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The Green Movement’s Dark Side

“A Good Without Light” is an excerpt from Curtis White’s new book, The Barbaric Heart, and appears in the Hope/Dread issue of Tin House. White will be appearing at the third installment of our Disjecta reading/music series Saturday the 21st at 7 pm, along with the poet David Biespiel. Adrian Orange & the Child Slave Rebellion will follow. Proceeds will benefit BARK.


A Good Without Light, by Curtis White


“As so often happens in disasters, the best course always seemed the one for which it was now too late.”

–Tacitus, The Histories

For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is “sustainable.” Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities. Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways. It’s not, really. The great unspoken assumption of the sustainability movement is the idea that although the economic, political, and social systems that have produced our current environmental calamity are bad, they do not need to be entirely replaced. In fact, the point of sustainability often seems to be to preserve—not overthrow—the economic and social status quo.

This should not be surprising. Sustainability is, after all, a mainstream response to environmental crisis. It may want change, but it does not want what would amount to a fundamental self-confrontation. While it wants to modify existing models of production and consumption, especially of energy, it does not want to abandon what it calls “freedom,” especially the freedom to own and use large accumulations of private property. And certainly it does not want to ask, “What went wrong in the great Western experiment with freedom? Why do we seem to be mostly free to destroy ourselves?Read More »

Fall 2010 Theme: Class in America

Just received word that we’ve settled on our Fall 2010 theme issue. From our esteemed Editor, Rob Spillman:


Tin House is seeking to invest in fiction, essays, and poetry that address the often taboo subject of CLASS IN AMERICA. We are looking for all perspectives: from or about the rich to the middle class to the poor and those who have moved up or down. We want to know more about those who identify with a non-traditional class, or consider themselves classless, along with those who have immigrated from class-bound or class-less countries or societies. Also, what are the new class indicators in our increasingly digitized, global, and green world? The issue will be out September 1, on stands through November. Our deadline is June 1, but this issue is sure to fill sooner than later.

Summer, 2010 will be an OPEN issue and we are reading for this issue as well. The deadline is March 1, on stands June 1.

There are a still a small amount of space in our Spring, 2010 issue, with a theme of “Games People Play.” The deadline is November 24.

Thank you for all of your support, and for those of you in New York, we hope to see you at the Rumpus/Tin House fundraiser on Tuesday, November 17 (more info: http://www.highlineballroom.com/bio.php?id=1183)

Sincerely,
Rob Spillman

Tin House (E) Books

Lee Montgomery shows off her new Apple Tablet

While we’re still getting comfortable with the technology ourselves, Tin House is beginning to roll out our list on various E-Book devices. Most of our forthcoming titles will be available the same time that physical books hit the shelves, and our backlist is in the works. Check back soon for titles from Keith Lee Morris, Jeff Parker, Karen Lee Boren, Adam Braver, and others.

Jim Krusoe’s ERASED, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Jim Krusoe’s GIRL FACTORY, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Zak Smith’s WE DID PORN, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

Matthea Harvey’s THE LITTLE GENERAL AND THE GIANT SNOWFLAKE, available on Kindle

Alex Lemon’s MOSQUITO, available on Kindle and Sony E-Reader

JC Hallman: Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight

J.C. Hallman’s anthology, The Story About The Story, collects essays that approach book criticism from a personal angle. One of his favorite venues for that sort of thing is Tin House’s own “Lost and Found” section. In our most recent issue (Hope/Dread), Hallman writes about encountering Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

I had it pretty good: Big Wheel at six, go-cart at eight, ten-speed at twelve, Volkswagen Rabbit at sixteen, and I ran all of them into the ground. When I was twenty, a motorcycle ran me into the ground, and after two weeks in the hospital and a year of physical therapy I cashed a check for $120,000. I limp a little, like the devil—but he gets around, and so do I, and we’ve both, since our respective falls, signed our share of lucrative contracts.

Which isn’t to say I’ve rolled in dough. I haven’t. In fact, whether a writer should turn a profit—selling his soul to academia or otherwise—has been a live question ever since writers began to prematurely retire and hang out their shingles as teachers instead. I’ve always thought of the writing life as a protracted action of the mind, supported by a body that does whatever it needs to do to pay the bills. But it’s rare anymore to hear of a writer scraping by on this sort of life—of a Kafka in his insurance firm or a Melville on his boats. This is reason enough to consider the career of Kenneth Patchen.

