Thursday 6 August 2009

Presented Without Comment

A self-published book:



An Amazon review of same: "This is the tale of three African American horses (Latawnya, Latoya and Daisy), who leave the stable and get drugs from four white horses (Connie, Chrystal, Jackie and Angie). It is a timely and poignant tale that will leave you laughing, crying, and making scary noises. It starkly and accurately presents the real dangers horses in black neighborhoods face from Caucasian equine drug pushers."

An excerpt from same:



Other self-published works by this author:




The 'product description' of the first of these books: "Ricky is a cool worm who knows how to skate. He is very famous for his figure eight. Ricky meets a skating worm named Willie who thinks he is so great. Willie brags to Ricky about being the best skater of the figure eight. Ricky is a skating pro. This is something he lets everyone know. Ricky and Willie have a skateboard race. They intend to find out who will win first place. They exercised to make them healthy and strong. They know if they continue exercising, they cannot go wrong. Mr. Ted and Little Ed are on the way to the big skateboard race. They are going to cheer and shout for Ricky to win first place. Everyone who heard about the race is going to the race. They want to cheer and shout for their favorite friend to win first place. The race took place with a big crowd. Everyone cheered awful loud."

A link to the full Latawyna here.

A link to an excerpt from Spicy True Stories, Investigators Lies, Slanders And Stocks here.

12 comments:

John Self said...

"Posted by JRSM at 10:11 PM
Labels: awful, POD"

Presented without comment indeed! You scoundrel!

Alan said...

I'd seen Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say 'No' to Drugs before: it certainly is something. My favourite thing about it was an Amazon review that called it 'a tour de horse'.

Ian Koviak said...

I need to buy that first one ASAP. I have a crisis on my hand here...

Neffits. said...

I actually own a copy of Latawnya the Naughty Horse. Only later did I realize that the title page is autographed by Ms. Scott Gibson herself...

JRSM said...

Signed copies of 'Latawnya' are selling for US$150 online--given that nobody would pay anything for something I wrote, I feel rather less smug now.

Bob Fingerman said...

A friend of mine used to work for a vanity press called Vanguard. He collected some of their more outlandish titles and I seethed with envy (he did this before we met, otherwise I'm sure he'd have snagged me copies, too). Some were the most inspired lunatic outsider "art" ever. Really mind-blowing stuff. If I can persuade him to scan or photograph some of the covers I'll send them to you.

JRSM said...

That would be brilliant! Thank you--some of these things have the sort of mentally unhinged quality you couldn't imagine before seeing them.

Bob Fingerman said...

One of the books this friend had was called Tongue House. If that title doesn't grab you, nothing will.

I sent him an email to see if he'd oblige. Let's hope.

Bob Fingerman said...

I got the name wrong. Not Vanguard. Vantage.

JRSM said...

I tried looking for a cover of 'Tongue House' online, but no luck. I can't imagine what it would look like.

Steerforth said...

Wonderful. I wish I could remember he self-published horse story I stocked a few years ago - the cover looked as if someone had dropped some acid and the plot was utterly bizarre.

The one thing I miss about working in a bookshop is having mad people trying to sell me their ridiculous, self-published books.

JRSM said...

I suppose one "advantage" of the new advances in self-publishing is that demented self-published books will now never disappear. They'll always be lurking on some Lulu-style server somewhere out there, at least until nuclear war or the Y3K bug get them.