Category: book acquired

Lithogenesis (Book acquired, mid-June 2026)

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Lithogenesis is by Rainer J. Hanshe “with flares of” Dejan Lukić. The book, subtitled A Choral Poetics of Accretion, Rupture, & Becoming, is forthcoming from Contra Mundum. Their description:

Lithogenesis: A Choral Poetics of Accretion, Rupture, & Becoming announces a radical reconfiguration of writing — not as expression, but as mineral formation, as geophonic resonance. It begins from the conviction that language is not a human construct but an elemental process through which matter listens, dreams, and becomes. Against the anthropocentric myth of linguistic mastery, this work proposes a choral poetics wherein stone, soil, water, and stellar plasma each sound through the human sensorium.

Drawing upon Hölderlin’s seismic attunement, Nietzsche’s solar metamorphosis, Artaud’s telluric scream, and Deleuze and Guattari’s planetary becomings, this poetics unfolds as a living continuum between geologic & cosmologic consciousness. From Empedocles to Baudelaire to Carmelo Bene, lithogenetic poetics listens to a subterranean lineage — the poets of pressure, fracture, and resonance — who wrote with the earth rather than upon it.

Central to its proposition is the concept of allogenic writing — writing that originates elsewhere, transported like a stone across strata, containing alien inclusions. This notion emerges in explicit opposition to automatic writing, whose psychical automatism remains confined within the human nervous system. Lithogenesis moves far beyond such limitations: it is not the unconscious that writes, but the earth itself, the cosmic forces inscribed through us.

Mass-market Monday | Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America

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Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America, ed. by Barbara Howes, 1973. Avon-Bard (1974). No cover artist or designer credited. 576 pages.

A promising mixtape, via many translators. Clarice Lispector might not have been a big enough name for English-reading audiences in the 1970s to make the front or back cover, but editor Barbara Howes included two of her stories.

Here is a piece (the shortest) from the collection:

“Why Reeds Are Hollow”

by

Gabriela Mistral

Translated by William Jay Smith

For don Max. Salas Marchant

I

Even in the peaceful world of plants, a social revolution once took place. It is told that in this case the leaders were those vain reeds. A master of rebellion, the wind, disseminated propaganda, and in no time at all there was talk of nothing else in the vegetal centers. Virgin forests fraternized with silly gardens, in a common struggle for equality.

Equality of what? Of their thickness of trunk, the excellence of their fruit, their right to pure water?

No, simply equality of height. The ideal was that all should raise their heads uniformly. The corn had no thought of making itself strong like the oak, but only of stirring its hairy tassels at the same elevation. The rose did not strive to be useful like the rubber plant, but just wanted to reach that high crown, and make of it a pillow on which to lull its flowers to sleep.

Vanity, vanity! Delusions of grandeur, even if they went against Nature, caricatured their aims. In vain, some modest flowers—the shy violet and flat-nosed lily—spoke of divine law and the evils of pride. Their voices seemed dotty.

An old poet, bearded like the River God, condemned the project in the name of beauty, and had some wise things to say about uniformity, hateful to him in every respect.

II

How did it all turn out? People tell of strange influences at work. Earth spirits blew upon the plants with their monstrous vitality, and so it was that an ugly miracle took place.

One night, the world of lawn and shrub grew dozens of feet, as if obeying some imperious appeal from the stars.

Next day, the country people were dismayed—when they came out of their huts—to find clover high as a cathedral and wheat fields wild with gold!

It was maddening. Animals roared with fright, lost in the darkness of their pastures. Birds chirped in desperation, their nests having risen to unheard-of heights. Nor could they fly down in search of seed: gone was the sunbathed soil, the grass’s humble tapestry.

Shepherds lingered by their flocks beside dark pastures; their sheep refused to enter anything so dense, afraid they might be swallowed up completely.

Meanwhile, victorious, the reeds laughed aloud, whipping their riotous leaves against the blue tops of the eucalyptus.

