Major Book Announcement : Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler pre-sale/firefight

Scorch Atlas (destroyed) by Blake Butler from featherproof books on Vimeo.

Master and commander/Brother Butler/Crier of The Good Lit/Partygirlin Eater of Babies/W.I.B. BLAKE BUTLER has announced that his novel in stories, Scorch Atlas, can now be pre-bought before it’s 9/9/09 release date — and for a 33%off, i.e. $10! — from the inimitable Featherproof Books. And not only can they be paid for, but you can secure a limited edition ‘destroyed’ copy, i.e. a book that’s been punished brutally by our beloved friend Blake, & his company. Or, you know, you can just get a plain old regularly clean version of the book too, if that’s what you’re into.

I have been more excited to subsume this set of words than any other set of words in ________.

Buy this book.

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Author News / 22 Comments
July 22nd, 2009 / 10:40 pm
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HTMLGiant sort of missed covering the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest story, so just in case you’re one of those people who gets 100% of their news from us, here’s a roundup of all the Gawker posts on the topic.

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Fishing for something to read

I'd love to hook me a Snork

I'd love to hook me a Snork

I was back home in South Jersey this past weekend. Knowing full well how difficult it is to find good books down there (there will be no Nelson DeMille for Mrs. Toal’s boy), I made sure to bring my own reading material. Of course, in the end, I was no match for the call of the mall, and before I knew it ended up poking around in Borders. When was the last time you found something good at that place? It’s all vampires, self-help and celeb or Jesus bullshit these days. You have to go in to the nonfiction aisle to even have a chance of finding a tolerable title. Which I did. And I came across Tom McGuane’s The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing. Has anyone read this? I haven’t been out fishing for at least a decade, yet felt strangely compelled to read it. I like McGuane’s fiction well enough, but to define your life in terms of angled snappers and trout—that is awesome.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to Atlantic County for suggesting that its denizens can’t read. I’m…sorry.


Behind the Scenes / Comments Off on Fishing for something to read
July 22nd, 2009 / 3:41 pm

Thomas Bernhard for life

Q: Reading your books, one gets the impression that you see no hope whatsoever in this domain.

A: That’s a stupid question…

Q: What kind of intellectual aims do you…

A: These are all questions that can’t be answered because no one asks themselves that sort of thing. People don’t have aims. Young people, up to 23, they still fall for that. A person who has lived five decades has no aims, because there’s no goal.

“Thomas Bernhard for life“

[In an interview from 1986, the late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard discusses the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men and the incurability of stupidity. By Werner Wögerbauer]

Uncategorized / 21 Comments
July 22nd, 2009 / 1:59 pm

Learn Valuable Lessons

Have you ever been experienced? Stephen has.

Have you ever been experienced? Stephen Elliott has.

APB FOR NYC RESIDENTS: Perpetual friend-of-Giant and all-around badass Stephen Elliott is teaching a one-day wokshop on writing from experience in NYC on August 3rd. The cost is just a measly fifty-five bucks. No idea how many spots are left, but I’m assuming just a few. Here’s the course description. Click anywhere to get put through to the reserve-me-a-spot page.

Your experiences, and how you process them, are what make you unique as an individual. They are also the most valuable things we can offer readers. We will talk about writing from experience in fiction and nonfiction, and how to use our lives as jumping off points and framing devices for the stories we tell about ourselves and others. We will also talk about the dangers of writing from experience and overcoming the blocks set in place (often unnecessarily) by our fears of exposure. We will look at strategies for getting past those fears and for dealing with friends and relatives whose memories might be different from our own. Finally, we will focus on unlocking our lives and the joy and value of integrating the worlds we know with the worlds we create.

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July 22nd, 2009 / 11:18 am
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Foreignpolicy.com has a piece on the 2009 Failed States Index. And while you’re over there, you should also check out this fascinating article by Noah Efron on secular/extremist tension in Jerusalem.

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Damn. Dalkey’s running a summer sale again: 5 paperbacks for $35, 10 for $65, 20 for $120.

(via JoshMaday)

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Vanity Fair edits and researches Sarah Palin’s resignation speech.

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Yann Martel and The Holocaust as genre

mattbriggsYou may have heard that Life of Pi author Yann Martel was given a rather huge contract for his next book. And that the book is being described as an allegory about the Holocaust with animals.

Seattle writer Matt Briggs, in a post on his blog, reacted with this:

It disturbs me that the Holocaust is or has become a genre, just as there is a British tea cozy mystery. Is this an inevitable progression, that a collective trauma becomes shtick? Is the pot boiler Western the equivalent reduction of the genocide of Native Americans?…Three million dollars seems like a lot of money to pay for anything besides a bridge or highway or something.

Intrigued, I asked Briggs to elaborate.

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Author News & Behind the Scenes / 18 Comments
July 21st, 2009 / 3:11 pm
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see noah cicero read poems here.

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