Brian Cogan channels Dick Cheney as Ken Wohlrob (to the right and wearing the blue shirt) looks on

March 23, 2008

Thanks to Rachel London, the founders of the Blacksmiths For Literary Progress--Ken Wohlrob, Brian Cogan, Tim Hall, and Mike Faloon--returned to Freebird and read to a standing room only crowd (see right). We also celebrated the release of Ken Wohlrob's first collection of short stories, The Love Book, which is on sale now at Freebird. The rest of the gang have books forthcoming, including a novel (Full of It by Tim Hall), an encyclopedia of punk (Brian Cogan), and a collection of essays and stories from the mastermind behind the 'zine, Go Metric (Mike Faloon).

Curated by Rachel, this series will feature novelists, short story writers, poets, and musicians one weekend every month. Taking time off in April to have a baby, Rachel has scheduled readings with Sara Goodyear and Fiona Maazel (7 pm, Sunday, May 18), Joshua Furst and Jim Shepard (7 pm, Sunday, June 8), and Nick Flynn (7 pm, Sunday, July 6).

After Saturday night's reading, Ken Wohlrob and I talked about Mavis Gallant and her influence on his writing. We'll pursue that discussion further in another blog, but the subject arose after he spotted her Paris Stories in our new display of NYRB classics. It's easy to fetishize these strikingly designed reissues (see the photo to the left of how they look together spine out on our shelves) but they are actually a remarkable library of obscure and forgotten literature that are never stuffy or dated in style.

In fact many of my favorite editions are comic rants and dark satires, far more iconoclastic (and delightfully bizarre) than anything generated by the literary workshop mill today. Currently I'm reading two translated works of Soviet-era subterfuge, Yuri Olesha's hilarious Envy (in which a sausage magnate is tormented by, and in turn torments, a houseguest) and Andrey Platonov's more somber Soul (a parable about a Central Asian nation under the Stalinist thumb).

While those writers were outside the mainstream--which any writer worth his salt was in the Soviet Union--they were still part of a movement, no matter how subterranean. The same can't be said of several of the NYRB stable who had no training or literary precedents. Malcolm Braly was an ex-con when he wrote his masterpiece (and one of the best novels I've read in the last 10 years) about prison life: On the Yard. G.V. Desani came out of nowhere, or perhaps everywhere (the Kenyan-born child of Indians, self-taught, free spirit, and restless globe trotter), when he wonderfully twisted the English language like a clown balloon in All About H. Hatterr.

On the other hand, G.B. Edwards proved a lifetime on an island (Guernsey) is not a crimp on the imagination. Considered a crackpot when he peddled his plotless novel to publishers in the sixth decade of his life, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, is a weird yet entertaining chronicle of a crank suffering through world upheaval. And then there is Fr. Rolfe, who was so arrogant about his intelligence and embittered about being refused the priesthood (though note how he fashioned his name to look like a cleric) that he exacted revenge in Hadrian the Seventh--a wild fantasy in which an angry, vindictive English priest is plucked from obscurity by the college of Cardinals and elected Pope.

But these don't do justice to some of the other works NYRB is resurrecting and what we will try keep in stock, from Georges Simenon's roman durs, Curzio Malaparte's astounding World War II novel Kaputt (with haunting imagery based on his first hand experience reporting from the German front lines), and Edward Lewis Wallant's book about a New York slum lord losing control of his tenants (The Tenants of Moonbloom).
--Peter Miller