Read the review on The Outlet.

Part of my ongoing series on novellas (thanks as ever to New Directions and NYRB). In this review:

• Nazis
• Scooby-Doo
• The amazing Jakov Lind
• Cannibalism
• Ahab
• “Chronotrope: All of Europe’s madness… unleashed in a half-decade, the monster slouching out of modernity, not just towards Bethlehem but towards every quiet holy place.” [The woods.]
• Paralysis and becoming-deer

Lind, smoking a pipe, bout to get back to writing like a bad-ass, thinking about some deep shit.

Read the review on The Outlet.

In this review:

• A quotation from Benjamin Franklin
• Brief review of Mishima’s powers as poet and logician
• Lust and death-lust* (*”Death Lust” = good band name, sans hyphen, perhaps sans the A in “death,” so making it “DETH LUST,” probably all caps)
• EVEN MORE

In this blog post:

• BONUS image of Mishima Yukio, looking like a pensive young genius:

Read the review on The Outlet.

The most terrifying aspect of The Murderess—Alexandros Papadiamantis’s famous psychological terror-fable—is the calm and lyrical nature of its prose. As others have said, Modern evil is rational: “Murder [or some other evil] simply must be committed; there is no other logical option [according to my limited human worldview]. Let me tell you why…”

The second-most terrifying aspect of the short, episodic book is its description of a bad-ass Greek sea-eagle:

…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…

WTF. Remind me not to mess with a bird that eats seals and sea-snakes. (Or, per the rest of the book, killer grandmamas…)

Read the review on The Outlet. Denon’s masterful long short story is translated by Lydia Davis and introduced by Peter Brooks, who hints at the mystery of the novella.

On my own ongoing investigation into the novella, for Electric Literature:

What makes a novella a novella, as opposed to a long short story or a short novel? Why does the novella seduce us, even though relatively few are published or taught? (You never hear, for example, “Mommy, I want to grow up to be a famous novella-ist!”) Deleuze and Guattari offer a few hypnotic thoughts on the subject, but even they abandon the question after only—and perhaps appropriately—half-contemplating it.

Towards a literary–psychological theory of the novella, writer and compulsive short-text reader Wythe Marschall offers a biweekly review of classic and contemporary works that may or may not fit your definition of the term.

By focusing on their playful relationship with theme—a constant seesaw between story and meditation, narrative-packed-into-a single moment and timeless “whoa” of profound human experience—Wythe hopes to pin down just what the novella does to its reader’s brain:

Can we situate “the novella effect” somewhere between the constrained, heightened consciousness of the short story and the taxonomizing–exhausting consciousness of the novel? Tune in every other week to find out—

Or, at least, to discover several novellas worth reading.

Thanks to Electric Literature, New Directions, NYRB Classics, and Melville House.

The man’s (invented) name was V.D., and he wrote about sex. Lulz.

Read the review on The Outlet (Electric Literature’s blog).

Bad Nature, a novella about translating for Elvis in a Mexico City dive bars, is mesmerizing. Javier Marías is a force of compact, darkly humor. I wish I’d known about him earlier, and I wish I could read his work in Spanish.

Self-grievance aside, I’m happy Electric has both introduced me to Marías and offered to publish my thoughts on novellas, novella-writing, and novella-tasting on their blog. Channeling the spirits of Deleuze and Guattari, I approach a novella as a meditation on an incident (”What happened?”), a freeing-out-of short story which strays into philosophy while reining itself in enough to prevent a freezing-into novel.

My list of novellas and quasi-novellas is already too long to tear through before the summer’s out. My mood is, in a word, psychednessitude.

Potentially up next for the Outlet series: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain; a long short story about sex, lies, innuendo, and levels of counter-innuendo), The Murderess (a brutal meditation on women, money, aging, and—naturally—murderizing), The Chrysalids (a post-apocalyptic American tale—perhaps too long to qualify, but too tempting to put down, now that I’ve started it—or really now that I’ve seen its future-primitive rainbow cover), and a “classic” classic by James.

In the mean time, pick up Marías (who is the king of Redonda) on the King (of whatever he was “the King” of). If so inspired, do a dance:

My homies over at Electric Literature have done it again. In less than a year, they’ve become one of those sacred few “real” literary journals, pioneering how to make e-reading more friendly to literature pur sang: Their journal (5 great stories per quarter, $10 an issue) appears in print as well as on Amazon and Lulu, and via the Kindle and iPhone.

And now they’ve become the first literary publication on the iPad.

Granted, I don’t have an iPad and don’t intend to buy one. Between a Macbook and an iPhone*, I have all the computing power and mobility I want. (Probably too much: Multitasking is dangerous.) Mostly, all I want is to write about the Crusades and make inspirational hip hop graphics that are really just silly.

But the iPad app works on the iPhone and is free, so check it out.

Sayeth Scott and Andy:

Whether or not you go in for all the iPad hype, we found it’s a great way for us to feature everything Electric Literature does in one place. Our videos, audio, and imagery work together to enhance the reader’s experience without overpowering the literary content.

We designed the application from scratch, with the help of a young programmer who quit his job at Motorola and left Silicon Valley to study writing in New York.

(Read the press release for more.)

*Confession: I find reading books on the iPhone irritating. Weeks ago I started Wodehouse’s Little Nugget, purely based on its hilarious name, and have only made it a few pages in. The charm of paper is still obvious. Then again, the iPad is commandingly bigger than its telephonic cuz. More tests to be conducted, perhaps sans Wodehouse…

Regardless, props to EL for being available. However it is that we read, we should keep doing so. That Kool-Aid I drank long ago. Reading expands the world infinitely in all directions. It’s cheap. And it’s even maybe a little hip. At least, the possibility is there, humming with charge.

Of the Literary variety. Danger! Adventure! Perhaps misadventure! Check it out: Literary Death Match. Thursday, May 20, at Bowery Poetry Club.

If you want to see me win this DEATH MATCH… buy some cheap tickets.

Here’s the party line:

Not for the faint of heart, LDM NYC’s 26th episode promises to tantalize and titillate your most sensitive literary bits. We’ve assembled an army of brilliant judges — literary renegade Richard Nash, subversive comedian Jena Friedman and blogger/author/goddess Paulina Porizkova — to hold sway over the unruly proceedings.

A hodgepodge of lovable deviants will battle it out on the Bowery Poetry Club stage, including Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART, King of Counterculture Mike Edison (High Times, Screw), devilish storyteller Wythe Marschall (representing Electric Literature), and laconic absurdist-or-is-he Mike Topp, author of Shorts are Wrong and Happy Ending.

And—holy shit—it’s a Culture Mob article about the show.

If you live in New York, perhaps you really should come and see me win, on behalf of my friends’ stellar journal, Electric Literature. I will be winning via a story about a cowboy. I have many of them. Devil I am. Words I pitch, via fork, into flames. Pass the flask. All I read is words. If I had a car or a chuck wagon, all I would do is ride around shining: