Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Issue number two of The Collagist, the online literary journal from Dzanc Books, just went live. It includes, in there amongst a lot of other stuff you and I both need to check out, my review of Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr, which begins like so:

Joshua Mohr’s debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, is where Michael Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road. Replace the director’s Science of Sleep-style clouds-of-cotton whimsy with harsh whiskey and hot sand and you get a sense for the dark world Mohr constructs. Dark, yet not pitch black: he pits his vision of ugly realities against one of basic human kindness. It is this tension that gives his engaging novel its emotional power.

Part of me is like, I should be all professional-chill about this, but, whatever: the book excites me and writing about it excited me and The Collagist excites me and being a part of it excites me and yeah.

(Meanwhile, in totally unprofessional shameless fanboy eyes-gaping "If you had told me that one day I would see..." news, if you had told me that one day I would see my name just below Elizabeth Crane's name on a contributors' notes page...)