http://www.catherinelacey.com/
Catherine Lacey is a 2012 NYFA Fiction Fellow. She has published work in The Believer, The Atlantic.com, a Harper Perennial's 40 Stories, Diagram and others. She writes for Brooklyn Magazine rather often and is a founding partner of 3B, a cooperatively operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn.
Ah, the multitude of ways an author photo can come out so very wrong.
Here’s a classic:
Let’s forget for a moment that this is Dan Brown and instead just list all the ways his photographer/stylist managed to make him look like a schmuck:
Shit-eating grin, Ye Olde Boys Club decor, leaning against the fireplace, hand on hip, feet positioned for him to pirouette to his next manicure, T-shirt tucked into belted Dad Jeans… Oh my god I have to stop. Next… READ MORE >
flikr (Bdiz)
In ’08 when I got a galley of Reality Hunger, it was pretty clear that the book was going to rouse a little rabble when it came out. After I read it for a grad school class, I invited David to speak on a panel discussion I was putting together and I got to speak to him a little about the book and later did an interview. David also asked me to ferry a copy of the book out to the iceberg where Zadie Smith lives to hand a copy of the book to Zadie Smith, who was teaching at my university that year. I managed to get it the book into her hands, albeit blushing heavily. (I do admire her, despite suspecting her blood might run metallic and cold.) My bet was that she was going to enjoy the manifesto, though not necessarily agree with its every platitude.
When Zadie’s strange review in The Guardian came out, I was surprised to have been mentioned in it as the “excited American writing student,” and the implication that my peers and I are dancing on the grave of the novel. (I would link to the article but it’s not up on their site anymore. Here’s something I wrote about it a while ago.) In fact, Professor Smith, I am not dancing on the grave of anything, especially not the novel.
So after reading Zadie’s essay, Lincoln Michel’s really smart review on The Rumpus and Sam Anderson’s funny but annoyed review in New York Magazine, I feel like I need to say something in Reality Hunger’s defense. READ MORE >
I just read on MobyLives that the American Book Review has just released their Top 40 Bad Books list. To which, I can only say, Um, really? Ok, I can say a little more than that.
First of all, can a publication be crying for attention any more than this? No? Ok, good. I didn’t think so. So here’s your attention, American Book Review. Hi. Here it is. Here you go. Moving on.
Secondly, I forgive you, American Book Review. It’s ok. Sometimes I read a book and I don’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to, because every time I open a book I am looking for enjoyment. I may even call that book bad, but if I give it a second thought I soon realize that my opinion came out of a particular set of circumstances that is called my brain. And my brain is a very particular machine. It is not a literary-award-distributing-machine. It’s just a brain that likes to be entertained in the particular way that it finds entertaining. In fact, no brain is a literary-award-distributing-machine. The best book reviews are neither advertisements nor tossed rotten tomatoes. The best book reviewers show the reader what it was like to experience the book in question if you happen to be the one writing the book review. Nothing more. Nothing less.
We all know this. Certainly we all know this.
So, what is the point of collecting 40 book reviews that 40 distinguished book reviewers hate?
I am not sure. Maybe they just need a hug.
Or maybe there is more going on here under the surface? Someone? Anyone? Can a book really be categorically bad?
Sometimes traveling sucks. By sometimes I mean it will suck on March 9th when this amazing event happens.
Tao Lin, Lore Segal and Melville House Editor, Kelly Burdick will be doing a panel discussion about the novella at The Center for Fiction in Manhattan, which is where I usually live when I am not having a what’s-going-on-with-my-life-thing somewhere else.
Kelly Burdick, if you’ve never had the pleasure of chatting with him at a Melville House event, is a really smart, cool editor; Lore Segal is a fantastic, old-school-New-York writer who says really interesting stuff and Tao Lin, as we all know, says crazy shit. On top of that, The Center for Fiction is an awesome venue. Sounds like a good panel to me.
So don’t make any plans on March 9th and tell everyone I said hello.
Let’s say you’re a successful writer-journalist with a reputation for calling people’s shit. And let’s say you’re being interviewed by another journalist who mentions he doesn’t care for a book you wrote. You:
A) Bite your tongue and make a mental note to hate his next book.
B) Laugh it off.
C) Throw your coffee in his face and storm out of the cafe.
D) Wait for that milkshake you ordered, drink it and then throw your coffee in his face and storm out.
If you’re Matt Taibbi it turns out you choose C and follow up with a little big-tough-guy arm waving.
Um, seriously? I am waiting for this to not be true. Seems a little too melodramatic, even for a writer. Shouldn’t this have happened over Twitter or something?
Socrates Adams-Florou and Crispin Best just started a new online magazine. It is called Rejection Digest.
If you have written something that someone has rejected, we want to read it. Send it to thisstoryhasbeenrejected@rocketmail.com as soon as you can. In order to qualify for submission, we also require a copy of a rejection e-mail of some sort. There is a special rule. If you can provide us FIVE rejection e-mails, we GUARANTEE publication. If you have less than five, we do not guarantee publication.
Dare you.
If you want to go to a very lonely place, find the Cultural Criticism section of your local bookstore. No one is ever there, it seems, except for the occasional confused student staring at the placard– Cultural Criticism?— wondering what it could mean and forgetting that he is actually looking for Joan Didion’s The White Album. But if you find yourself in this dusty corner, you could do worse than pick up Will Self‘s Junk Mail. It’s a collection of nonfiction and journalism he published over the 90’s and 00’s. There’s an essay about London crack houses, another about Woody Allen and Jewish comedy, and many others including one about artist Damien Hirst in which you will find this question:
“Is it better to masturbate over the image of the Emperor if he has no clothes on, or is it preferable to stimulate yourself discreetly knowing that he is tightly sheathed?”
Go read the full interview at Bookslut.
David Yoder
This morning as I was catching up on MobyLives I came across a video of David Foster Wallace discussing the productive failure of traveling. It was filmed in 2006 while he was in Italy and if you watch it you will hear DFW say, “Everything that is a failure is also a victory,” and you will see Jonathan Franzen chuckling to himself and leaning back in his chair, which, as we all know, is Jonathan Franzen’s favorite pastime. In any case, 2006 was the first (as only?) time that DFW had been to a country where English was not the predominate language and his failure to be able communicate caused him to feel like a child, or more accurately an infant. He had to pay closer attention to others faces and gestures. He had to slow down.
I am leaving the country on Wednesday and I won’t be back until winter has left this hemisphere. I’m doing this for a number of reasons but the most interesting of which is to write. I suppose what I’m writing doesn’t matter much because any plans I have now are sure to change. The point, I think, is to put myself in an environment where I am clueless, where I have to pay closer attention to the banal, where I am forced to adapt, to learn and to fail.
I like this book.
This book is called Bluets. Maggie Nelson wrote it. I read Bluets. I liked Bluets. It is about a woman who loves the color blue. The woman who loves the color blue is Maggie Nelson. She also loves a man but not really. She is also sad but not really. The word fucking is in this book a few time. Also the word fuck is in this book. One time Maggie Nelson said this in an interview: “The words feel like irritants in the soft lap of an oyster, as Henry James had it. Then the pearl — if one could call it that with a straight face — starts to congeal around the irritant. A snowball in the muck.
This is Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson writes memoirs and poems. She has published six books since 2001. That seems crazy. The End.