Yes, we wrote that the right way round.
Last week, at a Best American Poetry event in NYC, John Ashbery read a John Gallaher poem, "In the Book of the Disappearing Book," which appeared in The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way, 2007, winner of the Levis Prize judged by Henri Cole).
You can get your hands on John's book at the Four Way Books website - a 32% discounted price when you buy direct from Four Way!
The Little Book of Guesses was one of the first books of poems to present an especially 21st century mindset. It takes place in a world where we’ve “accustomed ourselves to our customized dogs” and “honed the idea of ideas there in the obstacle race / that’ll never catch up.” But while it’s a world we’re not unfamiliar with – “in the New Age tourism is the answer” – Gallaher’s turn of speech is at once unique and exact, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
Serving as our escort through scenes including ‘The War Presidents Afternoon Tea’ and ‘A Moment in the Market of Moments,’ Gallaher offers us several Guidebooks: “to the Afterlife”, “to When Things Were Better”, a “Pocket Guide to Some Foreign Country.” There can only be guesses, but these poems are ever confident in their form and lyricism. Abundant with comedy, they contain more than a dose of irony and cynicism, and still find room for the quiet anger of frustration, of knowing that what seems most surreal about this world turns out to be reality itself.
Bin Ramke has commented, of John Gallaher’s poetry, that it is “neither pretending wholeness nor embracing fragmented language as if it were good enough…a powerful new kind of poem.”
"It appears / someday we’ll have a wonderful / future, in the green houses, the red hotels” writes Gallaher, and we find ourselves believing him, or at least wanting to—and desperately.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Eileen Pollack: Reviews, Readings
Eileen Pollack, author of the critically-praised and much-loved collection of short stories and novellas, In the Mouth (Four Way Books, 2008), is reading in several Jewish Book Network events, including at the Jewish Literary Festival in Washington, D.C., next week, September 22nd. If you're within travelling distance of D.C. go hear her, and find out why Stephen King called her "an American talent." Eileen will also be appearing at the Jewish Book Festival in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Jewish Book Festival in San Francisco, CA, both in November.
Eileen has recently received another two wonderful reviews, in Jewish Book World and in Ploughshares . Congratulations, Eileen!
Eileen also was quoted in the NY Times this week, asked for her opinion about the boundary between art and pranks. A busy week for this wonderful writer!
Eileen has recently received another two wonderful reviews, in Jewish Book World and in Ploughshares . Congratulations, Eileen!
Eileen also was quoted in the NY Times this week, asked for her opinion about the boundary between art and pranks. A busy week for this wonderful writer!
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Growler Poetry Review: April Ossmann's Anxious Music
April Ossmann, whose debut collection Anxious Music Publisher's Weekly described as written in "a voice remarkable for its confidence and fierceness," has received a positive review from Jennifer Hanks, who writes that "Anxious Music reveals to us that while we are often at the mercy of our desires, we are seldom in control of them"
You can buy Anxious Music at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
You can buy Anxious Music at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Eileen Pollack Interviewed
Eileen Pollack will be reading from In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas at several Jewish Book Network events in the Fall, beginning excitingly with the Jewish Literary Festival taking place in Washington, D.C. from September 14-24; Eileen will read on Monday September 22nd at 7.30p.m. You can read a glowing review of In the Mouth in the San Francisco Chronicle here.
An interview with Eileen, conducted by Catherine Bates, follows.
In the Mouth is a collection of short stories and novellas. How do you distinguish between the two different forms? Do you think about length at the beginning stages of the each piece? Do you have a preference between the two forms?
The novella is my favorite form – it offers the clean, simple structure of a short story (one main character facing one central conflict as that conflict moves through one pleasing narrative arc, exploring one central thematic question, usually from one dominant point of view) while providing much more space in which to work out all of the above. As you can see, I’m a maximalist, in terms not only of language and thematic meditation but also plot. Even in my short stories, I tend to work with as much plot as some literary writers provide for an entire novel. So the novella length allows me to take my time and not give in to the temptation to scrunch in a novel’s worth of material in 25 pages.
And yes, I do tend to know which form a piece will take before I start out. If an old man tells his son that he needs to be circumcised before he dies, you’re not going to be able to accomplish the circumcision – let alone convince your readers the story is remotely plausible or explain why the old man needs a circumcision, literally or thematically – in fewer than forty pages. This was especially true since I knew “The Bris” was going to have a fairy-tale structure: the king asks his son to perform a difficult task, and the son must surmount daunting obstacles, trying at least three strategies before he succeeds (in fairy tales, everything comes in threes!). With “Beached in Boca,” I knew I was writing two intertwined stories, each so dramatic (an elderly father with AIDS, a father who’s murdered a secret lover) I would need lots of pages to do them both justice. That said, I wasn’t sure if I was writing a forty-page novella or a full-length novel until well into the project!
And now that I’m writing this, I have to admit that I also love the story form … for the sheer beauty of its compressed brevity, accomplishing so much in so little space. And stories are easier to publish on their own, in magazines. If not for the wonderful literary journal SubTropics, which doesn’t balk at printing long works of fiction, “The Bris” wouldn’t have come out on its own and won a Best American!
Could you talk a little about your writing process for a short story collection? I know you have written novels as well. How does the completion of a collection differ from the completion of a novel?
I write my novels all at one go, and even though this might take three to five years, the book spans one discrete period of my life and by its nature focuses on one central theme. But the stories that end up going into a collection might span decades of my life, in and around the novels and works of nonfiction. All the while, I’m moving through different periods of my life, facing different challenges as a person and as a writer. At one end of In the Mouth, my son was being born, while at the other end, my son was approaching manhood and my father was dying. The challenge is to find the common themes that span several eras of your life. In this case, I tried to put together the collection before I’d written “The Bris,” with a far different story (“Breaking and Entering”) in its place, and I couldn’t see the unities. Then I wrote “The Bris” and took out the one story that didn’t fit, and suddenly everything came together and made sense, all those parents and children, all those secrets, all those questions of what parents and children give to each other, or can’t give, what we can or can’t give to lovers and total strangers …
How does the title speak to the larger themes in this collection?
Well, as I said, the parents and children in this collection keep many secrets from each other (and from themselves). In the first story “The Safe,” the main character is keeping her passion for her son’s physical beauty a secret from her husband, her son, her father, everyone, while she’s also starting to wonder if something was wrong about her own father’s physical responses to her when she was a child.
In contemporary American society, a secret of that nature demands to be explored and made much of: Oh, no, maybe your father sexually abused you! Oh no, maybe you’re sexually abusing your son! But by the end of the story, the narrator is as unwilling to explore those so-called problems and pathologize her feelings for her son (or her father’s feelings for her) as the father has been unwilling to open the safe in the basement of his office. Once I had that image – the safe that might or might not be opened to reveal its secrets – I also saw the image of the dentist peering down his patient’s throat to see what he can see about the patient. In the safe, in the mouth … what do we really know about what’s inside anyone else, even people to whom we’re closely related?
And there’s the idea of nursing a child, which comes up in “Milk,” when Bea stares at her son’s mouth and gets freaked out because he’s asking something of her that she doesn’t think she has to give. Or getting kicked in the mouth. Or, well, all the sexual connotations of mouths and what goes into mouths. That said, I have to give credit to my friend, Marcie Hershman, who actually suggested the phrase when I was hunting for a title! All I did was see the wonderful rightness of her suggestion!
Florida reappears in these stories. What role does place have in this collection? How aware were you of the physical settings of these stories while writing the collection?
Setting is everything to me when I write. I tend to make up plots, but I always work with real settings. The setting is the world of the story, by which I mean the culture. Every detail, every object and image and ritual of that world has to strike me as rich in poetry and sociology. There are people who are insiders in a given world, people who are outsiders, and most of the conflicts in my stories (and novels) occur because of some sort of clash between the insiders and the outsiders. The Catskills, where I grew up, certainly qualifies as a world unto itself. But that world died, and most of the older people who used to live there retired to southern Florida. They took some of their own customs down there with them, but they also created new ones. The gated communities of Boca are so rich in ritual, language, a certain well-defined set of values … That’s what I need to create a world. But I didn’t want to stay on the stereotypical surface, the way Jerry Seinfeld does when he takes his characters to Boca (though I do laugh myself sick when those episodes come on in Seinfeld in reruns); I wanted to explore what was going on inside characters like Milt Rothstein, a seemingly mild-mannered dentist from upstate New York.
The body is intricately woven into the plot of these stories. Hospitals and dentist offices often house some kind of heartbreak. The characters’ struggles are connected to the body’s limitations. Could you talk about the importance of the body in your writing?
Honestly, I never thought of that before in relation to my work. I’m someone who lives most of her life inside her head, so it always comes as a big surprise to me that I even have a body. Then again, I’ve always been very active and athletic, and I’ve had a great many physical setbacks in the past ten years (I recently had to have part of my spine replaced!). Having a baby and nursing him and taking care of him is a very physical activity, absolutely saturated with powerful emotions. And caring for my dying father and declining mother in Boca have been powerful reminders that we all have bodies. I suppose that what you’re reading here is a chronicle of my growing realization that no one can live solely in her head! You’re reading the stories that came out of the collision between the life of the mind and the life of the body in my own history. Oh, and I suppose that I realized that one of the main ways I connected with my own father was sitting in his dental chair (and filling in as his dental assistant) … and that sitting in the chairs of other dentists now that he’s dead is an emotionally wrenching and very physically upsetting and scary experience.
A lot of these characters really stuck with me. In some of the stories like “Milt and Moose,” “The Safe,” and “Milk,” the protagonist reaches a deeper understanding or a startling realization only at the very end of the story so the reader is left pondering over these quiet, but vast changes. Do you think these characters share similar struggles?
I do. I’m not a fan of stories in which the epiphanies are small. As I said earlier, these are characters who are trying to figure out what to do with their secret lives. They’re also facing conflicts over how much they can give to other people, even the people they love most. In real life, I’m a complete and total egotist. Yet I’m also someone who feels called upon to give, give, give. I live with that conflict every waking moment, and most of my non-waking moments as well (I am plagued by vivid, disturbing dreams), so it makes sense that my characters would share similar tensions in their lives. The trouble is, most of the startling realizations and vast changes we undergo in this life tend to last for a day or a week before most of us need to go through the whole disturbing business yet again.
An interview with Eileen, conducted by Catherine Bates, follows.
In the Mouth is a collection of short stories and novellas. How do you distinguish between the two different forms? Do you think about length at the beginning stages of the each piece? Do you have a preference between the two forms?
The novella is my favorite form – it offers the clean, simple structure of a short story (one main character facing one central conflict as that conflict moves through one pleasing narrative arc, exploring one central thematic question, usually from one dominant point of view) while providing much more space in which to work out all of the above. As you can see, I’m a maximalist, in terms not only of language and thematic meditation but also plot. Even in my short stories, I tend to work with as much plot as some literary writers provide for an entire novel. So the novella length allows me to take my time and not give in to the temptation to scrunch in a novel’s worth of material in 25 pages.
And yes, I do tend to know which form a piece will take before I start out. If an old man tells his son that he needs to be circumcised before he dies, you’re not going to be able to accomplish the circumcision – let alone convince your readers the story is remotely plausible or explain why the old man needs a circumcision, literally or thematically – in fewer than forty pages. This was especially true since I knew “The Bris” was going to have a fairy-tale structure: the king asks his son to perform a difficult task, and the son must surmount daunting obstacles, trying at least three strategies before he succeeds (in fairy tales, everything comes in threes!). With “Beached in Boca,” I knew I was writing two intertwined stories, each so dramatic (an elderly father with AIDS, a father who’s murdered a secret lover) I would need lots of pages to do them both justice. That said, I wasn’t sure if I was writing a forty-page novella or a full-length novel until well into the project!
And now that I’m writing this, I have to admit that I also love the story form … for the sheer beauty of its compressed brevity, accomplishing so much in so little space. And stories are easier to publish on their own, in magazines. If not for the wonderful literary journal SubTropics, which doesn’t balk at printing long works of fiction, “The Bris” wouldn’t have come out on its own and won a Best American!
Could you talk a little about your writing process for a short story collection? I know you have written novels as well. How does the completion of a collection differ from the completion of a novel?
I write my novels all at one go, and even though this might take three to five years, the book spans one discrete period of my life and by its nature focuses on one central theme. But the stories that end up going into a collection might span decades of my life, in and around the novels and works of nonfiction. All the while, I’m moving through different periods of my life, facing different challenges as a person and as a writer. At one end of In the Mouth, my son was being born, while at the other end, my son was approaching manhood and my father was dying. The challenge is to find the common themes that span several eras of your life. In this case, I tried to put together the collection before I’d written “The Bris,” with a far different story (“Breaking and Entering”) in its place, and I couldn’t see the unities. Then I wrote “The Bris” and took out the one story that didn’t fit, and suddenly everything came together and made sense, all those parents and children, all those secrets, all those questions of what parents and children give to each other, or can’t give, what we can or can’t give to lovers and total strangers …
How does the title speak to the larger themes in this collection?
Well, as I said, the parents and children in this collection keep many secrets from each other (and from themselves). In the first story “The Safe,” the main character is keeping her passion for her son’s physical beauty a secret from her husband, her son, her father, everyone, while she’s also starting to wonder if something was wrong about her own father’s physical responses to her when she was a child.
