Most coverage of the press around underground poster boy John Wray paints the 37 year-old as a roguish, self-indulgent author. The unorthodox approach he takes to promotion provides his books with talking points beyond their literary laurels. His stunts continue this week with a YouTube video starring him and friend Zach Galifianakis, promoting the paperback release of Wray’s third book, Lowboy. But the inflated treatments of Wray’s endorsement capers don’t give the author fair shake for being a modern literary pragmatist, infusing both his work and promotions for them with only what is required to get his point across. Read more

ZACHARY GERMAN IS sitting at a table in the back of Coffee Time.The cafe is on the corner of Bleecker Street and Bowery. Zachary has short brown hair and is wearing oversized glasses and a tie underneath a sweater. He is drinking an iced soy latte. Its 5 oclock. Read more Read it in print

This debut collection follows a single narrator through nine stories and 30 years as the world worsens and deteriorates.. Read more Read it in print

At first glance, the premise of cartoonist and author Ted Rall’s autobiographical graphic novel The Year of Loving Dangerously reads like pure porno fantasy. After being kicked out of Columbia University, dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his job all in a matter of weeks, a broke and homeless Rall found a creative way to ensure a roof over his head throughout the summer of 1984: bedding a bevy of Manhattan women. Actually making it work proved a complicated mixture of carnal delights and desperation. Read more Read it in print

Whereas Illinois native Joshua Ferris, author of the award-winning debut novel Then We Came to the End, voluntarily relocated to New York, the protagonist of his thoughtful and unsettling second novel, The Unnamed, finds that a force beyond his control governs his physical movement. New Yorker Tim Farnsworth is a happily married father of one, and a full partner in a prestigious law firm.Yet when a strange affliction of which he has suffered two bouts in the past returns, this time for good, he must grapple with “the enormity of a crumbling life.” Read more Read it in print

The photographer, painter and New York native explores the fuzzy world of dogs and hairy men in this photo collection.. Read more Read it in print

Dance of Days, Mark Anderson and Mark Jenkins’ two-decade history of punk rock in Washington, D.C. was first released in 2001 and quickly became a touchstone in the realm of such books. Now, almost nine years later, the duo has updated the book for the second time (another edition was published in 2003 and this one is out on Brooklyn’s own Akashic Books) with new chapters and updates on the city’s punk rumblings since the book’s original release. Read more

This debut novel tells the story of Ja Feng, who is arrested in Maoist China, locked away in solitary confinement and then released into the world a broken, shattered man, where he attempts to reclaim his life.. Read more Read it in print

Mickey Leigh may have slept with Joey Ramone, but it was nothing special. Joey snored and he hogged the sheets. But they were only sleeping and Joey was there to comfort Mickey, who was having a nightmare—the two are brothers after all. Read more

Lots of great ideas start with a night of heavy drinking—it’s the actual execution that normally suffers. Not so for Hard Case Crime. Charles Ardai and Max Phillips founded the Upper West Side-based publishing house to reintroduce readers to the hardboiled crime fiction of pulp novels five years ago after a night at the bar turned their typical discussion of a mutual love for the genre into plans for a pulp publishing company. Read more