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.
Brian Evenson’s LAST DAYS: a long review
I can still remember with odd clarity the first time I read the words of Brian Evenson: I ordered ‘The Din of Celestial Birds’ after running into it somewhere on the internet in my earliest explorations of independent lit, and as I can’t remember fully how I found the book, I must more imagine it found me. Almost as vividly as I remember reading each of the series of progressively insidious and truly haunting stories, I equally remember the aura of the book as object, the way I sat it on my bed in weird light and stared at the psychedelic cover full of stories that I still have not found a way to shake, staring at it as if at any moment it might come alive, much in the same way that as a child I stared for hours at the cover to my first dungeon master’s guide, full of incantation and instruction, or the reams of comic books that for years lived in my blood.
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February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am
February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am
Lily Hoang’s CHANGING
In the third fantastic release from the already massive-powered Fairy Tale Review Press (whose first two releases, PILOT by Johannes Goransson and THE CHANGELING by Joy Williams are both brain eating monsters of true glee), the brand new and clean white book object CHANGING by Lily Hoang has now hit and awaits your head.
At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang’s CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family’s story. Changing is Little Girl’s fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.
“This is an impossible thing, a dream object”–Joyelle McSweeney, author of FLET.
That the book is based on the I-Ching plays no small part in the making of the book’s power: consisting of a series of form-shaped prose sections that mimic the structure of the holy book, CHANGING begins to take on this weird, recursive power. Lily Hoang has a way of roping the big mythic energy of tableau and mysticism down out of the nowhere and branding it with her own peculiarities of everyday upbringing. The result is kind of a maze of hypnotic language and cultural mishmash, which truly operates in resonance unlike any other book I can remember.
— (part 1): THE MORE I CAN FEEL I AM FALLING OUT OF BABIES THE BETTER I BE ABOUT THE MOUTH
When you are ready to sit at the desk, sit at the desk.
When you aren’t ready, still have a desk too.
I like a lot of little food and walkings.
It’s good to have a dog to fuck you up.
If you ever start to figure out what you are saying, get up and sprint straight away until you hit a wall and there will be someone there telling you what to do, which might be GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.
Are you ready stop being so entertainment? That’s the most fun.
It’s never too late to get a law degree.
Have a mother bring you half a sandwich that she didn’t eat at lunch with those other women.
Try not sleeping when you are are asleep.
Try sleeping when you are not sleep and doing it the best you ever did.
Sometimes don’t masturbate for a long time and then do it first thing in the morning.
Shampoo is still soap.
When someone asks you what you are doing in that room for so long, say ‘titties’ or else take karate for enough years until you can gut punch them in that just one spot.
Say a lot of things in a very short time sometimes.
Say not much at all for really long.
Say things you don’t mean and mean them.
Mean mean things say and don’t you them.
Make use of that time when other people are just driving but don’t realize that you are making use of it.
When the guy approaches you at Wendy’s with that look in his eye, show him where it hurts because of what you did too much.
Be this guy more often:
Sometimes when you are reading something you really like in the bathtub, put it down right where you are really liking and get out of the bath and go all wet to the desk and finish writing what you were reading, but don’t do it like that, or do it later. Or do it before you read the next thing you really like at all.
Think about submissions less and publications less and just forget you are ever going to show anyone.
Try not to show anyone.
Turn off the gmail chat.
At your desk be the worst person ever born.
Whenever someone says, ‘teach me something,’ say ‘hi.’
Word Spaces (6): Tony O’Neill
Tony only hangs with the best.
This week we are quite lucky to have the badass, recent Giant object-of-affection, Tony O’Neill. Tony is the author of several books including most recently DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE, who took some time to share with us not only the place where his books get made, but also how he was led by Buddha to meet another, perhaps even larger, holy man.
Claire Donato’s SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY
New from Cannibal Books! Claire Donato!
Someone Else’s Body
by Claire Donato
32 pages, hand sewn
$6
flesheatingpoems.blogspot.comRead sample poems here:
http://www.coconutpoetry.org/donato1.html
http://www.caketrain.org/tellyou.html
http://www.harpandaltar.com/interior.php?t=p&i=5&p=46&e=141
Claire is a badass. She knows about rooms and hues. She knows how to say it. Here are a few lines from the Harp and Altar poem:
Tonight, a man on the phone poses an inquiry re: two boxes of books by Leon Trotsky.
I cover the mouthpiece, laugh with my co-worker.
Dear Sir or Madam: I am stunned by how easy it is to be a Very Bad Person.
This is one I am excited to be buying. The whole Cannibal subscription is a thing to behold, methinks.
