Press/Media
The Pedestal Magazine
“[The Evolutionary Revolution] will never let you settle into comfortable understanding…of its story, characters, even language itself. Overlapping genres constantly, Hoang wittily glides from fable to myth, from novel to intermittent stabs at something like personal essays […]”
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3:AM Magazine
Interview with Chris Kraus: new projects, sci-fi, and nuclear waste. Read full interview
Another Righteous Transfer!
Not Content: Performance 2
“Not Content, an exhibition of sorts curated by Les Figues Press and currently taking place at LACE, brings together an international group of writers-in-residence to investigate the shifting functions of language in private and public spheres. Performance 2 represented a sort of culmination of three text-based visual projects that had been developing within the gallery space, all with the input of visitors.”
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August 2010, New Pages
“This is one of The Evolutionary Revolution’s greatest strengths: the rich yet subtle characterizations and interactions twist in ways exotic and unexpected. I simply could not put the book down, beginning to form a very strong bond with these characters and the fate of their world(s).”
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July 2010, Bookslut
“There are so many possibilities in The Evolutionary Revolution — choices that provide the reader with adventurous scenarios, concocting piece by piece a sense of renewal and strength upon finishing the text. Hoang brands complex, coiled fable into memory with ease.”
Read full review
Examiner, Los Angeles
Interview with Vanessa Place: writing La Medusa, new projects with Les Figues Press, and the literary scene in LA. Interview by Dan Godston. Read full interview
June 2010, decomP: a literary magazine
[re: Not Blessed] “Such repetition picks up speed at points, and there is the teasing hint of breakthrough, rupture, represented in another repeating tale, a fragment of a story about a hunter who, returning to his family’s home, strides straight through the living room’s picture window.”
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June 2010, NewPages
“The best writers tell the same story over and over again. In his new book, Harold Abramowitz takes this idea to an extreme. Not Blessed consists of 28 chapters, each between two and three pages in length. Each chapter in this slim volume tells the same story: A boy wanders from his grandmother’s house, gets lost in the woods, and is rescued by a policeman.
Read full review
April 2010, eugene lim’s reading diary
[re: Not Blessed] “but even more interesting, more mysterious — and certainly constructing a delicate and beautiful linguistic hermitage — are each chapter’s introductory flourishes of direct address. these seem to situate the text’s ambitions but end up just dancing (which could amount to the same thing) and demonstrate a rare control somewhat reminiscent of blanchot.
Read full post
April 2010, Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi
“The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues) a ‘feminine feral’ book as a Naropa graduate student, Janna Plant, wrote to me today, towards: genre, an independent study come Fall, what Les Figues is doing[?] I’ve been reading it on a dark, spring-time, rainy afternoon, with the off-dazzle that comes from having said the word “mermen” aloud earlier in the day, and, in another context, “mermaid,”
Read Bhanu Kapil’s full post
April 2010, Ms Magazine Blog
“Feminaissance, a new anthology of women’s experimental essays, poetry and fiction, includes the work of renowned Los Angeles African American poet Wanda Coleman. I had a chance to speak with her recently about her writing and her feminism.”
Read full article
April 2010, Flatmancrooked
Babyfucker listed in The Big Secret: 10 Indie-Publishers and 10 books You Might Not Have Heard of For All The Wrong Reasons by Elijah Jenkins. Read
March 2010, Huffington Post
“Even if you don’t give a fig about literary games involving complex mathematics, reading through these arguments, experiments, successes and colossal failures will remind you that a vibrant literary culture exists in America—it’s just thankfully too weird and unmarketable for the New York Times Book Review. This book [The Noulipian Analects] is inspiration information, pure potential, the type of book you want to keep on hand for the times of writing block and blank, so you can have a laugh and begin again on the serious joke of literature.”
Read full review
Spring 2010, ThePedestalMagazine.com
“Paul Hoover’s Sonnet 56 is a provocative and smart book with a wicked sense of humor and a deep concern for the subtleties of language that manifest poetry.”
read full review
Spring 2010, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“‘I fuck babies,’ is how he introduces himself, and perhaps those with weak constitutions will venture no further. To stop there, however, is to let your scruples deprive you of a severe and ugly gem; and while I would hate to diminish the shock value of the book, let’s be clear: There is no babyfucking here…”
Find in RCF
December 2009, Mó-lós-sús
“From JBAD is a skeleton journey through a traveler’s Jalalabad, an eery and suggestive contribution toward Adair’s project goal. It’s a worthwhile if unconventional book.”
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December 2009, Mó-lós-sús
“[Sonnet 56] manages to question the naturalness and inevitability of free verse in the most elegant mode of criticism, art itself.”
