VANTABLACK TMB019C ISBN 978-0 -9974578-0-3

AVAILABLE NOW // THIS TITLE IS A LIMITED EDITION 

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What is VANTABLACK? It is Ciona Rouse’s first collection of poems and Third Man Books debut title in the publisher’s new chapbook — think 10" EP as a music analogy — “C" series.  It is Rouse’s quiet music played within the language of her poems waiting to scream. It is the music of place, race, sexuality, home, growing up, being grown. It is everything in the life of a word.

Ciona Rouse is a staple in Nashville's literary scene (you may remember her from our joint event at (OZ Arts for International Women's Day) and we could not be more proud to have her as our pioneer chapbook author. Rouse's debut poetry collection features 17 poems that are thought-provoking—they shake and wake readers and aren't afraid to dive into the deep and dark that is encompassed by the word Vantablack. These limited edition (only 350 made) chapbooks will include a special audio flexi disc postcard of Rouse reading her powerful poem, "On the Sidewalk of Troy, TN, 1904."

We're Going to be Friends TMB017 ISBN 9780996401692

"Possibly the greatest-ever song about childhood BFFs.” — Entertainment Weekly

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-SALE"We're Going to be Friends" is one of The White Stripes most enduring and loved songs. With the help of illustrator Elinor Blake (aka April March), the perennial favorite feels right at home on the page as a children's book. Coming this November, children, adults, and you, too, can join Suzy Lee as she goes to school with her books and pens, looks for bugs, shows and tells, and finds a friend.

• WE’RE GOING TO BE FRIENDS, a new children’s book based on song lyrics from one of the most loved and recognizable songs by THE WHITE STRIPES.

• WE’RE GOING TO BE FRIENDS is the first book by twelve-time Grammy winning musician, actor, and producer JACK WHITE.

• Illustrator ELINOR BLAKE was an animator for The Ren and Stimpy Show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse & more. As a musician, she is known as singer APRIL MARCH, who’s song "Chick Habit" was featured in Quentin Tarantino’s movie Death Proof.

• The original White Stripes song along with new versions by April March and also The Woodstation Elementary School Singers will be included via download with the book.

• WE'RE GOING TO BE FRIENDS will be released on November 7, 2017, just a few months after THE WHITE STRIPES 20th anniversary as a band (July 14, 2017).

"In my favorite picture books text and art feel like they were conceived as one. This book has that quality. The text is the lyrics from the wonderful, now classic song "We're Going To Be Friends" by Jack White. In place of sound and music we have Elinor Blake's pictures. These images surprise and delight and have a genuine and rare timelessness, I can easily visualize this charming creation sitting snug between books by Robert McCloskey and Garth Williams on any bookshelf both past and present."   — Tony Fucile, Animator, Finding Nemo, The Lion King 

"I am a big fan of classic children’s book illustrations and an even bigger fan of Elinor Blake. I’m also a huge fan of pure Rock and Roll so naturally I’m a dedicated Jack White fan. Jack has written a perfect story and Elinor’s art is enchanting. It harkens back to 1940s Golden Books. Read it while listening to either Jack or Elinor sing the story. It’s a sonic/optic treat.” — John Kricfalusi, The Ren and Stimpy Show — John Kricfalusi, The Ren & Stimpy Show

The Blue Series Book: The Story Behind the Color, Volume One TMB016 ISBN 9780996401647

 As featured on The Beats 1 broadcast: listen to Blue Series producer, Jack White, the book's author/editor, Ben Blackwell, and Third Man Books chief editor, Chet Weise, in conversation about the Blue Series book!

