György Spiró, Captivity, Trans. by Tim Wilkinson. Restless Books, 2015.



The epic bestseller and winner of the prestigious Aegon Literary Award in Hungary, Captivity is an enthralling and illuminating historical saga set in the time of Jesus about a Roman Jew on a quest to the Holy Land.
A literary sensation in Hungary, György Spiró’s Captivity is both a highly sophisticated historical novel and a gripping page-turner. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ’s death and the outbreak of the Jewish War, Captivity recounts the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew.
Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri’s father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family’s prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later, in cosmopolitan Alexandria, he undergoes a scholarly and sexual awakening—but must also escape a pogrom. Returning to Rome at last, he finds an entirely unexpected inheritance.
Equal parts Homeric epic, brilliantly researched Jewish history, and picaresque adventure, Captivity is a dramatic tale of family, fate, and fortitude. In its weak-yet-valiant hero, fans will be reminded of Robert Graves’ classics of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God.


"With the novel Captivity, Spiró proves that he is well-versed in both historical and human knowledge. It appears that in our times, it is playfulness that is expected of literary works, rather than the portrayal of realistic questions and conflicts. As if the two, playfulness and seriousness were inconsistent with each other! On the contrary (at least for me) playfulness begins with seriousness. Literature is a serious game. So is Spiró’s novel."—Imre Kertész


"Like the authors of so many great novels, György Spiró sends his hero, Uri, out into the wide world. Uri is a Roman Jew born into a poor family, and the wide world is an overripe civilization—the Roman Empire. Captivity can be read as an adventure novel, a Bildungsroman, a richly detailed portrait of an era, and a historico-philosophical parable. The long series of adventures—in which it is only a tiny episode that Uri is imprisoned together with Jesus and the two thieves—suggest at once the vanity of human endeavors and a passion for life. A masterpiece."—László Márton


“A novel of education and a novel of adventure that brings to life ancient Rome, Alexandria, and Jerusalem with a vividness of detail that is stunning. Spiró’s prose is crisp and colloquial, the kind of prose that aims for precision rather than literary thrills. A serious and sophisticated novel that is also engrossing and highly readable is a rare thing. Captivity is such a novel.”—Ivan Sanders


“Impossibly engrossing from the very first page…. Building on a huge volume of reference material, the novel rings true from both a historical and a literary point of view.”—Magda Ferch

“György Spiró presents a theory in novelistic form about the interwovenness of religion and politics, lays bare the inner workings of power, and gives insight into the art of survival….This book reads easily and avidly like the greatest bestsellers while also going as deep as the greatest thinkers of European philosophy.”—Aegon Literary Award 2006






Thanks to the labour of the indefatigable Tim Wilkinson, this autumn we will finally gain access to an important work by yet another representative of Hungarian letters who has all the chances to become a household name among the readers of literature in translation, just like Nadas, Esterhazy and Krasznahorkai.
Captivity is a vast historical novel  dedicated to the period between the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the end of the First Jewish-Roman War. The action primarily takes place in Rome, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, following the trials and tribulations of a Roman Jew called Uri. The protagonist is a physically weak yet intellectually endowed youth whose adventures start when his father arranges for his journey to Judea as part of the delegation  delivering the annual ritual tax for the maintenance of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the course of the following years Uri will come of age and gain formidable knowledge and diverse skills that will make him a genuine polymath and a leading intellectual of that epoch. Among the most important formative experiences will be his captivity by Herod’s administrators,  encounters with Christ and Pontius Pilate, forced labour in the countryside,  and the studies in the famous city of Alexandria. While following the ups and downs of Uri’s destiny the reader will get an extensive and meticulously researched overview of the culture, economy, warfare, politics and everyday life of Ancient Rome and Judea.
The novel has been a tremendous success in Hungary, having gone through more than a dozen editions. The critics lauded its page-turning quality along with the wealth of ideas and the ambitious recreation of historical detail.  I highly recommend reading this interview with György Spiró about the novel as well as this summary of his works. It is great that Captivity will reach a wider audience. However, I have to say that just judging by the description, I would have liked to see his other novel translated, The Kingfisher, which sounds totally insane:
Adopting the same sarcastic voice, he has composed a gigantic novel of nearly 800 pages, a dystopia of the present and future ages comparable to the works of Jonathan Swift or Thomas Pynchon. The Kingfisher of the title is, in fact, a woman by the name of Zsonna Bísztő, whose biography, the main body of the book, is being written by a certain Bollog Shonason who lives in the strange country of Talismania (clearly somewhere in America). The story relates how Zsonna, who was born in the Meagerland (Hungary) of our times, is becoming a victim of an international conspiracy in the course of which she is transformed into the prototype of a woman with three vaginas. Moreover, part of her brain is transplanted in the head of a kingfisher, who manages to escape and finishes her life on the remote island of Hölle, becoming in the process Talismania’s first saint: Shona Bisto. The dark and ironic novel teems with a multitude of frightening and also hilarious subplots.

I want to believe  that the publication of the  tamer Captivity will spark enough interest around the name of this writer to eventually bring forth the English translation of this extravaganza. - theuntranslated.wordpress.com/






http://www.restlessbooks.com/captivity


Uri, the hero of Spiró's enormous novel, is a Jewish Candide, although the scope of his exploits suggests more of a naive Don Quixote type—a wide-eyed and resilient innocent, faithful to both his family and his religion. His big dream is to travel from his native Rome to Jerusalem, which he does in the course of this episodic epic. Set in the first century A.D., the novel (first published in Hungary in 2005) covers roughly the same period as Robert Graves's classic I, Claudius, but Uri is on the ground with the rabble instead of in the exalted halls of intrigue. Indeed, a good chunk of the story involves Uri and his friends' retelling the exploits of the royals. The pacing is slow but deliberate, evocative and richly detailed. Spiró's elaborate style reflects Uri's acute observation, with the hint of a wink at the reader. Whether he is imprisoned next to Jesus Christ or is conversing with Pontius Pilate or Kainis, his ex-wife, who happens to be a faux empress, Uri remains his earnest self. Much of the novel is dedicated to Uri's everyday struggles, musings on religion, and arguments with friends. Spiró, a Hungarian man of letters, juxtaposes the prosaic and the significant with aplomb and offers a cheeky, unique view of history through the eyes of his modest everyman. A thoroughly impressive literary feat. - Publishers Weekly


Brilliant, picaresque novel of Jewish life in the first century, a bestseller and prizewinner in Spiró’s native Hungary.
Gaius Theodorus, aka Uriel, aka Uri, is a beloved only son—until, that is, it’s revealed that he has trouble seeing, which brings down his father’s bewildered wrath. “Because you don’t want to see!” cries Joseph, not pausing to allow that though myopic, Uri loves books and stories. It might help to have a cockeyed outlook on the world, though, for in the time of Nero and company, the Roman world is upside down. Joseph dispatches young Uri to Jerusalem with the inventive charge of making his fortune there and bringing honor to a family name that needs a little refurbishing. There are two great impulses at work in Spiró’s yarn, the first being a comprehensive sociology of Roman Jewry, the second a grand, seriocomic novel of ideas. Uri, overcoming obstacles and a flaw of birth, makes for a Joseph Campbell–worthy epic hero, though events are always larger than he, and he doesn’t always appreciate their significance until well after the fact—as when, for instance, it dawns on him that he shared a cell with a certain soi-disant Messiah. “Your Anointed hero was a man!” Uri tells a zealous convert. “A man! I was jailed with him, saw him from an arm’s length away!” The translation is sometimes anachronistic and not quite idiomatic, whether Uri is expressing upset that a philosopher has “ripped off” another’s ideas or, chiding his daughters late in life, when he would regularly “tear them off a strip for not getting married.” Still, there’s a lot packed into these pages, including an engagingly complicated portrait of Roman-Jewish relations in the early empire (“We loathe, absolutely loathe your kind, but not to the extent that we too will perish”), a rambunctious tour of ancient philosophies (including a hilarious semi-Mishnaic defense of prostitution), and no end of plain, good shaggy dog humor.
A winning and thoughtful entertainment, somewhere between Lives of the Caesars and The Tin Drum
- Kirkus Reviews




Captivity follows Jewish Roman citizen Gaius Theodorus -- known as Uri -- from when, aged nineteen, he is sent on a delegation to Judae, and then travels on to Alexandria before finally returning to Rome a few years later. It begins close to the time of Christ's death, and then accelerates when Uri has returned to Rome, through Caligula's ascension to the Roman throne, and then the reigns of Claudius and Nero.
       The novel centers closely on Uri, and appropriately it begins not in his earlier childhood but when he is uprooted from his family (and his homeland); from then on he is literally individual, and while he will come to have ties -- familial, friendly, and professional -- and settle down in various locales these all prove more or less tenuous, and throughout there is very much a sense of him standing alone.
       In focusing on and through Uri, the narrative is also, like Uri, myopic -- aware of the historic changes going on, but seeing those that do not directly touch Uri more as a blur than distinctly. Uri has a good sense of some of what is happening, and he encounters some of the leading figures of the time, but Spiró does not follow too closely in the trend of historical writing that puts protagonists in the thick of everything and has them in close contact with the high and mighty and witness to every momentous decision. So here even an encounter with Christ barely registers at the time.
       Similarly, the novel is paced to go along with Uri's maturation: at the beginning everything is new for essentially still-adolescent Uri, and practically every day brings new experiences; here the novel follows his progress in close, painstaking detail. By the time he's returned to Rome a few years later he's mature if not downright jaded; the day-to-day doesn't stand out nearly as much and the narrative proceeds much more quickly, eventually skipping along over months and years at a time. Rome is undergoing dramatic changes during this period, but mature Uri is now able to stand back and consider the big picture, rather than let himself be thrown about by the day to day minutiae, as he was when he first set out. It's an effective narrative technique: Captivity is a very long novel (of about 350,000 words), but pacing it as he does Spiró quite easily holds the reader's attention through to the (surprisingly bitter) end.
       In this way, Spiró impressively focuses his historical novel on the local and individual -- as well as specifically the communities that define Uri and often set him apart, his Jewish religion and his Roman citizenship. But in this remarkably thorough and detailed novel Spiró also manages to present a great deal of substantive historical and cultural information -- adroitly too: it rarely feels like simple information-dumping, as instead he weaves even obscure details about (especially Jewish) life in those times into the narrative in a way that doesn't feel forced.
       Uri is extremely nearsighted, and a polyglot bookworm. As a Roman citizen he has some privileges and standing, but as he nears adulthood his future is a bit uncertain. His physical limitations aside -- he's been going bald since age sixteen, on top of it all -- he shouldn't have too much to complain about:
(I)t was a distinctly good time to be Jewish in Rome, and not a good time to be a senator or a knight; it was a good time to be poor, and not so good to be rich, because anyone might be condemned, have his fortune taken and be put to death, with any denunciation given credence.
       The opportunity that suddenly comes Uri's way is, nevertheless, exceptional -- "Jerusalem ! Home ! Where the Temple is !". Of course, that's also part of the problem: notorious Agrippa had asked Uri's father for a loan -- and when Agrippa asks, it's impossible to say no. Uri and his father know already then that the debt -- because the money for Agrippa has to be borrowed, too; Uri's father doesn't have those kinds of funds -- will be almost impossible to repay over any lifetime, but there's nothing to be done. But the one concession Uri's father wrangles out of Agrippa is to have Uri made a member of the delegation bringing offerings to Jerusalem -- a great experience and opportunity, even though Uri is, of course, regarded with suspicion by those he travels with both for his connection to Agrippa and his suspicious inclusion in this group.
       As the group nears its destination there are hints of larger tensions in the air, too:
     "This year Pilate is going to Jerusalem earlier than usual," Matthew muttered to himself. "Very early.
     There must be some trouble in Judea after all, that suggested.
       After their lengthy journey, the delegation has little use for Uri when they get to Judae and cut him loose as soon as they can. Uri winds up incarcerated -- briefly sharing his cell with three prisoners who are unceremoniously led away on the Friday before Passover -- but soon enough winds up dining with Pilate himself, and Herod Antipas. But he already sees the writing in the stars:
     I'm dining with a king and a prefect. This is not going to end well.
       Uri endures some internal exile in Judae -- one of the few things they can think to do with him -- but it allows him to experience something new again. He bristles some at how he's been treated and asserts more of his individuality, realizing that it's dangerous (and unpleasant) to have to pick sides (or be thought to have picked one or another, as others repeatedly do about him; he can't quite bring himself to simply accept his fate -- that, as someone explains to him: "Whether you're a sleepwalker or an ignorant novice, you still become what people consider you to be, and you can't do anything about that"):
"I don't want to live in any community ! I don't want to know anything about anybody !"
       Regardless, he realizes that he is a pawn of sorts -- but has no idea exactly in what game. Still:
     He was being kept in Jerusalem, kept in the country, fed and watered as if he were livestock marked for slaughter.
       At least he's clever enough that, once he has served his purpose, he gets a favor in return: allowed to leave he manages to arrange it so that his journey home first takes him to the other city of his dreams, Alexandria. There he can pursue some of his scholarly interests, finding in Philo of Alexandria a mentor and benefactor. It's the happiest time in his life, especially once he is admitted to the Gymnasium -- the highest local institution of learning. Yet his myopia still extends beyond simply the physical:
     "We're in a time of peace, gymnasiarch, said Uri. "There will be no war during my lifetime."
     Isidorus laughed.
     "You're naïve, my child," he said, almost affectionately. "It's a good thing there are some idiots among your generation."
       Indeed, things go south soon enough, first for the Jews of Alexandria. By the time he's ready to leave for Rome Uri is singing a different tune, realizing:
A period of frightful gravity is coming, cheerless, humorless, humdrum... Wars of religions, not empires...
       Yet even then Uri still believes Rome won't be too badly touched by these -- and, oh how wrong he is.
       The novel accelerates upon Uri's return to Rome. His life suddenly becomes domestic: he has a mother and sister to take care of, and soon a wife -- definitely not of his choosing. A son, Theo, is the light of his life, and he has several more children, but anything resembling domestic bliss is not in the cards.
       A new threat appears, the baffling-to-Uri Nazarenes, and he and his family are washed up in the Roman over-reaction to that perceived threat, leading to another period of exile that also comes at considerable personal cost. Eventually things settle back down in Rome, and so can Uri; he is able to pursue some of his interests -- including, desperately, trying to save valuable records, his love of books a one constant he believes he can hold onto until the end; alas, Uri remains a naïf in these sorts of respects to the -- yes, bitter -- end.
       The story goes to Nero's death, and beyond, by which time Uri is an old man. The one woman he loved has become empress -- though she admits it's all gone to hell: "I just sham it" -- and even nostalgia ("It would have been nice to grow old together with you", Uri says, imagining what might have been) doesn't stand a chance in the face of brute, hard, cold reality. There are hints of what is to come -- his one-time love is well aware of the Nazarenes, and casually notes: "'It's a simple religion,' she said. 'It will win through.'" -- and all Uri can hope for is to record what he can, to write his own book. But even that .....
       Uri is admittedly rather conveniently smart -- book-smart, certainly, if less frequently the: "strategos gone wrong", as he once described himself -- with a talent for languages, but he's nevertheless an impressively convincing character, whose path through these tumultuous times Spiró chronicles thoroughly engagingly. There's lots of knowingness here, yet even in the casual treatment of, for example, Christianity, it's almost never heavy-handed. The historic events are also very well-handled -- in particular the frenzies that bubble up and then subside, and how life is at one moment on razor's edge, and then returns (at least for the survivors) to almost everyday banality.
       Captivity is a superior, well-researched historical novel, but history aside it's also simply a vey good story, with a compelling protagonist. - M.A.Orthofer


With Captivity, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, György Spiró introduces English readers to a visceral new form of epic history. Here mountains of trivia form vivid landscapes and academic minutiae open windows into the soul of a forgotten age. It is a work of fiction, though, and it is hilarious.
Our unlikely Odysseus, half-blind Gaius "Uri" Theodorus, has resigned himself to an unfulfilling life in the “Far Side” of first-century Rome when his stern father unexpectedly entrusts him with the future of their family and the wealth of their community on a dangerous quest to Jerusalem. In the first episode, Uri experiences Candide-esque ups and downs (sharing haute cuisine with Pontius Pilate and a prison cell with a certain rebellious Nazarene) while the reader accomplishes what feels only in retrospect like a course in Jewish history.
Capitivity requires a commitment, not just to its impressive page length—a bookcase trophy with gravitas—but also to a difficult hero who makes all the wrong moves through an infinity of unfortunate events. It is possible to lose track of decisions that cost Uri his fortune, let alone his sandals. The payoff, however, is significant: each trial humanizes a protagonist who, at the center of so many pivotal events (such as the earliest pogrom, in Alexandria, 32 CE), might otherwise slip into allegory. Uri’s experience is less a metaphor for the saga of the Jewish people than a lens through which to experience a piece of it.
Spiró’s serious accomplishment is to challenge the chilling observation, popularly attributed to Stalin, that “one death is a tragedy and one million deaths a statistic” by breathing life into the neglected statistics of a magnificent—and terrifying, brutal—age. His Melvillian digressions into topics as varied as the observation of halakha in Rome, the intricacies of Alexandrian tax code, and the practice of rural Judean carpentry immerse the reader in an authentic experience. Bloody political intrigue also features in Captivity, but Spiró more often chooses the realism of quotidian bureaucratic nonsense.
Goofy and lacking a political agenda, Captivity is nevertheless an intently philosophical book. Where American novels like Ben Hur have attempted to dramatize the period as a Christian morality play, Captivity expresses historical ideas authentically, and explores from contemporary perspectives how Christianity and the First Jewish-Roman War (66 – 77 CE) both arose from the clash of imperialism and monotheism. It is unsurprising that Spiró’s friendliest historical portrait is of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher and diplomat Philo of Alexandria, who was interested in reconciling Jewish and Greek teachings.
As an award-winning author, Spiró displays predictable creativity, but the real power of Captivity is the ability the extensive historical detail lends the reader to inhabit and empathize with ancient life. It is difficult to imagine a more entertaining way to realize so much data, and it is wonderful that Spiró has managed such an accomplishment. His technique is a welcome innovation for historical fiction in general, and perhaps the drollest scholarly introduction to the first century yet. - Jack Hatchett




Born in 1946 in Budapest, award-winning dramatist, novelist, and translator György Spiró has earned a reputation as one of postwar Hungary’s most prominent and prolific literary figures. He teaches at ELTE University of Budapest, where he specializes in Slavic literatures.

Carlos Velázquez, The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories, Trans. by Achy Obejas, Restless Books, 2016.


The much-anticipated English-language debut of “one of the most original and entertaining voices of contemporary Mexican literature” (Revista Gatopardo): a collection of surreal, ironic, and madcap stories about the comedy and brutal tragedies of life in Mexico.
The provocateur and cult sensation Carlos Velázquez has earned comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, and has been called “a grand storyteller” (Diario Jornada), “an icon” (Frente), and “one of the most original and entertaining voices of contemporary Mexican literature” (Revista Gatopardo). His English-language debut, a collection of seven surreal, unrelentingly ironic, and unsettling tales, portrays the comedy and brutal tragedies of a region that occupies a unique place in the North American imagination.
Akin to Márquez’s Macondo or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, PopSTock! is a fictional northern Mexican territory where Velázquez’s stories take place. In addition to their common setting, central to each of these stories is the The Cowboy Bible–a magical object that can drastically change shape. The Cowboy Bible first appears as the talisman of a Santería-practicing luchador, DJ, and art critic, but later morphs into an unbeatable marathon drinker, a reality television show in which contestants must burn pirated CDs at top speed, and the leather for a pair of boots so coveted that it leads a man to grant the devil a night with his wife. With these otherworldly scenarios, pop culture references, and Velázquez’s linguistic inventiveness, The Cowboy Bible is a brazen social and political commentary on modern Mexican reality. 



“The Cowboy Bible is one of the most extraordinary books invented by northern Mexico to comprehend itself.”—Sergio González Rodríguez


“Although his work has a certain geography and language that situate it in the tradition of northern Mexican fiction, the precision and depth with which Velázquez captures the pulse of his setting has turned him into an icon of Mexican fiction who is read with the same ease in his hometown of Torreón as in Argentina or Spain.”—Frente


“[Carlos Velázquez’s] writing sparkles with the fireworks of turbulent crossover fiction.… Velázquez [has] completed some of the most extraordinary works not only of his generation but also of the past two decades of Mexican literature…. Velázquez depicts his scenes with flashy language and sordid excesses, a sort of neonorthern Esperanto…. The critics have celebrated this emerging literature from the deep north as the sign of a transformation in the national letters. The confidence and nerve, the brazenness, the playful and uncontrollable liberty in Velázquez’s texts, as well as his exceptional narrative intuition and the density of his stories, arouse an expectation about the paths to be taken in the future by this author who is barely thirty-three years old.”—Revista Nexos


“Some explosive, original, and controversial pages…. The experience of reading this work is similar to that of listening to the radio on public transportation, with thousands of scenes, with thousands of thoughts, but with something that becomes addictive, that ties together the narration, that shares the quickness of a contagion and ends with the solitude of the individual that gets off at the next corner.”
—Revista Siempre


“Carlos Velázquez is an author that appropriates elements of reality and adds a little bit of sarcasm, irony, criticism, and fiction to them in order to create characters situated in the most improbable scenarios, inside worlds that seem to belong to other dimensions.”—Excélsior


“Indebted to ‘la Literatura de la Onda’ and a good number of other currents that found their battlefield in marginalization, the prose of the Coahulian author is intended to provoke, to speak bluntly and freshly, like the northerners do.”—Vértigo


“Northern Mexico is not only the territory with the largest number of casualties in the war between the drug cartels and the Mexican police and military; it is also where a distinct and profoundly innovative kind of literature has grown, one that responds like few others do to the multiform reality of the world that founds—or, better yet, creates—realities at the unstoppable rate of globalization.… This crossroad is expressed through the recurring use of terms from the border language of mestizos, Spanglish, but with a style that surpasses and leaves behind its usual uses. Over this linguistic surface, Velázquez extends another thick layer of word games, changing meanings, and invented terms in the style of Lewis Carroll…. [Velázquez is] an unrestrained pyrotechnic who makes sparks fly in every moment.… The Cowboy Bible [is] a wild and effervescent text, a soup that boils until incandescent.”—El País

Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro, Poems by Gerard Legro, BookThug, 2016.


In the spring and summer of 1949, Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro—two teenage pranksters with the right mix of bad attitude and artistic ingenuity—composed, circulated, and performed a collection of poems on the campus of Black Mountain College, an experimental school located just outside Asheville, North Carolina.
Now, BookThug is bringing this previously unpublished work to light for the first time in Poems by Gerard Legro, edited with annotations by noted Canadian poet and scholar Alessandro Porco.
Porco’s insightful work (including a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and rare photographs sourced from archival documents and historical materials) offers an enlightening exploration of a side of the Black Mountain College canon that’s rarely seen. Rich with aleatory compositional methods and found materials, and replete with scatological puns, doggerel rhymes, and surreal imagery, Poems by Gerard Legro was meant to be a critique of the ‘obscurity’ of modernist poetry from two disaffected teens in post-war America who were desperate to fight back against aesthetic and moral codes of maturity, propriety, and sophistication.
This unique and timely addition to the canon of Black Mountain College will appeal to poetry and art enthusiasts and students—especially those interested in twentieth-century American poetry and literature, the work of Black Mountain College scholars, and major art figures like Salvador Dali, Frida Khalo, Julien Levy, Ilya Bolotowsky, Herbert Bayer, and Josef Albers.


“Beautiful Gerard Legro is alive. At Black Mountain College two students rebelled against their teachers, Josef Albers and Charles Olson, to create a mythic figure—part hoax, part avatar of disenchanted youth—who is entirely their own.… These poems are a vital addition to the history of the extraordinary educational experiment that was Black Mountain.”—Kaplan Harris


“The literary history of Black Mountain College has received a useful amplification and illumination in the form of Poems by Gerard Legro…. Through his detailed and insightful introduction, and in his careful annotation of both the poems and the circumstances of their composition and (non-)dissemination, Alessandro Porco equips the contemporary reader not just to get the joke(s), but also to appreciate the significance of a fascinating project, equal parts homage and satire, that has too long languished in archival storage. A valuable recovery.”—Steve Evans

Martí Sales, Huckleberry Finn, Trans. by Elisabet Ràfols and Ona Bantjes-Ràfols, BookThug, 2015.


Enter the world as seen through the eyes of Huckleberry Finn—a weary and defeated landscape, but one of inherent hope, where reinvention is possible through the seminal power of words, those elemental beings that are capable of creating realities all their own.
There’s sex, there’s drugs, and there’s rock’n’roll—and all the while, there’s a young man’s search for wisdom through the beauty of literature and love that he finds along the way.
In a style that combines the avant garde tradition with an authentic adventure-style narrative, the poems of Catalan poet Martí Sales’ debut collection Huckleberry Finn usher us in to the primordial experience of giving name to each and every thing, as a means to inaugurate life—or the city of Barcelona, which, in some ways, for Sales and Huckleberry, are one and the same.


Catalan poet Martí Sales works as a freelance writer and translator in Barcelona, Spain, after living for some years in Rome, Cuba, and New York City. Sales has translated the works of John Fante, Kurt Vonnegut, Jim Dodge, Shirley Jackson, and Harold Pinter. He is the author of four books: Huckleberry Finn (the collection of poetry published in Catalan in 2005; winner of the Vila de Lloseta Poetry Prize), Dies feliços a la presó (Happy Days in Prison; prose; 2007), Ara és el moment (Now Is the Hour; essays; 2011), and Principi d’incertesa (Uncertainty Principle; prose; 2015). The English translation of Huckleberry Finn by Elisabet Ràfols and Ona Bantjes-Ràfols, forthcoming from BookThug in the autumn of 2015, is Sales’ first work of poetry to be translated from Catalan into English.

Claudia Apablaza, Everyone Thinks I’m a Fakir. Edicola, 2014.
excerpt


These stories talk about the body, technologies and postmodernity in the creation of the person carrying these violent constructions: telephony, internet and Wi-Fi merged with eco-vegan practices, happy dance, yoga, fakirism, and all types of human being who currently lives as individual of the twenty-first century.




Claudia Apablaza was born in 1978 in Rancagua, Chile. She studied Psychology and Literature in Chile and Barcelona. She received the award of the magazine Paula (2005 ) for his story “Mi nombre en el Google” and the Latin American Alba Fiction Prize in 2012 with her novel “Goo y el amor”, recently published  in Havana, Cuba.
claudiaapablaza.blogspot.hr/
www.elguillatun.cl/entrevistas/inspiracion/claudia-apablaza

Luis Landa, I Don’t Intend to Complain, Edicola, 2013.


The characters in these stories are marked by an introspective nature. Occasionally naive, somewhat lost, they struggle against their problems without really solving their conflicts. These stories speak of music, drugs, obsessions, anger,  failure, death, television, loneliness, modesty and nakedness.

Berit Ellingsen, Not Dark Yet,Two Dollar Radio, 2015.


beritellingsen.com/
twitter.com/BeritEllingsen

Brandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for a quiet life in the mountains, after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon being forced to kill a research animal. It is a violent, unfortunate episode that conjures memories from his military background.
In the mountains, his new neighbors are using the increased temperatures to stage an agricultural project in an effort to combat globally heightened food prices and shortages. Brandon gets swept along with their optimism, while simultaneously applying to a new astronaut training program. However, he learns that these changes—internal, external—are irreversible.
A sublime love story coupled with the universal struggle for personal understanding, Not Dark Yet is an informed novel of consequences with an ever-tightening emotional grip on the reader.




"[Ellingsen] is just starting what promises to be a major career, but already giving readers a unique and fascinating perspective."—Jeff VanderMeer


"I cannot remember the last time a writer impressed me so quickly."—InDigest Magazine


"Fascinating, surreal, gorgeously written, and like nothing you’ve ever read before, Not Dark Yet is the book we all need to read right now. It is art about science, climate change, and activism, and it vitally explores how we as people deal with a world that is transforming in terrifying ways."—BuzzFeed






Interview about the novel here.


