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Posts tagged The Suburban Swindle
New review at Literary Kicks
Sep 5th
Mikael Covey reviews The Suburban Swindle for Lit Kicks:
“These are power words that Jackie Corley writes. Come screaming atcha from inside your head, a white hot poker stuck in your mind’s eye. Emotion raw and real, honest as it gets. … Words as emotions transcending literal meaning to an inner storm of feeling. Where it hurts, or where there is love, lust, desire, longing. A bursting forth of the moment, the augenblink. All of that, being young and feeling old. Feeling all of it slip sliding away like quicksand, and drowning in our own unfulfilled needs.”
New reviews
May 9th
Hipster Book Club on Nick Antosca’s Midnight Picnic:
“This might be the scariest thing about the book, the essential thing that all scary books need: the conviction that, for as long as you are reading the story, the world is inescapably dark, and all one’s experiences that would say otherwise are simply tricks or misunderstandings. The feeling of relief on putting the book down after its satisfying ending—of seeing that it’s light out and your loved ones are alive—is followed by a nagging feeling that one has missed something. There might be dead people right in front of the reader’s face, in a space stained by trauma.”
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P.H. Madore reviews The Suburban Swindle:
“These are stories which even Bruce Springsteen wouldn’t want to tell. Mostly gritty and realist: the kind of stories I love. Corley flexes some real descriptive power… Yes, The Suburban Swindle is full of the stories of street punks and noir beauties–probably the stuff of real New Jersey, not the New Jersey I’ve seen on television. I don’t know. I just know that I liked the way she painted her youthful characters and did this without apology.”
One of the first times P.H. Madore emailed me was to say that some of Word Riot’s design was lame and that I should take down the animated GIF ads I had up. That got my attention. I don’t get insulting emails very often or if I do they’re just lame and emotional and don’t have a point. I thought P.H. had balls to say that, and he was right. I took down the crappy ads.
I was nervous when I saw on Goodreads that Madore was reading The Suburban Swindle. I knew if he thought it sucked he wouldn’t have qualms about saying so. I’m glad he liked the collection.
Review at <HTMLGIANT>
Mar 22nd
<HTMLGIANT>‘s pr reviewed The Suburban Swindle on Friday:
“And here is the key to the brilliance of this collection; there is God in these people, even if it’s hidden deep and swathed in pain and ugliness and carelessness. These are stories that don’t shy away from anything: the realities of class, the pain of love and the simmering violence in all of us. Corley’s evenness of tone truly astonishes. She shows a impressive, sustained effort and does justice to words and humans. And regardless of squalor and suffering, Corley insists that our lives have meaning, have true and astonishing beauty, and our time on earth, even in New Jersey, is profoundly precious. This is soulful stuff. Read it.”
Aw schucks
Dec 23rd
decomP Editor-in-Chief Jason Jordan named The Suburban Swindle the best collection of 2008.
I got to meet Jason in Pittsburgh last week. Great dude. He reminded me a lot of the guys I used to hang out with in high school. I’ve had Powering the Devil’s Circus on my shelf for far too long. (It’s my next read. I stumbled into Don Quixote and am just starting to stumble my way out. I loves me some fat books.)
Many things
Dec 22nd
Shome Dasgupta wrote an incredibly kind review about The Suburban Swindle for the footnote.
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Pittsburgh turned out to be a far more vibrant town than I had expected. The drive there and back was kind of hell, if hell was a really, really long turnpike. The central Pa. landscape was pretty damn mountainous and beautiful. Should have brought a camera. I got exhausted driving back Thursday morning and pulled into a rest stop to take a nap in the back of my car. The backseat of my hatchback Yaris was surprisingly roomy and comfortable. I can’t remember the last time I fell asleep that quickly in a car.
Thanks so much for the folks who turned out in the cold for the Pittsburgh reading. And thanks to Savannah Schroll Guz and her husband, Michael, for being so incredibly hospitable.
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Nick Antosca’s MIDNIGHT PICNIC is now available in Kindle edition.
I want to make it available for iPhones and iPod touches but I haven’t found an eBook generating software that produces a good-looking product. (Amazon makes it pretty easy to format books on their site for Kindle, which is helpful.) Anyone have any advice for producing eBooks to sell on iPods?
Reading in Pittsburgh on Dec. 17
Dec 12th
The New Yinzer presents… Reading Series
Jessica Fenlon (poetry), Jackie Corley (fiction) and Lottery Puffs (music)
Wednesday, Dec. 17 at 8 p.m.
Modernformations Gallery
4919 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA
Write-up in The Reading Experience
Oct 27th
Daniel Green wrote a pretty lengthy post on The Suburban Swindle:
“One might say that the ‘radical exclusion’ manifest in these stories goes beyond the implicit narrowing of focus to be found in all short stories and extends to the exclusion of any extraneous plot devices and gestures at character ‘depth’ that inhibit immediacy of expression. Of course, one could also suggest that the sparseness in plot and character only reinforces the essential realism of the stories, since the kinds of lives they portray are themselves likely to be rather short on ‘plot’ and psychologically afflicted in generally similar ways. But whether form most often influences content or content determines form, the result in this collection is a kind of fiction in which the form of expression doesn’t merely point us to its subject but is dynamically a part of it in a way that I, for one, find impressive…
“I wouldn’t say that The Suburban Swindle is a flawless book–sometimes the familiarity of the material does subsume the liveliness of the writing–but it introduces a writer whose approach both to her subject and to the literary presentation it requires certainly makes me curious about what her future work might be like.”
Review at bookmunch
Oct 20th
Katherine Woodfine reviewed The Suburban Swindle for bookmunch. Here are some highlights:
‘…there is no doubt that ultimately the most powerful voices are those of the (often anonymous) female narrators – young women who may see themselves as just “some guy’s girlfriend” yet who are nevertheless sharp-eyed, unflinching observers. Though they share the tangible sense of uncertainty and confusion which runs through these stories, their narrative voices are able to offer us flashing instances of clear-sightedness, perhaps best seen in “Persons of Bondage” in which the narrator has a sudden sense of “the scene curved fresh in front of eyes that were holy and were mine.”
‘It is in these thoughtfully judged moments that Corley offers us, finally, the hints of hope and redemption that give these stories their kick.
‘Any Cop?: Whilst it may be raw in places, The Suburban Swindle fizzes over with an irrepressible energy and possibility, hinting at promising things to come.’
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Also, Steve Himmer wrote this on his blog the other day:
‘It’s the voice of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective, standing around on a stakeout and waiting for something to happen. Corley’s characters are often caught waiting for stagnant lives to change, as dependent upon that change being external as detectives are. They’re like detectives staking themselves out and finding nothing to watch, no more able to change their own lives than The Continental Op can make a suspect appear at the moment he most wants one to.’
Reading at Bluestockings
Oct 20th
Who: Marty Beckerman, Nick Antosca and Jackie Corley
When: Wednesday, October 22 @ 7 p.m.
Where: Bluestockings
172 Allen Street, New York, NY
About: Jackie Corley (The Suburban Swindle), Nick Antosca (Fires, Midnight Picnic) and Marty Beckerman (Generation S.L.U.T., Dumbocracy) read from their new books of cutting-edge fiction and political satire.
More info: Bluestockings event page
Facebook event page
The Suburban Swindle is now available on Amazon
Oct 8th
You can pre-order my book on Amazon.com here.
But pre-ordering directly from my publisher means So New gets more of a cut, so please support small press and order direct from them.
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