What are you currently reading?

[Andy]

Vera and Linus, a flash/microfiction collaboration between Jesse Ball and his wife, the Icelandic poet Thordis Bjornsdottir, was a pure pleasure to read. The stories mix the whimsy and cuteness of children's fairy tales with scenes of matter of fact sadistic mayhem in some highly creative and delightful ways. An added plus is the beautiful look and feel of the book itself. Recommended!

[Andy]

Just finished Owen Egerton's story collection How Best to Avoid Dying and overall enjoyed it quite a bit. Some of the pieces were somewhat forced for effect and lacking in subtlty but Egerton relies on his very well developed imagination to make up for such failings in many others of these. Giving it 4 stars but 3.5 is more accurate.

[Andy]

Read another Tim Hall story collection: Triumph of the Won't. This doesn't feature as much the wickedly inventive satire of One Damn Thing After Another but it does demonstrate Hall's mastery of plot and characterization in more conventional fictive modes. The sly hipness of the quasi-autobiographical narrators is basically the same in these pieces as in the later book and it's definitely very much worth reading as that one was.

[Andy]

I found Blake Butler's novel in stories, Scorch Atlas, less successful artistically than his other book, Ever. There are several quite brilliant sections ("The Gown From Mother's Stomach" and "The Ruined Child" for example) but there are several long stretches of writing that seemed too much to be striving to reformulate the style and ideas of the later works of Beckett (The Unnamable, How it Is and the Nohow On triolgy). Perhaps Scorch Atlas represents a young writer not yet emerged from the shadow of his influences though I'm just assuming the ficitions in this book predate the maturer and more original work of Ever, a book that does indeed bode well for Butler's future.

[Andy]

Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge), my first encounter with the fiction of Joshua Cohen was something of a let-down. This is a 12 story chapbook which is of very small dimensions and very hansome to look at. The writing is obviously sophisticated but in several of the stories, Cohen's penchant for "clever" verbal shorthand left me intermittently unable to decipher what was going on or what was being said. Several other stories were actually rather clever in a good way and worked well. So a mixed bag. 3 stars.

[Andy]

In the short novel i poisoned you, Pablo D'Stair succeeds in very believably putting the reader in the mind of a spree killer. Subtlety and restraint are much in evidence here and the violence, when it does happen, surprises. A very effective character study.

[Andy]

Finished Kim Chinquee's new book, Pretty, earlier today. She demonstrates here as masterful a control of highly compressed fictive spaces as in her previous collection, Oh Baby. Definitely among the small handfull of the flash fiction/prose poem format's best practitioners along with Joseph Young and Daryl Scroggins.

[Andy]

Ander Monson's interconnected story collection Other Electricities, while consistently displaying prose writing of quite effective poetic intensity, was, for me, something of a slog to get through. I found the deliberate heaviness of the writing allied to the grimness of the subject matter (violent death and grieving, the cold darkness of winter in northern Michigan, and the aimless, disconnectedness of most of the characters) difficult to take. The creativity of Monson's use of language and form did keep me interested however and I don't want to leave the impression that this is anything less than first rate prose. So I do respect what he achieves here; I think it's just that at this stage in the development of my reading tastes, I've come to prefer writing with elements of whimsy and wit.

[Andy]

Finished the very fun little little collection of narrative fragments which comprise Notice by the Canadian writer Geoffrey Brown. I came across this title among a favorite books list by Ken Sparling and the book itself indicates some form of involvement by Sparling in its production. There is obvious similarity with Sparling's own fragmented prose stylings and a good thing too since I love Sparling's books. The story fragments in Notice are if anything even more decontextualized than in most of Sparling's writing but still, there are connections and correspondences which, to some extent, bring things together into something (albeit remotely) like a novel. A solid 4 stars.

[Andy]

Really liked Zachary C. Bush's poetry collection Angles of Disorder; he mixes wit, whimsy and verbal/formal/typographical creativity in work that is fun for someone like me who has always tended to be mystified by a lot of contemporary poetry. Most of the pieces have a narrative structure and read like wildly imaginative prose. Great stuff; highly recommended.

