Starcher-Blog

Now blogging on Dzanc

2010-10-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

From now on, see us on Dzanc Books's blog, where our posts will be part of a collective of authors and editors that include Dan Wickett of Dzanc Books, Matt Bell of The Collagist, and many more. The Starcher-Blog site will remain as an archive of past Starcherone posts, 2004-2010. Thanks for following!

(Note: to look at the earliest posts, go to February 2006, where the first Starcherone blog posts, 7/2004-2/2006, are pasted in.)

As always, you can see what's new with Starcherone, as well as all our books, at starcherone.com.

Sarah Falkner wins 7th Starcherone Prize

2010-08-23T10:08:00.000-07:00

Sarah Falkner's Animal Sanctuary, a wild and mysterious novel of multiple characters and episodes structured around the life and career of a fictional actress and animal rights activist, is the winner of the 7th Starcherone Fiction Prize. The manuscript was selected by novelist and short story writer Stacey Levine.

Falkner, who lives in Brooklyn, will receive $1,000 and publication in Starcherone Books' 2011-12 season.

A total of 216 manuscripts had been submitted to the prize competition. Stacey Levine made the selection from among three finalist manuscripts. Two of the initial finalists withdrew from the competition. The runners-up were:

(second place) Barbara de la Cuesta, Rosamundo, a novel

(third place) Laurie Glover, This Fair Paper, This Goodly Book, a novel

In addition, Honorable Mentions are made to:

Ivan Pam Dick, Shadowtyper
Jefferson Navicky, Transparency
Bram Riddlebarger, Earplugs
Mark Wagstaff, Working for the Englishman
Kate Zambreno, Green Girl

Animal Sanctuary is Sarah Falkner’s first novel. A number of her short stories are part of City of Salt (2005: Aperture, New York), a collaborative work between herself, visual artists Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, and writer Erez Lieberman. Other stories have appeared in a couple of now-defunct magazines, Tatlin's Tower and The Styles. She has also written non-fiction features about sustainable living, ecological activism, community affairs and alternative healing practices for community monthly magazines New York Spirit and The Park Slope Reader, and on US political activism and police response for L’Offensive (Paris).

Animal Sanctuary is a challenging, readable, powerful, and mysterious novel. The story - not a single plot, but multiple, peripherally connected episodes and discourses - concerns an American actress, Kitty Dawson, who stars in two movies by a famous (and famously obscure) British director, Albert Wickwood, both having animal disaster themes. Kitty then goes on to make a great many other pictures with animal themes, and to found in the 1970s a sanctuary for big cats that rich people decide first to have as pets, then abandon. Later, Kitty's only son, Rory, raised in the animal sanctuary and as a young teen the lover of a renowned Austrian big cat trainer, becomes an installation and performance artist whose work incorporates animals & animal themes, as well as attempts to critique and get outside of institutions. Other plotlines concern a would-be revolutionary who also serves as Kitty's body double in a film in Africa, the career of a cinematographer whose specialization is "shooting" animals, and reflections on understanding the ethics of human-animal relationships. The book as a whole becomes a series of meditations on making one's own meanings from within those structures others place us in - the effort of striving for freedom, the enclosures that keep us from attaining it, and yet the beauty and necessity of such efforts. Throughout, Falkner's prose is smart, versatile, and frequently beautiful.

In commending Falkner's achievement in the novel, Stacey Levine said: "Sarah Falkner creates this work with a deeply-hued palette, incorporating specific notions of film theory, film stardom, visual art, human relationships (which in this text have no magical edge and are burdened by insanely difficult moments), and the ways in which animals are held under human control. Animal Sanctuary is an intensely focused, ambitious work with a wonderfully insistent sense of obsession. The novel brings together weirdly disparate elements in the same surprising way that life does. Returning continuously and seemingly helplessly to animals as a point of reference, Animal Sanctuary suggests that obsession may be the only way of pinning down the truth. This is a rich, interesting, multidimensional book that knows fragility and maps it."

Although the Starcherone Fiction Prize is not solely awarded to debut works, the selection of Animal Sanctuary marks the 7th consecutive time that a debut work has received the prize. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize include Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, Zachary Mason, Janet Mitchell, and Alissa Nutting. The contest has proven a springboard to future success. Most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the 2008 New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age or younger, and to see the work acclaimed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. Sara Greenslit, whose Blue of Her Body won the prize in 2005, went on to have her second novel, As if a Bird Flew By Me, win the FC2 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest.

The 8th Starcherone Fiction Prize will begin accepting submissions in October, 2010, with a final deadline of February 15, 2011. The final judge for this contest is yet to be determined.

Finally...

2010-08-03T22:36:00.001-07:00

These are the five finalists that have been forwarded to final judge Stacey Levine, who will pick the winner of the 7th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction:

- Animal Sanctuary, a novel

- Rosamundo, a novel

- Sleight, a novel

- They Had Goat Heads, a short story collection

- This Fair Paper, This Goodly Book, a novel

The winner is scheduled to be selected during month of August. Good luck to all finalists!

All Good Intentions

2010-07-23T08:15:00.001-07:00

I have to apologize for our still being behind on the contest. We do know THREE of the finalists as of today, but must hold off announcing the final two until we are completely on top of the task; there's still a bit left to figure out. These titles (listed alphabetically) are being forwarded to Final Judge Stacey Levine as we speak:

- Rosamundo, a novel

- They Had Goat Heads, a short story collection

- This Fair Paper, This Goodly Book, a novel

Our blind is still in place, so if you know the authors of these works, please keep that information to yourself. We plan to announce the remaining finalists by the end of the month.

Best of luck to all!

2010-07-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

We will announce the five finalists for the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction ONE WEEK FROM TODAY. I promise!

- Ted Pelton

Slow... but getting there

2010-07-04T06:33:00.001-07:00

A note to contestants in our annual Starcherone Prize competition - we are slightly behind where we usually are on this date, but hope to have finalists announced in two weeks, and a winner a month after that. Stay tuned!

In Memoriam, Leslie Scalapino

2010-06-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

I was on an intentionally unplugged week's vacation this past week and so could not respond to the terribly sad news that one of the most significant poets of the late 20th century, Leslie Scalapino, had died. Leslie's most recently published book, FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE-FLOWS, is just out from Starcherone, but this note is about much more than this. Leslie had in recent years done significant work in bridging the gulf between the avant-gardes of poetry and fiction. She had also given us a writing that was so absolutely distinctive and her own for some thirty years that even her passing from this world will not diminish the sound of her voice, the voice of her words, in our ears as we go forward. I first saw Leslie read in Boulder in 1986, already at that time familiar with her work from her astonishing That They Were at the Beach. In the same way that you know a location exists on the map even when you are not there for several years, I knew Leslie and her work existed and would be consistent and undeniable from that time forward. It is as Lydia Davis has said of Leslie's work, "a new book by Leslie Scalapino is - always! - a cause for celebration." We will have one more that I know of; the sequel to Floats Horse-Floats will be published I believe in the coming year by Post-Apollo. But she has left us much, even as we grieve her loss. I say this without fawning or exaggeration of her importance: Leslie's way of using words was one whose echoes were among the most undeniable of any writer of the last 50 years in the American English language, and I will hear them in my own and in others forever.

Who is the Next Zachary Mason?

2010-01-30T09:51:00.000-08:00

A year ago, the New York Times poked fun at Zachary Mason. He was one of those crazy authors that sent them wacky things in the mail, begging for reviews. Silly rabble -- reviews are for the well-connected!

A year and a half later, the NYT finally assigned The Lost Books of the Odyssey for review. Of course, first the book had to be published by a major NY house, Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux. The Times's primary job isn't to discuss literature, after all -- it's to support the beleaguered NYC publishing establishment. FS&G also got its cue from somebody else -- they picked up The Lost Books after it was nominated for a Young Lions Prize by the NY Public Library in early 2009. (Thanks, Brigid Hughes! Thanks, Ethan Hawke!)

The first recognition The Lost Books of the Odyssey received was when it won The Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2006, a blind-judged manuscript contest offered annually by Starcherone Books. We've got our seventh such contest accepting manuscripts now, until February 15. Zach was winner #4.

I'm not saying that books like The Lost Books of the Odyssey come around every year, or even every two or three years. But keep your eyes on our other winners. Without making it a competition, these are definitely books that at least deserve to be in the conversation with The Lost Books of the Odyssey:

> Woman with Dark Horses, stories by Aimee Parkison (selected by Cris Mazza)

> Hangings: Three Novellas, by Nina Shope (selected by Kenneth Bernard)

> The Blue of Her Body, by Sara Greenslit (selected by Brian Evenson)

> The Creepy Girl and other stories, by Janet Mitchell (selected by Lance Olsen)

and forthcoming in Fall 2010:
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, by Alissa Nutting (selected by Ben Marcus)

Readers interested in what's new in contemporary fiction can purchase any of these titles, or subscribe to our entire 2010 season or 4 titles at a discounted rate. The Jack Kerouac Just Sent Mom Out for Another Bottle of Tokay Annual Subscription -- which this year includes three novels, Raymond Federman's Shhh: The Story of a Childhood, Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, and Thaddeus Rutkowski's Haywire, as well as Alissa Nutting's contest-winning short story collection, is only $49.95, ppd.

If you read books, this subscription is one of the best deals you can find -- especially when we see the Starcherone first edition/first printing of Zachary Mason's book now a coveted rarity, selling for over $100! When you wait for for someone else to tell you what's good, you pay for it.

Our subscription is also a very well-kept secret. As of today, and including our donors who get the subscription as a thank you for their contributions, we have a total of 22 subscribers! Meanwhile, The Lost Books of the Odyssey has crossed into amazon's Top 200 -- and it doesn't even get released until Tuesday!

You can read tomorrow today by subscribing to Starcherone Books. If you are interested in mainstream publishing, continue to read what the mainstream publishers are selling. But if you are interested in the future of literature, subscribe to Starcherone Books.

Contest Press Release (with finalists, honorable mentions, etc.)

2009-08-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

Press Release
Contact: Ted Pelton, Director, Starcherone Books, ted@starcherone.com, 716-885-2726

Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Chosen by Ben Marcus for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction

Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. She will receive $1,000 and publication during Starcerone’s 2010-11 season.

Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus. A total of 210 manuscripts were submitted for the prize.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for The Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Nutting’s manuscript was one of five finalists. The titles of these manuscripts were announced in July, while the names were held back to keep the judging blind. The other finalists, listed alphabetically, were:

• Roxanne M. Carter – Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
• Rich Ives – The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins to Leak
• Grace Krilanovich –The Orange Eats Creeps
• Levi Teal – 200 Pieces

Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories have been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

In awarding the prize, Ben Marcus had this to say about Nutting’s book:

“Alissa Nutting builds a dark catalog of behavior for her characters and the result is a kind of human bestiary, if humans were programmed to go down in flames, to run themselves aground, to seek ruin on every occasion. These fine stories, anthropologically thorough in their view of the contemporary person, illuminate how people hide behind their pursuits, concealing what matters most to them while striving, and usually failing, to be loved.”

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work; most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the 2008 New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age or younger.

The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell. Mitchell's book, The Creepy Girl and Other Stories, is newly available from Starcherone Books.

There were also 5 manuscripts designated as honorable mentions in the 2009-10 contest:

• Rebbecca Brown – They Become Her
• Misha Hoekstra – The Joy of Edge Tools
• Mary Overton – The Gossip's Crime
• Brian Seabolt – The Alpha Privative
• Ron Tanner – Kiss Me, Stranger

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 210 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010. The judge of next year’s contest will be novelist Stacey Levine.

Winner!!!

2009-08-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for the Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories hagve been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work: most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age. The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell.

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 209 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010.

Starcherone Prize Finalists Announcement

2009-07-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

These are the titles of the five manuscripts that are finalists for the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction:

> 200 Pieces
> The Balloon Comtaining the Water Containing the Narrative is Leaking
> Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act
> The Orange Eats Creeps
> Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

These manuscripts, with the authors' names remaining undisclosed, have been forwarded to Final Judge Ben Marcus, who will select one winner of the Starcherone Prize for 2009. The winner will receive a $1,000 prize and be published in our 2010-11 season.

The Final Judge has the option of selecting additional manuscripts from which to make a selection.

This year's contest began with 210 entries, and our decisions to date have been extremely difficult, owing to the high quality of the submissions. Many terrific books had to be eliminated from contention, simply due to the limitations of the contest and what we are able to accomplish as a small press. In order to help promote some of these worthy manuscripts, a number of other entries will be designated with Honorable Mentions. These will be announced when our final decisions are announced, in early August. Please check this blog for an announcement in late July or after.

An Interview with Ted Pelton

2009-04-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

This "interview" mash-up was constructed by Brian Lampkin.

Ted Pelton is the author of the novel Malcolm and Jack and other Famous American Criminals and the collection of short stories Endorsed by Jack Chapeau 2 an even greater extent. He is also the founder and executive director of Starcherone Books—a publisher of innovative fiction. Ted was also a classmate of mine at the University of Buffalo and co-conspirator in several literary and community experiments and projects. He is currently at work on a collection of Woodchuck Stories. Let’s call them parables.

The danger in all interviews for the interviewee is that all control is lost in the editing process. A writer can be taken completely out of context or elided to the point of incomprehension. This interview foregounds those concerns and is compiled from twenty-five years of conversations, letters, blogs, articles and e-mails.

Brian: Hi, Ted, do you have time to talk?
Ted: Oh, we are all such busy people! Who has time? But friends, let us not forget what brought us here. No need to write essays every time out of the box. But we should continue to talk about why we think innovative/avantgarde/experimental/heterodox fiction is what we all have said it is: a potential antidote to the stupidity of American hegemony in 2007! [ed: I’m sure he knows the year; perhaps he refers to the pre-Obama era.] to the mindlessness of a society that knows of many ways that it's going in the wrong direction but seems powerless to stop itself!! to the simplistic selves we're told we are by advertisers politicians law enforcement officers and many many others!!! an art form at a time when books are commodities and Bertelsmann Murdoch Time Warner etc. has nearly secured its victory over us and we're at the point of near-irrelevance!!!! -- It's important to keep talking. We are not against tradition. We are a version of the tradition that's being edited out.

Brian: Right on. So how does an independent publisher and experimental writer promote his work?
Ted: A funny thing happened to me this week. I was promoting my novel Malcolm & Jack during the month… (and so the smartest among you are now saying, oh, I see, this isn't a legitimate [interview] [ed: to say the least], this is just part of his marketing strategy ... but I'll just leave that thread alone ...), and have it linked on amazon.com with Jack Kerouac's new "Original Scroll" version of On the Road …. This has made my sales rise ever so slightly (and not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the promotion).

Anyway, my novel is called Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) and is centered around a conjectured meeting between Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac. It's a novel about history, underground characters during the beginnings of American empire, improvisational poetics & politics, etc.

Brian: Okay, we’ll talk specifically about your novel. I was going to get there, but now’s fine. I love its mix of imaginative re-creation with the hard science of research. Is there any conflict in your mind about altering and even misrepresenting history?
Ted: Endings are the toughest thing to do, as a writer, no doubt….

Brian: I’m sure that’s true, but can you answer the question?
Ted: I am interested in and sensitive to questions concerning the ethics of representation…questions…may well be raised about my own novel, Malcolm & Jack, particularly where I fashion artificial constructions of the subject positions of such figures as Malcolm X and Billie Holiday. In answering these concerns myself, I would underline the sense that narratives are always constructions, and any verisimilitude created by fiction is an effect of the art form, in no way a speaking for the absent subject: verisimilitude is not verity. At the same time, what fiction writers DO is represent. That is the essential form of the art: it is an art of lying, invention, artificial construction, mimicry, semblance. I think it is a limitation on the practice of the art to say that there is some aspect of discourse, experience, or history that one should refrain from representing, as a hard and fast rule. Of course, one should not go into the minefields of representation unadvised or without respect for the significances of histories of racism, oppression, violence and the like. We should also expect the representations of others from assumed and masqueraded subject positions will be problematic--that is the nature of experimental art. Fiction, by its very nature, is a practice which self-consciously presents itself as lies, thus leads us to reflect upon lying, both within deliberately designed aesthetic creations and upon the at-large practices of fictionalization at work in all walks of our lives. Fiction is that discourse that calls into question the truth-telling strategies of language even as it employs them. Airtight, airbrushed, sanitized lies are the ones we really have to worry about. I am a fiction writer, and so I lie, but my lies haven't been killing people. This distinguishes Kent Johnson and I and y’all (who’s out there?) from Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney, who lie and kill people, or who lie and make people killers. Fiction is lies that do not lie about lying. That distinguishes the art of lies that is fiction from the lies of power we are so much in the grip of in our national discourse today. We are distrusted and feared by the world and we have alienated our own youth so much that a majority have opted out of democratic agency even as we claim to be bringing this great gift to the rest of the world.

Brian: You know, I don’t really think of Malcolm and Jack as an explicitly political novel, but to hear you talk…
Ted: Reading is becoming more and more explicitly a political act, and promoting reading certainly is. When I was writing this book, many people said to me, “Ooh, you’re going to get into trouble for writing as Malcolm X. People are really going to be angry with you.”

Brian: Oh, sorry, that was me. We’ve talked in the past about issues of beauty and ugliness. How has the impulse to make something beautiful informed your work?
Ted: How this impulse informed Malcolm & Jack? I wanted it to be a good book, so I kept trying to make it more beautiful in fulfilling the tasks it had created for itself. Billie Holiday not being able to sing because she’s in jail for drugs she takes because she’s miserable about her life and, goddamn it, oppressed in white America, allowed to appear on a marquee at a hotel club but having to enter the hotel through the back door, and then finding herself in an interracial affair in the segregated jail ... I wanted to create such complex situations out of little-appreciated histories in a way that fit my sense of the complexities of lived experiences–beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That’s all I know, as the poet sez, and I’m sorry some find that a maudlin or politically unsophisticated construction. I want to move thoughtful and sophisticated readers; part of that is political, certainly, but, as Williams says, bad writing never helped anyone. Beauty is what makes a political art successful or not. What is beauty? You tell me.

Brian: Hey, I’m interviewing you, remember? Which reminds me, is marijuana still part of your writing practice?
Ted: Anyway, there was another aspect to your question, about remaking the past. I think this was basically just a side-product of writing about my heroes, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, Billie Holiday, and, sure, Alfred Kinsey. And it was also certainly prompted by political resentments against a generation of politicians who have now pretty much passed from the scene, though not entirely–and certainly their assumptions haven’t. I was interested in taking on the 1940s, the period of the development of American Empire. I mean, yes, we fought a war that saved the world from fascism, not rhetorical but real fascism, and that was wonderful and necessary, but what has followed from that, the national valuing of war, has been disastrous, and keeps repeating.

I started the book following on the heels of the Reagan-Bush years; Reagan and Bush were both of that war generation. Malcolm and Jack were both part of an underground in the 1940s that became the different parts of the powerful counter-culture discourse of the 1960s. I wanted to meditate on the 1940s mythmaking that fueled the rise of conservatism in the late 20th century and trumped 1960s pacifist and socialist impulses. Remaking the past is something everybody does. It is the job of fiction writers, I think, to clarify this. Reagan isn’t in the book, but he so clearly exemplified this: I mean, in his stories, as was well documented (see Gary Wills’s book on him, for instance), he believed he actually fought in the war, even though he had worn the uniforms only in war films, and believed as well he was actually present at the liberation of the death camps, so powerful and convincing had his narrative reconstructions about these events been.

So in Malcolm & Jack we’ve got American Empire, hegemonic national narratives, historical crimes (as Malcolm never stopped telling us), and a bunch of sexy people at the heart of it–why shouldn’t I enjoy the activity of remaking the past? Susan Sontag says somewhere that the past is the greatest, most tantalizing imaginative space we have. It’s supposed to be stable. Of course, it isn’t at all; it’s all stories, being remixed and recreated all the time.

Brian: Lovely, Ted, really lovely and astute, I think. Hey, I remember you saying something about your opposition to the New York Times Best Novels of the Post-War era. It’s no good complaining if you can’t come up with alternatives.
Ted: Here's my top list:
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Ben Marcus – Notable American Women
Jane Smiley – A Thousand Acres
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
David Markson – Reader’s Block and/or This is Not a Novel
Joe Wenderoth – Letters to Wendy’s
Walter Abish – How German Is It
Stacey Levine – Frances Johnson
Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale
Jeffrey DeShell – Peter (seriously; but then I'm the publisher, so maybe this is a cynical manipulation)
Denis Johnson – Jesus’s Son
Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers
Thomas Pynchon – Vineland

Honorable Mentions:
David F. Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times
Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern
Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue
Kevin Killian – Little Men
Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone
George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and/or Pastoralia
Nina Shope – Hangings (sorry, compromised again)
Kenneth Bernard – From the District File
Robert Gluck – Margery Kempe
Carole Maso – Ava
Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dictee
Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched
Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek

Brian: It’s not my place to argue, but what about Malcolm and Jack?
Ted: I want to read more so I can do better. I know I'm forgetting some. But not nearly what the TIMES has forgotten. I couldn't believe that list was for real.

Brian: Well, thanks for your time, Ted. Anything else about Malcolm and Jack you want to get off your chest?
Ted: Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops!

I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.

Brian: Goodbye, Ted, it’s always good to check-in with an old friend. I remember when we first met in French class, what, twenty-five years ago….
Ted: Fuck, it's Friday afternoon & I'm home from work & no one has been writing… this concludes the project of reconstruction of a small island of happiness now long lost.

Shoes

2009-03-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

After the explosion occurred, the shoes dropped from the sky. Some of them took up to a year to drop.

I am speaking, of course, of Joshua Cohen's novel, A Heaven of Others. All the great news in recent weeks about Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey obscured for the moment another terrific book we published this year by an under-35 author, Cohen. Then dropped two more shoes:

1. A powerful long article on A Heaven of Others in The New Haven Review:

(excerpt) "It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make […]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished."

2. Mentioned on The Believer short list reader survey of Best Books of 2008, at #14. Behind Morrison, ahead of Millhauser, and in between 2 Bolanos. [scroll down for the whole list]

For more about Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others, released one year ago this past month, see Starcherone or Amazon

Young Lions Fiction Award

2009-02-21T18:22:00.000-08:00

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey has been chosen as a finalist in the New York Public Library's ninth annual Young Lions Fiction Award.

