“Even Adam was reduced to barter–
What do I hear for this rib?–
& kicked out of bliss for shoplifting
into a world well-stocked with woe.”

That’s from “Limited Time Offer,” by Ronald Wallace, which is included in the new anthology IOU: New Writing on Money, from Concord Free Press.

Concord Free Press got a lot of attention at its launch last fall for its unique business plan: rather than charge for their books, they send them for free to people who request them through their Web site. What they ask in return is that the recipients make a donation to a charity, reporting it to Concord, then, once they’ve read the book, pass it on to someone else. It’s not a sustainable model on its own–the authors donate their labor, and the Press itself requires donations to survive–but, assuming the donations come through, it’s an interesting one, and I like how its insistence on sharing emphasizes the underlying sociability of the solitary act of reading.

IOU, edited by poet, former businessman, and Quarterly Conversation contributor Ron Slate, is the perfect book for Concord: it’s a collection of stories, poems, essays, and interviews, many of them never before published, relating to money. It makes a nice companion piece to more straightforward recent books that attempt to make sense of our lingering financial crisis: when you get fed up with the feckless financiers in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, you can turn to IOU for a poem found on a $5 bill (“almost hidden in the green bushes / at the base of the Lincoln Memorial”) in L. B. Thompson’s “$5 American Poem,” or an interview with a low-level embezzler (“The money was just paper to me . . . a piece of paper. I never took any cash.”). J. C. Hallman tells of his days as a casino dealer; Dan Pope contributes a satisfyingly Jim Anchower-like short story; Tony Eprile tells a story of money, work, and witchcraft in South Africa; Jenny Boully offers a typically lapidary essay on poetry and blue jeans; and much more.

Not all the pieces are fully successful: a few of the poems fall flat, a couple of the short stories are a bit schematic, and a brief piece by Douglas Rushkoff on local currencies (“Our money doesn’t work for people anymore. That’s why we people owe it to ourselves and one another to start printing our own.”) seems, at least to my jaded pragmatist’s ear, a bit naively optimistic. But the collection as a whole is pleasantly varied, its multiple voices and perspectives consistently refreshing. And for the price, who’s to complain?

You can order a copy here–or, now that I’ve read it and made my donation, why don’t you just take mine? First person to leave a comment with an e-mail address can have it.