“…the characters are fully realized—rooted in the land and veined with bad blood—and their motivations are complex and believable. Violent, bloody, and darkly beautiful, this is a fascinating novel depicting the seedy bottom of an America in decline.”

“Jonah Man is a vivid and unsettling portrait of naked American ambition, and Chris Narozny is a nimble and unflinching writer.”—Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers and Ablutions: Notes for a Novel

“A sort of charismatic bastard child of No Country for Old Men and The Grifters, Jonah Man is a riveting, suspenseful look at the grittier side of early 20th-century vaudeville. Beautifully and tautly written, this is an extraordinarily successful first novel.”—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and The Open Curtain

“As compelling as it is atmospheric, Jonah Man is above all mercilessly readable. This is the kind of storytelling that keeps you flipping pages against your will deep into the wee hours. Narozny writes like an insider. His prose is lean, mean and razor sharp.”—Jonathan Evison, author of Lulu and West of Here

“Chris Narozny has dipped his 21^st-century pen into early 20^th-century ink and come up with a wonder even a carney couldn’t oversell. Full of backflips, hook hands, bad drugs, busted acts and rag-tag beauties burning out before uncaring audiences under the glare of calcium lights, Jonah Man sings its story from deep in the throat, tells it from the gut, casts it into hard-won, hytone prose, tosses it growling and sparking onto the sticky asphalt, lets it bandy twist and barrel turn in the sizzling rain, the jaw-dropped sun.”—Laird Hunt, author of Ray of the Star and The Impossibly

“If William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy got together to write a novel about vaudeville, it would probably be something like Chris Narozny’s Jonah Man.”
—Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and Us

“What can we learn from exceptionally talented orphans, one-handed, moonlighting jugglers, and inspectors who proceed by the light of accidents? A great deal indeed. In the enigmatic language of vaudeville, Jonah Man posits readers at the crossroads with an invitation to consider the gaps between who we have been and who we might, still, become. A remarkable achievement, this book is a dream. And like all powerful dreams, it has the power to wake you.”—Selah Saterstrom, author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution

Narrated by a one-handed juggler who moonlights as a drug trafficker, a talented young boy who longs to escape the shadow of his abusive father, and a police inspector whose overzealous efforts to solve a murder result in a series of calamitous missteps, Jonah Man explores the dark side of life behind the curtain,  where artists resort to the most extreme measures—including drug dealing, self-mutilation, even murder—to prolong their time in the limelight. Resurrecting the lost language of vaudeville—a “Jonah Man” was a performer who, despite his best efforts, had stalled in his career—Jonah Man is a gripping portrait of people torn between their greatest hopes and fears, while trying to keep reality at bay.

Chris Narozny earned an M.F.A in fiction from Syracuse University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Denver. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Marginalia, elimae, and Hobart. While at Syracuse, he won the Peter Neagoe Prize for Fiction, and at the University of Denver, he was awarded the Frankel Dissertation Fellowship for an earlier draft of Jonah Man. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

“In Ghosting, Kirby Gann has created an utterly compelling ode to the fearsome and contradictory desires of his unforgettable characters. Writing in brilliantly sustained licks of prose, Gann gives us flesh-and-blood human beings who cannot escape what they cannot help wanting. Their fate is true, the ride beautiful and dark.”
—John Burham Schwartz ,author of Reservation Road and Northwest Corner

“With a plot as full of twists and turns as an ancient Greek tragedy, Kirby Gann’s Ghosting is one of the most beautifully worded and superbly crafted novels about the fateful consequences of being caught up in the criminal life that I have ever read.And I’m speaking truth.”
—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff

“What a richly imagined world Kirby Gann has wrought in Ghosting. A frightful world of drug running and addiction, but beneath that a story of family and the desire for safety and peace. This novel is full of grit and the yearnings of the human heart. Its carefully drawn characters latched onto me and wouldn’t let me go.”
—Lee Martin, author of Break the Skin and The Bright Forever

“Combining grit and poetry, deep feeling and an unsentimental gaze, Kirby Gann has written a novel as intimate as the stifling locale where it’s set and as expansive as the minds and voices of the people ensnared there. Ghosting is dark, funny, unexpected, and populated with characters we immediately recognize even as they avoid cliché.”—Christopher Sorrentino, author of Trance and Sound on Sound

A dying drug kingpin enslaved to the memory of his dead wife; a young woman torn between her promising future and the hardscrabble world she grew up in; a mother willing to do anything to fuel her addiction to pills; and her youngest son, searching for an answer behind his brother’s disappearance—these are just some of the unforgettable characters that populate Ghosting, Kirby Gann’s lush and lyrical novel of family, community, and the ties that can both bond and betray.

Fleece Skaggs has disappeared along with Lawrence Gruel’s reefer harvest. Convinced that the best way to discover the fate of his older brother is to take his place as a drug runner for Greuel, James Cole plunges into a dark underworld of drugs, violence, and long hidden family secrets, where discovering what happened to his brother could cost him his life.

A genre-subverting literary thriller explored through the alternating viewpoints of different characters, Ghosting is both a simple quest for the solution to a mystery, and a complex consideration of human frailty and equivocation.

