Ant Farmer's Almanac

MY NEW BOOK IS (Still) OUT!

That's right, he's done it again! "Go the F**k Back to Work! Rhymes to Inspire Our Contemptible Congress to Just Do Its F**king Job", is on sale at Amazon and other fine online booksellers NOW!

 So, what, would it kill you to buy a copy or three?

Remember when America had the best Congress money could buy? Neither can we.

As a public service, we offer these satirically inspirational rhymes to not-so-gently remind Congress both why they're less popular than cholera, cockroaches and colonoscopies and what they were sent to Washington to do... you know, they're f**king jobs!

 

Time's Running Out!

Still haven't bought the 2012 Doomsday Planner: The Official Unauthorized Makeover of the Mayan Calendar? What are you waiting for? Go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and get one today. Get a sneak peek here, and "Like" us on Facebook because, well, why wouldn't you?

The Zombie Also Rises

Before the literary masterpiece/cheesey monster movie mashup craze jumps the shark, Bandwagon Books (No Trend Left Behind!) announces the first of its series Zombies! for the Fall of 2010. (Also available as eBooks!)

The Zombie Also Rises

By Ernest Hemingway (with additional material by L.K. Peterson)

Excerpt:

We sat outside at the little cafe near the Plaza del Toros. We sat, Alexi and me, and watched for zombies. The cafe had run out of sangria and was serving ouzo that someone had left there the summer before. It was good ouzo. Damn good. The summer before had not been good. The summer before had been terrible. The summer before had been when the zombies came. I wondered if whoever had left the ouzo was now a zombie. I wondered if he would come back for his ouzo. I wondered if, as he approached us, he would mutter "ouzo" instead of "brains" and, if he did, should we give him some before we shot him. Just then the waiter, an old man, pale and stooped, with deep-set, dark-circled eyes shuffled toward us. He was a good waiter. Damn good. Alexi, drunk on ouzo (and before that, drunk on sangria) looked at the waiter, lifted his pistol and shot him between the eyes. "Goddam zombies," he said, almost to himself. I should have reminded him that all of the cafe's waiters looked like that, but they weren't all zombies and if he didn't stop shooting them between the eyes we would have to get our own ouzo. But I didn't. I was too busy thinking about drinking ouzo that had once belonged to a zombie. Still, it was a good shot. Damn good.

Other Titles in This Series:

The Naked & the Undead

Remembrance of Zombies Past 

Winnie-the-Pooh and Zombies Too

Eat Brains, Pray, Love 

Are You There God? It's Us, Zombies

Rich Dad, Zombie Dad

Where's Waldo?

Sneak Peak at Palin Book Cover

The Ant Farmer's Almanac has obtained a copy of what we believe to be a possible cover design for Sarah Palin's forthcoming memoir Going Rogue: An American Life. While this may not be the cover that gets used, we have been assured that it was near the top of the pile on the art director's desk.

Blogroll (kinda)

Julie Jackson, friend, haiku master (haiku mistress?), creator of Subversive Cross Stitch and other fine bits of hilarity, has a new book out: Glamourpuss, The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs. 

Buy it online before the bookstores get too crowded. Oh, and there's a cat-in-a-wig-themed haiku in it by me.

In other news:

Bill Gates has given up his Facebook page because he had "too many friends"; he also suspected that they really just wanted him to do their math homework for them.

As the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival approaches, people who attended the event will stop and reflect in awe that Max Yasgur didn't just turn the hose on them and tell them to get the hell off his lawn.

Ant Farmer's Almanac Holiday Gift Guide

Our Guest Book Reviewer's Roundup for 2008

By Elliott Nook

Pop-Up Books on Tape, Vol. III. Edited by Gerald Bostock (Ear-Drum Audio Books, $24.95) Read by James Earl Jones.

Eat, Pay & Leave Big Tip. By Anonymous (Vainglory Publishing, $19.95) Restaurant etiquette as defined by the former maitre d' at several of New York's swankiest eateries.

Growth Careers for the New Depression. By Richard Saunders (Beech Books, $21.95) Hobo? Madcap heiress? Singing cowboy? Using films of the 1930s as its guide, this timely book offers practical tips for finding jobs in the current economic downturn.

Kerouac's Children. By Philip Valens (University of Inwood Online Press, $22.95) Rather than poetry by neo-beatniks, this book profiles three middle aged drifters, all claiming to be the illegitimate offspring of the On the Road author.

