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To get free books you have to read the whole thing, sorry
Bump bump go the books on the top of the site. This site, I mean. When you roll your mouse over one of these books, they leap. When your mouse departs, they crunch back into the title banner like some old Atari obstacle. O obnoxious HTMLGIANT, where the hustle never sleeps. A recent commenter said, in fact, that she actually refrains from buying stuff recommended here because of all the “nepotism and over-hype.”
I mean, that’s fair. We’re probably not friends, dear reader. Statistically, you probably don’t know who I am, and I probably don’t know who you are.
I don’t mean “heard of.” Whatever that means. I mean know know. If we do know each other, we’re unfortunately probably going to go out of our way to allude to it—like waving our Red Sox hats at each other in the bus terminal—thereby pissing off everybody around us because we’ve made them feel isolated and outsider-ish. It sucks to feel that way! It sucks even worse when you’re sitting at your computer on the balcony, mooching your neighbor’s wireless and trying to translate a finger-bound interaction with an LED screen into a feeling of Significant Human Connection. I mean, people complain about online people choosing to be anonymous, but how obnoxious is it to go on here with our real names? Mike? Who cares if I’m Mike. There’s a million Mikes I’m not, and they spend just as much time in their bed rehearsing apologies. Do you make a habit of walking into huge, thousand-bodied parties—where everybody’s trying to sell something, or pick a fight, or invite you back to their place, or come off all dashing/sagely/whimsical/epic/wacky—and inserting your two cents after somebody’s spiel? And not only that, but giving everybody who’s heard you a picture of yourself, your phone number, directions to your house, and making sure everybody who’s heard you also knows what your name is. Like maybe you are forced to carry a giant sign that says your name, and this sign blinks like crazy when you talk. Sound terrifying? Well, hi there. Here you are.
But the problem is this: reading cool shit is one of the best (and only) ways I’ve ever found to feel less lonely in a fundamental way. And the stuff I want to read is stuff I usually find in two ways: 1) By myself. I was flipping through channels one night and saw a move where this dude with a square forehead chases a car and slams his face into a stop sign. Whoa, I said. I watched the rest of the movie, where Jack Black tries to save some bunnies and Dennis Hopper says “Talk into my bullet hole.” So I found out the movie was called Jesus’ Son and that it was based off a book, so I bought that book. And it was great. On the back of the book, someone says Jesus’ Son reminds them of this other book, Airships by Barry Hannah. This is where we enter #2 of How To Find Out About Shit: 2) Through others.
Because I liked Jesus’ Son, and because I liked it in a way that made me feel less weird about being alive, I felt like I could trust other people who expressed similar enthusiasm. This is not the same thing as both of us liking pancakes. Everybody likes pancakes. Good for everybody. I’m talking about the kind of Liking that feels like a holy relief. The kind of Liking that involves being a teenager and realizing the other dude with all the acne in your Earth Science class also has a Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirt, which makes you much faster friends with him because you feel like you can let your guard down. Because you feel like he might also understand what it feels like to walk around on what you perceive to be (granted, based a lot on immature self-romanticizing) your fucked-up wavelength. So this kid tells you about The Violent Femmes or Harry Nilsson, and you want to check them out. Not because you want to know all about this kid’s summer camp experience in sixth grade, when he accidentally swallowed a frog skull and peed on Jessica Yurtface while he was trying to do the rope course. If he tells you that, you’ll sympathize, but you don’t really care. What you care about is that his way of shivering before the world seems similar to yours, and he seems to have similar taste in self-indulgent shivering sessions, which seems really important because there doesn’t seem much else to do besides die, have babies, and flip pancakes. So you go on the fucking internet and you download Nilsson Schmilsson.
Meanwhile! Some other lonely kid overhears you guys talking the next day about Nilsson Schmilsson, and because you’re both so enthusiastic and allusive and wrapped together, he feels even more lonely and gets mad and decides you and your new friend with the bladder problems around hot girls of the Yurtface clan—well, you’re both fucking elitists. When you guys get the same sunglasses Harry Nilsson wore and sit together at lunch making obscure jokes, you’re being total fucking hipster douchebags. And he’s kind of right. More than kind of. If asked in an abstract way whether you wanted to share your love of Harry Nilsson, you might say, um, okay, yeah sure, I wanna share it. But you’d be kind of lying because it feels fucking awesome not to have to share that love, to have this tight shiver-based connection, to walk around cocooned in the espirit de corps of knowing your walking partner knows how walking around feels for you. Everybody else? Maybe they’d know. Maybe they wouldn’t. It’s too scary, sometimes, to find out. You like having your thing. You like being elitist.
