Marvel and a Wonder

by Joe Meno

  “I’m better off working a job anyway. The job at the survey office is not so bad and even though it’s a bore, I know I’m lucky to have any kind of job right now, even though it’s pretty mind-numbing. But it’s still better than my roommate Isobel who works at a corporate copy shop making copies for people who can’t figure out how to use a copier themselves. At least, with the survey job, I don’t have to deal with absolute idiots. There are just a high percentage of people who are incredibly old, because those are the only people who answer their phones anymore, and then there is the fact that I’ve fallen in love with someone who happens to be my supervisor, and I’ve only slept with him three times, and two of those times I only gave him a handjob, which hardly even counts, but apparently it doesn’t mean that much to Paul either because he’s obviously seeing other girls in the office. Which is retarded. Because the more I think about him, the more I realize I really like him.

  “Paul is probably the first person I actually enjoy having sex with, because he’s a couple years older and totally unapologetic, while the other four people I’ve slept with always wanted to talk about everything beforehand, and during, and even after. I lost my virginity back in high school, when I was a senior, working on the school yearbook. It was with a boy I did not like but I knew he was smart and I thought I could trust him. It was more like a social experiment than actual sex, at least to me. We only did it twice because he had a girlfriend who was away at college, and he never mentioned it to anyone, and I think I will always be thankful to him for that. The first time we did it he came on my skirt and I didn’t know what to do so I just laid there. For like a half hour. Seriously. Anyway, he used to kiss too hard. He kissed like that because he watched too many porno movies, I think. And then there was Brandon, who I dated freshman year, and a boy I met a party who I never saw again, and then this other guy, Will, who I was seeing off and on for a while—a photographer who I met in art school, who doesn’t even actually take pictures anymore because he’s a waiter right now—and once he wrote me this long letter asking why I didn’t make any sounds during sex and I happen to think it’s more sexy if you are quiet and he said I needed to start acting like I was having fun with him in bed, so I decided right then it was probably not going to work because what I’ve figured out is that it never gets any easier once you fall in love with somebody. Even with Paul.”

  Odile pauses at a stoplight on Orleans, just after the bridge. The snow comes down like a bad feeling.

  She looks up, catching a single snowflake on the tip of her pink mitten. The snowflake is lopsided and quickly melts.

  She glances around and watches the city fall off into darkness.

  You murderous city.

  You oafish palace.

  I’d like to burn it all down.

  What am I doing here? What am I even doing?

  What do you do with the rest of your life when you realize you don’t like anything?

  She decides the only thing to do now is quit.

  Okay. She will quit. It will be easy.

  Because Odile has quit seventeen jobs in the last three years already.

  END OF EXCERPT

  More about Office Girl

  “An off-kilter romance doubles as an art movement in Joe Meno’s novel. The novel reads as a parody of art-school types . . . and as a tribute to their devil-may-care spirit. Meno impressively captures post-adolescent female angst and insecurity. Fresh and funny, the images also encapsulate the mortification, confusion and excitement that define so many 20-something existences.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Wonderful storytelling panache . . . Odile is a brash, moody, likable young woman navigating the obstacles of caddish boyfriends and lousy jobs, embarking on the sort of sentimental journey that literary heroines have been making since Fanny Burney’s Evelina in the 1770s. Tenderhearted Jack is the awkward, quiet sort that the women in Jane Austen’s novels overlook until book’s end. He is obsessed with tape-recording Chicago’s ambient noises so that he can simulate the city in the safety of his bedroom, ‘a single town he has invented made of nothing but sound.’ Mr. Meno excels at capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave and freshly alive to their surroundings . . . the story of the relationship has a sweet simplicity.” —The Wall Street Journal

  “In Joe Meno’s new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics (“It doesn’t pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone”).” —Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)

  “Meno has constructed a snowflake-delicate inquiry into alienation and longing. Illustrated with drawings and photographs and shaped by tender empathy, buoyant imagination, and bittersweet wit, this wistful, provocative, off-kilter love story affirms the bonds forged by art and story.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999 . . . When things Get Weird as things do when we’re young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot notes: It’s 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was . . . well, you know. Meno’s alternative titles help give the gist: Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things. Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky element.” —Marie Claire