I love great books about records: ripping yarns about everything that happened on the way to my stereo, with no minutiae too small to matter. The Blue Series: The Story Behind the Color is the tale, in depth, behind every Blue single. – David Fricke, Rolling Stone

The Blue Series: The Story Behind the Color, Volume One standard edition is now available for pre-order from Third Man Books. The standard edition is 282 pages of behind-the-scenes stories, information, and interviews about the Blue Series singles. This hardcover book also includes a 7" of unreleased Blue Series session songs by First Aid Kit and Gibby Haynes (Butthole Surfers) on black vinyl manufactured at Third Man Pressing, a ten song sampler of Blue Series music curated by the book's editor Ben Blackwell, Foreword by award-winning Rolling Stone music journalist David Fricke, and exclusive interviews with Beck, Courtney Barnett, Stepehn Colbert, Insane Clown Posse, Wanda Jackson, Kate Pierson, Dexter Romweber, Jack White, Dwight Yoakam, and more.

As the brainchild of Jack White, the Blue Series started in tandem with Third Man Records, White’s Nashville-based record label founded in 2009. Built on the simple premise of 7” 45rpm singles all recorded in the same studio, with the same producer (White), with photos taken in the same locale (Third Man Records’ onsite Blue Room) and manufactured at the same pressing plant (United Record Pressing), a stone’s throw from TMR’s offices) the resultant 40 singles impressively run the gamut of artists and styles. Whether it’s the wildly popular like Beck, the classic veteran Tom Jones, the character Stephen Colbert, the polarizing Insane Clown Posse, or previously unknown performers making their debut releases, the Blue Series is the perfect snapshot of what Third Man, and by extension Jack White, have focused on and championed for the past seven years.

The Standard Edition will be available at a bookstore near you on June 6.

Blue Series Photographer Jo McCaughey and Editor Ben Blackwell

 * Includes extensive interview with Jack White covering the span of the Series, musicians involved, recording techniques, and the direct influence of the Series on his own career.

* Interviewees include Stephen Colbert, Dwight Yoakam, Courtney Barnett, Kate Pierson, Wanda Jackson, Insane Clown Posse, First Aid Kit, Mildred and the Mice, Dex Romweber, Lillie Mae, Ruby Amanfu and more Blue Series artists.

 * In these exclusive interviews, artists describe their Blue Series recording experience in a behind-the-scenes look at their own creative process and the creative process of producer Jack White. The immediacy of the recordings and unusual circumstances create stories rife with insight and interesting moments.

 * Features unseen photos of the artists, including Jack White, plus an interview with principle photographer Jo McCaughey.

 * A sample playlist of Blue Series songs  curated by editor Ben Blackwell will be included via download card.

 * Foreword written by David Fricke, who is one of the most recognizable names in music  journalism. Mr. Fricke witnessed the Dungen Blue Series session and is the only journalist who has been in the studio during one of the recordings.

 * Preface by TMR co-founder Ben Blackwell. The book also features contributions from TMR co-founder, Consigliere Ben Swank, long-time TMR Queen of Hearts Bonnie Bowden, and TMB editor Chet Weise.

* Over 100,000 copies of Blue Series 7" vinyl singles have been sold with digital streams and downloads combined actual consumption is over 1 million

* Artists covered in the book include best sellers such as Beck, Tom Jones, Brittany Howard (Alabama Shakes), and others.

* Grammy winning and multi-platinum musician Jack White produced every session.

mary wants to be a superwoman TMB015 ISBN 978-0-9964016-1-6

"People still sing goddamn it. Praise be to erica lewis." 

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Third Man Books is very happy to release erica lewis' new book of poems mary wants to be a superwoman. The notes are letters, the sounds are words, the rhythm in the breaks, the book is playing music on the page, it's right next to our turntable, Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder shaking the room. Wonder plays a part in every poem, but he sits in the background, providing the groove with his keys, the lead is taken by lewis's mother, mary, and lewis' family, her friends, fellow poets, the world around her, all the struggles and triumphs, all in the key of life.

Being of black, Native American, and white descent, poet erica lewis’ mary wants to be a superwoman recounts her family’s history, their voices within that history — especially the women on her mother’s side — and her friends’ complex history with race, gender, and class in America, what it means to live with your own history, dealing with a history that has been passed down, and how to move on from that history and its implications.

It is lewis’ take on revising the confessional while taking inspiration from her family’s own oral history. Each poem is also framed by phrases from the lyrics of Stevie Wonder’s Motown records, but the poems are not “about” the actual songs, but what is triggered when listening to or thinking about the music. What happens when you take something like a pop song and turn it in on itself, give it a different frame of reference, juxtapose the work against itself, against other pop music, and bring it into the present. mary wants to be a superwoman is the second book of the box-set trilogy; daryl hall is my boyfriend (Barrelhouse, 2015) is the first.

A SPECIAL EDITION IS AVAILABLE HERE

praise for erica lewis:

erica lewis' poems map the relationships among music, memory, place, and the passage of time . . . . By intertwining the public and the personal, Lewis's poems become a membrane through which pop culture permeates the most intimate experiences of selfhood — Publisher's Weekly

Every word is held accountable and must carry a sort of gravitas. For all the white space and sparse lines, what remains in the gaps after all the excess has been chipped away is striking. lewis manages to strip language down not to its bare bones, but the particulate marrow contained therein. — The Rumpus

mary wants to be a superwoman is a tapestry of woven continuums. Its images contain a methodical new naturalism where one’s past is the frontier, alternating with the brutal urgency of a witness who would save your life. erica lewis’ poems investigate the practice of identity and the sums of nonlinear biographies. Like a relaxed musician, she has the small secrets of the day at her fingertips. —Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Someone’s Dead Already

This book made me suck my teeth and say goddamn, and yes, and thank you. This book hit me right in the ancestors, spoke to me like a sister. erica lewis is aware that time is fiction, in a way that only black women know. A collage of music and memories, language that's lived before, people we carry and people we try to forget, causes and effects, the proverb that "everything is everything." This work is both archival and built from scratch. It's a stunning altar to the past, a balm for the present, and a prayer for what will be . — Morgan Parker, author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night

This is what it sounds like when a sparrow sings Stevie Wonder, when it casts a lariat around your wits, when it wears all its shit at once, grinds and prays and dances in the overdub till the rain falls upward, being the blues itself, being gospel sung straight into the mouth of the sun, a thrall to love in three-four time. — Julian Brolaski, author of Advice for Others 

Open this book and hear the needle drop on the vinyl, the soft crackling surrounding lewis' voice sing her stitched song of longing, love, & pain, heavily sampled with old soul, voiceless ghosts, and the disquieting hum of her living history and ancestors:  “we are beautiful and powerful / some things i know for sure / the story of our love / the place i want to take you / after midnight / when the train comes i will hold you / to find my way back home.” From poem to poem, lewis lyrically invents a new music to survive the present with its “blue notes that didn't exist before,” and reckon with the past: whiskey and jewels, friendship and fucking, “old blues to cover the new blues.” Like a dream turned inside-out, mary wants to be a superwoman is vivid, raw, and real, and will make you wanna cry and sing: “when the sky / is pink / with history / and yes / we will set sail / and smoke out / desperate fires / with these wings / and endless rain.” People still sing goddamn it. Praise be to erica lewis. — Sampson Starkweather, author of PAIN: The Board Game

When the World Wounds TMB012 ISBN 978-0-9913361-5-9

INTRODUCING THIRD MAN BOOKS FIRST BOOK OF FICTION!

SPECIAL EDITION NOW AVAILABLE HERE 

WHEN THE WORLD WOUNDS, A NEW COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES BY AWARD WINNING AUTHOR KIINI IBURA SALAAM

"Transformative, wise and vivid with the quality of fantasy and fable."
—Sheree Renée Thomas, editor Dark Matter

"Kiini Ibura Salaam’s short stories (and the characters who inhabit them) are vital, fantastic in all senses of the word, audacious and tender."
—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Stranger Things Happen

Excited is not the right word, maybe it's ecstatic, or maybe it's an otherworldy word that we have yet to experience, but might discover while exploring all the worlds and beings in Kiini Ibura Salaam's collection of speculative fiction short stories, When the World Wounds. In this eagerly-awaited collection, Kiini Ibura Salaam continues her exploration of the dark, the sensual, and the mysterious with fiction that disturbs, delights, and dazzles. The five stories and one novella collected in When the World Wounds examine the tumultuous nature of the human condition through such wild imaginings as sensual encounters with deer, escapism in a dystopian prison, and volcano women. In “The Taming,” a lupine creature is trapped by beasts whose nefarious nature is beyond their prey’s understanding. In “Hemmie’s Calenture,” a woman escaping enslavement is thrust into a war between gods. “The Pull of the Wing” is the prequel to Salaam’s wildly popular "Of Wings, Nectar, and Ancestors" trilogy. “Because of the Bone Man” transports readers to the desolate landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans and the struggle of the city’s culture bearers to carry on. A welcome follow-up to Salaam’s award-winning Ancient, Ancient, When the World Wounds is perceptive and engaging as it examines our world’s callous and perilous landscapes while tickling the imagination and startling the senses.

Street Date November 1 // AVAILABLE NOW!

My Dinner With Ron Jeremy TMB010 ISBN 978-0-9913361-4-2

"More than anything, DeColo's fearless new poems grapple with the complicated here and now, full of, as she writes, 'a tenderness that wrecks me.'"—Keetje Kuipers, Author of The Keys to the Jail

"The poems in Kendra DeColo’s extraordinary second collection, My Dinner With Ron Jeremy, live in the sinuous space between want and propriety, fantasy and the 'Must Be 18’ button.”—Adrian Matejka, Author of The Big Smoke, a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

SPECIAL EDITION NOW AVAILABLE HERE

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Third Man Books is ready to take sides, and we’re choosing Nashville poet Kendra DeColo. Her new book, My Dinner With Ron Jeremy, is unlike any other in its vulnerability and absolute fearlessness. Described by some as “erotica for feminists,” and “enemy to family values,” DeColo’s poems convulse with desire and a longing for connection. Her work speaks to the particular loneliness of watching Fox News after you’ve masturbated too many times, depleted and filled with fascination and terror. Balancing tenderness with ferocity, cynicism with wonder, DeColo’s poems disrupt and reclaim misogynistic language, creating a lyricism that dazzles and swoons, hoping to leave a stain deep enough to last. As DeColo says, “I wrote this book during my pregnancy, while watching the Republican nomination unfold. I wrote it for my 14-year-old self, smoking Parliaments and reading Anais Nin on the floor at a Violent Femmes show. I wrote it for the 27-year-old me who got sober. Most of all, I wrote it to combat the reductionist and nihilist vision of certain politicians that seeks to numb and disempower us through the corruption of language. I hope that my poems go out into the world swinging both fists, ready to take on this demagoguery and twist it into something profane and beautiful.” Third Man Books is ready to send those poems out to fight. We’ll be swinging both fists, kicking both feet, and using our teeth to put these very important, beautiful poems of self and the political out into the world.

Praise and articles about My Dinner With Ron Jeremy:

 "Marvelous poetry … poems that would make great feature films.”—Ron Jeremy, Actor

HERE'S A VIDEO:

* A review at The Nashville Scene.
"Sex-positive feminist verse... DeColo manages to coax beauty and meaning from the absurd aching morass of human existence. It’s not every writer who can emerge from these corners with anything approaching grace, much less deft and bracing poems such as these."—The Nashville Scene

* An interview with Bitch Magazine.
"[DeColo's] work is ferocious and tender, demolishing patriarchal language and using the fragments to build riotous new worlds."—Bitch Magazine

* An essay at VIDA:Women in Literary Arts
“...my book is neither pro- nor anti- pornography. Rather, it uses pornography as a starting point to talk about sexuality, agency, and identity; the poems about pornography set adjacent to poems about motherhood, coming of age, and politics.” —Kendra DeColo

* A soundtrack for the book at Large Hearted Boy.
"My Dinner with Ron Jeremy is engaged in perpetual conversation with music and the refuge of fandom. It's a coming-of-age book as well as a book about motherhood; a bridge of recovery and reckoning connecting the themes. . . .The book is a mix-tape I made for my 14-year-old self, proof that she would grow up to be someone who doesn't apologize for who she is, especially her love of pop music."—Kendra DeColo