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.
Blake Butler—
The mp3 conversation between Barry Hannah & Larry Brown (from this post) has been reposted for download here
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The Quarterly on Ebay
My pal Garett Strickland has just put up his collection of all of the issues of Lish’s The Quarterly for auction on ebay, along with bonus issues of 3rd Bed, New York Tyrant, Noon, and lots more. 40 Journals of experimental prose, all in one buy. Too rad.
Right now the auction is at $25. Give her a go.
Ocho 24 is Twitter Poets
Didi Menendez’s OCHO #24, dually edited with Collin Kelley, consists entirely of Twitter-related poets and poetry:
OCHO #24 (The Twitter Edition)
You can buy a hard copy here.
See also: Didi on Twitter
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June 3rd, 2009 / 12:58 pm
June 3rd, 2009 / 12:58 pm
Dennis Cooper = !!!
In honor of his brand new collection ‘Ugly Man‘ (which I am all kinds of excited for), a couple of video interviews with Dennis Cooper about the book and his career, publishing, and punk, from Harper Perennial’s Olive TV videos.
How could you not love this man?
Jeremy M. Davies’s ‘Rose Alley’
Just out (today!) from the wonderful Counterpath Press is Jeremy M. Davies’s debut novel, ‘Rose Alley,’ a book ostensibly about an obscure blue film made during the 1968 Paris riots. The book consists of a series of chapters each based on one of the film’s crew and cast, chaining the mostly by turns gristly and sex/violence addled lives and whereabouts in their intersection with the film’s strange creation and resulting aura.
Davies’s prose sings from paragraph to paragraph in that way of Pynchon and Hannah, in that each could stand alone in its music, and each contains multitudes, packed into syllables clearly fought for and refined for their finest parts.
For a more thorough review of the book, please check out my post in this month’s edition of Bookslut, including my claim: “Here is a debut novel full not only of sex and violence, alternate histories, layerings of will, but also in sentences designed to entertain as much as dazzle, making Jeremy M. Davies a great new brain trust for the page.”
Power Quote: Thomas Bernhard
The matured idea is enough in itself to destroy most people.
– Correction, p. 203
Sentence by Sentence & Story by Story (2): ‘A Pursuit’
The second story in Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State,’ is ‘A Pursuit,’ which I have written up in full here.
My sentence to keep from this story (I can’t say favorite anymore, as there are too many, but choices hereon will be considered strong and representative at once):
Would it help if I were to swear to you, by the deceased individual of your choice, that I had nothing to do with my first ex-wife’s demise, assuming she is in fact dead?
This sentence, itself a whole graph in the text, is wonderful again not only for its Evensonian use of odd familial tags such ‘first ex-wife’ (I always go back to his ‘The Ex Father,’ and those weird overtones of relationship bounds), but for how it manages to begin to drag the reader (the ‘you’) as an entity into the text, another relationship that will continue to be put to use in the extremely odd and Bernhard-ian summoning that goes on in this text.
As I discuss in the full story review, Evenson is a master of blurring the lines of his occurrences, here as delivered on behalf of the narrator, in such a way that it is not only hard to condemn or not condemn the actions of the central figure, it also blurs the body of that narrator with the body of the reader, in such a way that the reading itself becomes an experience. You are caught in the narrator’s ongoing waddle into his own mind. You follow him along terrain that will not hold, etc.
The question is a question that eats the space out from between the reader and the narrator itself, which, how much more could you ask from a single line?
Sentence by Sentence & Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State’
Just got a galley of Brian Evenson’s new collection ‘Fugue State,’ coming out in July from Coffee House Press. I haven’t felt this giddy about a book in a while. As with each Evenson title that comes out, I feel he reroutes not only the terrain of what is possible in fiction, but my own mind and method of writing: the power of new blood page by page.
In the spirit of this, and because I’m so excited about it I can’t help not, I’ll be exploring the book and reviewing it or commenting on it story by story, between longer posts on my own blog, and over here, at Giant, sharing my favorite sentence from each story, beginning now, with the first piece in the collection, ‘Younger,’ which kicked off the book in massive, terrored form, if in a more subtle and understated way than Evenson’s past might have predicted, maybe even more so, for it, terrifying.
In this way, we’ll lead up to the release of the book in July slowly and then continue with posts thereafter with the book in people’s hands.
Here’s the sentence:
They weren’t getting anywhere, which meant that she, the younger sister, wasn’t getting anywhere, was still wondering what, if anything, had happened, and what, if anything, she could do to free herself from it.
I love the repetition in the short segments here, the repeating and recursing tonalities, but also the mental loop of the logic therein, the sentence trying to figure what it is saying out while it is saying which as a pocket in the story, about being locked in a moment of a life, hit full on in its pacing, with the kind of abstract but right-there verbiage and at-your-throat but aimed away construction that seems so difficult to nail, and yet which Evenson is unarguably a master.
My full post on the story itself is now live here.
More info on ‘Fugue State’ here.
Preorder ‘Fugue State’ here.
More all in thereon to be continued…