Here’s a great preview in the Village Voice of the Franklin Park Reading Series that I’m participating in Monday, March 9 at 8pm.
The Franklin Park Reading Series celebrates its sixth year with six illustrious writers. Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy has been described as Harry Potter for adults and, comparisons aside, is powerful in its own right. James Hannaham’s forthcoming “Southern Gothic” Delicious Foods has been praised by Jennifer Egan and Dave Eggers. Matt Sumell reads from his hilarious and touching new Making Nice, and Jim Ruland reads from his novel Forest of Fortune, based on his own experiences working in a Native American–run casino. Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star, a poetic and semiautobiographical story about self-destructive lovers…
Vermin on the Mount is hitting the road this spring with new shows in Berlin, Prague and London. Stay tuned for dates and venues. Poster by Sergio Hernandez.
The paperback edition of The Forest of Fortune is coming April 3.
The Unstrung Harp has the subtitle “or, Mr Earbrass writes a novel” and begins with “Mr C(lavius) F(rederick) Earbrass” contemplating his next book. “On November 18th of alternate years” he selects a “title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book.” Over the course of the next several pages, we get glimpses of the plot-heavy story he’s constructing, and while his novels have pseudo-serious-sounding titles like “More Chains than Clank” and “The Meaning of the House,” the clues suggest that he’s at work on a highbrow, yet slightly off-center, mystery.
The Floating Library is besieged by sirens with reviews of Dorothy Iannone’s You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends and Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star.
Iannone’s work combines text and image in arresting fashion. While her figures are typically clothed, or at least ornamented, their genitalia are almost always on display. While the text describes erotic scenes, it’s seldom vulgar—more Marguerite Duras than Anaïs Nin—and more often then not, the words are used to convey stories, recipes, anecdotes and aphorisms of a nonsexual nature. The result is something that appears at first blush to be as shocking as Raymond Pettibon, only more poetic and much more polite.
