Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 10
October 17, 2015
These Books Will Change Your Life - If I'd Known You Were Coming by the Kate Milliken and Lungs Full of Noise by the Tessa Mellas.
If I'd Known You Were Coming by the Kate Milliken and Lungs Full of Noise by the Tessa Mellas are endlessly connected in the literary loops that run through our brains. They are Iowa Short Fiction Award winning debut short story collections that are electric and pulsing with life. They slowly choke away the reader's breath as they ratchet-up our anticipation of what we think is to come, but hope will not. They are stories by women that speak to the complexities, triumphs and abuses that women face around sex, family, marriage and child birth, as only women can tell them. And we happened to read one night with both Milliken and Mellas and thought these books should somehow be read together, and that they were companion pieces, if nowhere else, in our imagination alone certainly. 
And in all of this they are of a piece, but they are not the same thing, no books are, not really. So while Mellas assaults our senses with abject weirdness and the bizarre - so much of which is spot-on, though hits its artistic peak with Beanstalk, both at once a beautiful tale of a baby born at one with plant life, and a rumination on how the very act of birth leaves any mother at risk of being subsumed by the very life they have created; Milliken's work is in the realm of the realistic - pain and loss, violation, and lacking parents - squirelling its way into our brain, then shaking us and insisting we pay attention. Which again, much of it is right there, but is especially crushing in the stories A Matter of Time and The Whole World, tales of limitation and weakness, and the endlessly uneasy place that women, girls really, find themselves in a world dominated by men and their deficits. All of which is to say, that these books will change your life, even as they squeeze it out of you, before lingering long after you're done.
October 16, 2015
This Podcast - Episode One Hundred and Nineteen - Positively Disruptive starring the Christian Picciolini - and This Book - Romantic Violence - Memoirs of an American Skinhead - Will Change Your Life.
We are so podcast and ridiculously Picciolini. We are also Life After Hate skinhead culture music WAY isolation community changing the world entrepreneurship Blue Island Exit USA and Romantic Violence - Memoirs of an American Skinhead, Picciolini's absolutely must-read by everyone, everywhere, meditation on love, hate and all things - violent, positively disruptive and sure to change your life - in between. This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode One Hundred and Nineteen - Positively Disruptive, starring the Christian Picciolini.
We are so podcast and ridiculously Picciolini. We are also Life After Hate skinhead culture music WAY isolation community changing the world entrepreneurship Blue Island Exit USA and Romantic Violence - Memoirs of an American Skinhead, Picciolini's absolutely must-read by everyone, everywhere, meditation on love, hate and all things violent, positively disruptive and sure to change your life in between. October 15, 2015
The Sara Lippmann is most appreciatedly "Can you say 'spaghetti' for me?"
"Can you say 'spaghetti' for me?" @BenTanzer pic.twitter.com/dPdVgvtwyE— sara lippmann (@saralippmann) October 14, 2015
October 14, 2015
"God's Work" from The New York Stories is Hypertext Magazine excerpt and filled with joy we are.
An excerpt of God's Work by @BenTanzer - the beauty and acidity of everyday life. Gorgeous stuff. Don't miss it. http://t.co/fM3Rc7tze6— Hypertext Magazine (@HypertextMag) October 14, 2015
And there you have it. Did we mention we are thankful too? Because we are. Mightily. Excerpt of the excerpt? Word.
"I look into her deep brown eyes, something I’ve been doing since I first got lost in them back in high school, and though she may still be speaking, I’m elsewhere, thinking about her breast cancer scare, not even a year before, sitting with her in Two Rivers Hospital, and watching the drip, drip, drip of the chemo trickling into her arm, killing the twisted cells intent on killing her.At first everyone seemed so old there in the cancer ward, the wispy hair and ashen skin, and they were, but I soon realized that we were old now too, Alice and me, not old, old, but not young either, and somewhere in the second half of our lives.“Hey,” she said during one especially bad morning when she could not get out of bed, “if I somehow beat this, and then it comes back, I’m not doing all this again, I can’t, and I need to know that you’re good with that?”“Yeah,” I said lying, wanting every moment with her, every breath, and touch.“You’re fucking lying,” she said, “you’re a terrible fucking liar, it’s probably the main reason you never cheated on me, but I’m serious, so look me in the eye and say ‘cool,’ because I need your blessing, I need to know you get it, and that you’re really listening, not that thing you usually do.”“Yeah,” I said, “cool.”She had recovered though, and now here we were talking sex, or not, and tradition, though not tradition that involved sex apparently."
October 13, 2015
Flesh Eating Creeps - The Book About The Movie: Complete Recordings 1995-2000 is so out now from the Handstand Records.
Did we mention that this is available as a deluxe cassette? Or that the Flesh Eating Creeps starred the one and only Chris L. Terry? Well, we have now. So do hit it, it just might change your life.
October 12, 2015
Manny's Lost in Space The New York Stories Orphans Tacos Doughnuts Hypertext Magazine Interview.
There is The New York Stories. There is Lost in Space. There is Manny's. And there is definitely much appreciated interview with the Christine Rice. Excerpt? Totally.CR: You mentioned how hard it was when Lost in Space came out and didn’t get the reviews you’d thought it might. And how your writing momentum seemed to stall. You said that you might have horizontal momentum. Can you talk a little bit about that?
BT: Might might even be strong, but I was hoping for something, and maybe even desperate for a certain kind of response, because my prior book Orphans, had received reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, but what’s important there – and something I needed to pay closer attention to later – is that I thought if I garnered those kinds of reviews, other things might happen – agents might call, or books festivals – which on paper is embarrassing to even say, but I thought those things could happen, and they didn’t, and so I thought, maybe the next one, I’ll get those kinds of reviews again, and it will compound in some fashion, but then Lost in Space while well received, was ignored by the trade publications, which was really hard, and left me wondering where that left the act of creating books for me? The act of writing, the ideas, the compulsion and desire to write, never stalls, but building some kind of presence, or at least the act of getting there, can feel like it has. I thought I was building towards something slowly, book by book, but I may not be, and so I’m working on being more Zen about all of it regardless.
October 11, 2015
The Leesa Cross-Smith most awesomely feeling The New York Stories feels.
THE NEW YORK STORIES by @BenTanzer! Blurbed & loved. You know my feels abt The Ben.
October 10, 2015
October 9, 2015
The New York Stories is Boswell Book Company, yo. It is also the Greg Gerke and My Brooklyn Writer Friend. Not to mention the Tomaloffs, the Lee Krecklow and the Robert Vaughan.
the Ben Tanzer machine spinning light from lung, random #rainy #night, #mke // #bentanzer #reading #boswellbooks #milwaukeeA photo posted by David Tomaloff (@dtomaloff) on Oct 8, 2015 at 5:56pm PDT
