In practice, what is known as a Terry stop—an investigative detention of a citizen to confirm or deny an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that a crime may just have been or be in the process of being committed—is the launching pad for more or less whatever judicial orbit the officer wants to send you into. If the officer orders you to stand in one spot but you move to another you can be arrested (never mind that the very definition of “arrest” is having your freedom of movement curtailed, so a non-arrest Terry stop is already a contradiction in terms). If you run away, regardless of whether you’ve done anything wrong, you can be arrested. If you disobey the officer’s order to produce identification you can, in many states, be arrested. If you start swearing at the officer and there are other people around you can be arrested. If you touch the officer, no matter how lightly or even cordially, you can be arrested. If you hinder, in any way, the officer’s attempt to speak to another citizen you can be arrested. And on and on it goes; the number of ways for an “investigative” stop to end in a citizen being arrested for something having nothing to do with the original reason for the stop numbers in the hundreds or even thousands, not the dozens. Many criminal cases begin with minor traffic violations or minor civilian complaints. And if any of these complaints-cum-investigative stops-cum-arrests should befall an individual who is not a legal denizen of the United States, that individual can, despite not being charged with any criminal offense, be held in a federal ICE (formerly INS) holding cell for months and then deported following an administrative (not criminal) hearing.

So again, originally the Arizona statute merely added to officers’ literally endless stock of “reasonable suspicion” cover stories—which is not to say officers always use such stories, merely that they’re always available and are as numerous as, say, any lie you could think of for being late to a business meeting. Given that one can’t tell from mere visual observation whether or not any individual is an illegal immigrant—the law is so sketchy on this point that it more than implies, but indeed allows, that an individual getting into a truck on a roadside with a large number of other people can be interrogated (but would that interrogation really happen, if all the gentlemen looked, say, Irish?)— the statute in its initial conception was merely pretextual. It did, and was intended to, make racial profiling even easier for the police than it already is. And most such instances of profiling, it should be noted, can result in a form of detention ineligible for state-level judicial review; an officer could initiate contact with someone dark-skinned hanging around in a neighborhood known for harboring illegal immigrants (shades of Arvizu), make a bad or simply weak arrest either on the basis of a failure to produce identification or any of the hundreds of other options available to that officer, and then sit back and watch ICE place an immigration hold on the suspect as soon as he entered the criminal justice system. Whether or not the individual ever saw a judge on the original charge ICE would come (under U.S. law, it would have to come) and whisk them away. Problem solved; except, of course, for the 31,000 illegal immigrants now sitting interminably in U.S. lockups who’ve committed no crime, and for the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of false positives which could ensue from such procedures, in which citizens are stopped on the basis of an officer’s inarticulable, inscrutable “hunch” that they might be illegal or “look” illegal. It’s worth noting, too, that if a Terry stop based on the Arizona statute results in a weak arrest of an individual who turns out to be a citizen, the police will then be doubly committed to getting a conviction on that weak arrest in order to avoid a civil suit from the citizen (as a non-immigration-status-related criminal conviction would establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, a reason for the arrest beyond the skin-color of the suspect; this evidence could then be used in the police department’s defense at a civil trial).

Recently, the Arizona law was amended—not an admission of wrongdoing in the initial writing of the law, the statute’s authors and conservative pundits hastened to tell us—so that immigration status can only be investigated during investigation of another potential crime. That is, a Terry stop initiated for any of the hundreds of reasons an officer may initiate one, which reasons no judge is in a particularly good institutional position to question, and which cases like Arvizu tell us will be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court whatever cockamamie basis for them an officer provides. Indeed, the same amended Arizona statute which allows investigation into immigration status only during the course of another criminal investigation also allows, in the first instance, just such a criminal investigation if a car pulls over to the side of the road and picks up a large number of dark-skinned persons. Or then again, of course, if, as in Arvizu, kids in the back of a car wave to a police officer in a way the officer believes is “odd.” Can you imagine a judge trying to adjudicate what an “odd” wave would look like? Can you imagine a criminal defendant or civilian witness trying to convince a judge, through testimony at a motions hearing, that in fact no one waved “oddly”? If you can picture a bench trial in which the judge has never seen the defendant before in his life, but lives down the street from and is friendly with the police officer-cum-witness, and in which the officer says the wave was “odd” based on his ten years of experience in law enforcement and the unknown-to-the-court defendant swears under oath it was a “normal” wave, you have a better sense of our criminal justice system than you will ever get from any Dick Wolf production.

So the Arizona statute now at issue makes a crime what was not a crime, expands further the definition of “reasonable suspicion,” which was already a term of infinite dimension in practice, and implicitly provides a mechanism for officers to make bad or weak arrests intended, in fact, to force ICE to issue concurrent federal immigration holds on state-detained suspects. In the balance, hundreds if not thousands of dark-skinned citizens will be subjected to intrusive Terry stops by government officials. And some of those will get arrested on petty offenses and then find themselves, despite having no prior criminal record, in no-deal criminal prosecutions because police departments are afraid (as well they should be) of civil litigation under this new statute. Perhaps this is why most law enforcement officials are against the new Arizona statute, both in Arizona and elsewhere. (And you early-career patrolmen who think it will be easier, not harder, to do your job under this new statute really, really need to talk to your “rabbis”) Perhaps this is the same reason so many in law enforcement have told conservatives for years, to no evident effect, that torture doesn’t work. That racial profiling doesn’t work. That incarceration rather than rehabilitation for non-violent, petty drug offenses doesn’t work. That draconian community policing, rather than interactive community policing, doesn’t work. That using a brutalization paradigm for the punitive detention of petty criminals doesn’t work. Perhaps this is why America is beginning to ask why conservatives support so many criminal justice policies that disproportionately intrude on the lives of our nation’s most vulnerable populations—the poor, minorities, urban-dwellers, the under-educated, the mentally ill—and also, as significantly, show no signs of ever having been effective. Arizona legislators claim that illegal aliens commit a disproportionate number of crimes; what they don’t say is that communities with suspected concentrations of illegal aliens are also policed with exponentially more ferocity than suburban communities, that in this country dark-skinned persons are (studies have shown) more likely than white people to be arrested and prosecuted and incarcerated for identical offenses, that the poor (and illegal immigrants are almost always this, understandably) have always received different treatment from law enforcement than the rich, and that there is a distinction between crimes related to the drug trade and the immigration status of immigrants who come here to work. Indeed it would be far more accurate to say that an illegal immigrant is by definition a working person and/or one who desires to work, rather than a fancifully-denominated “criminalien.” Now if only the Arizona legislature would get to work on some real laws that promote real policing and produce real results. If only Dick Wolf would start producing real accounts of real people in our real criminal justice system. Maybe then—then—we could have a real conversation about real justice in this country.

Yesterday I was listening to Sean Hannity’s nationally-syndicated radio program. He was savaging Attorney General Eric Holden for having apparently conceded, under Congressional questioning, that he had not yet read the new Arizona statute making it a state-level crime to be in the United States illegally. This, despite the fact that Holder had on more than one occasion registered concern over the law’s potential for promoting racial profiling—which, Hannity pointed out repeatedly to his listeners, the language of the statute explicitly forbade. While I was listening to the show no one called in, or was allowed on the air, to point out to Hannity that racial profiling can no more be “forbidden” than it can be codified. Any statute codifying racial profiling would be nullified by any court in the United States, state or federal, before it could be enacted; likewise, any statute claiming to outlaw racial profiling would be just as toothless and irrelevant, whether or not it passed judicial muster as a mere reiteration of the Fourteenth Amendment.

For years conservatives of Hannity’s ilk have been hard at work turning the cottage industry of spreading misinformation about the criminal justice system into a veritable empire of criminal justice-related misinformation. Dick Wolf’s endlessly syndicated and replicated Law & Order series has done more to intentionally misinform the American public about its system of laws than any determined propaganda campaign of the twentieth century, and I include in this all of the most infamous propaganda campaigns of that bloody century. Those who watch Wolf’s politically-charged tripe regularly are not merely uninformed about the operations of police and prosecutors in the United States, they are in fact less knowledgeable about our national system of criminal justice than those with absolutely no awareness of it whatsoever—for instance, a child of seven living in a lightly-policed suburban enclave somewhere in middle America. Every episode begins with a studied, deliberate lie: police officers, while often courageous, often honorable, and undoubtedly critical players in American society, in no way whatsoever represent “the people,” as we are so sagely informed by voice-over actor Steven Zirnkilton at the beginning of every hour-long Law & Order. Nor do the “district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders,” represent the “people” (the full text of Wolf’s seminal deceit: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories”). As anyone who’s stepped into a courtroom is well aware, both police officers and prosecutors represent the awesome power of our state and federal governments. They are not beholden to the citizenry of their district, or their state, or their country. Their employers and, yes, masters are government officials, some of whom are elected, some of whom are appointed, some of whom are merely bureaucrats. Were the entire population—every man, woman, and child—of some American hamlet to object to the government-authorized investigation and prosecution of a given offense, the police officers and district attorneys of that hamlet would not only be under no obligation to acknowledge such objections but indeed under every imaginable obligation to ignore them entirely. In the criminal justice system, the only representative the “people” have is the jury, a body composed of twelve ordinary citizens from the legally-defined subdivision in which the offense allegedly occurred. And if there’s one maxim in the criminal justice system, it’s that police and prosecutors would far prefer to try a case before a judge—another government official—than any sampling of the “people.” More than nine times out of ten. Draw your own conclusions. (That conservatives have dressed up “tort reform,” which is definitionally a hatred of citizen-comprised juries, as, instead, a hatred of effete attorneys is just another indication of the spite so many Republicans have for their fellow Americans.)

