Work-in-Progress
Betsy is a New Orleans based novel about two couples, a pair of brothers and their wives as they prepare and weather the 1965 hurricane, Betsy, that devastated the city. Anne had actually completed the first draft of the novel well before Katrina had become a watershed event. With the impending hurricane as the background, the novel deals with the couples, their relationships more fragile and etched in cracks than the levees would prove to be.

Work-in-Progress
MORE OF THIS WORLD OR MAYBE ANOTHER — From the rural Gulf Coast to a rough-and-tumble New Orleans neighborhood known as Mid-City, the stories in the collection pulse with an anxious inner life set down in the chaos of the street. Closely linked tales introduce us to teenaged Delia, who experiences first-love jitters atop an oil storage tank where she tries to work up the nerve to kiss a girl. Dooley’s music career takes off when he moves to the city, but some devastating news points to divorce and an impulse buy ends in tragedy. A sensitive alcoholic named Pudge survives his fat-boy childhood with an abusive father and then hides out from his own son, Luis. On the eve of his confirmation, the fatherless Luis drugs his mother’s boyfriend. It is a Mid-City laundromat that serves as home base for this cast of powerfully drawn characters who must all unite to save Luis from a violent end. Funny and haunting by turns, Johnson’s characters are driven by a fragile and irresistible sputtering drive to love and be loved. (HARPER PERENNIAL - October 2009)

"These are stunning stories. Barb Johnson is the kind of writer whose work I dream of finding and rarely do. Yes, precise and gorgeous language. Yes, a wonderful sense of humor, and another of pathos made over into something much more effective-a vision of all these people just doing the best they can and along the way becoming the best kind of stories-the kind that reveal, enlarge and make living seem worth the trouble." — Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Work-in-Progress
None Alive, None Famous - While “Everyone's a critic”, Gabe Sack makes his living as one. None Alive None Famous, told through Gabe's razor wit & self-loathing voice, is a raucous send-up of music journalism, rock 'n' roll, and Vegas lounge acts. Gabe Sack decides to quit his job as Los Angeles' most notorious rock critic. He's tired of ruining careers and wrecking personal relationships with his venomous tongue. Tired of getting his ass kicked by angry musicians. Tired of his own knee-jerk cynicism. Tired of himself.

For his final assignment, he is sent to Las Vegas to profile an infamously bad lounge singer Hambert Larkin. What begins as a simple assignment turns into an epic road trip encountering neurotic metalheads, kleptomaniacs, billionaire low-rollers and, finally, the crazed lounge singer, Hambert Larkin, himself -- who proves to be much more than a mere subject for an easy hit piece. None Alive, None Famous is, in the end, a Gabe's journey into the Heart of Manufactured Darkness to find personal redemption.

"Ben Myers has the imagination of a lovable serial killer, his writing will fill you with love and scare you to shit." - Kelly Jones

"Something odd but irresistible that's both poetry and prose." - Time Out

"A mordant intelligence mixed with a sense of amused bewilderment. Superb black-humoured road trip of the soul." - Spike magazine

"Myers' conversations swim with the rhythm and buzz of real talk’ -- he reminds me of JP Donleavy, with his lurching, inebriated poetry." - Playlouder

Work-in-Progress
The Missing Kidney. starts with an operation that Ben had a child to remove a kidney. The tale evolves to be a twisted portrait of a changing England. Ben has described it as:

"A novel about tarmac, traffic jams, will o' the wisps, grilled fish, ghosts of lions, saunas, surgical techniques, unexpected metamorphosis, Mozart, morphine addiction, hare-lips, hospital incinerators, bananas, nurses, train track closures, Latino bongo players, contemporary town planning, extinct animals, scars and a celebration of the minutiae of our everyday existences."

