Brooks Sterritt
http://twitter.com/brookssterritt
Writing by Brooks Sterritt appears or will appear in The Believer, Subtropics, Salt Hill, Denver Quarterly, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.
linkdump.com
Today seems quiet. Everyone is probably packing?
Threats by Amelia Gray is out, and I can tell you it’ll do to your head/brain/skull all things promised, and more. (I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy, borrowed from someone who had borrowed it [now I have my own], but it is available HERE)
Picador has been reprinting the novels of Donald Antrim with new intros: George Saunders (The Verificationist), Jonathan Franzen (The Hundred Brothers), and Jeffrey Eugenides (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World). Elect Mr. Robinson… will be out this June.
Kaleidoscope is a randomized novella by Jianyu Pên.
Madras Press recently released a special edition of “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link, with illustrations and a letterpressed cover.
The second issue of The Coffin Factory just came out, with work by Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Edwidge Danticat, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, etc. (more later)
The Guggenheim has digitized many of its (out-of-print) publications.
Redivider FINALLY (yes I’m calling you out) has an updated website with the new issue, featuring the talented Mike Young, Mary Miller, J.A. Tyler, Melissa Broder, etc. The cover is nice:
Some of these things will be available at AWP. Do you think someone will write a blog post soon called “AWP recap?” What if that didn’t happen?
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
SPD had a sale I learned about the day it was ending so I never got around to buying anything (discounted). The list of their 100 top-selling books of 2011 is worth a look, however. Hovering the cursor over covers to see titles takes too long so I opened 10 tabs, copied and pasted the info, inserted a number, a period, and the word “by” between author and title, repeating this process 10 times. Except I ended up with a list of only 99 books, so I had to go back and find the omitted book and redo the numbering![!!] I was also going to insert links to everything but decided against it. Enjoy.
1. Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
Publisher: Ibis Editions
2. Girlvert: A Porno Memoir by Oriana Small
Publisher: A Barnacle Book
3. Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky
Publisher: Tuumba Press
4. Barrio Bushido by Benjamin Bac Sierra
Publisher: El Leon Literary Arts
5. Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo
Publisher: Cypher Books
6. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field by Tara L Masih, Editor
Publisher: Rose Metal Press
7. Clamor by Elyse Fenton
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
8. The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle
Publisher: Octopus Books
9. Gully by Roger Bonair-Agard
Publisher: Cypher Books
10. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project
11. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil
Publisher: Kelsey Street Press
12. Divorcer by Gary Lutz
Publisher: Calamari Press
13. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
Publisher: Lost Roads Publishers
READ MORE >
Don’t Blog
You can always microblog, Houellebecq had told him when talking about his career as a blogger, and try to string together tweets; but to launch yourself into the writing of a blog post you have to wait for all of that to become compact and irrefutable. You have to wait for the appearance of an authentic core of necessity. You never decide to write a blog post, he had added; a blog post, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the blogger’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction, for the process to start by itself.
–Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory
Everybody Loves Bacon
“I think of myself as a kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed.”
Brooks Sterritt—
Can anyone verify, preferably from a source other than the internet, that Samuel Beckett drove a young André the Giant to school?
22
Gordon Lish, 1986
A former professor of mine recently gave me a copy of StoryQuarterly 21: Stories from the Gordon Lish Workshops (edited by J.D. Dolan). I don’t want to excerpt too much, but here are some words from Lish:
“This feels good. I tell you, it feels good to have my hands on this forum, and I am not going to let the moment get away from me without my offering a remark or three….I tell you, I take such delight in them all, in all these students, in all these writers, that I’d like to sit here and start reciting names–this in the exorbitant spirit of the madman who thinks the mere calling out of the entries in a list must offer to all who hear an invitation to war.”
ToBS R1: Sewage Treatment Technologies vs. The Pulitzer Prize
[Matchup #28 in Tournament of Bookshit]
A corpus containing all Pulitzer Prize-winning books in the Fiction category from 1948-present and the Novel category from 1917-1947
vs.
A list of sewage treatment technologies, included below: READ MORE >
A ham is proud of cocoanut.
A CLOTH.
Enough cloth is plenty and more, more is almost enough for that and besides if there is no more spreading is there plenty of room for it. Any occasion shows the best way.
….
A TIME TO EAT.
A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.
….
APPLE.
Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.
A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.
[from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein]
Robert Henri on Writing
“The picture that looks as if it were done without effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.”