Grains of Sand 
With the three seed drills and tractors the sowing took only a few days. Then the fields were still dark, but full of hidden, secret life, which would germinate during the winter and become sustenance, income, and a bulwark against starvation, what countless people in the world must be desiring. Seed banks and grain stores had been mentioned more and more frequently in the news. The word “stockpiling” hadn’t been used yet, but he assumed that by now most countries were refilling their grain and seed stores, as well as recalculating their annual yields from food and plant production given the new numbers for yearly average precipitation and temperature. Several nations had started rationing water for private use to ensure that the industry had the water it needed. There were rumors on the internet that some countries were pumping water that had already been used once by industrial facilities into municipal water networks, still full of heavy metals and other toxic compounds.
It was at least clear that the food prices had increased alarmingly and that an international race to purchase arable land and sources for water had been going on for quite a while. He assumed that corporations and individuals who could afford it would not only stockpile resources, but create gated enclaves, like revelers in the stories about the plague, to ensure their access to the most vital resources. He also wondered whether his own move from the city to the cabin, and the neighbors’ tilling and seeding, could also be regarded as such. But he thought not. It was safeguarding the future, taking active measures. Neither he nor the farmers were keeping anyone out or preventing them from leaving.
At first he enjoyed the idea of the seeds growing in the dark soil all around his new home and turning the ancient nutrients of the earth and air into food. He dreamed of yellow fields and the wind whispering in the grain, but when he realized that the first green stalks might soon peek like stubble through the substrate, he thought the freedom he had gained away from the apartment, away from his social obligations,  had vanished, and that he hadn’t searched far enough to procure a home in the wilderness.
The cabin was nevertheless just as isolated, and the nights and days as silent, as before. No additional road had been built, nor had any of the neighbors erected new buildings or created any constructions that imposed on his land. Worse yet, he had willingly accepted the tilling and sowing, and signed the farmers’ agricultural project. As when the plans had first been presented to him, he couldn’t see any drawbacks to it, only advantages. It would bring food, security and the possibility for a steady income. But he disliked looking at the now cultivated land so much that he turned the sofa, the mattress, and the treadmill away from the panorama window and towards the deck and the forest and the sky that was visible through the glass in the kitchen and the front door.
To further distract himself from the new and unsympathetic view, and although he usually feigned disinterest in the culture of his father’s country, he ordered pale sand for the hearth especially selected and sieved by traditional craftsmen near the city where his grandparents lived. The sand originated from a beach where a historical battle had taken place and was flown to his continent of residence. When the bag of ridiculously expensive sand arrived, he immediately walked to Eloise and Mark’s farm to borrow a clean shovel, and emptied the hearth of the old and dark sand. Then he hiked through the heather to the post office, carried the new sand home, and slowly poured it into the square pit in the floor.
Like a vampire finally in possession of soil from his ancestral lands to rest in, he eagerly spread the pale grains out into the hearth with his palms, and when that was done he spent half the night digging his fingers into the dry and fine-grained sand, picking it up, and letting it fall through his hands, again and again.






Berit Ellingsen, Beneath the Liquid Skin, firthFORTH Books, 2012. 


Immerse yourself in what has long enraptured both the sensualist and the scientist—the natural world. Seismic in its permeable temporal and geographic states, Beneath the Liquid Skin examines humankind’s response to the environment: our pursuit of milder emotional, political, social, and cultural climes; our flight from ecological catastrophe; and our refuge in safer mythical domains. Although her habitat is exotic, Berit Ellingsen saturates—with humanistic and preternatural harmony—a remarkably vulnerable yet enduring surface.




I met Berit Ellingsen on Twitter, where she shares photos of her two Burmese cats, Chloe and Dotty and where she frequently talks about the beauty of video game characters. I love a good cat photo like the rest of the Internet crowd, but it’s the way Ellingsen talked about the video game world that made me ask her to tell me more. I know nothing about video games (I’m plagued with heavy duty motion sickness which makes me vomit). Still, I found myself laughing at a video she posted in which one of her avatars dances to Up All Night To Get Lucky. I wondered if I was missing out by being unable to participate in the gaming universe. Five seconds into a video game, I confirmed that, until a magic pill is invented to keep my stomach settled, five seconds is my limit. I also discovered that Ellingsen is a compelling and extraordinary writer. Her story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin is mesmerizing.
First, I must explain how I don’t usually read books like Ellingsen’s. The closest I’ve come is Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams in which there are short passages of true and fantastical renderings of the concept of time. In contrast, Beneath the Liquid Skin offers a much more varied range of stories in style and content. Each story is different from the last in tone, subject matter, and point of view. Usually, I read books where reality is pretty standard, there are no truffles growing on my lover’s leg (from “The Love Decay Has for the Living”) and the laws of gravity apply (“The light swells and swells inside us until we are ready to come off the ground like scabs from the skin,” from “Sliding”) or I’m asked to accept there’s order even when there doesn’t seem to be order in this fictional world (“0 is for wholeness and emptiness at once…”).
Ellingsen says, “When I wrote the stories I didn’t want to be constrained by ideas of literary genre or tradition. I just wrote what I felt like doing…There is currently a lot of interesting things going with some people writing in the cross sections between the literary genres, as hybrids, even between fiction and non-fiction and that’s great.”  She says her “stories originate from dreams, some by photographs or images, others are inspired by various media or entertainment, but most originate from that empty space between thoughts where all stories come from.”
One image I find particularly relentless is in “The Tale that Wrote Itself”: “It was as if the buildings had tried to consume one another, each larger and more imposing than the next, but had bitten off more than they could chew and were now decomposing with their opponent in their jaw.”
Hard to forget that one, right? In fact, the story itself points to Ellingsen’s idea of storytelling:
Another memorable passage is from “The White”: “While you sleep your dreams are sampled like ancient water, your hair touched and your breath frozen. Someone thinks the foxtail is yours, others point out that it’s attached to your fur hood with metal and that the rest of your body is organic. This makes everyone laugh and want to touch you instead. You are petted like a cat, and your memories of the curious penguins and the professor with ice for eyes and the price of your funny hat are passed on like buckets of water to a fire.”
Ellingsen’s stories are like beautiful crystals, the kind that flashes prismatic colors. In them, you see yourself, you see the entirety of existence, you see how small you are and also how large. You’re acted upon by extremes of weather (“The White”), at the mercy of fate (“The Story that Tells Itself”), your own desires (“The Love Decay Has for the Living.”). She points to humankind’s impact on our planet (“Anthropocene”) and the violence we perpetrate on each other (“Sovetskoye Shampanskoye”). The ideas are grand, shocking, recriminating and redemptive.
Because of the particularly deliberate way she uses language and the format of the words on the page (she uses white space in short bursts of prose in “Crane Legs,” for example), I ask her about her choice to write in English as a Korean-Norwegian woman living in Norway.
She says she studied life sciences and neurosciences at the university level where all the textbooks and lab manuals were in English. It was too expensive to translate specialized materials for graduate courses. She noticed that English afforded her more range in her writing. The English words ‘lend’ and ‘borrow’ for example have only one counterpart in Norwegian.
I also ask her about a comment she’d made about how she could relate to Korean-Americans.  She says, “In particular the part about growing up in a race other than ‘your own,’ and supposedly belonging to that race and culture in some respects, but also very clearly not being a part of it, because it’s not really your heritage or your background. Then, on the other hand, you don’t belong to your ‘root culture’ either, and can’t go back to it, because you’d be even more of stranger there since you grew up in that other culture…This becomes a definite dilemma and contradiction. I think many Korean diaspora share this, and it fascinates me that this displacement and ‘in-between-ness’ may be a part of the Korean diaspora’s ‘home culture.’” - Jimin Han


The disparate pieces that make up Berit Ellingsen’s new anthology Beneath the Liquid Skin seem to bear little relation to one another. This collection of flash fiction, prose poems, short observations, fragments of tales and a few more fully developed stories has been drawn together from pieces that have appeared in various online journals. Length varies from a few lines to a few pages; genre veers wildly from cold war thriller to science fiction to ‘transgressive fantasy satire’ (Ellingsen’s own description of the wonderful story “The Glory of Glormorsel”).
Certainly there are recurring themes in the collection: the desire for freedom; personal identity and the mutability of form; physical decay and its relationship to the living; the purity of the countryside versus the complicated and duplicitous city. But it’s difficult to say one or the other is the overriding theme of Ellingsen’s writing. Instead, unhindered by the need to yoke her writings to one unifying idea, Ellingsen is free to explore, experiment, play, create, test and move on.
“A June Defection” is probably the most conventional of the stories, a clever piece that seems to comment on the collection itself and the reader’s approach to it. In the story, the narrator and a boyfriend discuss the mystery of a body found in their area years previously—a woman, unidentifiable but with multiple passports scattered around her. Clearly, says the boyfriend, an Eastern Bloc intelligence agent, killed in the process of defecting. But the narrator embellishes this story—the dead woman was another woman entirely, killed and robbed of her identity by the defector, the latter desperate to escape a life of “secrecy and betrayal.” The narrator leaves the boyfriend shortly after this discussion and the reader understands that the embellished story is the narrator’s projection—the bare bones of the actual story padded with the narrator’s own motivations and desire for escape.
This fleshing out is something the reader has to do a fair amount of, in this collection. Ellingsen does not provide us with much information about characters—no backstory, no insight into their thoughts or feelings. We aren’t even told what they look like. Instead, we must infer what we can from their words and actions. In “The Celtic Itch,” Ellingsen provides us with a skeleton of a story and demands that, if we want meaning, we go and get it ourselves. And of course, just as with the narrator of “A June Defection,” we readers might very well be projecting our own needs and desires onto the story, creating meaning rather than uncovering it, and in the process revealing more about ourselves than we do about the tale.
Not that Ellingsen is entirely unhelpful. She may not provide much in the way of physical description of character, but her descriptions of things: landscapes, interiors, even the slow decomposition of dead animals, are loaded with meaning and an absolute delight to read. In these two passages from the Cold War thriller-style “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye,” Ellingsen’s intensely visual descriptions are both beautifully written and useful in providing clues to the mood of the scene and character. Here, from an interior setting:
Unfertilized sturgeon eggs from the warm and muddy waters of the Black Sea, in a leaded crystal bowl with a wide-handled silver spoon, along with sparkling Belarusian Chardonnay—Sovetskoye Shampanskoye—Soviet champagne, warm the teak wood. In the light from the living room candles, the serving cart burns golden. He smiles.
And some time later, outside:
Years of warm smiles and cold handshakes, while ice shrouds and flays the Moskva River and clouds rush across the sky like time.
However, as carefully crafted as the language is, a number of the stories don’t give the impression of having been thought about too finely. Ellingsen says of the collection, “Most of the stories appeared by themselves …” and many do have that sort of natural, unstructured and flowing feel to them.
There’s a sweet, gentle optimism evident in many of the pieces. Characters are generally kind and treat each other well; lovers are generous and open-hearted, happy to make sacrifices for one another. As the narrator says in “The Glory of Glormorsel,”perhaps the most thematically challenging of the pieces in this collection, “We are nothing but kind to each other, because without kindness we are nothing.”
This optimism is evident also in the way Ellingsen explores the twin themes of mutability and decay. In her hands, nothing is repulsive. In “The Love Decay Has for the Living,” a man sprouts mushrooms from an open wound, which serve as a magical ingredient in his lover-chef’s cooking. It’s not difficult to see how this could make a reader queasy. But in fact this is a sweet love story filled with generosity, self-sacrifice and gentle regret.
Similarly, “Still Life of Hypnos,” is ostensibly a tale of rot and decay, yet Ellingsen’s language is lush and “alive” as she describes the gradual decomposition, in their various ways, of fruit, flowers, insects and animals. But the decay is neither repugnant nor negative—it’s actually rather lovely and it seems such a natural end point to life, that it’s almost a part of it.
While not all the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin are completely successful—some are quite baffling and likely to leave the reader struggling to find some clue to hang meaning on—overall, this is a collection of playful, brave, complex and exquisitely written pieces. A real treasure trove. - Robyn Goss




Towards the end of this collection’s first story, Berit Ellingsen writes, “We need to be something else again.” We begin in uncertainty at the point of dissolve, as things change, and it is this unease, this perpetual state of transition that drives Ellingsen’s brilliant, undulating and mysterious first short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin.
The book begins with the aforementioned “Sliding,” the inevitable drift into winter, and ends in a duet, “The White,” which chronicles the journey of “you,” a logistics assistant who treks from a research base into the vast, shifting whiteness of the Antarctic landscape, and finds wholeness and home, the universality of everything in the ice and snow. This is followed by “Anthropocene,” describing, in fierce, poetic language, a frigid apocalypse on our age, dragging everything into the center, when “you” and “I” are torn apart in fire and ice, only to begin again:
This is where it ends: in a concrete hall between reticent, snow-burdened mountains, under a mute sky the color of forgetfulness, snow falling like soot, and the air so frigid that every metal object tears the skin from your fingers. The lashing nettle-wind shrieks and tries every door and hollow window frame, like a burglar at night, clinking across the floor’s lake of glass shards. The red-rusted ley lines with rows of disc-shaped insulators curve into the sky and sing of legacies misspent and lost, of eternal life squandered.
(These, these are the places, the ways we are drawn to follow the cold; Ellingsen, a Korean-Norwegian writer who lives and works in Norway but writes in English, is known to pine for the fjords when abroad.)
The variety and ordering of the stories throughout Beneath the Liquid Skin has a terrific fluidity to it, balancing straightforward tales with more abstract works—short, textural pieces that hover between prose and poetry. The combination situates the book in an atmosphere all its own. “The Love Decay Has for the Living”—a fable-like story of two male lovers in a drowned city, where one, the Chef, harvests the mushrooms growing from an infected wound in his Lover’s arm—sits alongside satirical fantasy like “The Glory of Glormorsel,” bizarre dream sequences like “Sexual Dimorphism – A Nightmare Transcribed from Sanskrit,” and interstellar set-pieces (“A Catalog of Planets”). In this diversity of landscapes we find a world of color and current stretching from peak to plain, marked with mountainside villages, kingdoms scraping the sky, and cities floating in the waters from endless monsoons. The characters populating these stories are both named and unnamed, collective and singular, with nationalities and homelands both real and imagined, from the Ural Mountains to a kingdom built entirely of mother of pearl, history and not-history.
These are stories that subvert themselves, restless in their bodies and heedless to the constraints of genre, blurring at the edges. Stories oscillate between the modern and seemingly ancient, with and without the markers of our modern, technological experience. Yet the pieces in this collection feel like they all come from the same world, utterly expansive in its breadth and experience.
And yet, all of them seem to explore something fundamental, journeys outward but never back, into the mountains or out into the snow to find new versions of ourselves. Ellingsen’s writing, most of all, speaks to the mutability of all things, the search for something stable: “Still Life of Hypnos” depicts preservation and decay in a series of time-lapse photographs, while “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye” depicts the life, flight, and reinvention of a Soviet agent during the Cold War, in the numbers 0 to 9. She writes:
 7 are the years that follow, when he gathers information like eiderdown. Years of warm smiles and cold handshakes, while ice shrouds and flays the Moskva River and clouds rush across the sky like time.
8 is the number of days it takes for the cosmos to entropy into chaos in the pewter sunlight off the river. Assets are lost, intentions intercepted. They take him back to the white tiles and ask him again, this time more insistently. The information he transmitted was tailored to distract. Now he is no longer useful and his employer has been notified. He expects to be killed, desires it almost.
Time is palpable; new identities are assumed. In comparison to this, in the second series of “Still Life of Hypnos,” life decays before our eyes, before the lovers even enter the frame:
The flowers open slowly, tremble in the flow of time like the lips of a shy lover. Finally, they reveal themselves in full, many-hued splendor. This state lasts for less than twelve hours before the blossoms sag, crumple, and lose their petals. Long stamen bow, dusting the steel with pollen in a final attempt at procreating before death. The plants wilt in individual tempo, but the end point is always the same.
Berit Ellingsen has the meticulousness of a painter. These are wonderfully ornate stories—populated with food, rare mushrooms, exotic seasonings, sturgeon eggs and pomegranates; with flora, the heather and chestnut trees; with animals and landscapes, from fjords and mountaintops, farmer’s fields to the white plains of Antarctica. And they are all painted in such beautiful colors, using language so precise and acute as to convince us that the mythical world Ellingsen describes could just as well be our own, a peculiar geography we’ve never seen before. Or perhaps it’s meant to make us realize the intricacy of our daily lives; the ways we eat, sleep, walk, and transform. The purpose and intent of these things.
But if Berit Ellingsen is a fabulist, she is a fabulist devoid of cliché—she presents no easy truths, no tidily-wrapped endings. As she writes in “Anthropocene,”
The world was an epic poem, but it became a dirge. The firstborn illness took everything, as hungry as its name. We wrung the air and the water and the soil like a rag, until everything became yellow and drained. When that was done, we turned on one another.
If there is a moral lesson to be learned here, it is that the world is just as strange, arbitrary and self-devouring as we’ve always believed it to be. - Simon Jacobs


The 23 stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin offer a balanced mix of longer fiction and flash, with many of the stories weighing in at two or three pages. Berit Ellingsen combines elements of the universe, the self, folk tales, history, nonduality, and classical literature, which work together in alchemical synergy to produce gold. The author’s background as a science writer informs many of the pieces, but none are weighted with jargon. I never know where her stories will take me next, but I’m always pleased with the destination.
Ellingsen shines at packing punch with brevity in her flash pieces. “Hostage Situation,” the shortest story in the book, condenses timeless social commentary with a dash of humour into just a few lines. Prose poem “Sliding” reads like a zen koan in luscious autumn shades.
A personal favourite, “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye” is a spy story-by-numbers. Within the confines of three pages, the author tells the tale of half of a man’s life, framing it within the wider universe in which the man’s smaller story plays out. The tale proceeds at a measured pace like a documentary filmed through a neutral lens. Outdoor environments and indoor architectures all are important details within the man’s experience, but the external and the internal also meld to form a greater whole. Ellingsen’s lens zooms in on the main character and pulls out for long shots. This is perhaps the first spy-story ever told from a nondual perspective.
Some of the stories are non-plot-driven vignettes, mindful meditations and ponderings inhabiting a fuzzy borderland between prose and poetry, yet they do have subtle plots, with outcomes, futures and pasts implied. The haunting “Sexual Dimorphism – A Nightmare Transcribed from Sanskrit,” with its references to both Hindu mythology and Japanese film, has a rhythmic feel to its short verses. “Crane Legs” is a light-hearted piece that begins like a review of a TV show, but the painterly language turns it into a prose poem. The sudden ending leaves the reader with both the gut reaction of the (re)viewer and a clear aural and visual image of the show. The more serious “Polaris” takes a chilling look at exploitation, perceived lack, and doing things for all the wrong reasons.
The dream-like elements of some of the pieces conjure Borges or Kafka at times. “The Love Decay Has for the Living,” one of the longer stories, opens like a waking from a nightmare, the line between the dream and real life unclear. The tale shape-shifts between humour and horror, while borrowing lightly from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. It delves into the balancing act of give-and-take in a relationship, and the need for nourishment on both a physical and philosophical level.
The beautiful folk tale-like “The Tale that Wrote Itself,” the longest story in the book, questions the possibility of altering the course of reality. “Still Life of Hypnos” isrich with references to Greek mythology and a surreal procession of decaying flora and fauna. “The Astronomer and the King,” a speculative fiction vignette, revolves around a real historical figure who served as both astronomer and astrologer to Louis XIV. The tale addresses the age-old search for the reasons for human suffering and for the existence of a god.
With its rich, evocative descriptions, “A June Defection” is one of my favourites. Set in natural surroundings that are at once beautiful and oppressive, this is a story about people doing what they must to escape. The writing in “Down the River” is rich with sensory details, the adrenaline rush of gaming and the need to be the best.  Stendhal Syndrome, a whimsical imagining of a character suffering the strange and disputed tourist disease of the same name, made me laugh out loud.
“In All the Best Places, Lightning Strikes Twice” is a bizarre tale that offers a wry look at some of the unfortunate consequences of monoculture. Not all of Ellingsen’s stories are surreal. The very realistic “Autumn Story” takes a critical look at food safety, questionable production practices and how our business and purchase choices affect the quality of life for ourselves, our livestock and pets. Many of Ellingsen’s stories deal with environmental, economic, ethical and social issues, but she deftly tempers the heavier topics with light or wry humour without softening the punch.
Boyfriend and Shark, a twisty tale tinged with both humour and melancholy, ponders the way we hold onto things, and the way attachment can cause us to hold back or imprison others, be they human or animal.
While the philosophy of nonduality informs many of the stories in the collection indirectly, it comes to the forefront in the final three. Characters and situations from Ellingsen’s first book, The Empty City, return in “From Inside His Sleep.” Reminiscent of a Kundalini awakening, main character Yukihiro struggles with lucid dreams.
Science meets silence in the far north in The White. The most overtly nondual story, it raises questions about the nature of awareness and being. “There is no way to argue with the present. You can only be here,” and “Everywhere is here.”
“Anthropocene” also combines science and nonduality. The last lines of the story and the book leave us with a new beginning and hope in the face of hopelessness. It is in this story that we discover the heart of the book’s title, and in the final lines that Ellingsen puts forth the immutable beauty of the universe, regardless of how ugly the situation may get.
While most of the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin are very short, they condense whole worlds, some fantastic and some quite plausible, into polished gems. Ellingsen’s writing invites a new way of reading and thinking about fiction, but her style and voice keep the stories from becoming mired in obscurity. Though I had read most of these stories before, (all but three have appeared previously), it was a pleasure to read them again and to have them all in one place. Best of all, I like being able to pick out a story to read according to my mood, like a chocolate truffle from this gourmet box. - Chris Galvin


Beneath The Liquid Skin is a collection the defies categorisation. Ranging from whimsical fairy tales to freeze frames of eerie experiments, the stories take the reader on a journey of beautifully spare prose, astoundingly original thoughts and images that remain alive long after the last page.
No perspective is safe from Ellingsen’s exploration; in Sexual Diamorphism – a Nightmare transcribed from Sanskrit, she writes with the voice of a character who is both male and female, while in The White, the protagonist finds himself receiving unexpected answers from the snow that surrounds him. With a voice that varies wildly, and yet retains a comforting level of familiarity, Ellingsen creates worlds in just a few sentences, and ends them just as quickly.
This is the kind of book that inspires jealousy – both of Ellingsen’s talent, and of the other readers who will be lucky enough to discover and enjoy this anthology. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.


- circles under streetlights


Video review by Peter Tieryas Liu






Flash Frontier: Your book has been said to embrace both the sensual and scientific world. Tell us about your relationship to the environment and how these stories reflect your own experience with geography, climate and culture. How does writing fiction bring you to new worlds and root you more to this one? How does the relationship between myth and reality impact the way you go about writing short stories? And tell us a little about the marvellous title of this collection, too.
Berit Ellingsen: I wrote the stories without planning a common theme. But when I started to put the collection together, I saw that many of the stories revolved around our relationship to the natural world and the ecological environment. It’s a personal interest as well as a professional one since I’m educated as a biologist.
Because of the theme I initially called the collection Anthropocene, the word some scientists use for the current geological era. It means “the age of humankind”, ie the age where human activity affects the planet more than any of the natural large scale processes.
But this is not a very common word. Moreover, the publisher loved the line “beneath the liquid skin”, which was used to describe the surface of water in the story Gold-Flecked Water. We then realized that many of the stories had water or the ocean as image or part of the plot, such as “Boyfriend and Shark”, and “The Love Decay Has for the Living”. From then on there was no other choice for the title. Instead we used “Anthropocene” as title for the last story in the collection, which describes one of the outcomes of the age of humankind.
Our generation is the first that is truly aware that we are making our planet’s environments less habitable, for many other species, but also for ourselves, yet we are so addicted to the way our societies work that we seem unable and unwilling to change them. I think much of my writing comes out of an indignation and guilt over that. Some of the stories that deal with this are” A Catalog of Planets”, “Polaris”, and “In all the Best Places, Lightning Strikes Twice”.
To me, our destruction of the habitability of the planet is also caused by the narratives we tell ourselves about what we are and what we need in our lives. I address some of these myths in the collection, particularly in “The White” and “The Story That Wrote Itself”.


Excerpt from “Sliding”
When we are sliding fast toward winter, daylight narrows to silver as the eaves of the wooden houses and the corners of the hedge-bounded gardens grow dark.
Leaves slap yellow and orange and green against the bare birches and the moist cobbles in the courtyard, and aim for the mountains across the bay.
The light swells and swells inside us until we are ready to come off the ground like scabs from the skin, and the sky pulls us quickly apart.
But we can’t stay in this moment for long; we yearn for it to pass. We need to be something else again.
Denser clouds drift in and the sun sets unseen.
           




Berit Ellingsen, The Empty City, Jnana Press, 2011.


1. chapter            




The Empty City is a story about awakening to universal truths and one’s true self. It is told in short episodes that describe a place, a dream, a question, a memory, a fantasy or an event. Urban explorer and lucid dreamer Brandon Minamoto discovers that outside his thoughts and emotions exists a world that is silent and open, surrounding him and everyone else. The silence starts picking him apart and makes him question his sense of self and his past. But behind all the noise and the stories, there is something constant and unchanging.




most of the books about zen are non-fiction: biographies, introductions, collected lectures - but recently i arrived at a zen-novel, writen by Berit Ellingsen. It was an interview in Nonduality Magazine that made me curious for it, in it, Berit explains:

"The Empty City is a short novel about nondual awakening, becoming comfortable with silence and letting go of the past. Connected themes are questioning your own beliefs and what you regard as yourself. .. I wanted to write a novel about nondual awakening, where that was central to the story. There's a lot of nondual nonfiction and poetry, but little fiction. I was curious to see if it was possible to write at all." (interview link)

reading this, of course, made me curious for the narrative of Empty City. i finished it a week ago - it's a thought-provoking, vivid read, with short chapters that move through to different level of consciousness - there are dream sequences, past memories, the present - together, the chapters form a larger mosaic. it was one of the books that i didn't want to end yet, to move on, and on. i looked for a quote to put here, but like with physical mosaics, pulling out a single piece only hints briefly at the larger image.

reading through it also points out how used we are to the established forms of narrative, and it's both refreshing and at the same time perplexing in the best of senses to follow another format - the concept of the Koan comes to mind, the riddle-like stories or notes used in Zen-pracitce to provoke the mind. It also made me think of reading "Open City" by Teju Cole earlier this year, and the line i wrote back then refers to "Empty City," too:"It isn't the typical novel, it's more on the experimental side. While reading it, i looked for interviews with the author.." (here's the Open City blog post)

the book is available both as printed book and as e-book. i picked the e-book version, which makes it my second novel read on the kindle, the first was Wild - and i guess the intro picture shows it: it's too bad that e-books don't come with the cover image - especially that in this case, the cover feels like a physical part of the story mosaic, a part of the narrative almost.

summed up, i would definitely recommend it for readers who are a) into zen / yoga and/or b) into experimental writing. if you want to read an excerpt, the first chapters are online on the book website: Empty City.
- virtual-notes.blogspot.de/2012/07/zen-and-empty-city-global-reading.html










I was wondering if you were thinking of a particular city when you wrote the Empty City. What city or what cities would you say resemble the city in your book the most? 
I had several cities, from Berlin to Seoul to Vancouver, or the essence of the modern city, in mind when I started writing. Most cities do have characteristic landmarks or buildings, and even a special atmosphere or flavor, but with globalization and modernization, they also become more and more similar to one another, with similar type of stores, apartment buildings, business high rises, industrial areas in the periphery, and such.

