May 08, 2008
May 04, 2008
African Psycho a finalist...
...for the 2008 Believer Book of the Year. As is Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin, in this instance for last year's novel Remainder.
March 30, 2008
Monday's Reviews Today: Black Flies
Starred PW for Black Flies by Shannon Burke.
Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke. Oliver Cross graduated from Northwestern as a middle-class do-gooder. But he and his partner, Rutkovsky, a jaded Vietnam veteran and one of the city’s best medics, see enough massive trauma to put Cross on the fast track to deep disillusionment. Of the bizarre, tragic and often shocking emergencies encountered during Cross’s rookie tenure, the crisis comes when he and Rutkovsky respond to a call from an abandoned building where a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother has just given birth to a premature baby, and their handling of the mother and child—believed to be stillborn—will alter the course of both men’s lives. Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross. (May)
March 28, 2008
We're in a poem!
And the poem's called Viagra.
March 19, 2008
CBS Sunday Morning on Paris Cafe
Soft Skull's first appearance on 60 Minutes since the Fortunate Son debacle of 2000. This one, featuring Paris Cafe was a wee bit milder.
January 27, 2008
A good weekend...
It appears folks like How the Dead Dream this weekend
San Francisco Chronicle
Toronto Globe & Mail
LA Times
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Previously:
Village Voice
LA Weekly
Eye Weekly (Toronto)
Washington Post
And a radio interview.
Oh, and this Bizzaroworld review from the Vancouver Sun that considered Lydia a lesser Tom Perrotta? Ha!
January 07, 2008
Guatanamo—wins Three % Best Translated Book; reviewed by New Yorker...
Most everything relating to Guantanamo the island falls into the better late than never category, and Guantanamo the book is no different. Published in Sept 2007, it was just reviewed by The New Yorker last week, and just won the vote at Three Percent (the Chad Post/Open Letter blog)
Other nice items on the book include the Words Without Borders review, and one from the Village Voice, as well as Time Out Chicago, and The L Magazine
And here's a link to German discussion for this of you endowed with facility in that language...)
When Dorothea was in town last year for the PEN World Voices Festival, she hinted that maybe, just maybe, she would write another novel, in German, just for Soft Skull, about Pfc Lynnie England. I suspect she'd bring the same humane touch to her as to the imprisoned protagonist in Guantanamo...
December 04, 2007
Telling It Like It Is...
A Best Business Book of the Year from Strategy & Business Magazine. And THE Best Entrepreneurship Book..."[b]ecause David Silverman does not flinch from sharing the most painful and revealing lessons of his journey..."
November 30, 2007
NBCC's Most Recommended #7: How the Dead Dream
So, poking amongst the underbrush of the NBCC's Best Recommended of 2007 I note a long list in which How the Dead Dream is #7 on the list of Most Recommended Books on the NBCC. Flanked by McEwan, Ondaatje, and Russo.
November 27, 2007
Two for Two in Canada: Sylvain Trudel wins the Governor-General
Well, it's been a good awards season for us in Canada. Elizabeth Hay won the Giller two weeks ago, and we're publishing her in Counterpoint in April 2008; now Sylvain Trudel wins the Governor-General for La mer de la Tranquillité—we're publishing his Mercury Under My Tongue in Feb 2008, and I promise we'll get the winning story collection out as soon as possible...It does have to be translated first.
The fun thing also, is that we get to publish him in English in the same country in which he won in French, which is goddam bloody exciting.
November 07, 2007
Giller Prize in the house
One book you might find in the catalog I posted about? Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air. Aka winner of this year's Giller Prize.
November 05, 2007
New newness
Apologies to all for the ongoing and unconscionable lack of fresh content on this blog...it is truly remarkable how naive I was about how involved and time-consuming the process of creating a two-imprint publishing company out of the three imprints of Soft Skull, Shoemaker & Hoard and Counterpoint would be. In a short while, this should produce a nice stream of cool new stuff on this blog, but at the moment, strained silence.
Anyhow, two new additions to the world, the first: our Spring 2008 catalog.
