2022 NEW TITLES and Backlist
Consistently selected for annual “BEST BOOKS” & “MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS”
Art by Matthew Revert
Document Title
the crux where
art intersects
literature
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Art by Laurie Smithwick
“More and more, what we
will refer to as
important literature KERNPUNKT Press is an independent publisher of literary works. We enjoy symbolism, non-traditional plots, unique characters, taboo, and experimentation.
will be released from
small presses” –filmmaker & author Jeff Vande Zande, in the preface to his interview with KERNPUNKT publisher, Jesi Buell
We like challenging. In short, we value art over entertainment.
For discounts and publicity contact: Jesi Buell, Publisher (607) 226-3121 • Hamilton, New York kernpunktpress@gmail.com • www.kernpunktpress.com
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2022 CATALOG & BACKLIST
KERNPUNKT books are distributed by
KERNPUNKT Press 2022 Catalog
“inextricable from erotic tension, mesmerizing”
Birth of Eros a novel
Debra Di Blasi ISBN-13: 978-1734306576 Published: November 1, 2022 Language: English Paperback: 170 pages Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 4.25” x 6.875” Promotional gifts for preorders & special requests Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) Los Angeles 1951-1953. A vicious rape, revenge gone awry, and American consumerism collide in this first novel of a projected 4-book mytho-lyric. Lucy is born gifted and burdened with an “unsightly” right eye that sees far beyond the visible spectrum, lending her an uncanny view of events, things and people, including the dead. Her father is famous as an obscenely well-endowed men’s underwear model; her mother is famous as a sexy teenager modeling luxury automobiles—until wicked L.A. car dealer Mr. Wolf cons her into posing for increasingly explicit pinups. In language both wildly lyrical and transgressive, Lucy recounts the story of her “not smart” parents and Big Bad Wolf who becomes the catalyst for her conception and eventual calamity. Evoking the lean, compressed style of her award-winning book Drought, writer Debra Di Blasi crafts an unrepentant tragicomedy navigating the complexities of beauty vs. “ugliness,” hate vs. love, sexual freedom vs. moral hypocrisy, and American materialism in the Atomic Age. “Debra Di Blasi’s BIRTH OF EROS, a voice-driven jewel box of tight, honed, sculpted sentences carrying the frequencies of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, and Kathryn Davis, pulsates with emphatic philosophical inquiry and emotional verve across time and cultures. Through her exquisite blend of the brutal and the beautiful, Di Blasi deftly finds the historical bruise incurred by the gordian knot of sex and violence...” –Christopher Higgs, author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney “At times beautiful, at times brutal, the real protagonist of Birth of Eros is language, the sexiest of unreliable narrators. In Debra Di Blasi’s wicked and wonderful imagination, a novel is a thing that erupts. Starting with a literal birth and moving through family toward sex and yes, the falling of love and death, this experimental prose collection reads like a magician’s coat…The act of reading this book is inextricable from erotic tension, mesmerizing.” –Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and With Animal
Please check back for pre-publication press, reviews, interviews.
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KERNPUNKT Press 2022 Catalog
New from Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry finalist
Unearthingly a novel
Julian Mithra ISBN-13: 978-1734306569 Published: July 1, 2022 Language: English Paperback: TBD Cover Price: TBD Item Weight: TBD Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches
Unearthingly is an assemblage of imaginary archival documents from 1937 that constructs a narrative following Cheeky, a chicana tomboy, as she collects impressions of underground explorations around her boom-n-bust Rocky Mountain town. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julian Mithra writes about things that haven’t happened and never could happen. If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic Press, 2018) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. Read more in Lifted Brow, Versal, Milvia Street, Storm Cellar, Sharkpack Annual, Name and None, and inside bags of Nomadic Coffee. For a Master’s in Folklore from Berkeley, Sara dressed up as a 19th century anthropologist and ventriloquized through a copper pipe. Born and raised in golden California, they eke out a living in the Bay Area by encouraging young people to write. Please check back for pre-publication press, reviews, interviews.
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KERNPUNKT Press 2022 Catalog
Instrument for Distributed Empathy Monetization a hybrid collection
William Lessard ISBN-13: 978-1734306538 Published: April 1, 2022 Language: English Paperback: 30 pages Item Weight: TBD Cover Price: $14.99 Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.99 (47% off) Instrument for Distributed Empathy Monetization is Sylvia Plath's Ariel for the age of algorithmic capitalism and the sentient corporation. Combining PowerPoint templates with charts and collateral sampled from Google Patents, the series blurs the lines between visual poetry and the corporate performativity of self. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Lessard has writing that has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and the Southwest Review. He is Poetry & Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review. His visual work has been featured at MoMA PS 1. “Instrument for Distributed Empathy Monetization is the illustrated poem that you need in your life right now…. If corporations are people, or at least consider themselves people, then they will crave relationships, as Lessard aptly described in the corporate yearning to achieve empathy…. This is a poem for our times. Modernism and Post-modernism have faded. Welcome to the age of monetization.” –Entropy Magazine
Please check back for pre-publication press, reviews, interviews.
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KERNPUNKT Press 2022 Catalog
“crackling with meaning, insight, lyric energy”
The Smoke Is Me, Burning a novel
C. A. Blintzios ISBN-13: 978-1734306521 Published: March 1, 2022 Language: English Paperback: 235 pages Cover Price: $15.99 Dimensions: 6” x 9” Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (44% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.99 (50% off)
Blake and Jamie Ackerman grew up on the lip of the woods in Harmswood, Arkansas. Raised by an alcoholic mother and a Vietnam War veteran uncle, they have grown up believing in gods beyond the chicken wire fence that steal children from their beds. After an accident in the pines leaves Blake blind in one eye, the boys' lives are never the same. They grow up and drift apart until the memories of their childhood force the contents of Blake's blind spot out into the light. “The lore, the blood mythology, the whole thing crackling with meaning, insight, lyric energy.” –Eoin McNamee, author of Resurrection Man, Orchid Blue, The Blue Tango “A sort of scrapbook of place magic. Almost told by ecology itself, The Smoke is Me, Burning has a reliable cyclical power that is often the mark of good art." Jonathan McAloon, book critic
Please check back for more pre-publication press, reviews, interviews.