[Andy]

Read another book of poems (albeit prose-ish ones): Kathryn Regina's chapbook I Am In the Air Right Now. Fun and whimsy feature prominently here but with tinges of darkness around the edges. The theme of flying is carried throughout, each poem being narrated by a female who prefers to remain permanently aloft piloting her hot air balloon. Thoroughly charming.

[Andy]

Finished another poetry chapbook, The Deviants by Jack Boettcher. A few of these, especially the title poem, were beautifully strange and fascinating multi-layered little journeys. A lot of them had me scratching my head struggling toward some sort of comprehension.

[Andy]

Zachary Schomburg's Man Suit is a collection of prose poems but, as with so many of these little small press books, such labels are misleading inasmuch as the pieces here seem to be clear examples of flash fiction. And what hyper-imaginitively surreal and LOL funny work this is! I was completely entertained, frequently amazed even, by Schomburg's off-the-wall and extremely clever whimsical flights of fancy. It's the funnest book I've read in the past year or so and I highly recommend it to everyone.

[Andy]

Holy Land, a prose poem collection by Rauan Klassnik is filled with disturbing imagery of war and violence juxtaposed with wildly surreal renderings of male/female couplings and the natural world. Unlike some other work labled "prose poetry", these most definitely come across as poems and very good ones indeed. I really liked Klassnik's aggressive, unflinching attitude in bringing together very sharply contrasting elements in very creatively clever ways. Bravo.

[Andy]

My first encounter with Sam Pink is his newest book, Frowns Need Friends Too, which turns out to be a poetry collection that is riotously funny and off the charts in the absurdity of its biting and caustic imagination. I was sometimes reminded of the self deprecating comedy of Emo Phillips though with Pink, self flagellation or even annihilation is more like it.

Here is perhaps my favorite line in the book (from the poem Holographic Personality Disgrace):

Some people are such assholes that saying, "Look, again, I'm sorry I cut off my thumb and glued it to your baby's head because I thought you'd like him better as a unicorn" means nothing to them."

4.5/5 stars. And I can't wait to get my back-ordered copy of I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It.

[Andy]

Walkups by Canadian author Lance Blomgren is a quite fascinating cycle of fictive fragments bringing the reader, as if through the keyhole, voyeuristically into bits of the lives of the inhabitants of apartment units scattered around Montreal. Accompanying the texts are a series of enigmatic photos of interiors which perfectly match the tone of the scenes described without in any way illustrating them. The style is reminiscent of the French New Novel c. 1960 and also reminded me very much of Mario Bellatin's novellas in his book Chinese Checkers one of which also had text with accompanying photos which I liked a lot. Walkups is well worth tracking down.

[Andy]

Just finished Zachary Schomburg's Scary, No Scary, his newest collection. Once again this guy's imagination tickles and delights me. There's something very refreshing, like a gust of cold, pure mountain air, in Schomburg's writing which makes me sad when I get to the end of one of his books. I'll always be on the lookout for whatever he can get into print.

[Andy]

I liked Mairéad Byrne's latest collection, The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven, a bit less than than the earlier Talk Poetry. Unlike the earlier book, there are a variety of different formal strategies employed and a wider scope to the thematic content which was, indeed, interesting, but I felt there was some loss of consistency in the strength and effectiveness of the poems here as compared to the more uniform and focused work in Talk Poetry. Byrne's wit and wry humor are still much in evidence in TBOWLOH and I certainly found it worth reading and look forward to more from this author. A solid 3 stars.

[Andy]

I was a little surprised by the refined craftsmanship of the stories in Stuart Ross's Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. I guess I've come to expect some degree of heavy-handedness or lack of depth in fiction written in a frankly surreal/absurdist mode. Ross's examples, however, display a lot of writerly intelligence in knowing just exactly how far to push a bizarre concept to arrive at a perfectly satisfying aesthetic result. I was repeatedly impressed by the restraint and subtlety shown in dealing with totally off-the-wall characters and situations. The poetry of the language certainly enhances this perception too. In fact, I was motivated to order one of this author's poetry collections because it seemed I was getting some representation of what he could do in that arena by these prose pieces. Needless to say, this is a very worthwhile book.

