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Award-winning author Debra Di Blasi gathers her most radical, challenging, and evocative writing into one delicious book. Not for the faint of heart, these stories stretch from the Phil Spector murder trial to murders in an African township, from a hedge fund manager's sexually explicit death throes to a suicidal teen's Facebook page, from the fragility of a marriage to the hidden violence of suburbia, and beyond. A sumptuous, compelling and intelligent collision of text and image. Praise for Debra Di Blasi's Writing New York Times Book Review: "In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies." Publishers Weekly: "Both Di Blasi's style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer." Kansas City Star: "Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins."

Debra Di Blasi's lyric memoir Selling the Farm: Descants from a Recollected Past maps her grief for the lost people, places, and myriad creatures of her childhood on a Midwest farm that was both heaven and hell.

COLOR EDITION Award-winning author Debra Di Blasi gathers her most radical, challenging, and evocative writing into one delicious book. Not for the faint of heart, these stories stretch from the Phil Spector murder trial to murders in an African township, from a hedge fund manager's sexually explicit death throes to a suicidal teen's Facebook page, from the fragility of a marriage to the hidden violence of suburbia, and beyond. A sumptuous, compelling and intelligent collision of text and image. Praise for Debra Di Blasi's Writing New York Times Book Review: "In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love's multiple ironies." Publishers Weekly: "Both Di Blasi's style and her objective distance and comprehension of her chosen subject mark her as a very psychologically driven, very talented writer." Kansas City Star: "Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins."

""What the Body Requires" is to the mind what chocolate is to the tongue - rich and decadent." -Carolyn Szczepanski, for "The Pitch" Madeline goes to Europe to kill her husband, a musician, but falls in love with his doppleganger, an Italian policeman. Structured as a symphony, "What the Body Requires" explores a woman's sexuality and passion for art as she slides into the madness of revenge. MORE CRITICAL PRAISE ..".highly ambitious and of the deepest seriousness...with an evocative prose and an exotic, vividly imagined landscape. The consistency with which the writing invests everyday actions and objects with an almost erotic fervor is truly extraordinary...." -- R.M. Berry, author of "Leonardo's Horse, Dictionary of Modern Anguish, " and "Frank" LONGER DESCRIPTION Police lieutenant Massimo Benevento is desperate to escape his ill-fitting occupation and the gloomy Italian suburb he patrols. When a beautiful American painter moves into the tower of a local villa, Massimo imagines her as his pathway to freedom. But she has come to kill her husband, a handsome musician she believes has run off to Europe with another woman. The husband's uncanny resemblance to Massimo creates a plot thick with sexual hijinks and erotic intrigue. An engaging cast of misfits, unforgettable settings, and sumptuous writing propel "What the Body Requires" to a contemporary literary classic. With illustrations by Debra Di Blasi.

Horror meets the American Dream in this scathing take-no-prisoners novel about Hollywood, suburban sprawl, racism, gun culture, automobile fetishism, love & hate, and what just may prove to be the American Nightmare. Award-winning author and screenwriter Debra Di Blasi returns to the scene of society's crimes with comical, outrageous, angry, and horror-filled excoriations. Ugly Town n. 1. a pejorative term for suburbia, or more specifically the suburban sprawl endemic (and epidemic) to many cities of the United States; 2. adj. a pejorative phrase describing a person, place, or thing that lacks taste; 3. v. pejorative, meaning to transform a person, place, or thing into something tasteless; 4. n. purgatory; a place of supposedly eternal punishment to where people who die angry are consigned.

Debra Di Blasi is a visual artist and an award-winning author. Her work has been exhibited at museums, galleries, and universities, with illustrations and fine art published in books and journals. This is the first book in a series showcasing her Nature watercolors. She began Chinese brush painting and ink drawing while living in Hong Kong and continues to practice Eastern visual art methodologies as they intersect with Western art styles. Chinese influences include Zhao Shao'ang and Yang Shanshen, and other Asian artists whose work combines the immediacy of abstraction with representation. A former art critic and contributing writer for The Pitch, SOMA San Francisco arts magazine, and The New Art Examiner, Debra earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute where she later taught literature and creative writing, including mixed-media and digitally-based fiction. She is a former publisher and currently author of ten literary works. Awards include a 2019 C&R Press Nonfiction Award, Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award, Diagram Innovative Writing Award, and Inspiration Grant from Kansas City Metropolitan Arts Council, among other achievements

These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact. The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight, Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to creat a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. "Hyperfictions" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts? This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human--and awake--in the post-millenium.

Debra Di Blasi is a visual artist and an award-winning author. Her work has been exhibited at museums, galleries, and universities, with illustrations and fine art published in books and journals. This is the first book in a series showcasing her Nature watercolors. Debra began Chinese brush painting and ink drawing while living in Hong Kong and continues to practice Eastern methodologies as they intersect with Western art styles. Chinese influences include Zhao Shao'ang and Yang Shanshen, and other Asian artists whose work combines the immediacy of abstraction with representation. A former art critic and contributing writer for The Pitch, SOMA San Francisco arts magazine, and The New Art Examiner, Debra earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute where she later taught literature and creative writing, including mixed-media and digitally-based fiction. She is author of nine literary works and winner of C&R Press Nonfiction Award, Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award, and Diagram Innovative Writing Award, among other achievements.

Award-winning avant-garde writer Debra Di Blasi spent the last two socio-politically traumatic years researching her new collection of short fiction via comments on social media (Facebook, Twitter...), news sites (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC...), YouTube channels (Alex Jones Info Wars, Rush Limbaugh...), comedians (Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert...), intimate conversations and surreptitious eavesdropping, ad nauseam. The result? Visceral and sometimes vitriolic stories that distill, channel and question the interior and exterior voices of contemporary culture while seeking the devastating, the comical, the atrocious and the wondrous.

Two novellas. In Drought, a young couple's relationship on a failing cattle ranch is dissected, allowing us to see all the subcutaneous mental and physical violence they endure. Say what you like offers an even more ruthless examination of a couple's deep-seated pain, pared down to short, numbered sections.