Since it's coming up to the end of the year, I thought I'd cash in shamelessly by doing one of best-of-the-year thingies. Not the freshest of ideas, I know, but here's the original twist: I'm only going to cover small press releases, indie stuff, and self-published books. One problem I had compiling this is that when a small press puts out a book, there is usually a slow burn which means that even a year after its release the book will still be finding its way to its audience. So unfortunately, many books that I read in 2007 actually came out in 2006 and narrowly missed out on being included. Honourable mentions to Matthew Firth's excellent short story collection on Anvil Press, Suburban Pornography; HP Tinker's surrealist classic The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity (Social Disease); Dan Fante's play Don Giovanni (Burning Shore Press); Cursed from Birth - The Short, Unhappy Life of William Burroughs by David Ohle (Soft Skull); Tom McCarthy's Remainder (Alma Books); Travis Jeppesen's Wolf At The Door (Twisted Spoon); and Stewart Home's Memphis Underground (Snow Books).
The list is not in any particular order - I don't like to rank books like that, even through I am a list fanatic. Strange, I know.
1. London Pub Reviews by Paul Ewen (Shoes With Rockets) A book of pub reviews by New Zealand provocateur Paul Ewen. It's also a comedy book, I suppose, judging by how many times it made my laugh while I was reading it. But there is something dark at the heart of it, something almost tragic, and certainly threatening. The format is simple: a series of pub reviews written by that perennial of all London pubs, the insane drunk. He hallucinates, causes trouble and, by the end of the review is usually thrown out of the pub for disturbing the other customers. The concept is wonderful, and the execution is top notch. Paul Ewen is the poet laureate of pub weirdos everywhere.
Excerpt: (from the Prince George, Hackney) Wetting my lips, I began to play a few quiet chords from the harmonica I had managed to retrieve from my rear trouser pocket. I've never pretended to be a particularly accomplished harmonica player, and in fact all I really do is run my lips back and forth really fast and blow. A noisy, shrill frenzy of harmonics soon reverberated inside my tiny wooden den, and I'd like to think I pulled off a fairly convincing interpretation of Rhythm is a Dancer. A subsequent hush emerged from the people immediately outside, and when the little door was suddenly whisked back, I was temporarily blinded by the bright daylight that flooded the interior of the Prince George pub. I thought about arranging another appointment with my psychiatrist as I was escorted, meowing, towards the doors, but she asked me not to return, YOU LITTLE HAIR-CURLER, SAUSAGE-MEAT FREAK!
2. BED / EEEEE EEE EEEE by Tao Lin (Melville House) After giving us the fantastic poetry collection You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am in 2006, author and blogger Tao Lin fulfilled his promise with a double release from Melville House - the short story collection Bed, and the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee. I resisted reading Eeeee Eee Eeee for a long time, scared off by the whimsical aspects of it: the title comes from the noise dolphins make, and the story is populated by talking bears. But slipping into Tao Lin's world via Bed I was immediately blown away: the stylistic audacity of both books is inspiring; despite the talking animals, these are dark works about the alienation of modern times. Tao's characters all seem shell-shocked by the world around them. They work in crummy McJobs, or spend hours chatting online with people they don't really know. Their dialogue is the Ambien-dulled mumble of people who know that life is meaningless and absurd. Every so often a talking animal will emerge and, seized by existential despair, will either moan and cry, threaten to go on a shooting rampage, or - in one memorable scene - go kill Elijah Wood.
Excerpt: People got a bit careless that year. Band-aids were forgone, small wounds allowed to go a little out of control - to infect a bit. Jobs were quit. People woke early-evening or mid-afternoon, fisted ice cream bars, wandered from their homes - only a little bit depressed - and walked diagonally through parking lots. They felt no longer in the midst of things, but in the misty aftermath of things, the quaint and narcotic haze of what comes after. A haze in which nothing, they knew, could ever fully, truly, happen. Anything there was could only yearn for itself, at a distance, behind barricades, could only long for the real self of itself. The core of things - of love and life, of any simple feeling or thought - could no longer be experienced center-on, could no longer be thought of or felt directly, but only in trying, in tics and glimpses, in ways holographic and fleeing in the mind.
3. Treatise by Noah Cicero (Lulu) Noah Cicero had me hooked at The Human War, and via his always interesting blog. Cicero writes with rage and venom, but all of it is focused into precise surgical strikes: his books grab you by the throat like a pissed-off pitbull. When he is not working as a line cook in Youngstown, Ohio, Noah is writing: so far he has turned out the aforementioned The Human War, The Living and the Dead, Blue Collar Boy (a memoir, written on diet pills, published for free via his blog), and Treatise, which he described as a "remix" of Chekhov's My Life. Cicero's writing is like polished steel, but he's funny too. It's a rare book that can make you feel disgusted with humanity, and leave you laughing.
Excerpt: I went to see my father. I must tell you about my father. My father loves watching television. He has been watching television since he was a little boy. In the seventies he loved Starsky and Hutch, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, Eight is Enough, Little House on the Prairie. He found Chips too intellectual for his tastes. The eighties came and he watched Mash, Cheers, Growing Pains, and The Cosby Show. He loved Cheers. He used to tell me he was just like Sam Malone. I believe he masturbated to lewd pictures of Shelley Long.
4. Everyday by Lee Rourke (Social Disease) I first got to know Lee Rourke as the editor of Scarecrow, one of the more interesting and exciting literary zines out there. You might know him as a blogger on the Guardian as well. But above all of this, Lee Rourke is a master storyteller, and his debut collection was released this week on the independent press Social Disease (who as you may have gathered also have the great good taste to have published my short stories). Everyday is Rourke's hyper-modern love letter to London: a London filled with the bored, the aimless, people living out soul-crushing routines with no sense of a life outside of it all:
Excerpt:
If only you knew. If only you could understand how mundane my life is. I get up. I commute. I sit at my lousy desk all morning acting on orders like a drone; speaking with people I have nothing in common with. I feed the pigeons in my lunch hour and I smile. I go back to my desk. I sit at it all afternoon acting on more orders like a drone; speaking to more people I have nothing in common with. I commute back home. (END QUOTE)
Rourke is aiming for the big guys with this collection, writing with the ghosts of Joyce, Beckett and Dostoevsky looking over his shoulders. Everyday's 28 stories delight, confound and provoke: another blow to the assumption that the short story is a dying form.
