BOOKS
Review of Fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick
James Greer
01.30.12
Painterly? No that's sort of feeble for what it is. Impressionistic? Nah...getting there but... author James Greer ponders––with his own lyrical might––the right word to describe Sean Kilpatrick’s Fuckscapes (his first collection of poetry with a title con huevos). Vomitous? Yes, but bombastically beautiful in the squalor. Here's a revolutionary panorama of jarring rhythm that deserves your prompt attention.
Girls in Trouble
Winston Ward
12.26.11
Douglas Light has built a world of characters tossed into the air with a fascination for their lack of safety. Their context fails to hold them on the page, and as they arc out over the unknown, Winston Ward analyzes their doomed trajectory with one eye down the barrel of a shotgun. The hunted, haunted heroines of Light's Girls in Trouble.
The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality
Donal Mosher
12.08.11
A party-line game of telephone in which each voice is distinct, The Air We Breathe grew by accretion into a conversation that stepped off the page into an exhibition at SFMOMA, running November 5, 2011 through February 20, 2012. Photographer and filmmaker Donal Mosher enters the pages of the formative text/collage on marriage equality from the mind of editor Apsara DiQuinzio and takes a look at what is on display, and what is at stake. The public and the private forms of exhibition and exchange are on the table.
Lay Mirrors in the Street / Bring Heaven Down to Earth: On Jen Benka's Pinko
Laura Carter
11.28.11
All the leaves fall off the trees in one night (as they do) and all the flowers come back red in the springtime. Laura Carter explores the loveliness in revolution of Jen Benka's Pinko.
Swarms of Swarms: The Awakened Space of Dennis Cooper's The Marbled Swarm
Blake Butler
10.31.11
Fanzine caught up with the always gracious Dennis Cooper in Paris this summer and was casually handed his forthcoming book The Marbled Swarm on a day we went to see Anish Kapoor's inflatable Leviathan sculpture at the Palais Royal. "It's my best yet," an understatement of humble challenge coming from America's elder statesman of trangressive literature, now a more on-than-off expat in the country of his literary heroes, France. Cooper certainly has taken his economically taught, So-Cal erotic horror mastery and cloaked it with a mashup of continental elan. A novel of cannibalism twixt the secret passages of chateaus told in a new form of language that turns ouroboros-like (cannibalistically) in on itself, we couldn't think of anyone better to unravel such a challenge than the next gen bard of sleepless nights, Blake Butler.
Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism
Gean Moreno
09.25.11
InfraNet Lab/Lateral Office is building a new architecture out of the carapaces of our dreams and failed cities. In volume 30 of the esteemed publication Pamphlet Architecture from Princeton Architectural Press, INL/LO suggests six "post-national" infrastructures from a proposed bridge across Bering Strait to Vatnsmyri Airport in Reykjavík. Gean Moreno considers the post-dreamtime landscape with a keen eye on the visually stunning and an ear for which playlist is called to muster.
Stories V! by Scott McClanahan
Amy Herschleb
07.25.11
Fanzine has seen Scott McClanahan read. He has the charisma of a Flannery O’Connor character, a southern preacher in a dusty black suit bringing to his flock the gospel that James Joyce is dead, even if Scott’s more transparent prose might well from a tributary of the same spring, riverrun from his hometown West Virginia down here to Georgia (where Fanzine now resides). McClanahan is a story teller, and he has a wealth of oral yarns ready for an ear; thankfully they are also on the page. Amy Herschleb reviews his latest collection, Stories V! from Holler Presents.
the buddhist by Dodie Bellamy (in review)
Bett Williams
05.27.11
In live-blogging her terminal affair with an emotionally abusive “spiritual teacher,” Dodie Bellamy confessed intimacies in a highly public forum. Her online posts are now available in print form, packaged as the buddhist, with a previously unpublished chapter that mirrors life's open-ended complexities. Bett Williams is personally transformed by Bellamy’s purging, finding strength in the author’s refreshing exhale of love and rage. Williams review puts the fan back in Fanzine.
Lynne Tillman: Someday This Will Be Funny
Amy Herschleb
05.25.11
Amy Herschleb finds there are several ways to read American Genius Lynne Tillman's latest collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny. And some ways are more fun than others.
