Kenning Editions is pleased to announce the publication of Insomnia and the Aunt, by Tan Lin.

Insomnia and the Aunt, by Tan Lin. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. Art. Asian American Studies. Tan Lin’s INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT is an ambient novel composed of black and white photographs, postcards, Google reverse searches, letters, appendices, an index to an imaginary novel, reruns, and footnotes. The aunt in question can’t sleep. She runs a motel in the Pacific Northwest. She likes watching Conan O’Brien late at night. She may be the narrator’s aunt or she may be an emanation of a TV set. Structured like everybody’s scrapbook, and blending fiction with nonfictional events, INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT is about identities taken and given up, and about the passions of an immigrant life, rebroadcast as furniture. Ostensibly about a young man’s disintegrating memory of his most fascinating relative, or potentially a conceptualist take on immigrant literature, it is probably just a treatment for a prime-time event that, because no one sleeps in motels, lasts into the late night and daytime slots.

Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, Ambience is a Novel with a Logo, Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) and 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010). His work has appeared in numerous journals including Conjunctions, Artforum, Cabinet, New York Times Book Review, Art in America, and Purple. His video, theatrical and LCD work have been shown at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Yale Art Museum, Sophienholm Museum (Copenhagen), Ontological Hysterical Theatre, and as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Soundcheck Series. Lin is the recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book-length study of the writings of Andy Warhol. He has taught at the University of Virginia and Cal Arts, and currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University. He has just completed a sampled novel, entitled Our Feelings Were Made by Hand

.

ISBN: 9780976736479. 44 pp. Saddle-stitched chapbook w/ limited edition letterpressed wraps designed and printed by Rebecca Cooling-Mallard.

$10.00 from Small Press Distribution, or enjoy a discount by subscribing to Kenning Editions. The new direct mail subscription offer allows you to choose any three titles, with free domestic shipping, at a substantial discount. The book can also be purchased directly from the press, via 2co, using your credit card.

Order from Small Press Distribution (always in stock).

Order from Amazon.com (periodically in stock).

Kenning Editions proudly announces the publication of the second collection by Jesse Seldess, LEFT HAVING.

Brian Massumi once wrote that the conscious narration of affective states is subtractive, a retrospective reduction of underlying bodily complexity made to fit requirements of continuity and linear causality. Sliding away from the “continuities” of foreclosed presents and enfolded pasts, Jesse Seldess’ Left Having might be read as a non-subtractive exploration of the virtual remainders of such narrations (of historical trauma, of the time of events, of a person now present in a city or a room…). Seldess resituates us “Beyond the scattered signaling” of history – in pulse rates that flow through and across their own fractures and stalls – so we can hear the “Distance just now reaching us.” These signalings (with gracefully decaying half tones in them) evoke both the familiarity and strangeness of durational life. As in the epigraph to the book taken from Alvin Lucier’s famous work (in which he records his own “disfluent” speech, playing it back into the room and re-recording it repeatedly), what can finally be heard in Seldess’ writing are the resonant frequencies of the architecture itself. That architecture’s “End” (of which Seldess has also produced a video with artist Leonie Weber) is always ending but never done, because it turns back into itself (through us) toward something…else.–Laura Elrick

One sees lines coming into being going out of existence.  Taken that way, the words turning toward lines, seeing them become one another as they differ among themselves and dissipate into words and as spaces, this reader virtually floats and within this active resting state practices an incredible intimacy with the unknown in communication and in sharing an imminent sensate awareness with its language.  Jesse Seldess’s work performs this book, honoring and taking full advantage of its occasion to replace any knowing with the certainty of a relentlessly generous nature.  I will never get to the bottom of it, and this work demonstrates what a pleasure and what an honest reckoning that can be.–Steve Benson

Left Having is a virtuoso performance of contending forces: subject and object, I and you, the will behind utterance and the will of utterance itself. In these deftly musical poems, language (object) turns into subject, always escaping the speaker’s will. Seldess takes us on a highly pleasurable journey into the materiality of semes, but behind the pleasure lies an urgency: how a hair’s-breadth difference between two words can translate to chasms of difference in meaning. What if the word were liable, what if it were reliable? The slipperiness of the signifier in Seldess’s inquiry into the conditional questions the very routes that events take to unfold. The brilliant final section is an investigation into the intersection of deixis and time, the certainty implied by pointing thwarted constantly by the delay in finding the word—the act of writing’s inherent deixis questioned, challenged. In Left Having, Jesse Seldess has given us a magnificent meditation on utterance itself.–Donna Stonecipher

$14.95 from Small Press Distribution, or enjoy a discount by subscribing to Kenning Editions. The new direct mail subscription offer allows you to choose any three titles, with free domestic shipping, at a substantial discount. The book can also be purchased directly from the press, via 2co, using your credit card.

Jesse Seldess is the author of LEFT HAVING (Kenning Editions, 2011) WHO OPENS (Kenning Editions, 2006), and numerous chapbooks. He lives and works in New York, where he edits and publishes the acclaimed international journal of writing and music Antennae.

ISBN: 9780976736486 / Binding: PAPERBACK / Price: $14.95 / Pages: 112

www.kenningeditions.com
www.spdbooks.org

Kenning Editions proudly announces the publication of the long-awaited second novel by Pamela Lu, AMBIENT PARKING LOT.

Part fiction, part earnest mockumentary, Ambient Parking Lot follows a band of musicians as they wander the parking structures of urban downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise, one that promises to embody their historical moment and deliver them up to the heights of their self-important artistry. Along the way, they make sporadic forays into lyric while contending with doubts, delusions, miscalculations, mutinies, and minor triumphs. This saga peers into the wreckage of a post 9/11 landscape and embraces the comedy and poignancy of failed utopia.

$14.95 from Small Press Distribution, or enjoy a discount by subscribing to Kenning Editions. The new direct mail subscription offer allows you to choose any three titles, with free domestic shipping, at a substantial discount. You can subscribe by credit card to receive The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater and Ambient Parking Lot for a steep discount, too. If you prefer, Amazon should have it in stock. We encourage you to support you local, independent bookseller with a purchase, and to request your local public and academic libraries acquire a copy themselves!

Portions of Ambient Parking Lot were previously published in Chicago Review and Harper’s. She is also the author of Pamela: A Novel and The Private Listener, a chapbook from Corollary Press. Pamela: A Novel is on the decade’s bestsellers list from Small Press Distribution, and has been taught in a number of literature and creative writing classes. Her writing also appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error, and has been published in periodicals such as 1913, Antennae, Call, Chain, and Fascicle. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

On Pamela Lu’s previous novel—“Pamela: A Novel is one of the finest books to emerge from the ardent, experimental writing scene in the Bay Area . . . Lu builds a social space and founds a society.”—The Stranger “Reading the word ‘I’ in this novel becomes a mystical experience—an invitation to connect to the ‘I’ in all of us . . . This is a work of ‘precision,’ as Robert Musil would say, ‘in matters of the soul.’ It extends the novel’s capacity to think.”—Rain Taxi Review of Books “Lu, in her debut, . . . [creates] a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions . . . This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself.”—Publishers Weekly

ISBN: 9780976736431 binding: PAPERBACK 200pp.

www.kenningeditions.com
www.spdbooks.org