For The Empty City I wanted a nameless city so the reader would identify as much as possible with the location and the setting.
There’s a quiet energy to the writing in this novel. It’s the same thing that I’d observed in your collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin as well. Who would you say are your major influences? 
I’m very glad you see some similarities between The Empty City and the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin!
The influences are so many, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, JK Huysmans, Comte de Lautreamont, Edgar Allan Poe, to haiku writers such as Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa and Yosa Buson, and more current writers such as Albert Camus, Ursula LeGuin, the Japanese writer Naoyuki Ii, the Finnish-Swedish writer Irmelin Sandman Lilius, and the films by Terrence Malick, Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Michael Haneke, and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Current writers such as Kathy Fish, Ethel Rohan, Tania Hershman, Kristine Ong Muslim, Sam Rasnake, Matthew Salesses, Jeff Vandermeer, Paul Jessup, and many others, have been influential.
What was the inspiration or the seed from which The Empty City grew?
Before I started The Empty City I really wanted to write something longer. My life situation changed and it was time to start writing what had been brewing at the back of my mind for a while. It was probably inspired by many different sources and the new opportunity to actually sit down and just write. I wrote the first draft with as few constraints as possible, then cut much of it and tweaked and edited a lot. It was a long, but fascinating process.
One reason why it’s not talked about so much is that I self-published it. I wasn’t good at finding reviewers or sending it to book blogs for review. I didn’t think many people would enjoy it.
How much do you plan when you write your stories? Would you say you’re a pantser or a plotter?
I’m very much a pantser. I can plot a little, but the story usually changes while I write it, sometimes drastically, and I just follow those changes as they happen. I make notes to keep track of events, but usually quite few, or only after the first draft is done. It might have be nice to plot more, but it doesn’t seem to be the right method for me now.
There are many lovely lines in this novel, but one of the ones that captivated me was this where you write: Now the world played out inside him…He was completely and irrevocably real. 
Would you like to talk a little bit more about how your protagonist reached this point in the novel?  Is it reflective of a personal epiphany?
Oh yeah, like in the story, when someone first notices the gap between thoughts and that there is a difference between events and our perception of them, this discovery tends to become clearer and clearer over time, just through whatever happens in their everyday lives.
It is the recognition of a part of oneself that is there all the time and which all humans share, and which our everyday culture has little knowledge of and religions tend to ascribe something mythological or unattainable to, but is an accessible and an integral part of everyone, even if we don’t always notice it.
Another thing that fascinated me about The Empty City is that feeling of space—there’s also that feeling of solitariness despite of the fact that your protagonist interacts with other people in the story. Would you like to say something about that? (Was it intentional or did it happen organically?)
Part of the reason for that may be that the story plays out more on the inner plane than in outer events, so it seems more solitary. And I do think the protagonist is alone for most of the time in the various sequences. It seemed the most straightforward thing to do in the story.
What is your own take on genre and genre boundaries?
As you can probably guess I don’t like the genre boundaries at all. They’re small and restrictive and keep writers and readers in their comfort zones, and worse, make people reluctant to try something outside the boundaries. The genre “limits” are also artificial and pretty arbitrary, but I guess they make things easier for marketing and audience targeting, and hence are difficult to change.
I try not to worry too much about the genre boundaries and assumptions when I write, but it’s hard to shake them.
What is it like to be an sff writer in Norway?
There are a few SFF writers working and publishing in Norway, but because there are only a couple of literary journals (no creative-writing MFA “track” with university-backed journals, like in the US), I assume that Norwegian writers in all genres publish their work directly in books with the Norwegian publishing companies. Maybe some also publish online on their own websites or as ebooks. I’m not sure since I have not submitted anything to a Norwegian journal or publisher.
You’ve written about your feelings regarding genre boundaries, is this reflective of the attitude in Norway towards genre boundaries?
I don’t think it is. There was talk a few years back that Norwegian publishers were looking for SFF young adult, paranormal romance, and fantasy manuscripts. I see that a few homegrown SFF books are published each year, but I suspect that the translations of the biggest fantasy books are more popular.
Here the big genre is crime fiction, and it seems to have very clear boundaries towards for example literary fiction. I assume other genres have equally strong boundaries.
I’ve read a good bit of your work in English. I was wondering if you also wrote in Norwegian and if there’s a difference in dynamics when you write in English as when you write in Norwegian.
I usually don’t write fiction in Norwegian, but I do write non-fiction (popular science articles) in Norwegian. Which I’m glad I do, otherwise I might lose even more Norwegian words than I already have. Learning more in one writing styles does influence the other form, which is a good thing.
What was your compelling reason with regards to choice of language to write your fiction in?
It wasn’t a decision that was really planned, it mostly just happened. For years I had been reading almost exclusively in English, both fiction and textbooks at university, so I was using English a lot.
I wrote a few stories in Norwegian, but thought I’d try to write in English, and it made writing “click” much better. One reason for that may be that English is a more specific language than Norwegian, and has a wider vocabulary, and I prefer that for writing.
What are some of the things you struggle with as a writer? How do you deal with those things?
My biggest difficulty as a writer is to set aside time and energy to actually write or edit. Life is busy and also has many fun and some not so fun distractions. I’ve found that the best way to deal with this is to write, and especially edit, during the day, whenever that’s at all possible. I’m most awake then and that makes it less difficult to write or edit my way through a challenging story or part of the manuscript.
I usually get slightly obsessed with the stories I’m working on, and just let the “obsession” work itself out by writing, without exhausting myself or getting too obsessed. That makes finding the time and energy to write much easier, almost effortless at times, but difficult parts that I know will require a lot of work or several rewrites, can still feel like a chore.
My other biggest challenge is to trust my own instincts in how a story should read and play out. Therefore, I always try to follow the story itself and worry less about how it “ought to be” or how I want it to be, and just write and keep in mind that things can always be changed once the first draft is done. As with writing itself, learning to do this is a work in progress.
What are you working on right now? Would you like to talk a little bit about it?
I’m currently working on a novel that is a sort of follow-up to The Empty City. It has the same protagonist, but a different structure, setting, and plot. It’s about climate change, environmental activism, personal agency and responsibility, and cabins. - Rowena C. Ruiz






39: A Dream In The Forest
In his dreams he followed a path of exposed bone through a snow-dusted forest surrounded by winter mountains. The forest’s heart hid a white city that reflected the sun. The light reminded him of the few winters when they had snow in December, and of the rarified, high-altitude illumination he had seen in pictures from the mountain ranges in the east.
He decided to enter the city with impunity. Its pale outer wall was clasped shut with a gate of solid brass. The defenses were high and smooth, with no handholds for intruders. Standing before them, he felt like a little boy who tried to get a glimpse through a high window.
But why not try the direct approach and use the door instead? He took hold of the bottom edge of the gate and pulled hard. A deep boom rang through the structure. The metal moved, just far enough for him to slip inside.
A long boulevard pointed towards the city center. The wide thoroughfare was lined with tall statues that wore stern stone faces and white marble robes. An icy wind blew from the snow-covered mountains.
The boulevards, statues and buildings were smooth and whole, but covered in fine dust. His shoes left faint prints. The city’s walls, doors, pilasters, colonnades, domes, benches, fountains and agorae were decorated with graceful, intricate curves and curls. At first, the design looked beautiful and his eyes followed the patterns willingly. But there was no variation, and even beauty repeated was monotonous to watch, like a person dressed in all designer plaid.






Research Notes about The Empty City in Necessary Fiction – December 2011.
About colors– in Pure Slush – November 2011.
Interview excerpt in writer Marcus Speh’s communal blog Kaffe in Katmandu – October 2011.
About writing and publishing– in writer Chris Galvin Nguyen’s blog – October 2011.
About writing Gothic– at Innsmouth Free Press – October 2011.
About writing and inspiration– in writer Magen Toole’s blog – July 2011.

About nonduality and writing– in Non-Duality Magazine – March 2011.






Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian writer who lives in Norway and writes in English. Her stories combine the realistic and the imaginary, prose and poetry, and are inspired by, among others, science, history, philosophy, music and film. Berit’s fiction has appeared or will appear in literary journals such as Unstuck, SmokeLong Quarterly, elimae, Metazen and decomP magazinE. She’s also had haiku poems and creative non-fiction work published, as well as popular science articles in Norwegian. Berit was a semi-finalist in the Rose Metal Press Chapbook Competition in 2011 and two of her stories received an honorable mention by Ellen Datlow for Best Horror of the Year vol. 4. In September 2011 Berit’s novel, The Empty City, a story about silence, was released, and in February 2012 Turtleneck Press published Berit’s chapbook What Girls Really Think. Berit’s collection of short stories, Beneath the Liquid Skin, was published by firthFORTH Books in November 2012. You can find her online at her personal website.
I recently interviewed Ellingsen via email about her writing, weird and unclassifiable literature, and the link between science and fabulism, among other things.
Weirdfictionreview.com: What kinds of stories did you read growing up? Do you remember reading anything especially unusual, weird, or out of the ordinary?
Berit Ellingsen: The first book I can remember reading with a passion was Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s popular science book about the universe. I didn’t understand all of it, but I loved it.
Later on I enjoyed Swedish-speaking Finnish writer Irmelin Sandman Lilius’s Sola Trilogy, Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series, the books by Norwegian fabulists Tore Hansen, Jon Bing and Tor-Åge Bringsværd, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and short story collections, and Edgar Allan Poe’s work, as well as Norwegian, Danish and German folk tales and the Norse sagas and mythology. Living in Scandinavia, you don’t get away from those.
As a science student I read a variety of literature and genres, such as the plays by classical Norwegian writers Henrik Ibsen and Alexander Kielland, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler’s crime stories, P.G. Wodehouse’s 20^th century farces, the French SF comics by Moebius, Enki Bilal, Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres, and classical haiku by Matsuo Basho and Kobayashi Issa.
WFR.com: Which writers or stories have been most influential to you, as a writer?
Ellingsen: Most recently, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I remembered the end passage from my teen years, but didn’t know which book it was from, so it was fantastic to find it again and finally read the entire book. The same with J.K. Huysman’s decadent and surreal novel Against Nature, and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph,” which felt like stories I should have read a long time ago, but didn’t know about.
Ursula LeGuin’s Orsinian Tales, a collection of short stories set in a fictional Eastern European country, has also been a large influence. The same goes for Irmelin Sandman Lilius’s Sola Trilogy, which also mixes realism with fabulist elements.
I’ve also recently read short stories by many contemporary writers (some of them do not write weird fiction), such as Kathy Fish, Paul Jessup, Kristine Ong Muslim, Tania Hershman, Jeff VanderMeer, Matthew Salesses, Ethel Rohan, Jennifer DuBois, Paul Griner, and Aliette de Bodard, as well as essays by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and they have been influential as well.
WFR.com: What about some of these stories or writers do you find so influential or inspirational to you? Why do they impact you?
Ellingsen: What I think all these writers have in common is the ability to make accurate and relevant observations about our world and the way we live and act, and to communicate this in eloquent ways, via both the content and form of their stories. By doing so they also question our ways of living and I find that important and a source for hope.
WFR.com: What do you want to see more of, in regards to literature and art?
Ellingsen: I would like to see a higher degree of freedom from commercial constraints and the current expectations of entertainment value and value-for-money for literature and all art forms.
Every genre has its conventions and expectations to theme, length, characterization, setting and so on, and if the artist strays too far away from it, it doesn’t belong to that genre any longer and can’t be marketed as such. These conventions and rules tend to make things repetitive, simple, and easily digested, and well suited for consumption. But the question is, do we really want more of the same, or something new or more complex that may surprise, challenge, change us, or show the world in a different light?
Therefore, I’d like to see more experimentation, more playfulness, more hybrid forms, more questioning of the conventions and traditions of genres and art forms, and by extension, questioning our current ways of life and civilization, which aren’t working that well anymore.
Weird, surrealist, experimental, and cross-genre literature’s willingness to consider the unusual and the unexpected and to try new avenues is probably why it has a special place in my heart.
WFR.com: There’s definitely an element of playfulness and experimentation in your writing, especially formal experimentation, that’s present in many of the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin, like “A Catalog of Planets,” which is essentially what the title would indicate, and “Still Life in Hypnos, which takes the form of a series of time-lapse photographs. What do you consider as successful or failed experiments in your own writing?
Ellingsen: I really enjoy playing with forms and styles, and as with any experimentation there are failed attempts, where I can’t express what I want to, or can’t shape or edit the story into what I envisioned it to be like, or work I lose interest in before it’s finished, or pieces that lose interest in me before they are finished, stories that just don’t work.
I have gone back to a few of them after a while and then they have transformed into something else and unexpected, which is great fun, or become what I hoped, but it’s rare. I do think of these stories as maybe meant just for me, and for testing the waters, and that’s all right.
A successful experiment is like a puzzle: all (or most) of the pieces will be there and just need to be assembled and polished, and comes to life like a little Frankenstein creation, almost all by itself.
WFR.com: What kind of impact does science have on your writing overall? You’ve mentioned your affection for literature like Cosmos, as well as your experience as a science student. How does this admiration for science and scientific literature impact, or possibly conflict with, your affection for fabulist or surrealist literature?
Ellingsen: One might think there would be a conflict there, but I suspect my liking for science expresses itself more as a desire for even fabulist literature to have a clear connection to the world and be somewhat analytical as well as imaginative, instead of dismissing the imaginary outright.
The background in science is probably also why I like describing the landscape and ecology of a setting, and how the people there sustain themselves. It also makes me enjoy satirizing systems of hierarchy or taxonomy, as in “The Tale That Wrote Itself” (one of the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin) .
The science background may also make me more open to experimentation and playing with form and content, but as words and images, rather than in a lab.
WFR.com: What inspires you the most in your writing? Where do you most frequently find catalysts for your stories?
Ellingsen: What I find most inspiring in writing is the writing process itself, when the story almost seems to write itself, when you find ways to express what you want, both linguistically and plot-wise, in exactly the tone and style you wish, and seeing the story take shape from tentative tries and sketches to the finished version.
I find the catalysts for stories in everything from phrases, ideas, questions, memories, dreams, indignation, science, philosophy, paintings, photography, film, music, games, design, to other people’s literary work. It can be everything from a great phrase, to an interesting character, to certain colors or a tone of light.
For example, a recent shot from one of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, which are known for slow panning into or out of scenes, and a masterful cinematography of water, made me realize that his films have influenced my writing a lot. It’s a while since I watched them, so I didn’t realize how much of an influence they are.
A montage of images from Stalker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPUyR3aFMJQ&feature=player_embedded
WFR.com: How about your story “The White,” which we’ve reprinted elsewhere on this site? What inspired you to write that story in particular? Please walk us through the process of the story from inception to completion, if you like.
Ellingsen: “The White” was written for literary magazine The Medulla Review’s call for “lucid fiction”. They wanted fiction that experimented with and presented new ways of regarding the world, the self and how we tell stories, point of views, characterization etc. I therefore wanted to write a first contact story, since extraterrestrials might have a very different view of themselves, their minds and bodies and where they belong, than we do.
One of the most challenging and alien settings on Earth is Antarctica. I had read blog posts and descriptions from scientists that spent the winter in bases in the Antarctic and it sounded like being on another planet, so that became the setting for the story.
In my work I’ve also interviewed scientists who have, like Professor Johansen in the story, what they themselves describe as “polar sickness”. They’ve been to the Arctic or the Antarctic and constantly want to go back. I’ve been to the Arctic myself, it’s a fantastically beautiful place despite the harsh conditions, and I can really understand why some people are eager to live there. All of that made up the inspiration for “The White” and found its way into the story.
I also wanted the reader to be a part of the narrative and have a sense that it’s about them, or a different part of them, and therefore wrote it in second person present tense. The text itself was straightforward to write and revisions consisted mostly of polishing the dialogue and do line editing.
WFR.com: In addition to your short story collections, you also have a novel that was published last year, The Empty City. How does your novel fit into your overall body of work, in terms of the themes you choose to explore and the style you develop? What lessons did you learn from writing your novel that you can now apply to your short fiction? And what might readers of weird fiction find really fascinating about your novel?
Ellingsen: The Empty City shares some of the themes of “The White,” but takes place in an everyday setting rather than the Antarctic. The novel is written as a series of vignettes, each ranging from a few hundred to several thousand words long.
During the course of the story, the protagonist starts questioning the objectivity of the individual experience, the accuracy of personal memory, and in particular the continuity of the personality. It seemed pertinent to make the form of the narrative reflect this as well, and writing the novel as separate but interconnected vignettes therefore seemed to be the best form.
I learned a lot about developing a story, both the short form and longer structures, as well as revising, and working with an editor, something I hadn’t done before. Maybe the biggest lesson was the freedom to choose approaches and themes that were previously new to me.
The Empty City is about encountering the strange and the unexpected, but also about turning inward and finding what’s there. It uses some science fiction and fantasy imagery to explore the protagonist’s past and present.
WFR.com: Do you have any other projects that you’re currently working on?
Ellingsen: I’m working on a novella which mixes existential themes with imaginary elements. Among other things, it’s about how the past is a very fluid narrative that tends to change according to our present, even without any conscious lying or glossing over. But when we know this is the case, what is really true and objective? The first draft of the story is almost done, and I hope I will like it well enough to start editing, which for me is a long process. I’m also usually working on a short story or two, of flash fiction length and longer.
WFR.com: Finally, what’s the weirdest piece of fiction, story or novel,  that you’ve ever read? Why?
Ellingsen: Comte de Lautreamont/Isidore Ducasse’s long and surreal prose poem Les Chants des Maldoror was an eye– and mind-opener when I read it a few years ago. I loved the non-linearity of it, the lack of a solid plot or storyline, a central character who is willful and unusual, the dark and sometimes disturbing descriptions, the striding poetry and play with words and images, and the unapologetic and uncensored voice of the writer.
It’s one of the most unsettling and weird pieces of fiction I have read so far. It felt like what I imagine taking a peek into insanity would be like, but with a high degree of expression and accuracy and control of language. The author died at a young age, it would have been very interesting to have seen what he would have written, had he lived. - Adam Mills






SHELDON LEE COMPTON: You have died and need to decide the place you want to haunt and the form you want to take as a spirit. Tell me what you decide.
BERIT ELLINGSEN: I’d find a really old and run down cemetery of the type you’d expect or even want to be haunted. A cemetery full of ancient headstones and crumbling mausolea and tall grass and trees. Then I’d start haunting, moving things and making sounds and creating cold spots and such. I’d try to have the word about it spread to attract some fun and bumbling ghost hunters and scientists so they could actually get some measurements and pictures. I’d probably be a Lady in White type of ghost, or a tiny will o’ the wisp.
When the ghost hunters and scientists had gotten the recordings they wanted, I’d probably go to Venice and haunt an old palazzo there and scare some tourists. Unless ghosts are tied to one place, I’d go to Chernobyl since as a ghost radiation won’t be an issue. If possible, I’d travel the world as a ghost and see places I didn’t see while alive.
Maybe that’s what ghosts do when they’re not angry or bound to a certain place; they travel the world still. This makes me wonder if Facebook memorial pages can be haunted. I don’t think I would have bothered haunting a Facebook page. That would have been a terrible afterlife.
SLC: Full facial tattoo or painlessly losing your lips. One has to happen. What’s it going to be?
BE: I once wrote a story about a man whose lips had rotted off so it looked like he was always smiling, but he was dead so there was a reason for the lack of lips.
For someone living, I think that having no lips might make it harder to eat and drink, which would not be a good thing. It would also be so scary for others; it would be hard to have neutral interactions with just about everyone. Sad to think that that is the reality for burn patients and victims of acid attacks. The surface of our bodies has been given way too much importance in our culture, beyond skin’s basic function.
Full facial tattoos are also problematic. I don’t have any tattoos because I know I’d get tired of them after a certain while. I’ve seen pictures of some bad full facial tattoos and some that looked scary but were very detailed and well made. My issue with them though is that they do look as if the person is wearing a mask, and I keep thinking that it is not their true face, even though the tattoos are supposed to express what they look like on the inside
The best facial tattoos I’ve seen have been mostly Maori, so I’d have to go with that. Although I don’t think Maori tattoos are given to non-Maori, so it would have to be a Maori-inspired tattoo instead.
SLC: You’ve somehow recovered the innocence of your childhood while still retaining your general adult knowledge. How will you best take advantage of this, if at all?
BE: I think some of that innocence, at least the capacity for wonder and surprise, if not naivete, must be present in order to write fiction. If one has no sense of innocence or wonder, how can one then write about the world, even if the world has many sides that are not innocent or wondrous.
The ability to wonder and have a childlike curiosity is probably also quite important to keep learning throughout life. When I graduated from university I thought my time of learning was over and that I’d never again be learning as much as I did then. But that’s been completely wrong and I’m still learning something new every day, whether it’s in writing or reading, or about science or current affairs. I think this continual learning is a good thing.
SLC: You can be shown every secret the Catholic Church may have to offer or every secret the Freemasons might have to offer. Which do you choose?
BE: Definitely the secrets of the Catholic Church hands down.
I don’t think the Freemasons have that many interesting secrets beyond some intricate rituals and perhaps some intriguing books. Maybe the most interesting thing about the Freemasons is who is and has been members throughout history, and what advantages or not that has given the members.
The Catholic Church on the other hand, has existed for many centuries, amassed an enormous amount of wealth and store of ancient tomes, relics, artifacts, letters, and other pieces of information. I’m sure the Catholic Church’s objects of historical and cultural significance would take life times to catalog and analyze, even if you had no interest in the purely religious side of those objects.
I’m also sure some of their secrets would change the way we look at certain historical figures or events if they were made public, so I wish there would be more transparency. It would also have been interesting to see more information about the few female popes the church has had. - enclave.entropymag.org/chaos-questions-17-berit-ellingsen/


Meet Me At The Fountain In Caras Galadhon– a virtual journey. Nominated for Best of the Net by Atticus Review.
Summer Dusk, Winter Moon– a fairy tale tribute to JK Huysmans. First published in Transactions Of The Flesh – A Homage to JK Huysmans.
Midsummer Murders– a homage to the TV series Midsomer Murders – in Wyvern Lit. Read here by Georgia Bellas.
Natura Dominatur – or: How the Arctic Gets Under Your Skin– a visit to the northernmost abandoned town – in Litro Magazine’s Blog.
Towards a Virtual Terroir: Architecture and Games– in games, architecture is more than buildings – in Litro Magazine’s Blog.
Grains of Sand in Blue Fifth Review Winter 2014 – excerpt from the new novel – Not Dark Yet.
Vessel and Solsvart– a fairy tale of decay – in Birkensnake 6.
Isabelle’s Pictures in ESC. A collaboration with French philosopher, writer and photographer Isabelle Pariente-Butterlin.
The Love Decay Has for the Living in Unstuck #2. (Only in print so far.)
The White (Dans le Blanc) in Weird Fiction Review. A storm in Antarctica.

Dans le Blanc (The White) in Publie.net’s Ouvrez series.
Sexual Dimorphism — A Nightmare Transcribed From Sanskrit– in Elimae.
Poison Ore Heart in Everyday Genius. “We wrung the air and the water and the soil like a rag.”
Sliding in Thunderclap! Magazine’s Blog and Thunderclap’s National Poetry Month 2012.
Hostage Situation in Safety Pin Review.
The Glory of Glormorsel in Metazen. Glory Hound.
The Celtic Itch in decomP magazinE. “… an itch you can’t scratch…”

Lindsay Stern, Town of Shadows,Scrambler Books, 2012.
excerpts


lindsay-stern.com/








"That the fresh and haunting new voice Lindsay Stern exercises in TOWN OF SHADOWS is difficult to classify ought to serve only to make it impossible to ignore. Rife with arch urgency, brief density, and fruitful disregard for traditional genre bounds, Stern's debut is an important addition to the recent rejuvenation of the novella form. Through its razor-sharp technique, translucent diction, and elliptical vignette structure, TOWN OF SHADOWS peels layer from layer to reveal a complex, perspicacious author who is unafraid to trouble the water where poetry and prose mingle. Stern's youth and precocity are certainly striking, but don't let them dupe you: here is a young Lydia Davis or Anne Carson unspooling only the beginning of a corpus all her own. Lindsay Stern defines the term 'one to watch.'"—Laura Goode



"TOWN OF SHADOWS is Winesburg, Ohio coated in arsenic, stippled with word math, and carved on a butterfly's body. What Lindsay Stern creates here is throttling and gorgeous, a child's hand grasping for a lightning storm trapped in a white balloon."—J. A. Tyler


“Enter the Town of Shadows, where noise is ‘the color of rain,’ and the self is a ‘hidden crowd.’ Indeed like shadows, the town’s inhabitants are elusive—slipping in and out of mirrors, wandering down secret corridors of the mind, hiding in the spines of houses—and perpetually at risk of disappearing or being ‘deleted.’ Lindsay Stern’s brilliant, urgent vignettes depict a people struggling to make sense of the limits of language and time. A dark and fascinating debut.”
— Hanna Andrews


Imagine, as writer Lindsay Stern has, a schoolchild approaching the blackboard to answer word equations such as:
“sound + sound =”
or
“today / day =”
or
“thinking / thought”.
In her exquisite debut novella Town of Shadows, Stern gives sensible answers to the first two: sound plus sound equals sound and today divided by day equals now, not zero as a hapless student in the story would have it. But what is thinking divided by thought?
In the story, Alice, a rebellious student, has thrown this last equation up on the board along with her own answer: “I”. Here Stern presents the perennial theme of dystopic literature: the bold assertion of one’s individuality against a hostile, monolithic authority.
Alice is liberated through creation, through writing and answering her own word equation. The teacher disapproves: “Alice’s terms are invalid. Intelligent children do not think. They solve.”
Stern’s writing is meticulous, studied, and inward-facing: the prose of a young writer constructing her own private, fiercely imagined world, complete with a bureaucracy against which many of her characters — the dollmaker, the cellist, the horologist, etc. — struggle to assert and express themselves.
The dystopia here is fully and delightfully realized: vowels have been outlawed, artists have been “deleted,” mathematics has replaced speech as the “national dialect,” and in one of my favorite moments, the mayor arrives announcing “war season.” But the real battleground for Stern is language itself, in other words, “Alice’s terms.”
Stern’s clever word equations operate as Zen koans (e.g. What’s the sound of one hand clapping?). Indeed, “thinking / thought” is a perplexing, paradoxical riddle. Alice says the answer is “I”, but there is no “I” in her world. Stern both dramatizes the absolute assertion of the individual and shows how this same “I” dissipates into a private, imagined space that simply vanishes. For even as Alice revolts, Pierre, the novella’s protagonist, looks in the mirror and sees only the daffodil wallpaper behind him.

Alice makes sense of the equation. Thinking, that vast Big Mind, that cloud of all human mental activity, divided by thought, that singular instance of a thought in time, that Cartesian proof of the individual, equals I. But Pierre is just another shadow in the Town of Shadows. As Suzuki Roshi might say, “It is very paradoxical, but actually it is so.” Contemplating a koan is supposed to provoke enlightenment by demonstrating the inadequacies of logical reasoning. And, for me, this one seems to be working.
Throughout this slim volume, Stern plays with and reconfigures language in arresting and satisfying ways, in ways that make you not only stop and think, but stop and think differently. Her work gives off these flashes of insight by its relentless digging under the surface of language.
In addition to word equations, we see Pierre devising his own lexicon with entries such as “Happiness, n. selective sight” and “Icicle, n. a brief spear.” Stern also presents ten nifty “experiments,” such as “How to Swim” or “How to See,” complete with numbered lines as in a recipe:
Experiment 4: HOW TO FORGET
Materials:
Light bulb, magnet, drill.
Procedure:

1. Drill hole in bulb.
2. Locate memory.
3. With magnet, extract memory from eyes.
4. Trap memory in hands.
5. Notice the melody of wings on skin.
6. Lift memory to bulb.
7. Open hands.
8. Watch memory flutter through hole, to filament.
9. Turn bulb on.
10. Notice the flames.

