Author: augurybooks

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Alicia Jo Rabins tour dates for Fruit Geode

Upcoming Performances

Saturday October 6 – Portland, OR
Fruit Geode book launch/performance!
@ Mother Foucault’s Bookshop with fiction writer Mat Johnson
523 SE Morrison St.
7 pm, free

October 20-21 – Seaview, WA
Airstream Poetry Festival @ Sou’wester!
Alicia reads, performs & teaches @ this festival at the inimitable Sou’wester Lodge
more details here
$15, call (360) 642-2542 for lodging or more info!

Thursday, October 25 – Northampton, MA
Fruit Geode launch reading/performance
@ Iconica Social Club, 7 pm door, 7:30 show
BYOB, snacks & drinks available for purchase

Sunday, October 28 – Fruit Geode NYC launch reading/performance!!!
14th St Y Theatre, 344 E 14th St
An evening of Jewish Women Writers from the West
with novelist Rebecca Clarren & poet Lynn Melnick
Q&A to follow
free and open to public, details coming shortly

Saturday, November 10 – Portland, OR
Alicia reads @ the Portland Book Festival!

Thursday, November 15 – San Francisco
Fruit Geode launch reading/performance
at Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative
3130 24th St, SF (in the Mission)
a double book-launch with the wonderful Jake Marmer!!!
free!

Sunday, November 25 – Baltimore
Fruit Geode book launch reading and performance!!!!
at The Ivy Bookshop
6080 Falls Road
Baltimore, MD 21209
5 pm, free and open to the public ** note this is an afternoon reading**

Monday, November 26 – NYC
Alicia reads & performs at The Poetry Project
131 E 10th Street @ 2nd Ave
w/Vi Khi Nao
8 pm, $8/$5 members, tickets here

Wednesday, November 28 – Hadley, MA
class visit, Mt Holyoke college

Thursday, November 29 – Exeter, NH
@ the Word Barn
66 Newfields Rd, Exeter, NH 03833
details tba, open to the public!

December 23-27, Birmingham UK
Alicia reads & performs at Limmud UK!
Open to conference attendees only

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Free Books for Do-Gooders

Welcome, do-gooders! You’ve landed here because you’ve donated your time or money to a progressive cause and are looking for some summer reading!

Augury Books and Brooklyn Arts Press want to thank you for your good work. We are attempting to find ways we can make a difference, which means supporting individuals and organizations that resist, stand strong, speak out, demonstrate, and support each other. Not just in a single way, but in whatever myriad ways we can, because a lot of what we care about is under attack and it won’t end by utilizing one solution.

So in the spirit of supporting those who are helping others, we invite you to:
*visit the Augury Books and BAP websites and make your selection from the authors listed below
*let us know if you prefer an ebook or a pdf of your selected book
*email us (augurybooks@gmail.com) a screenshot of your donation receipt to any of the following social organizations (or any other like-minded progressive groups); or email us a paragraph detailing any current activist roles you hold in your communities.
*get a free book!

Please allow up to 2 weeks for books to arrive.

Some of our favorite orgs: Ali Forney Center, Coalition for the Homeless, Doctors Without Borders, Equal Justice Initiative, The Innocence Project, Lamda Legal, Planned Parenthood, National Center for Trans Equality, RAINN.org, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), Sierra Club, Social Justice Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, World Central Kitchen.

Thank you!

Kate Angus & Joe Pan

__________________________________________

Augury Books
www.augurybooks.com
augurybooks@gmail.com

Authors

Arisa White
Carey McHugh
Halina Duraj
Joe Pan
Justine Post
Randall Horton
Sara Schaff

Brooklyn Arts Press
www.brooklynartspress.com
info@brooklynartspress.com

Authors

Alex Green
Alexander Boldizar
Anaïs Duplan
Carol Guess
Daniel Borzutzky
Dominique Townsend
Erika Jo Brown
Heather Morgan
Jay Besemer
Joe Fletcher
John F Buckley
Martin Ott
Martin Rock
Matt Runkle
Matt Shears
Michael Ernest Sweet
Michelle Gil-Montero
Noah Eli Gordon
Paige Taggart
Seth Landman

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Announcing Our 2019 Titles

Augury Books is delighted to announce our 2019 titles! Congratulations to t’ai freedom ford whose poetry collection & more black, chosen from our January Open Reading Period, will be published in the spring, and Arisa White, whose hybrid-memoir Who’s Your Daddy? will be published in the fall. 

