Looking back, absorbing now, casting a gaze toward the ugly red horizon, this is the liturgy we have left to us ... as WSB said, "until the bare lies shine through": To see Big Bad Bill read the whole thing in all his glory, watch this video of WSB reading "Thanksgiving Prayer": Amen.
Craft Notes: Always with a Bit of Laughter
The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". Always With a Bit of Laughter If there’s one thing I’ve taken from works of the authors I admire it’s the role humor and high-spiritedness can play in making fiction come alive. It seems to me fiction should bring to bear the full spectrum…
Rigaut – Excerpt from Housebreaking the Muse (in progress)
Throughout my novel Housebreaking the Muse, numerous short chapters provide a glimpse into the mind of Jacques Rigaut on the night of his suicide, November 5-6, 1929. The following fragment is from an early draft of one such chapter. Rigaut I have long been favored by visitations from oblivion, enveloped in its seductive lack, which…
Craft Notes: Paul West’s Technical Advice for Fiction Writers, Part VII
The novelist Paul West has had the greatest influence on my development as a writer. I first had the great fortune of encountering this member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the Prix Médicis and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Literary Lion of the New York Public Library system, and…
More Off Topic: Halloween is for The Cramps
Picking up on my last post, I have to highlight The Cramps, whose amazing singer and founder, Lux Interior, left this mortal coil this very year, 2009. RIP LUX. Here we have The Cramps performing "Call of the Wighat," one of the best rock'n'roll numbers of all time. My momma had twin babies on one…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 