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October 2019

Spotlight on American Symphony by Suiyi Tang
AnnouncementBooks

Spotlight on American Symphony by Suiyi Tang

by The Accomplices
written by The Accomplices

We’re excited about American Symphony by Suiyi Tang!

Read all about it at: The Accomplices

American Symphony: Other White Lies is an existential travelogue that reminds me just how much the hyper-conscious 21st-century self sometimes longs for abandonment; if only we could unshackle ourselves from the conditions of our era, our origins, even our memories. Tang’s prose is at once futuristic yet nostalgic, deeply interior yet fantastical, and freely associative in search of its own set of truths. The worlds Tang has built linger, and their insistent weight is sure to incite revelations big and small.”
– Grace Shuyi Liew, author of Careen

“You see,” the difficult conversation would begin, “I am actually a flower.” Check out Bloom, an excerpt from the book at: Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Find more excerpts from her book at Cardiff Review & at The Offing Mag

Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies is a polyphonic work that shatters genre boundaries and subverts our ideas of the singular “self” or the singular voice. It contains multitudes, each dynamic sentence twisting blade-deep. It’s truly symphonic: at once lyrical and essayistic, humorous and visceral, this novel will rearrange your insides. It’s unrelenting and immersive and peppered with breathless moments of language (“she was much too buoyant to be buried.”) I was lost and found in the span of these pages.”
– K-Ming Chang, author of Past Lives, Future Bodies 

Spotlight on Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice
Books

Spotlight on Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice

by The Accomplices
written by The Accomplices

W’re excited about Between Appear and Disappear

But we’re not the only ones

“An unforgettable and perfect book.”
–Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

“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 by Doug Rice

 

To try a sample and begin to see for yourself, go here

 

…John [Gardner] taught me to see in other ways, through other art practices. John painted as a way of seeing more slowly, more intimately. I have used photography in that way in my life. To understand something about the negative space of photography and the negative space that can be made vivid in a sentence.
– From an interview with Doug Rice by Joe Milazzo, at Entropy

 

MEOWZA: INTRODUCING THE FALL CATALOG!
Books

MEOWZA: INTRODUCING THE FALL CATALOG!

by The Accomplices
written by The Accomplices

TODAY IS RELEASE DAY FOR THESE AMEOWZING TITLES. Order them now!

American Symphony: Other White Lies
by Suiyi Tang

BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND

EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / HYBRID / NONFICTION / SPECULATIVE MEMOIR / ASIAN-AMERICAN

American Symphony is a portrait of a portrait, a mirror’s reflection of someone that’s gone missing, a speculative memoir that takes cues and challenges from works by Kathy Acker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Jenny Zhang. S has made it her duty to be the editor, piecing together how ! had disappeared, picking apart the words that ! had left behind in hopes of discovering what went wrong. Through a captivating assemblage of literary pieces, S solves the puzzle, inadvertently creating an impression of what people remember most of the missing and the dead. Melancholic and bravely honest, Suiyi Tang has achieved something thought to be impossible, taking linguistic fortitude and bending it into a new shape, achieving new emotional heights.

Where in the American literary landscape has there been a place for a text like Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies? Here is the work of an Asian American female millennial—fiercely intellectual; embodied; by turns, exuberant and melancholic, artistic and theoretical, personal and political—that deserves to be read and heard amid and beyond the usual cacophony of praise for young white writerly yearnings.

In a voice that is wry, shattered, and undeniable, American Symphony takes a torch to the myths of the “model minority,” the available female “Oriental” sex object, and the technically-brilliant-but-not-creative “Asian” while also ripping through the raced and gendered lies undergirding our ideas of nation and aesthetics. A brilliant debut. –Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Between Appear and Disappear
by Doug Rice

BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND

MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / HYBRID / EXPERIMENTAL

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.

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 embodied 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 Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water

Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
by Hillary Leftwich

BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND

HYBRID / FICTION / EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / CREATIVE NONFICTION / MEMOIR

Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a multi-genre collection that examines grief, violence, heartbreak, and the universal challenge of living in a body that is always vulnerable. In this greyscale kaleidoscope of the familiar and the uncanny, muted voices shout, people commit to devastating choices, and mundane moments are filled with silent hauntings. A sleep paralysis and a séance of voices long dead, this collection’s characters illuminate both our own darkness and our strength, revealing how love can emerge from the most impossible of conditions.

In this hybrid collection of works, Hillary Leftwich speaks to us in her own deeply authentic, inimitable voice. Innovative in approach and breathtaking in execution, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a haunted and haunting work of art. By turns gut-wrenching, dark, funny, and ultimately transcendent, this is a must-read book by a writer of considerable depth and originality.
–Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018

Also, coming in 2020 & 2021:

– be/trouble by Bridgette Bianca
– The Depression by Mathias Svalina and Jon Pack
– Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama
– The Secret Lives of Negroes by Ernest Hardy

Janice Lee on Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Interview

Janice Lee on Vol. 1 Brooklyn

by Writ Large Press
written by Writ Large Press

Our very own Janice Lee answers, um, six ridiculous questions on Vol. 1 Brooklyn:

3. Do scorpions have rich inner lives? Why or why not?

Of course. I believe all animals and plants and living beings do. Just because we can’t access it doesn’t mean there aren’t worlds within worlds occurring all around us. They think, imagine, dream, just not in the same ways we do.

Six Ridiculous Questions: Janice Lee