Bøger udgivet af Artless Dodges, Incorporated

THE PRANK is a novel about the tendency for any news story involving a cute child or a reprehensible parent to become a media feeding frenzy, about the incredible communicative power of the internet, about the speed at which a fabricated happening can cross the threshold into accepted truth. But it is also about us as consumers of narrative: about how the digital revolution has changed the way we process information. My hope is that as you are reading you will find yourself scanning, skipping, dismissing, and cherry-picking: pay attention to these moments. This is your brain doing something remarkable, something profoundly post-modern, something perhaps not altogether benign. - from the author's foreword Frank Nevis knows that there's more than one way to get famous in America. When massive flooding strikes his town, only Frank has the presence of mind to weave a fabricated story into the actual drama unfolding around him. After all: what better way to attract interest and funding for his now-defunct reality show career? Fueled by the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, and the echo chamber of the 24-hour news cycle Frank's fabrication is soon the biggest story breaking, but how long can he maintain his hastily-constructed lie? And where is the line, in the American audience's thirst for "reality entertainment," between the drama of Frank's unraveling plans and his and his family's fictional hardships? Written in a style intended to mimic the overwhelming cacophony that is news and culture in the 21st century, The Prank explores the question of reality in the digital age, where viral falsehoods and reported lies are par for the course. Written by Adam Black Cover Design by Tom Maven

"I started thinking that Grant was right, that we all came from too much money. Not enough to spare us any hardship, but enough to take the edge off. We were never going to really fail or really succeed. Everything was going to be blunted by a buffer of money. There would always be money. We were never going to be destitute or struggling or starving. We would have to break entirely from our parents and their money to get anywhere near an experience that was not lessened by the knowledge that we would always be protected, looked out for, and kept from anything unpleasant or dirty. It was not life at all but something else, something lived walking six inches off the ground. I had never dropped anything that could not be replaced or transgressed in a way that couldn't be corrected." - from THE DISTINCTION OF THE MATURE AND THE HORROR OF THE NAIVE A pair of teenagers live their own version of Hemingway's fiesta in Pamplona; a group of college students spends the weekend at a hotel for a friend's wedding; a young bartender at a Mexican resort flirts with a pretty tourist: the characters in the seven stories that make up Fowler's collection - his "youth in limbo" - share youth, but they also share a palpable uncertainty, a wavering and fragile becoming made all the more perilous by their awareness of it. They are characters on the brink: they are preparing to sacrifice their infinite possible futures for the singular lives they will live. While the anxiety of this phase of life is often forgotten in time, when memory has made the course of one's life seem inevitable, in Fowler's hands it becomes vividly palpable once more: these are characters staring down an impending tragedy, one made all the worse by its intangibility, by their uncertainty about it, by their inability to articulate its character, by the older world's indifference to it. It is a tragedy Fowler captures with due restraint, subtlety, art, and compassion. Written by Ellison Fowler Cover Design by Tom Maven

"Will you write about us, too?" she said after a while. "Will you write about how happy we were when we stood here together?" "I'll try to," I said. "It's a hard thing to write about. Nobody wants to read about two people who are happy. People like stories much better where everyone is unhappy and nothing works out." - from Hephaestus Thomas Tull's vivid debut chronicles a romantic relationship from beginning to end. James and Katherine meet in college, date, get married, honeymoon, grow old. The life they lived on the world's center stage - as the young and promising married couple - fades into unremarkable middle age. James' work doesn't interest him, and he drinks too much; Katherine lives a life separate but contained within their shared life. Hephaestus is a stark, poetic, and unflinching look at the slow and unprotested ebbing of youth and all of its promise. Written by Thomas Tull Cover design by Tom Maven

"Perhaps when I die, whether by assassin's bullet or by some natural end, I will float free of my body and come into the blessed light of eternal repose beside my Maker. But in my heart I do not believe it to be so: I know that in truth the world is only like a house afire, a frantic and terminal farce from which no doorway leads and of which no record remains." from I AWOKE IN A HOUSE AFIRE Orphaned at age five, when his anarchist parents are executed for treason, Rousseau travels through life buffeted by chance. Along the way he is deified and damned, imprisoned and exalted, welcomed and exiled. Through these trials he comes to believe that the world is like a house afire: a terminal farce into which everyone is born and of which everyone must make some reckoning while the walls collapse around him. In the tradition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Kafka's America comes a novel that is at once a window onto our own world and a funhouse mirror reflection of it, a portrait and a caricature, at once profoundly funny and deeply unsettling. Written by Orhan Miloshe Cover design by Tom Maven

