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OR Books
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Today’s guest on Mediabistro’s Morning Media Menu was Colin Robinson, co-founder of the new publisher, OR Books. The company focuses on a stripped-down distribution model with the unofficial motto, “No book printed until it’s sold.”
Listen to the interview on GalleyCat.
Inferno is the latest book by poet, novelist, essayist, performer, and one-time presidential hopeful Eileen Myles. (It’s true, she ran as a write-in candidate in 1992.) Eileen did not call Inferno a memoir, even though it sort of is. Maybe one could call it a remembrance. Eileen calls it a novel. In the process of remembering, she lets go a frantic and enlightened rush of recall, impressions, and wit. Loosely modeled on Dante, the novel traces the character Eileen’s dual coming out as both a poet and a lesbian (via hell, purgatory, and paradise). It starts in Boston (hell?) and quickly moves to New York, where she has mainly lived since the ’70s. She moves in and out of the punkier side of the NYC poetry world in a warm, complicated way. That’s mainly because Eileen is, let’s say, a pillar of that world. She’s published numerous books of poetry, including Not Me and Skies, the short-story collection Chelsea Girls, and an earlier novel, Cool for You (she also wrote the libretto for an opera). She’s a former steward of The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church and was a caretaker of genius poet James Schuyler in his later years at the Chelsea Hotel. Inferno includes encounters, for better and for worse, with Amiri Baraka, Marge Piercy, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, and Patti Smith. Like many of Frank O’Hara’s poems, the seeming bits of real life in this novel take gossip and elevate it to the level of art.
Read more at bookforum.com
The deceived lover is always a detective. Once you suspect your partner has been unfaithful, everything becomes evidence of her infidelity: when she arrives home, what she wears, even the way she washes dishes. Suspicion charges and changes formerly prosaic objects and gestures; the ephemeral trash of our daily existence takes on true weight. And because anything could be the thing that tells the truth—the hard piece of the world that transforms idea into fact—everything is worthy of attention. But doubt and distrust provide certain pleasures, ones that are as powerful as they are perverse. These satisfactions are the reason we remain so long with the people who betray us: Under investigation, our dull, daily routines become, for once, the stuff of intrigue. We are, at last, alive to our own lives.
Read more at The Observer
Having read and reviewed Rushkoff’s previous books, Think Outside The Box, which was good, and Life Inc., which was nothing less than brilliant, I wondered what was next for the media maven. This new one is short and concise, but a highly worthy successor. His mission is to raise awareness of the human implications of our technologies — the context (if you will) of our actions.
Read more at the Miami Herald.
On page 4 of the current (Dec/Jan) Bookforum, under the heading “Pub Dates: 2010: A Year of Reading” is a feature where they ask their “favorite [authors] to tell us what they liked reading this year.”
Here’s an excerpt from the entry by Sam Lipsyte, acclaimed author of The Ask (FSG):
“Collected Fictions by Gordon Lish. His enormous importance, as an editor and teacher, to the story of twentieth-century American fiction is now, finally, not in dispute. But I guess some more people will have to die before there can be a full reckoning with the power of these pieces.”
“American class privilege is very much like the idea of sex in a Catholic school — it’s not supposed to exist in the first place, but once it presents itself in your mind’s eye, you realize that it’s everywhere.” That’s Chris Lehmann’s opening volley at the pervasive “Money Culture” of our time, the first of many lobbed with wit and fury in his book Rich People Things.
Read more: The Phoenix
