A new novel based on a controversial 2012 eviction of anglers occupying fishing shanties in Hudson, N.Y. is set to be released by Two-Headed Calf Press on December 8. To celebrate the occasion, Spotty Dog Books and Ale at 440 Warren Street in Hudson plans to host a book release party featuring live music and a book signing with the author, William Shannon, on Sunday, December 8, at 7 p.m. The River's Never Full follows a group of eccentric anglers who face eviction from their long-held river shanties on public land in Hudson, N.Y. A young newspaper reporter is fascinated with the shanty dwellers and seeks to make sense of their plight, while they spend most of their time fishing for herring and striper, target-shooting, steaming clams, cooking eel and talking about better days. But once guns are drawn, whose side will you be on? This is the debut novel from William Shannon, a freelance journalist whose feature stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He covered the Occupy Wall Street protests and murders in the Bronx while interning at The New York Daily News and earned a M.S. in 2012 from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. His oral history project seeking memories of earlier eras in the Hudson Valley culminated in a book titled Hudson River Zeitgeist: Interviews from 2015. He lives in Germantown, N.Y., with his wife, Rena, and their daughter, Arabella. To sign up for pre-order information or for other inquiries, write to Devyn Waitt of Two-Headed Calf Press at twoheadedcalfpress@gmail.com.

Human Host began in December 2002. The creative core of the group includes Mike Apichella and a rotating ensemble of diverse collaborators and figments of your imagination. https://humanhost.bandcamp.com/ Yes Selma is the bedroom recording project of Chad Beattie. https://chadbeattie.bandcamp.com/ Hudson's Personal Crisis Management are BACK too. Keep an eye out for their parachute.

Volume is a FREE reading & music series featuring prose, poetry and a short DJ set. Every second Saturday at 7:00 pm at The Spotty Dog. Books are available for purchase and signing. Volume is proud to present the 4th annual HOME TEAM lineup - a special night of emerging writers! Deenie Hartzog-Mislock is a writer and freelance copy director living in Hudson, NY. Her essays touch on the messiness of being human with heart and humor, and have been published in the New York Times Modern Love column, Refinery29, and Glamour.com, with a forthcoming piece in Longreads. You can find her at @deenkat on Instagram. Anna Victoria is a photographer and writer living in Hudson, NY. She uses her art to collect memories, ask unanswerable questions, and get all emotional and stuff. She studied English Literature at the University of Connecticut, and her work has appeared in Chronogram, Long River Review, and existentia. You can find her work at @annavictoriaphotography on Instagram. Dani French is a writer based in Hudson, NY. She currently co-hosts the Volume Reading & Music Series and was a co-founder of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in NYC. She holds an MFA in fiction from the New School, and her work has been published in Broken Pencil and Playgirl. When she's not writing short fiction or working at her day job as a technical writer, Dani helps her oldest daughter write disgruntled letters to Jon Favreau. Kate Devine is a writer from the shores of central New Jersey. Her essays and poems have been published in Crab Fat Magazine, POND Magazine, Breadcrumbs, and others. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She currently lives in Hudson, New York. After a decade as a critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter ("the neo-Stevie Nicks" The New York Times), Alexa Wilding received her MFA in 2017 from The Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's College. She has been featured in Vogue, Allure, Bust, and Style Like U, and her writing recently appeared in Parents. You can follow her diary of #alchemicalcancermom @alexawilding on Instagram. Alexa lives in Hudson with her husband and twin sons. She is working on a memoir and new music. Followed by a set from DJ Dan Bunny. "Two Hudson writers seem to have found a new formula, turning the traditional reading into a party celebrating the best in new lit." --Jamie Larson, Rural Intelligence "Two 'dorks' pump up the Volume in Hudson, NY. Reclusive literati come out and play in a converted firehouse on the second Saturday of every month." --Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle www.facebook.com/volumehudson

Keith Bendis has been a freelance illustrator for forty years. His humorous illustrations have appeared in most of America’s leading magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, Time and Sports Illustrated. He has illustrated ten books, including The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle, Casey at the Bat and the still unpublished Only the Good Stay Dead by Joe Queenan. He has also illustrated two children’s books, including Calvin Can’t Fly for Sterling Publishing. He lives with his artist wife, Betzie, on an old farm in Columbia County, NY. Ambrose Bierce, a contemporary of Mark Twain’s, is known for his irreverent wit, sharp sarcasm, and sardonic view of human nature. His perennial classic of American satire, The Devil’s Dictionary, offers biting observations that lampoon people, politics, American society, and its most cherished institutions. Acclaimed New York cartoonist Keith Bendis has chosen a sampling of Bierce’s most wickedly funny definitions to bring to life through illustration. Bierce’s acerbic wit has met its perfect match with Bendis’ humorous, tongue-in-cheek watercolor drawings.

Sondra Sun-Odeon is a Los Angeles and Brooklyn based voice, composer, and recording artist. A classically-trained pianist and self-taught guitar player, her music aims to describe the inexpressible, and reach for what is higher-than, and beyond the realms of our tangible everyday lives. www.sondrasunodeon.com Arone Dyer is a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer & founding member of duos Buke and Gase & Mistresses, as well as the composer and director of Dronechoir, a project which examines social dis/comfort through long-durational choral performance, metamorphosing through a moving meditation of sometimes subtle sonic changes. www.aronedyer.com Iva Bittová’s countryman Milan Kundera wrote how Europe’s “small nations” form another Europe. The violinist-vocalist may be ‘small nation’ Czech but her musical worldview and visionary creativity acknowledge no borders. Her powers of spontaneous creativity are more bountiful than it is fair to confer on one person. Witness and marvel. www.bittova.com

Window's annual reunion! The trio, formerly of Hudson, are back just before the holidays to treat us to a set. Support comes from one of Spotty's favourite artists, Lily Konigsberg, who'll be performing some of her finest solo cuts. Kingston's Jared Ashdown will open the show. Known for his work in his Fugazi-sounding band Open Head, this'll be the best of his solo work.