Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: I Ruined His Weekend

      December 11, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Heroes Must Wear Capes

      December 10, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Some Very Small Times

      December 6, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Foster Care: And Silence Makes Three

      December 5, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Walls

      June 5, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: In Memoriam, Amy Winehouse: Years Later, My Tears Are Still Drying on Their Own

      June 3, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      Best of 2019: Favorite Online Fiction & Short Stories

      December 6, 2019

      Fiction

      Autumn Passing

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Best of 2019: Best Fiction Books

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Vexing the Dog

      November 27, 2019

      Fiction

      A Hurt In Negative

      November 20, 2019

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: The Way Cities Feel to Us Now by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins

      December 9, 2019

      Review

      Obsessive, Recursive Violence and Concentration: Charlene Elsby’s Hexis

      December 5, 2019

      Review

      EVERYTHING CAN GO/ ON THE GRILL: A Combined Review of Alissa Quart

      December 2, 2019

      Review

      Review: If the House by Molly Spencer

      November 18, 2019

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      MOUTH: EATS COLOR and the Devoration of Languages

      January 12, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Penteract Press

      December 10, 2019

      Small Press

      Game Over Books

      December 3, 2019

      Small Press

      Jamii Publishing

      November 19, 2019

      Small Press

      Elixir Press

      November 12, 2019

      Small Press

      October and November: Small Press Releases

      November 1, 2019

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Featured

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 11 (Karma Police)

        November 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Shattered Memories: Biography of a Place

        September 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Downpour: Biography of a Place

        August 3, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: I Ruined His Weekend

      December 11, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Heroes Must Wear Capes

      December 10, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Some Very Small Times

      December 6, 2019

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Foster Care: And Silence Makes Three

      December 5, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Walls

      June 5, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: In Memoriam, Amy Winehouse: Years Later, My Tears Are Still Drying on Their Own

      June 3, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      Best of 2019: Favorite Online Fiction & Short Stories

      December 6, 2019

      Fiction

      Autumn Passing

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Best of 2019: Best Fiction Books

      December 5, 2019

      Fiction

      Vexing the Dog

      November 27, 2019

      Fiction

      A Hurt In Negative

      November 20, 2019

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: The Way Cities Feel to Us Now by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins

      December 9, 2019

      Review

      Obsessive, Recursive Violence and Concentration: Charlene Elsby’s Hexis

      December 5, 2019

      Review

      EVERYTHING CAN GO/ ON THE GRILL: A Combined Review of Alissa Quart

      December 2, 2019

      Review

      Review: If the House by Molly Spencer

      November 18, 2019

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      MOUTH: EATS COLOR and the Devoration of Languages

      January 12, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Penteract Press

      December 10, 2019

      Small Press

      Game Over Books

      December 3, 2019

      Small Press

      Jamii Publishing

      November 19, 2019

      Small Press

      Elixir Press

      November 12, 2019

      Small Press

      October and November: Small Press Releases

      November 1, 2019

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Featured

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 11 (Karma Police)

        November 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Shattered Memories: Biography of a Place

        September 3, 2018

        Video Games

        Silent Hill Downpour: Biography of a Place

        August 3, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
InterviewLiterature

What How & With Whom: Two Questions for Shane Jones

written by Christopher Higgs November 6, 2014

scanCRYSTAL0001

 

Welcome to my new micro-interview series, which focuses on recent releases that I’ve found noteworthy. Past entries are archived here.

In this series I’m asking writers to respond to the two questions I most frequently ask when I’m teaching a book in the classroom: (1) what is the text doing / how is the text doing it, and (2) with what does the text connect?

These questions arise from my particular approach to reading and critical analysis, which is deeply indebted to Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. As they put it, “Literature is an assemblage…a book itself is a little machine…writing has nothing to do with signifying…it has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.”

So, without further delay…

I present Shane Jones, whose recent book Crystal Eaters has been described thusly:

“[Jones is] something of a millennial Richard Brautigan. Read this if you want to read a book so visual that it will inspire you to create artwork of your own.”
—Nylon

“Crystal Eaters is full of sentences that jump at you like a pop-up book, painting a world that is at some times painfully real, and at others an exercise in vivid hallucinations. Jones is pushing genres here, not unlike George Saunders or Karen Russell, but using a harsher lens. Crystal Eaters grabs your face and pushes it up against a fantastic, sprawling, impressionistic painting of death and family.”
—The Rumpus

“A grounded epiphany of the highest order, revealing the stark and majestic grace that is present within the loss each living thing must endure. Page after page, Jones’s exquisitely styled prose drugs the ear like otherworldly music—this pyretic, hallucinatory novel stings with beauty at every turn.”
—Alissa Nutting

 

 QUESTION ONE

What does your book do and how does your book do it?

