SPD at the Guadalajara International Book Fair!

Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Arts, SPD was able to feature books from some sixty publishers at the 2009 Guadalajara International Book Fair, better known in Mexico as the Fil (Feria Internacional del Libro), the world’s second largest book fair and an impressive event in many ways. While the fair focuses on Spanish language books, each year the FIL celebrates a particular country or city from abroad. This year Los Angeles had that honor, and so along with a handful of other independent publishers (including The Getty, Children’s Book Press, Heyday, Red Hen, Tia Chucha and Cinco Puntos), SPD books (related in some way to LA) were the very first books most visitors saw upon entering the LA Pavilion, which also served as the main entrance to the entire expo. A magnificent presentation put on by the NEA and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs included a uniquely designed open bookstore space, under giant floating balloons upon which independent art films were projected, by a giant wall where an interactive display of LA writers’ names were projected, by a dazzling display of Chicano lowrider vehicles (compliments of Tia Chucha), and of course, groovy music and various lounge seating areas.

The FIL goes on for an astounding nine days, running on selected days from 9am straight through to 11pm. The focus is on literary titles and it serves both the trade (librarians, booksellers, agents) as well as the general public. In addition to innovative displays and a huge roster of readings and panel discussions, one strolling around the FIL can enjoy wandering mariachis, tequila and many other surprises. Many of the booths feature attractive young women striking enticing poses (apparently in Spanish they are known as edicones—“hostesses”—though we dubbed them “booth bunnies”). Despite the absence of booth bunnies in the LA pavilion, crowds perused our wares and showed considerable interested in these here rare English language literary offerings.

Live events throughout the day featured such Latin American literary luminaries as Carlos Fuentes and the poet José Emilio Pacheco, and such USA writers such as Ray Bradbury and Jane Smiley. I was able to enjoy several of these programs, despite my remedial Spanish, through live, simultaneous translation provided through free headsets. I particularly enjoyed when Pacheco (who was there for a 70th birthday tribute) was asked if he thought there was an audience for poetry. His response: “No, there is no audience for poetry, but there are readers.” Ray Bradbury, just on the cusp of 90 years old and now nearly blind, appeared through a video simulcast, with translators in both countries. A young writer asked for advice to those just starting out. His reply, as best as I can recall: “It’s simple. Do what you love and love what you do. If your friends don’t support you, call them up and tell them they’re fired! You must jump off the cliff and then your wings will grow.” These sessions were packed with readers, including many high school and college students. Nighttime at the FIL the exhibition halls fills to overflowing with readers buying books—quite a sight to see. Perhaps one day our own BEA (Book Expo America, North America’s largest trade show) will also welcome individual readers in this same way.

All of Guadalajara seems to participate in the FIL. Whereas those not working in publishing here would scarcely know what BEA even was, let alone if it were taking place in their own city, nearly anyone in Guadalajara knows about the FIL. All of the museums featured related exhibitions (in this case, shows on loan from the Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other California art institutions), the University of Guadalajara featured a series of LA noir films, and every night there were free or low-cost dance, theater and music performances, some large enough to fill circus tents. These culminated on the final Saturday night with a performance by Los Lobos (which I was able to enjoy from backstage, while snacking on los chips de Los Lobos and enjoying their generously offered tequila). But the FIL overall really is about books, and mostly literary books. The folks at the NEA, particularly Jon Peede, the Director of Literature there, worked tirelessly in maneuvering all of the red tape and complicated trade permissions necessary for us to feature our books. The NEA staff missed Thanksgiving with their families to arrive early and make sure all the books had arrived and were displayed correctly. They made it possible for us to showcase not only SPD books at a major international fair, but to have them in the absolute place of honor in the expo halls. It was a thrilling experience to have SPD titles featured in this way and to have so many readers from another country spend time with our books and purchase them. If you ever plan a trip to Guadalajara (and I strongly suggest you do!), be sure to go during the FIL.

—Jeffrey Lependorf, SPD Executive Director

SPD OPEN HOUSE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6!

SPD's FALL OPEN HOUSE & BUCK-A-BOOK SALE is Sunday, December 6 from 1-4PM. Free and open to all! Food! Non-alcoholic beverages! Paper Napkins!

