Significant Objects
Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Rebecca Wolff
THE IDEA
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!
This sounds interesting.
It was created by Joshua Glenn, a cultural semiotics analyst and independent scholar. Click here for the “About” page & here for the list of items.
Uncategorized / 7 Comments
July 23rd, 2009 / 10:11 pm
July 23rd, 2009 / 10:11 pm
You Haven’t Known An Easy One Exactly
The Difficult Farm by Heather Christle ships August 2009
Once while I was eating some Pop Tarts, everyone was saying that they always went around wishing they were something else. Like ants or marmots or Joshua trees. Not me, I said. Really? Heather Christle asked. She seemed very incredulous, an incredulity of startling emotional intensity. You never, she said, want to be anything else? Not even a boat? Well, no, I said. Then I said something like: there are so many trick ends and trap cliffs in being human; it takes all my time figuring out how to be human; why would I want to waste that time wishing I were a boat?
Dalkey Archive Interviewed
The LA Times blog, Jacket Copy, interviewed John O’Brien, founder of the amazing Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s an excerpt:
JC: How important do you think awareness of form, or a sense of play, is to telling a story in contemporary fiction?
JO’B: I think it should be, and I do emphasize “should,” at the heart of contemporary writing, but this playfulness is not always foregrounded as such. Fiction writing began with this strange consciousness of itself and the possibilities of playfulness, as though it were an inside joke with a great deal of eye-winking going on. The critic Viktor Shklovsky spent a lifetime tracing and exploring such things in relation to fiction, even as related to what would seem to be the un-playful writing of a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. The fiction that I find unreadable is that which seems unaware of anything that has been written before, and the reader is supposed to go along with what is truly a “suspension of disbelief.” I find this fiction to be boring and condescending to the reader, though apparently many people like it.
Attention Houston HTMLGIANT Readers
NANO Fiction will launch a monthly reading series this September at Kaboom Books.
The editors write:
To commemorate the series, there will be a limited edition mini-chapbook produced combining each month’s readers. Chapbooks will be available for purchase for a dollar a piece.
Visit their site for details.
Uncategorized / 2 Comments
July 23rd, 2009 / 4:35 pm
July 23rd, 2009 / 4:35 pm
The Lifted Brow 5 has arrived
THANK YOU RONNIE & TEAM TLB FOR SHIPPING MY COPY TO HONG KONG!!!
Got in from the Hong Kong Bookfair this afternoon (more on this later/tomorrow) and found a package waiting for me. It was my contributor copy of The Lifted Brow, the badass “biannual attack journal” out of Brisbane and Melbourne, Australia. This issue includes Joe Wenderoth, Blake Butler, two short-shorts by Jennifer L. Knox, a massive piece by Tom Bissell, twelve poems by Tao Lin, Ellen Kennedy’s short story “Probably Going to Die Alone,” something by a dude named Glen David Gold called “Pornography Available for Download from the United Dairy Council,” and a whole lot more besides. Also, a CD insert on the inside cover, accompanied by a note from no less than Daniel Handler, who harangues all readers to not make the usual CD-in-a-litmag move of totally ignoring the CD forever. Apparently, what the CD contains is an “epic rhyming sci-fi audio drama” written by Thomas Benjamin Guerney, who also narrates. Finally, my copy also included a sticker announcing THIS IS NOT ART as well as a little white string. Why don’t you get linked through to their website and order yourself one?
Uncategorized / 2 Comments
July 23rd, 2009 / 6:04 am
July 23rd, 2009 / 6:04 am
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.
Justin Taylor—
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.
Comments Off on
Fishing for something to read
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.