Chris Dankland

Chris Dankland is the co-founder of X-R-A-Y. His head is made of smoke.

ALL OUR TOMORROWS: AN INTERVIEW WITH AMY DEBELLIS by Chris Dankland

Over the last year or so, Amy DeBellis has been one of my favorite newer short story writers. Now she has a new novel, ‘All Our Tomorrows,’  published by CLASH Books, which is one of my favorite books of the year.Her writing is so skillful: the language, the plots, the pacing, the characters. But I also love her writing because I find many of her stories to be dark and bleak. To me, her stories feel steeped in depression, menace, and a kind of claustrophobic doom. I want to present the reader some examples of stories we’ve published by DeBellis:Purgatory’ –- a short story about a teen who becomes infatuated with a boy at her highschool who is killing animals. Soon he teaches her how to hunt and they start shooting animals together in the woods: deer, foxes, frogs. At one point the boy says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.” Then the story says: “She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.” The story ends with them shooting the neighbor’s cat.His Body’ — a short story about a woman whose husband has caught an STD that causes incurable lesions to break out all over his body. The holes in the flesh never go away, until eventually his entire body is covered in them.We also published three micros by her:Yakutsk’ — about a woman who is getting ready to wander alone into the frozen taigaWake’ — about a woman at her mother’s funeral. First sentence: “Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky.” And a micro titled: ‘Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill.’I spoke with DeBellis about her writing.

