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We kick the new year off in style with one of our all time favorite talks from the workshop, Anthony Doerr’s lecture on Defamiliarization. As those of you who have read Doerr’s work know (and if you haven’t read him, what gives?), he has the unique ability to make the known world seem strange, swatting aside clichés as if they were a fourth quarter LeBron James jump shot (inside joke, sorry).

So shake off those winter blues with a little shop talk from Mr. Doerr, who will once again be joining us this July at the Summer Writer’s Workshop.

You can listen here.

I’ve been reading poetry for almost twenty years.

I mention this because whenever you read a certain genre for an extended period of time you can find yourself returning over and over to old favorites. Which is good! Who doesn’t keep eating chocolate when chocolate is so awesome? (Especially when the chocolate’s ordered from Lagusta’s Luscious in New Paltz, NY!) Often I find myself returning to the poems of Gerald Stern, Yusef Komunyakaa, Diane Wakoski, and others. Poets I have read over and over with joy, sadness, and mystery. But sometimes one should pick up an orange or a cantaloupe, maybe some broccoli. In fact, a balanced diet of the well-established protein and the brand new vitamin is important to the body of any reading life. Really I’m hungry for both. I’m equally thrilled to find myself at the table with a Pulitzer Prize winner’s tenth book or, as I find myself this evening, a first book that makes you feel like you’ve been starving your whole life, until now.

I mention all this food, the protein and vitamins, because our bodies need them and in her first book of poems, Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press, 2011), Robin Richardson is writing for the body, for our bodies and our sensual, intelligent, minds. They are also poems that threaten, that darken the path. I received a copy of the book three days ago and can’t stop reading it. Lines like:

“Red stripes of the barber wrapped like cherry
floss around a pole. At least he used his hands, letting
blood as he swiped bristles from a pale chin”  (from A Post-Industrial Eulogy)

And

“gently. I tore my clothes and choked.
The tip of my tongue a lovely blue, I licked
her ear like Claudius and wouldn’t let go”  (from Scavenger of Ships)

There is an incredibly moving balance of formality and wild human eroticism, violence and tenderness, in Richardson’s book. There is in this collection, as Richardson writes in the poem ‘Feet, Small and Shapely’, a steady rising in a high campaign of casting out,/ catching something wide and writhing, greater than the self.

I felt greater than myself when I consumed this book.

Gwenaëlle Aubry’s remarkable novel, No One is on sale now–and you can read excerpts here and here–but perhaps the natural place to start is with the introduction that Rick Moody was kind enough to supply for our translation. Enjoy.

In case you dwell on the American side of the Atlantic, let me catch you up on a recent development in international literature—l’autofiction.

L’autofiction is the French term for the stylized hybridization of fiction and autobiography as applied in contemporary literature. It’s in relatively wide circulation, this coinage, dreamed up, originally, by one Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, perhaps as a term of self-discovery, or of literary politics. The movement waited for about a generation to lift off however. By now, l’autofiction is nearly pandemic, at least continentally speaking. An uncharitable theorist of contemporary literature would find in these particular tea leaves a draining away of the power of imagination, perhaps along the lines of David Shields’s recent manifesto on the value of non-fiction, Reality Hunger. But this reality hunger reading would be to dramatically miss the nuance in contemporary French literature—the way the writers of France occasionally situate themselves, paradoxically, oxymoronically, between autobiography and fiction, between genres, finding in this impulse the energy and liberty that is released by recombination. Autofiction is all about this nuance, this historical wisdom; it’s about exploiting the energy of uncertainty and possibility between the imaginary and the documentary, in the process staying close to the human intention that is language, which is not, after all, a creature of genres.

Gwenäelle Aubry’s No One coincides with this recent revolution in French contemporary writing. The title in French, which makes clear its multiple layers, is Personne, which literally means no one, but which also has traces of the Latinate persona, and the Etruscan phersu, mask, and the English person.

The story is simple. The father of the narrator of No One, the father of one Gwenäelle Aubry, is an intellectual of some heft and import who in the middle of his life’s journey becomes episodically, seriously, progressively, mentally ill. Not just a little bit mentally ill, but deeply, psychotically, unstably mentally ill, given to flights of free association and impulsive behavior of a kind that could jeopardize the maturation of his two daughters. The causative event of No One, the engine of its alphabetical recollections of his multiple personae, is Gwenäelle’s discovery, after the death of her father, of a self-composed manuscript that attempts to detail his life and times. Through this manuscript, (and in it and with it), she attempts to make peace with her father—after the fact of his death. Continue reading →

As a model and actress, Jennifer Sky has lived under the public eye. (Perhaps you recognize her from here?) Now as a writer, she turns her gaze back on the world of fashion and celebrity and tells us what we haven’t been seeing, in this web extra for our fiftieth issue: Beauty.

The Birthmark

ENGLAND

The blood on the grey marble floor is concerning me.

I am alone in the ballroom bathroom. It’s around four a.m., Michael Jackson went to bed hours ago, and I have had a lot of champagne. The small red spots look like cupcake crumbs leading into the thick dark of a forest.

