Lit Randomness: Stories by Scott Garson, Ben Tanzer, Ryan Bradley & Justin Hyde

"Two Flash Fictions" by Scott Garson: At 3 AM Magazine.

Small Lockers in the Back of the Factory by Justin Hyde: At Zygote in My Coffee.

Annalemma Double:

"Goddess" by Ben Tanzer

"Goodbye Ruby" by Ryan Bradley
(Magnum P.I forever).

Shameless self-promotion by the ever shameless people of Deckfight. Follow that shamelessness here.


More after the jump...

Lit Randomness: Stories from Opium Mag, LitSnack, Significant Objects, MonkeyBicycle

Sorry to the music side--I'm rocking a lot of lit this week. But read these stories, including one about Charlie's Angels.

"Motel Lives" by Charles Spano: At Opium Mag.

"Free Space" by Paula Ray: At LitSnack.

"Charlie's Angel Lunchbox Thermos" by Carl Wilson: At Significant Objects.
(this is awesome).

"Everyone's Velocity" by Katie Jean Shinkle: At MonkeyBicycle.


More after the jump...

review: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

The Unnamed
by Joshua Ferris
Reagan Arthur Books, 2010

If you hear someone describe this book as "about a lawyer," they're lying. This book is no more about a lawyer than McDonald's is about floor tiles. Both entities contain their descriptors, but each is about something completely different. Instead this is a book about impulses, uncontrollable impulses. It's a book of family and commitment and being. It's a book of relationships and marriage and that "I do" phrase. This book is not about a lawyer.

It's also a book about illness, and mental illness. I once read an essay something or another about how recent literature has taken a discernible bent towards dealing with medication and the effects of pharma (someone send me the link...I think it was at n + 1, but I couldn't find it...).

Tim Farnsworth is subjected to bouts of uncontrollable walking. Not pacing, but walking, the kind where he strips halfway down and just goes and goes with no control. Due to this ailment, he is strapped to his bed, he misses work, he leaves places with no announcement or goodbye. He tries and hides this from his workplace, saying that his wife has cancer, but it affects his career, destroys his career.

No one has this certain walking disease, the New England Journal of Medicine can't figure it out, all the specialists this side of the Mayo and Cleveland clinics can't figure it out. Tim is alone in his disease.

But he is not alone in his life. His wife picks him from far off distances, his daughter Becka becomes a babysitter for her father. He misses large chunks of their life from work, and then eventually misses large chunks of their lives due to his walking.

Eventually, Tim ventures on his own, alone to handle the disease. Ferris rightly details the frantic nature of Tim's walking and the scant details he is able to retain, finding himself in public parks and baseball fields, this is where the genius of Ferris is really evident. It's the third section, second chapter and it is descriptive, it is fast, it is perfectly applicable to Tim's situation, it is some of the best writing I've seen in awhile. An excellent combination of anyplace-highway land and the menacing rambling thoughts of Tim that mixes his lawyer-ese with bouts of soul-bashing, it is a stumble into madness, physical breakdown and loneliness.

Ferris, like in his previous novel, is deft at changing pace and perspective. We see Tim, then his wife Jane, their stories told separately in some sections, but intermingling where appropriate. The third-person narrator that Ferris invokes is sometimes unreliable to great effect, such as Tim meeting an old friend in a restaurant, and I'll leave it at that.

Tim is obstinate, but also afflicted. His disease causes pain on others, he eventually learns how to handle it, with a potent pharma-cocktail. Then, in many ways, it's too late.

There are some disappointments here. Tim's disease described is vague and unknown, but it's almost too much so. Tim walks a lot, why can't he stop and talk to someone? Why does he end up in random places, why doesn't he just turn back around? Why doesn't a treadmill work very well? Why can't he walk laps or in a specific area? Simple questions like those are never fully addressed, the reader is just expected to be in agreement, the suspension of belief almost too great to get at Ferris' main point---the bounds of marriage.

There are some mixed reviews, but most of those come from too many comparisons to the "other" work, a clever conceit with a lot of funny moments. This is not more of the same, there is really nothing funny or humorous at all.

