Archive by Author

Good Good Story and New Thing: Ben Marcus at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading

23 May

If you don’t yet know, Electric Literature is doing a pretty awesome thing. They want to support and increase awareness of great writers, journals, and presses, and so: every week they’ll publish a great story by a great writer at http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/.

This week’s story is by the wonderful Ben Marcus, and it’s called “Watching Mysteries with My Mother.” As someone who’s growing older, watching my parents grow older still, this fearful and loving meditation on a parent’s eventual imagined demise struck a deep and painful chord of recognition with me.  Like so:

I did it to her as a child, too. I said good-bye and went to school. I said good-bye and went to camp. I said good-bye on a Saturday morning and who knows when I came home. When I did this, I left my mother dying. In doorways, in kitchens, in living rooms, on lawns. Sometimes even when she was sick with a cold in bed, I said good-bye from the bottom of the stairs, just as her chances of dying had crested to an all-time high. I said good-bye and went to college, when she was even more likely to die. And when I came home to visit, it wasn’t long before I departed again, leaving her to die. Just as tonight, after watching a mystery on PBS, I said goodnight to my mother and left her at home to die.

We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.

Go here to read the whole thing. And check out the beautiful single sentence animation, too.

 

Story Alert: Jamie Grefe at New Dead Families

4 Apr

I’d never heard of Jamie Grefe before and now I’m all over that shit. Seriously. There’s a new issue of New Dead Families out, always a great read, and the best thing in it is this remarkable, moving, fever-dream of Grefe’s.

A bit and then you’ll go read the rest, yes?

we ascend and open the door to the roof, stand at the precipice, looking out at the fifty-four floors, each alight with people moving, people talking, people eating, people showering and people combing hair in brightly lit bedrooms and bathrooms, and from this building and other buildings bodies float across the sky through evaporating smoke tunnels like gigantic intestines, and they are growing larger, the news said, but our television was destroyed weeks ago when my partner smashed it with her fists, dissembled and rebuilt it as a weathercock which she threw from the window down onto an abandoned automobile that someone was using for shelter, and she heard screams for days after, but no one helped all those people, just took snapshots of them and the smoldering and slime-drenched city

 

To Read Now: “The Ship” by Stephen Sturgeon

2 Apr

If you loved Stephen Sturgeon’s beautiful, brilliant debut poetry book, Trees of the Twentieth Century, then you need to check out this excerpt at elimae from a new, longer work called “The Ship.” Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:

The letters I have written to the world
while traveling in this boat
contain the same message more often than not
The world is terrifying
and this boat is not much better
but it is better.

 

My AWP Haul: FJORDS Vol. 1

6 Mar

Like many of you, I spent an exciting and exhausting weekendish at AWP in Chicago. I read stuff, took in readings, slung books for the first time with the Vouched crew(!!) saw old friends and new friends, ate way too much food and drank way too much beer, talked until the wee hours of the morning about literature and books and movies and music, and cleaned up at the book fair. It was magical.

I took a couple of extra days off work after I got back on Sunday to just chill, detox, be inspired, write, and read. And I’ve been thinking–what better way to drag out the magic that is AWP than to talk about all the books I bought there, little by little by little? Yes, bittersweet. But also rewarding, in a way that I think you will like, too.

  • So, first up: Zachary Schomburg’s FJORDS vol. I. I have to admit, the Black Ocean table was the first one I hit up at the book fair. I was laser-focused, looking for this book like a questing knight. When I got it home, I immediately devoured it, and found it so painfully sad, so beautifully made, so original and funny and insightful and so even better than anything else he’s ever written, that I kind of wanted to just give up writing and buy a hundred copies of this book and hand it out instead, everywhere I go. The book focuses on a bunch of “little deaths” that live on the fjords of the title, coming for Schomburg slowly but surely, and concentrates on disappointment, loss, death, love, and the beauty in all of the sadness. The joy in all of the blackness. Schomburg keeps writing these things that just break your fucking heart, over and over and over, into little tiny shards of glass that glimmer and gleam in the light like his poetry. Things like this:

I don’t know how best to tell you about the angel, about what death really is. It seems so implausible until it happens. You start to sweat and you get swallowed into the dark. then you’re swinging on a rope over a beautiful cliff, only there’s no such thing as beauty.

Or this:

The truth is there is no such thing as spells. The world is always as it is, and always as it seems. And love is just our own kind voice that we whisper into our own blood.

The only thing to do with poems like this is absorb them into your body. Or the only thing to do with poems like this is to sit back, apart, and watch as they try to make you feel something. And be amazed and breathless and struck dumb when they succeed, utterly, completely. Ouch. And wow.

Yes, They’re Basically Bratty Teens, but It’s Epic Just the Same

14 Feb

Those of you who know me know that I hate most romance. I hate flowers. I hate hearts. I hate Valentine’s Day. I have many things in common with Elaine Benes (as in, we’re just about the same person) but nothing so much as our shared hate of the world’s most boring film ever, The English Patient. And don’t even get me started on romantic comedies.

So I know people always find it incredibly odd when I start passionately defending Gone With the Wind against all detractors. Yes, the main characters are bratty and impossible. Yes, Ashley is pasty and boring. Yes, Rhett is a jerk and so is Scarlett. Yes, she gets what she deserves at the end. Yes to all the above.

And yet. I love that damn book and I love that damn movie even more. I know. It makes no sense. There are exactly three movies that make me cry and that is one of them. (The other ones involve animals and a Bronte.) Why? What is wrong with me?

This essay articulates it perfectly. Perfectly! It’s not about their relationship, really. It’s about the surrounding elements. The book and movie, besides being a gorgeous spectacle (and yes, I’m a sucker for war films, too–I also love Casablanca‘s star-crossed romance) are an unsubtle metaphor for the sweeping destructive force of the future. People who claim it’s a monument to the Old South–I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think it works like that for us today.  Somehow I love Scarlett, in spite of everything, because of the weird elemental brutality of her being. She is the bulldozer of the future. She has some of the Old South in her, yes, but with her comes the destructive force of change. She is the world, moving on, utterly practical, always hungry. And I like that. I root for change.  I feel for Ashley and Melanie because they are the done-and-gone past, those who can’t change, those stuck behind the false front of gentility and grandeur while their lives fade out like wallpaper. The whole damn war and the aftermath, music and grand costumes and sets and all, is not just a  grand spectacle, but the burning of the old ways, the old America, the turning point in our history. And even more than that, to me, as someone who loves classic film, it’s one of the last of the epic films. The kind that got made like this. The kind with intermissions and choreography and three bajillion extras. It’s 1939 as much as it is 1865, and it’s the sad blazing unapologetic end of an era when seen today, just as it was in a different sense for Flannery O’Connor when she used it in her own story.

There. Can I just link to this post from now on when people express their confusion about my love for Gone with the Wind? I think that I will.

The new PANK is pretty awesome.

3 Feb

I mean, have you seen this monster yet? It’s amazing. The table of contents is like a jillion pages long and full of goodness.

My favorites so far are the winners of the 1000 Words contest in the back.  There’s a really, really good story by our own Tyler Gobble, and also a fantastic piece by one of my favorite writers (and one of my Shut Up/Look Pretty co-authors) Erin Fitzgerald.

If you don’t own this yet, you need to remedy that. Lit mags are expensive so I’ve had to stop subscribing to many–but the one I make sure and pick every year is PANK. Roxane and Matt and crew do such a nice job and it looks so damn good every time and the writing is just unreal. You guys. Get it.

The Dry Voice in the Lush Story: The State of Kansas by Julianna Spallholz

26 Jan

If Lydia Davis knew more people who hung out shirtless in small places and owned pitbulls instead of pedigreed cats, her stories might look at little like Julianna Spallholz’s. Lucky for us, we’ve already got Julianna Spallholz to write those stories. Her debut short story collection, The State of Kansas, is recently out from GenPop Books, and it’s a wonderful,  lush read by a drily witty writer.

Spallholz writes the story of certain kinds of people in certain kinds of places.  We know these people; of course we do. We all knew a Billy Glock, the kid with diabetes,  who “when it was Billy Glock’s birthday, all the kids got regular Popsicles and Billy Glock got a special Popsicle that he had to eat sitting down with a fork and plate.”  The kid who never particular stood out otherwise, who hung around his hometown and eventually because a cop or a firefighter or a paramedic or something else pivotal to our society yet oddly invisible to most of us.  We all have friends like those in “Business Idea,” who:

sit at the kitchen table. They use fine point markers. They become excitable. They draft a budget for their business idea. They use imaginary money. Their business idea will not work.

