Just re-reading and mulling over Melville’s “Benito Cereno”–one of the few American short stories of the 19h century that stands up well in a comparison with Kleist’s short stories.

Hi all! Just a quick note to let you know that Jesse and I will be working on posting up a couple of new projects this weekend. The first, Mark Spitzer’s newest bad-ass book, Age of the Demon Tools. Writes Skip Fox of Spitzer’s new book:

Triage of daily life and text, mines in the headlines, flat faced mutancy in the details of man’s folly and avarice, rapacity and ballsack confusion, set against an individual pastorale amid the cowpies, text addled by brush, “angry vines,” and “channel cats with mongo backs,” sluiced with wind and wave, in turn set against the maw of what increasingly seems to no longer exist, green world of birdsong, face of simple intention, word strong as bough, and so forth (and yet . . .). Text with an edge like a serial killer’s holiday in a target rich environment, the monkeyward of Washington, or the plains of Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate board rooms and city council meetings clotted with preening inanities in the form of the human, etc., the text’s language slick as a lineman’s clit, doffing a nod to the warbled wordexitry of Burgess and the wee ones who sleep in eaves, all woven with the witchery of electronic missives, condensing words to mush. Spitzer in battle-rut (Moloch panting beneath.)

—Skip Fox, author of At That

More today and tomorrow from us!

50 Drawings to Murder Magic
by Antonin Artaud
Edited with a Preface by Evelyne Grossman
Donald nicholson-Smith, trans.
Seagull Books, London.
Hardback, 86 pages.

This volume is a moving and challenging compilation of drawings executed (irony intended) between 1946 to 1948 in elementary school exercise books. The selection of drawings was done by Artaud for a publication planned by Loeb Gallery in Paris, and the poet wrote a text (his last) to accompany it. Artaud died before the project could be brought to fruition. The design of this book is wonderful: the cover accurately reproduces the blue of the student notebooks of the time along with its cloyingly sentimental drawing of fields and haystacks, and on the verso tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We also see the smudges, tears, stains that will be mirrored on the yellowing, blue-gridded pages within. What strikes us is the utter poverty of the poet forced to use such humble media for his writings and designs. We witness his meat machine–even then secretly sapped and undermined by cancer–as the vision trembles through the muted explosions of chemical-induced electricity to cause the muscles to expand and contract with varying degrees of delicacy. We see the piercing of the page–stabbed 11–perhaps 12 times–in ecstacy, frustration, or as part of a private “gris-gris” ritual–by the poet, who includes nails, thorns, and other emblems of ritualistic transfixions in his cruel drawings. The drawings themselves give us glimpses of the poet’s penis, of his thyroid, of lung-like sacks collapsed upon a scream; of bodies dissected and exploded and simplified to maps of layered graphite, and of electrical armature-like processes connected by sinister, exfoliating wires. There is also a heroic landscape of words written, smeared, struck through, that encase the drawings.

Now I know
the objective plastic power
of the breath

says Antonin Artaud, and in our contemplation–our encounter–with this wonderful volume–we know it too.

Ahadada for Obama! Ahadada for Obama! Now More than Ever! Keep it before the people! Jess

Happy Easter from all of us down here at Ahadada Books!

We’re happy to announce that the latest offering from Alison Croggon is now available for download!

Check out all of our Ebook offerings in our catalog by clicking here. Read more about Alison Croggon via her author profile.

Torque is the third release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series edited by Catherine Daly — it’s the eighteenth online chapbook offered by Ahadada.

We’ve posted notices at both our MySpace and Small Press Exchange sites.

Learn more about Alison by clicking here!

Happy to mention the kindness of M.L.Webber to include three of my poems and a brief meditation on a mule I knew in the latest issue of Sugar Mule e-magazine of poetry. I appear in the company of some interesting names—all new to me. Take a look here!—Jess

An exciting new option will be open to our authors beginning next month and that will be publishing via the print on demand services of Bookmobile. We’re planning to keep a good part of our past catalogue permanently in print in this manner, and we also expect to publish some exciting new manuscripts by Michael Heller and Skip Fox as well as some anthology projects that have been on the back burner for far too long. More soon on this subject. Jess

Lindley Williams Hubbel writes that two of his greatest influences are Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. Search as I might, I see no trace of either in his writing. Perhaps he knew very well that certain models are only to be admired–like looking at the moon in a mirror and not expecting to take it home when one slips the mirror in one’s pocket.

Lindley Williams Hubbell was born in Connecticut in 1901 and died at the age of 93. He was educated by tutors and was Long a resident of Kyoto, where beginning in 1953 he worked as a professor of English literature at Doshisha University. He became a Japanese citizen in 1960, taking the name Hayashi Shuseki. His volumes of poetry have been published by Yale, Knopf, Alan Swallow, and others.

Jesse first wrote about Hubbell in this blog in January 2006. Check out his post here.

We are pleased to begin offering Hubbell’s works (published by the Ikuta Press). Check out our shop here.

If you have any questions, or would like to order a book — feel free to contact us!

Pleased to announce that David Annwn’s Bela Fawr’s Cabaret is now cleanly birthed from the presses and properly celebrated by the likes of your humble correspondent, Joe Zanghi, and Joe Zanghi’s landlord, a kindly gent of 78 summers that Joe regularly rescues from sidewalk mishaps and deposits safe and sound to sleep it off in his room. We all three enjoyed lifting a glass or two or three–Joe and his friend to the thrills and perils of skiing in the Japanese Alps,–and me (secretly) to brothers Alan Halsey, and David Annwn, and sister Geraldine Monk in the distant islands of England. The Muse clearly dances in Bela Fawr’s Cabaret. With Mark Spitzer’s raging demotic and David Annwn’s multi-lingual riffs, we truly have defined for us yet another conceptual space in which the dance of the intellect may continue. Not a bad night to tie one on a bit! Jess