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Book Review

I just read Dead Souls

I recently finished reading Dead Souls (the David Magarshack translation) and I don’t know what to do now. I finished the unfinished novel today. I guess I’m still sitting with it, trying to process it.

I loved it and I’m happy that I read it but I’m really sad about finishing it because the book itself is incomplete and the story ends abruptly, with the hero, Chichikov being banished and Prince chastising his officers for being dishonest and stealing and something else that is only hinted at. I feel a sort of sadness that I will never get to finish the actual story and see what else Gogol had planned for Chichikov. We’ll never know if he changes his ways and makes good as a man of the earth, tilling his soil and living modestly, or if he continues on his roguish ways and finds himself in new predicaments in other parts of Russia.

I was gonna write a blog post about this but then I started writing a synopsis of the plot and no one needs to read that. Just read the book. It’s so good and so funny. It’s an old book or whatever but the ideas are all very relevant, and the way Gogol talks about society and class and social norms and trends is brilliant and hilarious. I’m probably going to re-read it so I can highlight the sections I laughed really hard at. I spent a lot of time reading this book in public and laughing out loud, like running on the treadmill and cracking up.

There was something that I kept thinking about while reading, however. I was very conscious of Gogol’s presence in the novel, his role as the narrator and the narrator’s commentary on his observations and the craft of writing itself. There was also plenty of commentary on the part of the characters who spoke of the nonsense “scribblers” put out into the world, books that made people want luxuries and to live beyond their means. How education corrupts and spoils. Dead Souls isn’t just a novel and it isn’t just a parable and it isn’t just social commentary and it isn’t just an epic poem about an immoral man. It is all of those things and it also feels super personal. It feels like a perfect novel, even though it is unfinished.

The funny thing about reading an older piece of literature is trying to talk about it with other people in a normal conversation. It’s like that stand-up piece about watching Heat. I think of that piece a lot because I tend to catch onto films and albums after everyone else is already over them. It’s funny to try to talk with someone about a movie that you just saw and are excited about even though it came out 20 years ago, but it’s an even stranger experience dropping a Penguin Classic into casual conversation.

November 14, 2017 0 comment

Literary Scene Required Reading Review Small Press

A Review of Shya Scanlon’s IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

Before opening Shya Scanlon’s In This Alone Impulse, the cover art is already setting the tone for his trapeze act with all the same tools any writer can find. It’s just that Scanlon has a certain ear, an instinct.

The cover is minimalistic – a gray background interrupted only by the title in red at the top left, Scanlon’s name in white at bottom left, and, just off-center, what is left of a broken pencil lead, along with a fast mark, hectic, rushed, something incomplete but with a breaking power. Something impulsive.

Inside are prose poems, each seven lines in length. With the first, “A Bargain,” Scanlon puts his style on the table for the reader to consider, easing him into the broken logic of language, of theme and tone, that will tie this book in a spider’s web, both beautiful and strong. Here is the writer offering us a “bargain” on something brand new in the canon of prose poetry.

“I have a house. I have a house. It is not my house that I have. It is not my house, anymore…A have now house about me anymore.”

The narrator could be trying to sell you the house, a good deal, a bargain. The narrator might just as well be talking about himself. But one thing is certain – we are in different hands, a writer taking a bold chance at the “word level.”

The reader may not at once adjust to Scanlon’s syntactic innovation. The risk is a practice in building trust, coming to know this author’s voice so the stories can be told in a way that only he could tell them.

A key thing found early on is the use of the second-person point of view. Throughout much of the book, with a handful of exceptions, this is employed. But not exclusively.

In stories such as “Six miles south” the former John Hawkes Fiction Prize winner also speaks of “we” and “I” within the same story, grouping them with the second-person “you.” In this story that decision gives the piece the feel of a letter, something shared among good friends or current enemies, those close conversations found only among people with knowledge of one another’s pain, happiness, hope.

In “Six miles south” these three points of view are wed and rightly so as there is a sadness of tone beneath the sharing, one of learning and of growth – all the ingredients of any close relationship.

“You said something new, and let me learn, and I passed this along, and passed it wider, a broken kind of wideness, a small and splintered thing. We sat together and watched it spread…”

But these are some of the technical aspects within this book and, though important, are almost secondary to the work as a whole. Brian Evenson says of IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE: “…there’s really nothing else out there like it.” It’s as true a thing said of a book in a long while. Whether it is with a surreal piece, such as “Skeleton clock” (I went into outer space this morning.) or a piece about longing and self-worth as with “Imagine next” (Erin, sugar biscuit, you took me in like you have now taken in a dog.) Scanlon is pushing an emotion off the page. And even in this, he moves easily from one form to another such as the straight-forward narrative approach in “Daresies: Backsies” or the linguistically experimental dialogue of “A neighboring insert.”