We know the people Spallholz writes of in these stories. We are many of them. The one voice, the one persona we don’t quite get a handle on, is our narrator, or narrators. It’s not that they are unreliable, exactly; it’s just that she has made them into ciphers. They are a suburban secret, a window we can’t quite see into. They are what’s behind the lace curtains. They always seem a little separate, a little removed, which is of course exactly what allows those observations to be so sharp and painfully accurate. For instance, in “Tucson, Arizona”:

Some downtowners work at the little market, some work at the nicer restaurants, and some work at the bike shop. There are some banks and other offices. You could work at the University or at Raytheon, which is a place where they make weapons. A lot of people seem like they don’t have jobs, or like they have jobs that don’t take up too much time.

At the same time, Spallholz’s narrators occasionally expose their own isolation, in a blink-and-you-miss-it observati0n both funny and sad. This, buried in a bit about drink prices in Tucson:

Sometimes you end up getting drunk without meaning to. Entire days go by in bars. Entire weeks and months.

The people in the pages of The State of Kansas seem at times something more, or something less, than people.  They aren’t quite parable, either – they’re something in between that feels new and fresh and full of secret understanding. The almost parable-ness, comes from Spallholz’s lovely use of language, of repetition, of sing-song-ness. The way she uses language gives a fable-like quality to the rather sharp and subtle observations she makes throughout these short pieces.   Both “Your Maid in Real Life” and “The Body” make use of this extreme repetition, causing an almost total de-personhood of the maid, and separating the body from the being inside it.

And the fabled quality running through these stories allows Spallholz to do something else, as well, that is rather un-Lydia-Davis-like. She lets her characters, even her narrators, borrow hope. Her stories, then, become lush dreams in spite of themselves. Her stories become places where you find “the feeling of believing that every beautiful impossible thing could be real.” Even if it isn’t.

Julianna Spallholz’s debut collection, The State of Kansas, is available from GenPop Books.

New York Tyrant Eleven: Eat it All

31 Dec

Hopefully you’ve already got your hands on this, because it’s sold out online. I think there was one copy left at St. Mark’s when I snagged mine. It’s so good. It’s so good in the way that Tyrant is always good. Eat the whole cake at once good. I tried to just page through it on the train but ended up, crap, just reading the whole thing at once because I could not stop.

You should read the whole thing too, once you’re done staring at Gian’s gorgeously overdrawn Joan Crawford mouth. But here are the must-reads according to no one but me:

Conditions by Daniel Long

Breviary by Jason Schwartz

Boy by Evelyn Hampton

The New Me by Adam Wilson

The Basketball Monster by Scott McClanahan

Copper Top by Karl Taro Greenfield

A Meal is Being Eaten by Brian Kubarycz

Two on a Party by Tennessee Williams (!)

 

 

Ta da! All in one place: your very own literary gift-giving guide. You’re welcome.

9 Dec

If you’re like me, you plan on buying some books for loved ones this holiday season. And you’ve been reading all these Facebook and Twitter updates and getting excited about all the holiday specials and deals and sales and then…you promptly forget who or what they were for by the time you buy your gifts.

No more! For I have been watching, and paying attention, and taking notes; and I have compiled for you all a certainly-not-even-close-to-comprehensive-but-large-anyway guide to literary gift-giving this year. Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or Happy Holidays to all of you and I hope you can find some great gifts in this list.

For the reader who has no time to read: Get him or her a copy of Mud Luscious Press’s Stamp Stories Anthology! Not only are these stories bite-size, at 50 words or less, but they’re also a pretty wide selection of current literary talent in the fiction world today.

Speaking of Mud Luscious, one of the best deals going right now is the Mud Luscious Press subscription. For 40 bucks–35% off the cover price–you get the entire set of 2012 MLP titles: Gregory Sherl’s THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL, Matt Bell’s CATACLYSM BABY, Ken Sparling’s DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL, & Robert Kloss’s THE ALLIGATORS OF ABRAHAM. Yeah. Seriously.

For the international philanthropist: a copy of Roxane Gay’s Ayiti. They’ll feel like they’re doing some kind of vague good overseas, and meanwhile you’ll be subversively introducing them to a fantastic literary talent AND some truth-telling about the Haitian diaspora experience. Or pick up the Writers Abroad Anthology – sales benefit The Book Bus, a non-profit aimed at increasingly literacy in Africa and South America.