  “Odile and Jack are . . . two characters in search of authentic emotion . . . their pas de deux is . . . dynamic. Meno’s plain style seems appropriate for these characters and their occasions, and the low-key drawings and amateur photographs that punctuate the narrative lend a home-video feel to this story of slacker bohemia, the temp jobs, odd jobs and hand jobs.”—Chicago Tribune

  “Meno’s book is an honest look at the isolation of being a creative person in your twenties living in a city . . . Cody Hudson’s hand-drawn illustrations, which relate to the text only laterally, add a charm akin to the small doodles that break up long New Yorkerarticles. The photos by Todd Baxter add a third level to the package, helping to make Meno’s book feel more like an artwork.”—The Daily Beast, “3 Must-Read Offbeat Novels”

  “A beguiling and slyly disquieting storyteller, Meno forges surprising connections between deep emotion and edgy absurdity, self-conscious hipness and timeless metaphysics. In this geeky-elegant novel, Meno transforms wintery Chicago into a wondrous crystallization of countless dreams and tragedies, while telling the stories of two derailed young artists, two wounded souls, in cinematic vignettes that range from lushly atmospheric visions to crack-shot volleys of poignant and funny dialogue. With bicycles in the snow emblematic of both precariousness and determination, Meno’s charming, melancholy, frank and droll love story wrapped around an art manifesto both celebrates those who question and protest the established order and contemplates the dilemmas that make family, creativity, ambition and love perpetually confounding and essential.” —Kansas City Star

  “A wispy, bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter, not the sweet) romance, Office Girl is the story of Odile and Jack, a pair of alienated twentysomething bohemians whose artistic ambitions are being worn away by one soul-killing call-center job after another in Chicago.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Office Girl is a bittersweet little love story framed by Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial and the turn of the millennium .
. . By letting his characters be emotionally vulnerable, even shallow or trite—which is to say . . . real—Meno supplies an off-kilter, slightly inappropriate answer to the Hollywood rom-com. Meno is a deft writer. The dialogue in Office Girl is often funny, the pacing quirky, and some of its quick, affecting similes remind me of Lorrie Moore.” —Chicago Reader

  “Meno’s books have become increasingly liminal and idiosyncratic. In this latest, it feels as if Meno has written the book he’s been wanting to write for years, combining all of those classic elements of his previous work: the stop-and-start of youthful inertia, the painful purity of romance, the way childhood informs (i.e. wrecks) us as adults and a direct prose cut into vignettes and montage. He also works with longtime collaborators photographer Todd Baxter and painter Cody Hudson . . . Gorgeously packaged, it’s like a Meno box set 15 years in the making.” —Time Out Chicago

  “It might be a standard boy-meets-girl tale, if not for the fact that the boy likes to record the sounds of gloves abandoned in snowdrifts, while the girl has a penchant for filling elevators with silver balloons. It’s 1999. Odile has left grad school while Jack’s wife has recently left him; after both stumble into jobs at the same telemarketing firm, they meet, and it isn’t long before he is supporting her attempt to create a whimsical, anti-establishment art movement.” —Time Out New York

  Best-selling novelist Joe Meno is back with fantastic new novel about two young people and a visionary, doomed art movement

  No one dies in Office Girl. Nobody talks about the international political situation. There is no mention of any economic collapse. Nothing takes place during a World War.

  Instead, this novel is about young people doing interesting things in the final moments of the last century. Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who's most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set in February 1999—just before the end of one world and the beginning of another—Office Girl is the story of two people caught between the uncertainty of their futures and the all-too-brief moments of modern life.

  Joe Meno's latest novel also features black-and-white illustrations by renowned artist Cody Hudson and photographs by visionary photographer Todd Baxter.

  Office Girl is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions. Our printed books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. Digital editions are available wherever e-books are sold.

  Demons in the Spring

  "Eclectic, funny, constantly surprising—these are the things a short story collection should be allowed to be, and Joe Meno's Demons in the Spring absolutely is. Add to his rock solid prose and big heart a wonderful idea—how each story is illustrated by a modern master—then you have a rich, unforgettable stew of a book." —Dave Eggers

  "The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman." —Hubert Selby, Jr.

