EDWARD GAUVIN

Are being reviewed on the interwebs.

• Jonathan at Omnicomic checks out the first issue in Okko: The Cycle of Air.
• Jonathan Chuang at Broken Frontier claims Issue #1 of The Killer: Modus Vivendi finally answers the question, “What would happen if James Bond was a bad guy?”
• Richard George at IGN, who “loves all villains,” looks at the same and takes writer Matz and me to task for beating “the obvious into the captions, rendering some sequences overly-narrated and a bit archaic,” though in the end he can’t decide if it’s a strength or a weakness.
• While Greg Burgas of Comic Book Resources recommends both The Secret History omnibus, covering issues 1-7, and the newly released Issue #8, along with The Killer, everyone’s favorite, and arguably Archaia’s highest profile book, thanks in part to the movie deal.

I am happy to see all these series up and running again.

On the front page for this month at Joyland San Francisco, their first translation: Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “The Excursion.”

The latest issue of PEN America, the journal of the PEN organization is out, with my translation of an excerpt from Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows, previously featured in Words Without Borders.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Friends are afoot with fun stuff online. Go check it out!

• In the seventh installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Joshua Furst reads the short story “Black Ice,” published in BOMB 111’s First Proof literary supplement, along with an excerpt from his novel The Sabotage Café published by Knopf.

• Ken Schneyer has kicked off a nifty project on Kickstarter to fund this summer’s short story production:
  • “I will write the first drafts of six science fiction or fantasy stories this summer. Eventually (over many months) I will revise them, re-revise them, and send them out for publication. Sooner or later, they will appear in print or on the Web. Maybe I’ll get paid for them, maybe I won’t. In any case, I won’t be paid much…. This Kickstarter funding will defray the costs of producing these drafts — basically letting me do less work in my day job to have time to write these things. And freeing me up to send them to whatever markets suit them best, without worrying whether they pay anything.

With apologies to Kafka~

Behind the counter sits a postal clerk. To this postal clerk comes a man from the suburbs who has a package that will only take a few minutes to mail. But the postal clerk is not taking customers at the moment. There are five windows at the counter, and only one of them has a postal clerk sitting behind it. The man wonders if he should have picked a better time to come. But the sign on the counter at the window says OPEN, so the man walks up to the window, hoping to attract the postal clerk’s attention. The postal clerk says, “Please wait your turn behind the yellow line, and don’t come up till you’re called. We reserve the right to refuse service at any time, for any reason. Don’t make me call my supervisor out back.”  The suburban man has not expected such difficulties: services should always be available for everyone during normal business hours, he thinks, but as he now peers more closely at the postal clerk with his bored, superior air, his tired eyes, his flesh beleaguered by a sedentary sinecure, the man decides it would be better to wait on the chance his slowly building frustration will find release, however delayed, rather than make a scene and be forced to leave even more frustrated than before. » Read the rest of this entry «

is the title of a short story by Bernard Quiriny, an excerpt of which I’d like to share with you, in these times when it has, tragically, with the environmental debacle of the “Crisis on the Coast,” once more become apposite. It was first published in 2008, in his collection Contes carnivores, which took Belgium’s top literary honor, the Prix Rossel. Its satirical drift is, I think, readily apparent, and reminds me of T.C. Boyle’s work. The quotation in “Gould’s pamphlet” is from Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

At two a.m., we made out a crowd and saw light coming from the beach below. Gould, who’d taken the wheel around Muxía, slammed on the brakes, parked the minibus and, elated, ran toward the sea shouting hurrahs. There were many people on the dunes; in broken English, Vincent and I asked two passersby if the oil had already been sighted. They nodded and gestured wildly to convey the scope of the disaster while a breathless Gould called out for us to hurry and join him.

We reached the beach at last. The spectacle was breathtaking. Everywhere around us bustled people in rubber jumpsuits, like astronauts; bulldozers growled, trucks towed trailers where petroleum pancakes were tossed by the shovelful. Before us, waves were sweeping in the first patches of fuel; despite the darkness of the hour, we made out the sticky black mud slowly covering the blond sand. The club members and I contemplated the scene, deeply moved, and I must admit I found all this magnificent. » Read the rest of this entry «

Advance reader response has returned to us in the form of some hilarious suspicions that we are taking this opportunity to quash in the proverbial cradle. To wit, despite all prominently featured photographic evidence to the contrary, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is not Kurt Vonnegut. He was, for instance, not yet conceived when Dresden was firebombed. Proof of the existence of Tralfamadorians may alter our perspective on but not the sequence of these facts, although both authors have written about time travel, the Second World War, getting old, being too young, failed marriages, the general waste of life, the irony of fate, the indifference of the universe, and porn actresses. The imminent release of A Life on Paper is not an elaborate hoax to foist, upon an unsuspecting and recently bereaved reading public, secretly discovered and previously unpublished manuscripts by Kurt Vonnegut, written using another name and left in a drawer (the lower left, locked) with instructions to publish thereunder. The name Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud may be mathematically construed to designate a set that that shares philosophical but no fleshly elements with the set designated by the name Kurt Vonnegut. » Read the rest of this entry «

Some nice things that came in the mail recently:

the latest Conjunctions, featuring my friend Josh Furst’s story “The Kiss” and Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “The Pest,”

the latest issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, with Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “A City of Museums,”

the deluxely coffered latest Postscripts, with my Clarion teacher Paul Park’s “The Persistence of Memory, or This Space for Sale,” which he read last summer at Mysterious Galaxy, and Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “The Denham Inheritance.” And for the win, now prominently featured at the Joyland store, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s A Life on Paper from Small Beer Press (story and book both forthcoming later this month!),

The title story of A Life on Paper, which first appeared in translation in AGNI Online (Spring 2006), has managed to remain oddly relevant in our age, when taking snapshots is easier than ever. In a strange case of life imitating art it probably didn’t know existed, Munish Bansal, an accountant from Kent, has taken pictures of his two children every day fro the last thirteen years, the Daily Mail reports (showing a selection of the photos). I was staying at a friend’s house in LA last year when I got an email linking to this story, and shared it at the breakfast table. Soon thereafter my friend left for work, and his wife prepared their newborn for the daily ritual of having her photo snapped and texted to Daddy at the office. Apparently showing it to his coworkers was part of the ritual too.

When, bemused, I reported this to Gavin Grant at Small Beer, he said he did the same with daughter Ursula. Most recently, I was stunned to find unexpected echoes in the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Its main character, Thierry Guetta, assigned his mania for compulsively videotaping every last mundane minute of his life to his mother’s early death. While by no means an exclusive or even unpredictable motivation, it is one nonetheless shared by Kathrin’ father in “A Life on Paper”: the event that drives him over the edge, and causes him to ruin his daughter’s life. » Read the rest of this entry «

Spring 2010 issue, now available. Which makes this a silver anniversary of sorts. Brought to you by the tireless, incredible Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca. All hail!

Featuring, for a mere $5 (in print):

Fiction
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, “A City of Museums”
(translated by Edward Gauvin)
Jennifer Linnaea, “Fire-Marrow”
Ben Francisco, “This is Not Concrete”
Sean Adams, “The Famous Detective and His Telepathy Goggles” » Read the rest of this entry «

Saturday, May 1, at 2pm

The fabulous Betsy Bird, children’s librarian extraordinaire, hosts the latest edition of the Children’s Literary Cafe!!

Lost in Children’s Literary Translation

How do children’s books from other countries cross over into the American publishing scene?  » Read the rest of this entry «