PRE-ORDER PARTISANS NOW 

and get 50% off another Atelier26 title! (details below)

 "Always, everything we see challenges us to understand.
The extent to which we take up the challenge by our own wits and
without resorting to prior interpretations is the extent
to which we escape oppression."  —G.P. Leed

To use your 50% discount on your second Atelier26 book, enter that book's Promo Code into the box at the checkout:

• For Elizabeth Rosner's Gravity : enter GRAVITY
• For Harriet Scott Chessman's The Beauty of Ordinary Things : enter TBOOT
• For M. Allen Cunningham's The Honorable Obscurity Handbook : enter HONORABLE
• For M. Allen Cunningham's Date of Disappearance : enter DATE
• For Cunningham's The Flickering Page : enter FLICKERING

Discount limited to one copy of a single title per customer. Offer only applies when pre-ordering Partisans.
Offer expires Sunday March 8, 2015.

PLACE YOUR ORDER HERE

Pre-Order Partisans Now

Partisans is now available for pre-order from Atelier26 Books!

Copies ship in late-February / early March.

Place your order HERE

Q: What is Partisans about?
A: War, Art, Ambition, Perception, Subversion.
Q: You can't be any more specific?
A: How could I possibly be?
Q: Who was G.P. Leed?
A: A writer who worked in the Northwest Territory like me. A compatriot of anyone espoused to the humane imagination, the powers and possibilities of consciousness as opposed to mass perceptions or the dilutions and mediations of systems and 'high' technologies.
Q: Is Partisans a political book?
A: Ask the reader.
Q: Is Partisans an allegory?
A: No. Though many things are.
Q: Is it speculative fiction?
A: What other kind is there?
Q: How did you come to edit and publish G.P. Leed's lost manuscript?
A: Some questions cannot be answered.
Q: Will its publication put you in danger?
A: Probably. But that's true of every book. Art is the result of having been in danger.
Q: You're quoting someone, aren't you?
A: Yes. Of course everything is a quote in its way.
Q: Is Partisans a quote? What of?
A: Oh, Don Quixote and many other things. It's not for me to say but for the reader to perceive.
Q: Where is the Acknowledgements page?
A: Leed never included one. Why should I? Refer to answer above.
Q: Was G.P. Leed for real?
A: Was Jules Renard or Cervantes, or Janos Lavin?
Q: What are your hopes for Partisans?
A: They're no different than Leed's were, and those are plain to see on every page.
Q: Read the book, you're saying.
A: Leed himself writes, "Dare the reader to understand!"
Q: But would you really call most readers daring?
A: They'd better be.
Q: Who are the most daring among them?
A: Those who go first, naturally.

M. ALLEN CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels The Green Age of Asher Witherow (a #1 Indie Next Pick) and Lost Son (about the life and work of Rainer Maria Rilke), the illustrated limited-edition short story collection Date of Disappearance, and two volumes of nonfiction, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook and The Flickering Page: The Reading Experience in Digital Times. He lives and works in the Northwest Territory.

Rainer Maria #Rilke, b. 12/4/1875 & raised as a girl. Here's his birth depicted in my novel about him. http://t.co/0bNG0lvzML pic.twitter.com/Wv4IlS5vaY
— M. Allen Cunningham (@M_A_Cunningham) December 4, 2014

For #IndiesFirst Day: Why it's imperative for writers to buy at the indies. @ABAbook @indiebound @NWBookLovers pic.twitter.com/wZRkbKtsKY
— M. Allen Cunningham (@M_A_Cunningham) November 29, 2014

New at Tin House: GHOST CODA

My essay "Ghost Coda: A Rilke Pilgrimage, or: On Being Glad No One Knows You" can now be read on the Tin House blog. 

I first started working on this piece more than seven years ago, shortly after the appearance of Lost Son, my big novel about Rilke. In that time the essay has stretched into a meditation on the nature of artistic legacy, our changing attitudes toward artists of earlier times, the question of honorable obscurity, the power of certain inspirational zones and places, and the mysterious circuitry of inspiration across the generations. (How's that for a summary one cannot tweet?)

