An excerpt:

…the dominant sensibility of Thirteen Girls is one of mordant compassion. Its intense empathy for those who have suffered saves it from true-crime exploitation, but its unsentimental and sometimes even darkly humorous accounts of routine violence, enacted at all levels of society and invading every life, prevent it from becoming a self-righteous victimology. Brottman’s grimly pragmatic literary stance recalls such earlier artists of the quotidian macabre as Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor: Thirteen Girls is an impressive successor to their stories of American dread.

You can order Thirteen Girls through Nine-Banded Books directly here. Or you can order it through Amazon here. Please do.

Perfect binding, 6 x 9, 164 pp.
Release date: November 2012
Price: $14.95
U.S. shipping: FREE
International customers: click here

Underworld Amusements has released this compilation of “Essays and Aphorisms on Egoism,” edited by Kevin I. Slaughter. The writings collected here are from the contemporaries of Ragnar Redbeard, radical thinkers who went against the herd with all their might. They upheld themselves as Gods, all other concerns come after that. Blasphemous, mocking and visceral, they are the children of Nietzsche, Stirner and Thoreau. Though often overlapping with Anarchists, they are too individualistic for many so-called anarchists who are often just Socialist-minded egalitarian Utopians.

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We will begin taking advance orders for Tool. in early December.

An excerpt:

Most of us first experience death as a natural part of life—the loss of a grandparent or parent, the childhood death of a beloved pet. Murder is an act often experienced at a remove: as a news item, an entry in a crime blotter. Or it’s even more abstracted and smuggled inside of genre—in true crime’s fictional kin, the murder mystery or more extreme, horror. Slasher movies are merely excessively stylized murder stories with their own conventions. Murder’s extremity is easier to digest when it’s part of a larger narrative that includes some kind of resolution, dramatic or judicial.

This focus on true crime’s typical starting point—the disappearance, the discovery of the body, etc.—doesn’t allow room for the usual genre machinations that cushion the act. What’s left are the nonlinear and disjointed facts of killing, which gives Thirteen Girls’ stories a sometimes overwhelming weight.

The piece ends with a teaser about Mikita’s next book, a study of suicides at Baltimore’s historic Belvedere Hotel.

“Mikita Brottman takes terrifying risks but never puts a foot wrong. These stories begin with delicate precision and build stunning pace and power. This is fiction that is truer and more penetrating than the savage facts at its core.”

Click here to order a copy of Mikita Brottman’s Thirteen Girls through Nine-Banded Books. Click here to order a copy through Amazon.

Click here to read an excerpt from Katherine Dunn’s long-anticipated novel, Cut Man, which will be released “soon.”

In 1985, Peter Sotos was arrested. He was charged with obscenity for publishing a magazine and was later convicted for possession of child pornography. After his trial, he kept a low profile. He worked for a meat distribution company and struggled to pay down his legal bills. He underwent mandatory counseling. Then, in the late 1980s, he began writing a manuscript that, once published, would signal the mature arrival of one of the most disquieting and original voices in English literature. That manuscript was called Tool.

Opening with an excruciating set piece inspired by the crimes of Ian Brady, Tool unfolds through a sequence of vivid metafictional narratives that rain hard light on the blackest recesses of a Sadean abyss, limning a ferocious tableau vivant thronged with victims and whores and jaded cops, with grief-stricken mothers, writhing AIDS casualties, and abased gloryhole habitués. In one deeply resonant chapter, Sotos renders a coruscating account of his fateful arrest and interrogation.

Written in lean, exacting prose, Tool stands as a deftly structured, pornographically sifted psycho-literary inquest, a pneumatic masterpiece marked by preternatural acumen, stark verisimilitude, and implacable emotive gravity. Originally published by Jim Goad in the 1996 omnibus, Total Abuse, the text has since appeared in the Creation Books collection, Proxy. This is the first stand-alone edition. It is presented with a publisher’s introduction and a new closing essay by Peter Sotos.

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