The Quivering Pen

Finding a Home in Richard Ford's Rock Springs

2012-02-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

Outside the public library, the wind was scouring the streets of Livingston. Again. It was nearly 8 p.m. and God’s furious wind machine had been at it since 6 a.m. that day.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. In Livingston, Montana, the wind never stops; it only pauses to take another deep breath before it blows metal trash cans a-clattering down the alley and snatches the toupee clean off the Rotary president’s head as he stands on the street corner talking to the PTA treasurer whose dress flies up and everyone learns the rumors about her thong underwear are, disappointingly, untrue. On really bad days, featherweight toddlers who haven’t been tied down by precautionary mothers are sucked skyward, never to be seen again.

So yes, Livingston really blows.

On this particular night in 1987, I was temporarily safe from the wind, but my hair was still bedraggled from the long walk between my house on D Street and the public library nine blocks away. I sought shelter in the middle of the adult fiction section. It was warm and breezeless in the library; but inside my head, a wind still howled.

I was 24, just out of college, married, the father of two children with a third on the way, and about $200 this side of being broke. Our budget was so lean, Jack Sprat looked like a glutton. To conserve gas, I walked to work, head down and collar up as the hard winds of south-central Montana scraped the streets. I was distracted, disconcerted and on my way to a depression that would grey my life for a number of years.

The ink was still fresh on my English degree from the University of Oregon and I was constantly going around fanning the flames of my ambition to be a Great Writer—a fantasy which, even at that time, I knew was hollow. Despite my higher education and la-ti-dah literary airs, I’d ended up at a minimum-wage job: the copy editor at the town’s newspaper. I worked 10-hour days five days a week, which left almost no time to write the Great American Novel. I thought about my novel a lot, but I had yet to write a single sentence.

On the night the wind blew me into the library, I was looking for consolation and inspiration. I came there not knowing what I’d walk out with, but I knew I wanted to read a great piece of literature--one that would make my heart pound, my palms sweat and the little hairs on the backs of my hands stand up. I wanted fiction that would take me away from my life.

Little did I know I was a character straight out of Richard Ford’s stories.

I roused myself from my gloom and looked at the shelf just above my head. Rock Springs. The title on the spine glowed in the fluorescent light and I thought of burning bushes, parting clouds, choirs of trumpets. I reached up, took the book in my hands, and opened it to a random page.

I swear to all that is holy, these are the words my eyes fell on: "This is not a happy story. I warn you." That’s how "Great Falls" opens.

The words were like an opera aria and this is what the diva was singing in my ear: "This writer knows you." I had never heard of Richard Ford before that night, but somehow he had wormed his way into my life. The hairs on the backs of my hands stirred, the dusty ten-foot stacks leaned overhead like trees, and the front door of the library banged open as another person stumbled inside. I kept turning pages, skimming the opening paragraphs to the other stories in Rock Springs.

      I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying good-bye to her ex-husband, Bobby. I had already been out to the stores for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.
     This was not going to be a good day in Bobby's life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail.
          --"Sweethearts"

Narratively-speaking, these openings are rather flat, loaded with exposition, and documentary in nature. It's as if each narrator was sitting across from you in a diner, elbows resting on the Formica-topped table, and unspooling the story of his life--stark, naked facts at first, but then gradually turning more complex and colorful as the teller becomes engaged in the telling. These were lives as grim and bleak as mine and it made me happier than you can imagine to find them here on the page. They were me, I was them.

Later, this would become one of my favorite opening paragraphs in Rock Springs:

All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever--ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life.
--"Optimists"

These first lines in the stories of Rock Springs give just enough intriguing detail and turns of phrase that you read the second paragraph, and the third, the fourth, until you finally reach the end and then circle back around to that first paragraph to take a second look at how confidently Ford sets up an entire story's worth of character and conflict in a remarkable economy of space. There are entire worlds in these few words.

They are enough to keep you standing deep in the stacks of a library for nearly an hour--until the muscles in your lower back start to throb, until the librarian announces the building will be closing in fifteen minutes and patrons should bring all materials to the check-out desk at once, until the winter night wind rises in pitch and intensity, warning you of the threadbare walk home. I knew there were bills waiting for me on the kitchen counter, diapers needing to be changed, and a wife wondering where I’d been all evening. But, for the moment, all those cares burned away like sun-warmed fog. I was in Rock Springs and I never wanted to leave.

This article originally appeared at Book Riot.

My First Time: Myfanwy Collins

2012-01-30T05:29:00.000-07:00

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Myfanwy Collins, author of the novel Echolocation (forthcoming from Engine Books). Collins lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with her husband and son. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, Potomac Review and other venues. Ron Currie Jr. (author of Everything Matters!) had this to say about her debut novel: "Myfanwy Collins has the goods. It's that simple. Echolocation is about love in all its magnificent slipperiness; it's about how secrets bind us rather than rend us; it's about the endless series of personal reinventions we call a lifetime. And these are things we had all better be thinking--and reading--about, if we plan to try and get out of this alive." A collection of Collins' short fiction, I Am Holding Your Hand, is also forthcoming from PANK Little Books in August. Please visit her website for more information.

My First Acknowledgments

In my mind, I had written acknowledgements dozens of times, always hoping that someday I would write them for real. I imagined how satisfying it would feel to finally be able to publicly thank all of those people who had helped me and believed in me along my path to publication. I couldn’t wait to let my husband know how much I appreciated all of his years of sacrifice and to let my family and friends know how much I appreciated their dogged support.

I firmly believed that if I were ever so lucky as to have a book published, that writing the acknowledgements would be the easiest, most natural part of the whole process.

I was wrong.

When it came time to write the acknowledgements for my forthcoming debut novel, Echolocation, I found myself flustered, baffled, and afraid. These words were no longer fantasy. They were real and everyone who read the book would potentially read them as well.

Once I started writing, some of the fear fell away. I remembered that I was writing these words to express my thanks to people and organizations who had helped and/or inspired me. I was thanking people for their belief in me. I was thanking people for lending me their strength. That part was easy enough.

I felt satisfied with the first draft and walked away from it for a couple of weeks. When I opened the file again, I knew it would be the last time I worked on it before I sent it to my publisher. I was either on the verge of tears or actually crying as I worked. The emotions I was expressing on the page were real. I reached a hand out and touched each of these people and thanked them as best as I could. I hoped that they would feel that.

It was not until I sent the file to my publisher that the panic resurfaced. What if I forgot someone important? After I sent it to her, I read it again and asked her if she would let me know before she sent the book off, just in case I needed to make changes to the acknowledgements. She kindly agreed. As I write this, the acknowledgements are still with her. I’m not sure I’ll be able to take a deep breath until the book is gone and I can make no more changes.

Like all first times, this one has been a mix of joy and fear. When I am ever so lucky to write acknowledgements again, I will look back on how I feel now and, I hope, be able to use what I’ve learned in shaping my new experience. And what I have learned is this: what your family and friends give you as you work is a gift. Like all givers of gifts they have likely given what they have given you expecting nothing in return other than you are enriched by their generosity. Your gratitude is shown through your perseverance in putting the words on the page and never giving up on yourself. Your acknowledgements are merely the sweet icing on the hard-earned cake.

Great Beginnings: Ron Rash's Saints at the River

2012-01-29T06:26:00.000-07:00

The other day, a battered, stained and water-wrinkled book arrived in the mail for me. It was Saints at the River, Ron Rash's 2004 novel. I'd received it as part of a BookMooch trade. From all outward appearances, it's not a pretty book because of the rough condition it's in after passing through other readers' hands. This is one of the hazards of BookMooch and I usually take what I can get. In this case, I'm glad I got this mooch, grime and all. After reading the opening pages of Saints at the River, I can see clearly why the book is so bent and wrinkled: those previous readers' hands have gripped this novel hard.

Here's how the book begins in an italicized three-page preface before Chapter 1:

She follows the river trail downstream, leaving behind her parents and younger brother who still eat their picnic lunch. She is twelve years old and it is her school's Easter break. Her father has taken time off from his job and they have followed the Appalachian Mountains south, stopping first in Gatlinburg, then the Smokies, and finally this river. She finds a place above a falls where the water looks shallow and slow. The river is a boundary between South Carolina and Georgia, and she wants to wade into the middle and place one foot in South Carolina and one in Georgia so she can tell her friends back in Minnesota she has been in two states at the same time.
She kicks off her sandals and enters, the water so much colder than she imagined, and quickly deeper, up to her kneecaps, surging under the smooth surface. She shivers. Fifty yards downstream a granite cliff rises two hundred feet into the air to cast this section of river into shadow. She glances back to where her parents and brother sit on the blanket. It is warmer there, the sun full upon them. She thinks about going back but is almost halfway now. She takes a step, and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom she tries to set her foot on is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she is a good swimmer and has passed all of her Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won't hit her head on a rock and as she thinks this she's afraid for the first time and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep her from it and the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath before the river pulls her under and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into darkness and as she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and all is black and silent and she tells herself don't breathe but the need grows inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through the chest and throat and as that need rises her mouth and nose open at the same time and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone along with the dark as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final beautiful thought—that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that same moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

I don't know about you, but I'm more than hooked--I'm right there in the river with this little girl. I think I even forgot to breathe for the space of that last long sentence that runs like liquid current. I loved Rash's masterful novel Serena and am looking forward to his new novel The Cove, which goes on sale in April. But, after this humdinger of an opening, I may have to give serious consideration to reading the rest of Saints at the River first.

2012 Academy Awards Prediction Contest

2012-01-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the annual Oscars prediction contest at The Quivering Pen blog.

Last year's contest proved to be so popular, I'm rolling out the red carpet for a second time. Once again, you have the opportunity to predict who will take home the little golden statuette once all the bribes, under-the-table handshakes, and Rock-Paper-Scissors games are all done in Hollywood. Think you can forecast which way the wind will blow in Tinseltown this year? You'll probably do a better job than me. I'm not even going to try and make my predictions here at the blog because I've seen so few of the nominees (I've been too busy with a little thing called Fobbit: a Novel). My 2011 Oscar-nominee viewing list so far includes: Midnight in Paris, The Help, The Tree of Life, The Ides of March, Jane Eyre, Rango and 20 minutes of Transformers: Dark of the Moon (and even 20 minutes was too long for that crapfest). I hope to see a few more of the nominees before February 26, but not enough to make educated guesses without the help of tea leaves, dice, and a dartboard.

You, on the other hand, can show off your mad skillz and astound us with your Oscar picks. Here are the rules:

1. One entry per person.
2. You must answer all the questions in the survey to compete (in other words, predict a winner in each of the Oscar categories, and provide your name and e-mail address*).
3. The contest is open to anyone, though winners who reside outside the United States might have to wait a bit longer to receive the prize.
4. Each correct guess is worth one point. If more than one person ties for the number of most correct guesses, those names will go into a hat and the winner will be drawn from there.
5. The contest closes on Feb. 25, the day before the Academy Awards presentation.
6. The winner will be announced here on the website on Feb. 27.

The Grand Prize

One winner will get a copy of each of these books related to the Oscar nominees, generously donated by the following publishers:

W. W. Norton:

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Scholastic:

The Hugo Movie Companion: A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture by Brian Selznick

Penguin Books:

Albert Nobbs: A Novella by George Moore

The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer's Daughter to Prime Minister by John Campbell

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: A George Smiley Novel by John Le Carre

BONUS! From my own personal DVD collection, I'll throw in a (very gently) used copy of Days of Heaven in honor of this year's Best Director nominee Terrence Malick. While I was alternately astounded and confounded by The Tree of Life, I still believe Days of Heaven is, hands-down, a masterpiece. It's easily one of my Top 10 Films of All Time. This particular DVD went over to Iraq with me and, for the space of 93 minutes, took me away from the war. If you're the winner, it's yours, with my blessing.

Click Here to Take the 2012 Academy Awards Prediction Contest

(When you've completed the survey, you'll automatically be directed back here to the blog)

*Your email and other personal information will not be given to third parties. By participating, you consent to have your name published here at the blog as the winner.

Friday Freebie: The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau

2012-01-27T06:50:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Nomi Hurwitz, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Hystera by Leora Skolkin-Smith.

This week's giveaway is The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau. You've already heard from Nancy earlier this week when she dropped in to talk about her "first time." Now, you have the chance to read The Crown for yourself and find out why her third-grade teacher was like the Nostradamus of the literary world when she taped a sign to the classroom wall which read, "Have You Heard of Nancy Bilyeau, the Famous Writer?"

I have The Crown on my Kindle and am looking forward to reading it soon. I mean, who could pass up murder, political intrigue, religious fanaticism, sex, and nuns? (Perhaps it was inappropriate to put those last two things in the same sentence, and for that I apologize.) The Crown is set in 1537 and, according to Library Journal, will appeal to fans of Dan Brown and Philippa Gregory. Here's a bit of the plot summary from the publisher:

Joanna Stafford, a Dominican nun, learns that her favorite cousin has been condemned by Henry VIII to be burned at the stake. Defying the sacred rule of enclosure, Joanna leaves the priory to stand at her cousin’s side. Arrested for interfering with the king’s justice, Joanna, along with her father, is sent to the Tower of London. The ruthless Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, takes terrifying steps to force Joanna to agree to spy for him: to save her father’s life she must find an ancient relic—a crown so powerful, it may hold the ability to end the Reformation. Accompanied by two monks, Joanna returns home to Dartford Priory and searches in secret for this long-lost piece of history worn by the Saxon King Athelstan in 937 during the historic battle that first united Britain. But Dartford Priory has become a dangerous place, and when more than one dead body is uncovered, Joanna departs with a sensitive young monk, Brother Edmund, to search elsewhere for the legendary crown. From royal castles with tapestry-filled rooms to Stonehenge to Malmesbury Abbey, the final resting place of King Athelstan, Joanna and Brother Edmund must hurry to find the crown if they want to keep Joanna’s father alive.

O, The Oprah Magazine had this to say about the novel: "Bilyeau deftly weaves extensive historical detail throughout, but the real draw of this suspenseful novel is its juicy blend of lust, murder, conspiracy, and betrayal." It sounds like the perfect book for a mid-winter read.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Crown, all you have to do is answer this question:

What's the name of Bilyeau's ancestor who fled to the New World in 1661 to escape religious persecution in France and later built the first stone house on Staten Island? (You can find the answer by visiting the author's website.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Feb. 2--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 3. If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Robert Penn Warren's snow-snagged Tetons

2012-01-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

I'm still practicing my Poem-a-Day habit like a monk at his daily matins. This morning, I came across Robert Penn Warren's "Mortal Limit" and was happily surprised to see the Tetons, which loomed in my back yard as a child growing up in Jackson, make an appearance in his stanzas. The other Warren poems in The Poets Laureate Anthology left me rather unmoved, but "Mortal Limit" really spoke to me--especially that one phrase "the last purity of snow-snags." I really like the alliteration in that line and will carry it with me through the rest of my day. (Note: I've also seen it transcribed as "lazy purity" elsewhere on the web. I'm not sure which is the official version, or if Warren changed it at one point, but I'm sticking with "last" because it sounds better and makes more sense.)

Mortal Limit

I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.
It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags
Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming
Of dream-spectral light above the last purity of snow-snags.

There--west--were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be
In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height
Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see
New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?

Read the rest of the poem here.

Photo by Ansel Adams: The Tetons and the Snake River (1942)

Razors in the Bloodstream: Men in the Making by Bruce Machart

2012-01-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

I was halfway through Bruce Machart's debut collection of short stories, Men in the Making, when I rushed over to Facebook and posted this somewhat breathless message: "I can only read one story per day because they are like miniature razor blades bumping through my bloodstream. This is fiction that excoriates and scrubs the reader from the inside out." That sort of hyperbole is pretty typical of me and sometimes I'll later "reflect and regret" when I look back at what I've written.

Not in this case. Machart's ten stories, set mostly in Texas, are brutally good. It's the kind of fiction you read with equal parts pleasure and pain. It's the kind of pain that's good for you--the dental yank of the festered tooth, the extraction of the splinter, the snap-crunch back into place of the dislocated shoulder. At times, the stories can be hard to read, but when we've made it through to the end, we're rewarded with that sweet succor of catharsis.

But yes, it can be emotionally wrenching to reach those epiphanies. Machart, who also wrote the excellent novel The Wake of Forgiveness, doesn't shy away from the awful. He forces you to take your eyes off the road ahead and stare at all the gory realities of the wreck on the shoulder of the highway. In "The Only Good Thing I've Heard," for instance, we spend some time with Raymond, a nurse in a burn unit, as he administers debridement treatments to the patients. There are scenes in there guaranteed to make you squirm. But you cannot look away.

Or consider this opening paragraph of "Monuments":

When I was ten, after my mother left Dad and me and flew off to Europe, Kevin, the five-year-old next door, got run down in front of our house. He was chasing a cat, and after his body hit the pavement and slid into the grass near the Houston Lighting and Power substation across the road, neighbors say a bearded man in overalls stumbled down from the truck, put a hand on the sideview mirror to keep his balance, and took a leak right there in the street, beer cans falling from the cab to his feet. Later, we heard that Kevin's aorta had burst, that he probably hadn't felt the asphalt peeling his skin or the dark green cool of the grass where he'd come to a crumpled stop.

Every word in that paragraph is carefully orchestrated and impeccably placed, from the drunk's hand reaching out to the sideview mirror for balance to the "dark green cool of the grass" to the "crumpled stop." That kind of hard work on the part of the writer is all but invisible to the reader caught up in what's happening on the page. The details in that paragraph are so vivid and so shocking you forget it started with the seemingly-casual comment that the narrator comes from a broken home. But that absentee mother and the narrator's longing for love are central to the story. Kevin with his peeled skin is important, too, but he's the gory window dressing that pulls you inside the door.

Another standout story is "Because He Can't Not Remember"--the tension starting in the double negative of the title. It's about a couple--new parents--in the last five minutes of their life together in a Walmart parking lot on "another Houston night so hot and humid you could hang teabags from tree branches to steep." In a few moments, their lives will intersect with the troubled Ramirez twins in their blue LeMans cruising the parking lot and they will all be changed forever. After reading this, I sat in my chair, unable to move for several minutes, reamed through and through by the unbearable heaviness and beauty of the writing.

Machart also does an excellent job of describing the worlds in which his characters live; the details of the stories take us to places most of us have never been--a lumber mill, for instance, with this explanation of a debarker from "The Last One Left in Arkansas":

Imagine a porcupine turned inside out, a big mother with three-foot-long steel quills. That’s what a debarking drum is like. An enormous pipe, fifteen feet in diameter and lined inside with hundreds of these quills. Load it with a dozen or so twenty-foot-tall, forty-year-old Arkansas pine trunks, turn that sucker on, get it rolling good, and thirty seconds later you’ve got naked trees, fresh and clean as an Eden stream. Step back, blow the bark and sap out the discharge vents, smell that rich, sappy-sweet smell, and keep on keepin’ on.

After reading Machart's story, I know enough to stay away from one of these machines and not let my curiosity lead me inside to check out those quills at a time when no one else knows I'm in there and the foreman comes along to throw the switch. That happens here in "The Last One Left in Arkansas" and it's not pretty.

There's not a single story in this collection that doesn't work its ass off to earn genuine sympathy for its characters. These men defy the stereotype of blunt, hard-shelled machismo; Machart makes them far more complex than that. Oh sure, there's some swagger, but we recognize it for the thin shield it is; like this paragraph from the opening story, the aptly-named "Where You Begin":

You know Jimmy, all right. Here’s a guy with--as he’ll tell you--a truck and some luck and on good nights a fuck. A guy just far enough out of his mind to own the Exxon shipping and receiving record for blindfolded forklift driving--all hundred and five feet of the loading dock and down the ramp without ever putting on the brakes. Yup, Jimmy’s got more bowling shirts than sense, but you’ve been knowing him a long time, and when tit turns to trouble he ain’t ever late in that truck. He’s good people, Jimmy, never mind all his ribbing.

For every Jimmy, we get men like the members of the pipe fitter's union in "Among the Living Amidst the Trees" who shave their heads in sympathy for a co-worker with cancer:

These are rough-hewn and heavy men, men with calluses thick as rawhide, men who aren't afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts.

In Men in the Making, Machart is trying to get all the way to that inner core of hurt, past the leather epidermis of stoicism and brute force. What he finds, in fact, is that men are some of the most tender creatures around--whether they know it or not. The very last line of the last story in the book neatly sums it up: "to be a man, a whole man, is to remain forever in need." Though women aren't the main characters in these stories, neither are they marginalized. We are all travelers on the same journey, Machart says, with the same vulnerabilities and fear. Every reader has something to gain from the beautiful scouring debridement of Machart's fiction.

Edith, I Love You

2012-01-24T07:29:00.002-07:00

I fell in love with Edith when I was in graduate school.

For the sake of my wife's suddenly-arched eyebrows, let me clarify: I fell in love with Edith Wharton when I was buried up to my chin in required reading at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. She was long dead by that point, so my wife had nothing to worry about. Edith was dead, but her words lived on. At that point in my graduate career, I had been nearly conquered by the dullness of other novels on the reading list (I'm lookin' at you, Mr. Henry James!) and I needed literature that would cut through the fog. The House of Mirth proved to be a pretty bright lantern in all that gloom. Reading Wharton's 1905 novel, I felt like Lawrence Selden himself in the opening paragraph:

Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

Today marks Edith's birthday and I thought I'd take a moment here at The Quivering Pen to celebrate her life and influence on my own writing. Because I'm still on my diet (see: Jan. 1; also: resolution), I won't be having any birthday cake. (Insert lame joke about "having your cake and Edith, too.") But, if you could see me now, I'm wearing a rainbow-colored cone-shaped hat and blowing a paper noisemaker that unrolls like a red carpet from my mouth.

Edith Wharton (who would have been a whopping 150 years old today) is well worth feting in such a potentially-embarrassing manner. She combines everything I love about classic literature: the sharp realism of Flaubert and Dickens and the biting social criticism of Henry James (without, you know, all the dull parts). My Wharton education is far from complete--I've yet to read The Age of Innocence or The Custom of the Country--but what I've read, I've loved. In particular, I'm very fond of Summer. It's one of her books that doesn't get as much notice as The House of Mirth or Ethan Frome, but I found it to be every bit the arrow-to-the-heart kind of reading I'd come to expect from Wharton.

Like Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Summer caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1917, primarily because it's about sex and the enjoyment thereof. Supposedly, Wharton called it her "hot Ethan." It tells the story of Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners who "comes down from the mountain" to be adopted by a family in a rural New England town (this is one of the few times Wharton set one of her stories outside of New York City society). Overcoming her abusive past, Charity gets a job as a librarian and eventually has a passionate affair with Lucius Harney, an architect who has come to the country to escape the Big City. Complication: Lucius is secretly engaged to a society girl back in the B.C. Ruh-roh, Raggy!

