Tag: books

Sleight | Coffee House Press

Sleight | Coffee House Press.

A daring novel about families, artistic responsibility, and tragedy.

The Glass Bead Game meets Black Swan.

Sisters Lark and Clef have spent their lives honing their bodies for sleight, an interdisciplinary art form that combines elements of dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word. After being estranged for several years, the sisters are reunited by a deceptive and ambitious sleight troupe director named West who needs the sisters’ opposing approaches to the form— Lark is tormented and fragile, frightened by the art she is compelled to make; Clef is driven to excel.

But when a disturbing mass murder makes national headlines, West seizes on the event as inspiration for his new performance, one that threatens to destroy the very artists performing it.

In language that is at once unsettling and hypnotic, Sleight explores ideas of performance, gender, and family to ask the question: what is the role of art in the face of unthinkable tragedy?

50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read

50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read by China Mieville.

I recommend Mieville’s recommendations because he is himself a fantastic science fiction author. There is a fantastic interview with him at the website of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of such fantastic works as The City & the City, Kraken and his new book that I’m holding in my hand in eager anticipation, Embassytown. Enjoy!

“Fantastic!”

But I Was So Much Younger Then I’m So Much Older Than That Now

But I Was So Much Younger Then I'm So Much Older Than That Now — Building Science Information.

I couldn’t put the book down that night. It kept referencing the Canadian Building Digests. I read them too. The one guy, N. B. Hutcheon was some real smart guy. He headed the Division of Building Research of the National Research Council of Canada. The guy I wanted to punch out, G. O. Handegord was also real smart and from the same place. What was a guy like Handegord doing at a Home Builders Association meeting? I couldn’t believe I almost punched him out. They sure knew walls. Roofs, too. Windows. Airtightness. Energy. Everything. I had a mechanical engineering degree and I thought I knew stuff but I knew none of this. But I could understand the language. I read and learned. The buildings I was going to build and design forever changed that night. It pays to go to Home Builders Association meetings. Really.

Stalker | The Nation

Stalker.

One night more than twenty years ago, I was followed on my way home by a drunk who wanted to get into a fight. A block from my house, he started throwing punches. I yelled, in a Texas accent that I didn’t know I still had. He broke my glasses. And then, to my surprise, I punched him back. He ran off, and when I got home, I was happy to find a little of his blood on one of my knuckles.

Over the next few days, I told the story to anyone who would listen. I expected sympathy, which many offered. But to my chagrin, quite a few listeners suggested that I must have done something to provoke the assault. Had I challenged the man? Maybe I had made a pass at him? It was my introduction to the human weakness known as the just-world hypothesis. As it turns out, many people wish so strongly to believe in the safety of their environment that they prefer not to acknowledge that a bad thing can happen to someone who has done nothing to deserve it. In the just world that they imagine, no one gets cancer unless he has eaten or smoked something naughty. Bicyclists aren’t run over if they wear their helmets. And no one is assaulted who hasn’t at least leered at his attacker.

The news in James Lasdun’s memoir Give Me Everything You Have is that there is a new kind of bad thing in the world: persecution on the Internet by a clever, mentally unbalanced person. If you haven’t experienced it yet, you may have trouble believing how upsetting and disorienting it can be. And you may be tempted to wonder if a sufferer like Lasdun hasn’t somehow asked for it. Lasdun, a novelist with a taste for creepy, unreliable narrators, doesn’t shy away from the suspicion. To the contrary, he rather exhaustively invites it, revealing even private thoughts as if they could somehow have set off his tormentor. I wouldn’t recommend full confession as a litigation strategy—in this case, readers who want to fend off Lasdun’s bad news will easily find grounds for blaming him—but it does clarify the stakes. Lasdun insists on being as messy as the next human being, and he demands to know whether he deserves six years of misery, and counting, because of it.