BIG OTHER

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Brian Evenson, Christine Schutt, Cynthia Ozick, Diane Williams, Gary Lutz, Harold Brodkey, Joy Williams, Mary Robison, Noy Holland, Raymond Carver, Will Eno | 13 Comments

13 Responses

1. on November 5, 2009 at 10:35 pm | Reply Gary Amdahl

   Oh what the hell: “The Bouncers,” Q 15, by…me.

   
   
   • on November 6, 2009 at 2:45 am | Reply John Madera

     No fair Gary! What about your favorite stories from some of the other writers. But now that you’ve brought up your story, my favorite passage from it is this one:
     “‘Language and information are everywhere. In the air, in the soil — the Universe itself is in some sense raw information. You know what I mean? And we don’t get it. Ninety-nine percent of it: it flies right through us. Even if we hear something, even if we sense vaguely that we’re being spoken to . . .’ Jim was making little quote marks with his fingers every other word, up and down and up and down. ‘. . . Even if we stop and wonder uneasily for a second, we’re bound to think what’s happening is that we’re forgetting something we were supposed to do. You know what I –? We go blank and then fall into a daydream or start worrying aimlessly. I was walking along this trail in the woods, along the edge of a gorge, last summer in New York. Very idyllic. A narrow strip of woods flanking a steep gorge, a stream, a waterfall . . . It’s early in the morning, I’ve read the Times, had my coffee, the water is flowing, the birds are chirping — I’m whistling a merry tune. Life is good. . .”

     
     
2. on November 6, 2009 at 12:25 am | Reply ravi

   Yannick Murphy and Lydia Davis

   
   
3. on November 6, 2009 at 2:13 am | Reply Greg Gerke

   Is it confirmed that Lydia Davis was in his classes?

   
   
4. on November 6, 2009 at 2:21 am | Reply Greg Gerke

   Yeah Gary!

   
   
5. on November 6, 2009 at 5:31 am | Reply John Madera

   Speaking of Will Eno, have you seen his thing at Post Road, “Books For Readers and Other Dying People”?

   Here it is:

   “If Gary Lutz were dead and Gordon Lish were French, do you know who my favorite living American writer would be? Do you know whose books I would want along if I were stranded on a desert island, dying of loneliness and thirst, while my tiny library looked on in impassivity? What books would be the books, if I needed some reading material to kill time as I lay dying? On, again, a desert island. And would they differ from the books I’d want to have to die with if I were dying on a freezing mountaintop? If you were stuck on an island, thinning, mad, in ridiculous sun, would you want to read Robinson Crusoe? If your airplane crashed in the Andes on the way to the soccer game, would it be Alive by Piers Paul Read you’d want to read?

   The question gets harder as it gets more real. You will die, you do die–most likely, statistically speaking, less heroically, in the room temperature of a hospital or nursing home. What do you want to read? Probably nothing, by no one. But, before that? There are some books. In my opinion, some books are: The High Traverse, by Richard Blanchard; Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley G. Crawford; End Zone, by Don DeLillo; Captain Maximus, by Barry Hannah; The Spectacle of the Body, by Noy Holland; The Way the Family Got Away, by Michael Kimball; Venus Drive, by Sam Lipsyte; Epigraph, by Gordon Lish; Stories in the Worst Way, by Gary Lutz; and Lincoln Dahl Turns Five, by Sam Michel. If you are not conversant with these, the way I so feel they are conversant with me, you might as well be dying in Peru or somewhere in the insane sun off Tongatupu. Why not die here, locally, an American, in the arms and writerly hands of equally-dying equally-American Americans. My list is a list–for as long as the national luck holds out– of great living American writers. There are a lot of great living people around, these days. Certainly, sadly, life will make its revisions, its adjustments to the category.”

   
   
6. on November 6, 2009 at 12:34 pm | Reply Christopher Higgs

   David Ohle, Motorman. Hands down, my favorite Lish-edited text.

   
   
7. on November 7, 2009 at 1:02 am | Reply Dan Wickett

   Adding writers as opposed to specific texts or stories:

   Dawn Raffel
   Yannick Murphy
   Pamela Ryder
   Brian Evenson

   
   
8. on November 20, 2009 at 8:01 am | Reply apsiegel

   Late to the game with this one, but how come no one ever talks about Bill Tester? Head is amazing, and so is Darling, one of the mid-nineties gems Lish pushed through at Knopf.

   
   
9. on November 20, 2009 at 4:47 pm | Reply Greg Gerke

   apsiegel,

   Here’s something on Ken Sparling. http://www.greggerke.com/?p=74

   And Ryan Bradley’s Artistically Declined press is reissuing ‘Hush up and Listen…” http://www.artisticallydeclined.net/2009/10/hush-up-and-listen-preview/
   I know he has a new one coming out next year as well.

   Tell us more about Tester.

   best

   
   
10. on November 20, 2009 at 7:02 pm | Reply apsiegel

    I’d put William Tester’s 1993 novel _Darling_ (Knopf, 1993) and short-story collection _Head_ (Sarabande, 2000) up against just about anything else published in the US in the 1990s. If you like your reading bleak and strange and linguistically “chewy,” you should check him out. Stylistically, temperamentally, qualitatively akin to Amy Hempel and/or Dennis Johnson and/or Mary Gaitskill and/or Brian Evenson, etc. Very unjustly neglected.

    
    
11. on November 20, 2009 at 8:05 pm | Reply Greg Gerke

    I’ve tracked down HEAD. I’m looking forward to it. I fixed the Sparling/Darling confusion above.

    I can’t believe I forgot Lipsyte.

    
    
12. on November 20, 2009 at 9:27 pm | Reply apsiegel

    I just went out and re-read some of Head. Oops, and I misspelled Denis Johnson above. Sorry to be a pedant. I hope you enjoy it! I forgot that Amy Hempel wrote a long and laudatory foreword to that book.