ALL HANDS ON: A THE2NDHAND Reader
edited by Todd Dills
w/ an Introduction by Jim Munroe
$12

Like placing your ear beside some kind of magical, future radio and listening to the shocking world of the strange and new.... ALL HANDS ON, an anthology of new work and old, features the best of the magazine and a look at what may stand as the underground lit world's most interesting contemporary writing. --Punk Planet

THE2NDHAND has been the most exciting literary vessel in Chicago, opening a comfortably padded room for the anecdotal fiction writers and the experimental tale-spinners to play together where no one will get hurt. Read through this collection of four years worth of stories, and you'll see the line between the two isn't as clear as all that. And in the way the strongest species survive, it would seem the cross-pollination that happened over the years has strengthened both sides. --PopMatters.com

THE2NDHAND is really about writing.... This is in many ways better than McSweeney's, and in many more ways better than McDonalds. --Roctober

Read Frontlist Review or Rockpile Review, or....

Or mail a check for $12, made out to Elephant Rock Books, to THE2NDHAND c/o Todd Dills, 1827 1st Avenue N #301, Birmingham, AL 35203.

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#01: FOR WEEKS ABOVE THE UMBRELLA
2002 November, by Todd Dills
70 pages, saddle-stapled, $7

To order, mail to:

THE2NDHAND
c/o Todd Dills
1827 1st Avenue N #301
Birmingham, AL 35203

Or buy now using any major credit card via PayPal (allow a few weeks for delivery):

At the close of the twentieth century, amid the wiretapping, the e-mail interception, a few of us were none the wiser, but all the saner just the same; this is the sad anomaly. These 15 stories, produced over the course of 2 years, were mostly published elsewhere prior to this collecting, and include certain THE2NDHAND classics about Rat Kings, heavy metal albums, the Skunk Ape, menace to southwestern Florida, and the like, and surely wouldn't be complete without such formal hi-jinx as Weeks, Itineraries, Canned-Vegetable Activity Schematics, and more. Suffice it to say we're glad to see it. May the light shine down on thee....

'22 Feb 2002: in the haze of this morning's sleepiness I thought that we none of us are deserving of names, that it makes more sense just to be the lady, the cohort, the friend, the columnist, the Frenchman, the single man, the Skunk Ape. In any given moment there are never much more than one of each, anyway, are there...'
from Week of Skunk Apes

'...there will be things that will rend you, things that will take your ribcage like in fists and pull and pull until your breastbone breaks and your guts go spilling over the table in certain indistinct and highly emotive phraseology, but not today, not now, for you will be swimming in glory in a little tiny corner restaurant waiting for reallyreally nice and good food and A. will smile and pour herself another glass of wine and raise it high, but not before your version of same...you will raise that glass and A. will her own and you will smile and nothing will be said and there will be shortly a sound as of two cheap plastic ink pens being tapped together and you will stand in back of yourself and feel...'
from London Itinerary -- Day 2

'4. I heard a wild rumor that, where I now reside, there is a man running around town in an El Camino shooting holes with a .38 in those big blow-up gorillas people put on top of new sports stores and in car lots to attract the attention of people in their own cars with money. And I believed the rumor. Likewise, where I now reside, there are protests here and there against this and that, mostly against things that don't matter, like T.V. shows...'
from Sell Me to the Mayor