Fanzine Speaks! Kaya Oakes and Indie Everything
Ben Bush10.05.09
Hey special thanks to Kaya Oakes for a great time last Sunday at Skylight Books and thanks to everyone who was…
Book: Sex Dungeon for Sale!
Michael Louie10.03.09
This came in the mail – Patrick Wensink’s collection of short stories Sex Dungeon for Sale! is one of those rare gifts we (or rather, I) get every…
Book: Deborah Eisenberg
Ben Bush10.02.09
Last week Deborah Eisenberg was given one of this year’s famed MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants. I’m a big fan of her short stories,…
The Haze Pervades: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
Jeff T. Johnson10.01.09
During some of the long silences of Pynchon’s career, it must have seemed he had disappeared for good. With his latest, we doubt it, as the Pynchon cartel reemerges to take on/revisit the best threads of his past works – The Lot cries for more. Jeff T. Johnson reviews Inherent Vice.
Book: Awkward Press
Ben Bush09.12.09
Jeffrey Dinsmore’s novels begin as page-turning genre fiction satires but in their oddness and literary invention quickly veer into something else….
Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink
Matthew Derby08.31.09
Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 won last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award and received praise from Jonathon Lethem, Francine Prose and Time magazine. Although that 900-page epic was Bolaño’s final work before dying of liver failure, New Directions is publishing the first English translations of some of his earlier works. Matthew Derby brings his perspective to Bolaño’s noir-ish The Skating Rink
Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture
Rob Tennant08.25.09
The question remains: Who is more ‘indie’ – the O.C.’s Seth Cohen or New York poet Frank O’Hara? In Slanted and Enchanted Kaya Oakes reframes the debate by creating a wide-ranging lineage of independent media and artists, defying the categorical limitations that have arisen around the term in recent years. Mike Watt, Kathleen Hanna, David Berman and cartoonist Daniel Clowes all make appearances. Rob Tennant asks the ramifications of this heritage for the current state of independent culture. -Ben Bush
Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia
Olena Jennings08.23.09
Russia has seen its share of changes, rapidly over the last century and a half. And so has its literature, from the days of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, to the writers managing to document the Soviet era, to today’s pen wielders of supposed freedom and autonomy amidst ongoing conflicts in Chechnya and growing gangland capitalism. Editors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker bring us a new survey of Russian literature for current times. Olena Jennings reviews.
The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder
Michael Miller08.07.09
For several novels now, Stephen Elliott has been writing scintillating fiction that is almost always about himself; each is a memoir of some segment of his life, and like many a memoirist, there are those, like Elliott’s father, who challenge the writer’s veracity. In his latest, The Adderall Diaries, Elliott steps up to several challenges: he gets involved in a story that’s not his, a murder mystery, he confronts the naysayers like his father who complain that his memories are fiction, while simultaneously writing, in the midst of it all, perhaps his best memoir yet. Michael Miller charts Elliott’s tortuous and triumphant course through the new novel in his review here.
Don’t Smell the Floss: Healthy Social Boundaries as an Obstacle to Fiction
Jamie Gadette08.06.09
In this collection, Los Angeles-based writer, painter and musician Matty Byloos examines the human condition through amputation, eerie amounts of hair, kittens, pornography and ghost stories. While Byloos’s stories have appeared in The Fanzine and elsewhere in the past, taken together, they bump up against each other like strangers on a bus and as the stories make small talk with each other, they soon realize that they have something in common: Byloos’s funny, warped world view. Here, Jamie Gadette inhales the flossy aroma and reports back.
