Category Archives: Uncategorized

A new fiction piece:
▪ “The World According to Arthur Arluck” (Underground Voices)

Some new reviews:
▪ Review of Peter Selgin’s Life Goes to the Movies (The Diagram)

▪ Review of Aleksandar Hemon’s Love & Obstacles (Open Letters Monthly)

▪ Review of Translation in Practice, edited by by Gill Paul (New Pages)
The Interrogation (Bookslut)

My wife and daughter are in New Hampshire for three weeks, and while I’m happy that my wife is working on her masters in dance therapy, I’m still sad. And I’m continuing to bum myself out with my marathon listening session of the Jackson Five and MJ’s solo stuff.

But on the brighter side, the July issue of The Chapbook Review is up. It features a conversation between Shya Scanlon and Nicolle Elizabeth about Scanlon’s Poolsaid. Following that are reviews by J.R. Angelella, Matt Bell, Andrew Borgstrom, Matt DeBenedictis, Tina Hall, Josh Maday, J. A. Tyler, and John Dermot Woods.

Here’s a link to the introduction:
http://thechapbookreview.com/2009/07/01/welcome-to-the-chapbook-review/

And a link to the issue itself:
http://thechapbookreview.com/current-issue/

Thanks to all the contributors! It’s so great to work with you on this.

Please spread the news far and wide.

Here’s some work of mine that’s been published recently:

▪ New story: Was What It Was (ArtVoice)

▪ Review of Everything Was Fine Until Whatever by Chelsea Martin (The Rumpus)

▪ Review of AM/PM by Amelia Gray (Word Riot)

▪ Review of Log of the S.S. Mrs Unguentine by Stanley G. Crawford (Tarpaulin Sky)

▪ Review of The Mirror in the Well by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Tarpaulin Sky)

▪ The Last Book I Loved: Fog & Car (The Rumpus)

After reading Eugene Marten’s novella Waste, struck by its concentrated unity, its razor-sharp timing, its immediacy, etc., the way it zipped along like a guilty-pleasure page-turner but with Gordon Lish-approved sentences, penetrating insight, and an underlying critique of consumption and waste, I wondered which works of comparable length had a similar effect on me and why? What immediately came to mind were books that I’d read as a teenager like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Billy Budd, The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fahrenheit 451, Heart of Darkness, The War of the Worlds, etc. While these are all arguably significant works, I wondered why, in contrast to novels, had my reading of novellas since then been so meager. This led to thoughts about how a novella is, or even whether it should be, defined. Is a novella simply a work of prose having a certain amount of words, a fiction that’s longer than a long story, or a novellette, but shorter than a novel? Or are word and page counts really just arbitrary considerations in determining how to define a work? Is this kind of categorization simply shaped by marketing forces? Is it even worthwhile to ask these questions?

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