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"Art lays its eggs in its own eyes.
If you want to be an Artist, let Art lay its eggs in your eyes and change your vision; and make you into a Seer; and make you shed a swarm of winged, infectious, dirty Art, equipped with wiggy egg sacs and further compound eyes. You can’t treat reading like some plastic bottled water you have shipped in from Fiji to refresh you as you lay by the pool, a resource you quaff and utilize. You have to pour Art’s acid on your face and let it eat your face and make you a new face, and you have to be looking into a mirror the whole time, and the mirror has to be made of some molten registering substance that records the whole event in a kind of distended smeary disingenuous film. A damage film. If your eyes melt, you know you are doing something right. That’s the Art coming out of your skull. How refreshing!
Some artists whose written, visual, and multimedia work has caused me this kind of permanent damage include Jack Smith; Andy Warhol; Nick Demske; Kim Hyesoon; Fi Jae Lee; Artaud; the critics Mark Seltzer, David Gissen and Achille Mbembe; Deleuze and Guattari; Harryette Mullen; Alice Notley; Cesar Aira; Aime Cesaire; Kara Walker; Bylex Puma; and Raul Zurita. Also the Internet, Slavoj Zizek, my grad students, WikiLeaks and AlJazeera English. Also, Johannes Göransson’s new book, entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate from Christian Peet’s dynamite Tarpaulin Sky Press."
{Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the hybrid novels Flet (Fence Books) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press), as well as two books of poetry from Fence. She edits Action Books and contributes to the collective blog, montevidayo. Please check it out! She also teaches in the MFA Program at Notre Dame.}
"Reading is how you learn to write, which is to say it's how you learn to stop lying to yourself about life, about sex, about death, about fear, about love. Only by watching other people tell the truth about themselves can you learn to stop repeating the same boring stories we've all been taught to believe."
{Seth Fischer’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Swink, Pank, Guernica, Monkeybicycle, Gertrude, and elsewhere. He’s Sunday Editor at The Rumpus and founding editor of The Splinter Generation and webscribbler.net. During the day, he works in a cubicle not too far from an albino alligator, and he does writing consultation.}
"As a child I often suffered from bubonic plague. I'm fine now but I use crutches and drag my wooden leg. The leg part is a lie but then so is the plague. What really happened is that I had water on the brain--hydrocephaly. The opposite of a pinhead, I sported a pontoon of sorts that I could not hoist to verticality with the slender crane of my neck. Pressure was building and had to be released via operations, a shunt, wicks, and still the water rose. The way I held or, rather, could not hold my head up made it look as if I were trying to get the fluid to drain from my right ear. That side was heaviest, most affected. The waters receded, leaving a still enlarged head and a somewhat wasted infant body that dangled from this buoyant balloon. By directed exhalation, I was able to steer the balloon that carried me through cloudless skies and settled me softly upon the mossy grounds of many adventures that don't come into this tale. Almost normal development ensued, yet speech was marked by clang associations and echolalia. Words seemed attached to their own ghosts in ways I was compelled to verbalize. I'd trail off with singsong neologisms or feel the need to call someone a yellow fellow after they said hello to me. I was enraged that I could only read from left to right--instead preferring right to left or down to up. The various ordering schemes that railed and caged phonemes in mouth and on page seemed tyrannical amidst teeming possibilities.I would have been a sped case but my parents had money for specialists. I outgrew most everything to do with to do with to do with echolalia and then discovered Edgar Allen Poe, Romantic poets, and bad science fiction. Circa age eleven, I would marvel at and then mouth and then speak back at pages of robots, ravens, and dead lovers 'Rolled round in earth's diurnal course.' The words were like water pouring back into my head--restoring an inland sea of language as a fluid having lost all bounds. My head leaned to the right and hung low over the pages. I looked for signs that words and things were secretly connected, alive through connection to a world where all was one. If this oneness seemed a disordered chaos, then the best writers had survived to weld little faucets that led back to it or construct miniature vessels whose design bore every sign of collision with the infinite. The better a text was, the heavier my head would become with the word worlds that filled it. Wordsworth and Shelley appealed to the sublimation of my echolalia. Edgar brought me more rhyme and my first taste of a thick and deadly literary atmosphere lit by paranoia. The bad sci-fi brought to life every mechanical diagram and shard of history contained in my 1917 Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia set, multiplying one actual world into many speculated worlds. I bore canticles and fought for the glory of Dejah Thoris. I began to think of words as a fluid that could turn one space, one head, one self, into many. To release building pressure, I began to lie and to write. I read for a sense of conspiracy with the world, and for the familiar hydraulic pouring in of water and life."