The best part of the trapeze act? The fact that never is the core of this book lost amid these risks and experimentation. Scanlon achieves across 59 prose poems not as much a linked storyline as a consistent feeling of something unmentioned but known to us all, the inner voices of our secret lives.

November 2, 2017 0 comment

Fiction Hot Damn Literary Scene Required Reading Review

A Review of Best Small Fictions 2017

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

Best Small Fictions 2017

Guest Editor Amy Hempel

Series Editor Tara L. Masih

Braddock Avenue Books (September, 2017)

$13 (Braddock Avenue Books)

$16 (Amazon)

My general thoughts about the Best Small Fictions series are probably no secret. I’ve called both BSF 2015 and BSF 2016 the most important books published in their respective years.

This year is no different.

The most important book published this year is now and will prove to be Best Small Fictions 2017.

Now that’s we’ve established that once again, I will say this year has been a particularly good year for flash fiction. The New Yorker has decided to publish flash stories throughout the summer (though some of those stories beg the question as to whether The New Yorker and those of us writing flash fiction actually agree on what constitutes the form). This year, BSF series editor Tara L. Masih worked with a writer who is arguably one of the best ever at this beautiful and supremely difficult form, the astonishing Amy Hempel. Hempel herself has said this of the series: “[T]his striking new series…has quickly become essential reading.”

Yes, it has, Amy.

This year the selections are as strong as ever. The usual cast is present with veteran flash fiction authors such as Scott Garson, Jen Knox, Randall Brown, and Sherrie Flick, among others, while also peppering in some iconic short-short form writers like Joy Williams, Stuart Dybek, and Robert Scotellaro. But don’t let these big names and longtime flash writers lead you too far afield from the others included in BSF this year. The talent is spread around.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s story “The Sea Urchin” was the first story to stop me in my tracks this year. First published at Paper Darts, Cancio-Bello takes what could be a basic memory from childhood and creates a picture perfect example of flash fiction, employing nearly all the usual techniques in the most delightful ways, beginning with that always important first line: “Grandmother kept a diver’s knife strapped to her thigh.”

She continues the story and gives the reader a marriage of the beautiful and practical, along with strange tradition and other-worldliness.

“On my birthday, she brought me a ball of spines in a bucket, lifted its bit of ocean into my cupped hands. The creature’s round mouth explored the cracks of my palm, tasting the salt on my skin, recoiling. An offering like the pincushions I often brought my mother, every needle threaded with a different color. Grandmother boiled garlic, soybeans, salt into broth, ladled the seaweed soup into a white bowl. She turned the urchin and broke it open, scooped out the ocher roe with a spoon, dropped it in among the kelp.”

Another story as deserving for inclusion in this year’s edition is the flash piece “Silent Hill” by Ras Mashramani, originally published in Pank. Mashramani takes a Playstation game from the late 1990s and creates a flashback world to when the character lost herself in the game while escaping a world in which her father was dying.

“There was a first generation Playstation video game about a young father who lost his child in a town where it snowed ash. Together you stumbled through foggy whiteness in the creature infested streets looking for her. Some early mornings you passed out in front of the living room TV screen watching hidden monsters behind your eyelids, ash in your hair, a fire burning forever underground. For so long it had been you and your father just like in the game running from stuccoed apartment to stuccoed apartment.”

We are firmly placed in this world of father and daughter, both in the context of the video game and also the reality of the story. And when we find later on that the character finds herself allowing a boy much older than her named Marquise to live out a young lapgirl fantasy while she loses herself in the game, it’s both a revealing and a supremely sad moment. But more than that it’s a brilliant technique and wholly original, even for a form that is innately original in nearly any and all concepts of fiction. When a story stands out in such a way, it’s no surprise to find it between the covers of BSF.

“You did this on the point of Marquise’s knee, engrossed in game play, addicted to the focused labored attention of a teenaged boy with sexual behavior issues and the fear of the screen, the fear of touch, wanting the fear, flattening all the affect and focusing it into this character, the Father, and his quest for his kid in this ghost town, and it was hard to disentangle Silent Hill from Paramount, California, and the neglected section 8 pool and automatic gates that made up the Sierra Gardens apartment complex.”

