The Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses haven’t bought into that date, so why should we?

The  2012 catalogues for Feral House and Process Media prove that we are optimistic enough to believe that technology will not totally fail, and that people will be functional enough to spend time reading books, both in their Gutenberg-style physical form as well as the etheric bytes that can be downloaded and read on a Kindle device or iPad.

Feral House’s  2012 catalogue has just appeared, and is easily downloaded from the home page HERE.

Both Feral House and Process Media catalogue are also available in their physical form, and we’d be happy to snail mail them to you if you send your requests to info@feralhouse.com.

We are excited about many of the titles that will soon be published, so have a look!

With all our beast wishes,

Have a Feral Year!

After Feral House released Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., in 1992, many readers got quite excited. Practically nothing was actually known about Wood’s life; author Rudolph Grey spent more than a decade tracking down the amazing stories, and I helped Rudolph stitch them together as an oral biography in the style of Edie. Richard Corliss wrote a full page appreciation in Time magazine. A hundred ‘zines did Ed Wood appreciations. Rhino released videos of Wood’s oeuvre. Documentary films were made, and producers, actors, and writers called Feral House frequently asking about rights.

The most persistent caller was Denise DiNovi, trying to secure rights for Tim Burton. Unlike most Hollywood projects, what became the Ed Wood film shot up to the head of the list, a big NY agent negotiated rights for us, and author Rudolph Grey made a small bundle. For reasons unknown, we were told that the screenwriters insisted that we not receive front credits. After Ed Wood was released we discovered that the “Based Upon Nightmare of Ecstasy” credit was shifted to the very end of the end credits, near the crewmen who provide the toilet facilities.

Press material released by the studio had screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander discussing how they did the true research for the movie. The Feral House book was disguised by its non-significance in the credits and this promo material.

Just after Ed Wood was filmed, Larry Karaszewski flew up to Portland, and bought lunch for me and my ex, Lisa Everett. At that lunch I could do nothing but talk about a subpoena I had just received from Larry Flynt’s people regarding an article I had written for Hustler magazine about all the “How To Kill” books. An Oklahoma district attorney blamed my article for inspiring the killing of a five-year-old boy. This DA circulated the subpoena to right-wing “journalists” nationwide, and as a result my article and Larry Flynt became a small cause celebre in the right-wing press. Eventually it was discovered that the DA’s info was entirely false, and the threatened trial was shut down. Some months later Karaszewski and his partner Scott Alexander wrote the film The People Vs. Larry Flynt.

Another coincidence, and yet one more to come.

When we released the Ed Wood book, I wrote a creepy cover story for The San Diego Reader about the Keanes, the progenitors of the kitschy Big Eye art that was hugely famous in the ’60s, and the dispute that got them in court. I was really pleased with myself for securing crazy interviews and court transcripts. Margaret Keane was a painfully nice woman who sent me personally inscribed Jehovah’s Witness books while the 70-something Walter Keane strangely made passes at my girlfriend and tried to give me tips on oral sex. Later Walter claimed that the “Citizen Keane” story I wrote was the result of being paid off “at least a  million dollars” by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It seems that my Keane article started a wave of interest. Juxtapoz magazine reprinted the article and it later appeared in my collection called Cult Rapture.

A huge question was how to fit all the titles and covers into a 16-page Feral House catalogue and 8-page Process Media catalogue.  The answer for the FH catalogue was this: to simply list titles, author info, trim size, and ISBN numbers for several dozen backlist titles, with the hope that interested parties will browse our website for further information.

We also wanted to address the issue of publishing’s expansion into eBooks and print-on-demand. As we mentioned in the catalogues, “Like an overweight Kiwi bird, the digital age has landed awkwardly on the publishing world, and after initial resistance we’ve decided to convert most Feral House titles into electronic books readable by Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other eBook devices. You can find and order them on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and elsewhere, including Apple’s iBookstore.”

In the future we would like to develop apps for books, so that we can address the best aspects of digital integration. But if you want a toteable Kindle version of any of our books, this is indeed possible.

Feral House’s first print-on-demand book is now available: The Manson File: Charles Manson as Revealed in Letters, Photos, Stories, Songs, Art, Testimony, and Documents. This is the first title in Feral House’s new Resurrection series, created to bring in demand and previously out of print books back into the hands of readers. Now anyone can order The Manson File HERE.

The Manson File was originally released in 1988 by Amok Press, a now-defunct company of mine, in which I teamed with Kenneth Swezey, who later published as Blast Books with his mate Laura Lindgren. The Manson book led me into addressing cult phenomena in an unorthodox way. I asked myself whether we all needed another moral lesson, as if any reader really needed to know that killing is wrong? Or a perspective from a District Attorney climbing the ranks, or a cult member looking for a lighter prison sentence? Could we learn more from the cult itself in unapologetic terms?  The Manson File offers that different perspective.

