EDWARD GAUVIN

Two new pieces up in the Words Without Borders “Foreign Correspondents” issue this month, one by Gébé and the other by François Vallejo. Gébé, a satirist after my own heart, looks into the mysterious activities of the International Bureau for Front Location, while Vallejo chronicles the 1988 fire that consumed the Chiado district of Lisbon.

Editorial cartoonist Gébé’s piece, featuring a short introduction by yours truly, is taken from his prose collection Not-Quite-Botched Dispatches (But a Hard Sell for the Nightly News), originally Reportages pas vraiment ratés mais difficile à vendre à France Soir, reprinted in 2001 by Le Diléttante (that last link for readers of French).

The excerpt by François Vallejo is the opening to his 2008 novel The Burning of the Chiado (L’Incendie du Chiado) from Éditions Viviane Hamy.

Check’em out!

—Cinderello, why do you sigh?
—The wind outside makes moan and my heart mourns.
—Cinderello, the wind is silent and stirs not a leaf. Why do you sigh?
—The blood of all the animals I’ve killed glows red in my memory.
—Cinderello, in your memory is naught but the cool breeze on your cheeks, the crisp dawn grass beneath your feet, and the pond’s misty mirror. What is your sorrow?
—The loss of my beloved mother surrounds me with lament.
—The loss of your beloved mother never drives you from the books you both so cherished. Cinderello, you are lying.
~ Pierrette Fleutiaux, “Cinderello”

I’m a month late in mentioning the 8^th annual Imaginales “Festival of Imaginary Worlds” in Épinal (best known for a printmaker that’s sort of the Currier & Ives of France), but luckily enough this year has seen an explosion of a English language blog coverage: Hal Duncan, Cheryl Morgan, and David Anthony Durham especially provide detailed accounts and fun photos. (The con site itself has an English version that, where tourism sites are concerned, only slightly smacks of wonky Anglicization. Monsieur gets to say that ‘coz he’s a snobby translator très littéraire.)

Among the stories nominated for the Prix Imaginales in the Best Short Fiction category were Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” and two nouvelles by Lionel Davoust. One of these, “L’Île close,” a meta-Arthurian fantasia, took home the prize–CONGRATULATIONS–and will be appearing (translated by yours truly, with wonderful advice from editor Delia Sherman and all this despite the author’s fluency in English) in the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s fall anthology Interfictions 2. Ah yes, this post had you fooled at first, but it is in fact a shill. By hook or by crook, I always end up pushing a book. Which leads us to this shout-out from the IAF:

Support Interfictions 2!

We live in a world of niche marketing. The Interstitial Arts Foundation brings artists together to tear those barriers down.

We are asking you now to join us in our next adventure in storming the barricades: Interfictions 2: a New Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak. Interfictions 2 will be published in November 2009 in collaboration with Small Beer Press.

The first volume of Interfictions, published in 2007, was hailed as “A phenomenal collection…engrossing and provocative” (Hipster Bookclub) that “belongs on the nightstand of anyone interested in the development of contemporary short fiction” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

This second volume features original work by a whole new set of writers who joyfully explore the big imaginative spaces between conventional genres. And this time, we’ll be reaching out to even more readers by publishing a series of free stories on the new Interfictions 2 Annex online!

What can you do to help? This extraordinary collection of interstital fiction needs your financial support. We’re asking you to sponsor not just a book, but an idea – the idea that artists need to be able to express themselves freely and directly to their audiences, without the restraints of conventional genre limitations.

Here are some ways you can help us publish Interfictions 2: » Read the rest of this entry «

“Être aimé n’entraînait aucun devoir et donnait tous les droits, aimer ne conférait que le droit de souffrir.” ~ Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, L’Autre rive

“Aimer sans retour, c’est admettre qu’on se jettera dans le feu pour quelqu’un si l’occasion s’en présente, et que ce sacrifice nous vaudra trois secondes de reconnaissance, suivies d’un oubli pur et simple. Si béjaune qu’on soit, on comprend que l’autre s’accommode fort bien de nos tourments et que la vie lui demeure douce même quand elle nous devient insupportable.” ~ Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, Le Château de verre

“Quand on est aimé, on ne doute de rien, quand on aime, on doute de tout.” ~ Colette

Review issues of the July-August Fantasy & Science Fiction have gone out to bloggers; I’ve just gotten my comps. My thanks to editor Gordon Van Gelder for all his support and enthusiasm for Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s story, “Icarus Saved from the Skies.” He’s opened a thread for comments on the issue here. The latest from him:

Now’s a good time to let your readers know the issue is out—copies should be on the newsstands, while subscribers who sign up for a year of F&SF will still start off with this issue.  (If you’re going to encourage people to subscribe, tell them to put a message in their order that you sent them.  I’ll give a cookie of some sort to anyone who persuades ten people to subscribe.)

