A Review of A Questionable Shape, by Bennett Sims (Two Dollar Radio, 2013)

The first zombie in Bennett Sims’s A Questionable Shape doesn’t appear until page 161, and then only as a silhouette seen from across a lake. Most of the zombies have been detained, quarantined, or “put down” by a government that seems relatively more functional in its performance of disaster relief, especially in Louisiana, than in its earlier iteration, not so long ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The undead that remain roaming the bayou possess “roughly the same citizen status and legal rights, as, say, coma patients or the mentally ill.” FEMA funds refugee shelters and welfare checks and undead search operations, although, by now, the term “undead” is increasingly frowned upon for being “dysphemistic and dehumanizing.”

The search for the undead yet at-large in Louisiana has grown quite urgent by the novel’s beginning, because in five days it will be the end of July, and the beginning of hurricane season. The story’s narrator, a young bookish man named Vermaelen, has agreed to help his friend Matt Mazoch search for his undead father.

The five days they have left in their search–Monday through Friday–serve double- READ MORE >

An unimaginable thing suddenly possible:

He could see the whole world from the height of space orbit. The newly made islands off Dubai and Abu Dhabi, archipelagoes in the shapes of palm trees or the seven continents. All of Paris at once, every arrondissement. The five boroughs of Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. The darkness of North Korea at night against the spider webs of cobalt that lighted the rest of Asia. In daylight he could zoom to helicopter height and see the prison camps where three generations there lived and died.

Some magic of silicon and rocketry and a worldwide network of optical fibers of silica glass had made it possible for voice or fingers to command images and they would instantly appear: Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China. Aurora Borealis, the Nebula Crab, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn . . .

All the mysteries of time and space, and yet he aimed his cameras again and again at a patch of ground near the airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, not far from the dog track where he’d sometimes made a few extra dollars by slipping numbers to the drunken bettors who always tipped when they won. That was the kind of thing that would have got him kicked out of school, but the school was gone now. The evidence from the sky was conclusive. Most of the buildings were now a squares of dirt, and the old football field was a big square of dirt, and they’d knocked down the paper trees and the Banyan trees and the starfruit trees and the giant Australian pines that so grandly lined the entrance that greeted his mother’s school bus every morning.

All the important things were gone, and though he’d hated it while he was in it, now he searched for traces of it all the time in the pixelated grass and dirt.

The Stud Book, by Monica Drake

“The Stud Book is a dreamy, druggy, sexy concoction — no surprise coming from the author of Clown Girl. I was instantly consumed by its evocative exploration of motherhood in the Pacific Northwest. Monica Drake’s vision of the world is like no other.” - Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and The Melting Season

“I haven’t had this much fun since Flannery O’Connor or Kathryn Dunn.  FINALLY a book for our times, of our times, emerging from the minds and bodies of real–as opposed to fake-o imagined–women.  Hilarious, heart-wrenching, and stylistically brilliant, The Stud Book is about who we are and why we matter–about our stubborn, beautiful drive to make a life, love, a world inhabitable for those who come after us.  If women carry whole worlds into unknown futures, Monica Drake is the mapmaker of the human condition.  I love this book out of my mind.  I will read it and pass it on to everyone, ever.  Proof that women writers have arrived–that they can not only make it to the show, they can intellectually and creatively steal it.” - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase.

Loteria, by Mario Alberto Zambrano

“Take the architecture of Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies and marry it to the wide-open childhood receptivity of McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, and you might achieve something like the effect of LOTERIA.” - Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead 

“LOTERIA is constructed as a beautiful, gripping, and lyrical set of riddles (asked and solved) about life—and—death matters in one family. Like the novels of Cortazar, its form is intricate and beautiful. ” – Charles Baxter, author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

The Virgins, by Pamela Erens

“A sensual and haunting story of sexual awakening, Pamela Erens’s exquisitely written The Virgins vividly captures the thrill of youthful innocence and the crushing pain of its loss. This is a profound—and profoundly moving—novel. I couldn’t put it down, and I didn’t want it to end.” - Will Allison, author of Long Drive Home

“Suspenseful and swift and well made, The Virgins, Pamela Erens’s exciting new fiction, rachets up the heat on the boarding school novel with ferociously sensual descriptions of frustrated love—of love imagined and love experienced with youth’s long kisses and all the touching that goes on. Easy to fall for this book and fall hard.” - Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends

The Era of Not Quite, by Douglas Watson

“Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Doug Watson’s first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.” – Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends

“Once upon a time, an acquaintance of Kurt Vonnegut, having read all of the writer’s books, accused Vonnegut of putting bitter coatings on very sweet pills, and I am here to level the same charge against Douglas Watson. Yes, this collection is a relentless catalogue of frailty, folly, and mortal misery, but if you look beyond the cholera, the neck wounds, the burning feet, the bleached bones, the voids, the caves, the deaths at sea, the stillborn babes, the senseless yearnings of the heart, the grief and despair and profound loneliness, then what you will find, reader, is a tender, lovely, elegant celebration of the very idea of life, of living. These are vital and exceptional tales.” – Chris Bachelder, author of Abbott Awaits

A Questionable Shape, by Bennett Sims

“Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov’s, Nicholson Baker’s gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance.”
—Wells Tower

“In A Questionable Shape everything is questioned – love, family, memory, the way we lead our lives. Even loss itself seems obsolete in these worn out Zombified days. And yet, out beyond the margins of genre, two young men embark on a search as worthy as Walker Percy’s in The Moviegoer, taking us into a fascinating textual netherworld of footnotes full of Heidegger and haiku, leading us on a journey as ancient and true as a son’s desperate search for a father whose undead life may not be worse than the broken existence he left behind. Bennett Sims brings an allusive genius energy to everything from YouTube to Euripides in this inquiry into what survives the onslaught, in a world—our world, we come to recognize—suffering a major case of apocalypse fatigue.”
—Charles D’Ambrosio

Heading to Laundromania with a basket of dirty clothes, a bottle of liquid detergent, twenty quarters, four Cynthia Ozick stories, and a biography of the German Marxist who wrote Bobby Darin’s greatest hit, which was later adapted into a vehicle for selling Big Macs, which validates its worthiness as art as only money can says America.

Here’s Darin, performing “Mack the Knife” in Las Vegas near the end of his life:

It’s amazing to listen to the recording and see how abstracted the song has already become from its origin. It starts out in German, moves to English, moves out of The Threepenny Opera and into a swing idiom, gets recorded by a guy whose fame is partially built upon it but who by the time of the YouTube recording is probably contemptuous enough of it to joke through the first verse, but it’s endearing to the crowd, and they laugh and applaud, but their applause isn’t exactly for the song or the singer, it’s for their nostalgia for the younger selves they were when the singer’s version of the song was young like they were young, and that’s why they’ve come to Las Vegas, in part — to recapture that youth — but their attempt at recapturing their youth requires a long drive to the desert, where they’ll give their money to a gambling cartel in exchange for a few hours of hope they know will turn to nothing by design, and where they’ll linger among replicas of things that exist elsewhere in the world. But listen a little while longer, because when Bobby Darin says, “Let it swing, yeah,” and the orchestra agrees, it all gets real again, and anything could happen, because the thing still has that transcendent power latent in it, and for the last two minutes it’s the whole world.

Terrance Hayes

Pilot Books publishes limited edition poetry chapbooks and comics from the likes of Matthew Zapruder, Mary Ruefle, and Jessica Fjeld. They contend that “innovative work demands innovative design,” so: “all of our books are designed and printed in ways unique and luminous to the manuscript itself. We take the editorial and design process as a seriously creative act, one that gives the poems an opportunity to live a physical life that the reader can interact with in new ways.”

They’ve been at it for five years. All of the books are beautiful, but none more beautiful than Who Are the Tribes, their latest offering, by Terrance Hayes. The book was produced in a limited letterpress edition of 300, bound in a double pamphlet handstitch, with illustrations (pen-and-ink drawings, it looks like) by the author.

The text is a single poem in 15 parts, and it is wild, formally and otherwise.

The first movement, “1. BEEFS,” begins with a spreadsheet in which the rows are delineated Tribe, Color, Poison, Smoke, Loves, and the columns are 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Each tribe is given a name (ANTLER, SPIKE, QUIXOTE, BILL, and SIXFOUR) READ MORE >

Saint Monica begins with an entry from the online Patron Saints Index. It goes like so:

Memorial: 27 August

Mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose writers about her are the primary source of our information. A Christian from birth, she was given in marriage to a bad-tempered adulterous pagan named Patricius. She prayed constantly for the conversion of her husband (who converted on his death bed), and of her son (who converted after a wild life). Spiritual student of St. Ambrose of Milan. Reformed alcoholic.

Born 322 at Tagaste (South Ahrus), Algeria.

Died 387 at Ostia, Italy

Patronage: abuse victims, alcoholics, alcoholism, difficult marriages, disappointing children, homemakers, housewives, married women, mothers, victims of adultery, victims of unfaithfulness, victims of verbal abuse, widows, wives.

Then we get a dedication: “For all the girls with names that begin with M.“ The reader notices right away that the author’s first name begins with M.

