This PDF Chapbook: Matthew Salesses

I'm pleased to introduce We Will Take What We Can Get by Matthew Salesses. It is a funny and personal story about a man’s relationship with his fiancée and with his writing.



Salesses calls this “up-to-the-minute nonfiction.”



Told in 65 short sections, the story is about the writing of a story about a spate of bad luck, and how the writing plays a role and helps the writer adjust.



Salesses’s work is published in Glimmer Train, Hobart and many other journals. He is the fiction editor for Redivider.



Read it and print it at PublishingGenius.com.

This PDF Chapbook: Francis Raven

Francis Raven’s poem covers the C&O Canal, but manages to be about much more. Raven was driven to write the piece based on his reflection while walking along the canal to work each day – that in America we have so few ruins.



The poems match that sentiment, themselves falling apart, tracing out what was but what is left hanging on.



Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His books include 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).



Francis lives in Washington DC; you can check out more of his work at his website.

This PDF Chapbook: P. J. Druecke & Claire Readig

The Last Days of John Budgen Jr (Chapter One), by P. J. Druecke and Claire Readig, is the first installment in a serialized story that is distributed free (in hardcopy) in stores and news shelves etc. around the Midwest. It's an interesting project from a brilliant public space innovator, so it's exciting for PGP to be able to participate on the occasion of the release of the third chapter. As that is being distributed physically, I'm pleased to introduce the first chapter in digital form as part of This PDF Chapbook.



The story chronicles the life of John Budgen. Swooping through time, from the point we meet him in his middle age and back through the detailing of his odd history, we are introduced to Budgen as a blogger, a serious, melancholy man who is trying to deal with the passing of his mother by confronting his strange -- and strangely not-so-strange -- family history. The writing moves through excerpts of Budgen's blog and meticulous biographical details. Druecke's prose incorporates powerful and subtle storytelling elements which, in this chapter, build slowly to foreshadow Budgen's death. This is no spoiler: the effect of this chapter's resolution can only be known by giving it a read.



More on Paul Druecke:

A Social Event Archive

The Cool White Cube

Wikipedia ("His work is best understood within the context of conceptual art.")



Like everything in This PDF Chapbook, The Last Days of John Budgen, Jr can be read online or in hardcopy. However, this edition is not formatted for home printing. To have a copy mailed to you, use the ordering system at Publishing Genius. Chapters one and two are available ($4 for one, $7 for both, as always).

Open publication - More TPC

This PDF Chapbook: James Iredell

Boil water! Lots of it! Just born is the third installment of Jamie Iredell's brilliant (yes! brilliant!) novel-in-chapbooks that you've already read from oh-so-holy-wow presses GREYING GHOST (the one called "When I Moved to Nevada") (is this one out officially? I have it, but can everyone else get it? I don't know) and ACHILLES (the one called "Atlanta").

SHORT POST
OPTION 1:
Read on screen here.

OPTION 2:
Print yourself a copy here.

OPTION 3:
Order a copy for $4 here.

LONG POST
"Before I Moved to Nevada" is a 40-page chapbook, which is a lot, so take some of the water you just boiled, pour a cup of tea, and sit down at your computer and enjoy it slowly. Or even better: build yourself a copy using the print-formatted PDF version. Read it on screen or print it: here at the Publishing Genius home of This PDF Chapbook.

"Before I Moved to Nevada" is a story about travel, about family, football, friendship, friendship, kissing, sports recreation vehicles, bears, about cabins and rivers. It's a story that ends with this sentence: "Nothing happened, except for the fish" which is a really good sentence.

Christy Call, who I think is the universal favorite of everyone who went to AWP, drew the deer on the front. There were over 30 emails exchanged proclaiming the superiority of that deer over all other deer. I mean, look at it!

A word about printing these chapbooks at home: if you have an awesome printer then you probably know what you are doing and you're all set. If you have a cheap printer that you got for free or really cheap when you bought your computer, this is the perfect machine to print from. Now, if you have a dot matrix printer, you are awesome but you can't print this PDF. But everyone else! Hey everyone else! Print this book, your printer will show you how to flip the pages for double-sided printing. It's easy and rewarding. Then you just fold the book in half and staple in the middle.

However, stapling in the middle is tricky unless you have a long-arm stapler, like me. But you can figure it out! And if you can't figure it out, I'll tell you what to do. Here's what to do: Lightly bend the back half of the book -- crap, I'll just draw it:

OK, but if all else fails, we at PGP are happy to build you a copy and mail it to you. We at PGP are prepared for this sort of thing. We will do it for you on the cheap, too. Go here.

Open publication More TPC