Dzanc Books is both excited and proud to announce the first two titles we will publish in 2008.
February 2008 will see the publication of our second book, Yannick Murphy’s In a Bear’s Eye. Murphy’s collection includes 24 stories, 16 of which have been published in journals such as The Quarterly, McSweeneys, and StoryQuarterly. The title story will soon be included in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2007 (Anchor, May 2007).
Murphy’s earlier work has been very well received. The New York Times Book Review stated her debut collection, Stores in Another Language (Knopf, 1987), was “…disturbing and provocative … the stories in this debut collection from a twenty-four year-old writer have surprising assurance,” and named The Sea of Trees (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997), Murphy’s debut novel, as one of their Notable Books of the Year. Mark Richards deemed it “an extraordinary first novel, harrowing, brutal, funny, and extremely wise.” The Sea of Trees was also included in The Best Novels of the Nineties by Linda Parent Lesher. Murphy’s second novel, Here They Come (McSweeneys, 2006) was a Litblog Co-op Read This! Nominee last year, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and was called “a hell of a book …” by Frank McCourt. Wendy Smith, in the Los Angeles Times, praised Murphy’s “remarkable use of language, the expressive way she puts together ordinary words and images to create surprisingly lovely and moving metaphors.” Yannick Murphy’s new novel, based on the life of the infamous courtesan, Signed, Mata Hari, will be published by Little, Brown in November of this year. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a national Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a MacDowell Artits’ Colony fellowship.
Dzanc Books will follow In a Bear’s Eye with Peter Markus’ Bob, or Man on Boat in the Fall 2008. Peter’s fourth book, Bob, or Man on Boat, will be his debut novel. Markus’ three story collections have shown him to be a master of repetition and rhythm and have earned him a loyal following of readers, as well as seeing his work frequently anthologized. Markus’ third collection, The Singing Fish, spent its first few weeks atop Powell’s Small Press bestseller list.
Regarding Markus’ first collection, Good, Brother, Brian Evenson wrote “Good, Brother is like watching Raymond Roussel and Flannery O'Connor show up to the barn dance wearing hip waders and despite this still managing to outwhirl the best of them." Peter Conners added “…language is primal, even primitive, but his sentence structure is among the most perplexing and, ultimately, fascinating I have ever encountered. Markus serves up sentence after sentence of startling musicality.” As to the most recent collection, The Singing Fish, Gary Lutz remarked that “… gorgeously spare, riverine fables of brotherly sweetness and violence are hypnotic, haunting, and sublime.”
Peter has a Creative Artist Award from ArtServe Michigan, and was recently named Wayne State University’s Urban Writer in Residency. He is also InsideOut Literary Art Project’s Senior Writer, and is the Fiction Editor of Marick Press. Peter is the proud father of both a daughter and a son, is considered to have pretty good hands when it comes to catching fish, and also plays in an adult hockey league, in which he has a lengthy annual streak of scoring at least one hat trick (three goals in one game) each year.
Dzanc Books is thrilled to be able to publish the fantastic books by these award winning authors and believe they are both excellent additions to the incredible start we have given ourselves with Roy Kesey’s story collection, All Over (Dzanc Books, October 2007).
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