One of the books I picked up at AWP comes from the always exciting to read Stephen Graham Jones. From FC2 (who had a very nice sale on backlist titles at AWP), the bird is gone: a monograph manifesto (2003) has this as a portion of the description on the back cover:
Inside a bowling alley they called Fool's Hip, Special Agent Chassis Jones is questioning Nickel Eye about thirty-nine tourists who have gone missing. Everybody in the place is listening: Mary Boy, the Jesus tattoo on his arm still bleeding; Cat Stand, about to peel off her last undershirt; Back Iron, checking the run in his nylons; and LP Deal who, ins spite of the AllSkin tournament under way and the swarm of anthropologists at the border, is writing it all down.
Just started to dip into this one and it's as energetic as that paragraph might have you believe. I never know where Jones is going to take me when I'm open the early pages of his work but it's always been worth the ride.
Just received in the mail two days ago was Blake Butler's forthcoming novel, There is No Year (Harper Perennial). This is a book as object effort to go along with the writing inside. Blake is another very energetic writer, or one that puts very energetic words across the page in front of my eyes. This one keeps pulling my attention to it; it can't help it and I'm pretty sure that's the intention of the cover, the internal design and the writing itself.
One I bought not too long ago, Pacific Rims by Rafe Bartholomew. This young basketball junkie convinced the Fulbright folks that it was worth their money and his time to go and document the hold that basketball has on the Filipino culture. The Philippine Basketball Association is the 2nd longest running professional basketball league in the world, behind only the NBA here in the States. I'm early into this one but it's pretty fascinating just how important basketball is to this culture (they've moved elections due to PBA games for instance).
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