April 2017

struggle

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April 25th, 2017 / 2:06 pm

Reviews

Marina Started to Wish: Rachel Bell’s Loving the Ocean Won’t Keep It from Killing You

Rachel is a cool person who moved into the room I recently left in Brooklyn, NY. This room has been the home of at least two other HTMLGIANT-adjacent writers in the past.

She gave me a copy of her new book Loving the Ocean Won’t Keep it From Killing You on Hello America press. It’s a small paperback with a sleek typographic cover. I had met Rachel previously–when we shared Adam Humphrey’s video production help two summers ago–so I knew there was something worth paying attention to inside the cover. Rachel is a driven, focused writer-artist and who is also fun to be around. We smoked cigarettes together. We went to the deli across the street. READ MORE >

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April 25th, 2017 / 11:22 am

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April 11th, 2017 / 2:24 pm

“Mystery and Mortality,” Paula Bomer’s book of essays

Bomer Mystery CoverMystery and Mortality: Essays on the Sad, Short Gift of Life is, as the title says, a collection of essays. In this book, Paula Bomer (author of the powerful and unflinching books Nine Months and Inside Madeline from Soho, and Baby from Word Riot) looks at the work of writers ranging from Tolstoy to Ferrante and Kathy Acker to Brian Allen Carr. She combines her reflections about this literature with her mother’s dementia and her father’s suicide and, through this, she runs some painful thought experiments about why we are what we are and do what we do.

It’s very generous, for a writer to expose so much. It’s humbling to publish it.

Here’s the first paragraph:

Yesterday, I walked by a mirror and I stopped and looked into it and thought, or maybe said out loud, as I’m prone to talking to myself, being one of those writers who spends far too much time alone, “I am not my mother,” repeatedly. Then I walked away.

A few of the 15 essays originally appeared here at HTMLGiant before the turn of the decade, when Paula was a contributor here known as “pr.” Some readers might remember her being lauded for all that scholarship on Flannery O’Connor.

There’s an introduction by Meg Tuite where she says there’s:

no milquetoast in … anything she’s written. Straight on ferocity that doesn’t reek of the formaldehyde of sodden decorum and martyr-esque, flushed vaginas that pop out babies with a smile and a song. Bomer’s work rakes through brutality.

Plus, check out this cool spine:

Bomer_Spine

The book is available now from Publishing Genius, and right now it’s still just $10 (+ $3 shipping) through this week.

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April 11th, 2017 / 10:32 am