Anthology fever

I gave a reading last night with Rachel Sherman and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh at the Lillian Vernon Writers' House (it was fun), for the students at the NYU summer session. There I also got to pick up a copy of They're At It Again: An Open City Reader, edited by Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas.

It's huge—I didn't realize it was nearly 800 pages. Who's in it? A quick glance yields Paul Bowles, Jonathan Ames, Geoff Dyer, Bryan Charles, the aforementioned R.S. and S.S., Davids Means and Shields, Sam Lipsyte, Martha McPhee, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Walter Kirn, James Lasdun, Victor Pelevin, Hal Sirowitz, Edmund White, Leni Zumas, Richard Yates (!), Charles Bukowski, Will Eno, Sylvia Foley, Hubert Selby Jr., Jessica Shattuck...the list really does go on...It's satisfyingly heavy, and I'm excited that my story "Bring on the Dancing Horses" (from Open City #30) is included...

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A slimmer book, but with nearly as many contributors, is No Near Exit, an anthology of writing from Post Road magazine, each one selected by a different writer, making for a vertiginous reading experience. Plus, some of the pieces are interviews with writers, and others are writers recommending books by other writers...

Two small things for the end of the year

I. My whatsit, "The Freud Notebook," is available in somewhat jagged form at the Post Road website. An excerpt:

‘Rosa’s self-satisfaction was embarrassing and irritating, for he boasted that he had surpassed Michelangelo, and Passeri quickly changed the subject.’
—Born Under Saturn

(It's also in Post Road 17. Thanks to Hillary Chute!)

II. I chose two music-related books and a documentary-poetic work for The Millions' Year in Reading.

The bit between my teeth

Parkian verbiage oozing out into the webosphere..........

At the Poetry Foundation, I look at Silver Jews mastermind/Actual Air poet David Berman's book of drawings, The Portable February.........the piece features a slideshow....



And back in May—remember May? I don't—I pondered Edward Gorey's unproduced screenplay, The Black Doll, for Moving Image Source. (More of me on Gorey here.)......"The Freud Notebook" is in the current issue of Post Road (#17)......

Coming soon: READ HARD (Blvr anthology)[UPDATE: Available now!]—


—and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Exilée and Temps Morts (for which I wrote an essay).................

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Also: the Believer music issue is out, about which more soon—but for now check out Joe Hagan's "The Ballad of Benji Hughes"; the site features two B.H. tracks that I think you'll like....one has the great title "I Went with Some Friends to See the Flaming Lips."

The Collected Blurbs of Thomas Pynchon

Rachel Donadio on blurbs (NYTBR):

Sometimes a blurb is news. The reclusive Thomas Pynchon seems to elicit excitement each time he breaks his public silence, as he has by endorsing, among others, “The Testament of Yves Gundron” (1999), the first novel by Emily Barton; Jim Knipfel’s memoir “Slackjaw” (1999); and “The Restraint of Beasts” (1998), a Booker-nominated novel by Magnus Mills, which he called “a demented, deadpan-comic wonder.” (Pynchon has also written the liner notes for “Nobody’s Cool,” the second album by the alt-rock band Lotion.) Recently, Post Road magazine published Pynchon’s collected blurbs from the years 1966 to 2003 — more than two dozen in all.

I love Post Road's occasional aggregations: I recall something about John Cheever characters (or places? in any case, a list of all of them), and I read a great thing featuring the jacket copy (not blurbs, just descriptions) of every Joyce Carol Oates novel.