Goodreads Giveaway Complete

Congratulations to Karen Mikusak from Detroit, Michigan. She won a free paperback copy of The Irreal Reader: Fiction & Essays from The Cafe Irreal in Guide Dog Books' recent Goodreads giveaway. The Irreal Reader is currently available in paperback and Kindle formats.

Czech Literary Portal & Goodreads Giveaway

The paperback edition of The Irreal Reader: Fiction & Essays from The Cafe Irreal was officially released today and mentioned in the Czech Literary Portal. A lot went into the creation of this anthology; naturally we're very proud of it. Below are a few different places where you can check it out. Reviews are appreciated!


Also, there is a Goodreads giveaway for a free copy of the book that will run until the end of the month. Enter to win here.

The Irreal Reader

Available now from Guide Dog Books: The Irreal Reader collects the best fiction from The Cafe Irreal.

CafeIrrealLarge

Order direct or purchase from Amazon.

The Cafe Irreal: International Imagination, a pioneering web-based literary magazine, first went online in 1998 with the intention of publishing a type of fantastic fiction most often associated with writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe and Jorge Luis Borges. To this end, it has published more than 250 authors from over 30 countries. In the course of the past fifteen years, it has also seen its editors nominated for a World Fantasy Award and been named by Writer’s Digest as one of the Top 30 Short Story Markets.

In this anthology, edited by G.S. Evans and Alice Whittenburg, Guide Dog Books presents a selection of the fiction and essays from The Cafe Irreal that take us most definitively into the realm of the Irreal. These include pieces by Diploma de Honor Konex winner Ana María Shua (Argentina), Michal Ajvaz (winner of the Magnesia Litera prize in the Czech Republic), Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic, and Pushcart Prize winners Bruce Holland Rogers and Caitlin Horrocks.

White Indians

The launch for GDB's next book, Michael Gills' White Indians, is on Thursday, October 24, at The King's English Bookshop. In this memoir, Gills' recounts his experience as a participant at a Native American Sundance ceremony on Zuni Territory, New Mexico, in July 2005. Here are a couple of blurbs:

“Gills’ beautifully written prose in White Indians combines his warring natures—the daring macho infused crazy man with the earth-reverent husband and father. This book is a reminder that we Americans still live on a continent that recently was a wilderness, and that we all possess an atavistic need to interact with it. For those of us not so good as Michael Gills at camping, hiking, and white-water rafting, he’s offered us a thrilling armchair version.”
 —Diane Wakoski, author The Diamond Dog
“Each word is a spark, every sentence a sizzling fuse. The whole of White Indians is a sun-white conflagration, cleanly and cleansing. The intensity of this visionary memoir is the core of its message. Michael Gills sojourned in the heart of light and he has returned to his home world with that light still clinging to his every utterance. I shall never be the only reader grateful for his revelations—and a little frightened of them.”
 —Fred Chappell, Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories

White Indians will be available in paperback and ebook formats. Please check out the book's Goodreads page.

The Irreal Reader: Cover

Coming in November from GDB . . .


The Irreal Reader: Description & TOC

In November, Guide Dog Books will release The Irreal Reader: Fiction & Essays from The Cafe Irreal, edited by G.S. Evans and Alice Whittenburg. We're very excited about this anthology and it's been a long time in the making. Here is the cover description and the full table of contents.

The Cafe Irreal: International Imagination, a pioneering web-based literary magazine, first went online in 1998 with the intention of publishing a type of fantastic fiction most often associated with writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe and Jorge Luis Borges. To this end, it has published more than 250 authors from over 30 countries. In the course of the past fifteen years, it has also seen its editors nominated for a World Fantasy Award and been named by Writer’s Digest as one of the Top 30 Short Story Markets. In this anthology, Guide Dog Books presents a selection of the fiction and essays from The Cafe Irreal that take us most definitively into the realm of the Irreal. These include pieces by Diploma de Honor Konex winner Ana María Shua (Argentina), Michal Ajvaz (winner of the Magnesia Litera prize in the Czech Republic), Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic, and Pushcart Prize winners Bruce Holland Rogers and Caitlin Horrocks.

