Brand New Easter Rabbit Cover!

Here it is, straight off the easel (actually, work bench) from painter extraordinaire Christine Sajecki. Encaustic and photocopy transfer on birch panel. Back cover design by Adam Robinson. Sent to the printers today!

Ready?

In early 2011, Publishing Genius will do the REPRINT of my book of microfictions, Easter Rabbit. The REPRINT will have an all-new cover from original Easter Rabbit cover maker and brilliant encaustic artist Christine Sajecki. The REPRINT will also include new stories and such. Ready?

I didn't like it

At Books I Read in 2010, Zachary German didn't like Easter Rabbit. Maybe it's because after I met him here in Baltimore and he gave me his book I didn't send him mine for like 2 months? Nah, just joking. Isn't everybody going to like it. Still, I don't mind the review, as such: "i didn't really like it. wasn't unpleasant to read, just didn't really leave me with much. reminded me sort of of diane williams mixed with david berman. ON ACID!"

Dark Sky Magazine

Hey, me and microfiction just got interviewed at Dark Sky Magazine by the excellent Brad Green. Great mag, fine interviewer.

Best New Book by a Local Author

Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young

Microfictionist Joseph Young has whittled the short story down to a few sentences—and often fewer than 50 words. What’s disarming is how effective these stories are in Easter Rabbit. You expect something so terse to feel incomplete, a mere piece of some greater whole, but the stories, moments, relationships, and feelings in these 100 pages end up saying all they need to in an artfully precise use of language.

LINK

Vestal Review Review

Wow I've been so caught up in some other stuff [see below] that I haven't posted about this cool review at Vestal Review by the hard working Antonios Maltezos. Says Antonios,

"As an admirer of Joseph Young’s work, I’m aware he has collaborated with visual artists, placing his “texts next to their work on gallery walls in various ways.” Quite extra-ordinary considering how the artist, in general, will pair up with his medium for life—the painter with his canvas, the sculptor with his clay, the writer with the printed page; the single-minded devotion to the medium almost religious. But in this age of hybrids, it seems quite natural for Joseph Young to want to manipulate space and time much as the painter does, by capturing a moment that only seems devoid of arc if the reader is unwilling to participate. For the open mind, however, we aren’t simply dropped in the moment, but within the folds of a lifelong struggle for balance and meaning, some measure of reward.

"

Nice!


[Oh, what I've been caught up in: My vampire novel, NAME.]

2-Reviews

Easter Rabbit just got this really cool and thoughtful review by Mike Young at his very own Noo Journal. He says such smart stuff like,

"These stories tick along with such sentences until the camera starts to melt: the world suddenly understood not through mimetic language but through the imposition of imagination. Conversations invent machines, a spider bite invents a vision of God" and "their job is to permute our circumstances and our language until they’ve uncovered new ways to make our world mysterious again."

Isn't that great? It's poetry itself, those words.

Rabbit also got a review from Stefani R. Maclin, who seems to be a librarian. She says,

"...hidden among these pages are treasures of tiny portraits, slices of life, of love, death, and breath. Cities and heartbreaks both rise from the ashes here, each story grasping at 'starlight... out of reach' with 'small and smaller tries.'"

That's nice too.

Linkner Likes Rabbit

A fine shout to writer and reader Andy Linker and his blog Outside of a Dog, whereat he writes up the many books he reads. It's quite a nice source of indie and other books. Says Andy on Rabbit, "These are highly intriguing and often strikingly beautiful miniatures. Highly recommended." Thanks!

Hey, Reviews, I've Got to Catch Up

Easter Rabbit has 3 new reviews since last we checked in. Well, maybe 2 and a half, one is more a succinctly stated opinion than a review. But those are good too!

Number one we have a review and interview at the colorfully lettered and nicely ambitious The Short Review. The interview was conducted by head chief Tania Hershman and the review handled by David Woodruff. Says David, "One gets a sense that the stories of Easter Rabbit are crafted from a sense of music as well as a mystery of daily life, the relationships, tired or conflicted, that help to define us." Also, "Those who liked their fiction well-defined or gobbled up and forgotten after a single reading, will find Easter Rabbit vexing. But in its open-ended form, in its prism-like prose, this is one book that the reader can return to again and again to see new meanings. In that sense, I believe the book is worth far more than its price."

Number two is a review at Ghoti Magazine (you know what that spells, right?) by CL Bledsoe:

"The bottom line is that Young takes situations that seem, mostly, fairly mundane, and breathes meaning into them. A man sees a black rat running through the leaves and this becomes a beautiful moment. Nature reflects experience as a girl feels “wind sliding up her skirt like a friend’s hand.” Young’s stories turn on a dime, taking simple scenes and suddenly exposing them for the powerfully important moments they really are."

Three we have the blog post by Ben White, runner of Nanoism, the Twitter fiction concern. Ben is perhaps less enamored of the book than some others. He says, "With around 80 stories that one could read in under an hour, the collection has the potential to be a numbing read. Many of stories understandably have a similar feel, the sparse dialog of a man and a woman, an image, a setting. ER demands to be read slowly, picked up and put down." Fair enough. He also wonders, fairly enough, if Easter Rabbit, despite it's fiction tab, is not in fact poetry. I've heard that.

