Reading Wednesday Feb 5 at Jefferson Market Library

A reading tomorrow at the landmark Jefferson Market Library, Sixth Avenue at 10th Street, 6:00 pm FREE!

https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2020/02/05/poetry-prose-prose-poetry-reading

SLY BANG REVIEWED IN INTO THE VOID

Read Charles Rammelkamp's review of Sly Bang, which appears in the current issue of edgy print journal Into the Void.

Sly Bang by Larissa Shmailo

Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Sly Bang”

Novel

Spuyten Duyvil, 2019

$18.00, 198 pages

ISBN: 978-1-947980-98-3

Larissa Shmailo’s novel feels like a mash-up of William Burroughs’s paranoid mind-control fantasies and the kaleidoscopic space fantasies of superhero comic books. Indeed, the “sly bang” in the title alludes to the plot to destroy the universe by the – mad scientist? sui generis bad guy? – Prince Eugene (Genya) Ouspensky that the protagonist, Nora (as in Ibsen’s Doll House), aka, Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayenvna Romanova, is determined to thwart. But this is not a traditional what-happens-next narrative, though by the end it does “feel” like a resolution has been reached.

But people die and come back to life all over the place, so who can tell, and we are often treated to flashbacks to World War II era concentration camps and Soviet gulags. Ouspensky pursues Nora/Larissa through the whole strange space-time warp of this science-ficitiony world. Ouspensky can read Nora’s mind, trying to control her. But “Larissa artfully dodges sex with Ouspensky by role-playing Anna and Vronsky, Lara and Zhivago, and he enjoys this.” Nora is an FBI agent (not necessarily a good thing, more sinister than salubrious) with telepathic, comic book superhero powers of her own.

Speaking of “sly,” Shmailo often makes these amusing, satirical references to the cornerstones of western civilization, from Heidegger and Nietzsche and Tolstoy to John Lennon and Patti Smith. “Hillary Clinton lay on the table wriggling, bound and gagged.” Johnny Depp provides occasional voiceover.

Shmailo uses a variety of literary forms in the construction of her novel. The book opens up, stage drama-like, with stage direction and setting and off-stage voices, as we encounter Nora masturbating on a leather couch.  As in a play, the dialogue is written:

MICHAEL:  Hey there!

NORA: Hello, Michael, are there walls between us, buildings, I hope?

MICHAEL: Yes, and I’ve triple-locked the door and bound my feet…

The writing then moves to a more conventional style of an omniscient narrator voice moving the story along. But don’t get used to any particular style! Shmailo seems to be having fun subverting readers’ expectations.

For just as easily, Shmailo will burst out into poetry, including sublime lyrics like HOW MY FAMILY SURVIVED THE CAMPS, Nora’s poem.

            Was micht nicht umbringt, macht mich starker:

            What does not kill me makes me stronger.

            Nietzsche said this about other things.

            Not this.

            How did my family survive the camps?

            Were they smarter, stronger than the rest?

            Were they lucky?

            Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen,

            Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?

This comes from an episode involving Nora’s mother, Leda, in which we read in Nora’s backstory, reminiscent of the “origin story” of so many comic book superheroes. Leda, we learn, conceives Nora in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg in 1946 “with the last sex she will ever have.” Of course, Leda’s resentment about this is a factor later on.

But it’s best not to give away the plot, spoiler-like, especially as the plot, like a dream, is subject to the interpretation of every reader, which may be the ultimate point of Shmailo’s satire.  Still, after so much gore and blood and guts and sexual perversity, it’s hard not to smile at the fairy tale ending when the character Bensinck “dropped to one knee and took her hand” like Prince Charming swooning over Cinderella. Dim the lights. Shine a soft spot on the dude. With what seems the sincerity only an earnest fairy tale prince can display, he says to her, “No more undercover, no more faking it. Just us, and a quarter of the world’s land mass.” Hah!

And Nora, God bless her, having just a moment before read through a story she’s written about killing Ouspensky after he has an orgasm inside her (“ He starts fucking her with his tiny dick and Nora starts fantasizing about killing him and it turns her on.”), smiles sweetly and responds: “And create a world safe for our children, Albert? Or am I going too fast for you?”   

