By Tobias Mayer, with a foreword by Ron Jeffries and afterword by Lyssa Adkins

Tobias Mayer is known in the agile community as a brilliant and evangelical orator, an innovative trainer and an extraordinary trouble maker. You could call him the Hunter S. Thompson of the software arena, and no one who knows him would laugh. This book is a collection of essays drawn from his writing over the past seven years on the blogs Agile Thinking and Agile Anarchy, missives from the front lines of agile practice that represent the next generation of thinking on conventional agile topics like self-organization, technical debt and estimation–and utterly original writing on new topics like organizational anarchy, corporate oppression, the effect of testosterone on business practices, and artisanal product development.

Moving beyond the mere how-to, this is a book to excite the emotions and the intellect in those of us who have chosen the path of scrum to guide us in our work lives. Not since Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters has the discussion of software development been elevated to this level of world-view-changing discourse. In Tobias Mayer, technology has an exciting new voice to lead us into the brave new world of agile practice.

About the Author

Tobias Mayer has a background in software development, publishing, theatre arts, and community service work. For the past seven years he has worked as a change agent, trainer and facilitator, providing coaching and consulting services to teams and organizations wishing to make a transition to more agile, trustful and team-centered ways of working. An online essayist, Tobias blogs at businesscraftsmanship.com, where he frequently challenges the status quo, and offers ideas to inspire other practitioners in the organizational development field. Tobias is the editor of the Silicon Valley literary journal 113 Crickets, also published by Dymaxicon.

Business Craftsmanship

A novel by Gabrielle Chavela

$14.95 paperback (coming soon)
$5.99 kindle (coming soon)

Eva is a woman as stealthy, as soothing, as beguiling as a warm breeze. It’s a good cover, assuming the invisibility of the wind, and one that allows her to slip in and out of the identities she needs to stay alive: nanny, hacker, college student…

But is it safety that Eva wants, or revenge? And what if they turn out to be the same thing?

Part of Your World is one of the most original and fascinating novels to come out of modern Haiti. Gabrielle Chavela spins a narrative that veers between enchantment and terror, a story that is fraught with political intrigue, tenderness and brutality, set in a world of personal and political violence. Eva’s story unfolds against the backdrop of recent events in an unnamed island nation where covert US operatives and military contractors decide who rules and who dies.

Bracing, sexy, frightening, cinematic and wise, Part of Your World will change the way you see the politics of island nations and the influence of the American military machine.

Links

Advance Praise and a Pub Date for Gabrielle Chavela’s Part of Your World (pdf-press release)

Stories by Nancy Rommelmann

$14.95 paperback (coming January 2013)
$5.99 kindle (coming January 2013)

Author and journalist Nancy Rommelmann is known for her unflinching documentarian gaze, usually focused on subjects like serial killers, Munchausen moms, con-men and homeless teens. But the stories in Transportation have an elevated, untethered quality—they are transported, and transporting. At times the storytelling surges toward sci-fi, and at others, toward an unadorned magical realism­­­­. The first story in the collection, “The White Coyote,” is an intense study of shame that takes place in a grade school gymnasium. The title story, “Transportation,” documents the metaphysical journey of two grieving parents who must literally circumnavigate the globe, on separate paths, in order to heal.

Advance praise for Transportation:

“Nancy Rommelmann’s startling stories are as compelling as they are unsettling.  The worlds she creates are recognizable but also completely and wonderfully unfamiliar.  She writes close to the body, and we are made to feel each uncanny detail.  Transportation is a fascinating, fierce, and original collection of stories.”

Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia

“I inhaled this book in one sitting, thoroughly hypnotized.  Rommelmann has the uncanny ability to tease out the nightmarish moments of everyday life in stories that are audacious, darkly hilarious, surprisingly tender and HDTV sharp.  Fiction doesn’t get any better than this.”

Karen Karbo, author of How Georgia Became O’Keeffe

“Somewhere between gritty allegory and your mother’s kiss on your forehead lies Transportation, Rommelmann’s startling new collection. Each story crackles with violence, folding over into realms of other-worldliness, where the reader dare not look away. As the voice in the title story claims, ‘There is only one escape and that is to brush away the sentimental cobwebs, get them out of your eyes quickly,’ which Rommelmann does with razor-sharp precision.”

Deborah Reed, author of Carry Yourself Back To Me

 

By Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson

$9.95 paperback
$0.99 kindle

A pocket-sized overview of roles, artifacts and the sprint cycle is adapted from the bestsellerThe Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson.

