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08.01.08: If you're interested in seeing what a writer I'm pseudonymously connected to, Bjorn Verenson, has been up to lately, check out the beautifully produced and handsewn first issue of Birkensnake ( edited by Joanna Ruocco and Brian Conn) in which Bjorn speaks his mind in a letter at the beginning of the volume that doesn't appear in the table of contents. Also includes great work by David Ohle, Joanna Howard, Tina Connolly and others. Hard to beat for $4, and going fast.
07.28.08: The French blog Bartleby les Yeux Ouverts has published an interview with me, translated into French. Bartleby's questions are excellent and thoughtful, covering everything from my connection to Deleuzian notions to my relation to my former faith. If you read French you can get to it here.
07.18.08: Fric-Frac Club has posted a interview/author questionnaire with me, translated into French. You can get to it here.
06.16.08: The Spring 2008 issue of The New Review of Literature has published a new story "Bitter Music." Also included is work by Dennis Barone, Ben Lerner and others, as well as an essay by Douglas Messerli on The Third Man.
06.16.08: The latest issue of Cranbook Academy of Art's Literary journal Listen Up, this issue edited by Peter Markus, includes an excerpt from my novel Last Days, forthcoming from Underland Press in February of 2008.
05.27.08: New Translation Available. My translation of Jean Fremon's book on visual artist Robert Ryman, The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman, has just appeared from Black Square/TBR Press.
05.05.08: The latest issue of Conjunctions, fresh off the press for Cinco de Mayo, contains as one of its fifty entries my "Angel of Death." Also great work by Rick Moody, Nam Le, Rikki Ducornet, William Gass, Shelley Jackson and many, many others.
05.04.08: Thanks to storySouth which listed my story "Midsummer" as a notable story of 2007 in their Million Writers Award.
04.03.08: For those of you who read French, take a look at the excellent reading of "The Sanza Affair," a novella in my first book, Altmann's Tongue, on Le Festin Mue blog. You can see it here.
03.29.08: Dennis Cooper's smart and provocative blog has just posted an interview that Mark Doten did with me, in which he got me to be more honest than usual. You can see it here. Thanks to both Dennis and Mark for the support and for their kind words.
02.11.08: "Watson's Boy" has just been reprinted in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The New Weird anthology, alongside stories by China Miéville, Jeffrey Ford, Kathe Koje, Michael Moorcock, Cliver Barker, and many others. There's also a history of the term, including the original debates first defining it, and a "new weird round robin." I'm delighted to be part of it.
01.01.08: You know the apocalypse is near when writers start appearing on a calendar. I'm the month of October for Hobart magazine's 2008 calendar. The images, taken from a film by Eric Barkin I was in, have me looking very much like a revolutionary from 1920s Russia. Available free with a Hobart subscription. For more information go here.
01.01.08: Soft Skull Press has released Steven Lee Beeber's anthology of insomnia stories, Awake!: A Reader for the Sleepless. I've got a piece in it, "Invisible Box," and I also translated a fine piece by Claro for it, "And So They Sleep." Lots of great pieces, and quite a range: everybody from Lydia Lunch to Louis Bourgeois. Check it out if you have a chance.
01.01.08: Columbia: A Journal has published a new nautical story of mine, "Alfons Kuylers." The same issue includes work by Matt Derby, Deb Olin Unferth, Jenny Boully, and many others. Happy New Year.
12.05.07: Director Jason Martin's short film The Language of Birds, which uses as its text my story "Altmann's Tongue," is now available on You Tube. You can get to it here. Enjoy!
12.04.07: I have a new piece in Richard Truhlar and Beverley Daurio's fiction anthology The Closets of Time, published by Mercury Press. In it, each writer was asked to write a story using the title "The Closets of Time." Lance Olsen, John Shirley, and Gary Barwin are among those included. It's a unique and unusual anthology.
11.30.07: The Open Curtain is now available in Italian translation, very ably rendered by Enrico Monti, from ISBN Edizioni. It's being called La Colpa [Guilt]. For more information, go here.
11.15.07: The Open Curtain has received a Lilly Award in the Crime Fiction category! Thanks very much to the League of Independent Literature (LIL) for choosing the book.
10.29.07: I've just done a short piece on literary decapitations for the "Headless" issue of Carolyn Kellogg and University of Pittsburgh's online magazine Hot Metal Bridge. You can check it out here.
10.15.07: My first comic collaboration (and hopefully not my last), "Dread," illustrated by Zak Sally, has just been published in the Fall 2007 issue of the Fantagraphics comics anthology MOME. If you don't know Zak Sally's work or his press La Mano, he's doing great things.
