gosspress

[gosspress]

The Sufferers

THE SUFFERERS is the third livre d’artiste by Elisabeth Stevens. It is essentially an art work, no text; just four, signed and numbered erotic etchings and an envoi in a clam shell box in the limited edition of 15 and 2 Artist’s Proofs. The price is $1,500. One copy was just sold to Stanford University by the itinerant sellers of artists’ books, Vamp & Tramp of Birmingham, Ala.…

[gosspress]

American Nocturne

AMERICAN NOCTURNE, Elisabeth Stevens’ sixth book of poetry, is unfettered, wide-ranging. The book begins with a Manhattan sunset (the title poem), moves across the country and concludes in a sun-animated hospital solarium back in New York City. In between, the poet visits a North Carolina pizza parlor, a tour boat in Dunedin, New Zealand, and drives a mysterious passenger on a bureaucratic, night…

[gosspress]

A Green Isle In the Sea, Love

A Green Isle In the Sea, Love

A line from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, ”To a Lost Love,” provides the title for Elisabeth Stevens’ elegiac, provocative, and sexy new novel of the 1950’s. A Green Isle in the Sea, Love returns to that calm, politically and sexually conservative era of Post World War II optimism before the angry years of racial violence and feminist protest that followed. Stevens, whose sensual and plain-spoken…

[gosspress]

Kirkus Review: 'American Nocturne'

Kirkus Review: ‘American Nocturne’

Unaffected and affirmative lyric poetry on cycles of aging, death, and rebirth. In her aptly titled new collection, Stevens (Sirens’ Songs, 2011, etc.) offers poetry true to the best qualities of the nocturne tradition—atmospheric, tranquil, dusky, and musical verses—while inflecting it with an undeniably American optimism. “Night is moving across the country,” she concedes, and soon, the lands…

[gosspress]

See the “Phantasmagoric” Exhbit Through December 9th at SCF The works of Elisabeth Stevens, "Phantasmagoric," is still running at Neel Performing Arts Center at State College of Florida through December 9th.

[gosspress]

Interview with Elisabeth Stevens by Laura Schleussner on "The Sixties in Black and White"

Interview with Elisabeth Stevens by Laura Schleussner on “The Sixties in Black and White”

Laura Schleussner: When organizing your drawings for this book, I noticed that most of them are from the first half of the 1960s. Why? Elisabeth Stevens: In the early 1960s I was living in a fifth-floor, walk-up apartment on York Avenue in New York City. I was working on my PhD in English Literature at Columbia and also writing a novel and teaching, and I needed money. You could get ten dollars…

[gosspress]

VIDEO: A Conversation with Elizabeth Stevens Independent curator/editor Laura Schleussner sits down with artist, fiction writer, poet, and journalist Elizabeth Stevens to talk about her kinetic illustrations and the fascinating events she's covered.

[gosspress]

Phantasmagorical: The World of Elisabeth Stevens

Phantasmagorical: The World of Elisabeth Stevens

Photos from the opening night reception for Elisabeth Stevens “Phantasmagoric” at SCF, Oct. 16. [rev_slider alias="phantasmagorical"]

[gosspress]

Kirkus Review: A green Isle in the Sea, Love

Kirkus Review: A green Isle in the Sea, Love

Stevens (Household Words, 2014, etc.) shines light on a young woman’s struggles to break from societal expectations. Twenty-two-year-old Amy Morse is not going to follow in her father’s footsteps. A professor at “The Hill,” Dad passed away before fulfilling his life’s ambition of publishing an analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems. Amy has her heart set onart school in the Big Apple, after which…

[gosspress]

SCF to Exhibit the Phantasmagorical Art and Literature of Elisabeth Stevens

SCF to Exhibit the Phantasmagorical Art and Literature of Elisabeth Stevens

I am excited to announce that I will be exhibiting my art work at the State College of Florida-Bradenton, during my show, Phantasmagorical: The World of Elisabeth Stevens opening October 16 through December 9. The exhibit features more than 25 of my graphic works and illustrated books. From the Bradenton Times: “In a special exhibit, the works of Elisabeth Stevens will be featured at State…

[gosspress]

Kirkus Review article, 2015, Review of ‘AMERICAN NOCTURNE’

[gosspress]

‪#‎SCRIBE‬ THE SECRET PAINTINGS OF ELISABETH STEVENS Created late at night over several decades, these strange, colorful acrylic paintings on paper picture impossible scenes. In “Big Mama,” a smiling, voluptuous woman with six arms holds and balances a dozen brightly colored balls. In “Cat Song,” a white, feminized feline performs under a dark sky in which a green skull floats. ‬

[gosspress]

#SCRIBE: HOUSEHOLD WORDS Inevitable changes are envisioned in the poem “Metamorphosis.” With Franz Kafka’s story of being turned into a cockroach in mind, the more mundane alterations of time are detailed: “White hairs drifting across the forehead,/whispers dispersing like dust in the hall.”

[gosspress]

#VOXUNA: Dream of the Great American Novel

#VOXUNA: Dream of the Great American Novel

The Dream of the Great American Novel is  a 567-page, 2014 study of American fiction by Lawrence Buell, a professor emeritus of Harvard University.  In considering  approximately two hundred years of American fiction, he divides candidates for the elusive honor of being the GAN into four, catch-all categories.

These, and some of his significant examples, are:

1: Classic plots re-told (Hawthorne’s

[gosspress]

#VOXUNA: Ward Just

Ward Just is the author of seventeen novels and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It is puzzling then to find that his 2014 offering, American Romantic turns out to be pallid and lifeless.

Ward Just, obviously, is an admirer of Joseph Conrad’s stories of foreigners in exotic settings. He also loves painters –– Italian Renaissance masters, Goya, French…

[gosspress]

#VOXUNA: Mark McGurl

After reading a belated review in The New York Review of Books of Mark McGurl’s  The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing of 2009, I ordered the 466-page study, read it immediately, and found it fascinating and timely.

McGurl, an English professor at Stamford University, focuses on the Post-World-War-II rise of “creative writing” as a serious academic subject.  He…

[gosspress]

#VOXUNA: 'Tapka'

#VOXUNA: ‘Tapka’

It’s been a long time since I read a dog story, maybe that’s why “Tapka,” the first piece in Natasha and Other Stories by the Canadian writer David Bezmozgis stuck in my mind.  The book contains seven, compassionate, chronologically arranged stories about growing up in Toronto by Bezmozgis, the child of Jewish immigrants from Riga, Latvia.

In “Tapka,” the author is a first grader assigned, with a…