• Celebrating New Lit Generation with our Poetry Trading Post: trade a poem or story, get a free book (it's crazy of us, yes, but that's how we do)
• Readings start at 2PM with Alan Bernheimer, Andrew Joron, Nicole Mauro, Lindsey Boldt, Annie Yu, and Robin Black
  
  
• 20-50% off all books! Hundreds of Buck-a-Book $1 books! Hundreds of jaw-droppingly spectacular Buck-a-Book $3 books! You will have to remain calm! You had best bring a friend!

If you have never been here, you will never know what we are talking about.

Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710

(Directions and BART QuickPlanner on the right sidebar →)

SPD Poetry Best-Sellers November 2009

1. THE LAST 4 THINGS by Kate Greenstreet (Ahsahta Press)
2. A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA by Graham Foust (Flood Editions)
3. FACE by Sherman Alexie (Hanging Loose Press)
4. INCIVILITIES by Barbara Claire Freeman (Counterpath Press)
5. PINK ELEPHANT by Rachel McKibbens (Cypher Books)
6. SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA AND OTHER POEMS by Amiri Baraka (House of Nehesi)
7. THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING by Sherman Alexie (Hanging Loose)
8. FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY by Craig Santos Perez (Tinfish Press)
9. SHOT by Christine Hume (Counterpath Press)
10. THERE'S THE HAND AND THERE'S THE ARID CHAIR by Tomaž Salamun (Counterpath Press)
11. DUST AND CONSCIENCE by Truong Tran (Apogee Press)
12. THE BOOK OF FRANK by CAConrad (Chax Press)
13. SOME KIND OF CHEESE ORGY by Linh Dinh (Chax Press)
14. TRAFFIC by Kenneth Goldsmith (Make Now Press)
15. COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS by Aram Saroyan (Ugly Duckling Presse)
16. THE DIFFICULT FARM by Heather Christle (Octopus Books)
17. WITH DEER by Aase Berg (translated by Johannes Göransson) (Black Ocean)
18. AREAS OF FOG by Joseph Massey (Shearsman Books)
19. THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU by Frank Stanford (Lost Roads Publishers)
20. ESCAPE FROM COMBRAY by Rick Snyder (Ugly Duckling Presse)
21. MY NEW JOB by Catherine Wagner (Fence Books)
22. THE ANCIENT BOOK OF HIP by D.W. Lichtenberg (Fourteen Hills Press)
23. TALK SHOWS by Mónica de la Torre (Switchback Books)
24. NIGHT SCENES by Lisa Jarnot (Flood Editions)
25. BREAKING POEMS by Suheir Hammad (Cypher Books)
26. POETICAL DICTIONARY (ABRIDGED) by Lohren Green (Atelos)
27. CLAMPDOWN by Jennifer Moxley (Flood Editions)
28. ELEANOR, ELEANOR, NOT YOUR REAL NAME by Kathryn Cowles (Bear Star Press)
29. EUNOIA by Christian Bök (Coach House Books)
30. THE FRONT by K. Silem Mohammad (Roof Books)

O Canada!

NEWSFLASH: Jim Bartley of the Toronto Globe picks Amphibian, by Carla Gunn from Coach House Books, and The Briss, by Michael Tregebov from New Star Books, as among the Top 5 first-fiction books of 2009:

AMPHIBIAN Carla Gunn $17.95 | paper | 220 pp. Coach House Books ISBN: 9781552452141 Fiction. In AMPHIBIAN, we meet nine-year-old Phineas William Walsh who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. He's obsessed with animals; it's practically all he talks about. He spends all his spare time watching the Green Channel and researching obscure facts on the internet or in books. And he's worried sick about what humans are doing to the planet and its other animals. So when his Grade 4 class gets a pet frog—a White's Tree Frog from Australia—it becomes the perfect focus for all Phin's worrying. Carla Gunn's work has been published in the Globe and Mail, the National Post and heard on CBC radio. Along with writing, she teaches psychology. This is her first novel.

THE BRISS Michael Tregebov $19 | paper | 240 pp. New Star Books ISBN: 9781554200436 Fiction. There is a Jewish proverb that goes: "Grandchildren are your reward from God for not having murdered your children." And so THE BRISS begins, with Sammy, the father of two grown children he would like to choke the life out of. His daughter Marilyn has just ended an affair that should have been kept a secret. In the meantime, his younger son, Teddy, who had left months ago on a ten-day Birthright Israel tour, got himself mixed up with gush shalom Israelis who introduced him to a diaspora Palestinian woman visiting her ailing grandmother in Ramallah. Teddy falls in love with her, and, well, knocks her up. Sammy, who fought in Israel in '48 but moved back home to Winnipeg years ago, a move he has regretted, is forced into an angry struggle with his son that reveals all their unresolved emotional conflicts. A wildly entertaining and poignant novel, THE BRISS explores, on a personal level, family relationships, and on a political level, the continuing debate about Jewish identity and its connection to Israel and Palestine.

CONGRATULATIONS TO 2009 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER KEITH WALDROP!

SADNESS AT LEAVING by Erje Ayden

SADNESS AT LEAVING: AN ESPIONAGE ROMANCE Erje Ayden $7 | paper | 256 pp. Semiotext(e) ISBN: 0936756578 Fiction. Friend of Frank O'Hara and "bodyguard" to Willem DeKooning, Turkish expatriate Erje Ayden was the house novelist of the New York School poets and painters during the early and mid-1960s. Ayden boasts of a background in espionage, so this genre-spy thriller could be a veiled autobiographical tale. Carl Halman, posted by East Germany in Manhattan as a "sleeping agent" during the cold war, must develop a cover identity as a writer. Committed to ending injustice, Carl sees his espionage activities as a personal contribution toward maintaining a global balance of power. But in New York, Carl begins to believe in his cover identity: editing a magazine, marrying the wife of the famous novelist Hubert Cleaver (a hilarious a clef portrait of Norman Mailer). He thinks that he can live this way forever...until suddenly, he's called. Writing after the book's first self-publication, O'Hara hails Ayden as pop art's answer to Camus. "Ayden," writes O'Hara, "is an alien wherever he goes, probing and disfiguring ordinary reality."

ALONE WITH THE MOON by Musa McKim

ALONE WITH THE MOON: SELECTED WRITINGS OF MUSA McKIM Musa Mckim $12 | paper | 159 pp. The Figures ISBN: 0935724672 Poetry. "There was an air of fragility and culnerability about Musa McKim that made her friends want to be fprotective of her. She did not disclose with what fierce and undeceived attentiveness she watched, from day to day, the human comedy, faithfully recording her bittersweet perceptions. Now with the posthumous publication of ALONG WITH THE MOON, she has given us her slant, quirky, and quizzical letter to the world."—Stanley Kunitz Musa McKim (1908-1992) was a poet and painter married to the Abstract Expressionist artist Philip Guston.

AIRLESS SPACES by Shulamith Firestone

AIRLESS SPACES Shulamith Firestone $8 | paper | 160 pp. Semiotext(e) ISBN: 1570270821 Fiction. Refusing a career as a professional feminist, Shulamith Firestone (author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution) found herself in an "airless space"—approximately since the publication of her first book THE DIALECTIC OF SEX. This is her collection of very short tales about losers in and out of (mostly mental) hospitals and the small crises which trigger their awareness that they're in trouble. These are deadpan, deadend stories, culminating in "Obits" and "Suicides I Have Known." "In the century I'm most familiar with, the 20th, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insider's tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there's no one left to shut the door."—Eileen Myles

THE ECSTACY OF COMMUNICATION by Jean Baudrillard

THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION Jean Baudrillard $7 | paper | 128 pp. Semiotext(e) ISBN: 0936756365 Cultural Writing. Criticism and Theory. First published in France in 1987 as L'Autre par lui-meme, THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION was Baudrillard's attempt to summarize his work for a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne, a degree he never received. But more than a summation of Baudrillard's work, ECSTASY is the most decisive, compact description of what it means to be wired, a perspective that is virtually impossible to recapture since advanced communications technologies have become totally normalized. "Our private sphere," he writes, "has ceased to be the stage where the drama of the subject at odds with his objects and with his image is played out: we no longer exist as playwrights or actors but as terminals of multiple networks ... Private telematics: each individual sees himself promoted to the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect sovereignity ... in perpetual orbital flight ...." ECSTASY is the swansong of 20th century alienation: a flashback to pre-techno amnesia by one of France's last living humanists.

