Soft Skull News

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So one publisher at least has decided to organize itself according to, oh, say, perhaps...the actual content, as opposed to the packaging, of their licensed intellectual property. See, in the Land o' Publishing, a parallel, if not in fact perpendicular world to the one the rest of the world lives in, we frequently our brand according to the type of packaging we use. In the Land o' Publishing, for example, Gillette would have two divisions—one that sold products in cardboard packaging, and the other that sold them in plastic blister packaging.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ta-da! OK, well, in fact, it's not exactly The Economist, but rather its sister publication, More Intelligent Life. But still, whatever you think about its politics (and you know, to give them credit, they're sticking with the free market despite a rough few weeks for that agenda...), their writers can write. And I've craved their approbation for a while. And now, courtesy of Get Your War On, I have it. And they admit they're wrong, sometimes.

Between fusillades, Rees reveals some surprising characteristics for an angry cartoonist. One is prescience; in early 2002, he was riffing about war in Iraq, although it would not begin for another year. In spring 2006 he began to rib John McCain for shedding his maverick suit for an ill-fitting orthodox Republican one. And he has long criticised the way America's relentless campaign in Iraq has pulled resources and attention away from Afghanistan, well before Barack Obama made this concern mainstream. It is worth checking his website for animated vignettes with these characters, which are reliably entertaining.

But perhaps Rees's most striking quality is his persistence in spotlighting the unending bloodshed. The years have ushered a parade of Washington obsessions--the Iraq Study Group, the Plame Affair, the Democratic takeover of Congress, warrantless wiretapping, etc--yet Rees has been rare in his dedication to reminding readers that real people continue to die violently, and at an alarming rate. One of the last strips in the "Get Your War On" book, from August 7th of this year, could almost be the first oned (unfortunately an image of this strip is not available):

A: Will you remind me what our goals are in Afghanistan?

B: Same as Iraq: Large piles of dead terrorists. Freedom. Fewer beards. Bragging rights. Stability.

A: "Stability." How does that work, again?

B: Easy: you just invade a country and keep killing people until it calms down.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...but my RSS feed is far worse than my clogged inbox.

Levi on "Junk Books and Junk Bonds (or, Sometimes the Book Game Reminds me of the Bank Game)"

Really well done.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Because while reading is a solitary activity, talking about books is a social activity. Indeed one of the richest, thickest social glues there is.

Exhibit A.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our weird ole Wizard of Oz publishes next month. More peeks...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...and Benjamin Strong has something to say about The Pisstown Chaos.

[A]s usual, it is Ohle’s topsy-turvy mise-en-scène that’s the real main character. Like his precursor Beckett, Ohle knows just how funny, and also how frightening, a world without memory is (“Stars? Moon? I don’t know. I never looked up much”). Each of the novel’s twelve chapters opens with excerpts from the City Moon newspaper, and Ohle’s exquisitely rendered journalese is awesome in its deadpan illogic: “Moldenke, the touring stinker, has filed a deed to purchase certain properties in the afterworld. Local legals say the properties do not exist. Moldenke says they do, at the edge of the city, and that he has seen them as recently as two nights ago.”

There's also Domenick Ammirati in Bookforum—

Unlike the writer to whom he is most often linked, William S. Burroughs, Ohle eschews radical prose play; the characterization of his writing as experimental derives from his grim absurdity, the flatness of his characters and tone, and his rejection of traditional novelistic arcs. His style is approachable and precise; he writes with dry humor in detailing the bizarre: impregnation by suppository, a Russian giant receiving a leech treatment, a job deliberately misfolding parachutes.

And Zach Baron in the Voice:

Part epistolary satire, part Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (the narrative, such as it is, alternates with cryptic and alarming Pisstown news bulletins), Ohle's book pulses with the cool logic of the insane—the kind of deadpan surrealism that Ben Marcus once memorably pegged as "apathy noir." The familiar battles the strange, and the duel ends in a delirious tie.

Finally, to give you a sense of the diversity of reviewing styles a book like this requires, the Brooklyn Rail:

There’s chaos in Pisstown tonight. Stinkers are roaming the streets—wretched souls who are not quite dead yet, but who are, without doubt, dying, slowly and inexorably, infested with parasites so potent and swarming that at times whole colonies can be seen roiling under the surface of the victim’s skin, devouring the host over the course of years, even decades, bursting out finally through the victim’s rotted abdomen in a flushing spray of “cadaverine” (no etymology dictionary necessary). Living among these putrid stinkers are the good, parasitically uninfected citizens of Pisstown, desperate to avoid all physical contact with the infected ones, with fear of the illness being so great. It’s an uneasy situation for everyone involved.

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The installed base of iPhones with book reading software (Stanza) exceeds even the most generous estimate of the Kindle installed base, so notes Forbes.

Of course, Lexcycle, Stanza's creator, has no interface wherein publishers can contact to offer content, sadly...

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm getting to teach a four-week masterclass at the Columbia University MFA program in the Spring. Here's the course description (note that the title is borrowed in part from a talk by Harold Augenbraum.)

Forty years ago Roland Barthes announced the "Death of the Author," yet not only are there more authors than ever, but more with more blogs, websites, and YouTube trailers. Now, it is the "Death of Print" that has been announced. Is this obituary greatly exaggerated? Or, if true, is print even mourned?
With the help of a tremendously eclectic reading list comprising philosophy, gossip, true crime, cultural anthropology, poetry, and fiction of all stripes, we're going to examine the evolution of the book publishing industry so as to delineate the possibilities for the cultural and economic role of the writer and editor in the coming decades. Over the course of the four weeks, students will be following a social media feed from me called FriendFeed that provides links to article to read, a kind of real-time syllabus. From those texts and in relation to the class readings and discussion, students will write a short essay or story towards inventing their own definitions of how they are going to act as cultural producers, rather than slot themselves into pre-existing categories.

[This assignment will take the form of Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence but there wasn't enough space in the course description to explain that.]

So, you know, any thoughts about the forgoing, the reading list, possible structures to think about etc. fire me an email. (It's looks like I need ot upgrade to the next generation of Movable Type in order to enable comments, and I sadly just don't know how to do that :-(

Posted by Richard Eoin Nash at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)