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5-9-08 Speaking of new sites, please pay a visit to Eleni Sikelianos’s new page launched in part to provide info about the upcoming release of her new collection, Body Clock, this fall. 4-28-08 This is an overdue notice: Duncan Barlow’s wonderful novel, Super Cell Anemia, is out from Afterbirth Books.
2-27-08 I’m very happy to announce that Actes Sud, who have published both The Impossibly and Indiana, Indiana in French, have just made a nice offer for The Exquisite. More later when I have a pub date, name of translator, etc. Look for reviews I’ve written of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by Julio Cortazar, The Boat, by Nam Le, and the Memoirs of Voltaire in upcoming issues of The Believer, Bookforum and Raintaxi, respectively. My translation of and interview with the French novelist Oliver Rohe is now up at Drunken Boat. Please pay a visit. 1-2-2008 Happy 2008! If you have a moment, take a peek at the story + interview up at Smokelong Quarterly, a fine online destination. 7-31-07 Heading Europe-ward, to Spain, France and Greece. Back in October, with any luck I'll have an advanced draft of the new book, Ray of the Star, in hand. (...) The French version of Indiana, Indiana was very generously reviewed in Le Monde, La Matricule des Anges, Rendez-Vous, Livres Hebdo and Les Inrockuptibles, among other places. 5.10.07 Bud Parr's excellent 1 Minute Video Inspired by The Exquisite is available again for viewing. The Exquisite was chosen for a 2006 Believer Book Award by Mark Swartz. This was part of the writer's survey they conducted. His citation reads: "A great many writers aspire to write the ultimate post-9/11 novel. Laird Hunt may actually have pulled it off with The Exquisite, a watercolor sketch of a halfhearted hit man rambling through a para-noir, paranoid, paranormal Manhattan. Every time “murder” comes out of Henry’s mouth, the word sounds slightly different, until the voice becomes comfortingly reliable in its unreliability." The French version of Indiana, Indiana, translated by Barbara Schmidt, is out and garnering some strong reviews. Janelle Martin, at Eclectic Closet, has this nice look at The Ex. Nate Haken gives The Exquisite a very thoughtful reading at the lively new journal Cadillaccicatrix. Among other things, he writes: "...reading The Exquisite is an odd and beautiful experience with loosely related anecdotes and characters and settings. As we turn the pages we find ourselves artfully escorted by twists and turns, up one alley and down the next, into nooks and crannies so immense that one can see 'The rising sun was dribbling rivulets of light into the troughs of the cross-town streets…', and anecdotes like the one about a guy named Fish with a blind roommate who doesn't know that he is there." If you are in Chicago this Thursday, Feb. 1, I will be reading for Bookslut with Simone Muench and Gerard Donovan: Hopleaf Bar: 7:30 p.m. This nice note over at Five C Reviews... The excellent indy McNally Robinson has The Ex up as a staff pick. Ed Park rates The Ex one of his favorite fictions of the year at The Dizzies. An interview I did with Andrew Ervin can be viewed at Bookslut. Matthew Tiffany's review of The Exquisite is up at Popmatters. The Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum has a very generous review of The Ex in it (along with, among other good stuff, a dossier on Sebald and an excellent piece on Cormac McCarthy's searing The Road). Exquisite ephemera... Over at Bookmunch, Jane Bradley has nice things to say about The Ex. The Ex gets a nice mention on Slate today -- apparently it's overlooked. I must say it doesn't feel that way! The Village Voice says... The Ex is a daily dose pick at Powells for today, October 10. Rake's Progress bounces off The Stranger in deciding The Ex worked for him. Duncan Barlow's cat, Monkey, approves of the book. Time Out NYC and Seattle's The Stranger generously accord The Ex some column inches. Bud Parr has posted this interview. Powell's has made The Ex a staff pick. Largehearted Boy posts an Exquisite playlist: David Gutowski says, “Shocking, intellectual, eerie, and wonderfully written, The Exquisite is my favorite literary thriller of the year.” Carrie Jones has some pleasant things to say about The Exquisite at KGBBarLit. Sarah Weinman has made The Exquisite a pick of the week at Confessions
of an Idiosyncratic Mind. She writes, "This is so, so my kind
of book. A broken young man gets mixed up with a There is an amazing review of The Exquisite by Lance Olsen in the Fall print issue of Rain Taxi. Olsen writes, "The Exquisite is both a response to 9/11 and a paean to Manhattan—especially to its seedy, shadowy, cramped, and unhinged Lower East Side, where anything can and does happen. . . . Here is an extraordinarily intelligent, goofy, pained, energetic, gorgeously written work that insists on letting the existential unsteadiness that defines our era shape its very rhythms, warps, textual flexures." Bud Parr, my new hero, has put up this fabulous little movie inspired by The Exquisite, on his fab blog.
Pay a visit to this awesome trailer for the book -- a million thanks to Tom Henwood and Daniel Brothers (plus a mysterious individual smoking a cigarette)!!! Matt Cheney has a nice reaction to a partial read of The Exquisite over on The Mumpsimus. Bud Parr, who runs the excellent Chekhov's Mistress, has this to say about The Exquisite. And also gives it another nice shout here. The Exquisite is featured in the Page One section of the September issue of Poets & Writers. The online version has a little feature on the book. If you want a preview of chapter 1, go here. A terrific review of The Exquisite by Donna Seaman, who calls it "an edgy and labyrinthine tale of longing, madness, and death," just came in from Booklist. The whole text can be found on The Exquisite page. Motoyuki Shibata, translator extraordinaire of Indiana, Indiana, has sent along a pair of reviews of the Japanese edition. This nice bit on The Exquisite. Not the first time I've had reason to send thanks out to Caleb Wilson (see below). Oh, and reading Sebald is absolutely not a pre-req for reading The Exquisite, not to worry! Please pay a visit to this photographic dream tour of The Exquisite's East Village haunting grounds, with photos by Chris Narozny. There have been early sightings of The Exquisite at St. Mark's Books in New York and the Boulder Bookstore. And elsewhere? Drop me a line at lairdhunt@earthlink.net and let me know if you have seen it. I'm told it likely won't be in the big chains until the Sept. 1 pub date, or thereabouts. The Exquisite is a Booksense notable selection for the month of September. Axel Alfaro of Puerto Rico was the first to write in about the giveaway copy of The Exquisite so I will be speeding a copy out to him. The Exquisite is back from the printer. So while it won't be generally available until September, it does exist. To celebrate, I'd like to send a free copy to the first person I've never met who emails me with the subject line: It's Alive! Sorry people I've met. I love you too! Reviews of The Exquisite are starting to come in. Take a look here for a sampling. DU's Danielle Dutton, whose novel Sprawl was accepted by Clear Cut Press earlier this year, has had a second book, Attempts at a Life, accepted for publication by Tarpaulin Sky's new imprint. There are very nice blurbs on The Exquisite in from Sam Lipsyte and Shelley Jackson -- have a look. The Japanese edition of Indiana, Indiana, translated by Motoyuki Shibata, is getting ready to hit bookstores in Japan The Gravedigger, a novel by Peter Grandbois, is out! Grandbois is a marvelous writer and well-worth supporting. Lydia Davis is reading tonight, April 20th, at 7:30, in room 286 of DU's Sturm Hall. This is nice. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. The Exquisite gets its first mention here. Please pay a visit to Heart Hammer. Visits should become more and more worthwhile. Well, maybe. Dog Trainers for No Pets, a cool new blog, can be found here. Matt Cheney at The Mumpsimus has been kind enough to post the text of the talk I gave at AWP as part of the Nonrealist fiction panel sponsored by Omnidawn (see just below). The very nice-looking bound galleys for The Exquisite are back from the printers. To request review copies, etc., please contact Publicist Lauren Snyder at Lauren@coffeehousepress.org. For a look at Linda Koutsky's cover design for The Exquisite, click here. DU Grad student Danielle Dutton's novel SPRAWL has been accepted for publication by the excellent Clear Cut Press. Event: Nonrealist Fiction: Writing That Alters, Subverts, Re-envisions The Real. (Brian Evenson, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link, Laird Hunt, Matthew Cheney, Kenneth Keegan) Why do writers, editors, and publishers choose to present work that doesn't conform to accepted notions of reality? Does such writing provoke a questioning of accepted frames for experience, of ethical issues germane to our times? Why have literary critics disparaged writing that doesn't conform to the realist test? Panelists will discuss the burgeoning fields of nonrealistic writing, which have previously been relegated outside literary fiction's sanctioned bounds. (9-10:15 a.m., March 11, Austin Convention Center, Meeting Room 4ABC) The inimitable Gary Lutz is interviewed in the February edition of The Believer. A new review of Une Impossibilité (the French version of The Impossibly) is up here. The second issue of Marginalia, from Western State College, featuring an interview with George Saunders and work by Brian Evenson, Wendy Walker, Pedro Ponce and many snazzy others, is now available for perusing. DU grad student Sandy Florian's Cantos have been accepted for Garner by Kirstin Allio, which was published this Fall by Coffee House Press, is the The Litblog Co-op's Winter 2005 READ THIS! selection. Coming Soon: Paraspheres (Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Fiction) from Omnidawn. Coming this Spring: PP/FF: An Anthology (edited by Peter Conners) from Starcherone. Look for an excerpt from Vacant Lot, a novel by Oliver Rohe, translated from the French by yours undoubtedly, in an upcoming issue of the excellent Drunken Boat. Issue one of Ellipsis, a new journal devoted to "literary serials and narrative culture", has released its first issue and with it the first installment of a six-part serial, called Without Remainder, by yours undoubtedly. A sample can be found here. The ever more indispensable Archipelago Books has released Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury (translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies), which the January 15 issue of the New York Times Book Review rightly calls "a genuine masterwork." The November issue of The Believer has a long, generous article on The Impossibly and its cousins by Mark Kamine. The following teaser doesn't get too far, so it might be worth finding a copy of the magazine. Four Gentle Persuasions, a long article on Georges Perec, was published by Editions Inculte this Fall in a gorgeous re-release of the 1979 issue of L'ARC dedicated to Perec. Feel free to ignore the bit where I get called a Perec specialist. Devotee is more like it.
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