Are you already preparing? Are you carbo-loading, flooding your system with antioxidants, reading everything Jumpa Lahiri ever wrote, doing deep-squats and calf-raises to help with the bookfair hike, locating all your old flings in and about the DC area, saving up your pennies for the overpriced hotel, asking a friend if you can ship them books, if they’ll ship them back, if you can sleep in their carport? Well, not us. We’re planning parties.

But, Flatmancrooked is going to be on a budget, of sorts. So, we’re trying to figure out what’s the most important thing to have an AWP off-site event and what most folks want to avoid. No worries, our Puppets vs. Authors will happen again at our booth in the book fair, our authors will be found at various readings. But, we’re talking parties folks. So, let us know what you want. Feel free to comment about what you dread.

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Jay Miskowiec  Rain Taxi

Published twenty-five years after Julio Cortázar’s death, Papeles inesperados (Unexpected Writings) brings together a vast range of little-known texts by the Argentine author. Though not all technically “unpublished” works, many previously having appeared in newspapers or magazines, this trove varying in style and genre offers Cortázar fans and scholars a fresh look at his work. Co-edited by Carles Álvarez Garriga and Cortázar’s literary executor and former wife, Aurora Bernárdez, Papeles inesperados is among the most important books published in Spanish in 2009.

Jorge Luis Borges said that while Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, and Peruvians from the Incas, the Argentines descended from boats. That connection, closer to the old world than the new, has often set Argentines apart culturally from other Latin Americans. Even to call Cortázar an Argentine is incomplete. Born in Brussels in 1914, he grew up in Argentina but moved to Paris in 1951, where he wrote most of his notable work and where he died. While writers like Miguel Ángel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez were forging a style that would become known as magical realism—based upon the very history of the Americas, where one need not look beyond the reality of this world to find the magical, the astonishing, the marvelous—Cortázar would be influenced by surrealism and the novelists of the nouvel roman like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Philippe Sollers, where punctuation and syntax were as important as words in conveying character and setting. (Read More)

by Clarissa Romano

Read Part I

“It’s simple,” Molly said to him when he got her on the phone. “Wyatt and I live here now. You live here. Why shouldn’t you two have a relationship?”

“Hey, I’m not dense, all right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I’m catching up on a few years of being in the dark, if you’ll forgive me.”

“I understand.”

“So I have a few questions.”

“I’m not after your money, if that’s what you want to know.”

“Why not? I mean, I’m sorry, but I have a few questions—”

“What if we all have dinner Saturday night? Jim wants to meet you. We can put it all on the table.”

“I’m not sure,” Nicholas admitted.

“We’ll pick you up. Wyatt wants to see where you live, anyway.”

“He said that?”

“How’s two o’clock?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Janet Maslin  |  The New York Times

What does a writer do when he has already won the Man Booker Prize and can make copacetic use of words like preterite, spalpeen, goitrous and phthistic? In the case of John Banville, whose accolades also include the Guinness Peat Aviation award, the answer has been to take a pseudonymous flight of escapism into genre fiction.

So this Janus-faced author has two current novels: “The Infinities,” a convoluted marvel about Greek deities wreaking havoc in the household of a dying theoretical mathematician, and “Elegy for April,” the third installment in a crime series credited to Benjamin Black. As this very busy author told an interviewer, Banville writes meticulously; Black just writes fast. It’s a toss-up as to which of them has more fun.

“The Infinities,” a much merrier novel than its premise might suggest, is the exponentially more elaborate effort. It is derived from Heinrich von Kleist’s 1807 play “Amphitryon,” about the Theban general of the title. (Synergy alert: Mr. Banville has adapted Kleist plays for the stage, including this one.) And a character in “The Infinities,” an actress, is named Helen. In addition to the other classical allusions she provides, Helen has been cast in “Amphitryon” as Alcmene, a woman seduced by mythology’s best-known stealth lady killer, Zeus. (Read More)

by Clarissa Romano

He looked up the street and there she was, walking toward him in pink jeans, hair dyed black and pulled into a ponytail. It wasn’t until she took off her sunglasses and he saw her eyes that he found evidence of the years. Eleven this winter. He’d seen her once or twice more to sign the papers and pick up his stuff, but she’d gone straight into rehab and he was glad to be rid of her.

