Coffee House Winter 2012 books are here! The Impossibly by Laird Hunt, the novel that launched the literary noir movement, in paperback for the first time, and Errançities, the new collection from award-winning poet Quincy Troupe.
To give you a taste of what literary riches await, we’ve prepared a sneak peek of what you can expect to find between the covers of these books. But before you delve in, be sure to swing by The Next Best Book Blog to hear why Coffee House publicist, Tricia O’Reilly, is excited about our new books!
Errançities by Quincy Troupe
Publication Date: February 1, 2012
In a sentence: Award-winning poet, Hollywood author, and Miles Davis confidante Quincy Troupe evokes a sheer love of invention in this collection.
In a phrase: Improvisation of a soul.
In a word: Errance (“to wander”)
“Troupe is an innovator of form and tone who shifts quickly from a lofty, elegiac mode into burlesque or smoky, jazzed-down pop phraseology.”—Publishers Weekly
“Troupe’s poems are exuberant and passionate outpourings with driving, syncopated rhythms and improvisatory riffs of colorful language.”—Star Tribune
Want to hear Troupe’s take on the poet’s journey? Take a look at his interview with Mildred Howard and Richard Whittaker about how he became a poet, the difference between hearing and seeing words, and more. To hear the difference for yourself, listen to Quincy in action.
From “Sentences”
movement of time through the music of space
eye hear a bell ringing blue in sentences,
the language spoken in sleep becomes an echo here,
a translation when written down on white paper,
in the air, when spoken, words seem like a dream
pulsating through ether in blue melodies of tongues
weaving inside sentences, saturated with local
idioms, carved from blue spaces by human breath
sounds rooted in voices here evoke metaphors
coursing blood-deep, form ancient tribal gestures,
where words fixed in geographic locations repeat
through reverberating memory, bring recognition
ricocheting through a collective truth, perhaps
then language can evoke a shared history,
when sentences might mirror rhythms of drums
& a rising sun could birth a circle of love
The Impossibly by Laird Hunt
The book that launched the literary noir movement—in paperback for the first time.
Publication Date: February 1, 2012
In a sentence: When the anonymous narrator botches an assignment from the clandestine organization that employs him, he must seek out and uncover the identity of his assassin.
In a phrase: Erudite gumshoe yarn.
In a word: Noir
“Hunt is an intellect and a great spinner of claustrophobic noir plots, and his erudite gumshoe yarn owes as much to Georges Perec and Gertrude Stein as it does to Paul Auster.”—The Believer
“A fractured espionage story, John le Carré à la Borges.”—The Stranger
We see you tailing Hunt online. So check out this interview with M. T. Fallon to hear Hunt’s thoughts on his most recent books, his characters’ slippery senses of self, and chapter-long sentences. Or read his conversation with Andrew Ervin of Bookslut about reinventing noir. Oh, and you’ll definitely want to watch some Impossibly videos.
Excerpt
The conflated smell of onions and of some kind of meat and of stewed apples and of the animals and of cigar smoke and of, after a few minutes, singed hair and singed flesh is not a good one.
I am, pardon me, I repeated, telling you the truth, I suggested, all truth, etc., please please please, although I definitely did not suggest this in so many words.
The singed hair and the singed flesh part was about this: each time I answered I got burned on the back of the neck with the cigar. It was the tall, thin woman who would take the cigar, apparently, from my boss and place it against my neck.
I think that each time it was the tall, thin woman.
But it was impossible to be sure.
Those are just kisses, the boss would say, stuttering on the kisses part, so that it seemed to me, each time she never quite finished saying it, that I had received several kisses instead of just one.
Once, I went to a circus, the clowns and animals kind.
Once I say, but this was not really all that long ago . . . I had stumbled upon the circus by accident as I was following someone, and when I had finished following that someone, I went back to it, bought a ticket, and went in. Inside the orange and ochre tent it was all bright lights and flashes and drums and choreographed roars and clowns and odd movements and frightening voices and a woman standing on top of a horse and an elephant, finally, the feature, sitting in a car. Put your hands together, said the announcer, a dwarf on stilts, for Kisses the Driving Elephant, who was, in fact, driving, so to speak, an appropriately enormous convertible, using her trunk to turn the wheel.
Eventually, Kisses drove her car into a small pyramid of very short clowns.
Which hadn’t been meant to happen and hadn’t been all that funny.
In various parts of the world, at various times, they have used elephants to execute people. One way was the elephant would rear back and you would be tied to something and then it would come down on your head. Brave people, it was said, wouldn’t close their eyes. Those elephants were painted with all kinds of patterns. I forgot who told me about that. But at any rate I used to imagine it sometimes—lying there, eyes open, being brave, with the painted elephant rearing back.
I don’t think any of the very short clowns were badly hurt. Kisses, certainly, was not hurt, and she kept driving, around and around.
It was of Kisses the Driving Elephant, at any rate, that I thought, and of elephants in general, and of those painted elephants, as they applied, for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, of great big elephants and of jeering onlookers, one of their kisses to the back of my neck.
Insofar as I was able to think.
—Lindsey Giaquinto