I didn’t come close to dying in my accident, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that when I was kneeling on the asphalt and realized the blood pooled on the ground was my own. That shook me up. A young man who buzzes death and then receives a significant lump payment might be forgiven for taking a while to screw his head back on straight. And when he does, it might not be a surprise if he’s inclined to take stock of who he is and where he might go.

I ws a rich kid who’d never had a job. So when the $120,000 ran out, I went to Atlantic City—not to gamble, but to work. I’ve told the rest of this story elsewhere, but the important part is that I wound up as a table-games dealer with two master’s degrees. I was looking for the education my universities had left out of their core curriculums. I got it in about three months, and then I was stuck.

Well-read people were hard to come by in the casino world. Even literate people were a tough trick to turn. So I was surprised when one day on a high-action craps game—the very same table where a few months later I would watch a player seize and crumble and die right beside me—I realized that another member of my dealing crew, a guy named Tim Gosman, was far better read than I was. Books were not typical cross-table chatter for dealers, but the subject came up, and, like members of some guild who couldn’t simply reach out to see if the other knew the secret handshake, Tim and I at first regarded each other warily, tossing about titles and authors, plumbing the depths of each other’s libraries. Our box man and pit boss listened for a moment, then decided to ignore us, and we were left talking books across the felt bathtub of the craps table, all the while calling the game (“Come out roll! Craps, yos, highs and lows!”) and setting up come bets and proposition wagers for players so hypnotized by the action they were entirely deaf to our discussion. Read More »

Painting Pictures Is Not A Normal Job

blogentryLike everyone else, at a certain point, several hours in, you begin to wonder if doing your job is insane.  And, like everyone else, the first evidence that it’s not is that you get paid for it.

When you’re a professional artist, however, the thought process doesn’t stop there.  The fact is, doing enough to simply get paid doesn’t take that long.  Once you’re somewhat established, you can easily get five figures for something that takes you less than ten minutes to make.  A contemporary fine artist can draw a face on a bottle cap with a sharpie and make enough to feed a growing child for ten years.

What takes up the vast majority of the time is making the thing good.  This process is made strange by the fact that the customers don’t notice when it’s not good.  Ask any full-time painter, sculptor or video artist—what they subjectively consider their fuck-ups sell as well as anything else.  But, nevertheless, you put in hours trying to make it good.  Trying to make it, in fact, unlike anything you’ve seen before.

It’s like you come into work at Taco Bell at 7am and your job is to make one taco.  You make it, and so at 7:10 your boss is like “Hey that is a beautiful taco, whenever you wanna go home is fine, see ya later.”  Then you stay in the kitchen and spend the next seven hours and fifty minutes making the taco better.

Why do you do that?

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Up and coming story writer Seth Fried made this after hearing we’ll be publishing a story of his in the Spring.

Expect more of this kind of thing from us in the future. Maybe even audio samples from “Bad Dudes” or “RBI:Baseball.”

Q&A: MATTHEA HARVEY

Parents: You know that 10,000th time you read your kid Go, Dog. Go! as your unfinished copy of that Anne Carson collection you really wanted to read sat on the coffee table and served as nothing but a sippy-cup coaster and a reminder of all the great writers you no longer had the time to fully appreciate? (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no particular experience with or knowledge of parenting.) Not to worry. Kingsley Tufts winner and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Matthea Harvey has a new book that your kids will love as much as you do. Next month, Tin House will make our foray into children’s book publishing with The Little General and The Giant Snowflake.  Harvey was kind enough to answer some of my fanboy questions:

Tony Perez: I’ve heard you mention that The Little General came to you in a dream. Can you talk about the book’s genesis?

Matthea Harvey: About five years ago, I had a very vivid dream, in which I looked out a window (I was on the second floor of a stone house in England) and saw a smaller-than-usual Napoleon standing on the path below. Moments later, a giant snowflake obscured that view. The combination of the tiny general and the giant snowflake stuck in my head, and eventually I decided to try and write a story about it—partly as a way of understanding the dream. The story came very easily… Napoleon makes his way into my poems every now and then (I also had a pet blue and white budgerigar called Napoleon), because my fathr has read hundreds and hundreds of books about Napoleon. In this case, I made him a kind of “Everygeneral.”

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Curtis White: A Good Without Light

A Good Book

Curtis White’s intelligence, colored by righteous indignation, is a slippery and protean thing. He’s tackled Liberalism and contemporary Art Culture and in his newest book, The Barbaric Heart, he examines the hidden ills of the environmental movement. We were fortunate enough to publish an excerpt of it in the “Dread” half of Issue #41, called “A Good Without Light” — check it out.

