Review
More true to life in its set of preoccupations than many a 'realist' novel or plotted memoir can ever become.... From Old Notebooks is a charm, a goad, an anti-masterpiece of an anti-novel -- a work of art that's easy to enter, and hard to put down. --Stephen Burt, Rain Taxi
Truly remarkable.... This startling, insightful compendium reminds us what literature is in its endless, mutating forms. --TriQuarterly
A genius enterprise. --The Southeast Review
A manic, hilarious, intense vision that makes it so singular it s almost its own genre. --Blake Butler, HTMLGIANT
This work changes the art of the book and challenges what it means to write and read, to live and tell a story. --Prick of the Spindle
Evan Lavender-Smith reveals what other writers, especially first-timers, try to hide.... He makes us shudder and swoon. --The Rumpus
Finally a conceptual art that is thoroughly literary. --Charles Altieri, author of The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects
The great tradition of modern philosophy and letters, from Nietzsche and Artaud to Deleuze and Houellebecq, has taught us this much: maintaining the old grammars, figures and style of humanist narrative will never allow us to think. While sustaining a beauty of textual expression Lavender-Smith has nevertheless created a new genre of literature and a new mode and style of thought. This work is at once intellectually compelling and creatively breathtaking. This is a book to be read slowly, carefully and with thoughtful pleasure. --Claire Colebrook, author of Milton, Evil and Literary History
Like an atonal musical composition, Evan Lavender-Smith's suite of fractured annotations scores a symphony of wonder one abridged but baying note at a time. This is pointillism on point -- both the static of the infinite spaces between the stars and the salt and pepper snow spilling from a deranged cathode ray tube on fire. You don't so much read the book as absorb the scintillating ecstatic pulsing radiation. --Michael Martone, author of Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List
Scenes, plots for possible stories and novels. Whimsical, fearful, lusty, philosophical, and scatological notes on books, moods, dreams, domestic events. Carrying this book around, the reader will look into it from time to time to jiggle quiescent corners of the brain. --Alphonso Lingis, author of The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
Unapologetically honest, dazzling introspective, meticulous and charming. Evan Lavender-Smith's From Old Notebooks presents us with both the minutiae and macrutiae of a lived life -- both the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the miraculous -- and interrogates genre so as to interrogate why we live and why we die. His writing commands us to eavesdrop, and we do so ravenously. --Jenny Boully, author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings
This is not 'stream of consciousness,' this is jet stream of consciousness. The mind above itself looking into itself, into fantasy, imagination, longing, and fear as if from a great and bemused but wary distance. If, as Baudelaire has written, the philosopher is the one who has 'acquired by habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego,' then Evan Lavender-Smith is that philosopher -- writing with an intense wit, an open vulnerability, and an intricately layered intelligence -- layered like a cake and layered like a Dantean vision: sweet, rich, terrifying, demonic. An outrageously smart and seriously playful/prayerful book. Read it. --Julie Carr, author of 100 Notes on Violence
From Old Notebooks is not only about stories, or even about writing stories -- it is writing itself, or rather, it is writing being re-written before our eyes. Here everything changes: what counts as writing, thinking, and a 'book.' And its readers don t simply read From Old Notebooks -- they become part of this change as well. It is very rarely that such things occur. --John Mullarkey, author of Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline
If Italo Calvino and Kathy Acker had a literary bastard child, then Evan Lavender-Smith would no doubt be that person. From Old Notebooks is by turns a gentle, almost wistful meander through the twists and turns of memory and a violent poke in the eye of literary and critical conventions. It is beautiful, provocative and seductive. --Ian Buchanan, author of The Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory
Any of the concepts gestured at herein, if executed, would make an awesome book-project. This compendium of potentiality, laced through with Eros and Thanatos and Knee-Slappers, is all we will ever need, ever again. --Rebecca Wolff, author of Manderley
A genius enterprise. --The Southeast Review
About the Author
Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of FROM OLD NOTEBOOKS (BlazeVOX, 2010) and the forthcoming AVATAR (Six Gallery Press, 2010). He is Editor-in-Chief of Noemi Press and the Prose and Drama Editor of the literary journal PUERTO DEL SOL. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and criticism appears in many journals and magazines, including COLORADO REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, FENCE, GLIMMER TRAIN, MEMORIOUS, THE MODERN REVIEW, and POST ROAD.
