ACE Publications

2011-11-28T09:23:00.003-06:00

My review of Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on 11/27/11. I've reviewed a number of his other books in the past, including Love (for the Philadelphia Inquirer), and admire his work a great deal. For all the hype 1Q84 is receiving, much of it deserved, I hope Parallel Stories also finds its audience. It may very well be the best book I've read this year.

On a somewhat related note, I wrote about Hungarian fiction in translation a few months ago for Publishing Perspectives.

Parallel Stories
Péter Nádas

Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1,133 pages; $40)

Being a subversive writer must be difficult when whatever it is one stands in opposition to ceases to exist. And, to make matters worse, there's bound to be some disappointment when the new, longed-for regime fails to live up to its promise. These tensions enliven the Hungarian writer Péter Nádas' sprawling new novel, "Parallel Stories."

The title calls to mind Plutarch's "Parallel Lives," a series of biographies about influential Greek and Roman dignitaries written in the first or second century of what would become the Christian era. Those texts also served as the acknowledged inspirations for Nádas' 1986 novel "A Book of Memories," which was published in English to the breathless (and warranted) critical acclaim reserved for the most remarkable literary accomplishments.

On the surface, "Parallel Stories" would appear to be a sequel or some kind of continuation of that project (now up to 1,800 total pages in English translation, courtesy of the indefatigable Imre Goldstein). Both books consist of three parts divided into stand-alone chapters. There is, however, an important difference between "A Book of Memories" and "Parallel Stories." Nádas wrote the first during the Soviet occupation of Hungary and completed the second after the fall of the Berlin Wall - which is to say during the initial growing pains of a new Western-style democracy.

And the results are spectacular.

The two novels work in parallel much the way Plutarch's biographies did, but even taken alone, "Parallel Stories" is an epic on a literary par with Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" or William Gaddis' "The Recognitions." Unlike those books, however, it explodes the traditional linear story in favor of a patchwork approach that perfectly captures Hungary's unique and unenviable place at the burning center of Europe's brutal 20th century.

As in Roberto Bolaño's "2666," meaning accumulates over a series of stories that on the surface don't always appear related. "Parallel Stories" doesn't follow the traditional model of beginning, middle and end any more than do our own memories. There's no unifying plot in the traditional sense, but instead a series of forking paths. These vignettes have been arranged and published in a particular order, of course, but connections between them are for the most part left up to the reader. The book opens in 1989, but many of the goings-on take place during World War II and at other moments in Europe's recent past. The Hungarian anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 gets a lot of attention, as you might expect.

No out-of-context excerpt or example can do justice to such a lengthy novel, but a passage from "By the Summer of '57" exemplifies the overall mood and is worth quoting at length:

"The trains were taking orphans and bombed-out children somewhere, though the official language no longer permitted these innocent words, just as it had been forbidden, since March, to utter, even by accident, the word revolution. Jails and internment camps were full, reprisals against the uprising of the previous autumn had entered their most vicious stage, and people were determined not to let their mouths betray them; if they had managed to survive until now, they weren't going to make a wrong move and risk everything. Anyone talking to a policeman had to invent a whole other language, taking into account that the very act might be considered suspicious by people standing around."

Nobody is better than Nádas at articulating the constant renegotiation of what's possible. Most of his best scenes involve the interplay of three people or competing forces. "Everyone in Their Own Darkness" is set in one of Budapest's famous thermal bathhouses, where three friends are luxuriating near the hot springs when another guest collapses. "Margit Island" is set on the Danube River between Buda and Pest and features a young man named Kristóf. He's new to the city's gay cruising scene and finds himself checking out the other men: "Their freedom seemed beautiful and dazzling to him. He saw himself as tied down by tethers of convention." The different varieties of freedom - political, personal, sexual - might be seen as another theme here.

The timeline jumps around a lot and the prose style changes with it. You'll get used to it. In fact, the immense joy of reading the novel derives in large part from its lack of linearity. "Parallel Stories" reads like a series of half-remembered dreams (and occasional nightmares) and it seems to contain the entirety of 20th century Europe.

Nádas is the chronicler our era needs and deserves. Though he's focusing on the inner lives of these particular characters, his gaze is big enough to contextualize them amid thousands of years of history. When future generations want to know how we as a species survived the 20th century and what we lost along the way, "Parallel Lives" will have the answers.

San Francisco Chronicle // 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

2011-11-04T10:15:00.002-05:00

My review of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday Oct. 30.

1Q84
By Haruki MurakamiTranslated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip GabrielAlfred A. Knopf; 928 pages; $30.50

Haruki Murakami's "1Q84" is one of those rare novels that clearly depict who we are now and also offer tantalizing clues as to where literature may be headed. The title, of course, evokes George Orwell's masterpiece "1984," which is quite timely considering that Orwell is everywhere these days. Flip through this very newspaper and you may well find references to "Big Brother" and "thoughtcrime" and "Newspeak." If "1Q84" is any indication, Murakami will one day prove to be just as much of a visionary.

"1Q84," like Murakami's other novels - among them "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "Kafka on the Shore" - is a remarkable book in which outwardly simple sentences and situations snowball into a profound meditation on our own very real dystopian trappings.

The chapters here alternate between two story lines that slowly converge like parallel lines on the horizon. In one, a young woman named Aomame - which literally means "green peas" - works as a kind of demure assassin, taking revenge on men who have physically abused their wives. The other features Tengo, a former judo wrestler who teaches math and is haunted by an image from when he was a baby. We move gracefully between their two stories, and soon see that Aomane and Tengo knew each other as children. Their eventual reunion begins to feel inevitable but, in Murakami's hands, never contrived.

When we first meet Aomame, in a scene reminiscent of the opening of Fellini's film "8 1/2," it's 1984 and she is stuck in Tokyo traffic on her way to an important meeting. Her taxi driver recommends climbing down a set of emergency stairs and getting on the subway, which she does. In the process, however, something changes in the fabric of her reality. Her new world mirrors the one to which she had grown accustomed throughout her entire life, but she soon notices staggering physical changes around her.

"There were two moons in the sky - a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with moss."
Aomame naturally questions her own sanity, but she gives the new world the name 1Q84. (In Japanese, the No. 9 has the same pronunciation as the letter Q in English.)

"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question."

All things considered, she handles the change pretty well.

"Like it or not, I'm here now, in the year 1Q84. The 1984 that I knew no longer exists. It's 1Q84 now. The air has changed, the scene has changed. I have to adapt to this world-with-a-question-mark as soon as I can. Like an animal released into a new forest. In order to protect myself and survive, I have to learn the rules of this place and adapt myself to them."Meanwhile, Tengo's story is equally fascinating. He aspires to be an author and takes on the job of ghostwriting a novella, titled "Air Chrysalis," by a dyslexic teen named Fuka-Eri. He and his calculating editor plan to submit it for Japan's biggest literary prize. As their scheme gets under way, against Tengo's better judgment, the reader starts to see some similarities between Fuka-Eri's fictional world and Aomame's 1Q84. There's also a strange religious cult lurking in the background, but its significance to Tengo's efforts is difficult to discern.

Murakami clearly appreciates that Orwell matters now more than ever. "1984" serves as a kind of guiding light here, in large part because that novel seems to have predicted every element of our current surveillance state.

The term "Orwellian" has come to signify any form of technology capable of recording personal information and potentially used for invasive purposes, from ATMs to your Netflix queue or hacked cell phone. (The enormous contributions that the rest of Orwell's wonderful oeuvre have made to our literary landscape have not received the same attention and, tragically, do not factor into our current usage of "Orwellian.") What makes the world of "1984" so terrifying is how subtly it mirrors and mimics our own world. That's also true of "1Q84."

I'd be curious to know how Murakami's yeoman translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel divided up the work - did one follow Aomame and the other Tengo? - because there are no noticeable bumps in the pristine and deceptively simple prose.

More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world, and he's not afraid to incorporate elements of surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for who we really are. "1Q84" is a tremendous accomplishment. It does every last blessed thing a masterpiece is supposed to - and a few things we never even knew to expect.

Update 11/28: This review was apparently reprinted in the Denver Post and San Antonio Express-News.

Miami Herald // Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

2011-09-12T15:04:00.001-05:00

My review of Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams ran in the 9/11/11 Miami Herald.

The difficulty of publishing a masterpiece like Jesus’ Son — apart from, you know, actually writing it — is that every book Denis Johnson writes for the rest of his life will be compared to it. Part of what makes his work so great is that the prose is so deceptively simple. Tree of Smoke, the magisterial epic about America and its involvement in Vietnam that earned Johnson the 2007 National Book Award, also shows a great deal of restraint. Johnson consistently builds complex and frequently damaged characters out of carefully chosen details and gestures. And he makes it look easy.

Johnson’s new novella may be his most pared-down work of fiction yet, but make no mistake — it packs a wallop. The text originally appeared in the venerable Paris Review in 2002 and now finds its way back into print not a moment too soon. I’m not sure why Johnson waited so long to resurrect this story, but I’m glad he did. Perhaps the growing popularity of e-readers is contributing to the recent resurgence of the novella form. Whatever the reason, Train Dreams is a small book of weighty ideas. It renders the story of America and our westward course of empire in the most beautiful and heartbreaking manner imaginable.

The story begins around the turn of the 20th century and focuses on Robert Grainier, who has joined a lynch mob attempting to murder a “Chinaman” who helped build the railroads but got accused of pilfering from his employer. While making his escape, the laborer puts a curse on Grainier, or so he believes, and that will have a profound impact on the remainder of his and his family’s life. That said, I don’t want to write too much about what else happens to Grainier, for fear of ruining for you what is an intense and rewarding reading experience. (My own reading of the novella was interrupted by an earthquake and a hurricane. That seems appropriate somehow.) The clashes of competing forces — American vs. Chinese, for example— is vintage Johnson. So too is the confusion between religion and superstition.

Train Dreams is easily construed as some sort of commentary on American expansionism and manifest destiny. Johnson writes: “This sudden attention to terrain so long neglected constituted a disruption in the natural world, about as much as if the Almighty himself had been hit in the head.” The will to move westward carried with it every nature of sacrifice — the uprooting of native populations, the destruction of vast natural vistas — in the name of progress. But Johnson is too smart of a writer, and too subtle, to offer a blanket approval or condemnation of those policies. He’s interested in bigger questions.

Train Dreams explores what was lost in the process of American growth. Much to his credit, Johnson doesn’t simply posit industry and nature against each other, or science and religion, or even human and animal, but instead looks at how their interactions can transform both. And Grainier is there through all of this examination, over the course of his long and sad life, to serve as our witness and maybe even our conscience.

Philadelphia Inquirer // We Others by Steven Millhauser

2011-07-31T09:05:00.004-05:00

I had a great deal of fun reading and rereading the stories in Steven Millhauser's We Others: New and Collected Stories. I brought the galleys with me to Seattle last month and it was the perfect thing for a pair of cross-country flights. It's a spectacular book.

My review is in today's Philly Inquirer. It's always cool to write for the newspaper I grew up reading, and to which I still subscribe:

I'm usually not a big fan of greatest-hits collections like this one. A typical book of short stories, artfully arranged, has its own inner logic and narrative arc in the same way a great record does. Taken alone, a song such as Springsteen's "Blinded By the Light," for example, always rocks, but the way it effectively sets the mood and raises the bar for everything still to come on Greetings From Asbury Park cannot be overstated. And that song is made even better by what follows it. Context is everything.
Fortunately, We Others isn't only a greatest-hits introduction to Steven Millhauser's world - it's a cordial invitation to it. And his is a world that looks an awful lot like our own, except distorted ever so slightly, enough to make it comfortable and disconcerting at the same time. Over the last three decades, Millhauser has proven himself to be one of our most consistently dazzling American voices. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler - one of the truly great novels of our time - and has become the kind of big-time author who will have prizes named after him one day. (Not anytime soon, I hope, as those tend to be posthumous.)
Of the 21 stories here, seven are new and 14 have been cherry-picked from four previous collections, "as if," an Author's Note points out, "they'd been written by someone whose work I had never seen before." The patchwork approach here gives us the opportunity to focus on the mechanics and beauty of each individual story. Not every one will hit home with every reader - the diversity of styles precludes that possibility - but we'll always find something profound and worthwhile.
Take "The Slap," among the newer stories here. The premise is simple, and weird: A sleepy New York town is thrown into distress by the presence of a stranger who every so often shows up to slap a resident in the face. The good citizens' fear and outrage grow to near-manic proportions over the perhaps harmless violations. "Far from spreading random terror, the Slapper was making a point: his target was not particular people, but the town itself." The growing tension soon reaches the telltale heart of the suburban dream.
"Getting Closer" concerns a 9-year-old boy named Jimmy picnicking with his family and eagerly looking forward to jumping in a river. He doesn't dive right away - he's not scared, but rather wants to savor the anticipation. Millhauser here toys with the way time functions in fiction. "Everything has led up to this moment. No, wrong, he isn't there yet. The moment's just ahead of him. This is the time before the waiting stops and he crosses into what he's been waiting for." It's a strangely captivating story that uses Zeno's paradox as a way of spelunking the adolescent imagination.
"The Invasion from Outer Space" is another gem. In it, Millhauser retells the traditional alien-invasion sci-fi story, but does so in a way so realistic that it doesn't feel like mere camp or fantasy. It demonstrates what makes this author so fascinating: Millhauser can pinpoint the deeper truths about how spectacular and even life-changing events can appear ordinary on the surface. Along the same lines, though, he also locates moments of transcendence in the most mundane details of our everyday lives.
The title piece, "We Others," is the only of the new stories that left me wanting less rather than more. (Even if the magnificent chestnuts "Eisenheim the Illusionist" and "August Eschenburg" were 1,000 pages long, they would still be too short for my taste.) It's an expansive take on the ghost story that I was personally unable to warm up to. I imagine, however, that many readers will love it.
Of the previously published stories, "The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad" and "A Visit" are particular favorites. "A Protest Against the Sun" calls to mind both Thomas Mann and Yukio Mishima, yet feels entirely fresh and original.
Perhaps this comparison is unfair to both authors, but Millhauser at times ("The Next Thing" and "People of the Book") also reads a bit like the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges in his ability to take an outlandish or even metaphysical concept and bring it to full artistic fruition on the page. Millhauser also avoids the cliches and formulas endemic to so many of our contemporary factory-farmed MFA short stories. If Millhauser had as many disciples as, say, Denis Johnson or Alice Munro (both wonderful authors, I should add), our literary landscape would be a lot more wondrous and capable of surprise.
One possible critique of We Others is that these stories appeal more often to the intellect than to the heart - that they're researched, but not felt - but those strike me as tired and even sad distinctions. What I love about Millhauser's fiction in general and the stories in We Others, new and old, is that they're delightfully weird and sometimes even challenging in the best possible ways. They contain big words and big ideas. They will force you to think about the world around you a bit differently. But, mama, that's where the fun is.

Tin House // "Book Clubbing"

2011-07-28T10:15:00.006-05:00

The nice people at Tin House asked me to write something about my favorite bookshop for their blog. I have to admit that I geeked out a little bit when I got the email--it's one of my absolute favorite magazines. I wrote about The Spiral Bookcase, here in my Philly neighborhood of Manayunk.