III

Thus a month is said to have passed. Then the decline set in.

And it came about in this fashion: violets, which delight in shade, dried up when their purple heads were exposed to full sunlight.

“It doesn’t matter,” the reeds hastened to say. “They’re a mere nothing.”

(But in the country of the spirits, they were mourned.)

Lilies, stretching their height to fifty feet, broke in two. Like the heads of queens, white marble heads lay lopped off all around.

The reeds argued as before. (But the Graces ran wild through the wood, lamenting.)

Lemon trees at that height lost all their blossoms to the violent winds. Adios, harvest!

“It doesn’t matter,” the reeds stated yet again. “Their fruit was so bitter.”

The clover dried out, its stems twisting like threads in a fire.

Corn tassels drooped, but no longer from gentle lassitude. In all their extravagant length they fell upon the earth, heavy as rails.

Potatoes, to strengthen their stems, put forth feeble tubers; these were little bigger than apple seeds.

Now the reeds laughed no more; at last they grew serious.

Blossoms of shrub or grass were no longer being fertilized: the insects could not reach them without overheating their little wings.

Furthermore, it was said that man had neither bread nor fruit nor forage for his animals; hunger and sorrow were abroad in the land.

In such a state of things, only the tall trees remained sound, trunks rising strongly as ever: they had not yielded to temptation.

The reeds were the last to fall, signaling the total disaster of their tree-level theory; roots rotted from excessive humidity, and even the network of foliage could not keep them from drying out.

It was then clear that, compared with their former solid bulk, they’d become hollow. They reached hungry leagues upward, but, their insides being empty, they were laughable, like marionettes or dolls.

In the face of such evidence, no one could defend their philosophy; no more was said about it for thousands of years.

Nature—generous always—repaired the damage in six months, seeing to it that all wild plants would again spring up in the usual way.

The poet, bearded like the River God, appeared after a long absence and, rejoicing, sang of the new era.

“So be it, dear people. Beautiful is the violet for its minuteness, and the lemon tree for its gentle shape. Beautiful are all things as God made them: the noble oak and the brittle barley.”

The earth bore fruit once again; flocks fattened, the people were nourished.

But the reeds—those rebel chieftains—bore for all time the mark of their disgrace: they were hollow, hollow . . .

 

Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations by Drew Lerman (Book acquired, 3 June 2026)

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I’m a big fan of Drew Lerman’s work, and I’m always excited when he puts together a new collection. His latest is Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations, collecting his recent strips. I would describe these strips as functioning in the mode of pseudoautiobiographical postmodern literary interrogation, only that makes them sound pretentious, which they aren’t. They are very funny and very niche, and I often feel like I am Lerman’s ideal reader. This is my niche.

Each one-page strip features (a version of) Lerman encountering (and often trailing) a writer (DeLillo, obv., but also Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, William T. Vollmann…); the conversations are often very one-sided and allow Lerman to interrogate his subject on the kind of minutiae that often overtakes our ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, when it comes to art. In one of my favorite bits, for example, Lerman critiques the implementation of (“middle school book report-ass”) Courier New Unjustified as the font for DeLillo’s novel The Silence. I could go on but I should save it for a proper review.

Conversations with Don DeLillo also features a great negative blurb by a certain grouchy “Myron Circle”:

And maybe this is corny of me, but I love that Lerman used Chris Ware stamps to mail me Conversations with Don DeLillo. (Chris Ware shows up in Conversations, btw — he tries to give Lerman a bunch of his books and tell Lerman how much he loves Snake Creek

More thoughts to come.

Two by John Berger (Books acquired, mid-May 2026)

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NYRB will publish reprints of two John Berger books on June 16th of this year (why does that date seem so familiar?), his experimental picaresque 1972 classic G., and 1984’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photo. I’d never heard of the latter, which NYRB describes as maybe

…the most original of John Berger’s books; certainly, it is among the most moving. A meditation on first and last things, it is divided into two parts, one reflecting on humanity’s relation to time, the other on our place in space.