Romancing the Douche: On Peter Moutford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism
Michael Thomsen
05.16.11
Writer Tom Bissell has argued that the often poorly regarded genre of the political thriller (think Graham Greene and John le Carré) has something valuable to offer in the—forgive me—post-2001 era, in which international relations have regained their urgency. Peter Mountford's first novel is in many ways part of that tradition. Here, the intrigue is financial speculation set in Bolivia in the month leading up to Evo Morales' 2005 election, in which Morales' campaign promise to nationalize resources presents opportunities for profiteering. Like Graham Greene, who worked as an agent for British intelligence, Mountford was inspired by his experience working for a think tank in Ecuador—which he later discovered was also running a hedge fund. Responding to this book whose primary motivating factor is desire for money, Michael Thomsen finds it wanting.
Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X
Gean Moreno
04.19.11
A certain type of architectural book has proliferated from the 1990s on - mammoth "doorstops" from heavyweights such as Rem Koolhaas in pubs like S, M , L , XL. But in the 1960s and 70s a different breed of architecture publication was common - smaller, handmade, with the DNA of the maker visible (well almost surely a fingerprint or two). Artist and publisher Gean Moreano has researched these magazines collected in the book Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X for inspiration.
The Pale King, An Unfinished Novel
James Greer
04.12.11
David Foster Wallace died before finishing his third novel, The Pale King. If he imagined while living that he'd be pleased to have it published in this state, after checking out, we can't know (...um). But I can barely explicate briefly how pleased I am that Jim Greer is Fanzine's man of the hour writing the review of the manicured "mess" we are left with. He nails it. Death and taxes, and oh boy. Whatever Wallace might have thought of Michael Pietsch's Herculean task of putting The Pale King together, he, a bit of Yorick's skull now, would certainly smile back on Greer's words here.
The Prison Suit: Incarceration during China's Cultural Revolution
George Barber
02.16.11
As a 20-year-old, Xiaoda Xiao drunkenly ripped a poster of Mao off the wall and used it to mop up his spilled drink. Without a trial he was sent to a prison where he spent the next five years working in a gravel quarry. The Prison Suit describes this time through interconnected essays, each one focused on a different topic or fellow prisoner. Egor Lazebnik reviews the book, both as part of the genre of prison literature and as a part of history.
Everything Sings: Intimate Cartography
Rob Tennant
02.04.11
Rob Tennant reviews Denis Woods' Everything Sings, a book of eccentric maps exploring an array of aspects of Boylan Heights, a neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, including the distribution of its jack-o-lantern, the areas in which different radio stations are available, the route and duration of the newspaper boy, shades of autumn leaves and many others.
The Dehumanizing Effects of Sam Pink's Person
Jamie Gadette
12.15.10
The narrator of Sam Pink's novel Person has sex with his neighbor, shoots himself in the face with a pellet gun and agrees to kill his roommate's father, but primarily the book is composed of elaborate fantasies, none of which come to pass. Perhaps anticipating this criticism, Pink has commented, "people will say nothing happens in the book but that's impossible, you silly motherfucker!" Jamie Gadette, who has quaffed deeply of the waters of eccentric literature in her previous reviews for the Fanzine, retorts that it's fine to create a text chock full of anti-social psychosis, but please don't bore your readers.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Ben Fama
11.08.10
Belatedly but, as always, with the purest of hearts Fanzine offers poet Ben Fama's thoughtful take on Maggie Nelson's Bluets. Despite or due to its incorporation of Wittgenstein and Goethe, Nelson described this meditation on the color blue in a grant application as "heathen, hedonistic and horny." Nelson, who has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, examined the death of her aunt in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder and Bluets is not without its darkness.
Secret Historian: Samuel Steward
Kevin Killian
11.02.10
In Kevin Killian's review of Justin Spring's Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, Killian recounts his own close encounters with Steward, who lived in the Bay Area in the '80s, and his divergent viewpoints with a man whom he found, while not entirely fascinating, intriguing, not only for his sexual prowess and Stud File, but for Steward's relationship with Gertrude Stein, his life as a tattoo artist in seedy postwar Chicago, his artistic endeavors, and multiple identities during an age of homosexual persecution. It was a transitional time for Killian as well, and his initial apprehensiveness toward Steward as subject matter gives way to real understanding.