Work-in-Progress
Concord, Virginia is a collection of inter-connected tales of the people and the events of a Southern town, as often brutal in action as it is bucolic in setting. The writing has been compared to Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Allan Gurganus, T.R. Pearson, Clyde Edgerton, in fact practically every Southern writer, living or dead, except Margaret Mitchell...and, at 27 years old, there’s still time for Peter to be linked to her. (ST. MARTIN’S - 2009)

Works in Progress
• Down & Out on Murder Mile. A couple, both drug addicts, meet at a party in LA. With nothing better to do, they decide to marry & go down together. Eating up prospects & destroying opportunities, they end up living in the worst section of London...where the husband, but not the wife, remakes his life. (HARPERCOLLINS - SEPTEMBER 2008)

• Sick City - Two hapless drug addicts who meet in rehab and concoct a get-rich-quick scheme that would only make sense to a couple of coke heads. Their picaresque journey through LA has them bumping into a delightful plenty of grotesque characters: from Dr, Mike, the Tony Robbins/Dr. Phil Recovery Guru, whose self-help empire of luxury rehab centers, reality TV show, and best selling books could be tumbled by his secret obsession with Champagne, not the drink but a stunning transvestite, to Trina, the stripper who has to give blow jobs for drugs because she's tapped her bank account for a "business expense" boob job, to Spider, a former childhood sitcom star now stealing suitcases from the LAX carousels to see what he can pawn for drugs, to Stevie Rox, the bloated movie mogul who orders (too loudly) the most expensive wines at Musso & Frank's, to Rupert DeWald, the wealthy jingo writer who discreetly uses some of his wealth to acquire trinkets like Napoleon's penis for his "collection," to Pat, the sociopath dealer/killer who adds a delightfully dark tension, always lingering in the narrative's shadows, to an otherwise often humorous tale.

The story is unmistakably Tony O'Neill, New York Times best selling author of previous novels Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile, but reads as though he's been snorting high grade Jim Thompson and mainlining Elmore Leonard. (HARPER PERENNIAL - 2010)

Work in Progress
The as-yet-nameless collection of Tennessee Mountain tales, at once warming & heartbreaking, familiar yet peculiar, has received praise from iconic musician John Prine, "Minton Sparks is a great storyteller." Humanity with humidity all told humorously with humility. Sin Sick is just what the doctor ordered," and writer Dorothy Allison, "Minton Sparks sounds like my momma, my Aunt Dot, my Aunt Grace and even a bit like my Uncle Jack-only better and wilder and heartbreakingly more powerful. If I could have heard poetry like this as a girl, I wouldn't have had to waste all those years thinking we were dumb as dirt."

His memoir, Never the Same Again, was chosen as a Best Book of 2004 by both The Austin Chronicle and The LA Times. The nonfiction narrative weaves together his music and writing careers, Austin and LA, the murder of his girlfriend in 1976 by a serial killer,and then he was diagnosed with throat cancer and had 4% chance of survival. Of his writing, others have said:

"Harrowing, wrenching, spellbinding work of great candor and soul. Read it, think with it, dig it." — James Ellroy (Author, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand)

"Never the Same Again is an important work. Jesse Sublett's pursuit of his dreams is the true chronicle of a generation. Sublett takes us on a ride through life that is crazy, funny, and sometimes deeply tragic, but ultimately, an inspiring and always highly readable survivor's tale." — Michael Connelly (Author, Bloodwork, Void Moon)

"Jesse's odyssey of growing up in a small Texas town with a head full of big ideas, and his relentless drive to take them in the direction of his artistic intuition, is a moving story that captures an important cultural moment. Surviving the horrible murder of his girlfriend in 1976, and going from punk rock to fatherhood, his story becomes a universal one, and he makes it sing with authenticity." — Richard Linklater (Filmmaker, Slacker, Dazed & Confused)

"Jesse Sublett is one of the few of my generation to actually run the thread through the eye of the needle and be able to tell me what it's like. He defined punk in Austin, Texas when everyone else was still trying to figure out how to walk properly in cowboy boots so they could get next to Willie. He'd ditched his axe and his band the Skunks for a typewriter, and, using Austin and music as his canvas, painted a picture as black as any Lou Reed ditty as a rock and roll crime writer. It's powerful stuff, mainly because he keeps reminding me, he's one of us. He just got here quicker than we did. Reading is believing." — Joe Nick Patoski (Senior Editor, Texas Monthly and Author, Selena and Stevie Ray Vaughan)

Work in Progress
A HAWK AND A HANDSAW introduces Quinn Tammany, a freelance writer and circumstantial sleuth (a bit of a hip Philip Marlowe who hates guns). The tone is reminiscent of Charles Willeford and Denis Johnson. More important than the crime element of the stories is Quinn’s daily routine as a struggling writer, trying to make it without whoring himself out too much.

