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BRING THE NOISE: THE BEST POP CULTURE ESSAYS FROM BARRELHOUSE

Over the past decade, readers have learned to count on Barrelhouse to publish inventive, irreverent essays by authors exploring the ways their lives have been shaped by their pop culture obsessions. BRING THE NOISE is a collection of the magazine’s greatest hits, plus five new pieces produced exclusively for this anthology. Inside, a roster of accomplished and respected authors grapples with a wide range of topics, including Thin Lizzy, dive bars, Barry Bonds, Bob Dylan’s beard, pro wrestling, The Hills, roller derby, Adrian Grenier, and Magnum, P.I.

Passionate, insightful, and funny, this collection is simultaneously a celebration and a critical dissection of the ways in which pop culture affects us all.

here’s what a few high rollers had to say:

The troubled minds behind Barrelhousehave done it again: this book is hilarious, outrageous, and frequently profound. It is also, arguably, the most important document yet produced in the growing field of Patrick Swayze Studies. – Owen King, author of Double Feature

Bring the Noise blasts the old notion that literature is inevitably late to the news, a bit out of sync with the moment. It’s all here, the way we live right now, in all its mess and glory and confusion. And not a dull note in the house.  –Paul Lisicky, author of Unbuilt Projects and Lawnboy

table of contents

Introduction: On the Stupid Things We Love
by Tom Mcallister, Barrelhouse nonfiction editor

Before Adrian Grenier Got Famous
by Sarah Sweeney

Jam
by Paul Crenshaw

Home of the Poor and Unknown
by Chad Simpson

All Aboard the Bloated Boat: Arguments in Favor of Barry Bonds
by Lee Klein

Hipster Mosaic
by Johannes Lichtman

Irish on Both Sides
by Tom Williams

For the Love of Good TV
by Melanie Springer Mock

This is Not Their Job: The Never-ending Reality of The Hills
by Patrick Brown

Babyfaces
by W. Todd Kaneko

A Myopic Appreciation of Roller Derby
by Louisa Spaventa

Home From the War
by Steve Kistulentz

What it Means to Grow Bob Dylan’s Beard
by John Shortino

Return to Oz
by Matt Sailor

We Know the Drill
by Leslie Jill Patterson

This Essay Doesn’t Rock
by Joe Oestreich

Drumming
by Nic Brown

Lost Calls
by Jill Talbot

the illustrated story: On Tubes, by Ted Stevens
by Brian Furuness, comicked by Kevin Thomas

the swayze question
What’s your Favorite Patrick Swayze Movie?

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OUR LATEST ISSUE: BARRELHOUSE 11

Barrelhouse 11 features new fiction from Edward Porter, Dave Madden, Sarah Rose Etter, Matthew Vollmer, and more, essays on Jersey Shore, rollercoasters, hipsters, and the Three Stooges Museum, and poetry from Justin Marks, Shanna Compton, Gina Myers, and lots of others. Plus, Ian Stansel interviews Hal Hartley. What’s Hal Hartley’s favorite Patrick Swayze movie? You’re going to have to buy Barrelhouse 11 to find out.

This issue also features artwork from Dean Haspiel and Joe Infurnari of Trip City, and an amazing illustrated story, “Me and Gin,” written by Lindsay Hunter and comicked by Jordan Jeffries.

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Be the first on your block to have Barrelhousey goodness delivered straight to your door!  Stories originally published in Barrelhouse have been featured in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Million Writer’s Award.

We publish great work by established and emerging writers. We’ve interviewed the Hold Steady, Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, Emmylou Harris, Hal Hartley, and others. We’ve run special sections on Patrick Swayze, Crime, Roller Derby, Dive Bars, and the Future.

We pity the fool who doesn’t make like Mr. T and subscribe right away, and we’ve made it super easy and somewhat confusing by giving you a whole lot of options (NOTE: click on your option below, and the shopping cart will appear at the bottom of the page).

TWO ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION: $18
Two issues for the low, low price of $18.

THREE ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION: $25
Three issue of Barrelhouse. That’s one better than two! Math!

FOUR ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION: $30
Four issues of Barrelhouse. This will probably be very much like a two year subscription, but with some fun variation — it could be a year and a half if we get super motivated, or two and a half years if we drag our feet. In any case, four issues for you!

SIX ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION: $45
It’s a six pack of Barrelhouse! Can we tell you a secret? Because you’re actually considering a pretty big commitment to Barrelhouse? This whole number of issues subscription thing? Just a big excuse to write that phrase: A SIX-PACK OF BARRELHOUSE!

BARRELHOUSE 10

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Barrelhouse Ten is a heaping helping of fiction, poetry, and essays, including the winners of our Barrelhouse Invitational: Crime Edition. We’ve got fiction from the likes of Barrett Travis, Christine Sneed, Jen Fawkes, and Gabe Durham, poetry from Melissa Broder, Steve Kistulentz, and Christie Ann Reynolds, and essays about Before Adrien Grenier Got Famous (about, you will have to trust us, so much more than the star of Entourage), heavy metal screams, and coming to grips with (the twin horrors of) getting older and going to a John Mayer concert.

But wait, there’s more! Our Crime Section includes work from Chad Simpson, Mary Biddinger, Michelle Dove, Art Taylor, and Tara Laskowski. Plus we partnered with the wonderfully named Diarmid Mogg of the wonderful site Small Town Noir, and asked some of our favorite writers — Stewart O’ Nan, Stephen Graham Jones, Craig Clevinger, Brian Evenson, Paula Bomer, and Randall Brown — to write fictional pieces to match Small Town Noir’s real stories of real mug shots rescued from the New Castle, PA police department, and taken from the 1930s through the 1950s.

All of that stuff, plus the illustrated story “Unbecoming,” written by Emma Straub and illustrated by Elizabeth Graeber.