Bøger udgivet af Verse Chorus Press

Lost Joy collects the writing that first brought Camden Joy wide attention in the mid-90s, when he wheatpasted his “manifestoes” around New York, excoriating the music industry and celebrating unsung geniuses of rock and roll. Joy’s voice—heartfelt, mocking, lyrical, razor-sharp—earned comparisons to the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Nick Hornby. Rooted in DIY zine culture, his rants prefigure the unfettered public expression of personal views that would explode with the rise of the Internet, and enact in words what Banksy would later achieve in art. Joy’s groundbreaking early fiction, in which his characters often invoke musicians and songs, is also included here. These haunting stories explore the many ways in which we use music to communicate our feelings and make sense of our memories.

Grizzled homicide detective Bernie "Burnout" Farrell heads the hunt for a serial killer who is murdering call girls around Times Square. Hoping to set up a stakeout, Farrell recruits tall, blonde, ambitious rookie cop Gladyss Chronou for the investigation. But Gladyss believes her mystical yoga practice can give her an intuitive edge in solving the crimes and sees mythological patterns in the suspects and events they're investigating. Bernie thinks she's nuts, but then, he's a little too grounded. In fact, he's on a steady downward spiral: his wife is divorcing him, his longtime partner just died of AIDS, and he's developed a nagging cough since working down at Ground Zero. "Gladyss of the Hunt" oscillates between chilly street realism and new age mysticism. As their investigation takes Bernie and Gladyss from arty society gatherings to shabby hotels and SROs, the narrative offers a suspenseful, often wittily satirical account of a city that is flashy and glamorous one moment, dark and violent the next.

"Mother Paul, the incomparable nun-detective, is faced with her most perplexing case yet when a former pupil of the convent school she oversees is murdered at their annual reunion"--

"Stacey Levine's fiction is unlike anything else. Peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition, Mice 1961 is terrific."-Kelly LinkStacey Levine's new novel recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessively observant housekeeper. Will Jody be able to cope if her younger sibling Mice, subject to constant harassment in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How will their all-watching companion convey her fierce attachment to them both? When they cross paths with an unsettling stranger at a neighborhood party, the three women are driven toward momentous changes. Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness.

These paired novellas show a master writer developing some of his most emotional, vital explorations of America yet. In "Some Phantom" an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship. She begins to explore the city and its inhabitants and takes a job teaching disturbed children, but she finds her own mental stability becoming more and more precarious. A marriage of "The Turn of the Screw" and Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom" poses questions about the line between memory and madness, fantasy and abuse. These questions are further elaborated in "No Time Flat, " which follows Wade, a boy living a somewhat isolated existence with his elderly parents on the American plains. Wade makes his way through a childhood marked by playground shootings and mysterious strangers before becoming a wanderer himself, inhabiting a sparse landscape of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes.

BRISBANE, 1943. Overnight a provincial Australian city has become the main Allied staging post for the war in the Pacific. The tensions – social, sexual, and racial – created by the arrival of thousands of US troops are stirring up all kinds of mayhem, and Brisbane’s once quiet streets are looking pretty mean.Enter P.I. Jack Munro, a World War I veteran and ex-cop with a nose for trouble and a stubborn dedication to exposing the truth, however inconvenient it is for the -powers that be. He’s not always a particularly good man, but he’s the one you want on your side when things look bad.When Jack is hired by a knockout blonde to find her no-good missing husband, he turns over a few rocks he’s not supposed to. Soon the questions are piling up, and so are the bodies. But Jack forges on through the dockside bars, black-market warehouses, and segregated brothels of his roiling city, uncovering greed and corruption eating away at the foundations of the war effort.Then Jack is hired to investigate a suspicious suicide, and there’s a whole new cast of characters for him to deal with – a father surprisingly unmoved by his son’s death, a dodgy priest, crooked cops, Spanish Civil War refugees – and a wall of silence between him and the truth, which has its roots deep in the past. Friends, enemies, the police – they’re all warning Jack to back off. But he can’t walk away from a case: he has to do the square thing.Written in the spare, plain-spoken style of all great pulp fiction, G.S. Manson’s fast-paced debut captures the high stakes and nervous energy of wartime, when everything becomes a matter of life and death.

The publication in one volume of Gilbert Rogin's novels, "What Happens Next?" and "Preparations for the Ascent," will bring to a new generation the comedy, pathos, and incisive observation that made him a favorite contributor to the "New Yorker," where he published thirty-three stories in the 1960s and '70s. Hailed by the "New York Review of Books" for the "grace and intelligence" of his writing, Rogin's work nevertheless fell out of print for two decades--and yet seems astonishingly fresh to 21st-century eyes. Contemporary readers will find in him an antic genius in the manner of Larry David, and a literary stylist who "often writes with the humor and sensitivity of the best work of Saul Bellow" ("Newsweek"). Rogin's dyspeptic protagonist--who appears under different names in the two novels, but bears the same quirky sensibility--roams the streets and bedrooms of Manhattan (with side trips to Florida and California), dispensing his unique brand of laugh-out-loud wisdom on the faults of psychotherapy, the folly of marriage, and the foibles of family life. Rogin's Everyman is the trenchant commentator on the human comedy that we all wish we could be. Drowning in the indignities thrust upon him by his ex-wife, his parents and his girlfriend (known only as the Human Dynamo), he nevertheless rises above the surface with flights of empathy and poetry to anchor himself in our affection. Elegantly written and very funny, these novels confirm Rogin's place alongside not just his literary contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth, but also next to Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld as one of the great comic minds of his time--and our own.

BOOK + CD PACKAGE. Jon Langford is best known for the music he creates with the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, but he's gained increasing acclaim for his visual art, too, over the past decade. "Nashville Radio," his first book+CD of paintings, writing, and music (Verse Chorus Press, 2005) was a sprawling, jam-packed collection full of punk energy. For this book, Langford has created a highly personal portrait of Wales, where he was born and raised. It incorporates a CD featuring Langford's rare album "Skull Orchard," originally released in 1998 on a label that promptly went bankrupt, and revamped and extended with live material (and a Welsh male voice choir) for this edition. The songs' lyrics, at once autobiographical and fanciful, are illustrated in a series of "word paintings" scattered throughout the book, which also includes an A to Z of Welsh culture and history (personal and general), thematically related etchings and paintings, family photographs, and Langford's first published fiction, a dystopian fable about a whale and a dolphin.

The Go-Betweens recorded six albums that are among the finest work of the 1980s, earning them a reputation as the ultimate cult band and the lasting esteem of their peers, from R.E.M. to Sleater-Kinney. In 2000 they returned to making records--and received the best reviews of their career. David Nichols relates their story with wit and verve, and since the Go-Betweens had personalities as well as talent, their biography is compelling reading, not just for committed fans but for anyone interested in the current music scene. I loved this book, raved Jonathan Lethem. How elegant that the dark-horse band lavished with obsessive and loving attention by David Nichols should be the one whose weird and lovely depths can truly sustain and reward it the life-altering Go-Betweens.

First published in 1998, The Last Rock Star Book has become an underground cult classic.Camden Joy's hero can't wrap up the quickie biography of rock star Liz Phair he's been commissioned to write. Instead, the shaky author finds himself recounting the troubled events of his own life. His ex-girlfriend (who just might be the illegitimate daughter of dead Rolling Stone Brian Jones), Liz Phair (whom he's never met), and a mystery girl seen looting a shop in an old newspaper photo all start to blur together in his mind. If only he could get closer to his subject before the assignment spins out of control, maybe he'd have a shot at the distinction he feels he deserves . . .