Boldtype | April 2007


	subscribe	unsubscribe		boldtype.com		archive		send to a friend

April 2007:: issue 42

Books This Month
1.	How I Became a Nun by César Aira
2.	The Final Unfettering by Jay Chung
3.	The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz
4.	New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories from America and Beyond Edited by Robert Shapard & James Thomas
5.	So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
6.	The Psychic Soviet by Ian Svenonius
7.	Fields by Michal Rovner
	Tiny Books: A Field Guide Book News Credits/About Us

Tiny
In the book world, bigger is often taken to mean better, more important, and, of course, more expensive. Super-sized tomes have their virtues, but sometimes it's the littlest books that pack the biggest punch. For a change, this month we review only books that are either physically slight themselves or concerned with tiny subjects. A slim new novel by Argentine writer César Aira spins a childhood event into an intriguing puzzle. Two titles revamp the Little Red Book format: in the first, an artist reprints a collection of tips for con-men, while the second finds an indie rocker penning a miniature treatise. You'll be moved by the taut drama of William Maxwell's compact classic, and even by two-page bursts of flash fiction in a new anthology. Sometimes smaller just means a shift in perspective, as with Michal Rovner's digital photos of miniscule, human forms, or Corinne Botz's study of crime-scene dioramas. We close out this celebration of small things with a guide to the current crop of pocket-sized paperbacks.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

Pick a nice spot for your library. The Reader from Sony® holds about 80 electronic books, and hundreds more with a removable memory card. It's as easy to carry as a slim paperback and, thanks to electronic paper, easy to read. Are you a Reader? See more at sonystyle.com. Get $50 worth of many top best-sellers, classics and more! with purchase and registration by 4/30/07.

FICTION

How I Became a Nun by César Aira


Published:	February 2007
Pages:	117
Publisher:	New Directions
Links: Author bio Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

“Layers of cloudy inter-relatedness and vague hints of consequence create an intriguing puzzle — one that simultaneously begs to be deciphered and defies that process.”

Review
Many novels succeed by virtue of their authors' abilities to take a single event or moment and parse it into individual elements: background information, subtle details, motivations, consequences. The reader, in this model, is taken from a point of relative confusion to a point of clarity. This is a time-tested formula, but there are writers capable of succeeding by following a model that runs contrary to this one.

César Aira's How I Became a Nun starts with a small but not insignificant event: the day the narrator's father delivers on a long-standing promise to treat her (or him — Aira changes the child's gender every few pages) to an ice-cream cone. But the child hates the taste so much that she ends up sobbing violently at the thought of another mouthful. To reveal what happens next would spoil the tragic story, but it changes the child's life.

The beauty of this slim book (only 117 pages) lies in the fact that the author doesn't, as might be expected, demonstrate precisely how and why this event alters the child's life. Instead, Aira adds layers of confusion and complication to the story, showing that although moments in our lives are dependent on their predecessors, we shouldn't expect them to be predictable, malleable, or any easier to understand.

Aira describes the months following the tragedy, and the child's bizarre preoccupations, but intentionally stops short of tying everything together into a linear, cause-and-effect narrative. In Aira's world, we move from a relatively simple state of confusion, one that urges us onward, to a wholly complex one. Layers of cloudy inter-relatedness and vague hints of consequence create an intriguing puzzle — one that simultaneously begs to be deciphered and defies that process. How I Became a Nun suggests that the passage of time can, and often does, make events more confusing and less defined, so that for the reader, any understanding of events that occurred in the first chapter will disintegrate by the last. But you will have much to think about.
- Tom Roberge

NONFICTION

The Final Unfettering by Jay Chung


Published:	2004
Pages:	136
Publisher:	Commerce Books
Links: Book site

“A cultivated dandyism permeates the text, equally applicable to Charles Baudelaire and James Bond.”

Review
A contemporary artist living in Berlin, Jay Chung embraces the Dada movement's anti-ethic by blatantly appropriating Dadaist Walter Serner's 1928 text Handbook for Swindlers as his own. The result is a pocket-sized collection of 591 "loosely translated" dictums and aphorisms, published by Commerce Books — a publishing venture by artist Joe Scanlan. The Final Unfettering doubles as an artwork — in the summer of 2006, it was on view at the Wallspace Gallery in New York.

