From Old Notebooks presents us with both the minutiae and macrutiae of a lived life — both the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the miraculous — and interrogates genre so as to interrogate why we live and why we die. The writing commands us to eavesdrop, and we do so ravenously.

The great tradition of modern philosophy and letters, from Nietzsche and Artaud to Deleuze and Houellebecq, has taught us this much: maintaining the old grammars, figures and style of humanist narrative will never allow us to think. While sustaining a beauty of textual expression Lavender-Smith has nevertheless created a new genre of literature and a new mode and style of thought. This work is at once intellectually compelling and creatively breathtaking. This is a book to be read slowly, carefully and with thoughtful pleasure.

Finally a conceptual art that is thoroughly literary. This is not a registering in language of various perverse tasks like copying an entire issue of The New York Times. Rather Lavender-Smith’s fictions ask us to project, reflect on, and even enjoy the bizarre ways that fictions pervade our world — recalled simply by mention, without the necessity of their being developed. I especially like his projected plots because the reader cannot know if he or she could easily complete them or find it impossible to have much to say at all. Perhaps in the long run those are both the same states, and what matters most about our fictions is that they are so always already complete that they also seem inexhaustible.

CHARLES ALTIERI
AUTHOR OF THE PARTICULARS OF RAPTURE: AN AESTHETICS OF THE AFFECTS

Scenes, plots for possible stories and novels. Whimsical, fearful, lusty, philosophical, and scatological notes on books, moods, dreams, domestic events. Carrying this book around, the reader will look into it from time to time to jiggle quiescent corners of the brain.

ALPHONSO LINGIS
AUTHOR OF THE COMMUNITY OF THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON

“Novel in which the verb to be and all inflections thereof appear italicized in every instance.” “Story about a mother who develops an allergic reaction to her kids.” “Monologue spoken by an aging pianist-composer, based on Prokofiev, beginning with the following sentence: My fingers have grown very tired.” This is not “stream of consciousness,” this is jet stream of consciousness. The mind above itself looking into itself, into fantasy, imagination, longing, and fear as if from a great and bemused but wary distance. If, as Baudelaire has written, the philosopher is the one who has “acquired by habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego,” then Evan Lavender-Smith is that philosopher — writing with an intense wit, an open vulnerability, and an intricately layered intelligence — layered like a cake and layered like a Dantean vision: sweet, rich, terrifying, demonic. An outrageously smart and seriously playful/prayerful book. Read it.

JULIE CARR
AUTHOR OF REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION

Like an atonal musical composition, Evan Lavender-Smith’s suite of fractured annotations scores a symphony of wonder one abridged but baying note at a time. This is pointillism on point — both the static of the infinite spaces between the stars and the salt and pepper snow spilling from a deranged cathode ray tube on fire. You don’t so much read the book as absorb the scintillating ecstatic pulsing radiation.

MICHAEL MARTONE
AUTHOR OF MICHAEL MARTONE: FICTIONS

From Old Notebooks is not only about stories, or even about writing stories — it is writing itself, or rather, it is writing being re-written before our eyes. Here everything changes: what counts as writing, thinking, and a “book.” And its readers don’t simply read From Old Notebooks — they become part of this change as well. It is very rarely that such things occur.

JOHN Ó MAOILEARCA
AUTHOR OF POST-CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY: AN OUTLINE

If Italo Calvino and Kathy Acker had a literary bastard child, then Evan Lavender-Smith would no doubt be that person. From Old Notebooks is by turns a gentle, almost wistful meander through the twists and turns of memory and a violent poke in the eye of literary and critical conventions. It is beautiful, provocative and seductive.

IAN BUCHANAN
AUTHOR OF THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF CRITICAL THEORY

Any of the concepts gestured at herein, if executed, would make an awesome book project. This compendium of potentiality, laced through with Eros and Thanatos and Knee-Slappers, is all we will ever need, ever again.

REBECCA WOOLF
AUTHOR OF THE KING

Evan Lavender-Smith reveals what other writers, especially first-timers, try to hide: the influence, the bravado, the insecurity, the bravery, and the cowardice and the hubris of writing … He’s abstract and lucid, direct and indirect. He makes us shudder and swoon.

A wildly self-aware collection of big ideas that obliterates distinctions between fiction, philosophy, poetry and autobiography. Witty, sweet, and often brilliant … The book is a dynamic conversation, a rowdy three-way between reader and author and text.

This startling, insightful compendium reminds us what literature is in its endless, mutating forms.

I kept reading [From Old Notebooks] thinking, why does this work? This shouldn’t work! Meanwhile I was laughing out loud and loving it. When I finished it I thought, well, if he can do that, I can do any damn thing I want in poetry.

Lavender-Smith, the writer and character, is something of a rock star in his seemingly effortless riffs and charting of his own craven, absurd existence … [From Old Notebooks] is a book on what it’s like to write a book in light of the heavyweights, to have a voice but to be unsure of the results produced from an anxiety-laden mind … Lavender-Smith pulls off this type of book, triumph that it is, easily enough.

[Evan Lavender-Smith’s] hybrid memoir–philosophic mania–idea machine–joke book–power assemblage From Old Notebooks is simply out of control. In the vein of Markson or D’Agata, but with a manic, hilarious, intense vision that makes it so singular it’s almost its own genre.

From Old Notebooks implodes genre expectations and conventions … This work changes the art of the book and challenges what it means to write and read, to live and tell a story.

Lavender-Smith’s book is, if fictionalized and created, if structured to look genuine but in fact earnestly planned … a genius enterprise. There is an arc within the lines, there is a story in each of the related bits: we learn more about his family with each continued moment, we follow the ideas of a writer and how the craft works, we learn something more about being human, about existing.

More true to life in its set of preoccupations than many a “realist” novel or plotted memoir can ever become … From Old Notebooks is a charm, a goad, an anti-masterpiece of an anti-novel — a work of art that’s easy to enter, and hard to put down.