Wednesday, December 16, 2009

THE COLLAGIST podcasts Norman Lock reading from SHADOWPLAY


A big thanks to Matt Bell for THE COLLAGIST and its most recent podcast, featuring Norman Lock reading from his SHADOWPLAY. An excerpt from Norman Lock’s new novel Shadowplay also appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Collagist.

Podcast here: http://thecollagist.com/wordpress/?p=479


Friday, December 11, 2009

Little Burn Films' 60 Writers / 60 Places

Little Burn Films' 60 Writers / 60 Places will screen today at noon at Pratt University and tomorrow 12/10 6:30PM at PPOW Gallery.

Ellipsis Press authors Eugene Marten & Eugene Lim, along with several contributors to our upcoming Harp & Altar anthology--Eileen Myles, Joanna Howard, and Leni Zumas--will be featured.

See trailers and more info here:
http://www.littleburnfilms.com/60Writers60Places.html

PPOW Gallery is at 511 W 25th St, Rm 301 :: New York, NY 10001 :: 212.647.1044

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Two upcoming readings

This Friday 12/11 @ 7PM Eugene Marten reads with Erich Hintze and musician Phillip Stearns as part of the Littoral series at Issue Project Room. Marten's new book FIREWORK due out soon from Tyrant Books.
http://issueprojectroom.org/2009/11/04/littoral-with-phillip-stearns/

On Monday 12/14 @ 8PM Eugene Lim reads with Justin Sirois at The Poetry Project.
http://poetryproject.org/program-calendar/eugene-lim-justin-sirois.html

Buy Eugene Marten's WASTE and Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR from Ellipsis Press:
http://www.ellipsispress.com/

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The Quarterly Conversation reviews Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY.


"Lock’s language reflects the fabulous nature of the myth, intricate in description but never hard to understand, full of repeated images that, however simple, resonate deeply within the story."


Friday, November 20, 2009

Eugene Lim reads at Poetry Project on 12/14


Eugene Lim reads at Poetry Project on 12/14 with Justin Sirois. Come by!

http://poetryproject.org/program-calendar/eugene-lim-justin-sirois.html

December 14, 2009
8:00 pm | Monday

Ruocco and Lock in The Midwest Book Review

The Midwest Book Review recommends both Joanna Ruocco's THE MOTHERING COVEN and Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY in their "Small Press Bookwatch."

http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/nov_09.htm#Fiction

Guerrilla Girls on Tour names THE MOTHERING COVEN one of 2009's best books



Guerrilla Girls on Tour corrects PW's weenie roast--and names Joanna Ruocco's THE MOTHERING COVEN one of the best books of 2009.

http://guerrillagirlsontour.blogspot.com/2009/11/best-books-of-2009.html

New MLP chapbooks from Ellipsis Press authors

Joanna Ruocco's THE BAKER'S DAUGHTER and Eugene Lim's AND THEN SHE WAKES UP are two new chapbooks just out from J. Tyler's Mudluscious Press. Including shipping, only three bucks!

http://www.aboutjatyler.com/index_files/Page326.html

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Interview with Norman Lock at The Collagist with Matt Bell

Interview with Lock at the Collagist

Norman Lock, author of the recent SHADOWPLAY (Ellipsis Press) interviewed by Matt Bell over at The Collagist. Here are two bits:

Life apart from the page has become difficult – this, I know to be the result of self-consciousness, which in my case is a flinching from the assault of consciousness on a sensibility insufficiently armed against its painful disclosures. I’m sure this is true for many other sensitive people; I’m just one who has happened to make self-consciousness a subject of fiction.

and another bit:

To say that I am a writer and am interested in stories is not the tautology it might appear. At least for one who was once suspicious of stories. I came of age when language was foregrounded and stories were mere plots and to be despised. Even before language was preeminent, characterization was everything; the psychological work of fiction, this was the ideal to which a young writer with very little experience of world literature – with no experience at all of anti-naturalistic forms – aspired. My mistrust of stories may have been a misunderstanding of what fiction is; even psychological fiction tells stories – yes? I may have confused story with plot, or perhaps not. Do we not seem to prefer “fiction” and “narrative” to “story” in our description of what we do? In our minds don’t we make a distinction between literary fiction and mere stories, which are what general readers seek in the best-sellers we disdain? (Perhaps writers younger than I are today suspicious even of the literary.)

Read the rest of the interview at: http://thecollagist.com/wordpress/?p=371

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and Gary Lutz read for Ellipsis Press


Book party for Shadowplay & The Mothering Coven
.

Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and Gary Lutz
read for Ellipsis Press
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 4-7PM
Readings start at 4PM.



at Barbès | DIRECTIONS: 376 9th St, Brooklyn, NY

Come celebrate the launch of new Ellipsis Press titles by Norman Lock and Joanna Ruocco. A hypnotic tale of artistic obsession, Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY tells the story of a Javanese shadow-puppet master. "Wise up and get all you can of Lock," says Gordon Lish. Joanna Ruocco's THE MOTHERING COVEN is a "work of wonder" (Carole Maso), a singular act of prose daring. Also reading will be special guest and short story master: Gary Lutz.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Excerpt of SHADOWPLAY in The Collagist


The rods were awkward in Guntur’s hands, and the puppets faltered behind the screen. No longer supple, his hands had forgotten how to divine the presence of the unseen. His voice also faltered. It would advance haltingly, as if words were stones above the surface of a river to be crossed with deliberation. During his exile, Guntur had lost the habit of speech. But an uncommon — even unnatural — sympathy for the wayang had not lessened during the years he had kept himself apart from people and puppets, both. If anything, it had increased while he taught himself to enter the minds of his puppets, especially that of Arjuna with whom he most identified...


Read the rest at http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/October2009/Lock/index.html

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY and Joanna Ruocco's THE MOTHERING COVEN officially released today!

Buy from Ellipsis Press at: http://www.ellipsispress.com/

And come to the launch party on Saturday 10/24 from 4-7PM:

A hypnotic tale of artistic obsession, Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY tells the story of a Javanese shadow-puppet master. "Wise up and get all you can of Lock," says Gordon Lish. Joanna Ruocco's THE MOTHERING COVEN is a "work of wonder" says Carole Maso, a singular act of prose daring. Also reading will be special guest and short story master Gary Lutz.

Saturday, October 24th, 2009 4-7PM
at Barbès | 376 9th St, Brooklyn, NY

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Derek White reviews SHADOWPLAY

Shadowplay in Bangkok


Seeker and Scriber Derek White -- about on one of his many and various peregrinations -- reviews SHADOWPLAY:
"Lock is a master storyteller that transcends place & time. more than a storyteller, Lock seeks to reveal new meanings & truths in his explorations, to unveil the unseen [not to expose, but to reVEIL[& thus reveal]. he doesn't just seek to entertain, you get a sense he is deeply (& oddly) compelled towards his plots."
Read the rest here: http://5cense.com/09/BangTokDon/Re_Siam.htm



Monday, October 12, 2009

Eugene Marten's WASTE reviewed in THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION

Eugene Marten’s Waste is blurbed up by the Lish School (including Lish himself) so I was expecting a quirkily written, intelligent effort more concerned with the structures of its sentences than narrative cohesion; what I got is a brutal, disturbing little novel that works beautifully both for those who read for story and those who read for the artistry—or at least those who read for those things but who can deal with a shocking amount of physical and psychological trauma distilled down into sharp, tight sentences.

Read the entire review at http://quarterlyconversation.com/waste-by-eugene-marten

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

THE KING OF SWEDEN reviewed at Bookslut.com.

Norman Lock's previous book THE KING OF SWEDEN (Ravenna Press) reviewed at Bookslut.com.

"Lock demonstrates a keenness for bringing the inanimate to life… The fresh language that Lock employs makes reading it more akin to lyric poetry than no...vel. … [A] brilliant miniaturist…"
--JESSE TANGEN-MILLS at Bookslut.com
http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2009_10_015190.php

Monday, October 5, 2009

Eugene Marten in The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt from Eugene Marten's forthcoming novel Firework (New York Tyrant) in the current Brooklyn Rail

Dennis Cooper gives a nice shout out to WASTE on his blog

Along with Blake Butler's SCORCH ATLAS, Tao Lin's SHOPLIFTING..., and Matt Bell's THE COLLECTORS, DC cites Eugene Marten's WASTE among books he's "read recently and loved."

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and Gary Lutz read for Ellipsis Press


Book party for Shadowplay & The Mothering Coven
.

Norman Lock, Joanna Ruocco, and Gary Lutz
read for Ellipsis Press
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 4-7PM
Readings start at 4PM.



at Barbès | DIRECTIONS: 376 9th St, Brooklyn, NY

Come celebrate the launch of new Ellipsis Press titles by Norman Lock and Joanna Ruocco. A hypnotic tale of artistic obsession, Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY tells the story of a Javanese shadow-puppet master. "Wise up and get all you can of Lock," says Gordon Lish. Joanna Ruocco's THE MOTHERING COVEN is a "work of wonder" (Carole Maso), a singular act of prose daring. Also reading will be special guest and short story master: Gary Lutz.