But this is a book that Save(s) Ferris from just being a gimmick. It would have been easy for Ferris to take the Max Barry route, writing clever corporation satire one after another in a time and place where that is vogue. This firmly puts Ferris on the other side of the fence, into that "serious" writer side. I would be surprised if some consider this book better than Then We Came...but that doesn't matter. Because Ferris puts his career in a steady upward trajectory with this one, it builds and diversifies at the same time. If people doubted Ferris before, The Unnamed shows Ferris to be no joke.

More after the jump...

Lit Randomness: Salinger (of course), designer David Pearson, Shteyngart, Michael Muhammad Knight & more

JD Salinger Double
Why a publisher let him go (w/ George Plimpton): At The Paris Review (h/t Maud Newton)

Walking in Holden Caulfield's shoes: At NY Times

The takedown of Literary Manboys: At Gawker (h/t HTML Giant)

Gary Shteyngart talks Russia: At Jewcy

Interv. w/ David Pearson, designer of the Penguin 'Great Ideas' series: At Print Mag. (h/t Yewknee)

Shya Scanlon on Literary Hustling: At WordHustler
(got this from somebody, forgot who...)

Islamic punk rocker & world traveler & oh yeah, author, Michael Muhammad Knight: At NY Times.



More after the jump...

Friday Five: 5 Best Things Molly Gaudry has read recently

If you spend some time on the literary interwebs, two words that begin to appear repeatedly are "Molly Gaudry." Yes, from what I can figure out she is a real person and has a real (novella) book from Mudluscious called WE TAKE ME APART. Most recently, I've been enjoying her work over at Big Other where she convinces writers to submit embarrassing childhood photos. Quite impressive really.

For the five best things she's read recently, Molly chose five introductory paragraphs, at random, from an anthology she's editing for Flatmancrooked tentatively titled Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narratives (due out fall 2010) and will feature over 50 writers. Plus, here's a bonus cookie recipe she said was good.

1) Aimee Bender's "Appleless," from The Fairy Tale Review

I once knew a girl who wouldn't eat apples. She wove her walking around groves and orchards. She didn't even like to look at them. They're all mealy, she said. Or else too cheeky, too bloomed. No, she stated again, in case we had not heard her, our laps brimming with Granny Smiths and Red Deliciouses. With Galas and Spartans and yellow Golden Globes. But we had heard her, from the very first; we just couldn't help offering again. Please, we pleaded, eat. Cracking our bites loudly, exposing the dripping wet white inside.




2) Blake Butler's "The Gown from Mother's Stomach," from Ninth Letter and Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books)

The mother ate thread and lace for four weeks so that her daughter would have a gown. She was tired of not being able to provide her daughter with the things many other girls took for granted. Their family was poor and the mother's fingers ached with arthritis so she couldn't bring herself to sew. Instead she chewed the bed sheets until they were soft enough to swallow. She bit the curtains and gnawed the pillow. With one wet finger she swiped the floor for dust. God will knit it in my womb like he did you, she murmured. When you wear it you will blind the world.

3) Gary Lutz's "The Preventer of Sorrows," from Stories in the Worst Way (Calamari Press)

At some point I played up to myself long enough to be living in a room that was scarcely part of the house it was tacked onto. Mornings, the open space between the bottom of the door and the carpet admitted a scalene wedge of light from more substantial regions of the house. Things besides light could have got in. It was my fault for not having insisted on a door that locked.

4) Michael Martone's "Rumination"

I think of him thinking about his cows. I never even knew he was a dairyman. At the Starbucks in the Student Union where I worked he’d ask me about the steamed milk—real milk, right?—in the latte. I think of that now. He’d nurse the drink all day, staring off into space, the space so thick I could almost see that electromagnetic soup of digital bleats bawling from the laptops, the cell phones, the other students all around him were nudging and pawing, grazing through their email, their texts. I drifted over to him, started talking. He bought me a macchiato stained with milk and never let on he left a dairy farm to come to school. Though once early on, now that I think about it, he told me one could major in ice cream if one wanted to. I majored in numbers. Made ends meet. Thinking about it now, there were infinite silences between us like the silences between the bits of the binary alphabets herding around us in the ether. He didn’t say much at all, but that is the nature of farm boys, I guessed, or at least the ones I met back then, weaned in the vacuums of all those empty acres out there.

