so let’s get together and celebrate.
the awful possibilities is my best book. it was my best book when i submitted it to jonathan and zach at featherproof, and then jonathan helped me clean it up and rearrange it, and zach filled it with creepy postcards and crammed my handwriting in there and slathered the whole thing in black goo, and now it is really my best book. i think it’s exactly like being inside my mind. thank you, jonathan and zach.
so first of all, go here to read excerpts (including a downloadable version of the first story, “ss attacks!”) and order the damn thing. don’t you want to be in my mind?
then realize that i’m about to start doing a bunch of readings. i’ve updated the lecture page, and i expect to see you at them if you live within flying distance. if you’d rather just schedule a reading within walking or driving distance, email me at christian dot tebordo at gmail dot com.
this is all by way of saying that things will be pretty quiet around here for a minute, but i will update when i can, and you should check back to see what readings i add, because there will be more to come.
finally, i feel bad, because i’ve been reading a lot lately, but given all of the above, and the fact that i’m buying a house (did i mention i’m buying a house?) and also working a full time job, means i don’t have a ton of time to post stuff just now. but here is a list of stuff, some of which i may come back to later, that i’ve read recently, that i think is really good and worth your time:
- the ask, by sam lipsyte. not as straight up funny as home land, but as consistently well-written, and with more effort (and a good deal of success) toward depth. really dark. in some cases possibly wallowing in it, which is the only complaint i can come up with against lipsyte. i don’t expect to see many better books than this this year.
- the taste of penny, by jeff parker. i wrote a thing here about parker’s ovenman, which i loved. i’ve since met him (beers and pizza) and gotten a blurb from him and will be reading with him this spring. this new collection is awesome. it has all of the strengths — taut prose, great humor, utterly convincing characters — that the novel did, but it also shows a range (of voice, subject matter, hell, even ambition) that i wouldn’t have expected based strictly on ovenman. i hope to write more thoroughly about this and the ask together, because they complement each other in many ways.
- we take me apart, by molly gaudry. i read this in manuscript form a while back, so it took me a minute to get to my bound volume. the book itself is beautiful, as is gaudry’s text. if i were writing a blurb it would say something about a cross between gertrude stein (style) and jeanette winterson (content). except maybe the style is more similar to carole maso and the content to kate bernheimer. does it matter? i thought of all of those writers, and they’re all good. good reasons to check the book out.
- inconceivable wilson, by j a tyler. possibly the best book title of the year? tyler published gaudry’s book through mud luscious press. oh, what a tangled web. anyway, to continue with the blurbesque conceit, inconceivable wilson seems like what would happen if (second trilogy era) beckett rewrote heart of darkness. tyler’s got the linguistic chops to merit that comparison. i have to admit, i frequently asked myself about the political ramifications of such a rewrite (conrad contextualized himself so well, whereas beckett’s context seems to come from avoiding context). but whether you accept his program or not, you have to admit that tyler’s got skills.
