HUNTERS & GAMBLERS releases today. Order your copy HERE.

.
.

This month we expand upon an earlier Noted Abroad installment, providing the full text of a piece that was initially stripped down in the interest of achieving a blog-friendly style. Subsequent events, notably a USA Today interview with romance author Nicholas Sparks, have made a reprise of the material seem appropriate.

The bookstore in Puente Genil has a wide selection of reference books, novels and biographies in Spanish, but, perhaps because no sensible English-speaking traveler would make Puente Genil part of their Andalusian adventure, English titles are few and far between. Even the proprietor isn’t always sure which books-in-English he carries, or where in his store they might be found. If you happen to find one, it is likely to be an American or British novel that has been made into a Hollywood blockbuster, which blockbuster has inspired publishers to repackage the book — NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! — and send shit-tons of copies, in various languages, out into the world far and wide, so far and so wide that some of them, somehow, land in places like Puente Genil. In short, a thorough combing of the bookshop revealed that if my student Macu wanted to study a novel in English, she would need to choose between Atonement, No Country for Old Men, and The Notebook.

(more…)

“I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.”  — Leslie Marmon Silko

(more…)

I was a friend and a fan of Ryan Ridge long before I met him in Irvine, California near the end of the summer in 2008. I was living in Portland, Oregon for some time before that, and — as anyone who has ever lived in Portland will tell you — that friendly city is built of tribes, outposts, franchises of youth from different zip codes. Chances are if you befriend one person arrived from Maine, you’ll meet at least six people they went to high school with, most likely living in a ten-block radius of one another. Through happenstance, scattered employment, and someone else’s brief love affair, I was running with a crew of Kentucky transplants that I had met through old friends from Reno, Nevada, where I had grown up sorely before moving to Oregon with seven or so other discontents. One of these Kentucky natives mentioned he had a friend in Louisville, who was also a writer, and also named Ryan, and, without so much as asking, he began to send the work we were sharing with him to each of us, acting as emissary between the two Ryans. This is when I first read “Holiest of Holies,” by forwarded email, a novella that has gone through many incarnations to make its way into this collection — long, short, long, just right — but has always kept that great title. This is also when, out of the blue, I would receive a message addressed to our mutual friend about my own work — Ridge and I through this whole period never had any direct communication, we were always moderated — the experience of which was like overhearing a conversation about yourself conducted by strangers and, for once, liking what they had to say. I even had the opportunity to publish Ryan Ridge in a small art zine I was working on at the time called Old Growth. Again, through our mutual friend’s unwavering commitment to act as emissary, I came across a piece of Ridge’s called “List of Character Sketches I’ve Drawn Only to Remain Character Sketches” in a bundle of works rejected by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, complete with correspondence by this author I’d never met and the editors of the website, which, in itself, was fucking hilarious. We turned the piece into a drawing contest, where readers were urged to illustrate each character based on Ridge’s descriptions, with one panel drawn up by Justin “Scrappers” Morrison.

(more…)

Grammar! Religion! Love! Orgasms! What more do you need? The comma is perpetually under threat, but it endures. And where would Virginia Woolf’s art of editing be without it? E-books may be threatening your love life, while Scientology is threatening your church. Bad news, yes. But still I want you to get through your day wearing a smile, so have a look at Christopher Turner’s new book, which offers a rousing take on those wonderful breath bumps we call orgasms. Happy Thursday.