Laird Hunt: elsewhere

"...incredibly funny and well-written and oddly touching, and certainly unlike anything else you've read this year."
-The Capitol Times

Elsewhere, News & Links

Time Out!

date: Aug 28, 2009

Time Out Chicago and Time Out New York have both weighed in, simultaneously, on Ray of the Star. Thanks to both!

Indiana, Indiana at Buntport

date: Aug 18, 2009

The marvelous Denver based Buntport theater company has put up details about its forthcoming production of Indiana, Indiana (based on my second novel).

The Collagist

date: Aug 18, 2009

Dzanc Books has started an excellent new journal called The Collagist, edited by Matt Bell. Check it (and a Ray excerpt) out here.

Not Normal, Illinois

date: Aug 18, 2009

Michael Martone’s anthology, Not Normal, Illinois, peculiar fictions from the flyover, is now out from Indiana University Press. Some great stuff included, and a piece of mine called Happy Film.

First Ray Reading

date: Aug 11, 2009

The 5th Anniversary of Vermin on the Mount!

Savor a Night of Irreverent Readings with Laird Hunt, Sean Carswell, D.R. Haney, Alicia Gifford and your host, Jim Ruland!

Sunday, August 23 8pm at The Mountain, 473 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, LA.

FREE rat cake for the filthy and the depraved!

Indiana, Indiana and The Exquisite

date: Jul 31, 2009

M.T. Fallon at Trestle just put up this interesting post about Indiana, Indiana, while Val Killpack had this to say about The Exquisite at Literary Analysis. Many thanks to you both!

In the same week that Publisher’s Weekly called Ray of the Star, among other things, a “sour mishmash of unexplainable sadness”, David Milofsky, writing in the Denver Post, said the same book “has a mesmerizing quality that is hard to resist and is frequently dazzling in its evocation of both place and states of mind” (who was right? you decide!), while the New York Times reserved judgement but generously ran a playlist I put together around my various books.

In other words, the fun has started!

Five Reviews: Book 3

date: Jun 25, 2009

An excerpt from a short review I did some years ago in Rain Taxi of Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones.

Dreams and Stones, Polish writer Magdalena Tulli’s first novel to be published in the United States, dexterously braids cords of memory, imagination, and elegiac intensity, as she give us the story of the founding and development of a major city and, by extension of all cities: a brilliant tale of “these interpenetrating spaces” that become “ever more confused, entangled, diffuse.” Tulli manages with apparent ease to parse the shifting urban amalgam she posits into complementary component parts that are rendered with great exactitude: “The city of yesterday and the city of today can seem like a pair of identical looking pictures from a puzzle in which on closer inspection one may find a flag missing from a rooftop, an additional flowerpot on a windowsill or one more sparrow upon a ledge.”

To read the whole review, click here.

Five Reviews: Book 2

date: Jun 23, 2009

Excerpt from a review I did for Bookforum of Nam Le’s The Boat.

The unusually various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection, The Boat, live between worlds. In “Cartagena,” for example, a teenage contract killer in Colombia moves from squalid shantytowns to his master’s opulent mansion; in “Hiroshima,”a young girl shifts unambiguously toward death in the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; and in the title story, a Vietnamese refugee overtaken by a storm on the South China Sea feels as if she is “soaring through the air, the sky around [her] dark and inky and shifting.” As these brief descriptions indicate, the book’s seven stories are also diverse in setting and mode. Consequently, the reader, invited to travel from, say, a tale of cultural and generational estrangement in Iowa City to a brooding coming-of-age story in an Australian coastal town, becomes a participant in Le’s transglobal examination of lives being lived in mental and physical border zones.

To read the whole review, click here

Five Reviews: Book 1

date: Jun 22, 2009

An excerpt from and link to a review I did for The Believer of Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.

Envision a journey informed by a playfully relaxed version of Zeno’s paradox on the impossibility of forward motion, and you’ll have a sense of the spirit presiding over Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. But only a sense, for if this collaborative volume, which recounts a thirty-three-day, 490-mile meander along the Paris-Marseille autoroute, at the carefully calculated rate of two rest stops per day, has an air of high jinks about it, the mad enterprise is also imbued with an air of sweet melancholy, a by-product of the mental and physical demons afflicting the two voyagers. Indeed, given that Canadian writer and activist Carol Dunlop died shortly after the trip was completed, and that Julio Cortazar—Argentinian author of vertiginous twentieth-century experimental classics such as Hopscotch—nearing the end of his own days, was left to finish the resultant book alone, it’s hard not to read a little too much sadness into the proceedings. Happily, though, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute resists projected pathos with the same vigor that “Fafner,” Cortazar and Dunlop’s fiery red VW camper, valiantly resisted the elements. To read the whole review click here

Indiana, Indiana on the Stage

date: Jun 09, 2009

The marvelous Denver-based Buntport Theater has announced its fall lineup, which will include their adaptation of my second novel, Indiana, Indiana.

Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 5

date: Jun 01, 2009

The fifth of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.

It would be hard to overstate the impact the writings of Georges Perec have had on my work. Whether in his increasingly unsettling debut Things, his pamphlet sized cabinet of wonders, A Portrait Gallery, or in his masterwork, a book Warren Motte has put forward as perhaps the greatest work in French of the 20th century, Life: A User’s Manual, there is much in Perec to stun and refresh. Ray of the Star opens with an epigraph from Perec’s novella A Man Asleep (trans. by Andrew Leak): “Now you must learn how to last.” My protagonist, Harry Tichborne, enacts the inverse of Perec’s man and his gradual move into Bartelby-esque stasis, but the shoe of existential melancholia is always threatening to drop back on him. Or maybe the boot.

Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 4

date: May 30, 2009

The fourth of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.

Marie Redonnet’s Forever Valley (trans. Jordan Stump) hit me like a ton of bricks when I first came across it. Part of what Redonnet calls a triptych, rather than a trilogy, Forever Valley stands alongside Hotel Splendid and Rose Mellie Rose just outside of time, just outside of place. In Forever Valley, the young female narrator, who lives alone with an aging minister in a valley that is going to be flooded, spends her free time digging holes to try and find the cemetery that long since erased any trace of itself. That all she ever manages to uncover is ooze is terribly a propos in the watery universe of the triptych. The narrator’s preferred pastime puts me in mind of the instruction that my friend the writer Selah Saterstrom received many a time in her youth (and which I borrowed in my novel The Exquisite ) to go out into the yard and “dig for the devil.” In Ray of the Star Harry Tichborne does his own variety of digging in a city that is not quite Barcelona and a time that is not quite now and is both surprised and not surprised by what he digs up.

Ray Sighting

date: May 29, 2009

Time Out New York is showing some Book Expo America acquisitions.

Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 3

date: May 29, 2009

The third of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.

Ann Quin’s 1964 debut novel Berg famously begins with the following, set apart on its own page: “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….” The backbone of Berg‘s plot duly summarized, Quin goes on to give us a novel about how lives get lived in the odd torquing of language, or perhaps how odd lives get lived in the torquing of language. Berg/Greb, a traveling salesman (hair tonic) in an off season past its sales date “resort” town in England, lives in a highly active, highly interesting befuddlement that infects everything that surrounds him.

“Isn’t there a moment caught between two moods, that space within, separated from life, as well as death, when the sun is faced without blinking, when eternity lies here inside; no division whatsoever, simply a series of circular motivations?”

I hope so.

Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 2

date: May 28, 2009

The second of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.

What happens to literary characters when they die? What does it take to kill them? Can they be killed? Do they go quietly? Loudly? Would they sit down in pleasant conversation with their creator or look to strangle him/her? What if that creator were dead or even long dead? What if the character in question wasn’t quite a character (as in a “person” in a novel) but one of several “heteronyms”—identities created by a writer to speak to various distinct impulses: to create works of their own? What if the heteronym in question wasn’t quite “dead” yet—but had one last year to live? These are just a few of the questions that come up in reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, not necessarily the best known book by Portuguese Nobel Laureate, but for my money one of the best. Saramago’s sentences appear to be much more languid than those of the author of The Assignment (see yesterday’s note) and they are certainly shorter (though some can rack up quite a few clauses before they quit), but they are curiously ropey, muscular things: metonyms for the marvelous complexity that Saramago builds as he narrates this final year. In RayI was interested in cultivating an improbable hopefulness in the face of felt ultimacies (I like the idea that they might be made of felt)—Saramago’s novel was particularly helpful in this regard.

Influences on Ray of the Star: Book 1

date: May 27, 2009

The first of five books that influenced the writing of Ray of the Star.

The first book is one I haven’t read. Or have only read a little of. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment. I picked this up on a recommendation I’ve now forgotten (thank you and apologies to whomever that was) and read five or six of the Swiss writer’s pages long propulsive sentences, which he was using to tell a murder mystery, and I knew I wanted to try to do something like it (though not a murder mystery). This meant, my thinking went, that I had to put the book down and begin straightaway to actively forget it, so that when I started my own story, I wouldn’t be doing knock-off Dürrenmatt. I’ve read other of his works and highly recommend the selected essays edited by Brian Evenson. And now that Ray is done I look forward to finishing The Assignment