"Yes, sentimentality: that phenomenon by which the emotional need of the viewer takes precedent over the reality of the object; sentimentality: the excessive and inappropriate infusion of meaning, the incorrect alignment of form and content; sentimentality: a child's perception, the stain of immaturity, sister to stereotype, father of prejudice, the soul of dramatic irony! What happiness: to surrender the child's frantic and broad assertions about the world for the nuance and subtlety of true understanding! What joy: to abandon these delusions, to marry form with content, to live without sentimentality!" - from The Sentimentalist The author begins by offering a definition: sentimentality, he says, is "the excessive and inappropriate infusion of meaning, the incorrect alignment of form and content." Viewed in this way, sentimentality is an existential quagmire: how is one to know the "true" significance of others' words, gestures, and actions? How is one to know the "true" significance of one's own? Through the stories that follow the author stays close-cropped to this dilemma, highlighting the misunderstandings that occur between boyfriends and girlfriends, lovers, peers, colleagues, parents and children, and exploring the ways in which these fundamental misunderstandings can be rooted in or result in fundamental misunderstandings about ourselves. Written by Stavros Stavros Cover design by Tom Maven

"The call, arising from the Royal throat of the reclining King, possessed of a great bellow from his Royal lungs, propelled by his Royal vocal chords, passed his Royal lips with such fury as to fill the august and stately bedchamber, traverse the threshold into the hall without and escape, through the open-air congress, even into the central courtyard, where it echoed momentarily among the gilded domes topping the castle's many towers, and disturbed as it did the many birds nesting there and startled the many guards on duty, before it rose, finally, into the blue and cloudless and insensate heavens. 'Bring me the head of Hazaiah the Terrible!'" - from Hazaiah's Head A mad king calls for the head of a landed vassal in this novel from the author of I Awoke in a House Afire. The reward offered is so great that nearly every capable man in the kingdom sets off to win it. But their journey is fraught with misadventure, while political infighting, disease, and ambitious enemies threaten the kingdom in their absence. Far from a period drama, Miloshe's second novel rises to the level of metaphor, and for all of its violence and horror remains a sympathetic look at a race of animals gesturing at control while stumbling around in ignorance. Written by Orhan Miloshe Cover design by Tom Maven

"She considered her life: each aspect rested on another, was undercut by its arbitrary predecessor in a deconstructive chain leading back to the blank canvas, to defenseless impulse and unjustifiable whim. She felt seduced by despair, felt a void opening before her; what was this void? The apparition of suicide, the specter of her own death? No, it was the nothingness stretching forever beneath the seemingly concrete aspects of her existence, the eternal blank canvas upon which she had enacted her life (and to which she would eventually return)..." - from The Sirens The interconnected lives and trials of five characters - an Artist, a Seeker, a Seductress, a Dreamer, and an Academic - comprise a novel within this novel, while their author's struggle to achieve his lofty artistic vision forms the framing drama in this unconventional and experimental story of ambition, inspiration, and obsession. The novel's unnamed narrator has failed: the promise of his youth has been spent and ruined, and he fears that he will never achieve the great work of which he - and others - imagined him capable. It is only through a chance encounter with a strange and beautiful woman - a woman who seems to know more about him and his troubles than she should - that he feels himself newly inspired, capable of the ambitious work he once envisioned. But who is this muse, and towards what is she leading him? And what will he discover, when the quest for true expression lures him ever deeper into his own scarred and fractured mind? Written by Stavros Stavros Cover design by Tom Maven

"This is a novel about friendship, about infidelity, about emotional ignorance and animal malice, enacted within the framework of re-appropriated Greek mythology. It's a novel about ingratitude and imposition, about bad behavior and heavy drinking. In the end it's about not seeing it coming when you should have seen it coming, because after all, it's your fault." - Auric Adams Elliot Poulain is a crime scene reporter. He's also foul-mouthed, drunk, and caustic. Arthur Cannason is young, charming, and well-off. The friendship the two form is fast and unlikely, fueled on drunken late nights and Elliot's genial envy. When Elliot is offered the use of a colleague's lake house for the summer he invites the newly-divorced Arthur to come stay with him, to relax and get out of the city. Up at the lake they meet a beautiful woman, the wife of a renowned artist. Together the three spend the summer drinking, swimming, boating, and playing tennis. Elliot is happy, but happy isn't what Elliot is used to. Also, Arthur and the artist's wife seem to be spending more and more time alone. Auric Adams' debut is a moving and insightful story about how the hardest prisons to escape are the familiar ones we keep making for ourselves. Written by Auric Adams Cover design by Tom Maven