Jaded Ibis Press

[REVIEW] Brief, by Alexandra Chasin

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~by J. Capó Crucet

Brief

http://jadedibisproductions.com/

Paperback: $15.00

iPad App: $4.99

Fine Art Limited Edition Snow Globe: $8,500

 

I have a confession to make: I don’t own an iPad, and so I’m not the target audience for the original format of Alexandra Chasin’s Brief. (The iPad, we’re told in a note from the publisher that opens the book, is “the device for which [the text] was specifically written.”) I also don’t make the kind of bank to afford the $8500 limited edition fine art snow globe version (which features a fake Warhol and has “a tiny print copy” of the book buried in its wooden base). That left me with the monochromatic paperback option, tried and true but, as the book’s opening note warns, somewhat limited: part of the experience of the app version is that it randomly splatters images (and snippets of images) in and around the novel’s text in an effort to “evoke the novel’s time period and storyline, probing the role of cause and effect in history.” The paperback version is just “a snapshot of the app,” and with that intro, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve chosen wrong for picking paper over plastic (or whatever iPads are made of). Continue reading →

Family Romance, by Tom Bradley, with Art by Nick Patterson (A Review by Ally Nicholl)

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jadedibisproductions.com

Full Color Bleed
$49.00/246 pages

Black & White Bleed on White
$16.99/246 pages


Until a few weeks ago I had never heard of Bizarro fiction. A relatively new genre, it bills itself as the cult section of the literary world and boasts titles such as Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, Shatnerquake and The Haunted Vagina (all of which, frankly, sound like contenders for Best Book Ever.)

The Bizarro movement exists to provide literature for lovers of weird reads, and reads surely don’t come much weirder than Family Romance, by Tom Bradley and visual artist Nick Patterson. Taking Patterson’s deviantArt as a starting point, Bradley has fashioned a darkly humorous, sexually perverse and satisfyingly gruesome tale of life in and around a none-more-dysfunctional family.

As mysterious creatures eavesdrop at the window, Mom fills her children’s heads with ludicrous doctrine and instils fear of the pathogens that can attach themselves to the back of your head and make you sneeze so hard it blows your whole face off (the ‘Sneeze Catastrophic’). Dad, meanwhile, has abandoned his family and his religion and joined the side of the Relic Amalekites, heathens who are said to wipe their assholes with both hands and worship false deities. Little Sissy swears Dad is buried in the garden; but then, she hasn’t been quite right in the head since her visit from the Grand Religiopath. Continue reading →