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

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

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.