Yes, Summer's story is good, but I especially like Wharton's description of the rural New England setting. Here, for instance, are the second and third paragraphs of the novel:

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The spring-like transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected New England villages. The clump of weeping-willows about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock wall enclosing the cemetery.
The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook the doleful fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the straw hat of a young man just passing under them, and spun it clean across the road into the duck-pond.

If all goes well with The Biography Project, you should be hearing much more about Edith Wharton later this year since Hermione Lee's 2007 biography of E.W. is in the queue to be read. For now, I'll leave you with this little tease--the opening paragraph of Chapter 2:

A little American girl, born into the middle of the Civil War, is growing up in the 1860s and 1870s in a well-established New York family. She is a late child, with much older brothers, so her childhood feels like an only childhood. She is taken to Europe when she is very young, and has a bad illness while she is there, which makes her more anxious and fearful than she was before it. She enjoys her early exposure to Paris, Rome and Spain, and when the family gets back to New York, she finds it ugly and alien, and always feels like a stranger there. She is red-haired, awkward, shy eager to please, in love with the sound of words and passionate about dogs. She is happier when she is running about, swimming and boating at the family's seaside home in Newport, or alone in her father's library, than when her mother dresses her up and takes her into society. She is devoted to her Irish nurse, affectionate with her father, less fond of her mother and puts up with being teased by her brothers. She tells herself stories all the time. She is to have no formal education.

My First Time: Nancy Bilyeau

2012-01-23T05:08:00.001-07:00

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Nancy Bilyeau, author of the just-released novel The Crown which is set in Tudor England and is an intriguing stew of murder, sex, and religious fanatics. Woman's Day called it "a must-read...Part The Da Vinci Code, part The Other Boleyn Girl, it will keep you guessing until the very end!" Bilyeau has worked on the staffs of Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Most recently, she served as deputy editor at InStyle magazine. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children. More information about her life and The Crown can be found at her website.

My First Writing Teachers

I went to public school in suburban Detroit. Big buildings, with classrooms filled to bursting. In elementary school there were always at least 30 of us per class. By the time I got to Winston Churchill High in Livonia, we were sometimes three to a locker. My graduating class topped 900 kids.

I liked learning but I was shy and uncertain of myself: the sort of student who finishes her test first but sits frozen at the desk without turning it in for fear of looking like a show-off. Each year, I couldn’t wait for summer to end and to get back to school, but I was careful never to tell anyone that.

Overcrowded schools. Quiet student. It would seem unlikely that I’d attract much notice. And no, I wasn’t a star. But I did make connections with two teachers. Each of them encouraged me to write and made me feel I had some talent for it.

The first one was my third-grade teacher. We had recently moved from Chicago to Dearborn, Michigan, and now to Livonia. My father, Wally Bilyeau, was an artist and Michigan was his home state and he wanted to return. Daniel Webster was my third elementary school. I’d made no friends, and I was so far behind in math I had to attend the remedial arithmetic group after school.

We went on a class field trip and, once back in the school, wrote a report. I don’t remember what we saw except that on the way back there were leaves on the ground. I described what they looked like. After we turned in our reports, the teacher announced to the whole class that I wrote something special. She made a small sign--“Have You Heard of Nancy Bilyeau, the Famous Writer?”--and taped it to the wall.

I felt embarrassed looking at that sign. But I was fiercely proud, too.

Eight years later, I was one of hundreds of teenagers careening down the halls of Churchill High School. I’d made friends by then. Like many an insecure girl, I’d plunged into theatre. My friends were all in the Drama Club and I kept scrapbooks at home of actors and actresses.

But I was still a bookworm. I inhaled novels—I used to fall asleep reading every night. My family got used to the sound of a book hitting the floor with a thump when I turned over in bed.

I took a creative writing class, and the teacher was Mrs. Erickson, slim and blonde. She was so intelligent--the kind of teacher who commands the classroom without ever raising her voice. In fact, it was her voice that I remember best. She would sit on the edge of her desk and read aloud from novels that she wanted us to get excited about. The one that made the deepest impression on me was E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. She didn’t have a trace of self-consciousness as she read passages from the historical novel—and I went right into the year 1902 and the lives of Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman and Mameh and Tateh.

Mrs. Erickson never told me, “You will write novels some day!” That wasn’t her style. She was more subtle. She taught writing; she exposed us to good writing; she encouraged us to write. In her class, I created characters and crafted dialogue. I even tried poetry.

I’ve stayed in touch with high school friends, and this month, the month I published my first novel—a historical thriller--we shared memories of Mrs. Erickson. One of my friends, Karen Lizon Webb, found out she’d moved to Florida and helped me figure out how to contact our former teacher. I sent her an email not knowing what kind of response I’d get. I doubted she would remember me.

A single day later I got a response: “Yes, Nancy, I do remember you...lovely redhead...and I think of you often because I bought a watercolor from your father (you told me he painted in the basement) and it's been with me for over 40 years and now hangs in our bedroom in Florida. Congratulations on the publication of your book. I'm a working artist with representation in The Dancing Crane Gallery in Bradenton, FL. Thank you so much for your note and keep in touch, please.”

How incredible it was to hear from Mrs. Erickson—I can’t quite bring myself to use her first name—and to know that while she had such a profound effect on me, I made an impression on her, too. She remembered a conversation from decades ago about my father’s studio in the basement of our tract suburban home. And now she is a successful artist herself.

I believe this is the perfect moment to read Ragtime again.

"Hello...Is it Joseph Conrad you're looking for?"

2012-01-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday and you just want to relax on this day of serenity. You want to sit back with your mug of fresh-brewed cappuccino which your wife has just brought down to you in your basement office, sweetening the delivery with a hug and kiss. You just want the distracting noise of the past six days to leave your head. You don't want to think about deadlines and dilemmas. You want quietude, you want solitude, you want to feel gratitude for the simple joys of life.

I've got your prescription right here.

I've been saving this trio of videos for just the right moment to share with you here at the blog. As I sip my cappuccino and try to Zen my head, I realize the time has come.

First up, an amusing and clever mix of movie moments in which your favorite actors recite the opening stanzas of Lionel Richie's "Hello."

Next is a gorgeous meditation on the beauties of nature, filmed in Malaysia and set to the words of Joseph Conrad. "We Were Wanderers on a Prehistoric Earth" takes lines from Heart of Darkness and scrambles them (much like the Hollywood "Hello" remix above) into sublime visual and aural poetry. Here are the excerpts from Heart of Darkness, as painstakingly transcribed by yours truly:

The high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes...standing higher than the wall of a temple... The silence of the land went home to one’s very heart—its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life...Over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur...Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings... The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam...The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life...Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound...The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky...was a benign immensity of unstained light...In its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low...The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness...All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.

And here's the video, which I first discovered at Chris LaTray's excellent blog Naked But for a Loincloth (I recommend playing the video in full-screen mode--click the four-way arrows between "HD" and "Vimeo"):

And finally, an oldie but a goodie--a trailer for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is given the Happy Treatment ("Meet Jack Torrance....He's a writer looking for inspiration"):

Friday Freebie: Hystera by Leora Skolkin-Smith

2012-01-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Ken Olsen, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen.

This week's book giveaway is Hystera by Leora Skolkin-Smith, which is described as "a timeless story of madness, yearning, and identity." Here's the plot summary from the publisher:

[Hystera is] set in the turbulent 1970s when Patty Hearst became Tanya the Revolutionary. After a fatal accident takes her father away, Lillian Weill blames herself for the family tragedy. Tripping through failed love affairs with men, and doomed friendships, all Lilly wants is to be sheltered from reality. She retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital. Unreachable behind her thick wall of fears, the world of hospital corridors and strangers become a vessel of faith. She is a foreigner there until her fellow patients release her from her isolation with the power of human intimacy.

And, to further whet your appetite, here are the opening lines from the novel:

Inside the locked ward on Payne Whitney’s fifth floor, Lilly stepped onto a steel platform. The examination room was harshly lit, the bulbs behind plastic squares on the ceiling, fluorescent and burning. The metal examining table sparked from too many electric darts and moonbeams.
It was an April evening in 1974. The city’s night lights streaming in from the window would have been enough to illuminate the room, Lilly thought. The arrows of the moon pierced her blue-jeaned legs.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Hystera, all you have to do is answer this question:

What's the name of the late great writer who edited and published Skolkin-Smith's first novel, Edges? (You can find the answer by visiting Skolkin-Smith's website.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 26--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 27. If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

"Please, sir, I want some more Dickens"

2012-01-19T07:32:00.001-07:00

The Biography Project, Day 19

I'm past the point in Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life where she talks about the composition of Oliver Twist, but I wanted to post about it here at the blog before I got too far ahead of myself.

To put it bluntly, Tomalin was not entirely charmed by the vapid, snot-nosed, gruel-addicted street urchin. She's not about to burst out with a chorus of "Consider yourself part of the furniture" any time soon.

And I'm okay with that. Oliver Twist has never been high on my list of Dickens favorites.

Which is odd, considering the fact that it was Oliver who first brought me to worship at the feet of the Great One in the first place.

When I was five years old, my parents took me to the State movie theater in Kittanning, Pennsylvania and there, with a cardboard box of Red Hots candy clutched in my tiny hand, I watched Charles Dickens bloom to life on the screen above my head. Of course, I had no idea who Charles Dickens was at that time--and wouldn't for many years--but I was dazzled, frightened, and thoroughly enraptured by the singing-dancing orphans and street urchins of Oliver! I don't think anything had filled me with as much joy and love in my young life as Lionel Bart's musical--not a mouthful of Red Hots, not the evening tuck-in from my mother, not even an overflowing Christmas stocking. What I was witnessing in this early stage of my literary education, long before critical analysis and deconstructionism, was Grade-A melodrama, the pure and holy attention to Story. My mouth fell slack, Red Hot juice trickling onto my chin, as I was swept into the trials and tribulations of young Oliver (Mark Lester) at the brutal orphanage, the terrifying undertakers', the cart full of hay bound for London, then Fagin's apartment with his smart-ass pickpockets, and finally to the sunny fairy-tale ending in the care of Mr. Brownlow. I was entertained and emotionally moved beyond all measure. Of course, the dancing prostitutes didn't hurt, either.

Oliver! captures the very best qualities of Dickens, running the whole gamut of sentimentality and delivering a potent stew of story and songs that worm their way into viewers' ears and, if they're open enough to it, their hearts. A few years later, my parents gave me a glorious gift for Christmas: the large hardback movie-tie-in edition of Oliver! from Random House. It's written by one Mary Hastings who "freely adapted" Dickens' novel and it's filled with movie-still photos. Turning the pages, I relived the movie day after day, night after night. I wore out that book to within an inch of its life. Later, in the move from Pennsylvania to Wyoming--where I would spend the rest of my growing-up years--the book was tragically lost and I was bereft of Dickens for a number of years, until high school when I saw a BBC production of A Tale of Two Cities, read the novel, and my love for Dickens was rekindled. (As a postscript, I'm happy to report I found a copy of that Oliver! hardback at a garage sale not too long ago here in Butte. I'm sure you'll believe me when I say tears of joy stung my eyes when I saw it sitting there in the 4-for-$1 cardboard box.)

The day I first received that hardbound edition of Oliver! back in the late 1960s was the day I started worshipping Charles Dickens. For the first time, I had a name to put to the creation of the story I loved. I was probably six or seven years old at that point and I was already becoming an accomplished reader, the world of books opening like a set of double doors onto an entirely new, verdant landscape. I was beginning to understand that books did not spring forth, parentless, from some back room at the public library. They were brought to life by real people with real typewriters (or quill pens) who carefully, artfully arranged the words on the page. I was becoming aware of the creature called the Author. Charles Dickens, therefore, by virtue of being the imagination behind my favorite movie, was the first celebrity author I ever encountered.

It's been that way practically from the start of Dickens' life. He began his career as a journalist, covering Parliament and the Old Bailey. His keen observations of the foibles and follies of his fellow mankind soon found their way to the page, after being pasteurized and processed by his fertile imagination. His first major success, The Pickwick Papers, was a wildfire among London society as it came out in installments. Tomalin writes:

Each number sold for a shilling and they were passed from hand to hand, and butchers' boys were seen reading them in the streets. Judges and politicians, the middle classes and the rich, bought them, read them and applauded; and the ordinary people saw that he was on their side, and they loved him for it. He did not ask them to think but showed them what he wanted them to see and hear...It was as though he was able to feed his story directly into the bloodstream of the nation, giving them injections of laughter, pathos and melodrama, and making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them.

At the same time he was producing serialized installments of The Pickwick Papers, he had begun work on his first truly-plotted novel, Oliver Twist. From where I sit, this was an incredible feat of energy and skill. I can't imagine serializing a complex story, let alone engaging in all the other whirling-dervish activities Dickens threw himself into. Tomalin gives us a taste of what life was like for C.D., circa 1837:

Managing this double feat was an unprecedented and amazing achievement. Everything had to be planned in his head in advance. Pickwick had started as a series of loosely rambling episodes, but he was now introducing plot, with Pickwick accused of breach of promise, the dealings with lawyers, the trial and his imprisonment, all of which demanded more care in setting up each number; and Oliver was tightly plotted and shaped from the start. There was no going back to change or adjust once a number was printed; everything had to be right first time. How different this is from the way most great novelists work, allowing themselves time to reconsider, to change their minds, to go back, to cancel and rewrite. Each number of Pickwick and Oliver consisted of about 7,500 words, and in theory he simply divided every month, allotting a fortnight to each new section of each book. In practice this did not always work out as he hoped, and although he sometimes got ahead, there were many months when he only just managed to get his copy to the printer in time. He wrote in a small hand, with a quill pen and black (iron gall) ink at this stage--later he favoured bright blue--on rough sheets of grey, white or bluish paper, measuring about 9 x 7½ inches, that he’d fold and then tear in half before starting to write; he called these sheets ‘slips.’ For Oliver he spaced the lines quite widely, fitting about twenty-five lines on each sheet where later he would cram forty-five. Something like ninety-five slips made up one monthly number. In the course of a day he might produce eleven or twelve slips, and if pushed up to twenty. He had also to arrange for the two illustrators--Browne for Pickwick, Cruikshank for Oliver--to see the copy to work from, more often than not deciding for them what would make the best picture. On top of this he was editing Bentley’s Miscellany, which meant commissioning and dealing with other writers, and with the printers. The pressure was intense, but the results were gratifying: in February Pickwick sold 14,000 copies, and after the opening instalment of Oliver was reviewed in four papers, 1,000 extra copies had to be printed of the next number.

When it was later published in three volumes, Oliver Twist caught on well with the reading public--including, Tomalin reports, "the young Queen Victoria, who found it 'excessively interesting.'"

For her part, Tomalin thought portions of the melodrama were overwrought:

Apart from the colourless virtuous characters, the chief failure of the book is Nancy, on whom Dickens lavished great care and whom he claimed to have modelled on a young woman he had known. He was proud of his portrait and said it was drawn from life, but he fails because he makes her behave like an actress in a bad play: she tears her hair and clothes, writhes, wrings her hands, sinks to her knees and contrives to lie down on a stone staircase in the street....Dickens must many times have observed prostitutes in the streets, yet he is creating a stereotype here, one he used again in later novels: the penitent woman who tears her hair and seeks the river to make an end of things.

Tomalin may be correct here, but when I read Dickens' novel, there is such a hard shellac of my Oliver! memories over my eyes that I can't see anyone but the movie Nancy (Shani Wallis) on the page. And my ears can't hear anything but "Oom-Pah-Pah" or "It's a Fine Life" as Nancy whips the bar crowd into a beery joyous frenzy.

I'm perfectly aware this is a Technicolor vision of a life that's not "fine," but brutal, deadly, and degrading to women. There's an ironic heartbreak plucking an off-key chord when Nancy sings:

Though you sometimes do come by
The occasional black eye
You can always cover one
'Til he blacks the other one
But you don't dare cry!

Sad as it is, I grew up with this skewed Hollywood vision of Oliver Twist and, no matter how many times I read Dickens' novel, I will take it with me to my grave (where, no doubt, I'll be humming "Reviewing the Situation").

Look What I Found: Paul Gallico's Mrs. 'Arris

2012-01-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned. I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931. If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

Does anyone remember Paul Gallico these days? Have his charms evaporated and his novels been banished to the neglected kingdoms of the attic, the thrift store, the 89-year-old widow's nightstand (where Gallico slumbers with co-residents Arthur Hailey, Ernest K. Gann and Frank G. Slaughter)?

If Paul Gallico does get any attention from our nation of readers distracted by the new and shiny, I'd wager that attention is focused on his two major works, the mega-disaster The Poseidon Adventure and the all-ages fable The Snow Goose. This week, sadly, Gallico's 1969 bestseller came back to mind as we watched the Costa Concordia cruise ship capsizing Poseidon-like off the coast of Italy. Of course, if you're of a certain age (like me), Paul Gallico is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "Poseidon Adventure." It's Shelley Winters and her brave, tragic breaststroke.

I have a fondness for Paul Gallico because the very mention of his name takes me back to my first paying job shelving books at the Teton County Library. Gallico was pretty hot on the bestseller list around that time and I remember checking out, reading, and thoroughly enjoying one of his nearly-forgotten books, 1974's The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun. After nearly 40 years, I don't remember plot specifics, but this site has a brief summary:

A young boy has a brilliant idea for a toy--a toy gun which shoots bubbles. He builds a working model of it, and shows it to his father. Unfortunately, his father shows no interest in the toy. So, to demonstrate to his father that it is worth doing, he gets on a bus and takes it to Washington to patent it. This is his story, and the story of the people he meets along the way.

I found it thoroughly charming and suspenseful--I seem to remember there's a gun battle near the end and the bubble-gun boy caught in the crossfire. And that's the forte of Gallico's writing: it's simple, straightforward, and possesses an unadorned charm (some might call it treacle and sentiment, but my mileage varies).

In recent years, I've been trying to stock my personal library with Mr. Gallico's works whenever I can find them at garage sales, estate sales and, in one instance, eBay (where I scored a nice copy of Scruffy, a novel about an ape named Harold living on Gibraltar). Last week, my wife gently twisted my arm to pay a visit to the thrift store on Cobban Street here in Butte. Once inside the doors, I'm glad my arm was wrenched behind my back. When we entered the store, she took a right-hand turn to the used furniture (which she'll eventually turn into beautifully-repurposed furniture like this); me, I beelined straight for the bookshelves, which were laced with catnip: signs advertising BOOK SALE 6 for $1. I was sniffing like a hound on the musk-trail of a coon.

I picked up a couple of Mary Higgins Clark Christmas novels (that's right, you heard me--I'm not ashamed to admit my guilty pleasures in this public forum), and then I spotted this musty, dull-colored paperback from Pocket Books, circa 1962:

Click to enlarge

Two Gallico novels for just under 17 cents? Score!

I haven't met Mrs. Harris, the London charwoman, but the back cover of the Cardinal paperback that was now in my hands offered introductions all around:

Click to enlarge

Opening the paperback (which was in remarkably good shape), I turned to the first chapter of Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (Flowers for Mrs. Harris in the UK):

The small, slender woman with apple-red cheeks, greying hair, and shrewd, almost naughty little eyes sat with her face pressed against the cabin window of the BEA Viscount on the morning flight from London to Paris. As, with a rush and a roar, it lifted itself from the runway, her spirits soared aloft with it. She was nervous, but not at all frightened, for she was convinced that nothing could happen to her now. Hers was the bliss of one who knew that at last she was off upon the adventure at the end of which lay her heart’s desire.

The New York novel begins thusly:

Mrs. Ada Harris and Mrs. Violet Butterfield, of numbers 5 and 7 Willis Gardens, Battersea, London, respectively, were having their nightly cup of tea in Mrs. Harris' neat and flower-decorated little flat in the basement of No. 5.
Mrs. Harris was a charwoman of that sturdy London breed that fares forth daily to tidy up the largest city in the world, and her lifelong friend and bosom companion, Mrs. Butterfield, was a part-time cook and char as well. Both looked after a fashionable clientele in Belgravia, where they met varying adventures during the day, picking up stray and interesting pieces of gossip from the odd bods for whom they worked. At night they visited one another for a final cup of tea to exchange these tidbits.

I hope to sit down with Mrs. 'Arris sometime in the near future, mug of tea and scones at my elbow, and get to know her better. No, this isn't deep, world-rumbling literature. But then again, sometimes I need a break from Franzen, DFW, and Denis Johnson. Mrs. 'Arris'll do just fine, thankyouverymuch.

Front Porch Books: January 2012 edition

2012-01-17T07:08:00.001-07:00

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, Amazon and other sources. Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books. In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss. Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.

The Odditorium by Melissa Pritchard (Bellevue Literary Press): The beauty of Pritchard's short story collection begins with the cover design, which depicts the corner of what looks like a natural history museum with large, frightening fish. Inside, there's an equally unusual collection of tales, most of them taking the reader to distant lands, distant times. Here's the Jacket Copy:

In each of these eight genre-bending tales, Melissa Pritchard overturns the conventions of mysteries, westerns, gothic horror, and historical fiction to capture surprising and often shocking aspects of her characters’ lives. In one story, Pritchard creates a pastiche of historical facts, songs, and tall tales, contrasting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, with the real, genocidal history of the American West. Other stories are inspired by the mysterious life of Kaspar Hauser, a haunted Victorian Hospital where the wounded of D-Day are taken during WWII, the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe played as a child, and the story of Robert LeRoy Ripley, of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” and his beguiling “odditoriums” as seen from his life-long fact checker.

Blurbworthiness: “Pritchard's best stories are ambitious, lush and even thrilling. She takes risks, different risks in different stories. Can she write a segment in the form of a comedic Shakespearean dialogue? She can. Does a story evolve into epistolary form? It does. Will she be able to build a story around the format of an old newspaper feature? She will. Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back. Is Melissa Pritchard someone whose short fiction should be well known? Do you even have to ask?” (Los Angeles Times)

The Underside of Joy by Sere Prince Halverson (Dutton): A galley of Halverson's debut novel has been sitting near the top of the queue on my Kindle for several weeks doing the electronic equivalent of drumming its fingers on the table. I hope to get to this one very soon. Really, I promise. This novel has all the hallmarks of a bestseller--especially among readers who enjoy the fiction of writers like Caroline Leavitt, Marisa de los Santos, and Jodi Picoult (I say this without having read Underside, so don't sue me if those comparisons are a little off). Here's the Jacket Copy:

Set against the backdrop of Redwood forests and shimmering vineyards, Seré Prince Halverson's compelling debut tells the story of two women, bound by an unspeakable loss, who each claims to be the mother of the same two children. To Ella Beene, happiness means living in the northern California river town of Elbow with her husband, Joe, and his two young children. Yet one summer day Joe breaks his own rule--never turn your back on the ocean--and a sleeper wave strikes him down, drowning not only the man but his many secrets. For three years, Ella has been the only mother the kids have known and has believed that their biological mother, Paige, abandoned them. But when Paige shows up at the funeral, intent on reclaiming the children, Ella soon realizes there may be more to Paige and Joe's story. "Ella's the best thing that's happened to this family," say her close-knit Italian-American in-laws, for generations the proprietors of a local market. But their devotion quickly falters when the custody fight between mother and stepmother urgently and powerfully collides with Ella's quest for truth. The Underside of Joy is not a fairy-tale version of stepmotherhood pitting good Ella against evil Paige, but an exploration of the complex relationship of two mothers. Their conflict uncovers a map of scars-both physical and emotional-to the families' deeply buried tragedies, including Italian internment camps during World War II and postpartum psychosis. Weaving a rich fictional tapestry abundantly alive with the glorious natural beauty of the novel's setting, Halverson is a captivating guide through the flora and fauna of human emotion-grief and anger, shame and forgiveness, happiness and its shadow complement...the underside of joy.

