CONJUGATION TIME
L’étranger, The Calendar Factory, Beyond the Last Estate, reading books
My fiction was featured on L’étranger again recently. You can listen here. I sometimes feel a quiver of fear when I hear the words I write being repeated. That’s true this time but I also feel like there’s an artistic validity to what I wrote. The spy novel it’s taken from is partially about the Global War on Terrorism years of the George W. Bush administration (2000-2008) and Islamic terrorists come in for some criticism that is allied with something surreal and beholden to imagination. It may not exactly be “woke” (whatever that may mean now) to mock extremist Muslims but in some level the Muslims in this novel are not meant to be true Muslims but some kind of caricature as we often saw in the media at the time. I need to work on the novel more and one task may be to try to construct a sophisticated, multi-surface object of satire, that satirizes the terrorist but also the Westerner at the same time. It will take a serious course of CPR to resurrect the novel from where it is now. More pressing and urgent is the work I need to do to complete I See Prism Threads. That may be even more complicated for reasons I won’t mention out of fear that by explaining the process of writing the end of the book, it will dissolve any motivation to continue writing the end of the book.
In the meantime, my collection The Calendar Factory is coming together and is entering the proofing stage. I got my two very important blurbs, which is all I wanted for the book. Here I show you the latest front cover and back cover for the book.
I love Franklin Gothic Heavy, italicized as a font. It gives me a David Lynch Wild at Heart feeling somehow. Kuhnlein and Gransden gave me excellent blurbs, I feel. I’m very grateful to them for reading the collection and supporting it in this way. When I get the proof and sign off on it, the book will finally be available and I guess that will be in early August or thereabouts. It will be available on Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut as I am unfortunately a mere barnacle on that massive ship, a stowaway. I don’t want all my books to be there but they are currently, for better or worse.
The first issue of Beyond the Last Estate is here and it looks tremendous. I hope this can be an ongoing project and that people get the niche it fills in the independent lit space as it exists in my neighborhood. Gabriel Hart is to be commended for shepherding this thing to realization. If you haven’t bought the first issue I recommend checking it out and catching the headwinds. Contact info can be found on Twitter/X at the account for Beyond the Last Estate I believe (for some reason it won’t let me put the address here w/o fucking up this newsletter). They are looking for more pitches and reviews and interviews and ideas. I am trying to cook up some things to pitch. More on that later. I also may write a newsletter in the future giving my impressions of the first issue and its offerings if you’re curious. Nothing like commenting on the commentators.
Books I’ve read currently: The Trial by Franz Kafka. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. The Bacanora Notebooks by Mather Schneider. These books were all reviewed at Goodreads. I could link them here but it might be too much intertextuality for right now. Or I’m just lazy. You can go there and look up my reviews (and check out my books while you’re there!). I have so many books to read. I’m trying to hold myself accountable and stick to my inner plans. I’m reading the Library of America collected stories of William Faulkner now. It’s wonderful for those who might have liked his novels and want to get smaller doses of that world. Also just a great example of a short story writer. It’s short story summer, have you heard?
You’ll hog it and like it. Until next time…