Lovely new review in Hayden’s Ferry Review of How the Loser’s Love What’s Lost, the prize-winning debut collection from Patrick Ryan Frank (Four Way Books, 2012) by Debrah Lechner.
“Patrick Ryan Frank is a poet of noteworthy talent, whose poetry is affecting, and impossible to forget.How the Losers Love What’s Lost is an important collection and a brilliant accomplishment.”
Read the review here.
A blog called BookLerner wrote a great review of The Pretty Girl by Debra Spark.
“The novella, “The Pretty Girl” (the book and the novella have the same title), explores the relationship between Andrea, a young woman, her spinster Great Aunt Rose and one of Rose’s paintings. From the start, there’s an air of mystery about Rose’s painting, which symbolically carries the weight of a family secret. With each turn of the plot, Spark brings us in a little closer, all the while maintaining suspense. At the novella’s end, the story blossoms and satisfies, its secrets finally revealed.
The novella is followed by six short stories, each of which showcase Spark’s considerable talents in painting multi-dimensional characters—outwardly successful, yet with slippery motivations and interior landscapes riddled with self-doubt and confusion. As each of the stories progresses, its characters unfold and facets of their personalities are slowly revealed. Reading a Spark story is a little like touring an old house using a flashlight—individual rooms light briefly and only at the end do we see how each contributes to the whole. Certain elements in Spark’s work weave in and out of each story and form a thematic undercurrent: art and the creative life, the older generation’s legacy and Judaism. These elements give the stories a common thread.” Read more.
To buy The Pretty Girl, click here.
Paul Lisicky (author of a short fiction collection that we’ll publish this fall, Unbuilt Projects) was interviewed by Cobalt Review and The Pride Review.
“Cobalt: Over the last year or so I’ve read Lawnboy, The Burning House, and now Unbuilt Projects. Your work seems to be getting shorter – or happening in shorter increments – which I find interesting. Also, though, I noticed that your language has changed, sometimes quite dramatically. Lawnboy has moments of lyricism, but for the most part it’s pretty straightforward. The Burning House, though, has a completely different tone, and the words move differently. Unbuilt Projects has that slightly modernist (ish) resonance also, to some extent, and also keeps coming back to Virginia Woolf. Has this shift been a deliberate writing choice, or has it evolved more organically?
Paul Lisicky: It’s very cool to have that noticed. I like the challenge of working in smaller, tighter spaces, and I want to write work that operates on several levels at once, like a poem. It’s harder to get that several-level feeling in a long, long narrative. I think the work might just be getting closer to how I am in the world. I’ve always chosen my words carefully. I didn’t talk much from grades four through eleven. I was pretty interior, painfully shy, as they say. If you’d asked me how I felt about things, I would have much preferred playing it on the piano than speaking it aloud.” Read the rest of the interview.
“Pride Review: What was your parents’ dream profession for you and when did you realize you could be a professional writer?”
“Paul Lisicky: Well, outwardly they wanted me to go to law school, but I secretly think they wanted my brothers and me to be famous, as silly as that might sound. My brothers and I are all in the arts. My middle brother is an architect, my youngest brother is a symphony musician. I was going to be a musician too. I played piano, trained to be a composer through my teenage years until I took a fiction workshop in college, then that started to become my thing. I was never going to do anything I didn’t love to do — I was always stubborn that way.” You can finish the interview here.
Be sure to watch our website so you can get a copy of Unbuilt Projects this fall! In the meantime, take a look at our titles this spring.
We are thrilled to say that Alex Dimitrov (whose poetry book Begging For It will be one of our Spring 2013 titles) has his poem “American Faith” posted in Undertow Magazine.
One of our authors, Debra Allbery wrote a piece on Larry Levis for at Length Literary Magazine. Great work, Debra!
DEBRA ALLBERY ON LARRY LEVIS
Memory is the Confederate of the Eye
“In 1981, in my second year as an MFA student, I took a class with Larry Levis called “Memory and Imagination.” My notebook from that class seems more his now than mine, a document of his reading and thoughts as he wrote the poems which would become Winter Stars. Quotes from Nietszche and Flaubert, Auden and Eliot and Stevens, Keats: “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” And his own observations and asides: The shape of the understanding is the form of the poem. Poetry depends on the way we can include things that are not poetry. Memory is the confederate of the eye. An arrow flying in both directions—he must have drawn it on the chalkboard—with Memory (Lowell tucked beneath it) at one end andImagination (Ashbery inserted here) at the other. Larry Levis, in art as in life, bringing those two points full circle. Not so much a distinction between the two, my notes say, but the method in which they are used.” Read the rest of the piece.
