Over 1,000 pages of Georg Trakl coming. In 3 years, but coming…
Forthcoming in 2013 is The Collected Works of Georg Trakl, translated by Daniele Pantano and published by Black Lawrence Press. The book will include all of his poems, plays, fragments, drafts and letters and will be well over 1,000 pages. The timing of publication will dovetail with the centenary of Trak’s death (November 3, 1914).
Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish
Wow. Forthcoming from OR Books. [via Clusterflock]
In literary America, to utter the name Gordon Lish in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits or you prefer to stay away. Its Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname Captain Fiction) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country’s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck.
And as a writer himself, Lish’s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that “Lish…is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.”
This definitive collection of Lishs short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one “Gordon Lish.” The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.
Publication April 30, 2010 546 pages
Paperback $17 Ebook $10
Paperback and ebook $22
Florian | Wilkinson
Two new I’m super excited about, coming soon from Sidebrow Books, do a get! … …
On Wonderland & Waste
Sandy Florian
Collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie
April 2010
ISBN: 0-9814975-1-9
104 pages, 6×8 full color, perfectbound, $20
“A bellow that is not a bucket. A bucket that is not a bone. There is wisdom in slipping into oceans. Into those wider organs horning. The way churches slip into twilight. Stone after stone. See the plaything on the mantel. I lean toward the paintings. See the baby fastened on the mast. I lean toward the window. See the sea, see the ship, see the ship’s low hull. See the winding of vowels by the function of the fist.”
For a preview of On Wonderland & Waste, go to http://www.sidebrow.net/books/wonderland-amp-waste
Selenography
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Polaroids by Tim Rutili
April 2010
ISBN: 0-9814975-2-7
103 pages, 6×8 full color, perfectbound, $20
“an owl breaks the
fold a cut tree spills
a soft crutch
hits
this dust
a freezer stocked
with I
happened
to myself in these very woods.”
For a preview of Selenography, go to http://www.sidebrow.net/books/selenography
Both books are available until March 31 at a special discounted rate of $30 for the pair, 25 percent off the cover price.
On Wonderland & Waste, featuring full-color collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie, and Selenography, featuring full-color Polaroids from Califone’s Tim Rutili, are also available separately for $18, a 10 percent preorder discount.
Trash
What makes a work unpublishable? Ubu Web invites 50 authors to answer this question.
Read a conversation over stolen food by John Cotner and Andy Fitch, a handwritten letter to her father by a young Mary Jo Bang, Christian Bok’s proposal for nanoscopic poems,some language dissolutons that end in a review of Lou Reed by Alan Licht, and lots lots more.
The web is a perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure.
Against Answers: A Conversation with Kyle Minor
Last week I mentioned that I had asked Kyle Minor (author of In the Devil’s Territory, Dzanc 2008) to participate in a public conversation about our differences of opinion vis-à-vis literature. He was kind enough to take me up on the offer.
HIGGS: Let me start by saying thanks for taking time to discuss a topic I know we are both passionate about but approach from different angles: the creation of prose.
MINOR: We’ve been discussing it for a long time. I’m glad to finally do it in a more public manner.
HIGGS: Prose writing, for me, is first and foremost a form of art. I have this commitment to preserving the autonomy of art, i.e., art for art’s sake, which I think you don’t share with me.
MINOR: I agree that prose writing is a form of art. I also believe that it is a form of communication, and that on the other side there is a reader. I don’t think that the writer who believes in the reader is necessarily acceding to the tyranny of some particular imagined reader. But I do think that, for me at least, literature started in reading, and one of the things I aim to do when I write is to deliver to the reader pleasures akin to the pleasures that other writers delivered to me.
HIGGS: So when you sit down to construct, are you consciously thinking about the reader?
Uncategorized / 72 Comments
March 15th, 2010 / 11:23 am
March 15th, 2010 / 11:23 am
A Look at Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, guest posted by Giancarlo Ditrapano
[The Tyrant writes in with thoughts on one of our most anticipated books of the year, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask. Here’s Gian… – BB]
You got the new Lipsyte yet? That’s weird. Why not? You bought what instead? No you didn’t. Really? You really bought that? Were you Ex-Lax/Tampax-embarrassed at the counter when you bought that? You must have been. I wish I could have seen you there holding that stupid, stupid book. I wish I were behind you in line so I could’ve coughed all over you, said excuse me, then started up a conversation about the book you were getting ready to buy. I’d say I hadn’t heard much about the author (a lie) and then I’d ask if you knew anything about them. I’d laugh and laugh (on the inside). Then I’d ask why out of all these books are you buying this one. You will probably have called over security by now so, hey, I’ll back off. But really. You shouldn’t have bought that. Take it back. Trade it in for The Ask (can you even do that with books?).
Joking partly-aside, I’m sure whatever new book you bought is just great (I’m just trying out some dickish) but why not get another one? Venus Drive, Sam’s first book, was a huge one for me. I think I read DFW mention it somewhere, so I bought it, read it, fucking loved it, googled Sam, and that led me to an interview where he not only mentioned Lutz and Kimball and Michel but also Paley, Elkin, and Hannah, who were also unknown to me at the time. And it just snowballed from there. I had always just read “classics” up to that point, but paid closer attention to Faulkner and Conrad (both still my top major dudes). Sam was like my gateway drug to good indie-lit. And now I’m strapped in, begging like a bad kid, sucking anything they make me suck for the rare new good stuff.
Although I prefer Sam’s short stories to his novels (and this could be purely sentimental), The Ask is fantastic. Better than Home Land? Yes, in its way. Better than The Subject Steve? That depends. There is so much gorgeous shit in that one. How it got overlooked is fucking confounding. How Sam can keep great humor so close to this Old World romantic poetry should be noticed more than it has been. Like right here, when he’s fucking the cripple in The Subject Steve, he writes, “Compensation is not the word for what Renee does with her hands and her mouth to triumph over her dead half. I’ve discovered marooned colonies of feeling down there, too. We’ll lie under moonlight for hours, tell jokes, sing jingles, make puppets of our private parts. I’ll kiss her breasts, kiss the blue vein in one of them that must flow to her heart, a quiet river running through a church.”
That there is the shit I love love love.
Uncategorized / 101 Comments
March 15th, 2010 / 11:08 am
March 15th, 2010 / 11:08 am
Attitudinal altitude
A 6th grade teacher who marked 20% off a student’s assignment “for being a loser” says he was joking, that it was some kind of informal ingratiation used to relate to the student. Herein lies the trouble with rhetoric, or purposeful irony, because intent is something earned in the reader, never intrinsic to the inception of the writing. In reading random articles’ comments about this story, I was struck by the abundance of caps. Of the passionate folk:
Two Parts Rancor, One Part Joy
Guess which parts are which. But seriously--isn't this photo fucking gorgeous? Forget who it's a picture of for a second, and the fact that I found it on Gawker. Just look. Imagine it on a gallery wall. It's beautiful.
Tony O’Neill offers a pre-emptive FUCK YOU to Dr. Drew Pinsky for presumably planning to exploit the death of Corey Haim, and for being an asshole in general.
A controversial method of proselytizing to Muslims by starting with Jesus’s minor but significant role in the Koran, has generated–wait for it–controversy, drawing fire from Muslims and also some Christian groups. The procedure, naturally, is known as “The Camel Method.”
Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, loves the blazing hell out of Scott McClanahan’s Stories II.
There is a simplicity to the writing that feels very much like traditional storytelling, like a conversation, the easy way the character allows you to come into his life for a little while to hear what he wants you to hear. Despite the humor, which sneaks up on you and floors you, the stories are bleak; almost all of them are set in West Virginia and the propects for most of the characters in the stories are not good. There is sadness everywhere in these stories. And what I’m going to say next is why I think I love these stories so much. Amidst the sadness, the ways in which everyone fails each other, there is such an amazing tenderness that lifts these stories up. I felt very tightly connected to these characters and was grateful for having been around their stories…
Funny, because I was just saying something similar to fellow-Giant Amy McDaniel over gchat yesterday morning (she’s a fan too). I said that McClanahan’s book reminded me of the subtly acerbic, realist-ish Richard Brautigan not of the novels but of the short stories, like say “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” crossbred with the big-hearted schlubbery of the Larry Brown of “Big Bad Love.” McClanahan seems like the kind of guy who probably read Breece D’J Pancake and came away thinking, “yeah, okay, true, but dude–take a load off.” No kidding. That said, it must be admitted that McClanahan’s lightness can occasionally, like Brautigan again, bleed into slightness, but if the worst thing you can say about a writer is that his not-bogging-you-down occasionally manifests as it-floats-off-on-the-breeze, he and his book are still in pretty fine shape. Anyway, the upshot is that we are all very much charmed/impressed/pleased by Scott McClanahan, and you should see if maybe you are too.
It’s worth noting, by the by, that this is not Giant’s first time delighting in Scott McClanahan. Back in January, Sam Pink reviewed Stories II. That post also conatins a story from the book, “The Couple,” which I think is exemplary and swell. And back last June, pr enthused about the original, Stories. And Scott’s own site is here.
29 Comments
March 14th, 2010 / 11:42 am
March 14th, 2010 / 11:42 am