Thoughts on Eric Lundgren’s novel of a surreal Midwestern city, a look back at the Basilica Soundscape Festival, Rutu Modan in NYC, new music from Swearin’, and more.
It started with a cover: a familiar detective-novel image slowly bleeding into the abstract. This was my first encounter with the work of Portland’s Gabriel Blackwell: picking up a copy of his Shadow Man after hearing good things about some then-recent readings he’d given in NYC. Subtitled “A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer,” Blackwell’s book creates a narrative out of the spaces in which noir‘s chroniclers and its characters overlap: a dense, thrilling work with hints of abused power and still-buried secrets. His […]
Notes on the minimalist composer Dennis Johnson — no relation to the writer or to Melville House’s publisher — whose November sees release this year. Ad Hoc has more. A selection of covers to past editions of Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man — some evoking terror, some evoking ’80s Cinemax. Alexander Nazaryan on celebrity publishers. New fiction from Gabriel Blackwell. Neil Gaiman wrote the episode of Doctor Who that’s airing this weekend. News on forthcoming books from Matt Bell. Birdsong‘s Tommy Pico: interviewed. Jayson Greene […]
And in some years, I notice trends in my own reading. Sometimes I’ll discover the work of a particular author and end up reading almost everything they’ve written. (This has happened recently with both Geoff Dyer and Javier Marías.) This year, while I certainly suspect I’ll engage in similar behavior, I’m also planning to focus on specific areas of writing: specifically, art writing and poetry. Why? Because I know far too little about either, and that doesn’t sit all that […]
There’s something uneasily evocative about a character defined by their absence. In the novel I’m working on now, I’m trying to summon up one of the central characters via the narratives of others, and it’s not an easy task. When this is done well, it can be breathtaking: consider Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody, in which the assemblage of the novel turns the (offscreen) character into as vividly rendered a figure as the book’s ostensible protagonist. The books discussed this week make […]
“I try to create parasitic works, building on others’ creations—not just acknowledging the reader’s life outside of the book but (so I hope) pointing in fruitful directions for his or her distraction.” Gabriel Blackwell talked with The Lit Pub about his books Shadow Man and Critique of Pure Reason. Novelists on their first drafts. “And I loved spooky books about witches, or where a girl’s house is haunted by antique dead twins trying to inhabit their bodies. Shit like that was my jam. […]