Kevin Sampsell

From the Downtown streets littered with strip clubs and gutter punks to the north side where gentrification and old school hip-hop collide, Portland, Oregon is a place that seems straight out of a David Lynch movie. It's a city full of police controversies, hippie artist houses and overzealous liberals, where even its fiction blurs with its bizarre realities.

Portland Noir

a memoir

A common pornography

In 2014, after the release of his debut novel, celebrated writer and visionary publisher Kevin Sampsell switched gears and turned to a new creative obsession: making collage art. Initially influenced by the wild cutup language of William S. Burroughs, Sampsell soon discovered countless modern collagists that inspired him to take his art further and further from where it started. Years later, he finds himself at the center of a growing movement of 21st Century cut and paste.

I Made an Accident showcases over 200 of Sampsell's collages, exploring a range of styles: hilarious sight gags, subtle cultural jabs, elegant mysteries, colorful surprises, fragmented hauntings, and gloriously strange accidents. Combined with Sampsell's sharp and lively poems, this book is a feast for the eyes and brain and a nonstop entertainment.

I Made an Accident

A gritty, realistic collection of stories of the night explores the dark side of human existence--feelings of violence, melancholy, desperation, sexual desire, and craving for unhealthy things--and includes contributions from Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Ames, Michelle Tea, and others. Original.

Stories of the Night

The Insomniac Reader

Chronicling five years of a troubled romance,This Is Between Us offers an intimate view of one couple’s struggle—from the illicit beginnings of sexual obsession to the fragile architecture of a pieced-together family. Full of sweet moments, emotional time bombs, unexpected humor, and blunt sexuality, the daily life of this man and woman, both recently divorced, with children and baggage in tow, emerges in all of its complexity. In this utterly engrossing debut novel, Kevin Sampsell delivers a confessional tale of love between two resilient people who have staked their hearts on each other.

This Is Between Us

“For beauty, honesty, sheer weirdness, and a haunting evocation of place, Kevin Sampsell is my favorite Oregon writer. Ken Kesey, Chuck Palahniuk—make some room on the shelf.”—Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of it All Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography is a memoir, told in vignettes, that captures the history of one dysfunctional American family. An extension of a 2003 “memory experiment” of the same name, A Common Pornography weaves recollections of small-town youth with darker threads from his family’s story, including incest, madness, betrayal, and death. A regular contributor to Dave Egger’s The Believer and McSweeney’s, Sampsell has written “the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive” (Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Double Life is Twice as Good).

A Memoir

A Common Pornography

Thisbe Nissen

Anthony Opal

Ashley Farmer

NANO Fiction (print ISSN 1935-844X; digital ISSN 2160-939X) is non-profit literary journal that publishes flash fiction—a form of short story also known as micro fiction, micro narrative, micro-story, microrrelatos, postcard fiction, the short short, the short short story, kürzestgeschichten, and sudden fiction—of 300 words or fewer. Featuring twenty to thirty authors in each issue, NANO Fiction has roots that draw from Aesop’s Fables and Zen Koans. Notable practitioners of this prose form include Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Naguib Mahfouz, and Linor Goralik, among others. This issue of NANO Fiction features works by: James Tadd Adcox, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Elissa Cahn, Jesse Cheng, Katie Cortese, Ashley Farmer, Jaydn DeWald, Genevieve Hudson, James Iredell, Takeki Ishihara, Erin Jewell, Gina Keicher, Peter Kispert, Harry Leeds, Thomas Patrick Levy, Jorge Ricardo Lopez-McKnight, Sean Lovelace, Matthew Mahaney, Gary L. McDowell, Kelly Miller, Gene Morgan, Thisbe Nissen, Anthony Opal, Michael C. Rodriguez, Matt Rowan, Marina Rubin, Angela Rydell, Kevin Sampsell, Didi Schiller, Mark Sutz, Brendan Todt, Elizabeth Wade, and Elizabeth Wyatt.

NANO Fiction Volume 5 Number 2

This Is Between Us, Kevin Sampsell's utterly engrossing debut novel, is a confessional tale of love between two resilient people who have staked their hearts on each other. Chronicling five years of a troubled romance, This Is Between Us offers an intimate view of one couple’s struggle—from the illicit beginnings of sexual obsession to the fragile architecture of a pieced-together family. Full of sweet moments, emotional time bombs, unexpected humor, and blunt sexuality, the daily life of this man and woman, both recently divorced, with children and baggage in tow, emerges in all of its complexity. In this utterly engrossing debut novel, Kevin Sampsell delivers a confessional tale of love between two resilient people who have staked their hearts on each other.

Kevin Sampsell

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