This year’s edition of BSF is a clear indication that the series is nowhere near a slowing down point, but is, instead, gaining momentum and prestige throughout the world of literature. When the history of flash fiction as a vital form is told, Best Small Fictions and Masih will be in the opening chapter. Of this there should be no doubt.

August 13, 2017 0 comment

Fiction Hot Damn Literary Scene Review Small Press

An Appreciation of Marcus Speh’s GISELA

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

Gisela

by Marcus Speh

Folded Word Press (June 30, 2017)

$16 paperback (from Folded Word Press)

$5.99 Kindle (free with Kindle Unlimited)

I won’t spend too much time talking about when Marcus was Finnegan Flawnt, but you should know that Marcus was once a writer on the indie scene that other indie lit writers couldn’t talk enough about. He was like Basquiat in the 1980s New York art scene. He still is, it’s only now there’s that asterisk there under the conversation with that cool pseudonym. Like Basquiat, he is talented, charming, completely original, and when working under the pen name, mysterious without being in your face with it. He’s a natural, you know?

Over the past several years, he’s receded a bit, back to Berlin and his primary work of being a genius in other fields of study (yes, Marcus is bonafide that way. My daughter could possibly still believe he alone invented the internet, in fact). But let’s move along to his most recent achievement, the historical novel-in-flash Gisela, recently published by Folded Word Press.

Based on the historical queen and later saint Gisela of Hungary, Gisela, the book, bloomed in Marcus’s mind (that’s how I imagine it happening, blooming) from the idea of this influential woman who history forgot or, at best, made a footnote. How would the many pieces fit together, and how could he, Marcus, combine them to magical ends?

The end result is a beautifully crafted set of short pieces that can both stand on their own as exacting and fully realized works of literature but also, when laced together by Marcus’s skilled hands, become a full structure that is, for me, literally breathtaking, in that I seriously discovered myself holding my breath while reading at least half a dozen times throughout. For instance in sections such as one titled “The Witches” the reader feels as much under a spell as any character presented in the text. Here’s an excerpt:

“Gerbert, by the window, shuddered; his mouth contorted. The witch began to twist faster and faster while her twin was talking to Gisela, mumbling to her, marching old holy words straight through the child’s ear into her skull, where they entered the bloodstream and looked for the enemy. The monk’s fingers twitched in the same rhythm and he found himself falling into a trance. He knew it would be dangerous to witness the witches brewing and dancing but there was an energy in it that he’d missed badly since he’d been asked to educate the young princess. Gerbert didn’t even notice when the hags stopped, tucked the girl in, rubbed the concoction on her lips and left for the unseen place from which they had come. Gisela healed quickly thereafter: The fever fell that same night and she asked for solid food the next morning. She had no memory of what had happened, but when she bounced on one leg across the meadow in the castle yard, she chanted a little melody that had not been heard in church, an odd melody that made Gerbert’s ears prick up because he sensed the uncanny in it.”

To my mind (and I’ve read everything that Marcus has written that I’m aware is out there) this novel surpasses anything he’s accomplished to this point. It is no mind whether you have an interest in history or, in truth, even literature. Reading Gisela is to be fully enchanted, and that is the rarest of all states for any writer to place a reader. It may be the writer’s greatest achievement. Marcus set an extraordinary goal for himself in this and never faltered. We’re all richer for his effort and success.

August 11, 2017 0 comment

Hot Damn Literary Scene Poetry Review

The Appreciation of Heather Sullivan’s WAITING FOR AN ANSWER

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

Waiting for an Answer
by Heather Sullivan

Nixes Mate Books (July 15, 2017)
$9.95 paperback
$2.99 eBook

My purchase of Heather’s poetry collection Sullivan’s Waiting for an Answer set the record, I think. I saw it on my Facebook feed at let’s say 8:17 p.m. I owned the eBook edition at let’s say 8:24 p.m.

I would have gotten the hard copy, but I was eager. And my book buying funds were wiped out about three weeks ago. These are the facts as presented. Here are some more facts.

I’m a fan of Heather’s poetry and with this, her debut collection, I was, yes, eager, to say the least. What I found was a heartfelt collection full of talent and composure that took on the powerful topics of love and family and loss and parenting and childhood with an ease that has been, to my eye, unmatched.

The poems are written sincerely and from a place of awe or contentment or some kind of cosmic blessing the rest of us have yet to experience. When Heather trains her poetic vision on the present day of say her children or the seaside town she now calls home, the reader wants to be there with her, feel all the moments along with her. She does this with words, sentences, lines. And in poems that explore a childhood that immediately intones a past with more shadows and perhaps more jagged learning curves that will later feed the seaside present, Heather never falters with the same composure and talent. What is best about what is given up to the reader of these poems is simply everything Heather has to give that is best about her heart and her mind.

Waiting for an Answer is less a debut poetry collection and more a culmination of one incredibly strong person’s inner awakening to a life lived with integrity in the face of hardship and a philosophy built on family and built to last for all time. When a poet gives you that kind of book, you pay attention.

August 6, 2017 0 comment

Hot Damn Literary Scene Poetry Review

An Appreciation of Timothy Gager’s CHIEF JAY STRONGBOW IS REAL

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

Chief Jay Strongbow is Real
by Timothy Gager

Big Table Publishing (July 18, 2017)
$14 paperback (Amazon)

Timothy Gager is a fantastic poet. I’d like to say this up front. And I say that for everyone. To my mind, and I could be off base in mentioning this, but I seem to think he may go unnoticed too often for his poetry. Reading his most recent collection, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, I’ve become convinced he could be one of our most natural poets. His poems have this feel to them, as if they appeared to him in visions. In truth, I realize this only means he worked on them extraordinarily hard. But still, not everyone can bring across this natural feel in their work.

Take this from Act I, the first of eight sections of poems from the collection, a piece titled “Repatriation”:

It’s still happening, now, as
science, debunked their tall tale

that I wasn’t really a native American,
not a cultural item of lineal descendants

see what they dug up, check the DNA
which shows, I still long to be in the ground.

Timothy spends a good deal of time at the beginning of this collection dealing with justice and injustice, especially in regard to the native American. In his preface, he explains that his perspective on the treatment of the native American was changed following a failed grade school assignment. He spends time on the subject in the title poem, as well, Chief Jay Strongbow, a former pro wrestler who used a racist gimmick, a popular show technique for those guys in the 1980s. But he doesn’t stay on the subject, instead moving on to topics ranging from the complexities of love to the hardships of addiction.

In the poem “Sobriety” with stripped down language and minimal space, Gager absolutely sums up one of many aspects of what staying clean is like, the hourly grind of it and how beautiful recovery can be when managed successfully. The poem begins with a familiar image, the addict or alcoholic in recovery with coffee. In this instance, sitting alone in thought, viewing oil paintings.

view the oil paintings
hung boats and fields

thousands of brush strokes
thousands

But more than what he can do with a ripe subject matter, and returning to this natural rhythm his style develops on the tongue, it is his use of syntax that can astound in this collection. Of the many poems on display, none show this more clearly for me than “Nursery Rhythms.” Have a look at the final stanza and consider while reading how Timothy must have labored over each syllable working in perfect concert with the other.

off my crooked clavicle
sapiens discern vertebrae
unbreakable, resilient
missiled. And shatterproof
glass in pitched little houses
is how we wind up a catapult.

Big Table Publishing just released this title. I suggest you get to Amazon and get a copy as soon as possible. BTP will have it available at their site soon, I’m sure. In the meantime, know that Timothy is writing poetry that is not only pleasing on a poetic level but is also important on a social level, aware of long-standing debts and the newly-wronged alike and poetry that offers wisdom shared beautifully, not something found easily or often. And he shares this asking nothing in return but your attention.

August 1, 2017 0 comment

Opinion

#WeekofSpoop: Horrorstör

written by Quincy Rhoads

Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix, illus. by Michael Rogalski
Quirk Books, 2014
256 pages / $11.46 Buy from Amazon

Here’s a book that’s a lot better in theory than in practice. Written by somebody who clearly knows the horror of working retail, Horrorstör transplants the usual “ghosts with a grudge” story into a novel setting: Orsk, a faux-Scandinavian furniture superstore somewhat spoiled by the fact that it exists in the same universe as the real IKEA, which Grady is obviously parodying. (The conceit that Orsk is an IKEA “me-too” run by a WalMart-like American conglomerate instantly rings false, as do the out-of-place Britishisms embedded in the store’s punny product names and corporate slogans.)

