buy MLKNG SCKLS (autographed)

$6.99

Very limited amount left - Autographed
and you also get a free limited edition print by Connor Willumsen

I've got a tiny excerpt from MLKNG SCKLS in the new Stamp Stories Anthology

A big thank yo to Andrew Borgstrom and J.A. Tyler.


Other participating writers include: James Tadd Adcox, Jesse Ball, Ken Baumann, Matt Bell, Kate Bernheimer, Michael Bible, Jack Boettcher, Harold Bowes, Donald Breckenridge, Melissa Broder, Blake Butler, James Chapman, Jimmy Chen, Joshua Cohen, Peter Conners, Andy Devine, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Claire Donato, Raymond Federman, Kathy Fish, Scott Garson, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Steven Gillis, Rachel B. Glaser, Amanda Goldblatt, Barry Graham, Amelia Gray, Sara Greenslit, Tina May Hall, Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, Tim Horvath, Joanna Howard, Laird Hunt, Jamie Iredell, Harold Jaffe, Stephanie Johnson, Shane Jones, Drew Kalbach, Roy Kesey, Michael Kimball, M. Kitchell, Robert Kloss, Darby Larson, Charles Lennox, Norman Lock, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, Josh Maday, Dave Madden, Kendra Grant Malone, Peter Markus, Chelsea Martin, Zachary Mason, Hosho McCreesh, Alissa Nutting, Aimee Parkison, David Peak, Ted Pelton, Adam Peterson, Ryan Ridge, Joseph Riippi, Adam Robinson, Ethel Rohan, Joanna Ruocco, Kevin Sampsell, Selah Saterstrom, Davis Schneiderman, Zachary Schomburg, Todd Seabrook, Ben Segal, Gregory Sherl, Justin Sirois, Ken Sparling, Matthew Simmons, Terese Svoboda, Deb Olin Unferth, Timmy Waldron, William Walsh, Rupert Wondolowski and Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.



http://mudlusciouspress.com/books/stamp-stories-anthology/

MLKNG SCKLS hardcover

Thought it would be nice to have a pair of hardcovers that looked nice together on a shelf. I think I'll try to discount these somehow, but Lulu's prices are fixed according to the page count. $40 for the pair seems a but high. I might write some extra shorts for MLKNG SCKLS to make it worth it.

signing and remailing the Al Mutanabbi Street and MLKNG SCKLS broadsides back to Newlights Press

Falcons on the Floor - map from Fallujah to Ramadi

http://www.maplandia.com/iraq/al-anbar/ar-ramadi/

One easy mistake to make about Iraq is to assume it's nearly all infertile desert. As you can see from this satellite map, land surrounding the Euphrates is lush and verdant - it's an area that many Iraqis choose to live by. Animals of all kinda populate the waters. You can find Iraqi children diving in to escape the summer heat. Even I sometimes forget that this beautiful land was the cradle of civilization.  

Haneen Alshujairy interviewed on Outside Writers - Understanding Campaign

HERE.

MLKNG SCKLS on Kindle

BUYHERE

MLKNG SCKLS on Nook

eBooks have their place. An airplane. The car. While handgliding. And now you can read MLKNG SCKLS on a Nook:

Buy it here.

DeComp Magazine review of MLKNG SCKLS

MLKNG SCKLS is a book characterized by contemplate urgency, a story and a project that reflects on the nature of life, war, and narrative itself. Sirois, through the presentation of hallucinatory consciousness, offers an undeniably human portrait. More:

http://decompmagazine.com/blog/?p=142

first story from MLKNG SCKLS

Blurbs and praise for MLKNG SCKLS

MLKNG SCKLS is a book characterized by contemplate urgency, a story and a project that reflects on the nature of life, war, and narrative itself. Sirois, through the presentation of hallucinatory consciousness, offers an undeniably human portrait.

Spencer Dew, decomp Magazine

________________

A tight, spare and quietly tense gem of a book.
Brian Evenson
Author of Last Days and The Open Curtain
________________


Clean and visceral like few others. Sentences like nails. MLKNG SCKLS is an intense new vision and strong argument for literature still being essential in our modern world. I can't wait for Falcons on the Floor.

Michael Fitzgerald
author of Radiant Days (Counterpoint Press)

________________

"5 Books Published in 2009 that Wrecked My Brain a Little":

MLKNG SCKLS, Justin Sirois. A book about Iraq. War-torn Iraq. It provides such a complicated narrative and emotional system that the didacticism inherent in political literature falls away. But, this book has great political potential. Justin leaves his characters bare to the reader so as to create an emotional connection and shift in values in the way we see an abstracted political conflict. The balance of power and our role in it will necessarily shift after reading this book.

John Dermot Woods
Author of The Complete Collection of people, places & thingshttp://bigother.com/2009/12/31/5-books-published-in-2009-that-wrecked-my-brain-a-little/

________________


Sirois’s prose glistens with precision. Its sparseness mirrors the parched desert through which Salim and Khalil travel, its lyricism one proof of how resilient we can be in the face of disaster. Clocking in at fifty-five pages, this novelette manages to pack dreamy reveries, juvenile taunts, gorgeous descriptions of landscape, gothic depictions of vultures circling, lapidary views of blood, and doses of humor (like Khalil’s tall tale about a man with a crippled hand whose life was saved by a cigarette) that spell the reader through a harrowing trip to a place that’s, with any luck, safe, or, at least safer. If MLKNG SCKLS’s excised texts are any indication of the quality of Falcons on the Floor, then, as readers, we have much to look forward to.

John Madera
on New Pages

________________

The language is not dense, but it has a deep and impressive lyricism. Sirois has a gift for lyrical writing that in no way seems forced. The alliteration and internal rhymes that occur in the well-constructed sentences work in ways they don't in a lot of prose lyricism. He is restrained, picking the right spots to deploy a rhetorical figure to advantage.

The books two main characters are walking through the Iraqi desert, journeying from Fallujah to Ramadi, one recording it all on a laptop with a slowly draining battery. It has its Beckett precedents, but instead of Beckett's surreal, placeless place settings, MLKNG SCKLS is played out on the great contemporary American misadventure of our war in Iraq. Absurdity and tragedy collide every day in that Middle Eastern country, and Sirios recognizes and reveals it all well.

A favorite scene of mine features a man uncooking a meal, a task as seemingly impossible as, say, unringing a bell; or uninvading a country because of faulty, cooked intelligence. The characters manages his task. America, though, won't.

Mathew Simmons
Author of A Jello Horsehttp://themanwhocouldntblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/rider.html

________________

In MLKNG SCKLS, two young men leave Fallujah to follow a river, letting its flow dictate the path of their escape. Along the way, the narrator keeps track of his thoughts on his slowly dying laptop, its fading battery power increasing the tension of his already fraught passage through this dangerous landscape. These brief entries record not just the thoughts of the refugee, the exile, but also how these two men try to understand themselves through tall tales about brothers saved from rabid dogs by mere cigarettes, through fantastical memories of uncooking meals for girlfriends, through hallucinatory visions of predatory trees and circling vultures. These are stories told first to pass the time, sure, but also to explain who they once were, in the lives they have just left behind.

Sirois' masterful creation is not just a travel narrative, not just an epistolary, not just a war story. This is desert madness made universal, a coming of age rendered apocalyptic in language as sparse and beautiful and ultimately perilous as the desert passage it describes.
http://www.mdbell.com/blog/2009/6/2/mlkng-sckls-by-justin-sirois-available-for-pre-order.html

Matt Bell
Author of How They were Found and The CollectorsEditor for Dzanc Book’s Collagist

________________

Justin Sirois knows that for many Americans, the U.S. War on Iraq has been little more than one long Scene Deleted. The dynamic between what isn’t seen or can’t be seen or doesn’t want to be seen becomes essential to MLKNG SCKLS, a book comprised of deleted scenes from Sirois’ novel Falcons on the Floor. In playing peek-a-boo with the desire of readers to know all from some Cheney-style safely undisclosed bunker, MLKNG SCKLS wants us to recognize that in Iraq, peek-a-boo is played with disinformation, weapons, and lives.

Mark Wallace,

author of Haze and Dead Carnival

________________

If Beckett’s characters stopped waiting for Godot and went, walked into a sunned horizon, their feet would make the dust of MLKNG SCKLS. Sirois’ writing is artful and slender in this beautifully sparse novella.

J. A. Tyler
Author of IN LOVE WITH A GHOST
Editor for Mudluscious Press

Michael Fitzgerald on MLKNG SCKLS

Clean and visceral like few others. Sentences like nails. MLKNG SCKLS is an intense new vision and strong argument for literature still being essential in our modern world. I can't wait for Falcons on the Floor.

Michael Fitzgerald author of Radiant Days

Amelia Gray on MLKNG SCKLS

I got a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee this morning and read the whole of MLKNG SCKLS. Well wrought, with the kind of quiet ease to the lines that draws you close and surprises. He had two hair-related elements that intend to stick in the old craw.

Link.

words on MLKNG SCKLS from Christopher Newgent

"MLKNG SCKLS by Justin Sirois. A book about two refugees fleeing from Fallujah, deleted excerpts from Sirois’s hopefully forthcoming novel Falcons on the Floor. Small haunting scenes sparsed with much needed humor; you should read this, too, late at night, beyond the time you should have gone to bed, so when he talks about sand, you feel it in your eyes."

Link.

win Conner Willumsen's sketch for MLKNG SCKLS

This is one bad ass prize. It's the concept sketch Conner Willumsen sent me with the original art for the new book cover. It's 8.5 x 11 and easily framed. Anyone who preorders MLKNG SCKLS (2nd print) before Jan 15th will be put in the running to win this original sketch. Exciting?
Yes.

John Dermot Woods on MLKNG SCKLS

"5 Books Published in 2009 that Wrecked My Brain a Little":

MLKNG SCKLS, Justin Sirois. A book about Iraq. War-torn Iraq. It provides such a complicated narrative and emotional system that the didacticism inherent in political literature falls away. But, this book has great political potential. Justin leaves his characters bare to the reader so as to create an emotional connection and shift in values in the way we see an abstracted political conflict. The balance of power and our role in it will necessarily shift after reading this book.

More here.

Falcons on the Floor & MLKNG SCKLS featured in the Baltimore City Paper

Feature by Bret McCabe
Illustrations by Deanna Staffo

New Pages review of MLKNG SCKLS

"Sirois’s prose glistens with precision. Its sparseness mirrors the parched desert through which Salim and Khalil travel, its lyricism one proof of how resilient we can be in the face of disaster. Clocking in at fifty-five pages, this novelette manages to pack dreamy reveries, juvenile taunts, gorgeous descriptions of landscape, gothic depictions of vultures circling, lapidary views of blood, and doses of humor (like Khalil’s tall tale about a man with a crippled hand whose life was saved by a cigarette) that spell the reader through a harrowing trip to a place that’s, with any luck, safe, or, at least safer. If MLKNG SCKLS’s excised texts are any indication of the quality of Falcons on the Floor, then, as readers, we have much to look forward to."
.

John Madera

More here.

MLKNG SCKLS 2nd printing cover

Illustration by Connor Willumsen.

Publishing Genius (press).

Connor Willumsen cover for MLKNG SCKLS

Connor Willumsen illustrated the new cover for the 2nd printing of MLKNG SCKLS. The man is brilliant. Check out his bleak and existential comics here and buy a few here before they are sold out.