Books published by RunAmok Books

“Vern Smith is a phantasmatic presence hovering over hard luck debacles and muted urban theater, colloquy consisting of full-bodied gestures captured in the word, messy lives tangled at the root, twisting misshapen into bloom. He haunts the North American literary canon with a salt-of-the-earth journalist’s ear for the unspoken and unspeakable. There is an uncanny violence to these selections, as if there before the fact, now willed into expression in lean, muscular, lockstep cadences that model with sobering, unsentimental reverence and radical, stethoscopic clarity the raging interiority of the North American animal/everyman/mammal. With preternatural stylistic range, Vern Smith renders the ineffable with documentary devotion. It is poetic realism with exacting, brutal command of the minimal. Nothing less than ink, pulp, and blood amalgamated with sinew and synapses.” – Manuel Marrero, author of Not Yet 

Three generations of women suffer the consequences of a single violent act. Mimi has no memory of the beating she endured at her mother Eva's hand. Both struggle to understand and perhaps overcome the detachment that defines their adult relationship. Eva's gentle mother, Anna, who witnessed and stopped the event, becomes a thorn in Eva's conscience, a constant unwitting reminder of her shame and self-loathing. Adam, Mimi's small son, occupies the center of this troubled family. He knows nothing of the cause, but is a precocious observer who, unawares, uses the best of his open nature and the purity of his child's love to move the women toward healing.

In the tradition of the Lazlo Letters and the Henry Root Letters comes Jackass Letters, a collection of hoax correspondence with corporations, celebrities, and politicians that consistently pushes the boundaries of good taste and polite decorum, always with hilarious results. Now, these irreverent gems are available in a multi-volume book series. Real people, real letters, real jackass.

With wildly imagined characters and jarringly unexpected circumstances, these stories exist in a kind of literary twilight zone. Yet they go beyond merely the creepy and strange, the odd and sometimes absurd, at times exhibiting a keen authorial understanding of human nature and a Kakfaesque pathos for the human condition. The dialogue crackles and the tales delight,and the reader cannot help but be drawn into the painstakingly crafted mise-en-scène, with its parade of fully rendered characters. In the end, the reader, now mesmerized, is left with the inevitable task of finding his or her way out again.

Containing elements of SciFi, humor, and erotica, Frida Sex Dreams and Other Unnerving Disruptions includes stories about an over-sexed octopus, Jimmy Carter's alien encounters, and an attempt to reach Harry Houdini through a seánce. These stories are about facing the unknown whether that unknown is Frida Kahlo, a fifty-foot woman, or a painting elephant.

Miscellany is a collection of essays that runs the gamut on form and topic. The one single element that brings these overtly disparate essays together, makes them somehow similar and alike is their voice. Theirs is the voice of an outsider, a voice that occupies that space beyond the customary and the commonplace in society, a voice that flickers on the dark periphery, beyond the blinding compass of that bonfire that is the mainstream. A voice from the fringe.

Created for the college classroom, and intended for aspiring screenwriters, Mark Achtenberg's Get Your Hero Up a Tree: How to Write a Movie (That Doesn't Stink) is a surprisingly refreshing and entertaining how-to book that tackles the medium of film. A long-time educator and respected expert in the field, Achtenberg approaches his topic from a position of deep understanding, producing a guide that at times reads like a philosophical treatise but for the healthy dose of wit and humor throughout. Indispensable for serious students of film and screen writing, this book will also prove a pleasingly insightful read for movie aficionados and enthusiasts alike.

Told from numerous and at times oblique perspectives, while using various literary forms and styles, this unusual family saga begins with the forbidden love of a manor tutor and lunatic scullery maid. The illegitimate line begun by Peter Montgolfier and Theresa Seyfert is, from beginning to end, beset by hardship, scandal, and shame. Spanning centuries and continents, the story jumps generationally if erratically down the family tree, beginning in the eighteenth century in the Kingdom of Hungary with Peter and Theresa and ending more than two centuries years later in a futuristic L.A. with controversial performance artist Vic Ray. Along the way, the reader meets an unforgettable cast of characters: Ernst Seyfert, footman and fratricide; Georges d'Aubigne, suicidal playwright and republicain; Joseph Vasser, bigamist and author of the Bible II; and Jesus Ramos, the Dog-faced Boy; to name a few. Ultimately, Animal Magnet probes the notion of humanness, human identity, and humanity. With unflinching honesty, this novel-in-stories poses the disconcerting question, Are we more human than animal, or more animal than human?