Dzanc rEprint Series

The Dzanc Books rEprint Series is dedicated to publishing great works of contemporary literature that are deserving and clearly will benefit from having their work appear in electronic form. Our efforts include works that have recently gone out of print, books in print that have yet to be converted to e-form, as well as titles where the author holds the eBook rights and is looking for a publishing partner for the electronic version of their book. Starting in Summer 2011, these works will be made available by Dzanc to the reading public in the form of eBooks compatible with all currently available eBook platforms, distributed both directly from Dzanc and through eBook resellers.

This series originates out of a belief that many of these titles did not have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential audiences in the time of their original publication, and that a second chance for achieving a wider readership is long overdue. By bringing them back into print in widely-available electronic formats, Dzanc hope to restart the critical conversations around these books, and to get them into the hands of the enthusiastic readers they each deserve. Just as the eBook revoluation has put an always-connected bookstore in the hands of every participating reader, we believe that our rEprint series is an important and innovative part of ensuring that bookstore's virtual shelves are stocked with beautiful editions of these titles, all among the very best books of the preceding decades.

For a full list of upcoming titles, please click here.

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The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing

Michael Hickins

Release Date: May 15, 2012

eBook Price: $7.99

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DESCRIPTION

Eleven stories told from the depths of anger, lust, and the confusion of doing the right things at the wrong times.

Michael Missing, the name of eleven different young men in various states of unrest, is the linked but unrelated protagonist of these wry and angry tales; a hit man, the cabin boy of 19th century French pirate Jean Lafitte, erstwhile baseball hero and the man who would be President of France, a frustrated salesman who loses an evening with Captain Kirk in the unrequited hope of laying the town slut of Scarsdale.

Readers will shudder as, to their dismay, they recognize themselves, or at least part of themselves, in the naive and angry young man who sincerely wishes things were different, and who regrets he has never overheard someone say, "Michael is a real good guy."

A criminally funny and perceptive literary debut.

 

PRAISE

"Beneath the violence are wise and wryly funny tales of survival. For some readers, the beauty of such images as "I wanted to stifle my old girlfriend to death with the thick yarn of my voice," will not mitigate lurid rapes and murders. But they may, at least, promote interest in this New York City-born author's next move." —Sara Nelson, People Magazine

"I am astonished by this first work of fiction; Missing, we discover, uses words as weapons of survival." —Irving Malin, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Hickins is no moralist. He merely presents to us in fiction the unprovoked, unfocused wrath we increasingly encounter in everyday life." —Rex Roberts, Columbia: The Magazine of Columbia University

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Hickins is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, iUniverse 2000). His own subsequent adventures include helping his wife run an American eatery in La Rochelle, France, and becoming an editor at The Wall Street Journal. His writing includes an essay on foot fetishism in Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex (Bloomsbury, 2009) and the novel Blomqvist (iUniverse, 2007). Excerpts from The What Do You Know Contest have previously been published in semi-obscure literary magazines, MonkeyBicycle, issue #8, and Sententia 3 (Fall 2011). An excerpt of Blomqvist has also appeared in New Dead Families. Hickins lives with his family in New York City.