Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 17

Rejoice! New Brandon Hobson there is.

For real. Desolation of Avenues Untold from the Civil Coping Mechanisms. More here.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode One Hundred and Fifteen - Primitive Genius, starring the Daniel Nester.

So podcast. So Nester. And so genius. Primitive and otherwise. Not to mention vague booking, SEO, Queen, sestinas, Kanye West, reviews and rejections. So do check it out, it just might change your life.

Mortified prep more we are, yo.

"Imaginative, entertaining, and beautiful." Orphans. Much appreciated Goodreads goodness and love.

For real. All of that. Excerpt? Word.

"Ben Tanzer is among my favorite writers. His stories are witty, colorful, and always heartfelt with a uniquely Tanzer style. Orphans is a sci-fi novel on the surface, but at its core it tells of family, love, and longing."

This (chap) Book Will Change Your Life - Bottom Of The Ninth by the Wyl Villacres.

There is the Villacres and the Bottom Of The Ninth from the WhiskeyPaper and we have read it and blurbed it and we are happy to report that it changed our lives and we believe it may just change your life as well, so please do hit it when it is available to be hit, well done, thank you.

“Like any Cubs fan Wyl Villacres knows that there is poetry in foolish hope, we have to love hard if we are to love at all and that without a healthy embrace of the surreal, we can’t hope to make it through another season, much less find a reason to smile.”

"I was sad, but only because it came to an end." Lost in Space. Goodreads. Sadness. Goodness. And appreciations.

All of that. And an excerpt. Cool? Word.

"Having recently become a parent--is fifteen months still recent? Fifteen months!? Jesus--having somewhat recently become a father, this book was exactly what I needed. It unnerved me, comforted me, made me laugh."

Self-serving Podcast Twitter hype.

Taking a break from my own stupid voice for the much more lovely & entertaining voices of @BenTanzer & Sean H Doyle. https://t.co/vRC5rcEHxs

— Melissa Faliveno (@melissafaliveno) August 12, 2015

Patrick Wensink is A Brief History of Book Trailer Failure and quite Fake Fruit Factory at Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

And this at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Which is not to be missed. It just might change your life.

This Zine Will Change Your Life is a most special Charles Bukowski Birthday edition. And quite Micheli.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live, and we are thrilled to have new story, The City of Angels as told by Bukoswki by Matt Micheli, and (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and debate prose love from Pete Anderson. We hope you enjoy this edition and we appreciate all shout-outs and links. Finally, please note, we are hoping more of you will submit comix, and music, novel excerpts, and art, and video, yes, video, and combinations there of. And most finally, the Cubs, what?

This Book Will Change Your Life - F250 by the Bud Smith. And Tables Without Chairs #1 too.

Vacation. Beach. Drink. Read. Rinse. Repeat. In consuming F250 by the Bud Smith we are reminded of something we've written about here before - writers will write origin stories that might even feel like debut novels even if they're not. We all have the arc of one within us - our path, and our journey, how we got from some beginning point to some kind of redemption, or at least the next point in our lives - the next story, or journey. The challenge is telling the story anew, with fresh wrinkles, and observations that cause us to experience the origin story from a new perspective. And from this perspective Smith has accomplished both the new and the fresh. Yes, we have a young man both trying escape where he came from and find something new - a future, or an identity, some kind of closure or answers. In this case it's a young man from nowhere, with no true family, and little stability. But he has friends and music and the state of New Jersey - everything from refineries to mountains - and it is here where Smith makes the story his own. These are blue collar characters from a blue collar place. They build things - when they're not destroying them - and they dream, big, before they crash. They are outsiders, steps from New York City, but not there at all. They live in a parallel world where moving to big cities and things like going to college barely exist as options - they are certainly not assumed - until they do. And it is this outsiderness of the characters where Smith comes to life, because we so rarely see these characters on the page, and by extension we much too rarely get to read authors like Smith who exist outside of the world of AWP and MFA programs.


Still, between the drugs and the fights and the trucks, the characters are alive, and in that way Smith is reminiscent of his contemporary Brian Alan Ellis - who we've written about here before as well - and it is no surprise that the two of them have a split book titled Tables Without Chairs #1 dropping this coming week. Tables Without Chairs #1 is a platform for what both authors do so well - revel in characters who are scraping by, and like them, living both inside and outside the established literary world. It's also a reminder that there are a wealth of authors out there, writing, creating and telling stories, who are not waiting around to be found, but are certainly ripe for discovery.