The book is at its best when it is skewering retail culture and the vast gulf that exists between corporate think tanks and the actual people forced to carry out their inane policies. Hendrix attempts to enhance this satire by leveraging a rather uninspired horror trope: as it turns out, the store was built on the site of a Puritanical prison/torture dungeon, and the ghosts of both prisoners and warden walk the showroom floor after dark. His message gets a little muddled in the process, but while the ghost story that dominates the second half of the book is nothing new, it’s at least entertainingly written in a Stephen King meets Christopher Moore kind of way.

–Reviewed by Byron Campbell

There’s only a week left until Halloween! In addition to the #VERYSCARY series, we’ll be featuring some capsule reviews this week of some of the spookier books that have come out this year to get you prepped for the best day of the year.

Byron Alexander Campbell is an aspiring human living in Southern California. He is interested in games, story, and the surprising ways they intersect.

October 29, 2015 0 comment

Small Press

#WeekofSpoop: The Art of Horrible People

written by Quincy Rhoads

The Art of Horrible People
by John Skipp
Lazy Fascist Press, 2015
176 pages / $12.95 Buy from Amazon

John Skipp’s The Art of Horrible People functions as an anti-pretension manifesto. The snobs in his stories, be they from Hollywood or the art scene, are savaged brutally in his bare-bones prose. These are plot-driven, blood-drenched stories where women pack heat, Eldritch worms run the film business, and everyone is clambering to make sacrifices to The Devil. True, there are some more philosophical moments, as in “Worm Central Tonite!” as our worm narrator contemplates human existence as he feeds on optical nerves, but Skipp seems far more focused on depicting new kills and premises each more gory than the last over more substantive commentary. As much as I love smart, deconstructive horror and reading fiction experimenting with innovative forms, it’s refreshing to read a throwback to a bygone splatterpunk era like The Art of Horrible People. It may not be performing any literary acrobatics,but nihilistic gore can be just as satisfying at times.

October 26, 2015 0 comment

Opinion

#WeekofSpoop: Welcome to Night Vale

written by Quincy Rhoads

Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel
by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Harper Perennial, 2015
416 pages / $11.99 buy from Amazon

Good news! The Welcome to Night Vale novel is just like the podcast. Bad news: The Welcome to Night Vale novel is just like the podcast. The podcast is amazing, absurdist fun, but what makes it work is that it’s broken up into digestible, thirty-minute chunks. The novel still maintains the same fun, absurd charm as the show, but the sort of repetitious jokes which would be funny in audio format are turgid when presented in prose. The novel is still worth reading if you’re a fan of the podcast, though. I found the plotline involving Diane and her teenage son, Josh, a shapeshifter who spends an affecting driving lesson scene as a wolf spider, especially poignant. The 1-2 punch of pathos followed by a joke works well enough, but I’m unconvinced that that’s enough to really draw in and hold a reader that’s never heard or enjoyed the podcast before. Thus, I don’t think this book will function as anything more than ephemera for an already cultish audience.

October 25, 2015 0 comment

Small Press

The Incoming Tide

written by Quincy Rhoads

The Incoming Tide by Cameron Pierce
Broken River Books, 2015
88 pages / $7.95 Buy from Amazon

Could the pocket-sized volume of poetry be the most important political statement in the debate for art’s universal appeal? Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—and the rest of “The Pocket Poets Series,” really—certainly vied for the necessity of a teensy book of verse to accompany lunch. Cameron Pierce’s newest book, The Incoming Tide, is a slim volume of poetry and lyrical essays about Pierce’s fishing adventures, his life in Astoria, and his transition into domestic life and fatherhood, and it’s an excellent lunchtime companion, too.

Pierce has been publishing a slew of fish-themed books this year, but The Incoming Tide marks a high point in his writing career. The collection maintains the sincere weirdness of his excellent story collection Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon while distancing itself from the bizarro moniker so firmly branded across his previous books. And, sure, there’s an essay about an experience with a haunted lawnmower, poems referring to “the skeleton hands of aliens,” and there’s a firm skull motif throughout, but, for the most part, reality is a far more constant feature in this collection than in Pierce’s previous work. “Up [on XXX Creek] there exists a futuristic world where trout outnumber people,” Pierce writes. “That’s my kind of science fiction.”

The reverence he holds for fish and fishermen alike, the reverence for “the personal narratives that develop” while a fisherman goes about his job and how fishing is “about… how a fish fights—and just as importantly, how you fight the fish,” is contagious. I’ve never been a fan of fishing, and yet, I yearn to fish after reading Pierce’s collection, I long to go with him and his friends to dig clams, and, most of all, I wish he and his wife really would open up a Richard Brautigan-themed restaurant. But I suppose taking The Incoming Tide, with its faux-distressed cover—as if begging to be dog-eared and shoved in a back pocket or, more appropriately, a tackle box—along with me and reading it over and over will just have to do for now.

