Bryan Charles’ “Wowee Zowee” and Shawn Vandor’s “Fire at the End of the Rainbow”

The latest from Continuum’s stellar 33 1/3 series of little rock ‘n roll books is Bryan Charles’ treatise on Pavement’s third album WOWEE ZOWEE. Charles, author of the funny and affecting novel “Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way” (itself a Pavement song lyric; you could say Bryan is a fan), interviewed all band members and various label staff and recording engineers, venturing to Memphis and generally keeping his unyielding love for the band and the album stuffed into a mason jar of intrepid journalistic inquiry. The launch for Wowee Zowee will be held at Brooklyn’s WORD bookstore on Wednesday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. Charles will read and sign and answer Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog’s questions.

Shawn Vandor’s debut collection of stories “Fire at the End of the Rainbow” is one of three coolly attractive books published by the Key West-based Sand Paper Press earlier this year. The press, in “limited operation” since 2003, recently ramped up production with “Fire” and two collections of poems: Stuart Krimko’s “The Sweetness of Herbert” and Arlo Haskell’s “Joker.” The trio is intended as a set, and they are certainly complementary in their Key West-esque peach, cornflower and strawberry pastel covers. All three Sand Paper Press authors toured the West Coast together this February and March. I can personally attest that Vandor’s deadpan delivery of the scatological little doozie titled “Manhood, a Cautionary Tale” at LA’s David Kordansky Gallery brought the damn house down.