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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 20 books, starting with Camden Joy’s now cult-classic novel The Last Rock Star Book, or: Liz Phair, a Rant, through to Kill All Your Darlings, a “best of” essay collection from brilliant cultural critic Luc Sante, published in collaboration with the excellent art-music-lit zine YETI. Our most recent titles:

No Certainty Attached, Robert Dean Lurie’s much-anticipated biography of Steve Kilbey and his band, the Church. Details

The Devil's Jump, the second in Peter Doyle's classy crime fiction series, is in bookstores now. Billy Glasheen is on the run from the crims, the cops, and a shady private army. They all think he has what they want, and will kill to get hold of it. Billy doesn’t know what it is . . . but he’d better find it fast. Order now!

collects 215 of Jon Langford’s unique paintings, plus his writings about music and art, and a CD with 18 new recordings of Mekons and Waco Bros classics/rarities, all for $29.95! There are still a few copies of the special edition which includes a limited, signed color print.

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

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."

Luc Sante, Folk Photography
Luc Sante turns his penetrating gaze on the real-photo postcard phenomenon of the early 20th century, revealing the images as much more than depictions of a vanished way of life - they represent a crucial stage in the evolution of photography, possessing a blunt, head-on style that inherits something of the Civil War photographers  plain aesthetic yet also anticipates the work of Walker Evans and other great documentary artists of the 1930s. Combining all his gifts as a chronicler of early 20th-century America, a historian of photography, and a brilliant critic, Sante shows how real-photo postcards offer a revealing "self-portrait of the American nation." Published in association with YETI. details

Forthcoming in 2010:

Two Novels, by Gilbert Rogin
Longtime New Yorker contributor Gilbert Rogin’s two comic masterpieces, What Happens Next? (1971) and Preparations for the Ascent (1980), were published to great acclaim, but subsequently 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. Verse Chorus Press is reissuing the two books in one volume, with a new introduction by Jay Jennings, to coincide with celebrations of Rogin’s 80th birthday.

Nomad Codes: Travels in Modern Esoterica, by Erik Davis. A major collection from a unique writer with a devoted following. The author of the influential Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998) and The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), has gathered a decade's worth of essays for this collection.

• Wild About You : interviews with/photos of '60s garage bands from Australia and New Zealand.

• the Puncture anthology: 60 interviews and features that deliver 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.

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