08.24.07: "An Accounting," has just been reprinted in Best American Fantasy, the new yearly anthology edited by Matthew Cheney. The work in this issue was chosen by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, who are on the front lines of the new wave fabulist battle to blur the lines between so-called literary and so-called genre fiction. Lots of great work here, including fiction by Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand, Chris Adrian, Kevin Brockmeier, and Maile Chapman.
08.17.07: "Invisible Box," a short story about sex and mimes, has just appeared in Steve Erickson's and Cal Arts' Black Clock. Lots of great writing throughout the issue.
08.17.07: "Ninety Over Ninety," a comic novella about the publishing world, has just appeared in New York Tyrant. I'll be reading in New York in late August to celebrate the magazine.
08.17.07: Naropa's Bombay Gin magazine #33, has reprinted an excerpt from Father of Lies and a short tribute to the Welsh poet who was my mentor, Leslie Norris.
07.03.07: "An Accounting," a short story about post-disaster America, has just been reprinted in Justin Taylor's The Apocalypse Reader, which also includes stories by Rick Moody, Shelley Jackson, Gary Lutz, Deb Unferth, Kelly Link, and others.
07.03.07: The recently published O. Henry Awards Prize Stories 2007 anthologizes my story "Mudder Tongue" (which the Publisher's Weekly review of the O. Henry volume described as "immensely frightening"), a story that first appeared in McSweeney's. There's a great William Trevor story in the same volume, as well as impressive stories by Christine Schutt, Yannick Murphy, and others.
07.03.07: The latest issue of The Mid-American Review contains a good review of The Open Curtain, written by Jennifer Bryan. "Evenson combines the best of beautiful prose, complex and engaging characters, and a suspense-filled story to keep the reader engaged until the end."
06.20.07: The International Horror Guild has just announced that The Open Curtain is a finalist for a 2006 IHG Award in the best novel category! Thanks IHG! The winner will be announced on November 1st at the World Fantasy Convention.
06.20.07: I've just heard that The Open Curtain has been chosen as a finalist for the 2007 Paterson Fiction Prize, by judge Laura Boss. Thanks to the Poetry Center and all those who made this possible.
06.04.07: The scholarly journal Sympoke has published, in the "forum" section of issue #14, "Taking Things for Granted," a brief essay I wrote on the state of contemporary fiction. The forum contains other brief essays as well by Susan Steinberg, Lance Olsen, R.M. Berry and Michael Joyce, and in the body of the journal there is a truly excellent essay on William Gaddis by Marc Chénetier.
05.12.07: My story, "Desire with Digressions," has appeared in Conjunctions: 48, Faces of Desire.
05.01.07: An older story, "Stockwell," has been reprinted online at Wet Asphalt, an interesting blog-like lit-mag. Check them out if you get a chance.
04.12.07: Claire Juillard's positive review of Inversion [The Open Curtain] has just been printed in Le Nouvel Observateur. "C'est un livre qui brûle les yeux.... Brian Evenson convoque son lecteur à une étrange cérémonie, une expérience inédite, l'initiation à des états modifiés de la conscience. On en ressort sidéré mais admiratif."
04.08.07: A brief story, "City," has just appeared in Detroit: Imaginary Cities, edited by writer Lynn Crawford and put out by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit.
04.03.07: A radio play I originally wrote for SEXO (Seattle Experimental Opera) has appeared in The Modern Review.
04.01.07: Thanks to Hadley Ross for her fine review of The Open Curtain in the Spring 2007 issue of Rain Taxi. "Evenson makes a devastating case that the same elements of a religion that make one devotee a faithful and obedient member of the community—repressive rules of behavior, isolation from nonbelievers, unquestionable doctrines—can produce despair and violence in another."
03.15.07: The Open Curtain has been purchased by ISBN Edizioni for an Italian translation, to be translated by Enrico Monti. This will be my first book to be translated into Italian.
03.10.07: John Domini's review of The Open Curtain has been published in The American Book Review. "Call it a slasher story seeking a higher purpose."
03.01.07: The Brooklyn Rail has just published Jim Feast's review of The Open Curtain . "Evenson ties his Mormon belief to stories of horror and Gothic romance, and by combining and interrogating these genres, he is also studying and distancing himself from a religion that is presumably masked in narrative constructs. So, by a disturbing and unsettling entwining of genres, Evenson both deconstructs his own belief system and offers the reader two version of terror, each with its own frisson."
