Well, the day has finally arrived! Shenanigans! is available for order from Amazon.com for $9.99!!

Initial reviews are indeed favorable. Here are a few of the blurbs:

“The voice in Shenanigans! is muscular, rhythmic, and full of whizz-bang linguistic energy. The stories view the world with the kind of self-deprecating humor that makes you want to spend an afternoon just wandering around in Benjamin’s mind. Read Shenanigans! You’ll laugh, you’ll think…you’ll have a great time.” — Amy Hassinger, author of Nina Adolescence

“Shenanigans! is the textual photo-album of Anna and Ben, language made to Polaroid the gentle tangle of coupling and maturation. This is a collection wonderfully tinged with humor, beautifully tempered with landscape, and soaked in the genuine.”
– J. A. Tyler, author of Girl With Oars & Man Dying

“The charm of Joseph Michael Owens’s debut collection, Shenanigans! can be found in his voice. At heart, these are a young man‟s stories of love and loss, of life and death. There‟s a sincerity that flirts with retro yet feels like innovation. Each one reads like a conversation … unscathed by the unsentimental tone that too often passes for hipness in this day and age, yet clearly of his own time. These are honest stories.” – Karen Gettert Shoemaker author of Night Sounds and Other Stories

“Between Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace‟s essays, Joseph Owens‟s stories will take you through a caffeinated romp through his life, its exciting highs and frightening lows. Dogs, horses, bicycles come alive with as much love and empathy as the people he holds dear. Owens’s voice, spirited, crackling with energy, is too fierce, and engaging to be ignored.” – Catherine Texier, author of Russian Lessons, The Breakup

(originally posted at http://biblioklept.org/

David S. Atkinson posted a truly wonderful review of Shenanigans! on Goodreads.com. I am humbled by his kind words!

I’ve heard that by the time Bukowski was really into the swing of things as a writer he had stopped reading much of anything because he did not feel that most of what he came across had life. It felt dead and, as such, was worthless. I can’t really say for sure because I didn’t know old Buk’, but I believe he would have felt very differently about the writing in Shenanigans! If there was ever writing with life, Shenanigans! is it.

In some cases, I mean this quite literally. The writing in “Contemptibly, A Hair” blasts out of the page with more energy than a hyperactive toddler on meth, though with much more pleasurable results. It dances, it spins, it screams. In short, it is the language equivalent of class ten rapids.

Read more HERE:

CALLING ALL WRITERS: please reblog and help get the word around about this exciting new project.

More information HERE

1) Cracking the cover, 2) The cover itself, 3) First page of the TOC, 4) Officially official writerly–type-stuff like ISBN and Library of Congress #s

I felt a sense of relief when I opened up to the T.O.C. of the latest issue of The New Yorker and saw—under Fiction—Roberto Bolaño’s name. The previous two issues featured Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and John Lanchester (and before them, upon taking a second look at my back issues: Etgar Keret, Margaret Atwood, Nathan Englander, César Aira and Alice Munro).

I’d never heard of Sayrafiezadeh or Lanchester. (I’m probably late to the party here; it’d be par for the course, etc.) As a consequence, I had a strong, capricious kneejerk feeling that The New Yorker was tending toward the, well, underwhelming. How about another story from George Saunders? (Even though he just had one published recently.) How about Sam Lipsyte? (See George Saunders comment.)

And then it hit me and I became sad.

Not because the writers I seem to like reading most weren’t in the two most recent issues—for that, I simply began to feel childish and, honestly, a little dumb. I felt sad because I realized I’d just been guilty of being both a literary snob and a hypocrite. I felt sad also because I’d quickly dismissed two writers I’d (honestly and apologetically) never heard of. I felt like a hypocrite because I’m usually among the first critics of The New Yorker for never printing fresh new voices [like Joseph Michael Owens(?)].

Truth be told, there are very few things I wouldn’t do to be published in The New Yorker. I say “very few” only because there might be things I’m not willing to do, but I simply can’t think of any right now. And who would any of us be kidding, really? Few people outside of Amy Hempel would pass on a chance to see their name in that famous typeface.

Because here’s the (oh so very obvious) thing I realized: the stories I dismissed out of hand must be pretty darn good to even have made it into the magazine in the first place. The other thing I realized is that I can be kind of an asshole reader some times.

Perhaps I give myself too much credit for checking out as many indie lit. magazines as I do. I mean, there are plenty of fresh voices in in those, right!? But, similarly, I’m guilty of many times doing the same thing with the indie lit. mags as I am with the more prominent publications. I tend toward automatically seeking out the writers I know and, oftentimes, skip over writers I’ve never read before. And that bothers me.

Over the past two years, I’ve gotten to know—at least on a regular email, Twitter and/or Facebook basis—a good deal of the editors of the indie lit. mags I enjoy reading. Why should I ever second-guess anything that’s printed in [PANK], The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, ElectricLiterature, Bartleby Snopes, et al? They’ve never lead me astray. I think it comes down to another obvious realization, which is we can never hope to read everything we might want to. It’s simply impossible (see link below).