We were quite impressed with the essay and book and followed up with him via email.

Tin House: In your previous non-fiction work, you’ve played the Socratic gadfly, uncovering all sorts of life’s sinister things even the “educated” among us fail to see as sinister. How does The Barbaric Heart, if at all, continue that line of attack?

Curtis White: I’ve come to think that the three recent nonfiction books—The Middle Mind, The Spirit of Disobedience, and now The Barbaric Heart—really are a trilogy. They are all books critical, in order, of what passes for art culture in this country, what passes for liberalism, and finally what passes for an environmental movement.

I think the guiding idea has been, as Marx wrote, “If capitalism must have enemies, it will create them itself and in its own image.” The major environmental organizations are enemies in the image of their purported foe. And I say this while acknowledging that I’ve belonged to just about all of these organizations for decades. Read More »

CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM

 

Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread (our designer, the fabulous Janet Parker, created stunning covers for each). In the dread corner, look for Nick Cave, Ander Monson,  Alex Lemon, Matthea Harvey, and other doomsayers. Flying the colors of hope, we have Karen Russell, Abigail Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, Matthea Harvey (she’s good enough to have her cake and eat it too), and, as you’ll see below, Cory Doctorow. The “Genre” label created something of a controversy on this site awhile back, but Doctorow’s take on what Science Fiction is capable of is pretty tough to argue with. 


CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM


Every writer has a FAQ—Frequently Awkward Question—or two, and for me, it’s this one: “How is it possible to work as a science fiction writer, predicting the future, when everything is changing so quickly? Aren’t you afraid that actual events will overtake the events you’ve described?”

It’s a fresh-scrubbed, earnest kind of question, and the asker pays the compliment of casting you as Wise Prognosticator in the bargain, but I think it’s junk. Science fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally), but if they’re very good, they may manage to predict the present.

Mary Shelley wasn’t worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn’t worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels. Read More »

An Essay in Criticism: Virginia Woolf on Hemingway

An Excerpt from our new anthology, THE STORY ABOUT THE STORY, which hits bookshelves today.

Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.

And yet, barring the learned (and learning is chiefly useful in judging the work of the dead), the critic is rather more fallible than the rest of us. He has to give us his opinion of a book that has been published two days, perhaps, with the shell still sticking to its head. He has to get outside that cloud of fertile, but unrealized, sensation which hangs about a reader, to solidify it, to sum it up. The chances are that he does this before the time is ripe; he does it too rapidly and too definitely. He says that it is a great book or a bad book. Yet, as he knows, when he is content to read only, it is neither. He is driven by force of circumstances and some human vanity to hide those hesitations which beset him as he reads, to smooth out all traces of that crab-like and crooked path by which he has reached what he chooses to call ‘a conclusion’. So the crude trumpet blasts of critical opinion blow loud and shrill, and we, humble readers that we are, bow our submissive heads. Read More »

THE DISCIPLINED SOUL

The essays in The Story About the Story differ from traditional literary criticism in many ways.  They contemplate rather than argue.  They do not artificially sublimate subjectivity.  They preserve mystery instead of dissecting it.  And often they expand the scope of what they are willing to address so as to speak to the basics—the history, the process, the purpose—of literature itself.

I didn’t quite mean to do this when I started collecting pieces for the book, but the essays in The Story About the Story add up to a solid century’s worth of literary wisdom—straight from the horses’ mouths.

This wisdom takes a number of forms.

Cynthia Ozick (“Truman Capote Reconsidered”) begins with an elegant aphorism: “Time at length becomes justice.”  Similarly, Nabokov (“‘The Metamorphosis’”) introduces Kafka with a rapid-fire definition of art, “Beauty plus pity,” a maxim that a few pages later is met with Camus’ insistence (“Herman Melville”) that Melville is the furthest thing from Kafka but still offers “inexhaustible sources of strength and pity.”
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A Conversation w/ Deborah Eisenberg

In celebration of Deborah Eisenberg’s recent MacArthur Fellowship, we decided to post her conversation with Anna Keesey from our interview anthology, The World Within (for you subscribers, it also appears in Tin House #34). We’ve been calling her a genius for years, and are thrilled that it’s been made official.

