Cover design: Dan Parent. Photo: Thomas J. King.

Here’s Dan Parent’s sharp cover design for Fisherman’s Beach, an ebook coming this spring from CBR Press. Originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1962, the new ebook edition will mark the 50th anniversary of George Vukelich’s potent novel about a struggling Two Rivers, Wisconsin fishing family. The Milwaukee Journal said at the time, “This impressive first novel by George Vukelich has all the turbulence, surge, ebb and, sometimes, serenity of the great body of water which is its setting—Lake Michigan … Every character is as true as life.” The ebook edition features a new Foreword by Doug Moe, columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal and colleague and friend of Vukelich’s. Also included are photos of Two Rivers by photographer Thomas J. King. Watch for excerpts from Fisherman’s Beach forthcoming in Rosebud #52 (March 2012) and Madison Magazine (May 2012).

Book critic Stephanie Bedford in The Capital Times (week of Jan. 4-10) pens some wonderfully trenchant remarks about Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem (now a CBR Press ebook):

Cambridge’s CBR Press has just reissued the short, punchy and funny sci-fi “micro-novel” Redshift: Greenstreem by Cambridge resident Rod Clark. First published in 2000, it’s an unapologetically geeky piece of futuristic sci-fi set in 2093 Los Angeles, in a world where what we quaintly refer to as “the 99 percent” have been enslaved by debt and inflation. These consumer drones inhabit “Redshift,” an area where their whimsical desires, fanned by a constant stream of advertising, can be transformed against their will into binding agreements to purchase. Redshift presents a satirically exaggerated dystopia, but one that pointedly resembles our own here and now. Wonky appendices hark back to other sci-fi classics like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, but Redshift is more intent—if only slightly—on tickling your funnybone than giving you nightmares.

Here’s a first look at the print ad for Fisherman’s Beach, the 1962 novel by Wisconsin author George Vukelich that Cambridge Book Review Press is bringing out in an ebook edition in the spring of 2012. Big thanks to graphic designer Dan Parent for creating this eye-popping ad, and to photographer Thomas J. King for the photo of the lighthouse tower at Two Rivers, Wisconsin (the setting for Fisherman’s Beach). More of King’s striking Two Rivers photos will be included in the ebook. The ad will be appearing in the next issue of Rosebud, due out in March, along with an excerpt from the novel.

Ad designed by Dan Parent.

]]> http://coffeespew.org/2011/12/30/fishermans-beach-the-ad/feed/ 0 Cambridge Book Review Add to Facebook Add to Digg Add to Del.icio.us Add to Stumbleupon Add to Reddit Add to Blinklist Add to Twitter Add to Technorati Add to Yahoo Buzz Add to Newsvine FishermansBeachAD http://coffeespew.org/2011/12/18/brett-alan-sanders-on-redshift-greenstreem/ http://coffeespew.org/2011/12/18/brett-alan-sanders-on-redshift-greenstreem/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:17:15 +0000 cambridge book review http://coffeespew.org/?p=3586 ]]>

We’ve been alerted to some incisive remarks about Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem (now a CBR Press ebook) from writer and literary translator Brett Alan Sanders. The latest issue (51) of Rosebud includes an excerpt from Sanders’ translation of Passionate Nomads by Argentinian novelist Maria Rosa Lojo. Here’s what else Mr. Sanders found in Rosebud 51:

It also contains Appendix I and Appendix II from Clark’s science fiction “micro-novel” Redshift: Greenstreem, originally published in 2000 and just re-issued by the Cambridge (WI) Book Review Press. (It is available from the publisher and from amazon.com.) The book is being touted as “a minor cult classic,” and having just purchased and read a copy I can see why. It has much to say about the present economic crisis (about which it is highly prescient) and about the need for something like the Occupy Wall Street movement that is currently sweeping the nation. Say what you will about the merits of these occupations, the need for concern that they highlight—over the wildly increasing gap between rich and poor both at home and abroad—seems hard to seriously question. Maybe, by some creative mix of rhetoric and protest, we can still save our children and grandchildren from the ill fate prophesied in Clark’s dystopian narrative.

Sketch of poet John Lehman by artist Spencer Walts, from the back cover of "Shrine of the Tooth Fairy."

We’re celebrating the release of the ebook edition of John Lehman’s poetry collection, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, first published by Cambridge Book Review Press in 1998 with illustrations and cover art by Spencer Walts. John stopped by for coffee this morning and we recorded him reading from the collection. Here’s “Clark Street Rag”:

Clark Street Rag / John Lehman

On a night that shadows make tents
of backrooms a streetcar strums
past the cemetery
on the corner of Clark and Wilson
as Harold the Upholsterer
eyes a 1911 D penny,
the air in his shop suffocating
as a worn cushion—
dusty, warm, smelling of mold.

“I lost this,” he says and points
to a left ear chewed past the lobe,
“in a fight to a guy
who vomited so hard he died …
with the help of a pen knife.”

Floorboards creak in the vacant
apartment above.
Harold runs his thumb along the
counter’s glass edge.
He is a Pharaoh with a jeweler’s lamp
and the moon’s rays trapped
in his tomb.

“Four dollars.”
It twists from his mouth, a sound
like dry leather,
to the boy with an envelope
clutched in his hand.

And my heart plays banjo
to a city of small deals!

Spencer Walts illustration from "Shrine of the Tooth Fairy."

John Lehman stopped by this morning for coffee and audio. We’re celebrating the release of the Kindle ebook edition of John’s poetry collection, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, first published by Cambridge Book Review Press in 1998. The ebook includes Spencer Walts’s wonderful illustrations. Here’s John earlier today reading “Del’s Supper Club”:

Del’s Supper Club / John Lehman

They used to sit on car hoods
along the beach
or turn radio knobs and cigarettes
and watch the coil
of sun go out
and wait
for distant rumblings,
for the smell of lightning
from across the lake.

Now they applaud
tumbles
of liar’s dice
in a leather cup—
white shirt, short sleeved men,
who might sell appliances or tires
their wrist hairs coil
so smoothly
over chainlinked bands.
Laughter barks
from gesturing hands.
They caress a party glass
with a pin-up in a dress
that disappears
behind ice and gin
as the incandescent sign
through an open window’s screen
blurs
into a lipstick blot,
red taffeta,
eye glass frames of plastic bone.
They drift to midnights long ago
when bodies slid from clothes
and in the river glided over rocks,

their fingers slipping into moss,
while pines reeked, overripe
as rotting cantaloupe.

They hesitate,
alone,
at urinals,
with feet raised on rails at bars,
and in parking lots
at the door handles of their cars,
listening
to a green strand of neon
snap.

Spencer Walts illustration from "Shrine of the Tooth Fairy."

Happy Holidays from Cambridge Book Review Press. We’ve dropped the price on Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, John Lehman’s wide-ranging collection of poetry, first published in 1998 with illustrations by Spencer Walts. For a limited time, the $8.00 paperback will be available for $2.99. John’s stopping by the CBR studio this week to record some Tooth Fairy audio that we’ll be posting soon. Plus, a Kindle edition is on the way!

~

Survey of Teachers’ Sexual Fantasies / John Lehman

Phys Ed
When we moved away
from our old house
I left a magazine
of naked women
with pillowy breasts
hidden in the attic.
We stopped at a motel
with an indoor pool
that smelled like warm semen.
My parents stayed
in their room,
drank bourbon.
I dove again and again
through clouds.

Home Ec
Once she had a boy
in her classroom.
He sat slouched in the corner.
“His eyes glowed,” she said,
“like that back left burner
I just turned off.”
She thought his bare arm
looked like baking sponge-cake.
She touched it.
It was greased metal.

Assistant Principal
It tastes so good
don’t ever try it
even once.

English
The fish’s belly—
slippery smooth,
whiter than the neck
under a girl’s long hair—
is kissed
purple, red, yellow,
and blue
by the lamprey’s bite.

Metal Shop
I love a good truck.

Art
I was married to a man
who once was my student.
He, not I, could have been
another Auguste Rodin.
I loved the way he listened
to my words when I talked,
and when he did
I listened to them too.

Mathematics
I’m going to drive
to Ann Arbor for a convention.
I like to go kind of slow
in my ranchwagon,
watch those women go by
alone in their cars.
I like the ones
with short black hair,
eyes bulging behind wire glasses.
Not cool blondes,
but new housewives
with buckteeth
who won’t look back.
Sometimes I’m late.
I forget, go too slow.

History
My young man died in Vietnam
pouring the foundation for
a village school by himself.
Shot. From bushes. His rifle
wrapped in plastic to keep it
clean, against a tree.
At nights—his lieutenant
was kind enough to write—
he had been digging a well
by hand with a shovel.
The officer wondered if
it weren’t a sort of grave.
But I know. Stripped, sweating,
breathing hard in the dark,
he is burrowing home to me.

Janitor
Lock your doors and windows.
We don’t want trouble here,
if you know what I mean.

Rod Clark joined us this morning for coffee and a recording session. Listen as Rod shares a young boy’s perilous shopping adventure from his micro-novel Redshift: Greenstreem. First published by CBR Press in 2000, Rod’s dystopian tale of hyperinflation and grocery store products that stalk customers like prey, feels more real and scarier than ever. Redshift: Greenstreem is now available in a 2011 second-printing, and as a Kindle ebook.  

Rod Clark 11/17/11

Jem had never been in a “real” store before, and the store knew a rookie customer when it saw one. As he slid his goggles to his forehead to see clearly in the gloom, the glittering tiles lit up beneath his feet, and a thousand soft hooks reached for his eyes. Rainbows of choice wove radiant tentacles about him! How could the severe Saver exchange malls wreathed in black crepe have ever prepared him for this? JUST KEEP MOVING, KEEP MOVING, DON’T LET YOUR EYE REST ANYWHERE, he told himself, walking firmly down the aisle toward the seemingly distant and unreachable counter. But the dreams were stacked so thick and bright on the shelves; it hurt not to reach out and touch them. Bright bottles of soda with their implicit promise of fun-filled romps with laughing girls, menthol cigarettes pitched by tinnily singing penguins holostitched on the cartons. KEEP MOVING! JUST KEEP MOVING!, he thought. But narcotic lollipops in myriad flavors leaned toward him like flowers toward a rare beam of sun. Bottles of cheap gin and mescal featuring skimpily clad sirens of several genders invited him to an afternoon of debauchery, cheap blue packets of cockroach editing software gave confident promise of virtual pest control, and rows of laundry soaps emanated their sweet and sickly perfumes, strangling him softly in a paradise of fluffy towels and sun-drenched sheets.

The lemon yellows and sweet purples of the packagings made him dream of synthetic blossoms—lawns of artificial grass, fanned by a climate-controlled breeze under a fluorescent sun. Meadows of cool, quick, sweet feeling spread in front of him, lands where true joy and real pain were equally impossible—landscapes looking into sunlit kitchens that were somehow everybody’s kitchens, full of always happy faces and endless platefuls of the world’s most delicious waffles. Mmm! Looked pretty tasty—especially the frozen ones with the pink bunny doing somersaults on the box, and perhaps … NO! NO! JUST WALK TO THE COUNTER! LOOK AT NOTHING! TOUCH NOTHING! FEEL NOTHING!

Rosebud 51 is smokin’ hot off the press and ready for readers and coffee tables. Order the issue direct from the Rosebud website. Worth owning alone for the cover art and inside illustrations by Wisconsin watercolorist Geri Schrab. But there’s so much more: 144 pages of fiction, poetry, and art. “Go Figure” drollery from New Yorker cartoonist and Rosebud regular P. S. Mueller (“The town’s electricity is distributed from a large ceramic-looking wire thrusting out of what everyone calls ‘the Founder’s Rock’ in the basement of the old City Hall”). “Afterwords” comic strip from another Rosebud regular and former National Lampoon cartoonist Rick Geary. Editor Rod Clark’s “Voice Over” column with a grassroots homage to mowing the lawn (“Now and then I glance up to see a turkey vulture circling high above me. Does he imagine me to be a wounded animal nearing my final gasp?”). Fiction from Rosebud founder and editor-at-large John Lehman, and from Hugo Award-winning writer Kristine Rusch. And let’s just say: tons more stuff. Including, dear family and friends, my short story “Summer of the Cinetherapist.”

Rosebud readers of issue 51 can also look forward to excerpts from Rod Clark’s scarily prophetic sci-fi micro-novel Redshift: Greenstreem, first published in 2000 by Cambridge Book Review Press and now available in a 2011 second printing and as a Kindle ebook. And here’s a deal that no one should pass up: Anyone subscribing or re-subscribing to Rosebud can get a copy of Redshift: Greenstreem by putting “I WANT MY RG” on the note with your Paypal order at www.rsbd.net or in a letter with your check to: Rosebud, P.O. Box 459, Cambridge, Wisconsin, 53523.

St. Martin's Press edition (1962). Design: Tom O'Brien.

Pictured here is the cover to the 1962 St. Martin’s Press edition of Fisherman’s Beach by Wisconsin writer George Vukelich (1927-1995). Vukelich reprinted the novel in 1990 under his own North Country Press imprint, with a new cover, but using what appear to have been either the original printer’s plates of the inside pages or, more likely, newly shot photo-offset reproductions from the earlier edition. Cambridge Book Review Press is currently preparing an ebook edition of Fisherman’s Beach for release in spring 2012. The ebook will include a new introduction (by a Madison notable and Vukelich friend who we’re keeping a surprise for a while longer). Also included will be photos of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, where the novel is set, by fine arts photographer Thomas J. King. There’ll be additional supplemental material in the ebook, as well, such as a biographical sketch of George Vukelich by James P. Roberts, and a study guide that should make Fisherman’s Beach perfect for reading groups and classrooms.

Here’s the inside jacket copy from the 1962 edition:

Old Man LeMere was dying upstairs. He was a tough old gull, but nobody lives forever. Downstairs, Roger, his second son, was waiting to inherit the fisherman’s beach. He could not afford to wait long. The lamprey eels from the ocean were destroying the trout of Lake Michigan, and the fishermen were powerless to stop them. Also he was afraid of Germaine.

Germaine was the eldest son. He had left the family and the Church. He was a major, stationed in Europe, who had come home for the first time in many years when he heard of his father’s illness. The Old Man wanted Germaine to take over the beach. Roger—ambitious, brutal, suspicious—knew it and would not believe that Germaine wanted no part of the inheritance. Nor would Roger believe that Germaine had not come home to reclaim Ginny Dussault, Germaine’s high school sweetheart who, despairing of Gemaine’s return, had allowed Roger to become her lover.

From these elements George Vukelich has woven a first novel of astonishing power. He is a poet and his descriptions of the changing seasons on the lake shore of his native Wisconsin are woven with a lyricism too seldom found in contemporary writing. He is also a keen student of humanity—its frailties and its strengths. Fisherman’s Beach gives an unforgettable picture of a family of strong characters, closely united yet at war among themselves.

And here’s the back cover author’s photo and bio:

Author photo of George Vukelich from 1962. No photographer credited.

Mr. Vukelich is best known in Wisconsin as “Papa Hambone,” a disc jockey with the top rated night-time program in the Madison area. He writes “I’ve become a split personality to further a writing career. ‘Papa Hambone’ buys the groceries, meets the mortgage payments and maintains the menage; George Vukelich simply tries to write the best first novel of which he is capable.” George Vukelich also spent a year as a creative writing instructor at the University of Wisconsin, and another as a merchant seaman. His poetry and short stories have been published in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and Botteghe Oscure.

Title page: North Country Press 1990.

Title Page: St. Martin Press 1962.