Malarkey Summer

Books for/on sale

Over at malarkeybooks dot com we’re having a summer un-sale, with all our in-stock titles being for sale, even if they’re not all necessarily on sale. A subtle distinction. English is like that.

But for you, for you, dear email openers, they’re all on sale. You just need the secret code: MALARKEYSUMMER. That code will take 20% off your order. Another shopper’s tip: we have shipping set at a flat rate of $5. It’s $5 if you order one book; it’s $5 if you order five books, or ten.

Let’s go through the titles we have in stock, starting with preorders:

• King Ludd’s Rag, issues 18 and 19. This comes as a bundle (and is not, strictly speaking, even in stock, since we haven’t printed any copies yet, but we will be soon and it will ship next month). KLR is a labor of love. We never make any money on it; we rarely break even. But each issue features two short stories of at least four thousand words in length and for which the authors have been paid $100. We have also squeezed a couple poems (by Veronica Bennett) into No. 18. We were hoping on adding poetry on a regular basis but the money just isn’t there. In addition to Veronica’s poems, these issues, guest-edited by Suzy Eynon and Alan ten-Hoeve, respectively, feature new fiction from Daniel David Froid, Íde Hennessy, Mike Wilson, and J.M. Schmidt.

• The Grift. A PDF-only litmag designed to generate revenue for Malarkey Books. The authors waived payments. Authors like LJ Pemberton, Adrian Sobol, Tyler Dempsey, Craig Rodgers, Lauren Bolger, Donald Ryan, Justin Bryant, Roger Vaillaincourt, Ben Arzate, Eric Williams, Sheldon Birnie, and Mike Nagel, who provided a deleted scene from Duplex.

• The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories by Steve Gergley. Out next month; on sale for $15. A gun-toting conspiracy theorist breaks into a famous actor’s house to search for kidnapped children. An impulsive warehouse laborer drops a dangerous quantity of LSD in the middle of a daytime shift in an attempt to build a friendship with his aloof coworker. A lead actress falls in love with her ursine costar while shooting a new movie in Alaska. A guitarist in a local hardcore band finds herself caught up in a wild chase through a strip mall after her most prized possession is stolen in the middle of a show. And a millennial couple encounters naked cult members, a transatlantic highway, the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer, and microscopic people in their teeth, all while trying to navigate the ups and downs of their years-long relationship. In this collection of weird, dark, and moving short stories, these characters and others grapple with the strangeness and chaos of living in a world where anything is possible and nothing makes sense.

  "Steve Gergley's stories are funny, sinister, and disorientingly off-kilter. Taken as a whole, this book creates an immersive and haunting world of its own, a shadow that will follow you for long after you've finished the book." - Dan Chaon,  author of Among the Missing and Stay Awake.

• Hope and Wild Panic, stories by Sean Ennis. Another preorder. Will be signed by the author. We don’t have quite have the cover yet, but it’s by Angelo Maneage so we expect it to be killer. To be honest, we are running way behind on this and we don’t even have the jacket copy drafted. This is what happens when writers and editors have to work for a living and write and edit and promote their little books in between. A longer email, devoted specifically to Hope and Wild Panic, will come in the next few weeks. For now, please know that this book rules and Sean Ennis is a sublime master of the written word.

• First Aid for Choking Victims, stories by Matthew Zanoni Müller. Preorder. Will be signed by the author. First Aid for Choking Victims is a collection of mostly longer short stories set in rural areas around Western Massachusetts and the Hudson Valley of New York. These stories are interested in mapping how characters confront and react to deaths in their lives, awakenings to love and sexuality, their place in rural America, their own shortcomings as people, and their struggles with mental health. The collection has similarities in style and approach to Tessa Hadley’s psychological focus in Bad Dreams and Other Stories and Elizabeth Strout’s rural visions in her collection Anything is Possible.

• I Blame Myself But Also You and Other Stories by Spencer Fleury. Preorder. Will be signed by the author. The eleven stories in I Blame Myself But Also You (and other stories) are a little absurd, a little speculative, and a little dark. In them, Fleury repeatedly digs into a handful of universal themes: The search for that one existential totem we expect to fix everything, but that never quite does; the strange, unnerving liminal space between childhood and not-quite-adulthood; the endless struggle to find our place in the world, and the nagging fear that maybe we never will.