Bloggers are already chiming in! Caren “spitkitten” Gussoff singles out in her review “a translation of a short piece… whose ending has all the punch of a tickle but bowls over in its restraint,” while Aaron M. Wilson at The Soulless Machine Review devotes a post discussing the inevitable Marvel mutant associations the story takes on in an American context, calling it “a train wreck of emotions that sends the winged-narrator over the side of a cliff. Don’t miss it.” Many thanks for the kind words!

The shift in cultural context brings with it an interesting, almost temporal shift in terms of dating subject matter. The notion of the person with powers who just wants to be normal is probably, because of comics, way more played out here than in France, but being normal doesn’t quite carry the same weight in a less markedly conformist society, where the choice is less either/or, the dichotomy between normal and not less damningly clear-cut. The normal lives Americans yearn for often involve some idealized happiness, itemized down to the last possession by our pursuit thereof—Superman’s corn-fed family fantasies, for instance. Many Châteaureynaud protagonists tend to want to be normal in a more retiring, passive, even self-effacing way; love and happiness don’t have to enter into it. His heroes and narrators are usually marginal, outcast dreamers and luckless, well-meaning Everymen. » Read the rest of this entry «

…it was no longer gentle Aribert who spoke, but a solemn and impassioned lover:
—Where do you live?
—A place underground where the light speaks.
—What do you see?
—The sockets of my eyes.
—What can I give you?
—The silence of your lips.
—My thoughts never leave you. Can this be what they call love?
—Love feeds on gazes, on kisses, and my body has left me.
—Will that keep me from loving you?
—Love asks no permission.
—Say something to me, just a word.
—Sword.
—What am I, a simple girl, to make of one?
—The most violent of offerings.
—What can I offer, if not myself?
—What is beyond you.
—And what is in me?
—Death has already taken hold of that. Give me your shadow.
—I’m trembling.
—I will marry your shadow.
—Will I ever see you someday?
—When the secret becomes a pearl.
—I feel like crying.
—Your tears, your tears in my voice…
—Must I always wait?
—Your tears in my eyes, and you will blossom.
—Never in this world?
—Always in this world.
—Mélitta.
—Conradin.

from “Terre de songes” by Marcel Schneider, in the collection Histoires à mourir debout.
A beautiful bit of dialogue I just had to translate. Ideally I’d like all my dialogue to slip logic’s shackles so poetically, almost accidentally, a dream catechism, each speaker responding to the other like a lost soul to the echo of stone struck on stone in the distant chambers of a cave: for who, making his or her way alone from the labyrinth, is not led on by such a sound? » Read the rest of this entry «

Saturday 1/31 at 4pm at Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St, NYC btwn. Stanton & Rivington. I’ll be reading with Jon McMillan (he has a story out now in the New England Review!) and Micaela Morrissette (a senior editor at Conjunctions who won a Pushcart and a best american fantasy award this past year). Scott Geiger was instrumental in setting me up for this reading up with his New School buddies Jim and Jason, who run the Enclave reading series; huge thanks to all three. Apparently, Micaela Morrissette named her hedgehog after Scott’s first published story, “The Pursuit of Artemisia Guile” in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 16 (July 2005). If you watch this site, further info and reader bios should eventually get posted there.

Come one and all!

Charlito, of Indie Spinner Rack fame, and co-publisher of what is to date my only published comics work, has produced a handsome handmade card game from the natural effervescence of his irrepressible creative spirit and sheer infectious joy at our soon-to-be President. I am egregiously late about notifying the masses of it, but when I saw notice posted on my friend GB Tran’s blog, I thought Duh, why not be a copycat. I’m still in time for inauguration. Please go buy it. Feed Charlito.

www.obamacardgame.com

With apologies to Andi Watson, Benjamin Parzybok, and Small Beer Press.

was what the Russian girl, in a thin fuchsia sweater and pink puffy vest, told me after a brief conversation on a cordless with what I guessed was the wife of the ground floor convenience store owner. Ali himself, despite being a half-Costa Rican Muslim, had been Noel AWOL since the day before. In fact, I must have seen him shortly before he left, because I was there when, one solicitous hand behind her back, he’d walked the Russian girl through the lobby to his store, at the last minute turning back to wink at the guard who leaned from behind his desk with a double-barreled thumbs up. She wasn’t actually pretty, but her hair was dyed maroon and her eyes were bright as her rhinestone earrings, and when she first walked in looking for Ali, her face at once blase and quizzical, her sparkly phone in one hand bent her wrist back with its weight, as if she’d just hung up. Now, from behind a countertop set on a freezer case of popsicles, apology struggled to break the surface of her inexpressiveness. Sorry, she said, which sounded either sultry or dragged up from the back of her throat.

Ali had a whole rigmarole devised around the bananas, which involved momentarily unplugging his radio in favor of the scale whose cord lay lovingly draped, a jungle vine, over the silver-insulated power conduit that dropped from the ceiling to cool his deli meats. The bulb inside this display had long since burned out, which failed to show items to their greatest advantage. The turkey looked particularly ashen. Ali would then make sure to plug the radio back in before ringing you up. Having never paid attention to the bananas’ unit price, I doubted I could cajole the Russian girl into the whole routine, and let it drop. Yes, we have no bananas today.