This year we received over 550 submissions during our open reading period and were thrilled to discover so many manuscripts of great promise. We commend the many talented authors who sent us their work and are grateful for the opportunity to read their manuscripts!

About the author:

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is available from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

About the book:

From the author: & more black is a collection of what ford calls “Black-ass sonnets” that take their cues from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets. For ford, the word “American” conjures the spirit of her ancestors. In that way, the poems are rebellious, outspoken and, as she says, “take no shit.” They investigate Black art, Black bodies, Black sexuality, and Black language, unapologetically and with a capital B.

 

About the author:

Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White is the author of Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved and Black Pearl. Her book You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened was nominated for the 29th Lambda Literary Award and the chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer and trans people of color. She serves on the board of directors for Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor at Colby College. arisawhite.com

About the book:

Arisa White’s Who’s Your Daddy?, a hybrid memoir combining poetry and creative nonfiction, is a meditation on paternal absences, intergenerational trauma, and toxic masculinity. Who’s Your Daddy? asks us to consider how the relationships we are born into can govern us, even through absence, and shape the dynamics we find and forge as we grow. White lyrically moves across distance and time, from Brooklyn to California to Guyana. Her book enacts rituals that plumb the interior reaches of the heart to assemble disconnected and estranged parts into something whole, tender, and strong. 

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AWP 2018, Tampa

Thanks for everyone that stopped by our booth at AWP in Tampa this year, we had a blast meeting new folks, seeing some old friends, dining in Ybor City, and selling a lot of Augury books!

Thanks also to everyone who brought soaps and other toiletries from their hotels to our booth, as we were able to drop off several donation bags at the Bonnie Center at Alpha House, which helps homeless pregnant woman and women with children. You can find photos over at the Brooklyn Artists Helping tumblr.

 

 

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Over the Rainbow Book List Selection for Arisa White

We are very proud to announce that Arisa White’s You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened has been selected to appear on the 2018 Over the Rainbow Recommended Book List. This list of outstanding books is selected by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. The Over the Rainbow committee has this to say about You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened: “A gorgeous, intelligent poetry collection from Lambda Literary Award-nominated White. These poems burst with emotion, soaring to ecstatically loving highs and capturing the sorrows of longing and black lesbian life in a vicious world. A beautifully realized and joyful read that deserves a place in poetry collections and the canon of lesbian literature.”

Congratulations to Arisa White and our heartfelt thanks to the Over the Rainbow committee.

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"Diatomaceous Earth" by Sara Schaff on Garo

Garo‘s apropos slogan, “Work that connects people to the land and each other”, did just that with their feature of “Diatomaceous Earth” by Augury’s forthcoming author Sara Schaff last Friday.

“Diatomaceous Earth” is from Schaff’s short story collection, Say Something Nice About Me, our prose selection for 2016 which we will publish this fall.

Like much of Schaff’s prose, “Diatomaceous Earth” is a haunting, naturalistic tale, heavy on dialogue, showcasing the many forms intimacy between two people can take.

After combing through online chat rooms devoted to households plagued by indoor ants, Ella, Stephen, and I finally settled on a remedy that sounded feasible and only mildly dangerous: diatomaceous earth, a powdery, porous substance that occurs naturally, is safe near food preparation, but illegal to sell in Ann Arbor. I purchased a bottle online.

When it arrived, days after my afternoon with Ella and Stephen, Gerry was downstairs with me. He thought we should celebrate me being done with all my papers. Also, he felt hopeful about getting the job in Dearborn. “The interview went great. They responded well to my enthusiasm.”