Praise for The Elements of Scrum:

“If you want to understand the essentials of Agile development and Scrum, The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson is a must read.”
-Dave Moran

“Bravo. 6 stars. I wish all computer books were written like this.” -T. McCann “As a consultant who works in agile, this is the book I’ve been waiting for.”
-Liz Lewison

“For those only dancing with the idea of learning scrum and agile, I have three words—Read this Book.”
-Brendan Kane

Kindle exclusive $0.99

A memoir of growing up in Brooklyn Heights in the 1970s, by the author of The Bad Mother and Transportation and a Top 10 Longreads of 2012.

Excepted in the New York Times Magazine February 2012.

“Being a 13-year old with free time in New York City was not a hardship. We—my best friend Sarah, who’d had to leave school for financial reasons; a few other girls who, like me, would be asked to leave the following spring—rode the trains, wound up in Central Park or Washington Square, where we dropped acid and watched the sixties’ protracted death rattle.”

Links:

New York Times Magazine (excerpt)
Brooklyn Heights Blog (online review)
McBrooklyn (online review)
Unlikely Words (online review)

A journal of creative writing from Silicon Valley and beyond. Edited by Tobias Mayer

$9.95 paperback
$1.13 Kindle

Spring 2012:

Summer 2012:

Editor’s note:

113 Crickets is a new literary periodical based in Silicon Valley and published quarterly by Dymaxicon.

Dymaxicon is a genre-agnostic publishing company owned and operated by Agile Learning Labs. Through the publication of both technology-orientated books and works of fiction it strives to promote connections between the two fields. With the advent of agile practices, complexity science, and other modern, more human-centric ideas over the past ten years, many leading technology companies and start-ups alike have embraced a new approach to running businesses, one that treats work as a creative endeavor, and people as unique individuals, rather than components of a system. Such an approach lends itself naturally to craftsmanship and art, hence our effort to seek out and form connections between technology and the literary world.

113 Crickets will feature prose, poetry and short stories by new and upcoming writers, alongside extracts from Dymaxicon’s own literary publications, coupled with author interviews. In addition to this content 113 Crickets will embrace its Silicon Valley roots by seeking published writers from the Bay Area to participate in the project. We also plan to feature one published Bay Area writer in each issue, both to promote interest in the periodical and to weld the connection between the two worlds.

Tobias Mayer, founding editor, January 2012

About the Editor

Tobias Mayer has a background in software development, publishing, theatre arts, and community service work. For the past seven years he has worked as a change agent, trainer and facilitator, providing coaching and consulting services to teams and organizations wishing to make a transition to more agile, trustful and team-centered ways of working. An online essayist, Tobias authors the blog Agile Anarchy, where he frequently challenges the status quo, and offers ideas to inspire other practitioners in the organizational development field. 113 Crickets is a project he has been mulling over for a few years, and in working with Dymaxicon has found an innovative publisher who shares his ideas on partnership, craftsmanship and business democracy—an ideal environment for launching such a publication.

Links:

Stanford University Book Haven (online review)

By Ricki Grady

$14.95 paperback
$2.99 Kindle

Ricki Grady’s BeBop Garden is a book about gardening in the same sense that Izaac Walton’s  The Compleat Angler is a book about  fly fishing. Or that Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking  is a book about food. If this book really were a jazz composition, it would be a clever, brightly syncopated tune by Dave Brubek—there’s a lot of bright and shiny to delight the ear, but this is a kind of storytelling that can change the way you see the world at a molecular level. While BeBop Garden is about how to grow plants, it’s also about how to grow your heart and mind, how to find your improvisational center and learn to trust your instincts when it comes to discovering paths through life that will consistently delight and surprise you.

From the Introduction:

I share a fantasy with a lot of people: I see myself in a jazz band, so tuned in to my fellows that we can extemporize freely, taking a simple, familiar tune into unknown territory with wild abandon. There is one problem with this wishful vision. I have a tin ear. No amount of musical training or hours of practice can give me the vocabulary to speak music.

But I have found an improvisational medium better suited to my talents. Jazzy compositions are no longer beyond me, they just get worked out by startling plant juxtapositions, rhythmic color repetitions, harmonic arrangements of light and shadow.

Downloads:

Author Interview
Press Release

Links:

Herman Miller Lifework (online interview)
A Garden of Possibilities (online review)
The Book Corner (online review)
Gardening With Grace (online review)
Danger Garden (online review)
The Oregonian (online event preview)

By Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson

$29.95 paperback
$9.95 Kindle

This book is the result of hundreds of hours spent training, coaching, thinking, writing and learning about scrum. In our training courses we teach scrum interactively, because we find that experience is the best teacher. So when we set out to write a book to serve as a companion to our work in the field, we didn’t want to produce just another technical training manual that explains the rules of scrum in an officious, business-y tone that is as dry as day old toast and just as easy to swallow. We wanted instead to write the kind of book people would consider a good read.

But how to translate our experiential style into a book? We knocked around a lot of ideas, but circled back to the technique humans have been using to pass on information in the most accessible, meaningful, retainable form, and that is storytelling. So you won’t find a lot of bullet points in The Elements of Scrum. What you will find instead are lots and lots of anecdotal explanations, historical examples, and frank opinions couched in terms of our own and others’ real-life experiences in the field. As co-authors, Chris brought the subject matter expertise, and Hillary brought the novelist’s engaging writing style.

Watch co-author Chris Sims in “Scrum in 13 Minutes”:

Downloads:
Author Photo – Chris Sims
Author Photo – Hillary Johnson
Book Cover

Links:

Print review by Bruce Hagen for the BayAPLN
Blog review on Software Results review by Dave Moran
Blog Review by Jim Downey
Blog reivew by Joel Bancroft-Connors

$19.95 paperback

“Like sorting through postcards sent from a godless middle America-or leafing through a madman’s high school yearbook.”

John Chandler
Portland Monthly

“A mass-murdering couple. So romantic!
And no one could have captured this particular
infamous couple like Ms. Ristagno has.
Beautiful art and storytelling!”

Cartoonist Peter Bagge

Lili Ristagno spend years reasearching, illustrating and writing her graphic true crime novel, Short Fuse, which tells the story of teenage lovers Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather, who went on a murder spree in rural Nebraska in 1958, long before the term “serial killer” had taken root in our cultural imagination. Lili became so obsessed with the story that she actually moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to immerse herself in its environment—and found herself not entirely welcome. The citizens of Lincoln wanted to forget all about Caril and Charlie.

In 2010, now living in Portland, Oregon and working at one of the busiest public libraries in the country, Lili brought out a private edition of Short Fuse, organized more like a scrapbook than a graphic novel. She only printed fifty copies, and sold out almost immediately. The six copies purchased by the Multnomah County Library have been on permanent wait-list status ever since.

The Dymaxicon Cult Classic edition of Short Fuse is fully redesigned, taking what was once a collection of gorgeous but static works of art—a meditation on a theme—and turning them into a compelling, page-turning narrative. Lili has created several new illustrations to advance the storytelling, and novelist Nancy Rommelmann worked closely with her to craft prose that is as haunting and spare as the accompanying images.

Listen to a radio interview with author Lili Ristagno.

Watch the book trailer:

Downloads:

The Sunday Oregonian (feature story)
Publisher’s Letter
Q&A with Lili Ristagno
about Dymaxicon Cult Classics
author photo
author self-portrait
front cover
back cover
interior image 1 – victim
interior image 2 – shooting
interior image 3 – Caril Fugate
interior image 4 – Charlie Starkweather

Links:

KBOO radio interview with author Lili Ristagno.
Portland Monthly – Wordstock Preview
The Sunday Oregonian (print feature)

$14.95 print
$2.99 Kindle

Thanks to our readers for making A Detailed Man a #1 Amazon Bestseller!

A relentless tour of DCs most crime-ridden streets, with many beautifully written surprises, and darker than the deepest noir.
~Madison Smartt Bell

Half of DC Police Detective Ezra Simeon’s face is immobilized from a persistent case of Bell’s Palsy—he must drink through a straw and eat carefully to avoid chewing through his own cheek. He has been detailed from robbery to the cold case department while he heals.

“How odd to dream with one eye open, like having one foot in reality,” Sim muses in the dark, bluesy vein that is typical of his Chandler-esque narration. “That’s what makes dreaming dangerous and why I moved my gun farther from the bed.”

Detective Simeon’s half-frozen world begins to heat up when a friend from his Academy days drops dead of a heart attack, and Sim is tapped to replace him, detailed now to homicide, where he inherits the high-profile case of a murdered escort he alone thinks may be the victim of a serial killer.

About the Author

David Swinson spent the 1980s as a punk rock music promoter and film producer, booking acts like Social Distortion, Nick Cave, John Cale, Chris Isaac and the Red Hot Chili Peppers into clubs and producing spoken word events with Hunter S. Thompson, John Waters and Jim Carroll. He produced the cult classic film Roadside Prophets, starring John Doe of X and Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys and featuring Timothy Leary, John Cusack, David Carradine and Arlo Guthrie.
In 1994, Swinson returned to his hometown of Washington DC and joined the police force, where he worked robbery, homicide and narcotics and became one of the city’s most decorated detectives. In 2000 he was promoted to the Special Investigations Bureau/Major Crimes, where he was often called upon by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, The Treasury Department and The US Attorney’s Office for assistance with sensitive cases.

A Detailed Man is Swinson’s first novel.

Downloads:

Praise for A Detailed Man
Interview with author David Swinson
Press Release: A Detailed Man hits number 1
Author photo
Book cover

Links:

DC Library pick for the 2012 Library of Congress National Book Festival
Washington City Paper (print feature)
Long Beach Press Telegram (print Feature)
Seattle Post Intelligencer (online review)
Defrosting Cold Cases (online review)
House of Crime and Mystery (online review)
The Best Reviews (online review)

$14.95 paperback
$7.99 kindle

Journalist Nancy Rommelmann left her Hollywood beat some time ago. In this, her debut novel, she delivers a heartfelt, unforgettable love letter to the street kids who society would just as soon forget.

–Mark Ebner, author of Hollywood, Interrupted

Utterly harrowing and sweet, alien and recognizable all at the same time. I didn’t know which child to empathize with more. This is obviously the work of not only a good writer, but also a very good
mother.

–Erika Schickel, author of You’re Not the Boss of Me

I’ve long admired Nancy Rommelmann’s non-fiction because, with brutal compassion and emotional wallop, she unfailingly reveals that no life is really ordinary. Now, she brings the same promise and punch to her first novel, The Bad Mother. You may find it hard to look at these beautifully desperate characters, but it’s much harder to look away.

–David Rensin, author of A Few Perfect Waves and The Mailroom

Rommelmann casts an excellent, gritty mood.

–Willamette Week

In The Bad Mother, she spares the reader none of the grotesque details; the effect is strangely akin to accounts of Christian martyrs and their tormentors.

–The Sunday Oregonian

A first novel by the award-winning journalist Nancy Rommelmann, The Bad Mother is set among Hollywood’s transient population of street kids. The idea for this book grew out of Rommelmann’s experiences chronicling the under-told stories of Hollywood’s various underground populations for the LA Weekly and the LA Times: a crew of Mexican gardeners working the Hollywood Hills; the “cop groupies” who hang out at the LAPD’s favorite bar, and the dream-broke residents of Sunset Boulevard’s transient hotels. Hollywood is hard on everyone, from aspiring actors and actresses to those on the way back down, but it is particularly indifferent to the children who ghost along the boulevard, unseen by the tourists squatting over Marilyn Monroe’s hand prints in front of Grauman’s Chinese. As Rommelmann explains, “Hollywood herself is the bad mother of the title.”

Watch the book trailer:

Downloads:

Interview with Nancy Rommelmann
Author Bio – Nancy Rommelmann
A National Book Tour for Nancy Rommelmann (press release)
Author Photo
Book Cover

Links:

Reason Magazine Hit-And-Run (video interview)
LA Weekly (print interview)
Willamette Week (print review)
The Sunday Oregonian (print review)
LA Observed Blog Review
Dr. Helen (Helen Smith) (blog review)
Portland Mercury (print review)

By Larry Kronish

$14.95 paperback
$2.99 Kindle

The style of this book is a cross between Batman comics (chikushoo, baka-yaro!) and Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum adventures. The fast pace of the story, vivid imagery and lighthearted plot line make this book perfect for taking along on vacations and airplanes.

- Portland Book Review

Set in 1980′s Japan, The Sushi King’s Daughter follows the adventures of Fat Harada, a gentle, noodle-slurping small-time enforcer, and Yuko, his purple haired, black-lipsticked, foul mouthed nemesis and unlikely dream girl, as they go up against the Yakuza.  Violent, sexy, and very, very funny. If you are nostalgic for Delacorta’s new wave novels  of the same time period (Luna, Diva, Nana), then you will be smitten by The Sushi King’s Daughter.

Harada threw the bruised and gasping Snake on top of the jackknifed Peach Boy, gave them both an extra kick in the gut to keep them down, “For Sato, you baka-yaro!” charged into the hall, leapt lightly over the prone and groaning Shin, grabbed Yuko’s wrist and surged along the hall, down the stairs, through the curtain, burst into the shop ,knocking the phone out of Muso’s hand sending it flying through the air to strike a teetering pile of books, which toppled with a dusty sigh of relief pulling three other stacks along with it. Books sprayed across the floor.

“Harada, you bastard—” Muso screamed.

Plowing through the store trying to run, bow, and Yuko flying along behind him, Harada shouted back, “I’m sorry, really, Muso-san,” exploded through the shop’s front door sweeping aside two blue-suited salarymen and a teenager lost in his favorite S&M manga. The salarymen flew into a taxi stand, their newspapers puffing into flight. The teenager slammed into a pile of cardboard boxes with a soggy whomp! His magazine drifted down and settled by his head, the bound and gagged girl on the cover eyeing him as he lay there gasping for breath.

Watch the book trailer:

See Larry Kronish read from The Sushi King’s Daughter:

links:

Portland Book Review (print review)