Quivering Pen: The Resurrection

Just like General MacArthur, a bad penny, and that ugly sweater you got from your Aunt Julie last Christmas, I have returned.

For a variety of reasons too complicated and personal to go into here, I let this blog lapse into a four-month silence. While I had plenty to occupy my time and engage my attention this past winter, I always felt the gentle yet insistent tug of The Quivering Pen: Come back to me. Put blood in my veins once again.

And so here I am. Here we are. For now, at least. I don’t know how rigorous or frequent my writing here at the blog will be going forward from this day (because, after all, I am starting work on a new book and I have my priorities in order), but I’ll try not to let so much time pass between posts again. I’ll soon be bringing back all the old regulars: My First Time, Friday Freebie, and Sunday Sentence, along with the occasional guest post and, if I can make the time for it, my own stream-of-consciousness musings about reading, writing and publishing.

(By the way, even though I’m posting this on the first day of April, this is no joke. The Quivering Pen is, indeed, back.)

One reason—which may seem small to you, but felt huge to me—why the blog jumped the tracks back in January was the Best of 2017 posts I’d planned to write, highlighting my favorite books and literary moments of the past year. I’d made notes all year long, but had never gotten around to actually stringing all those words into something coherent and interesting. I always meant to get it done, but I never carved out enough hours during the day to finish those blog posts. Time passed. More time passed. Too much time passed. And then it seemed silly to be posting a “Best of” feature halfway into the next year. And so The Quivering Pen drifted off into silence.

That in itself is silly, of course. Why should the calendar—and the fact that everyone else had posted their lists back in November and December—keep me from publicly expressing my love for certain books published in 2017? Who wrote the rule that no best-books lists should be posted after January? Probably the same jerk who once said it was gauche to wear white after Labor Day.

And so, without further ado and dithering (and with minimal commentary because I’m still fighting those irrational feelings of “don’t bother posting this if it isn’t a long and comprehensive review”), here are my various picks for the cream of 2017’s literary crop, starting with

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2017

Hourglass
by Dani Shapiro
This is my new gold standard for how memoirs should be written: tight, poetic, and deeply-felt. Shapiro charts the course of her 18-year marriage to “M.” in the space of 161 beautiful pages. Along the way, she covers a wide swath of territory, including thoughtful meditations on how external forces like luck (good and bad), family history, and those damned grains of sand in the hourglass can bend, but not always break, a relationship. On the surface, Hourglass may look like a small book, but open it up and it becomes a candle in a dark room whose light reaches all corners of the heart.

Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
In my personal reading history, Saunders’ unique novel about Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the loss of his son is as rare as an albino Tyrannosaurus Rex: I loved this book so much that I read it twice, once on audiobook and then in print. That never happens, mainly due to the constant flood of new books coming into my home. But Lincoln in the Bardo is so full of nuance that a second time through was just as rewarding. It is easily one of my favorites of the year, in any format.

Letters to a Young Writer
by Colum McCann
I can think of no better compliment for McCann’s book of advice to writers (and all creative artists) than to say the ink in my new highlighter pen ran dry halfway through reading. Open my copy and all you’ll see is canary-yellow lines shading brilliant bits of wisdom.

Imagine Wanting Only This
by Kristen Radtke
Can a book about urban decay move me to tears? If we’re talking about Radtke’s graphic memoir about ruined places like deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, and islands in the Philippines, then the answer is a most emphatic “Yes!” Like the equally-brilliant Building Stories by Chris Ware and Here by Richard McGuire, Imagine Wanting Only This made me think long and hard about what we love, what we leave behind, and what ultimately crumbles back to dust and rust.

We Could’ve Been Happy Here
by Keith Lesmeister
This is a criminally-overlooked collection of short stories about contemporary Midwesterners that had me running out the door and grabbing everyone by the shoulders and shouting, “You have GOT to read this!”—on social media, rather than in real life, of course, because I am at heart a shy person. Consider your shoulders shaken, dear blog reader. You really must give this collection a try, not only because it was issued by a small press that, despite all good efforts, wasn’t large enough to make this book ping your literary radar, but also because Lesmeister writes beautiful lines like “The autumn sun felt like a quilt” and “I felt like a rusty nail getting hammered into the knot of a two-by-twelve, getting all bent up, going nowhere.”

