Greg Gerke

Splice published my novel, In the Suavity of the Rock, in June of 2024. An excerpt is in The Cleveland Review of Books, as well as Minor Literatures, where there was an interview as well. Conversation with Ryan Ruby about the novel. 

Promotional film on the novel by Christopher Brunt

Beyond the Zero Podcast Interview.

A few words on it by Joseph McElroy:

The materials of your novel do branch and multiply like arteries and carry life and are life and always at some point let the analogies reach or settle toward the literal in anchorages of organic fact somewhat beyond what we mean by metaphor. I read it at first — first 40 or 50 pages — as a frankly  unflinching, unflinchingly even deliberately banal or awkward memoir type of narrative but the resistance to artifice became an honesty that became art and fiction in the sense of something made. Made again and again of not turning away from what art in fact might resist and It became this other half-indefinable form subtly and stubbornly rich and off-balance suspenseful. Not a plot — distinctly not turning on  the absence of the father —  so much as an unpredictable veering this way and that always toward elusive or awkward  or unmanageable truths and always with a further or prior truth that we might not get there. A risk here that’s a great virtue of the narrative.

And Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask:

And Jen Craig, author of Wall and Panthers and the Museum of Fire:

To read In the Suavity of the Rock is to turn over and over in your hands the marvel of an object that‘s been pressed and rubbed by the impossibility of writing, a Bildungsroman turned on its head. Greg Gerke’s debut novel is as sad, wry and darkly bright as a wet slapped coastline — and as beautiful too.

Christina Tudor-Sideri, author of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth and Disembodied:

A mesmerising exploration of how we depict memory through storytelling, through narration, how memory depicts us through these means, and how, when one puts pen to paper to give voice to memory, what we create becomes something like the memory of memory, aided by the flow of time in its becoming. … Time itself flows through this novel. Time as ruination, as chronicler of existence, as both narrator and the story that it tells. From the primordial pleasures of childhood to the routine of later years, time as one reads it in these pages flows and carves a path to where both reader and protagonist escape, and a path to places one escapes from escaping. Fragmented by the serpentine ways of the mind as it faces itself, nonlinear in its crossing, using the narrator as reflection and echo, the book enthrals from first to last word.

Rod Moody-Corbett, author of Hides:

In the Suavity of the Rock is ambitious and wise, full of sinuous intimacies. Greg Gerke maps the intricate appetites of a mind run amok and he does so with unerring lyricism.

Emily Hall, author of The Longcut:

“We see much,” says the narrator of Greg Gerke’s novel, “but seeing is not enough.” In his fractalish maddening soliloquy he isn’t so much awakened by madeleine moments as assaulted by them, hurtling us through his past’s brutal architecture and his equally brutal assessment of it, returning—and avoiding, and returning—to the consolations of art and to its (god forgive me) limitations. Severe, exhausting, gratifying.

Jack Houghteling, author of Sunnyside:

The sound of Greg Gerke’s voice is that of the suspended line; the fragment is already begun, and you know where the theory says the line goes: straight on until laughter or mewling or fear or revelation or another of the Consubstantiations. But the mastery of Gerke’s artand the trust and warmth he builds as a progenitor—is that arrest: What if the ice cream is rage, the nighttime a songbird? “Do you enjoy being enigmatic?” is jocosely asked at one point in the book. But what if the act of measuring—the animacies, the inanimacies and the dark quiet in between—requires it?

Zerogram Press published a new and expanded edition of See What I See in April 2021, with an introduction by scholar Steven Moore. Short teaser from the unpublished 10K word essay on Eric Rohmer.

Anthony Domestico reviews See What I See in Commonweal

LATEST WORK: Canetti, Coppola, a Corridor

Reading Styles – Medium

Back to Coney Island, Back to The Windhover – Medium

Reply to All – Hobart

No Way to Bresson – The Smart Set

The Live Louise Glück – Cleveland Review of Books

On a Sentence from Joseph McElroy’s Actress in the House

On a Sentence of Guy Davenport

Serge Daney and Today’s Cinema – LA Review of Books

“In Relationship” (fiction) – Hobart

Faulkner’s Ghost in US Fiction – Cleveland Review of Books

Three short fictions at Propagule 

The Year of Hamaguchi (Japanese director) – Verso

While Reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s MalinaBerfrois

“The Latest Scar in Time” – On the Seawall

“Hardwickian” – The Baffler

“A New Scar in Time” – The Smart Set

On Dreyer’s Gertrud – In Review Online

“On Being Looked At” – Oxonian Review

The story “The 100th Anniversary of The Waste Land” is at The Rupture

One Shot in Carlos Reygadas’s Cinema – Caesura Magazine

See What I See-related:

Beyond the Zero Podcast interviewed me

Michigan Quarterly Review reviews See What I See

Dialogue with Gabriel Blackwell about our books at Full-Stop

Brad Listi interviewed me for his Otherppl Podcast

Feelish Bookish Podcast interviewed me about Socrates on the Beach and the state of large press vs. small press

Steven Moore’s Introduction to See What I See is now online in the first issue of Exacting Clam

Interview at 15 Questions

Paul Skinner reviewed See What I See at his blog

Chris Via did a video review of See What I See at his well-known Leaf by Leaf channel

Garielle Lutz interviewed me with one question at 3am Magazine

Podcast at 42 Minutes–a conversation about Gass, Gaddis, The Tunnel, reading, and writing, etc

Volume One Brooklyn has posted an excerpt from the “Paris Doesn’t Belong to Us” essay about honeymooning in Paris and going to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont to find a location from Eric Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife.

