A Field Guide to the North American Family

The long awaited book by Garth Risk Hallberg is finally out! Contributing artists include:

Jordan Alport, Timothy Briner, Jessica Bruah, Kara Canal, Sandy Carson, Alana Celii, Janice Clark, Jason Curtis, John Paul Davis, Chris Eichler, Amy Elkins, Jason Falchook, Elizabeth Fleming, Catherine Gass, Hans Gindlesberger, Andres Gonzalez, Maury Gortemiller, Jonathan Gitelson, Jennifer Greenburg, Ben Huff, Christy Karpinski, Mickey Kerr, Liz Kuball, Michael Kwiecinski, Shane Lavalette, Jason Lazarus, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, Nick Meyer, Matt Nighswander, Alexis Pike, Colleen Plumb, Gus Powell, Abby Powell-Thomas, John Putnam, Shawn Records, Rebecca Blume Rothman, Christopher D Salyers, Matthew Schenning, David Shulman, Kevin Sisemore, Brandon Sorg, Brian Sorg, Sai Sriskandarajah, Tema Stauffer, JJ Sulin, Brian Ulrich, Consider Vosu, Grant Willing.


PRESS RELEASE:
Mark Batty Publisher announces A Field Guide to the North American Family

New York, September 4, 2007: Mark Batty Publisher announces its first foray
into illustrated literary fiction: Garth Risk Hallberg¹s A Field Guide to
the North American Family, with accompanying website: www.afieldguide.com

For more information or to request a review copy, contact: pr@markbattypublisher.com

The story:
For years, the Hungates and the Harrisons have coexisted peacefully in the
suburbs of New York. But when the patriarch of one family dies, the
survivors face a stark imperative: adapt or face extinction.

In sixty-three entries and a website, A Field Guide to the North American Family offers a collaborative portrait of two fictional specimens and the environments they inhabit. Both established and up-and-coming photographers contributed this edition¹s lavish illustrations via the website an ongoing, networked internet community. The novella¹s entries can be read straight through, but alphabetical headings and cross referencing also enable readers to move through the narrative on their own as they see fit.

Part fiction, part reference work, part photo-essay, this singular Field
Guide invites readers and participants to consider the state of the family .
. . and to explore the future of the book, since visual content for a book
has never been generated this way before. Quite simply, this is a novella
like no other.

Garth Risk Hallberg, 28, will be included this fall in the anthology Best
New American Voices 2008 (Harcourt/Harvest Books), guest-edited by Richard
Bausch. His short stories have appeared in venues such as Glimmer Train,
Canteen, Evergreen Review, pindeldyboz, h2so4, and Em. Garth also writes
about books for the website, The Millions. His essay, titled Why James Wood
is Wrong About Underworld..., will appear in the fall issue of The Quarterly
Conversation. A graduate of New York University¹s M.F.A. program, where he
was a Starworks/Geduld Fellow, Garth earned the William H. Gass award for
fiction and the Leana Boysko essay prize as an undergraduate at Washington
University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Hofstra
University.

A Field Guide to the North American Family
Garth Risk Hallberg
Fiction, Media Studies
144 pages
Color throughout
Casebound 7 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0-9779850-9-8
$19.95
October 2007