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.