Already, by the dedication, before the first poem begins, the reader is attuned to a strange quality that attaches to the cult of saints, which is that their personhood is inextricably mingled with the personhood of the latter-day people who revere them. Saint Monica, mother of St. Augustine, was born in Africa in the fourth century, and died in Italy sixty-some years later. What has that to do with American girls whose named begin with M., in the twenty- and twenty-first century? What is the relationship between the Saint Monica of help and reverence and the Saint Monica who gave birth to a son, took up and then gave up devotion to alcohol, and studied with St. Ambrose, more than 1700 years ago?

Time and tradition have warped a flesh-and-blood person into an abstraction READ MORE >

Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections, A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer and Nightwork. She is also the author of two novels: All Souls, which was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and Florida, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. With Diane Williams, she edits the literary journal NOON. Her new novel, Prosperous Friends, will be published by Grove Press on November 6.

Michelle Y. Burke is the author of Horse Loquela, winner of the 2007 Red Mountain Review Chapbook Series Award. She lives in Cincinnati.

Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. READ MORE >

The Montevidayans, a loose group of writers and poets and visual artists (including Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Goransson, Lara Glenum, Danielle Pafunda, and, more loosely, Kate Bernheimer), are distinguished from the preponderance of those who are identified (or who self-identify) as avant-garde or experimental or “new” or otherwise willfully other, by their willingness to embrace and explore rather than to exclude, and by their idea that art can accommodate the high, the low, the middle, the sideways, the backwards, the constructive, the destructive, the deconstructive, the narrative, the anti-narrative, the lyric, the dramatic, the miniature, the epic, the restrained, the willfully artful, the willfully artless, the garish, the respectable, the kitschy, the hybrid, the hi-bred, the high bread, and the red hype. Where others out of explicit big-timing (and implicit self-protection or self-promotion) construct ever smaller boxes within which art might reside — and say, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly): because I reject your standard notion of rules, which are meant to bind and shame me, I will make an idiosyncratic notion of rules, which are meant to bind and shame all who are not like me — the Montevidayans, in general, say: Yes.

This is not the only reason I am drawn to their work READ MORE >

“A lot of it feels, to me, like a crisis of narrative. These stories basically follow the same model, often it’s the redemption narrative—a Christian redemption narrative of sinking low then rising above. This same narrative is repeated over and over, the culture can’t get enough of it for some reason. It’s not a bad story, but it’s crowding out alternative tellings, alternative versions, and this is very limiting, and basically false because it is limiting.”

(Read the rest, from the 2006 print interview newly posted at the Sycamore Review.)

1. Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, by Donald Antrim. It is not terribly later in the history of the universe than it is now. We’re on Florida’s west coast. Mayor Jim Kunkel has fired Stinger missles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool. Picnickers have died. Our hero, ex-third-grade-teacher Pete Robinson, would probably make a better mayor than Jim Kunkel, and it’s not probably a liability that he creates a 1:32 scale model interrogation chamber (the Inquisition is what he’s mocking up) in his basement.

First sentence: “See a town, stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish.”

2. The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker. Our hero can stop time, drop into “the Fold,” and do whatever he wants for awhile, while the rest of the world stays helpfully still. What he mostly does is check out what women look like, beneath their clothes. If this seems a premise too flimsy to sustain a book-length narrative, well, it is, and half the fun of the book is watching Baker find a way to make a novel out of a paper-thin conceit. When he does, it’s all the more thrilling.

First sentence: “I am going to call my autobiography The Fermata, even though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for The Fold.”

3. Too Late, by Stephen Dixon. This is one of those lost Stephen Dixon books nobody ever talks about. It’s strange that it is, because it’s also one of the most approachable Stephen Dixon books. It’s also the rare Stephen Dixon book that flirts with genre (in this case, the procedural), and it comes early enough in Dixon’s publishing career (1978) to have Harper & Row on the spine. Here we don’t have the fractured narrative, the irreconcilable set pieces, or the Bernhard-esque paragraphs-without-end. But we do have plenty that is recognizably Dixonian–the snappy, talky dialogue; the tortured, tie-yourself-in-knots interior life of the speaker; the everything-turned-up-to-seven-and-a-half-but-not-eight-out-of-ten event machine. It also offers up the dark urban pleasures of the late ’70′s, which are hard to find anymore except in novels and on late-night proselytizing movies on Christian cable television (for starters–and for funny–I recommend The Cross and The Switchblade, shot on location in Hell’s Kitchen, in which the big gangland conversion scene involves a massive zoom-in on a picture of Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ. It also has the most “realistic” tie-off-and-shoot-up-heroin-in-the-stairwell scene I’ve ever seen in American cinema. But I digress.) READ MORE >

Deformation Zone: On Translation is the latest installment in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series, which is edited by Anna Moschovakis, and which has already distinguished itself as one of the more adventuresome and aesthetically exciting projects in American publishing. (Other titles in the series include Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Jon Cotner’s and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks/Two Talks, and Laura Nash’s Brownfields.)

