Click here to read an article from The New York Times.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
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During the 19th century, a panopticon was a prison or asylum with an all-seeing eye. Some of the C-shaped prisons with central watchtowers still stand in the U.S. and Europe.
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| Click here to listen to the story on All Things Considered. |
The Shining Girls
The sole survivor of a time-traveling serial killer who began his murder spree in Depression-era Chicago tries to hunt him down in 1989 along with help from an ex-homicide reporter.Click here to read an excerpt.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
She Left Me The Gun
Documents the author's investigation into a shattering childhood trauma in South Africa, tracing the discovery of her grandfather's abuse of her mother, which compelled her mother's unsuccessful attempt to kill him before fleeing the country.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital
Realizing during a trip to Paris that she no longer loves her husband, Berie Carr remembers her childhood in upstate New York, where she shared a deep friendship with a captivating older girl named Sils.
Author of Note To Self
Alina Simone is a singer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in Kharkov, Ukraine and came to the U.S. at a young age as the daughter of political refugees after her father refused recruitment by the KGB and was blacklisted for ‘refusal to cooperate.’ Raised in the suburbs of Massachusetts, Simone moved to Austin, Texas after graduating from art school in Boston. It was there that she first started singing in public, in the doorway of an abandoned bar on Sixth Street. After the release of her first EP, Prettier in the Dark (2005), and her debut album, Placelessness (2007, 54º 40′ or Fight!), Simone became known for her sparse instrumentation and raw and powerful delivery, earning national airplay and critical acclaim.
Author of Fools
Author of Rockaway
Tara Ison is the author of the novels The List (Scribner), A Child out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber, Inc.), a Finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway, forthcoming from Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, as well as the short story collection Ball forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
Author of All Descent Animals
Oonya Kempadoo was born in England to Guyanese parents. She has lived in Europe and on various islands in the Caribbean. Her first novel, Buxton Spice, was published in 1998 to great acclaim. Her second novel, Tide Running, won the prestigious Casa de las Americas Literary Prize for best English or Creole novel. Kempadoo lives in St. George’s, Grenada.
Author of The Celestials
Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American born and raised in New York City. She is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?, and the forthcoming The Celestials. Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self, USA Today, and the Boston Globe, among others. She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, and their three children.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro
“Passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable . . . Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O’Connor.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
“An obsessive first collection that feels like a fifth or sixth. . . . Strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest.”—J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review
Southern Fiction Writer Stephanie Powell Watts
2012 Ernest J. Gaines Award Winner Stephanie Powell Watts knows what it's like to be an African American Jehovah's Witness in the South. She talks about how this experience informs her characters and reads from her book WE ARE TAKING ONLY WHAT WE NEED.
Susan Steinberg
In this inventive collection of linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. A woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning “Cowboys.” And when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. Steinberg challenges conventional gender roles and subverts assumptions about narrative with a fierce, lyric intensity, as these wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew. (graywolfpress)
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair
Excerpt:
Time Past: Text
‘You ask me, sahib, for an account of my life; my relation of it will be understood by you, as you are acquainted with the peculiar habits of my countrymen; and if, as you say, you intend it for the information of your own, I have no hesitation in relating the whole…’
‘You ask me, sahib, for an account of my life; my relation of it will be understood by you, as you are acquainted with the peculiar habits of my countrymen; and if, as you say, you intend it for the information of your own, I have no hesitation in relating the whole…’
Time Present: Context
1
This is what I see across time and space. This is what I see from the gloaming of my grandfather’s library, surrounded by Dickens and Collins; this is what I see from a whitewashed house in Phansa. I see a place in London more than a hundred years ago. In… what year is it… in 1837, the year of the coronation of Queen Victoria. I see a room. I see – what is that?
Perhaps it is a tattered shirt hanging from a nail hammered into the cracked windowpane. Or a window curtain, ragged, netting the dregs of the light which, dying a lingering death all day, still manages to creep into the room from the grimy court in a corner of the rookery, at this late hour.
The man reclines across a sagging bedstead. He is dressed in expensive clothes, or clothes that seem expensive in this tawdry room. Also lying (dressed in shabbier clothes of varying cut) are a Chinaman, a lascar with a long, white beard and a haggard woman. The first two are asleep, or only half awake, as if in a stupor, while the woman is blowing at a kind of pipe, trying to kindle it. She shades it with her bony hand, concentrating her breath on its red spark of light that serves as a lamp in the falling night, to show us what we see of her face. It is wizened and wrinkled, an old woman’s face, though her body has the agility of someone younger. Her hair is matted and clumpy, as if under it the bone was uneven and indented. A sweet, sickly smell pervades the room.
