… a valuable book for sound and media scholars, and for anyone interested in how notions of the cinematic extend into today’s vernacular musical practices. ―Carlo Cenciarelli, Lecturer in Music, Cardiff University, UK, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening.

From the publisher: What does it mean when a singing voice is detached from an originating body through recording? And how does this affect consumers of recorded song? This book examines the practice of lipsynching to pre-recorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early cinema through to the current popularity of self-produced internet lipsynching videos. It examines the ways in which we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity.

Merrie Snell’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI and Cimarron Review. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa and, during a lengthy writing hiatus, completed a PhD in music from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Snell’s sound and video installations have exhibited in the UK and Sweden. She lives in England with her husband, dog, and their embarrassment of degrees. Her work has appeared in NER 18.4 and 39.1, in addition to an interview discussing the long interval between the two.

Lipsynching can be purchased from Hart Publishing or your local bookstore.

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These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. —Kazim Ali, judge for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose.

From the publisher: Winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Miracles Come on Mondays begins with a voice—stark, chilling, totally captivating—that searches a barren landscape for a single receptive ear …Penelope Cray creates dark and sometimes darkly funny scenes that most resemble the works of Kafka. Cray’s characters strain against the indifference of everyday life until, too tired to yearn anymore, they begin the systematic work of making their worlds mentally and spiritually tolerable. And yet, somehow, there’s joy. This book asks us to let go of our ideas of sense and replace them with something better, something that somehow makes more sense than sense. Cray has written a debut work of fiction that feels entirely new and deeply true.

Penelope Cray holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home. Three of her pieces were featured in NER 36.4; read her story “Real and True” here, and listen to an oral performance of her story “The Red Painter,” delivered at NER Out Loud here.

Miracles Come On Mondays can be purchased from LSU Press or your local bookstore.

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Barber approaches the scrap heap of common discourse as a connoisseur ready to celebrate the vitality of lexicons and vocabularies so encased in custom and context that everyone else has mistaken them (and by implication the aspects of our lives that they evoke) for dead. —Langdon Hammer, poetry editor of the American Scholar.

From the publisher: In David Barber’s third collection of poetry, the past makes its presence felt from first to last. Drawing on a wealth of eclectic sources and crafted in an array of nonce forms, these poems range across vast stretches of cultural and natural history in pursuit of the forsaken, long-gone, and unsung. Here is the stuff of lost time unearthed from all over: ballyhoo and murder ballad, the lacrimarium and the xylotheque, the Game of Robbers and the Indian Rope Trick, the obsolete o’o, the old-school word hoard, sunshowers and beaters and breaker boys…Reveling in vernacular lingo of every vintage even while brooding on dark ages without end, Secret History chronicles a world of long shadows and distant echoes that bears more than a passing resemblance to our own.

David Barber is the author of Wonder Cabinet and The Spirit Level, which received the Terrence Des Pres Prize from TriQuarterly Books. He is poetry editor of the Atlantic. His poetry has been anthologized in Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Writing, edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and PEN New England. His work has appeared in NER 17.3, 26.2, and 33.4.

Secret History can be purchased from Northwestern University Press or your local bookstore.