My first best-seller list

2011-07-28T10:15:00.005-05:00

It turns out that Extraordinary Renditions made the list of SPD's Fiction Best-Sellers for May-June 2011, which is kind of cool as the book came out back in September.

I also learned this week that the book has sold enough copies that I earned out my advance, which is great news (as far as I understand these things), especially for a independent, non-profit press like Coffee House.

Miami Herald // The Astral by Kate Christensen

2011-07-10T10:10:00.001-05:00

Harry Quirk, the appropriately named hero of Kate Christensen’s engaging sixth novel, is a “malnourished string bean of a poet eligible for AARP” and increasingly out of his element in his gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. His wife Luz has just kicked him out of their apartment, located in a building called The Astral. Perhaps their relationship was never meant to be, considering that they met in a hospital and on their first date he asked her, over Chinese food, “You’re insane, do you know that?”
Luz has found evidence of Harry’s extramarital activities with his friend Marion — or so she believes — in a notebook of ideas and unpublished poems, which she promptly destroyed. His attitude has also confirmed her suspicions. “I had been feeling lost and alone in recent years,” he reports. “like a failure, a has-been. Marion had just lost her husband. We were pals, comrades, drinking buddies in our hour of mutual need and sadness. But I had not touched her, nor she me, except for the usual hug and kiss hello.” But there’s no persuading Luz of his innocence.
Harry ends up crashing on Marion’s sofa, while negotiating an uneasy relationship with his lesbian, freegan daughter Karina and planning to visit his son Hector, who has recently been re-named Bard at a commune where they purported to “live humbly and simply, sharing everything as the first-century Christians had.” In short, his story is that of an old-fashioned man in a rapidly changing world over which he has no control.
Even a simple visit to the neighborhood donut shop becomes a trial when a passing compliment to the Polish girl behind the counter gets him beat up by another customer.
“One meaty hand squeezed both of my bony ones, convincing me to release my grip on his windpipe. The other meaty hand punched me full in the face and picked up the metal napkin dispenser and slammed it into my eye. I was pulled off him by someone very firm and purposeful, and then my enemy and I were both in handcuffs being led out of the donut shop by two cops who clearly would have preferred to stay there all day.”
The reason for the assault is never totally clear to Harry, but then again few things are. He gets booked, thrown in a cell with his assailant, and issued a court summons, all which make it perfectly obvious to those around him that he’s not very capable of looking out for himself. Left to his own devices, he begins to write an epic poem titled The Astral, intended to be “a sort of modern-day, secular, personal Paradise Lost orInferno, but it wasn’t going well.”
Yet Christensen doesn’t stop there. She amps up the tension, suspense, and pathos until it feels like the book could ignite in your hands. She’s a spectacular author who’s only beginning to get the attention she so richly deserves, such as the 2008 PEN/Faulkner for The Great Man. Her style is unique in that her work is more based on fascinating and real — maybe too real — characters rather than upon on the same three or four basic plots we’ve seen a million times. And Harry Quirk is one of her greatest creations. (I will admit that I’m also quite partial to Hugo, the creepy hero of The Epicure’s Lament.) Christensen is amazing at capturing male voices and desires, particularly the ones that don’t often get aired outside Philip Roth novels.
I can’t wait to see how Christensen’s work develops over the coming decades. She has the makings of a major American author. Her storytelling derives organically from a firm grasp of characterization and how people work, flaws and all. The Astral, artfully composed and emotionally tender, is evidence of true literary genius.

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

2011-05-30T07:55:00.003-05:00

My review of David Foster Wallace posthumous, unfinished novel The Pale King ran yesterday (5/29/11) in my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer.

The story lines here never fully converge, but many of them involve the employees of an Internal Revenue Service regional examination center in Peoria, Ill. An editor's note at the beginning of The Pale King describes the challenging process of turning shopping bags full of manuscript pages into a salable book. Apparently, at the time of his death in 2008, Wallace did not leave behind detailed plans or outlines for the project. That said, the lack of a traditional, linear plot works to the advantage of Wallace's inimitable style, which combined a maximalist obsession with the intricacies of arcane topics (such as Reagan-era tax codes, as is the case here) with a microscopic or even pointillist ability to examine the subtlest nuances of our ever-shifting attitudes and inner lives. He was willing - or was compelled - to probe the darkest and remote crevices of the human psyche, where few other authors dare to venture.

The Pale King is sure to delight the zealous fan base that made Infinite Jest into an unlikely cult phenomenon. I mean, you try lugging a 1,104-page book around all day in your messenger bag! Wallace was known for his frequent and manic use of footnotes and endnotes, a device that purposely disrupted linear reading by making us flip back and forth and often injected a kind of absurdist humor. Sixty-six pages in, we get to an Author's Foreword, in which a character named David Wallace insists that he is the real author David Foster Wallace (not to be confused with another David Wallace character here):

Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona. Granted, there sometimes is such a persona in The Pale King, but that's mainly a pro forma statutory construct, an entity that exists just for legal and commercial purposes, rather like a corporation.

The risk with these hey-looky-here devices is a kind of cuteness or cleverness that often comes at the expense of nuanced and carefully crafted characters in the traditional sense. But the traditional sense didn't appear to be Wallace's primary concern in The Pale King, and one has to admire his ability to make fiction work in fruitful new ways. He effectively expanded the range of what a work of fiction could look like and how it could behave.

While in The Pale King we get - for better and for worse, I must admit - all the so-called po-mo pyrotechnics his readers have come to expect, it also features a number of characters for whom we can't help rooting. The most memorable among them is probably a schoolboy named Leonard, who is such an overzealous goody-goody that even the authority figures begin to detest him.

My favorite section of the book involves a Jesuit professor attempting, on the last day of an advanced tax course, to impress on his students the value of drudgery:

"To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress - this will happen, mark me. . . . True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk."

The apparent if not actual tension here between the transcendent and the mundane is vintage David Foster Wallace. The Pale King, like everything he wrote, is prone to long bouts of intense navel-gazing, but his ability to bring the ponderous back down to Earth with a carefully chosen detail or image helps keep his characters and readers grounded in the real (whatever that might be) here and now.

It's never a good idea to scour the dung heap of fiction for corn kernels of autobiographical insight, not even when a character or two shares the author's name (especially not then), but it seems to me that in The Pale King (as elsewhere in his oeuvre), Wallace wrote very, very honestly about his own internal fragilities and occasional moments of enlightenment. No American writer has ever known himself better. The Pale King is a novel to savor, to read slowly, to allow to steep in the imagination, to recite aloud to a loved one when the house is quiet. But it's also terribly sad, reminding us of just how much American letters has lost with his tragic and untimely passing.

Jeanne M. Leiby (1964-2011)

2011-04-25T08:15:00.003-05:00

I’ve struggled with what to say about my friend Jeanne Leiby, who passed away last week. When she took over as editor of the venerable Southern Review a few years ago, she instituted their radical Resident Scholar program in which a recent creative writing grad would go to work for the magazine and teach one class each semester at LSU … and get paid for his own writing time.

I was the first person to get the job, which allowed me to work with Jeannie twenty hours a week (give or take) for two years at Old President’s House, located on the campus of Louisiana State University. During the first year, she and I pretty much made up the job responsibilities on the fly, day by day, and tailored it to the things I can do well (which do not include, I might add, Chicago Manual-style line edits or catching typos). Then, every year another talented writer came in for a two-year stint, so there would be overlap and more distinct voices contributing to the magazine. What an awesome idea. The two Resident Scholars there now are great people, and have also made their jobs their own.

Creating the Resident Scholar position was the kind of too-crazy-to-work idea that Jeannie excelled at. (I can hear her now giving me grief about ending that previous sentence with a preposition.) At least once a day, she would come barreling into the conference room, where I liked to read the manuscripts under consideration, and yell, “I got it!”

50% of the time her ideas were terrible (e.g. moving all the editors into one room) and I would tell her so. 25% of the time the ideas weren’t very good, but I didn’t want to break it to her, so I suggested she run it past other people on the staff. (Sorry, Leslie!) But … 25% of the time, she was on to something.

25%? I would take those odds any day of the week.

Jeannie was a visionary editor, someone who painted in strokes broader than anyone else thought were possible. She had big ideas, all the time, and I was the lucky recipient of one of them. Of course, with that kind of vision usually comes an equally super-sized personality. Working with her wasn’t always easy, but she never wavered in placing the long-term needs of The Southern Review ahead of her own well being and that of her staff. Her methods and her management style were unorthodox to say the least.

She could frustrate me beyond all comprehension, though I’m sure that I more than returned that particular favor. She was also a stickler for paperwork—“It’s too bad your boss is such a bitch,” she told me once, talking about herself—until something more important crossed her desk and distracted her. One thing I found unusual, if not outright baffling, was her dogged insistence that everyone fill out their administrative paperwork in blue ink. It had to be blue. Mind you, these forms never left the confines of The Southern Review’s offices. No one ever looked at them. On one occasion, I filled out the paperwork to her exacting standard of color and penmanship and she promptly fed it into the shredder.

In retrospect (my position having ended almost eight months ago), I see all too well that although Jeannie’s focus on the minutia of process often seemed eccentric and unpredictable at the time, it’s what made her such a remarkable editor. The issues of The Southern Review she helmed will speak for themselves forever. She expected a lot from the people around her, from her colleagues and students, and in turn we all improved as editors and writers. She was enormously inspiring, if not in the traditional rah-rah ways. I wrote a ton of fiction during my two years there. Whatever her methods any particular week, there’s no questioning the final product. Her issues of The Southern Review are incredible in every way. Her contribution to Southern letters, though cut short, cannot be overstated.

(I’m giving some thought to writing an essay about her 13-issue tenure, if I can. Her too-short time there covered Summer 2008 to Spring 2011, with another issue currently in production. It will be difficult to live with those texts again—oh she hated the word “text”—and with the emotions they will surely dislodge in me. We’ll see…)

The last time I saw Jeannie was in mid-July of 2010. She was going on vacation shortly before I was leaving Baton Rouge for my native Philadelphia. We met for lunch at Chelsea’s, the kind of gourmet dive that Louisiana specializes in. We were there for hours, consuming massive amounts of iced tea and Diet Coke; the wait staff had cleared all the other tables, but we were unwilling to leave, to say goodbye.

Finally, it was time to go, but we both had to pick up a few things across the road at the Bet-R supermarket. There, in the produce section, she hugged me and said, “I love you, Drew.”

I was a little surprised, I admit. Not at the love, but at its expression. “I love you, too,” I said. And I meant it. And I still do.

Philadelphia Book Festival

2011-04-15T09:47:00.002-05:00

On Saturday April 16, I will be signing copies of Extraordinary Renditions at The Philadelphia Book Festival from 2-5. My local indie shop The Spiral Bookcase will have a booth. (Did you know that you can find your own closest indie bookshop here?)

During that time, Stewart O'Nan will also be signing copies of his new novel, Emily, Alone, which is getting stellar reviews. Afterward, weather permitting, we head down to see Cole Hamels and the Phillies beat up on those Florida Marlins.

There are some facts you might not know about Cole Hamels here. I submitted #401, which could be unfortunately appropriate for the evening's forecast.

Friday April 15

2011-04-15T09:00:00.004-05:00

Today is the official pub date of The Pale King, which I'm 100 pp. into. The DFW Industry makes me a little uneasy, but I'm struggling to put my finger on why exactly that is. His self-appointed BFF Jonathan Franzen has a spectacular essay in the current New Yorker about dealing with his grief. Wallace's lasting legacy might end up being the way he was willing to writing about a wider and truer range of his own inner-monologue; he expanded the emotional landscape available to to writers, and Franzen makes wonderful and heartbreaking use of it here.

Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? does something similar in that it draws from a different part of the inner life than most literature. It accomplishes a kind of self-examination that most people never get close to doing. It's my favorite book of the year so far and worthy of far more attention than it's getting. Sheila was nice enough to mail me a copy, as it's not for sale yet in the U.S.

My reading list is swelling in anticipation of more leisure time this summer. I can't wait to get to The Color of Night by my former teacher Madison Smartt Bell. His recent interview about his inspiration was just spectacular. I studied with Madison as an undergrad many years ago, and even now I find myself relying on things I learned from him, both in my own writing and when teaching. I identified with this strange interview perhaps a little bit too much.

I'd like to thank Tim Horvath for this thoughtful refutation of the lone negative review of Extraordinary Renditions, which appeared on the blog of The Writer's Center. I've admired Horvath's fiction and an enormously grateful for his efforts. He wasn't the first author to come to defense of the book. Last month, Anis Shivani had this to say on the Huffington Post:

As though to thumb their noses at the rest of the reviewing community at the end of a year of calculated affront, the Times picked Andrew Ervin's Extraordinary Renditions, from Coffee House Press, for a good old thrashing. Ervin's crime was that he tried to bring a risky politics to his three intersecting novellas--not the kind of thing the Times goes for.

Kyle Semmel also interviewed me for that same blog. The topics we covered included the Hungarian (non-)response to the book, my current research into Philadelphia's (and my own) Lenape heritage, my fear of A.M. Homes, and my harassment of Julian Barnes:

Shortly before I moved abroad, while I was still an undergrad, I sent a series of letters to the English author Julian Barnes. I asked for advice, tried to pawn off my own horrible early stories on him, and so on. His replies were always thoughtful and unfailingly polite, even in the face of my sophomoric and ham-handed invasions of his privacy. One of the things he told me has been vitally important to my development (such as it is) of my writing: Barnes told me to write for myself and for that part of myself I see in the people closest to me. That is still how I think of my audience...

Finally, here's the gartner snake I found on a Philadelphia sidewalk. It was injured and I picked it up and moved it to my front yard, where it buried its head. I'd worried that it died, either from its injury or maybe the recent cold spell.

A First Draft

2011-04-10T09:41:00.004-05:00

While I figure out how I'm going to merge this blog with my site er3n.com, I'll post a little bit about what I'm working on.

I have a story collection nearly finished. The collection is anchored by a 5-story cycle called "Down the Shore" and loosely inspired, at least formally, by Tibor Dery's "Games of the Underworld." Stories in "Down the Shore" have appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review and Monkeybicycle and one is forthcoming in Conjunctions.

Yesterday I finished the first draft of the fourth story in the cycle (which will probably end up coming third when they're put together), and here's what my first drafts typically look like. I hope to get this into shape over the next few weeks, and then write the oh so grand finale.

In other news, books I'm reading now or want to read very soon include: The Pale King, Emily Alone, Nowhere Near Normal, Luminarium, There is No Year, and Silver Sparrow. And this summer I'm looking forward to finally getting to Freedom and beginning my research about the original Lenape settlement at what became Philadelphia.

Philadelphia Inquirer // Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah

2011-03-27T08:42:00.002-05:00

My review of Barry Hannah's posthumous Long, Last, Happy is in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Also, on Friday night out at Arcadia University (where they're starting a terrific looking low-res MFA program, I might add), I had the pleasure of attending a reading by Brad Watson, who was a student of Hannah's. I'd like to encourage you to read his stories. I'm halfway through Aliens in the Prime of their Lives now and am floored.

Here's that Hannah review:

Barry Hannah's posthumous collection of stories, Long, Last, Happy, is large enough to use as a doorstop and incendiary enough to burn a rain-soaked barn to the ground. Hannah died last year at 67, but only after a long career of marking a sizable territory for himself within the world of Southern literature.
He was the author of 13 story collections and novels, the first of which, Geronimo Rex, was nominated for the National Book Award and won the William Faulkner Prize. He would go on to win many more awards, including a Guggenheim and the PEN/Malamud. As Long, Happy, Last makes clear, his best writing often was in his short stories.
Hannah's stories are crude, irascible, indecent, and sometimes offensive, but I'm sure they have some bad qualities, too. The 31 tales here span his entire career, beginning in 1964 and including four new ones. The book comes across more like a boxed-set anthology than a greatest-hits collection. Unless you are, for example, getting paid to review it, you may jump around and skip the stories that don't grab your attention. No shame in that.
But even the less-than-superb work here has some interesting - and frequently disquieting - things to say. But I've come to praise Barry Hannah, not bury him (again), so I'd like to tell you about the best stories contained herein.
At his best, Hannah wrote like a man held at gunpoint by the devil himself. Stories such as "Drummer Down," "Bats Out of Hell Division," and the early "Sick Soldier at Your Door" read like classics, or like epics reconfigured for our own troubled times. They are redolent of the oral storytelling tradition.
"Fans" is set on "the morning of the big game in Oxford, Mississippi," and it looks at the emotional underbelly of sports fanaticism. The trouble begins in the opening paragraph: "The bar was out of their brand of beer, and they were a little drunk, though they had come to that hard place together where there seemed nothing, absolutely nothing to say." Wright, to the chagrin of his father, is talking yet again about his friendship with the team's star player, Jet, who was guilty of some horrendous off-the-field actions. These fans' own unfulfilled dreams linger in the margins of these pages.
"Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet" is set in Vietnam during the war. A young man has become strangely obsessed with a photograph of a golfer taken by a compatriot. "Here we shot each other up. All we had going was the pursuit of horror. I had never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer." Such coming-of-age dichotomies turn up in a number of these stories.
"High-Water Railers" features a circle of elderly men who hang out at a fishing pier, where they tell the same stories they've shared with one another for years. Sidney Farte and the rest of these guys are as real as you and me. Hannah's greatest gift was his talent for capturing voices, but much of what's said here cannot be quoted in a family-friendly newspaper. Their uneasy peace is broken by the arrival of Melanie, the widow of one of their friends: "Something was always suspended when she came around. A sort of startled gentility set in, unbearable, to Farte, like sudden envelopment by a church."
Hannah's similes are perfect throughout. A kid's grandfather looks at him "like I was a crab who could say a couple of words." Some people killed in an explosion are "like flesh sparklers over the water just out of Cuba." A lovely woman in "Testimony of Pilot" looks "like something that hung around New Orleans and kneaded your heart to death with her feet."
Many themes pop up again and again. These characters are growing up in the South, making music, dropping out of college, losing their vision, fighting in Vietnam. Some stories are so unusual - in content and in structure - that they read as if Hannah simply jotted down the tall tales and twice-told stories picked up at every juke joint and fishing hole and crossroads between Tuscaloosa and Little Rock, but that does not in anyway undermine the intense literary craftiness at work.
Like Faulkner before him, Hannah dedicated himself to perpetuating a kind of down-home mythology. In the two years I spent in Louisiana - not in Angola, I should add, but close - I saw just enough to undermine all my unfortunate Yankee prejudices about the South. OK - most of them. Many of Hannah's characters are unapologetic racists and homophobes, and while they come across as equally believable and unlikable, they also reflect only one tiny segment of the population down there. The South that Hannah describes - and by many accounts fully embodied - is one that may be passing into history and legend. Not everyone will be sad to see it go.

er3n.com

2011-03-27T08:39:00.002-05:00

As you may have noticed, this blog pretty much migrated over to here after my book came out. I'm trying to figure out a good way to integrate this page with that site. I hope to have this up and running again soon.

The Believer // Nox by Anne Carson

2010-09-20T12:59:00.002-05:00

My review of Anne Carson's magnificent Nox is in the September issue of The Believer. My review starts like this...

Anne Carson’s Nox doesn’t look or behave like any other book of poetry (or prose) out there. It’s not a book in the traditional sense; the usual binary of verso and recto is confounded by one long page that accordions out of a coffin-like box. But its physical shape isn’t the only thing that makes Nox so special; the text itself is an assemblage of words and images so artfully arranged that they make us reconsider not only what poetry can do—and should do—but even what a book is.
Like B. S. Johnson’s book-in-a-box, The Unfortunates, Nox will change the way you read. It’s a reproduction of the handmade book Carson lovingly wrote and assembled after the death of her estranged older brother, Michael. “When my brother died,” she tells us, “I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” It contains her own poetry, translations, photographs, canceled stamps, letterhead, you name it. From those artifacts the details of her relationship with Michael, of his life on the run, and ultimately of his demise, come with dirgelike slowness. We learn that he had legal problems, was homeless for some time in Europe, and that he rarely wrote home. His distance makes his death all the more tragic. “When my brother died (unexpectedly) his widow couldn’t find a phone number for me among his papers until two weeks later. While I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea.”

Extraordinary Renditions published today

2010-09-01T09:20:00.003-05:00

Well the book is officially out. Here are some early reviews...

"To read Andrew Ervin’s new book is to know why independent small-press publishing just may hold the ticket to our future in literary fiction. Ervin skillfully converges three lives in three stories by intertwining beautiful, minor details that bring separations into an exquisite whole. "

-The Longest Chapter

"With dexterous sensibility and fluid prose, Ervin’s protagonists find liberation from the onerous strictures of Budapest’s Nazi and Communist past."

-Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

"Ervin’s prose style seems to fit his protagonists, becoming more elegant for Harkályi, angrier and more combative for Gibson, and more diffident for Scholes until the climax, as the theme of “Strange Fruit” grows stronger. A thoughtprovoking exploration of tyranny, freedom, and the power of music."

-Booklist

"Ervin writes with fluidity and authenticity about a place in which he himself lived for several years in the late 1990s … the range and intensity of this book provide a welcome reminder that the world is a vast and complicated place, especially for those willing to explore its edges."

-New York Journal of Books

"Andrew Ervin has used this factual history to compose his own triptych-like storypiece, one that reveals true historical details from Budapest, the military (both then and now), and the structure of orchestras and music. … The stories have a synchronicity to them because of their themes, and while the characters seek resolution, their path is never clear cut. … I really enjoyed the historical details of this novel."

-The Black Sheep Dances

Publisher's Weekly - Fall Indie Sleepers

2010-08-30T09:43:00.003-05:00

I'm enormously flattered that Extraordinary Renditions made the list of "Top 20 hand-sells from independent press this fall."

Extraordinary Renditions
Andrew Ervin
Coffee House Press (dist. by Consortium)
Sept., $14.95 paperback original; 7,000 first printing
3-city tour; more than 1,000 galleys
"Through the eyes of three outsiders, Extraordinary Renditions takes the reader deep into the heart of Budapest, both its past and present," says Stewart O'Nan. "The whole city is here, the banks of the Danube brimming with history, intrigue, art, food, drink, and most important of all, music. His characters may be lost—even the one native is a foreigner—but Andrew Ervin is a sharp-eyed, sure-handed guide."

Miami Herald // New Stories from the South 2010

2010-08-22T09:01:00.002-05:00

Here's a review I started writing while living in Louisiana and finished after settling in to Philadelphia.

NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH 2010: The Year's Best. Edited by Amy Hempel. Algonquin. 400 pages. $14.95 in paper.

The 2010 edition of New Stories from the South represents the 25th anniversary of the series. The guest editor this time, fiction writer Amy Hempel, has chosen these tales from such impressive but lesser-known literary magazines as Appalachian Heritage and Natural Bridge as well as the stalwarts of contemporary literature (The New Yorker, Tin House and The Paris Review).

Enlisting Hempel as the editor was a bold decision. She is, after all, a Yankee whose own admirable fiction has little that's Southern about it. Her perspective as an outsider might just explain why this collection holds together so neatly. A few petty, personal gripes aside, her selections live up to what readers have come to expect from Southern literature.

The best story here is The Ascent by Ron Rash. In it, a young boy named Jared spends his days wandering through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, pretending to fight off bears with his pocketknife and letting his imagination run wild while his deadbeat parents sit at home getting stoned. When he finds the remains of a recent, otherwise undiscovered plane crash, he takes a diamond ring from a dead passenger and plans to give it to a girl on the playground, but his father sells it to fund a weekend-long bender. The mangled plane provides a mental escape from his family, and Jared tries to fix the engine so it can take off again. It's a story designed to break your heart, and with it Rash joins the ranks of such authors as William Gay and Charles Portis, whose work defines contemporary Southern letters.

Almost as impressive is Drive by Aaron Gwyn, which features a young couple, Jill and Jimmy, trying to decide if they want to commit to each other and have children or go their separate ways. That is, until Jimmy gets a bad idea while driving: ``It was like his hands belonged to someone else. They gripped the wheel at ten and two, and he watched them tighten and the knuckles go white, and then he watched, as if on a monitor, then steer the car into the oncoming lane.'' Their suicidal games of high-speed chicken on the open road do wonders for their sex life. And of course there's a gun in the glove box. In some respects the story is just as silly as the premise would lead you to believe, but it's also carefully constructed and nuanced.

The Green Belt by Emily Quinlin serves up familial tragedy, violence and strange humor in a way that would have made Flannery O'Connor proud. I look forward to reading more of her work. Other highlights include Retreat by Wells Tower, Arsonists by Ann Pancake, Nightblooming by Kenneth Calhoun, and Rick Bass' Fish Story, a mesmerizing tale about a Texas boy charged with keeping an 86-pound catfish alive on dry land. The best line in the entire book comes in another fishing story, Eraser by Ben Shroud: ``Maybe I should be staring at nutrias after all.''

One problem with New Stories from the South is Hempel's baffling introduction, which uses a lot of catchy phrases to say little. ``The choices I made,'' she writes, ``can be further understood this way: I don't have much interest in causality in fiction, but I do want to see accountability.'' In the same paragraph, she adds, ``I want effects, not just events.'' I'm unable to reconcile those competing aesthetic impulses.

Nevertheless, her I'll-know-it-when-I-see-it approach has paid off big time. The collection grants a nice overview of our nation's most fertile breeding ground for great short stories. The traditional critique of Southern literature, of course, is that it's an exclusive club for elderly white men with questionable sartorial tastes. I wish collections like this one would do a bit more to celebrate the ethnic and cultural and aesthetic diversity of life below the Mason-Dixon line. That's a pretty big problem here. Hopefully this series will dedicate itself to introducing the new generation of writers -- Tayari Jones and Blake Butler, Barb Johnson and Ravi Howard -- who are already redefining Southern literature and, by extension, the South itself.

Extraordinary Renditions is for sale

2010-08-14T09:33:00.003-05:00

My book Extraordinary Renditions is now for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Nobel and Powell's. My author copies arrived yesterday and I couldn't be happier with the way it looks.

Brooklyn Book Festival

2010-08-14T09:23:00.003-05:00

I'll be on a panel called "Foreign Destinations, Departures and Destinies" at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Come say hello.

The Huffington Post: Most Anticipated Books for the Rest of 2010

2010-07-24T09:53:00.000-05:00

Extraordinary Renditions is one of 15 books that The Huffington Post has listed as “to look forward to from publishers at all levels for the rest of the summer and the fall.” Jonathan Franzen, Gary Shteyngart, Orhan Pamuk, and Edwidge Danticat also made the cut.

Booklist review

2010-07-24T09:52:00.000-05:00

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: August 1, 2010
Extraordinary Renditions.
Ervin, Andrew (Author)
Sep 2010. 192 p. Coffee House, paperback, $14.95. (9781566892469).
Three disparate lives—of an aging, internationally renowned composer; an African American GI; and a young American violinist—intersect in contemporary Budapest in Ervin’s first novel. Lajos Harkályi returns for the first time to his native city to attend the world premiere of his new opera with his niece, Magda, a translator at a nearby U.S. Army base; PFC “Brutus” Gibson is having an affair with Magda; and Melanie Scholes has a solo in Harkályi’s opera. But each person’s story has a darker side: Harkályi is reminded of being sent to the Terezen concentration camp as a youth and narrowly escaping death, Gibson is blackmailed by his sadistic commanding officer and attacked by skinheads in the city where his race makes him stand out, and Scholes is an expat adrift in a personal relationship. Ervin’s prose style seems to fit his protagonists, becoming more elegant for Harkályi, angrier and more combative for Gibson, and more diffident for Scholes until the climax, as the theme of “Strange Fruit” grows stronger. A thoughtprovoking exploration of tyranny, freedom, and the power of music. — Michele Leber

Starred review in Publisher's Weekly

2010-07-24T09:49:00.002-05:00

On July 19, Publisher's Weekly named Extraordinary Renditions their "Pick of the Week" and gave it a starred review.

Fiction

* Extraordinary Renditions: Stories
Andrew Ervin. Coffee House, $14.95 paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-56689-246-9
Set in a madly grasping modern Budapest, literary critic Ervin’s debut mines very different ways of achieving personal and artistic freedom in three neatly polished, interlocking tales. In “14 Bagatelles,” world-renowned Hungarian composer Harkályi Lajos, a WWII concentration camp survivor who emigrated to America at 15, returns to Budapest for the premiere of his opera, The Golden Lotus, and finds the city shockingly hostile, criminal, and deeply anti-Semitic. “Brooking the Devil” follows the plight of a young black American GI, “Brutus” Gibson, rescued from skinheads by Harkályi, who is framed by his superior officer. Set up on a dangerous gun-running mission, Gibson recognizes his two choices: submit or refuse and risk court-martial. Finally, in “The Empty Chairs,” a second violinist in the Budapest orchestra, a young American expatriate performing Harkályi’s opera on the night of the premiere, deviates wildly from the score in a surprising and transformative reaction to the work--to the conductor’s horror and the composer’s great delight. With dexterous sensibility and fluid prose, Ervin’s protagonists find liberation from the onerous strictures of Budapest’s Nazi and Communist past. (Sept.)

Please Visit ExtraordinaryRenditions.net

2010-07-24T09:47:00.002-05:00

Please click here for news and updates (including tour dates and reviews) about my book Extraordinary Renditions.

Interviewed in Hobart

2010-07-11T08:27:00.002-05:00

My dear friend Bayo Ojikutu was generous enough to interview me for Hobart about my forthcoming book, Extraordinary Renditions. Here's a sample:

Were the novellas actually crafted in sequence, or conceived as a compendium from the outset?
My editor and I devoted a great deal of energy to deciding whether to call the final product “3 novellas” or “a novel,” but those are ultimately meaningless distinctions. I’m pleased to report that the book we have here did not turn out as I first envisioned it all those years ago. Brutus in “Brooking the Devil” is the direct but distant descendant of a character from a truly awful story I wrote for my one and only undergraduate writing class, which was co-taught in 1993 by Elizabeth Spires and Madison Smartt Bell. That story was an abject disaster, but the character remained intriguing to me. Or maybe I’m just stubborn. Over the years, Brutus solidified into a distinct individual and I became interested in setting him loose outside the United States so that he would have a clearer vantage point of our society.