Excerpt from See What I See: “The One and Only Autobiographical Writer” in Berfois

Interview with Jim Gauer about See What I See and Novel Explosives

Michael Dirda reviews See What I See at The Washington Post, along with essay books by D.H. Lawrence and Emmanuel Carrère

I am editing a new Internet journal called Socrates on the Beach.

Further Work:

“Burning the Days” – a short fiction at Berfois

“Bedtime” – a short fiction at Ligeia Magazine

Why Sebald? – Berfois

The Story “Just Give Me a Funeral” is at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine

“Merrill Stein: Wallace Stevens Scholar” a fiction, is at Twelve Winters Journal

“The Road Not Taken?” – Berfois

Review of Kjell Askildsen’s “Everything Like Before” – LA Review of Books

“My Father through the Mann” (on Anthony Mann’s Man of the West) at The Smart Set

Review of Mark de Silva’s Points of Attack at Full-Stop

“Returning to The Dreamlife of Angels” Erick Zonca’s 1998 film – Caesura Magazine

Fiction at On the Seawall: “Response”

Back to Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict – New Critique

The First Paragraph of Henry James’s “The Story In It”

To Tell or Not to Tell – LA Review of Books

“Highlight” – The Smart Set

The video of  @WUSTLlibraries discussion on William Gass’s The Tunnel

On Jen Craig’s “Panthers and the Museum of Fire” – Volume One Brooklyn

On Alexander Theroux’s An Adultery – Full-Stop

“The First Movements in William Gass’s The Tunnel” – The Tunnel at 25

“The Wait” – Fiction at The Kenyon Review

Review of Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes at The Arts Fuse

An epistolary piece on reading Faulkner’s The Hamlet with Genese Grill at 3am Magazine (3 parts)

“Past as Epilogue” at The Smart Set

I interviewed writer/translator Genese Grill at LA Review of Books

“Re-discovering Patrick White” at Music & Literature

“Child as Parent” at Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood

“Guy Davenport as Exemplar” at Essay Daily

“Why Write?” at The Millions

“On or About”-excerpt from See What I See at 3am Magazine

  Splice Interview about writing/reading Part I     

Part 2

The Wrong Things List (fiction) – 3am Magazine

Unappeasable and Peregrine: Eyes Wide Shut – The Smart Set

“Descant” a story at Columbia Journal

“Paris Doesn’t Belong to Us” in the anthology We’ll Never Have Paris, edited by Andrew Gallix, with more than 70 writers, including Brian Dillon, David Hayden, and Evan Lavender-Smith

Review of The William H. Gass Reader in the North Dakota Quarterly

On The Shining – The Smart Set

Nearer My Hong Sang-soo to Me – MUBI

William Gaddis’ Compositional Self – LA Review of Books

“Debut” a story at The Collagist

The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport – LA Review of Books

Reading The Cantos – Big Other

A Year With Wallace Stevens – 3am Magazine

On First Reformed – Big Other

On Eating Combos – The Smart Set

Return to Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival – LA Review of Books

“A Modern” (fiction) – Berfrois

Autumn in New York – LA Review of Books

Reviewings in Light of the Zeitgeist – 3am Magazine

Remembering William H. Gass – LA Review of Books

On Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon – MUBI

Interview with John Haskell – The Millions

Bergman’s Spell – MUBI

Helafizzles – 3am Magazine

“The Condoleezza Rice Fan Club Visits Akron, Ohio” at The Collagist

On Toni Erdmann and it’s ending at LA Review of Books  

“On or About” – a short essay, at MUBI

“Manhattan,” a short fiction, is at Juked

 Mark Greif Interview at LA Review of Books

On Divorce at Ozy.com

“Take This Waltz” Then Move On?: Breakups in the Age of Selfish at Mubi.com

Review of Joseph Tabbi’s William Gaddis biography at Kenyon Review

On William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own at The Millions

Essay at 3am Magazine – All Hues in His Controlling

Arts Fuse Review of My Brooklyn Writer Friend

Brooklyn Rail Review of My Brooklyn Writer Friend

Interview at The Collagist 

A review of William Gass’s Eyes at 3am Magazine

Interview at Electric Literature

At Fanzine a short essay, “Envy, the Unsuccessful Writer’s Friend”

At MUBI, Mister Fincher and Monsieur Dreyer, cinematic despair and rapture

At Medium/Human Parts, a piece on Internet Dating

At MUBI, On Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy

At MUBI, four new pieces: Mr. Turner, Boyhood, and CriticismEric Rohmer’s A Winter’s Tale, Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud on its 50th Anniversary, and a look at French director Jean Gremillion

Short story “Such a Sweet Meat” is in The Collagist

A review of Eric Rohmer: Interviews is in the Summer Issue of Film Quarterly 

An essay on Paul Thomas Anderson, envy, and space in film at the LA Review of Books

On Louise Gluck – The Millions

Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications. See What I See, a book of essays, and Especially the Bad Things, stories, were both published by Splice in the Autumn of 2019.

gregorygerke@yahoo.com

 

Pain Pays the Income of Each Precious Thing – On Barry Lyndon