But wait, that’s not all! The story is followed by APPENDIX; NORA’S SLAA SEXUAL HARMS INVENTORY (FRAGMENT). Her sexual ideal? “I have sex with a man  whom I love and respect and trust and am attracted to and who loves and respects and trusts me and is attracted to me as part of a committed relationship and as a byproduct of sharing and partnership. Our sex is creative, playful, imaginative and hot. [following pages illegible]”  There follows a series of fragments about various men and her “reasons for getting involved.”

Do you get the uncomfortable feeling that Shmailo is playing the reader, having us on? It’s this discomfort that’s finally at the heart of the writing, masterful satire whose object is constantly shifting and, yes, may be you. You just have to read Sly Bang yourself and come to your own conclusions.  You won’t regret it.

Charles Rammelkamp

READING FROM MY NOVEL SLY BANG, Feb 5

The Poetry in Prose, the Prose in Poetry: A Reading

Wednesday, February 5, 2020, 6 p.m.

PROGRAM LOCATIONS:

Jefferson Market Library, First Floor
Avenue of the Americas at 10th Street NYC

ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.

Wednesday, February 5 at 6 pm

The Poetry in Prose, the Prose in Poetry:  Blurring the Lines

A Reading featuring:

Larissa Shmailo
Alan Baxter
Bonnie Walker
Dean Kostos

Presented in the first floor Willa Cather Room.  All events are free and open to the public.

2019 Lit Roundup, with Gratitude

What a whirlwind year 2019 has been ! I have been honored to read with amazing poets and wrtiers this year at AWP and on tour for my new novel, SLY BANG. We blew up sex writing in Portland with Thaddeus Rutkowski, Jonathan Penton, Cecilia Tan, and the iconic Erica Jong; we auteured poetry editorship with Kwame Dawes, Marc Vincenz, Michael Anania, and Sam Truitt.
Wonderful Russians and Americans alike helped me celebrate SLY BANG this year - supporting my "psychosexual feminist ebullience " were readings by Annie Finch, Ron Kolm, Irina Mashinski, Anton Yakovlev, Regina Khidekel, Don Yorty, Anna Halberstadt, Andrey Gritsman, Thaddeus generously again, Dean Kostos, Michael T. Young, Stephanie Strickland, Alexander Veytsman, Elizabeth L. Hodges and the late great Steve Dalachinsky, who read on my birthday and picked (of course) the most experimental section to perform, brilliantly. Deep thanks to all the SLY BANG reviewers, incuding Jeff Hansen, Baron Drave, Kimberly Rae Lorenz-Copeland, and MCQ Michael W McHugh!
Many great pubs, including Annie Finch's upcoming blockbuster anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, Bernard Meisler's Sensitive Skin anthology, Anna Halberstadt's Russian edition of the Cafe Review, the St. Petersburg Review, KGB Lit, and many more. And unexpected and wonderful, thanks to Marie C Lecrivain for nominating me for Sundress Best of the Net in creative nonfiction!
Deep respect and love to my co-ediitor and legendary Russian translator, Philip Nikolayev, for his contributions to our new anthology, From Pushkin to Pussy Riot: Russian Political Poetry and Prose, as well as to our remarkable poets, essayists, and translators; blessings upon Virginia Konchan of www.MatterMonthly.com for hosting us wild Slavs.
Next year brings new forays into international experimental poetry, immigrant literature and the politics of resistance, more SLY BANG events, and vigorous political activism. Until then, happiest of holiday seasons and best literary wishes!

GREAT REVIEW OF SLY BANG IN BOOKS FOR READERS

Read Meredith Sue Willis's great review of SLY BANG in Books for Readers #204!

And now for something completely different-- a new novel by Larissa Shmailo, continuing her themes that include feminism, female sexuality, power struggles, and a family that may have collaborated with the Nazis, but also suffered hugely themselves. She writes again about a powerful, debilitating combination of sex addiction and sexual abuse. This time she does it with a rollicking, often comic (and comic book style) fantasy/science fiction story.

Her main character is Nora, a psychologically damaged but uber-resilient hero who spends a lot of time in a coma, drugged, or otherwise disabled-- because the bad guys and the good guys are all and constantly aware of her power and trying to channel it, or kill it, for their own purposes..

The neat psycho-spiritual trip here is that Nora remains through all the abuse and danger and rising one more time to rejoin the battle--a deeply Christian character--that is, not that she particularly practices Christianity or even believes in God, but she is committed to forgiving and loving. Her special bailiwick is vicious serial killers like her sometimes charming. occasional savior Michael, whose idea of a special treat is sex with dead, young vaginas. But he is NOT, he insists, a pedophile. Michael is, like Nora, a multiple personality.