In contemporary American society, a secret of that nature demands to be explored and made much of: Oh, no, maybe your father sexually abused you! Oh no, maybe you’re sexually abusing your son! But by the end of the story, the narrator is as unwilling to explore those so-called problems and pathologize her feelings for her son (or her father’s feelings for her) as the father has been unwilling to open the safe in the basement of his office. Once I had that image – the safe that might or might not be opened to reveal its secrets – I also saw the image of the dentist peering down his patient’s throat to see what he can see about the patient. In the safe, in the mouth … what do we really know about what’s inside anyone else, even people to whom we’re closely related?
And there’s the idea of nursing a child, which comes up in “Milk,” when Bea stares at her son’s mouth and gets freaked out because he’s asking something of her that she doesn’t think she has to give. Or getting kicked in the mouth. Or, well, all the sexual connotations of mouths and what goes into mouths. That said, I have to give credit to my friend, Marcie Hershman, who actually suggested the phrase when I was hunting for a title! All I did was see the wonderful rightness of her suggestion!
Florida reappears in these stories. What role does place have in this collection? How aware were you of the physical settings of these stories while writing the collection?
Setting is everything to me when I write. I tend to make up plots, but I always work with real settings. The setting is the world of the story, by which I mean the culture. Every detail, every object and image and ritual of that world has to strike me as rich in poetry and sociology. There are people who are insiders in a given world, people who are outsiders, and most of the conflicts in my stories (and novels) occur because of some sort of clash between the insiders and the outsiders. The Catskills, where I grew up, certainly qualifies as a world unto itself. But that world died, and most of the older people who used to live there retired to southern Florida. They took some of their own customs down there with them, but they also created new ones. The gated communities of Boca are so rich in ritual, language, a certain well-defined set of values … That’s what I need to create a world. But I didn’t want to stay on the stereotypical surface, the way Jerry Seinfeld does when he takes his characters to Boca (though I do laugh myself sick when those episodes come on in Seinfeld in reruns); I wanted to explore what was going on inside characters like Milt Rothstein, a seemingly mild-mannered dentist from upstate New York.
The body is intricately woven into the plot of these stories. Hospitals and dentist offices often house some kind of heartbreak. The characters’ struggles are connected to the body’s limitations. Could you talk about the importance of the body in your writing?
Honestly, I never thought of that before in relation to my work. I’m someone who lives most of her life inside her head, so it always comes as a big surprise to me that I even have a body. Then again, I’ve always been very active and athletic, and I’ve had a great many physical setbacks in the past ten years (I recently had to have part of my spine replaced!). Having a baby and nursing him and taking care of him is a very physical activity, absolutely saturated with powerful emotions. And caring for my dying father and declining mother in Boca have been powerful reminders that we all have bodies. I suppose that what you’re reading here is a chronicle of my growing realization that no one can live solely in her head! You’re reading the stories that came out of the collision between the life of the mind and the life of the body in my own history. Oh, and I suppose that I realized that one of the main ways I connected with my own father was sitting in his dental chair (and filling in as his dental assistant) … and that sitting in the chairs of other dentists now that he’s dead is an emotionally wrenching and very physically upsetting and scary experience.
A lot of these characters really stuck with me. In some of the stories like “Milt and Moose,” “The Safe,” and “Milk,” the protagonist reaches a deeper understanding or a startling realization only at the very end of the story so the reader is left pondering over these quiet, but vast changes. Do you think these characters share similar struggles?
I do. I’m not a fan of stories in which the epiphanies are small. As I said earlier, these are characters who are trying to figure out what to do with their secret lives. They’re also facing conflicts over how much they can give to other people, even the people they love most. In real life, I’m a complete and total egotist. Yet I’m also someone who feels called upon to give, give, give. I live with that conflict every waking moment, and most of my non-waking moments as well (I am plagued by vivid, disturbing dreams), so it makes sense that my characters would share similar tensions in their lives. The trouble is, most of the startling realizations and vast changes we undergo in this life tend to last for a day or a week before most of us need to go through the whole disturbing business yet again.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Ron Silliman Reviews Degrees of Latitude
Ron Silliman writes a very thought-provoking and complimentary review of Laurel Blossom's Degrees of Latitude on his blog today. Describing it as "completely persuasive" he writes "This is not the language of lyric verse, nor of the particular sort of Quietist confessionalism one might associate, say, with Carolyn Forché or Jane Miller, both of whom blurbed this book. There is a grit to these descriptions."
Ron Silliman has been writing an interesting series of posts on the William Carlos Williams award, which he judged this year, and which brought Degrees of Latitude to his attention. While it didn't win the award, it was one of a handful of books that particularly caught Silliman's attention and he feels deserves awards.
There's a link to the review on Ron's blog.
