Highlight of My Night!

Books To Look Forward To In 2012

While everyone is looking back at 2011 (and of course they always pick the wrong books!), I'm looking forward to 2012 with many presses ready to have next year's titles printed. Here are some of the things I'm looking forward to.

FICTION:

Fires of Our Choosing by Eugene Cross (1/2012) - Eugene Cross is hot. I've been Facebook stalking him and following his work. I first encountered his stuff in American Short Fiction, and then he was in Hobart and Narrative. Apparently, he has a short story collection coming out, which should be promising with blurbs from Dan Chaon and Charles Baxter.

Shut Up/Look Pretty by Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale, Amber Sparks (2/2012) - I don't know many of the writers in this chapbook collection, but Amber Sparks is worth the price of the book itself. Sparks has been published in PANK (I was in the same issue!), Wigleaf, Smokelong, and whole bunch of other major indie magazines. Her work can be categorized as magical realism that is quirky a la Aimee Bender, but more dream like and playful. Her voice is truly her own. Buy it for the sake of Amber Sparks!

The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice (2/2012) - Anne Rice, fuck duh! It's her return to speculative fiction, after all those Jesus-fail novels. But instead of vampires, we have werewolves! We all knew Anne Rice was a Taylor Lautner fan!

The Reeducation of Cherry Truong by Aimee Phan (3/2012) - I thought Aimee Phan was dead. After her criticially acclaimed We Should Never Meet a collection, which dealt with the lives of those evacuated during the fall of Saigon, no one (or at least myself) never from heard from her again. That was 2005. Her new book deals with the Vietnamese diaspora again, but this time her characters return to their homeland. Despite the weak title (sounds like an Asian version of a Jane Austen remake [this is an untapped market!]), it should surely be worth the wait!

Basement of Wolves by Daniel Allen Cox (4/2012) - D.A.C. NEVER disappoints. His newest will be about dreams, Hollywood, and identity crisis.

The Fifth Lash by Anis Shivani (early 2012) - I never read any fiction from Anis Shivani. After reading his critique of the workshop last year (Against the Workshop), it's interesting to see the critic at work as an artist in his second collection, of which I know very little about, but nevertheless want to read.







This is a Dance Movie! by Tim Jones-Yelvington (maybe 2012, maybe 2013): Tim Jones-Yelvington is like a gay Lydia Davis. But more than that, he is the Lady Gaga (when she was good) of literature. His stories are concise and short, yet his use of language is always surprising. Also, he makes Youtube videos:


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NONFICTION:

Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World by Anne Fausto-Sterling (4/2012) - Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body was probably one of the most influential books I read while in college. Building off Focault, she argued that the idea of sex and science are not static, but in fact contingent upon time and place. This volume promises to explore the ideas of sex and gender futhur using biochemistry and neurobiology to examine the ethical and moral side of sex and gender. Its sounds like heavy reading, but Fausto-Sterling writes clearly and with humor.

Two Spirits, One Heart by Marsha Aizumi and Aiden Takeo Aizumi (4/2012) - Marsha Aizumi is an aspiring person. I first met her during a roundtable discussion about AAPI queer youth. I told her I wished more mothers could be like her. A mother of a transgender child (here, her co-author), this book traces their journey from confusion into acceptance. It the first book (that I know of) that explores this issues from the AAPI side. Should be a wonderful read, something along the lines of Hilda Raz and Aaron Raz Link's What Becomes You (another great duet memoir).

128 Beats Per Minute by Thomas Wesley Pentz (4/2012) - Itzzzz Diplo! A pictorial book, it documents his travels and observations and development as a musician. This is why you should pick it up (not sure how many words are in it, though):


A Queer and Pleasant Danger by Kate Bornstein (5/2012) - Kate Bornstein is my hero! A gender anarchist, activist, and theorist (and all around inspiring person), her previous books explored gender constructs. In this one, a memoir, she explores coming of age in a Jewish tradition, leaving it for Scientology, then leaving that to become a woman. A must-have in any collection!

Faithest by Chris Stedman (11/2012) - Chris Stedman is a community organizer who is making waves. Mainly, he's an atheist (humanist to be technical) doing interfaith work. His work has been published in the Washington Post and Huffington Post. His debut book is a memoir is subtitled "How One Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious," and explores (most probably) his coming out as queer, as atheist, and as an atheist doing interfaith work. Knowing his work, Stedman weaves a picture in which diversity is celebrated as a strength. What's different about Stedman's book that it's less of an atheist book about how the religious is wrong (Dawkins, for example), and more of a personal memoir, more of a type of vision.


OTHER

Resilience edited by Eric Nguyen - So I have a book I edited (designed, self-published) coming out. (I'm horrible at self promotion! Bear with me!). Money from it will go to The Make It Safe Project. Buy it through Lulu starting January 24. More info at betterbookproject.blogspot.com.

Book Review: Junction X

Junction X
by Erastes
9781937692063

Erastes perhaps might be on a point of crossing over. Known for her gay romances, her newest, Junction X blurs the lines. Is it romance or is general fiction? Indeed, the book is under Lammy consideration not for "Gay Romance," but for the more general "Gay Fiction," a spot usually reserved for titles that do not adhere to genre rules.

And here, Erastes does break her own rules. Instead of her historical settings circa 1800s, the setting in Junction X is England in the 1960s. There are trains, London is a bustling metropolis, suburbia is sprawling, hiding the everyday lives of its inhabitants in a cloak of manufactured sameness. The book is about such conformity and the lives that people live under it. "How much do we know about other people?" the main character ponders, "The more I thought about it, the more confused I felt and the more I realised I knew nothing of what really went on behind other people's closed doors."

