This is the first Single Sentence Animation from Recommended Reading, Electric Literature’s new weekly fiction magazine.

Edwin Rostron animates a sentence from “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” by Ben Marcus. Music by Supreme Vagabond Craftsman.

The sentence: “We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.”

Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.

The Nachbar across the Straße appeared in his Door, swaddled in Bademantel and crouching over to retrieve the Zeitung from the Treppe. Gertrudis waited until he was returned inside, then again honked the Autohupe and waved for me to join her. And I did, bolting the Door behind me.

Don’t just stand there—get in, said Gertrudis and I sat beside her. I strapped myself in, the Seatbelt strangling me due to my low status—too low to see out through the Windschutzscheibe. Gertrudis was seated low also, but she’d spurted and was able to reach the Gaspedal. The Problem was seeing in front of us, and also the Auto being Stickshift and jerking forward, until the Motor cut and we almost crashed into the Bordstein. But finally Gertrudis managed to pull out onto the Straße and drive down the Block, around the Straßenecke headed—I had no Idea where we were headed, and neither did Gertrudis. And I don’t think she cared if we only drove around the Block and then back again, but I remember we passed a Milchviehbetrieb and then the Fußballplatz surrounded by Wäldern, covered with Schnee and soon it started snowing again, thick Schneeflocken, and soon we merged from a small winding Landstraße onto a larger Straße, driving alongside other Autos and Transportwagen and even a Traktoren, and Gertrudis sat up, gripping the Lenkrad, terrified.

Passing over the submerged Bahngleise, we nearly crashed into the Traktoren, but at the last Moment Gertrudis sped up, skidding out into the wrong Spur, blinding Headlights. Somehow Gertrudis remained calm and again changed back into the other Spur, speeding out in front of the Traktoren, missing the incoming Milchwagen but then sliding across an Eisdecke and leaping the Bordestein, until at last we plunged through Schaufenster into a Coiffure, shattering Glas and also the Windschutzscheibe. Between us, a Schaufensterpuppe was lodged but I escaped through the Fenster and circled around to check on Gertrudis.

She was knocked out, slumped forward over the Lenkrad, her Stirn gashed. I remember standing there a Moment, watching her under a great Stille—before the Polizeisirenen screamed faraway and Gertrudis awoke, startled and confused, but then smiling. That was fun, I remember she said while I helped her out through her shattered Fenster—her Arme splintered, but otherwise she was OK. Next time, I promise I won’t almost kill you. And then she started laughing, until the Polizei came and then the Krankenwagen, and laughing also at the Krankenhaus while Doktoren attended to her and after, when Opa arrived, furious. And when Vater and Mutter returned, they were also furious, but Gertrudis laughed it off again then and that was Gertrudis, the same Gertrudis, if older, who wanted to be in a Musikvideoproduktion, although if not the Russen in Beanie and Masken would have found her elsewhere—when we ventured out later that Abend, or the next Morgen, the last I’d see Gertrudis alive.

Alec Michod is the author of the novel THE WHITE CITY (St. Martin’s). He is currently working on a second book. You can find him online at www.alecmichod.com.

With Sam Lipsyte, Carole Maso, Rikki Ducornet, Thalia Field, Shelly Jackson, Brian Evenson, Rick Moody, Ben Marcus, Bradford Morrow, Matthew Derby, etc.

Tuesday, 1 May

8 pm, 001 Salomon Center
Readings by Jonathan Baumbach, Robert Coover, Sam Lipsyte
& Ben Marcus
+ a multi-media music work by Butch Rovan (based on a Baudelaire
translation by Keith Waldrop)

Wednesday, 2 May

11 am, McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown Street
Postmodernist Fiction, a Critical Assessment, with Geoffrey Green,
Heinz Ickstadt, Larry McCaffery & Brian McHale, moderated by Robert Scholes

3 pm, McCormack Family Theater
Readings by Brian Evenson, Thalia Field, Rick Moody, Wesley Stace & CD Wright

8 pm, 001 Salomon Center
John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet Of Unspeakable Wonders, featuring:
Daniel Falsenfeld
Kristin Hersh
The Jessold Consort (Evelyn Farney, Mila Henry and Jessica Schmitz)
Rick Moody
Ken Reid
Marcy Richardson, Soprano
Wesley Stace

Thursday, 3 May

11 am, McCormack Family Theater
Readings by Robert Arellano, Mary Caponegro, John Cayley, Geoffrey Green, Michael Joyce &  Joanna Scott

3 pm, McCormack Family Theater
Readings by Rikki Ducornet, Renee Gladman, Geoffrey Green, Shelley
Jackson, Carole Maso, Shahriar Mondanipour & Brad Morrow

8 pm, 001 Salomon Center
The Unspeakable Circus, countless manifestations of literary surprises, featuring Ringmaster Matt Derby

More info here.

There really isn’t.

“The Flame Alphabet portrays the emergence of a new kind of human born of a global union of metaphysical and physical suffering. With language we constantly impose doom upon ourselves, be it through religious prophecy or post-apocalyptic fiction, and Marcus gives us a fascinating glimpse of how we might react if that dismal tide of words turned real. If our own intellectual brilliance were to poison us, as it already does every day.”

Read more.

From the acclaimed novelist and The Believer editor HEIDI JULAVITS, a wildly imaginative and emotionally intense novel about mothers, daughters, and the psychic damage women can inflict on one another.

Is the bond between mother and daughter unbreakable, even by death?

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother’s suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.

Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have noted Julia’s emerging gifts, and soon she’s recruited to track down an elusive missing person—a controversial artist who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes far deeper than she ever imagined.

As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits’s acclaimed novels, The Vanishers is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter’s love.

Purchase: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Powell’s.

At Riverview
One Warburton Avenue
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706
Catered by Chutney Masala
Click here for directions
Make reservations online

3.12.2012, 7pm, Housing Works Bookstore

Diane Williams reads from her new book of stories, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, with Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet) and Deb Olin Unferth (Revolution).

In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams’s unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman’s sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fir—-are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence. These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams’ position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.

“The uncanny has met its ideal delivery system: the stories of Diane Williams.”
—Ben Marcus

“These stories are the Giacometti walking man, the Cornell box, that extraordinary object born out of a genius for expressing the inner murmur of the mind. Each page is like throwing open the window in an electrical storm—strange sky, air full of voltage, and inside, a square of brave. Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours.”
—Deb Olin Unferth