South of the Pumphouse Format: Paperback

A debut novel from the art-rock pioneer and frontman of Primus, Les Claypool.

“[Claypool’s] characters’ escalating savagery culminates in a satisfyingly unsettling conclusion.” ―Publishers Weekly

A dark, clever tale of two brothers, a fishing trip, misconceptions, drugs and murder, South of the Pumphouse skillfully combines classic motifs of epic struggle and intelligent layers of imagery, reminiscent of The Old Man and the Sea, and the raw, tweaked perspective and hallucinogenic tutorial of a Hunter S. Thompson novel.

But like Les Claypool’s music, the material is still hugely innovative, highly independent, and excruciatingly thought-provoking. South of the Pumphouse is sure to be a cult phenomenon, doing for books what Donnie Darko and the Coen brothers did for film: bringing disquiet back to the forefront of popular writing.

Laura Mullen (b. 1958 - ) in Los Angeles, is a contemporary American poet working in hybrid genres and traditions. As with the poetry of (among many others) Cole Swensen, her work is considered Postmodern and post-Language school, but it also takes a lot from her interests in Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and numerous authors and visual artists who fall outside of the poetic cannon. This explains that, among her five published books, one finds the post-modern gothic, The Tales of Horror (Kelsey St. Press), traditional formed poems such as the "sestina in which my grandmother is going deaf" in The Surface, and a prose-poetry-crime novel-postmodern language text: Murmur (Futurepoem Books, 2007). In fact, Mullen's work holds the mirror up to language, attempting to find out (and find ways out of ) the limits of the wor(l)ds we are sentenced to. The lyric impulse exists in her writing, but the surface is rough, like her jagged language use at times, reflecting the violence of the effort to see into seeing itself. Mullen received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before going to teach at, among other places, Colorado State University, where her courses included seminars on Modernism, Postmodernism, and Cross-Genre Writing. She's also been invited as a guest author to teach at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program (1996, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2008), Columbia College - Chicago - (spring semester 2003), Brown University (2001), and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop Summer Program, (1998). She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1988 and has since received numerous "ther fellowships in the United States and abroad. She is currently on the permanent faculty at Louisiana State University where her teaching and research interests include Creative Writing, Literature, Translation, Poetry, Fiction, and Film.