I’ve got a story in the upcoming Versal 11, and the launch party will be in Amsterdam this May 30. Looks like a rad reading and they’ll have “Butcher’s Tears Beers.” I’ll be sorry to miss it!!
About Writing
Lately, I feel like reading books that address the fact that they’ve been written. By people. By writers, actually. Living in Los Angeles, finishing my first year of a PhD in Literature, working on a bit of writing myself, I feel like I want to write about writing all the time. But no one would find that interesting— right? No one would fucking care? Well, when these brilliant geniuses write about writing, I fucking care.
This debut novel by French genius Laurent Binet was called a masterpiece by the Rumpus. And it is! It’s plot charts the assassination of a high-level Nazi in occupied Prague. The two parachutists, one Czech and one Slovak, would be heroes for generations to come; the dead Nazi, known as “The Blond Beast” or “The Butcher” is the type of terrifying Aryan psychopath Tarantino knows well. And the writer/narrator in this novel, the one putting the events down page-by-page, is totally thrilled by these characters, he’s devastated by their failure, impressed by their feats, and annoyed at himself every time he has to invent a bit of dialogue to put their mouths. A brilliant bit of writing about writing. Voted most likely to Nobel Prize.
It’s a weird kind of obsession, the “overshare.” Emily Gould is the New York genius who literally defined the over-share for Millennials. The literary editor-turned Gawker columnist- turned blog aficionado exposed her ex-boyfriend in a long and incredible New York Times Magazine cover story I have almost memorized by now. This is the book that came of it, a self-exposing nonfiction that charts the writer’s obsession with writing about herself. In the article, she admits, “It’s easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug’s effects. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn’t a metaphor at all.” In the book, she watches herself “rise and fall and rise” again using the melancholic essay as her medium instead of a blog. Her writing has that same addictive quality as her oversharing does. It feels a little scummy and totally pleasurable to read about her waitressing/dating/writing for Gawker/being 20 in New York days. Voted most likely to screenplay.
OK, this book feels old because it was written in the 90s. But Jonathan Dee knows something about New York, about writers, about emergency, about fame, and about how to flesh out characters so desperate they would do anything. During a (Rodney King-like) race riot in New York, a white guy is pulled from his car and beaten by a mob. Turns out the white guy is a failed novelist, the mob is led by a black man caught unawares by the violence— and each has a publishing company after them for the rights to their ‘stories.’ Dee’s voice is natural and assured, he deftly takes us through each player in the game: the lawyer, the film producer, the junior editor, the wife of the writer, the failed poet friend, the mother of the accused. But mostly, he takes us through the writer’s writing— how do you write a random act of violence? How the hell do you write that book? If you’re Dee, you write a novel about a memoir and you do it brilliantly. Voted most likely to win a Pulitzer late in life.
Wonderful news. I was just named the Graywolf Prize winner in the 2013 SLS Contest. Huzzah!
This means I will travel to Lithuania (see photo) or Kenya for the 2013 seminar. And, best of all, Graywolf will publish an excerpt of my novel-in-progress on their website. All is golden!
Degrees of Dystopia
Not all speculative fiction is about space stations, rogue plagues and desertification. The ways in which we fictionalize the future depends on how we interpret the present. Margaret Atwood points to environmental meltdown. Orwell predicts a dictatorial thought-reading. Huxley leans hard on pharmaceutical solutions to doldrums problems. Terrifyingly, most of those predictions have come true— if only in the comparisons we draw to global warming, Facebook and anti-depressants. But when we read these novels, it’s hard to see our society in their over-wrought, depleted worlds.
Perhaps more relevant, and more difficult to write, are the small-scale dystopias, the novels that place only part of society in the future while the rest remains resolutely in the present. These three novels write a kind of future we could all predict, if only in its likeness to today.
Jonathan Letham’s Chronic City focuses on a former child-star Chase Insteadman and his stoner pal Perkus Tooth as they negotiate Manhattan’s perpetual state of crisis. A tiger is terrorizing the town. A parallel Sim-version of the world is occupying too much time and money. And Chase’s finance is trapped aboard a space station, paralyzed by Chinese space mines. The obsession with Marlon Brando is real, the medical-grade marijuana feels real, but the winter is endless, the snow lingers through August, the tiger turns out mechanical, and the millionaire mayor is terrifyingly behind it all. This novel attempts a version of the future that isn’t a warning call, so much a view into a counter culture that could already exists on the island that is NYC.
