Saturday, May 27, 2006

Another Upcoming Event . . .



They're coming fast and furious now....I can't even keep up. Some of you may have heard the rumor that FYH was trying to start a monthly art exhibiton program. Well, it's official! Our first monthly exhibit, Sensuality, desire . . . and other warm places: The artistic journey of Rose Henry, features sensuous oil landscapes and bodyscapes created by Rose Henry. Rose's works will be on display at Feed Your Head Books for the entire month of June; the opening reception, which is free and open to the public, will be held on Saturday, June 3 at 7 pm. In Rose's own words:

"By the means of my brushes, some paint and images forever en-grained in my psyche, I attempt to express a variety of emotions ranging from the exhilaration of love, passion, lust, and desire to the depths of despair, hopelessness, and pain, drawing each viewer in for an individual experience hopefully resulting in a personal explosion of emotion. My art is a collage expression of total life experiences. It is the road map of who I am. It is me."

Friday, May 26, 2006

Two New Vegan Lip Balms


We've only been open a couple of months, but it's already become painfully clear to me that the store's bestseller by far are the vegan lip balms by Heather Joy. So I'm happy to announce that we now carry 2 new flavors of Heather Joy's lip balm: The Natural and Clove!

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Stop Faking Me Out...

I was really disappointed by the small turn-out at Susan's reading last night. It's a great book! It had great publicity! What does it take to get you guys in the store? Could it possibly be the latest issues of Kitchen Sink, Bust, Anthem, and Beautiful Decay magazines? Or possibly I Want Everything to be Okay by Carrie McNinch, creator of "The Assassin and the Whiner," and I Wish There Was Something I Could Quit by Aaron Cometbus? I sure hope so because that's what I have to offer...

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Susan Richards will be Reading from Chosen by a Horse Tonight!

Ok. Ok. I know I've already posted about this event, but now it's tonight so I'm entitled to post again, right? Chosen by a Horse is really a great book and everyone should come here Susan read from it. It doesn't matter if you're a horse person; this book is about horses, but more importantly, it's about emotions, and is something everyone can relate to. So come in and check it out!

TONIGHT
Wednesday May 24, 7pm
Feed Your head Books
272 Essex Street
Salem, MA 01970
978-744-4009

Saturday, May 20, 2006

The New Web Site's Live!

I'm soooo psyched! It's taken 2 months, but www.feedyourheadbooks.com finally matches the contents of the store....There's still a little tweaking to be done, but it's live, and that's all that counts...In fact, since this blog is the home page, you meay even be on it as I type...And, if not, check it out. Go!

Friday, May 19, 2006

Used Book Sale--This Sunday!!

At the risk of repeating myself, Feed Your Head Books is having a huuuuge used book sale to benefit MassPAWS this Sunday, May 21, from 10-4. Seriously, there is going to be everything you can imagine here. So far, I've put together boxes featuring romance, foreign language/travel, self-help, contemporary fiction, suspense, home buying/job hunting/finance, classics, women's studies, political commentary....And I know that there are still computer books, plays/theater, pets, health, cooking, and so much more to go...Except for really nice art books, all hardcovers will be $1 and all paperbacks will be 50¢ How can you not at least come check it out??

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

PostQueerProject


Ooops! I totally forgot that I wanted to help spread the word about PostQueerProject because it's awesomely cool....From their website:

The PostQueerProject was started with the idea that every experience is worth acknowledgement. Unfortunately, queer identity and personal experience often goes unacknowledged, so easily swept beneath the blanket of larger pictures and bigger issues.

We want to change that. We want every voice to be heard, every vice exploited, every vision to come to fruition, and we want to collect these multifaceted, multidimensional, cross-cultural fragments of queer identities so as to force that acknowledgement and gain recognition.


Yeah. So. Check. It. Out.

Finally--The Rain Has Stopped!

After a week of continuous rain that has driven me insane, flooded the basement of the store, and, actually made it impossible to even reach the store, we are open and have some new additions to the shop: goodies from Tiny Meat. Yup. There really is a company called Tiny Meat and we've got their goods...I mean products. Specializing in quality vinyl products, Tiny Meat makes some of the cutest wallets around. Here's just a taste of the ones we've got in the store...

Friday, May 12, 2006

Chosen by a Horse


I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but on Wednesday, May 24, at 7 pm, Susan Richards is going to be in the store reading from her new memoir, Chosen by a Horse. Chosen by a Horse covers a year in Richards’s life—a new chapter that opens when Richards is summoned by the SPCA to rescue a horse one bitter March day. Already the proud owner of one mare and two geldings—the diva-like Georgia, the boyish Tempo, and the hopelessly romantic Hotshot—Richards finds herself taking home a skeletal former racehorse, Lay Me Down, and her foal. The wild foal is eventually returned, but Lay Me Down remains with Richards, teaching her courage and kindness, even as Richards’s friend warns her not to anthropomorphize her horses.

