A new science-fiction title by Jed Brody, The Philodendrist Heresy, is available for pre-order (see above). Jed wrote the book as a prayer for the preservation and resurrection of the great forests of the earth. “Philodendrist” means “tree lover.”

In The Philodendrist Heresy, Danielle Gasket’s search for ancestral secrets is imperiled by warring factions that agree about nothing but that Danielle must die.

Danielle’s home is a dystopian city beneath the earth’s surface. People have lived underground for so long that knowledge of the surface is preserved only in dwindling communities of persecuted heretics. According to the heretics, a prophet called “the philodendrist” led people underground to repent for their violent conquest of the natural world.

Following a string of clues while eluding pursuit, Danielle races toward the long-forgotten path of ascension to sunlight, relying upon her wits and valor to make it through. Finally, her mercy toward her fiercest persecutor convinces him to help her ascend to the pure waters of the sunlit world.

Reviews

Welcome to the bizarre and chilling world of a subterranean future where all your needs have been anticipated and provided by society’s long dead planners . . . except freedom. You’ll cheer Brody’s plucky heroine on as she makes her break for a rumored heaven somewhere beyond her familiar hell – the very heaven we are now foolishly destroying, tree by tree.

-Stephen Wing, author of Free Ralph! An Evolutionary Fable

With her acerbic wit and unsettled intestines, Danielle Gasket may make an unlikely heroine.  But her arduous journey, from techno-dystopia to a full embrace of the natural world, offers a necessary parable for our ecologically troubled times.”

-Kyle Kramer, organic farmer and author of A Time to Plant: Life Lessons in Work, Prayer, and Dirt

Author Jed Brody teaches physics at Emory University and has published short stories in Atlanta’s weekly newspaper Creative Loafing. He has also published ten peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, including American Journal of Physics and Journal of Chemical Education. Jed plans to donate all his royalties from the sale of this book to Sustainable Harvest International. Moon Willow Press will also donate 5% of sales from this book to Guarding the Gifts, a non-profit organization helping to guard the gifts of the Gitga’at Nation and the Great Bear Rainforest.

Also check out a couple longer essays I wrote that have been recently dug up: Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers and Practice of the Wild.

Johnny Depp starred as Paul Kemp, and Michael Rispoli as his sidekick Sala. Drunken master of mind Richard Jenkins played Lotterman–I really loved this role. I thought the movie started a bit slow, but soon I was immersed into the jungle, the booze, the witty one-liners–all that, and the main characters are twisted but mindful of the importance of living. It’s not money that makes their world go round. They live for the experience, and they care about the street people who are starving more than the corporate corrupters who want to ruin an island with development: the playground of the rich. Kemp would rather not see the land and people corrupted. He quotes Oscar Wilde:

Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Kemp also says while on mesc looking at a tank lobster:

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a god and the only living thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one.

The style also reminded me quite a bit of Infernal Drums by Anthony Wright, a not yet widely known treasure of a novel set in Mexico.

A couple new Amazon reviews for Infernal Drums:

As a Mexican, I was very pleasantly surprised to read the vision of present-day Mexico that the foreigner/narrator gives the reader in Infernal Drums by Anthony Wright. He pointed out customs and traditions that we take for granted. This reveals the profound research and observation carried out by Wright when writing his novel. His detailed descriptions and figurative language offer great insight to Mexican culture. In particular I would like to quote the beginning of Chapter 20, which I believe is beautifully worded imagery: “Bazza hit Oaxaca City, settled in. It was a pretty, laid back melting pot populated by hard-working mestizo locals, huipil-attired Triquis romantically enlarged by the rose-colored magnifying glass of tourism, and, to perfectly define the latter equation: stout, head-shaven yuppies, fat middle-aged tourists and hairy, tattooed backpackers of all nations and stripes – everyone alien to each other, frightened of each other, hating the other for being there and spoiling their pathetic fantasy of a unique experience that does not and will never happen.” Congratulations to Anthony Wright.