5) Stuart Dybek's "Fiction," from Tin House

Through a rift in the mist, a moon the shade of water-stained silk. A night to begin, to begin again. Someone whistling a tune impossible to find on a piano, an elusive melody that resides, perhaps, in the spaces between the keys where there once seemed to be only silence. He wants to tell her a story without telling a story. One in which the silence between words is necessary in order to make audible the faint whistle of her breath as he enters her.

More after the jump...

missed it the first time: Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine by Ben Tanzer

Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine
By Ben Tanzer
Orange Alert, 2008
Review by Josh S.

I approach most of the reviews on Deckfight divided. My mind is rarely made up before I sit down. I write and somehow make up my mind. Like most writers (I think), the writing process is a process of decision making. It is through this act I make up my mind, not before I write.

So it goes with Ben Tanzer’s Most Likely. A book I was sure I was going to love, only to find that I admired its craft far more than its actual story; that’s the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever given, (perhaps I hit it out of bounds?). This is a story of one couple (two maybe), Jen and Geoff. Jen and Geoff are overly anxious about one another, somewhat repelled by each other, but enthralled enough to start breaking the manufactured dating rules, enthralled enough to wonder if after only a couple dates if this relationship is THE relationship, enthralled that this relationship in being THE relationship may be the relationship that breaks all the rules that their single friends and acquaintances still follow.

Think Annie Hall, or more recently 500 Days of Summer with a lot of dialogue and self-analysis and that’s Most Likely. The story is set in the early months of this decade, a key fact for understanding their position in life and their use of landline phones. In some ways, this is also the trusty buddy comedy, the most interesting lines and advice and scenes come from the repeated office-advice scenarios, something familiar for anyone with a girlfriend/boyfriend that the office knows about. No advice is solicited, but relationships are the one topic where everyone has advice.


Ben Tanzer!

Repetition is important here, so important that I didn’t realize that it was central to Ben’s writing strategy, which initially made me loathe it a bit. At first, I didn’t get the threads like “Geoff finds Paul and asks him if he wants to spark one in the alley behind the office. They spark one.” Ben was being kind of glib and stupid in an effort to be too ironic and too flat, but the humor came to me and by the end of the book, I got the trope and looked forward to it, especially advice from Descartes the management guru.

And then I got it or think I got it. The office scenes were routine and everyday in light of a possible, life-altering, non-routine relationship. What was thought initially to be routine eventually became something beyond the routine, but it all started in the routine. And that routine expanded beyond just simple office scenarios, but also into how Geoff and Jen date, their old routines influenced by habit and family and friends. Everyone has dirty laundry and it must be sorted through. Speaking of rules and dirty laundry, I’ll be honest, I was surprised at the frankness of sex in this book. I thought there would be more conversations about condoms and diseases and other contraceptives, especially since so much is exchanged not with friends but complete strangers--maybe there’s a stereotype, maybe it’s real-life, maybe it’s too real to make a point, or at least that worked with the rebound girl Claudia, so I think I talked myself around to understanding it---so it makes sense then with Geoff and Jen because it didn’t make sense for Geoff and Claudia. I got it now, I guess.

Written in short bursts (84 chapters in about 175 pages) and mostly in dialogue, Most Likely flies and every word that the characters speak is casual, but important. The use of dialogue was a highlight for me, I too am really intrigued by fiction just told in conversations between characters with little narration--I think the technique is under-appreciated, under-taught and under-utilized. And Ben has such an ear for it, a great mimicker of natural rhythms and conversations that each character is easily defined by their conversations, a task that as people we do all the time, though in writing is so much harder to nail down. So way to go Ben! (that was a forehanded compliment).

Buy Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine at Orange Alert.
Visit Ben's blog here. Read Ben's Friday Five.
More after the jump...

