Colin Winnette's Users

March 31, 2023 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

We here at Mutable first met Colin Winnette in a loft in Chicago sometime in early 2009, and have delighted in watching as his career has blossomed in the last decade-and-a-half. From the subtle allegorical realism of his debut novel, Revelation, a voice that matured with Coyote and Haint’s Stay, turned wondrously weird with The Job of Wasp, and has now founds its home with Users.

Hailed by the New York Times as “timeless”, the story also reads as very timely, centering around a tech creative and his efforts to create VR experiences from dreams, a premise which perfectly fits with Winnette’s signature dreamlike prose. From Western to sci-fi, the one constant is a kind of watery and elastic reality, a prose both biblical and sly.

You can read a sample of Users here.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

This is Not a Review: of The Reeking Hegs

April 09, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Modernist literature was working to uncover something. It had a purpose. It existed in the age of Freud, back when there was a strong faith in the power of dark truths revealed, and what wisdoms can be found hidden undetected in our streaming consciousness—but ideologies wane and ebb. They surge. They subside.

There was a time when manically playful experimental literature was a mainstay of the art, and the lone scribner penning a piece of madness, comedic or otherwise, was a type. From James Joyce to John Kennedy Toole, writers were treated as a kind of amusing malady of the age, to be found in the cafe’s of Paris or living with their mothers, and sometimes, these madmen and madwomen could actually write. But that idea, of geniuses peering over the heads of their small-minded peers, began losing its definition somewhere around midcentury, and slowly morphed into something more insidious. The MFA student.

Nietzsche was right to mistrust the institution. It has done little good for philosophy. Throughout the twentieth century, philosophy has become an increasingly academic pursuit. These days, our philosophers are either populists (like Sartre) or produced by and for the institution (Lyotard and really the whole postmodern school), and at best a bit of both (Foucault and Žižek). The dangerous exoticism of a lone philosopher pontificating in print seems almost as quaint today as the tradition of prophecy that came before.

And the institution is doing the same thing to literature.

People say that writers who learn at MFA programs and writers who sprout from the sidelines are equally numerous, but that is not the point. The point is that, just as the philosophy being produced today is entirely academic, the type of literature being produced is now wholly commercial. You will disagree, I am sure, and rightly so, but when I say something is ‘commercial’, what I mean is it’s written up to the audience, rather than written to some point beyond the audience. There is no more writing for posterity. The thinking class has lost hope in their grand project, and so the publishing industry has lost its purpose beyond the barest of business models.

Experimental literature itself only exists as a subgenre of the institution. We call it “experimental” because it fits that genre, but actual experimenting is no longer something we envision being done by covens of artists with manifestoes clutched in hand but by grad students who are more articulate at pontificating upon their ideas than in presenting coherent works. Which is why The Reeking Hegs is such an important book.

It doesn’t fit into any of these little holes.

This is Not a Review: of Haints Stay

January 13, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Haints Stay is something like as if Cormac McCarthy’s bloody West were touched by the hand of Samuel Beckett, and something of the aesthetic spirit child of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, except for more honest. It breathes through its bloody teeth and sings in places you thought were immune to song. It has a power that is difficult for a reader to reconcile themselves with, but also difficult to turn away from, or something like rubbernecking a divine accident.

Trinity: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

herocious

Originally published in The Open End

For some reason three is a good number. There’s a balance to three, a symmetry that seems to establish an axis. Three is triptych, three is trinity. With a title like REVELATION I feel like trinity is the more applicable to Colin Winnette’s first novel.

It’s a good book. There’s a weight to it that sits heavy and savory, like the first book you ever read.

In One Story

January 12, 2021

Colin Winnette

Mutable Author Colin Winnette recently released a remarkable new pair of works bound as one, labeled Fondly, and put out by Atticus Books. One of these books is Gainesville, which follows the twisted branches of a restless family tree in a small Texas town, and the other is a collection of stories entitled, In One Story, stories that detail the lives of two sisters, both cast as wildly imaginative entities, each story more bizarre than the next.

Some years ago Mr. Winnette recorded an audio book of In One Story, and Mutable has put this book up for free download at bandcamp in conjunction with the new release!

19 stories available to stream or download now!

Listen

Interview of Colin Winnette in The The

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(Author Colin Winnette, whose novel, Revelation, was put out by Mutable last Fall, is interviewed below by The The’s Brian Chappell.)

Brian: What authors and styles have shaped you?