When Extraordinary Renditions began to take shape, I envisioned the book as two novellas, responding to or mimicking in some crude way the formal structure of Julius Caesar, in which the entire narrative momentum changes halfway through after the emperor bites it. “The Empty Chairs,” about two American expatriates living abroad, was to be the second part. Although those two stories did fit together, it didn’t feel complete. Something was missing, so I bailed on the formal model—those two novellas—I had been so attached to. I came to realize that I was avoiding writing about what mattered the most: how history will judge the United States.

The composer in “The Empty Chairs” started out as a minor character, but his story, as detailed in “14 Bagatelles,” triangulated the other two novellas. That title derives from an solo piano composition by Béla Bartók, but it was his “Konstrasztok” (“Contrasts”) from 1938 that best explains, I think, how the three parts of Extraordinary Renditions work together. There’s a stunning recording from 1940—shortly after Bartók fled his homeland for the United States—featuring Bartók himself on piano, József Szigeti on violin and Benny Goodman on clarinet. The three parts don’t fit neatly together, but they’re also inseparable.

Miami Herald // The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

2010-07-11T08:21:00.004-05:00

I wrote a review of a book about an insane asylum while visiting my family on the East Coast. Make of that what you will.

Adam Foulds' third book is a kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, all of them foolish, delusional, even clinically insane. The picture-perfect depiction of 1830s England, from the squalor of a rudimentary enema procedure to the vagaries of the era's poetry scene, got this based-on-real-events story shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. And deservedly so.
There isn't one main character in the usual sense. Instead, a vast cast comes and goes on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Among them is Dr. Matthew Allen, who runs a mental institution outside of London. Allen is a man of science first and foremost, but his interests reach beyond the natural world and the inner lives of his patients. "I think it is unhelpful to specialise too strictly,'' he tells a guest. ``One must have a broad range of intellectual activities if one is seeking unifying ideas."
His other intellectual pursuits include the invention of an Industrial Revolution-era machine, the Pyroglyph, intended for mechanical wood carving.
But Allen has trouble with his patients and his potential patents. "When dealing with the mad a virtuous dishonesty is sometimes required. So with his investors: he would mislead them to ultimate rewards. His heart beat light and fast with the pleasure of his own cleverness." He may, of course, be too clever for his own good.
One of Allen's earliest investors is Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose poor brother Septimus is being treated for melancholia. The poet plays a considerable role in the proceedings, in part because Allen's daughter Hannah is so smitten with him. But Tennyson doesn't exactly reciprocate her affections, and a tragedy of bad manners ensues.
The most colorful of the patients is one John Clare, a pastoral poet in his own right who alternately believes himself to be Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Lord Nelson. He also has a habit of sneaking off and staying out too late, which gets him beat up by his brutish guardians.
Clare's delusions grow more pronounced as the novel progresses, and the passages told from his point of view include some virtuosic prose. "His thoughts began picking up uncomfortable speed as he looked and realised that those were particular logs being consumed, logs from particular trees burning with particular flames in that exact place at that specific hour and it would only ever occur once in the history of the world and that was now."
These scenes form a novel that is unconventional in such wonderful ways that I'm forced to wonder why the conventions exist at all. The Quickening Maze will appeal to anyone who lives and works with crazy people, which, by my reckoning, is pretty much all of us.

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe

2010-06-13T08:59:00.002-05:00

My review of Oe's The Changeling ran today in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. It's always cool to write for the paper I grew up reading and which my parents still get delivered.

The Changeling seems to invite the comparison. In The Silent Cry, published in 1967, the main character's best friend has painted his face red, inserted a cucumber where the rising sun don't shine, and committed suicide. While that strange act isn't central to the plot, the psychic ramifications inform everything that happens in the novel.

Fast-forward 43 years. (Do we still fast-forward?) The Changeling begins with the news that the close friend of the narrator, Kogito, has killed himself. This time, that tragedy becomes more central to the goings-on, to such an extent that what little plot there is feels almost irrelevant. Linearity isn't really the point here.

Pre-order Extraordinary Renditions

2010-06-07T09:54:00.002-05:00

My first book, Extraordinary Renditions, is now available for pre-orders are Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's.

Or you might wait until Sept. 1 and buy in from a human being working in a nearby independent bookshop. My closest one is Cottonwood Books, here in Baton Rouge. I'm moving back to Philadelphia in August and am looking forward to visiting the great indies there too.

What's the indie bookshop closest to you?

Other ways to find me

2010-06-07T09:49:00.004-05:00

ExtraordinaryRenditions.net

Facebook

Twitter

GoodReads

My essay "White Privilege and Responsibility: Reading Wallace Shawn" is here at The Quarterly Conversation.

More updates

2010-06-07T09:39:00.005-05:00

6/7: Ben Greenman was nice enough to quote me in his blog for The New Yorker.

-------------------------------------------------------

6/4: Hobart included me in their roundtable discussion about first books.

Is it just me, or does all this self promotion — "tweeting, facebooking, articles in newspapers up to big event-type readings" — feel kind [of], I don't know, dirty? I have the Facebook page and Twitter feed and I'm hoping that some cool magazines and blogs will interview me, &c. I want people to read the book, I guess, and so it's up to me to get the word out about it, and I'm totally doing that, yet it feels like self promotion isn't what I signed up for when I started writing this thing. Are these qualms normal?

The other participants, from whom I learned a great deal, were: Kyle Beachy, Jedediad Berry, Roxanne Gay, Rachel B. Glaser, Julia Holmes, Caitlin Horrocks, Holly Goddard Jones, Tom McAllister, Laura van den Berg, Kevin Wilson, and Mike Young.

Loser of the 2010 Moby Award (Best Low Budget/Indie)

2010-06-07T09:16:00.005-05:00

5/14: My book trailer got nominated for a Moby Award (Best Low Budget/Indie).

5/24: My book trailer lost the Moby Award. My concession speech is here.

New York Times Book Review // The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

2010-05-30T10:50:00.001-05:00

I had the enormous pleasure of reviewing Julie Orringer's novel The Invisible Bridge for The New York Times Book Review.

Orringer builds on that historical tension in very clever ways. We all know what happened in the Holocaust, even if few among us can ever understand it, and the close of the novel demonstrates the refreshing trust Orringer has in her audience. “The Invisible Bridge” provides another literary glimpse of the day-to-day horrors of that time, and also reminds us of the potential contributors to the postwar world — the architects and painters, the professionals and tradesmen — who were lost from Mitteleuropa. A brief epilogue, set in the United States, brings the monumental tragedy even closer to home.

Pre-order Extraordinary Renditions

2010-04-19T15:27:00.002-05:00

My first book, Extraordinary Renditions, is available for pre-order at Amazon.

Just $14.16 including shipping can make you the first kid on your block to read these three novellas when it drops of Sept. 1.

Los Angeles Times // Hulk Elvis by Jeff Koons

2010-02-19T09:40:00.003-06:00

My review of the latest Jeff Koons book appears in today's L.A. Times.

One cannot expect the introductory text of an expensive coffee table book to be terribly critical of the artist in question, but this essay treats Koons in the same way Koons did his then-wife, the porn princess Ilona Staller (a.k.a. La Cicciolina), in his famous "Made in Heaven" series.

"Before the Opera" in The Southern Review

2010-02-18T10:45:00.005-06:00

"Before the Opera," an excerpt from my forthcoming book of novellas Extraordinary Renditions, appears in the winter 2010 issue of The Southern Review.

Another excerpt can be found in the current issue of Conjunctions.

Coffee House Press will publish Extraordinary Renditions on Sept. 1.

The Believer // The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

2010-02-18T10:42:00.004-06:00

My review of Sam Lipsyte's new novel is in the February 2010 issue of The Believer. It start like this:

Sam Lipsyte wants you to shit your pants. By that I mean parts of The Ask are so sphincter-looseningly funny that you will want to invest in some adult undergarments before reading it. As the author of several previous novels, including the Believer Book Award–winning Home Land, Lipsyte has cultivated a well-earned reputation as our preeminent chronicler of the absurd. There isn’t a funnier author working today. But what makes The Ask so incredible is that the delightfully nasty jokes, puns, and malapropisms—and they are delightfully nasty—serve the development of the characters and a plot that isn’t all that riotous. There’s a serious story here and this is a novel of real maturity, albeit one that routinely employs words like “dick-smacked” and “spidercunt.”

Couple things...

2010-02-18T10:35:00.002-06:00

Couple things I never got around to putting on this blog...

HTML Giant ran a "Word Spaces" feature about where I write.

Rain Taxi published an interview in which I asked Blake Butler questions from a Cosmopolitan magazine quiz about keeping guys happy.

The Quarterly Conversation posted an essay I wrote called "White Privilege and Responsibility: Reading Wallace Shawn's Essays." I wrote the first draft of that text some years ago in a craft class with the great Tayari Jones.

Washington Post // 3 books about basketball

2010-01-20T09:23:00.003-06:00

The review ran in the 1/20/10 edition of the Post.

Unlike baseball, America's purported national pastime, basketball is most definitely homegrown. It originated in Springfield, Mass., thanks to a Canadian immigrant who had forsaken the ministry for a life in physical education -- a tough decision for a man who grew up believing that athletics were "a tool of the devil." In James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball (Temple Univ., $27.50), sportswriter Rob Rains teamed up with the legendary coach's granddaughter Hellen Carpenter and gained access to a cache of Naismith's personal papers, making this biography a hugely valuable addition to our understanding of the sport's earliest days.

It started in 1891 as a way to keep some bored young men busy indoors during a nasty New England winter. Naismith rounded up a couple of peach baskets, codified the game with 13 rules thumbtacked to a gymnasium bulletin board and became responsible for what may have been the fastest-growing sport in history. (He's also credited with making the first football helmet.) He soon took his new game with him to the University of Kansas, where he established the iconic college team. Carpenter's introduction in particular demonstrates just how much the sport has changed since: "My grandfather never profited from inventing the game. . . . He turned down endorsement offers, and he never sought a patent on the game, which would have earned him millions of dollars in royalties." What would he make of today's NBA?

Outside the Limelight: Basketball in the Ivy League (Rutgers Univ., $24.95), by Washington Post sportswriter Kathy Orton, provides a welcome look at a frequently underappreciated side of college hoops, one that Naismith would have been proud of. The Ivy League is unique, Orton writes, in that it doesn't use a tournament to decide the championship. The eight schools don't offer athletic scholarships, they still travel by bus to their away games, and they play a style of basketball that harks back in many ways to a simpler game. Understandably, perhaps, it's not every season that an Ivy League team participates in the hysteria surrounding the annual March Madness tournament, yet the teams share a long and exciting history of extremely competitive basketball.

Orton spent the 2005-06 season closely following Cornell, Penn, Princeton and Harvard, the last of which went into the year with hopes of its first title. "Harvard is believed," she writes, "to be the only Division I program never to have won a conference championship." Alas for the Crimson -- and for Orton, who might have had a bestseller on her hands -- it was not to be. Come the end of the season, "only two of the eight teams still had a shot at the Ivy League championship, and given the history of the league, most outsiders were not surprised those two were Penn and Princeton." Orton's talents shine most brightly in her ability to make us care deeply about these players, like Harvard's Matt Stehle and Penn's Ibrahim Jaaber, both on and off the court. She reminds us that, contrary to public perception, "student athlete"isn't a contradiction in terms.

Unfortunately, the terrible writing in The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (Ballantine, $30), by ESPN contributor Bill Simmons, undermines what should have been an exciting and engaging project about Naismith's legacy. But Simmons rarely passes up the opportunity for a crude, R-rated joke, which makes the book inappropriate for the young fans who would most benefit from his vast knowledge of the game. The similes and metaphors here are horrendous, such as when he writes of future Hall of Famer Jason Kidd, "If shooting ability were a bra size, he would have been wearing a 32A for his entire career." And is comparing players to specific porn stars really the best analysis he could come up with? That kind of thing wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't think Simmons was smarter than this.

That's not to say the book is a total disaster. Simmons knows his history and provides an interesting look at how the NBA evolved, beginning right after World War II. The most interesting section combines detailed statistical analyses and close observations to create an ordered list of the greatest players of all time in a proposed restructuring of the Hall of Fame. The section on Allen Iverson alone makes it clear that Simmons could be a great writer if he hadn't sold his soul to the devil's earthly incarnation, ESPN, and chosen the authorial persona of a lifelong frat boy. He has clearly put in his time watching and rewatching countless games, but his juvenile approach is neither funny nor shocking, and it doesn't do justice to his immense knowledge and passion for the game.

1/22/10: I found a funny critique of this review on some guy's blog:

If you are going to write a review about three books on basketball, as Andrew Ervin did for yesterday's Washington Post, you simply cannot write a sentence such as this one about a book on Ivy League basketball:
Understandably, perhaps, it's not every season that an Ivy League team participates in the hysteria surrounding the annual March Madness tournament, yet the teams share a long and exciting history of extremely competitive basketball.
. . . and then complain about "the terrible writing in The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy."

Read the excerpted sentence. I have no idea what it means. For one thing, what is its subject? And since the regular season Ivy League champion receives an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament every year, the sentence seems factually wrong if it says what I think it is trying to say. I know it's sort of unfair to cherry pick one sentence from a review like this. It's a bit like criticizing someone for grammar or a spelling error or a typo in a blog comment. But when you lead off your discussion of a book by saying it is terribly written, you really cannot afford a shit-storm of a sentence like that in your 800 words.

In retrospect, that is a shitstorm of a sentence! Oh well. (It is not factually wrong, however.)

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Humbling by Philip Roth

2009-12-07T09:07:00.005-06:00

My review of Philip Roth's The Humbling ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Dec. 6.

What is left to say about Philip Roth? Along with Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, maybe Cormac McCarthy, he's among the legends of American letters - the kind of artist capable of both describing his own era with a remarkable clarity of vision and setting the agenda for writers with the misfortune to come along after him. His vast oeuvre includes some of the greatest books produced on this landmass. American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint, and Sabbath's Theater, my personal favorite, come to mind. We're extremely fortunate to live in his age, to see how Roth's talents continue to reveal themselves in new and unexpected ways. He has won every prize you can think of except, so far, the Nobel. One day - not too soon, I hope - there will be prizes named afterhim.
The Humbling, Roth's 30th book to date, is not the best Roth ever, but being Roth, it's pretty good. Simon Axler is a 65-year-old actor of tremendous acclaim whose talent has dried up. After disastrous runs as Macbeth and Prospero, he loses his ability to perform on stage and retires to his home outside New York City. His despair and the mental breakdown that follows combine to motor this deeply engaging story. Wackiness and, this being a Philip Roth book, anxiety ensue: "When you''re playing the role of somebody coming apart, it has organization and order; when you're observing yourself coming apart, playing the role of your own demise, that's something else, something awash with terror and fear."
Axler's moping causes his wife, Victoria Powers, to leave him, and thoughts of suicide persuade him to check himself into an asylum. (Many of the names here feel a bit forced. His powers have left him! Get it?) Upon his release, he takes up with a much younger woman, Pegeen, who is the daughter of longtime friends. They first met when she was a baby; now she's a (possibly former) lesbian whose obsessed previous lover finds new and inventive ways to intrude on their relationship. Her parents also disapprove, but Axler and Pegeen soldier on with the help of a big bag of sex toys and the assistance of a local beauty, Tracy, who joins them in the sack. The reader finds none of this quite as transgressive as it feels it's supposed to be. Nothing is shocking anymore, at least nothing inThe Humbling.
As in many of Roth's novels, angst threatens to overwhelm the protagonist at every turn. Roth has all but patented his own proprietary variety of angst. It comes steeped in the big-E Existential woe of Sartre and Camus (you'll-get-nothingness-and-like-it angst) and the bleak, paralyzing horror of Ingmar Bergman's greatest films (nothing-we-do-matters angst), but Roth's version involves despair and the disappointment of ideals (is-that-all-there-is? angst):
The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind felt as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought every day of killing himself with the gun in the attic.

