Fall 2020
Catalog
Spring 2021 P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065 (940) 243-0904 MadvillePublishing.com
Fall 2020 Mistakes by the Lake by Brian Petkash 978-1-948692-32-8 paper 19.95 978-1-948692-33-5 ebook 9.99 5½x8½ , 256 pp. Short Fiction May 2020
Set in Cleveland, Ohio, from its earliest beginnings as a forested frontier to the urban blight of modern times, Mistakes by the Lake is a collection of ten thematicallylinked stories spanning the many faces of the city’s history: A motorman navigates his 1920’s back-and-forth trolley until he snaps; A stockyards knocker encounters the Virgin Mary during the 1954 World Series; A wannabe wrestles his unruly mind along the flammable 1960’s Cuyahoga River; In a reinvention of Henry IV, a young man must either stick with his bumbling criminal crew or uncover legit ways to support his mother and transgender Gramps. The collection and its stories have garnered numerous accolades: Finalist: Nilsen Prize (Southeast Missouri State University); Winner: The Lake Prize in Fiction (Midwestern Gothic); Shortlisted: The Novella Award (Liverpool John Moores University); Shortlisted: Munster Literature Centre’s Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition; Honorable Mention: Family Matters Contest (Glimmer Train). Praise for the novella, Mistakes by the Lake: “Full of action, movement, tension and shocks. The world of the Cleveland stockyards and its denizens is brought to life with verve, skill and command” (Vulpes Libris). Brian Petkash was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa and his stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Southword, among other publications. He currently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he remains an avid fan of Cleveland sports.
Drumming Armageddon by George Drew 978-1-948692-34-2 paper 18.95 978-1-948692-35-9 ebook 9.99 6x9, 144 pp. Poetry June 2020
Often it is said of contemporary music that it’s the soundtrack of our lives. If so, Drumming Armageddon is a poetic rendering of that soundtrack: Rock, Country, Jazz, Pop, Folk, The Blues—they’re the genres comprising it, and they all are present in this collection. The poems pay homage to the artists—Dylan, Clapton, Lennon, Crow, The Beatles, Elvis—and track the poet’s personal musical biography: his experiences and memories the music both relates to and marks. The poems, like the music, have plenty of swagger. Finally, though, they remind us that, at their best, poetry is music, music poetry. George Drew is the author of Fancy’s Orphan (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press, which also published his Down & Dirty (2015) and his New & Selected, Pastoral Habits (2016), winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Poetry Book, and a finalist for the Lascaux Review’s Poetry Book Prize.
Studio drummers use the phrase “In the Pocket” when they want to talk about being in that sweet spot right on the beat and tucked straight away into a song. That is exactly where you’ll find George Drew’s voice in the poems of Drumming Armageddon. Drew spins his turntable through the history of electric music from rock-n-roll icons like Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, to blues giants like Stevie Ray Vaughn. The poems render these characters much better than any history book could, and what’s even more impressive, the lines ride the melodies of the music in and out of personal narratives deftly telling family stories and offering tributes to friends who’ve passed away. This book rocks like a greatest hits album, and this poet turns in a performance as memorable as any front man could. —Jack B. Bedell, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019 Surely all good poets, especially the ones born in Mississippi, think of their poetry as a sort of blues. George Drew’s Drumming Armageddon is, without question, not merely a celebration of the blues, but the blues in fact. Oh, he channels such heavyweights as Chuck Berry, Gladys Knight, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha, Roy Orbison and so on, but Drew knows the blues are love, how you somehow keep
going and keep caring in spite of a world that seems always just a breath away from Armageddon, a terrible world of anger and pain and death. Aptly, he leaves us with Charlie Parker blowing his sax on a lonely country road, playing to a cow. He leaves us wrung out and worn out and whole, putting our envies and sins aside for a little while and saying, Lord have mercy, that boy can sing. —Jack Butler, Author of Broken Hallelujah
The World Out There by John Talbird 978-1-948692-36-6 paper 20.95 978-1-948692-37-3 ebook 9.99 5½x8½ , 296 pp. Fiction July 2020 Cover art by Melinda Yale.
