However, The Atlantic is bringing short fiction back to its normal subscriber issues starting this May:

I HAVE SOME GOOD news. Next month, The Atlantic will once again send fiction home to our subscribers, in a special supplement that will accompany our May issue. On the newsstand, the supplement will be bound into the May magazine….We think—we hope!—we are seeing renewed interest in the short story.

Fiction writers haven’t had a lot of good news in the magazine world recently with many longstanding magazines folding or gutting their staff and moving to a student-run online version like TriQuarterly. At the same time, it would not surprise me if fiction readership has increased with the web and other recent trends. The gap just seems to be being filled with other magazines. It is nice to see some of the big boys taking notice and adjusting course.

Cooking the Books — Episode 7 — Sam Lipsyte and Ceridwen Morris from The Awl on Vimeo.

NOIR by Robert Coover. The Overlook Press. $24.95

Is there any limit to the number of blows the back of a human head can endure? Not in the world of Robert Coover’s latest genre-bending novel, NOIR. Coover’s city is a place of shadows that perpetually hide thugs, cops or dames of some kind. They always seem to be waiting for a beating or ready to dole one out. In short, it is a tough world to navigate for a private dick like Philip M. Noir.

Robert Coover, now 75, is one of America’s great literary treasures and a new Coover work is something to pay attention to. Always the meta-fictional master, in the last few decades Coover has increasingly turned his mischievous eyes on literary genre with books like Gerald’s Party, Stepmother, Briar Rose, and the masterful Ghost Town. NOIR follows in that tradition, seizing the tropes of film noir and hardboiled detective fiction and twisting them into a bizarre yet hilarious homage.

Or perhaps Coover is less twisting the genre tropes than piling them on. NOIR seems to recall every detective novel at once. It is so hardboiled you could chuck it through a police station window. The novel opens as you—it is narrated in second person—Philip M. Noir, are at the morgue questioning the perverted attendant, Creep, about your quasi-client, the Vanishing Widow. Most of the names in NOIR have been similarly honed to their bluntest form: the policeman who hounds you is Captain Blue, your street rat informer is Rats, the elusive villain is Mr. Big, and your lounge singer love is Flame. Time seems to be measured not by the movement of the sun, but by the number of bruises on your body. Everything in NOIR’s city is a dive of some kind and they are all connected by tunnels or pitch black alleys. Well, maybe not everything. Occasionally you might stumble out of the shadows and onto something normal like kids at an ice cream shop:

They were blowing bubbles at each other in their shake and giggling. It was like they lived in a different world. They did live in a different world. It was called daytime.

The celebrated New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani once said that “Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodern writers. Perhaps it is fitting that the funniest and perhaps most malicious segment of NOIR involves a prostitute named Michiko who got herself involved with two rival Yakuza gangsters with penchants for tattoo art. They began using her body as a canvas to artistically threaten each other:

He turned her breasts into magnificent mountainous landscapes with little bridges over streams that his own gang members posed on in their pinstriped suits, holding up placards that read: Do not dream mountains from anthills, pisant. The scene invited interpolations and the rival obliged by turning it into a classic yakuza bloodbath with his own gang, disguised as giant ants in black fedoras an suits, wiping out the lover’s gang.

And so on. Eventually the rivals start to appreciate the other’s artistic skill so much they become friends and have to be executed by their own underlings.

Another stellar passage, that shows Coover hasn’t lost any of his delightful perversity, is when a character describes his love affair with the coldest dame of all, the city itself:

Come and get me, big boy. I seemed to hear her say that. But how do you fuck a city? The only thing I could come up with was to jerk off over a subway entrance, but that only made her madder.

Passages like these show Coover still at his comic and naughty best. The book as a whole doesn’t quite reach the heights of his best works or subvert an entire genre in the way Ghost Town did the western. The effect is more of a twisted homage, like Quentin Tarantino by way of David Lynch. Who killed who isn’t the point here. The hardboiled story is just a terrain for Coover to work his Loki-like literary magic on. Whether you are a devotee of detective novels or an enthusiast of experimentalism, NOIR will be one of the most fun reads you have this year.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/03/16/playing-in-the-shadows-the-tft-review-of-noir-by-robert-coover/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/03/16/gordon-lishs-collected-fictions-coming-in-april/ http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/03/16/gordon-lishs-collected-fictions-coming-in-april/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:40:03 +0000 Lincoln Michel http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/?p=945 Everyone has an opinion about Gordon Lish, the masterful editor and teacher who helped shape (or some might say suffocate?) many of America’s most important writers in recent history: Barry Hannah, Amy  Hempel, Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, and many others including, most famously, Raymond Carver.

Lish was also a fierce and controversial writer in his own right. Many of his books have been out of print for awhile, but they are going to be collected in one 546 page volume by O/R books this April:

This definitive collection of Lishs short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one “Gordon Lish.” The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.