Here's the opening:

Spring, 2005
I stand in the doorway of the Bibliothèque Nationale reading room, the soaring sanctum before me, above me the ceiling a grandeur of opaque glass wreathed with names of great cities: Alexandria, Athens, London, Babylon, Jerusalem, Byzantium, Peking. I’m here in search of Rainer Maria Rilke. Strapped for cash, unschooled, twenty-seven years old and devoid of curricula vitae save years of ardent reading, I’ve already spent an absurd, obsessive half-decade writing a novel about him. It’s grown to more than one-hundred-fifty-thousand words. I hope to complete it in Paris.


The roundness of this room suggests a vast egg enclosing the world’s knowledge. I want to swim forth through the bluish light, amid the desks and along the curving walls shelved four stories high with books, but the clerk at the entry explains that I cannot come in. I lack the proper license: the coveted carte de bibliothèque. Malte, the main character in Rilke’s single novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), cherishes the card permitting him entrance to this room — not only for the learning the card allows him, but because the card puts an honorable seal on his otherwise dissolute life. A young scion of erstwhile aristocrats in Denmark, Malte has fled the land of his ancestry to fin de siècle Paris where he will live as a poet — or die a nobody, as his notebooks’ agitated first words suggest: “So, people do come here to live. I would have sooner thought that this is where one dies.” Malte’s health is failing him. Destitute, squalidly housed in the Latin Quarter, he fears he’s becoming indistinguishable from his neighbors: the sick, the desperate, the mad. His library card saves him, temporarily at least, from the spiritual degradation shown in those impoverished “husks of humanity” who ambulate the grim cobbled warrens around his apartment. “It is possible that one day it may occur to them to come as far as my room,” writes Malte while sitting in the hush of this salle de reference.

They certainly know where I live, and they will take care that the concierge does not stop them. But here, my dears, here I am safe from you. One must have a special card in order to get into this room. In this card I have the advantage of you … I am among these books, and then taken away from you as though I had died, and sit and read a poet.

Discontent to stand in the doorway, I decide I must get a card of my own. Fumbling through the necessary questions in my quasi French, I’m referred to one attendant after another. Finally, at the Accueil, an English-speaking clerk directs me across the library’s palatial foyer to the enclosed area marked “Orientation des Lecteurs.” Bureaucracy-phobes acquire nightmares here.

Wound up and out of sorts, I breach the shrine and install myself in a chair before a librarian’s desk, babbling. Gatekeepers make me nervous. And now I’m much too aware, in my tongue-tied foreignness, in my pullover and backpack and scuffed sneakers, that I cut the figure of a failed pretender, a would-be tourist-cum-scholar. Worse, I give the impression, despite myself, of knowing my own charade, knowing I cannot claim legitimate candidacy for the access I seek. The library wardens — officious, serious, and thoroughly French in their skeptical decorum — reduce me with every sidelong glance. They won’t grant a card to just anybody. As my stuttering interview concludes, I’m instructed to return with passport and proof official of my status as an author; e.g., a published book. I will thereafter be informed of materials in the library relevant to my research.

Rattled, I exit the marbled lobby, cross the cobbled courtyard to the ravine-like rue de Richelieu, and start back toward my cramped studio apartment on the Left Bank. As I walk I pocket my clammy hands and replay the interview. Did I call myself un écrivain or romancier? Which was more correct considering my motive? I know I said recherche — that was a kind of lie. But how can I explain that I’ve got nothing to research, at least not in the manner they mean? How explain that I simply wish to sit and work in that reading room, that the spirit of the room itself is what I’m after?

(continue reading on the Tin House site)

The ingenious Nathan Shields is at work on a new design project for Atelier26. Analog tools go far. @Draw4Us #GPLeed pic.twitter.com/47zKKJngEh
— M. Allen Cunningham (@M_A_Cunningham) November 19, 2014

Technology & Ideology: Ch.2 of The Flickering Page, my treatise on e-reading. Art by Nathan Shields http://t.co/Bhm2QEYDyQ pic.twitter.com/ZgTMtMbRtx
— M. Allen Cunningham (@M_A_Cunningham)

Exciting news from Atelier26 Books!