I mean, I could change the story. I could say you’re wearing football jerseys or you’ve got carburetor grease on your wrist. Mutual loneliness coping isn’t exclusive to art intake. The point is, you’re right to hoard your thing, and the annoyed kid is right to call you a douche. These are feelings, and feelings do what they do. What’s missing, maybe, in my strawpeople story, are honest attempts to imagine into the feelings of others. Like for the annoyed kid to realize the validity of the douches’ loneliness, and for the douches to stop being douches and tell people what they’re listening to. And not only that, but to tell people what they’re listening to in a way that overcomes their default insecurity and self-protectiveness and invites shared experience. Even shared experience of a nature outside of their own experience. An invitation for others to experience Harry Nilsson (and here I think is the kicker) even if those others don’t like it. Or like it, but in a “wrong” or different way. And to not get defensive or personal about any of this. To be as honest and open as they can about their feelings toward Harry Nilsson, but not to take someone else’s inability to feel the same way as a rejection of theirs, as a foot stuck out to trip their tentative walking-around-in-the-fucked-up-world. And sometimes being this honest means being less enthusiastic than you want to be, less bombastic, more gentle and restrained, because trumpeting infatuation often just makes people feel bad that they’re not, at the moment, infatuated, which is kind of—if we’re still being honest—what your trumpeting wants them to feel. Look at me, you trumpet, I am in love! Isn’t that awesome for me, you fucked up stranger standing in for the fucked up world?
I don’t know how to magically solve this shit. All I know is this seems to resemble the currency of praise exchange and enthusiasm ’round these here parts. I don’t want anybody to change how they feel or how they do things. Nobody except myself, maybe. So in an effort to be less defensive about how fucked up I feel all the time, here’s something: 1) Tell me in the comments section about a book you’ve heard about on HTMLGIANT. Or anywhere from a stranger on a site like HTMLGIANT. A book you haven’t bought because you don’t have the money or you feel weary for whatever reason. Maybe you will pick a book I think is terrible. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The point is: 2) This Friday, October 1st, I will randomly pick four (4) book-hearing tales and buy those books and send them to the tale-tellers. I would love to buy books for everybody, but I only make about $13,000 a year. Maybe when I’m crazy wealthy after I’ve invented this new insta-pancake spray I can’t tell you about, I will do another version of this post and buy books for everybody who comments. 3) The only rule is I can’t know you in real life. We can’t have ever met, or made out, or had any version of what the world considers significant face time. Probably a more graceful version of this would be if I randomly and anonymously went around fulfilling people’s wistful comments about books on their wish-lists, but—I don’t know. That would be better, yeah. Maybe the reason I am doing this in this way is because I feel defensive about the reputation of the site? Yeah, that’s probably it. If I were a more graceful person, I wouldn’t bother feeling defensive, but unfortunately, I also still get aggressive with my haircut.
I know this place can feel like the “cool kid” lunch table. In the long run, that’s probably not such a bad thing. But every kid of a certain cool is a huge fuck up, for crying out loud. So let’s throw the table out and sit on the floor.
Tags: cool kids
Well, I first heard about the Codex Seraphinianus in Justin’s post here:
http://htmlgiant.com/presses/the-codex-the-hurders-and-me-a-new-book-an-old-book-and-two-years-of-intermittent-emailing/
(Can’t blame me for trying, can you?)
Seriously though, I second the sentiments of the anonymous commenter you quote in the first paragraph. I mean, I’ve found about some great books through you guys, for which I am forever grateful, but far more often (especially with new releases), there’s a lot more uncritical cheerleading of books that are average if not outright awful.
. . . mm-hmm . . . yeah . . . totally . . . mm . . .
I liked this post.
Brilliant.
The Avian Gospels by Adam Novy. It’s maybe the most beautifully designed book(s) released this year. (It is not; Nox by Anne Carson is.) The HTMLGIANT post told you nothing about the book. I remember it being a series of excited expletives. It was how I felt looking — just looking — at the books, too.
Nice to meet you.
Well, I first heard about the Codex Seraphinianus in Justin’s post here:
http://htmlgiant.com/presses/the-codex-the-hurders-and-me-a-new-book-an-old-book-and-two-years-of-intermittent-emailing/
(Can’t blame me for trying, can you?)
