After almost a year (a fucking year? really?) I finally got around to posting bios from the print issue contributors. Apologies if you were in the print issue and were at a party and told someone you were in the print issue of this bad ass journal and the person you were talking to went home and got on the internet to google-proofed your story and thought that you were a goddamned liar and then started telling people you were a goddamned liar and next thing you know everyone hates you and you’re living in a box. Sorry about that.

Also, contributor Paul Kwiatkowski got a shout out at the Paris Review blog for his essay Lions that first appeared in Issue Seven.

Also, we need artists. If you are an artist or know an artist and would like to illustrate a story we’re running on the web then email me at chris {at} annalemma {dot} net and I will probably like what you do.

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.

Want to read the story Amber Sparks originally published in Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance? It’s now live at The Reprint, a cool project from the folks at Zine Scene, wherein they post stories previously appearing exclusively in print and pair them up with the work of one visual artist. This issue features Pamela Wilson. Go check it out now.

Like Amber’s stuff? Check out an interview with her here.

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.

How many things do you make for yourself? How much do you depend on others to make things for you? When people make things for you does it make you feel important or impotent?

Here’s some powerful quotes from Junot Diaz (via Rumpus) to infest the brain on a Monday morning. Are you making things (stories, drawings, compost, business deals, love)  to feel accepted, important? Or are you making them out of necessity?

Working on point-of-purchase stuff for AWP.

None of this stuff actually helps us sell anything. We usually sell out of books at AWP because of good old fashioned hand selling and friendly customer service.

Still, it’s fun to make this stuff and cool to give people something to walk away with. Are you going to be there? I hope so. I like meeting people who know/read the magazine. Feels good to make those connections. AWP is good for that reason alone: To hang with the people who are electronic ghosts the rest of the year. Start warming your palms up for the slew of hi fives.

My lady got me the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 for Christmas. I was all pumped about this edition since I found out Anne Elizabeth Moore‘s essay from Issue Five got a head-nod in the “Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2009” section. I hadn’t picked up one of these in a while. I’m not sure why. They’re always good. I’d rather have one of the pieces we publish reprinted there than in Best American Short Stories or BA Essays. It starts with an incredible short story by Sherman Alexie from his collection War Dances. In the midst of getting a growth in his brain checked out by the doctors, the narrator juggles his children, his dying father, and the very real possibility that he may be dying soon too. Alexie hasn’t lost his edge. It feels like he’s grown more crotchety as he’s gotten older, which is great. He’s at his most entertaining when he’s barbed and thorny.

There’s an etherial comic by Lilli Carré that’s a good example of when tone and feel are enough to carry a story.

Rana Dasgupta‘s essay, Capital Gains, on India’s unregulated capitalism run amok is discomforting, shocking, and an enthralling read from start to finish. Dasgupta attempts to hold a mirror up to a hopelessly corrupt government and a national psyche obsessed with the accumulation of wealth above all other things.

An excerpt from the photo journal/graphic novel hybrid “The Photographer” by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefévre and Frédéric Lemercier tracks a photojournalist covering a doctor’s travels in Northern Afganistan in 1986 treating mujahideen soldiers and residents of small villages effected by the war against the Soviet Union. The parts of the story unseen Lefévre’s photos have been dramatized by graphic artist, Emmanuel Guibert. I’m always thinking about roles that the arts play in politics and war, if they play any role at all other than Greek Chorus. “The Photographer” feels like a good example of commentary by-way-of objective storytelling.

I started reading War and Peace. I don’t really know why. I guess I felt like I was ready for it. For some reason it feels comforting in a way, to read about Russians in the 1800’s, to know that people haven’t changed all that much since then. We like to think we have but we haven’t. The settings and circumstances change, but we still behave the same. I’m having a hard time getting through the politics of it. If anyone’s read it before and or some advice for getting through the first few hundred pages (having difficulty keeping up with names and references) that’d be appreciated.

If you haven’t clicked on over to the website of this week‘s illustrator, Walter Green, then do yourself a favor. Walt’s images have been showing up everywhere lately and his watercolor/handscript style seems appropriate almost every situation. He’s got knack for knowing what kind of image looks good for a literary object, as displayed in these fake book covers:

Well done, Walter. Looking forward to your further ubiquity.

Meet Lisa Hanawalt. She’s weird. Exhibit A: her new window dressing at Desert Island.

So you can see she’s weird in the best way. I recently read a copy of I Want You #2. The cover drew me in, anything with anthropomorphized animals usually does. I wasn’t ready for what was inside: Crude humor expertly illustrated, a recipe for a deliciously devilish good time.

First you barf at the image of an Avatar character defecating out if its mouth, then you marvel at the attention to detail on a she-moose’s face as she pleasures herself with a newly bought vibrator. Hanawalt sticks to the classics to get laughs, good old fart and poop jokes. You’re lying to yourself if you don’t find those things funny.

And then there’s this:

The FL release party for Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance was held in Eatonville, FL. Why?

Because of this man: Ted Hollins.

I first heard about Ted at a photo show curated by our very own print designer, Jen O’Malley. Jen consulted N.Y. Nathiri (director of the The Hurson Museum and founding board member of The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, pictured left) to determine who was the best photographer in Eatonville. She didn’t hesitate to name Ted. When Jen and I started talking about featured artists for the Endurance issue, Ted’s name kept coming up. He’s been documenting the ZORA! festival for the last 21 years. To us, nothing said endurance like the life and work of Zora.

So we put together Ted’s photo essay, we got N.Y. to write a really beautiful foreward for it and we decided to donate a portion of the proceeds from the issue to the Hurston Museum.

To get a sense of closure to the project, it only seemed right to throw the release party in Eatonville at the Hurston Museum. So that’s what we did.

And a lot of people came out and had a damn good time, as was our intention. Alberta, Moms, Karina and Alberto.

I stood up and said basically everything you just read. People looked at me funny while I spoke.

My heart was warmed with the old and new friends that came out to support. Metha and Kris.

The Black Bean Deli catering crew unleashed an avalanche of empanadas that Eatonville was not prepared for. They were not wearing sock garters so their socks got blown clean off. Andy, Janelle, Gabi and Jessi.

Magazines were perused and enjoyed. It was, far and away, the best Anna party ever thrown.

Thanks to Ted, Jen, N.Y. Nathiri, The Hurston Musuem, and, most of all, the Eatonville community for welcoming a bunch of strangely dressed outsiders with open arms. Don’t miss ZORA! fest happening at the end of January!