The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing

Literature & Fiction

United States

Lake Forest College Press

Book by Schwieterman, Joseph P, Mammoser, Alan P

Beyond Burnham: An Illustrated History of Planning for the Chicago Region

History

Mammoser, Alan P

Schwieterman, Joseph P.

Americas

Hunting is Painting is the debut collection by Jessica Savitz, winner of the inaugural Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize from Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. This haunting collection offers Savitz’s world: where the cunning and ruthlessness of the hunter exactly parallels that of the artist-naturalist, an Audubonesque figure who uses a 'gun as microscope' and for whom 'Slaughtering the animal / Was like freeing him with a knife / From a little trap.'With baroque flair, these poems track the factsof personal biography, of animals and their habitats, of artworks and artists to strange lairs, bringing them with startling linguistic turns into higher resolutions, new configurations. Empathic and unflinching like Whitman, Savitz brings, with immense charm, a predatory fierceness to bear that startles and clears the eye, helping us to recognize that 'the dying arrangement is a living being.'Savitz confront us with the necessary violence of sensemaking: we kill what we notice, and what we do not. But with these poems as guides, our gaze preserves the objects of the world even as it pierces them, and they in turn pierce us: 'dying and animate / to direct light, or to create privacy.'

Hunting is Painting

Savitz, Jessica

Traces of many books mask themselves inside Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality—all with a wry sense of self-representational humor. A lineage that bequeaths mysterious relics to an unsuspecting recipient, led through a textual labyrinth by Bea: a deformed reincarnation of Dante’s muse. The story-within-a-story takes shape through the mysterious “Undertaker”—a perhaps reanimated-yet-disabled Beatrice, intertwined with the contemporary Gloria Heys and the presumed publisher, Gretchen E. Henderson. An infamous brotherhood called Ye Ugly Face Clubb. Lushly designed with crowdsourced images, text deconstructions, and enough narrative tomfoolery to make Tristram Shandy blush, the Galerie is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and “choose your own adventure.” This bestiary of the novel-as-poem-as-essayas- art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity for the digital millennium.

Galerie de Difformité

Arts & Photography

Henderson, Gretchen E.

History & Criticism

This second volume of The &amp;Now Awards recognizes the most provocative, hardest-hitting, deadly serious, patently absurd, cutting-edge, avant-everything-and-nothing work from the years 2009–11. The &amp;NOW Awards features writing as a contemporary art form: writing as it is practiced today by authors who consciously treat their work as an art, and as a practice explicitly aware of its own literary and extra-literary history— as much about its form and materials, language, as it about its subject matter. The &amp;NOW conference, moving from the University of Notre Dame (2004), Lake Forest College (2006), Chapman University (2008), the University at Buffalo (2009), the University of California, San Diego (2011), and Paris (Sorbonne and Diderot, 2012)—sets the stage for this aesthetic, while The &amp;Now Awards features work from the wider world of innovative publishing and serves as an ideal survey of the contemporary scene. Contributors include: Harold Abramowitz (.UNFO), Shane Allison, Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Rachel Gontijo Araujo, Garrett Ashley, Joe Atkins, Jesse Ball, Lutz Bassmann, Jose Perez Beduya, Matt Bell, Kate Bernheimer, Arno Bertina, Andrew Borgstrom, Daniel Borzutzky, Amina Memory Cain, J. R. Carpenter, Julie Carr, Sam Cha, Alexandra Chasin, Don Mee Choi, Jack Collom, Josh Corey, Shome Dasgupta, Katie Degentesh, Andy Devine, LaTasha Nevada Diggs, Ben Doller, Sandra Doller, Manuela Draeger, Marcella Durand, Kate Durbin, Craig Dworkin, Brian Evenson, Elisa Gabbert, Roxane Gay, Elizabeth Gentry, Johannes Göransson, Amelia Gray, Amira Hanafi, Duriel E. Harris (Black Took Collective), Gretchen E. Henderson, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Laird Hunt, Kim Hyesoon, Parneshia Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Jennifer Karmin, Janice Lee, Daniel Levin Becker, Michael Leong, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, John Madera, Annam Manthiram, Jennifer Martenson, Dawn Lundy Martin (Black Took Collective), Joyelle McSweeney, Christina Milletti, Monica Mody, K. Silem Mohammad, Nick Montfort, Sawako Nakaysu, Urayoán Noel, Alissa Nutting, Lance Phillips, Evelyn Reilly, Dan Richert (.UNFO), Kathleen Rooney, Marc Saaporta, David Shields, Eleni Sikelianos, Amber Sparks, Anna Joy Springer, Ken Taylor, Anne-Laure Tissut, Sarah Tourjee, J. A. Tyler, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Nico Vassilakis, Antione Volodine, Ronaldo V. Wilson (Black Took Collective), Raúl Zurita

