padlocked and loaded

"The Facades belongs to the same subgenre as Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn: detective novels influenced as much by Kafka as they are by Chandler.

     Generally speaking, in these novels, style and atmosphere trump plot and action, the setting is as crucial as the crime, and intertextuality is more important than investigative chops. Just as we have the collective term for the Southern Gothic, perhaps it is time to name this bastard offspring of Dashiell Hammett and Jorge Luis Borges. Hardboiled Existentialism? The Metaphysical Whoodunit? The Urban-Decay Procedural? Take your pick.
     Certainly, in its foregrounding of its setting, The Facades fits the bill. The crumbling, financially strapped city of Trude, once dubbed 'the Munich of the Midwest,' is now filled with the 'abandoned mansions of industrialists,' and boasts 'the most diverse and effective suicide lobby' in the region."
 — Jon Michaud, The New Yorker
Read more…

Buy all or any of the books mention in this post here...

Selective. Memory. Select… Me… S.M.

"I don’t know, though I do wonder (literally) what the effect exponentially-growing mass input of (mostly junk) data might be doing to our noggins. Maybe the effects lean more towards dissolving privacy and reflective time—when does a person think if interruptive stuff is coming into your head at all points of the day, with the brain trying to interpret incomplete and ambiguous strings of sensory inputs?

     Seems scary to me. Maybe memory is affected, maybe it makes it go away, shriveled because recollection is being eliminated. Or demented like the wonderful Yossarian (his first name is John, btw) from Joe Heller’s beautiful Catch-22 who develops for himself a condition in which he remembers everything twice (whatever that means).
     It would be interesting to see a war of societies in which the sides were a culture that remember nothing versus a culture that remembered everything. The unspeakably lovely Jorge Borges wrote something touching on this in 'Fumes the Memorist,' in which the humble narrator is capable of forgetting nothing, being able to recall explicitly everything within eyesight, perfectly—the problem is though that it takes a day to remember the events of another day. What would happen in such a culture where everyone forgot nothing? "
— John F. Ptak, Ptak Science Books
Read more…

Fiction Facebook

“California-based Internet entrepreneur Valla Vakili had a vision.
     'I wanted to do something that caters to pathological obsession,' he announced at a recent high-tech conference. He said he wanted to monetize 'perversion' by 'mainstreaming' it. And as a result of his efforts in that cause, he has emerged as the latest white knight riding to the rescue of a beleaguered book industry. [...]
     Like so many other Internet sensations, would-be and real, Small Demons provides answers to questions that nobody ever thought of asking. A growing electronic index that aims to tag and cross-reference the occurrence of almost every person, place and thing mentioned in almost every 'narrative' book ever written, it won’t just tell you what type of car James Bond drove in which novel, it will tell you the name of every other fictional and many real characters who drove the same types of cars, visited the same cities or seduced similar spies. [...]
     Navigating the Storyverse becomes a game – an obsessive one, if all goes according to plan – that no writer ever anticipated. The honourable exception, according to Vakili, would be, whose story Tlön Uqbar Orbus Tertius describes a minutely constructed fictional universe infiltrating and taking over the 'real' one. 'The history of the universe is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon,' Borges wrote. [...]
     The eagerness of publishers to enter Small Demons' trippy Storyverse reflects the immediate crisis facing their trade: the death of bookstores and the concomitant end of browsing. So far, neither social media nor e-store algorithms ('customers like you also bought …') have proved able to recreate the serendipity that once helped sell so many physical books. Publishers love Small Demons because it opens new avenues of 'discoverability,' according to Vakili. [...]
     'Every city and every place has a history that is both real and imagined,' Vakili said. People too. 'We want to bring them closer to each other.'”
― John Barber, The Globe and Mail
Read more...

Find a related post here...

Get everything by Jorge Luis Borges (and touch other real books) here...

Find the Small Demons Storyverse here...