Theft by Finding: Diaries: 1977-2002
by David Sedaris
I knew this diary would be funny. What I didn’t expect was how moving and thought-provoking it would be. And yes, the section previously covered in The Santaland Diaries is just as brilliant the second time around.

See What I Have Done
by Sarah Schmidt
The opening pages of Schmidt’s debut novel about Lizzie Borden are drenched in blood, but don’t let that deter you from this breath-taking historical thriller, a stunning book that makes us reconsider that 1892 crime in a new light. Schmidt tells the tale via a chorus of voices, each offering a slightly different perspective on what happened in that house, leading us to think long and hard about Lizzie’s so-called “forty whacks” with the axe. Did she or didn’t she do it? When the writing is this good, who cares?

Draw Your Weapons
by Sarah Sentilles
After my reading from Brave Deeds at Powell’s last summer, bookseller Kevin Sampsell came up to me and said, “Have you read this?” I took one look at the cover with its paintbrush morphing into bullets and said the same thing to the book that I did to my wife when we met thirty-four years ago: “Where have you been all my life?” I don’t say this lightly: Draw Your Weapons will completely change your outlook on art, war, and religion. Sentilles does an incredible job of blending the stories of two men: Howard, a conscientious objector during World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib. Reading this felt like putting on a pair of prescription glasses after squinting at the blurry world my whole life. Thanks again for the recommendation, Kevin!

The Girl of the Lake
by Bill Roorbach
Let me just put this out there: I love Bill Roorbach, I love his sentences, and I really love this book of short stories. All nine stories in the collection are terrific, but my favorites are “The Fall” and “Harbinger Hall.” Dive in, readers!

The Shape of Ideas
by Grant Snider
I have loved Snider’s Incidental Comics series for years and so I greeted the news that the best of them would be collected into a hardbound book by tooting a horn, releasing a cloud of butterflies, and taking my menagerie of pet alligator, turtle, cheetah, and camel for a parade down Main Street. Oh wait, that was Snider’s alter ego doing those things in these pages. Still, that’s the kind of joy I always feel when encountering Snider’s offbeat imagination, so perfectly inked in panels that teem with inspiration. If I were the Secretary of Education, I would make Congress pass a law that said every graduating high school student should get a copy of The Shape of Ideas along with their diploma.

THE BEST FIRST LINES OF 2017

Phoebe never hated her husband more than when she visited him in prison.
       The Widow of Wall Street by Randy Susan Meyers


Despite protests from the Kirkwood Neighbors’ Organization and bad press in the local paper, they bulldozed the house where I lost my virginity.
       Flight Path by Hannah Palmer


I left Indiana and drove toward happiness.
       Should I Still Wish by John W. Evans


Killing, Balint discovered, was the easy part. Not killing required discipline and restraint.
       The Mask of Sanity by Jacob M. Appel


My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them.
       Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash


After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew.
       The Art of Misdiagnosis by Gayle Brandeis


In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma arranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points to her stomach, where the chicken now resides.
       The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt


Francis never expected the silverware would be his undoing.
       The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Mathews


The index finger is in my pocket feeling like a soft twig, or a bent piece of stale licorice in my warm palm.
       What’s Wrong With You Is What’s Wrong With Me by Christian Winn

THE BEST BOOK COVERS OF 2017

The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil, design by Nick Misani

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, design by Rachel Willey

Exes by Max Winter, design by Strick&Williams

To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, design by Oliver Munday

Heating & Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly, design by Alex Merto

The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo, design by Alison Forner

The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler, design by Allison Saltzman

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, design by Alex Merto

Isadora by Amelia Gray, design by Na Kim

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips, design by Jason Ramirez

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash, design by Karl Engebretson, illustration by George Boorujy

Release by Patrick Ness, design by Erin Fitzsimmons

I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking by Leyna Krow, design by Zach Dodson

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, design by “committee”

Front Porch Books: August 2017 edition

The Age of Perpetual Light
by Josh Weil
(Grove/Atlantic)

