John Haskell! Monica Youn! Matthew Derby! Camden Joy! Lonely Christopher!

Five Remarkable Writers Join Forces at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, NY
Sunday October 23, 2011 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.

John Haskell is the author of a pair of novels, most recently Out of My Skin (FSG) about the spiritual journey of a Steve Martin impersonator and the collection of short stories, I’m Not Jackson Pollock. His work has been praised by Nick Cave, A.M. Homes, Geoff Dyer and Ben Marcus.

Monica Youn is the author of the National Book Award finalist Ignatz, a collection of poetry themed around George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strips series, which ran from 1913 to 1944 and featured a love triangle between a police officer dog, a good-hearted cat and an anarchist mouse. She is also the author of Barter, active as a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice and has appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times: Stories (Back Bay Books, 2003).  His writing has appeared in Fence, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and The Believer, where he served in various editing capacities from 2003 to 2007.

Tom Adelman / Camden Joy – Tom Adelman is the author of a pair of unusual, thoughtful, literate baseball books, including the best-selling Long Ball about the 1975 World Series. Under the pseudonym Camden Joy, he wrote five books that transformed his obsession with rock music into novels and rants about rock icons such as Frank Black, Liz Phair, David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven, The Eagles and Al Green. These beautifully hand-printed books presaged the Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. His work has been praised by Ira Glass, Dave Eggers, Jonathon Lethem and Dennis Cooper. He will perform a series of songs from his recently released concept album about the government’s controversial presidential coin program.

Lonely Christopher is an American poet, fiction writer, dramatist, and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry volume Into (with Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman) and the fiction collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse from Little House on the Bowery, Dennis Cooper’s imprint on Akashic. Currently he is directing his first feature length film, MOM, which he also wrote. His latest chapbook, Poems in June, is newly released from The Corresponding Society.

For More Information Contact:
Ben Bush (benjaminhbush@yahoo.com)

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
(between Dean St. and St. Mark’s)
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
(718) 789-1534
Trains 2, 3, 4 to Grand Army Plaza or B, Q to 7th Ave.

Solex reviews her own Pandora station, Aimee Bender, Tom Bissell, Spalding Gray

I just wanted to pass along some links to some interesting pieces that are up at The Fanzine right now.

I am a longtime fan of Dutch cut’n'paste pop-star Solex, a.k.a. Elisabeth Esselink. Here she reviews the Solex Pandora station. It’s interesting to read a musician’s opinion of the Pandora playlist that typifies their style.

Also, Matthew Simmons did a great interview with Tom Bissell about his recent book, Extra Lives, which sets out to apply something a bit like literary criticism to video games. Also, an interview with Aimee Bender about food, fiction and her recent novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.

Also, a review of the new Steven Soderbergh’s recent documentary on actor and monologist Spalding Gray, who committed suicide in January 2004. The review is written by Theresa Smalec, who was the last person to interview Gray before his death.

Louis Chude-Sokei delivers a fascinating review of Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass delving into the importance of self-loathing as an authorial tool and the ways it’s traditionally been off limits for black writers.

Great fiction from Jimmy Chen of HTMLGiant and Andrew Leland.

Kaya Oakes brings a thoughtful piece on the radical anarcho-socialism of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers. Oakes presents a real different vision of the possibilities for Catholicism, after the ongoing bad news about priest abuse scandals.

Finally, here’s a blog I wrote about fiber optics and the difficulty of visualizing internet infrastructure.

Trinie Dalton, Kevin Sampsell, Joanna Ruocco, Louis Chude-Sokei

Just wanted to pass along some links to some of my favorite new pieces up on the Fanzine.

“Sex and Micro-Prose” — Trinie Dalton on Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography and Joanna Ruocco’s Man’s Companions. Trinie makes a lot of interesting connections between the two works.

“Pottymouth” — Kevin Sampsell talks dirty in his piece on the conversations that occur in bed.

“Knowing Me, Knowing You, Knowing Them” — Louis Chude-Sokei reviews Shameem Black’s Fiction Across Borders but perhaps more importantly tangles with the echoes of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the way it has inhibited fiction writers from imagining and/or speaking as characters who are culturally, racially, sexually different than the writers themselves. He aptly describes the way that disdain has become indistinguishable from respect. I always find Louis’s work to be pretty incredible but here he says quite a few things that seem long overdue. The accompanying collages are from Berlin-based artist Paul Tyree-Francis, who has done quite a bit of graphic design for the Luaka Bop record label.

Inspirational Critique: a conversation with Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade of My Barbarian

I first saw My Barbarian perform as the grand finale of Liz Glynn’s “24-Hour Rome Reconstruction Project (or Building Rome in a Day)” at Machine Project here in Los Angeles. Compressing the 1200 year history of ancient Rome to 24 hours, participants built an impresive scale model of the city from cardboard and hot glue until at the stroke of midnight My Barbarian arrived in the role of Visigoths to sing and perform while participants destroyed the replica they had spent all day creating. This is just one of the many historio-critical-performative-collaborative projects My Barbarian (Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines, Alexandro Segade) have been a part of. Jesi Khadivi, curator of Berlin’s Golden Parachutes gallery, interviews.

