Dear friend and Issue #4 contributor Sam Weller had a new book, Listen to the Echoes, released this week on Stop Smiling Books. My body is buzzing with nervous energy to read it. The Paris Review was gracious to host the release party.

The man of the hour was gracious enough to throw an invite in my direction.

There was a looping slideshow of pics from Bradbury’s house. Ray Bradbury’s got a globe of Mars in his home. Fucking Mars!

It was wild to walk around  TPR’s office. I felt like I was gonna brush up against some priceless artifact and accidentally break it, going down in history as that guy.

Even the bathroom’s got cool stuff in it.

Mr. Peak and one of the more sexual lit mag advertisements I’ve ever seen.

We were part of an ex-Chicago contingent showed up in support of Sam.

Sam is an amazing human. He believes in people. He believes in the strange and exciting work that they do. Even when they don’t believe in themselves. That is a rare thing to find these days. Consider yourself lucky if you’re in the position of being his friend.

The Paris Review! Come on! I’m sorry, this office was incredible. I won’t deny it, I was nerding out big time.

Thank you, Sam. And congrats!

It’s hot out. There’s nothing to do but find some AC and kick back with some fine reading material. But a hard drive spinning in a laptop can get cooking and the greedy heart of a publisher can  make books pricey. What’s a reader to do? We got you covered.

Order your copy of Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrfice today and get $5.00 off any back issue of your choosing. That means you could get $5.oo off Issue Five or you could Issues #3 or #4 for FREE.

To take advantage of this discount that’s wildly unscrupulous on our part, simply add Issue Six to your cart, add one back issue of your choosing, then enter the coupon code “Summer” (case sensitive) in the coupon code field at the checkout page.

Think the savings don’t get any better? Think again! From now until August 15th, the Annalemma Bundle is a whopping 20% off! That’s all the available issues of Annalemma for a mere $20.00 plus S&H.

The summer sale ends August 15th. Head over to our store now!

The city of Chicago was up to a whole heap of bullshit, as mentioned a couple weeks ago. Not sure how it happened, but the Chicago Public Library stepped up and got the Gabriel Levinson’s bike full of books out of the garage and back onto the streets where it belongs. Raise a glass once again for Gabe and the CPL for keeping an undeniably good project going.

Read a good interview with Gabe here.

A few months back this blog saluted Gabriel Levinson, operator of the Book Bike. Chicago thinks the Book Bike is a threat to the public process and decided to shut him down. I think that is fucking bullshit. Absolute, utter bullshit. In spite of all the dubious and downright nefarious things the city of Chicago daily turns a blind eye to, their swift arm of justice has effectively obstructed one of the primary threats to Chicagoans: free literature. Way to go, Chi (slow clap). Way. To. Go. {via. Hat-tip to Vol. 1}

Check out the modern mythology of Caitlin Hackett. I’ve got half a mind to start an internet petition to get her and Matt Bell to work on a fucked up storybook together somewhere down the line. How sick would that be? {via}

Oh, Florida, you really made me love you a lot last night.

Our very own Jen O’Malley curated a show for the Snap! Orlando Photography Festival, which Annalemma sponsored. It was dedicated to photographers from Florida and their images of the Sunshine State.

Annalemma contributor, Kim Vang.

An excellent point the show made last night is that Florida (Central Florida in particular) has this cultural perception of being strictly a tourist destination, an entire section of the country existing as this homogenized and commodified culture made safe for mass consumption. Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s a big part of this state. But, like everything, this is just the veneer, and if you’re curious or adventurous enough, Florida will surprise you with its treasures.

Treasures like the photography of Christopher Bolton. This one sold within minutes of the gallery opening. Not surprising in the least.

Another big seller was our very own, Rose Wind Jerome.

Louise Erhard’s photographs of a dilapidated, yet still operational, motel near West Palm Beach, another pocket of Florida that’s got more stories than anyone can handle.

My mom and the kitsch wall.

Kitsch has been a part of Florida long before the mouse invasion. That comes with being a sunny climate most of the calender year.

You can either be annoyed by this crass expression of consumerism, or you can be charmed by the ideal and naive worldview that it represents. I think most Floridians look at it through both lenses from time to time.

Here is a secret of Florida that outsiders don’t know. We have springs. They call to us. We go to them. They fill us with life.

A new (to me) photographer who’s work I regrettably failed to capture last night was Ted Hollins who photographs the Zora! festival every year. The images on his website are hard to find but check out the photo grid in the lower left. Some amazing shots. More to come on Ted in the future.

This man makes works crazy hard at making a good living doing something amazing in Florida.