02.23.07: Inversion [The Open Curtain] has been been reviewed in Le Monde by Nils C. Ahl. "Dans Inversion la question ne semble pas tante de savoir s'il existe plusiers réalités, ou si l'une l'emporte sur l'autre, que d'explorer la confusion des perceptions, l'éparpillement progressif des identit´s et des désirs.... Parfois consid´ré come un érivain de romans d'horreur, Brian Evenson ne s'y aventure que pour mieux rejoindre Kafka ou Poe—avec une pointe de Ballard et un zeste de Stephen King."
02.08.07: KRCW's Bookworm program has just made available online an interview I did with Michael Silverblatt. You can listen to it or get the podcast here. There are a lot of great interviews at Bookworm — including recent ones with Lynn Tillman and Dave Eggers—and Silverblatt is always smart and provocative.
02.06.07: Check out the smart, thoughtful review of The Open Curtain by T. B. Grennan in University of Virginia's literary magazine Meridian: "He's a writer so good you want to tell your friends about him, but don't because you're afraid of what they might think of you.... Evenson's sure hand with pacing allow[s] him to create gorgeous. disturbing scenes that generate a feeling of growing panic that never feels cheap or forced."
02.02.07: An interview with Leonard Schwartz on the program Cross Cultural Poetics, including my reading from The Open Curtain and from my translation of Claro's Electric Flesh, is now available at Penn Sound.
01.19.07: The Mystery Writers of America have just announced that The Open Curtain is a finalist for a 2006 Edgar Award in the Paperback Original category! The Edgars, named after Edgar Allan Poe, honor the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television, and film published or produced in 2006.
01.09.07: The First French Review of The Open Curtain has been published in Les Inrockuptibles. "Inversion [the French title] est le récit d'une plongée dans la folie, d'un monstrueux retour du refoulé, qui brouille les repères entre le réel et l'imaginaire. Un thriller fascinant et d´rangeant, qui creuse profond dans la psyché, et fonctionne d'autant mieux qu'il se contente de lancer des indices avant de laisser l'imagination du lecteur faire son travail. Au fur et à mesure que Rudd grandit et que le livre progess, la confusion entre le fantasme et la réalité s'épaissait, pour laisser le lecteur pantois avec un chapitre final d'une force ahurissante, un tour de force glaçant." Thanks to Raphaëlle Leyris for a great intelligent review.
01.08.07: The Open Curtain has just appeared in French translation, under the title Inversion, published in Le Cherche-Midi Editeurs' Lot 49 series.
01.08.07: Michael Miller has chosen The Open Curtain as one of the ten best books of 2006 for Time Out New York! He says "You get the sense that Evenson could extract a horror story from the Rockette's Christmas Spectactular, but his latest novel, in which a Mormon youth becomes enthralled with a ritualistic murder, makes a highly engaging beeline for mayhem.... the coup is in the final act, in which the antihero's shapshifting sense of reality escalates into the year's most mindtweaking fit of writing."
01.07.07: Thanks to Sam Coale for his review of The Open Curtain in The Providence Journal, which calls the book a "wonderfully strange, mesmerizing, eerie page-turner of a novel... We watch and hold our breath as Evenson leads us down dark paths into the darker underbrush of the human mind."
11.09.06: The first page of Andrew Ervin's beautifully written review of The Open Curtain for The Believer is now up on The Believer's website. "The final fifty pages of Brian Evenson's new novel, The Open Curtain, contain some of the most stunning and virtuosic fiction I have ever read. Seriously."
To read more, go here.
11.09.06: Thanks to Rod Smith for an insightful and generous review of The Open Curtain in Time Out New York which calls the book "one of the year's creepiest and most resonant thrillers."
To read the full review, go here.
11.09.06: Thanks to Lance Olson and the fine people at Now What? for a review of The Open Curtain which calls my work in general "...its own sprightly menaced thing, and one of the most important projets being undertaken..."
The review is available here.
11.08.06: David Gutowsky's Largehearted Boy has published a Book Notes entry for Claro's Electric Flesh, a book that I translated. It contains both his soundtrack and my soundtrack for his wonderfully carnivalesque book.
To find out more, go here.
11.02.06: The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas's lit blog, has published a guest review by Matthew Tiffany of The Open Curtain. Lots of other great reviews on the site as well, and great recommendations as well (for instance for Sheila Heti's Ticknor). "The Open Curtain is one of those books that you want to tell people about....absolutely riveting..."
To find out more, go here.
11.01.06: The excellent Bookslut has published an interview that I did with Angela Stubbs about The Open Curtain. To find out more, go here.