As the title suggests, The Final Unfettering has an anarchist's mandate: to instruct its readers in the ways of shysterism as a means of repudiating bourgeois morality. Like much of Dada, its sensibility is perversely aristocratic. The introduction, "In Preparation," exhorts readers, before continuing any further, to bathe, rest, dress in a tuxedo, and enjoy a decadent meal at an upscale restaurant, followed by coffee and cordials.

A quixotic marriage of Mao's Little Red Book, the Tao Te Ching, and Miss Manners, Chung's book is divided into 14 chapters, including "Human Nature," "Travels and Hotels," and "Dress and Manners." A cultivated dandyism permeates the text, equally applicable to Charles Baudelaire ("312. Know the suggestive value of necktie colors, perfumes, and above all, the weather") and James Bond ("531. There are hotels in every city that work with professional criminals. (Before going to sleep, put a chair at the door and a water carafe at the edge)").

Walter Serner was a Czech playwright and magazine publisher who abandoned his involvement in Dada in Zurich and reputedly disappeared in 1928 to live a notorious life of crime. His actual fate was more tragic; he became a school teacher in Prague and died in the concentration camp Theresienstadt sometime after 1942. Chung's version of Serner's text puts the radical absurdity of Dada back into play by reclaiming a piece of history otherwise nearly lost.
- H.G. Masters

FICTION

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz


Published:	2004
Pages:	225
Publisher:	Monacelli Press
Links: Village Voice reviews Botz's photography

“Based on actual police reports of unsolved deaths, the Nutshells are ornate, dollhouse-sized, macabre reconstructions of crime scenes.”

Review
Founder of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard, Frances Glessner Lee was born to an affluent Chicago family in 1878, where she learned the treasured and worthy skills of homemaking from her aunts and mother: metalworking, crocheting, painting, embroidery, and knitting. Lee, however, was anxious to attend school for medicine, but was barred from doing so because "a lady didn't go to school."

By her mid-60s, Lee's love for craftsmanship and her desire to do something worthwhile for her community led to her first "Nutshell study," 18 of which are photographed and featured in Corinne May Botz's The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Based on actual police reports of unsolved deaths, the Nutshells are ornate, "dollhouse sized (1 inch: 1 foot)," macabre reconstructions of crime scenes, with dolls made up to resemble corpses. Although based on real cases, with the intention of "convicting the guilty, clearing the innocent, and finding the truth in a nutshell," the constructions have characteristics that speak of the creator herself. Lee believed they should be as acutely detailed as possible, to replicate death in miniature.

Meticulously created objects — stockings knitted with needles the size of straight pins, a tiny New Yorker, and a miniature corkscrew flung among tiny bottles — made the Nutshell worthy of attention from academics and police officers alike. The men in blue who attended her workshops at Harvard deemed Lee "the patron saint of policemen and policewomen," and she was eventually made an honorary Captain of the New Hampshire police force.

Family, aging, youth, loneliness, and sexuality are innate, frozen themes in the miniatures. The cases depicted in Botz's photography and floor-plan diagrams are both gripping and disconcerting — artistically, they have the same emotional effect as Hans Bellmer or Chapman Brothers dolls, with the attention to craft of Tracey Emin and Judy Chicago. Lee's dollhouses, however, are harrowing — not only because of their stereotypically innocent medium and construction, but because of their subsequent stillness.
- Karen Ingram

FICTION

New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories from America and Beyond Edited by Robert Shapard & James Thomas


Published:	January 2007
Pages:	368
Publisher:	W.W. Norton
Links: vice-versa interviews Shapard Editors' 1987 Sudden Fiction

“The 60 stories (each fewer than 2,000 words) in New Sudden Fiction aren't dependent on twists at the end; they aren't cute and they aren't anecdotes.”

Review
In the past 20-odd years, with TV distracting readers and the Internet stealing the pleasure of a page-turner, short stories had to adapt. They got sneakier. They learned new tricks. They called themselves by new names: four-minute stories, smoke-long stories, skinny fiction, microfiction, and flash fiction are modern-day monikers.

These mini-genres can be defined by word counts or how long it takes to read them— for example, "smoke-long stories" should be read in the time it takes to puff down a cigarette. Editors Robert Shapard and James Thomas have been trolling the burgeoning short-story genre since the early '80s, in print and online, admiring its Darwinist ability to evolve, looking out for lightning strikes, and publishing three anthologies of sudden fiction plus Flash Fiction Forward.

