This year Verse Chorus Press will reissue four volumes of Tom Adelman’s writings as Camden Joy. Lost Joy compiles Adelman’s early short writings—handwritten Xeroxed manifestos that he once glued up to walls and telephone poles all over New York City, letterpressed tracts about albums he loved, short stories as music criticism, and music criticism as questionably authentic memoir. A pair of novels The Last Rock Star Book: Or: Liz Phair, a Rant and Boy Island, as well as his novella collection 3 by Camden Joy, share a tendency to put real-life musicians (e.g. Phair and bands like Cracker and
William T. Vollmann In 1994, as William Vollmann traveled by car from Split to Sarajevo with two fellow reporters—one of them a friend he’d known since high school—an explosion or possibly a sniper killed his two companions. Later, while reporting on the Siege of Sarajevo, Vollmann was offered journalistic access to an important Bosnian military leader if he was willing to murder a prisoner of war as a show of loyalty—an opportunity he turned down. Fictional treatments of these real-life horrors open Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories, a collection that veers from realistic to supernatural representations of death,