The following is an excerpt from the story A-hole in Germantown by Mickey Hess, appearing in Annalemma Issue Six. Image by Charles Bergquist.

In fourth grade, Lynn was assigned to write to a pen pal in a foreign land. Her classmates chose Paris, or Australia, or Tokyo, places there were movies about. She chose Iceland. Why? Because she knew nothing about it, because neither did her classmates or even her teacher. Her pen pal correspondence with Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s most renowned novelist, was tacked to classroom walls. But it was overshadowed by the letters her classmates received.

Her friend Sarah received letters that were also carefully folded origami. Her name written in Japanese characters on ornate sheets of paper folded into swans. Lynn, on the other hand, received a bag of dried fish, stories about how Iceland was founded. She corrected these stories. She bought a pack of red gel pens and mailed the marked pages back to Reykjavik, referents corrected, tenses changed. Her mastery of the Icelandic language was remarkable, Laxness thought, particularly for a nine-year-old girl from Louisville,Kentucky.

Her concise paring of sentences, the way he came to rely on her editing: “now criticizing, now praising my work, but hardly ever letting a single word be buried in indifference.” But that last letter he got from her, just as the school year ended…

Dear Mr. Laxness,

This is the last letter I have to send you. You’ve been a good penpal. Keep writing. Most of your stories are good.

Sincerely,
Lynn

Thirteen years later, Halldor Laxness has moved to Louisville, Kentucky. Renowned novelists do this. After James Joyce published Ulysses, he moved there and opened a semi truck dealership. A lot of people don’t know that. Laxness has purchased a shotgun house in Louisville’s Germantown area. All his neighbors are officially unemployed, except for various entrepreneurial activities such as making and selling crystal meth or running perpetual yard sales. Once, a man tried to sell him a meatball sub out of the back of his Chrysler LeBaron.

Click here to pre-order Issue Six, which ships April 11th.

Mickey Hess is the author of Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory (Garrett County Press). His work has appeared in Quick Fiction, Ninth Letter, Pear Noir, and other journals. He is an associate professor of English at Rider University.

Charles Bergquist is a human man. He is a director, designer and photographer living in California. He loves the moon and hasn’t slept since 1998.

There’s a satisfying simplicity to the language in this book. When you feel sad you don’t really want to get fancy with language. When you’re hurt you don’t care about painting a picture. Those sorts of things don’t really matter to you at that point. When you’re sad, you just want to lay the facts on the table like puzzle pieces, to see if you can make any sense of it. And if there’s no sense to be made then sometimes the only thing that feels right is to sit and stare at the pieces.

I thought it was bad to participate in these videos, like in order to purge yourself of these negative vibes you’re spreading them out into the world, infecting everyone who comes into contact with them. But it kind of makes you feel better, like like you’ve pooled your collective sadness into something ridiculous and funny in hindsight.

Annalemma Issue Six is now available for pre-sale in our print store. If you enjoy the writing of the following people:

Mickey Hess

Matt Bell

Jonathan Messinger

Jack Boettcher

Ryan Call

J.A. Tyler

Henry Ronan-Daniell

Anne Valente

Ian Bassingthwaighte

Jim Ruland

Ravi Mangla

Roxane Gay

Jimmy Chen

Brandi Wells

…accompanied by the image work of the following people:

Charles Bergquist

Joseph Wood

Ghazal Hashemi

Daniel Lucas

Jenny Kendler

Owleyes

Nathaniel Shannon

Chrissy Lau

Anthony Cudahy

Todd Jordan

Xenia Fink

Rose Wind Jerome

Accettura & Ludde

Yana Tutunik

Ryan Marshall

Chase Heavener

Cara Faye Earl

…then you should hi-tail it over to our print store. As mentioned above, there’s a borderline-terrifying amount talent in these pages. We are bracing for the onslaught of orders as I type this. Secure your copy today! More details to come in the following weeks.

Random thoughts:

Don’t go into We Did Porn hoping for the alt-porn version of David Foster Wallace’s Big Red Son or Eric Schlosser’s An Empire of the Obscene. This book isn’t an investigative look into the recent trend of adult film stars covered in tattoos and Technicolor hair. This is a diary from the front lines of a culture war. Zak Smith rarely takes a microscope to porn. Instead, as someone who’s performed in a handful of alt-porn titles himself, he writes from the perspective of an insider, rarely delving into the personal histories of his subjects, mostly showing them as they are in the moment: actors, actresses, directors, various producers and production people engaged in the often unsexy process of performing sex on camera for money.