Here is a paragraph from the middle of G.:

You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.

Stephen Dixon’s Goodbye to Goodbye (Book acquired, 19 May 2026)

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This October, McSweeney’s will publish an anthology of Stephen Dixon’s short stories. Titled Goodbye to Goodbye (after Dixon’s 1985 short story), this anthology inaugurates a forthcoming wave of Dixonia over the next three years, including editions of I and End of I in paperback, a new edition of Frog next year and a reprint of Interstate the year after that, and, most exciting, a previously-unpublished novel called Half Stories, Full Novel, and Out of Time, a collection of previously-unpublished short stories.

The collection includes “Said,” one of Dixon’s more “experimental” pieces; you can read it here.

Jacket copy:

When Stephen Dixon passed away in 2019, American literature lost, in Jonathan Lethem’s words, “a great secret master.” In a career that spanned six decades, Dixon published over seven hundred short stories and had two novels shortlisted for the National Book Award. Arguably, his innovative work represents the earliest appearance of what we now call autofiction, and many of this generation’s writers count him among their greatest influences.

Goodbye to Goodbye is the first major collection of Dixon’s stories since 1994. The current anthology includes work that spans Dixon’s remarkable career, from his very first published story to previously unpublished works written at the end of his life. The stories have been chosen to reflect the development of Dixon’s ever-evolving style, from earlier, more traditional stories; to pioneering experiments with dialogue, point of view, and sentence structure; to what became his trademark: obsessively self-revising texts that reflect experience as if through a funhouse mirror, paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. As J. Robert Lennon writes in his introduction, Dixon’s work “doesn’t efface its artificiality; it doesn’t want its reader, or its author, to disappear.”

At once deeply personal and comically exuberant, Goodbye to Goodbye showcases both Dixon’s unique perspective on life and his innovative approach to writing.

Some books acquired, 17 April 2026

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This past Friday, after some spring semester-is-almost-over-time-to-clean-out-the-office-and-take-all-the-plants-home cleaning, I converted some of the review copies, old anthologies, and textbooks in my office I’d crammed into a box into bookstore credit.

I didn’t intend to pick up anything while browsing, but I couldn’t resist a second copy of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. I’d never come across the 1985 Penguin Books edition before, and it matches nicely with the edition 1985 Penguin reissue of J R that I found on a dollar shelf in Atlanta a few years ago. This 1985 edition of The Recognitions is a bit stiff in the hand; I’m glad I first read it in the ’93 Penguin Classics edition (with the William Gass introduction that everyone should absolutely skip until after they’ve read The Recognitions for the first time).

I also hit an unshelved seam of Alasdair Gray novels, just sitting in a stack on the floor in the sci-fi section, and picked up The Fall of Kelvin Walker, which I’d never heard of, and a third copy of Lanark. I lent the first copy of Lanark I owned and read to someone who never returned it. I have doubles now, but as a wise man proclaimed, “Triples makes it safe. Triples is best.”

Near the Gray novels, also unshelved, was a copy of Literal Madness, which collects three Kathy Acker novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Florida. 

It is probably a terrible compulsion to crowd my shelves with duplicates of novels I’ve read several times already. There’s a part of me that imagines I will one day have a small bookselling space with a very specific inventory of titles I will ultimately refuse to part with, and which my children will not-so-reluctantly have to throw away after my demise. I also imagine being able to hand one to a friend, suggest they read it without any anxiety over its return. (If you are reading this, Lanarkklept, the book is now yours, has been for years. I hope you read it.)