Here's the press release:

 

ATELIER26 BOOKS TO PUBLISH DEBUT

BY PORTLAND WRITER MARGARET MALONE

 

Atelier26 Books is proud to announce acquisition of the brilliant short story collection People Like You, the debut title by Portland writer Margaret Malone, for publication in late 2015 or early 2016. 

Margaret Malone is the recipient of fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and

Photo: Sabina Poole

Literary Arts, two Regional Arts & Culture Council Project Grants, and residencies at The Sitka Center and Soapstone.  Her writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Coal City Review,  Swink, Nailed, latimes.com, and elsewhere, including recently the Forest Avenue Press anthology The Night, and the Rain, and the River. A Dangerous Writers alumnus, Malone has a degree in Philosophy from Humboldt State University and has taught creative writing as a visiting artist at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives with her husband filmmaker Brian Padian and two children in Portland, where she co-hosts the artist and literary gathering SHARE.

With People Like You, Malone delivers an assemblage of characters and conundrums all at once funny, unsettling, subtle, and moving. Malone’s people exist, like most of us, in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies, and they are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. They win us over completely although we know they are bound to break our hearts with each confused and conflicted decision they make.

“I’ve long wanted Atelier26 to be the vehicle for a phenomenal debut,” says press founder and publisher M. Allen Cunningham, “and in Margaret’s work you immediately hear the brave and startling sound of a born writer. Her voice is so assured—she’s got such a razor wit—and each of these stories is so beautifully controlled and alive to its own truth, readers will hardly know what hit them.” 

For Malone’s launch, Atelier26 plans a significant promotional campaign to booksellers and extensive events. “We’re going to grow our operations considerably on behalf of People Like You,” says Cunningham. “We’re giving it everything we’ve got, and we anticipate a passionate bookseller response. You can’t read Margaret’s work and not want to enthuse over it to anyone who cares about great writing.”

More details about People Like You and its exciting release are forthcoming in the months ahead. Visit www.Atelier26Books.com and follow the publisher’s tweets at https://twitter.com/M_A_Cunningham. 

Listen to a 10-minute recording of Margaret Malone reading from the title storyon LiveWireRadio (minute 20). More about Margaret Malone at: www.margaretmalone.com

 

Atelier26 Books, an independent press founded in Portland, Oregon in 2011, specializes in contemporary literature in fine trade editions showcasing the highest design standards. Atelier26 books are offered for sale through the publisher’s online storefront, and through an ever-growing roster of independent booksellingpartners around the U.S. 

Paths to Publishing Workshop

I'm leading a publishing workshop in NW Portland next month, as part of Word Harvest, a rich 6-workshop lineup spanning the weekend of November 22-23. Other workshops offered focus on poetic form, generating ideas, travel writing, and short story writing. More info HERE.

Download Stories and Essays by M. Allen Cunningham

I'm continually adding stories and essays to my e-book catalog on Smashwords. Each can be downloaded in multiple formats for the price of a coffee -- or less! The current offerings (with more appearing frequently) include:

• Sight Unseen, a short story about discovering one's own blind spots
• Chimera, a short story about the human capacity for failure and faith
• The Man in the Blue Coat: A Chamber Picture in Six Acts, a whimsical, surrealist short story about the seemingly infinite distances between ourselves and others
• The Sky at Her Back, flash fiction about love, loss, and looking at one's life like a picture
• Variations on the Morning of the World, an essay about the passage of time, the experience of being lost, the construction of memory, and the mysteries of imagination
• Prose Conjuration: The Art of Reading Cormac McCarthy, an essay originally published in Poets & Writers Magazine, considering McCarthy's entire corpus and the trajectory of his career.

P.S. Books are still better! (But, for reasons much too complicated for a single blog post,  some of these works you can't get in printed form.)

It's National Short Story Month! Get Cunningham's Date of Disappearance for More Than 40% Off -- and a Bonus Book!

An offer from Atelier26 Books:

May is National Short Story Month, and Atelier26 is celebrating by offering M. Allen Cunningham's illustrated, limited-edition story collection Date of Disappearance for just $10.00 a copy through the Atelier26 Store. That's more than 40% off the cover price! (This offer lasts until May 31st.)

