emily, Author at OR Books

At Gawker, Rich Juzwiak praises Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon’s GAY PROPAGANDA

Monday, February 24th, 2014

One of the best things to come out of this anti-gay bullshit in Russia is Gessen’s elevated platform. This is wonderful not necessarily for her—Vitaly Milonov, author of the anti-gay propaganda bill, frequently uses her as an example of the kind of “pervert” his law is supposedly protecting children from; feeling at risk, Gessen eventually left the country—but for the world. She is a brilliant woman. She helped put together OR Books’ recent moving collection of LGBT Russian narratives, Gay Propaganda.

Read the full essay at Gawker.

Salon excerpts FIGHTING FOR THE PRESS by James Goodale

Monday, February 24th, 2014

On Sunday June 13, 1971, a story was published on the front page of the New York Times under a three-column headline: “Vietnam Archive: Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” I thought it was the most boring headline I had ever read; no one would read this article.

It was the first installment of the series of articles that became known as the Pentagon Papers. When we published it, my colleagues at the Times and I had been expecting all hell to break loose. It was the first article in a planned series based on leaked Defense Department documents showing decades of deception and duplicity: how the American people had been misled about our involvement in Vietnam. But with this boring headline, I wondered if all our expectations of a huge explosion following publication would be wrong. All that day, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it didn’t.

Read the full excerpt at Salon.

MASHA GESSEN speaks to Immigration Equality about LGBT exile from Russia

Monday, February 24th, 2014

Watch the full stream of Asylum After Sochi on Youtube.

Gordon Lish will read from GOINGS this Thursday at McNally Jackson

Monday, February 24th, 2014

Widely acknowledged as perhaps the most influential editor since Maxwell Perkins, Gordon Lish has worked closely with Harold Brodkey, Don DeLillo, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Anne Carson, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Will Eno, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and others. But, as Delillo writes, Lish who may be ” famous for all the wrong reasons,” has also “written some of the most fascinating American fiction of the last ten years.” In the new story collection, Goings, Lish wrestles with memory, self-knowledge (or the lack of it), friendship, mothers, sons and lovers in language which leaps off the page as only Lish can make it.

See the full event listing at McNally Jackson.

Next Magazine interviews Joseph Huff-Hannon about GAY PROPAGANDA

Monday, February 24th, 2014

Reading Gay Propaganda feels like getting to know a bunch of new friends at an intimate dinner party, listening to the revealing sort of stories that give you a true sense of someone’s spirit—and Gessen and Huff-Hannon’s fine editing allows the unique personality of each person interviewed to shine through on the page. Particularly personable are the couples’ courtship narratives, capturing the “No, no, you tell it!” quality of every meet-cute tale.

Read the full piece at Next Magazine.

The Institute for Public Knowledge announces an event with CREDITOCRACY author Andrew Ross

Monday, February 24th, 2014

Ross contends that we are in the cruel grip of a creditocracy – where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and history shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage for the bulk of the population.

Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe, Ross argues, for a debtors’ movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North. After examining the varieties of lending that have contributed to the crisis, Ross suggests ways of lifting the burden of illegitimate debts from our backs. Creditocracy outlines the kind of alternative economy we need to replace a predatory debt-money system that only benefits the 1%.

Read the full posting at the Institute for Public Knowledge or attend the event March 13.

The New Yorker writes about GORDON LISH as a teacher

Monday, February 24th, 2014

Lish figured out how he wanted to run his workshop when he started teaching undergraduates at Yale in the early 1970s. He had just turned forty and had earned a reputation as a dynamic young fiction editor. One afternoon a week, he came from the Manhattan Esquire office full of a sense of power. He asked each student to read from her work but stopped her as soon as he lost interest; usually this was before she finished the first sentence. Then he took advantage of the silence to describe, in intensely eloquent monologues that could last hours, how to write work he would want to hear read aloud. “Remember, in reaching through your writing to a reader, you are engaged in nothing so much as an act of seduction,” former student Tetman Callis recalls him saying. “Seduce the whole fucking world for all time.”

Lish’s willingness to be bored and show it was one of his strengths as an instructor. He created a situation in which each student had to approach him, like a stranger at a party or a bar, to see if she could catch his attention. Lish shot down these nervous suitors one by one, not even bothering to hear out the pickup lines they fretted over. Then he shifted in an instant to a masculine role: talking endlessly, enacting his charisma, awing his listeners into submission.