The point is that it’s no surprise whatsoever that in America we no longer have a common language with which to speak about our criminal justice system and any national controversies arising from it. Much of the country believes, per Wolf, that prosecutors regularly meet face-to-face with defendants during plea negotiations (over my dead body, says this former public defender); that prosecutors and defense attorneys are mortal enemies disgusted by one another in every possible sense, rather than, as is so often the case, friends and mutual admirers both socially and professionally; that cross-examination proceeds through a series of open-ended questions (in fact, a proficient cross-examination contains almost no questions whatsoever, only statements made by the questioning attorney, to which the only possible reaction is “yes” or “no”); that the Constitution and a liberal judicial branch present a near-insurmountable hurdle to the proper investigation and prosecution of crimes (in fact less than 10% of criminal cases ever go to trial, and less than 5% of those cases are decided by a pre-trial motion to exclude evidence under one of the Amendments to the U.S. Constitution). I’d say that Dick Wolf and his Law & Order series produce (in all senses of the word) several identifiable lies per every five minutes of airtime, so these are just a few exemplars of the larger, now-twenty-year-old propagandistic setpiece. More immediately pertinent to the debate over the statute recently enacted in Arizona is the fact that most Americans don’t realize it’s not a crime to be an illegal alien in America. You could be excused for thinking this, though, if you’d heard Arizona Governor Jan Brewer declare otherwise; if you’d heard the authors of the Arizona statute declare otherwise; or if you’d heard even center-left “news” organizations like MSNBC declare otherwise (choose your article: most recently, May 14th’s “Jews: Stop Arizona-Nazi Comparison,” whose headline, needless to say, poses more than one problem). Or perhaps you heard Hannity or Limbaugh say it, and in the flood of outright, unabashed lies—all broadcast over the public’s airwaves—you were unable to distinguish one fish-story from another.

The truth is that being an illegal alien in the United States is a civil infraction, and leads to incarceration only because the federal government has, among its many powers, the power to detain and deport men, women, and children when the nation’s federal immigration statutes are at issue (detention of illegal immigrants became mandatory under a Democratic President—Bill Clinton). But in terms of legal status, an illegal alien is no more a “criminal” under federal law than someone who drives a few miles over the speed limit. Perhaps this is why Boston radio shock-jock and former MSNBC contributor Jay Severin was endlessly jeered as racist when he tutored his listening audience to call illegal immigrants “criminaliens.” It’s easy to presume racial animus when one deigns to call millions of people “criminals,” before a listening audience of hundreds of thousands or even several million, without once checking your facts. Which is why I found Sean Hannity’s smackdown of Eric Holder more than a little bemusing. Not only does the Republican platform Hannity shills for exhibit no understanding whatsoever of the criminal justice system (the GOP plan for preventing recidivism would, paradoxically, only make sense only if we presumed recidivism desirable), in fact Republican criminal justice policies have for decades now fetishized the promotion of crime: yes, that’s right, if you’ve worked in the criminal justice system for long you’ve seen how Republican criminal justice policies make us all less safe, and markedly so.

