September 2024
Arcade Publishing Monthly Newsletter
From the Editor
September is here, and while summer still lingers (technically, it is still summer), the coffee shops have already begun schlepping Pumpkin Spice™ all over. Flannels are already making an appearance despite, as I sit here sweating over my keyboard, the high eighty-degree weather. With Labor Day approaching and the seasons seeming a bit confused, it’s the perfect time to indulge in a good book. Fortunately, that’s the business I am here to attend to.
In August, I had the pleasure of attending an event at McNally Jackson Books for the launch of Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis. Comedian and podcast host Adam Friedland joined Davis for a humorous discussion of his book, which is already garnering great reviews (check out the write-up in the Los Angeles Review of Books). We’re excited to see its continued success.
Looking ahead to fall, we have two releases on September 10th. First up is Vivienne by Emmalea Russo, which has already been generating buzz. Get a sense of Russo’s beautiful poetic prose in an excerpt featured in Forever Magazine.
Also on September 10th, we’re excited to release A Quiet Life by William Cooper and Michael McKinley—a cyberthriller that speaks to the times we live in (or at least some of us). That makes the 10th a busy day over here. Help us out, preorder now and skip the lines.
Next up, we are looking forward to our 2025 titles including The Agonies, a debut novel by Ben Faulkner as well as a novel by Leslie Stein, a Jungian psychoanalyst and former attorney called The Psychoanalysis of Dr. Seele. We’ve also signed deals with Noah Kumin, editor of the Mars Review of Books, for his novel Stop All the Clocks, and the acclaimed playwright Matthew Gasda for his novel The Sleepers, scheduled for Summer 2025.
There will be more to look forward to in the coming months, for sure. We are awaiting some very good news we can’t share with you yet. Maybe next month.
Hope you are well, please read Arcade.
Emmalea Russo’s VIVIENNE
A 264-page Arcade Publishing novel. Out September 10th, 2024 ISBN: 9781648210648.
"Vivienne is a dizzying, bold novel told in text messages, open letters by protesters, and vivacious surrealist prose."—Language Arts
"Stylish, satirical, and inventive, contemporary yet timeless, Vivienne takes place where urgent and unanswerable questions reside, at the intersections of art, love, and the immortal soul. It is surprising, mysterious, and delightful at every turn of the page, an utterly singular story circling the life and legacy of a fascinating and larger-than-life figure.” —Sarah Gerard, author of True Love
“Vivienne is a novel of rare vivacity and invention in a literary period not noted for visionary fictions: a vital recreation of the sheer scandal of our surreally real lives, a poet’s novel in the sense in which all novels worth the name should be poets’ novels: a work of poiesis, the inspired formation or manifestation of a new reality.”—John Pistelli, author of Major Arcana
Set over the course of a fateful week, Vivienne deftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art? What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife?
Did Vivienne Volker Kill Wilma Lang? This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortly after Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s. Once a famous artist and fashion icon, Volker is now in her eighties and spends her days in religious contemplation in rural Pennsylvania alongside her daughter Velour Bellmer, her granddaughter Vesta Furio, her much younger boyfriend—a garbageman named Lou—and Franz, the family dog. Their quiet lives are disrupted when Vivienne’s work is selected for inclusion in a high-profile retrospective called "Forgotten Women Surrealists" at the prestigious NAT Museum. However, when rumors of her past misdeeds begin to circulate and she is dropped from the show, a gallery curator enters the picture hoping to capitalize on the buzz generated by the controversy, sending the family's tensions, hopes, and dreams to a dizzying peak.
Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
“In an instant, one of our finest poets has become one of our finest novelists. Emmalea Russo is—as Leonard Cohen sang—‘All dressed to kill, in rags of light.’”
—Bruce Wagner author of Dead Stars
Reviews and such for VIVIENNE:
Artnet - Fiction About the Art World
Excerpt of VIVIENNE in Forever Mag
John Pistelli's review of VIVIENNE
Shelf Life: Books That Can Fit In A Luar
Excerpt of VIVIENNE in American Vulgaria Magazine
Emmalea Russo on THE UNSPEAKABLE podcast with Meghan Daum - How To Cancel A Poet
William Cooper and Michael McKinley’s A QUIET LIFE
A 264-page Arcade Publishing novel. Out September 10th, 2024 ISBN: 9781648210334
It was just a link in an email.
Michael Housen is living a typical, white-collar American life at a security company when he falls for a phishing campaign with dire implications. One click, and suddenly the US is under marshal law and bombing Tehran.
Michael unknowingly triggered a cyberattack by Iranian hackers, which a belligerent President Davis uses as pretext for war against Iran. Michael blinks and he and his wife, Pam, are thrown into private prisons owned by the president, a multibillionaire tycoon. This ordinary couple suddenly must answer a harrowing question: What do you do when the enemy of the state is you? And they find themselves cooperating with extraordinary partners, from right-wing militias to Iranian documentarians, as they work to clear their names and stop the global conflict that Michael set off with an unwitting click.
Written by a renowned cybersecurity attorney and a bestselling author, A Quiet Life is a cyberthriller for the times that we all live in, and how we can lose everything on the strength of a lie. And how once we start fighting back, we cannot stop.
“A compelling rallying cry for democratic institutions under threat in America [and] perfect for readers eager for a non-partisan analysis of the threat to American democracy.”
—Publishers Weekly
William Cooper is a cybersecurity attorney and award-winning journalist. His writings have appeared in hundreds of publications around the world including The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post, Toronto Star, and Jerusalem Post. Visit him online at Will-Cooper.com.
Michael McKinley is a journalist, author, and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books, and his most recent, Willie: The Game Changing Story of the NHL’s First Black Player was named Top 20 Books of 2020 by the CBC, and nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award. His novel, The Penalty Killing, was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award as best debut crime novel, and his Amazon Kindle thriller Facetime was a bestseller. As a journalist, he has written for The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, Vancouver Sun, National Post, Saturday Night Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, Food & Wine, New York Observer, New York Daily News, Politics Daily, Washington Post, The Players Tribune, America Magazine, and has won national news and magazine writing awards. He is a citizen of Canada, Ireland, and the United States and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Please see www.libertayo.com for a digital sampling of McKinley’s work.
“This is noir they way they did it back when they really did it."—Don Winslow, author of The Power of the Dog
“[Cooper’s] reasoned tone and bipartisan critiques are a welcome perspective in an increasingly polarized and heated political landscape.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A fascinating read.”—Toronto Star
“Arcade is a storied literary imprint (its original publisher discovered Samuel Beckett) that mirrors and embodies Tony Lyons’s fierce, lifelong commitment to writers and their art. After thirty-five years and fourteen novels, I have never been treated with more care, respect, and devotion, and have never, hands-down, had such beautiful books created from my work than with Arcade . . . Long may Arcade (and Tony Lyons) live!”
—BRUCE WAGNER