Blake Butler
Love in the Time of Xanax and Nokia
Fiction is less about what happens than how it’s told, and to me there’s no one else speaking quite like Tim Sanders.
Print's Not Dead: Thirty Years of Dalkey Archive Press
For the past 30 years, Dalkey Archive has quietly and consistently been a vital aesthetic cornerstone in print. Here are some of my favorite titles.
'Sprezzatura' Basically Means You’re Chill But You Give a Shit
Mike Young is a writer of great grace, which is weird because the things he tends to write about are oatmeal muffins, garbage vacuums, robotic butterflies, Ice Cube, and pretty much anything you could find out in the dumpster behind a 7-Eleven in Weed...
Underappreciated Masterpieces: J. G. Ballard’s 'High Rise'
I was sold on High Rise (1975) after the first ten words: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog…”
Why Do So Many Soft Drinks Taste Like Teletubby Blood?
The land of off-brand soda is vast and largely uncharted. The tastes these beverages hold exist only inside of their cans and can't be found anywhere else in the whole world. It’s like a Willy Wonka of weird water, and I found a golden ticket.
M. Geddes Gengras Makes Electronic Music for the Last Wild Indian
M. Geddes Gengras is a staple in the LA experimental music scene. His work gives me the feeling of a computer asleep and orgasming at the same time, conjuring weird worlds of sound that mutate and bleed and dig out tunnels through one another. Gengras...
America Needs Alzheimer’s Funding Now
While the National Institute of Health spends $3 billion a year on AIDS research, and nearly $4.9 billion on cancer, for Alzheimer’s it spends only $500 million, an enormous drop off for an illness that is already widespread and growing rapidly.
Joe Wenderoth Cannot Be Vanquished
Wenderoth's newest book, If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep, is a dark and peculiar volume you might keep in the same drawer with your Faces of Death tapes and the Flowers of Evil. I talked to him about his new poetry collection and...
Underappreciated Masterpieces: Javier Marías’s 'Dark Back of Time'
I ordered Dark Back of Time from an online bookstore, based almost entirely on the title. I know that goes directly against traditional book-buying advice, but that’s really a hell of a title, and it turned out to be one of the best things I’ve...
Some Books Can Watch You Read Them
Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched? Sometimes, when I’m sitting there in front of the computer, naked for whatever reason, I see the eye of the camera and the wires leading out of my house, and wonder whether or not someone is recording...
Owning Porno Used to Mean Something, Damnit
The internet really changed the way people masturbate. Today, if you want to see someone naked you just press the buttons and poof, there’s a boob. But as a teenager I remember thinking of pictures of naked women as a kind of secret relic, something...
If I Can’t Be Brain Damaged I Don’t Want to Read
When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth. Ed Steck's latest novel, The Garden, comes close to that...