Potato I have. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. Drop him like a hot potato. They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. Potato. In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks. Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes. Bloom pats with parceled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepocket, sweets of sine, potatosoap. A phial, an Agnus Ddei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the model farm. Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. Sir Walter Ralegh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will understanding, all. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vinters, trussmakers, chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket an archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us. Give me back that potato, will you? She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh, and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking. A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his rearing nag a torrent of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes. He is pelted with gravel, caggabestumps, bisquitboxes, eggs, potatoes, dead codfish, woman’s slipperslappers. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast. On the contrary that stab in the back touch was quite in keeping with those italianos though candidly he was none the less free to admit those icecreamers and friers in the fish way not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth over in little Italy there near the Coombe were sober thrifty hardworking fellows except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good old succulent tucking with garlic de rigueur of him or the next day on the quiet and, he added, on the cheap. …O no thank you not in my house stealing my potatoes and the oysters 2/6 per doz…he was on the pop of asking me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling the potato cake…wouldn’t even teem the potatoes for you…shes restless knowing shes pretty with her lips so red a pity they wont stay that way I was too but there no use going to the fair with the thing answering me like a fishwoman when I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes the day we met Mrs Joe Gallaher at the trotting matches and she pretended not to see us in her trap with Friery the solicitor…

Unknown Arts by William WalshUnknown Arts is a collection of texts and poems derived from the works of James Joyce.

• About this Book
• About William Walsh

• Print $9.99
• 
• free shipping

• Share
• Tweet

Unknown Arts, to use a Joycean coinage, is a thinkling. Walsh offers a series of critical appropriations—poems, stories, and a silent play—drawn from Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and more. “Enjombyourselves thurily!”

“Art critic Thomas Hess found that the only worthwhile criticism of a work of art is another work of art. William Walsh must feel this too, because he does not merely document and rearrange Joyce’s work here—he makes, with Joyce’s materials, his own music. Each piece is a lovely read, and a reminder not of totemic, hallowed literature, but of how personal and playful the act of reading really is.”
—Darcie Dennigan, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse (Fordham University Press)

“A mixup, an accumulation; William Walsh faithfully divines James Joyce and his multiflex bodies. Here is a man (two men, I mean, meant to mingle, both) once won of song and slave to rhythm; sum dumb, fully plumbed. Here is a truly prazeful recapitulation! Read.”
—Ken Baumann, Solip (Tyrant Books)

Here’s the link:
http://matterpress.com/journal/2011/10/11/the-forest/#more-1065

Walsh’s minibook, Pathologies, is now available for free in electronic form, which you can download here. If you want it in print, it’s $10 and available in the store as well.

See, you ask me what‘s going on, and I know you mean, tell me something good, but not much is going on. No stories to tell. Not one you‘d want to hear, unless you count what happened two days ago and that‘s not really a story.

It‘s just about this old woman at the grocery store and how she couldn‘t reach the peanut butter because it was stocked on the top shelf. So while I was standing there picking out strawberry jam, I said, ―Let me help you, and I asked her, ―What kind do you want? and she said, ―Peter Pan, smooth, please. After I handed her the peanut butter, she said, ―You‘re a little pretty and very nice. Then she said, ―Hold on, and she reached for her purse, this beat up white leather bag sitting in the shopping cart. She took out her wallet and her hands were shaking and I said, ―Oh no, thinking she was going to offer me money, but instead she handed me a business card and said, ―This is my grandson. He‘s a nice boy. You should call him; he‘s lonely.

I looked and saw he had a nice boy name and he was a travel agent and he had a work phone and a cell phone and I said, ―Thanks, and put the business card in my own purse, which was just a little straw bag because it‘s summertime. And since I‘d had it with mean boys, it seemed a good thing to do, to call a nice boy, and after two glasses of wine that evening, I called the old woman‘s grandson. When I said who I was and how I got his number, he was quiet. I felt stupid, but then I felt even worse because he finally said, ―I‘m sorry. My grandmother isn‘t always well. I‘m married. She forgets. Then he laughed and said, ―Or maybe she does remember and doesn‘t like Jill anymore, and I heard him say, ―Ouch! like his wife Jill must have smacked him on the back of the head.

I apologized and hung up and drank another glass of wine because he did sound like a nice boy. And I went to bed and it was another night like so many of my nights.

