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.

Do you feel like there is a singular ‘best thing you’ve ever written’? What became of it? What happened to the thing that was ‘the best thing you’ve ever written’ before you wrote the current one? What do you do when you feel good about something you made?

Like Prions: An Interview with Terese Svoboda by Shya Scanlon

Svoboda_Terese_cTerese Svoboda is one of the best writers of her generation. HTMLGIANT readers especially will notice at once the tell-tale signs of the pee-free classroom commanded by one Gordon Lish, but her work operates on a global level as impressively as it does syntactically. It has the concision and dark, domestic play of Christine Schutt and the scope and moral outrage of Don DeLillo. But of course she is an author all her own—as much a product of her work in The Sudan as she is of her time in the classroom—and her wry, canny, and cosmopolitan sensibility is tempered only by a rooty ease and kindness—surely a farmer’s inheritance. At home in a multitude of different forms, she’s received prizes both for her fiction and poetry, taught all over the place, produced video work for PBS and MoMA—the list goes on. She’s just released a book of poetry heralded by Thomas Lux as “goddamn terrific,” has a reissue of her third book of prose coming out this month, and two (TWO!) novels being published in 2010 and 2011, one comprised solely of pirate dialogue. If you haven’t read her yet, you’re lucky: it’s superb stuff, and there’s a lot of it out there to discover. If you’re already familiar with her work, it’s always worth revisiting. I asked her a bunch of questions about her craft, her practice, and her politics. Fan Club line forms here. — Shya Scanlon

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Author Spotlight / 101 Comments
November 9th, 2009 / 1:27 pm

Favorite new thing I’ve read online in a while: Doorographical Divisions by Ryan Ridge, from the Diagram 9.5.

4 from the Ubu Web Video Archives

UBU

Selected Works by Bas Jan Ader

14 Video Paintings by Brian Eno

Organism by Hilary Harris

Report from L.A. by David Byrne

Web Hype / 4 Comments
November 8th, 2009 / 4:35 pm

Today is National Delete That Old Ass Shitty Manuscript Off Your Hard Drive and Live Again Day.

Matt Kirkpatrick’s Improbable Object has a lot of new alive, including Drew Kalbach, Forrest Roth, Jeff Crouch, Jeremy Schmall, and more…

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Janaka Stucky’s Your Name is the Only Freedom

Brave Men Press is pleased to announce the release of

YOUR NAME IS THE ONLY FREEDOM
by Janaka Stucky

Cover is letterpressed with gold ink on red paper.
Printed in a limited edition of 60.
23 pages.

$9

Janaka Stucky has had poems appear in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review, Redivider and VOLT. He is the publisher of Black Ocean and its literary magazine, Handsome.

READ SAMPLE POEMS – http://bravemenpress.com/stuckysample.html

TO BUY – http://bravemenpress.com/yourname.html

Presses / 10 Comments
November 7th, 2009 / 3:38 pm

Heather Christle Week (5): Pale Lemon Square

If you don’t by now know you should have bought or be buying soon Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm, there’s just nothing else I can say to you. You gone.

the_difficult_farm

Happy weekend, here’s one bit of bright light for some road:

PALE LEMON SQUARE

When they say nobody rides horses anymore
what they mean is: look, the ineffable sadness
has returned
, and while every mindless plant
in town is blooming, an accidental family
reunion is also growing, and my neighbors’
houses are filling up with maiden aunts.
For a time, trading was all the rage, and now
I’d like to try it again. You give me
your native handbag collection, and I will give you
my lilac soap. Later we can get carried away
and perhaps even employ a tombola. I will not,
I cannot remain in charge of prizes. Please,
you must look quickly at our fellow citizens
and tell me, do they not seem unwell? I feel so
concerned. I feel like I’ve been studying
to become a doctor forever and now, faced
with a real-world pandemic, I’m full
of unmitigated lust for business—as though
I were sitting in a high school classroom
watching the morning’s snow foster impending
cancellations and all the attendant policies. Soon,
if not at once, the library and gymnasium will be
redubbed infirmaries, and you and I will drift
among the cots like swans in ever-wider grids.

Author Spotlight / 8 Comments
November 7th, 2009 / 5:43 am

Dalkey Archive is doing their ‘we will eat your pocketbook and mind’ sale again, which I have now taken advantage of 3 times and will likely a 4th: Holiday Sale at Dalkey! Get 10 books for $65, 20 books for $120, running through November 22.