[Andy]

It was nice to immediately dive into Stuart Ross's poetry collection I Cut My Finger right on the heels of finishing his stories (Buying Cigarettes for the Dog). As with his prose, there's a lot to like about these poems. There is the same predilection for the surreal and absurd but much more abstracted and unrestrained. Quite a few of them left me mystified (as a lot of poetry is wont to do with me) and quite a few had me marveling delightedly at Stuart's incredible imagination and wordplay. Overall, a very worthwhile read.

[Andy]

There's a lot to like in Jason Heroux's poetry collection Emergency Hallelujah. For me, it was especially nice to read an entire full length book of poems and not once be totally baffled by any of them. Heroux, like so much of my favorite writing these days, works in the surrealist/absurdist vein but with a much lighter, less aggressive approach than Schomburg or Stuart. There's less risk taking and less pushing language and syntax into rarefied territory. At times, I felt there was an over reliance on similes and recurring metaphors. But there were also a lot of deliciously imaginative formulations such as:

"The clouds overhead looked like crumpled
suicide notes."

So, quite an enjoyable book. Recommended especially for the poetically challenged such as myself.

[Andy]

Just finished David Peak's The Rocket's Red Glare and was quite disappointed. It wasn't at all what I expected given the almost unanimous praise for high literary merit his previous book, Museum of Fucked, received. The new book is a Y/A fantasy/adventure novel with all the plot and character cliches associated with that genre and with no apparent pretention to any artistic quality as a work of fiction. Very light, mindless entertainment which, I suppose, is OK once in a great while. Two stars.

[Andy]

Ken Sparling's new book, Book, continues his fascinating literary project of narrative fragmentation but this time the dislocations from paragraph to paragraph of character, plot, scene, timeframe, etc., are even more profound. Consequently my disorientation, as a reader, became more pervasive in this than in Sparling's previous books. While still highly interesting at the level of individual sentences and paragraphs due to the extraordinary imagination at work, I missed the accumulating sense of familiarization with who the characters are and what's going on that's gained in reading the earlier books. The weird flights of fancy and powerful emotional content is still there but the parts didn't add up to as meaningful a whole as my favorite Sparling books; Untitled, For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers and Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt.

[Andy]

Daniel Bailey's The Drunk Sonnets and Jimmy Chen's Typewriter are two very worthwhile chapbooks from Magic Helicopter Press. The first is a cycle of 53 sonnets on themes of social alienation and, of course, booze, done in a very lively and amusing style and read more like 1st person narrative prose poems than traditional sonnets. The second is a cycle of flash fictions on the theme of internet culture and the attendant isolation and loneliness of those consumed by it. These pieces by Chen are excellent examples of inventive imagination coupled with dry wit and biting satire. Very amusing stuff.

[Andy]

Just finished another chapbook from Magic Helicopter Press and this one really knocked my socks off! It's Evelyn Hampton's We Were Eternal and Gigantic, a collection of stories and poems displaying some truly brilliant flights of imagination and verbal acrobatics. I found myself rereading passage after passage just to savor the highly original wordplay going on here frequently reaching the end of a poem or story with a big smile on my face wanting only to start over again. Hampton has a strikingly personal take on the absurdist/surrealist model and doesn't shy away from real emotional depth along with the wild conceptual juxtapositions. Really great stuff by a very talented young writer. Five stars.

[Andy]

Written, according to the author, in 1967 and published in 1969, Olt by Kenneth Gangemi brings to mind the mid-60's fiction of Georges Perec and interestingly prefigures David Markson's "anti-novels" such as Wittgenstein's Mistress and Vanishing Point with their compilations of factoids. A thoroughly engaging mini-novel you can read in about an hour.

