What to Wear During an Orange Alert?

new-no-negative-spaceOne of my long-time favorite media-blogs Orange Alert has just relaunched with a new full on website, which makes me happy in the way of reading pleasure.

Orange Alert is unique in that they focus heavily not only on independent lit (with a weekley ‘Reader Meet Author’ feature that focuses specifically on small press peeps, including Giant folks like Sam Pink, Conor Madigan, Amelia Gray, Brandon Gorrell, and tons more), as well as weekly features on independent musicians, artists, and everything else all in one place. It’s a wonderful daily mishmash of new media, and in particular their ‘Watch List’ of things reading, watching, wanting, etc., is a good way to keep up with their favorite stories from online journals and new releases from small presses. It’s one of the things I look forward to reading each week.

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Presses & Web Hype / 6 Comments
February 7th, 2009 / 7:57 pm

“The Heart Is Deceitful” Perfume

Smell like a male teenage prostitute!

Smell like a male teenage prostitute!

I own this perfume. I bought it back when J.T. Leroy was in Vanity Fair Magazine, singing in a band, and havng the likes of Tom Waits gush praises all over his ass. Now, I bought the perfume because the fact that there was a perfume cracked me up to no end. Also, I have a lot of perfume. And face creams. And so forth. I did read the infamous story collection and I read the whole thing. And to be frank, I didn’t think it was so great. I thought it felt contrived, but I didn’t hate it. I remember reading this one short story in Zoetrope by Mr. J.T.  and laughing  and I wasn’t supposed to laugh. I was supposed to go “Oh, man, that is deep and painful.” I thought today I would check to see if this perfume still existed. It does. Now, we all know the J.T. LeRoy scandal has been beaten to death with a million sticks, but did you know there was a perfume made in honor of Yosh’s “friend”, J.T. Leroy? No, you did not. You learned something today! And it relates to the history of literature! Any other perfumes of products named after books? Le’ts hear it.

Author News / 53 Comments
February 7th, 2009 / 4:57 pm

Power Quote: Gordon Lish

God, the only thing to do is to have a good laugh at the joke. Ha ha ha. You hear me laughing at the joke? I am laughing at the joke. Ha ha ha. I am having a good laugh at it. Ha ha ha. “This is me.” “This is you.” Ha ha ha.

 

–Zimzum


Excerpts / 2 Comments
February 7th, 2009 / 12:17 pm

Barry, Jereme and pr at the AWP: An Htmlgiant Original

"I love you, Jereme."

The day of trolling tables and tables in a convention center is over. It was fun, but now the real fun begins. We started drinking at dinner. Now, it is late. Like, two in the morning. We are all in a suite, in Blake Butler’s suite. Blake has a suite because he is famous. The light is dim and yellowish. Sounds of delicate laughter and glasses tinkling with booze abound. I am sitting on a couch, the windows behind me, but I can feel Chicago glittering below. Jereme is next to me. Sitting there on the couch, next to each other, it no longer matters that I have an Amazonian, East German discus thrower vibe to me, because when I am sitting, it hides that aspect of me (as opposed to standing). Being next to Jereme is like being next to warmth. Being next to Jereme is like wanting to hold a baby bird in my hands and I’m afraid I won’t do it right, because it is so delicate. But I want to, I want to do it right, I feel I’ve never wanted anything so badly in all my life. I also am afraid he might get angry at me and that would crush me. But everything is good. He is not angry. He has beautiful eyes. We are nicely drunk, not yet shit-faced and I haven’t blacked out yet. My right shoulder is touching Jereme’s left shoulder. I can smell him. He smells like cigars and whiskey and a man’s warmed skin. I have all this love flowing from me, from my chest, from where my heart is, toward Jereme. He lets me touch his beard. It is soft, the way longish beards are, not scratchy. It is thick and comforting. I stroke it with my hand. Then I lean in, and rub my cheek on his beard. This is what I am doing when Barry walks up to us, towering above us, interrupting our soft, kind moment.

“pr.”

“Yes?”

“That’s enough.”

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Web Hype / 21 Comments
February 6th, 2009 / 3:41 pm

Brian Evenson’s LAST DAYS: a long review

ldlgI can still remember with odd clarity the first time I read the words of Brian Evenson: I ordered ‘The Din of Celestial Birds’ after running into it somewhere on the internet in my earliest explorations of independent lit, and as I can’t remember fully how I found the book, I must more imagine it found me. Almost as vividly as I remember reading each of the series of progressively insidious and truly haunting stories, I equally remember the aura of the book as object, the way I sat it on my bed in weird light and stared at the psychedelic cover full of stories that I still have not found a way to shake, staring at it as if at any moment it might come alive, much in the same way that as a child I stared for hours at the cover to my first dungeon master’s guide, full of incantation and instruction, or the reams of comic books that for years lived in my blood.

