Bad at Sports’ own Literary Correspondent Terri Griffith has published her first book “So Much Better” and is on sale now through Green Lantern Press & Amazon.com

“So Much Better” is a debut novel about a self-sabotaging Credit Union employee, a cold woman at odds with and alone in the world. In the absence of her lover, she seduces her lover s sister, wades through old storage units and wonders after her own absent family. Printed in an edition of 500 w/ silkscreen covers by Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer.

Terri Griffith’s writing has appeared in Bloom, Suspect Thoughts, Bust and in the anthologies Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class and Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak about Health Care in America. Along with Nicholas Alexander Hayes, she is co-authoring a transgressive retelling of the Greek Myths. Terri is the literary correspondent for the popular contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports and she also co-hosts the online reading series The Parlor.

Henry Roy’s Spirit seems to live even as it lay open on my kitchen table. The cover image depicts a sleeping man in breathtaking color. The man’s rich, dark skin and the green of a plant in the background pop against the amorphous beige interior that surrounds the scene.

Spanning the past ten years of his career, Spirit collects nearly 50 photographs and 6 short stories that capture a mystical energy. With the eye of a portraitist, Roy skillfully isolates his subjects and obscures their circumstance. Working in a “very intuitive, almost mediumnic way,” Roy manages to express a poetic tension between reverie and the mundane in his images.

My favorites stories in the book are Paris In October and A Night In Africa. The former is a brief ode to the Parisian autumn, while the latter tells of a half-drunken protagonist urinating on a bathroom wall. Both stories are narrated by an urbane young man suffering from a bout of ennui. The ordinary settings of the narratives provide a nice counterpoint to the dreamy images, and make me a little less jealous of Henry Roy’s life.

Spirit was released in October by Gottlund Verlag, a small publishing house based in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Available at Gottlund Verlag online and Golden Age in Chicago.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to  mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

Up for grabs this week is a copy of Joseph Larkin’s “Arcade of Cruelty. You know the drill email me (megonli@badatsports.com) and lucky number 11 will get the book.

via William Jones for Graphic Novel Reporter
“Crass-for-the-sake-of-crass comics usually go one way or the other; there isn’t much middle ground. Either the author has a special touch that somehow makes the work funny despite the reader’s better judgment or he doesn’t, leaving a book filled with racist, homophobic, and/or simply offensive material, not only to the subject matter but good taste.

Joseph Patrick Larkin knows this, if the comic on page 237 of his Arcade of Cruelty is an indication. The comic is titled “Johnny Ryan’s Response to 9/11,” and it takes the aforementioned cartoonist of Angry Youth Comix to task for missing the point, this time without the apologies Larkin often offers with his style-imitation strips. It features a disgusting character pointlessly spewing the dirtiest possible language and really has nothing to do with 9/11, or anything else for that matter.

That’s not to say Larkin is an upstanding member of the comics world himself. The strip in question appears in a section devoted to 9/11 comics, and not in the artsy Art Spiegelman sense, but in the making-jokes-about-it-and-people’s-opinions-of-it sort of way. The rest of the book is littered with his deranged sexual ponderings (including a slew of jokes about rape), defacement of childhood yearbooks, and plenty of self-loathing. But Larkin seems to have the touch, using a tongue-in-cheek approach to give many of his strips a heavy helping of irony, with many of them truly at the expense of their author.”

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This week: Duncan talks with James Elkins about his forthcoming round table at Art Chicago, and the art Phd. Like you didn’t have enough student loan debt.

BAS Boston’s Matthew Nash talks to comic artist Liz Prince about her work, and her excellent book “Will you still love me if I wet the bed?”

Go, right now, buy it. [Read more]

Yesterday, Collier Schorr had a book signing at Dashwood Books for her latest release “There I Was”. In the fall of 2007 I had a chance to see “There I was” at 303 gallery. The show was a departure from Schorr’s photographic work. Through drawings, photographs, source images, and letters Schorr retells the vivid story of Charlie ‘Astoria Chas’ Synder. While accompanying her father on a interview in 1967 , Schorr met the 19 year old drag racer and his “Ko-Motion” Corvette. By the time the article was released Synder had already been killed while fighting in Vietnam. Based on both facts and fantasy Schorr retells the last days of ‘Astoria Chas’.

The Long Century has a small musing from Schorr about Synder and war films.

“I was talking to a friend about a scene in Full Metal Jacket and he said “that is my favourite war movie”. Later, I thought, what does that mean? What does a favourite war movie satisfy? What makes it so desirable? All narrative cinema pivots on the transformation of a protagonist and so most war movies satisfy this requirement in spades. From An Officer and a Gentleman to Platoon, the young soldier is transformed into a man, either ruined by brutality or recused by structure, there is a simple pleasure in watching someone (other than oneself) abused into a potential killing machine.

…When I starting making drawing’s based on a young friend of my father’s who was killed after just on month of serving in Vietnam, I re-engaged with all those Vietnam movies I thought I loved and I no longer could love them. The fact that they were a fetish for me, and an ideal about masculinity that I couldn’t afford to indulge.”

Read the full article at This Long Century.

For more information and to pre-order a signed copy please visit Dashwood Books

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