October 17, 2016
I first encountered Nicholas Mainieri’s fiction in those great baseball issues that Hobart used to put out every spring. His first published story “The Tools of Ignorance,” which appeared in the spring of 2008 and was titled after an old nickname for a catcher’s gear, carried itself with such authority and deep-in-the-grain understanding of our national pastime that it stuck with me for months afterward. Later that same year, I accepted a two-year position at The Southern Review at Louisiana State University, and, knowing Mainieri lived nearby, I looked him up and we began to meet regularly to watch baseball—my beloved Phillies won the World Series that fall—and talk about writing stories, including a novel he was just beginning to formulate. Back then, his book had a sort of Heart of Darkness sound to it.
Read the entire interview here.
October 6, 2016
Electric Literature
Geek Reads: If Trees Could Scream
Andrew Ervin looks at trees, Ents, and what we don’t see in the forest
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?” the humorist Jack Handey once asked. “We might,” he admitted, “if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
In his superb The Hidden Life of Trees, the German forester Peter Wohlleben indicates there may be some truth in Handey’s joke. “When trees are really thirsty,” he writes, “they begin to scream.”
Read the entire essay here.
September 12, 2016
Washington Post
Alan Moore’s sprawling new epic, Jerusalem
Jerusalem
By Alan Moore
Liveright. 1,266 pp. $35
“Over the past four decades, Alan Moore has earned a reputation — and a massive, worldwide audience — as a historian and champion of the macabre. In his legendary comics “
V for Vendetta,” “
Watchmen” and “
From Hell,” the natural and the supernatural can be difficult to distinguish. Now, he’s published
a new novel, “Jerusalem,” which is epic in scope and phantasmagoric to its briny core. It takes place over 1,000 years in the English town of Northampton, also known here as the Boroughs. It’s a hardscrabble realm teeming with painters and prostitutes, would-be poets and biblical demons. The angels play snooker with the eternal souls of the residents on the line.”
My review is available here.
February 5, 2016
L’incendie ed la maison de George Orwell
[Burning Down George Orwell’s House]
Gallimard/Éditions Joëlle Losfeld
Translated by Marc Weitzmann
Praise for the French Edition:
“A sharply funny portrait of a young yuppie returning to something approaching a state of nature… Is it possible to open up a place to the outside world; to knowledge, to literature and art, without a cost to its identity? This is a finely-formed question posed by Andrew Ervin… an interrogation of societies’ ability to surmount their self-erected barricades.”
–Ariane Singer, Le Monde
“A very successful, unusual, and wonderfully translated first novel… At times somber, yet humorous… as tasty as 17-year-old Bowmore!”
–Delphine Peras, L’Express
“It is completely exhilarating: as soon as you have started it, you cannot stop turning the pages. And when you’ve finished, dazzled as you are by the talent, you rush to return to it.”
–Gérard Guégan, Sud Ouest
“A novel that is cerebral, complex, and somber enough despite the occasional ray of sunshine and despite its happy ending, a novel that could pass as a parable about the anxiety of the White Western Male. And it is all related not without humor, and greatly reinforced with whisky, that elixir of the gods: golden, peaty, violent and bewitching all at the same time. Just like this book. It can be enjoyed without moderation.”
–Jean-Claude Perrier, Livres Hebdo
“A humorous and biting novel; evincing hopelessness in its own way, even if we never stop smiling as we read it. What it tells us, without making any fuss of it, is that wanting to feel an Orwellian and polluted world to rediscover the Rousseau-esque purity of time-forgotten spaces is really not the idea of the century… And it tells us also that, come what may, sooner or later, Big Brother will arrive even here.”
–Jérôme Leroy, Causeur
“With an uncommon sense of humor, the young American novelist Andrew Ervin, for whom this is his first novel, has taken his Breathalyzer test—and it really hit the spot.”
–Didier Jacob, L’Obs