To order books please use our Paypal system or send a check or money order (made out to Kevin Sampsell please) to our address. Please add ONE dollar for shipping on books, and TWO dollars for THREE or more books. Future Tense titles are also available through Amazon.com and Powells.com. Please e-mail us if you have any questions. Bookstores can order directly from us, and sometimes through Ingram or Last Gasp Distribution.

Future Tense Books
PO Box 42416
Portland, OR 97242

You can buy our books using paypal below.

NEW RELEASE!! It's Here! Everything Was Fine Until Whatever By Chelsea Martin $11.00, 128 pages ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-35-5 Anything is possible in Chelsea Martin's bizarre and endearingly honest collection of stories, lists, flash fictions, and revealing factoids. Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is a poker-faced and unpredictably comic tour de force. Festooned with artwork and hand-written notes, this is a grand debut by a magical new talent. Check out her own web site for extra goodness. "Chelsea Martin offers a quirky blend of absurd erudition, hard-eyed candor, unexpected sentiment, tiny subliminal footnotes, and loopy artwork. The illustration alone for her "to do" list is worth the price of the book. Plus she's insane." -Mike Topp, author of Shorts Are Wrong "Chelsea Martin's shapeshifting debut is not only wonderful and wacko, but, goddamn,something honest, something new." - Blake Butler, author of Ever. Read an interview with Chelsea.

NEW RELEASE! Embrace Your Insignificance: Lessons Learned Teaching English in Japan By Bob Gaulke $11.00, 124 pages ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-34-1 ISBN-10: 1-892061-34-8 Bob Gaulke's 2nd book (after The Nervous Tourist) is his personal adventure into the world of teaching English in Japan. Told in diary-like entries, this is an entertaining and illuminating look into the world of teaching. This beautiful paperback release features a cover by Pete McCracken. Bob Gaulke lives and teaches now in the Bronx. "This addictive book kept me from doing anything else--work, laundry, speaking to my family--until I'd finished it. With a laugh on every page, Gaulke's direct, disarming style captures the funny, strange, and muted lunacy of Japan in a way that few other writers manage." --Chuck Thompson, author of Smile When You're Lying "Well-observed and frequently hilarious." --Rolf Potts, author of Marco Polo Didn't Go There

Our Beloved 26th By Riley Michael Parker $3.00, 40 pages ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-33-3 ISBN-10: 1-892061-33-1 Riley Michael Parker has created a perverse, white collar world full of angry and oversexed office drones. Our Beloved 26th is a biting satire and an assured debut by a bold new Portland antihero. A specially-priced pocket-size chapbook with cover art by the author. Read an interview with Riley.

Double Header is a "flipbook" featuring two of Suzanne's stories. These are the two cover images for those stories. Art by Kurt Eisenlohr.

Double Header By Suzanne Burns $5.00, 44 pages ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-32-4 ISBN-10: 1-892061-32-5 Suzanne Burns shows us that size does matter, but not in the way we think. Using size both literally and as a metaphor, Tiny Ron raises questions about every fairy tale that ends with marriage, and every marriage clouded with myth.--Monica Drake Suzanne Burns is obsessed with misfits. An Acquired Taste is a love story about a widowed street magician and a glass-eating divorcee. But Burns never treats her characters as one-dimensional freaks. She offers us a look past their exteriors, into their hearts and minds, where, ultimately, we find ourselves.--Elizabeth Ellen Read an interview with Suzanne.

Partial List of People to Bleach By Gary Lutz $6, 56 pages ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-31-7 ISBN-10: 1-892061-31-7 "Gary Lutz is the best writer you've never heard of. To certain stylists, he's a kind of prose god. Lutz "belongs to a category of sentence geniuses that includes Ben Marcus, Aleksandar Hemon, and David Foster Wallace." -Christopher Frizzelle, The [Seattle] Stranger "Searing realism . . . terribly exact . . . a matter for rejoicing" -Lucy Daniel, The [London] Telegraph "Gary Lutz is excellent. He writes some of the most interesting, subtle, oddly constructed sentences in contemporary lit." -Dennis Cooper "One would call these lives adrift except that would suggest they once were safely moored and docked; in Lutz's world there is only ever the open sea of failed (non)relationships, with no land in sight, the characters' only rudder being the extreme care taken in the words they choose to render their own misery. In each of these stories, the lonely anonymity of a narrator's misfit existence vies with the glorious singularity of his or her discourse to offer a marvelous, raw tension. Partial List of People to Bleach is at once cruelly honest, precisely painful, and beautifully rendered." -Brian Evenson Read an Interview with Gary Lutz by cover artist Derek White

The Haiku Inferno Book By Haiku Inferno (Frank D'Andrea, Elizabeth Miller, Frayn Masters, and Kevin Sampsell) $8, 32 pages The long-awaited first collection by the Portland haiku performance group. Mixes the absurdity, anger, and humor of their work into a greatest hits stew. Lovingly printed, designed, bound, and published by Crack Press of Portland. Limited to 200 copies.

Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella By Myriam Gurba $14.95, 224 pages ISBN-13: 9781933149165 ISBN-10: 1933149167 WINNER of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction! Chicana. Goth. Dykling. Desiree Garcia knows she's weird and a weirdo magnet. To extinguish her strangeness, her parents ship her to Saint Michael's Catholic High School, then to Mexico, but neurology can't be snuffed out so easily: Screwy brain chemistry holds the key to Desiree's madness. As fellow crazies sense a kinship with her, Desiree attracts a coterie of both wanted and unwanted admirers, including a pair of racist deathrock sisters, a pretty Hispanic girl who did time in California's most infamous mental asylum, and a transnational stalker with a pronounced limp. As high school graduation nears, Desiree's weirdness turns from charming to alarming. Plagued by increasingly bizarre thoughts and urges, Desiree convinces herself she's schizophrenic, despite assurance otherwise. In college, she finds Rae, an ex-carnie trannyboi, who becomes the June Carter to her Johnny Cash. With Rae's help, Desiree answers the riddle of her insanity and names her disease. Combining the spark of Michelle Tea, the comic angst of Augusten Burroughs, and the warmth of Sandra Cisneros, Mexican American author Myriam Gurba has created a territory all her own. Dahlia Season not only contains the title novella, but also several of Gurba's acclaimed stories. Read an Interview

Before You She Was a Pit Bull By Elizabeth Ellen $5, 52 pages ISBN-10: 1-892061-30-9 ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-30-0 Elizabeth Ellen is one of the most thrilling writers to come out of the literary Internet scene. She writes boldly about her wayward characters--reckless women, cold-shouldered men, and unsupervised children. In her debut collection, Before You She Was a Pit Bull, Ellen unleashes six stories that will crush your heart and leave you begging for more. Elizabeth Ellen's eye never fails to capture the most revealing  details in these humane, off-kilter fictions.  Like Denis Johnson, her stories take place in the passenger seats and rec rooms of an uneasy Americana and are warmed by a generous sensitivity to human frailty. --Ryan Boudinot, author of The Littlest Hitler Read an Interview

Don’t Take Your Life By Justin Maurer $5, 48 pages ISBN 1-892061-29-5 Don't Take Your Life is the first book of true stories by Portland, Oregon musician and rabble rouser, Justin Maurer.  These gritty and lucid memoirs burn brightly on the page as Justin presents his eccentric father, his deaf mother, his freewheeling siblings, and a vibrant cast of co-stars. Divided into two parts, the book shifts from resonant childhood dramas to Justin’s adventures as a wide-eyed traveler. Highlights include Justin’s father explaining sex, Justin huffing gasoline as a teenager, a botched attempt at losing his virginity, pining for a Canadian beauty, getting drugged in Istanbul, and passing out in a black lesbian club in Manhattan. Justin Maurer is as charmed as he is charming. Don’t Take Your Life is about walking into any worldwide situation without fear or guile. From being homeless in a van to getting drugged in a Turkish rug shop, you’re always rooting for Justin to come out on top. – Todd Taylor, author of Born to Rock and Shirley Wins Read an Interview

Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter By Eric Spitznagel trade paperback, 224 pp. US$13.95 ISBN-10: 1-933149-05-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-933149-05-9 Part of the Future Tense series published by Manic D Press With dreams of becoming a highly respected screenwriter, Eric Spitznagel moves to LA. When Hollywood fails to notice him, he settles for the next best thing: writing scripts for adult films. Determined to make the most of his bad luck, he sets out to make a movie that will be celebrated more for its witty dialogue and gripping plot than its raw depictions of hardcore sex. As Spitznagel discovers, making the Great American Porn is far from easy, especially when you've been hired to write a sequel to Butt Crazy. "Like most pornography, I found Fast Forward to be a relentless and indecent assault on the traditional family values that Americans find most sacred. Makes a great stocking stuffer." - Amy Sedaris Read an Interview

The Heart Is Also a Furnace By Magdalen Powers ISBN 1-892061-28-7 $5, 44 pages  The strange, elusive, and haunting stories in Magdalen Powers’s long-awaited second collection are like stars—small, sparkling, and, upon closer inspection, containing worlds full of shadows and surprises. The Heart is Also a Furnace contains 26 stories about bizarre dreams, serene desires, and cracked innocence in language that is carefully concise, slyly humorous, and always artful. Read an interview with Magdalen.

