From Old Notebooks Author:Evan Lavender-Smith From Old Notebooks is a memoir, a novel, a poem, an essay -- a self-styled memoivel -- which exemplifies how love of language and literature enriches our lives, and explores, often with great humor, the many pitfalls confronting a young writer and father on his journey to maturity. Each entry in From Old Notebooks is literal... more »ly that -- an idea written in a writer's draftbook. Within this unconventional format, Lavender-Smith is able to tell us the story of his life while ruminating on subjects ranging from fatherhood to philosophy, art, football, music, politics, TV, teaching, fear of death, and everything in between. In the process, Lavender-Smith lays bare the day-to-day trials and tribulations of an artist confronted by the pressures of culture, family, writing, and, simply, being. Witty, original, poignant and deeply insightful, From Old Notebooks is a coming-of-age story, an ode to writing and reading, to living and loving -- a celebration of 'human thought in all its glory, all its mundanity.' // 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. --Claire Colebrook, author of Irony in the Work of Philosophy// Unapologetically honest, dazzling introspective, meticulous and charming, Evan Lavender-Smith's 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. His writing commands us to eavesdrop, and we do so ravenously. --Jenny Boully, author of The Body: An Essay// 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//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 Mullarkey, 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 Deleuzism: A Metacommentary// 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 Wolff, author of Manderley« less