Teen Porn
Andrew Leland04.30.10
You never know where this business starts. Erotica – You know? Maybe in the future everyone will be writing it. Everyone. Andrew Leland, ultrasuperstar in my book (and the book of many) gives us a peek at that future (Hey whatchoo lookin’ at Willis?) This is spores, this is pottery. I mean this is prose, this is poetry. I mean this is the stuff, so read. Art by Danny Jock.
Blake Bultler gets honest (and funny) on weight/body control
Casey McKinney04.28.10
Blake Bultler gets honest (and funny) on weight/body control
Reboots uniting parents and children: pop-cultural apologism
Ben Bush04.27.10
I’ve often wondered if remakes and reboots are timed about a generation apart in order to hit two demographics at once. Parents and children…
Women Making Love With Monsters
Emily Schultz04.27.10
Maybe you are well versed in mythology, like you have a good grasp of the Greek monsters – the minotaurs, centaurs, harpies, and such? the Irish Dulhallan, or the Hebrew Leviathan and Behemoth always ready to duke it out? But have you ever seen any at a party? Have you ever run your gaze over an entire Dewey Decimal horde of unearthly beasts and got your pick of the litter, the most well hhhh… happy to see you? Well parties, as they did in Roman times, still tend to end rather ugly, with drunken garrolousness and folks fighting in the streets. Emily Schultz, author of Heaven Is Small and cooeditor of Joyland, guides us on a night like no other. Art by Danny Jock.
And Now for Something Less Funky: A Fan in Search of Joanna Newsom’s Elusive New Epic
Brian Howe04.23.10
Brian Howe finds Joanna Newsom’s latest, expansive offering most generous and yet somewhat unusual to digest. In fact, Howe believes her two-plus hour and three-disc album may not be completely digestible at all. That’s not to say Newsom isn’t providing tasty musical numbers to gorge upon. Rather, sometimes one’s final say may require a readjustment that only a personal viewing can do.
One, Two, Three and Four: Bad Nature, or the Literary Universe of Javier Marias
Eli S. Evans04.21.10
The politics of telling usually don’t vary much from the school yard through adulthood; the semantics and subtleties are among the few tacit principles in life that remain static. Here, Eli Evans explores the dangers, repercussions, and motivations of the urge to tell in some of the works of Javier Marías, from the diminutive Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico to the Proustian Your Face Tomorrow and finds the similarities striking, the characters’ predicaments, their impulses to tell their stories, which in more than one way reveals their methods for escaping an unexpected death in a foreign country, and ultimately their own survival.
Knowing Me, Knowing You, Knowing Them: Fiction Across Borders
Louis Chude-Sokei04.19.10
Are "discursive domination" and "representational violence" the colonial impulse in fiction or the very nature of literature itself? Is there an ethical way for writers to represent people who are racially, sexually, culturally different or should writers even be concerned with being ethical in the first place? In his review of Shameem Black’s Fiction Across Borders, Louis Chude-Sokei, author of The Last Darky, looks at how we look at fiction about the "other." Along the way he takes blandly utopian multiculturalism to task and examines how disdain and cross-cultural respect have come to seem interchangeable.
Accompanying images are courtesy of Berlin-based artist Paul Tyree-Francis.
Pottymouth
Kevin Sampsell04.15.10
The oral aspect of sex can’t be overestimated and here Kevin Sampsell presents several case studies of the way we talk during the act. Sampsell is the author of the recent memoir A Common Pornography and proprietor of Future Tense Press. Art by Danny Jock.
Sex and Micro Prose: A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell and Man’s Companions by Joanna Ruocco
Trinie Dalton04.14.10
Kevin Sampsell, a longtime indie press stalwart with his Portland-based Future Tense Press, is also the author of A Common Pornography, a memoir about sex and family told largely in small segments. Joanna Ruocco’s writing has received praise from Brian Evenson, Robert Coover and Carole Maso. Her second book Man’s Companions is a collection of very short stories. Trinie Dalton, no stranger to the world of short prose, reviews these two new works.
