It was Curt White who told me to read it. In workshop, he stressed the importance of having a good hook—the reason being, once you’ve captured the reader’s attention, you can get away with just about anything—a good strategy for experimental fiction. He also said that Travesty had one of the best. Here are its [...]
Posts Tagged ‘John Hawkes’
The Book Club Reads John Hawkes’s Travesty
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Daniel Green, John Hawkes, Joseph M. Conte, Second Skin, The Lime Twig, Travesty on October 4, 2011 | 10 Comments »
This month the Big Other Book Club is reading Travesty by John Hawkes. Everyone is welcome to write a post about Travesty or Hawkes. It is 132 pages and out of the handful of books of his I’ve read, the most accessible. John Hawkes’ short novel Travesty presents a monologue of a person driving an automobile who [...]
Book Hunting in San Francisco: Wallace, Wallace Stevens
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ardvark Books, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Christine Schutt, Community Thrift Store, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Frank Kermode, Henry James, Home Land, John Hawkes, Nightwork, Paul Valery, Sam Lipstye, San Francisco, The Collected Works of Paul Valery, The Crossing, The Quarterly, The Wings of the Dove, The World within the Word, Travesty, Wallace Stevens, William H. Gass on August 7, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I love San Francisco. Especially the book stores and thrift stores. The Community Thrift Store in the Mission has been a goldmine for me the last six years and each time I come here I check in and check out with jewels for about $1.50 each. I remember going there and finding the first six [...]
Joy to the Reader When Reading Gass’s The Tunnel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bookworm, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Guilt and Innocence in The Tunnel, Habitations of the Word, Henry James, Hitler, Holocaust, Into The Tunnel, John Hawkes, Lannan Foundation, Marus Klein, Michael Silverblatt, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett, Sonnets to Orpheus, The Lime Twig, The Tunnel, Tropes of the Text, William H. Gass on June 15, 2011 | 9 Comments »
How can I contain myself? (But perhaps the question is: how could Gass both contain and not contain himself to have done what he did?) Having had The Tunnel to go back to every morning was like having the one you love next to you, to be transfixed and freshened, to be, as that worthy [...]
New Issues of The Quarterly Conversation and Rain Taxi
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged David Foster Wallace, Evan La, Helen Vendler, John Ashbery, John Hawkes, Lance Olsen, Oblivion, Rain Taxi, The Passion Artist, The Quarterly Conversation on June 7, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Issue 24 of The Quarterly Conversation has a great David Foster Wallace symposium, with seven essays, including Lance Olsen on Oblivion. Also reviews of books by Rimbaud, Ovid, and Andrew Ervin, as well as an interview with Eliot Weinberger. My review of Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries by Helen Vendler is also in the issue. [...]
Finally a Cogent Definition of Avant-garde, care of Monsieur Hawkes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged John Hawkes on December 30, 2010 | 24 Comments »
My own concept of “avant-garde” has to do with something constant…this constant is a quality of coldness, detachment, ruthless determination to face up to the enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around us, and to bring to this exposure a savage or saving comic spirit and the saving beauties [...]
Start Suffering
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Cormac McCarthy, dalkey archive, Flannery O'Connor, John Hawkes, Leslie Fletcher, Louise Gluck, Mock Orange, The Lime Twig on December 28, 2010 | 21 Comments »
“You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can’t.” – Flannery O’Connor *** The stakes get raised again. After reading John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig I’m of a mind with Louise Glück lines from “Mock Orange”: How can [...]
Recovery Project
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Erewhon, Horace Walpole, John Hawkes, Samuel Butler, The Castle of Otranto on October 15, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Hey Everybody! Much is being written on the cutting edge publications happening right now, but I’d like to produce a series of posts here that addresses texts from the past that I feel have been either lost or forgotten or ignored. My hope is that by resurrecting them they might inspire the contemporary generation. Obviously, [...]
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Ryan W. Bradley
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Michael Leong
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Tim Jones-Yelvington
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Rachel Swirsky
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Edward Mullany
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Aya Karpinska
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Paul Kincaid
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davis schneiderman
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Amber Sparks
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Tim Horvath
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John Domini
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Elaine Castillo
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Curtis White
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James Tadd Adcox
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Nick Francis Potter
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Brian Kubarycz
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Announcing the Book Club Schedule!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Big Other, C, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Djuna Barnes, Gilgamesh, Gordon Lish, Helen Vendler, John Barth, John Gardner, John Hawkes, John Maier, Lyn Hejinian, Manuel Puig, Mary Caponegro, Mo Yan, My Life, Nightwood, Peru, Searches and Seizures: 3 Novellas, Stanley Elkin, The Complexities of Intimacy, The Sotweed Factor, Tom McCarthy, Travesty on December 26, 2010 | 9 Comments »
The votes are in, and the winner of the poll for the first book to be discussed in the Big Other Book Club is Tom McCarthy’s C. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, hailed by many and knocked by maybe even more, McCarthy describes the book as dealing with technology and mourning. I’m excited to have, as [...]
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