Two by Nancy Lemann (Books acquired, early March 2026)

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NYRB is reissuing Nancy Lemann’s 1985 novel Lives of the Saints next month. Her most recent novel, The Oyster Diaries is a sort of sequel to that early cult novel. From Geoff Dyer’s introduction to Lives of the Saints:

I want to believe that there is always a trail, however faint, leading readers back to a book that, like a hiker lost in the wilderness, is on the brink of perishing. But where does the trail start? In 2020, one of my undergrads at the University of Southern California told me that her mum was a writer. Good for her, I thought. The following week, my student said I’d really like her mum’s writing and offered to bring in a book by her. Um, okay. At the end of the semester, she gave me a harmless-looking paperback called Lives of the Saints, published in 1985 by Louisiana State University Press. I put this little book on a shelf in my office and forgot about it.

In 2023, the writer Heather McGowan texted to tell me about a “bonkers” novel by someone called Nancy Lemann that she was sure I’d like. I ordered it online. Didn’t look very promising: a print-on-demand book published by Louisiana State University Press. But, after the book arrived, I started reading and within half a dozen pages was as besotted as the narrator, Louise, is by Claude, one of the family of “saints” (the Colliers by name) whose lives—and a death—swim around her in a cocktail- and heat-soaked New Orleans. She adores Claude for his generosity, kindness, and wisdom (the three are synonymous in her view), and also because he’s on the brink of dereliction and collapse—as are many people in the book. She hangs on his every word, but these words, delivered in the family’s “curious deadpan” and often unfolding in the midst of binges or their hungover aftermath, are nonsensical, “idiotic.” She can’t stop listening to them, and I couldn’t stop reading them, or those of Claude’s little brother, a boy actually called Saint who, out of nowhere, announces, “There’s a certain meteorite in the sky, and it’s all made up of plasma.” Oh, and let’s not forget Mrs. Stewart, “an intelligent woman” who tells Louise that the thing she remembers most vividly from her youth is either “that little red hat which I wore in the summer of . . . 1912” or the “shoe sizes her friends wore in 1910.” Mrs. Stewart gets on with her daughter-in-law Julia because they happily spend “many hours talking about details of girlhood attire, and other lame-brained elements of clothing through the decades.”

Frederic Pokosch’s Voices (Book acquired, late Feb. 2026)

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Frederic Prokosch’s 1982 memoir Voices is getting a reprint from NYRB. Their blurb:

Frederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch’s long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the “middle-class and fancy dullness” of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis, collecting butterflies, and printing deluxe limited editions of poems he admired.

In 1982, Prokosch returned to the literary limelight with Voices—a self-proclaimed memoir framed by his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France, made of short chapters about his encounters with famous figures, whose every word he seems to recall. Voices, too, is a work of fantasy. But if Prokosch’s portraits are not strictly true to life, they come alive as few portraits do. Whether he is playing tennis with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall’s wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W.H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his ability to capture these artists’ cadences and characters, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir.

Death/Blast/Bonus (Books acquired, late Feb. 2026)

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I got a copy of the last (maybe latest?) of David Ohle’s Moldenke novels, The Death of a Character, in today’s mail. I’ve read or reread Ohle’s Moldenke’s novels over the past few weeks, and I think they are some of the best, grossest, funniest diagnoses of the emerging 21st-century apocalypse I’ve ever encountered. I’m a bit sad that The Death of a Character might be the last one, but there’s always rereading. I got a copy of Ohle’s 2014 short novel The Blast, which I think is a Moldenke novel without Moldenke. (Ohle’s 2008 novel The Pisstown Chaos is basically a Moldenke novel without Moldenke.)

I also got a copy of a 1981 anthology called A Reader of New American Fiction which features a piece by David Ohle I’d never heard of before, called “Easy Neutronics.” I got the book via interlibrary loan, requesting it as part of an in-class demo I was doing during a class. It arrived bearing the stamp of Brevard Community College (née Brevard Junior College), which is now Eastern Florida State College. Thank you to the librarian in Titusville.

The book appears to have never been read.

 

Antoine Volodine’s The Monroe Girls (Book acquired, 13 Feb. 2026)

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There is an old saying, some may say a cliche, but nevertheless it rings as wisdom in my waxy ears: The best time to read a Volodine was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. Maybe start with Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls, forthcoming in translation by Alyson Waters from Archipelago. Their jacket copy:

Breton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of binoculars to his withered face. He peers from the grimy window of a near-empty psychiatric compound—one of the last buildings standing after an unspecified disaster—spying rue Dellwo below, dreary in perpetual rain. Into this world of devastation drop the Monroe girls—paramilitaries trained in the “dark place” by Monroe, a dissident executed long ago. Their mission to revamp the Party is futile in this bleak, decaying world. Breton, our schizophrenic narrator, is tasked (and tortured) by what remains of the Party to locate and identify the Monroe girls using special optical equipment and his powers of extrasensory perception. Breton’s journey through a bardo-like, hostile labyrinth invites us into a sensual swirl of bodily decay, political acquiescence, and civilizational collapse. In this derelict setting, Volodine ruminates on identity, surveillance, life after death, and love (which, alas, does not conquer all). An urgent and blistering tale, beautifully rendered with Volodine’s distinct pathos and humor.

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (Book acquired, 12 Feb. 2026)

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I reread Robert Coover’s 1968 sophomore novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. in January in anticipation of its reprint in the next few weeks from NYRB. I had remembered the novel’s dark humor and bright inventions, but had forgotten how sad it is, particularly its conclusion. I have a full review planned. In the meantime, here’s part of NYRB’s publicity copy for the novel–

Somewhere in a “major-league” American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh—no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh’s life, as far as he is concerned, is lived in his head, where he is sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, which is now entering its fifty-sixth season. The games are played with dice and scorecards, and the players are just numbers and names, but for Waugh they’re more real than the dreary office, the dive bar, and the dingy apartment in which he spends his days.

–while the NYRB blurb doesn’t give a full “spoiler,” it does characterize a pivotal event in the novel a bit too directly. Although I don’t really think so-called spoilers can affect strong works of literature (and I think that The Universal Baseball Association is a strong work of literature), I do think that its early climactic action is best enjoyed cold. For this reason, I’d avoid reading the back of this edition, along with Ben Marcus’s introduction, until after you’ve finished it. More thoughts to come.

Blog about George Saunders’ novel Vigil, a novel I have not yet read (Book acquired 11 Feb. 2026)

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I’ve been reading a lot of David Ohle lately — the Moldenke cycle, specifically. I read The Pisstown Chaos (2008) late last year, then kept going with The Old Reactor (2013), and then reread The Age of Sinatra (2004). I’m near the end of a  reread of Ohle’s seminal weirdo novel Motorman (1972) right now, and I’ve got The Blast (2014) and The Death of a Character (2021) on the way.

The Moldenke books take place in an abject, stinky, ruinous post-apocalyptic landscape populated with jellyheads, neutrodynes, imps, Stinkers, and Americans. The world runs on broken logic and bureaucratic absurdity. Order is repeatedly disrupted by Chaoses and Forgettings. Bodies fail; technology fails. Ohle relates these stories in a genteel, dry tone (especially in the later books) that mocks any hint of a Hero Saving the Day. His novels, especially those published during US America’s foolish GWOT misadventures, capture the spirit of my country’s farcical post-twentieth-century trajectory.

But this blog post is ostensibly about George Saunders, or rather George Saunders’ new novel Vigil, which I have not yet read, having only just today received a review copy in the mail.

I do not think that a writer has a cultural duty to respond to now, or Now, or even “Now!” if you like–but I do think that Saunders has always aimed to respond to the US American zeitgeist in his fictions. And in the best of his fictions — including the stories “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “Sea Oak,” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” — Saunders skewered US American absurdity with a tender pathos that balanced his dark humor without overpowering its core anger. But Saunders’ later fiction is perhaps over-seasoned with love, empathy, all that hippy-dippy shit. It’s not necessary to look through everyone’s eyes. Empathy has its limits. Latter-day Saunders often read to me as, in its worst moments, sanctimonious.

