EDWARD GAUVIN

Can it be that less than two days are left to give to

Well, what are you waiting for? Go save literature by giving to a new magazine!

Randy and Laura were the masterminds behind The Coffin Factory (the magazine for people who love books), which featured artists and writers representing over 30 countries and was sold in Barnes & Noble and bookstores nationwide. Now they’re setting out to publish Tweed’s: a boutique magazine of literature and art, designed for people who want a unique, deep-reading experience.

Tweed’s will be filled with captivating fiction, engaging interviews, and absorbing art, poetry, and informative essays. Everything you could ever want from a literary magazine will be woven together into a harmonious reading experience that has the focus of a journal and the beauty of a glossy.

Who’s already in Tweed’s? The first issue will bring you intimate conversations with Edwidge Danticat, John Freeman, and Sjón, with the full list of contributors to be revealed soon. Lots of goodies at their Indiegogo campaign for contributors!

Better late than never to the year-end best-of lists! H.V. Chao makes Bradley Winterton’s year-end roundup in The Taipei Times of notable literary titles: novels, nonfiction, and stories alike.

Finally, Thunkbook 1 surfaced this year, as the incarnation of the former Taiwan-based English-language literary magazine Pressed. In August, I found that the best item it contained was by H.V. Chao.

Winterton’s list looks like a lot of fascinating reading I will have to check out, including Edmund Trelawny Backhouse’s memoirs Decadence Mandchoue, about a homosexual English eccentric and talented linguist who gained access to the Forbidden City and became one of the Empress Dowager’s many lovers; Thai Stick by Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter; and The First Bohemians by art historian Vic Gatrell, on London’s 18th-century satiric cartoonists.

The January 15th Washington Post sports Michael Dirda’s review of two Wakefield titles, Jean Ferry’s The Conductor and Other Tales, translated by yours truly, and Pierre Mac Orlan’s A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer, translated by Napoleon Jeffries.

The Pulitzer prize-winning Dirda is one of our country’s most perceptive and dedicated critics when it comes to fantastical work… and one of the few English speakers ever to write on Ferry outside of a ‘Pataphysics or Rousselian context. I had recourse to his essay “Frank Confessions” while composing my introduction to the Ferry collection, which I am immensely proud to state that Mr. Dirda qualifies as “excellent.” Calling Ferry’s very short stories “Scrumptious Petites Frites,” Mr. Dirda also says:

Big, ambitious works tend to get all the ink and attention, but smaller books, sometimes consisting of little more than charm and idiosyncrasy, are often the ones we come to love. I opened “The Conductor and Other Tales,” by Jean Ferry, and found myself, to use one of those no-no words among serious reviewers, enchanted. In tone and subject matter, these two dozen very short stories may remind you of Italo Calvino or Steven Millhauser at their most beguiling.

My wife writer Nicole M. Taylor and I were guests of the Portuguese Artists Colony on Sunday, January 5, at San Francisco’s Make-Out Room, part of an event called Victimless.

Nicole was there because in November, she won their Live Writing competition, which works like this: Attendees vote on a prompt as they enter the show, and four writers write on the winning topic while the audience watches them sweat, swear, and get inspired. Each writer will read what he/she wrote, and the audience votes on which piece they’d like to see developed into a finished story/poem/rant to be read at the next performance.

I was there because I was one of this time’s Live Writers, along with Carolyn Cooke, Ira Marlowe, and Lori Savageau, who won. I didn’t do the household proud like Nicole, but I did get to listen to folky musical duo Girl Named T warble while I sweated, swore, and got somewhat inspired onstage.

Other readers that evening included Tom Barbash, Maisha Z. Johnson, and founder Caitlin Myer, who called on surprise guests to help her in a polyphonically staged reading of Ted Bundy in prison.

The Make-Out Room’s disco ball presided over all, almost undersea amidst the kelp forests of tinsel and silver ribbon. It was a festive and convivial occasion.

Tireless comics agent Nicolas Grivel drops my name in his state-of-the-union on French comics in the U.S. at Publishers Weekly.

Nicolas, un grand merci!

The good folks at Asymptote were kind enough to kick off their new blog series of mini-interviews with translators—dubbed the “Lydia Davis” Questionnaire, in answer to the perennial “Proust Questionnaire”—with yours truly. Had a lot of fun.

Asymptote really is a terrific up-and-coming online mag for world lit.

Thanks, Asymptote!

Jean Ferry’s The Conductor and Other Tales is picking up steam again after a holiday lull following its November release:

• It makes beloved indie Green Apple Books’ list of recommendations in SFGate:

A book of crazily inventive short-prose narratives with the imaginative zeal of Borges or Breton – first published in France in 1950.

• Gabriel Blackwell, erstwhile editor of The Collagist, excerpts a favorite bit at his site.
• Look I Have Opinions weighs in on my translation of Ferry’s most famous story, “Le tigre urbain” as “The Society Tiger,” previously translated as “The Fashionable Tiger” and “The Urbane Tiger.”

I like “society tiger” as a translation of “tigre mondain.” I don’t know French well but “mondain” seems to come from a root meaning “the world” and to suggest high society. In contemporary English a fashionable tiger sounds like it means a well-dressed tiger, without connoting much about social class or status.

Sir, I concur.

I’ve made a page in the left sidebar for Ferry with info, quotes from reviews, and links to pieces available online. More, bigger Ferry news in the offing, but I must keep mum for the moment.

The estimable Brazos Price, Atlanta librarian, has these fine words and more to say about Frederik Peeters’ Pachyderme at Cleaver Magazine:

So, Pachyderme is clearly about one woman coming to grips with her life.  Or it is a Freudian look at the sublimation of desire. Or it is a treatise on post WWII paranoia. Or it is the exorcism of guilt. Really, though, what this comic is about is not important. Pachyderme is dense. It is cinematic. It sticks with you, it makes you think about it long after you’ve read/watched it. You may want to re-read it, to re-interpret it. Perhaps you will even dream on it.

Thank you, Mr. Price!

Rick Kleffel is a very, very awesome guy. Or in this case, I should say, Ferry, Ferry awesome! One of the hardest-working, most indefatigable voices in indie coverage of fiction—spec and more—he rolls in the very very first review of my latest full-length prose translation, Jean Ferry’s The Conductor and Other Tales, at his site The Agony Column:

Ferry’s prose pieces are short and often embrace a tart spirit of self-contradiction. He’ll et the reader up with an lavish and sometimes graphic description of a place or an event; a trip to Easter Island — and then deny the truth of what he’s written. He makes it real for the reader, then suggests it is not. Of course, where the lies begin and end is the question, and the import of the something being “true” as well. Ferry’s stories reflect a deep and thoughtful conception of the reading experience, and he uses this to a degree as a plot point…

This is a perfect one-a-day antidote for reality in all its clunky, gory glory. Consider these seeds, prose to be planted in your mind and left to grow very, very wild in the fertile soil of your unconscious life. It’s possible the best effects of reading this book may not be accessible to conscious thought.

Kleffel continues his coverage with a podcast interview. It was a thrill to be quizzed by such an insightful and perceptive reader; in typical esprit d’escalier fashion, my mind was predictably buzzing with add-ons, caveats, and quips hours after the interview. Excerpts from the interview were also broadcast on KUSP’s 88.9 Central Coast Public Radio (6-7 PM PST, December 8th). On Rick’s show there, I had the huge honor of joining Susan Stinson, Jeff VanderMeer, and Jonathan Lethem.

Thank you, Rick!!!