Birds Attack Man on Bike

Mike Stilkey

"Birds Attack Man on Bike," by Mike Stilkey

“Birds Attack Man on Bike,” by Mike Stilkey

Los Angeles native MIKE STILKEY has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. His work is reminiscent of Weimar-era German expressionism and his style has been described by some as capturing features of artists ranging from Edward Gorey to Egon Schiele. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as internationally. He has also created numerous large-scale installations internationally, in Turin, Italy; Bern, Switzerland; Manila, Philippines; and Hong Kong and Beijing, China. He is online at mikestilkey.com.

He’s Kind of a Big Deal . . .

Look_Ma_I'm_Writing

Sam writes like a champ and looks good doing it.

Forgive us the not-so-humblebrag, but Samuel Snoek-Brown, JDP’s stalwart Production Editor, has not one but *two* Items of Literary Awesomeness happening right now, and you should check ’em out.

First, his story “Lightning My Pilot” is a storySouth Million Writers Award Finalist. Vote for it here!

Second, Sam’s new chapbook of short fiction, Box Cutters, is available from Sunnyoutside press. Buy it, read it, love it. (Don’t worry; it’s sharp in the sense of being smart and having a stylish design, not sharp like a tool Gus Fring would use to teach you a lesson.)

And you don’t have to take my word for it—here’s what Ethel Rohan, author of Goodnight Nobody, has to say: “The familiar-made-wonderfully-strange image of a ventriloquist’s dummy is just one of the many moments that has stayed with me from Sam Snoek-Brown’s Box Cutters. So too has the image of multicolored bruises, those of the body, ego, and heart. Bruises make us tender, make us hurt. Bruises simultaneously resist and seek out contact, just like the wounded and wandering spirits from these stories.”

Congratulations, Sam!

LOVE ME Two Times

the world's most flammable novelOK, one more reminder that Love Me, the world’s most flammable novel, by Danger_Slater, the world’s most flammable writer, IS ON SALE NOW! Just in case you slept through yesterday. No judgement. It happens.

Anyway, you should buy Love Me. In an effort to facilitate that, here are some handy links:

Buy the paperback from Amazon.
Buy a Kindle copy.
Buy some other kind of digital copy from Smashwords.

Spread them around. Tell your friends, tell your enemies. Tell that dude on the bus with the iPad. He’s clearly got money to burn. And, really, why burn money when you can use it to buy books?

Read an excerpt of Love Me here, if you like, and then, you know, buy it. That’s kind of the point we’re trying to make, in case it wasn’t obvious.