NewPages Review

Easter Rabbit was just reviewed by the ever-so-busy John Madera for the New Pages site. I like the first paragraph a lot:

"With their directness and precision, their attention to what Ezra Pound would call “luminous details,” Joseph Young’s microfictions might be mistaken for Imagist poems, but with their shift away from showing “things” as “things” toward “things” as something else, or, rather, toward portraying both the “thingness” of the thing and of some different “thing,” his miniatures suggest something altogether different. But where they fit is less important than what they do, how they make you feel. In Easter Rabbit’s miniatures, its sharp sentences focused on often mundane details, Young offers epics. Seemingly channeling William Blake, he offers further “auguries of innocence,” further testaments to worlds in granules, heavens in flowers, and – well, suffice to say, these are sentences to linger over."

John also wrote a nice blurb of his review on his blog, where you can find links to other reviews he's done and other projects. You should check out some of these other reviews, too. He's good at what he does.

Easter Fish

Easter Rabbit got a new review. This time, by the talented and famous Kathy Fish. She had her review at the JMWW blog, right here. From this review, Kathy says, "This is a beautiful collection. These are not stories in the traditional sense and I can’t really compare this writing to any other, which is a very good thing. I feel both smarter and dumber reading Joseph Young’s work, but ultimately I feel…nourished. Because he brings to writing what I go to writing for and that is the beauty and depth of a true artist." I would say to her, you too, what you do too.

Flye and Baker

I've signed up and nominated myself for the Baker Artist Awards, a Baltimore institution that awards cash prizes to local artists (visual, written, aural, etc). You can vote for me to win the popularity contest part of the award or you can just send good vibes that the judges shall pick me in the juried part of the contest or you can just look at some of the Easter Rabbity stuff I posted.

Second, Michelle Garren Flye has blogged on Easter Rabbit at her blog. She says this provocative thing: "Anybody who tells you you can read a good piece of microfiction in a few seconds is either joking or an idiot." She also talks on my story "Marie Celeste," which was getting talked on at Matchbook too.

Rumble Review Interview

UPDATE: WOW, I just realized if you click on each of the four Easter Rabbit cover images on the Rumble homepage they take you to a different ER review. Cool!

The ubiquitous and energetic JA Tyler has written a review of Easter Rabbit over at Rumble Magazine. As he says, "Easter Rabbit takes words and makes them mean more, makes them hit us harder, makes us see better how language functions in short breaths, in gasps, in tight fists." JA also interviewed me for the magazine. Plus, check out the great fiction and poetry in the new issue. Nice. Thanks, JA.

A Matchbook Review

As in all things Matchbook, a thoughtful, closely read review of Easter Rabbit appears on the Matchbook Magazine blog by Edward Mullany. Edward and Matchbook also run, in case you don't know, a popular and lively discussion group on Fictionaut. From the review:

"At his best, Young pressures language until the plot he is describing - even a plot that is ordinary - is suffused with something sacred. His use of white space, between title and story, and between lines of the story itself, is bold enough to relieve us of the sort of sedentary composure which some habits of reading effect in us. Yet it is also careful enough that the traces of the story are retained.

"Easter Rabbit is composed of three sections - the title section (which is the longest), Deep Falls, and God Not Otherwise. It is possible to conceive of the book as a sort of literary triptych - a treatment of religious ideas in a secular world."

That last is really neat.

Blog-A-Sphere

So...there's ER activity on the blogs, starting with this cryptographic message out of Derek White's 5cense blog for xmas day: "some books clustter useless knowledge & words in your headpool—others like this one accumulate such disparate junk DNA & bundle it into tidy packages—objets d'art—so you can move on."

There's also the Big Other with other. John Madera so goodly gives Easter Rabbit a nod in his post My Favorite Books in 2009 (in alphabetical order). Then, just a couple days later, John Dermot Woods, 5 Books Published in 2009 that Wrecked My Brain a Little. John says, "This is an IMPORTANT book. Some reviewer predicted early in Richard Brautigan’s career that he was creating a new genre, that one day we’d read novels, poems, short stories, and 'brautigans.' He was right, even if common parlance has yet to catch up. Enter the new mode of writing: 'joe-youngs.'"

And, Brad Green at Elevate the Ordinary gives Easter Rabbit a year end entry in A Year in Reading. My title is in bold in Brad's systemology but I'll let you visit to see what that means.

Dispatch Litereview Gives Away the Rabbit

The FEB10 Drawing Event

Very simple, actually. All you must do is subscribe to the mailing list, which you can do either by clicking the link in the upper left corner of this page which says "subscribe" or by sending a blank e-mail to subscribe@litareview.com. If you are already on the mailing list then you are already in the running. If you are not on the mailing list on the night of 12 February 2010, then you will not be entered into the drawing. Very simple, we believe.