Racial profiling is an excellent example. Not only does it not work, not only does it waste precious human resources—one reason law enforcement is generally against it—it also telegraphs to terrorists, drug-runners, and other assorted baddies that we’re going to go about detecting them in the most ineffectual and transparently predictable way possible. Racial profiling is like a handbook for terrorists and kingpins: if you don’t want to be found out, avoid using anyone who fits the “profile” in your operation. It’s remarkable that the same conservative radicals who wanted every hearing about national security to be classified (at least when Mr. Bush was President) in order to avoid tipping off the enemy as to our “methods” are now suggesting, with enthusiasm, that Americans make international and domestic law enforcement a game of chicken we’re absolutely guaranteed to lose. Again, this is where the allegations of racism come into play: if the policy you’re proposing will have precisely the opposite effect of the one you claim it will, and history has shown this repeatedly, observers will start looking for other motives besides efficacy. I’m looking at you, Bush torture policy. And so are the Founders, as the system of “reasonable, articulable suspicion” promulgated by our Fourth Amendment does, if executed responsibly, offer the absolute best method for detecting and preventing international and domestic crime ever devised. It requires that law enforcement officials be able to synthesize data, rather than merely distinguish between colors—something newborns can do after one week.

Understanding Arizona’s new criminal statute prohibiting the presence of illegal immigrants in the state—which is so haphazardly written it will likely be struck down by the first federal court to review it—requires not only an understanding of what racial profiling is (which would reveal it to be something no state legislature can effectively prohibit) but also how crimes are investigated in the United States. And if you’re been watching radical-conservative Dick Wolf’s masturbatory fantasies for any period of time, you’re not only ill-equipped for either task but indeed well behind the starting line. And the starting line is this: In policing, as our Founders well knew, the ballgame isn’t so much the arrest itself but the contact. If the government is permitted to make contact with you, it can and does have countless ways of ensuring you end up in the back of a cruiser. Indeed our system is designed this way, and not merely because even an illegal arrest can land you in jail for months—between twenty-four hours to a weekend before a judge reviews your bail commissioner-set bail (if the state uses bail commissioners; otherwise, you sit in a cell and wait for the judge), and then, if you can’t make bail, many weeks, up to months, until your first (movable) trial date. A sheriff’s deputy once told me that he didn’t really care if a DWI/OUI arrest led to a conviction, as even being arrested for drunken driving can lead to so many administrative and criminal justice consequences that in fact it’s the police, as much as any judge, who have the power to determine penalties in the first instance. So it’s important to know, then, that in the United States the government can initiate contact with you if one of its duly-designated officers has “reasonable suspicion” you have committed, are committing, or are about to commit a criminal offense (for a civil infraction, the standard rises to “probable cause”). Reasonable suspicion means whatever the officer thinks it means; later on, when the officer must show “reasonable, articulable suspicion” in court, it still means largely what the officer thinks it means, as for a judge to find that an officer initiated contact with a citizen without any legitimate basis is to insult both the officer’s professional skills and, often, his personal integrity—both of which are more or less out of bounds when that same judge will need to trust that same officer’s professional skills and personal integrity in countless bench trials over the next days, weeks, and months. The problem isn’t so much, as Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz once said, “testilying”—intentional perjury by government officials—though that happens on occasion also. No, the real problem is that it’s police officers, not state legislatures or even judges, who run this country’s legal system on a day-to-day basis. The judge who fails to defer, more than ninety-five times out of a hundred, to the sense impressions of police officers will not be allowed to remain a judge for very long. A regularized, systematic circumspection of police testimony as to “reasonable suspicion” would bring this nation’s criminal justice system to its knees within seventy-two hours.

In enacting a new criminal statute, the Arizona state legislature has granted police officers a new and wholly unnecessary weapon in their arsenal of “reasonable suspicion.” Officers already had the implicit power to racially profile; it merely required of them a cover story which a judicial branch already institutionally beholden to them would be willing to believe. In practice, a workable cover story is just about anything: one famous U.S. Supreme Court case, United States v. Arvizu, found that a government official could initiate contact with a vehicle if that contact happened near the U.S. border, if the car was a minivan, if the car slowed when it became aware of the police (as you do), if the driver exhibited a “rigid” posture and did not look at the police officer while passing by (as you do), if the car was registered to a U.S. town with an illegal immigrant population, and if the children in the back of the minivan waved to the officer. The upshot? The officer in Arvizu had a “hunch,” and that hunch turned out to be right, and thus bad law was created. Now, as before, all across the nation officers’ hunches are treated as the law of the land, not because they’re always right, but because if a case actually makes it to court it probably was. We don’t hear of the millions of false positives every year because those cases don’t make it into the criminal justice system. (In the same sense, we don’t hear much about county jails and nickel-and-dime misdemeanors on cable television, though in fact this is what our criminal justice system is largely comprised of—not state prison bids and violent felons, but friends and neighbors with minimal or no prior records who are accused of non-violent offenses and will be released back into our communities either immediately after trial or within a matter of days or weeks.)