The award honors the works of authors age 35 and under who are making an indelible impression on the world of literature. The winning writer will be awarded a $10,000 prize on March 16, 2009 at a ceremony hosted by Young Lions co-founder and actor Ethan Hawke, held in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

The award is given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories. Each year five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of award judges, including novelist Lore Segal, and last year's winner Ron Currie, Jr. (who won for God Is Dead), will select the winner of the $10,000 prize.

AWP hype

2009-02-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

If you're going to AWP in Chicago this year, stop by the Starcherone table (#544, Northwest Hall, Lower Level) on the following days and times to meet some of our authors:

Thursday Feb 12, 1-2 pm - Johannes Göransson, Dear Ra

Friday Feb 13, 1-2 pm - Donald Breckenridge, YOU ARE HERE

Saturday Feb 14, 1-2 pm - Sara Greenslit, The Blue of Her Body

How Zachary Mason supplied The NY Times with a candy dish, and other strange tales of 2008

2009-01-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

The big spread on Starcherone in the newest edition of American Book Review (Vol. 30, No. 2, Jan/Feb 2009) is only the latest in what has been a year of great press for our books. Here is our annual year-end review of online reviews and other curiosities (toenail clippings, a Swedish poet, the last Jew on Earth, a novelist-veterinarian...) relating to Starcherone authors, leading off with what may be the book of 2008...

Zachary Mason – The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Eugene Lim, "The Trojan War Will Take Place." Brooklyn Rail

Garrett Rowlan, "Irreal Expedition." The Café Irreal. http://home.sprynet.com/~awhit/review9.htm

Jefferson Hansen. Experimental Fiction/Poetry/Jazz blog.

Shawna Yang Ryan, Gently Read Literature

Ben Ehrenreich, "Get Lost!" LA Times Book Review

Alex Kasman. Mathematical Fiction

NY Times Book Review blog, "Papercuts" (mention by Rachel Harris - re: candy dish)

Steve Donoghue, "Many Voyages Home." Open Letters Monthly

Daniel Green. The_Reading_Experience

James Crossley. Review of Contemporary Fiction

Francois Monti. Tabula Rasa (in French)

Joshua Cohen – A Heaven of Others

Buffalo ArtVoice (interview)

Alexander Zaitchik, "The Politics of the Afterlife." Brooklyn Rail

Joshua Cohen, "Last Line." Esquire Magazine Books Blog

The Wrong Heaven: Critic Joshua Cohen on His New Novel (interview). Jewish Forward

Patrick Schabe. PopMatters

Daniel Green. The_Reading_Experience

Johannes Goransson - Dear Ra

Kevin Killian amazon review

Blake Butler. No One Does That blog.

Rauan Klassnik, "Ecstasy of Dismemberment: interview with Johannes Goransson." Holy Land blog.

Ploughshares Blog

[Movie of JG reading poems in Swedish] Rabbit Light Movies.

Raymond Federman and George Chambers – The Twilight of the Bums

Buck Quigley, "Federman @ 80." Buffalo ArtVoice

Jeff Simon. Buffalo News

Raymond Federman – My Body in Nine Parts (2005)

Buffalo News (mention by Mary Kunz - cutting toenails)

Sara Greenslit – The Blue of Her Body (2007)

"Sara Greenslit — Novelist grabs second career in animal care." U. of Wisconsin-Madison News

The Grand Return

2008-11-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

After a year away, Starcherone Books announces the return of our annual manuscript contest, featuring fiction writer Ben Marcus as Final Judge.

The 2009-10 contest, offering $1000 and publication with Starcherone Books, is now accepting entries. Contest is open to story collections, novels, or indeterminate prose works up to 400 pages. Manuscripts will be blind-judged; the author's name should appear on the first of two title pages and nowhere else in the manuscript. There is an administrative fee of $30. Please do not send cash. The postmark deadline is February 15, 2009. The winner will be announced in August 2009. All finalists will be considered for publication with Starcherone Books. See our ad in the January 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

We are very happy to have as judge for our prize for innovative fiction one of the most daringly innovative and powerful authors of our time, Ben Marcus. Marcus is the author of three books to date -- The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and, with Matthew Ritchie, The Father Costume. He also edited The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. He is Chair of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Columbia University.

[click here to go to the Starcherone contest page]

Views of Federman

2008-11-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

Here are images from the day of events celebrating Raymond Federman @ 80 at University of Buffalo's Anderson Gallery and Poetry Room, and at Medaille College of Buffalo, Oct. 18, 2008.

Click for an expanded view of the sketches of Federman by artist Harvey Breverman and various members of the UB English department from the 1960s-90s.

artist Mark Lavatelli, Ted Pelton, poet Charles Bernstein, scholar Marcel Cornis-Pope.

Hallwalls director Edmund Cardoni, Pelton, Cornis-Pope, artist Harvey Breverman

artist Terri Katz-Kasimov, Federman, scholar Larry McCaffery

Federman, Pelton, scholar Menachem Feuer

Cardoni, Federman, Erica Federman, fiction writer Christina Milletti

scholars Susan Rubin Suleiman & Marcel Cornis-Pope

Debby and Harvey Breverman, poet Jorge Guitart

Charles Bernstein, curator James Maynard, Erica and Raymond Federman

FEDERMAN@80: A CELEBRATION

2008-10-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

FEDERMAN@80: A CELEBRATION
Saturday, Oct. 18, morning, noon, and night, Buffalo, NY

Friends, colleagues, critics, and students past and present from near and far welcome writer, raconteur, and retired distinguished professor Raymond Federman back to Buffalo for a day-long celebration of his work and him in visual art, critical appreciations, rollicking literary readings, & champagne. All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by Starcherone Books, the Department of Romance Languages of the University at Buffalo, UB Anderson Gallery, the Poetry Collection at UB, Medaille College, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and the following endowed chairs at the University at Buffalo: Melodia E. Jones Chair of Romance Languages, James H. McNulty Chair of English, David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters, and Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

Morning: 10:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M., UB Anderson Gallery, One Martha Jackson Place.
Opening reception (with coffee and accompaniments) of an exhibition of Federman-inspired art works by Terri Katz-Kazimov and Harvey Breverman, & photographs by Bruce Jackson. [The image above is Jackson's.]

Noon(ish): 1:00-4:30 P.M., Poetry Collection, 4th Floor Capen Hall, UB North Campus.
Two sessions of presentations and discussion featuring contributors to the forthcoming SUNY Press collection of essays, Federman at 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo.

1:00-2:30: A Life in the Text.
Dr. Larry McCaffery, Dr. Menachem Feuer, & Dr. Ted Pelton.

3:00-4:30: Laughter, History, and the Holocaust.
Dr. Susan Rubin Suleiman & Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope.

& NIGHT: 8:00 P.M., Medaille College, Main Building, Foyer & Lecture Hall.
An Evening of Laughterature, Surfiction, & Playgiarism in Tribute to Raymond Federman

Readings by (in order of appearance):

Ted Pelton, Christina Milletti, Geoffrey Gatza, Julie Regan, Michael Basinski, & Steve McCaffery.

—Intermission—

Davis Schneiderman, Charles Bernstein, Simone Federman, & Raymond Federman

The readings will be followed by a reception and 80th birthday toast.

Joseph Lease, from "now"

2008-08-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

Starcherone Books has long been interested in poetry -- you know, that stuff that breaks lines? Less commercial fiction such as we publish probably has more in common with poetry than with the mega-blockbusters that the commercial fiction marketplace has become nearly entirely about. As a writer myself interested in alternative writing, I've had many long-time friends and fellow-travelers in the poetry world. One whom I've known for more than twenty years, though we've always lived in different cities, is Joseph Lease. Joseph and I met through Bob Creeley and through Joseph's coming to the read, for the first time, in Buffalo in 1983, I believe. I was taking a course with Creeley at SUNY-Buffalo at the time. Since then, over the years, Joseph and I have sent each other work and met up in various cities around the country -- New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo again, Las Vegas. Sometime after Creeley died a couple of years ago, Joseph came out to Buffalo again to do a reading at Medaille College, and we had a sad drink in a hotel out by the Buffalo Airport. I've always been a fan of Joseph's work -- its lyric beauty, its understanding of sound, its civic engagement. So here is some Starcherone fellow-traveler work, from a new poem by Joseph (with apologies for the clumsy formatting of this medium).

from “now”

you—in the park—

watch them sleeping—

you invented the family, private property, and the state—you did it—

“hey you”—it was you—and gray rain, shadow, mist—

And this is perfect—you are the light and the dark—

And no you don’t and no you don’t—

You don’t want to laugh at them you don’t—

You say take me to Heaven you say take me to Heaven—

Don’t you want to say that—don’t you—

Blue night
Opens
Blue night
Comes
Soft sweet kiss
Dear Mr
Fantasy

We came back to the world: the green world, the fertile world, the corn world, the gun world

We came back to the world and there was nothing there
fine
depression it is

a flying yell and
naked pants—everyone’s

diaspora—

You
Paint

God

Lightning
Spinning

Heat
Lightning
Far

“this sky is your sky this sky is my sky—“and God said let there be gas let there be cash and soft glances

bright
branches

blue side of the mountain, blue side—will I drink, will I laugh, tell me, will I laugh—tell me—will I spark—in this light, expensive light—did you pray—did you beg—for days like these—

so

typing

too late to watch the sunrise

pink and gray violet

bands

hills

there is nothing innocent

nothing more innocent

“I was unspeakable, I was backwash, or a global Marshall Plan to reduce carbon emissions or one from the distant past, elite with shoddy environmental records, spiritual disciplines, treat yourself to tart cherries this summer: new research suggests the juicy fruit could shield your heart health, and a boy in the twilight, a face in light blue, tan, orange, palm trees dark and offices and the sweetness in the air and the light and sleeping pills”—

the lake the
blue
35

clear mini lights,

42 inch animated and lighted

grazing doe (no sneering):

any purple day someone scatters

someone’s ashes,

[to be continued]

Joshua Harmon, "History of Cold Seasons"

2008-08-08T05:59:00.000-07:00

"History of Cold Seasons" was published in Chelsea in 1996 and is the title story of a collection of short fiction that "has been looking for a home for some time now." Harmon's Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone Books, 2007) was one of three finalists this year for the Cabell First Novelist Award.

History of Cold Seasons

Where we live: brown weeds lifting from unbroken snow, blown snow rising like smoke. Smoke rising like smoke, thick and white these subzero days, from chimneys. Snow, days-old and packed, squeaks underfoot.

My Mattie’s feet froze in his boots, the leather laces stiff with ice. When they carried him in, I put his feet against the woodstove, watched while ice hissed and steamed, while water pooled on the hearth, knowing not to bother, knowing already that feeling stopped inches short of what are called “extremities.”

Which is not how Mattie would say it.

Dalton, feet under drifted snow and frozen earth, would have said, “Where everything else begins.”

Where we live: words take form as I speak them, hanging in the air for anyone to see—my breath visible the instant I exhale it.

I don’t speak much, generally.

The searchers—men from town, all of them known to me except those Carl Normandeau called up from Deerfield, leading dogs churning through snow shoulder high, sniffing my Mattie’s glove, not barking, as if they knew.

In my kitchen, I scraped frost from the window with a fingernail, watched all the men disappear in blue dusk, spreading apart in a line before they reached the woods. My tea steeped, swirls of color clouding the water. I held the mug in circled hands, warming.

Later, I held those toes in my hands, not warming, the skin blue and under the nails purple. I held them to remember in my hands their shape, to keep with me a feeling he couldn’t feel.

* *

Through February and March I chipped at ice dams along the edges of the roof, watched snow warmed by sun slide off—heavy, soft. Icicles dripped deep holes in packed snow. Mattie sat in his chair by the window, quiet, his eyes flicking from one thing to the next.

His cuticles he chewed raw, bloody.

The old sugar house, below the orchard, was where they found him, huddled inside the door, blanketed by snow blown through the chinks, through the windows hunters shot out.

Two, three hours, one of those Deerfield boys told me.

He said other things into his radio while we waited for the ambulance.

Footprints through snow are not difficult to follow. Carl Normandeau wanted the dogs for the newspaper people, whose trucks skidded along my plowed driveway half an hour past dark.

* *

“Mother,” my Mattie would say, if he could. What he says when he means “mother” is not a sound anyone else would recognize.

Carl Normandeau, that Frenchman blood in his veins, also told me words that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, words his own mother whispered to him when he still slept in her arms.

Most can, I expect—mothers being mothers.

Nights, in bed, this is what I tell myself, saying the words only in my head.

“Fool,” is what Dalton said. “Idiot,” he shouted, slapping the loose leg of his pants. He would sic the dog on him, watching as he stumped thick-legged into the woods.

“Not mine,” is what Dalton said.

Me, I went into the woods after my Mattie, chasing the shape of his broad back, calling off the dog that ran away the same day Dalton died. Mattie: shivering in dry ferns, hiding behind a tall tree, its shadow darkening his face. I held him, the bark pressing its pattern into my skin while he leaned his weight against me. That dog sniffed the ground.

“Shh,” I whispered, patting my Mattie’s back, “hush,” I breathed, stroking the soft flannel of his shirt.

We waited for dark.

We did not move.

This—in summer, any summer it could have been, before Dalton, before Mattie.

I held to Mattie under arching trees. Leaves sifted slanting light.

What I heard in my head were the words he’d murmured the occasion he held me, like this, and the body’s wordless answer, lifting, stretching, warming; taking in what is not its own—a time of year when cold did not give words shape, when water was not yet ice.

Ted Pelton, "Something New"

2008-07-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

After he shot John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald shot a policeman, Officer J. D. Tippit.

However, it was actually Tippit, a Dallas policeman, who shot the unarmed Oswald, switched clothes with him in further enactment of his own plan to murder Kennedy, under another identity.

Tippit, in fact, was Richard Nixon, dressed as a Dallas police officer.

So Richard Nixon, impersonating a Dallas police officer, shot an unarmed man named Lee Oswald, switched clothes with him, thereby adopting a second new identity, in further enactment of his plan to shoot John F. Kennedy, whose election fraud in Illinois in 1960 had cost Nixon the Presidency.

Nixon was also angry that Kennedy had stolen away his lover, Marilyn Monroe.

Nixon and Monroe had met in California, while Nixon was a Senator and Monroe an up-and-coming actress.

It was Monroe, evidently, who suggested to Nixon that they name their family dog Checkers.

Checkers, coincidentally, died the same day as Kennedy, and was also murdered, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

Many years later, when asked by Madame Mao during the famous state visit in 1972 if she had ever known sadness, Pat Nixon, evidently confusing details due to jet lag, replied, Yes, when someone shot my poor dog Checkers from a nearby schoolbook depository.

Madame Mao replied, through an interpreter, Yes, it was me who did that – a statement whose meaning has been debated ever since.

The most outlandish interpretation of this statement that has been suggested is that Madame Mao, dressed as Officer J. D. Tippit, shot the unarmed Lee Harvey Oswald, changed clothes with him, in further enactment of her plan to murder John F. Kennedy, and confessed to the killing of Checkers, which happened at the same time some twenty-five hundred miles away, in Washington, DC, to create an alibi.

This interpretation is unlikely, a) because Madame Mao was not known to have left China during this time, and, b) because it would mean Madame Mao and Richard Nixon were, in fact, the same person.

Madame Mao and Richard Nixon could not possibly have been the same person because, a) they were photographed together on many occasions during the 1972 state visit, and, b) because even if Madame Mao were real in these photos and posed next to Officer J. D. Tippit, disguised as Nixon, or if on the other hand it was Nixon who was real and Tippit who was Madame Mao in the photos, one of the two of them would have to have been in Dallas with Tippit in order to take his clothes and then exchange a second time with Oswald after killing John F. Kennedy, and so could not have simultaneously been shooting Checkers in Washington, DC, and posing for a photo in China.

As regards Madame Mao and Richard Nixon, all reasonable commentators are in agreement – there had to have been two of them.

Nina Shope, "The Clinic"

2008-07-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

This excerpt from a novel-in-progress includes sections first published in Fourteen Hills, then later in New Standards: The First 10 Years at Fourteen Hills. Nina Shope's Hangings: Three Novellas won the 2005-6 Starcherone Fiction Prize.

The Clinic

you stand at the front of the amphitheatre, chalk in hand, the right side of your face drooping and insolent like a stroke victim. your hand curving inward, clenched, right leg dragging behind your left like a vestigial appendage, a half-amputated limb. you play to the crowds—ape paralysis—distort your face until they almost cease to recognize you, wondering if you have not in fact escaped the wards, if you are actually an inmate imitating the great professor rather than the reverse. charcot, le maître. cold. aloof. with a face like an undertaker. under your black stovepipe hat. your dark coat that always smells of damp wool.
the stage is arranged like a set around you—your entire body dedicated to this performance of paralysis, this act—standing amidst charts, drawings, and plaster casts, image after image projected onto the wall behind you. a picture show, a preview of the live performance. the illusion is only ruptured when you add to the illustrations on the blackboard—standing straight so as to draw more accurately, coloring the muscles along the right side of a chalked skull a bright and glaring red, as though you have peeled back the board to expose flesh or struck hard enough to bruise it—leaving a flaring handprint against your subject’s drawn and sallow cheek. only then do you relax the muscles of your mouth, your arm, your leg. only then do you return to yourself—the doctor with the dour face. the professor in the black coat with the brain in his hand.
I am the example. the living proof. no farcical facial impressions.
when the projector screws loosen in the middle of the lecture, the lens pivots so that the images swing sideways and project upon me, and I am covered by the bones of someone else's body, by a portrait of you with another patient. your image superimposed upon me, as if the subject has become le maître, dressed in black coat with a torn white nightgown underneath. neither one of us looks quite real. the students laughing and scrambling for the screws that have fallen under their seats.

our casual sleight of hand.

augustine, you say, looking out at them, your audience, augustine, and you linger like that over my name, making it hover there above us all, so that even I wonder what it is you will make of it, of me, so completely have you taken over that word, augustine, you say, and we are breathless, all of us, breathless. your audience, waiting, for a single word from you. augustine, you say, is the classic example, and we nod, and we let out a sigh. you have said it all so simply, moved us somehow into the realm of art with that one word. classic. and we are now as those contemplating an exquisite nude—you, the master painter, your hand tracing the anatomical charts, your chin raised, and all of us too, somehow raised by your words, the audience suspended several inches above the stage. and they look at me, and I look at them, and we look at you, breathless.

your fascination until death, la grande hystérie.

in the studio at night, next to the wax figure of the emaciated woman, underneath the skeleton strung to the ceiling, you say, augustine, seize for me, and you place your hands under my uterus and below my breast. applying gentle pressure, you release and wait, and I, arching my back, ecstatic, the feeling of your hands under my hipbone, hips pressing upwards, eyes rolling back, teeth clenched, wait for your hand to find that spot, to press it again, to stop all of this with a touch, as you have told the audience you can, your face flushed. augustine, you say, but you do not touch me again. writhing, rocking, unable to stop, legs twisting around themselves, knees hitting the wall, and the bed hardly beneath me now for more than a moment at a time, as if I am levitating, only my head my toes touching the mattress, you whisper, arc-en-ciel, and the reverence in your voice freezes me there, and I cry out maître, and mother, and wait for you to stop this. your notebook out. writing. everything in focus for a moment.

and I am your masterpiece.

note the arched back, you say to your listeners, the infamous arc-en-ciel. you will notice that this patient’s form is nearly perfect: first, we are presented with an epileptoid phase with two parts, tonic and clonic, followed by exotic movements, and then a phase of high emotional pitch. all of this succeeded by these elaborately contorted postures.

the attitudes passionelles. the poses plastiques. like some elegant stilled ballet.

in the mornings, you rehearse your lecture before me. repeating it so often that I can mouth it back to you –like a prompter in the wings, never remembered, never needed—this speech of yours so flawlessly fixed in your memory. each hysteric has her own specific hysterogenic points, you say once more, touching my back, each breast—above, below and upon the nipple, the back of my knee, my thigh. and doctor, how do you expect me to stop from falling, your dexterous thumb throwing me again and again to the floor. the base of my neck, the space behind my ear, my abdomen, there, you say, and there, and I on the floor, hoping it will not stop.

fridays are your grand events, les leçons, the only time that you address an audience other than your peers and students. hours of memorization in which the drawings you will make are traced, erased, and traced again—until you know that every gesture will be accurate, precise. the projector carefully focused. and you in the center of the stage—dark coat, pocket watch, every detail so conscientiously, so conservatively chosen. the amphitheatre empty until you order the doors to be opened. and the interns whisper, there are authors and journalists in the audience, actresses, the women in furs have performed before royalty. and star struck, we step out onto the stage to become the soul and center of it all.

Doug Manson Interview: On Having Fallen In

2008-07-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

This week something a little different: I had a chance to publish this interview conducted between two friends of mine who are also terrific writers and people I've met in the great Poetry City of Buffalo, NY, where Starcherone Books is located as well. In fact, the interviewee here, Doug Manson, recently signed on as our new Development Director. He is also the publisher of Celery Flute, a Kenneth Patchen newsletter, and of Little Scratch Pad Books, a micro-press publisher of poetry, and he's the author of several chapbooks as well as of Roofing and Siding (BlazeVox Books). He is interviewed below by Jonathan Skinner, publisher of the wonderful litmag, Ecopoetics.

Jonathan Skinner: So how did you fall into poetry in the first place?

Douglas Manson: This assumes a kind of direction—a relatively useful place to start—the notion of a "fall", rather than a start to a writing practice, or the beginning of a dialog with poetry, which is what it was. My mother used to read to me each night when I was a small child, a “Shakespearefor kids" book, European myth stories, and the Bible. I started writing when I was eight or so: adventure stories, science fiction epics and scripts for my dolls to act out (called "action figures" so boys could play with them). When I was nine or ten, I began writing songs like Roger Waters, after buying Pink Floyd's The Wall. I used to spend my after school hours playing records and lying on the floor with my head between these two plastic clamshell speakers from Sears. I wrote obnoxious and pornographic stories in seventh grade study hall and handed them around to my friends. Then, when I was thirteen, I re-wrote Poe's "Annabel Lee" as "Tony the Tree," which was a real ecological manifesto. I was asked to read it for the entire class. Until high school I was rarely asked to read poetry, or saw very much of it. It was never really a presence in our house. Music seemed much more important to me, and I studied Bob Dylan's lyrics more intensely than Walt Whitman's poems. I started learning guitar when I was twelve. Dylan and Whitman: these seemed to be the two poets of my adolescence who stand out. I started reading and writing much more when I turned fourteen, and I also began smoking a lot of pot.