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KERNPUNKT Press 2022 Catalog
“the first book I’ve loved reading in a long time.”
A Book About Myself Called Hell a hybrid novel
Jared Joseph ISBN-13: 978-1734306545 Published: February 15, 2022 Language: English Paperback: 140 pages Item Weight: TBD Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: TBD Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off)
A modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno from the twinned vantage points of the Covid-19 pandemic and the crisis of global capital, as well as a vintage review of pop culture and modernity-at-large through the literary lens of medieval hell. In a tragicomic collage of the fictive and the historical, the ancient and the contemporary, the book ultimately poses the questions: Why are we in hell? Why is it so funny? And why can’t I laugh? “A Book about Myself Called Hell isn’t for faint readers. It's bold and cunning, clever and radical. It will make readers laugh out loud and simultaneously feel dirty, which isn’t horrible to do, because as the book pushes readers toward discomfort, it asks them to consider the fringes and encourages them to visit for a while.” –Nicole Yurcaba, Sage Cigarettes “[T]hought crime made flesh. In Jared Joseph's hands, what might have been merely a capricious interpretation of a classic also becomes a challenge to literacy.” –Martin Devecka, UCSC Classical Studies Director and author of Broken Cities: A Historical Sociology of Ruins “I shake my head in amazement at this book. Jared Joseph is ‘funny.’ But so is hell. OK, I'll explain: Jared Joseph is our father Virgil guiding us (uh oh, we're Dante) through hell, which is both the text of the Inferno and the text of life during Covid-19, complete with horrors and suffering… It is also a retelling of the Inferno as a pandemic lockdown coping project called for by tremendous grief. It hurts. I needed it. In all honesty, this is the first book I've loved reading in a long time.” –Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere “Jared Joseph’s wild A Book About Myself Called Hell dispenses with the pregnant deferrals and cunning allegories of Dante’s poem, finding eternal platitudes alongside changeless torments and ecstasies right here in the present tense…. ’The funniest things in life,’ this very funny book reminds us, ‘are also hell.’ It’s a pleasure to be here, I mean there, howling alongside our hero in the flames.” –Brandon Brown, author of The Four Seasons
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
A giving project in support of Surfrider Foundation
The Celestial Bandit
Tribute to Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont anthology of writing and images
Jordan A. Rothacker, editor ISBN-13: 978-1734306552 Published: December 7, 2021 Language: English Paperback: 120 pages Cover Price: $14.99
Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.99 (47% off)
All profits from the sales of The Celestial Bandit will be donated to Surfrider Foundation for their efforts to protect our oceans that Ducasse loved so much. Featuring work by authors and artists including: Mark Amerika, Louis Armand, Ben Arzate, duncan b. barlow, Tosh Berman, R.J. Dent, Douglas Doornbos, Seb Doubinsky, Steve Finbow, Stewart Home, Chris Kelso, Faisal Khan, Dylan Krieger, Callum Leckie, Chris Lloyd, Alexis Lykiard, Jennifer Macbain-Stephens, Christopher Nelms, Golnoosh Nour, David Leo Rice, Jeremy Reed, John Reed, James Reich, & Audrey Szasz Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), better known by his pen name Comte de Lautréamont, is the most influential writer most people have never heard of. Maldoror, the first of his two works, has been described as the most evil book ever written. It has also been described as the funniest. Either way, it provides some of the most gorgeous, twisty, weird sentences in any language. An inspiration to the Surrealists, post-colonial Caribbean writers, and the Situationists to name a few, Lautréamont still garners a following today. In The Celestial Bandit, editor Jordan A. Rothacker brings together twenty-four contemporary artists from music, visual arts, and the writing world to pay tribute to this unique and exciting influence. Poetry, essays, short stories, experimental texts, and a dictionary of disruptive neologisms, this anthology has it all.
