We decided to call it The Milan Review of Adultery. This is because it consists entirely of Travels in Central America, a new novella by Clancy Martin, that we are publishing as a worldwide exclusive, which is made up of 66 micro-chapters that tell mostly of sleeping with somebody other than your husband/wife. It is also (principally) a love story and it is also (largely) about drinking too much and also (slightly) about Central America, but mostly, yes, it’s about sleeping with somebody other than your husband/wife.

Clancy Martin is a Canadian philosopher, essayist, translator and novelist. His first novel, How to Sell (FSG, 2009), was a Times Literary Supplement “Best Book of 2009″ (chosen by Craig Raine), and a “Best Book of 2009″ for The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, The Kansas City Star. He was a 2011-2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. He is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, VICE, The Times Literary Supplement, Ethics, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, GQ, Esquire, Details, Bookforum, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals, and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Scroll down after the pictures to read the book’s first three chapters.

All photos by Bea De Giacomo

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1.
One of us had to watch our hotel in Tulum during the storm, so I was flying into Cancun International and renting a car. The hurricane had closed all the airports on the coast, and my flight was delayed, and then cancelled. As I was walking out of the airport, I heard an announcement my flight was boarding. It was the last flight into Cancun. When I got to the hotel, I told the story to the clerk and she laughed and upgraded me to a suite.  “It will just sit empty anyway,” she told me, as though she were apologizing for the change. “We’re getting flooded with cancellations.” I asked her for an envelope, put sixty dollars into it, and handed it back to her. The room was enormous, with a dining room table, a kitchen in case you’d brought your own cook, and floor-to-ceiling windows with long views of the ocean. The waves were huge and confused in the storm, and they stretched as far as I could see in the rain.
It was ten in the morning.

2.
I paced around the room, looked at myself in the mirror, went to the bathroom, and then opened my computer on the desk. I sat for a few minutes, trying to tell myself I could write, and then moved to the bed and read the room service menu. When I came to the wine list in the back, I closed it. I went over to the window, leaned my forehead against the cold glass, and stared down the ten stories. My forehead made a smear on the glass. I got a coke light from the minibar. Then I took off my shoes and jacket and sat on the couch to call Paul.
“I’m already lonely for you,” I said. It was the day after Christmas, and the truth was I was glad for a break. Paul’s boys had been out of school for a week and his family had visited for the holidays. His mother was a friend of mine but she had a way of taking over the house. She was a devoted grandmother but the boys were nervous around her, because she was wealthy and uptight and dressed carefully each morning. Paul’s father was there now—his parents were divorced—and he was clingy and demanding. He frequently needed to go to the pharmacy or the grocery store to buy things. But he hated Mexico City—they were from a small town in Massachusetts—and he’d get lost if he drove himself. He was good with the boys but he liked to tell us how to parent them. Also, after a few days Paul felt like he had a third child in the house.
“My dad is driving me crazy. He keeps getting angry when I won’t stay up and watch a movie with him. We watched two Burt Reynolds movies last night and he wasn’t satisfied. Hurry home,” he said. “I need you here right now.”
“I’m sorry. One of us had to go. It’s three nights. I really should be there for at least a week. And I’ve already got a little writing done. It’s so quiet here, with the hurricane, there’s nothing else to do.”
“You wrote? That’s good. I told you. How’s the Ritz?”
“It hasn’t changed. Anyway, without you, it’s a room. It doesn’t matter.”
We didn’t have anything to talk about but I didn’t want him to get off the phone.