The second, my daughter, born Oct 24th, a much better reason to be behind on posting.
September 11, 2007
Cinema of Transgression, "Deathtripping," and "Llik Your Idols"
So there's a rather excellent interview with Angelique Bosio, in which she discusses her film Llik Your Idols which documents the still-influential (and still underground) Cinema of Transgression. She was asked, why hasn't a documentary about it been made before now?
I know there was something done about Richard Kern (photo sessions being filmed). SA Crary did "Kill Your Idols" about the NY music scene in which Foetus, Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch etc...appear. To my knowledge, nothing on film was made about the COT specifically. But maybe these documentaries simply never got out. I'm sure I'm not the only one having thought about it! I bet it's just because people couldn't make it happen for technical or financial reasons. Or because these filmmakers didn't want to participate in such a thing until recently. Or more possibly because Deathtripping by Jack Sargeant was such an excellent and complete book about it! Actually the book will be published in a new version in December by Soft Skull. I strongly recommend it.
Ah well thanks very much.
July 31, 2007
Bloggers unite!
The LBC Read This! Jamestown.
July 09, 2007
Bookslut lovin'
In the Land of Book Sluts, when you're back from the dead, you get to be a heartthrob...
June 05, 2007
The Awards Twofer: Quill & Lambda
Matthew Sharpe's JAMESTOWN is a Quills Finalist in General Fiction and Michael McColly's THE AFTER-DEATH ROOM wins (yes, wins!) the Lambda Literary Award for Spirituality.
I know there was much slagging of the Quills these last couple of years, but looking at the company this year, I'd like to think it's going a little less lowest-common-denominator. So, you know, get excited about it, folks! This year at least! (Other on the short list: Pessl, McCarthy, Brothers by Da Chen and American Youth by Phil LaMarche...)
The winner is voted on by booksellers and librarians—any of you out there who need a copy, give us a holler.
February 26, 2007
The Bronte Prize
Well, whodathunkit. In this morning's e-mail:
From: "<_______@bronteprize.org> Date: February 25, 2007 3:12:43 PM EST To: publicity@softskull.com Subject: Bronte Prize Nod - Roger Alan Skipper Roger Alan Skipper's "Tear Down the Mountain" has been named as one of five finalists for the 2007 Bronte Prize, romantic fiction's biggest award.You can find more details at: www.bronteprize.org
Truly
Tally Dawson, Ph.D.
Chairwoman
The Bronte Prize
_________@bronteprize.org
I have to say though, that any romance book award that includes Nora Roberts, Sara Gruen, and Roger Alan Skipper, has one helluva open-minded jury. Kudos to them, I hope the award itself gets some good attention, I'd love to see that kind of spirit rewarded...
January 22, 2007
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart shortlisted for Arthur C. Clarke Award
The wonderful Oh Pure and Radiant Heart has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the major British SF award.)
December 11, 2006
Two books on The Scotsman's Year-End list...and Lynne Tillman on KCRW's Bookworm...
Nice mention of both Oh Pure & Radiant Heart and American Genius A Comedy by the Scotsman’s critic, Stuart Kelly...
But the major developments were all transatlantic. The old guard gave a very poor showing, with John Updike's flaccid take on fanaticism (Terrorist); a rather paint-by-numbers Paul Auster (Travels In The Scriptorium); a slight take on ageing from Philip Roth (Everyman) and an otiose further volume of memoirs from Gore Vidal (Point To Point Navigation). That said, the wow factor was all American.Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day received some snotty reviews that missed the point with almost thrawn critical blindness - it's a hoot, an elegy and has a talking dog that reads Henry James. Ken Kalfus' A Disorder Peculiar To The Country managed to give an original and pitch-black-funny take of September 11, and Chris Bachelder's US! fulfilled the promise of his earlier Bear Vs Shark, imaging a world where veteran socialist novelist Upton Sinclair is back, angry and constantly assassinated. Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions was a freewheeling, psychedelic roadtrip, and easily the most gorgeous piece of book design since - er - his last book, House Of Leaves. Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy was a manic monologue (and I'm still unsure what it all meant) and Lydia Millet's Oh Pure And Radiant Heart made the most unbelievable plot (three nuclear physicists from the 1950s reincarnated in contemporary America) more than just credible: it undermined how convincingly real we are.