Just after a really difficult time in my senior year of high school, I became very close to another poet named Jennifer. After an illness that put me in the hospital for three weeks, she took me out to a quarry to go swimming one day and we sat there and talked until I could make sense of what had happened to me—and it was a magical experience. Poet helping poet—profoundly uncomfortable experiences worked through together, made sense of in a way that was real to the way my consciousness had been affected. She taught me what a "paradigm" and a "paradigm shift" were, and so there was a shift in my own realization of what I had gone through. She made a collage out of that conversation I still own. So, I have been writing poetry and song lyrics since I was ten. I don't like to think of them as separate in any great degree. I never fell into poetry, its always been one of those components in my life that has lifted me up, no matter what.

Jonathan: Can you say a bit about what Ohio, or the midwest/ Great Lakes region more generally, has contributed to your formation as a poet?

Douglas: I grew up in a relatively stereotypical whitebre(a)d suburb. Ohio. Flat, with humid summers and cold grey winters. Strict parenting with high expectations, of education and (mechanical/civil/railway) engineering stock, milling and farming ancestors. I often felt myself drawn to Polish moods and Central European authors as a young man. But these facts say as little as they do taxonomize--and seem more mythic to me than real. After living in Buffalo for ten years, all the similarities of experience from Ohio to New York seem simulacral, and being "from" a place only seems to reinforce my need to recognize a distance: cognitively, philosophically, emotionally. Geographically there is something to be found there--forest, river and lake--though "suburban" really trumps all these considerations--cars, TVs, church and school. Garrison Keillor's recent visit to my hometown (aired 6/21/08) featured an author from the same place, and I'm assuming he's near my age, but the prose was so "flat" I wasn't invested in remembering his name [his name is Ian Frazier]--his memoirs reminded me of my childhood, but in a very simplistic way. I felt no nostalgia hearing his words, just a kind of claustrophobia, really. I was one of the "kids in the woods" he describes. And then there's the infamous Cuyahoga River. As a family, we spent a lot of our free time walking in the second- and third-growth trees, or drifting in a sailboat on a wakeless, man-made lake. A lot of stillness, come to think of it. Being without a car for the majority of the last four years has returned me to that kind of stillness. I've obsessed for some time with relative speed differentials and consciousness, the way automobiles have (had?) such a determining quality on our experience.

Hindsight shows this as a very privileged upbringing, especially since I consider myself a poet fully invested in the term. This means economic sacrifice and openness far beyond what my childhood ever encouraged me to expect. In the Midwest there isn't an oceanic/desert existential line of vastness on the horizon. The land seems a bit more generous, nurturing, but also consuming. It’s an intimate space--embowered. Character ranks pretty highly, too. Since I wasn't interested in staying within the neatly drawn lines mapped out for me as a child, I acquired a fair degree of shame for my endless questioning of limits and rules, for my experiments with living. But the truth is I don't like to define my work in regional/geographic terms, though my work may announce this more than I'm aware of.

So, given this, people from quite different circumstances may find my poetry saturated with a Midwestern mind--and I do write about my place a great deal. I like to write as much about the rich human universe here in the city of Buffalo as I do its geographic specificity. This region and my specific background may account for the inward, reflecting, syncretic attempts at meaning in my poems, or show up in the broader activity of writing, editing and mentoring. When you are fully engaged with basic human questions like love, living, dying, time and speed, its a little harder to account directly for place. If I am nothing more than an elaborate infolding of my environment, then all ideas I work with will show it. It is an idea worth pursuing consciously and descriptively, as well. But as you've noted before, I am obsessed with language, with the "conversational implicature of our words". The language I most know (or only know?) is the one spoken in the Midwest, however much it is used as a model in the larger, national society. Likewise, there are a lot of economic, social and technological pressures that ask us to forget about our place and how well our neighbors are doing--just as we know the Eisenhower/Robert Moses epoch effectively divorced Buffalonians from their waterfront with the building of a highway system and suburban rings. It is encouraging to know that the much-needed reconnection of communities and the reconstruction of waterfront access is just now getting underway.

One joy of living in Buffalo, among others, is the quality of the light. Light. period. I agree with Penelope Creeley, the light here is pure magic. It always teaches, it opens the senses. It doesn't mean I bathe in it all day, but its beauty forces me to step outside my own writing obsessions just as emphatically as do the basic pressures and invitations of living in the culture, being open, approachable, and responsible to others. I write my poetry in a room that catches the morning light, my "room of light"; my emails and business writing take place in back, in the windy "night room". I am blessed with ample space to work in.

To sum up these diverse thoughts: the question of “region” is one that I examine in my essay "What is a Regional Poet?" (In Celery Flute issue 3), which does include some of my own personal views on the issue. To compare my work with Charles Olson's enormous and articulate concern for geography, and for the many who follow his example, I have to say that I do not consider my poetry "regional". I am not trying to work on the same issues in my poetry. Because I live on a major ornithology fly-way, I hear a complex, varied & continental music when the birds return or the weather permits. On the street I hear hip-hop, country, rock and Latin music, too. I play my Beethoven records very quietly at 3 a.m.

Jonathan: Are there particular mentors, communities of writing, publications, major figures you might identify with the "Great Lakes" region, who have been vital to your development as a poet?

Douglas: The mentors in Kent I learned the most from were Maj Ragain, Alice Cone, Ted Lyons, and Tom Hines, but many other writers were influential, including Maggie Anderson and Zee Edgell. In Buffalo, I learned from Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Michael Basinski and William Sylvester; though the younger poetics scholars were often my more direct mentors (see below). In Kent, my community was made up of the open-mike readers I met from 1996-98. There was no "formation" label other than place, Brady's Café. My friends were Jayce Renner, Kathy Korcheck, David Snodgrass, Jim Burris, R.J. Wilson, Steve Skovensky, Katie Daley, Ben Pershey among many others. And this led to friendships with Cleveland poets like Ben Gulyas, Adam Brodsky, Christopher Franke, Jim Lang and Daniel Thompson.
At UB in Buffalo, I was lucky to spend time and work with a lot of amazing poets--Loren Goodman, Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, Kristen Gallagher, Alicia Cohen, Tim Shaner, Chris Alexander, Rosa Alcala, Michael Kelleher--the list goes on and on, especially factoring in the 10-15 poets visiting every semester to give talks and readings. The head spins to think of it now.

In the past 3-5 years, I've witnessed the dispersion of this temporary community, and made good friends with poets, artists, writers in Buffalo like Aaron Lowinger, Kristi Meal, Damian Weber, Celia White, Ted Pelton, Ethan Paquin.
The major "Great Lakes" precedents for me are Kenneth Patchen, d.a. levy and bpNichol, and with a little shake'n'stir-up of my "regional" reading in the 1990s: the midwest deep imagist James Wright. The question of publications that are important to me pretty much mirrors the sense of my University at Buffalo communities—there are many temporary coalescences of energies—though Jim Lang's "Split/W*sky" bag-o-zine has been holding steady for the past decade or so. Frank Davey's "Open Letter", certainly. The House Press magazines, though often temporary, have showcased amazing work--Drill, or String of Small Machines. As a starting point, then, in terms of my own publishing, I have to credit Cheryl Townsend's Impetus press for being my first publisher, which was a longstanding magazine in the 80s and 90s, and the soul-child of d.a.levy's renegade and 7 Flowers presses. I’m also interested in whatever Basinski is up to at the moment, and the Slack Buddha series from William and Lisa Howe. After saying all this, to indicate the influence these have had on my development on a personal level would take another day or two to give adequate acknowledgment—if I could do it at all.

Jonathan: I zoomed to Great Lakes contexts in my first two questions, given, yes, your interest in and extensive writing on d.a. levy, bpNichol and Kenneth Patchen. Not that you've focused on and conceived of this as a "regional" project, but I'm wondering if you see yourself carrying forward a certain tradition of "midwest poetics." (Are you a Lake Poet!? And if so, who is your Edinburgh Review?) Whether in the positive sense, as identifying with the geography and its holdouts (including, yeah, James Wright), or negatively in terms of a resistance to the bicoastal polarities that have so dominated the narrative of New American Poetics. Or in terms of something that unites these three important figures . . . ?

Douglas: Well, it’s a seemingly odd formation—Patchen, levy and Nichol—but they really are closely connected, aesthetically. And with the major league poetry teams so sharply divided into the Americans and the Nationals, they may forever be thought of as the Batavian Muckdogs of Modernism. I see my own writing project as less one of carrying any tradition forward, but rather paying it forward, in the time-honored practice of a generalized reciprocity. I hope all my creditors, spiritual or otherwise, can recognize my commitment to this. The amazing scholar Gordon Brotherston had me shaking in my seat one day when he described how the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures initiate novices into the scholars' caste. I felt it such an apt analogy for my own experiences as a graduate student, however buffeted I was by the corporate comforts of the campus lifestyle. It involves the ritual bleeding of the novitiate’s ears for something like four straight days without food. I’m not exaggerating too much to say that it felt like I went through this once every 6 months for 10 years, though after each bleeding we’d all go get starbucks and play kickball with the media studies grads! The problem today is that, after all this, our unspoken model for new scholars is: any non-trust-funded humanities graduate in the 21st century must either slavishly obey dogma for their kibble, or go preach to birds! Or “move to Brooklyn.”

But, okay, Jonathan, I'll try to tease this out: Patchen registered the shock of Fordist capitalism in a poetry of spiritual disjunction. I'm not certain he resolved the contradictions he witnessed the 1930s, because his Furies are still tormenting the landscape—no deal was made with them. He got stuck in the non-cathartic tragedy that is the twentieth-century, and got his back smashed in the heroic rescue of a Hollywood starlet. Riding as we are on Minerva's wings, we should see him as the perfect example of postmodernism before Warhol. You know, Pittsburgh and Youngstown are both on the Baltimore & Ohio railway. For his part, d.a. levy discovered that the midwest wanted nothing to do with modernism, or with any of the deep level remedies to the military-industrial complex proposed by the antiwar generation. So he disappeared into the vortex of his solar plexus. He was the Buddhist precursor to Devo and Pere Ubu. Devo-founder Mark Mothersbaugh was a part of the poetry scene in Kent/Cleveland in the mid-70s, before he realized that music and film were a lot easier to make money from. And both you and I have met Charlotte Pressler, Peter Laughner's widow, who donated a huge underground literature collection to UB. Nichol was able to transcend a lot of this heavy historical baggage, perhaps because he was Canadian. Though it’s more likely that, as he stated, he had to replay the phylogeny of modernism in the ontogeny of his work. Most serious poets in Cleveland understand what levy was doing, though one of the Flarf Popes has recently told me he's still shit. So he still gets under the skin of some of the heavy hitters in the National league, which is, to my mind, a productive relationship—as useful to defining a "midwest" poetics as anything else. The history of this kind of poetry and ethics is like the history of salt—you know? How American expansion was in many ways held back for a century or more by the need for salt, and that most settlements beyond Appalachia depended first on finding salt deposits. So, when the Americans and the Nationals come roaming around the provinces for kicks, they might discover these salt mines. Otherwise, they get chicken wings, or as in your fillip, "holdouts".

What connects these three poets is their maintenance throughout their careers of a serious concern for poetry that materializes across artistic practices. They demonstrated an ethics just as much as a poetics—so that, when you read a visual poem, the effect is poetic: its called kenosis, kind of like a good samadhi kick in the ass. A visual poem is not an example of visual art or design, though laborers in these fields do a good amount of poaching from each other. All the rest of the talk about the subject is rhetorical foreplay. But my idea of it, in this offhand definition, might just be a masculine way of seeing things (because it’s only concerned with the blank). So, if I fetishize the “spasm” of the poem, I also know that the trick is to maintain this state for longer and longer periods of time. Great poets know how to do this. It’s like tantra. And it is a lifelong study.
But Ginsberg was right, d.a. levy got too caught up in the fight, and he let anger take over. Patchen, perhaps because of his disability, knew how to keep the teakettle at just the right temperature. Myself, I'm fully, thoroughly, invested in sustainable and renewable resources. The best example I can give for this poetics is the experience I had when I realized, while studying bpNichol's archive in Vancouver, that he had fucked with his own archiving system for his work, and got me to scramble around for an hour looking for "missing" poems that didn't exist—AHA!

Put the reader into the context, put the context into the poem. Be a good whore, love your clients.

You playfully compare me to the Lake Poets, and ask me what “My Edinburgh Review" is. It sounds like a good title for an self-mythologizing literary study. “Call Me Endymion”. Pretty much any of the beautifully allusive non-recognizing recognitions that spurt out of the bloggosphere these days make up the dismissals I come across. I can't say I taken two across the bow lately. It feels more like the "death by a thousand cuts" process (see Aztec reference above). There must be a decent book out there on the case of Lyrical Ballads v. Edinburgh Review. The most I know about the Edinburgh Review comes from John Brewer's book The Pleasures of the Imagination. As I was trying to tell Dale Smith in his blog—I'm just the guy making the sammiches in the kitchen. They want lunch, I give them lunch. Its very, very difficult for me to get invested in ideas of "formations" and canon-this and canon-that, because it’s such a drain of useful energy. Nor am I very interested in pulling oars on a polytechnic research and development trireme. Midwest poetics: get up in the morning, eat your eggs and drink your coffee, and get to fucking work. Everything else is love-love-love (play La Marseillaise here).

Jonathan: We met in the context of the SUNY at Buffalo Poetics Program. Did that program change you in any fundamental way as a poet?

Douglas: Undoubtably. Oddly enough, I had to carry whatever scholarly ability I had with me to Buffalo, because the point of the program wasn't to refine scholars, it was to keep up the pace. And I wasn't ready for the social stratification. We likes it flat in the midwest!! *yawn* "Buildins goin' up to the sky/ people goin' down to the ground" as some crazy folksinger put it. But, honestly, it was an amazing, intense experience. They brought in just about every important writer you can name. And you don't just learn poetics, you learn parlimentary culture. So there was a year or two of feeling, as Linda Russo once said, "crushed by knowledge." And then I became comfortable to mostly watch the goings-on, as I learned my "place". Lots of maps and retorts, diagrams and genetic sequencing lists. Aaron Kunin has a beautiful book in the works called The Mandarin (excerpted in Fence 11:1) which dramatises perfectly how this kind of artistic incubation works. It was collaborative, anarchic, exhilirating, and enormously disillusioning—all useful experiences in the end.

Jonathan: We came in the wake (backwash?) of a vanguard that had hit Buffalo (from the late 'sixties through the early 'nineties, say) but were ultimately interested in making waves of our own. Where do you see the edge, for language arts in these early (yet accelerating) years of the 21st-century?

Douglas: I hate to shift this question away from a survey of the state of the art, but I honestly feel my view is far too limited to pick out any particular names or obligations for the moment. It seems to depend on what any particular writer, or group of writers, feel they have to do, and how well they stay committed to that activity. I am drawn towards poets and writers who understand that they have the incredibly difficult task to work and gain the continuance of their efforts. Careful consideration of the history of literature shows us that much of the discourse around the work is a kind of shuffling of terms, a chess-game, and an attempt at self-invention. Nick Piombino spoke into the virtual air recently—"I don't give a flying fuck how my personhood is doing!" (on the Poetics list, I think). That's the case for the best work going on—and it may seem selfish, and it may seem indifferent, but when you know that what you can provide in the work depends on a way nobody else may understand, or even dislike, you gain a better and better grasp on its meaning, better and better company, and better and better work. Great works are written by Martians, waitresses, martini-drinkers, dishwashers, subway cellists, and ski bums in their chalets out in Aspen. What should accelerate right now is a diversity of means for the work of art that doesn't wreck the ecology. Any work that pursues its question honestly is one that isn't getting caught up in the schizophrenia of trying to be what it already is. And we all benefit from that. But more often than not, we don't know what it is sufficiently to give it a name—so any names provided for this "edge" are already retrospective. But the comfort of working in retrospection and on familiar tropes may also provide for a career and two-car garage. Right now there is an enormous set of means for writers to discover what has been written, and to narrow that enormous potential into a single list of twenty book that will point the way through is ludicrous—I mean, we're no longer interested in just "buy[ting] a goddam big car and driv[ing]" anymore, are we? The landscape may have been vast, but we know now that it really isn't, because everything is connected. And we have to take care to understand when the frame of our potential literature shifts dimensions/shifts planes of reference. It’s important to recognize when some soils are exhausted, and it seems to me, the best writers know how to get continual harvest, even if only on a subsistence level.

Jonathan: You are the founder, editor and publisher of a unique, ambitious and thoughtfully composed 'zine, Celery Flute: the Kenneth Patchen Newsletter. I am interested in how you manage to serve Patchen's (underappreciated) legacy, while directing many of the contents of the newsletter to the present moment. How do you see Kenneth Patchen functioning as a vortex (or insert metaphor of your choice) for present concerns in poetics?

Douglas: I'm not much into the rehabilitation game for great figures—but I am working on an essay about Melville and Patchen right now. As much as I expend a lot of energy trying to figure him out, Patchen remains an anomaly to me. And there still seems to be no explanation for how or where he would fit into American literature, or Modernism more generally. I suppose resolving this question and making an elegant case for him would have gotten me a nice book contract. But the question is still with me, and though it no longer feels as personally determining as it once did—I get an enormous amount of satisfaction and pleasure in working on the questions he poses, one of which, to unfairly minimize (and hopefully not to cheapen it) seems to be: "Damn, you human beings are so nasty, but why do I love you so much?"

Jonathan: In "The Guts & Mechanisms" (Roofing and Siding) you quote a mentor we shared at SUNY Buffalo:

"Words are amphibious, says Bunn,
combining a materially transmitted signifier
supplanted by a superstructural signified."

Elsewhere (in At Any Point), you state that "it is irresponsible to make the world seem less complex than it really is."

I'm drawn to how you hold onto both ends of the amphibian. Your poems often address lyric situations they refuse to clarify. And they mobilize language without resorting to chess moves.

Some readers, I fear, have not the depth to hear your hearing. While others may not care to touch "the little green blackbird hiding in pleine sight." (The context you put your reader in.) Who, then, do you feel you are writing for?

Douglas: James H. Bunn's book Wave Forms is blindingly complex on its own terms, but thanks for bringing that into view. His thesis is that wave-forms in language form a material consistency (a constant) that can be followed from the cognitive and the sonic into the basic rhythms of nature. This proposes an empirically verifiable connection that may get us past the sceptical philosopher's "problem of other minds". A radio signal carries the "superstructural" information of language, and we transpose, or translate, the basic wave (electromagnetic) to the sonic (human speech as sound), into our particular language (English, perhaps) and then into the particular message ("Sonic Youth is playing tonight at the Hollywood Bowl"). The resonance doesn't end, and we can find a meaning at every level. But in our experience this doesn't happen sequentially—what we hear is the message, instantaneously—that part we can use. Love, language, and message pass through the most complex entity in the universe—us. But they also pass through a very complex world and its ten thousand things. Love, language, and the message bring traces of all the other waystations they visited along the way. The poet has to learn all the ways, all the transformations that take place to get from HERE (the lover) to THERE (the beloved): "Come here, tired one, and let me love you, soothe you, and make you whole again." OR: "Lover, I am tired and in pain, please touch me and heal me." I guess that clarifies what the message is—but you can find clarity at any level you would like: "here's what I know about how to love" or "here's how I didn't know, I'm sorry. I'll remember."

The "little green blackbird" image I use in "Sines-poem" is from a seven-part sequence in Kenneth Patchen's book Because It Is—which is included in the new compendium We Meet, coming out this week from New Directions!

Who do I write for? I sometimes write for specific people, I write for communities, my society. I write for my lover, and I write for the one who doesn't, or can’t love. I write when I'm out of my own depths and I don't even know what it is I'm writing or who I'm writing for—etc., etc. I've written for you, Jonathan. My parents. For anybody at any point. But I have recently changed, or have maintained a particular direction in my work, in the poem To Becoming Normal. I constantly "revise for clarity" in the same way I ask my composition students to. Being ambiguous or amphibious can be seen as generous if you realize you are not trying to direct or determine what the reader will experience. But sometimes you want to be direct. I often write to someone. To YOU. Everybody wants a big mac, right? A flavor-blast. If you streamline the process and give the reader the product the same way every time, and they don't have to worry about it, they will go there to find what they were looking for. But maybe some readers will find something in my work. I can’t stop to worry about this too much. And then again, there are some people you don't want touching you. Take it or leave it. Isn't that the baseline function of our capacity for judgment? These pills don't work!! or That shit was superfly.

You mention the lyric situations that my poems refuse to clarify. There is some reticence in the poetic "lover's voice" in my poems, yes—uncertaintly about that use of language, and uncertainty about who, specifically, is looking back at me. Language is the same way. But since I trust myself and other people more and more these days, I invite this "other" insofar as I trust myself, and am able to anticipate, to look forward to, what I can't predict. I've made a lifelong commitment to love, and to express that love in what I write. Consciousness is divine suffering, and consciousness is bliss. Some people may find presumption, patronizing attitudes, or a bit too much self-satisfied pride in my work. Yes, I have heard this from others. And I'm sorry. I really am. Pay it forward.

Jonathan: Sound. I love the extravagance of your word-choice, as much when heavy-handed as when deft. Like the actual bolt screwed through the chapbook version of Love Sounds (Like Perfidy).

Indeed, sound is perfidy in this counter-reformation. (I typed the parentheses wrong in that title, but I like it better now.)

Or sound nowadays is used only modestly, or severely, or systematically, or unrestrictedly, or ironically, or between parentheses. But what about sweet nuzzling sounds. Unleashed sounds. Thrushes that make the woods ring. When we use them we lose our hall pass. Yet anyone will listen in, peeping Dimmesdales.

