Experimental Detective Fiction
One of my all time favorite writers, Robert Coover, has a new book coming out in about two weeks called Noir. It’s a detective novel written in the second person. Say what you will about writing in the second person, I’m super excited to see what Coover does with this puppy.
You can read an excerpt at Vice.
You can listen to Coover read from the book and answer some questions via Kelly Writers House.
Here’s a blurb from Ben Marcus:
“At age 75, Coover is still a brilliant mythmaker, a potty-mouthed Svengali, and an evil technician of metaphors. He is among our language’s most important inventors.”
Here’s the summary:
You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband’s killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. “The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow” unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny.
The HTMLGIANT So Many Books Contest
HTMLGIANT is holding a writing contest.
The prize is the Dalkey Archive 100 books for $500. If you want to contribute to the prize pool, let us know in the comments and we’ll add it to the package.
We want your writing, up to 3,500 words however you want to assemble them.
The theme: love stories, however you interpret those two words. The numbers 100 and 500 should also somehow be involved in your writing and not just as an afterthought.
HTMLGIANT contributors will select 10 finalists. Special Guest Judge Rick Moody will determine the winner of which there can be only one.
The winning entry as well as the work of the finalists will be published on a sweet website to celebrate their words.
Send your entries both in the body of an e-mail and as an attachment (.doc/.pdf/.rtf) to contest@htmlgiant.com.
There is no fee to enter.
You do not need to submit a cover letter.
You do need to include your name and address so we know where to send your prize(s) if you win.
Deadline is Midnight, Sunday March 21. Winners will be announced on Tax Day, April 15.
Questions? Ask them in the comments or e-mail contest@htmlgiant.com.
Jeremy Schmall Poems
from Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort
Andrew Jackson
finished off the Creek Indian
civilization after fighting beside them.
Why Andrew?
& he puts his finger in my nose.
To the gods goes my excess asparagus,
linoleum tabletop & coffee-bruised newspaper.
I say the mountain’s not coming.
I say “the traffic,” and shrug.
There’s just not enough Vaseline
for the whole room.
I do apologize.
If the presentation never ends maybe
I can keep this laser pointer.
Rabbit under truck tire
by the high school
already cold.
Socks up to my teeth.
Electric drill to the avocado.
Striped wallpaper behind a plastic folding chair.
It’s certainly not always the case
that infidels will stalk the dumb hallways
rimming the family manor
but we’d like to believe
our cheap picture frames & outdated
electronics are at least worth stealing.
There is an exercise inside everyone’s skull
that forces them to stop slathering
lotion on their hands and wonder
what we can’t know until next March.
The assignment now is to ruin the face
of your opponent with a grapefruit spoon.
There’s a certain trick to remaining
calm while a grizzly claws
through the meat under your ribcage
but no one’s ever lived to tell it.
Jeremy Schmall is the founder & co-editor of Agriculture Reader, and author of “Open Correspondence from the Senator, Vol. 1: But a Paucity of His Voluminous Writings” (X-ing). His work has appeared in PEN America, The Laurel Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Juked, and Forklift Ohio. He lives in New York City.
The Next Step and The Whole Point
When reading the work of prodigiously–okay wildly–talented contemporaries–people like Natalie Lyalin, Heather Christle, Sabrina Orah Mark, Chelsey Minnis, Claire Becker–I tend to think first:
I love this. This is essential and beautiful.
And then at some point, my thoughts turn to my own work, and a voice says,
I can’t do anything like this.
It is all too easy to stop at that point, and stew, and–to drown out the voice–spend the next part of the day doing something that isn’t writing.
But the voice isn’t done talking.
That is going to have to be okay. There are other things I can do.
Listen to that, and return to your writing. This is the next step.
It’s not as if Chelsey Minnis can do what Sabrina Orah Mark does. It’s not as if Sabrina Orah Mark can do what Chelsey Minnis does. This is the whole point.
Harold Bloom recites “Tea at the Palace of Hoon” by Wallace Stevens
with a hearty hat-tip to Adam Fitzgerald. Happy Sunday!
Let’s Love Some Stuff
crash art by Scott Teplin
I was lucky enough to hear Fred Moten read at the Segue Poetry series at the Bowery Poetry Club a month or so ago. This post at Beatrice.com has one of Moten’s poems, as well as a link to Pennsound where you can hear him read some of his work.
Schools used student laptop webcams to spy on them in school and at home. (h/t to Rumpus for the link.)
There was a Times profile of DeLillo and we somehow missed it when it was new. But now it’s NYTea Time. William T(ea) Vollmann has the cover story, a review of Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. Dwight Garner discusses Elif Batuman’s The Possessed–remember this book? We all flipped out over the excerpt that was published at the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago. You probably don’t remember that this book was first discussed on this site before the Chronicle “controversy,” when Keith Gessen mentioned it in his anti-top 3 top 3 of 2009 guest-post. Jenifer Egan, whose reviews I always appreciate, discusses Eight White Nights by Andre Acimann. On the Paper Cuts blog, I am answering Stray Questions , and David Goodwillie has a playlist for his new novel, American Subversive.