It's tempting to play armchair therapist and assume that Axler's anxiety mirrors the fears of his creator, who is very nearly the same age. Is Roth worried about losing his talent after all these years? After all, he does have a history of imaging literary super-egos - oops, I mean alter egos - in his fiction. Or perhaps Axler's inability to perform could also signal the sexual anxiety that seems to have so much of the Viagra Generation feeling blue.
But we're dealing with a far better writer than these simplistic explanations would allow - and, frankly, a better writer than you would think from reading just The Humbling. It feels a bit like an excerpt or like the aborted draft of a larger project. Still, it's a vitally important addition to Philip Roth's already amazing body of work.

"The Light of Two Million Stars" in Conjunctions

2009-11-09T14:47:00.002-06:00

I'm absolutely thrilled to see my story "The Light of Two Million Stars" in the new issue of Conjunctions. I've been reading that magazine for a long time and have seen most of my favorite writers in its pages, so this comes as a true honor.

"The Light of Two Millions Stars" is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas.

It's an incredible issue, also containing some previously unpublished letters by Samuel Beckett, a long poem by Thomas Bernhard, and a slice of the next Bolaño translation. Other contributors include Francine Prose, William H. Gass, Peter Orner, Stephen Marche, Peter Gizzi, Matt Bell, Robert Coover, Rachel Blau DePlessis, Can Xue, and Paul West among many others.

11/16: Dan Wickett at the Emerging Writer's Network was kind enough to write:

Andrew Ervin's short story, "The Light of Two Million Stars." It's pretty rare these days for somebody to write a story about the Holocaust and have it still feel fresh or new. Ervin accomplishes this in spades. A really excellent story reminding me to keep on the lookout for news of his trio of novellas being published by Coffee House Press in 2010.

Monkeybicycle 7 Available for Pre-Order

2009-11-06T12:47:00.008-06:00

My short story "My Brother's Keeper" will be in the next issue of Monkeybicycle, which is now available for pre-order. Please go ahead and pick up a copy--it's a great magazine and lit mags need all the support they can get these days. And there will be so many great writers in this issue. Thanks.

Leopold

2009-10-01T15:01:00.002-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the creation of a new literary magazine, Leopold. Details will be distributed in a timely fashion.

New York Times Book Review // White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

2009-09-18T08:15:00.005-05:00

My review of White is For Witching ran in the New York Times Book Review on 9/13/09. It's an interesting and ambitious (in the good way) novel, reminiscent in some ways of Beloved and Song for Night--two of my favorite books. I'd like to read more by Oyeyemi.

Helen Oyeyemi’s eerie third novel features a young woman who has a strange eating disorder and lives with her twin brother and widowed father in a haunted house across the street from a cemetery full of unmarked graves. On the surface, this setup might appear best suited to the young adult fiction market, but Oyeyemi (who was born in Nigeria and educated in England) knows that ghost stories aren’t just for kids. And “White Is for Witching” turns out to be a delightfully unconventional coming-of-age story.
Miranda — or Miri, as she’s called — suffers from pica, a disorder that compels her to eat foreign objects. “She crammed chalk into her mouth,” her brother explains. “She hid the packaging at the bottom of her bag and threw it away when we got to school. But then there’d be cramps that twisted her body, pushed her off her seat and lay her on the floor, helplessly pedaling her legs.” The novel was published in Britain as “Pie-kah” (the pronunciation of Miri’s affliction), a less sensational title that grounds the narrative in the girl’s sad psychic state rather than in its supernatural elements.
After his wife, who works as a photo journalist, is killed on assignment in Haiti, Miri’s father takes sole control of the family’s ancestral home in the southeastern coastal town of Dover, which the couple have converted into a bed-and-breakfast. But the house — which has its own spirited personality — has other ideas. It frightens off the hired help and even insists on narrating some of the story. (“One evening she pattered around inside me . . . and she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the stiffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour or so.”) Another spectral presence, known as Goodlady, may be a figment of Miri’s active imagination.
Everything changes when a new housekeeper, a Yoruba woman named Sade who has “tribal marks” scarred on her face and practices juju in the kitchen, isn’t scared off. In fact, she stays even when Miri goes away to college and her brother takes up an internship in South Africa. At Cambridge, Miri befriends an African adoptee named Ore, and at that point the novel begins to lose focus.
For a while, Ore’s story takes center stage. Subplots abound (including attacks against Kosovan refugees and violent happenings at an Immigration Removal Center), but they rarely advance the main plot or refer back to Miri’s life in any meaningful way. Throughout, however, the theme of displacement, both cultural and personal, recurs. Miri’s illness — the “pie-kah” of the British title — provides a clue as to how the apparently disparate story elements relate. Could it be that England, as a body, is systematically rejecting its foreign population? Perhaps a statement is being made about English xenophobia. What’s more likely is that Oyeyemi’s story is suffering ever so slightly under the weight of a political agenda.
As in Toni Morrison's “Beloved” or Chris Abani’s “Song for Night,” the super natural elements of “White Is for Witching” serve to remind the characters — and Oyeyemi’s readers — of horrifying historical circumstances. Although she may rely on some too familiar narrative ploys, Oyeyemi clearly appreciates that some crimes (like slavery or genocide or, in this case, institutional racism) are so heinous that the conventions of realist fiction seem woefully inadequate to describe them. She makes us glad to suspend disbelief.

Washington Post // Shake the Devil Off by Ethan Brown

2009-09-13T08:10:00.001-05:00

My review of this disturbing book ran in the Washington Post on Sunday 9/13/09. I've only been in Louisiana for a year and didn't live through the horrors of Katrina, but the aftermath (physical & psychological) are still apparent. This is a valuable, albeit incomplete, true crime book.

Even though the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall has passed, much of New Orleans remains obliterated. Entire neighborhoods -- homes and schools, corner stores, churches and barbershops -- got washed away and have not been rebuilt. Outside the relatively higher ground of the French Quarter, and off the beaten path, it's impossible to escape the lingering trauma of the flood.
Given the bleak conditions, it's no surprise that the murder rate in New Orleans has skyrocketed. In one sense we will never get an accurate toll of the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the criminal (in my opinion) governmental mismanagement that followed it. In "Shake the Devil Off," journalist Ethan Brown takes a close look at two lives tragically lost in Katrina's wake.
Zack Bowen was a personable and popular 28-year-old Iraq War veteran and a fixture of the city's quasi-bohemian world. By all accounts, he was a charming, stand-up guy and a good friend well loved by his neighbors and former army buddies. He lived with his volatile girlfriend, Addie, whose "dark humor, wild creativity, and eagerness to fashion an existence away from some presumably more ordinary or otherwise undesirable past made her an ideal fit for the French Quarter bar and club scene."
During Katrina, the two of them remained in New Orleans in defiance of Mayor Nagin's forced-evacuation order and survived the storm, in part, by looting. In fact, they turned the almost-empty city into a private playground. "The immediate aftermath of the levee breaks -- mass power outages, eerily abandoned streets, and a silence that descended over the entire city even during the daytime hours -- had a cleansing effect on Zack and Addie," Brown writes. "The disaster seemed to have washed away their pasts -- his tour in Iraq, her sexual abuse -- and created a world of their own in which they could fall in love."
Fourteen months later, however, Bowen leapt to his death from the top of a hotel at the heart of the French Quarter, but not before he brutally strangled Hall; then, according to a suicide note, "after sexually defiling the body a few times," he chopped her body to pieces over the span of a few days, cooked some of the pieces in the oven of her apartment and then spent a week partying with friends in the Quarter.
The intrepid Brown, a recent transplant to New Orleans, attempted to figure out why Bowen did it. Very much to his credit, Brown mostly avoids the usual pop psychology and pat causality. The 15 pages of "source notes" at the end of the book attest to his thoroughness as a reporter and researcher. We never learn exactly why this particular murder motivated him to move to New Orleans, but upon his arrival he began to interview Bowen's friends, neighbors, co-workers, army buddies and even his estranged wife in an attempt to make sense of what happened. Bowen emerges as a complex and contradictory figure suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder exacerbated by governmental indifference. Brown devotes significantly fewer pages to Hall, acknowledging that "my wife had occasionally angrily accused me of being too sympathetic to Zack," and many readers will feel the same way. Perhaps it's unfair to judge a book on what it's not about, but I find it a pity that the young women so savagely murdered didn't receive equal attention.
"Shake the Devil Off," which stems from an article Brown wrote for Penthouse magazine, is a powerful indictment of our ineffective political establishment and seemingly unfeeling military bureaucracy. Brown cites a published report that shows more than 100 veterans had committed homicide after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan but "neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department tracks murders specifically by Iraq and Afghanistan vets." He also notes that "a National Institute of Mental Health official said that postwar suicides among Iraq and Afghanistan vets may exceed the number of combat deaths because of inadequate mental health care." Like Dave Eggers's recent "Zeitoun," "Shake the Devil Off" is essential reading for those willing to face the awful truths about New Orleans -- our nation's most misunderstood city -- and the trials its residents still face every day.

Low-Budget Book Trailer #2

2009-09-10T15:34:00.001-05:00

<a href="http://www.grapheine.com">Studio de création graphique Graphéine</a>

Hobart // Interview with J. Robert Lennon

2009-09-10T15:27:00.003-05:00

Lennon is one of my favorite contemporary authors & it was a joy to pick his brain a little bit. If you haven't read his new Castle, I recommend it.

For the record, he did OK the publication of the final Q/A:

ACE: What's your favorite AC/DC album?
JRL: I'm afraid I don't have any AC/DC records, please don't print that, it's very embarrassing...

Pete Lit on Extraordinary Renditions

2009-08-14T16:33:00.006-05:00

My buddy Pete Anderson over at PeteLit had some nice things to say about my forthcoming book:

I'm very pleased to see the formal announcement of my friend Andrew Ervin's fiction debut Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas, which is coming out on Coffee House Press sometime next year. I've really enjoyed Drew's stories as well as our often lengthy email conversations during the past several years, and am greatly anticipating his book. Seeing such glowing praise from the likes of Chris Abani and J. Robert Lennon whets my appetite even further.

Pete's a great guy, and one of the few who has ever read my first published story in a cool but now-defunct little journal back in 2001.

Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas forthcoming from Coffee House Press

2009-08-05T15:11:00.003-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that the great Coffee House Press will publish my first book next year.

Please see my new web site: www.er3n.com.

The site was made by my close friend Troy Hendricks. He is an amazing web developer--among many other talents--and I wholeheartedly recommend his services. You can learn more about him and his work here.

New story up on Significant Objects

2009-08-05T15:08:00.005-05:00

I have a story up this week on Significant Objects. Please see the story here and bid early and often. Thank you.

Nice shout-out on HTMLGiant

2009-08-05T15:04:00.003-05:00

Blake Butler over at <HTMLGiant> (and elsewhere) was nice enough to plug my forthcoming book:

Really excited about this one: Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas by Andrew Ervin, coming in 2010 from Coffee House Press. Andrew is a badass, and 3 novellas in the same book is about exactly what I need right now. Mark it.

Philadelphia Inquirer // Imperial by William T. Vollmann

2009-08-02T08:17:00.005-05:00

My review is in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Imperial

By William T. Vollmann

Viking. 1,366 pp. $55

Imperial: Photographs
By William T. Vollmann

powerHouse. 200 pp. $55

William T. Vollmann is without question the most ambitious, indulgent American writer of his generation or, very likely, any other. Fortunately for him, he has all the talent, singularity of voice, and, clearly, dedication required to live up to that ambition. He has written 12 books of fiction, including the National Book Award-winning Europe Central, and, now, seven of nonfiction. One of those seven was Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume, 3,299-page treatise on the history of violence.

The thing is, despite the prodigious output, he hasn't written a bad book. In fact, they're all remarkable.

Vollmann's latest book, Imperial, along with its beautiful companion volume, Imperial: Photographs, of Vollmann's own photos of the region, is an exhaustively researched macrohistory of California's Imperial Valley, in the far southeast of the state, a desert region that became an agricultural powerhouse after canals brought irrigation water in 1901. It's now a major source of fruits, vegetables, cotton, grain, and - because it abuts Mexico - immigration tensions.

But Vollmann doesn't limit his survey to that physical location. "Imperial County's attributes overwash its borders on every side," he writes, "as if they were squint-wrinkles extending like sun-rays from its inhabitants' eyes." His subjects are the borders - physical, psychic, economic, even sexual - that separate the United States from Mexico, and Imperial provides an amazing and unparalleled contribution to our understanding of who and what we are as a nation.

The Imperial Valley serves as a kind of microcosm for all of North America: "When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained unbiased by knowledge. All I knew was that somehow Imperial County had altered from being one of the richest bits of farmland in the United States to the poorest county in California, and I couldn't fathom how."

What we learn is not always pretty. That's a large part of what makes Imperial so impressive. It's an astounding book that raises the level of the rhetorical tools available to historians - and, therefore, our expectations of them.

Vollmann is no armchair reporter content to smoke his pipe (or even a crack pipe, as he is rumored to have done in reporting past projects) among leather-bound books in a study smelling of rich mahogany. No, he's a throwback adventurer/author willing to put his own neck in jeopardy to get at vital truths of our society. The sections of Imperial that are lived rather than reported are particularly profound.

Among the most interesting concerns Vollmann's fascination with a series of tunnels rumored to have been built in the Mexican town of Mexicali by Chinese immigrants to the valley. The tunnels, originally for hiding, came to include bars, eateries and brothels, almost an underground town. The tensions between the Mexican population and the remaining Chinese make his efforts to see a tunnel for himself all the more challenging. It's difficult to determine, at first, if they even really exist. And if they do, there's no telling what sort of illegal activities might be happening in them. It's all very exciting.

The biggest payoff, however, comes near the end, in a chapter titled "The Maquiladoras." Here, Vollmann narrates his clandestine efforts to film working conditions inside factories known for their appalling mistreatment of employees. It turns out that many of the workers - people who don't have many options - are grateful for the jobs those factories provide. Here, Vollmann is at his best: He's willing to lay aside values and prejudices out of respect for other points of view. He comes to appreciate that there's no consensus among the workers about their own conditions.