Year of Reading Faulkner: The Sound and The Fury Update 2

The Sound and The Fury: Update 2
(Read Update 1)

So I cheated... I read the Wikipedia page on this book after reading the Quentin section. It gave me comfort to know I am not alone. Quentin and this section are screw-ups. Figure myself to pretty savvy with the post-mod stuff, since I'm toting around a copy of A Thousand Plateaus most days, but putting the pieces of that together was difficult. To say Faulkner throws the reader into the action is a misnomer, instead he throws you in the aftermath of the action, to put together a body just from bullet holes.

A note--possibly a suicide note, someone point me to where that is in the section however. Concern/lack of concern about time---it doesn't matter to someone about to kill themselves. The immigrant girl---an obvious Caddy reference and Shreve's comment about how "it happens all the time" about how children follow him around, yes, Quentin is distraught over a lost childhood.

I understood they sold Benjy's "pasture" for Quentin's Harvard education, okay but why is that Benjy's pasture? Where is Quentin's pasture? Why doesn't he have a pasture? Do the other children have pastures?

Dalton Ames. The unspeakable name. Beat up everyone as if they are Dalton Ames. Wikipedia told me Caddy was marrying Herbert to cover up the pregnancy with Dalton Ames, but I didn't catch that was the problem. All I realized was that Caddy was marrying Herbert, but Quentin was obsessed with Dalton Ames. Maybe I should read more than 7 or 8 pages at a time...

The southern vs. northern element in this section is fascinating--how white Southerners get along better with Southern blacks, as if both sides agree on repression. Odd, really. Chivalrous Southern Gentlemen, but not chivalrous to blacks.
And these are the inconsistencies of the Southern mindset...

After trudging through this, understanding, but not understanding, confused and in awe of sentences like these:

"Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the signficance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who."

What does everyone else think so far?
More after the jump...

Lit Randomness: James Patterson, Book pirates, Dennis Cooper, Kavalier & Klay, Philip Dick

This James Patterson piece is not what you think: At NY Times Magazine.
Really this is fascinating. Writers CAN make money! A lot of money!

Philip K. Dick & the last years in Los Angeles: At LA Times (h/t Jacket Copy)

How Kavalier & Klay ruins comics for a comics guy: At The Comics Journal (h/t Bookslut)

That epic Dennis Cooper/Blake Butler piece you probably already read: At HTML Giant.
Well, read it again. It's that good.

A book pirate named The Real Caterpillar: At The Millions.



More after the jump...

review: I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

I Am Not Sidney Poitier
by Percival Everett
Graywolf Press, 2009

I feel kind of stupid for not knowing who Percival Everett was before this book. Not that I KNOW him now, but now I’m a bit more familiar, and I want to explore his back catalog, maybe take on Glyph or Suder or that beastly-sounding Strom Thurmond one. But here we are with I Am Not Sidney Poitier, an ironic statement if any, especially since the kid’s name is Not Sidney Poitier. Of course having a name as “Not...” anything would be a nice set up for a lot of cheap laughs and “Who’s on First?” montages, but of course Everett chooses the name of the most powerful African-American actor, so all of those sequences are not only more confusing, but more meaningful.

Not Sidney’s birth is a great mystery, there is no reason to believe that he was conceived by Sidney Poitier, though he might have been or his mother may have conceived him by her own thoughts, her own special form of “Fesmerizing,” a hypnosis tool that gets Not Sidney out of some sticky situations in his youth. Not Sidney’s mother dies early on, but she’s smart enough to invest heavily in a broadcasting company started by Ted Turner and leaves Not Sidney tons of cash and names Ted Turner his pseudo-guardian. Not Sidney lives with Ted Turner, but pays him rent and Turner serves him as a father offering non-sensical advice, only trumped later by one of Not Sidney’s professors at Morehouse College, Percival Everett, who teaches the philosophy of nonsense.

If all of this sounds funny it is, but the extra layer are the situations that Not Sidney finds him in, all vaguely familiar of the real Sidney Poitier’s acting career (a weird double entendre of not Sidney, because really, that’s not Sidney in those movies, it’s Sidney as an actor....and I digress), so Not Sidney is arrested for being black, is handcuffed to a white prisoner, goes home for Thanksgiving with a lighter black classmate who only wants to use him to prove him a point to her family, then ends up in Smuteye, Alabama and must solve a murder and build a church for nuns.