Read full review
November 2009, bad texas blog
“Adair’s book seems to be a perfect example of what Carrión is talking about. A book that does not need to be read word for word, a book that can be skimmed, whose conceptual project is more important that the actual words on the page.
Read full review
September 2009, Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Art
Article on independent bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown features photo of Dies: A Sentence.
Link to article
Review of Contemporary Fiction
A. D. Jameson reviews Amina Cain’s I Go To Some Hollow
“We need more writing like this.”
Read full review
August 2009, Green Integer Blog
Tom La Farge reviews The /n/oulipian Analects
“This is a collection well worth having for showing the range of directions in which constraints and experimentalism in general can throw writing and the range of types of reading these can demand.”
Read full review
Review of Contemporary Fiction
Brian Evenson reviews Axel Thormählen’s A Happy Man and Other Stories
“Axel Thormählen, a German writer who lives in Sweden and translates from Swedish to German, writes carefully constructed, almost peaceful sentences that feel at once natural and weightless; the resulting stories have an effortlessness to them that belies the sometimes profound meditations lodged just below their seemingly straightforward surfaces.”
Read full review
July 2009, BR Footnote
Entry and response regarding Sophie Robinson’s a
Read full text here
June 2009, Bookslut
Reviews for Amina Cain’s I Go To Some Hollow
“Don’t be surprised if you’re carrying this book around with you for a while. It has a way of wanting to accompany your own daily rituals. It has a way of expecting something from you.” Read full review from Bookslut
May 2009, Time Out Chicago
“There’s something calmly erotic about Cain’s writing, a treatment of sex as both a source of energy and a supremely unfascinating part of life…Even in the rhythm of the writing, there’s an ebb and flow of temperance and indulgence.” Read full review from Time Out Chicago
May 2009, The Brooklyn Rail
“From [Cain’s voice] we gain insight into the experience…where place matters less than feeling and connecting to others is all about disconnecting from others. There is distance here, which is Cain’s point.” Read the full review from The Brooklyn Rail
May 2009, Pop Matters
“Cain’s stories…include occasional bright flashes of beautiful phrasing, her prose…offers a chilly, plainlyspoken elegance…”
Read full review from Pop Matters
May 2009, The Believer
“…the dominant mood is this sense of wonder, shot through with nervousness. Amina Cain’s travelers view their surroundings with a curious emptiness, other times ecstasy, while adrift either abroad or in a distinctly American terrain: bodies of water, fields, or forests, the banality of a heated pool or the aisles of Home Depot.” Read full review from The Believer
May 2009, The Pedestal Magazine
“[Cain] is much like a fast expressionist painter who employs color and texture, letting the viewer decide what the painting reveals. Ultimately these stories highlight the distance that occurs in any relationship and how, within quiet moments, people can transcend this coldness, finding the sublime within an awkward state.” Read full review from The Pedestal Magazine
Spring 2009, Rain Taxi
“The recursive speaker in Amina Cain’s body of stories I Go To Some Hollow, a deliciously intelligent and subtle spark of a book, moves through scenes and landscapes in which the event that might ordinarily catalyze a short story’s forward motion has on some level already happened—or isn’t, at any rate, more important than anything else.” Link to Miranda Mellis’s review
Feb/Mar 2009, Diagram 9.1
Scott Butterfield reviews A Fixed, Formal Arrangement
“The rewards are not to be underestimated.” Read
February 2009, Audiatur
Brian Kim Stefans reviews re: evolution
“Her lyrical “I” is never quite not Kim Rosenfield, carnival barker and perfume saleswoman, and yet – pinched from different sources – it is Kim-inflected general, abstracted “I” (an amalgam of “I”s created through strategic eaves-dropping) that lifts her work above mere solipsism.” Read full review
February 2009, The Pedestal Magazine
Reviews Three Titles by Les Figues Press
“A Fixed, Formal Arrangement and re: evolution come from the 2008 TrenchArt installment, called The Tracer Series. God’s Livestock Policy comes from the previous series, The Parapet Series.” Read review
February 2009, The Short Review
Interview with Axel Thormählen
“Every story calls for a different process of maturity.”
Read interview
Read review
Voice of Ice wins 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems
Congratulations to Alta Ifland, whose book Voice of Ice / Voix de Glace has been selected as the 2008 winner of the Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems.
The Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems is awarded each year for a collection of prose poems written in French. Selected by an eleven-member jury, it is a French prize awarded to a Francophone writer of any nationality. Voice of Ice / Voix de Glace will be added to the collection of previous award-winning titles, housed at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.
