BOOKS
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