Stern’s aim, it seems to me, is to upend the mind’s business-as-usual approach.
In this pursuit, she follows in the lineage of Borges, of Wittgenstein, and most of all, of Beckett, my favorite abstract novelist. In Beckett’s letters, he wrote, “My language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.” He sought to “drill one hole after another after another into [language] until that which lurks behind it, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though.”
Each of the stories in Stern’s Town of Shadows is a beautifully drilled hole into language. Take a peek and see what lurks beneath. - Paul Griffin


What: a debut prose-poem novella
Who: the eponymous town of shadows
And: its cast of shadowy characters, including a rug doctor, a lepidopterist, bureaucrats, a bodiless mayor speaking from a gramophone that sputters ash, a child with an hour glass and a white balloon who might be god, etc.
Where: mirrors, shadows, bell jars, and graves
When: see “where”
How: absurdly, surreally, in the not-psychologically-penetrating mode of the fairy tale
Also, of course: non-linearly
Why: why not?
Why, put less glibly: trying the forms less travelled is always a worthwhile endeavor
Why, put another way: when writing about time, eschewing traditional narrative structure is probably a good move
Cleverness, dispersed throughout: a lexicon of pithy definitions, e.g. “Self, n. A hidden crowd” and “Photograph, n. A stunned pulse”
And: word equations on a black board at the town’s school, e.g. “thinking – thought = I”
Beauty, dispersed throughout: carefully chiseled sentences, like “The seasons had spun from autumn to spring so quickly that the blood in his thermometer splashed up and down, leaving a ruby film on the glass.”
Intellectual reactions: a fleeting, perhaps insecure desire to return to writing reviews in sentences and paragraphs
Visceral reactions: not many, except when a character shaves off his eyelashes
Aesthetic reactions: “hot damn, another beautiful sentence!”
Small risk taken and more or less averted: preciousness
Big risk taken, perhaps necessarily: the lack of a clear narrative arc
Setback of that big risk: the reading process slows mid-way, when you’re wondering how all the beautiful sentences and clever observations will add up
The payoff: a refreshing reading experience full of arresting imagery and fascinating if not provocative ideas that linger well after finishing the book. - Anca Szilagyi 

Truth, n. An axis. Knowledge, n. Its asymptote. (p. 81)

Town of Shadows, told in vignettes, is the stories of the people of a town subject to the mathematical, bureaucratic oppression of its warmongering mayor. Besides the mayor and his faceless horde of bureaucrats, husband and wife Pierre and Selma are the only recurring characters. The transitions between the sixty-odd vignettes are negotiated by Pierre's writings: his lexicon (of which the above quote is an example) and his "experiments," including "How to Write,""How to See," and "How to Read." Pierre's experiments are magical, his lexicon filled with signposts rather than definitions, and it is people like Pierre—those with a sense of the wondrous—that stand against the mayor's vision for "a town of ones and zeros" (p. 86).
Stern's book is surreal, and her style ranges from breathtakingly numinous to bizarrely horrifying. Her writing is nearly flawless, playing with a diversity of images, emotions, characters, and situations in a poetic prose that neither spares the words it needs nor undertakes any it does not. The book is only 123 pages long, but it exhausted me: each vignette required digestion as I struggled against, or basked in, its conclusions.
Washing kept the pictures quiet. Gently the man scrubbed the knuckles of his left hand, then his right. He was scrubbing off the edges of a picture. The picture was of a boy in a bald meadow. The sky was blank except for a popping sound. The man listened, and saw that the boy was perforated. ("The Soldier," p. 82)
Stern's darker passages remind me of Blake Butler's novel There Is No Year (2011) or The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (2010), but neither of these comparisons fully satisfies: both of these works are considerably grimmer than Stern's, and neither shines any lights to guide the reader out of the dark worlds they build. Town of Shadows, by comparison, holds out hope: even in the darkest moments, there is a light to throw those shadows, a body to form their dance upon the walls of Plato's cave.
I'm making that allusion as a segue, not a pretension. Stern cites Plato's cave parable (514a through 521d of The Republic) in her acknowledgements, and her studies in philosophy are a possible key for a reader trying to interpret Town of Shadows. (She's also an English student, for those of you who, unlike me, possess that particular set of keys.) And—although it can be unwise to interpret a book based on the bare handful of facts that we as readers have about an author—Town of Shadows, which is not a standard narrative by any stretch, inevitably requires a serious measure of interpretation.
When I first read the book, I felt that it was an existentialist novel: nearly every story evokes ennui, nausea, or emptiness. "The Banker" is a vignette filled with facelessness (a recurring image); in "The Executioner," a political prisoner commits suicide to preempt being put to death; both "The Lost Year" and "The Vivisection" evoke the arbitrariness of time. I felt that the overarching didactic was the impossibility of meaning or sensibility; I saw the conflict between the mayor's bureaucrats and the town's artists as the persecution of those who had, like "The Horologist" who claims "I've a tempo all my own" (p. 45), stepped outside the bounds of understanding, by those who were trying to circumscribe it with numbers, equations, and rules.
The second time through, this theme remained, but it was complemented by that hope of which I spoke before: the possibility that you might not live in the cave forever, but can be led out into the light of day—that you can escape, in short, the shadows. I began to sense, behind every vignette, the auctorially inflected presence of the noumenon: the senseless, unascertained object that lies behind or beyond the phenomenon, the agglomeration of sensations perceived by the subject. Sometimes, this is explicitly addressed, as in "The House": a man argues with a bureaucrat about the existence of his invisible house. "'If my house exists in thought,' he said, 'I can fashion it as I please.' He smiled politely. 'If I can fashion it as I please, I can fashion it real'" (p. 102-3). Once I started looking for it, this revelation was everywhere: every vignette, even the saddest ones, were in a sense a house fashioned real. Behind the nauseating nothingness of being, the mind begins to build a platform on which to stand. It's this hunger for truth, and the possibility of creativity, that pulls us out through the existential crisis.
The man's claim that he can fashion real things of thoughts is indicative of one of the major tensions in Town of Shadows, which is the one hanging between two opposing conceptions of being. The mayor and his bureaucrats are engaged in the "deletion" of artists and the forcible conversion of the townsfolk to literally mathematical language, progressing from word equations, to a prohibition on vowels, to the final statutory declaration of mathematics as the official language of the town. Says the mayor, "I have banished the artists. I have banished the vowels . . . today, I banish the currency of thought" (p. 73).
This is an interesting passage, classifying words, speech, and the imaginary play of artistry as the "currency of thought." To me personally, this theme feels tired: philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have conceived themselves in opposition to perceived dominant trends (or as existing purely outside of regular discourse, being "timeless" rather than "timely"), and artists have conceived of the world in much the same way. In a speech to the winners of the 2012 Whiting awards, Jeffrey Eugenides incited young writers to "write posthumously," suggesting that to blaze one's own trail requires one to be literally apart, to be divorced from the fashion of the day (like Nietzsche's "solitaries").
Although this well-worn conflict was a bit of a hiccup for my reading, Stern's writing was enough to prove that we have nothing to fear of bureaucrats or mathematics taking away from the beauty of art; and I think that she already knows very well, and wants to share with us, how to escape or avoid restrictive conceptions of being. Town of Shadows opens and closes with the beginning and the end of the world, according to Pierre: the world begins with "the Child," who, upon taking apart her parents and her room, finds nothing behind them but dust and bone. Coming across a white balloon, the Child breathes her name into it and releases it. The world ends—or, maybe, never ends—when the Child tries to catch the balloon (and, concomitantly, her name), and finds it forever beyond her grasp. As suggested in Pierre's lexicon, knowledge approaches truth, but never reaches it.
Town of Shadows has a plot that concludes, and a parable that opens and closes it; but this is not a book that opens and shuts. In Being and Time, Heidegger argued that philosophy is a circular process, not a linear one, and in this way Town of Shadows has neither beginning not end: its parts relate to one another both in and out of order, and, having read it twice, I can only wonder what I will think of it the third time. Town of Shadows isn't even really a narrative; it has much more in common with Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra than it does with any novel. Although I usually donate my books to the library when I'm done with them, Town of Shadows will stay on my shelf—or in my hands as I comb its pages again. No doubt other readers will reach different conclusions than I about what this book "really means," but I'm sure they will be no less interesting or worthwhile. - Ben Godby


Town of Shadows is a treat for the imagination that rewards careful reading. The structure of the story is weblike; there is indeed a story here – the inhabitants of a surreal, dystopian town attempt to make sense of their lives as various events interrupt them, including but not limited to the actions of a dictatorial mayor – but the core of the story lies in the imagery and language used to show readers the inner and outer lives of the characters. Children solve word equations on a blackboard in school, working out the correct answer to today / day; if their answers are illegal, they are hauled off by bureaucrats for “deletion.” A lepidopterist writes living contradiction poems on the wings of butterflies. A rug doctor named Pierre loses track of his shadow. Citizens are forced to wear wooden cages on their heads to prevent the transmigration of their ideas. All of this and more is written in crisp, almost detached language that in fact heightens the eerieness of what transpires.
Language itself is a central preoccupation of Town of Shadows. The mayor of the town bans vowels and establishes mathematics as the official language of the people. The children of the town find secret corners and reclaim language and definitions for their own. And all throughout, characters use language and narrative to come to terms with the deeply odd and uncanny world they inhabit. The stories of most everyone in Town of Shadows are indeed tied to this desire for understanding, and the use of language as a vehicle for understanding – and, sometimes, its weaknesses in that regard.
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about Town of Shadows is how all these vignettes remain in conversation with one another to the very end of the story, connecting to one another through their surreal imagery and themes. These connections in turn form a shared lexicon that not only defines the world of the story, but becomes the story. So, readers should not be surprised if they feel compelled to engage in willful exercises of linguistic mapmaking, charting every equation, every pattern of image, every experiment devised by Pierre to understand the world, and every time Town of Shadows rewards or denies the fruits of his experiments. This leads to a satisfying experience where readers aid in recreating this world, willingly placing the pieces together to see the larger whole.
For information on ordering Town of Shadows, please visit the website for the publisher, Scrambler Books. The novella will also be available on Amazon within a couple of weeks and in audiobook format as soon as November of this year. - Adam Mills


I don't know what I expected from Lindsay Stern's novella, Town of Shadows, but it wasn't what I got.
Waiting for my car to be fixed, sitting in the dealership's plastic chair with all the other strange folk who drive cars that don't properly work, I flicked on my Kindle and decided I'd read a few pages while I waited. Luckily for me, the wait ended up being much longer than expected.
It's not a long read and so I was able to read it in about ninety minutes, but those are powerful pages and an emotional ninety minutes.
It's a peculiar book, relying on more than sentences and stories to give you the life it holds within. Full of odd math problems and experimental notations and lists and poetry and definitions that seem all wrong, Stern disorients the reader by dropping us in the middle of this town where nothing is quite what it seems to be, where absurdity and magic are just a skipped breath away.

For a long time the mayor required all citizens to wear small wooden cages
on their heads. The idea was to trap their thoughts before they wafted
behind another’s eyes, between another’s ears. At first the results were
satisfactory. Then came the complications: the cages filled until the mayor
could no longer distinguish one face from the next. Through the bars he
discerned only light — red for politicians, for philosophers bright blue, and
for children the glint of candleflame. They were happily blind, watching
their thoughts unfold before them as the objects of the world ticked on.

It is these little touches of magic that grabbed me early on, held me close as it whispered the life of this strange little town full of strange humans doing almost human things that were just a few shades off.

Lately, Pierre has felt his brain expanding. Growing lighter, as if swollen with
air. This morning, a thrust against the roof of his skull. Last night, a pressure
in his jaw. Before long, he suspects, the whole machine will burst. Words will
trickle through his ears, scamper back into the world. So as not to forget
them, he has built a lexicon:

Mirror, n. A palindrome.

Loneliness, n. Wordlessness.

Indigestion, n. Swallowed noise.

Making the disorientation begin to feel natural, I found myself accepting Stern's definitions, agreeing with them, assimilating them into the fabric of my life. While the novella shifts and bends reality, like dancing shadows, it manages to grow in realness and even the oddity of this town of shadows feels right.
It feels true.
And as I sat there reading, my car forgotten, the people around me just noise, the world Stern created began to collapse and my heart collapsed with it. All that reality she wove so tightly together, making a world like one I would dream of if I only knew to dream that way, began to unravel and it hurt. It hit me hard, harder than I expected.
I was caught in that town with them and I never even realized, never saw it happening until the walls were all crumbling and then I was disoriented in a new way, falling back into the world beyond the page, where I had to go talk to a mechanic about what he did and then drive that car home to see what the rest of the day held for me.
I didn't know who Lindsay Stern was before opening Town of Shadows, but I don't think I'll ever forget now that I've closed it. - edward j rathke


more reviews:
Artvoice
Boog City (page 10)


“Pierre awoke to find he had lost his shadow. He is still sitting by the window, whistling hymns through two teeth. Beside him are a crinkled slip of paper, a flute, and a little tin cyclist painted red. He is naked. His wife Selma will not notice because she is blind. She is also mute, as she lost her voice cheering in the war. Even so, he can tell she is ashamed of him. He is always losing things.”


LÜZ
I recently interviewed Stern via email about her novella, as well as her approach to her writing, her feelings on the tension between “experimental” and “traditional” literature, and weird literature and art.
Weirdfictionreview.com: So, what kinds of stories did you read growing up? Do you recall reading anything that was definitely out of the ordinary, or weird or stranger than usual?
Lindsay Stern: I spent most of my childhood immersed in Roald Dahl — his wickeder stories, in particular. George’s Marvelous Medicine and The Twits come to mind. Later I moved on to Skin, his collection for adults. (In my case, unfortunately, life began to imitate art. If you’ve read Dahl’s Matilda, you’re familiar with Miss Agatha Trunchbull, the tyrannical headmistress who locks children in a closet laced with nails. There happened to be a small brick alcove in the playground of my elementary school, an academy for girls in New York City. Much to the chagrin of my popularity, I took Agatha’s cue and thrust my classmates into said alcove every afternoon.)
In any case, I can’t think of Dahl now without thinking of Salvador Dalí. Both have a way of throwing the ordinary into impossible relief. What I found so captivating about Dahl was how he managed to implicate the reader and the reader’s world. As strange as his stories are, they have a moral dimension. Reading Dahl, you never feel — as I sometimes do reading “experimental” fiction — that he’s speaking a different language. Instead, he twists our common lexicon into something anomalous and new.
WFR.com: Your novella, Town of Shadows, is markedly dark and postmodern/experimental at points, very surreal. What draws you to that kind of writing in the first place?
Stern: What seems postmodern to me about Town of Shadows is its attention to language. Many chapters consist of the writings of its protagonist, Pierre. I wanted to explore the intersection between my (third-person omniscient) narrative voice and his. The last chapter welds the two together, a fusion that coincides with his physical disappearance. I was also interested in the idea of language as a means of transgression. In the novella, the characters navigate life under the rule of a tyrannical mayor, who does things like banish vowels and declare mathematics the national dialect. Many of them use language — the writing of poems, proofs and definitions — as a way to withstand and defy that absurdity.
That said, I do try to distance my writing from the “postmodern” thought that truth is relative. You often hear a strain of that view in anthropology classes, or in the cliché “to each his own.” Beyond the fact that the view is self-negating (“the truth is, there is no truth”), it seems to me deeply patronizing, even schismatic. True, it promotes tolerance; but only by foreclosing dialogue. Bertrand Russell has a great quote that sums it up far better than I can: “Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for…the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.”
WFR.com: How much do you feel compelled to follow a “traditional” narrative in your writing, in general? Do you feel such a compulsion or obligation?
Stern: While I try never to impose a stylistic agenda (whether it be “traditional” or “experimental”) on a given piece, I do feel obliged to work within a shared grammar. Growing up, I went through a phase of free associative writing after discovering Gertrude Stein and the Cubists. While I admire their work, I worry now about estranging the reader. I used to see literature as a means of re-enchanting words — as solely aesthetic, rather than normative, in value. It didn’t matter to me whether the reader “got” my work. Why should it matter, I thought, if meaning was subjective? That line of thought seems solipsistic to me now. At least, it seems to contradict the idea that literature should make us feel less alone. We read, in part, to empathize; the thought is hardly new. And empathy presupposes something shared. In that sense, I do feel compelled to follow a “traditional” narrative, even as much of Town of Shadows defies that compulsion.
WFR.com: What writers or stories do you feel have been most influential for you and your writing?
Stern: Pierre, the protagonist of Town of Shadows, occurred to me several weeks after I discovered Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The connection wasn’t incidental; both Pierre and Rushdie’s protagonist disintegrate over the course of their respective pages. Months later I picked up a copy Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio at the library. That book inspired the vignette structure of TOS. As I write these days, I keep a copy of Anne Carson’s Decreation and Norman Lock’s Grim Tales close at hand. Both of them deal in fragments, and manage to weave a whole out of seemingly incommensurable parts.
WFR.com: Many elements in Town of Shadows feel like parts of real life twisted into unrecognizable forms. How does that process work for you, i.e. taking something from the real world that could be inexplicable or weird and then converting it into a different form for your writing? Any particular moments from Town of Shadows where you want to show how that works for you?
Stern: Yes, I guess I did take a set of familiar paradigms — mathematical equations, logical proofs, and scientific procedures, to name a few — and redeploy them. It’s funny how things align in retrospect. I never set out to twist the ordinary into the unrecognizable, as you put it well. But that’s what happened. Here’s one example, taken from Pierre’s book of experiments:

1. Lift hands to surface.
2. Flap once.
3. Notice water’s modesty in feigning monochromatism.
4. Flap twice.
5. Lift mouth to surface.
6. Kick once.
7. Breathe to avoid becoming a thought.
8. Kick twice.
9. Watch: at high temperatures, water may shed.
10. Do not mistake evaporation for flight.

WFR.com: Can you recall any particular spark or point of inspiration that got you started writing Town of Shadows?
Stern: In April 2008, on a visit to Amherst College (where I’ve just begun my senior year), I stopped in a town called Northampton with my parents. We had lunch, then returned to the car. Just as I was opening the door, I spotted an awning across the street. The awning read, “The Rug Doctor.” The next morning I wrote an eponymous short story about Pierre. When I returned to Northampton that fall, the awning was gone. I can find no record that it ever existed.
WFR.com: Can you describe the process of writing Town of Shadows as a whole? Especially since the structure of the novella is so different from a traditional narrative arc.
Stern: As you might imagine, the process was far from linear. After reading Winesburg, Ohio in my parents’ living room, I ran upstairs to begin one of the chapters of TOS. It was June, and I resolved to write a chapter a day for the next month. I succeeded, more or less, and set the book aside by the 30th of July. That winter I wrote what I thought was a separate project: a series of experiments and definitions. One night, on a whim, I tried weaving those chapters in between the existing vignettes. By then it was apparent to me that I’d been writing in Pierre’s voice. I rewrote and rearranged, and then added a few more chapters on Pierre and Selma. To answer your question then, the process felt less like writing and more like braiding a series of parts into an unlikely whole.
WFR.com: How much would you say Town of Shadows exemplifies what you try to do with your writing? What kinds of directions do you think you’ll move in going forward with your career?
Stern: I’ve thought hard about this question — about what it is I try to do with words. I could give you a canned and nonetheless honest answer like this: I try and will continue to try to communicate some kind of truth about our situation here on this spinning rock. Here’s a better answer, which is also honest and which won’t make any sense. A little over a year ago, as I was finishing up Town of Shadows, I stopped at a pet store with a close friend. Inside, we encountered a parrot named Max. For reasons I’ll never know, my friend addressed the bird with the following question:
“What is being?”
Max adjusted his feathers, cocked his head, and sneezed.
WFR.com: It might be a bit soon to say, but how has the response to Town of Shadows affected you in the time leading up to and after its publication?
Stern: It’s all a bit surreal, as I’m still in college and hardly feel qualified to give interviews like this to literary venues I so respect. I’ve been leading somewhat of a double life recently, promoting the book as best I can in my hours off from class. All I can say is that I’m immensely grateful to Jeremy Spencer at Scrambler Books and to the writers and editors who have supported the book over these past few weeks. I’ve been overwhelmed by their generosity.
WFR.com: Do you have any other projects that you’re currently working on?
Stern: I am working on a full-length novel now, which I’ll submit as my senior thesis at Amherst. The book traces the genealogy of a fictional city, incorporating its surviving literature and laws. Its protagonist is an astronomer who discovers that the night sky is speaking in Braille.
WFR.com: Finally, what’s the weirdest piece of fiction, story or novel, that you’ve ever read? Why?
Stern: One of the strangest pieces of literature I’ve read, by Aram Saroyan, is only seven letters long:
What I find mesmerizing about that piece (poem?) is how it exposes the silence in a familiar word. Ten thousand more insertions of “gh” would yield no difference in pronunciation. In Saroyan’s words, “[the extra ‘gh’] adds an element to the word as if to make the phenomenon more palpable.” And yes, the silence in “lighght” does seem to reflect the phenomenon: the composition of white light — every beam of which contains, imperceptibly (silently), the entire color spectrum.
The strangest piece of fiction I’ve encountered is Borges’ “Argumentum Ornithologicum” (translated here by Mildred Boyer):

“I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don’t know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let’s say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.”

Linguistically, the paragraph is completely lucid. Its parts are simple: the thought experiment, the flock, the closing of the eyes. We think we’re with him, and then he takes us somewhere illegible. We’re left swimming in that final declaration, not understanding and yet feeling paradoxically that our lack of understanding is itself a kind of proof. Work like this — that creates out of comprehensible parts an incomprehensible whole — I find most exciting, because it mirrors our predicament. We can make out the things of this world — its objects and events — but we can’t agree on how they fit together. So we make up stories, religions, explanations. And when we think deeply enough, we admit that those stories fail. We can start to hate thought for its irresolution, for its failure to map what Borges calls the “inconceivable.” We can think, I don’t know, ergo, there’s nothing to know. That’s the trap; and that, for me, is what great art refutes.
In 2008, a writing student of mine named Lindsay Stern emailed me to set up a meeting to “talk about poems and college apps.” Lindsay was 17, and had recently finished her junior year of high school. In preparation for the meeting, she sent me a handful of poems.
One of the poems, “The Rug Doctor” began arrestingly:

Pierre keeps his autobiography under the sink. It reads:

Pierre
January: Birth.
February: Childhood.
March: Pierre is a boy of ambitions.
April: Pierre makes his living extracting salt from seawater.
May: Wedding.
June: Pierre and Selma buy a house with daffodil wallpaper.
July: A chandelier falls on Pierre.
August: Pierre recovers.
September: Pierre learns to play the flute.
October: For Halloween, Pierre is a frayed hem.
November: [unwritten]
December: Pierre becomes a rug doctor.
I remember sitting back from the poem in a kind of awestruck stupor, my thoughts drifting back to the humiliating drops of latrine-sweat that I called poems in my own college applications. My response to the remarkable work now before me came in the form of her calendar:

January: Lindsay Stern sent me six poems, but they’re not really poems.

February: I don’t know what to call these, but I like them.
March: These whatever-the-hell-they-ares are fucking great.
April: A teenager wrote these?! Christ.
May: This Lindsay Stern is really something. Does she know how good she is? I have to tell her how good she is. Dear Lindsay Stern, you are so, so good.
June: Has anyone seen the top of my head?
Four years later, I’m elated to discover that “The Rug Doctor” has returned as the opener to Stern’s haunting, elliptical novella-in-vignettes, Town of Shadows. Alternately illusive and elusive, TOS operates outside traditional constraints of plot or narrative, instead presenting a collection of short prose poems that become a sort of algebra of memory, or lexicon of sense; Town of Shadows could be called the synesthetic’s almanac. Not one to wait to publish her first long work until she had, say, graduated from Amherst College, where she’s just begun her senior year, Stern made her literary debut on August 25, when Town of Shadows was released by Scrambler Books.
Using her gorgeously unclassifiable text as source—after all, on page 46 of TOS, Stern asserts “Answer, n. A question disguised.”—I caught up with Lindsay to discuss age, light, calendars, Nabokov, and other dissections.
2. Four-and-a-half. Town of Shadows came into being on an afternoon in April 2008, when I spotted a shop in Northampton, MA called “The Rug Doctor.” The next morning I wrote a short story about a mender of carpets who loses his shadow. That character became Pierre, the protagonist of the book. I left the story alone for a year or two, and then picked up a copy of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio at the library one summer. I read the first chapter and charged upstairs to write. The novella grew from there. I finished the first draft during the winter of my sophomore year at college and sent it out to a few small publishers without expecting to hear back. In the end I was lucky enough to choose between two presses, and signed on with Jeremy Spencer at Scrambler Books—a fantastic editor and person. I’d returned to Northampton by then, only to find that the shop had disappeared. Eerie, considering what happens to Pierre.
3. Fifty-four. That number might seem odd to those unacquainted with the work of Kurt Gödel. Gödel was an Austrian logician who proved that all consistent arithmetical systems are incomplete—i.e. incapable of proving their own consistency. He also developed an intense fear of his refrigerator. In any case, thirty-three extra years would have given me a chance to roam this rock when he did. (The writer Laura Mahr and I visited his grave last year, after hours, and were unfortunately locked in the cemetery.)
February: Extracted pins and needles from limb. [Fiction]
March: Accidentally escaped from computer program. Had been using avatar to fly. [Fact]
April: Feared time’s acceleration. Discovered that said fear was largely to blame for said acceleration. [Fact]
May: Began sewing quilt with pins and needles. [Fiction]
June: Skinny-dipped in pool of Marriott Hotel. Lost room key. [Fact]
July: Communicated with skin cell in wrist. Suspicion confirmed re: somatic feudalism. Told cell about capitalism. Was diagnosed with skin cancer the following week. [Fiction]
August: Dug hole in lawn. Jumped in. Emerged in Jakarta. Kept falling, into sky. [Fiction]
September: Felt sad about feeling sad. [Fact]
October: Finished quilt. [Fiction]
November: Coerced left hemisphere into admitting that fiction and fact alliterate. [Fact]
December: Wrapped limb in quilt. [Fact]
Nerve, n. A leaf’s rib. (cf. Merriam)
Amanuensis, n. To prefer not to. (cf. Melville)
Aphasia, n. Loneliness.
Fiction writers: 60% [Excluding the work of Italo Calvino, who would clock in at 10%.]
Diarists: 71.2%
Prose poets: See Italo.
Clock, thumb, lake.
Procedure
1. Dismember clock.
2. Tape thumb to hour hand.
3. Spin.
4. Notice lake water whiten into cloud.
5. Reverse.
6. Notice rain.

Mieko Kanai, Word Book, Trans. by Paul McCarthy. Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.


Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he’s an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.


«After starting this blog I've come to realize just how much Japanese literature,(just considering the twentieth century alone), there is yet to be translated. So it's great to learn that the Dalkey Archive is adding Mieko Kanai's, The Word Book to the list in their Japanese Literature Series. It's a collection of twelve short stories, originally published in Japan in 1979 under the title 'Tangoshu' by Chikuma Shobo, and is translated by Paul McCarthy. In Japan, Mieko Kanai has published collections of short stories, novels, and has won numerous awards for her poetry, this is her first collection to appear in English.
Mieko Kanai has a detached dream like quality to her prose, but retains a certain exactness to her writing, through these stories she presents an array of characters that seem to be lost in memory. Many of the stories feature memories from childhood, her narratives mingle real events in the character's lives, with recollections, seen or remembered again by the character as an adult, some of the characters here seem to be in a locked groove,repeating or re-enacting scenes or memories from childhood, in a way that sometimes resembles a Kafka like world, it sometimes feels that there is a distant nihilism in her writing. These stories portray lives, lived as a reflection of incidents in the past or the reflection of their memory. Mieko Kanai has an unnerving ability to dislodge notions of time,memory, dream, i was completely captivated how Kanai can pick up a theme and circle over it,and not waste a single word.Another disorientating aspect about this collection, that gives the whole a unifying feel, is that the character's are rarely named, many of the stories being depictions of family relationships, so it's just, mother,father,brother sister. In the other stories,characters are distinguished by being referred to as, her or he. I found this to be a really interesting element, and creates a great feeling of intimacy with the characters. In fact the only names i think in here are the names of other authors; Mishima, Yoshioka Minoru, Jun Ishikawa , and also Von Geczy and Leo Reisman , whose songs feature in the story 'The Rose Tango', which tells the story of a violinist of a small band, who is witness to a fight caused when a jealous gangster punches a man for dancing with his girl. But none of the stories are solely about these people. Mieko Kanai, who herself features in the story 'The Voice', a story about an author,(Kanai), who receives strange,sometimes hostile phone calls from a young aspiring writer/reader, who foresees that Kanai will write a story featuring the phone call they are having, another story that explores the world of authorship.
The last three stories,(Kitchen Plays,Picnic, and The Voice Of Spring) seem to have connecting elements to them, again memories from childhood, a mother's instruction to buy a litre of milk, spindle-tree hedges, train journeys, a visit to a dilapidated basement theatre,the milk being spilt,the possibility of a father's infidelity.Kanai mixes the narratives to the degree that it's uncertain to who is actually narrating the story,the father?,the son?.The mirror like labyrinthine quality to these stories is spellbinding,'Windows', starts with a meditation on authorship,the author (Kanai?) sitting contemplating writing a story on plants, but gets distracted by objections made by the character she is about to create, the character questions the author's knowledge of the character,but slowly the character's story emerges,a memory from childhood, a building, a weapons depot, and a first experience with a camera, a photo album from father with pictures of mother as a young woman,before we were married,his father tells him, the mother he never met. Photography becomes his obsession,wanting to photograph every second,every hour. He returns to the weapon depot building of his youth to photograph it everyday,to witness it slowly deteriorate into a ruin,but then come to be dissatisfied with what a camera can capture, he dreams of the single photograph,which catches the stopping of the instants, separate from time's continuous progression.
The brilliance of this collection completely caught me off guard, explorations of relationships lost, meditations on authorship, examination of events, that skip from dream, to memory, from childhood to adulthood,and pass from generation to generation, memories that seem to hover and exist in some other ethereal realm. I'm already looking forward to another collection.» - ihondistractions.blogspot


This is a collection of 12 short stories. Like fine wines, each with its own idiosyncrasy, or like a set of twisted pearls, each story displays an entirely different appeal when viewed from a different angle, and reading them through is no simple task.
The curiously titled Choriba shibai (Kitchen Play) can be read as the tale of a boy getting on a train with instructions from his mother to deliver a letter to a certain house. She puts a black leather box in his inner pocket and fastens the pocket flap firmly closed with a big, shiny, silver safety pin. (What the box contains is unspecified.) Besides the box, the boy is given a letter, an apple, chocolate, sandwiches, and motion sickness pills.
Inside the train, a woman wearing a gray tweed traveling outfit seats herself in front of him. She opens up a film magazine with a cover photo of a smiling Maureen O'Hara in long green gloves with a matching velvet evening bag, and begins to read. The boy, his head reeling from her musky smell, falls asleep. When he wakes, the safety pin is unfastened, the box gone.
When the boy (the narrator, "I") gets off the train, a thought suddenly comes to him: "I'm grown up now." Thinking that his mother may actually be dead, he nevertheless keeps his promise to her and buys a one-liter bottle of milk on the way home. It is perhaps not the "I" of the present who feels compelled to do so, but the little boy of the past whose black leather case was stolen.
At some point the protagonist boards the train again, encounters the woman in tweed, and has physical relations with her. Ultimately the new protagonist, or perhaps the original little boy, remembers "definitely going" on the train long ago with his father and little sister, carrying their mother's ashes to a grave in a town by the sea.
In this story, the pronoun "I" shifts meaning without continuity or consistency. Even the gender of the person referred to is never certain, but switches back and forth. Time progression is not straightforward, either. Drawn in by the author's unique sensibility, the reader is confronted by the uncertainty of existence. - www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/284-the-word-book



«Reading Mieko Kanai's stories is an unsettling experience, like swimming underwater, existing in a new and shimmering medium, and coming up for air between stories just to make sure everything is still real — or as real as you remember it. Concurrently, it feels as if one were skating on a slippery surface, gliding along, glimpsing things possibly more substantial beneath — maybe even catching sight of your own double.
In "Rivals," a standout among the stories collected in "The Word Book," a writer travels north on a train, moving through dreamlike landscapes of forests and wastelands. She meets an encyclopedia salesman in the dining car who asks her to join him for a whiskey. He reveals that he used to be a writer; he tells her of his first love, of a rival for the woman's affections, and how he found the rival's notebook, identical to his own, with passages from his own works. This mirror effect, this fragmenting of self, forced the man to abandon writing. The story enfolds and explodes like a rose grenade, asking questions about originality and inspiration.
In "Windows," a photographer meets an author in a teahouse; already an imagined character, he arrives just as the author is delineating his nature. He tells her of memories and photographs and the shifting relics of past and present, and how he took the same photograph every day for 20 years. Concerned with fluctuations of time and the impossibility of capturing memories and things, the story allows us into the writer's mind.
"The Rose Tango" tells of a boy's childhood in postwar Peking, his return to Japan, the death of his parents, his membership in a criminal gang and the formation of a musical group. It reminded me of Borges'"Man on Pink Corner" with its tangos, violence and yakuza molls.
The history of memory, the hierarchy of recall, the question of fictive selves, autobiography, identity, and fiction about fiction are the subject matters of "The Time of One's Life."
"Vague Departure" and "Fiction" are mirror-image stories. The first deals with an act of loss, a lover's departure and the different-depth perceptions of love and forgetting, while the latter is a story of longing for something insubstantial, something just out of reach. Both enact their own storytelling within their fictions — that is to say, both are self-aware that whatever our reality is, whatever stage our desire is at, then that "situation" may change in an instant or change imperceptibly over time until it is unrecognizable from the original.
Regaled by a rival and a reader, the narrator of "The Voice" questions what it is to be a character, and from where writers get their stories — how difficult is it to be original without appropriating others' stories and others' lives?
Three stories reminded me of Surrealist paintings. "The Moon" is like a Paul Delvaux painting. A ghostly paranoia pervades; the narrator, haunted by memory, realizes things are not quite what they seem. "The Boundary Line"— a nightmarish story about a drowned corpse — conjures images of Yves Tanguy-like beaches, where the boundary lines between the real and dream, life and death are vague. "Kitchen Plays," with its chance encounters and dreamlike train journeys, is very Chirico-esque.
Kanai's tales are fragmented and nebulous yet remain vivid in the memory. Smells and objects act as catalysts for narrative. The storyteller becomes a character telling a story about a storyteller. The stories tell of plays and films that are versions of the stories, and vice versa. These interconnected stories are concerned with travel, memory, identity and writing — like Roberto Bolano rewritten in the slow-motion prose of W.G. Sebald. Very good.» - Steve Finbow