Giant Talks: Joshua Cohen interviewed by Lily Hoang
I first came across Joshua Cohen’s work a couple years ago at AWP. I walked by the Starcherone Books table and asked editor Ted Pelton which book he would recommend. He handed me a bunch, and luckily, among those was Cohen’s A Heaven of Others. What struck me then (and continues to strike me every time I read his work) is what an incredible badass he is. For one, he’s an amazing writer. His words are quite literally delicious. But beyond that, he’s the most prolific writer I know (and I know some crazy prolific writers!). Still shy of thirty, he’s got four books in print, one on the way from Dalkey Archive, and tons more sitting either on a physical or virtual shelf. Cohen is a powerhouse, but don’t take my word for it. Go buy one of his books. You won’t regret it.
— Lily Hoang
LH: Something that really strikes in about your writing is the very distinctive voice your characters have. In A Heaven of Others (from here on out known as Heaven), the narrator has an extremely urgent voice, one that compelled me to read faster & faster, until I was practically skimming. (Then of course, I had go back and read the whole thing over again to really savor the language!) Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (known as Cadenza), however, has a much more patient narrative voice. Can you tell me more about the development of these narrators in particular? Please feel free to talk about your other works as well.
JC: The voices of both my novels are fictions within fictions, and, as that, they’re opposites: The voice of A Heaven of Others is that of 10-year-old Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem. The voice of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto is that of Laster, an octogenarian, perhaps nonagenarian, concert violinist from eastern Austro-Hungary. Again, both are fictions, meaning both are ultimately Me. I think what I’ve done in all my books so far comes, primarily, from speech rhythm. The rhythm of how I want to speak. How I speak to myself. As for echoes, A Heaven of Others derives from poetry, especially 20th century Hebrew poetry (Dan Pagis), and German-Jewish poetry (Paul Celan), while Cadenza comes from comedy, and despite its typographical trickery owes more to the history of the novel, and much, specifically, to Saul Bellow.
Diode
Diode v2n2 is now live, featuring work by:
Dilruba Ahmed
Aaron Anstett
Tamiko Beyer
Ash Bowen
Charlie Clark
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Angela Hibbs
Dennis Hinrichsen
dawn lonsinger
Bobbi Lurie
Ron Mohring
George Moore
Deborah Poe
Patrick Rosal
Michael Salcman
Maureen Seaton
Floarea Ţuţuianu, trans. Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti
Jakob VanLammeren
Have a read.
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January 12th, 2009 / 4:27 pm
January 12th, 2009 / 4:27 pm
2 New from Black Ocean
from Black Ocean:
We are swollen with pride and brimming with relief now that our next two books of poetry are at the printer. Please consider pre-ordering either/both of them now, at a specially discounted rate of $10, plus free shipping. In doing so you will not only help us quickly recoup some of our overhead expense (and in these dark days of publishing all expenses seem to be over our heads har har), you will ensure yourself that status of ‘coolest kid on the block’ when you receive your copies weeks before they’re even available on Amazon. But hurry: this offer expires on February 11th. All pre-orders will ship on March 3rd. A little bit about these titles:
WITH DEER by Aase Berg / translated by Johannes Göransson
In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche—pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror. With Deer [Hos rådjur] was Berg’s first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world. Read advance praise from Cathy Wagner, Dodie Bellamy and Michael Gira (and place your order) at blackocean.org.SCAPE by Joshua Harmon
Scape, a poised and attentive debut collection by Joshua Harmon, engages with various landscapes—from the constructed and debased world of parking lots, potato chip factories, and cul-de-sac traceries to the “rural equation” of woods, fields, and “clouds’ crumpled page” to create a series of conversations and engagements with the idea of the natural. Through his precise observations, Harmon defines landscape—the word and the idea—through an insightful and meticulous relationship with language. For Harmon, landscape is never static; instead his poems map a constantly changing terrain, in which the interior is imposed on the exterior as a frame for seeing it. Read advance praise from Lydia Davis, Michael Davidson and Noah Eli Gordon (and place your order) at blackocean.org.
Quite stoked on both these, my order is in. The Berg (who is indeed an incredible poet, can’t wait to see this one) has a blurb from Michael Gira. Fuck. At $10 a pop, free shipping, this is a do-it-now.
DFW Syllabus
You know a man is great when even his syllabus is a work of art.
Also included in the other pages (of which there are many): a wonderful reading list. At the height of my obsession, I made it policy to read every book DFW blurbed, reviewed, or mentioned in passing during interviews (including things like Brautigan’s ‘In Watermelon Sugar’ and Renata Adler’s ‘Speedboat’). I can’t remember him being off even once. Said compilation forthcoming.
Gert Jonke 1946-2009
Austrian novelist, playright, poet, etc. Gert Jonke died this past Sunday, of cancer, at age 62.
The author of more than 17 books in German, not to mention countless other texts for TV, the stage, and elsewhere, I would call Jonke one of the most important writers that more people in English should know about. So far 2 of his books have been translated in English and published by the ever-vital Dalkey Archive, including the absolutely incredible ‘Geometric Regional Novel‘ and the more recent ‘Homage to Czerny,’ with 2 more on the way, and hopefully more to come in the future.
I wrote about Jonke and his work more extensively here, if you are so inclined.