Farewell to 2014
We asked contributors to gorse nos. 1 and 2 for their favourite reads of the year.
News: March
1.1 Welcome to Colony, co-edited by Rob Doyle.
1.2 Rob has a short story, ‘On Nietzsche,’ in the current Dublin Review.
1.3 Rob has been interviewed by tn2 magazine.
1.4 Rob offers ‘bad writing’ advice to The Stinging Fly: “As an artist of any kind, all you really have are your obsessions, fascinations and perversions, and the way to artistic self-definition is to be trenchantly faithful to them. All the rest is dreary obligation: in other words, community service.”
2. S.J. Fowler’s Fjender project exhibits Morten Søndergaard’s Wordpharmacy (Broken Dimanche Press). More on the Fjender project here.
2.2 Steven comperes an evening of poetry from The Quietus and Blue Pavillion writers, 18 March 2014, 30 Broadway Market, London.
3.1 Darran Anderson’s chapbook, A Hubristic Flea has been published by Blue Pavillion press.
3.2 Darran was on the BBC NI’s Arts Show talking about poetry and the resurrection of The Honest Ulsterman.
3.3 Darran on the Gustave Doré exhibition, Master of Imagination, at the Musée D’Orsay.
4.1 Joanna Walsh has been interviewed by Restless Books.
4.2 ‘A kind of permission’, Joanna picks short story collections for the London Review Bookshop.
5. Hidden City, Karl Whitney’s book on Dublin, has its own page on Penguin, and uses a quote from gorse.
6. Desmond Hogan has an essay on Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in the current issue of the London Library Magazine.
7. gorse interviewee Adam Thirlwell is in conversation with Stuart Hammond and Joe Dunthorne, as part of Visual Editions’ Literary Explosions, Ace Hotel Shoreditch, London, Wednesday 2nd April at 7.00pm.
8. David Winters reviews Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story in the Quarterly Conversation.
Sugar, dissolved
The current Quarterly Conversation is (mostly) a symposium on Lydia Davis, and includes Scott Esposito on innovation, Lynne Tillman on ‘A Mown Lawn,’ David Winters on The End of the Story.
Introducing: David Winters
Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.
David Winters is an invigorating literary critic (“criticism will be renewed by being disembedded, deligitimized, deinstitutionalized”), who has lead discussions on Gordon Lish (“it’s no overstatement to say that Lish is to the second half of the 20th century what Gertrude Stein was to the first”) and modernism. In an interview with HTMLGiant David said,
“Perhaps every novel contains a “theory” of the novel, as part of its cache of tacit knowledge. A novel has an understanding of itself, whether it knows it or not…“The novel” as a grand project: the idea fills me with nervous exhaustion. What I can say with confidence is that I’m less and less interested in that sort of novel. I’d rather read a book that wants to do away with itself. Deep down I closely identify with literature, but I also compulsively want to kill literature.”
For gorse, David interviews literary experimenter Evan Lavender-Smith.
The Quarterly Conversation
The Quarterly Conversation never disappoints. This issue has essays on the art of disturbance in the novels of James Purdy, Dalkey Archive’s Library of Korea series and Simon Leys, an interview with Mircea Cărtărescu, plus David Winters talks to Chrisitne Schutt.
CS: “’Reality,’ of course, is man’s most powerful illusion; but while he attends to this world, it must outbalance the total enigma of being in it at all.” So says Erik H. Erikson, but reality does not for me “outbalance” the bewildering experience of being in the world. Add the scrim of memory and incessant excursions into the past, and the most I can do to construct a world is to stitch together sensations of it. I do not want an impenetrable style but prize compression and music. I abhor quotidian easy speak, psychobabble, brands, news and slogans—a “writer’s prose” as Gordon Lish once described it. Mine calls for close, hard readers of fiction. This year in reviews of Prosperous Friends, I was bumped up from being a writer’s writer to being a writer’s writer’s writer; either way, it cautions challenging prose ahead. A lot is left unsaid and must be inferred simply because I want to avoid the dulling effect of belated language.