«Writing is where you learn to think. Yes, you gather information through reading--about everything from science and the natural world to philosophy--and through your own life experiences and personal observation, but writing is where you work out your own thoughts on the matter. Writing is how you share those thoughts with an audience, especially yourself. Most writers and critics can tell you that sometimes it helps to get thoughts onto the page before seeing where you might want to go with them. Sometimes, merely seeing them offers you the chance to consider what they mean, where they're coming from, how you feel about them. Writing is a path to self-knowledge.
Not in the extremely skilled prose of Japanese author Mieko Kanai, though. In The Word Book writing becomes an act of unknowing, an act of obfuscation. Ideas of self, time, and fact become fugitive issues in Kanai's prose, and she achieves such an inchoate state through writing that is both as logical as a scientific proof and as gossamer ornate as a flower's petal. The tension between these forces, the poetic and the argumentative, gives her work a curious dreaminess, a fleeting mental space that she even describes in her "Fiction," included here:
'The young narrator in the story waits for this apocryphal woman of his memories or imagination at a train station, but through a series of subtle changes in voice and point of view, Kanai slowly alters this story from being about a young man waiting for a woman in a train station to a young author passing his time at an old folks home to an old man at this home who may be a writer trying to make sense of a story of a woman at a train station, a story he feels like he's read before--or maybe even written.'
Kanai's narrators aren't so much unreliable as they are mutating forces of uncertainty. And her prose - in stories whose titles (such as "Vague Departure,""The Time of One's Life,""The Boundary Line") often suggest a built-in prosaic pliability - so elegantly moves from narrative drive to reflective musing and back again, in precise control of tone and mood that makes The Word Book's stories not merely stories, but writings that plumb quotidian consciousness. Such a skillful wooziness recalls the architectural paragraphs of Borges or Robbe-Grillet, only Kanai has an ephemeral sensuality that offsets and compliments her modulated voices, who guide you through mini epics in this crisp, cool collection.» - Bret McCabe

«The short stories in THE WORD BOOK begin with a prosaic remark or observation, typical of how we spend the vast majority our days. For example, the first line of "Fiction" is "The platform was crowded with commuters boarding the 6:58 a.m. train for Tokyo and with high school boys in uniforms, their hair slicked back with pomade." MIEKO KANAI, a well-respected author in her first book to be translated from Japanese into English, takes those mundane starts and delves into complex psychological and philosophical journeys.
When reading her carefully-crafted stories, the reader will experience a vague and restless uneasiness, a subtle but effective way to drive the plot. In "Fiction", a cleverly disconcerting point-of-view shift (from first to third person) makes us reconsider who the story is about, or even if it is truth or fiction. A young man, besotted with a mysterious woman, waits daily at the train platform for her return. But she never arrives and the man leaves disappointed. The story proceeds with a vague dread that perhaps something bad happened to the woman, perhaps that the man did something bad to her. He is staying in a cheap seaside resort inn, where the other visitors speculate that he is a writer, most likely a novelist, perhaps taking a break from writing. In the end, the man's fate is not so much revealed as questioned.
In "The Moon", a husband sets out on an errand at night when the moon is rising. The sight causes memories to bubble up, transporting him back to times in his life when he the moon or weak, pale sunlight held him transfixed in the moment. We wonder why these moments have meaning, and how they tie to the present. In a few pages we come to know him as if we have known him all his life, and feel the weight of his existence.
Kanai's stories, while each is unique, all have a meta-cognitive and meta-narrative experience. The characters, and readers, are thrown into a soup of wonder, sometimes addressed directly, other times revealed obliquely like shadow puppetry. We wonder about their thoughts and our own, and how they relate to the stories unfolding in many layers. Readers will have to consider their role in reading: to answer the characters questions and solve their problems, or perhaps to construct the characters fictional existence.
The settings, characters, and themes could be in Europe or South America, as much as Japan, but perhaps not in America which is often too transparent and requires a more conflict-driven approach to storytelling. Kanai's stories remind me of Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges, with their stylistically vague flatness yet strong character-driven underpinnings. They need to be read in a quiet room to fully appreciate their subtlety and power. But however you read the stories, I highly recommended them and look forward to more.» - Todd Shimoda

«That it has taken 30 years for Japanese writer, Mieko Kanai, to be translated into English seems like a surreal, absurd expansion of time performed in one of her short stories. Kanai's story collection, The Word Book, written in Japanese in 1979 and translated last year by Paul McCarthy, observes the filmy atmosphere of a dream with the objective precision of a scientist. A writer discovers his own words in a rival's notebook. A photographer documents a decaying wall for 20 years. Lives fade "into that strange silence that lies between memory and oblivion." The basic elements of fiction in The Word Book are elegantly fractured to expose new, delicate inner structures.
Perhaps the most interesting experiment Kanai performs is on the element of place. The nameless characters float through strangely familiar urban spaces: empty dining cars, amusement parks deserted in the afternoon, neon-bathed night streets. In abandoning the vernacular, the specificity of place, Kanai creates folktales of the modern, urban world. Her stories could take place in any lonely cityscape - Tokyo, Mexico City, New York. In this way, Kanai might be considered what Eliot Weinberger calls in an essay from Oranges and Peanuts for Sale, a "post-nationalist" writer. Her aesthetic is indifferent to the notion of nation, irreverent to rootedness of place. She is unfettered by the vernacular and so can create bold experiments-narrative voices shifting seamlessly, landscapes mutating, memory melting into the present. In our era of Weltliteratur, we might wonder how nation functions in fiction-do we stay grounded in the provincial, or hover above it? Kanai's translation seems to represent the latter both in form and content.» - Noelle Bodick

"The pink cover of this small paperback might lead one to think that it’s a short collection of chick lit. While it’s true that Kanai Mieko is female, and while it’s true that she has often been classified as a “women writer,” The Word Book is just about as far away from chick lit as you can get. The twelve short stories in this collection are perhaps not so much “stories” as they are prose poems, or perhaps even essays written in the form of short stories. Kanai’s language is gorgeous, and the way she presents her ideas is fascinating. The stories themselves are very loosely structured and don’t follow established narrative patterns.
Kanai’s preoccupation in The Word Book is the writing self, or the self who is speaking, or telling a story. Many of the narrators in this collection are writers, and many of them are trying to explain something that happened in the past. Kanai almost fetishizes her narrators as they write about writing and constantly question their ability to tell a story. Perhaps it happened like this, perhaps it happened differently. Who is writing? Who is telling the story? Is the narrator of the story the same person as the protagonist of the story? Many of these stories have multiple narrators within the span of less than ten pages. A reader is faced with two choices – to either puzzle out who the narrators are and what their relationship to one another might be, or to let the narrative flow wash over him or her and simply accept that the narrator of a story is never a stable or unquestionable entity.
In that each of Kanai’s stories resembles something of an intellectual puzzle, I am reminded of Borges’s Labyrinths. In that Kanai’s stories are filled with a multitude of unreliable narrators who may or may not actually be the same person, I am reminded of Faulkner, especially As I Lay Dying. However, since Kanai is still able to infuse her stories with a sense of place and beauty, I am reminded of Furui Yoshikichi (Ravine and Other Stories, translated by Meredith McKinney), another Japanese writer of mysterious short fiction.
An interesting aspect of Kanai’s prose that I think is undeniably characteristic of her and no one else, however, is her play on gender. Kanai is a woman, but all of her narrators are men. To be more precise, Paul McCarthy has translated all of her narrators as men. I have only read a handful of Kanai’s stories in the original Japanese, but it is my impression that the writer takes full advantage of the ability of the Japanese language to not differentiate gender. Why does Kanai write with exclusively male narrators? Or are her narrators all men? Is she intentionally writing within a masculine narrative realm? If this book did not have a pink front cover and an “about the author” blurb on the back cover, would the reader even know that the author of this collection is a woman? Does it matter?
Meta-textual issues aside, I really enjoyed reading The Word Book because of its narrative sophistication, dreamlike atmosphere, and poetic touch. To illustrate what I like so much about this book, I would like to end with a passage from a story entitled “Fiction:”
'But after awhile, I changed my mind: my guest’s words were as vague as they were clear, spoken by one who expresses by looks or by his whole weak body the scintillating talent of a born poet. Realizing this, I trembled with envy. Bitter as it was to admit, I was envious of those empty words, not understood even by the man who uttered them, those empty words that shone with a soft, rose-colored radiance. Words such as these, shining words bathed in a soft, rose-colored radiance, precisely because of their emptiness lusted after a shameless ecstasy of the sort one can only experience in dreams. And I thought, feeling a kind of despair, “Long ago my words, too, trembled violently in this shining, soft, rose-colored radiance.” - japaneseliterature.wordpress.com

«The stories that comprise The Word Book hold only a fragile grip on reality – and the effect is quietly unsettling. Poet, writer and film-maker Mieko Kanai is, perhaps understandably, concerned about stories: how they are told, how they are composed and what reading them actually means. This could make for heavy, even pretentious reading, but Kanai perfectly judges the balance between the theoretical and the enjoyable.
Like her contemporary Haruki Murakimi, Kanai is more indebted to the western influences of Kafka, Barthelme and Borges than the long traditions of Japanese literature, and this is obvious as the reader weaves through these dreamscapes. The plots are fantastical – a man finds his love rival writing the same journal as he keeps, a boy out running errands discovers he has turned into man – but the writing so exact and precise it feels crushingly real.
Undoubtedly these are stories that take effort and reward re-reading, but they are also playful, occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a deft and subtle collection that should see Kanai reach a much wider audience outside of her native Japan. In fact, the biggest surprise is that it’s taken thirty years for this book to make it to the UK.» - theshortstory.org


Sometimes it’s only a whisper. Didn’t we just see that man? Weren’t they just talking about a missed train? And veins on a rock…where else did we just see veins? In one story, a man still feels guilty years later for not having met his lover at a train station to depart for a new life together. In the next, the tables have been reversed, or set askew: a man goes every day to a train station to wait for an unidentified woman who never arrives. Images are stitched across the stories that make up Mieko Kanai’s The Word Book, nagging at the reader, making her wonder whether this is one long, shifting tale rather than a collection of stories that explore rotating questions through the lenses of a few, usually unnamed characters. Time and situations shift without warning and characters mutate, as in dreams, from parents to lovers to strangers, leaving their counterparts little choice but to adapt.
These whispers finally become explicit in the dream trilogy that closes the book. In “Kitchen Plays,” a man remembers the many, many times he had to fetch milk for his mother as a child because the milkman forgot to deliver it. There is a large stone that juts out of the ground in front of his house, on which he often trips when returning with the bottles of milk, and has sometimes even broken the bottles on. Remembering all of this, the man thinks of his mother’s death, then feels uncertain about whether it really happened, so calls home; his mother answers, and asks him to go buy milk since the milkman has forgotten to deliver it. The story closes with the narrator remembering a train ride with his father and sister and his mother’s ashes. Who, then, is he bringing milk to? The next story, “Picnic,” opens with a narrator on the way to see his lover after having just delivered milk to his mother—a clear continuation of the last story, although the horrible moment when the man delivers milk to a house that either contains his mother or doesn’t is left to the reader’s imagination.
This thwarted anticipation takes another shape, that of the “kitchen play.” We never really learn what these evocatively named events are, though they are referenced prominently in two of the stories. They aren’t plays, exactly, and they don’t happen in kitchens, or not real kitchens, anyway. There’s a feeling of excitement as the narrator and his lover walk down the steps into a basement theater, but water from the canal next to the building immediately smashes the windows in the room, and the two have to run, like in a dream, up the stairs and through labyrinthine corridors of the building to get to safety. And in “The Voice of Spring,” two men discuss kitchen plays over hamburgers and beer, and then enter a theater in the basement of an abandoned hotel, apparently in pursuit of a kitchen play, but the story ends before the play begins. Surely, like in a prose adaptation of a villanelle or an OuLiPo experiment, there must be a pattern or logic here.
These stories demand attentive reading, although, as with a David Lynch film, it seems the solution to the puzzle will always be just beyond reach; but also like in Lynch’s films, the payoff is in trying to unravel the mystery, and in the beauty of the journey. Kanai’s delicate and sparse language—and Paul McCarthy’s superb rendering of it—make up for the lack of coherence.
One thing is for certain: Kanai is deeply invested in exploring the mutability of the self. And why wouldn’t she be? It is her profession to inhabit the minds and bodies of others. The narrator of the opening story, “Rivals,” falls into conversation with a traveling salesman who recounts a romance he had when he was younger, in which he came to realize that his lover was seeing another man. This other man, it turns out, was a rival in more ways than one: he would leave his diary lying around, and it mirrored the salesman’s diary word for word:
The notebook contained passages I myself had written, but that does not mean that the unknown man deliberately copied each word and phrase from my book. His notebook was exactly identical to my own.
The salesman has lived his life with the knowledge that somebody out there mimics his every move, thinks his every thought, feels his every emotion. “And since,” the story ends, “there is no one anywhere who can accurately gauge our numbers, instead of ‘rival,’ let us speak of ‘rivals.’”
The narrator of this story speaks in the first person, as does the traveling salesman—without quotation marks or italics—so that the reader has to keep close track of whose story is being told at all times. Naturally there is an expectation that this is the narrator’s story, since he is the one who invited us in, so it takes a few pages before we realize that this is not his story at all. But why nest the salesman’s tale within the narrator’s, when the narrator ultimately melts into the background? The narrator is a mask the writer wears; Kanai is allowing herself a tangible presence in the story, perhaps to remind us that without her, there would be no story. In “Windows,” the authorial voice interrupts again, with a description of where she is while she’s writing the story, deliberations about what to name her character, and even a prickly exchange with her character, who says:
I’m sure you realize this, of course, but what you wrote about was only one small part, and what you didn’t write of was much, much larger. And I feel that I’m living my life within the flow of the time you didn’t write about. Besides, you don’t know anything about me, and I bet you never really cared about me at all.
Rivals indeed.
These are strange, unnerving little tales: serious, surreal, and incredibly complex, yet told simply, with detachment. “I know which corner it is, but I don’t know how to explain how you would distinguish it from the other countless corners of the same kind, without drawing a map,” says the narrator of “The Voice of Spring” to his lunch companion. This could serve as a metaphor for the book—we recognize these experiences and emotions as real and crucial, but to relay them coherently to another person seems unfathomable. - Anne McPeak

You might not have heard of the Japanese writer Mieko Kanai (金井美恵子), but she wrote the short story "The Moon" that inspired my short film "LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER".
I stumbled upon her works by accident. It was September 2010. My uncle (father's younger brother) passed away suddenly, my parents, who were in Tokyo with me for my graduation ceremony, had to fly back to Malaysia immediately.
I was left alone in the hotel that my parents were supposed to stay for a few more days. Overwhelmed by solitude, I went to my favourite Aoyama Book Center in Roppongi, hoping to distract my mind with literature.
Going through the shelf, "THE WORD BOOK" by Mieko Kanai, a collection of her short stories, caught my eye. Maybe it was the cover. THE WORD BOOK came out in the 70s, but it only just got translated into English that year.
I flipped through the book, went through some stories, and found myself captivated by the imagery of her dream-like tales. I didn't buy the book immediately, but her words lingered. (I bought the book a few days later on Amazon)
This is the opening paragraph of "The Moon":
According to Mother, I was already old enough to go on errands all by myself, even at night. "The chicken butcher and the green grocer just in front of it, near the castle at the edge of the shopping area, should be open till nine, and I want you to get me a chicken and a package of mushrooms there, I'm sorry you have to go at night like this, but I couldn't say no. "Your older sister" - she had died at age six - "used to take a little wicker basket and go buy the enriched powdered milk she always drank," Father said, laughing good-naturedly; but Mother looked a bit sad. Then I went out into the town, where the last dim twilight had been swallowed up in night."
Another one:
Oddly enough, our accounts of our memories of the dead begin with the arrival of news of a sudden death. When this call comes, we are dazed, left speechless. Those who were close to the dead person may have the impression of things occurring in a dream whose meaning is out of reach. Like words heard in a dream - or rather, in a dream one was trying to recall while only half-awake..
What was sad, in what words? We have no idea. There are only traces of the raw reality of having been informed of something truly frightening. One's very irritation of being unable to recall the significance of words spoken in a dream feels like something that is happening in yet another dream, a nightmare. Thus, confronted with news of a sudden death, they (I) feel vertigo. Then they start to talk about you, who have already turned into a memory - about their memories of you, which are somehow lacking in reality. They emphasize the fact that you are no longer in this world as they speak of you, so the memories all become beautiful, taking on a tragic tone. Even the most boring memories are enveloped, in this place, in deep, tragic shadows.
And finally:
When I got home, I found everything just the way it had been when I left, with Mother lying on a rattan chaise-longue in her usual place in the sitting-room, listlessly reading a book with a russet cover. When she saw my face, she looked a bit angry and said, "Where were you off to, young man? I was afraid you'd been kidnapped and would never come back!" I started to open my mouth to explain what I had seen, but I was in the grip of a melancholic fretfulness and couldn't say a word. Then Father spoke: "You were looking at the moon, weren't you?"
 I blinked and just said "Unh" in reply. father took the packages of good, saying, "It'll take thirty minutes to cook the chicken, so go take your bath, you're big enough to wash yourself now, but I'll wash your hair for you."
It was after that Mother died, though I don't know if it was a year after, or a month, or a week, or a day.
The story shifted from the point of view of a child, and then to an adult, I wasn't sure whether it was the same person, or whether it was told from the perspective of the child and his father.
A few months later, I made LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER, because I needed to get these images out of my system. It usually happens this way. (my earlier short films, LOVE SUICIDES and KINGYO, were loose adaptations of Yasunari Kawabata's short stories as well)
Retyping the words from "The Moon", I am mildly surprised by how faithful I had been to the source material.
Two years after that, right now, I became a part of James Lee's HUNGRY GHOST FESTIVAL: 3 DOORS OF HORROR omnibus, I find myself, once again, drawing from the Mieko Kanai pool of inspiration, this time, it's from the short story "The Boundary Line" (also from "THE WORD BOOK"), which revolves around a drowned female corpse. The other two directors, Ng Ken Kin and Leroy Low have finished their segments (Leroy finished his shoot just a few days ago), both will most probably be great, so I'm now preparing for my shoot (scheduled at the end of June). Yesterday, I have secured most of the key cast members for the film. Soon, I will continue revising the script to see what is there to fix. I usually work on my script until during the shoot itself.
Going through the "THE WORD BOOK" again, I realized that another Kanai book "INDIAN SUMMER" had just gotten translated earlier this year. This book review is written by Paul McCarthy (who was the translator of THE WORD BOOK!).
Through this review that I found out Mieko Kanai had been living in Mejiro for decades, the very same area that I've stayed in for the past five years.  - Edmund Yeo



Read also: «The Rose Tango by Mieko Kanai»
http://www.untitledbooks.com/fiction/short-stories/rose-tango-by-meiko-kanai/

Mieko Kanai,Indian Summer, Trans. by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. Kawade Paperback, 1999. / Cornell Univ East Asia Program, 2012.


Indian Summer (Koharu biyori) is the title of a relatively short novel by Kanai Mieko (b. 1947), recognized by critics both inside and outside Japan as one of the most important Japanese writers of recent decades. The work brilliantly demonstrates Kanai’s light-hearted wit in addition to her penchant for biting commentary on conservative elements in Japanese society. Kanai is also an acclaimed essayist, film critic, literary critic, and poet, and has produced a steady output of high-quality material since making her literary debut in her teens.


Mieko Kanai is a prolific and provocative contemporary author whose poetry and short stories have been appearing in English since the 1970s and ’80s, but whose longer works are only now being translated. Her range is very broad, from the shocking, in-your-face short story “Rabbits” (translated by Phyllis Birnbaum, 1982) to the avant-garde collection of interrelated chapters that make up “Word Book” (which I translated, 2009).
Now we have something completely different: what was the third in an ongoing series of novels set in Mejiro, a middle- to upper-middle class enclave where Gakushuin (the former Peers School) is located, and which has been Kanai’s home for decades. “Indian Summer” has now been deftly translated into natural and amusing English by two Australian scholars.
“Indian Summer,” which appeared in book form in 1988 after serialization, centers on Momoko, a girl who has come up from the provinces to attend college in Tokyo. At the behest of her old-fashioned mother, she is living with her Aunt Chieko, a writer of novels, stories and essays, at least until her younger brother can come to Tokyo, after which, the mother assumes, Momoko will devote herself to “looking after him.”
Momoko’s mother is much concerned about boys in Tokyo, though she need not be, since Momoko regards them as mostly “useless,” and romantic/erotic relationships play no part in her world. We see that world through Momoko’s own eyes and hear it described in her girlish, colloquial voice, for she is narrator as well as protagonist. Her aunt figures largely: asleep for many hours of every day yet marvelously well read in Western and Japanese literature and devoted to films, especially “classic” ones by directors as different as John Ford and Jean-Luc Godard. In her Bohemianism and through her biting, sarcastic comments on establishment figures, she represents a model of liberation for Momoko. (She also seems to bear a passing resemblance to Mieko Kanai herself, though that is the sort of comment a reviewer is “forbidden” to make nowadays.)
The other principal character, Momoko’s great friend at college Hanako, is physically unprepossessing, unconventional and boyish (and indeed is taken for a boy by some arrogant and, of course, useless college lads at an art-film house — one of many comic vignettes that spice up Kanai’s novel). Hanako and Momoko roam the streets of Tokyo, from toney Ginza and trendy Roppongi to the more bohemian haunts of Takadanobaba and the gay district in Shinjuku. They eat their way through Tokyo, one might say, since food plays almost as great a part in Kanai’s world as film and fiction (witness the long, elaborate breakfast menu that opens Chapter 2).
Indeed, carnality is an ever-present element — not in the usual sense of sex but in a fascination with other body parts. Aunt Chieko, for example, obsessively brushes her teeth and gums and meticulously cleans the wax from her ears. “It’s self-love itself,” she insists to a puzzled Momoko.
There are lots of surprises in store for Momoko: She knew that her father had left her mother some years before but did not realize for what sort of relationship. Aunt Chieko talks vaguely of her father’s “flower artist partner,” avoiding a giveaway personal pronoun and describing the partner only as “a nice person. … A cat-lover, too.”
Surprises also await the reader, as six essays and two short stories are interspersed throughout the novel. These are given as samples of Aunt Chieko’s writing, but some, at least, had appeared under Mieko Kanai’s name in earlier years. Their presence substantially varies and enriches the texture of the novel proper. The story “Flower Tales,” in particular, is an elegant pastiche of the romantic girls’ fiction writer Nobuko Yoshiya from the late Taisho to early Showa eras.
By the novel’s end, Momoko and Hanako have decided to share rooms in a modest apartment house not far from Aunt Chieko’s house. Their next-door neighbor is a young man named Natsuyuki, who is caring for a mother-cat and kittens left with him by a roguish Eurasian youth who calls himself Alex. Kanai is skillfully concluding this “girls’ fiction” (as Tomoko Aoyama rightly calls it in her very helpful introduction) by re-introducing us to the principals of her earlier Mejiro novel, a “boys’ fiction” titled “Oh, Tama!” The two taken together form an amusingly provocative “matching set.”- Paul McCarthy



Mieko Kanai, Oh, Tama!, Trans. by Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy. Kurodahan Press, 2014.

Oh, Tama! takes the reader deep into the haphazard lives of Natsuyuki, the protagonist, and his loosely connected circle of dysfunctional acquaintances and family. Trying to keep some semblance of order and decency in his life, working as an occasional freelance photographer, Natsuyuki is visited by his delinquent friend Alexandre, who unexpectedly entrusts him with his sister's pregnant cat, Tama. Despite his initial protests, Natsuyuki accepts his new responsibility and cares compassionately for Tama and her kittens.






Mieko Kanai (1947–) read widely in fiction and poetry from an early age. In 1967, at the young age of 20, she was runner-up for the Dazai Osamu Prize for Ai no seikatsu (A Life of Love), and the following year she received the Gendaishi Techo Prize for poetry. While maintaining a certain distance from literary circles and journalism, she has built up a world of fiction known for its sensual style. Along with her fiction, her criticism, which showcases her often scathing insights, has a devoted following.    

J. S. Breukelaar, American Monster,  Lazy Fascist Press, 2014.
excerpt + excerpt 2
www.thelivingsuitcase.com/




‘A deeply original post-apocalyptic novel. Like William S. Burroughs set in Philip K. Dick’s California.’ - Matthew Bialer


‘This is an ambitious, complex novel, one that deserves to be read and read again. You need it.’ - Cameron Pierce


“American Monster is a fascinating science fiction story that takes place in a time of decaying human society. The main character is an alien creature/mechanism, but is also intensely human and becomes more so throughout the story. The prose is by turns lyrical and in your face matter-of-fact--a fine mix. Interesting and innovative….I have not read anything like American Monster."—Alan M. Clark


“A sci-fi novel of sentient stars, a cyborg samurai post-apocalyptic quest with a rich and multi-layered cosmology and a lot of fine and romantically visceral writing all along the way… a really splendid effort; she's been largely known through her short stories to the community for some time…highly recommended.” —Christopher O’Riley


“Set in a shifting post-apocalyptic landscape, Breukelaar’s novel falls into the same realm of hallucinatory, futuristic fiction as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.” —Vol.1. Brooklyn


"American Monster is a tour de force in dystopia seen through the eyes of an alien who’s more human than most humans. Breukelaar’s ability to range at will with the subtlety of a pickpocket through cascading elisions of register, tone, style, and mode is astonishing…Throughout the book, which, not incidentally, navigates modes of natural, scientific, and travel writing better than anyone I’ve read since Cormac McCarthy—and here I’m thinking specifically of Blood Meridian—we’re treated to a true cornucopia of influence and style appropriated and converted to her own, among them such lights as H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Bukowski, and Michel Houellebecq."—D. Foy





             
- Mommy? Are you there?
- Norma?
- Is everything all right?
- Everything's fine. I just want to go home is all.
- Where are you?
- I already told you.
- Tell me again.
- Outside a pharmacy on the coast. It's almost dawn and I'm barefoot.
- Barefoot?
- I don't know if he's the guy.
- When you find the guy, you can come home.
- I know. It's just, the longer I'm here the more it...
- it hurts?
- And it's just that we dropped I don't know how many pills. Couldn't you just come get me? You can drop me back, okay? I just need a break. I'd like to see
to hold, to touch, to haveto be
In the beginning, KALI I8 created Norma (a network operation requiring minimal access) with a singular goal: bring back the horn of the perfect male.
Spill City: the coast of a near-future California, newly broken from the continental United States. In a temporary calm between storms, Norma combs the exposed intestines of the human world for the Guy. The Guy, the horn, is the only way home. If home exists. If home ever existed.
The longer Norma stays, the harder it is to remember.
She is a woman, a mother, a harbinger, a vessel, a tool, a program. She can be written and unwritten over and over again until something, someone, sticks.
And people, humans, are starting to stick.
Mommy is not pleased.   




