If you’re like me, a surge of happiness washes over you like a floodlight every time you come across a beautiful book cover. If you’re like me, you’re going to love 300KS, a collection of stunning book covers writer Dev Aujla has collected from his travels to used bookstores all over the world. Prepare to get lost in the wonder.

If you’re looking for a new lit mag that will stoke the fires of your brain check out Cousin Corinne’s Reminder.

It’s a powerhouse of a lit mag, serving up everything you might possibly be interested in, from big names like Jhumpa Lahiri, Nick Flynn and Jonathan Lethem to internet superstars like Emma Straub and Rachel Glaser.

Not to mention the visual quality is fantastic, a commendable effort of the idea of the book as an artifact, something to be treasured: full color, superb attention to design and layout, and extensive coverage of contemporary fine artists and photographers.

And they have comics! The whole idea feels like a throwback to an arts almanac, a big ass book with plenty of information and stimulation to tide you over for a long winter on the farm. Click on over to their site to check them out, I heard they just reduced their prices, take advantage!

Matt Bell came in town last weekend and we worked on a secret project together.

It’s only a secret because we can’t tell you about it until next year.

That’s when this project will be finished and it will coincide with a very cool event. You can probably figure out what the secret is by these photos. Sorry for being secretive. Anticipation is always the best part though, right?

Barry Grass takes us to Belgium on a journey into the heart of artesian brewer Dany Prignon of the Fantôme brewery. Designer/dressmaker Jen O’Malley walks us through the American history of the bridal gown. Fiction writer Blake Butler talks about the role playing game he invented as a kid. Author/activist Anne Elizabeth Moore shows us the landscape of gender inequality in the world of comic books.

This issue is dedicated to creators, people who make things, people who use ingenuity to work around barriers. To the people who aren’t satisfied with a problem and instead of ignoring it, they face it and try to make it better. This issue is dedicated to the makers of the world.

This item is available for pre-order only. This item will ship July 15th, 2011. Order now and save $5 off the cover price.

[image: Donya Todd]

Behold, a tentative list of folks we’re publishing in Issue Eight: Creation. Thanks to all these talented folks who felt the desire to submit and those who responded to the call. I’m very excited about the stories and essays we’re publishing in the issue, I’ll be giving some details on each piece in the coming weeks. Also, big thanks to this issue’s readers who helped out big time in whittling these choices down: Sarah Bridgins, Sarah Rose Etter, Justyn Harkin, John Kemmick, Nicolette Kittinger, Eric McKinley, Anna Neiger, and, of course, Dylan Suher.

Also, thanks to everyone who’s helping out with our subscription drive (that’s helping us pay for this issue).

Nonfiction

I Tried Really Hard to Play

Essay: Blake Butler

Images: TBA

How to Make a Bride

Essay and Images: Jen O’Malley

Uncommon Knowledge

Essay: Gina Ishibashi

Images: Amber Albrecht

Phantasmogoria

Essay: Barry Grass

Images: Paul X Johnson

The Measure of Creation

Essay: Amanda Jane Smith

Images: Susan Hope Lanier

Fiction

Win a Chance to Be in my Next Novel

Story: Eliza Tudor

Images: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

South Beach

Story: Ryan Rivas

Image: Shannon May

Project

Story: Peg Alford Pursell

Image: Yann Faucher

Autonomous in my Rib Cage

Story: Maggie Ritchie

Images: Donya Todd

City

Story: Paul Kavanagh

Images: Jon Mcnair

Golem

Story: Dov Naiditch

Image: Walter Green

And it was Good

Story: Sam Libby

Images: Joe Gunn

Yesterday I talked about my friend Jason and the inspiration for the Issue Eight: Creation, but he’s not the only piece of the puzzle. Meet Lloyd Kahn, also a role model for this issue. We’re trying hook up an interview with him. Until then, watch this short doc on him and what he does and be excited.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was in Orlando for a thing that ended up not happening so I went to see my friend Jason Gregory who runs a wildly successful leather goods company called MAKR.

He’s been doing well, so he had to bust down the wall of the space next to him and expand into this tasty realm.