The 60 stories (each fewer than 2,000 words) in New Sudden Fiction aren't dependent on twists at the end; they aren't cute and they aren't anecdotes. New Sudden Fiction presents whole stories, albeit only a few pages long — stories that are "suddenly just there," according to the editors. The tight word limit, though, does not limit their scope — Jennifer Hollowell's story, "A History of Everything, Including You," which debuts in this anthology, starts out with the possibility of the Big Bang and covers the evolution of man. In Tobias Wolff's "Powder," the history of a broken family unfolds as a car coasts down a closed, snowy mountain road.

Not just anybody can deliver a complete story in only a few pages, which partly explains why the anthology's roster includes such notable and veteran novelists as Nadine Gordimer, Yann Martel, Sam Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Foster Wallace. These writers champion this short-short form so beautifully that it makes you wonder: did Infinite Jest really have to be so long?
- McKay McFadden

FICTION

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell


Published:	1980/1996
Pages:	144
Publisher:	Vintage Books
Links: Author bio Washington Post book club CNN obituary Maxwell's The Outermost Dream

“Such territory might doom a lesser writer to banality, but in Maxwell's hands, the familiar is archetypal, and an American pastoral becomes a tiny masterpiece.”

Review
Whence sentimentality? A synopsis of William Maxwell's slender 1980 novella, which first appeared in its entirety in the New Yorker, where Maxwell was a fiction editor, is the stuff of Hallmark specials: an old man remembers his childhood on the brink of the Depression; an adulterous affair rocks a Midwestern farm town; children lose their mothers and fathers; and a dog waits for a boy who isn't coming back. Haven't we heard this one before? Such territory might doom a lesser writer to banality, but in Maxwell's hands, the familiar is archetypal, and an American pastoral becomes a tiny masterpiece.

So Long, See You Tomorrow opens with a pistol shot, as a man murders his best friend, Lloyd Wilson, before killing himself. The novel's nameless narrator was friends with the murderer's son, Cletus, and the two shared the sort of laconic friendship only children can have — the title is the refrain that attends their parting each day. Years after Cletus and his mother flee from the murder, the boys' paths cross again, unexpectedly, when the narrator moves to Chicago. Until the final pages, the book ruminates on what can be said to someone whose past casts such a haunting and ineluctable shadow, and though Maxwell's structure seems initially ad hoc and conversational, the novella dictates that we witness the murder and its ramifications first, before learning how and why it came to pass.

As the narrator reveals the back-story — ultimately, the heart of the novel — with wisdom and insight that his younger self couldn't have fathomed, Maxwell's intentions become clear: the novel is not so much about the events as the memory of them and the knowledge of how things might have been different. So Long, See You Tomorrow is a story about regret — one told so artfully and with such compassion that it's as beautiful as it is devastating.
- Chris Parris-Lamb

NONFICTION

The Psychic Soviet by Ian Svenonius


Published:	2006
Pages:	270
Publisher:	Drag City
Links: Svenonius's Soft Focus talk show

“Over the course of 19 missives, the author takes on the Cold War, vampirism, the Rolling Stones, and Swedish girls. Svenonius creates a layered mythology, with each successive essay decimating its predecessor.”

Review
Washington, DC's preeminent rock 'n roller, Ian F. Svenonius (of Weird War, the Make-Up, and Nation of Ulysses), takes his conspiratorial scribbling from the liner notes to the printed page in The Psychic Soviet. Meant to "clear up much of the confusion regarding events of the last millennium," this pocket-sized collection of essays poses an alternative history that sees the blood of global imperialism in a can of Coke and holds Seinfeld responsible for urban renewal.

Svenonius' accounts of world events are unlike any history you might remember: Stalin's purges were "bitchy" and Christianity prevailed because "'Zoroastrianism' was too hard to pronounce." Over the course of 19 missives, the author takes on the Cold War, vampirism, the Rolling Stones, and Swedish girls. Svenonius creates a layered mythology, with each successive essay decimating its predecessor.

But between the lines of glib remarks and tongue-in-cheek parlance, some keen observations emerge, especially when Svenonius turns his guns on his own chosen trade: rock 'n roll. His accounts of punk aping from the '70s gay scene and of Oasis as the Lynyrd Skynyrd of BritPop will have you reconsidering your record collection. Svenonius even finds a connection between Alan Greenspan and popular music: expensive real estate means less space for musicians, he argues in a piece also featured on National Public Radio, hence the early 21st-century emergence of freak folk and electroclash — two genres that do away with the drum kit. Svenonius claims rock is a religious cult with hedonism and consumerism as its main tenets — Chuck Berry as Jesus, and indie rock as the Seventh-Day Adventists — and as the former preacher of the Gospel Yeh-Yeh, he might be singularly placed to make such an argument.

