Anthony Ausgang, shown here at Kustom Kulture II, reads from his new and twisted novella The Pawnee Republican Saturday July 20, at La Luz de Jesus

Anthony Ausgang can paint, that’s for sure, and he’s a genius with fine line work and colors.  On July 20, Ausgang steps away from the easel, unlocks his unconscious, and opens his spam folder to read from The Pawnee Republican, the follow up to last year’s The Adventures of Puss Twitter.

For five years Ausgang saved all the spam emails he received that contained scrambled texts ranging from porn to appliance owner’s manuals to works by Charles Dickens. With his prose and plot based on this chaotic gibberish, Anthony Ausgang has created a bizarre world that takes advantage of both the garbled classic literature and the random word generating websites favored by spambots.   Archaic doctrines and psyber-tropic modernism combine, making The Pawnee Republican required reading for anyone who has ever inherited a million dollars from someone they never met or won a lottery they never entered. Plus the cover features an original Ausgang painting.

Fellow writer and painter John Tottenham, whose idiosyncratic readings include elements of performance and stand-up, has finally sold out to the lucrative, fast-paced world of poetry. He is the author of The Inertia Variations, an epic cycle on the subject of work-avoidance, indolence and failure. His final collection of poetry, Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment – a sequence of mean-spirited love poems with particular respect paid to the institution of marriage – was published by Penny-Ante Press in October 2012.

Rounding up the arty-literary evening: Art critic  Shana Nys Dambrot, who has has written essays for scores of exhibition catalogs and artist-monographs, will read  excerpts from her introduction to  The Pawnee Republican, along with a selection of poetry by Gertrude Stein.