47 Journals Llc: 17 books

In this humorous look at life, C. Michael Bogdal takes a light-hearted look at the quirks and eccentricities of our fellow human beings. From pedestrians to our own flesh and blood, Bogdal highlights behaviors that he sees as being "abnormal." Always with an understanding tone, Bogdal makes us laugh at our own eccentricities with precision and wit.

Disturbing and comical, Pianotown lays fame to a giant cat and kidnapped hitchhikers. When in doubt, the eclectic inhabitants of this surreal and twisted world consult messages on cans of hairspray scattered about town. Not for the faint of heart or kidney.  

It’s 1986, and the famine machinery is humming in Ethiopia. It’s been two years since the greatest famine of the twentieth century has been uncovered with the deaths of half a million and counting. Clinic nurse Emma Smith, alone and rattled in the remote village of Godo, hears that a new nurse,...

Churches are fixed structures that enable intangible beliefs. In Some Churches, Tasha Cotter gives words similar power to transform. Each poem in this collection is like a penance, a salve when "we are strangled by the walls," when we feel like only "shell and shadow." Here's a...

Oh, what a wonderful e-mail! Decline of the able-bodied greeter. Carefully hidden among the potatoes. Hot pear. Tooth strikes sink. My child is pretty. Is that your thatch? U.S.S. Pajama Bottom. Ectopic fantasy. Cat refuses to swallow hair, dies young. Save all Teds. The birthday party across the...

Russell Helms tackles tornados, virginity cults, IKEA, and cube steak with grace and the mundane horror of life that plagues us all. Finessed with a dark sense of humor, Helms explores the human condition one character at a time.

In these stone-whetted and machete-whittled sting fictions, Christopher Chambers forges, from the idioms of stamped enameled steel and patina-pocked chrome, the narrative poetry of hard-knocked gorgeous vernacular. In Delta 88, he bondos the new noir southern gothic gloss with the crystal methods of...

Pregnant with Bobby Hartwig’s child, Thai nurse Silliporn tracks him down to Alabama where, having survived a jump from a bridge in Bangkok, Bobby’s back home taking care of stroke-victim Harold Suggs and falling in love with his gorgeous granddaughter Bee. The tiny Suggs’ house turns pressure...

Helms drives his imaginary pen through neighborhoods we may not really want to visit, but once there cannot keep our eyes from prying. From trampolines to peanut butter, The World Split Open explores the dim edges of things humorus, grotesque, and otherwise mildly frightening.

Days involves several conflicting impulses. Many of the poems ask to be understood by being voiced, the saying of them being a process of sorting out their multiple syntactical directions, the saying of them aloud being a manifestation of their specific music. Others have key elements that can only be...

Tightly knit, these five stories weave an unholy melange of revenge and ultimate kindness—a Frankenstein tale, vignettes wired together, spanning a thousand years of language, birth, cruelty, justice, and incest.

  Disappointed by a failed mortgage, Daniel treks to the jungles of Peru for an encounter with the legendary ayahuasca. He’s been warned that his medications are a deadly mix with the juice of the sacred vine, but he’s up for the challenge anyway.

After viciously attacking a judge, while giving him a pedicure, Jack escapes the domed city of Pan, Alabama, and begins his quest to free his secret love Lura from the grips of the Infirm, the grotesquely disabled leaders of his world—an over-the-top literary adventure in gothic Southern malaise.

Godo, Ethiopia, 1986, and Reece Myers has been shot in the head and evacuated back to Alabama, his fiancée Kristin in shock. As Reece fights to regain his life, the budding romance with fellow clinic nurse Emma back in Godo overshadows his engagement and spells trouble. As Reece recovers and reexamines life with Kristin, Emma longs for him and soon meets her own tragic fate.