  “The stories in Fleury’s collection are strange, unsettling, yet so firmly anchored in place that we can hear, see, smell, and almost touch these remarkable settings. Each story feels utterly familiar but also slightly shifted; they’re sharp gems and I wanted to read twenty more of them.” —Amber Sparks

• Awful People, a novel by Scott Mitchel May. This one is not a preorder, but it will be signed by the author. Scott has a handful of books left that he can sign and send out, and then it will be out of stock, at least with us. It will still be available from Asterism, Amazon, Bookshop, and the others. I may revisit this another time, but you may have heard people say “But books directly from publishers.” Yes. This is good. There’s nowhere we sell books where we make anything close to what we do if we sell directly from our website. The catch is it costs money to have books to sell. So while it’s nice to have books on hand, because they’re fun to look at and we can fill orders, they also represent money we can’t spend on new covers or author payments, or our annual $255 website fee that just came out. So yes buy books directly from publishers! Anyway, more about Awful People, a Death of Print title: When a secret government agency called the Federal Paranormal/Psychological Investigation Bureau, whose soul purpose is to funnel money to defense contractors until the next war, accidentally discovers a telepath who can create undead rage-monsters from violent acts, they set out to recreate the circumstances which made it possible. Awful People follows a group of friends as they live out the moments that lead each one of them to being kidnapped and housed thirty stories underground forced to reconfront the craziest day of their lives ten years later. Dirty, real, absurd, funny, and horrific, Awful People is a reunion novel in a meat-grinder where likable people are harder to find than what it means to be a human today.

  “Awful people is a novel about history and addiction and unending pain and pasts that never go away and bombing during stand up and viral YouTube videos and secret government buildings in Madison, WI. This is a novel about all those things and a lot more and it’s really fucking good.” —Graham Irvin: Author of Liver Mush

• Gloria Patri, a novel by Austin Ross. Austin has a few copies left he can sign. Unless he gave them all to Tim Kaine, who said this about Austin: “A great writer. Get his novel!” I’m going to skip the jacket copy and blurbs and tell you what I think about this book: it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and it makes me sad it ended up with a shoestring-budget press like Malarkey, even though I loved working on it. In a just world it would have been published by a major publisher with a shit ton of money. I say this about most of our books. In a just world we would only be putting out weird stuff and Malarkey would be funded by my $250,000 book deal.

• Kill Radio, a novel by Lauren Bolger. Lauren has a few copies she can sign. We ordered some up for the one-year anniversary and I know there’s at least two or three copies still available. When Rachelle unearths her ex’s handmade crystal radio, violence and terror reign in the form of hellhounds, shadow figures, and finally, possessions. Enter smooth, dark-eyed James Carroway. He offers her protection she’s quick to accept despite her apprehensions. When James reveals he’s a warlock in search of the crystal radio that caused these supernatural events, Rachelle explains it belonged to her son’s estranged father, Chad. They realize it played a part in Chad’s possession. Their only option is to find Chad and learn about the origins of the radio before more of her family are killed. Or worse, taken. Rachelle has to risk losing the people she loves (again) to make it stop.

  “Lauren Bolger finds the right frequency for horror with her absolutely frightening novel KILL RADIO. Turn on, tune in and get ready to be terrified.” —Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters

• Sophomore Slump, poems by Leigh Chadwick. 5 copies left. "Leigh Chadwick is the rockstar of poets, who are already the rockstars of writers, who are otherwise pretty dull people. Sophomore Slump is a certified banger."  —Mike Nagel, author of Duplex

• Your Favorite Poet, poems by Leigh Chadwick. 12 copies left. The poems in this collection are about being alive and wanting to stay alive. They are poems teetering off a cliff. Poems created by the first and last feeling worth feeling. Poems about guns and sex and what follows both: daughters and husbands ducking from bullets. Leigh Chadwick weeps a collection that is both monstrous and intimate, terrifying and beautiful. With an eye for making the mundane extraordinary, Chadwick uses wit and charm to remind us that everything is bad, but we still have poetry. In this nightmare world, Your Favorite Poet is a dream.

• Un-ruined, a novel by Roger Vaillancourt. We have four or five on hand. This is one of my favorite books, and one that has flown under the radar. Get it. It’s magnificent.