Grope: A Fiction By Dayvid Figler ISBN 1-892061-25-2 $4, 36 page chapbook What happens when a wandering Jew and his long-time friend meet at a strip club on Thanksgiving? Award-winning NPR commentator and performer Dayvid Figler's Grope is the story of Finn, a man who has let a lifetime of decadent Las Vegas culture catch up to him. His friend Harvey meets him at the Original Eden Gentlemen's Club, forgoing a holiday with their families for a night of drinking and lap dances. There they meet Beth (dancer name: Cookie), someone that shares Finn's loneliness and hope for renewal. Dayvid Figler's story about one night in Vegas comically dances on that fine line between sexual perversity and spiritual pilgrimage. Read an Interview

The Insomniac Reader edited by Kevin Sampsell ISBN 0-916397-94-7 Trade Paper, $13.95, 264 pages People are different at night. More desperate, violent, or sad. Sometimes hunting for adventure, sex, drugs. Cruising around, throwing their bodies recklessly into...anything. The stories in The Insomniac Reader: Stories of the Night examine the dark side (literally and figuratively) of the evening time. From prostitution and adultery to emergency rooms and suicide. This anthology features some of the best writers in the country (Jonathan Ames, Rick Moody, Aimee Bender, Michelle Tea, James Tate, Jonathan Lethem, and many others) shining their flashlights into a world that begins around the time when most people are asleep. Click on cover to see a list of stories and contributors. Note: The Insomniac Reader is the first release in the Future Tense series, being generously published through Manic D Press, the great small press in San Francisco. Future titles in the series will be distributed widely by Publishers Group West. We're very excited about this new venture, which should happen about once a year. You can also order these books from the Manic D web site or your favorite bookstore.

Strategies for Modern Living By Charles Ullmann ISBN 1-892061-24-4 $4, 40 pages Charles Ullmann has emerged as a one-man fiction and satire wrecking ball, an expatriate looking in from the outside, a mad scientist who shapes words and sentences into stories that are odd, funny, shocking, and new. A young writer who has emerged from the on-line world of letters, his writing is like a cross between Robert Coover and Richard Brautigan, with an acerbic touch that’s not afraid to poke you in the gut from time to time. Read a bonus interview here

Black Fag Shane Allison ISBN 1-892061-23-6 $3.50, 24 pages Shane Allison is a star that continues to rise in the world of provocative queer writing. This special fold-out book has 13 poems in 24 pages, with titles like Slut Machine, I’m His Nigger, and Talking Dirty to Myself. Deeply personal, abrasive, funny, and shocking, the poems seem to melt together, making Black Fag one of the most enthralling books of poetry that you’re likely to read in this day and age.

The Nervous Tourist By Bob Gaulke ISBN 1-892061-22-8 $5, 56 pages Bob Gaulke moved to Salvador, Brazil from Portland, Oregon in the winter of 2001in a cultural experiment designed to measure the effects of a musical, tropical culture on the body of a cynically nervous 34 year old North American male. He faithfully reported his findings in a series of email essays and interviews in the year that followed, covering interactions with street vendors, dancers, musicians, beach goers, and random members of the Bahian (residents of Salvador) middle class. Confined to roaming the tourist neighborhoods that line the four-lane beach front thoroughfare (The 'Orla') of the city of Salvador, Gaulke attempted to shed as much of his preconceptions and inhibitions as he could during a 12 month period. The Nervous Tourist is the hilarious result. Read a bonus interview here

Susannah Breslin You?re a Bad Man, Aren't You? ISBN 1-892061-19-8 SOLD OUT Postfeminist psuedo-sexpert Susannah Breslin's poignantly provocative short stories of mannequin fetishism, midget love, and pornographers gone wild provide the perfect literary accompaniment to the porn collection of any true intellectual. Bringing together the hilariously obscene and the obscenely hilarious, You?re a Bad Man, Aren?t You? heralds the long-awaited arrival of PornoPomoLit, a.k.a. Pornographic Postmodern Literature. Until now, fondling a book never felt so right. She is literature?s dominatrix, with a heart where her whip should be. –Richard Rushfield

Happy Ending: Selected Writing by Mike Topp ISBN 1-892061-18-x $5, 56 pages Mike Topp has been a longtime favorite in the world of adventurous literary magazines and web sites. His short work blurs the lines of poetry, fiction, memoir, and disjointed logic. This 52-page mini-book includes some of Topp's best-loved work. Mike Topp's other chapbook, Own Your Own can be bought here!

