First, some news:
As of this week, Subterranean Press has, on sale, a very special edition of Goliath with artwork by my favorite artist, Kasiq Jungwoo. Two editions, really. A limited edition and an even rarer lettered edition.
Lettered: 26 signed copies, housed in a custom traycase
Limited: 400 signed numbered hardcover copies
It’s still, even now, a mind-boggling thing. Subterranean Press first approaching me with the idea, our reaching out to Kasiq, whose artwork elicited a veritable coup de foudre in me years ago, to now having these gorgeous objects finished and ready to go out in the world, it’s all as though ambered in the cocoon of dream. A lot of love and hard work went into giving my book this form, and I could not be happier, nor more honored.
So go ahead and add to cart while supplies last!
— Trust the Tale, Not the Teller?: Art and Propaganda in Contemporary Russia - Adam Kelly, Mar. 12, 2023
“Journalistic profiles of Surkov often quote his memorable response to becoming the target of Western sanctions following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, sanctions that, among other things, prevented him traveling to the United States. “The only things that interest me in the US,” Surkov is quoted as saying, “are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.” Here, Surkov names three icons of postwar and contemporary American art, artists who, in their different spheres, have come to represent the importance of individual freedom during that period. Their art—music, poetry, and painting—could never be confused for propaganda, not only because it was created without the intention to put forward a message on behalf of official state power but also because it was so clearly singular, personal, and freely expressed. (Some of this singularity is captured in Surkov’s own reading of a Ginsberg poem, available online.)”
— Tricky Minds - Michael Wood, London Review of Books, Sept. 5, 2002
“Here is Frank’s hypothesis. In 1838 Dostoevsky, a student at the Academy of Military Engineers in St Petersburg, wrote to his father in Moscow to give him some bad news: his expected promotion at the Academy was not going to happen. ‘The letter brought on an apoplectic stroke, and the stricken doctor’ – Dostoevsky’s father was an Army doctor – ‘had to be bled in order to relieve his condition. Fyodor himself, as a result of this, fell ill and spent some time in the Academy hospital.’ Frank thinks Dostoevsky must have told his wife this story, which in her mind became entwined with the father’s murder and the son’s epilepsy. He calls her account an ‘innocent falsification’. We can of course imagine father-son relations, even including strokes and psychosomatic illnesses, which have nothing to do with Freud or Oedipus. But the overall picture here, as Frank himself says, suggests Freud was onto something about the Dostoevsky family, even if the dates and the details of his theory were all wrong. The murder and the epilepsy look like variations on an already established theme, gothic elaborations, supplied by history and pathology, of ways of wishing and not wishing for the father’s death.”
Currently reading: [redacted]
Currently listening: This Appointed Love - Skindred