You can buy Degrees of Latitude at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
Ron Silliman has been writing an interesting series of posts on the William Carlos Williams award, which he judged this year, and which brought Degrees of Latitude to his attention. While it didn't win the award, it was one of a handful of books that particularly caught Silliman's attention and he feels deserves awards.
There's a link to the review on Ron's blog.
You can buy Degrees of Latitude at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
NYer reviews Kevin Prufer
This week's New Yorker includes Kevin Prufer's latest book in its Briefly Noted section, 4/28/08:
"The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge."
Congratulations, Kevin!
Kevin also received a wonderful review from Robert C. Jones in the Kansas City Star which syndicated to a dozen other papers across the United States, including the Miami Herald .
Of National Anthem , Marie Howe has written “From within the American Empire, [Prufer] is listening to the memory of the future. . . Can this be a poet who can writes the sentence we are, as a people, on the verge of saying?”
National Anthem is available directly from Four Way Books at a 32% discount. Order it, and all our other titles, here
"The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge."
Congratulations, Kevin!
Kevin also received a wonderful review from Robert C. Jones in the Kansas City Star which syndicated to a dozen other papers across the United States, including the Miami Herald .
Of National Anthem , Marie Howe has written “From within the American Empire, [Prufer] is listening to the memory of the future. . . Can this be a poet who can writes the sentence we are, as a people, on the verge of saying?”
National Anthem is available directly from Four Way Books at a 32% discount. Order it, and all our other titles, here
Thursday, March 6, 2008
C. Dale Young's The Second Person a ForeWord BOTYA Finalist!
We're delighted to post news that C. Dale Young's second book of poems, The Second Person , has been announced as a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year Award Finalist. Find out about the awards, the magazine, and other titles at the ForeWord magazine website. Their press release is below.
Congratulations, C. Dale, we have our fingers crossed for you (which will explain any ttypos in this posting...). Winners announced May 29th.
You can buy The Second Person at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
FOREWORD BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED
ForeWord Magazine announces the finalists in the tenth annual Book of the Year Awards. These books represent some of the best work coming from today's independent press community.
Nearly 1,600 books were entered in 61 categories. These were narrowed to 658 finalists, from 350 publishers.
The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers, selected from our readership. ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books across a number of genres.
Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles on May 29. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.
Congratulations, C. Dale, we have our fingers crossed for you (which will explain any ttypos in this posting...). Winners announced May 29th.
You can buy The Second Person at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
FOREWORD BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED
ForeWord Magazine announces the finalists in the tenth annual Book of the Year Awards. These books represent some of the best work coming from today's independent press community.
Nearly 1,600 books were entered in 61 categories. These were narrowed to 658 finalists, from 350 publishers.
The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers, selected from our readership. ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books across a number of genres.
Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles on May 29. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Kirkus Praises Eileen Pollack's In the Mouth
Kirkus Reviews will review Eileen Pollack's forthcoming collection of short stories and a novella, In the Mouth , week beginning March 1st.
In a sneak preview, we can reveal that they described her book as "Delicate but dazzling" and praise it for its "incisive, beautifully crafted stories about family relationships, focused especially on the dynamic between fathers and daughters."
"It’s hard to choose favorites here, for all are worthy," writes the reviewer. We heartily agree! Congratulations, Eileen.
In a sneak preview, we can reveal that they described her book as "Delicate but dazzling" and praise it for its "incisive, beautifully crafted stories about family relationships, focused especially on the dynamic between fathers and daughters."
"It’s hard to choose favorites here, for all are worthy," writes the reviewer. We heartily agree! Congratulations, Eileen.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Forrest Hamer's Rift reviewed
Cutbank has just posted a thoughtful and complimentary review of Forrest Hamer's Rift . The reviewer, poet Helen Losse, writes: "Rift is a book that begs to be read again and again, for in seeking reconciliation, we must notice the rift."
Read the full interview, and many more reviews and thoughts on poetry, on the Cutbank blog.
You can buy Rift at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
(Thanks to Ron Silliman's blog for the link.)
Read the full interview, and many more reviews and thoughts on poetry, on the Cutbank blog.
You can buy Rift at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
(Thanks to Ron Silliman's blog for the link.)
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Hear Eileen Pollack on Detroit Today
This Friday, February 8th, Eileen Pollack, author of the forthcoming In the Mouth , a collection of stories and a novella, will be featured on WDET 101.9FM's DETROIT TODAY program. An interview with her will air between 10 and 11am. If you're not in the Detroit area, you can listen live by clicking the link above.
If you're in Ann Arbor on Wed. March 19th at 7pm, catch Eileen live, reading and signing from In the Mouth , hosted by the great indie bookstore Shaman Drum. Full details here.