The new Process Media and Feral House titles will be posted quite soon. Keep an eye out!

Feral Wishes,

Adam Parfrey

Friends were calling my attention to various YouTube posts from various countries that present strange and unsettling boomy and distant sounds. Pranksters love posting things like this to laugh at the gullibility of the public.

I now gladly add to this virus.

Here are some of the posts:

A roundup of strange sounds internationally

An aficionado of ancient prophecy ejaculates his thoughts

Believers of the apocalypse think they’ve heard the trumpets calling Revelation

A conspiratorial and also Christian skeptic mulls over the possibilities

A news program on a Costa Rica television station reports this as high news

I think we’ll be getting a lot more of this kind of thing this year. The Mayan prophecy calls!

Read more about the Feral House publication Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman here.

Read the director of AJM’s introduction here: AJM_Funnyman_Activity_Sheet

Read more about the exhibit below!

Super Silly!
Superman Creators’ Funnyman Fights Crime with Shtick
January 10–March 28, 2012
Fine Perlow Weis Gallery
The Anna L. and Irene V. Caplan Exhibit

Photo Gallery

Opening Reception: January 14, 6 pm
Jews, Humor and Funnyman presentation by Funnyman expert Mel Gordon, UC Berkeley
FREE
Reception sponsored by Miriam and Jim Leib

Press Release 

A buffoonish crime fighter who uses wit and gags for weapons, Funnyman is the antithesis of noble Superman. Ironically, not only were both created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster but the duo created Funnyman on the heels of Superman. Made in theirs and actor Danny Kaye’s image, Funnyman’s Jewishness comes from an inherent essence rather than from Jewish characteristics derived from stereotypes. On display for the first time ever, Super Silly is comprised of 50 original Funnyman comic storyboards.

Does it matter that images are reproduced much more sharply on a book than a computer screen?

Has it made much of a difference to the public-at-large that listening to an MP3 file rather than a live performance is like listening to sewage in a tunnel rather than a rushing river?

Like many other publishers, Feral House and Process Media don’t want to appear like killjoys and have given into the ebook hype. Many of our titles are now available for a wide variety of E-Book devices in formats like ePub, PDF and Kindle-friendly PRCs. And the selling point of the Kindle and other devices is the ability of the reader to reformat their reading material, which is all well and good for text-only books, but for tomes meticulously formatted by designers for printed books, the ebooks can look crushingly wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, it makes perfect sense to have some ebook device for the purpose of wasting one’s time on throw-away novels, or often changing travel guides. Better bits and bytes than crushed trees for this sort of thing. It makes sense to me that the best-selling ebooks are genre fiction: romances, mysteries, detective novels.

Does anyone know or care that supposedly innovative and progressive Apple corporation refuses to carry ebooks like Feral House’s Voluptuous Panic, which can otherwise be found in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum? Perhaps that’s all for the best. The 9 x 12 sized Voluptuous Panic should really be seen in printed offset form.

I’m curious to see when people finally give up on the antiquated form of the printed book.

On this same day seven Republicans appearing in the final flatulent “debate” prior to the Iowa election argued for the mega-inflation of military expenditures. Apparently a thousand dollar wrench is more necessary than social security  or medicare.

Welcome to the Police State my friends. And may I refer you to the Updated and Expanded Edition of Getting Out: Your Gude to Leaving America, which is going to the printer next week.http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Out-Leaving-Expanded-Self-reliance/dp/1934170291/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Check out the first edition HERE

Rumored to come:

Tony Millionaire, Mel Gordon, Martin Olson, Maja D’Aoust, Jodi Wille, and the Feral Man in the Feral Land.

Hope to see you there!

More info HERE

RSVP to the Facebook event HERE

Purchase On Demand Here

The Manson File caused a sensation when it first appeared in 1988 under the Amok Press imprint. Never before had uncensored source material from the Family itself become available in a commercially distributed book.

Now, under Feral House’s Resurrection series, here’s the entirety of a long out-of-print book, complete with Manson’s letters, spells, curses, artwork, lyrics, stories, and an essay on the power of evil, intended not for the public, but to influence his circle of followers. A picture emerges of what it was like to be part of Charles Manson’s Family, and the process of conversion to Mansonism.

Here are rare photos, revelations by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sandra Good, an examination of Manson’s ATWA ecological organization, and links to revolutionary right-wing factions and Libya’s Colonel Khaddafy. Included is an annotated bibliography, anecdotes, death certificates, bizarre coincidences, and obscure but pertinent facts that provide the keys to unlock further unsolved mysteries.