reading list - Fence Books

reading list SETH ABRAMSON: “Been reading the NewerYork, Entropy, Triple Canopy, Hyperallergic,

BOAAT, out of nothing, Troll Thread, The YOLO Pages, Clickhole, back issues of The Claudius App, io9, Stereogum, and Weird Twitter.” ANDREA ACTIS recently published her “Notes on ‘Seriousness’” in World Picture Journal and

will assume editorship of The Capilano Review this summer. She recommends, as usual, reading everything that Laura (Riding) Jackson ever wrote (especially her early essay “In Defence of Anger”), and then recommends a year’s walk to cool off. JOHN ASHBERY: “Todd Colby’s Splash State (Song Cave); Nicholas Moore’s Selected Poems

(Shoestring [UK]); Geoffrey Nutter’s The Rose of January (Wave); and Emily Skillings’ Backchannel (Poor Claudia).” A. BALKANO: T. Lindsay Baker & Julie P. Baker, editors, Till Freedom Cried Out: Memories of

the Texas Slave Trade. Sample sentence: “Before I was born, my mother was tucken away from her playmates and kept in the attic hid.” Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. A sample sentence: “The velocity of the galaxy in which the supernova is embedded can also be easily determined using the Doppler method.” Mo Willems, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! Sample sentence: “Hey, can I drive the bus?” ANTHONY BARNETT: “Takashi Hiraide: The Guest Cat (New Directions, 2014); For the

Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008); Postcards to Donald Evans (Tibor de Nagy, 2003); Cees Nooteboom: Letters to Poseidon (Maclehose, 2014); Valeria Luiselli: Sidewalks (Granta, 2010; Coffee House, 2014); Faces in the Crowd (Granta, 2012; Coffee House, 2014); The Story of My Teeth (Granta, 2015; Coffee House, forthcoming, 2015); Kajii Motojiro¯ & Stephen Dodd: The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro¯ (University of Hawai’i, 2014). MOLLY BRODAK: Nonfiction: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of

American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist. Poetry: Cats and Dogs by Andrew James Weatherhead. Fiction: 300,000,000 by Blake Butler.

JULIE CARR is reading various books by Tomaž Šalamun, Solitary Confinement: Social

Death and its Afterlives by Lisa Guenther, Neverhome by Laird Hunt, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz, Red White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms by Frank B. Wilderson III, Flesh of my Flesh by Kaja Silverman, The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Ranciere, and The Volta Book of Poets, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson. C.S. CARRIER: “Much of my reading lately has been in the service of my dissertation: New

Directions in Digital Poetry by C.T. Funkhouser, Digital Modernism by Jessica Pressman, and Reading Moving Letters by Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfer, and Peter Gendolla (eds.). Also, both issues of the Electronic Literature Collection. The recent passing of Tomaž Šalamun has sent me back to his poems, particularly Poker and The Four Questions of Melancholy. Though I’ve read these books numerous times, it always feels like I haven’t, and that’s just magical to me.” TINA BROWN CELONA: “Fathers and Children (Turgenev), A Personal Matter (Oe), Villette

(Charlotte Bronte), I Was Not Born (Julia Cohen), War and Peace (Tolstoi), and New Organism (Andrea Rexilius).” J’LYN CHAPMAN lives in Boulder Colorado, and with Michelle Naka Pierce she edits the

online poetics journal Something on Paper. She’s reading Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. She exchanges hopeful letters with the poet Amy Wright so as not to feel too blue about things. LAYLAGE COURIE: “I just finished Their Eyes Were Watching God, am finishing Minima

Moralia by Theodor Adorno, and just began re-reading Remembrance of Things Past. The stack on my floor that must be read this year or released back into the universe includes: Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, The Golden Bough, a collection of Georgia folklore, and a pamphlet I ‘borrowed’ from a tower rehearsal room at Riverside Church: Obstacles to Mystical Experience. Oh, the obstacles.” BEN DOLLER: “Fred Moten’s The Little Edges, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Edward W. Soja’s

Postmodern Geographies, Chris Nealon’s Heteronymy and Sandra Doller’s Leave Your Body Behind are on rotation in Ben Doller’s house, alongside The Coconut Oil Miracle and every novel by James M. Cain.”