It is said that even in the Before there were those who fell. The curse of their fall was to become Brainworlds. Sentient and eternally celestial, they were unable to generate or sustain life. They were not so much planets as conscious Wholes.
Thus begins American Monster, J.S. Breukelaar’s monstrous novel about a quest for reunion, annihilation and, accidentally, redemption. Norma, formally Norm, is a humanoid creation of a dying Brainworld, Kali 18, referred to as “Mother” or “Mommy.” Norma’s raison d’être (literally) is to find a man with a perfect “horn” that she can reunite with, and bring Kali 18 to this world – this world actually being California, now an autonomous state separated from the continent after a huge earthquake. The story is told in a mixture a linearity and fragmentation that create an almost hypnotic state in the reader.
From a rather classical storytelling approach:
Norma woke two days later arched and gasping. Entombed in sagging mattress. On the floor lay the urchin’s bloody pillow. A roach kicked in a sticky glass by the bed.
We switch to this in a later chapter:
Telefaxis: (n) A process of splitting and then catapulting one aspect of a psyche or sentience (Viewpoint) into a separate physical presence (the host) in an entirely different space/time.
The constant switching of narrative points of view – if the main character is Norm/Norma, we also follow the tracks of her friend/lover Gene (creating the dual star “Norma Gene”), the urchin Raye and a few other minor characters – linked with the definitions taken out of a mysterious cosmic dictionary linked with the Brainworlds, makes the story both dynamic and dizzying, in the best sense of the word.
What’s more, although the novel is basically built on contemporary clichés taken out from our everyday life, like Michael Jackson and commercials (reminiscent in that aspect of Saknussemm’s formidable Zanesville), and clearly refers to dystopias like ‘Mad Max’ or video games like the ‘Fallout’ or ‘Stalker’ series, its world is completely idiosyncratic, thanks to J.S. Breukelaar’s magnificent style and images.
The story itself, with its twists and turns, is extremely enjoyable and veers away from the traditional ‘quest’ novel to morph into a mythical tale of the Future. One can read it as literally as symbolically, but it is up to the reader to decide. J.S. Breukelaar tells everything and nothing at the same time – there are as many holes in the story as there are descriptions.
From hunter/huntress to defender, Norma’s evolution and nearly impossible quest for freedom is heart-wrenching and credible. The more she tries to escape Mother, the more suffering she feels, and forces our empathy, although we are never sure of who/what she really is.
American Monster is not an easy book by any means – on the contrary, it is very challenging, as it kicks against any easy classification and middle-of-the-roadness. In that sense, and because of the (played-down, but nonetheless present) metaphysical aspects, it is in the same league as Hal Duncan’s Vellum, and as rewarding for the discerning reader.
To me, American Monster is, in a way, the great lost American novel everybody’s looking for, except it died long ago and has come back as a winged demon. -Seb Doubinsky
      

J. S. Breukelaar,Ink, Les Editions du Zaparogue, 2013.


An armless pianist, a demon, a psychopath and other "freaks"... J.S. Breukelaar's characters could definitely spring out of some acid-fueled freak show and yet she manages to give them a depth and a humanity that is both chilling and fascinating. Following the short stories, you will find a small collection of J.S. Breukelaar's poetry, which is as hard as it is sensitive - pushing the reader towards emotional unbalance and satori-like experience. A major new woman's voice in literature, J.S. Breukelaar's stories and poetry is an must-have for all those who are dedicated to REAL literature.


‘We have now today an author who revels in revulsion that invites… the forensic tenderness of imagine worlds and forbidden thoughts that seem simultaneously to be both deeply peculiar and disturbingly apt.’ - Kris Saknussemm


“There are stories that I read and like a lot and know I’m going to buy them, and then there are stories like this, that just blow me away and prompt me to write to my editorial team in all caps and use words like 'amazing' and 'wow'."—John Joseph Adams


“One thing [JS Breukelaar] is committed to is some of the weirdest, creepiest fiction I’ve had the pleasure to read in a while. I had the difficult task of choosing between several pieces she submitted; each is a masterpiece of skin-crawling horror."—Deb Hoag


“Working with JS Breukelaar on a short story was a kind of masterclass in thinking differently about my work. She broke open paragraphs, discovered new directions, turned sentences upside down and shook out the flaws. And she’s as fastidious, considerate and patient as they come.”  —Sam Twyford-Moore


"I took this class last time it was offered. J.S. knows her stuff. Her lectures are challenging, entertaining and cover nearly any aspect of weird fiction you can think of. I still go back to read them when I'm feeling stuck or need some inspiration. The homework is great also, and her feedback is invaluable. Highly recommended!"—Cory C.



JS Breukelaar has a name that’s as awesome as her fiction. When it comes to writing weirdness in a way that it packs as much strangeness as intelligence, there are few authors who come close to what Breukelaar is capable of, and American Monster, which was released early in 2014 by Lazy Fascist Press, is testament to that. This talented author and educator has a busy 2015 ahead of her, including new books teaching a four-week course at LitReactor. With all that goodness coming, I thought it was a good time to ask her some weird questions.

---

GI: Let’s get some important stuff out the way: can you please tell people that American Monster is much more than a sci-fi story? Thanks.
JS: I don’t know that I can. Okay, so it’s a novel, first of all. So yes, there is a sci-fi premise, but in the end it’s a fictional narrative that takes place over time with characters and settings and so on, and that asks the usual questions about what it means to be human. It began with a dystopian premise, sure. Given geopolitical conditions, and my own obsession with noir, that in itself isn’t so far fetched. Those ‘mean streets’ are by definition dystopic, so it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to project my fears and disappointments in my birth state of California onto a fictional, near future narrative.
There is very little that occurs in Spill City that hasn’t already, if not in California than somewhere in the world. Oil spills, cartels, earthquakes, floods, condo wastelands, border kickers, Michael Jackson lookalikes, 80s TV soundtrack drag shows. I’m sure there’s a Karaoke Schnitzel House, somewhere—cults like my made-up New Westborians, and body-building gang bangers like Augustine and his buddies—seemed to emerge of their own accord from a setting like this. So with Spill City what I was going for was my own emotional response to coming back to America—both estranged and deeply nostalgic at the same time.
American Monster began with three basic premises. What if California, my birth state, totally destroyed itself, as it so seems so intent on doing, environmentally, politically, and culturally? Two: what if the hot alien chick of scifi, is not so hot, not so alien, and maybe, not even a chick? And three: what if the lone-wolf hero gets sick of being a prop for our most dearly held myths and decides to reenter the game on a whole new footing? I know that none of these premises are particularly novel. We’ve seen them in works by Le Guin, Dick, Atwood, and others, anyone interested in doing serious working in genre writing ends up confronting these questions, not sooner or later, but from the outset. Shelley pretty much covered all three of those bases with Frankenstein.
The novel sets out to sharpen our focus on humanity through alienated eyes. The scifi novel takes it one step further, stretching the metaphor of alienation to breaking point. I think it has to break to be a really effective piece of fiction. As an ex-pat as I am, or as someone swimming against the literary or cultural streams, as so many genre writers are, the sense of loss, or of, sadness at both not being where we belong, and never quite being able see the world through the eyes of another, is at the heart of fiction, and scifi, in the words of Bladerunner’s Ray Batty amplifies the continually thwarted human need to see and be seen through the eyes of another. Sci-fi is the literature of alienation, it is a distillation of everything the novel tried to do in speaking to the modern condition in ways epic poetry, romance literature or any other of the premodern forms, hadn’t because there wasn’t a need for it. Function gave rise to form. When Cervantes wrote Don Quijote, the first Western novel, he produced a work of fiction which was, if not scifi, deeply weird. And I definitely tried to do all that with American Monster.
But I guess what you’re getting are the other elements in the book. There’s horror—blood and drool and outer and inner demons. There’s the fraught Frankenstinian relationships between the monster and its maker—Norma and Mommy, Norma and Raye, author and character, humanity and the monster we’ve made of America, our world. And then there’s the weird stuff. Norma’s wing man is Bunny, a hetero drag queen who does a Wonder Whoa-man act at a dive on the border called World Wide Wang, and her alter ego is a skinny demon-cowboy called Guy Manly. So that. And there’s sex. I mean the basic premise of Norma’s dentata and her being a quote-unquote program to find the perfect male for the brain-fried Mommy, is the running gag behind the whole novel. But it’s also a love story. Not just between Norma and Gene, but Norma falls in love with love. She falls hard for the child Raye, and Raye falls back, of course. Love is the drug. The connections the monster makes are key to alienating her from the creator’s messed-up mission.
GI: Norma is a vehicle you use to say/critique a lot. Did that come about naturally or did you set out to create a multi-layered character that would allow you to juggle the story and all that commentary?
JS: Norma grew and changed and became herself over time, as characters do. Everything is filtered through her eyes, which are of course, also my eyes. But that vision is increasingly contaminated by her relationships, which aren’t always my relationships. And her relationships, the connections she makes change her. Give her an empathy the mission couldn’t prepare her for, sever the apron strings to Mommy. Install in her human fears and frailties that make her feel both less and more herself. She’s just a piece of organic software, initially, programmed to find a receptor so Mommy can track humanity to its source code. But as she fucks and fights her way down the severed west coast, she changes and delivers some of the sad and beautiful facts of human existence to us through strange eyes that I hope seem true.
GI: Who/what is the biggest monster America is facing right now?
JS: Wow. That’s a question.
The American monster is everything we know it to be—poverty and racism and a culture of violence and waste and complacency, if not a lunatic self-supremacy. But I think what I’m able to see more and more from an ex-pat’s point of view, similar, I guess to Norma’s, is that America’s monster is in the end, no different than that of the rest of humanity’s and the sooner we get down with that the better. Charlize Theron’s image may be on bus stops from Glasgow to Gundagai, but most of the world from West Baltimore to Wollongong couldn’t give a flying fuck.
Americans are in a unique position in that we participate in the world second largest democracy, and our own giganticism—along with the particularities of history—gives the human suffering that I mentioned above a unique inflection. All that’s true. Racism is a problem in Australia too, both historically in terms of the indigenous population, and the fall-out of modern wars. But Australia has never been as divided as the US is over race, certainly not to the point of civil war. So there’s a strong anti-Asian sentiment here morphing from virulent anti-Asian racism to the current equating of Muslims with being terrorists. I teach at a university with a large Middle Eastern contingent, and during a class on Nineteen Eighty-Four, I asked my students to describe their particular definition of a dystopia, and a young woman said, being a Muslim woman in (conservative Prime Minister)Tony Abbott’s Team Australia program. For this student, the threat of racial profiling was already so real, the daily experience of having judgement already made against her, of being always already guilty, has created a kind of psychic, if not an actual ghetto here for people of Middle Eastern appearance. But even without historical influences, in a country with a population of 23 million, these problems are not going to be as explosive, as complex as they are in a country with a population of 300 million.
There’s a line in The Wire that speaks to everything I wanted to say in American Monster. It’s season 5 and Denis Cutty tells Dukie Weens that the world is bigger than the street and Dukie says, ‘How do I get from here to the rest of the world?’ Just asking the question, voicing his desire to be free, and knowing that there is a world out there in which that could be possible, sets Dukie apart, and amplifies his tragedy. There are characters like that in American Monster. Some get out, some don’t. And many of us know what that’s like.
Denial is a huge monster in the American closet. The tragedy is not just wanting to and not getting out, but in not wanting to. As Michael Kazepis says, ‘For fucks sake, we’re not alone in the universe!’ How many Americans wish they were, or have, on an individual level lost faith that they aren’t? This is the American monster, not just kids lost in the ghetto, not just complacent NPRers and indie darlings and California girls and professors and ‘American Snipers’ and clerks in Macy’s, but a loss of faith in possibility, in not knowing. How do you get from a distorted sense that American is all there is, to the reality that it’s not?
I know from profound personal defeat, so I can’t answer that any better than Cutty can, but I also know that it’s easy in a huge, unendingly complicated society to see it as the whole world or to not see it at all. Like Spill City. A fallen world-unto-itself. The LA sprawl, the NY trenches, San Diego Condoland—everyone has an exit strategy but no one ever leaves. But that whole other world— a world of unease and suffering and complexity and possibility— is out there and connections to it can help to address the suffering and inequities in America, or anywhere, on a more compassionate, more effective footing at the policy level. But that’s the challenge. The world is bigger than America and the Americans I know who are down with that are doing the best work, digging their way out and making art on a freer footing. I mean it’s more than travel, it’s a consciousness raising and a spreading the word. Studying Korean or New Zealand cinema, taking up writers’ residencies overseas, hitting the road in Amsterdam or Scotland or wherever, as more and more people are doing. This might not help the Dukie Weens of the world or the NPR ostriches, but it might. I’m talking about a cultural shift here, a change of emphasis from the bottom up. An acceptance that America is not the whole monster, and protest is one thing, but knocking down the walls is another.
For a brief moment, under the liberal administration prior to Australia’s conservative government, the marginalised and forgotten indigenous population here knew what it felt like to be the cool kids. The outside world became more aware of Australian indigenous culture and through government grants and the media, Indigenous cultural practice—dance, hip-hop, visual arts—got the nod from outside the country, which shamed white Australia into beginning to address its terrible record on Indigenous living conditions, infant mortality and black deaths in prison.
A poet friend of mine, Celina Ozymandias, came ‘home’ from Scotland to El Paso, only to discover that she no longer knew which was home. Things that she found hard to deal with at the beginning in Glasgow now seemed to her to have a merit, to be freeing. Another friend, D. Foy, is working on a new book set entirely in Europe, quite a departure from his previous work, which is about the closest thing to the great American novel I’ve read in a long time. I asked him if it freed him, not having to set his fictions in the USA, and he said he’s finding it totally liberating.
My new book is called Aletheia which means truth in Greek, but in the ‘true’ inflection of the word in that disclosure is partial and multiple and multiplicity will set you free. The parts are bigger than the whole. There are many paths from here to the rest of the big world—a world of gun control and universal health care, for starters—and that American monster is hopefully the one in the making. I hang with another American writer in Sydney, Sarah Klenbort, and she said she was so happy, in moving to Australia, to get away from having to use, and throw away, so many napkins! But there are times that we both feel terribly lonely and homesick and isolated here, not knowing where we belong, and I hope that not-knowing empowers my work.
GI: I have a Cool Last Name People Get Wrong All The Time club with a few friends (Michael Kazepis, Benoit Lelievre, Michael J. Seidlinger, etc.). Would you like to join us? What’s the weirdest spelling of Breukelaar you can remember?
JS: Brewerkaar. Broccolini, Breukglaar, Thanks to my kids for the last two.

GI: It looks like 2015 will be a big year for you. Can you tell us a bit about the projects coming our way?
JS: A novel with the agent now, a new collection under way called 20-20. Some interesting collaborations including with artists.
GI: What’s your favorite donut?
JS: The powdered sugar ones. They make your lips taste sweet all day.
GI: You write weird stories really well. Why did you decided to write superb strange fiction instead of making a bundle self publishing dinosaur porn?
JS: Thank you!
Strange fiction chose me. I grew up in the wilds of New York State when parental supervision amounted to a jug of Kool Aid in the fridge and someone’s big brother somewhere. Maybe. The real and imaginary worlds conspired against us in equal measure, and there was no one to explain it. I gorged on lake and fields and sky, stumbled over strange kindnesses and cruelties, ran away, came back. I devoured Poe, Bronte, Tolkien, Alcott, and Capote, and the Playboys and Hustlers someone kept in a tree hollow, the big brother, probably. My family hit bad times just as I was beginning to make sense of the beauty and strangeness of it all. When that happens, when one kind of insanity gives way to another and another, I think you just kind of give up ever trying to make sense of anything again. The random is the norm and you just grow gills to breath it in. With my fiction, it was never going to be any other way.
But Tyrannosaurus Sex. Definitely worth a shot.
GI: You’re teaching a four-week course on weird fiction for LitReactor. Does online teaching come as natural to you as face-to-face teaching? What can folks expect from a month under your guidance? How excited are you to be sharing your knowledge with aspiring authors?
JS: Coming through these myself, I always found that online models like LitReactor are a truly effective alternative to the standard, face to face MFA model. But teaching is something I had to come to over time, and my own writing instructors taught me as much about that as writing itself. One was Russell Rowland, who mentored me through online classes, and the other was Wells Tower, who made a huge impression at the Tin House Summer workshop, which I think is one of the more experimental, inclusive workshop experiences offered out there. I learnt as much about teaching as writing from them.
I still get incredibly nervous before the first class, whether it’s face to face or online. When I was a graduate student, about to teach my first class as an adjunct, my husband called to wish me luck but ended up trying to talk me out from under a desk. Fortunately he succeeded. And fortunately both the instructors I mentioned instilled in me a belief in fiction itself as bigger than me, than any of us. So all I need is a perfect story by Kelly Link or Stephen Graham Jones, and if I can say, do what they do, my people, it seems to work. Under my guidance, I hope that folks learn that trust. That writing is thinking. That knowing is death. And that reading is the heart of our practice.
GI: Do you have a bizarre public transportation story you can share with us?
JS: I was with my daughter on the Surf Liner from LA to San Diego, a trip I’ve made more times than I can count. I fell asleep and I woke up to soft voices and a big man holding court with a bunch of marines about his wolf. ‘Little bitty inside voices,’ he said gently with a smile I’ll always remember. ‘So we wouldn’t wake you.’ And that conversation became the moment I woke up to the story that would become America Monster, and to the character that would become Gene.
Another time my husband and I were on the train heading downtown on a date night and a homeless woman in her forties staggered into the compartment and asked if every body was happy. Is everybody happy? she kept saying. You and you and you, fixing each person with the penetrating stare of the addict, pointing to us in turn with one hand, and swigging on something with the other. Then she flashed her tits and did the splits—she seriously yanked up her maxi dress and dropped into a perfect splits on the floor of the train—and then she sat down and told me I was beautiful. The whole thing was kind of hot, actually. Like if Cinderella’s fairy godmother had traffic school and couldn’t make it, so she sent her own screw-up step-sister to do the job. It was a good date night.
So you got a twofer there.
GI: What’s your definition of creepy?
JS: What the Coen Brothers did to No Country for Old Men.
GI: Is it hard to keep up with social media in the US when you’re living in Sidney/the future?
JS: Unfortunately no. I can always be the first one to wish someone Happy Birthday on Facebook. Which is kind of creepy, right? - Gabino Iglesias


In this week’s Author Spotlight, we ask author J.S. Breukelaar to tell us a bit about her story for Fantasy, “Union Falls.”
Could you tell us about the process of writing “Union Falls”?
I finished the story and it was close, but not there. For some reason this disturbed me more than any other story that I’d written. It meant a great deal to me, and it was terribly important to get it right. But I knew it wasn’t. I showed it to two trusted readers, and they asked the right questions, and I started again, and that time it came out as it should, effortlessly, as if someone was telling me, rather than I was telling it. That’s when you know it’s true.
In terms of where the idea came from and so on, I’m never able to answer that. The setting in this story came first, that’s all I know. It’s a place I haven’t been to for a long time.
Ame’s favorite song is “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes. Its lyrics seem to describe her. Was the song inspiration for the character? Or did you find the character first and the song later?
The character came first. In the writing, Ame was telling me the story, and the song came out of nowhere. I just picked a random song from the eighties, random because I shy away from over-thinking things and trying too hard to fit details to a theme, and random because it’s a classic, one-hit wonder kind of thing, but I can see now that it fits perfectly. I think also because Ame’s voice in my head always had that slightly cracked sound, like Kim Carnes but not quite, kind of peculiar and raw, so it was easy to imagine her singing that song, but then kind of getting it all wrong. And now that I’m thinking about it, for the first time actually, the image of Bette Davis also seems to fit, doesn’t it, because Bette Davis in life and on the screen seems so out of sync, so kind of off-world. At least to me. She’d come onto the screen, and you’d think, oh no. What’s wrong with this picture?
Deel “hadn’t touched a soul since her family was killed.” Yet it’s the armless stranger who moves her the most. Have you ever been moved by a stranger?
All the time. My stories are peopled by these chance encounters. By dream characters, minor players in novels who get under my skin, stuff on the cutting room floor, a stray bar of music or scrap of lyric. That’s what moves me.
I don’t talk to strangers. I’m kind of scared of them actually. But they talk to me. Skinny kids and bag ladies. I have come such long distances that I always feel like I am the stranger. It seems like wherever I am, my accent stands out, or my appearance. Rimwalkers kind of target me. I was leaving the park the other day after walking the dog and I noticed a caretaker get out of his van and take his charges—two young disabled men—to the restroom. The dog and I got into the car and I put it in reverse and the next thing I knew the whole car started shaking and I heard a terrible guttural roar, and one of the men had broken loose and had jumped onto the car. He’d sprawled across the hatch suckered on like a giant squid or something and wouldn’t get off, barking and roaring like he was trying to tell me something.
I’m intrigued by the idea of waiting for a stranger, someone who will take you to where you belong.
Music is a key feature of both “Union Falls” and your novel Blue Moves. How does music feature in your own life? Do you listen to anything in particular when you write? Do you find inspiration in it?
I showed some skill at the piano when I was a kid. But I have a horror of performance. So I am intrigued by that. By the process of moving from the raw private moment to the public persona. What gets lost, what gets found on the way. Who you become. I listen to music obsessively. Nothing special. Punk, I guess. Patti Smith was my muse for Blue Moves, you know, but so is Meat Loaf. And Jane’s Addiction and Johnny Cash and Bob Marley and Tom Waits and Thom Yorke and Beth Ditto and Rufus Wainwright and Florence Welch and Tom Petty. I’m a sucker for a voice. It’s the voice that kills me. I try and write with the blood of the voice. That’s what inspires me. Human noise.
Sometimes I listen to the characters’ songs when I write the first drafts. Then I don’t have to. It’s there in my head. So I just play along. - Jennifer Konieczny


Writing:
The Bridge
The Box
Fixed
Some Kind of Monster
The Fall
Union Falls
Lion Man (scroll down for PDF)
Blue Moves(excerpt)
The Opening
You have to leave wanting
Untitled (scroll down)
Shitty Vampire
Higher
Maggot
Lunch Break
Blue Note
Bad Form (Antipodean Scifi)

www.anneboyer.com/


GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women's and children's lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It's a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival's requisite thoughts.


“Here Anne Boyer accounts for a form of life—form of life of a woman in this century living in Kansas City apartment complexes or duplexes with names like The Kingman or Colonial Gardens, form of life of a low-rent, cake-baking intellectual parenting a Socratic daughter, form of life of a person whose body refuses to become information or pornography, which are the same. These are the confessions of Anne Boyer, a political thinker who takes notes and invents movements, social and prosodic. Ta gueule, Rousseau.” —Lisa Robertson


Anne Boyer’s new book of poems, Garments Against Women, is a subtle feat of poetic mise en abyme. She conceptualizes the daily into the philosophical and, thankfully, collapses the philosophical into the quotidian. With her lyric prose, she does not spare words—there is no fear of that sort of economy here; and her language patterning is reflective of the template one might use for sewing: This is two-dimensional so that you may make of it something three-dimensional, something to walk away with, to cover you. These poems collapse her world perfectly onto the page, and in reading them, they become again the uncollapsed world—like a three-dimensional rendering of a mise en abyme painting, each frame falling into the next like an accordion: in and out, in and out (until it slips, beautifully); the music produced may not be perfectly in tune, but it is amazingly attuned.
And in her seeing, the very real world of women up against and among men, women writers among men, women seers among male logos, becomes even more frustrating, more poignant, surprisingly feels more unfair and unequal and angering than a feminist manifesto calling for radical action (okay, maybe that’s what certain of these poems are, but they are so beautifully quiet in their call). The naming of things, and the power therein, grows monstrous in its ability to, alone, validate things in their existence:
Despite the reality of the sky, that it is blue, a woman with an interior is trumped by a man with an exterior or that is what I read in the notes: even the color of the sky is stable only as long as it has a man’s proof [ ... ] I suspect, like many humans in this culture, I have seen more commands of men that I have seen the sky itself. (49, 50)
Boyer’s writing is eloquent in its matter-of-factness, though facticity here is bent, slanted, so that the solidity and confidence of the known sloughs off like skin, exposing the subcutaneous. It is here that we encounter "the problem of what-to-do-with-the-information-that-is-feeling" (3).
This book is evidence of escape. Escape in the sense that some constructs are built for leaving behind, while others may be rooms we cannot, without, be. Boyer, master builder, puts together words, and designs this:
One imagines that one can escape a category by collapsing it, but if one tries to collapse the category, the roof falls on one’s head. There a person is, then, having not escaped the category, but having only changed its architecture. Once it was a category with a roof, now it is a category in which everyone is buried in the rubble made of what once was a roof over their heads. (51)
The "what once was a roof" over our heads becomes new rocky terrain beneath our feet. Floors and ceilings are different and yet radically the same—it is about position and perception. Both are protective planes for the extremities that contain us. Yet what Boyer targets is the ways in which women, specifically, are even further contained.
"Everything in the world began with a yes," wrote Clarice Lispector (The Hour of the Star, 1977). That was a very long time ago, however, and Boyer understands that things aren’t so uncomplicated anymore: she writes, "the subsubsubcategories of a whatever yes" (86). There is such depth to what is expected—if only it was mind boggling. What it seems to be is mind numbing: "Every morning I wake up with a renewed commitment to learning to be what I am not ... No more jumping ahead, rebellion, daydreaming" (26). And that the complicated nature of our universe and the social structures in our small world(s) are layered so that the strata cannot be exhibited and witnessed in a cross section alone—that too much is held in the spheres themselves; too much is potential-to-be, and that is fragile: "To refuse a bookkeeperly transparency is to protect the multiplicity of what we really want" (36).
Boyer’s poems are simultaneously building to expose and cracking mirrors and breaking pattern, and the things within the frames are being moved outside. Because that is where the world really is (even interiorly). Reading this collection put me in mind of a recent essay by Christine Koschmeider:
I refuse to talk about happiness, for happiness has far more powerful advocates at its disposal: Food industry, health industry, entertainment industry, each of them offering applicable products to carry us towards happiness [ ... ] No, I’m not jumping for the happiness-stick. I want to talk about freedom. The freedom to select and pursue one’s happiness. ("Blame Me!," Christine Koschmieder)
Boyer and Koschmieder seem to understand that seeing beyond what has been built for us (this "us" means all humans), what we have advertently and inadvertently built, what we have consciously fought against building, and what we have failed to rail against—that this architecture of form and function needs to loosen into so much malleable, breathable mesh. Boyer writes,"a catalogue of whales that is a catalogue/ of whale bones inside a catalogue of garments/ against women that could never be a novel itself" (86). This Steinian moment offers the chance to break the boning in our corsets, to bust out of the constructed exoskeletons that have been sewn into our culture, our economics, our lives. It is a confinement that can feel like we have been placed into the abyss. There must be freedom to select and pursue an uprising.
Michaela Mullin




Few writers today feel as urgent as Anne Boyer. Who else toils so originally to open a futile door out of a room full of literature leading, impossibly, to a negative space? I feel as if I read her book at a poet-stuffed party and then looked up to find the door slamming in the wind, the cake vanished, the war happening live on TV, and the poets gone. She hadn’t done away with the poets, and I hadn’t forgotten about them. But something had changed with the architecture.
Beckett once spoke to an interviewer about art turning away from itself in disgust. “And preferring what?” the interviewer asked. “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” Boyer’s concerns aren’t exactly Beckett’s, and yet she shares much of the same paradoxical impulse. In her new collection, one essay/prose poem is called ‘Not Writing’, another is ‘What Is “Not Writing”?’, another is ‘A Woman Shopping’, in which she imagines writing the book A Woman Shopping—“this book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it”—all part of an actually existing book called Garments Against Women.
Garments are literature, and literature is garments. Both contain, both obscure, both are seemingly open and apparent, both are imprisoning and appealing, and both are against women. The problem is how to continue to operate within them. The book begins with two black pages and large white text demanding “WHO EATS IN A CAGE? OR WITH A CAGED MOUTH?” An epigraph from Mary Wollstonecraft follows, describing a bookish woman who writes “rhapsodies descriptive of her state of mind”, to “perhaps instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, that her mother knew not how to avoid”. The misery and tyranny, in part, is in the historical injustice of literature, and Wollstonecraft’s character tries pointing a direction out, while being aware that for her an escape is impossible. In the postscript, a similar note is struck—Boyer dedicates the book to her daughter, “who has allowed me the possibility of a literature that is not against us”. Garments Against Women is a dispatch from a cage, but the possibility of an exit, of subverting the mock-eternity of literature’s historical conditions, is what gives Boyer’s book its urgency, its paradoxes and its shape.
Lisa Robertson, a poet from Canada, captures the oblique rigour of Boyer’s writing; on the back of the book, she calls Boyer a “political thinker who takes notes and invents movements, social and prosodic”. A political thinker who invents—what is foremost on display in her writing is logic. It’s a dream logic—displacements, condensations, reversals—and a Marxian one, in which things are always turning into other things. Happiness, pornography, literature, photography and information become scrambled concepts, and the rest of the world falls into a simile-d relational order: “writing is like literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and of men”; “epics are the dance music of the people who love war”; “movies are the justice of the people who love war”; “information is the poetry of the people who love war”; “that feed is your poem”; “the flaneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand”; sleep is dreams is gossip, architecture or civic planning; shopping is a woman shopping; garments are literature; transparent accounts are literature; and “the fin is not a fin of a shark at all though it is a reproduction shark fin strapped on a boy’s back”. A political thinker who invents.