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Chris Dankland: Hi Amy! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Do you feel like your writing as a whole tends toward the melancholic, or does it only show up in certain pieces? Is that feeling something you consciously cultivate and lean into, or does it emerge naturally? Amy DeBellis: I do think it leans towards the melancholic as a whole. (In fact, it’s like the Tower of Pisa with how much it leans…) I’m trying to think of a piece I’ve written in the last couple of years that doesn’t have that darkness, and I’m coming up short. Even humorous pieces (“Upgrade” in HAD, for example, or “Persistence” in Roi Fainéant) have elements of darkness in them—it’s just that that darkness isn’t played straight the way it is in the majority of my writing. Yeah, it’s in everything. It emerges naturally. I love beautiful things—for me, in many ways, the written word is the ultimate form of beauty—but I also believe you can’t have beauty without something to contrast it. That discordant note. That, to quote Donna Tartt, “little speck of rot”. Except for me it’s a little bit more than a speck.  CD: To me, your stories often feel physically heavy. Sometimes I get a weird image when I read your work of a stone sinking in water. You are very good at embodying emotion and describing it in a tactile way. Your stories feel like they live in the body: grief shows up as fatigue, sorrow has weight, dread feels like muscle tension. Is this a conscious part of your craft, this physical translation of emotional states? AD: I love the image of the stone! And that’s a huge compliment, that my writing could give you this mental image. I’ve always believed that the body is the seat of memory. There’s this wonderful Stephen King quote: “Art consists of the persistence of memory.” So the body and art are inextricably linked, being as they are both holders and representations of memory. And since the present runs continuously into the past, almost everything not held by the future is already a memory. I personally feel emotions very strongly, so no, it’s not really conscious that this comes across in my work. I mean, of course I try to choose the best descriptors for a feeling of dread, but the translation of emotional states to the physical—I believe it’s the most powerful way to get across emotion to a reader who might not have experienced the same thing that’s happening in the story. Let’s say there is a story about a grieving widow. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have lost a husband, or even to have lost a close family member, but everyone knows the feeling of grief. Describing it as a physical sensation is a way to bring the reader into their body (not their mind, where they’re thinking Oh but I was never a grieving widow) and force them to feel the emotions of the piece.     CD: I feel like the three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows’ are all stuck in a depressive rut at the beginning of the book. The characters are isolated in the sense that they are always wearing some sort of mask around most people. They don’t feel a real human connection with others, and this only starts to change near the end of the book when the characters meet.For most of the book, each character seems trapped in their own depressive logic, their own sealed inner monologue. Was it challenging to bring them out of that headspace and allow for genuine human contact?AD: It was a bit difficult, but it was also really fun. I massively enjoyed describing each character from the viewpoint of the others—it allowed me to view them from the outside looking in, for once. I am not one of those writers (no shade to them though) who says that their characters are speaking to them in their head. But for the scene where they all meet—particularly the second one where they’re all together—I kind of just let the words flow. My characters took the reins more than ever before. I truly had no idea what Janet was going to say when [redacted]*, for example. Or when Gemma figured out that [redacted]*. It was truly magical seeing their personalities come alive on the page. *I am keeping everyone safe from spoilers. CD: I feel that climate change is mostly unstoppable. I have little to no hope that humans will solve this problem, and I believe that things are only going to continue to get worse from here on. Humans are survivors, but I think that the Earth in which humans will have to live, 200 or 300 years from now, will be so degraded that it won’t be all that different from hell. I don’t feel hope for the future, in the long run. The existential threat of climate change is a worry hanging over the heads of all three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows.’ How do you personally feel about climate change?AD: Sadly, I agree with you. I think we’ve all seen over the past few years that even if humans could solve this problem, we wouldn’t want to. And by “we” I mean the people who run the world, the CEOs of megacorporations, the billionaires who wreak the most environmental damage. It’s my opinion that they are almost uniformly psychopathic in their behavior and their lack of empathy. No normal person would want to do the things they’ve had to do in order to gain their position—and I believe that if a normal person did find themselves with that much power, they wouldn’t remain normal for very long. On the one hand, I truly enjoy my laptop, and my phone that allows me to contact my friends overseas. And parasite-free, running water. And medicine! But I also believe that our modern way of life is an aberration, a blip, almost a wrinkle in the way things are designed to be on earth. We are not entitled to live this way, it is not sustainable, and we are paying the price. People forget that for the overwhelming majority of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. The Neolithic Revolution (when humans first began to farm) happened only ten thousand tears ago, which is around 3% of the time Homo sapiens have existed. And the Industrial Revolution, which gave us our industrial capitalism and modern infrastructure and nearly everything we feel entitled to as a part of “regular life,” happened so recently that only about 0.08% of human history has occurred after that. It’s mindblowing that we’ve caused so much damage to our planet in such a tiny fraction of time.And that 0.08% is what we think of as normal. Our own lives are so short in comparison that, looking back along the eight or so generations that have lived since the Industrial Revolution, it really does seem like it’s been forever. There’s a part in All Our Tomorrows where one of the main characters is thinking about the spiral drawing that’s mean to represent all the eras on earth — something like this, but colorful. Most of it is blue and green. Only the very newest end of the spiral is a different color. To quote my book, that’s “the Anthropocene, a slice so tiny you could easily miss it, a fingernail sliver of rust-covered gray. If you zoomed in enough you could see minuscule buildings, cars, an airplane, all hovering precariously just at the edge. To Anna it looked as though anyone standing on that edge was about to fall off into nothing, into the timeless black that surrounded the spiral.”I fear I’ve gone into a bit of a raving tangent, but I’ll wipe the froth off my mouth, do some deep breathing, and attempt to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t feel hope for the future in the long run, either. Climate change is multi-pronged, as it gives rise not only to fires and floods but also ancient pathogens thawing out of permafrost, mosquito and tick-borne diseases moving further and further across the globe, and so many other things we simply aren’t prepared for.  CD: In a past interview, you mentioned that you were “gearing for a not-so happy ending” with ‘All Our Tomorrows’ but ultimately felt like the novel needed a more hopeful ending because you didn’t want the book to “leave readers feeling like the novel was a bunch of pointless doom—we get enough of that from social media and the news.”Are you concerned that readers will misread the darkness in your work as nihilism? How do you feel about nihilism? What do you hope that readers are left with after reading ‘All Our Tomorrows?’AD: I’m not really concerned that they’ll misread the darkness in my work as nihilism. If they do, I don’t mind. I would probably mind if I branded myself as some kind of “Hope Coach,” but thankfully that is not a direction I have gone in. One of the phrases you used earlier to describe the feelings my work gave you—“claustrophobic doom”—made me smile. I love claustrophobic doom! (Writing about it, not feeling it.) But I don’t think that all of life is claustrophobic doom. Existence is multifaceted, and I choose to bring attention to the darker parts of it. They’re a lot more fun to write about, for one thing. But I also see a lot of toxic positivity everywhere. You get demonetized on social media if your content is too depressing, which admittedly makes sense from a branding point of view. But at the same time, I don’t agree with phrases like: Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. It has its uses during a panic attack, I suppose, but on the whole that phrase never made sense to me. Like, what if someone is dying of a horrible disease? What—are you saying that things will be okay in the end because of the sweet relief of death? Well, okay, I guess that’s one way to think about it, but I don’t think that’s what that particular phrase is going for…The most popular type of nihilism seems to be that life is meaningless and has no value, nothing you do matters, and there is no point to anything (and, I can’t help reading this into it—that you may as well just shuffle yourself off this mortal coil sooner rather than later). Honestly, I think those nihilists are overthinking it. I don’t like to burden my small monkey brain with the overall meaning of life. Like, yeah, duh. Nobody knows the meaning of life. Maybe there is none. Where I don’t agree with nihilism is that life has no value. I happen to like being alive, for the most part. There is so much beauty to be found in life. There’s beauty in pursuing creative activities, in spending time with loved ones, in listening to your favorite music, in eating good food. I don’t care if it’s meaningless—I still enjoy it. And hey, maybe it’s all meaningless in the end, since we don’t live forever, and you and everyone you know will eventually die…but honestly, I think immortality would be so much worse. It’s the ephemerality of life that makes it so precious. (And, going back to the psychopathic billionaires, this is something that the most powerful people on the planet seem to have forgotten. I truly believe they can’t enjoy small pleasures anymore. They want to rule the world and live forever because they can no longer appreciate things that would make the dopamine and serotonin receptors in a normal, healthy brain light up.)  Towards the end of All Our Tomorrows, it was a bit of a challenge to keep the story realistic but also have it not be totally depressing. The ending of Janet’s last chapter, as well as the ending of Gemma’s last chapter (which is literally the last sentence of the book) is probably my most clear and straightforward answer to the question that snakes through the manuscript, which is essentially “What are we supposed to do about all this anxiety, all this uncertainty, all this pain?”So, to answer your question, I want readers to come away from All Our Tomorrows with a sense of hope, with the knowledge that they can do something—even if it’s just something for themselves, and not something that saves the world, because that’s impossible—but something. Whether that’s spending time with family, or doing something creative you enjoy, or being with the person you love. Something that has meaning, and purpose, and value. And that is what makes my book incompatible with nihilism. Order 'All Our Tomorrows' here.

