beau mot plage, you’ll find, is a little easier than park, ha ha. The San Francisco Bay Guardian has a piece by Jason Shamai on three novellas for a novel (he calls it a “brainy horror experiment") sort of in response to Jonathan Karp of the Washington Post’s piece on the future of publishing.

The Bay Guardian piece on three novellas is here and the original Washington Post article is here.

More good news is that from July 29 till October 4 this year I’ll be back in Japan courtesy of the Japan Foundation as the TWS (Tokyo Wonder Site, I shit you not) creator in residence. I’ll be researching and writing and you know just having a lot of fun.

What’s not in the actual text of the novellas is that I’d like to dedicate this all to Anna Smaill, to Ryan Skelton, and to director, inspiration, charmer and friend CS Leigh. Thanks to Michael FitzGerald and Jun Onuki for all their help and support, and thanks and love to you, the fit though few. 

“...these shared-theme novellas, adding up to a mid-sized unified novel by the end (hence its title), are in fact designed for the top one-percent of most intelligent, most educated, most erudite readers out there, those who are fatally bored with almost every single other book on the market.... If you’re one of these people, you’re going to freaking love Three Novellas for a Novel; if you’re not, you’re going to likely wonder who this Shuker fellow thinks he is, calling this readable literature in the first place.”

“...a dense and trippy and highly atmospheric fever-dream of a tale...”

“...jarringly original ...”

“...unreadable...”

“...mental...”

“...startlingly...”

“...the...”

For your pleasure, the depleted forest, the first of three intertwined twenty-first-century horror stories to be published in serial for free or more, is now live at www.threenovellasforanovel.com/ - for just two more weeks until ∆O hills park arrives with all its madness mid-June. Novellas written, designed and laid out by me, web site design by Ryan Skelton at the Chop Shop with Junichiro Onuki deftly bevelling the tech.

I’m just back from Beirut, Syria, Israel and the “Territories”, and in partnership with Ryan Skelton at the ChopShop, we’re readying three novellas for a novel for publication tomorrow. I’m trying to engineer paypal to accept zero dollars but it’s currently demanding at least a cent. This is just not the same thing.

the depleted forest goes live tomorrow. ao hills park goes live two weeks later (approximately, as I’m in Maine for some wedding-related fun June 10 to 19). beau mot plage goes live two weeks later.

Because I’m not a total hardass I’m going to leave up forest for a little overlap with park and then plage so latecomers can catch up.
It’s coming…

Limited edition illustrated download of three novellas in serial in june 2008 for free or more

“The Depleted Forest”

In which editor James Ballard, working in the concrete-cancer-riddled Tokyo of the near future, has a crisis over beating his Japanese mistress… To escape or resolve his confusion he rents a prostitute and heads to the hinterlands of Mount Fuji for a weekend of escapist sex, hippies and organic food amidst the remains of Aokigahara, the depleted floating “Sea of Trees”. But unwelcome memories intrude, as do the consequences of the cancer wiping out the Japanese skyline.

And Ballard has a letter waiting for him - someone very dangerous knows what he is doing to his mistress, and he begins to realize the story he is currently editing, of a boy named “Spoil the Child” and his terrific vengeance, may be his own story, and his undoing…

“∆O Hills Park”

In which we enjoy the machine-translated story of twelve-year-old orphan Spoil the Child and his older brother, who become quite willingly embroiled in the Japanese Ivy League rape and party club “I’m Your Man” under the leadership and malign influence of the dark nihilistic twenty-something witch-student “The Doubt Which Assaults"…

Spoil the Child trips up an American martial arts student at the top of the unforgiving stairs of Shinjuku station - the student’s fall to his death impresses the xenophobic Doubt Which Assaults, and provides the Child entrée into I’m Your Man’s world of privilege and wealth - privilege which extends to the consumption of people themselves…
“Based on the shocking true story of Super Free”


“Beau Mot Plage”

