Culture
March 30, 2016
Michael Miller
Brian Evenson has been disturbing readers with his stylish and macabre fiction since the 1994 release of his collection Altmann’s Tongue, which included a story about, among other things, a corpse whose mouth has been stuffed with bees and sewn shut. Evenson’s latest book, A Collapse of Horses, reveals that his unsettling talents have grown subtler and stronger—seventeen stories featuring unsolvable mind-games, drugged-out cults, and space-station claustrophobia, all rendered in Evenson’s unmistakable prose, which is capable of suggesting both grounded realism and jittery paranoia, often at the same time. He has been hard to categorize from the start, drawing influence Matthew Stadler The future of publishing has been the subject of many debates and panels for the past five or so years, but until recently, not a lot was being done about it. That’s beginning to change, thanks to newcomers such as OR Books and Cursor, Inc. Perhaps the most innovative and philosophical new independent press is Publication Studio, the brainchild of Portland-based publishers Matthew Stadler and Patricia No. In 2009, Stadler purchased a printer and an unusual perfect binder (christened “Ol Gluey”) and launched Publication Studio as a print-on-demand publisher. Since then, the independent press has honed its 
Patrick Dewitt, photo by Danny Palmerlee. In 2009, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel introduced author Patrick DeWitt as a master of corrosive comedy. That book follows a barback at an L.A. watering hole who, with alarming (and somehow hilarious) alacrity, ruins his marriage, robs his employers, and calls in a bomb threat during a shift. For all of its chaotic scenes and drunken antics, DeWitt’s debut proceeded with a raconteur’s wit and surprising control, qualities that also distinguish his follow-up, The Sisters Brothers, released this week. The new book is a Western, but it, too, is about a job Nick Flynn’s new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb, is by turns, and often simultaneously, self-reflective and socially charged. A poet by training, Flynn writes short chapters with impressive agility and cultural command, drawing subtle analogies between Greek myths, zombie movies, photography, Buddhism, and the anxieties of becoming a parent. Anyone familiar with his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, knows that Flynn also has a live-wire story on his hands: That book alternately circles and probes his postcollegiate years working at a homeless shelter in Boston, where his dad—a drunk gone off the rails—winds up. But Flynn A concentrated dose of sixties mythology, Zachary Lazar’s 2008 book Sway puts a fictional spin on the Manson family, the rise of the Rolling Stones, and the Lucifer-referencing underground filmmaker Keneth Anger. One of the first things you’ll notice about Sway is that its characters are based on and named after real people, but the author states in an introductory note that the book is a work of fiction. And it is: Lazar’s story might weave around and intersect with actual historical moments (Altamont, for instance), but it is primarily interested in imagining how its intertwined characters push beyond the RONI HORN’S WORK urges us to see the unfamiliar in familiar materials and phenomena—the weather, for instance. She has described water as “just tumult everywhere endlessly, tumult modulating into another tumult all over and without end,” a notion she conveys particularly well in the 2000 photographic series “Some Thames,” which lingers over form-defying ripples and reflections of the river’s surface. She seeks to put viewers in a state of flux, too. Her Water, Selected, 2007, made up of cylinders filled with water collected from different glaciers in Iceland, not only points to the hazards of global warming but also calls