edward j rathke

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• ISBN 9781590213698
• 242 Pages •6 x 9"
• $15.00
Surreal Imaginings, Harrowing Hauntings, and Beautiful Masterpieces
05/20/2013
I first discovered Christopher Barzak a few months before I moved to Korea. A friend of mine mentioned his book The Love We Share Without Knowing which is, among other things, about expatriation in Japan. While Japan is certainly not Korea, I thought it might be nice to get a glimpse at what I was…
• Book: Before and Afterlives
• Author: Christopher Barzak
• Publisher: Lethe Press
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9780312180782
• 400 Pages •5.5 x 8.5"
• $19.99
As Beautiful as it is Dangerous
01/30/2013
This book is a weapon: heavy and dense and as beautiful as it is dangerous. Of all the books I’ve read in my life, this is the one that seems to have no analogue, to exist in its own frame of reference, a maelstrom of language, sex, violence, and transcendence. Every sentence is a dance…
• Book: Dead Trilogy (Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things)
• Author: Richard Calder
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9780578112596
• 123 Pages •5.8 x 8.2"
• $12.00
It Whispered the Life of this Strange Little Town
01/14/2013
I don’t know what I expected from Lindsay Stern’s novella, Town of Shadows, but it wasn’t what I got. Waiting for my car to be fixed, sitting in the dealership’s plastic chair with all the other strange folk who drive cars that don’t properly work, I flicked on my Kindle and decided I’d read a…
• Book: Town of Shadows
• Author: Lindsay Stern
• Publisher: Scrambler Books
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN TBD
• 240 Pages •10 x 10"
• $14.99
The Way I Sleep Is Sporadically and Often Desperately
12/10/2012
If you were to see my bed or even my bedroom, it might be hard to think someone sleeps there. Books, paper — so much paper just somehow everywhere — clothes, letters, those envelopes and boxes people mail books in, Gameboy Advance games — only Pokémon, really—a toothbrush, pens, used up batteries, and all kinds…
• Book: The Way We Sleep
• Author: C. James Bye Jessa Bye
• Publisher: Curbside Splendor
• Genre: Anthology
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• ISBN 9780374229764
• 1152 Pages •6.5 x 9.5"
• $25.00
Relationships that Push You On; Prose that Carries You
10/07/2012
How does one encapsulate Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas? Where does one even begin with this nearly 1,200 page monster? I wonder, even, if it makes sense to recommend it, as many will probably hate it. Hate it, even, for all the reasons I love it and can’t stop thinking about it. Starting at the…
• Book: Parallel Stories
• Author: Péter Nádas
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Genre: Fiction
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• 168 Pages •4.25 x 6.75"
• $2.95
A Beautiful, Off-Kilter Viewpoint
08/18/2012
“The horizon is a miasma of dream. Ghosts float through its skin and beckon me with snake-like arms. Wipe my eyes.” There are few imaginations like Craig Wallwork’s. There’s a magic in his eyes, a beautiful off-kilter viewpoint that causes the world to turn in different directions, highlighting the bizarre and the caustic and the…
• Book: Quintessence of Dust
• Author: Craig Wallwork
• Publisher: Kuboa Press
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9780982631836
• 145 Pages •5.5 x 8.5"
• $16.95
Us brothers, we knew what it meant to be better than dead.
07/04/2012
But us brothers, we knew what it meant to be better than dead. We knew that when things die they sometimes just then begin to live. It is moments like this within Peter Markus’s We Make Mud that make you read and reread sentences over and over. So simple and so understated, but, in many…
• Book: We Make Mud
• Author: Peter Markus
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9780984739929
• 100 Pages •5.5 " x 8.5 "
• $14.00
Creating Negative Space, Showing Us the Ways We Fail, the Ways We Lose Our Humanity
06/27/2012
I’ve known Caleb Ross for a few years and his writing’s always visceral — both grotesque and erudite — and As a Machine & Parts is no different. A man, inexplicably, begins to transform, and his transformation is almost Kafka-esque. But, more than his transformation into a machine — certainly the most obvious part of…
• Book: As a Machine & Parts
• Author: Caleb J. Ross
• Publisher: Aqueous Books
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9781936873036
• 186 Pages •5.5 x 8.5"
• $15.95
This is a powerful collection with language that surprises and characters that fascinate.
12/22/2011
“I had him once to hold. I have a stone to hold. From this day forward. We go forward, we watch the road, we listen for the hills. I listen to the stone: there is no singing. Once there was singing; we were singing. We were kneeling and we sang the words we knew. There…
• Book: A Tendency to Be Gone
• Author: Pamela Ryder
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN ISB-What?
• 24 Pages •5.5 x 8"
• $5.00
and i hope it rains forever
11/14/2011
A phrase without context, one I’ve written a thousand times and will write thousands more, in every language I know, backwards, forwards, inside out. It’s been in me for years and I’ve chased after it, even built a novel around it just so I could see it, feel it, be it. But it’s still here,…
• Book: Wolves
• Author: Becky Cloonan
• Publisher: Self-published and proud of it!
• Genre: Graphic Novel
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• ISBN 9780393956238
• 704 Pages •5.1 x 8.4"
• $14.19
"If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever."
09/11/2011
I believe I was sixteen when I read Crime and Punishment for the first [four] time[s]. I held the book in my hands, all too many pages of it, wholly unaware that it’d shape everything that came after. It’s a book that scares and intimidates me now because maybe my whole life will be turned over again. Afraid…
• Book: Crime and Punishment
• Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9780060936235
• 510 Pages •5.2 x 8"
• $15.99
An Elegy for China
09/02/2011
This is not an easy novel to pin down, as it strives to push the boundaries of what constitutes a novel. Part memoir, part metafiction, part travelogue, part ethnographic exploration, part political, part ecological and environmental, part history of the Cultural Revolution, part the realities of post-Mao China, part folklore, part poetry, part mythology, part nightmares and dreams, part songs…
• Book: Soul Mountain
• Author: Gao Xingjian
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9781573661461
• 216 Pages •6.3 x 8.5"
• $17.50
"I remember you."
09/01/2011
I picked up Ledfeather again and opened to that page before it starts where all it says is, “I remember you,” and I was hooked all over again, for the third time, never the last time, and the next thing I knew, the sun was rising and my heart was breaking, but in a good way, the way that…
• Book: Ledfeather
• Author: Stephen Graham Jones
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9780982015186
• 208 Pages •5.5 x 7.5"
• $16.00
"a rare sort of book"
08/31/2011
Perplexing and mystifying, frenetic and endlessly engaging, The Orange Eats Creeps is a rare sort of book, the kind that’s hard to compare. Many see the influence of Burroughs, which is fair, I think, because she takes that cut-up technique and pushes it as far as it can go, to awesome effect. It has that same kind of wild…
• Book: The Orange Eats Creeps
• Author: Grace Krilanovich
• Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
• Genre: Fiction
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• ISBN 9781573660402
• 493 Pages •5.5 x 8.3"
• $14.95
The Most Perfect Thing I've Ever Read
08/30/2011
This novel is a puzzle or maybe a labyrinth as much as it is a scrapbook of the dead. I had always dreamt of a book that can be read in any order, and this is that book. I’d recommend reading it from beginning to end, but I’m certain it can be read in any order, by simply…
• Book: The Book of Lazarus
• Author: Richard Grossman
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Genre: Fiction, Poetry