In which our narrator, a young and very pregnant American woman working as a model in Tokyo, stops off in London with her Japanese film professor husband, en route to the Cannes film festival. Bored with Breillat, she leaves her husband to his conference on transgressive cinema and heads to France, but at Nice airport she will have an accident that will leave her in Cannes during the festival a year later with no child and no memory of what happened, let alone how it came to be that she has money, a luxurious apartment prone to strange events (burned evidence in the armoire, footsteps above her, a child’s voice at a locked and sealed internal door) that give ominous clues as to what may have occurred…
Innocently, the amnesiac heads out to the film festival taking over the town, a festival to which James Ballard, who has dreamed her accident, and a twelve-year-old boy with revenge on his mind, seek attendance…

threenovellasforanovel.com

”The Depleted Forest”, ”∆O Hills Park” and ”Beau Mot Plage”.

More information to come…

I have been busy working fulltime at a job type job, getting ready to fly to New Zealand for Christmas in summer and oysters and wine on Waiheke beaches, and working on a screenplay for an independent feature film of THE LAZY BOYS. This is getting round so I may as well out it here. Check the Author page for some new collages I made, and current recommendations are the brilliant 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (starring “The Girl” as in “This is the girl” from Mulholland Drive, Melissa George), Zach Leader’s beautifully-put-together LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS, Jane Bowles’ Collected (a birthday gift from poet and academic Sandeep Parmar and The Wolf [plus check out the John Kinsella inteview on mp3 on the Wolf’s site - I was at the reading at Foyle’s and Kinsella is a brilliant, fiery, inspiring reader and environmental activist, though I can’t abide hemp boots]), and the huge indictment on the settlement project and the messianic drive to expansion in Judea and Samaria, Idith Zertal’s LORDS OF THE LAND, who I met and was wonderful, humble, self-effacing and brilliant (after Jacqueline Rose’s introduction she said, “Erm, thank you very much for your wholly exaggerated introduction. I think I should get up and leave now and leave you with that impression") and who signed my copy at the LRB Bookshop, and I was so tired and frazzled and a little starstruck I barely said anything, and Idith said to me, a propos of pretty much nothing, “A good writer is a good reader. You have to be a good reader.” Happy Christmas.

I will be in Cannes for the 60th anniversary festival this year from the 16th of May till the 27th, with Anna and Ryan Skelton. This week the superb Michael FitzGerald is reading at KGB and Happy Ending in New York City - RADIANT DAYS was reviewed in the NYTBR.

In the UK Anna and I will be reading with Bill Manhire at the Manchester Literature Festival in October. And genius David Markson’s THE LAST NOVEL is published this month. The world is exciting.

Reading: Anthony Burgess’s gorgeous A DEAD MAN IN DEPTFORD. plus Mike Davis’s CITY OF QUARTZ, the elaborately bound and beautiful A LETTER FROM JAPAN, John Swope’s photographs. Wherein, having bought it for Swope’s photography of post-occupation Japan I found the shot of Brando from Julius Caesar that got me excited way back when I blogged for Powell’s.

As Malvolio puts it,
Why, every thing adheres together, that no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance—What can be said? Nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

To the dark house…

I am the only person in the world who likes YELLOW DOG. (The text messages aside.)

There’s a new dfw story at the New Yorker.

“Don’t do anything for the crowd. Don’t do anything with the crowd. But you’ve got to be aware of the crowd. In the novel I’m writing now (The Pregnant Widow), remembering the seventies, girls would go to bed with you even when they didn’t want to, because they were responding to the peer group. Very weird feeling. A girl going to bed with you for ideological reasons. You get that, and you also get, if you went out with a girl from up north, or from Cornwall or somewhere, she would have an actual rule about no sexual intercourse. She’s obeying an ideology of sort of save yourself for your husband, and a bit of religion and all that. So I formulate the rule, don’t do anything for the crowd. Don’t fuck, and don’t not fuck, for the crowd. Fuck for yourself.”

- Amis in conversation at the Prince Alfred