Dalkey Archive Press is selling 20 books for $120 books, which means you can pick up some books for yourself along with stuff for your loved ones, too. And Dalkey’s catalog is immense and terrific, so there’s something for everyone.

Black Ocean is offering a subscription to next year’s full catalog for $50,and that means a subscriber gets all this: Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen, , Fjords by Zachary Schomburg, Handsome Vol. 4, Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson, and The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik. Yikes.

Over at at Uncanny Valley, they’ve got a deal going where if you buy a magazine and give them two extra bucks to cover (part of) shipping, they’ll send one to a friend of yours, gift-wrapped, for free. Again–I love things where you give one AND get one.

This is a great (and very pretty) deal: $20 for 8 chapbooks from Birds of Lace Press, plus Anna Joy Springer’s novella.

If the one you love needs clothing, bags, accessories–but loves books, might I suggest Out of Print? I love this store for all things book-related, especially the awesome t shirts.

And finally, I won’t list them all here, but on Big Other I posted about the best books I read in 2011. Any and all of these would make lovely gifts for the people you like. And even for the people you don’t. I didn’t include links here, but please try to buy from your favorite indie bookstore, online or off.

And last, but certainly never least: all of you and your brains. Please leave a comment if your press is having a sale and I didn’t mention it, or if you have a great holiday idea of your own for the book-lovers we know. Thanks!

Happy Holidays and happy reading and gifting!

 

 

 

An Intricate Dance of Objects and Words: A Review of Left Glove by Mac Wellman

29 Sep

Solid Objects is shaping up to be a solid and lively new small press. Their first offering, Master of Miniatures, was a gorgeous and poignant Jim Shepard novella about the special effects wizard at Toho Studios during the heyday of the Gojira (Godzilla) films.

Their second offering shares the same eclectic vibe but is a unique creature in its own right. The play-as-poem-as-wordlove by Mac Wellman, Left Glove, is a spirited sprint through the adventure of a single glove, lost and then found. Wellman proves, with deft wordplay and tongue-in-cheek seriousness, that objects can be stars in a universal drama. He uses acrobatic sentences, chants, poetry, singsong, and a Greek chorus (of gloves, of course) to nimbly dance us over the chasm between object and soul, between person, place, and thing. He proves that objects can be funny, fun, and quite serious in their inherent meaning.

Or, to put it another way: This is the proper and fitting version of that dull plastic bag dance in American Beauty that people who’d apparently never thought about anything (A plastic bag can dance! O my eternal soul!) touted as the deepest thing they’d ever seen. This is a truer, wiser, funnier ode to lost things, to the power of the object as projection and also somehow as a rejection of projection. For we are told that Yamaha Nazimova, the loser of the glove, is a person:

of whom
Nothing is known. Not where she comes
From. Not where she goes. Not what she
Does if anything she doth. Her said character
A mystery. Likewise the place of her birth.
Age, status, comportment, and deportment
Nay…

The same is true of the finder of the lost left glove, a certain Jewel Beckett, of which we are told:

Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett is known to the rest;
Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett: not her height, not her weight,
Nor the meaning of her mysterious name;
Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett is a matter to bother;
Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett is a matter to care;

Of course, in a way this intentional, repetitive anonymity suggests a glaring absence, a person alienated and more truly lost than our glove. The glove, at least, is promised a mate, for there is always a Right Glove out there in the universe. Indeed, we get a rich, strange life woven around our titular left glove. Our glove is praised, disparaged, prophesied over, made to pass through trials, and finally given a happy ending of sorts. Metaphysical discussion, parody, and play circle throughout the telling. Indeed, a play this fanciful and fun could only have been written by a longtime playwright, someone who has an ear for the music of language and how it works both on the page and on the stage. Corporate speak and choral speak and pop-culture speak are scattered throughout and soaked in the surreal images that make up Left Glove.

Did I mention the book itself is an object of art? Did I mention you should absolutely read this book? Because you should and moreover, if you want to get the most out of it, read it aloud. Grab a few friends and a few copies and a big bottle of bourbon and spend the night dancing among the words in Mac Wellman’s lovely meditation on the universe of lost people and things.

Left Glove, by Mac Wellman, is published by Solid Objects, and is available at SPD for purchase.

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