 

A Common Pornography A Memoir of Youth & Trouble in the Nuclear Land of Eastern Washington by Kevin Sampsell ISBN 1-892061-15-5 SOLD OUT A Common Pornography explores the fragmented world of youthful memories in a style at once spare, haunting, and uncomfortably nostalgic. Kevin Sampsell's daring and creative style of memoir is peppered with insightful (perhaps distracting) footnotes by Mike Daily and ethereal photo-collages by Melody Owen to create a literary montage unlike anything of recent memory. A beautifully designed trade paperback. 60 pages.

Playthings By Karl Koweski ISBN 1-892061-14-7 $4.95, 44 pages Playthings is the debut collection of stories by Alabama writer Karl Koweski. Well-known in the world of "small magazines", Koweski has stormed the scene with numerous appearances in journals and zines the past couple of years.

St*rf*ck*ng short stories by Jemiah Jefferson ISBN 1-892061-09-0 Fiction $4 US, 40 pages The short stories of Jemiah Jefferson take on the sensual and emotional perplexities of the celebrity life. It doesn't matter if you're talking about the famous people of Portland, Oregon or Hollywood. They all feel the pressure of living up to their image, while also trying to figure out how to act in the public eye.

Girl Juice stories by Ritah Parrish ISBN 1-892061-11-2 $5.00 Ritah Parrish serves up more dark, evil goodies in her second fiction collection.

Frank D'Andrea LungMouth is a poetic suite of stories, distractions, sound effects and thoughts. Presented in a bite-size package that will keep you full for days, LungMouth is a document that shows us how language can be loved, fondled, and thrown about recklessly. Sounds inhuman and words deeply felt are juxtaposed until they seem to break and crumble with fantastic force. Frank is also a member of Haiku Inferno. ISBN 1-892061-01-5 $2.79

Invisible Radios Here's a strange soup of kink, humor and slander for ya! As John Clark, editor for the great Indiana litzine pLopLop says: "If Andy Kaufman devoted his life to poetry instead of comedy, the result would closely resemble the twists and surprises of Kevin Sampsell's writing... Sampsell's work transcends categories, labels & movements. Plus there's always the delight in wondering "What'll he come up with next time?" and Two Girls Review's Lidia Yuknavitch calls it "Blasted open" and says Sampsell "forms and deform poetry." See what everyone is talking about in the pornographic stores- Buy this book! Kevin Sampsell ISBN 1-892061-05-8 $3.95

The Patricia Letters by Kevin Sampsell A collection of fictional letters from an 80-year old Oklahoma man to his future step-daughter. Full of southern humor and wisdom. Now in its 2nd printing! "The Patricia Letters is a mind theater of a true American voice-sincere, subtle, taut, a rarity in the smaller presses these days." --Michael Hemmingson, author of *The Naughty Yard* $3

Let's Start Something Special From 1995, Kevin's frank foray into the world of "post-punk pornography". 18 and older please. $3.95

Holes: a book not entirely about golf by Richard Meltzer ISBN 1-892061-02-3 $4.00 This new release by the author of *The Night (Alone)* and *The Aesthetics of Rock* is a lovely collector's chapbook featuring "What is This Thing Called Golf", an essay on the author, a hilarious on-the-field battles with trying to understand this famous leisure sport. Also added are several new poems in a section called *Savage Meat*. This legendary icon is known for creating the gonzo art of rock journalism back in the 60's and Tom Robbins has called Meltzer " A firecracker under the teacup of polite fiction."Grammar, puncuation, and English purists may want to drink some hard liquor before this one!

Pink Menace The stories in this collection have been called "deliciously creepy" by Beth Lisick, but they are also funny, vivid, and true. An audience favorite of Portland audiences since storming the scene in '95, these tales display a dark new direction. *Monkey Girl* author Beth Lisick says, "Though Ritah Parrish has already cut a juicy swath acros the nation's performance poetry scene, this first collection of stories reveals the other dimension behind her dead-on, cringeworthy insights... A deliciously creepy foray into the lives of people you stand behind at the supermarket and wonder about."   Ritah Parrish ISBN 0-9653194-9-0 $4.00 0

Doll Head Eater Full throttle and full length, Baby! High octane, high quality, high times. Called "A revelation" by Philip K. Dick award winner Rudy Rucker. Super stylin' at 128 pages. *Factsheet 5* recently said: "Think of middle America spinning fast and out of control. Think of a Raymond Carver story immersed in alien radioactive ooze. Think of a trailer park *Fahrenheit 451* or George Orwell on acid... You just don't know what you're going to get on your plate in Doll Head Eater". A fantastic, sometimes surreal read! SOLD OUT   Gregory Tozian ISBN 0-9653194-8-2 $8.95