. . . next installment this Friday . . .

I love out-there theories and the people who are seized by them. I’m a sitting duck for crackpots. Maybe that’s why I like the Web.

But even those of us who pride ourselves on never showing skepticism arrive at a crossroads sometimes. Should I really sacrifice 20 minutes of my life to hear out this particular rant (about Google, Obama, the Fed) or politely back away from the ranter?Well, you really sound as if you’re on to something, sir!

In analog times, one sign that it was time to retreat was if a big talker, having declared himself an author, produced his “book” and something about the book just wasn’t . . . booky. Maybe the pages carried a whiff of the Xerox or mimeograph machine. Or maybe the volume — about Atlantis or Easter Island — looked too good, with engraved letters, staid cover, no dust jacket. After a casual examination of the spine or the title page, realization would dawn: self-published.

In this time of Twitter feeds and self-designed Snapfish albums and personal YouTube channels, it’s hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing. But it was very real. By contrast, to have a book legitimately produced by a publishing house in the 20th century was not just to have copies of your work bound between smart-looking covers. It was also metaphysical: you had been chosen, made intelligible and harmonious by editors and finally rendered eligible, thanks to the magic that turns a manuscript into a book, for canonization and immortality. You were no longer a kid with a spiral notebook and a sonnet cycle about Sixth Avenue; you were an author, and even if you never saw a dime in royalties, no one could ever dismiss you again as an oddball. (read more)

I. Lauren Groff is the author of The Monsters of Templeton which was published by Hyperion on February, 2008 and debuted at #14 on the New York Times Bestseller list. Her debut novel was well received and heavily promoted by Stephen King, who read it prior to release and and praised it to no end on Entertainment Weekly. The Monsters of Templeton was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2008, and was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Amazon.com and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Monsters of Templeton is a contemporary tale about coming home to Templeton, a representation of Cooperstown, NY. It is interspersed with voices from characters drawn from the town’s history as well as James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Pioneers” which is also set in a fictionalized Cooperstown which he also calls Templeton.

Groff has short stories published in The Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, and Ploughshares, and the anthologies Best New American Voices 2008, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best American Short Stories 2007. All of these stories appear in her collection of Short stories, Delicate Edible Birds which was released on January 27th, 2009.

Her next novel, Arcadia is forthcoming, and she is currently working on a project for Flatmancrooked, to be announced sometime in the near future.

Here’s Lauren discussing Monsters of Templeton

Here is the trailer for Monsters of Templeton

10: Mud Luscious Press & Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart

I don’t read much “experimental” writing as a practice. I also generally steer clear of books with script typefaces on the cover (snooty, I know.) That said, Gaudry’s ambition is admirable and her talent wonderfully evident in this compelling debut that a big house probably wouldn’t have taken a chance on.

From PANK Magazine’s review

We Take Me Apart begins with an homage to Gertrude Stein and could be read as a reinterpretation of the three-line poem, “A Carafe that is a Blind Glass.” This approach is an act of pure courage on Gaudry’s part. Only a brave and talented writer would dare mess with the perfection of Gertrude Stein. Add this offense to your favorite childhood fairytale being reimagined and We Take Me Apart reads like a novella about to implode. And yet, as if by magic, the story holds even as the narrative spins out of control.

9: Wave Books & Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents

I covet the sense of authority with which Wave Books publishes its books. For example, I read poetry on occasion, and when that occasion comes along I read Wave’s books. Why? There titles are so consistently good (Zucker being an prime example,) that I needn’t worry about being disappointed. They’ve become a stage upon which new careers can begin to flourish.

from Publisher’s Weekly:

Zucker’s willingness to put her own pain on display may frighten or even disgust some readers, but most will be grateful to find themselves less alone in their own everyday suffering. This is a book for all who seek what Zucker calls ‘the antidote for despair,’ however elusive it may be.