Debra’s book Fimbul-Winter can be purchased on our website.
A big round of applause to a Four Way Books author, Monica Youn for having her poem “Against Imagism” in the July 23rd, 2012 edition of The New Yorker!
“Great fiction has always seemed the best way to peer into others’ joys and horrors…. But at some point I lost the habit, and began reading primarily for information. Maybe it’s because reading is what I do all day for work. Maybe it’s the parenting exhaustion, leaving so little brainpower left at the day’s end. Maybe it’s the boom in truly great television, making David Simon’s The Wire the equivalent of Dickens for our era.
All of which is an enormous amount of throat-clearing just to say that I have fallen into a book of fiction that I absolutely love: Debra Spark’s The Pretty Girl. A young American woman cleaning out her beloved grandmother’s effects bites into a chocolate and finds a tiny rabbi who talks to her in parables. A Swiss farm girl, desperate to escape her confined and ugly life, falls accidentally into a wealthy and wonderful life in Paris, unaware that this new life was poisoned from the start. A cousin’s slow and unfair dying overshadows a grifter’s thievery. Complex stories unreel in plain, straightforward language, with emotions so underplayed that they startle deeply. Plot twists are revealed with the opposite of flash, slipped in behind the scenes, changing everything retrospectively, showing ordinary women’s lives from angles that shift queasily and yet are revealed with great compassion. Reading these stories is a wonderful treat.”
Keep reading this wonderful review by E. J. Graff for Friday Fiction Break in The American Prospect. Debra, congratulations! For a copy of The Pretty Girl, visit our website.
In case you didn’t already know, Bryant Park has a wonderful series called “Word for Word” where writers, poets and other artists read/show their own work and present the work of others. For the full schedule of events through August, click here. There’s even an event tonight! “Word for Word Reel Talks” from 7-8pm in the Bryant Park Reading Room. Go after work to cool off and enjoy.
We were thrilled to see such a great review of one of our spring titles this year How The Losers Love What’s Lost on Justin Hamm’s blog.
“How does the chorus to the classic Tom Petty song go? “Even the losers get lucky sometimes?” Well, not in Patrick Ryan Frank’s How the Losers Love What’s Lost. Each of the poems in this collection presents us with a character plagued with loneliness, awkwardness, or just plain bad fortune. Here we find the internal damage of the gambler, the gun moll, the prison inmate, the character actor, the regretful alcoholic, the one-armed man, and the nondescript skinny kid from high school, to name just a few. How the Losers Love What’s Lost contains a handful of truly standout poems but needs the poems around them to attain full power; the hard times of the great poems and the simply good ones work together until the collection turns, finally, into a kind of protest song for social justice, but without ever trying to be—without ever seeming corny or intent on anything but showing how life feels for the cursed.” Here is the rest of the review.
Take a look at the book on our website and get your copy today. Congratulations to Patrick!
Four Way Books poet Patrick Ryan Frank has his wonderful poem “Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote Dance” published in Slate. You can even hear him reading it! Congratulations, Patrick!
For a copy of his latest book of poetry How The Losers Love What’s Lost, visit our website. And while you’re there, see what other spring titles we have.
On Friday, July 20th at 7pm Alex Dimitrov will be reading at Studio 10 (56 Bogart Avenue (first floor of The Bogart building) in Brooklyn across the street from the Morgan Avenue L train for the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series. He will be reading with Dorothea Lasky and Timothy Donnelly. Alex’s first book of poetry, Begging for It will be one of our Spring 2013 titles! Be sure to keep an eye on our website so you can get your copy. Visit our site now to see what we have available this spring. Congrats, Alex!
“It is always a pleasure to read poetry that throws one back to other poems. Recently, reading many of the poems in Black Blossom, Rigoberto González’s newest work about Death—and what goes on before and after, I had such an experience. There is, after all, a whole tradition of the modern poet serving as metaphysical or gothic anatomist to melancholy; for what is Life if not catastrophic and grimly humerous? Consider Baudelaire with Edgar Allan Poe as a precursor, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) comparing the evening to “a patient etherized upon a table,” or Djuna Barnes, who in “Suicide” (1915) described a destroyed woman: “She lay out listlessly like some small mug / Of beer gone flat.” To open Black Blossom is to drop down the rabbit hole of Rigoberto González. Warning: Even as a metaphor, the last rabbit in a González poem did not fare so well:…” Here is the rest of the review. Congratulations to Rigoberto!
For a copy of Black Blossoms and to see what new titles we have this spring, visit our website.