Read the full piece at The New Yorker.

Chris Ruen speaks to Newsweek about an upcoming event and the consequences of FREELOADING

Thursday, February 20th, 2014

“I think a lot of people aren’t aware of the situation,” Ruen, who organized the event with Ribot, told Newsweek. “Those marginal payments that artists and session players are missing out on can make the difference between someone being able to continue their career, someone being able to live a life of dignity.”

Read the full story at Newsweek.

At PEN.org, JOSEPH HUFF-HANNON writes about the situation in Russia

Wednesday, February 19th, 2014

This past Friday, while Russia’s extravagantly produced Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony was broadcast worldwide, four activists in St. Petersburg were arrested and taken in to custody, as was their banner, which read, “Discrimination is incompatible with the Olympic movement.” That same evening while ballet dancers draped in glow in the dark costumes danced to Tchaikovsky in Sochi’s Olympic Stadium, ten more protestors in Moscow were arrested in Red Square for singing the national anthem and unfurling rainbow flags. The activists may well be charged with a low-level administrative offense (protesting without a permit,) but their late-night stand was clearly meant as a challenge to the country’s notorious new ban on “gay propaganda.”

For an authoritarian state, a law that is rarely, or only very selectively enforced, yet gives agents of the state broad leeway to police their citizens, and leads to wide-ranging changes in public and private behavior, is the best kind of law there is. Since it’s passage last June, only half a dozen people have actually been charged or tried for violating the vaguely worded ban—and perhaps that’s the point.

Read the full article at PEN.org.

GOINGS by Gordon Lish is given a starred review by Booklist

Wednesday, February 19th, 2014

The title is Goings, but readers will ask “Going where?,” at least initially. Those who relish a challenge can rely on Lish to offer literary surprises couched in experimental prose that demands concentration and patience. Delights hidden in this short book include rhythmic language, conversations that ring true to the age and experience of the characters, and, as the book progresses, the fun of wordplay, glorious puns, and generous references to scholars, writers, mythological beings, and intellectual geniuses.

Read the full review at Booklist.

GAY PROPAGANDA is featured on Towleroad

Wednesday, February 19th, 2014

Now a new book has been released, Gay Propaganda, edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, that serves as “a collection of stories, interviews and testimonials about the lives and loves of LGBT Russians living both in Russia and in exile today.” The project tells the “tales of long-term commitment, dating, and daily life—offer[ing] a timely and intimate window into the lives of Russians persecuted for who they love.”

Read the full post at Towleroad.

Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg covers artists’ tributes to ACORN

Friday, February 14th, 2014

“Before her encounter with John Lennon, Yoko Ono was an independent artist and pioneer: she made performance art long before the concept became common. In February, Yoko Ono celebrates her 81st Birthday and brings out a new book, a collection of instructions as poetic as they are absurd.”

Watch the full segment on Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg Mediathek.

Stories from GAY PROPAGANDA are shared by the PEN American Center

Friday, February 14th, 2014

As part of our Sochi Campaign feature, we set out to find the voices of the very people most affected by the recent laws enacted in Russia. What follows is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Gay Propaganda (OR Books), a collection of stories and testimonials, edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, that offer a glimpse into the lives, loves, and politics of LGBT Russians.

Read both excerpts at the PEN American Center: Sergei and Olga and Irina.

For Valentine’s Day, GLAAD shares stories from GAY PROPAGANDA

Friday, February 14th, 2014

The book Gay Propaganda, edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, provides a platform from which LGBT Russian voices can be heard. Gay Propaganda includes stories form gay couples raising their children, people living in exile to escape the anti-LGBT climate, advocates who have been arrested, and LGBT people from all walks of life.

Read both excerpts at GLAAD: Aleksandr and Ivan and Olga and Maria.

Melville House writes about “modern-day samizdat” in GAY PROPAGANDA

Friday, February 14th, 2014

More infamous, of course, is Russia’s 2013 law against “homosexual propaganda,” effectively banning all forms of speech in support of gay rights. Western media have extensively covered the law’s most obvious consequences—public demonstrations thwarted, activists arrested, LGBT people beaten and tortured—but equally important is the stultifying effect of the law on Russian culture, including literature. In fact, it has forced the reintroduction of a literary form presumed to have ended with the USSR: samizdat, the illegally self-published texts circulated surreptitiously by Soviet dissidents.