[Andy]

William Walsh's Pathologies has introduced me to yet another terrific practitioner of the wry and ironic brand of flash fiction. This is a consistently inventive and witty collection which ended all too soon. Walsh and the folks at Keyhole Press have a real winner here.

[Andy]

Chelsea Martin's chapbook of microfictions, What I Want and What I Want, is full of highly amusing and insightful observations about the struggles of having and maintaining a relationship with the opposite sex. This tiny book--the whole thing took about 25 minutes to read--whets the appetite for more. Recommended!

[Andy]

It was a real pleasure re-entering the strange world of Robert Walser's prose pieces in the newly published Microscripts. This is a selection of English translations of the myriad strips and odd pieces of discarded paper, used envelopes, advertising flyers, etc., containing the tiny texts written in Walser's unique radically miniaturized version of German Kurrent script which were left behind after his death in 1956.

The items range from whimsical musings and observations about quotidian events that captured his fancy to short fictional narratives.

In most of these pieces the Walserian penchant for long sentences which continually veer in unpredictable twists and turns is in full flower. It's that ever surprising quality of the writing allied to a truly strange imagination that makes the reading so much fun.

This edition is very scholarly in it's documentation of the original sources including photos of each original microscript text heading the English translation of it that follows and extensive footnotes as well as reprintings of the German texts that were used for the translations at the back of the book. Also included as an Afterword is a translation of an interesting essay of appreciation of Walser by Walter Benjamin.

So, I'd say this is definitely essential for dedicated Walserians but probably not the best introduction to his work. In that category I'd recommend the novel The Robber and the collection Speaking to the Rose.

[Andy]

I read Sasha Fletcher's When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds during the interstices of a four day trip out of town which was otherwise tediously unpleasant. The fantastical flights of Fletcher's imagination proved to be a terrific intellectual playground to have fun in, enjoy oneself and forget the quotidian stresses of the real world. Recommended!

[Andy]

I really liked about half the poems in Linh Dinh's Jam Alerts, was pleasantly mystified by about 30% and didn't like about 20% (primarily the Neo-Marxist oriented ones). The best poems display a very raw, often angry sensibility frequently allied to wit and humor. I was impressed by the total fearlessness of Linh's risk taking; his unconcern with possibly offending in not shying away from vulgarity and ugliness. Almost all the work here reveals a distinctively personal and edgy approach which is fascinating though not pretty. Well worth looking into.

[Andy]

Read another very fun, bubblingly imaginative poetry chapbook, this one a collaboration between Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg called OK, Goodnight. I do detect a softer, gentler wordplay on offer here than in Schomburg's solo projects but I kind of expected that and the result is still very satisfying, just a bit less edge. Good stuff!

[Andy]

Kim Parko's collection Cure All is another genre bender--are they prose poems or flash fictions?--but one thing they definitely are is superb. The imagination at work in these pieces is in full throttle and frequently veer toward the weird and creepy in fascinating ways. Much of the imagery deals with the human body in states of disease and death or with the female organs of reproduction but these subjects are always treated in allegorical or fabulous ways with juxtapositions which continually surprise and delight. Cure All is among the very best things I've read recently and Parko is another writer whose work I'll eagerly look out for in the future.

[Andy]

Chelsea Martin's collection Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is an eclectic mix of "confessional" micro-fictions, wry and frequently LOL funny reflections and observations, "subliminal" micro-texts and artwork which is highly entertaining throughout. The biting wit and edgy sarcasm on offer here at times reminded me of the stand up comedy of Sarah Silverman. Fun stuff! Check it out.

[Andy]

I was pretty much completely baffled by the poem contained in Mathias Svalina's chapbook The Viral Lease notwithstanding my recent growing appreciation for the work of a number of different poets e.g., Zachary Schomburg, Myread Byrne, Ross Stuart, Linh Dinh, etc. Svalina's poem makes me realize I still have a long way to go before I'm able to grasp much of the poetry that shares none of the familiar anchors of prose narrative. Oh well, I'll keep trying.

