Mark Gluth - Some Gus van Sant longing, Lynch's quieter moments near lakes and ferns in Twin Peaks

Mark Gluth, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (Akashic Books, 2009)

«Margaret Kroftis is a writer, living alone. A personal tragedy propels the narrative forward in an emotionally coherent manner that exists separately from linear time. As themes of loss and grief cycle, repeat, and build upon each other, they create a complex structure of cross hatched narratives within narratives, which mirror each other while also telling their own unique stories of loss that are both separate from Margaret's as well as deeply intertwined.»

«The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis begins during the later days of Margaret Kroftis's life. She is a writer, living alone. As she experiences a personal tragedy the narrative moves forward in an emotionally coherent manner that exists separately from linear time. Themes of loss and grief cycle and repeat and build upon each other. They affect the text and create a complex structure of crosshatched narratives within narratives. These mirror each other while also telling unique stories of loss that are both separate from Margaret's as well as deeply intertwined.
This groundbreaking debut demonstrates an affinity with the work of such contemporary European writers as Agota Kristof and Marie Redonnet, while existing in a place and time that is uniquely American. Composed in brief paragraphs and structured as a series of vignettes, pieces of fiction, and autobiography, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis creates a world in which a woman's life is refracted through dreamlike logic. Coupled with the spare language in which it is written, this logic distorts and heightens the emotional truths the characters come to terms with, while elevating them beyond the simply literal.»

"In The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis, Mark Gluth does something I've never seen another author do: he captures perfectly the feel of daydreams. Though everybody in the book daydreams, Gluth doesn't simply describe their thoughts; instead, he does something better and more brilliant - he infuses his words with the deceptive simplicity and surrealism of the fantasies we dream up for ourselves. Like daydreams, his book is brief but powerful; like daydreams, it is both heartbreakingly hopeful and heart-stoppingly honest. It's a reverie that's a revelation. It is great."- Derek McCormack

«Maybe time isn't linear. Maybe grief cuts spacetime in diagonals and fiction is merely life considered on other planes. I couldn't care less about the conceit of time while enjoying Gluth's book like a solemn morning walk. This giving-in to non-linear, planes of grief. He does it well. The way in which Lynch doesn't have to really explain what his movies are about. The plot is just a scaffold. "Clocks click." Such a whispered, layered read here. Gluth frames and reframes his narrative realities, flowing seamlessly between lives, friends, dogs. It has an elegaic, Northwestern daydreaminess that I think you see in some movies that are filmed out there. Some Gus van Sant longing, Lynch's quieter moments near lakes and ferns in Twin Peaks. He captures the small weights of the mundane. How can we know that we're not fiction? That we're not someone's daydream? Really real? Nice choice for Dennis Cooper's series at Akashic, as he features similar blurred lines in his own novels between the illusion and the presumed reality. But I really appreciated this work for it's soft mourning, ephemeral simple prose, personal hollows.» -
commodityriskmanagement.blogspot.com

«Mark Gluth's writing is a spider's web in the rain, hidden under a bush and holding up beads of water like a strongman.
Mark Gluth's writing reminds me that thought and dream are types of membrane we pass weighted through.
Mark Gluth's writing is supple and drenched, he opens up fertile spaces in the imagination.
I have been looking forward to this book for a long, long time. When I get my grubby, sweat laminated mits upon it's beautiful cover, inevitably to read it in one go, i'll attempt a review.
Still, i think you should (if there is anyone out there reading this) order The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis right now, right this second. Everything I have been lucky enough to read of Mark Gluth's work has left me open mouthed, spinning and suspended... like being literally re-placed in the world.» - the-hunger-ground.blogspot.com
 

 


Mark Gluth, No Other, Sator Press, 2014.

preview (pdf)

In a sequence of haunted seasons, Tuesday, Hague, and their mother Karen are pained by the aporia of love and death. With powerfully elemental prose, No Other lays bare the mysterious and emotional fate of a small family. 

"In Mark Gluth’s beautiful family gothic No Other, the reader encounters a landscape of mood and mystery, burning with a stripped-down pain. Gluth’s sentences devastate in their raw economy, attempting to penetrate the everyday, tracing abbreviated existences struggling to survive through bare seasons." – Kate Zambreno

"In clipped, incantatory verse shined from whorls somewhere between Gummo and As I Lay Dying, Mark Gluth’s No Other invents new ambient psychological terraforma of rare form, a world by turns humid and eerie, nowhere and now, like a blacklight in a locked room.” – Blake Butler

"It’s devastating." – William Basinski


What does your book do and how does your book do it?
- No Other embodies a sense of failure in the form of a novel. It accomplishes this via a narrative shape that is essentially broken and unfixable as well as by the fact that the book provides an authentic feeling portrayal of characters that are, by and large, despondent, forsaken, desperate and in most ways sans hope. I thought, while I was writing No Other, that it was a black hole. That the narrative shape was able to overwhelm whatever contents the novel had. Thus the characters just being fucked, basically.
There’s probably a ton of other stuff that No Other does, but I’ve come to realize of late that not only do I not understand all the ways that my writing functions but that I also prefer that lack of full understanding. Essentially I like when my writing contains mystery on many levels and for that to really work, I need my writing to be a mystery to me.
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?
- One of the core texts that influenced the book, and a text with which No Other had a conversation with was Black Metal, specifically ‘Suicidal’ or ‘Depressive’ Black Metal. My favorite Black Metal has a subtext which just aligns perfectly with what I was attempting with the book. A sense of being completely and utterly without hope. Another core text is what I will call spirituality, specifically what is generally considered Buddhism. I wanted there to be a sense of the voice narrating the novel to be a meditating mind. I wanted the voice to come off as fairly objective, but also colored by its own point of view which it could not avoid being colored by and which it was generally ok with being colored by. Another foundational text for No Other is certain mumble core films, most particularly The Exploding Girl. It’s such a great movie. I loved the idea that a narrative could really just grab a portion of someone’s life and with minimal trickery, create something super compelling. As far as other books or other writers, I wanted the book to be like me combining the work of Cormac McCarthy, Jean Rhys, and Gary Lutz. I internalized the work of those writers a ton while writing the book, though I’d be deeply troubled should you ask me to pin point in what ways that showed up in the final draft. - interview by Christopher Higgs