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Recipient of American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellowship
Sister Séance a novel
Aimee Parkison ISBN-10: 1734306513 ISBN-13: 978-1734306514 Published: October 5, 2021 Language: English Paperback: 225 pages Cover Price: $18.00 Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $9.50 (47% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $9.00 (50% off)
Sister Séance is set in Concord, Massachusetts, just after the Civil War. Spiritualism is sweeping the nation when a Halloween celebration calls for a traditional “dumb supper,” a dinner party where no guest may speak but must convey needs and desires through nonverbal communication. After the dumb supper, mysterious intruders shock the guests into confronting their pasts, uniting abolitionists, freed people, former slaveholders, a matchmaker, the single women who are her boarders, wounded Civil War veterans, and a female photographer pregnant with the child of her former slave. “Like a stage play or a fever dream where boundaries are blurred, characters emerge and fade without reason, likenesses are confused, and secrets are carried over generations; this is a story that haunts.” –The Brooklyn Rail “Sister Séance…will delight readers with all things occult, hayrides and bonfires, dancing and games, and terrifying memories of the worst period in American history. –Grab the Lapels “Parkison’s attention to historical detail is lucid...[and her] ultimate charm is luring readers to join in this grand cackle—against absurdity.” –Barrelhouse Review “The author, like all good authors, is able to evoke something from our collective experiences… Deftly weaving the landscape descriptions and her character portraits, Parkison plays the one against the other, arriving in a near-cinematic denouement.” –Heavy Feather Review “The novel is a séance itself, inviting the dead to commune with our conscience. A haunting achievement.” –Steve Tomasula, author of Once Human: Stories
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“compelling, original, and innovative”
Wiki of Infinite Sorrows short fiction
Matthew Burnside ISBN-10: 1734306505 ISBN-13: 978-1734306507 Published: July 7, 2021 Cover Price: $18.00 Paperback: 168 pages Dimensions: 4.25 x 0.5 x 6.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.50 (53% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (58% off)
Wiki of Infinite Sorrows is a collection of fictional wiki entries (an expanded analog version of the digital sandbox novel, In Search Of), short stories, possibilities, negations, fragmented fairy tales, and secret messages–solvable by a cipher embedded throughout the book. A testament to obsession and the intranslatability of grief, Wiki bends, breaks, and fractures the human heart to create a makeshift prism of hope. “Rather than documenting the unusual, the notable, the lofty, ‘Wiki’ highlights the aching beauty of the mundane, the hidden moments of sadness and wonder that occur around the everyday characters, and thus directs us to search out and find these moments of beauty in the warp and weft of the mundane moments in our own lives.” –Entropy Magazine “[D]o we become fiction by becoming a part of the book, or does the fiction become real by our participation with it? What is "real" blurs inside these pages, as it must, because it is made so only through language, and it is only with our participation as readers that that language is made real as we are made to feel something. This is the structural genius of the book, both at the macro level and the micro level.” –The Rupture “One of the most compelling, original, and innovative explorations of grief and loneliness I've ever read.” –Nick Olson, author “Matthew Burnside’s Wiki of Infinite Sorrows borrows the form of a wiki and elevates it to artistry… Burnside captures this kind of edgy feeling where we suspect the universe or at least other people are desperately trying to tell us something important but, at the same time, we also suspect that nothing is being communicated at all or at least not to us.” –Heavy Feather Review
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Lambda Literary's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of April 2021
Thick Skin a hybrid novel
N/A Oparah ISBN-10: 1732325197 ISBN-13: 978-1732325197 Published: April 6, 2021 Language: English Paperback: 156 pages Item Weight: 15 ounces Cover Price: $18.00 Dimensions: 5.75 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $10.50 (42% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $9.00 (50% off) Also one of Entropy Magazine’s Best of 2021 Fiction Books and Big Other’s Most Anticipated 2021 Small Press Titles After Nneka, a young Nigerian-American, is dumped and abandoned by her partner Jacob, she undertakes a ritual of thickening her skin physically and spiritually—with mud, knives, tweezers, and a questionable form of therapy. Nneka’s healing process is as layered as the emotional abuse of her interracial relationship and embodies all the ways we hide, obsess, flail, fail, and finally carve our way toward feeling and healing. This heavily metaphorical novella, inspired by the author’s experience, mines meaning from memories and half-lived moments. Told in vignettes, from the perspective of a someone-turned-noone, it grapples with the question: who’s responsible for the wreckage? “The story found in Thick Skin is one that requires intense digging to uncover its hidden gems. Oparah’s writing is succinct but quite complex, making the work one that will leave an impact on nearly every page. It’s a fantastic story that will show how one woman’s examination of her self after the end of a toxic relationship can unveil hidden truths but doesn’t shy away from showing how potentially destructive that process can be if one chooses harmful ways to change.” –The Coil Magazine “What makes the reader persevere through a novel without much forward movement is Oparah's evocative language. "You taught me to write us," Nneka apostrophizes Jacob at one point… Throughout, the prose style manages to arrest our attention through its effective balance of clarity and suggestion, out of which does gradually emerge an austere kind of narrative development.” –Long Story Short “Oparah has…created a character in Nneka that operates more as an examination of the way we embody grief, how we process the damages present in our relationships—in this case one that includes the various abuses of an interracial dynamic—and what lengths we will take in the effort to heal ourselves…. [A] gorgeous hybrid story.” –Foglifter
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Lambda Literary's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of November 2020
Tight Little Vocal Cords a hybrid novel
Loie Rawding ISBN-10: 1732325189 ISBN-13: 978-1732325180 Published: November 7, 2020 Language: English Paperback: 145 pages Item Weight: 7 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 5.75 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $9.50 (47% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $8.50 (53% off) Also a finalist in Big Other’s 2020 Reader's Choice Award and one of Entropy Magazine’s Best of 2020 Fiction Books Loie Rawding’s debut novel is a prismatic journey into the depths of one young person’s chaotic psychic and physical awakening. Part fiction, part poetry, part cabaret, Rawding sketches a surreal world that is at once historical and hauntingly modern; a place where to deep dive into love can save, and to stay silent will most certainly destroy. “If you’re the kind of reader who relishes underlining favorite sentences and marking up the margins of your books, keep a pen handy while you read Loie Rawding’s debut novel… Tight Little Vocal Cords is slim, but don’t let the page count deceive you; this novel is filled with delectable writing you’ll want to sink your teeth into but not devour in one or two sittings.” –Lauren Connell Johnson, The Critical Flame “[A]n amazing debut novel.” – Eric Norcross, The Writing Life podcast “Tight Little Vocal Cords is not a traditional or typical novel. It is a collection of stories, vignettes, lists, dialogues, letters, sequences, and voices. It is poetry through and through.” –Ekphrastic Journal The reader surges along on a sparkling current of daring language and insightful structural play, carried into overlapping landscapes of sexuality and history, love and isolation, and form and feeling, always eddying back to the wondrous, grief-laden mystery of embodiment.” –Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man “Loie Rawding’s dazzling Tight Little Vocal Cords is ekphrastic, ecstatic, and epistolary…Referring to her subject—the modernist painter Marsden Hartley—simply as M, Rawding creates an aching portrait, both abstract and expressive.” –Kelcey Parker Ervick, author of Liliane’s Balcony
