A Spring Without Borders

Indie Literature Now's Author-on-Author interview series will kick off April 1st with a conversation between two talented and daring contemporary writers. Daniel Kine, Author of Between Nowhere and Happiness, sits down to interview woman writer and activist Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of Real to Reel, Liberty’s Excess, Her Other Mouths, about her upcoming memoir, The Chronology of Water (April, Hawthorne Books).


“If you’ve never read anything by Lidia Yuknavitch, I will tell you this: she's fucking brilliant, and you’re going to be hearing a lot about her very soon.”

Daniel Kine on what to expect from his upcoming interview with Lidia, set to appear April 1st, (April 1st is also Hawthorne Books’ publication date for her new memoir, The Chronology of Water).

Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of Real to Reel, Liberty’s Excess, Her Other Mouths, and the upcoming memoir, The Chronology of Water (April 1st, Hawthorne Books).


Daniel Kine, Author of Between Nowhere and Happiness.












Other things to look into from The New York Times and other Boring sources of literary media:

Book Review Leads to Criminal Libel Charge
By ADAM LIPTAK
An author claims criticism damaged her reputation and lodged a criminal complaint in a country with almost no connection to the book or the review.
February 21, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: SUITS AND LITIGATION, FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND EXPRESSION

‘Henry’s Demons’ and ‘The Memory Palace’ - The Pain of Schizophrenia
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.
A father and son write about their experiences, and a daughter writes about her mother’s illness.
February 21, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: SCHIZOPHRENIA, MENTAL HEALTH AND DISORDERS, BARTOK, MIRA, COCKBURN, PATRICK

‘Alone Together’ by Sherry Turkle - Review
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle waves a caution flag at the technological devices, from social media to robotics, we use to build our emotional lives.
February 21, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: TURKLE, SHERRY

Shakespeare the Pirate: An Internet Tale
Readers respond to a recent Op-Ed about culture and the Internet.
February 21, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: COPYRIGHTS AND COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS, COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins
By DIRK JOHNSON
In a digital world, scholars see an uncertain fate for an old and valued practice.
February 20, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: WRITING AND WRITERS, NEWBERRY LIBRARY

‘Moby-Duck,’ by Donovan Hohn - Review
By JANET MASLIN
Donovan Hohn’s “Moby-Duck” is a book that works as a lively travelogue as well as a voyage of discovery and a philosophical inquiry.
February 20, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: TOYS

In ‘Ugly Beauty,’ a Look at Two Cosmetics Giants
By BRYAN BURROUGH
A new book offers concise historical looks at Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller, the founder of L’Oréal.
February 19, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: COSMETICS AND TOILETRIES, L'OREAL SA, RUBINSTEIN, HELENA, BRANDON, RUTH, SCHUELLER, EUGENE

Young Readers in Dystopia
By CHARLES MCGRATH
After the vampires come aliens, alienation and elimination games.
February 19, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: TEENAGERS AND ADOLESCENCE, FREY, JAMES

Mets’ Dickey Writing a Self-Portrait, Warts and All
By DAVID WALDSTEIN
In a memoir to be published next year, R. A. Dickey will detail how a new grip on the baseball accompanied a fresh grasp of life.
February 19, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: BASEBALL, NEW YORK METS, DICKEY, R A
Germany: Defense Minister Accused of Plagiarizing Ph.D. Dissertation
By REUTERS
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s heir apparent pulled out of an election rally on Thursday amid a plagiarism scandal that could cost him credibility, his Ph.D. title, and possibly even his job.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: PLAGIARISM, GERMANY, GUTTENBERG, KARL-THEODOR ZU

Visual Books Reviewed
By STEVEN HELLER
Visual histories of fanzines, horror magazines and banned comics, and of the Italian shelter magazine Abitare.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: COMIC BOOKS AND STRIPS, INTERIOR DESIGN AND FURNISHINGS, DESIGN
Paperback Row
By IHSAN TAYLOR
Paperback books of particular interest.
February 18, 2011

Perry Moore Dies at 39; Author of Book About Gay Superhero
By DENNIS HEVESI
Mr. Moore, the author of “Hero,” was also an executive producer of the movie series “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: DEATHS (OBITUARIES), MOVIES, HOMOSEXUALITY, MOORE, PERRY

Book Review - Revolution- By Deb Olin Unferth
By JULIA SCHEERES
The author, 18 and in love, dropped out of college and headed for Central America to hunt for a revolution.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: EL SALVADOR, NICARAGUA, CENTRAL AMERICA, UNFERTH, DEB OLIN
Bruno Littlemore’s Lineage
Letter in response to Christopher R. Beha’s review of Benjamin Hale’s novel, “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.”
February 18, 2011
Read the Book Instead
Nicholas Delbanco, the author of “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age,” responds to the review of his book.
February 18, 2011
Market Values
Letter in response to Megan Buskey’s review of “The Price of Everything,” by Eduardo Porter.
February 18, 2011

