Spread Plates • 80# Matte
Love’s Sole Ash: Earth’s First Alphabet
Typographic experiments bridging ancient symbol systems and forensic typography.
144 pp • Hardbound • Edition of 250
A Tornado, a Turnip, and a Minotaur Walk into a Bar
An American Memoir
A fearless, genre-defying hybrid memoir that refracts fear, personal identity, and the fading Jim Crow South through a prism of Greek myth, mid-century pop culture, and visual art.
- Format
- Trade Paperback • Scored Cover
- Trim
- 6.0 × 9.0 in / 152 × 229 mm
- Colophon
- Perfect bound • 70# smooth text stock • Full-color plates
- Status
- In Stock • 2nd Edition
In August of 1963, 11-year-old white David boards a segregated bus on his first solo journey and forms an immediate bond with a precocious Black boy named Theseus. What begins as a youthful effort to understand fear fractures into dimensions defined by the absurd.
Soon enough, their route collides with philandering, masquerading deities, the stubborn confusion of growing up, and a Purgatory processing station perched atop a giant prune in near-Earth orbit. The boys run for the office of U.S. President, become a warm-up act at a Las Vegas-style nightclub before Las Vegas is a style, and reckon with a hidden truth: David’s mother’s wartime affair with author James Agee.
Book as Physical Art Object
Designed as both a literary narrative and a collectible artist’s book, this refined second edition features 27 chapters interwoven with full-color visual art, typographic expression, and experimental poetry. Recognized in juried museum art exhibitions as a physical art object and developed as the foundation for an American Playwriting Foundation-honored stage adaptation, the work documents a search for friendship, family history, and truth.
"Publishing where the current meets the page—anchoring procedural history, absurdism, and the physical architecture of the book."
Riparia.US produces volumes that function simultaneously as literary interventions and tactile artifacts. We focus on limited-run monographs, forensic historical documentation, and works exploring the boundaries between narrative structure and the visual archive.
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Riparia.US LLC
Independent Fine Art & Literary Press
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