[Stuart]

I don't think B.S. Johnson has been discussed yet in this forum. I first started reading this British anti-novelist when I was a teenager, but I've recently been looking at his work again, after discovering that his masterpiece, Christie Malry's Own Double Entry, was made into a film (not a very good one, but an interesting one).

Johnson gained some fame a couple years ago when the British novelist Jonathan Coe (whose work I also love) wrote a masterful biography of him. I'd bet, though, that Coe's biography has been read by more people than Johnson's novels.

Anyways, for me the great Johnson works are the aforementioned Christie Malry, along with House Mother Normal, and recently reissued The Unfortunates, which consists of loose pages collected into a box.

Johnson was decades ahead of his time. Or maybe entirely out of any time whatsoever. Highly recommended.

[Andy]

Thanks Stuart for the tip on Johnson. His books have been on the periphery of my radar for a very long time but I never took the plunge. I'll definitely find a copy of Christie Malry's Own Double Entry now though.

By the way, your earlier recommendation of Gangemy's Olt, which I found in hardback in the very cool original dust jacket in near mint condition, was spot on.

[Andy]

Danielle Dutton's flash fiction/prose poetry collection Attempts at a Life I found to be really fascinating. Her work harkens back in interesting ways to 20th Century Modernism and engages referentially, from one piece to the next, with various writers from that era and earlier eras as well as the present, notably Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, et. al.

Some of the writing here I found quite challenging in the same way I'm baffled by a lot of modern poetry but that's OK! Much of Dutton's work here, however, is just flat out brilliant in its creative wordplay and mind wrenching conceptual juxtapositions. Good stuff!

P.S. Dutton has a short novel due out from Siglio Press Aug. 23rd called SPRAWL.

[Andy]

Coming off the mystification of Mathias Svalina's The Viral Lease I jumped right back up on the horse, read his collection, Destruction Myth, and totally loved it. These prose poems are top flight expressions of wildly imagined absurdist fantasy full of wit and whimsy. Can't think of anyone (except for some stuffy inlaws) who would not be delighted by this book!

[Stuart]

Andy, I saw you recommending Chelsea Martin up there. I haven't read her, but hope I can find her work here in Canada.

I suspect she may be similar to Alison Bundy, author of Duncecap and Tale of a Good Cook. Microfictions that often read as prose poems: some as short as one line, but rarely longer than two pages. Lots of beautiful disjunctive moments and minimalist imagery. I love her work.

This brings me to a great Canadian writer who is virtually unknown: Doug Melnyk, author of Naked Croquet. A really fascinating collection, consisting mostly of one- or two-page stories each made up of three or four paragraphs that are only tangentially linked. Again, very prose-poem-like. Funny and often moving in their starkness.

[Andy]

Two more writers I'll now have to investigate. You're a font of hot literary tips Stuart! Thanks.

[Andy]

James Kaelan's We're Getting On is a very absorbing novella which is quite clearly intended to pay tribute, as acolyte to master, to the work of Samuel Beckett. Readers familiar with Beckett's fiction and theater pieces will recognize multitudes of allusions, themes, images and uses of language directly referencing the older writer's oeuvre. The title itself refers to the famous final line from The Unnamable: "I can't go on, I'll go on." and the book begins with an epigraph from the same work.

Aside from its obvious function as homage, Kaelan's book is also a gripping and thought provoking story on its own. The writing is highly effective in conveying the coolly crumbling obsessions of the central character and the increasingly desperate circumstances faced by his band of followers as he proceeds to strip every last vestige of civilization from their lives in the remote, inhospitable, wilderness to which he has brought them. If it doesn't completely rise above being a pastiche of its models, it nevertheless is a very satisfying two hour read.

[Andy]

I finally managed to get a hold of an elusive copy of Sam Pink's first book, I am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, and once again was laughing out loud and reading excerpts to anyone around who would listen. Yes it's totally twisted, despairingly negative and nihilistic but it's so, so funny, even eloquently and touchingly so in places, that everyone who appreciates the outer extremes of absurdity in literature must read this!

[Andy]

The prose pieces collected in Alison Bundy's Duncecap are a bit difficult to generalize about because of the various genres and styles employed. Some are brief character sketches or vignettes reminiscent of the feuilletons of Robert Walser (a point made to me by Evelyn Hampton) while others are flash or microfictions which frequently display the elusiveness of prose poems. Some, on the other hand, are full length short stories which tend toward the style of the traditional fable. The most interesting and effective pieces for me were the "Walserian" vignettes and the flash fiction pieces which are some of the best examples of their kind with their engaging wit and sly conceptual disjunctions. The longer works, while entertaining and absorbing, struck me as less distinctively original creations. All in all, a very stimulating read.

[Andy]

Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions initially (the first 5 or 6 stories) had me very excited by the subtly intelligent humor and the perfectly judged lapidary quality of these mostly flash sized fiction works. There are quite a few in the first third of the book that are truly outstanding (e.g., "Canary", "Mice" and "Lemmings"). Unevenness begins to affect the later pieces though one fascinatingly quirky and original longer story ("White Buffalo") also comes along toward the end. I'm quite curious about Ruocco's novella The Mothering Coven after seeing what she's capable of in this book.

[Andy]

Canadian author Doug Melnyk's Naked Croquet is another very fine example of narrative fragmentation which fascinatingly coheres into something like the form of a novel. There definitely seems to be a distinct group of writers from north of the border practicing this technique including Lance Blomgren, Geoffrey Brown and most notably, Ken Sparling. Dating back to 1987 as it does, Naked Croquet precedes the published work of these other writers and might possibly(?) have served as their inspiration. Melnyk's book is one of the best examples of the form I've encountered so far with its continually surprising weirdnesses and its subtle profundities. I'm amazed that it seems to still be in print from Turnstone Press. Thanks to Stuart Ross for mentioning this one.

[Andy]

I found James Tate's collection of prose poems Return to the City of Donkeys to be perfect for dipping into desultorily as during lulls at work or whenever a few spare minutes should arise over the course of the day. Nothing earthshakingly original or profound here, just quietly well crafted light entertainments in the mild to moderately absurdist manner spiced here and there with wit and whimsy. Nice stuff.

[Andy]

Finished the new English translation of Bernhard's 1967 collection, Prose and I must admit to being somewhat disappointed with the unevenness of these early stories. The best ones are the first three and my favorite of all is the opening story, "Two Tutors", which has all the hallmarks of his mature style: the obsessed narrator on the edge of insanity, the comically exaggerated language, the inexplicably weird series of events, etc. "The Cap" and "Is It a Comedy? Is It a Tragedy?" also deliver much of the searing wit I look for in Bernhard. These qualities are either absent or lack the coherence to be very effective in the remaining four stories including the long (40pg.) "The Carpenter" which ends the book. So, worth reading, but primarily for those first three.

[Andy]

Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson turned out to be a highly entertaining comedy in the dry, erudite British manner about a sociopathic mass murderer. The juxtaposition of such a depraved protagonist and the wit and humor with which he and his story are presented was different from anything I'd encountered in fiction before. Johnson pulls the trick off winningly and once again I thank Stuart Ross for directing my attention to another first rate book.

[Andy]

Reading Stuart Ross's Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New and Selected was so much fun I deliberately limited my intake to just a little bit every day to make it last. With a sampling of his output from 1978-2003 this is a real compendium of the wide variety of methods and subject matter Ross had chosen over the course of his career to that point and I, for one, find those choices, mixing absurdity with depth of feeling and accessible language, to be exactly and satisfyingly right. These poems stimulate with their highly creative wordplay, whimsical flights of fancy and wit while at the same time not shying away from grappling with personal issues of sorrow and regret.

A terrific book then by a writer whose forthcoming publications (a novel has been announced for 2011!) I'll always eagerly seek out.