My Favorite Generals: Roberto Bolano's The Third Reich and New York's Latin Awakening
Andrew Haley
10.10.10
Andrew Haley explicates how Bolaño's unpublished manuscripts led to a US-based Spanish-language joint venture that included Random House and a Berlusconi-owned Italian press—a deal that will have large ramifications on how Spanish-language literature is bought and read in the Americas. Business strategies may be an apt parallel to the novel in question: Bolaño's The Third Reich is about an obsessive player of a World War II board game, not unlike the gaming classic Axis & Allies. El Tercer Reich was published last March and Natasha Wimmer's English translation will hit stores this fall.
You Have Arms to Bar Yourself from People: Gary Lutz and I Looked Alive
Alissa Nutting
10.03.10
Gary Lutz is notoriously unprolific and for good reason: the man puts a super-human amount of thought into each line of his prose. In his speech "The Sentence is a Lonely Place" he describes how he thinks about word choice and order: the shapes of the letters on the page, his preference for ending a sentence with a hard consonant sound unless there's a reason to leave it intentionally open-ended. Given the intensely unusual grammar of his fiction, it's either counter-intuitive or completely appropriate that he is also the co-author of Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference. I wasn't entirely sure it was the same "Gary Lutz" until I saw that Ben Marcus's novels were listed in an example of how to correctly use a colon. With copies of the first edition of Lutz's out-of-print 2003 short story collection I Looked Alive currently priced at $175 on Amazon, Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions have kindly reprinted it for the rest of us. Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, reviews.
James Baldwin, Uncollected
Nicholas Boggs
09.21.10
Although he was well known as a gay public figure, Baldwin rarely spoke candidly about his own sexuality and The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings only highlights the absence of the most essential of his unpublished papers. Baldwin's correspondence has been called the “one great Baldwin masterpiece waiting to be published” but his family has long suppressed these letters because of their own discomfort with what they contain. Nicholas Boggs describes the writer's many contradictions and the importance of Baldwin in his own life, growing up white and gay in a predominantly black public school in Washington D.C.
The New Hybridity: "Bird Lovers, Backyard" by Thalia Field and "Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows" by Leslie Scalapino
Jeff T. Johnson
09.06.10
What constitutes hybrid writing? Select from the following list: a) a combining of different literary forms, b) literary collage, c) literary collaboration, d) a compressing and combining of words and phrases. In Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field applies her hybrid poetry form to a biographical work on Nazi-sympathizing physiologist Konrad Lorenz and a consideration of the last member of the now-extinct dusky seaside sparrow species/sub-species — a bird that lived out its final days in the Walt Disney World Resort. Float Horse-float or Horse-flows is the final work published by Bay Area experimental writer Leslie Scalapino before her death last May. Her friend, collaborator and longtime Fanzine contributor Kevin Killian described her in an obituary in The Bay Citizen as a spiritual writer with a beautiful voice and a great sense of humor.
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.
Success is not an Option: Postmodern Crime and Comedy in L.A.
Jim Ruland
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.
One, Two, Three and Four: Bad Nature, or the Literary Universe of Javier Marias
Eli S. Evans
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
Louis Chude-Sokei
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
Trinie Dalton
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.
If You Give Enough Helper Monkeys Enough Typewriters: An Interview with Madras Press Publisher Sumanth Prabhaker
Pasha Malla
03.29.10
Sumanth Prabhaker's Madras Press recently published a quartet of novellas by Aimee Bender, Trinie Dalton, Rebecca Lee and Prabhaker himself. The books are small, square, beautifully designed and include neither bar codes nor blurbs. The profits from each book are donated to a charity of the author's choice. Part of what makes this interesting is the type of non-profits they select -- the proceeds from Prabhaker's book will be donated to a Helping Hands, a group that trains helper monkeys for the disabled. Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method, speaks with him about the ideal way to read a short story and fiction of odd lengths.
The Time of the Men with Guns: My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef
Michael Busk
03.17.10
In December the Obama administration brought 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, attempting a surge strategy similar to Bush's in Iraq, and, with the escalation of the war, the Taliban has found its way back into public debate. Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan, where he was captured in 2002 and held in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility until 2005. Michael Busk reviews Zaeef's recent autobiography, which brings up troubling questions about the conduct of the U.S. government but also what the appropriate response to theocratic despotism might be.
