BOOKS | memmott-author01

THE BOOKS

Canned Tuna

Novel by David Memmott

Redbat Books, Pacific NW Writers Series

ISBN-978-0-9971549-8-6

$16/3.50 sh, trade paperback, 6 X 9, 290 pgs.

Available directly from the publisher here

or through Amazon.

We all carry the ghost of Vietnam. It lives in the American psyche. Vietnam doesn’t haunt only our soldiers, it is woven into the fabric of a nation. In Canned Tuna, two different characters, each in their own time, encounter the ghost of war. Both their lives are changed by something they see but cannot share. In the gulf between their two worlds lives a stark contrast between 1963 and 1969, between the ghost that threatens and the ghost that saves.

Nicolasa Bilboa sustains a serious head injury when his jeep hits a landmine. He is medically discharged. Back home in Boise in 1969, his head injury invites him into therapy at a V.A. clinic. The leader of his therapy group is an ex-Marine named Doc and they plan a hit on the governor. The unplanned outcome of their harmless guerrilla theater causes the group to fracture into factions, lining up behind different ideas of revolution.

Milo Simonson’s late-adolescent blooming is put on hold by an inexpressible dread. The world around him is breaking down. A dark storm has stalled off the Oregon coast. His home town is experiencing some kind of time slip at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1963. His fragile reality brings him into an uneasy relationship with a mystery resurrected from a watery grave.

How are they connected?

"...despite pages of gorgeous mimetic writing which evoke [the Sixties] with grace and precision, overcoming simple nostalgia, Memmott's book is a fullblown fantasy, a weird road trip through a cosmically shattered landscape that summons up comparisons to Bruce McAllister's classic Dream Baby."

--Paul DiFilippo, Asimov's SF Magazine

Lost Transmissions

Poems by David Memmott

ISBN-978-0-9858495-1-1

$12/3.50 sh, trade paperback, 6 X 9, 102 pgs.

2014 ERIC HOFFER AWARD FINALIST

The poems in Lost Transmissions speak to the need we have to explore the depths of our own psyches, a need so insistent that many of us would sell our souls to unearth the answers to what motivates our lives--what motivates our actions.The poems express the power of verse, how it can help us rise above those experiences that might otherwise be crippling--war, death, brutality, loss of love, loss of voice and creativity, the soul's variable value, the insecure body and mind never knowing where the doors to understanding are, nor how many dimensions surround us unexplored.

-- Duff Benna, author of Too Cool and The Holy Book of the Beard

In his new collection, Lost Transmissions, David Memmott does as he has done over the last 40 years; he leads us from "the edge of the American Dream" and all its contradictions, "to the center of the world," where generosity awaits our arrival.

-- David Axelrod, author of What Next, Old Knife?

Includes 2010 finalist for Spur Award in Poetry from Western Writers of America:

“Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West”

Web del Sol/Poets & Writers (Chaps), edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy.

Giving It Away

Poems by David Memmott

ISBN-978-1-877655-62-3

$14/3.50 sh, trade paperback, 6 X 9, 176 pgs.

"Rich in personae--Dreamer, Warrior, Traveler, Gardener, Lover, Son, Witness, Poet--David Memmott's Giving It Away is mature, sophisticated, visionary work. These diverse poems range far and near, inside and out of time and place. They intimately explore what we all want to know: How does the dream of life shape our every waking moment? What happens in a day under these wheeling infinite stars? Are harmony and wisdom possible? Readers anywhere may savor the fruits of Memmott's amazing range of replies and his passionate quest of the universal round--our common dance."

--George Venn, author of Marking the Magic Circle

Samples from Giving It Away

Giving It Away (pdf)

Dreaming Back the Wild (pdf)

First Father (pdf)

Second Wedge (pdf)

PrimeTime

A science fiction novel by David Memmott

ISBN-978-1-877655-53-1

$15, trade paperback, 6 X 9, 272 pgs.

Worldbenders are trained to re-invent the past. Benito Cortezar creates a perfect past only to find it haunted by forces he cannot control. A shadow at the core of Primetime threatens our very humanity. So many depend on him--even the dead.

"Prime Time gives us a future where the sun shines while mythologies and realities of the past and future collide thanks to the emerging technology. It's a pleasure to read... Come to think of it, it also comes close to my fantasy of science fiction that makes you want to get up and dance..."