That approach characterizes Vollmann's balanced research, and the organization of all this material into a cohesive, compelling narrative is a marvel in itself. Imperial closes with 179 pages of appendixes with titles like "Concerning the Maps" and "Sources" and "Persons Interviewed," all intended to gain the trust of readers.

That said, the obsessive detail of Imperial will test the patience of even Vollmann's most ardent admirers. You can trust me on that because I'm one of them. Sticker shock alone - $55 is a lot to spend on a book - might scare off some potential readers, even if the hand-cramping girth doesn't.

There's a ton to admire about this book (and maybe a ton for some readers to skim past), and it's required reading for anyone interested in notions of identity played out every day on the U.S.-Mexican border. But I couldn't help wondering who the intended audience might be for Imperial. It clearly isn't the maquiladora workers he describes, nor the coyotes or narco-capitalists or prostitutes.

It's entirely possible that Vollmann's ideal audience hasn't been born yet. In the many, many hours it took me to read and review it, I came to believe that this book is ultimately a meticulously constructed time capsule. When future generations look back at our era to figure out what went wrong, Imperial will be waiting. Historians will one day look at Vollmann the way we look at Tacitus - as one of the greatest chroniclers of his fledgling nation-state. He has written Imperial to last, perhaps even to outlive the empire it so brilliantly chronicles.

* * *

Update 8/9/09: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has reprinted this review. I just sent the editor there, Bob Hoover, an email to thank him. He runs a great section. Then I looked more closely at the review. Apparently, someone at the Post-Gazette decided to change a few things. In my original review, above, I wrote:

"The thing is, despite the prodigious output, he hasn't written a bad book. In fact, they're all remarkable."

The Post-Gazette changed that to:

"The thing is, despite the prodigious output, Vollman has written few bad books."

That's a big difference, and despite the fact that my name is on this article I don't agree with this assertion one bit. Vollmann has not written any bad books. None. I've read them all. And his name has two n's: Vollmann.

While I remain grateful to see this review in another excellent newspaper, I can't help but feel like Imperial and I are both being slightly misrepresented. Not a huge deal, mind you, but still.

Miami Herald // Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

2009-07-21T07:32:00.001-05:00

Zeitoun. Dave Eggers. McSweeney's. 342 pages. $24.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant who was living in New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated that city. With his wife, Kathy, he had built a widely respected painting and contracting business and owned several rental properties. Sadly, the destruction of his home and livelihood was just the beginning of what would be a grotesque and awful ordeal. In Zeitoun, based on hours of interviews and other research, Dave Eggers tells the man's tragic story and puts a human face on what may be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Zeitoun spent the days leading up to Katrina in denial. He didn't anticipate the storm's direct impact on New Orleans or even the failure of the levee system to control the water rushing in. ''This had happened before, Zeitoun noted, so many times. The storms always raged across Florida, wreaking havoc, and then died somewhere overland or in the Gulf.'' Kathy didn't share her husband's optimism, and so she took the children out of town while Zeitoun stayed behind to look after his company's job sites and his tenants. When the storm hit and the levees broke, he slept in a tent on his roof and spent his days paddling through the city in a canoe. Eggers' description of the washed-out city will call to mind the scorched-earth wasteland of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The difference is that Eggers' New Orleans is real.

Still Zeitoun stayed. He helped some old folks escape from their homes and even delivered food every day to some neighborhood dogs whose owners had gone. He took tremendous pleasure in helping others, and he stayed even after the mayor called for a forced evacuation. ``He had never felt such urgency and purpose. In his first day in his flooded city, he had already assisted in the rescue of five elderly residents. There was a reason, he now knew, that he had remained in the city. He had felt compelled to stay by a power beyond his own reckoning. He was needed.''

The telephone still worked in one of his buildings. He returned every day to call Kathy until he got arrested, wrongly, for looting his own property. The police and National Guard imprisoned Zeitoun at a makeshift jail and accused him of being in al Qaeda. ``Zeitoun was in disbelief. It had been a dizzying series of events -- arrested at gunpoint in a home he owned, brought to an impromptu military base built inside a bus station, accused of terrorism, and locked in an outdoor cage. It surpassed the most surreal accounts he'd heard of third-world law enforcement.''

Eggers leads the reader deftly back and forth to between equally tense storylines. Unable to contact her husband for weeks, Kathy feared that he was dead. Zeitoun soon got transferred to a maximum-security prison, where his treatment at the hands of xenophobic guards didn't exactly improve. He was not allowed a phone call or medical treatment.

The fact that this sort of crime could happen is nothing short of disgusting. The government's mishandling of Katrina remains a national embarrassment. Large sections of the city remain devastated, but other issues have distracted us from the plights of Americans still living in atrocious conditions. That's why we're fortunate to have journalists like Eggers who are willing to do the muckraking necessary to keep the story in the news.

To his credit, Eggers appreciates that writers of privilege have the responsibility to speak for those whose voices might not otherwise be heard. In Zeitoun, he tells a story made more upsetting by the fact that although it surpasses our worst nightmares, it is absolutely true. It is a major achievement and his best book yet.

My Low Budget Book Trailer

2009-07-20T14:53:00.001-05:00

<a href="http://www.grapheine.com">Graphiste indépendant Paris Lyon Graphéine</a>

Washington Post // In Hanuman's Hands by Cheeni Rao

2009-07-05T09:57:00.001-05:00

IN HANUMAN'S HANDS

By Cheeni Rao

Harper. 399 pp. $25.99

A descendant of generations of Brahmin priests, Cheeni Rao chose a tragic path to enlightenment. "Drugs gave me the power to hear the divine in the way my ancestors had," he writes. His powerful memoir, "In Hanuman's Hands," describes in harrowing detail Rao's troubles with crack addiction and the spiritual awakening that led to his recovery.

As a university student in Chicago, Rao embraced drugs, sex and crime. In one heartbreaking scene, his grandmother catches him doing cocaine in her bathroom: "It's a new kind of snuff," he tells her, "just like what Grandfather used." His family eventually abandons him. At the depths of his despair, while high on crack in an alley, Rao is visited by the spirit of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, who shows him the way toward a cure. "After my family disowned me over the phone, tears and pleading replaced by the tough-love click," Rao recalls, "it was Hanuman who held me in the alley and told me I wasn't alone." Rao's encounter with the divine elicits a new respect for the Indian stories of his youth; the tales held dear by his ancestors and immediate family inspire him to reexamine his poor choices. It's little wonder Rao, who eventually graduated from the University of Chicago and the venerable Iowa Writers' Workshop, has become such a great storyteller in his own right.

Miami Herald // The Show that Smells by Derek McCormack

2009-07-05T09:53:00.002-05:00

Dreams of a vampire carnival with freaky fashions in 'The Show that Smells'

The Show that Smells. Derek McCormack. Akashic. 110 pages. $15.95 in paper.

This thoroughly hilarious, strange and altogether ghoulish little freak show of a book is a campy vampire story with more in common, aesthetically speaking, with William Gay'sTwilight than with Stephenie Meyer's. Even the author's note in the beginning provides a good, dark-humor laugh in setting the record straight about a famous perfume called Shocking! created by the surrealism-inspired fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937. ''This book is a work of fiction,'' McCormack warns us. ``It is a parody. It is a phantasmagoria. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Elsa Schiaparelli was never a vampire. Shocking! by Schiaparelli never contained blood.''

Shocking! indeed. There's not much of a plot, but isn't linear narrative overrated anyway? Instead, we get something that reads more like a combination of prose poetry and avant-garde drama in which people stand around in a hall of mirrors having witty conversations, most of them riotously funny. The cast of characters includes someone named Derek McCormack, as well as the yodeling singer Jimmie Rogers, Joan Crawford, Lon Chaney and Coco Chanel. Schiaparelli plays the villain. ''Couturiers whispered her name in terrified tones,'' says Coco Chanel of her. ''She was a legend, a figure feared but seldom seen -- a Satanic seamstress who catered to vampires.'' And: ``She started creating clothes for human clients. Even the names of her collections curdled my Christian soul.''

Schiaparelli is apparently designing a ''Carnival Collection'' of haute couture -- or ''Haute horreur!'' -- for the discerning sideshow freak. Among her minions are Larry the Lobster Boy, Pinny the Human Pincushion and a trusty embroiderer named Otto the Octopus Man.

Chanel's most famous perfume is one of the many smells of the title. Lon Chaney in particular, however, has a serious aversion to it. ''Worse than wolfsbane. Gruesomer than garlic. Chaney clutches his throat like he's strangling himself. All vampires act like silent stars.'' When someone spills some on him, it ``burns like battery acid. Blended with bleach. Skin smokes. Seared hair. Seared skin. Seared seersucker. Stinks. Chaney No. 5.''

Be warned: The book is not only hilarious but grotesque. Schiaparelli dreams of a vampire carnival where she will ''pinken popcorn with baby blood'' and ``prizes will be dolls -- dead babies stuffed with sawdust.''

The Show that Smells is the 10th book in the Little House on the Bowery series edited by the great Dennis Cooper, an author and editor whose impact on American letters has not yet been fully felt in the mainstream. Most of the books he has chosen so far for this series, like Trinie Dalton's Wide-Eyed and Travis Jeppesen's Victims, will rock your world in unexpected ways.

A book like The Show that Smells -- not that there are many books like it -- reminds us that much of our most eviscerating contemporary literature is coming courtesy of the small, indie and university presses. It demonstrates that innovative literature, if such a thing still exists, can be accessible and even fun, especially for those of us with a dark sense of humor.

Washington Post // Larry's Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose

2009-06-28T11:58:00.004-05:00

Who Needs One?

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Larry's Kidney

By Daniel Asa Rose. 305 pp. $25.99

"Larry's Kidney," a stranger-than-fiction memoir by Daniel Asa Rose, serves as an enjoyable testament to the lengths to which we sometimes go to help family, even when doing so is a terrible, terrible idea. The absurdly long subtitle -- "Being the Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant -- and Save His Life" -- should come with a spoiler alert. It's not giving too much away to reveal that the plot involves a guy named Larry, who somehow persuaded his long-lost cousin, Daniel Rose, editor of the literary magazine the Reading Room, to leave his wife and kids behind and accompany him to China. There Larry hoped to get an illegal kidney transplant and meet his bride-to-be.

The ensuing adventure is the stuff of slapstick comedy, as Rose and Larry navigate the Chinese black market, the dodgy medical establishment and their own relationship. It's curious and occasionally tense, especially when after all that trouble Larry threatens to call off the operation if it's going to be too expensive. Though their odyssey was a success in the end, Rose makes the moral of the story clear: "Don't try to go to China for a kidney. We got the last one."

6/17/09: A blog about bioethics called this "another favorable--and utterly amoral--book review."

Washington Post // The Dangerous World of Butterflies by Peter Laufer

2009-06-28T11:55:00.002-05:00

A Delicate Subject

Sunday, May 24, 2009

THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES

The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists

By Peter Laufer

Lyons Press. 271 pp. $24.95

"To me," Peter Laufer writes early in "The Dangerous World of Butterflies," "journalism is an all-or-nothing calling. A real journalist is a journalist to the grave." But even the toughest reporters can get worn out. Laufer, the author of many hard-edged books -- about the rise of neo-Nazism, vigilantes on the Mexican-American border and, more recently, the suffering of soldiers returning from Iraq -- has decided to take on a more lighthearted subject: butterflies. He begins his sally in Nicaragua, where he learns of a conflict between the "butterfly huggers" of the North American Butterfly Association and the International Butterfly Breeders Association over the staged release of butterflies at public events. His investigation reveals a sordid underworld of butterfly hobbyists in which "nefarious collectors fuel criminal butterfly poachers worldwide."

Laufer writes with humor, as if to concede that he's trying too hard to find an exciting story where one doesn't exist. Nevertheless, his book is charming and his attention to detail, combined with a real gift for describing these fascinating characters -- like calling entomologist Arthur Shapiro "an endless litany of intriguing butterfly stories" -- made me want to read everything else he has written. And I'm certain to look differently at the butterflies in my own backyard, knowing now how far they may have traveled to get there.

6/28/09: Republished in the Miami Herald.

Miami Herald // Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

2009-05-25T11:53:00.000-05:00

Well I've fallen a little behind in posting my book reviews.

NOBODY MOVE. Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 192 pages. $22.

Denis Johnson had no easy task in following up his sprawling, National Book Award-winning Vietnam epicTree of Smoke. But the same could have been said about his story collection Jesus' Son, a bona fide American classic that has inspired more young fictioneers than any other book since On the Road.He has, to date, written 10 works of fiction, several poetry collections, and even a play.

Nobody Move appears to take its title from the reggae song Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt by Yellowman. That's an unlikely soundtrack to a story about a barbershop harmony singer named Jimmy Luntz who has run up too many gambling debts and gets taken for a ride through south-central California by a thug named Gambol. Instead of accepting the beating he deserves, Luntz shoots Gambol in the leg and spends the rest of the book on the run. Along the way, he meets a beautiful woman named Anita, who has her own share of problems. She's a hard drinker involved in a scheme to steal several million dollars. She and Luntz make a good team.

Gambol recovers from his gunshot with the help of Mary, the ex-wife of his boss, Juarez. Mary is an Army vet with a habit of stealing medical supplies. Her care for Gambol involves all of the therapeutic exercises you might expect from a story that originally appeared in Playboy magazine. In many ways, these are all classic Denis Johnson characters.

Many of Johnson's books appear to inhabit the same universe, as if each title is another piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the subject of which -- maybe the effects of war on the home front? -- is still taking shape. Longtime admirers of Johnson's work, who tend to be somewhat obsessive, will spot a few themes that placeNobody Moves squarely in that context. It is set after 9/11, and the Gulf Wars exist in the story's subtext. Gambol, who is of the mind to nuke ''that whole Muslim desert to glass,'' becomes distraught when he learns that Juarez might be of Middle Eastern descent.

Little of the snappy dialogue can be quoted at length in a family newspaper. And given the spare, made-for-glossy-serialization tone of the book, Johnson's poetic range doesn't find its fullest expression, but there are the occasional passages of utterly perfect prose. ``Luntz's vision turned a brilliant brown, then a mellow purple, then a beautiful color he'd never seen before in which he had everything he needed and all the time in the world to decide what came next. He gripped the wrists of the hands that were choking him and removed the hands as easily as if he were taking off a sports jacket.''

Even if Nobody Moves lacks the obvious gravitas and emotional resonance of Johnson's best books, its hardboiled, tough-as-railroad-spikes tone is likely to find an enormous audience. It reads like a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen, a cross between Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men. There's certainly enough going on here to feed the jones of Johnson's legion devotees.

Philadelphia Inquirer // New Collected Poems by George Oppen

2009-04-29T11:44:00.004-05:00

My review ran in today's Philly Inquirer.I'm guessing it's the first review of George Oppen to cite Ol' Dirty Bastard. The book comes with a CD of Oppen reading his own work.

And the recordings of Oppen reading his own poems are exhilarating. You'll want to follow along in the book. His voice sounds like a combination of Woody Allen and James Mason, and he swings a little bit, placing the accents and stresses in places we never expect. I'd recommend loading this CD into your iPod - somewhere between Ol' Dirty Bastard and Otis Redding - and allowing Oppen to shuffle in the background the next time you're hosting a dinner party or planning a socialist uprising.

