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Richard Bresler was Rorion Gracie's first regular student in LA, and is widely recognized as the first student of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in the USA. His memoir, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life: A Memoir by Richard Bresler with Scott Burr, now available in its second edition, chronicles his over 40 years' involvement with the Gracie family and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, including the almost twenty years he spent working closely alongside Rorion Gracie helping to grow Jiu-Jitsu through the Gracie Garages, the founding of the Gracie Academy, and the creation and inception of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Worth Defending includes never-before-told stories from the early "dojo storming" and "challenge match" days at the first Gracie Garage—in the house that Richard and Rorion shared in Hermosa Beach—the Gracie Academy, backstage at the first UFCs, and much, much more.
Though this is not an ADP publication, it was co-authored by ADP author Scott Burr, and we are proud and happy to spread the word and the love for this great book! |
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Dex Foster has a pregnant girlfriend, a radio show facing cancellation, and a heart full of Gen-X cynicism. Now he's trying to reboot his broadcast career with a podcast featuring, for its debut episode, an interview with Logan Hazelette, Dex's former bandmate and current rock demigod, lately absent from public life. But for Logan, on the run from life in L.A., this trip back home is a chance to do more than reconnect with old friends. And for Dex, still jealous of Logan's success and now facing imminent parenthood, these few days will mean a confrontation between the past he's still clinging to and the future he's being rocketed towards.
WE WILL RID THE WORLD OF YOU is a startling and staggering odyssey through our celebrity-obsessed and terror-threatened present, through commercially-re- appropriated punk rock and the rural heroin epidemic, through one man's struggle to choose love over fear. |
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SUPERHERO SIMPLIFIED: Collected, Selected, Revised and Expanded collects the best of the Superhero Simplified blog (www.SuperheroSimplified.blogspot.com) with over 50 pages of new, previoulsy unpublished material added in. Written by Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and Strength & Conditioning coach Scott Burr, the Superhero Simplified blog served as a "fitness, nutrition, and skill resource for the aspiring superhero."
From the Author's Foreword: "I started the Superhero Simplified blog in August, 2013. At that time I'd been running The Fight Gym—a mixed martial arts training center-turned Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo and Strength & Conditioning gym—for almost six years, and I felt like I had some ideas to share. The original concept was to give regular people practical advice and simple instruction on lifestyle, diet, fitness, martial arts, etc., and in so doing help them surprise themselves. I felt like I had finally sorted through a lot of my own misconceptions about training, and could see where other people were struggling. ...It is my hope that what I have written in these pages will help you discover or rediscover just how much potential you have, and just how super you can be." Published in partnership with Superhero Simplified Publications. |
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Aspiring writer David Moore spent his twenties waiting for the world to recognize and applaud his unique literary talent, but at twenty-nine he's still "just another nobody," unpublished and scraping to pay his bills. His girlfriend, Carol, wants them to get a dog, wants them to move out of their apartment, wants them to move into the next phase of their lives. But how can David move forward, when pursuing that future feels like accepting his own failure? Readers are calling Scott Burr's "funny, sad, and urgent" debut novel "a surprisingly honest account of millennial angst" and a "bildungsroman for our age."
"Bummed Out City is one of the most painfully honest books about the writing life that we've seen." - The Tailwinds Review “Mesmerizing and intelligent, possessed of a powerful authenticity, Scott Burr’s Bummed Out City emanates out of the quiet desperation that is uniquely that of the writer at the beginning of the 21st Century.” - Steven Hayward, author of To Dance the Beginning of the World Scott Burr is a graduate of the creative writing program at The Colorado College. His writing has appeared in Mildred, The Mayo Review, The Decades Review, and elsewhere. Bummed Out City is his first novel. He lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. |
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At twenty-one the narrator of Victor Park’s Animals knows all he needs to know about people: “when things go bad,” he says, “all of that stuff about morality and refinement and civilization goes right out the window and you’re left with a bunch of savages screwing for warmth and eating each other.” Through this lens he presents the last month of his junior year of college: a month defined by sex, drugs, and a potentially unforgivable crime. Animals is a generation-defining novel about excess, self-absorption, and the narcissism and nihilism of the young intellectual elite.
“Provocative, startling, unsettling... Park seduces and deceives, and wields his words with the poise and craft of a seasoned pro. Quite simply put: You want to read this book.” - Stavros Stavros, author of the novels The Sirens, The Sentimentalist, and Nu. Victor Park lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Animals is his first novel. |
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Straddling the line between experimental fiction and essay, Nu. is Stavros Stavros’ most ambitious novel yet. All religions and philosophies, the author says, “comprise, in sum, an offering to an unresponsive void, an inquiry posed against infinity’s infinite reticence.” Human existence, he says, is therefore “defined by this puzzling and immitigable ignorance.” This portrait of existence sets the stage for the action that follows: a young writer, facing failure and rejection, and preoccupied with speculations about his own course and purpose, receives the news that his father has, for an unknown reason, collapsed. What follows is a meditation on living in the face of profound ignorance, on the horror at the heart of absurdity.
"It seemed to him then that life, occurring in frantic singularity (there was neither time nor opportunity for trial and error, one’s end was absolute, one’s time was always ebbing), dictated and navigated by blind steps, by incomprehensible action (one never knew the weight of one’s actions at the outset, nor what misadventures might befall one), and forgotten immediately upon its completion (the indifferent universe held no memory), comprised only a vast and unintelligible madhouse, a chambre d’horreur which no claim to order could compel or illuminate; that viewed truthfully, stripped of explanations and mythologies, divested of illusions and lights, laid bare, the naked world - le monde nu - was only a vast absurdity through which man stumbled, hardly certain it was the ground he felt beneath his feet." - from NU. Stavros Stavros is the author of the novels The Sirens, The Sentimentalist, and Nu., all published by The Artless Dodges Press. He lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. |
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Frank Nevis knows that there’s more than one way to get famous in America. When massive flooding strikes his town, only Frank has the presence of mind to weave a fabricated story into the actual drama unfolding around him. After all: what better way to attract interest and funding for his now-defunct reality show career? Fueled by the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, and the echo chamber of the 24-hour news cycle Frank’s fabrication is soon the biggest story breaking, but how long can he maintain his hastily-constructed lie? And where is the line, in the American audience’s thirst for “reality entertainment,” between the drama of Frank’s unraveling plans and his and his family’s fictional hardships? Written in a style intended to mimic the overwhelming cacophony that is news and culture in the 21st century, The Prank explores the question of reality in the digital age, where viral falsehoods and reported lies are par for the course.
“Alternately funny and disturbing but unwaveringly insightful, The Prank turns a trained and probing eye on life in the digital age.” -Auric Adams, author of Here Groan the Dead Adam Black lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. The Prank is his first novel. |
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A pair of teenagers live their own version of Hemingway’s fiesta in Pamplona; a group of college students spends the weekend at a hotel for a friend’s wedding; a young bartender at a Mexican resort flirts with a pretty tourist: the characters in the seven stories that make up Fowler’s collection - his “youth in limbo” - share youth, but they also share a palpable uncertainty, a wavering and fragile becoming made all the more perilous by their awareness of it. They are characters on the brink: they are preparing to sacrifice their infinite possible futures for the singular lives they will live. While the anxiety of this phase of life is often forgotten in time, when memory has made the course of one’s life seem inevitable, in Fowler’s hands it becomes vividly palpable once more: these are characters staring down an impending tragedy, one made all the worse by its intangibility, by their uncertainty about it, by their inability to articulate its character, by the older world’s indifference to it. It is a tragedy Fowler captures with due restraint, subtlety, art, and compassion.
“Fowler’s talent is evident from the first word.... Turning the last page of this collection I had the sense that somehow Ellison had been looking over my shoulder from the ages of seventeen to twenty-three. It was, frankly, quite disturbing.” - Orhan Miloshe, author of the novels Hazaiah’s Head and I Awoke in a House Afire Ellison Fowler lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. The Distinction of the Mature and the Horror of the Naive, and Other Stories of Youth in Limbo is his first collection. |
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A mad king calls for the head of a landed vassal in this novel from the author of I Awoke in a House Afire. The reward offered is so great that nearly every capable man in the kingdom sets off to win it. But their journey is fraught with misadventure, while political infighting, disease, and ambitious enemies threaten the kingdom in their absence. Far from a period drama, Miloshe’s second novel rises to the level of metaphor, and for all of its violence and horror remains a sympathetic look at a race of animals gesturing at control while stumbling around in ignorance.
“Miloshe’s fiction lies somewhere between realism and folklore, and it is this fluidity that defines it: we think we are reading a realist drama when suddenly we find ourselves reading a fairy tale; we think we are reading Swiftian satire when we discover that we are reading existential allegory...”- Ellison Fowler, author of The Distinction of the Mature and the Horror of the Naive, and Other Stories of Youth in Limbo. Orhan Miloshe is the author of the novels I Awoke in a House Afire and Hazaiah’s Head, both published by The Artless Dodges Press. He lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. |
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Orphaned at age five, when his anarchist parents are executed for treason, Rousseau travels through life buffeted by chance. Along the way he is deified and damned, imprisoned and exalted, welcomed and exiled. Through these trials he comes to believe that the world is like a house afire: a terminal farce into which everyone is born and of which everyone must make some reckoning while the walls collapse around him. In the tradition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Kafka’s Amerika comes a novel that is at once a window onto our own world and a funhouse mirror reflection of it, a portrait and a caricature, at once profoundly funny and deeply unsettling.