‘Another?’ says the woman in a rattling whisper, extending her pipe towards the men. ‘Have ’nother?’
The well-dressed man stirs slightly, and makes a gesture of repugnance.
The woman laughs and lazily retracts the pipe. She pulls at it herself.
‘He’ll come to it,’ she says to the Chinaman and the lascar, who show no sign of hearing her. ‘Always does. I sees his kind coming here, angry-like, and I ses to my poor self, I’ll get ’nother ready for him, for there’s a gentleman. Not like you lot, no better’n me you are, though I’as nothing ’ginst you. A few years in dust and smoke and toil and who can tell yer skin from mine? Ha. But he’s a gentleman. He’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye, sir, that the market price is dreffl e high just now. And I makes my pipes from old penny ink-bottles, ye see, dearies – with me own two hands – and I fi ts in a mouthpiece, all clean, sir – see, like this – and I takes my mixter out of this thimble with a little silver horn… Not every place is like this, sir. I sets the pipe going myself, with me own breath, like this, see… Here y’are…’
Having prepared a new opium pipe, she tries to pass it to the gentleman, but he pushes it back, so abruptly that the pipe falls to the dirty ground, and embers fan out like fireflies released from a bottle, waking the Chinaman, who starts stomping on them alongside the woman, both of them muttering and cursing.
Our gentleman sits up and watches the spasmodic shoots and darts of the embers on the floor, the unsteady stomping that extinguishes an ember in one place and sends another whirling into the murky air. He does not know who he hates more, himself for being here, or these people. When the Chinaman stumbles into him in his drugged stomping out of the embers, the gentleman pushes him so hard that the wizened old opium-smoker bounces off the opposite wall, knocking down a pan in the dark, and crumbles into a heap, quivering but not getting up again.
This makes the old woman indignant. She protests that she runs a respectable house and not even the ‘lascars, moors and Chinamen who come here with nary a word of English, sir’, take such liberties with each other in her presence.
The gentleman puts one finger to his lips and holds out a coin in the other hand. He beckons to the woman. A crafty light steals into the woman’s eyes and she sidles up to the man, simpering. He holds her at arm’s length and with the other hand, still holding the coin, probes her hair. Perhaps she takes it for a caress. She certainly tries to make the appropriate noises, smiling seductively. But the man is not caressing her. He probes her skull with knowing fingers and if she had been able to look up, she would have been struck by the expression on his face. Then suddenly, the gentleman pushes her away. As she begins to remonstrate again, more loudly this time, he tosses the coin at her and walks out of the room.
The long-bearded lascar continues to sleep on the sagging bedstead.
(I see him. I distinctly hear his hoarse breathing in my grandfather’s half-gagged library in Phansa.)
Perhaps it is a tattered shirt hanging from a nail hammered into the cracked windowpane. Or a window curtain, ragged, netting the dregs of the light which, dying a lingering death all day, still manages to creep into the room from the grimy court in a corner of the rookery, at this late hour.
The man reclines across a sagging bedstead. He is dressed in expensive clothes, or clothes that seem expensive in this tawdry room. Also lying (dressed in shabbier clothes of varying cut) are a Chinaman, a lascar with a long, white beard and a haggard woman. The first two are asleep, or only half awake, as if in a stupor, while the woman is blowing at a kind of pipe, trying to kindle it. She shades it with her bony hand, concentrating her breath on its red spark of light that serves as a lamp in the falling night, to show us what we see of her face. It is wizened and wrinkled, an old woman’s face, though her body has the agility of someone younger. Her hair is matted and clumpy, as if under it the bone was uneven and indented. A sweet, sickly smell pervades the room.
‘Another?’ says the woman in a rattling whisper, extending her pipe towards the men. ‘Have ’nother?’
The well-dressed man stirs slightly, and makes a gesture of repugnance.
The woman laughs and lazily retracts the pipe. She pulls at it herself.