Colin: Influence is a tricky thing to talk about. I can say that Ben Marcus’s work was extremely important to me. It still is, but at one point it totally saved me. Or, reinvigorated me. I was finishing up undergrad and I was in love with writers like Beckett, Proust, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, these iconic figures who did what they were doing so masterfully that there seemed nowhere to go at all after that. That was also the result of my age at the time and what being in school can do to you. I didn’t realize it then, but I had a pretty narrow vision of what it meant to be a writer and what one could do with fiction. But then I picked up Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women and I was just totally blown away. It was an entirely different approach to working with and examining language than I had ever encountered before. Those books led me to Gertrude Stein and William Gaddis and all of these authors who were breaking language apart, yes, but also reclaiming it, making it do new and fascinating things. And, I mean, they had been doing this for a long time and in different ways, and here was Ben Marcus doing it still in his own way and just killing it. So I suddenly felt very free again. It’s interesting the difference between grad school and undergrad. In undergrad I was constantly being told what good writing looked like. It looks like Carver. It looks like Chekhov. It looks like Pynchon (and indeed it does!). It looks like Austen. Etc. Workshops were little help because they were often the same kind of thing: I think you should do this, or I think this should happen, etc. Initially I lacked the confidence to assert myself. Then, when I gained a little confidence, I asserted myself by just ignoring pretty much everybody and only listening to the 2% I thought made sense or seemed to come from a good place. I started to tune a lot out. So I left undergrad fed-up, but with a lot of energy. I wrote and worked and traveled and didn’t write and two years later I went to grad school with a much different attitude. I used that time to write as much as possible. I listened to people and read as much as I could, but took the whole thing less…personally, I guess…than before. I took it seriously, but I knew the conversations we were having in class were often selfish in that we were all interested in enhancing our work by discussing the work of others. Helping one another wasn’t exactly the point, although we certainly did help one another from time to time. And I should say I think all that’s great. The two most important things grad school gave me were time and a sense of purpose. I felt encouraged to work and I had the hours in the day to do it. Or if I didn’t have them, I made them because I knew my time was limited. I taught myself how to make time to write. I was writing a lot on the train and in bed my first year. I wouldn’t let myself sleep until I had done a certain amount of work. I’m not sure I would have had that kind of discipline at first if I weren’t in a program. Now, it comes much more naturally. I had to learn how to kick my own ass.

The End of the World: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Steve Himmer

Originally published in the Steve Himmer Blog

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.

Colin Winnette reading from Revelation!

January 12, 2021 in Podcast

Colin Winnette, Mutable author, recently informed us that he got engaged in Prague and to celebrate we’re putting the first chapter of his remarkable novel, Revelation, up for audio download.

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
208 Pages
$12.95
Out of Print

An Excerpt of Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Colin Winette

From the cliff, it looked like an enormous pecan shell. As they climbed down the rocks, Marcus could better see the soggy outline of each broken plank. Below them was a wooden hull, flipped on its side.

The old water had worn a smooth stone grotto into the cliff set. It also left pieces of a ship there.

Most of the planks came loose with a tug. Marcus removed four pieces and laid them beside one another on the stone at their feet.

“This ship,” Colin said, “was a model ship.”

“How do you mean?” Marcus rearranged the boards into a square, brought together the corners. “It was a battleship or something.”

“Someone built it like a battleship. Someone built this thing to look exactly like a Roman battleship. See, these are the oarlocks, below deck, because warriors didn’t row. Slaves did.”

Interview of Colin Winnette in Monkey Bicycle

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(Recently, Monkey Bicycle interviewed Mutable author Colin Winnette about Revelation, his writing process, pressures, and hopes for the future. This interview can be found below.)

MB: What is your religious background?

CW: I’m not a religious person at all, really. Far from it. But I had the unique experience of being a non-religious person growing up in a small town in Northeast Texas. So throughout my life I was steeped in various devoted interpretations of biblical narrative. The closest our family ever came to adopting a religion was when, in an arguably noble attempt to set our family on a, well if not more righteous, certainly more socially accepted path, my older sister (who was very young at the time) insisted our family begin attending church. The idea was that we would then be more like the other families in town, more like her friends’ families, and a little less…our strange selves. My parents were very open-minded and supportive, so we went. I don’t remember which denomination it was, or even what we did there. I only remember dressing up for a few Sundays in a row, then being very happy when we abandoned the project. Christianity, in one form or another, was the dominant religion in our hometown, but I never really got into it and, aside from this little experiment, I was never really asked to. Then, in grade school, I had a good friend who was Muslim, (his was the only Muslim family in our school, I think) and I used to talk to him a lot about his beliefs and his particular religious practices, and the benefits/challenges of these. I distinctly remember him telling me that I had to believe him about something or other because he couldn’t lie as it was against his religion. That struck me then as very convenient; to have a system of beliefs that worked as a set of rules governing your behavior. In my head, he didn’t have to worry about lying because he couldn’t lie. It was against the rules. I was open to, and enthusiastic about, his religious experiences and accounts because he was my friend and they were so unfamiliar to me. The idea of finding something like that for myself became appealing, and I asked my mother to take me to the library so I might read up on various religions and see which one best suited me. Then I too might have a set of rules by which to live. On the one hand, the project was a failure. No single text, or tradition, really fit me that well, but it all seemed really wild and each religion exhibited these great imaginative capabilities. I was learning a lot. At the same time, I was struggling my way through Tolkien, some Shakespeare, Greek mythology, that kind of thing. It’s probably for this reason that I have always viewed religious texts simply as powerful narratives, as literature, rather than existential truths or solid guidebooks for how to live. At best, I guess, they’re examples of how things could be, or might have been. But, again, this was just my experience. Since then I’ve always studied religious texts as/alongside literary texts, particularly the Bible, as it was such a dominant narrative voice in the town/state/country where I grew up. This was one of the initial sparks for this project, engaging a biblical narrative on literary terms, and exposing it to the same manipulations/experimentation one might any other literary tradition.

Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Product

Colin Winnette

“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.”

—Ben Marcus, author of *The Flame Alphabet*, *Notable American Women*, and *The Age of Wire and String*

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

—Rosellen Brown, author of *Before and After* and *Civil Wars*

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.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

herocious

19 stories available to stream or download now!

Steve Himmer

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"208 Pages$12.95Out of Print

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"208 Pages$12.95Out of Print

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
208 Pages
$12.95
Out of Print

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
208 Pages
$12.95
Out of Print