In "That One Thing (on sublimation)," you rap on the feminine endings—expectation, transformation, realization, compunction, duration, anticipation, location—bringing back certain words like a sestina teaser. Or like a quenine. You flirt with oulipian sounds (for instance), but won't grid your poems. (Or did you write one for Stalling's Grid?)

You bring into poetry the non-meaning sounds of your life in music. At the same time, and interestingly enough, your critical rap focuses on visual poetry.

Douglas: Putting a bolt through a book was a heavy-handed thing to do. It left a hole in the center of the text. It split the book into "above" and "below". It seemed at that time that what I had loved betrayed me, and the poem got included in that feeling. I was also feeling that the conversational implicature of the words "I love you" could be heard as a kind of command to do something very harmful to oneself. Of course, one may come home unexpectedly and overhear their beloved having sex with someone else. Or, in turn, you open the door and find a Dimmesdale in the hallway. Its really sad. Yes, I lost my hallpass, but they didn’t tell me until three years later.

I do have a poem in Jonathan Stalling's grid book. I used the idea of the "shell game" for that one: I / You / We –under which shell do we come together?

Jonathan: Where does your emphasis on sound come from, then, and where do you think it is headed?

Douglas: Well, my emphasis on sound isn't from anything I can specifically name. I guess I'm vedic in that way—sound is both source and destination. As for my writing on visual poetry: Visual works vibrate. Great visual works vibrate greatly. Same thing—wave forms.

Jonathan: I won't ask you about America, or the sinking carbon economy, since we know your answers (though I can't wait to read the Melville essay), but do you think now that the future has gone South (God help them), or in the North we can look forward to the benefits of a future in reverse? Will you watch the olympic games?

Douglas: Well, I do love the South! Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas—I've met more generous and genuine people in these states than I can tell you about here. And these are beautiful, beautiful geographies. Read William Bartram's Travels. I guess any "regional" predictions about the future would have more to do with making good rather than bad economic, emotional and environmental choices, and with giving up on the terrible idea that we can't stop doing something wrong once we've started doing it. Any rhetoric of "us vs. them" is exploitative—is used to push buttons and collect $200—it is offensive to the conscience, and offensive to what we really know about ourselves as human beings. Our culture, if American, is a fluid one, it changes. I can't define that identity in any other way. If there is a hope for a "static" American culture, well, then, hand over the embalming fluid, and we will mourn. I like to recite Mr. Rogers’ poem about "what do you do with the mad in you" which he read at a Senate appropriations hearing for PBS back in 1968. If my poetic project is the consistent examination of the components of identity, one of the first to be deconstructed are the false binaries. Hey, I played my first games for the American league! Jonathan, don't paint in such broad swathes: I plan on writing a series of Pindaric odes to the olympians.

But I really have no idea what you mean by a "future in reverse.” And a "carbon economy” is just a buzzword, isn't it? Aren't we made of carbon? Isn't this our house??

Joshua Cohen, "Aim"

2008-07-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

Continuing our in-house journal, here's a new short fiction by Joshua Cohen, author of A Heaven of Others.

Aim

He was six or seven and this was fun, it was fun being in the woods, doing everything in the woods with dads and his dad and the other boys their sons, hunting or pretending to hunt or fish, making fire with three matches (collecting tinder, branches), pitching tents and breaking it all down again, the campfire stories, the gear.
When you had to piss you'd go deep into the woods away from camp, always bring another boy with you; it was good and not shaming if the other boy had to piss, too, or only said he did.
Then, if he had to piss, you'd stand about five six feet apart and face each other and, careful not to piss on each other (though that sometimes happened), piss at each other, trying as hard as you could not to cross the streams but to merge them into one stream where they would deflect each other down to the ground. But this skill could only be sustained for a moment or two, at a uniformity of flow.

Later (years) aim was tested from the train platform, the El. Waiting was boring so you'd talk sex while smoking cigarettes with other friends from college. When the tobacco taste hurt your mouth and the cigarette was almost done you'd spit over the railing to the street (careful not to hit a passerby), then drop your lit cigarette butt trying to land it and so snuff it directly in the spit puddle (again, careful not to hit a passerby). You tried for three years including summers, you dropped out; you only hit it once.

For your grandfather it had been taking the gun they'd given them, loading it with bullet then shooting that into a German, and with your father it was similar in Asia: you pulled the trigger and suddenly, motion stopped, behind that shed door outside Aachen or a stand of bamboo … Sometimes you saw your victim, before or after you killed him, other times not. Still, there was no doubt he was there: He, in turn, could kill you. He took aim and you, too, were a target.
Not him. He sat at a desk embedded with a screen. When a light blipped on the screen he pressed a button, a bullet was launched remotely, then the light disappeared, eventually, ten nine eight, the light was destroyed. There was no danger to this work. There was no aim, and his finger could not miss that little white circle that was the same size and shape and color as his mother's nipple. What was necessary was only that he "Pay Attention." Every three hours he was relieved from duty to eat dinner, or take a piss — which he did, pissing, alone and with his eyes closed the entire time.

Harold Jaffe, from "Paris 60: Docufictions"

2008-07-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

This month begins a new direction for this blog, as we are going to start featuring recent works by our 13 Starcherone authors, with new works appearing every week or so, creating a type of journal from our list. American fiction is moribund and predictable; its most well-heeled promoters are intentionally looking to print works in already tested formulae, and as a result fiction is the most conservative of all contemporary art forms. This is a small attempt to give voice to an alternative, to renew the art form. Starcherone Books tries to publish and promote the types of non-mainstream authors ignored by big publishing.

The following are from an unpublished manuscript by veteran fiction writer Jaffe, called Paris 60. Its 60 pieces were each composed in Paris, as dated semi-documentary, semi-fictive journal entries.

4.3 Dracula
I saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula walking in the Tuileries gardens.
It was daytime, the sun was out, he looked splenetic, distinctly out of sorts.
His head (with the widow’s peak, Asian eyes) was bent.
He was wearing black.
(Of course French males wear black as a rule.
Whether for reasons of style, tacit devotion, grieving, or indirect satire, has never been established).
Lugosi as Dracula was wearing black for his own immemorial reasons.
Looking hard, I thought I made out a sharpened canine.
At that moment I heard a bird sound—a raven on a dead chestnut tree clacking like a woodpecker.
It was warm, the raven could have been in courting mode.
Bela Lugosi died in 1956, and here we are eight years into the Millennium with a small hyper-ambitious man named Sarko at the helm.
Lugosi didn’t die, his morphine habit and quality time as Dracula on those Hollywood sets sucked up death and vomited it back out as life eternal.
These off-center formulations unreeled rapidly in my chest.
When I came to my senses (if that’s what they are), I thought of following him.
But he was gone, disappeared into nuclear springtime.
Then I remembered the dream I had in my small bed in my small Paris flat.
Alongside someone else, unidentified, I was looking across a broad verdant landscape when suddenly it began to sink behind the horizon until it disappeared.
I turned to the person by my side and said: “It’s over at last.”

4.6 Solitude
Baudelaire in Paris Spleen goes on about the virtues of solitude.
This was before the advent of the Internet.
After despising Parisians with whom you’re compelled to interact daily, returning to your flat at dusk and securing the locks on the door would seem reassuring.
The cask of laudanum, half-open bottle of absinthe, and hashish laced with opium are arguably more productive than surfing the Net or watching a DVD.
I’ve been isolated in New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Quito, Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi, Paris.
Paris is the most evocative city in which to be alone.
It is only the French who admit, or do not deny, the fou and folle.
The mad and palpably deviant.
Not the functionally mad: bankers, corporate chieftains, uniformed child-murderers.
Those are welcome everywhere in the First World.
I mean the dysfunctional who smell bad, can’t decipher the métro do nothing “right” but dream and rant.
True, Sade was imprisoned and Artaud institutionalized, but there were mitigating circumstances.
Parisians cross the boulevard at the red.
Drive their cars and motorcycles on the sidewalks.
Litter the Bois de Bologne with condoms.
Love their dogs but don’t pick up the dog shit.
They welcome, at least in principle, the transgressive tradition in art and letters.
After a bad day with bad people, cross-dressing or undressing,
Getting high on anything,
Then going out in the Paris dark to a film festival or gallery opening and sexually groping the human or sub-human to your left,
Stabbing him in the thigh with the poisoned tip of your umbrella,
It’s a rush, cathartic, very satisfying.
And Paris is the only major city I know that grants you your donnée, won’t even turn around to glare.

4.8 Nose
Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Aznavour, Bonaparte, Sade, Le Grand Charles, Sarko himself . . .
The prominent nose accords with the broad forehead of Descartes.
With the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame, flying buttresses, gargoyles.
The intricate streets and rooftops of Paris.
Redondo Beach, California, is a Pacific Ocean beach city in Los Angeles County.
Silicon-rather than carbon-based, one might say.
Profile-less as the computer.
Females are blonde and tall with flat, pretty faces.
Males are blond and rangy with flat, handsome faces.
The male voice is low, without timbre.
Like the radiant Pacific when the tide is out.
It came to pass that a well known philosophe from Paris was on
his way to deliver a lecture in the Flemish city of Antwerp.
Sitting next to him in the first-class cabin of the Air France-slash-Delta Airlines aircraft was a champion surfer from Redondo Beach.
He was on his way to a high-level competition near the Flemish city of
Knokke-Heist, on the North Sea, where for obscure reasons, the surf was breaking abnormally high.
Each of the principals was according to type: the philosophe, 49-years-old,
medium height, sallow with an imposingly broad forehead and De Gaulle-like proboscis.
The surfer, 23-years-old, tall, rangy, broad-shouldered, sun-bronzed, with blond hair, a flattish face, very white teeth, and a small upturned nose.
It might have happened after the complimentary champagne (two small bottles each) that the unlikely pair got into a conversation in English (the philosophe was fluent), and decided to exchange identities.
The six-foot-four-inch surfer with the blond hair and flat face would deliver the lecture (on Gilles Deleuze) at the University of Antwerp, respond to questions from the distinguished audience, be honored at dinner, then return to his senior post at the Université Paris-Sorbonne.
While the sallow-faced philosophe with the Cartesian nose, who could not swim, let alone surf, would compete in the surfing competition near Knokke-Heist, from there fly to Hawaii for another surfing competition, then return to Redondo Beach, California and smoke a joint.
This exchange was validated with a handshake, the surfer’s long, tanned hand tenderly enclosing the philosophe’s delicate fingers.
Was the extraordinary transfer of identities implemented?
The aircraft crashed while trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the short Antwerp International Airport runway.
No survivors.

4.9 Cannonball
Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, jazz alto saxophonist and composer, especially known for his bebop arrangements, was living in Paris between 1959 and ’63.
He changed apartments three or four times, first living in the 14th close to Saint Anne Hospital; next in the Marais, then in the Belleville quarter.
While in Belleville he was visited by his younger brother Nat, a virtuosic jazz cornetist.
Cannonball opened the door, he and his brother embraced, Nat said:
--Man, this is a small pad.
Cannonball laughed:
--Yeah, it’s a small pad. But it’s a small pad in Paris.
They both laughed.
Over a drink, Cannonball said:
--Notice the Parisian women?
--Damn right, Nat said. Real lookers. Elegant.
--You got it, Cannonball said.
Nat sipped his gin.
--Are all the bathrooms as small and dark as this one?
--Most of ‘em, yeah, Cannonball said. Some have bathtubs but no showers. Others--it’s the other way around.
--How can a French chick look so fresh in a bathroom like that? Nat said. How can she apply her makeup ‘n shit?
--That’s the 64,000 dollar question, right there, Cannonball laughed.
They sipped their gin.
--How’s the music going? Nat asked.
--Good chops here, kid bro. The audiences dig us. Ain’t many black folks in the audience, true. But you remember that singin’ soul sister Josephine Baker? They loved her in Paris.
--I heard ‘bout that, Nat said. Was a long time ago. And she showed her titties, as I recall. Me, I’ll do some shit, but not that.
They laughed and sipped their gin.
--I can’t tell you how it all goes down, Cannonball said. But they seem to understand what we’re up to much better than that other place.
Nat feigned surprise.
--You don’t mean America?
--Polish your horn, Cannonball said. You gone see fuh yo’sef at our gig tomorrow night.

4.10 Fast Train
First class on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris.
Every seat taken but one, next to a middle-aged man sitting near the window.
I face a family of three: mother, son, grandmother.
The son, about 10 years old, called Alfonse, can’t sit still; he stands on one foot, hops down the aisle, kicks the air like a kung fu warrior, puffs out his cheeks and makes goofy faces.
(Americans would label his condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and attribute it to a malfunctioning brain).
The mother and grandmother appeal to the boy.
“Alfonse, Arrête-toi!.
“Alfonse, Viens ici!”
Alfonse ignores them.
Mother and grandmother glance at each other in familiar futile frustration.
Meanwhile, the middle-aged man who alone has an empty seat beside him has gestured to Alfonse and, astonishingly, coaxes the boy over.
The man gets up from his window seat, sits on the aisle, and manages to get Alfonse to sit by the window.
Once seated, the man talks to him softly, and while he talks Alfonse looks at the floor or actually looks at the man without jerking his body or twisting his face.
Next, the man puts his hand gently on Alfonse’s back and begins to stroke.
I’m reminded of a documentary I saw of one of Mother Teresa’s nuns stroking the back of a severely traumatized Palestinian boy.
Alfonse responds to the gentle stroking the way a feral cat, temporarily appeased, might respond.
Are the mother and grandmother suspicious of the obviously homosexual man stroking their child?
Pas du tout.
The mother and her mother smile and exchange a look which says silently: Unexpected relief. Thank you, Monsieur, whoever you may be.
For his part, the man is now talking softly, almost lovingly to the boy, while stroking his back with longer, more penetrating strokes.
Alfonse occasionally responds with a few words.
Even when he doesn’t talk, the boy seems relaxed, almost at peace.
This continues for the duration of the trip, which is about three hours.
When the train pulls into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, I watch the middle-aged man trade friendly, low-key goodbyes with the mother, grandmother and with Alfonse.
He.tousles the boy’s hair.
The family and the man go in opposite directions.

Quinnehtukqut a Finalist for First Novelist Prize

2008-05-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

Visit Quinnehtukqut here.

Joshua Harmon's novel, Quinnehtukqut, has been named one of three finalists for the Virginia Commonwealth University First Novelist Award.

Quinnehtukqut traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life beyond her family's farm in Northern New Hampshire. In varied and musical language, Quinnehtukqut interweaves Martha's story with those of the dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd's expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. Elegiac and lyrical, evocative and visionary, Quinnehtukqut reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people through its vivid study of the New England landscape.

Quinnehtukqut was published in 2007 by the Buffalo, NY-based small press, Starcherone Books. It is the only one of the three finalists for the VCU prize published by an independent small press. The other two finalists were issued by Dial/Random House and Vintage/Penguin, respectively. The much-lauded first novel by Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, finished as a semi-finalist.

Quinnehtukqut may be ordered from Starcherone directly or from your favorite bookseller.

Starcherone at AWP-NYC

2008-01-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

[photo: Aimee Parkison & I in NYC a coupla years back]

Starcherone Books's appearance at this year's Associated Writing Programs conference and book fair, Jan.31-Feb.2, will be the largest gathering of its authors in one place ever. We don't ever all get to see each other -- but folks are coming in from Denver, California, North Carolina, and Wisconsin; I'm driving down from Buffalo with fellow Starcheree, Doug Manson; and then we've got more folks who are already in the NY-metro area. In all, 10 Starcherone book authors may well be in one place at one time -- I think the most we ever had before was 4 -- and that's in addition to our staff and all the writers who graced our PP/FF anthology a couple years back. I am tingling.

While some conference events are limited to registered participants (costly, and they sold out anyway!), the Book Fair is open to the public on Saturday, Feb. 2. If you are in New York, I urge you to check it out -- this is the largest small press book festival in the world, and everyone sells at discount, especially late in the day Saturday. It will be taking place at the New York Hilton, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, in Midtown, and it's free to get in (that day).

Starcherone authors signings will be taking place at our book table #94 all three days -

Thursday, 1/31: 11 am - Sara Greenslit, The Blue of Her Body
2 pm - Joshua Cohen, A Heaven of Others

Friday, 2/1: 11 am - Aimee Parkison, Woman with Dark Horses
1 pm - Nina Shope, Hangings: Three Novellas

Saturday, 2/2: 12 noon - Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey
2 pm - Joshua Harmon, Quinnehtukqut

The grand culmination of it all will be a celebration reading Saturday night in the East Village with all six of these authors (Greenslit, Cohen, Parkison, Shope, Harmon, & Mason) reading from their work at KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St., 7-9 pm, hosted by yours truly. More info can be seenat the KGB site.

If you are registered for AWP, you are also invited to come check out a panel I'm on with authors R.M. Berry, Michael Martone, and Noy Holland from FC2: "Fraud! The Debunking of Experimental Fiction." Should be fun -- and good for you!

Hope to see you all there, one way or another! Please come by and say hello or introduce yourself.

--
PS - A new interview with Joshua Cohen on the eve of the release of A Heaven of Others appears in the Jan. 16 Jewish Forward.

The Year in Reviews

2007-12-29T15:41:00.000-08:00

[image is from Joshua Cohen's notebook for A Heaven of Others]

More than any year since we began publishing books in 2000, Starcherone publications garnered terrific reviews in 2007. Here's a listing of these reviews (at least most of them), with links to those that can be found online:

Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut:

Jeff Hansen, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 07/08, p. 44: "'The Legend of Jimmy Frye' is reason enough to get this book."

Anne Cammon, KGBBarLit: "a bold effort from a new writer eager to push the boundaries of storytelling."

John Cotter, "Voices in the Woods," Open Letters Monthly, November 2007.

Alexander Nazaryan, "The Wood Demons: Wilderness, darkness, and drink in a debut novel," Village Voice.

Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body

Mary Cappello, "Monstrous Beings in Need of a Hair Wash," Women's Review of Books, November/December 2007, p. 20-22: "an extended prose poem passing as a novel."

Daniel Green, "The Silence She Sought," The Reading Experience: A LIterature and Criticism Blog, May 29, 2007.

Harold Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave

Steve Shaviro, "Strategies for the War on Culture," American Book Review, November/December 2007, p. 20-21: "Harold Jaffe is pissed off. As he ought to be. As we all ought to be."

Gary Lain, Belphegor, June 2007

Michael Filas, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2007, p. 47: "The essays especially bring in an element of earnestness and personal conviction, nakedly revealing the heart and courage for which Jaffe is so often noted."

Larry Fondation, "Nonfiction: Writing as Warfare," Brooklyn Rail, April 2007

PP/FF: An Anthology, ed. Peter Conners

Chris Murray, "A Fluxifyin' Concoction, PP/FF: can we have our say and play it too?", Sentence #5, p. 271-4.

Peter Bricklebank, "Neither/Nor Fish/Fowl (NN/FF)," American Book Review, January/ February 2007, p. 6-7.

"Rants & Raves" exchange between Peter Conners and Peter Bricklebank, American Book Review, September/October 2007, p. 3.

Jeffrey DeShell's Peter: An (A)Historical Romance

John Domini, "Par(enthetical)ody," American Book Review, January/February 2007, p. 9.

This list includes only reviews from 2007 (PP/FF & DeShell had a lot more last year). Look for more in 2008! And in the meantime, check out these 2007-08 Starcherone author pages:

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (worth it for the hilarious FAQ alone!)

Joshua Harmon's blog

JoshuaCohen.org

As well as the interview about publishing I gave last February in Conversations in the Book Trade.

Happy New Year!

PP/FF Podcast [link]

2007-12-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

How did I miss this for a whole year?

Starts with an interview with Peter Conners, then goes on to a reading from the anthology featuring Thom Ward, Ethan Paquin, Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Geoffrey Gatza, Christopher Kennedy, Peter Conners, and Tony Leuzzi.

A Rave for Quinnehtukqut [link]

2007-11-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

John Cotter, Open Letters Monthly

Quinnehtukqut
Joshua Harmon
Starcherone Books, 2007

{This month's issue of Open Letters features a lead review of Joshua Harmon's Quinnehtukqut by John Cotter, who calls it "the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years...." Read on.... - ed.}

Vermont shares so smooth a northern border with New York, you could finish their maps with a straight edge and a single stroke. But travel one state over, and you’ll find the Canadian border as complex and cragged as the spider web of wide rivers and narrow lakes that shape it. They are the headwaters of the Connecticut River (“Kwenitekq or Quinatucquet—something like that the native tribesmen called their Great River, speaking so low in their throats”). Here, briefly, was once an independent nation, “The Republic of Indian Stream,” and here is the spiritual home of Joshua Harmon’s haunting novel Quinnehtukqut, the most accomplished debut I’ve read in years.

An unassuming package, Quinnehtukqut’s dull beige cover reproduces a period photograph of a couple of backwoods swells smirking outside a clapboard post office. It looks eerily like a snap from one of those Arcadia collections: Images of [Your Town] drawn from historic post cards and documents. As soon as you open the book and read a few lines, you’ll find Quinnehtukqut to be the opposite of that black and white embalming fluid with which we set our local histories. Here is a whole shelf of books: adventure stories, tearjerker romances, historical curios, post-modern poetry, fairytales. Reading Quinnehtukqut is like dropping a dozen of these books on the sofa next to you (what a friend of mine used to call “full-contact reading”), and skipping from book to book, until it gradually dawns on you that that the same current runs through all of them. The story is the same; only the weather changes.

Harmon is a brave writer, and one of the novel’s great strengths is its daring mix of narrative styles: from a straight third-person which easily shuttles back and forth through time, to haunting impressionistic monologues, to jagged, folkloric nuggets and parallel narratives that creep alongside one another on the page. What’s remarkable about this mixture of methods is how accessible it is. Harmon takes care to provide lots of concrete detail, the “whipchords, puttees, suspenders, crumpled and battered hats” of the old New Hampshire settlers, and the feel of the woods, the “dirt, dirt worn smooth, the twigs ironlike, the spruce bark and frozen pitch.” [continued...]

{for more, click the link above.}

{to purchase Quinnehtukut, click here.}

The Odyssey, or, What's in the Horse?