3.
I called my friend Sadie, a doctor from Galveston, Texas. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, and she was driving to Cancun to meet me for the weekend. She wasn’t afraid of the weather.
I hadn’t told Paul Sadie was coming. Not for any reason. I knew it would annoy him. It was supposed to be a necessary but unfortunate work trip and I wasn’t supposed to enjoy myself. But I should have told him. He had never been crazy about Sadie. “She’s trouble,” he always said about her. “All psychiatrists are crazy. But she’s not just ordinary crazy. She’s crazy about sex. She tries to sleep with me every time she visits.” “Paul, she does not.” Maybe she did, a little. But she didn’t mean anything by it.
“Man! These roads are for shit. I’d turn around right now if it weren’t for you.”
“I’m glad you’re coming. Thanks. You want to go to Pobrecito’s? I’ll make a reservation.”
“You’re buying. Hell, I’m almost in town, I’ll come to your hotel. No, you’re not invited, buddy, sorry. I’m dropping you off the minute we cross the border, like you said. Del la What? That on the coast?”
“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“That’s where they catch those green lobsters, right?”
“Tell me you didn’t pick up a hitchhiker, Sadie.”
“I have you on the speakerphone, Brett, watch what you say.” I heard her pick up the phone. “He’s a college kid. No? Well, what’s with the bandanna? You want any of this? Okay, fine. Well, just hold it, would ya? It’s a pipe, buddy, it don’t bite.”
“Sadie, I gotta go.”
“Can you believe this rain? Beautiful, actually. All the colors.”
“I’ll see you when you get here. Just valet under my name.”
“You just called. Alright. Set up that restaurant.”
I thought about calling Paul back but I knew he was busy with his dad and the boys. I needed to work. Before I started I checked my email. Three emails from an Italian publisher panicking about a manuscript I had promised him for months. Dozens of emails from Fab, Dwell and Tablet. A request to blurb a book. Fan mail. An invitation to sit on someone’s doctoral dissertation. I started to switch into Word, when I saw there was one from Paul’s banker. “I’m in Cancun,” was the header.
“Do you have time for a cup of coffee today or tonight? Paul said you’re here. I was supposed to be in Panama, but I’m stuck with everybody else. They say I’ll get a flight tomorrow. Yrs, Eduard.”
Eduard and I had met briefly once at a party nearly a decade before, but I didn’t remember it. I only knew because Paul told me so.
“He’s not the kind of man you would notice,” Paul said. “He’s old, a bit chubby, and he doesn’t know how to dress.”
I didn’t want to meet with Eduard but thought I probably should. Plus now Paul would find out Sadie was in Cancun.
I wrote to Eduard. “I have a friend in town from Texas, a psychiatrist I’ve known since high school, but if you want to meet us, it would be great. I’d love to hang out. What’s a good bar? You’d be doing me a favor, in fact. My friend Sadie is a drinker, and this way she’ll have a drinking buddy.”
Eduard wrote back immediately: “I don’t know the bars in Cancun. I’ll try to find a place close to your hotel.”

That’s right. You can read it here.

RAP VIOLENT IN THE GHETTO STREET è stampato in formato A4 (vuol dire che è grande) a colori, su 48 pagine, ed è stato presentato al Festival Internazionale del fumetto di Bologna Bilbolbul 2013.

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Uscito serialmente in America per Fantagraphix Books con il titolo di PRISON PIT (per ora ne sono usciti 4), IL POZZO DI SANGUE Volume 1 è l’inizio della serializzazione italiana, nella quale ogni uscita accorperà due numeri americani in un singolo volume.

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IL POZZO DI SANGUE rappresenta un’evoluzione marcata nello stile di Ryan che, abbandonando l’umorismo adolescenziale (o pre-adolescenziale) dei suoi lavori più noti, si getta senza remore in un pastiche delle sue passioni, da JIMBO di Gary Panter a BERSERK di Kentaro Miura, filtrato assieme al wrestling, a Dungeons & Dragons, ai videogiochi e al suo acerbo senso dell’umorismo per creare un mondo spietato che si basa sulla violenza, la sopravvivenza, la vendetta, i brufoli, e i mostri a due teste con mazze a spuntoni al posto delle braccia.

Il fumetto inizia con Cannibal Faccia di Cazzo, l’eroe della serie, che viene gettato nel Pozzo, una specie di mondo negativo post-apocalittico inabitato da mostri violentissimi e senza pietà, che Faccia di Cazzo dovrà sconfiggere uno a uno, in maniera sempre più esilarante ed inventiva.

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They are the fantastic Armani Libri Koenig, in via Manzoni 31, the august Libreria Internazionale Hoepli in via Hoepli 5 and the scrappy Standard Books, in via Conca del Naviglio 10. Check the rest of our distribution points out over at The Where, and remember, booksellers: we’re always happy to stock our books in your store! Just drop us an email if you’re interested.

For non-Italian speakers, here’s a few choice cuts of what Cristiano De Majo said about the third issue of The Milan Review, which consists entirely of Travels in Central America, the latest novella by Clancy Martin.

1. “The graphic design is already an invitation to read, the modernist wrapping, the typographical refinement, the paper inside—and fortunately the literary quality of the content isn’t shadowed by such beauty.”

2. “In Martin’s novella, where everything seems to become, perhaps ironically so, a triumph of stereotypes—Mexico, the Latin lover, alcohol abuse—everything sounds extremely credible, powerful, three-dimensional.”