December 2008, Bookslut
Reviews A Fixed, Formal Arrangement by Allison Carter.
“It’s best to be frank with one another, you and this text, if you want to get to the meat of it..”
Read full review
Nov/Dec 2008, American Book Review
Reviews The nOulpian Analects edited by Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener
“Fetchingly bound in a hot-pink and burnt-orange checkered Ouchi optical illusion, teh cover of The nOulipian Analects indicates that from cover to conception to content, this is no ordinary book.”
See issue
November 2008, Bookslut
Reviews A Happy Man and Other Stories by Axel Thormählen.
“One of many to-be-desired releases in Les Figues’ TrenchArt: Parapet Series (among others such as I Go to Some Hollow by Amina Cain [sic] and God’s Livestock Policy by Stan Apps), this special compilation of nine well-crafted short stories by German author Axel Thormählen exceeds any careful reader’s expectations…” Read full review
September/October 2008, American Book Review
American Book Review launches its “Scenes” column with an article on Les Figues: “The TrenchArt series is a unique publishing model in that it makes experimental work more…” [PDF of full article — coming soon!]
American Book Review
September/October 2008, Bookforum
Lists Kim Rosenfield’s re: evolution as a forthcoming October release. Look on page 5, under “Miscellaneous.”
Bookforum
August 2008, Book Club
Reviews A Happy Man and Other Stories by Axel Thormählen
Read
July 2008, Pop Matters
Reviews A Happy Man and Other Stories by Axel Thormählen
Read
July 2008, KPFK
Indy Media On The Air: Focus: Small / Independent Presses
featuring Les Figues Press, Arktoi Books, and Akashic Books
Listen
Summer 2008, Skylight Books Blog
on A Happy Man and Other Stories by Axel Thormählen
Read My Encounter with A Happy Man
Summer 2008, BOMB
Editor’s Choice: The /n/oulipian Analects
“An array of strong voice, Analects is itself a constrained composition.”
In this issue
Summer 2008, The Pedestal Magazine
Reviews Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland
“Ifland travels the entire spectrum from birth to death, and does it with fine language, imagery, philosophy, and a thorough sense of her life and the lives of others.” Read
May 2008, The Great American Pinup
on The /n/oulipian Analects
“Often exploring the role of gender in shaping the Oulipo canon, the essays in this anthology suggest new possibilities for diversifying and democratizing the constraint-based writing…”
Read:http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2008/05/noulipian-analects.html
April 2008, Lemonhound
On Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place
“Not since The Waves have I been compelled to read an experimental novel through. Not just to appreciate the concept but to actually read it through…” Read
April 2008, Carp(e) Libras
Reviews Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland
“[Ifland’s] made a beauty of what we have all struggled to understand about ourselves, trying to figure out where we fit into this very imperfect world.” Read
March 2008, Gertrude’s Basket
Les Figues = Monstrous Women of the Avant-Garde
March 2008, Giver
On God’s Livestock Policy by Stan Apps. Read
February 2008, Pantaloons
On God’s Livestock Policy by Stan Apps. Read
January 2008, Feminist Review
On +|‘me’S-pace by Christine Wertheim
Read
November 2007, LA City Beat
Michael Silverblatt of NPR’s Bookworm highlights Les Figues Press as one of three LA presses publishing interesting fiction and poetry in this interview in LA City Beat. Read
November 2007, The Agony Column Book Reviews and Commentary Read
“Ifland describes her work as prose poems, although these days they might be tagged as “flash fiction.” Forget the label; the work is dark, rather frightening and very surreal. “Drinking Oblivion”, “The Louse” and “The cat, the mouse and the Merlot” seem to coalesce out of nightmare into the written word.”
November 2007, Dust Jacket Review Read
“The book, a side-by-side French/English publication of prose poems and their translations, found a ready audience of high expectations. I was not disappointed. For the past few months I’ve been looking for a book that I, in my cynical attitude toward the publishing industry, thought could not find a publisher smart enough to put it to press.”
November 2007, Beyond Baroque
Photos of event featuring Adair, Taylor, Wertheim and Ifland
View
November 2007, The Brooklyn Rail
Review of Wertheim’s +|‘me’S-pace Read
“+|’me’S-pace’s task is to unravel language before our eyes. It is the first in a series of CalArts feminist/critical studies teacher Christine Wertheim’s open notebook investigations of the atomic elements of language…”
October 2007, Ifland’s Voice of Ice — SPD October Bestseller
Congratulations to Alta Ifland, whose book, Voice of Ice (Voix de Glace), is a Small Press Distribution October poetry bestseller. See the complete list here
Summer 2007, How2
Review of Inch Aeons by Nuala Archer. Read
“Using forms of Haiku, Archer balances themes of time, distance, and consciousness with those of unity and fragmentation, whether in solar systems, or in the human psyche. The mind mimics the planet, the planet mimics the mind. In ‘In That Grainy Lapse,’ the internal is a reflection of the external and the external, then, is reflected back inward: ‘In that grainy Lapse/The Catastrophe-the slow/No-End of Cooling‘” (p. 7 ).