ALEX DUNBAR is currently reading The King in Yellow, Wolf in White Van, The Papered

Wall, Wallpaper and the Artist, The Wallpaper Book, and Wikipedia articles about Outer Space. WILL EDMISTON: “Will Alexander, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field; Jennifer Bartlett,

Autobiography; Jim Brode, Heart of the Breath; Brené Brown, Daring Greatly; Ed Sanders, The Family; John Coletti, Deep Code; Arlo Quint, Death to Explosions; Erica Kaufman, Instant Classic.” MARY FLANAGAN is a game designer in New Hampshire, an artist in New York, and a writer

in transit. She’s engrossed in her friend Gwen’s surprising book Trail of Stones, which embeds you deep into the minds of fairy tale characters. She’s also reading Unica Zürn and MacGregor Card and having some strange dreams. RANDAL GENTRY: “Lately I’ve enjoyed Haruki Murakami’s short book on marathoning,

What We Talk About When We Talk About Running, and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s vivid, funny rendition of Gogol’s Dead Souls. Next for me is the finale of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, Lila.” MELISSA GINSBURG: “Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead, Sara Gran; Tribute to Freud,

H.D.; Kiss Me First, Lottie Moggach; The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, Olena Kalytiak Davis; Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood; Peace, Gillian Conoley; Dora: A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Sigmund Freud” KRISTEN GLEASON was born in California. She is reading Mountain Gloom and Mountain

Glory by Marjorie Hope Nicolson (morning) and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (night). These days, she admires The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas and Michael Jackson’s Earth Song. REGAN GOOD is currently reading The Founding of English Metre by John Thompson and

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. MICHAEL GRAY is reading Ivan Morris’s translation and edition of The Pillow Book of Sei

Shonagon, 55 Chants D’Amour Hmong Blanc compiled by Fr. Jean Mottin, Amplitude: New and Selected Poems of Tess Gallagher, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from

San Francisco Chinatown translated by Marlon K. Hom, Paisley Rekdal’s The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, and Three Hmong Folktales in Hmong Language by Vangtou Xiong X. Toyed and illustrated by Gerri Graber-Wilson. He lives in a snuggly apartment in Tacoma, where he listens to KBIF 900 AM: The Central Valley’s Asian Voice, watches Fei Cheng Wu Rao, and enjoys Seahawks radio broadcasts. AMY GROSHEK: “China Miéville (Railsea, Embassytown) is the most sophisticated, lyrical

sci-fi/fantasy novelist since LeGuin. Calvino’s Cosmocomics (just, yes). Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North. Ishac Bertran’s code {poems}, to see more code poems written by actual developers.” ALEN HAMZA: “I’m currently reading P-town Stories by Roger Skillings, volume 3 of

Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and Ashbery’s Where Shall I Wander.” CARLA HARRYMAN: “The Disk poems, of which Disk Two is an example, are improvisations

influenced by sampling, electronic music, and remix, particularly but not exclusively in the context of Detroit music scenes.” JEFF HILSON: These books have recently found their way into the house: Jackson Mac

Low’s Complete Light Poems (Chax: 2015); The Rough Guide to Brussels (Rough Guides: 2009); Rosemary Tonks’ Bedouin of the London Evening (Bloodaxe: 2014); Zyxt by Nancy Gaffield (Oystercatcher: 2015); Concrete & Open Skies: Architecture at the University of East Anglia 1962-2000 (Unicorn Press: 2001); Allen Fisher’s Sputtor (Veer: 2014); The Public Sculpture of South London by Terry Cavanagh (Liverpool University Press: 2007); The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus (Carcanet: 1986); Type Specimen: An Observant Guide to Linus Slug (Contraband: 2014): “hung like Christ thin young girl with slender arms speaking of I am fly brought crooked pins and first made her swallow and 2nd made her. then there came from her head a blistering – BRIGHT [ffly] cant & hypocrisy pale & crimson.” Nuff said. ANNA MARIA HONG is reading The Word Exchange: A Novel by Alena Graedon, Gloss by Ida

Stewart, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine and looks forward to the release of James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods this spring. She is the Visiting Creative Writer at Ursinus College, an Instructor at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and her novella H & G, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

DREW KALBACH: “The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Deep Code by John Coletti, The Wire, Dead

Youth or The Leaks by Joyelle McSweeney, heirophage.tumblr.com, Today In Tabs, Michael Robbin’s essay on Frederick Seidal in Post Road Magazine, The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, The Peripheral by William Gibson, 5 Intriguing Things, MediaREDEF, Reply All, The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, Answer Me This!, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. DANIEL KHALASTCHI is currently reading the final draft of Marc Rahe’s second book of

poems, On Hours, which is forthcoming from Rescue Press this spring. He is also enjoying Molly Antopol’s The UnAmericans, Jericho Brown’s The New Testament, and the latest issue of Little Village (an alt-mag based in Iowa City). If you haven’t done so already, he recommends that you read (as soon as possible) The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels. And then tell your friends. BECCA KLAVER: “Most of my reading time is taken up by my dissertation right now, which

means that in addition to being immersed in primary texts by post-1945 U.S. women poets (Diane di Prima, Sonia Sanchez, Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley), I’m also discovering some of the secrets of everyday life (Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life) and the too-soon-lost histories of second-wave feminism (Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow’s The Feminist Memoir Project, Toni Cade’s The Black Woman).” ISH KLEIN: “I am now reading Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: the Spiritual Dimensions of

