Where can I get more?

Happy New Year!

We're busy working on our next few chapbooks, but while we're working, you can keep up with Revelator writers through their blogs.

• I read that somewhere—Michael Duncan, author of Line Jester and Other Stories: A 21st Century take on the common reader—quotes from literature and contemporary writers. (Meg Sparling and Gavin Craig also contribute)


• nights best unspoken—Andrew Hungerford, author of Between the Water and the Air: A livejournal on Hungerford's work in the theater.


• A nothing day full of/ wild beauty—Angela Vasquez-Giroux, author of Letters to My Sister: The musings of a poet, mother, and Detroit Tigers fan.


• Short Schrift—Timothy Carmody, author of The Bridge and the River: Notes on news, art, pop culture, politics, and ideas.


• the attic which is desire—Tim Lane, author of Pure Pop: Paintings.


• Wordwright—Gavin Craig, author of Nine Poems: Notes on the written word: books, newspapers, and lit mags, both analog and digital.


• Black Tee Shirt—Brandon Kelley, Revelator's resident designer: Notes on music culture, and New York life, and, of course, photos of black t-shirts.
  

Proliferation

"Line Jester" by Michael Duncan has been published by the online magazine Void.

Congratulations to Mr. Duncan, and for those who like "Line Jester," be sure to check out the additional stories available in Line Jester and Other Stories.

A nice tie-in

The New York Review of Books has posted, from its archive, a 1999 essay by Joan Acocella on Vaslav Nijinsky. (I'd like to think that the NYRB's timing is a response to Meg sparling's recent collection, The Nijinsky Poems, but it probably has more to do with Acocella's new collection of essays, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, which is reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates in the NYRB's current issue.)

On a recent rainy Wednesday

Meg Sparling, author of The Nijinsky Poems, writes about an exhibition of Nijinsky's drawings in New York.

Suggested List for Further Reading (part 2)

by Michael Duncan, author of Line Jester and Other Stories

10 things you may have read and should reread

1. The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Quite simply my favorite novel ever. Experimental, touching, and completely inimitible. A work of artistic perfection.


2. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The first novel that I know of that I would describe as a 'modern' novel. Strangely structured, contradictory, and leaves one with more questions than answers.


3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The 'first' European novel may be the best, and almost certainly is the funniest. Not in a Shakespeare ha-ha-I-understand-the-pun-he's-making way, but in a look-like-you're-crazy-laughing-aloud-in-public way.


4. Light in August by William Faulkner

The best American writer of the 20th century, hands-down. And never let anyone tell you any different.


5. "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor

I could just have easily said "The Artificial Nigger," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," or just told you to read everything she ever published like I have, because it's all great.


6. On Photography by Susan Sontag

Everything criticism should be and rarely is: lucid, deep, surprising. You will look at the modern world differently having read this.


7. Let us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

Agee's baroque, poetic prose humanizes the overlooked Depression-era tenant farmers he is reporting on even more effectively than the beautiful and famous photographs by Walker Evans in the book.


8. Collected Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

What can one say? I think he will be looked back on in 300 years as one of the 2 or 3 most important writers of the 20th century.


9. White Noise by Don DeLillo

At first glance it seems dark and apocalyptic, but on a second read, it really stands out as incredibly funny. Seems as if it were written yesterday, even though it's from the mid-1980s.


10. Frederick by Leo Lionni

This is my favorite picture book, and it will teach your children and remind yourself that art is important!

AND DON'T FORGET Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Thomas Frank, Gertrude Stein, W.G. Sebald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Onion, Imre Kertesz, Gustave Flaubert, Samuel Beckett, and anyone who ever wrote anything in 19th-century Russia!!

Suggested List for Further Reading (part 1)

by Michael Duncan, author of Line Jester and Other Stories

10 things that you have not read and should

1. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson

Though many breathless blurb-writers have made this almost a meaningless statement, this is truly a novel unlike any other.


2. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

Lyrical throughout; one of the most beautiful last pages of any novel I have read.


3. "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" by Franz Kafka

A barely-talked about Kafka story that is more touching than any story about the pointlessness of art has any right to be. Plus it has animals, and they're not cockroaches!


4. A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem

Reviews of imaginary and yet-to-be-written books with a philosophical bent.


5. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

A Canadian poet on how the page should reflect the ideas on it. Also the best epigraphs of any book I've ever picked up.


6. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

The secret fountain of the Latin boom. Garcia Marquez and Cortazar approach the quality of this novel on only their best days.


7. After the End of Art by Arthur C. Danto

How does one make and think about art in a world where so much has already been said, and the pressures to 'make it new' are ever-mounting to ever-lessening effect?


8. "The School" by Donald Barthelme

He has written so many stories in so many styles that this perfect 3-page jewel has been somewhat lost in the flood.


9. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

This oral history of the Chernobyl incident is terrifying and made me cry, and I'm a cold-hearted bastard.


10. Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

It is a testament to the power of Kawabata's spare writing style that a story really best covered by Ricki Lake becomes something, well, beautiful and sad.