Up Front: Walter Isaacson
By THE EDITORS
Walter Isaacson has led CNN and Time magazine, and he now runs the Aspen Institute. But he is perhaps even more distinguished as one of the country’s most talented biographers.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: ISAACSON, WALTER
Unkind and Unnecessary
Letter in response to Neil Genzlinger’s review of Allen Shawn’s memoir “Twin.”
February 18, 2011
Editors’ Choice
Recently reviewed books of particular interest.
February 18, 2011

Wesley Stace’s ‘Charles Jessold,’ Musical Murder Mystery
By CHARLES MCGRATH
“Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer” by Wesley Stace, also known as John Wesley Harding, is both a murder mystery and a novel about classical music.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: MUSIC
Bogart’s Lonely Place
Letter in response to Holly Brubach’s review of Stefan Kanfer’s “Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart.”
February 18, 2011

Book Review - The Hemlock Cup - Biography of Socrates - By Bettany Hughes
By WALTER ISAACSON
Bettany Hughes examines the life and death of Socrates, and the city that nurtured and killed him.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: PHILOSOPHY, GREEK CIVILIZATION, ATHENS (GREECE), HUGHES, BETTANY

Deal With the Devil
By WILLIAM LOGAN
Three new collections illuminate the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, including her time as a poet for The New Yorker.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: POETRY AND POETS, NEW YORKER, BISHOP, ELIZABETH

Book Review - West of Here - By Jonathan Evison
By MIKE PEED
Jonathan Evison’s panoramic novel contrasts a group of visionary settlers with their pussyfooting descendants.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: WASHINGTON (STATE)

Book Review - When the Killing’s Done - By T. Coraghessan Boyle
By BARBARA KINGSOLVER
A habitat restorer and an animal lover square off in T. C. Boyle’s rollicking novel set in California’s Channel Islands.
February 18, 2011
MORE ON BOOKS AND LITERATURE AND: ENDANGERED AND EXTINCT SPECIES, CHANNEL ISLANDS, CALIFORNIA, BOYLE, T CORAGHESSAN

Book Review - The Old Romantic - By Louise Dean
By SYLVIA BROWNRIGG
An acerbic comic novel about an old divorced couple gradually finding a spark of reconnection.
February 18, 2011

Five Great Writers You've Never Heard Of:

Coming In At Number One: Fernando Pessoa, Author of Numerous Great Works.

Despite his recent fame, the Portuguese poet and novelist received little to no recognition during his lifetime. Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator, one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets of all time. The critic Harold Bloom has referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the 20th century, along with Pablo Neruda. He was trilingual in Portuguese, English, and in French.
On 13 July 1893, when Pessoa was five, his father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis. The following year, on 2 January, his younger brother Jorge, aged only one, also died. His mother Maria Madalena Pinheiro Nogueira married again in December 1895. In the beginning of 1896, he moved with his mother to Durban, capital of the former British Colony of Natal, where his stepfather João Miguel dos Santos Rosa, a military officer, had been appointed Portuguese consul. The young Pessoa received his early education at St. Joseph Convent School, a Catholic school run by Irish and French nuns. He moved to Durban High School in April, 1899, becoming fluent in English and developing an appreciation for English literature. During the "Matriculation Examination," held at the time by the then University of the Cape of Good Hope, forerunner of the University of Cape Town, in November 1903, he was awarded the recently-created "Queen Victoria Memorial Prize" for best paper in English. While preparing to enter university, he also attended the Durban Commercial School during one year, in the evening shift. Meanwhile he started writing short stories in English, some under the name of David Merrick, many of which he left unfinished [1].


Durban City Hall.
At the age of sixteen, The Natal Mercury (July 6, 1904 edition) published his poem "Hillier did first usurp the realms of rhyme...", under the name of Charles Robert Anon, along with a small introductory text: "I read with great amusement...". In December, The Durban High School Magazine published his essay Macaulay [2]. From February to June, 1905, in the section "The Man in the Moon," The Natal Mercury also published at least four sonnets by Fernando Pessoa: "Joseph Chamberlain", "To England I", "To England II" and "Liberty" [3]. His poems often carried humorous versions of Anon as the author's name.
Ten years after his arrival, he sailed for Lisbon via the Suez Canal on board the "Herzog", leaving Durban for good at the age of seventeen. This journey inspired the poems "Opiário" (dedicated to his friend, the poet and writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro) published in March, 1915, in Orpheu nr.1 [4] and "Ode Marítima" (dedicated to the futurist painter Santa Rita Pintor) published in June, 1915, in Orpheu nr.2 [5] by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos.











If Franz Kafka is the writer of Prague, Fernando Pessoa is certainly the writer of Lisbon. After his return to Portugal, when he was seventeen, Pessoa barely left his beloved city, which inspired the poems "Lisbon Revisited" (1923 and 1926), by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. From 1905 to 1921, when his family returned from Pretoria after the death of his stepfather, he lived in fifteen different places around the city[9], moving from a rented room to another according to his financial troubles and the troubles of the young Portuguese Republic.