-Cristina Sanchez-Fuentes

Beneath the errant tale of a backpacker who’d lost his way is a very moving examination of the play of fate — and what is fate but a lot of mumbo jumbo, luck, unanswered prayers, a few bad moves… all beautifully interwoven into the book and captured in a really powerful way. I loved the way the story just sank deeper and deeper into the shit, despite all efforts — not even any aspiration to succeed but just to stay afloat — and the way it became more & more introspective in parallel until the religious epiphany kicks in. Why? — because what else is there? It’s consistent with Jonah’s style to be going for more mumbo jumbo — just an institutionalised one… like betting with the blue chip shares of the soul this time. He was a Catholic school boy after all…

The story and the themes are a humdinger — I loved it. It’s kind of like a Graham Greene nightmare — it felt very real and very uncomfortable, and in the end very sad.

-Kim McCoy

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac is a novel which has inspired a literary renaissance in the fiction of Big Sur, written with the precise psychological insight into characterization. The narrator Duluoz shows an appreciation for the beauty of nature, and describes his experience of being alone in a rugged west coast environment, ending the novel with the innovative text Sea, Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur, a poetic study of the concrete sounds of the ocean, which makes this novel a classic of American innovative fiction.

Wife of famous roadster Neal Cassady, Carolyn was good friends with many of the beats, including Jack Kerouac.

Sweden based production company WG Film, behind films such as BANANAS! (2009) and Burma VJ (2008) is delighted to be part of the film Love Always, Carolyn, which will be screened at Chicago IFF. The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in New York in May this year, followed by a North American premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto, Ontario. The film is also being screened in competition at Nordisk Panorama Film Festival in Denmark. Preliminary screening dates at Chicago IFF will be October 16-17 2011. (More details will follow soon on www.chicagofilmfestival.com.)

Reviews:

An unrelenting core sample of a world bent on its own destruction. Intensely moral and idealistic, Hibbard’s The SacredRiver of Consciousness is political and pragmatic, beautiful and ultimately encouraging. Hope surfaces from the wreckage.

-Michael Rothenberg, poet and author

Reboot movies and reload politicians and the land of the overdog –
all this money and nothing to spend it on, really? Really. At a time
when smart poets hide themselves under a borrowed shine, Tom Hibbard’s poems
are an obvious, emergent flow. Flux of useful blood, necessary silt.

-Buck Downs, American poet

Empire so often comes to this: “potholes imitating frozen potholes.” The poems in Tom Hibbard’s The Sacred River of Consciousness reflect on various crimes of humanity by simply reporting them. That Hibbard’s language is poetic rather than journalistic does not mask the realities being referenced — how at times life does unfold “as though civilization were garbage.” The suffering disenfranchised, the suffering environment, the corrupted governments, the dysfunctional relationships — how did compassion evaporate? That question is but one of many begot by these poems. For the poems also ask “at what time does the candle make crimes unredeemable.” The answer could be: upon the lighting of the candle or consciousness of those events, hence the import of Hibbard’s poems. If these poems facilitate that consciousness where the New York Times et al has failed, the river may yet turn sacred again. For the sake of the planet, open yourself up to these poems.

-Eileen Tabios, poet and author

Blurbs:

An unrelenting core sample of a world bent on its own destruction. Intensely moral and idealistic, Hibbard’s The Sacred River of Consciousness is political and pragmatic, beautiful and ultimately encouraging. Hope surfaces from the wreckage.

-Michael Rothenberg, poet and author

Reboot movies and reload politicians and the land of the overdog –
all this money and nothing to spend it on, really? Really. At a time
when smart poets hide themselves under a borrowed shine, Tom Hibbard’s poems
are an obvious, emergent flow. Flux of useful blood, necessary silt.

-Buck Downs, American poet

Empire so often comes to this: “potholes imitating frozen potholes.” The poems in Tom Hibbard’s The Sacred River of Consciousness reflect on various crimes of humanity by simply reporting them. That Hibbard’s language is poetic rather than journalistic does not mask the realities being referenced — how at times life does unfold “as though civilization were garbage.” The suffering disenfranchised, the suffering environment, the corrupted governments, the dysfunctional relationships — how did compassion evaporate? That question is but one of many begot by these poems. For the poems also ask “at what time does the candle make crimes unredeemable.” The answer could be: upon the lighting of the candle or consciousness of those events, hence the import of Hibbard’s poems. If these poems facilitate that consciousness where the New York Times et al has failed, the river may yet turn sacred again. For the sake of the planet, open yourself up to these poems.

-Eileen Tabios, poet and author