Featured book: The Avian Gospels, by Adam Novy

My review of Adam Novy’s wonderful dystopian novel is up at Cow Heavy Press, here.  It’s well worth picking up.

Here Are Things I Did.

It’s nice to say this:  I have some work out.  I’d meant to post on this a while ago, but single-digit temperatures and huddling in dark and quiet rooms kinda got in the way.  Of the pieces online that are out, I’ve got a poem that can be found at Disquieting Muses Quarterly. I have several in Willows Wept’s Fall issue, and hot off the microchips, I have two additional pieces that can be found in the Winter issue of Willows Wept.

Also published this month is a piece in Artifice Magazine, whose link appears in the column to the right.  I’ve been consistently amazed by the stuff they publish and it’s exciting for me to see my work there. And, come to think of it, you should really subscribe…

An interview with Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has also just come out in the new edition of Sycamore Review, available for purchase here. He was quite generous with his time, and it was fun getting a chance to chat and share a cinnamon roll.

There are more things coming down the pike.  Stay tuned…

Melville House’s New Catalogue

It looks like Melville House has a great, really great, 2011 planned, judging by the upcoming publications they’ve got in their catalogue. Not being able to see these folks at AWP is one of my big regrets.

Melville House, who have been quietly rereleasing Heinrich Böll’s novellas (and whose Art of the Novella series is worth your attention), along with Dalkey Archive, Open Letter, and Archipelago, publish some amazing literature in translation.  Melville House also has a great deal going on in that, if you pre-order a book, you get it 30 days before its official release date.

Best Reads of 2010 Part 2

Wow, that’s a big pic.  I’ll sneak some text under it.

It’s been a rough February.  I tried, in five different ways, to get to AWP, the writers’ conference in Washington DC, this year.  In six different ways, I was prevented from attending.  My continuing flu is the sixth way.  In combating the want to do things that I am tired of doing–namely sleeping  or watching random videos on YouTube–I’m brought back to the books I read last year, all of which are well worth picking up.  The highlighted text has links to the books in question…

On Photography–Susan Sontag:  I’d not known of her groundbreaking essay until after I heard Gavin Bryars’ recording, which I reviewed for MusicWeb International a couple of years ago.  I finally got around to reading the actual essay back in April.

Grave of Light, by Alice Notley. I met Notley entirely by chance in Atlanta at the same yearly writers’ conference in Atlanta that I’m too sick to attend this year in DC.  I must confess that I turned into a 14 year-old gawper when I realized who I was talking to.  This volume of collected poems is not only a gathering of a poet’s greatest work, but is also arranged to be a specific artistic sequence of its own.  Fascinating and wonderful to read.

The Man Suit; Zachary Schomburg:  I bought this the same day I bought Joe Hall’s Pigafetta (mentioned later in this post)–The poems in this volume were fuel for dreams for months afterwards.

Don Juan, His Own Version, by Peter Handke:  Handke’s politics have gotten muddled with his popularity lately, and his latest novel–I really did try to get through it– is a very heavily congested mass, but this novella is a beautiful play on something I’ve been fascinated with, namely, temporal recurrence and its musicalilty, both as fugue and canon.

Beyond the Fire, by Mary Leader: Leader is someone who has overturned the way I write in many ways, and this most recent volume of her poetry is a good and cohesive example of her interest in traditional forms and experimental method.  I recently reviewed this book at cow heavy press.

Pigafetta is My Wife, by Joe Hall: A wonderful book on the elastic tether between two people in love.  The writing is immediate, haunting, and wonderful to read.  A much-recommended book.

The Other City, by Michal Ajvaz: See my earlier post about magical Czech fiction.  One of my top five books of 2010, this is a beautifully hallucinatory book on parallel reality, with secret underground rooms, ocean liners plowing through city streets at night, and boats sinking through locks into subterranean spaces.

Household Hints for the End of Time, by Ken Howe:  A poetry book by the Principal Horn player of the Regina symphony in Alberta?  Yes, and it’s a wonderful collection, published a while ago by Brick Books.  You can find it here.

Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley:  I’ve been on a Notley binge this past year, reading all I can of her work, ever since her amazing Descent of Alette, which I read back in 2006.  It’s set in Paris, where Notley now lives.

Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes:  I tried, really tried to get through her Ryder, but found it too inside-jokey and nudge-in-the-ribs witty to enjoy, but this Parisian novel is dense, well-written, and makes you read it on its own terms. The footsteps the characters take can still be traced by present-day readers.

An Oak Hunch, by Phil Hall:  Astoundingly well-written, I keep going back to this book in 2011.  Well worth picking up.

Well, there’s my Top 20 (plus some) of 2010.  I’m well on my way to a top 20 for 2011.  Let me know what your best reads were last year!

Best Reads during 2010

I have a blank book I’ve been using to record every book I’ve finished reading since 1995.   I note the date and the title and author.  I star the ones I particularly like. This week I just happened to look through the entries for this recently-passed year:  97 books–a fairly respectable number.  I thought I’d put in a list of my top 20, in no particular order.  Here’s the first installment of ten or so:

Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo:  Haunting, lyric, and unforgettable.  I’d started a couple of drafts of something that tried to play with the sense of timeframe the way this novel does.

Slowness, by Milan Kundera: I believe I may well becoming a fanatic of strange Czech fiction, as evidenced by other entries below…

Say, Poem, by Adam Robinson: the long title poem is a wonderful send-up of poetry readings, complete with between-times banter and paper shuffling.

We Take Me Apart, by Molly Gaudry: I bought her book but hadn’t read it when I met her in Baltimore for a reading tour.  Once I heard her read, it was the first thing I picked up as soon as I got home.  The suitcase wasn’t unpacked until I finished it.

Best European Fiction 2010: The first installment of an annual series published by Dalkey Archive.  There’s great stuff in here.  I’m halfway through with Best European Fiction 2011 and you can bet that it’ll be on next year’s list.

Foreskin’s Lament, by Shalom Auslander: A gift from my good friend Kristen.  I had no idea what to expect, and with a title like that…  Wonderfully witty, very funny, problematic, and a fascinating read.

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), by Macedonio Fernandez: Boy howdy, is this one a wild ride.  Experimental and grand in scope.  A novel, an anti-novel, an author’s haranguing of the reader, the book’s material is more than halfway taken up with a series of prologues to the the novel the author is going to write.  Here’s hoping more Fernandez gets translated soon…

The Golden Age, by Michal Ajvaz: See:  Strange Czech Fiction.  A strange sort of travel narrative that reminds one of Gulliver’s Travels and Lost.

A Philosophy of Evil, by Lars Svendsen: Wonderfully readable philosophy on why people do things that are bad.  I picked this up on impulse in a DC bookstore back in October and I found myself reading it with a couple of pencils always within reach, ready for underlining and margin notes.

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, by Luis Sepulveda: The clarity of detail in this novella is fascinating.  Sepulveda is able to evoke a sense of place and setting like few can.

The next ten in a future post!  I’d be interested in hearing of others’ top 10 (or 20) lists!

What I’m Reading: The Avian Gospels by Adam Novy

I’m currently working up a review for Cow Heavy’s blog on Adam Novy’s excellent first novel, The Avian Gospels, available here.

It’s dark, wonderfully written, and beautifully printed, all Bible-like, with rounded corners and gilded page-ends.  It also brought about the first time I’ve ever been blessed by a stranger in a McDonalds while reading.

Detroit as Possible Future Artist Colony?

HTML Giant’s post on Detroit reminded me of a conversation I’d had about three years ago, not long after I’d found a series of very interesting (and saddening) websites on the decline of once-great cities in America.

It was over a table laden with very large mugs of very bad beer in Lafayette, Indiana that this was discussed with a clutch of writers in the MFA program at Purdue University. Detroit’s real estate is currently, shall we say, quite low in comparison with the rest of the country.  It has grand, tragic, crumbling infrastructure, as various websites can attest.  It’s a port city as well, with all the actual and figurative significance such a place affords. Wide swaths of Metropolitan Detroit have even subsided into open grassland, dotted with the occasional feral Victorian, clotted with vines. Entire neighborhoods have vanished, such as the one surrounding St. Cyrils, which used to stand near Van Dyke on Foster street.

Much of this makes Detroit an ideal place to transform into a great center for writing, for music (again, after Motown left for sunnier Los Angeles over 30 years ago), and the plastic arts.  There’s strength in numbers, we said over those meekly-fizzing beers.  The more that show up and the approach we take (as social experiment?  urban revitalization?  housesitting?  crime reduction drive?) could have artists as a sort of domestic Peace Corps to bring a formerly major American city back from the brink.

More and more, the artistic community is finding it necessary to join forces:  small presses and writers, exhibition spaces working with artists and musicians, etc.  And due to all the odd jobs we artists have had to take over the years, we all know a thing or two about renovation, community-building, and bringing life back to neglected places, some of these, as can be found in Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photographs here, would be amazing in this new capacity. What say you, fellow artists? Detroit could be our crowning achievement…