"Careful, Wally," she said. "It's a great metaphor, but it'll weight the book down. There's no bigger taboo than disgust..."
My big fall project is the new, next-wave novel by Lawrence Shainberg, Crust, published by Two Dollar Radio and out officially today! Early fans include Jonathan Lethem, The Boston Globe's Brainiac blog, Artsjournal, and Norman Mailer, who called it "wild as sin." Youtube, Myspace, IMs, blogs, Facebook, it's all there plus more in this hysterically funny dispatch from the very, very near future, including tons of gorgeous, inspired illustrations including a fake (yet authorized) Barbara Kruger. My favorite aspect of the book, though, is Shainberg's laser-like insight on our culture of this moment, e.g.
"There wasn't a writer alive who hadn't seen his work trivialized by the flood of information, entertainment and culture... that had engulfed the world like smog. The onslaught of books, film, television, magazines, newspapers, and, most of all, perhaps, the endless flood of Internet material had not only swamped the writer's audience with distraction but so diminished its attention span that serious reading had come to seem as anachronistic as typing or traveling by steamship... Not so long ago, we'd been able to send our manuscripts to editors and friends with confidence that they'd be received with gratitude and read at once, but nowadays, they were more likely to be greeted with resentment and, often as not, put out with the garbage. How could it be otherwise when every reader's shelves were filled with more than he or she could get to in a lifetime? The truth was undeniable: once a happy love affair, the relationship between writer and reader was now adversarial. It made no difference whether the work was good or bad. Indeed, it's not unlikely that good books, being harder to ignore and requiring more effort and attention, evoked more resentment than bad."
More: LawrenceShainberg.com.
Save the date: The New Indie Novel Night.
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