In the midst of this, Not Sidney is hit on by older women who believe he may be the real Sidney Poitier, because as fate would have it, Not Sidney looks eerily similar to Sidney, and all this involves a lady obsessed with bells and the words “Mr. Tibbs.”

In equal parts Forrest Gump and O Brother Where Art Thou, Everett’s book is funny on the surface level just for the comments by Ted Turner, but the linguistic wrangling of the allusions (and he never mentions a movie!) and situations provokes deeper questions about fame, race and identity in the South, without beating anything “stereotypically” Southern over us--I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a fresh way to approach the old issues, old issues that not only look absurd and nonsensical, but actually are.

More after the jump...

Lit Randomness: Stories by xTx, John Grey, Bruce Pratt, HV Whitehead

Read an article over at The Big Other (new fav. site, yeah!) and it confirmed an idea I've wanted to pursue for awhile, i.e. the need to link to more actual stories & poems, not just lit news. So Wednesdays will be for actually reading fiction & poems & interesting stories, not just talking about them.

Let me know if you've got a hot story to read (wait...I'm not starting a journal here, send me links to a fictional story/poem published somewhere else...).

"The Strain of Collusion" by xTx: At Smokelong Weekly.
MRSA is so sick!

"The Couch in Ben's Bachelor Pad" by John Grey: At This Zine Will Change Your Life.

"A Porcupine in Vermont" by Bruce Pratt: At Staccato Fiction.
Yes, porcupines!

"Three Days" by HV Whitehead: At Word Riot.
Lady Gaga's "Poker Face"? For realz? More after the jump...

Friday Five: 5 Best Things Mel Bosworth Has Read Recently

Some of you may know Mel Bosworth for being awesome. Others of you may know him for writing this cool lil' chapbook called When The Cats Razzed The Chickens. Some of you may know him for both reasons.

Some of you may also know him for popping up on the Outside Writer's Collective and on his own blog, Eddie Socko.

Some of you may not know him at all, but at least you'll know the 5 best things that he's read recently:


1) I Am Richard Simmons by Ben Tanzer. I carried this MLP chapbook in my pocket for a while to whip out whenever I ran into anyone. I may have scared a person or two, rummaging around in my front pocket, saying things like, “You’ve gotta see this!” but overall things went well. No face slaps. I keep the artifact in my “reading room” now because I enjoy reading fast, fun things in my “reading room,” and I am Richard Simmons is exactly that: fast and fun. It’s like a little ampersand-fueled train of good times.





2) "'Driving While Mexican' by Chuck Shepherd" was the header for the recent “News of the Weird” section in the local A & E publication, The Valley Advocate. The story went something like this: Mexican drivers in Dallas were being ticketed for being “non-English speaking drivers.” The phrase was part of a check-list that appeared on the officers’ in-car computers. Sadly, the officers’ issuing the tickets misinterpreted the phrase as being an “offense” instead of a mere indicator that the drivers didn’t speak English. Um, wow.


3) Museum of F***ed by David Peak is a tight, vivid little collection of shorts about urban decay put out by Warm Milk Printing Press. The writing style is clear and crisp. I like clear and crisp. Makes me feel clear and crisp.



4) Charactered Pieces by Caleb J. Ross. Man, oh man. This dark and beautiful chapbook released by OW Press is a “wow,” but in a much better sense than the “wow” from #2. It’s a collection of short stories about twisted characters doing twisted things, and it’s sticky. It sticks to your brain like peanut butter sticks to the roof of your mouth. I think I walked around clicking for a while after I read this.

5) Play on the Beach and Stay on the Beach. This is from a postcard I received from a friend. I keep it tacked to my bulletin board, right in front of me. I read it daily. It makes me grin. These days it helps me remember that there are places out there that are warm, sunny, and not buried with snow. Someday I will indeed play on the beach and stay on the beach. We all will, and it will be grand.

Ed. note: Some of you may notice that the above video ran in yesterday's Bosworth feature, was removed and now appears here. I'll tell you one thing--if you think we actually have an editor to make this note, you're more gullible than anyone has ever told you. More after the jump...