After thirty years on West Seventeenth Street in Chelsea, Deborah Eisenberg is moving house. The closets have “disgorged” their contents, books tip sideways on their shelves, boxes lie here and there. Eisenberg and her beloved comrade, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, will be moving to a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks away, a small “palace” of elegant moldings, terraces, a willow tree. Shawn says, in his lovely, wry, and bemused way, “We think it will make our declining years more . . . acceptable.” And the exercise they’ll get apparently makes their doctor “ecstatic.” It’s no accident that some people in sixth-floor walk-ups are ninety years old and going strong.

But even for the casual visitor, such a move seems laden with loss. This apartment, with its air of industrial romance, clarity, and ghostly chic, seems right for Eisenberg’s literary aesthetic: radiant, complex, dense, fierce, and comic. In a closet-sized study here, she has composed some of the most ambitious and memorable works of fiction in the contemporary literary landscape. Like her peers Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, she has predominantly written short stories, and what short stories they are: “Flotsam,” “A Lesson in Traveling Light,” “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “In the Station,” “Someone to Talk To,” “The Custodian,” “Mermaids,” “Revenge of the Dinosaurs.” For them, Eisenberg has received numerous awards: Best American Short Story and O. Henry prizes, a Whiting award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the prestigious Rea Award for Short Story, made to writers who have contributed substantially to the short story form. Her prose is fresh and lyrical and pungent; by any accounting she’s one of the country’s most distinctive stylists, and her capacity to describe fleeting states of mind and heart is unmatched. All her work shows a species of stubborn courage in dissecting the mind, with particular attention to the space where consciousness and conscience overlap. She resists the blandishments of conventional wisdom, particularly those of her own cultured kind; like a diplomat on an eerie planet, she has beautiful manners but takes no creature’s self-presentation as the truth.

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“KAFKA? I LOVE KAFKA. HE’S VERY – KAFKAESQUE.”

Anthologies are notorious for a number of reasons.  The books have too many words on each page.  They’re way too expensive because they’re intended as textbooks.  And they’re never quite as comprehensive as they’re meant to be.

The Story About the Story is an attempt to correct all that.

One of the reasons anthologies prove problematic is the whole business of permissions.  I went into the process of obtaining permissions for this book with a degree of curiosity and the tenacity of a visionary.  But if I’d known what I was getting myself into I probably never would have started.  The permissions labyrinth is a maze manned by a squadron of unruly Minotaurs, and I quickly found that as a single Theseus I wasn’t going to be able to find my way through it alone.  After about a month of phone calls I was at the end of my string, as it were.
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Steve Almond Tackles Toto

During the 10th Anniversary celebration, Steve Almond revealed the utter inanity of the song “Africa,” by the band Toto. The take down turned poignant, though, in the end, but had us all in stitches.

Beware: this song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the afternoon!

And be sure to check out Steve’s story in issue #40, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” which don’t worry, doesn’t involve any creepy sexual stuff, I mean, other than the fact that it was written by this guy.

HEAL THE LUNG

The essays collected in The Story About the Story assault the institution of literary criticism.

The problem with literary criticism is not that critical actions conducted on literary texts do them damage—the problem is the way in which critical actions tend to be conducted.  There’s a basic contradiction built into the system: dry, soul-deadening, derivative, entirely dispassionate prose is used to dissect literature that is supposed to be inspiring, passionate, creative, and unique.  Worse, this critical doublespeak has become the way in which we expose literature to new readers, to kids.  The insidiousness with which literary criticism has infected the culture and targeted children recalls the basic marketing strategy of religious cults and tobacco companies.  The present low status of serious reading should not surprise anyone.  The Story About the Story wants to believe that this hobbling of our collective soul is like a smoker’s lungs: if we quit the bad habit of setting out to write poorly about good writing we can heal ourselves.

The collected essays approach the problem in a number of ways.

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Tenth Anniversary!

How appropriate is it that tin is the traditional metal used to commemorate a 10th Anniversary? I’ll tell you precisely how appropriate: very. From the first issue to the 40th, we’ve been lucky enough to publish some of our country’s finest writers, both established and emerging. And in order to celebrate our past good fortune and ferry us into another decade, Literary Arts in Portland threw us a birthday party. There’s a sort of Whitman’s Sampler video of it. Check it out and stew in envy of the fun we had!