Tayari Jones has chosen me as one of her "Amazing Eight"

2009-04-27T14:18:00.002-05:00

I'm extremely honored & flattered & humbled to be included among the "Amazing Eight," part of a series about debut books that Tayari Jones is doing on her blog. That's just so cool.

In addition to being incredibly good-looking, what do these eight writers have in common? Well, for one thing, they are all members of this blog community. But the real thing, the news, the thing that calls for champagne is that all of them are publishing their first books! (You may notice that one of the Amazing Eight is pictured twice. That's because Dwayne Betts is publishing TWO first books this year, with his bad self.)
Over the next few weeks, each of these amazing first-timers will be featured on the blog. I'll post a little about their books and they will each share something about writing and the writing life.

Ninth Letter // Podcast of "The Snotgreen Sea"

2009-04-27T14:09:00.002-05:00

It turns out that Jodee Stanley and my pals over at Ninth Letter have made a podcast of an essay I published there. "The Snotgreen Sea" is about St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. You can hear it here.

Miami Herald // Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

2009-04-05T10:09:00.004-05:00

Here's a review that got rejected by The Believer, but the Miami Herald was nice enough to run (after some much needed editing). My editor there, the great Connie Ogle, has an excellent blog that I'd like you to see.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Wells Tower. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 240 pages. $24.
The best stories in this sparkling debut collection employ a sort of emotional bait and switch. Tower's language is so precise, so funny, that you'll find yourself laughing and then, after some reflection, come to realize that the situation isn't actually all that amusing.

The Brown Coast opens with: ''Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants.'' These sentences appeal to many different emotions in a short span of time. Despite the obvious and too-easy potty humor -- or maybe because of it -- the rhetoric here is extremely smoove. (There's no better way to describe this book than "smoove.'')

There are nine stories here, and had the subtitle With Love and Squalor not already been used by J.D. Salinger, it would have been appropriate for any of them. The prose often flip-flops over a sentence or two from hilarious to melancholy and back again. On the surface, these stories are about less-than-sympathetic characters who drink too much (Retreat, The Brown Coast), suffer through disintegrating marriages (Down through the Valley, The Brown Coast again), and try to make nice with horrendously difficult stepparents (Leopard, Executors of Important Energies). Tower's ability to hint at things below the surface accounts for the immense joy these stories bring.

In Down through the Valley, a man named Ed agrees to make a long drive to an ashram where his estranged wife and daughter are living with a creepy-ager named Barry. Barry has injured his ankle and can't drive himself home. Their roadtrip is, understandably, rife with tension and petty jealousies. ''You can't sit in a little Datsun car with your wife's new lover,'' Tower writes, ''without recollecting all the nice old junk about her that you'd do better not to haul up.'' The journey, not surprisingly, doesn't end well.

The best story here is Retreat, about a man who invites his music-therapist brother to visit the remote mountain he wants to develop into a series of homes for lonely, single men. A heartbreaking aside about the brother's efforts to care for an elderly, bladder-compromised collie concludes with the notion that "it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside, hand-juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you'd flock to for lessons on how to be less out-your-mind.''

This image might be terribly sad, but we can't help laughing. And then we feel bad for laughing and start to wonder if just maybe we're terrible human beings for finding something amusing about the awful situations these poor characters (and sometimes their pets) are in. We're awkward and uncomfortable, and yet we're still laughing. I can't tell if these stories are tragic or comic, but what makes Tower's writing so impressive is that in all cases it insists on the both/and instead of the either/or.

Miami Herald // Low Boy by John Wray

2009-03-15T08:22:00.001-05:00

My review of John Wray's excellent new novel appears in today's Miami Herald.

Review | Mad teen's subway solutions

BY ANDREW ERVIN
LOWBOY. John Wray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 258 pages. $25.
John Wray's third novel, one of the most anticipated books of the spring, has the makings of an American classic. Lowboy also represents Wray's arrival as a major author, even though the story is in many ways a conventional one in which the hero of modest means sets out into the world with an enormous task, encounters a number of obstacles, comes to some new realization about his condition and finds a degree of redemption in the end.

What distinguishes Wray's novel is the formal decision to tell his story from a perspective that closely mimics the paranoid-schizophrenia of his 16-year-old protagonist William Heller. Heller is as troubled as Ishmael (who went to sea in Moby-Dick, you will recall, as a ``substitute for pistol and ball''), as precocious as Holden Caulfield, and as invisible to some extent as the unnamed, underground-dwelling narrator of Ralph Ellison's masterpiece.

Heller got the nickname Lowboy, in part, because of his fascination with the New York City subway system. He spends his days hurtling through the maze of tunnels. The story begins on a particular November day, one in which the world is going to end, thanks to global warming. William has come to believe that only a reduction in his own body temperature can prevent the Earth's immediate destruction and that having sex is the only way he can cool down enough to prevent the imminent overheating of the world. To that end, he goes in search of his friend Emily.

The chapters alternate between his wayward adventures and his mother Violet's efforts to find William before he can harm himself or others. William has a history of violence, including a previous run-in with Emily that didn't end well and spent some time in an institution. ``Big beautiful brownskinned nurses who blew kisses at you while they kicked your ass. What kind of school is this I said. What kind of study. It's summerschool William they said. Take a look outside! I went to the window and saw high cottony clouds and yellow leaves and my own face and sailboats on the river. I saw everything I was supposed to see. I see everything I said to them.''

Precisely why Heller now prefers to be underground remains a mystery, though his mother believes it's because that's where he feels safest. Whatever the reason, Heller becomes a tragically believable character. His mental illness, which Wray renders with perfect precision, infects the reader's thought processes for the duration of this fast-paced novel. The prose makes us feel the way Heller feels, and the boy's schizophrenia also feels strangely familiar. Is he sitting in for our entire, short-attention-spanned society?

Wray's genius as a storyteller lies in the fact that he recognizes that schizophrenia may well be the prevailing logic of the Twittered, Facebook-friended, RSS-fed culture around us. We can sympathize with Heller, and even love him, because he is all of us.

New York Times Book Review // Canvey Island by James Runcie

2009-01-04T09:03:00.003-06:00

My review of Canvey Island appears in today's NYTBR.

"The Swedish Mirror" in Mythtym (PictureBox Books)

2008-12-28T11:48:00.005-06:00

A couple days ago I got my contributor copies of Mythtym, an amazing anthology edited by the ever-so-awesome Trinie Dalton. It's a collection of the zines she has put together over the past few years. I have a short story titled "The Swedish Mirror" in there. Were you so inclined, you could score a copy here.

Interview magazine did a nice little write-up of the book:

The bulk of the book is an original entry, "Mirror Horror," of which the centerpiece is Dalton's essay about a collection of film stills in which women gaze in a mirror before they are killed. Therein she links Snow White to 15th-century witchcraft, discussing the mirror as both "the bane of feminine existence ... where self-criticism and loathing fester" and also something mutable and empowering.

There's a good preview of Mythtym here.

Philadelphia Inquirer // Alphabet by Ron Silliman

2008-12-01T16:55:00.004-06:00

My review of Alphabet by Ron Silliman ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday. It read, in part:

Narrative implies progress, indeed. With a book like The Alphabet, as with, say, Finnegans Wake, the point isn't to get somewhere, to complete - or in some way consume - the text, but rather to revel in the journey it provides. To enjoy the ride. While any thousand-plus-page book may at first appear daunting, reading these 26 poems will require little more concentration than staring out the window of the SEPTA R3 local on your way to work, watching the stations roll past: Wallingford, Swarthmore, Morton, Secane.

I also reviewed Silliman's previous book for the Inky, and that got reprinted here.

Update 12/23: Silliman mentioned this review in an interview on Word Riot. Is he accusing me of plagiarism? Kind of seems like it, but I'm not sure. I've never read the intro he mentions:

RS: The presumption that I'm a "difficult poet." I was pleased the other day when Andrew Ervin reviewed The Alphabet for The Philadelphia Inquirer and said reading my work was no more difficult than looking out of the window of a SEPTA train here in Philly. It's a trope that Ervin borrowed (sans attribution I would note) from Barrett Watten's original introduction to Tjanting in 1981, when Watten argued that a "bus ride is better than most art." It's good to see that some people are getting it, that you can just read what's there and that will tell you everything you need to know about my work.

I'm reminded of this 7/17/66 letter to the New York Times Book Review:

To the Editor:

In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name "Genghis Cohen" from a novel of his to use in a novel of mine, The Crying of Lot 49. Mr. Gary is totally in error. I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gary really believes himself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely, perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.

Thomas Pynchon,
New York City.

Update 12/24: Silliman made this nice comment on his blog:

Ervin dropped me a note when this appeared on the Word Riot site to say that he had not seen the 1981 edition of Tjanting & had come upon the transit trope independently. Given how long that edition was out of print before Salt reissued the book in 2002 (with a different Watten introduction taken from the early drafts of The Grand Piano), Ervin’s correction makes sense. I am intrigued – and pleased – by the parallel, given that they’re descriptions of different books more than a quarter century apart. Hopefully one could say of both, as Watten concluded his first intro to Tjanting, “It is possible, in fact, to read this book on the bus.”

update

2008-11-16T11:11:00.003-06:00

Since my last post: New town. New job. Book deal. Hurricane Gustav. 10 days w/o electricity. Denver. DFW RIP. My wife returned from a 10-week professorship in Illinois. Phillies World Series. Rain delay. Phillies World Series. Read at LSU with Hank Lazer. Short stories pending in 2 publications. Book reviews pending with NYTBR, Philly Inquirer, The Believer. Off to New Orleans this weekend.

The Believer // Awesome by Jack Pendarvis

2008-08-29T10:09:00.004-05:00

The Sept. issue of The Believer includes my review of Jack Pendarvis's novel Awesome. It also contains another great essay by Ander Monson, whose book Neck Deep is pretty much required reading as far as I'm concerned.

Here's what my long weekend looks like:

My New Job: Southern Review Resident Scholar

2008-07-14T16:40:00.003-05:00

I'm delighted to report that today I signed the contract for my new job, the first ever Southern Review Resident Scholar.

In a few weeks, I'll move down to Baton Rouge. The 2-year gig entails 20 hours/week working for the stately Southern Review and teaching a creative writing class each semester at LSU. I'm thrilled to go to work for such an amazing journal.

Louisiana, here I come.

Los Angeles Times // The Pathseeker by Imre Kertész

2008-06-15T11:00:00.002-05:00

My review of the newly translated Imre Kertész novella appears in today's LA Times.

It's amazing what a Nobel Prize will do for an author's career. Imre Kertész's profound and puzzling novella, "The Pathseeker," has finally arrived in English, 30 years after its initial publication in Hungary. In it, a man known only as "the commissioner" travels, along with his wife, to some unnamed Mitteleuropa seaside resort. He decides to take a detour along the way to make some inquiries about an old, unresolved case that involved "the part of universal evil that falls to our lot." Or, it's equally possible that the detour was the point of the vacation all along.

The Believer // Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

2008-06-01T07:48:00.003-05:00

I reviewed a fascinating debut novel for the June issue of The Believer.

Amazon listing for MYTHTYM

2008-05-22T10:40:00.002-05:00

The Amazon listing is up for MYTHTYM, an anthology edited by Trinie Dalton. It's due out in December and will contain my short story "The Swedish Mirror."

San Francisco Chronicle // Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

2008-05-22T10:28:00.003-05:00

My review ran in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Chuck Palahniuk appreciates more than anybody else writing today the dark matter that holds our world together. Like the great Kurt Vonnegut in his heyday, he writes sentences so outwardly simple that, were it not for the boldness and clarity of his creative vision, they could easily congeal into schlock-heavy pulp fiction. Palahniuk revels in exposing the moral and psychic fault lines of our society. He writes about the ugly underbelly of contemporary life, but in Palahniukland - which is our land, only amplified well beyond the point of distortion - the seedy underbelly is all that's left.

Miami Herald // The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

2008-05-13T14:42:00.003-05:00

My review ran in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Hemon's extensive research results in a beautifully rendered reevaluation of a previously misunderstand chapter in the history of immigration to America -- which is say, into the history of America itself. Like the fiction of Ha Jin fiction or Chris Abani, Hemon's best work describes and defines what it means to be a new citizen in this land. Books like The Lazarus Project should make us glad he's here.

Signing Books at the Printer's Row Book Fair

2008-04-30T11:10:00.003-05:00

On Saturday June 7, I'll be signing copies of Chicago Noir (Akashic Books, 2005) at the Printer's Row Book Fair. Not sure of the exact time yet, but it will be something like 2 or 3 o'clock. My pals and fellow contributors Amy Sayre-Roberts and Bayo Ojikutu will be there as well.

Update 5/14: We'll be at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tent from 3:30-4 on Saturday June 7.

"Self-Portrait" makes Notable Stories list

2008-04-30T11:02:00.005-05:00

So it turns out that my "Self-Portrait" made the Million Writers Award: Notable Stories of 2007 list at StorySouth. I'm grateful to all involved.

Washington Post Book World // 5 Memoirs

2008-04-27T09:03:00.004-05:00

I reviewed five memoirs for today's Post:

Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i by Susanna Moore
Greetings from Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor
Kinky Gazpacho by Lori L. Tharps
A Long Retreat by Andrew Krivak
Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari

Philadelphia Inquirer // Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

2008-04-10T08:00:00.002-05:00

My review is here.

Few authors today so accurately get at the heart of what makes us tick. Despite the beautiful exactitude of the prose, and the fluid turns of phrase that remind us how elastic the English language truly is, reading Wolff can be a little disconcerting - in a good way. In his fiction, Wolff fully exposes the good, bad, and ugly about what it means to be alive in this day and age.

"The Phillie Phanatic" in Hobart

2008-04-02T15:31:00.006-05:00

I'm pleased to report that my short story "The Phillie Phanatic" is excerpted in the annual baseball issue of Hobart online. You can find the entire story in the current issue of Fiction International.

Also, don't miss the amazing story "A Father's Guide to the Sea" by my friend Caroline Duda in the current issue of the Abacot Journal.

4/13: "The Phillie Phanatic" got a nice (and unusual) comment about "The Phillie Phanatic" at On the Prairie Diamond:

"Hobart’s Annual Baseball Web Issue. An excess of sentiment and perhaps better judgment leaves me helpless to the charms of Andrew Ervin’s “The Phillie Phanatic,” who is rather certainly related to the Snuffleupaggi of Hawai‘i. (The Phanatic, not Ervin, though one can never assume.)"

Miami Herald // Knowledge of Hell by António Lobo Antunes

2008-03-16T09:14:00.001-05:00

My review appears in today's Miami Herald.

Readers of the newly translated Portuguese novel Knowledge of Hell will not be surprised to learn that its author, António Lobo Antunes, is also a practicing psychiatrist. It's difficult to name another artist who better understands the subtle ways in which memory constantly affects our conscious, in-the-present thought processes. W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust are obvious choices, but not entirely accurate ones. At his best, Antunes can make even those madeleine-induced, temporal cross-fades of In Search of Lost Time look like choppy edits in a bad home movie. If we're to look for influences on Antunes' lush, dreamy novel, admirers of Dante's epic will want to note that the Portuguese title Conhecimento do inferno could have been literally translated as Understanding the Inferno.

