Chapter 12
I knock on the bright green door. It’s square on the bottom, round on the top. Grandma answers it with a squeal and a bear hug. She still stands a clear foot taller than me. I walk inside and I sit down at the kitchen table. She offers me tea and I accept because I like the way it tastes, and I was counting on her offering. It’s probably not a good idea. But I need some kind of stimulation going here.
We’re pleased to have an excerpt today from Ross McMeekin’s new book Below the Falls, set for release on March 22 on Thirty West. Of this collection, Tommy Dean wrote, “McMeekin writes with a steady and assured hand, with a patience for allowing scenes to develop naturally, for creating bright and dark settings teeming with life and menace.” Read on for a taste of what readers will encounter within this book’s pages.
Artist and publisher Craig Yoe has had a long career in comics and media — one that’s overlapped with everyone from Jim Henson to Steve Ditko over the years, as this interview in Scoop makes clear. His new project is an autobiographical one: the graphic novel Woman & Man+, for which Clover Press is running a crowdfunding campaign. We’re pleased to present an excerpt from the book featuring some of Yoe’s phantasmagorical imagery and unique storytelling approach.
Chapter 11
I wake up on the floor of Everhet’s kitchen and instantly bring my phone over my face.
I dreamt that I text Morgen a Homeric epic about how my parents were dead. How they exploded.
I look at my texts. Wasn’t a dream. Initiate shame blocking sequence.
Colleen Burner’s Sister Golden Calf is a strange, gorgeous debut novel about two sisters, Gloria and Kit, who travel through the desert with their jars full of “invisible things for feeling and knowing.” It’s about grieving the death of a parent, about isolation and longing, and it features an eight-legged taxidermied calf, a ghost town, and a nude ranch. Reading Sister Golden Calf, I was moved by the propulsive, sometimes breathless sentences, and the quiet, meditative moments where Gloria and Kit find space to grieve—a space that is a car, a body, a sister willing to travel to the ends of the earth.
It’s the cottage where a New York City teacher named Frank McCourt wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes. Since McCourt’s time there in the 1990s, this Milford, Pennsylvania cabin owned by former AMC-TV head and current indie film producer Josh Sapan has served as the periodic retreat – an “accidental art colony” in his words – for creative-minded friends and friends of friends. It has hosted everyone from national book award winner Colum McCann, who worked on his acclaimed international bestseller Apeirogon there, to a bevy of poets, painters, photographers and composers.
It’s March, and the pollen has returned. It’s an interesting month for books — though to be fair, it’s a rare month that isn’t interesting in some way — with everything from experimental horror to incisive takes on pop culture hitting the “new releases” table. What are we most excited about? Read on and find out, gentle reader.
Chapter 10
With my hands unrestrained I trace the names scratched in the black leather upholstery by former passenger’s fingernails.
The cop opens the door for me to get out.
He rolls down his window, I can’t see it, but I can hear it. My back to him, I hear him say, “Hey, kid—ub-uh— Mr. Defoe. You, uh. You sure you’re okay?”