Congrats to Jen for not only curating an amazing show, but for helping shed light on the unseen pockets of beauty and horror that lay just beneath the saccharine manicured surface of Florida.

I have a hard time recommending Garth Ennis to anyone I know personally. It reflects something about ones character to say that you read and seem to enjoy stories written by a man that is so very clearly demented, a man that has sick, sick thoughts he deemed fit to commit to paper and unleash upon the consumer culture.

I’m not extensive on Ennis’s back catalogue. I’ve read the whole Preacher series and part one of The Boys. Ennis’s characters can often be too brash, too much machismo swagger for my tastes, the dialogue can be a little idealized and familiar, and the sex and violence often moves beyond comically gratuitous and into the realm of downright grating. But all in all, the stories are fun and he knows how to keep a reader hooked.

Crossed lacks Ennis’s balance of humor and darkness, his normal attitude of “The world’s fucked, we might as well crack a few jokes along the way to apocalypse.” The humor in Crossed comes in fits and spurts, nowhere near the centerpiece of the characters personalities. Crossed sees Ennis at a level of darkness that’s unsettling, which is say a lot for him.

In his version of a zombie apocalypse tale, a disease is spreading across the human race where peoples lack of self preservation clicks off and their every wanton desire, their every twisted fantasy, their every murderous thought becomes their driving force. These people are known as the Crossed, namely for the lesions that appear across their face in a cross pattern. The difference with Ennis’s vision of a zombie tale is that there is no happy ending in sight, no fighting back, no rescue, only avoidance of the threat. The only battle is the characters ability to maintain their humanity.

Crossed is Ennis’s meditation on humanity, on what makes us human, what happens when we lose it, and how brittle the latticework holding it up appears to be.  It’s a new side of Ennis I haven’t seen before: A more mature, and subsequently darker side, growing out of the voice of demented carnival barker and into one of Cormac McCarthy gone completely psychotic.

In a way, I respect Ennis more after reading this. I was this close to writing him off as a shock master, a little too quick to reach for the rape and murder as a plot changing device. With Crossed, those ingredients are there (in sickening supply) but they are there in a way that shines a light on the evil that humans are capable of and how close we are to committing those kinds of evils, given the right circumstances.

Contributor David Peak sat on my couch a couple weeks ago and told me he was teaming up with Ben Spivey to start a micro press. “It’s been nice being friends with you,” I said to David, “but now that you’re a publisher like me I must do everything in my power to destroy you, because that’s how this cold, harsh, vindictive world of small press publishing works.”

Well, I saw the unveiling of Blue Square Press yesterday and damned if that didn’t change my mind. Blue Square’s first release “Flowing the Gossamer Fold” looks too good to defy and has got some pretty impressive dudes talking about it:

“Reading like the troubled offspring of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus and the surreal ending of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold creates a deliberate and satisfying confusion between the habitations of the skull, of the word, and of the world. A strange and satisfying debut.”
-Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

“Malcolm Blackburn (motivational speaker, estranged husband of a bird with orange pubic hair, and lover to a mannequin) has a voice that throttled me from the first page, while Ben Spivey–an extraordinarily talented and shockingly young new writer–demonstrates that his own voice is versatile, vivid, funny, and trenchant. I read the book in one eager sitting. Flowing in the Gossamer Fold is a bizarre and genuinely exciting debut.”
-Nick Antosca, author of Midnight Picnic and Fires

Pre-order your copy today! I did.

While futilely researching small press magazine distributors I came across a good article at Publishing Perspectives by Gabriel Levinson, reviews editor of Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine. The article concerning “cause publishing” is an essential read, but the thing that hit me most was Gabe’s frustration with the form of book reviews and what that frustration evolved into. Enter the book bike.

Gabe decided that it was the duty of editors and writers to get the books out to the people. So he loaded up an old ice cream bike with books, peddled it out to the North Ave beach and put up a sign saying the books were free for the taking. All the books Gabe gives away are donated from publishers who want their books read. To date, Gabe has distributed some 3,000 new and used books throughout the city of Chicago. Gabe also goes on to explain that this isn’t a new idea and that Biblioburro is worth your attention.

For your commitment to your community, and for your mission of getting them invested in books, Annalemma salutes you, Gabriel Levinson.

I know almost nothing about Flatmancrooked’s latest release, We’re Getting On, but the prospect of the Zero Emission Book Project is inspiring. If you live on the west coast you should read up on James Kaelan and go see him when he comes to a city near you. And if you don’t live on the dream coast, head on over to Flatmancrooked and pre-order Jame’s book to send him off right!