  *Finalist for the 2008 Story Prize

  *Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2008

  *Time Out Chicago Best Books of 2008

  "An inspired collection of twenty stories, brilliant in its command of tone and narrative perspective … Creativity and empathy mark the collection … Illustrations enhance the already vivid storytelling."—Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*

  "The strongest stories in this collection (with accompanying illustrations by different artists) don't try too hard to dazzle with formal virtuosity but let Meno slowly pull his characters out from their own peculiar inner worlds into the one we recognize, for better or for worse, as the 'real' world. Loss seems to be the lingua franca that unites these souls; Meno's sympathy for them is acute, and he never lets fictional pyrotechnics blind him, or us, to their humanity."—New York Times Book Review

  "Meno knows just how to press a variety of emotional buttons ranging from giddy delight to not-quite-hopeless despair. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries."—Library Journal

  "Mr. Meno's fiction pops with the energy of youth, its purity and heart … Mr. Meno has a finely tuned grasp of the fumblings—romantic, existential and otherwise, that make up the first twenty-five years of our lives."—New York Observer

  "These playful, postmodern stories find the Chicago author's artistry reinforced by illustrators who provide divergent perspectives on his prose … The range of illustrations adds to the volume's appeal, but Meno's writing is strong enough to stand on its own … There's a profound empathy in Meno's work that makes it more than just a stylistic exercise."—Time Out New York

  "Meno shows his mastery of the short form with his twenty latest tales of whimsy and loss. Meno's best stories fuse together postmodern ideas with subjects that have concerned literature through the ages, such as love, heartbreak, death, and malaise … Intriguing and eccentric, Meno's stories never distract with their surreal flights of fancy but instead draw the reader in deeper to their magical reconfiguration of the modern world. Twenty different graphic artists provide idiosyncratic illustrations that perfectly complement this daring collection."—Booklist

  "Nothing like getting inventive. Local author Joe Meno continues to push the limits of traditional lit with each of his releases … Meno's tales are funny, heartbreaking and in-sightful, most of the time all at once—he's getting better with age."— Newcity (Chicago)

  "Demons is a beautifully crafted collection and benefits greatly from the illustrations of twenty diverse and well-matched artists from around the world. Consider also that a portion of the book's proceeds are being donated to 826CHICAGO, a nonprofit tutoring center in the Windy City, and you've got a great book that's giving to a good cause."—Philadelphia City Paper

  "In Joe Meno's newest collection, even the table of contents reads like a story, each title an evocative verbal starburst [and] the stories don't disappoint. They pop and bristle with the tender, with the weird and with great appreciation for the limitless resources of storytelling."—Time Out Chicago

  "The twenty clever and sometimes surreal stories in Joe Meno's new collection, Demons in the Spring, reveal the workings of a curious and inventive mind. The pieces are diverse in style and setting, but for the most part their characters are all trying to navigate a world that's at best indifferent and more often bewildering or downright cruel."—Chicago Reader

  "These tales have the feel of whole novels distilled into tone poems and lyric fragments of natural dialogue, lucid dream states, and pure, all-too-human existential ludicrousness."—ELLE

  "The first enticing element about Demons in the Spring is the sheer beauty of the book … The volume itself has the irresistible charm of a bygone charm. The stories are thoroughly modern—at once quirky and accessible."—Chicago Sun-Times

  "Prolific South Sider Meno is the closest thing we've got to a literary ambassador … No one has captured the odd blend of grit and fantasy, community and danger, that comes with an urban upbringing quite like Meno."—GQ

  Twenty new Meno stories accompanied by twenty original pieces of art by twenty different groundbreaking visual artists.

  Demons in the Spring is a collection of twenty short stories by Joe Meno, author of the smash hits The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned, with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds—including Charles Burns, Archer Prewitt, Ivan Brunetti, Jay Ryan, Paul Hornschemeier, Anders Nilsen, Geoff McFedtridge, Kelsey Brookes, Kim Hiorthoy, Caroline Hwang, Rachell Sumpter, KOZYNDAN, Evan Hecox, and Cody Hudson.

  Oddly modern moments which occur in the most familiar of public places, from offices to airports to schools to zoos to emergency rooms: a young girl who refuses to go anywhere unless she's dressed as a ghost; a bank robbery in Stockholm gone terribly wrong; a teacher who's become enamored with the students in his school's Model United Nations club
; a couple affected by a strange malady—a miniature city which has begun to develop in the young woman's chest, these inventive stories are hilarious, heartbreaking, and unusual. While many of them have never been previously published, others have been featured in the likes of LIT, Other Voices, Swink, TriQuarterly, and McSweeney's.