Seriously though, I second the sentiments of the anonymous commenter you quote in the first paragraph. I mean, I’ve found about some great books through you guys, for which I am forever grateful, but far more often (especially with new releases), there’s a lot more uncritical cheerleading of books that are average if not outright awful.
This is a good post, Mike. I have to say though that in thinking about how I talk about books, I generally choose to spend my time talking about books I love and I want others to love them so hell, I’m going to be enthusiastic. It is not about nepotism. I rarely know the writers I talk about. I kind of hate that to talk about things you love means people assume you’re being nepotistic or that you’re offering unearned praise. In some ways, I think this ties into what Justin said the other day about self-deprecation. Furthermore, what if you happen to know awesome writers? I do. Is it nepotism to spread that good word? I don’t know. I think the “accusation” of nepotism is overused.
Hey Mike. Do you like Son of Schmilsson?
i liked this post so much you should buy me a bunch of random books that i can give away to my friends. my friends will never thank you, and neither will i, which makes the fact that i’m asking for something like this even more rude, my seeming lack of gratitude, but because of the nature of the internet and the levels of anonymity inherent in online interactions and my ability to pretend i don’t care about anything that goes on on the internet because the internet is not real life, then i’ll post this.
that’s fair, roxane. i guess i didn’t really end up talking about that kind of nepotism at all in the post. it is true that i often become friends with a writer after i like their writing, and i try not to artificially trumpet writing i don’t like by friends i (obviously) like, but this is very rare because reading is so often the experience of someone’s mind, and usually people whose minds i enjoy experiencing i will enjoy being friends with. unless there is some weird gap between how someone’s mind works on paper and how it works in their walking around, which is common and interesting, if not especially “friendly.”
thank you person that liked my post enough to click ‘like,’ i feel the like option is the only way to provide praise in an objective manner, in a way that will spare the feelings of others that do not do the things in the same way that i do them or as well as i do them, feelings which can be betrayed in a normal textual comment. if there were an option to like your like i would do so.
Richard Yates by Tao Lin. Or anything by Tao Lin. I read a handful of his work in poetry workshops and for some reason his stuff makes me feel better about not being a “cool kid” at the lunch table like this blog did. I would have already gotten anything by him but I am a pretty poor college student so it’s all about Beg, Borrow and Steal right now.
I love Harry to death.
“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
Cool kids are victims too. I hope you guys get through this in your time of despair.
Like likes to like like.
I mean, yes, Richard Yates by Tao Lin. I have never felt so torn about an author since another author in my recent past that I’m sure I felt torn about. But seriously, I find myself loving some of the things Lin does while hating them at the very same time. The Stranger article was hilarious, and what little poetry I’ve read I’ve not known how to even think about, so I really want a deeper, deeper experience. What solidified it for me, though, was that a NYT reviewer hates the book (yes, he implied he wanted to kill himself while reading the last 50 pages). So, now, I know I really need to read it.
BTW, I read “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” in an undergraduate creative writing course, and it honestly changed my life; I don’t mean an epiphany, but the story was so right, and the rest of Jesus’ Son was so right, that it just pushed me that much more to write, to really write, I guess, in hopes of getting it right, the way it felt when I read that story for the first time. Great post dude.
I loved this post.
One of the many books I’ve read about on HTML Giant and immediately wanted to read is Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky. It was mentioned in Roxane Gay’s post. It looks and sounds fucking beautiful.
Hrmm…I actually visit this site almost solely for book recommendations and reviews and interviews with authors I’ve never read before. I mean, this place introduced me to Amelia Gray and Kendra Grant Malone and Kevin Sampsell and Annalemma and Pank and Mud Luscious (awesome by itself) all on top of featuring what has come to be one of my favorite Alain Robbes-Grillet quotes and giving me a reason to write gay porn about Neal Genzlinger.
I guess what I’m saying is: nepotism is fine.
I’ve seen The Orange Eats Creeps here and a few other places and I have to say it’s the one book I’m dying to read but unable to find anywhere, so if you could hook me up with that I would have to to do something miraculous in return.
I second Codex Seraphinianus from the above post. Have that page bookmarked ever since it was posted.
Grace Krilanovich’s “The Orange Eats Creeps”. I first saw it mentioned on here and I was immediately interested. A while later, while at Quimby’s for Tao’s reading, I was going to purchase it but unfortunately, did not have enough cash. Since graduation, I spend a lot of my time lately folding myself into different shapes while counting the dust flecks that crater on the sole lampshade in my room. Reading “The Orange Eats Creeps” would be a great life choice at this time in my life, I feel. I would be very grateful if you purchased this for me, Mike!