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Uncategorized / 29 Comments
February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am

Lily Hoang’s CHANGING

changingcover
In the third fantastic release from the already massive-powered Fairy Tale Review Press (whose first two releases, PILOT by Johannes Goransson and THE CHANGELING by Joy Williams are both brain eating monsters of true glee), the brand new and clean white book object CHANGING by Lily Hoang has now hit and awaits your head.

At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang’s CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family’s story. Changing is Little Girl’s fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.

“This is an impossible thing, a dream object”–Joyelle McSweeney, author of FLET.

That the book is based on the I-Ching plays no small part in the making of the book’s power: consisting of a series of form-shaped prose sections that mimic the structure of the holy book, CHANGING begins to take on this weird, recursive power. Lily Hoang has a way of roping the big mythic energy of tableau and mysticism down out of the nowhere and branding it with her own peculiarities of everyday upbringing. The result is kind of a maze of hypnotic language and cultural mishmash, which truly operates in resonance unlike any other book I can remember.

Author News / 4 Comments
February 5th, 2009 / 9:57 pm

Barry Graham is a Writer I’d Like to Fuck

Barry Graham is a writer I’d like to fuck. Now, we all know that here, so why bother, you ask? Because I want to fuck him, man! And he’s a writer!!! And I invented the WILF! It is probably the only good thing I have ever invented! So, Graham’s excellent collection of stories, The National Virginity Pledge, just published by the independent press Another Sky Press, should be on everyone’s shelf. (Above the bed shelf is my spot for it). The collection features work that originally appeared in Storyglossia, Hobart, Wigleaf and many other journals. (Lots of links here, people. Check it.) It consists of short shorts and longer, more traditional short stories, but all represent Graham’s rich vision of the complexity of sorrow and humor in life. Here is “Parable of the Dead Rolling Snowball”:

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Author Spotlight & Presses / 42 Comments
February 5th, 2009 / 9:19 pm

HTMLXYLOPHONE: Mayke Things Mayke Things Mayke Things

“Make Things” – A Drum and An Open Window (mp3)

When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go into iTunes and play this song by A Drum and An Open Window. I met them through my friend Jordaan, and they played a show in Oroville, CA with me the summer before I moved to Massachusetts. We skipped rocks and visited the Chinese Temple, stayed up in Ryan’s apartment keeping Whisper awake and singing with both Ryans, including the backhoe driver. Dustin was driving and making all his money through poker, mostly online. Andrew wanted to go to Europe, and Ashley had a radio show.

when it’s dark i’ll write some new songs

This song is really twee, to which I’m like, well: either life really is holy with meaning and that’s coming up, your scuffle with that, or life is just a place to keep your bones for a while, which you’re going to handle by moving them a little and then moving them some more.

Random / 2 Comments
February 5th, 2009 / 2:48 pm

Reap the Willow Weep

big-rock-winter

9 new winter themed additions have been added to the Willows Wept Review. I am not usually a fan of themes. To me themed writing feels contrived and meaningless kind of like a forced shit after eating too much cheese.

I read all the posted pieces . Nothing felt contrived. Everything was vibrant.

Specifically this piece by Brandi Wells:

January 6, 1998

I’m ending the post on a high note. There is no where else to go from here.

Uncategorized / 8 Comments
February 5th, 2009 / 2:29 pm

New & Massive: The Rumpus

Fifteen years ago Sheila Schwartz wrote her first novel. In November 2008, four months before its release, she succumbed to ovarian cancer. Her husband, Dan Chaon, wants to tell you about the new book by Sheila Schwartz.

Schwartz is one of those writers who you’ve probably never heard of, and who, but for the dice of fate might just as easily have become a household name. USA Today named her first book of stories, Imagine a Great White Light, one of the best books of the year of 1991. (Actually, if you think about it, USA Today talking about a book of stories at all is amazing in and of itself–if it was tougher than a mountain-climb then, it’d probably take two miracles now.) Anyway, her debut novel, Lies Will Take You Somewhere–which in a just world would never have had to be described as “posthumous”–is out this month from Etruscan Press. In “What Happened To Sheila,” her husband Dan Chaon guides us through his wife’s life and works, and recounts for us the delightful story of their courtship, when he was “an undergraduate student, and she was a first time teacher, straight out of Stanford…” Chaon writes: “I know I’m only one of many of her students who fell madly in love with her, but I happened to be lucky.”

It’s an incredible story, and it seems to me emblematic of the kind of stellar, unique work that The Rumpus is committed to publishing, so after you click over there and read it, click back over this way and read my Q&A with editor Stephen Elliott, which you can find right after the jump. We talk about the impetus for founding the site, what’s missing from the mainstream blogosphere, and the challenges that promising web-projects like his (and ours!) face and how to overcome them or die trying. Plus, you know, other awesome stuff too.

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Author Spotlight & Web Hype / 9 Comments
February 5th, 2009 / 12:16 pm