We Are Billion Year Carbon: A Tribal-Love-Rock Novel set in the 60s on an Outpost Planet called Memphis 

“It’s a beautiful, quirky, spooky, rhythmic, hilarious and sneakily moving piece of work.”

                        M. Allen Cunningham, author of The Green Age of Asher Witherow

“Corey Mesler’s exuberant, spaced-out love letter to the 1960s—and to his hometown of Memphis—gives renewed meaning to the phrase, “Far out!” Invoking the ghosts of Richard Farina, William Kotzwinkle, Richard Brautigan (who appears!), and Thomas Pynchon at his most whimsically stoned, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, with its cut-and-paste assemblage of poems, stories, and memoirs, deftly captures both the innocent charm and the dark menace of the period. “

                                    Marshall Boswell, author of Alternative Atlanta

"If this was music, it'd be a slippery, jazzy 'Green Onions' with a sitar break played by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, using the edge of his dictionary for a pick."

                                    Marshall Chapman, author of Sweet Little Rock and Roller

“This book is best approached as poetry: playful, allusive (and often elusive too), with a distinctly hippie sensibility, which veterans of the Age of Aquarius will recognize instantly, and which will give other readers a vivid sense of those bygone, patchouli-fragrant days. Indeed, this book is perhaps most accurately described as a literary version of that Sixties-specific phenomenon known as a “Happening”: there’s a lot going on, it’s often colorful and entertaining…{and}a good time was had by all.”

                                    --Peyton Moss, ForeWord Magazine

“Imagine The Crying of Lot 49, mixed with Richard Farina, mixed with early Rolling Stone magazine pieces. Think about the playful word play of poet and playwright Tristan Tzara. Mesler’s work here is like taking a hit of acid without experiencing the possible longterm aftereffects. Well, maybe…”

                                    George Singleton, author of Novel

“Tying all of these disparate elements together in one big tie-dye, Mesler's prose and verse swirl psychedelically, making use of obscure words like paralipomena and clerihew, as if learning to speak a new language. He possesses an easygoing, slightly stoned wit: he refers to a character's canvas as being "like those paintings by that painter" and describes a memory as "strained through the cheesecloth of time." Overall, his writing possesses a noodly quality, as if each sentence were either a guitar solo or some hippie variation on square literature. [Mesler’s] '60s may be perhaps equally rose-colored, but in Carbon the times seem much more personal and idiosyncratic than generational. In fact, at times this amiably ambitious novel -- especially the poems, which read as later-in-life ruminations by any one of these characters -- often reads like Mesler's attempt to reclaim a personal past from the mass-market memories of flower power and Woodstock. He's fighting against the public demystification of the past, desperate to unmake certain connections, to leave some things unexplained. As Camel observes, ‘Mysteries ... were beautiful as mysteries.’ Far out.”

                     --Stephen Deusner, Popmatters

“Mesler’s language is spare and excessive—a contradiction held and delivered by humorous and graceful syntactical arrangements. These are narratives which give visibility to the cracks from which versions of Self erupt. Since ‘home’ (thus returning to it) is destabilized by a shifting sense of Self, Mesler reveals nostalgia as the poetry of the thwarted attempts which expose how awful, awkward, and endearing humans can be when ripped open by the complexity of history. Mesler invokes nostalgia to engage with the difficult issues it creates…It’s a fragile enterprise—how we coordinate our identities with history, how we then come to terms with versions of ourselves. We are Billion Year Old Carbon suggests that it remains a worthwhile experiment.”

                                    --Selah Saterstrom, Ellipsis: Literary Serials and Narrative Culture

“[A] sexy and energetic novel-ala-collage…As energetic as the beginning of this book is with its unfettered adventures and engorged dreams, Mesler is at his best describing the end of an era…Billion Year Old Carbon is a bold and often humorous tribute to the brave and foolish times of galvanized youth.”

                                                --Susan Henderson, Arkansas Review

And a nice review here in the new issue of Ghoti: http://www.ghotimag.com/reviewmesler.htm

“Corey Mesler’s Talk is a brilliant tour de force of a novel, witty and wise and zingy with the zeitgeist.  This is indeed an auspicious fiction debut.”

                        Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Corey Mesler’s novel-in-dialogue Talk is a smart, funny, harrowing look at the way language at once defines us and fails to sustain us. Talk is a bittersweet gospel for our time.”

                        Steve Stern, Jewish Book Award winner for The Wedding Jester

“Talk is original and evocative.  Mesler has a sharp ear not only for how we say things, but, more importantly, for what the words really mean.  A unique reading experience.”

                        John Grisham

“You’ll be surprised how sexy a book made out of dialogue can be.  It’s a wonderful, funny, touching story.  Buy it and read it and you’ll be glad you did.”

                        Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe

“A refreshingly realistic, intelligent and sexy novel.”

                        Lee Smith, author of Oral History

“It is a bit of Beckett, sprinkled generously with Mamet…In the end…this book is a well-crafted exploration of a life of ‘quiet desperation’.”

                        Doug Ibbetson, Ibbetson Review

“I so loved Talk—it is new and unique, hot and immediate—I could not put it down…one of the best books of the year, and I have touted it as such to my friends and fellow writers.”

                        Suzanne Kingsbury, author of The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me

By illustrating through Jim’s struggles how dialogues with the self, others, and the world may be the only way of grasping meaning in our lives, Mesler says that it is and isn’t all just talk.”

                        --Ralph Clare, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“What a smooth, bright, sophisticated piece of work—and how gutsy, too—all that damned fool stuff like furniture that everybody else fusses with that you ignore,”

                        --David Markson, author of This is Not a Novel and Springer’s Progress      

“In a word, wow. I was struck by the bravery of the book and the sheer bedrock intelligence behind it. It’s hard to write in such a learned way and make it accessible but Talk does it. There is more intelligence and humanity in it than in anything Woody Allen ever did, to my tastes.”

                        --Cynthia Shearer, author of The Celestial Jukebox

“So few writers can achieve good dialogue and Mesler hits every note on key. I always knew exactly who was speaking…and he kept such tension among a remarkable set of characters.”

                        --Cary Holladay, author of Mercury    

 Livingston Press
University of West Alabama

Both novels published by Livingston Press, overseen by its Head Sage and Necromancer, Joe Taylor.

They can be found at: www.livingstonpress.uwa.edu