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Life of the Party
The Complete Autobiographical Collection
by Mary Fleener
One of the best collections of autobiographical comics -- or "autobiographix," as she calls them -- Life of the Party presents cartoonist Mary Fleener's crazy life of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll is all grist for the mill in this series of "autobiographix," as she calls them—strips based on her own life that have appeared in such anthologies as Wimmen's, Weirdo, Rip Off Review, and Snarf, and, especially, her own title, Slutburger. Growing up in the alcohol-soaked, tiki-decorated world of her parents' suburban Los Angeles, and then living on her own through a progression of loud-mouthed boyfriends, gay and straight pals of both genders, and untenable roommates, Fleener takes last-minute band gigs in dyke bars, is visited by ghosts, picks up after other people's sexual misadventures, and brews her own kitty stew to feed her cat. Her high-contrast drawing is augmented by her unique "cubismo" style: whenever characters are in agitated mental states, or their spiritual selves are interacting on some astral plane, Fleener expresses the effects in emotive geometric abstractions that would've tickled Picasso's funny bone. This is a one of a kind collection. Recommended!
retail price - $14.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $7.77

Housebound
by Rick Geary
Though he is better known now as the creator of a series of Victorian murder mysteries, back in the day Rick Geary was (more or less) the Richard Brautigan of comics. He pioneered the genre of short, off-kilter stories that, by virtue of their peculiar slant on the events they portray, continue to provide readers with fresh perspectives on the mundane. The stories contained in Housebound are, on average, over twenty years old, but they are as unique now as they were when he first laid Rapidiograph pen to paper. Quirky, entertaining and fun, this book is a one of a kind treasure (well, truthfully, it is one of two -- the companion volume, At Home with Rick Geary -- is every bit as wonderful, but is, sadly, long out of print and tough to find), and now it's a bargain to boot!
retail price - $11.95 copacetic ¡SALE! price - $7.77

No Love Lost
by Ariel Bordeaux
The tangled relationships of twenty-somethings in Seattle is the crux of this 56-page squarebound comic, but it's all in the details and there's plenty of those here; and, from the woman's point of view, no less. This is a work that has generally been overlooked. Don't pass it by this time!
retail price $6.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $2.95

Portraits from Life (copacetic favorite)
by David Collier
This book presents the strongest of David Collier's work and is one of our perennial best-sellers here at Copacetic. It is filled with extremely engaging stories of the lives of minor, obscure and offbeat Canadian figures. Some of these are full fledged biographies, such as the fascinating account of Humphrey Osmond, the Canadian scientist who was an early researcher into psychotropic drugs and reputedly coined the term "psychedelic." Then there's the life story of Ethel Catherwood, the Olympic high jumper known as the Saskatchewan Lily, who ended up infamous and reclusive. A more tightly focused tale is that of "Grey Owl," an enigmatic British man who managed to convince those he came into contact with in the Canadian north that he was a North American Indian. The acme of the collection is the tale of David Midgaard, a Saskatchewan man arrested as a teenager and imprisoned for decades for a rape and murder he didn't commit. This is a gripping tale told in the inimitable Collier fashion, wherein he weaves his own life into the tale of another, and so really makes it hit home hard. The stories in this volume were key to pioneering the comics journalism movement. They amply illustrate why the most notable of the new comics journalists, Joe Sacco once said, "I don't think there's a cartoonist whose every new work I approach with such anticipation as David Collier." retail price - $12.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $8.88

Hamilton Sketchbook
by David Collier
This is a great bedside companion book. In it, long suffering Canadian comics artist, David Collier shares his life in a trailblazing hybrid of words and images, primarily in the form of journal entries and sketches. This is among the most intimate forms of expression and pushes the McCloudian definition of comics into the realm of artists' sketchbooks. It is a relaxing and enjoyable read, full of interesting anecdotes, witty observations and self-deprecating humor, and, of course, great pen and ink sketches of life as it is lived today in Canada.
retail price - $14.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $7.77

Waiting for Food: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings #3
by R. Crumb
hardcover
Here it is, the third collection of R. Crumb's acclaimed restaurant placemat drawings -- for less! As Crumb himself states in his forward, the originals of many of these grease stained, food splattered drawings have sold in galleries for thousands of dollars. Who would've thunk it? Allow this collection to inspire you and your friends, loved ones and relatives to make more constructive use of that time between ordering and eating!
retail price - $26.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $12.95

The Summer of Love
by Debbie Drechsler
The Summer of Love is a poignant rite-of-passage graphic novel that lays bare -- in pen and ink on paper -- one soul as it navigates the roiling waters of the transition from girl to woman, revealing the angst, lust, love and confusion produced by the raging hormones of adolescence. The entire book is beautifully printed in two colors: a flat olive and a light mahogany, that work together serve to provide a unique reading experience -- no black ink anywhere! Peggy Orenstein, the author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, has this to say: "Debbie Drechsler's is one of the most authentic, profound voices of female culture in any medium. Summer of Love perfectly captures the daily anxieties and mundane traumas of coming of age in the suburbs."
144 pages • two-color
retail price - $16.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $6.95

