Tag Archives: fall 2008

AMERICA AMERICA

Ethan Canin Random House ($27) by Luke Finsaas Judging by the fiction its famed Writers’ Workshop faculty produces, living in Iowa must be a lot like driving at night with no decent radio station in range: there’s not much to do, so you just mull over things. Take Ethan Canin’s new novel, America America. The novel […]

UNLUCKY LUCKY DAYS

Daniel Grandbois BOA Editions ($14) by John Domini In a quip that’s become dangerously famous, Stephen Dedalus insists on aesthetic distance: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Daniel Grandbois certainly fulfills the demand of […]

GEEK MAFIA & GEEK MAFIA: MILE ZERO

Rick Dakan PM Press ($15.95 each) by Spencer Dew The hackers—or self-described “trolls,” hackers of a particular, trickster type—who recently flooded the Epilepsy Foundation web pages with fluttering, seizure-inducing color fields, did so for the particular joy of disrupting other lives, finding gleeful amusement in anarchic disruption, expressing this unique pleasure via the subgenre of […]

GIRL FACTORY

Jim Krusoe Tin House Books ($14.95) by Michael Jauchen Girl Factory opens with vintage Jim Krusoe hi-jinks. Jonathan, the book’s narrator, visits an animal shelter intending to liberate a dog named Buck, who, after years of secret government testing, has developed human-like intelligence. But through a case of canine mistaken identity, the well-meaning Jonathan accidentally uncages […]

SUPER CELL ANEMIA

Duncan B. Barlow Afterbirth Books ($13.95) by Christopher Lura In Cincinnati, there lives a man who sometimes emits an electric spark so strong that it burns holes in fences and household furniture. He spends his days and nights either at the office of a somewhat dubious occultist physician, with a Russian dancer who works at […]

Surviving the Wolverines: An interview with Stephen Graham Jones

by Gavin Pate At thirty-six, Stephen Graham Jones has emerged as one of the country’s most innovative and prolific young writers. Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, has written works that range from horror to thriller to science fiction, all the while confronting stale ideas about the limitations of genre with his unique approach […]

American Trilogist: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith

by Kareem Estefan Acclaimed conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of numerous works of what he calls “uncreative writing”—books that in recording quotidian events or transcribing unliterary texts, nonetheless reveal permutations in the language and achieve a kind of sculpted beauty. Works in this vein include Fidget (a transcription of every movement Goldsmith’s body made over […]