MLKNG SCKLS by Justin Sirois -- Redux

MLKNG SCKLS sold out and Justin Sirois redesigned his book for a second printing:

The picture is by an artist named Connor Willumsen.

More info here.

Justin Sirois in the City Paper

http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=19486

Massive article on Justin's novel that ends, "What the fuck have we done?"

Justin Sirois at Big Other

Speaking of that time at John and Ginny Woods's house as I was in the last post -- here at Big Other is a really, really interesting interview that Ginny did with Justin Sirois, who wrote MLKNG SCKLS. I think it's interesting because it's about Iraq. Justin knows a lot about this stuff.

Read the interview.
Read MLKNG SCKLS.

MLKNG SCKLS on Bookslut

There is a nice article about MLKNG SCKLS in September's issue of Bookslut. Gina Myers calls it "a smart and compassionate little book."

Matthew Simmons Wrote About MLKNG SCKLS (plus an addition to yesterday's post)

Hey, Matthew Simmons wrote some really smart stuff about MLKNG SCKLS. Check it out here. My favorite part is the first paragraph, where he says,

The language is not dense, but it has a deep and impressive lyricism. Sirois has
a gift for lyrical writing that in no way seems forced. The alliteration and
internal rhymes that occur in the well-constructed sentences work in ways
they don't in a lot of prose lyricism. He is restrained, picking the right
spots to deploy a rhetorical figure to advantage.

With regard to Matthew's book, A Jello Horse, there are plans in the work to add a sort of coda. So it'll be a little longer. Pre-sales for the new edition will start soon.

And yesterday I neglected to mention the great interview between Matt DeBenedictis and Jamie Iredell at The Chapbook Review. Sorry Jamie! Sorry people! It is a great interview and you should read it to find out what's behind those detailed and precise short fictions that Jamie writes.

I ho I'm still alive yeah yeah I ho I'm still alive I'm still alive

What's the title of this post quoting?


Speaking of asking questions to an indeterminate Internet readership, the contest to win a copy of MLKNG SCKLS by writing an acrostic was won by a hot guy named Frank Sung. Justin wrote about it. The contest was hosted by Brian Allen Carr. I don't know what he looks like but I think he's awesome. He wrote about it too.


I've been away for so long that I don't think I'll be able to devote the proper amount of attention to the items Matt Bell has been sharing in my Google Reader. Crap, I feel like I'm missing a lot.


But I watched Blake Butler eat his book Scorch Atlas, which is amazing. The book I mean. Not sure how I feel about him eating it. It's obviously a publicity stunt, and that pisses me off.


I read about Sean Lovelace going to Hot Springs, Arkansas though and want to go there. I also want to write things such as "I calmed down like a TV show" like he does. In fact, I don't want to write at all unless I write things like that.


Back in May I walked down an alley in Ann Arbor and listened to Blake get really angry and cuss-y and say that Sean doesn't know anything about nachos. I mean, it was just insane how upset he got about the whole thing, about how Sean talks about nachos all the time but doesn't know jack cheese about them.


What else did I read about? That Michael Duckett thing at HG is awesome. Apparently Justin Taylor wrote some mean stuff about some botard or whatever and now Gene's name is really Russell.


I think it's funny that Russell changed his name to Gene, as if one was less awkward than the other. To me, both of those names fall into the awkward category of names. If Mike is a normal name and Joe and Dave are normal names, Gene and Russell are equally abnormal. What made him go from Russell to Gene? What's the point? This really pisses me off.


I have a friend; his name is Russell Elliott. That is an awesome name. It's two weird names in a row. He's in China now and he likes baseball and his favorite band is The Raspberries probably. He has a preference between Greg Kott and Jim Deregotis.


And now there's Russell Morgan -- also two weird names in a row. Morgan, though, is kind of hot. Like, when I think about someone named Morgan I think about Baywatch for some reason, and I don't think I'm the only one who this smatters for.


(Sold the film rights to Light Boxes, btw.)


I bought Stephanie Johnson's book from Keyhole. It better be good. I watched SJ read from it on the Internet because that's what the Internet is for.


This morning I woke up on the floor. Never even tried to make it to bed. I remember when Joe left I was thinking, oh I'll just rest here for a second and I laid down. Next thing I know I'm waking up with my cell phone in my hand thinking "I should tweet this."


OMG I read about the hardcover copy of MLKNG SCKLS that Justin "Muscles" Sirois is making. CRAVE:



My brother used to call me tuna breath.

MLKNG SCKLS contest (#2)

First of all, Brian Allen Carr received a second copy of MLKNG SCKLS and he's holding a contest. The prize includes his extra copy and PLUS

Amelia Gray's AM/PM

Larry Fondation's Unintended Consequences

and a year's subscription to Boulevard Magazine.

Holy wow! Go here for details on how to win.

SECOND OF ALL, congratulations to Bret McCabe, who won the MLKNG SCKLS IS NOT A CALLOUS VIDEO GAME contest. He was selected by Justin Sirois in a blind reading. (There were two other entries.) Bret walks away with a copy of the book signed by Justin and his Iraqi editor, Haneen Alshujairy.

MLKNG SCKLS contest update -- 7 days to play

You have until Friday, June 26 to submit cover copy for the new video game, 6 DAYS IN FALLUJAH.

The winner will receive:

• Justin Sirois's newest book, MLKNG SCKLS, signed by Justin and Haneen Alshujairy (the Iraqi refugee who consulted with him on the story)
• A print of the cover copy inserted into the game design (see picture, below)
• A drawing Justin has been working on all week

Here's part of one entry that I like a lot:

Oof! Kill that person! Are you going to ice that person? That one?

MLKNG SCKLS contest

Justin Sirois wrote MLKNG SCKLS with Haneen Alshujairy, an Iraqi refugee, and when I read it for the first time I thought, Cool, a post-apocalypse story like A Boy and His Dog or Road Warrior. Then I caught myself: Wait, this is real. This is here and now. Or to be precise, this is Fallujah 2004.

That’s when Marines stormed the Iraqi city in response to a vicious and grotesque attack on four Blackwater mercenaries. Sensing the impending retaliation, many of the city's residents fled, including the characters in MLKNG SCKLS who walk a hard trip up the Euphrates. And today Fallujah is a bombed out post-apocalyptic city after all.

That isn't discussed in MLKNG SCKLS, though. The inciting incident is hauntingly absent. Instead, Sirois presents the quiet hustle of Salim and Khalil as they itch for a swim, a nap or a smoke on their trek to safety. I think it's a smart way to treat the whole thing. People should care about what happened in Iraq, and it's the strength of fiction to give a human perspective.

It's the strength of video games to give the first-person shooter perspective, and the new game "Six Days in Fallujah" is a dirty bomb to drop. It presents the early days of the fight in 2004, when 48 Marines and thousands of insurgents were killed. You play as a soldier. You walk through the rubble and decide whether or not the guy in the tracksuit is someone you should shoot.


That's where THE MLKNG SCKLS IS NOT A CALLOUS VIDEO GAME CONTEST comes in. Here are the details:

What?
• The contest is to write back cover copy for the video game, “Six Days in Fallujah.”
• The prize for the contest is one copy of MLKNG SCKLS, an 11x17” cover illustration by Sirois and a Sirois-designed image of the video game packaging that shows your write-up (see the picture).
• Send 1-3 entries to adam at publishinggenius by June 26, the Friday before MLKNG SCKLS official release on June 30. Entry is free, judged by PGP editorial staff.

What?
• Entries should be about 50 words long.
• They should address the events of April, 2004 in Fallujah.
• They should address the video game.
• There is no constraint on criticizing the game as a good or bad.

What?
• An entry could be a straightforward description of the game or a description from the perspective of a civilian living in Fallujah in April, 2004.
• It could address the "Play Theory" that Johan Huizinga writes about in Homo Ludens, that playing is freedom, and is distinct from real life.
• It could be about how much fun you'll have pretending to shoot real people, if that's your thing.

What?
• Aside from promoting MLKNG SCKLS, the purpose of this contest is to consider again the horrible situation in Fallujah, and to care about it.

MLKNG SCKLS blurb

“Sirois’ MLKNG SCKLS reads like what might happen if you crossed Gus Van Sant’s ‘Gerry’ with the parts of an Iraq war documentary that the Bush administration had censored. A tight, spare and quietly tense gem of a book.”
Brian Evenson
Author of Last Days and The Open Curtain

(Get it here.)

MLKNG SCKLS

Is available for preorder.

Matt Bell breaks it down for you:

In MLKNG SCKLS, two young men leave Fallujah to follow a river, letting its flow dictate the path of their escape. Along the way, the narrator keeps track of his thoughts on his slowly dying laptop, its fading battery power increasing the tension of his already fraught passage through this dangerous landscape. These brief entries record not just the thoughts of the refugee, the exile, but also how these two men try to understand themselves through tall tales about brothers saved from rabid dogs by mere cigarettes, through fantasical memories of uncooking meals for girlfriends, through hallucinatory visions of predatory trees and circling vultures. These are stories told first to pass the time, sure, but also to explain who they once were, in the lives they have just left behind.

Sirois' masterful creation is not just a travel narrative, not just a epistolary, not just a war story. This is desert madness made universal, a coming of age rendered apocalyptic in language as sparse and beautiful and ultimately perilous as the desert passage it describes.
- Matt Bell, author of The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind