It's election time in New Babylon, and President Maggie Delgado is running for re-election but is threatened by the charismatic populist Ted Rust. Newly appointed City Commissioner Georg Ratner is given the priority task to fight the recent invasion of Synth in the streets of the capital, a powerful hallucinogen drug with a mysterious origin. When his old colleague asks him for help on another case and gets murdered, things become more and more complicated, and his official neutrality becomes a burden in the political intrigue he his gradually sucked into. Supported by Laura, his trustful life partner and the Egyptian goddess Nut, Ratner decides to fight for what he believes in, no matter the cost.

Seb Doubinsky's short, quiet poems are little explosions of epiphany. "A rose is a rose but not a rose." "20,000 lightnings in the night but no illumination." A worn down, broken toy is actually a sign that the child is growing up. A bird not chirping makes the poet realize that the bird is indeed there and we need the poet to describe it and sing its song. These poems soothe, startle and illuminate as great poetry should. And like any real literature, I can read them over and over and make new connections, have new revelations. 'California Raisins, ' the fantastic long poem that concludes the collection, is a meditation on the poet's long awaited return to California. It is exactly the mythical California that he remembers, with "Kerouac's melancholic fog" and "Sandburg trains" and yet California is also an empty parking lot with "Safeway brown bags and Gucci shoeboxes." The poem is both a celebration of this beautiful, sunny state and an elegy for the failures of culture. Doubinsky's little explosions indeed illuminate.
Matt Bialer
Author of Bridge, Already Here and ARK
Seb Doubinsky's collection, Spontaneous Combustions catches us off guard with a riveting arsenal of language--and with the 'shock and awe' of everyday life. These pristine and startling snapshots happen upon us, then at a moment's notice, enters our interiors. These spare and sleek poems are crisp testimonials to the flaws, follies, and fragile shadows that follow through the hallways of joy and sorrow at the very epicenter of what it is to be human, "My bones rattle like drums." This smallest moments ask for this poet's astute gaze and keen sense of observation, baring witness to the most ordinary and spontaneous of daily moments. Doubinsky compresses riffs with cadence of language and etches the searing ontological chemistry down to the basic elements. These poems tease and torque with images full of both harmony and discord: "shock of knuckles against a jaw," then offers a door inside a door-and dares us to enter "where spring has just left the room" and "this poem is two minutes late." These poems are vibrant with energy, and remind us of the irrational, dangerous, complex and evocatively rich small moments of our lives. Doubinsky sings us into our own nakedness--sizzles and parses the silence, grace, and exacting rituals of nuance
Cynthia Atkins
Author of In the Event of Full Disclosure and Psyche's Weathers

From Jordan Krall, author of HUMANITY IS THE DEVIL, comes a series of novellas in the tradition of early J. G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and Barry Malzberg. Exploring the concepts of personal and public tragedy, this is a book unlike anything Krall has written before: a collection of brief chapters in an infinite universe of physical and mental illness, urban destruction, and the cracks in society we fight to ignore. This collection includes FALSE MAGIC KINGDOM, BAD ALCHEMY, THE GOG AND MAGOG BUSINESS, SODOMY IN NINE-ELEVEN LAND, and INVOCATION OF A BLAST EVENT (a new story exclusive to this collection). Introduction by Seb Doubinsky. "Jordan Krall is one of the best of the next generation of writers looking askance at modern life and able to chart its absurdities and its dangers. These books conjure up uncomfortable visions with a lucid and alienating gaze." - Jeff Vandermeer, author of FINCH and CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN

Seb Doubinsky was born in Paris and spent part of his childhood in the USA, an experience that indelibly marked him for life. He currently lives in Denmark with his wife and children. He writes fluently in both French and English and has published more than a dozen novels that blur the boundaries between literary fiction, science fiction and crime fiction, and a volume of short stories. His poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim and has been collected intat least nine stand-alone volumes. He edits the bi-lingual on-line literary magazine Le Zaporogue, publishes books under his Les Editions du Zaporogue imprint and is at work on at least one new novel.
Doubinsky is concerned with the intrusion of words into our celebration of life. His poems are often about vetting them. Because he regards words as potentially intrusive, there is a feminist element in his work. He wants to make sure they're not rapine. He wants to make sure they're not in the service of the state. But can a poet so suspicious of words write fine poetry? To address my own question I think of the tools on my workbench. A number of them will do the same job, but only one of them is perfect for the job. We could say this of any poet. But few of them start out from a recognition as Doubinsky does that noise is not technical, it's social.
Djelloul Marbrook reviewing Mothballs: Quantum Poems
in The Four Quarters Magazine