Date of Disappearance, which the Oregonian has called "superb, well-balanced, and deeply seductive," features ten resonant stories, each with an accompanying illustration by artist Nathan Shields. Signed and numbered by the author, and presented in a fine paperback with beautiful design features (French flaps, colored end-pages, and glossy stock for each illustration), Date of Disappearance is, we like to think, a pretty special package. Take a peek in this video:

What's more, great fans of short fiction that we are, we'd like to sweeten the deal by offering up a few of our favorite short story collections alongside Cunningham's. Thus, the first five readers to order a copy of Date of Disappearance will be invited to select a bonus book from the following excellent list. We're offering one copy of each of these -- first come first served. If you're one of the first five, you'll receive an e-mail from us shortly after you place your order.

Happy Reading, and long live the short story!



The Beauty of Ordinary Things by Harriet Scott Chessman (Atelier26 Books)
OK, not a story collection, but many have called it a novella, and goodness, we love this book!

Disorder by Dan DeWeese (Propeller Books)
A compulsively readable volume of subtle, unconventional, often curiously moving tales reminiscent of the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, W.G. Sebald, and even, sometimes, Henry James.

Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor (Sarabande Books)
Minor breaks a great many "rules" in this astonishing collection book (including instructing the reader from the outset not to think of Praying Drunk as a mere collection, and not to skip around), and instructs us all, on every page, in how to write one's heart out.
P.S. Listen to an inspiring conversation with Minor HERE.

The Afterlife by John Updike (Knopf)
Updike, OK?

Fast Lanes by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
Breathtaking, fearless, riveting -- classic Jayne Anne.

On the Double!

And now for a brief, non-literary commentary: I really like our governor. This isn't a competition, but upon how many citizen strangers did Schwarzenegger perform successful emergency aid while in office? Like I say, not a competition, but ... take that, California!

Story courtesy of The Oregonian:

Gov. John Kitzhaber performs CPR on woman lying unconscious on Portland street

The governor was driving to dinner shortly after 5 p.m. near Southwest Main and 13th Avenue when he saw “someone along the edge of the street who seemed to be attempting to resuscitate a woman” lying on the ground, Nkenge Harmon Johnson said in an email to The Oregonian.

The governor ordered his driver to stop, Harmon Johnson said, then “jumped out of the vehicle” and ran to the woman’s aid to begin giving CPR. He directed one of his state police security guards to call paramedics, who took over from Kitzhaber when they arrived.

The incident, first reported by KGW-TV, is one of several in which Kitzhaber -- a former emergency room doctor -- has administered emergency first aid.

(more HERE)

New M. Allen Cunningham Website!

Redesigned for the first time in seven years, the new M. Allen Cunningham site is now live at www.MAllenCunningham.com, and I happen to think it sparkles nicely. Please take a moment to explore its offerings, which include audio selections, glimpses of forthcoming novels, links to my shorter writing, and more.

"Skulls" by M. Allen Cunningham

A reading of "Skulls," which is part of something longer. Accompanying artwork by Nathan Shields.

M. Allen Cunningham's Partisans Shortlisted

Aqueous Books announced today the shortlist for the 2014 Flann O'Brien Award for Innovative Fiction, and among the six titles is M. Allen Cunningham's Partisans.

How to describe Partisans? Maybe like so:

A lost work by the mysterious writer G.P. Leed, Partisans is a book in two alternating parts, one part being the story of a sole surviving resistance fighter (from an unspecified war in an unspecified time) as he wanders war-torn landscapes in search of a new life. The other part of Partisans derives from Leed’s own private notebooks. M. Allen Cunningham has painstakingly edited the manuscript according to Leed’s designs as indicated in papers discovered after his disappearance, and the whole work creates a unique dialectic that is hard to convey in a mere synopsis. But this miraculously surviving work is long overdue for publication. 

It's an honor to be included in the O'Brien Award shortlist.

On the basis of an excerpt from Partisans, Cunningham was recently awarded a 2014 residency at Yaddo.

Now in Stock!

ISBN: 978-0-9893023-2-6

Retail Price: $12.00 on sale now for $10.00

116 pages 

6"x6" trade paperback 

 

Learn more HERE

APPEARING APRIL 2014 in trade paperback:

 Vol.2 in the Atelier26 Samizdat Series

 

The Flickering Page: The Reading Experience in Digital Times

Three Guided Chapters (and a Preface) by M. Allen Cunningham

with 24 illustrations by Nathan Shields

the jacket copy:

Are physical books merely old media in need of an update?

What characterizes the electronic reading experience versus the reading of print? How significant are the differences?

As our reading media change, how will our reading and writing methods change? What effects might this have on our literature and our interactions with information overall?

A provocative casebook for our digital times, The Flickering Page is designed to jumpstart in-depth dialogue about the historical, cultural, civic, and scientific implications of a mass shift in reading methods. Originating in M. Allen Cunningham's ongoing work with the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project, arrestingly illustrated by artist Nathan Shields, this small volume weaves together some of the most cogent thought of the past fifty years, urging readers to consider anew -- and pose for themselves -- the many questions about our technological revolution that remain far from settled. 

the contents:

-a preface: Five Characteristics of an "E-book World"

-chapter 1: The Technology of Individualism: How Print Helped Shape the Renaissance
          Guide: Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy

-chapter 2: Technology & Ideology: Why Our Tools Are Never Neutral
          Guide: Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly

-chapter 3: Neuroplasticity: What Do a Story from Ancient Greece and Decades of Brain Research Have in Common?
          Guides: Socrates; Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows

-appendix: some more key questions about e-books; more for reflection and discussion

ISBN: 978-0-9893023-2-6

Retail Price: $12.00 on sale now for $10.00

116 pages

6"x6" trade paperback 

IN STOCK SOON: PRE-ORDER NOW

Coming Very Soon

Volume 2 in the Atelier26 Samizdat Series.

6"x6" trade paperback,
 with 24 arresting illustrations by Nathan Shields. 

More info momentarily...

New Book Features Interview About M. Allen Cunningham's Lost Son

The new book Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, out this month from Bloomsbury, includes a lengthy interview with me about my writing process for my second novel, Lost Son, which novelizes the life of Rainer Maria Rilke. 

A snippet from my interview with the book's editor Michael Lackey can be read below. But all the conversations in this volume fascinate and inspire, and I'm pleased to join the company of numerous other novelists whose work I greatly respect: Julia Alvarez, Russell Banks, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Cunningham, Anita Diamant, Bruce Duffy, Ron Hansen, Sherry Jones, Rebecca Kanner, Kate Moses, Joyce Carol Oates, Lance Olsen, Jay Parini, Joanna Scott, and Edmund White.

Lackey: What’s the difference between [the] especially good [Rilke] biographies and your novel?

M. Allen Cunningham: I think in part it’s this dual dimension in Lost Son, in which Rilke’s story is constantly overlaid by a more personal story of this figure in the literary future dialoguing with this ghost. Certainly, there are informational things to be found in Lost Son that can be obtained from the factual record too. Readers will come away from my novel knowing a lot about the factual circumstances of Rilke’s life. But Rilke’s story as fiction, as this relentlessly complex human narrative that is sensual in detail, poetic in perspective, intimately imagined, and aesthetically configured as a series of rhyming biographical events — that amounts to a contribution to the imaginative record concerning Rilke. I think that’s something worth making special note of in any discussion about biographical fiction. With any life-story that’s been around for some time, that’s been passed along in various forms down a few generations, we develop a historical record and, alongside that, we develop a complementary imaginative record, a body of understanding that is somewhat folkloric — disarming, alluring, complicating — in its effects. Which is not to say that this imaginative record is always necessarily unfactual. In the case of good biographical novels, it often cleaves very closely to facts while taking logical imaginative liberties. I can think of any number of serious biographical novels that contribute greatly to the imaginative record — DeLillo’s Libra, about Lee Harvey Oswald, comes immediately to mind, and so does Brian Hall’s I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, about Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea. This imaginative record is something to value in itself, because it exemplifies mind meeting mind aesthetically across time — that is, in the most complex and characteristically human way. We should value the imaginative approach as well, however, for the reason that such an approach can actually contribute to the factual record. These things intersect and interrelate and enrich each other.  

Order Truthful Fictions HERE.

Interview with a Recluse

A new reading of my work entitled "Interview with a Recluse."