News from The Oliver Arts & Open Press

OLIVER'S FUTURE IS BRIGHT, if reviews like these two of Alan Salant's novel Ablong are any indication. Or if this Mark Hand review of Adam Engel's I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague is also an indication, or on top of all that, this magnificent review of Corpse by Randall Tillotson, on the same Amazon page (scroll down). Detailed, intelligent, and attentive reviews like these can't be gotten for the asking. They can only be given. And if more like these are presented to more books from Oliver--then, yes, the future is bright.

AND WILL OLIVER'S FUTURE BE BRIGHTENED early in the year when Eric Larsen's

The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking in an Age of Great Peril, comes out? Will this also be a volume that brings brightness to Oliver? We'll have to see. The book is made up of eighteen pieces written between 2006-2009, and, for the most part, they examine a number of well-known writers, journalists, and media figures--revealing them for what they actually are, which is to say malefactors, dissemblers, and deceivers about the very greatest political issues in the world. A glance at the table of contents may give you a clearer idea of what's coming up in the book. Click right here and take a look.

AND THEN, AFTER THAT, THERE REALLY WILL COME BRIGHTNESS FALLING FROM AIR, with a new work from Adam Engel, author of Topiary, I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague, and, now, the soon-to-be-out Cella Fantastik. And what, you may ask, does the title mean? Well, in "The Knight's Tale" of Chaucer, poor imprisoned Arcite is tormented with love for the unattainable Emily. Not only is he wretched with the usual "loveris maladye," but, worse, he is driven by the "humour malencolik" that has previously been "engendered" in "his celle fantastik," which is to say, in the part, or cell, of his brain that produces fantasy and imagination.

And what, exactly, now comes from Adam Engel's "celle fantastik"? Well, nothing less than an entirely new literary genre. These pieces aren't prose, explains Engel, nor are they really poems, nor even prose-poems, but "they are 'proems,' created using an algorithm of prosody. Large quantities of data, sometimes whole novels, are imploded through the sheer gravity of poetic techniques (often resembling object-oriented computer programming, which handles data in similar ways)."

So what are "proems" like? We'll give you some hints and samples next time. For now, suffice it to say that they are both unique and uniquely appealing, even irresistible: whole lives in a paragraph, entire novels on a page, with sorrow, depth--and brilliance--everywhere.

Only from Oliver. Nowhere else.

AND STILL TO COME:

FROM THE WIDELY-PUBLISHED POET Helen Tzagoloff, a first collection in book form, Listening to the Thunder. Its tones range from the long-ago and powerfully tragic through the droll, wistful, and sometimes acerbic, with every poem a wonderful piece of perfected thoughtfulness.

FROM TIM GATTO, THE UNIQUELY-VOICED author of the novel Kimchee Days, comes the second volume of what might be called the political autobiography of Tim's mature years. First came From Complicity to Contempt. Soon to follow will be From Contempt to Outrage. Be on the lookout.

VERSE LIKE YOU'LL NEVER HAVE READ before, in We Have Too Many Uncles by Alan Salant, author of the popular Ablong.

AND FROM BARBARA MOR, AUTHOR WITH MONICA SJOO OF THE supremely important THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER: REDISCOVERING THE RELIGION OF THE EARTH, comes new, unique, and absolutely extraordinary work in the form of Blue Rental.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE:

Working without assets, endowment, or reserves, The Oliver Arts & Open Press struggles to bring out works of great merit that are nevertheless ignored by the general publishing industry. If you are able or would care to help in this cause and in making it more widely known, we at Oliver would be most highly grateful, as would the authors whose work we are celebrating.