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—
Every time you complain about literary magazine submission response times a little baby in heaven gets its hands chopped off.
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Blake Butler—
How many literary magazines do you buy a year and what percentage of their content do you read?
The Orange Eats Creeps
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.]
Montevidayo Foerversy Dear
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.
Online Jerks
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.
2 New from Keyhole: Bell & Burch
For a limited time only, Keyhole Press is offering both Matt Bell’s How They Were Found and Aaron Burch’s How To Predict the Weather in a package deal for $19.99 including shipping. Can’t wait to have these monsters in my hands.
Blake Butler—
Christian Lorentzen profiles Tao Lin for the New York Observer, writing in a ‘parody of his style.’ What do you think, did he nail it?
Blake Butler—
Which writer would you most like to read a memoir from who hasn’t done it yet and maybe probably won’t?
Catalog Colony Box
1. @ Thought Catalog, Brandon Scott Gorrell interviewed me about HTMLGIANT and online networking.
2. I put up a preview of the final issue of Lamination Colony, in the form of Christopher Higgs’s “Sometimes I Feel Like Punching Someone In The Face Until They Can’t Breathe Anymore And That’s The End Of It,” more is on its way.
3. Weescoosa posted the entirety of the Merzbox, dang.