Evan Lavender-Smith

Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of From Old Notebooks (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Avatar (Six Gallery Press, forthcoming 2010). His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama and criticism appears in many journals and magazines, including Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Glimmer Train, The Modern Review, No Colony and Post Road. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Noemi Press and the Prose and Drama Editor of Puerto del Sol.


what are you reading now

I am currently reading (an advance review copy!) of The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, trans. Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive Press). It's marvelous. I've enjoyed most everything I've read put out by Dalkey in the past few years.


classic you’ve been meaning to read

War and Peace. Russian literature was my minor field of study in college; I believe I read every "major" Russian novel from the 19th century except for W&P. Never been able to muster the courage/stamina (or the French).


last book you finished in a single sitting

Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies by Danielle Pafunda. Twice in a single sitting, actually … we're publishing it at Noemi.


favorite neglected book by a celebrated writer

Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel by Evan S. Connell


most challenging book you’ve ever read

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is probably the most challenging book I've finished. Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the most challenging book I haven't finished, yet I've spent way more time reading the latter than I have the former, which I've read and finished twice.


book you’ve planted on a coffee table to impress someone

From Old Notebooks by Evan Lavender-Smith


if you could subscribe to only one literary journal

As an editor at Puerto del Sol, I don't have to subscribe because I can pretty much steal as many copies as I want. So I can't say that one.

It would be the journal Unsaid, without question.


most anticipated upcoming release

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace


recommended reading list:


Books the Pages of Which I Can Still Smell in My Mind's Nose


- V. by Thomas Pynchon

- Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

- Tranquility by Atilla Bartis

- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

- Correction by Thomas Bernhard

- A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari

- Travesty by John Hawkes

- Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

- YOU-The City by Fiona Templeton

- The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

- Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline by John Mullarkey

- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

- The Crab Nebula by Eric Chevillard

- Being and Event by Alain Badiou

- You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann

- The Mirror in the Well by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

- Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

- The Trilogy by Samuel Beckett

- The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers: A Novella in Twenty-Four Sentences by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

- The Dream Songs by John Berryman