Home by Toni Morrison (Knopf): Morrison's Beloved cemented my fanboy love for her work--lyrical, unnerving, engrossing--and her forthcoming novel holds the promise of another winner. The Jacket Copy:

An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood--and his home.

The galley of Morrison's book isn't too far behind Halverson's in my Kindle queue.

The Bro-Magnet by Lauren Baratz-Logsted: There's something beguiling about a novel which begins with an Opening Line like this: "Right from the start, I've been a disappointment to women." Baratz-Logsted, author of The Thin Pink Line, certainly knows how to snag a reader. I'm resisting lame jokes about eye-magnets, but the truth is, I'm already hooked on this book's style before I've gone more than two pages into it. I'm even willing to accept the fact it has a character with the unsubtle name Helen Troy. Here's the Jacket Copy:

Women have been known to lament, "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride." For Johnny Smith, the problem is, "Always a Best Man, never a groom." At age 33, housepainter Johnny has been Best Man eight times. The ultimate man's man, Johnny loves the Mets, the Jets, his weekly poker game, and the hula girl lamp that hangs over his basement pool table. Johnny has the instant affection of nearly every man he meets, but one thing he doesn't have is a woman to share his life with, and he wants that desperately. When Johnny meets District Attorney Helen Troy, he decides to renounce his bro-magnet ways in order to impress her. With the aid and advice of his friends and family, soon he's transforming his wardrobe, buying throw pillows, ditching the hula girl lamp, getting a cat and even changing his name to the more mature-sounding John. And through it all, he's pretending to have no interest in sports, which Helen claims to abhor. As things heat up with Helen, the questions arise: Will Johnny finally get the girl? And, if he's successful in that pursuit, who will he be now that he's no longer really himself? The Bro-Magnet is a rollicking comedic novel about what one man is willing to give up for the sake of love.

Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop (Penguin): I'm a big fan of Ron Hansen's slim, exquisite novel Mariette in Ecstasy. And so, when I received a copy of Yallop's novel, read the first page, and then skimmed the back-cover plot summary, the comparison to Hansen's book was enough to draw me in. Here's the Jacket Copy:

Set in contemporary and World War II France, this is the story of Sister Bernard: her forbidden love, her uncertain faith, and her guilt-ridden past. A once-bustling convent in the South of France is closing, leaving behind three elderly nuns. Forced, for the first time, to confront the community that she betrayed decades ago, Sister Bernard relives her life during the war. At thirty, Sister Bernard can hear the voice of God--strident, furious, and personal. When a young Nazi soldier, a member of the German occupying forces, asks her to meet him in the church in secret one evening, she agrees. And so begins the horrifying and passionate love affair that will deafen the heavens and define her life, tempting her into duplicity. Obedience is a powerful exploration of one woman's struggle to reconcile her aching need to be loved with her fear of God's wrath.

And here are those pitch-perfect Opening Lines:

Mother Catherine knew the devil. He was twisted and dwarfish; his clawed hands were gnarled. His neck was short and his legs bowed. He had a hump on his back, heavy like a sack of walnuts. He was crafty, she knew that; she had heard how cunning he could be. But surely he could never stretch over five shelves of jars, pickles and conserves to take down the coffee and tempt her nuns?

(That "devil" in the pantry, by the way, is a German soldier who has set up camp in Sister Bernard's refectory.) Need more convincing evidence that Obedience is a good read? Okay, here you go. Blurbworthiness: "An intensely imagined novel about one of the defining questions of the century just past: where and how we choose to draw the line between innocence and guilt, ignorance and complicity. Obedience also asks us to consider what ghastly harm is committed in the name of love. It's rare to find a book that is seemingly so simple, but is really ambiguous and thought-provoking." (Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall) And this: "The character of Sister Bernard is a Madame Bovary of the convent world. Her fantasy and insatiable need for love prove to be far greater than her ability to analyze character. While superficially simplistic, her relationship with God is complex and she is capable of battling God with the strength of Joan of Arc. These contradictions in her character are seamless and a complex and unforgettable character emerges." (Catherine Gildiner, author of After the Falls)

Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): This new novel by the author of White Guys looks to have a little Franzen dust sprinkled on it. That's a compliment, by the way. I'm very much looking forward to reading this novel about ambition and dashed dreams. Here's the Jacket Copy:

Norumbega Park begins with a vision. Richie Palumbo, the most prosaic of men, gets lost one night in 1969 while driving home with his family. He finds himself in the town of Norumbega—a hidden town, remote and gorgeous, at the far edges of Boston’s western suburbs. He sees an old, venerable house there, and without quite knowing why, decides he must have it. The repercussions of Richie’s wild dream—to own a house in this town—lead to a forty-year odyssey for his family. For Jack, his son, Norumbega becomes a sexual playground, until he meets one ungraspable girl and begins a lifelong pursuit of her. For Joannie, his daughter, the challenges of living here lead her to pursue the contemplative life. For Stella, Richie’s wife, life in Norumbega leads to a surprising growth as both a sexual and spiritual being. Norumbega Park is a novel about class and parental dreams, sex and spirituality, the way visions conflict with stubborn reality, and a family’s ability to open up, for others, a world they could never fully grasp for themselves.

The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels (Bloomsbury): Okay, here's the deal. My biggest internal torment--bigger even than the annual agony of buying the perfect birthday-anniversary-Christmas gifts for my wife, all dates within weeks of each other (the Bermuda Triangle of my marriage)--is the spiritual wrestling match I engage in every time another great-looking book enters my library. I mean, I have a writing career of my own, I have a Day Job, I have marital responsibilities (see above)--how can I possibly read Every Great Book which arrives on my front porch? It's not humanly possible. And so, I pick and choose...and wrestle with my agonized self. Many worthy and deserving books are forced out of the car, rolling and tumbling to the side of the road as I continue speeding down my personal racetrack of reading. All this is a long way of saying that when Carter Sickels' book arrived and I started reading the first chapter, I was in torment because I wanted to read all of the 327 pages right away. But I can't. I'm already heavily invested in four other books at the moment. And so I must leave it to you, dear blog reader, to rush out and buy The Evening Hour and then report back on whether or not my instinct proved right. I'm not positive, but I have a sneaking suspicion this debut novel will prove to be one of my favorites of 2012. Judge for yourself. The Jacket Copy:

Most of the wealth in Dove Creek, West Virginia, is in the earth--in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become an aide in a nursing home. He's got a shock of bleached blond hair and a gentle touch well suited to the job. He's also a drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him to a younger crowd looking for different kinds of escape. In this economically depressed, shifting landscape, Cole is floundering. The mining corporation is angling to buy the Freeman family's property, and Cole's protests only feel like stalling. Although he has often dreamed of leaving, he has a sense of duty to this land, especially after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather is not the only loss: Cole's one close friend, Terry Rose, has also slipped away from him, first to marriage, then to drugs. While Cole alternately attempts romance with two troubled women, he spends most of his time with the elderly patients at the home, desperately trying to ignore the decay of everything and everyone around him. Only when a disaster befalls these mountains is Cole forced to confront his fears and, finally, take decisive action--if not to save his world, to at least save himself.

And the Opening Lines:

Cole double-locked the trailer door behind him, then stood on the top rickety step for a moment, still waking up. Gunmetal sky, with the faintest hint of light rippling at the edges. There was a tight chill in the air on this early April morning, and he shuddered, rubbing his bare arms. The air smelled like sulfur and scorched earth.

Blurbworthiness: “The Evening Hour could be a hymn sung out in a country church; when I finished it, I wanted to close my eyes, listen to its echoes, feel the power of its song. For that is what this beautiful book is: a sweet-souled, hard-eyed prayer for a beleaguered people and the beloved landscape they call home. With striking authenticity and admirable restraint, Carter Sickels brings both forcefully to life in his deeply moving, spiritually uplifting debut.” (Josh Weil, author of The New Valley)

My First Time: John Minichillo

2012-01-16T06:44:00.001-07:00

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is John Minichillo whose first novel, The Snow Whale (Atticus Books, 2011), is a contemporary retelling of Moby-Dick. Hey Small Press! included The Snow Whale on their best of 2011 list and called it "the funniest book we reviewed all year." Publishers Weekly called The Snow Whale a "wonderfully inventive debut novel" and the Los Angeles Times said it was filled with "wry, dry, pure hilarity." Minichillo is the recipient of a 2012 Tennessee Individual Artists Grant and he lives in Nashville with his wife and son. He can be found at thesnowwhale.com or on twitter @thesnowhale.

My First Book Cover

Long before a book gets a cover the writer carries around an abstract yet vivid sense of the scenes therein. It's a favorite daydream: my book. I so desperately wanted my novel to have a physical birth that I would make room on the shelves of bookstores and libraries compulsively at every visit. I'd shove over books to leave a gap the size of an imagined spine between Milhauser and Mitchum.

My novel was a retelling of Moby-Dick, and since there was a long history of Moby-Dick inspired art, I was sure the visual possibilities would be recognized by an editor at a big publishing house, and I'd be on my way. But I never got an agent. If I was given a choice a couple of years ago of getting my book published or of rapturing up all the agents to the moon, I'd have had to really think about it.

Querying small presses was just as discouraging. I loved my novel too much to send it to just anyone. I don't know if it was the printer, the artist, or the JPEGs on the publisher websites, but some of the books advertised in small publisher catalogues sometimes looked like they were drawn with not enough crayons in the box. I understood the economics of publishing, but I felt bad for these books.

When I first queried my publisher, Atticus Books, I had reservations about a fledgling press, but the covers looked great, and my book seemed like a good fit with the books they were putting out. When I was offered a contract I could hardly believe it. There was someone on this planet who believed in my book enough to invest his own money in it. On the phone we talked about type fonts and I'd already been aware of the cover designer he'd used, Jaimie Keenan, because I'd been watching as each new book came out, with the book before mine really stunning.

In the daydreamy early days I imagined a Knopf or HBJ white hardback with no image at all, just the title of the book, also in white. But now that I had a paperback coming out and I'd seen what Jaimie Keenan was capable of, I was sure I'd get a whale and I was really excited to see my whale.

From the day I was sent the cover, with the full spread sent within a day or two after that, I was in love. I knew writers who were unhappy with their own covers, or mystified by the choice. Mostly these were serious females whose books were made to look like soft porn or chick lit. I got a whale.

I was asked for input, but I kept my mouth shut. I really loved the shape of the whale, the way it was suggestive of so much girth, and I'm really grateful to Mr. Keenan for being able to represent that. I had expected the whale to be white, but who cares what I think? I wasn't about to suggest any changes because it's a really great cover and I felt lucky to have it.

There in the middle of the whale, very small, but recognizable, is my main character in his office chair. He embarked on something bigger than himself and in that he's like me. As a writer, you will come to depend on a lot of creative people--one of the unexpected but most rewarding aspects of the whole experience.

A Literary Trampoline: Two Murders in My Double Life by Josef Skvorecky

2012-01-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

The world lost another good writer earlier this month when Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky slipped quietly into the afterlife. Best known for The Engineer of Human Souls (a term Stalin used to describe novelists), Skvorecky often found himself in trouble with Communist authorities and had many of his works banned both before and after he left Czechoslovakia in 1969. When he died on Jan. 3, he and his wife had lived in Toronto for more than 40 years. He was 87 years old and he suffered from cancer.

I am not necessarily a student of Skvorecky's work--in fact, I've only read one of his books--but what I read I enjoyed. When I learned of his death, I went back into my review archives and found my critique of his one novel which I'd read, Two Murders in My Double Life. Interestingly, I make reference to Vaclav Havel in the review. The former Czech president died less than three weeks earlier than Skvorecky. As can be expected, the lives of Havel and the expatriate novelist often intertwined and in 1990, Havel awarded Skvorecky the Order of the White Lion, the highest honor in the Czech Republic.

Here is my review of Skvorecky's book, written shortly after Two Murders in My Double Life was released in the U.S. in 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

* * *

Imagine Agatha Christie inviting Vaclav Havel over for tea. Picture the two of them, the dame of mysteries and the Czech president, sitting down to a nice steaming mug of Earl Grey and discussing murder and politics. Think of the wild swings the conversation would take.

That’s the kind of literary trampoline you’ll be bouncing on when you read Two Murders in My Double Life, by Josef Skvorecky (who, incidentally, dedicates his novel to Havel). As the title implies, there are two murders in this bipolar, bicontinental novel. There’s the killing in the tradition of Christie, P.D. James and Ellery Queen: a professor at quaint little Edenvale College in Toronto has been strangled in a traditional locked-room mystery (the biggest piece of evidence is a piece of chipped-off nail polish found in a file folder); the other murder is a larger, more intangible crime involving a McCarthy-like witch hunt in Prague—it is “a total crime,” as Skvorecky puts it in a brief introduction:

North America leads, by a wide margin, in the worldwide statistics of murder, but North Americans have never experienced total crime. In Europe and Asia, millions of people fell victim to it, many millions in large countries, but it is not only the body that is murdered by this mega-assassin, it is the soul: the character of the community called a nation. However, one can hardly write a murder mystery about the assassination of souls.

Though it's a slim book, this is a big-issues novel. The story is sharply divided between a traditional murder mystery and a political saga (the likes of which you might find if you tuned into National Public Radio on any given afternoon). Two Murders in My Double Life is not for everybody; but for those who enjoy sipping this cup of tea, they’ll probably be captivated by what’s inside.

The writing is authentic enough to make you wonder how much of this is autobiographical. I had never heard of Skvorecky before I picked up the novel, but his approach feels awfully close to the bone. And, in fact, the photograph on the dustjacket is an old photo of the author and his wife: he’s seated on a rock on a hillside, she stands next to him, and both of them have their backs turned to the camera as they look out over the countryside below. Curious and intriguing.

At the center of Two Murders in My Double Life is the Skvorecky figure, an unnamed professor at Edenvale whose colleague is strangled with a piece of string one night and whose wife is under investigation for a past Czech “crime.” The novel flips back and forth between the two halves as the professor flashes back to how his wife was blacklisted for stray remarks she made about a friend of hers who was once involved with a Communist. For those unfamiliar with European politics of the Cold War, the Czech portions can get a bit murky and difficult to follow, but Skvorecky has a tart, bracing style that keeps you reading all the way through.

The Toronto scenes, however, are a pure delight to read as the author has a great deal of fun at the expense of university politics and mystery writers. At times, reading like a Lite Version of Kundera, Kafka or Camus, Two Murders in My Double Life spreads a veneer of wicked satire over every page—especially those set in North American academia. This is a world where long debates rage over whether or not an instructor should leave his door open when a female student shows up for office hours or—more precisely—who is the faculty’s biggest and best adulterer. There are no lack of catty cocktail parties in these pages.

There’s also no lack of sly humor, which mystery fans should quickly catch. One character, a police detective, is named Dorothy Sayers; another is Raymond Hammett; and so on. Skvorecky had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek while composing this, his first novel written in English. His other works include The Cowards, The Engineer of Human Souls and Dvorak in Love. No two ways about it, Skvorecky has a good grasp of our language—in these pages, it is alternately a light brush of the fingers and a hard slap across the face.

Soup and Salad: Dennis Lehane and the Hurt of Death, Dancing Books, The Tournament of Books, In the Swamp of the Non-Reader, Dave Eggers' Shower Curtain

2012-01-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

On today's menu:

1. When Dennis Lehane opens his mouth, I listen. The author of Mystic River and Moonlight Mile is rarely dull in interviews and in this conversation with Andrew Cotto at Grub Street Daily, I particularly liked a couple of his comments. The first is about finding his literary legs when he was just starting out his career as Future Bestselling Author:

I was primarily a short story writer, even though it was common knowledge I had a genre novel being shopped around NYC. And, yeah, there was a certain looking down the nose at genre fiction. Hell, I looked down my nose at genre fiction. But what was also happening at that time—we’re talking the early nineties—was the beginning of a backlash against faux-literary fiction. If you were published by Vintage, did that automatically make you literary? If you wrote a self-indulgent, sexually embarrassing, “semi”-autobiographical novel in which the protagonist referenced Virginia Woolf and Moliere enough times for us to accept that you’d read literary fiction, did that make your work literary? Literature is literature, doesn’t matter what it comes dressed to the ball as. Over the course of time, a novel endures and thereby defines itself as such. Or it doesn’t. “Literary fiction” is a genre. And it’s not a given that what’s accepted as the literary fiction of today will be the literature of tomorrow. What, in essence, is literary fiction? I’ll accept that it’s Edith Wharton or Julian Barnes, but I refuse to accept that some plotless model of post-modern, post-structural masturbation is comparable to something as majestic as Ellroy’s LA Quartet or Thom Jones’s The Pugilist at Rest.

The second broadens the conversation to how careless writing can have a bad ripple effect:

In ’99, I was on vacation and tried to read a particular type of commercial novel—one of those crass, plot-is-the-only-thing pieces of shit that line the racks at the supermarket checkout—and it opened with this fourteen year old girl being murdered. It was immediately obvious the author was pretending to condemn violence against poor 14-year-old girls who also happen to be black and therefore prostitutes (as if it’s all so axiomatic that) but in reality he was getting his rocks off and expecting the reader to get her rocks off depicting the sensational and the salacious aspects of said death. It disgusted me and I decided to write a book in which someone dies and dies off-stage in the best Greek tradition and yet that one death hurts like hell. Hurts everyone within the orbit of this girl’s life. I was very determined to make that loss of life rip the reader’s stomach out. Because violence does not exist for our fucking entertainment. Death is finite and wasteful and it destroys the lives of those who cared about the victim and sometimes even the lives of those who didn’t even know the victim. Violence ripples out from the center and those ripples can scald anyone they touch.

2. I am probably the 100,001st person to share this video of books dancing after-hours in a Toronto bookshop, but it's always worth a replay. Ladies and gentlemen, The Joy of Books (also known as The Joy of Text):

P.S. I tried to find a "Dancing Kindle" video, but came up empty-handed. Take that, Mr. Bezos!

3. The cock is crowing! (Good Lord, I had to be extra-careful to type a "c" and not a "g" in that sentence.) In other words, the annual Tournament of Books is on! For the uninitiated, I'm talking about the Morning News' literary smack-down which pits book against book in a series of competitive brackets, not unlike basketball's March Madness. Books, judges, brackets and the reader-participant Zombie poll are now live at the site. An explanation:

A ridiculously small and poorly informed group of TMN editors and contributors have chosen 16 of the most cherished, hyped, ignored, and/or enthusiastically praised books of the year to enter into a month-long tournament, NCAA-basketball-madness style, beginning March 7, 2012....We take these books and seed them, with the odds-on favorites receiving “1” seeds and longer shots receiving “4” seeds. Then we place them in an NCAA-style tournament bracket and assign books in pairs to judges, who read both assigned books, advancing one. Each judge is required to make a choice and also required to explain their choice (and Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, our booth announcers, plus special guests, will comment on those decisions). After the first round of combat, the eight advancing books are pitted against each other, and then the four remaining books become two. When the judges have eliminated all but two books the competition moves to the Zombie Round, and this is where we need your help. In the Zombie Round, the two books most favored by TMN readers, but unfairly tossed aside in an early round by the capriciousness of a power-mad ToB judge, will rise from the dead to do battle against the only two undefeated novels of the tournament. The winners of those matchups become the Tournament of Books finalists.

You can vote for your preferred Zombie title now. For the record and in the spirit of Obama-ish transparency, I'll tell you that I voted for The Tiger's Wife. I hope she eats the competition.

4. This week's must-read is "In the Land of the Non-Reader" by Jonathan Gourlay who tells us what happened when he tried to give up reading. He finds that it's like a special kind of hell with delirium tremens, the kind that shake the dental fillings out of your mouth as you walk streets made from shards of glass and you stumble from room to room clutching your head like you were caught in a Quentin Tarantino montage with a heavy-metal soundtrack. Oh wait, that's what it was like for me when I tried to go a day without books. Here's Mr. Gourlay:

Back when I was a reader, it often troubled me when friends claimed that they had no time to read. Was it possible that their lives were so full of wonders that they could not spend five minutes here or there to read? How was it that my life, in comparison, seemed to offer so many chunks of reading time throughout the day? A train ride, a late-night break, and an office wait. Through marriage, babies, graduate schools, and new jobs, I always found time to read for pleasure. Alas, dear reader, the term “pleasure” doesn’t capture the mental and physical need for books I once had. Without a book nearby I felt bereft, purposeless, barely human.

Kids! Don't try this at home!

5. Who says you can't read in the shower? Now, thanks to Dave Eggers, you can.

Friday Freebie: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen

2012-01-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Kim Anderson, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman.

This week's book giveaway is the debut novel The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen. I've been intrigued by this book ever since the advance reading copy landed on my doorstep a couple of weeks ago. The story revolves around oil and marriage (sometimes, but not always, the same thing as "oil and water"). Specifically, it deals with Saudi oil and marriages with "extra wives." Here's the jacket copy from Harper Perennial:

Set in oil-rich Saudi Arabia amid an unprecedented wave of terrorist violence, and exploring the loneliness of expatriatism and the immeasurable dangers of intolerance, The Ruins of Us is a timely story about the universality of family and the injustices we endure for love. More than two decades after moving to Saudi Arabia and marrying Abdullah al-Baylani, Rosalie learns that her husband has taken a second wife, beautiful Palestinian Isra. The discovery plunges the powerful family into chaos as Rosalie grapples with leaving Saudi Arabia, her life, and her family behind. Meanwhile, Abdullah and Rosalie's consuming personal entanglements blind them to the crisis approaching their sixteen-year-old son, Faisal, who is growing increasingly involved with a controversial sheikh. When Faisal makes an ill-fated choice that could destroy everything his embattled family holds dear, all must confront difficult truths as they fight to preserve what remains of their love.

