Keith Montesano is the author of the newly released and stunningly black and bracing Ghost Lights, his debut from Dream Horse Press. At his First Book Interviews blog, he conducts a series of interviews with writers upon the publication of their first book, detailing the experience and the feeling of the completion of a first work, and I asked him to do the same with his own questions.

How often had you sent out Ghost Lights before it was selected for publication by Dream Horse Press?

I sent the book out 60 times before I received an email from J.P. Dancing Bear telling me that I was a finalist for the Orphic Prize and that the press was able to publish the finalists that year.

Was the title always Ghost Lights? Did it go through any other changes?

A good chunk of the book was my MFA thesis at Virginia Commonwealth University, when it was called About Ravishment. I remember sitting with some friends at a bar near VCU, and when I told them the title of the manuscript I was sending out, which they knew was the title of my thesis, I got some weird looks. I was asked if other titles were kicking around, and I told them I’d been thinking about Ghost Lights. Then I got the looks that said, “I think you found your title.”

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While we’re on the Harmony Korine again, there is a new short film called Act Da Fool by him on the Proenza Schoulder site. It is retarded gorgeous. In a related Q&A on the site he refers to it as his version of The Ten Commandments. [Thanks to Mike Kitchell for the point.]

1. Also officially out today, the amazing The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, which truly lives up to its hype: it’s enormous and insane + magic. Full review forthcoming.

2. @ Not Coming, a 3 part review of the Back to the Future series. (1) (2) (3)

3. @ the Guardian, Harmony Korine has a list of things he knows, including: “When I hear the song “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” by Three 6 Mafia, it’s like listening to the gospels…” & “I didn’t really research anything for my film Trash Humpers, I just did it – just lived like a homeless person and it was great.”

Today marks the release of a book I’ve been waiting for itchingly for a good long while now: Lindsay Hunter’s could-not-be-better-titled collection Daddy’s, new from Featherproof. If you’ve ever seen Lindsay read live, you already are probably pressing buy: she slams heads. The book is shaped like a tackle box and guaranteed to be stuffed full of more freak than you might be able to handle in one read. She kind of makes Harry Crews and Angela Carter look like Jerry Seinfeld.

“In Daddy’s, babies mean blood, and nipples are like “lit match heads.” Lindsay Hunter transgresses where others fear to tread.” —Terese Svoboda, author of Pirate Talk or Mermalade

“Each tiny, diamond story—precise, comic, poised at the edge of surreal—contains one brutal life force tearing itself off the page. You can hold Daddy’s in your hands and feel it breathing.” —Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation

“Lindsay Hunter won’t be caught lie-telling in the name of nice. The miniature stories in Daddy’s are fierce and unapologetic. When the We’s she voices say the axblade was bloody with dirt, what they mean is the neighbor’s swingset creaked and moaned next door and we heard a child’s voice say Never ever. When I’m looking again for my next undoing, I’ll crack open Daddy’s, and get the true news they tell us we’d be better off not hearing.”—Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory

For a taste, here’s one of the stories from the book, about a messed up baby: That One.

Get a further peek inside and place your order here.

Get out your diapers, sluts! PW weighs in with the top 50 MFA programs. My dad says this is totally out of whack with the actual parameters of what young thugs want in language learning these days. What are you to think? (click img for larger versions)

Sorry, the Bible’s a really rad book. It’s really funny. I wish I’d written it. I feel like if like Action Books or Dalkey Archive had published the Bible instead of whoever it would be a really respected work: I mean, respected by atheists who think the Bible is dumb and only like like poetry by James Tate or something. I read a whole bunch of the Bible the other week in the swimming pool. It was my sister’s copy from when she got baptized I think. She hadn’t touched it since then. I think I have one from that day too but I think it’s buried in a closet somewhere. I got a bunch of poolwater on the book and later my mom told me not to do that because my sister would probably want it. I can’t imagine my sister wanting the Bible. Somebody should make the Bible into a cool movie or like a reality show.

Today I found a website that has a bunch of Sacred Texts, which features holy books of everything from the bible to wicca to Nostradamus to Tolkien to the Book of Shadows to deleted scenes from the Bible, all kinds of stuff. It’s Sacred-Texts.com: how’s that for marketing. One could spend probably years here, on this one site. It’s a popular hit for a lot of searches on google. I found it googling ‘ham begat’.

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Sarah Falkner wins the 7th Starcherone Prize for her novel Animal Sanctuary, selected by Stacey Levine. It sounds quite look-forward-to.

Last year’s winner, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by our own radical Alissa Nutting, selected by Ben Marcus, is coming out October 1st! It’s going to eat your hair. You can preorder it now from Starcherone or wherever great books are. Here’s a taste, from Fence.

A letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 8, 1988, from Gary Lutz:

[via Caketrain]

Just got this in the mail… kind of really excited about it: The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, coming from Two Dollar Radio. It speaks for itself I think, I kind of want to marry it for its description alone:

It’s the ’90s Pacific Northwest refracted through a dark mirror, where meth and madness hash it out in the woods. . . A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape—trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts—locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.

A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along “The Highway That Eats People,” stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks’ “Bob” and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.

With a scathing voice and penetrating delivery, Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps is one of the most ferocious debut novels in memory.

“Like something you read on the underside of a freeway overpass in a fever dream. The Orange Eats Creeps is visionary, pervy, unhinged. It will mess you up.”
-Shelley Jackson

“Wandering back and forth between the waste spaces of the Northwest and the dark recesses of its narrator’s mind, The Orange Eat Creeps reads like the foster child of Charles Burns’ Black Hole and William Burroughs’ Soft Machine. A deeply strange and deeply successful debut.”
-Brian Evenson

[You can preorder this book now from Two Dollar Radio for $10. It ships soon I believe.]

1. If you haven’t been following the discussions at Montevidayo, a new group blog run by Johannes Göransson, you should start now. Recent posts include Joyelle McSweeney on the Bourne Identity, Johannes on atrocity kitsch, and at least 3 posts on the mechanics of Shutter Island.

2. @ The Awl, an interesting allegation made in finding similarity between Jessica Soffer’s story “Beginning, End” from Granta and Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent publication in the NYer, “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly.” Apparently Soffer was a student of Foer’s wife Nicole Krauss, and the similarity between the stories is mmm. I personally don’t give a crap about stealing, or allegations thereof, because I think all words are words, but still, take a whoop.

3. A friend of mine compared the new Matthew Dear album, Black City, to a Talking Heads for the 00s. He may be on to something.

Are there people you see writing/publishing/commenting online that you feel like you don’t like, even though you’ve never met them? I’ve been thinking about the way persona comes out of no tone mostly online and how people can seem unlikeable and some people even become so angry as to physically hate the person, based mostly on an exchanging of ideas (even if the idea are, you know, bitchy). I often feel I personally have come off like an ass in situations where if it were bodies talking I wouldn’t have been perceived the same way, and yet I also feel I am better at expressing my opinions in text than I am in speaking. It’s a strange duality. I wonder who people hate and what it is that might make someone dislikable someone based on their online appearance? Is it more childish to judge someone based on their online action or to be childish online in the first place? Have you ever felt you didn’t like someone online and then met them in person and felt differently, or vice versa? I know this shit doesn’t matter really, but I wonder.