Ants Dissolve in Moonlight

Literature & Fiction

W. B. Keckler

Poetry

Fugue State Press

This very funny, very bleak novella, "The Human War," is about the first hours of the 2003 war in Iraq, as experienced by a screwed-up kid in Ohio who feels the world is spinning out of his control. His reaction to the coming war? He drinks, has sex, goes to a strip club, he does anything that Youngstown, Ohio offers as human distraction--but this only makes his horror deepen. Noah Cicero's deadpan humor is reminiscent of Beckett, and "A Human War" is a blackly funny and deeply cruel look at the cold hearts of men. The novella is accompanied by two outstanding short stories, "The Doomed" and "Little Flowers," both dark, funny vignettes on the impossibility of human interaction: further examples of Noah Cicero's wicked talent. This is Noah Cicero's first book. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio.

The Human War

Cicero, Noah

Parenting & Relationships

Black Magic Woman # Zero Point Negro

Rivers, I

This novel tells the life story of Stet, a filmmaker from Soviet Leningrad, who (like the real-life Sergei Paradjanov) is sent to a prison camp in the 1960's, and who dies there without having produced much more than a single film. The novel is narrated in an extravagant third-person voice which emulates the sound and attitude of the classic "Russian Novel." Opinionated, discursive, soulful, the voice establishes the basis of the society in which Stet lives: a place where everybody judges, everybody feels he has the right to criticize, and the State even encourages "self-criticism." Failing that, the State may even criticize you to death. The novel imagines a world where we do not live by our judgments of others, nor by our fear of what other people think of us.Stet, a classic Russian "holy fool," does not criticize anybody, and does not defend himself, but simply works at his art without acknowledging any barriers. He does not compromise because it doesn't occur to him to compromise. The result is that he is treated brutally by friends and enemies, and is judged in every imaginable way. Yet he lives and dies as a happy man. The mystery of this is the mystery of the novel.James Chapman's Stet, the story of a Russian filmmaker who draws "pictures on the only storyboard in Russia that expresses and does not communicate," is a novel of relentless beauty and bleakness.... Written in a mesmerizing, meticulous prose, Chapman's novel is a bitter examination of the artist's place in society.... His narrator is a mind-blowing mishmash of third person, second person, first person plural; he revels in narrative intrusions and direct addresses to the reader. No object is safe from the examination of this narrator--not a teacup nor a hole in a shirt nor the sun. Inanimate or animate, tangible or abstract, even the most inconsequential object is shown to have some meaning overall, some contribution to the grand scheme, though this grand scheme is persistently met with pessimism and doubt. In a time of few truly important novels, when most so-called literary fiction is light or escapist, Stet is undoubtedly literature. For its breadth of ideas and emotional resonance, its uncompromised artistry and its great beauty, its inventiveness and experimental playfulness, Stet is a major accomplishment which deserves the gift that the work of its title character is denied: an audience.--Scott Bryan Wilson, Rain Taxi

Stet

Chapman, James

Contemporary

This brilliant first novel is a portrait of an artist at the end of an art form. The elderly Jewish-Hungarian composer Schneidermann, who survived a musical education, survived the war, survived Europe, survived the neglect of all his music, finally and suddenly vanishes during a movie matinee on the Upper West Side of New York.

Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press Classical)

Arts & Photography

Cohen, Joshua

Music

A novel made of incantation and hymn, in outright preference to storytelling, Degenerescence is about the creation and destruction of the world--both creation and destruction being caused by language, the human urge to name things and make stories.   In the novel, a goddess named WOE creates a world and bears seven daughters, then witnesses the death of all her creation.   An homage to ancient Near East writings of 4000 years ago, Degenerescence shares with Sumerian literature a drumming repetition and a sense of devotional terror that inhabits every human's relationship with the natural world.   "What Chapman gets most in this book is this voice, this trancelike voice that moves in a way both tragic and full of awe, almost ancient if it weren’t removed from time altogether. It’s a voice both enlightened and ignorant, in an argument that this sort of ignorance is the key to enlightenment. The voice has always been the greatest strength of Chapman’s, different in every book though always fully immersed in their directions. His mastery of voice is matched only by his ability to perceive and understand." --Forrest Armstrong

Degenerescence

Literary

Deeply Russian in its sense of life, bitter, very funny, and shattered in its love of beauty, Fences by Ben Brooks shows what happens when the art of poetry and the art of the novel get in a head-on collision. Told in flashes and fragments of compressed emotion, this novel tells its story through glimmers of an intense personal narration: about a Russian girl, a librarian and an Italian man's mysterious wife, a hopeless car trip across Europe, judgement, inadequacy, God in his drunkenness, death at the end of time, and the fury of an apocalyptic search for meaning. 
 Ben Brooks has invented an involving new form for the novel - emotional montage like experimental film only wishes it could be - but more importantly has cut human desperation into pure form and made it go 180 miles an hour.

Fences

Ben Brooks

This novel is about an absence. Rat is in love with a dancer he has never seen.  He tries to forget her. He hears her feet dancing overhead. She is all he cares about.  He finds many reasons why he should not love her.  He desiccates his heart through work, he grinds his heart to powder with absurdly difficult tasks.  He turns all the love in him over to ideas, to abstractions, to darkness. He tries to occupy his whole heart with the desperate unrequited worship of a subway train. For years he tries to kill his emotion in every possible way. And every minute of every single day he thinks about her, this absent love, this possibility, and constantly hears her dancing footsteps over his head. In order to meet her, in order to love her, he is going to have to change.

The Rat Veda

James Chapman

How does this writer, Vi Khi Nao, even exist?  She puts herself on a wood stove. Stretches her fingers. Stretches her back. Stretches her toes. She reaches out to the cutting board. She places herself on the cutting board. She slants herself on the cutting board. She lifts the hammer. She lifts it high. As high as her eyebrows. She lifts her skirt up. She lifts her skirt with the unused hand. She lifts it up for the view. She lifts the skirt. She lifts the hammer. The hammer falls... Wait: correction.  With a hatchet. She takes herself apart with a hatchet.  She puts herself on the wood stove....

The Vanishing Point of Desire

Vi Khi Nao

A priest looking out the door of his church sees a woman, falls in love, and follows after her.  Together they retreat to the desert, to pray, to love, and to test his faith.  This book is a love triangle between a man, a woman, and truth.

Qurratulain

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