Sagging Meniscus Press – serie

This darkly humorous collection of short fiction by Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor and Back in the Game, revolves gracefully around an esoteric and, it goes without saying, entirely fictional account of the imaginary formative years of someone who at times resembles America's most notorious -- so far! -- Vice President. This centre provides a jumping -- off point for free-wheeling, fanciful explorations, both poetic and satirical, into the archaeology of the banality of evil, that reveal, with a light touch and forgiving good humor, the soul-distorting burdens of duty, repression and narcissism in our daily life.

Every so often a novel appears that demands a paradigm shift, that redefines what literature is and what its powers may be. This is such a work. A novel of seemingly modest dimensions, it relates, in scrupulously direct, clear, and naturalistic prose, a story of the tense reunion of two old friends in a Maine bar. That story, and the stories nested within it, while fascinating, are hardly melodramatic; not much happens of more consequence than the refilling of a beer glass. And yet, by the novels conclusion, the reader will be faced with a dilemma as unexpected and perplexing as any thriller could provide, and as piercing, substantial and profoundly involving as anything in the work of literatures great psychologists. The first reading of this book is an unforgettable, shocking surprise; and each re-reading brings new rewards.

Charles Holdefer, author of Dick Cheney in Shorts, The Contractor and Back in the Game, has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world's longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full colour.

Now in an expanded second edition, this collection of alert, witty, and world-wise limericks by the great New Orleans jazz pianist and composer Tom McDermott, illustrated with his own drawings, is a snapshot of a restlessly creative mind and heart at play. These "personal nursery rhymes" demonstrate that simplicity of means need not be incompatible with sophistication of ends. In all their various modes -- the frivolously comic, the self-deprecating, the wistful, the gently mocking, the philosophical -- a very individual elegance and generosity of spirit are always to be found.

This autofiction by Lee Klein, framed by his attending a Sunn O))) concert in Philadelphia on 18 March 2017, two months after Trump's inauguration, is an opportunity for inquiry into a variety of subjects, including: anxiety, edibles, solitude, talent, self-realisation, responsibility, dry ice, fog, Seasons 52, Guitar Center, effect pedals, improvising, paying attention, rearing children, raising fists, anticipating mass shootings, deleting Twitter, assassinating the president, public flatulence, private resistance, moral alignment, and the search for pure tone.

Four days before the 2016 Presidential Election, disgraced teacher Scott Bonneville foils a mass shooting at the Pizza Galley Family Fun Center by shooting the would-be perpetrator. He is hailed as a hero, but what the public does not know is that Bonneville walked into Pizza Galley with violent intentions of his own, nurtured by urban myths, conspiracy theories, and deep-seated delusions. Meanwhile, his former student Blake Mesman, inspired by Catcher in the Rye and a not-so-secret brotherhood of aspiring alpha males, reshapes himself into the man he always felt he should be and embarks on his own journey of destruction. A black-hearted satire of our new reality, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun tells a story of the real carnage of Trumps America: guns, the toxic radicalisation of young men, fake news, the endless anger and resentment we feel towards one another, spirits broken by a world we refuse to acknowledge as of our own making, and how we convince ourselves of horrible absurdities, rather than face something even more disturbing: our own essential truth.

A new poetry collection from a great American visionary. Iván Argüelles fills his Blank Page with astounding poetry, bringing us through Homeric, Dantesque, and Vedic worlds as well as the Americana of his youth in beautifully constructed lines with imaginative juxtapositions that would be the envy of André Breton or Paul Éluard. -- Carl Landauer "It is difficult, William Carlos Williams famously wrote, to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack of what is found there. In Iván Argüelles brilliant new book we follow a fecund mind through our plague year. Day by day, poem by poem, Argüelles unspools the internal news, speedy, profuse, enjambed and unwilling to cycle through the usual bromides and pronouncements. This is language on fire, midnight speech unraveled, crafted and raw, overflowing and yet aching toward a sublime silence where meaning diminishes/ in mulch and nothing comes back. The Blank Page is news that wont be forgotten. -- Philip Brady, author of The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics

Marvin Cohen writes of Booboo Roi, his playfully anti-theatrical adaptation of Alfred Jarrys Ubu Roi: In the 1970s or 1980s I read Barbara Wrights Ubu translation, which inspired me with its sheer royal barbarity of being brutal and decisive to any opposition: pure powerful selfishness. I wrote this play as a compensation for being poor, more than half deaf, and growing up in Brooklyn with poor parents. I envied my middle-class contemporaries privileges. I felt powerless and inferior to everyone. I had childishly daydreamed of having power over everyone, ruthlessly tyrannical, so I put myself in Ubu Rois Booboos shoes, and got imaginary literary revenge on the world.

Drawn both from previously unanthologised published work and from the authors personal horde of typescripts from the 1960s to the 1980s, this collection of stories centres around philosophical themes: the awareness of existence and experience, of reality and truth, and the relativity of time and place.

Lapo is a marine biologist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed after an accident that caused him amnesia. When distant memories slowly resurface and the weight of modern life becomes apparent, he realizes that having an empty head was not so bad. Like a present-day Oblomov, Lapo clings to his hospital routine to avoid the outside world, fending off the attacks of family and friends who continuously pester him. As the days go by, the pressure for Lapo to go back to his normal life keeps mounting. Will he ever leave the hospital or will he settle there for good? Lost pieces of his history may provide the answer. Interspersed with intimate thoughts and daydreams about the lives of the fish he used to study, Lapos epic struggle is filled with irony and depth in equal measure. Nostalgic and provocative, Reset is an existentialist journey through the inner world of a man who has lost the thread of life and finds it again in nature and his past.

Cavanaugh is not Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh is not Cavanaugh. Yet when Cavanaugh, a pencil-pushing, number-crunching, middling, middle-aged middleman, reluctantly buys a bobblehead of the controversial Supreme Court justice for his innocent young daughter at a minor league baseball game, past traumas are retriggered, households unravel, and a mysterious inner voice reawakens, knocking Cavanaugh off the wagon and steering him headlong into the hillocky and tortuous terrain of the surreal and absurd. With a narrative that charms and intoxicates sentence-by-sentence, Cavanaugh is not only a bleak comedy of the reverberating repercussions set off by a single fraught decision, but also a darkly poignant reminder that no matter how rigorously we endeavour to seek refuge from what haunts us, memory will always find a way to creep into the din of our surroundings, forcing itself upon us against our will and, inevitably, of those we love most.

Christopher Carter Sanderson's uniquely poetic and practical translation of The Dhammapada. Sanderson, working from Pali and Sanskrit sources, aims to artistically transmit the essence of Buddha's sayings in a form useful for meditation. Freely cast in a flexible, idiomatic and often catchy iambic pentameter, in tone ranging as needed from the academic to the profane, these verses combine musicality with a refreshing directness. This new creative realisation joins a galaxy of inspired translations of this great work to offer additional artistic insight and religious utility.