For all you Chicago HTMLreaders, Brian Evenson will be reading tonight (with Tod Goldberg and David Taylor) at the Bookslut Reading Series, at 7:30 at the Hopleaf. Evenson! Beer! Beer! Evenson!
Not too long ago I posted by request a list of 15 ‘towering literary artists’ who personally and historically seem important. Most of them have published 8 books or more, most of which in each case I’ve read. Here are my favorites of each of those authors, for fun. Some are very close calls. What are yours?
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistess
Year of the Liquidator, the press Shane Jones and I started earlier this year, will release its first title, Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television, on Halloween.
Designed to run as a series, the books, as we hopefully put out more, will form a continuum of design, like a little freakhouse on your nightstand.
People have already said nice things:
To read One Hour of Television is to flip channels between a 50’s science film on the joys of nuclear prowess and a heist-driven road movie set in a late-imperialist apocalypse. In Born’s hands, all social code is a recipe for deadpan horror. Strained domestic tableaus are intimately wedded to carpet bombings and crowd control, and our best chances at intimacy arrive via gruesome medical emergencies. This book is in revolt against language as an anesthesia machine. It’s in revolt against an empire in which any vote you cast necessarily ends up as a vote for genocide.
– Lara Glenum, author of Maximum GagaOne Hour of Television‘s recurring headwounds make an apt symbol for the work as a whole; urgent and insistent, the oozing gauze on an otherwise lovely skull. Would that all flash fiction be this deadly.
– Amelia Gray, author of AM/PM
You can read an excerpt and preorder One Hour of Television now for $10.
You can also add the book on Goodreads.
Thanks!
Stephen Elliott forwarded this to me. It was sent to him by a fan named Vicki Gundrum. She created some metrics for Stephen’s The Adderall Diaries. They’re funny and interesting. I turned them into a PDF and now you can view them by clicking here: Metrics for The Adderall Diaries. NYC People Reminder: Stephen’s at Joe’s Pub tonight and Bookcourt (launch party) tomorrow night.
The MotherThe girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a doll-house. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.
“The Mother,” a short piece from Lydia Davis’s Break it Down, perfectly demonstrates, for me, the unhumorous punchline where the last line and components leading up to it operate as a joke, but aren’t funny. Punchlines at their best are oblique and unexpected; it’s the minor epiphany of “getting it” that makes them so visceral — keyword here, because what begins in the brain ends in the gut.
I don’t have anything amazing to say about Sarah Manguso except that her book, The Two Kinds of Decay, was so awesome I feel like it became a part of my body. I wrote this thing for The Rumpus that goes more into that book, but for now I want to give you one quote from a Bookslut interview with her:
In a magazine feature I read years ago, a mathematician was quoted as saying “I am a machine that turns coffee into equations.” And at the time I thought, “Oh, I’m a machine that turns coffee into poems.” I live a regimented life. I work in a little box, a little room at the back of the apartment, and eat lunch at the same time every day. I’m a simple machine.
I guess I just love the memoirist/poet hybrid. Nick Flynn and Michael Ondaatje are two more that come to mind. Anyone know of other poets who venture into memoir?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
See? Sing me a story.
I imagine that I’m not the only one that carries around up to half a dozen books with them everywhere they go, at all times. I really hate having any kind of down time with nothing to read. Doctor’s office, in line at Walgreens, on my way to sell books at the Strand, less exciting moments in foreign movies I’m watching, or for when my lady friend is watching Top Chef. Whatever. One of the few I was lugging along on the train today—Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (which is pretty great so far, fyi)—had an interesting passage that got me to thinking about the previously unconsidered victims of my solipsistic and obsessive habits.
“You must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.” To her mother she says, “He reads everywhere—in the subway, between the acts at plays, at intermissions in Symphony Hall, on picnics, on dates.”
This speech conveys considerable information to Aunt Emily. She watches Sid’s eyes close in mock agony, while a really very engaging smile takes over from the sheepishness on his face. “Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind. Everybody’s read ten times more than I have.”
“What did you bring?” Charity asks. “Restoration dramas?”
“I’m taking a rest from those. I’ve just got some hole-fillers. Middlemarch, The Idiot, things like that, novels I should have read but haven’t.”
When is it okay to bring along books, and when is it not? Dinner parties? The bar? Bar Mitzvahs? Sporting events? Sporting events where your team sucks and them losing is a foregone conclusion but you still want to tacitly show your admittedly wavering support? Please advise.