‘He’ll come to it,’ she says to the Chinaman and the lascar, who show no sign of hearing her. ‘Always does. I sees his kind coming here, angry-like, and I ses to my poor self, I’ll get ’nother ready for him, for there’s a gentleman. Not like you lot, no better’n me you are, though I’as nothing ’ginst you. A few years in dust and smoke and toil and who can tell yer skin from mine? Ha. But he’s a gentleman. He’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye, sir, that the market price is dreffl e high just now. And I makes my pipes from old penny ink-bottles, ye see, dearies – with me own two hands – and I fi ts in a mouthpiece, all clean, sir – see, like this – and I takes my mixter out of this thimble with a little silver horn… Not every place is like this, sir. I sets the pipe going myself, with me own breath, like this, see… Here y’are…’
Having prepared a new opium pipe, she tries to pass it to the gentleman, but he pushes it back, so abruptly that the pipe falls to the dirty ground, and embers fan out like fireflies released from a bottle, waking the Chinaman, who starts stomping on them alongside the woman, both of them muttering and cursing.
Our gentleman sits up and watches the spasmodic shoots and darts of the embers on the floor, the unsteady stomping that extinguishes an ember in one place and sends another whirling into the murky air. He does not know who he hates more, himself for being here, or these people. When the Chinaman stumbles into him in his drugged stomping out of the embers, the gentleman pushes him so hard that the wizened old opium-smoker bounces off the opposite wall, knocking down a pan in the dark, and crumbles into a heap, quivering but not getting up again.
This makes the old woman indignant. She protests that she runs a respectable house and not even the ‘lascars, moors and Chinamen who come here with nary a word of English, sir’, take such liberties with each other in her presence.
The gentleman puts one finger to his lips and holds out a coin in the other hand. He beckons to the woman. A crafty light steals into the woman’s eyes and she sidles up to the man, simpering. He holds her at arm’s length and with the other hand, still holding the coin, probes her hair. Perhaps she takes it for a caress. She certainly tries to make the appropriate noises, smiling seductively. But the man is not caressing her. He probes her skull with knowing fingers and if she had been able to look up, she would have been struck by the expression on his face. Then suddenly, the gentleman pushes her away. As she begins to remonstrate again, more loudly this time, he tosses the coin at her and walks out of the room.
The long-bearded lascar continues to sleep on the sagging bedstead.
(I see him. I distinctly hear his hoarse breathing in my grandfather’s half-gagged library in Phansa.)
Monday, July 22, 2013
Fast Geek Press to release a new multimedia collection of poems called Not Good With Names by Charly Fasano featuring music by Denver’s Malamadre on August 8, 2013.
Not Good With Names is a multimedia book of 30 poems based on 30 linocut block print portraits by Charly Fasano. It includes an mp3 download code of Fasano reading the book in its entirety, backed by the music of Malamadre. It will be released as a paperback book, an ebook, and an mp3 download audio book. Not Good With Names can be thought of as a book of poetry or a record with an illustrated lyric book. Either way, it immerses the reader into Fasano’s brief observations of thirty composite characters.
The paperback version features a QR Code at the beginning of the book that the reader can scan with a smart phone application in order to access streaming audio portions of the book while looking at the illustrations and reading the poems. The mp3 download of the audio portion of the book, featuring the collaboration between Charly Fasano and Malamadre, includes a PDF of the block print portraits that can be printed as a zine. Fasano and Fast Geek Press hopes the integration of smart phone and tablet technology, as well as the use of QR Codes to link the reader of poetry books to additional media, will invigorate interest in poetry as a popular, tangible and accessible art form.
BIOS
Denver, Colorado’s Malamadre is Alejandro Sanchez, Vincent Fasano and Alan Muniz. Malamadre can be looked at as an international art collective rather than a band. Hailing from Mexico, Costa Rica and the U.S., Malamadre brings together a diverse vision of artistic experience and influences. They describe their style of music as synchronized drowning. Their brand of world/avant-garde/jazz is cinematic in how they use changing tempos and subtle rhythmic instrumentations to add space and mood to a landscape of loosely constructed improvisations. The improvised themes that are explored by banjo, guitar, keyboards, trumpet and drums produce unique performances and recording sessions that are rarely repeated. Not Good With Names is their first release. Visit http://malamadremusic.tumblr.com.
Not Good With Names will be available at http://fastgeekpress.storeenvy.com and amazon.com
For more information please visit: http://fastgeekpress.tumblr.com and http://cmousefasano.com
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