Here is a trailer for the book:

(hat tip to htmlgiant)

“I wrote [the] piece mostly in hotels and dressing rooms while touring with Radiohead,” Music blog TwentyFourbit quoted Greenwood. “This was more practical than glamorous — lots of time sitting indoors, lots of instruments about — and aside from picking up a few geographical working titles, I can’t think that it had any effect where, on tour, it was written.”

You can see a series of film stills here.

(hat tip to RanyaChantal)

This year’s judges include Andrew W.K., Julie Powell and C. Max Magee. The books in competition include Lowboy by John Wray, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, and many more.

Round one occurred today where Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin took down Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere.

Grab your popcorn and over-sized foam fingers and follow along.

I have a fairly long response essay up at The Rumpus titled Reality Boredom: Why David Shields is Completely Right and Totally Wrong if you want to take a look.

1.
Reality Hunger, the newest book from the always interesting David Shields, comes sheathed in glowing blurbs from the likes of Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, Amy Hempel and Jonathan Lethem. Needless to say, I had high expectations and on one level they were met. Shields writes passionately about the vitality of short works, the inanity of our copyright laws, the relevance of remix culture, the changes technology is bringing, and, as always, the need to find new modes of expression. Reading these arguments left me with a renewed faith in the relevance of fiction and the authors, filmmakers and other artists who are making fascinating work from the power of their imaginations.

2.
However, this outcome might annoy David Shields. Because while Shields praises the same qualities I look for in my art, the book is framed by a somewhat incoherent thesis that fiction is dead, narrative is pointless and the premier literary form of the now is the lyric essay (with memoir, it would seem, being a close second). I cannot be the only one to read a supposedly radical manifesto—the book jacket labels detractors as mere defenders of “the status quo”—and be a little disappointed to learn that the novel is dead (again?) and the literature of our bright, hectic future is the lyric essay and memoir. Even the terms “lyric essay” and “memoir” feel dusty sandwiched between discussions of hip-hop and cell phone stories. In short, I read this book with as much disagreement as agreement.

Read the press release here.

Here is a round-up of some remembrances, old interviews, recipes and other Barry Hannah sundries:

* Vanity Fair has a new piece with writers from John Grisham to Richard Ford remembering the late master.

Ford said yesterday, “One great thing about Barry was how, in his person, he managed to preserve the deep mystery of literary art. In that way he was like Faulkner, himself. Frontally, he presented you with what seemed to be a recognizable southern type—the swaggering, impudent, small-town, pool-hall residing, wise-cracking, occasionally bibulous little smart-ass. Who then incongruously but absolutely legitimately wowed and amazed you with his celestial-quality literary sentences and constructions that could’ve come from no other brain but his, and that you never forgot. “

* The New York Times remembers the “darkly comic writer.”

* The Oxford American, the great journal of southern culture and writing, reprints a Hannah interview from 2001.

* At htmlgiant, Alec Niedenthal, Jeremiah Chamberlain, Michael Bible, and myself comment on his life and writing. Here is what I said, in regards to one of my favorite passages:

These are the opening sentences to a story called “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter.” It is hard to talk about writing like Hannah’s. He is the kind of mad-cap genius you are almost afraid to read when you are a young writer, or, hell, an old one, because he smashes every rule and bit of sense and builds it back up from scratch into something raw and gleaming. You can’t help but let him sink into you. I’m doing it already. What do I love about this passage? Look how beautifully the tone and town are set, yet without any concrete details or the expected plot set-up. Hannah’s sentences always careen to their own logic, their clauses leap out of the bushes at you. They are like the folk sayings transmitted from some other world. And that last sentence is one of my favorite in fiction. A writer needs to swallow some Hannah sentences on a regular basis. He is good for the soul.

* An old Michael Bible post on htmlgiant reprints some of Barry Hannah’s “rules” for writing, such as:

When you tell a story think more in terms of yarn, tale, even whopper. Then tell it subtly. DON’T think of nuance or “interior decoration.

* Tin House also reprints an interview online, this one from 2009.

* A video interview, although it annoyingly requires iTunes to watch.

* Over at The Rumpus, A. N. Devers remembers hearing Barry Hannah lecture.

*Lastly, also at The Rumpus, Barry Hannah’s own recipe for three-bean soup:

“You start with three kinds of beans: kidney, white (navy) and black-eyed peas. Take a big–real big–pot of water, dump ‘em in, and add some shredded onions. Saute either pork or beef, cut up in little chunks, and dump it in. Bring it to a boil. Add salt mixed with pepper, to taste. Turn up the heat and bring it up again. Add water if needed; dump in a small bag of rice, and bring it up. Boil until it thickens. For extra seasoning, I sometimes add some crab-boil, Tabasco, or whatever’s handy on the shelf. Serve it with French bread and butter. It’s all the nutrition you can stand.”