Does anyone have any recommendations for bookstores in Denver?

R.I.P. Carlos Fuentes. I just found out. He was one of the greats. Places to start if you haven’t read him: Where the Air Is Clear (1958), The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962),  Terra Nostra (1975). & here he is on the BBC (audio), and here are various YouTube videos.

Godspeed, good sir.

Joyce’s handwritten pages for Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, etc.

Dana Levin is a poet. She’s super cool. She’s so cool that someone wrote a song about her. (Seriously, click the link, listen to the song.) How often do poets have songs written for them? Well, if you’re Dana Levin…

Watch the official book trailer for Dan Boehl’s Naomi and the Horse-Flavored T-Shirt. (& read Katie Smither’s previous HTMLGIANT review/interview with Dan Boehl)

Also cool book trailer/art animation piece for Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire. The book is just out from Norton. Get it here.

Too old to comment on a litblog, too young to die.

Now available for pre-order from the always-exciting Jaded Ibis Press, NO ONE TOLD ME I WAS GOING TO DISAPPEAR, “a novel told in thick chunks of language and explosions of lines and colors” by J.A. Tyler & John Dermot Woods. Order soon to receive a limited edition print that’s sure to be gorgeous.

Here’s a nice interview with the authors about the making of the book.

And here are good words from the Los Angeles Review, including this sentence, which has me sold: “Only the barest of plots is visible, yet the story’s climax is as powerful as that of the most meticulously planned novel.”

Courtesy of Adam J Maynard and a bunch of rad voices: a new My Name is Mud.

Okay, so Derrick Rose will maybe never again play basketball like such a firefly, but that doesn’t mean you should stop believing in the triumph of the canny and soulful: for example, friend of the GIANT Heather Christle has won The Believer‘s 2011 Poetry Award for her book The Trees The Trees. Congratulations, Heather!

For their 6th issue, the always excellent Birkensnake is looking for strangers to cull the content for versions of an entire issue, as an experiment in curation: “We hope that many prospective editors will become involved in this project, and that there will be a large number of different Birkensnake 6s.”

Those interested in the Oulipo should peep Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker, out today from Harvard University Press. [addendum: excerpt of an excerpt from The Believer]

What is the most overrated book in the world?

For you: a copy of ARK CODEX ±0. Comment to win, and I’ll respond to the winner in a day or so. I have this book at home and it is beautiful.

The New Yorker‘s diaeresis tic bothers some people.  It’s the double-dot thing they put in words like “coöperate” to tell you to pronounce both syllables.  It’s also “the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.”  As I read this piece about it, I kept waiting for Mary Norris to announce that they’d finally decided to change their style.  But apparently the diaeresis lives on.  What do you think, is the diaeresis annoying or endearing?  (I like it.)  Diaeresis.

HTMLGIANT is seeking anonymous reviews, which can be sent to brooks [at] htmlgiant [dot] com. Guidelines and previous reviews are here; questions are welcome.

You are friends with writers even if you don’t like respect their writing: true or false?

Students/Teachers: Do you remember reading a story or poem by someone in your creative writing workshop and being truly amazed by it?

Who wrote it? What was interesting or peculiar about it?

Listening to this Ben Lerner interview from Minnesota Public Radio is similar to attaining an MFA in Poetry.

If there’s any one good way to make writing even more irrelevant in the world it’s by doting over ceremonial bullshit that never meant anything in the first place.

Like its predecessor, HEATH (plagiarism/outsource), HEATH COURSE PAK exists somewhere between a Project Gutenberg version of Samuel Pepys’ Diary and a minute-to-minute news feed and blog of Heath Ledger’s death. Sad, appropriated, lyrical and confused, the book contains a brief history of recent performance art, a legal defense of plagiarism, the diary of a poetry workshop at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, an MP3 protest song, and an examination of SMS and GMS technologies as distribution networks for human sadness. Multi-authored, and with numerous text blocks and photos, HEATH COURSE PAK adds a multivalent commentary to its first edition, once again in full color.