My story "Bible Camp" is in the new issue of SmokeLong Quarterly, chosen by xTx when she was Guest Editor. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but what's new is the short interview that xTx did with me about the story, which you can read here.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
If you're in the Boston area and have a chance to see Jim Shepard read either tonight at Newtonville Books or tomorrow night at Harvard Bookstore, do so! Not only is he an incredible writer and his new collection, You Think That's Bad, one of the best short story collections I've read in recent years, but he's a very entertaining reader of his work. Even more, he's a great guy and generous with students, as we found this past April when he accepted my invitation to visit Suffolk University to give a reading from the new book and meet with creative writing students. Go see him read. Buy the book. Read stories about apocalyptic floods in the Netherlands, the invention of the Godzilla monster, the 15th century mass murderer Gilles de Rais, and many others, and marvel at his ability to be so damn convincing about all of it.
Monday, June 13, 2011
I'm happy to announce that my story "Bible Camp" is featured this week at SmokeLong Quarterly, chosen by Guest Editor xTx, author of Normally Special. And it is accompanied by some beautiful art by Shannon Reynolds.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
An eclectic summer reading list so far:
Sisters by a River, Barbara Comyns's first novel (1947)
Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson's second novel (1951), which I re-read along with a handful of favorite Jackson short stories, "The Daemon Lover," "The Beautiful Stranger," "The Tooth," and "The Rock." Also her children's book, The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956).
A bunch of Tintin books, which I'm reading with my daughter, along with Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which I'm not reading with my daughter.
Currently reading Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason and the new collection of previously uncollected prose The Essential Rebecca West.
---
The internet is a lovely thing. In doing a bit of Google-searching on William Joyce, the British fascist hanged for treason who is the subject of the first essay in West's book mentioned above, I was reminded of David Britton's Lord Horror novels and comics, none of which I've actually read, but in which Joyce appears ("Lord Horror" is a play on Joyce's radio broadcast nickname "Lord Haw-Haw"). Following some links I came across the work of artist John Coulthart, who produced with David Britton the Lord Horror comic Reverbstorm, and who has a blog full of fascinating reading. (He's working on something new with Alan Moore called The Soul as well.) One of his recent blog entries, among other interesting items, links to China Miéville on Lord Horror and other alternative histories of note, including the film Notting Hill (see link and also below).
Meanwhile, on one of my favorite web sites, Montevidayo, Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson are writing about China Miéville, monsters, kitsch, and jouissance.
I'll leave with this quotation from Miéville's summary of Notting Hill:
"To celluloid, and a movie of brilliant, chilling, minatory vision. Roger Michell and Richard Curtis's is a dystopian image of contemporary London after the triumphant rise of some unseen fascist authority. With searing rage, the film underscores the totality of this victory, this dreadful alternative path, in its depiction of Notting Hill, famous for its Afro-Caribbean community and culture, as successfully ethnic cleansed. An area defined by diversity, the history of the British Black Power movement, the Mangrove restaurant, Claudia Jones and social struggle, is, with satire more bitter than Dean Swift's, stripped of people of colour, the streets instead wholly populated with mindless, twittering, wittering, lily-white rich. There is no more Carnival, with its history in struggle and play, nor shall there ever be again. A bravura cinematic hell to be shelved alongside Pasolini's Salò."
Sisters by a River, Barbara Comyns's first novel (1947)
Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson's second novel (1951), which I re-read along with a handful of favorite Jackson short stories, "The Daemon Lover," "The Beautiful Stranger," "The Tooth," and "The Rock." Also her children's book, The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956).
A bunch of Tintin books, which I'm reading with my daughter, along with Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which I'm not reading with my daughter.
Currently reading Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason and the new collection of previously uncollected prose The Essential Rebecca West.
---
The internet is a lovely thing. In doing a bit of Google-searching on William Joyce, the British fascist hanged for treason who is the subject of the first essay in West's book mentioned above, I was reminded of David Britton's Lord Horror novels and comics, none of which I've actually read, but in which Joyce appears ("Lord Horror" is a play on Joyce's radio broadcast nickname "Lord Haw-Haw"). Following some links I came across the work of artist John Coulthart, who produced with David Britton the Lord Horror comic Reverbstorm, and who has a blog full of fascinating reading. (He's working on something new with Alan Moore called The Soul as well.) One of his recent blog entries, among other interesting items, links to China Miéville on Lord Horror and other alternative histories of note, including the film Notting Hill (see link and also below).
Meanwhile, on one of my favorite web sites, Montevidayo, Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson are writing about China Miéville, monsters, kitsch, and jouissance.
I'll leave with this quotation from Miéville's summary of Notting Hill:
"To celluloid, and a movie of brilliant, chilling, minatory vision. Roger Michell and Richard Curtis's is a dystopian image of contemporary London after the triumphant rise of some unseen fascist authority. With searing rage, the film underscores the totality of this victory, this dreadful alternative path, in its depiction of Notting Hill, famous for its Afro-Caribbean community and culture, as successfully ethnic cleansed. An area defined by diversity, the history of the British Black Power movement, the Mangrove restaurant, Claudia Jones and social struggle, is, with satire more bitter than Dean Swift's, stripped of people of colour, the streets instead wholly populated with mindless, twittering, wittering, lily-white rich. There is no more Carnival, with its history in struggle and play, nor shall there ever be again. A bravura cinematic hell to be shelved alongside Pasolini's Salò."
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