“Two kindred spirits find each other in this beautifully written memoir about the human-animal bond.”
—Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

Thursday, May 11, 2006

New Goodies from Fishcakes

Feed Your Head just got in a bunch of the cutest stuff ever from Fishcakes. We got a ton of fun patches featuring monsters saying things like "I Disobey," "I'm Dead," and "Go Away." We also got some really, cute little zines about animals that are great for kids of all ages. And, my personal favorite are teeny monsters in 4 different designs that look kind of like this:

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Used Book Sale to Benefit MassPAWS

On Sunday, May 21, from 10 am to 4pm, we're going to be hosting a huge used book sale to benefit MassPAWS. MassPAWS is a Winthrop-based animal rescue group committed to working on the most compelling animal issues in Massachusetts including the rescue of cats and dogs from life-threatening situations; foster care and adoptions; and humane feral cat management.

All books will be priced from 50 cents (for mass market paperbacks) to $5 (for hardcover coffee table books), and include a wide variety of topics: art, contemporary fiction, classic fiction, feminist theory, computers, cookbooks, crafts, suspense, cultural studies, romance, textbooks, travel guides, plays, parenting, foreign language books, and many, many more. And trust me, people have really gone above and beyond all my expectations in their donations--this will truly be a fabulous sale!

Small Press Night Recap

For those of you who attended the small press extravaganza last weekend, you know that it was a huge success. Roxy from Persephassa Press, Matt from Thieves Jargon Press, and Janaka from Black Ocean were all great presenters and we had a full house! Books published by all three presses are now available in the store, so, if you weren't able to buy something at the event, stop on by.


Thieves Jargon Press's first book is Kittens in the Boiler by Delphine Lecompte is set against a dreary Belgian coast, and the ook is about a young woman and the company she keeps, both on and off the streets. Comedic catastrophe and sexual assassination are afterthoughts for the narrator as she carries her warped neighbor, her sleazy johns and her best friends close to the heart. Kittens in the Boiler is the portrait of a desperate soul staggering on the divide between destruction and deliverance.

Black Ocean has nine books under its belt, and now three of them, Dear Al-Queda, A Useless Window, and Upon Arrival, are in stock at Feed Your Head.

Dear Al-Queda by Scott Creney started as an exercise in social commentary and became much more as the infamous Al-Qaeda soon became Creney’s closest confidante in this accidental memoir of letters to the world’s most notorious terror organization. Creney is apocryphal in his condemnation as he walks with us, and Al-Qaeda, hand-in-hand through each day of trailer-park armageddon and suburban apocalypse. Heart-breaking, hysterical, and outrageous, these letters will leave you gasping. Of the collection, Creney says: “This book is not a political book, or something so dull as ‘anti-republican’ or ‘anti-american.’ This book is anti-everything. Even you. Especially you.”

A Useless Window by Carrie O. Adams and Upon Arrival by Paula Cisewski are both collections of poetry. A Useless Window embodies the title perfectly as it explores the paradox of form and function in life and language. Quiet without being subdued, intelligent without being obtuse, and deeply affecting without resorting to melodrama, this book carries itself into the reader with arresting honesty and simplicity that is at once harsh and elegant. Upon Arrival is the first full-length collection from Cisewski and showcases the best work from this Minneapolis-based poet who has graced the pages of literary journals across the country for the past decade. These poems, full of charm and wit, demonstrate an airy playfulness even as they confront isolation and loss.

And, last, but definitely not least, we have a great selection of handmade artist books produced by Roxanne Carter of Persphassa Press. Too numerous to list here, you'll just have to come by and check them out. I will post a picture, though, just to give you a taste of her work...

There's So Much Going On...

that I don't even know where to begin, so I think I'm going to divide it up into two posts: Upcoming Events and New Stuff in the Store. Over the past couple of weeks, we've gotten a ton of new things in stock. Two of the areas that the store is weak in is our comic selection and our handmade gift-y stuff, so a lot of the new stuff reflects our attempts to build up both these areas.

On the comic front, we just got in a ton of stuff from Mark Todd and Esther Watson. Best known for her comic strip Unlovable, which appears on the back page of every issue of Bust magazine, we got in a bunch of goodies from Esther. Included are the first three, count 'em three, issues of Unlovable and fat packs which include a fat mini of Unlovable, stickers, and more.

And from Mark, we got some really cool stuff that defies categorization. First up is Flip-tard, this really crazy flip book created by Mark and Bwana Spoons of Grass Hut Corp. that allows you to create a bunch of mixed up monsters. Words can not descibe this thing; you really have to see it to believe it. Garbage is another truly unique piece of work. Basically, this is what's in Esther and Mark's garbage can. It's a bunch of stuff that they've collected, cut, and stapled into a zine. Each one's an original and also contains assorted Mark/Esther ephemera like a 1" button. The Pain Tree (and other teenage angst-ridden poetry) is exactly what it sounds like, a collection of 12 different poems, illustrated by Mark, who's also a contributor.

All the from New Zealand, Nut and Bee has sent us a bunch of some of the cutest stuff you'll ever see: sticker sacks featuring "The Moods of Egg," "Elvis of the Wild," and "Gnome Town" and bookplates in two designs: "The Sweater Set" and "Hedgehog, Day and Night." We've also gotten in a ton of fun stuff from FluffyCo., including handscreened vinyl eyeglass sleeves, bag tags, wrist cuffs, and ipod cases. Check it out!