Here are some of the nice things people have been saying about Parssinen's first novel:

“Parssinen’s gripping, well-crafted debut tracks the awakening of a Saudi Arabian family to the dangers that lurk within....Parssinen deftly illuminates Saudi Arabian life through a family locked in a battle over morality and cultural chasms.” (Publishers Weekly)

“Parssinen convincingly inhabits the shifting moods of her characters....Throughout, her prose is artful without being showy, forced, or melodramatic, and her knowledge of Saudi culture informs the story.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“A big, brave novel, Keija Parssinen’s The Ruins of Us takes us behind the compound walls of Saudi Arabia and into the secret passions that threaten to tear one family apart. Step into Parssinen’s sensual prose and be transported.” (Anna Solomon, author of The Little Bride)

“The Ruins of Us is a stunning debut novel--a love story that spans continents. Parssinen teaches us that while cultural differences run deep, when it comes to matters of the heart, we are all the same. I was dazzled by this book.” (Amanda Eyre Ward, author of Close Your Eyes)

If you'd like a chance to win Parssinen's novel and be dazzled by her story, all you have to do is answer this simple biographical question:

Where was Parssinen born? (You can find the answer by visiting the author's website HERE)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 19--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 20. If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party.

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Fobbit update: "The real Iraq War, in all of its bloody, dark, and often hilarious glory"

2012-01-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

With every email from my editor at Grove/Atlantic, Fobbit inches closer to the reality of a bound copy held in the palms of my trembling, outstretched hands. This week, we were e-talking about a plot summary to go on the back cover of the galley copies which will be mailed to a select list of authors who, if all goes well, will say nice things about the novel for publicity purposes. (Even if they aren't moved to sing Fobbit's praises, I'll just be grateful they took the time to read the book.) Here's what we came up with:

Of all the fobbits stationed at Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding is the fobbitiest. His M-16 is collecting dust, he reads Dickens and Cervantes instead of watching NASCAR with the grunts, and the only piece of Army intelligence he really shows an interest in is the mess hall menu. Gooding works in the base’s public affairs office, furiously tapping out press releases that put a positive slant on the latest roadside bombing or strategic blunder before CNN can break the real story. Another soldier who would spend every day at the FOB if he could is Captain Abe Shrinkle, but unfortunately for him he’s a front-line officer, in charge of a platoon of troops. Abe trembles at any encounter with the enemy and hoards hundreds of care packages, brimming over with baby wipes, foot powder, and erotic letters from bored housewives. When Shrinkle makes a series of ill-judged tactical decisions, he ends up in front of his commanding officers, and Gooding has his work cut out trying to make everything smell like roses....and that’s just the start of the bad news. Gooding and Shrinkle join a cast of characters reminiscent of M*A*S*H and Catch-22 to paint a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war, in all of its bloody, dark, and often hilarious glory.

It's still a work-in-progress and will probably expand for the actual final jacket copy, but I thought I'd share it with you to get your reaction. What do you think? Is this something that would pique your curiosity enough that you'd walk up to the bookstore counter and plunk down your hard-earned ducats to buy a copy of the book?

As long as we're talking about the embryonic flutterings of Fobbit, I thought I'd also share a sketch I did for a cover-design idea: a battle-clad soldier peeking over an office cubicle. The brilliant design gods in Grove's Art Department will no doubt come up with something far, far better than this stick-figure attempt of mine, but this is good for shits-n-giggles, as they say in the Army:

Click to enlarge

Deliriously Dickens: "A sort of brilliance in the room"

2012-01-11T05:18:00.001-07:00

The Biography Project, Day 11

If you aren't already sick of Charles Dickens, you will be before this year is over. In this, the bicentennial of Boz's* birth, he is everywhere: books, BBC series marathons, bobblehead dolls, bumper stickers, bubble gum, bath salts, ballpoint pens, and breakfast cereal. If you're not a fan--if you're still gagging from being force-fed ladles of Pip and Miss Havisham by an overzealous high school English teacher--then this coming twelvemonth will be the worst of times, not the best.

But if you are a Dickens devotee, come sit down next to me. As should be apparent by now, I'm bonkers for Boz.

I've started my yearlong quest to read biographies of writers with Claire Tomalin's excellent new biography, Charles Dickens: A Life. And what a life it is, as brought to vivid, sparkling, intelligent and highly-readable life on Tomalin's pages. In fact, I've been enjoying her style so much, I went ahead and purchased her biography of Thomas Hardy, which I hope to read later in The Biography Project.

Tomalin has a way of encapsulating Dickens' vibrancy in just a few well-chosen words. Here, for instance, is how she brings the book's Prologue to a rousing finish:

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation--and sometimes sobs. He stored up his experiences and reactions as raw material to transform and use in his novels, and was so charged with imaginative energy that he rendered nineteenth-century England crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation--and sentimentality. Even one of his most hostile critics acknowledged that he described London "like a special correspondent for posterity." Early in his writing career he started to call himself "the inimitable": it was partly a joke with him, but not entirely, because he could see that there was no other writer at work who could surpass him, and that no one among his friends or family could even begin to match his energy and ambition. He could make people laugh and cry, and arouse anger, and he meant to amuse and to make the world a better place. And wherever he went he produced what, much later, an observant girl described as "a sort of brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless. I remember how everyone lighted up when he entered."

Tomalin begins by charting Dickens' family history of Men Who Cannot Hold Their Shillings. John, Charles' father, was famously careless with the family income and spent months in debtor's prison while young Charley slopped blacking on boots in a factory straight out of one of his novels. CD himself, despite his enormous income from writing, struggled occasionally with "money troubles," but we also see that it was a problem for his grandfather. John's parentage is shadowy, but Tomalin suggests it may have been the politician Charles James Fox or the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan--both men who "gambled away several fortunes and borrowed from...friends without a thought of ever repaying any of them."

As is widely known, it was Charles Dickens' uncertain childhood of near-poverty and moving from house to house and town to town which greatly informed his later writing. The turbulence also turned him into someone who seized the day and worked his ass off in a certain "toil today for we know not what tomorrow brings" mentality. In 1827, when he was fifteen, Dickens got a job as a clerk in a law firm (which, as Tomalin points out, was just a fancypants way of calling him an "office boy"). Happy to leave his boot-blacking days behind him, he dressed as a dandy, attended the theater on a regular basis, and entertained the other clerks with his spot-on imitations of people he met in the streets, clients and other lawyers. Tomalin writes:

He was always looking, listening to the voices and reacting to the dramas, absurdities and tragedies of London life. From these early observations he built up a store of knowledge that would nourish his art for the rest of his life.

In these pages about the young impressionable Dickens, Tomalin sets the stage for the writer he will become, the force of nature who shaped and defined Victorian life for the rest of us almost 200 years in the future: "It's not easy to follow his day-to-day activities during the late 1820s and early 1830s because he was doing so much, taking in so much, spreading himself over so many activities, feeling everything with such intensity."

Tomalin closes out the first 50 pages of the biography--just before Dickens embarks on his writing career--with this keen observation:

He had spent seven years applying himself to master a series of different skills, always seeking to find a congenial way to earn a good income. He had served in lawyers’ offices, taught himself shorthand, taken down law cases, reported the procedures of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, prepared himself for the acting profession and returned to writing about what he saw around him for magazines. All were demanding activities and one by one he tried them, rejecting some, persevering with others. Even when he did find the right path, there was still a long way to go before he could hope to establish himself professionally. But his pursuit of various goals was so energetic, and he demonstrated such an ability to do many different things at once, and fast, that even his search for a career had its aspect of genius.

I'll be back later with another report on my progress through The Biography Project. Meanwhile, I'm applying some lessons learned from Dickens to my own writing: work hard, let the ink flow without cease, and let the naysayers be damned.

Video bonus: Dickens' great-great-great granddaughter takes us on a tour of the Portsmouth home where he was born

*"Boz" is the nickname Dickens adopted for himself early in his career. His first sketches as a reporter for the Monthly magazine were signed "Boz" and it was the name the public knew him by as the author of The Pickwick Papers until he came out from behind the pseudonym once the book became wildly popular. He earned the nickname after his brother Augustus was born in 1827. Tomalin writes: "Charles took to calling him Moses by the time he was a toddler...'Moses' became 'Boses' when spoken through the nose, and Charles was prone to colds in the head, so 'Boses' became 'Boz,' which in turn became the pen name adopted by him for his first published writing in 1834.

Portrait of Dickens by Daniel Maclise, 1839.

My First Time: Erika Dreifus

2012-01-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Erika Dreifus, author of Quiet Americans--which, as you probably already know, was one of my favorite books of 2011. Erika, publisher of the free monthly newsletter The Practicing Writer, is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and for Fiction Writers Review. She also serves on the editorial board for J Journal: New Writing On Justice. Visit her website here.

My First Punch-in-the-Gut Review

Ten months elapsed between the release of my first book of fiction—a story collection titled Quiet Americans—and my first encounter with what any reasonable person would call a truly "bad" review thereof. In this age of Google alerts, that might seem impressive indeed. But I should admit that my book and I are also late bloomers of sorts. Part of the extended honeymoon with reviewers is quite possibly due to the fact that none of the major prepub magazines—Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, or Booklist—bothered to write about the book, although review copies and ancillary information went out to them according to their respective guidelines and timetables. Maybe the combination of an unknown author and a tiny new press (not to mention a short-story collection) was simply too disenchanting.

When the coverage came—frequently on blogs, and not infrequently from people with whom I was at least slightly, if only virtually, acquainted—the tone seemed overwhelmingly positive. But even on Goodreads, where plenty of readers unfamiliar to me weighed in from the start, 87 percent (to date) rated the book "4" or "5." Many of these readers went beyond the numerical ratings and offered thoughtful, considered praise, specifying what they saw as the book's strengths (apparently, Quiet Americans contains at least a few). More than once, I was astonished (and humbled) by the clarity and enthusiasm with which some of these reviewers discerned themes and other elements in my work that even I, the author, had not perceived.

On the other hand, not one of the readers who characterized the book as meriting a "3" offered any comments. And the explanation for the single "2" rating ("Got amazing reviews on Goodreads, but I'm just lukewarm. Short read.") lacked sufficient power to inflict anything more than a superficial wound. In other words, I wasn't prepared for a punch-in-the-gut review.

But that's exactly how it felt to read the latest review, which I discovered thanks to my own hyper-conscientiousness.

Here's what happened: When an editor for a certain (unnamed) publication contacted my publisher for a review copy in November 2010, I was delighted. I told my publisher that this was great news: The publication, which appears bimonthly, would reach a significant target audience.

Since the press that published Quiet Americans is so small, and since, as a reader, I appreciated the reviewing publication, I assumed the responsibility for checking each new issue to see if a review of Quiet Americans had appeared.

Many months—and several issues—went by. No review surfaced.

Then, about a year after the request for the review copy, I clicked on over to find the November/December edition posted. And within it, I found a review that was, in fact, equivalent to a punch in the gut.

I'm going to try to be discreet about this, so I won't quote from the review itself. But I can tell you that almost none of its 250 words were complimentary. Factual inaccuracies—yes, you read the plural correctly—exacerbated my dismay. (I really have a thing about accuracy. Always have.) And I struggled mightily to reconcile what other reviewers' had praised as "classic storytell[ing]" and an "effectively unemotional" or "clear, direct style" with this one's strong suggestion that the prose was too straightforward and predominantly linear to be of any literary merit.

Some of the review seemed eccentric as well as harsh. Perhaps the strangest comment was a forceful sentence deploring what the reviewer perceived as my extensive reliance on a particular verb tense. (If you have read my collection, and you are thinking that perhaps the reviewer was targeting the use of the present tense in one of these stories, you'd be wrong.) Finally, there was this icing on the bitter cake—unlike several of her fellow reviewers elsewhere in the issue, who refrained from counseling for or against a purchase, this reviewer displayed no such restraint.

If you should ever find yourself in a situation similar to mine, here's how I suggest you cope:

1. Email the review to your mother. Wait for her to email you back, assuring you—just as she did all those years ago in high school—that the person who is being so unkind to you(r book) is "just jealous!"

2. Email the review to your publisher. Wait for him to email you back with comforting words (albeit words you won't republish here, just in case this is a family blog). Appreciate his overall characterization of the review: "grumpy."

3. Share a copy of the review with an author friend over a meal. Remember that after she read your book, this friend wrote you one of the nicest unsolicited responses you've received so far. Laugh—despite yourself and despite your still-aching gut—as you watch her facial expressions while she reads the review. Agree wholeheartedly with her bewilderment.

4. Reread all of the other (positive) reviews your book has received.

5. Reread all of the generous, non-review emails and letters your book has prompted from people you admire.

6. Google the offending reviewer. Wonder about the significance of the fact that her uncommon name yields so few returns. Reconsider your mother's words. Wonder if maybe this reviewer really is jealous.

Above all (and you knew this was coming, right?)—keep writing. If you have to, make some lemonade with this particular lemon. Write about it. Ideally, publish what you write. But if you're looking for a venue to share your thoughts on "My First Punch-in-the-Gut Review," I'm sorry to say that you'll be the second to address that on The Quivering Pen because I've already beaten you to the punch!

Photo by Lisa Hancock

Soup and Salad: Rick Moody: Ironic Pedagogue?, Time-Warping with Stephen King, How to Build a Hidden-Door Bookcase, I Can Haz Dead White Guys, The (Verbal) History of the Typewriter, Our Daily Poem, Can Small Presses Compete?, Bells and Whistles, The Long and Winding Sentence

2012-01-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

On today's menu:

1. Novelist Andromeda Romano-Lax (The Detour) recently attended a seminar taught by Rick Moody (The Four Fingers of Death, The Ice Storm) and liked what she heard. Sort of. Here's what she had to say about it at the 49 Writers blog:

      Moody had great stage presence. Wearing a stylish hat and slouchy jeans, he spoke slowly and leaned in close to the microphone, delivering his advice on the subject of revision in a gravelly, wry, Tom Waits-kind-of voice.
      The large audience of faculty and students, myself included, enjoyed Moody’s sense of humor and his aura of hard-won success. I appreciated that he came to the seminar prepared (some don’t) and that he came with strong opinions. Exposure to other writers’ “rules,” beliefs and attitudes helps us create our own sense of authority. Whether we agree or disagree, at least we find, in pressing up against others’ sharply defined opinions, the shape of our own.
      However.
      However, not only did I not agree with some of Moody’s basic precepts, but much more troubling, I did not think that Rick Moody agreed with Rick Moody’s basic precepts. Which raises an issue: what can we learn from writer-instructors who say one thing but do another?
      I’m tempted to coin a new term for this: pedagogical irony.

Read the rest of Romano-Lax's thought-provoking piece: "Buy Fresh Fish Here: Rick Moody and Why Great Writing is Hard to Teach"

2. This year for Christmas, Becca at the Bookstack blog received Stephen King's new novel 11/22/63 as a gift. A few days later, she decided to walk around Dealy Plaza and get a feel for the aura of King's thriller about time-traveling back to the day of JFK's assassination:

The whole scene seemed smaller, more claustrophobic than I would have expected. Having only seen ancient black and white film footage, the road seemed large and expansive, where in reality it’s a small two lane section of city street, flanked closely by buildings. But being there in the actual city where history occurred and where so much of King’s book is set, certainly added an extra dimension of realism to an already fantastic read.

3. From the Department of Scooby-Doo Investigations: How to Build a Hidden-Door Bookcase.

4. Are you reading Dead White Guys? No, not the classic Western Lit canon (though it's a good thing if you are). I'm talking about the totally irreverent, totally hilarious blog written by Amanda Nelson. You aren't? Get thee to DWG posthaste! Or else, get thee to a nunnery. Each week, Amanda will smash your literary idols' pedestals to crumbly bits with charm and wit. Take, for instance, her take-down of Doctor Zhivago (the novel, not the movie):

This book made my soul moan in pain, like the moaning of the Reds as they marched across the frozen tundra to oppress the Whites and Purples and Greens and Polka Dots, like the moaning of this secondary character who randomly becomes super important in 400 pages and you're supposed to remember him, like the moaning of the blabbering, incoherent, vague craps that is Doctor Shutthehellup.

There's plenty more snarky goodness where that came from. Check it out. Your stuffy, pipe-smoking, elbow-patch-sporting World Lit 301 prof will hate you for it, but I think you'll have a jolly good time.

5. And now, for Something Completely Different: The History of the Typewriter, as Recited by Michael Winslow. For those of you who don't remember Winslow, he played Larvell "Motor Mouth" Jones in the Police Academy movies. And for those of you who don't remember typewriters, well....sit back, close your eyes and try to imagine the peck of keys, ink-smeared fingers, and the satisfying zzzippp! of a page being pulled out of the black-rubber platen. Here's Mr. Winslow recreating the noise of typewriters in a 21-minute video:

6. I've dispensed this advice before: A Poem a Day, That's All I Ask (and I still practice what I preach). But along comes Alan Heathcock with his prescription for a daily dose of poetry and he says it so much better than I ever could. Here's part of what he wrote for NPR:

Even with a crazed daily docket, I can manage a minute or two for the words, reading while waiting for the bread to toast, sitting in a school parking lot. I've read poems at jury duty. At Jiffy Lube. Once, at a football tailgate, I read a poem in a Portajohn. That's the practical greatness of a poem. They don't take much time, travel well, don't require any plug-ins or accessories. It's the ancient and perfect technology of words on a page that make you imagine beyond your means, make you feel the truths of lives that are not yours, and contemplate the life you have.

7. I'm very late to the party on this one, but I just stumbled across this interview with Victoria Barrett of Engine Books at the Psychology Today blog and thought I'd share. Sure it was published last September, but I thought Barrett had some interesting things to say about small presses--including this:

I would at one point have said that small presses can't compete with large presses' resources, but as publishers put less and less cash behind a project, that becomes less true. As a new startup, I don't have the budget to send writers on tour and I don't, as of yet, offer advances. And I think, in a lot of cases, the money big presses do throw around gets misspent. I would also at one point have said that small presses can't offer authors the same level of connection in the publishing world that big presses do, but that begins to be less evident, as well. Recent winners of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award have come out of very small presses. You can find small press books on Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers shelf. Doors are opening for small presses and their authors. They've not been flung wide just yet, but they're opening.

8. Here's another older news article, but still timely. From the New York Times, a look at how publishers are trying to lure readers away from ebooks with bells and whistles (not literally, but perhaps someday soon we'll have microchip-enhanced books whistling at us in bookstores):

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading. “When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,” said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. “It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.”

9. At the Los Angeles Times, Pico Iyer goes on--at length--about the pleasures of the long and winding sentence in this day and age of chopped syntax and CNN news flashes:

Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker. Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).

Somewhere, Mr. William Faulkner is shedding a tear of gratitude.

Friday Freebie: Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman

2012-01-06T05:56:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to Melissa Kramer, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Spring by David Szalay.

This week's book giveaway is a novel which regular readers of The Quivering Pen have heard me trumpet once or twice in the past year: Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman. As I wrote at the beginning of my earlier review:

Sheri Holman’s fourth novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, begins at the end of Eddie Alley’s life as the has-been host of a campy TV horror show writes what appears to be a suicide letter to his grown daughter Wallis. In this opening paragraph of Holman’s book, we find a good illustration of how the author of The Dress Lodger and The Mammoth Cheese uses detail to bring her sentences to life:

Of all the props I saved, only the coffin remains. Packed in boxes or tossed in the closet were the skulls and rubber rats, the cape folded with the care of a fallen American flag, my black spandex unitard, white at the seams where I’d stretched out the armpits, sweat-stained and pilled. I saved the squeezed-out tubes of greasepaint, the black shadow for under the eyes, the porcelain fangs. Of the gifts fans sent, I kept that bleached arc of a cat’s skeleton, the one you used to call Fluffy and hang your necklaces from, and a dead bird preserved with antifreeze. I kept maybe a hundred of the many thousands of drawings and letters from preteen boys and girls. There were some from adults, too, confessions of the sort they should be writing their shrinks or the police, and not a man who plays a vampire on TV. “Dear Captain Casket, Fangs for the memories.”

Just as The Mammoth Cheese embraced everything from dairy farming to Jeffersonian politics, Witches on the Road Tonight is a novel which takes a wide-angle view of mid-century American life. Holman touches on matriarchy, Appalachian witchcraft, silent movies, FDR’s Works Project Administration programs, homosexuality, traumatic childhoods, and the fleeting nature of fame—but especially the latter. Imagine Captain Kangaroo in a blue funk after the television studio cameras have blinked off for the last time and you’ll have some sense of the malaise which settles over Eddie Alley after he’s hung up his Captain Casket cape. Witches on the Road roams across the 70-year timeline of Eddie’s life, from his childhood in Panther Gap, Virginia to his campy popularity in small-market television in the 1960s to the twilight of his life in a Manhattan penthouse at midnight.

But don't just take my word for it. Here's what The Washington Post had to say about the novel: "[Witches on the Road Tonight takes readers] deep into the secretive silence and sublime vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a setting which Holman splendidly evokes in all its eerie beauty....She is as eloquent about the physical landscape of her stories as she is about the internal terrain of human emotion.... Seductive and hallucinatory....Witches on the Road Tonight is less about monsters and witches than it is about people whose fears and failings are profoundly and recognizably human."

I have a new paperback copy of Witches to give away to one lucky blog reader. For your chance at winning it, all you have to do is answer this question:

What is the name of Holman's first novel, published in 1997? (You can visit her website to find the answer--or, if you're a fan like me, you'll know it off the top of your head.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 12--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 13. If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party.

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Bullets, Runaway Boulders, Busted Brakes and a Box of Poisoned Chocolates: Agatha Christie's Peril at End House

2012-01-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

Every year for the past seven years (except for one, overbusy instance), I've made it a habit to begin my reading calendar with an Agatha Christie mystery. The New Year's Eve champagne is still tingling through my blood when I visit the "Ch" bookcase of my library (yes, my library is so large, an entire bookcase is devoted to just "Ch") and choose a whodunit I haven't yet read. Reading Agatha Christie is a sublime way of getting my "little grey cells" humming and buzzing--shaking off their winter torpor--as I start another twelve months of often heavy literary fiction.

This year, I chose Peril at End House, published early in Christie's career (1932). It was relatively short and the setup intrigued me. A young carefree woman named Nick Buckley (there's also a girl named Freddie--but no boy named Sue) has had a run of bad luck lately. The brakes on her car went out as she was going downhill, a large oil painting over her bed came crashing down minutes after she'd left it, and a boulder rolling off a cliff narrowly missed her when she was sunbathing. Then, just as she's on her way to meet friends at a resort hotel, someone fires a bullet at her. Again, it passes harmlessly through her sun hat, but by this point it seems pretty obvious that someone is out to kill Nick Buckley. Even so, the happy doesn't go out of her happy-go-lucky. Her joie de vivre is irrepressible, even in the face of all this near-tragedy.

