make magic
3:AM’s David Winters interviews the legendary Gordon Lish for Critical Quarterly: If we go back to Beckett, or to various bits by Thomas Bernhard, these examples seem to represent an exception. One wants to find the new. And, in finding it, do everything one can to fight for it. There was a time when I was far more bellicose than I am now. I loved getting on panels and saying, ‘Well, piss on you all: if you haven’t read a Raymond Carver story, you haven’t read the best thing in short fiction’. They’d say, ‘Raymond who? Raymond what?’ Now, to
Top Reads of 2015: Steven J. Fowler
Tom Jenks, Spruce (Blarts Books) One of most overlooked poets in the UK, doing the work conceptualism should be doing, getting to the heart of uniquely British ennui through splicing methodology and jet black humour. Sandeep Parmar, Eidolon (Shearsman Books) High modernism powerfully maintained and redeployed by one of the most interesting poets crossing the American / UK scene. Tom Chivers, Dark Islands (Test Centre) One of the clearest voices in British poetry in his finest work to date, beautiful rendered, written and designed. Emma Hammond, The Story of No (Penned in the Margins) Powerful for it’s immediacy,
Top Reads of 2015: Tristan Foster
Wolfgang Hilbig I’ve got a problem with best-book-of-the-year lists. I can’t really articulate what that problem is – they’re egotistical? it’s not the end of the year yet? I’m doubtful anybody cares? that they seem to somehow dovetail into the frenzy of Christmas? Whatever it is, they fill me with a general discomfort. So in compiling my list I thought: why not give that discomfort an even deeper skewering? Listed below are the books that are my most memorable from the year. Incidentally, they’d all likely make my best books list anyway (with a few others: Pond by Claire Louise-Bennett
Top Reads of 2015: Joanna Walsh
Joanna Walsh’s Top Reads of 2015 My books of the year, all published in 2015, and in no particular order… Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond (Stinging Fly/Fitzcarraldo) Words build spaces for living in Bennett’s genre-defying meditation on creating and practicing a solitary life in rural Ireland. Gavin Corbett, Green Glowing Skull (4th Estate) An ecstatically energetic, linguistically inventive, moving, and very funny novel of strange bodies, Hibernian nostalgia, love, and New York. Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press) The poet’s essential lyric essay on surviving as an artist and a mother
Top Reads of 2015: Dustin Illingworth
Clarice Lispector I consumed books in two very different modes in 2015; the tension between the two shaped my reading year in a number of ways. As a critic adhering to a review schedule, much of my reading was necessarily driven by a need for angles and fertile connections, the controlled epiphanies of interpretation. There is certainly pleasure in treating a book this way, as an engine of discrete meaning awaiting articulation; however, when not on assignment, I experienced a kind of wanton gratification in striking out into literature’s fecund jungle without map, compass, or specific motivation. I followed
Top Reads of 2015: Fernando Sdrigotti
As always, I wish I could have read more in 2015. That said, it is still hard to cut down to only 10 titles. It needs to be done, though — people love lists. Here is mine, in no particular order. Michel Mourre, In Spite of Blasphemy (John Lehmann) A remainder from last year’s summer reading list, In Spite of… is an autobiography that deals with the aftermath of the infamous Notre-Dame affair, and beyond. An interesting and odd book about the prehistory of the Situationist International. Susana Medina, Philosophical Toys (Dalkey Archive Press) A witty, funny, and sensual novel,
Top Reads of 2015: Sam Stolton
Zak Smith Steve Roggenbuck, LIVE MY LIEF (boost house) Bust out a tab on the roof of your mouth, finger your belly button with a bump of brown sugar, crank up the looney tunes and purse open your eyes to a Ryan Trecartin video, and it may feel somewhat akin to the experience of reading Roggenbuck’s definitive poetry collection, LIVE MY LIEF. Many of us know Roggenbuck from his flamboyant youtube videos, immersing us into a paradoxical world in which it appears as if a tragico-comic poet first encounters the heights of a mad and dizzying existence, conflicted by the
Top Reads of 2015: K. Thomas Kahn
Kay BoyleFollowing fellow 3:AM editor Joanna Walsh’s lead from 2014—after her highly impressive #readwomen2014 social media campaign—I aimed to continue this by forming a group on Goodreads for reading only (or mostly) female authors in 2015.Because of a prolonged immersion in British novelist Elizabeth Taylor’s work, much of which has been reprinted by NYRB Classics but the majority of which remain available only in Virago editions, I found myself reading a lot of green-spined Viragos, getting lost in the modernist and British interwar traditions—as reflected by marginal, neglected, and some woefully out of print authors like Kay Boyle, Betty Miller,
The Missing Links
Brian Dillon and Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin (podcast). * Walter Benjamin, our contemporary. * Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with Brian Dillon. * My review of Claire-Louise Bennett‘s wonderful Pond for the Guardian. * Claire-Louise Bennett interviewed in The Skinny. * Lydia Davis reads from a work-in-progress, a fake autobiography (video). * Lydia Davis on one of her father’s stories. * “Fifty-Seven” by Rachel Kushner. (More here.) * Marina Warner on the history of the destruction of art. * The ageing of art. * An extract from an interview with Gordon Lish: “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could
Tonight in London: A Beast in View
A BEAST IN VIEW: AN EVENING OF SATIRE IN POETRY & PROSE with authors Holly Hopkins, Anthony Howell, Courttia Newland, Tony White Poetry at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, N17 9AS Saturday 5 December 2015 Starts: 7.30 £5 entry plus donation for refreshment A timely and unmissable evening of satire in poetry and prose at The Room, a space for the arts in Tottenham, featuring leading black British novelist Courttia Newland— author of The Scholar, Society Within, The Gospel According to Cane, etc. — ‘a truly gifted storyteller’ (Time Out) — and the 2011 Eric Gregory Award and
my brooklyn writer friend
Former 3:AM fiction editor Greg Gerke‘s debut short story collection is out now from Queen’s Ferry Press. From the publisher’s page: “These swift, swervy, nervous fictions—as often as not about writers in antic crisis with the language, lovers in trouble with their loves—are heartachingly hilarious and stocked from margin to margin with agony-born brilliances fresh and revitalizing. Greg Gerke’s endearingly self-questioning narrators worry their doubts into a make-do grace that leaves a reader sweetened too.” —Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way “Greg Gerke writes like an anthropologist of love, or like a Brooklyn-based Sigmund Freud, walking down
The Missing Links
Adrian Nathan West on Marianne Fritz. * Adrian Nathan West reviews Houellebecq‘s Submission. * Benjamin Noys on R.D. Laing and anti-psychiatry. * 3:AM‘s Joanna Walsh on Leonora Carrington. * Linder Sterling: “My mother has Alzheimer’s, and in her mind it is perpetually 1974. Somehow being in that flat, it felt like I was in the same place as my mother”. * Lydia Davis on Lucia Berlin: “These stories make you forget what you were doing, where you are, even who you are”. * Clarice Lispector and Elizabeth Bishop‘s fraught relationship. * Benjamin Moser on Clarice Lispector. * Nein. A Manifesto