Driving The Stake

The whole question of beginnings is tricky—a point Geoff Dyer makes about D.H. Lawrence’s poetry in the excerpt of Out of Sheer Rage reprinted in The Story About the Story:

“Who can say when a poem begins to stir, to germinate, in the soil of the writer’s mind?  There are certain experiences waiting to happen: like the snake at Lawrence’s water trough, the poem is already there, waiting for him.  The poem is waiting for circumstance to activate it, to occasion its being written.”

The same may apply to editing anthologies.

Okay, an anthology is not a poem.  The Story About the Story is not something I, as its editor, created or wrote.  (That’s actually why I can tell you it’s a great book—I didn’t write it.)  But it’s not just an anthology either, or at least I hope it’s not.  I hope it’s a clarion call.  I hope it changes the world—of course I do.  Is that conceited?  Probably.  Would it be worth doing if it didn’t have a shot at accomplishing just that?  Probably not.

So I’ll just assume at the outset here that the beginning of an anthology is interesting.  But it’s still tricky—and I might not be able to tell you what exact circumstance resulted in its being edited.
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Q&A with WE DID PORN’s Zak Smith

Zak Smith paints, writes, and performs in adult films. His new book is at the center of that venn diagram. The book is available now, both in paperback and limited-edition hardcover, and next month, it will be available in the UK from Beautiful Books. For those of you in Seattle, Zak will reading Sunday at 5:45 at the Bumbershoot Festival. Stop by and say hello. Zak was kind enough to answer some questions from Tin House Books associate editor Meg Storey. Without further ado:

Meg Storey: In your memoir, We Did Porn, you critique the art world and the alt-porn world. What’s your take on the publishing world?

Zak Smith: I still don’t know much about it. I do feel like the standard “canon” of which books are good is more accurate than the “canon” of what artworks are good. Probably because in literature, authors opinions count for more than critics’ opinions, whereas in art it’s the other way around. I mean, people are going to trust a John Updike blurb on that back of your book way more than the opinion of some guy at Kirkus Review. Another factor might be that it takes a long time to read a book—it’s hard to tell yourself you liked Ulysses if you put in something like twenty hours of sitting quietly and reading and weren’t actually having fun—so if you say to yourself you like it, it means you probably actually did like it. On the other hand, in order to tell yourself you like some stupid Franz Hals or Andy Warhol painting you only have to look at it for like three seconds. There it is, you saw it. So it’s easier for art people to just be posers who just say they like shit for some non-actual-enjoyment-related-reason.
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Brief Interviews w/ Русская (Wo)men: Natalya Klyuchareva

It’s launch day for Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (You’ll see the little red “buy now” button in that right-hand corner…you should be able to handle it from there). To cap off our series of mini-conversations, Jeff Parker checked in with Natalya Klyuchareva, author of White Pioneers, a collection of poems, and Russia on Wheels, a novel. Her contribution to Rasskazy–”One Year in Paradise”–has been published by the Virgina Quarterly Review (you can read a preview of it here, or, if you subscribe to their  journal, you can read the whole thing…along with an Etgar Keret story and a great piece by Tom Bissell and so on and so on).

Jeff Parker: Your first novel Rossiya: Obshchi Vagon has not yet been translated into English (though it has become a best seller in Europe). The book is about a train ride into the countryside and, one might say, an attempt to find out what the Motherland is and what that means for someone in contemporary Russia. I found myself thinking of the book as related to Yerofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. Did you have that reference in mind? And why did you choose the train as the catalyst for the book? It has a rather allegorical quality.

Natalya Klyuchareva: The train as a catalyst for the book was chosen without any connection to Moscow to the End of the Line. The fact is I travel extensively around Russia (I work for a newspaper), and the plot of the road is the plot of the road in my life, both actual and allegorical—in fact, we are all on the road. Read More »

Brief Interviews w/ Русский Men: Oleg Zobern

Now that we’ve settled on the proper cyrilic for the demonym “Russian,” we’ll continue with our series of short Q&A’s with the Rasskazy contributors. Today our interlocutor, Jeff Parker, is mostly made fun of by Oleg Zobern. Zobern is the author of Silent Jericho and Funeral Feast for Yann Volkers. His story “Bregovich’s Sixth Journey” appears in the anthology. If this whets your appetite, Zobern will be making several appearances in the states this fall (9/15 at Prairie Lights in Iowa City; 9/21 at Housing Works in NYC; 9/22 at the Russian Samovar in NYC).

