[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
Friday, May 15, 2009
WASTE reviewed on Word Riot
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
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:
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:
It starts out with some friendly fire:
_____________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
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Harp & Altar #5 now up!
harp & altar #5 has new poetry, fiction, and essays for your recurrent, sweet, sad days... including new fiction from joshua cohen, evelyn hampton, lily hoang, peter markus, bryson newhart and some re(-dis)covered robert walser translations. also: poetry by stephanie anderson, jessica baron, julia cohen, claire donato, elizabeth sanger, peter jay shippy, and g.c. waldrep; patrick morrissey on john taggart and matthew henriksen on anywhere; michael newton's gallery reviews; and artwork by a.l. steiner + robbinschilds...
Robert Walser
From "Oskar"
He began this strange behavior at a very early age by going his own way and finding such evident pleasure in being alone. In later years he recalled very clearly that nobody had made him aware of such things. All by itself the strange need to be alone and apart had appeared, and was there... Even though it was winter, he would have no heating. He did not want any comforts. Everything around him had to be rough, inhospitable, and miserable. He wanted to bear and endure some thing, and ordered himself to do so. And that, nobody had told him either. All alone he had the idea that it would be good for him to order himself to bear hardship and malice in a friendly and good-hearted manner. He considered himself to be at a kind of upper-level school. He went to university there, as a weird and wild student...Bryson Newhart
from "Paterfamilias"
After compulsory relocation to Hornville, Misery's family lived in a skyscraper made of living flesh. The building's eyes served as windows that were barely transparent, and although it was said that the heavens were out there, no one could see them. The people who lived in the building wore internal helmets injected into their ears by the doorman, who was also a skilled surgeon. On any given day, one was either deaf to the world, or everything was painfully amplified, but it was worth it. The human head was indestructible. When people died, the government shot their heads into the sun...
Evelyn Hampton
From "Discomfort"
While I am talking with him I am also walking, and I've lost track of where I am by the time our conversation pauses. Curtains get in the way, obstructing light as clutter obstructs movement. He is not someone I have ever been comfortable with—I can't recall his name—so I am more aware of my body while I'm walking and intonation while I'm talking than I am when with a familiar person, whose ways of judging me won't surprise me. It doesn't help that he's a back-patter and an arm-grabber, likes to touch while conversing...
Friday, December 12, 2008
Fog & Car reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail
Oisin Curran writes, "Fog & Car alternates between Car and Fog, establishing a contrapuntal rhythm that incrementally resolves into a lucid, supple prose emblematic of their slow recovery from each other. Ironically, over the course of the novel they become more alike. And just as the reader is settling into what appears to be a subtle, penetrating meditation on contemporary relationships, everything is thrown into disarray by the appearance of a deus ex machina in the form of a third major character..."
More at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/12/books/fiction-accidents-will-happen
Monday, December 1, 2008
Ellipsis, Calamari, and 3rd Bed Books at the 21st Annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair
Saturday 12/6 from 10AM-6PM &
Sunday 12/7 from 11AM-5PM
We'll have a table with papery, soft wares. A good chance to pick up Ellipsis titles as well as books by Peter Markus, Miranda Mellis, Robert Lopez, Norman Lock, J'Lyn Chapman, Derek White, James Lewelling, Gary Lutz, David Ohle and many an other.
Come by!
Directions: http://www.nycip.org/contact/directions.php
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
