Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before by Brandon Getz

New year, new book: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before is twelve tales of the weird, including a previously unpublished story and novelette, by the author of Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.

100% true & accurate blurbs:

“By turns enigmatic, funny, and terrifying, Brandon Getz has crafted a daring, expansive debut collection. For lovers of realism, satire, speculative fiction, and psychological horror, the genre-bending Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before has something for everyone.”

– Taylor Grieshober, author of Off Days

“Brandon Getz is to magical realism what the electric guitar is to music – a thunderous narrative force, transforming folk tales into power ballads and reenergizing stock characters. Lyrical and improvisatory, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before showcases Getz’s many literary rhythms. These stories are grungy. They’re lo-fi. And you’ll want to listen straight to the end.”

-Robert Isenberg, author of Curse of the Qattara

“Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before hopscotches around your psyche with stories to fit every mood. From laugh-aloud funny to utterly heartbreaking, this is a fantastic collection that never lets up.”

-Gwendolyn Kiste, author of Reluctant Immortals

“Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before is twelve tales of visitation, hauntings by demons and decaying code, house spirits and homunculi. Brandon Getz has written a beautiful book of magic and loss.”

-Samuel Ligon, author of Miller Cane: A True & Exact History

“Getz’s M.O. is to take genre forms and then mercilessly humanize them until they start to feel like Chekhov. A++”

-Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

Reviews too! So far, so good, will update as more appear.

“In these 12 stories, Getz fully embraces characters who are desperate, strange, and often have absolutely no idea what to do next. In this way he creates a collection that is deeply weird but also strikingly human.”

–BuzzFeed

“This collection finds the heartbreak inside the preposterous. … All the stories in Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before are a treat.”

–The Big Smoke

Online, it’s currently available from Bookshop, Indiebound, Powell’s, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, & wherever else (ebook versions too, if you’re into that). They all say Large Print but it’s a lie, unless 12 pt. counts (it doesn’t). If you’re in Pittsburgh, White Whale Bookstore should have more signed copies shortly. Interested booksellers & librarians can order copies from Ingram.

Happy 2022 & happy reading!

3/26 White Whale Bookstore Presents: The Mold Farmer launch & reading w/ Claypool, Cotman, Isenberg, & McCloskey

7 PM EST FRIDAY, MARCH 26…

Come celebrate The Mold Farmer, the latest from Rick Claypool, who’ll be reading with Elwin Cotman, Daniel McCloskey, and Robert Isenberg!

All these writers’ books are available on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events. Check out our curated lists and picks on our main Bookshop.org affiliate page, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book’s ISBN usually works best.)

Please register for this event by snagging a ticket on Eventbrite! There are both free tickets and pay-what-you-can tickets available. Registration will end at 6:30pm ET on 3/26.

 

Think you’ve got a bad job? Take consolation that you’re not scraping mold for a living, that you don’t have any tentacles in your head, and that you’re not sewing tents from the discarded skins of the creatures who’ve taken your world over. A wonderfully odd novella with a profoundly human core.

-Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World and The Warren

At its best, Rick Claypool’s work makes the disturbing and surreal feel believable. The true horror in this book isn’t the alien overlords, but the alarmingly relatable journey of a man navigating a world he will never understand, willing to stoop ever lower just to get by.

-Daniel McCloskey, author of Cloud Town and A Film About Billy

Claypool’s post-apocalyptic novella draws readers into a world that’s compellingly surreal, darkly imaginative, and just not… quite right.

-Premee Mohamed, author of A Broken Darkness and Beneath the Rising

A character struggling between the twin horrors of alien invasion and economic degradation, I found Rick Claypool’s Mold Farmer a voice that held me in its grip. Full-on body horror merges with the most human of concerns – family, and how to protect it – to produce a fascinating, frightening tale.

-Aliya Whiteley, author of The Loosening Skin and The Beauty

REVIEWS

https://babou691.com/2021/01/18/the-mold-farmer/

https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2020/12/30/dec20-wwr/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55905048-the-mold-farmer

https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-mold-farmer-by-rick-claypool/

http://vol1brooklyn.com/2021/02/18/the-horrors-of-work-a-review-of-rick-claypools-the-mold-farmer/

READERS

Rick Claypool is the author of Leech Girl Lives (Spaceboy Books, 2017) and The Mold Farmer (Six Gallery Press, 2020). His short fiction appears here and there online and has been anthologized in Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, 2018) and The Future Will Be Written by Robots (Spaceboy Books, 2020). By day he works for Public Citizen researching corporate crime. He spent most of his life in Western Pennsylvania and now lives in Rhode Island, where he goes looking in the woods for fungi as frequently as he can.

Elwin Cotman is a storyteller from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of three collections of speculative short stories: The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010), Hard Times Blues (Six Gallery Press, 2013), and Dance on Saturday (Small Beer Press, 2020), a 2021 Philip K. Dick Award finalist. His work has appeared in Grist, Weird Fiction Review, Black Gate, The Southwestern Review, and Cabinet des Fées, among others. He was a core member of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers’ Cooperative in Pittsburgh, has toured across North America doing readings, and has curated many readings and reading series. Cotman holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Mills College.

