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News & Features » September 2015 » SALE: Get two Joe Meno titles for only $2.99 each, wherever e-books are sold!

SALE: Get two Joe Meno titles for only $2.99 each, wherever e-books are sold!

To celebrate the release of Marvel and a Wonder — the latest novel from best-selling author Joe Menothrough October 4, you can get Demons in the Spring and How the Hula Girl Sings by Joe Meno for only $2.99 each wherever e-books are sold, including Nook, Apple, GooglePlay, Amazon Kindle, and Kobo. (Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstore with your Kobo purchase! A full list of participating Kobo partners can be found at IndieBound.)

*For a limited time, you can also purchase paperback editions of Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, Tender as Hellfire, and Office Girl together for only $25.00 exclusively from our website. Click here for details.

Demons in the Spring

Praise for Demons in the Spring:

“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)

“Spanning worlds, generations, cultures and environments, each of Meno’s short stories in this stellar collection explores depression, loneliness and insanity in the world, while never quite offering a clear solution or glimmer of hope. Misery loves company, and Meno’s assortment of off-center, morose characters fit seamlessly together . . . Catering to all the odd men out in the world, this short story collection succeeds word to word, sentence to sentence, and cover to cover.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The author of Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails is back with a handsome new collection, pairing twenty short stories with original artwork from illustrators like Charles Burns and Nick Butcher. Meno is at his best when he mixes raw emotional realism with tender insight.”
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.”
Library Journal

The limited edition hardcover of Demons in the Spring was a finalist for the 2009 Story Prize, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2008, a Time Out Chicago Best Book of 2008, and drew starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. It is a collection of twenty short stories, with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds—including Todd Baxter, Kelsey Brookes, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Nick Butcher, Steph Davidson, Evan Hecox, Paul Hornschemeier, Cody Hudson, Caroline Hwang, kozyndan, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Geoff McFetridge, Lauren Nassef, Anders Nilsen, Archer Prewitt, Jon Resh, Jay Ryan, Souther Salazar, Rachell Sumpter, and Chris Uphues.

Within Demons in the Spring, 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.

How the Hula Girl SingsPraise for How the Hula Girl Sings:

“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 that should bolster Meno’s reputation.”
Publishers Weekly

“The author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace, never succumbing to the overkill that American gothic tales are often prone to, seeming to take his inspiration equally from the stories of Jim Thompson and the lyrics of Nick Cave. The evil eyes of small-town America seem to peer from every page of Meno’s claustrophobic noir, where the good and the bad are forced down the same violent paths.”
Kirkus Reviews

“An intimate book, wrapped up in the bent logic and lame emotional politics of folks tied by memory and old-school loathings . . . 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

“Joe Meno writes with the energy, honesty, and emotional impact of the best punk rock.”
Chicago Sun-Times

“Meno’s poetic and visceral style perfectly captures the seedy locale, and he finds the sadness behind violence and the anger behind revenge. Fans of hard-boiled pulp fiction will particularly enjoy this novel.”
Booklist

A young ex-con in a small Illinois town. A lonely giant with a haunted past. A beautiful girl with a troubled heart. Strange and darkly magical, How the Hula Girl Sings begins exactly where most pulp fiction usually ends, with the vivid episode of the terrible crime itself. Three years later, Luce Lemay, out on parole for the awful tragedy, does his best to finds hope: in a new job at the local Gas-N-Go; in his companion and fellow ex-con, Junior Breen, who spells out puzzling messages to the unquiet ghosts of his past; and finally, in the arms of the lovely but reckless Charlene. How the Hula Girl Sings is a suspenseful exploration of a country bright with the far-off stars of forgiveness, but still dark with the still-looming shadow of the death penalty.

Posted: Sep 15, 2015

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