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Baby Geisha
by Trinie Dalton
$16, ISBN 978-0-9832471-0-4, 162 pages
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"Half ingenuous and half wily, winningly hard to pin down. The result is a kind of everyday
fantastic. Dalton nails the Walserian trick of evincing a sincerity nearly indistinguishable
from irony. The effect is a poised instability, more uncanny than the magic the stories sometimes
describe."
-Bookforum
Baby Geisha is a collection of thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel
to the Greek Isles.
True to Dalton’s form, the stories in Baby Geisha are distinctly imagined while also representing a
more grounded approach in the author’s style. There’s the Joan Didion-obsessed starving journalist of 'Pura Vida,'
struggling to maintain a relationship with her performance artist sisters (or anyone, for that matter), on assignment
in Costa Rica to write an article on sloth-hugging. 'Millennium Chill' is about a woman who discovers that her body heat
is mysteriously linked to that of an elderly beggar.
Baby Geisha serves to underline Dalton’s reputation as a remarkable stylist and original artist.
Trinie Dalton has authored and/or edited five books.
Wide Eyed, Sweet Tomb, and A Unicorn Is Born are works of fiction. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your
Name Is and Mythtym are art compilations. She writes articles and reviews about books, art, and music,
somewhat collected on sweettomb.com.
Additional Reviews
"[The stories] feel like brilliant sexual fairy tales on drugs. Dalton writes of self-discovery and sex with a knowing humility
and humor."
-Interview Magazine
"'Pura Vida,' about an emotionally unavailable journalist on assignment to cover a sloth clinic in Costa Rica, is a standout,
its final moment between woman and sloth arriving with breathtaking lightness, like the first flower of spring. Other memorable
outings include trips to the Missouri Ozarks ("Wet Look"), the Alps ("Shrub of Emotion"), and the Painted Desert ("Baby Geisha"),
with men and women on the verge of, but never quite reaching, psycho-sexual breakthroughs."
-Los Angeles Magazine Critic's Pick
"Though Dalton writes in the minimalist vein, alongside the likes of Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus,
and Gary Lutz, her peculiar fascinations give her a singular voice. A pleasurable trip."
-Publishers Weekly
"Trinie Dalton’s Baby Geisha is a travelogue. Her stories speak volumes of lostness about a world full of riveting
features and no map. Things just kind of dead-end in a macho way that feels like porn that didn’t happen – the dirty scene
I mean. Trinie’s writing absolutely unfeminine work. Which feels unique to me. In her hands, gender, like a new kind
of western, is just moving across a landscape, the salutary effect of which is that it requires that Trinie write this
beautiful stuff of which I can’t get enough. Like a desert, her work refuses to give us
even a drop more, is full of strange animals, is enduring and glittery."
-Eileen Myles
"Trinie Dalton's collection, Baby Geisha, is seductive and exciting, the stories told by voices that might be talking
inside your head, except their language is entirely unexpected and dazzling. Every sentence winds up in an unexpected
place, peopled by "space virgins...on orgiastic planets" and "cousins smelling like salami." Both fantastic and very
real, Dalton's stories are surprising universes, ringing evidence of her terrific talent."
-Lynne Tillman
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Damascus
by Joshua Mohr
$16, ISBN 978-0-9826848-9-4, 208 pages
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* Shelf Unbound Magazine's Best Books of 2011.
"Damascus succeeds in conveying a big-hearted vision."
-Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
It’s 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco’s
Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.
Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar’s proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time,
agrees to host the joint’s first (and only) art show by Sylvia Suture, an ambitious young artist who longs to take her
act to the dramatic precipice of the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.
An incredibly creative and fully-rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There’s No Eyebrows, a cancer patient
who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead-singer who
acts too much like a lead-singer; and Owen, donning his Santa costume to mask the most unfortunate birthmark imaginable.
Joshua Mohr is the author of
Some Things That Meant the World to Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus (forthcoming October 2010).
He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing.
Additional Reviews
"With a remarkably subtle hand, Mohr leads the reader through a minefield of explosive topics:
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, living with cancer and dealing with addiction. Damascus
transcends all that and is nothing less than a primer on how to love those incapable of loving
themselves."
-San Diego CityBeat
"[An] assured new novel. As gritty and sordid as its details are, Damascus has a soft, sentimental heart."
-The Columbus Dispatch
"Mohr's writing in Damascus works winningly... Some of the humorous touches may remind readers of the prose of Bukowski, but
where he would have shined the spotlight on their drunken stupor, Mohr reveals a more thoughtful, existential consideration of who
these people are. If his work continues in this vein, we may one day instead see Bukowski being compared with Mohr."
-Shelf Awareness
"[Mohr] is the new millennium street poet of San Francisco's Mission District."
-3:AM Magazine
"Mohr continues his impressive trajectory of artistic integrity with an ambitious story of self-pity and redemption, the Iraq war, cancer,
addiction and the purpose of art. At once gripping, lucid and fierce, Damascus is the mature effort of an artist devoted to personal
growth and as such contains the glints of real gold."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"There is no greater achievement than being able to locate the sacred in the profane, to raise the light out of the dark, to find the sage
in the alcoholic. As Mohr makes sense of our illogical drunken ramblings, he also finds the human element in characters most often overlooked.