8: Dzanc Books & Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

Dzanc is becoming a something of a mini-empire in the indie world, with publications and entities like Best of the Web, Monkeybicycle, The Collagist, Keyhole Press, and Black Lawrence Press under its roof. But even as they grow, they consistently provide a platform for talented and fresh new voices, as is the case with van den Berg.

from Publisher’s Weekly:

In her affecting debut collection, van den Berg taps into her characters’ losses with an impressive clarity. Each of these stories is meticulously crafted, and often the protagonist is recovering emotionally from a staggering life’s blow.

7: Les Figues Press & Urs Allemann’s Baby Fucker

I hate to think that it is the fate of indie presses to take all the risks and then lose authors to larger publishers when they’ve been vetted on smaller stages. But, if it is to be our lot, so be it. Allemann will surely be gobbled up by a larger house, but Penguin wouldn’t touch a title like Baby Fucker with a ten-foot pole, regardless of it’s literary force and prowess. Germans have all the fun and culture.

Dennis Cooper:

A stunning, exquisite, perfect, and difficult little benchmark of a novel that makes literature that pre-dates it seem deprived.

6: Tarpaulin Sky Press & Mark Cunningham’s Body Language

Tarpaulin Sky is a press and lit journal–kind of our long-lost cousin. Their books are, by-and-large, extremely good and well-designed. Cunningham’s Body Language stands out on both fronts. His voice is unique and powerful–a poetic force to be reckoned with.

from Prick of the Spindle:

The appeal of Body Language is universal. Always thought-provoking, always enjoyable and unexpected, the combination of topics of math, language and symbolism via the alphabet and the body as a complex system, turns out to be an appropriate, engaging compendium.

5: New York Tyrant & Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg: Limited Edition

New York Tyrant is usually just a tri-annual lit journal. But when they get wild, they go all out. How they got Brian Evenson to do a book for them, I wish I knew. Furthermore, whoever came up with making it a limited edition hardcover with Evenson’s smearings of a “blood-like substance” on the front should be applauded.

from Blake Butler:

Via a series of sparely rendered dream loops, each wormed so deep into the other that it is no longer safe to say which might be which, Baby Leg extends the already wide mind-belt of Brian Evenson’s terror parade another mile, and well beyond.

4: McSweeney’s & John Brandon’s Arkansas

Is McSweeney’s still indie? Hmm. I mean, you still have to have a clerk order Brandon’s book at most stores. They don’t readily carry it at the chains. But most people outside of the lit world say “McSwchat?” when I mentioned them in passing. Think what you want about McSweeney’s, but their books are gorgeous, editor Eli Horowitz has that ever-sought-after eye for greatness, and most of the work they publish is, well, really, really good. Arkansas is really, really, really, really, really good. Shit. I mean really good.

from McSweeney’s description:

There are the days: the dappled grounds, the aimless yardwork, the hours in the booth giving directions to families in SUVs. And then there are the nights, crisscrossing the South with illicit goods, the shifty deals in dingy trailers, the vague orders from a boss they’ve never met. Sooner than Kyle and Swin can recognize how close to paradise they are, in this neglected state park in southern Arkansas, the lazy peace is shattered with a shot. Night blends into day. Dead bodies. Crooked superiors. Suspicious associates. It’s on-the-job training, with no time for slow learning, bad judgment, or foul luck.

3: Coffee House Press & Laird Hunt’s Ray of the Star

Coffee House is kind of old school and only barely indie, but it’s still a place to go to find some exceedingly powerful new and/or relatively under-the-radar names in literature. Hunt’s Ray of the Star is phenomenal and deserves as wide a readership as anything on the front shelves of Borders. I don’t doubt that Hunt will someday find his books on many a syllabi as required reading for MFA students, and that his books will be reprinted by larger houses, once they catch on.

from Time Out Chicago:

Reminiscent of Camus’ The Stranger, Ray of the Star gives little consideration to the death that has sent Harry reeling, though the way he’s easily sent in various directions by the people he meets hints at a numb, almost deranged wanderlust—the type of confusion that follows deep loss—and it’s this kind of slow burning mania that reminds also of Paul Auster; all of which proves that Hunt, even when on a mad sprint, has what it takes to create timeless efforts.

2: Featherproof Books & Blake Butler’s Scorched Atlas

Featherproof is super-dope. Aside from giving away DIY mini-books and having one of the best colophons I’ve ever seen, they’ve also got Butler’s Scorched Atlas, an exceptionally well-written composite novel, pre-distressed and filled with black pages. I am a book design dork, and this design is absolutely superb. Sick. Dope. Dumb. Grand. Featherproof is a beautiful thing.