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INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT MCCLANAHAN

Scott McClanahan is the author of The Sarah Book, The Incantations Of Daniel Johnston, Hill William, Crapalachia, and The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. 1. He is the owner the finest small volume library in the state of West Virginia

What’s a book that first put the hook in your heart? Or if there isn’t a single book or author that got you hooked on reading, maybe you can tell me what age you were when literature started playing the pied piper song to you.

I think I’ve always fetishized books. There was a ton of children’s stories my mom used to read to me. “The Little Fir Tree” and “The Shoemaker and the Elves.” The stories she told me about herself were just as important though. I checked out John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from the Rainelle Public Library when I was in fifth grade. My mom said, “You’ll like this. He’s easy to read.” I read that book the same weekend I played Tecmo Bowl for the first time. Sort of a life changing weekend. I was a weird kid though, reading a lot of biographies. Weird shit like Oliver North’s autobiography and Norman Schwarzkopf.

I think probably the book that made me start discovering things was a biography of Jim Morrison called No One Here Gets Out Alive. It’s embarrassing to say, but true. I found out about Antonioni, Artaud, Godard, Van Morrison, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Beat writers, Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince. It was all stuff that I had absolutely no access to in West Virginia. That would have been in the 8th or 9th grade. I always used books to find out about other books.

I used to imagine books before I read them just simply because I couldn’t find them. I don’t know if we do that anymore in the age of on-line books. I used to imagine what a book was like and sadly the book was never able to measure up. I remember reading about The Executioners Song in high school for a long time before I actually found a copy. I used to read the World Book Encyclopedia and that book was mentioned in three different places, but then when I read the book I was like, “This sucks.” I feel differently now, but you know.