On the outside, Ed Johnson is like any other person in his neighborhood: a business man with a beautiful wife and two kids. His wife kisses him goodbye at the door every morning, his children are taken care of by a nanny, they have parties now and then inviting everyone in their neighborhood. It's nearly a perfect life. But underneath it, the relationship between Ed and his wife is icy; Valerie is cold while Ed is distant; there is no intimacy, they sleep back to back. Not knowing better, Ed easily accepts this. It's a rather simple life until he meets his next door neighbor Phil who shows him other options one drunken night during a family vacation. Their sexual trysts brings an awakening in Ed, something that both inspires and frightens him. Their emotionally abusive relationship ends abruptly when Phil moves for a promotion. Eventually, a new family moves in next door--a nice couple with a teenage son. It's with the teenage son that the story begins to move, lines get blurred, tragedies occur, veils are lifted, and lives are changed.

Erastes builds up the story with scenes of pure ecstasy, intermingled with identity crisis pangs leading to the inevitable downfall. It's the type of book you imagine the narrator telling you in a whisper, full of secrets: "The more I lie, I discovered, the easier it becomes." In that way, Junction X is an intimate story that touches on taboos because it's shared between the narrator and the reader.

But it's a Lolita-esque novel that lacks the complexity of Nabokov. That doesn't mean it lacks tenderness and eroticism: "There was no gentleness in that kiss; we were rocks, crashing against each other." Nor does it shy away from exploring the complex issues of love and lust. Can one choose who to love? Can one love too much? It's a claustophobic study of obsession and the lengths we go to hide our secrets.

Where Erastes falters is perhaps the vestiges of the M/M genre--conventions that might work there, but fail in more general fiction. The love explored is often idealistic. The only two characters that are focused upon are the lovers, leaving secondary plots completely absent. The prose at times can be clumsy, relying on cliches.

"This isn't really a story of my sexual conquest," say the narrator, yet it reads like it nearly. Here everyone has hard cocks with a strong emphasis in orgasmic sex and tightening pants and erections. (It could have been more explicit of course, and erotic sex scenes are not necessarily bad things). Additionally, while the book does try to steer far from the pulp M/M novels--by the end, it falls into the easily recognized tragedy of early gay novels (if you know what this means, you know how this ends).

Nevertheless, Erastes is a skillful writer. Her dialogue flows naturally, her plot moves briskly, and overall her story has its heart-wrenching moments of despair and beauty. While Erastes might not win the Man Booker any time soon for this jump into more general fiction, she knows how to keep her audience interested.

I Might Know Famous People

(take note of Sharon Needles...)

Katy Perry Inspired by Jack Kerouac

I'm not a fan of Katy Perry. Her songs her a bit on the homophobic side ("I Kissed A Girl" substitutes lesbian sexuality with a type of male gazed experimental bisexuality, "Ur So Gay" was full of stereotypes). But I found this interesting: her Grammy nominated song was reportedly inspired by Kerouac (though it took five people to work on the song). Video below (around 1:18):



She says:

"I got it from a really great book called "On the Road." And he wrote a paragraph in that book called 'I want to be around people who are buzzing and fizzing and full of life and they never say a common place thing and they shoot into the sky like fireworks and make everyone go Awww" and that's me paraphrasing of course."

From the book:

“[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'” 

Close enough, right?

Occupy Amazon?

Amazon is not good: not for booksellers, businesses, community.

Recently, The Daily Show highlighted the company's efforts to avoid taxes:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Gawker also points to the corporation's holiday plan: paying customers to not buy from their local stores (though Melville House points out that this is indication that Amazon does need local stores)

Apparently concerned that it's not already doing enough to undermine local physical retailers across the country, Amazon.com announced it will pay customers $5 to go into a local store, scan an item, walk out, and buy the same item on Amazon. Please don't do this cheap, sad thing.
To get the $5 discount, you're supposed to use Amazon's "Price Check" iPhone and Android app to scan in the bar code of an item and then indicate what price the item is being sold at. This gives Amazon valuable intelligence on how various retailers are pricing various items. "We scour online and in-store advertisements from other retailers, every day, year-round," an Amazon director said on All Things D. But now Amazon won't have to work so hard in the future, since hordes of consumers will (theoretically) sell out the merchants who pump sales taxes into their localities with sales taxes, all to save a measly five bones.

As the #OWS protests continue, can independent use the momentum to fight back against Amazon? Occupy Amazon?

The idea is not as far-fetch. Michael Moore was approached about it as far back as October. The proposal? If booksellers "sold his new book, Here Comes Trouble (Grand Central), at their cost (bringing the consumer price closer to the discount Amazon can offer), would the celebrity pro-indie author not sell his books on Amazon?"

Moore didn't answer but agree that things needed to be done. He mentioned, for example, that Lady Gaga's new book was printed in a unionized factory: "How old is this woman?...And she was smarter than me? I have so much hope with these kids that we raised."

While "Occupy Amazon" might be a misnomer (we surely don't want readers to occupy Amazon, instead of their local bookstore), the trick here is to get books out of Amazon, into indie bookstores, into readers' hands.

When asked if Melville House would pull its titles from Amazon, editor Dennis Johnson said: "Zing! Nah, as far as I'm concerned anyone can sell our books. It's our only chance to enlighten people like you!"

On the one hand, Amazon is a great way to get the word out about your books. Yet, Amazon kills businesses and local community and does everything to do so.

Can #OWSers offer advice/guidance to revive local book economies?