Posts Tagged ‘Eileen Myles’
Marks on Paper: Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls
March 14, 2013 | by Rachel Hurn
At Bluestocking Books, my favorite indie bookstore in Hillcrest, San Diego, I pick up a glorious-looking object. The cover is textured, beige with a blue inside flap—a look typical of the publisher Black Sparrow Press. On the front is a painting by Nicole Eisenman of twenty women in a brawl, or having sex, or both. All over the cover and among the cream pages are hand-scrawled notes. It looks like a literature student once owned the book. Probably someone studying creative writing. Probably someone at UCSD. I hold up the paperback to the woman behind the register, and ask, “What is this?”
“That’s Eileen Myles. She’s a lesbian poet. She’s amazing.”
That day I read the entire thing. Read More »
“Marley Was Dead: to Begin With.”
December 14, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
This Saturday, December 15, join Housing Works for the third annual A Christmas Carol marathon reading. Readers include John Hodgman, Eileen Myles, David Wayne, our own dear Lorin Stein, and many other terrific people. See you there!
Heroine Worship: Talking with Kate Zambreno
October 22, 2012 | by Christopher Higgs
Kate Zambreno’s first book, O Fallen Angel, won Chiasmus Press’s “Undoing the Novel” First Book Contest, and her second book, Green Girl, was a finalist for the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. So it should come as no surprise that her provocative new work, Heroines, published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents imprint next month, challenges easy categorization, this time by poetically swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history, criticism, and theory. With equal parts unabashed pathos and exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity to produce an impressive and original work that examines the suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno’s own complicated position as a writer and a wife. It concludes by bringing the problems of the modernists into conversation with the contemporary by offering a timely consideration of the role of the Internet and blogs in creating a community for women writers.
What was it about the modernist wives that first interested you?
I think I came to the wives through an initial discovery of more neglected modernist women writers—Olive Moore, Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, maybe I’d add Jean Rhys to that list. I was living in London working in a bookshop and not doing much in terms of trying to write a novel, so I pitched to Chad Post at Dalkey that I write an essay on Kavan. And because I had nothing else to do, I sat in the British Library and read everything by her. And started reading all these other experimental women writers, like Elizabeth Smart—not the Mormon abductee, but the one obsessed with the poet George Barker, an obsession she documents in the amazing By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Not a modernist, I know, but I sat at the British Library and read the communal notebook she kept with Barker and thought about Vivien(ne)’s hand on “The Waste Land” manuscript. I began to be really interested in ideas of literary collaboration.
Bookscapes, Book Gardens
August 17, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
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Bah, Humbug!
December 16, 2011 | by The Paris Review
Stop by Housing Works Bookstore Cafe this Sunday afternoon to hear Emma Straub, Eileen Myles, Kurt Andersen, Joshua Cohen, Ira Glass, John Hodgman, and many others, including our own Lorin Stein, in the second annual marathon reading of A Christmas Carol. (Spoiler alert: Lorin reads the part where Scrooge renounces his Scroogey ways.)
Where: Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012.
When: Sunday, December 18, 1 P.M.