Jeff Johnson on Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path

“If you have to buy a ticket, it’s modern. If you are already inside and you have to pay to get out of it, it’s more modern,” writes Ben Lerner in his book Angle of Yaw, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He has followed it with his latest collection Mean Free Path. Taken from physics, its title refers to the average distance traveled by an electron between two successive collisions with other moving particles, an idea which — along with the Doppler effect — Lerner uses to explore 21st century distraction, the military industrial complex and his wife Ari. Jeff Johnson reviews this ambitious new work.

The Fanzine: Linh Dinh, Slavoj Zizek, Interview with a Bouncer, Joanna Ruocco, Matt Bell, Blackface, Queer Children

One of the most popular articles at Fanzine of late has been Matt Bell’s micro-fiction Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo. The accompanying artwork by Joshua Hagler makes Bell’s unsettling world all the more vivid. Bell is an editor at the online literary journal The Collagist and the author of several novellas.

Another great fiction piece came from Joanna Ruocco who Derrida-ian second-guessing of oneself into a piece that has a kind of perfectly off-kilter comedic timing. Ruocco has received praise from Robert Coover and Carole Maso and has a collection of short stories out on Ellipsis Press.

Prof. Louis Chude-Sokei makes some interesting distinctions between the meaning of blackface when performed for a domestic audience and what it can mean in cultures outside the U.S. He touches on Turkey’s newscaster who performed in blackface after Obama’s visit, as well as America’s Next Top Model, Mexican cartoon characters and the popularity of blackface festivals in Africa.

Berlin-based curator Jesi Khadivi reviews Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy with vivid details on the brilliant theorist’s tendency to over-salivate.

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, reviews the latest from Vietnamese-American writer Linh Dinh. I’m a big fan of Dinh’s short stories and I’m eager for his novel Love Like Hate, which Seven Stories will publish in May.

Also, don’t miss Jennifer Blowdryer’s interview with bouncer Frankie Clinton about his experiences getting stabbed and the proper way to handle drunks, and Aaron Nielsen’s tackling of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Stockton’s book is intriguing in part due to its investigation of the oddities of the entire conception of childhood in western culture.

Tao Lin, Darius James, Brief Interviews, Werner Herzog, Arthur Russell,The Informant, Galit Eilat, Girls’ Guide to Rocking and getting 86′d

It’s been a busy month over at The Fanzine:

Tao Lin, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel, on Werner Herzog’s short documentaries.

Darius James, author of Negrophobia and That’s Blaxploitation! has written a pretty amazing, sad and hilarious piece on his childhood experience watching the film Revenge of the Zombies with an eye for race, identity and voodoo.

Jennifer Blowdryer interviews people about their experiences being kicked out of bars, apartments and restaurants in the the first installment of 86′d stories.

Thom Donovan’s profile on cellist and disco pioneer Arthur Russell and interview with Israeli experimental curator Gail Eilat about the Mobile Archive, an unusual traveling video art exhibit that specializes in war zones.

Daniel Hamilton reviews Chronic City, the latest from Jonathan Lethem and uncovers the latent critique of capitalism in Stephen Soderbergh’s recent films

Amy Meyerson closely reads both David Foster Wallace’s and John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and comes up with some engaging contrasts.

Also: new fiction from Joshua Cohen, who has an 800 page novel forthcoming from Dalkey Archive, and Mike Louie’s stellar review of Girls’ Guide to Rocking.

Finally, a write up and photos of Fanzine’s participation in Kaya Oakes’ independent media discussion panel at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

Jeff T. Johnson on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

There’s at least two surprising things about the new Pynchon novel: 1) it’s fairly short, 2) the cover looks like a Carl Hiasen mystery novel. Jeff Johnson, the former Kitchen Sink music editor and now a Brooklynite, shares his insights into this new work and compares the narrative structures of assorted Pynchon works in his review for The Fanzine.

We Can Only Expand the Boundaries When We’re Up Against the Ropes: Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Brandon Scott Gorrell

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted, reviews the work of two very different young poets: one who writes in the voices of historical figures, including Amelia Earhart’s mechanic and boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, the other working in the genre of “Gmail Confessionalism.” Through these collections, Oakes traces the influence of parallel trends: the rapid expansion of MFA programs and the growth of digital publishing, showing us two very different points in the vast territory of contemporary American poetry.

Kaya Oakes, two Los Angeles independent record labels and I will be part of a panel discussion on independent media at Skylight Books, Sunday Sept. 27 5:00 pm. It would be great to see you there.

The Fanzine: Matthew Derby on Roberto Bolano

I’m a pretty huge advocate of Matthew Derby’s collection of short stories Super Flat Times and so I’m puffed up with pride to say that Derby’s review of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is now up on The Fanzine. Following the success of Bolano’s 2666, New Directions press is publishing the first English translations of some of Bolano’s work including this, his first novel. Derby is a former editor at McSweeney’s Believer and his review is as insightful and occasionally funny as one might expect. Fanzine will also be publishing an article from Derby on Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam diptych Full Metal Jacket, apparently a subject of his fixation.