Also Lynne Tillman will be on KCRW’s Bookworm on 12/14/06...Check it out!
December 10, 2006
Beyond Race Magazine
Nice piece on Soft Skull at a new quarterly magazine called Beyond Race...runs the gamut from painting, to hip-hop, to theatre, to tattooing...
November 07, 2006
Good Fairies Amazon.com Top Ten SF/Fantasy of 2006!
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!)
November 06, 2006
Hal's a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize
Hal Sirowitz's "Life is Supposed to be Noisy" from Father Said won Second Prize in the the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize
Littell "Non!" Soft Skull author Alain Mabanckou "Oui!!!!"
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...
October 24, 2006
We {heart} Large-Hearted Boy's Booknotes
Much as we'd like to like Booknotes just on its own merits (though we do, we do, and you should too), we're liking it right now especially because of the profusion of Soft Skullers that have popped up there recently.
Those merits, not-so-incidentally, are that Mr. Large-Hearted Boy invites writers to talk about the music that inspired them, or that accompanied them as they wrote, or that might serve as a soundtrack for the reader...
So herewith four Soft Skuller's responses (And make sure you scroll down, cause there's a bonus prize from Mark Swartz at the end...)
There's CAConrad, of Deviant Propulsion (of which Sam Delaney says: "[B]brilliantly tough, now jaw-droppingly romantic, witty, outraged, yearning, and often unabashedly lovely. With a clarity of language that makes the bones sing, they sneak past our defenses and do things, directly, surprisingly, irreparably, to us...")
There was this crazy fag I met when I was 19 and he LOVED the band X, and soon enough I too was a crazy fag, LOVING the sound of that wicked bitch EXCENE CERVENKA! Excene drag is the BEST drag to do man! Curdled punk swaggering out, "A THOUSAND KIDS BURY THEIR PARENTS!" All my writing has come ashore on white caps and pounding curls of song. Continues...
Lynne Tillman on American Genius
Glenn Gould playing Beethoven Sonatas equaled: we’re in this game of imagining together. You can hear him humming happily sometimes beneath the music, and it’s reassuring. He goes in and out of range nicely, the way my protagonist does. Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations: concentration aid, since Bach’s logic and reason are merciless, and this novel reckons with reason and unreason all the time. Bach kept me in line.But then there’s the irrational, which is as much what the novel’s about, and which is always compelling, so let’s say it’d be Miles Davis’s “You’re Under Arrest” : a wake up call and a reminder of how bad things really are. There’s an insanity – or unreasonableness-- I need when writing anything, and Miles supplies it, except when he plays ballads, and then he stops everything and holds it in place. Sometimes Hole’s first CD worked for adolescent angst, which never goes away completely, when nothing can ever be right. Courtney Love sounded like an aggression I needed to usurp for the novel at times.Continues...
And the ravishing Michelle Embree of Manstealing for Fat Girls...
CRAZY TRAIN — Ozzy Osborne: I still get pretty riled up when I hear this song. In the eighties, I would go insane. Ozzy was something punks and the burn outs had in common; Ozzy, weed, beer (though not necessarily in that order). The name OZZY next to a big pot leaf was spray painted on pretty much every available surface. And I don’t think it was really a tagging thing, I think that is just what stoned working-class-suburbia, white-dudes painted on a wall whenever they got the chance. Continues...
And, as promised, a bonus from Mark Swartz, of H20:
Call it Water Music. This isn’t the soundtrack to the nonexistent movie of my eco-noir novel H2O, but to one proposed way of reading the book. The first three people who write me at swartzmark [at] yahoo (friends and family excluded) win a CD-R of the mix.
Chapter 14.TEXT: We settled in a far corner, out of earshot, but neither of us said a word as the room filled. She took me by the hand, but I didn’t know whether it was a true gesture or part of the act.
AUDIO: Marianne Faithfull, “Don’t Forget Me,” from 20th-Century Blues. It’s about a breakup, but for a long time I thought it was about dying. I’ve never heard the Harry Nilsson original. Continues...
And, if you've not yet checked it out, the Flash trailer for the book!
October 17, 2006
"Perversely Brilliant"
Nice little round-up of some recent Soft Skull titles...
September 18, 2006
Bookforum and BOMB
The new Bookforum is out, with, delightfully, two reviews of Soft Skull books—American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman, and Mark Swartz's H2O, though sadly neither of them are available online—much other stuff there though.
However, the Geoffrey O'Brien interview of Lynne Tillman in BOMB magazine (not [yet?] online) is partially transcribed by Brian Sholis at In Search of the Miraculous...
Also, apologies for the lack of posting last week, the German Book Office had me in Munich and Berlin meeting a gazillion German publishers and editors, in the company of folks from Arcade, Grove, Melville House, Graywolf, and Publishers Weekly. Will try to post some little bits about all that later this week...
August 18, 2006
Three bloggers heart...
...CAConrad's Deviant Propulsion, all in one day. Ron Silliman. Joe Massey. Bill Knott.
May 01, 2006
Two Soft Skull authors finalists for PEN Awards!
Congrats to Maggie Nelson and Clayton Eshleman, respectively author of Jane: A Murder and editor and translator of Conductors of the Pit.
Maggie was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir (won by Gregory Rabassa for If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents.)
Clayton was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (won by Wilson Baldridge for his translation from the French of Recumbents by Michel Deguy).
As many as Pantheon, PublicAffair and Knopf!
Happy days...Our first ever national award finalists.
An occasion to remind everyone of other incredible indie publisher successes in the past year, including Dalkey Archive's NBCC win for Non-Fiction, Akashic's LA Times Book Award finalist for Debut Fiction, Flood Editions, Other Press and Graywolf also with PEN finalists, a bunch for LSU Press, and obviously Copper Canyon, taking care of business all the time all over the map.
Not bad for us all, given the shit that hit the fan with the Nationa Book Awards a couple of years back...
March 29, 2006
You Know You've Made It When...
...you're name-checked in The Onion.
Somehow this feels more (g)ratifying than the full page photo of the office in US News & World Report.
March 26, 2006
Queer Awards Galore...
So the finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards and Publishing Triangle Awards have been announced and we're pleased to report multiple finalists from the Land of Soft Skull, with particular kudos to Charlie Anders, a doppel-finalist...
Tennessee Jones for Deliver Me From Nowhere a Lambda finalist in Transgender/GenderQueer
Charlie Anders for Choir Boy a Lambda finalist also in Transgender/GenderQueer
Michelle Embree for Manstealing for Fat Girls a Lambda finalist in Lesbian Debut Fiction
Jennifer Camper for Juicy Mother a Lambda finalist in Humor
Douglas A. Martin for Branwell a Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award Finalist for Fiction: Men
Charlie Anders, again for Choir Boy, a Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award Finalist for Debut Fiction
It's also worth noting that two Soft Skull queer titles from 2004, Bend Don't Shatter and Kings and Queens: Queers at the Prom were both recently selected as New York Public Library Books for Teens and as ALA Popaulr Baperbacks for Young Adults.
January 02, 2006
A little awkward this, but...
...some nice news (though let me note, it wasn't single-handedly, and I consider this to be an award for Soft Skull as an entity...)
Washington, D.C., December 22, 2005: The Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced today that Richard Nash, Publisher of Soft Skull Press is the recipient of this year’s Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. The award will be presented on March 15 in New York at the AAP Annual Meeting for Small and Independent Publishers.
The award, given annually, was created in memory of Miriam Bass to honor her many contributions to the book publishing community and is co-sponsored by AAP, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and National Book Network (NBN). It carries a $5,000 cash prize, which is fully funded by Rowman & Littlefield and NBN.