Only towards the end of the book does Smith try to tackle the how’s and why’s of women’s reasons for pursuing a career in the adult film industry. It’s the most interesting chapter as he challenges the general conception that most women in the porn industry are there because of a history of sexual abuse.

Smith’s writing style reflects his paintings: meticulous–borderline obsessive–with the detail. The images he chooses to show look washed out and spent, with spikes of color just to make sure you’re paying attention. He’s so generous with the scenery that sometimes he forgets a scene needs to reveal something about the people in it, which is a nice way of saying there’s a handful of excerpts the feel directionless.

Points off to Tin House for design. The thickness of the cover stock makes the book feel like it would fracture your skull if dropped from a height of a few feet. The inside pages are a weird semi gloss finish, presumably chosen to accommodate the images. The appeal of the paperback is that it’s somewhat malleable. This thing is just goddamn unwieldy.

This is a hard book to read. Zak Smith’s admittedly cynical worldview is refreshingly honest at times, but isn’t necessarily something that calls to you from the bookshelf. But Smith is writing about the zeros, as he calls the previous decade. It’s hard not to write cynically about a dark chapter in the history of the US, a time that we still live in, where it feels like things couldn’t possibly get much worse and we long for the innocence of only a few years ago, when we felt that things couldn’t possibly get much worse. The form of the memoir demands honesty, so it’s rings false to offer glints of hope when there doesn’t seem to be much of that going around. Of course, the drawback is that if your audience already knows how fucked up things are, they’re not necessarily going to want to be reminded of that every ten pages or so.

The above is from Mark Weaver‘s Make Something Cool Every Day project. Check out his flickr page to see the whole set, each image more magnetizing than the last.

I know there’s a lot of you out there who make it a point to write every day and sometimes it feels like a job, that you’re just sitting there typing away at some bullshit because otherwise you’d feel lazy and unproductive. What if instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to write every day,” you tell yourself, “I’m going to write something cool every day?” Whatever the definition cool means to you, you write it.

I try to write every day. Sometimes it feels like a job. Like I’m just typing away at some bullshit because otherwise I’d feel lazy and unproductive. As an experiment inspired by Mark Weaver I’m going to stop telling myself, “I am going to write every day” and instead tell myself, “I am going to write something cool every day,” and see where that gets me. Go, Mark Weaver, go!

Thanks to Gia for the heads up!

A friend is getting his house bug bombed and he asked if his cats could stay at my apartment for the day. I said of course, so he came over early this morning and dropped them off. Three cats crept about on their haunches, sniffing everything, dazed from the subway ride, probably the biggest adventure of their lives. My friend left to go to work and I poured some of their food in a bowl and set it on the ground. I stood back up and there were only two cats. I have a small apartment, not many places for a cat to hide. I called my friend and asked if one of the cats had followed him out, or if it could teleport. He said no, but that she was crafty and had thwarted him on many occasions.

I got ready to leave my apartment and then another cat disappeared. This one crept between the crack between the fridge and the counter. One last cat was still exploring my bathroom. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and the last cat was gone. Not under the couch, not behind the bookshelf, totally disappeared in the 400 square feet of my living room. I hope there isn’t a portal to another dimension behind my fridge that the cats keep disappearing into. That would really upset my friend. And me. The cats may be indifferent to this, depending on the dimension. When I left, my apartment was silent and still, offering no suggestion that there were three small creatures hiding somewhere in there.

Almost every woman I know owns a cat. They love their cats, but they fear that this love will spread to obsession and they will squander their love on these creatures, instead of another human. They fear becoming the crazy cat lady.

The main character in Lily Hoang’s story has already achieved that status and wants to go beyond. She wants to become a cat. Her cats are more than happy to oblige. They teach her the cat language, teach her to hunt and go so far as to replace themselves as her vital organs. Hoang’s detail of wounds being sewed up with shimmering cat whiskers sticks with me.

Hoang takes an every-day fear that slowly eats away at the psyche of most young women and ramps it to a surreal degree. It feels as if she does this to suppress that fear, as if to say At least you’re not as crazy as this woman.

Hoang’s story is part of the mud luscious chapbook series, which is a colorful little bunch of booklets that are one great story after another. When the cats disappeared this morning I thought maybe reading this would psychically draw them out. Hopefully when I get home they won’t be ready with the needle and whisker, ready convert me.

Book cover design virtuoso Jim Tierney redesigned four classic Jules Verne novels, not for some reissue campaign for a big time publisher, but for his senior project.