ANSWER

Crystal Eaters blends styles – mainly realism and surrealism – while also incorporating, as a kind of sub-flooring, moods or themes of fairy tale, fantasy, family drama, coming of age tale, domestic blackness, sci-fi, romance, and ‘campy’ action adventure, culminating, hopefully, in a ‘new’ feeling, or vision, where the reader is pushed (the first half of the book) and pulled (the second half of the book) through an original/surreal landscape opening up portals to ‘real’ human emotion and feeling. How this functions without being totally exhausting, annoying, or dull, is solved (again, hopefully) in the structure: short chapters that move between several settings and story lines, thus allowing the reader to ‘catch her breath’ or a kind of ‘mental resetting’ before the next chapter where the story either highlights the surrealism (for example, Remy eating crystals and entering a dream sequence) or stark realism (for example, the prisons scenes with Pants McDonovan). Chapters typically move in a way so the themes can play off each other, keeping the reader interested and off guard, but as the book moves along the realism or ‘reality’ begins to dominate, as if to say that the fantasy (mainly the idea of crystal count and many of the earlier dreamy scenes) has a very real consequences (death) that the family has to eventually deal with in the final chapter where there is no escape into a dream, crystal count, dog-walking, etc, only the family in silence huddled around a dead mother, connecting through physical connection (holding and touching each other, no fantasy).

QUESTION TWO

Having identified your book’s comportment, could you bring it into focus by describing its relationship to other texts? (By “texts” I mean any relatable objects.) Put another way: if we think about a book as a star in a constellation, or a node in a circuit, I’m interested in hearing about the constellation or circuit in which readers might find your book. Put yet another way: if we think about your book as contributing to particular conversations, could you describe those conversations and their other participants?

ANSWER

I thought about this question all morning. I took my son (age two) to a doctor’s appointment this morning where they drew a small vial of blood from his thumb, but I kept thinking of my book as a piece of dog shit covered in glitter. But not just a random piece of dog shit covered in glitter, say, in a backyard, if that’s even possible, but a piece of dog shit preserved and waxed and covered professionally in glitter and placed in MOMA by an artist like Paul McCarthy. I’m not sure this even begins to answer this question, but I’d like Crystal Eaters to be part of a conversation about how surrealism, instead of always being labeled ‘artsy’ or ‘avant garde’ or ”just plain weird’ can connect, or work on a level, with sincerity. Some of my contemporaries are on drastically different sides of the spectrum. Where people like Amina Cain, Tao Lin, Joshua Cohen, and Ben Lerner, have chosen the realism route, writers like Blake Butler, Amelia Gray, Grace Krilanovich and Joyelle McSweeney are on the side of surrealism. All of these writers (with each I’m thinking of their latest works) do powerful, amazing things, but I’d like Crystal Eaters to be a book that sits kind of in the middle as a book that does the realism vs surrealism thing, or at least attempts to do it (it has a lot of flaws, it kind of is a piece of shit with glitter) without sacrificing one for the other. Using the star or constellation metaphor as an actual visual I see Crystal Eaters in the middle, but somehow way in the back, connecting to these other books by thin galaxies.

BIO

Shane Jones lives in Albany, New York. He’s the author of several books including Light Boxes, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, and Crystal Eaters. Follow him @hishanejones

 

 

What How & With Whom: Two Questions for Shane Jones was last modified: November 6th, 2014 by Christopher Higgs
What How & With Whom
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Christopher Higgs

Christopher Higgs wrote As I Stand Living (CCM #RECURRENT, 2017), Becoming Monster (The Cupboard, 2013), The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press, 2010), and the SPD #1 Bestseller ONE (Roof Books, 2012, in collaboration with Vanessa Place & Blake Butler). His shorter work has appeared widely in print and online venues such as AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. He holds a Ph.D. in Post-1900 American Literature from Florida State, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Ohio State, and he’s currently Assistant Professor of English at California State University Northridge.

previous post
Sara Postpartum
next post
The Review Game

You may also like

Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like): with Ariel Gore

March 26, 2018

When machines surprise us, we treat them as mystic idols: An Interview with Jacob Bakkila

October 28, 2014

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

October 23, 2014

Do Sad Robots Lose Any Sleep?: Mike Meginnis’s Fat Man and Little Boy

June 1, 2015
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • Incognito Lounger This is so much better than the other lists I've been raiding today. I'd add Zapruder's Fathers Day and BJ Soloy's Our Pornography and other disaster songs. Ariana Reines and Tommy Pico will save us...

    Best of 2019: Poetry Books & Poetry Collections ·  December 11, 2019

  • Simmons Buntin You missed a few over at Terrain.org... :-)

    Best of 2019: Favorite Poems Published Online ·  December 6, 2019

  • Ginger Lang Mairead, a heartfelt gift from you to all who read and share your piece, and peace. Thank you for being brave and vulnerable so others in need of healing can feel you reaching out to them. Thank you...

     The TO THE TEETH #4 ·  December 5, 2019

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • Sunday Entropy List
  • Variations on a Theme
  • WOVEN
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • Birdwolf
  • Session Report series
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Notes On Motherhood
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • The Talking Cure
  • Best of 2018
  • The Weird Interview
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • Pop Talks
  • The Concept World is No Longer Operational
  • Splendid Grub
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy
  • Stars to Stories

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2019 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top