Music by Joscelyn Godwin, Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp, and Illustrated Games of Patience by Ben Estes. As a side note, my book, Consolation and Mirth will be out in April.” RICKEY LAURENTIIS: “Inger Christensen, Solmaz Sharif, Roger Reeves, Wallace Stevens, Ai,

Malachi Black.” PAUL MALISZEWSKI is the author of Fakers and Prayer and Parable. He’s been reading James

McCourt’s memoir Lasting City, Ed Skoog’s poems in Rough Day, and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows by Leslie Scalapino. CHRIS MARTIN is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007), Becoming Weather

(Coffee House, 2011), and a forthcoming volume, The Falling Down Dance, which should arrive courtesy of Coffee House in November of this year. “My reading habits have been

hopelessly fractured of late, so here’s the array: a monograph on the artist Simon Evans, Spectral Landscapes by Sam Gould, Detailing Trauma by Arianne Zwartjes, Big Questions by Anders Nilsen, On Immunity by Eula Biss, Deep Code by John Coletti, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Sugar Break by Maged Zaher (plus a slew of other new chapbooks from UDP), and a biography of Zebulon Pike.” LARA MIMOSA MONTES: “I am reading Sleep it Off Lady by Jean Rhys and You Animal

Machine by Eleni Sikelianos.” RICK MOODY: “Right now I am reading A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick for my class at

NYU in the foundations of American experimental writing, and also The Canterbury Tales, bilingual edition, translated by Sheila Fisher (Norton). I am enjoying the Chaucer in the extreme. I had only dipped in before. I love all the sex and scatology as well as the postmodern form of the whole.” DUSTIN LUKE NELSON has been reading James Gleick’s The Information, Privacy Policy,

and documents from the NSA and DOJ on technology and hacking. He’s had Ashleigh Lambert’s Ambivalent Amphibians, Brad Liening’s Death Salad sitting on his desk for a ridiculously long time, because they’re wonderful. His first full length collection, In the Office Hours of the Polar Vortex, is out in Fall 2015. KARIN OLANDER is currently reading An Untamed State by Roxane Gay, Malign Velocities:

Accelerationism and Capitalism by Benjamin Noys, and the Sweet Tooth graphic novel series by Jeff Lemire. She co-curates Bushwick Sweethearts, a reading and art series in Brooklyn, New York. ALICIA OSTRIKER: Recommended reading this month: C.D. Wright, One With Others;

Marilyn Hacker’s new and selected, A Stranger’s Mirror; Galway Kinnell’s Strong Is Your Hold; and Penelope Fitzgerald’s elegant and exquisite novel based on the doomed love of the German Romantic poet Novalis, The Blue Flower. KEVIN PHAN is currently bookworming through On Love, Respect and Connectedness: An

Analysis by Thomas F. Fogarty, Principles of Horticulture: 5th Edition edited by Adams, Bamford, & Early, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Rimbaud’s Collected Poems, Kindly Bent to Ease Us (Part One: Mind) by Longchenpa, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, & Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos.

GREG PURCELL: “I’ve been immersed in pulling the threads of music out of Ronald

Johnson’s ARK—fascinated by what it sustained throughout the journey of the book, and the breadth of his fellowship—while remaining hardhearted to the book’s metaphysical presence. Have been reading and teaching about forms of dissent in organizational life: John Weeks’s Unpopular Culture is a good example. Ann Leckie’s gender-bending Ancillary Justice deserved its Hugo and a Nebula win last year. My first book, The Fundaments, will be released in Fall 2015 by Poor Claudia.” BIN RAMKE: “These are books I am currently living with: Gillian White’s Lyric Shame:

the “Lyric” subject of Contemporary American Poetry; Hazel White’s Peril as Architectural Enrichment; Idiot Psalms, Scott Cairns; Transforming Matter: A History of Chemisty from Alchemy to The Buckyball, Trevor H. Levere; Constituents of Matter, Anna Leahy; Corona: Selected Poems of Paul Célan translated by Susan H. Gillespie; The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods since 1600 by Susan Owens; Spike Bucklow, The Riddle of the Image: the Secret Science of Medieval Art and The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science, and Secrets from the Middle Ages.” STEPHEN SANDY grew up in Minnesota; graduated from Yale, US Army, and Harvard.

