All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10, a Reader
THE2NDHAND broadsheet was founded in 2000, perhaps the last periodical on earth to be launched without a prefabbed website to bolster its offset-printed pages (though ’twas to follow shortly, publishing flash and serial fiction here weekly from late 2000 on). We mean: THE2NDHAND was a page. A big one — 11×17-inch block of black text peppered variously with photo-illustrations, comics, line drawings, distributed in storefronts first in Chicago, then in an ever-growing list of cities around the U.S. New writing, simply, was its focus from the time editor and publisher Todd Dills founded it in 2000 — a small format its physicality, but a loud mouth and a big heart its most important parts.
All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10 arrived in summer 2011 to celebrate and lay down the best of the mag’s 10+ years of publishing writing by the budding insurgents of the American lit landscape — and others, no doubt. True to form, the book began with a section of new, previously unpublished work.
“When the editors said, ‘Hey, come over here and play with us,’ not only including me in the pages of their marvelous broadside, which crammed a hell of a lot of funky fresh words onto one shiny sheet, but inviting me to participate in literary good times at events around Chicago, I said, ‘Who me?’ and jumped right in.” –Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy to Enter
“Making Chicago as vital as its coastal brothers.” –Chicago Sun-Times, about THE2NDHAND’s erstwhile “So you think you have nerves of steel?” performance series
“Best Lit in Chicago” –New City Chicago
Order All Hands On: THE2NDHAND AFTER 10 via this page.
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The Last Orchard in America, a novel by Michael Peck
In Michael Peck’s first novel, published in 2015, Sue Longtree is too young to be a matriarch, but when she moves to run down the story behind her brother’s suicide, she stands at the top looking down on a family in shambles. The suicide’s hardly a whodunit, as the private dick that Longtree hires, the hero of this noir, Harry Jome, sees it. Or is it? The answer may lie less in a wall’s bloodstains or the cheap framed prints that cover them than in the pages of a manuscript. The hardboiled meta-noir that is The Last Orchard in America channels both the noir genre’s suspense and seaminess, and at once offers an implicit critique of the culture that makes it possible. Order the book via this page.
PRAISE FOR LAST ORCHARD/excerpts/reviews
Vol. 1 Brooklyn: “At once a compelling detective story and a meditation on just what makes a compelling detective story. Surreal, unpredictable, and precisely assembled, this is a head-spinning read.”
A classical story of the damaged damsel limping alongside the recovering rogue toward parts unknown. And while it’s clearly a novel that takes itself seriously, that doesn’t mean the reader is never given a moment of levity, a break from the grim nature of the subject matter: “Anybody who gets his head knocked off by a slow-moving train is challenged in some special way.” It’s the beautiful bastard child of The Long Goodbye, Pulp, and Confederacy of Dunces. –Andrew Armacost, author of The Poor Man’s Guide to Suicide
You know the guy: private gumshoe, buying his pistol back from hock, waiting on a tailor to finish his suit cuffs. You know the city, though here it helps that our hero has the eye of an architecture critic, pacing around the brutalist office blocks, monuments to extortionist drunks. Here daylight comes like “a premature baby — dangled in the trash-filled crevasses … wax[ing] gray and forbidding.” And, yes, you know the genre, but this is noir on noir, cynical to the point of meta-reflection. “Real stories don’t have morals or plots,” our protagonist muses, and real mysteries are just that, jagged-edged puzzle pieces for which, at best, solution is an act of will and denial. After the dame has made her entrance, dripping sex, then gone like “curdled milk on an expensive porcelain saucer” and pulled out her blades and made her exit, all too fast, there:s nothing left but a motel room that smells of death and more liquor on top of the liquor that has already stopped having any kind of effect. The dick picks up the Bible, that “first, monstrous piece of detective fiction,” and a con plot, at that. Peck gives us a world “as wholesome as lice,” in a tone that’s as infectious, inescapable. You’ll be itching through these pages for days after you’re done, thinking back on the images of bridges or lines like this, about death: “Dying is just the fear of dying. I savored and chewed my breath as though it were poisoned oatmeal.” –Spencer Dew, author of Songs of Insurgency, among others
Here’s a book that any avid Law & Order or Dashiell Hammett fan – like my old lady — can get behind: a novel that’s hilariously deadpan noir parody and excellent noir at the same time. It’s like ruddy, half-polished wingtips in the rain, or like a simile. –Jamie Iredell, author of The Book of Freaks
Last Orchard combines the black-hearted noir of our haunted country with more twists and turns than anyone could predict; better yet, in its narrator, Harry Jome, it unleashes a voice as wry, surprising and inventive as any in recent memory. –Peter Rock, author of The Shelter Cycle and My Abandonment
Order Last Orchard via this page.
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All Hands On: A THE2NDHAND Reader
In 2004, THE2NDHAND published the predecessor collection to our 10th-anniversary All Hands On collection. The 2004 collection brought together the best of the broadsheet and online magazine’s first four years’ foray into the literary world, centered in those days in large part in Chicago’s vibrant lit scene. The books features an introduction by Canadian writer and independent publisher Jim Munroe, and stories by dozens of writers, from Joe Meno to the magazine’s editor to stalwarts of those early years such as Joe Jarvis, Eric Graf, Germania Solorzano and many more. Order the book via this page.
THE2NDHAND has been the most exciting literary vessel in Chicago, opening a comfortably padded room for the anecdotal fiction writers and the experimental tale-spinners to play together where no one will get hurt. Read through this collection of four years worth of stories, and you’ll see the line between the two isn’t as clear as all that. And in the way the strongest species survive, it would seem the cross-pollination that happened over the years has strengthened both sides. –PopMatters.com
THE2NDHAND is really about writing…. This is in many ways better than McSweeney’s, and in many more ways better than McDonalds. –Roctober
THE2NDHAND is at the direct center of the underground writing scene in Chicago.” –Chicago Tribune
THE2NDHAND might be a true heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and unlike McSweeney’s, you might be able to afford this one. –Clamor