Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Kyle Minor

Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction, and co-editor of The Other Chekhov. His work appears in The Southern Review, Surreal South, Best American Mystery Stories 2008, and Random House's Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers.

A couple of days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
I'm on a 25-city book tour for my short fiction collection In the Devil's Territory, which means lots of planes, trains, buses, rental cars, subway stations -- lots of waiting, in other words, which means lots of reading. Lucky for me, I've been traveling with a first-class book, Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object, by my tour partner Kathleen Rooney. It's a memoir in six essays, a meditation on Kathy's work as an artist's model. The book is interested in the body, and what we do with it, and what we think about it, and why. It's also interested in the personas we create for ourselves and for others, and the uses of art and the way the idea of art gets used. Along the way, Kathy sketches beautiful, incisive, and occasionally devastating portraits of her fellow models and the artists for whom they pose. She doesn't spare herself, either. The book ends bravely, positing that the work toward empathy and human connection that literature and art strain toward might ultimately be doomed to fail ("we are all alone!" she writes), but that all of it is worth pursuing nonetheless.
Learn more about Kyle Minor and his work at his website, MySpace page, and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue