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MASTER OF MINIATURES
Jim Shepard
56 pages / $12.00 / Cover art by Michael Kupperman
ISBN-13 978-0-9844142-3-9
One of the pleasures of this novella is the context Shepard creates for a moment of history that has already attained cult status. By investing all the bells and whistles of fiction in Tsuburaya and his creature, he brings them both alive and gives us a fresh look at the familiar."—Mike Harvkey, Publishers Weekly
This is probably his best work, along with his chilling 2004 school shooting novel, Project X. If there's a theme, it's this: Jim Shepard writes about alienation, about unbelonging, better than pretty much anyone else in America today.—Michael Schaub, Bookslut
As in Nosferatu, with its smartly imagined life of the German film director F. W. Murnau, here Shepard considers the Japanese special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and his cinematic inventions for the science-fiction movie we know as Godzilla. And like
many of Shepard's stories, Master of Miniatures limns the intense and alienated world of a focused expert obsessed with his field of endeavor, at a cost to his marriage and children. For Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fifties, America itself seemed king of the monsters, to be looked at with fear and awe. This is a poignant and important story that seems to me a summation and condensation of many themes that have preoccupied Shepard before. Like a diamond held aloft, each turn of this tale in his deft hand flashes still more light.—Ron Hansen
Jim Shepard is the author of numerous novels and short stories, including the collections Like You'd Understand, Anyway; Love and Hydrogen; and Batting Against Castro, as well as the novels Project X and Nosferatu. He has won the Story Prize and been nominated for the National Book Award. He lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Williams College.
LEFT GLOVE
56 pages / $12.00 / Front cover art and design by Jonathon Rosen
ISBN-13 978-0-9844142-0-8
June 2011
In Left Glove, Mac Wellman makes a theater of fragments, of lost objects and unnoticed people, of waste and cast-off isolation. But this somehow never becomes a theater of alienation or lack or loneliness or emptiness. Left Glove is unique in showing how things that are broken or alone can nevertheless have their own fullness.—Young Jean Lee
Chorus of One Resolved, that: Left Glove will fit thee like a glove if thou relishest the sort of play in which the most awe-inspiring acrobatic feats are performed by no other character than language. A left glove may have been lost, but here thou shall encounter dexterous play bountifully—not the telling of This and That in the established mode of articulation, right-handedly, for that's unglovely, and dull. And that is that. YEA.—Mónica de la Torre
From three-time Obie Award-winner Mac Wellman comes this complex and provocative play about two simple events. Yamaha Nazimova drops a glove. Jewel Beckett picks it up. Between these occurrences, a band of moths, fingers, demons, and all-too-human pronouns sing 27 choruses rich with puns, reversals, exclamations, whisperings, cries of loss, cries of victory, arguments, and resolutions. Turning dramatic convention on its head, Left Glove offers a profound view of a mishap and its ramifications in the public and private sphere. This paean to lost gloves everywhere covers and uncovers its methods and its radiance with grace and exhilaration.
Mac Wellman’s recent work includes The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (with composer David Lang) at Montclair State University in the fall of 2006, and 1965 UU, for performer Paul Lazar, directed by Stephen Mellor at the Chocolate Factory in the fall of 2008. He is also working on two plays for chorus: The Invention of Tragedy (Classic Stage Company) and Nine Days Falling (commissioned by the Stuck Pigs Company of Melbourne, Australia). He has received numerous honors, including both NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2003 he received his third Obie, for Lifetime Achievement. In 2006 his third novel, Q’s Q, was published by Green Integer, and in 2008, a volume of stories entitled A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds was published by Trip Street Press, as well as a new collection of plays, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, by Minnesota Press. His recent books of poetry are Miniature (2002) and Strange Elegies (2006), both from Roof Books. He is the Donald I. Fine Professor of Playwriting at Brooklyn College.
RANDY BRADLEY
40 pages / hardcover / $14.00 / Cover art by Michael Kupperman
ISBN-13 978-0-9844142-2-2
October 2011
This taut and terrifying epistolary novella of toxicity between sisters is a triumph of thrillingly crazed elegance. Jake Bohstedt Morrill is a remarkable new writer.—Gary LutzA cheerfully demented monologue on the subject of that which cannot be said, but which I'll say here anyway: Randy Bradley. Jake Bohstedt Morrill is a terrifically gifted writer.—Ben Marcus
For years, Lucy has visited her sister Miriam each summer, but now? No more. The invitation has been retracted. Maybe because of Lucy's strange conversational word games? Or maybe the accidents that happen every time she visits? Randy Bradley, Miriam's former companion, could solve the problem—but unfortunately, he's been replaced. With this letter of vulnerability and protest, we enter the deranged and yet funnily human thought processes of a well-meaning plague of a houseguest, sympathetic but agitated, scholarly but naive, a misfunctioning buoy in a dark sea of repressed familial discomfort.
Jake Bohstedt Morrill has degrees from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard Divinity School. He is a minister in East Tennessee.
THE SPOKES
Miranda Mellis
48 pages / hardcover / $14 / Cover art by
Jonathon Rosen
ISBN-13 978-0-9844142-4-6
June 2012
In lucid, utterly captivating prose, Miranda Mellis delivers a highly disciplined, deeply melancholy portrait of the living and the dead. I read it transfixed. It is a radiant piece of work.
—Carole Maso
The Spokes is as elegant as it is daring, as arresting as it is mysterious. It seems to me a truly timeless story, which is to say not only that it removes itself from time—though it does—but that its pleasures, enigmas, and meanings ought to be as accessible fifty or a hundred years from now as they are today.
—Kevin Brockmeier
Miranda Mellis is the author of None of This Is Real, Materialisms, and The Revisionist. The Revisionist was a finalist for The Believer 2007 Book Award and has been translated into Italian, Croatian, and Polish. Mellis is a founding editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She lives in San Francisco.
ON GHOSTS
Elizabeth Robinson
64 pages / hardcover / $16
ISBN-13 978-0-9844142-6-0
August 31, 2013
“This book is continuing a tradition of Neo-Spiritualist literature in America where the poem is the means of divination. The poem is a map of a world where ghosts and unattributed thinkers and writers haunt and intrude and give signals to the world next to us. This is an occupation for all poets, the most secular to the most conceptual and the most experiential and spontaneous. If words appear in prose here in these pages, they are still the production of a New Spiritualist poet who feels the presences and wants to tell us about them.—Fanny Howe
Elizabeth Robinson's On Ghosts returns us to the haunted aura around words. Here, a crossing of genres—poetry, prose meditation, personal testimony—shows that language itself amounts to a gathering of ghosts. Robinson’s oblique lyricism beckons us toward a twilight zone where we become ‘witness to the unverifiable.’ This is writing as the highest form of bewitching.—Andrew Joron
Elizabeth Robinson has published twelve books of poetry; the most recent of these is Counterpart. A previous winner of the National Poetry Series, she is also the recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She co-edits both Instance Press and the Etherdome Chapbook series, and she has taught at Naropa University; the University of Colorado, Boulder; the University of San Francisco; and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Robinson is the 2012 and 2013 Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana.