This novel, not surprisingly, has some of the quality of a fever dream, and one could imagine at any moment being awakened and told it was, indeed, all a nightmare, but that is never the point. The point is the ride, the changes, the themes played and dropped and played again. It picks up momentum throughout, and the final section moves into even faster changes, ending with short dispatches from an action packed summary, with more flips and twists. Nora triumphs in the end, offering us a poem in which she entertains Satan himself.

https://www.amazon.com/Sly-Bang-Larissa-Shmailo/…/ref=sr_1_1?

AMAZON.COM

Sly Bang

Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battle....

RAIN TAXI REVIEW OF SLY BANG

SLY BANG

Larissa Shmailo
Spuyten Duyvil ($18)

by Jefferson Hansen

Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is written with tremendous energy and moves at an exhilarating pace, yet it dwells on depraved characters and actions. Almost nobody is nice in this novel about serial killers, mad scientists, FBI agents and evildoers.

The plot centers around Nora, an FBI agent with telepathic and scientifically grounded superpowers, who is hunted by Ouspensky, a scientist, satanist, and Nazi who wants to destroy the world using nuclear colliders. Among Nora’s defenders are Michael, a serial killer, and Andrew and Aubrey, fellow FBI agents who seem to be the only characters without obsessions, perversities, and obscene desires.

Indeed, the book reads like a psychotic episode. People die and come back to life. The line between dream and reality is not entirely clear. Mind-reading is possible. Strange, advanced technologies propel the action at times. Some characters have superhuman abilities: Most of the men have extraordinary strength and beat up a slew of other people to prove it. They can even break their way out of manacles.

And that is where the satire lies. The book, while it portrays horrific actions, makes fun of superhuman male figures and the traditional ideal man. Their activities are so outlandish that readers may find themselves laughing out loud and cheering as Nora outlasts most of them through her grit, pluck, and resilience. As she contemplates being saved by a man, she writes “hey, this damsel in distress thing really turns them on . . . subconscious hostility that they want me to be harmed?” The book takes direct aim at the fantasies of some males, making them so extreme that their absurdity becomes crystal clear.

Sly Bang’s satire on the whole is extreme—it begins with a scene of Nora masturbating under command while being remotely surveilled. She is alone, sleep deprived, and very scared. Serial killers lurk blocks away, pretending to be friends, and attempt to confuse her through remote communications. She needs to fight the depravities of the males, who are lampooned in their aggressiveness and inability to treat Nora straight. And Nora has her own issues. She treats men badly by manipulating their feelings, loving them and leaving them, cheating on them, and so forth. It may be a kind of visceral revenge.

To top it all off, Nora and her “friends”—neither she nor we are entirely sure who is or isn’t on her side—need to save the world from Ouspensky’s attempt to destroy it just for kicks. The comic book element makes war itself seem cartoonishly absurd, driven not by a desire for territory or money or power, but to dominate women in a psycho-sexual manner.

This is a hilarious and horrifying novel. It depicts the worst humanity is capable of, but what keeps Sly Bang from becoming overwhelmed by the depravity it describes is the writerly energy of Shmailo. Wise cracks and madcap scenes burst one after another in a buoyant fashion—so it goes down easy in spite of the horrors it describes.

---

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

POEM FROM SLY BANG: SCHWEINEREI

A poem "by" Nora Volkhonsky, the protagonist of SLY BANG, for D-Day.

SCHWEINERIE

Get up, schweinerei, my father says, waking us late.

And at dinner, my dyadya, talking drunk and loud,

says that he and my dedushka guarded railroads

in the war. For the Germans. The railroads are old,

but this country is new: not the Soviet Union, I ask?,

not wanting to know. Barely breathing: the world,

hard, atrocious, and cruel, falls into place.

And Babushka? Babushka worked at the railroad, too.

(I feel her hard hands braiding my hair, the stern lips

mouthing: zhid). I remember my mother, seeking salvation

at her grave, saying (but lying): “I once opened a gate.”

The world falls into place. What was on those rails? Who?

And what did their guards do? Somehow I knew, I always knew.

Tonight, I hear my mother’s reedy voice simper, singing,

Nach jeden Dezember ihr kommt ein Mai. Her home of

gemutlichkeit,comfort without joy. My mother’s love

for the German tongue; how often she said “There were

good Germans, too.” As Ukrainians, save the martyred few,

they were kapos, collaborators, too. Did they have a choice?

Starvation in the kolkhoz, bodies lying, dying in the streets,

and only the Germans, said mother, protested Stalin’s rape

and collectivization of the Ukraine. How much victim?

How much volunteer? Did my mama, my papa, my dyadya,

my baba, my dyedushka commit atrocities in the war?

In Kalinivka, the mass graves; my family was there.

In Prymsl, deported Jews; my family was there.

In the Harz Mountains, Northhausen and Dora-Mittelbau;

my family was there. What other families? Who survived,

and why? (There was no crematorium in Dora, my mother

lied.) In the face of starvation, of death, of Stalin’s camps,

tell me, you, well-fed and safe, judging me and mine: is there

complicity when there is no choice? (Was there choice?)

The stories, the lacunae, the lies. Now I know why I always felt

like a Jew. O, Adonai, why? Why these origins for me, why no

orisons for me? The dead are dead, but not within me, my

holocaust today, forever my bread.

Bios of My Birthday Readers!

I am thrilled to be celebrating my birthday May 31 at Unnameable Books with readings by Steve Dalachinsky, Ron Kolm, Dean Kostos, Stephanie Strickland, and Michael T. Young. Here are their bios below.

Poet/collagist STEVE DALACHINSKY was born in Brooklyn in1946. His book “The Final Nite” (Ugly Duckling Presse - 2006) won the PEN Oakland National Book Award. His latest cds are “The Fallout of Dreams” with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach (Roguart 2014), “ec(H)o-system” with the French art-rock group, the Snobs (Bambalam 2015) and the book/cd “Pretty in the Morning with the Snobs”(Bisou Records – 2019). He is a 2014 recipient of a Chevalier D’ le Ordre des Artes et Lettres. His recent books include “The Invisible Ray” (Overpass Press – 2016) with artwork by Shalom Neuman, “Frozen Heatwave”, a collaboration with Yuko Otomo (Luna Bissonte Prods 2017) and Black Magic (New Feral Press 2017) and The Chicken Whisperer (Positive Manets – 2018). His newest book “where night and day become one – the french poems” (great weather for MEDIA 2018) received a 2019 IBPA award in poetr

Ron Kolm's latest collection of poetry is Welcome to the Barbecue. He is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere To Nowhere: The End of the American Dream and a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. He is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection

Dean Kostos is a poet, translator, anthologist, and memoirist. He is the author of eight books. His collection, THIS IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation grant. His memoir, THE BOY WHO LISTENED TO PAINTINGS, will be released this fall.

Stephanie Strickland’s 9 books of print poetry and 11 co-authored digital poems have garnered Brittingham, Sandeen, di Castagnola, and Best of the Net awards. She has been granted National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. Her digital poems have been shown at the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Strickland’s work in print and multiple media is being collected by the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. How the Universe Is Made, a volume of New & Selected Poems, has just been published. http://stephaniestrickland.com

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his collection, Living in the Counterpoint. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including The Los Angeles Review, One, The Smart Set, Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His poetry has also been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac.

COME TO MY BIRTHDAY READING 5/31

RECORDING OF ANTIFASCISM POETRY FROM SLY BANG

Thanks to exceptional poet and blogger Don Yorty for recording this reading of poetry from my hybrid novel, SLY BANG. I read "How My Family Survived the Camps," "Lager NYC," and "Warsaw Ghetto."

https://donyorty.com/blog/201S9/04/27/larissa-shmailo-reads-sly-bang/

SLY BANG TONIGHT APRIL 17 ON POETRY THIN AIR!

Tonight, April 17!
Larissa Shmailo's SLY BANG launch part 2 on 
Mitch Corber's television show 
Poetry Thin Air featuring readings 
by Don Yorty, Ron Kolm, and Larissa Shmailo
Manhattan Wed. 8:30pm
SPEC-TW 67 FiOS 36 RCN 85
Brooklyn Wed. 11pm
SPEC-TW 34 OPT 67 FIOS 42 RCN 82

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE: SLY BANG READER BIOS

Take a look at the impressive bios of the readers for From Russia with Love: A SLY BANG Book Party on May 13!