This one guy on Ars Technica was going on and on about some book called The Gutenberg Bible … I totally want a copy of that shit to check out.
I’ll even review it on Goodreads.com !
I heard about Michael Earl Craig’s book, Thin Kimono, here. This wasn’t the first place I heard of it. I heard of it somewhere else, then sort of forgot about it or put it somewhere in my brain that wasn’t the part I use every day. But then one morning I woke up and in my waking-up whatever I thought about the phrase “Thin Kimono”. I wondered where I had seen the book. I looked everywhere I could think I might have heard of it from. I looked on goodreads, I looked on Mathias Svalina’s blog (I don’t know him either, I just look at his blog), I looked at We Who Are About to Die, I even looked at Trick With a Knife (not really a slight against TWaK, I just don’t actually visit them that often). Then I came over here and Blake had just done one of his live book-talking things and had mentioned Thin Kimono in it, and said it was good. Then I still wanted it. Am I supposed to say why I can’t purchase it myself? My actual reason sounds like a made-up reason, so I won’t mention it.
i think this site, i mean i know, or think, this site is and was a huge influence and introduction into the independent literary scene for me and also following blake butlers blog before this site happened, and i am grateful for that because it was something i was ignorant (am still) of and i have gotten a good feel of it now (sort of) i think and what i think it is and some parts of it kind of make me cringe a lot but ive found a lot of stuff i wouldn’t have even known how to look for before.
so that said, the hyperbole thing here does bother me, though ive kind of come to accept it as thats what is here and thats what makes this place this place. but i mean when i see anything here about ‘i like ___ and its wonderful wonderfulness wonderfullishtacular!” my first reaction is do i get the sense this person knows this person, which isn’t good and can be disregarded but the real thing is this. things could be praised so much more intelligently half the time that to see the blatant falling back on hyperbolic ridiculousness of everything makes me instantly think theres nothing substantive about this thing they love and they are desperate to sell it for some reason like that crazy car guy on tv. so i become utterly disinterested in exploring the thing unless i had already been considering the thing for my own reasons.
so here is my thing. a long time ago, jimmy chen posted a post about william gaddis and i had never really read about gaddis much but it was incredibly intelligent. not like this jr book will blow your face off (ahh!) but instead, i love this book. and. here’s. why! actual critical like interesting reasons.
you cant control nepotism, anyone who is complaining about that is retarded. but you can control your ability to sell a work using more substantive evidence that a thing you love (im suposed to just lvoe whatever you love and take your word for it?) is worth loving and here’s why.
I used to make a habit of nodding when people would name-drop the name of something even if I didn’t know what it was, so that those people would shiver with me even if I would never shiver with them. But also because I wanted them to keep talking; when you don’t nod it makes a gap, and people will describe something they love differently to someone who they think loves it already than to someone they think is an inconsequential retard for not knowing what Neutral Milk Hotel is.
When I stopped doing that (mostly) was when I moved to this really hip and cool city in the Pacific Northwest where everyone is always with it and always nodding and has heard of everything and usually they heard about it before you heard about it – before anybody heard about it – because they grew up next door to the person who made it, or at least their cousin’s best friend did. I was at some super duper hip party and someone mentioned a book with a beautiful, long, nonsensical title, like a gy!be album, a big book-length poem written somewhere in the south. I nodded. I was drunk and fading and had long since stopped paying attention except to nod occasionally. After a few minutes of conversation, someone turned to me and asked me what I’d thought of it, as I’d been quiet through the whole conversation.
Maybe I could’ve faked it. Most likely I could have faked it, because I’m pretty good at faking it. But instead I shrugged and admitted that I hadn’t ever heard of it before. And he asked me, why were you nodding the whole time, then?
the thing is, everywhere i turn people are preceding or succeeding “witz” with “800 pages.” now, let’s forget what it means to say a book is 800 pages. sometimes it’s just fun to say something is so big. who doesn’t want big balls, butts, etc. but now i can’t get that out of my mind, the bigness, the 800 pageness. and if that’s not enough, justin taylor is stroking “witz’s” spine every chance he gets. it’s been so obscured by reactions and my reactions to those reactions, that i really don’t know what the book is about. it’s jewish, i think. or, it’s a joke. kind of like “the rock” but with glasses and less napalm?
