These Books Will Change Your Life - Notes from No Man's Land by the Eula Biss and Bad Feminist by the Roxane Gay.

In a year that has been just stupid with essay collections, Once I Was Cool by the Megan Stielstra to name just one of the many acclaimed collections this year, we have read all kinds, including not just the Stielstras, but I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac by the Jamie Iredell and Slouching Towards Bethlehem by the Joan Didion. And yet with all this essay goodness in the air, we still must pause to note how truly accomplished Notes from No Man's Land by the Eula Biss and Bad Feminist by the Roxane Gay truly are in this suddenly crowded, and highly electric, genre. We could add, that celebrating two authors that seem to be everywhere right now is not so original or daring, but nor should their insane success overshadow what they are in fact actually doing.

In essence both are writing personal essays, that are not on the whole especially fraught with criticism, though both are doing that as well. Nor are these pieces specifically academic, though their works are constructed as such. Instead, what they are both doing is taking the personal and making it political, providing commentary on race, gender, class, violence, and the America as a grand experiment in democracy and equality. And it is in this that both are doing something not just wholly unique, but something the rest of us ideally could strive for: using the personal as a filter for seeking an understanding greater than our own lives, and examining that which makes the world around us tick. The policies and structures that control the world we exist in, and the motivations, simple, sophisticated, and unseemly, that drive them. They are arguably two of our great public intellectuals, and at their greatest moments, which are many, they challenge us to change lives, both ours, and those around us.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode Eighty-Nine - Stories About Kissing, starring the Leesa Cross-Smith.

So insanely Cross-Smith we are. And so podcast. Smitten too, yo. Not to mention the Every Kiss A War, Whiskey Paper, Louisville, marriage, Roxane Gay, and kissing. Always. Can't get away from that. So do hit it, now, yes, nice. It just might change your life.

We are Flavorwire Independent Presses. And fine company we are.

Well, technically we are shout-out, and Artistically Declined is Flavorwire, but the company is most definitely fine, and we are most proud of the Artistically Declined.

New joint. Running Late. [PANK].

Big thanks to Roxanne Gay and the whole [PANK] crew for running with this. Excerpt maybe? Word.

"You are running late, always running late to pick up the older one at daycare, and it is five dollars for every minute passed 6:00pm. Which is already late enough as it is, but there you are again, trying to do one last thing in the office, missing a train, sitting on a train, stopping to buy the kid a snack at the scary bodega on Division, and running through the rain to not be late.

Because you are so close, the watch reading, 5:55, then 5:56, suddenly 5:58, but you are at the door now, buzzing and bursting in, where it is so quiet that it’s not clear to you whether any children are still there at all.

Then you see them, a group of kids and the teacher, the young guy, all of them fresh-faced and sweaty, sitting in a big group, leaning forward and intently looking at something.

You slow down, you try to catch your breath, and you tell yourself that it’s okay, everything will be okay. 

You walk up to see what everyone is looking at.

It is your kid."

These Books Will Change Your Life, Part I - AYITI by Roxane Gay and Temporary Yes by Kat Dixon.

Travel. Read. Beach. Lie in bed. Read. And on and on. Here we have two joints from Artistically Declined, the short story collection AYITI from Roxane Gay and the poetry collection Temporary Yes from Kat Dixon. As always there is a desire to seek out threads and how these collections hang together given their shared publisher, and yes, one we too have worked with, and continue to work with. Here at least, there is youth, relationships, and the potentially fleeting nature of life, love, and even crises, both big and small, all of which we believe is true and real and our experience of reading these works. But this is also where the similarities end, or said differently maybe, this overarching reading of these works is the spring board for two collections that ultimately go off in disparate directions.

AYITI is comprised of a swirling series of stories about characters who live in Haiti, have left Haiti, or are desperately trying to get out of Haiti, all of whom, and regardless of the state they are in, are trying to make sense of relationship to Haiti, its past and what it still might become. The stories are also about violence, and beauty, conflict, and not just what men need to do, think they need to, or feel entitled to do, or how crippling male pride can be, especially in a place where men have no place and no way to make their way, but in this case, what all of this means for the women in their lives, and how they must adapt, what they must give, and what is constantly taken from them.In terms of the fleeting, what AYITI reflects, is that even what appears to be fleeting, and what seems to be a momentary, lingers, and carries over throughout your life, something Gay captures as beautifully as anything in this quite jaggedly vibrant collection. In contrast, Dixon writes about what it means to be in the middle, or even the start, of the fleeting, to be young, in love, and trying to figure out and discern what it all means. She writes of the small things that every relationship is comprised of, and how imbued with meaning every touch, every step, and every angle can be. What these characters don't know is what these moments will mean later, how they will carry and linger throughout their life. They can't of course, which is what is so wonderful about youth in the first place. It is all new. Who knows what is to come. And who cares.

Other People. The Roxane Gay. Hit that. It? Something.

Here.

AYITI. Is pre-order.

Quite excited about this we are. AYITI the debut story collection by Roxane Gay is pre-order at the Artistically Declined. We think it just might change your life. We also suspect that you might know that we might think that.

Ayiti. Roxane Gay. Artistically Declined. Pre-order fever. Catch it. Now.

Tremendously pre-order. And tremendously unfathomable to us that we haven't mentioned this until now. It's madness frankly and we will be talking to the marketing team here at headquarters post-haste. Very post in fact. And very haste.