oleg-zobern-foto-ekaterina-boyarskikhJeff Parker: In your story “Bregovich’s Sixth” from the Rasskazy anthology, the narrator is concerned about a neighbor’s dog he has nicknamed Ivan Denisovich. The story is in many ways a meditation on the condition of freedom in Russia. He imagines Solzhenitsyn himself voluntarily imprisoned at his dacha outside Moscow, and he seems to consider himself imprisoned, though he’s never been in jail. This results in a final, perhaps futile, act. How should an American reader understand this psychological context?
Oleg Zobern: I must admit that I have not personally seen one American reader. I have seen writers from the USA, translators, politicians, sheeplike tourists; I have even seen an FBI secret agent working in Russia, I have seen psychos who think they’re Americans though they’ve never once been in America, but I have never seen an American reader, not my own and not someone else’s. And how can I give this phantom advice on the psychological context of my story? I cannot. Now, if I see one of these American readers, then probably I will be able to answer this question. Perhaps upon meeting I will even touch the face of this person with my hand to make certain that he really exists. As for imprisonment, it’s all very simple: imagine that your brain is divided by a partition, and in one section of it there is the glory of civic heroism and in the other sadism, pedophilia, and concentrated death, and like that before your eyes begins the construction of your very own personal, private prison, secured by your right to freedom of opinion. And about the futility of the final act: I don’t know of a single useful final act in the history of literature. What kind of benefits are in question? By the way, in Russia now there are people imprisoned by the millions, not for their ideas but for money, and Lyubyanka now tortures not anti-Soviets but fearful businessmen in crumpled suits.

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Drill and Song Day, by Vladimir Kozlov

There’s one week until the release of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. Because I’m feeling charitable this morning, I’m posting an excerpt from the book–a short story by Vladimir Kozlov (translated by Andrea Gregovich with Mikhail Iossel). Enjoy.


Each year around the twenty-third of February, to celebrate the anniversary of the Red Army, we had Drill and Song Day at school. Classes from the first through seventh grades made their own “military” uniforms and performed drills in the gym, with rhymed slogans and songs. At two tables in the corner of the gym sat our patrons: our headmistress, school director, military instructor, and the deputy trade-union head from the tire factory. They assigned places.

Classes from the first, second, and third grades competed separately. The previous year, our class, then 2-B, had taken second place, and this time we hoped to be first: last year’s winners, 3-C, were now 4-C and had to participate in the older-grades’ competition. Not only had they taken first place in our school, but at the district level as well, and second in the whole city, and the director always brought them up as an example to other classes.

Our homeroom teacher, Valentina Petrovna—unattractive, prematurely aged (she was no older than thirty at the time, but her face was all wrinkled)—was very worried: what if it didn’t come together and we failed to take first place in the school? Even worse, what if we did, but then completely humiliated ourselves at the district level?

We began to prepare for the competition at the end of January. Vera Saprykina’s parents, through their theater-club connections, got us red cavalry budyonovka cloth helmets and red stripes to sew on our shirts. We learned by heart the song:

White army, black baron
Are readying for us again the tsarist throne
But from the taiga to Britain’s far seas . . . etc.

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Brief Interviews w/ Русский Men: Dmitry Danilov

On September 1st we’ll be celebrating the release of our new anthology Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. In the meantime, Jeff Parker (who co-edited the book with Mikhail Iossel) will be posting brief interviews with some of the contributors. The first conversation is with Dmitry Danilov, author of Black and Green and House Ten, and wearer of the finest beard I’ve seen since Jeff Parker was last in town.

Jeff Parker: Your story “More Elderly Person” published in the Rasskazy anthology is told almost exclusively in the passive voice. Your characters hardly act, rather the world seems to always act on them. What was your thinking in executing it this way?

Dmitry Danilov: I would say for me as a writer I am interested not in a person but in the non-animate circumstances and objects that surround the person. Historically it’s developed such that literature is full of human deeds. In literature a human always acts, goes through emotional states, thinks, speaks. The entirety of literature is written about the acts of people. And when I write I am interested in shifting the focus from the person onto what surrounds him, to some things and circumstances that we usually don’t pay attention to. Because of that my characters come out very passive. They practically blend with the world. For example, there is a character and there is a house or there is a station and the person doesn’t stand out on his own in the background of the house or the station. I’m interested in practicing this approach. My characters indeed are passive, frozen, bloodless, inhibited. Read More »

Genre Redux

The post I made last week, “To Genre or Not to Genre,” rankled a lot of readers. I have yet to decide whether this is a good thing.

