Big Lonesome

FOURTH(S) OF JULY UPDATE

Nothing like those lazy days of summer, right? While I've been busy as ever, I've been slacking off on the updates so here's an overdue update on work that recently went live. But first a note on the photos: they were taken this time last year during a vacation in Ireland. Okay? Okay let's go...

I don't often get a chance to write about sports, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to write something for the lads at Free Darko. While I wouldn't call this piece on Converting Your Significant Other into a Sports Fan an essay per se, I'm not ready accept the label "relationship columnist." Check it out and decide for yourself.

Speaking of relationships, it's usually not a good idea to hack your employer to death with an axe. Of course, it's a bit more forgivable when your employer has shanghaied your ass. Anyway, I wrote a piece of short historical fiction about this conundrum based on a story I read in the National Police Gazette dating back to the late 19th century and the story appears in Dossier, a cool arts and culture magazine out of Brooklyn.

Hollywood is big on remakes; literature not so much. At least until Damion Searl decided to "remake" stories by André Gide, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Yasushi Inoue, Vladimir Nabokov and Tommaso Landolfi. Intrigued? Read the review of Searls's What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going in the Los Angeles Times.

Lastly, a short anecdote about my new favorite work of fiction in translation, Monsieur, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint can be found on the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass.

Enjoy your weekend! Although I wish I was running away to Ireland I'll be spending mine curling up with the new novel from Toussaint, Running Away.

MAIN STREET BRATS

I has had the pleasure of interviewing seminal punk band The Zeros a few weeks ago at the guitarist's home in National City. Check it out and be sure to come see them on June 25 at Bar Pink in San Diego.

HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!

No fresh and frothy pints of Guinness for me today, but you can check out this inspired Q&A conflicted catechism at Jacket Copy.

FILL IN THE BLANKS

This great new record by Blank Dogs is in heavy rotation on my iPod, vehicle CD player, and record player. I'll be listening to Under and Under over and over all summer long.

DAYDREAM REINCARNATION

 

Did you know Sonic Youth was set to release their 15th studio album this week? Now you do.

BOOK REVIEW ROUND-UP

Once again, I've neglected to provide links to recent book reviews. Working backwards chronologically, the most recent review is of Mary Miller's Big World in The Believer. You don't need to be a subscriber to read the complete review. Big World is the second book in Hobart's Short Flight/Long Drive series and Mary Miller is one of my favorite contemporary short story writers. It's an all-around beautiful product. Here's a quote:

Miller’s characters tend to be introverted women whose appetite for alcohol and/or desire for sex make them extroverted, but only for a little while. They get involved with men who aren’t available, emotionally or otherwise, and are invariably treated like kitchen appliances: “convenient, yet out of the way.”

As you can gather, Miller's stories are anything but dull. I find them artfully energetic. Moreover, I'm thrilled to be back in the pages of The Believer, one of my favorite magazines.

I didn't intend to review J. Robert Lennon's Castle, but when it arrived from Graywolf Press I simply ouldn't put it down and jumped at the chance to review it for Bold Type. Since I still can't access the Bold Type archives I'm going to link to the review at Gooreads, but here's a taste:

J. Robert Lennon's fourth novel starts out in a familiar territory, but quickly strays from the path, following signs and markers from ghost stories and fairy tales. Eric Loesch has returned to rural upstate New York to renovate a house on a large parcel of land he has purchased. Although it's not clear why Loesch has come home, it quickly becomes apparent that something is very wrong. The forest behind his house beckons, but it rebuffs Loesch's efforts to explore it with inexplicable hostility. When he does manage to penetrate the perimeter, Loesch quickly finds himself disoriented in a dark and preternaturally quiet wood, calling to mind stories of New England's haunted forests. He's infatuated with an elusive and seemingly sentient white deer, but the discovery of a malevolent presence in his domain threatens to upset the peace Loesch craves.

It's not a perfect book and its receieved some rough reviews, but it's easily the most suspenseful book I've read all year. I've also come to enjoy reading Ward Six, a collaborative blog where Lennon shares his thoughts on the books he's reading and how they relate to writing projects past and present.

Last but not least, is this L.A. Times review of the excellent anthology Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry edited by Andrew Blauner. It's a surprisingly moving collection of essays that I can't recommend enough. My brother and I are 13 months apart so I'm a bit biased, but I couldn't agree more with the following quote from Tobias Wolff: "The good luck of having a brother is partly the luck of having stories to tell." I was fascinated to read about the relationship between John Cheever's sons, John and Dominick Dunne, Mikal and Gary Gilmore (yes, that Gary Gilmore) and many others. 

 

EXIT LAUGHING

BUSY WEEKEND IN BIG LONESOME COUNTRY

 

This weekend promises to be one of my busiest of the year with multiple readings and literary activity in multiple states.

The first event is a fiction reading in conjunction with the Northern Arizona Book Festival in Flagstaff, Arizona where I earned my MA. How long ago was that? So long that I'll have the honor of sharing the stage with a former colleague and a former student from my very first class as a Comp instructor!

Reading with Seth Muller and T. Greenwood
Saturday, April 25 at 3pm
Orpheum Theater
Flagstaff, Arizona

The next day I'll fly back to Los Angeles for the L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA. As usual, the depth and breadth of the events is across-the-boards excellent, prompting many hard decisions for attendees. And, with the exception of parking, it's completely free. I won't have too many tough decisions to make this year as I'll be modering a panel and participating in a reading, both on Sunday.

Fiction: The Post-Modern World
Todd Hasak-Lowy, Lee Konstantinou, Fiona Maazel & Jerry Stahl
Sunday, April 26 at 1:30pm
Franz Hall, UCLA
Westwood, CA

Big Lonesome will be available for sale after the reading; however, I won't be at the signing booth as I'm participating in a reading immediately afterwards. I'll be contributing a three-minute story as part of Amy Wallen's Dime Stories  and will be happy to sign books after the reading at the Etc. stage.

Dime Stories with Amy Wallen
Sunday, Aprril 26 at 3pm
Etc. Stage, UCLA
Westwood, CA

Lastly, Gorsky Press will be sharing a booth with Manic D Press this year at their infamous location -- Both 666. They'll have Big Lonesome available and you just might catch me hanging out in the morning.

SAN DIEGO'S NEW NORTH ENGLISH SOUND

I'm a little late with this post, but don't miss Northern Towns -- a San Diego punk band fronted by a lad from the north of England. I did a short piece for the San Diego City Beat but I'm gonna interview them for Razorcake soony soon. Good stuff. Loud, fast, and very blokey.

THINK BLUE

 

Spring is here and that means two things: a new season of hope for the Dodgers and Hobart's baseball issue. Last year I wrote about my trip to Los Angeles Coliseum to see the boys in blue play a spring training game with the Boston Red Sox. Who knew that a few months later the Red Sox's most celebrated player would be traded to the Dodgers. This year I wrote a fictional account of the enigmatic player's offseason. Remember, fiction means "stuff I made up."