The &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing

Elizabeth Gentry’s debut, Housebound, is a novel like no other: a disquieting and interior fairy-tale adventure through one family’s secrets and lies. Maggie, the eldest daughter, is preparing to leave the house in which she’s lived, worked, and been educated her whole life: a life led seemingly without contact with the outside world, save in the form of weekly trips to the library for the stories that are the only escape for Maggie and her eight brothers and sisters. Maggie’s seeming estrangement from the most familiar details of her life give the novel an almost Kafkaesque feel, as if Kafka had been born an Appalachian woman.

Housebound

Gentry, Elizabeth

Winner of the 2011 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize Jose Perez Beduya’s first book Throng takes us "inside the bright wheel" where selfhood and community whirl along the event horizon of an elusive center—the fused question of the Singular and the Common. Jennifer Moxley, who selected Beduya as the winner of the 2011 Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency, writes that in this book "a shimmering subjectivity—sometimes singular, more often plural—emits an intermittent signal, coming in and out of view like some mysterious lost ‘other’ flashing a pocket mirror against the sun in hope of rescue." In spare lyrics, evocative of what George Oppen called "the bright light of shipwreck," Beduya searches not just for the meaning of being numerous but how to sustain that numerousness, with "No trace showing / The quickest way back / No light caught / In the hair of the void." The poems are fierce, tensile, and assured, but also display a heartbreaking vulnerability: "Who belongs / To this wounded face / How do we / Extinguish our hands / In prayer." The ethics of beauty in the face of violence contend with and haunt the forms of political desire in this marvelous and unexpected debut.

Throng

Beduya, Jose Perez

Poetry

Whether by road, rail, water, or sky . . . people come to Chicago. In droves. In waves of migration and immigration. For work and for play. But how do they get to Chicago? Terminal Town answers this question with a fast-moving history of Chicago’s many passenger transportation terminals. These have, for generations, served as defining features of the city’s cosmopolitan character. Showcasing great icons of transportation, including Chicago’s Union Station, Dearborn Station, and Midway and O’Hare airports, as well as lesser-known and long-gone terminals throughout the metropolitan region, this book illustrates why the Windy City so richly deserves its reputation as America’s premier travel hub.
Featuring 48 stations and terminals through short narrative, 215 color photographs, and 20 custom maps, Terminal Town provides a fascinating portrait of the city’s famously complex and constantly changing transportation system.

Terminal Town: An Illustrated Guide to Chicago's Airports, Bus Depots, Train Stations, and Steamship Landings, 1939 - Present

The Starling sisters, Pearl, Minny, and Esther are being raised by film, by what they hear on the radio, and by the hottest new pop culture phenomenon: television. They spend their feral trailer park childhood devising their own contortionist skits, daydreaming their own soap operas, and gushing over the latest episode of their favorite absurdist puppet show. After their lounge-singing mother flies the coop, the sisters run away to join an all-female revue in Northern California, run by the charismatic and power-hungry Bette Bunting. Their story is a portrait of a cultural moment in which television, a private viewing experience for the intimacy of home and nuclear families, precipitated the erosion of live, public performance and the mid-century American music hall. The glamour of Callbacks is vulgar and gimcrack, the humor crass and slapstick. The women on stage rebel against the male gaze and male domination in entertainment. Callbacks is inspired by the structure and tone of the serial sitcom format, with fragments of unresolved narrative, a focus on the ensemble, pattering dialogue, recurrence, fadeouts, and a denial of closure. The uncanny and carnivalesque create an entrancing tone that is parried by the tragic side of showbiz—the scrutiny of women aging in front of an audience, and the resulting fear of failure and obscurity that drives rivalry and family feuds.

Callbacks (The Plonsker Series)

Whiteford, M.

Women's Fiction

At once sharp and tender, this debut collection from Christine Larusso (winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize) overflows with all the sorrows and ecstasies, the violations and acts of revenge, of girlhood and women's coming-of-age. Set against the landscape of Southern California, where wide, wild expanses mingle with segregated sprawl, written from the viewpoint of a woman in a multiracial family, There Will Be No More Daughters has one foot planted in the firm realities of patriarchal domination, racial unbelonging, sex, death, and intergenerational alcoholism--and another in vivid flights of dream and dissociation. &nbsp;

There Will Be No More Daughters: Poems

Larusso, Ms. Christine

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