Bøger udgivet af Tough Poets Press

Though virtually unknown today, Maxwell "Bogie" Bodenheim (1892- 1954) was considered one of the Jazz Age's most controversial and scandalous writers. Bughouse Dope is an extensive collection of his essays and articles written for publications ranging from tabloids to respected literary journals such as The Little Review, Poetry Magazine, and The Chicago Literary Times. Also included are several previously unpublished pieces left in the possession of his first wife which had been sitting in a cardboard box in her closet and passed down to her second husband after her death.Bughouse Dope presents the writer's often radical views on literature, the arts, and social issues. "Poets, Poets Everywhere & Hardly a Line to Read," "Should Sex Dominate Modern Literature?," "The Relation of Economics to Poetry," and "Psychoanalysis and American Fiction" are just four of the 130 wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and often humorous pieces in this collection, carefully compiled and edited by leading Bodenheim scholar Paul Maher Jr. Poet Allen Ginsberg wrote that Bodenheim was "just too beat," and novelist William S. Burroughs described him as "somehow lost, and I don't know why." Bodenheim was the prototypical Beat writer and Bughouse Dope is an excellent introduction for contemporary readers to this uncompromising, unconventional writer.

Twenty years in the making, Michael Brodsky's opus, Invidicum, is a sprawling satirical novel about an experimental drug for "Envy Disease" and those involved in its clinical trials: participants, drug developers, psychiatrists, technicians, hangers-on, advertisers, etc. Brodsky states, "I think this book is my 'richest.' It did start out . . . propelled by a preposterous desire to write something more accessible-to achieve a breakthrough."

New edition of the 1965 debut novel by Turkish-American author Erje Ayden (1936-2013). "Mr. Ayden's book is, essentially, the story of the disintegration of an alcoholic. Disintegration, Trouble, Doom, Bad Things-another story about unrelieved disaster seems like a crashing bore. Who needs it? But let me quickly assure you that this book is anything but that. Although Mr. Ayden has a sad tale to tell, the writing, or the telling, is just about as alive and surprising as anything you have probably read in quite a while." - Seymour Krim

On April 24, 1966, Pookie and Paul Sweetmeat, rock idols of America's youth, mysteriously disappeared from their hotel room in New York City. G. F. Gravenson's The Sweetmeat Saga is the documented account of subsequent events."The Sweetmeat Saga, An Epic Story of the Sixties deserves to be left in a time capsule because it beautifully describes the decade without drifting into maudlin nostalgia. . . . The best thing about The Sweetmeat Saga is the way it's told. Instead of ordinary sentences and paragraphs, Gravenson has dropped standard literary form altogether and used snippets of conversation, plot, and commercials to create an intricate aural collage; like the Firesign Theatre on paper, or maybe more like constantly flipping the TV dial and trying to piece together a story from seemingly unrelated fragments. . . . The Sweetmeat Saga might be hard to find because it was first published in 1971 and has since gone out of print. But just wait and read it when you get the chance. It has its flaws, but these are far outweighed by its plate-juggling literary technique and its har-dee-har type humor." - The Cincinnati Enquirer, April 7, 1973

Novelist Donald Newlove (1928-2021) contemplates how alcoholism has affected the lives and work of other writers, as well as himself.". . . a passionate blend: part autobiography, part confessional, part sketches of famous alcoholic writers and part sermon on the dangers of 'Drunkspeare' . . . its bird song and purling ravishment, bliss of self-love. . . . Like improvisational jazz . . . the Newlove sound is robust and swinging, the mark of a man who has discovered that his talent is intoxication enough." - R.Z. Sheppard, Time"Newlove's memoir makes The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson seem like a dull college weekend. It is, quite simply, terrifying, a tale to chill the blood of anyone who's ever hoisted a drink in a bar. It is a book with both literary merit and social value of the most redeeming sort imaginable."- Judson Hand, New York Daily News"Those Drinking Days ought to be read. It is an astonishing, moving memoir."- Joel Oppenheimer, New York Times

First published in 1992, Wendy Walker's The Secret Service takes place in an alternative 19th century. A young king sits on the English throne and is about to take a bride. His Majesty's Secret Service has learned of a plot against the royal couple: three nobles from the Continent, all passionate connoisseurs of the arts, are ready to release their dastardly attack in an effort to topple the current dynasty. The agents of the Secret Service, apprised of the threat, have formulated a technology that enables them to masquerade as objects-the objects most desired by the connoisseurs-in order to spy upon them undetected. Thus Polly, the protagonist, is sent abroad as a crystal goblet, while her two male colleagues perform their missions as a rose bush and a bronze statue of Thisbe. Once on the mainland, they discover, to their great peril, the full scope of the villains' designs.

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award.Early Stories, the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow).Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high! We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters? Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice- to our great and continuing pleasure.

Nine recently discovered unpublished short serio-comedies from the 1960s and 1970s by essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, humorist, and surrealist Marvin Cohen, one of America's most innovative postmodern writers.