Boyer’s is a political imagination, but aestheticised: “What at first kept me enthralled wasn’t justice, it was justice-like waves, and a set of personal issues, like the aestheticization of politics.” Sometimes her prose gives way to lists, as if only in minute specificity can meaning emerge, or as if only in specificity can she attain the right amount of vague complexity, channeling the aleatory, stringing together an unclear life. She claims she considered writing a treatise on happiness, “but only as a kind of anti-history”. “For,” she goes on, “who better to consider sleep than an insomniac?” Part of the anti-book negativity of Boyer’s project is how many shadows of unborn books keep flitting around. Included here is a memoir that’s not a memoir that is a memoir. (“Memoirs are for property owners.”) Included also are scenes from the unwritten book A Woman Shopping: “Lavish descriptions of lavish descriptions of the perverse or decadently feminized marketplace, some long sentences concerning the shipping and distribution of alterity.” She doesn’t write Leaving the Atocha Station by Anne Boyer or The German Ideology by Anne Boyer but she would like to write Debt by Anne Boyer. And she does write
many small books using methods and forms popular and unpopular with my contemporaries. Among these books was a book of my terrors, a book of my dreams, a book of imagined things, and a book about the rabbits in the yard. I wrote a book for computers with voices. I wrote a book based on euphonious sounds. I wrote a book that was a universal novel. I wrote a book for an avant-garde collective. I wrote a book of traumatic facts. … I wrote this memoir that you are reading, then I wrote a book that was a history of the future in advance of itself. I wrote a book that was the story of a prostitute who walked the streets of Google earth. I am now finishing a book: it is called ‘the innocent question’ or it is called ‘garments against women’ or it is called ‘this champion: life.’
Eventually, so many books appear and vanish you lose track of where one stops and another begins. Garments Against Women is a work in eternal progress, a physical book trapped by covers which nevertheless continues its proliferating self-sabotage. Meanwhile, any notion of books as physical objects collapses. Meanwhile, you forget what book you’re reading.
Some of the most wonderful writing I’ve read on happiness occurs in these pages. Boyer becomes sick, a misery remedied by mixing pills and adding Frost & Glow to her hair. She remembers misery and yet isn’t quite miserable anymore, and it’s in this narrow window that she glimpses happiness. “I dressed a young man in a leopard fur coat and sent him walking through the neighborhoods like that. There was a rising interest in tango dancing. I allowed myself to eat liberal amounts of fresh fruit.” This, I think, is where writing can really delight: a portrait of a miserable person in slightly happier times.
The pieces are short, the book is slim, and it becomes obvious that writing this book took a huge amount of life. There is, after all, a memoir, Ma Vie En Bling: it takes up 30 mostly blank pages. In the memoir, life shows through movement, through drift. It’s a large, melancholy, poetic life—“the frame of poetry”—without any whiff of romanticism. (“The syntactical evidence of poetry without the frame of poetry is a crime which is much more criminal. Or rather, if it is not in the frame of poetry, poetic syntax is evidence, mostly, of having no sense.”) She lives in apartments named The Kingman and The Franklin Court; she has ideas; her daughter has ideas; she struggles against systems and geography; she works, writes, bakes, goes to China and many American states; she watches a dove die and seasons change and climate change progress and she stands at the edge of cities and economies. It’s a full life, ongoing and tied to politics, economy, history, and the book improvises around this chord. A Walserian trudge through the snow, but with the possibility of a new ending. (From the title piece: “To go to work and work all day and go home / to sleep to get up the next day to go to work / and then to think ‘that was walseresque.’”) Like in Beckett, the modesty and difficulty of carrying on becomes a major theme. A paragraph in the memoir ends like this: “You see I was a woman who took notes. Everyone was very kind and wanted to help, but in order to be clear about it, I will tell the story like this: it appears that she refused the ladder, but in truth she refused the rope.”
And yet this is just half a point: the book implies waves of lived experience through the continuation of life, yes, but also through the tightness of logic, the sharpness, the stunning stretched coherence of these brief pieces. The book reveals labour, but not necessarily the labour of writing: the labour of not writing, perhaps, of tranches of time spent thinking without a notepad—“the words of a restive me, sitting motionless for a year”. You can sense the pauses, the accumulations of ideas. Ideas distill into figurative parts, permutated together in logical relation, and then solidify back into ideas, all in the span of a few airy pages. ‘The Open Book’ employs as its figurative parts “transparent accounts,” kept transparent in the service of profit, along with the individual tallying the accounts, tallying also in the name of profit. The individual has two choices: to tally transparently, in the service of some larger corporate profit, or to steal, for her own individual profit. But maybe someone will discover a third option, Boyer imagines, outside of profit’s circumscriptions—what if she works not for some larger social logic but for herself? Here, at the piece’s end, the figurative parts sharpen: the transparent account becomes also literature, which likewise presents itself as openness and truth, its value supposedly clear, and which must be dealt with through negation, through denial and “conspiracy” and oblique independent motive. Here, in condensed figurative form, is Boyer’s project: the impossible possible revolutionary desire of undermining the smug transparent history of literature through a new literature, “off the books”. She’s given up literature to sew a garment that’s an anti-garment. Her tools? Logic, poetry, a sewing machine, and all of these things’ negations. - William Harris


In this textual hybrid of rhythmic lyric prose and essayistic verse, visual artist and poet Boyer (The Romance of Happy Workers) faces the material and philosophical problems of writing—and by extension, living—in the contemporary world. Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it, turning to sources as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the acts of sewing and garment production, and a book on happiness that she finds in a thrift store. Her book, then, becomes filled with other books, imagined and resisted. "I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night," she declares, and concludes that "writing is like literature is like the world of monsters is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and of men." This text is in constant upheaval, driven in equal measure by the poet's insistent questions and by her refusals, as she recalls "the days when we believed information." Of course, Boyer cannot resolve the problems she faces, but in providing new frameworks to think about them, her writing rewards readers with its challenges.  - Publishers Weekly


I tried to write an essay but failed. My essay failed because I couldn’t figure out how to weave the threads together in any wearable way. I kept getting stuck on something, especially at work: the edge of the cash register drawer, the lock on the rare books case. The essay that failed was mostly about the sticky substances suspended on the surface of social life, the kinds of feelings I’ve become obsessed with examining because of what they tell us about power relations: aimlessness, alienation, boredom, illness, depression, anxiety, shame.
These are the feelings Anne Boyer draws out in Garments Against Women, a book of mostly lyric prose that pushes up against the boundaries of genre. “Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions,” Anne writes in the opening pages, and even before she tells us, we already know: “How is capital not an infinite laboratory called ‘conditions’? And where is the end of the electrified grid?” It’s so ordinary it should be obvious, but this is the public secret Anne Boyer insists on talking about, what everybody knows but nobody admits.
Drifting through thrift stores and garage sales and shopping malls, Garments Against Women registers the low-level alienation and depression that pervade the contemporary affective landscape. It’s the inconspicuous, the intimate, the quotidian forms of violence this book tracks relentlessly — the kind that demand the reproduction of life while simultaneously rendering life impossible. Shifting how we talk about the most common means of suffering, Garments Against Women reconstitutes individual suffering as social. It’s a perspective that interrupts the numbness generated by a grueling system of exploitation by allowing us to see personal problems as structural.
In these small fragments of everyday life we get something between theory and memoir, between poetry and newsfeed. Moving between the analytical and aphoristic, Garments Against Women gives us rigorous critique alongside wry humor, “The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock” alongside “Ma Vie En Bling: A Memoir.” When Anne Boyer is not writing she is not writing Leaving The Atocha Station by Anne Boyer, but she is also not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners: “I will leave no memoir, just a bitch’s Maldoror.” There is trauma, which is the cause of so much not writing. There is spam from Versailles. Anne is at her sewing machine, like Emma Goldman, setting sleeves, waking up each morning to attempt a wearable garment. She is waking up with the desire to read everything. She is fastidiously taking notes.
A treatise on happiness which is actually a record of its opposite, Garments Against Women is what confession looks like when language “prefers to live on the internet,” when “there is no such thing, really, as the public ever again.” The personal leaks into and out of the formal.
“There is a risk inherent in sliding all over the place. As if the language of poets is the language of property owners. As if the language of poets is not the language of machines,” but I keep sliding all over the place. My memory is shaky, my grasp of history uneven. I need to keep checking my notes. When Anne imagines writing a book called A Woman Shopping (“If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her”) I think of Barbara Loden as Wanda, fumbling with her purse, drifting through rural Pennsylvania, leaving everything for nothing, or with the kind of desperation of a woman just trying to survive. A woman drifting through the street will still look like a woman shopping, though a flâneur is free of purses. “Why don’t you do something about your hair?” Mr. Dennis bullies Wanda, “It looks terrible.” So she goes shopping and buys a hat that looks more like a wedding veil.
What’s the difference between wide hope and desperation? I was trying to hold everything together, all at once. When I say my essay failed, I say it failed because I didn’t listen to my horoscope: “Feeling on the fence about something? Well, pick a side. You can’t be wish-washy.” I am wishy-washy, which means I want it both ways. I keep sliding all over the place, looking for better language.
There are at least two types of people in the world, Anne writes in the early pages Garments Against Women: The first feels at home in the world, the second seems to be made of a different type of substance, one that repels the world at every moment. Do I really need to tell you which type of person I am? Wanda too, I imagine, is made of this second type of substance, which is maybe just a second kind of fortune.
The truth is I was sick, I was bedridden, I had no desire to get better. I did not want to talk about it, so I did not talk about it. Didn’t my exhaustion, my depression, my inability to walk down the stairs of my apartment and into the sunlight, point to all the ways capital exploits our inner reserves? I have been through enough schooling to know how to ask a smart question, but saying capitalism is the problem doesn’t help me get out of bed in the morning.
I mean I was sad and thought that was okay, even though I knew better than to let the difference between “I feel terrible” and “This feels terrible” become an immobilizing refrain. I was irresponsible, or maybe not. I read a lot. I sought intellectual refuge in the work of Sarah Ahemd, who has become a kind of patron saint of bad feelings. I saw myself as part of the tradition she delineates: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, the melancholy migrant. But “even heroic refusals often aren’t that heroic,” Garments Against Women reminded me. I felt my sadness to be in me, deeply, at the same time as I understood it to be outside of me, generated by the world. There is no easy absorption.
It’s in recognizing this inability to cohere to the world — this inability or refusal to adapt to the conditions that make both life and literature nearly impossible — that Garments Against Women is indispensible to my ability to actually believe in it. “After all,” writes Fanny Howe, “the point of art is to show that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.” It’s at the precise moment of their impossibility, or failure, that both life and literature become possible again.
It’s Anne’s daughter who asks us to imagine what would happen if the world had no things in it — no cars, chairs, or cars. “People would make things,” she decides. “We would make things with trees and dirt,” which is another way of talking about the difference between being and doing, when surviving is, in and of itself, a form of accomplishment.
What do we need to survive? is one version of the question. “I feel like I read some, but still there are so many things of such importance about which I have never found a book,” is another. Reading helps, but communing with ghosts is deeply exhausting. Garments Against Women may not offer us a way out, but it does enable a possible horizon. I mean: Things change. When the forms available to us — garments or literature — are not enough to fashion our survival, we need to find new ways of being alive. Rousseau’s little girl throws down her needle. “Everyone was very kind and wanted to help, but in order to be clear about it, I will tell the story like this: it appears that she refused the ladder, but in truth she refused the rope.” - Anna Zalokostas        




In the first pages of his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recounts the death of his mother during childbirth, concluding melodramatically: “So my birth was the first of my misfortunes.” Maternal death, not uncommon in Rousseau’s time (and, appallingly, to this day), is, perhaps, a stark metonym for the dark side of reproductive labor; its full spectrum forms a constitutive thread—alongside illness, information, happiness, pornography-as-literature, and the broader relation of persons to Capital (“an infinite laboratory called ‘conditions’”)—of Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women. The book of (mostly) prose, divided into unnamed sections and dedicated to Boyer’s daughter, bears an epigraph from Maria: or the Wrongs of Woman, in which Rousseau’s contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft details her protagonist Maria’s reasoning for writing about the events of her past: “They might perhaps instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, her mother knew not how to avoid.” The distinction between these two impulses toward autobiography—one that recasts the trauma of others into a personal misfortune, and one that makes of personal trauma an heirloom weaponized against injustice—may be the distinction between conventional (even brilliant, even political) memoir and Boyer’s achievement in Garments, in that the former is concerned with the question How did I become who I am today?, the latter with the question Why am I not not writing? The double negative isn’t decorative; it mimics forms of desire and of politics that run throughout the book: 
Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body, and when not caring for a human body many hours, weeks, years, and other measures of time spent caring for the mind in a way like reading or learning and when not reading and learning also making things (like garments, food, plants, artworks, decorative items) and when not reading and learning and working and making and carrying and worrying also politics, and when not politics also the kind of medication which is consumption, of sex mostly or drunkenness, cigarettes, drugs, passionate love affairs, cultural products, the internet also, then time spent staring into space that is not a screen, also all the time spent driving, particularly here where it is very long to get anywhere, and then to work and back, to take her to school and back, too.


The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock
If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably.
But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she is put in the conditions where she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions.
If an animal is inescapably shocked once, and then the second time she is dragged across the electrified grid to some non-shocking space, she will be happier than if she isn’t dragged across the electrified grid. The next time she is shocked, she will be happier because she will know there is a place that isn’t an electrified grid. She will be happier because rather than just being dragged onto an electrified grid by a human who then hurts her, the human can then drag her off of it.
If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture.
If an animal is shocked, she will manufacture an analgesic response. These will be incredible levels of endogenous opioids. This will be better than anything. Then later, there will be no opioids, and she will go back to the human who has shocked her looking for more opioids. She will go to the shocking condition — called “science” — and there in the condition she will flood with endogenous opioids, along with cortisol and other things which feel arousing.
Eventually all arousal will feel like shock. She will not be steady, though, in her self-supply of analgesic. She will not always be able to dwell in science, as much as she now believes she loves it.
That humans are animals means it is possible that the animal model of inescapable shock explains why humans go to movies, lovers stay with those who don’t love them, the poor serve the rich, the soldiers continue to fight, and other confused, arousing things. Also, how is capitalism not an infinite laboratory called “conditions”? And where is the edge of the electrified grid?


‘Literature is against us': In Conversation with Anne Boyer
If you don’t know Anne Boyer’s work, you should. She’s a fierce intellect, tremendous poet, and laudable person. I’m grateful she spent time untangling my meandering questions. Her new book, Garments Against Women, is just out from Ahsahta Press, a perfect fit for Boyer’s words. We talk politics, protest, the personal and poetry. Boyer’s strength and insights make me hopeful, and that is worth everything.
Amy King:  Hi Anne Boyer—I’m reading Garments Against Women, your latest that has been described by Chris Stroffolino as “widening the boundaries of poetry and memoir” (The Rumpus). It is for me something of a memoir of the mind in real time. That is, the persona (you?) explores the things she is considering, weighing, analyzing, on the page. This resonates with the ways in which social media posts so often deal with the social and current happenings, except in this case, Garments isn’t so much responsive to current events but perhaps to what the persona is thinking through, the ideas of social order she is interrogating, how a person navigates many mediums, etc. Do you think the ways in which we interact through social media influenced your approach? (Have the mechanisms and conditionings of social media affected your writing for the page?)
Anne Boyer:  Hi Amy King—Thank you for taking the time to read my book and to ask me questions about it.  When you say “a memoir of the mind in real time” I think you must be a very astute reader: that’s most likely the way any book would come out if anyone was reading what I was reading at the time I wrote it, I think.
The scene of the book then is a scene of the struggle to be a person who could think and write, the account of a person who isn’t supposed to be spending much time in intellectual activity yet does despite, even if she thinks it makes her sick, even if she has to do in the negative, even if the only territory in which to think is that of the terrifying and too-generally-articulated not-.
Aaron Kunin had recommended I read Jean Jacques Rousseau and Hannah Arendt, so I went to the library and checked some stuff out, and everything followed from there. Rousseau met me at the problems of confession, of gender, of “freedom,” and Arendt at the problem of appearances, of the object world, of reason and of will, of the question of survival itself as the grounds for freedom. Arendt, though, never answers what we are supposed to do when anything beyond survival is scarce. Rousseau can’t answer much of anything, only seduce and mislead and really hurt our feelings, writing such terrible things about us (women and girls). Neither of them were writing for a reader like me, at least as I was living at that time.
And yeah, social media lends certain structures the thoughts and feelings of everyone who uses it, but much of this book was written during periods of refusal—refusal of the blogs, times I’d turn off the internet, refusal of poetry’s available socialities and structures. I wanted to figure out some way to live as something more than information. I wanted to figure out some way to write what we need that wasn’t going to turn it into a pornography of particularization. That we are alienated, that we are unsure, that our next month is so regularly worse than our this one, are things common to many of us, are these hard and ordinary things of life as it is now which an algorithmic display of affect can’t soften.  The feeds could weep all day long, and it wouldn’t mean they won’t also be crying harder tomorrow. So what are we supposed to do?
Amy: “…even if the only territory in which to think is that of the terrifying and too-generally-articulated not-” Is this writing, even if it is making you sick, happening around the time you were diagnosed with breast cancer? Is the articulated not- heightened by this experience?  Or are you referring to the less specific but common human condition of being aware of our mortality, our inevitable nothingness, and how writing, with all of its promise of immortality, cannot redeem this inevitability that already exists?
Anne:  This book was written a while ago, mostly in 2010 and some years before. My daughter and I were struggling, then, in the kind of poverty in which you are always getting sick from stress and overwork and shitty food then having no insurance or money or time to treat the problems caused by having no insurance or money or time. I began to believe that it was the extra burden I put on myself to be a writer that was making me sick and that we would be a lot happier and healthier if I could give it up. Things changed for us in 2011, fortunately, and as soon as I got a full-time job with health insurance and enough income to cover the rent, I stopped getting sick until I was diagnosed with breast cancer in September of 2014. The “not” in the book, then, is quite general. The “not” I learned about last year is a whole other story.
Amy:  My partner, Melissa Studdard, is also a single mom, rarely gets sleep, takes on extra work and gets sick regularly from overworking and pushing herself to write. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to be a woman in this country, raising a child single-handedly, often with little to no financial help from the other parent, and the impact of that on you as a writer?  Has that situation—and the relief from the full time job–directly impacted your writing in terms of content or even simply productivity?
Anne:  I didn’t know how to do it. I still don’t.  My daughter is fifteen now—that means I am very close to having “done it”—that is, “raised her”—and I still don’t know how anyone does. I was desperate for models of how to be a single mother and still get a chance to write, to have an intellectual and creative life, how to do it without it bringing real harm to one’s child or children. The search for models led me to some of my favorite poets, people like Alice Notley and Diane di Prima, also people who didn’t make it, who left mostly a scathing record of why they failed, like Marcia Nardi. The experience itself informed everything I think and care about—without it, I would have possibly not noticed the way the world is made of unwaged labor, not begun to think about things like care and the nature of the family.  While the situation has so often been prohibitive of writing, at the same time, it gave me the things that have been worth writing about.
Amy:  I only recently got to dive into your Tweets of the past six months or so, which say so much about your experience as someone with breast cancer in this country. Can you give those of us who haven’t had to go that deeply down the rabbit hole of the shame and injurious ways in which women have to endure treatment, often harmful treatments, for breast cancer an idea or example of what this process entails? How such handling impedes healing, and even if there is healing beyond the “cancer free” diagnosis?
Anne:  This is what I am writing about now, in a book about cancer and the politics of care, one that I hope will reach a wider audience than my poetry has.  Recovery is tough and often lonely—and that’s what I am still trying to do now, which means I spend a lot of time being exhausted and confused—and the structures of the world as is are hostile to what it takes to try to get over something as catastrophic of the effects of a serious illness.
Amy:  Does writing come from a place of the negative because it is intimately connected to the struggle for survival, for recognition on a human level, to have a voice, to have a way of keeping yourself and your dependents housed and fed and clothed in this neoliberal, end stage capitalist economy?
Anne:  Yes. That’s it.
Amy:  Some of what you seem to be doing is pushing, poking, cutting little holes in the clothes of poetry.  It no longer fits, and what?  Do we need new styles?  A whole new wardrobe?  The poetry of nudity? Does my metaphor come close to what you envision the next big permutation of poetry to be? Any idea what it might look like in five years and what it will be doing?
Anne:  This is probably totally obvious to anyone who has read the book, but I’ll still say it: by “garments,” I mean “literature.” And literature is against us. And when I say “literature,” I mean something with historical specificity, seen with all of its brutality intact, with our own intact too, not as we might define it from its exceptions, despite how these exceptions are honorable and instructive and how much we might ground our work in them.
And this is going to get kind of long, so I apologize for that, but by “us” I actually mean a lot of people: against all but the wealthiest women and girls, all but the wealthiest queer people, against the poor, against the people who have to sell the hours of their lives to survive, against the ugly or infirm, against the colonized and the enslaved, against mothers and other people who do unpaid reproductive labor, against almost everyone who isn’t white—everyone who has been taken from, everyone who makes and maintains the world that the few then claim it is their right to own. And by “against,” many of us know this “literature” contains violent sentiments toward us, is full of painful exclusions, but that isn’t even the core of its opposition to us. How “literature” is also against us is that it is a magic circle drawn around the language games of a class of people—the rich and powerful and those who serve or have served them. It gives (or appears to give, like any mystification) these words a permission and a weight, dangles the ugliness in our faces and names it beauty, gleefully shows off stupidity and claims it as what is wise.
Now how, believing this, can I participate in—even “love”—what hates me, what hates us? I also know that writing can be vital to our survival, has helped me survive, even as it has imperiled this survival, too.
Perhaps the answer lies in the historicity of the idea of literature, that “literature” is not universal or eternal, but specific to certain times and places and parts of other structures which are also historically specific, which mean they haven’t existed forever and the only certainty about them is that they will end.  Perhaps the answer lies in the possibility that poetry doesn’t have to be literature, isn’t necessarily always literature, can exist before the idea of literature and also after it and apart, or apart enough, from it.   Perhaps the answer lies in a truth that there is no essential nature to a set of words arranged on the page, that every time we arrange words, we are arranging the possibility of something that isn’t literature at all.
Perhaps the answer starts in the exceptions, the fragments and figures that survive into memory and remind us that there are have always been those who have used writing as a grounds for struggle, that poetry can have a vitality beyond every institutional weight tied to it, that the most vital poetry is always issued from surprising quarters. Maggie Zurawski has been writing beautifully about some of this over at Jacket2 (“Poetry is always in the service of a sociality, but not necessarily the dominant sociality.”).
Or maybe the real poetry hasn’t been written yet, at least not the poetry we need, because the world as most of us need it arranged isn’t here yet, either.  Sometimes I see something like it—perhaps in the manner of a reflection off of a surface, but not the surface itself, or the echo of a sound, but not the actual sound. I have a poem that goes something like:

And by “revolution,” I mean I don’t know.
Amy:  Having just been discussing “literary activisms,” I’m keen to hear a bit more on your position. Someone was indirectly instructing that all of these activisms are useless if we don’t articulate shared goals, what you may be referring to as the ‘revolution coming’. The fact that you ‘don’t know’ resonates with my feeling that we can’t know altogether what it looks like, that we can identify what’s wrong right now and push against that, and maybe even envision some relief in the immediate. Can you say a little more about this idea that literature is against us, unless one comes from the class that has … what? Material, safety and therefore primacy? So is it their stories that are told fully?
Anne:  I think politics, even more than poetry, requires an aptitude for a kind of negative capability, a kind of rigorous not-needing-to-know to know, like how by its very nature freedom is almost entirely unknowable from the condition of being unfree, and yet those who are unfree struggle for what they can’t-yet-know every minute on this earth; or how action is that which we do which has no certain consequence —yet that on which all politics depends; or how material conditions create ideological ones that sometimes make it impossible for us to imagine the effects of new and different material conditions. Politics keeps its ground in the shadows. Still the world changes, has changed, continues to change.
Amy:  Regarding Zurawski’s idea about poetry not necessarily being in the service of the dominant sociality, do you think poetry has a proverbial leg up over other genres in terms of its remove from the obedience and adherence to capital? Can it be something of a wedge, disturbing moments akin to Debord’s insurrectionary events? Are those disruptions effective–do they benefit those who are not the wealthiest? How so?
Anne:  Poetry has some useful things about it.  It’s terrific at creating mentally portable yet complex concepts, so you can memorize a sonnet much more easily than you can a book or essay. Metaphor and other forms of figuration, which poets more than any other artists tend to excel at, are excellent for inventing new possibilities and unthought of thoughts. The music of poetry creates intense somatic reactions that can calm people down or excite or inspire them. Poetry is good at preservation—of tradition, but also experience. Poetry is also kind of weird and delightful in that how easily it is memorized, copied, and so on, makes it very difficult to own or sell, so it has some of the social permission that comes from neglect.  Poetic language also functions as a kind of code—Fred Moten has that vital poem, barbara lee [the poetics of political form], in which he refers to poetry as something like “the open secret.” Now who is sharing the secret, who this code is written for, who can break it, seems to be what Maggie is talking about, saying we need to be very historically specific when we make claims about poetry’s place in society. No shovel digs the same hole; not all bullets fire the same direction. I hope I am clear about all of this when talking about “literature” on one hand, and then about literature, on the other. And what’s useful about poetry can be actually useful, just depends.
Amy:  Who gets to wear the poet’s clothes?
Anne:  I might have already answered this.  Maybe one answer is “Why do we want to?” and maybe the other answer is “No one or everyone.”
Amy:  You seem to suggest that some mediums are more effective towards achieving goals like social justice on the implied premise that they unite more readily, “Poetry was the wrong art for people who love justice. It was not like dance music.” I wholly believe the starkness of that statement, but I sense a frustration over how to get people to converge via poetry. Do music and science fiction actually bring people together over social justice causes often? Do you think social change can be found, not simply through groups uniting, but in more minute ways such as individuals, apart, having transformative experiences via encounters with the more isolated arts that you note (I.e. poetry, painting)? Would a fantasy boost in the proliferation of the arts inspire leaps on behalf of social justice?
Anne:  I get nervous seeing that statement about poetry and dance music standing all alone like that, suggesting I meant it without equivocation. At the time that I wrote it, I was listening to Jace Clayton’s music (this mix) feeling sad about my own.  Jace and I like to talk with each other about a certain kind of aheroic Science Fiction.  I was thinking about him, thinking about what we think about when we are together, and trying to figure something out, make a claim to test it. Some of what Jace does brings bodies into new arrangements, of actually “moving” people, of something so much closer to collective action than anything like poetry seemed to be able to encourage. But I am not certain about much of anything about poetry, so I don’t know if that claim holds up. Like most poets there are times I mistake a spot for a leopard, write an extended treatise on that spot, odes to the spot, ardent social media posts about it and love poems for it, too, even disappointed or exhausted condemnations of it, and then realize in embarrassment that I’ve missed the cat.  But as unsure as I am about poetry, I am fairly certain that politics is not what occurs in hearts. Politics is what occurs in the arrangement of the world, and that is necessarily not an individual pursuit, but a collective one.
Amy:  Beyond the poet being distracted by the spots, you suggested earlier that poetry may be in other things, that it may not be simply on the page. Do you think poetry can be in street protests? Is there a clear division between poetry and protests that make material demands? Perhaps I’m obtusely asking if the poetic informs the political, and if so, is that productive?
Anne:  I want to start this answer with that great Fred Moten poem I mentioned before, Barbara Lee, because it starts “Even since Plato, some poets are surprised that they don’t run shit, that they ain’t even citizens.”  First, I know poets don’t run shit.  Second, yes, of course we run shit, right? At least sometimes, at least in the Missy Elliot kind of way?  Or, more precisely, yes, there’s a poetics of action. Yes, we can use some of the things we practice in understanding poetry to understand other things, too, and also forms we make can also translate to ways we are in the world. Yes, there’s a potential for a thing called “poetry” that has nothing to do with the page, has to do with what we can’t even imagine except in how we can’t imagine it.
Amy:  Are we always responding to contexts?  At once, upon entering each sphere or space, defined by them and then resisting, complying, embracing those clothes imposed on us?
Anne:  Oh completely. No one is ever born alone, and no one is in a bigger crowd whoever has joined the company of the dead, and no one in between birth and death is ever anything but a person in a world full of other people, full of animals and objects, full of things and their relations, full of processes and histories and types of weather. Whatever we are, we are made.
Amy:  Brooklyn-based poet, Amber Atiya, recently wrote on Facebook:
Did you have a similar sentiment in mind when you began Garments? Any speculations on making that connection?
Anne: I appreciate this, so thank you for bringing it to my attention. What Amber Atiya describes is my life, and that of most people I know. I guess my qualification then might be that poets aren’t then the opposite of the average person on the street; both are a type of fiction. I know poetry books, including my new one, are too expensive for a lot of people, so if anyone would like a pdf I’m happy to send it—just send me an email—and I’ll be grateful for your interest, because a half hour spent on reading poetry is a miraculous thing in a heavy world.
Amy:  It’s funny that you say that, because after reading the various responses and back and forths to those aforementioned “What Is Literary Activism?” posts, I caught myself thinking about how hard it is to get my students to read more than an essay or short story sometimes and that, in fact, reading itself is becoming a radical act. I’ve never been a fan of the pessimistic view that we are a country on the verge of no longer reading, or even worse, on the verge of a strictly image-based literacy, but I’m starting to wonder if reading pages upon pages of just words isn’t actually radical…
Anne:  I am not sure reading is more radical than anything else, but it is something that takes time, and capitalism very literally takes our time, too, in that we have to sell off the hours of our lives to survive. Then there’s not much time left for anything other than whatever we have to do to take care of ourselves so that we can sell more hours of our lives. Reading—even literacy—can always be, and for some kinds of people always has been, a minor rebellion, but it’s probably never a full scale revolt. There’s a genius in bodies, too, in hands, in seeing and hearing, in feeling, in arrangement, in taking care, in imagining, in saying words aloud. But the world as it is makes reading particularly hard, like we should read just enough to get some bad ideas but never enough to finally get to the helpful ones.
Amy: In “Bon Pour Brûler,” you seem to be conveying the transformation of the person, a little girl, into Rousseau’s version of the little girl. She owns her wealth and stops writing, except to claim possessions. I find this a bit uncanny in that you are describing Rousseau’s instructive lesson, just as the little girl followed his instructions, and in this way, by simply repeating the story, it becomes apparent how wrong it is for the little girl to simply do as instructed and frame herself as one of the wealthiest girls. But you are not simply retelling the story via appropriation; you are able to summarizing it very eloquently–poetically–with the “O’s” and, in so doing, you foreground the narrowing down of the little girl in carefully but almost overtly.  Do you see any overlap with this and the projects of some conceptual poets? I ask because of the political implications of that club and because the techniques may overlap, the effects are markedly different.
Anne:  It’s dinnertime around here, and everyone is waiting for me to cook, and if I start going on about all of that, no one will get to eat tonight. It’s like I told Sandra Simonds the other day when she was mentioning how hard it is to keep up with the poetry nanoscandals: Poets don’t even get bread and circuses—we get crumbs and flea circuses. But thank you, Amy, for the thoughtful questions, and also thank you to everyone who took some time to read this. - Amy King
Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers, Coffee House Press, 2008.                                


excerpt


An exciting new American poet harvests fields of sound from the seeds of her bucolic vocabulary.
Anne Boyer revels in the layers, the history, and the edges of her flamboyant love for, and skill with the English language in her book, The Romance of HappyWorkers. Through playfulness, Boyer gives the readers meaning in and behind her poetry. The Midwest is a geographical and sociological phenomenon where change is slow, whether it is cultural or social change. There is a certain resistance to new ideas; this is also true with poetry. Boyer is an exception. Her poetry is filled with a reckless attention, giving the reader a new look at language, and still paying her dues to the old masters.
The title, The Romance of Happy Workers, evokes images of a bucolic setting with happy blue collar workers — working in harmony with something larger and more important than their daily wages and routines. However, Boyer shows us a comical version of disharmony and romance, rather than the idealized harmony of nature as expressed by the Romantic poets. Boyer’s version is that of the workers providing romance, rather than nature, and she seems to be working within the geography of her location: the Midwest, specifically Kansas. The Midwest covers a great deal of land, and there is a peculiar and similar feeling to this land in the middle of everything. Those of us who live in the Midwest take a certain stubborn pride in the hardships of inhabiting this part of America. People live with great beauty, but much of that beauty has an austerity (and anxiety) to it, and those who live there have to live close to the hardships of the natural world in this place. Besides the huge geographical area it is an area without many large populations. Boyer expresses that with an attitude and quirkiness, writing with tones of loneliness, isolation, too much life on the prairies and plains, too much small talk, and daily desperation so that it sounds interesting, exciting, and yet desperate.
The Romance of Happy Workers is divided into several sections. The first section is a comical series of poems that reference Woody Guthrie, socialism, and socialism’s various ideological offshoots. It is often unclear where the poems are taking the readers; Boyer does not seem to want to leave us with a clear political/social message. She does not include a variation on the harsh reality of communism under Lenin and Stalin. Instead she seems to be playing with the ideas to give us images and possibilities of communism and community. Rather than being left with a strong message, she takes us down into Alice’s rabbit hole and turns the playfulness into itself. Boyer tells us that “His lips {Woody’s} were a proletarian mediation/on May, a battle between pathogens.” She begin with a strong image of socialism, including the importance of May, especially the annual communist May Day, but then Boyer switches to a fight between germs. Is she reducing this ideological battle to a battle of germs?
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Presenting Woody Guthrie as the hero, or the anti-hero of the movement is brilliant. Woody Guthrie evokes all the best attributes of the American socialist/people’s movement. However, Boyer gives us a flawed, somewhat frustrated, and comical version of our American hero — or my American hero. More lines from Boyer’s poems illustrate Woody’s thoughts on capitalism. combing the political and the personal:
At times, I think that Boyer is giving the reader the folk art revision of the revolution tongue-in-cheek, the revolution that the artists were supposed to create
Boyer captures the ideas, images, and nuances of Russian communism that many of us are familiar with in a startling way, “Bolshevik mattress,” and “Kremlin of lips,” juxtaposed with images of the western world, such as “Hamlet’s kiss,” and “Tyroleans mouthing Viennese rock songs,” and Woody is the hero who keeps — or tries to keep it all going — singing, working, producing… . Communism was and still is a serious subject; however, Boyer has made all the implications of communism serious and light-hearted, offering them up to us to examine under many different lenses, and then to examine again. She uses Woody as the conduit for approaching communism with American idealism, and my understanding of the history of communism in the United States is that it was an idealistic mythos, rather than the grim reality of Russian and Chinese communism.
Throughout the book Boyer shows us her ability to take language apart and to put it back together into new meaning in her new/old country. In the next section, she shows readers the cowboy ethos, once again using names and mythology with the stoic but reckless nature of the Midwestern prairies and plains dwellers. Boyer turns the American mythology into concrete language that still leaves the reader struggling for her own words to describe what Boyer is describing, moving beyond the cliché of what is the expected in the poem, “Biplane: In a plain democracy blue skies are axes, axes are soap,/Perseus is a stuttering tendency. Medusa is a sod ear,/and the corral shudders with ponies: winged things.” In her poem, “Larks,” Boyer continues to take the reader on her prairies/plains journey: “do not hope for a minute I would not turret, moat and knight for you. I would Harvester and John Deere and Pioneer for you.”
Throughout the rest of the book, Boyer takes us on a romp, a revelation, and a rowdy journey, even a polka and waltz of the world and its language. She offers the reader the plain language of the plains and prairies with insights into what people know, but have known through different cultures and words. She uses the common and everyday to express the mystical revelations of an ordinary life; however, what she is really telling me is that there is nothing ordinary, or it is sublime in its ordinary nature — and that is the secret of these homely places. In her poems the obvious becomes an awareness that we live in unaware ways. Several of Boyer’s lines reflect this in the poem, “GRIP:” “People who think in lonely sentences are lonely./Beasts who think in lonely sentences are beasts.” I am trying to paraphrase what Boyer expresses in this book of poetry, that beside her glittering and sardonic wit is that the obvious is often too available for us to see; we need the Buddhist bonk on the head to help us identity what we have walked over without noticing.
Finally, Boyer uses the language of Lewis Carroll by creating new meanings for our words. With these line, “The cricketry thought/from the bray and the haw,” I understand what she is saying through the intuitive sound of language, with the denotative meaning of the words giving me the clues to what she may mean — or not mean. Another example of this if found in “Elegy,” in the lines, “The human thought a blouse/waist and south thought Adam.” Finally, in “Oh Universe!” Boyer writes (and reveals), “Twittering Atlas triggered/his handgun.”
Even though Boyer gives a location for her poems, I realize that where the poet fits geographically is a part of the poetry, but only a part of it. Location fits into the words and words fit into the location, thus resulting in a unique placement of the meaning of location. Because of location, Boyer’s language has immediacy to it. In areas where the natural world functions with the world of human beings, the human made materials are functional, reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ first few lines from his famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In a geography of open spaces, human existence does depend upon the word. I have often wondered if my placement (or life) in a small Midwestern city has thwarted my own freedom with language; there is something to be said about enlarging language experiences by being enveloped in the culture of people, rather than the culture of geographical spaces. Boyer seems to be able to embrace the vaster uses of language without sacrificing her feel for the land, people, and culture — somewhat and sometimes uninhabited.
- Mary Kasimor

“I can’t put Siberia down
but can’t keep holding onto it.”

This second couplet from the title poem of Anne Boyer’s debut collection sums up what makes the collection wonderful. The Romance of Happy Workers is something that no lover of poetry can put down once they’ve had a taste of it. Boyer tells us, “There is Kansas in the wilderness,” and she takes us on a tour of it. In this wilderness, in this Kansas, we learn that “stanza catfights with strophe,” the end // thought the broccoli [was] left / to yellow the summer,” and “twittering Atlas triggered / his handgun.” And those are only a few things. Be sure to keep close to Boyer in this wilderness.
But realize, that it’s all slipping around you. This wilderness is bright and enticing and will make you want to lose your inhibitions, but it can’t be held in the palm of a hand. Along the way in The Romance of Happy Workers, you’ll run into another Anne Boyer. This Anne Boyer “thought on fingering the moss in Iowa and threatened love with a fistful of honeysuckle.” This Anne Boyer “is a skirt being hemmed.” This Anne Boyer is the Kansas in the wilderness. And you won’t want to put any of it down. - Nathan Logan

Kay Boyle, Three Short Novels: The Crazy Hunter; The Bridegroom's Body; Decision,New Directions, 1958.

By far, Kay Boyle was the best literary discovery of 2014 for me, and I have the Buried book group/resource on Goodreads for alerting me to her work. In this collection, whether Boyle is focusing on the role a doomed horse plays in a dysfunctional and displaced family’s dynamics in the English countryside, the queer ways in which class disintegrate in the face of sex and nature, or the political ramifications of speaking out against authority, Boyle is a prose stylist without peer—so it’s a shame that her work has not earned her the reputation she so rightfully deserves. While her singular style owes much to Henry James, Boyle is a master all her own: a reader of her work will never view a sentence’s possibilities in quite the same way again
...Now reissued in The Revised Modern Classics series, Kay Boyle's Three Short Novels can once again startle the unwary reader with their brilliant combination of keen observation, skillfully crafted prose, and moral awareness. In "The Crazy Hunter," the killing of a blind gelding is pivotal in a power struggle between a businesslike mother, a feckless father, and an almost grown daughter. In "The Bridegroom's Body," swans become surrogates for human emotion in a story of suppressed passion and the unquestioned male subjugation of women. "Decision," the only overtly political story in the collection, deals with the liberating power of moral choice—even if the choice means almost certain death—in Franco's Spain. As Robert Smith wrote about Kay Boyle in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "Few American writers have written so beautifully of the human condition with a mind that recognizes the limitations of conduct and with a heart that sees the need to test those limits always by love and courage." - K. Thomas Kahn








Kay Boyle, Fifty Stories. New Directions, 1992.


read it at Google Books
excerpt


Kay Boyle’s Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience. Now in her ninetieth year, Kay Boyle dares us, in this most comprehensive collection of her stories, to explore the themes that have preoccupied her for a lifetime: "the inviolate integrity of the human soul, the impact of external events on the most intimate of feelings, our fractured experience of love versus duty, self-respect versus hubris, social convention versus personal ethic...She is still unquestionably modern" (Ann Hornaday, The New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed novelist Louise Erdrich has provided a very personal appreciation of Boyle’s power and grace. As she comments in the Introduction: "Kay is a citizen whose life and art are intertwined, one morally dependent on the other, both inexhaustible."

Kay Boyle, Crazy Hunter, New Directions, 1993.


“I think my Crazy Hunter is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Kay Boyle wrote to her sister Joan in 1939, two weeks after she had finished writing it. Twenty years later she wrote to a friend, it “remains one of my best, I think.” This stunning short novel portrays a family––an almost grown young woman, her mother, and her drunkard father––and a magnificent blind gelding. Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him. Part of Boyle’s “British” period (based on her year’s stay in Devon), The Crazy Hunter is a charged inquiry into family relations and moral choice.



Kay Boyle, Death of a Man,New Directions, 1989.
excerpt


When Death of a Man was first published in 1936, the anonymous reviewer in Time described the novel as a "Nazi idyll." Nothing could be further from the truth. Boyle, who lived in the town of Kitzbühel in the Tirolean Alps during the mid 30s, recalls that "In 1934, mothers, fathers, children––all barefoot––stood in the ankle-deep snow on the sidewalks of Vienna, their hands out-stretched for help .... Nazism as to them mutely accepted as the one hope for the economy." The subtlety and precision honed by Boyle in her acclaimed short stories are used in Death of a Man to describe the tragedy of a society pushed to the edge by circumstance but as yet unaware of the dangers, the incipient evil, of the course it is choosing. In this setting, the passionate relationship between the appealing and vigorous but pro-Nazi Dr. Prochaska and the pampered, neurotic American young woman Pendennis, is a paradigm of the difficulty of individual love in a disordered world.

Kay Boyle, Life Being: the Best & Other Stories. New Directions, 1988.
excerpt


In both her art and her life, Kay Boyle has exemplified that quality she values most in other artists––the bold articulation of a passionately held belief. An American expatriate in Europe from 1923-1941, Boyle was part of that pioneering group of modernists forging the "revolution of the word." Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are collected in Life Being the Best & Other Stories, are masterful in their complex, innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgment of the subversive realities of life. From the quivering expectancy of the three sisters awaiting "The First Lover" to the dashed hopes of the architect’s daughter in "The Meeting of the Stones" to the desperate remedy a small boy finds for life’s dissatisfactions in the title story, Boyle provides a catalog of the ways in which love can fail. The missed (or nearly missed) chances for human connection as each individual mounts his or her solitary quest for identity provide Boyle’s characters with moments of personal intensity and her readers with an ache of recognition. Boyle strove (as she once said of Harry Crosby) to write "with an alertness sharp as a blade and as relentless." She succeeded.


Author Kay Boyle was an American expatriate in Europe from 1923-1941. Her stories from that period, thirteen of which are included in this volume, are masterful in their complex and innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgment of the subversive realities of life. At the heart of all Kay Boyle's stories is "--a belief in the absolute certainty of love-on a private and public scale- and a sense of tragic loss when human connections fail, leaving individuals who are desperately in need, bnouncing off one another like atoms".

Kay Boyle, Process, University of Illinois Press, 2006.


Three quarters of a century after the manuscript of Kay Boyle's first novel disappeared, a carbon copy of it was discovered by Sandra Spanier, the pre-eminent Boyle authority. Set off by Spanier's substantial introduction, "Process" is published here for the first time in paperback. A classic bildungsroman, "Process" tells the story of Kerith Day, in search of her own identity and place in the world. A keenly critical observer of the dreary industrial landscape and the beaten-down inhabitants of her native Cincinnati, Ohio, Kerith determines to discover something better. She places her faith in art and politics and sets off for France, where workers and radicals are on the same side.


'Process' tells the story of Kerith Day, in search of her own identity and place in the world. A keenly critical observer of the dreary industrial landscape and the beaten-down inhabitants of her native Cincinnati, Ohio, Kerith determines to discover something better.







Kay Boyle, Avalanche,The Reader's League of America, 1944.


In the blacked-out carriage of a train running through "unoccupied" France sits a young American girl, Fenton Ravel. She knows that two men share her compartment, but in the blackness she cannot see their faces. As the night wears on, the two men try to draw her into their conversation - to discover what brings her alone to this dangerous country. But Fenton is too wary to speak the words aloud to strangers - that she has come to search for her lover who has disappeared in the dark intrigues that followed the coming of the enemy.



Kay Boyle, My Next Bride, Penguin, 1986.


"I am ready to take each act of my life as a stone in my hands, never to be denied,and my words will be like stones to myself, hard and irrevocable."
Victoria John, a young American with Puritanism in her blood, arrives in Paris in 1933 and takes a room in a Neuilly lodging-house. Here are two Russian women, starving and shivering over the remnants of their gentility who advise her to leave and tell her of Sorrel the visionary in his steel-grey tunic. Drawn into his fantastic artists' community where she sells handwoven scarves, she witnesses the dirt and conniving behind the scenes. Victoria is looking for truth but stumbles instead into drunkenness and emotional chaos when she meets the erratic artist, Anthony Lister. First published in 1934, this autobiographical novel which lays bare one woman's path to self-discovery, is a poetic and imaginative achievement.  



Kay Boyle, Plagued by the Nightingale, Virago Press, 1981. 


'Papa says we should have a child,' he said. 'A dear little child to run around and call us mama and papa. I can give it paralysis, what can you give it, my dear?'This extraordinary novel, first published in 1931, recounts the love story of the American girl Bridget and the young Frenchman Nicolas whom she marries. Bridget goes to live with his wealthy, close-knit family in their Breton village and finds there a group -- mother, father, sisters, and brother-in-law -- who love each other to the exclusion of the outside world.
But it is a love that festers, for the family is tainted with an inherited bone disease, a plague which, Bridget slowly discovers, can also infect the soul. Then Luc -- young, handsome, healthy -- arrives and Bridget is faced with a choice: confronting the Old World with the courage of the New she makes the bravest choice of all...
In subtle, rich and varied prose Kay Boyle echoes Henry James in a novel at once lyrical, delicate and shocking.


Sandra Spanier, ed.,Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters, University of Illinois Press, 2015


One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Kay Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children's books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievement can be even better appreciated through her letters to the literary and cultural titans of her time.

Kay Boyle shared the first issue of This Quarter with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, expressed her struggles with poetry to William Carlos Williams and voiced warm admiration to Katherine Anne Porter, fled WWII France with Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, socialized with the likes of James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett, and went to jail with Joan Baez. The letters in this first-of-its-kind collection, authorized by Boyle herself, bear witness to a transformative era illuminated by genius and darkened by Nazism and the Red Scare. Yet they also serve as milestones on the journey of a woman who possessed a gift for intense and enduring friendship, a passion for social justice, and an artistic brilliance that earned her inclusion among the celebrated figures in her ever-expanding orbit.






Joan Mellen, Kay Boyle: Author of Herself,  Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994.                           



Mellen's intimate, admiring, captivating biography of Boyle (1902-1992), short story writer, poet, novelist, memoirist and political activist, follows her egocentric trajectory as a "citizen of the planet." Fiercely ambitious, romantic, Minnesota-born Boyle moved to Paris in the 1920s, becoming a modernist writer and "golden girl" of the expatriate set. In the 1930s, living in Vienna with her second husband Laurence Vail, a surrealist painter, Boyle wrote emotive anti-Nazi pieces meant to show, as Mellen observes, how fascism "might be seen as a means to self-respect by ordinarily moral, indeed virtuous people." A New Yorker correspondent in postwar Europe, Boyle returned to the U.S. with her third husband, Austrian baron Joseph von und zu Franckenstein, to defeat a McCarthyite witchhunt branding them traitors. Boyle, living in the San Francisco area, emerged in the '60s as a writer of social conscience, fighting racism, militarism and the Vietnam war, but in her politics, as in her self-dramatizing fiction, she was "heroine of her own life," notes Mellen ( The Waves at Genji's Door ). An antifeminist who deemed the women's movement too narrow, she bore six children, viewing procreation as "a woman's natural destiny." Although Boyle was then forced to write for money, subverting her talent, Mellen makes a plausible case that her finest work, in particular her short stories, should be revived. - Publishers Weekly                

Driven by a mother who insisted she become a creative artist, prolific short story writer, poet, and novelist Boyle (1902-92) began writing at age five and never quit. A fascinating woman who lived on her own terms, Boyle was married three times, lived abroad for an extended period, authored more than 30 books, mothered six children, and became a social activist. Her literary fame reached is peak in the late 1930s, when, writing short stories for The New Yorker, she was hailed as one of the greatest of contemporary writers. Mellen (English, Temple Univ.) shows how after this point the sociopolitical climate of postwar America contributed to Boyle's decline as a writer, but she also makes it clear that Boyle squandered her talent by writing pulp for the mass market. Mellen emphasizes Boyle's life rather than her work, complementing the literary analysis in Sandra Spanier's Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (Southern Illinois Univ. Pr., 1986). This thorough and at times damning study is recommended for public libraries. - Ellen Finnie Duranceau

Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, Ed. by Matteo Pasquinelli, Meson Press, 2015.


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With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe and Ben Woodard.


One day, it will not be arbitrary to reframe twentieth century thought and its intelligent machines as a quest for the positive definition of error, abnormality, trauma, and catastrophe—a set of concepts that need to be understood
 in their cognitive, technological and political composition. It may be surprising for some to find out that Foucault’s history of biopower and technologies of the self share common roots with cybernetics and its early error friendly universal machines. Or to learn that the desiring machines, which “continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly” (Deleuze and Guattari), were in fact echoing research on war traumas and brain plasticity from the First World War. Across the history of computation (from early cybernetics to artificial intelligence and current algorithmic capitalism) both mainstream technology and critical responses to it have shared a common belief in the determinism and positivism of the instrumental or technological rationality, to use the formulations of the Frankfurt School. Conversely, the aim of this anthology is to rediscover the role of error, trauma and catastrophe in the design of intelligent machines and the theory of augmented cognition. These are timely and urgent issues: the media hype of singularity occurring for artificial intelligence appears just to fodder a pedestrian catastrophism without providing a basic epistemic model to frame such an “intelligence explosion”.


I could be wrong, but my hunch is that if you want to know about how the history of computation might point toward both possible and impossible futures for us all — this would be a great place to start.— McKenzie Wark


“An embryonic trauma can be found at the center of any new abstraction.” So writes Matteo Pasquinelli in his introduction to this must read collection on “the reason of trauma.” Needless to say given the number of new abstractions here, readers of Alleys of Your Mind are in for a shock, indeed many of them.
But as with other forms of trauma that can only be recognized as such the second time around, the new concepts elaborated here for the first time, from “cybernetic feedback as dialectics without the possibility of communism” (Pinto) to extended cognition as “encephalized sociality” (Wolfe)—with great political urgency—register intelligence as the legacy of crises that in one way or another are already occurring–to you.— Jonathan Beller

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Ed. by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson,The Ohio State University Press, 2015.


A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative offers a collection of foundational essays introducing the reader to the full scope of unnatural narrative theory: its meaning, its goals, its extent, its paradoxes. This volume brings together a distinguished group of international critics, scholars, and historians of literature that includes several of the world’s leading narrative theorists. Together, they survey many basic areas of narrative studies from an unnatural perspective: story, time, space, voice, minds, narrative levels, realism, nonfiction, hyperfiction, and narrative poetry. Rarely have these fundamental concepts been subjected to such an original and thoroughgoing reconceptualization. Much of the book is directed toward an investigation of experimental and antirealist work. Each essay focuses on texts and episodes that narrative theory has tended to neglect, and each provides theoretical formulations that are commensurate with such exceptional works. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative articulates and delineates the newest and most radical movement in narrative studies. This anthology will be of great interest to students and scholars of narrative studies and of the history and theory of modern fiction.


“A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative touches on all of the relevant research fields and all of the important theoretical texts. There are many fascinating debates within the contributions, and some traditional narratological concepts are revisited with rewarding results. This volume promises to be an important and provocative contribution to narrative theory.” —Alan Palmer


“Unnatural Narratology” at the Narrative Research Lab
“Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology” at the Narrative Research Lab
Narrative Research Lab


www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unnatural-narrative

Brian Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction,Ohio State University Press, 2006.



read it at Google Books




Brian Richardson presents a study that explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern narrative. Unnatural Voices analyzes in depth the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of experimental narrative voices that transcend familiar first- and third-person perspectives. Going beyond standard theories that are based in rhetoric or linguistics, this book focuses on what innovative authors actually do with narration.
Richardson identifies the wide range of unusual narrators, acts of narration, and dramas with the identity of the speakers in late modern, avant-garde, and postmodern texts that have not previously been discussed in a sustained manner from a theoretical perspective. He draws attention to the more unusual practices of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf as well as the work of later authors like Beckett and recent postmodernists. Unnatural Voices chronicles the transformation of the narrator figure and the function of narration over the course of the twentieth century and provides chapters on understudied modes such as second-person narration, "we" narration, and multiperson narration. It explores a number of distinctively postmodern strategies, such as unidentified interlocutors, erased events, the collapse of one voice into another, and the varieties of postmodern unreliability. It offers a new view of the relations between author, implied author, narrator, and audience and, more significantly, of the "unnatural" aspects of fictional narration. Finally, it offers a new model of narrative that can embrace the many non- and anti-realist practices discussed throughout the book.




“A landmark in narrative analysis and in the study of modern and postmodern fiction generally” —Modern Fiction Studies


“[A]ccessible to undergraduate students . . . . what Unnatural Voices ultimately argues for . . . is not a different poetics, but an additional one, an anti-mimetic poetics that supplements existing mimetic theories. landmark in narrative analysis and in the study of modern and postmodern fiction generally” —The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association


“Brian Richardson has written a stimulating, insightful, and thoroughly convincing book. Unlike critics who rely on well-known works of secure literary stature in presenting their theories, Richardson breaks out of that circle by providing a wealth of fresh and challenging literary touchstones and by working inductively rather than deductively. He recognizes that the unusual and aberrant examples provided by postmodern and postcolonial literature are just as valuable for study as canonical narratives and merit just as much theoretical consideration.” —William Nelles



Brian Richardson, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative,University of Delaware Press, 1997.
 
read it at Google Books


[Chapters on causality in philosophy and literature; the canons of probability governing fictional worlds; causal connection as defining feature of narrative (with analysis of Mrs Dalloway); chance in Conrad, Faulkner, and Ellison; Beckett's assault on causality; chance, cause and fate in minority, postcolonial, and postmodern texts.] Reviewed in Style


Unlikely Storiesis the first book-length study of the full range of causal issues in narrative, and explores the neglected question of just what brings about events in a fictional text. This book focuses on causality as a foundational element of all narratives, and as a distinguishing feature of many of the most compelling works of distinctively modern fiction and drama. Richardson draws on a wide range of literary texts: seminal ancient and early modern works, the classics of high modernism, numerous avant garde and postmodern pieces, as well as narratives by recent postcolonial and U.S. Ethnic authors. This study brings together a number of related critical issues, including the causal laws that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront major characters, and the philosophical and ideological ascriptions of cause that are variously embodied, interrogated, or parodied. One of the most significant features of this study is its disclosure of just how fundamental and widespread causal issues are in complex narratives--and how insistently they are thematized in twentieth-century works.
The first, theoretical section of the book explores several issues invariably present in the often curious intersections of philosophical and literary uses of causality, and engages in larger, ongoing debates involving deconstruction, feminism, and more traditional theories of narrative. It goes on to scrutinize claims about the nature of narrative, and outlines a theory of probability in fictional worlds that can both encompass traditional notions like fate and determinism as well as distinctive modern and postmodern uses of chance. The last half of the book identifies exemplary moments in modern deployments of causation present in Conrad's Nostromo, Faulkner's Light in August, and Ellison's Invisible Man, as the power of necessity is challenged by irruptions of chance and coincidence. This is followed by an account of Beckett's relentless interrogation of causality in Molloy>, perhaps the most farreaching such investigation in literature. Another chapter examines non-Western causal agencies, as Asian, postcolonial, and U.S. ethnic authors explore causal issues from quite different metaphysical vantage points. The final chapter provides an overview of contemporary practices, and identifies some distinctive postmodern strategies and potential limitations. Here the paradoxes of representing chance events in fictional discourse are outlined and discussed. This book also explores related questions of literary history and theory, ideological critique, and narrative sequencing.
"This is a book not so much about causality as about its infringements and displacements in modernist and postmodern narrative. Richardson gives us readings of a truly astounding range of novels, short stories and plays and explicates their structural and thematic preoccupations with causality, fate, chance and supernatural forces. Enjoyable, insightful and instructive: a book written with great tact and sophistication." - Monika Fludernik

Where You Are, Published & Edited by Visual Editions, 2015.
you can read, see, explore it all here


“Beautiful, unexpected ruminations on our place in the world” — The New York Times


“We really like the idea of starting an adventure through maps. The ability to find yourself in the unknown and discover new places – that’s what exploring is all about.” —Google Maps Team


“Where You Are is beautiful. Its contents delight the mind, its composition the senses.” —Will Gompertz


“These imaginative and irreverent personal cartographies expand the conception of a map as a flat reflection of geography and reclaim it, instead, as a living, breathing, dimensional expression of the human spirit.”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings


Where You Are is a book of maps. And it’s also a website www.where-you-are.com.
It’s a collection of writing (non-fiction and fiction) and visuals (drawings, photographs, paintings) that explodes what a map is. A wide range of writers, thinkers, artists responded to what their map would be, bringing together human stories about modern, everyday personal lives and mapping.
Those stories range from Chloe Aridjis’ short story mapping out the daily journeys of a homeless woman in Mexico City, to John Simpson essay that looks at the perils of following GPS systems in South Africa, to James Bridle mapping the technology and looking at how GPS was developed in the first place, to Geoff Dyer mapping out his childhood in Cheltenham according to sex, death and drugs, to Leanne Shapton documenting her everyday desk objects at the end of each working day.
Where You Are plants the flag at an amazing map-shifting point: from one kind of map — the geographical kind that gets you get from a to b — to another kind of map altogether — a life map that tells human stories about our everyday.
Where You Are begs the question: What would your personal map be? Here is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.




Contributors
Introduced by Will Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor
Chloe Aridjis
Lila Azam Zanganeh
Alain de Botton
James Bridle
Joe Dunthorne
Geoff Dyer
Olafur Eliasson
Sheila Heti + Ted Mineo
Tao Lin
Valeria Luiselli
Leanne Shapton
John Simpson
Adam Thirlwell
Peter Turchi
Will Wiles
Denis Wood
















http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/where-you-are