Ellipsis Press will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival


We'll be selling lovely, soft papery wares--
including our new fall 2009 titles:

Norman Lock's Shadowplay and

Joanna Ruocco's The Mothering Coven.


Brooklyn Book Festival Directions

Corey Frost and Joanna Sondheim will be reading at the Boog City Festival.



Saturday, September 12th and 13th, 2009 | 12-6PM


at Unnameable Books | 600 Vanderbilt Ave. in Brooklyn

Books--including new titles by Joanna Ruocco and Norman Lock--will be on sale.


Corey Frost will be reading at around 1:40PM on Saturday. He is the author of The Worthwhile Flux (conundrum, 2004) and My Own Devices (2006). He has been a featured spoken word performer at festivals and events across Canada and the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and his performances have aired on the CBC, the ABC, and local stations around the world. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center, entitled The Omnidirectional Microphone: Performance Literature as Social Project. His work appears in the forthcoming Harp & Altar Reader (Ellipsis Press).




Joanna Sondheim will be reading at around 12:30PM on Sunday. Her work has appeared in Unsaid, can we have our ball back, sonaweb, Harp & Altar, The Portable Boog Reader 2, and Bird Dog, among others. Her chapbooks, The Fit and Thaumatrope, were published by Sona Books. Her poetry appears in the forthcoming Harp & Altar Reader (Ellipsis Press).



Other Harp & Altar and Ellipsis Press contributors also participating. See full schedule at: http://welcometoboogcity.com/bc59.pdf

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Eugene Marten's WASTE reviewed in the Ottawa XPress

Geoffrey Brown's summer reading list in the Ottawa XPress includes Eugene Marten's Waste:
Eugene Marten's slim novella Waste (Ellipsis Press) details the day-to-day existence and experiences of Sloper, a janitor in a big-city office building. With unnerving clarity and precision, Marten starkly executes a chilling portrait of loneliness and anonymity, reminding us, in the process, that that which we might ever so casually discard and dismiss may not necessarily respond so casually in kind.
Check out the whole list at http://ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=17883

Monday, June 22, 2009

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

Thursday, June 18, 2009

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.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Monday, June 1, 2009

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

Friday, May 15, 2009

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

Thursday, April 2, 2009

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

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

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

_____________

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

Monday, January 5, 2009

HARP & ALTAR & MAD HATTERS’ REVIEW PRESENT

Come by and hear some great writers of unconventional fiction chosen by the editors of Harp & Altar and the Mad Hatters' Review.

Joshua Cohen is the author of four books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007) and A Heaven of Others (Starcherone, 2007). Another novel, Graven Imaginings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. North Vain, Bluff, from which the piece that appears in the current issue of Harp & Altar is excerpted, is the second book of a series entitled Two Great Russian Novels. He lives in Brooklyn.

Tim Horvath, whose fiction appears in the current issue of MHR, won the 2006 Raymond Carver Short Story Award and the ‘06 prize of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. His stories are out or forthcoming in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Fiction, Web Conjunctions, SleepingFish, Sein und Werden, and elsewhere. He teaches a class for Grub Street Writers in Boston centered on the application of findings from brain science to writing and literature. His novella Circulation, called “a glittering narrative performance” by David Huddle, will be released as a short book by Sunnyoutside Press in January 2009. He is currently working on a novel in which one or more (it is unclear which) microscopic counter-novels fester in the interstices of the typeface and must be eradicated lest the infra-structure come crashing down.

Joanna Howard is the author of Frights of Fancy, a collection of short prose forthcoming from Boa Editions. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters and Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. A chapbook In the Colorless Round, with artwork by novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, is available from Noemi Press. Her “Seascape” appeared in Harp & Altar #2.

Mary Mackey, with poems forthcoming in MHR Issue 11, is a poet and novelist who lives in Berkeley, California. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Breaking The Fever (Marsh Hawk Press); one experimental novella, Immersion; and fourteen novels, including A Grand Passion(Simon & Schuster), The Year the Horses Came (HarperCollins), The Notorious Mrs. Winston(Putnam/Berkley Books), and The Widow’s War (Putnam/Berkley Books--in press for Fall 2009). Mackey’s works have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. She has lectured at Harvard and the Smithsonian, is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. A member of the Writers Guild of America, West, she wrote the screenplay for the award-winning feature film Silence. More information about her can be found at www.marymackey.com. and at www.marshhawkpress.org.