As with writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mikhail Bulgakov in the Soviet Union, LGBT writers in modern Russia have suddenly found themselves silenced, unable to write honestly or speak freely about their lives without breaking the law. Now some of these voices have been collected in a new book of stories and testimonials called Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories.

Read the full article at the Melville House blog.

JOHN OAKES talks to Hyperallergic about the future of St. Mark’s Bookshop

Thursday, February 13th, 2014

“There are too many good bookstores in Brooklyn,” Bob Contant said. Contant is one of two co-owners of St. Mark’s Bookshop, the embattled last independent bookstore standing in the East Village. He was explaining to me why he wouldn’t consider a move to what’s generally deemed New York’s most literary borough. “They don’t need another one. What we’ve always focused on in terms of subjects areas and specialties, it’s really in the East Village. We have an anarchist section, which most stores don’t. There’s still remnants of politics and poetry — we focus on both. There’s still a home for that here.”

But that home is in crisis, and has been for two and a half years. The problems began in the fall of 2011, when news spread that the bookstore — beloved for its literary and artistic offerings, which often leans towards the obscure, esoteric, and DIY — was struggling to pay its $20,000/month rent. The bookstore approached its landlord, Cooper Union, asking for a $5,000 reduction, but the school refused. A petition was circulated, garnering more than 44,000 signatures, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer stepped in to mediate. By the end of that year, St. Mark’s had a $5,000 monthly rent reduction and $7,500 in debt forgiven by the school. The bookstore, the literary community it represents, even Stringer, celebrated. “Every time we save a local bookstore we save a local community,” the borough president said at the time.

Read the full article at Hyperallergic.

Time Out features Gordon Lish’s reading of GOINGS at McNally Jackson

Wednesday, February 12th, 2014

While best known as a powerhouse editor who has championed authors ranging from Raymond Carver to Sam Lipsyte, Lish has written linguistically confrontational fiction throughout his career. This title is his first collection of entirely new tales in 16 years.

See the full post at Time Out New York.

JOSEPH HUFF-HANNON is interviewed by the Rumpus

Wednesday, February 12th, 2014

As the 2014 Sochi Olympics get underway, the biggest story is not any particular event. No perfect triple-axel or record-setting bobsled time will overshadow that which will define this Olympics in history as surely as John Carlos’s and Tommie Smith’s raised fists at the 1968 games in Mexico City.

Russia’s clownish anti-gay laws have sparked intimidation and violence against the country’s LGBT community and have put state-sanctioned homophobia in the global spotlight. But author and activist Joseph Huff-Hannon set out to write a book about the flip side of this story—true tales of gay and lesbian Russians at home and within the diaspora—and in an oral history reminiscent of Studs Terkel, Huff-Hannon and his co-editor, Masha Gessen (herself an out journalist who recently fled Russia and wrote about it for The Guardian last year), chronicle individual tales of this community. These are ordinary people living their lives as best they know how in unexpected and frightening circumstances.

Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories is absolutely illegal under the new Russian law, but it stands as a testament to the idea that the best defense against bigotry and narrow-mindedness is a good offense: take some humanity and shove it in your face. Huff-Hannon and Gessen hope to circulate the Russian-language version of the book within the country’s borders, and I recently spoke with Huff-Hannon about how he hopes this book can contribute to the resistance against Russia’s heightened homophobia.

Read the full interview at The Rumpus.

M Sarki reviews GOINGS by Gordon Lish

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

I have been heading to Florida since the day after last Christmas and have been gone there until just last week, just after January ended. I should have stayed put as the winter weather here in Louisville has been atrocious, to say the least. But I would have missed, wedged within the growing stack of my held mail, this nifty and pretty little book titled Goings. I am generally more than a bit amped to receive anything in my mail, and especially so when Gordon Lish’s name is on it. Seems the two of us do not speak as often as we used to, whether by phone or the subsequent years of regular correspondences we shared through the postal service mail. Gordon has not a machine such as the one I have here which sends information on a super highway he has yet to personally travel on. In other words, he does not use the internet.