Jason was actually the inspiration for the creation issue. He sent me a text that said, “You should do an issue of Annalemma that’s all about making things.” I texted him back, “That’s a great idea.” And here we are.

I’m jealous of Jason’s wild success with his brand and his beautiful space with his antique mid-century furniture.

But whenever I get jealous I remember a scene from Seven Years in Tibet where Lhakpa Tsamchoe’s character says to Brad Pitt’s character, “A friend’s good fortune is a blessing. I’m sorry you resent ours.”

The workshop.

The bookshelf. Well, well, well. What do we have on the bottom shelf…

Jason will need something, like a coat hook, and make a design, get it a limited run manufactured and then sell them all. Once they’re sold, they’re gone, never to be made again.

Enough gushing, you get the idea. The dude makes rad stuff. We had an editorial meeting and it went well, gave us a lot of focus and I’m very excited about the direction of all this. It’s making me feel real good inside.

The man and his big ass desk.

Unrealted: new Brice at Stardust. Thanks, Orlando, for being rad.

Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott

(McSweeney’s, 2011)

What if Donald Rumsfeld got caught up in the state-sanctioned torture machine he helped design? That’s the premise of Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott’s short novel Donald. The main character is abducted in the middle of the night by a clandestine military group who take him to an undisclosed location where they begin a series of esotheric interrogations. It’s unclear what they want, and before the main character can even discern if he can give it to him, he’s taken to a Guantanimo-like facility where he becomes a prisoner of war he helped create. Events soon blur together, interrogation sessions become more clouded in mystery and alliances with guards and prisoners are formed quickly and dissolved just as fast.

Martin and Elliott have done an impressive thing considering the audience they’re catering to, considering the goal they’re trying to achieve. They’ve made the character of Donald into a person you sympathize with, a person you feel for and relate to and root for even though you don’t agree with his actions, his rationale, or his worldview. It would have been easy to take Donald at face value, to play up the caricature, to feed into the liberal desire to burn him at the stake. Of course, the premise of the book is hurling Donald into the downward spiral of confusing madness that is the military torture machine. The book borders on tedious as the interrogations become maddeningly repetitive and unproductive, but that comes with the territory when you’re trying to mimic the feeling of psychological torture.

People often question the importance of fiction. What’s its role? Is it relevant? What’s the point? Novels like this, ones that make clear, unflinching, political statements (ones that have the balls to come out on the same day as Rumsfeld’s true memoir) seem to be the answer to that question.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

(Norton, 2004)

This was the one that was everywhere when it came out. The one that was on all the book club lists, the one everyone was reading, even if they didn’t read all that much, even the people who only read three or four books a year, this was the one. I missed it. I missed it cause I was snobbish when this book came out. I was arrogant enough to think that I knew something that everyone else didn’t because I wasn’t going to get sucked into the hype train. What a dumbfuck mode to be in. What a willfully ignorant, up-my-own-ass-for-no-good-reason mode to be in. What mistake to miss out on a book like this because I’m stuck in this mode of thinking that I’m somehow better than someone else. What a waste of time it is to think like this. Think about how much this book could have taught you with its tight and powerful vignettes adding up to a monumental story. Think about all the time you wasted thinking you were hot shit when you were so much the opposite.

DMZ Vol.1: On the Ground by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli

(Vertigo, 2006)

In the not-too-distant future, anti-social militias that pepper the country (once thought of as bastions of crazy inbred woods folk) awake like a sleeping giant and topple the US government. The borough of Manhattan becomes a Demilitarized Zone, where chaos reigns and no one has any concept of what life is like, where rumors end and fact begins. Inexperienced photojournalism intern Matty Ross is thrown headlong into answering these questions as his team is attacked when they land in the warzone and he’s left alone without a contact inside to pick up the pieces.

The macho, bar-stool voice bravado that seems to pervade most male comic book characters personalities isn’t skimped on in this series. The most interesting thing about DMZ is the story that lies beneath the surface, the story the news is often unable to provide about warzones: the story of what life is like for the individual. If post-apocalyptic genre stories should be judged not on the questions of why the word as we know it has come to an end, but what life is like for people after the fact and how communities attempt to rebuild themselves, then DMZ is worth a read in this regard.