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Big Other Finalist for Best Fiction Book of 2020
We Were Called Specimens flash fictions
Jason Teal ISBN-10: 1732325170 ISBN-13: 978-1732325173 Published: July 1, 2020 Language: English Paperback: 156 pages Item Weight: 8 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 4.25 x 0.5 x 6.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) Also a finalist for Big Other’s 2020 Reader's Choice Award Marjorie Cameron Parsons. Famed occultist, Thelemite, strikingly Iowan, Navy volunteer, poet, artist. This book has nothing to do with her. Or is it the key to the universe? You, reader, have summoned the Three, intertwining your fate with their own. Relationships are mutable and the world spins into another year. We Were Called Specimens is Jason Teal’s first book of flash fictions. The collection centers on a mythical, supernatural Marjorie untethered to time and space. Follow her into the bleakest, harshest storms of humanity— and flee with her from the onslaught of dreamers and villains alike. “What makes debut writer Jason Teal's collection of speculative fiction work is the punchy writing that never veers too far from our own reality.” –BuzzFeed, “21 Great Books From Small Presses To Read Now” “Teal has created a wholeheartedly fun but thought-provoking ride in We Were Called Specimens.” –Mid-American Review “[A]n experiment in understanding both how certain personalities come to take hold of our collective imaginations, as well as something uniquely American: the desire to believe in something greater than anyone of us might quite understand that will save us from the hard work of looking at ourselves, our decisions and our failures.” –Lit Reactor The greatest accomplishment of this book may be its ability to claim space within a literary tradition, while pushing to break new ground and speak to present moment conversations in mass media, conceptions of gender, and much more.” –Bridge Eight
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Big Other’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2020”
The Fabulous Dead flash fictions
Adriana Minou ISBN-10: 1732325162 ISBN-13: 978-1732325166 Published: March 24, 2020 Language: English Paperback: 130 pages Item Weight: 6.4 ounces Cover Price: $16.99 Dimensions: 5.75 x 0.3 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (47% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (56% off) The Fabulous Dead is a collection of un-historical fiction, a type of literature that deals with the undoing of history and its reweaving into surreal fables. Famous and fabulous dead characters find themselves in dream-like situations that influence the living in unexpected ways. Brahms is having telephone troubles and is a sauerkraut addict, Marlene Dietrich lives in an ice-cream freezer, Gus Grissom has a secret affair with Dante’s Beatrice, and Virginia Woolf, Sarah Kane and Sylvia Plath drink bloody Marys in the living room. This book is an intricate mosaic of identity, individuality, and lives wasted or enjoyed. The Fabulous Dead is, perhaps above all, a ball-masque oscillating between the eternal and the ephemeral. “Minou plays with art, musical composition, and literature in wonderfully contemporary postmodern fashion, mixing absurdity with fragmentation, history with fiction, and blurring the lines of reality... It is through her composition and arrangement of the short stories that Minou keeps us hooked…. For readers who enjoy books such as Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders who also focuses on what the deceased can teach the living, fragmentation of time, and an examination into the human condition, The Fabulous Dead would be a fun and challenging read.” –Heavy Feather Review “The stories in Andriana Minou's collection The Fabulous Dead haunt and surprise in equal measure.” –Largehearted Boy “These stories can be categorized as un-historical fiction: literature that completely undos history while building it back up again into whatever form it wishes to take. Minou's fabulous dead teach us lessons, but more importantly show how meaning can be found through the journey of death, whether literal or metaphorical.” –Ready Mag
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Big Other’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2020”
Ceremonials a lyric novella
Katharine Coldiron ISBN-10: 1732325154 ISBN-13: 978-1732325159 Published: February 11, 2020 Language: English Paperback: 134 pages Item Weight: 6.4 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) Also a finalist in the 2020 Bisexual Book Awards from Bi Writers Association and one of Entropy Magazine’s Best of 2021 Fiction Books Ceremonials is a twelve-part lyric novella inspired by Florence + the Machine's 2011 album of the same name. It's the story of two girls, Amelia and Corisande, who fall in love at a boarding school. Corisande dies suddenly on the eve of graduation, but Amelia cannot shake her ghost. A narrative about obsession, the Minotaur, and the veil between life and death, Ceremonials is a poem in prose, a keening in words, and a song etched in ink. “Coldiron weaves together a twelve-part novella about two girls, Amelia and Corisande, falling in love while at boarding school. When Corisande dies and suddenly and haunts Amelia, the effect is as majestic as it is heartbreaking.” –Publishers Weekly, one of “15 New and Forthcoming Indie Press Gems” “A gothic novella that captures the sensuality of both love and grief.” –Kirkus Reviews “Ceremonial is a ghostly novella—a tribute to music and romance, unusual in its blend of powerful visuals and morphing feelings. Its depiction of defining relationships is both heartening and terrifying.” –Foreword “I’m a big fan of fiction that draws its inspiration from music… So I’m thrilled to see what Katharine Coldiron has done with her novella Ceremonials, which draws its inspiration from the Florence and the Machine album Ceremonials…. Coldiron is a thoughtful and talented writer.” –Literary Hub, one of “14 Books You Should Read in February” 2020 “Ceremonials is a dreamy punch of a book, a haunting, poetic aria. These pages ache with the far reach of love, hum with the slow blossoming of self, crackle with the power of myth. Katharine Coldiron has created something very special here, as fierce and tender as girls, as ghosts.” –Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Entropy Magazine’s “Best Fiction Books of 2019” list
The Big Red Herring a novel
