An Apparent Event: A Second Story Books Anthology

Bys: Mary Burger, Avery Burns, Brenda Coultas, et al.

Poetry. Prose. Cross-Genre. Edited by Mary Burger, this anthology brings together nine chapbooks from Second Story Books in an exploration of narrative-the representation of events in language, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0977382303
• ISBN13: 9780977382309
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Second Story Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Everything's Eventual

In the pages of this book, which I've been reading and re-reading on and off for most of 2006, I've been luxuriating rather like a bubble bath. That's not to say that the work isn't challenging or stimulating. Mary Burger is one of those names, like Chanel or Wittgenstein, in whom one can have complete trust. Just surrender yourself up to a good time. Herself an accomplished novelist and poet, and the author of SONNY and BLEEDING OPTIMIST, Mary Burger is also an accomplished editor and anthologist and is one of the innovative writers who put together last year's splendid "New Narrative" casebook BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Press). Here she reprints in one handy volume the chapbooks she produced between 1998 and 2002 as publisher of Second Story Books, a Bay Area-based press specializing in expanding the syntactical maps of narrative. Thus you get nine books in one, and probably only a very few of you have seen them all yet. Will they answer the momentous questions Burger poses in her introduction: "Is narrative an engagement with events, or an enactment of events? Are all our understandings of time, of events in time, ultimately instances of narrative?" The individual pieces vary in length and ease of access. Kristin Prevallet's "Red," divided into two "Crimes" and with an epigraph from Raymond Chandler, is the briefest and most concentrated, while Gregory Brooker's story "Spirit's Measure," with its unique concatenation of Mormon teachings and self-fulfilled prophesy, covers the most ground. Camille Roy's "Craquer" and Renee Gladman's "Not Right Now" invent simulacra of old, or "classic," New Narrative, but with a lesbian dismantling of what were already unconventional structures of family, sexual desire, social community. "She had to change her ideas about sex," writes Gladman, "because she was having it." Elsewhere visual work animates the metapoetics of Jacques Debrot and the parodic pedagogic behind Avery Burns "A Duelling Primer," and an investigatory lyric approach makes the always welcome work of Lauren Gudath and Brenda Coultas seem more like poetry than poetry itself. Will there be a difference in the future, between the philosophism of the poem, and the cursed dynamism of the story? I doubt it. This convergence of opposites might be the "apparent event" behind APPARENT EVENT: A SECOND STORY BOOKS ANTHOLOGY.