Re: Forthcoming Books
 

Ordered! :)

Secret Europe was outstanding.

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

Agreed re Dark Regions. I have unfulfilled orders from them that I paid for 3-5 years ago. I've moved house, moved interstate & had more than one life-changing event during this time.

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

I have one preorder from Dark Regions, now almost a year old.
When - if - it ever arrives I do not intend to order from them again.
If I had a longer history of orders with them, then I might feel differently.
Hells belles.

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

Yes, I'm still waiting on "The Boke of the Divill," which had its printing pushed way back. At least they let us know.

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

Yup... waiting on this one too. I have not heard any news about printing being pushed back. I only saw their production note about the book being sent to the binders and sitting in a cue behind two other books. Who knows though.

This represents the last book I pre-order from them or contribute to via crowd source funding. My last book I got from them was the Strantzas, which was pushed back by what felt like a year or two. Made zero sense to me and I never got a straight answer.

I feel like there are other small presses out there that have figured things out and are able to put products out regularly and communicate well with their customers. Not sure why DR is struggling so much with these concepts, not like they are a start up at this point. Nothing personal of course, just tired of waiting for them to pull it together.

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

I'm also waiting on the deluxe edition of "The Red Brain," the one that's supposed to be signed and match "A Mountain Walked." I thought I missed an email or something. Radio silence.

Dark Regions
 

To be honest, I do not "know" the Dark Regions press well.
I bought almost all of the books released under their Dark Renaissance imprint.
Like others, I preordered The Boke Of The Divil.
Since Dark Renaissance announced the Oliver title in 2016, I presumed - ha ha ha ha - the layout was half complete.
The fool believes. Again, I only have myself to blame.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not knocking this press or saying I have had bad dealings with them.
This could well be normal. This is me. At my age, I have grown uncomfortable with long production schedules.
Nevertheless, I am looking forward to Oliver's book!

http://i64.tinypic.com/25it7r9.jpg

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

Dementia 21
Shintaro Kago

Yukie Sakai is a sprightly young home health aide eager to help her elderly clients. But what seems like a straightforward job quickly turns into a series of increasingly surreal and bizarre adventures that put Yukie’s wits to the test! Cartoonist Kago, who is well known for combining a more traditional manga style with hyper realistic illustration technique, an experimental visual storytelling approach, and outrageously sexual and scatological subject matter, has single-handedly created his own genre: “fashionable paranoia."

Mort Cinder
Hector German Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia

Alberto Breccia is recognized as one of the greatest international cartoonists in the history of comics and Mort Cinder is considered one of his finest achievements. Created in collaboration with the Argentine writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld, best known in the U.S. for his politically incendiary sci-fi masterpiece, the Eisner Award-winning The Eternaut, Mort Cinder is a horror story with political overtones. This episodic serial, written and drawn between 1962–1964, is drawn by Breccia in moody chiaroscuro. The artist’s rubbery, expressionistic faces capture every glint in the eyes of the grave robbers, sailors, and slaves that populate these stories; while the slash of stripes of prisoners’ uniforms, the trapeziums of Babylon, and more create distinct and evocative milieus.

Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection
Junji Ito

The master of horror manga brings the world's greatest horror novel—Frankenstein—back to life.
Junji Ito meets Mary Shelley! The master of horror manga bends all his skill into bringing the anguished and solitary monster—and the fouler beast who created him—to life with the brilliantly detailed chiaroscuro he is known for.
Also included are six tales of Oshikiri—a high school student who lives in a decaying mansion connected to a haunted parallel world. Uncanny doppelgangers, unfortunately murdered friends, and a whole lot more are in store for him.

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

Upcoming from Wakefield Press:

Curl
By T. O. Bobe
Translated, with an afterword, by Sean Cutter

“Death doesn't scare me. Its barbershop does.”

Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He is one-point-sixty-two meters tall and weighs fifty-eight kilograms. He is also the fastest barber in the world. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave.

Mr. Gica’s shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs, and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, fantasies of Edith Piaf, four lost hippies, and other ludic figures—including our superhuman protagonist's ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu.

Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curl scissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references, and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness.
February 2019


The Sundays of Jean Dezert
By Jean de La Ville de Mirmont
Translated, with an introduction, by André Naffis-Sahely

“He thought of life as a waiting room for third-class travelers. From the moment he purchased his ticket, there was nothing left for him to do but watch men pass him by on the platform. An employee would let him know when the train would depart; but he was still clueless as to its final destination.”

Before his death at the age of 27, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont left behind one undisputed classic, self-published a few months before he would meet his fate on the front lines of World War I: an understated, humorous tale of urban alienation that outlines the crushing mediocrity of bureaucratic existence.

Jean Dézert is a young man living in a low-ceiling flat on the Rue du Bac, an office worker employed by the ministry who rounds out his regimented life with snippets of Eastern philosophy, strolls through the city, counting streetlamps—and strangely psychogeographical efforts at injecting some content into his life by structuring his Sundays through a rigorous use of advertising flyers that take him from saunas to vegetarian restaurants to lectures on sexual hygiene. Eventually his urban divagations lead him, as most lives do, to a romantic dalliance: with a young lady at the Jardin des Plantes. In his mortal boredom, his modernist engagement with the banality of the everyday, and his almost heroic resignation to mediocrity, Jean Dézert emerges as something of a French counterpart to Herman Melville's own rebel bureaucrat, Bartleby the Scrivener. Save that when it comes to being an existential rebel, Jean DéŽzert goes even further in his will to prefer not to...

“Had he lived, what would we have meant to one another? Would he have had a literary destiny? For the twenty-something de La Ville, just as for the forty-year-old Charles PŽguy, the war was quite simply a relief. Yes, it was the most horrible war the world had ever seen, where millions of young men murdered one another, but they also saw it as their destiny’s final terminus, a means to suddenly give their dead-end, onerous lives some heroic meaning.”—Fran�ois Mauriac

“Jean Dézert is like a brother to me, because of his ability to escape despair by means of emptiness.”—Michel Houellebecq
March 2019


Samlio Pardulus
By Otto Julius Bierbaum
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger
Illustrations by Alfred Kubin

“He stepped very close to me, and his eyes were terrible as he said, ‘Hear this, man from Tuscany, and remember it, because it is the truth: God was dead when He created the world’”

Buried in an isolated castle on the outskirts of a city in the Albanian mountains, the wildy ugly painter of blasphemies, Samalio Pardulus, executes works too monstrous to bear viewing, and espouses a philosophy that posits a grotesque world that reflects the ravings of a dead, grotesque god. Told through the horrified account of Messer Giacomo (a mediocre artist at once repulsed and uncontrollably fascinated by the events unfolding around him), Samalio Pardulus describes the simultaneous descent and ascent of the titular anti-hero into a passionate perversion of Catholicism in which love and madness become one, as a dark, incestuous incubus settles into a doomed family.

When it was first published, Otto Julius Bierbaum's 1908 Gothic novella, the first of his “Sonderbare Geschichte” (weird stories), offered a Gnostic steppingstone between German Romanticism and the nascent Expressionism that had not yet taken root. It presents a vision of the grotesque not just as a way of life, but as a godly path to a higher vision, even when it appears to be but a manifestation of evil.

This first English edition includes the full set of illustrations by Alfred Kubin from the book's 1911 German edition.
April 2019

Re: Forthcoming Books
 

I am really excited by the forthcoming books by both James Ellroy and David Peace, This Storm and Tokyo Redux, respectively. 2019 can't come soon enough.