CONTENTS

Preface

FICTIONS

TERRY DARTNALL
The Santa Fe

ANA MARÍA SHUA
From Geisha House
From Botany of Chaos

EWALD MURRER
From The Diary of Mr. Pinke

KEVIN SEXTON
The Spindler 

KUZHALI MANICKAVEL
Kisi Shayar Something Something
Cats and Fish
Because We Are Precious and Brave

CHARLES SIMIC
Seven Prose Poems

NORMAN LOCK
Unreal Geography
The Cruelty of Poetry

VANESSA GEBBIE
Storm Warning
The Note-Takers

PETER CHERCHES 
From Mr. Deadman

JIŘÍ KRATOCHVÍL
A Sad Play
From the Pulps

PAUL BLANEY
The Restaurant
I Came Highly Recommended
I Dreamed and in My Dream
As I Walked Out
How the Universe Works

GREG JENKINS
I Feel My Temperature Risin'

CAITLIN HORROCKS
Herzenboogen's Theory of Collective Truth

GUIDO EEKHAUT
Just Words

GIRIJA TROPP
Cellular

MICHAL AJVAZ
The City and Heaven

LEE WILLIAMS
The Kn!ghts of Slipway Seven

GLEYVIS CORO
The Fever

BOB THURBER
Shuteye

ALEXANDRA BERKOVÁ
From Magoria

D.E. LUCAS
Of the Minotaur

B E TURNER
The Comedy of Art

MAURICIO ROSALES
Poster

RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
Openings

HARRY WHITE
The Best of the Besht

BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS
Witness
The Ledger Angel

BRIAN BISWAS
A Betrayal

JIRI VALOCH
semantical studies

J.B. MULLIGAN
The Man in the Red Raincoat
The Message
A White Chair

UTAHNA FAITH
All Girl Band

EMILIO MARTINEZ
News from Burgundia

D. HARLAN WILSON
Giraffe

DAVID RAY
Seven Pieces of Meat

VIT ERBAN
A Small, Cold Sun
The Belly of the Centipede

STEPHANIE HAMMER
Mayoral Morbitas

PETER GRANDBOIS
Sewing 

TOMÁŠ PŘIDAL
From The Coconut Ape

JOSÉ CHAVES
All I Misunderstood as a Man Makes
Complete Sense as a Parrot

THEORETICAL WRITINGS

G.S. EVANS
What Is Irrealism?

ALICE WHITTENBURG
On International Imagination

GARRETT ROWLAN
The Waking Dream: A Review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

G.S. EVANS
Irrealism Is Not a Surrealism: A Consideration of Analogon #32

GARRETT ROWLAN
Irrealism and the Visual Arts

G.S. EVANS
From “American Irrealism and the Cult of Experience”

DEAN SWINFORD
From “Defining Irrealism: Scientific Development and Allegorical Possibility”

G.S. EVANS
A Response to “Defining Irrealism” 

DEAN SWINFORD
A Response to “A Response to ‘Defining Irrealism’”

G.S. EVANS
Irrealism and the Dream-State

ALICE WHITTENBURG
From “Finding the Strange in the Familiar: Irreal Stories by Women Writers”

G.S. EVANS
Magical Realism and Its Meanings: A Not So Necessary Confusion

GARRETT ROWLAN

Irrealism and Ambient Music

G.S. EVANS
This Could Be a Pipe: Foucault, Irrealism and Ceci n'est pas une pipe

G.S. EVANS AND ALICE WHITTENBURG
After Kafka: Kafka Criticism and Scholarship as a Resource in an Attempt to Promulgate a New Literary Genre

Afterword

Revolutionary Brain on Kindle


Harold Jaffe's Revolutionary Brain: Essays & Quasi-Essays is now available on Kindle. Get it for $2.99 for a limited time.

Also check out the Kindle edition of Jaffe's Anti-Twitter, currently ranked #1 in the Satire category at Amazon. It is available as a free download for the next 24 hours.

Monstrous Creatures for FREE

For a limited time, Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy through Essays, Articles and Reviews, is available for FREE on Kindle. Here's a description of the book:

"An entertaining, eclectic chronicle of modern fantastical fiction, Monstrous Creatures delivers incisive commentary, reviews, and essays pertaining to permutations of the monstrous, whether it’s other people’s monsters, personal monsters, or monstrous thoughts. A two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, Jeff VanderMeer is one of speculative fiction’s foremost voices. For the past 20 years, he has not only written weird literary fiction translated into 20 languages, but written about it extensively, influencing the way people think about fantasy through reviews in major papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as through interviews, thoughtful essays, blog posts, teaching, and guest-speaking. Monstrous Creatures, a follow-up to his 2004 nonfiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, collects all of his major nonfiction from the past five years, including such controversial pieces as “The Romantic Underground,” “The Triumph of the Good,” and “The Language of Defeat”. Interviews with writers like Margo Lanagan and China Miéville are an added bonus, creating a dialogue with VanderMeer’s own interpretations of the monstrous in the fantastical."

