FANZINE

Readings, Readings, Readings (3 in Atlanta next 3 days)

05.13.10

See the Atlanta events page on Fanzine.

Thursday, tonight, hit Whitespace with Jonathan Lerner.

This Friday at…

Success is not an Option: Postmodern Crime and Comedy in L.A.

05.07.10

James Greer’s enviable big league career began as a music critic of such a high order that, well, shoot, he was asked to throw down the pen to play in one of the seminal rock bands at the fin/turn of the siècle. Then he wrote their biography (talking about Guided by Voices here, dream job). His debut novel Artificial Light unraveled the Kurt Cobain realm of rock star mythos, and in his sophomore novel from Akashic, Greer succeeds, with dark stunning wit, the story of The Failure – "Guy Forget…a harebrained scheme addict of the highest order." Jim Ruland reviews.

Party for Cryptic Latest McSweeney’s Tonight In SF

05.01.10

New McSweeney’s Party Tonight In SF

Blake Bultler gets honest (and funny) on weight/body control

04.28.10

Blake Bultler gets honest (and funny) on weight/body control

One, Two, Three and Four: Bad Nature, or the Literary Universe of Javier Marias

04.21.10

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

04.19.10

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.

Sex and Micro Prose: A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell and Man’s Companions by Joanna Ruocco

04.14.10

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.

iPad anyone? I still like Kindle (for iPhone Mind You)

04.05.10

iPad anyone? I still like KIndle (for iPhone Mind You)

More Kevin Killian to read

03.30.10

In case you aren’t overwhelmed by his incredible output already, from the tip of the Amazon iceberg on down to the heft of his plays, poetry…