TOM GAMMARINO
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SNARING NEW SUNS
Speculative Works From Hawai'i and Beyond
Bamboo Ridge Press and guest editors Tom Gammarino, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, D. Kealiʻi MacKenzie, and Lyz Soto put out a call for submissions and challenged writers to create speculative narratives that “imagine otherwise.” The result is a collection of pieces from forty-eight established and emerging authors and artists whose work goes beyond science fiction and fantasy into a new realm of speculative work. Thoughtfully curated and arranged to amplify each piece within a larger reading experience, SNARING NEW SUNS is a special anthology that experiments with form and mixes genres to include stories and poetry of the supernatural, alternate reality, climate fiction, and more. Plus, art, graphic stories, nonfiction, and even a stage play.
KING OF THE WORLDS
"If Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams had a baby, it would look a lot like 'King of the Worlds.' With its tongue-in-cheek humor and intelligent allusions, this is the kind of fiction that playfully reassembles tropes and rejects all labels. It's a dark riot." - Mindy-Lynn Sanico, Honolulu Star-Advertiser
King of the Worlds is an excellent sci-fi novel that combines the interiority of literary fiction from the 50s, 60s and 70s with the all-out weirdness of the golden age of science fiction." - Paul Constant, The Seattle Review of Books
Dylan had always wanted to live as many lives as he could--that was the appeal of being an actor. But at the end of a brief, bright stint as a Hollywood heartthrob, Dylan loses the lead in Titanic and exiles himself and his wife to a recently settled exoplanet called New Taiwan. At first, life beyond Earth seems uncannily un-wondrous. Dylan teaches at an American prep school, raises a family with his high school sweetheart, and lives out his restlessness through literature. But then a box of old fan mail (and the hint of a galaxy-wide conspiracy) offers Dylan a chance to recapture the past. As he tries to balance this transdimensional midlife crisis against family life, Dylan encounters a cast of extraordinary characters: a supercomputer with aspirations of godhood, a Mormon-fundamentalist superfan, an old-school psychoanalyst, a sampling of his alternate selves, and, once again, the love of his lives.King of the Worlds throws cosmology, technology, nineties pop culture, and religion into an existential blender for a mix that is by turns tragic and absurd, elegiac and filled with wonder.
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JELLYFISH DREAMS
"A Google search reveals more than 87 million results equating love in some way to a black hole, but no one has taken the concept quite as far as fiction writer M. Thomas Gammarino has in his imaginative Kindle Single Jellyfish Dreams. One day, Sam Rogers drops his bookmark while reading, bends down to retrieve it, and finds a black hole under his couch. Sam tries to make sense of it, but the black hole, as you might imagine, is not forthcoming. As word slips out, and scientists and religious fanatics swarm to the hole, Sam finds himself fleeing to the memories of a lost love, and to a bizarre conclusion: he must bring her back from the dead. Gammarino, author of Big in Japan: A Ghost Story, has woven a wonderfully strange tale that conjures up both the weirdest works of Philip K. Dick and the timeless love story of Orpheus and Eurydice." - Benjamin Moebius
BIG IN JAPAN: A (HUNGRY) GHOST STORY
"With Big in Japan, M. Thomas Gammarino seamlessly ties the world of rock to prose in a way that strikes me a beautiful and rare." - Art Edwards, The Rumpus
"Aggressively readable and luridly entertaining to an almost televisual degree." - Kevin TS Tang, KGB Bar Lit Magazine
While playing to lackluster crowds in their hometown of Philadelphia, progressive rock band Agenbite clings to the comforting half-truth that they're doing better in Japan. When their manager agrees to send them over on a shoestring tour, though, they're swiftly forced to give up their illusions and return stateside. All but one of them, that is. Brain Tedesco, the band's obsessive-compulsive nerve center, has fallen in love with a part-time sex worker - the first woman ever to have touched him - and his illusions have only just begun. What ensues is a gritty coming-of-age tale in which Brain, intent on achieving some kind of transcendence, paradoxically descends into the Hungry Ghost realm of Tokyo’s underworld. He becomes, in effect, a gaki - the insatiable creature of Buddhist cosmology - and must learn how to live even as his outsize desires threaten to engulf him. By turns compassionate and ruthless, erotic and grotesque, riotously serious and deadly funny, Big in Japan is a sparking, gut-wrenching, face-melting debut novel.