Andrew Farkas ISBN-10: 1732325138 ISBN-13: 978-1732325135 Published: November 1, 2019 Language: English Paperback: 460 pages Item Weight: 12 ounces Cover Price: $16.99 Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $9.99 (41% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $8.00 (53% off) In this latest work by Andrew Farkas, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies. The moon landing was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick. The Space Race and the Cold War were diversions enacted to cover up the biggest secret ever kept. But Wallace Heath Orcuson (Wall to his friends) has more immediate problems to deal with. He’s just woken up in an apartment he’s never seen before. There’s a dead body under his couch. It’s his girlfriend’s husband, a man named “Senator” Kipper Maris. Meanwhile, at a donut shop, a radio narrator, who’s been forced to adopt the name Edward R. Murrow, reads Wall’s story. He hates it. He wants to change it. The problem: Murrow is a narrator, not a writer, and the penalty for altering a manuscript is death. Luckily for Murrow, his boss, “Senator” Kipper Maris, was recently murdered. So maybe no one will notice. Or maybe there’s a reason for the rule. But you can’t find out what’s in Pandora’s box until it’s opened, right? Who wants to see what’s inside? “Farkas leaves narrative convention lying dizzy on the floor, with prose that invokes Thomas Pynchon and Neal Stephenson… Though Farkas’s cleverness occasionally veers into selfindulgence, readers will enjoy this humorous, high-energy romp.” –Publishers Weekly “In his truly wild first novel, Andrew Farkas smashes history straight through the looking glass to offer a world of Orwellian chill and Strangelovian élan. Indeed, the whole beautifully complex, carnivalesque bundle dances with uncommonly light and dexterous step. Even when it gets dark. And man does it ever. The Big Red Herring is a revisioned century’s worth of truth and hoax, pain and fun.” –Laird Hunt, author of In the House in the Dark of the Woods “The Big Red Herring, Andrew Farkas’s vibrant pulsar of a book, generates accommodating light, both particle and wave, piggybacked and packed with rich dense packages of info and intel. Not a mere novel but a kind of juiced and jumpy step-up transformer... Farkas is the new Newton of narration, standing on the shoulders of giants, yes, but double clutching this shift of the novel’s paradigm. There’s no stopping this novel Novel, this new New.” –Michael Martone, author of Brooding
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Winner of the Eyelands Award for Best Poetry Book of 2019
The Nurseryman fiction, poetry, hybrid
Arthur Allen ISBN-10: 1732325146 ISBN-13: 978-1732325142 Published: October 8, 2019 Language: English Paperback: 133 pages Item Weight: 8.7 ounces Cover Price: $15.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.00 (53% off) The Nurseryman is a verse novel told in polyphony as the collected account of a 17th Century voyage to Meta Incognita - the absolutely unknown ice-land at the top of the world. A composite of original sources and collected accounts of medieval voyages, The Nurseryman is a postmodern travel compendium that explores the hidden, magical worlds within our own. "An extraordinary debut that combines the awed wonder of early seafarers with a freshness and buoyancy that is essentially 21st century. Alternating between the late sixteenth century ‘FRAGMENTARY records of a Roote Gatherer, practiced of alchemical craft & in the spiritual use of fruit trees…’, lyrical meditations on the beauty of nature, and notes on some of the marvels encountered during the voyage (such as how female whales are snared by their protectiveness towards their offspring), The Nurseryman takes us on a startlingly original odyssey that is at once an homage to the past as well as being a prescient ‘fable for the present." –Jenny Lewis, author of Gilgamesh Retold “As the reader, every page is a new discovery. In fact, as I turned the pages, I realized I couldn’t predict what came next, and was surprised time and time again what I found. At an early point, I realized I was reading a work of genius, by someone who didn’t just write a book, but actually imbued an entire world, adventure, characters, and infinite possibilities.” –Hunter Liguore, Northwest Review
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Dennis Cooper’s “Best of 2019” list
Angel House a novel
David Leo Rice ISBN-10: 173232512X ISBN-13: 978-1732325128 Published: June 13, 2019 Language: English Paperback: 453 pages Item Weight: 1.93 pounds Cover Price: $24.99 Dimensions: 6 x 1.25 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $12.99 (48% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $11.50 (54% off) After crossing a vast inland sea in an ark called Angel House, Professor Squimbop docks on a distant shore. As soon as his anchor makes purchase, a town sprouts up that may or may not encapsulate all of existence. At the behest of some distant master, he embarks into this town to teach the children about death, a concept they've never encountered before. What follows is a surreal epic about friendship, childhood, solitude, creation, and the darkest realms of obsessive nostalgia. Both tender and depraved, familiar and bizarre, it is an utterly original coming-of-age story that questions how we can establish a shared reality when meaning was, is, and will always be malleable. "Rice has created something here that conjures up memories of the works of Julio Cortazár and Michael Cisco: it’s primally unsettling and unnervingly compelling.” –Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn ”[Rice has] continued to show me things I’ve never seen before. To me, his works aren’t just exercises in imagination, but explorations of what is imaginable." –Michael Natalie, The Believer “As I’ve come to expect from [Rice’] work, Angel House is a wild, mind-bending ride.” –Joshua Lemay, Lit Magazine “David Leo Rice’s Angel House is a haunting novel—brave, astute, and strange in all the best ways. I highly recommend it!” –Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking “Lash yourself to the mast of your ark as you set sail for the siren song of David Leo Rice’s imagination… The emerging cult novelist of today's moment, he’s the reigning surrealist sorcerer of tomorrow’s century.” –Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Shadowbahn “Unlike anything else you will read this year...” –Kurt Baumeister, author of Pax Americana
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Entropy Magazine’s “Best Nonfiction Books of 2019” list
The Skinned Bird essays
Chelsea Biondolilo ISBN-10: 1732325111 ISBN-13: 978-1732325111 Published: May 1, 2019 Language: English Paperback: 75 pages Item Weight: 3.2 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.00 (53% off) From award-winning essayist Chelsea Biondolillo, The Skinned Bird is about all the ways we break our own hearts. In lyric, fragmented essays—full of geological, ornithological and photographic interventions, with landscapes, loss, and longing—Biondolillo travels the terrain of leaving and finding home while keeping her sights fixed firm on the natural world around her. Also includes the Best American Essays 2014 notable, "Phrenology." "Biondolillo’s compelling experimental memoir takes some big risks, both in emotional openness and in structure… The result is a gorgeous book about trauma and its aftermath that carries much more weight than its slim 165 pages.." –BuzzFeed "An arresting collage of ornithological research, observations of landscape and relationship, photographs, and memories, The Skinned Bird is an exacting dissection of loss and relocation." –Seattle Review of Books “Her debut essay collection, The Skinned Bird, uses Biondolillo’s expertise as a springboard toward deeper explorations of a living planet, of human connection, of everyday realities like disappointment and grief…. This collection gets to the heart of what I’ve come to understand as Biondolillo’s most poignant inquiry: How do we live, how do we carry on, when we know all that we know? When we realize we know nothing at all.” —Bomb Magazine “The Skinned Bird is a brilliant dive into how deeply we can love people and place and dirt and birds and air. And how we sometimes have to let go of all of that to truly fly.” —Nicole Walker, author of Sustainability, A Love Story “Chelsea Biondolillo's The Skinned Bird is nothing short of breathtaking.… [T]he stories open up what we mean when we say being, steal your breath, and bring you back to life so that we might yet remember the risk and beauty involved in becoming.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“A promising poetic debut.”