Coffee house «A Brasileira», established in 1905, the year Pessoa returned to Lisbon.
Pessoa had the flâneur's regard, namely through the eyes of Bernardo Soares, another of his heteronyms [10]. This character was supposedly an accountant, working at an office in Douradores Street, where Vasques was the boss, and living in the same downtown street, a world that Pessoa knew quite well due to his long career as free lance correspondence translator. In fact, from 1907 until his death, in 1935, Pessoa worked in twenty one firms located in Lisbon's downtown, sometimes in two or three of them simultaneously [11]. In The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares describes some of those typical places and its "atmosphere".
Pessoa was a frequent customer at Martinho da Arcada, a centennial coffeehouse downtown, almost an "office" for his private business and literary concerns, where he used to meet friends in the 1920s. He also frequented other coffee shops, pubs and restaurants, a number of which no longer exist. The statue of Fernando Pessoa (above) can be seen outside A Brasileira, one of the preferred places of the young writers and artists of the group of orpheu during the 1910s. This coffeehouse, in the aristocratic district of Chiado, is quite close to Pessoa's birthplace: 4, Largo de São Carlos (in front of the Opera House) [12], one of the most elegant neighborhoods of Lisbon [13]. In 1925, Pessoa wrote in English a guidebook to Lisbon but it remained unpublished until 1992 [14].
[edit] Writing a lifetime
He looked about thirty, thin, rather above average height, exaggeratedly bent over when seated but less so when he stood up, dressed with a certain negligence, which was not entirely negligence. On his pale, uninteresting face an air of suffering did not stir interest, although it was difficult to define what kind of suffering that air –- it seemed to suggest several kinds: privation, anguish, and a suffering born from the indifference of having suffered a great deal.
Fernando Pessoa,
from The Book of Disquiet, tr. by Alfred Mac Adam.


Aleister Crowley and Pessoa in Lisbon, September 1930.












In his early years, Pessoa was influenced by major English classic poets as Shakespeare, Milton or Spenser and romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Later, he was also influenced by French symbolists Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, mainly by Portuguese poets as Antero de Quental, Gomes Leal, Camilo Pessanha, Cesário Verde, António Nobre or Teixeira de Pascoaes, and modernists as Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, among many other writers [1].


Astrological chart of the heteronym Ricardo Reis by Fernando Pessoa.
During World War I, Pessoa wrote to a number of British publishers in order to print his collection of English verse The Mad Fiddler (unpublished during his lifetime), but it was refused. However, in 1920, the prestigious literary review Athenaeum included one of those poems [15]. Since the British publication failed, in 1918 Pessoa published in Lisbon two slim volumes of English verse: Antinous [16] and 35 Sonnets [17], received by the British literary press without enthusiasm [18]. Along with two associates, he founded another publishing house, Olisipo, which published in 1921 a further two English poetry volumes: English Poems I-II and English Poems III by Fernando Pessoa.
Pessoa translated into English some Portuguese books and from English the poems "The Raven", "Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume"[19] by Edgar Allan Poe which, along with Walt Whitman, strongly influenced him. He also translated into Portuguese a number of esoteric books by leading Theosophists such as C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant [20].
Pessoa was influenced by occultism and developed an interest in spiritism and astrology. He was an amateur astrologue, elaborating astral charts for friends and even for himself and the heteronyms. His interest in occultism led Pessoa to correspond with Aleister Crowley. Later he helped Crowley plan an elaborate fake suicide when he visited Portugal in 1930 [21]. Pessoa translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan" into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Pessoa's library shows that he possessed copies of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and Confessions. Pessoa also wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in several fragments, including Moral [22].


Pessoa's tomb in Lisbon, at the cloister of the Hieronymites Monastery since 1988.
Politically, Pessoa referred to himself as a 'mystical nationalist' and was conservative in many of his views. He was an outspoken elitist, anti-democratic, and aligned himself against communism, socialism, and Catholicism. He supported the military coups of 1917 and 1926, and wrote a pamphlet in 1928 initially supportive of the Salazar dictatorship, but by the mid-1930s, Pessoa had become disenchanted with the regime.[23]
Pessoa died of cirrhosis in 1935, at the age of forty-seven, with only one book published in Portuguese: "Mensagem" (Message). However, he left a lifetime of unpublished and unfinished work (over 25,000 pages manuscript and typed that have been housed in the Portuguese National Library since 1988). The heavy burden of editing this huge work is still in progress. In 1988 (the centenary of his birth), Pessoa's remains were moved to the Hieronymites Monastery, in Lisbon, where Vasco da Gama, Luís de Camões, and Alexandre Herculano are also buried. Pessoa's portrait was on the 100-escudo banknote.
[edit] Heteronyms