Madonna's "A Kabbalah Family Christmas." By Madonna (Random Hut, $14.95 OBO) They're practically giving it away. Just ask, they'll probably pay you to take one.

Woodstock 2019. By W.D. Forte (Nightflyer Press, $14.95) When everybody who's been fibbing about being at Woodstock in 1969 shows up for its 50th anniversary — along with everyone who really was there the first time around — the results are equal parts hilarity and disaster in this first-novelist's darkly comic sci-fi satire about gracelessly aging Baby Boomers.

This Was Supposed to be Out Like Four Months Ago! By Michael Phelps, with Bob Costas and NBC Sports (NBC Sports Publishing, $49.95) A heavily illustrated "memoir" made up of transcripts from NBC's color commentary about Phelps at the Beijing Olympics.

What the F*** Was I Thinking?!? By Guy Ritchie (Piquant Press, $11.95) A collection of blog entries in which the once promising British film director struggles to make sense of his eight-year marriage to Madonna.

Crash Tests for Dummies. By Norman L. Legg (Hat Trick Books, $16.95) We're not sure why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's 5-Star Crash and Rollover Ratings needs to be presented in haiku. Nonetheless, we'll never look at our Corolla's airbag light again without thinking, Marshmallow embrace/Forward, backward, pushing hard/Yet still we remain.

Title. By Literary Heavyweight (TBA) The latest from [name here] will delight/disappoint long-time/first-time readers. This once/still great prose stylist has/hasn't lost his/her touch. [Note to Ed.: I'll send this one later. I'm off to Barnes & Noble to dig up something "more on the highbrow side," as you put it, but it's snowing pretty hard so if I'm not back by press time, just print what I've sent so far].

Elliott Nook's column "Book Nook" appears twice monthly in the Tri-County Courier-Journal's Weekend Arts & Literature Supplement Section.

Re-Freyed

Revised Edition of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to be Retitled An Indeterminate Number of Pieces Ranging in Size from Smallish to Really, Really Tiny.

NEW YORK (Ant Farmer's Almanac Newswire) Citing his televised admission, on The Oprah Winfrey Show and elsewhere, of "Inaccuracies," "Exaggerations" and "Totally made-up stuff" in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, Penguin Publishing has cancelled its contract with disgraced author James Frey. This is despite the book's having been written and published by Random House long before Frey signed on with Penguin.

Random House, meanwhile, mindful of the invaluable publicity generated by the uproar, is printing a second, "corrected" and retitled, paperback edition of Frey’s now-infamous book.

"The decision to rename this new edition was difficult because of the high recognition factor of the original," admits Random House spokesman Harlan Dervish, "But the veracity of everything in A Million Little Pieces was so questionable that even the number and size of the pieces was suspect."

"We considered but ultimately rejected Mr. Frey’s suggestions for a new title," Dervish continued, "Including, Okay, Maybe Not Quite so Many Pieces as I Said at First; More Pieces Than I Wanted to Count, Some of Which are Fairly Small; What's the Big Deal, It was a Best-Seller fer Crissakes; and The Fandom of the Oprah."

In a press release, Random House announced that it had settled on the name An Indeterminate Number of Pieces Ranging in Size from Smallish to Really, Really Tiny.

Along with its new title, the revised version of Frey's journey through addiction and recovery will feature a new final chapter on his writing about addiction and recovery, of being promoted by Oprah for his recovery then denounced by her for not having been addicted enough and how, finally, he recovered from that.

Because of Frey's propensity for more than total-recall, a fact-checker will be on hand during the editing process to verify each and every word of the new material as well as much of the punctuation.

The book is listed in Random House's summer catalogue and is expected to hit bookstores by Memorial Day weekend. Oprah Winfrey could not be reached for comment or a book jacket blurb.

They're Just Upset that Jesus' Descendants Would be French

Defenders of Christianity Rebut 'The Da Vinci Code' (New York Times article by Laurie Goodstein, April 28, 2004)

Fearing that the best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code" may be sowing doubt about basic Christian beliefs, a host of Christian churches, clergy members and Bible scholars are rushing to rebut it. 

Readers have bought more than six million copies of the book, a historical thriller that claims Christianity was founded on a cover-up — that the church has conspired for centuries to hide evidence that Jesus was a mere mortal, married Mary Magdalene and had children whose descendants live in France.