Hello, Everyone

[Jason anthony]

I just wanted to post a little introduction, just joined the board. My name is Jason and I'm a 30 year old bibliophile-amateur writer living in Chicago, IL. I first became interested in books when I was a freshman in high school, so I guess it could be said I was a bit of a late bloomer. It was around this time that I also began writing, regularly publishing my, in hindsight, embarrassing results in a semi-regular zine. Since then I've been a bit obsessive about reading and, more recently, collecting and building a library of books that tend to be more on the rare and esoteric side. Some of my favorite writers would be: Peter Sotos, Octave Mirbeau, Ann Quin, Dennis Cooper, Jean Genet, Kathy Acker, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka and some younger authors involved in the whole Altlit thing. Aside from reading, I'm interested in movies, Bulldogs, food and especially music. I hope to talk to as many of you as I can. Cheer's!

[tailor STATELY]

Howdy !

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY

[TRIGGERSIDEWYS]

Rare and esoteric deserves a recommendation.. What's not necessarily the most best read but the most interesting you've read?

[Jason anthony]

I'm quite a champion of Peter Sotos' work, particularly his work from the 90s. His earliest publications were in a kind of zine/newsletter he release in the 80s called Pure. Pure was pretty bad, a really angsty, juvenile, self conscious mix of serial killer-worship and poorly written shallow "transgressive" material: sexual violence, blah, blah. He got into some legal trouble over this and began writing some creative non-fiction that wound up being published by Creation Books. His books are very unique. He mixes true crime with a lot of stream of consciousness ranting on things like child sexual abuse, gay gloryholes, rape and overall nastiness. It's definitely difficult to actually enjoy this kind of thing, but I love it. If you're at all interested in this, I'd recommend checking out a somewhat recently republished piece of his called Index. Most of his books are pretty hard to come across. Most of it was published by Creation which has been defunct for a few years now. Nine-Banded seems to be rereleasinf some of his titles but the original can be quite costly.

I do enjoy a few others authors that write in a similarly confrontational way - Hogg by Samuel Delany, Cows by Matthew Stoko and The Sluts by Dennis Cooper to name a few - but most of my interests just seem to go in a more just plain experimental direction (Eden Eden Eden but Pierre Guyotat, Berg and Tripticks by Ann Quinn, Fences by Ben Brooks, Suicide by Edouard Leve and The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud).