Matt Bell’s ‘A certain number of bedrooms, a certain number of baths’
I remember the first time I read this story in Caketrain 4, I read it in the bathtub with some awareness of who Matt Bell was but not fully yet having found. By the end of it I remember going, “Oh, shit, this guy knows what is what and who is who.” I was right to go that, because since then Matt has only continue to slay and slay and slay, and yet this story, in all that time, in comparison to so much wonderful work he’s since published, has not lost an inch of its fine luster.
Herein Matt Bell demonstrates his amazing ability to meld the unknown and the curiously black with the most identifiable of human moments, without the baggage of sentimental cheese that often crops up in making something seem ‘human.’
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We need somebody to handle advertising on the site and to provide some assistance with structuring said potential revenue stream. It is a paid position.
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June 8th, 2009 / 7:19 pm
June 8th, 2009 / 7:19 pm
Found
Bennett Cerf asks:
Do you have a restless urge to write?
If you do, here is an opportunity for you to take the first important step to success in writing. READ MORE >
List of Literary Events Not To Be Missed This Week In Atlanta
1. Walk through the magazine racks at Borders, that one section of one kiosk that sometimes has random cool magazines but mostly not, not anymore
2. Look through the window of that bookstore in Decatur that just went out of business and breathe on the glass and pretend like that’s you in there looking at the books that you didn’t buy because you went home instead and bought them on Amazon for less money
3. Read a book and pretend in your head that that author is reading it to you, in the way you think their voice is, without the witty asides or the host between people (you can add the host if you want)
4. Secretly cherish that there aren’t that many lit events here so you don’t have to feel obligated to attend them when it’s, like, your friend and stuff
5. Look at the internet some more
The Onion has still got it
Although the sole film made from Salinger’s work, My Foolish Heart, based on his short story “Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut,” was considered by Salinger to be such a bastardization of his prose that he never agreed to another adaptation, he now states that “if McG wants to do any of my stuff—’A Perfect Day For Bananafish’; Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; hell, all of Nine Stories—he has my complete permission. Anything. Anything he wants.”
Read it all here, and deal with how comparatively unfunny we truly are.
Blake Butler—
Issue 9 of Robot Melon is live with many crazies including Jamie Iredell, Sean Lovelace, Justin Dobbs, Mike Young, Peter Berghoef, Ani Smith, my review of another Evenson story, and lots o more.
A writer cannot live on books alone.
Ernesto Neto
Please leave your desk for just a moment and go see Ernesto Neto’s installation, anthropodino, at The Park Avenue Armory in New York City. All the information you need is here.
Andrew Zornoza’s ‘Where I Stay’
The ‘road novel’ might be one of the most maligned forms in storytelling, in that for a mold that by in proper handling could be kinetic, shapeshifting, and packed with an uncontainable kind of light found only in certain kinds of travel, too many books get caught up in minutiae and joking, leaving out the language and the true moving meat.
Thankfully, Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay, just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press, manages to not only wield that rare light while avoiding those common pitfalls, but to do so in a refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe.
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June 6th, 2009 / 4:16 pm
June 6th, 2009 / 4:16 pm
The Chapbook Review
We’re chock full of writers, right, and there are more and more presses starting up every day. Hallelujah. Like check out North Punk Press and their new thing, the nicely titled story by Paula Bomer called “An Important Day in the Joyful Life of Marjorie Wallace.” It’s a teaser for a future chapbook, and it’s put together handsomely on blogger and as a downloadable PDF. The story concerns Marjorie, an administrative assistant who runs into an old friend and chastises her for not calling, and then ends up feeling kind of bad but kind of hopeful, or maybe she has sunstroke. Read it, get it.
But anyway, what I was saying is that there are plenty of writers and presses starting up all the time, a bunch of people and publishers I’ve never heard of even. I can’t keep track.
So that’s why I’m really excited about The Chapbook Review, which as founder John Madera puts it, is “a monthly online literary journal focused on the critical examination of the venerable chapbook.” Just as the list of novellas Madera put together is massive (not to mention, holy geez, his gorgeous and flabbergasting review of Light Boxes), so shall be The Chapbook Review. The first issue features a conversation that Pig Babi Blake Butler had with academe Chris Higgs, and then that conversation in reverse. It’s got reviews by Sean Lovelace and Tobias Carroll and Kimberly King Parsons and tons of people about books by Matt Bell, Mike Heppner and Aaron Burch and so much more I’m not saying it right. There’s reviews of Willows Wept books and Sunnyoutside books. I mean, there’s like two reviews of the same book from The Cupboard for crying out loud. I’m as excited as a squirrel on fire about The Chapbook Review, for real, because to go along with the shit ton of writers and editors, now there is more inquiry to legitimate it, lightening the burden some for the precious few outlets (New Pages, Rain Taxi, The Quarterly Conversation) that are taking critical reviews of small press fare as a serious and sole objective.
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June 6th, 2009 / 2:19 pm
June 6th, 2009 / 2:19 pm