Quinn takes a temporary, but paying, writing job blogging about the SXSW music festival, shelving (again) his novel about a victim of the ice pick lobotomy fad of the 1950s-60s. On the eve of the festival, a musician shows up with a head wound, a 1954 Stratocaster, a SXSW wristband and a gig schedule. He plays guitar like an avenging angel, but can’t remember his name. Quinn believes he’s found the story of a lifetime and sets out to find the identity of the mystery guitarist.

The victim of an unsolved murder appears to be linked to the guitarist. During the six days of the festival, Quinn is on maximum overdrive, attending dozens of gigs and parties a day in order to learn the guitarist’s name. Throughout the novel, Quinn is also driving around town with the ashes of his dead ex-girlfriend in his trunk, too discombobulated to figure out what to do with them.

A HAWK AND A HANDSAW is largely about identity. What is it, where does it come from, how do we lose it? And how some people you never really know, no matter what you thought.

PATTI CALKOSZ drew her first cartoon as a young child and has continued her love affair with drawing ever since. Patti received a BA in English at Duke University and after graduation traveled the country, living in New York, Charleston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She plans to release collections of her earlier works, “Cats Are Best,” “Dogs Make a Mess,” “Wanda Needs Her Rest,” and “Death Has Breasts.”

Work-In-Progress
The Rational Mathematician is an amusing, light romp through the world of math. It is a serious work where the reader will learn all the basic concepts we forgot [or slept through] in school. Dr. Tandy Grubbs has written a refreshing book that can make math enjoyable and fun, and Patti Calkosz’s witty cartoons add a flair that is necessary to any math book. Their philosophy is simple – “All math books should have cartoons.” In The Rational Mathematician the reader will learn about “Homer Simpson Math” and how it helps explain computer science, what “Rabbit Season” is and how reproducing rabbits explains compound interest and a very interesting lesson by playing a financial game with Warren Buffett.

Available Now
My New Orleans. When the levees broke in New Orleans, August 29th, 2005, Rosemary assembled a distinguished group to write tributes (not eulogies!) to the city they loved. Among the contributors are writers Andrei Codrescu, Christopher Rice, Bret Lott, Robert Olen Butler, Stewart O’Nan, Poppy Z. Brite and local dignitaries Wynton Marsalis, Paul Prudhomme, Leah Chase, Ella Brennan.

{ Simon & Schuster }

Work-in-Progress
Delay, Deny, and Hope We Die: The NFL’s War on Their Disabled Veterans. For the opportunity to play a mere 3.2 years in the NFL (the average length of a pro football player’s career), the life expectancy for former players is only into their late 50s (almost 20 years less than the average American male). Often, players live incapacitated after leaving the game, unable to hold down jobs or hold their own children, their bodies racked with pain that even near addiction levels of Vicodin and other painkillers cannot dispel. Of the over 13,000 former NFL players, only 317 are receiving disability checks from the league. Hundreds of other former stars are left disabled, sometimes homeless, and several have taken their own lives, such as the 44 year old Andre Waters, whose autopsy revealed his brain to be that of an 85 year old man because of the concussions absorbed in football. With a narrative built upon a wave of wrenching personal stories that put a human face of the mountain of statistics, Bernie Parrish’s drives a well documented and compelling stake into the heart of America’s Number One Past time. (Counter Point Press - Fall 2009)

Work-in-Progress
The Floating People is a collection of moving portraits of people throughout the world that, either by birth or circumstance, do not fit into their culture. Included are Muslim women, refused entry in European universities after 9/11 because they refuse to remove their nigabs, or veils, an older Dutch man, riddled by guilt for the torture & war crimes he committed as an overzealous 20 year old soldier in Indonesia, Aboriginal girls sold off into prostitution to avoid starvation, a Texas man on Death Row after his life of extreme poverty left him few options but crime, and a novella length portrait, reminiscent of the documentary film, Born Into Brothels, about an Indian couple that seek, and beautifully fail, to buck the caste system by erecting schools in urban slums and desolate rural areas to improve the fate of lower class children.