One of the stories from the collection, "The Bris," was featured in Best American Short Stories 2007 , and Eileen was recently described as "an American talent" by Stephen King in the New York Times Book Review
If you're in Ann Arbor on Wed. March 19th at 7pm, catch Eileen live, reading and signing from In the Mouth , hosted by the great indie bookstore Shaman Drum. Full details here.
One of the stories from the collection, "The Bris," was featured in Best American Short Stories 2007 , and Eileen was recently described as "an American talent" by Stephen King in the New York Times Book Review
National Anthem a Good Read, say book critics
Kevin Prufer's National Anthem has been voted onto the National Book Critics' Circle's winter list of good reads. The list is a wonderful place to start for anyone looking for some early 2008 poetry reading, and don't forget that National Anthem will shortly be available directly from Four Way Books at a 32% discount. Order it, and all our other titles, here .
Congratulations, Kevin!
Congratulations, Kevin!
Monday, February 4, 2008
Kevin Prufer on Poetry Daily
Kevin Prufer, whose fourth book National Anthem is forthcoming from Four Way Books this April, will be Thursday's featured poem on Poetry Daily.
Of National Anthem , Marie Howe has written “From within the American Empire, [Prufer] is listening to the memory of the future. . . Can this be a poet who can writes the sentence we are, as a people, on the verge of saying?”
National Anthem will shortly be available directly from Four Way Books at a 32% discount. Order it, and all our other titles, here
Of National Anthem , Marie Howe has written “From within the American Empire, [Prufer] is listening to the memory of the future. . . Can this be a poet who can writes the sentence we are, as a people, on the verge of saying?”
National Anthem will shortly be available directly from Four Way Books at a 32% discount. Order it, and all our other titles, here
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Four Way at AWP
This Thursday to Saturday, come and find Four Way Books at the AWP Conference 2008 where we'll be offering significant discounts on our titles, where you'll be able to hear our authors read, and where you can get your books signed by some of them. We're celebrating our 15th anniversary, and almost all of our back catalogue will be available for purchase!
AWP Discount: $10 per book (less than 2/3 of cover price). Buy three or more and get them for $8 a book!
(Even if you're not registered for the conference, the Book Fair is open to the public on Saturday February 2nd.)
You'll find us at:
TABLES 42 and 43
Rhinelander Gallery, 2nd Floor
Author Signings (at our Tables)
Friday 2:00-3:00
Daniel Tobin & C. Dale Young
Friday 3:00-4:00
April Ossmann & Jeffrey Harrison
Friday 4:00-5:00
Laurel Blossom & Kevin Prufer
15th Anniversary Reading
Saturday 1:30-2:45
(Regent Parlor Hilton, 2nd Floor)
Laurel Blossom
Jeffrey Harrison
April Ossmann
Kevin Prufer
Daniel Tobin
C. Dale Young
April Ossmann's Anxious Music Reviewed
April Ossmann, whose debut collection Anxious Music Publisher's Weekly described as written in "a voice remarkable for its confidence and fierceness," has received a glowing review from Beth Kanell at the fabulous specialty mystery, poetry, and fine press shop, Kingdom books, who enthuses: "I'll be reading this collection again. And again."
If you're in Vermont, stop by Kingdom Books to pick up a copy of April's book. Or, you can buy Anxious Music at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
April will also be reading and signing books at AWP this weekend, for those of you descending on Manhattan.
If you're in Vermont, stop by Kingdom Books to pick up a copy of April's book. Or, you can buy Anxious Music at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
April will also be reading and signing books at AWP this weekend, for those of you descending on Manhattan.
Deborah Bernhardt's Echolalia Reviewed and Recommended
Third Coast, the wonderful journal produced out of Western Michigan University, features a review of Deborah Bernhardt's Echolalia in its newest issue (Fall 2007). Check out the journal at the Third Coast website.
You can buy Deborah's fantastic book at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
You can buy Deborah's fantastic book at the Four Way Books website where all our titles are available at a 32% discount. You'll be supporting independent publishing AND saving yourself money!
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Eileen Pollack, Florida Writers Festival
Next month, Eileen Pollack, author of the forthcoming In the Mouth , a collection of stories and a novella, will read as part of the Florida Writers Festival.
One of the stories from the collection, "The Bris," was featured in Best American Short Stories 2007 , and Eileen was recently described as "an American talent" by Stephen King in the New York Times Book Review
One of the stories from the collection, "The Bris," was featured in Best American Short Stories 2007 , and Eileen was recently described as "an American talent" by Stephen King in the New York Times Book Review
Friday, November 9, 2007
Kevin Prufer reads
Dear all,
Please come along to the famous KGB Bar on Monday night to see Four Way poet Kevin Prufer read. National Anthem will be released in February 2008.
