Shane Jones’s next novel, The Failure Six, has a page on Goodreads. He’s trying to create some legitimate noise about this book before it hits next January. Judging from Light Boxes, the expectation and anticipation are well deserved.

The coolest thing is that he drafted artist Chris Pell to do some sick (as in diseased) drawings for the book. Should be a thing of beauty.  Here’s a sample of one of Pell’s drawings:

Geoffrey Gatza, my publisher, just let me know that my that the proofs of my novel The Complete Collection of people, places & things are all set and ready to go to the printer. So I’m pretty excited about that. I’m going to offer a pre-order deal soon. I just need to come up with something cool and handmade to give away.

Here’s the cover of the book:

 

I’ve been meaning to write about this one for a while. If you haven’t heard already, Shane Jones‘s Light Boxes is a beautiful book and should be read. I’m probably not the first person to tell you that. If you only read comics, and you don’t know about this little novel, you should still go and read it. It only has one picture but it will make you want to draw comics. I wanted to draw comics the whole time I was reading it – the images are haunting.

What I really respect about this book is Shane’s total indulgence of imagination (I’d go so far as to say fancy). The guy has fun writing this book and it makes it fun to read. Like any affecting imaginary world, this one bears resemblance to our own (questions of authority and faith are very similar), but more notable to me is the fact the Shane creates a world that is definitely not ours. He invented it! The way people used to. Reading this book brought back the feeling of the first time I read Kafka and Calvino and Barthelme and Davis. I felt sad in that exciting and compassionate way; I felt that I was really caring. Light Boxes pries you from your intellect. Light Boxes is not a pared down, raw, visceral, and dirty work like so much of what’s popular (and good) these days. Its few pages are layered and rich and get you lost in the woods, mired in February.

Oh, and go listen to Shane read a section at Apostrophe Cast if you haven’t.

John Madera, the kind soul behind the lists and lists of novellas, has made another very cool contribution to the contemporary fiction discussion with his Chapbook Review. His new website is dedicated to discussing the volumes of little books that come out everyday offering some of the most exciting art that is being created right now, work that often goes unremarked because it doesn’t fit into the critical categories of review sections. He’s got smart people talking about smart books. And he’s looking for more people to get involved, so go look at the list of books available for review.

Oh, and he wants to feature mini-comic reviews too, which is awesome.