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At the Husavík Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's upcoming colonisation. The reports he composes are fragments of snarky travelogue, highly suspicious tales of local folklore, unforgiving recaps of childhood trauma, and cris de coeur from a misanthropic outsider fated to stalk the wild Welsh countryside suffering squeamish erotic reveries about Helga Horsedóttir. Presented in alphabetical, achronological order, Condemned to Cymru is a comico-pimply picaresque, a digressive ramble into the dark heart of boredom, and the essential reference encyclopedia of self-hatred.

In Graham Guest's novel Henry's Chapel we watch a film by proxy, through the eyes of a narrator who offers a play-by-play account, complete with probing analysis, of Albarb Noella's Lawnmower of a Jealous God. Within this unusual frame we encounter the story of an isolated family in rural East Texas, a tragicomic tale of incest, abuse, mental illness and liberation. As meta-narrative and narrative merge into one another, the film's characters, its director, and implicitly the narrator and author themselves all become significant figures, while the film itself becomes both an immersive if ghostly medium and a distanced object of critical inquiry, its meaning and being inseparable from the metafictional organism that contains it. The final product is a kind of narratological incest heretofore unexplored.

Sorry, I Broke Your Promise is a text-cosmos entwined in its own birth and decay, suffering both obscurities of erasure and, amidst the resulting caverns of darkness, twinkling ignitions of wit and purpose. Quasi-intentional structures appear (or appear to) on every scale, summoning the ghosts of meaning and compelling them to a perpetual haunting, but stubbornly, through its own self-creating processes of distortion, redaction, and interruption, the text always holds any final possibility of meaning's materialization just beyond our reach; the forms of the visible are systematically undermined by the invisible, by the power of an all-encompassing field of "dark meaning." Lest this seem deadly serious, the trials and tribulations of Light in this dark cosmic minefield are both light- and dark-hearted, absurd and profound: the charming, taunting and befuddling pratfalls of a clown who is also, both openly and secretly, Hamlet.

Your Dark Meaning, Mouse is the ultimate field guide to the most bewildering and elusive topic in all literature: Dark Meaning, a subject that hitherto has only been accessible after deep study and courageous initiation to the most resourceful and sagacious of scholars, withdrawn, lab-coated persons who occasionally may be found stumbling about in forests, taking cryptic notes in their squared-paper moleskins from closely attended birdsong and astronomical observations. Now this indispensable collection of essays, stories, poems and scripts blasts the subject into public consciousness and beyond.

"Lapo is a marine biologist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed after an accident that caused him amnesia. When distant memories slowly resurface and the weight of modern life becomes apparent, he realizes that having an empty head was not so bad. Like a present-day Oblomov, Lapo clings to his hospital routine to avoid the outside world, fending off the attacks of family and friends who continuously pester him. As the days go by, the pressure for Lapo to go back to his normal life keeps mounting. Will he ever leave the hospital or will he settle there for good? Lost pieces of his history may provide the answer. Interspersed with intimate thoughts and daydreams about the lives of the fish he used to study, Lapo's epic struggle is filled with irony and depth in equal measure. Nostalgic and provocative, Reset is an existentialist journey through the inner world of a man who has lost the thread of life and finds it again in nature and his past."--Amazon.

Fiction. Everyone is constantly admonishing our narrator to keep quiet: You're full of bull hockey, college boy...Shut up and drink your beer. Or, 'Shut up, ' Michelle replied. 'Shut up, ' Michelle repeated. Or, Don't look up. At least don't shout anything when you do. She's here, on the balcony. Or, 'Shit.' Sarah spit this out like a too-hot cinnamon ball, pulled me off the dental chair, and led me to the closet with the skeleton, shushing me with her fingers. Or, Hush, be still. Tacete, tacete. Everyone admonishes him, when all he wants to do is shout the wonders, the horrors, the terrors that he and his older adoptive brother Galen face as one spiritual incursion after another manifests in their lives, moving from trickster poltergeists to forlornly wandering ghosts to intent fetches to avenging revenants. Perhaps, instead of admonishing him, everyone would do better to heed his early, youthful deliberation: I never heard his voice again after that night. If we humans could always recognize the last words we were ever to hear from each person we knew or even met, our lives would perch as fragile indeed, gathering tragedy every listening moment to lean over a dark cellar, of dark farewell

Poetry. In this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest - death, reproduction, evolution, friendship, grief, the vagaries of adaptation and survival - with a joyful spark that never goes out.

Fiction. After a nefarious yet revered mayor bans horse-drawn carriages in his city, a reclusive horse-and-buggy driver loses his job, his lover, and his unborn child, as the desolate farm he has lived on his whole life deteriorates around him along with his sanity. But this lone wolf vows revenge. With language lean and lyrical, and humor dark and grotesque, HORSEBUGGY is not only a haunting portrait of what happens when man's capacity for intimacy and acceptance is undermined by his more violent and sadistic impulses, but also a tragic love story and a penetrating study of how we destroy ourselves as much with our moralism and self-righteousness as with our vice and self-indulgence.