BOOKS
Aaron Nielsen
The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton
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.
Adam Ganderson
Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth: a review
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.
Alissa Nutting
You Have Arms to Bar Yourself from People: Gary Lutz and I Looked Alive
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.
Amy Herschleb
Lynne Tillman: Someday This Will Be Funny
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.
Amy Meyerson
Comfort the Afflicted Food and Afflict the Comfort Food: an Interview with Aimee Bender
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.
Andrew Haley
My Favorite Generals: Roberto Bolano's The Third Reich and New York's Latin Awakening
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.
Andy Beta
2666 by Roberto Bolano: a review
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.
Ben Bush
Review of Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
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.
Ben Fama
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
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.
Bett Williams
the buddhist by Dodie Bellamy (in review)
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.
Blake Butler
Swarms of Swarms: The Awakened Space of Dennis Cooper's The Marbled Swarm
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.
Brian Howe
45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme
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.
Brian Pera
Reviews: Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory and Masha Tupitsyn's Beauty Talk & Monsters
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."
Daniel Hamilton
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
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.
Donal Mosher
Unhealthy Appetites: Dennis Cooper's Ugly Man
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.
Eli S. Evans
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.
Gean Moreno
Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X
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.
George Barber
The Prison Suit: Incarceration during China's Cultural Revolution
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.
James Greer
The Pale King, An Unfinished Novel
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.
Jamie Gadette
Don't Smell the Floss: Healthy Social Boundaries as an Obstacle to Fiction
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.
Jeff T. Johnson
The Haze Pervades: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
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.
Jesi Khadivi
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek
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.
Jesse Hudson
Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian
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.
Jim Ruland
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.
Jon Leon
Marque of Goodness
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.
Kevin Killian
Secret Historian: Samuel Steward
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.
Laura Carter
Burn This Book: an interview with author Blake Butler
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
Louis Chude-Sokei
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.
Mark Asch
Review of Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
03.07.08
Worlds within words within worlds. Mark Asch tackles the infinite regression of Steven Millhauser's latest short story collection.
Matthew Derby
Roberto Bolano's The Skating Rink
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
Michael Busk
The Time of the Men with Guns: My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef
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.
Michael Louie
Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB
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.
Michael Miller
The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder
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.
Michael Thomsen
Romancing the Douche: On Peter Moutford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism
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.
Nicholas Boggs
James Baldwin, Uncollected
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.
Olena Jennings
Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia
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.
Pasha Malla
If You Give Enough Helper Monkeys Enough Typewriters: An Interview with Madras Press Publisher Sumanth Prabhaker
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.
Richard Parks
Review of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
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.
Rob Tennant
Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture
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
Sam Sacks
REVIEW: In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
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.
Scott Bradfield
Review of Zeroville by Steve Erickson
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.
Trinie Dalton
Put Your 3-D Glasses On and Drop Acid Now
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
Vikram Johri
Reviews: Denis Johnson's - Tree of Smoke and Richard Russo's - Bridge of Sighs
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.
Winston Ward
Girls in Trouble
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.
Zach Baron
IMPRINTS 1: Don Delillo, Simon Rich and Joshua Ferris
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.