--Ernest Hogan, author of High Aztech and Cortez on Jupiter

"THIS IS PHILOSOPHIC SF AT ITS BEST."-- Paul DiFilippo, Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine

"A DIZZYING DEBUT...THAT EXPLODES INTO A POST-CYBERPUNK EXTRAVAGANZA."

-- F. Brett Cox, scifi.com

Sample chapter (pdf)

Shadow Bones

STORIES by David Memmott

ISBN: 1-877655-28-7

DISCOUNTED: $10 ($7.50/5.00 sh), trade paperback, 5.5 X 8.5, 116 pgs.

From Foreword by Thomas E. Kennedy

“Interesting that a third of the dozen stories in David Memmott’s Shadow Bones were first published in Europe, a place where Memmott has never lived. Not surprising perhaps, given his dedication as a writer AND publisher to the non-mainstream, to literature that speculates not so much about the arbitrary manners of our crumbling civilization as its ground zero, about the science which is writing the fiction of our reality, and the shamanic nonrational forces that are claiming it back.”

Includes the award-winning story, "Warrior, Falling Awake."

"The tales in Shadow Bones...sing with powerful imagery that serves the dual purpose of old-fashioned storytelling and mythic symbolism."

-- Jeff VanderMeer, NY Review of Science Fiction

"[David Memmott's writing] is always on the verge of shimmering into something that will take your breath away with its mythic resonance, wise magic, and compassionate imaginative fire."

-- Lance Olen, author of Anxious Pleasures and Calendar of Regrets

At his best, [Memmott] combines New Wave preoccupations with high style and unusual but effective storytelling devices.”

– Douglas Spangler, The Bear Delux Magazine

The Larger Earth:

Descending Notes of a Grounded Astronaut

A Cycle of Poems

ISBN-1-882633-18-0

DISCOUNTED: $9.95 ($8/3.50 sh), trade paperback, 6 X 9, 104 pgs.

I found The Larger Earth to be beautifully written and a pleasure to interact with. A strange mix between David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth) and Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets. Great!

– Mark Amerika, author of The Kafka Chronicles

The Larger Earth is a work that accumulates, its critique of society gaining force – and the struggles of the grounded astronaut gaining poignancy – through variation...Memmott has negotiated a place between literature and science fiction, a philosophical space from which begins to resonate a lyrical, original poetry.

– Brian Evenson, Rain Taxi

"The Larger Earth counts as the best writing Memmott’s done yet: his metaphor of the ‘grounded astronaut’ travels with uncanny speed across the late 20th-century landscape. Each poem within the cycle, moreover, can be read as a self-contained entity, possessing its own mood & character. I admired the simultaneously autobiographical & visionary feel of the cycle.

– Andrew Joron, author of Science Fiction

Out of Print

House on Fire

Poetry and Collage by David Memmott

ISBN-1-877655-06-6

OUT OF PRINT

"Here we find no versified SF stories; none of Memmott’s poems depict generically typical SF situations. Instead, each poem weaves a language-pattern correspondent to a soul in crisis; here, intersecting and brilliantly colored planes of discourse slide past one another in a (speculatively conceived) carnival of existential doubt."

– Ignatz Mees, Science Fiction Eye

"In this collection the poet appears as a narrator of the fantastic in the ordinary - of the supremely strange in the apparent normalcy of life in our world... One cannot read these words without apprehending them as genuine; nor can one understand the thoughts and messages framed by those words as being other than personal and unaffected."

-- Mark Rich, Magazine of Speculative Poetry

Includes 1990 Rhysling Award-winning long poem, "The Aging Cryonicist..."

Watermarked orders only.

Chapbooks

WATERMARKED

Poetry Chapbook, 32 pages, sadde-stitched w/ wrapraound cover

Traprock Books, Eugene, OR (2004)

Edited by Erik Muller

Cover Art by David Memmott

Eighteen poems in a sequence revolving aound Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River.

DISCOUNTED: $7 ($5/5.00 sh)

WITHIN THE WALLS OF JERICHO

Poetry Chapbook, 28 pgs., saddle-stitched

26 Books, Portland, OR

Edited by Dan Raphael

Cover Art by Richard Schindler