Pessoa's statue outside Lisbon's famous coffee house «A Brasileira».
Pessoa's earliest heteronym, at the age of six, was the Chevalier de Pas. Other childhood heteronyms included Dr. Pancrácio and David Merrick, followed by Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, succeeded by others. Translator Richard Zenith notes that Pessoa eventually established at least seventy-two heteronyms [24]. According to Pessoa himself, there were three main heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. The heteronyms possess distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles [25].
Fernando Pessoa on the heteronyms
«How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what. (My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I'm sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as "me myself" instead of "I myself", etc.., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive...)»[26].
George Steiner on Fernando Pessoa: «A man of many parts»
«Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance). 'Heteronyms', as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his 'voices', Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as 'everything that Pessoa is not and more'.
He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuoso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterise Pessoa's 'own' intimate verse.» [27]

Coming In At Number Two: Gordon Honeycombe, Author of Neither the Sea Nor the Sand:

GORDON HONEYCOMBE
Neither The Sea Nor The Sand

Pan, London, 1971
first published Hutchinson & Co, 1969
(price: 30p; 224 pages)

dedication: To the memory of my mother and father

The blurb on the back:

'Horror in the best Poe tradition ... Compulsive reading for the hours of daylight. After that, you are on your own' - Birmingham Evening Post

When obsessive love animates a no-longer-living body, the result can be gruesome beyond human believing...
In this wholly original novel, mind-chilling terror is the fruit of a passion that survives beyond the grave.

'Told with a fine macabre flourish by an author well known alike as an ITV newscaster and a BBC dramatist' - Daily Mail
Gordon Honeycombe 'comes menacingly near frightening us rigid' - The Scotsman

opening lines:
'Hugh!' She called his name up the slope of the hill to the sky, against the swooping downrush of the wind. 'I can't go on.'

This is an extraordinary book.

Just to clear up the authorship for younger readers: Gordon Honeycombe was a newsreader, who worked for ITN between 1965 and 1977 and in the 1980s for TV-AM. In case that doesn't sound too impressive in a world where 'TV news' refers to the likes of Sky News and the neutered remains of post-deregulation ITN, do remember that things were better then: Honeycombe was a broadcaster of impressive integrity as well as authority. His departure from ITN, for example, was occasioned by a dispute between him and his employers over the coverage of the momentous fire-fighters' strike - he supported the strikers, they (as ever) did not. So he left and became a full-time writer.

Our Gordon
Gordon Honeycombe

By that stage he was already a published author, and amongst his work was this phenomenal piece. The set-up is deceptively simple: a couple fall in love and decide to celebrate their union by having a 'honeymoon' (they're not actually married) in the wilds around Cape Wrath, the far North-Western tip of Scotland. He has a heart-attack on holiday and is pronounced dead, so she takes the body back to their home in Jersey. The twist, of course, is that in the meantime he's come back to life. Well, not exactly life: he doesn't breathe, has no heartbeat and can't speak, but he can walk and follow her instructions as though he can hear her. He is, in short, some kind of zombie, kept animated simply by the power and ferocity of her love.

The close observation of human behaviour is immensely impressive and, despite the comments on the back about Poe and the like, this is not really a true piece of horror, so much as a Gothic love story. Both literate and literary, it's a slow-paced slow-burning tale that sucks you deep into its intense, oppressive atmosphere, and reveals Mr Honeycombe to be a very fine writer:

About herself and her childhood she talked readily and with little reserve. This he could not do, and even when talking about what he knew and what intrigued him he spoke with the slight awkwardness of someone unused to making long statements. But he had none the less a command of language and expression that never rested on clichés. He was conscious of this, and proud of his carefully acquired knowledge and its ordered integrity. (pp.26-27)

He could be writing about his own style.


Mr Honeycombe and Rosemary Davies later adapted the story for a 1972 movie from Tigon starring Susan Hampshire, Frank Finlay, Michael Petrovitch and Tony Blair's dad-in-law, Tony Booth. I really wish I'd seen it so I could enthuse, but I haven't, so instead I'll steal the comments of the Radio Times Guide to Films, which calls it 'a genuine oddity that was sadly overlooked at the time'. Sounds good to me, and faithful to a book that's also a genuine oddity, but it's so obscure that it doesn't even get mentioned in Halliwell's Film Guide. It was also known as The Exorcism Of Hugh.