Hari Kunzru’s fourth novel Gods Without Men was reviewed by Daddy-of-them-all Doug Coupland in the New York Times. Coupland calls it Translit, genre of fiction that effortlessly pinballs between locations and eras as if on a smart phone of its own, accounting for our ability to synthesize multiple characters and story lines as easily as our fingers scroll a screen. In Kunzru’s world, we only need a location to tether us to the book; the narrative drifts around three pinnacles in the desert. The pinnacles serve as witnesses as burnt out London pop stars, Mormon miners, Franciscan monks and Iraqi war simulators interact with the desert in their own destructive ways. This novel is dystopian only in its intense vision of the present: the autism, the talk shows, the crystal meth and the general loneliness that consume us so deeply today.
Lauren Groff’s novel of past-present-future begins beautifully as a utopian novel— a small caravan of hippies stop on a river bank to establish a colony. A commune is born and named and nurtured in the era after the summer of love. Gardens are planted. A dilapidated mansion is renovated. Small but observant Bit is the first child born on the farm dubbed “Arcadia’ by its leader, and he is the best protagonist to witness the groups rise and inevitable fall. By Groff’s third section, which takes place in a near future, we witness the shattering effect that a community has on its most dependent members. A gorgeous, lyrical novel that is only dystopian in its thwarted, pitiful version of utopian gone wrong.
What shocked me about Zadie Smith’s latest novel was not the complex layers of characterization, the shocking range of voices, her ability to manipulate the same(ish) dialect into four heart-wrenching throats, to make it seem like these characters are that fucking real…. it is Zadie Smith’s ability to say ‘fuckit’ to traditional structure. Yes, you can play with voice, you can play with style, you can mess with timelines, but ALSO messing with structure seems so crazy risky. But she does it…
This mega-novel tracks four characters from a NW London council estate (read subsidized housing project) in their various trajectories up, out, and away from their childhoods. They vary in their financial success, their misery. Leah is white and lost. Natalie is a barrister of Caribbean parents, lost too, but rich. Felix is the cleaned-up kid of a Rasta. Nathan is an addict, homeless, and thoughtful and destined for destitution.
But that’s the thing— nothing is ‘destined’ in this novel, nothing seems inevitable, and anything that would be considered “plot” is thwarted here. People don’t deserve what they get. Characters don’t always have very good excuses for their actions. Like real life, we are led through events that don’t always connect too-perfectly. What is perfectly wrought is her language, which leaves a taste that lingers long after the pages are done.
Huge Books, New Year
All things that were created during the year of the Dragon (2012) are magical amazing/still interesting to me. These four books, all from 2012, rocked seriously hard. CONSUME THEM ALL!!!!!
How perfect can you be Heidi Julavits? I mean, besides teaching at Columbia and marrying your super-smarty Ben Marcus and looking bomber in all author photos. You’ve got this cover??? This only proves your power as a super-genius that everyone wants to emanate/ball. This novel is also super hilarious and heartbreaking, about a psychics (living in a community not unlike a writers retreat) before they spiral into the totally wacky. Huge imagination. Voted best hair.
Jess Walter, I understand the desire to write something people will get behind, why after the merely moderate buzz over “the Financial Lives of Poets” you’re hitting us with the movie shit— Liz Taylor and Richard Burton shooting Cleopatra in Rome and the cute little starlet he’s knocked up hiding out in a picture perfect cinque terre town that is glazed in hot sun and long legs and swarthy Italian fisherpeople… I like this. I’m not going to write it, but I’ll see the movie. Voted most likely to succeed.
Are you into a terribly sad Jewish suburbs after all of your friends have gone to college and you left are alone to troll Whole Foods for MILFS and foie gras? What if you listen to your only friend, an elderly actor in a wheel-chair who may not just be “giving you” all of that free viagra and crystal meth? What if you sleep with the most depressed people on your block? Then imagine 30 different endings. Tadum! Adam Wilson wrote a filthy, funny novel a bit like Sam Lipsyte’s entire oeuvre, which I’m sure you’ll read in five seconds flat. Voted mostly likely to stay friends.
Junot Diaz is a puto who writes like he’s getting in serious shit from an ex-novia, like he’s got his balls in a vice, like he can’t always hide behind his school smarts, his MIT, his McArthur, his mega-huge Oscar Wao, his sucias, his huevones who cheat on their wives like everyone else, he can’t even hide behind his mother, or his hot neighbour, or the sweet old Dominicanas who are stuck cleaning the hospital sheets of New Jersey— This collection of stories is proof that Junot Diaz (or at least his writing) can still break a heart or two. Voted slut of the year, nerd of the year, culo of the year, genius.
Thanks to the amazing folks at The Loudest Voice in Los Angeles, I’ll be reading with some of my colleagues in Highland Park on Thursday, Jan. 24th, 2013. Come check the amazingly hilarious fiction writer Anthony M. Abboreno and the gorgeous poet Michelle Brittan, with friends Sarah Vap and Heather Dundas. Yes.
The amazing folks at The Collagist just did a little post-publication interview about the Vegaboy Chronicles, pentacostal vibes in Las Vegas, and drugs. It has been fabulous seeing my work in this rad magazine. Huzzah for Matt Bell and the whole team.