From Time Out New York:

Butler is an original force who is fearless with form… The design is appropriately disarming, an apt part of the overall barrage by this inventive and deeply promising young author.

1: Hobart & Michelle Orange’s The Sicily Papers

Can I just say, “Fuckin’ Hobart.” I mean, seriously, this book is printed to look like a goddamn passport. The editors at Hobart, Elizabeth Ellen and Aaron Burch, have taste for days and the eyes for talent. Their single-author titles, while rare, are so good that it’s stupid. The Sicily Papers was a find of Ellen’s and what a find it was!

from World Hum by Frank Bures:

The Sicily Papers embodies the aimless joy (of travel) in a way that most travel books don’t. It has the texture of the journey. It has the feel of the unstructured days. And in the end it is almost like being there for real.

And, since this is a list of books I love, I must quickly note Flatmancrooked and the Zero Emission Book, which is James Kaelan’s We’re Getting On. As far as we can tell, this is the first novel ever produced that 1) is entirely recycled and biodegradable, 2) grows trees from its seed-paper-cover, 3) is entirely carbon-neutral, and 4) will be toured by bike up the entire west coast (LA to Vancouver.) We are very proud of the whole project. Plus, it’s a really good book.

“O Time Thy Pyramids” by James Benton

“On the First Cold Morning in October, My Cat Kills Another Starling” by Heather Lynne Mercer

“WALDEN” by Will Dowd

“Oceanus Pacificus” by James Benton

“Bridges” by Theo Schell-Lambert

“Role Models” by Kimberly Olsen

“Zoology #1″ by Jilly Dreadful

“Crush” by Marina Pruna

“Americanism” by Diego Baez

“Two Dot, Montana” by Micah Ling

“How I Never Want to Have Coffee with You” by Anna Clarke

“Wormwood” by Marissa Bell Toffoli

“Petrichor” by Shideh Etaat

“The Fistulated Cow” by Katie Cappello

“When You Told me You were From Sierra Leone” by Sara Stripling

“Dorothy Comes Home From Work” by Rebecca van Laer

“Tracks” by  Emily  Pulfer-Terino

“LA Confidences” by Cami Park

“Cape Hatteras” by Ali Shapiro

“Konstantin Wakes Up Fifty” by Ronald Jackson

“September ” by Caitlin Gildrien

“The Replacement” by Megan Moriarty

“A Condensed History of Parachutes” by Megan Moriarty

“Stories ” by Sara Stripling

Even the most dedicated fiction readers might have trouble naming contemporary authors from Macedonia, Liechtenstein or Slovenia. Dalkey Archive Press intends to change that with its new anthology of “Best European Fiction.”

The international project, the first in a planned annual series, compiles fiction from 32 countries. Apart from pieces from English-speaking countries, all were translated into English for the first time. “There’s a catastrophic shortage of translation in the United States,” says Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, who edited the anthology.

Assembling the collection, which involved finding and translating the stories, took about two years. Mr. Hemon chose pieces from more than 100 translated works. Arts Council England and other European cultural groups helped to fund the project, said Dalkey’s associate director Martin Riker. Dalkey, a nonprofit based at the University of Illinois, is printing 25,000 copies, and plans to expand the project to other continents, starting with Asia.

Mr. Riker hopes the anthologies will spur interest in foreign fiction. Newly translated works accounted for about 3% of all books for sale in the U.S. in 2004, according to Bowker, a company that tracks the publishing industry. Last year, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, caused a stir when he chastised the American literary community for being “too insular.” (Read More)

DMC is a 50-year-old private firm looking to invest in, produce, and market new consumer technologies. DMC Worldwide senior v-p Anthony Antolino said that Copia is the result of the company’s long-term examination of “emerging markets, content consumption, and what makes consumers tick.” Antolino described Copia as a “social reading platform that combines all kinds of content—books, movies, comics, music—and collaborative tools that let people read and enjoy books together, and, of course, it offers commerce.” 

The hub of the Copia network/device venture is the social network,  a Web-based platform that is free to consumers. It will launch a limited beta in March and a public beta by the summer. Antolino said that Copia offers a distinctive online graphical display as well as a search infrastructure that allows readers to discuss and compare books, but that also attempts to visually recreate book browsing.  While Copia offers the usual social networking functionally—connections with like-minded readers; title and subject-focused discussion groups; the ability to compare book lists—the site offers its own nifty and intuitive ways to do so. (read more)