Our sponsor Dr. Regina Khidekel received her MA in Art Theory and History and Ph.D. from the Academy of Arts in Leningrad. She is an art critic and curator, the Art Director of the Diaghilev Art Center (1990-1993) and founding director of the nonprofit arts organizations, Russian American Cultural Center in New York (1998) and the Lazar Khidekel Society (2010), and member of AICA and SHERA. A frequent contributor to the magazines in Russia and ArtNews in the USA, Khidekel is the author of a number of catalogues and books, including “It's the Real Thing.” Soviet and Post- Soviet Sots Art and American Pop Art - Minnesota University Press (1998), Artists from St. Petersburg (2006), Homage to Diaghilev;s Enduring Legacy (2009), Russian Avant-garde: Work-in-Progress in Russian Constructivist Roots: Present Concerns - Maryland University (1997), Traditionalist Rebels: Nonconformist Art in Leningrad in Forbidden Art - Curatorial Assistance, LA (1998),and Lazar Khidekel in Malevich's Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers in Russia, 1920s-1950s -The State Russian Museum (2000).

Emcee Andrey Gritsman, a native of Moscow, immigrated to the United States in 1981. He authored seven volumes of poetry in Russian and five collections in English and received the 2009 Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention XXIII and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times between 2005 – 2010, and also was on the Short List for the PEN American Center Biennial Osterweil Poetry Award. Poems, essays, and short stories in English have appeared or are forthcoming in more than 90 literary journals. His work has also been anthologized in Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Crossing Centuries (New Generation in Russian Poetry), and The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place. Andrey edits the international poetry magazine Interpoezia and runs the Intercultural Poetry Series.

Anna Halberstadt has been widely published in Russian, English, and Lithuanian. Eileen Myles s first collection of poetry in Russian translation by Anna Halberstadt “Selected Selected” was published by “Russian Gulliver” in Moscow in April 2017. Anna’s translations of poetry by Edward Hirsch into the Russian “Nocturnal Fire “were published by Evgeny Stepanov’s Publishing House in 2017. Halberstadt was a finalist in the 2013 and 2015 Mudfish poetry contests and in the Atlanta Review 2015 contest. Anna was a semi-finalist for the Paumanok Poetry Award 2015 and a winner of the International Merit Award in Poetry 2016 International Poetry Competition in the Atlanta Review and awarded a Poetry prize 2016 for a group of poems in Russian by Children of Ra journal. Her “Vilnius Diary” in Lithuanian has become one of TOP10 books, published in Lithuania in 2017, named by the Lithuanian news site Lt.15. It was also chosen for the list of most important books in translation 2017 by the Lithuanian Translators Association. Нalberstadt was named Translator of the Year by the literary journal Персона PLUS 2017 for her translation into the Russian of Bob Dylan’s poem “Brownsville Girl.”

Elizabeth L. Hodges has been editor of the print journal St. Petersburg Review, www.stpetersburgreview.com, since 2006 and the digital Springhouse Journal, springhousejournal.com, since 2014. Her book of poetry, Witchery, was published by MadHat Press in 2016.

Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow; she graduated from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she later completed her Ph.D. studies. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the Journal of Brown University’s Slavic Department. Irina Mashinski is the co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the StoSvet literary project. She is the author of ten books of poetry and translations (in Russian). Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.

Alexander Veytsman writes poetry and prose in both English and Russian languages. His original poems, translations, as well as short stories and essays, have appeared in more than 30 publications in Russia and the United States. Over the years, he served on the editorial boards of The Word and Interpoeziya literary journals, in addition to chairing the Compass Translation Award under the auspices of Cardinal Points journal. A native of Moscow and a graduate of Harvard and Yale universities, Alexander currently lives in New York City.

Anton Yakovlev's latest chapbook Chronos Dines Alone, winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2018, was published by SurVision Books. He is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks: The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Measure, Amarillo Bay, and elsewhere. He has also written and directed several short films. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books.

Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters , In Paran , A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. She has been published in Plume, the Brooklyn Rail, Barrow Street and over 30 anthologies. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Garage Museum of Moscow, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and has been a translator for the Eugene A. Nida Institute of Biblical Scholarship on the Russian Bible. Currently, she is guest-editing an upcoming Russia and politics issue of Matter. Please see more about Shmailo at her websitewww.larissashmailo.com and Wikipedia ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa_Shmailo