Bøger af Laurie Blauner

Poetry. What Books Press is proud to publish the poems from its first Open Reading selection. Laurie Blauner's It Looks Worse Than I Am compelled the editors by its deft and fearless language, shifting tonalities, and discomforting surrealism. The creature she calls "the animal" is delightfully recognizable to any reader, as are the poems' dreamers, forlorn, and misanthropes who exist in a condition of otherness that can't be appeased. In playful and savage language she reminds us: "There's blood everywhere and a throat full of rabbits. Intent is what happens to others."

I WAS ONE OF MY MEMORIES is a collection of lyrical nonfiction that includes essays, poetry, prose, lists, postcards, and memoir.I wasn't always like this, Laurie Blauner writes in her first creative nonfiction book. In this book houses fly, the Wizard of Oz reveals himself, a recipe for fur is shared along with how humans recreate themselves as animal hybrids, Nabokov's Lolita infatuation is observed, and the author describes having been seen outdoors in her underpants. The twenty essays cover a variety of topics, obsession, telling lies, outer and inner spaces, myths and facts, evolution, aging, the death of a beloved cat named Cyrus, and the definition of what it is to be human. In the book secrets surface concerning how to talk to yourself, good and bad familial relationships, pretending to be another religion, and a mother lying about her age.I love this book's fragmented and looping storytelling, its sense of humor, and its amazing, strange, and smart sentences.--Caryl Pagel, author of Out of Nowhere into Nothing...so strange and true, structurally organic, surprising and moving.--Polly Buckingham, author of Expense of a ViewNonfiction. Essays. Memoir. Hybrid.

The precision of Blauner's beautifully executed and deeply imagined prose evokes the sense of dreams that are awake and stronger than reality, but are reality. We are presented with the archetypes of our age: the challenged; the world-weary, the homeless, the hallucinators, the would-be saviors manifesting in movements which permeate society and truth, the anxious, the hopeful, the neglected, the lost. Blauner moves us through her novel in linguistic lightning strikes, illuminating and penetrating, but never lingering. Out of Which Came Nothing is a stunning book, a book not so much about the change that is coming as the change that has come.

In 1924 New York, Lil (short for Lillian) Moore, an artist, and Leon Shaffer, an accountant, narrate this Jazz Age story of triangular love, art and its future, willing and unwilling sacrifices, heroes and heroines, dreams, visions and illusions, music, insanity, insomnia, fame and the lack of it, and how each era is similar and different from our own. Lil's patrons, Mr. and Mrs. Becker, have interesting, themed parties at their country home. Their lion, Herbert, is wise and a good companion. Alice Thompson, a talented visual artist, and George Holman, an attractive older man and owner of the 191 Gallery, are loosely based on Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. Marco, a piano player, and Izzy, an African American singer, are also members of the Bohemian group. Lil's desires and needs, as well as Leon's attraction to her, form the plot, which includes philosophical discussions at a Chinese restaurant Round Table, a women's art exhibition at George's gallery, a beauty contest, Lil's wish to act in moving pictures, a visit to a museum to see King Tut, and swimming in a lake. The novel is studded with historical figures and other characters, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, a Freudian analyst, gangsters, absurdist artists and art lovers, and Mary Beach, a 191 Gallery assistant with her daughter, a long, white scar, and a criminal husband. 1920s slang, the experience of art creation, psychiatric notes, newspaper advertisements, headlines, articles, reviews of popular cultural events, and current events like the Leopold's and