Coming Soon: ‘Youth in The City’ Illustrated Edition

 

 

Arriving in July 2016 is the Evil Tender release ‘Youth in The City: Various Small Fictions‘, a collection of short stories with illustrations by UK based artist Thomas Danthony. 

An edition of the book was released in late 2014 with the hope of an illustrated edition. This latest release is that hope taking shape. Danthony was up for the project and set out to enhance the reader’s experience, tapping into the themes and mood of the book. The stories gain added depth with the artwork at their side and as the author of the book I am privileged to say that Danthony showed me what I could only imagine. Part fragmented novella and part chapbook, now with the addition of Danthony’s illustrations ‘Youth in The City‘ takes on a graphic novel sheen.

Here are a few reviews for the first edition, via Amazon —

“A beautiful, lyrical danse macabre, filled with strange and lovely characters. Loved it.”

“Abrupt and sweet like cotton candy surrounding razor blades, or maybe the other way round. It tasted like my first beer. Try it. The brevity of the stories gives you just a taste of what’s in the author’s mind, like a Jolly Rancher hard candy.”

“This book of short stories is truly experimental literature – and it is refreshing to read work that is this unique, challenging our manner of thinking, asking us to relinquish credibility or the attempt to tie everything together into a cohesive whole. Some readers may get lost too early in settling in with this book, but others will become excited not only with the strange tales offered by a multitude of narrators over a couple pages until we bump into the next observer of mankind and scoop us up in another strange encounter.”

Here is an excerpt from the short story ‘Astra‘ —

“She lived in cosmic language. In unknown and haunted mouth speak. In the bedroom she was a blur of oiled hair and blood, milked skin and arms of muscled rope. Fury distilled and made tangible. This wasn’t love, no. This was a great and wide-eyed drunkenness on the female existence in general and all of the hallowed places her summer’s sweat can pool and dry. This was living, high, inches from death.

After weeks together I woke to find that she had deleted herself from my phone. Pure name removal with all sequences of numbers deleted. A note gave a new address and a new phone number, but the address left behind ended up being an abandoned warehouse and the phone number rang in an echoed void. All I wanted to know was how much time she had spent researching warehouse locations. Had she sought out the perfect venue to act as her final words? Was it supposed to tell me something?

This is me. This is you. Us, together. Left behind. Shattered. Our lives an unwanted and unusable landscape.”

 

With a scheduled release date of July 22nd for San Diego Comic Con, the book will be in hand with giveaways happening via the ETDC social media feeds, so for those interested keep up on the ETDC Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages for a chance to win a free copy of the book.

 

‘Youth in The City’ Illustrated Edition is currently ‘Coming Soon’ in the ETDC Shop.