The Extended Dream of Mr. D
by Max
The title has it right: This is an extended (or perhaps extensive would have been better) dream. It is an adventure story, but it is an adventure that could only take place in a dream. The narratvie really captures the ineffability of dream world dream logic, where one place transfroms into another and suddenly you become someone else and they become yet another and you keep trying to figure out what's going on but before you can things have changed yet again... Anything and everything goes here, yet it all connects somehow and the dreamer's very soul is at stake. The sumptuous art and surreal story perfectly complement one another in this truly far out tale by the Spanish cartoonist, Max.
retail price - $12.95 - copacetic ¡SALE! price - $4.95

SUPER SET SALE:
Get a set of all four volumes of the Kochalka Sketchbook Diaries

Cicada
by José Menjivar
retail price - $12.95 - copacetic sale price - $3.95

Hey, Mister: The Fall Collection
by Pete Sickman-Garner
You want funny? Look no further: This book will make you laugh. Like Peter Bagge's Hate, but smarter and more brutal in its judgments on this dysfunctional society of ours, and with a distinctive flavor all its own, this is a comic for people who see past the façade as a matter of course. Hey, Mister takes sarcasm to new heights. It makes us think of the Monty Python episode, the "Piranha Brothers," in which a fearful and trembling thug played by Michael Palin relates how Doug Piranha was the most terrifying gangster he had ever encountered because of the deft manner in which, "he used... sarcasm." And the bitterness, oh, the bitterness! The Fall Collection is the Guernica of bitterness. This volume is without doubt the best (and, sadly, the last; at least to date) Hey, Mister collection. Work-a-day America has never been stripped so completely naked as in these pages.
retail price - $12.95 copacetic sale price - $6.95

Truer Than True Romance
by Jeanne Martinet
oversize softcover
retail price - $19.95 copacetic price - $9.95

Essential Films of the Decade:
Film Posters of the 30s through the 90s
edited by Tony Nourmand & Graham Marsh
oversize softcovers
retail price - $17.99@ copacetic price - $8.88@

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FICTION

Servants of the Map
by Andrea Barrett
hardcover
This is an engrossing and fascinating collection of linked stories that link -- albeit in an oblique and unexpected fashion -- not only to each other but, in a round about way, to her novel, Voyage of the Narwhal and her novella, Ship Fever as well. Andrea Barrett is the most consistently engaging writer of fiction that centers on the history of scientific themes -- usually science that is itself related in some way to that most historical branch of science evolution: paleontology, genetics, etc. These brand new copies of the original hardcover edition of her latest work are a great value.
retail - $24.95 • copacetic price - $8.88

Out of Sheer Rage
by Geoff Dyer
hardcover
This is a one of a kind book that, if it must be categorized, might be considered as being related to the hyper-self-aware literary genre now often associated with the McSweeney’s crowd, but written a bit earlier, and possessing a distinct British flavour. Originally published in England in 1997, it is, first and foremost, a book about writing a book, about D.H. Lawrence, that is also a literary biography, of D.H. Lawrence, as well as a book of literary criticism, focused on the writings of D.H. Lawrence, which includes a criticism of D.H. Lawrence’s literary criticism. Parts of it serve as a travelogue, in the tradition of D.H. Lawrence’s travel writings, and also -- but I think you get the idea: it's a book that can't seem to get around to doing what it's supposed to be doing yet is constantly at work rationalizing that this inability is actually a blessing in disguise. In other words, it's an ode to procrastination. Amazingly, it’s also a real page turner, the kind of book that's hard to put down. AND: it's funny. It also sports one of the cleverest book jackets of all time. Need we say more?
retail price - $24.95 copacetic price - $12.95

Kafka Americana
By Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz
Official hype: "Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, Kafka Americana has achieved cult status. In this act of literary appropriation that is by turns witty, affectionate, and shameless, the author of Motherless Brooklyn and the co-author of Palimpsests seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of 20th-century America. In one of five tales, Hollywood welcomes Kafka as scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. "The Amount to Carry" transports the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute to a conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, to muse on what can and can't be insured. "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial in which Kafka faces fraudulent charges. Taking modernism's presiding genius for a joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived. "
retail price - $11.00 copacetic price - $3.95

Next up: three (now four!) classics by the master American prose stylist.

