Come visit us at AWP. We'll be at Table X [The Lit Pub / Mud Luscious Press], in location I-21.
The Lit Pub is an independent publishing company specializing in literary hybridity. We're interested in the genre-blurring that occurs when authors experiment with traditional and established forms of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. We also serve our fellow publishers (as well as readers like you) by recommending at least one book a day on our blog.
Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards and shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil. She is the founder of The Lit Pub.
Tonight’s post title comes from Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf), which I just started reading last night and am loving. I bought this book at Page Turner 2011, the Asian American Literary Festival in NY this past October. I’m not sure why I picked up this particular book, but it was on the table at…
The first thing I need to say is that after reading this book I felt like I totally needed Carmen to be my best friend. Not in a silly BFF way, but in a professional way — because it is really, really difficult to make 30-year-old life decisions (dating, marriage, children) when all I’ve got…
I’d like to begin with a little confession: I had no idea what book I was going to write about for today’s post until about 5 p.m. yesterday, on Thanksgiving eve. It wasn’t the end of the world — my backup plan was to publish any of the 50+ posts we already have scheduled for…
Marguerite Duras’s essay, “Writing,” ends with: ”Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.” Marguerite Duras. What a name. Like Lol Stein. I am listening to Soley, this song on repeat, thinking about solitude and…
This story is old; I’ve told it before but I’ll pinch it to this: In the spring of ’98, I read his story “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach” in Ninth Letter and felt a hard hurt in my throat. I flipped to his bio, discovered his blog, and for the next days I systematically clicked…
Blake Butler needs no introduction, which means all I need to say here is that the following interview was conducted using Google Docs between August 10, 2009 and October 18, 2009, and it originally appeared in Keyhole Magazine in October 2009. 1. Scorch Atlas MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Blake. Thanks for doing this. What would you like…
Before picking up this issue of Granta, I had never read anything by Rachel Cusk. The contributors’ bios at the end tell me that she has written a memoir, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, and a novel, The Bradshaw Variations. However, a quick search on Amazon reveals that she has written many more…
I’m new to C. K. Williams, but I bought his Collected Poems and began with the collection Tar, from 1983, which appears about a quarter of the way into the book. My reason for writing about this collection here is because, lately, I’ve become interested in long-line poems. In many instances while reading Williams’s, I asked…
The sixteen short-short stories in Claudia Smith’s “Put Your Head In My Lap” (Future Tense Books, 2009) convey such tenderness it’s difficult not to develop a big-ass lump in my throat, the kind that causes tears to well and fall. This is a collection to read alone, wrapped in a blanket beside a crackling fire,…
1. WHO IS LIDIA YUKNAVITCH? MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Lidia, thank you for allowing me to showcase your incredible memoir, The Chronology of Water, as one of The Lit Pub’s inaugural Book of the Month features. I think the first thing a lot of readers would like to know is: Who is Lidia Yuknavitch? Why did…