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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling. Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success—and a movie adaptation—to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurre...
Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle's audacious and gripping debut novel Wolf in White Van is a marvel of storytelling and genuine literary delicacy. Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move. Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. His primary creation, Trace Italian, is an intricate text-role playing game that enables participants far and wide to explore a dystopian America, seeking refuge amidst the ruin. However, when two high school players, Lance and Carrie, extend the game into their reality, the consequences are horrifying, leaving Sean to account for it. Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van invites us to comprehend the depth and intricacy of Sean's life. Told in reverse, the story draws us back to the moment that fundamentally altered Sean’s life as he knows it.
Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa—a small town in the center of the state, the first “a” in Nevada pronounced “ay.” This is the late 1990s, and while the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: It’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy...
Black Sabbath's Master of Reality has maintained remarkable historical status over several generations; it's a touchstone for the directionless, and common coin for young men and women who've felt excluded from the broader cultural economy. John Darnielle hears it through the ears of Roger Painter, a young adult locked in a southern California adolescent psychiatric center in 1985; deprived of his Walkman and hungry for comfort, he explains Black Sabbath as one might describe air to a fish, or love to an android, hoping to convince his captors to give him back his tapes.
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'This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVE Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of mu...
The third collection of deadpan absurdist poetry by a Certified Journeyman Farrier from Montana.
In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether? A novella filled with beauty, terror and strangeness, This Census-Taker is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.
An isolate, protracted surrealism attaches languidly to objects, animals, and emotion in Michael E. Craig's poems of semi-rural outlandishness. Profundity takes its rightful place in the shallow arena: "You can't step out of your tragedy, it wouldn't be a tragedy./ Neither can I./ Together we walk/ and think thoughts in a cornfield. . . ./ A thing cries out from the interior of corn." The reader is embroiled in textural exposition, encountering dark recessions of realism against the relief of interior truth: "Today you strike me as needing something./ So take my ten-thousand-pound typewriter . . . / . . . For here is an older,/ other world, taking almost forty sheep to make one sock./ A serious mist fills my eye. You/ have made me cry." Winsome, ominous vapors arise from the combustion of "dreamish, autobiographical thoughts" with their counterpart, the cosmic laughter provoked by close observation. "A man had been out walking with a very long cigar./ As he passed by me, closely, I could see it/ was actually an eight-inch-long ash/ that he had, perched beautifully between his/ fingers. And that he had passed away./ And that his eyes were gone from his head."