Here’s a piece:
Your opening paragraph feels supremely biblical, mysterious, full of pause and premonition – can you speak a little towards placement – why lead this way, departed from the story’s primary affect?
Las Vegas is a profoundly religious place. People are praying all the time, on free cable, in front of the slots, in the thousands of churches all over. I wanted that pentecostal power to sort of seep into the text from those first words— I wanted signs, suspicion, sideways luck. Because Las Vegas gets to invent everything again (Paris, the Pyramids, etc) it reinvents religion too, in the form of casino chapels and Criss Angel shows. Jimmy wants to see stallions and flaming torrents, but really he’s just watching a cop on a horse, or melted foam dropping from the roof of the Monte Carlo. This says a lot about Las Vegas; people want Sin City to be magical, a place where God could deliver a miracle at the blackjack table. But no. Jimmy’s miracle is divined by Vegaboy of the Desert, and it comes in the form of crystal meth.
Read the interview here!!!
So thrilled to see my latest Vegaboy story in this issue of The Collagist. I have been a massive fan of Matt Bell’s magazine for such a long time, I’ve always wanted to see my work alongside the super-rad voices in its pages. Huzzah!
Some 2012 fiction that is rad:
This year, We Sinners won Hanna Pylvainen a Whiting Award and some deservedly rave reviews. Her debut ‘novel in stories’ focuses on one family of believers, The Rovaniemis— nine kids, two extremely devout parents of a rare Finnish faith, and many questions. Like, if God says wearing green nail polish is wrong, and I wear it, what about my future? Am I fucked? What if my brother is gay? What if I don’t want to have nine kids? What if I like the fact that I’m part of something, and when I leave I’m just another sinner, just like everybody else? Each kid questions her place in the church, a few boyfriends question the dad-minister, and it climaxes in turn-of-the-century Finland. A wicked debut from a young American talent. Recommend.
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Oct
30
The wonderful people at the Canadian lit-mag SubTerrain (Strong Words for a Polite Nation) have just published my story Spiritus Mundi in their issue #62. Other awesome writers in this issue include poet Emily Davidson, reviewer Alex Leslie and novelist Michael Turner, author of the brilliant Pornographer’s Poem.
Those of you in Canada can check the shelves of your local bookstore. BC people can buy it on the ferry! Big love to the Writers Festival and the good editors at subTerrain.
As for news:
I’ve just accepted an Annenberg Fellowship at the University of Southern California, starting in September of 2012. In LA, I’ll be pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. This means: so long Canada, so long rainforest. It means, hello sunshine, starlets and silly-ass traffic. Here’s to the pursuit of higher learning. Ra. Ra. Ra.
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Aug
07
When a character begins his research by climbing to his Madrid roof and smoking a spliff with his morning espresso, I’ve found a kind of pal. When the prose stumbles over all of the familiar humiliation, neurosis and alienation of living abroad, I feel at home. And when the language flits around so effortlessly, despite the protagonist’s privilege, despite his snotty attitude and his I’m-the-center-of-this-world ethos, I’m impressed. One of the best of 2012.
May Showers = Read Your Face Off
May has been grim in Scotland: sideways rain, inside-out-umbrellas, hours in the library hiding from the drizzle outside. It has given me the opportunity to read, and read, and read. Of the dozens of books I gobbled up this past month, there were some winners. In order of very best to kind of great:
HOPE: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander is my kind of hysterical. For one, it is totally cringe-worthy: a paranoid Jewish father who finds Anne Frank, alive and geriatric, squatting in his attic. Auslander’s protagonist is riddled with Holocaust guilt; he simply never suffered enough, despite his mother’s PTSD from a war that ended before she was born. This novel is bitingly funny, crisply rendered, and impossible. Loved it.
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward is a rich, sensual, serious novel about a small Mississippi family facing Hurricane Katrina. Like most National Book Award winners, this is a coming-of-age story; the 15-year-old protagonist is poor, pregnant, and desperate for the smallest sign of tenderness. That said, the girl-narrator is strange and bright, and brings Greek myth and a fierce setting into her narrative without a trace of self-pity. Gorgeous stuff.
Blue Nights by Joan Didion (pictured above) was not an easy read. This is a memoir about grief, whereby Didion, now nearing the end of her writing career, meditates on motherhood, mourning a dead daughter, and her own fragility. Harrowing accounts of waking up on the floor bleeding out of her head and watching her daughter die in four different ICU facilities are stitched together to fashion a kind of dreamy meditation. This book is slender and cryptic, but a testament to a Joan Didion’s prowess as memoirist numero uno.
I believe I suffer from what Douglas Coupland calls Fictive Rest:
The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction. Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack one’s own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.
1/4
