Welcome, America, to the Season of Guilt, a.k.a. The Holidays. Right now you’re probably feeling bad about yourself for one of the following traditional reasons:
- You are either missing absent members of your family, or dreading the approach of a family member who is never absent enough — for instance, your insufferable great aunt Maude who arrives later today by Greyhound and needs to be picked up in a car she can smoke cigars in.
- You either feel guilt for not cooking Thanksgiving dinner yourself, or you worry you won’t cook it well enough to please certain hard-to-please members of your family — such as your stormy vegetarian nephew Albert, who called you a fascist last year because you used the word “giblets” in conversation.
- Either you are recently unemployed or you’re working twice as hard as usual because your employers just laid off everybody else. And yet you know that Black Friday is coming, and with it the fiscal & emotional demands of Christmas gift-giving — demands such as from your daughter Phina who demands a new iPod because the one you gave her last year is scratched, and “boring”.
Here at Famous Author Mykle Hansen, we empathize deeply with your holiday depression. We’re stressed too. We just finally published a new novel — a year’s worth of work! — and you’d think it’s time for a rest and a well-deserved meal, but no! Now we have to sell the damn thing! Which shouldn’t be hard, because it’s a great book (we’d know, we wrote it) but nobody’s heard of it yet because it’s only been on the shelves for a week.
That’s why we’re asking you to take a moment for yourself this Thursday — a moment with your real family, your online family over here in Internet-land. At some point this Thursday you’ll be fed up, ready to scream, past your limit. And while the furious hurling of cranberries is always cathartic, odds are good that you’d be stuck with the cleanup. Instead, why not excuse yourself to your private study, toolshed or car — or wherever a decent Internet connection can be found. There you’ll find the soothing succor of the Interwebs: lolcats, dwarf porn, and us.
Because it’s at that blackest moment of holiday madness that you’re most likely to need the healing power of comedy! And this Thanksgiving we offer you three (3!) new books that combine sardonic, Bizarro comedy with a proud denunciation of the hell that is Thanksgiving dinner. They are:
 THE CANNIBAL’S GUIDE TO ETHICAL LIVING, by Mykle Hansen, is the story of a man who loves to cook and to eat, and of the men he loves to cook and eat. It takes place over the course of a seven course French meal, a meal even more excruciating that the one you’ll be at this Thanksgiving. Everything difficult and awkward about polite dining is hilarious and disturbing about this book.  LICK YOUR NEIGHBOR, by Chris Genoa, combines a whodunnit about a murdered pet turkey named Gus with an eerie Pilgrim-era tale of witchcraft, double-crossing and animal husbandry at the original Thanksgiving dinner. It’s every bit as profane, ridiculous and surprising a book as you’d expect from the author of FOOP! — a book that Christopher Moore called “a surreal pie in the face.” And it has ninjas.
 THE VEGAN REVOLUTION … WITH ZOMBIES is by David Agranoff. It’s zombie Portland hipsters versus lovable vegans armed with shotguns. If that’s not a good reason to read a book, I don’t know what is!
So this Thanksgiving, we’d like to ask your support in purchasing these three books from Amazon.com . By doing so, you’ll be helping out independent authors, getting a head start on your Christmas shopping and spending precious moments away from your family.
Furthermore, by making your purchase on Thanksgiving you’ll help us to reach other disaffected Amazon shoppers stuck in the same sad gravy boat as yourself. That’s why there are no BUY NOW buttons on this page. We’d rather you BUY THEN. Together we can get the Amazon salesrank for these books below ten thousand on Thanksgiving. And if we do that, just for one day, Amazon.com will start recommending these books to random strangers! Random strangers who are just as depressed and confused as the rest of us. Random strangers who need help deciding what book to buy. Random strangers who need you!
So this Thanksgiving, please help us help you to help yourself, help your family, help some random strangers and, above all, help us. Join Mykle Hansen, David Agranoff and Chris Genoa for ESCAPE FROM THANKSGIVING!
Eraserhead Press has just released Mykle Hansen’s latest novel: THE CANNIBAL’S GUIDE TO ETHICAL LIVING! It’s a dark comedy of madness, money and haute cuisine. Mr. Hansen reportedly considers it the bee’s knees.
“In a remote and dangerous corner of the ocean, the renowned gourmet and food journalist Louis De Gustibus is held captive by an elite chef-and vegan cannibal-named André. But André would never eat his dear friend Louis. Andre only eats millionaires!”
“The Guide” (as we at FAMH have taken to calling it) will enjoy a “coming out” party at this year’s BIZARROCON and a World Promotional Tour of Ultimate Promotion in spring 2011. But you don’t have to wait as long as that — you can order it now from Amazon.com!