  

IMPORTANT BOOKS TO ME (MINUS ISAK DINESEN, JEAN RHYS, JOHN AUBREY)

The Collected Short Prose of James Agee

The Life of Alexander the Great by Plutarch

Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan

The Portable Rabelais (The Viking Portable Library) by Francois Rabelais

First Love by Ivan Turgenev

My Life by Benvenuto Cellini

An Egyptian Childhood by Taha Hussein

A Christmas Memory: One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote

The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

Pages From A Cold Island by Frederick Exley

Death On The Installment Plan by Celine

Epitaph Of A Small Winter by Machado de Assis

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Nick Tosches Reader

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

The Whole Motion: Collected Poems by James Dickey

Careless Love: The Unmasking Of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick

 

Do you read compulsively? Do you feel like reading is an addiction for you, sometimes? What do you think is the main driving force behind your desire to read more and more books? Are you looking for something?

Yeah I’m compulsive. Reading has always been kind of weird necrophilia. I can’t think of a more intimate act with a living writer as well than reading. The only thing that can compete with it is music and even that’s not the same. I usually go through 2-3 books a week. I’m sure it’s tied in to OCD or some slight autism. I always think of that robot from Short Circuit. Need more input. At this point I don’t think I’m looking for anything. But when I find a new writer like Machado De Assis or Lu Xun (two writers I read for the first time last year) it feels like a conjuring. I may be the only person who went bankrupt buying books.

  

BEST BOOKS I'VE READ IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS

Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson

Roughing It by Mark Twain

garden, ashes by Danilo Kis

The Garbage Times / White Ibis by Sam Pink

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

Memoirs From The House Of The Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Coma by Pierre Guyotat

The War by Marguerite Duras

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere

The Anatomy Of A Moment by Javier Cercas

Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

Wartime Lies by Louis Begley

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

Outline by Rachel Cusk

The Atlas by William T. Vollmann

 

How often do you put a book down? Do you have rules about how much of a chance you’ll give a book before moving on to something else? If I book doesn’t catch me by page 75, I usually throw it out. But some books are late bloomers.

I don’t put down any books usually. I have lists of books that I want to read. If it gets slow, I start to skim and sometimes by skimming you can get back inside the book again. Most of the times I’ve read about the book so much that I know I want to read it. This is what is in my Amazon cart right now.

Denton Welch, In Youth is Pleasure

George Perec, Life: A Users Manual.

Imre Kertesz, Fatelessness

Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Sei Shonogan, Pillow Book

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

Gustaw Herling, A World Apart

Anita Brookner, Look at Me

Hopefully someone will buy these books for me and send them to me.

   

IMPORTANT BOOKS TO ME

The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe

Nothing Like The Sun by Anthony Burgess

Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library Classics) by Arthur Rimbaud

Justine by Marquis de Sade

King Of The Jews by Nick Tosches

The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet

Miracle Of The Rose by Jean Genet

Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov

The Selected Letters of John Keats

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

My Childhood by Maxim Gorky

The Bible

Martial's Epigrams

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

 

You seem to read a lot of biographies, which is a big blank spot in my reading life. Can you recommend five or six great biographies that I should read this year?

Oh I don’t know. I guess these are my favorites.

Elizabeth Gaskell Life of Charlotte Bronte, Richard Holmes: The Pursuit: A Life of Shelley, James Boswell: The Life of Johnson, Emanuel Carrere: Limonov; and I am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, Enid Starkie’s Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde. Judith Thurman’s bio of Isak Dinesen is pretty great.

I also love a book by Gorky called Reminiscences’ of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Andreyev. Not a biography, but just these little moments or impression and anecdotes. The description of Tolstoy’s hands is something else and easily tells us more than a 1,000 page biography would.

 

THE BEST BOOK THAT NO ONE HAS EVER READ

Reminiscences Of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Adreyev by Maxim Gorky

 

Does a biographer need to be trustworthy, for you? Should a biographer carefully research a life and stick to the facts as much as possible, like a journalist? Or should a biographer just try to tell the most interesting and entertaining and compelling story they can, even if it involves exaggerating or making up lies? Does a journalist need to be trustworthy?

1. No. 2. Not necessarily. 3.Yes to an extent. 4. Yes trustworthy journalists are essential to any representative republic.