"Johnny Stanton's Mangled Hands is such an oddity that it confounds description or comparison. . . . [It] is so unusual and original that many readers with a serious interest in fiction will find it liberating." - Bob Halliday, The Washington PostExcerpt from the back cover of the original 1985 Sun & Moon Press edition:: "For years, Manged Hands was passed among New York poets and fiction writers in manuscript form, and its author, Johnny Stanton, developed an underground reputation as one of the most gifted writers of the generation directly influenced by the New York Poets. . . . Mangled Hands stands between Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in style and spirit."

Maxwell Bodenheim's 1934 novel Slow Vision depicts a young couple, a pair of average Americans swept up in labor struggles and reduced to painful subsistence, portraying the protagonists' gradual understanding of labor unions and the psychological, philosophical, and political trials that led to sympathetic affiliations in Socialism and Communism. Thus initiates their "slow vision," a simmering understanding of the manifestations of Leftist movements and of special relevance to the climate of the first two decades of the 21st century.Bodenheim's books-thirteen novels and nine volumes of verse-are mostly out of print. Some were resurrected in the late-1940s through the mid-1950s as cheap pulp paperbacks after Bodenheim had lost the rights to his own work. Slow Vision was not one of them. Presumably, nobody wanted to be reminded of the Great Depression. Slow Vision would be Bodenheim's last published novel and literary history has forgotten it.

Six humorous plays written between 1952 and 1968 by Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), two of which have never before been published.

SPEAKING IN AN EMPTY ROOM collects 72 years of letters by author John Sanford (1904-2003), a PEN/Faulkner Award recipient and LA Times Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

According to author Kirby Doyle (1932-2003), Happiness Bastard, his only published novel, was "written on a sojourn that my lover post-wife and I took to New York in 1959-1960." Similar to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the novel was composed on a single scroll formed from taped-together sheets of paper. The novel was submitted to, and rejected by, several publishers before it was finally released in 1968 by Essex House in North Hollywood, California.Poet Michael McClure described the original manuscript of Happiness Bastard as "the most grotesque and hilarious novel I'd ever seen." Charles Bukowski called the novel "good stuff." In the only known review of the novel (Los Angeles Free Press, Sept. 6, 1968), Lawrence Lipton, author of The Holy Barbarians, the classic 1959 study of the Beats, wrote: "The most important innovative breakthrough in wordcraft since Howl, Naked Lunch, The Free-Lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed, Informed Sources by Willard Bain and Mailer's Why Are We In Vietnam? . . . Read Happiness Bastard by Kirby Doyle. Then, if you still don't know where it's at, the hell with you."

A vicious, and often quite funny, satire of Southern California's bohemian community in the 1920s by Jewish-American novelist Myron Brinig (1896-1991). Illustrated by Lynd Ward (1905-1985)

Debut collection of "neo-Beat" poems and prose poems by L.A.-based writer and filmmaker Vanessa Matic

PLAYS ON WORDS collects for the first time six of Marvin Cohen's humorous and occasionally surreal plays written in the early 1980s, five never before published.

New edition of noted American prose poet Russell Edson's 1951 debut collection of poems and short stories

New edition of Gil Orlovitz's neglected and long out of print experimental opus, Milkbottle H, originally published in 1967 by Calder & Boyars.

New edition of J.S. Scott's 1924 English translation of Children of the Age (original title: Børn av Tiden) by Knut Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

The Water Wheel recounts both the real and imagined-real adventures of one John B. Sanford in New York and London over a short period in 1927. The novel is completely dominated by Sanford, a self-assumed individualist-and self-styled "lawclerk, sinner, ex-convict, adolescent, grandson and legatee of a Litvak matchvendor."

Expanded 30th-anniversary edition of Patricia Eakins's critically acclaimed collection of short stories, "a modern bestiary which reworks the stuff of mythologies, spanning the cultures of the planet."

Donald Newlove's The Wolf Who Swallowed the Sun is an enthralling and unorthodox dark fable, full of intrigue and comedy, and with a healthy dose of romance and sex. Written in 1998 but never before published, the novel is a sweeping saga of one family's greed, extortion, and double-crossing as they strive to acquire a controlling interest in the world's wealth. It is also the story of Billy Baxter, heir to this massive fortune who, with the help of a married couple of Chinese-Swiss Jungian psychologists (one of whom he has fallen in love with), seeks atonement for his family's sins. As an added twist that only a first-rate storyteller like Newlove could credibly pull off, Baxter also happens to be descendent from an ancient clan of humanoid wolves on the brink of extinction.

Originally published in 1944, Alan Kapelner's first novel, Lonely Boy Blues, is an intense (though not totally humorless) story of a dysfunctional family living in Brooklyn during World War 2. Written in a style that captures the rhythms of jazz and bebop, it is a precursor to the Beat novels of the 1950s.

First-ever resissue of GULPING'S RECITAL, the humorous, somewhat absurd, and somewhat surreal first novel by Russell Edson (1929-2014), "the godfather of the prose poem in America."