2 Loose Book Reviews

2008-03-05T09:52:00.002-06:00

An editor in Philadelphia, my hometown, solicited two short book reviews from me a while back. Unfortunately, they got lost in a spam filter and never ran. As I did however get paid for them (and subsequently blew the check on such trivialities as rent and food), I didn't bother trying to place them elsewhere. Here they are.

What is Sport?
By Roland Barthes
Translated by Richard Howard
University of Yale Press, 96 pages

What is sport? Well, if you’re a lifelong Phillies and Eagles fan, the answer is probably “torture.” But this year’s going to be different, right? Right? According to Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth century’s foremost philosophers and cultural critics, the function of sport is more than an outlet for our basest, battery-chucking instincts. “What is Sport” consists of the short, aphoristic text Barthes wrote for inclusion in a 1960 movie by Hubert Aquin. (Aquin, it should be noted, would go on to write several amazing novels and become an important figure in the Québec-sovereignty movement. Won’t somebody please republish “Neige noire” and “Prochain épisode” in translation?) In his commentary, Barthes focuses on five sports: bullfighting, auto racing, the Tour de France, ice hockey, soccer. He tells us that, “Ultimately man knows certain forces, certain conflicts, joys and agonies: sport expresses them, liberates them, consumes them without ever letting anything be destroyed.” That’s open to debate, I suppose, but when Barthes writes that sport is “the entire trajectory separating a combat from a riot,” you would almost think that he spent time with us up in the 700-level of the Vet.

All Over: Stories
By Roy Kesey
Dzanc Books, 145 pp., paper, $13

In “All Over,” Roy Kesey creates drama—real tension, I mean, not melodrama or bathos—seemingly out of thin air. Shiny pieces of plot and of character rotate around each other as in a kaleidoscope but, eventually and invariably, congeal into a vivid and unexpected image. In these nineteen stories, many of which bear one-word titles like “Cheese” and “Calisthenics” and “Interview,” his characters get attacked by llamas, give birth, build a structure out of ingredients from a Pizza Hut salad bar. “Scroll,” about a frustrated painter, takes a hard look at the distinctions between artistic, commercial, and popular success. In “Hat,” a personal favorite, a man learns to make a functioning airplane out of a paper clip. Quite a few of these have already turned up in some of our most respectable literary magazines and in one of those annual “Best American” anthologies, but having them all in one makes Kesey’s talents all the more obvious. The stories in “All Over” don’t represent anything, they just are. What they are, however, is what makes them so intriguing: terrifying, goofy, mesmerizing, discomforting, hilarious, terrifying again.

Miami Herald // Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño

2008-02-24T09:06:00.002-06:00

The Miami Herald today published my review of the new Roberto Bolaño novella. The editor there, Connie Ogle, runs an amazing book section. She also has an excellent blog .

The satire isn't limited to mocking a bunch of pretentious, pantywaist Nazis. These often absurd portraits add up into something unique, and seemingly random threads combine to form a richly textured tapestry.
Bolaño's genius then, lies not only in telling a series of compelling stories, nor even in piling those up to form a larger narrative about a particular and unfortunate (if make-believe) artistic movement, but also in gently prodding us to ask some important questions about our own literary establishment.

Washington Post Book World // The Assist by Neil Swidey

2008-02-17T14:07:00.004-06:00

Now is the winter of every sports fan's discontent. The sports page these days all too often reads like a rap sheet, if not a treatise on advanced pharmacology. With the football season over, the weeks drag on in eager anticipation of spring training and March Madness. Maybe that's why Neil Swidey's The Assist, about a remarkable inner-city basketball team, seems to have arrived at the perfect time.

You can read the review here.

2/23: Reprinted in the Seattle Times.

San Francisco Chronicle // God Save the Fan by Will Leitsch

2008-02-05T13:35:00.001-06:00

Cliches of course run rampant in most books about sports, and "God Save the Fan" suffers from its fair share. It also boasts the kind of superficiality that makes so much sports-talk radio so tedious. In speaking out against the sports establishment, however, Leitch demonstrates that he commands the kind of critical, independent spirit that if used effectively could raise all fans' awareness about how poorly they're being treated by the teams and leagues to which they devote so much time and money. It will come as no surprise if one day he produces a truly powerful book about the state of sports in America. "God Save the Fan" is not it.

You can find the entire review here.

Off to NYC

2008-01-28T17:32:00.000-06:00

I'll be in NYC (from 1/30-2/2) to attend the AWP conference and to meet my agent, Ira Silverberg, for the first time. Should be a good time. I miss the East Coast. A lot.

I'd like to encourage the readers of this blog, both of them, to please stop by the Ninth Letter table in the AWP book fair and say hello. I'll be there during the following times:

Thursday: 3-4
Friday: 9-11 and 12-1 and 4-5:30
Saturday: 10-11, immediately after which I will get on a train for the Jersey Shore.

The Believer // Detective Story by Imre Kertész

2008-01-28T17:24:00.001-06:00

The February issue of The Believer contains my review of Detective Story by the great Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész. If you haven't read his previous books, especially Fatelessness, I'd like to encourage you to do so.

My friends Sheila Heti, Blake Butler, and Tayari Jones are all in the issue too, which makes me very happy. It's like hanging out with friends I don't get to see very often.

Tayari Jones's Mac & Cheese

2008-01-21T11:38:00.001-06:00

The key word is "jones," as you will want to make this again and again.

See Tayari's blog for details. I first round the recipe on Maud Newton's site, which I adore.

Macaroni and cheese is sort of a cultural thumbprint. How you make it shows exactly who you are and where you are from.
This is a recipe for southern macaroni and cheese, which means it is baked. I also want to say that it is a traditionally African-American version, in as it does not contain breadcrumbs. I am hesitant about the last part because I am sure that I will get an email from some black person who detests stereotypes or generalizations of any kind.

So, for the sake of keeping the holiday peace, I am going to say that it is a southern mac and cheese. And it is really really delicious. I promise.
10 oz of elbow macaroni
6 oz sharp cheddar cheese, grated
6 oz mild cheddar, grated
1 stick of butter
4 eggs
1 cup whole milk *
½ cup evaporated milk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
pinch of paprika
½ small onion diced (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Whip eggs in small bowl and put aside. Mix cheeses in small bowl and put aside.

Boil pasta in LARGE pot and drain off most of the water. While pasta in still steaming, stir in the butter and about ¾ of the cheese. Stir until everything is all melty. Add salt, pepper, and paprika. (This is your last opportunity to taste, so please do.) Next add eggs, and all milk. You can add the onion now, if you like. The whole concoction should be really soupy. Stir, stir and stir some more.

Pour mixture into a casserole dish and bake for about 30 minutes. It will rise like soufflé, so make sure that your dish is big enough. Carefully open the oven and slide the rack out halfway so you can sprinkle the remaining cheese on top. Continue to bake about another ten minutes until the cheese is bubbly. Take it out of the oven and let it sit about 10-15 minutes while it sets.

* Dieters can substitute skim or 2% milk and the butter can be cut down by half. You might be able to scale back the cheese a little, but just use less cheese, not a 2% or fat free.

My Favorite Books of 2007

2007-12-10T10:04:00.000-06:00

An incomplete list:

Fiction
Chris Abani, Song for Night (Akashic)
Amiri Baraka, Tales of the Out and the Gone (Akashic)
Ron Currie Jr., God is Dead (Viking)
Trinie Dalton, A Unicorn is Born (Abrams)
Steve Erickson, Zeroville (Europa Editions)
Percival Everett, The Water Cure (Graywolf)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (FSG)
Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male (NYRB)
Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the Kind of England (New Directions)
Travis Jeppesen, Wolf at the Door (Twisted Spoon P)
Gyula Krúdy, Sunfolwer (NYRB)
Rick Moody, Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (Little, Brown)
Stewart O'Nan, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking)
Aaron Petrovich, The Session (Hotel St. George)
Lydie Salvayre, The Power of Flies (Dalkey Archive P)
Selah Saterstrom, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House P)
Jim Shepard, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf)

Nonfiction
Roland Barthes, What is Sport? (Yale UP)
Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture (Pantheon)
Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus (Pantheon)
A.M. Homes, The Mistress's Daughter (Viking)
Sally Jenkis, The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (Doubleday)
Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace (Wesleyan UP)
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions)
Peter Nádas, Fire and Knowledge (FSG)
Henry David Thoreau, To Myself (Yale UP)

Poetry
Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook (Dalkey Archive P)
Ron Silliman, The Age of Huts (Compleat) (U of California P)
Victor Segalen, Stèles (Wesleyan UP)

3 2007 Books I Still Want to Read
Robert Stone, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco)
Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor (Dalkey Archive P)
William T. Vollmann, Poor People (Ecco)

What am I forgetting?

"The Phillie Phanatic" in Fiction International

2007-12-05T08:41:00.000-06:00

My short story "The Phillie Phanatic," about the sordid inner life of the beloved baseball mascot, is in the new issue of Fiction International. It begins:

I have been set on fire and pushed down these steep cinderblock steps. The people here have snapped the bones of my arms and kicked my stomach. My heavy fur doesn’t help—it just makes the sweat and stink and daily humiliation even more insufferable. On a muggy East Coast night I can feel the weight of this entire city pressing me down into the toxic and overly manicured field from which the heat rises in a blinding, swiggling haze. My life has become a carnivalesque nightmare from which I cannot awaken.

For twenty-eight years I have been imprisoned: an eternity of solitary, lugubrious winters and sweltering Philadelphia summers. I ask myself sometimes which is worse and I have found in myself no suitable answer.

I owe a world of thanks to my teacher and friend Audrey Petty, who helped me a great deal with this story.

1/5/08: The issue is available here. Please buy a copy.

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Water Cure by Percival Everett

2007-11-18T07:29:00.000-06:00

Frank Wilson over at my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer was nice enough to let me review Percival Everett's latest.

Consider yourself warned: The Water Cure will keep you awake at night for however long it takes you to read it and likely for a significant amount of time afterward. The novel, part revenge fantasy and part treatise on ancient philosophy, details the emotional devastation of a father beset on all sides by trouble and tragedy. It is at times violent, blasphemous, crude, juvenile, indecent, hilarious, upsetting - and altogether captivating, so to speak, for those very reasons.

11/27: Conversational Reading is discussing the review today. Some people over there aren't thrilled about my comparison of Everett to Gilbert Sorrentino.

11/28: My review has been reprinted in today's Lexington Herald-Leader and the Centre Daily Times in State College, PA.

12/5: PopMatters has also republished this review.

12/7: Minneapolis Star-Tribune too.

12/28: This review is all over the damn place.

12/16: San Jose Mercury News.

Miami Herald // Song for Night by Chris Abani

2007-11-11T09:45:00.000-06:00

Abani writes like a man possessed by demons, but his fiction doesn't attempt to exorcize them so much as welcome and understand and times actively love them. His characters frequently experience moments of ecstatic release, and in Song for Night we get thoroughly caught up in a few of our own. This novella doesn't simply blur the lines between the real and the unreal -- or the real and the hyperreal -- but instead makes us question if those distinctions ever truly existed.

The review is here.

The Believer // Zeroville by Steve Erickson

2007-11-01T13:11:00.000-05:00

The first two paragraphs of my review are online here. It's a beautiful novel.

"If there’s a surrealist quality to his fiction, it’s likely because Erickson recognizes as well as any artist working today the surrealist quality of our real world."

Miami Herald // Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

2007-09-12T14:52:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure there's been a better Vietnam novel since William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed. Honestly, I can't be sure that there's been a better American novel published in the past 10 years. Johnson understands the conflicts at the heart of the American psyche, and in Tree of Smoke he delivers the sort of historical novel that not only shows us where we've been but also shines a light on where we're going. It is a masterpiece.

Read the whole review, if you feel like it.

Hobart // Interview with Rick Moody

2007-09-06T08:48:00.000-05:00

The entire interview is here.

The Believer // God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.

2007-09-04T14:10:00.000-05:00

The full review is available here. It's a great book.

Truthiness in Advertising

2007-09-04T13:23:00.000-05:00

On 2/8/07, I reviewed Richard North Patterson's novel Exile for the New York Times Book Review. It read, it part:

"I won’t ruin the ending for you because Patterson accomplishes that all on his own, revealing way too much way too soon. And yet, despite its occasionally gastropodous pacing, Exile delivers the sort of torn-from-the-headlines story Patterson’s fans have come to expect."

An ad in today's NY Times for the paperback editions quotes that review:

"Torn from the headlines . . . Exile delivers. --The New York Times Book Review"

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Age of Huts (compleat) by Ron Silliman

2007-06-24T07:47:00.000-05:00

Silliman is actively reshaping what poetry means and causing us to rethink the very nature of language. Can you ask for more than that from any artist? If The Age of Huts provides any indication, we're witnessing the development of what is sure to be a defining literary project of the postmodern era. Good luck, reader.

Read the review here, please. And have a look at Silliman's blog.

7/5/07: PopMatters has apparently republished the review.

7/7/07: I'm big in Taiwan.

Washington Post Book World // 4 Sports Books

2007-06-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

I reviewed 4 books about sports for the 6/17 Washington Post Book World:

The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation by Sally Jenkins

1941: The Greatest Year in Sports by Mike Vaccaro

Maradona: The Autobiography of Soccer's Greatest and Most Controversial Star

Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major by John Feinstein

Oxford Magazine // "Self-Portrait"

2007-05-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

The venerable Oxford Magazine has just published my story "Self-Portrait" in their 2007 issue. Not sure, but I think that's where Andre Dubus published his final story.

7/9/07: PeteLit was nice enough to call the story, "a sharp piece of metafiction which suggests that the narrator might have a viable career as an art thief, should his writing career not materialize as hoped."

7/10/07: I'm incredibly flattered to see that Dan Wickett has discussed "Self-Portrait" on the Emerging Writer's Network blog:

To date I've had the pleasure of reading four or five of Ervin's stories, and each one is wildly different from the rest of the pack. This time around the narrator claims to be somebody who has taken on the person of one Andrew Ervin, and even goes so far as to link, within this story, to online efforts attributed to Andrew Ervin (stories, book reviews, etc.). [...] The story is entertaining, witty, and as one expects from Ervin, well-written.

7/11/07: Brian Kornell at (Plan B) was nice enough to plug "Self-Portrait."

7/12/07: The Ninth Letter blog has also linked to "Self-Portrait" & included a photo from my recent trip to Budapest. The very bad-ass editor there, my pal Jodee Stanley, also mentioned it on her personal blog, Minor Arcana. (For the record, I'm one of the fiction readers at 9L.)

Miami Herald // The Session by Aaron Petrovich

2007-04-08T10:46:00.000-05:00

I wrote up Aaron Petrovich's debut The Session for the Miami Herald:

In terms of style, The Session is likely to bring to mind the absurdist drama of Vaclav Havel or Wallace Shawn or even Samuel Beckett as directed by a young and still intellectually constipated Ingmar Bergman. Little wonder that Petrovich is himself a playwright whose work has been staged in several New York City festivals, as his ear for dialogue is astounding.