June 2007, BLEED
Interviews Vanessa Place, Sissy Boyd, Teresa Carmody
View
April 2007, Fruitful
Gayle Brandeis interviews Jennifer Calkins. Read
March 2007, Publisher’s Weekly
“Indies Group at AWP Meet” — showcasing Les Figues’ unique model. Read
March 2007, Andi Lit
Review of Requeim by Teresa Carmody. Read
February 2007, L.A. Lit
L.A. Lit interviews Vanessa Place. Listen
Jan/Feb 2007, American Book Review
Review Inch Aeons by Nuala Archer
“There’s a tough, tart brightness to the poems in the collection, consisting entirely of haiku” Link
December 2006, Good Magazine
Michael Silverblatt recommends books by Les Figues and other independent publishers. Read
November 2006, L.A. Lit
L.A. Lit interviews Teresa Carmody. Listen
August 2006, The Compulsive Reader
Review: of Inch Aeons by Nuala Archer
“The capricious capitalization and the pell-mell and dizzy flight of these expressions create new and improbable beings of considerable splendor. In all her work, however concealed may be her meanings, there is a constant search for precise form on a plane of being that did not before exist.”
August 2006, The Compulsive Reader
Review: of A Story of Witchery by Jennifer Calkins
“To set words down and to take exceeding care of which words to use and how to place them is an activity that requires bravery and endurance of heroic proportions.”
July/August 2006: American Book Review
Review: Requiem by Teresa Carmody
“Like the difficult and necessary theological propositions embedded within the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, Requiem suggests that perhaps, in the end, all we can do is see until we can’t anymore. Carmody’s darkly poignant illustration of this advocates that seeing—despite our fears, limitations, and distractions—may be one of love’s most sincere gestures.”
April 1—April 29: Poets House Showcase
Les Figues Press participates in the Poets House showcase
2 Spring Street, Second Floor | New York, N.Y. 10012
Admission Free
March/April 2006: American Book Review
Review: Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place
“…one comma leads to another in this delightful tour de force of a hopelessly grim predicament.”
March 2, 2006: Too Beautiful, the blog
What Are You Working On?
Mark Pritchard Interviews Teresa Carmody
February 22, 2006: Too Beautiful, the blog
What Are You Working On?
Mark Pritchard Interviews Vanessa Place
Series: Writers on their works in progress
February 16, 2006: Seattle, WA
OseaO, Worldwide Internet Radio
A Leg To Stand On: A reading of new work
Recorded reading of Jennifer Calkins, Pam Ore and Stokley Towles
February 3, 2006: The Great American Pinup
Review: Pam Ore’s Grammar of the Cage
“How does one write about an imperfect world, a sick and tired and poisoned world that sets up numerous cages for its inhabitants? Indeed,…”
January 2006, The Compulsive Reader
Review: of Grammar of the Cage by Pam Ore
“There is variety. The bane of many chapbooks is a relentless sameness of tone. Ore in ‘Pop Quiz’ invites the reader to join her in play, to see…”
October 28, 2005: Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA
[Article on Noulipo Conference at Redcat, with LFP author Vanessa Place]
“When the professionals get to playing with constraints, however, the going gets considerably weirder. For instance, a 117-page book that consists of a single sentence, which occurs in the mind of a critically wounded World War I soldier. That’s ‘Dies: A Sentence,’ published in July by Los Angeles writer Vanessa Place.”
October 20, 2005: The Olympian, Olympia, WA
Small books, big ideas
“If poetry and zoology seem an unlikely combination, you haven’t met Olympia poet Pam Ore…”
October 3, 2005: Los Angeles, CA
Dies: A Sentence selected by KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt as an October Bookworm Library Title.
September 7, 2005: Stockport, UK
Across the Atlantic and onto ReadySteadyBook
August 10, 2005: Portland, Oregon
An Interview with the Women of Les Figues Press
Invisible Insurrection interviewed the women behind Les Figues, calling Les Figuges “one of the most original, inspired, and coherent visions for a small literary press we have seen in recent years. Please do investigate their website and subscribe. The books are beautiful and thought provoking, especially for…”