Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground

by M. Kitchell

--A selection of Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery series.

"This anthology intends to bring to light some of the new fiction writers who are using the Internet's labyrinthine array of blogs and personal web pages to expose, test, and develop their work. The contributors range in age from sixteen to early forties. They are gay, straight, and in some cases still searching for their identities. They live in North America's cities and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933354151
• ISBN13: 9781933354156
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Starting Fires

All of the writers have contributed to the blog of famed US experimentalist Dennis Cooper, most of them probably thrilled out of their minds to be thisclose--coinage by Walter Winchell--to their hero, and mine. When I met Cooper for the first time he hadn't even written a novel yet, or barely, and yet I felt like Kenneth Anger approaching Aleister Crowley in the back room of Thelema Abbey, heart completely in my throat despite the reassurances of many friends that he is, in fact, not personally scary at all but just the opposite, warm, nurturing, plain spoken, nearly a polymath, and on top of everything else, wickedly handsome and could have been a movie star. Well, after that I lost my heart completely I'm afraid, so let me just say that I am with these nervous bloggers in spirit, for I know what it's like to come up to the table of the gods and have them lay hands on me. Like that scene in FELLOWSHIP IF THE RING when Frodo gets all those gifts from Cate Blanchett and her light confounds him, and her divine practicality. That said, it's a mixed bag but that's what's so intriguing about it. The tones are varied more than in DISCONTENTS, a previous fiction anthology edited by Cooper back in the day. Well, those days were all about AIDS and "Against Nature," etc., and here the social landscape against which this writing is conducted is very different, attenuated, sad, post-apocalyptic and lukewarm as opposed to the fiery inferno of DISCONTENTS. Cooper says in his preface that this if fiction "alive with passion" but I don't think so, not so you'd notice. It is however, fresh and exciting and all involved deserve a big round of applause. I see some of the writers as just being so excited about meeting Dennis Cooper that they were agonizing about "What should I write?" just like Cinderella was all like, "What can I wear?" as she ran through all her rags on coat hangers before the birds, mice and fairy godmother showed up to help her out. So some of the writing is too brief, too tenuous, really to see what its authors have in mind. A paragraph here, a sketch there, as though one were no longer allowed to write (as lyric poets paused, however briefly, according to Theodor Adorno's strictures on Auschwitz)--postmodernism has subtracted as much as it has made things open up. And these are some of the best pieces, in fact, in USERLANDS, but by the same token one has no idea what a second story by these minimalists might actually be like, it is sort of personality-free. Forty-one writers, three or four of them female, nearly all of them white (so there is a "whited-out" feeling too, pace Barthes), a sensation of possibilities eliminated. (The writers represented here were from an early prototype of Cooper's blog and hardly represent today's 42 per cent female membership.) Garrison Taylor's story is sharp, fast-moving, and frequently amusing, and yet underneath the anomie we get a feeling for real people, real problems, and a current of rea