by Joe Meno
www.ivanbrunetti.com
Charles Burns is an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator who lives in Philadelphia. He is the creator of the Harvey Award—winning graphic novel Black Hole, as well as the works Big Baby and Skin Deep.
Nick Butcher is a painter, poster artist, and musician. He is also a beach comber who lives in Chicago.
www.programmablepress.com
Steph Davidson was born in Toronto, Ontario. She attended the University of Western Ontario for Visual Arts and currently resides in Toronto.
www.prettyempty.com
Evan Hecox is an artist and graphic designer who has become known largely through the subculture of skateboarding, having produced hundreds of skateboard graphics since 1997. He has also emerged as a fine artist and has shown his work in galleries in the United States and abroad, including solo shows in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, and group shows in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Paris, and London. With an approach that has as much in common with photography as it does with drawing, his work deals with the complexity of the urban landscape reinventing the mundane surroundings that might be otherwise overlooked.
www.evanhecox.com
Paul Hornschemeier was born in Cincinnati in 1977 and began self-publishing his experimental comics series, Sequential, in college. After graduating and moving to Chicago, he began work on a new series, Forlorn Funnies, which produced the graphic novel Mother, Come Home. His newest is The Three Paradoxes. He currently resides in Chicago.
www.margomitchell.com
Cody Hudson, who works under the name Struggle Inc., is a Chicago-based artist and graphic designer. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He enjoys ice fishing, sleeping, reading, and things made of wood.
www.struggleinc.com
Caroline Hwang is an artist and illustrator who was born in Minnesota and raised in southern California. She currently resides in Brooklyn.
www.carolinehwang.net
kozyndan is a husband-and-wife team who divide their time between making art and working as test subjects on a project to grow gills on human beings for future life underwater. They reside in Los Angeles.
www.kozyndan.com
You can easily spot The Little Friends of Printmaking in a crowd—their inky hands and clothes are a dead giveaway. Their work is just as distinctive. Husband-and-wife team JW & Melissa Buchanan first made a name for themselves through their silkscreened concert posters, but soon branched out into other fields, designing fancy junk for whoever would pay them money. In addition to their work as illustrators and designers, they continue their fine art pursuits through exhibitions, lectures, and artists’ residencies worldwide. Their awards include honors from the Art Directors’ Club, American Illustration, and Communication Arts; and their work has been published in the books New Masters of Poster Design (Rockport), Juxtapoz: Poster Art (Gingko Press), and Handmade Nation (Princeton Architectural Press), among others. The Little Friends currently live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with two very round cats.
www.thelittlefriendsofprintmaking.com
Geoff McFetridge lives and works in Atwater, California, an independent community of cholos, designers, and bicyclists that exists within the borders of greater Los Angeles. McFetridge’s work can be seen via Google.com, championdontstop.com (well, not really), and solitaryarts.com
Lauren Nassef was born in North Carolina and grew up in central Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. Now she is a Chicago-based artist and illustrator living with her husband and shepherd mix almost exactly between President Obama’s house and Lake Michigan.
www.laurennassef.com
Anders Nilsen was born in New Hampshire and grew up there and in Minneapolis. He did a year of graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before dropping out to make comics full time. He is the author and artist of Big Questions, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Dogs and Water, and Monologues for the Coming Plague. He currently lives and works in Chicago.
www.margomitchell.com/thc/an.htm
Archer Prewitt is a cartoonist by day and a musician by night, touring and recording as a solo artist and with his band, The Sea and Cake. His comic series, Sof ’ Boy, is published by Drawn & Quarterly. He is currently working on a new solo album.
www.myspace.com/archerprewittmusic
Jon Resh is a writer and graphic designer in Chicago whose work includes, among many other collaborations and commissions, a number of cover designs for books by Joe Meno.
www.go-undaunted.com
Jay Ryan lives very, very close to Chicago and spends most of his time drawing and screenprinting concert posters at his shop, The Bird Machine. The remainder of Jay’s time is spent splitting logs, riding his bike, and talking to dogs in other people’s yards.
www.thebirdmachine.com
Souther Salazar’s work first began to circulate in the early ’90s, in the form of xeroxed cut-and-paste minicomics and zines made from his bedroom as a young teenager in rural Oakdale, California. He now lives in Los Angeles, where he creates collages, paintings, drawings, and sculptures in dense and frenzied installations that encourage exploration and participation by the viewer. His work has appeared in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Brazil, and Tokyo, and in publications such as Kramers Ergot, The Drama, and Giant Robot.