PRINCESS FREAK by Nancy Agabian

PRINCESS FREAK Nancy Agabian $10 | paper | 121 pp. Beyond Baroque Books ISBN: 1892184079 Poetry. Fiction. Performance Texts. Gay and Lesbian Studies. PRINCESS FREAK is the first book by Nancy Agabian, a performance artist and writer who formed the performance art-punk-folk band Guitar Boy with Ann Perich in Los Angeles in 1998. PRINCESS FREAK documents the coming-of-age of a shy, funny, bisexual Armenian-American woman who flees the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts to tell the stories of her family. Agabian's paternal grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey in 1915, and much of the work in the book carries the impact of this devastating event. "She pays close attention to what most of us overlook—in her hands the ordinary explodes into beauty and complexity."—Holly Hughes

Attention Span 2009

Third Factory's Attention Span 2009 is up. A must-read.

BLUE VITRIOL by Alexei Parshchikov

BLUE VITRIOL Alexei Parshchikov $9.50 | paper | 57 pp. Avec Books ISBN: 9781880713020 Poetry. Translated from the Russian by John High, Michael Molnar and Michael Palmer, with Nina Gerkin, Julie Gesin, Katya Olmsted, Eugene Ostashevsky and Darlene Reddaway. Introduction by Marjorie Perloff. "Alexei Parshchikov is undoubtedly the most exciting young Russian poet today. Through this first English-language collection of his work, American readers get a glimpse of an imagination that soars freely and boldly through all times and places. Indeed, this book is the trace of a poetic road that, in Parshchikov's words, 'is the place for finding your way' while 'time's wind unwinds you and sets you against the flow.'"—Andrew Wachtel, Professor of Slavic Studies, Northwestern University "In an 1898 letter from St. Petersburg, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that it was Russian things that would give him the names for his most tender 'devoutnesses.' Now, almost 100 years later, it would seem that it is not Russian things but Russian names—the fullness of these poems, here beautifully translated for us—that embody those devoutnesses that prolong close observation and sustain contemplative complexity. Alexei Parshchikov's detailed lingering in the world he perceives has given us the fullness of these poems. Their publication in this, his first American book, is an important occasion."—Lyn Hejinian LINK

THE INCONVERTIBLE SKY by Ivan Zhdanov

THE INCONVERTIBLE SKY Ivan Zhdanov $8.95 | paper | 56 pp. Talisman House ISBN: 9781883689438 Poetry. Translated from the Russian by John High and Patrick Henry. Born in Siberia in 1948, Ivan Zhdanov emerged in the early 1980s as one of the leading Russian poets of his generation, admired by the traditionalists and the avant-garde alike. "I have never, under any circumstances, been directly engaged in politics," he said in a recent interview. "For me it was more important to discover the roots of the events that make up our lives, the life of our country, our society, and our history, in that order." Zhdanov's work has been honored by poets and critics around the world. According to Mikail Epstein, "Zhdanov is the master of depicting forms that seem already to have lost their substance but regain them in memory, in times of waiting, in the depth of a mirror or the shell of a shadow." LINK

JUST IN!

BABYFUCKER Urs Allemann $15 | paper | 136 pp. Les Figues Press ISBN: 9781934254165 Fiction. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by Peter Smith. A Beckettian character, who may or may not be trapped in a room with four baskets full of infants, focuses obsessively on a single sentence—"I fuck babies." This virtuoso text by Swiss experimental writer Urs Allemann won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Preis des Landes Kärnten in 1991 and caused one of the biggest literary scandals in the post-1945 German-speaking world. Translated now for the first time in a new bilingual edition with an introduction by translator Peter Smith and an afterword by Vanessa Place, BABYFUCKER belongs in the canon of twentieth-century provocations that includes Bataille's The Story of the Eye, Delany's Hogg, and Cooper's Frisk. For BABYFUCKER is, as Dennis Cooper says: "a stunning, exquisite, perfect, and difficult little benchmark of a novel that makes literature that predates it seem deprived." LINK

Cathy Wagner in the classic SPD pose. Cathy's new book, My New Job, is just out from Fence Books.