  "Un-ruined by Roger Vaillancourt is a complex love story filled with tender subterfuge, and benevolent deception." -Bud Smith, author of Teenager and Double Bird

• Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky, a novel by Justin Bryant. We have two copies of this beautiful, enchanting novel on hand. The Big West: a largely unexplored region of Calem, Central America, where time and gravity obey different laws, where sloped lakes and mineral snow decorate the landscape, and where a grand resort hotel existing simultaneously in three different eras hides from the modern world. As satellites rain from the sky during a solar storm, Geoff has come here to fulfill a mission he once believed in, but increasingly suspects is pointless. Is it just a malarial fever dream, or are his dead parents really here? Who is the shark-human hybrid always waiting ahead in the shadows? What business does a mercenary known only as ‘the tall man’ have with him? And is there any way for him to find his way back home?

  “Readers who enter the world of Justin Bryant's Thunder From a Clear Blue Sky will find themselves in a setting at once familiar and elusive . . . . This is a journey worth taking.” —Tobias Carroll, author of Ex-Members and Reel

• Faith, a novel by Itoro Bassey. This book kick-started the Year of Malarkey back in 2022. We haven’t slowed down since. Faith is a coming-of-age tale about Arit Essien, a first-generation Nigerian-American woman born and raised in the U.S. who resettles in Nigeria. The novel is a meditation where four generations of women riff off ideas of faith, expectation, identity, and independence. It's a poignant conversation between the dead and the living, the past and the present, and a young woman grappling to find her place in it all.

• Fearless, a novel by Benjamin Warner. Christine Harmon is not afraid of anything. Dr. Blau wants to know why. He subjects her to a seemingly endless series of experiments, testing her reactions to spiders, rollercoasters, and being buried alive. Christine’s boyfriend, Carl, a professional archer turned party-entertainer, doesn’t care why. He subjects her to a seemingly endless series of increasingly dangerous party tricks. As the experiments and tricks grow weirder and more dangerous, Christine is forced to come to terms with her past, and the men in her life who both love her and do her harm.

  “A high-wattage thrilling comedic fantasy. A novel as FEARLESS as the title suggests in exploring the vast expanse of what it means to be courageous and vulnerable as we face the hazards of our own ambitions, insecurities, and our past. An absolute MUST read! It will hook you and never let you go.” —Melissa Rauch, Actor, Writer, & Producer

• Man in a Cage, a novel by Patrick Nevins. Gabon, 1892: American primatologist Richard Garner constructs a cage deep in West Africa's rainforest to learn the language of chimpanzees—a study he believes will prove Darwin's theory of evolution. His cage protects him from gorillas and leopards, but fails to shield him from his enemies in the French colony and the press. Stymied by dogmatic priests and lacking a phonograph to record the chimpanzees' speech, he doggedly pursues his study. Populated by bureaucrats, hunters, missionaries, and the indigenous peoples whose lands and lives they have intruded upon, Man in a Cage evokes life on the ground during the Scramble for Africa. 

  "Evoking rich historical details while telling a story that feels urgently contemporary, Patrick Nevins doesn't merely set Man in a Cage in the 1890's—he unflinchingly embodies the era in a way that will thrill anyone with a love for deeply immersive literature. By adopting the structure and vocal timbre of a Gilded Age novel with pitch perfection (at times it felt as though I was reading a lost manuscript from Frank Norris—or some other long-forgotten practitioner of American Naturalism) Nevins conjures a world of colonizers, profiteers, and missionaries—and the harm they've inflicted upon every living thing on this planet—proving the old adage history doesn't repeat itself, but it does indeed rhyme." —Jeff Chon, author of ​Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun

• White People on Vacation, a novel by Alex Miller. One copy on hand. Get it. This is one of the books that made me devote all my free time to Malarkey. We were going to publish one book in 2022, and I had already decided it would be Faith, but I also wanted it to be this book, and there were a few others I couldn’t say no to, and so here we are.

• Guess What’s Different, essays by Susan Triemert. Our only nonfiction title. Guess What’s Different is a collection of essays about the moments no one wants to talk about. Family history, family secrets. Anxiety, depression, and grief. With sharp prose and an open heart, Susan Triemert brings these moments back to life and makes you care about people you don’t know. Even when it hurts, she writes about her life and family with honesty and tenderness, from the pain and confusion of losing her parents, to the joy of finding her children through adoption. To Triemert, every moment matters. Memories fade and shape our narratives, and photographs should be scrutinized for any missing truths. It’s the writing that gets you though. Whether they’re sad or scary or sweet, Triemert’s style and precision turn these essays into stories that you really don’t want to end.

