Category: bookish
Really, just two passages I’ve stumbled onto these last couple of days. The first is from Eric Miles Williamson, a guy I really respect because he can seriously write. On the editorial board of some mystery-press a couple of years ago, I read a book of his in manuscript which I still think of just a whole lot, and wish I’d kept my copy of. Can’t even remember the title of it, even. But it really got to me. Anyway, East Bay Grease is of course what he’s known fo…
Man, except for re-hitting ReAnimator the other day — and maybe even including it — Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon is far and away the best horror I’ve seen all year. Best I’ve seen since Feast, really.* And Feast is that holy kind of good for me. The only time I plan on being this horror-movie happy anytime soon is come fall, when we get the sure-to-be-beautiful All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. Cannot wait for that one.** Though I do suspect IR…
As part of my quest to not write any reviews, either book or movie, I submit this by way just of suggestion: William J. Cobb‘s Goodnight, Texas (Unbridled Books, who, going by this, man, they produce some seriously clean books. And pretty too. If I’m not mistaken, they even commissioned the painting for the cover here. A press to watch, I’d say. Them and Dzanc and Chiasmus).
As for what I can say about it: I’d already committed this week to reworking thi…
“In a great turnaround, upstart Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, billed as something of an homage to The Omega Man‘s Charlton Heston, whom McCarthy once did stunt-work for, but owing more probably to Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, managed to steal the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction from — “
Okay, sorry. Just figured out that any book I put in there’s either going to be insulting that book or trying to pull down The Roa…
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: no more. Gone. Maybe like Billy Pilgrim, though, he’s just rollercoasting back and forth through it all now. Laughing. Hope so, anyway.…
Which, I’m finding, aren’t at all the same as my five favorite books. Ridiculous, yes? Wish I had some fix for that, or at least an explanation, or suspicion. I mean, it’s kind of presupposing some major disconnect between intensity and . . . I don’t know: appreciation? Revisitability? Not some Pirsig-ish ‘quality,’ I don’t think. But who knows. Anyway, today, were I picking my five favorite-ever books, they’d look som…
Man, turns out Only Revolutions, at 360 pages, was an easy read, yeah? I mean, as compared to three million pages. But it is Richard Grossman, so maybe three million pages is just the right amount [ see below ]. As some of y’all know, I’m always pushing that seventy-page sentence fragment from his The Book of Lazarus as maybe the most beautiful piece of prose in the English language (like I know any other languages — it just sounds ‘grand’ to quali…
[ the title and the whole piece here may not make much sense–it may not anyway–without cueing into TheValve.org, which, it looks like, may have the original Marcus article in PDF ]
Just what is experimental fiction, then?
The easiest definition for experimental or innovative or non-conventional fiction is fiction that, both at armslength and upon closer inspection, doesn’t look or read at all like standard, mainstream, commercial fiction. A more …
I first read Pynchon when I was twenty-two, I think, between a B.A. and an M.A. The only reason I read him, too, was because I’d hit up a professor I trusted for a list of books I’d need to have read if I didn’t want to get laughed out of grad school. She of course gave me an excellent list — Nabokov, Heller, etc — but, when guiding me through the highs and the lows of all these titles, that professor stopped at Gravity’s Rainbow, said I wanted to st…
Looks like, in pre-celebration for TURISTAS1, Demon Theory pulled two reviews this week:
&
Cool places each, though the reviews are kind of opposites of each other.
Anyway, it’s none other than Mike Bracken on the Toxic Universe one. Which, I mean — for my first novel, I remember telling somebody that it would only be complete when I knew that Gerald Vizenor had read it. And then, bam, it was suddenly complete before it was even publis…
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More