{Matt Jasper is the author of Moth Moon which can be found here and his band, Pneumershonic, can be found here.}
"I read to 'hear', and thus to be immersed in, particular voices. Writing that is devoid of voice, disengaged from style, carries very little interest for me. In current times, style has come to be seen as an enemy of clarity, and it may well be so, but clarity is not a quality I demand of literature. I prefer to slowly savour passages of intriguing beauty, or gradually penetrate a difficult poem. One of my most fulfilling reading experiences, probably about twenty-five years ago, was with Stephen Spender's translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies -- I remember that I would read an elegy and put it aside hardly comprehending any of it, and then return to it the following evening to try again. Eventually, what it yielded was immensely valuable to me, and not even because the translation itself was particularly satisfactory. I had established, through my labours, a strange relationship with the original text. I had no acquaintance with German, and yet certain words like 'kindertod' pierced me with sadness, and reading the original with Spender's often extremely literal translation beside it created a unique transport. From this I learnt that voices, even foreign voices filtered along odd angles, have the power to transform. More recently, I had a similar experience reading Henry James's little known The Other House. At first, I felt slightly repelled by it, and set it aside expecting to shelve it away sooner or later. But the following day, I picked it up again and felt compelled to reread it, and eventually came to comprehend its choreography. It now stands out to me as a book whose narrative is almost entirely driven by style -- and the disturbance that it caused in my mind opened my eyes to the idea that narratives of integrity always emerge from style, although perhaps not quite as starkly as in The Other House. The words we use to tell a story are not just the clearest way to join a set of pre-determined dots -- they are the words themselves, and the voices that they compose, from which narratives arise."
{Sunetra Gupta's fifth novel, So Good In Black, will be published in the United States by Clockroot Books in March of 2011. She won the 2009 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific achievements. Sunetra, who lives in Oxford with her husband and two daughters, is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University's Department of Zoology, having graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London in 1992. Visit her website here for more information.}
"reading is:1. finding that lost set of keys2. riding on strong, strong shoulders3. hovering above your row house4. the fine crust of a new pie5. grateful drowning6 a feast made of tiny bites 7. hunger, especially for 8. sex without sex 9. a lap cat that follows 10.defying everything 11. the hook to hang so many hats."
{Meg Pokrass writes flash-fiction, short stories and poetry. Damn Sure Right from Press 53 is her debut collection of flash fiction. Meg serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review). Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications. Meg creates and runs the popular Fictionaut-Five Author Interview Series for Fictionaut and is associate producer for a new documentary, From Ghost Town to Havana by filmmaker Eugene Corr. Visit her website here for more information.}
"I write and read primarily very short fiction, and I often hear the idea that these compressed kind of works are written for the ADD generation of readers. I used to think, 'Well, of course that's true.' But lately I've been thinking that I attend to very short fiction with an intensity that I don't necessarily have when reading longer pieces. I tend to drift in and out of longer works, and so much of the words of a novel seem to exist to be forgotten. I love how very short work demands my attention. It's why I love reading poetry. I find a very intense focus over a very short time is the kind of reading I love to do these days. Maybe that is a bit ADD. Maybe it's something else."