Rachell Sumpter currently lives on a remote island in the Pudget Sound. She has contributed art to past McSweeney’s publications such as What Is the What, Issue 20, Issue 24, and Here They Come.
www.rachellsumpter.com
Chris Uphues is an artist living in Brooklyn with his monkey Del. He spends his days drawing, painting, writing, and generally having a good time.
Thank you: Cody Hudson. Without you, this book would not have happened. It’s hard to imagine someone so talented being so fun to work with.
Thanks also to: Koren, Lulu, Johnny Temple, Johanna Ingalls, Jon Resh, Dan Sinker, James Vickery, Todd Baxter, and all of the contributing artists for their time and creativity.
JOE MENO is the best-selling author of the novels The GreatPerhaps, Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender As Hellfire, as well as the short story collection Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir. He was the winner of the 2003 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
CODY HUDSON is a Chicago-based artist and graphic designer. He collaborated with Joe Meno on the concept of this book as well as the selection of artists featured here.
Also available from Akashic Books
HAIRSTYLES OF THE DAMNED
a novel by Joe Meno
290 pages, trade paperback original, $13.95, Punk Planet Books
*A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program
“Sensitive, well-observed, often laugh-out-loud funny … You won’t regret a moment of the journey.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Captures both the sweetness and sting of adolescence with unflinching honesty.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“The most authentic young voice since J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield … A darn good book.” —Daily Southtown
THE BOY DETECTIVE FAILS
a novel by Joe Meno
344 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95, Punk Planet Books
*A Chicago Tribune, Booklist, and Kirkus Book of the Year
“This is postmodern fiction with a head and a heart, addressing such depressing issues as suicide, death, loneliness, failure, anomie, and guilt with compassion, humor, and even whimsy. Meno’s best work yet; highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“A delicate blend of whimsy and edginess. Meno packs his novel with delightful subtext.”
—Entertainment Weekly
HOW THE HULA GIRL SINGS
a novel by Joe Meno
212 pages, trade paperback, $13.95
&nbs
p; “Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details, life in the joint, and the trials an ex-con faces, and he’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization. A likable winner …”
—Publishers Weekly
“An intimate book … The novel succeeds because Meno gives Luce Lemay the struggling soul of a poet looking to bend anguish into possibility … offering what Raymond Carver used to call ‘glimpses’ of what else might be, flashes of another, more comforting brand of reality.”
—Newcity (Chicago)
TENDER AS HELLFIRE
a novel by Joe Meno
208 pages, trade paperback, $14.95
“A trailer park in the Plains town of Tenderloin is the setting of this crusty coming-of-age debut, which features some of the liveliest characters just this side of believable that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel … Often charming, the novel is full of labyrinthine explanations and bizarre details delivered in poetic language. Meno’s passionate new voice makes him a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
ANIMALS AND OBJECTS IN AND OUT OF WATER
Posters by Jay Ryan, 2005–2008
*With an essay by Joe Meno and foreword by Andrew Bird
144 pages w/color illustrations throughout, oversized paperback original, $22.95
“Ryan’s painting background is apparent in his approach to layout, composition, and color. Combinations that initially seem bold or chaotic turn out to be controlled, even somewhat subdued, upon closer inspection: rust red fading into robin’s-egg blue, seafoam green flowing into burnt sienna, juice orange crashing into taupe. As an art book, it’s inspiring …”
—Chicago Reader
“My favorite art book of the year. Jay Ryan’s posters are strange, whimsical, and absurd.”
—Shelf Awareness
CHICAGO NOIR
edited by Neal Pollack
260 pages, trade paperback original, $14.95
Brand-new stories by: Joe Meno, Achy Obejas, Bayo Ojikutu, Adam Langer, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Peter Orner, Kevin Guilfoile, Claire Zulkey, Andrew Ervin, and others.
“[T]he Chicago entry [in Akashic’s city-themed noir series] offers eighteen all-original stories that illustrate Chicago’s great ethnic diversity, pay homage to its sports teams (particularly the Cubs), and invoke its cultural past from jazz to Prohibition.”
—Publishers Weekly
These books are available at local bookstores.
They can also be purchased online through www.akashicbooks.com.
To order by mail send a check or money order to:
AKASHIC BOOKS
PO Box 1456, New York, NY 10009
www.akashicbooks.com, [email protected]
(Prices include shipping. Outside the U.S., add $12 to each book ordered.)