“Wildly imaginative, relentlessly playful and yet meticulously crafted, Miloshe’s stunning debut reminds us with a wonderfully light touch that we, too, are born into this world as into a house afire. Miloshe’s talent for illuminating the absurd in the familiar - for capturing what Camus called “the primitive hostility of the world” - recalls the better works of Kafka. Indeed, I Awoke In A House Afire reads like Kafka with an LSD chaser: its fictional landscape, incontrovertibly askew, is still somehow more familiar than we are comfortable admitting, and we can only hope that its horrors will fade when this trip is done. Orhan Miloshe is that rare writer whose preoccupation with the discourse of existence is nevertheless founded in a genuinely humanist impulse. I Awoke In A House Afire is a novel that should not be missed.” - Stavros Stavros, author of The Sirens, The Sentimentalist, and Nu. Orhan Miloshe is the author of the novels I Awoke in a House Afire and Hazaiah’s Head, both published by The Artless Dodges Press. He lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. |
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The author begins by offering a definition: sentimentality, he says, is “the excessive and inappropriate infusion of meaning, the incorrect alignment of form and content.” Viewed in this way, sentimentality is an existential quagmire: how is one to know the “true” significance of others’ words, gestures, and actions? How is one to know the “true” significance of one’s own? Through the stories that follow the author stays close-cropped to this dilemma, highlighting the misunderstandings that occur between boyfriends and girlfriends, lovers, peers, colleagues, parents and children, and exploring the ways in which these fundamental misunderstandings can be rooted in or result in fundamental misunderstandings about ourselves.
“Not since Joyce’s Ulysses have I read prose so carefully constructed and yet so lyrically written. Stavros’ proclivity for and insistence upon experimentation redefine what we have come to expect from fiction in our time. What more can I say? I loved this novel. I wish I’d written it.” - Thomas Tull, author of Hephaestus Stavros Stavros is the author of the novels The Sirens, The Sentimentalist, and Nu., all published by The Artless Dodges Press. He lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. |
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Thomas Tull’s vivid debut chronicles a romantic relationship from beginning to end. James and Katherine meet in college, date, get married, honeymoon, grow old. The life they lived on the world’s center stage - as the young and promising married couple - fades into unremarkable middle age. James’ work doesn’t interest him, and he drinks too much; Katherine lives a life separate but contained within their shared life. Hephaestus is a stark, poetic, and unflinching look at the slow and un-protested ebbing of youth and all of its promise.
“Tull’s seemingly innate ease with language, his ability to illustrate with masterful subtlety the changes enacted by prolonged doubt or protracted dissatisfaction, his pitch-perfect sense for the nuances of aging (and aging relationships) are stunning. Surpasses even the high standard set by his short fiction. A stirring and impressive debut.” - Auric Adams, author of Here Groan the Dead. Thomas Tull lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Hephaestus is his first novel. |
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The interconnected lives and trials of five characters - an Artist, a Seeker, a Seductress, a Dreamer, and an Academic - comprise a novel within this novel, while their author’s struggle to achieve his lofty artistic vision forms the framing drama in this unconventional and experimental story of ambition, inspiration, and obsession. The novel’s unnamed narrator has failed: the promise of his youth has been spent and ruined, and he fears that he will never achieve the great work of which he - and others - imagined him capable. It is only through a chance encounter with a strange and beautiful woman - a woman who seems to know more about him and his troubles than she should - that he feels himself newly inspired, capable of the ambitious work he once envisioned. But who is this muse, and towards what is she leading him? And what will he discover, when the quest for true expression lures him ever deeper into his own scarred and fractured mind?
Stavros Stavros lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of the novels The Sirens, The Sentimentalist, and Nu., all published by The Artless Dodges Press. |
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A crime reporter and a wealthy young executive become fast friends, but soon discover that life condemns us to repeat the patterns we do not understand.
“This is a novel about friendship, about infidelity, about emotional ignorance and animal malice, enacted within the framework of re-appropriated Greek mythology. It's a novel about ingratitude and imposition, about bad behavior and heavy drinking. In the end it's about not seeing it coming when you should have seen it coming, because after all, it's your fault.” - Auric Adams Auric Adams lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Here Groan the Dead is his first novel. |