New review: The Story of How All Animals Are Equal

Just came across a thoughtful review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales in The Pleiades Book Review. Jared Wolfe writes, ‘Runkle proves to be a fearless proponent of imaginative power and willingness to push boundaries.’ Buy the book from Brooklyn Arts Press!

'... animals out of humans ...'

Zachary Kocanda at the Mid-American Review wrote a really thoughtful and thorough review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. He says the book '... makes animals out of humans, showing them at both their best and worst. It strips what makes us all one confused, messy yet beautiful species.' Get the book from Small Press Distribution!

Impromptu Nancy sez ...

Meeah Williams at sparrowmuffin recently reviewed The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014). She really captures the collection's spirit with a Joe Brainard-inspired drawing of 'Impromptu Nancy,' who sez: 'Different enough to be worth reading.' You can buy the book from Small Press Distribution!

Mission Creek Lit Crawl: BAP & Poetry magazine

Brooklyn Arts Press is collaborating with Poetry magazine for Mission Creek Festival's Lit Crawl this Friday, April 3. I'll be reading between 5–5:45 pm at NoDo Downtown along with Erika Jo Brown, Robert Fernandez, Robyn Schiff, Mary Hickman, BJ Love, and Emily Brown.

'Intimate in detail ... wide in scope and variety'

Foreword Reviews has posted a new review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. They describe the collection's stories 'as intimate in detail as they are wide in scope and variety,' and calls them 'vignettes, hints at the lives of characters who come and go throughout the book, often while leaving an indelible mark on the reader.' You can buy the book from Small Press Distribution!

Jan/Feb Bestseller!

The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales spent another two months on Small Press Distribution's Fiction Bestsellers list! Learn more about the book (hanging in there at lucky #13!) HERE.

February Reading at Prairie Lights

I'm excited to read from The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales at Prairie Lights later this month. If you're in Iowa City, come join me on Wednesday, Feb 18 at 7 pm!

The Story of How Gill Sans & Goudy Old Style Are Equal

One of the great things about working with Brooklyn Arts Press to put out The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales is the amount of control I was allowed over the book's design. Under the guidance of Sara T. Sauers at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, I combined Goudy Old Style and Gill Sans with underlining and strikethroughs to create an effect reflective of the book's lyrical but frenetic narratives. 

I was trying for movement, for a tension between harmony and fragmentation. I'm grateful to BAP for letting me have so much typographic control: the book's design (in conjunction with the cover image by Alicia DeBrincat) ended up looking great. Buy it now and see for yourself!

20. FACE

If you order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales now, you may be one of the first 50 to get a free broadside of a story featured in the collection. Click HERE to order now!

One of the collection’s 22 stories is titled ‘face’. It’s an attempt to concretize the slippery but all-consuming phenomenon of Facebook, and it does so by starting with the following Stéphane Mallarmé quote:

All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.

The story unfolds around a triangle modeled after the one that is central in the Jean Rhys story, ‘The Lotus’. The triangle consists of

… [A] retired stewardess and a young straight couple who suffer a bit from a case of the hipsters. The couple consists of Poney Marie, a Portlander fresh out of public policy school, and Remy, a young man from a wealthy background who helped develop the book. The retired stewardess, Myrne, is singled out as a political candidate for Poney Marie to mentor and possibly install as a puppet dictator in the newly opened district of the book.

The book refers to that materialized version of Facebook I mentioned. The above excerpt is from a series of blog posts I wrote about ‘face’ when I was deep in the midst of writing it. Not only did I bring in Jean Rhys, I also managed to reference Danielle Steel, Roberto Calasso, and Caitlin Horrocks. To learn more about how ‘The Lotus’ influenced my writing process, you can read those posts here.

And click HERE to order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, where you can read the full text of ‘face’!

18. THE STOIC TRUCKER WITH A HEART OF GOLD

The inspiration for ‘The Stoic Trucker with a Heart of Gold’ came from an experience I had when I was hitchhiking. I was riding with a trucker, who was both mellow and entertaining—the stories he told me really strained towards another dimension. What he related on that ride really formed this story's protagonist’s hyperbolically scripted backstory:

Some time in the near future, the world is suffering from an increased rate of seismic disasters. Volcanoes and earthquakes are ripping apart continents and making them pretty much uninhabitable. This is really hard for Chuck, an antiheroic trucker, constantly having to swerve to miss pools of lava. Half his runs are stopped short by missing chunks of freeway. One day he decides to do a little research, spends a couple nights in the icy light of the Internet, and comes to a startling conclusion. 

The world’s seeming illness is in reaction to an over-extraction of oil. The world leaders know this, and through an ominous concoction of motives, are bent on destroying the planet. The presidents of every nation and the heads of every megacorporation are building a luxury pod just outside the earth’s orbit, where they plan to escape, leaving the general populace to be crushed between the restless tectonic plates. Heavy shit, but Chuck doesn’t waste a second wringing his hands. He has a vision, a plan to end America’s dependence on oil by constructing a new method of cross-country transport: a network of canals that rely on nothing but water and gravity to float goods long distances. Against all odds.

The trucker told me he was heir to thousands of acres of Nebraskan farmland, and that he was getting ready to settle there to plan the network’s nexus. I included these details in the story, but gave it all a twist: because the trucker’s tale veered slightly toward a Hollywood narrative (albeit with a more left-wing slant), I decided to make the whole situation unfold on a sound stage. The protagonist trucker would be a career character actor who is miraculously granted a lead role. The supporting cast of this venture all has similar histories, and from reading the script, Chuck the stoic trucker knows this:

A tech-savvy starlet, he remembered (he anticipated, actually). A good-natured black man whom the script disclosed dies halfway through the journey. A handsome doctor who turns out to be working for the builders of the pod. A prophetic homeless woman …

I’m pretty enamored with character actors, who tend to be the most likable presences on screen (Angie Jo excepted). I’ve even daydreamed about trying to break into the business myself, once I'm old enough where weirdness starts counting more than looks. The documentary, That Guy .. Who Was In That Thing, understands—watch it here. 

And go to Brooklyn Arts Press to order my new book, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. It includes ‘The Stoic Trucker with a Heart of Gold’, and if you’re one of the first 50 who order it, you’ll get a free broadside adaptation of a story from the collection. Order it HERE!

17. HEIR

Champagne, please! Tonight is the release party for my short fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, out now from Brooklyn Arts Press! Click HERE to order it.

Included is a piece of flash fiction called ‘Heir’, which I adapted into a broadside printed on a manila envelope. The story’s young narrator stalks her uncle at a Salvation Army thrift store and pores over a collection of increasingly haunted objects until she encounters an old woman who may or may not be her grandmother’s ghost.

If you live in Iowa City, drop by the Paper Nest tonight between 5-7 pm, where the 'Heir' broadside will be on display. OR be one of the  first 50 people to order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales from the Brooklyn Arts Press website, and receive a free letterpress broadside of one of stories featured in the collection. ORDER NOW to get yours!

16. LARAMIE & RUDYARD

As embarrassing as it is to admit, many of the pieces included in The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Stories are love stories. ‘Laramie & Rudyard’, though, is on the more lustful end of the spectrum: a courtship/seduction story.

In the tradition of athletic camp (read this for more details), Laramie agrees to accompany Rudyard to a football game. He meets his straight-acting love interest at his house, where he takes inventory of Rudyard's waterbed and trophy shelf. Once they're at the game, though, Rudyard leaves to buy beer, and Laramie identifies vaguely with Cleopatra as he wonders if he’s been abandoned. To find out what happens next, order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales HERE.

IT'S OUT!!!

Today is the official release date of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales! Buy it now from Small Press Distribution!

And if you're in Iowa City, stop by the book's release party at the Paper Nest this Friday, Dec 5 between 5-7 pm. I'll have collages and broadsides of select stories on display and will give a brief, informal reading at around 6. The Paper Nest is at 220 E Washington St, across the alley from Studio 13.