2007-11-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

Zachary Mason's book The Lost Books of the Odyssey just came back from the printer and I am beside myself with anticipation to see what people think of this book. It was the winner of our 2nd most recent contest, judged by Carole Maso -- and I remember Carole writing to me about it after the judging was done and saying, "You're really lucky to have found this one." It's a miracle of a book -- for his debut, Zachary Mason has imagined a long-lost ur-text of the Odyssey, with alternate episodes, fragments, retelling and the like of the original, and rendered it in such stunning fashion that Harry Mathews (whom Mason wrote, out of the blue) had this to say:

"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odyssey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes — Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) — the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three.”

OK, OK, I won't make this a simple press release. I have more to tell. Dig this picture of sculptures that Mason commissioned to enclose review copies sent to five major reviewers -- Harper's, NY Times Book Review, NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and LA Times Book Review. Each review copy, wrapped in white crepe paper written over with gold calligraphy, goes inside a sculpture.

I take no credit for this -- this was Zach's idea -- and one of the smarter and more stylish book campaigns I've seen. Now hopefully it will work, and people will pay attention to this absolutely singular book -- a book I can honestly say (though such a statement is subjective, and there's a disagreement in the very next post) is the most impressive first novel I have ever seen.

Since the originals of these are off to do their business and will be seen by relatively few people, I wanted to show them here. You gotta go a long way these days to try to get a review these days for a small press book! But this book especially is one I hope people really pay attention to.

Go to Mason's Starcherone page to order the book here.

An Interview with Joshua Cohen

2007-10-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

In from the printer this week, with review copies now starting to go out, is Joshua Cohen's new novel, A Heaven of Others. Despite the fact that Cohen is just 27, this is his fourth book. Most recently, his Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto drew raves from venues as diverse as Library Journal and Bookslut, the former saying the book "just might become a cult classic." A Heaven of Others is scheduled for a February 2008 release, but copies are available now exclusively on Cohen's Starcherone page.

I interviewed Josh over the last couple days via email.

STARCHY: Today, so-called "experimental" writing seems often to be labeled such simply to be dismissed; a review of Schneidermann, for instance, refers to the "much-maligned 'experimental' genre" -- as if it's a surprise that your book would be good. Where do you think the state of fiction is today? Is there hope of transcending this rhetorical ghettoizing and reawakening a sense of excitement in the discoveries one can make as an innovative artist who happens to be working in
fiction?

COHEN: Having never worked in marketing or managed a business, I can only tell you how labeling, as you say, or categorization, feels: both as a book reviewer, and as a writer of fiction. I earn a living as a book reviewer - or critic - for The Forward. I know from experience that categorizing a book as X or Y is much easier than explaining it as it is. I also know this: Categorization is the ultimate technique by which book reviewing is reduced to salesmanship.

Now as a writer of fiction, being labeled "experimental" feels anywhere from humiliating to enraging - depending on day of week, position of stars, and who under them might be doing the labeling. It's like being called an African - if it means anything at all, it's neglect; it's the Western hubris to have to know what you're ignoring. As for "the state of fiction" – let me say this: As I don't believe in bins, categories or genres, I don't believe in "experimentation," either. "Experimentation" is often just trying to say something in a way that isn't blemished or compromised. I don't like the language of progress in art. I like to read a writer in history, but I don't like to read a writer making history – "experimenting." Such "experiments" almost always result in foolishness and, conversely, expose the writer as desperate product of his or her day and its immediate ambition or concern. Given that, I should be happy with "the state of fiction" - as everybody's writing so expectedly and unprogressively of late. Why, then, am I not happy? I never am.

Lastly, you ask is there any hope of "transcendence"? I don't know. I think there might be. You write and try not to die, and one day you and the culture begin speaking the same language. If worthy, you become less a description and more an individual: At some point, postmortem, Melville was no longer regarded or referred to as a maritime writer; just like Nietzsche transcended "existential philosophy" and Freud "psychology" – a category he created himself! - to become two of last century's greatest writers, period. Hopefully, my book won't only be read by Jews or the Philosemitic…

STARCHY: That would be a shame. Your book comes from a perspective, in that there are certain markers that identify it as the work of a Jewish author, from the identity of the protagonist, to the closing date marker, "Yom Hazikaron, 2004," which I had to look up to find out is Memorial Day or, more particularly, at least according to Wikipedia, "Israel Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day." But it is a book that, to its very core, challenges intolerance. I'd like to hear you talk about this: you have said that this is a "political" book. What are its politics, to the extent that one wishes to articulate them beyond what the book itself says?

COHEN: Swedenborg, working freelance, mapped the Christian heaven. The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Koran and various Arabic poetries, Hadith and other homiletic commentary (I've profited from that of Ibn Kathir). The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery — it's mystic. Jews believe in olam haba — lit. "The World to Come," which is, accurately, this world if and when Messianically perfected, and not "The Next World," or any other world, for that matter, past or future. Because Jews have this world and only this world, then, they have been particularly sensitive to the lives they live on and of it.
To example: Martyrdom, or suicide, is forbidden in Judaism. The only way a Jew might become martyred is if he or she is killed, not if they kill themselves.

In "A Heaven of Others" a Jewish boy (he's an Israeli, but he's also a Jew) is exploded by a suicide bomber, and ascends, mistakenly, to the Muslim Heaven. He's on the wrong side of the wall, and without a passport — this is, in itself, and even if mistaken, a political act.

But before we get any further, some thoughts: Baruch Spinoza, who denied the divine authorship and so authenticity of Scripture, died a century before the founding of America with its Constitution, and still we're having this discussion of religion vs. politics. Our current American president has exampled, once again, that the more religious the politician, the more dangerous. A religious person like W. Bush can justify his politics, though, because this isn't it for him — there's more (and it's a shame that since 2001 "religion" has meant "ideology," and "politics" can only be had by Western democracies and not by those native to deserts). According to the theology of this Administration and, too, to the theology of every terrorist that wants to kill Americans, Israelis and Jews, today does not have to be tended if a tomorrow awaits. Earth and humanity can be defiled and murdered, these people think, because heaven is inexhaustibly ours — only, that is, if you're a believer. It follows that there is no such thing as a nihilist suicide terrorist, or a brave or courageous suicide terrorist — because true belief wins over nihilism, because religious conviction will always oppose any individual or personal sense. All of that said, the politics of this book are simple, almost simple-minded: I believe in peace. I believe in the world here and now. Spinoza said that he considered "reality" and "perfection" synonymous terms. He was saying, in effect: This is the only world and the only life we have, or that we know we have. "We" not just being Spinoza's Jews anymore, but — as the Age of Reason created the Enlightenment — everyone.

There are a number of old questions I ask anew in the book: Are people still religious in Heaven? Does a Sabbath exist in Heaven? Are there foods one may or may not eat? Do dead people pray, why and for what? The absurdity of these questions marks the corpse of my private politics and religious belief like the tape around a police scene.

STARCHY: I wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea about this book – there are these terrifically sweet and sad moments of the boy's remembrance and evocation of life with his Aba, his father, family meals and shopping expeditions, and you do a remarkable job tenderly rendering the circumscribed life of a ten year-old child, outside/unaware of all the dreck of political labels and machinations before the end of his earthly life. One of the things that impressed our readers when we first saw this book was its work in the discourse of fiction. Not that it didn't signify in other ways—certainly it did, and powerfully. But what is it that fiction does or sets out to do that you find powerful and persuasive? You are also a reviewer and an essayist, and we have been told at times of late that in today's world, only non-fiction will truly suffice. How would you respond, in terms of articulating the importance of fiction as art and/or discourse?

COHEN: Here's Spinoza again. He said that the true was true and the false was false, but fiction was pure possibility — the way things could have or would have happened, or will. It's true that nonfiction has gained prominence, lately. This is because there's a crisis of record. With so much information, with so much of so much, we seem to have developed a deep need for the bottommost truth, a craving for what or who really is real.

We want to know the facts, according to Them, and then we want to know the facts, according to Us. And then we want to make a synthesis of the two, enabling us to think ourselves enlightened, open-minded. Most "facts," though, are actually facts of facts, are winnowed-down, or sieved: We find ourselves wounded by bullet-points, bombarded by dates and laid flat on timelines, crucified by twelve steps, Ten Commandments. Fiction, though, refuses to homogenize or come to consensus. The "persuasion" of fiction, as you put it, is just that: its argumentative passion, its unrelentingly subjective agenda. A
hundred histories attempt objectivity on the history of Israel and Palestine, and none achieve it. In their fear of irrationality, they lose heart. I should stress that I'm not trying to make an argument in favor of what's been called Relativism — I'm speaking not about or within history, but around history, outside history. It's between the failures or abuses of history (violence predicated on religion, for one, political discrimination predicated on race, for another) that we
find the possibility of fiction, which is the success of the individual over the mass or a God — whatever entity that presumes to tell the writer who he is, who he should be, what he should do and think, and when and where to think and do it. I have come to believe that fiction is a form of agnosticism, the highest and most respectful form of doubt.

STARCHY: What are you working on next?

COHEN: "Next" has been for the last seven years: As of September 2007, I've finished work on a novel, an epic, about the last Jew in the world. I call the book "Graven Imaginings." Its first sentence is: "In the beginning, they are late." When will it be published? That would be my next question, were I interviewing myself...

At long last ... The Winner!

2007-08-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

JANET MITCHELL's short story collection THE LAST OF THIS DAY’S LIGHT has won the 5th Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction!

2007-08 Contest Press Release - August 1, 2007 -
JANET MITCHELL is the winner of the 2007-08 Starcherone Fiction Prize competition. MITCHELL's manuscript, THE LAST OF THIS DAY’S LIGHT, was selected by Final Judge Lance Olsen from Starcherone Books and publication in our 2008-09 season.

About the contest: Mitchell's manuscript was one of five finalists for the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, a blind-judged contest focusing on innovative fiction, now in its fifth year, which began with a pool of 190 entrants.

The remaining finalists, announced at the beginning of last month, can now also have their identities revealed. They are:

Jai Clare – Whore to Evolution
Affinity Konar – Abecedaria
Fred Muratori – Nothing in the Dark
Terese Svoboda - Pirate Talk, or Mermalade

5 Honorable Mentions, also listed alphabetically, have also been designated:

Ari Aster, Samuel Barthowe at Your Service
Sandra Jacobs, The Before Life
Nick Mamatas, Prying Open My Third Eye
Bryson Newhart, Fibonacci Time
Tom Whalen, The Straw That Broke

About The Winner, The Last of This Day’s Light:

The generic titles of stories in this collection (“The Father Story,” “The Carpentry Story,” “The School Story,” etc.) are misleading, because in each of these 16 stories Janet Mitchell displays a distinctive, exuberant, playful, and surreal talent for language that always feels fresh and is full of insights about families and childhood, small towns and prophets, life and death. This is a debut and a talent to take seriously.

In awarding Mitchell the prize, Final Judge Lance Olsen said, "These energizing, sparklingly imaginative, at times downright visionary stories – one, for instance, by a monkey bemoaning its aging elephant colleague at the circus; another about a woman who wants her mother stuffed and made pretty when she dies; others about mysterious metalogical creatures, a brutal college rape, a patricide – often form a necklace of deceptively childlike voices moving through an avant-gothic cosmos. But they are as much, if not more, about the beauties of surprising, rhythmic prose, as well, the syllabic stuff you can taste on the tongue. This book marks the advent of an exhilarating new voice and vision in the contemporary literary jungle."

About the Author:

In May 2005, JANET MITCHELL received her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was the Bingham Scholarship recipient in her second year. Her short stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Pomona Valley Review, and have been optioned by Lifetime Television as well as by independent producers.

Janet earned her Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from the University of Southern California, where she won the coveted John Huston Award for Best Director and a prestigious Paramount Pictures Fellowship. Her award-winning short film, "How Does Anyone Get Old?", starring Mark Ruffalo and Mina Badie, was featured on IFC's "Inside the Indies" and on NBC's "Starwatch." Her educational video, "Behind Closed Doors" won a Cine Golden Eagle and is currently being used in over 250 schools nationwide.

As a freelance writer, Janet has worked for such companies as E!, Paramount Classics and Delta Airlines.

----

Finally...
Thank you to all our contestants -- this year's judging was very intense and difficult largely due to the superb quality of a great many of the manuscripts. We are very happy that all of you chose to participate. Your participation has set the bar for winning this contest very high and resulted in the Starcherone Fiction Prize having become one of the most successful and frequently imitated literary contests in the United States. You are all to be thanked – for your talents and your dreams.

Ted Pelton
Executive Director
Starcherone Books
PO Box 303
Buffalo, NY
14201
716-885-2726
http://www.starcherone.com
http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com
ted@starcherone.com
_________________

Starcherone Finalists Announcement

2007-06-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

Here are the titles of our five finalists. These manuscripts have been passed on to Final Judge Lance Olsen with the authors' names remaining undisclosed.

The titles are:

Abecedaria
The Last of This Day's Light: Stories
Nothing in the Dark
Pirate Talk, or, Mermalade
Whore to Evolution

This contest, our fifth, has been by far our deepest in terms of manuscript quality, and this made our decisions extremely difficult. Many terrific books had to be eliminated from contention, simply due to the limitations of the contest and what we are able to accomplish as a small press. In order to help promote some of these worthy manuscripts, 15 more entries will be designated with Honorable Mentions. These will be announced when our final decisions are announced, in late July/early August. We are currently running about a week ahead of schedule, so check this blog for an announcement beginning in mid-July.

Finally a new sampler

2007-06-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Month in, month out, except during the high-water months of our contest in January (submits) and August (winner announcement), the most action on our webpage comes from people downloading the Starcherone sampler.

Lazy me hasn't updated the damn thing since 2005.

Well, lazy me no more! Here it is, FINALLY, A NEW SAMPLER!

It's 89 pages of free fiction highlighting our most recent publications, featuring:

Sara Greenslit, "Falconiformes," an excerpt from her novel The Blue of Her Body

Harold Jaffe, "Suicides," from his collection, Beyond the Techno-Cave

Ted Pelton (me), "Kitchen on Fire," from Endorsed by Jack Chapeau 2 and reprinted in the anthology, PP/FF, edited by Peter Conners

Jeffrey DeShell, an excerpt from his novel, Peter: An (A)Historical Romance

Nina Shope, "Elevation," from the anthology, PP/FF, edited by Peter Conners

Joshua Harmon, "Quinnehtukqut, 1893-1947," from his novel, Quinnehtukqut

But as to why else you may be reading this, here's an update: I'm still reading contest manuscripts, every day, every waking hour, helped by Starcherone's terrific staff. And we're getting close, in what is proving our most competitive year ever (I have no idea who will win)! The next post on this site, I promise, will announce the five finalists -- maybe this coming weekend, and no later than the end of the month --

In the meantime, check out FINALLY, A NEW SAMPLER -- it's exciting work, various in form and style, and the best possible introduction to all that is Starcherone Books! (And don't be afraid, if you like something, to BUY THE BOOK IT CAME FROM. WE'RE A BROKE, VOLUNTEER-RUN NON-PROFIT! WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!

Harp & Altar Fan Letter

2007-06-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

Eugene Lim wrote me recently:

"We've started a new electronic journal, Harp & Altar.
Our latest issue has new fiction from Corey Frost, Joanna Howard,
Steve Katz, and Johannah Rodgers. More info below. We're also
accepting submissions for a Fall issue and are hoping to make a home
for experimental and innovative fiction. If you could put out the word
on the Now What or the Starcher blog, it would be much appreciated.

"I also wanted to send a note of appreciation. For some time now,
as simply a reader of experimental fiction, I've been admiring the
growth of your press and its already-felt impact. In a short time,
Starcherone has done some amazing work in the name of innovative
literature and is setting a great precedent for DIY publishing. Kudos
for the fine work and thank you very much for your ongoing efforts."

Thanks, Eugene! Good luck with your new mag -- the first issue looks great!

Upcoming Starcherone Readings

2007-06-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Our authors will be all over the place this summer and early Fall, from New York to Belgium. Here's a list, which will be updated in the future -- mark your calendars!

June

14 - Joshua Harmon, author of Quinnehtukqut, at Chop Suey Books, Richmond, VA. [Note: see all Joshua Harmon-related action at JH's Blog.]

15 – Harold Jaffe, University of Ghent, Belgium, reading and giving a talk based upon “The Writer During Wartime,” from his new book, Beyond the Techno-Cave. [Harold Jaffe's webpage.]

July

21 - Peter Conners, editor of the anthology PP/FF, Common Grounds Coffee House, 35 Albany Street, Cazenovia, NY, as part of the Society for New Music reading series. [Peter Conners's webpage.]

August

3 - Nina Shope, author of Hangings, and Ted Pelton (me!), reading with Nate Graziano, in the Dire Reading Series at Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge, MA.

23 - Ted Pelton, Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell, NY.

September

21 - Peter Conners at the Barnes & Noble in Pittsford, NY. A reception (after-party) will be held at a different location.

28-30 - Joshua Harmon at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, Brattleboro, VT.

October

25 - Aimee Parkison, author of Woman with Dark Horses, in the Write Thing Reading Series at Medaille College, Buffalo, NY.

November

8 - Peter Conners, Greenwood Books, Rochester, NY.

The "Experimental"

2007-06-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

I came across this paragraph at the end of a very strong review of Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body by Daniel Green on the website The Reading Experience.

"I believe that the future of prose fiction will only lead it closer to a kind of rapprochement with poetry, where the novel began as a splintering-off of narrative from the storytelling mode of epic poetry (just as drama appropriated the "dramatic" in dramatic poetry). Now that film and television (as well as what is called "creative nonfiction") have in turn taken over the storytelling function, at least for the mass audience, fiction's continued relevance, aside from those novels seemingly written with the film adaptation in mind, will perhaps require that it return to its origins in the poet's attention to language per se. Experimental fiction almost always points us in this direction, as challenges to the hegemony of conventional storytelling usually entail a reinvigoration of the resources of language, highlighting the capacity of prose fiction to do something else. The Blue of Her Body is an admirable addition to this effort."

I live a love-hate relationship with the term Experimental Fiction. The hate is because of the negative connotations it has with readers, because it is used as a categorizing billy-club by mainstream publishing, and because of its imagery of sterile nerdiness. Even I can't say with a straight face, "I love experimental fiction" -- it reeks so much of the locker room of late 1960s/early 1970s authors and their (at worst) contentless I'm-so-smart gaming. The term is a caricature. It also is called upon to take on a tremendous amount of territory at a moment in fiction when mainstream presses are so firmly centered in realism. I remember an early review of Nicolette de Csipkay's Black Umbrella Stories referring to the stories there as "highly experimental." They are inventive, sensitive to language, fun with form, but they are not "highly experimental" -- and I can think of very few fictions of the last decade or two that are as experimental as, say, art is routinely experimental. Yet, like in our politics, the movement of the right further right makes the old center the new left, if you see what I mean. So we're in this odd situation where writing that's no more formally daring than that of a generation ago is still seen as radical beyond the pale, unpublishable, unsaleable, undesirable.

But then comes a guy like Green along saying what it is that "experimental" might continue to mean to a thoughtful reading public concerned with the trajectory of the art of fiction. And while we can experiment with terms like "innovative," "avant-," "heterodox," etc., we see that Experimental can remain a useful term, because it really can only be honestly applied to new books when they are their own authors' books and not recyclings of the past. Sara Greenslit's novel is such a book -- its form is all its own, organic, intense in its relationship to the words of which it's comprised. The "experimental" novel is a type of trial in the scientific sense because it does try out something untested and new. Surely that inquiry in our own moment has fiction writers and poets looking at each others' works and asking what is it that makes them different, and what is the space between. Don't say "prose poetry" -- that's a type of poetry. But it may be that "experimental fiction" today is the equivalent, coming from the other direction.

Joshua Harmon at BEA

2007-05-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

If you're going to be at Book Expo America in New York next weekend, stop by the Small Press Distribution table and say hi to Joshua Harmon, author of our newest title, Quinnehtukqut, which officially debuts next month but is already available from SPD and on the Starcherone site. Josh will be there Friday, June 1. Why is Josh going to BEA and I'm not? I think he's much better at talking with people than I am, for one thing. Besides, I've still got my head buried in contest manuscripts!

More on Quinnehtukqut soon!

Starcherone at Toronto Small Press Fair, etc.

2007-05-22T18:31:00.000-07:00

Starcherone is taking the trip up to Toronto this weekend for the Toronto Small Press Fair. Come by and see us if you're in the neighborhood. It's at Trinity St. Paul's Centre, 427 Bloor St W, Toronto, from 11am-5pm on Saturday, May 26th. We'll have all our books available at half price, at face value (so you get the Canadian exchange to boot!).

Contest update. The long silence is because we've been reading! We're still on pace to follow our usual schedule, announcing finalists in early July and the winner in early August,with Lance Olsen doing the final judging.

Sara Greenslit's voice

2007-02-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

It was fitting earlier this month that, as we received the last entries for our 5th Starcherone Fiction Prize contest, a previous winner should show up in Buffalo for a reading of her work. Sara Greenslit won our 3rd contest, and her prizewinning novel, The Blue of Her Body, is now available from starcherone.com in advance of its official release in April.

The Blue of Her Body is summarized in four words on our website: LOVE LANGUAGE ANTIDEPRESSANTS FALCONRY.

That gives you an idea, but doesn't prepare you for the striking beauty of Greenslit's language as it scopes the territory of human suffering, hacks its way through the pharmaceutical thicket of attempting a cure, or engages the uncanny non-humanness of a large bird's talons and black eyes. As novelist Elizabeth Sheffield has said about The Blue of Her Body, “Language is a bird in this novel - at times warm, close, pulsing in the hand, at others flying, soaring in the space of the unsayable." Sara's reading, her first in several years as she finishes veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin, was powerful and evocative, playful and alert. But don't just take my word for it. Here's a link to a recording of Sara's recent reading at Medaille College in Buffalo. It's about 25 minutes long and tells better than I can what is so wonderful about her work.

A last word about our 2007-08 contest (#5) before I go. It's come in as our 2nd biggest ever, with 189 entrants. Some 20 of these took advantage of our book special in entering, purchasing our previous two contest winners' books (Sara's, plus Nina Shope's Hangings) at discount. Four straight years, running a blind competition, we have selected debut authors -- brand new voices -- an exciting and rewarding outcome for me personally. We hope our next winner makes us just as proud. Look for an announcement of the finalists on this site in early July, and for an announcement of the winner one month later, as selected by final judge Lance Olsen.