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, I’m guessing. Definitely a blustery, deliberate mess and a time commitment, but there aren’t a lot of books people get together to have marathon readings of, and that’s one.
im about 550 pages into witz right now. i would say on the surface its a fun read and for a certain kind of reader (me) that’s enough to warrant reading it. i feel though as i start to dig beneath the surface is where the book kind of starts to crumble a little maybe? i hate to say under the weight of itself. i have an essay in me i think comparing it on the one hand to works like gravitys rainbow that depend heavily on allusion after allusion, although with witz, its kind of like all allusions are just jewish allusions over and over, and i mean im not jewish but you sort of get the gist pretty quickly, at least generally, what he’s alluding to, but that redundancy gives the whole thing less depth than its grasping for? and on the other hand comparing it to works like gass’s the tunnel that has almost a little too much fun with language to be telling something that at its root is so dour, or something. gass gives a great explanation for it in an interview i saw online somewhere, but i dont know about witz, or i dont know if i trust that cohen is thinking about it similarly, i think its more like trying to add to the religious/mythical sense of it all, biblical ridiculousness, and it all feeds into that. im still plowing through it all and my thouhgts along with it.
stuff i’ve heard of on here and want to read:
Kamby Bolongo Mean River by robert lopez.
Brian Evenson stuff.
the awful possibilities (i think i heard of that on here)
amelia gray’s books.
william walsh.
speaking of We Who Are About to Die, I don’t know if you were responding to that directly-ish when you talked about HTML being compared to the cool kids lunch table, but WWAATD did just that not very long ago. I mean they compared the site to a lunch table. my sentence isn’t very clear.
i haven’t heard it! i got into nilsson a long time ago and then forgot about him until recently. i have only heard a few albums. i will try that one next.
God’s hazard. As recommended by Blake Butler I think. [Checked, it was Matthew Simmons]. It’ll cost you though, I’m not in the states.
Who made the comment a few days ago that you used for your opening graph?
Two books that I first heard about here, bought, and loved–From Old Notebooks by Evan Lavender-Smith and The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich.
tl;dr
yaeh i threw up at the top of this thread
huh, ima sneak-read this whole damn post and the comment thread too
tomorrow at work no matter what because today was too-busy and now i am too-tired
‘tl;wrtaw’
and i have read any number of great and not-so-great things thanks to finding out about them on htmlgiant (i am so tired i can’t even capitalize that) but hands-down the best thing i’ve read after having learned of it on htmlgiant is Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine written by Stanley G. Crawford and first published in 1972 (note capitalization – that’s how good i thought it was)
this was one of the most interesting and moving books i have ever read, so un-real, i was totally enthralled
and it’s fascinating to me that it was written by a man
I had this tab open in my browser for seemingly weeks, and I finally read it and it was great. I want this book “The World That Never Was,” about nineteenth century anarchists, because I’ve always been fascinated by that kind of dude (it was mostly dudes, I gather), the kind of guy who was actually throwing those big round bombs with the wicks coming out of them like a cartoon. I could never find a book just about them, and then I found out about that book.
It can be worse than that, Mike. You can live in a small town and actually be the only person to know your obscure tastes at all. You can isolate yourself like that. You can go for months without having one actual friend. And such. But then later in the article you elucidate something so glaring and in need of saying: about how you guys then create a clique and an outsider class. What you end up realizing, though, is that it’s even hard to promote something to everyone without turning into a douche. You don’t want to commercialize at the same time as you don’t want to be elitist. It’s amazingly hard.
I’d love to read The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding that book, which is… enticing.
One of my favourite things in life (among many others) is those ‘cool kid reveal’ moments, or just reveal moments in general — when the everyday facade and the posturing come down, usually helped along by alcohol, and everyone realises that the person they’ve found intimidating for so long, or in whom they’ve always been acutely aware of certain characteristics they feel they can never hope to have, feels exactly the same way about them. Like jereme said, cool kids are victims too.
I suppose they’re meant to be Nerds, but the far-left-hand guy in that picture up there looks pretty cool. Pretty snazzy. I want to welcome him into my fold, or any fold, which is not a euphemism for anything.
Yep, that would be me. I didn’t compare HTMLGIANT to a lunch table, though, I was drawing what I thought were amusing parallels between quintessential school cliques and group lit blogs. Since much school socializing happens during lunch breaks that’s where my mind went.