The World Out There is set in Gainesville, FL during the early nineteen-nineties and its North-Central Florida setting is important as both physical and psychological space. In addition to Spanish moss, heat-radiating highways, and palmettos, the novel explores the violence beneath the glittering surface of the “Sunshine State”: racial tensions, neofascist violence against “others,” and a string of serial murders acts as an ominous backdrop for the action. The car wreck into Lake Walters, coming within the first pages, is a catalyst for action—the concentric waves radiating from the car dropping through that lake surface like danger reverberating throughout the book. The story follows the lives of three people—Jan, William, and Ray—with the action centered around a used bookstore.Each of these Gen-Xers came to Gainesville to get college degrees and then never left. Each watches his or her grandiose ideas of “success” drift away as they pass through their thirties, replaced with a vagueness of purpose, a nagging anxiety that there is something else they’re supposed to be doing. John Talbird is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Grain, Juked, The Literary Review, Ambit, Potomac Review and many others. He is on the Editorial Board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and a frequent contributor to Film International. An English professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives in New York City with his wife, Melinda Yale.
In one of the (many) compelling and memorable scenes in John Talbird’s debut novel, The World Out There, Jan responds to her fear of an at-large serial killer who’s terrorizing the town. Most of the victims are “petite brunettes with shoulder-length hair,” Jan tells her boss and lover, William, when she asks him to crop her long, dark hair that she then dyes bright yellow. After William runs his fingers through Jan’s short hair, he has her shave his head. The dramatic tension and the sensuality of this moment amplify the reader’s awareness that these are people disguising themselves even as they seek their true identities. Talbird vividly creates the multiple perspectives of contradictory characters and earns sympathy for imperfect men and women struggling to make connection and find love in a violent and unpredictable world. —Allen Wier, author of Late Night, Early Morning and Tehano. The World Out There is the world we occupy—full of chaos, love, longing, and despair. Talbird takes us to the Florida of the early nineties, a landscape that pulses with violence under the skin of all encounters, and where danger makes itself intimately known. Each of these characters is haunted by their mistakes and the mistakes of others, and by the daily perils of simply being human. It made my heart hurt with the reminder of how hard it is to grow the hell up. —Erin Flanagan, author of The Usual Mistakes and It’s Not Going to Kill You and Other Stories John Talbird’s The World Out There thrums with electric energy. Talbird mines and displays our deepest fears, desires, and heartbreaks through his mismatched couple, Jan and William. It’s the swampy 90s and the world hasn’t yet tipped to technology. The World Out There dwells in the loneliness of the indie bookstore, the awkward hipness of the indie record store, the solace of the second-run movie theater, and the futility of the won’t-ever-make-it band playing a nowhere bar. Mainly, it looks fear right in the eyes. Dig in. You’ll crawl out of this book a changed person. —Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc.
The Asthmatic Kid & Other Stories
The Asthmatic Kid & other Stories by Mark Tulin 978-1-948692-46-5 paper 18.95 978-1-948692-47-2 ebook 9.99 5½x8½ , 203 pp. Short Fiction August 2020
Mark Tulin
The Asthmatic Kid & Other Stories is a collection of narratives that chronicle the life of a young man trying to survive his childhood. These stories take place in the 60s and 70s featuring compelling characters that often have conflicting interests, get a
few bumps and bruises, but discover what is truly important. Mark Tulin’s quirky stories speak of freedom, love, and the joys of youthful mischief. “Crazy Grandpa,” “Into the Blue Suburban Sky,” “Dark Clouds Over Baseball” and others in this collection will make trauma not seem so scary and, in many cases, quite amusing. Mark Tulin’s formative years were spent in Philadelphia playing baseball and getting into mischief with his friends. He parlayed his experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family to become a successful marriage and family therapist. Once he retired and relocated to California, his interest in creative writing flourished. His stories have appeared in anthologies, journals, and podcasts. He has published in Page & Spine, Cabinet of the Heed, and Fiction on the Web, among others. His poetry chapbook, Magical Yogis, was published by Prolific Press in 2017. Follow Mark at www.crowonthewire.com.