Read the full review by M Sarki.

The New Yorker excerpts two stories from GAY PROPAGANDA

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

When we meet, Oleg pulls out a novel by journalist Artur Solomonov, which he says caused a fair share of controversy when published earlier this year in Russia. Its protagonist is an actor who falls in love with another actor. None of the major publishing houses would publish it. A small publisher finally picked it up, releasing the book with a disclaimer on the back cover: “This work does not contain homosexual propaganda and is not meant to offend people of faith.” Despite—or perhaps thanks to—the controversy, Oleg says the book is selling well.

…

I was born and grew up in Saratov, Russia. It’s a provincial town, built on a mix of old-fashioned Orthodox Christian values (which condemned homosexuality as a sin) and Soviet beliefs (when most people thought that homosexuality didn’t exist in the Soviet Society at all).

Read Oleg and Dmitriy‘s and Tatiana‘s stories at The New Yorker.

The Daily Californian reviews CYPHERPUNKS by Julian Assange

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

WikiLeaks mastermind Julian Assange explains the necessity of “A Call to Cryptographic Arms” in his book of international political philosophy, “Cypherpunks.” He defines cypherpunks as people who write and solve secret codes to help achieve sociopolitical change and do so because of the rising fear that in the near future “global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia.” Assange calls for a widespread adoption of cryptography, or the protective coding of language, in all of our online and telecommunications in order to defend what he sees as the three basic human freedom rights of physical mobility, free speech and and free economic interaction.

In the opening pages, Assange warns that “like sailors smelling the breeze, we rarely contemplate how our surface world is propped up from below by darkness.” In eloquent simile, Assange explains that through his personal experiences he has learned that our world is riddled with more censorship, surveillance and corruption than we can imagine. Much still lies in secret beneath the surface.

In an expository nonfictional dialogue, Assange engages in an intellectual discussion with WikiLeaks supporters and fellow cryptographers Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmermann. Over the course of “Cypherpunk’s” 150 pages, the four men analyze and interpret various political events such as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt from a progressive outlook. By structuring “Cypherpunks” in an endless-dialogue format, Assange evokes earlier philosophical works of the same structure such as philosopher George Berkeley’s “Three Dialogues.” The four cypherpunks explicate and support their ideas in a formal, informative manner and evoke the didactic prose style of philosophers, but with a modern technological twist.

Read the full review at The Daily Californian.

ROAR Magazine reviews Andrew Ross’ CREDITOCRACY

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

If the 2007-’08 financial crisis and its aftermath have shown us anything, it is that our economy is essentially a debt economy, one that grows, thrives, and benefits the few through the creation and extension of credit and, conversely, debt. A number of important books in the past few years have drawn attention to the various ways in which debt functions economically, politically, morally, and theologically in our global economy. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years and Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man come to mind.

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and veteran of the Occupy movement, makes a significant contribution to this literature with his recently published Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (OR Books, 2014). The bulk of Creditocracy provides a concise, polemical analysis of the various ways in which the creditor class preys upon the majority through the creation and maintenance of debt.

Read the full review at ROAR Magazine.

GAY PROPAGANDA is featured in Sabotage Reviews

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

The democratic credentials of Putin’s Russia have been getting shakier and shakier in recent years (cf. Pussy Riot). After the suppression of pro-democracy protests in 2013 and the Kremlin’s ongoing support for Syria’s President Assad, the last thing President Putin needs is a new law that crushes the basic freedoms of millions of his own people at the same time that Russia enters the global sporting spotlight.

Unfortunately, in June 2013, Russia passed a law banning the promotion of ‘non-traditional’ lifestyles and the implication that homosexual relationships have an equal footing with heterosexual (read ‘normal’) ones. While homosexuality remains legal, there are fewer and fewer protections against hate crimes, and greater implication that being gay is not ok.

As I sit writing this (in relative safety in Britain), tens of millions of people around the world are watching the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. There were some good bits with huge, floating Soviet heads and a ring that failed to open up. It’s traditional for Olympic Opening Ceremonies to celebrate the achievements and values of the host nation; you might remember London 2012′s Opening Ceremony celebrated the Industrial Revolution, the NHS, British film and Shakespeare. With a global audience, you want to put your best wares out on the market.