3. “Martin’s style does the lion’s share. Reduced to the bone, severed from embellishments, of a miraculously descriptive simplicity, with rapid-fire dialogues, it produces characters that stick to the reader.”

Nice, right? We knew it was good, but it’s always good to feel like you’re not crazy. To be part of, as George Costanza might say, a society. So, in a spirit of kinship and brotherhood, order your own copy over at The Store.

“Johnny Ryan and Frederic Fleury’s War and Penis started as a selection of illustrated insults shared between friends. It never really progressed beyond that, until it found a publisher and worldwide distribution. Even so, it’s still just a bunch of crude knob drawings and surreal sex scenes, but we confess it’s had us in stitches on more occasions than we’d really like to admit. Hooray for smut!”

They used the word “knob” instead of “dick” because they’re all British and whatnot.

Go read the rest of the Best Publications of 2012  here or go to The Store and order WAR & PENIS, our Best-of-2012-worthy book of silly dick jokes.

148 pages inside a multicolored hardback cover, bound in black cloth and wrapped with a thick ivory paper sleeve.

The entire issue consists of TRAVELS IN CENTRAL AMERICA, a new novella by the esteemed Clancy Martin, a story about love and Mexico and booze and sex that reads “like lightning”, according to our friend R_____.

Unfortunately, we cannot sell this issue in the United States of America.

1. We will have a bunch of artists and writers and poets and they will all do performances, some of which will be planned and uptight, while others will be all loosey-goosey and weird.

2. We will have two bands who will play concerts: one will be Roman noisers ROMBI, the other a secret mystery act that we can’t reveal now but that will kick ass. We will also have an awesome dj-set by Hamburger Lady, whose musical selection is as delicious as her name suggests. UPDATE: The secret mystery act has been confirmed as SCANT INTONE, straight from Canada.

3. We will show a short movie produced by THE MILAN REVIEW for Slutever.com and Purple Magazine, titled VERY DESPERATE CHARACTERS (with apologies to Paula Fox).

4. We will have nine, NINE exhibitions. One each by: Massimiliano Bomba (drawings), Carola Bonfili (paintings), Maison Du Crac (B&W photocopied prints), Ratigher (comics), Francesco De Figueiredo (we still don’t know exactly what it is), Johnny Ryan (offensive post-its), Frédéric Fleury (more offensive post-its), Giorgia Malatrasi (photographs), Francesca Grossi (paintings).

5. We will have all our books on sale at redonkolous prices. 20% off everything!

6. We will high-five anyone who asks and give them candy and soda.

Here is where it will take place:
Forte Fanfulla, Via Fanfulla da Lodi 5, 00176 Rome, Italy. From 6PM onwards.

Here is the facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/124234104398258/

Here is a picture that asshole Johnny Ryan made for us:

See you in Rome!

The book is a collection of four years of Giorgia’s mobile phone photographs, taken on an old Nokia 2610, a very blurry and pixelly camera through which Giorgia kept a diary of her life, her friends, and the weird and awesome things she saw around her.

Come celebrate this fresh new book by drinking wine and making old-timey jokes about hippies with us. Like: Why wasn’t the hippy savd by the lifeguard? He was too far out, man.

Oma & Bella: The Cookbook collects recipes from Eastern-Europe, classics of Jewish cuisine, which come from decades of them re-creating—from memory—the tastes of their childhoods before the war. To bring this vivid and personal cookbook into being, Alexa cooked with Oma and Bella in their kitchen, translating “handfuls” into half cups, “pinches” into teaspoons, and “platefuls” into servings.  Color illustrations by the artist Joana Avillez are interspersed throughout the cookbook. The book also includes color photographs of the two ladies by Bella Lieberberg. Each book includes both German and English texts.

Stories by Iphgenia Baal, Amie Barrodale, Chiara Barzini, Blake Butler, Matthias “Wolfboy” Connor, Seth Fried, Amelia Gray, Shane Jones, Robert Lopez, Clancy Martin, Francesco Pacifico and Lynne Tillman.

Art by Massimiliano Bomba, Carola Bonfili, Milano Chow, TJ Cowgill, Joe DeNardo, Francesco de Figueiredo, Roope Eronen, Frédéric Fleury, Christy Karacas, Taylor McKimens, Brenna Murphy and Toony Navok.

Thanks to Bea De Giacomo for the lovely pictures.

Head on to the Store to look inside it’s thick covers like a damn dirty voyeur and buy yourself a copy. Do it only if you are proud of being a human being. (You should all be).

You can see some of book in these pictures by Bea De Giacomo, and you should run and go buy it from here or from our store here.