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HOW TO READ A NOVELIST and GOODBYE TO ALL THAT at Powerhouse
Two terrific events coming up at Powerhouse arena focusing on writing, living, and interacting as a writer in New York and the world….
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT edited by Sari Botton
Tuesday Oct 08, 2013
In Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, edited by Sari Botton, 28 women writers take up Didion’s literary legacy by sharing their own stories about New York. With stellar contributions from some of today’s most beloved female authors of memoir and literary fiction—Cheryl Strayed, Dani Shapiro, Emma Straub, Emily Gould, Emily St. John Mandel, Hope Edelman, and more—Goodbye to All That tells the stories of their own love/hate relationships with New York, as well as the city’s gravitational pull on them—even at the worst of times.
HOW TO READ A NOVELIST by John Freeman
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Between 2000 and 2013 John Freeman put interviews to tape with just about every major writer who published a book: he spoke with such departed legends as Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace; the Nobel laureates Doris Lessing, Mo Yan, and Günter Grass; bestsellers such as Amy Tan and John Irving; American greats from Toni Morrison to Philip Roth; and a younger generation of novelists that includes Dave Eggers, David Mitchell, Kiran Desai, and Jonathan Safran Foer. How to Read a Novelist rounds up 55 of Freeman’s very best profiles and interviews, but it is not simply a collection of discrete dialogues between interviewer and interviewee; these authors are also in conversation with one another, with Freeman serving as a deft moderator connecting the dots of a global literary culture. And in the poignant introduction about Freeman’s experiences interviewing John Updike, he gets to the heart of his enterprise: what it means to love a writer, to attempt to live up to his or her achievements—and then to come face to face with him or her in less-than-ideal circumstances.
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Alison Elizabeth Taylor
Pinkney Herbert
David de las Heras
Video Weekend: David Sullivan
THE WEEK/WEEKEND: FEBRUARY
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One Night Stand: A Biblical Epic on Mastication
By David Moody
Lord, forgive all my foxiness. Remember us humans, us cruising
to nightclubs and not braking to dead stop, us stepping—
no hand rail—in black pumps and boot-cuts up to the slut box
then forgetting to dance. Us keeping secrets. Our leaving no tip.
Sometimes in a good fuck I speak carpentry—spackle and jack
tape, Jesus rib, caulk. I awoke this morning naked as a jay bird. Buzzed,
wearing glasses, I held on to no one but my body pillow, Sacagawea,
keeping her warm. Almost a godsend, God, almost.
I confess I want guidance. Guide me to the country of Charity,
that hard-knuckled woman, her deep ankle boots. Can she have red
hair or is black a must? I imagine her hips as I often do hips—chisels
and axes that hack at a crowd thralled to some DJ.
This woman shapes through body’s rhythm her own thrumming
god. Fox beast, incisors, torso warped thing. Its own twisted shape a way
of confessing. To choke without a throat, slowly, on praise.
From what is this thing we have gnawed happiness? How
has it tasted all of our lives? God of Smudged Chins. God of
Half-Virgins. We wedge fingernails into the gaps between backboard screws
and corner beams. With a wonderful quickness we know bed as world.
God, what I’m saying is that I suspect heaven
was planned with a right hand drawing blueprints on napkins,
the left hand still-buried in some idle fur.
Forgive me but nightclubs are like your mouth, like my bedroom
with its ceiling too low. The off-kilter whir of fan blades replace
any belief in collar-starch morals. Forgive the room’s stucco.
Forgive the drunk nothings this tile floor revibes. No,
nothing’s wrong with yesterday’s meats. Sometimes, though, I am
little more than gaps found between words—good and then
morning. A click-click that lingers. I cannot tell if its high heels or teeth.
If I am flea, Lord, and not a fox, I insist one thing: you must bite, hard.
David Antonio Moody writes out of Tallahassee where he pursues a PhD in poetics at FSU. Former poetry editor for SawPalm and Juked, David is production editor of Cortland Review and Southeast Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sweet, Eleven Eleven and Spillway.
The 22 Magazine 