For further Afghanistan reading, check out William Vollmann's out-of-print Afghanistan Picture Show, which recounts his time as a naive young buck fighting alongside the Mujahdeen against the Soviets. Also, recommended is Love and War in Afghanistan, a collection of oral histories that shows that region's conflicts from many wildly different perspectives.
The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton
Aaron Nielsen
01.11.10
The suicide rate among queer youth is twice to four times that of their heterosexual counterparts depending on your source, and perhaps concern for that population formed the root of Kathryn Stockton's inquiry into the depiction of queer children in literature and film. But to take on such a project is inevitably to tangle with our social construction of childhood and its very problematic relationship to sexuality. Stockton, an intellectually fearless English literature professor at the University of Utah and a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, relies on a fascinating array of texts including Georges Bataille, Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Supreme Court cases, Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Aaron Nielsen, a contributor to Dennis Cooper's Userlands anthology reviews.
Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian
Jesse Hudson
12.28.09
Just in time for 'Best Of' lists, 2009 has been a hell of a year for writer Kevin Killian. Heck, he's been blowing up this whole decade with some of the sharpest, wittiest, and most prodigious work of any writer in American Letters (though you still might find a lot of his words freely given in reviews on Amazon.com). As a San Franciscan for many years, it's fitting that Killian's latest collection of stories - Impossible Princess, one that mixes out-of-print material with new, darkly mature tales of desire and danger - is out on City Lights, the imprint that has defined the San Francisco lit scene for over half a century. Jesse Hudson reviews.
The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack
Jamie Gadette
12.16.09
Derek McCormack explained himself in a special guest post on author Dennis Cooper's blog: “The Show That Smells – this is what carnies and circus folk call an animal show. It’s also what I named my new novel." The second installment of a planned trilogy that began with The Haunted Hillbilly and the latest in Cooper's Little House on the Bowery imprint at Akashic, McCormack's sartorial fantasy is an appropriately seamless blend of vampires, country music and acclaimed fashion designers. McCormack has been a contributor to The Fanzine since its infancy and interested readers might also enjoy his fashion columns on the history of the sequin, Santa costumes and tragic Hollywood costume designer Vera West. Jamie Gadette, music editor of Salt Lake's City Weekly, reviews.
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek
Jesi Khadivi
12.06.09
In his review of Disney's High School Musical, Fanzine contributor Kevin Killian wrote of the film's male lead, "Ryan’s outfits are maybe one or two sizes too small, so that he seems to bulge in unseemly places all over. I think of that as the intellectual look. You know who has it, that kind of stuffed sausage sexiness? Slavoj Zizek of course. I could eat them both with a spoon." In her review of Zizek's approachably sized new work on the economic crisis, Jesi Khadivi, curator of Berlin's Golden Parachutes gallery, will instead leave you with images of the Slovenian philosopher's tendency to over-salivate.
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Daniel Hamilton
11.13.09
Jonathan Lethem has been cultivating under "an umbrella"... "ideas about identity, culture, history, cities, and loss" since 1999's Motherless Brooklyn, Daniel Hamilton writes in this review for Fanzine. Chronic city, Lethem's latest, is "a story about storytelling", one that unloads a giant gobstopper of a plot in the author's most postmodern novel to date.
The Girls' Guide to Rocking
Michael Louie
10.29.09
I know this is a kids book, or at least a book aimed at kids, girls specifically, but just because we're a "literary magazine" doesn't mean we can't step back and check out something good for the next generation. Because we may as well admit it that we're all getting older, and as we get older, the saying goes, the ground gets colder. For all of us. Despite the corny cover photos, The Girls' Guide to Rocking is one of those things; for as easy as it is to be critical and cynical of how-to music books, this one by Jessica Hopper, a music journalist and long-time band member herself, is surprisingly approachable and informative without being preachy or distant.
The Haze Pervades: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
Jeff T. Johnson
10.01.09
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.
Roberto Bolano's The Skating Rink
Matthew Derby
08.31.09
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 Tennant
08.25.09
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 Jennings
08.23.09
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 Miller
08.07.09
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 Gadette
08.06.09
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.
