An advance review of The Insurgent has appeared on DescriptedLines.
Noah Cicero’s The Insurgent will be published in February. The book will be available for pre-order on the BLATT website in the coming days. Look for upcoming features on the book on htmlgiant.com and 3ammagazine.com.
“Travis seems to continually win the battle between a raw collection of words and organized original thought.”
Read the excellent review of Travis Jeppesen’s Dicklung & Others over at Orange Alert.
The London launch for Heidi James’s new novel, CARBON, will be held next Wednesday, October 28th. It will begin at 4pm and will be held in the John Galsworthy building at Kingston University (details at the main reception on Penrhyn Road). There’ll be an introduction by Professor Simon Morgan Wortham, a reading and of course, drinks!
You can order CARBON via the BLATT website, www.blatt.cz, or on Amazon.com.
Karl Whitney reviews Heidi James’s Carbon on 3ammagazine.com.
Raymond Federman, author of over a dozen works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, passed away on October 6th, according to his daughter. He was eighty-one-years old.
Federman was born in Montrouge, France on May 15, 1928. When the Nazis invaded France, his parents hid him in a closet – an experience the author would later draw on in his 1979 work, The Voice in the Closet. His family did not survive the Holocaust. In 1947, Federman immigrated to the United States, eventually earning his PhD in literature at UCLA in 1963 and becoming one of America’s most vocal apologists of Samuel Beckett.
Federman’s own work is characterized by extreme fragmentation, formal experimentation, and inventive wordplay. In a 2006 interview with Rain Taxi magazine, Federman stated: “It’s clear, I think, once one gets into my work, that I am a multiple human being. Not only in the way I live — I live like a good bourgeois, I play golf, I used to be a paratrooper, I played the saxophone, I bummed around, I starved in New York, I did all those things — so it’s clear when I sit down to write that I am not one single voice.”
For over two decades, Federman worked as a professor at the University of Buffalo. He retired in 1999, and devoted the remaining years of his life to a prolific output of writing. Some of his best-known books include Double or Nothing, My Body in Nine Parts, To Whom It May Concern, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, and The Twofold Vibration. His study of Samuel Beckett, Journey into Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction, is considered to be a pioneering work of the Irish author and is frequently cited by Beckett scholars. Federman also maintained a lively blog that has been highly popular in the experimental literary community.
Federman’s most recent book was The Carcasses: A Fable, though there is much speculation that the late author left behind a slew of unpublished and unfinished works.
Carbon author Heidi James is among the fantastic writers featured at this upcoming gig in London on July 31st. Don’t miss it!
For all our Spanish-speaking readers out there…. Check out this clip of Heidi James talking about her new novel. CARBON has already been released to critical acclaim in the Spanish-speaking world. You’ll be able to read the original English language version of the novel from BLATT in October.
Read the review at CultureVulture.
“A post-trauma text, a post-coital text that in its ragged breath speaks in short bursts, in order to regain unity and cohesion.”
Heidi James reviews C. Bard Cole’s This is Where My Life Went Wrong for 3ammagazine.
So… we are still alive and kicking, despite all claims to the contrary! In addition to publishing Aleš Mustar’s poetry debut, C(o)urt Interpretations, we’ve spent the last year plotting our next move. While we can’t say when the next issue of the magazine will be out at this point, we are proud to announce the publication of four new books in 2009:
This is Where My Life Went Wrong, a novel by C. Bard Cole
Carbon, a novel by Heidi James
Dicklung & Others, poetry by Travis Jeppesen
The Insurgent, a novel by Noah Cicero
The first of these, This is Where My Life Went Wrong, will be in stores on March 1, 2009. Of C. Bard Cole’s debut novel, Sarah Schulman writes,
In this associative road trip through “Americaville”, Bard internalizes the true history of our literature. Playful, intense, filled with leaps off of various cliffs. A tribute (high and low) to the thought/sentence – how its preserved secrets and blurted truths operate in daily life.
Next up will be Heidi James’s long-awaited debut novel Carbon. El Tercer Nombre in Madrid recently acquired Spanish world rights for Carbon.
Dicklung & Others will collect a healthy (or toxic, depending on who you’re asking) batch of Travis Jeppesen’s poetic output since Poems I Wrote While Watching TV inaugurated BLATT Books in 2006.
Finally, we will close out 2009 with a new Noah Cicero novel, The Insurgent. Brilliant, witty, and seething with discontent, Cicero is truly the voice of the Other America.
***
Beginning in 2009, BLATT Books will be sponsored by ArtBar71. If you happen to be in Berlin, stop by and visit us at this awe-inspiring gallery-bar space in the Mitte district at Kronenstrasse 71. Plans are underway for a monthly BLATT reading series, so subscribe to our mailing list or our Myspace to keep abreast of all BLATT activity, local and worldwide.
Have a great 2009, and thanks for your interest and support in all things BLATT!
“Resist, Rebel, Relax… Ahh”
Friday May 2nd, 7pm. FREE
The KGB Bar, 85 West 4th Street, NYC 10003
www.kgbbar.com
Tony O’Neill, Zachary German, Lee Rourke, Tao Lin
Tony O’Neill is the author of “Digging the Vein” (Contemporary Press) and the forthcoming “Down and Out on Murder Mile” (Harper Perennial)
“Digging the Vein is phenomenal” [Jerry Stahl]
In summer 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be publishing “Eat When You Feel Sad”, Zachary German’s debut novel. Selections from Eat When You Feel Sad are available at Bear Parade.com. Zachary has a blog called “every time a police officer gets shot i throw a party”.
Lee Rourke is the author of ‘Everyday’ [Social Disease]. He writes for The Observer and The Guardian, edits ‘Scarecrow’ and is reviews/contributing editor of 3AM Magazine.
“Sick, depraved and utterly mad, with no redeeming features whatsoever. I loved it”. [Stewart Home, author of Slow Death and 69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess].
“Dark and seamy stuff – London from p.o.v. pigeon-in-gutter” [Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, Men in Space, Tintin and the Secret of Literature]
Tao Lin is the author of “Eeeee Eee Eeee,” “Bed,” and “you are a little bit happier than i am.” Melville House Publishing is publishing his second-poetry collection, “cognitive-behavioral therapy,” in may, 2008. His website is called “Reader of Depressing Books,” and he has been published in Vice, Bear Parade, Noon, and Nerve.
“Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass – from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious.” – [Miranda July]
Heidi James, Matthew Coleman, and Lee Rourke on the Offbeat Generation Video Channel.
This over at the Guardian’s web site
The BLATT Books “We Love America and America Loves Us” Sale
Coyote got your blanket? Wolf at the door? BLATT is here to help! As a sign of our sympathy, we’ve marked down the prices on all titles for our US customers.
You’ll still pay a lot more if you order our books over Amazon – and you’ll have to wait a lot longer. Then again, that’s your own fault for supporting an evil corporation instead of getting the goods direct from the dealer. When you order from us, you save money AND time – you’ll most likely get your copy within a week.
Get all of them today, because, as you should know well by now, nothing lasts forever – not even capitalism.
Go to http://www.blatt.cz/shop/ today and snatch yourself a piece of the American Dream.