Soft Skull News

Some of you may be aware of the excitement generated when Jonathan Lethem mentioned to Mark Sarvas that he'd be writing the endnotes to the Library of America's edition of four Philip K. Dick novels. I therefore thought it worth mentioning that Jonathan himself is making another contribution to the book world at the moment, viz Patchwork Planet, a book of photographs by Kate Milford, of downtown Brooklyn, accompanied by texts by Jonathan, published by ourselves, and available exclusively through Bookcourt Brooklyn. So, buy it here, and here only...

All the details on the book itself after the jump, but Bookcourt will also be hosting a party for this fun project on December 7th at 8:00pm at their store on 163 Court Street in Cobble Hill to which all are invited!

Patchwork Planet is two Brooklynites' idiosyncratic composite portrait of an urban landscape—unlovable yet much loved—published by Brooklyn publisher Soft Skull Press and exclusively available from BookCourt on 163 Court St in Cobble Hill—serving books to Brooklyn and beyond since 1981.

Brooklyn is in the middle of a broad and deep transformation on both the macro-scale of the demolition and rebuilding of entire neighborhoods and the micro-scale of incremental house-by-house gentrification, obscuring its past under the curtain walls of high-rises, and the sheetrock of brownstone renovation. So Kate Milford and Jonathan Lethem have together created Patchwork Planet, a portrait of the real Brooklyn—not the sepia-toned "old" Brooklyn of the Dodgers but rather the five-and-dime downtown Brooklyn of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties rendered in Milford's acutely detailed large format photographs of office buildings and intersections, storefronts and shoppers, accompanied by Lethem's whimsically personal anecdotes of chance encounters with Mad Brooklynites, of lost subway lines, and, yes of great views of the Manhattan skyline.

Photographer Kate Milford lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. The photographs in Patchwork Planet are selections from a larger body of work on Downtown Brooklyn, to be completed in early 2007. Her other recent projects include Siding, a series of portraits of exterior walls of Williamsburg, Brooklyn buildings; Mug Shots, a group of original portraits using the structure of mug shot photography; and Rock Camp for Girls, featuring photos from her two summers as the photographer-in-residence at Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. She has worked as a portrait, event, architectural, and editorial photographer, and has taught photography to college students and 7th graders. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Travel Magazine and Places.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.

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One of our authors, Rich Melo, has a newly-designed and really lovely author website... 'Tis the season for re-designs...

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Roy Christopher, a David Frost of the counter-culture, has a new book out, and I'll quote a Soft Skull fellow traveler, the ingenious Disinformation Company, on why you should check it out:

“A special shout out to Disinfo ally Roy Christopher, whose much-anticipated interview collection Follow For Now is about to hit bookstores near you. The collection includes stellar discussions with the key cultural luminaries, blogerati, and intellectuals of our time, from Douglas Rushkoff and Bruce Sterling to Doug Stanhope and Howard Bloom. Read the Table of Contents and you’ll see why I believe, if you’re interested in these people and their personal visions, that Follow For Now will be amongst the most important books published in 2006.” — Alex Burns

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A blogger sees on a quote in Drugs Are Nice that's so good, I feel compelled to iterate it:

“To protect ourselves, we spun cocoons out of TV, books, video games, early stolen alcohol, and dreams. And then one day we realize we’re grown up yet still all muffled inside what we’ve built around us. We don’t feel real. 'There were often times when he would feel as if he were lifting out of his body and observing himself from above,' Dan Chaon writes in just about every one of his short stories. All the writers my age write about blackouts and floating . We try to get out of these cocoons and make our way down to where our bodies are. We try shoplifting and racist/sexist/ageist humor (trying to offend our way out); we get naked on stage. We try sleep deprivation and razors on our skin. We date creepy, scary sleazes who we half-hope, half-fear might do the cutting for us. But we’re so used to living inside a dream, even cutting feels dreamy. We can’t get out. We can’t wake up.”

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The regular reader of the Soft Skull News Blog will have noted how I manage to connect just about any ole event in the world to a Soft Skull book...Here's a particularly fine example of that pathology, courtesy of Nick Mamatas...

The real world: TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home

The Soft Skull world: Under My Roof—A wild fantasia wherein a 12-year-old telepath creates a nuclear device and overthrows the US government.

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Whodathunkit. On the Lenny Lopate Show, last Thursday, Isabel Allende was asked

What's the last great book you read?

Allende: Lynne Tillman, American Genius
The Shadow of the Wind by Ruiz Safon

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In this glasshouse of a publishing operation, I tend to avoid talking about other publishers, but I think I'm safe telling you about this:

FRAGMENTS FROM
IF I DID IT! THE MUSICAL

(Ben Greenman, lyricist for the above musical, is also the author of Superworse. )

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The new Soft Skull catalog is now available for download. By way of whetting your whistle herewith my "Dear Reader" letter...