{Randall Brown is the author of Mad To Live (Flume Press). He is the founder of Matter Press, and he blogs regularly at FlashFiction.Net. Visit him here for more information.}
"We read if for no other reason than to be more than we are – to go beyond ourselves, if only a short way; to know, if only in a small way, Others and, finally, ourselves. To read what we already know, therefore, is to confirm ourselves in our confinement, to draw the shade on the wider prospect, to narrow life deliberately as a river is narrowed by the channel that humbles it. To read only what is inscribed in the forms to which our reading has accustomed us is to remain at anchor, on the verge of oceanic experience – tumultuous, dangerous, and thrilling; is to lose the chance to be enraptured or – an equally valuable emotion – terrified by life, as life is made manifest by art. Reading is our consolation for living only one life. Reading is another form of life – comparable in importance and largesse."
{Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays. He received the 1979 Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review. He is a recipient of fellowships in prose from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – both for fiction – and, in 2011, for poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest prose works are the novels Shadowplay and The King of Sweden, published by Ellipsis Press and Ravenna Press, respectively, and the short-fiction collection Grim Tales, released this year in a new version by Mud Luscious Press. Norman lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, with his wife, Helen. Visit his website here for more information.}
"Writers perform on the page; as readers we get to experience a writer’s performance, preserved across space and time, as live as it gets."
{Pedro Ponce is the author of Alien Autopsy, a story collection just out from Cow Heavy Books. His novella Homeland: A Panorama in 50 States is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press.}
Breathing Books"I read, and the tiny diamonds in my wedding band are thrown back on the page; one, two … eight tiny stones, tiny refractions of light. I move my hand so and the brilliant reflections vanish. Move my hand again and there they are back. There, gone. There, gone. Safely in and out.As a girl, I didn’t own jewelry, didn’t have anything but the words coming off the page, and me right there inside the story. Safely in and out. My mother called and called, chores and mending to be done, but she couldn’t get me out of the page, out of the words, out of the story. She raised the head of the sweeping brush and brought it down on my book, my lap, and first one knee, then the second knee. Her face the most terrible cover.Something died that day. Something I’ve yet to name. Not my love for books, for sweeping floors, for my mother. All that lives on. Invincible."
{Ethel Rohan is the author of the story collection, Cut Through The Bone (Dark Sky Books), and her second collection of stories, Hard To Say, will be published by PANK in 2011. Visit her here for more information.}
"During my undergraduate studies, I once remarked to a fellow English student / very good friend how I couldn’t begin to comprehend the nuances of a novel or any other long-ish work until I had read it at least twice. He gave me a reproachful, funny look. And I must give my former self a funny look, too, but without the reproach. I try to be forgiving of my past idiosyncrasies, though I don’t blame the friend now for thinking me a bit daft. Time constraints aside, I can see the big trap of this approach relating to my current predicament, among other reasons.As I’m in my second year of English Ph.D. studies, I find most of the so-called reading I do—for coursework or a handful of comprehensive exams—is certainly not the same emphatic reading that actively engages me for another go-around (barring the off-hand chance I’ve picked up something sublime, unrelated to academics), yet I’ve acquiesced. It’s a sort of faith I may figure out what those impersonal words ever wanted from poor little me in the first place. I recall a notion about reading for pleasure which I, and perhaps every reader, unconsciously attribute to that extra-educational plane of Youth when nothing wanted to bother us. Sadly this escape escapes me—even as a creative writer who thrives on loving diversions like other creative writers. I hope to retrieve it someday when Higher Education no longer finds me useful or vice versa. Then, I suppose, it will become the grand nostalgia I will have wanted to avoid all my life for some strange reason I keep kicking around."
{Forrest Roth is the author of a novella, Line and Pause (BlazeVox Books), Co-Editor In Chief of Rougarou, and a Ph.D. student at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Visit him at:: totemic :: for more information.}
"Reading, for me, is a place to go, a place to be. It’s sitting on the bottom porch step, bare feet in the dirt, looking up at my still-young mother sitting on the top step in shorts and tank top, hair falling forward, legs crossed, long and bare, paperback in her lap, ignoring me for the words. Reading is a dirt-floor basement, with a hidden corner filled with boxes turned sideways, crammed full of well-worn paperbacks, spines lined with white vertical fold marks obscuring titles, authors. Reading is the smell of the musty dank and the damp of the pages waiting for time to turn them yellow. Reading is taking from those boxes, sitting cross legged in the basement dirt, turning page after page, finding out and then understanding what kept my mother ignoring me, summer day after summer day after summer day."