Date: Monday, November 19th
Time: 7pm
Place: KGB, 85 East 4th Street, NYC
The poets:
Wayne Miller is the author of Only the Senses Sleep
(New Issues, 2006), translator of I Don't Believe in
Ghosts (BOA, 2007), by Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and
co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of New European Poets
(Graywolf,2008). He has received the Lucille Medwick
Award, the George Bogin Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship
and the Bess Hokin Prize. He lives in Kansas City and
co-edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
Kevin Prufer is the author, most recently, of National
Anthem (Four Way, 2008), Fallen From a Chariot
(Carnegie Mellon, 2005), and The Finger Bone (Carnegie
Mellon, 2002). With Wayne Miller, he is Editor of
Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and General Editor
of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). With Joy Katz
he has recently edited Dark Horses: Poets on
Overlooked Poems (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007). The
recipient of three Pushcart prizes, he lives in rural
Missouri.
Joy Katz is the author of two books of poems, Fabulae
and The Garden Room, the latter out recently from
Tupelo Press, and also is the co-editor (with Kevin
Prufer) of the anthology Dark Horses: Poets on
Overlooked Poems and a senior editor at Pleiades. She
was recently writer-in-residence at The University of
Misosuri and she teaches poetry workshops at The New
School.
Please come along to the famous KGB Bar on Monday night to see Four Way poet Kevin Prufer read. National Anthem will be released in February 2008.
Date: Monday, November 19th
Time: 7pm
Place: KGB, 85 East 4th Street, NYC
The poets:
Wayne Miller is the author of Only the Senses Sleep
(New Issues, 2006), translator of I Don't Believe in
Ghosts (BOA, 2007), by Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and
co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of New European Poets
(Graywolf,2008). He has received the Lucille Medwick
Award, the George Bogin Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship
and the Bess Hokin Prize. He lives in Kansas City and
co-edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
Kevin Prufer is the author, most recently, of National
Anthem (Four Way, 2008), Fallen From a Chariot
(Carnegie Mellon, 2005), and The Finger Bone (Carnegie
Mellon, 2002). With Wayne Miller, he is Editor of
Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and General Editor
of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). With Joy Katz
he has recently edited Dark Horses: Poets on
Overlooked Poems (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007). The
recipient of three Pushcart prizes, he lives in rural
Missouri.
Joy Katz is the author of two books of poems, Fabulae
and The Garden Room, the latter out recently from
Tupelo Press, and also is the co-editor (with Kevin
Prufer) of the anthology Dark Horses: Poets on
Overlooked Poems and a senior editor at Pleiades. She
was recently writer-in-residence at The University of
Misosuri and she teaches poetry workshops at The New
School.
Jeffrey Harrison Readings
Jeffrey Harrison, whose Incomplete Knowledge was on the Booksense Top Ten Poetry Books of 2007 list, has several upcoming readings. Come along - and bring friends!
Late 2007
Concord Poetry Center
40 Stow Street
Concord, MA
Sunday, November 18, 2007
3:00 pm
George Washington University
Washington, DC
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
8:00 pm
Marvin Center, third floor amphitheater
800 21st St. NW
2008
AWP in New York
“Four Way Books 15 Years”
Saturday, February 2
1:30-2:45 pm
With Daniel Tobin, Laurel Blossom, April Ossmann, C. Dale Young, Kevin Prufer
Hilton New York
53rd Street and Avenue of the Americas
PEN New England / Hotel Marlowe Reading Series
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
6:15 pm (with Wine Hour starting at 5:00)
Hotel Marlowe
25 Edwin H. Land Blvd.
Cambridge, MA
The Ruskin Art Club
800 S. Plymouth Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
With Carol Muske-Dukes
Sunday, February 24
2:00 pm
Idyllwild Arts Academy
Idyllwild, CA
Monday, February 25, 2008
7:30 pm
Parks Exhibition Center
University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert campus
Frank Sinatra Drive (at the corner of Cook St.)