In the Penny Arcade
by Steven Millhauser
This collection of works from the early 1980s by Millhauser starts off with August Eschenburg, a prototypical tale which serves as the template for several later Millhauser works, most notably Martin Dressler (see below). The middle section is composed of three stylistically linked forays into the classic short story mode, each of which stages an elaborate wedding of location with season to produce an exquisite evocation of an exact yet unnameable emotion, and each of which manages to pull it off. The stories that will really having you reaching for the champagne to celebrate their success, however, are the three that close out the volume, and most especially the titular tale, In the Penny Arcade. This story reacheds the summit where so many others have fallen short in capturing that oh-so-elusive scene in which childhood ends. It distills this instant in an essence that is as momentous as it is bittersweet. This story is bracketed by a pair of equally successful distillations, first of childhood, and the other of tradition. This book is a treasure.
import softcover
copacetic price - $3.95

Little Kingdoms
by Stephen Millhauser
The lead story in this collection of three novellas by America's reigning master of the form, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is an amazing tour de force for which the life and work of Winsor McCay serves as a springboard into a hallucinatory trip inside the mind of a powerful and obsessive creativity. We believe that this work stands to be especially appreciated by comics aficionados, and as we just secured a large quantity of the UK edition at a special price (and as the US edition is now, while not, technically, out of print, available only in a print-on-demand edition) we felt it was appropriate to bring it to our customers' attention at this time. The two additional novellas that fill out this volume are every bit as original, unique and intense: "The Princecss, the Dwarf and the Dungeon" is a magnificent deconstruction of the fairy tale that reveals its origins and functions -- social as well as psychological; and "Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810 - 1846)" is one of the most singular works in the annals of fiction -- a turbulently romantic tale presented in the form of, as the title has it, the catalogue for an exhibition of paintings. Recommended!
copacetic price - $4.95

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
by Steven Millhauser
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel represents the apotheosis of Millhauser’s obsession with obsessives. In the character of Martin Dressler, Millhauser has found a character that fulfills both his personal needs as a writer and the novel’s needs for justification. Dressler serves as a synecdoche for both the American Way and the American Dream, or, perhaps, more properly, how these two overlap and even, at times -- such as during the 1990s, when this novel appeared, merge into an organic whole in which each are indistinguishable from one another. Millhauser’s inimitable style carries the reader through the life-cycle of Dressler’s dream of life that seems so real that at times its hard to believe that it’s only a dream; but then, the best of dreams are always like that, aren’t they?
Import softcover
copacetic price - $4.95

and, his latest work in hardcover... for less!
The King in the Tree: 3 Novellas
by Steven Millhauser
hardcover
Three novellas by the greatest living master of the form. A tale of love and betrayal unfolds on a private home tour in "Revenge," while both "An Adventure of Don Juan" and the title novella transform classic fables into wholly original works as only Millhauser can. The latest work by America's champion prose stylist... for less!
retail price - $23.00 copacetic price - $4.95

The Wishbones
by Tom Perrotta
hardcover
We still have a few brand new hardcover copies of this well received novel of 1997 available at a low, low price. This novel presents characters and dilemmas that are vaguely similar to that of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (which was published two years earlier) -- rock-guy(s) being dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood -- but on this side of the Atlantic (New Jersey, to be exact) and playing in a bar-band-turned-wedding-band (the titular Wishbones) rather than working in a record/CD store. The Wishbones are not as cool as the High Fidelity folks, but they're every bit as well defined and delineated. There's a bit more wish-fulfillment fantasy going on here as well (as the title/band-name broadly hints at). On top of this (or maybe, beneath it) the book works hard to de-mythologize the "rock life," showing how it's mostly just another job -- albeit one much more accommodating to fantasy. Sort of like comics. Eminently worth a read, if its sounds up your alley.
retail price - $22.95 copacetic price - $4.95

Brightness Falls from the Air
softcover
by James Tiptree, Jr.
The lastnovel by one of the brightest lisghts in the history of science fiction .
retail - $9.95 • copacetic price - $4.95 READ JAMES TIPTREE, JR.!

Winner of the National Book Award
by Jincy Willett
hardcover
A tale of Gothic horror disguised as a wicked black comedy, this, the first novel by long suffering woman of wit, Jincy Willet, is one of the most readable books in recent memory and is a real winner (although not of the National Book Award). It tells the tale of two sisters who represent opposite poles in the approach to living -- one, a sensualist who yields to all temptation and biological drives, the other, an ascetic who lives a life of the mind through books and self-restraint -- who then become involved in a love triangle with the same man, a man "with the face of a Nazi and the eyes of a Jew." Clearly, this is a book rife with conflicts, inner, outer and otherwise, yet it nevertheless manages to be an extremely entertaining read. Recommended.
retail price - $24.95 • copacetic price - $4.95

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NON-FICTION

Woman: An Intimate Geography
by Natalie Angier
hardcover
retail - $24.95 • copacetic price - $7.95

ART

Laurie Anderson
by RoseLee Goldberg (Abrams 2000)
The definitive retrospective monograph on Laurie Anderson, this exhaustively researched volume documents her entire career, from the seventies through the end of the 20th century. Here's a chance to learn how much more there is to her art than just simply her music, great as that is.
oversize hardcover
retail price: $39.95 copacetic price - $14.95

Hypermental: Catalogue of the Exhibition
Now out of print, and previously offered by us at the full price of $40.00, this is that rarity: an engaging, intellectually stimulating, thought provoking exhibition catalogue that discusses a new framework in which to group and view late 20th century art. Briefly, the show's curators take the position that art's role has shifted from mediating nature, to mediating media, in as much as the reality that we currently occupy is more defined by media than by nature.
oversize softcover
retail price: $40.00 copacetic price - $10.00