Work-in-Progress
The Joy of Sects: an info-tainment A-to-Z encyclopedia of religious cults and fanatics. With years having passed since Jim Jones (‘78), the Branch Davidians (‘93), and Heaven’s Gate (‘97), we’re "due" for the next publicity tie-in.

Life’s Too Short takes on the the new wave of books, movies, and magazine articles about all the Bucket Lists and places you must see before you die. Sam researches, or does, the must-see, must-do suggestions and decides it is always better to stay home. The book is filled with factoids, such as recording the number of deaths resulting from people that must climb Mt. Everest (the all-time one day record is 8), and how much trash the average climber leaves on the mountain during their spirit quest (44 pounds!).

(photo credit: not really Darby & Kerin, but rather an image from the incredible work of Loretta Lux)

Work-in-Progress
BROKE IS THE NEW BLACK - Financial times have become so suddenly dire, tall office buildings in major cities are replacing small spikes on window ledges meant to keep pigeons away with much larger & sharper spikes to keep office workers from climbing out and into jump position. Pilots have dropped their commercial airliners into The East River just to get a 3 million dollar book deal. Even Kobe Bryant has had to supplement his 30 million a year income by charging $49.99 to subscribers of his random-thoughts blog. Times are tough for Everyone.

That said, there are many (too many) books offering advice on how cut costs or budget better. BROKE IS THE NEW BLACK offers advice with attitude. A healthy mix of economic guidance, online income, borderline scams, freebies, and new money-making opportunities in which people of all tax-brackets can take advantage.

The book will be a highly designed, fact filled, irreverent, but indispensable how-to-make-ends-meet or how-to-stretch-out-what-remains-of-your-401K resource for anyone who can still afford to buy a copy. The text will include specific tips - like websites to connect people with too much stuff with other people with too much space to broker deals better than can be had with companies renting storage units. Or how to travel without money for a hotel (or hostel for that matter). Also included are unconventional tips - like selling virtual items to on-line gamers - to frugal living recommendations - cautioning cost-conscious/eco-conscious consumers to not waste the bonus nitrous buzz at the end of used-up whipped cream cans - to borderline illegal tips - if you're going to steal food to survive, make it lobster not cans of tuna!

In addition to a slathering of advantageous advice and adventurous attitude, BROKE IS THE NEW BLACK will be designed in a style befitting two Zine superstars. Placed on shelves next to books by Suze Orman and the Motely Fool, it will be like seeing a pair of Stuart Weitzmans in a sea of Stride Rites.

Work-in-Progress
Mysteria: A Medley of the Obsessive, Addicted, Murderous, Suicidal, and Insane. Jill has been lifelong collecting tales of real life creepy people like the lesser known British coffin maker, so obsessed with being buried alive, he designed trap doors to "escape" and had himself cremated (before it was fashionable) rather than run the risk, plus more renown figures like Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in human blood.

Work-in-Progress
In My Kitchen: photo essays of women, with an emphasis on immigrant women, standing proudly in their American kitchens, displaying their signature dish prepared for important family gatherings. The text is recipes and tales of shopping for ingredients, making the dish, and great family moments built around the feast.

Work-in-Progress
A History of the Great Historical Hoaxes in American History is for all the wackos that think Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon was staged. Andy exposes the other famous hoaxes like the building of Niagara Falls (after a failed attempt by Belgium to outdo France’s gift of The Statue of Liberty), and The Birth Place of Jazz (not New Orleans, but Sasakatchawan), all the way back to the Discovery of America (Irwin Lipschitz). Presented with pictures and charts...some doctored.

Now Available
My Parachute is Beige: A Career Guide for the Untalented & Unmotivated: Series of 64 tips for how to keep your cube dwelling job even without any discernible talent (ABRAMS - IMAGE March 2008)

Now Available
An Incomplete & Inaccurate History of Sport - A collection of essays, ostensibly about sports from Australian Rules Football and Ax Throwing to X Games and Yachting. Couldn’t think of a Z sport. Chapters are actually about whatever the hell he wants them to be about. The Hunting chapter, for instance, is about hunting for the perfect Triple Tall Americano, light on the water, in the modern world of befuddled (and often over charging) coffee baristas. I call the writing "Calvin Trillin or Ian Frazier for guy-guys that never heard of Calvin Trilln or Ian Frazier." (CROWN-RANDOM HOUSE - APRIL 2008)

Work-in-Progress
Bad Jocks: seen as an annual of bad behavior by athletes & coaches. The website (and the intended book) favors the more obscure but interesting stories of high school coaches that impregnate the entire cheeerleading squad or parents that alter birth certificates so their son can dominate Little League over the more overexposed exploits of Barry Bonds or T.O. The Darwin Awards for jocks.

Work-in-Progress
Autobiography of a Wart. Competitive eating is just one of Crazy Legs many attempts to escape the banality of his suburban Swanson TV dinner & collectible Hummel figurine upbringing. All his ventures toward the Fringe, all his attempts to be a wart on the unblemished face of America, keep being frustrated as our culture keeps turning everything into a brand or a consumable. Crazy legs has worked at strip clubs (where there are now Tuesday night lessons for soccer moms), a cook at roach-infested greasy Lower East Side dive (then becoming Time Out-New York "authentic" cool), working at a rebellious upstart Indie film company (then absorbed by a large corporate media giant as their hip boutique brand), and his life as a pro eater, gone from stuffing reindeer sausage in front of 10 people in Juno, Alaska to getting commercial endorsements & live ESPN coverage. May a man’s reach exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?

Work-in-Progress
Family Sentence: The Search for my Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Deadbeat Dad. Jeanine was just two years old when her father, a Cuban revolutionary turned anti-Castro militant, was sentenced to thirty years in prison for political bombings. His absence left a single mother to raise four children and those children to conjure a father-hero out of little more than occasional letters and prison yard visits.

The narrative shifts between Little Havana, where Cornillot spends her summers with her Spanish-speaking grandparents and cousins, and Philadelphia, where her unconventional Irish-American clan skirts poverty and conceals their family secret.

As she pieces together her own identity, a wryly funny and unsentimental narrator emerges. Whether going to prison to meet her father for the first time at age six and hoping she looks Cuban enough, imagining herself a girl-revolutionary leading protest marches, quitting Spanish class after one day, or writing to demand her father to end his 44-day hunger strike, young Jeanine maintains a hopeful pragmatism that belies her age.

Eventually, a child’s mythology is replaced with adult reality in a final reckoning with her father, remarkable for the unsparing honesty on both sides. (BEACON PRESS - Fall 2009)

Work-in-Progress
Stealing Green Mangos is the fascinating story of two brothers: Sunil and his older brother Raju, who were born into extreme poverty in Punjab. One chose a path of running from the law and the other, law enforcement. Raju is currently on the lam in Canada while Sunil is a Lieutenant in the LAPD. The memoir tells the story of how it is to live and grow up in a place where there is little hope, but also the story of how one brother came to America and thrived in school and work. The book describes what it means to be a police officer in one of the largest cities in America and how he balances the different worlds of gang violence and tragedy with his music and poetry. One stirring chapter describes his first day on the job and how a routine traffic stop almost turned into disaster.

Work-in-Progress
Thinking Outside the Black Box. A near crash on route to study in France ratchets up Bern’s fear of flying to a complete obsession. The book is her exploring every aspect of airline disasters. She takes a fear of flying course in San Francisco, attends a 12 day accident investigation study in Virginia, reads the NTSB disaster reports and follows www.airdisaster.com like some guys read daily box scores, interviews "hero" passenger turned pilot Denny Fitch and scholar Gary Compoblanco of Old Dominion, who wrote the definitive study of trauma in airline crash survivors. The text is an amusing but fact-filled journey.

Work-in-Progress
Dots That Won’t Connec - t is a memoir...sort of. Ellie Fabe is an almost perfectly average American; a wife and mother of two (she notes if she could figure out how to birth half a child, she’d be statistically perfect) upper-middle income, college-educated, living in the comforting blandness of a colonial house with a two-car garage in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her mind, however, is anything but bland—or focused. Dots is a wildly tangential expoloration of a woman on the verge of a nervous breahthrough. Breakthrough to what is often close but never fully clear. The memoir’s verbal flips, turns, flutterings and twirls are most like Nicholson Baker’s fictional The Mezzanine, a novel about a man going out to buy a pair of shoe laces during his lunch hour. In a world hungry for a "fresh voice," Ellie Fabe is certainly that. Imagine if David Sedaris and Garrison Keillor met at a party, dropped acid, and spent the night talking about menopause and non-dairy creamers.

Work-in-Progress
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World. A lifelong resident of New Orleans, for last year’s Lent, Anne gave away 40 objects and wrote about each one as she did so. This exercise is her entry point to write about the resonance in other sacred objects or places given away, lost, or altered over the years. These include The Saturn Bar, a legendary dive whose heart & soul, owner/bar tender O’Neal Broyard, was lost to Katrina, a grocery store where Anne and her sisters used to sit together and solve life’s issues, the hundred year old house where she now lives and has traced every previous owner, one who keeps showing up to reclaim his tools, one at a time, though he has moved 80 miles away, and finally, her beloved New Orleans itself.

Work-in-Progress
Home Front is a family potrait about as distant from Ozzie & Harriet as one can get. When daughter, Shannon, goes off to school and husband Mark leaves the home wearing the badge as LAPD’s Chief Deputy, Jorja rushes into these same crime riddled streets, in her new stay-at-home role, interacting and ingratiating herself with many of the toughest of the LA gangs, the infamous Bloods and Crips and their offshoots, the Pueblos, Bishops, Denver Lanes, and Piru Street Boys.

Work-in-Progress
Normal is a collection of essays by a distinctly Midwestern (but quirky) voice. They deal with the really important issues in life: food, football, the weather, and lawn care. Think Erma Bombeck channeled through Miranda July.

Work-in-Progress
Seeds Sown & Scattered is a portrait of the New Orleans music scene, what it has meant to America and how the musicians are struggling to keep it alive and growing after the disaster of August 29th, 2005.

Happiness in the Rear View Mirror is a portrait of the music scene of Lubbock, Texas, a bedrock fundamentalist community that has chased out her creative class from Buddy Holly to the Dixie Chicks. Title comes from Mac Davis, a 70’s singer/songwriter/actor from Lubbock. His quote, "My idea of happiness is seeing Lubbock, Texas...in my rear view mirror."

Work-in-Progress
Hero of the Underground. Imagine what you could do with 7.5 million dollars if you were a cocain/heroin addict. He did. Hero is a fearless, vivid, and intense portrait of the train wreck of his life. The voice makes the book unlike any of sports bio, closer to the reading experience of Bukowski or William S. Burroughs. Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, said of the book:

Hero of the Underground gives us a portrait of red-blooded jock as monster dope fiend. It's a savage, unsparing, eye-popping ride through the dark soul of big money, endless drugs, American manhood and our national past time -- self-destruction. Ex-Cornhusker Jason Peter writes like a soulful badass, and we're lucky he lived to tell the tale. Had Hunter Thompson been a football player, instead of a fan, this is the book he'd have written. Flat-out, mash-your-face-in-the-dirt amazing.

(ST. MARTIN’S - JULY 2008)

"Burlesque is booming in New York and Angie Pontani is it’s reigning star" -- New York Post

"Mind-boggling beauty Angie Pontani has elevated tease to an art form; she is Gypsy Rose Lee incarnate" -- New York Edge

"First rate...The perfect centerpiece." -- The New Yorker

Work-in-Progess
Burlesque Geste: My Very Personal History of Striptease will be both her memoir of her own life in Burlesque as well as a lively and anecdotal history of the art form. Where the story begins with her childhood love of watching movies with her dad and the splendor of elaborately choreographed and costumed dance numbers in Yankee Doodle Dandy and Busby Berkley extravaganzas, it will include profiles of legendary performers like Blaze Starr and Tempest Storm, the latter still shaking her tail feathers at age EIGHTY!, and the early days of entertaining sailor boys and mobsters, which competitive dancers would booby trap (literally) each other’s costumes. The book will be lavishly illustrated with both contemporary and archival photographs, billboards, flyers, and other exotic ephemera.

Work-in-Progress
Music Lost and Found is the story of how musician Richard Reed passed from normal life (well, normal for a rock & roll musician) into a wall of deafness, and then—miraculously—back into the world of the hearing. The thrust of the book is his long battle with two afflictions—ongoing (and for a long time undiagnosed) Crohn’s disease, followed by going deaf—told against a backdrop of wild, foolish and filthy adventures in the rock and blues world. The book will always be funny, but the humor will get darker and darker as he becomes deaf. The big turnaround is the miracle cure that brings him back to the land of the hearing.

Work-in-Progress
My New Gun: A Memoir With Bullets is the memoir of a young ultra-liberal midwestern girl that moves to LA, has a man shot to death on her apartment steps, freaks out, and, much to the horror of her parents & friends back home, seeks protection and comfort in a gun. The narrative then goes on her cross-country social experiment, using herself as both guinea pig and observing scientist, to explore her developing inner gun nut. Honor attends the SHOT Show convention in Vegas, where she describes the spoectacle "Guns glistening, lined up like new pumps in a Nieman Marcus shoe department,"the Rapid Fire Show in Louisville, where she drags her husband on their first anniversary, hangs out with gun lobbyist, slick marketing directors for gun manufacturers, Babes with Bullets, a real organization, and scary survivalists. The result is a fact filled but amusing armchair journey through the subculture of gun enthusiasts.

Work-in-Progress
Blue Skies Ahead is an apercu, or a series of nonfiction prose-poem sketches, or quick impressions, that dip in and out of the characters in her life and in and out of chronological order, but collectively make a gentle but powerful memoir. Her pen & ink illustrations add to the text throughout. The narrative deals with the Big Issues of love, lust, betrayal, fitting in, and sexual orientation but in a style so light in execution that it feels no more weighted with gravitas than riding around with the top down. I have alternately called Anne's work "Colette with most the words taken out" or "LOVE LOST & WHAT I WORE for lesbians" or "Kind of like Annie Ernaux, except it's nothing like Annie Ernaux." In other words, it's really like nothing I've ever read but is, none the less, absolutely compelling.

"It's all here: the emotional squalor, the sweet bite of loneliness. Make no mistake: Sampsell can write like hell." Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Met

"I am a huge Kevin Sampsell fan. He's a gifted storyteller and canny observor of the world who writes with enormous sensitivity, innovation, and humor. These stories have the same powerful effect on me as all of my favorite art -- they make me feel things deeply." - Davy Rothbart, FOUND Magazine and This American Life

"Kevin Sampsell writes with great energy and grace about the hurt, the semi-hurt, the sordid and the downright deranged. Full of wonders, and all the best kinds of tenderness and danger." - Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

"This is a gem of warmhearted idiosyncrasy and oddball observation." -- Publishers Weekly

Work-in-Progress
The Suitcase. From the text: "When I was fifteen years old, I had a suitcase full of porn. It was greenish-blue-the aged color of flat turquoise. Square and heavy. Two metal latches that kept it shut. Two buttons that popped the latches. I kept it in the back of the closet, behind the clothes, and next to another suitcase that didn't match. We were a poor family without nice things."

The Suitcase is Kevin Sampsell’s portrait of his fractured family and their many secrets buried in the back of the closet, a half brother from a brief affair his mother had with a "black man," a mentally disabled sister (he was to later learn impregnated by his father) and mostly his own sweetly perverse childhood leading to his sexual awakening, and then re-awakening, and then awakening again. (HARPERCOLLINS - 2009)

Work-in-Progress
Paradise Misplaced is sort of Julie & Julia meets Robinsin Crusoe. When Alex’s life isn’t working, he concocts the idea to buy a one way ticket to the South Sea island of Yap and takes along 100 "Great Books" in order to learn vital life lessons. The list of books alone, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Seuss’ Green Eggs & Ham is worth a segment with Terri Gross. Over the course of two years and the one hundred books, the life lessons he learns are actually (profound) reinforcements of ones Alex had already written on his airline ticket sleeve, waiting to leave for Yap from the Newark Airport.

Work-in-Progress
DO NOT ENTER is meant to be Joey Skaggs tombstone book. Now in his 60’s, Joey has kept extensive files which detail all of his hoaxes & resulting media. The book will have photographs, press clippings, manifestos, and his "real life" philosophy about art & public works. The New Museum in Washington is collecting materials for a permanent exhibit. Voyager Films is working on a documentary.