Hercule Poirot, however, is concerned. After a chance encounter with Nick at the Hotel Majestic (where the errant bullet went through the brim of her hat), he is determined to find out who's behind all these "accidents" in the girl's life. Along with Captain Hastings (the Watson to Poirot's Holmes), he begins investigating the perils of End House, the gloomy house overlooking the ocean. Nick is the last of the Buckleys, a centuries-old family, living in the place which, Hastings says, "looks rather eerie and imposing standing there by itself far from anything."

A typical cast of Christie suspects gradually comes on the scene: Nick's beautiful-but-listless friend Frederica, art dealer Jim Lazarus, a would-be suitor named George Challenger, and cousin Maggie who comes to End House to be by Nick's side during Poirot's investigation. There's also a dim-witted gardener, a maid who seems to know more than she lets on, a shady lawyer, and an overly-friendly Australian couple renting the lodge at End House. Eventually, they'll assemble in the dining room for Poirot's Big Reveal. But that's at the end of the book, mon ami.

Before that climax, there are many more perils at End House: gunshots, fireworks, and poisoned chocolates--not to mention the omnipresent perils of human relationships. End House is full of deceit and betrayal, as befits any good Christie plot. It's up to Poirot to figure it out with "the correct employment of the little grey cells."

I suppose it sounds like boasting to say that I figured out the villain about halfway through the book. BUT, as always, even though I could figure out whodunit, I couldn't unravel the howdunit. I have never ever been able to be even one half-step ahead of the author in any of her books. This was no exception. It's in the complicated tangle of character, misdirection, and tightly-wound action where I find the most pleasure in these books.

In addition to some brisk, clever plotting, Peril at End House gave Christie a chance to highlight the Belgian detective's ego and fastidiousness to a comic degree. He goes through half the book saying to people, "But surely you have heard of me?" and beaming a bloated smile when they respond, "Of course, you're the famous detective!" Those who haven't heard of Poirot are given a withering dismissal.

There's also an amusing interlude when Nick asks Hercule, "Are you very tidy, M. Poirot?"

      "Ask my friend Hastings here."
      The girl turned an inquiring gaze on me.
      I detailed some of Poirot's minor peculiarities--toast that had to made from a square loaf--eggs matching in size--his objection to golf as a game "shapeless and haphazard" whose only redeeming feature was the tee boxes! I ended by telling her the famous case which Poirot had solved by his habit of straightening ornaments on the mantelpiece.

I really enjoyed Peril at End House and thought it was one of Agatha Christie's best--right up there with Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and The Body in the Library. That's why I was a little surprised to read this in Christie's Autobiography: "Peril at End House was another of my books which left so little impression on my mind that I cannot even remember writing it."

What?!!

I'll excuse dotty Dame Agatha because she was writing her memoir--at various intervals--between 1950 and 1965. By that time, I suspect many of her plots and characters were starting to swirl together in one bloody whirlpool of guns, knives, and bottles of arsenic. For me, however, Peril at End House was an impressionable way to start out a new year!

The Hours I Keep

2012-01-04T05:26:00.000-07:00

Writing fiction at night was rather rare for Tengo. He enjoyed working when it was light outside and people were walking around. Sometimes, when he was writing at night while everything was hushed and wrapped in darkness, the style he produced would be a little too heavy, and he would have to rewrite the whole passage in the light of day. Rather than go to that trouble, it was better to write in daylight from the outset.
--1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

I'm the opposite of the novelist Tengo in Murakami's new novel: I get itchy if I write during the hours of full daylight. All that hustle and bustle under the sunny glare of the nine-to-five clock can be a distraction for me. I need to work under the suffocating blanket of a black sky. On the other hand, I don't generally write at night.

I am a zero-dark-early writer. Friends are always shocked when I tell them I set my alarm for 3:33 a.m. (yes, I'm a little bit OCD) and make my way to my basement office where I station myself in front of the keyboard at an hour when cab drivers, cops and waitresses at Denny's are the only other laborers here in Butte. This has been my routine for the past four years and I find it suits me well. It's just me, the cats, a cup of coffee, and the soft roar of the boiler furnace a few yards from my office. And, of course, all those voices in my head which I can finally hear in this hush before dawn. It's only when the house is at a standstill that I'm able to listen to my imagination.

Still, Murakami brings up an interesting point when he says that time of day has a direct influence on style of writing. Tengo's compositions at night are dark and heavy, whereas the writing he does in daylight has, we are to assume, less sturm und drang. Perhaps my fiction would be light as a cheese souffle if I emerged from my dim mole-hole in the basement of my house and took my laptop to Starbucks during the bright morning rush-hour.

Whatever the case, neither the fictional Tengo nor the very real Me have anything on the dynamo named Charles Dickens. It's probably no coincidence Dickens rose to prominence during the Industrial Age in Britain--his work habits have all the force of a steam-powered factory.

Here's how Claire Tomalin describes his daily routine in the introduction to her biography, Charles Dickens: A Life:

He worked furiously fast to give himself free time. He lived hard and took hard exercise. His day began with a cold shower, and he walked or rode every day if he could, arduous expeditions of twelve, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, often summoning a friend to go with him. He might be in his study from ten at night until one in the morning, or up early to be at his desk by 8.30, writing with a quill pen he sharpened himself and favouring dark blue ink.

Dickens, as is widely bandied about, wrote himself to death; he was still scratching the pen across the pen right up until the afternoon of the day he succumbed to a stroke. I'll never have his level of energy, but at least I'm being as productive as I can in those few dark hours before the hurly-burly tumult of the day.

The Ones We Lost

2012-01-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

This is wrong, but I have to admit my favorite part of the Academy Awards telecast used to be the "In Memoriam" video montage about half-way through the ceremony--that one pause in Hollywood's self-congratulatory gaiety when clips of recently-deceased movie industry stars would flash by, sweetened with the nectar of a tear-wringing soundtrack. I loved watching this parade of the dead because it reassured me that the flame we thought was snuffed could flicker to life in our memories one last time--if only for 2.5 seconds. Reputations, careers, magic movie moments--they all had one last hurrah before being sealed back in the coffin of half-remembered history.

Writers are nothing like actors, directors and cinematographers. Their passing rarely gets mention in the media (our incestuous book-culture media doesn't count here) and it's only in year-end obit-recaps like this one that we even remember they're gone. Now, mourn with me--if only for 2.5 seconds--those wizards of the written word who passed on to that Final Draft in the Sky in 2011....

[This list is hardly complete, by any means. I combed through my back issues of Poets & Writers magazine and did a few Google searches to find these names, but I know there are many, many more authors I've missed. Feel free to remind us of other literary passings in the comments section.]

Wilfred Sheed
Dec. 27, 1930 – Jan. 19, 2011
In his obituary, the New York Times called Sheed a "wittily satirical man of letters who drew upon his Anglo-American background to write bittersweet essays, criticism, memoirs and fiction about cultural life on both sides of the Atlantic."

Like most of his colleagues, only a little more so, Irving [Berlin] always needed someone else to tell him when he was good. Witness the famous instance when he almost discarded that most palpable of hits 'There's No Business Like Show Business' because his secretary didn't like it, and perhaps more seriously, because Richard Rodgers didn't light up when he first heard it. A more confident man might have realized that Richard Rodgers never lit up over anything and that he was hearing this new song under the worst possible conditions: Irving was playing it himself. And Irving's pianism was so primitive that Hoagy Carmichael once said that it had given him the heart to go on, on the grounds that 'if the best in the business is that bad, there's hope for all of us.'"
--from The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

Reynolds Price
February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011
American novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist whose many books include A Long and Happy Life, Clear Pictures: First Loves First Guides (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Tongues of Angels, Blue Calhoun, Kate Vaiden, and The Surface of Earth.

Forrest Mayfield was drowning in gratitude, kneeling above his wife, taking the last of what she freely offered--the sight of her body in morning light laid safely beside him on linen marked only by proofs of their love. Till half an hour ago, at dawn, he had never seen more of her than head and arms--what showed to the world at the limits of her clothes. So he'd loved her because of her face and her kindness, the mysterious rein she accepted from the first on his oldest need--free flight outward from his own strapped and drying heart, that he be permitted after decades of hoarding to choose one willing gift and love her entirely, the remainder of his life. Almost no matter that she love in return, only that she wait and endure his love, his endless thanks; acknowledge them with smiles. Now she was here--by her own will, unforced, still offering (though the room had filled with light) her entire brilliant body, perfect beyond any dream or guess and visibly threaded with the narrow blue channels that pulsed on, warm from their first full juncture.
--from The Surface of Earth

Brian Jacques
June 15, 1939 – February 5, 2011
The author of Redwall, the fantasy series about animals which was translated into 29 languages and sold 20 million copies.

Mossflower lay deep in the grip of midwinter beneath a sky of leaden gray that showed tinges of scarlet and orange on the horizon. A cold mantle of snow draped the landscape, covering the flatlands to the west. Snow was everywhere, filling ditches, drifting high against hedgerows, making paths invisible, smoothing the contours of earth in its white embrace. The gaunt, leafless ceiling of Mossflower Wood was penetrated by constant snowfall, which carpeted the sprawling woodland floor, building canopies on evergreen shrubs and bushes. Winter had muted the earth; the muffled stillness was broken only by a traveler’s paws.
--from Mossflower

John Haines
June 29, 1924 - March 2, 2011
Poet, essayist, memoirist, he was also the heart and soul of the arts in Alaska, serving as the poet laureate of that state from 1969 to 1973. In his obituary, the New York Times noted: "[he] found inspiration in the peaks of the Alaskan range that he could see from the cabin he built himself, in the butterfly he held in his hands, in the moose he shot and butchered. He told of stones waiting for God to remember their names." On a personal note: though I received my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, I never had the pleasure and privilege to study under Mr. Haines. I'm sure my work would have been the richer for it if I had.

Long before I went to live in the woods my awareness of death seemed to have a depth beyond any exact recall. It existed as a memory composed of discontinuous images: a snake crushed on the summer roadway, reeking in the sun--how dull and flattened it was compared to the live snake, supple and glistening, I had seen in the grass a week before. A drowned and bloated frog I had pulled from the bottom of a backyard pool and held in my hand: a wonder--why did it not breathe? A bird in whose decaying nostrils small white worms were boiling. These were the naked things of an uninstructed childhood in which there was little instinctive fear.
--from The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness

H. R. F. Keating
October 31, 1926 – March 27, 2011
Mystery writer best known for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.

The inspector swallowed nervously. He had a feeling that he ought not to let such a person tread all over him, otherwise his chances of ever applying the proper procedure would be slight.
--from The Perfect Murder

Ed Lahey
1936 - April 27, 2011
Poet and novelist who was born right here in my adopted town of Butte, Montana. Lahey brought his hardscrabble upbringing as a miner's son to life in his verse. His descriptions of the men and women of Butte were potent shots of whiskey--burned going down, but ultimately gave you that swimmy-headed feeling of great art.

Topside,
a bull gear caught Haggerty's hand,
slick iron on a wet day.
I heard him speak to it.
"Whoa," he said.
It cut his hand off anyway.
--from "A Different Price"

Ernesto Sabato
June 24, 1911–April 30, 2011
Argentine writer best known for his novel El Tunel (The Tunnel) which was praised by Albert Camus and Thomas Mann upon its publication in 1948.

It should be sufficient to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed María Iribarne. I imagine that the trial is still in everyone's mind and that no further information about myself is necessary.
Granted, it is true that the devil himself cannot predict what people will remember, or why they remember it. I for one have never believed there is such a thing as a collective memory--which may be one way humans protect themselves. The phrase "the good old days" does not mean that bad things happened less frequently in the past, only--fortunately--that people simply forget they happened.
--from The Tunnel

Josephine Hart
March 1, 1942 – June 2, 2011
British novelist whose bestsellers included Sin and Damage, which told the story of a politician's obsession with his son's girlfriend.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outline all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever having the agony as the twisted iron of our souls unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
--from Damage

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
March 25, 1940 – August 26, 2011
American novelist whose many books included Buffalo Afternoon, a novel about the Vietnam War.

There is so much I would like to tell you, for example about the rice paddies and how beautiful they are under the wide sky, and how different they look depending on where you are standing when you look at them.
--from Buffalo Afternoon

Ruth Stone
June 8, 1915 – Nov. 19, 2011
Poet who won late-in-life fame when she received the National Book Award at the age of 87 for her collection In the Next Galaxy.

Oh mortal love, your bones
were beautiful. I traced them
with my fingers. Now the light
grows less. You were so angular.
The air darkens with steel
and smoke. The cracked world
about to disintegrate,
in the arms of my total happiness.
--from "1941"

Anne McCaffrey
April 1, 1926 – November 21, 2011
Best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series, over the course of her 46-year career she won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award.

The bronze dragon furled his great wings, and F'lar heard the warning claxon in the Hold's Great Tower. Mnementh dropped to his knees as F'lar indicated he wished to dismount. The bronze rider stood by Mnementh's huge wedge-shaped head, politely awaiting the arrival of the Hold Lord. F'lar idly gazed down the valley, hazy with warm spring sunlight. He ignored the furtive heads that peered at the dragonman from the parapet slits and the cliff windows.
--from Dragonflight

Russell Hoban
Feb. 4, 1925 – Dec. 13, 2011
Novelist whose books for adults--including Turtle Diary (1975) and Riddley Walker (1980)--won great acclaim. But for an entire generation of children, including yours truly, he was the creator of Frances the Badger whose tales were told in a series of children's books illustrated by his wife Lillian (the first, Bedtime for Frances, was illustrated by the equally-great Garth Williams).

It was a fine summer day, and after breakfast Frances said, "I am going to play with Thelma."
"Be careful," said Mother.
"Why do I have to be careful?" said Frances.
"Remember the last time?" said Mother.
"Which time was that?" said Frances.
"That was the time you played catch with Thelma's new boomerang," said Mother. "Thelma did all the throwing, and you came home with lumps on your head."
--from A Bargain for Frances

Christopher Hitchens
April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011
Journalist, critic and quick wit, his bestsellers included God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Arguably: Essays and the memoir Hitch-22.

“I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”
--from Hitch-22

blogger.com

The Biography Project

2012-01-01T08:18:00.002-07:00

Goals for 2012:

Lose 35 pounds

Improve my posture

Taste a food I've never tried before

Sell 10,000 copies of Fobbit

#1 is already on its way to happening since Jean and I, in typical cliche fashion, are starting a diet today (the 17-Day Diet, which we've tried before and have been successful with); #2 is directly tied to #1 since the gravity of my belly fat pulls my shoulders slouchward; #3 will most likely come after #1's success; and #4? Well, that depends in large part upon you, dear blog reader. You have my thanks starting now for whatever you can do to help me reach that goal once the novel launches later this year (still no firm date from Grove/Atlantic).

But buried among those New Year's resolutions is another idea I've been toying with--something I call The Biography Project. Since 2012 is the year when this caterpillar of a writer will officially transform into a published butterfly (a Real! Legitimate! Writer!), I thought I'd devote the next twelve months to reading biographies of writers. I'm always curious to see the men and women "behind the page" and learn how they came to write the books they did. In this, my Year of Publication, maybe I can use their lives as roadmaps to how I should conduct myself as a writer (or, in the case of Richard Yates and Raymond Carver, how not to conduct myself).

Coupled with reading the biography, I plan to read one of that writer's works I've never before cracked open (when it comes to Flannery O'Connor, I'll read the entire Library of America edition of her works since I've already gone through her complete canon; same goes for Raymond Carver and Nathanael West). First up will be Claire Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens, along with The Haunted House, a collaborative project he wrote in 1859 with fellow Victorian novelists Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell (among others). I've read all of the Dickens novels and so it was either The Haunted House or Pictures from Italy. I'll save that one for when Jean and I go on our tour of Tuscany (date still undetermined).

Just a few of the lives under consideration

I don't know, maybe The Biography Project is doomed to failure. There are, after all, so many new books which I want (need) to read in the coming months (Richard Ford's Canada, Stewart O'Nan's The Odds: A Love Story, and Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue to name just a few). I'll probably be so overwhelmed by new Want-To's and Need-To's that the biographies will peter out after a few weeks or months.

For now, though, this is one of my foremost goals: to examine the writer's life and learn what I can about success and failure. And if there happen to be a few diet secrets in the biographies, well then, all the better.

The Nerd King: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

2011-12-31T06:26:00.000-07:00

It's Junot Diaz' birthday today, so I thought I'd offer up this small, humble gift of a review. My take on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao first appeared at January Magazine in November 2007.

Meet Oscar de Leon, dubbed “Oscar Wao” by bullies who liken him to the foppish Oscar Wilde. Our Oscar is a fat, virginal Dominican-American teenager who carries a Planet of the Apes lunchbox to school, spends hours painting his Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, and who knows “more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee.” If Nerd was a country, Oscar would be its undisputed king. Oscar is the kind of kid we would avoid on the subway--sweaty, mumbles to himself, inevitably invades personal space, probably has bad breath.

In Junot Diaz' debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, however, Oscar is the flame and we are the moths. An earnestly open-hearted protagonist, he draws us to him until we incinerate in the intensity of his character. He's a pitiful-but-hopeful loser we can all relate to, even the Prom Kings and Queens among us (who might just be the loneliest kids in school). The last time I was this absorbed by a fictional weirdo was in 1989 when John Irving's Owen Meany forced me--FORCED, I SAY!--to read his Prayer twice in rapid, thirsty succession. Oscar held me captive in much the same way with his sweaty, sticky fingers tightly gripping my attention.

Let's return to Diaz for a moment. To use the words "Diaz" and "debut novel" in such close proximity is something of a joke. Diaz has been a middleweight figure on the literary scene for 11 years, based almost exclusively on his previous (and only) book Drown a collection of interconnected stories which, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, chronicled the Dominican immigrant experience with a startling freshness. If you turn to the back flap of that 1996 book, you'll read an author bio which concludes with "He lives in New York City and is at work on his first novel." To say that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was much-anticipated would be an understatement.

Why the long wait? Tick off the reasons on your fingers: writer's block, the paralysis which comes with sudden fame at a young age (Diaz was in his late 20s when the accolades started flooding in), working for years on an apocalyptic novel about the destruction of New York City which was eventually trumped by the sur-reality of 9/11, you name it. Little of that matters now, except as a footnote, because at last we hold in our hands the solid, substantial The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We can rest assured that Junot Diaz won’t turn out to be this generation’s Harper Lee.

As the novel's title implies, this is the chronicle of Oscar's brief, candle-flame life and charts his quest, but rarely conquest, of girls. You see, not only is Oscar a Tolkien-loving, Star Trek-quoting, Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek, he's a horny geek whose tongue hangs out and eyes bulge in cartoon cones every time a pretty girl walks by. The only trouble is, as his friend Yunior points out, "Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber." Save for one unexpected happy encounter late in his life, Oscar's lust is unrequited, but he takes this as a matter of course because he believes his family is living under the cloud of an Old-World curse called fuku brought to our shores by Columbus.

Despite wearing the family doom like a black, itchy sweater and meeting romantic rejection at every turn, Oscar optimistically journeys through the 1970s, "the dawn of the Nerd Age," Diaz writes. It's Oscar against the world and he glumly accepts his lot in life. "Everybody," he says at one point, "misapprehends me." As he grows older and retreats from his peers into the other-worlds of Lovecraft, Doc Savage, Asimov, Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Oscar begins to think his destiny is to be "the Dominican Tolkien." He spends countless hours holed up in his room writing science-fiction and fantasy sagas. If Diaz had allowed, Oscar probably would have spent 11 years working on his masterpiece; but, as we're always reminded, this is a brief life. Oscar tries to make the most of it, even with the fuku hanging over his head.

The novel is more than just a Nerd Epic, however. Diaz pulls out all the stops in an attempt to tell an all-encompassing story of immigration and assimilation. Oscar lives with his mother and sister in the ghetto of Paterson, New Jersey, and the novel is as much their story as it is his. We're just starting to groove with sympathy for fat little Oscar when Diaz suddenly shifts gears and takes us into the world of Lola, Oscar's beautiful, athletic sister who has a stormy relationship with their mother, Belicia, a "hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador." Then, before too many more pages have elapsed, we're deep in that woman's story, in an extended flashback called "The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral," where we learn what happened to her in the Dominican Republic to make her so bitterly protective of her children. These chapters, along with the rest of the book are truly shaped by heartbreak, a tragedy written by fuku which determines the course of everything to come, from Oscar's obsession with Shazam to Lola's runaway teen saga. Draped across the entire book is the narration of Yunior, Oscar’s reluctant protector who relates this sad saga in a voice that reverberates with hip-hop slang, tough-guy ghettospeak and, most of all, a slowly-dawning love for his friend the dork.

Diaz proves to be something of a risk-taker. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao bravely assumes there is an audience of readers who will sit through a long novel in which the English and Spanish languages mingle without the author once stopping to translate the unfamiliar words. The gist of what the Spanglish phrases mean is pretty easy to pick up, and for those readers who absolutely have to know what guapa or chuleria mean ... well, an English-Spanish dictionary is as close as the Internet.

Diaz also hopes his readers will come to the table with some knowledge of Dominican history, specifically the tyrannical regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and who, if Oscar is to be believed, was master of the fuku. Trujillo who? You know, the "portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery." If your mind is as blank as mine when it comes to the island's past, never fear: Diaz replays the highlights of Santo Domingo History 101 in footnotes which annotate the novel. Yes, footnotes. The novel is peppered with them, as any well-respecting Screed of Nerd should be. Diaz understands most of us don't know squat about Dominicans and, as in Drown, he brings us briskly into the light. (Pay attention to Trujillo, though, because he plays an important role in Oscar's destiny.)

Diaz never lets the pace lag and his sentences remain fresh and sharp throughout. One woman is described with "eczema on her hands looking like a messy meal that had set." Later, Yunior tells us what it's like to be mugged: "my guts feeling like they'd been taken out of me, beaten with mallets, and then reattached with paper clips." Through his wondrous use of language, Diaz brings the book alive and makes it tremble in our hands.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an epic in the truest sense and in its fat, endearing hero's chest beats a Homeric heart. Oscar leads us through his unflagging quest for happiness, while Diaz tumbles us through a century of Dominican history and shows us how the brief life of one lonely boy can epitomize the immigrant experience. This novel was well worth the decade-long wait.

An Apology

2011-12-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, an email from The Quivering Pen went out to nearly 1,800 addresses. I suspect about 1,500 of those recipients had not expected this email, nor did they even want it in their Inbox. I'm here to apologize for that mass emailing, which came about as a glitch in a new format (via Mail Chimp) which I'm trying out for my weekly Quivering Pen updates. Instead of sending the email to just those who had signed up for Friday Freebie contests and/or expressed an interest in the blog in the past, the "This Week at the Quivering Pen" email was blasted out to all of my Gmail contacts. You can imagine my embarrassment. But if you can't imagine it, picture me crawling under the nearest rock and pulling it over my head.