{xTx is a writer living in Southern California. She has been published in places like PANK, SmokeLong, Monkeybicycle, elimae, kill author, and Wigleaf. She has a free e-book entitled Nobody Trusts a Black Magician available at Nonpress. Her new chapbook He Is Talking to the Fat Lady was released November 15th from Safety Third Enterprises. She says nothing at No Time To Say It.}
"I first read out of spite, hoping to just see one series of bookshelves destroyed. Far from an actual decimation I only craved to see the ideas within the books worth little more than dust.My families' library stood larger than the room itself, certain bound volumes created a shadow larger than myself while other books emitted a musty smell I have (thankfully) not come across since. Where a posed family photo should have stood a picture of Ronald Reagan commanded the room. He was riding a horse passing the part of America where militias attend christenings. Inspired to defy I read anything that waved a blade at that room. It wasn't until much later that I began to read out of love for a story, a drawn feeling for a style, or anything close to literature. I wish I could have started reading for that reason younger; uptight, over-political younger years, a defiance purely bred in the 'burbs. I could have lit a match and read what matters to me now so much sooner."
{Matt DeBenedictis is the author of three chapbooks including Congratulations! There's No last Place if Everyone is Dead. He runs the press Safety Third Enterprises and talks with music artists for a un-secure living. His internet home is wordsforguns.com.}
"I used to think reading could change the world--that if we looked through different characters' eyes and hearts and souls, we might learn empathy. We might learn to be nicer to one another. But I'm getting older and more 'seasoned' (see: tired, lazy, disillusioned), and now I think of reading/writing mostly as entertainment. It's better than TV because it actively engages your brain--quality calories versus empty calories--and if the writing is good, for a moment, however brief, you connect with the world in an entirely new way. Of course, you come down and go back to being your normal self, but there's that flash, that blinding, ephemeral flash where you embody a character and experience a life that's entirely new."
{Joshua Mohr is the author of the novels Termite Parade, which was an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List, and Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine's Top 10 reads of 2009. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, 7×7, The Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, among many others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing. Please visit him here.}
"The love of my life - wife, mistress, concubine - has always been - books. I am, unashamedly, a promiscuous, polygamous, adulterous lover of books. I've taken to bed a different book every night of my life. Apologies, of course, to those who can (and do) read the same shop-worn soft cover for twenty or thirty years at a stretch, but I could never manage it.I love the figure of a well-made book, the texture. I never take up a book without cracking it down the middle first, and taking a good whiff. Age is unkind to books in every respect except odor. The older the better, here, with the oldest smelling, I find, of spice cake, or watered-down rum. The scent of thousands of books together is - narcotic.My mania for books and reading started early. By age 20, my personal library exceeded two thousand volumes - a number some bibliophiles would sniff at, but to me seemed like the whole Bodleian crammed into a modest four-bedroom. There were books in cupboards and closets, on tables, under them, in piles lining the walls. It was never surprising to come across a volume or two between sofa cushions, in a flowerpot, to come tumbling out of a liquor cabinet. I more than once found a book in the Frigidaire.Suffice it to say, amongst so much fine reading material, there was practically no room for me. So little that, exasperated, I came close to tying up a few essentials on the end of a stick - Boswell's Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Bleak House, and one or two others - and turning vagabond. It was the thought of all those books going untouched and unappreciated, alone, that saved me from vagrancy.If books have been my life, they've very nearly been my death (and may be yet, who knows). A good host, I'm occasionally obliged to sleep on the floor, and make room for guests. With memorable results, this is just what happened one Christmas Eve. Of course, family begged me not to - the room in question sported two leaning towers of bookcases notorious for toppling over without warning - but I, the good host, insisted. 