Mr. Geebee on the dawn of Mutable

It was ten years ago this month that we here at Mutable put out our first product, a green vinyl record called, “A Journey to Happiness Island”. It was just a little joke of an album we wrote and recorded over the course of a weekend with a roomful of friends in a loft in Greenpoint, New York. We had no idea we would still be putting out records and books ten years later.

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Revelation, a novel by Colin Winnette, is a story about the end of the world in which, somehow, the apocalypse isn’t the biggest thing going. The story follows a core of three friends (Marcus, Colin, and Tom) from youth to old age as they lead ordinary lives in the midst of exploding trees, vanished oceans, plagues of locusts, and the Four Horsemen. Mundane traumas like a lost teenage girlfriend are more devastating to these characters than a lost ocean, and the vast wasteland of dead, rotting fish left behind as it dries are taken as a wretched novelty but not much of a warning.

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(Who is Kristina Marie Darling? Whoever she is, her poems have affected us strongly, even as we cough uncertainly in the far east, growing weaker by the day. Three of these aforementioned poems can be found below:)

Noctuary (i)

The brass locket, which contained only an empty frame, was the first in a series of ominous love tokens that appeared beneath her window.

                                                *

When he fastened the clasp on her necklace, every nightingale seemed to sing. Their swollen throats and colorless eyes.

                                                *

He reminded her of Petrarch, driven by the necessity of pursuit. The beloved as interchangeable, a vessel. A bird heaving under the weight of an otherworldly song.

                                                *

The homage felt contrived, mechanical. And still the luminous buttons on her shirt.

                                                *

It was then she wished the pursuit would continue indefinitely.

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The artist statement of sorts, “Fiction”, that begins the first half of the stories in A.D. Jameson’s Amazing Adult Fantasy, teaches us how to read the entire collection: we’re told that we’re reading a book that’s been lost in a fire, that the book we’re reading doesn’t exist. A better metaphor for childhood, the gratuitous fiction of how we remember it, might not exist either.

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“In Revelation, Colin Winnette sets fire to the world, and in the aftermath, characters wander through smoke, struck dumb by devastation. A forceful book — stripped down, cool, and painful — about the absolute peril of desire.”

“Colin Winnette has… made a provocative work by framing the ordinary in the unfathomable.”

Revelation, Colin Winnette’s debut novel is a startlingly simple, fresh and audacious retelling of the famous biblical apocalypse tale. Winnette’s Revelation is, on the one hand, a very everyday and modern story, in which desperate characters wander and slip from one year to the next, but behind what would otherwise be a mundane detail lies an architecture of the supernatural — a father carries his son to his grandfather’s retirement community, but does so across a parking lot consumed in a plague of locusts, two childhood friends construct a fort from the hull of an enormous ship abandoned by the oceans as they recede, a body falls from the sky as a warning, but only demolishes the deck of a character’s lakeside home.

To us here at Mutable, Colin Winnette seemed to pop out of nowhere a year ago to instantly become a force of some renown among the indie literary world. A Finalist for the 1913 Press First Book Award, Winnette has stirred up notice from all corners for his innovative and striking stories, as well as his various narrative experiments of larger size. However, Revelation is more than just a stylistic exercise, it’s a powerful emotional document.

Revelation is available now! Click here to read an excerpt from Revelation.

AD JAMESON’S Amazing Adult Fantasy opens with a brief indictment: “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st century.” The stories that follow—fabled, sardonic, sharp—venture to strip fiction of its conventions, substituting in their place a new narrative logic: one that brandishes an acute playfulness and grandiose sentiment, one of mustachios and infatuation, the most mature kind of absurdity. These are stories about obsessions and deficiencies, about people who glare every bit of themselves, who feel the world on its largest scales. In these stories, astronaut Buzz Aldwin falls into the bad graces of NASA, a girl shares her various and mutually exclusive truths about Oscar the Grouch, and Bronx monkeys devote themselves to preserving earth’s aurora borealis. While these are certainly stories of insistent and shifting forms, they are also stories that always endeavor to a literary beauty.

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To begin with, these short fictions are funny.

They are also experimental, wayward and surreal, any of which might make them seem far more serious and “worthy” than they actually are.

They are not stories in the conventional sense. Some of them may offer a narrative, but if you try to follow them too closely you will find characters change, chronologies wander all over the place, and an obsessive interest in something mundane and irrelevant will suddenly intrude into the text. They take risks with what we expect of our fiction, which is a good thing, but not all the risks pay off, of course. This means it is all too easy to linger over phrase-making or ponder construction, or otherwise consider the success or failure of the individual pieces in some drily academic way. But that would be to miss the simple joie de vivre, the devil-may-care insouciance of the pieces.

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[Ulrich Haarbürste's remarkable stories of Roy Orbison and the wrapping of Roy Orbison in cling-film have developed a cult following in various english-speaking portions of the globe, and perhaps in other parts where they speak other languages, but I would know nothing of this. He has since developed these stories into a full-length book, which is not yet available in America, but is most certainly available in New Zealand and England. Those of you who live in these places should purchase it, and those of you who live in other places should wait with bated breath and possibly petition local conglomerates to bring this literary work to your homeland. Story below.]

It always starts the same way. I am in the garden airing my terrapin Jetta when he walks past my gate, that mysterious man in black.

‘Hello Roy,’ I say. ‘What are you doing in Dusseldorf?’

‘Attending to certain matters,’ he replies.

‘Ah,’ I say.

He apprises Jetta’s lines with a keen eye. ‘That is a well-groomed terrapin,’ he says.

‘Her name is Jetta.’ I say. ‘Perhaps you would like to come inside?’

‘Very well.’ He says.

Roy Orbison walks inside my house and sits down on my couch. We talk urbanely of various issues of the day. Presently I say, ‘Perhaps you would like to see my cling-film?’

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