Brand new books. For our brand new, totally insane world.

Featherproof Newsletter: February 3

Oh holy Cheeto Jesus—how the hell are you? We mean that for real. 'Cuz the latest in a long line of oppressors have wasted no time here, have they? And now we're smack dab in the middle of the War on Psychic Warfare to End All War Instead of Ending the World.

Don't forget that we are many, and you are not alone! But also don't forget that the many are counting on you to show up… We're in this for the long haul if you are, friends. And if you need to communicate with a real, live human being: we're here.

Actual Good News (i.e., In No Way Fake):

On February 14, we'll be officially releasing our newest book: Leyna Krow's I'm Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking.

Shawn Vestal has described these stories as "bound by a crackling wit, an inventive vitality, a laser eye for the silent currents between people, and a sneaky emotional power."

Following in the footsteps of our debut collections from Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter, we're proud to now introduce you to another promising young writer.

Get I'm Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking direct from us now, before it's available anywhere else!

The New York Times Magazine has said "Everyone on every coast and in between reads MAKE because it’s smart and cool and thoughtful and stylish and kind."

To celebrate MAKE Magazine's 10th anniversary, we're pleased to present the anthology collection MAKE X: A Decade of Literary Art.

More than a "best of," these are carefully curated selections of writing & art, featuring some of yer all-time favorite people: Eula Biss, Lily Hoang, Lindsay Hunter, Maggie Nelson, Jac Jemc, Tim Kinsella, Kathleen Rooney, Mahmoud Saeed, Valeria Luiselli, Kate Zambreno, and many, many more.

MAKE X will be officially released March 14, but you can get a copy from us right now!

Yeah, We Don't Know Either

It pains us to think about what sort of abomination we'll have to protest next week, but if you're in the nation's capital February 8–11, we will be, too.

After you inform the new administration personally about what you think of their machinations, come see us at the AWP Conference & Bookfair in the Washington Convention Center. We'll be at booth #250 with our good friends from Curbside Splendor.  

If you can't make the bookfair, shake a tailfeather over to Petworth Citizen (829 Upshur St. NW) for the AWP Small Press Party on Saturday, February 11, at 7pm. No readings. Just booze & camaraderie & revivification. Hope to see you there. 


With love, solidarity, and an itch we're sure as shit gonna scratch,
Tim & Jason & Sammi

Love Trumps Hate

Love Trumps Hate

We are gutted and terrified by the recent revelations of just how dark, small-minded, scared, and hateful the American collective unconscious can be. But we are ready to fight the long fight ahead for the basic rights and dignities of all people.

We are a small company and wish we could do more, but this is what we can do: From now through November 17, when you use the discount code LoveTrumpsHate, our entire catalog is 20% off and 100% of all sales will go directly to Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, and organizations fighting for LGBTQ and immigrant rights.

If you've ever considered buying any or all of our books, please make this week the time that you do so.
 

Summer Release Party—or, rather, PARTIES

It's all happening this weekend in Chicago...

 

Robert Ryan Book Release and Exhibition
Saturday, August 6 from 7–10pm
Great Lakes Tattoo
1148 W. Grand Ave.

Join us for an exhibition of a bunch of new work on canvas from Robert Ryan, plus new prints, new limited-edition-available-this-weekend-only T-shirts, and, of course, the release of The Inborn Absolute.

 

Live Podcast Recording with Tim Kinsella & Robert Ryan
Sunday, August 7 from 2–4pm
Chicago Athletic Association (in the Drawing Room)
12 S. Michigan Ave.

The latest edition of our Storytelling Series events in partnership with Chicago Athletic Association, which is, as always, being recorded for the Featherproof podcast.  Come sit in a comfy chair in the amazing lobby of this hotel, have a cocktail, and engage in conversation with our main man & the man-of-the-hour. Oh, and we'll also have this-weekend-only T-shirts from Robert, in addition to copies of the brand-new The Inborn Absolute (and the rest of our catalog).

 

Featherproof Summer Release(s) Party
Sunday, August 7 at 7:30
Rainbo Club
1150 N. Damen Ave.

To celebrate the release of The Inborn Absolute and The Tennessee Highway Death Chant, we're inviting all peoples of the world to converge at our home-away-from home for music, readings, and maybe a cocktail or two.  Keegan Jennings Goodman and Devin King will supply their own personal brand of linguistic magic, and Robert Ryan will be doing a solo drone set. We'll have our whole catalog there, at our usual, unbeatable prices, plus your last chance to get those limited-edition Robert Ryan T-shirts.