Deformation Zone might also be considered the latest installment in the intertwined multi-platform and multi-genre project that the careers of Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson have become. Both writers seem to have long ago eschewed any of the preexisting boxes into which literary artists typically confine themselves. Their work routinely crosses the borders that perhaps artificially have separated the practice of poetry, fiction, the personal essay, the scholarly essay, the Internet post, the stage play, the translation READ MORE >

Image c/o Gawker.

1. Sometimes when I’m reading a review of a Book B, and Book B is written by the author of Book A, which was widely and favorably reviewed and which sold pretty well and got a lot of well-deserved attention, but Book B isn’t as good as Book A, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the review of Book B, which seems, implicitly, to actually be a review of Book A. Book A, it seems, was so amazing, that the love it engendered spilled into the love the reviewer is offering Book B, and the reader wonders: Is the reviewer reviewing Book B or the reviewer’s preexisting idea of Book B and the author of Book B based upon the good things that attach to Book A?

2. Sometimes when I’m reading a review of Book D, which is the second book by the author of Book C, the reviewer will spend half or more of the review of Book D talking about Book C, often using phrases like “sophomore curse.” The reviewer seems to be disappointed that Book D isn’t Book C, or that Book D doesn’t have the relationship to Book C that the reader would have admired in Book D, or that Book D is too much like Book C and therefore doesn’t represent the “step forward” that the reviewer would have hoped to find in Book D. But ought not the measure of Book D be Book D, rather than the relationship of Book D to Book C?

3. Sometimes the editor who assigns the review will assign the review to the author of a book that is superficially similar to the book to be reviewed, or which is about the same subject. Although the publications often have rules READ MORE >

The rondeau is a fifteen-line poem appropriated from a French form dating to the 13th century. Here is John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” the most famous rondeau in English:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Note the straitjacket of the form — the AABBA AAB(refrain) AABBA(refrain) structure, and the refrain itself lifted from the first half of the first line.

Here is Laura Kasischke’s “Rondeau,” from the April 2011 issue of Poetry:

Small and panting mass
Of moonlight and dampness on a log
This glistening tumor, terrible frog
Of moonlight and dampness on a log
My small and panting mass READ MORE >

The Necropastoral is a chapbook by Joyelle McSweeney. It proceeds in five parts. First, “Necropastoral, or, Normal Love,” an essay that sets out McSweeney’s idea of the Necropastoral by examining Jack Smith’s film Normal Love. Second, a series of poems, all titled “King Prion,” which may be read as individual poems, as a cumulative poem, or as parts of a longer poem which isn’t present in its entirety. Third, “Arcadia, or, Anachronism: A Necropastoral Effigy,” an essay or possibly a story in the form of a list which is also in the form of an effigy. Fourth, “Infernal Tributaries of the Necropastoral,” which is an acknowledgements section that we might also read as a deletion of the boundaries of the chapbook. Fifth, ten blank white pages. There are also pages between sections illustrated by black-and-white collage.

The task of the first paragraph of these notes was to describe the contents of the chapbook, but already the reviewer has had some trouble, because questions of genre and form and the place of each section have been blurred in a manner that requires the reader to rethink each how each element works and what each element is.

For starters: The chapbook form. What is a chapbook? READ MORE >

Good news for the world: There is a new Miroslav Penkov story live at Five Chapters. “Makedonija.” It’s excerpted from Penkov’s East of the West, which will be out in hardcover June 21 from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I’ve read the whole thing, and it’s one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. You can pre-order from Nightbird Books or Amazon.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

Read the rest of “Makedonija” at Five Chapters.

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, a novella of sexual passion and transaction in Bulgaria, which calls to mind the richly textured fictions of Imre Kertesz, W.G. Sebald, and Marguerite Duras. Greenwell grew up in Kentucky, studied poetry at Harvard, and taught high school in Michigan, before settling (for now) in Bulgaria, where he teaches at the American College of Sofia. Mitko is available in bookstores, and also through Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and the publisher. We corresponded last week by Facebook messaging.

MINOR: I first became acquainted with you through your poetry, but your first book, Mitko, is a work of fiction, a novella, which reads in some ways like that variety of fiction that hews close to autobiography.

GREENWELL: Until coming to Bulgaria, all of my creative work was in verse, and in some way I don’t fully understand I think that moving to a place so free from things I recognized or understood READ MORE >

Best Deal on the Internet:

James Wright on Bill Knott, from Wright’s collected letters:

Some notes on Knott from Peter Jurmu: