Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Richard T. Watson’

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Overheard: Stories To Read Aloud (ed. Jonathan Taylor)

In anthology, Saboteur Awards, Short Stories on May 21, 2013 at 3:00 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

The earliest stories were told through word-of-mouth, and passed on with slight variations by being told over and again to new generations. Imagine narrating to groups of rapt listeners, probably huddled round a fire in their cave, hoping the power of the spoken word can hold back the terrors of the night. These were tales to make sense of the world around early mankind, told simply and in a way that connects with something basic and primitive inside us. Salt’s anthology Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud aims to reconnect with that spoken heritage, and asks a scattering of modern writers to contribute their stories in the good old style.

Overheard Jonthan Taylor

That’s not to say that Overheard‘s stories are fairy tales or myths for the campfire. Nor are there Homeric epics or tales spread out over a thousand and one nights. But like our fireside storyteller, there’s an awareness of the ‘physical power of words’ (in the anthology that opens with a quote from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Power of Words) The focus is on clear, linear narratives, strong focal characters with a clear voice and stories short enough to read aloud to an audience without them getting restless.

Overheard offers a punchy read, with a lot of short, sharp stories from some writers who’re on top of their game. Some are snappy, bitesize, only a page or so, while others take some more chewing. But all of them draw the reader into a contained world, leave their mark, and then move on. And in case you missed the place of the anthology in the oral tradition, editor Jonathan Taylor has arranged the stories in sections with names like Crying Stories, Singing Stories and Whispering Stories.

There are sincere stories of family heartache and support (Sara-Mae Tuson‘s ‘Ill Angels Haunt Me’, Gemma Seltzer‘s ‘My Sister Like This’ or Kate Pullinger’s ‘Estranged and Unanticipated’), alongside the Kafka-esque transformation of PJ Carnehan’s ‘A Changed Man’ – a transformed man who wishes he’d only turned into a beetle – and the fantastical in Catherine Rogers’ folklore-inspired ‘The Derby Poet’ or the downright odd narrator of ‘Frank’ by Claire Baldwin.

Despite Overheard‘s Western bias, there are some stories from elsewhere. In ‘Good Advice is Better than Rubies’, Salman Rushdie contributes a lovingly-constructed depiction of the Tuesday Women at India’s British Consulate, and evokes the dusty India where the rules are there but not always obeyed and the people get by in the gaps between them. Hanif Kureshi‘s ‘Weddings and Beheadings’ offers a different take on the viral beheading videos which so often finish off hostage-takings in the Middle East, and is both uncomfortable and fascinating.

There’s Adam Roberts‘ sci-fi hymn in rhyming couplets, ‘McAuley’s Hymn’, which blends an element of mystical devotion with a touching story of personal loss and sacrifice in a universe at once familiar and yet unique. In just a few pages, Roberts creates his world and, in the space of a single human soul, dramatises the age-old battle between religious morality and science. Religious devotion is taken to a more disturbing extreme by the narrator in Jane Holland‘s ‘The Cell’, which beautifully evokes the isolation of a nun’s cell and her gradual descent into either madness or anther spiritual plane. Rather beautifully, Holland lets the reader see this as both a loss of health and also an outcome to be desired and welcomed.

As with the best short stories, some of the strongest moments in Overheard come when writers drop hints but leave their reader (or listener, of course) to fill in the blanks. For example, Taylor’s own short and sweet ‘Synesthetic Schmidt’ does an excellent job of expressing its character’s long-held guilt, beautifully capturing the physical sensation and effects, giving just enough clues without spoiling it with explicit explanation.

With such a strong line-up of writers assembled, a mix of well-known and less well-known names, Taylor presents a quality anthology. As well as those already mentioned, there are entries from Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, Louis De Bernières, Tania Hershman (author of Saboteur 2013-nominated My Mother Was An Upright Piano) and Joel Lane (whose own collection we’ve reviewed here).

The oral tradition pre-dates the development of writing, so it seems surprising that there aren’t more books like Overheard. We’re used to the idea of poetry being performed out loud and brought to life off the page; less so with prose stories. But with the increasing number of spoken word events across the country, performances of prose are becoming more popular and Overheard is unlikely to be the last such publication.

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‘Controller’ by Sally Ashton

In Novella, Saboteur Awards on May 12, 2013 at 2:30 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

In the absence of words and common language, much of human communication happens through non-verbal means: body language, gestures and looks, for example. So it seems right that Sally Ashton’s debut novella, Controller, which follows its protagonist into an alien and foreign city whose language she learns as she goes along, should feature so much looking and touching and sense of watching oneself. The words just fall away.

Controller Sally Ashton

Laura has arrived in Spain, apparently on a whim, understanding very little Spanish, and her first encounter (in the novella, at least) has the same alienating effect on the non-Spanish-speaking reader as it must do on her. Sure, you can go to Google Translate and find out what the little old lady in the cafe is saying, or you can throw yourself into Ashton’s world and accept that Laura doesn’t entirely understand, and neither should you. You can join her in trying to navigate through a series of polite smiles, guesses, physical gestures and half-meanings: the non-verbal language of those who can’t speak to each other.

She’s not the only one to struggle. Ashton also introduces Bea, the Argentine immigrant whose venereal infection and sexual history have left her almost mute with strangers. She, however, has an eloquent non-verbal vocabulary, and – despite her other difficulties – communicates with Laura, through touch and smell, a message of human togetherness in the midst of a culture and a place neither of them can connect with.