Mohr's got an inherent ability to spin a yarn; it's as if he's standing over your shoulder lighting each page with a match as you read.
Damascus is a scrapbook of all the things from our lives we worried would get lost in the wind."
-The Rumpus
"We'll tell you what [Joshua Mohr] did accomplish [with Damascus]: the feat of bringing a pathetic dying man, an alcoholic semi-prostitute,
and a naive performance artist to full literary life while at once intelligently exploring various viewpoints on the war in Iraq. Oh,
do we dig this book."
-Shelf Unbound
"Rife with themes of humanity, passion, and determined resilience... this accomplished effort
demonstrates Mohr's rich, resonant prose, authentically rendered settings, and deft characterization."
-Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review)
"Reading like a cross between Harry Crews and Armistead Maupin, [Damascus]
has a wacky authenticity and demonstrates the preciousness of life. For immediate consumption
by fans of gritty reality; an outstanding achievement."
-Library Journal (*Starred Review)
"Moving, bitterly charming, sometimes depressing, but always engaging."
-HTML Giant
"What elevates Damascus from the mire of its fatalism is its immense compassion."
-Zyzzyva
"Quite a feat. Mohr treats his characters with such tenderness that he managed to squeeze the blood
of empathy from this turnip I call a heart."
-LitReactor
"A better understanding of our sweetly seedy city we could not ask for."
-SF Weekly
"The extraordinary low road characters that make up the saloon world of Damascus rush straight at the reader right
from the opening bell. In this startling and original work, Joshua Mohr explores the dark side of the human condition
with compassion, humor and dangerous precision."
-Rudolph Wurlitzer
"Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Behind his wayward
and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist."
-Jonathan Evison
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Seven Days in Rio
by Francis Levy
$16, ISBN 978-0-9826848-7-0, 146 pages
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"The funniest American novel since Sam Lipsyte's The Ask."
-Village Voice
Kenny Cantor, always dapper in his seersucker suit from the Brooks Brothers 1818 collection, is a CPA, amateur
psychoanalyst, and sex-tourist vacationing in Rio when he gets waylaid at a psychoanalytic conference.
What ensues is a provocative journey that merges sex and psychoanalysis through Rio’s tawdry netherworld of
Sontag-quoting denizens as only an incendiary voice like Francis Levy could imagine.
Francis Levy's short stories, criticism, humor,
and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star,
The Quarterly, Penthouse, among others. He is co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination,
is a third degree black belt, and blogs at TheScreamingPope.com.
Additional Reviews
"Levy delivers a visceral blend of hilarious satire and study in human sexuality, taking us on
a deviant tour of Rio."
-Royal Young, Interview Magazine
"It's like an erotic version of Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
Levy is matter-of-fact in his raunchiness, which is try-and-suppress-your-laughter-because-people
-are-beginning-to-stare-at-you funny. The man is fearless in his exploration of human sexuality."
-Joshua Chaplinsky, The Cult
"A ribald chronicle of [a] 60-something Manhattan accountant, who's come to Rio de Janeiro as a sex tourist. [A] fever dream of a novel."
-New York Times Book Review
"Francis Levy's sex-tourist hero is sucked into a psychoanalytic convention during his Seven Days in Rio."
-Vanity Fair
"Twisted brilliance... Levy is a hilarious satirist, who launches the book with a thunderclap and maintains its
galloping pace throughout."
-The Collagist
"A hilarious and absurdist romp that turns the cultural fascination with sex on its head. This riotous look inside the mind
of a sexually preoccupied, ambitious American male is as intellectually provocative as it is ridiculous."
-Publishers Weekly
"An impressive satirical comedy that tackles themes of sex and psychoanalysis and had me laughing aloud
from the first page to the last."
-Largehearted Boy
"This ironic and absurdist highbrow little sex novel is a hoot. . . . Mr. Levy’s humor is dryer than Monty Python’s but
no less funny, and he combines high and low culture in a particularly appealing way."
-David Cooper, New York Journal of Books
"An incredibly elaborate and well-crafted satire... Levy is wicked smart, has a very strong voice, and is clearly out to poke his Literary knife into our precious little feelings."
-Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Seven Days in Rio is the best buy of the decade; it’s worth a full course of psychoanalytic therapy of
whatever persuasion. Reading this book will have the added benefit of curing you of psychoanalysis itself, not
just the neuroses psychoanlysis guns for. In other words, by reading Levy you get seven days in Rio living like an
exiled great duchess in excellent health and rolling in dough. Additionally, you also get the pleasure of schadenfreude
because you realize that for the price of a book you get what people spent fortunes for in the past. If Levy ever
gets retroactive, he could take the cash from all the business Freud’s spanned and distribute it to you, readers.
You’d all be rich. And smarter. Oh yeah, and he’s hilarious."
-Andrei Codrescu
"Seven Days in Rio is a brilliant comic novel. I marveled throughout at the energy, enthusiasm, and innocence of the
protagonist in his quest for multiple hookers. This is a great gift, to be able to combine so seamlessly a character's
intellectual curiosity with his compulsive horniness, and is especially warming in the cold climate of political correctness.
I hope this book receives all the notice it deserves."
-Robert Brustein
