so it seems right to us to use super text-heavy mode (against every web designer’s advice) to tell you about them. Rising from the ashes of indie-rock magazine Puncture, Verse Chorus Press has now published close to 30 books, starting with Camden Joy’s now cult-classic novel The Last Rock Star Book, or: Liz Phair, a Rant, through to two books by cultural critic Luc Sante, published in collaboration with the excellent art-music-lit zine YETI. Some of our recent titles:

Wild About You! The Sixties Beat Explosion in Australia and New Zealand. The outpouring of rock’n’roll in '60s Australia and New Zealand produced such iconic bands as the Easybeats, the Masters Apprentices, and the Missing Links, but also many lesser-known bands who created music of enduring power.Wild About You! has them all. There are chapters on 35 key bands, along with authors Ian D. Marks and Iain McIntyre's list of the top 100 beat and garage songs of the period. Profusely illustrated and with a detailed discography, this is the definitive account of a unique time in rock history. details/order

What Happens Next? & Preparations for the Ascent, by Gilbert Rogin. Longtime New Yorker contributor Gilbert Rogin’s two comic masterpieces were published to great acclaim in the 1970s, but then fell out of print. Thirty years later, his stylish humor and keen observation seems completely fresh - and more in line with the tastes of a generation raised on Seinfeld and Mad Men. Both novels in one volume. details/order

Check out our complete catalog, which includes biographies of AC/DC legend Bon Scott, The Church, and The Go-Betweens, novels by Stacey Levine, Susan Compo, and John Dixon, and a wickedly funny and smart cartoon history of rock. Also: an expanded edition of Inner City Sound, the legendary, photo-packed history of Australian punk and post-punk.

We’re also proud to offer you DeFord, by David Shetzline -- a modern fiction classic. Shetzline was part of a Cornell circle that included Richard Fariña and Thomas Pynchon, who called DeFord "an extraordinary book . . . comic; and impassioned; and always deeply moving."

boneyard, by Stephen Beachy. Among the advance raves for this novel: "Existentially profound and emotionally dangerous . . . Read this and know how fiction can be a discovery” (Lonely Christopher); "In this sly, endlessly surprising collaboration with a troubled Amish persona and his skeptical (self?)-editor, Beachy exalts and simultaneously deconstructs the tradition of the literary hoax. The result is mythic, manic, and amazing” (Michael Lowenthal). details/order (and watch a ten-minute video about boneyard)

Jon Langford’s new collection of paintings, writing, and music, Skull Orchard Revisited, grew out of his long unavailable solo debut album and offers a personal account of the South Wales he grew up in and left. For the CD available exclusively in this book, Jon returned to those lost recordings and radically revised them, with the aid of the Burlington Welsh Male Chorus. He illustrated the lyrics in a set of specially created “song paintings,” and the book also includes many more paintings, an A to Z of South Walian culture and history (both personal and general) by brother (and acclaimed SF writer) David, photographs by their father, Denis Langford, and Jon’s first published story, a witty, dystopian tale about a whale and a dolphin. details/order

Books for 2o12 include: a reissue of Stacey Levine's contemporary classic novel, Dra- (January); crime fiction from Peter Doyle and G.S. Manson (May); Temperature's Rising: an oral and visual history of Galaxie 500, in conjunction with YETI (June); and Now Is the Time To Invent, the long-promised Puncture anthology, 60 interviews and features that offer a unique account of the evolution of indie rock in the 1980s and 1990s, from Throwing Muses and Camper Van Beethoven to Neutral Milk Hotel and Sleater-Kinney; and much more (August) . . .

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