Blake Butler

http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/

Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.

NYC: Tony O’Neill & Rob Plath @ KGB

NYers, this Wednesday July 8 from 7-9 PM, two of the realest of the real will be reading at KGB Bar: Tony O’Neill and Rob Plath. You should be at this.

FanteO'Neill reading 012

While you are at it, check out Tony on 52 Stories, and his latest book Down and Out on Murder Mile.

In case you didn’t know:

In a previous life Tony O’Neill played keyboards for bands and artists as diverse as Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After moving to Los Angeles his promising career was derailed by heroin addiction, quickie marriages and crack abuse. While kicking methadone he started writing about his experiences on the periphery of the Hollywood Dream and he has been writing ever since. His autobiographical novel DIGGING THE VEIN was published in Feb 2006 by Contemporary Press, in the US and Canada. Wrecking Ball Press released a UK edition April 2007. SEIZURE WET DREAMS, a collection of short stories and poems was released in the UK on Social Disease January 2006. A volume of poetry, SONGS FROM THE SHOOTING GALLERY was released on Burning Shore Press, Spring 2007. DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE, his new novel, will be released in October 2008 by Harper Perennial. He also is the co-author of HERO OF THE UNDERGROUND, the memoir of Jason Peter [2008, St Martins Press]. He lives in New York.

Rob Plath is a 39 year old poet from New York. He is a former student of American poet Allen Ginsberg. Rob has published 7 books of poetry: Ashtrays and Bulls (Liquid Paper Press 2003), An IV Bag Full of Bile (Scintillating Publications 2007), Whiskey and Clay (Pudding House Publications 2008), Squeezing Blood from the Alphabet(erbacce press 2008), Tapping Ashes in the Dark (Lummox Press 2008), There’s A Little Hobo In My Heart Who Forever Gives The Finger To Humanity (d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t press 2008) and Nicotine Stained Scribblings From A Hammock In The Void (Good Japan Press 2009). He has a monster collection of new poems 300 pages in length called A Bellyful of Anarchy (Epic Rites Press 2009) coming out in April. Rob has also published hundreds of poems in nearly 200 different magazines and journals both nationally and internationally. He is co-host of infamous blogtalk radio poetry show ‘Rob & Jack America’ and is editor and creator of an online zine called The Exuberant Ashtray.

Wish I was in the house. Go and come back and tell me how it was.

Author News / 7 Comments
July 6th, 2009 / 1:59 pm

Fence 21

fence21Reading and enjoying muchly the new issue of Fence, #21, which is full of fresh and good and fun, one of their best issues of late. It has some wonderful work from Giant friends Sean Kilpatrick, Colin Bassett, Janaka Stucky, as well as new by Rachel Sherman, Dean Young, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ben Black, and a roundtable on nonrealist fiction with Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Joyelle McSweeney, Kate Bernheimer, and Eric Lorberer, and a lot more. I haven’t read a piece yet that I haven’t enjoyed and felt cooled by.

While you are at it, the friends at Fence are still offering a really great deal in that if you subscribe for 2 years (only $30, which is a steal), you get a free book of your choice (another $15 value, at least) from their excellent of array of past titles, including, among my favorites, Joyelle’s Flet, Daniel Brenner’s The Stupefying Flashblubs, Aaron Kunin’s The Mandarin, and their many new titles. If I weren’t already a subscriber, and have most all of their books, I would have done it again now twice.

Not sold yet? Fine. If that won’t do it, try on this sentence cut from Kilpatrick’s poem (1 of 3 from him), ‘Gay Trade.’:

Same old fears kind of save the day, / or make you look vacuously sane / in this light, eyelid small, giving / handshakes of solid milk, warmed / by crack-lighters drying your reflection / on a buried clothesline.

If you aren’t ready now, you never will be.

Uncategorized / 30 Comments
July 3rd, 2009 / 1:24 am

RB @5cense.com Tonight (7/1, 7:30) at Abilene’s Bar in Brooklyn, Andrew Zornoza will be launching his new novel, “Where I Stay,” from which this excerpt was from. ** Wish I lived in NYC. If you do, please go support Andrew, Tarpaulin Sky, and the incredible book.

Featherproof Dollar Store Tour

Hey friends. Leaving this Friday to hit the road for the Featherproof Dollar Store Summer Tour, which if you are on the east coast or nearby, is likely coming to or near you… would seriously be awesome to see faces, meet faces, drink drinks on faces, eat faces. Come out! Please? We have a lot of crazies peoples, crazy guests (check each city below to see who in yr city will be there), surely to be drunk fun, I have early copies of my new book Scorch Atlas, there are things going to happen. Consider putting it on your schedule? Dates/more info after the break:

summertour

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Author News / 38 Comments
July 1st, 2009 / 12:41 pm

Everyone is making something. What are you making?

Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (10) ‘Ninety Over Ninety’

fsTenth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (which is officially out TOMORROW from Coffee House Press) is ‘Ninety Over Ninety,’ which originally appeared in New York Tyrant.

Among the several blackened modes of Brian Evenson, his comedy⎯heretofore only poked at from askance, and under another dark veil, in the earlier ‘Mudder Tongue’⎯is another sort of shrift, that where his other stories might take noir stylings, hallucination, and paranoia, another, like ‘Ninety Over Ninety,’ takes from the slapstick and the comedic-approaching-profane.

Certainly, in Evenson’s humor stories, the appeal is not only from his maintaining of a Kafka-ian eye in the face of strange ilk, but his simultaneously flagrant and pleasant-seeming attitude, in which foul things can be said and laughed at, perhaps like Todd Solodnz. It is interesting here too, at this point in the queue of stories, to find the meta-fucked black hole of the previous ‘In the Greenhouse,’ into this comedic blank so screwed it seems an intensified version of the current state of the frequent corporate ruin of art.

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Uncategorized / Comments Off on Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (10) ‘Ninety Over Ninety’
June 30th, 2009 / 1:05 pm

3:am has a fantastic interview with Dennis Cooper regarding, among other things, Ugly Man (which I read in one sitting last week and loved, a possible explanation for my recent influx of sublimely jarring dreams), and includes the quote: “The generally held idea that the kinds of things I write about aren’t ’serious’ or aren’t what a truly serious literary work would concentrate on is just an insurmountable and boring enemy that I accepted would be there for all eternity a long time ago.”

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Random / 21 Comments
June 29th, 2009 / 5:22 pm

A well-designed new web journal: Requited.

Michael Bay eating a bowl of cereal

In the theme of Michael Bay memes lately, here:

Web Hype / 6 Comments
June 29th, 2009 / 3:51 pm