Arriviste

The book. It is arriving. The UPS man with his beige shorts and eyeglass/mustache combination is sometimes the only human I see during the day (but not hear). And I will be seeing him soon (well first he will be delivering rain/snow boots, and then the books. Or perhaps books and then the boots. I am shivering w/ anticipation. This is high excitement for me in Akron. The mail.)

So I have a limited amount to send out to reviewers (like, 20). So...if you are in possession of a blog that does regular book reviews/write-ups or review for  an online magazine or a print publication like Rain Taxi or something and would really be interested in reviewing or spewing about the book. Please contact me. At francesfarmerismysister@gmail.com. And tell me your name + address. And I will TRY to send you a book. Soon!  Or perhaps I will see you at AWP in April and I can give you a copy then. Or I'll be doing a couple readings in Chicago March 2 and April 3? (is that right?) The book is technically out in April. So. Yes. I am nervous. To have readers.

It will all be okay, I think.

(UPDATE: I know I said I would send you PDFs if you were interested for your blog, but then I had more response than I thought, and then I thought, hmmm, I guess I'm supposed to be selling books as well! I am a terrible terrible businessperson! So if you're interested but are not a reviewer or do not yet possess a blog abt literature with regular readers please oh please buy the book! It will be available in April on SPD and Amazon! Or send me your blog link and then maybe I can send you a PDF.  Or if you come to one of my readings I will sell it to you very cheap. And perhaps I will have a contest on Frances Farmer to give away a couple free copies!)

David Shields

This interview in Bookslut (courtesy of HTML giant) makes me want to read David Shields. What should I read of David Shields? His new Reality Hunger looks interesting. I like when he says that he loves books that have numbered sections, as I do too, Nietzsche, Pessoa, Letters to Wendy's. He mentions Maggie Nelson's Bluets, which I so want to read, except Ohio Link, that whore, does not have it.

I also like what he says about non-novelly novels.

I read a lot of novels and love a lot of them, but none of them are what Geoff Dyer calls novelly novels. I love Camus’s The Fall. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. David Markson’s last four books. Are these novels? Not really. They dwell exclusively and obsessively in human consciousness. They spend the entire book trying to figure out something that matters. They expend zero or next-to-zero energy on narrative machinery. Those “novels” I can read and love to death. Carole Maso’s The Art Lover. Thomas Bernhard. A Fan’s Notes. Sebald. Letters to Wendy’s. Proust. Duras, The Lover. Moby-Dick. Speedboat. The Anthologist. Flaubert’s Parrot. Tristram Shandy.

So many of my favorites here (the Coetzee, Bernhard, Sebald, Wenderoth, Duras, Speedboat). Although I'm not the biggest fan of Julian Barnes, because I tend not to read boy's clubs writers, that's my bias. And Barnes was super popular when I worked at Foyle's, and for that I judged him. Terribly unfair of me.

There's a story I tell in Mad Wife, about how for a while in Chicago I saw a doctor who I chose from my HMO because he was French (how else do you pick a dr. from an HMO?) and his name was Dr. Bruno, and I began seeing him when I was having severe anxiety problems, even though he was a urologist, and he identified himself as a writer, a writer who did some doctoring on the side, and he prescribed me Xanax, which took me forever to wean myself off of. But anyway, he was very interested in my anxiety-depression, my depressive anxiety, which he was charmed by because he attributed it to my creativity (but I am not creative I wanted to tell him, I am destructive).

One time he had the nurse call me to come in to see him. He asked me so much about my writing practice, whether I took walks when I was unproductive, he was imagining himself the Otto Rank to my Anais Nin or something. And after being apparently satisfied by my answers he relaxed back in his chair and put his fingers together in a tenting motion and said,

"Tell me, Miss Zambreno, do you enjoy the novels of Julian Barnes?"

I hope I wrote about this in a much more lyric way in Mad Wife.