With sensitivity and lyrical sentimentality, Mark Tulin zooms in on what it’s like to grow up. His characters exist in a gentler version of urban America. An America that’s lost to the past as they experience their first road trip, first sex, first experiments with drugs—our heart flutters along with theirs. These stories will transport you to when you were sneaking away from your parents for the night, fumbling your first kiss, or listening to the record that blew your heart wide open. —Charlie Fish, screenwriter and short story writer. Mark Tulin picks up the torch left by Philip Roth, and The Asthmatic Kid doesn’t try to pretend that real life is always pretty. The book’s filled with gritty writing that leaves stains on the sidewalk. However, Tulin’s skill lies in raising his central characters above everything that surrounds them. The Asthmatic Kid is literature that entertains, challenges, and uplifts all at once. —Gordon Lawrie, editor of Friday Flash Fiction and author of several novels including The Blogger Who Came in from the Cold. Mark Tulin’s darkly hilarious stories have graced the pages of Smokebox.net since April 2016, when we published his beautifully stark, Room Full of Strangers. Inner demons, unsettled familial scores, and brutally honest appraisals of human frailties are employed deftly by Tulin in The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories. If the title story is any indication, with its cast of hopelessly damaged ne’er-do-wells and sweetly fragile personal growth, Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories promises to provide an expertly guided journey through the highs and lows of life’s headlong course. —Marcus Covert, associate editor, Smokebox.net
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The Memoir of the Minotaur by Tom Shachtman 978-1-948692-38-0 paper 18.95 978-1-948692-39-7 ebook 9.99 5½x8½ , 203 pp. Fiction September 2020 Cover art by Nick Gilley.
The Memoir of the Minotaur is the posthumous confessions of the half-man, half-bull of Crete, as offered to an audience of recentlydeceased, 21st century fellow souls in Hades’ domain. This book is a satire for readers unafraid of a rollicking good tale involving anatomically-complex beings, unforgivable puns, the champion serial killer of all time, scantily-clad Greek maidens and youths, articulate tyrants, and feminist proto-history leavened with theological impertinence. The Memoir of the Minotaur shares its form with other popular retellings of the monster narrative such as John Gardner’s Grendel, and the narrative voice has likenesses to the exuberance, bawdiness, and blasphemy of Salman Rushdie and John Barth. Packed with actions both big and small, while containing a breadth of complexity as it deals with themes of power, violence, sexuality, and the role of storytelling, its most endearing quality is the hilarity and absurdity of our classical values interacting with our animalistic cores. Ultimately, the book is riotous. Tom Shachtman holds a B.S. in animal behavior, an M.F.A. in playwriting, and has a body of published and produced work that includes eighteen non-fiction books, such as The Day America Crashed, Rumspringa: To Be Or Not To Be Amish, and the latest, The Founding Fortunes; short novels, including Beachmaster and The Eagle’s Claw; books for children, such as Growing Up Masai; and documentaries for ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, the most recent being Absolute Zero and the Conquest Of Cold, a two-hour Nova based on his book of the same name. He has also collaborated on a dozen books, among them Whoever Fights Monsters (with Robert K. Ressler), considered the definitive study of serial killers.
Some Notes You Hold by Rita Quillen 978-1-948692-44-1 paper 16.95 978-1-948692-45-8 ebook 9.99 6x9, 80 pp. Poetry October 2020 Cover art by Suzanne Stryk.
Some Notes You Hold is about surviving what life throws at us as we age. The so-called “Golden Years” are so named because of the high admission price—the tremendous losses, disappointments, illnesses, and failures we all experience if we live long enough. The first part of the book, called “Letting Go,” focuses on surviving deep grief; the second half, called “Holding On,” explores all the roads leading to survival: playing music, prayer and meditation, deep communion with the natural world, and writing. The price paid for those “golden years” leads to the prize: insight, joy, and a kind of peace we were incapable of when we were young. Rita Quillen’s new novel Wayland, a sequel to Hiding Ezra, will be published by Iris Press in fall, 2019. Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, was published in 2016 by Texas Review Press, a Texas A & M affiliation and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Her novel Hiding Ezra, released by Little Creek Books, was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she received three Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. Read more at www.ritasimsquillen.com
Framed within the twin templates of scripture and domestic ritual, these poems pay loving homage to hard times and the resilience it takes to survive them. Quillen often employs a colloquial voice that perfectly fits these poems, poems that ring as brightly as the “big bell on the steeple” of the family church, narrative poems animated by metaphors of music, “music . . . the creek you swam in.” I am grateful for this collection and how it unfailingly reminds me that beyond heartache, poetry persists in offering deep solace. —Marc Harshman, author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the 2017 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry.
As I’ve heard it said that harmony creates a longing in the voice, this book creates a longing in the heart—for all that passes as well as for all that endures. Rita Quillen draws for us a world that holds both abundance and quiet, joy and “grace from going without.” Some Notes You Hold is itself a “holy chorus” bringing the human voice together with “wolf howl, cooing doves, hallelujah magpies.” —Diane Gilliam, author of Kettle Bottom “Heart wide as the river, / spirit open and at risk every moment / yet strong enough to stand all the sadness and sweet longing”—that’s how Rita Quillen praises fiddlers who take listeners to “the exact spot where music lives.” Those words also perfectly describe Quillen’s own art in these radiant poems. Her deft, generous voice travels the octaves from “the tiny cosmos of root, stem, and vein” to the human complexities of hard work, loss, and love. Quillen knows in her blood that language is the music of living, and her readers will savor her every word. —Lynn Powell, Season of the Second Thought, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize
Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology
edited by Karen Head & Collin Kelley 978-1-948692-42-7 paper 18.95 978-1-948692-43-4 ebook 9.99 6x9, 192 pp. Poetry Anthology November 2020
The Virgin Mary long ago transcended her religious origins to become and instantly recognizable icon. From pop art to pop music, Mary’s status as the Mother of God continues to inspire the faithful and the secular. A statue of Mary weeping blood or appearing in a piece of toast still has the power to make front page news and bring the devoted running with candles and eBay bids. In Mother Mary Comes To Me, poets explore the intersection of the sacred and the larger than life persona that Mary has become throughout the ages and how she still holds sway in 21st century as a figure to be praised, feared and mined for pathos and humor. Karen Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (UP New England, 2017), She has published five books of poetry (Lost on Purpose, Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year), co-edited the poetry anthology (Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry), and exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects. In 2010, she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize. She also creates digital poetry; her project “Monumental” (part of
Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, and is the Editor of Atlanta Review. Collin Kelley is the author of the poetry collections Midnight in a Perfect World, Render, Better To Travel and Slow To Burn. He is also the author of the Venus Trilogy of novels, Conquering Venus, Remain In Light and Leaving Paris. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award and a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, Kelley’s poetry, reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world. The editors will be donating their profits to the fund for the black churches in the south that have been ravaged by arson.
Spring 2021—preview Daughters of Bone by Jessica Temple 978-1-948692-48-9 paper 18.95 978-1-948692-49-6 ebook 9.99 6x9, 80 pp. Poetry February 2021
Daughters of Bone explores the landscapes and people of the South. Drawing on personal and collective history, these poems explore the relationships between place, people, history, culture, and language. Subjects include family and relationships, especially between women of different generations, means of handling grief, and travel and return. Photographs or physical objects often work as keys to memories of events or people from the past. Particular locations or landscapes likewise serve as reminders. This collection questions the meaning of “home” and “family.” It mythologizes the author’s own history as she searches for her place within it. Jessica Temple earned her PhD in poetry from Georgia State University. She co-directs the syndicated poetry college radio program melodically challenged and teaches at Alabama A&M University. Her work has appeared in Thema; Crab Orchard Review; Canyon Voices; and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems from Negative Capability Press, among others. She is the author of the chapbook Seamless and Other Legends (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was named Alabama State Poetry Society’s 2019 Poet of the Year. Find out more at jessicatemple.com.
What a Wonderful World This Could Be by Lee Zacharias 978-1-948692-50-2 paper 19.95 978-1-948692-51-9 ebook 9.99 6x9, 360 pp. Fiction March 2021
What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means. Lee Zacharias is the author of three previous novels, Lessons, At Random, and Across the Great Lake, a 2019 Notable Michigan Book, as well as a collection of stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, and a collection of essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received two silver medals from the Independent Book Publisher Awards, won North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has been reprinted and frequently cited in the annual volumes of The Best American Essays. You can read more about her at www.leezacharias.com.
Alegría by Emi Wright 978-1-948692-40-3 paper 18.95 978-1-948692-41-0 ebook 9.99 6x9, 336 pp. Novel January 2021
Alegría is the story of two towns divided by a river and by irrational bigotry and hate borne of tradition and superstition. (full synopsis and author bio pending)
About
Madville Publishing We are a nonprofit, independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction (in the form of familiar essay and memoir), and poetry. Our mission is to present language in a playful, imaginative way. English is our first language, but we adore code switching and regionalisms from around the world. Our catalog straddles borders. While our authors often hail from the English-speaking academic community, our audience extends beyond the narrow confines of the academy into the popular market. Our fiction offerings, in particular, tend to stray into adventurous, fantastic, and dystopian realities. Contact us for wholesale pricing. All manuscripts published by Madville Publishing undergo a rigorous vetting process before they are accepted for publication. Visit our website for more information.
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