The Desert Places
The Desert Places
by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, illustrated by Matt Kish
Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2013
84 pages / $10.60 buy from Amazon
Rating: 8.5
Evil is ubiquitous. It’s in the best literature and (as I present it to my students) it is the reason why humanity needs literature: as relief from evil and as elucidation for evil. The Desert Places, the new hybrid text by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, with illustrations by Matt Kish, depicts the history of malevolence from primordial Earth all the way into a nightmarish technological future. Plenty of other narratives have depicted the fall and subsequent struggle of Lucifer, Chamcha, Grendel, et al., but what sets Sparks’s and Kloss’s narrative apart is its broad scope within such a slim package. READ MORE >
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October 17th, 2013 / 6:06 pm
October 17th, 2013 / 6:06 pm
Painting Moby-Dick One Bloody, Brilliant Page at a Time
Moby-Dick in Pictures
by Matt Kish
Tin House Books, 2011
600 pages / $32 Buy from Tin House Books
We often speculate on the future of the book, mourn its possible extinction, and dream of what strange offspring the future intercourse of form and technology might yield. In an age where digital media reigns supreme, Moby-Dick in Pictures is a brilliant, nightmarish argument in defense of the book as a physical object of art. It reads like a labor of hatred and love, the manifestation of the artist’s intimate and tortured, relationship with Melville’s nineteenth century masterpiece.
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October 14th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
October 14th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Illustrating McCarthy and Melville
page 67: He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound.
Remember how Zak Smith did that cool illustration of Gravity’s Rainbow? Well now he’s doing Blood Meridian as a collaborative project with Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle.
Also, Matt Kish is doing one for Moby Dick:
Page 048 : Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.