 

Announcing Zachary Schomburg's first novel!

We're proud to announce that in 2017 Featherproof will publish acclaimed poet Zachary Schomburg's first work of fiction, the novel Mammother. It's a fabulist tale set in the town of Pie Time, concerning a young man who takes on the job of holding the random objects born from the bodies of those who have died in the plague of God's Finger. Beneath the book's strangeness, surrealism, and absurd humor is a heavy tenderness and sincerity that explores family, mourning, loss, relationships, time, and our complicated relationship with death.

Past praise for his past work:

“With wit, humor, tenderness, and his characteristic, logic-bending surrealism, Schomburg probes into the subjects of futurity, personal history, and mythmaking.”
— Publishers Weekly
“…out of chaos, darkness, fire, and violence Schomburg builds a fearlessly balanced galaxy, a cosmos inhabited by angry mobs and bleeding trees but thick with sweetness and blossoming light.”
— The Believer
“Schomburg’s meditations on death … often seem to be a way of thinking about what it means to be present, to be breathing in the now, to be a human in a busy world.”
— Bookslut
“[His tone is] morbid, yet ironically luminous and welcoming, an opposition that creates tension and electricity, that propels a reader through the narrative with a pleasant discomfort.”
— Heavy Feather Review

 

Zachary Schomburg was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Iowa. He earned a BA from the College of the Ozarks and a PhD in creative writing and poetry from the University of Nebraska. His books include The Man Suit, Scary, No Scary, Fjords vol. 1 (which won the 2013 Oregon Book Award), and The Book of Joshua. Schomburg co-edits Octopus Books and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Reviews & Praise for “Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion“

“Their handling of athletes’ words is careful and respectful, and the results are surprising: profound, funny, poignant and occasionally beautiful."

—review & excerpt at Flavorwire

 

“It's poetry that takes the very best of what is said in the heat of battle, and reforms those erratic sentences into a passionate profile of the player. "

—review & excerpt at The Commish

 

"The interactions between media and players have become increasingly standardized—mindless cliches and then reporters trying to squeeze blood from those stones…the best way to create meaning is to chisel those stones down and then pile them up with a bunch of others into an interesting shape."

— Q&A at Hardwood Paroxysm

 

"Hilarious and sometimes inspiring…"

— interview at Philly.com

 

"Best of 2015" selection

— CBC Books & Orlando Weekly & The Globe and Mail & Connected

 

"A substantial thread of Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion is that of the power and nature of human experience. If there is sublimity and humor, there is also the moral repugnance of Don Imus’ 2007 remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team alongside Fuzzy Zoeller’s offensive “joke” about Tiger Woods…"

— review at The Found Poetry Review

 

"Language trickery peaks a few times when several voices merge and Malla and Parker present a poem with a group of indistinguishable narrators … It’s just one of many notes that these skilled poetic DJs hit in this unique and surprising book. Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion sets out to find the poetry in sports talk. Through clever sampling and an attention to sound and form, Pasha Malla and Jeff Parker succeed."

— review at The Los Angeles Review

 

“… an interesting look into the lives of athletes while being evocative, substantial poetry.”

— review at Lawrence.com

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Unmanned"

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Unmanned"

William Arkin talked about his book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, on BookTV (C-SPAN), October 21, 2015.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s Unmanned…

“ … a personal meditation … This well-informed but quirky analysis of the development of drone warfare and its ongoing effect on the nation’s military strategy is the latest lament for the disappearance of personal honor and valor from warfare that began in 1914.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Arkin insists that we must contemplates the ‘cost to society and humanity for even operating in this seemingly near-perfect way.’ Readers will have to navigate a minefield of technical details, acronyms, and political and military infighting, but Arkin makes worthwhile the effort of understanding both the extensive transformations modern militaries are experiencing and their far-from-perfect consequences.”
— Publishers Weekly, in a starred review
“Unmanned attempts to explain these views in a first-person narrative that is alternatively informative and quirky. The quirkiness derives from Arkin’s insistence that “to understand drones you have to understand Gilgamesh,” the main character in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a 5,000-year-old literary work. Arkin devotes a chapter to the topic and then returns to it from time to time throughout the book. The connections remain obscure, however, and the story he tells of the life of the drone program is not enhanced by his references to Gilgamesh. … Whether Unmanned’s forecast of an excessively automated future, as implied in the final chapter of the science fiction example, is a dilemma left to the reader. The facts of the drone program presented, however, are worth attention.”
— CIA
“Arkin makes clear that the sheer amount of data being collected ‘masks the intelligence’ …

Drones—and the ‘Data Machine’—give the illusion of being able to know, understand and control what is happening on the ground thousands of miles away via remote armed systems. The reality, as we shall no doubt continue to see, is just the opposite.”
— Chris Cole, for DroneWars.net

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "American Coup"

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "American Coup"

William Arkin talked about his book, American Coup: How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution, on BookTV (C-SPAN), October 23, 2013.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s American Coup…

“A systematic discussion that provides a well-documented basis for assessing future developments.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Bill Arkin has a knack for stirring our national pot on uncomfortable issues that must be addressed. Today’s world demands unconventional views on unconventional security challenges facing the United States. Bill asks tough questions of our security institutions, and the right answers demand a delicate balance between national-security preparedness and constitutional protections afforded to our citizens.”
— General Victor E. Renuart, Jr., USAF (Ret), commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command
“If anybody else had written this book, I would urge caution. But Bill Arkin has explored every nook and cranny of American national-security policy for decades, from nuclear-weapons targeting to war plans for the invasion of Iraq, and his reputation for sober accuracy is rock solid.”
— Thomas Powers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Divining Victory"

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Divining Victory"

William Arkin’s book, Divining Victory: Airpower in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, examines why the Israel-Hezbollah War may well be a paradigm for 21st century warfare. The technically-sophisticated Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were confronted by a much smaller, but well-armed and highly unconventional, "state within a state" opponent. Israel launched an intensive 34-minute air assault designed to essentially disarm Hezbollah; it did not. Hezbollah's interspersion within the civilian population presented major targeting problems for the IDF, setting up condemnation of Israel's "over-reaction" in the international press. Airpower became the big loser in the press and after-action reports.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s Divining Victory…

“William Arkin, the well-known independent military analyst, explodes both myths in his new book... meticulous documentation”
— Air and Space Power Journal (US Air Force)
“William Arkin’s book has an extremely valuable role to play. It has certainly succeeded inasmuch as it is one of the few recent books on air power to rate a review—and a positive one at that—from the pages of The New York Times.”
— RAF Journal (UK)

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Top Secret America"

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Top Secret America"

Co-authored by Dana Priest and William Arkin in 2010, Top Secret America was a series of investigative articles published by the the Washington Post on the post-9/11 growth of the United States Intelligence Community. In 2011, Priest and Arkin published the book, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, and in 2013, Frontline aired the film Top Secret America—9/11 to the Boston Bombings on PBS.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s Top Secret America…

“… a breathtaking investigative account of America’s vast new secret world. … An invaluable book.”
— Bob Drogin, for the Los Angeles Times
“One of the many strengths of Top Secret America is that Priest and Arkin take nothing for granted. They ask basic, even faux- naïve questions about the purpose, accountability, and effectiveness of the acronym soup of covert programs, companies, and Pentagon commands created or expanded after September 11. Their analysis is neither naïve about the threat posed by al-Qaeda and similar groups, nor credulous about the generals, spies, and bureaucrats who have so dramatically expanded the country’s defenses in response to September 11.”
— Steve Coll, for the New York Review of Books
“Priest and Arkin, columnists for the Washington Post and other media outlets, won the 2010 George Polk Award for their exposé of the surveillance state. Here, they blow the whistle on how, since 9/11 and the adoption of the Patriot Act, the government and its contractors use classification and security screens to conceal expenditures that have failed to enhance national security. … Overall, this is an important book that should receive greater attention.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A former Army intelligence analyst in West Berlin in the 1970s, Arkin, according to his Post biography, later did stints at Greenpeace International and Human Rights Watch—activist associations that might not pass the classic standard of journalistic objectivity that has been much debated in the wake of Post blogger David Weigel’s resignation from the Post. Arkin’s background was almost immediately cited by right-leaning blogs Monday as undermining the credibility of the series…

’The digital part of it could not have been done without him and without his kind of brain,’ [Dana Priest] said. ‘That’s not necessarily a blogger brain. That’s the research phenomenon that he is.’”
— Politico, July 2010
“IGC.org is a hard-left email address. If the guy’s a real Washington Post reporter, can’t the Washington Post manage to give him a Washington Post email address? And if he’s a real Washington Post reporter (since 1998?), what’s he doing advising the U.N.?

Hugh Hewitt had more at the Weekly Standard back in 2003, including: ‘Arkin’s own speech to an audience at the U.S. Naval War College on September 25, 2002. In this lengthy and vitriolic attack on the Bush administration, Arkin admitted to feeling “cynical about the fact that we are going to war to enhance the economic interests of the Enron class,” and declared that “the war against terrorism is overstated.”‘

Oh, and Mr. Arkin also writes for the Nation …

I’ve always believed you judge the journalism by the words not by the biography of the author, but this is really something. ”
— Ira Stoll, for FutureofCapitalism.com
“William Arkin has just dropped a stellar entry in the biggest asshole in America contest. I was stunned by the incredible amount of disgusting, deranged, disrespectful drivel the wanker was able to cobble together in one hearty F U to the troops.”
— BlackFive blog

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Code Names"

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Code Names"

William Arkin’s book, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World, was covered on the front page of the New York Times, and he talked about it on BookTV (C-SPAN), February 3, 2005.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s Code Names…

“William Arkin makes amateurs of all of us who think we know something about America’s constantly expanding hidden world. ‘Code Names’ is quite simply a stunning array of secrets and super-secrets that Arkin has put together in a way that makes it easy for any citizen to comprehend—and decide for himself or herself whether such activities are consistent with democracy and good government.”
— Seymour Hersh
“Arkin’s solution: Fight fire with fire. A secret held, a secret disclosed. He offers many bomblets, each of which could make up a chapter of the 600-plus-page book.”
— The Washington Post
“Full of useful information not only for scholars and practitioners of intelligence, but for any serious newspaper reader.”
— Patrick Radden Keefe, for the New York Review of Books
“William Arkin, who successfully challenged a number of Air Force claims about its bombing results during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, is continuing his role of informed critic and irritant with the book Code Names. It is a gold mine...”
— Aviation Week and Space Technology
“Arkin, a military analyst with NBC News and an independent journalist with impressive credentials, has taken on this massive subject with a solitary vengeance stretched out over years … dedicated readers, including students of national security policies, will look for specific topics in small doses or cover sections of interest in a measured, incremental approach.”
— Air and Space Power Journal (U.S. Air Force)
“A detailed and comprehensive exposure of the American security system ... whether or not one agreed with Arkin’s logic and motivation for writing this book, the information contained inside Code Names makes for a fascinating read for any national security specialist.”
— Robert B. Killebrew, for Parameters (journal of the U.S. Army War College)
“Arkin lays out his version of patriotism, explains what ‘special access programs’ (SAPs) are, the differing levels of information security generate and how they get their names. Four sections follow: a ‘cast of characters,’ describing U.S. and foreign agencies, commands and other organizations involved in sensitive operations; a list of their ‘activities by country’; the ‘code names dictionary’ ... and a glossary of acronyms (‘MIO: maritime interdiction operation’) and other terms. Taken together, they offer a prismatic array of activities that come under the aegis of the war on terror, and provide a concrete means for further research and debate.”
— Publishers Weekly, in a starred review & PW Pick
“William Arkin’s ‘Code Names’ will rock the National Security Community. We do not agree on any issue, my problem when we argue is that unlike most of his ilk, he researches the facts thoroughly and has impeccable integrity. Code Names scares the hell out of me because Arkin dredged up so many secrets and turned them into a comprehensive tour of our national security efforts around the globe. This book lays out for the reader what China, Israel, France and Russia probably spent billions trying to find out. It will become the basic reference book for those who study our foreign affairs, unfortunately that includes every spy agency around the world. This book shows the dysfunctional aspects of our all too frequent over-classification process that blocks our agencies from working together, hides waste and stifles debate of important issues. Most of all it proves we need to rethink how we protect our secrets in the information 
age.”
— Gen. Charles A. Horner, General, USAF; commander of coalition air forces in Operation Desert Storm, and former commander, U.S. Space Command