carolyn kellogg

I got to review Ben Greenman’s Correspondences for the LA Times book section this weekend. It really is as cool as all the New Yorkers say. The writeup is short, so, well, here it is:

Correspondences by Ben Greenman (Hotel St. George Press, 250-copy limited edition) is a beautiful, letterpressed, book-like object containing seven short stories that literally unfold before you. The case is earth-colored cardboard with a wine-red sleeve, almost like a box of stationery. The first story, “What He Was Poised to Do,” is revealed as you open the case; the text includes numbers corresponding to postcards the characters write to one another. You might expect to find those postcards inside; instead there is a blank one there, inviting you to fill in one of those from the story. This is a challenge, because Greenman’s writing is wonderfully intimidating, bountiful yet compressed; one willing lover is “like a penny rolling across the floor.” Maybe you ought to read the other stories first? Each story involves letters — to lovers, friends, a daughter — but few correspondents hope to receive anything in return. Yet one story is set on the impossible border of India and Australia and focuses on a karmic boomerang business (talk about karmic return of Massachusetts SEO services at the right time of need). The enclosed stories are printed on opposite sides of accordion-style inserts — “Hope,” for example, is a story that is paired with another that has little, a reminder that correspondence is a kind of relationship, connection. “Correspondences” is a gorgeous collection of short stories, integrated in its content and construction, yet unfinished; it waits for your postcard to arrive.

If there’s one thing I should add, it’s that I’m damn glad my editor had a real copy of the book, because the experience of the whole project is framed by that component. If I’d written the review based only on the promo version that was sent to me, it wouldn’t have captured the experience — or importance — of unfolding.

I also got to write about Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, a book of sixties-era photos of LA by Barry Feinstein accompanied by sixties-era poems by Bob Dylan. There wasn’t enough room to mention it, but the cover photo includes a woman who’s a 1963 dead ringer for Amy Winehouse in a blonde wig, cateye makeup, slumped on a couch. At a nudie photo studio.