Palm Desert, CA
February 26, 2008
7:00 pm
Auditorium, Room B-100
Casa Romantica
415 Avenida Granada
San Clemente, CA
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
7:00 pm
Pegasus Books
2349 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA
With Cathleen Michaels
March 13, 2008
7:30
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madiera, CA
March 14, 2008
7:00 pm
Emory University, Atlanta
A Fine Excess: A Celebration of Waywiser Press
(April 2-4, with Richard Wilbur, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, J.D. McClatchy, Mary Jo Salter, and other Waywiser poets)
With Eric McHenry
Thursday, April 3, 2008
1:30 pm
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University
Brookline Poetry Series
Brookline Booksmith
279 Harvard St.
Brookline, MA
With Afaa Michael Weaver
May 2, 2008
7:00 pm
Late 2007
Concord Poetry Center
40 Stow Street
Concord, MA
Sunday, November 18, 2007
3:00 pm
George Washington University
Washington, DC
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
8:00 pm
Marvin Center, third floor amphitheater
800 21st St. NW
2008
AWP in New York
“Four Way Books 15 Years”
Saturday, February 2
1:30-2:45 pm
With Daniel Tobin, Laurel Blossom, April Ossmann, C. Dale Young, Kevin Prufer
Hilton New York
53rd Street and Avenue of the Americas
PEN New England / Hotel Marlowe Reading Series
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
6:15 pm (with Wine Hour starting at 5:00)
Hotel Marlowe
25 Edwin H. Land Blvd.
Cambridge, MA
The Ruskin Art Club
800 S. Plymouth Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
With Carol Muske-Dukes
Sunday, February 24
2:00 pm
Idyllwild Arts Academy
Idyllwild, CA
Monday, February 25, 2008
7:30 pm
Parks Exhibition Center
University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert campus
Frank Sinatra Drive (at the corner of Cook St.)
Palm Desert, CA
February 26, 2008
7:00 pm
Auditorium, Room B-100
Casa Romantica
415 Avenida Granada
San Clemente, CA
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
7:00 pm
Pegasus Books
2349 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA
With Cathleen Michaels
March 13, 2008
7:30
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madiera, CA
March 14, 2008
7:00 pm
Emory University, Atlanta
A Fine Excess: A Celebration of Waywiser Press
(April 2-4, with Richard Wilbur, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, J.D. McClatchy, Mary Jo Salter, and other Waywiser poets)
With Eric McHenry
Thursday, April 3, 2008
1:30 pm
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University
Brookline Poetry Series
Brookline Booksmith
279 Harvard St.
Brookline, MA
With Afaa Michael Weaver
May 2, 2008
7:00 pm
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Deborah Bernhardt Reading
Meteorologists! Climatologists! Forecasters of Atmospheric Phenomena!
We got your weather right here.
Listen as Nancy Kuhl, Cathy Eisenhower & Deborah Bernhardt , author of Echolalia
Thunderstorm, Squall and Exquisitely Precipitate!
This Friday, November 9th, 7pm -- FREE!
Deborah Bernhardt received an MFA in Creative Writing from the
University of Arizona and fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for
Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, Penn State Altoona, Writers@Work, Summer Literary
Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, Summer Fishtrap in Wallowa, OR,
and the Hessen-Wisconsin Writers Exchange, Germany. Her poetry
collection Echolalia was published by Four Way Books as the winner of
the 2005 Intro Prize.
Nancy Kuhl's first full-length collection of poems, The Wife of the
Left Hand, was published in 2007 by Shearsman Books. She is co-editor
of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher ( www.phylumpress.com). She
is Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Cathy Eisenhower is a poet and librarian in Washington, DC. Her first
full-length collection is forthcoming from Edge Books.
Only at Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 302-3770
"L" to Lorimer, "G" to Metropolitan.
Visit http://www.multifariousarray.blogspot.com/ for links to their
work and email me for more information.
We got your weather right here.
Listen as Nancy Kuhl, Cathy Eisenhower & Deborah Bernhardt , author of Echolalia
Thunderstorm, Squall and Exquisitely Precipitate!
This Friday, November 9th, 7pm -- FREE!
Deborah Bernhardt received an MFA in Creative Writing from the
University of Arizona and fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for
Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, Penn State Altoona, Writers@Work, Summer Literary
Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, Summer Fishtrap in Wallowa, OR,
and the Hessen-Wisconsin Writers Exchange, Germany. Her poetry
collection Echolalia was published by Four Way Books as the winner of
the 2005 Intro Prize.
Nancy Kuhl's first full-length collection of poems, The Wife of the
Left Hand, was published in 2007 by Shearsman Books. She is co-editor
of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher ( www.phylumpress.com). She
is Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Cathy Eisenhower is a poet and librarian in Washington, DC. Her first
full-length collection is forthcoming from Edge Books.
Only at Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 302-3770
"L" to Lorimer, "G" to Metropolitan.
Visit http://www.multifariousarray.blogspot.com/ for links to their
work and email me for more information.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Four Way Books announces TWO November Readings
We hope you'll be able to join us at one or both of these November readings, celebrating Fall '07 and Spring '07 poetry releases
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