Harp & Altar #6 is up!

Harp & Altar announces the release of its sixth issue

It was a nice two-syllable name. Hart Crane. Even one. He was the son of a candy-maker, the one who invented life-savers. Hart Crane drowned, so that was pretty strange. I read everything he wrote which was only White Buildings and The Bridge which I found a little impossible. And then the fat biography and his letters. I had never read anyone's letters before.. I was 27. It was good being a journalist or whatever I was now because I could do all the reading that was too much in college because now I was getting paid to know. I could see in my reading that Hart was trying to write the great long American poem and I think it was beyond him. Not because he wasn't great, but the long poem idea seems a little stretched thin and who needs it, really. But Hart kept finding patrons and getting grants. He was like a comic ingenue. He winds up completely isolated on an tropical island in a hurricane or else getting thrown out of Mexico on his Guggenheim he was such a drunk. Meanwhile, writing writing the bridge. Why has no one ever made this film. He was a very familiar man. I felt I knew him. A prematurely white-haired fag, shy-faced and handsome. Wearing one of those Russian sailor shirts he was always leaning against a tree or posing in a group, distractedly touching his own face. He seemed to be gazing into another world. My father looked that way in our family pictures. I figured it meant you were gay. There's one of me when I was thirteen sitting with all of my friends and I was doing it. Looking right through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture seem to be actually in the world. They're stopping the balloon from floating off.

Eileen Myles, from "hart!"

Also: poetry by Kate Greenstreet, Jennifer Hayashida, Karla Kelsey, Justin Marks, Patrick Morrissey, Rob Schlegel, and Andrei Sen-Senkov, translated by Zachary Schomburg; prose by Roberta Allen, Stephen-Paul Martin, Joanna Ruocco, and David Wirthlin; Jared White on Brandon Shimoda and Michael Zeiss on Kafka; an excerpt from Lisa Jarnot's biography of Robert Duncan; and Michael Newton's gallery reviews.

www.harpandaltar.com

Eugene Lim's Fog & Car reviewed in The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Lim peels relentlessly at his story’s realism until it tugs loose, revealing much stranger happenings underneath… a disturbing mystery pitched somewhere between Mulholland Drive and City of Glass... [I]t never loses its appealing initial tone of aching loneliness, even as its characters and its goings-on grow increasingly supernatural.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2009 issue
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show_review/89

Eugene Marten reads for latest UNSAID issue

Ellipsis Press author Eugene Marten reads as part of the great UNSAID's issue launch this Monday at KGB.

http://kgbbar.com/calendar/events/unsaid_launch_party/

Fog & Car reviewed on NewPages

How Lim manages to negotiate the reversals, to maintain believability, to take the reader with him, is only part of his success, for it is, ironically, the story’s lack of resolution that brings satisfaction… It balances, albeit in a detached tone, compassionate depictions of moral dissolution with Murakami-styled fabulist plot departures, dramatic reversals, and coincidental connections. It leaves the reader with a balled up jumble of narrative threads, but in such a sophisticated and befuddling manner as to force Murakami’s own mind into a tailspin. Fog & Car is an extraordinary debut.

Read more at: http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2009_06/june2009_book_reviews.htm

WASTE reviewed on Word Riot

[T]the banality of the day-to-day workaday eccentricities of a troubled janitor's lonely life is recorded with devastating precision... One might think that mentioning the novella's startling nods to "A Rose for Emily" and Psycho, would ruin its surprises, but the details of Waste's strengths lay not beneath a spoiler alert but within its acute attention to language, its profound empathy and understanding for its protagonist, and its underlying critique of the endless cycle of consumption and waste.

Read more at: http://wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1921

New Norman Lock website

Ellipsis Press will be publishing Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY later this year. His latest novel is called THE KING OF SWEDEN from Ravenna Press. His website just got a relaunch and it's a good place to get acquainted with his fantastic and various work. A bit of praise from it:

"All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass."
–Kate Bernheimer

"[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen."
--Gary Lutz

"Lock's weapon is words, and he uses them well....like a nightmare that wakes you up shaking, forcing you to reassess your life."
—LA Life

"Lock’s language, though basically sleek and minimal, combines the high gloss and perspicuity of the Edwardian age with the robustness and vigor of American inventiveness, leavened by a facility for maximizing – to marvelous effect – the dichotomy between the sign and its object."
–– John Olson, First Intensity

"In truth? In truth, Lock writes it, Lish reads it! – which is a damn sight more than Lish will say for Proust."
–– Gordon Lish

Read more about Norman Lock here.

Ellipsis Press featured in Time Out New York

In a cover story about do-it-yourselfers' various workarounds, Ellipsis Press author and publisher Eugene Lim gets profiled. Full story at:
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/72815/take-charge/2.html

Video of Lim and Marten reading at McNally Jackson last week

Courtesy of Derek White:

The good, the bad, and the slightly confusing....

The ever generous, flâneuring Derek White takes a walkabout NYC and does some ruminating on Fog & Car:

On the plane here I watched some movies, most not worth mentioning besides Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I did see some program on Andy Warhol though, and they were talking about his movies, the ones where he would put a camera on people, unscripted, without guidance, and then leave the room. They'd leave the camera on them for hours, until something had to give. Somebody commentating on it was saying something about how Warhol dances this fine line between what’s exciting and boring. And how this is sexual or some such thing. I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, except to say that maybe Fog & Car skates this same fine line. Through rout reiteration, Lim pushes boring to the extreme that it becomes exciting. How does Lim do this? To quote his character, “the normal always let my mind go the farthest, always the immediate physical world was navigable without thinking, so that thinking would head elsewhere, deep into its own self-contained jungle.”

more at: http://www.5cense.com/zero_sum.htm

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A critical, sometimes complimentary review of WASTE by Vanessa Place in The American Book Review. Arguably it underestimates the use of class in the book--but judge for yourself:

http://americanbookreview.org/sampleReview.asp?Issue=10&id=20

It starts out with some friendly fire:

Eugene Marten is a writer's writer, a writer after whom many other writers would be happy to clean up, his books provoking the sort of breathless admiration usually reserved for the deceased... Marten writes precisely. He writes to the point. His sentences are crisp and clean as fresh cider. His paragraphs unfold with the grace of small paper swans. He writes of things in their thingness, abject in their sobbing objectivity. If his books were marsupials, they'd be opossums. If furniture, Ottomans. He eschews similes and metaphors like these, preferring the raw truths of things simply said.

_____________

Also Thomas McGonigle writes something about both Waste and Fog & Car. For example:

I have tried to read each of the books.

I know that Marten has published an earlier book with Turtle Point Press.

I am interested in why I have not read more. The Marten book is in the tradition of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.

I am probably not strong enough to read about a janitor and what he collects.

FOG & CAR by LIM is more appealing but I can’t get beyond the names: MR FOG and SARAH CAR.

The rest at his blog: http://abcofreading.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-and-old-lim-marten-and-fine.html

Eugene Marten + Eugene Lim read at McNally Jackson on Thursday March 12th

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