Future TWO LINES Authors

Posted on June 06, 2011 by Scott Esposito

Some pretty exciting authors that will be appearing in the next volume of TWO LINES have been in the news lately.

First up is Gonçalo M Tavares, whose awesome Joseph Walser's Machine (no relation to Robert Walser) we'll be excerpting in TWO LINES. I'm a little partial since I picked this piece, but I've had the book's greatness confirmed by other people.

Tavares is interviewed in euronews on the subject of, what else, machines.

It’s only by having a man who thinks like a machine that we can understand that machines are violent, inhumane, cruel and destructive. Man and machine are not friends, contrary to what you might think. The machine is not man’s best friend, like the dog. The machine belongs to another world. It has no compassion. It does something or it does not do it. It is built just to do things and that is terrible. I think we have not yet fully understood machines. They have their world, they are not our dogs. They have their philosophy, their way of thinking. And their way of thinking is simply to act. Do not break down. Be effective.

The other author is the Russian Surrealist/absurdist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who is the subject of a very nice essay by Adam Thirlwell in the current New York Review.

In 1924 a collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, Fairy Tales for Wunderkinder, was accepted for publication, but the publishing house went bankrupt before the book came out. And so begins the sad history of Krzhizhanovsky’s impossible publications. In 1928 and 1929 he wrote more stories, a screenplay, and a play. None of these appeared in public. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party created the Union of Soviet Writers, with Maxim Gorky appointed the first chairman. In the same year, Gorky stated that stories like Krzhizhanovsky’s “would hardly find a publisher,” and if they did, and managed to “dislocate a few young minds,” he added, would this really be desirable?

In effect, his opinion made Krzhizhanovsky definitively unpublishable. The next year, Krzhizhanovsky’s Academia edition of Shakespeare was canceled. In 1934, another play, The Priest and the Lieutenant, went unstaged. A collection of stories that was provisionally accepted by the State Publishing House was stopped by the censors . . .

And that makes us all the prouder to be publishing him, even if no one can pronounce his last name.