chiasmus press would like to introduce you to the NEXT BIG THING–the winner of the chiasmus book contest:
please say hello and give it up for:
Kate Zambreno — O Fallen Angel
We’d also like to ring the bells of praise for:
Jane Downs — The Sleeping Wall
and
Boris Pintar — Family Parables
So season’s greetings to all — and BUY BOOKS PUBLISHED BY INDEPENDENT PRESSES. BECAUSE IT MATTERS.
Out of hundreds of entries to this year’s Chiasmus Press First Book Competition, we have selected eight finalists which represent the best of the best:
- “VTV” by Elena Knox
- “Glamorous Freak: How I Taught My Dress to Act” by Roxanne Carter
- “Caprichos” by Pedro Ponce
- “The Sleeping Wall” by Jane Downs
- “O Fallen Angel” by Kate Zambreno
- “Girl Love” by Sandi Sonnenfeld
- “With One Step Ahead” by Goro Takano
- “Family Parables” by by Boris Pintar
These manuscripts will now be sent to our secret final judge and his/her selection will be made by the end of November.
Thanks to all that participated in this years contest. As you can see you were all in great company.
Since Chiasmus Press doesn’t live on profit we’ll take praise… or even honorable mention. Check out what Poets and Writers.com has to say about us this time.
Kevin will be reading from Creamy Bullets on Sunday, June 22 at the Hawthorne Street Powell’s in Portland. Click here for time and location.
Kevin will also be hosting his Booty Call reading series on July 13. Other readers appearing are Steve Almond, Jami Attenberg, Zack Plague, and Melissa Lion.
Chiasmus Press is proud to release a new book by Lily Hoang:
A work of proportion, grace, tenderness, ferocity. The easy intelligence and genuine audacity of Lily Hoang’s Parabola makes it a wonderful and disarming reading experience.
—Carole Maso
Lily Hoang’s Parabola deploys a calculus of composition that always already approaches the absolute of… Or I was going to say something like that, but this book exhausts the conceits of mathematics, physics, heavenly bodies, and the human heart. The story problems have all been proven; the figures figured. Parabola is a tour de form with force multiplied further. Elegant vision is the constant and ever-changing. And imaginary numbers are the least part of the imagination evident here, and everywhere, in this sublimely sublime book.
—Michael Martone
The simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings, and our journey begins. A tracing modern day mythologies, Parabola weaves through genres, mathematical formulas, and photographs, all while following the curve of a parabola, stopping at various points to pick up strands of intersections or stories. Lily Hoang’s debut novel offers readers tender snapshots of an Asian-American girl coming-of-age juxtaposed with the Pythagorean belief in numerology placed right beside a physical manifestation of dark matter contrasted with interactive IQ, personality, and psychological tests. Smart, challenging, sad, and kind, by the end of Parabola, you will have moved through every emotion, and you will end right where you began, with that simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings.
Parabola will be available soon at Amazon.com and through Small Press Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org
We’ve just released a new book, Nightmare in Silicon by Colette Phair.
We hand picked this book for our first book competition because it represents our small shift into smart, literary cyberpunk that needs better representation in the indie press world. Besides, albeit creepy, Nightmare is an erotically charged cultural commentary of current trends placed two minutes into the future. I mean they’re now cloning monkeys for chistsakes.
Here’s what Alan Moore, author of V For Vendetta had to say about the book — “A toxic-shock torrent of bad energy and beautiful language, Collette Phair’s ‘Nightmare in Silicon’ is recklessly brave and driven writing, brimming with fluorescent style and startling ideas. Hers is a strong, new voice that demands and deserves to be listened to.”
Nightmare in Silicon is available at amazon.com. So what are you waiting for?
…”The Man and How We Plan To Stick It To Him” by Delightful Young Man!
Thanks to everyone who submitted to the fight song contest. We’ll debut the winning tune in next month’s podcast.
I recently heard John Banville read from his new book Christine Falls. It wasn’t that interesting to be honest, some crime novel with a dead lady and an alchy dectetive. He did say something interesting though; he said that he believes that the european novel is dead and that the American novel is still new. He then said this waning in europe is reason why American novels and novelists are so popular. I think that’s a bunch a crapola. What do you people think?
to the question, “what should fiction do”:
Stacey Levine says: The smallest transaction or event in life, anything, is an opening. That’s how.
Lance Olsen says: In The Middle Mind, Curtis White maintains that the narratives generated and sustained by the American political system, entertainment industry, and academic trade have taught us over the last half century how not to think for ourselves. Essentially, those narratives shun complexity and challenge; avoid texts that demand attentive, self-conscious, and self-critical reading; and embrace The Middle Mind’s thoughtless impulse toward the status quo. In a phrase, what we are left with is the death or at least the dying of what I think of as the Difficult Imagination. What writers can do is attempt to revive that Difficult Imagination by exploring various strategies that call attention to, reflect upon, and disrupt the assumptions behind conventional narratives, thereby challenging the dominant cultures that would like to see such narratives told and retold until they begin to pass for truths about the human condition. “Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot,” Fredric Jameson once noted, is “a kind of satisfaction with society as well,” and I would add much the same is the case with our satisfaction with undemanding style, character, subject matter, and so forth. My orientation, then, rhymes fairly closely with those posed by Viktor Shklovsky for art and Martin Heidegger for philosophy: the return through complication and challenge (not predictability and ease) to perception and thought.
Mark America says:
Writing should do what it’s always done when performing its shamanistic tricks ON
the one who writes, that is –
it should trigger new FORMal investigations
for the writing body to play OUT
its hyperimprovised MOVEments
IN the compositional field of PLAY.
Watch out, though, the last thing you need to do is get a concussion!
Trevor Dodge says: Writing should share a hot shower with you, towel you off with a high thread count, and then retreat downstairs to powder the sugar on your pancakes.
But before all that, writing should throw a psychotic fit in front of you because you haven’t been paying enough attention to it lately. You, with all your InterWebs and XBoxing and iLife–a-ma-jigging that you do; with all your attempts to tell writing what it is (a juice extractor!) and what it is not (a mini-fridge!), you are missing what writing *could be*, and this is why writing is so thoroughly and justifiably pissed off at you right now.
It is, after all, Valentine’s Day this week.
to the question, “what should fiction do”:
Debra di blasi says:
In the beginning was the word
And the word gave human apes dominion over other apes
And the word showed man and woman they were naked and made them like god
And the word cast them from the garden of innocence into the desert of ego
Where the word divided and multiplied, mutated and evolved
And the word created cities and machines, laws and religions, weapons and wars, music and song, love and revenge, poetry and fiction
And the word created more words that created new beginnings that created new possibilities
When and only when the word was read and understood
DOESN’T IT
Writing does. It does in advertising, in newscasts, in sexual murmurings. It does in video games, in MP3s, in sitcoms. It does, sometimes beautifully, in fiction, poetry, and dreams. We cannot stop writing from doing because we are because it does.
SHOULDN’T IT
I try to keep my shoulds to myself — though I confess to losing patience every now and then with writers who shouldn’t but do anyway because they’re lazy, or caught in some isolated academic interpretation of what writing is, was, will be. I’m not so fascist that I believe everyone should be on the same page, pun intended. John Grisham should be doing what he does because it is what he can do. (He admits he wishes he could write literary fiction, but his attempts have proved fruitless.) In my times of near poverty I’ve wished I could do the tripe of Danielle Steel (under an assumed name, of course); but I could not. And thus should not. My fascination with language always took me deeper into the music and dance of it. As Alice discovered, that rabbit hole is deep. And deeper.
CAN IT
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo could-did. Margaret Atwood’s Murder in the Dark could-did. Walter Abish’s How German Is It could-did. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. My question to me is how? Why? Because I want to do, too.
P.S.
Mourn the lost ship of attempt, like Montaigne’s essais (lit trans. trials or attempts) when to try was a satisfactory goal rather than to succeed. Then was exploration vs. manufacturing. Now is product vs. process.
Zack Wentz says: I don’t feel entirely certain in regards to what “writing” even is just
now. I must admit that I have a lot less faith in the effectiveness of the printed word than I used to, but at the same time there seems to be more writing, and reading, going on than ever before (via the internet). Of course most of it is un-edited, stream-of-self-PR rubbish, but the sheer cyber-bulk of it is beyond overwhelming. What writing can do, at one extreme, is bore you into not reading it before you even really get started, or throw you into a state that is so beyond description the words you’ve processed have become keys to the gates of the Ineffable (writing at
its best). The type of writing that produces the latter effect has become rare.
I’m not sure if this is because of the fact that a lot of the best of it is only speaking through/to other writers/students of literature in an academic/post-academic context, or because books (especially of the fiction/poetry variety) have almost completely lost their viability in popular culture. A considerable bit of both, I’m sure. At the same time I don’t think this situation is entirely bad. It has, and will, force writers (and writing) to hybridize and adapt. What writing should do is, undeniably, a moral call. In my opinion that “should” is changing how people feel in a way that actually changes how they act.
Unfortunately, that “should” can be fulfilled by the shoddiest of online journalism/blogs/propaganda, but on the flipside people can be so moved by a particular piece of work (usually something hovering in that vibrant area between the beautiful and the grotesque) that, for better or for worse, after reading it they will never be the same. The best writing should
hurt people in a good way*. As for myself, I do, genuinely, write because I have to. The can, should, etc. are largely afterthoughts. “Should” is too broad—a driving demon/angel in the conscience that never fully reveals itself. I’ve mostly been busy learning (and unlearning) all my
“shouldn’ts” as I’ve gone along. They have been much more helpful. That Other thing I’ll probably come closest to (if I’m lucky) right before I die. I can only hope we’ll recognize one another . . . embrace.*No coincidence that the concept of S+M is largely literary in origin, eh
Shane Hinton says: I came home the other night and Fiction was passed out on the couch, hand down her pants, electrodes hooked to her nipples with tiny alligator clamps, limp smile across her lips. Disconnecting the wires from the battery I knelt next to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and gently shook her until she woke up.
“We can’t go on like this,” I said to her in a voice which coyly attempted to console her. Her bloodshot eyes slid over to the battery and then up to mine.
“I looked for you on television tonight,” she said after a mortgaged silence. “You were there, in strict narrative form, stiff-collared, looking grimly over news events and headlines.’”
I lowered my head and looked at the floor, at the battery and the wires hanging from her nipples over the edge of the couch, knowing that we were never going to understand each other. Hooking herself back up to the battery, humming along with it in a hairy semblance of synchronicity, Fiction pulled the blanket up to her chin and rolled over.