Described in the blogosphere as one of the nation’s most underrated writers, Kirby Gann is the author of the novels The Barbarian Parade (2004) and Our Napoleon in Rags (2005). He is also co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, which was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). His work has appeared most recently in The Lumberyard and The Oxford American, among other journals. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an Honorable Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Gann is Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.

The message that our environment is in peril has filtered from environmental groups to the American consciousness to our shopping carts. Every day, millions of Americans dutifully replace conventional produce with organic, swap Mr. Clean for Seventh Generation, and replace their bottled water with water bottles. Many of us have come to believe that the path to environmental sustainability is paved by shopping green. Although this green consumer movement certainly has many Americans consuming differently, it raises an important and rarely asked question—”is this consumption really any better for the planet?”

By examining the major economic sectors of our society, including infrastructure (green housing), consumer goods (green clothing and jewelry), food (the rise of organic), and energy (including solar power and the popularity of the hybrid car), Green Washed: Why We Can’t Buy Our Way to a Green Planet explains that, though greener alternatives are important, we cannot simply buy our way to sustainability. Rather, if it is the volume of our consumption that matters, can we as a society dependent on constantly consuming ever be content with buying less?

A new and unique take on green consumption, Green Washed shows how buying better is only the first step toward true sustainability.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is the sustainable development editor for Justmeans.com. She holds a master’s degree in sustainable development from the SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont. She has created outreach material for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Convention on Biological Diversity and worked as a researcher for Terrapin Bright Green, an environmental consulting and strategic planning firm.

Next came a book that wound up being quite prescient in anticipating the political and social turmoil that would come to represent 2011, Reviving the Strike: How Working Can Regain Power and Transform America. Author and labor lawyer Joe Burns convincingly argues that the only way for workers to break free of the repressive system of labor control that has been imposed upon them by corporations and the government for the past seventy-five years is to redevelop an effective strike based on the now outlawed traditional labor tactics of stopping production and workplace-based solidarity. Joe’s book perfectly represented a moment of change that began with the attacks on labor in Wisconsin the spring, and continued with the OWS movement in the fall.

2011 also saw the continuation of our “Class-Ig” series of reprints of important works of history and politics, with the release of Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion and Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers. Our second title by Bernays, after Propaganda, which we reissued in 2004, Crystallizing, originally released in 1923, was the first ever book written about the then nascent field of public relations, and set down the principles that corporations and government have used to influence public attitudes over the past century. Featuring an introduction by Bill McKibben, The Waste Makers is Vance Packard’s pioneering 1960 work on how the rapid growth of disposable consumer goods was degrading the environmental, financial, and spiritual character of American society. We are happy to reintroduce these classic works to a whole new audience.

The fall saw the release of two dynamic novels, Laura Ellen Scott’s Death Wishing, a tale of what happens when dying wishes start to come true, and Mark Yakich’s A Meaning for Wife, the story of a man trying to come to terms with the sudden death of his wife, the aging parents he has long avoided, and the tribulations of single parenthood. A Meaning For Wife helped us end the year on a high note, as it was chosen as the number one “Small Press Highlight” of 2011 by the National Book Critics Circle.

If 2011 was a good year, we have even higher hopes for 2012, when Ig will celebrate its tenth anniversary. Among the books you can look forward to in the new year are Kendra Pierre-Louis’s Green Washed, about how we cannot shop our way to sustainability; Ghosting, Kirby Gann’s lush and lyrical novel of family and community, and the ties that can both bond and betray; Jonah Man, Chris Narozny’s novel about vaudeville, drug dealing and one-armed jugglers; Andrew Cotto’s Outerborough Blues, a mystery set in early 1990s Brooklyn, Trevor Aaronson’s The Terror Factory, based on his Mother Jones cover story about how the FBI uses informants to manufacture terror plots,; Mark Van de Valle’s Trailer Park Nation, about trailers in the American psyche; and Diana Wagman’s brilliantly bizarre novel, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets.

Happy New Year to everyone! See you in 2012.

While Caesar is initially trying to earn an honest living at the neighborhood watering hole, his world quickly unravels. In addition to being haunted by his past, including a brother who is intent on settling an old family score, Caesar is being hunted down by a mysterious nemesis known as The Orange Man. Adding to this combustible mix, Caesar is a white man living in a deep-rooted African American community with decidedly mixed feelings about his presence. In the course of his search for the French girl’s missing brother, Caesar tumbles headlong into the shadowy depths of his newly adopted neighborhood, where he ultimately uncovers some of its most sinister secrets.

Taking place over the course of a single week, Outerborough Blues is a tightly paced and gritty urban noir saturated with the rough and tumble atmosphere of early 1990s Brooklyn.

Andrew Cotto has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Salon.com, Teachers and Writers magazine and The Good Men Project. He has an MFA in creative writing from The New School. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

UPDATE–Dan Cafaro of Atticus Books, who I spoke to on Friday, has a very well thought out post on our free giveaway of Death Wishing.

This is the second Bernays title we have published, along with his classic 1928 work Propaganda.

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