He has published a dozen books of poems, most recently Overlook, from Louisiana State University Press, and a book of criticism, The Raveling of the Novel. His favorite winter reading: Selected Poems (W. H. Auden); Local Souls (Allan Gurganus); Orchards of Syon (Geoffrey Hill); Phaedrus (Plato, transl. Nehamas); Museum of Innocence (Pamuk); Madness, Rack, and Honey (Mary Ruefle); Selected Poems (Jas. Schuyler); Rings of Saturn (W. G. Sebald). KATHRYN SCANLAN is reading essays by Mary Ruefle and Marilynne Robinson, poems by

Catullus and Claudia Rankine, and stories by Samuel Beckett and Diane Williams. MAUREEN SEATON: “Books I’m enjoying or reinhaling at the moment: Mary Ruefle’s

Trances of the Blast (Wave Books) and Edmond Jabès’ From the Book to the Book (Wesleyan). Also: 25 Sightings of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker by Re’lynn Hansen (Firewheel). ANNE LESLEY SELCER is an art writer, most recently for SFMoma’s Open Space, and author

of from A Book of Poems on Beauty chosen by Dawn Lundy Martin for Gazing Grain press. She is currently reading: Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh) by Fred Moten, Cinema of the Present by Lisa Robertson, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Divya Victor’s new

books, Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben, House and Field: The Aesthetics of Saturation by Marja Cetinic, In the Break by Fred Moten, Land is a Relationship: In conversation with Glen Coulthard on Indigenous Nationhood by Harsha Walia, Onto-Cartography by Levi R. Bryant, Pierre Guyotat interview in Bomb by Noura Wedell, Poems of the Black Object by Ronaldo Wilson, Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Roselli, ed. Jennifer Scappettone, Uncorporate Identity by Metahaven, “Untitled Essay” from Nilling by Lisa Robertson, Viewpoint Magazine on the State, everything that can be found by Hito Steryl. WONG MAY was born in China and lives presently in Dublin. Her most recent book—

and her first in over thirty-five years—is Picasso’s Tears (Octopus Books, 2014). She is currently reading William T. Vollmann & Michel Houellebecq. SARA JANE STONER is a PhD student at CUNY Graduate Center who currently teaches at

The Cooper Union and Baruch College, and whose dissertation focuses on the constitutive relationship between subjects in embodied teaching and writing, particularly in the contexts of queer theory, contemporary experimental writing, and composition instruction. Her first book, Experience in the Medium of Destruction, was recently published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. Presently, she is editing reviews for the Poetry Project Newsletter, and concurrently reading and rereading Lisa Robertson, Jacqueline Rose, Fred Moten, John Dewey, Roland Barthes, Lauren Berlant, Claude Cahun, Paulo Freire, and Renee Gladman. WENDY S. WALTERS is reading Wendy, a comic by Montreal artist Walter Scott; The Language of Things: How We Are Seduced by the Objects Around Us by Deyan Sudjic; and Melville: His World and Work by Andrew Delblanco. JOSHUA WARE: “I’m currently reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in its entirety,

as well as W. J. T Mitchell’s Picture Theory, which is a dialectical critique of imagetext composites.” DAVID WEISBERG: “I’ve recently enjoyed I Don’t Know Do You (Roberto Montes), Meat

Heart (Melissa Broder), Metaphysical Dog (Frank Bidart), and Ian Hamilton’s wonderful biography on Robert Lowell. For nonfiction, I recently read The Psychopath Test, and following that, pretty much every piece of nonfiction Jon Ronson has ever written. For fiction, I most recently read Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State, which I would highly recommend. I’m always rereading James Baldwin and Ha Jin. Lastly, I would have to

recommend a wonderful book on dog training, Mother Knows Best (Carol Lea Benjamin), if you’re into that kind of thing, which I obviously am.” JAMES WAGNER is the author of Thrown—poems to paintings by Bracha L. Ettinger (There

Press, 2014), Work Book (Nothing Moments, 2007), Trilce (Calamari Press, 2006), and the false sun recordings (3rd bed, 2003). He is reading Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, Samuel Mallin’s Art Line Thought, Denis Feeney’s Caesar’s Calendar, Bettina Judd’s Patient, Ayya Khema’s Be An Island, and Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light. He lives in California.