A tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle Sewing Shut My Eyes is a tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle--nine darkly satiric out-takes of America tubing. Visions of mid-air synchronicities, robotic cockroaches, cyborg poets and one monstrous HDTV, all rendered in a hypo-manic style of electrified clauses and full-throttle patter. Here's Mona Sausalito, self-proclaimed "fricking gorgeous" bad-little-girl for Escort a la Mode and, on the side, Neogoth lyricist in the band of her boyfriend Mosh ("His real name is Marvin Goldstein"). Mona wants to be a poet. "I write about human sacrifices, cannibalism, vampires, and stuff. Mosh loves my work. He says we're all going to be famous some day. Only right now we're not, which bites, cuz I've been writing for like almost ten months. These things take time, I guess." Olsen hallucinates a turned-on, channel-surfing nation where pain has become home theater and given enough channels, watching would beat sex. A nameless agent of the ultimate phantom bureaucracy holds his Yeltsin-70 at the ready and recalls O.J. on trial, supermodels and styrofoam landscapes, America screening fast and addictive. In the title story, Kerwin Penumbro wakes on his birthday to the ultimate tv, the renowned Mitsubishi Stealth, and at a point thirty-three thousand feet above the triangulation of Iron Lightning, Faith, and Thunder Butte, SD, Itty Snibb, supremely confident dwarf and prosperous entrepreneur, prepares to meet God. These are fictions for minds lit with cathode-ray tubes, hands pixilated with static, for bodies that have become switching stations for the Society of the Spectacle. The only thing left to do is start sewing shut our eyes.

SIC] includes public domain works published under Davis Schneiderman's name, including everything from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales to Wikipedia pages to genetic codes, along with a transformation of the Jorge Luis Borges story: "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." SIC] is part of DEAD/BOOKS trilogy of conceptual works by Davis Schneiderman from Jaded Ibis Press. Other books in the trilogy are BLANK (2011), and INK (forthcoming).

The publishing world has just received its bill of health, and the prognosis isn't pretty. Literary marauders are rising up from the hazardous material bins labeled Horror, Surrealism, and Science Fiction. Here the pen is not merely mightier than the sword; it is a plague heralding the apocalypse for convention, writing a dirge for complacency. The stories herein explore illness in all its forms: physical, mental, and societal. These sick stories are horrendous, hilarious, and stupefying dissections of creative minds on the scalpel's edge.