I take only small comfort in the fact that the New York Times had a similar problem this past week.

Understandably, the reaction was, in some cases, strong. One person went so far as to write (as a reason for unsubscribing): "The Quivering Pen nauseates me, more or less. All these just-hatched writers laying down the law, as if they already knew all about it. Narcissism and arrogance, lovely."

Okay, I can take a hint.

So, in an effort to try and smooth the waters and repair whatever damage I may have done to unwitting and unwilling Inboxes, I sincerely apologize for my error. I'll be much more careful with those Mail Chimps in the future.

David

Friday Freebie: Spring by David Szalay

2011-12-30T05:59:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to Sidney Woods, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro.

This week's book giveaway is Spring by David Szalay, freshly published by the never-disappointing Graywolf Press. Before I go any further, let me just say how much I like this novel's cover design--the overhead shot of that bright, arresting orange-red umbrella in a sea of other gray umbrellas--very eye-catching! Now, on to what's behind the cover....

Spring is Szalay's U.S. debut after being named one of The Daily Telegraph’s twenty best British novelists under forty. Here's the publisher's jacket copy:

James is a man with a checkered past—sporadic entrepreneur, one-time film producer, almost a dot-com millionaire—now alone in a flat in Bloomsbury, running a shady horse-racing-tips operation. Katherine is a manager at a luxury hotel, a job she’d intended to leave years ago, and is separated from her husband. The novel unfolds in 2006, at the end of the money-for-nothing years, as a chance meeting leads to an awkward tryst and James tries to make sense of a relationship where “no” means “maybe” and a “yes” can never be taken for granted. David Szalay builds a novel of immense resonance as he cycles though perspectives that add layers of depth to the hesitations, missteps, and tensions as James tries to win Katherine. James’s other pursuit is money, and Spring follows his investments and schemes, from a half share in a thoroughbred to a suit-and-tie day job he’s taken to pay the bills.

Here's what Margot Livesey had to say about the book: "In Spring the gifted writer David Szalay explores the complex worlds of love and money, each with their surprises and vicissitudes. This novel made me feel in the best way that I was eavesdropping on a series of fascinating conversations. An insightful portrait of contemporary England."

In an article earlier this year for The Telegraph, Lorna Bradbury spent the day with Szalay at the racetrack and wrote:

His third novel, Spring, is a literary reworking of Dick Francis, complete with a bulimic jockey, a shady trainer who sleeps with his stable girl and a tipster who’s arrested for stalking a stranger who catches his eye in a supermarket. And it is a riposte to John Updike, who Szalay views as the “king of writing about sex”. It dissects the desolation of a doomed relationship and is remarkable in that it does not shy away from sex or hide behind comedy. The Telegraph last year included Szalay in its list of the 20 best novelists under 40–and his new book bears that out. It is the only novel I have read that brings to life–and without too many cringeworthy passages–the reality of a sexual affair.

If you'd like a chance at winning a new paperback copy of Spring, all you have to do is answer this question:

In that same article in The Telegraph, what is the name of the horse which Szalay puts his money on in the first race?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 5--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 6. If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party.

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

A Chimp Off the Old Block: RIP, Cheetah

2011-12-29T07:24:00.001-07:00

If you're anything like me, you were stunned into melancholy silence when you heard the news that Cheetah the Chimp had died at an animal sanctuary in Florida last Saturday. Stunned not by the fact that the star of the Tarzan movies and Doctor Dolittle (Rex Harrison version) was gone from us forever (kidney failure) or that the silver screen was a little less gilded by his absence, but by the fact that he was even alive at all. After all, the Hollywood ape was 80 years old when he passed on to that great tire swing in the sky--which is like 214 in human years.

Debbie Cobb, outreach director at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary, said, "He was very compassionate....He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings." She also said Cheetah was soothed by Christian music and enjoyed finger painting and watching football.

Not everyone shed a tear at the news. Mia Farrow, daughter of Tarzan and His Mate co-star Maureen O'Sullivan, Tweeted: "My mom, Tarzan's Jane, referred to Cheetah-the-chimp as 'that bastard' - saying he bit her at every opportunity."

But, wait! Hold the vine!

As it turns out, Cheetah may not have died after all. It's all so confusing and the truth seems to hang in the balance of an "h."

Whatever the case, as Andrew Wood notes in his remembrance of the time he "interviewed" the prime-time primate, "We're not really mourning the animal, after all, but remembering the character." In just the same way, we have fond memories of any one of the eight Lassies who saved Timmy from the well. In something akin to racism in the animal world, "they all look alike" to us, don't they? Hard to tell one Cheetah from the next. Therein lies the confusion over which chimp turned us into chumps when we rushed to report the death of Tarzan's hairy co-star.

Since this is a "blog about books" and not top bananas in Hollywood, I should direct you to James Lever's novel Me Cheeta, a faux-memoir published in 2008. The Guardian raved about the book, saying, "this is far more than a wicked spoof tell-all. It operates, and works smoothly and well, on several levels: it is a Swiftian satire, as Cheeta walks through the world observing human foibles and, often as not, getting them exactly wrong, as when he imagines that the stuffed animal heads adorning the walls of one actor's house are all old pets, lovingly preserved....[It's] a tribute that bursts its own narrative confines, and stands the novel on its head, to become a hymn to a certain kind of beauty and innocence."

I haven't read it yet, but it's long been about midway up my towering TBR stack (aka Mt. NeverRest). The book opens with a "Note to Readers" in which Cheeta-without-an-h writes:

Dearest humans,
So, it's a perfect day in Palm Springs, California, and here I am--actor, artist, African, American, ape and now author--flat out on the lounger by the pool, looking back over this autobiography of mine. Flipping through it more than reading it, to be honest: the whole Lifetime Achievement idea of an autobiography makes me a little nervous. The--what's the word?--the valedictory aspect to it. I'm in fine health, I'm producing some of the best paintings of my career, I'm in no obvious danger of being killed, but I've seen it happen too many times to too many of my fellow greats. The book comes out and, next thing you know, they've disappeared.
Or, as Johnny once told me, "Soon as they start calling you an Immortal, you start worrying about dying."

That's Johnny as in Johnny Weissmuller, of course--the greatest Tarzan of them all. Here's the scene where he and Cheeta first meet-cute in Lever's novel. It starts with Cedric Gibbons, director of Tarzan and His Mate, saying:

      "Maureen, come on over and meet your new leading man. And where's the King of the Jungle? You seen him?"
      "He's on the escarpment," somebody said, and a number of the humans began to shout, "Johnny! Call Johnny!" and in answer there came a faint, high call, like the trumpet of an elephant.
      "You seen Tarzan the Ape Man, Gately? No? We had a good chimp in that, but old. Can't use it anymore. What we're looking for--" and Gibbons was interrupted by the high call again. "Johnny! For Chrissakes. What we're looking for is comic relief. Uh, an animal with a bit of mischief, but easy for Maureen to handle..."
      Here Gibbons was interrupted again, by a human, a male adult, dropping down from a tree and sprinting over to us. Dropping down from a tree! He wore no clothes but for a flap of hide round his middle and I was amazed to see what a human's musculature was, how powerful they were underneath their coverings. It was impossible that he wasn't an alpha, probably the alpha of the whole group, yet there was no tyrant's force in his face as he said, smiling, "Me on escarpment with second unit. Me meet chimps now."
      "Oh, Johnny," Maureen sighed as she strolled over towards us. She was not much more than half his height. He was so upright. "Do you think you could possibly give it a rest with the ape-talk? It's just a trifle worrying..."
      "Jane angry. Jane need smack on rear end," said Johnny.
      Yes, this was the king of the forest, all right....
      "Me meet chimps," Johnny said, looking over the four of us and holding out his hand. Ah, humanity, you were so beautiful! "Me Tarzan. Me Johnny. Who Cheeta?"
      ....Who Cheeta? What kind of a question was that?
      I leaped into the home of the arms of the King of the Jungle and, for the second time that day, my heart tipped over. It was me. Me--Kong, Jiggs, Louis, the Cheater of Death--me, Cheeta.

RIP, whoever you were

The Tentacled Splendor of Nature: An interview with Gretel Ehrlich

2011-12-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because we're both from Wyoming, maybe it's because she lives so close to the land that her very words are perfumed with the loam of soil, maybe it's because I admire anyone who can be struck by lightning and not only live to tell about it but do it so eloquently* ("Before electricity carved its blue path toward me, before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground...I could not hear because I was already dead"), but I've always been drawn to Gretel Ehrlich and her books, especially The Solace of Open Spaces. So, when Michelle Gluch wrote asking if I'd be interested in posting an interview she recently conducted with Ehrlich, I didn't hesitate to say "Yes!" Here's their conversation from Nov. 2, 2011:

Michelle Gluch: One of things I admire most about your writing is your ability to take the reader along with you to these beautiful places. Wyoming and Greenland hold a special place in your heart, but are there any other landscapes you would like to share with us?

Gretel Ehrlich: Those are sort of my heart songs. Wyoming is my real heart song and I’ve spent so much time in Greenland that it is just a part of my retina. When most people see green, they feel comfortable; when I see snow and ice or an iceberg, I feel at home. I like everywhere I am because every place has its own magical quality. I mean every place outside of cities. I like cities, too; but in the wilder world there’s birds everywhere, there’s all kinds of living things everywhere, and also the tentacled splendors of all sorts of trees and plants and microclimates. So I’ve tried to absorb whole ecosystems wherever I am, and I’ve traveled in quite a few places: all over Japan, western China, Ladoch, Tibet, the tip of South America, and places in Europe and Scandinavia. But I also find [that feeling] in some little gravel bar in a river someplace, or an island. There are some little islands in Yellowstone Lake where I’ve been able to stay for a few days—every place has its own magic. I just try to stay open to every place.

Nature is clearly a defining element in your life. Was it always this way for you?

I’m afraid so. Growing up, we had dogs and horses (I was raised on a horse farm). My sister’s favorite story about me is about the time when she went out on a date and, after she came home, went into to my room to see if I was asleep. The dog was in the bed with its head on the pillow and the covers all tucked in; I was asleep on the floor. That pretty much describes how I feel about everything. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I had trouble with people, but I prefer to think of it in a more constructive way. I just feel that limiting dialogue with just one’s own species is really provincial. So I’ve tried to expand my dialogue with everything. I hope people don’t think I’m crazy. I mean dialogue in a real way—not just talking to yourself—but really seeing everything as living and having its place in the natural hierarchy of things that we are co-resident with.

I like that word “co-resident.”

Yeah, instead of “I own this piece of property and I own everything on it,” I try to see it in a more open way. It’s very nourishing when you do that. I think “nourishing” is the operative word. I just try to be outside every day, no matter what the weather. It’s so complex, and so immensely beautiful. I feel the beauty of the world really saves me from my own torments and habits and neurosis and doubts and self-hate.

So nature is your healer.

Yeah.

Whenever your name is mentioned, the response is always “Ehrlich, the nature writer?” Do you consider yourself a nature writer? How do you feel about being labeled in that way?

You know it’s fine with me. It’s better than being called a travel writer because as I always point out—if you get up to go to the bathroom you’ve traveled. We all wander around and look at things. But of course, humans are a part of nature, so if I choose to write a novel that involves human characters as well as dogs and horses and wildlife and birds and trees and rivers, then that’s part of nature, too. I try to appreciate how we’re all kind of organized together and how we influence and learn from each other.

It seems to me you have an extremely adventurous spirit—traveling the world, often alone. I call this “feeding your fire.” Which do you enjoy more—the adventures or the writing?

Writing is always hard but if you’re driven to do it, you just do it. Traveling alone can be funny and wonderful and also harrowing. I have friends who have been all sorts of dangerous, difficult places; but I go to places where there is an opening for me. Sometimes I have to go first to find that out. There is no agenda. It just happens. I travel completely instinctively. I don’t have anything organized in my mind.

You just go where the story takes you?

I just see something and I go. It doesn’t always work out. The first time I went to Greenland alone, the Inuit subsistence hunters said, “Oh, we thought you had money problems, boyfriend problems. Are you going to commit suicide?” The second time I went they just watched me a lot, as well as the third and fourth and fifth and tenth and fifteenth times. But by then I was just a member of their extended family.

You became an insider.

Yeah, in a way. You’re never really an insider. As a writer, I’m not sure you’re even an insider in your own culture because you kind of have to stand outside to see where you are. You know I had some adventures while traveling, but I don’t seek adventure per se. It just sometimes happens. Lately I’ve been writing about the tsunami survivors in northeastern Japan, and while it’s not such a physical adventure to go there, it’s a much more emotional adventure. It’s a landscape so altered, so devastated, it’s kind of mind-boggling. So, there are all kinds of adventures.

Your writing includes a lot of interior thought. Can you tell me about your process? Do you keep a journal while on these adventures?

I take constant notes. I probably have thousands of notebooks. There is no way you can remember everything. I think it’s so important to get a sense of the real texture and nuance and grit of a place. What does it look like today? Every hour is different, and every minute is different, and certainly every month, and every season, and every continent, and every hemisphere. I just got an email and a bunch of wonderful photographs from my friends in northwestern Greenland because on the 24th of October the sun went down for the last time until late February. Every year they send me pictures on that day when there is still a little light in the sky. It’s such a different world from what we have in the middle latitudes of North America. So you have to kind of put your nose into these places in every way and really experience all these changes that happen in order to write about them. In order to do that—unless you are some kind of strange genius—you need to be taking notes or the particulars will escape you quickly.

What things do you think are most important when writing about place or what advice do you give your writing student in regards to place?

When I had my ranch up in Wyoming, I would go on the same little walk around the lake, every day, at the same time of day. I would see the changes within a continuum, but at the same time I was seeing the “whole” place: the Wyoming sky, the change of seasons, and dealing with livestock. It is learning to be alert on every level. It’s like looking at a cloudy sky, where there are layers after layers of clouds. To understand what each layer means, and to understand what it all means together, and what movement through the sky means, and what the atmosphere is made of, you have to be curious and digressive in your writing. You have to do tremendous amounts of fact reading, research reading, on one tiny topic, to write about clouds. Then you have to think about and observe cloud formations—even if you are writing some tiny bit, you need to know to understand the whole thing, the whole picture. From that, you can take what is resonant or alludes to in a metaphorical way, like internal cloud layers or internal weathers.

It sounds like you’re telling us to be open to not only a lot of research and hard work, but ourselves, and to new experience, and to where the story takes us.

You never know where the story is going to take you, but that is part of the fun, otherwise you’d get bored. I never plot it out. I just see where a day of writing takes me. Of course if I am writing a book, I know what it’s about and I have my material amassed, but I don’t know how it’s going to lay down on the page. But that's part of the fun; every day must have its own surprise. The most important thing for everybody, for all of us, is to read deeply and widely. If you're a non-fiction writer—particularly as an American writer—you need to start with Thoreau and Emerson then read everything that has been written since then. And go back further to Montaigne, to people in Europe, to Asia. Those are your teachers, those wonderful books, as well as the current ones coming out daily. Resolve to read only the best. There's not enough time to read junk. I'm a terrible snob about what I read. If you’re not a writer and you read all sorts of things, all right. But, if you’re a writer and if you’re going to dedicate your life to it, then you have a lot of hard work and reading in front of you.

You’re a very prolific writer. Do you have a favorite piece?

Oh, I don’t know, I like them all. I like my book about when I first went to Greenland, before the climate crisis started destroying the ice there, called This Cold Heaven. I worked on that book for many years. I’d just write whenever I went there, in every season. I traveled up the coast and I finally made it up to the top—the inhabited top part—of Greenland, and I had the luxury of time to sort of marinate. So, that is one of my favorite books.

Is your favorite piece the same as your most successful piece?

No, just the opposite. That book won the Pen Thoreau Award years and years after it was published, and that made me very happy. But The Solace of Open Spaces has been my most successful book, as well as A Match to the Heart which is about being struck by lightning. I’ve been writing so long, they each represent an era in terms of my writing and my life. It’s hard to pick one.

What advice would you give to new and emerging writers?

Read a lot. Take notes. And wander around with a sense of curiosity and discovery and humor. See what happens to you. Don’t start out with an idea that is really firm then try to stick things in. Start in a more raw place and see what kind of letters fall on your skin and go from there.

Michelle Gluch is an author with more than fifty Idaho-based stories, articles, and photographs published in print and on the Internet. Her writings are rich with details of her home in Southwestern Idaho. Michelle holds a BA in English with a writing emphasis, and is currently a graduate student studying Composition and Rhetoric, at Boise State University.

*In A Match to the Heart

Soup and Salad: Lev Grossman on the Green-Eyed Monster, Jenna Blum on Inappropriate Skyping, Josh Getzler on an Agent's Pre-Pub Jitters, Sabina Murray on the Much-Maligned Short Story, Lydia Netzer on Purging Demons, Sherry Simpson on Writer's Block, Benjamin Hale on Dem Ole Post-Publication Blues, Anne Trubek on What America Used to Read

2011-12-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

On today's menu:

1. Early in his career, novelist Lev Grossman (The Magician King) almost let the green-eyed monster get the better of him when he judged himself against the success of other writers in his college class:

I was also convinced that my work was crap, and would always be crap, because I had no talent. There was some basis for this. There were other people in my year who also wanted to be writers, and they were producing some amazing stuff. Way better than my stuff. I still remember lines from their short stories. I was and am easily intimidated, and—through no fault of theirs—I was incredibly intimidated by these people. They were talented. They were confident. They were, for lack of a better word, glowy: they had that aura, the aura of genius in its youth, the aura of embryonic literary celebrity. I knew, to a certainty, that when we graduated and were weighed upon the great scales of the world, they would be blessed, and I would be damned. I would be the guy who appeared in the corner of the photograph in their biographies, making a weird face, who is denoted in the caption by “unidentified.”

I can relate, to a degree. Though my undergrad years at the University of Oregon are mostly a fuzzy blur thanks, in part, to the fact I was a newlywed and a new father when I moved to Eugene, I do remember sitting next to a guy named Bruce in my writing class. Bruce (last name now forgotten in the blur and fuzz) was thin, sported an equally-thin mustache, had dark hollowed-out eyes, and smelled like the bottom of an ashtray. But Bruce also wrote some of the most amazing poetry I'd ever read to that point in my life. I sat there casting sidelong glances at this guy who, I was convinced, was going to be Somebody someday. I don't know what became of Bruce--he may be dead from lung cancer or he may be out there quietly publishing his mind-stirring verse right now--but I do know that for two golden semesters he spurred me to be a better writer. And to force my eyes from green back to brown.

2. Am I the only one who thought Jenna Blum's primer for writers Skyping to book clubs was hilarious? For those of you who don't know what Skype is and think it sounds like a nasty comment you make about your co-worker's reindeer sweater at the office Christmas party, it's basically like something out of The Jetsons which allows computer users to talk to each other in "real time" via webcams. It can be a real boon to pajama-clad, whiskey-swilling authors who want to visit book clubs but have a hard time getting dressed or putting down the shot glass. I'm looking forward to Skyping with groups of Fobbit readers once the novel comes out in September.* Hopefully, they won't catch me making faces like this:

3. The days before a book comes out can be agonizing for the person waiting for its release: full of pacing, fingernail chewing, heavy sweating, inappropriate binging, and late-night calls to phone psychics. And that's just for the novelist's agent! At least, that's the case with Josh Getzler who's waiting for client Nancy Bilyeau's novel The Crown to hit bookstores in a couple of weeks. Getzler describes what it's like to have the schpilkes from the literary agent's perspective.

4. At The Story Prize blog, Sabina Murray (Tales of the New World) has some smart things to say about the short story:

The short story is a maligned form. Readers distrust it. Editors fear it. Reviewers ignore it. And writers, well, there is nowhere to hide in a short story, nowhere that a writer’s weakness is as exposed, so when the short story comes together and executes its promise, writers adore it. Otherwise, the short story can seem like the quippy, less ambitious relation of the novel. Of course, there are people who have built their reputation on the short story, people like Grace Paley and Alice Munro, so why is the short story seen to come up, so, well, short? One explanation is that the short story is held to the same standards as the novel—and how could a short story equal the breadth and depth of a novel? The truth of the matter is that most writers conceive of their short stories as part of a book, although the story has the added capacity to stand on its own. Novels in short stories come out of this—thematic linkage seems to imply a novel to some people, as if a novel is the only way that collected short stories can achieve the prestige of books. And of course there are short stories that explore the same characters, which is the most typical scenario of a “novel in short stories.” But it’s still not a novel. It’s a collection of short stories with a limited cast, and why would it aspire to anything else?

5. Novelist Lydia Netzer (Shine Shine Shine) wrestled her inner demons....and won. Getting the dark, bad stuff down on paper was one of the first steps:

I worry that I am not a good enough person to be a mother. That's me. I worry that I am a shitty wife. Again, me. I'm not looking in the mirror any more. I'm not looking at anything. Instead, in writing this book I have gone crawling down to a hole that is deep inside me, a black hole surrounded by claw marks and mold. Before, I did not know that it was there. But now, I have laid myself down next to it and plunged my arms into it. In dragging up whatever writhing awful thing came to my hand, and pulling it out, and examining it, I was publicly eviscerated myself. And it really did make things better. I don't feel bad about killing my mother any more. That is actually true.

--record scratch-- "Killing my mother"? What the--? You'll have to read "Confession of a Writer Full of Sin" to get the full story.

6. Alaska writer Sherry Simpson confronts another fear of all writers: the Big Nothing. Here's her very inspirational, very funny take on writer's block for the 49 Writers blog:

By nature I am a fraidy cat whose long list of fears encompasses the ridiculous more than the rational: Alien abduction (all that probing). Unnervingly hairy arthropods (tarantulas). Mushrooms (they grow on manure!). The usual writerly anxieties afflict me, too: fear of failure, a craven need for approval, a sadistic internal critic who must be bludgeoned into silence.
But a few months ago, something really scary happened to me. For the first time ever, I sat at my computer and had nothing to write about. Nada. Zip. The Big Zero. It was more writer’s blah than writer’s block. I felt de-sparked, un-mused, ex-inspired. What if this hollow sensation meant I had used myself up? What if there was no more there there (if there ever was)? Terrifying.

7. At The Millions, Benjamin Hale describes the post-publication depression which is familiar to all writers (unless your name is Joyce Carol Oates and you're so busy oiling the pistons at the word factory you don't even stop to think about lagging sales and the disappointment of poorly-attended book signings). I suspect this time next year, I'll really be able to relate to Hale's frank description of post-partum blues:

In the months following the publication of my novel in February, I didn’t write any fiction for a long while. This was due in part to being very busy with traveling, teaching, touring, writing nonfiction and little essayettes like this one, but also in part because of a particular type of depression that some other fiction writers I know have also experienced: the strangely sinking, empty feeling that comes after publishing one’s first book. At times I was thinking things along the lines of, “What’s the point of any of this bullshit? What have I accomplished? What have I changed? Maybe I should move back home and go back to painting houses.”
You work with single-minded devotion on something for years with hope, anxiety, desperation, ambition, daily dumping the greater part of your energy into the dream of seeing this thing bound between covers and on display in a bookstore—and then it actually happens. As Bill Hicks once said in a monologue about quitting smoking, “You know, in a way, I feel sorry for people who’ve never been addicted to anything. They don’t know what it’s like to want something that bad… and get it.” True—the elation of seeing your book in a bookstore for the first time is ineffable. But like the cigarette, it’s followed by a vacuous wake. So what now? After the last ripples from the initial splash of attention (if you’re lucky enough to get one) fade, after the bookstore readings are over, after the young, first-time novelist’s amuse-bouche taste of glamour is swallowed, digested, and passed: now what? Well, congratulations—you’re a writer. This is your job now. So get to work. Write another book.

Hale's mini-essay, by the way, is part of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series in which writers talk about the best books they read over the past twelve months. If you haven't already been following the series and if you have five distraction-free hours to spend with the Internet and if you have an unlimited budget to add new books to your wish list, I highly suggest you hightail it over to The Millions right now. The roster of this year's contributors is far too long to list here, but how about Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Charles Baxter, and Elissa Schappell for starters?

8. In an earlier** essay for the New York Times, Anne Trubek (A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses) wrote about the reading habits of America in the late 19th century--specifically, the books which were read by residents of Muncie, Indiana, which Trubek says has long been called America's "most typical" town. Fortunately, the town's librarians saved their records and the recent discovery of ledgers and notebooks allows us to get a good snapshot of every book checked out of the library more than 100 years ago:

What do these records tell us Americans were reading? Mostly fluff, it’s true. Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles. Horatio Alger was by far the most popular author: 5 percent of all books checked out were by him, despite librarians who frowned when boys and girls sought his rags-to-riches novels (some libraries refused to circulate Alger’s distressingly individualist books). Louisa May Alcott is the only author who remains both popular and literary today (though her popularity is far less). Little Women was widely read, but its sequel Little Men even more so, perhaps because it was checked out by boys, too. The remaining authors at the top of the list—Charles Fosdick, Oliver Optic, Martha Finley, L. T. Meade and others—have vanished from memory. Francis Marion Crawford, whose novels were chiefly set in Italy and the Orient, was checked out 2,120 times, whereas Dickens, Walter Scott and Shakespeare circulated 672, 651 and 201 times respectively. Fiction was overwhelmingly preferred, accounting for 92 percent of books read in 1903.

*If you're a member of a book club who'd like me to visit via the magical mystery of Skype, email me. I promise I'll be dressed from the waist up and will try not to slur my words.

**I'm behind in my Soup and Salad compilations, so sue me.

My First Time: Leora Skolkin-Smith

2011-12-26T05:56:00.001-07:00

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Leora Skolkin-Smith, author of Hystera, a novel which I've previously mentioned here at the blog. Her first published novel, Edges, was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley's own imprint at Glad Day books. Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award. The Fragile Mistress, a feature film based on Edges, is currently in pre-production, and is scheduled to begin shooting on location in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York. Skolkin-Smith's recent publications include a piece from The Fragile Mistress, which appeared in Guernica Magazine. For more about Leora Skolkin-Smith, please visit her website.

My First Mentor

Miss Gibson, my seventh-grade English teacher, was a young New England woman with a ruddy, but beautiful, face. She looked like a downhill skier and was from New Hampshire. She always reminded me of snow and the dark of winter. She was shy, recalcitrant, and dressed in simple skirts and tailored button-down shirts. After one class she called me to her desk. I had written a story about exactly how the wind outside my bedroom window brushed against my cheek—I had really been wondering how people commit suicide. My bedroom was up a few stories. I called my story "A Day in the Life of a Fink."

"What an understanding you have of metaphor," she said. After that, she met me in the mornings and we went together to sit in the school library, where she went over more of my stories, encouraging what was becoming a fever and passion to write. Then one day we went to a place called Leonard Park which had a huge lake. She introduced to me to a family of white, waddling ducks. How awkward and funny they walked but how uniquely proud they were of their own oddness, she explained.

I called her thirty years later to tell her I had become a writer. I think I frightened her. "Do you know what it feels like to have someone call you out of the blue like this?" she said; and after that, she never answered my letters.

Still, I am very sure she was the first person to tell me writing would be important. Wind and ducks figure abundantly in a lot of my novels.

A Fezziwig Christmas

2011-12-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

No matter where you are--Kokomo or Kabul, Portland or Paris--and no matter how many family members surround you (if any) and no matter how many gifts are wrapped and stacked beneath your tree (if any) and no matter if you believe in Santa Claus, Jesus Christ or nothing at all, my wish this Christmas is that you all find the spirit of Charles Dickens' Fezziwig in your hearts. Dance, my friends, dance!

“Yo ho, my boys,” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let's have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson.”

You wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it. They charged into the street with the shutters--one, two, three--had them up in their places-- four, five, six--barred them and pinned then--seven, eight, nine--and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

“Hilli-ho!” cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk, with wonderful agility. “Clear away, my lads, and let's have lots of room here. Hilli-ho, Dick. Chirrup, Ebenezer.”

Clear away. There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter's night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done," and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him.) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley." Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many--ah, four times--old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig cut--cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr and Mrs Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.

Hand colored etching by John Leech from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The Bears We Never See

2011-12-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

The radio program Reflections West is featuring a short piece I wrote for them called "The Bears We Never See." It's about the time my wife and I went camping in Glacier National Park and let fear get the better of us. The essay begins:

      My wife has never been disemboweled by a bear. But there was a time when, in the wild spaces of her imagination, she felt a set of three-inch razor-sharp claws start at her navel and work their way up. And the teeth. Oh yes, the teeth, the thick saliva, the hot bear breath and the eggshell-crunch of her skull.
      This is what we remember from that summer vacation to Glacier National Park.
      I planned the trip for months. I highlighted trails on maps, I learned how to stuff a sleeping bag into a sack the size of Kleenex box, I calculated the weight of freeze-dried meals. If I thought of bears at all, I placed them in the distance, far upwind of where we'd be standing.

Each week, Reflections West pairs reflections like mine with a passage from literature and history. For my essay about ursus arctos horribilis, they used a wonderful poem by Lowell Jaeger called "An Awakening."

Click here to listen to the entire program

Friday Freebie: Devotion by Dani Shapiro

2011-12-23T07:27:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to Thomas Baughman, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Big Machine by Victor LaValle.

This week's book giveaway is a new paperback copy of Dani Shapiro's memoir Devotion. Shapiro is also the author of Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Life Rescued by Tragedy and the novels Family History, Black & White, Picturing the Wreck, Fugitive Blue and Playing with Fire. For the last Friday Freebie of 2011, I could think of no more fitting book to offer blog readers than Devotion. For many of us, this holiday season is a time of reflection and resolution--if nothing else, we resolve to be less harried and more contemplative. Shapiro will help us get there through the quiet music of language. Here's the publisher's description of the book:

In her mid-forties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life was—a hodgepodge of errands, dinner dates, e-mails, meetings, to-do lists? What did it all mean? Having grown up in a deeply religious and traditional family, Shapiro had no personal sense of faith, despite repeated attempts to create a connection to something greater. Feeling as if she was plunging headlong into what Carl Jung termed "the afternoon of life," she wrestled with self-doubt and a searing disquietude that would awaken her in the middle of the night. Set adrift by loss—her father's early death; the life-threatening illness of her infant son; her troubled relationship with her mother—she had become edgy and uncertain. At the heart of this anxiety, she realized, was a challenge: What did she believe? Spurred on by the big questions her young son began to raise, Shapiro embarked upon a surprisingly joyful quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world. The result is Devotion: a literary excavation to the core of a life. In this spiritual detective story, Shapiro explores the varieties of experience she has pursued—from the rituals of her black hat Orthodox Jewish relatives to yoga shalas and meditation retreats. A reckoning of the choices she has made and the knowledge she has gained, Devotion is the story of a woman whose search for meaning ultimately leads her home. Her journey is at once poignant and funny, intensely personal—and completely universal.

Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad) had this to say about the memoir: "I was on the verge of tears more than once in the course of Dani Shapiro's impeccably structured spiritual odyssey. But Devotion's biggest triumph is its voice: funny and unpretentious, concrete and earthy-appealing to skeptics and believers alike. This is a gripping, beautiful story."

If you'd like a chance at winning a SIGNED copy of Devotion, all you have to do is answer this question:

What is the name of Shapiro's blog? (You can find the answer by visiting her website)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Dec. 29--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Dec. 30.

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by "following" this blog through Google Connect (to find the "Join" button on the right side of this page, scroll partway down to the section labeled "Followers"). Once you've followed (or if you're already a follower of the blog), send me an e-mail saying "I'm following you" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Publisher of the Year: Graywolf Press

2011-12-22T09:39:00.001-07:00

Here's the order in which average, everyday people (i.e., those who aren't heavy readers, obsessive-compulsive authors, or publishing industry insiders) think about books--when they think about books at all, which is not as often as HRs, OCAs or PIIs like to believe:

Genre ("I like mysteries, my Dad digs spy thrillers")

Plot ("I hear it has robots and Charlotte Bronte")

Title ("I think it's called Radon Weekend or Fallout Fling--something like that")

Author ("It's by that guy who wrote that other one about zombie accountants--I can't remember his name off the top of my head")

Format ("I don't do Kindle. It's the Death Knell of books!")

Industry insiders will be disheartened to see one element which I left off the list, the one thing they probably think belongs at the top: the Publisher. But let's face the facts: you'll never be standing in the line down at the DMV and catch someone saying, "Did you hear about that new book coming out from Knopf?" And yet, that book you're holding right now would never have gotten into your hands if it weren't for the lowly, forgotten publisher. Okay, maybe it would have if it was self-published by the next hot Young Adult writer who hustled to sell a gazillion copies of his zombie-accountant paranormal romance; but, for now at least, the publisher is a crucial link in the chain which delivers words from the author's head to our hands.

As a book reviewer and blogger, I probably pay more attention to publishing houses than do most readers outside the Inner Circle of Manhattan. I receive catalogs on a quarterly basis, books on a weekly basis and emails from publicists on a daily basis. I've come to the point where I can judge the quality of writing inside the padded Tyvek envelope just by looking at the publisher's logo on the mailing label. There are few envelopes which get me more excited than the ones which arrive bearing that trio of wolves on the outside, and for that I'm awarding the first annual Quivering Pen Publisher of the Year Award to

Graywolf Press

Sure I'm just a small-potatoes blogger and it's a dubious honor without compensation, trophy or paper certificate, but it's a good excuse for me to highlight the most overlooked player in the book's lifecycle. As an aside, let me just say as someone who's been blessed to have my work accepted for publication and who's managed to get an inside look at the editorial process this year, I can attest to the fact that a lot of care and compassion plays out behind the scenes at publishing houses--the kind of labor which will never been seen or acknowledged by readers. Editors, associate publishers, publicists, art departments, sales managers, and interns rarely get thanked for their hard, invisible work which begins months or even years before the book arrives on the shelves of bookstores. So, this is just one small appreciation for those vital champions of the written language.

This has been a remarkable year for Graywolf. Not only did it turn out consistently-good new titles, the small Minnesota-based publisher got a huge boost when one of its poets, Tomas Tranströmer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October. Then, about a week later, another Graywolf title--The Convert by Deborah Baker--was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award. Other 2011 honors to Graywolf authors included poets Tom Sleigh and Matthea Harvey who received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ander Monson whose Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir was named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and The House of Widows author Askold Melnyczuk who was this year’s recipient of the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). I'm not entirely certain, but I suspect there were a lot of cake-and-champagne afternoons in the Graywolf offices this year.

But, really, every release of a Graywolf book is a celebration in and of itself. In addition to the three excellent short-story collections I included in my Best Books of 2011 list (Volt by Alan Heathcock, American Masculine by Shann Ray, and In This Light by Melanie Rae Thon), other stand-out titles included The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen, Assumption by Percival Everett, In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle, The Other Walk: Essays by Sven Birkerts, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer, and Beautiful Unbroken by Mary Jane Nealon (which, after hearing off-the-cuff reviews from readers of this memoir about a nurse caring for her dying brother, tops my list of must-reads in 2012; people who talked to me about Beautiful Unbroken had a hard time finishing their sentences because they'd get so choked up with emotion--that's how good it is, they claim). Top poetry collections from Graywolf included The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn, Army Cats by the aforementioned Tom Sleigh, and Midnight Lantern by Tess Gallagher.

Leafing through the Spring 2012 catalogue, several titles have my radar on full alert: Boleto by Alyson Hagy, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka, No Animals We Could Name: Stories by Ted Sanders, and a vibrant new translation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno by Mary Jo Bang.

In the front of its catalog, the publishers describe themselves as "dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture." That's true, but what they forgot to mention was how their books fill readers with light--the kind of glow that can only come from experiencing the excellence of language, the kind of radiance that makes you want to sing aloud. So, join me as we lift our voices in a howling chorus of praise for Graywolf!

My Year of Reading: Best Books From Other Years

2011-12-21T16:18:00.002-07:00

I am beseiged by books. Every day (except Sunday, when my mail carrier is home nursing her aching back in an epsom-salt bath) my mailbox is stuffed with envelopes bearing the Next Great American Novel. At least that's what publicists assure me. That's all well and good, and I really am looking forward to quite a few new releases coming our way in 2012, but it leaves me little time stop and smell the roses of past years.

In 2011, I made a concentrated effort to hit the new-release Pause button every so often and find a previously-neglected-but-much-longed-for book on my shelves. It told myself I shouldn't be driving so fast into the future that I forget about the old books. And by "old," I mean anything published in 2010 or earlier. There are many more books I wish I'd made time to read (poor Lolita, she's still sitting over there in the corner, just off the dance floor, looking all lonely and unread), but when I did go all retro with my reading, I found that, to quote the Jewish philosopher Felix Adler, "The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action."

Here, in descending order of publication, are the voices I'm glad I stopped to hear:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell

In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet the titular character is a clerk in a Danish company deployed to Japan in 1799 to help keep trade running smoothly and to negotiate East-West politics with the xenophobic locals. While there, he meets and is enamored by a female medical student who, despite her sex, is garnering a reputation for her skills as a midwife. Things happen, the girl is sent to a remote mountaintop monastery where even worse things happen and Jacob is tortured by guilt over his inability to prevent tragedy. Oh yeah, there's also a very robust naval bombardment. (I'm being very circumspect to avoid spoilers.) While the plot is wholly engaging, I found it was Mitchell's lively style which really held me tight to the page. I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet on my Kindle and through it all, my thumbs were kept busy highlighting sentences and entire paragraphs where Mitchell fully engaged all five of the reader's senses ("Wistaria in bloom foams over a crumbling wall. A hairy beggar kneeling by a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog," etc.). This novel all but comes with a Scratch-n-Sniff strip on every page. It's the soundtrack, however, that struck me the hardest (and loudest). Throughout the book, cicadas sing, ship timbers grunt and sigh, snow falls from a pine tree with "a flat thud," and an artisan's loom goes "tack-ratta-clack-ah, tack-ratta-clack-ah." One section begins: "Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting." There's poetry, overt and covert, in a sentence like that. Put another way: as Akira Kurosawa was to color in Ran, so David Mitchell is to sound in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Daddy's
by Lindsay Hunter

In the early pages of Daddy's, Lindsay Hunter's brain-blistering collection of short stories from Featherproof Books, a restless wife who endures frequent bouts of rough sex with her husband finds pleasure in their invisible electric fence. Each day, after the husband goes off to work, she puts their dog Marky in front of the TV to watch Animal Planet then goes out to the edge of the yard:

I wind the vinyl part of Marky’s collar around my hand, holding the plastic receiver in my palm, and then I press the cold metal stimulator against my underwear, step forward, and the jolt is delivered. Like a million ants biting. Like teeth. Like the G-spot exists. Like a tiny knife, a precise pinch. Like fireworks. I can’t help it—I cry out; my underwear is flooded with perfect warmth. I lie back in the grass and see stars.

Still with me? If that paragraph shocks and offends, then trust me when I say it's one of the tamer moments in Hunter's squirm-worthy stories. I'm not trying to push readers away from Daddy's—quite the opposite, in fact—but I did want to make you aware this book is not for everyone. Hunter pairs latent sadness with the seamy details of her characters' lives. The dog-collar orgasms, the pie-eating-contest barf, the forlorn chafe of masturbation, the fat fathers who wear bras: at times, Daddy's is the literary equivalent of a John Waters movie—and you may feel like showering after each story. But where Waters shocks for shock's sake, Hunter uses the grotesque as a gateway into the loneliness that darkens many of our lives. She takes us where we would not normally go willingly, but even among the sordid and grimy, there are moments of startling beauty. In here, stars twinkle "white as little baby teeth," bits of cherry pie stick to the corners of a mouth "like blood under a neon light," a mother yearning for her baby has "nipples like lit matchheads." Hunter can get away with heightened metaphorical language like this because the entire collection is bold and fierce. Like a bottled hot sauce you're trying for the first time, there's always that first hesitant moment before you put it on your tongue. Make no mistake: Hunter burns; oh brother, does she burn delicious.

American Salvage
by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Here's another contemporary female short-story writer (and accomplished novelist: Once Upon a River) who kicks down the door and pushes us inside to a rough, gritty world inhabited by people who, to put it bluntly, are scraping the bottom of society's barrel. Like Lindsay Hunter, Bonnie Jo Campbell isn't always polite and rule-abiding in her fiction, but I think that's why I'm drawn to her work. In this collection, she took me to the rust-flecked scrap yards of rural Michigan and introduced me to some unforgettable characters (some with teeth, some without). I know it seems I'm inordinately drawn to the mean and gritty in fiction, but I find that writers like Campbell nearly always balance despair with hope. All the stories in this collection are top-notch, but for me the centerpiece chandelier, all a-blaze and glittering with crystals, is "The Inventor, 1972." It's an incredibly moving and intricately-plotted story of a man who hits a teenage girl on a dark road and he discovers--well, I won't tell you what he discovers...but I will say I love how Campbell fits all the various pieces of the narrative puzzle into one emotional whole by the last sentence. I also like the sentences which open "The Inventor, 1972." BAM! We're in the middle of the action from Word One:

A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year-old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow. Before the pain gathers its strength, the girl sees how her leg looks wrong against the asphalt. In slow time, she notices a hole in her new jeans, a puncture made when the jagged end of her broken fibula stabbed through and retracted.

Bonnie Jo Campbell doesn't waste any time playing patty-cake with her readers. American Salvage can be hard, mean and brutal....and she makes no apologies for taking us there.

Why Dogs Chase Cars
by George Singleton

Singleton’s collection of linked stories featuring young Mendal Dawes of Forty-Five, South Carolina, is funny, wistful, profane, funny, charming, funny, and—above all—funny. Mendal’s father affectionately calls his only child “Fuzznuts” and “peckerhead” and is not adverse to going to great lengths to set up an elaborate practical joke months in the making in order to teach his son a valuable lesson about his place in the world. Mr. Dawes loves his son, but can be a vexation and embarrassment. A jack-of-all-trades, he is also a compulsive Burier of Objects. Their entire property is filled with mounds and holes-in-progress as the elder Dawes hoards old metal gasoline-station signs, hardware-store yardsticks, and empty barrels labeled “Toxic Waste,” the latter with an eye to the future when it could be profitable to own a patch of condemned land. Mendal grudgingly admits his father is “maybe the only man in all of Forty-Five with the ability to look past tomorrow.” What Mendal wants more than anything is to escape from Forty-Five, “a town best known for its ‘Widest Main Street in the World!’ and ‘Second Largest Population of Albino Squirrels!’” It’s a place with “a gene pool so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one’s soles dry.” In the story “No Fear of God or Hell,” Mendal vows: “If we’d’ve had a travel agent in town, I would’ve booked a plane to Mississippi, or any of those other states where I could get lynched quickly and without notice—just so I could flat-out die without much fanfare.” Every boy trapped in a small town believes he is not living in the real world, a place of normality that exists somewhere beyond the town limits and is surely filled with people completely devoid of eccentricities. But, as in the best comic Southern literature like Singleton’s (and Lewis Nordan’s and T. R. Pearson’s and Eudora Welty’s and Flannery O’Connor’s), it is the weird, the off-beat, and the off-kilter which make the worlds of these stories more “real” than reality. Through hyperbole, we approach the truth; through the weird, we find the sane; and through humor, we get down to the serious business of understanding life.

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller

This year marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of the meanest, saddest, funniest, truthiest novel ever written about war: Joseph Heller's Catch-22. For five decades, people have been alternately holding their sides and scratching their heads as they read about the World War II bomb squadron stationed on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea. It's not always an easy book to read. As the best literature often demands, you have to work your way to the pleasures to be found here. Catch-22 is a novel that flips the narrative structure of the novel on its head as sure as Yossarian is thrown upside down in his Plexiglas bombardier's compartment. The same events are told multiple times, looping and returning to add another piece of crucial information. Catch-22 is illogical and irrational...and that's just the way the author intended it to be. Heller refused to play by the rules in this book, inverting expectations at nearly every turn: one minute slapstick, the next minute a hard slap of violence. This was my second time through the novel; my first reading was started on a plane bound for the Iraq War where, as an active-duty soldier, I was preparing myself for combat by reading Catch-22 like it was an owner's manual. It's unlike anything else I've ever read. Slapstick on one page, horror on the next. As I wrote earlier on the blog: "Anyone who thinks Catch-22 is merely a frivolity, a slapstick indictment, a howl at conformity, a circus of words (all of which it is), need look no further than the equally straight-faced scenes to be reminded of the bitter intent of the novel. Joseph Heller could be spit-take funny in one paragraph, but chillingly sober in the next. He had a point to make and he did it not only with jokes and circular repartee, but with convincing arguments for pacifism." I love Catch-22 so much, I devoted an entire week of blog posts celebrating its acerbic, off-kilter, Borscht-Belt-y humor. And I still don't think I exhausted everything I had to say about it.

Mildred Pierce
by James M. Cain

Mildred Pierce opens with the peaceful scene of a man doing yard work on a hot afternoon in Glendale, California. He goes inside, takes a bath, gets dressed, then walks to the kitchen where his wife is icing a cake. They talk about the weather and the husband casually mentions he might take a stroll down the street since he has nothing better to do. Suddenly, the mood turns and the wife snaps at him, blades in her voice:

     "She's waiting for you, so go on."
     "Who's waiting for me?"
     "I think you know."
     "If you're talking about Maggie Biederhof, I haven't seen her for a week, and she never did mean a thing to me except somebody to play rummy with when I had nothing else to do."
     "That's practically all the time, if you ask me."
     "I wasn't asking you."
     "What do you do with her? Play rummy with her a while, and then unbutton that red dress she's always wearing without any brassieres under it, and flop her on the bed? And then have yourself a nice sleep, and then get up and see if there's some cold chicken in her icebox, and then play rummy some more, and then flop her on the bed again? Gee, that must be swell. I can't imagine anything nicer than that."

Meet Mr. and Mrs. Pierce, Bert and Mildred. Don't get too cozy with them, however, because they're about to split up. In fact, in a few minutes Bert will be storming out of the house and their marriage will be kaput. As they argue about Bert's "flopping" with Maggie B., Cain writes: "They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to be cooled with spit." It's a helluva gangbusters way to open a novel. Cain doesn't take the time to stop and give much exposition about the adultery, he just brings you right in when the marital simmer has reached a rapid boil. From this point forward, Mildred Pierce is a fast-moving, hard-hitting account of divorce, abandonment, unemployment, suffering, and humiliation. Cain is brutal in what he says as well as how he says it--short, direct sentences that feel like punches clipping the underside of the reader's jaw.

Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis

Before the financial ruin, before the shame, before the suffering, before the world's slowest suicide, there was the sex. And it was good--at least in the hands of Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis, the most recent translator of Madame Bovary. Flaubert's novel, published in 1856 and dragged through the courts a year later, has long titillated readers with its ripe, non-explicit sex (e.g. "the joys of the night"). But now Davis helps make Flaubert even frothier for a new generation of readers. As with Catch-22, this was my second trip through the novel (I rarely re-read books, so this turned out to be an unusual year). The first, about fifteen years ago, was the competent but less-sparkly Paul de Man translation in the Norton Critical Edition. In a brief essay at Salon, Davis somewhat uncharitably sniffs that the de Man--itself a revision of the 1888 translation by Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling--is the worst among the eleven translations she's read. Perhaps it is; I only have my two versions for comparison, but in my opinion, Davis punches de Man to a TKO before the first bell has rung. She proves, once and for all, that the work of a translator does matter. It's not just swapping words between languages, it's investing that exchange with style and meaning. The thing I remember most about my initial Norton Critical encounter with Emma Bovary was that she did a lot of walking. I know Flaubert had an obsession with shoes, but come on. Emma is on a perpetual treadmill throughout the book--that is, when she's not stretched out on her two deathbeds (the first, a false one, comes after her lover dumps her via a note hidden at the bottom of a basket of apricots and she is stricken with what she thinks is a grave illness). But yeah, it's true, there are pages and pages of walking. Emma hoofs it all around town, dragging the hem of her adulterous dresses through the muddy streets of Yonville, along the streambanks, across the wheat fields. Walking, walking, walking. You'd think she'd eventually wise up and get a bicycle or a pair of rollerblades. But it's not Emma's Lusty Pedestrian Afternoons that I take away from the new version. It's the striking way Davis makes Flaubert's words pop off the page. Miniature fireworks. Springs tight as mousetraps. Sizzling sausages in a hot pan. It's like we're reading a whole new book. And in a way, we are.

My Year of Reading: The Best Books of 2011

2011-12-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

These are the ones I loved.

These are the ones I tried to persuade others to love.

These are the ones that, when I was asked "Whatcha reading these days?", would cause my eyes to spark, my hand to leap out and clutch the other person's forearm, my face to press close to theirs within socially-unacceptable distances, and these words to tumble out of my mouth: "I'm glad you asked."

These are the ones that stood out, the electric-blue mountains upthrusting from the beige prairie.

These are the ones whose language skyrocketed above the dull, the insipid, the unnecessarily dense words found on other pages I read this year.

These are the ones still burning bright in my memory after twelve, ten, three months, like a match-flare in the dark of a coal shaft.

In short, I fucking went apeshit for these books.

In a year of great turmoil within the publishing industry--a bankrupt Borders, a groundswell of e-books (which for the first time outsold hardcovers), a bestseller "written" by Jersey Shore's Snooki--one thing remained stable: writing that soared and the writers who gave it wings. Oh sure, there were plenty of instances where I opened books and found lazy, pedestrian writing (in some of the year's most lauded books, I might add); but I can't remember another year when I was more moved, provoked and entertained by what I read than I was in 2011. Book after book, I found myself marveling at superior craftsmanship--both at the sentence level and in the narratives as a whole. And many of those books did this in the tight, constrained spaces of a short story.

I know there are some readers out there who claim they're allergic to the short form, but I've never understood why this is so. Our increasingly-distracted culture should be ripe for reading in short bursts. But I'll save that sermon for another day. From where I sat, 2011 proved to be the Year of the Short Story. In fact, seven of the fifteen books on the following list are collections of short fiction. I was impressed not just by the quantity of story collections, but by their quality. I'll spit in the eye--ptui!--of anyone who tries to tell me the short story is "dead." Not according to what I read this year. It's alive and kicking, baby! In fact, it's doing a wild Charleston across the dance floor right now, so get out of its way you big lumbering lead-footed novels!

So, without further ado, here are my favorites published in 2011, from among the 55 books I read this year. They're in roughly the order in which I read them, from January to December.

Quiet Americans
by Erika Dreifus
Last Light Studio Books

This debut collection of short stories is the first book I started and finished in 2011 and even back in January, I knew it stood a good chance of making my year-end "best" list. It's a small book from a small press, but Quiet Americans is powerful in its delivery. The stories draw their soft rage from the atrocities of the Holocaust. The death-camp horrors are only seen on the periphery, but Auschwitz and Buchenwald never stop echoing in the lives of the Jews who populate the book. Dreifus doesn’t shy away from hard subjects, but she addresses the unthinkable--the broken histories of European Jews--with a remarkable mastery of form and sensitivity for her characters who have suffered through so much. She’s a storyteller in the classic sense of the word and it's possible to trace a clear, direct line from Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud to her 21st-century keyboard.
Click here for the full review

Volt
Alan Heathcock
Graywolf Press

Take the Old Testament, then add healthy doses of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Stir vigorously, then plunge the sparking end of a live wire from a downed power line into the mixing bowl and you'll come close to the hair-raising energy of Heathcock's fiction. In the course of this short-story collection, a father embarks on a cross-country odyssey after he kills his son in a farming accident, bored teens vandalize a neighboring town with bowling balls, a pastor wrestles with guilt over his son’s combat death in Iraq, yet another father enlists his son’s help in disposing of a man he’s killed when their trucks come to an impasse on a single-lane road, and--in my favorite story, "Peacekeeper"--Sheriff Helen Farraley conceals the discovery of a murdered girl’s body from fellow citizens who, she thinks, would be devastated by the truth. As I said in my review, "Volt makes us think, makes us feel, and makes us believe in the power of short fiction once again...Sin, guilt, regret, redemption, forgiveness, and mercy wrestle like naked, greased angels of God in these pages." Go ahead, stick your tongue on the end of Volt's live wire and see if your imagination doesn't ignite.
Click here for the full review

The Tiger's Wife
by Tea Obreht
Random House
Layered in myth, memory and folklore, this novel is one of those rare books which are full-immersion experiences. It begins with Natalia, a young doctor working in an unnamed Balkan country, who learns of her grandfather's death then makes it her goal to learn the truth about his fate. When she does, she unleashes a flood of memories--most of them involving long walks with her beloved family patriarch and repeated visits to the zoo. As we unpeel the many narrative layers of this novel, we also learn about a lonely butcher's wife, a marauding tiger, the superstitious residents of a snowbound village, and a certain “deathless man” who never seems to age but who always shows up just before a person’s demise. The Tiger's Wife weaves a remarkable spell as it moves across the boundaries of time and imagination. Obreht has paid special attention to the way a story is built. Every truss is carefully set in place, the floorboards are squared and true, each nail is pounded with the strongest, surest blows. The sentences in and of themselves are miniature works of art and you keep thinking each one is greater than the one before and Obreht could never top herself. And yet, she does. Just look at the beauty packed into the short space of this one sentence: “It was late afternoon when they came across the tiger in a clearing by a frozen pond, bright and real, carved from sunlight.” There are many more sentences like that waiting for you inside this masterpiece of a book.
Click here for a link to the full review

So Much Pretty
by Cara Hoffman
Simon & Schuster

Set in the fictional upstate New York town of Haeden, So Much Pretty revolves around the disappearance of Wendy White, a well-liked hometown girl in her early 20s. We've seen this sort of thing before in other books, movies and every third episode of Dateline: a woman goes missing, a family mourns, the case goes cold. It's a sad sub-genre of fiction (see also: The Lovely Bones) which is all too often happening in real life outside the covers of a book. But in her fierce, fiery telling of Haeden's latest crime, Hoffman makes this entry into Abduction Lit all her own. Hoffman tells the story through testimony from characters, shifting points of view, flashbacks, and pieces of forensic evidence. Throughout the novel, we move from head to head like a parabolic mic, picking up conversations and burrowing ever deeper into the lives of Haeden's residents. So Much Pretty builds slowly--it took me a few dozen pages to really get into it--but it wasn't long before I found myself deep, deep inside the world Hoffman created, unwilling to be pulled away for any reason. But yet, for all its appearance of a mystery-thriller, this is really a novel of ideas. So Much Pretty opens its arms to hug some pretty big themes--the depravity of mankind, the lost Utopia of rural living, the moral cost of single-handedly trying to cleanse society of sin, and the creeping rot of rumor in small towns--but at every turn Hoffman manages to turn social commentary into a gripping, white-knuckled read. Of all the books I read this year, this is the one which has haunted me the longest and deepest.
Click here for the full review

The Architect of Flowers
by William Lychack
Mariner Books

Long after you've finished reading The Architect of Flowers and set it aside to move on to other books, the cadence of William Lychack’s prose will continue to click like a metronome in your head. You may forget the plots of these stories (an old woman trains a crow to steal for her, a boy confronts memories of his father at his funeral), you may forget some of the characters (a ghost-writer, a pregnant woman raising chickens, a mother and her gun-toting son), but I’m willing to bet you’ll have a hard time shaking loose Lychack’s distinct voice. For example, consider the opening lines of "Hawkins":

Killed a deer last night. Kate and me and this creature almost completely over us. Flash of animal, tug of wheel, sound we felt more than heard, poor thing lying on the side of the road as we pulled around.
Should have just kept driving, gone home, felt bad. Don’t know what possessed us to get out of the car. November and nothing but trees around. No cars, no houses, deer small and slender, tongue powdered with sand.

Lychack’s strength lies in his ability to render details in language so precise--at once familiar and fresh--that the stories demand multiple re-reads just to savor the gorgeous flavor of the words.
Click here for the full review

The Sojourn
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press

Set in the years surrounding World War One, The Sojourn is an instant classic of war literature and fully deserves a place on the shelf next to Remarque and Hemingway. Krivak's style is simple, direct, and sedate, but when violence appears, it comes in unforgettable detail:

Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him.

Wow. Try shaking that image from your head. The Sojourn is told in three parts, and Krivak paces his cadence to the beat of a three-act play, beginning with a prologue set in 1899 in a Colorado mining town, moving to the Hungarian Empire, and eventually landing its protagonist, an Austrian sniper named Jozef, on the battlefield fighting the Russians on the eastern front. Along the way, the sharpshooter undergoes a metamorphosis from starry-eyed recruit to hollow-eyed veteran. In The Sojourn, war can be beautiful on the page, but hell in contemplation. As a writer, Krivak approaches combat with the placid nature of a Zen master--calmly, patiently knocking down the marble statues erected to glorify battles. His Jozef is on an odyssey from gung-ho Soldat to steel-hearted sniper to conscience-stricken prey-on-the-run to bedraggled prisoner-of-war. The Sojourn is an important, contemplative, necessary work of fiction--mandatory reading for those who want to gain some understanding into the psyches of our men and women in uniform returning from a long, bedraggled war in Iraq.
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You Know When the Men Are Gone
by Siobhan Fallon
Putnam

Here's another landmark of war fiction which comes to us at just the right time. In her debut collection of short stories, Fallon has a fresh perspective on another side of combat: the homefront. As the wife of an Army officer, the author knows all too well about the often-impenetrable society of stoic, buzz-cut soldiers and their families. Yes, these eight stories are about life inside the gates of Fort Hood, Texas, but they're not the cozy, frou-frou tales of a left-behind wife who fills her lonely hours baking cakes and gossiping at coffee klatches, nor are they the wildly-exaggerated soap operas of Lifetime's Army Wives series. The Sojourn may put us in the trenches, but You Know When the Men Are Gone takes us to a place where fiction rarely ventures: the paper-thin walls of military housing through which you can hear babies burp, chairs scrape on kitchen floors, and wives sob in the days after the husband leaves. In these stories, people try too hard, or they don't try enough; lovers are stymied by the intermittent static of phone lines between Texas and Iraq; children act out their anger and loneliness by playing hooky from school, leaving a terrified mother to wander the neighborhoods family housing calling their names; wives endure the sickly-sweet platitudes offered by chaplains at the Family Readiness Group meetings; and, in one of the most startling stories ("Leave"), a soldier comes home from Iraq unannounced and breaks into his basement where he lives for a week, hoping to catch his wife having an affair. If Fallon was merely an accurate chronicler of the military's domestic side, then You Know When the Men Are Gone would be little more than a literary curiosity to read and forget within a year's time. Thankfully, this is fiction than transcends novelty as it explores the universal themes of love, jealousy, anger and loyalty.
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American Masculine
by Shann Ray
Graywolf Press

Here's yet another strong debut from a writer who knows his way around a short story. Like his fellow Graywolf author Alan Heathcock, Shann Ray scrapes away the frills of language and goes all the way to the bone. His tales are set in the American West--primarily Montana--and they are populated with tough men and tougher women, souls knotted hard by the blistering circumstances of domestic abuse and alcohol. Ray writes not to entertain with clever plots or pyrotechnic language; his intent is to blast our souls loose with simple tales built on old-fashioned morality. Though the stories stop short of preaching and proselytizing, some readers might be put off by the uncompromising spiritual center to be found throughout the book, but that would be their loss if they walk away from American Masculine. This is one of the more challenging set of short stories I've read in a long time--it pokes my conscience and gently leads me to self-examination. Am I better man for reading American Masculine? I don't know, but I do feel refreshed and invigorated.
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The Last Werewolf
by Glen Duncan
Knopf
Not everything I read this year was a deep, ponderous exploration of the human condition. Sometimes I just wanted a kick-ass, sexy thrill ride about a 200-year-old werewolf. Glen Duncan's novel The Last Werewolf was the ticket to that amusement park. As the story opens, Jake Marlowe is given the news by his human "handler" that the only other known member of his monster-species has just been assassinated. From there, we're off: dodging silver bullets and replacing ripped-at-the-seams clothing every full moon. At times, the novel reads like an espionage thriller (complete with double agents and secret identities) from John Le Carre or Graham Greene, but sprinkled with a liberal dose of sex and violence. It's a fun ride, yes, but it's also smart in ways that a certain other twilit novel could never be. Duncan has crafted a novel that, like last year's The Passage, could transform paranormal literature for the better. The Last Werewolf goes deep and metaphysical with frequent references to Kierkegaard and Freud, but remains entertaining enough at the Stephen King level.
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We the Animals
by Justin Torres
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This exhilarating debut novel also has some animals at its core. In this case, however, they are the three wild boys of a Puerto Rican father and white mother living in upstate New York. Narrated by the youngest of the brothers, We the Animals is written with the density of poetry and the intensity of a drug trip. Structured in a series of short chapters, the novel plants us in the fragile bubble of a family who breaks and mends and breaks again. The parents, volatile and in love, frequently fight ("they made thunder, stomping above us, chasing each other, tumbling furniture") and sometimes put their children in danger with risky behavior. They aren't necessarily irresponsible, they're just tired and frazzled to a nub. Of their mother, we're told: "She worked graveyard shifts at the brewery up the hill from our house, and sometimes she got confused. She would wake randomly, mixed up, mistaking one day for another, one hour for the next, order us to brush our teeth and get into PJs and lie in bed in the middle of the day; or when we came into the kitchen in the morning, half asleep, she'd be pulling a meat loaf out of the oven, saying, 'What is wrong with you boys? I been calling and calling for dinner.'" Torres' prose is so mesmerizing and addictive that by the time you reach the end of this short book, you may find yourself quoting the first line of the novel: "We wanted more."

Train Dreams
by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Like We the Animals, Johnson's novel is short but potent. Technically, it's a novella, but you'll come away from Train Dreams with a tingle-dizzy sensation, as if you've been reading the book for weeks, meeting memorable characters, wholly baptized in story, and floating through the pages like you were in a passenger car of a lightweight locomotive as it smokes across the rolling landscape. Its main character is Robert Grainier, a day laborer working in the Idaho panhandle at the start of the 20th century and its central action is the consumption of his wife and infant daughter in a "feasting" forest conflagration, "a fire stronger than God." Grief sets Grainier drifting across Idaho and Montana working odd jobs. Johnson presents Grainier's biography in broad strokes that sometimes go off the canvas in Biblical panoramas of misery. At only 116 pages, Train Dream's brush strokes might strike some readers as too sweeping and Grainier's story too rushed, but this is not intended to be a sprawling tale in a thick book designed to sprain your wrist; it's an epic written on a bullet that smacks you quick and hard between the eyes. It's told in scenes written with the dynamism of billboards.
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In This Light
by Melanie Rae Thon
Graywolf Press

You don’t read Melanie Rae Thon’s short stories so much as you experience them. Her characters are junkies, vagrants, and castoffs; they’re lonely Vietnam vets, concentration camp survivors, and Civil War slaves; and for the space of 30 or 40 pages, they are you and you are them. Once you start any story in this volume of new and previously-published works, you're immediately pulled into the current of her energetic and uncompromising language. It's been said that Thon is among the most criminally-overlooked writers of our time. I have to confess I was one of those guilty as charged....until this year when I read In This Light and found myself performing a series of self-administered kicks to my butt for waiting so long. As I mentioned in my review, I felt like an unwashed sinner wandering into an evangelist’s revival tent at the height of his sermon, blasted by the heat of salvation. The entire collection is coated in a style which is expressionistic and highly internalized. Put simply, Thon’s stories exist on a different plane than most fiction you’ll read. The language is breath and smoke, keenly tuned to matters of redemption and healing. At the end of one story, I made a note in the margin: “These stories are prayers, petitions to God for understanding and clarity.” If you've never read Thon before, may you all come to the light and discover what all the fuss is about. And then start kicking yourself in the butt.
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The Art of Fielding
by Chad Harbach
Little, Brown

College baseball, sexual politics and Herman Melville sound like uneasy bedfellows, but in Chad Harbach's hands, they combine into one of the richest novels of the year. Like the other buzz-hyped debut author of 2011, Tea Obreht, Harbach comes out of the starting gate at a full, confident gallop in this never-dull novel about Henry Skrimshander, the up-and-coming shortstop for Westish College's Harpooners. The small school on the shores of Lake Michigan is famous for the discovery of some of Melville's unpublished papers. The undergrad who found those papers, Guert Affenlight, is now Westish's president who is also tortured by lust for Owen Dunne, the Harpooners' Zen-like player (and Henry's roommate). The Art of Fielding is populated with wonderfully-drawn, idiosyncratic characters--not a single one of them are given short shrift by Harbach. I won't give away too much of the plot for fear of ruining the wonderful surprises to be found on these pages. Suffice it to say that these are flawed characters who commit errors both on and off the field and spend a good portion of the book working out their emotional tangles. The comparisons to Bernard Malamud's The Natural and John Irving's The World According to Garp are equally apt. Harbach throws his words with an easy grace and wit, his fingers barely breaking a sweat as he makes the white-knuckle process of writing look effortless.

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt
by Caroline Preston
Ecco

Easily one of the most unique reading experiences I had all year, Preston's novel is told entirely through the pages of a young woman's scrapbook she kept during the 1920s. The fictional Frankie Pratt saves relevant scraps of her life and pastes them in an album, giving us a window into the heady, champagne-bubble whirl of Jazz Age life. Preston, an archivist and scrapbooker herself, lovingly reproduces pages which burst into life with actual keepsakes like postcards, sheet music, wine labels, playing cards, charm bracelets, gum wrappers, swatches of fabric, photographs and ads for freckle cream. When we first meet her in 1920, the titular heroine is a spunky high school senior with worldly ambitions. The first page of her scrapbook is headed with the paper label “The Girl Who Wants to Write.” On the next page is a picture of her father’s old portable Corona typewriter (“Mice had chewed the case but it still works!”). And from there, we’re off on a whirlwind tour of Frankie’s life as a blossoming woman which will take her to Greenwich Village, Paris, and straight into the heart of her readers.
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Men in the Making
by Bruce Machart
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This is one of the last books I read in 2011 and it turned out to be one of the most wrenching (it's neck-and-neck with Heathcock's Volt as Gut-Gripper of the Year). As he did in his debut novel The Wake of Forgiveness, Machart sets these short stories in the fertile land of Texas and populates them with hard-bit men who go all soft for women and babies (at least some of them do). Here you'll find guys who work in lumber mills, hospital burn centers, refineries, and in one particularly memorable story ("What You're Walking Around Without"), the front seat of a car as a medical courier delivering body parts on his daily route. In another stand-out story, "Among the Living Amidst the Trees," Machart writes: "These are rough-hewn and heavy men, men with calluses thick as rawhide, men who aren't afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts." Machart's style slips easily from the vernacular ("Teeth on him, he could eat corn on the cob through a picket fence") to achingly beautiful sensual details ("With the windows down, the forest smells akin to what you might get if you boiled Pine-Sol on the stovetop while roasting a sack of rain-soaked soil in the oven"). I was so moved by his fierce prose that, midway through reading Men in the Making, I posted an enthusiastic message on my Facebook Wall: "I can only read one story per day because they are like miniature razor blades bumping through my bloodstream. This is fiction that excoriates and scrubs the reader from the inside out." Well now I've finished this sharp-edged collection and I'm still bleeding--in a good way. I'll have a full and proper review of Men in the Making sometime in the near future, but for now I'm going around to everyone I see, my eyes sparking, my fingers grabbing their forearms, and insisting they do themselves a favor: Buy. This. Book.

For what it's worth, here are the books I never got around to reading, which may or may not have made this list:

What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories by Frank Bill
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean

These are just some of the many, many books I couldn't squeeze into my schedule. I mention them because I think they're books you'll want to make time to read.

One more thing: here's a link to my favorite books of 2010.