We’re all ready for NerdFest 2011.

You know you’re a nerd when you’re very excited about a book stand you made. Thinking about making more/selling them. Not sure if there’s a big demand for these though. Want one? Hit me up in the comments.

Very excited to be sharing a table with the fine folks at Avery. Come hang out with us! We will be at the following places on Thursday and Friday nights, respectively:

You surface from the Lorimer L stop onto Lorimer and Metropolitan. You walk west towards the droning BQE. Nestled between the hardware stores, cuban restaurants and noodle joints, embedded in the wood siding facades of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a weathered white and yellow storefront sign announcing SPARACINO’S BAKERY: ITALIAN FRENCH SICILIAN BREAD. Underneath the subtitle is a less-weathered yellow sign with red lettering reading AND COMIC BOOKLETS. In the storefront window is an art installation lifted from a Roald Dahl fever dream: bright colors and angular shapes, fantastical creatures made of paper, three dimensional sci-fi landscapes and the strange and beautiful creatures that inhabit them. Welcome to Desert Island Comics, an independent bookstore specializing in comics and prints, owned and operated by indie comic guru and Mad Magazine enthusiast, Gabe Fowler. Gabe was kind enough to speak via email concerning the lonliness of the internet and how it’s good to have impossible standards.

1. What’s the Desert Island’s origin story?

I grew up loving Mad Magazine, punk rock, and skateboarding, eventually studied fine art, and spent years working at art galleries. I decided it was time to put all of these interests together in a visual book store. I’ve always loved comics, graphic art, and artists’ books, and thought they would be served well by coexisting in the same environment. I’ve also always loved book stores. After years of obsessing over particular shops, it was fun to design my own and try to address the positives and negatives of other places. I started with little money and looked for a full year for a decent affordable place to rent. And I ended up with the third place I saw!

2. What’s the curatorial process when choosing books to stock?

In keeping with the “desert island” concept, ideally every item in the store should hold interest for a lifetime. Obviously this is impossible, but I think about it when I’m selecting books. If you had to live the rest of your life with this book, would it still pull it’s weight? It’s good to have impossible standards.

3. What helps a book sell? What are some of the more successful books at DI?

If I knew the answer to this one I’d one step ahead of everybody else. There’s a million intangible factors in the hard reality of selling something, especially a poetic product like an illustrated book. Why does anybody buy anything? Long-awaited work from particular artists always sell well. So does nicely handmade work, like sewn binding or screen printed covers. I also do well with limited edition items from known artists, including prints or signed books.

4. Williamsburg has a storied history in the last decade of being both the epicenter of the art/creative world as well as a neighborhood that’s become synonymous with drastic gentrification. What’s it like running a comic book shop there?

Yeah, it still hurts when rich people ruin a creative community by pricing out the artists. It has happened a million times in this town, and it will probably happen to me. Anyway, it’s great to have a comic store in Williamsburg as long creative people still live nearby. Every scene on Earth has originators, participants and spectators, and it’s always the spectators that kill it.

5. How does a brick-and-mortar shop maintain relevance in the age of online commerce? How do you compete with Amazon?

The internet is lonely. My shop is a social place full of surprising stuff, a lot of which you can’t find on Amazon. I host tons of artist signings and provide a place for people to sell their self-published books and prints. There’s tons of reasons why a physical store is not just relevant but crucial.

6. Please describe the store mascot.

Do I have a mascot? Maybe you’re referring to the pirate drawing by Matti Hagelberg which has been on my website for a few years. I don’t think I have a mascot, but I’ve been lucky to work with tons of amazing artists over the years on prints and other projects. Hagelberg is from Finland, and I approached him blindly to design a poster for the store when I first opened. With no further instructions, he created a killer geometric scratchboard piece of a pirate holding a hockey stick with a parrot on his nose. This image has been closely associated with the shop ever since.

Desert Island is a now stocking Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance.