Got this in the mail a few days ago. Beautiful new MLKNG SCKLS with Conner Willumsen’s orginal sketch for the new cover. I love when I get originals that have pencil and visible white-out. I’m also glad to see that more talented artists than me draw on cheap paper too! Planning on giving this some good wall real estate. (Thanks, Justin.)
Justin Sirois’s MLKNG SCKLS is going into a second printing from Publishing Genius. And you should buy it.
If you already have a first edition, then you should still buy it, because it now comes with this amazing cover drawn by Conner Willumsen. Clearly a worthwhile objet for shelf, desk, or table.
If you don’t have a first edition and have never read MLKNG SCKLS, then you should buy it, because you probably ought to read it. For my thoughts on that, click here.
If you still have any doubts, you should buy it, because Justin is giving way the original artwork for the new cover to one randomly selected pre-orderer. Here’s the info.
There is one compelling reason not to buy it. I’ve got a house with a lot of white walls and I would really love to win the artwork and the more people who pre-order, the less of a chance I have to win it. I was seriously tempted not to post this for that reason, but I like Justin and believe in what he’s doing – so go and buy MLKNG SCKLS (fancy cover edition).
Had the pleasure of reading this vowellessly titled book a couple times on the train this week. And had the pleasure of meeting Justin Sirois last weekend when we read together at the Baltimore Book Festival. I was really inspired by two things. ONE, the fact that he gave out handmade books to the whole audience who was good enough to brave the rain to watch us read (of course, I left mine in my hotel room), and, TWO, the voice that he is making available to American readers in his book MLKNG SCKLS and the longer, as yet unpublished, novel Falcons on the Floor. Justin also credits his work to Haneen Alshujairy, who he explained is a woman that he knows and regularly corresponds with who fled from Iraq to Egypt. Justin’s simple but properly indulgent words create stories that offer Alshujairy’s experiences to an audience (English-speaking Americans) who are usually prevented from seeing this side of Iraq (his book profiles two young men fleeing Fallujah). There is a lack of exoticism and a dull, familiar desperation that is rarely achieved by those portraying war and foreign lands.
A few moments in this book really stick with me. One is a haunting scene in which Salim, the book’s first person narrator, sets his laptop’s webcam to film to him taking a piss in the river at night, and he imagines an internet audience watching this moment, without explanation, on YouTube (or some other site). It’s an incredibly vulnerable moment for character and reader. Later, Justin writes an exceptional scene in which Salim “uncooks” a curry to show his girlfriend how much he loves her. Justin is good enough not to define this anomalous moment as a memory or a delusion or a dream – it is real to Salim and the reader. And as he goes through the painstaking process of “uncooking” we watch them flinch and cringe at the sound of a door knock, a far more threatening sound in their environment than the not-so-far-off screams of pain they’ve grown accustomed to.
MLKNG SCKLS sections are ancillary scenes to a larger novel, Falcons on the Floor, which Justin has written, and we can only hope will be made available to us soon.