“Good to see you, kid,” he said, giving her a hug, careful not to look at her too much. She ordered a soft taco and a lemonade. They sat on the terrace in white plastic chairs beneath a wall of bougainvillea.

“Goddamn it’s been a long time,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at him. “What’re you doing with yourself?”

He told her about his band and his carpentry and he tried not to get distracted by that particular angle she held her head at when she was listening. “Rockabilly?” she asked.

The sparrow tattoo on the back of her hand had faded to blue-green. He had no idea what had become of her after that first year.

“We live in Venice,” she said. “About eight months.”

When they were married they’d shared a downtown loft. The floors were cool cement and through the windows LA was vast and dreamy. Also urban and decayed. Nicholas remembered that Molly had wanted to be near the beach.

“Bullshit,” she said, with a laugh. “You haven’t thought about me.”

“Sure I do.” He shifted in his seat.

“Okay, look,” said Molly, leaning forward. “I’m about to drop a bomb on you.” For a few seconds doubt flickered in her eyes. “We have a son,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »

{NB: None of the following is intended as, nor should it be construed as, legal advice to any person, persons, or group. If you or someone you know requires legal assistance, contact an attorney in your area. The statements made below represent only the personal opinions of this essay’s author}.

In practice, what is known as a Terry stop—an investigative detention of a citizen to confirm or deny an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that a crime may just have been or be in the process of being committed—is the launching pad for more or less whatever judicial orbit the officer wants to send you into. If the officer orders you to stand in one spot but you move to another you can be arrested (never mind that the very definition of “arrest” is having your freedom of movement curtailed, so a non-arrest Terry stop is already a contradiction in terms). If you run away, regardless of whether you’ve done anything wrong, you can be arrested. If you disobey the officer’s order to produce identification you can, in many states, be arrested. If you start swearing at the officer and there are other people around you can be arrested. If you touch the officer, no matter how lightly or even cordially, you can be arrested. If you hinder, in any way, the officer’s attempt to speak to another citizen you can be arrested. And on and on it goes; the number of ways for an “investigative” stop to end in a citizen being arrested for something having nothing to do with the original reason for the stop numbers in the hundreds or even thousands, not the dozens. Many criminal cases begin with minor traffic violations or minor civilian complaints. And if any of these complaints-cum-investigative stops-cum-arrests should befall an individual who is not a legal denizen of the United States, that individual can, despite not being charged with any criminal offense, be held in a federal ICE (formerly INS) holding cell for months and then deported following an administrative (not criminal) hearing. Read the rest of this entry »

by Kai Flanders

The truck came out from under the shade of the bridge and into the sun. The street was narrow and the tires jumped on the cobblestone. The sun came in through the bars in the windows and it was very hot in the holding cell in the back of the truck. For a while there was nothing but apartments, but then the truck turned and there were not only the apartments but also some stores and, after a while, a park. But the truck passed quickly by and there was only a momentary glint of green through the bars. Then the truck was in the center of the city and the buildings were very tall so that you could only the sides of them and nothing else. The driver lit a cigarette and the smoke blew back into the holding cell.

“Could you open a window?” asked one of the men in the holding compartment. He was very tall so that his knees touched his chest sitting shackled to the metal bench. There was also a man next to him.

The driver did not say anything but reached over his shoulder and slid shut a glass barrier between the cab and the holding cell. No more smoke came into the back, but it was still very hot. By this time the truck had passed through the city center and there were no more large buildings. There was only the road and small shops and business and sometimes a restaurant on a corner.

