We support YAC!

And you should too!

We were saddened to hear about the recent cut in funding for the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council in Oxford, MS.  The county board of directors have made a huge mistake and we hope they rectify it.  Without the funding for arts in Oxford Kitty Snacks wouldn't exist.  Wayne and everyone involved with the arts council is a huge part of what makes Oxford the best place in Mississippi.  If you live in Oxford please call the board of supervisors and voice your opinion on this matter. If you don't live in Oxford this probably just looks like some Mississippi bullshit, which it is.

Our friends at VOX have also posted on this.

What We're Reading

Good Offices
by: Evelio Rosero


It’s a short and taut novel. Good Offices by Evelio Rosero, out earlier this month on New Directions, puts on full display the fallibility of man; in this instance man’s failure lies in man’s resignation. The main character is a hunchback named Tancredo. His greatest fear is becoming a wild animal by succumbing to his primal instincts of love and happiness and rebellion.

Abuse of authority seems to be a sentiment that often pervades Rosero’s literature, in conjunction with the haunted characters that impel the narrative. Tancredo is the puppet of the Catholic Church and, in so many definitions, Tancredo is a slave of the Catholic Church and it is as his character encroaches upon enlightenment that we see the story progress.

There are many surreal moments in the narrative that are given verisimilitude by Rosero that could bring shame to documentary. He is unforgiving and brutal in his treatment of his villains. While some scenes are somewhat surreal, there is nothing fantastical about the book, except the fantasy that Rosero is likely living through his book of really giving it to the bad guys.

Tancredo is not alone in his captivity. The goddaughter of Father Almida, Sabina Cruz and the Lilias join Tancredo in his repression. The Lilias are three elderly women that are responsible for cooking food for the poor, huge meals of which Tancredo is in charge. Each day’s meal belongs to a group of the depraved masses: old people, the blind, whores, families and street kids.

It is the lunch in which Tancredo must feed the old people that seems to haunt him most.

“…sooner or later he raises his head and it seems he is still in the company of all those faces with their toothless, drooling mouths, which open ever wider and swallow him up, one arm after the other, one leg after the other; they gulp down his head at a single go. They do not devour him with their mouths alone: they devour him with their eyes, those eyes, dead eyes.”

When Father Almida is forced to leave for one night, over which Mass must be held, Father Matamoros fills the void. Matamoros, not without his own nefarious inclinations, gives the church’s inhabitants a glimpse of freedom. It’s a door that, once opened, cannot be shut. The most extreme means will be taken to keep this door of freedom ajar.

This is a love story perverted almost beyond recognition, along with a social critique, pleasantly lost to the gripping nature of the compelling plot Rosero has created in this short book. He does more in 119 pages than I’ve seen most authors accomplish in their huge volumes that double as free weights.

-C. Hogue

Kitty Snacks editor, Michael Bible, talks to Michael Kimball on htmlgiant about his new book Simple Machines....

http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/a-kind-of-weird-beauty-michael-bible’s-simple-machines/

What We're Reading

The Halfway House
by: Guillermo Rosales

Two novels by Rosales are still in existence. The Halfway House is one of them. The rest of his work was destroyed in 1993 moments before he committed suicide at the age of 47. Guillermo Rosales was a schizophrenic, living in mental institutions after his exile from Cuba, which is where he gathered the material for this novella.

There’s a lot of misery packed in a mere 121 pages. The Halfway House gets in deep—to the most crepuscular depths of humanity’s capacity for evil. It’s a cousin of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—the cousin you were never allowed to hang out with growing up. The Halfway House is a dark, dark horse.

Here’s a panoramic view of hell on earth. 

-C. Hogue

Table of Contents for Issue #4

Stay tuned for a video flip through of the entire issue. Buy it here.

Kitty Snacks #4 available now online!

Just click below to purchase a copy of Kitty Snacks #4 and we'll mail it to you.

Issue #4 Release Party!

at Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi on Wednesday, June 1 at 8 p.m.

Featuring the psyched out sounds of Oxford's own Gray Things.

Free Beer!

8 bucks at the door (includes a copy of the magazine).

Kitty Snacks #4

The new issue will be out next week! Be on the lookout for pre orders soon. 

This issue features writing by:
John Brandon 
Chelsea Hogue 
Scott McClanahan 
Mike Suave 
Hank Martin
Charles Hale 
Jack Pendarvis 
Catherine Lacey 
Rachel Glasser 
Sam Pink 
Erik Wennermark 


photos of Barry Hannah by John Oliver Hodges 
tweets by Peyton Houchins 


an interview with Neil Hamburger 
an interview with Michael Schmelling 


and drawings by Josh Burwell 

We think it's our best issue yet and it's been in the works for quite a while now. We're definitely throwing a big release party in the coming weeks. So stay tuned!

Sorry about the links!

Some links on our page--mainly the stories above--are down at the moment. Sorry about this. We're having some weird domain name issues so for the time being you can only access our site through kittysnacks.blogspot.com. We hope to get the issue fixed asap.

Stay tuned for issue 4. It's rad!

Home Clips Vol. 1 : MS SWAG & SMAG

Check out this short film by our friend Alex about our friends and hanging out in Mississippi over the past few months. Stay tuned for more stuff from Alex in the future and in the meantime check this out:


Home Clips Vol. 1 : MS SWAG & SMAG from James Alexander Warren on Vimeo.

Rest in Peace

From the Cats Purring blog:

Many of you know we lost a beloved member of our family earlier this week, PEYTON "LARRY" HOUCHINS a.k.a. DJ SCARY MILK a.k.a. DJ KATE BUSCH. Peyton performed with GRAY THINGS and BASS DRUM OF DEATH, and he provided endless support to our music scene in Mississippi. He will continue to be a source of inspiration for his seemingly infinite number of friends, and we look forward to expanding the Cats Purring empire in his memory.

Kitty Snacks Issue #4 will be dedicated to Peyton and will feature some of our favorite tweets of his, as we all know how prolific of a tweeter he was. He will be sorely missed but we'll never forget the good times.

Kitty Snacks #3 FREE DOWNLOAD is up now!

Hey everyone,

To get ready for the release of Issue #4 we're offering a free download of Issue #3, which has been sold out for months now. Just click here to begin the download and enjoy.

None of the work featured in Issue #3 may be reprinted without the author's full consent.

Thanks

New Releases We Dig: Begin Again by Kenneth Silverman (John Cage biography)

Also just read No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage's 4'33" by Kyle Gann. Both are worth checking out.

Kitty Snacks #4 coming soon...

Check the cover below and stay tuned.

Come Back, You've Disafeared

by Matthew Salesses

We liked to predict the epidemics on our island before they came. But only one person was ever right. He predicted the epidemic of insomnia and the epidemic of indecision and the epidemic of bad jokes and the epidemic of lost children, though of course he couldn’t predict them all, not even more than two percent. We knew him and once admired him, though recently we’d run him into the hills. He’d developed immunity to the epidemics and that seemed to us why he could predict them. He was not part of them, like we were.


He predicted the epidemic of insomnia before he was immune; those late nights rolling endlessly in our sheets we couldn’t stop thinking of his guess. We thought of it with awe and then anger and we said maybe he’d caused the insomnia and without that to worry us maybe we might sleep. We asked him to predict the next epidemic and we tried hard to catch it, and we felt relieved when he was wrong and it wasn’t an epidemic of kindness, though we had no problem with kindness. We almost forgot about him being right until he was right again.


The second time was after the epidemic of shared dreams when each morning talking to each other we recognized our dreams and felt connected. As the dreams faded he predicted the epidemic of indecision, and indeed we spent months doing nothing, so unable to choose, and the epidemic seemed terrible but also almost nice and lazy and also like it was out of our hands and again we thought maybe it was in his hands.


But another year passed before he predicted the epidemic of bad jokes, as if his joke was to be right again. We thought maybe his prediction was the first joke. Still we enjoyed the epidemic and didn’t blame him—it was good to get all those punch lines off our chests. The children became natural kings and queens of the epidemic and we liked that as well. When they played basketball we called them our court jesters. When they played cards we said they always trumped our hearts. When they played hide and seek we cried, come back, you’ve disafeared!


It seemed the worst joke of all when he predicted the epidemic of lost children, his second right in a row. Then we had to run him up into the hills. He said that he was immune—and we were afraid of him, of him possibly spreading his immunity and of his predictions more prophecy than guess. He said we were all crazy and our children should lose themselves far away, as far as the outside world. But he was supposed to be one of us. After our children reappeared they helped us chase him into the hills and that seemed proof enough that something was wrong with him. The children could sense something wrong.




--------
Matthew Salesses holds an MFA from Emerson, where he is the retiring editor of Redivider. He is the author of a chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get, and stories in or soon to be in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, Pleiades, and others.

Kitty Snacks editor, Wilson McBee, has a new story at juked.com

Check out "Kingdoms" by Wilson McBee over at juked.com.

Hey Memphis! Kitty Snacks #3 now for sale at Goner Records

Go by or check out their website.

Gordon Lish talks

Great new interview with Gordon Lish over at BOMBlog.

Excerpt:

"BCE: I know you read DeLillo and McCarthy all the time. Would you be prepared to comment on that?

GL: I am always prepared to comment on DeLillo and McCarthy—much in the same way, if not entirely in the same way as I would be prepared to comment on myself. They are geniuses. My mother and my father wanted for me to be a genius. So did I. When I found out a couple of days ago that I couldn’t be I made up my mind to stick as close as I could to those who were. A feat, a procedure one finds one can accomplish, on the cheap by reading. And by reading. And by reading. So I pick up the books of these two writers every day that I am not otherwise busy with the genius of certain women I know and certain children and grandchildren I’m tickled to have."

Be sure to check out Lish's new book of collected fictions. 

Kitty Snacks contributors (Mary Miller & John Brandon) signing at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi July 12 & 14

Kevin Sampsell (A Common Pornography) and Claudia Smith (Put Your Head in My Lap) will also be reading with Mary at the event. For more info go here. 

John Brandon will be reading from his new book, Citrus County, on Wednesday, July 14. Joining him will be Jack Pendarvis--both dudes have been published in previous issues of Kitty Snacks magazine. John's book Citrus County was recently picked for the Rumpus Book Club. Check out an interview with John here. 

 

John's book was recently the cover review on the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Read the whole thing here. Listen to a podcast of the above event here. 

Barry Hannah in French

"Things black, things cowboy, things Southern seem to be very special in France now. I have no idea how to market myself, but if I were a real cynic I would probably get on a Lash La Rue outfit, be a cowboy writer, and make a lot of jack. My French reception seems solid. I’ve had good reviews. I’ve only had one book, my last collection, Bats Out of Hell, translated—which took three years. The French translator gave up on about three stories. He thought that they were so Southern that there was no way to idiomize them—which shocked me because I thought I wrote pure American, but I still must be really Southern. I was on the French “Tonight Show,” and my publisher is Gallimard, so I’ve got all the outlines of looking good in France."
-Barry Hannah in an interview with the Mississippi Review (1996)

Barry Hannah vit à Oxford (Mississippi), qui est aussi la ville de Faulkner.

C'est sans doute pour rendre le voisinage encore plus évident qu'en 1973, il remporte le prestigieux prix Faulkner avec son premier roman Geronimo Rex. ... Lire la suite

Et c'est sans doute aussi pour rendre hommage à son glorieux voisin que les quinze nouvelles de La tête à l'envers se déroulent dans le Mississippi, l'Alabama, la Géorgie, l'Arkansas et le Kentucky, comme un panorama de l'horizon sudiste. Rendre compte de quinze nouvelles aussi denses, noires, tordues, d'un existentialisme grimaçant et qui parlent d'une Amérique dont l'héroïsme se réduit à une horde de menteurs et de lâches minés par l'alcoolisme, le vide et le sentiment de n'être jamais à sa place est une gageure qu'il serait vain de relever.

La lecture de La tête à l'envers laisse l'impression d'avoir assisté à une parade de paraboles, une succession de dix mille phrases étranges et merveilleuses où la violence exulte dans une joie et une bonne humeur d'autant plus surprenantes qu'on se demande, lecture faite, comment on a bien pu se laisser aller à rire d'un monde aussi désespérément condamné à une médiocrité quasi surnaturelle. Une telle amertume serait difficile à avaler sans le soutien d'un cordial si l'écriture de Barry Hannah n'était aussi souvent habitée par la grâce, qui drape l'enfer d'un humour féroce séduisant comme une robe de soie doublée de barbelés.