Author Spotlight
Samuel Ligon’s DRIFT AND SWERVE
Just out from Autumn House Press, the new collection from one of my favorite people around, Samuel Ligon, titled ‘Drift and Swerve.’
I’ve been reading this book slowly for the past few weeks now, taking my time with each story in the collection, as the scope here is just ridiculous: I’ve really never seen an author who can speak in so many different modes and voices, all while sounding from the same pen, and of a unified and extremely singular vision.
I remember the first thing of Sam’s I ever read, ‘American League’ which appeared in an issue of Sleepingfish, and appears now in the collection: a run-on sentence which somehow encapsulates a Beat-meets-Pynchonesque vision of American in less than 3 pages, ending with the phrase ‘titty milk, suckling.’ I think I read that piece three times in a row in magazine form, and another three when coming to it in the collection.
But Ligon is by no means ‘limited’ to that one strain that got me hooked before. Even in the first 4 stories of this collection, Ligon throws one new pitch after another, such as the titular track, which follows a family on the highway watching a drunk driver in extremely stripped, Denis Johnson but sleeker style. And he throws the supremely visioned second-person narrative-but-wild-eyed, ‘Animal Hater,’ which contains this gem of a sentence:
“You run the point of the blade against the bottom of one foot, getting the feel for it, then up her calf and along the knee, over her thigh to her groin, and gently up around her belly button and under a breast, scraping nipple with the flat of the blade, up and down her neck, the knife standing, turning in a tiny point against her throat, then back down and over her topography.”
With such phrasings and images meshed into Ligon’s fine forms, which seem so smooth at times you almost forget you are holding paper: it’s impossible to not want to keep reading slower and slower, figuring out from sentence to sentence how Ligon both makes it look so easy and so hard at the same time.
With so much cataloging and genre-naming going on in the way of words these days, it’s nice to see a collection that so finely disrupts your expectations in a way that you literally can’t know what’s coming, and yet delivered with such confidence and poise and seeming disregard for its own influences that its as if the author himself is there watching you read, watching your eyes.
Sam Ligon’s ‘Drift and Swerve’ is refreshing not only for its variety of style and vision, but for its singularity and its heart. Perhaps the heart of this: the heart made so very clear from story to story even in the midst of such technical prowess and unwillingness to fall in expectation. This one has it all.
BONUS: Check out Robert Lopez’s interview with Sam at Word Riot.
+ Check out an excerpt from the title story at Random House’s O. Henry Prize stories spotlight.
Tags: drift and swerve, samuel ligon
That is an amazing sentence you quote. Just went and read the excerpt that’s linked too- such good stuff. And I’d never heard of the press. Great post Blake.
thanks pr: i think this one is definitely up your alley.
thanks pr: i think this one is definitely up your alley.
I must have this book.
I must have this book.
Nice post, Blake. It’s a great book and just another in a long line of short story collections that Sharon Dilworth has published, first as editor of Carnegie Mellon University’s Short Fiction Series and now at Autumn House Press.
Nice post, Blake. It’s a great book and just another in a long line of short story collections that Sharon Dilworth has published, first as editor of Carnegie Mellon University’s Short Fiction Series and now at Autumn House Press.
hey blake, besides netsub and gurlesque, could you point me to other genre-naming activitites going on? i’m curious in the recent and current cartography in all its transience.
hey blake, besides netsub and gurlesque, could you point me to other genre-naming activitites going on? i’m curious in the recent and current cartography in all its transience.
I’ve been soaking in this collection too. Or should I say “soiling in” it. Sam’s great–and I was lucky enough to read with him (and Jess Walter and Katherine Dunn) just last week.
I’ve been soaking in this collection too. Or should I say “soiling in” it. Sam’s great–and I was lucky enough to read with him (and Jess Walter and Katherine Dunn) just last week.
Right on. Ligon has a range that is rare these days.
Right on. Ligon has a range that is rare these days.
Ligon’s one of my favorites, too. Saw is first published story in Vintage Quarterly, way back when, and he just gets better.
The novel, Safe in Heaven Dead, is also a must read.
Ligon’s one of my favorites, too. Saw is first published story in Vintage Quarterly, way back when, and he just gets better.
The novel, Safe in Heaven Dead, is also a must read.
*his* first story. ooops. title: Blue Boy
and btw, can you post this review on Amazon, too? There are only two up there, and with a small press like this, its not available at the chains. Even better, we should all urge our indie booksellers to carry it. :)
*his* first story. ooops. title: Blue Boy
and btw, can you post this review on Amazon, too? There are only two up there, and with a small press like this, its not available at the chains. Even better, we should all urge our indie booksellers to carry it. :)
[…] whose wonderful Drift and Swerve came out earlier this year (and who we profiled here and reviewed here). It’s sure to be a […]