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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.