Whose is it? I think. I shake my head in mild disgust, but don’t move or step away. I can’t stop staring.

That’s when I realize, the blood is mine.

*   *   *

Eight hours earlier I sat watching Faye Dunaway weigh her salad on the scale she kept in her purse. The tent we were seated under was laced with small white lights giving the effect of endless stars. On top of a gold-rimmed plate rested a blue velvet box. Inside I found a pair of crystal glasses and a small decanter etched with the name of the exclusive hotel owned by the second wife of a Sultan. The pad of my finger brushed the ridges of the scarred crystal as I considered how easy it would be to break. Outside lay a vast estate, the former country manor of a member of the English gentry, a person who perhaps enjoyed strolling the perforated ground of mud and sheep dung. I was deep in the English countryside for the Sultan’s son’s 25th birthday party.

The day before I arrived, Michael Jackson spent the evening playing Twister in the drawing room with a group of guys I’d refer to as “Young Hollywood.” This term could have been applied to me as well. The cover of Maxim will get you that club card. Modeling with Liv Tyler, traveling to Japan, Italy, and France (and sometimes making $2500 a day), living in New York and Miami by the time I was seventeen, co-starring in movies opposite DMX and Bradley Cooper, and playing the title character of a TV show got me that club card, too.

The focus has always been on my outside: the genetic coding that created the cheekbones, the one-sided dimple, the arrangement of hair fibers on the brow.  The same coding passed down the flaw and grew the mass, the birthmark upon my liver. Hiding inside my body was this mark, a secret I harbored for years until an operation would cut me in half, save my life, and end my Hollywood career.

Continue reading →

When I was in grade school I was perpetually turning in the wrong stuff as homework. A teacher would ask for a poem about the potato famine and I would turn in an Antarctic diorama, insisting, “I couldn’t help it!” I had been thinking, and hard. I just had a funny way of showing it. I recognize the same heartfelt heedlessness in the work of German artist Anke Feuchtenberger. Like somebody said “comics” and she couldn’t help but build her worlds–which only occasionally comprise gutters, panels, speech bubbles, the customary graphic amenities. Sticklers might not call her books “comics” at all. What Feuchtenberger offers is darkness, dream-logic, polysemous mythology, and a stellar reminder of how to cold-shoulder the sticklers with grace. W the Whore–likely Feuchtenberger’s most obtainable book stateside, and a good point of entry into her oeuvre–is a collaboration with poet Katrin de Vries, and, although I want everybody to fall in love with Feuchtenberger’s drawings, it makes sense to say that her comics are comics for poets and their patrons.

I am so grateful for how far she’s stretched the spectrum–through her own work and through the curation of one of the strangest and most beautiful comic almanacs I know–Frozen Charly. It was an honor to get to ask just a few of the cherished questions (I translated the interview from the original German) her work has evoked in me.

Elizabeth Pusack: Many critics have spoken of decoding, deciphering or unlocking the narratives in your comics. How do you feel about this as a process for experiencing your work? How would you respond to someone who described your work as “cryptic?”

Anke Feuchtenberger: I have no great interest in my work being decoded. No, what I create is not math homework or psychoanalysis. I would characterize my work as cryptic in so far as cryptic really is associated with darkness, the hidden—like a dream. The poetic rarely develops willfully, even though hard work goes into its creation. The poetic is a deeper connection and an essential one, and when you cut it up into its component parts, it loses its richness.

EP: What role does chance play in your work?

AF: Fate and chance are not the same thing. Fate is when I can only do what I am compelled to do: to draw, to speak German as my mother tongue, to be a woman, my bones… I don’t really believe in chance. This often creates problems for me. The production of my books by a publisher always happens purposefully, not by chance. An artist’s creativity sometimes seems to benefit by chance, as for example, when information pertaining exactly to the theme you are secretly already working with is constantly calling out to you. But even that I wouldn’t call chance, because you have already certainly sensitized yourself to the topic.

EP: How have you experienced collaboration? How is collaboration different from working alone?

AF: I have only collaborated with Katrin de Vries. On the other hand that work was very solitary; she gave me her texts, which were finished, written as prose, and I tried to spin these texts into a picture world that almost behaved independently in the sense that they answered the text, but did not illustrate it. Katrin de Vries’ texts have been very inspiring to me, have formed me. Now I work alone again, because I notice that I’ve gathered enough storytelling material within myself, material I want to draw. The work is dream-like, in that I work every minute of the day, because the work is circling and thinking and dreaming. This is how new connections develop, connections that only become true in the drawings. In the drawing a new element emerges, it has to do with the materiality of drawing, and it changes the stories that live within. The gaze, which doesn’t focus concretely at one thing, but rather with dream-like openness perceives things in the farthest corners of the eye, is therefore the most important thing in this process. Continue reading →

This year Tin House Books brings you wistful ruminations on things lost, moving and dark explorations of mental and psychical illness, harrowing tales from asylum seekers, and, of course, art thieves.  With so many great things coming out, we could not be more excited for the year ahead.

