Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader, Come Back Donald Barthelme, and co-editor (with Eva Talmadge) of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. With Jeremy Schmall he makes The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn.
New York dwellers, get ’em while they’re hot: Yesterday I was up at BookCulture (formerly Labyrinth Books) on 112th and Broadway, where they always have tons of blowout-priced remainder specials, but yesterday’s findings were so exciting I just can’t keep them to myself: The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, in hardback, for $10– marked down from the original jacket price of $40 (!!!). Now keep in mind that this doesn’t include KK’s longer poems, which comprise a volume of approximately equal size and price…oh wait. What? The Collected Longer Poems is sitting right there on that same table, also in hardback, and also just ten bucks. They’ve also got big discounts (I think half off) on handsome hardback first-editions of Notes from the Air (Ashbery’s selected later poems), and Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s ass-kicking biography of Donald Barthelme. Plus like 100 other things, but any one of the above-mentioned is already reason enough to drag yourself uptown.
Seriously, that’s what it’s called and that’s what it is. Stephen’s talking to Dave about the latter’s new nonfiction book, Zeitoun. Here’s a taste. Click anywhere to get the full serving.
Wonder and delight!!!! (Also: Terror and violence!!!!)
Recently The Onion chose Blood Meridian for their Wrapped Up in Books feature, and then they decided to kick things to the next level by calling up Harold Bloom to talk about it with them in an Onion A/V Club interview not to be missed. And what are the first words out of Professor Bloom’s mouth? “I read it on the recommendation of a friend, Gordon Lish, a New York book editor and a specialist in fiction”
It’s Monday morning and I love life, not just because of the above, but the above sure as damn doesn’t hurt. One more money quote (they’re all money quotes) then you need to go click through and read the whole thing.
Slate’s audio book club is talking about Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Don’t know why they’re doing that, but uh– sweet? Yes, sweet. **UPDATE** “And the reason we’re doing this is there are two big new biographies out of each writer.” – Meghan O’Rourke, 00:39.
Mathias Svalina: “Some things I regret now that I am leaving New York.”
Deb Olin Unferth’s “Wait Till You See Me Dance” is the featured short fiction in this month’s Harper’s. A thousand huzzahs.
On Smugness
by Tom Barbash
I often wonder how it all worked out for the couples who end up together in the last scenes of movies. What happened for instance to Elaine Robinson and Benjamin Braddock after they escaped onto the bus at the end of “The Graduate?”
Supposedly the scene was to end with them smiling in triumph, but they kept the camera rolling a few minutes longer. In the actor’s exhausted faces they found their ending, which was essentially: They’re in love, but the world is a mess, so now what?
Poetry as Site of Resistance
by Jeremy Schmall
If you’re willing to argue with me when I say that nearly every poetry book published in the last 30 years is an abject failure, it’s likely you’re among the small group of people across the country who consider themselves poets. For everyone else, poetry simply doesn’t exist outside of high school textbooks. Poets do not appear on talk shows, do not perform on late night TV, and it’s increasingly unlikely their books will be reviewed in prominent publications like The New York Times or the Washington Post. It’s common knowledge in the publishing industry that even the rare “blockbuster” poetry books sell laughably small numbers compared with verifiable “failures” in the fiction and memoir world. In almost every measure we use to gauge success—money earned, books sold, widespread popular relevance, public recognition—poetry today is an absolute failure. My argument is that’s a good thing.
Susie Bright was plugging this on her facebook yesterday, and it popped up in the feed on my page, and it seemed pretty neat. This is all NSFW, so caveat whatever. …