I look forward to a new Josh Weil book like Donald Trump looks forward to a 2 a.m. Tweet (though my anticipation is decidedly less malicious in intent). From the time I read his debut collection of novellas, The New Valley, to the dazzling dystopian epic novel, The Great Glass Sea, Weil has bound me in a beautiful spiderweb of words. He burrows deep into his characters and, like the cleverest of spiders, draws me closer and closer to the center, where I die in ecstasy. And now comes this new book of stories. From the title to the cover design to the story about an Amish woman discovering the wonders of electricity, light—both manmade and divine—guides us forward into this brilliant fiction.

Jacket Copy:  Following his debut novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history: from a Jewish dry goods peddler who falls in love with an Amish woman while showing her the wonders of an Edison Lamp, to a 1940 farmers’ uprising against the unfair practices of a power company; a Serbian immigrant teenage boy in 1990’s Vermont desperate to catch a glimpse of an experimental satellite, to a back-to-the-land couple forced to grapple with their daughter’s autism during winter’s longest night. Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.

Opening Lines:  One by one the windows come alight. From up the hill, I watch: the Hartzlers’ old stone house so dark, so still, it might be the new-turned soil of a garden bed—huge, square, black—and in it the orange lamplight blooming. Bloom, bloom, bloom. Mrs. Hartzler lighting the wicks. There: I can see her shape. It goes window to window, a bee drifting, till it reaches the first floor, again, and goes straight to—where else?—the kitchen. My stomach moans. I suck in my gut, tug the rucksack’s belt more tight. On my shoulders I shrug the straps a little higher. Down I start toward the farm.

Blurbworthiness:  “Josh Weil is a lamplighter, the best possible kind. He moves us into each of these earthy, elegant stories and suddenly the light changes in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The Age of Perpetual Light is a special book woven with generosity and grit as it works against the dark to take the true measure of kinship.”  (Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine)

The Grip of It
by Jac Jemc
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

I’m going to start building this year’s Halloween reading list with Jac Jemc’s new novel right at the top. From the mad-seeming black-marker scrawl on the front cover and the equally-childlike drawings of screaming heads overlaid on the cover in a near-transparent layer (tilt the book to see the faces in the light) to a groaning haunted house, The Grip of It is the book to prickle my skin with unease this autumn.

Jacket Copy:  Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. “That’s just the house settling,” the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong. The move―prompted by James’s penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check―is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The framework― claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms―becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall―contracting, expanding―and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of painful, grisly bruises. Like the house that torments the troubled married couple living within its walls, The Grip of It oozes with palpable terror and skin-prickling dread. Its architect, Jac Jemc, meticulously traces Julie and James’s unsettling journey through the depths of their new home as they fight to free themselves from its crushing grip.

Opening Lines:  Maybe we move in and we don’t hear the intonation for a few days. Maybe we hear it as soon as we unlock the door. Maybe we drag our friends and family into the house and ask them to hear it and they look into the distance and listen as we try to describe it and fail. “You don’t hear it? It’s like a mouth harp. Deep twang. Like throat singing. Ancient. Glottal. Resonant. Husky and rasping, but underwater.” Alone in the house, though, we become less aware of it, like a persistent, dull headache. Deaf to the sound, until the still silence of ownership settles over us. Maybe we decide we will try to like the noise. Maybe we find comfort in it. Maybe an idea insists itself more easily than an action.

Blurbworthiness:  “I mean this in the best possible way: Jac Jemc gives me the creeps. The Grip of It deserves a spot on the shelf beside Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves―not only because it is a masterful haunted house story, but because it, like its literary predecessors, is elegantly written, psychologically rich, and damn terrifying.” (Benjamin Percy, author of The Dark Net)

The Shape of Ideas
by Grant Snider
(Abrams Comicarts)

