NEW BOOKS BY TSKY EDITORS & STAFF
Feminaissance
Edited by Christine Wertheim
Poetry | Prose | Essays | $20
Les Figues Press, 2010
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-17-2
ISBN 10: 1-934254-17-7
Size: 6“x9”
Pages: 132
Binding: Softcover, Perfect
Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, Lidia Yuknavitch
Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed |s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity.
It is with an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of self that Feminaissance approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; Hélène Cixous; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.
If the fact that “women do not say ‘We’” was one of the constitutive problems for 20th century feminism, the fact that women do and still clearly feel the need to say “We” is just as rich and interesting a topic for feminism today. The writings gathered here prove feminism to be alive and more relevant to all genders than ever: not just because feminist discourse remains a political necessity, but because of its artistic and intellectual pleasures.
--Sianne Ngai
Inconceivable Wilson
a novella by J.A. Tyler
Scrambler Books
4.25"x 6.875", paperback, 129 pages
Cover photo by Andrew Ilachinski
$12.00
* Order your copy now and receive free shipping (will ship sometime between December 15 and December 30, 2009)
About Inconceivable Wilson:
A woman in a red dress, ankles strapped in shoes, leaving a man at the airport, at a terminal, holding a photograph of him, this man, and on the back only written: Wilson.
Forgive him, he has become so much less now.
Wilson goes: planes, boats, walking until the sun quits rising, until the sun stops existing, and there he begins, there he becomes. A place where the trees change shape and purpose, the environment lost to nothingness, where people speak in clatters and clicks, incomprehensible, a place where he is lost in blindness, deafening sickness, waves of unencumbered night. And Wilson unties within their circle, these people of pitch and tar, this village, these men and their women, their children. He should be reading them, writing words, penning a culture, creating a world from the tips of sentences, but he is instead consumed by them, bent to charcoal words on canvas made of darkness, hearing always and only the rattling of bones and laughter. Curtains open and he becomes less.
Forgive him, he should not have gone.
Men, women, children play in his brain, finger the creases of his thinking, until he comes undone.
Go, he has gone. Go Wilson. He goes.
Go Wilson. Go.
Museum of Vandals
by Amish Trivedi
(accordion-fold mini-chapbook)
Cannibal Books
Boundless Books Series #1
$5
TWO TSKY EDITORS PLEAD NO CONTEST
Advising Editor Elena Georgiou has new fiction in No Contest, the online magazine from GenPop Books, wherein you will also find a review of Asst. Poetry Editor Jamey Dunham's The Bible of Lost Pets (Salt Publishing, 2009).
From the GenPop Blog:
An excerpt from Elena Georgiou's short fiction, "Hummus," from The Immigrant's Refrigerator:
She spent the hour between the piano lesson and the black-eyed peas and spinach for dinner trying to calculate the correct answer. The first time, d - y equaled Jesus answering a prayer. The second time, d - y equaled the separation of piano + pianist from family. The third time, d – y equaled government intervention and her being placed in care (which, in effect, was the same as the previous answer). The fourth time, d - y equaled a struggle for independence. The fifth time, d - y equaled being swallowed up by the Loch Ness Monster and living happily inside Nessie’s stomach, like Jonah had done inside the whale. Once inside Nessie’s stomach, she would repeatedly practice the "Sonata Pathétique" until her whole body was filled with music.An excerpt from Charles Freeland's review of Jamey Dunham's The Bible of Lost Pets:
At the school where I teach, the creative writing students, through close contact with Jamey Dunham’s work, have been for some time filling their prose poems with all manner of small animals doing cute and/or zany things. I hope this will stop. Such superficial emulation does not so much stunt the student writers’ growth as threaten to rob Dunham’s accomplishment of its power. It gets everything wrong.
TSKY AUTHORS: MAKING MORE THAN TO-DO LISTS
We're delighted to report that Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay is hanging tough at #7 on SPD's Fiction Bestsellers list, and Ana Bozicevic's Stars of the Night Commute receives not one but four shoutouts at No Tell's "Best Poetry Books of 2009" list.Also, this amazing "congratulations" greeting card image was, like, totally free for the taking.