Robert Isenberg is a freelance writer, playwright, photographer, stage performer, and documentary filmmaker. His books include The Archipelago: A Balkan Passage (Autumn House Press, 2010), Wander (Six Gallery Press, 2011), The Green Season (The Tico Times Publications, 2015), and three entries in the ongoing Adventures of Elizabeth Crowne series: The Mysterious Tongue of Dr. Vermillion (Backpack Media, 2015), The Woman in the Sky (2020), and Curse of the Qattara (2020). He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, where he served as Whitford Fellow. Originally from Vermont, he lived in Pittsburgh for 16 years. For two years he lived in Costa Rica, where he served as a staff writer for The Tico Times. He freelances widely and teaches for numerous institutions, including Arizona State University. Isenberg now lives in Rhode Island, where he is a contributing editor for Providence Monthly.

Daniel McCloskey founded the Cyberpunk Apocalypse, a writers’ project which housed 45 writers from across the US and Canada and hosted hundreds of literary events. He is the author and illustrator of the prose/graphic novel hybrid A Film About Billy (Six Gallery Press, 2012), the comics Top of the Line (soon to appear in graphic novel form as Made Monsters) and Free Money, and the graphic novel Cloud Town (Abrams ComicArts, forthcoming). His work has been anthologized in BOTTOMS UP! True Tales of Hitting Rock-Bottom (Birdcage Bottom Books, 2017) and published on The Nib.

Toad Suck Review reviews Of Tire & Anonymity by Che Elias

A straightforward review that makes sense of the work in question:

I gumshoed the room
Che Elias built recently
Of Tire & Anonymity

In the center, like a shower drain,
stood a stone and mortar well
A damp bucket hung from a frayed rope
Ghosts moaned from below

Light began to rain through the ceiling
The floor beneath me was a parade
of chalk outlines
One looked like me then, but not like me now

The ghosts below began to scream
Light poured, and water flowed
under the door to prism it
The chalk bodies washed away,
save a few prism-aimed,

laser-pointed ghost wombs

The water was soon pouring
When the flood breached the lip of the well
Ghost wombs gave birth to bones, and

The room became a whirlpool
I clung to the well’s wooden posts
Skeletons swam passed, diving
toward the screams

that wouldn’t drown

When the bones dissolved into the darkness,
the screaming ended
I imagined boney-breaststrokers
swimming into wailing apparitions
Then lying back down in a parade of graves

The water finally receded, and I shook like a dog
I left the room and found
my yellow crime scene tape
I even slapped
an “Enter at Your Own Peril” sign on the door

for my colleagues

-JJ McNiece

The New Yinzer & Poems for Jerry

The New Yinzer is back with a new issue, featuring contributions by Six Gallery scribblers Jason Baldinger, Angele Ellis, John Grochalski, Chuck Kinder, Scott Silsbe, & Don Wentworth. Check it all out here.

Also, a new anthological tribute to Gerald Stern, edited by Caliban Books’ John Schulman, just dropped.

Stern will be in town NEXT TUESDAY as part of the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures Series. Shit is FREE but you are supposed to register.

“Imagination Motel: Fiction writer Chuck kinder goes rogue with poetry” by Leslie Anne Mcilroy

“Imagination Motel: Pomes With Many Bags of Buttered Popcorn and Big Pepsis” is a large book, a dense book, a prose writer’s poetry. It is also a movie, a black-and-white Western, a campy Tarzan, Invasion of the …. It is music and the visceral landscape of neon, soundtracks, blue screens, radio waves and Frida Kahlo — cheap motels, weed, bars, sex, guns, cars. It is the small-den glow of the TV — projection.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

Odds & Ends, Winter 2015

So far, 2015 has brought some very nice articles about/by Six Gallery scribblers:

A Film About Billy reviewed & Dan McCloskey interviewed by Rachel Mennies for PANK Magazine.

Jonathan Moody interviewed by Melody Nixon for The Common.

Elwin Cotman writes about (sometimes inadvertently) writing about Pittsburgh for Grist.

Ally Malinenko has been doing a lot of excellent blogging lately; this post also links to three recently-published poems.

These folks are all working on fantastic-sounding new projects, by the way. If you’re not familiar with them, check out their previous work!

The Lower Forty-Eight CP review & Menesini performance video

The Lower Forty-Eight was reviewed in this week’s City Paper! & here’s a fun video of John Menesini performing at last month’s Karl Hendricks benefit.

Tikkun reviews To Die Next to You

Emily Warn says some nice things about the Kamenetz-Hafftka collab To Die Next To You in the latest Tikkun.

Kamenetz and Hafftka’s collaboration feels markedly different to me than other poetry-visual art projects, perhaps, in part, because Hafftka’s work is a direct response to Kamenetz’s poems, a way of working that is anathema to many poets and painters who team up but only want their art to relate obliquely. Kamenetz’s poems and Hafftka’s drawings, on the other hand, play off one another, not as sequential, competing riffs in jazz do, but as cello chords, reverberating and diminishing into settled or unsettling silence.

Read the whole thing here.

Poet Hound reviews Ally Malinenko’s The Wanting Bone

Poet Hound dug The Wanting Bone! Check out the review & three of Ally’s poems here.

The Rumpus reviews Hard Times Blues

Starbursts of talent! Devastating satire! Hang on, clichéd bloodbath? That bloodbath was expertly drawn!

Read all about it.

10/24 To Die Next to You in NYC & SWOM#6 @ Biddle’s Escape

TONIGHT at 8PM at Columbia University 501 Schermerhorn,

Join Rodger Kamenetz and Michael Hafftka to celebrate the publication of To Die Next To You, a book of poems and drawings from Six Gallery Press. Readings, music, slides and a dialogue between poet and artist are all part of the mix.

Here are some nice things Liel Leibovitz said about the book in Tablet Magazine.

ALSO TONIGHT at 7PM at Biddle’s Escape in Pittsburgh: