Theater-State by Jack Boettcher Pre-Order

Cover design by the incredible Chi Birmingham.

I am excited to announce that Blue Square Press is taking pre-orders for its sophomore release Theater-State by Jack Boettcher. Theater-State is one of the best books that I've ever read and I cannot wait for people to have it in their hands. You can read an excerpt and pre-order it, here.

The book was blurbed by Joyelle McSweeney and Matthre Rorher. Here's what they said:

“Theater State reveals the panopticon not as an instrument of surveillance but as a mesmerizing holograph from which we prisoners of “reality” (and of high school) cannot tear our eyes. In this inside-out world, violence is an encircling Megahighway and the center mutable, vulnerable, and virtual, always flowing somewhere else. As young Janus negotiates the heights and sinkholes of adolescence, including an affair with a regional pop-avatar, servitude to a morphing, megalomaniacal principal, and a class project managing a convulsive neocolony, Jack Boettcher’s reticulated sentences themselves contract and unfurl with sometimes enticing, sometimes ensnaring beauty. As the civics teacher Ms. Denton TX threatens: “Learning is an adventure.”

–Joyelle McSweeney, author of Nylund, the Sarcographer, The Red Bird, and The Commandrine and Other Poems

“Even though the principal in Boettcher’s Theater-State has a white tiger slumbering in his office, the school that Janus and Katydid and Cassie attend, with Ms. Denton, TX as their teacher, is all too familiar – terrifyingly familiar. The mind-bending cross over between the world of statecraft and a private science academy becomes all too real for Janus…when it is revealed that it is drivers that shape the roads and not the other way around…and when the general paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it.”

–Matthew Rohrer, author of Destroyer and Preserver, Rise up, and A Green Light

Pre-order Jack's book by following this link.

If you take a second and help spread the word in whatever way you like to spread words that would be greatly appreciated.

SOLAR ∆ LUXURIANCE

The Destruction Loops by David Peak is now available from Solar Luxuriance.

Specifications: 16 pages. 8.5'' x 5.5''. Staple-bound.
Edition of 30 + 1 Artist Proof.
$5

Solar Luxuriance has a cool site.

Origin Story: An Interview With David Peak in Knee-Jerk Issue # 14

Not only is David Peak a rad dude, a fantastic writer and friend, but he's also the co-editor/ founder of Blue Square Press. There' s an interview with Peak in the most recent issue of Knee-Jerk that should not be missed--he talks about BSP's inception, independent, literary video games, some of our inspirations, and small press stuff in general.

"Ben and I were both published in a genre anthology a few years back. I read his story--a really taut, visionary piece of sci-fi--and loved it so much that I wrote him an email, telling him so. We stayed in touch after that, eventually started exchanging writing, venting our frustrations/successes with getting published. Now I consider him a very dear friend.

All the while, he had this book he was working on. He'd send me pieces and I'd give him notes. I thought it was incredible, one of the best books I'd ever read. I didn't want to see it slip through the cracks--like so many good books do. So I emailed him one morning and I was like, I want to start a press with you and I think our first book should be yours."

Read the interview here
&
Read the rest of the issue here

News

Advance praise for Flowing in the Gossamer Fold:

“In mental maps made of out of milk and hair, Ben Spivey negotiates the slick space between our dirt and air. ‘You can’t count on things to stay how you expect,’ a man’s lover tells him just after handing him a bag of her pubic hair and turning into a kind of bird. It is warning meant for him and anybody expecting any less than magic in the lean, prismatic, calming barrage of Spivey’s sentences and rooms and hours, built on the all too rare commodity of heart.”

–Blake Butler, author of EVER and Scorch Atlas

Pre-Order here.

Have you read Butler's new story at New Dead Families? You should.

Warm Milk Presses first chapbook, David Peak's "freakshit" Museum of Fucked is now sold out. We've been hard at work on our next chapbook, ZZZZZZZZZZZ [the stars] by J.A Tyler (in collaboration with Greying Ghost, New Lights Press, The Collagist, and Pangur Ban Party) for May 2011.

Spilt Milk will be back soon. We're probably going print. Stay tuned. Submissions will probably open sometime this year.


Going to watch 60 writers/60 places tonight.

I watched Zach Schomburg read tonight and ended up buying both of his books. Really impressive live performance. He's doing a huge tour thing so check his blog and see if he's going to be near you.

Free, Free, Free

I am offering a free copy of David Peaks newly released novel The Rocket's Red Glare to the first person that orders his chapbook Museum of Fucked and leaves a comment on this post. You can order it here for $7. I will ship both of the books to you at the same time.

Update:
The free book has been given away. Only 5 copies of Museum of Fucked remain for purchase.

Today on Spilt Milk is a piece by Eric Bennett, this starts our Spring issue. Check it out.

+ We only have about 6 remaining copies of our first chapbook, Museum of Fucked by David Peak. If you've even had a passing interest in the book, you should get it before it's gone, forever. This is a limited print. But don't believe me, believe the blurbs.

"The exhibits in Museum offer rare, studied glimpses of a world we too often ignore. We begin with a legless man in a wheelchair, an oncoming bus; we see parking lots filled with broken glass, children, hypodermic needles; a good friend-turned-junkie; a confrontation between strangers at a train stop; and a woman, Marilyn Monroe's daughter, reminds us why we shouldn't close down our mental institutions. This is just the first half of the tour, which in all truth serves to mentally prepare us for the second. When at last we close this book and return, blinking, to our own safe homes, we are, like the brutally rendered poor in David Peak's powerful collection, bare and gasping for release."
--Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart

"Museum of Fucked is an implosive and brutal study, the results of which are clear and foreboding: Cruelty exhibited--and the self-protective indifference it inspires--can turn a metropolis into a necropolis. Watch through the window, now. We're almost there."

--Ken Baumann

"David Peak builds people – observing and then rejecting their forms, making them into another or something else entirely. Museum of Fucked is this – the population gone astray and re-rendered in all their frantic delusions, Peak’s sullen thick words, people as they should be written."
--J. A. Tyler, author of Inconceivable Wilson (Scrambler Books, 2009)

"In this offering from David Peak--a writer whose prose and poetry ekes out in the literary world like the good custard at the edge of a cannoli--the narrator comes to a central truth about his Chicago (and dare I say our) world: all its collective elements, 'they are small and unmanageable.' From the fat, baseball bat-wielding child-tormentor to the homeless guy waving a morning 'god bless,' so too does the prose of this chap wave a dream your way. Tame it; I dare you."
--Jamie Iredell, author of Prose. Poems. Novel.

"Beautifully brutal and written in a simple and clear style, Museum rings true of Oscar Wilde, that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'"
--Shane Jones, author of The Failure Six

"If we build museums to remember who we were--and who we wish we had been--what then to make of David Peak's Museum of Fucked, with its curated Chicago grit, its exhibitions of human failure collected on the city's streets and pressed flat between these pages? One read is all it takes to see how Peak's specimens resist the pin and prick of his sharp, clipped language, so that always they threaten to escape his control, to leap from their paragraphs and back into our lives. This is book as museum, sure, but also as emergency siren, as distress beacon, as a warning to be ignored at our own peril."

--Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found and The Collectors

"'I am not a bad person,' becomes a brief refrain in David Peak's slim, messed up bloodblister of a text. In the spare repetition, and in the clean and brutal sentences of Museum of Fucked, a guilt is hiding, a paranoia. The streets are no longer safe for cats, nor is Craigslist, nor is the whitespace of the mind behind the mind all here throughout: a sublime and eeriely pleasing emotional amalgam that makes Peak's freakshit calmly scream: not toward you, as a reader, but into: like a bullet sent through skin in one hole, then once entered, split in ten. Watch out."
--Blake Butler, author of Scorched Atlas


You can get your here for $7, while they last.

Finished reading Everything here is the best thing ever by Justin Taylor.

Everything here is the best thing ever is a collection of 15 short stories. Taylor's prose is beautiful, smart, and lasting. I became attached to Taylor's characters quickly and deeply-- that's the beauty of these stories, the character's depth. Some of the highlights of the book for me were the stories, Tetris, Tennessee, The Jealousy Angels, and What Was All Once Yours. My least favorite story was Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time.


--

P.H. Madore reviewed David Peak's Museum of Fucked.
-Thanks P.H.

This book has one of my all time favorite poems in it. Gravity. Buy this book. Read it. Devour it.*

If you don't believe me, here's a blurb:

Amputation of person, amputation of limb, amputation of smaller and smaller shapes of cells. Into his sentences David Peak fits deleted frames from wonderful films we saw once half-asleep, that time asleep on the sofa in that room we would have paid more attention to if we'd known we weren't going to be back there these years later. A warm familiar butting hard up against a terror that fills sofa pillows and cabinets right there, rarely opened. A new kind of hair. A sublime and everpresent surface tension, most definitely, in all best things, of which this book called Surface Tension is certainly, magnificently, one.

— Blake Butler

You can buy it from Amazon or directly from BlazeVox (the better option) for a $15 donation.



*Review forthcoming.

David Peak has a new poetry ebook called The Dead Space of April published by Pangur Ban Party. Give it a look.