Dear Reader,

The catalog contains multiple blows to three conventional wisdoms:

1. The Farm Team Theory. We’re putting the lie to the theory that authors leave the independent press. Notwithstanding the tremendous success of Matthew Sharpe’s TODAY Show Book Club selection The Sleeping Father, he’s back with us for his tragicomic, dystopic, visceral political-farce-cum-love-story Jamestown. Former NBCC finalist
Wayne Koestenbaum returns with Hotel Theory, David Ohle concludes his epic trilogy with The Pisstown Chaos, Daphne Gottlieb follows her 2003 Audre Lorde Award with Kissing Dead Girls and we get to reissue Lydia Millet’s 2002 PEN-USA Award-winning My Happy Life.

2. The No More Translations Theory. No fewer than five of the Spring list are works of translation, and they include two of the fifty writers selected by the French book magazine Lire as the writers to watch in the 21st century—Asli Erdogan (Turkey) with a stunning fictional evocation of Rio de Janeiro, and Alain Mabanckou (Congo Republic), recently honored with the 2006 Prix Renaudot, with African Pyscho. Then, from Japan, Mari Akasaka’s Vibrator, from France Camille de Toledo’s thrilling takedown of the Establishment Left, and from Germany a quietly devastating fictional account of a Guantanamo prisoner.

3. The Stick To Your Niche Theory. We have a memoir of a man who tried and failed to save the American typesetting industry, a progressive relationships/dating book, a progressive pro-free trade book, a fictional biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s marmoset, gang literature, an amputee’s guide to sex (that is in fact a poetry book), a novel—laid-out like a ransom note—characterized as a work of genius both by the Times of London and Absolutely Fabulous’s Joanna Lumley, water politics, politics in art, historietas, histrionics, hysterics, and an Orthodox Jewish performance poet’s young adult novel, Candy in Action.

And now, our candy, for you...

All the best,
Richard

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...because why not.

Dear Mailing List,

Big update here:
http://www.mnftiu.cc

ALSO:

It is my honor to give the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture at Harvard University this Thursday (11/16). The lecture is in conjunction with "Dissent!"-- an exhibit of political art at Harvard's Fogg Museum. Since the exhibit includes some GYWO comics, they asked if I would give a lecture. I said, "Yes-- if it means I can be on the short list to become the next president of Harvard University."

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I AM IN THE RUNNING!!!

My campaign motto: "We Should Pay Down 100% of Harvard's Endowment in Five Years-- Our Goal is a Zero-Balance Endowment."

Anyway, here is the lecture info:

Thursday, November 16
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
485 Broadway
(617) 495-9400
6:00 PM
FREE

===========

And now, a private message for any optometrists or ophthalmologists:

Hello, I am developing a stand-up comedy routine about ophthalmology and refractive surgery. Yes you read that correctly, all your wildest dreams are about to come true: Everything from jokes about radial keratotomy to jokes about matrix metalloproteinase expression in corneal wounds. Does this entice you? Oh, and also, jokes about LASIK lasers-- VISX versus NIDEK. Anyway, what I need is an appreciate audience. Could you please book me a gig at an ophthalmology conference and pay me $5,000 to perform this act? PLEASE SAY YES. Contact me at dr@mnftiu.cc Thanks!

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TEV: On one hand, the literal lost thoughts of the soldiers in your book, particularly those of Star-Gazer and Handsome Jack, have the density of poetry; on the other hand, their yearnings and quotidian catalogs could fill several books. Why did you choose the form of a novella for this story?

DF: Two writers were guiding influences as I was writing The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers: W G Sebald and Junichiro Tanizaki. I'm a huge fan of Sebald's, especially the way in which he assumes our knowledge of the Holocaust in his novels and works around its edges to concentrate instead on ephemeral details of trauma and longing. In doing this he completely renews that history's capacity to shock; this is what makes his novels profoundly moving and deeply moral. This idea of renewing history to make it sting appealed to me greatly. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Tanizaki writes about Musashi's abiding sexual obsession with "woman-heads", the noseless heads of warriors slain on the battlefield and taken as trophies. There is a compelling Japanese elegance about Tanizaki's choice to focus his story on this bizarre detail; and, again, that history seems more alive and human to me because of that choice. Sebald gave me the courage to assume that readers were already familiar with the story of Little Bighorn and to concentrate instead on the human detail, the "seams and spaces in between" as Benteen himself says. And there was something about the west that seemed compatible with an almost Asian approach. The haiku-like brevity of people's speech in Wyoming, for example; and the sense of a shadow-world at its edges. I wanted to emphasise the strangeness of that history, to make it foreign, in order to take the spotlight off Custer and turn the focus onto poignant, ordinary moments.

The complete review and interview here.

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The Good Fairies of New York was just selected as a Top Ten SF/Fantasy of 2006 by Amazon.com' Editors! Note also that blogger fave (everyone's fave?) Jeff VanDerMeer's Shriek is there too!)

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Hal Sirowitz's "Life is Supposed to be Noisy" from Father Said won Second Prize in the the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize

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Ferd Eggan's essay in the forthcoming revised and updated edition of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimiliation entitled "Dykes and Fags Want Everything" is excerpted at The November 3rd Club... (FYI, November 3rd is "an online literary journal seeking to 'up the ante' of literary political writing"...)

Queers didn’t always salivate at the sound of a wedding bell. I know, because I was there. Well, the truth is that I was around the corner from Christopher Street on the nights of the Stonewall Riots, but I was too afraid to join in. Rioting did not daunt me: I’d been beaten before in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. No, I was scared of the brash and noisy queens who reigned in Sheridan Square. Back then, my gay life was hidden underground. Not well-hidden—I had gotten caught only a month before while having sex in a subway bathroom on the Lexington Ave line of the IRT. I worked as a subway messenger boy for a film company that made Twinkies commercials. The kindly young officer let me off with a warning, since I was cute and ingenuous (and white). But I could not muster the self-acceptance to play a part in the very un-hidden urban theater of fierce fairy boys and muscular dykes. Additional terror loomed two blocks away on Cornelia, where leftist friends shared an apartment; if they saw me fraternizing with the fags and the drags, wouldn’t they reject me? Many an evening that summer I visited the lefties, purloined a novel like Nausea out of the bookstore and read on a bench in the Square. I’d walk over from my apartment-hovel on E 6th Street after my day job and my psychedelic gig doing light shows at the Fillmore East. I wasn’t like the street queens; I saw myself as an artist, exploring higher states of consciousness; needless to say, my acid trips lacked a certain panache—I was strapped in tight to avoid blurting out my queer desires.

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Alain Mabanckou, author of the forthcoming African Psycho, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley, just won the French book prize the Prix Renaudot, beating out the much-touted (and much-paid-for) Les bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell...

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Peter Rost has a great guest editorial on Buzzflash.com

Few recent elections have been as critical for the drug industry as this one. And that's the reason the Wall Street Journal reports that "Assailed by Democrats, drug companies are pouring millions of dollars into close races, giving some Republicans a financial edge."

What is at stake is a financial windfall the size of which has never before been endowed on a single industry, courtesy of the current administration. And that windfall is coming from drugs for poor people.

By some estimates the windfall for the drug industry could be $2 billion or more this year, and it is the result of the transfer of millions of poor people into the new Medicare Part D program. Under this program, the prices paid by the taxpayer, for the medications given to those unable to pay for drugs, are likely to be higher than what was paid under the Medicaid programs.

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...is Wayne Koestenbaum, so sayeth Bidoun magazine. What magazine? BIDOUN. It's amazing. Check it out.

And a snippet of what you'll find vis-a-vis our boy Wayne, as interviewed by Bruce Hainley:

BH: I'd like to begin this sitting on a bench at the intersection of poetry and politics. The title of your most recent book, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, recalls an early essay of yours, which when first published was, I seem to remember, called 'The Aryan Boy Who Pissed on My Father's Head.' I'm interested in the way your writing continuously pulls toward porn while retaining all its stern, Sontagian glamour and purpose. Where do you situate the porn-poem, or poem-porn, given the precedents of Shelley's 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'?

WK: I'm ready to talk politics and poetry and everything else under the sun. I got splinters on my butt-cheeks from sitting so long on this bench. And then the splinters got infected. I was worried I'd have to amputate flesh gobbets. But then the Valium kicked in, with its little-studied antibiotic properties. So I'm raring to go, ass in gear. The porn-poem: to write a poem is pornographic, in the senses of wasteful, useless, awful, ignored, debased, hurdy-gurdy, repetitive, regressive, navel-gazing, ass-licking, time-killing, boring, ludicrous, transcendent, dilated. I've been reading mischevious L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E practitioner Charles Bernstein lately (he's against National Poetry Month, thinks it's bad for poetry). Also Slovenian writer Tomaz Salamun, also Austrian pathbreaker Ingeborg Bachmann. I'm feeling entranced, once again, by the possibilities of language that ignores the supervisor. It's my regular May/June fever, the high of rediscovering poetry's rankness, naughtiness. And, for me, these days, naughtiness exists in being minimal. Some of the most exciting pieces at the MoMA, New York, on a recent visit were by Walter De Maria and Ellsworth Kelly, nice old-fashioned staunch minimalists. Looking at them, I think I "got"-perhaps for the first time-what a thoroughly anal pleasure, like gin, minimalism can be, so spiked with content in its refusals and excisions, its "Why bother?" So "up there," as Andy would say. Like a good old-fashioned hit of poppers. Like Warhol's goodbye to art. Like rambunctious poet Ed Smith. Or Sturtevant. The porn-poem is there, where Smith meets Sturtevant. Poetry is politics on poppers?

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