3Vote!
[helix] (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
Yes, those are my favourite yellow sneakers with the laces that are forever coming undone. Did I just leave my telephone in that apartment with the black cat, the bonsai trees and the hats strewn across the wall? 10:30 a.m. and bleary-eyed I showed up at J.'s apartment and left with these books: Paradise by Donald Barthelme A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat , Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Louise...
3Vote!
Tom Conoboy's Writing Blog (Free subscription) | 07/11/2009
From Don DeLillo's Mao II : Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of thngs or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance. I'm inclined to agree. I find lists fairly dull, on the whole. Those...
3Vote!
Blog Town, PDX (Free subscription) | 28/10/2009
The 2009 Oregon Book Awards were presented last night during a ceremony held at the Armory. Finalists in all six categories — fiction, poetry, general & creative nonfiction, children's literature, and young adult literature — are promoted to Oregon libraries and bookstores, and invited to take part in a statewide reading tour. In addition to the obvious honor of being selected, I'm...
3Vote!
Blog Town, PDX (Free subscription) | 26/10/2009
The 23rd annual Oregon Book Awards are tonight at the Armory, but the real action is over at Reading Local , where the first person to correctly guess the night's winners gets a $25 gift card to the bookstore of their choice. My picks: FICTION: Liveability , by Jon Raymond POETRY: All-American Poem , by Matthew Dickman GENERAL NONFICTION: Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Dougherty...
3Vote!
The Eclectic Chapbook (Free subscription) | 25/10/2009
Florida Post-Modern, Scandinavian Detectives, A Fabulist's NYC, and BoucherCon . . . More Than Wallander : Zack O'Yeah drop in to the Swedish Book Fair in Gothenburg for a look around and discovers that Mystery novels have become almost a cottage industry there . # An interview with and portrait of Florida writer Padgett Powell who was a student of the late Donald Barthelme by Dan Halpern . # Paul...
3Vote!
A Pelt, a shrub, a soil sample (Free subscription) | 07/10/2009
Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna Ted Jenner Titus , 2009 (This review first appeared in Breif 38) This collection should be compulsory for anyone interested in innovative writing from New Zealand, and Scott Hamilton’s introduction offers a fantastic entry-point into what is a startling and difficult oeuvre. The opening piece, “A Quiet Shape”, is dense and somewhat daunting;...
3Vote!
You Don't Say (Free subscription) | 24/09/2009
Today is National Punctuation Day , one of those gimmicky holidays on which one can be jocular or sober or both. Last year I posted a sentence that incorporated the standard punctuation marks. This year, some practical advice. The comma By now you should have figured out where the comma is required, such as setting off appositives and nonrestrictive clauses, and where it is discretionary to mimic the...
3Vote!
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
Back in Issue 12 of The Quarterly Conversation, Dan Green lamented the fact that we can't read Donald Barthelme any longer as he originally intended: I never really understood why Donald Barthelme chose to re-publish his stories in collected, compendium editions, first in Sixty Stories and then in Forty Stories. The very titles of these books obscured the playful and distinctive signposts provided...
4Vote!
The Eclectic Chapbook (Free subscription) | 10/09/2009
Does writer Donald Barthelme still have any fans out there? Sometimes when a writer dies, his work goes into eclipse for a while. SpliceToday , an online magazine, has an interesting interview with Tracy Daugherty, one of Barthelme's former students, who has written a biography of the late writer called Hiding Man . Perhaps the publication of Daugherty's book will initiate a revival of interest in...
3Vote!
The Mumpsimus (Free subscription) | 09/09/2009
Oh, Library of America , you know I love you. You have parted me and my money more times than I would care to admit. I love you for your Bowles and your Lovecraft and Du Bois and Thoreau and Douglass , your O'Connor and Baldwin , your Ashbery and Crane , your Porter and Powell , your Singer and Singer and Singer , your movie critics and poetries , your civil rights and revolution . I am currently enraptured...
3Vote!
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 09/09/2009
One of my favorite reviews this issue if John Lingan's in-depth look at Donald Barthelme via Tracey Daugherty's recent bio, Hiding Man. John has also published an interview with Daugherty at Splice Today. If you've been following this bio, definitely check out the interview: ST: The Quarterly Conversation, the online magazine where my review of your book will appear, published an essay last year about...
3Vote!
Quarterly Conversation (Free subscription) | 06/09/2009
Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, Tracy Daugherty. St Martin’s Press. 581pp, $35.00. Unlike any most other forms of nonfiction writing, the literary biography is routinely asked to justify its own existence. The genre’s subjects are of interest for what they wrote, obviously, so skeptics ask why we need still more words to illuminate the [...]
3Vote!
New Jersey as an Impossible Object (Free subscription) | 30/08/2009
Looking back, I feel like I didn't get a lot of summer reading done, termiting along with a bunch of my own scattered projects, but I decided to categorize what was done under the general heading of Williams-related, and non-Williams related, with nuances in-between. Also included are sincere revelations as to how much was eventually read: Williams related: --Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist...
3Vote!
ZYZZYVASPEAKS (Free subscription) | 19/08/2009
The new issue of the biannual FICTION, number 55, includes no writers who live on the West Coast. The page number 1, inserted pro forma by the printer, was not deleted from masthead/title page by the proofreader, and the number 2 was not deleted from the table of contents. On page 231: a full-page Farrar, Straus ad, the only ad in the issue, except for a house ad for FICTION 's host, CCNY. Of the 17...
Videos