'It's perfectly safe,' I said, with a dismissive wave of the hand, trying hard not to show my trepidation. And as I lay there, late at night, in my sleeping bag, precarious shadow-mountains of books all around me, I'll confess - I was afraid. But I soothed myself, tallied up the probabilities, and satisfied, at last, nodded off. And then, at half-past three in the morning ... a crash ... then another ... then a deep, muffled scream. Of course, everyone knew what must've happened, and came rushing in from every direction - to start digging. What could've easily been an exhumation proved a rescue, fortunately, when they pulled me from the rubble, bruised and shaken, but still very much alive. It wasn't so bad, all things considered. I was unconscious for the initial avalanche; and the week of bed rest that followed gave me plenty of time to catch up my reading. A few scars still remain, 'potent reminders,' friends tell me, of the dangers of bibliomania. In fact, if you look very closely, you can still see HAMLET branded on my right cheek.Thankfully, the fever to hoard has abated some in recent years; and while I read as much as ever, don't bother snatching up every book in sight, and storing them in the fireplace, or the garden shed, like some dotty squirrel. I've even paired down the collection, giving away, selling, and tossing out masses of volumes. I'm happy with my condensed library of a thousand-or-so indispensable favorites. They should be enough for a lifetime of reading. But I'll have to start right now."
{Rolli is the author/illustrator of the acclaimed poetry/art book Plum Stuff (8th House Publishing), and the forthcoming gothic novel-in-poems Mavor's Bones. Visit his website here and follow him on Twitter here.}
"In the morning I feed the cats, make a pot of coffee and sit down on the sofa and open a volume of Remembrance of Things Past, in the Montcrieff Kilmartin translation. At the moment, I’m on The Guermantes Way, just after Marcel unexpectedly succeeds in kissing Albertine; he reflects on how inadequate the lips are for kissing. I read for an hour, almost as slowly as if I were reading in French. Sometimes I feel like I am reading in French. To navigate the topiary maze of Proust’s sentences, which can twine and undulate for an entire page, often requires reading out loud. The challenge is not just to follow those sentences’ syntax but also their turns of mood: On certain days, thin, with a gray complexion, a sullen air, a violet transparency slanting across her eyes such as we notice sometimes on the sea, she seemed to be feeling the sorrows of exile. On other days her face, smoother and glossier, drew one’s desires on to its varnished surface and prevented them from going further; unless I caught a sudden glimpse of her from the side, for her matt cheeks, like white wax on the surface, were visibly pink beneath, which was what made one so long to kiss them, to reach that different tint which was so elusive. At other times, happiness bathed her cheeks with a clarity so mobile that the skin, grown fluid and vague, gave passage to a sort of subcutaneous gaze, which made it appear to be of another colour but not of another substance than her eyes; sometimes, without thinking, when one looked at her face punctuated with tiny brown marks among which floated what were simply two larger, bluer stains, it was as though one were looking at a goldfinch’s egg, or perhaps at an opalescent agate cut and polished in two places only, where, at the heart of the brown stone, there shone like the transparent wings of a skyblue butterfly, her eyes, those features in which the flesh becomes a mirror and gives us the illusion that it allows us, more than through other parts of the body, to approach the soul. (1009)
As much pleasure as my morning reading gives me, it’s also a struggle. This isn’t because of the difficulties of Proust’s style, which, to be honest, is part of the pleasure of reading him--how often do you get to experience a sense of accomplishment while sitting on your ass in your bathrobe? It’s because I came into the kitchen with my Blackberry. If describing a Blackberry for a visitor from the last century--say for Marcel Proust, had he been somehow plucked off the Boulevard Hausmann in 1916and deposited, gasping and palpitating, in the eastern U.S. in 2010--I’d say it was about the size of a small cigarette box. That might connote its addictive properties. But it’s more like a black hole, a phenomenon that no one even imagined until decades after Proust’s death in 1922, a black hole that sucks up not matter but attention. I can’t go ten minutes without looking at it. If no new e-mail shows up in my message box--announced by a tiny red and white explosion that might be made by a tiny bomb--I use the Web browser to read the Times. Often I become so engrossed in an article--or, more often, in the clever or boneheaded but usually vituperative reader comments about an article--that fifteen minutes race by before I think of horny, hyper-aesthetic Marcel and his circle, and when I return, the spell they cast on me is broken. I open the book and it’s just words, lots of them. Too many.
