Bring the Noise

Owen King

Barrelhouse Books

Literary Nonfiction. THANKS AND SORRY AND GOOD LUCK compiles a dozen years of disappointment transmitted via e-mail from a single editor to hundreds of writers around the world. Performative and funny one minute, respectful and constructive the next, these rejections both serve as entertaining writing tips (suitable for use in today's more adventuresome creative writing classrooms) and suggest a skewed story about a boy and his seminal literary website, Eyeshot.net, which Lee Klein founded in 1999. What started as a lark—sending playful rejection notes to writers who'd submitted work for the site—over ten years took on a life of its own, becoming an outlet for Klein to meditate on his aesthetic preferences, the purpose of literature, and the space between the ideal and the real.

Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejections From the Eyeshot Outbox

Literature & Fiction

Klein, Lee

History & Criticism

Poetry. What happens when you take something like a pop song and turn it in on itself, give it a different relevance or frame of reference, juxtapose the work against itself, against other pop music, bring it into the present, experience it in a different way? This book is a new revising of the confessional. It's about having to grow up, about those feelings we want to get back to, the people we want to get back, the people we've had to let go. Humor, love, and responsibility. Selected from among the nearly 400 manuscripts submitted to our open reading period, each poem in DARYL HALL IS MY BOYFRIEND takes its title from a line of a Hall &amp; Oates song. The poems here are not "about" Hall and Oates songs or what they "mean," but rather what is triggered when listening to or thinking about the music, those feelings, experiences, and memories, that specific nostalgia attached only to the sort of pop music Hall and Oates created.

daryl hall is my boyfriend

Lewis, Erica

Poetry

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Growing up in an eccentric North Carolina home, with aging-hippie parents whose marriage was forever crumbling around her, author Sarah Sweeney was primed for trouble. For drugs and boys. For learning about sexuality from Madonna videos and prank-calling teachers and meeting celebrities--including a young Adrian Grenier. For escaping the South and even her own family. Funny, exuberant, and often heartbreaking, TELL ME IF YOU'RE LYING examines the lies we're told as children and the downright unbelievable--but true--stories that comprise Sweeney's colorful coming of age.

Tell Me If You're Lying: Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Sweeney, Sarah

Community & Culture

Fiction. The narrator of YEAR 14 was a young man when a revolution changed his homeland forever—a new regime, a new calendar, a new flag, a new anthem and new money. Thirteen years later he has a comfortable job as an editor for the state-sanctioned newspaper, a loving wife, and an unswerving belief in the benevolence of his country's Caring Leaders. But when a new Information Gatherer is assigned to the newsroom—a peculiar man-child named Tup-Tup, the son of an important government minister—he's forced to face the truth about his sacred homeland. YEAR 14 is a comedy, a tragedy, and a cautionary tale. By turns frightening and absurdly funny, the novel ultimately offers a hopeful, if hard-won, affirmation of humanity's indomitable spirit.

Year 14

Konik, Michael

Humor & Satire

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