Beyond the Techno-Cave

2006-12-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

Spending a lot of time proofreading, typesetting, guerrilla marketing, and fighting versus Barnes & Noble for fair practices toward small presses, etc., it seems that it's very rare that I actually get to savor the entrance of one of our books into the world. But that is what I am doing today with appearance of Harold Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture.

Jaffe is one of the best prose writers I know of in the US today. He's perfected a style of immediate, single-sentence-paragraph composition that I find myself imitating quite a bit in my own work. His writing is socially engaged, a rarity among today's fiction writers, who more commonly handle political situations in apolitical ways, as if truth were somehow always in the middle of every debate. Harold Jaffe doesn't think so. His writing is horrified that we have rampant homelessness in our wealthy nation, that our tax dollars fund secret prisons in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and especially that many writers accommodate these and other injustices so as to find sinecures where they can practice their safe arts safely.

But Jaffe is more than just a writer of political screeds, as I started to mention above. His prose is one of the most innovative and interesting around today. The single-sentence paragraphs he customarily employs create movement in his short "docufictions" (mixtures of fact, fiction, and philosophical and political specualations that have become his dominant form) are terrifically agile, able to spring in any direction at once. Jaffe is the author of over a dozen books, and before I was his publisher I was his reader, and a fan. He also plays games with voices, playing off knowing versus innocent, world-weary versus unaware, and storyteller-interlocutor oppositions to advance his narratives. His leaps are frequently startling, often provocative, and NEVER boring.

Beyond the Techno-Cave is heavier on the docu- oftentime than the -fiction. This is intentional: his main goal here is to collect observations on contemporary art, writing, politics, and social trends. But these essay-fictions, or whatever one wishes to call them, are formally innovative as well, as one would expect from a writer who is also the editor of Fiction International, which is one of the longest-lived and consistently innovative fiction journals around, which recently published its 39th issue in its 33rd year of existence.

Beyond the Techno-Cave will be available in 2007, but pre-publication copies are now available on the Starcherone Books site. If you don't know his work, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Ted News & Reviews

2006-10-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's Ted Pelton's blog, what about Ted Pelton himself, his writing, his new novel, his upcoming gigs?

Glad you asked, Mom.

My new novel with Spuyten Duyvil Books has been getting good buzz in the blogosphere, and good reviews all around. Here's a sampler:

"Ted Pelton's new novel Malcolm & Jack takes a daring and ambitious approach to a well-documented era in American history. Because it is told from many points of view, it doesn't simply follow one or two characters through momentous events in their lives." - Douglas Manson, The Brooklyn Rail, September 2006.

"Pelton does the period magnificently: New York, he says, is a 40s town, and his lens - because a lot of this book lingers like a camera well-handled - zooms in on all the grays and the grillwork, the municipal weight. Kinsey, he of the famous sex poll, shows up as a reincarnation of Freud, who earlier in the book counsels David Kammerer (not smart or attractive enough to be gay as Allen Ginsberg was gay), killed by Lucien Carr after making unwanted advances. Carr runs to Bill Burroughs, ten years his senior, who advises him to get a good lawyer. Kerouac helps Carr bury the weapon. Kammerer sinks into the Hudson. Though many of Pelton's stories retold are well-known, they've never been said better (especially his disquisition on Billie Holiday jailed). Malcolm & Jack is art history pure, as it once was, total story, the oral-thing, returned to the campfire to spark." - Joshua Cohen, Blatt.

"There is a sense that despite America’s ambition for some kind of utopia; some kind of perfection; some sense of fairness and equality; some genuine believe in its ability to 'win through', somehow, seemingly through no fault of its own, it's going to get in a car-wreck. This is a brilliant book and I recommend it." - Alan Roche, The Cusp of Something.

"Intricately detailing the short-lived friendship between two high-school drop-outs, Malcolm And Jack opens readers to the reality of the post-war fifties and the pretentious mentality of Americans as the era neared revolution. An original, superbly crafted, imaginative novel, Malcolm And Jack is very strongly recommended as an engaging (albeit fictitious) tale in which several of America's great historical icons meet and mingle with one-another." - Midwest Book Review, June 2006.

And here where I'll be on the road during the remainder of the Fall, 2006:

Wednesday, Oct. 25 - Buffalo, NY. Talking Leaves Bookstore, Main St. store, 7pm.

Friday, Oct. 27 - Detroit, MI. Small Presses Dicsussion Panel, with Jeffrey Levine from Tupelo Press, Peter Conners from Boa Editions and Peter Markus from Marick Press. The Simon Room, Purdy-Kresge Library, Wayne State University, 1-4pm.
- Reading in Poet's Follies series, with Sean Thomas Dougherty, Peter Conners, Jeffrey levine, and Peter Markus.

Saturday, Nov. 4 - Albany, NY. Behind the Egg Reading Series, reading with Pierre Joris. The Capital District Federation of Ideas, 383.5 Madison Avenue, 4pm.

Friday, Dec. 1 - Syracuse, NY. Contributors to PP/FF: An Anthology reading from their (prose) poetry, (flash) fiction, and in-betweens: Peter Conners, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Geoffrey Gatza, Chris Kennedy, Ethan Paquin, and Ted Pelton. Syracuse YMCA, 7pm.

Friday, Dec. 8 - San Francisco, CA. Small Press Traffic Reading Series, reading with Camille Roy. Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco campus, 7:30pm.

We Have a Winner

2006-08-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey has won the 4th Annual Starcherone Fiction Prize!

2006-07 Contest Press Release - August 15, 2006 - ZACHARY MASON is the winner of the 2006 Starcherone Fiction Prize competition. Mason's manuscript, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, was selected by Final Judge Carole Maso. Mason will receive a $1000 advance from Starcherone Books and publication in our 2007-08 season.

About the contest: Mason's manuscript was one of five finalists for the Starcherone Fiction Prize, a blind-judged contest focusing on innovative fiction, which began with a pool of 157 entrants. Final Judge Carole Maso also designated a runner-up: Dear Ra (a story in flinches) by Johannes Gorrannson.

The remaining finalists, who round out the top five finishers in our contest, listed alphabetically, were:

Arthur Binder - Guest
Lauren Schiffman - - Some Days Like Superheroes: a povella
Terese Svoboda - Pirate Talk, or Mermalade

15 Honorable Mentions, also listed alphabetically, were also designated:

Kurt Jose Ayau - At a Loss for Words
Cheryl Burket - The Dead Elvis Ball
Eugenia Chao - Taipei–Nipple
Jai Clare - The Storyhouse
Jocelyn Cox - Falling
Candice Favilla - Desperate Beans
Doran Larson - Syzygy
Leslie Anne Leasure - Heretic
Thomas Maltman - The Night Birds
Craig O'Hara - Missing Presumed Dead
Pat Rushin - Quantum Physics & My Dog Bob
Nicole Sabourin - The Ephemeralizing Device
Rosalind Stevenson - Insect Dreams
Steve Street - The Murther of Blick Mancoosh
Ed Tasca - Autobiography of a Worm

About The Winner, The Lost Books of the Odyssey:
With brilliant prose, a rich body of authorly knowledge, and a terrific imagination, Zachary Mason has fashioned a book that might have been one of the classics of world literature, if only it actually dated from the time of Homer. The Lost Books of the Odyssey richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece. But Mason's book also justifies comparison with the great postmodern fiction hoaxes of Borges, Nabokov, and Robert Coover.
"Mason's book is incredibly impressive. Beautifully written, intelligent, war-inflected in all the most ancient and contemporary ways, filled with all kinds of pleasures. An ambitious feast!" - Carole Maso

PP/FF Mega-Review

2006-08-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

While I can't seem to buy a review of my new novel, Malcolm & Jack, this does seem to be the month for reviews of Starcherone Books. Most amazing of these is a terrifically thorough, long review (it comes out to 30 pages when printed out) of PP/FF: An Anthology, "Not Just a Flash in the Pan," by Luke Kennard, in the online Stride Magazine from the UK. Kennard goes as far as to give each piece in the anthology (about 70) a grade, A to F. Can't reprint something so long here, but see it at this link: http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/2006/July%202006/FlashFictionReview.kennard.htm

Federman's persistant Voice

2006-08-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

Continuing the theme of recent reviews of Starcherone Books, here is a recent review of Starcherone's all-time bestselling book, Federman's The Voice in the Closet, in International Fiction Review (New Brunswick, Canada):

Raymond Federman
The Voice in the Closet/La Voix dans le cabinet de débarras
Buffalo: Starcherone, 2001. Pp. 76. $15.00

Reviewed by Piet Defraeye

Raymond Federman calls his novels "pre-texts," because, in their telling of a story, they always necessarily remain unfinished. They postpone the story they want to tell, often elide it, and, invariably, they continue being made, composed and recomposed in the act of reading. To date, he has published ten novels, in English and in French, of which Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976) are the best known, and are often critiqued as examples of postmodern texts. His 1979 The Voice in the Closet is a short coda that has now been republished in a bilingual edition. The original publication was a serendipitous result of the refusal of Indiana University Press to have it included as part of his novel The Twofold Vibration (1982). In Federman's own words, they didn't want "to print twenty unreadable pages in the middle of the book." Meanwhile, the book has been adapted into a radio play, has been produced on the stage, and has inspired a modern ballet choreography. It has since been published as a CD recording.

Imminently readable, though cryptic in its semiotics, the text remains an extraordinary inscription of a dreadful event in the early days of the Holocaust, the July 1942 mass roundup or "Raffle du Vel' d'Hiver." The French version of the story with its twenty-two pages confirms the old idea that language is like a glove, in which the French glove always yields plenty of space, whereas the English glove is a tighter fit; here too, the same text gets told in English in twenty pages. The book has no pagination, and is, in fact, a lengthy apposition of words, without punctuation or capitalization, and numerous neologisms and typographic signage. Instead of a page number, an evolving graphic on each page, with a center that remains open, represents the reader's progress in the labyrinthine structure of the narrative. The story is that of a child who is hidden by his mother in a closet from which, with anguish, but also innocent excitement, he witnesses the arrest of his parents and sisters by the Nazis. He will never see them again. The book is dedicated to their memory.

In the current outflow of Holocaust commemoration in literature, film, and repository, Federman's text stands out. In "The Necessity and Impossibility of being a Jewish Writer," he writes: "As we continue to live the Post-Hitlerian era, it is essential to deal with the Holocaust in an effort to come to terms ... with its incomprehensibility." The problem, then, becomes not so much the anti-Semitism and extermination policy of a regime, but "the erasure ... of that extermination as an event." It is a problem that has emerged in countless films and novels about the Holocaust. Most recently, for instance, Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), with its emphatic focus on the story of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Spilman, while tremendously moving, has an eliding impact on its own documentary potential of a historical event and its socio-political context.

Gadamer's notion of art as an experience that uniquely blends alienation and authenticity is useful here: "The cognisance of art ... is always a secondary cognisance. It is secondary towards the immediate claim to truth which emanates from the work." In The Voice of the Closet, Federman tries to come to terms with the fact that a historical event, especially one of the enormity of the Holocaust, defies representation. It is, therefore, a text sous rature, in which what is told is the silent witnessing of an unspeakable event. The absence of words to express that event is the most crucial exposure of the narrative. Or, in other words, The Voice in the Closet becomes "the metonymical extension" (Opperman) of a young boy's survival experience in that dreadful cupboard in 1942 into the linguistic event on the page now, a closet of the mind, in which the reader is caught witnessing, "now again at last," a typographical event. The story is, as it were, confronted "from the reverse of farness" with its unrepresentability in the act of writing, and subsequently un-read in the act of reading.

This is the kind of writing that, in Walter Davis's words, "has the power to lead us beyond the narrow range of our self-serving beliefs and our self-protective emotions." Here are "doodling words" "wordshit" that "provides single light" in a terrifying closet, while at the same time circumventing the "threat of becoming just another paradox."

Nina Nina Nina!

2006-08-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite literary quotations (seen before on this blog) is Emerson's "Never read any book that is not a year old." I think I like it so much because these days so much of what constitutes literary success is hype-based: a book is released and expected to sell immediately or get pulped; it gets reviewed in the first few weeks of publication, or not at all. As most new fiction is produced by entertainment conglomerates, books are supposed to be consumed like movies are, the minute they come to town. If you blink, you missed it.

But literature doesn't operate that way, as Ralph Waldo told us. We need to give books time to work on us, and on a larger literary audience, time for the best books to rise to the top via the choices of readers. "Buzz" is another word for this, but proper literature buzz develops over months and even years, rather than the hours or days expected by the ruling marketers.

So it's great to see the buzz that continues to swell for Nina Shope's great novella collection, Hangings. Here's excerpts from an absolutely glowing review by Holli Baumgartner in the most recent American Book Review:

"In Peter Greenaway's 1996 film, The Pillow Book, the female protagonist struggles after her lover's death to become the pen instead of the paper. To provide inspiration and to give contour to her experiences, she searches ancient Eastern traditions for written traces of women's lives. In Hangings: Three Novellas, Nina Shope paints characters who similarly struggle
for voice. Her book, however, is informed by the ancient Greek and Roman roots that undergird the Western tradition, especially the worlds of women, which, though written about obsessively, were never voiced by women themselves. Shope reminds us that perhaps the memory of those ancient stories clings to us in ways we have yet to imagine...

"The book exemplifies the best of experimental fiction: jarring us out of our complacency with narrative, chalenging our conceptions of the writer's craft, overturning our expectations of language. One strange effect of this book is that the three novellas, so very different in tone and topic, can be read seamlessly; likewise, any discrete page becomes a poem...

"Shope has written tragedy in the Greek sense of the word -- something inevitable, beyond grief, beyond poignancy, with Medea-like impact."

Here too is a long post that appeared on a reader blog done by Caroline Wilkinson (http://www.carolinewilkinson.com):

"The first line of Nina Shope's Hangings, a collection of three experimental novellas, shows the connection between a mother and a daughter and while doing so, immediately connects the reader to the scene at hand: 'When they are reading like this, her head on her mother's breast, the empty shell of her ear covering her mother's nipple, it is as if they have become one fused and fantastical creature.' Shope, expanding upon this line, endows the scene with its own calm and reverberating breath. 'The girl hears her mother's voice resonate with each ear. The stories entering her right ear are of myths, monsters, transformations. Words of the mouth. Yet the left ear, pressed to the breast, hears a second strain of sound. A language that comes from the nipple. A humming, which begins in her mother's throat, fills her ribcage, echoes through the dome of her breast.' Shope evokes the essential magic of words and of the mother through this sensual description of reading. She also reminds us to listen with both of our ears – one taking in the resonance of the words – when reading this memorable, original novella.

"The plot of this first novella, Hangings, is, like Shope's language here, rooted to the body. We soon learn that the mother, who is never named, has become ill with breast cancer. To describe this change, Shope uses words that create a rhythm of disruption; and in between these words come silent spaces that are filled with a new sense of isolation for the daughter: 'And her mother's breast sounds suddenly hollow. Emptied of everything but tissues. Glands. Tumors. And knotted veins.' The mother will no longer be reading to the girl, who also is never named over the course of the novella. The girl is becoming a woman and now is too old to be read to, says the mother, who believes her daughter 'should be going out. Seeing friends. Meeting boys.' As the once 'fused and fantastical creature' falls apart, the mother and girl must embark on their own physical transformations into, respectively, illness and womanhood. Shope illustrates how these transformations are every bit as strange as the myths that the mother is describing in the opening scene when she is reading out loud from what turns out to be Ovid's Metamorphoses.

"In her second novella, Shope uses Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as her central allusion. In Urbem is an exploration of an ancient city populated by winged women, vestal virgins, priests, lovers, Caligula, Caesar, his mother, architects, nurses, senators. Part of this crowded city is powered by 'the friction of bodies in moments of desire': 'when lovers quarrel the quarter is dark for days. sometimes it is lighted for weeks on end. luminous. the lovers' bodies raising the temperature to an unbearable degree.' Shope is drawing upon Calvino's cadences in Invisible Cities, altered by her own preference for sentence fragments, and throughout In Urbem, she is also borrowing on the basic premise of Calvino's book: her city, like his invisible one, dwells within the imagination and appears to be many different cities at once. But unlike Calvino's novel, which reads like a fanciful and philosophical poem, Shope's In Urbem is often airless and without whimsy. It sits beneath the architecture of Invisible Cities and stays there, suffering from a lack of movement.

The last novella Hagiographies begins and ends with a quote from Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. Shope enters the territory so sharply explored by Barnes in Nightwood by taking on the subject of obsessive, destructive love between two women. The prose is polished as it is throughout the book and the ending is a quiet surprise, but the relationship between the women remains superficial throughout much of the piece. It doesn't help that one of the women is solely referred to as 'the girl with the black eyes.' The phrase is repeated often, along with 'the girl with the pixie haircut,' another character, who, quite possibly, is friends with Aimee Bender's 'girl in the flammable skirt,' I don't know. I do know that the repetitive phrases soon annoyed me, and I realized that Shope was not living up to the wonderful promise of her title novella, Hangings. She was not allowing her girls to transform into women, and as a result, the last novella suffers from an odd gap. The external reference to the complicated and poetic Nightwood seems disconnected from the flatness of the characters contained within the story and the coy clichés Shope uses to describe them.

Nina's book is now a year old -- so, according to Emerson, it's safe for you to read now.

Starcher-Blog

2006-07-26T04:40:00.000-07:00

A quick contest update:

Owing to the vicissitudes of the US Mail (generally not something I complain about; indeed a service I generally admire), we've had a delay in finalizing our contest. No biggie; we have multiple copies of all finalist manuscripts. But outcome will likely not be determined until after August 15.

The coolness of PP/FF (2)

2006-07-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

Hey, cool cats one & all,

Join us Wednesday, July 26, 7pm, at Night & Day, for our Brooklyn PP/FF Anthology Party! If you haven't heard about PP/FF, it's the newly released Starcherone Books anthology featuring 61 of today's leading practitioners in the in-between prose-poetry/flash-fiction form that editor Peter Conners has named "PP/FF." See http://www.starcherone.com/ppff.htm for more info on this first-of-its-kind book, ideal for creative writing classes and for just hanging around in the park reading and looking cool with in these summer dog days...

Readers: Kazim Ali, Brian Clements, Peter Conners, Geoffrey Gatza, Christine Boyka Kluge, Ted Pelton, Anthony Tognazzini, Jessica Treat, & Mark Tursi.

Location: Night & Day, 230 5th Ave (cross street: Presidents St.), 7pm

Reader Bios:

Kazim Ali is the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage, and a book of poems, The Far Mosque. He is the publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University.

Brian Clements is the author of several collections of poetry in print and online, including Essays Against Ruin, Burn Whatever Will Burn, and Flesh and Wood. He is the editor of Firewheel Editions and of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and he coordinates the MFA in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Peter Conners is founding co-editor of the online literary journal, Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction, as well as editor of PP/FF: An Anthology. His third poetry collection, Of Whiskey
and Winter, will be published by White Pine Press in fall 2007. Conners works as Marketing Director/Associate Editor for the poetry publisher BOA Editions. He lives with his wife and two sons in Rochester, NY.

Geoffrey Gatza has dedicated himself to protecting the downtrodden of his city from a continuing series of deadly poetic schemes by the insidious School of Quietude. He is editor and publisher of BlazeVOX
Books. His web site is Geoffreygatza.com.

Christine Boyka Kluge is the author of Teaching Bones to Fly, a poetry collection from Bitter Oleander Press, and Domestic Weather, which won the 2003 Uccelli Press Chapbook Contest. Her prose poetry and
flash fiction collection, Stirring the Mirror, is due out from Bitter Oleander Press in 2007.

Ted Pelton is the author of three books, most recently the novel, Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). Recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction, he is an Associate Professor at Medaille College of Buffalo, NY, and Executive Director of Starcherone Books.

Anthony Tognazzini has published work in Swink, The Hat, Sentence, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, La Petite Zine, The Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, Ducky, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other journals, and
in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction. He has received a Pushcart nomination and an award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jessica Treat is the author of two story collections, Not a Chance (FC2, 2000) and A Robber in the House (Coffee House Press, 1993), and is completing a third. Her stories and prose poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Award.

Mark Tursi is one of the founders and editors of the literary journal Double Room, and he is an Assistant Professor at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Denver and his MFA from Colorado State University.

Hope to see you all there! It's not too late to book a flight!

Contest Finalists Announced

2006-07-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

Five finalist manuscripts have been forwarded to judge Carole Maso, from which she will select the 2006-07 Starcherone Fiction Prize winner. They are:

Dear Ra (a story in flinches)
Guest
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Pirate Talk, or Mermalade
Some Days Like Superheroes: a povella

In addition, the following 15 manuscripts have been designated Honorable Mentions. In the unlikely event that our judge does not choose a winner from among the five finalists, these manuscripts may be forwarded to her to select from. Honorable Mentions go to: At a Loss for Words; Autobiography of a Worm; The Dead Elvis Ball; Desperate Beans; The Ephemeralizing Device; Falling; Heretic; Insect Dreams; Missing Presumed Dead; The Murther of Blick Mancoosh; The Night Birds; Quantum Physics & My Dog Bob; The Storyhouse; Syzygy; Taipei – Nipple.

This year's judging was among the toughest we've ever done, and I believe the final five books are the strongest group we've ever had. We thank all the contestants for their submissions. If you are interested in trying again next year, look for our announcement in the November/December Poets & Writers, as well as on our website, as of October 1.

Now, since practically all I've been doing for the past month, morning til night, is reading, reading, and more reading, I'm going on vacation! (Not for too long -- look for an announcement of our winner in early-to-mid August.)

Contest Wind-Down/Thaddeus Rutkowski

2006-07-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

Getting near the end of our 4th annual contest -- I've been reading mansucripts pretty much constantly for the last month, since finishing my academic term. Two finalists have been forwarded to Final Judge Carole Maso; three more will go out at the end of this week. Look for an announcement of these finalists then, and then for the winner to be announced sometime in early August, both on this blog and on our contest page (http://www.starcherone.com/winners.htm).

Last evening, Starcherone hosted a former finalist in one of our contests, Thaddeus Rutkowski. Thaddeus was one of three finalists the year that Nina Shope was selected as winner of the Starcherone Prize by Judge Kenneth Bernard; but coincident with him being selected a finalist, Thaddeus signed a contract to publish the book with Beyler Publications. So all came out well -- and this book, Tetched, came out in 2005.

Rutkowski is one my favorite contemporary US writers. His work is funny, vulnerable, unsentimental, spare, language-conscious, and formally smart without sacrificing an ability to entertain. What I didn't know about Thaddeus was that he's also a great performer of his ownj work, having cut his teeth in the slam-scene of the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe. Unlike a lot of the slam poetry I've seen and heard, however, Thaddeus's writing isn't wordy or, as I like to put it, soft. It works as well on the page as it does aloud, which is rare.

I just wished I'd asked him to send stuff for PP/FF. Tetched is a novel made up of dozens of short-shorts, and the pieces work well individually. Particularly good is his story about going to a writer's colony; all of his fellow office workers mistake his announcement as "nudist" colony; then, at the colony itself, Thaddeus's narrator discovers that all studios and apartments have mattresses for sleeping off depression and mitigating the impulse to suicide. This is dark -- but then the recognitions one has (funny) bring in light -- the best kind of work!

Memorial

2006-05-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

I can't pick up on most of the great stuff here - great simply that it is happening - but I will quickly post something before I leave town for weekend (holiday Memorializing a time before we became the new Soviet Union...).

Buffalo last week had a birthday party for Robert Creeley who would have been 80 last Saturday had he made it. (Miles Davis's 80th then followed later in the week, which I thought was sweet beyond words.) In the long day and a half celebration of this occasion, there's a couple of things I wrote down, from the film Creeley by Bruce Jackson - a couple of Creeley statements which seemed to me useful:

"Words make very powerful grids of determinant meaning."

and

"Words don't care about the truth."

I bring these statements in first as a final salvo in the "non-fiction" thread way far above. Even the slightest engagement with language should convince one of its slipperiness and disabuse one of the simple dream of pure representation. And so my problem with the realists, the creative non-fictionists, and the political mythologists (in Roland Barthes' sense of the term) of our time is this: they lie. As Barthes said long ago, Mythology (readerly writing) is the end of Writing, that is, it shuts down imagination, installs a narrative (a politics, a reading, a "Truth") that ends free-play of imagination, and with it actual literature. In the marketers' desire for a fiction whose sales they can predict and in the political leader's desire for a pliable people are the same abusive readerly "Mythological" uses of language, and the things they stamp out are real participatory democracy and literature.

Painting all this with a very wide brush indeed.

Other lines that come to mind, that I've been thinking about lately (& that have haunted mne for years):

Let those who use words cheap, who use us cheap
Take themselves out of the way
Let them not talk of what is good for the city
-Charles Olson, Maximus Letter 3

The "city" for Olson being a construction of future political and artistic organization - the "book to come" of our potential social & imaginary organization. Let them use words intelligently & sensitively and all else will follow.

Call me naive, but I also believe this. I don't think it's accidental that when Orwell gave us his portraits of totalitarianism, he focused so heavily on how language was employed as the basic component of social engineering, abuse, and mind-fucking: "Four legs good, two legs better" -> "work shall set you free" -> "support the troops": we have seen this many times, to many degrees, in many contexts. Reading/deconstructing are tools resembling what Woody Guthrie long-ago painted on his guitar: "This machine kills fascists."

So, pedagogy: I try NOT to give exercises to writing students that are heavy on doctrine; rather, I try to construct situations where they be forced to consider the formation of writing-art in language.

One of my favorite exercises is to go with students to the zoo (across the street from my college) and tell them to find an animal they've never heard of before and write a story/prose-experiment about it. (This is a mid-semester intro-workshop exercise, after they've seen some & hopefully retained some things but hopefully while they are still open to experiment - they do close down, too frequently.)

The crucial other part of the exercise is that each paragraph's first letter has to ultimately spell out the name of the animal, as an anagram. This gets them thinking about their words, where they break and how they use paragraphs, and how long the story is -- that texts are artificial constructions, and may have to end in a hurry if you're up to the V in cerval.

In this spirit it was great to hear about Christian Bok's book, of which I didn't know. It reminds me of those old Walter Abish books so formative for me back in the (yes-Kass-I-remember-them-too) 1980s, Alphabetical Africa, Minds Meet, and In the Future Perfect. But here again, poetry - Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse is also full of such experiments. Someone back there quoted Andy Rooney about the pretentiousness of poetry; yes, it can be and often is. I generally prefer reading fiction myself,too. But this too: if you are happy with the narrative assumptions of Andy Rooney, by all means, keep avoiding reading poetry. These questions, on average, are much more likely to arise among poets than in the general run of prosewirters. I think this group is on to more than that.

I also run a second track in my fiction writing classes where we read stories when there's nothing to workshop, and I use an anthology for that purpose. I use a handful of classic and new pieces -- "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," "A Cask of Amontillado," "Monkey Garden" (Cisneros) -- usually I use Story and its Writer, supplemented with something avant-garde, or handouts, the first chapter of Notable American Woman ("Bury Your Head"). Paragraph Magazine is good -- about 40 single para. stories to read, imitate, joust with, That magazine, available from a Oat City press in Rhode Island (see http://conan.ids.net/~oatcity/Paragraph.html). Or, yes, STARCHERONE BOOKS has that PP/FF thing....

The classic "Exquisite Corpse" exercise too always yields great images and sentences that I'll then challenge students to accept the logic of, and write coherent (or incoherent) narratives around.

All this to say I am really itchy when I hear someone say students have to be indoctrinated or formed or recruited in a doctrinaire way. I think that if you present them with object lessons and simply try to get them to ask the questions that make the other kind of writing (that doesn't think about the role of language) impossible, then you move them toward a more interesting art and a more open politics.

The New York Behind-the-Times

2006-05-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen it, the NY Times recently ran a list of what a poll they had conducted had determined were the best novels of the last 25 years.

The method was to ask a list of invited writers and critics to submit the best novel of this period. Many didn't respond. Beloved by Toni Morrison was selected, in a rout, as the consensus choice -- but even this was based on only 15 choices. The remainder of the list got there by being named by as few as one of the contributors.

Even so, such a list, with the imprimatur of the Times, is bound to be suggestive. Worse, the listed books seemed to show such an insular picture to many of us who read and care about innovative fiction, that it seemed to require a reply. First, here is the Times list:

Toni Morrison, Beloved; Don DeLillo, Underworld; Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels; Philip Roth, American Pastoral; John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces; Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Philip Roth, The Counterlife; Don DeLillo, Libra; Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Norman Rush, Mating; Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son; Philip Roth, Operation Shylock; Richard Ford, Independence Day; Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater; Cormac McCarthy, Border Trilogy; Philip Roth, The Human Stain; Edward P. Jones, The Known World; Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.

Only 2 women, 6 books of the 22 written by Philip Roth, and the backdoor inclusion of John Updike's Rabbit cycle (though half had been written before 1980) were among the other suspicious aspects of the list. As well, the list favors well-published, realist, what one might safely call establishment novels.

Bloggers have been at it ever since, challenging the Times list with their own. I have compiled a combined version of these.

Notes on how the list was compiled appear below.

113 Works of Fiction in reply to the New York Times:

Walter Abish - How German Is It; Kathy Acker - Blood & Guts in High School; Great Expectations; David Antin – tuning; Donald Antrim – Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World; Paul Auster – In the Country of Last Things; Jonathan Baumbach – B; Greg Bear - Blood Music; Kenneth Bernard – From the District File; R. M. Berry – Frank; Judy Budnitz – Flying Leap; Mary Burger – Sonny; Octavia Butler – Kindred; Mary Caponegro - Complexities of Intimacy; Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dicteé; Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek; Dennis Cooper – Period; Michael Cunningham – The Hours; Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves; Lydia Davis – The End of the Story; Samuel R. Delany – Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Bradley Denton – Blackburn; Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times; Jeffrey DeShell – Peter; Jim Dodge – Fup; Stone Junction; Ricki Ducornet – The Word “Desire”; The Fanmaker’s Inquisition; Katherine Dunn – Geek Love; Dave Eggers – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue; Percival Everett – Erasure; Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern; William Gaddis – Carpenter’s Gothic; William Gass - The Tunnel; Denise Giardina – Storming Heaven; William Gibson - Neuromancer; Robert Glück – Margery Kempe; Barry Hannah – Ray; Carla Harryman – Gardener of Stars; Marianne Hauser – Prince Ishmael; Donald Hays – The Dixie Association; Laird Hunt - The Impossibly; Shelley Jackson – The Melancholy of Anatomy; Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers; Gwyneth Jones – Life; Kevin Killian – Little Men; Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale; Stacey Levine - My Horse; DRA—; Frances Johnson; Mark Leyner – I Smell Esther Williams; Kelly Link –Magic for Beginners; Pamela Lu – Pamela: A Novel; Alison Lurie – Foreign Affairs; Nathaniel Mackey – From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate; Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String; Notable American Women; David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress; Reader’s Block; Carole Maso - Aureole; Ava; The Art Lover; Defiance; Harry Matthews – My Life in CIA; Cris Mazza – Former Virgin; Heather McGowan – Schooling; Ursule Molinaro - Fat Skeletons; Toni Morrison – Tar Baby; Walter Mosley – Devil in a Blue Dress; Padgett Powell – Edisto; Tim Power - Last Call; Thomas Pynchon – Mason and Dixon; Vineland; Doug Rice - Blood of Mugwump; Mary Robison – Why Did I Ever; L. A. Ruocco – Document Zippo; Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched; James Salter- A Sport and a Pastime; George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; Pastoralia; Sarah Schulman – Girls, Visions, and Everything; Jason Schwartz – A German Picturesque; Joanna Scott – Arrogance: A Novel; Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone; Lucius Shepard – Beast of the Heartland; Nina Shope – Hangings; Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony; Almanac of the Dead; Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres; Ordinary Love and Good Will; Gilbert Sorrentino – Aberration of Starlight; Little Casino; Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver; Bruce Sterling – Schismatrix; Ronald Sukenick – Mosaic Man; Lynne Tillman - American Genius; Steve Tomasula – VAS; Joseph Torra – Gas Station; William Vollman – You Bright and Risen Angels; Europe Central; Chuck Wachtel – Joe the Engineer; Howard Waldrop – Heart of Whitenesse; Alice Walker – Possessing the Secret of Joy; David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; Joe Wenderoth - Letters to Wendy; Curtis White – Requiem: Diane Williams - Excitability; Joy Williams – The Quick and the Dead; Gene Wolfe – The Book of the New Sun; Douglas Woolf – Wall to Wall; Lidia Yuknavitch – her other mouths.

Notes: Obviously, I haven't read all of these books. Indeed, I've read less than half. (About one-third, actually.) Still, the sources are ones I trust, including the responses of the Now What and Ron Silliman blogs, lists friends (including some names you'd recognize) have provided, etc. Sometimes, bloggers (like Silliman) gave only lists of author's names -- in such cases, I've chosen representative books and made choices on the basis of amazon reviews and the like. Short story collections as well as novels appear (the Times suggested their list was comprised of novels only but included a Raymond Carver collection); as well, there are some books, such as David Antin's work, that some people would define as something other than fiction. I've eliminated any works I found on blogger lists that were first published before 1980 -- this explains the absence of Delany's Hogg and Sorrentino's Mulligan's Stew from the list, among others. Finally, I've tried to keep British and other national fictionists off the list, when such could be identified, to keep this as a uniform consideration.

The final product is not ranked but alphabetized and is not intended in any way to be comprehensive. Instead, it is intended to indicate the great richness and variety of US fiction and its authors, in terms of gender, ethnicity, genre (and post-genre), and formal innovation. I figure it in my mind in the shape of an enormous burr -- attaching itself the pantleg of the NY Times as it confidently walks past, careless as a millionaire -- round, with untold sharp points, all the points arrows, each of the arrows pointing outward.

Now What Blog

2006-05-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

Lance Olsen and I have teamed up to start a blog on contemporary fiction and small press publishing, with multiple participants, called Now What. Lance is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction or about contemporary fiction and on the Board of FC2, the long-lived experimental fiction presses. See it here: http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com

What to do when you can't keep up one blog? Start another! But seriously, I'm really excited about this venture -- we've got a place now where some of today's most important practitioners in innovative fiction will have a place to talk about what they see, who they're reading, and to monitor the collapse of mainstream publishing.

English Shope fan blog post

2006-04-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

I post today an entry from the blog of Jai Clare, a British writer-blogger. See the original at http://www.jaiclare.com/blog --

It’s not often one reads a book that leaves you gobsmacked – for non-British readers that means shocked, stupefied, amazed. And by this book so I am. Gobsmacked. It isn’t like ‘normal’ books – it takes risks, it tries different things, without being alienating. This is not about clever meta-fictional techniques but stories through lyricism. If you like your fiction literal and accessible and down to earth this isn’t for you. But that means you’ll be missing out a piece of miraculous inventive imaginative and quite beautiful prose. Nina Shope’s collection of novellas under the umbrella title of Hangings won the Starcherone prize last year and is a worthy winner of any literary prize. The book left me reeling with excitement – at the audacity, the risk, the beautiful prose, the rhythms, the lack of playing by the rules of Creative Writing 101 – those rules that straitjacket many writer’s imaginations and pocket. Shope has taken serious risks here and Stacherone Books has the foresight to see that this is a writer of quality and Hangings is a book of long-lasting literature. I can’t do her book justice in this brief review. I can only reveal my enthusiasm and love of this book, so be aware there is far more to this book that I can summarise as ‘plot’ details.

The first novella called 'Hangings' concerns a daughter whose mother is dying of breast cancer who is haunted by a painting by Miro that depicts a giant spider. The narrative becomes littered with spider imagery, stories told about the mythic Aradne, weaving her way in and out of stories. The story of the two women and the girl’s burgeoning sexuality is told through riveting imagistic prose.

“Her mother, reading, is entirely unaware. She is an atheist. A philosopher. A classicist. She reads mythology for the symbolism. For the psychology. For the pure lyric beauty of form and idea. She does not understand that her daughter actually believes in women who transforms into beasts and spiders. That she dreams of mythical creatures. That she dreams of bodies transforming.”

The second 'In Urbem' is a marvellous, in the true sense of the word, recreation of ancient Rome, an alternative version, taking up ideas and even characters from the differing periods of that city’s history and again through haunting prose takes a part that city’s creation built upon the bones of women and slaves. (the city is continually under construction) In one section the imagery is particularly outstanding: Verginia has been auctioned as a slave and all of the parts of her body have been bidden upon. Her father comes to rescue her but can only afford parts of her:

‘he is raising a knife above her breast and baring his teeth as if to defend her until she feels the knife inside her and her father above her trying to wipe her clean of marks and measures and numbers and names. And the crowd surrounding her – the bidders reaching desperately for the pieces they have bought.’

The novella is reminiscent of Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Angela Carter’s the Infernal Desire Machine of Dr Hoffman, but in its use of imagery and so on is even more beautiful.

The last novella, 'Hagiographies', was for me the least successful but still stunning. Instead of a plot this story moves forward through juxtaposing time and imagery. It concerns a pixie-haired girl who is friends with a black-eyes girl and a series of letters sent /unsent between them, a tale of obsession and jealousy especially when a boy from out of state enters their friendship. It’s a collection that pumps life into the novel form with its imagination and audacity. Not here will you find timidity, carefully following well-trodden routes. Instead you will find storytelling refreshed and exciting. Something to challenge you. As for me I was left reading this book thrilled more than any anti-climatic fast-paced commercial thriller could ever do. This is only a brief review. Unfortunately I haven’t time to write a full paper to do justice to the startling way Shope writes and the intricate complex yet very subtle way she weaves stories through words. I can only urge you to read this book for yourself. But I warn you if you’re looking for an easy read, work much like that you have perhaps read before, I can only say you’re in for a shock. This happens to be one of the best books I have read in years and it is so gratifying to know there are people out there writing original glorious prose AND getting it published. Thank god for Starcherone Books.

The coolness of PP/FF (1)

2006-04-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

For a while, I thought that Kent Johnson was Geoffrey Gatza, or rather that Geoffrey Gatza was Kent Johnson. I first heard about Kent Johnson through Geoffrey Gatza's online mag BlazeVox. Kent had the amazing poem/text there, "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz (or, 'Get the hood back on'.)" Kent was the first person I saw in print really express the anger I was feeling at our disgraceful national cruelty and stupidity in blundering into becoming worldwide torturers. The kids who speak in Kent's poem are the same dumbheads we see in George Saunders stories in "Pastoralia" and elsewhere. But here they've discovered absolute power and the intoxicating power of being able to completely debase someone who doesn't matter, having been cast as inhuman.

Kent Johnson was the guy who had first come on the scene (I now dimly remembered) as the revealed huckster behind the poems of the supposed Hiroshima survivor, Araki Yasusada. Yasusada's poems had appeared all over the place (see the Marjorie Perloff article here detailing the Johnson-Yasusada saga) and when the hoax was revealed, there was even an article in PMLA. For those of you who have never seen it, PMLA is as establishment as it gets, the journal of the principle literary academic professional organization. The article about Kent in a place where you usually see articles about Henry James or Olaudah Equiano. Johnson at the same time remains a community college professor in Illinois. He seems at once notorious and unknown or, to use Gertrude Stein's terms, "genius" and "outlaw" at the same time. He gets ever more notorious with books like Epigramitis, his newest from Gatza's press, BlazeVox, which features about 100 poems about contemporary poets, alternately nasty, insightful, scandal-mongering, and lyrical.

Anyway, Kent Johnson, whom I had never met, had pretended to be someone else, and just as Yasusada could not be contacted except through Johnson, so too I had only had access to Johnson through Gatza -- so I can be forgiven for thinking them one and the same. Ethan Paquin thought the same thing for a while-- you can ask him.

I'm trying to invite Kent Johnson to Buffalo this Fall, to get some things straight. Anyway, both he and Geoffrey Gatza are in our new anthology, PP/FF, as are Ethan Paquin and I and Nina Shope and Lydia Davis and Elizabeth Robinson and Gary Lutz and Dan Nester and Brian Evenson and Jessica Treat and Harold Jaffe and Raymond Federman and many many more.

E-vailability

2006-04-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

Starcher-Blog

Starcherone is happy to offer the option, for consumers of e-books and to create greater access for all readers, of electronic PDF copies of our titles with purchase through our website. If you desire an e-version of a title purchased through us, simply note this in the comments section of your PayPal purchase request. Note that electronic versions of our books, like their print counterparts, are protected by U.S. copyright.

R. M. Berry

2006-03-25T08:31:00.000-08:00

Starcher-Blog
Let me see if I can explain what Ralph Berry is doing.

Ralph was a visitor this week to the Write Thing Reading Series, which I co-coordinate with Ethan Paquin at Medaille College. He read from Frank, his "unwriting" of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. An "unwriting," he explained, is a working through of an older story that controls and contains us, as stories are wont to do, observing the entire way through the parameters of the original, and thus engaging in an activity of undoing or revealing its power. Frank has the same number of chapters as Shelley's Frankenstein, and corresponding gestures for each of the novel's characters, narrations-within-narrations (plentiful, if you recall the original), and plot developments.

The Frank Stein of Berry's novel is, like Shelley's Victor F, the protagonist of a bildungsroman gone bad -- so much promise and talent, yet possessed by ambitions that take him down unfortunate paths, the most notable of these the seemingly unnatural act of male creation. Like any extended parody, this would quickly grow tired were it not for two things: first, Berry's remarkably nimble prose, which is funny, incisive, observant, and philosophical all at once; second, the penetrating metaphor he develops out of the Frankenstein monster for what happens in authorship.

I had an uncanny experience this past week, with Ralph's visit, and in reading his book. My own novel, Malcolm & Jack, is just out -- that is, I've received pre-publication copies, it is "out" in the world. It now has independent existence from me. This has been a long project -- terrifically long, nearly eleven years since I first had the idea and began writing about the possibility that Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac might have bumped into each other in 1940s Manhattan, both of them ducking the war in favor of jazz, Billie Holiday, & kicks. But despite my long effort to get the book into print, despite the silent wishes I made each time I blew out a birthday candle for a whole decade that the thing be published, when people asked me now, "How does it feel?", I couldn't really say I felt elated. One day, in talking with Geoffrey Gatza, it came to me. I felt terrified. My creation was loose in the world, no longer in my control, out wreaking havoc, or having that potential. Given such a state of affairs, as with Victor Frankenstein, even if there is ever now a moment of quiet, no reports coming back of destruction, the monster still being at large, I knew of its potential -- it was all just the quiet that anticipates disaster.

I was given this insight by reading Ralph's book -- saw, in an uncanny light, my own sense of exposure in the same feeling Frank Stein gets, having unleashed his novel-monster.

The couple of poets I've talked to about this (and in Buffalo, it's practically all poets I talk with) don't understand quite what I'm talking about. Of course, they say, writing is exposure -- if it is honest, you put yourself out there in the world. I think this is a particularly novelistic phobia. There is a sense in which a poet creates language behind which s/he can hide, to a greater extent than a novelist can. There is a safety, to my mind, in the very nature of poetic language, both in its more condensed and cryptic mode of address and in terms of audience, the fact that it will not be accessed by the types of people it would most horrify you to know had read it. The receptionist at work is less likely to be reading a book of poems than a novel; people are less likely to bring books of poems with them on airplanes -- poets are less exposed to casual access, just by how these genres and their reading are structured. The novel, although the types of readers experimental fiction seeks are not necessarily of this breed, nonetheless is structured as a popular art form. These readers are the German countryside, awaiting a rampaging figure cobbled together out of pieces of death, carrion shot through with lightning, transmuting its creator's own dreams into things unrecognizable, personally, but nonetheless, having issued from this source, having the potential to bring infamy or blame.

I am not articulate enough to register this fully, especially writing this morning, with a stack of papers waiting for me to grade, rushed, the way one with two jobs does everything. This final thought: I was reminded by Ralph Berry's visit of the strange power literature has to unveil our lives before our own eyes. Like a lover, a book allows you to feel & see things in yourself and yourself-in-the-world that you could not have access to without that other. The truly uncanny moments of reading come when we are trying to see something for ourselves and cannot, when suddenly a book enters our worlds and gives us that bclarity. This does not cause the terror to subside, but does give us clearer coordinates by which to locate and view it directly, perhaps for the first time.

