AN ANTHOLOGY OF ART AND WRITING FULL-COLOR ILLUSTRATED EDITION "It's pleasant being naked, as swimmer or writer or reader.... Naked's a way of being free, unencumbered by garment or censor. There exists no other way of knowing certain things, or oneself, without stripping away." -from the Preface by Debra Di Blasi, editor One artist and 54 writers accepted the challenge of creatively defining "dirty" in the 21st Century. Mugi Takei's delicate, profane watercolors position the human body within, on and against nature. While some writers surrendered to play through sexually explicit love poetry, bawdy fiction, threesomes, twosomes, onesomes, and all the delightful fantasies and realities in-between, others suggested genocide to be the real dirt of humanity, or offer sexy, new versions of biblical stories. As an anthology, Dirty: Dirty exhibits the beauty, humor, raunch and invention possible when talented artists and writers tackle a very old subject. THE ARTIST: Mugi Takei THE WRITERS: Greg Bachar, Elizabeth Burns, Jennifer Calkins, Jane L. Carman, Kylee Cook, Beth Couture, Dirk Cowan, Justin Dobbs, Trevor Dodge, Rion Woolf, C. M. Connelly, April Gigliotti, Christopher Grimes, Steve Halle, Jeff Hansen, Michael Harold, Garrett Hayes, Jacqueline Heffron, Lily Hoang, Nabila Najwa, Eric Jeitner, Liesl Jobson, Steve Katz, Kimberly Koga, Stacey Levine, Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Robert Lopez, Cris Mazza, Joe Milazzo, Kathleen Miller, Scott Million, Theresa A. O'Donnell, Jordan Okumura, Melanie Page, Mitch Parker, Aimee Parkinson, Jack Rees, AE Reiff, Doug Rice, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Davis Schneiderman, Mikal Shapiro, Gary Shipley, Ascot Smith, Rob Stephenson, Helen Tran, Holms Troelstrup, J. A. Tyler, c.vance, Laura Vena, Hal Wert, Lane Williams, Alyssa Wisener, Lidia Yuknavitch

In Modus Tollens, Yuriy Tarnawsky fully develops the technique of Heuristic Poetry that relies on ambiguity, sketched out in some of his earlier collections, which forces the reader to create the poem for himself as he reads through the text, becoming in the process its co-author. In the end he discovers himself standing alone on the denuded earth beneath an empty sky.

BLACK AND WHITE EDITION. In Modus Tollens Yuriy Tarnawsky fully develops the technique of Heuristic Poetry that relies on ambiguity, sketched out in some of his earlier collections, which forces the reader to create the poem for himself as he reads through the text, becoming in the process its co-author. In the end he discovers himself standing alone on the denuded earth beneath an empty sky. "What I love about Yuriy Tarnawsky's poetry is the sense one gets of the poet's determined dissection of his surroundings, both in word and in world. The poet seems to be questioning his belief in the idea of meaning, he having been raised, of course, with the notion that life is meaningful. So he turns over both leaf and sheaf, and his discoveries alternately appall and appeal: Is life order or ordure?... Tarnawsky breaks words open to find the worlds they reveal, as if he were looking for the lost letter 'l, ' which stands for 'love, ' for only that letter can turn the word into the world." - Eckhard Gerdes, editor, Journal of Experimental Fiction "In Modus Tollens, Yuriy Tarnawsky shows us the world living its passions out in a language which is one of its passions. Contra Wittgenstein, Tarnawsky breaks the silence of that about which we cannot speak. He cannot remain silent, so he finds a language which can, which does speak only in the only language of poetic truth - the broken tongue of hidden elegance where a stream that seems to exist does exist and a god that exists - if at all - obliquely bathes in it." - Martin Nakell, poet, Tautological Eye and Settlement

These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact. ""The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions"" is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In ""Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight,"" Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to create a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. ""Hyperfictions"" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from the former Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts? This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human - and awake - in the post-millenium.