The Book of Transparencies a novel
Jefferson Navicky ISBN-10: 0997292490 ISBN-13: 978-0997292497 Published: December 1, 2018 Language: English Paperback: 75 pages Item Weight: 3.2 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $7.00 (53% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $6.00 (60% off) In The Book of Transparencies, the narrator discovers a book in a community college library that changes his life. With increasing intensity, he traces both story and author through New York, Paris, Italy, and Berlin, arriving finally in Maine where the author disappeared decades ago. Part epic love story, part detective novel, The Book of Transparencies is an archive of a man's life, which comes to include the narrator himself. Its pages speak to the permeable, intersecting nature of our memories, and the efforts we make to bring the pieces into wholeness. "Navicky’s writing reminds me of late Melville, the Melville of Pierre, familiar and grave from evasion and obsession… Navicky has created a rare document of pain and pleasure. A promising, poetic debut." –Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess "Jefferson Navicky has created a delight of a debut for its sensuality and invention, its handling of light alongside the deepest dark. The Book of Transparencies is a rarity of its own making, an existential novella in which prose merges with poetry to explore topics of common interest—love and loss, art and travel, the permanence and impermanence of nature and phenomenon… both illuminating and dark." –Jodi Paloni, author of They Could Live with Themselves “The Book of Transparencies is a stream-of-consciousness tour de force... Within the book, the distinction between subjective and objective language, between reader, writer and character is effaced—hence, the act of reading about incomplete Others can itself become an exercise in selfunderstanding.” –Heavy Feather Review “Overall, the book is a unique work, inclusive of different voices or rather speakers that help describe what Bolzebados was feeling during this time and what his thought processes were throughout the entire narrative…. [T]hose interested in the study of mental states told through the narrative of one person, narrated by people other than that particular person, would love this book. –Prism Review
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
Featured interview on National Public Radio El Paso
Fabulations short stories
José de Piérola ISBN-10: 0997292474 ISBN-13: 978-0997292473 Published: October 15, 2018 Language: English Paperback: 121 pages Item Weight: 4.8 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6.25 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.00 (53% off) Encompassing thousands of years, Fabulations is composed of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories as varied as the early effects of human civilization on our planet or the strange relationship between machines, chess and the human mind. These fabulations, intimate and panoramic, are imaginative periscopes that reveal part of our shared human experience from fresh, new angles. "De Piérola welcomes his readers into fabulous worlds, from distant places and times to familiar neighborhoods, from strange loops of reality to the stone and dust of our own cities. Each story is rooted in human desire, in real people, and there is an urgency in reading them, a reluctance to put the book down, as you might miss something. And you don’t want to miss anything de Piérola writes…. The stories are beautiful and heartbreaking." - Daniel Chacón, American Book Award winner for The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes "Fabulations is marvelous and startling: utterly original, gravely essential. Elegantly traversing chronology, geography and narrative structures, what is historically absurd with the protest of imagination, it provokes and disturbs, pierces and resonates… These stories are deftly rendered with such sensitivity that he arrives, through the fabulist narrative, at a masterful calculus of who through history we have been—and in so doing, ennobles who we can be, and who we are. –Sasha Pimentel, author of 2016 National Poetry Series award-winning For Want of Water “José de Pierola’s Fabulations is an impressive and deeply stimulating collection, one that explores a diapason of forms and modes as it slyly reinterprets the implications of its title….This collection is, above all, highly original and eclectic. Its variety of narrative exercises is impressive and always provocative, and the writing itself is meticulous and economical, each sentence and story marked by a beautiful precision that authoritatively establishes the author’s mastery of English prose. –Heavy Feather Review
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“a strong, passionate, emotional ride”
How to Carry Scars a novel
Dana Green ISBN-10: 0997292482 ISBN-13: 978-0997292480 Published: September 55, 2018 Language: English Paperback: 222 pages Item Weight: 11.9 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.00 (53% off) Olivia and her mother obsess over memories. For her mother, compulsion is a need to document everything in her life. To preserve. Olivia's urge is to revisit the scars of her body, as places of destruction. Yet, as Olivia grows up, she discovers that she cannot always rend memory from herself; it can burrow itself into places so deep that she can't make them bleed. ”How to Carry Scars is a strong, passionate emotional ride. Green’s prose is elegant beyond measure, and the book’s intimate language transforms emotions into something palpable, relatable, and gripping.” –Foreword ”[T]his novel is propelled forward by an intense, emotional thrust, the likes of which is rarely seen in contemporary literature. While there was no doubt before that Dana Green is one of our most bold contemporary prose stylists, this heightened story of loss and family proves she is also one of our most devastatingly earnest. –Timber: A Journal of New Writing “The wit and glittering intelligence of these stories is a kind of haunting in full daylight: the loss enacted in these stories ends up being filled by a spectacular humanity, by love for language, for light, and love for her deftly drawn characters. This book as a whole is an unexpected act of love.” –Bin Ramke, author of Light Wind Light Light “Dana Green’s debut novel is a marvelously nuanced meditation on loss and desire and how one captures the intimacies of mourning…. The intensity of observation, the flashes of wit, and the razor-sharp attention to language create a series of unforgettable snapshots of a young woman who is fighting for control of her own identity, even as she plumbs the depths of her mother’s obsession and puzzles out “the fortune of leftovers.” The result is a haunting story of how the instantaneous lingers. The book is an incantation for the moment, the ephemeral, the half-healed scars that make a life.” –Tina May Hall, author of The Physics of Imaginary Objects