It’s all given me a lot to consider. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a position where my opinions have been held up for such wide scrutiny. And while being called ignorant and pathetic puts me on the defensive pretty much right away, it would be irresponsible not to ask myself if I have some mistaken assumptions, or if I could be more clear with my arguments.

I’m not sure the blogosphere and heuristics are the best bedfellows. I did see the Tin House blog as a prime place to hold a discussion on the idea of genre, especially when fielding a question that posed such a great opportunity.

It’s true that many of my assumptions were exposed in my response to a question that itself held unfathomable assumptions that I was not even privy to. Read More »

Congrats to Jim Krusoe! And Persistence!

Jim Krusoe–our dear, dear friend and idol–has been shortlisted for the St. Francis College Literary Prize, an award for a fourth work of fiction.

The prize carries a $50,000 purse and the honor of being nominated alongside Aleksandar Hemon (who kindly endorsed Rasskazy, our forthcoming anthology of Russian Short Stories), Chris Abani (who was recently featured in Tin House editor Rob Spillman’s anthology Gods and Soldiers) and Arthur Phillips (whose new novel The Song is You just jumped even higher up on my to-read list when I learned he was a five-time Jeopardy! champion…take that, Ken Jennings). Judges include a few people you may have heard of (Michael Chabon, Heidi Julivits, Jonathan Lethem, and Ben Marcus).

Other than patting Krusoe’s very-deserving back, I wanted to mention how encouraged I am that two of the four books nominated were published by small presses (Abani’s latest was put out by the wonderful Akashic Books), and, really, that this award exists at all. The trend in publishing seems to have moved toward a sink-or-swim mantra–if Bookscan doesn’t show a solid pattern of sales for your first book, it’s not easy to get support for those that follow. If publishing houses hadn’t fostered the career’s of promising writers that lacked first-book sales figures of Jonathan Safron Foer, think of the works we would have missed out on. I’m thrilled that a major award is looking not for the next pretty young thing (not that these boys aren’t pretty), but keeping an eye on those talented writers who have flown under the mainstream’s radar and persisted with the kind of writing that made me want to work in this field in the first place.

Of course we’re pulling for our favorite son, but I’m happy to know that St. Francis has used their resources to promote and reward such brilliant authors, and at this point in their careers. I only hope it has some trickle down effect for an industry that seems all too ready give up on any writer that doesn’t sell 20,000 copies right out of the gates.

The winner will be announced at the Gala Opening Night Party of the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 12, and while we feign sportsmanship above, the Gala will look like a Town Hall Meeting on Health Care if Krusoe doesn’t win…be warned, Chabon!

To Genre or not to Genre?

I recently received this question from one of our readers:
I have read several issues of Tin House, including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance.
—Confused in LA

Dear Confused,

You ask a question of the ages. Technically, we accept any and all unsolicited manuscripts between September and June. I would normally say “genre” fiction does not stand a particularly great chance of getting published in Tin House, but then again what exactly is considered “genre” fiction and what is considered “literature”? Many fine writers have straddled that line, Kurt Vonnegut being an obvious example, and Denis Johnson, one of the greatest literary voices of our time, in my humble opinion, just came out with a detective novel. Are Cormac McCarthy’s books Westerns?

Read More »

Tin House Workshop 2009

Bear witness as we jactitate: The 7th Annual Tin House Summer Writers Workshop was an overwhelming success! Led by another stellar faculty, including Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, Anthony Doerr, Walter Kirn among many others, participants were treated to an intensely fruitful workshop experience, not to mention fascinating seminars and panels on beginnings, endings, how a story bears fruit, Suspense and Poetry and Grief.

We all also expanded our vocabulary in the daily lesson: words that sound, but are not in fact, dirty, which covered jactitate, formication, cunctatious, puissancy, lucubrator, Cockaigne and penetralia. I smell a CONTEST!: make use of all these words in a sentence and post it in the comments below. The most original one (that actually makes sense) gets some FREE CRAPP! in the form of a 10th Anniversary issue and a special Tin House totebag.

UPDATE: Congrats to Brett B for submitting a super sentence! Stay tuned for more contests that involve winning FREE CRAPP!

