Sombrero Fallout is about an imagination in crisis. It is a “what am I doing with my life?” book. It is full of doubt and self-loathing – and it is also incredibly funny. Yes, I am talking about that dread phrase laugh-out-loud funny. In the Independent, Jarvis Cocker wrote about his love for the writing of Richard Brautigan.
Whether considering the ways in which his fragmented novel Hopscotch, which offers multiple narratives for the reader to consider, has influenced contemporary literature, or simply savoring the levels of description offered by his more grounded work, it’s hard to dispute Julio Cortázar’s importance to twentieth-century literature.
“And I do like to joke—although I don’t think it’s a joke, I think it’s true—that my body of work has the highest number, per capita, of Grateful Dead references in American literature. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I think it’s true.” -from Justin Taylor’s interview with Time Out New York‘s Tiffany Gilbert about his excellent new collection Flings, which is out today. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.
Chicago’s featherproof books has, over the years, released excellent books from the likes of Blake Butler, Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, and Tim Kinsella. (Full disclosure: I contributed to their minibook series several years ago.) This summer has brought with it the news that Kinsella will be taking over the press. In a recent interview with Chicago, Kinsella discussed his plans:
Amelia Gray’s fiction is sometimes visceral, sometimes revelatory, and often surreal. It’s fitting, then, that the cover of her forthcoming collection Gutshot contains all of those attributes. There’s a very literal sectioning of the figure at its center; there’s an organic-looking noise present that counterbalances the precision of the illustration. It’s one of the most arresting covers we’ve seen in a while. The cover design is by Charlotte Strick, and the art direction is by Rodrigo Corral. The book will be out in […]
Last year, we ran an excerpt from William Boyle’s novel Gravesend, one of the first titles published by Broken River Books. Boyle’s next book is a collection titled Death Don’t Have No Mercy; above is the cover, designed by Matthew Revert, which calls to mind Xerox art and collages made in a pre-digital era. Death Don’t Have No Mercy will be out later this year.
We’ve considerably enjoyed Laura Van Den Berg‘s pair of collections, The Isle of Youth and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. Van Den Berg has a knack for creating memorable characters and unpredictable plots, and the sense of place conveyed by her fiction is excellent. So we’re very excited to hear that her debut novel, Find Me, is due out next year. From the description, it sounds surreal and neatly cataclysmic; needless to say, our interest […]
For every story in That’s When the Knives Come Down, I’ll interview a person who has a related profession. I’ll ask a few questions about their work and a few questions connected to the themes of the story. When completed, the combined interviews for all twelve stories will be roughly the same length as a movie you might see in the theater. Which is to say: why am I doing this. Ha. But really. It’s foolish: the interviews only […]