the great American real-estate novel

Monkeybicycle fiction editor James Tate Hill joked on twitter about writing "the great real estate novel," and I tweeted back that one to two of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels fall into this category. . . and then within a week or two, I picked up my navy blue hardcover edition of Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City and learned that, in fact, this was the great real-estate novel of our time. Florida short sales, routine foreclosures, overbuilt subdivisions, leaking pipes, busted garage doors, and broken dreams are all invited to the party. Hill, Ford, and Jay McInerney can only dream of drinking the same I-4 7-11 colas as Orlando's Nathan Holic. A hundred pages in, I find BLM-SC to be a fun and informative page-turner with a creative hybrid model, mostly novel with some "choose your own adventure" and graphic elements. It's worth a look.

PS--You can buy five copies of this book for less than the average ticket to Disney World.

bright lights, five stars

At Goodreads, author Nathan Holic added a five-star review for Auggie's Revenge. His Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City arrived last December from Orlando's Burrow Press. 2019 was a different world entirely.

Romanian hit

Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, with cover art by Nathan Holic, managed to sneak into the back cover (page 68) of a Romanian literary journal (left middle), but no one from the Carpathians has come to anoint, kill, or otherwise congratulate me on this success. . . so, tentatively, I'm uncertain of what this means or whether I should lay low, smile high, or merely continue with life's daily routines.

Auggie's Revenge at Beating Windward Press

Beating Windward Press to Publish Alex Kudera’s Tragicomic Novel Illustrating
Precarious Times for College Adjuncts and Contract-Wage America.

UPDATED JANUARY 19, 2016: As the issue of destitute adjunct professors breaks into the mainstream with articles appearing in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Salon, and The New Republic, Beating Windward is excited to publish Alex Kudera’s second adjunct novel, AUGGIE’S REVENGE this fall.

AUGGIE’S REVENGE is a satiric crime novel packed with small cons, betrayals, vigilante justice, stolen vegetables, and clandestine romance. Michael Vittinger is an adjunct philosophy instructor on his last contract and searching for a life worth living. Disenchanted with academia, he finds himself drifting into late-night supermarket friendship with Auggie, a man on the make, and Jonny November, a one-legged grifter who is Auggie's protector-mentor, of sorts. As the economic recession drags on and the marks dry up, the three plot to murder Auggie's abusive stepfather and divide Auggie’s rightful inheritance among them.

At 75,000 words, AUGGIE’S REVENGE offers a fast-paced thriller while illustrating some of the critical labor issues of the day.

Alex Kudera is a Philadelphia native who teaches contemporary literature at Clemson University in South Carolina. His debut novel, FIGHT FOR YOUR LONG DAY (Atticus Books) won the 2011 Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Best Fiction from the Mid-Atlantic Region. Reviews and interviews can be found in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, Inside Higher Ed, The Southeast Review, and other locations.

Beating Windward Press is an independent publisher of novels, short story collections, and non-fiction. They are based in Orlando, Florida and produce 4 to 6 titles a year. Their books reflect the individual tastes of the small staff - mostly mainstream fiction with a literary edge. Print books are distributed internationally through Ingram; E-books are distributed in all e-reader formats through VitalSource and Smashwords. Matt Peters established Beating Windward Press in 2011. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans.

Visit http://kudera.blogspot.com and/or http://www.BeatingWindward.com for updates or find Alex Kudera at the Beating Windward table at #AWP16 in Los Angeles, Wright Library in Dayton, Ohio on March 5, and other readings and signings this spring and summer.

Kafkas arriving soon

I'm excited to announce that my bilingual short story collection, Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, is in the mail, and I'll soon receive 10 paperback copies.

cover art by Nathan Holic

Holic and Sweeney

Within the last week, my copies of Nathan Holic's American Fraternity Man and Isaac Sweeney's Same Track, Different Track arrived by mail.