Five Great Writers You've Never Heard Of

Coming in at number three: Rudy Wilson, Author of The Red Truck

Whether or not it's meant as a conscious allusion, the title of Rudy Wilson's novel ''The Red Truck'' instantly recalls William Carlos Williams's poem ''The Red Wheelbarrow,'' and in doing so, it signals some of the interests shared by this first-time novelist and the poet: a painterly use of color; a reliance on strong, often fragmentary images, and a fascination with syntax and diction.
Williams once said that when someone makes a poem, he takes words from the world about him, composing them ''into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses''; and a similar impulse appears to inform Mr. Wilson's book. It's less a novel in any conventional sense than a long prose poem told largely from the point of view of two visionary children, named Billy-Billy Jump and Teddianne Sayers, who speak to us bizarrely in a manner all their own. In the course of the story, both of them grow to adulthood, but they retain a heightened, idiot-savantlike perspective, and this condition not only colors their off-kilter perceptions but also twists their language into musical contortions. * *
The Red Truck is one of those late-80s Knopf books edited by Lish that I found remaindered one day in some TV appliance-warehouse-turned-bookshop that is now a place that sells tires. I took it home and immediately could feel the sensation of something new running through my hands. I think it’s a brilliant book, a one of a kind book, a book that wouldn’t have been made into a book had it not found its way into Gordon’s hands. I think the story goes behind it that Lish cut the manuscript in half (sort of what he did to Barry Hannah’s revved up Ray). I suspect what Lish did was find the core of Rudy’s Red Truck and cut away much of what a much younger Wilson thought was needed to hold the story together. For me it’s a novel that is pure hallucination and is the kind of book that I return to again and again in order to recapture that initial rush that language in its purest, most musical form can offer to us. Each time that I do Rudy’s sentences unglue me and then put me back together in new ways. I let my sister read The Red Truck, some years ago, and when she did she ended up having a major seizure. The effect that the book had on my sis is what we all want from our work: sentences that take hold of the brain and seize it up, unhinge us from the world around us, and make the body of us do some fucked-up sort of pogo to a music that Wilson’s song makes us hear inside our own heads. The Red Truck by Rudy Wilson is the realest of deals. You can get it now from Ravenna Press along with a brand new book of short fiction by Wilson called Sonja’s Blues. And while you’re loitering around at the Ravenna website, do yourself a third favor and nab Norman Lock’s The Long Rowing Unto Morning, an equally dreamy and necessary book.
Oh, and for good measure, I figured I’d add in a letter he wrote to the New York Times a while back.
Gordon Lish was my editor (D.T. Max, Aug. 9). Early on, he said to me about my work, ''Never explain or apologize in the writing.'' That is probably what accounted for the serious cuts he made in my first novel, ''The Red Truck,'' published by Knopf in 1987. He took my novel to France for a month and mowed it down from 440 pages to a final 178. He said to me when it was done, ''I wish I could put my name on it.'' I thought, ''You may as well.''
At first, I was in shock at the final outcome of his editing. Not only had he cut the book in half, but he had taken a line out of context from the middle of the book and put it in as the final sentence. It made no sense to me on any level of the work. He informed me that if the original manuscript were to be published, it would receive no notice and would be read only by the ''lunatic fringe.'' We eventually agreed on a version we both liked. There is not one word of his in the book. His main task had been to cut, and cut it he did. He wants to get to the meat of the work and display it in its honest reality, and I believe he is a genius at it.
Rudy Wilson

Five Great Writers You've Never Heard Of

Welcome Back

As most of you who are on our e-mail list already know, IndieLitNow is back for good.  We’ve switched our address, due to a copyright discrepancy that we won’t go into, except to say that it involves an exclamation point!  That said, we’ve reposted most of our backlog, and are starting fresh here and now.  Printed issues of IndieLitNow will be available, same as always, during the months of January, April, and August.

More importantly, IndieLitNow correspondent Micah Loosen has compiled this year’s list of Five Great Writers You’ve Never Heard Of.  The idea this year is to alternate between writers of the past, and current authors.  Coming in at number five this year is 20th century prose stylist Andrei Platonov.

 

Andrei Platonov: Russia's greatest 20th-century prose stylist?

His writing 'works on many levels' ... The anti-Soviet author Andrei Platonov:

Stalin called him scum. Sholokhov, Gorky, Pasternak, and Bulgakov all thought he was the bee's knees. But when Andrei Platonov died in poverty, misery and obscurity in 1951, no one would have predicted that within half a century he would be a contender for the title as Russia's greatest 20th-century prose stylist. Indeed, his English translator Robert Chandler thinks Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit is so astonishingly good he translated it twice. Set against a backdrop of industrialisation and collectivisation, The Foundation Pit is fantastical yet realistic, funny yet tragic, profoundly moving and yet disturbing. Daniel Kalder caught up with Chandler to talk about why more people should be reading Platonov.
Why did you translate Platonov's Foundation Pit twice?
No other work of literature means so much to me. I translated it together with Geoffrey Smith in 1994 for the Harvill Press, and again in 2009, together with my wife Elizabeth and the American scholar Olga Meerson, for NYRB Classics. There were two reasons for retranslating it. First, the original text was never published in Platonov's lifetime, and the first posthumous publications – on which our Harvill translation was based – were severely bowdlerised. One crucial three-page passage, for example, is entirely missing.
Second, Platonov is hard to translate: in the early 1990s we were working in the dark. During the last 15 years, however, I have regularly attended Platonov seminars and conferences in Moscow and Petersburg. One indication of how deeply many Russian writers and critics admire him is the extent of their generosity to his translators; I now have a long list of people I can turn to for help. Above all, I have the good fortune to have my wife, who shares my love of Platonov, and the brilliant American scholar, Olga Meerson, as my closest collaborators. Olga was brought up in the Soviet Union; she has a fine ear, knows a great deal about Russian Orthodoxy, and has written an excellent book on Platonov. She has deepened my understanding of almost every sentence.
You've argued that Russians will eventually come to recognise Platonov as their greatest prose writer. Given that he's up against titans such as Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov this is quite a claim.
Well, it probably sounds less startling to Russians than it does to English and Americans. I've met a huge number of Russian writers and critics who look on Platonov as their greatest prose writer of the last century. In my personal judgment, it was confirmed for me during the last stages of my work on Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, an anthology of short stories I compiled for Penguin Classics. I worked on this for several years, did most of the translations myself and revised them many times. I read through the proofs with enjoyment – I was still happy with the choices I had made – but there were only two writers whom I was still able to read with real wonder: Pushkin and Platonov. Even at this late stage I was still able to find new and surprising perceptions in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and Platonov's The Return. This didn't happen with any other writers.

Readers who encounter Platonov for the first time are often struck by his surreality: in the Foundation Pit, for example, a bear staggers through a village denouncing kulaks [supposedly wealthy peasants]. But you've said that almost everything he writes is drawn from reality.
Platonov's stories work on many levels. When I first read his account of the kulaks being sent off down the river on a raft, I thought of it simply as weird. Then I realised that it's one of many examples of Platonov's way of literally realising a metaphor or political cliché; the official directive is to "liquidate" the peasants – and this unfamiliar word is interpreted as meaning that they must be got rid of by means of water.
Many years later I found out that this scene is also entirely realistic. The Siberian Viktor Astafiev wrote in his memoir: "In spring 1932 all the dispossessed kulaks were collected together, placed on rafts and floated off to Krasnoyarsk, and from there to Igarka. When they started loading the rafts, the whole village gathered together. Everyone wept; it was their own kith and kin who were leaving. One person was carrying mittens, another a bread roll, another a lump of sugar." Any educated Russian reading these lines today would at once imagine that they were written by Platonov.
As for the bear, he's drawn from many sources. He is the generally helpful but somewhat dangerous bear of Russian folk tales; he is a representative of the proletariat – strong but inarticulate. As a hammer in a forge, he is linked both to Stalin, whose name means "man of steel" and to Molotov, whose name means "hammerer". He is the tame bear often employed by a village sorcerer. Platonov's bear "denounces" kulaks by stopping outside a hut and roaring; in the late 1920s an ethnographer working in the province of Kaluga recorded the belief that "a clean home, outside which a bear stops of his own accord, not going in but refusing to budge – that home is an unhappy home". And one of Platonov's brothers has written that there really was a tame bear who worked in a local blacksmith's.
Platonov started off as a committed communist, but was appalled by collectivisation and the excesses of Stalinism. Uniquely – unlike others who adopted an oppositional stance, or wrote critiques for the desk drawer – he tried to negotiate a space within Soviet culture in which he could write honestly about what was going on. Is it fair to say that he failed?
I don't think so. Some of the stories he managed to publish – The River Potudan, The Third Son and The Return – are as great, in their more compact and classical way, as the novels he was unable to publish. The Return was viciously criticised, but it was published in a journal with a huge circulation and may well have been read by hundreds of thousands of people. And there is no knowing how important Platonov's example was to younger writers. Vasily Grossman, for example, was a close friend. They met frequently during Platonov's last years and read their work out loud to each other. Grossman gave the main speech at Platonov's funeral. His last stories are very Platonov-like. And Platonov's very last work – the moving, witty versions of Russian folk tales he composed after the war – was included, without acknowledgment, in millions of school textbooks. Platonov was not widely known, but he was widely read. Here again he is in a similar position to Grossman, whose words are carved in granite, in huge letters, on the Stalingrad war memorial, without acknowledgment of his authorship.
Platonov's language is often extremely intimate yet also strange: alienated and alienating. Is he exceptionally difficult to translate? And does he sound more "normal" in the original than in translation?
He is certainly difficult to translate. On the other hand, I've sometimes been surprised by how much of him evidently survives even in a poor translation. I've met people who have been deeply moved after first encountering him in a very poor translation indeed. As for your second question, you need to ask someone who is entirely bilingual and not involved in the work. All I can say myself is that all languages have norms that can be infringed, and that we do our best to infringe English norms just as Platonov infringes Russian norms. It is for you and other readers to judge how much we have succeeded!

Sometimes I think you have a secret plan to steer readers away from familiar authors such as Chekhov towards more angular, difficult work such as Platonov, thus reshaping perceptions of 20th-century Russian literature.