October 22, 2015 0 comment

Random

Book I Loved & Four Quotes From Book I Loved: Infidelity by Stacey May Fowles.

written by Leesa Cross Smith

“So this is what it’s like, then.” “What it’s like?” “An affair. I’d always wondered.”

“even preferable, to have a domestic relationship with one man and a lustful, romantic tryst with another. One made the other tolerable.”

“I don’t know. I liked her. I found her relaxing.”

“Those women who felt safe because he was married but fantasized about him kissing them long and deep,”

May 9, 2015 0 comment

Fiction Small Press

Book I Loved & Four Quotes From Book I Loved: The Motion by Lucy K Shaw

written by Leesa Cross Smith

(421 Atlanta)

“I was drunk and lying down in a Brooklyn park at night with a boy I hardly knew.”

“I need at least one person to learn the rap part to ‘Drunk in Love’ so that we can do this properly next time there is karaoke.”

“As we left again, I felt secret and high.”

“We have resolved, like most sensible people, to read more books actually written by women.”

March 31, 2015 0 comment

Fiction Writing

Book I Loved & Four Quotes From Book I Loved! Man V. Nature by Diane Cook.

written by Leesa Cross Smith

“The sun was bright, and the grass smelled extra grassy because of it”

“She tossed her head and fluttered her legs like she was a captive in a monster movie.”

“The low sun poured orange through the window. The whole room filled to spilling with it.”

“Dave arrived a few minutes later, his summery baseball cap in front of his waist, sheepish, irresistibly everyman.”

January 31, 2015 0 comment

Art Conversation Current Events Fiction Literary Scene Poetry Writing

Conflict Inside: a Work by Claudia Rankine. A close reading of Citizen under Franco Berardi’s scope

written by Marco Antonio Huerta

We are all witnessing the effects of capitalism over our present times in the forms of abstraction of work, the disembodiment of the conscience, and the dematerialization of the commodities. The Italian Marxist Franco “Bifo” Berardi attributes the origin of this great transformation through abstraction to the development of finance:

Finance is the most abstract level of economic symbolization. It is the culmination of a process of progressive abstraction that started with capitalist industrialization. Marx speaks of abstract labor in the sense of an increased distancing of human activity from its concrete usefulness. In his words, capitalism is the application of human skills as a means to obtain a more abstract goal: the accumulation of value^{^[i]}.

On this particular situation he states that the most important changes in societies due to the dematerialization and the general abstraction of the economic rules and procedures are the disembodiment of the “general intelligence”, a concept he uses sometimes in terms of a representation of the cognitive group of workers whose labor is now exploited; the deterritorialization of labor and productivity, that ignited a process of pulverization and precarization of work and worker; the end of growth as a concept related to the “increase of social happiness and satisfaction of the basic needs of people”, but instead the expansion of financial profits and the expansion of the global volume of exchange value. He talks about “the new alienation” occurring in the cognitive worker by precarization and the acceleration of the information flow and productivity. All of these transformations are symptoms of the general intelligence as disembodied, taken away from its own social and erotic body.

January 26, 2015 0 comment

Random

Review of Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

written by Bud Smith

UGLY GIRLS
by Lindsay Hunter
FSG (2014)
review // Bud Smith

I sa ows_141834383046379 w another reviewer give Ugly Girls 1 star on Goodreads because they were scared of it.

They thought it was a YA novel about two adolescent girls, who are unlikely friends and get into a little trouble. What that reviewer was repelled by, will draw most people with a spine farther into the nervy, everyday trailer park terror that exists in the pages of Ugly Girls.

But as it goes, Ugly Girls isn’t YA, it’s Anti-YA.

January 13, 2015 0 comment

Fiction Writing

Book I Loved & Five Quotes From Book I Loved! Rabbit, Run by John Updike

written by Leesa Cross Smith

“As she bows her head to pinch them on, the white line of her parting makes him smile it’s so straight. Like a little birthday girl’s parting.” & “Your heart lifts forever through that blank sky.” & “Love makes the air light.” & “His name in her mouth feels like a physical touch.” & “All soft heart. I suppose that’s why men rule the world. They’re all heart.”

January 11, 2015 0 comment