Holic's fast-paced novel has an absolutely fantastic cover, and of course, I was excited to see this blurb on the back:

 

 

Both writers are full-time teachers now, but both have paid their adjunct dues, and in different ways continue to support the cause of the more tangentially employed among us. For Atticus Review, Nathan has delivered six sets of graphic frames for Fight for Your Long Day, and Isaac continues to write about adjunct issues and more for The Chronicle of Higher Education. More or less, what we have are two early 30-somethings with small children working constantly to survive but also thinking of the less fortunate of higher education, whether they're instructors or students.

 

I've already skimmed Isaac's book, and although I'd call most of what I read a nonfictional summary and assessment of how he fought his way out of the adjunct's life to land a full-time tenure-track job at a community college, in this telling, there is plenty of implied advice for adjuncts trying to do the same. Two key points from Isaac's experience are 1) apply early and often, many more jobs than you'd think would be necessary (this rings true as I remember a recent PhD comp/rhet grad applied to more than 100 positions to land one tenure-track job at a four-year school), and 2) also play to your strength during the teaching demonstration. For his TT campus visit, Isaac used a lesson he'd taught many times before, and he nailed it.

 

For many of us, easier said than done, yes, indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 



Fante and Holic

A nice reason to be back in South Carolina is to receive a couple paperbacks in the mail.

I've been a fan of the Fantes, father and son, since finding Dan's Chump Change as a Sun Dog trade paperback years ago, so although the serial-killer angle is a bit beyond my usual, I was excited to open my preordered Point Doom. I'm already 250 pages into it, and so far, the book is a page turner with some good SoCal AA and car-sales grit and satire to it.

Also, workaholic Nathan Holic's American Fraternity Man is due to arrive at my place in a few days, and I'm proud to say that this Greek satire will be the first novel I see with my blurb on the back cover.

Videos, Voice, Excerpts, and Graphic Novel Interpretations for FFYLD

Nathan Holic's graphic-novel interpretation at Atticus Review:

http://atticusreview.org/a-comic-adaptation-of-fight-for-your-long-day-episode-1/

http://atticusreview.org/fight-for-your-long-day-a-comic-adaptation-episode-2/

http://atticusreview.org/fight-for-your-long-day-a-comic-adaptation-episode-3/

http://atticusreview.org/fight-for-your-long-day-a-comic-series-adaptation/

http://atticusreview.org/still-fighting-for-your-long-ass-day/

Radio:

http://nhpr.org/post/fight-your-long-day

Videos:

http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv/reruns/watch/108019

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fah_s1XHswo

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/42577902 (first speaker's paper partly concerns FFYLD; I start speaking around minute 48 minute, but the middle paper is a penetrating look at how adjunct concerns intersect with Jesuit college mission statements)

Excerpts:

http://atticusbooksonline.com/blog/2011/05/16/fight-for-your-ippy-gold/

http://atticusbooksonline.com/books/2010-releases/fight-for-your-long-day/excerpt/

the weird kind of love from Atticus Review

Allow me to introduce Nathan Holic's latest interpretation of a classroom scene from Fight for Your Long Day.

thank you & have a good weekend.

graphic classroom

Thanks to Atticus's Dan Cafaro and Nathan Holic for the next installment of the graphic-novel interpretation of Fight for Your Long Day. There's a lot going on at the Atticus Books website as well, including the novel-in-emails, The Book I Will Write and a series on rejection letters from contributors far and wide.

Nathan Holic

I first learned of Nathan Holic as Lavinia Ludlow's partner in alt.punk, so this guy must be versatile. He can write fiction, edit and coach others, and draw shockingly handsome and svelte adjunct instructors with one arm tied behind his back and two fingers stuck in his mouth. But I suspect the fingers belong to his little bundle of sunshine, all he has to keep him going in this cold, relentless, backbreaking world!

Okay. Enough is enough. Here's Nathan's artistic rendering of some of the first chapter of Fight for Your Long Day. The plan is for new drawings to appear once a month at Dan Cafaro's other joint, Atticus Review.

Fight for Your Long Day, Nathan!