Well, I'd put it at least a little differently! I love Chekhov's stories as much as anyone, and would especially love to translate The Steppe and A Boring Story. But then Chekhov isn't so very easy or smooth either, though many of his complexities and contradictions are smoothed over in translation. What's certainly true is that I think we have a distorted view of Soviet literature. For many decades it was impossible for a Soviet writer to achieve fame in the west except through a major international scandal. This is what happened with both Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Both are important writers, but they are not greater writers than Grossman, Platonov and Shalamov.
Things are changing, however. Grossman is far better known in the west now than he was 10 years ago. Platonov is at least beginning to be noticed – Penelope Fitzgerald and John Berger are two of the English writers who have been quickest to realise his genius. And there is a chance that the Yale University Press will soon be commissioning a complete translation of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales. One more point: we have found it easier in the west to learn to appreciate the 20th-century writers who wrote from outside the Soviet experience. Bulgakov reached adulthood long before the revolution. He was never taken in by it; he looks down on everything Soviet. Grossman, Platonov and Shalamov, however, belong to a generation 10 to 20 years younger. All of them, at least for a while and to some degree, shared the hopes of the revolution. They write from inside the Soviet experience. This perhaps gives them a greater depth and complexity; their work contains no ready-made answers.

Donora Hillard: The TNB Self Interview (From The Nervous Breakdown Self Interview Series).

DETROIT, MI By Donora Hillard DONORA HILLARD's poetry collection Theology of the Body, a feminist response to the teachings of Jason Evert, Pope John Paul II, St. Paul, Christopher West, and other religious figures, was recently released in print by Gold Wake Press and was a bestseller in Women's Studies at Amazon.com. She is also the author of Exhibition (Gold Wake Press, 2008), Bone Cages: A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVox [books], 2007), and Parapherna (dancing girl press, 2006). Her creative nonfiction, fiction, photography, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books, 2010), diode, FRiGG, Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), Night Train, PANK, Segue, and Spork, among others. She has taught writing at King’s College, Penn State University, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry / Creative Nonfiction) from Wilkes University and is a PhD candidate in English (Rhetoric and Composition / Film and Media) at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she is composing a dissertation on the intersection of writing with other art forms, specifically contemporary dance and the work of Billy Bell. She is presently at work on both a poetry manuscript entitled Extraordinary Question and a collaboration with Sean Kilpatrick entitled who else is here and why.

The poem featured here is from your collection Theology of the Body, which was recently released by Gold Wake Press. Care to talk about it?

As part of a teaching position I once held, I was forced to attend a lecture by Christopher West, who’s considered an authority on Pope John Paul II’s teachings on adultery, contraception, marriage, virginity, and other matters of the body. At one point he said, "Ladies, your bodies don’t make much sense on their own, do they?" I knew I had to respond to that question in some capacity. As such, Theology of the Body contains quotes from the Pope and West along with other religious figures juxtaposed against poems that are unorthodox in nature. It’s my way of saying to those men, Look, what you’re forcing upon people just doesn’t function in reality, especially where women are concerned.

What are you working on now?

I’d like to read from Theology of the Body anywhere, so interested parties should contact me. I promise to wear something nice. I’m completing a poetry manuscript entitled Extraordinary Question and a collaboration with Sean Kilpatrick entitled who else is here and why. I’m coordinating a feminist poetry press with Molly Gaudry and drafting memoir notes about the aforementioned teaching position. Finally, as part of my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, I’m researching for what I hope will be my dissertation.

Dissertation? I thought that was only for smart people.

Yes, but I’m trying. I was originally going to write my dissertation on aphasic text, fragmentation, and the (in)accessibility of memory after assisting an Alzheimer’s-afflicted individual with piecing together his memoir. However, I’ve been focusing more on movement in my work, especially contemporary dance. I recently discovered Billy Bell, who moves in a way that’s almost inhuman (he’s the child character in the Mia Michaels-choreographed group piece, and he choreographed the solo piece on his own) and concluded that such movement is profoundly poetic. I’m attempting to exemplify a similar freedom of movement in the language of the manuscripts I’m finishing.
My research emphasizes the intersection of writing with other art forms and the conviction that writers can glean as much if not more material from observing and practicing dance (specifically contemporary, which breaks genre boundaries) as they can from reading. After all, what does strong writing do but have a sense of musicality and rhythm? I’ve also noticed a distinct sense of revision across various dance pieces.

Do you have anything else to say regarding academia?

Transitioning from completing my MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry into a PhD that’s critical in scope has been troubling for me at times. If there’s someone reading this in similar circumstances and perhaps you’ve published a book and none of your classmates know what it is and you believe you’ve been labeled the “crazy artist” or the “dumb blonde” (even though my hair’s now blue / black) and all you can do is scowl and scribble while your colleagues speak with conviction and skill, come to Detroit and I’ll buy you a whiskey sour and there will be smoke and a jukebox and we’ll sway in unison.