Also on the list of isolated people failing to connect with the world is Eric, the Dutch painter whose chest is a network of scar tissue and whose disability leaves his left arm floating about according to its own will, almost at random. This is a man whose life has been spent in visually recording the world and its suffering, and it is in him that we have the greatest hint as to the controller of the novella’s title. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a fellow foreigner, he speaks English to Laura, but English in an abrupt, infinitive-heavy style. Even with her blindfold on, Laura’s internal gaze reflects Eric’s external gaze, which explores and intrudes upon every part of her exposed body. Just how far can an artist go with his model before he crosses the line into abuse and exploitation of her submissiveness?

Laura’s money comes from being a still life model, and this is the second reason – along with her unavoidably foreign appearance – that makes her often the object of staring, of gazing and of probing eyes. Eric’s eyes explore every curve of her frequently naked body, and she herself is forever imagining what she looks like from outside, picturing her legs touching each other under her dress or the painful angles her back has been bent into. It all gives Controller a visceral quality; this is a novella very much concerned with its protagonist’s body and her relationship with it, as well as her physical relation with the outside world and how she communicates with both.

Beyond Laura’s internal gaze, the novella’s prose is brief and almost bleak. There’s a sense of being in a Spanish coastal town that isn’t a major tourist destination – the sea, the landscape and the language stretch out into the distance with no peaks or splashes of colour, simmering quietly in siesta sunshine. Sentences are often brief, disconnected from surrounding context and wandering through an alien landscape just as Laura wanders the foreign city. This style lends the novella a heavy emphasis on its protagonist and her perspective, rather than any specific location or experience of the world.

Not one for the squeamish, Controller revels in almost literally anatomising the relationship between an artist’s model and her body, and also between the model and the artist, at the deliberate expense of their relationship with the outside world.

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‘Holophin’ by Luke Kennard

In Novella, Saboteur Awards on April 8, 2013 at 1:15 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

In Luke Kennard’s debut novella, the Holophin is a tiny, incredibly-powerful, highly-personalised computer. While humanity has forever been developing tools and technology to make life easier – the wheel, the plough, the sail, the loom, the steam engine, the computer, the telephone – in recent decades the drive has also been to make these tools individual, for example the mobile phone as opposed to the household landline. At the same time, those devices are capable of an increasing number of tasks; the mobile takes/makes calls, but also sends messages (texts and emails), takes photos, surfs the web (including social media), keeps a calendar, plans routes, plays games, wakes us up, plays music and videos, writes/edits documents and can probably do far more as well. What’s more, it fits in your pocket and you can take it almost everywhere.

But with a rise in technological capabilities comes a rise in fear of that technology and what it can do to humans. I don’t mean the dangers of radiation from phone masts or handsets – though that probably should be a concern – I mean the fears that technology is becoming increasingly autonomous and has begun to run our lives, that people genuinely believe they can’t live without their smartphones, that civilisation would collapse without wi-fi access and that vast data servers hold swathes of information about every technology user on the planet. The other day I even saw a TV news report claiming that governments – obeying their ‘corporate masters’ – can (indeed, are obliged to) track individuals’ locations to within a hundred metres, using their mobile phone signals.

Maybe those fears are unfounded, but even if we aren’t heading towards a Terminator-style war when the machines finally take over, there’s no denying the increasing presence and ubiquity of technology in the developed world.

Luke Kennard's Holophin reviewed

Luke Kennard’s advert for a Holophin

At the same time, we’re bombarded with adverts for products that offer simple solutions to complicated problems (solutions made possible by advancing technology): combat the signs of ageing with this easy-to-use lotion; become sexually irresistible with this deodorant; buy this game and train your brain to be smarter! Those are just generic ones: the internet and Google can quite easily give each user specific ads based on your previous buying habits, your browser history and subject headings from your email inbox (though some of its choices can still be charmingly bizarre). You can chose to see this as a useful, personalised internet experience, or as technology’s further encroachment into your life.

As if with that in mind, Kennard’s novella opens with an advert for the Holophin, a dolphin-shaped sticker of immense (at least partly autonomous) processing power that promises help with, among other things, ‘weight loss or gain; confidence; alleviation of social anxiety […] happiness; concentration and focus […] insomnia, anti-social behaviour, addictions and phobias’ as well as grief management and self-discipline. On top of all that, the Holophin provides a built-in(to the brain) media centre and personal organiser which can not only arrange meetings with other people’s Holophins, but even attend them for the wearer too. If the creeping dominance of smartphones worries you, the Holophin is your worst nightmare, Kennard’s extrapolation from modern fears and trends. But at least it’s a cute dolphin shape.

The best sci-fi takes our modern-day fears and concerns and puts them in a different context, allowing us to see ourselves from a new angle, without the potentially comforting surrounds of the modern world. We can consider Hatsuka and Max – the young characters in Holophin – with a disinterest that would be much harder when considering our own use of, say, a smartphone. In his first novella, Kennard is able to explore the idea of politely domineering technology as well as looking at how that technology can develop a life of its own and raise rather deeper questions. One of the Holophins has started writing poetry, and another is working on the first Holophin novel – where do we consider these endeavours in the context of art as a means of human expression and creativity? And how much are humans actually limited by their reliance on technology: for example, how much do we now rely on autocorrect and autofill functions when typing, rather than remembering how to spell for ourselves?

As in good sci-fi, the setting here feels contemporary, it could be the early twenty-first century – except for the occasional references to, say, the fact that countries no longer have any meaning and corporations are everything (do you use an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android? a Microsoft computer or an Apple one?); corporations that fight over sales and staff like nations used to fight over resources and territory. There’s a hint of Margaret Attwood’s Oryx & Crake in the grooming of highly intelligent youngsters by powerful, quasi-governmental corporations hungry for technological developments – exposing the idea of nations as just one way of organising people; here, corporations provide schools, and education is paid for by working a shift or two in the factory. Who needs a government when the corporation provides its own housing, security, schools, shops and employment opportunities? The Cadbury brothers would be proud.

The dangers of powerful computers plugged right into the brain become apparent when Hatsuka loses all grip on reality and the novella’s narrative fragments. It’s at this point that Holophin becomes rather less accessible and more of a surreal whirl through fantasy, the subconscious, virtual reality and corporate competition.

Whether you’re left wanting a Holophin of your own probably depends on your attitude to technology’s impact on our lives. Is it an enhancement and a helper, or insidious and a threat? Holophin lets you believe either, but carries a warning that we’re bound to find out one way or the other eventually.

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A Fiction Round-Up 2012

In End of year round-up on December 23, 2012 at 5:35 pm

-Decided by Richard T. Watson-

‘Tis the season to be making lists and round-ups of the previous year, so it’s just the right time for a look back over the year for Sabotage Reviews and our fiction coverage. Arguably, we could do this at any time of year, but it seems more fashionable in December.

Our Poetry Editor, (now Dr) Claire Trévien, has already given her best bits and highlights from Sabotage’s poetry coverage, which you can read here. Now it’s my turn.

Following last year’s pattern of giving a ‘Top Ten’ [or Three] of most-viewed reviews, I’ve prepared a list of the most successful fiction reviews of Sabotage’s 2012. The publications might be considered as Christmas presents for that special reader in your life…? Just a thought.

#1 I Wrote This For You
A printed selection of posts from Jon Ellis’ and Ian Thomas’s blog I Wrote This For You, which the two men have composed through a process of intercontinental collaboration. There’s a narrative and a theme, but much of it is left up to the reader – Ian Thomas claiming that ”There’s no story I can tell you that is as powerful as the story you can tell yourself”. Our reviewer, Ian Chung, praised the way that ”Thomas and Ellis seem to have distilled something of what it means to remain profoundly human in a digital society”.

#2 Acquired for Development By…
A hyper-local collection of poetry, fiction and non-fiction based around and inspired by the London Borough of Hackney, and published by Influx Press. Our reviewer, John McGhee said: ”The collection neatly pinpoints some of the most critical tensions in modern urban life – tradition versus innovation, the real versus the perceived, the modern versus the post-modern – and sees how these play out in a borough perceived as both lawless and cool.”

#3 Armchair/Shotgun #3
Following the success of Armchair/Shotgun #2 in this year’s Saboteur Awards, their third instalment has also been popular. Our reviewer, Rory O’Sullivan, had this to say of the New York-based collection of poetry, pictures and short stories: ”The magazine manages to embrace so many art forms and yet remain a predominantly literary offering; storytelling is at the heart of literature, and indeed central to this publication’s mission statement”.

On a more subjective and personal note (as if the previous paragraphs have been really objective), I was pleased that the winner of this year’s Saboteur Awards in May was the second issue of Armchair/Shotgun, a review from Sabotage’s Fiction stable, and that their third issue also got a very positive review. We also got a rather lovely mention over on the Guardian website, thanks to Dan Holloway.

If you’re looking for more round-ups of Sabotage activity this year, why not have a look at the results of this year’s Saboteur Awards?

This is also a good time to thank all of our reviewer team for their hard work in the past twelve months, and to thank you all for supporting the independent and often low-budget publishing we cover on Sabotage. So thank you all. Well done you.

Oh, and have a happy Christmas.

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‘The Killing of a Bank Manager’ by Paul Kavanagh

In Novella on November 19, 2012 at 1:13 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

It’s a title that must have sounded very of-the-moment back in 2010, when The Killing of a Bank Manager was first published. Remember when bankers were the bogeymen of Britain’s public consciousness? They’ve since been replaced by phone-hacking journalists and – at the time of writing – a BBC that seems at worst complicit in paedophilia and at best incompetent. But the grotty feel of these public scandals is still right at home in Paul Kavanagh’s diversely worded novella.

The Killing of a Bank Manager by Paul Kavanagh

But don’t go thinking that this is any polemic on the evils of commercial banking. The bank manger appears near the start and the end, but for the rest of his killing is entirely absent. Instead, Kavanagh’s brutal and wide-ranging prose follows the dissatisfied butcher’s apprentice, Henry, who lives opposite the bank. It’s the story of a man in a world of his own, where all the people are somehow like people he’s read about or heard about somewhere else. Disconnected from everyone else’s reality, he’s invented his own by drawing in ideas and thoughts from a dozen other worlds.

We’re told of Henry’s journey around town – and his memories of previous events there – which isn’t a million miles from Harold Bloom’s journey in Joyce’s Ulysses. Henry too meets mythical creatures in human form, gives inside details on the process of digestion and reminds the reader of the close relation between human eating and animal digestion: the butcher holds up a knife ‘dripping blood and piss’.

Like Joyce, Kavanagh’s fond of his lists, listing the bones broken in an attack, the types of flies bursting from Henry’s body, the parts of animals dealt with by the butchers, rivers and things that are fake. Kavanagh’s lists go on for much longer than that one. They take the reader through every detail of, say, the dead animals being chopped by the butcher, layering towards an anatomical whole. Sometimes the list is Henry flailing around the for the right word, each one supplanting the one before. Sometimes, it’s almost as if Kavanagh wants to show you that he’s read up on species of flies.

Kavanagh knows how to write a breakdown; the book is full of physical and mental collapses, related in intimately graphic detail and all fairly unpleasant. It’s as if our main character – he’s not quite hero material, somehow – stumbles from one disorientating full-body shutdown to the next, via a series of increasingly surreal encounters. By the final pages, it’s a wonder that only the bank manager has been killed:

‘Rolling thunder broke his back. Henry was in Signorelli’s torture chamber. He tried to scream. His spine snapped. He felt his vertebrae undulate. Numbness started in the toes, he could not feel the fabric of his socks. His feet felt as though they would be erased. His legs would be next. He was being slowly rubbed out. Soon he would be nothing, not even a smudge.’

Signorelli is just one of the myriad external references Kavanagh – through Henry – draws into the novella. The text is littered with throwaway mentions and inferences from history, literature, art and mythology. Greek myths – Pan, and, yes, Odysseus – Dante, Archimboldo, Yeats, Don Quixote, Cravaggio, Shakespeare, Dali, Picasso, the Bible, Socrates, Euclid, Nostradamus, Persian myths, Petrarch and manuals on witch-hunting, besides many more. It makes his prose well-fertilised with ideas and thoughts that have gone before, though each of them is only ever really turned over, shown the light of day, and reburied. Like the introduction of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick – which I didn’t spot being referenced – The Killing of a Bank Manager‘s external references sometimes feel more like an invitation to see how widely the author has read, rather than necessarily being of service to the story.

The Killing of a Bank Manager takes the reader on a modern odyssey through the wide-ranging references of Paul Kavanagh’s reading, with a prose style that keeps them guessing and pulls no punches. Henry’s story flies about all over the place away from the initial concept of his love for the beautician downstairs and his hatred of the bank manager. As the blurb announces, ‘It’s never as simple as just the killing of a bank manager’.

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An Interview with some Editors of Armchair/Shotgun

In Saboteur Awards on October 17, 2012 at 1:45 pm

-Richard T. Watson speaks to Evan Simko-Bednarski and John Cusick-

Earlier this year, we at Sabotage opened up voting for the second of our Saboteur Awards (which marked, not coincidentally, our second birthday). At the head of an impressive field was the New York-based magazine Armchair/Shotgun, praised variously as ‘obscure, powerful and entertaining’ and ‘a saboteur in the best and worst ways’.

Armchair / Shotgun Issue 2's front cover

With its selection of short fiction, poetry and visual art, Armchair/Shotgun does conveniently represent both sides of the printed literature Sabotage aims to cover (as you’ll see later, they’re branching out into performance poetry – we don’t have an award for performance poetry…yet); the visual art is an added bonus. For that alone, it deserved recognition in our Saboteur Awards – but it won because it so impressed our readers, its own readers and our reviewer.

Rory O’Sullivan reviewed the magazine for Sabotage in June 2011 (coincidentally, their second instalment) and complimented the ‘refreshing originality’ contained within Armchair/Shotgun #2. The submissions policy at Armchair/Shotgun makes a real virtue out of anonymity (not the only publication on our list to do so: Anon came third, behind joint-seconds Ilk and New Linear Perspective). That focus on the purity of story enabled Armchair/Shotgun‘s content to ‘distract, grip and absorb’ the reader.

As they basked in the glory of winning our second Saboteur Award and set their sights on the third instalment, two of Armchair/Shotgun‘s editors, Evan Simko-Bednarski and John Cusick, answered a few questions we threw their way. [Disclaimer: the Saboteur Award has no prize outside of a logo for your website, and some kudos]

The Saboteur Award 2012, for Armchair/Shotgun

Tell us a bit about the beginnings of Armchair/Shotgun – how and why did it start? Can you explain the name?

ESB: First off, no, I cannot explain the name. We were discussing the magazine at a bar, back when this was just a thing we were discussing at bars, batting around some truly awful names, and John’s face just lit up and he said ‘OK, how about ‘Armchair Shotgun’? With a slash in between?’

Armchair/Shotgun came about at a time where we were all working in nominally creative fields, but were feeling creatively frustrated. The economy had just taken a humongous nose-dive, and we were trying to be writers, but all of the lit journals we could get our hands on had a kind of optimism or polish that seemed out of touch with our experience. We wanted to make the kind of journal that would take a story solely on its merits, and not on the formal training or critical acclaim of its author.

What’s you favourite part(s) of publishing Armchair/Shotgun? What really excites you about it?

ESB: Hands down, my favourite part is getting to develop relationships and friendships with our authors. These are stories that we pore over for months, debate and hash out and fight for at the editing table. Getting to know the folks behind them is a unique reward.

JMC: A close second is participating in the fabulous literary community in Brooklyn. There are so many amazing writers, editors, and publications here; it’s inspiring to be a part of that.

You carry out some activities outside of publishing the magazine, don’t you?

JMC: We’re all involved in other creative and professional pursuits. By day I’m an author of young adult novels and a literary agent. The fiction we publish in Armchair/Shotgun is very different than the kind of thing I write and represent, so it’s a nice balance. One of our managing editors works in textbooks, another for a not-for-profit. Our publicist is a full-time editor at a major New York publishing house.

ESB: I am a freelance writer, a poet, a performing musician and a bicycle mechanic. About once a week, I sleep.

What do you look for in a) creative writing submissions, b) artwork submissions, c) poetry submissions, d) non-fiction submissions and e) a perfect meal?

ESB: With poetry, I’ve never been a fan of flowery verse, or works very beholden to a formal structure. We certainly have published very ornate diction and fairly formal structure, but only because beneath all of that was a gorgeously constructed work of poetry that felt tangible, that begged for a second or third or fifth read. To me, poetry is storytelling without any of the requirements of narrative or grammar. In prose, there’s a linearity to the very structure of a sentence or a paragraph— they necessarily go forward. To my mind the mark of a good poem is to arrive somewhere different than where it started without relying on that linearity, or by playing with it, or by acknowledging it but going somewhere different.

JMC: For fiction, we prize story and character over style. We like to be moved emotionally, rather than wowed intellectually. Finding novel or beautiful ways to write fiction is fine, so long as your literary fireworks are in service of the story. Our taste in art is harder to pin down. We gravitate toward the understated. As with fiction, we’re more interested in craft than concept. As for a perfect meal? After an all-day editing session, nothing beats pizza and beer.

In a similar vein, what makes an Armchair/Shotgun piece an Armchair/Shotgun piece? What marks these things out as being yours? Is there a particular style, say, or theme, maybe?

JMC: So far we’ve published two stories about troubled dogs, and a few about lonely drivers on long stretches of highway. I think due to our name, we tend to receive a great deal of rusticana and rural settings, but we’re not looking for any of that specifically. We’re open to all genres, all styles, so long as the piece makes us feel something.

Is there another publication or two out there that you especially admire? Who else should we really be looking at?

JMC: We’ve modelled ourselves after the Paris Review, somewhat. The local folks we adore include Bomb, the Coffin Factory, Electric Literature, Abe’s Penny, the Atavist, and many more.

What’s coming up for Armchair/Shotgun?

JMC: This autumn we released our third issue, participated in the Brooklyn Bookfair, and were honoured to have a story from our first issue, The Kill Sign by Marvin Shackelford, featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Program. We plan to do many more events in the coming year — panels, readings and the like — and have plans to partner with the Cambridge Writers Workshop for a few literary ‘performance pieces’, for lack of a better term.

ESB: One of the things that thrills me about our latest issue is that, with our anonymous submission policy, all of our poetry and fiction for Armchair/Shotgun #3 turns out to have been written by women. I don’t know if you are familiar with the VIDA count, which tracks the discrepancy between the publication rates of men and women in large literary publications from year to year, but there’s often a lot of talk as to why there is so consistently a bias towards the publication of men. I think it’s pretty interesting that by ignoring our authors names and bios, we came up with an all-female group of authors, and I’m tremendously excited to share their work with our readers.

The cover of Armchair/Shotgun 3

‘The future of publishing is in ebooks and online, not in printed documents’ – discuss.

JMC: Publishing is transforming into an electronic industry, but print products will continue to have a market so long as people want to buy them. I know I still do. The thing most folks forget is that format is not nearly as important as content. I hope the companies who have found success publishing books don’t suddenly decide to get into the software development business. That would be like Ferrari coming out with a line of fragrances.

ESB: The future of publishing may lie in e-books, but the future of the art form very much requires paper. John and I worked at a radio station in college, and we always noted how terrestrial radio differed from the internet: the radio dial is only about yea big; you’re going to find something even if you’re not looking for it. The advantage of print lies in a particular advantage of the bookshelf— you can only fit so many things on it. This means that someone thumbing through a bookstore is going to happen upon authors they weren’t looking for, because the shelf has been curated. So much of e-retailing is based on identifying and pitching to a reader’s comfort zone. And it has to be that way, otherwise you’re staring at an app-store of every title ever written. But it means that the reader never gets jarred out of their routine the way they can be by a well-thought-out bookstore shelf. In an infinite space one only finds what they’re looking for. Happenstance requires certain physical limitations that belong to print. And that means new and different authors finding new and different readers.

One comment from our voters described Armchair/Shotgun as ‘literate’ and ‘fun’, in a world where the two are ‘too often, mutually exclusive’ – do you think they’re mutually exclusive? How do you manage to be both at the same time?

ESB: I think that there is a tendency to gird oneself against the vulnerability of creativity by being self-important. That’s true in any artistic community, and sadly that means too many literary events aren’t a whole lot of fun. But for us the point of all this is story. We wanted to read better stories. And story tellers are intriguing, interesting and fun people at their core. I think the trick is to be very serious about the magazine Armchair/Shotgun while having as much fun as possible with the organization Armchair/Shotgun.

JMC: Why should literature and fun be mutually exclusive? Books are fun to read. They’re fun to write. They’re fun to go to parties and talk about. Book people are some of the most interesting, amusing folks around. At last year’s Brooklyn Lit Crawl, Armchair/Shotgun, along with a few of our authors, performed a live reading of a Flash Gordon Radio Drama. It was a blast, and utterly goofy, and we hope to perform again next year. If you ask me, books are the most fun you can have in New York City.

That same comment goes on to say that Armchair/Shotgun is good for reading with a drink, but also to have a drink with – what would Armchair/Shotgun‘s drink of choice be?

ESB: A lot of what would later become Armchair/Shotgun developed from weekends in the country with typewriters and bourbon, writing short stories until we were sober. The Armchair/Shotgun drink of choice has definitely spent a while in an oak barrel.

JMC: We’ve been developing the ‘Armchair/Shot’, but so far none of the recipes have quite clicked (ingredients considered include black pepper, mango flavoured wine coolers, and gun powder).

—

Congratulations once again to all at Armchair/Shotgun, and well done to the other publications that made it onto the Saboteur Award 2012 shortlist. To follow on from the interview, as a dessert, if you like, here’s our more recent review of Armchair/Shotgun Issue 3.

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‘Circuits of the Wind (A Legend of the Net Age) Volume #1′ by Michael Stutz

In Novel on April 13, 2012 at 8:52 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

Circuits of the Wind Volume #1 is the first in this trilogy by Michael Stutz, which will cover computer communication’s rise from an obscure by-product of telephonic connections to the now-ubiquitous high-speed internet. Stutz’s blurb claims that he ‘coined the term ‘net generation”, which makes it sound like he knows what he’s talking about, and even raises the hint of this trilogy being a tad autobiographical. These books attempt to provide a personal narrative for the information age, trying to impose on it an overall meaning and poeticism missing from more usual computing histories.

Circuits of the Wind (A Legend of the Net Age) Volume 1 - Michael Stutz

Starting from an almost pre-consciousness age, Circuits of the Wind narrates the life of Raymond Valentine, an American whose life seems – through coincidence of birth, if nothing else – to be intrinsically linked with the growth of home computer technology and, ultimately, the internet. In Second Grade, he discovers arcade and home computer games in their infancy. His babyhood fascination with the home telephone flowers into a desire to become a hacker, with a home computer and modem, which will enable him to ‘call out and connect, [to] know the ways and [to] walk the winds like ghosts’.

It’s rather like a gradual biography of internet communication (Volume #1 being set in the 60s, 70s and 80s, before the internet as we know it today). Ray grows up as the reach of computers and phone lines extends, expanding with his adolescent body in ways he doesn’t fully understand but that he can see opening up a future world of adult promise. If you think that makes it sound like a geeky, teenage boy coming-of-age story, then you’re not far wrong. Circuits of the Wind is deeply embedded in external modems and old-school computer hard disks, recalling a time when teenage boys dreamed of ‘accidentally’ gaining access to the Pentagon’s mainframes (cf. Wargames) and hacking consisted of a few bits of metal across the house’s phone line. There’s a certain geeky appeal to Ray’s existence, and just enough computing/internet jargon to reel in geeks without losing the less technically-minded reader.

Ray’s is a life slightly disconnected from immediate reality, existing instead in a world spreading outwards and away from Ray’s physical location. His world (and, increasingly, these days, our world) is one of telephone lines and faraway places, of connections and information flying through the air. It’s a world with a vast amount of information readily available, where a person (like Ray) can know about many things, people and places without actually experiencing them tangibly. Stutz captures the thrill of first receiving a computer screen message from hundreds of miles away, and the desolation when that access is revoked and our horizons are suddenly reduced back to the merely physical.

His life’s disconnection includes relationships, which Ray struggles with as he gets older. Or at least, he struggles with relationships with more than a couple of friends in ‘real life’ – his online social life thrives. It’s a situation any modern Facebook/MySpace/Twitter addict will recognise, perhaps with a guilty half-shrug or sheepish smile; Ray chats with people across America, but feels isolated and ostracised when offline.

At times, Stutz tries to do a little more than tie together the parallel biographies of Ray and the internet. The narrator of Circuits of the Wind starts taking lengthy paragraphs to inject some poetic meaning into the story, and to condense longer periods of time into the book – as though the reader must have a constant stream of narrative about Ray and no part of his life can be left untold. It’s as if Stutz doesn’t want to leave a break in the plot, so rather than go from event to event he gives us everything without pausing except for new chapters. At times this technique is reminiscent of the modern internet’s unremitting stream of data and information, which needs sifting and sorting.

The next two instalments of the Circuits of the Wind series pursues Ray’s life into the internet-enabled 1990s, with increasingly advanced graphics and quicker connection times. Whether he’ll manage to make anything of himself, or while away more hours in front of a computer screen, remains to be seen – and bears a resemblance (and a warning?) to procrastinators everywhere.

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‘The Brothers’ by Asko Sahlberg (translated by Fleur and Emily Jeremiah)

In Novella on February 22, 2012 at 10:05 am

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

Asko Sahlberg has written a tight and compact little saga in The Brothers (entitled He in the original Finnish – which I gather translates as ‘They’ in English). This English translation, courtesy of mother-and-daughter team Fleur and Emily Jeremiah, is the first in Peirene Press‘ new series, The Small Epic.

You might remember Peirene Press translations from our review of Alois Hotschnig’s Maybe This Time, part of 2011′s The Man series. For 2012, Peirene’s focus is on The Small Epic, and there are two more to come in this series. As its name implies, The Small Epic is all about big stories told in a short form (I polished off The Brothers in a matter of hours). This particular Small Epic takes place in what is now Finland, just after the Finnish War (1808-9) between King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden and Czar Alexander I of Russia. In February 1808, the Russian Czar began a war against Sweden intending to draw that country into Napoleon’s Continental System; his prize for doing so was the newly-created Duchy of Finland.

The Brothers, by Asko Sahlberg, translated by Fleur and Emily Jeremiah - Peirene Press
The Brothers begins as it means to go on: with a sense not only of the Finnish cold but of the immediacy of everything. That’s not just because of the present tense narrative, but also because the Jeremiahs’ translation makes a virtue of this and it all feels punchy and immediate – there’s no messing around or unnecessary waffling here. There is a tension in the first few lines that never quite goes away and that always threatens to erupt into violence.

‘I have barely caught the crunch of snow and I know who is coming. Henrik treads heavily and unhurriedly, as is his wont, grinding his feet into the earth. The brothers are so different. Erik walks fast, with light steps; he is always in a hurry, here then gone.’

Elder brother Henrik treads heavily and has a lot of baggage to carry around. He’s returning to the family farm, in the isolated, snowy Finnish countryside – he has been to the war and it shows in his face. But Henrik fought for the Russians and will never be quite at home anywhere again. His betrayal hangs about the pages of the book, mingling with the bitter clouds of betrayals by his mother and brother. These are high emotions and deep feelings (high and deep not only in the sense of being intense, but of carrying a human nobility and universality); they are experiences of the human condition as much as they are the experiences of specific human beings: regret, bitterness, lust, despair.

But then Sahlberg’s characters are very much frail human beings, whose failings make them who they are, for better or worse. The Brothers is shot through with a bleak truth and honesty, and that’s most visible in the characterisation. It’s as true of the Farmhand, the Old Mistress and the brothers as it is of their cousin Mauri and the local bailiff. That each of these characters gets to voice their thoughts and perspective through a first-person narrative is another strength of Sahlberg’s writing, making each event and character multi-faceted as we see them from inside as well as outside. It makes for a genuinely three-dimensional realisation of the Finnish farmstead in the prose, even before that makes its way to the imagination.

The background to Sahlberg’s story is certainly the stuff of epic. Empires and kingdoms clashing, Napoleon, families torn apart by war, betrayal and secrets, and whole life stories piling into the briefest chunks of time. But what Sahlberg has done is make a pivotal moment in Scandinavian history accessible and empathetic. The Brothers makes the sweep of history personal and shows its impact on individuals, on people with whom we can identify much more easily than we can with kingdoms, empires or their rulers. That’s what The Small Epic is all about, and that’s its great strength.

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‘Maybe This Time’ by Alois Hotschnig (translated by Tess Lewis)

In Short Stories on September 13, 2011 at 12:50 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

Peirene Press has been producing a series of short story collections called The Man, which follows on neatly from their previous series, The Female Voice. Peirene aims to bring international writers to an English-reading audience, through translations of short story collections – their previous publications feature three female then three male authors. I admire a publisher with that sort of commitment to gender equality and international outlook.

I also admire a publisher producing small books as lovely as those printed by Peirene Press. Their short story collections are all about clean lines and a certain simple elegance. They’re also a very handy size for carrying around with you, and won’t take long to read through – especially if all of the collections are as engaging as the one I’ve just finished.

The third collection in Peirene’s The Man series is Alois Hotschnig’s Austrian German Maybe This Time, translated by Tess Lewis. Hotschnig’s stories are largely told by explicitly male narrators, and that seems to be how Maybe This Time (or Die Kinder beruhighte das nicht, in the original – and several stories contain the idea of troubled children mentioned in the German title) fits the theme of The Man series. There are no flashy car chases or explosions here, Hotschnig’s work unfolds gently and rewards close reading, saving its shocking (and sometimes beautiful) moments for a story’s closing image.

Maybe This Time Alois Hotschnig Peirene Press

And some of those moments are beautifully bittersweet. That may not be the case with the final image of ‘Encounter’, in which a dying insect is devoured from within by ants, but is very much the case with ‘Morning, Noon and Night’, in which the sense of loss comes like a hammer-blow at the end of a story that has wandered and drifted around summer’s day street, tragedy lurking beneath the surface. But it is a beautiful hammer-blow, in its subtlety and in the way it smashes a hole through the otherwise peaceful street, subverting all that has gone before it without anyone noticing.

Hotschnig returns time and again to that sense of loss, of something not being in the right place or lacking altogether. Peirene Press compare him to Franz Kafka, and there is something Kafkaesque about two stories in particular in Maybe This Time. They are stories where identity is fluid, shifting and impossible to pin down – the very elusiveness of this identity means it’s not identity at all, but rather a misplaced concept of self that doesn’t equate to reality.

Loss sits heavily over other stories, for example in the case of a man looking for his son and allowing other children to briefly take his son’s place. The fisherman, his endless quest quietly muted and understated, allows the identity of other children to slide in his own mind, filling a hole in his life for a moment. In ‘Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut’ an elderly woman is compensating for her grown-up children’s absence with dolls she thinks of as her children – dolls who look exactly like other children of the neighbourhood. Hotshnig builds this creepy little story delicately and masterfully, gradually allowing his narrator’s life to be first absorbed into the woman’s and then dominated by her. There’s something of Roald Dahl, never mind Kafka, at work.

Karl, the narrator of ‘Then a Door Opens and Swings Shut’, demonstrates perfectly the principle at work in so much of Hotschnig’s writing. The stories of Maybe This Time are stories with a gaping hole which sucks in everything around it. Karl knows he shouldn’t return to the dolls and the woman’s house, is even afraid to, but can’t stop himself. The narrator of ‘The Same Silence, The Same Noise’ doesn’t want to keep watching his indolent neighbours on the next jetty, but can’t draw himself away – in fact, their indifference to him merely serves to fuel his obsession.

Hotshnig’s stories are stories on the edge. Stories on the edge of obsession, almost always, stories on the literal edge of a lake, sometimes. ‘The Light in My Room’, with the fisherman, gives a good idea of the feature common to much of Maybe This Time. The room is on the edge of the fisherman’s lake, in the centre of which lies an island that draws to itself all the people nearby, at one time or another. Children flock to play on it, and it draws the attention of the adults whether they realise or not. That island is the gaping heart of Hotschnig’s stories, an absence that attracts as it repels. The people around the edges are forever looking in, watching, unable to escape or look away. Hotschnig explores the little obsessions in life that grow and grow and come to dictate our very existence.

Peirene Press has done well here, and Lewis’ translation serves the original text well, conveying that deep loss as well as the sense of watching life from the edges. In 2012, Peirene has another three collections coming out – this time the theme will be bite-size epics, and they’re bound to be just as lovely little books as Hotschnig’s.

At the heart of Maybe This Time is an absence that attracts, a rejection that draws the reader and character inescapably inwards, and I advise you to read it because it’s beautifully done.

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‘Do Not Pass Go’ Crime Stories by Joel Lane

In Pamphlets, Short Stories on July 20, 2011 at 5:21 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

‘Do not pass go’ has been chosen as the title for Joel Lane’s short story pamphlet, the first in the new Hotwire imprint by Nine Arches Press. But that other Monopoly phrase, ‘Go to Jail’, would have been just as suitable; for these are works of crime fiction and throughout the pamphlet there is a sense of foreboding, a fear that someone’s going to get hurt and it’ll all end in tears.

Do Not Pass Go: Crime Stories by Joel Lane, published by Nine Arches Press and reviewed for Sabotage by Richard T. Watson

But each of Lane’s stories is also shot through with the blues and an accompanying sense of regret, of sadness. Sometimes this is explicit, like when blues band Nine Below Zero play a gig in ‘No More the Blues’ – a brief story that burns as slowly as good, soulful blues and gradually reveals more about its narrator before sidling offstage and subtly leaving him to his fate. The first story, ‘This Night Last Woman’, though much longer is similar in the way that music and regret go together.

“Memories don’t stay the same. That’s why people need music, to help them remember.”

‘This Night Last Woman’ gently ties memory with melody, before letting the association slide, never to return; it feels like Lane’s missing a trick there.

At other times, Lane’s writing is oblique as he fills in one or two details and leaves his reader to plump out the rest of the picture themselves. This is probably most telling in ‘The Black Dog’, a sweaty and morbid story that eventually reveals itself as a Police report documenting a sweaty, sticky death. As with all the narratorial voices in Do Not Pass Go, this one reports back on life/crime seemingly at one remove, as though the speaker is never quite in contact with the life going on around him. There’s a certain disconnect between story and teller, between life and human – and a sense that the one isn’t fulfilling the other.

My favourite example of Lane pitching small details comes in ‘Blue Mirror’ (the story’s name is taken from the – this time fictional – blues band at its centre). David, the band’s singer, slips past two men to whom he owes money and bursts out of a club onto the street…

“Outside, he turned on a loaded shoe and ran in the direction of Hurst Street”

The inclusion of that single word, ‘loaded’, is enough of a small detail to not only remind the reader of the weight David carries about him (literally if he gets arrested with drugs hidden in his shoe, but metaphorically as well), and also of the reason he is now running for his life. With that one word, Lane effortlessly captures the world of music stardom crumbling around David through his drug-fuelled behaviour, as well as pointing up that the drugs cost and David can’t pay the men who are chasing him.

The final story, ‘Rituals’, digs deepest of all into the effect of crime on the psyche – as a gang member deals with the consequences of interrupting a gay porn film before the money shot. That makes it sound more comedic than it is: any laughs found in Lane’s pamphlet are dark and grimy. ‘Rituals’ shows Lane at his most insightful, though, treading close to the edge of showing sympathy for the criminal while the title denounces the habits and face-saving that characterises a life of crime. Indeed, in this case, those rituals seem to be the beginnings of such lives – lives wasted to serve no real purpose but crime.

That sense of regret, of loss, plays all the way through Do Not Pass Go. The abiding impression is that of lives wasted away and ended. Really, though, these aren’t people whose lives have abruptly ended, whose journeys have been pulled up short; they are people who never really had the chance to pass Go.

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