"Like getting a totally sweet hand job from someone with an MFA." The New York Stories is Clash "10 Best Books of 2015" list. And in ridiculously fine company at that.

Really fine. And most appreciated. So please do check it out. Excerpt? Always.

"Harkens back to the golden age of dirty realism, where Carver and A.M. Holmes and Gaitskill and Tobias Wolff were all your tightest bros. Tanzer’s the best, man." 

This Book Will Change Your Life - F250 by the Bud Smith. And Tables Without Chairs #1 too.

Vacation. Beach. Drink. Read. Rinse. Repeat. In consuming F250 by the Bud Smith we are reminded of something we've written about here before - writers will write origin stories that might even feel like debut novels even if they're not. We all have the arc of one within us - our path, and our journey, how we got from some beginning point to some kind of redemption, or at least the next point in our lives - the next story, or journey. The challenge is telling the story anew, with fresh wrinkles, and observations that cause us to experience the origin story from a new perspective. And from this perspective Smith has accomplished both the new and the fresh. Yes, we have a young man both trying escape where he came from and find something new - a future, or an identity, some kind of closure or answers. In this case it's a young man from nowhere, with no true family, and little stability. But he has friends and music and the state of New Jersey - everything from refineries to mountains - and it is here where Smith makes the story his own. These are blue collar characters from a blue collar place. They build things - when they're not destroying them - and they dream, big, before they crash. They are outsiders, steps from New York City, but not there at all. They live in a parallel world where moving to big cities and things like going to college barely exist as options - they are certainly not assumed - until they do. And it is this outsiderness of the characters where Smith comes to life, because we so rarely see these characters on the page - something else we've written about here before, but that makes it no less true - and by extension we much too rarely get to read authors like Smith who exist outside of the world of AWP and MFA programs.

Still, between the drugs and the fights and the trucks, the characters are alive, and in that way Smith is reminiscent of his contemporary Brian Alan Ellis - who we've written about here before as well - and it is no surprise that the two of them have a split book titled Tables Without Chairs #1 dropping this coming week. Tables Without Chairs #1 is a platform for what both authors do so well - revel in characters who are scraping by, and like them, living both inside and outside the established literary world. It's also a reminder that there are a wealth of authors out there, writing, creating and telling stories, who are not waiting around to be found, but are certainly ripe for discovery. 

These Books Will Change Your Life - The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes by the David S. Atkinson and Something Good, Something Bad, Something Dirty by the Brian Alan Ellis.

Travel. Read. Florida. Read. Alabama. Blizzards. Hotels. Read. Shrimp and Grits. Gin & Tonics. Read. And both The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes by the David S. Atkinson and Something Good, Something Bad, Something Dirty by the Brian Alan Ellis. Both of which are blurbed by the Bud Smith. Both of which reference the Village Inn. And both of which arrived at the corporate headquarters within days, if not hours of one another, and are hence, and forever, intrinsically linked in our collective lit memory. Which raises the question of whether these books, and authors, have anything to do with one another, and if there is some connective tissue beyond a diner, a Smith, and a common destination? Or whether they are in fact part of some kind of movement. They are indy lit, but so are most books we read. They are male, but that's not saying much, we know a lot of those. They do relationships at once young, and tortured, and the people in those relationships talk a lot. Maybe something Mumblelitcoresque then? Is that even a thing? And if not can we coin it as such, or something just like it? Though regardless, is any of this even necessary? Maybe not in the greater hustle and flow of all things lit and movement, but it is to us.
 

And yet, these are very different productions as well. Ellis is all about grime. His words and pages are caked with it. Not that this grime can cover-up his characters rampant sense of failure, though more than failure it's their existence as those among the never was. They never were going to be anything, but what they are, coke-addled, diner smashing denizens of Ellis world, who endlessly talk shit to compensate for just how much suck there is in said world. Which isn't to say that Ellis doesn't draw a rich world full of colorful characters doing colorful things, because he does, and they are, and that as Ellis completists, we are quite enjoying watching his canon expand, and the rougher edges grow more honed with each outing, the words full of life, and dance. And there is the Atkinson, he of Bones Buried in the Dirt, easily one of out favorite reads in 2013, and now The Garden, which lo and behold, is an epically different reading experience entirely, hipster magic realism, full of satire and sadness. But then not so different either in that these are characters who only know loss, and live in bubbles, both self-made and thrust upon them, while seeing no real way out, something writ much larger and metaphorical certainly in The Garden. Which is to say that Atkinson has stretched here, pushing the sparse language and realism of Bones somewhere funnier and weirder, while still retaining his characters ability to hurt and be hurt by one another. All of which is to say that this may be what Atkinson and Ellis share after all, hurt, inescapable and real, with no real sense how to escape from it. Now does that make for a movement? Why not? We just need a name. Well, that and people reading the books themselves. So do hit it, them, because it, they, just might change your life.      

"A parenting book written for fathers raised on Star Wars and Homer Simpson, but implemented with Tanzer’s unique charm, warmth, and brilliance." Lost in Space. The Brian Alan Ellis. Thanks. Endless.

And endlessly at that. Excerpt? Word.

"Despite the fact that I don’t have kids of my own and that I grew up an only child without a dad, I somehow found Lost in Space, Ben Tanzer’s essay collection about (predominately) parenting, both relatable and humorously engaging, which is a true testament to the man’s talent."

These Books Will Change Your Life - King Shit, 33 Fragments of Sick-Sad Living, and The Mustache He's Always Wanted But Could Never Grow by the Brian Alan Ellis.

So we are travel and read and compulsion. We are also completist, which may have something to do with any author willing to pose in a bathtub, but may just as well have as much to do with availability and length of said books, and the ultimately unique slice sick-sad life said author aspires to capture and elevate into a literature all their own. Not that the collected works of Brian Alan Ellis - King Shit, 33 Fragments of Sick-Sad Living, and The Mustache He's Always Wanted But Could Never Grow - a novel, flash fictions, and a short story collection respectively, are wholly unique. There is a distinct Bukowski vibe to them, which cannot be ignored. But that is not intended as a criticism, it is instead an effort to create some context for work that speaks to a people that normally get so little attention: the blue collar, under-employed denizens who haunt grim, dead-end neighborhoods, bars, and couches, as they try to figure out how to get laid, fix there fucked-up relationships, find work, or care for their damaged family members, all of whom exist in some near dank netherworld, that so many of us scurry by on the way to somewhere else. But there is no scurry here, there is love and affection, because these are Ellis' people, and he cares about them, and whether as in King Shit, he is following them on a night long journey of drugs and violence going nowhere fast, albeit as humorously as possible; The Mustache He's Always Wanted But Could Never Grow, and its longing and fucked relationships, any and all of which, are also going nowhere fast; or 33 Fragments of Sick-Sad Living, and its protagonist's lonely, piecemeal, going nowhere fast life, Ellis knows these characters like few others writing right now, they deserve their stage, and they have been gifted with an able chronicler, who is sure to change your life, just as he has changed theirs.