• Deliver Thy Pigs, a novel by Joey Hedger. It’s been a year since defiant vandal Marco Polo Woodridge lost his father in a gruesome factory accident at J. Lowell’s Meat Factory, the noxious Midwestern pork giant that employs the majority of Prairie Ridge, Illinois’s residents. Despite the smell of death in the air—both from the lingering memory of Charles Woodridge and the thousands of pigs slaughtered daily at J. Lowell’s—the people of Prairie Ridge live in a state of regretful acceptance of the company’s hold on the community. That is, until Marco Polo teams up with Susan and Margaret Banks, the mother-daughter duo committed to restoring Illinois’s native tree population and sticking it to the man all the while. Deliver Thy Pigs follows Marco Polo as he navigates an unwavering desire for revenge, his responsibility to the town, and his distaste for the self-pitying and overwhelmed J. Lowell’s manager, Dave Hughes. As Marco Polo, Susan, and Margaret exercise escalating acts of protest against the factory, the novel explores themes of community, loss, revenge, and connection to nature. With grit, humor, and Midwestern charm, Pigs examines what happens when you bite the hand that feeds, and what happens when that hand is the very one destroying you.

  “A timely and addictive antidote for our times, witty and sensory. A jaunt through grief and revenge I will not forget.” —William Burtch, co-author of W.G.

• Music Is Over, a novel by Ben Arzate. Between 2001 and 2013, the leader of the Japanese noise band The Gerogerigegege, Juntaro Yamanouchi, disappeared. Where did he go for over a decade? Perhaps he met a victim of the Slit-Mouth Woman and they took a night train to nowhere. Perhaps they stumbled on an industrial wasteland of a city filled with strange doctors, mysterious foreigners, psychotic policemen, and unfriendly residents. Perhaps they became caught between violent struggles they barely understood in their journey to go back home. One can only speculate. Malarkey Books is proud to present Music Is Over!, a surreal picaresque horror novel by Ben Arzate. It’s very weird, it’s totally bizarre, it’s kind of violent, and it’s weirdly touching. It’s all of these things but more than anything it’s just a cool book.

• It Came from the Swamp, edited by Joey R. Poole. Malarkey Books is proud to publish It Came From the Swamp, an anthology of short stories about the creatures that haunt our dreams and fuel our fantasies. Some of the creatures here, like the sasquatch if you ever find one, are flesh and blood animals. Others, like DG Bracey’s Boo Hag and Edward Karshner’s Appalachian golem, are the stuff of folklore, relics of a bygone era thriving on our fascination with the unknown. Though the subject might be the cryptids themselves, the real stars here are the human beings. The predatory privilege of the men in Jaq Evans’ “Flood Tide” is more monstrous than anything lurking in the shallows. Meagan Lucas’ Mishipeshu, the water panther of Anishinaabe lore, is blamed for the all-too-human sins of the past.

• The Life of the Party Is Harder to Find Until You’re the Last One Around, poems by Adrian Sobol. This was our first book of poetry, a remarkable feat by Adrian considering that our stance prior to this was to never, under any circumstances, publish a book of poetry. This book opened the door to us publishing books by Leigh Chadwick and Kat Giordano, as well as another one by Adrian Sobol, Hair Shirt, coming next year. Sorry we don’t have the preorder up.

• Book Club. Get books sent to you automatically. We make sure these are signed copies whenever possible as well.

• King Ludd’s Rag subscription. Gets you each new issue of KLR plus Hellarkey around Halloween.

• The Tip Jar. Maybe this is something we should promote more. If you like what we do and you’ve got a few extra bucks, feel free to send them our way. We’ve got authors and cover designers to pay, plus shipping and printing, website fees, etc., and we even paid a couple times this year for some editorial work, and since we decided not to count that against author royalties it makes it very difficult to recover those costs. Ultimately, Malarkey is a volunteer joint. I don’t make any money from it. In fact, I often end up putting money into it. When I pick up a freelance editing project I tend to kick most if not all of the money into Malarkey. (Hit me up if you need copy edits or interior book design.)

It is the time of year, because school is out and I need to get caught up, when we need to pay royalties to our authors. So every book sold now helps tremendously. Helps us cover costs, puts money in the paypal accounts of our writers. At the end of the day, we make books not to make money but because we love them; unfortunately, because I am a teacher and not an idle rich (which I should have been, it is the job I was born for) we have to sell books to keep making books. Let’s keep making books. Let’s make this a MALARKEYSUMMER!