Unhealthy Appetites: Dennis Cooper's Ugly Man
Donal Mosher
07.29.09
Dennis Cooper has been exploring new narratives through novels, poetry and theater for decades now. A diamond tipped, pyscho-sexual bodynaut, he can be counted as perhaps the furthest notch along the spectrum of the historically adventurous - black cat side of - Grove Press that has included authors such as Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and the Marquis De Sade. Now with his first collection of stories on the major press Harper Perennial, Ugly Man, Cooper is not pulling any punches for a broader audience. San Francisco based filmmaker and writer Donal Mosher reviews.
The Last Warlock: A Brief History of Clark Ashton Smith and The Golden Age of Weird Fiction
Adam Ganderson
04.05.09
Clark Ashton Smith, born and lived in Auburn, California, an old mining town founded at the height of the gold rush era. It is known as the "Endurance Capital of the World" and touts itself as a place where old traditions live on, where the good parts of living in a small town endure and time moves just a bit slower. A strange setting for one of the giants of Weird Fiction. Adam Ganderson offers a retrospective look at Clark Ashton Smith—his life in a small town, and his influences on science fiction, fantasy, and popular culture.
2666 by Roberto Bolano: a review
Andy Beta
12.26.08
Roberto Bolaño, Chile's own prodigal poet has been getting an expansive amount of respect since his novels began being translated into English over a year ago. Bolaño, the longtime junky and self-affirmed outsider, passed away from liver failure in 2003; but we now fortunately have the translation of his last great unfinished novel, 2666, a sprawling, beefy, gruesome and enigmatic hunk of prognostication for where mankind may soon be headed. Best read of 2008? You decide. Review by Andy Beta.
Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB
Michael Louie
11.25.08
We all miss Big Baby Jesus, and no we ain't talking about that little December squirt of joy, hell it ain't even Thanksgiving yet. Y'all can start shopping on Friday. And if you do, pick up Jamie Lowe's new book, Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB (that's Ol' Dirty Bastard, R.I.P., of the Wu-Tang Clan), a biography that'll make a great stocking stuffer for anyone's grandma. Michael Louie reviews, while Mr. jock draws Mr. Dirt McGirt in kind.
Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth: a review
Adam Ganderson
10.29.08
Fanzine basically took the month off, so we get this review just in time for the remaining days of October - a month of nippy nights that creep up early and announce the Halloween season; behold here Adam Ganderson's review of Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal. You may have read the Norwegian side of things in Lords of Chaos, or got a taste of other non-Norwegian death metal bands in the excerpt "A Blaze in the North American Sky" from Brandon Stosuy’s forthcoming book that ran recently in The Believer. Here we get the Swedish death metal story, an instant classic, and required reading for music lovers and fanzine fans of varied yet discriminating tastes.
Review of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
Richard Parks
08.05.08
Baseball is best viewed live, though it’s also a comforting respite on a lazy day spent sprawled out on the living room couch. Speaking of couches, have you ever talked baseball on the couch at your shrink’s office? Did that baseball talk give you the answers you needed to reconcile a painful love/hate relationship with your father? Well probably not. But if so, or if you at least find the baseball-as-psychological lens interesting, you should check out Nicholas Dawidoff’s latest memoir The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball, reviewed here by Richard Parks.
Review of Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
Ben Bush
08.04.08
Hypertext Lit is no longer a fad but a fact. From the earlier experiments of Shelley Jackson and Robert Coover on to today's ebooks on iPhones and Kindles, electronic literature is here for the long haul, making its mark in more ways than you'd think. Ben Bush reviews a thorough study of the subject - Professor N. Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
Review of Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
Mark Asch
03.07.08
Worlds within words within worlds. Mark Asch tackles the infinite regression of Steven Millhauser's latest short story collection.
45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme
Brian Howe
01.24.08
You'd think for the latest collection from Donald Barthelme, the man who left us the sets 60 Stories and 40 Stories, he might have settled on an even medium of 50 stories, but alas, never predictable (and dead, so obviously not making these decisions), gives up his ghost again in a new collection just 5 short of mathematical balance. Fitting for a writer whose sentences of anal algebra glean amidst an illusion of sweet anarchy (that makes no sense, I am all blurbed out). Brian Howe reviews Flying to America: 45 More Stories, Turkish delight for the Barthelme completist. Cover image of B. by Danny Jock.
Imprints 5: Tom Perrotta, Gay Talese, Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne
Zach Baron
11.15.07
In Zach Baron's 5th Imprints, a monthly books column, his theme is sex, and as a befitting follow up to Mailer, it tends towards the macho, then twists back to the humorously male deprecating. Included in the review is Gay Talese's classic Thy Neighbor's Wife, Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne's The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film, and a new one by "lapsed Roman Catholic" Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher, a novel which pits the prurient against the pious in a high school setting.
Review of Zeroville by Steve Erickson
Scott Bradfield
10.25.07
Steve Erickson, in his latest novel Zeroville, invents a character who chooses to live his life as if he were a cinematic character. And who wouldn't? In the movies, one can jump cut, laws of cause and effect are easily manipulated, and responsibility becomes malleable or mute. The problem for Erickson's hero however, Scott Bradfield explains, is that he's unknowingly driven by the causal concerns of his deft creator, Erickson the novelist. And all that drives Erickson, drives his characters...well, read and see.
IMPRINTS 4: Dana Vachon, Doug Stumpf and Jim Cramer
Zach Baron
09.29.07
"Wealth rubs people in different ways," writes Zach Baron, who in his first IMPRINTS tackled DeLillo's Falling Man. Baron isn't through with the world of finance yet, and in IMPRINTS 4 he addresses two novels concerning the subject - Dana Vachon's Mergers & Acquisitions and Doug Stumpf's Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy. For good measure, he also gives a turn to CNBC's seemingly insane Wall Street analyst Jim Cramer and his book Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich.
Reviews: Denis Johnson's - Tree of Smoke and Richard Russo's - Bridge of Sighs
Vikram Johri
09.28.07
Vikram Johri reviews two new novel from old masters, Denis Johnson's oddly epic Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke and Richard Russo's memoir of childhood, Bridge of Sighs.
Reviews: Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory and Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters
Brian Pera
08.26.07
Brian Pera reviews two new books: Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory, a visually experimental work which juxtaposes two seemingly disparate texts, a collusion of dead stars and theory and into one cohesive package, and Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of observations, "Disguised as a series of short stories," of women seeking "apartness-as-refuge."
IMPRINTS 3: Andre Aciman and David Markson
Zach Baron
07.31.07
Zach Baron reviews two novels of the summer romance variety (if you will) - Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and David Markson's debut Wittgenstein's Mistress. Not your average beach books...
IMPRINTS 2: Jeff Hobbs, Steven Hall, Joan Didion, Richard Yates, John Gregory Dunn...
Zach Baron
06.28.07
Zach Baron's second installment of Imprints runs the gamut from first-time novelists Jeff Hobbs (The Tourists, touted as "your ticket to snide fun in Manhattan" by USA Today) and Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts, about which critical quips have not been provided by Mr. Baron, or USA Today) to Joan Didion, Richard Yates, John Gregory Dunn, and Don DeLillo.
IMPRINTS 1: Don Delillo, Simon Rich and Joshua Ferris
Zach Baron
05.19.07
Imprints is the debut of Zach Baron's monthly book review column. This month Baron reviews Don Delillo's newest, Falling Man, Simon Rich's Ant Farm, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End.
REVIEW: Philip Roth's - Everyman
Sam Sacks
05.23.06
As somewhat jaded, detached fans of Woody Allen's personal life, Humbert Humbert, Gustave Von Aschenbach, etc... Fanzine doesn't always wholly endorse its writers' opinions as moral tautologies, yet we appreciate Sacks for beautifully nailing Philip Roth on a particular annoying tendency in American literature, the clichéd sexual braggadocio of the solopsistic veteran author.
REVIEW: In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
Sam Sacks
04.17.06
Sacks argues that Saunders, the author of the great CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, might be treading water with the political satire on this one, a collection that is saved by a good old fashioned love story.
Put Your 3-D Glasses On and Drop Acid Now
Trinie Dalton
11.07.05
Author Trinie Dalton gives a high five to some of her favorite indie publications - BJ and Da Dogs, Paperrad, The Ganzfeld, and Picture Box