Kirjahaku

Fiction. Music. DIDDY-WAH-DIDDY: A BEALE STREET SUITE is a crazy-quilt mosaic about a near-mythical place located, concretely, in Memphis, Tennessee, and abstractly somewhere on the road between Rapture and Perdition. The novel is a-historic, preferring the beautiful lie to the truth as plain as a mud fence. The novel, if we can call it a novel (and we can), is peopled with musicians, conmen, strippers, magi, foreigners, storytellers, ghosts, villains, heroes, fairy-tale sons of Adam like Elvis and Santa Claus, and the imps of the perverse. Told in myriad ways, including short stories, plays, and poems, the song Diddy Wah Diddy moves from Creation to Revelation and, in the end, emerges from the smoke and circus mirrors, to stand naked under the bright, bluesy Beale Street sun.

In a post-Trump world, Billy Kos, occasional poet, uneasy lover, and pot salesman, meets Kalma Voyles, a student and teacher. Billy believes she is the woman of his dreams, and his dreams are made of the usual surrealism and lust. It's your typical boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, something-goes-horribly-wrong-with-the-time-machine story. Billy's courtship, marriage, and ensuing distress, bring him to the edge of himself. In Memphis, in this near-future, in this country marginally changed, where prejudice and misogyny have returned to daily life, Billy Kos loses more than his heart. He loses his home. He loses his world. Camel's Bastard Son is a Vonnegutian journey into love and the unknown. It's about change and adjustment to change, the kind of change that happens like a seep, and the kind that happens like idiot lightning.

Opaque Melodies That Would Bug Most People is filled with young, vibrant poems from a wise voice. The poems often wax reflective, filled with the historicity of experience, yet always returning to the now. Thus, Mesler's collection is defined by beautiful immediacy, intimacy, and urgency. Constantly, these poems remind the reader what it means to be human, to be alive and living surrounded by a multitude of beating hearts and breathing lungs. While each poem recounts a snippet of life, together the poems create an earthy blanket that connects readers to a single mind whose voice throughout remains delicate, concrete, and vital, like an old friend. The verse engages the commonplace and the abstract with equal measures thoughtfulness. Each piece builds and builds until, by the end, the reader has experienced a life, and come away refreshed, having experienced hopeful energy.

Eric Warberg went to Hollywood to make it big. For many years, he was successful, until directing a few box office bombs made him virtually unemployable. When an opportunity presents itself for a return to his hometown of Memphis, to direct a small, independent film, it is a return to his roots in more ways than one. Despite the fact that he's greeted like a star, his homecoming is bittersweet. The novel begins on the onset of filming of what is temporarily called Memphis Movie. From day one, Eric feels stuck and unable to find his creative spark. He is helped along by a large cast of characters, some from his past and some from the filmmaking industry, including his partner, Sandy, who wrote the script for the movie. Their open relationship will be challenged by Eric's return to his roots. Memphis Movie reads like a Robert Altman film, with many story strands making up the rich tapestry. The novel's central question: will Eric lose or find his soul in Memphis, a town where soul has so many meanings?

Following Richard Brautigan concerns a young writer of bad poetry living in Oklahoma City in the late 80s, who is visited by the ghost of the hippie writer Richard Brautigan. Jack, when the visitation occurs, is recovering from an aborted love affair, which coincidentally happened in San Francisco. That city becomes the focal point of the story, the place where magic can happen, a place seemingly out of time and between-worlds.

Robert Walker is homeless. He awakes one morning in his box to find half his face paralyzed. In anguish, he walks to mimic normality. He also walks because walking for him is life. Eventually, in opposition to his dedication to desired anonymity, he is forced to rejoin the world. The novel follows two crucial days in his journey while he traverses Memphis, encountering the familiar, the foreign, the desolate, and the joyous.

Fiction. If Alice had gone to a sketchy doctor in a sketchy part of town this might be the rabbit hole she went down. Charlie Cain went looking for a cure for a minor pain and was given a medicament with a teensy side effect: it made Charlie invisible. This is the story of what happens next. Charlie's journey is Something Like Yours.

The World is Neither Stacked for Nor Against You is a book of disparate parts, a sort of Frankenstein monster of a collection. And indeed, there is a monster story, as well as a ghost story, an angel story, a mystical religious story, and a mystical secular story. Some of the work is experimental, some of it is outlandish, and some of it is as simple and comforting as a home-baked pie. Its stories are made of gypsum, bituminous coal, red bricks and whimsy. They are equal parts crassitude and chimera. The final one, "Publisher," the book's longest, concerns a man working for a vanity press who discovers "the real thing," a novel he is convinced will blast a hole in the complacency of modern literature. About "Publisher," John Grisham said, "It's not only funny and clever, it reminded me of the first 80 pages of Sophie's Choice. Great work." The stories have previously appeared in The Pinch, Orchid, Ghoti, Gargoyle and other fine periodicals, as well as story collections published by a handful of sincere, frabjous, small presses.

Meet Neill Rhymer. Writer. Bookseller. Romantic. Or, maybe, Pervert; it could be tough to know the difference, those days. Follow Neill, his conquests, his loves and his losses, his catches and fumbles, as he plies his own orbit through literature and love in Cock-a-Hoop, a semi-autobiographical would-be coming of age story for anyone who's ever attempted a life of mind.