Possible Architect 9 & 10

Episodes 9 and 10 are now available at the website for Lance Olsen's Architectures of Possibility. Professor, critic and novelist Davis Schneiderman talks about writing and publishing in the age of digital distraction and auto summarizes Alice in Wonderland in 85 words.

Praise for Revolutionary Brain

Here are some recent blurbs from interviews of Harold Jaffe's Revolutionary Brain:

"Both alarming and playful, Revolutionary Brain is an accessible read that offers neither authoritative explanations nor easy resolutions to today’s problems of digital overload; instead, the book, by its own example, attempts to illustrate how art and activism can shock us out of complacency." New Orleans Review

"[I]t is what Jaffe does with others’ words that makes his writing riveting. Along with poignant, startling, disturbing." San Diego Gay & Lesbian News

"I found myself pondering his words and meanings on every page. It was enjoyable; it was thought-provoking, at times it was comedic, and one that I will need to read many times to get the full gist of his meanings." San Diego Free Press

Interview with Harold Jaffe

Harold Jaffe has in interview in the latest issue of Rampike, a longstanding innovative Canadian-American journal, in which he talks extensively about his latest book, Revolutionary Brain. Here's the cover description:

In this timely collection of essays and "quasi-essays," acclaimed novelist and critic Harold Jaffe explores the intricate vicissitudes of millennial culture. Gesturing, in a philosophical shorthand, toward a kind of pop Armageddon, Revolutionary Brain is at once thesis, allegory, and surreal comedy, demonstrating just how far we, and the natural world we have debased, have fallen. Obsessed with technology, we are incapable of reconstructing ourselves. By way of Jaffe's elegant prose and perfect pitch, our collective disability is laid bare at the 11th hour. Revolutionary Brain is a powerful cry for a brave new aesthetics that turns towards, not away, from our tormented globe.

Technologized Desire on Kindle

D. Harlan Wilson's Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction, is now available on Kindle. The Nook will follow in the next week or so.

Here's the Table of Contents.

Here's the book description:

In Technologized Desire, D. Harlan Wilson measures the evolution of the human condition as it has been represented by postcapitalist science fiction, which has consistently represented the body and subjectivity as ultraviolent, pathological phenomena. Operating under the assumption that selfhood is a technology—i.e., a creative projection from the body encompassing everything from language to electronic machinery—Wilson studies the emergence of selfhood in philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari), fiction (William S. Burroughs' cut-up novels and Max Barry's Jennifer Government), and cinema (Army of Darkness, Vanilla Sky, and the Matrix trilogy) in an attempt to portray the schizophrenic rigor of twenty-first century mediatized life. We are obligated by the pathological unconscious to always choose to be enslaved by capital and its hi-tech arsenal. The universe of consumer-capitalism, Wilson argues, is an illusory prison from which there is no escape—despite the fact that it is illusory.