A judging committee representing a cross-section of the publishing industry selected Mr. Nash based on his tireless and visionary work at Soft Skull Press. Mr. Nash single-handedly took a struggling company and turned it into one that has become synonymous with excellence in literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Mr. Nash has demonstrated a remarkable ability to find and publish exciting and challenging new works as well as skill and creativity in getting his titles noticed, reviewed and publicized. Soft Skull titles have been featured and reviewed by national publications including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly and Vanity Fair, and on television programs such as “The Today Show,” “20/20” and “48 Hours.” The Neighborhood Story Project, a community documentary program in New Orleans, garnered national attention as well when Mr. Nash and other printers donated printing services and published books by four young authors.
When told that he was selected, Mr. Nash said, “I think of an award like this as a symbol of something much larger than the individual recipient. It's a celebration of the remarkable ecology that is independent publishing and it is an honor to be, for a moment, representative of that beautiful ecology.”
Jed Lyons, President of Rowman & Littlefield commented, “Miriam Bass loved creativity in people, especially when it was in service to the book business. Miriam would have heartily approved of the selection of Richard Nash who is one of the most talented and audacious people in our industry.”
Nominees for this award may be engaged in any area of book publishing provided their publishing house is independent. This year’s judging committee was composed of Peter Burford (Burford Books), Tom Dwyer (Borders Group, Inc.), Francine Fialkoff (Library Journal), Ron Powers (Ingram Book Company), John Whitman (Turtle Books) and Marcella Smith (Barnes & Noble).
December 18, 2005
The NY Times & Wash Post Double Whammy, or, Idealism and the Half-Jews, or The Passion of Chosing Christmas Trees
Just two lovely items, a stunning review of Paul Berman's POWER AND THE IDEALISTS in this week's Washington Post Book World, and a really lovely excerpt Oy Tannenbaum" from the forthcoming HALF/LIFE: JEW-ISH TALES FROM INTERFAITH HOMES (edited by Laurel Snyder, forthcoming 04/2006) in Saturday's New York Times Opinion Pages...
Thought the links are above, here are a couple of nice little excepts, to give you the flava...
Oy Tannenbaum
By KATHARINE WEBER
MY earliest Christmas memory: I am 5 years old, sitting on the bench seat close beside my father in our aqua and white Buick, the one that looked like a saddle shoe, on a mission to get the best Christmas tree we can find.
We drive and we drive, until we are at last in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. We park in front of a corner lot with colored lights strung along the top of the chain-link fence...
The tree man sees us. He has a long black beard and wears a round fur hat, and he is bundled in a big coat that looks as if it has been made from dead animals.
His dark eyes meet mine and I look away, embarrassed, certain that I have already done the wrong thing. I reach up for my father's hand but he is no longer beside me, and I turn to find him, then trot after him, playing my part of the little girl here to select a Christmas tree with her father.
The tree man has a large knife stuck into the leather belt that holds his coat around him, and a moment later I see him use it to slash at the twine binding a tree in order to shake it open for a customer.
"What do you think of this one?" my father asks, standing an enormous tree upright. I shake my head. It's the wrong kind, with long, sharp needles. I like the denser kind of tree that has short needles. People who get those long-needled trees are the same people who decorate with white lights and tinsel but no ornaments, or with no lights but only one kind of ornament, just shiny purple balls all the same size, like a department store...
Talking 'Bout His Generation
The tale of how a Marxist tough became Germany's foreign minister helps explain today's Europe.Berman's thoughtful book is a valuable history lesson, especially for those too young to remember much about the tumultuous 1960s or '70s. He draws the curtain back on the era of the "New Left," a time when capitalism and American power were considered the chief culprits for the world's woes and when a global peasant revolution seemed not merely possible but something that college students could help spark. But what makes this book more than merely a collection of reminiscences of intellectual arguments from the glory days -- earnest if long-forgotten quarrels that largely unfolded in obscure journals -- is that many of these activists have assumed positions of influence in Europe. Fischer's fellow '68ers include Bernard Kouchner, the French founder of Doctors Without Borders, who became the first international administrator of post-conflict Kosovo, Javier Solana, the former NATO secretary general who now serves as the European Union's foreign policy chief, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the great U.N. diplomat who was murdered by a suicide bomber in Baghdad in August 2003...
