Discussed: Kate Braverman, Squandering the Blue; Hob Broun, Inner Tube

In the right hands, a new edition of a book published years ago can be the makings of a new cult classic. The NYRB Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner is the example I’ve seen the most evidence of, but it’s far from alone. It’s no surprise that a growing number of publishers are tapping into literary history for their work, from Hagfish to the new Penguin Random House imprint Outsider Editions. There’s another useful task that reissue imprints accomplish: getting books that might have been overlooked to contemporary readers.

I am currently typing these words approximately 18 inches to the left of a shelf full of Wakefield Press’s editions of several books by Jean Ray, a Belgian surrealist whose uncanny fiction has been among the highlights of the last few years for me. These words were written more than 50 years ago, but the feelings of awe and discomfort they inspire is urgent indeed.

A copy of Outsider Editions’ new edition of Kate Braverman’s collection Squandering the Blue caught my eye at P&T Knitwear one evening. I knew that I’d read about Braverman before, but wasn’t sure exactly what. I opened the book a few days later and was drawn into the title story, which opens the book. By the time it reaches its final sentence — four devastating words long — I realized this was going to be one of the best books I read this year. Nothing about the stories that followed made me question that impression.

Some writers use collections as a way to showcase their range. Braverman does something else here: revisiting many of the same themes — the artist’s life, mothers and daughters, addiction and recovery — from different angles. If that sounds like a poet might do, there’s a reason for that: Braverman was equally at home writing poetry and prose. 

What does that look like in practice? Here’s how “Temporary Light” begins:

“It is early in December. Suzanne Cooper drives down Wilshire Boulevard through Beverly Hills and the city is not as she knew it. Overnight, wide, red ribbons have been entwined around street lamps, there is simulated snow and frost in shop windows, and legions of slaughtered pines are everywhere decorated and displayed. It is as if the earth had suddenly divested itself of the ordinary and revealed its pagan interior.”

While reading certain books, I imagine the author sitting at a typewriter composing impeccable sentences and throwing them on the ground with an Emeril-eque shout. This collection was full of those moments. Also: Its Pagan Interior would be an amazing title.

I’d heard a bit about the late Hob Broun through a number of missives from publisher Calamari Archive, and I knew that Sam Lipsyte was one of his admirers. Both of those got my attention, but what pushed me to actually read something by Broun was a Zona Motel conversation about Broun between Gene Kwak and David Nutt. Nutt described his introduction to Broun as the novel Inner Tube, which prompted Nutt to call Broun “the missing link between DeLillo, Lipsyte, and Nathanael West.”

That was about the point when I ordered a copy of Inner Tube from WORD.

Inner Tube has its share of dynamic sentences as well: “I watch, my attention paid like a war tax” is how one chapter begins. This is a frankly brutal book to read in places: it begins with the narrator describing the violent death by suicide of his mother and ends on an equally violent, equally disquieting note. The narrative moves around in time as the narrator recounts his troubling family history, juxtaposing scenes from his childhood with his equally troubled middle age. 

Throughout the novel, Broun’s prose conveys a sense of a fundamental wrongness. Here’s another representative sentence: “The sunset, laced with hydrocarbons, was deep purple.” The image it summons is pastoral, but the language clues you in to the effect that something is very wrong. It’s like one of those behind-the-scenes articles that shows you all the unappetizing ways food is prepared for a commercial shoot. 

These new editions were my introduction to both Braverman and Broun. Neither one will be the last book of theirs I read, and I’ve sent a few choice sentences to friends who might view things similarly.

Some Recent Writing

…it’s been a while since I did one of these. I made a foray into topics cinematic with an article on One Night Only and Code 46, two very different looks at authoritarian states controlling sex, at Reactor.

A pair of features I wrote for Publishers Weekly are up, one on comics as a medium for biographies of comic book creators, the other on boutique Blu-ray imprints making forays into the book world. I wrote about some recent books in translation for Words Without Borders, and chatted with both Ron Currie and Karishma Jobanputra for the Portland Press Herald.

Some recent reviews include  Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason (for On the Seawall), Adam Voith’s Recommended If You Like and Clair Hopple’s Change the Subject (both for Zona Motel), Scott McClanahan’s Fights! (for Vol.1 Brooklyn), and De Elizabeth’s She Haunts Me Still and Jedediah Barry’s Kill All Wizards (both for Reactor).