-Chicago Reader has this to say about Ockert's Rabbit Punches: "Reading Jason Ockert's debut collection, Rabbit Punches (Low Fidelity), is like getting lost on a road trip: you start off fine, following your map, but still somehow wind up in a place you never saw coming. Populated with earnest characters in mainly small-town and southern settings (Ockert was born in Indiana and raised in Florida), the 13 stories are quirky and unsettling, full of unexpected turns. In "Infants and Men" a dictionary salesman promoted to lexicographer has an affair with his boss's wife. He gets amnesia after she kicks him out of a tree house but for decidedly base reasons remains in his boss's family's care; the dialogue of the vocabulary-loving characters is especially funny. In "Some Storm" a young man is trying to find a suitable husband for his pregnant sister. He figures whoever can knock him off a hill in a fight would do, though those who show up to try leave plenty to be desired: "some fathers already, a dog-catcher, a few haggard boys, alcoholics, Uncle Tim." Other stories involve a peanut salesman who becomes a Bible hawker after arm wrestling "a man who may have been Jesus," a golf course mower passing himself off as a toad photographer to land a National Geographic Society gig, and an awkward boy acting on his infatuation with a girl at an annual scarecrow contest. Ockert's characters seem to be longing for someone or something, and while you really pull for them to attain it, they all fall...just...short. "
-Publishers Weekly calls Jason Ockert a writer worth watching in a review of his LoFi collection Rabbit Punches: "Ockert's debut features 13 stories, a host of quirky characters and strange plots grounded in a reality that is as disturbing as it is whimsical. In one story, a young boy feeds ticks into a sleeping child's ear while a man prepares to arm wrestle Jesus. Though Ockert's voice is still developing, his beautiful and unexpected imagery make him a writer to be watched."
-Time Out Chicacgo weighs in on Charles Blackstone's The Week You Weren't Here in a feature article: "There are clever ruminations on conversational silence, left-handed women, college rejection letters and the perfect kiss. Which means that, at its best, The Week You Weren't Here achieves the pitch-perfect sensation of a quirky pop song."
-The New York Times reviews Jonathan Baumbach's On the Way to My Father's Funeral in the Sunday Book Review, April 24, 2005:
"Jonathan Baumbach's retrospective collection showcases more than 30 years of work from an underappreciated writer. Baumbach employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair. The filmmakers, therapists and writers who make up his universe are contrary and hostile (''a little hostility was an attractive quality in a man,'' one character imagines his lover whispering). Yet Baumbach's narrators can also be wryly self-deprecating (''the baby's mother comes into my study and asks if she might interrupt my unproductive selfabsorption for a few minutes''), and at times he puts his formal diction to wonderfully double-edged use, as when a disreputable therapist couches his confession of sex with a patient in professional terminology: ''We used the seldom-used analytic couch for our transaction.'' In his recent stories, Baumbach relies less on the surreal effects he favored in the past, but he remains staunchly independent from the literary mainstream."
-Chicago Reader names Stefan Kiesbye's Next Door Lived a Girl the Critic's Choice: "Small presses have been putting out some really good books lately, and it's often hard for them to get noticed, but Stefan Kiesbye deserves whatever hype he can snag for his debut novella."
-Jonathan Baumbach's On the Way to My Father's Funeral receives a starred review in Kirkus: “A weighty collection brings together artists and writers, along with their analysts and miseries….Work from a master of short fiction.”
-The
Village Voice on Christopher Kennedy: "The irreducibility
of Kennedy’s Trouble With the Machine may be the point:
Prose poems verge on micro-stories, upturning mini-mythologies of
irresolute gods, Aesopean parables, and trivialities etched with the
surety of epitaphs—leading to the overwhelming question: Is
God 'a frail, chain-smoking woman named Jean'?"
-The Believer
declares Christopher Kennedy's Trouble
with the Machine one of the Underappreciated Books of 2003.
Here's what they have to say: "Kennedy's book is the prose counterpart
to David Berman's Silver Jews lyrics. These short pieces (like, half
a page) feature titles such as 'The Drunken American Winter Boat Club'
and 'God Is a Frail, Chain-Smoking Woman Named Jean.' Also like Berman,
Kennedy spins the skewed American cultural landscape into a profoundly
sad, empty, and yet somehow fortifying experience. (How do they do
that?)"
-Check out what Poets
& Writers magazine has to say about Lofi (we think it's
a compliment): "Low Fidelity Press in Brooklyn is a small press
with an attitude. With the release of Christopher Kennedy's book of
prose poems, Trouble With the Machine; a new contest for
best novella, judged by Robert Olmstead; and distribution by Baker
& Taylor and Small Press Distribution, Low Fidelity Press is emanating
enough confidence to support the following description—pumped
with enough testosterone to make Chuck Palahniuk blush—on its
Web site: 'We are Low Fidelity Press. We are the books you hear with
your eyes. We are printed on busted speaker cones. We sound best in
the back seat of your Ford Galaxy 500, V8 cylinder, 428 super cobra
jet, pro-shot 375 horse power engine, cherry fucking red.'"
-The
Village Voice raves about Low Fidelity's debut release: "Jonathan
Baumbach's 10th novel, B, is the book to read if you're sick
of other books, something to beat the worst case of reader's block."
