culture March 30, 2016

Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser

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It’s fun to imagine what the devoutly digressive Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) would have made of the term “plot twist.” His stories generate so many whimsical offshoots that the twists themselves become the plot, or rather a series of plots that are gleefully announced and abruptly dropped, sometimes in the course of a single page. He favored, particularly in the wonderful novella The Walk, the structure of a ramble, which is, like many things in Walser, a contradiction, because rambles generally do not have structure. In a single short paragraph early in The Walk, the strolling

interviews January 21, 2016

Bookforum talks with Brian Evenson

“Mormon horror writer with avant-garde leanings” might seem like an improbable description, but Evenson excels at bringing different worlds and genres together, and his gift for making contradictory versions of reality overlap often intensifies his work’s creepy effects.

Brian Evenson has been disturbing readers with his stylish and macabre fiction since the 1994 release of his collection Altmann’s Tongue, which included a story about, among other things, a corpse whose mouth has been stuffed with bees and sewn shut. Evenson’s latest book, A Collapse of Horses, reveals that his unsettling talents have grown subtler and stronger—seventeen stories featuring unsolvable mind-games, drugged-out cults, and space-station claustrophobia, all rendered in Evenson’s unmistakable prose, which is capable of suggesting both grounded realism and jittery paranoia, often at

culture Dec/Jan 2016

Hack Wit

RONI HORN'S WORK urges us to see the unfamiliar in familiar materials and phenomena—the weather, for instance. She has described water as “just tumult everywhere endlessly, tumult modulating into another tumult all over and without end,” a notion she conveys particularly well in the 2000 photographic series “Some Thames,” which lingers over form-defying ripples and reflections of the river’s surface. She seeks to put viewers in a state of flux, too. Her Water, Selected, 2007, made up of cylinders filled with water collected from different glaciers in Iceland, not only points to the hazards of

print June/July/Aug 2015

A Roam with a View

PEOPLE HAVE discussed their plans to procreate—or skipped the discussion altogether—under many circumstances, but Ben and Alex, characters from Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, are, to my knowledge, the only two who have started planning their family while staring at a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both of them are looking at Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc, a painting about reaching into the future, as Ben notes in one of his many essayistic set pieces, when Alex broaches the subject. Their placement is significant: “Our gazes were parallel, directed in front of us at canvas and not

interviews June 15, 2011

Bookforum talks with Matthew Stadler

The future of publishing has been the subject of many debates and panels for the past five or so years, but until recently not a lot was being done about it. Now, with newcomers such as OR Books and Cursor, Inc., this is beginning to change. Perhaps the most innovative and philosophical publisher right now is Publication Studio.

The future of publishing has been the subject of many debates and panels for the past five or so years, but until recently, not a lot was being done about it. That's beginning to change, thanks to newcomers such as OR Books and Cursor, Inc. Perhaps the most innovative and philosophical new independent press is Publication Studio, the brainchild of Portland-based publishers Matthew Stadler and Patricia No. In 2009, Stadler purchased a printer and an unusual perfect binder (christened “Ol Gluey”) and launched Publication Studio as a print-on-demand publisher. Since then, the independent press

interviews June 11, 2011

Bookforum talks with Patrick DeWitt

Patrick DeWitt's comic and poignant western, The Sisters Brothers, follows two horse-riding hit men on a mission to kill a man for reasons that remain, for much of the book, unclear. DeWitt talks to Bookforum about his aversion to backstory, the tension between disaster and comedy, and how loathesome protagonists can still be charismatic.

In 2009, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel introduced author Patrick DeWitt as a master of corrosive comedy. That book follows a barback at an L.A. watering hole who, with alarming (and somehow hilarious) alacrity, ruins his marriage, robs his employers, and calls in a bomb threat during a shift. For all of its chaotic scenes and drunken antics, DeWitt’s debut proceeded with a raconteur’s wit and surprising control, qualities that also distinguish his follow-up, The Sisters Brothers, released this week. The new book is a Western, but it, too, is about a job of sorts: Siblings Eli and Charlie Sisters

culture January 22, 2010

The Ticking Is the Bomb by Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn’s new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb, is by turns, and often simultaneously, self-reflective and socially charged. A poet by training, Flynn writes short chapters with impressive agility and cultural command, drawing subtle analogies between Greek myths, zombie movies, photography, Buddhism, and the anxieties of becoming a parent. Anyone familiar with his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, knows that Flynn also has a live-wire story on his hands: That book alternately circles and probes his postcollegiate years working at a homeless shelter in Boston, where his dad—a

culture November 10, 2009

Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder by Zachary Lazar

A concentrated dose of sixties mythology, Zachary Lazar’s 2008 book Sway puts a fictional spin on the Manson family, the rise of the Rolling Stones, and the Lucifer-referencing underground filmmaker Keneth Anger. One of the first things you’ll notice about Sway is that its characters are based on and named after real people, but the author states in an introductory note that the book is a work of fiction. And it is: Lazar’s story might weave around and intersect with actual historical moments (Altamont, for instance), but it is primarily interested in imagining how its intertwined characters

Michael Miller