15. ROMANTIC COMEDY

‘Romantic Comedy’ started out as a short narrative poem and, years later, ballooned into a 5,000-word story. I included it in a poetry zine I put out—probably around 2001—called XVII Ghost Stories. Its production was flawed on several levels: I alternated folios between standard photocopier paper and mylar transparencies, a concept that proved to be not only prohibitively expensive, but also resistant to staying stapled.

In 2004, I re-designed the zine to eliminate the need for transparencies. Here are scans of the cover and ‘Romantic Comedy’ from that later edition:

In 2007, in the midst of my fiction MFA at Mills College, I decided to turn the poem into a story. At this point, it felt like an outline just waiting to be fleshed out. The biggest change I made to the piece’s overall structure was adding another character: the supervillain. He joined the hairdresser, the drunken mayor, and the second-person Eros.

Click HERE to pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, my forthcoming fiction collection that includes the expanded version of ‘Romantic Comedy’. 

The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales at SPD!

Though its official release date isn't until December 1, you can now find The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales at Small Press Distribution! I once spent a summer helping in SPD's warehouse, where I picked orders and saw a lot of beautiful books. I'm excited to have my book (its cover image was created by the brilliant Alicia DeBrincat) keeping company with the many fantastic titles sitting on those warehouse shelves.

Review from Kirkus!

Kirkus feels mixed about The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales—but their confusion is the best kind possible: 'Runkle creates an array of worlds that will at different times surprise, confuse and entertain,' they write. And if you cherry-pick the good parts, you get, 'Highly imaginative & uncanny ... told with fresh, stunning language.'

The book drops December 1, but you can pre-order it now over at Brooklyn Arts Press. The first 50 who pre-order will get a free letterpress broadside of one of the book's 22 stories!

12. THE ONION’S TALE

‘An onion rolls into a natural foods store …’

Thus begins ‘The Onion's Tale’, a flash fiction piece included in The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, a book you can pre-order HERE.

‘The onion is really cute,’ the story goes, ‘I mean really cute, its face smushed together, one of its eyes squeezed shut in a wink. It even has the most darling little hands, just beginning to nub out from between its skins.’ An ongoing crowd favorite, ‘The Onion’s Tale’ was inspired by a panicky experience inside the smug and predatory lifestyle behemoth, Whole Foods. I also adapted the story to a broadside, which you can read more about here. And GUESS WHAT? The first fifty people to pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales from the Brooklyn Arts Press website will get a FREE limited-edition broadside from a story in the collection—yours could be 'The Onion's Tale'!

11. A FABLE IN SERVICE OF HASTENING THE END OF ALL BORDERS

Told in the second person, ‘A Fable in Service of Hastening the End of All Borders’ asks the reader imagine working as a teenage grocery bagger at a dreamlike Canadian borderland supermarket. The strip mall that houses the supermarket suffers a constant onslaught of drastic transformations: the manager begins building a transparent dome that straddles the border; the subsized housing where the protagonist grew up is demolished; a studly co-worker opens a male brothel; the frozen yogurt shop revamps itself as a smoothie bar; a barbecue champion and an entrepreneur toting a portable rock wall both set up shop in the parking lot. All the while, the bagger struggles with bulimia and grows increasingly obsessed with miniatures.

A finalist for the Calvino Prize, ‘A Fable in Service of Hastening the End of All Borders’ is featured in my forthcoming fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. Click HERE to pre-order it for only $15.95!

9. LITTLE TILES OF WEALTH

‘Little Tiles of Wealth’ is a story that focuses on a single mom who works as an ER nurse and worries as her pre-pubescent son’s interests diverge from her own. It’s just one of the 22 fiction pieces included in The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Stories, a collection Brooklyn Arts Press is publishing in December. If you don’t want to wait, though, you can pre-order the book HERE.

The story’s protagonist hears cryptic advice emanating from the philanthropic plaques she passes as she walks to work and makes her way through the hospital. ‘A walk down a hospital corridor reveals the outrageous inequality of contemporary health care …’ says writer Carol Guess about the story. Some of the more absurdist scenes from the ER in ‘Little Tiles of Wealth’ are courtesy of my friend who works the nightshift in a busy hospital. 