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 2013 BOOKS OF THE YEAR FULL COLOR ILLUSTRATED EDITION

"An Honest Ghost is brilliantly conceived and brilliantly performed." - Adam Phillips, critic and author of "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life"

Inspired by the task of unpacking his library, the narrator returns to writing an autobiographical novel about the sudden appearance his son, Joe, who at age nine shows up on the narrator's doorstep for the first time. The narrator, unnerved by the prospect of sharing his life with his extremely precocious child, is nonetheless moved by Joe's arrival. He has to change his own life by accepting the responsibility of fatherhood, a role he shares slightly with his young English boyfriend, David. Joe's unpredictable mother, Eleanor Sullivan, seeks her own satisfactions. The domestic scene is affected when David introduces a new friend, Roy Hardeman, a strange gay cop who dies as mysteriously as he arrived. The heart of the novel is the ghostly, persistent, unreliable qualities of literary and personal memory, and the ways in which a narrative can hold onto, recapture, and transform memory. "Rick Whitaker's An Honest Ghost is both narrative and objet, a singular work of art whose singularity keeps beckoning to the reader. He has put the force back into tour de force." - John Ashbery, poet and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

"Reading An Honest Ghost is an exhilarating, percussive experience, proof that literature is capricious and exalted... People always praise fiction for being lifelike but Whitaker proves that fiction is better than life - more interesting, much more thrilling, though it is inhabited by posturing, irresponsible, self-dramatizing characters.... The tension and excitement of this prose, constantly buffeting the reader, derives from all the different and unique authors who have contributed to it." - Edmund White, novelist and recipient of Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award

"An Honest Ghost is sheer genius, the uber novel, the ultimate palimpsest. It is a writer's truth and a reader's dream. Above all, it is a uniquely gripping read." - Jenny McPhee, author of "A Man of No Moon and No Ordinary Matter"

"I am struck by how deeply personal this book feels, even revelatory, as if the author had solicited other voices to perform an autopsy on his most private, intimate self.... Whitaker has performed such a work of genius and pushed it ad absurdum: the extreme bending appears effortless and forms a perfect circle, wherein full authorship of book, i.e. all the citations at the end of the book, are truly at the discretion of the reader, with all the responsibilities, pangs and joys this entails." - Filip Noterdaeme, artist, author of "The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart"

About the Book Within the binary world of coded zeros and ones arises a choir of disembodied literary voices, from William Shakespeare to J. D. Salinger, Gertrude Stein to Susan Sontag, Djuna Barnes to Don DeLillo, and hundreds between and beyond.

Published as an interactive iBook as well as a paperback and ebook, Rick Whitaker's semi-autobiographical novel, An Honest Ghost, consists entirely of sentences appropriated from over 500 books. Whitaker limited himself to using 300 words per book (in accordance with Fair Use); never taking two sentences together; and never making any changes, even to punctuation. In the iBook version, touching a sentence brings up its original source: a book's title, author, and page number.

The experience of acknowledging each sentence as literary artifact, combined with the imagined accretion of books that built An Honest Ghost, deftly mirrors the burgeoning nostalgia in the narrator's voice and, fittingly, in the careful reader's heart.

A gorgeous, haunting portrait of the 'we' that lurks in every family. In order to extract something beyond beautiful from ordinary words, c.vance retold his family's history abstractly rather than using the traditional memoir form. Somewhere in the process, the story infected words and the words became fable. Now, the author finds it difficult to remember if his grandfather really built bridges or something else - and in what way his father actually harvested land - and where his parents truly met - and how the world finally ended. In some places, the words succeeded in becoming something beautiful and true; in other places, the fable is more honest than anything that actually happened. Published with 22 full-color drawings by Debra Di Blasi.

BLACK AND WHITE EDITION] "Lyrical and funny and wise, Catto's one-of-a-kind family memoir is a stunning valentine to story telling." - Catherine Browder, author of Secret Lives "An intimate, rather than private look at family life, Patricia Catto applies an impeccable ear and a Coppola-like eye to paint a wonderfully exquisite, moving memoir of the Italian-American experience. Grazie " - Joey Nicoletti, author of Cannoli Gangster "Brisk, frank and always funny... With surpassing compassion, Catto animates the mothers, fathers, seers, ne'er-do-wells, misanthropes and heroes, whose sincerity and humor bring the lost world of Aunt Pig to spiny, sweet, crackling life." -George Guida, author of New York and Other Lovers: Poems Illustrations by Debra Di Blasi. This book is also available in Kindle and fine art limited editions.