Year of Reading Faulkner Update: The Sound and The Fury

In 2010, Deckfight decided to take on Faulkner. This is a chronicle of our journey.



Hey remember this? I'll admit, it's been a bit of struggle the first two weeks. I'm going pretty slow, I'm reading some other stuff simultaneously, really just to keep my interest. Yes, this is hard. And no, I'm not totally into The Sound and The Fury yet, but I have started.

Just so we're clear, I've read no outside criticism. No Wikipedia of the book, no Cliffsnotes, and I never read this before in high school or college. I just read the back of the book and learned of Benjy the "man-child."




In my Faulkner Reader edition, I'm on page 60, 61, just after the "June 2, 1910" section. Which by the way, is this the first (and only) chapter designation? More chapters would be helpful, but I guess that would disturb the rhythm that Faulkner establishes with the time flips and italics. It's hard to read, but I settled into the rhythm of it by about the 25th or 30th page, though I felt mroe confused than the flashing-piercing-time shocks of the Lost castaways.

Benjy is what one of our Sound and Fury editions calls a "man-child," obviously mentally-incapacitated, yet observant enough to craft a nice first-person narrative. There's some weird fascination with sister Caddy, with a simmering sexual tension there--incest insinuations make me sick.

With that I'm confused on the rest of the characters and their relationships...Dilsey is obviously a caretaker/servant for the family, but I have no idea where Luster, Jason or Varsh come in, except that they sleep in a barn sometimes. And why, exactly, did they change Benjy's name from Maury? Was it because it was more biblical?

Conclusion so far: Almost threw this book down within the first 10 pages, then settled into it. Wasn't sure if the whole thing was going to be Benjy/Maury's disjointed observations, but now that I've barely started the Quentin section, I'm intrigued to see what is revealed.

Anybody else reading this? What do you think so far?
More after the jump...

review: The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons

The Book of Basketball
By Bill Simmons
ESPN, 2009

Like Gilbert Arenas' gunhandling and sharpshooting ways, ESPN writer Bill Simmons’ new Book of Basketball is a polarizing force. Sports types love him and hate him, all the while turning that interest into fat checks that other sportswriters can only imagine as heaven.

There's no stretch to suggest that Bill Simmons is perhaps the most successful Internet writer ever, his words appearing on screen long before they ever inhabited a place in a magazine. He started on some AOL sports site, gained a loyal following for essentially being one of the few relevant sports columnists to young males, daring to talk about Swingers and Vince Vaughn alongside the Boston Red Sox while others could only discuss moral turpitude and the modern athlete.

Everything Simmons did seems like no big deal now, but I guess it was and somehow he has become the most successful sportswriter in America, even though he stays at his house most of the time, never sits in a press box and has season tickets to the historically worst professional sports team.


It would be annoying for Simmons to beat his uniqueness over our heads, and he doesn’t do that in this book, but his manner seems quite irreverent for a hardcover book and basketball. All his sexual jokes are unusual in this form, where on the Internet it doesn’t seem bad at all, maybe just tame. But to talk frankly about strippers in relationship to Jason Kidd is not really funny, just kind of odd, as I can’t believe this guy is married sometimes, his frankness embarrasses me as if I'm a 7th grader reading Madame Bovary.

There exists a running count of Boogie Nights jokes, and the number dials high, and so a fictional movie about a porn star is his grand allusion, his literary cred running high. But no one came to Simmons for his literary cred, but precisely because he dared to make those comparisons in the first place. So though Boogie Nights is beat like a dead horse, that becomes the point--to beat a dead horse as many times as possible.

But concentrating on those things is not the point of the book, in fact this discussion at NY Mag, made me think the whole book was about sex. When in fact, it’s about basketball. But not an encyclopedia of basketball, or a chronology of basketball, but more of an interesting paradigm to discuss basketball. Much of the book’s structure derives from actual conversations, claims Simmons, in the vein of one of his favorite buddy-Vegas movies apparently. So there’s a pyramid of the greatest 90 some odd players to have played the game of basketball, a riveting chapter on the debate of Chamberlain vs. Russell and a ranking of the most dominant teams best in the spirit of Keyser Soze (watch The Usual Suspects).