Another of the story’s themes was first suggested to me by my boyfriend: the campy potential of sports. One of the protagonist’s biggest fears is that her son is forsaking science for the pleasure of watching athletes onscreen. D. A. Miller writes about how athletes are seen as active rather than performative—although they are being watched, their movements are not scripted, but rather made in ways that deny the fact they’re on display. They’re part of a team that works together to dominate. Men on stage, however, have difficulty reading as masculine. They are not doing, but rather performing. According to John Berger, ‘men act and women appear.’

‘It is no accident ...’ writes David M. Halperin, ‘that sports matches—with one or two rare exceptions—are never reenacted, restaged, or reperformed exactly as they originally transpired. They must be seen to occur only once, because their very definition demands that they appear to be unscripted: in order to qualify as an “event," they must consist in a single, spontaneous action that concludes once and for all when it is over and that cannot be repeated.’

As athletes allow themselves to be more flamboyant, though, and—like David Beckham—sexualized, I wonder if spectator sports are changing. Maybe I’m just too gay for ESPN, but when I see its commentators debating, their humor feels frigid in a way that's weirdly outdated. The protagonist from ‘Little Tiles of Wealth’ feels this each morning as she walks past a sporting goods store and sees its employees clowning around, roleplaying as star athletes behind Xeroxed-face-on-popsicle-stick masks.

Visit Brooklyn Arts Press’s website to pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales.

7. THE STORY OF HOW ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL

The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales is due out December 1! Meanwhile, though, you can pre-order it HERE. 

The book's Orwell-inspired title story appeared earlier this year in Grist 7. A depressed narrator engages in a power struggle with a strong-willed fashion design student who he platonically shares a bed with. The narrator watches Lena try on different animal identities as she sews clothes inspired by farm animals, adopts and discards—then rediscovers—a Pomeranian, and incongruously dresses as Jessica Rabbit for Halloween. At night, they re-equalize:

We slept in a Murphy bed that never went up. There were hooks mounted on the wall above it, with hats piled thick enough to keep the bed from lifting. The mattress was too short—if we extended our legs, our feet made contact with an icy iron bar at the foot of the bed. I imagined us as batteries recharging, the cold shock pushing exhaustion up through our bodies and sparking dreams. 

Sometimes Lena made animal sounds in her sleep. I would break the iron current then, and cuddle. We’d be warm together, my knees locked into the back of hers. Of course this place is haunted, she’d say, with all those hats falling on the bed all the time. She’d say it like it was my fault, but most of the hats were hers.

Things become tense as the narrator grows jealous of Lena’s other relationships. He finds himself mirroring her tyrannical personality, the thing that drew him to her in the first place:

Lena was eight days older than me, and shared her birthday with Hitler. I shared mine with Saddam Hussein. We had a joint birthday party where we spent the day in bed. We read to each other, played cards, and gossiped. We took turns going to the store for more champagne. When it got dark, we took a nap, then got up and went out dancing. She brought home an NPR reporter who said he couldn’t take her home because his house was being painted.  

That means he has a girlfriend, I told her. 

Whatever, she said. It’s my birthday. 

 It’s my birthday, too, I said, and refused to yield the bed. 

As the narrator’s depression deepens, the rainy season sets in, and Lena obsessively listens to Prince’s ’17 Days’, a song that tonally syncs with the story’s up-tempo sadness. Because the Artist is such a freak about copyright issues, I can’t post the video here, but hopefully this link will stay up for awhile: http://www.wat.tv/video/prince-17-days-3oo43_3mbzf_.html

One time Lena said, Prince is such a man. 

Prince wears mascara, I said. 

I don’t mean a man like macho. I mean a man like human. Listen: there’s nothing animal in Prince’s world. It’s all artifice and emotion. 

I moved a beret from the bed to the hat rack.  

All you ever listen to is this one song, I said, and it’s the b-side to ‘When Doves Cry’. That’s maybe the most animal song ever.