June 6, 2013 Fiction 1 Story of God: 71 By Joy Williams Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we will be running a series of pieces from Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. First published in The Paris Review in 1968, Joy Williams has since appeared in our pages many times. 99 Stories of God is her first book of fiction in nearly a decade and was written, she has said, partly in an attempt to imitate the inimitable Thomas Bernhard, that “cranky genius of Austrian literature,” and his The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories. 71 A child was walking with a lion through a great fog. “I’ve experienced death many times,” the lion said. “Impossible,” the child said. “It’s true, my experience of death does not include my own.” “I’m glad.” “I’ve had near-death experiences, however.” “Quite a different matter,” the child said. Read More
June 6, 2013 On the Shelf Joyce Carol Oates Gives Questionable Advice, and Other News By Sadie Stein “If you want to get the news from poems, you’ve come to the right place.” That would be the Boston Review. So much for reading being its own reward. This principal eats worms when his students meet reading goals. Mandarin: a language uniquely well-suited to punning. First-edition book clubs are, apparently, a thing. In the words of one friend, “We live in a sad and awesome time.” “As an author with a half century of literary success behind me, I can assure you the only way to make it in this industry is to meet as many publishers as you possibly can and then fuck them.” Joyce Carol Oates, meet The Onion.
June 5, 2013 At Work Pinning Down: A Conversation with Catrin Morgan By Daisy Atterbury Air dies elsewhere, graphite on paper, 10 cm x 10 cm. Catrin Morgan has a history of sticking pins through words. (Check out her ongoing project, Pinning, which was installed at the Bromley House Library.) Maybe this is her real attraction to Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, which she just illustrated for Granta’s new edition: finally, a book with text she can’t easily pin down. In graphite drawings, Morgan builds disassembled—or, nonrationally assembled—architectural objects, maps, and containers, many of which seem to act as entry points to systems with unfamiliar parameters. The illustrations define and rely on their own language, complementing the language of The Age of Wire and String nicely, self-contained discourses with overlapping vocabularies. Your designs for The Age of Wire and String are almost all diagrams, fanciful maps or systems that have some kind of chronological or other organizational logic. Can you explain how the content and structure of the book informed your decisions here? It seemed to me that by attempting to illustrate The Age of Wire and String directly, by illustrating very faithfully the images suggested by the text, I would close it down. What I love about The Age of Wire and String is the space it opens up in my imagination and I didn’t want my images to take that space away from new readers. In the end, the images I created aimed to respond to the tone and construction of the text and to behave in a similar way. The text subverts our expectations of familiar patterns of language, and so I created images that appear familiar but in fact are always doing something that belies their appearance, so what appears to be a map is in fact composed of sleeping figures, and a circuit diagram is based on the floor plans of a building. The images also reference directly illustrations from manuals and encyclopedias, as I felt like the deadpan tone of this kind of illustration suited perfectly the tone of the novel. The set of illustrations I ended up with are a representation of the world that The Age of Wire and String projects within my mind, and some of them were created without planning exactly where they would go in the text. When placing them I looked for shared co-ordinates between an image and a piece of text, so that the image and text spoke to, but did not explain each other. Read More
June 5, 2013 Arts & Culture The Town of Books By Sadie Stein Hay-on-Wye, Wales, has a population of 1,500 and thirty secondhand bookstores. Since the 1960s, the town has taken in discarded tomes from across the anglophone world, and is known as “the town of books.” Appropriately enough, it’s also home to the annual Hay Festival, described by USA Today as “a geographically remote, bohemian version of the World Economic Forum’s Davos event.” Kindles, needless to say, are frowned upon.
June 5, 2013 Fiction 2 Stories of God: 62 and 70 By Joy Williams Competition at the West End Fair Demolition Derby, Gilbert, Pennsylvania. This week, we will be running a series of pieces from Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. First published in The Paris Review in 1968, Joy Williams has since appeared in our pages many times. 99 Stories of God is her first book of fiction in nearly a decade and was written, she has said, partly in an attempt to imitate the inimitable Thomas Bernhard, that “cranky genius of Austrian literature,” and his The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories. 62 The Lord was trying out some material. I AM WHO I AM, He said. It didn’t sound right. THAT’S WHO I AM. I AM. It sounded ridiculous. Read More
June 5, 2013 On the Shelf Story Stamps, and Other News By Sadie Stein This Irish stamp features a 224-word short story. For those who want more sci with their fi: a new anthology, Kepler’s Dozen, collects short science fiction about real planets discovered by Kepler Spacecraft. Edited by scientists from Kepler! Great literature may improve us as human beings … … but! “It is not sufficient to become learned to have read much, if we read without reflection.” RIP really long German word, coined in 1999 in reference to the packaging of beef. Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, we hardly knew ya.