Bøger udgivet af TOLSUN BOOKS

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Music. WOLVES is a mixtape of allegorical memoir, what Jeffrey Boosie Bolden called literary raps from his time chasing dreams in Gulfport, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is an African-American fantasy, a deeper look into the people America calls thugs. Hip hop guides the rhythms of the prose and leaves its music within the reader long after the pages have been turned. Time and place are the rails upon which Jeffery Bolden's work runs. Non-sequential but beautifully linked through lyricism, WOLVES guides its readers steadily by a third rail of joy and pain, a latitude people and moments sprawling over the page yet held tight with an MC's mind. A mixtape of memoir, this collection of tracks speaks to and for those who have scraped through the rough margins of 21st century America, scraped through building a sense of self in new places time and time again, and scraped their way to self-realization. Hip-hop in heart, flow, and delivery, WOLVES is a great book.--Cameron Barnett In WOLVES, Jeffrey Bolden creates an atmosphere you can touch. Track by track, this hybrid work grabs the reader like plugging into a tape deck. His characters are both golden-celebrity and everyday-grit, their voices penetrating the imagination like a sound wave. Bolden writes through music: hip-hop legends whisper throughout his lyricism. Shoulder to shoulder, they stand like giants. Yet, it is Bolden who echoes, reshaping the literary landscape. This is a book of dreams and redemption, of black love and vulnerability. Bolden interrogates the mirror of the self, of what it means to be a black man in America who dreams with his pen and ink.--Brittany Hailer

Fiction. The surface of FLUORIDE is inhabited by bizarre misanthropes, fumbling humans, and radical subversives, but in its basement live characters that only want something just out of reach: popularity, the perfect family, a full head of hair, restitution, a glimpse into the future to cope with the present. Chad Meadows' engaging debut collection brims in absurd and hilarious situations that are deeply sad and sympathetic. His dystopic, ultra-capitalistic worlds don't seem so far off from our own, and his protagonists--yearning for connection with a father, lover, friend, or the past--can be found in any of us. This is a book that will remind you that even the strangest of us is human, and our world is crumbling around us. In his wonderful debut collection, FLUORIDE, Chad Meadows gives us worlds inhabited by bizarre misanthropes, fumbling idiots, and radical subversives. These stories dramatize enough absurd and hilarious situations to last a lifetime. At the same time, these seem like people we know in their yearning for direction and connection. Indeed, this book reminds us that even the strangest among us is human.--Jeffery Renard Allen When I first saw Chad Meadows' FLUORIDE I thought, 'What a cute way to spell Florida--sounds French!' But don't fret, friends--this book has zilch to do with that Hell Hole, and everything to do with Good Times. If it's a 'Doom Loop' you want, well, take a knee, because this bad mamma jamma has four of them. Kicked out of your community college explosives course? Class is in session, Poindexter, courtesy of 'How To Make A Bomb.' In summary, Chad's merchandise contains 275 pages. Do the math!--Thomas Mundt The stories in FLUORIDE are zany, dark tales of celebrity worship, internet addiction, and wild metaphysical quests. This is the land of the absurd, populated by baffled seekers and adventurers full of vision and persistence. Chad Meadows is a hilarious, maverick writer.--René Steinke

New poetry from award-winning translator, Jake Levine!The Imagined Country is a core collection of poems written between 2010 and 2021. Split into three sections, the books draws a cognitive and imaginary map between the past and the future. The first section writes in response to the historical loss and trauma of Jewish memory in Lithuania. The second section with the carnivalesque shock of monster kitsch and hyper-capitalism in Seoul. And the final section is about darkly navigating the path of reconciling these competing influences into a singular existence. "The first thing I love about Jake Levine's poems is their memorability. His phrases enter the mind and make themselves very much at home, you want to quote them, they keep coming back on the tongue. The second thing is the fact that Jake Levine is a master of tone: there is so much tension between the lines because emotions are in conflict, and even if everything is quiet, we are told it is a quiet no one can imagine / and sometimes I lop both my ears off. There is no end to hilarity, and yet there is so much quiet that comes after the belly-full laugh. The third thing I love is Jake Levine's imagery. I mean, how can you not be impressed by the eye that sees days like books made of ice melting down the shelves--but this is not just skill for the skill's sake. There is a deep need for artfulness here, for metaphorical texture; the poet, for all his beautiful bravado (surely, Jake Levine would agree with Frank O'Hara's notion that a lyric poet rides on the nerve alone) is mining unanswerable questions, searching for meaning of our being here at all. My evidence? It is right here in the fierce river that splits your country / I swim inside the ribcage / of the invented self, diagramming / the memory of a field I call home. That, friends is a metaphysics. And Jake Levine, via images, tone, and music, those blessed tools of poetic craft, makes it memorable."--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicPolitics, Korea, International, Race Relations