BOMB's Fall Books Preview Is Tops

BOMB picks out some enchanting, strange reads — novels, poetry collections, reissues, dreamy drawings, translations, and more — for its Fall Books Preview, thanks to contributors Justin Taylor, Chelsea Hodson, Paul La Farge, Emmalea Russo, Alexandra Kleeman, Ted Dodson, Dan Sheehan, Kristen Radtke, Daniel Saldaña París, Marjorie Welish, Tobias Carroll, Jonathan Lee, Scott Esposito, and Lauren LeBlanc.

Where to begin? How about with Dodson, who highlights Inpatient Press's forthcoming Tonebook (we're also looking forward):

It's a fantasy that I have, to be able to look at sheet music and fully synthesize the work in my imagination like some sort of synesthete-savant playing out the orchestra in casual reverie. My ability to read music is near nil, however. I think that's why Tonebook (Inpatient Press) is so appealing to me. Edited by Michael Anzouni and Lea Bertucci, Tonebook collects seventeen scores, which are largely visual in nature or otherwise use atypical notation, each from a contemporary, vanguard composer. Merche Blasco's score for "Bardenas" (2009), which takes the shape of a mountain's silhouette seen at a distance and whose instructions present a dynamic range of how instrumentalists should interpret the vertical climbs of the notation, is a paramount example of what this book entails, a primer on contemporary uses of alternately expressive, musical languages. What Bertucci and Anzouni have brought together includes enough points of entry that philistines like me can imagine the works as they might be and a body of work novel enough that musicians will want to realize.

Emmalea Russo is excited for Ariana Reines's play-script Telephone (Wonder):

It's hard to remember how strange the telephone is. A play sprung from Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech? Yes. I'm excited about Ariana Reines' forthcoming Telephone (Wonder). I wish I had seen it in the theater. I'm here and I'm calling someone who's over there. Voices communicate and commune via the telephone which is a device for space and time hopping. I've long been a fan of Reines and I'm thinking the book will be mystical, eerie, otherworldly in its communication reveals.

More, more, more at BOMB.