NANO’s Summer Reading List

Hey NANO Readers – we may be a little late on the summer reading list bandwagon, but we’ve compiled a short list of spring and summer releases from a few of our contributors for you guys to check out. If you have a chance, we highly recommend you picking up one (or a few) of these titles or requesting them at your local library. (I know for a fact that librarians love searching for books from small presses, so give ’em hell.)

Also, if you’re a former contributor and would like to be listed, send us an email at nanofictionmag@gmail.com.

FGS Cover FrontFog Gorgeous Stag
By Sean Lovelace
$10, Preorder it Here
Excerpt

“Fog Gorgeous Stag is an electrical fire of a book. From the first page you know it’s going to combust, and it does, and it will. Each sentence is wired evil, a sentient boll weevil, a morning devil, an angry lover hovering for some reason or other, a bleeding fever. Each image a starsong; a shelved elf; a microwaved marshmallow egg. This book is just not safe for human consumption. If you must read it, I recommend real thick gloves like the furries wear, a mouthwash month, some antiviral gum with Freshening Riblet Crystals, a hundred-year moratorium, or kevlar hot pants. This is not a blurb. This is a warning label.” -Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities

Sean was featured in issues 4.1 and 2.1.

So You Know Its Me
By Brian Oliu
$7, Buy it Here

From the Publisher: So You Know It’s Me is a collection of lyric essays that were posted on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connections board over the course of 45 days. On the 45th day, in accordance to Craigslist policy, the essays began to erase themselves.

Brian was featured in issue 4.2 which is still available for order here.

516SF37nCaL__SL500_AA300_The Book of Freaks
by Jamie Iredell
$11, Buy it Here
ISBN 978-1-892061-39-3

From the publisher: Like an expanded Dictionary of Received Ideas, The Book of Freaks takes its subject matter from everyday life. Both hilarious and poker-faced in equal measures, this faux encyclopedia categorizes mundanities and renders them starkly unexpected. From circus freaks, to nationalities, to you and everyone you’ve ever met, The Book of Freaks points out what we already knew, but never acknowledged: every one of us, in our own little ways, is a weirdo. The Book of Freaks is bewildering in a good way–a bluntly informational yet oddly poetic tour de force.

Jamie was featured in issues 2.1 and 2.2 and also wrote a book called Prose. Poems. A Novel.

The Weather Stations
By Ryan Call
$8, Buy it Here

“There is a lot of weather in these stories—a lot of broken skies, miraculous clouds, killer storms, fantastical happenings. In thick, muscular, meticulous prose, Ryan Call provides a beautiful and troubling forecast. The people in the crumbling worlds of The Weather Stations do what they can to survive and bear witness, and we, as readers, are the better for it. Stock up on canned goods and read this book.” -Robert Lopez, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River

Ryan was featured in issue 3.2.

There is No Year
By Blake Butler
Around 10 bucks, Buy it Everywhere
From the Publisher: With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony O’Neill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler’s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”

Blake was featured in issues 1.2 and 2.2.

61791_154327567921639_154327474588315_355826_2496934_nTime Crumbling Like a Wet Cracker
By Ryan Dilbert
$12, Buy it Here

Description: Audrey, a failed tattoo artist with a worthless history degree, just fled an abusive marriage and lost the footrace to the joint bank account. Wallowing in self-pity, and hard up for cash, she hasn’t noticed that things are a little out of sync lately. Was Benjamin Franklin really hit by a car outside a Taco Bell? Did Segway-riding Huns overrun the East Coast? How did Chevy Chase escape human sacrifice at the hands of the Aztecs, and why are archeologists unearthing Green Bay Packers helmets alongside the bones of Neanderthal hunters? Deep in Wisconsin woods, a deranged scientist is slipping back through time, in a quest to purge recorded history of evil. But this experiment has gone terribly wrong, and somehow it’s now up to Audrey to put things right before the world descends into chaos.

Ryan Dilbert was featured in issue 2.2.

The Orange Suitcase
By Joseph Riippi
$14.95, Buy it Here

“In Joseph Riippi’s The Orange Suitcase, the fragments come together to create a mesmerizing whole. The fictional world Riippi creates is visceral and vivid, a kind of rabbit hole the reader descends into and is reluctant to leave. A wonderful collection from a deeply talented writer.” – Laura van den Berg, author of What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us

“From fragmentary childhood recollections Riippi construes a narrative in which figures of memory and dream cleave, in which elision supplants illusion as the engine of meaning.” – BOMB

Joseph Riippi was featured in issues 1.2 and 2.2.

15647100219750LThe Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan
By Tom Whalen
$19.16, Buy it Here

Description: Russell H. Greenan’s It Happened in Boston? is one of the most radical narratives to appear in the late 1960s (“this is a book that encompasses everything” as David L. Ulin noted in Bookforum). Yet due in large part to the difficulty of classifying Greenan’s fiction, many readers are unaware of his other novels. In The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan, Tom Whalen, drawing widely from the American literary tradition, locates Greenan’s lineage in the work of Hawthorne and Poe “where allegory and dream mingle with and illuminate realism,” as well as in the fiction of Twain, West, Hammett, Cain, and Thompson. Examining Greenan’s characteristic themes and strategies, Whalen provides perceptive readings of the dark comedies of this criminally neglected American master, and in a coda reflects on Greenan’s career and the reception of his work.

Tom Whalen was featured in issue 3.2.

Former contributors who would like to be listed here or on future lists may send us an email at nanofictionmag@gmail.com.