Doug Rice is haunted-by what we can only guess. He is trapped; he goes nowhere. He is a modern day hysteric, a psychoanalyst's dream. He writes the same thing over and over, runs the same spinning track, as if somehow, through the repetition of extremes, he could eliminate the trauma, break its foul-smelling, icy-fingered spell. Only it is a spell of beauty --the beauty that comes from devastation, from the constant struggle to rise again in that roaring fire's shouldered wake. You will find no plot or answers here, only the unbearable loss of abandonment and grief. Make no mistake: Doug Rice kills us again and again and he does not want us to survive it, for he has been burned at the stake and is burning still. He is a ghost who can do nothing but plead with his bones and remind us with the choking beauty ghosts bring. Despite his pleas, you will not like him. You will not like him, and yet . . .Skin Prayer is the power of redemption in the word when life has failed us. It has no inside or outside, it is only itself. It is the self-enclosed, hermetic world of obsessive need, a space where one can't breath. And yet it is breath. In its own suffocated space, if we survive it, or are patient enough not to throw it aside, it gives us insufferable hope.

Skin Prayer

Literature & Fiction

Rice, Doug

Contemporary

Eraserhead Press

HERE LIES MEMORY explores the place of memory in living, daily, scarred and sacred lives. Two Pittsburgh families struggle to survive trauma and love. A man wills himself to go blind, not to forget, but to remember in new ways. Another man drinks beer after beer until he can no longer drink away what he must face directly. This novel explores what language and photographs do to memory, desire, and love, and what gentrification is doing to the souls of families and neighborhoods.

Here Lies Memory: A Pittsburgh Novel

Literary

BLACK SCAT BOOKS

Remember mullets and teased bangs? Stonewashed denim jackets and jeans? Well, not everything about the ‘80s was lame, because that’s when the Garbage Pail Kids ruled the world! Those irreverent, satirical stickers quickly became a pop-culture phenomenon, but they never had their own comic book... until now! In the spirit of the avant-garde cartoonists and humorists who fathered these miscreants, a new generation of alternative-comics creators has lent their unique talents to bring the Garbage Pail Kids into the wacky world of comics.

Garbage Pail Kids

Comics & Graphic Novels

Kochalka, James

Haspiel, Dean

Wheeler, Shannon

Langridge, Roger

Elliott, Phil

Browne, Ryan

Barta, Hilary

Wray, Bill

Simko, Joe

Zapata, Jeff

Reynoso, Frank

Graphic Novels

IDW Publishing

When Love Was explores memories that haunt our bodies, our muscles, our bones, our breath, and our blood. Memories that cling to our souls. The fragmented narrative follows two characters, an unnamed man, who carries the pain of his past experiences and the pain of the loss of a woman he loved, and an unnamed woman, who carries the uncertain knowledge of something that happened to her in her childhood. Both characters are imprisoned by the traumas of a past that never disappears. Throughout the book, the stories of these two characters are interrupted by philosophical reflections on the nature of photography, time, and memory. Photographs, which accompany the text, reveal desire and beauty that is still possible and remains visible even when carrying the trauma of the past.When Love Was will transform your understanding of time and memory and of beauty and love. While most of it is autobiographical, Doug Rice writes most often in the third person in order to see into desire and longing in ways that complicate his own way for thinking of the world. Taking photographs on the streets and capturing unguarded moments provided Rice with new ways for reflecting on trauma, on how it stays even after we have "forgotten" or "forgiven" the places and people who caused such pain. When Love Was is a pillow book in the tradition of the Japanese pillow book. Rather than being a narrative, When Love Was is a series of musings and observations. It is designed to be read slowly as singular moments of time captured by poetic language. A remembrance of things past and a hope for new experiences. Like the traditional pillow book, When Love Was should be read one page at a time before bed to awaken the reader's dreams. The paperback version of the book is unpaginated so that readers can decide on their own order for reading each moment.The photographs throughout the book were taken by Doug Rice in Paris, Stuttgart, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Pittsburgh, Lotus, Berkeley, New York City, and San Francisco.

When Love Was: (A Pillow Book)

Independently published

Janey Quixote

New Urge Editions / Pocket Erotica

A Favorite Book of 2013&Prime;-HTMLGiant"The blood of Mai's ancestors run through her syllables. She takes photographs of sentences she abandoned in childhood--that loss of memory, that theme of what photography exposes. Written in the breath of a man in love, a novel, a poem, a photo album, this delirium of river language is finally a treatise on writing. 'Her breath remains in my mouth.' She told him the Vietnamese legend of a story that never begins, darker than any darkness when her family pushes their unsteady boat into the water. They fear arriving as much as they fear drowning. 'Every word is a goodbye.' She escapes sentences. Her body lay against him like moonlight. Doug Rice has written a beautiful-beyond-words American River."--Sharon Doubiago, author of My Father's Love, Love in the Streets, and Hard Country"Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It&#x2028;is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly embodied by and through desire in language.&#x2028;I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be&#x2028; exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully, real.--Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase

Between Appear And Disappear: full-color illustrated edition

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Jaded Ibis Press

Book #4 in our Blue Bustard Memoir Series “Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly emobdied by and through desire in language. I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully real. —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase "beautiful-beyond-words” —Sharon Doubiago, author of My Father’s Love, Love in the Streets, and Hard Country The blood of Mai’s ancestors run through her syllables. She takes photographs of sentences she abandoned in childhood—that loss of memory, that theme of what photography exposes. Written in the breath of a man in love, a novel, a poem, a photo album, this delirium of river language is finally a treatise on writing. ‘Her breath remains in my mouth.’ She told him the Vietnamese legend of a story that never begins, darker than any darkness when her family pushes their unsteady boat into the water. They fear arriving as much as they fear drowning. “Every word is a goodbye.” She escapes sentences. Her body lay against him like moonlight.

Between Appear and Disappear: a memoir

Memoirs

Some memories are transformed into myths at the very moment that they are remembered. Stories are told for those who have vanished, for the loves that have been lost. Language is borne out of this absence. In spare yet luminous prose, Between Appear and Disappear is a lyrical love story of Mai and Doug, and of the way that memoir is turned into myth. "An unforgettable and perfect book." -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan In Japan, the concept of ma (&#38291;) - literally "the gap", "the space", or the interval that glues one space to another, people, people to objects, and even what we are as human being s - predominates how we live, who we are, and how we interact with things around us. In Doug Rice's Between Appear and Disappear, this concept appears again and again: the muted space between Mai and "Doug", the tension between photographs and texts, fiction and nonfiction, meditation and action. What is this book - is this a philosophical book on loss and time? A book about aesthetics of photography? A love story? A memoir? A book of photographs with texts, or a narrative with photographs? But this is what is apparent: the world in this hybrid book is the in-between ma, where what is visible and invisible, knowable and unknowable, what is uttered and what isn't uttered, gentleness and terribleness, mythic and mundane, all come together to show us, through Rice's exacting words, a new way of looking at this world that is both cruel and beautiful. This is a terrifying book to read - illuminating, wise, philosophical, and, at the end, devastating. -Mariko Nagai, author of Irradiated Cities

Between Appear and Disappear

Essays & Correspondence

Civil Coping Mechanisms

Le sang des Mugwump: Conte d'inceste tirésien

Genre Fiction

DU ROCHER

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