No matter what you celebrate, the holidays this time of the year are filled with all sorts of presents. A fruitcake from the Secret Santa at work. Candy from that aunt you haven't seen in a long time. Socks from mom. A gift card to Best Buy from Dad. A documentary on chickens from your significant other (what...you didn't get one too?). But sometimes the best presents are those you planned yourself and completely forgot about.
Yesterday I got home to find a nice little package sitting in my mailbox, a wonderful little book called Alice Redux. Pulled together and edited by writer/editor/poet Richard Peabody, it's an anthology he's had trouble selling to publishers and finally decided to just put it out through his own Paycock Press. There are some big name writers (Robert Coover), local D.C. champions (Miles David Moore) and even a small handful of people I know from grad school. And, of course, a bunch of writers I'm not familiar with. It follows the pattern the Mondo series (Mondo Barbie, Mondo James Dean, etc) Peabody edited previously; he simply asked for work inspired by Carroll's classic work Alice in Wonderland and let the writers have their way. Some appear to be nice homages, others are satires, but a good number are unique pieces all to themselves. From genre work to mainstream to experimental, AR promises to spin poor Alice in every direction you can imagine (and many you probably haven't).
Despite the ever growing pile of books in my yet-to-read pile, I think I'll be shifting AR into the on-deck position. So I'll be tearing through the Thomas Paine book I'm reading now just to get to it (not that it's a chore...it's a damn good book, too). If you're at all interested, there's info on purchasing the book (as well as other items from Paycock) here and of course through Amazon.
Excelsior
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