Woman Who Hears voices Veteran Portland poet unleashes a storm of words about cracking, breaking, and putting back together again. A book that takes you out of your own body into other's experiences. Doug Marx of *The Oregonian* says Orr has a "tough-minded, sometimes scathingly funny way of moving through her material", while James Fleming comments, "These poems weave in and out of the madhouse."     Verlena Orr ISBN 0-9653194-9-0 $3.00

Savoir County Deceptively simple flash fictions that subvert your mind into thinking its reading a newspaper from Twin Peaks or some other Lynchian place! A cruel pleasure. Even *Factsheet 5* found themselves surprised at the odd power of this collection- "He packs so much action into each paragraph that it comes off with a disturbing surreal edge. The perfect thing for reading on the bus or for on top of the toilet(!) Surprisingly enjoyable." also available: *Razor Burns* (more white trash stories)- $2 Stephen Kurowski ISBN 0-9653194-6-6 $3.00

Jesus Christ: Live and In The Flesh by Lyn Lifshin Perhaps the strangest and funniest book ever released by the "Queen of the small presses". Lyn has a personal relationship with Jesus that you won't believe! "One of those unbelievably vivid reads where the images just appear automatically and can't be shaken for days afterward. Not that you'd want them to disappear either." --*Bleeding Velvet Octopus* $3

Museum Quality Orgasm Huge collection of full-on gay porno poems. Funny, agitated, and horny as hell! Includes many references to mutual-masturbation and lean lithe athletic boys. A must have. "Whimsical, angst-ridden, and horny as hell. This collection is a joy to read, a must have." --*L   Carl Miller Daniels ISBN 0-9653194-9-X $5.00

Sold Out

Who The Hell is Brandon Freels? by Brandon Freels As quick and as blinding as lightning, these fictions go POP! in the brain. Awesome color cover plus an Introduction by Hal Sirowitz (just so you know it's strange). "If the names Donald Barthelme and Firesign Theater mean anything to you, perhaps you'll find a message in the humor and absurdity of Freels... he's not quadrophenic, he's octaphenic." --*Flipside* $3

paper or plastic by Michael Walsh Subliminal piano noise or a dyslexic diary? Just when you thought originality was dead. Intro by Richard Meltzer. "Not that old Gen-X whine, not abuse hotline, neither PC nor PI but that voice, laconic but more robust than it first seemed. Beckett in a better mood than you've ever heard." --Douglas Spangle, author of *Initial* $3 Also by Michael Walsh: *the sound eye full* and *bruising my every*, $2

sold out

The Diner Anthology This best-selling (well, in small press terms anyway) booklet is chopped into four sections for your convenience and dining pleasure. Highlighting the quirky and surreal world of eating and drinking out are: John M. Bennett, Alan Catlin, Duncan Zenobia Saffir, Dayvid Figler, Jeff Meyers, Mike Halchin, Andre Ricciardi, Richard Meltzer, Mary Winter, Lydia Eugene, Oberc, Golda Fried, and many more. $3.50

Freels Comes Alive! short fictions by Brandon Freels ISBN 1-892061-12-0 $3.95, 40 pages Freels Comes Alive! marks the return of one of America's small press enigmas, Brandon Freels. His writing--abstract, painfully self-conscious, alarmingly funny, and ambitious in form--seems to inhabit a planet where things continually morph and change unannounced.

The Following Books Are Out of Print

Grosse Pointe Girl by Sarah Grace McCandless ISBN 1-89206-110-4 OUT OF PRINT The second book of the Heavy Flow series, McCandless offers an intriguing look at one of the country's richest suburbs, and growing up therein. This book was picked up by Simon & Schuster. Buy that version here. Congrats, Sarah!

Meat Won't Pay My Light Bill a novel by Kurt Eisenlohr ISBN 1-892061-08-2 Fiction OUT OF PRINT Meet Lupus Totten. A young midwestern man with two dead end jobs to support his bar binges and floundering art. He's convinced that only one thing can help him straighten out his life: winning back the love of his life. This book was re-published by Rose City Publishers in 2008.

Zoe Trope Please Don't Kill the Freshman SOLD OUT ISBN: 1-892061-13-9 Please Don't Kill the Freshman is the true tale of one Portland girl's first year of high school. It signals the emergence of a true and totally original voice in the world of underground writing. This title was bought by Harper Tempest and a longer version of the book is available through them.