We are proud to present our 2012 titles. Keep an eye on our website for more to come.

Glaciers
A novel by Alexis Smith, January 2012

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories—the remnants—of those around her and she begins to tell her own story. Watch the trailer here.

No One
A novel by Gwenaëlle Aubry
Translated by Trista Selous
Intoduction by Rick Moody, February 2012

No One is the portrait of a man without a true self; a one-time distinguished lawyer and member of the Paris bar who imagined himself in many important roles—a procession of doubles, a population of masks—who became a drifter and frequent visitor to mental institutions. Moving between the voices of daughter and father, this fictional memoir in dictionary form investigates the many men behind the masks, and a unified portrait evolves. A describes her father’s adopted persona as Antonin Artaud, the poet/playwright; B is for James Bond; H is for homeless; and, finally, Z is for Zelig, the Woody Allen character who could transform his appearance to that of the people around him. Letter by letter, Aubry gives shape and meaning to the father who had long disappeared from her view. The whole is a beautifully written, vivid exploration of a particular experience of mental illness and what it can reveal more generally about human experience. Continue reading →

Guest Post from Late Night Library’s Paul Martone

A challenge for Tin House’s readers: Name five poets and fiction writers whose debut books were published in 2011. You may not open a new tab and google “debut poets and fiction writers.” Ready, set, go…

Fact #1: Many people consider the book to be a tangible representation of the past: a single function artifact. Press a book’s cover, press its author’s photo: WTF? Nothing happens.

Fact #2: Debut poets and fiction writers entertain readers. They offer nuanced and poignant insights, profound revelations. At their very best, these artists provide opportunities for self-discovery; they sharpen our ability to see ourselves clearly; they stir our empathic impulses.

Fact #3: Millions of Americans still read books. Unfortunately most of them do not read debut poetry and fiction. A debut, by definition, is a first appearance. But sometimes debut books do not appear. I live in Portland, Oregon. We are fortunate to be home to Powell’s, the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world, yet every debut collection of poetry and short fiction I purchased this year was purchased online. These books did not appear on the shelves at Powell’s or anywhere else in the city of Portland.

Personal Narrative, Part One: Eight years ago, I couldn’t name three debut poets and fiction writers, least of all five. It was 2003, the year I entered the MFA program at the University of Oregon. I was twenty-seven years old and like most MFA students, I was a lifelong reader influenced by a slew of canonical and contemporary writers. If I recognized the name of a debut poet or fiction writer, it was only because I read something about them in Poets & Writers—maybe an article, more likely a blurb. People in my social and academic circles rarely spoke of debut books. In fiction seminars and workshops, my instructors assigned texts by writers such as Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Samuel Clemens, and Virginia Woolf. Outside of class, my fellow MFA-ers and I discussed writers like Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Mary Gaitskill.  To this day I love all of these writers, canonical and contemporary alike. But who are the new voices in poetry and fiction, and why aren’t more people discussing their work?

A question for today’s aspiring and emerging writers: How can you expect other people to read your work if you don’t read debut poetry and fiction? Continue reading →

Thomas Day was rich but very ugly. He couldn’t dance. “Who will marry me?” said Thomas Day. He thrust his hands into his pocket and asked his friend Richard. Richard took out his snuff box, lit a pipe.“My sister will marry you,” said Richard. But Richard’s sister wouldn’t marry him. Not even for all of his money, she said. Or all of the money in England, she said. He was that ugly. He was that bad at dance. “What about Anna Seward?” said Thomas Day. But Anna Seward heard about this and married someone else.

Thomas Day went to the orphanage and adopted two girls. The girls had names but he didn’t like them. “From now on you will be Lucretia,” he said. “Sabrina,” he said. The girls were eleven and twelve years old. Thomas Day promised to make at least one of them into his perfect wife. He hired a boat and they all sailed to France.

But in France nobody had a good time. Thomas Day, it turned out, didn’t like French people. He didn’t like French roads. In a letter to Richard: “The women prefer their lapdogs to their children; the roads are full of holes.” The girls got smallpox. They got fevers. They got mucous and pustules. Their crying kept him up all night. When they recovered they went on another boat ride, this time just for pleasure. The boat flipped over in the Rhône.

Eight months it went on like this. Thomas Day dueled a French person. Thomas Day dueled a French person. Thomas Day dueled a French person. Thomas Day hated dueling as much as he hated French people. But in France what could he do? Whenever he went to the coffeehouse or the market there was always another French person insulting him in French. The girls went to all the duels: duels by the river, duels in the field, duels at dusk. They’d sit on the ground and pull up grass.

And what about the girls? Turned out that Lucretia wasn’t perfect wife material. “Perfectly stupid,” Thomas Day wrote to Richard. When Thomas Day came back to England he apprenticed her to a milliner in Ludgate Hill. Later she married a linen draper. Everyone agrees that she lived a very happy life.

Continue reading →