In any case, check out the video made during this year’s workshop:

The Children’s Day: Discussion Questions

Michiel Heyns’ novel The Children’s Day is available now. Below are some discussion questions–for bookgroups, classrooms, or just your personal edification. If you have any thoughts or feelings, please post them below…

  1. The novel’s title is derived from the Robert Graves poem “The Cool Web,” reprinted in the book. Discuss ways in which the poem might be relevant to the book.
  2. Graves says, “There’s a cool web of language winds us in, / Retreat from too much joy or to much fear.”  To what extent does this apply to Simon’s use of language? How does Fanie relate to this theme?
  3. Still on language: discuss the role of categorization and classification (or, more simply, naming) in the various episodes of the novel. Can you relate it to the novel’s setting, in apartheid South Africa?
  4. Although the novel is told from a child’s point of view, the narrator is clearly an adult. What kind of adult does Simon seem to have grown up into?
    Read More »

10 Years of Tin House: Backstage Pass, By D.A. Powell

If Aimee Bender’s story a couple posts down wasn’t enough to make you run out and purchase a copy of our tenth-anniversary issue, you may be on the wrong site…allow me to hyperlink you to somewhere more appropriate. Still, for those of you who prefer  brilliance in verse as opposed to prose, might we whet your appetite with one of our favorite poets, D.A. Powell. His new collection, Chronic, was published this year by Graywolf and is well worth your time and money. Without further ado:

The rigging has come down again. Just last week
you fed on the free candy from the bank’s candy dish.
Now you will be everywhere: Toronto, Ithaca,
Chicopee Falls. It’s a bigger job than you expected.

So many components to the trap drum set: pedals,
wingnuts, hi-hat, snare. Be gentle with the heads. Yes,
that’s what they’re really called—check the package.

Just keep the bandmates happy, mister, just bring them
fudge, the Bud they asked for, the Amstel Light.

Whatever you have to do to keep yourself: in the back
of the bus, on a bumpy road, the stink of the guys’ pits,
their bobbing heads, patting the back of your hand.

Did you remember to pack extra sticks, the strings
and picks. Did you check. One, two. Did you check.

Excerpt: THE CHILDREN’S DAY

Michiel Heyns’ The Children’s Day is the second of our international series (you may have seen our first, When I Forgot, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review). We couldn’t be more excited to bring this novel to readers in the U.S. It’s a coming-of-age story set in apartheid South Africa, narrated by the sometimes precocious, sometimes naive Simon–it’s tender, and funny, and…

…Here, just read an excerpt:


1962

Children naturally take an interest in any newcomer, whether as object of their charity or as victim of their persecution. Thus even Fanie van den Bergh created a little hush of attention when he was brought into the classroom by the principal, Mr. Viljoen, and assigned a desk by Miss Jordaan in the front of the class, across the aisle from mine. On a first frankly exploratory stare, he seemed candidate for neither charity nor persecution — that is, he seemed just ordinary. He was very thin, but then so were many of the children in the class; he was poorly dressed in slightly grubby clothes, but again that was hardly noteworthy in Verkeerdespruit. He was wearing a pair of scuffed shoes, which did set him apart from the predominantly barefooted class, but that was understood as a concession to his first day at school. Verkeerdespruit people, my mother used to say, had to prove that they possessed shoes. I never wore shoes, not even on the last day of term when everybody else did.

In the course of the morning Miss Jordaan asked her new pupil a few questions, partly to make him feel at home and partly, I suppose, because she also felt a certain curiosity: she hadn’t been in Verkeerdespruit long enough to have ceased hoping for an exception. Fanie certainly was not it: her questions elicited only the usual  dour silence of ignorance or shyness or both. She and the twenty-five members of the Standards One and Two class settled down again to their routine, and Fanie van den Bergh took his unremarkable place in the unexacting primary educational system of the Orange Free State.

CONTINUE READING…

Summer Reading Recommendations: Brian DeLeeuw

As we continue with our Summer Reading Recommendations, we’ll turn inward to share what some of our editors are taking on vacation or using to fan themselves on the subway. Today’s selection comes from Brian DeLeeuw, Assistant Editor at the magazine and author of the novel In This Way I Was Saved.

Exotic locales, conspicuous consumption, and sordid love triangles are all staples of the summer beach read, and Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley features all three in spades.  But in Highsmith’s misanthropic world, the fetishization of luxury items — of luxury itself — becomes an impetus for murder, and her love triangle exists only in the imagination of a man who is himself terrified of sex.  Even the glamor of Italy is reduced to a decadent backdrop for wealthy, shiftless Americans, an Old World stage-set for a very New World tale of class jealousy and radical (to say the least) self-invention.  Highsmith’s control over her material is total; her prose and plotting is faultless.  This is a page-turner in the absolute best sense of the phrase.