PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THE GUEST LIST eBook available now!

Please Take Me Off the Guest List is now available in eBook
format, for only $5.99, from iTunes, Amazon.com, B&N, etc!

Please see below to read a new essay by Zachary Lipez
written exclusively for the Akashic Books blog.

It’s a disappointing time to be alive if only because we’re all going to die. Whenever I feel inclined to be disappointed in the Obama presidency or the rapidity of the freezer burn on my ice cream, I ask myself, “Is this as disappointing as my inevitable death? As the death of my loved ones?” I throw in the “loved ones” part as a concession to the possibility of a nosy god; in reality my loved ones are a distant second in my terrified concern. Maybe even a close third to Christopher Hitchens. The thought of that guy alone, shirtless in front of his mirror on a sunny Thursday afternoon, probably staring for hours as the ice in his gimlet melts, fills me with an existential sorrow that my entire extended family in a cliff-bound Greyhound just can’t match. Sorry, Mom. I’ll visit soon. Please make that peanut dip I love so much.

So what to do when death looms on the mind and with it the promise of the richly deserved perdition of unbaptised babies and privileged layabouts? Why, we look to the future. Just like our daddies did when they weren’t avoiding the draft, fetishizing album art, and laying the fetid groundwork for Graydon Carter’s career. Our daddies were smart, in their fashion, and we wouldn’t have all these ones and zeros without them. So thanks, parents, all your weird racist bullshit was totally worth it ‘cuz now we have computo-books. Or whatever they’re called.

Please Take Me Off the Guest List, the collaborative book that I did with Stacy Wakefield and Nick Zinner is now a computo-book. It glows, it flickers, in a hundred years it will have your job, puny human. Stacy made Nick’s photos pop and the text wiz; the design has retained its clever (and not that awful new kind of clever but the original kind—the kind that built the labyrinth) charm.

The computo- book is priced for the Endless Recession. You can even pay in Euros if you’re Beyonce.

Oh yeah, the iTunes version includes three songs that were initially just on a limited edition 7” that one could purchase with the physical, three dimensional, real world book. The record was also in all three dimensions. The songs are in, like, five, man. They were written and performed in one day in one basement in one upstate New York. The people who wrote and performed them are not important. It’s the songs that matter, again, man.

To make this blog post worth your valuable time, I’ve included an illustration by Nate Turbow. He is a character in one of the stories in Please Take Me Off the Guest List. His general spirit pervades it. His illustration should not be taken as his specific reaction to reading the book but a more universal sense of dismay that, god willing, you will all feel when feeling its warm digital light upon you. Or, embracing the newness, parlance, and crudity of these awful, awful times, “up in you.”

Please Take Me Off the Guest List—now built for end times and priced for the decline. Enjoy!

Text by Zachary Lipez; illustration by Nate Turbow (http://www.nateturbow.com/)