Jim employs all sorts of whimsical, rarely-used cover design methods like die cut half jackets, spin wheels and translucent film.

The best part about these covers is you need only glance at them to get a potent taste of the adventure that lies within.

The worst part about them is that they are one of a kind. Hey Penguin! Get off your ass and mass produce these.

Click over to Faceout Books to read a short interview with Jim about the process.

Thanks to Danny J for the heads up!

Random Thoughts:

“Common” experiences of the young white male in the late 20^th century/early 21st century: playing in bands, drinking, doing drugs, messing around with girls, masturbating to pornography, dealing with father issues. “Uncommon” experiences of the young white male in the late 20^th century/early 21st century: Loosing your virginity to a prostitute, dating four women at a time, engaging in mutual masturbation with a male stranger in a video booth.

When reading a memoir you’re looking to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for two or three hundred pages. I’ve grown a little tired of reading of the aforementioned “common” experiences. It’s subject matter I’ve been so immersed in for years and years that reading a book with these experiences in it is like a little bit like reading a book about breathing or eating breakfast.  They’re funny at times and my heart warms to it because I can relate, but the filler vignettes in ACP of drugs and sex veer dangerously close to “slice of life” territory. Ultimately those things just don’t move me anymore, don’t offer me a tectonic shift of thinking, which is what I look for when putting on someone else’s shoes.

I felt the same way when I read Catcher in the Rye. I was expecting something along the lines of the Anarchist Cookbook, a controversial text, dripping with napalm, that would get me arrested if I was caught reading it in public. But halfway into the book it just felt like a buddy of mine telling me about his trip to New York. The voice and subject matter were so common to me that I failed to see what was so special about it.

Luckily the book is balanced with the “uncommon” experiences. I’m using these quotes because these experiences aren’t that uncommon at all. They’re probably more common than you think, but they remain unspoken, looked down upon. But Sampsell is someone that has the guts to write about them. Being as honest as possible is about as essential to a good memoir as printing on paper.

It feels pithy to pass judgment on a book just because you’ve done some of the same things the author has. What makes this book worth the read is Sampsell’s voice. Calm, metered, matter-of-fact without being tepid or monotone. He doesn’t over-emphasize these experiences, doesn’t inflate them with meaning and wallow in denouement. He treats his love of football statistics with the same level-headedness as he does his sister’s mental illness. It’s refreshing to read an author that trusts the reader to put these loose vignettes together like a puzzle. He lets the audience impart their own meaning to these stories instead of dropping emotional cues everywhere, the equivalent of holding up an applause sign.

Google imaging “A Common Pornography” does not yield as many fucked up things as I had imagined it would.

{above image by Xenia Fink for the story “Bred in Captivity” by Ravi Mangla}

Did I mention we’re working on our new print issue? And did I mention that it’s got a stupid-ridiculous amount of talent in it? Don’t believe me? Do as Lavar Burton teaches by not taking my word for it and check out our tentative roster for our sacrifice themed issue.

A-hole in Germantown

Story: Mickey Hess

Images: Charles Bergquist

+

Three Stories

Stories: Matt Bell

Images: Joseph Wood

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Ashore, An Island

Story: Jonathan Messinger

Images: Ghazal Hashemi

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Goodnight, America

Story: Jack Boettcher

Images: Daniel Lucas

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Baron Von Richtofen Flies Again

Story: Ryan Call

Images: Jenny Kendler

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Illusions [n2]

Story: J.A. Tyler

Images: owleyes

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The National Pastime

Story: Henry Ronan-Daniell

Images: Nathaniel Shannon

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A Very Compassionate Baby

Story: Anne Valente

Images: Chrissy Lau

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A Flawless Pick

Story: Ian Bassingwaithe

Images: Anthony Cudahy

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Our Lady of Guadalupe Needs a New Fight Song

Story: Jim Ruland

Images: Todd Jordan

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Bred in Captivity

Story: Ravi Mangla

Images: Xenia Fink

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How

Story: Roxane Gay

Images: Rose Wind Jerome

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Condominium

Story: Jimmy Chen

Images: Todd Fisher

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Claim

Story: Brandi Wells

Images: Yana Tutunik

Whew. That’s a lotta hooch. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to lose my mind for a week while we try to get this to the printers and back in time for AWP.

Some things that you did not know that you now know:

– Contributor David Peak wrote a novel.

– The novel is called The Rocket’s Red Glare

– It is for sale here.

– You want to buy it. Why? Because David is a good writer. But you already knew that.