Dan Nester

2006-03-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

Dan Nester was in Buffalo tonight, as during his Spring Break he's been following Queen as they play a tour with Paul Rodgers nowhere near to filling the shoes of Freddie Mercury, Dan the author of course of God Save My Queen I and II, two volumes of writings, prose and poetry, one piece devoted to each single, album cut, and B-side ever released. Dan also a contributor to the new Starcherone anthology, PP/FF: An Anthology, which features "Bohemian Rhapsody," and also the author of a new collection from BlazeVox Books, The History of My World Tonight.

Dan is one of the good guys in contemporary writing. I speak very personally about this -- he generously embraced my work at a time when I was having trouble getting the time of day, publishing the first chapter of my novel, Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) in La Petite Zine #7. Now that novel is out from Spuyten Duyvil, which is cool, and I owe a lot of the credit to Dan for giving me the support to keep at it and get that ten year project finished and OUT.

We're planning PP/FF readings now in Buffalo, Brooklyn, Albany, Detroit, Denver, Portland (OR) and elsewhere, and we already kicked off the tour with two readings in Austin for AWP (which Dan couldn't attend, but 25 contributors did). The first, on Thursday afternoon in the Bookfair space, featured Brian Evenson, Cris Mazza, Jeff Parker, Aimee Parkison, and Nickole Brown. At the Saturday reading at The Ritz on crazy 6th Street in Austin, the readers were Jessica Treat, Geoffrey Gatza, Ethan Paquin, Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Gorannson, Aimee Parkison, Pedro Ponce, Brian Johnson, Kirk Nesset, Peter Conners and myself.

Got a space? Wanna see about six to eight prose and poetry writers testing the forms show up? Let me know -- http:ted@starcherone.com. Some/many of our 61 contributors will be there.

On "Honest" Fiction

2006-03-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

Starcher-Blog
(Talk I delivered at AWP-Austin this past weekend as part of the panel, "Why Do Some People Hate Experimental Fiction.)

I got a magazine in the mail last Fall without having requested it, as a freebie. That in itself might have been nice enough, perhaps if it had come to someone else, but I’m sadly of a cynical, indeed suspicious bent, so my inclination quickly turned to interrogating this gift. Evidently, my name appeared on a mailing list somewhere, which is not surprising. As a teacher, a member of AWP, a subscriber to various magazines, etc., my information is traded left and right out there, as is yours. This is the way of the world: one receives such so-called gifts frequently, free, unbidden, at random, received as one receives mainstream culture, as one of many subjects, perhaps hundreds, perhaps a thousand to choose a random number, perhaps more, perhaps many more, but no, this being still evidently literary fiction, so let’s keep it a thousand. Anyway, all these factors created in me the feeling that this magazine had been delivered to me by a certain authority, if not the magazine’s own, then partaking in and/or being issued from some place relatively established.

I say relatively because I direct a small press, whose name in fact is a joke on the fact that we started out with nothing. Starcherone Books. I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Sending out 1,000 copies? We may print 1,000. Mailing list? Something we put together ourselves. Postage, envelopes, printing – how many more copies are printed to sell if 1,000 are sent out free? Oh, but let’s not forget I made up that 1,000 number.

Anyway, here is the magazine. It’s called Carve, and at the bottom bears the legend, “Honest Fiction.” I don’t know that anything I have said about it is indeed true, but I have kept the magazine all these months simply because of that phrase. Honest fiction.

The rest of the cover is also interesting. A legend across the top designates this “The Best of Carve Magazine.” Carve Magazine has evidently published so many examples of Honest Fiction that a selection had to be culled from a much larger body of work – and there was evidently demand for such a volume, else why do such work, why publish these selected pieces again, although then giving them away suggests either that the demand wasn’t so great as one might otherwise suppose or, alternately, that the demand is growing so enormous that it is worthy of priming the pump.

But that’s not all. This is Volume Five of The Best of Carve Magazine. What author or genre or period can one think of where a “best of” collection would require so many volumes? Why would someone edit down to the best examples only then to proliferate volumes? Or, as it seems the volumes come out annually, why would someone create “greatest hit” collections each year? Evidently someone must believe there is that much good honest fiction out there, and that the tap keeps flowing.

Let me go that much further in judging this book by its cover. The remainder of its presentation is comprised of photographs. There is a supposed nature scene – a tiger, though shot at such close range one suspects the animal is/was likely in captivity, a conclusion reinforced by a blurred but rigid shape in the right foreground; there’s a sunset on an ocean; the snowy peaks of distant mountains, taken at a great distance – all three of these would appear to be tourist shots of one or another sort. Three more: a man who at least in this pixelated photo rather resembles Michel Foucault, whose profession it would seem is selling vegetables, here posing with varieties of what appear to be potatoes; beneath him a flower with some of the same tell-tale edge serrations that indicate not so much genes as bytes; finally, lower left, closest to the word honest, a barbershop scene in some darkened, even subterranean, public place, reminiscent of though not necessarily one of those New York City quick-in-out commuter storefronts, maybe Penn Station, maybe from what used to be the World Trade Center basement, maybe these pixelated people all dead, but maybe instead somewhere else where they have such ugly architecture, a mall, could be anywhere: Columbus, Ohio; Boise, Idaho; Los Angeles; Buffalo; Austin.

OK, my initial assumptions of Carve were wrong, to at least this extent: this document does not issue from a place that oozes money. These are evidently found photos. But I don’t mind picking on Carve anyway. I still assert that they represent an authority. And they started it – imposing this vision received, I say again, as one receives mainstream culture – upon me unbidden. Honest Fiction. I, too, am a fiction writer. And even the briefest of glances inside Carve shows me that my work would not be welcome here, even in regular Carve, let alone of volume of the “Best of.”

I read some of the stories. I read parts of all of the stories. But I don’t need to. Everything is told me by the subscribed legend, Honest Fiction.

Reconstructing intention is a tricky business, but here are some propositions that I think the editors of Carve are trying to present:

1. That “honest fiction” is a window on life, like a photograph might be innocently supposed to be, that does not interfere or mediate but allows access, and I speak here of the supposed operations of fiction to life as lived, condensed into its deepest, most meaningful truths.

2. That such a condensation does not partake in artifice (which would be dishonest), so that, while narrative is acknowledged by all to be a process of selection and invention, the processes by which these fictions do this are the opposite of that which might be called artificial – let’s call it natural selection.

3. That fictions constructed in such ways that highlight the roles of language in producing the artwork, or producing the so-called experiences reflected in the artwork, or acknowledging a mediating apparatus of any kind, are by the standard established by the cover legend, dishonest, though indeed they may seem more truthful at face value.

I am being bitchy toward Carve Magazine, there’s no doubt. But let us not forget, it is they who first insulted me. My fiction, which openly reflects on its own processes of composition; which acknowledges itself as partaking in the traditions of an art form, thus acknowledging predecessors, filters through which my work apprehends the world; which exists in the belief that, as a Frenchman of some renown once put it (though here it appears in my own paraphrase), that it is as correct or incorrect to say that we are possessed by language as to say its opposite; my fiction, which also partakes in many other such acts or propositions that strike me as truthfulness, was labelled by inference by these Carve editors dishonest, or not-so-honest, or maybe intellectual, high-falutin, detached, or any one of a number of euphemisms that suggest that what I do is less important, essential, and/or meaningful than the work done by these author employing traditional strategies of verisimilitude, filters of their own experience that their definitions of fiction don’t admit exist.

I say back to them, echoing what Laertes once said to his sister Ophelia, what Laertes always says to his sister Ophelia, in reference to Hamlet, they do not carve for themselves. Like the melancholic Dane, they do not necessarily possess, but are also as well possessed by.

Yes, but they endeavor to be Carvers, and not only in the sense of selecting experiences, discursive strategies, and the like. For these are the editors that sponsor the annual Raymond Carver Short Story Award.

Beware of entrance to a quarrel, says Polonius, But being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee.

I have always despised Raymond Carver. I don’t care how hard he worked on his stories, how many drafts he wrote, how frustrated he was by Gordon Lish’s editorial intrusions, or how often he stayed up in a car all night long drinking whiskey with John Cheever or whomever. I have always despised him in the same way I continue to despise Ronald Reagan even through his latter-day Renaissance in popular opinion, and the two are always linked in my imagination as regressive 1980s phenomena. I will always think of Reagan as the doddering old man who on the verge of his Alzheimers authorized the overturning of a popular revolution in one country and secretly sponsored death-squads in another. Reagan slipped fairly unnoticeably in the latter half of his term as world’s most powerful human from homespun to blithering, but his abdication of what was serious and at stake in the human community forgives me any charge of cruelty that may be levelled at me for cursing the dead. Raymond Carver never killed anybody that I know of, save himself perhaps (& of course we writers often go in for this sort of thing), but similarly reduced the complexities of experience, the relativities of truth, and the nobility of our living being in the wide universe into art that strikes me and has always struck me as glib, disrespectful, coy, false, trite, and belittling. That the reputation he gained for himself and his work is one of piercing honesty and crucial insight strikes me as every bit as ironic as Reagan being called “The Great Communicator” or our greatest post-Holocaust President. Reagan once spoke of having himself helped liberate the death camps, and believed it, even though it was subsequently pointed out to him that he had not left California during this period. That this was fiction, and yet it struck him with the force of actual fact, seems almost a parable of several of the points I make in this talk about the complexities of experience and representation and the lies those who purport to tell a simple story are actually telling themselves.

It may surprise and even anger a listener to this talk who is committed to traditional realist technique to hear it conflated with conservative politics of the late 20th century that, make no mistake, have in new fashion bled into our current century. But for surprisingly many practitioners of what is called “experimental” fiction – that is, that practice of fiction for which the processes of fiction and the roles of language are foregrounded – the work has a political dimension. It certainly always has for me. The lie of traditional verisimilitude’s strategies also seems to me What’s Wrong with Kansas: an over-reliance on illusory, traditionalist narrative assumptions, the stories one accepts about one’s life or one’s stories that prevent a vision of one’s own condition. Interestingly, the two sides in the debate other fictive representation each call the other dishonest and each claim themselves to be telling the truth. But, at present, one is not received as one receives mainstream culture, and so can call itself the oppositional discourse. Perhaps this is why the politics of representation seem to me truly a politics, and indicative of other political oppositions, which also makes it easier to explain, to come around to the title of this panel, why some people don’t like experimental fiction. One of the writers on our side of the equation, the fabulous Salman Rushdie, whose work has deconstructed both the Koran and colonialist impulses, has returned again and again in his work of recent years to the movie The Wizard of Oz as a source of inspiration. Perhaps this is a metafictive impulse inspired by how that movie breaks from black and white into the garish colors of an exaggerated world. Perhaps the impulse is inspired, at least part, by that emblematic line, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Coda:
At the opening night AWP reception, trying to decide whether or not to stand on line for my free drink, I ran into someone I knew from the conference I'd been to in Tallahassee in January. I got a glance at the name tag. It was the Editor-in-Chief of Carve Magazine. He seemed to me to be a very warm-hearted man. There is nothing personal here -- and nothing more to add to the above.

Stoked

2006-03-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

Starcherone has an updated website, two new books, and we're ready to make some noise in Austin. Dig:

March 8-11 Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference inb at Austin Hilton conference center, Austin, TX. We'll have book table #506, where Jeffrey DeShell will sign his novel, Peter, An (A)Historical Romance, Friday, 3/10, 2pm, and Peter Conners signs the collection of prose-poetry/flash-fiction he edited, PP/FF: An Anthology, Saturday, 3/11, 11am. Other events:
Thurs., 3/9, 4pm – A Reading from Authors of Starcherone Books: Nickole Brown, Brian Evenson, Cris Mazza, Jeff Parker, and Aimee Parkison, all contributors to the anthology, PP/FF.
Fri., 3/10 – I appear as panelist, with Davis Schneiderman, Steve Tomasula, and Kass Fleischer, “The Next New Thing; or, Why Some People Don’t Like Experimental Fiction”
Sat., 3/11 – The PP/FF Mega-Reading, contributors to the Starcherone anthology, 8pm, The Ritz, 320 E. 6th St., Austin. Readers will include Kazim Ali, Nickole Brown, Brian Clements, Peter Conners, Jeffrey DeShell, Geoffrey Gatza, Johannes Goranson, Laird Hunt, Brian Johnson, Peter Markus, Joyelle McSweeney, Kirk Nesset, Ethan Paquin, Aimee Parkison, Ted Pelton, Pedro Ponce, Jessica Treat, and more!

Back in New York, I have two readings coming up, including the debut of my novel, Malcolm & Jack (and other Famous American Criminals). The new edition of my short fictions, Endorsed by Jack Chapeau 2 an even greater extent, is also now available from Starcherone.
March 15, 4pm – Rooftop Poetry Club reading, with Irene Sipos. Butler Library at Buffalo State College.
March 29, 7pm – Reading and Book Signing of Malcolm & Jack (& other Famous American Criminals), Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport Museum, NYC.

Having once written a dissetation on Melville, I couldn't be happier than to debut my book in the old New York port district, and in the Melville Gallery itself!

One more note: I'm humbled to be reading May 10 in the great St. Marks Poetry Series, at the St. Marks Church in New York City -- alongside another of my heroes, novelist Brian Evenson.

The only thing left to do is apologize to my students this month -- but then the reading series at Medaille that I co-curate with Ethan Paquin is bringing in a great writer in March as well --
March 22, 7pm - Novelist Ralph Berry, author, most recently, of Frank (Chiasmus, 2006), and director of FC2.
Ralph's also going to be a guest in my Post-Atomic American Fiction class at Medaille, 3/23, when we discuss Ben Marcus.

Gotta go ... and buy some luggage. Something that comfortably holds about 4 dozen books....

Elemental Particles

2006-02-26T18:31:00.000-08:00

Starcher-Blog
I write this, slightly inebriated, after Starcherone's 48th Birthday Party for Michel Houellebecq. Ethan Paquin, Ed Taylor, Isabelle Pellissier, and I read selections from Houellebecq's novels Platform and The Elementary Particles and interviews (in French--Isabelle's department) & we had champagne and a birthday cake for dear Michel, that wonderful, fearless novelist.

Part of Starcherone's "platform," or mission in this case, is to promote contemporary innovative & experimental fiction -- that is, to our mind, fiction that matters, and that isn't represented in mainstream American culture. Houellebecq is published by major houses in the US -- Vintage and Knopf -- but he is an author who could never be an Oprah pick, and may well be unpublishable were not he an award winning write in France (see the Elfriede Jelinek entry, 2/28/05). He writes constantly, and often uncomfortably, about sex. He is openly critical of Islam. But he is also an author who registers acute states of tenderness and vulnerability, and is often, frequently, shockingly insightful, piercing to the heart of an idea or an experience.

Here is a selection of Houellebecq, from his best novel, The Elementary Particles, which in France won the Prix Novembre, but in this country could win nothing established, nothing but the hearts of genuine lovers or art & life --

Ethan Paquin selected & read this earlier tonight, Rust Belt Books, in Buffalo, New York --

"Michel still had a photograph taken in the garden of Annabelle's house during the Easter holidays on 1971. Her father had hidden Easter eggs in the bushes and flower bed. In the photo, Annabelle was standing in the middle of a bed of forsythias, parting the tall stems, intent on her search with all the gravity of childhood. She had just begun to mature; her face was delicate, and it was obvious even then that she would be exceptionally beautiful. The gentle swell of her sweater hinted at her breasts. This would be the last time there was an egg hunt at Easter; they following year they would be too old to play these games.

"At about the age of thirteen, progesterone and estrogen secreted by the ovaries in a girl's body produce pads of fatty tissue around the breasts and buttocks. When perfectly formed, these organs have a round, full, pleasing aspect and produce violent arousal in the male. Like her mother at that age, Annabelle had a beautiful body. Her mother's face was charming but plain, and nothing could have prepared her for the painful shock of Annabelle's beauty; she was quite frightened by it. Annabelle owed her big blue eyes and the dazzling shock of blonde hair to her father's side of the family, yet only most extraordinary fluke of morphogenetics could account for the devastating purity of her face.

"Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible--no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.

"At fifteen, Annabelle was one of those rare beauties who can turn any man's head--regardless of age or physical fitness. She was one of the few who could send pulses racing in young and middle-aged alike and cause old men to groan in regret simply by walking down the street. She quickly noticed the silence that followed her appearance in a cafe or classroom, but it would be years before she completely understood it. At the school in Crecy-en-Brie, it was common knowledge that she and Michel were 'together,' but even if they hadn't been, no boy would have dared try. The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline."

OK --I've continued drinking Monsieur Touton Bordeaux Sauvignon 2004 while typing all of this in. I'm tired and I've got an eleven hour day tomorrow. We have some fireworks coming up at Starcherone -- some big doings prepared for AWP-Austin in two weeks, with our anthology PP/FF coming back from the printer Tuesday, featuring 61 writers -- and two readings in Austin, April at &Now in Chicago; then again in Boulder, Colorado; in July a mega-reading at Night & Day in Brooklyn; other events in the works for Detroit, Denver, Syracuse, Louisville.... But I gotta go to sleep. I'm just a working stiff. There is sometimes small consolation in that I direct a press that continues to stay barely afloat. Won't you buy and read one or two of our books?

Welcome to our new digs

2006-02-22T00:17:00.000-08:00

Hello,

Thank you for joining us on Blogspot.com. We made the move to this space as it is much more open in the e-world and easier to manage! So please enjoy this and hopefully we'll be able to respond in a much more timely fashion. All of our previous posts and interviews have been posted below. And if you look closely maybe you'll find something new.

Excelsior,
Geoffrey the web-monkey

1/9/2006

2006-02-22T00:03:00.000-08:00

ON CONTEST ETHICS

I won't even go into how lame it is to go 105 days between blog entries....

This weekend, I'll be in Tallahassee for the Florida Literary Arts Coalition's annual Other Words conference, at Florida State University. One of the things I'll be doing there is moderating a panel on "Contest Ethics."

It's a subject I never expected to be an authority on. But this summer Starcherone Books was among the small presses who participated in a virtual roundtable sponsored by Council of Literary Magazines and Presses on Contest Ethics. A "Statement of Contest Ethics" was issued by CLMP this fall, based on this discussion. The statement reads:

CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to

1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors;

2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines -- defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and

3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public.

This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Starcherone helped develop these guidelines, yet recently realized that we were short of compliance with regard to the second half of guideline number 2. In a micro-business like Starcherone, it can be hard to keep up with new demands, and we had never had to put out a fire in the area of ethics, so had not completely articulated our position. We have always made the mechanics of our contests exceptionally clear, even offering contestants the opportunity to enter online. We have conducted all three of our contests (well over 500 applicants, 2003-05) without a single complaint (and in fact several dozen messages of thanks). Each of our three contests has resulted in a debut author winning publication (still forthcoming for Sara Greenslit, last year's winner). A different guest judge has made the final call in each of our four contests, in each case an author with several books and a distinct literary reputation, so that potential contestants had a barometer of the type of work we were seeking and in which we are interested. Our three judges of past contests -- Cris Mazza, Kenneth Bernard, and Brian Evenson -- have all been models of integrity. Each is a professor or former professor, which among other things ensured (at least for us) that their judgments would reflect not merely narrow concerns of the moment, but some idea of what constitutes LITERATURE. We think our three winning books (which may be seen elsewhere on this site), speak for themselves, and we look forward to working with Carole Maso, the judge of this year's contest.

But for all that, we have never done what the latter part of guideline #2, above, stipulates. To correct this oversight, here are our principles regarding definition of conflict of interest for all parties concerned.

1) The winner of the Starcherone Fiction Prize cannot be someone whose work that year's Final Judge recognizes during the blind final-judging process.

2) In order that the best manuscript in the contest not be penalized simply because a Final Judge recognizes some aspect of the writing or deduces the author's identity based upon some circumstantial fact, Starcherone agrees to offer to publish the best manuscript received in our contest each year, even if this book is disqualified from winning our Prize. In such a circumstance, the Final Judge agrees to choose a second book as the winner of the Prize, in accordance with #1, above.

Contestants should recognize that there may be many reasons why a judge or reader may recognize a contestant's work, as many different contingent circumstances may arise in any human endeavor. Starcherone employs a small number of friends of the press (of demonstrated critical acumen!), active readers and participants in literary life all, and to police all possible connections among contestants and judges at every level would be somewhat akin to counting the holes in Royal Albert Hall.

Nevertheless,

3) If anyone knows of any conflict of interest influencing a result in our contest, please make us aware of it and we will investigate and report our findings. Contest fees will be refunded upon request. (We only ask that contestants realize we are a volunteer-run non-profit, and need the receipts of our contest in order to pursue our mission to seek the best innovative fiction and publish it for the purpose of public education in the art of serious fiction.)

-----
It gets a little legalistic to go through all of this -- and there's also the problem of publicly proclaiming your integrity in a time when characters like Jeffrey Skilling, Tom DeLay, Scooter Libby, and Ahmed Chalabi are doing the same thing. Who is there that will believe anyone? But I wanted to go through this process of bringing Starcherone into compliance with the CLMP statement for several reasons: to help show the statement means something in the actual practice of a small press, to strive toward transparency, and because it was something we needed to do to continue this contest. Our experience of the Starcherone Fiction Prize competition, now in its fourth year, has been overwhelmingly positive. This satisfaction hasn't been because of money -- we don't even take in enough in contest fees to cover all the costs of administering the contest, compensating the judge, printing the winning books, advertising, etc. Scout's honor! -- and, besides, as a 501(c)(3) our financials are subject to federal review. We go through all the trouble of doing this annual competition because it has worked. We have met many new and exciting talents because of it. We also see many repeat entrants, an indication that many who haven't been selected still recognize our contest as fair. We thank them for their faith, and try to repay it. (It turns out entering more than once can pay off -- last year's winning manuscript was a semi-finalist the year before.)

In any case, the deadline for this year's Starcherone Fiction Prize is January 31, 2006. The numbered paragraphs above appear on our Contest Guidelines page as of January 10, 2006.