Cul de Sac by Scott Wrobel (website)
Spring 2012
248 pages
$14.95 $12

Review at The Collagist
Review at TwinCities.com
Review at JMWW
Interview on St. Paul Forum (video)
Interview with Steve Almond at The Nervous Breakdown
Review at the Brooklyn Rail
Review at the City Pages
Review at The Minneapolis StarTribune
Research Notes at Necessary Fiction
Review at New Pages
Review at  Mill City Bibliophile
The Minneapolis StarTribune’s notice

We know the men who populate Cul De Sac from our own neighborhoods and our own familiar fantasies of the American good life, yet in Scott Wrobel’s hands their faults and strange inner minds frighten and delight us. Here are middle-aged men who deal with parenting, marriage, and grief by untangling extension cords, organizing garages, stalking seasonal Eastern European service workers at family resorts, violating jars of mayonnaise, and sabotaging houses-for-sale to keep their neighborhood Caucasian. Cul De Sac is an honest and empathetic look behind the tailored lawns and powerwashed-perfect decks of a suburban community to its awkwardly humorous and sad reality—Cheeverland in a modern Midwestern suburb. Cul De Sac provokes, challenges, and invites nervous laughter.

Scott Wrobel has published work in The Rake, Identity Theory, Night Train, Pindeldyboz, Word Riot, Great River Review, and Minnesota Monthly, among other places. He is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series Fiction Award and won the Third Coast 2008 Nonfiction Award. He has also been nominated for the Best New American Writers of 2009.

Praise for Cul De Sac:

Scott Wrobel is an amazingly sharp and gifted writer, and his debut, Cul De Sac, set in a twenty-first century American suburbia of lost dreams and troubled families, is not only one of the truest and saddest collections of stories I’ve ever read, but also one of the funniest.
-Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time

Scott Wrobel’s stories are haunting, moving, strangely funny, and utterly unforgettable.  This is a book you will hang on to so you can reread it and feel the thrill of discovery all over again.
-Jessica Anya Blau, author of Drinking Closer to Home

With his debut collection, Cul De Sac, Scott Wrobel paints a pitch-perfect portrait of men shouldering heavy ass burdens with grace and humor. There are echoes of Raymond Carver and Larry Brown here, both in tone and setting, but the thing Wrobel has most in common with Carver and Brown is that all three tell stories that stick in your gut for a long damn time.
-John Jodzio, author of If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home

Wrobel’s stories of mitigation, miscommunication, and dissolution in this nowhere setting we all know so well, are acutely punctuated with the maladies of modern life. They move from laugh-out-loud comedy to stifled tragedy easily, and leave you with the sense that the world could melt away in a blink, that we are on the edge of the void always. I kept roaring with laughter in spite of myself.
-Geoff Herbach, author of The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg

Embodied by Keith Nathan Brown
A Psycho Soma in Poetry and Prose

large format 7 x 10″
160 pp
$14.95 $12

Review in The Collagist

Interview in PGP Features

Interview at HTMLGiant

In this multifaceted collection of dreamscape stories and arabesque concrete poetry, Keith Nathan Brown invokes a wide range of literary and non-literary forms—from poetry to scientific report, from short story to mathematical proof—as a way to explore the gray area between mind and body where selfhood finds its origin. These thirty three fictions, poems and hybrid texts are arranged in thematically-related sets and subsets to simulate a travel guide to “cross-conscious interstates.” Whether induced by illness or intoxication, or inspired by music or meditation, each psychoactive text offers itself as a node in a larger conversation about time, identity, meaning and the human bond. Philosophical in scope, psychological in depth, at turns witty and cerebral, at turns brooding and surreal, Embodied twists language—literally and figuratively—to open up portals of heightened reality and, more importantly, to activate a sense of discovery and awe in the face of everyday existence.

Sample work: “The Tongue” (elimae) | “The Makings of an Amateur Meteor” (Abjective) | “Clock Time”  (PANK)

Praise for Embodied:

Keith Nathan Brown’s elegantly eclectic book, Embodied, puts the high in hybrid. This is a significant new twist in the double helix of New Formalism’s formulae, an architecture of Frank Gehryesque proportions. There is no ironing out all these endless wrinkles, a static wall of balled up sound, stamping with the stutter of an uncanny cunning CAD.
-Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter

Keith Nathan Brown embodies many voices and forms in this collection, as we have visual poetry and equations mixed inside stories and recipes and the result is a feast for all of our human senses. At once daring and accessible, Embodied is an innovative work from a bold and talented writer.
-Robert Lopez, author of Asunder

“We have to go deeper yet,” says one of Keith Nathan Brown’s characters, early in Embodied. She says, “There’s more layers, always more layers,” and everywhere in this book our reading proves her right: Dig below Brown’s playful form and his accumulations of striking images and fragments, and there you might find only more questions, and beneath them only more almost-answers, new potential significances. “Someday this will all make sense,” promises another character, and perhaps he is right. But if not, then who are we to complain, when the uncertainties are this curious? This is a book for seekers, a ritual of discovery, and Brown is a fine guide to its mysteries.
-Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby

Keith Nathan Brown received a B.S. in Physics from Marlboro College. His essay, “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an Emerging Literary Trend,” published in Puerto del Sol, traces the philosophical and technological origins of a new branch of literature. His hybrid texts and visual poetry have appeared in Word For/ Word, elimae, Unsaid and elsewhere. Embodied is his first book. He lives in Brattleboro, VT.