Reviews

The Klondike by Zach Worton

The Klondike is Zach Worton’s comic book (320pp, b&w, on sale now at Drawn & Quarterly’s website) about the Yukon gold rush. It’s historical fiction about a fascinating period of expansion, and it’s well researched. In an afterword, Worton talks about finding the right way to tell the story, which he figures to be about 80% accurate, and then lists a detailed bibliography for further reading. I’m interested in the way comics deliver narrative differently from prose, so I found the author’s note to be particularly interesting. The challenges are not disimilar.

The first third of the book sets up all the characters and their objectives. These are in relatively short chapters. Because there are so many distinct people, I immediately thought that the book was going to be an encyclopedic look at separate historical figures, but before long Worton started to intertwine their stories. It was smart to establish things this way, because there are so many actors in the book. It’s like a Shakespearean history, in that it’s very easy to get lost with all the who’s-who. READ MORE >

3 Comments
June 21st, 2011 / 2:07 pm
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So, wow, Yale just announced $150,ooo literary prizes that’ll be awarded starting in about a year and a half.  Endowed by the late writer Donald Windham, who “specifically requested that writers with no academic affiliation be considered.”  Here’s hoping prizes go to some surprising (in a good way) recipients.

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Reviews

Nick Mamatas’s sensational Sensation

A webbed suspension. A stinging. A stunning. It’s stunning. I’m stunned and stung. It’s possible I’ve been infected.

Nick Mamatas’s Sensation is stunning. It’s sensational.

Ok, imagine a world with men of indeterminate ethnicity. Easy enough, right? Now, imagine these men are not made of flesh – like you and I are – but are mere veneers, flexible shells. Inside, thousands of spiders. Inside, these intelligent, mutant spiders control men. They are out to control the world. Or, to help the world. Or, at least, to prevent the wasps from taking over. No, not WASPs, but literally, wasps. From South America.

READ MORE >

6 Comments
June 21st, 2011 / 10:40 am

Random Ass Live Reading Of Some Recent Books I Like #6

The reading is over.

I read from:

Fog Gorgeous Stag by Sean Lovelace
Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City by Michael Bible
The Village on Horseback by Jesse Ball
The Iguana Complex by Darby Larson
Sparrow and Other Eulogies by Megan Martin
The Book of Interfering Bodies by Daniel Borzutzky
Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter
Helsinki by Peter Richards
&
The Cow by Ariana Reines

Random / 8 Comments
June 20th, 2011 / 8:42 pm

By the time you get to the murder it’s going to seem like a cough: An Interview with Andrea Seigel

I met Andrea Seigel ~5 years ago while we were both at Bennington. Unlike most writers, she was more down to talk about soap operas and strange medical conditions and wicked dance moves than book junk, which those familiar with her work probably won’t find at all surprising. So far she’s published three books of young adult fiction, of a voice surprising I think to even that genre: often wry and dark and funny, though also carrying heavy material in a rather elegantly surreptitious way. Over the past several weeks we traded emails about her latest book, The Kid Table, as well as the influence of TV and screenwriting, narrative function, daily process, the influence of the internet, particularly twitter (of which, her feed is one of my constant favorites), and more.

BB: I remember when we were in school you said you would often write in front of the TV or with the TV on, and maybe that you couldn’t write without it that way? Is that right, and do you do that still? How does that work, or what does it allow you?

AS: i used to be like that and then i don’t know why, but i didn’t want to do it anymore. maybe it was getting high-speed internet– i didn’t used to have that, and now the combination activity is that i watch tv and fuck around on the internet. around 2008 i was still writing everything but novels with the tv on, like i wrote a screenplay and an sat audiobook that year. but i started writing my young adult book to complete quiet. you know, that could also have something to do with the fact that my boyfriend was basically living with me during that period, and then he was actually living with me, and we were in one room.

the reason i used to write with the tv on was because one, there weren’t enough hours of the day to get everything in that i wanted to get in, so i had to double up. and two, i used to feel that watching tv while i was writing helped me be less neurotic about writing because i’d be half thinking about a performance on “american idol” and half thinking about my book, and maybe this is a false memory, but i remember my first book getting written so easily and so fast that way, like i don’t remember ever being stuck.

READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 15 Comments
June 20th, 2011 / 4:47 pm

Do the click to help Vouched Books & Big Car do good things for small press literature and community art in Indianaoplis, IN

I just got this email from Chris Newgent of Vouched Books in Indianapolis, IN, which I think is a generous, lovely project, so I am re-posting this here.

“Big Car Arts Collective is in the running for a $25,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant to support our new community space here in Indy called Service Center for Contemporary Culture + Community! The top 15 projects get funded. We are in the final push at 9th place with 10 days to go, which means if we can just hold on we get the grant!

At this new space, we plan to host events (the next Vouched Presents reading will be here), maintain a community garden, hold art and writing workshops (e.g. we plan to have a Dzanc Day event here next year), and have a lending library (you can bet I plan to stock that puppy with small press literature galore). On top of that, they’re devoting a shelf to Vouched Books so people visiting the community space have the opportunity to buy my books whenever the space is open. The whole endeavor is to kickstart a revitalization of a neighborhood in Indy that is in desperate need for new life. READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes / 2 Comments
June 20th, 2011 / 2:21 pm

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Sesshu Foster}

photo by Gary Kuwahara

Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East Los Angeles for 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and the on-line magazine Joyland.  He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the ELA Guide. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex (winner of the 2006 Believer Magazine Book Award) and the hybrid text World Ball Notebook (winner of a 2010 American Book Award).

READ MORE >

Random / 7 Comments
June 20th, 2011 / 12:10 pm

Some Notes on Kate Bernheimer’s Complete Tales Trilogy

Kate Bernheimer’s Complete Tales of the Gold sisters is a a trilogy of novels published over a ten year period. It is also part of a broader project, a life’s work, that includes not only the practice of reviving and revivifying the fairy tale, but also the tasks of developing a contemporary theory of the fairy tale, of identifying the ongoing subterranean influence of the fairy tale upon the work of writers not ordinarily associated with the fairy tale, and of championing and legitimizing and de-ghettoizing the fairy tale as a literary form.

Bernheimer is probably better known in her critical and editorial roles than as a writer. Her Penguin-published anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (co-edited with Carmen Gimenez-Smith), which includes fairy tales by the likes of Kelly Link, John Updike, Neil Gaiman, Lily Hoang, Michael Cunningham, Kevin Brockmeier, Joy Williams, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, is the most prominent of these efforts. In her introduction, Bernheimer invokes a line of Nabokov’s: “All great novels are fairy tales.” Then she makes a broader claim: “all great narratives are fairy tales . . . READ MORE >

Random / 8 Comments
June 19th, 2011 / 1:37 pm

Fan Mail #2: Lidia Yuknavitch

Dear Lidia Yuknavitch,

It’s your birthday, and I am grateful you exist.

Even if it wasn’t your birthday, I’d be grateful.

Lidia, the first book of yours I read was in 2004, Her Other Mouths. I read it for a class with Steve Tomasula. I read it and thought: fuck, writing really can do this. Mind you: I’d read Kathy Acker. I’d read James Joyce. I’d read Raymond Federman. I’d read Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace and Anne Carson. I’d read a whole bunch of people, but it was your book that told me that I could write what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it. Your book was brazen and unapologetic. Most of the other books I was reading were cowering and pretty, like princesses rather than heroines.

Your book was a heroine.

READ MORE >

Massive People / 11 Comments
June 18th, 2011 / 1:42 pm

A Few Notes on The Necropastoral by Joyelle McSweeney

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 >

Random / 17 Comments
June 18th, 2011 / 12:57 pm