So yeah pretty much feel like a massive dick after Mike’s beautifully elucidated post and generous offer, as many people on this blog have directly and indirectly introduced me to so much literature it would be pointless to list (just look back through the archives to the beginning, then click off to Blake’s personal site and go years back still.) I’m squishy as they come for all of you.
Um okay. Going to skip school and hide out in my room gorging on fruity pebbles and cutting myself for the next week (jokes: I got ’em).
dont feel like a dick. i thought that post was funny.
I second Richard Yates by Tao Lin. I’ve been reading about it everywhere. I find it odd that I’ve never heard the name Tao Lin until this book appeared. The first time I saw it referenced was on The Rumpus, but it’s now made the rounds to just about every literary blog that I read (and even got reviewed in The NY Times Book Review).
didn’t mean at all to make you feel like a dick, ani! don’t cut yourself with fruity pebbles! if anything, i thought you were pretty right on and it made me think “what can be done about this”
so yeah. you are awesome. let’s eat fruity pebbles together. =)
this post just made the whole month of september worthwhile.
“I liked it in a way that made me feel less weird about being alive.” Lovely.
glad your making waking your way through it. would like to hear some thoughts once you’ve digested it.
I’m fairly certain I have never met you, and if you’d like to send me Barry Hannah’s “Ray,” (which I heard of from this site), I’d appreciate it.
Son of Schmilsson!!! There’s a Harry documentary that came out recently. It’s not the greatest, but worth watching if you’re interested in him.
Nice, Mike!
someone in the comments here:
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/malone-savoca-week-4-our-cat-comes-with-memories-of-her-own-a-discussion-of-kendra-grant-malones-everything-is-quiet/#disqus_thread
it’s near the bottom, sort of.
Aw, haha, okay. I will just dedicate some angsty teenage poetry to you instead. ;-)
Mike Young is an American Hero.
Thanks. I meant this one:
“When you roll your mouse over one of these books, they leap. When your mouse departs, they crunch back into the title banner like some old Atari obstacle. O obnoxious HTMLGIANT, where the hustle never sleeps.”
Which reminded me of a darby in the Friendly Fire post I finally tracked down:
“this new site design i thought was funny with the ads like weighing down on the title, and mousing over them bumps them up and down like they are hammering htmlgiant into the ground.”
Referring to the weight the site gives to recommendations.
Mike, pick a fifth for me and I’ll buy that person’s book.
Mike Young is an American Hero.
oops, sorry :x
I heard about The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley on here. I want to read it because I like Aldous Huxley and he wore glasses, which makes him seem respectable even though he probably did voodoo in his basement with Timothy Leary.
Also, Island was a very good book and Point Counter Point was well-written so Huxley was a good writer, also another reason for reading the book.
UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS by Alissa Nutting. This is a collection that I’d seen mentioned by Dan Wickett at EWN, but I think it was Roxane Gay here who really sold it to me. I was already reading THE PHYSICS OF IMAGINARY OBJECTS by Tina May Hall at the time, and UJFWAG was mentioned in her trio of books, so I felt like I was on the right track. I’d love to get this book from you, and thank you for your generosity. I will in return, write a review of this book, and get the word out about it. Assuming I enjoy it, which I probably will.
In general, HTML has turned me on to people like Amelia Gray, Blake Butler, Sam Pink, Mary Miller, Roxane Gay and many others authors and journals/magazines/sites. I don’t get EVERY book I hear about here, but I do get some great ideas and suggestions here.
And no, we’ve never made out.
thanks, molly!
santa can i have The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam? pweeze, i’ve been a good boy this year, i even wrote my own book of poems.
Orange Eats Creeps.
Also I don’t understand this whole cool kids thing. I visit sites like this to get information, not make friends. This part of your post confused me. I don’t care about nepotism, sometimes the stuff recommended is shit (in my humble opinion) and thats ok, and sometimes its great/wonderful etc and thats great/wonderful etc. Whatever your reasons for promoting specific literature, you don’t owe me/readers anything because this is your(+y’alls) site and I’m not paying you and therefore don’t have any expectations. If I don’t like it I just click to another tab/visit less frequently. Do whatever. Jeez.
To anyone asking for “Richard Yates” by Tao Lin, I would totally be down to trade it for “The Orange Eats Creeps”, if I don’t get it here obviously.
I am ineligible and supportive.
[…] pick-axes until you reached everyone else, or at least a lot of other people. Which reminds me of that post that Mike Young put up the other day. I loved that post. (And it’s weird to realize that sometimes it’s a random blog post […]