So you see, it‘s not really a good story, not the kind you want to hear. No romance or adventure or mystery.
The guy didn‘t call back and say, ―Forget about Jill, let‘s meet for dinner.

He didn‘t call back and say, Actually, I‘m from another galaxy and I want to create a new type of being with you. I promise you‘ll really enjoy it.

He didn‘t call back and say that he would love to make something happen between us, but he was very busy because he was a rock star, a spy, a pirate, or a guy about to go on a cross country journey to find out some great truth.

He was just a nice guy and he was married and he even thanked me for helping his grandmother.

He didn‘t call back. End of story.

Now Playing, by Shellie Zacharia
Full-length collection of short stories.

• About this book
• About Shellie Zacharia

• Print $14.95
• 
• free shipping

• Share
• Tweet

 

 

It’s available in iTunes on your computer or iBookstore on your iDevice, in the Kindle Store, and from B&N.com or on your Nook. The add to cart icon links to a zip file containing DRM-free ePub and mobi file formats. Thank you.

Pathologies, by William Walsh
17 very short stories by the author of Without Wax, Questionstruck, and Ampersand, Mass.

• eBook free
• 
• 
• 
• 

Magazine

There are no guidelines. Submit whatever you want here.

Books

Before you submit your book to Keyhole, please consider the following. We have a limited amount of time and we prefer to be on the same page at the start so that we don’t waste what little time we have.

We are are looking for books and submissions are open, but we’re not just looking for good books, or even books in general. We’re not looking for books so much as we are looking for authors.

Keyhole will only release books from authors that are interested in a long-term relationship with Keyhole. Not one where authors are contractually stuck on Keyhole forever, but one where the author has the option to leave Keyhole at any time but prefers to stay and release all of their books with Keyhole.

We believe the publishing industry fails to build meaningful branding and meaningful art when the goal is primarily money and/or fame, or even when the goal is just to leach off of a major publisher’s large readership. We believe that the small press community is where the best writing is being published, and rather than let the big publishers buy it out and bury it, we want to cultivate it and nurture it through a strong publisher-author relationship, stronger publisher-author branding, and, for the author, absolute creative freedom (we believe that doing away with the tasks, time, and stresses involved with finding a publishing home, that authors will be more able to write what they really want to write), and above all, by working harder. We want authors that are more interested in working for something rather than having it handed to them. We don’t do advances. We put the horse before the cart. We don’t do large print runs until authors have proven that they can sell large amounts of books. We have the ability to print ultra-low print runs, and we have the ability to print large print runs and distribute nationally. Which we do depends largely on the amount of interest each author is able to build for him/herself. We believe that only authors can build real interest in their books. People respond to people, not to cover art or blurbs or press releases and, initially, not to publishers either. We believe a publisher is only as good as the sum of its authors. Without a good roster of authors, a publisher is not much more than an assembler of random books and a bookshelf with buy buttons. Books need faces and personality, and only authors can truly provide that.

We believe that a large readership is possible without major publishers, and that by staying with the small press community we will make it grow.

So if you are here just to publish as many books as you possibly can as fast as possible on as many presses as possible so that you can have the widest exposure, then you’re in the wrong place, especially if you’re doing that with the intent of catching the attention of a major publisher. But even if you’re not, we think presses and authors passing each other around is not a good way to build anything worthwhile, especially when every press and author has the exact same customer base: each other. It’s just a waste of time. And please do not send your book to Keyhole.

Don’t misunderstand: We want authors to succeed, and we want people to read these books, but we feel that the entire small press community should not take the path of least resistance to success and readership. Instead we should try harder, work harder. We should build, and hold on to what we have built, then build some more. We want to build something bigger than just the successes of individual authors. Because if we don’t strive for that, then there is no reason for small press to exist at all, and authors should just put their books out themselves.

We will also be using Keyhole Magazine as a way of discovering new authors, so submitting to the magazine is probably a good idea. Because we’re people and we respond more to conversation than to random book queries, and if we accept your story or poem for an issue of Keyhole, we’re more likely to get to know you while we’re putting the issue together.

If you like the sound of the above and you want to skip submitting to the magazine and just send a book now, then send it to books@keyholepress.com. Any format is fine.

615-866-2354

1307-B 15th Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37212