Well then. What else?

Cleaning the house, dancing, learning to cut my own bangs and dye my hair with some success, reading Avital Ronell’s body of work, and running.

What’s on the nightstand?

Anne Carson’s Nox, black lacquer, a Civil War-era glass eye, a sickly vintage-looking lamp, and Sephora cosmetics such as NARS blush in Orgasm.

Lit Week in New York

With all the ranting and raving about Fashion Week, Fashion's Night Out, and who will be where, wearing what, and taking it off later with whom, it's easy to forget (maybe you never knew?) that this weekend is also stuffed with awesome and free-booze-filled literary events. Saturday night is LitQuakeNYC, a literary bar-and-readings crawl around downtown NYC that will end with a big drunken party. On Sunday, we’ve got the Brooklyn Book Festival, an annual extravaganza featuring readings and talks from pretty much every writer you can think of and vending booths from every indie press you’ve never heard of but can’t wait to be introduced to. To help you navigate this weekend of authorial madness, I’ve come up with a rigorous itinerary.
1diggdigg Thursday 7pm - Tao Lin Book Party
If you want to start your weekend off early, come by BookCourt bookstore in Cobble Hill for the launch party for Tao Lin’s new novel, Richard Yates. There will be free wine, attractive hipsters, and a brief introduction from yours truly.
Friday 7:30pm - Brooklyn Indie Party
BookFest unofficially begins Friday night with a welcome party at Fort Greene’s Greenlight bookstore hosted by a bunch of indie presses like Akashic Books, A Public Space, and Electric Literature, and featuring food, drinks, and special guest DJs Johnny Temple (from Girls vs. Boys), and Dave Tompkins (author, How To Wreck a Nice Beach). Come dance awkwardly!
Saturday 6pm - Lit Chicks vs. Book Boys: Literary Trivia with Harper Perennial
Head to KGB Bar early to test your knowledge with hosts Neal Pollack, Jason Mulgrew, and the lovely Rachel Shukert.
Saturday 7pm - Welcome to the Jungle: Urban Lives Revealed
Stephen Elliott, Eddy Portnoy, Henry Chang, and Jack Boulware read giddy tales of city life at the Yippie Museum Cafe. (The Yippie Museum!?)
Saturday 8:15-9pm Sweet Home New York, Bomb-aoke, Paris Review Sneak Preview
The toughest time slot of the weekend in terms of too much good stuff to choose from. Gigantic and Open City host a party at Home Sweet Home featuring New York-related readings from great writers including Stephen O’Conner, Anya Yurchyshyn, Leopoldine Core, and Bryan Charles. Bomb mag is doing a bizarre lit-karaoke thing, in which contestants re-enact interviews from old issues of Bomb. It’s judged by po-mo-sweet-lady-of-the-moment Rivka Galchen, and the infinitely badass Nick Flynn. There’s also a Paris Review throwdown for those that want some serious schmoozing, copies of the new issue, and some great readings from unannounced special guests.
Saturday, 9pm After Party
Head to Fontana’s to find all the other lit-crawlers drunk and dancing, looking for lit-love.
Sunday 10am
Out of bed, coffee, bloody mary, etc, make your way to St. Francis auditorium for a rock and roll breakfast reading featuring an impressive trifecta: Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, Steve Almond.
Sunday 11am
Talk Kafka with Joshua Cohen, Francine Prose, Matthew Sharpe, and Liesl Schillinger. St Francis Maroney Screening Room.
Sunday 12pm
See Sam Lipsyte and other honchos of humor discuss what it’s like to live in the world (or something...). St. Francis Reading Room.
Sunday 1pm
Pack a lunch and check out Paul Auster in conversation with John Ashberry. This is a weird and amazing combo, and is not to be missed. St Francis Auditorium.
Sunday 2pm
Mary Gaitskill, Ben Greenman, and Simon Van Booy discuss primal impulses, whatever that means. St. Francis Auditorium (At this point, accept that you’ve been in the St. Francis Auditorium all day.)
Sunday 3pm
Sarah Silverman does her thing on the main stage.
Sunday 4pm
Salman Rushdie talks Indian Diaspora with Tishana Doshi, author of The Pleasure Seekers. St Francis Auditorium.
Sunday 5pm
Gary Shteyngart and others read at the International stage.
Sunday 6pm
Still going? Head back to Manhattan for one last event: Tag Reading Series at the Cell Theater featuring Justin Taylor, Elissa Bassist, James Yeh, and Chloe Cooper Jones—all excellent readers and writers who won’t disappoint.
This is just a small but highly recommended sampling of the many events. For full Litquake and BookFest Schedules, go here and here. I probably won’t make it to all of these, but I’ll certainly try. Feel free to say hi. I’ll be the shaven-headed man standing in the corner, looking cool. Follow me on twitter @bubblesdepot for up-to-the-minute reports on the goings-on. See you there!