Triumph of the Ape
by Todd Dills
THE2NDHAND, 2013
150 pages / $12 Buy from Amazon or Kickstarter
Rating: 7.5

The Kickstarter campaign for Todd Dills’s new book asks participants to “fund the printing of this book of 14 collected short stories, from literary New South yarn to end-of-days dirge.” This got me thinking about the New South.

My hometown is frequently called “the Gateway to the New South,” but what does that mean? Is it an effort to banish stereotypes of the decidedly racist and agrarian past? The term “New South” brings to my mind a group of self-indulgent, cultured men and women—the type that have subscribed to Oxford American for 15+ years, who have serious opinions about barbecue and shrimp and grits, and who have read every William Gay and Cormac McCarthy novel twice through, but have never given Joy Williams more than a lingering glance. Could this stereotype form the criterion for Southern citizenship as well? If so, even I, a second generation Tennesseean, fail the test. READ MORE >

My Pet Serial Killer
by Michael Seidlinger
Enigmatic Ink, 2013
316 pages / $13.99 buy from Amazon
Rating: 8.8

My Pet Serial Killer is an honest look at relationships. Yes it may be surprising that it took a main character that disembowels unsuspecting women to explore the power dynamic that exists between any two people in a relationship. That’s just how Seidlinger operates. Seidlinger is the sickest of the fucks. Few can compare. What’s doubly refreshing, though, is exactly what is left in and out of the book. Occasional gory details make their way through the passages (how a person tastes like cinnamon, etc.) but the main focus is the relationship between the killer (Victor) and the observer (Claire). READ MORE >

2500 Random Things About Me Too
by Matias Viegener
Les Figues Press, 2012
246 pages / $15.00 buy from Les Figues Press
Rating: 9.0

For us it is so normal to see the clouds from above, and inside.

— section xxxix, line 12

By extrapolating the popular Facebook meme, 25 Random things about me, duration generates gravity in Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too (Les Figues Press, 2012), blowing aloft a cloud of identity–a portrait of the artist’s wandering consciousness. Viegner’s sequence of anecdotal strands, aphorisms, autobiographical trills, and questions both large and small are keenly paced; fragments hang alone indefinitely while others pick back up a few lines down or pages away, forming themes that resonate in opp- and apposition throughout the work. This deceptively loose push-and-pull provides much of the work’s excitement as associations spark, link with others and hover or hang solitary and pleasantly naked.

Here’s an example from the text, titular and relatively contained:

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Action, Figure
by Frank Hinton
Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012
160 pages / $16.95 (paperback) $10.00 (ebook) buy from THP
Rating: 9.0

“I want my childhood back,” Lili states. This may be the heart of the book. Aging is terrible. A curse is associated with accumulating years. One realizes youth wasn’t wasted enough. With the sheer passage of time it becomes obvious life is not based on success. Characters in this book want to live. Success is a by-product of life, not the goal. Searches here involve the mundaneness of looking for work, of pleasing parents, and the surreal journey through bombed-out lonely streets to seek others to complete us.

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The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. 1
by Scott McClanahan
Lazy Fascist Press, 2012
132 pages / $10.95 buy from Amazon
Rating: 8.7

Scott McClanahan wonders about doing the right thing. Does he do the right thing? Is the right thing even important, with everything all twisted and evil? There are no great epiphanies in these stories. What you see are only glimpses. Traces of humanity in the smallest of details: being able to tell time, finding salvation in a gas station toilet, hating bologna sandwiches. Any attempt at rationalizing the entire universe is avoided. Rather, McClanahan does what any good writer should: he writes about what he knows. And he writes in a way that is so thoroughly enjoyable. I feel after reading this book I know McClanahan just a little bit better.

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The Secret of Evil
by Roberto Bolaño
New Directions, 2012
192 pages / $22.95 buy from Powell’s
Rating: 7.3

We now have a new book (in English) of Bolaño’s fiction, presumably one of his last (FSG is releasing the unfinished Woes of the True Policeman later this year, an extension of the Amalfitano section in 2666). The Secret of Evil is a collection of Bolaño’s fiction found on his computer after his death, comprised of many pieces that appear unfinished. As Ignacio Echevarría’s introduction notes, and as readers will already be familiar, Bolaño’s texts can tend toward inconclusiveness. The typical Bolaño ending culminates in anti-climax, things sort of petering out, trailing off indiscriminately, people boarding planes, looking down desolate streets, etc. So what’s interesting in these pieces is figuring out which are truly finished and which are still works in progress. READ MORE >

The Sky Conducting
by Michael J. Seidlinger
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012
308 pages / $14.95 buy from SPD
Rating: 8.2

The Sky Conducting is what post-apocalyptic America will look like. There won’t be as much bloodshed as some of the ‘gore-mongers’ would like. Don’t bother saving all those containers of spam. They aren’t going to prepare you for the overwhelming emotion. READ MORE >

Reading Noah Cicero’s piece about Marie Calloway, it struck me that the Internet has invented a subgenre of literary essay. These essays could be easily be published in a volume called ‘How I Feel About Marie Calloway,’ collecting the torrents of writing about ‘Adrien Brody’ alongside the very small trickle of responses to ‘Jeremy Lin.’ Someone should publish this, if for no other reason than that we might see the collective bloviation of our Best Minds on a topic that eludes them completely. Tao Lin might have done, if ‘Jeremy Lin’ hadn’t so effectively outed him.

Before I get into any kind of Substantial Critique, I’d like to point out that we are discussing a young woman of twenty-two years. She’s not a symbol, she’s not a literary persona, she is an actual human being of twenty-two years. I remember when I was twenty-two years old. I could barely tie my shoes and had a problem with public drooling. Calloway is also, it must be said, a young looking twenty-two. Both by genetics and by design, she appears about sixteen years old.

The Marie Calloway Problem is pretty simply stated: we live in a society in which the mechanisms of commerce are designed to encourage us to believe that young women are randy hot sex machines, but we have a collective meltdown when one of them actually writes about sex that is anything other than vanilla. It breaks discourse. We’re that unevolved.

This was, in part, the pro-Calloway critique offered by many women writers in the days after ‘Adrien Brody’ went viral. The problem with such critiques is that almost all of them attempted to tie Calloway into a greater narrative. ‘Adrien Brody’ could not exist in a vacuum. It needed to be contextualized within its Greater Import.

This is nonsense. ‘Adrien Brody’ is a piece about a groady balding Brooklyn Intellectual who writes about Big Issues (Why is Capitalism Bad?) having sex with a twenty-one year old woman that likes his Twitter. The woman, recounting the tale, makes vague allusions to Marx, Marxism and Marxist thinkers. The Marxism is, of course, an affect.

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Level End
by Brian Oliu
Origami Zoo Press, 2012
$7.00 / $12.00 (Gold Edition) Buy from Origami Zoo Press
Rating: 8.9