 

IMPORTANT BOOKS TO ME

Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Criminal Desires: Jean Genet And Cinema by Jane Giles

Selected Poems And Prose by Paul Celan

Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader

The Complete Poems Of John Keats

Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed by Robert Sellers

The Beleaguered City by Shelby Foote

Patriotic Gore: Studies In The Literature Of The American Civil War by Edmund Wilson

The Lives Of The Artists by Giorgio Vasari

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

The Creators: A History Of The Heroes Of The Imagination by Daniel J. Boorstin

Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann

You Can't Win by Jack Black

The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

The Life Of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter

New York Tyrant Vol 1 Number 1

Seven Plays by Sam Shepard

 

In an interview, you said: “I don’t think there’s a novelist today who can even compare with Robert Caro.” What do you like about his biographies? What can novelists learn from him?

Oh the usual. I think all great writers have just three skills. The ability to surprise and transform, the ability to propel you through a narrative, the ability to conjure emotion or laughter in a reader. Caro and John Richardson and Hilary Spurling and Jimmy McDonough all have that. Even some of our best writers can only do two out of those three things. Somehow I feel like biography still feels sort of primal or primitive and still connected to something very old in stories and magic. They're sort of still interested in these things. Also, some of these folks are spending whole decades writing these books. I'm talking about losing homes and running through advances in order to make something. I think that's beautiful and almost monastic in the age of corporate fiction, and experimental tenure fiction.

 

IMPORTANT BOOKS TO ME

Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell

Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret

The Civil War: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Selected Writings by Gerard de Nerval

Lectures On Russian Literature by Vladimir Nabokov

The Rise And Fall Of Athens by Plutarch

A Confederate General From Big Sur / Dreaming Of Babylon / The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas

The Complete Works Of Nathanael West

Genet by Edmund White

The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius

Selected Writings by Antonin Artaud

 

If you had all the time in the world, whose biography would you write? (I’m thinking about a famous person or a historical person, but it could be anyone.) Would you be a trustworthy biographer?

I’m going to write about my mom and dad. So no. It’s going to be a book called Vandalia or Rainelle Stories or something like that. A big family book. Like a Tristam Shandy or Rabelais almost. I’m going to see if I can’t take what I’ve learned from these books and write about two people who are just ordinary. I'm going to write it for my kids. Been struggling for six months though so who knows. This writing shit is hard.

   

BOOKS I'M READING/REREADING FOR THE BOOK I'M WORKING ON

Reminiscences Of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Adreyev by Maxim Gorky

Tristram Shandy & Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Oresteia by Aeschylus

True Stories by Sophie Calle

Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas

Memoirs From Beyond The Tomb by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

This Is Not A Novel And Other Novels by David Markson

Dark Back Of Time by Javier Marias

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Collected Writings Of Joe Brainard

Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas

King Lear by William Shakespeare

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald

In Search Of Lost Time Volume 6: Time Regained by Marcel Proust

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

 

What are some poems or other pieces of literature that you have memorized and could recite at any time? Do you have a trick for memorizing things like that, or just have a good memory?

Oh gosh I have reams of stuff. I've known Whitcomb Riley's "Little Orphan Annie" since I was a boy. I've done that so many times in readings I'm sure people are sick of it, but it makes me think of my mom. There's some Neruda I know, a section of Under Milk Wood, John Donne always kills. I used to do a section of Virgil's Georgics in a reading. I don't know if it's a trick, but I can memorize pretty easy. I've always liked doing it in readings because it gives you an element of control. You can move around, etc. I wanted to memorize the whole of Sarah Book for these final readings I was going to do, but I ran out of time.

 

IMPORTANT BOOKS TO ME

The Portable John Steinbeck

The Red And The Black by Stendhal

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere

The Blacks: A Clown Show by Jean Genet

The Art Of Destruction: The Films Of The Vienna Action Group by Stephen Barber

Of Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Ferdydurke / Pornografia / Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Odi Et Amo: The Complete Poetry of Catullus

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

Lost Highway: Journeys And Arrivals Of American Musicians by Peter Guralnick

My Mother's House and Sido by Colette

 

Who are some of the readers, living or dead, that you most admire?

