"The six long stories in Stephen-Paul Martin's outstanding CHANGING THE SUBJECT subtly challenge the conventions of the short story through seemingly simple prose that, in strange often hilarious digressions, knots in a fascinating, surreal, and masterful collection... CHANGING THE SUBJECT is a brilliant book..."
Pick up a copy and read more about this book at Ellipsis Press! Also available through Amazon and Small Press Distribution.
"In this exceedingly clever and mesmerizing collection, Martin guides us through six long stories that each contain numerous other stories, and are themselves also one long, strange fiction... Charmed from the very first sentence, I read this book straight through in a single night, and then reread it as soon as I could. How marvelous to see the story so thoroughly reinvented and reinvigorated! Changing the Subject is so far by far my favorite new book of 2010."Read the rest of the review here:
Read the full article at: http://www.thenation.com/article/158975/wrinkles-time-joanna-ruoccoOne of [The Mothering Coven]’s first descriptive passages, which concerns the witches’ next-door neighbor, presents an image of a lettuce heart as a model of the universe:
Mr. Henderson takes the lettuce heart. He had always thought the physical universe had no shape at all, just a multi-directional nothingness with deep space objects floating around at varying speeds. He realizes that he has been ridiculous. All these dark folded places, opening everywhere at once—of course, that’s what the physical universe looks like.
“Opening everywhere at once” is a good description of The Mothering Coven, which navigates the many, fantastical realities that crowd within the illusory unity of our universe... The novel encompasses a multitude of worlds, its concision no obstacle to its holding capacity, since the latter depends not on mere size but on an endless series of folds, which language is no less capable of creating than is vegetation.
...Ruocco’s coven is a counterproposal to language as a homogenizing force—to words that would flatten out the leaves of the lettuce heart or chop them into uniform, bite-size pieces. Ruocco’s feat is to show how esoteric vocabularies unfold hidden pockets of experience.
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Read the full review by Michelle Bailat-Jones at Necessary Fiction"There is quite a lot going on in The Mothering Coven: party preparations, art installations, visits from Ms. Kidney and her sled dogs, trips into town, shamanistic journeys, paleozoological studies and a score of research projects. Often, the tone of these activities is deceptively lighthearted. But this is not a book to read with blithe inattention, as much of what happens and what is said could be perceived as nonsensical whimsy. A slower, more careful read detects the fragile threads of what makes this a novel and not a playful and poetic montage... Despite the playfulness of the language and the sometimes comical, offbeat conversations, real moments of tenderness leap up from within these small scenes."
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.Buy CHANGING THE SUBJECT here.
http://bombsite.com/issues/114/articles/4732
"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
Midwest Book Review says CHANGING THE SUBJECT is "a fascinating read that will certainly prove difficult to put down, highly recommended." Order today!
"Ruocco paints her pages with bright, strong women who clearly revel in mischievous and playful language... In Ruocco’s deft hands, The Mothering Coven takes readers on a delightful romp through a uniquely imagined universe."
"Stephen-Paul Martin's latest work, Changing the Subject, reaffirms my belief that he is the American master of the short story. Although I've often compared his work to Borges and Calvino, to try to give readers unfamiliar with his work a frame of reference, Martin's style and vision are entirely and uniquely his own... Martin takes the deep, the difficult, the absurd and the ridiculous and synthesizes them into eminently readable entities that challenge our assumptions about the reality of the world we inhabit."
"As usual, these Martin stories are hilarious, philosophically rich, absorbing, and just plain fun... Martin is developing the ability to make his philosophically complex stories more and more accessible (and that's a compliment)... He is at the forefront of American storytellers."
When Guntur, the main character of Norman Lock’s Shadowplay, commits himself to the life of a dalang, a Javanese shadow-puppeteer, the narrator spells out his future: "Guntur would be . . . a shadow—a ghost—a teller of stories about shadows and ghosts to people who will be shadows and ghosts for him always." Guntur, perhaps like all storytellers, is bound to tell his story from behind a screen, separating himself from the world even as he aims to represent it. Just as a dalang retells ancient and iconic stories in his puppet-theatre, Shadowplay is itself a fable that stages the storyteller's struggle between imagination and reality, experience and its record.http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2010summer/lock.shtml
"The prose of Joanna Ruocco’s remarkable debut novel The Mothering Coven is so exuberant and thoroughly enlivening in its contagious and cheeky love for the mutability of language’s meanings that its plot often seemed to serve a subsidiary role to its stylistic rollicks; one could read for sound and linguistic play alone – its rhetorical approach to story seemed a narrative unto itself, and one could enjoy and take from this element of the novel as much – indeed, far more than – one could from practically any other published work out there, contemporary or otherwise... a kind of sui generis gem."
"Waste is one of those books that tolls the iron bell, a strong sense of foreboding murmurs right below the surface. You sit there waiting for the other foot to drop and you’re not disappointed when it does."
This is a cerebral work, and Lock is a heady writer, yet he evokes a deeply sensual world in which the smell of cinnamon all but sings in the breeze and the sea beckons like a lover... Shadowplay is informed by so many stories... that I initially feared I’d need to haul out my old Bullfinch’s Mythology and a dozen other reference works. But I didn’t. The novel stands on its own and does its tricky work unaided, like the afterlife of a dream. I suspect Lock is less interested in the reader catching everything than in catching the reader. He does.
"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."
Shadowplay in Bangkok"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
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.
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