It is no surprise that the Boston Celtics have a significant role in this book, much because Simmons is a Boston native, raised on the Celtics and Larry Bird and the legend of Bill Russell. But even though Simmons cares deeply about the Celtics, his arguments in favor of them are well-reasoned and factually based, the only subjective part is how high to rank Rober Parrish over James Worthy or the proper place of Dennis Johnson in the pantheon of minor all-stars. This pyramid ranking of the greats is the meatiest of the book, though his meeting with Isaiah Thomas to discuss “the secret” is the crux of Simmons’ argument, boiling down to the fact that basketball is not about basketball, meaning that the me-first Chamberlain fails to the team-first Russell, that Jordan understood “the secret” after two years off playing baseball, that Kobe may not have grasped “the secret” until Shaq/Jackson troubles and rape accusations.

I actually liked the ending interview with Bill Walton better, where Walton frames it as players making "a choice" to be unselfish, rather than "the secret." But Simmons met Isaiah Thomas at a topless bar and he only met Walton in his house, so "the secret" it is.

But I generally support Simmons’ outlook on basketball. I enjoy Magic Johnson. I understand the greatness of Hakeen Olajuwon and how underrated Tim Duncan is. I don’t think John Stockton or Patrick Ewing were as bad as Simmons says. Now he is rightfully Kevin Durant’s greatest cheerleader.

Back over at NY Mag, they try to dissect “micro” vs. “macro” Simmons, meaning can you put up with Simmons’ style to understand his points? Many times, I can’t. As a frequent reader of his columns, I bypass all of his football columns, because I don’t enjoy whining about fantasy teams and Simmons has singlehandedly made me want to avoid ever watching Swingers or the aforementioned Boogie Nights—I get enough of those two cinematic masterpieces from the scraps and fragments I pull together from all of Simmons’ columns and books. His boyhood fantasies and trips to Vegas have proven proper canon fodder for quite awhile, he’s going to have to take a few more local trips through Hollywood or twist his writing into sassy parenting metaphors a la Neal Pollack to stick around much longer. In other words, even Vince Vaughan has grown up.

This edition of the Book of Basketball may be Simmons’ last stand with his most familiar metaphors. With the rise of Deadspin and more focus on differing approaches to basketball in general (read FreeDarko.com), Simmons is dangerously close to becoming the new old guard. But this book is a powerful defense. More after the jump...

We read books in 2009. Here are our favorites.

There were a lot of books that came out in 2009 I wanted to read. We know the motto though, time is of the essence. I will not pretend to act like I know what really happened in the lit world in 2009.

All I know is that I started Inherent Vice and couldn't/didn't want to finish it.

All I know is that 2009 made me tired of one of my favorite authors (here's looking at you, Dave Eggers. I still like you, I just kind of OD'd on you. For the record, Vol. 1 Brooklyn was my pusher).

All I know is that Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer are more of a threat to literature than ebooks.

All I know is that I haven't made room yet for Scorch Atlas (gasp!) or Chronic City, two books I'm pretty sure I'd like. Also right now, I'm in the middle of 2666, Simmons' Book of Basketball, Lipsyte's new one and have Blood's A Rover and Amigoland on hold at the library. Those may have found their way on here if I finish any of them before the year is out.

So this is a list of the books we enjoyed the most this year and had never read before. Some of these books came out in 2009, some of them didn't. This is not a "best of" list; it's a favorites of 2009.

My list is up first, followed by Josh Rank....



1. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
2. Hopscotch by Cortazar
3. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
4. The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno
5. Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon by Christopher Cunningham & Hosho McCreesh
6. Hard Times by Studs Terkel
7. if on a winter’s night a traveler by Calvino
8. Columbine by Dave Cullen
9. Arkansas by John Brandon
10. Shake the Devil Off by Ethan Brown
11. Lowboy by John Wray
12. Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott
13. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
14. A.D. new orleans after the deluge by Josh Neufeld
15. Our Noise: the story of merge records by John Cook
16. Floodmarkers by Nic Brown

Josh Rank's list

1. Deliverance - James Dickey

The writing style had me hooked from the second page. I bought the book because I heard there was a pretty gnarly sodomy scene but there turned out to be a really good book on both sides of it. It ended up being based around a group’s struggle with morality when faced with the possibility of zero repercussions. Is it okay to kill when it’s necessary? The group answered in a scene so vividly described I felt as if I were climbing the trees right beside them.