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“wild and mesmeric”
Tucumcari a novel
Patrick Parks ISBN-10: 0997292466 ISBN-13: 978-0997292466 Published: May 15, 2018 Language: English Paperback: 150 pages Item Weight: 11.2 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9.25 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.99 (40% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) A man wakes up one morning believing he has a wife who lives in Tucumcari, New Mexico. A wife he somehow remembers yet does not know. When he decides to find her, he embarks on a surreal journey through both landscape and memory. The reader travels with the narrator through sinking cities, his father's various jobs, government-designated atomic safe havens, motel rooms, cities made of only men, and interactions with people from his childhood including Boyd Delmarco, a famous radio personality whose lungs have turned to glass. "There’s a seductive dreaminess to Parks’ conjured journey, one as hypnotic as the hum of real tires rolling down an actual highway…. Parks’ debut novel is a kaleidoscope of deep-rooted imagery, infused with magic realism yet tempered by the groundedness that comes with instinctive storytelling.” –Booklist "A thoughtful, surrealistic, and strange novel, Tucumcari delves into ideas around memories and the subconscious, as well as into the significance of places within both. It is as wild and mesmeric as can be imagined. –Foreword “Reading Tucumcari is like stepping into someone else’s lucid dream. Yet it feels like your own dream –something you forgot you had dreamed but now that you’re hearing about the dream again, it feels true....” –Atticus Review ”With spare language and rhythmic prose, Park’s debut illuminates the rough edges of memory with cinematic lyricism.” – Library Journal “This timely novel is to be treasured for the rich prose and witty intellect that inform the boldness of its storytelling. Parks is willing to risk the safety of a more traditional approach in order to press readers into a different kind of knowing, a truth that is more deeply felt than thought.” –The Critical Flame
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“Best Horror Read of 2018” –Heavy Feather Review
Mother Walked Into the Lake a novel
Alana I. Capria ISBN-10: 0997292458 ISBN-13: 978-0997292459 Published: December 5, 2017 Language: English Paperback: 100 pages Item Weight: 6.3 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.25 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.50 (43% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) Mother Walked Into the Lake, Alana I. Capria's second novel, merges fantasy, feminism, and horror into a brilliant but disturbing allegory on motherhood and mental illness. The story follows three children who come face-to-face with the consequences of their Mother's drowning. The novel explores the complicated nature of Motherhood and how women uniquely carry this onus of self-sacrifice, responsibility, and all-consuming love. “A lot of books are scary, but few fundamentally change the way you see the world. Alana I Capria’s horrific fairy tale novel, Mother Walked into the Lake, is one of these—an artful feminist nightmare dripping with atmosphere and style, almost supernaturally so…. This is horror ahead of its time, fully realized yet entirely accessible in 100 pages. A tall order: We need our books to possess us like this one.” –Fanzine “Part extended metaphor, part body horror and part haunted house…Mother Walked into the Lake serves as a warning of the traps of domesticity, a dark mirror where family dynamics are twisted ever so slightly to accentuate the latent horror of banality.” –Turn to Ash "A perfect blend of horror and fantasy…Mother Walked Into The Lake is both sublimely beautiful and hauntingly grotesque; in this work we see, as we do in all timeless novels, something of ourselves.” –Richard J. O’Brien, author of The Garden of Fragile Things "Mother Walked Into the Lake is one of those books that truly grabs you and doesn't let go…. Filled with terror and liberation, often within the same page, Mother Walked into a Lake is a great book, and one you will think about long after you've read the final word.” –Jonathan R. Rose, author of Carrion "Mother is a powerful work, part haunted house and part commentary which will demand the reader's attention, digging its claws into them until they forget to breath.” –S. L. Edwards, author of Cabras and And the Woman Loved Her Cats
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“a masterful book”
The Field Is White a novel
Claire Akebrand ISBN-10: 099729244X ISBN-13: 978-0997292442 Published: October 9, 2017 Language: English Paperback: 273 pages Item Weight: 15.5 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.7 x 8.9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.50 (43% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) John Eliason is a young Mormon missionary from Alberta about to return home after two years in Sweden. When his only convert dies, John's last duty is to visit the estranged family to make funeral arrangements. As the snow strands him in the countryside, tensions rise and family secrets are uncovered. The story unfolds through letters, journal entries, flashbacks, and fragmented ruminations. It is a love note to people outside of their cultural comfort zones, to failed poets, and to silence. "In this exquisite first novel, Claire Akebrand makes the domestic exotic through exact observation. Her particular vision of this protagonist—an off-the-rails Mormon missionary—and this place—a snowbound house outside a Swedish village, filled with memories that are not his own—is so profound, that Akebrand transforms this world into incredible richness. The snow burying everything, the voice of a woman trapped in the past, the smell of wood smoke, the rustling of pages of manuscript poems, the repeated actions of sleeping, waking, cooking, eating. An owl that passes, “rustling like the silken train of a dress across floorboards.” In this place time pauses so that “changes come about quietly like curtains slowly bleached in the sunlight.” Akebrand’s skill is of the poet, the ability to observe closely and metaphorically, to see and feel, and of the novelist, making dramas out of the mundane. What Akebrand has invented is no less than a new way of seeing, creating a narrative that gains tension as it pools and eddies, moving in circular, rhythmic time.” –John Bennion, author of Falling Toward Heaven "The Field is White is a masterful book. In an interview, Hemingway once reportedly said, 'I want to write like Cezanne paints.' Hemingway may have wanted to do it, but Akebrand does it, seemingly effortlessly.” –Jeff Vande Zande, author of Into the Desperate Country
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“Unforgettable and inimitable.”
Postludes a novel
Matthew Burnsides ISBN-10: 0997292415 ISBN-13: 978-0997292411 Published: February 6, 2017 Language: English Paperback: 220 pages Item Weight: 13.9 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $8.50 (43% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $7.50 (50% off) A, as in almanac for the dead but still dreaming. B, as in bestiary for the broken and the brave. C, as in crisis, catharsis, or conclusion: the cosmological fate of us all and how we choose to end things. Offering up an eclectic landscape of language experiments, patches of surrealism, and more traditional tales, Postludes spans the style spectrum from A-Z, analog to digital, and heartbreak to hope in its earnest and empathetic variations on the theme of finality and The End. "Postludes is a masterful collection of weaving stories, aphorisms, riffs, heartbeats, that ‘wear their theft-of-night like tourniquets’, ‘redeeming the irredeemable’ through Burnside’s humorous insight of what makes us human….Unforgettable and inimitable.” —Meg Tuite, author of Bound By Blue "If the postlude concludes a religious service, then Burnside’s Postludes collects the lullabies of those who have wandered away from their own funeral…. Postludes reminds the reader that it is the under-oiled technologies of the human heart that construct our liberation, then offers us a much needed tune-up.” —Nathan Blake, author of Going Home Nowhere and Fast "Burnside is a masterful conductor of language in all senses of the word: the magician; the symphonist; the vessel that harnesses electricity and delivers it to us.” —Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map "Matthew Burnside is wild and these brief fictions get at what makes storytelling so grand. These stories are so finely crafted it seems like they haven’t been written at all, but simply exist, like some marvel found locked in a trunk in the attic.” —Brandi Wells, author of This Boring Apocalypse "A polyphony of ringing, full-throated prose, Postludes will leave you disturbed, enchanted, and thoroughly dazzled.” —Rachel Yoder, author of Infinite Things All At Once
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“Mount Fugue is the best kind of novel.”
Mount Fugue a novel
J I Daniels ISBN-10: 0997292415 ISBN-13: 978-0997292411 Published: November 2, 2016 Language: English Paperback: 220 pages Item Weight: 13.9 ounces Cover Price: $14.99 Dimensions: 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches Wholesale (returnable): $7.50 (50% off) Wholesale (non-returnable): $0.00 (100% off) Mount Fugue explores how stories get told to us - through the news, through art, through bits of conversation, and through conjecture. J.I. Daniels pieces together the story of a tragic mountain-climbing expedition through different mediums and voices. This expedition is a historic one; it is the first led by a woman and a Latina. As Daniels tries uncover the truth about what really happened up there, we discover along the way that the reality is less of a singular Truth and more of a combination of truths. "To view and read J.I. Daniels' Mount Fugue is to relinquish all expectations and begin—and begin again—to choose your own news story about Tara Ortiz, to choose your own answers to your own chosen questions about what business it ever was of hers—that wife, thatmother, that Latina and African American corporate executive—to attempt to conquer anything, to attempt to conquer anything at all let alone the deadliest mountain in the world." –Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart "This has all the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident, all the jargon and wonder of a Jon Krakauer story, and it'll activate your narrative jigsaw compulsions as well—you can't help trying to piece together the puzzle, can't help wondering not just why and how and in what sequence, but who is even telling you all this?" — Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels "JI Daniels is a mountaineer. Wonderfully, paradoxically, the mountain he summits is of his own creation—sheer, imposing, daunting. It says a great deal about his ambitions, intellect, and generous nature that he is up to the task of leading the reader into these constructed heights. Mount Fugue is the best kind of novel — like a view from a high peak, it reveals the world you thought you knew from entirely different vantage. The world expands with startling clarity. And you realize that what you see in this clear light is yourself, but from a wonderfully unfamiliar perspective." — Alexander Parsons, author of Leaving Disneyland
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KERNPUNKT Press Backlist
“will dazzle readers”
In This Book You Will Find The Face Of Our Town a novelish in stories
Elizeya Quate ISBN-10: 0997292407 ISBN-13: 978-0997292404 Published: January 1, 2016 Language: English Paperback: 283 pages Cover Price: $14.99 ebook also available
Set in the American Midwest, Quate's debut collection of intertwined short stories explores the paradox of pervasive loneliness in our hyper-connected world. Each character's need for connection is hindered by disconnection: either through distance, through language, or through truths made malleable by tools that allow us to [re]construct our identities. Alternating between fantastic and realistic, male and female, present and past, Quate illustrates how technology simultaneously creates a world of infinite possibilities while at the same time generates myriad barriers to our most primal desires. “This is a book that breathes heavy and hard to the point where I found myself running out of breath, my heart racing, just to keep pace with his adrenalized prose pyrotechnics. Nabokov said, 'Without style, I have nothing.' There is miles of style in these pages, and a very specific sense of something-ness that Quate is in full-throttled control of…. I am a happy thrill-rider being swept along for the ride." –Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish "A delightful ski run through the crags of the millennial mind, THE FACE OF OUR TOWN will dazzle readers with its wordplay and dark, modern humor. This novelish by E. Quate maintains its relentless, addictive self-awareness in the face of loneliness, boredom, and the what-thefuckedness of everyday life. Do yourself a favor: get off the highway at the Velton exit and ask for Elwood Munn.” –Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under
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