NYT critic Dwight Garner didn’t use the word “sanctimonious” to describe Saunders in his negative review of  Vigil, but his lede comes close:

“Once you start illustrating virtue, you had better stop writing fiction,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. It was once difficult to imagine this dictum might apply to George Saunders.

From the start, in the mid-1990s, he’s been an American original, a briskly whiskered national asset. He’s an ineluctably strange, dark and funny writer whose work has some of Mark Twain’s subversive wit, Kurt Vonnegut’s cosmic playfulness and Donald Barthelme’s laboratory blitzing of high and low culture.

It was my colleague who alerted me to this review, which I skimmed, noting the phrase “Downhill Alert!”, before dispensing with it. (My colleague wants me to read the book in some kind of, uh, I don’t know, tandem?, with him.)

This colleague loved Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I did not love Lincoln in the Bardo. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it maudlin, trite. It was like watching your dad try and impress your boss (I don’t know what that means). I wrote that year, 2017, that—

Lincoln in the Bardo might be a really good novel and I just can’t see it or hear it or feel it. I see postmodernism-as-genre, as form; I read bloodless overcooked posturing; I feel schmaltz. I failed the novel, I’m sure. I mean, I’m sure it’s good, right? The problem is me, as usual.

By 2018 I had changed my mind on that last sentence. I read Saunders’ New Yorker published short story “Little St. Don” and thought it was a massive, massive failure to respond to the incipient fascist encroachment of the first Trump administration. I concluded that,

Saunders loves his reader too much. The story wants to make us feel comfortable now, comfortable, at minimum, in our own moral agency and our own moral righteousness. But comfort now will not do.

I thought Saunders’ next two New Yorker stories were a smidge stronger, calling “Elliott Spencer,” “a stylistically-bold tale about poor people who are reprogrammed and then deployed as paid political protesters.” Of “Love Letter,” I suggested that the exercise “reads like a thought experiment with no real conclusion, no solid answer. Or, rather, the solution is there in the title: love. But is that enough?”

Vigil is about a dying oil tycoon visited by a comforting angel, or series of angels, or something like that. It is, if I understand correctly, Saunders’ take on “climate fiction,” which I imagine will not really dwell in the nasty gross irreal reality of the fall we are falling into right now. But I could be wrong. I can’t help but notice that Vigil seems to be organized, like Lincoln in the Bardo, around a “Great Man” in USAian history — a mover and shaker, a powerbroker, a markmaker, etc. I’ll try to read it with an open mind, but I have to admit that even the prospect pales against my recent dip into Ohle’s sour, funky flavors. But we shall see.

 

John A. Williams’ !Click Song (Book acquired 28 Jan. 2026)

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I picked up a copy of John A. Williams’ 1982 novel !Click Song after reading Ishmael Reed’s write up of it from Rediscoveries II. From Reed’s essay–

The Ku Klux Klan may appear to be clownish, and inept to some, but they have one thing right. They do represent an “Invisible Empire,” of which, the kind of monkeyshines that go on in places like Forsyth County belong to those of a small ignorant outpost. On the day that some joker held a sign warning of welfare disaster if blacks moved into the county, a New York Times columnist and a book reviewer spread the same lie about welfare being an exclusively black problem, yet, I doubt whether demonstrators will march on the editorial offices of the Times.

Klan thinking goes on in the editorial rooms of our major newspapers, in the film, and television studios; and in the public schools, and universities whose white male supremacist curricula are driving Hispanic, and black children out of education. One hears Ku Kluxer remarks in places that present themselves as the carriers of “Western civilization” like National Public Radio where,recently, a man congratulated a musician for using the saxophone as a “serious” symphonic instrument. “Up to now,” he said, “the saxophone has merely been used to make ‘jazzy howls.’ ” In “the Invisible Empire,” George Shearing will always receive more recognition than Bud Powell, Paul Cummings more recognition than Cato Douglass, and racist mediocrities will always get more publicity and praise than John A. Williams.

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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I started Thomas Kendall’s second novel, How I Killed the Universal Man last night. Good stuff so far. Blurb from publisher Whisk(e)y Tit:

John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.

How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.

Richard Hell’s Godlike (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike is getting a new printing from NYRB. Godlike reimagines the volatile Verlaine–Rimbaud dyad as a 1970s No Wave New York collision of art, desire, and language language language. Symbolist rebellion transmutes into downtown punk nihilism, drugs, and poetry. This corrosive Künstlerroman was originally issued by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery (an imprint of Akashic books). Read the description/blurb at NYRB; here’s a taste from Chapter 15, around the middle of the novel:

They spent the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking in T’s apartment. These were probably their best times too despite being experienced largely as tedium. They preferred the times of thrills, but the thrills grew out of the tension; and the mild, mildly restless, half-frustrated times of the many nights and late afternoons of doing almost nothing in T’s apartment, or walking the streets without direction, were their true lives.

T’s room was like some kind of glum office in its lack of daylight and its featurelessness, but with the little pictures now tacked on the walls, and the typewriter and sheets of paper, and the drugs, it got some character. He’d picked up a few stray pieces of furniture on the streets, including a table and three chairs, crates for shelves, and a beat-up old oriental rug. There was a secondhand portable record player too and a few albums.

They drank coffee and beer and sometimes codeine cough syrup and sometimes smoked some grass or snorted a little THC or mescaline and every once in a while a tiny bit of heroin, but mostly they lay around and lazily, impatiently goofed and wrote and complained, goading each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night one of them would go out for a container of fresh ice cream from Gem’s Spa. They’d go to a movie sometimes, or wander the rows of used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or drink in a bar, but most of t he time was spent in the dim back apartment.

The days and nights were as endless as wallpaper patterns. Boredom and irritation were normal and lengthened out into sometimes-mean giggles and into pages of writing. Writing was their pay. Books were reality. The room was a cruder dimension-poor annex to the pages of writing. The writing, as casual as it was—smeared eraseable typing-pages with revisions scribbled on and crumpled pages of rejected tries—was the brightly lit and wildly littered universe erupting out from the dark, poor, inexpressive room.

How odd is it to have as a purpose in life the aim of treating life-in the medium created for the purpose of coldly corresponding to it, words—as raw material for amusing variations on itself? Sometimes T. and Paul fantasized about this, imagining themselves as godlike philosopher poets encouched in the advanced civilization, languorously sipping their fermented grain as they spun ideas and mental-sensual constructions of life-language in the air for the pleasure of their own delectation.

 

Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything (Book acquired, early Jan. 2026)

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Guillermo Stitch’s follow up to 2020’s Lake of Urine is The Coast of Everything, an enormous seven-hundred-and-something pager that with a matryoshka doll (decon)structure. I really liked Lake of Urine, a zany, slapstick surreal adventure story. The Coast of Everything of course intrigues me. It’s also pretty big! It’s been staring at me for a few weeks now, daring me to plunge into something deep. (I’ve been reading only short stories and nonfiction so far this year — story collections by Joy Williams and Robert Bingham, and a depressing and engrossing book called The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp.) So anyway, I dipped in this afternoon, read the preamble, I suppose you would call it, and then dug into the first of what I take to be connected/nested novellas, “The Tale of the Enchanted Road.” I plan to keep swimming.

Indie publisher Sagging Meniscus’s blurb:

To find the center, begin at the edge…

A daughter’s devotion parts her from her father. A dutiful soldier sentences his daughter to a loveless exile and her mother to madness. With her last breath a dying woman exhales the whole world. A young girl with a broken body holds it up.

Their nested stories bleed into one another: tributaries in search of a common sea; parched souls in search of an oasis; ink racing through blotting paper.

