Two Raymond Carver Stories Read

Cover of New Issue of CRITIQUE

Article in Business Insider mentions me…

A curious and flattering matter here, last week in Business Insider, Wall Street whiz guru James Altucher mentioned me several times in his column, “Six Things I Learned from Charles Bukowski.”

And I would like to shout link this interesting artcle in this weekend’s New York Magazine‘s Books section, “Just Kids,” about literary movements come and gone…being a current New Yorker person myself, such reading material is right on my doorstep, wet from rain and prime to ponder.

Article on Lish, Carver, Hannah in new CRITIQUE

New issue of Critique: Studies in Contempoary Fiction 52.4 contains my 10,000 word article, “Saying More Without Trying to Say More: On Gordon Lish Re-Shaping the Body of Raymond Carver and Saving Barry Hannah,” which is also, in a slightly expanded version, the second chapter in my overdue study on Lish contracted with Routledge. Did initial research in 2008 at Indiana University; submitted paper in 2009 while in Los Angeles and quickly accepted; published 2011 while I am in New York.

Carver Bio

Hey, Googler, my Raymond Carver life project is an interpretive biography, not critical, although there will be some critical aspects to certain stories that relate to his life story.

I am applying Norman K. Denzin’s Interpretative Biography as my lense — a sociological approach rather than literary, per se. Denzin’s method is to focus on pinpoints of epiphany in the subject’s life, which Carver had many: the day he met his first wife,  his first story published, his first story in a major magazine, the day he quit drinking, his first collection, his first NYTBR glow, meeting his second wife, etc.

Book is not done. We are most likely looking at a late 2012 pub date, or early 2013.

What Will I Write and Publish in 2011?

I’ll be focusing on completing a number of overdue non-fiction projects, such as a Carver crit book and Carver sociological biography, the Vollmann annotated biblio, snd the updated paperback version of my auto/ethnography, Zona Norte.  Hopefully as well, my monographs on Barry malzberg and Robert Silverberg’s softcore titles from the 1960s.

Along with these, the only fiction title I have scheduled so far is a Wildside Double of a short novel with time travel elements, Poison from a Dead Sun, and a collection of time travel SF stories, The Chronotope.

But there will be more…

I have two collections of stories I am shopping around, Cardiff by the Sea and This is My Time.

Two crime noir novels are also on the market: Hard Cold Whisper and A Bra Full of Bullets.

I plan to finish my big novel\, Lunch on the Grass, and two YA novels for the agent to sell…

I might complete a book-length essay, The Moon Under Her Feet, about Americans in Tijuana.

Of course, there is the hope that my current collection of stories, Pictures of Houses with Water Damage, will garner decent reviews and get some attention…

I would like to find a home at a decent NY trade house this year.

And of course there is Tinsel Town: screenplays, TV pilots, and meetings…

I will return to this blog post this time next year and see what I did or did not finish, and what books I published.

Current Projects for 2010

Novels to finish:

Lunch on the Grass

Time Lust

A Bra Full of Bullets

Non-fiction:

Women in Carver’s Stories

Carver: An Interpretative Biography

Gordon Lish and His Influence on Contemporary American Fiction

Auto-ethnographies: Essays

The Reflexive Gaze of Critifiction

American Softcore: Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks

Collections:

First Person Sociology

Sunlight Reflections on a Crushed Beer Can