Read the full essay at Sabotage Reviews.

George Packer writes in The New Yorker about the OR BOOKS model and Amazon

Monday, February 10th, 2014

The answer seems self-evident, but there is a more skeptical view. Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. “Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.

Read the full article at The New Yorker.

GAY PROPAGANDA and Words Will Break Cement are reviewed in The Independent

Friday, February 7th, 2014

In 2006, while working as a news reporter, I was sent on a hare-brained assignment to Kazakhstan to find the “real-life” Borat, shortly after the release of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film. What were the chances of success?

Miraculously, I stumbled across a close approximation: a local TV celebrity in Almaty with big dreams who showered me with tourist trinkets from the airport shop and talked about breaking into television abroad. It was hard not to warm to his outlook – until he started talking about homosexuality. How “in the Soviet Union, it was a crime. We were told it was our duty to beat them. It is different now – we have at least three gay bars in Almaty…”

Judging from the true accounts in Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories, it seems as if Soviet bigotry is still ensconced in the Kremlin. Where Pussy Riot’s punk performances have shown what waves a high-octane protest can make, this book presents another way for state repression to be resisted: by telling one’s story and distributing it. Gay Propaganda is composed of verbatim love stories (not all with happy endings) spoken by gays, lesbians and transsexuals either living in Russia or emigres, not least the book’s co-editor, Masha Gessen, who left Russia after “Vitaly Milonov, the St Petersburg politician who was one of the main spokespeople for the ‘propaganda’ bill, told the country’s highest-circulation daily that Russian orphans needed to be saved from ‘perverted families like Masha Gessen’s’.”

Read the full article in The Independent.

The Quietus features an extract from GAY PROPAGANDA

Friday, February 7th, 2014

We met on a dating website. It was November 26, 2010.

Mikhail mentioned that he wasn’t ready to meet for dating or anything serious. But it was the same for me. I just had in mind meeting up to talk. Nothing serious. It was the pictures of his dogs that caught my eye. I remember I asked him about them, what kind of dogs they were, because I love dogs. That’s how the conversation started. I was working as an administrative assistant at the time, so I didn’t like going back and forth on email. All these long messages about nothing. So I asked him to meet.

Read the full extract at The Quietus.

JOSEPH HUFF-HANNON writes in the Guardian about LGBT activism and Sochi

Thursday, February 6th, 2014

The problem with trying to disappear people who refuse to disappear is that their stories find a way of getting told. That’s the case with Andrei Tanichev and Roman Kochagov, owners of a thriving gay friendly cabaret in Sochi. Andrei and Roman, along with dozens of other Russian LGBT men and women, opened up about their relationships in a new book publishing next week, in English and in Russian, called Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories. The book is edited by myself and award-winning Russian journalist Masha Gessen.

Read the full op-ed at the Guardian.

Inside Higher Ed posts an essay on CREDITOCRACY by Andrew Ross

Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

Whatever else it may signify, the brutal connotations of “debt” make forgiveness sound much more demanding and consequential than “trespass” would imply. (Awkward recollection: Learning the prayer as a little kid, I pictured God being unhappy that people were ignoring a sign on His lawn.)

Homo economicus never spent all that much time on moral accounting. But at least the old bourgeois virtues included restraint and a residual belief that self-interest was justified insofar as it served a larger good. The issues that concern Andrew Ross in his new book Creditocracy (discussed in last week’s column) unfold in a world where debt itself is a kind of demigod, answerable to no higher power of any kind — and certainly not to the state.

Read the full essay on Inside Higher Ed.

Douglas Rushkoff to lecture on PROGRAM OR BE PROGRAMMED on February 6

Monday, February 3rd, 2014

The debate over – whether the Net is good or bad for us fills both the airwaves and blogosphere. But for Rushkoff, the real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” explains Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

See the full event listing at the University of Lethbridge.

The New York Daily News writes about ex-pats’ role in the publication of GAY PROPAGANDA

Monday, February 3rd, 2014

Several members of Rusa LGBT contributed stories to a oral history book with the tongue-in-cheek title Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories, which is set to be published in Russian and English by OR Books and distributed underground in Russia with athletes, journalists and others heading to the Sochi games bringing copies.

Read the full piece at the New York Daily News.

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