Also check out Angela's blog which is great and talks a little more about my work.
10.31.06: Condalmo, Mark Tiffany's blog, has published an interview I did with Mark about The Open Curtain.
To find out more, go here.
10.29.06: Rosemary Herbert 's Mystery Round-Up has some nice things to say about The Open Curtain in The Washington Post. "[A] shocking novel of murder and madness... produces scintillating sparks.... As the action progresses, Evenson compellingly spells out what it means to be a truly lost soul."
To find out more, go here.
10.26.06: "Altmann's Tongue" Broadside. Patrick Masterson produced a handsome limited edition (150 copies) broadside of my story "Altmann's Tongue" to commemorate a reading I did at University of Alabama. Here's a picture of the theater's marquee with my name in lights, courtesy of A. M. Weinstein.
To find out more, go here.
10.19.06: Matthew Tiffany's Condalmo blog has nice comments on the experience of reading The Open Curtain. It's a good blog, with useful comments on a lot of books.
10.12.06: Large Hearted Boy has just put out a "soundtrack" listing they asked me to do for The Open Curtain--songs I see as related to the book in some way. If you don't know their Book Notes series it's worth checking out: great pieces by Laird Hunt, Ander Monson (who apparently only listens to Low), and others. My soundtrack can be found here.
10.04.06: Justin Taylor's excellent review of The Open Curtain has appeared on Econoculture. "This is a tremendous, harrowing novel; an utter pleasure to be beguiled and terrified by." The same review also contains a generous and inspired reading of Father of Lies. You can get to it here.
10.03.06: Jonathan Messinger has written up The Open Curtain for Time Out Chicago. "..one of his generation's most arresting, invigorating and, yes, frightening writers." The article, called "Blood Meridian" also contains an amazing caricature of me. You can get to it here.
10.02.06: Scott Abbott's excellent review of The Open Curtain, "Mormon Civilization and its schizophrenic discontents," has just appeared at Catalyst Magazine, a Utah arts magazine available both online and in print: "This novel is David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' staged behind Provo's white picket fences."
10.02.06: Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Selected Works: Vols 1, 2, and 3 have now been published by University of Chicago Press . I wrote the introduction for the third volume, Dürrenmatt's Essays.
09.07.06: Claro's Electric Flesh, which I translated, has has, after various delays finally been released: I saw it for the first time yesterday. For more information on the book, go here.
08.31.06: The first (non-advanced) review of The Open Curtain has just appeared online in The Green Integer Review #4. You can find it online at: The Green Integer Review, along with work by Will Alexander, Frederick Mayröcker, and Alain-Fournier.
08.29.06: One of the better literary bloggers, Pinky's Paperhaus, says about The Open Curtain: "Now I know that to shake up a dark mood, I should read some high-quality horror. This disturbing and sleek book focuses on a teenage Mormon whose grip on reality may or may not be loosening. Amazing writing. And it shook me right the hell out of my funk." Visit the Paperhaus at http://paperhaus.typepad.com
08.25.06: Ellipsis...: Literary Serials and Narrative Culture has just published the fifth part of my novella Baby Leg in their latest issue, which also has work by, and and interview with Rebecca Brown.
07.25.06: Ellipsis...: Literary Serials and Narrative Culture has just published the fourth part of my novella Baby Leg in their latest issue. Two more to go...
07.25.06: The latest issue of Sleepingfish, Sleepingfish 0.875, has excerpts of (and an image from) The Drownable Species a story that will be published later this year in a (very small) limited edition fine artists book by Aaron Cohick's New Lights Press. For more information go to Calamari Press.
07.20.06: Issue 1:14 of The Lumberyard contains, about 20 minutes in, a six minute track in which I read the afterword for the paperback of Altmann's Tongue. You can get a podcast at The Lumberyard.
07.10.06: The final issue of 3rd Bed is now out, after a long delay, and includes, among terrific work by Sam Michel, Nina Shope, Jane Unrue and others, a new novella of mine, "Fugue-State." 3rd Bed was a great magazine; I'm very sorry to see it go.
06.19.06: A reprint of my story "Stung" (from Altmann's Tongue), and two new short prose pieces related to Georges Bataille's Ma Mere have just appeared at Jason Snyder's Sidebrow site as part of the "Mother, I" project. Take a look at Sidebrow.
06.08.06: I just found out my story "The Third Factor," published in Quarterly West #60 has been nominated
for an IHG Award in the short fiction category. See http://www.ihgonline.org/ for more details.
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