BOOKS
Tony O'Neill's Hollywood Frolic
Jim Ruland
08.18.10
Sick City is the most recent novel from Tony O'Neill. A master at telling his own story, he has also helped others to tell theirs. He worked on Neon Angel, the memoir of Runaways lead signer Cherie Currie, which was recently adapted into the film starring Dakota Fanning. He also assisted on the New York Times bestseller Hero of the Underground by Jason Peters, an All-American Defensive Tackle and NFL player, about his addiction to heroin and cocaine. Tony O'Neill has had a taste of hard living himself and here offers Jim Ruland a tour of Hollywood's seedy underbelly. Accompanying photos of O'Neill courtesy of Jim Ruland.
Comfort the Afflicted Food and Afflict the Comfort Food: an Interview with Aimee Bender
Amy Meyerson
07.03.10
In Aimee Bender's most recent novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Rose Edelstein discovers at her ninth birthday party that has the ability to understand people’s feelings through the foods they make. In this conversation with Amy Meyerson, Bender discusses the culinary traditions of close-knit families, 19th century French theories of gustation, genre-slipping and why it can be useful to make your characters friendless.
Burn This Book: an interview with author Blake Butler
Laura Carter
06.21.10
Could have put this one up weeks ago, 'cept ye editor here couldn't figure out how to blurb it. How to reckon a few lines on a book so poetic, yet lush with traditional narrative (if your idea of tradition spans from Samuel Beckett to Cormac McCarthy to Ben Marcus, taking a Lovecraft/Lynchian detour through a world familiar, close, suburban and simultaneously apocalyptically hellish... same difference?), as if all the tragedies you hear on the news distantly, the floods, the fires, the quakes were taking place on your own trimmed yard, or erupting from your esophagus and/or mind. So took weeks off to ponder it, and being summertime, our heads got swollen like a certain political character toward the end of said book to be blurbed, Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas. And finally Fanzine said wait, Laura Carter nails it here in her equally challenging and poetic intro; so fuck our blurb. Read her words and Butler’s in this interview. Butler, from Atlanta, is also the editor of HTMLGiant, author of the novella Ever and his next novel There Is No Year will be out on Harper Perrenial next year. -CM
My Life in the Bush of Words or, J.D. Salinger in Africa: Broken Glass, by Alain Mabanckou
Louis Chude-Sokei
05.25.10
Written in a long, continuous sentence this bawdy, intertextual novel from the Congolese author of African Psycho takes as its themes "capitulation, decadence and the joys of self-abasement." Louis Chude-Sokei, author of The Last Darky, reviews and examines the long-standing prohibition on black writers exploring themes of self-loathing and intra-community criticism, both of which he argues are essential literary tools.
Marque of Goodness
Jon Leon
05.20.10
How does one define the undefinable? It is the enigmatic and ineffable marque of goodness that Jon Leon does his ostensive best to name, winding his way through the meandering hooks of Jane Eyre, Marilyn Monroe, and the LA-based writer Kate Durbin, and in the end, winds up writing a book review. It's good.