Barrelhouse is happy to announce that in 2019 we will be publishing chapbooks from J. Robert Lennon and Meghan Phillips. We’re very excited to be working with both writers and can’t wait to share their strange and beautiful work with the world.
J. Robert Lennon's chapbook “Mistranslations and Meeting Notes” does what good linguistically-motivated writing does best: it examines, knocks around, and re-invents what we mean when we use words. In Lennon’s masterful hands, “Mistranslations and Meeting Notes” transcends wordplay and dives into a fractured landscape of meaning that comes alive phrase-by-phrase as it is experienced, mutating into a tapestry of rich notions, acute observations, and oddity-fueled moments that bind readers to a shared experience of life's collective nonsense. No one is alone. No one is spared. Barrelhouse is thrilled to be publishing this boldly original book from a writer whose work we have long admired.
J. Robert Lennon is the author of eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
Meghan Phillips’ chapbook, “Abstinence Only,” is a flash-length collection of “bad sex education stories” set in or connected to a high school where anything but actual sex ed is taught. In this more than slightly tilted world, all female students are issued chastity belts and forced to wear fake pregnant bellies, students are given “v-cards” that they must protect at all costs, and teachers and administrators take stranger and stranger measures, like bringing back medieval virginity tests to ensure their students stay chaste.These stories highlight Phillips’ rare ability to cut to the heart of a thing with a minimum of words, to lay bare something about the world and the strange experience of living in it without so much shining a spotlight as burning a quick, weird flare off to the side. The book will also include a series of original illustrations created by Barrelhouse Art Director Killian Czuba. Barrelhouse is thrilled to be publishing what we believe will be the first of many books from Meghan Phillips.
Meghan Phillips is a writer and editor from Lancaster, PA. Her recent flash fiction can be found in wigleaf, matchbook, Hobart, and Paper Darts. Her stories and poems have been nominated for the The Best of the Net Anthology, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as the fiction editor for Third Point Press and as an associate editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. You can find her writing at meghan-phillips.com and her tweets @mcarphil.
To see what we mean by a beautiful Barrelhouse chapbook, check out our latest, Sob Story: The History of Crying, by Allison Titus.