#thelitpub

[speh]

«This debut collection mixes the sacred and profane, beauty and beast, the strange and the wondrous. Not necessarily in that order. Or any type of defined order other than The Serious Writer segment  [...] Rather, the stories in this book seem quarantined like hungry orphans: Read me, they appear to shout from their temporary cots, take me home and love me; or better yet make love to me. Speh’s voices are consistently on pitch, his plots and settings well defined. There is a clatter in the book similar to the way Chekhov made his stories come alive.»

—from "A Certain Balanced Unbalance", a review of "Thank You For Your Sperm" in The LitPub by Susan Tepper, author of The Merrill Diaries. Image: Venus of Willendorf.

[colinwinnette]

Many of Purdy’s characters are gay men, but they rarely announce themselves as such.  Purdy allows their desires and actions to define them to themselves.  The reader and the characters discover things simultaneously.  In a world so very defined, Purdy creates a beautifully bizarre, free and ambiguous space for himself and his characters.

For this series I’m asking the writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I'm talking with Rachel B. Glaser about James Purdy's I am Elijah Thrush.

Previously, I spoke with Amelia Gray about Barry Hannah’s Airships and Roxane Gay about Claire Vaye Watkins's Battleborn.

[artfacciatumbles-blog]

LIT PUB FEATURED BOOK: SO YOU KNOW IT'S ME

http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/so-you-know-its-me/

So You Know It’s Me wears many hats. It synthesizes missed connection and bildüngsroman. Its dense references—which range from obscure college football coaches to the process for making hounds tooth fabric, from the The Little Prince to the Odyssey—reward careful probing. It offers a loving chronicle of Tuscaloosa, Alabama—not a store-bought map bound by the rules of cartography, but the kind of sketch someone would draw on the back of a paper bag. It weaves together the stories of many women in an attempt to recapture the story of one woman. It presents a narrator talking his way into relationship and self-awareness. It warns you that intimacy is a gem so lovely as to be nonexistent, then leads you to a quarry and asks you to watch as it chips away anyway. It promises jewels, then brandishes “your heart where a rock once was.”