Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg
Uh, oh. Get this while you can kids: Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg, from Tyrant Press, in a limited edition illustrated hardback of 400 signed with bloodprints. $30 may seem like a lot to the sensitive kids, but these are going to go fast and never again, and the price at time of release will raise up to $35. I’d pay $80. This is a rarefied, intricate and bloody object, and you need it. Believe that.
Believe me:
Review from Blake Butler
Via a series of sparely rendered dream loops, each wormed so deep into the other that it is no longer safe to say which might be which, Baby Leg extends the already wide mind-belt of Brian Evenson’s terror parade another mile, and well beyond. Those familiar with the Evensonian memory fractals, his freak-noir theaters, and his fetish for leagues of amputees, will find herein not only another puzzle box to nuzzle in its reader’s memory long after the book is closed, but as well enough blood and fearlight and paranoia to make Kafka or Hitchcock seem a foundling. “Who am I?” our narrator, Kraus asks, among Baby Leg’s endless questionings, its barrage. “Where am I?” “What is it?” “And now?” Thereafter, through the magicked wrath of Evenson’s dream speaking, from each of these questions birth more questions, and more questions, on and on, creating around the reader a glassy lockbox much like the one we find, we think, our Kraus, poor thing, inside.
Seriously, how could you start off the first release from a press arm of the already massive Tyrant than this?
You can’t.
Preorder now before you are shelling out for it like they did for The Brotherhood of Mutilation, et al.
Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (10) ‘Ninety Over Ninety’
Tenth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (which is officially out TOMORROW from Coffee House Press) is ‘Ninety Over Ninety,’ which originally appeared in New York Tyrant.
Among the several blackened modes of Brian Evenson, his comedy⎯heretofore only poked at from askance, and under another dark veil, in the earlier ‘Mudder Tongue’⎯is another sort of shrift, that where his other stories might take noir stylings, hallucination, and paranoia, another, like ‘Ninety Over Ninety,’ takes from the slapstick and the comedic-approaching-profane.
Certainly, in Evenson’s humor stories, the appeal is not only from his maintaining of a Kafka-ian eye in the face of strange ilk, but his simultaneously flagrant and pleasant-seeming attitude, in which foul things can be said and laughed at, perhaps like Todd Solodnz. It is interesting here too, at this point in the queue of stories, to find the meta-fucked black hole of the previous ‘In the Greenhouse,’ into this comedic blank so screwed it seems an intensified version of the current state of the frequent corporate ruin of art.
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June 30th, 2009 / 1:05 pm
June 30th, 2009 / 1:05 pm
Brian Evenson reads ‘Younger’ for Apostrophe Cast
This week on Apostrophe Cast is no other than Brian Evenson, reading from the leadoff story in his collection Fugue State, due out July 1 from Coffee House.
If you haven’t spent some time with the AC archives, they’ve got a backlog just waiting for you, recently including William Walsh, Shane Jones, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Sam Lipsyte, Michael Kimball, myself, and scads others. Check it.
After hearing ‘Younger,’ you can check out my review response to the story here, if you haven’t yet, in my story by story reviewing of all of Fugue State.
Sentence by Sentence & Story by Story (2): ‘A Pursuit’
The second story in Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State,’ is ‘A Pursuit,’ which I have written up in full here.
My sentence to keep from this story (I can’t say favorite anymore, as there are too many, but choices hereon will be considered strong and representative at once):
Would it help if I were to swear to you, by the deceased individual of your choice, that I had nothing to do with my first ex-wife’s demise, assuming she is in fact dead?
This sentence, itself a whole graph in the text, is wonderful again not only for its Evensonian use of odd familial tags such ‘first ex-wife’ (I always go back to his ‘The Ex Father,’ and those weird overtones of relationship bounds), but for how it manages to begin to drag the reader (the ‘you’) as an entity into the text, another relationship that will continue to be put to use in the extremely odd and Bernhard-ian summoning that goes on in this text.
As I discuss in the full story review, Evenson is a master of blurring the lines of his occurrences, here as delivered on behalf of the narrator, in such a way that it is not only hard to condemn or not condemn the actions of the central figure, it also blurs the body of that narrator with the body of the reader, in such a way that the reading itself becomes an experience. You are caught in the narrator’s ongoing waddle into his own mind. You follow him along terrain that will not hold, etc.
The question is a question that eats the space out from between the reader and the narrator itself, which, how much more could you ask from a single line?
Sentence by Sentence & Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State’
Just got a galley of Brian Evenson’s new collection ‘Fugue State,’ coming out in July from Coffee House Press. I haven’t felt this giddy about a book in a while. As with each Evenson title that comes out, I feel he reroutes not only the terrain of what is possible in fiction, but my own mind and method of writing: the power of new blood page by page.
In the spirit of this, and because I’m so excited about it I can’t help not, I’ll be exploring the book and reviewing it or commenting on it story by story, between longer posts on my own blog, and over here, at Giant, sharing my favorite sentence from each story, beginning now, with the first piece in the collection, ‘Younger,’ which kicked off the book in massive, terrored form, if in a more subtle and understated way than Evenson’s past might have predicted, maybe even more so, for it, terrifying.
In this way, we’ll lead up to the release of the book in July slowly and then continue with posts thereafter with the book in people’s hands.
Here’s the sentence:
They weren’t getting anywhere, which meant that she, the younger sister, wasn’t getting anywhere, was still wondering what, if anything, had happened, and what, if anything, she could do to free herself from it.
I love the repetition in the short segments here, the repeating and recursing tonalities, but also the mental loop of the logic therein, the sentence trying to figure what it is saying out while it is saying which as a pocket in the story, about being locked in a moment of a life, hit full on in its pacing, with the kind of abstract but right-there verbiage and at-your-throat but aimed away construction that seems so difficult to nail, and yet which Evenson is unarguably a master.
My full post on the story itself is now live here.
More info on ‘Fugue State’ here.
Preorder ‘Fugue State’ here.
More all in thereon to be continued…
Brian Evenson’s LAST DAYS: a long review
I can still remember with odd clarity the first time I read the words of Brian Evenson: I ordered ‘The Din of Celestial Birds’ after running into it somewhere on the internet in my earliest explorations of independent lit, and as I can’t remember fully how I found the book, I must more imagine it found me. Almost as vividly as I remember reading each of the series of progressively insidious and truly haunting stories, I equally remember the aura of the book as object, the way I sat it on my bed in weird light and stared at the psychedelic cover full of stories that I still have not found a way to shake, staring at it as if at any moment it might come alive, much in the same way that as a child I stared for hours at the cover to my first dungeon master’s guide, full of incantation and instruction, or the reams of comic books that for years lived in my blood.
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February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am
February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am
6 months of ML Press
Wow. ML Press announces their next 6 months of titles, and it is quite an onslaught:
we are very excited to announce the next 18 ml press authors:
BE NICE TO EVERYONE by sam pink
MISERABLE FISH by colin bassett
DON’T GIVE UP & DIE by james chapman
A HEAVEN GONE by jac jemc
LIKE IT WAS HER PLACE by kim chinquee
SOME OF THE LETTERS THAT WERE CUT by michael kimball
IN ENVY OF GLACIERS
& THE UNIVERSE OF THE BODY by norman lock
THREE ACTS WITH VINCENT by kim parko
WHAT I SAW by randall brown
THEY by brian evenson
BLUEBEARD by michael stewart
(forthcoming) by peter markus
ISN’T THIS WHAT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR? by ken sparling
THOSE BONES by david ohle
MOLTING by aaron burch
DA VINCI DIED BEFORE CIGARETTES by p. h. madore
ALTRUISM by matthew savoca
(forthcoming) by johannes göranssonsix-month subscriptions will be available until the dec. 08 trio is sold out.
$36 / 18 volumes, beginning with the dec. 08 trio.
want to order? click to the here.
Matthew Simmons interviews Brian Evenson
A great interview with Brian Evenson on his forthcoming book LAST DAYS is now available to be read at the Underland Press website. Simmons does a great job discussing Evenson’s masterful ability to impart extremely brutal or heavy circumstances in an even tone. Here’s a quote from Evenson regarding his restraint:
There’s an ethical openness there, a refusal to tell readers what they should think about what they’re perceiving. At its best it can create a tension between the reader and the characters, one in which they start to project their responses into the hole left by the flatness of the response. I try to be very precise, to give the readers just enough to let their imaginations do the work: the words are a catalyst to get their imaginations to take a dark inward turn.
Check out the rest of the interview and keep tabs for more new web only content from Underland, it is a press to watch for sure.
Left Hand Reading Series & Brian Evenson
I feel too tired to be mean on Mean Monday.
Will someone be mean? Be mean to me if you want, anything.
Here’s something not mean: the website for PENNSOUND (center for programs in contemporary writing), contains an archive dedicated to the Left Hand Reading Series, which goes back as far as 1998. The archive contains mp3 clips of several great people reading such as Brian Evenson, Lisa Jarnot, Jeffrey Deshell, Rikki Ducornet, and tons of others.
In particular I was excited to find Evenson’s reading of one of my favorite stories of all time:
The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette, which you can also read online in text form here.
In other Evenson news, his new book LAST DAYS is coming very soon, and is surely a thing to be salivated over. It includes the ultra-rare chapbook THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTILATION, which I often take off of my bookshelf in the night to scratch my face with.