Technologized Desire on Kindle/Nook


D. Harlan Wilson's book of literary and cultural criticism, Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction, will be available on Kindle and Nook soon. Here are a few blurbs and passages from some reviews:
"A common accompanying theme ... of postcapitalist science fiction is dystopian post-humanism: a merging of the biological self with technology with disastrous global consequences. Such stories swarm with clones, cyborgs, and virtual realities. These latter stories have a tendency to dehumanize the human, many seeming to strive to answer the question, 'What is humanity?' while characters plug or jack or dial into virtual, highly technologized existences. With this backdrop of science fiction, along with that of decades of culture, philosophy, politics, and history as its base, and expanding his science fiction data field to include cinema as the prevailing mass medium for such fiction, prolific fiction and non-fiction author D. Harlan Wilson's Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction is an ambitious undertaking, analyzing the currents of all these information flows and examining them for patterns and meaning with a keen, postmodern eye." The New York Review of Science Fiction
"With or without choice, Wilson's technologized subjects explore the possibilities left them through 'science fiction texts [...] that can be read as technocultural phenomena as well as sources that read into the nature of technoculture.' This is the fruitful outcome of Wilson's project—a series of deft and interesting analyses of the ways in which specific sf texts map the position of the technologized self within the postmodern world ... I would recommend the book highly to anyone interested in any of the texts under analysis and for those interested in postcapitalism or sf as a proscriptive genre. Although the level of theoretical engagement would make Technologized Desire a difficult text for all but the most advanced graduate students, I could easily see using it in the classroom as a model for graduate students on how to integrate multiple theories by multiple theorists into a persuasive argument." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
"Technologized Desire proves itself to be a rich addition to the growing canon of 21st-century critical theory and literary criticism. Wilson is an author who expresses a clear concern for the future; his book is an urgent text of keen observation and wide-reaching social commentary that warrants nothing less than a careful, thoughtful read." Rain Taxi
"Wilson's text serves not only as a well-informed addition to science fiction criticism and theory, but also as a critique of postmodem society and the direction it is headed. Utilizing examples from postcapitalist films, novels, and comic books, Wilson provides a dynamic analysis of science fiction as a way to view postmodern capitalism and its effects on society and individuals." FemSpec
"Postmodern SF, Wilson suggests, has recovered from the panic of cyberpunk and begun to treat the human as body as a commodity-self that can free itself from the technological ... Ultimately, Wilson's book is a quick read, except where he chooses to quote Bukatman and Deleuze-Guattari. It could serve as an entry into SF and postmodern fiction and film." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
"As time goes on, will humanity become less human? Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction is a discussion of science fiction and its relation to the future of mankind and its relationship to technology. Analyzing the works of many writers, D. Harlan Wilson brings readers some original philosophy about the conclusions we can draw for the future of mankind, by simply looking at science fiction. Technologized Desire is an utterly fascinating read that deserves a place in any literary studies collection." Midwest Book Review
"By and large, his interpretations are right on the money: Wilson's analyses are almost always rich, insightful, and convincing. Thus, Crowe's and Raimi's films demonstrate the impossibility of a 'natural' self even while guilefully suggesting the opposite; Burroughs' trilogy advances postcapitalist (i.e., hypercapitalist) 'reality'; and the Wachowskis' MATRIX films recapitulate all of this with an eye toward 'the futurological dimension of a postcapitalist dystopia,' as well as the history of science fiction itself. In addition, Wilson's key concern—that capitalist critique be added to the otherwise exemplary work begun by Bukatman—constitutes a valuable contribution to recent scholarship on postmodern science fiction." Science Fiction Studies
"Wilson mobilized a pantheon of twentieth century commentators from Freud to Benjamin, to Baudrillard and Lacan, to Jameson and Zizek, to, finally, Deleuze and Guattari—'poet laureates of technocapitalism' ... [D]espite being a deceptively concise book, Technologized Desire ... is a more than worthy addition to sf scholarship. I can appeal both to those deeply entrenched in the discourses of capitalist posthumanity and to beginners whom the book will send outward to other critical texts invoked by Wilson." Extrapolation
"In Technologized Desire, the cultural pathologies that mark the panic ecstasy and terminal doom of the posthuman condition are powerfully rehearsed in the language of science fiction. Here, images of prosthetic subjects, zombies, cut-ups and armies of the medieval dead actually slip off the pages of literature to become the terminal hauntology of these technologized times. Technologized Desire is nothing less than a brilliant data screen of future memories. Read it well: it's a survival guide for bodies flatlined by the speed of accelerating technology." Arthur Kroker, author of The Postmodern Scene and Panic Encyclopedia
"Describing an impressively wide arc from high-toned cultural theory to cyberpunk fiction to techno-centered cinema, Wilson advances his theory that 'the only choice available to the postmodern subject ... is rooted in a dependency on ... the ultraviolent schizophrenic production of the commodity-self.' Technologized Desire is a bright, brazen, evocative reading of technology, the body, and the art that is inaccurately labeled science 'fiction'." Harold Jaffe, author of Straight Razor, 15 Serial Killers and Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerilla Writer's Guide to Post-Milennial Culture
"D. Harlan Wilson’s Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction is a fantastic book. One of the finest theoretical examinations in the field, it is also eminently readable and highly incisive. With this, Wilson has written a major work, one that will stand out (and above) in science fiction studies. Both great fun and wonderfully intelligent, how could you go wrong? Highly recommended.” Gary Hoppenstand, editor of The Journal of Popular Culture
“Postmodern analysis of science fiction doesn’t get any better than this. Jump in and see how far down the rabbit hole goes.” William Irwin, editor of The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real and More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded