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| Let
there be light boxes: Shane Jones. |
Art
Beat
OVERTURE,
CURTAIN, LIGHTS Summer is coming. I can tell, not from the
weather, but because Stageworks/Hudson have announced
their 2010 season. It begins June 16 with the 1660s/1960s
“bodice- ripping mashup” Or, by Liz Duffy Adams,
which runs through July 4. Next up is a new play, Imagining
Madoff (as in Bernie Madoff), by Deborah Margolin,
which runs through Aug. 8. This will be followed by The
Amish Project by Jessica Dickey (a regional premiere)
on Aug. 18, and this year’s Play By Play festival,
Blue Moons, on Sept. 29. For more info, call
828-7843.
LOCAL
HERO In these days of ever-shorter publishing lists and ever-increasing
numbers of self-published books, local author Shane Jones
had something very unusual happen to him. He’s an overnight
sensation. OK, not quite overnight—his novel, Light Boxes,
was first published by a small press in Baltimore over a year
ago. The press run was, the author estimates, between 500
and 600 books. (This is the version reviewed in these pages
last July.) Then something amazing, unexpected and extremely
rare happened: Filmmaker Spike Jonze, of Where the
Wild Things Are and Adaptation fame, took out an
option on the novel. This sparked new interest in the publishing
world, and Viking/Penguin bought the rights and reissued the
book on the Penguin Original imprint.
Light
Boxes is, as the publishers succinctly describe it, “about
a town of balloonists who fight a war against the month of
February.” (It does sound like a plot in one of Jonze’s films,
doesn’t it?) Jones told an interviewer that it’s “a myth,
a fable, a war story, a detective story, a bunch of stuff
thrown together.” Our own Josh Potter wrote:
“Like
the spare text that constellates the stark white pages of
this slim volume, the story is rendered in simple clean lines,
like a schematic on graph paper. . . . The quality is more
akin to archetypal mythology, where the logic of the world
is simple, but the reader learns not to assume anything about
the world that is unspecified. The whole thing has a set quality
akin to George Saunders’ The Brief and Frightening Reign
of Phil (minus the allegorical comedy), while its quaint,
steam-punk historicism calls to mind Lars von Trier’s film
Dogville.”
Which brings us to the point of this write-up: Jones will
be signing Light Boxes on May 27 at 7 PM at the Book House
of Stuyvesant Plaza (Western Avenue, Albany). For more
info, visit bhny.com.
—Shawn
Stone
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