As this is happening, the '68ers are in their twilight. It is a fitting coincidence that just as Power and the Idealists was published, Fischer announced that he would be leaving the new, more conservative German government headed by Angela Merkel. "Young people must write the new chapter," he said. Now this new generation -- defined not by 1968 but by 9/11 and the Iraq War -- must grapple with the arguments that their predecessors could never resolve.
This final paragraph, in some way, represents why Soft Skull Press published this book, given the flak we expected—and got—over publishing a "liberal hawk." We must all write the sequel to the Generation of 1968 and the more we understand about the emergence, development and passing of that generation, the more effectively we will be able to express our own goals.
December 06, 2005
Good, Better, Best, Best, Best...
Well each year we get all excited when we discover one or two of our books make one of two "Best of..." lists—we feel like we've cracked some great glass ceiling of indifference.
This year, however, thing have moved to a much higher plane with Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.
Herewith the list of Best Books of the Year lists on which Lydia Millet's fifth book appears...check back here for updates, the Deities willing.
Christian Science Monitor In this humorous but compassionate satire, a Santa Fe librarian, in 2003 - thanks to a neat trick of time travel - meets the three physicists responsible for the creation of the atom bomb.Raleigh News & Observer This brilliantly imagined, deeply impassioned novel transports three of the men who invented the atom bomb -- Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer -- to contemporary America where they confront and grapple with their nuclear legacy.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Millet has always been a quirky, contemporary writer, but this book is a quantum leap into the dark-fantasy territory of writers like Jorge Luis Borges. Featuring a story line that finds Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the atomic bomb - being feted like a rock star by militaristic, fundamentalist Christians when he returns from the dead, satires about modern society don't get any more twisted and insightful than this.
Seed Magazine
Booklist
Boldtype
The creators of the atomic bomb are mysteriously transported to modern-day Santa Fe, where they encounter confusion, celebrity, and infamy. Lydia Millet manages this dangerously high-concept conceit with generous, precise, and funny prose.
October 28, 2005
We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs
Being is this is a blog, and being as we are publishing a book about/by Iranian bloggers, it does behoove me to alert you all to the great coverage this book has been getting in the UK (where it has already been published, by a wonderful new independent called Portobello Books).
First off Boyd Tonkin writing for The Independent has the nicest things of all to say about it:
This is not the first example of a book made out of blogs; the Iraq war spawned a couple. It does, I think, count as the finest so far: an eye-opening collage of extracts from the (roughly) 64,000 Farsi-language bloggers now at work in Iran, threaded by Alavi's illuminating analysis. The title aims to tease, and to provoke. This online Iran - young, liberal, freedom-seeking and rights-hungry - sounds a world away from the electorate which, this spring, gave a presidential mandate to the Islamist hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the blog selection does make room for many political dissidents and reforming clerics, as well as for a host of fun-starved youngsters to whom figures such as Marilyn Manson, Harry Potter and David Beckham matter more than any mullah. Though even the mullahs have moved - the clergyman Hussein Khomeini, to take one stunning example, has stated that his grandfather simply did not have the authority to slap a fatwa on Salman Rushdie.Alavi's theme-by-theme compilation, with the background filled in by her expert commentary, adds up to a vibrant portrait of a dynamic but thwarted nation - two thirds of Iranians are under 30. Bloggers may not yet rank as typical citizens, in Iran or anywhere else. Nonetheless, their energy, mischief and sheer courage - with jail a real risk - allow us to "eavesdrop on the clandestine conversations of a closed society".
The form of We Are Iran counts for as much as its content. Weaving the web material into a seamless narrative, with photos and cartoons scattered throughout, Alavi deserves to attract an audience far wider than the usual specialist readership for works on Middle Eastern affairs. Many literary folk have been quick to complain that online ventures steal from the culture of print. Yet the traffic, as this book proves and others surely will, can profitably run both ways.
The primus inter pares of Iranian bloggers, incidentally, is Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder. He's the guy that turned on Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Middle East correspondent onto We Are Iran; Dickey wrote a great preview piece on the book earlier this summer, with the wonderful title Writing Lolita in Tehran.