A book with no ending and endless beginnings, The Coast of Everything—the long-awaited second novel from the author of Lake of Urine—is an astonishing masterpiece, epic, unfurling, baffling and beguiling. A gumshoe noir, a space opera; a multiverse melodrama, an adventure; a leap of faith, a call to prayer and a call to arms. It is a notification of our first duty wherever our humanity is threatened: to persist.

Includes two free recipes.

Robert Bingham/Harry Crews (Books acquired, 9 Jan. 2026)

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I finally gave in and picked up Robert Bingham’s books, the novel Lightning on the Sun and the collection Pure Slaughter Value.

Bingham was one of the founders of the literary magazine and press Open City. Open City published David Berman’s collection Actual Air in 1999. Bingham was friends with Berman and the Pavement boys. He was also the wealthy scion of an old Louisville family. He o.d.’d in ’99. Both Malkmus and Berman eulogized him in song — SM in “Church on White,” the Silver Jews in “Death of an Heir of Sorrows”:

I wish I had a rhinestone suit
I wish I had a new pair of boots
But mostly I wish
I wish I was with you

I think what really plugged the Bingham back into my brain was going through a July 1999 issue of SPIN magazine. I was looking for something else, but I found an old Pavement profile in which Bingham shows up early with bobo hockey tix. From the profile:

Pavement are standing outside Madison Square Garden, shouldering their way through tens of thousands of burly hockey fans. There’s a sold-out game about to start—the Rangers vs. the Mighty Ducks—and cops, peanut vendors, and entire families in matching red-white-and-blue Rangers jerseys mill about, blocking the sidewalk. “We’ve never gone to a hockey game together,” says bassist Mark Ibold. He is unceremoniously shoved aside by a squall of kids bearing cotton candy. “Usually we go see baseball games.”

Pavement pal Robert “Bingo” Bingham, a New York fiction writer, grows increasingly nervous as they approach the arena. He bought the band scalped tickets, an offense he’s been nailed for once before. “Should we come up with a fall-back strategy?” he says.

“Don’t sweat it, Bingo,” says bandleader Stephen Malkmus, still wearing the track suit and squash shoes he threw on this morning while awaiting clean laundry. The band is determined to get in, as percussionist Bob Nastanovich has already phoned his bookie to bet on the Rangers. “We don’t much care for the Ducks,” Nastanovich says.

“They’re all Steve Garveys,” adds the clean-cut Malkmus. Nastanovich takes a final drag from his Marlboro, then leads the group through the throngs to the ticket line. They cruise right in, home free—until a security squad catches up with them moments later.

“You aren’t going anywhere with those,” a guard says, motioning at the ticket stubs in Bingo’s hand. “They’re fakes.”

“Oh, please,” Bingo says. He knows they’re scalped, but fakes? A bit stunned, the band takes a look. “Well, yeah,” Ibold says. “I can see that.”

The printing is all faded and off-register.

“Mine looks like it was perforated with a cookie cutter,” says Nastanovich. Upon further inspection, they realize they all have the same seat.

Meanwhile, the Garden crowd is going ballistic. Christopher Reeve has just been wheeled onto the ice for the opening ceremony. Security hems and haws for a while, and finally takes pity on Pavement. A bearded fellow rests a cozy hand on Bingo’s arm. “You tell me who you bought these from,” he says, “and if he’s still out there, we’ll bust the fucker.”

Bingo hangs his head. “I don’t remember,” he mutters, and ambles off. Pavement trudge back to the street, reassuring their friend that the night is still young. They end up viewing the game at a nearby sports bar, and work on getting stinking drunk. Nedved is benched. Gretzky is checked. The once formidable Rangers lose handily, 4–1. Nastanovich looks up from his Bass Ale and shakes his head, laughing. He just lost $100.

I also couldn’t resist a signed copy of Harry Crews’ 1998 novel Celebration.

If you can make out the inscription, let me know. I think it’s to Frank, who was on the ultimate quest for…?