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Founding and Art Editor Ronnie Scott recommends Everything.

Part of the fun in editing “The-Lifted-Brow-as-magazine” is that we did all kinds of things which could have never been anthologised: Krissy Kneen wrote us a novella that would’ve used up all the pages! Thomas Benjamin Guerney wrote us an eighty-minute epic postapocalyptic love story told in strict rhyming couplets and recorded by voice! Neil Gaiman wrote us a song and Claudia Gonson from the Magnetic Fields sung it! That’s not even going into the flipbooks and columns and live shows and art, and without all this I wondered how this book could even work. But you know what, it was insanely fun to filter all the weirdness out and find out if the straightforward writing could hold up by itself: the stories with beginnings, middles, ends; the longer-form reporting; the things that didn’t have diagrams or recipes in them, basically.

This anthology is the version of The Lifted Brow that dresses up and goes outside and sets out not to embarrass itself or anyone. We’re really proud of it, and we invite you to buy it and mess it up.

Editor Sam Cooney recommends ‘Shipwreck’ by Elspeth Muir.

Trawling the weird depths of my Hotmail Inbox, I can see that I first tried to find Elspeth Muir on the 22nd of June 2010, when I sent an email through to Voiceworks asking for her email address. I was putting together a folio of work by youngish Australian writers that I would then look to shop around to various esteemed publications. I’d read a piece of Muir’s in Issue 76 of Voiceworks and wanted more. I (and a few others) were worried that some of Australia’s established literary publications at the time weren’t trying hard enough to serve up delicious new writing from people who weren’t already acclaimed and reckoned that if we just gave them whole bundles of the most excellent stuff, then refusal would be outrageously unimaginable.

Sometime around then, then-editor of The Lifted Brow Ronnie Scott asked me if I wanted to do a folio of fiction for an upcoming issue of Brow. I said ‘Yes, sir’ and he called me a dudeburger (a moniker which seems to have stuck) and then several things happened and we published Elspeth Muir’s story ‘Shipwreck’ in Issue 10 of The Brow.

‘Shipwreck’ is the story of a man’s survival on an island. But “survival” is a word, like any other, that is understood differently by different people at different times and in different places. Most importantly, ‘Shipwreck’ is about the protagonist developing a meaningful/personal/sexual relationship with a female chimpanzee on the island as he proceeds to lose out on life. It’s a story that grabs your ankles with its simplicity and then yanks and flips you onto your face, but nicely, as though you’re landing in white chocolate cheesecake.

The story starts and ends with identical sentence sequences (‘The chimpanzee shrieks and the sound is extraordinary. Red, green and blue birds chirp, shit then resettle. They ruffle their feathers.’) and in between these borderlines you find yourself sitting on the sand of this island, watching events unfold, rooting for both characters and none - it’s not about words and sentences but about touching and all the rest of your wonderful senses.

Fiction Editor Johannes Jakob recommends ‘The Santosbrazzi Killer’ by Heidi Julavits.

This story is like a wonderful combo of Larry David and Franz Kafka. The heart of any Larry David bit is always this: your efforts to not be misunderstood actually make you way more misunderstood. Kafka is the same thing (basically…) except with him your inability to be make yourself understood additionally leaves you desperately alone. Same thing with this Heidi Julavits story! A woman on a monthly inspection of a “subsidiary research outfit” spends most of her time just maliciously jicking her ballpoint pen – jick-jick, jick-jick-jick-jick – and writing notes whenever office action is most unworthy of note, maximising dread in the employees. In her downtime she makes a point of enjoying the local Cincinnati non-attractions and ends up ordering The Santosbrazzi Killer at the hotel bar. Miscommunication! It turns out what she’s ordered is not a cocktail but an actual contract killer, one whose terms include all the same subclauses, nondisclosure and loopholery of corporate and government hellscapes the world over.

Specifically, the killer requires her to nominate an asshole for him to murder, and the fun of the story is really that it relishes the difference, not just in spelling, between an arsehole and an asshole. The artful cruelty of American assholes: self-aware, enjoying themselves, hyper-watchable.

So you’re gonna be laughing a lot, complicit and pretty much onside with all these people in the story getting screwed over and traumatised, because hey, it’s fun to read about. And that’s how Julavits gets you, keeps you off guard until the very last moments of the story. Rendered dumb to this tremendous, empathetic fear you have for yourself and for everyone else alone in this world with you, which it turns out you have been feeling all along, just needing the right asshole to come along and reveal to you.

Middlebrow Editor Ellena Savage recommends ‘What are the attributes of God?’ by Tom Cho.

The year is 2236, and in a large robotics firm, the CEO, Dr. Armstrong, directs his company to create its most ambitious robot yet: a robot that embodies the attributes of God. A manager is assigned the task of creating a “quality management system” to oversee the project, and a philosopher of religion is called in to narrow the scope of his inquiry. Could it be that God is the “The Possessor of Almighty Cuteness”? Or, perhaps, He is much like any of us, “except that God is taller and more capable.”

I think the main reason I love this story is that the project is obviously, completely, impossible, which provides a meaty framework for Cho to do what he does best: create Technicolored worlds of kitsch, while exploring the gravity that lurks beneath kitsch. Because of the limitless scope of the project, and the unnamable phenomena that require articulation in the story, the reader can see how hard Cho is working to keep the story afloat. This is not a bad thing: it feels as authentic and revealing as when you watch a self-conscious person open up about themselves in public.

‘What are the attributes’ is less assured than the stories that make up Cho’s collection Look Who’s Morphing but its inquiry moves into deeper territory. It is set to be a chapter in Cho’s forthcoming novel, a literary event I am breathless in anticipation of. On his blog, Cho writes that the story has undergone major rewrites, but so challenging was this process that he ‘almost gave up on the entire novel.’ I am so, so glad that didn’t happen.

Deputy Editor Stephanie Van Schilt recommends a Ronnie Scott hug.

If you haven’t experienced a Ronnie Scott hug, you’re missing out so let me tell you, it’s a strong and solid and intense and quality embrace: you know he cares. If Ronnie Scott has hugged you (lucky!) or hasn’t (sorry) you must know that The Best of the Lifted Brow is the book version of this mean squeeze. So obviously I highly recommend getting at it.

Firstly, get your hands on The Best of the Lifted Brow. Then crack open that stylish cover and get your read on. Once you eyeballs the contents page alone you’ll know this book is chock-full of intelligent, exciting, funny writing from the years of Ronnie’s editorial reign. From his foreword on, you’re guaranteed to marvel at the genius unfolding and while you’re at it, you’ll probably feel really good and happy and moved because this particular literary hug for your brain is a damn good one.

So props to Ronnie for calling Sam Cooney a dudeburger, for likening The Brow to throwing processed cheese and for being the reason this excellent anthology exists. Whatta guy. Whatta book. Get at it.