Malone & Savoca Week (1): Everything is Quiet
This week we’re going to be highlighting a new pair of poetry releases from Scrambler Books, now available for order: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. They are $12 each, or $20 together, and both available in limited hardback.
To kick off with K, you can read some of the poems from her book at Bear Creek Feed and via her blog, Tricoteuse.
The title poem in Natalie Lyalin’s UDP chapbook, Try a Little Time Travel, is funny. It begins:
Try it a bit, instead of sexing
One night. Close your eyes,And think, Grandmother,
I’m coming to you, live!… (link to purchase)
I like capitalizing the first word in every line in poetry. Some people think it’s old fashioned. It doesn’t mean anything really, I just like it.
All the poems are good. Here’s a bit from another one, where the title is the same as the first line of the poem (a convention I also like, though not as much):
Jesus shows inside his flesh.
He is airy marbles and we are
All looking at his un-pain
Troyan, Cassandra & Cody. Big Bill and the Lonely Nation (2010)
cover art by Sara Drake
The chapbook itself includes:
-eenui! -anti-nationalism! -apocalypse theory! -aristocrats (not cats)! -slime! -culture! -thomas jefferson! -french dames! -ostriches! -insomnia! -papsmearz! -drunkenness! -sea turtles! -humping! -circle-jerks! -cheeseburgers! -desperation! -outsourcing! -federally-funded infrastructure! -10 year-old girls! -consumerism! -capitalism! -minimalism! -maximalism! -marx(imal)ism!
Official release date, September 17th, 2010
Only $4
Pre-order your copy now!
The release of the chapbook is also the beginning of a reading series called EAR EATER that will happen at Cassandra’s apartment and other spaces in Chicago throughout the year.
Mooney, (it dissolved into the salt), freed.
We are all of the same tribe. We all wear the same markings. The book is, in one way, a family portrait: a portrait of our tribe. There are obviously many people missing from this portrait, but that makes sense to me. Someone is always missing. –Blake B. interviews Chris Higgs at Bookslut, and says this: ‘The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney seems to me unprecedented via form, making new ways of both telling a story and relaying information, but also doing so in a way that is, as David Foster Wallace so expressly begged for: fun.’
If you’re on Goodreads, you can win Mooney with one click.
And the Marvin K. Mooney Society is redesigned and alive. Buy the book in September and you’ll get a book from Mooney’s library.
Let’s all Wish Joshua Cohen an 800-page 30th Birthday
Today’s the day for Joshua Cohen, frequent target of this blog’s affection and voice of his generation for all those whom Tao Lin is not already providing a voice. So, how are you going to celebrate thirty years of the Tribe of One? As always, this blog recommends that you mark the existence of writers whose existence you are glad for by buying their books.
Witz is 20% off if you buy direct from Dalkey Archive. (Read Drew Toal’s Time Out New York review, and a snippet from Blake Butler’s in The Believer). A Heaven of Others is available new, used and Kindled at Amazon. You can get Witz there too, obviously, so if you want both you can probably score free shipping. And once the shipping’s free, why not pump those savings into Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto? The trifecta is very much in the spirit of thirtytude. Here’s me and Kyle Minor in conversation re A Heaven of Others at The Rumpus. Here’s Cohen himself answering Stray Questions at the Paper Cuts blog. Oh, and don’t miss Christian Lorentzen’s profile in the New York Observer.
From Yuri, Stoya, and all of us at HTMLGiant–Happy Birthday!
Fresh Air Exclusive Transcript
Terry Gross with Jonathan Franzen
TERRY GROSS: A lot of people think we look very similar, would you care to comment on that?
JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, you do sort of look like a man; no offense, and I’m dating a feminist, so we’re on the same team here. Most women have long hair and softer features, which is where the problem is. I just think Americans really need to step back and realize it’s not all about capitalism and gender. My new novel Freedom aims to expose the underbelly and subconscious of the American pathos.
TERRY GROSS: Thanks, that was really touching — speaking of which, what am I hearing under the table?
JONATHAN FRANZEN: Well Terry, I’m under contractual agreement with my publishers to “pound away at [my] future,” and this moment I’m focusing on DNA.
TERRY GROSS: Gross.
JONATHAN FRANZEN: Franzen.
Everything Is Quietly Descriptive Love
Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.
It is Friday: Go Write Ahead
previous generations of American writers pointed the way
and why would he be murdered when everyone in town knew he had terminal cancer?
i wanted to be “a pure mathematician” more than anything else (the mathematician as artist)
and for a while I even lived in a tree house
i was still drinking in the minor leagues at the time
bees don’t stop drinking
excuses to go to the store
warm beers in the attic again
a flag flew, lit by a spotlight, indicating the man was in residence
three reasons why alcohol and the writer go so well together.
1. Trance-like states
2. Nothing is free on planet E
Author Spotlight & Random / Comments Off on It is Friday: Go Write Ahead
August 20th, 2010 / 5:39 pm
August 20th, 2010 / 5:39 pm
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.]