WHO IS ELIJAH CLEARFATHER? Futuristic bioweapon or good old-fashioned messiah? Reincarnated ex-porn star or mutant information-age revolutionary? The man who awakens in New York City’s Central Park with no memory of his identity and the enigmatic message FATHER FORGIVE THEM F carved into the flesh of his back may be all of these things and more. Taken in (and then expelled) by a group of freedom fighters battling the soul-deadening Vitessa Cultporation, Clearfather is a stranger in an even stranger land. Following tantalizing clues that point to the gnomic Stinky Wiggler, and pursued by murderous Vitessa agents, Clearfather embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery across an America that resembles a vast amusement park designed by some unholy trinity of Walt Disney, Hunter S. Thompson, and Hieronymus Bosch. Accompanying Clearfather is an unforgettable cast of characters–including Aretha Nightingale, an ex-football-playing drag queen; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters sprung outrageously to life; and the ethereally beautiful Kokomo, whose past is as much a mystery as Clearfather’s own. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, a savage, fiercely intelligent satire that is also a page-turning adventure and a transcendent love story, Zanesville marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction.
Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volume’s key features include: • Strengthening key underlying capabilities of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness, clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail, sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. • Taking direction from other art forms such as African American musical improvisation, Brancusi’s sculptural idea of “finding form,” key ideas from drawing such as foreground, background, and negative space—and some of the great lessons learned from National Geographic photography. • Incorporating techniques drawn from unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL, working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for a global English market as a core or supplementary text at the undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level.
“James Ellroy meets David Lynch in this addictive mix of noir and supernatural horror” from the acclaimed author of Zaneville and Enigmatic Pilot (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Det. Birch Ritter is a man on the edge—of himself. His past is filled with secrets, guilt, and ghosts. And his latest case is about to lead him to Genevieve, a woman who claims that her business is shadows. The widow of a recently deceased real estate mogul, her grief isn’t entirely convincing. But she knows what lies between the darkness and the light inside men. And what she knows about Ritter is more than he can bear . . . and more than he can resist. Private Midnight is a seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage, all filtered through the mind of the “brilliantly illuminating” author and multimedia artist Kris Saknussemm (Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life). “Off-the-wall strange and surreal—and definitely not recommended as a Mother’s Day gift.” —Kirkus Reviews
Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeys—the story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s. Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father's church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of Civil Rights demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Sea Monkeys is the no-holds-barred tale of one of our most exciting contemporary authors’ own coming of age, and the perfect follow-up to Saknussemm’s Zanesville, which Booklist hailed as “one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels spawned in a decade.”
Sinister Miniatures is the definitive collection of short fiction by Kris Saknussemm, confirming that he is one of the best, most daring writers of the weird to emerge in the twenty-first century.
Enigmatic Pilot is Kris Saknussemm’s outrageously brilliant yet profoundly moving exploration and excavation of the American dream—and nightmare. In 1844, in a still-young America, the first intimations of civil war are stirring throughout the land. In Zanesville, Ohio, the Sitturd family—Hephaestus, a clubfooted inventor; his wife, Rapture, a Creole from the Sea Islands; and their prodigiously gifted six-year-old son, Lloyd, whose libido is as precocious as his intellect—are forced to flee the only home they have ever known for an uncertain future in Texas, whence Hephaestus’s half-brother, Micah, has sent them a mysterious invitation, promising riches and wonders too amazing to be entrusted to paper. Thus begins one of the most incredible American journeys since Huck Finn and Jim first pushed their raft into the Mississippi. Along the way, Lloyd will learn the intricacies of poker and murder, solve the problem of manned flight, find—and lose—true love, and become swept up in an ancient struggle between two secret societies whose arcane dispute has shaped the world’s past and threatens to reshape its future. Each side wants to use Lloyd against the other, but Lloyd has his own ideas—and access to an occult technology as powerful as his imagination.
Las Vegas Writes is an annual themed anthology that showcases the best of Las Vegas' writing talent, from novelists and short-story writers, to essayists and literature journalists. Produced in conjunction with the Vegas Valley Book Festival, this 2013 edition is the fifth collection in the series, with this year's contributions exploring the concept of "progress" in its broadest sense, from net positives -- downtown's rejuvenation; personal stories of emotional or spiritual growth -- to the flipside of social dislocation and other dark portents highlighting the limits and risks of change and "modernization." As a city that, from its very inception has consistently challenged convention, "Sin City" has always coined its own definition of progress. In these stories and essays by some of Las Vegas' finest writers, you will see how locals weave spectacle, risk, and reward into the narratives of civic, political, financial, and personal progress -- and at what price it comes.
At once, names like Ionesco, Beckett, and Albee come to mind, but then are topped by the understanding that this voice has an even more unsettling, hard-hitting edge." -Phil Abrams Instructions for Reading The Humble Assessment: Step one: Take a deep breath. Meet Mr. Humble. He is the sixteenth person to be interviewed for the position of Financial Controller. He needs this job. But he's not going to beg. Yet. Follow Kris Saknussemm, the masterful creator of Zanesville, Sinister Miniatures and Reverend America, on a dark and narrow path through the malign terrors of the modern American corporate machine. He will show you a fish bowl full of crickets. He will show you a tarantula as big as a suburban home. He will show you a woman in a black lace bra, a man in a gorilla mask. The Humble Assessment is a masterpiece of modern theatre. In a few short pages, Saknussemm will take you in, make you comfortable, then rip your heart out before you even notice he's been holding a dagger the whole time. Meet Mr. Humble. They've been watching him his whole life.
Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volume’s key features include: • Strengthening key underlying capabilities of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness, clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail, sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. • Taking direction from other art forms such as African American musical improvisation, Brancusi’s sculptural idea of “finding form,” key ideas from drawing such as foreground, background, and negative space—and some of the great lessons learned from National Geographic photography. • Incorporating techniques drawn from unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL, working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for a global English market as a core or supplementary text at the undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level.
WHO IS ELIJAH CLEARFATHER? Futuristic bioweapon or good old-fashioned messiah? Reincarnated ex-porn star or mutant information-age revolutionary? The man who awakens in New York City’s Central Park with no memory of his identity and the enigmatic message FATHER FORGIVE THEM F carved into the flesh of his back may be all of these things and more. Taken in (and then expelled) by a group of freedom fighters battling the soul-deadening Vitessa Cultporation, Clearfather is a stranger in an even stranger land. Following tantalizing clues that point to the gnomic Stinky Wiggler, and pursued by murderous Vitessa agents, Clearfather embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery across an America that resembles a vast amusement park designed by some unholy trinity of Walt Disney, Hunter S. Thompson, and Hieronymus Bosch. Accompanying Clearfather is an unforgettable cast of characters–including Aretha Nightingale, an ex-football-playing drag queen; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters sprung outrageously to life; and the ethereally beautiful Kokomo, whose past is as much a mystery as Clearfather’s own. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, a savage, fiercely intelligent satire that is also a page-turning adventure and a transcendent love story, Zanesville marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction.
“James Ellroy meets David Lynch in this addictive mix of noir and supernatural horror” from the acclaimed author of Zaneville and Enigmatic Pilot (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Det. Birch Ritter is a man on the edge—of himself. His past is filled with secrets, guilt, and ghosts. And his latest case is about to lead him to Genevieve, a woman who claims that her business is shadows. The widow of a recently deceased real estate mogul, her grief isn’t entirely convincing. But she knows what lies between the darkness and the light inside men. And what she knows about Ritter is more than he can bear . . . and more than he can resist. Private Midnight is a seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage, all filtered through the mind of the “brilliantly illuminating” author and multimedia artist Kris Saknussemm (Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life). “Off-the-wall strange and surreal—and definitely not recommended as a Mother’s Day gift.” —Kirkus Reviews
Enigmatic Pilot is Kris Saknussemm’s outrageously brilliant yet profoundly moving exploration and excavation of the American dream—and nightmare. In 1844, in a still-young America, the first intimations of civil war are stirring throughout the land. In Zanesville, Ohio, the Sitturd family—Hephaestus, a clubfooted inventor; his wife, Rapture, a Creole from the Sea Islands; and their prodigiously gifted six-year-old son, Lloyd, whose libido is as precocious as his intellect—are forced to flee the only home they have ever known for an uncertain future in Texas, whence Hephaestus’s half-brother, Micah, has sent them a mysterious invitation, promising riches and wonders too amazing to be entrusted to paper. Thus begins one of the most incredible American journeys since Huck Finn and Jim first pushed their raft into the Mississippi. Along the way, Lloyd will learn the intricacies of poker and murder, solve the problem of manned flight, find—and lose—true love, and become swept up in an ancient struggle between two secret societies whose arcane dispute has shaped the world’s past and threatens to reshape its future. Each side wants to use Lloyd against the other, but Lloyd has his own ideas—and access to an occult technology as powerful as his imagination.
Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeys—the story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s. Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father's church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of Civil Rights demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Sea Monkeys is the no-holds-barred tale of one of our most exciting contemporary authors’ own coming of age, and the perfect follow-up to Saknussemm’s Zanesville, which Booklist hailed as “one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels spawned in a decade.”
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.