“I’ve eaten there,” the tall one said to the man sitting next to him as the truck passed one of the restaurants. “I think that’s the place. We passed it so quickly.”

The man next to him did not say anything.

For a while the truck climbed up a hill, but then the road flattened out again and there was, on one side, train tracks running out of the city and on the other a steep drop. There was a tram that brought you up the hill for a dollar but it could not be seen from the back of the truck. The driver might have been able to see it, though. The train tracks were seldom used and then only for shipping goods out of the city. Hardly anyone rode the train. The tracks and the arcades over the tracks and the sides of the cars, sitting abandoned on side rails near the station, were all covered in graffiti. The truck passed the station and came down the hill and back into the city. At the bottom of the hill there were two wrecked cars. Read the rest of this entry »

{NB: None of the following is intended as, nor should it be construed as, legal advice to any person, persons, or group. If you or someone you know requires legal assistance, contact an attorney in your area. The statements made below represent only the personal opinions of this essay’s author}.

Yesterday I was listening to Sean Hannity’s nationally-syndicated radio program. He was savaging Attorney General Eric Holden for having apparently conceded, under Congressional questioning, that he had not yet read the new Arizona statute making it a state-level crime to be in the United States illegally. This, despite the fact that Holder had on more than one occasion registered concern over the law’s potential for promoting racial profiling—which, Hannity pointed out repeatedly to his listeners, the language of the statute explicitly forbade. While I was listening to the show no one called in, or was allowed on the air, to point out to Hannity that racial profiling can no more be “forbidden” than it can be codified. Any statute codifying racial profiling would be nullified by any court in the United States, state or federal, before it could be enacted; likewise, any statute claiming to outlaw racial profiling would be just as toothless and irrelevant, whether or not it passed judicial muster as a mere reiteration of the Fourteenth Amendment.

For years conservatives of Hannity’s ilk have been hard at work turning the cottage industry of spreading misinformation about the criminal justice system into a veritable empire of criminal justice-related misinformation. Dick Wolf’s endlessly syndicated and replicated Law & Order series has done more to intentionally misinform the American public about its system of laws than any determined propaganda campaign of the twentieth century, and I include in this all of the most infamous propaganda campaigns of that bloody century. Those who watch Wolf’s politically-charged tripe regularly are not merely uninformed about the operations of police and prosecutors in the United States, they are in fact less knowledgeable about our national system of criminal justice than those with absolutely no awareness of it whatsoever—for instance, a child of seven living in a lightly-policed suburban enclave somewhere in middle America. Every episode begins with a studied, deliberate lie: police officers, while often courageous, often honorable, and undoubtedly critical players in American society, in no way whatsoever represent “the people,” as we are so sagely informed by voice-over actor Steven Zirnkilton at the beginning of every hour-long Law & Order. Read the rest of this entry »

Jenny Dunning  |  Rain Taxi

FLUG /fləg´/ n. 1. A substance reputed to wash haze from some, but not all, early mornings. 2. By extension, any act or word or image which clears ambiguous action and verbiage from any given group of co-terminous situations selected by chance or, barring chance, by outright chicanery.

You won’t find flug in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, or even in the OED. It’s a word from Sid Gershgoren’s “imaginary dictionary,” The Extended Words. Yet, like so many of Gershgoren’s inventions, once you’ve encountered it, it seems like a word English should have.

The author of four books of poetry, Gershgoren has compiled a list of plausible-sounding words, defined them, and provided invented quotations that demonstrate their use. The words range from pure whimsy—such as galisse, a shoe that knows where its wearer wants to go and how to get there—to barbed rants aimed at intellectuals and mass culture alike, as in synecdofuge, “a device used to expel verbal, long-range, parasitic reductionisms.” Some are onomatopoetic—pecta pecta, an often fatal stuttering disorder—while others, like ikristics (frozen particles of air indistinguishable from snowflakes) wear their etymology on their sleeves. (Read More)