Gerry’s enthusiasm. My secret, gloomy future. I guess that’s why he and I had ended up in bed again, which is where we were when I heard the mail delivered. I put on a robe to go outside, and when I returned to the bedroom, I held out the package to Gerry. “I’m being proactive about my ant problem, see?”

Together, we laid the trail of diatomaceous earth: behind the toaster, leading from and to the hole Ella had spotted. “That’s where they’re coming from,” I told Gerry. “They’ll come out, gather the powder on their little bodies, and without realizing it, take it back with them to their nest.”

“And then?”

I shuddered, in spite of my new conviction. “Eventually, they all dry out, become little husks of their former selves.”

Sara Schaff’s fiction has appeared in FiveChapters, Southern Indiana Review, Carve Magazine, and elsewhere. A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Michigan, she has taught in China, Colombia, and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling. Sara is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College. Find links to her work at saraschaff.com.

More of Sara Schaff:

Sara Schaff’s website

Author Page

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"Wee Hours and Other Stories" by prose finalist Ellen Winter, and a tech apology

**Below is an excerpt from prose finalist Ellen Winter, which, due to a glitch in technology and spam folders on our end, we’re getting to you a few weeks late. We hope you’ll take a second to read and enjoy Ellen’s prose as you did our other finalists.**

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“The Little Mission” from Wee Hours and Other Stories

Swede was slowing for the cattle guard that marked the final fence line when something shifted in the clearing below him, catching his eye. He braked hard, cranking down a window sluggish with mud. At first glance it all looked normal enough. The pasture was a small one, backed by woodlands and divided by Little Mission Creek. There were a couple of outbuildings he’d never found a use for, an old loading pen that held cattle in its day. The creek ran right through the middle, all but a glint of it hidden by the trees.

In the shadow of one of those willows, a large animal was trying to be still. It was a horse, a well-groomed bay, head lowered to the ground as if grazing. The gelding was saddled—that was the first thing that struck Swede as odd. And it wasn’t grass he was nibbling at, but the collar of a woman’s shirt. The woman lay on her side, hands tucked beneath a cheek. She looked peaceful, so much so that Swede nearly opted to drive on by. But most folks wouldn’t nap so close to a roadway. He would have to investigate. Pulling onto the grassy shoulder, he parked.

The truck’s heavy door opened with a screech and the horse spooked. Swede approached the woman with stealth, worried he might catch her in an act of a private nature. When he was close enough he crouched, hands on knees, peering cautiously into her face. It was Elsie Tarnower; Swede should have known that by the oversized clothing. Elsie was fond of menswear. Long-legged Wranglers were cinched at the waist by a wide leather belt. Her shirt was a well-worn flannel. Pointed flaps held the pockets closed with pearly snaps. If there were breasts under there, Elsie did her best to conceal them.

It was the look on her face that undid him. Only babies should be capable of such repose. That peacefulness was odd to see on the likes of Elsie Tarnower. She was a big gal and a busy one, proud of the fact that she could outwork most of the neighborhood men. She’d been called antsy by some and hyperactive by others. One rancher had gone so far as to say she was spastic—annoyed, no doubt, that she’d been hired by someone else.

Swede tried whistling. Then he tried shuffling his feet. Spurts of dust settled on her head and shoulders, but Elsie Tarnower was unperturbed. He called her name, softly at first and then louder. Bending close, he whispered a string of obscenities in her ear. If she was faking, he’d know it by now.

Ellen Winter’s short stories have appeared in a number of magazines including Fiction, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Brain, Child. Her first collection, The Price You Pay: Stories, was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and went on to be published by Southern Methodist University Press. A second collection is being circulated, and there are a couple of novels in the works. Awards include fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Bread Loaf. She lives with her husband and three children in Livingston, MT, where she makes a living as a housekeeper.

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"Woman, Running Late, in a Dress" by prose finalist Dallas Woodburn

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What happened was, William had a stroke. A mild one, the doctor said. But he was out for a few minutes. I found him in the living room, collapsed beside my bag of knitting, his cheek against the carpet, the television blaring Larry King. The window was open; from outside came the rumbling of a truck, the laughter of the children next door playing in their front yard. It was an early autumn evening, hot and dry from the Santa Ana winds. The breeze coming in through the window offered no relief from the stifling heaviness in the air.

Of course I was scared when I saw William like that. Of course my heart started beating fast and I ran over to my husband and stroked his face and tried to wake him. Of course I called 9-1-1 and cried into the phone for an ambulance.

 
Later, when I sat beside William’s hospital bed and he reached over and squeezed my hand and smiled, I felt relief like none I’d ever felt before. That I wasn’t alone in this world. That he hadn’t left me yet.

But then he came home from the hospital, and he started going on and on about God and Jesus and being “saved” and “seeing the light.” At first I thought it was just a phase, just something he had to get out of his system. But it’s been four months now, and if anything he’s just getting more belligerent about it. He wants me to go to church with him. He wants the two of us to get baptized together. He keeps a Bible on the nightstand and reads passages out loud before bed, like a preacher in a movie. I always roll over and pretend to be asleep. Any response from me would just encourage him, make him dig in his heels even more. William is stubborn as the waves crashing onto the beach, breaking rocks down into sand.

 

Dallas Woodburn, a recent Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing,
has published fiction and nonfiction in Zyzzyva, Fourth River, The
Nashville Review, The Los Angeles Times, North Dakota Quarterly, and
Monkeybicycle, among others. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she
won second place in the American Fiction Prize and her work appears in
American Fiction Volume 13: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by
American Writers (New Rivers Press). Her short story collection was
previously a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short
Fiction and the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize. She is the founder of
Write On! For Literacy, an organization that empowers young people
through reading and writing endeavors: www.writeonbooks.org.

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"Girl with a Goat's Voice" by prose finalist Nate Liederbach

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“Selvin the Christmas Elf” from Girl with a Goat’s Voice

Winter bedtime legend, our family favorite, of Selvin the Christmas Elf—how Grams tells the tale: Dear sweet Selvin driving his pretend-dead girlfriend south to Arizona and going in no direction but beams bouncing ragged over cracked two-lane highways, to that place where cliffs go to die, where cliffs drag themselves like the worms of Dune across rock seas and deaf clay thirsting—or so Selvin imagines—for newness, for lush grass, for supreme flatness, oh, but finding only heaps of dry ancestry, and on that first night how Selvin the Christmas Elf sleeps with her body in the truck bed, his huskies curled over their shins while an autumn storm converges from Baja to ping the camper shell, winds abiding ever stronger, winds pugilizing, weaving, heave-whistling each window slit and colding every bolt to where, at one point, a terrific gust agitates the axles and Selvin the Christmas Elf thinks the pretend-dead girlfriend has moved—unnerving, sure, but in morning’s drab reality, nope, so Selvin makes a campfire from sodden cardboard as ravens circle like cursed Girl Scouts and he burns everything he can find, burns it into a different earth of vibrating floors of smoke that resuscitate pretend-dead girlfriend, who, with a loose cough, slinks over the tailgate to take up a plastic spoon, to feed them pre-stirred yogurt, its icy nips, and soon their site’s warmed and soon she urges they stripped off those road-spiced North Pole uniforms to fuck gratefully on a rain-beaded truck hood (even though, way before release, Selvin the Christmas Elf, still stuck in that Arctic pall, in that long-gone crevasse of a toy builder’s mind, scowls at the huskies for scampering around their love-making, for chasing chipmunks, for rearing back and boxing, the fruitlessness of their mock battles, which make Selvin think, All life as just play? Is that why I left?), though suddenly now the haze is clearing and beyond the girlfriend’s myth-sharpened ears an unbundling sun reminds Selvin the Christmas Elf to concentrate on this present, on rasping, twining, not violently, but steadily, his tool attuned as horologist finger, as so patiently trained, yes, for he’s the worker who works for wonder alone—or no, better, the man with the plan, the one who escaped, who wouldn’t rectify revolution and individuation, who saw through the hoary-white lies but couldn’t do it alone, had to let her drag him into it, as if it were his idea, as if it were ever his, just like this: he’s done, yanked loose, condom cast on the last smoldering log, all noxious smoke but no chimney, no plate of cookies, nothing to keep it ordered.

Nate Liederbach is the author of the story collections Doing a Bit of Bleeding, Negative Spaces, Beasts You’ll Never See (winner of the 2014 Noemi Book Award for Fiction), and the forthcoming Blessings Galore and Tongues of Men and of Angels: Nonfictions Ataxia. He lives in Eugene, OR and Olympia, WA.  

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"True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape" from prose finalist Micah Perks

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“Ghost Deer” from True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape

Colin’s story:

“This happened before my Dad took off, like a long time ago.” Colin’s blinking a lot, because he just got contacts, and it makes his eyes look big and wet, plus with his reddish brown hair and brown freckles, and the fact that he’s skittish and slim, he looks a lot like a deer himself.

Fiona turns from the sink and says over the rushing water, “What did you say about a deer?”

“Is this your Seder story?” Little My asks.

“It’s just this deer, okay? One day Dad was like, Get your nose out of that video game, Son, we’re going hiking.”

“He never called you son,” Fiona says.

“Whatever. You know I hate hiking. So then we were walking in the gorge, like a long way up, up by Taughannock Falls, and no one else was there because it was like October and grey and cold and no one wanted to be there, obviously. Then we saw this deer. It was tiptoeing along the cliff edge above the falls. When we saw it we were all, Whoa, holy crap! The deer heard us and freaked. It tried to turn around on the ledge or whatever. And it fell off the cliff. Like a long way.” Colin’s face is so pale now his freckles seem to pulse. His eyes blink.

“Are you serious?” Fiona says, turning off the faucet.  Daniel’s shirt floats winey, salty and abandoned in the sink. Fiona’s standing by the table holding the kosher salt. “I thought deer were sure-footed, like cats.”

“It was lying half in that pool at the bottom of the gorge and half on the like, gravel,” Colin says. “Its back was broken or something. It couldn’t move even when we got up close to it, except it’s eyes were rolling around. We realized if we left it there, the coyotes or dogs would get it.”

“Did you call the cops?” Little My asks.

“We put it out of its misery,” Colin says, “or whatever you call it.”

“Coño,” Daniel says. “When did you say this happen?”

“Nobody ever told me this,” Fiona says. “What do you mean you put it out of its misery?”

“Dad was like, ‘Son, you have to put this deer out of its misery.’ And he handed me a big rock.”

 

“Ghost Deer” won and was previously featured in The New Guard’s Machigonne Fiction Contest.

The Los Angeles Times called Micah Perks’ first novel, We Are Gathered Here (1997, St. Martin’s),  “a tightly woven story that is as fanciful as it is grimly real.” Her memoir, Pagan Time, came out in paper in 2009 from Counterpoint, has been translated into Korean and is an audio book from audible.com. In 2010 The San Francisco Chronicle listed it in Best Summer Reading and Adirondack Life listed it as Adirondack Required Reading.  She’s published short stories in Zyzzyva, The Massachusetts Review, and Epoch, amongst many others, and her stories have been anthologized in The Encyclopedia Project, Viz Inter Arts, The Best Underground Fiction and others. Four of her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She has been given multiple residencies at The Blue Mountain Center and received a Saltonstall Foundation For The Arts grant. She won an NEA in 2008 for the first chapter of her novel-in-progress. Recent essays have been published and are forthcoming from The Rumpus andTin House. Micah lives with her family in Santa Cruz California, where she co-directs the creative writing program and is a professor in the Literature Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s at work on a novel.