Friday, December 31, 2010

Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY wins the 2010 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award!

Pick up Shadowplay from Ellipsis Press here.

Shadowplay (Ellipsis Press, 137 pages) by Norman Lock, the 2010 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award recipient, is a dense fable, mixing magic realism with self-reflexivity. The entire story is given to us in miniature at the beginning, such that the novella itself is really a constant retelling–a folding and refolding–rather than an unfolding. A shadow puppet master named Guntur falls in love with Candra, who comes into his theater one day to buy puppets. When she dies of typhoid fever six days later, he falls into despair for many years, until finally he understands how to enter the world of the dead, through his shadow art, to abduct her shadow, bringing her back to the theater where she becomes his prisoner for many months... This plot unfurls slowly: it starts, stops, returns and starts again, usually with a new detail, or sometimes less detail, sometimes abstracted, sometimes enlarged. The effect is of narrative feathering, one moment being layered on top of another until the whole body is finally covered... Lock’s Shadowplay is a masterful rendering of the life of one story teller, trying desperately to fit within the intricate pattern of tradition, daring to transcend it by embracing it too much, until he is finally becomes a shadow in the story... an enchanting ritual of forms whose beauty will linger in the memory for a very long time.
Read the full review by Tori Alexander at http://tiny.cc/dactylawardSP

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY reviewed in latest RCF

John Madera writes: "Storytellers remind us that data retrieval is really a kind of betrayal, that truth and meaning are elusive, and that we see our selves, our relationships, our surroundings, as if through curtains. Norman Lock's Shadowplay penetrates these diaphanous folds by casting light on the folly of irreconcilable love, the melancholic ache of nostalgia, and the burning yearning of art, of making something out of nothing... Swathed in darkness, Lock traverses liminal realms with glassine sentences reminiscent in form and substance of the like found in Gene Wolfe’s and Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction, sentences you may be tempted to set off into line-broken verse. Shadowplay is another of the master locksmith’s nested boxes whose evocative, ensorcelling prose will withstand multiple readings, especially if read aloud."
Read the entire review here.

________________________

Pick up SHADOWPLAY (and check out our 2 for $20 holiday sale) at the Ellipsis Press website here.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Harp & Altar #8 is up!

With poetry and fiction by Roseanne Carrara, Andy Fitch, Eileen G'Sell, Amy King, Richard Kostelanetz, Lawrence Mark Lane, Jesse Lichtenstein, Charles Newman, Leslie Patron, Rob Stephenson, Stephen Sturgeon, and G.C. Waldrep. Also: Jessica Baran on Brandon Downing; Dan Magers on Paul Killebrew; Patrick Morrissey on Ben Mazer; Lauren Russell on Kostas Anagnopoulos; Michael Newton's gallery reviews; and art by Jesse Lambert.
www.harpandaltar.com
Join Keith Newton, Shane Book, & Jared White for a reading at the Poetry Project this Friday at 10 PM.

A/bun/dance.

Boo/kings.

Come/dies.

End/or/fin.

Flag/rant.

Me/anti/me.

So/do/my.

To/read/or.


Sunday, December 5, 2010

BOMB magazine names CHANGING THE SUBJECT an Editor's Choice

Changing the Subject doesn’t live up to its title, it consumes it. Though the stories make high use of syntactical or symbolic repetitions, they are also powerfully digressive, hallucinatory.
http://bombsite.com/issues/114/articles/4732
Buy CHANGING THE SUBJECT here.


KGB BAR LIT MAGAZINE reviews CHANGING THE SUBJECT

"If his new short story collection Changing the Subject has an ambitious title, Stephen-Paul Martin gets away with it. And it’s not only because of his change-ups between eco-terrorism, women with nice teeth, dogs, Macbeth, various assassinations of President Bush, and animated billboards depicting Custer taking Tylenol before his last stand."
Read the rest at http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/changing_the_subject