2. What is the What – Dave Eggers

If you think your life sucks, read this book. The main character, Valentino Achak Deng, is a real person. Yeah, this actually happened to somebody. The book outlines Deng’s journey out of war-torn Sudan and into Atlanta where things continue to go wrong. You think it sucks that your girl/boyfriend broke up with you? Well at least you don’t have to worry about lions eating your head after you just watched your mother get shot in the face.

3. Pygmy – Chuck Palahniuk

Palahniuk has made a name for himself taking fiction into new directions. Pygmy takes that idea to another level. Written in the voice of an adolescent, non-native English speaker, it is a chore to trudge through at first. After getting used to the style, though, the story lives up to Chuck’s level of story-telling.

4. When You Are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris

A main concern for musicians and writers alike is to not repeat yourself. However, when your style is as good as Sedaris’ this doesn’t need to be a concern. If you like anything he’s every written, this book doesn’t disappoint.

5. A Father’s Story – Lionel Dahmer

I may have an unhealthy interest in serial killers. When I got a chance to read about the childhood of my favorite one (is it wrong to have a favorite?) I jumped at the chance. Be prepared to actually think of Jeffery Dahmer as a person and not a monster. It’s a little strange.

6. Blindness – Jose Saramago

An epidemic of blindness takes over. People freak and lock up the infected in an old insane asylum. Shit gets crazy. Beautifully chosen words drag us through the mud of blindness and we come out with a great story.

7. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you like books that give you characters you become attached to, this book is not for you. Characters come and go constantly from page one until the end. However, the manner of their entrances and exits provide a narrative that makes you feel like you’re reading a dream.

8. Women – Charles Bukowski

Watch an interview with Bukowski and then read this book. Everything will make perfect sense. However, feminists should stay far, far away.

9. Dream House – Valerie Laken

A young couple buys a house together only to find it to be the scene of a crime from years before. The writing style is enough to pull you through but the consistently moving action acts as a motor that doesn’t let you stop until you’re finished. Plus, the author is a pretty sharp dresser.

More after the jump...

Friday 5: Five Best Things Shya Scanlon Has Read Recently

Everything is new again, so Shya Scanlon is serializing his novel, Forecast. Its 42 weeks over 42 blogs, which both honors the literary blogs while also throwing in some others to try and gain some new readers (I'm just guessing...nobody told me that's the exact purpose, but I'm sure that purpose is not disagreeable).


He got Kottke to sign on, so I'm impressed. The whole thing wraps up in a couple weeks and Shya recently announced that Forecast will be released "properly" (I'll let you define that word) in by Flatmancrooked.

Shya's "crazy" method has garnered him quite a bit of attention on the interwebs, but this interview with JacketCopy sums it all up nicely. In the midst of this, Shya was nice enough to tell us the 5 best things he has read recently (submitted about 2 wks ago):

5. An email from my dear friends Chad and Megan, saying they’ve gotten engaged.



4. About half of the pieces in AM/PM by Amelia Gray. I think many of the short prose pieces in this collection are terrific. She has an amazing sense of humor, and although there’s a bit too much filler in the book—I think her concept got the best of her—it’s well worth the read.

3. A Jello Horse by Matthew Simmons. It’s somehow incredibly concise without being dense, and highly emotional without being dramatic. It’s a remarkable novella.



2. The fifth chapter of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. It’s mindbendingly funny. I’ve read the passage many times, and it still very nearly brings me to tears it’s so damn good. I first encountered it at a talk given by David Wilson of The Museum of Jurassic Technology, who read it aloud before giving a slideshow about miniature art. I thought I was on drugs.

1. Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. It’s a memoir and it’s a war story and it’s a mystery and it’s all told in a neat fractured narrative based on rhythm and breath.


And some housekeeping---I've done a few of these now, so does everybody like these from the authors? Or would you prefer a 'traditional' interview in addition or instead of? Let me know.
More after the jump...