Steve Himmer

"American novelist" ~ The Guardian "Doesn't maintain this tone" ~ Kirkus Reviews

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I’m excited to share that my novel Scratch will be published in the UK this summer by Wundor Editions, the first of my books to travel abroad.

It’s a particular thrill to see it listed in Waterstones’ catalog, because their stores in Boston and Glasgow were formative places for me as a reader and writer. (And if anyone spots a copy on the shelf in Sauchiehall Street, picture please!)

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At Largehearted Boy, a playlist of music to set the mood for Scratch.

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An exquisite passage of angst and ennui, from “The Young Titans” by Nescio, (translator Damion Searls), in The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories.

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This week Steve Himmer compares his new novel, Scratch, to things like bears, squirrels, and mice. The book is out now from Dark House Press.

At Monkeybicycle today, I’ve written about Scratch for the “If My Book” series. In case you’ve wondered what my book would be like as a bird, squirrel, fox, or other wild creature.

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...insist upon your right to go off on a tangent. Your right to put the spanner in the works. Your right to refuse to be labelled and to insist on your right to behave like anything other than what anyone expects. Your right to simply say no for the pleasure of it. To insist on your right to confound all who insist on regimenting human impulses according to theories psychological, religious, historical, philosophical, political, etc. . . . Insist upon your right to insist upon your right to insist on the importance, the great importance of whim.

Dambudzo Marechera

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Sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. The woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. It is not uncommon in crossing the new States of the West to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track.

de Tocqueville, in a passage that has been on my mind lately with the approach of this new year

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But still the question of a failed project—as it applies to the tiny unreal world of my fiction—is not entirely wrongheaded. It’s true enough that my novels were once sunnier places and now the clouds have rolled in. Part of this I chalk up simply to the experience of middle age: I wrote White Teeth as a child, and have grown up alongside it. The art of midlife is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier. But it would be disingenuous to pretend it is only that. I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs. This fact, still obscure to a twenty-one-year-old, is a little clearer to the woman of forty-one.

Zadie Smith

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“In 2009, a man arrived in an Irish town with a plan to disappear forever” — a CCTV ghost story at Aeon

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And this is what is so oppressive in Hilbig. With horrific strength, with evocative sorcery, with obsessive precision, he described a world that is distasteful not only to Germans but actually harrowing for all of us who sense the unbroken strength of those ordinary events. He wrote his astounding novels about a world in which only the weak, the sensitive, those incapable of bargaining and in no way heroic, can sense the chaos and the surrealism. Because this world really does have its own rules, and there are those who realize and maintain its organizational structures, since this is their world, a world in which the aggressive, mean-spirited, cowardly, servile — namely the rat-person, running away from the monumental, the far-reaching, escaping from freedom — is the lord, pursuing at his pleasure those who are alien in his world, which he creates again and again; the alien, those who don’t belong there, whose existence cannot be legitimated — indeed, the unfortunates who cannot legitimize themselves.

László Krasznahorkai on The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig

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There is one formidable advantage in obscurity. No one expects anything particular from you, so you can divert the tedium of writing by trying to tell each story in a different way. [...] This doesn't make the work any easier but I can recommend it if you like risks and don't mind losing the previous novel's publisher.

JL Carr, quoted in The Last Englishman: The Life of JL Carr by Byron Rogers

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Necessary Fiction - N by John A. Scott

Over at Necessary Fiction, I shared a few thoughts about John A. Scott’s N, a brilliant novel of Australian alternate history and authoritarianism.

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It’s a story as old as civilization: a man ventures into the woods to seek his fortune, and finds something menacing and uncanny there. In the case of Steve Himmer’s new novel Scratch, …

Thanks to Tobias Carroll at @vol1brooklyn for asking me some questions about my novel Scratch recently.

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14 Novels of Wildness & Wilderness

A list of books that broach the great outdoors, by Steve Himmer

Thanks to @electricliterature for inviting me to share a list of some of my favorite novels of the wild outdoors.

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A novelist is thought to be a political novelist only when the politics of his novel are not the prevailing politics of his society. Then the politics stand out. We could discuss as a proposition the idea that all novels are political; all art is political, which seems to be endorsed in most countries of the world where the profession of novelist or artist is slightly more dangerous than that of high speed automobile racing. We have novelists who are put in insane asylums, who are tortured and put in cages, who are exiled. What does the rest of the world know that we don’t know, about fiction and about art? I’ve often made the observation that this is one of the few countries in the history of western civilization in which artists are not seen to be a danger to the state.

E.L. Doctorow, 1977

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Fresh from the forest

My novel Scratch is published today by Dark House Press, and I hope you’ll consider taking a look.

I'd call it a literary folk horror/monster story, with deep forests and shapeshifting and animal attacks and stone walls and solastalgia and a narrator who doesn’t find human beings quite as fascinating and special as we find ourselves.  And it began with something I read in an interview with the novelist Molly Gloss years ago (in an interview about her wonderful novel Wild Life):

“Here’s what it comes down to: I want to live in a world in which it’s possible to believe in giants living deeply secret in the forests. When the wild woods are entirely gone, that possibility won’t exist for any of us anymore.”

You can order a copy from your local bookstore, directly from the publisher, or from Amazon, Powells, and all the usual places (or ask your library to add one to their collection), if you’re so inclined.

Thanks.

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Mythical Irish Island Inspires A Sculpture Floating In Boston’s Back Bay Fens

“It would come and go like a mirage,” explains visiting Irish artist Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile.

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Turnabout

A warm afternoon toward the middle of autumn, one of the last before anyone with a head on their shoulders settles in for the sleep, so why not a walk? Mother and father out pushing a cart roiled with cubs; she’s rumbling and roaring away at her story about some thick-skulled couldn’t-catch-a-fish who had a hard time at the stream. They don’t notice the cubs have hurled their prized corn husk human out of the cart, not until their whining gets shrill, and father growls and he snorts but he goes back.

A mangy old bear on what remains of a bench and wrapped in the shreds of a trench coat stolen off some backyard line rolls out a half-hearted warning but he looks to have hit the honey too hard. His eyes are bloodshot and swimming. Father pays him no mind as takes the husk doll between his teeth where the lingering tang of the children who lost it to the gain of his cubs draws a sneeze.

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(What is this?)