About us
Angry Owl Books is an under-capitalized, loss-making Los Angeles-based independent publisher dedicated to making books that buck the for-profit cowardice of the chickenshit publishing establishment.
Fiction by R.F. RAMSEY
American Guernica
"Riotous. A tragicomic odyssey into the darkening heart of a nation gleefully devouring itself... A smasher of temple statues at a time when we desperately need one..."
— The New York Slattern"A wild, boundary-breaking work whose subtitle — Portrait of the madman as Artist— says it all... Except there's way more. Ramsey is lewd, outrageous, insightful, profoundly profane, and he delivers most of it with the mordant relish of an unhinged court jester. "
—Linda Yorba, Yorba Linda Avocado-Tribune
Fiction by R.F. RAMSEY
American Guernica: Book II
The second and final chapter of Ramsey's farewell chronicle. A singular work by a gentleman lunatic at the height of his powers...
Fiction by JUNCO GARR
JUST MURDO
Reluctantly back at it after a failed retirement and a suspiciously botched vasectomy, Murdo catches a strange case and finds himself sucked into a vortex of violent madness. His working philosophy —You can't beat back the bastards of the world by out-Nicing them— lands him neck-deep in the jackpot, tailed and menaced by shadowy forces, unsure who or what he's up against.
Fiction by JUNCO GARR
Not Just Murdo: Long Beach
With his survival hingeing on unraveling a vast criminal conspiracy and taking down its architects, a battered Murdo must go hell-bent into the face of his own doom, leaving his fortune to the fates...
Thanks
Maybe you'll hear back from us...
Praise (and other sentiments) about AMERICAN GUERNICA
"Dazzling, savage, profane—and extravagantly funny. A flaming cannonball aimed at America's sacred lies and false gospel by a bold new talent... visionary."
- Los Angeles Philistine"A dangerous, disgraceful book by one of the men we should've lost in iraq or afghanistan."
- Donald J. Rumsfeld"Funnier than other books."
- Fred "four-word" Floyd, Paid Reviewer"Like watching a chimp rubbing wet Rotten bananas together in hopes of sparking a flame. To call this a literary performance is like calling CHallenger 10 a space mission. Neither gets very far off the ground—but at least that one had an exciting ending."
- G. Susk-Reist, the stay out of space coalition review"Outrageous, absurd, and eerily accurate. A brash, bawdy voice dropping scorching roast-caliber comedy and laying waste with a wide-ranging virtuosic wit. Take the ride."
- Rick Nitz, Pox"An outlandish, frankly, pretentious mistake. Tremendous mistake. It'll have you praying for the end like an Aztec virgin who's just won the human sacrifice lottery."
-Rick Nitz, The Daily American Truth Examiner-caller for TOTAL FREEDOM"At least it's not another f*cking podcast."
- 400,000 people
Coming Soon
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WHAT??
STOP IT
How we became angry owl books
Our past is shameful. We were in league with the supposed culture bearing cowards of a large publishing conglomerate. They accepted pittance of money, we an abundance of malice, and thus were we liberated from their soft-palmed clutches to form Angry Owl Books.
We could explain how they feel about us, but we believe one of our cufflinked former overlords himself said it best, characterizing us in a company memo as "a failing, fourth-rate print shop lanced from an august publishing house jettisoning junk from its trunk to sharpen its focus and once again bring out only the finest works of literary prestige."
We think of it differently: we leave the gilded yawns to them. Sad slow divorces? Crotchless bloodless memoirs? Refugees with inner worlds like bad Disney movies? Herpetic magazine editors who may have been molested? Ennui in Connecticut? Adulterous driving loafers with drug problems? Not our thing.
What do we look to bring to the reading public? We defer again to our former sovereigns who've described our business model as "tripe casting" and referred to us as "schlock hawks," "dross buffs," "slush puppies," and, our favorites: "princes of rejectamenta" and "merchants of no premise."
(It's possible we were the ones masked and dressed as noblemen launching rotten blood sausages via rod and reel against the the office windows of our former employers until those windows were so smeared in gore that they no longer functioned as windows. It's also possible that was not us... (our lawyers press-ganged, browbeat, and jawboned us into saying that.))
What we actually publish
Our slate might be described as dark humor with a literary bent; black comedy, well-written; books that revel in the absurdity of living in world gone haywire; stories that both laugh and weep at a warming, quickening, dumbening era, lamenting what we've lost, mocking where we're heading, accepting that no matter how bleak this self-inflicted nightmare becomes, ours is to embrace the sacred human obligation: transmuting the madness into humor, torquing the tragedy and folly into jokes and taunts and pranks and farces, never forgetting that the ultimate joke is on every one of us: we die in the end anyway, no matter what. It's all gallows humor. And If you can't find the laughs in that — why live through it?
We believe American Guernica, the lone title we acquired in our founding spinoff, is the embodiment of that spirit. We hope to be able to bring you the second and final book of Ramsey's singular rendering of modern dissolution in 2025...
A (hopefully not, but sadly probably) final note on the peerless R.F. Ramsey:
We knew him only a little. He was smart and strange and magnetic, and undoubtedly on a mission. As one of our founders said: "You couldn't take your eyes off him. He moved like a panther feigning domestication. He noticed everything. He seemed like he'd been places you hadn't and was going somewhere you could never go with him. I don't know if he liked me, but I know I would have been scared as hell of him if I thought he didn't." The official account of Ramsey's disappearance... well, it just doesn't make much sense to us. He talked about the heavy work ahead of him, the toll it would take, the importance of it. He had much more to give. We doubt we'll look on his like again.
SOON...
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