Reviews

Microscripts by Robert Walser

Microscripts
by Robert Walser
New Directions, 2010
160 pages / $25  Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

At their most definable, Robert Walser’s microscripts are meditations, essays, parables, and sometimes distillations of other authors’ works. Then there are more unclassifiable pieces; these are awkward journal entries, truncated portraits, and non-narrative stillnesses. In Microscripts, twenty-five of these handwritten miniatures appear in facsimile form with their English and German translations. Aside from their physical smallness, what the pieces have in common is a narrating voice that often pays self-conscious attention to its language. For Walser, words are a dangerous delight; they easily get away from him and can even embarrass him. Microscripts offers a tacit commentary on the author’s difficult relationship with language and writing, as well as an extension of his artistic project. READ MORE >

1 Comment
August 15th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
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Tao Lin’s next novel, reportedly titled Taipei, Taiwan, has been sold to Vintage. More info at the Observer, “I honestly feel, to a large degree, like me and everyone else are close to death and that the awareness of this has, to me, precluded thoughts of “making it” (this is a theme of the novel).”

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Reviews

Repetition as compulsion: that you could make yourself believe a thing exists by tagging it, by making it again. Only, semantic satiation draws the word away from being, like the thin, drained smell of burnt rubber, rent into an air duct.

I Heart Your Fate
by Anthony McCann
Wave Books, 2011
96 pages / $16  Buy from Amazon, Wave Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A review of I <3 Your Fate, I [heart] Your Fate, or I [love] Your Fate, or, truly, the way your cognition’s filter makes you read it, maybe only when you look at the book, but maybe when you think of it, too, picturing the playful, blackbled type on the cover, I [hate] yr Fate, because the pull of the rhyme is stronger than the sound of the tongue-in-cheek, cardiod stain.

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6 Comments
August 12th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Late Afternoon Links

The Pen American Center has announced the 2011 award winners. I was particularly pleased to see Danielle Evans win the fiction prize for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.

Stacy May Fowles suggests that one way to address the gender imbalance in literary publishing is for men to stop submitting to those magazines who have serious gender imabalances among their contributors until those magazines rectify the disparity. I disagree with the suggestion because the responsibility belongs to editors, not writers, but her argument is interesting.

At the Texas Observer, Brad Green’s story, “Fixing Miss Fritz,” is worth a read or three.

Glenn Beck has something of a literary career and Laurie Winer offers some insight on that career, such as it may be.

In this interview, Dinty Moore talks about what he looks for in submissions and other things.

Roundup / 9 Comments
August 11th, 2011 / 5:54 pm

Spatial Anomalies in Kubrick’s The Shining

How Stanley Kubrick used Escher-styled spacial awareness & set design anomalies to disorientate viewers of his horror classic The Shining.

[Further maps & thoughts on this film and others here.]

Film / 15 Comments
August 11th, 2011 / 12:48 pm

Reviews

The Opportune Moment, 1855

The Opportune Moment, 1855
by Patrik Ouředník
Dalkey Archive Press, 2011
120 pages / $12.95 Buy from Dalkey Archive Press
Rating: 8.5

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dull is the immediate word for The Opportune Moment, 1855, but not a dullness on Patrik Ouředník’s part, nor on the book’s. Bruno, whose journal comprises the greater part of the book, doesn’t seem like much of an anarchist. His interior life is full of lust for one of the women on his ship to Brazil, vivid dreams about his dead mother, and his confusion over the anarchist’s notion of “freedom” (“And how can I tell whether I’m free?”) sounds very similar to the confusion of an acolyte or seminarian. This he has in common with his fellow anarchist from 1905, whose polemical jilt-letter to his ex-girlfriend, decades after she refused him, starts the book. That writer (incidentally the one who sent Bruno & Co. to Brazil) mentions a journal, “given me by the police officer charged with the investigation” into the demise or disbandment of anarchist settlers of Paraná. The cop couldn’t care less.

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2 Comments
August 11th, 2011 / 12:06 pm

Book + Beer: Betty Superman and Modelo Especial

I hope you’re not an amateur, the type to quaff dark beer in the summer, light in the winter. The sun all splattered as a flung ball of cheese, so time for Mexican. Today, Modelo Especial (of behemoth Grupo Modelo). You’ll need a heavy, cold glass. (If you can, a chalice [or goblet] would be best, preferably one with scoring [You can do this yourself with a glass cutter] on the inside bottom of the glass, to create a CO2 nucleation point.) You do drink your beer from glass? You do understand that aroma, clarity, head retention, bubble stream, the sheer synaptical rush, the anticipation, etc. is dependent on glass? Listen: Do you want a quality head? Yes, yes, you do—it traps the essential effervescent volatiles. What? You want to just release the volatiles like a bunch of damn kids running round the Walgreens parking lot? Ah, Jesus. You sick-ass. You know what, let’s move on.

[Jen Gotch]

Parents. Or, a parent, this woman (the men whirl around with all the gravitas of a vacuum cleaner). Betty Superman (Rose Metal winner) dominates, is the word I’m using. Who is she? Mingy fuss-budget. Rueful drag. Lying truth-yawper. Despotic depressive tarantella. Candy bar cad. Underdeveloped sloppy-knocker. God gossiper. Emphysemic tart. Mother. To this narrator. To this daughter trying to figure out something about her mother. To settle something. To grapple, to slam, to lift to a light, to see, to step upon, something. Tiff Holland (several glow poems here) has created a case study of characterization. A repulsion and an embrace. A homage and an exorcism. A bring up and a take down, of Betty Superman, not so easy—she dominates.

Do you even know how to pour a beer?

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Author Spotlight & Random / 5 Comments
August 10th, 2011 / 1:45 pm

Reviews

Palo Alto

Palo Alto
by James Franco
Scribner, 2011
224 pages / $14.00 Buy from Powell’s
Rating: 5.4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week, the Guardian posted their longlist for the year’s best first book award, an award carrying a prize worth £10,000. Afterwards they asked booksellers and bloggers to submit their nominations. In response, Elizabeth Baines posted an article citing her own list of books she felt were missing, one of which was James Franco’s debut story collection Palo Alto, recently published in paperback.

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127 Comments
August 10th, 2011 / 12:06 pm
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Today the New York Times tells us everything is going to be okay. That’s not quite what they say, but there are signs of growth in all markets. The adult fiction market, in particular, showed strong growth and e-books are doing pretty well so maybe this writing thing is going to work out, after all. Good news in publishing. Imagine that.

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Reviews

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
by Jon McGregor
Mariner Books, 2003
275 pages / $13.95 Buy from Powell’s
Rating: 7.3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s been close to a decade since Jon McGregor wrote his debut novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, published when he was twenty-six. He was the youngest and only first-time novelist to be long-listed for the Booker Prize, and he won both the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award.

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12 Comments
August 9th, 2011 / 12:06 pm