Watch this space for more information, as we manage the exciting transition from full-time-novel-writing to full-time-novel-promoting.
Today we sold our very last copy of the limited edition hand-bound ‘zine in book form, EYEHEART EVERYTHING.
It took ten years to sell seven hundred of these. Whew.
If you don’t already own a first edition paperback of this book, we can’t really help you. We could yesterday, but no longer. Sorry. Powell’s Books may have a few left on the shelves, and Amazon.com lists various used copies, some at unfortunately inflated “rare book” prices.
However, if you’re willing to wait a few weeks, you will then be able to purchase the new, second edition of EYEHEART EVERYTHING. It won’t be hand-bound, or collectable, or rare. But it will feature a new introduction by Kevin Sampsel, an afterward by the author, and several edits suggested by Dave Eggers.
More on that as it happens. Thanks again for all your support.
Attention literature fans! The FAMH offices will be closed 8/25/2010 through 9/8/2010 while we blow shit up in the desert. Continue reading Burning Alert!
On Saturday May 15th, Mykle Hansen is riding one hundred miles on this eight foot tall bicycle, to raise funds for the American Lung Association!
 Not Afraid Of Snakes Mykle writes:
“I’m just as sick of being asked for donations as anybody. So just let me say this: the ALA is a great organization. In their advocacy for clean air, their work in smoking cessation, and their contributions to asthma research they have acheived much with little. If you have lungs — and I know you do — then you really ought to take a moment to learn about what the ALA has been doing on your lungs’ behalf.
If that’s too boring and wonky for you, then just take my word for it and visit my fundraising page. I’m sorry it’s so spectacularly ugly, but that’s a great example of the ALA’s frugality: they could have spent donor’s dollars on a fancier website, but they said ‘no, we’ve got to spend that money on lungs.’ Lungs like yours and mine. Delicious, pink, juicy lungs. Mmmm.”
More details here.
… is the title of a short story by Mr. Hansen in the just-released Journal of Experimental Fiction, issue number 37. It’s a humorous tale of robot love, crystal meth and the end of the world.
![Journal Of Experimental Fiction]( "JEF 37 -- the front cover")
This latest issue of the JEF is dedicated to Bizarro Fiction, and contains fresh works from well-known authors and newcomers alike. Gina Ranalli’s intense THREE STORIES, Cameron Pierce’s flash-romance CRAZY LOVE and Forrest Armstrong’s lyrical ARIAS OVER THE DRUM MACHINE are all excellent pieces worthy of the admission price, and that’s just a quarter of what you get.
Provocatively, editor Echkard Gerdes’s introduction fires a shot across the bow of Carlton Mellick III’s widely-read essay EXPERIMENTAL FICTION VS. BIZARRO, taking umbrage at the core arguments of that piece and flinging back a mini-manifesto of what makes the JEF tick. Will CM3 respond? Is a literary cat-fight in the brewing? If it sheds more light than blood and fur, we say “bring it on!”
Mykle Hansen discusses writing, publishing and arson with the charming Lori Hettler over at The Next Best Book Blog. Check it out!
Not just mine, either! Read all about it on the HELP! blog … and sharpen your crayons now!
 Win these in Patrick Wensink's Coloring Contest!
WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG WITH AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM THE FAMOUS AUTHOR:
Hi,
My publisher, Eraserhead Press, is awesome in so many ways that I could write a whole book about how awesome they are and ask them to publish it. (Although they might decline to publish it, because who really wants to read a whole book about that? But then again, it would have lots of unicorn battles …)
But for instance: FREE BOOKS. Thanks to Jeff Burk at Eraserhead, from now until Thanksgiving you can use download free PDFs of several fine titles … including but not limited to THE BIZARRO STARTER KITS.
Now, I’m often asked what Bizarro is all about, and for all my loving it and knowing it and being it I sometimes struggle to explain it in straight-man terms. But really if you want the scoop you need to read one or both of these collections. My own novella, MONSTER COCKS, appears in the Blue starter kit, and one of my favorite absurd stories of all time, THE GREATEST FUCKING MOMENT IN SPORTS by Kevin L. Donihe, appears in the orange one.
For those reasons alone, you ought to avail yourself of this limited-time gift opportunity, and download these and other fine Eraserhead books. Then, after you’ve enjoyed those fine works of bizarro literature, you can investigate the works of two dozen other authors working in the genre. Love them? Awesome! Hate them? No problem — that’s the freedom that only free stuff can give you. All you have to do is download.
Do it now; do it here. Free is a very good price!
-mykle-
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