By Chris Millis
The underground cult hit that won the Grand Prize in the 23rd Annual International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest is now a major motion picture from Sony Entertainment directed by Grammy Award winner Jonas Akerlund and starring the most refreshingly offbeat cast ever assembled for a dark indie comedy.
Following the success of his novel, The Dreamlife of Bridges, Robert Strandquist makes a much-awaited return to the short story form. Settings are extreme or post-apocalyptic and walk the line of magic realism. Despite the sometimes-alien landscapes his characters inhabit, there is always the motif of adults navigating the riparian paths of longing, love and loss.
Snatch is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, Snatch picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence.
By CR Avery
In his take-no-prisoners style of verse and performance, Avery poetry is alternately profane, brilliantly vulgar, unsettling, outrageously funny and brash in it’s lonesome courage, and unquestionably original.
In prose that’s as sharp as broken glass and shot through with poetry, Teresa McWhirter unlocks the extraordinary subculture of urban adults in their twenties and early thirties. Most startling of all are the portraits of young women —tough, independent party girls who are strong enough to say “no” to love and smart enough to know why.
The Song Collides takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world—and then back via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life as an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simultaneous and nearly imperceptible process that lasts, we hope, at least until the exit.
By Ed Macdonald
Spat the Dummy is a confession—raw and unrestrained, a modern-day Hero’s journey to the Underworld and back, a novel about changing history by confronting it.
Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends who either flee suburbia or remain as resigned fixtures, Walter is content with his lot and finds the shoe store an ideal environment in which to pursue his grand ambition: designing the perfect woman’s shoe.
