Biting The Error

What is the best way to tell a story? In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson. Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Robert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue, but hapless Robert and his sidekick can't stop drinking and philosophizing long enough to keep up.

A welfare cheque floats down the river, a cowboy spreads the Word of the Lord and crotches tick like clocks: the world of Spare Parts is unpredictable, evocative and vividly distorted. Its initial appearance, in 1981, caused a stir; at a time when linear narrative was the m.o. of feminist writing, Gail Scott had the nerve to fracture and dislocate her stories and her language. Spare Parts is as vital as it was twenty years ago. Scott's densely textured tales about the world of growing up female in a small town, where violence lurks just beneath the skin, recreate the uncertainty of life. Their incantatory language and tough imagery are as relevant and crucial now as they were then. This edition adds two new pieces, including 'Bottoms Up', an essay on narrative which first appeared on the 'Narrativity' website Scott co-edits.

It's Jaz Parks. I've already smoked the guy who was the pain in the CIA's you-know-what for the past few years. But now, in the power vacuum left by the death of Edward "The Raptor"Samos, a struggle for supremacy has begun between his former allies. The CIA feels the balance must be maintained. So when an agent planted among the Weres discovers a plot to assassinate the Coven's leader, my vampire boss and I are brought in to take out the woman hired to do the deed, a killer who might be as wily and Gifted as ourselves. So it's off to the Scottish Highlands for some twisted fun among murderers, demons and half-crazed relatives. Sometimes being a top-secret CIA assassin isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.

Merit has been a vampire for only a short while, but she’s already seen a lifetime’s worth of trouble. She and her Master, centuries-old Ethan Sullivan, have risked their lives time and again to save the city they love. But not all of Chicago is loving them back. Anti-vampire riots are erupting all over town, striking vampires where it hurts the most. A splinter group armed with Molotov cocktails and deep-seated hate is intent on clearing the fanged from the Windy City come hell or high water. Merit and her allies rush to figure out who’s behind the attacks, who will be targeted next, and whether there’s any way to stop the wanton destruction. The battle for Chicago is just beginning, and Merit is running out of time.

Punk musician Nixie Schmeling is a hundred pounds of Attitude in a city full of Normal. She’s especially full of attitude after she’s volunteered to run Meiers Corner’s inaugural fundraising festival and finds out it’s to pay for a lawyer. Six foot plus of black-haired, blue-eyed sex-on-a-stick, powerful attorney Julian Emerson has come from Boston to defend the Corners from a shady group of suits—and the shadier gang the suits control. But even if they manage to succeed, what future is there for a tiny punk musician and a skyscraper blue-blood? And that’s before Nixie finds out Julian’s a vampire. Each book in the Biting Love series is a standalone story that can be enjoyed in any order. Series Order: Book #1: Bite My Fire Book #2: Biting Nixie Book #3: The Bite of Silence novella Book #4: Biting Me Softly Book #5: Biting Oz Book #6: Beauty Bites Book #7: Downbeat Book #8: Assassin’s Bite Book #9: Passion Bites

The merry adventures of two scrapping alligator children—and of Rosa and Willy, their human counterparts. ‘Else Holmelund Minarik, whose Little Bear indicated a uniquely charming talent, has outdone herself here.’ —K.