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New year, new book: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before is twelve tales of the weird, including a previously unpublished story and novelette, by the author of Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.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

7/28 A Hellbender Reading w/ Mark Spitzer, Lea Graham, & Co. @ EEBX

THURSDAY, JULY 28th…

Mark Spitzer has a new book out from Anaphora Literary Press about the wonderful hellbender, North America’s largest salamander!

Hear Mark read from his epic poem along with poet Lea Graham & local Six Gallery stalwarts Che Elias, Karen Lillis, John Thomas Menesini, & Don Wentworth… or risk the wrath of the hellbender!

UPDATE:

As animal names go, “hellbender” is a pretty good one. So if Mark Spitzer’s book-length poem about North America’s largest salamander (which can grow to more than 2 feet long) is titled Glurk! (Anaphora Literary Press) instead, it’s for reasons you’ll have to learn for yourself when the Arkansas-based author reads at East End Book Exchange. Tonight’s reading, backed by music made on the custom-made stringed instrument called The Electric Hellbender, also includes words from New York-based poet Lea Graham and local luminaries Che Elias, Karen Lillis, John Thomas Menesini and Don Wentworth. Bill O’Driscoll 7 p.m. 4754 Liberty Ave., Bloomfield. Free. 412-224-2847

Pittsburgh City Paper

10/28 Live Drawing in Big Sky Country

TOMORROW at 7PM, tune in here for this…

My live 24hour draw-o-thon was such a hit last year I decided to do live drawing events on my website as I travel the country.
My first drawing partner will be Olivia Everett, Creative Director of the Imagine Butte Recourse Center (IBRC) in Butte Montana. The IBRC is the organization hosting my month long residency in Butte. They’ll be opening this arts residency for application by the public very soon. TUNE IN and ask questions by tweeting me @cyberpunkdan

-Daniel McCloskey

Pura Via by Robert Isenberg

So, Isenberg is bicycling across Costa Rica & writing about it. He clued me in to this a couple weeks ago & sent a link to the first Tico Times article (of 11), but I’m just now catching up.

Aaand he’s done, as of 9/10.

A cool little series, & there are short videos for some of the articles. Also, you actually can click on the numbered circles on the map at the top to navigate, even though the cursor doesn’t change.

¡Que te diviertas!