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
Emerald City & Other Stories — a short story collection about her native Laplanders. Living below the radar of care in low-rent neighborhoods, her characters endure lives of impoverished boredom broken up by brief moments of violence. Barb’s writing fits firmly in the style of the Brutal Boys of the Deep South, Tom Franklin, William Gay, Larry Brown, early Harry Crews, some Tim Gautreaux.

Work-in-Progress
None Alive, None Famous has for a protagonist Gabe Sack, a Graham Greene burnt-out case in the guise of a rock critic. Once a passionate Lester Bangs or Greil Marcus wannabe, Gabe, the music critic, is fed up with the new music scene where it’s all gesture and marketing over content. Gabe is so bitter and cynical that he violates the basic "ethics" of critics and has, for months, phoned-in his scathing reviews based upon press releases and CD cover copy without listening to a note of music. He less fears being outed than Kraft, his slick boss, would use it as a marketing gimmick.

Instead, Kraft says, "Gabe, do you remember Hambert Larkin?" Kraft asks Gabe to leave LA for Las Vegas, trying to track down the former rock star. While most wanting to respond "Fuck Vegas and fuck Herbert Larkin," Gabe can’t bring himself to turn Kraft down. "I didn't dare underestimate the depths and surprises of his pettiness. He'd have no qualms about pressing the lotioned heel of his hand into what might charitably be referred to as my future professional life."

Thus begins Gabe’s jouney into the Heart of Darkness under the lights of the Vegas Strip.

"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)

Work 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)

"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." — Davy Rothbart, FOUND Magazine & This American Life

"Each story is a savory gem, capturing the gripping little deviant moments in life." — Jami Attenberg

"Kevin Sampsell writes with great energy and grace. Creamy Bullets is full of wonders, and all the best kinds of tenderness and danger." — Sam Lipsyte

"Let Kevin Sampsell in for one page and he has permanently won you over." —Dan Kennedy

Work-in-Progress
Kevin Sampsell's Greatest Hits - The irony of a Greatest Hits collection from a writer largely unknown to most readers is completely intentional. Kevin, an uber-independent writer and publisher, has a passionate though paltry following. The collection, which will include new material as well as previously published, is intended to reach a wider audience with his sweetly deviant writing.

Work in Progress
Darker Matters. Impulsive Rodney Miranda leeches off friends & relatives, making small messes wherever he roosts, as he pursues his life ambitions, "Pinot Noir, a little dope, and the occasional sado-erotic massage." Rodney gets mixed up with a Self-Squelch Society, led by the charismatic cult leader, Mr. Donald Way and uttering mantras like "I am dirt. I am less than dirt. I am a worm in that dirt. I am less than a worm."

Work-in-Progress
FOX & the Hounds recounts Akre’s 8 year court battle with FOX News. Refusing to supress her story about Monsanto and the US Dairy Industry’s immoral pact, reaping huge profits by introducing cancer causing bovine growth hormone into our milk supply, FOX fired the reporter. Jane wins her initial case, but then is dragged through retrials by the battery of FOX lawyers, backed now by depositions from all three major TV networks. Jane eventually loses by a ruling that, while unethical, FOX broke a code of conduct and did nothing illegal. Not satisfied with merely winning, FOX then tried to make an example by countersuing Jane for 3 million dollars in damages & legal fees. Yet another judge finds the amount draconian, but does reward FOX $200,000 to close the case. Both Jane Akre and her lawyers are left broken. The lawyers had hung on long past when she could pay them because they felt the cause fundamentally important. As noted by filmmaker.Jenny Stein, making a documentary about Jane Akre, "It has become more than a story about a whistleblower. These rulings affect all of us. If we are being lied to by the media, and the media is owned by the same corporate interests that lobby and fund our political representatives, when do we stop calling ourselves a democracy?"

FOX & the Hounds is far from a "happy" tale of triumph. It is more a canary in the coal mine cautionary tale of the new America.

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
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!).

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
Sweet Dreams will be interviews with successful food entrepreneurs like Warren Brown, Allysa Torey, Michele Hoskins about their early inspirational, fearful, and sometimes crazy moments starting and building their own food business.

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
Doggy Style: the food and fashion of the great American hot dog. Includes Charles’ famous Astro-Weenie Christmas Tree.

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
309 Miles From the Middle of Nowhere - After years of wandering, Poe settles down, literally & figuratively, in the middle of nowhere and later brings a new bride to a place many would consider the ends of the Earth. For Poe, Chadron, Nebraska was a sanctuary.

That is, until the new college math professor turns up missing. This lights up a sleepy community and their gossip trail, ablaze with what might have occurred. The local police department, used to cats stuck in trees, is ill-equipped to handle such a case. Months pass before the professor’s body is found barbed wired to a tree and burned.

309 Miles is not a true crime book any more than Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or In Cold Blood. It is a portrait of a community and a portrait of the well traveled souls that end up there.

Work-in-Progress
Reality Sucks is Alan’s memoir/portrait of behind the scenes of Reality TV, currently our most popular form of entertainment. The narrative includes material from his aired shows like Blow Out, the series about Jonathan Antin’s hair salon, his four years for MTV’s Real World, and the little-seen series about a high pressured talent agency for pets. The book also includes some projects that haven’t hit the small screen, such as a reality series that is Green Acres meets The Bachelor. A wealthy farm boy was to chose a wife after putting City-Girl contestants thru their cow milking, pig greasing, and chicken plucking paces. Anecdotes often so bizarre you can’t make this stuff up.

Work-in-Progress
Pesadilla Villa: A Tale of Lost Love, Love Money, and Lost Minds...in Spain is the story of an unconventional (eccentric) couple suffering the extreme swings of renovation hell (for which they are ill-equipped with zero experience and equally devoid of common sense) and adjusting to a confusing and often unwelcoming Spanish culture (they don’t speak Spanish), which strain their once passionate relationship. Consider Pesadilla Villa a melding of Under the Tuscan Sun meets Sid and Nancy.

Work-in-Progress
SumoNation. As a teenager in the UK, Mark was flipping channels late one night, hoping to find some cable nudity while his parents slept. He suddenly found something quite different, 400 pound, nearly nude Japanese men smashing into each other. He became transfixed then obsessed by the ancient sport. SumoNation mixes a lavish portrait of the sport with an eccentric memoir.

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
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, the table in a grocery store (only in New Orleans) where Anne and her sisters used to sit together and solve life’s issues, her twin sisters that have since committed suicide, 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
On Being Bald is an anthology of work from haiku poems to extended essays about a male issue almost Jungian in pull. Contributors include the bald Pulitzer Prize winning Oscar Hijuelos, the bald Pulitzer Prize winning Robert Olen Butler, Michael Malone, Rob Corrdry, and more.

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)

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
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
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.

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
Familial Ground 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 - 2009)

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)