I guess Amelia Gray is always the gold standard. Lindsey Hunter as well. I think Sam Pink is the most likable reader I've ever watched. He just has that quality about him. People like him. Chelsea Hodson is a great reader too. I saw Kiese Laymon read in Iowa City a few years ago and he really blew me away. It sort of feels like readings are dead now or something, but maybe that's just me. Five years ago people used to talk about them more and seem excited. Now it seems like they've dried up or something. I had a great time though at the Franklin Park Reading Series a month ago, which is easily the best reading series in the country.

Oh and I'm biased, but I saw Juliet Escoria give a reading with a video back drop in Brooklyn a few years ago. It was with some witches. One of the top three readings I've ever seen.

  

IMPORTANT BOOKS TO ME

Son Of The Morning Star: Custer And The Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell

Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes

The Education Of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Boswell In Holland, 1763-1764 by James Boswell

Cruising Paradise by Sam Shepard

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays On Art And Artists by Robert Hughes

Voyage In The Dark by Jean Rhys

The Poems Of Francois Villon

William Faulkner And Southern History by Joel Williamson

Satan Is Real: The Ballad Of The Louvin Brothers by Charlie Louvin

Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs

The Georgics by Virgil

 interview by Chris Dankland 

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PENNY GORING’S hatefuck the reader REVIEW by Chris Dankland

GET THE BOOK (read online + download epub and mobi versions for free)

LENGTH: 7,000 words

PUBLISHER: 5everdankly publications, 2016

YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE: Kathy Acker, Édouard Levé, Sarah Kane

Penny Goring’s book ‘hatefuck the reader’ starts with the sound of someone talking so close to your ear that you can feel hot breath:

when i was invincible i believed beauty lasts forever and i died every day. you gave me nothing. i prefer to think you hit me because you are ill. i prefer to stroke my cold pillow. i prefer to sit on a chair than a sofa. i have a plastic joint in my right big toe. you permanently damaged every part of me. my aches and pains are not caused by ageing they are the aftermath of the violence. the end of a story is something i forget. in the month leading up to the twin towers event, i kept waking from a dream where an aeroplane was crashing through my window. i look better in photographs than irl. i don't truly believe in anything. i am startled when anyone calls me Pen, it implies familiarity and affection. i am slow to learn from my mistakes in life, but not in my work. i am attracted to boys girls women men anyone anything anybody. competition repels me. to describe what remains would distress me. i wonder if i will ever truly want to give up smoking. when i sit on the edge of my bed i worry about damaging the mattress, i try to sit on a different area every time, there are not enough different areas. you said i was boring in bed, then you fucked me every day for 2 years. i have cheated on all of my lovers, they were easy to fool, so was i. i joke about Art when it is invoked with a capital A. i wonder if i love anybody except my daughter, it often feels like hate. i do not intentionally remember hurt. i do not trust you. i was fined £1000 for criminal damage, this is how it happened, you punched me in the face until i stopped talking, then you grabbed a knife, then you stabbed holes in my thin plaster walls, then you ran outside, then i knew what had hurt me was outside, then i wanted to hurt the hurt, then i hurled dirty plates and cutlery out the window, then a plate smashed the sunroof of a BMW parked in the road way down below. it is a serious crime to damage a car because car equals money on wheels, and that is the true meaning of beauty.

The book comes at you in a non-stop flood of confessions:

“i got my 1st black eyes, broken nose, walking home through the park after school. i curled in a ball in the mud, a crucial bone in my spine got kicked into a new shape”

“at times i have lived with people who are now dead, believing it to be a forever thing.”

“i have seen a dead junkie hovering 2" above me in bed, yes, i have known ghosts, and i have felt their fabric.”

The book looks beautiful to me. It’s one of my favorite examples of digital literature. I look forward to the time when print versions of books become collectors items and pdfs become the norm. Nowadays most of us consume our music and movies in digital, streaming formats. We don’t need cds and dvds to enjoy albums and movies. We don’t need print books to enjoy great works of literature.

‘hatefuck the reader’ never stops to take a breath, and even by the last sentence it seems like it could keep going forever. What does Penny talk about? Poverty, abuse, art, memories, sex, habits, apartments, dreams, death, children, drugs, unconsciousness, sickness, hope, and everything else. It’s hard for me to think of many other books that have as much sustained energy. It’s relentless.

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