Is the competition between Proust and the Blackberry a competition between literature and news? I don’t think so. If it were an actual newspaper on the sofa beside me, a paper one, I wouldn’t bother looking at it until I’d read at least ten pages of the Recherche. The competition is one between reading and something that resembles reading but is really a hybrid mode in which the familiar work of decoding clusters of tiny strokes and squiggles and extracting a world from them is a front for the hypnotic activity of pushing buttons and staring at a light-filled screen. The Blackberry allows its users to think of themselves as human while doing what lab rats do, except lab rats get rewarded with pellets of food. The reward of the Blackberry is the buttons and the screen."
{Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning. For more information, visit his blog here.}
"Reading is difficult. When I was young it was a physically unpleasant experience. I've never felt like a natural reader. Today as an adult, it's still a task to sit and read for a long period of time. I've never felt like a person who is a natural reader, who can consume large amounts of material with a high level of comprehension."
{Ben Mirov grew up in Northern California. He is the author of GHOST MACHINE (Caketrain, 2010). He is also the author of the chapbooks I IS TO VORTICISM (New Michigan Press, 2010) and COLECTED GHOST (H_NGM_N, 2010).}
"I have the kind of relationship with reading you can only have with something you know you’ll never quit. I love it; I hate it; I fear it; I beat my head against it; I use it as it uses me. I like to think it’s co-dependent, but I doubt reading needs me. It can walk away at any time, and that’s why I’m so jealous of its other lovers."
{For more information about Shya Scanlon, visit his website here.}
"Reading, for me, is a completely delicious escape while also an opportunity to reconnect, since my view of the world and my internal monologues are often driven by what I am reading. I love Baroque descriptions, exquisite adjectives, stunning nouns. I’m especially fond of reading psychological descriptions. What does someone else’s internal world look like? This is why I go to Joyce Carol Oates’ work when I need to restock my own ‘word larder.’ There’s an intense beauty to her descriptions of angst (because with JCO, there’s always angst). Also, I return again and again to Günter Grass. I’ve read his work in the original German, but it’s the translations—the really good translations (I know how hard it is to match meaning)—I go back to again and again. My favorites are Tin Drum and The Flounder , translated by Ralph Manheim in 1961 and 1978, respectively (my copies are badly dog-eared). Both are like that really good first shot of bourbon, which seems to brighten and sharpen the look of the world. I seem always to be thinking about reading The Flounder when I’m writing, and conversely, reading any of the above makes me want to get back to writing."
{Savannah Schroll Guz is author of the short story collections, American Soma (2009) and The Famous & The Anonymous (2004), and editor of Consumed: Women on Excess (2005). She divides her online life here and here.}
"Eating the tail and being the tail and eating the tale and being the teeth. It is only because I consider myself a reader that anyone considers me a writer."
{Andrew Borgstrom resides in the Matted Welcome Desert.}
"I wasn't a reader as a kid. I was way too restless to sit still and read. I did daydream a lot, though, making up stories in which I was generally the hero. I suppose all this imaginative activity contributed to my becoming a writer. It also -- and earlier -- contributed to my becoming a reader. I entered new and better daydreams through reading than I could find on TV or make up on my own. This isn't to suggest that reading for me was or is primarily an escape. It isn't. Rather, it's a kind of liberation from mental and physical contraints. You sit still while reading, but you can go anywhere in your head."
{Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as 23 print and digital poetry chapbooks.}
And You Are Gone
Winner of the 2010 Outsider Writers Press Fiction Chapbook Contest Available here.“Shome Dasgupta writes about young love with a heartbreaking honesty and simplicity that transcends anything I’ve read in recent years. As we follow Jonas and Mary from kindergarten to senior year, we see a range of textual expression that is both innovative and wildly appealing. This book cracks powerful with youthful thunder, black echoes laced tightly with ephemeral innocence. Dasgupta’s debut hits the mark, and leaves one.”---Mel Bosworth, author of When the Casts Razzed the Chickens (Folded Word) and Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing)“From the start, I fell in love with this book. Shome Dasgupta takes on perhaps the most common of all subjects—love—and makes it somehow fresh and new. Stunning in its use of form, language and character, i am here And You Are Gone is a delight. The book and its author are remarkable. This is the first you may be hearing from Shome Dasgupta, but I can’t imagine it will be the last.” ---Rob Roberge, author of Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life (Ren Hen Press)“In i am here And You Are Gone, Shome Dasgupta writes with a sparse and mathematical elegance, creating a system of symbols and spaces with which to describe young Jonas’ growing affection for his friend Mary. Throughout the too-fast years of their youth, the two friends hurtle across what must feel to them like a lifetime, moving like two near-parallel lines approaching the same point, one set so impossibly infinite that they might never reach it together. Still their paths pull close, closer, so close that no matter how we might look we may be unable to divine what unsolvable span it is that at the last separates them–and so perhaps us–from each other.” ---Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found (Keyhole Press)
"I read in bouts. I haven't seen an end of all potential. There is too much to read, if you're looking. Better to stay blind, be irrational and impatient, and don't hold conditioning as essential to faith. Books have dictated my behavior more than I'd like to admit. Some are very beautiful."
{Ken Baumann is. }
"I recently had an e-mail from a friend in Sweden. He told me he had been on his way to work that morning and had happened to be standing next to a young woman in the crowded subway train. She was reading a book and seemed to be completely lost to the world, with tears streaming down her face. As he bent over a little he could see that she was reading Astrid and Veronika, my first novel. The message moved me utterly, of course.When I was a child living in Sweden we used to call grandmother every Christmas Eve. She lived in the US and it was expensive to make the toll call, so we had to line up prepared to use the short time allotted each one of us. When it was my turn I would press the receiver to my year and wait for the miracle. My grandmother’s voice. Her words in my ear sounding so close, as if she was there in the room with us. I couldn’t understand it. But it was a very short moment. Now, when my grandmother is long gone, I still have her letters. And in them I still hear her voice. See her face. Her words in her driven handwriting still bring out the feelings that we had for each other. I can see her, hear her. And it happens that I am moved to tears when I read them. Writers are lonely people, I think. I am. My work, if you can call it that, takes place at odd hours, often very late at night, and in complete isolation. I have no colleagues to test ideas on, or discuss problem solutions with. Quality control happens only after the fact, when my manuscript leaves my computer. And I am rarely present when the miracle happens, when my words reach a reader. I do read reviews, of course (I have never believed writers who claim they don’t), but reviewers are not like regular readers. Their reading is work, while I hope that others will read for pleasure. I do get mail from readers and each message is wondrous. My readers, wherever in the world they happen to be, write to tell me that they have been moved by my words. The miracle has truly happened.I still don’t understand how phones work, though I often rely on my mobile to connect me with those I love. But I am even more intrigued by how the written word works. How can it be that the symbols that I type on my keyboard can instil the feelings that I invest in them in a reader across the world? In many cases in translation, too. If I talk to a person on the phone, then he or she is at least partially present in our communication. But if I read a letter or text message we are communicating entirely in code. We can’t see each other, can’t hear each other. Yet, the other person is there, on my screen or in my hands as I read the words. I can see him, hear him and the letters in front of me have the capacity to move me in some way. Perhaps this fact contributes to the difficulty of making books into films. Readers have already seen the movie and any other version is likely to disappoint. It is sad to consider that in spite of this extraordinary capacity to communicate that is imbued in the written word, it is so often used to mislead and deceive, and to communicate hateful or frightening messages. But abuse of power seems be present in all cultures, at all times. And the written word has enormous power."
{For more information about Linda Olsson, please visit her website here.}