Work-in-Progress
LOST VENISON was inspired by Ethan's going home to Kentucky to learn how to turkey hunt. Turkeys, believe it or not, are about the smartest animals people hunt. The vagaries of going after turkeys & spending time with his dad is the foundation of a well-researched experiential piece about hunting that's also wryly funny. As Ethan characterized, "I'm sort of envisioning the product as being something like Bill Bryson's book, but with more gunfire and talk about antlers."

Work-in-Progress
In Case of No Emergency are reworked safety cards from the back of the seats in commercial airplanes. The book will provide 50 visual tips as to how to make a boring flight more inteesting. The instructions have been altered & annotated with ironic (sometimes tasteless) captions or visual tweaks. Taber’s Airtoons website gets 325,000 unique page views per month.

Work-in-Progress
Mythic Backyard: Liesa’s portraits of young children dressed up as the alter ego of their dreams (fairy princess, pirates, Batman) set in their yard, basement, or cul-de-sac and costumes made up with whatever towels, trash cans, coat hangers were available to feed their imagination.

And She Was: Liesa’s portraits of patients on dementia wards in nursing homes. Visual short stories created by family & loved ones holding up pictures of what the vibrant person the patient used to be, plus their old dancing trophies, coconut head collection, etc.

He is currently contemplating moving to New York to bring Boxhead and Roundhead to fame in the land of Big Western Skies, Home of the Whopper, and (hopefully) Large Book Advances.

Pictures and animation can be found at www.elliotelliotelliot.com.

Work-in-Progress
The Stressful Adventures of Boxhead & Roundhead. Not to get too philosophical about Boxhead & Roundhead, but they are the archetypal saps, an illustrated Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Laurel & Hardy, Felix & Oscar, or Spongebob & Patrick (no wait! The latter are illustrated). Anyway, Boxhead & Roundhead are universal stand-in Everyheads to absorb the blows of pain & humiliation for the rest of us. Through a series of short strange tales, our stressed out duo display the classic themes elucidated in Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough -- Misshapen Head Against Nature, Misshapen Head Against Man or Machine, and Misshapen Head Against Itself. Sweeter than Edward Gorey, sicker than James Marshall, Elliot Cowan's characters occupy their own unique Netherworld.

Work-in-Progress
Party Dress is a "girlie" Pat the Bunny for slightly older girls & their moms to stroke fabric, such as tulle, satin, organza, brocade, etc. presented in a die cut party dress shape and accompanied by lively text and excerpts from literature that site the fabric (heavy on the Jane Austen).

Work-in-Progress
I Am My Family is a series of self-portraits where Rafael, after extensive research, made himself up to look his deceased relatives, male and female. (PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS - 2008)

Work-in-Progress
Blue Velveeta is a collection of 1950’s ads for food, appliances, and cleaning products being eaten or used by way overly-excited family members. Images are enhanced with ironic, odd, (sick) copy like Anne Taintor filtered through John Waters. An example would be a woman gleaming into her NEW kitchen phone, "Oh Harry’s out back frying on the barbecue. The rest of him is in the freezer."

Work-in-Progress
Conventioneers is a series of head on portraits (think 4-color Edward Weston) of people attending conventions like ComiCon, Car Shows, and Funeral Director Conventions where, amongst their own tribes, the individuals feel comfortable revealing their nonconformist identities.

Work-in-Progress
Granny vs Tranny: Crass Visual Quizzes are play at home picture quizzes where you try to figure out if you’re looking at an old lady or homely transvestite. Other quizzes include if the seductive girl is jail bait or legal age, if the facial ecstasy is caused having an orgasm or playing a guitar solo, and the extremely difficult Master Level he-cat or she-cat, trying to determine a cat’s gender by their face. Others I suggested be deleted, like mollusk or sex organ and milk or man juice.

Kevin Avery
Kevin has published over 300 articles & short stories in publications as diverse as Mississippi Review and California Quarterly to Penthouse and Gallery. He is the past President of Writers at Work and runs Mere Words Media, a PR firm offering array of affordable services to the published writer.

Work-in-Progress
Everything is an Afterthought: The Writings of Paul Nelson. Considered a pioneer & godfather of rock & roll criticism, Nelson died alone, near penniless, in his New York apartment. Kevin was chosen by Nelson in a posthumous note to compile & edit his seminal writings from Rolling Stone, Circus, Creem and other magazines. (FERAL HOUSE - 2009)