Load Up Your Bookshelf
By now, you undoubtedly have a copy of our book, The Lowbrow Reader Reader. In fact, if you are anything at all like our sample group (our parents), you have no fewer than ten copies! But surely, the bookshelf you purchased to display your Lowbrow Reader Reader copy or copies looks somewhat empty—even downright weird—considering that it holds no other titles. Here are three volumes with Lowbrow ties that we strongly recommend:
–Hitting stores this week is Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, a collection of short pieces by the great comic novelist Charles Portis. We would be queuing up to purchase Escape Velocity no matter who was involved, as Portis’s novels have been leaving us in stitches for years. But get a load of this! The new book was edited by none other than longtime Lowbrow Reader contributor Jay Jennings and features illustrations by another Lowbrow all-star, Mike Reddy. Read an excerpt of Jennings’s introduction at the Daily Beast. And New Yorkers, take note: On Thursday, October 4, Jennings hosts an Escape Velocity party at Soho’s swank Housing Works Bookstore, featuring music by Rhett Miller, appearances by funny literary heavies Calvin Trillin and Roy Blount Jr., and a reading from Portis’s play, Delray’s New Moon. Frankly, we’re just happy Housing Works wasn’t raided by the feds following Professor Irwin Corey’s set at the Lowbrow Reader Variety Hour back in May.
–Believe it or not, Charles Portis is not the only master novelist to find his work brought back to print thanks to Mr. Jennings. Back in 2009, in Lowbrow Reader #7, Jennings wrote about the wondrous fiction of Gilbert Rogin, whose three books had slipped out of print. That same issue featured “My Masterpieces,” the first Rogin short story to be published since he broke ties with the New Yorker at the end of the ’70s. (Both pieces are included in The Lowbrow Reader Reader.) In 2010, our friends at Verse Chorus Press published a new, single-volume edition of Rogin’s two novels, What Happens Next? and Preparations for the Ascent, featuring Jennings’s article as an introduction, plus cover art by Reddy (him again!) and fellow Lowbrow contributor Nathan Gelgud. Wait a minute…. You have yet to purchase this book? A shanda fur die goyim! Amend this wrong today!
–When we started working on the Lowbrow Reader back in 2000, there were a handful of publications to which we turned for guidance. MAD? Check! Puncture? Sure thing! CARtoons? What are we, red-blooded Americans or lowly communists? High on that list was the Minus Times, the fetchingly abstruse literary journal that Hunter Kennedy has edited since 1992. Freshly published is The Minus Times Collected: Twenty Years / Thirty Issues, a lovely door-stopper bound for smart coffee tables nationwide. The book features interviews with Stephen Colbert (just as he was becoming “Stephen Colbert”) along with writings by Sam Lipsyte, Wells Tower, Jeff Johnson, and many more. The handsome volume shares with The Lowbrow Reader Reader three contributors (David Berman, Neil Michael Hagerty, and Jay Ruttenberg) as well as a publisher (Drag City, here tag-teaming with Featherproof Books).
We beseech all Lowbrow Reader Reader readers to buy all three books! And while you’re at it, we request that sometime within the next five weeks you move to Ohio, Florida, and possibly Virginia and vote for President Barack Obama.