Meant to resemble Mao's Little Red Book, The Psychic Soviet's "small size will make it easy to carry around so as to refer to in the case of ethical quandaries, arguments, and social feuds," and comes sheathed in durable plastic to withstand any class conflicts that might ensue midchapter.
- Genevieve Smith

ART

Fields by Michal Rovner


Published:	2005
Pages:	359
Publisher:	Steidl
Links: Author bio BBC interview

“Michal Rovner's digitally composed pictures use undulating optical tricks to swiftly move from micro to macro viewpoints.”

Review
The cover of Fields features little black squiggles with fire-engine-red splotches, vaguely chromosomal in this post-Human Genome Project and OJ Simpson-trial society. The opening of the book plays on this visual scientific priming through a series of jagged-toothed lines that resemble viruses or electrocardiographs, until just after the title page, one line dissolves into a swirling crowd. Michal Rovner's digitally composed pictures use undulating optical tricks to swiftly move from micro to macro viewpoints. The pages in this book play with historical as well as scientific archetypes, when the same language of bodies metamorphoses from Petri-dish cultures to Rosetta-Stone typographies.

Rovner made the wise decision to mine her own work for images to create this book, while limiting original installation views and straightforward catalog checklists. Printed in saturated inks on uncoated paper, the pictographs of people move away from their origins as digital video or photography and move toward a matte graphic appearance, emphasizing Rovner's abstracted gestures. This smaller-sized book takes advantage of its longer width to connect the reading experience to a visual thread proceeding through the book from left to right, differentiating it from the choppier perusal of a more traditional monograph.

This fluid movement culminates in the final pages, Fields of Fire, where the see-sawing arms of oil pumps give way to writhing, horizontal streams of flaming vibrations. Drawing on a research trip to Kazakhstan, Rovner translated the socio-political chaos caused by oil fields into seismic vibrations. Together, these fierce waves and the preceding human hieroglyphics become a cosmological case study. Pushing toward abstraction, Rovner's images communicate universalizing dynamics of the conflict between crowds and individuals.
- Catherine Krudy


Tiny Books: A Field Guide The series below gracefully shrink novellas, travel guides, short stories, poetry, music writing, and even epics into bite-sized morsels. This is your guide to the miniature delights amidst the forest of bulky hardcovers.
	Art of the Novella Melville House Publishing	Solid-color covers with simple, large fonts displaying only the titles and authors, and sized at a mere 5" x 7". No blurbs, no endorsements, no ridiculous author photos. Some are famous short pieces (Bartleby the Scrivener, The Dead) and others are shorter pieces by equally famous writers (Tolstoy, Flaubert, Wharton). And only $9. (TR)
	Wallpaper City Guides Phaidon	With the lean, photo glossiness you'd expect from Wallpaper, this new series of pocket-sized city guides is chock-full of urban eye-candy and ultra-hip listings (with prices listed discreetly in the back). Covering cities like Shanghai, Barcelona, and Istanbul — as well as the usual suspects — the guides are crisply-edited and user-friendly, with plenty of maps and blank notepaper in the back. (LS)
	Cloverfield Press	Little independent Cloverfield Press understands that the only thing more refreshing than a perfectly executed short story is one that's beautifully illustrated and elegantly packaged between two letter-pressed covers. There's no better way to enjoy short fiction from such notables as Haruki Murakami and Miranda July. (TW)
	Penguin Epics Penguin	Hollywood has recently been re-imagining the epic genre as a bunch of chiseled dudes in loincloths doing battle, and Penguin UK follows suit with a series of action-packed selections from the classics — both the usual Greco-Roman fare, as well as more globally minded inclusions. We were always more fans of the strangely compelling monotony of epics, but with some of the world's most timeless tales slapped under such vivid covers, we can't hate. (TW)
	6x6 Ugly Duckling Presse	Now in its 13th issue since its 2000 debut, this handmade, gorgeously bound series from Gowanus/Red Hook-based UDP gives six artists six pages to do what needs to be done. With wildly divergent entries, from Sawako Nakayasu's poems about ant/roach gang warfare to brilliant translations of Serbian poet Novica Tadić, 6x6 presents an innovative forum for inventive literature. (TM)
	Clear Cut Press	Durable, vinyl-coated, French-flap covers, quality paper, and ribbon bookmarks sewn into the spine in a 4" x 6" package. Highlights of the small list include a collection of essays, Orphans, by Charles D'Ambrosio, and the anthology The Clear Cut Future. And in what they call "punk rock" tradition (think Factory Records and Joy Division), the books are created as nonexclusive joint ventures with the authors, with profits split 50/50. (TR)
	Schott's Miscellany Bloomsbury USA	Did you know that Miss America winners are 70% brunette? Or that "smaragdine" was the winning word in the 1961 spelling bee? These and other useful facts can be found in the Schott's Miscellany series. Don't go looking for anything specific, but you won't be disappointed with the often-surprising nuggets of trivia you do come across. (SVW)
	Penguin Great Ideas Penguin	Big ideas come in small, elegant packages in Penguin's Great Ideas series, which features 23 groundbreaking works from some of the world's most revolutionary thinkers. Published in thin pamphlet form, with embossed, type-driven covers, the series ranges from ancient philosopher Seneca's meditations on death to modern luminary George Orwell's thoughts on writing. (EMM)
	33 1/3 Continuum	Pseudo-intellectual musings or long-overdue appreciation of pop-music classics? Perhaps Continuum's 33 1/3 series is a bit of both. From Radiohead to Neil Young to DJ Shadow to Pink Floyd, each book tackles a particular song or album through behind-the-scenes reportage, close readings that deconstruct a song riff by riff, and fictionalized "covers." At 51 titles and counting, 33 1/3 shows no sign of slowing down. (SE)
	Picador Shots Picador (UK)	Some of the best tiny titles come from across the pond. Little rivals to the gold-standard Pocket Penguin series, Picador's Shots series comprises short stories by such authors as Alexander Hemon, Claire Messud, and Colm Toibin, each printed individually in a format so small you almost could fit them in a wallet. While they're hard to come by in the US, at £1 each, these little guys make a great gift for or from the bookish traveler. (TW)
	One Story	Since 2002, this Brooklyn operation has sent subscribers a single short story every three weeks, from writers both familiar and not-so-familiar, in a pastel-covered, postcard-size format. The magazine's selections tend to reflect its founders' MFA backgrounds, for better and for worse (mostly the former), but with venues for the short story on the wane, their efforts are increasingly vital to the form's survival. (CPL)
back to top

BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
March madness (The Morning News)
Fill out your brackets for The 2007 Morning News Tournament of Books, judged by Mark Sarvas.
Boys need action (Guardian)
As boys' reading levels fall below girls' in England, teachers reach for novels on spies, sex, and action to regain their attention.
Jonathan Lethem: going once, going twice (Bloomberg via The Elegant Variation)
Jonathan Lethem has promised nearly free movie rights to You Don't Love Me Yet to whomever writes him the most persuasive letter.
Lions in winter (Guardian)
Gabriel García Marquez, who based The Autumn of the Patriarch loosely on Fidel Castro, catches up with his subject on a walk in Cuba.
Stephen King, Erica Jong, Tom Clancy (Top Ten Books)
David Foster Wallace baffles with his top 10 list.
Hear ye, hear ye! (PEN)
PEN's World Voices Festival is set to kick off in late April with another stunning series of panels, readings, and conversations. Scrolling down this year's impressive list of world writers will literally take you several minutes.


CREDITS Editors Toby Warner Mark Mangan Zolton Zavos Doug Levy McKay McFadden Paul Laster Chris Parris-Lamb Chris Gage Nick Merritt Editors-at-Large Sean McDonald Contributors Scott Esposito Karen Ingram Catherine Krudy H.G. Masters Tom Mayer Tom Roberge Genevieve Smith Lauren Sommer Larry Weissman Sage Van Wing Production & Design Anjuli Ayer Jessica Bauer-Greene Morgan Croney Sascha Lewis Cover Art Michal Rovner Video still from Fields, 2005 Courtesy Steidl and D.A.P./Distributed Art Publications, Inc © 2005 Michal Rovner All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill also publishes ten other email magazines, covering ART, FASHION, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in six cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON. MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive media partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

ANTI-SPAM/privacy policy	subscribe \| unsubscribe
This is a copy of a Boldtype mailer. Use the link above subscribe or click to login and UNSUBSCRIBE. Flavorpill Productions complies with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. For more information, please read our ANTI-SPAM/Privacy Policy. If you have any questions about subscription to this list, contact us at subscriptions@boldtype.com (HQ: 594 Broadway, Ste 1212, NY, NY 10012).