So then maybe I’m only partially a snob like the snooty-countenanced gentleman above. Maybe I’m not alone in this selective reading M.O. But the more I think about it, the more I realize I should probably be more (or at least as) excited about seeing authors like Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and John Lanchester in The New Yorker as I am about any of the other writers I mentioned in the first paragraph. In fact, here, NPR’s culture critic Linda Holmes says, “It’s time to face facts: your time is better spent deciding how to choose what to read than bemoaning you can’t digest it all.” Which, while nice to hear, doesn’t completely alleviate the guilt and wishful thinking (respectively).

Fortunately, it seems like a fairly easy fix, namely by actively seeking out those writers I haven’t read before—at least for a time—and dedicating myself to discovering some new voices. Though, admittedly, even after coming to this epiphany, I still felt like I should probably come clean (in this post) about passing up stories that are probably most definitely totally worth reading.

So anyway, in a nutshell, there you have it.

Just sayin’

Bulls on Parade

“…just feed the war cannibal animal I /

walk tha corner to tha rubble that used to be a library line /

up to the mind cemetery now…

What we don’t know keeps tha contracts alive an movin’ /

They don’t gotta burn tha books they just remove ‘em!!”

Joseph Michael Owens
This is one aspect of SOPA This means that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be “Internet sites…dedicated to theft of U.S. property,” under SOPA’s definition. Simply providing a feature that would make it possible for someone to commit copyright infringement or circumvention (see: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) is enough to get your entire site branded as an infringing site. (quote provided by Celeste Duckworth)

Michael J Seidlinger
Wikipedia’s blackout should do some damage.

Colin McCarthy
Blackouts of websites will do nothing. Also SOPA will likely fail and PIPA will pass which is about 75% identical and most of that is specifying what penalties will be given if existing laws are broken.

Joseph Michael Owens
They both need to be shot down.

Michael J Seidlinger
I agree. PIPA is just as bad. Why would PIPA pass but SOPA fail?

Colin McCarthy
Oh I agree.

Colin McCarthy
PIPA is a senate bill and SOPA is house bill.

Joseph Michael Owens
PIPA is the new SOPA

Michael J Seidlinger
I’ve been way too afraid of these bills to really read into them. What are the chances PIPA will pass?

Colin McCarthy
SOPA seemed more like a smokescreen for PIPA to pass cause it hasn’t had as much scrutiny therefore it’s “better”

Michael J Seidlinger
Shit……………..

Michael J Seidlinger
I really hope PIPA falters and dies too.

Joseph Michael Owens
Any time you can get in legal trouble for stuff you have on your Dropbox or Email (child porn aside, of course), is bad news. This also seems like a good way to kill cloud computing, which is whatever, but it’s going to be a costly endeavor. People won’t want to put stuff in the cloud if they think there’s a chance they might get in legal trouble.

Michael J Seidlinger
Just think of what will happen to Youtube, Tumblr, hell social networking in general if PIPA passes…….

Joseph Michael Owens
Exactly.
And read this: “Experts and Internet engineers, who were conspicuously not invited to testify before the House committee, have issued warnings that SOPA could undermine the global domain system and create gaping network-security holes.”

Joseph Michael Owens
I imagine it’s the same for PIPA.

Michael J Seidlinger
I’d imagine so.

Joseph Michael Owens
And this immediately follows: “The world’s major Internet innovators—Google, Twitter, Facebook, Mozilla—contend that the legislation eliminates the safe harbors of previous laws that allowed them to experiment in good faith and would create onerous liabilities that would stifle new platforms. Civil-liberties organizations point to the First Amendment implications, arguing that the U.S. would be setting a global model for mass Internet censorship.”

Michael J Seidlinger
Exactly.

Colin McCarthy
There is a fight going on with DNS, it looks like they want to force people to register domains with their real identities. It would give the government far more power over who does what on the internet regardless of where they reside.

Joseph Michael Owens
i.e. not OK

Colin McCarthy
right now it has to do with top level domains, but will trickle down eventually.

Michael J Seidlinger
I honestly can’t think of any way PIPA can pass damaging the construct of the internet.

Colin McCarthy
They don’t care about our civil liberties why would they care about the internet?

Colin McCarthy
The Patriot Act being a perfect example of that.

Michael J Seidlinger
Sighs…. yeah….

Colin McCarthy
The DMCA is another example.

Colin McCarthy
Regardless, anti-piracy measures only hurt those who don’t pirate, those who do find ways around it. All these bills do is give the US Government carte blanche in controlling the series of tubes.

Michael J Seidlinger
I totally agree.

Joseph Michael Owens
That’s the funny (sad?) thing: Right or Left Wing: the govt. does not actually give a shit about its people. Politicians’ goals are all self-serving; the insatiable power elite brokering deals to each other on the backs of the people “they serve.” It’s bullshit. I don’t want to sound like a catastrophist, but these are the exact types of things that leads nations down a path to fascism where the people are too blinded by their ideologies and affiliations to realize they’ve been given illusions of freedom by the tanker-load while actual freedoms and civil liberties have been stealthily stripped away.