A curious query from Iran: “Has everyone noticed the spooky absence of graffiti in our public toilets since the arrival of Weblogs?” I confess, this little detail of modern life in Tehran—which tells you so much about young people desperately in need of self-expression—might have slipped right by me if I hadn’t been sent a new book called “We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs.” Written by Nasrin Alavi (a pseudonym), and due for international publication this fall, it’s a survey of the personal diaries that Iranians post online. Five years ago, there were none. Now there are many tens of thousands. And you won’t get a better glimpse of the obsessions and frustrations that exist behind the imposed cliché of the black chador; ideas and passions that thrive despite the rule of what Alavi calls “mutant Islamists.”Some of the bloggers’ language is very tough: “I s--- on the whole of Hezbollah.” Some is deeply evocative: “Have you ever been forced into exile? Has it ever happened that you just can’t get the pattern of those tiles in your Mother’s kitchen out of your head (for three nights in a row), but you just cannot remember the color? Has it ever come about that you call your Mother up from far away and ask her to describe the color of those tiles—at which you both uncontrollably sob?” Many Iranian women write with brilliant bitterness from their anonymity, and about it. “In the obituary columns instead of my picture, they place a picture of a rose,” writes one. “[Because] the image of a woman can ensnare a man.”
As mentioned in a previous post, Nasrin Alavi will guestblog here around the end of November, and we'd love to have her do what Kevin Smokler calls a Virtual Book Tour, so if any bloggers out there are up for hosting Nasrin arounfd the end of November, please do give me a holler.
(Update: Nasrin reacts to the vile comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on OpenDemocracy.net. "The speech of Iran’s president calling for Israel’s destruction is a sign of domestic weakness not international strength," she says.)
October 25, 2005
Drugs [in the rain] Are [very] Nice [indeed]
Lisa Crystal Carver is the author of Drugs are Nice which is publishing this week. Lisa'a having a wild shindig tonight, first at KGB, 85 East 4th Street, where she will give an unconventional and unforgettable lecture on post punk: why it happened and what went wrong. Accompanied by ethereal comic artist Dame Darcy on the singing saw, Lisa will draw diagrams and dry erase, explaining how chaotic, self-violent, transgressive performers like GG Allin, Suckdog, Lydia Lunch, and The Swans came to be. Also why they didn't wear colors and why they smelled so very bad. She will then turn the room (by top secret methods we would die rather than disclose here!) into a physical representation of ten minutes of the era she like to call "the late 80s, early 90s."
Then, since that's not enough, she's going to have a full-on party at Galapagos at 70 North 6th St in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I can't really say what exactly will happen there, but check out this interview with her in this weeks Philadelphia Weekly
Speaking of love from the alt weeklies (and this is what earns this the Shamelessing Hussying and Gloating categories), here's some more links to all the great things being written about Lisa this week: The DCist ; this from the Providence Phoenix: Provoke, provoke, provoke, spew, spew, spew, rant, rant, rant. Lisa "Suckdog" Carver has a million ways of foisting her opinion on you.; and from the Philadelphia City Paper, which requires me—because of content rather than any required subscription, to quote it in its entirety:
The Further Decline of Western Civilization
Lisa Carver must be post-post-punk. All the press photos for her new book, Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir, have her looking sorta sedate, posing with her kid and her dog. Like aw, the former fuck-off frontwoman of Suckdog has decided to drop her guitar and spend more time with the family. Of course if she were completely over it, she wouldn't be on tour reading from the diary of her misspent youth and lecturing on where post-punk went wrong. Yes, lecturing. Like with diagrams, time lines and a dry erase board. She'll expand on it with musical asides, backed by Meat Cake zine-maker Dame Darcy on the singing saw. Even when she was called Lisa Suckdog, everybody knew her as one of the most analytical minds in punk — that wasn't supposed to be a backhanded compliment — so she's exactly who you want discussing punk in scientific terms. Because when the lesson gets to the part where G.G. Allin smears shit on himself and calls it art, trust me, that's not pop culture, that's anthropology.