I have a very short shelf of inspirational books about writing and creativity; right now, the only other residents are Still Writing by Dani Shapiro and On Writing by Stephen King. To that shelf, I am joyfully adding a new member: The Shape of Ideas by Grant Snider, creator of the equally-fabulous Incidental Comics. I am only about one-third of the way through this “Illustrated Exploration of Creativity,” but I am taking it slow because smart, beautiful books like this deserve to be savored. The Shape of Ideas is divided into chapters with headings like Inspiration, Perspiration, Aspiration, Contemplation, Pure Elation and other wonderful “-ation” words. Snider is inventive, witty, forthright, and, yes, inspirational. I am hereby declaring this is the Gift Book of the Year for all creators in your life. It is for everyone who, according to Snider in his Dear Reader note, has ever been mocked “for carrying a notebook to bars, restaurants, and children’s birthday parties,” and those who “have been glared at in class or during an important meeting for aimlessly doodling on scrap paper.” Snider is quick to point out The Shape of Ideas won’t help you tap into a bottomless well of creativity (a non-existent well, he says), but it will provide the kind of long-lasting, deep-drilled inspiration that will keep you going when you think all wells have run dry. Want one more scrap of encouragement before you dip your pen in the ink? In addition to being a world-class illustrator, Snider has a full-time day job as an orthodontist. Dentist by day, artist by night. That kind of dedication, perspiration, and aspiration makes me smile.

Jacket Copy:  What does an idea look like? And where do they come from? Grant Snider’s illustrations will motivate you to explore these questions, inspire you to come up with your own answers and, like all Gordian knots, prompt even more questions. Whether you are a professional artist or designer, a student pursuing a creative career, a person of faith, someone who likes walks on the beach, or a dreamer who sits on the front porch contemplating life, this collection of one- and two-page comics will provide insight into the joys and frustrations of creativity, inspiration, and process—no matter your age or creative background.

Opening Lines:

Blurbworthiness:  “Grant Snider’s work delivers introspection, humor, and inspiration in visually stunning drawings. They are a colorful look into the creative process—from the moments of quiet contemplation to the days of frenzied desperation.”  (Susan Cain author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking)

The Standard Grand
by Jay Baron Nicorvo
(St. Martin’s Press)

Some of the best war literature doesn’t involve bullets, blood, or bombs, but centers around what happens to warriors after they redeploy. Think The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman, Redeployment by Phil Klay, and Tim O’Brien’s short story “Speaking of Courage” from The Things They Carried. When you’re in the midst of the fog of war, it’s hard to think; the contemplation—and the nightmares—often don’t hit full force until after you’re back among the uncomfortable comforts of home. That’s one reason I’m looking forward to reading Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand; the other is the dazzling and inventive plot which involves an AWOL vet, a cougar, a resort in the Catskills and Senator Al Franken. Good things wait for us in these pages, dear reader.

Jacket Copy:  When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard―and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation―is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows. With three violent acts at its center―a mauling, a shooting, a mysterious death decades in the past―and set largely in the Catskills, The Standard Grand spans an epic year in the lives of its diverse cast: a female veteran protagonist, a Mesoamerican lesbian landman, a mercenary security contractor keeping secrets and seeking answers, a conspiratorial gang of combat vets fighting to get peaceably by, and a cougar―along with appearances by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Senator Al Franken. All of the characters―soldiers, civilians―struggle to discover that what matters most is not that they’ve caused no harm, but how they make amends for the harm they’ve caused. Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand confronts a glaring cultural omission: the absence of women in our war stories. Like the best of its characters―who aspire more to goodness than greatness―this American novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.

Opening Lines:  Specialist Smith gunned the gas and popped the clutch in the early Ozark morning. Her Dodge pickup yelped, slid to one side in the blue dark, then shot fishtailing forward. The rear tires burned a loud ten meters of smoking, skunky rubber out front of the stucco ranch house on Tidal Road.
       She felt thankful for her bad marriage. It allowed her the privilege of living off base; she could go AWOL without having to bust the gates of Fort Leonard Wood. Her four-barrel pocket pepperbox, a COP .357—holstered, unloaded—rode on the passenger seat.

Blurbworthiness:  “With profound compassion for his outrageously wonderful characters, Nicorvo brings readers to a defunct and decaying Catskills resort where a ghost platoon of vets are surviving among dangers both natural and human-made. Insanely funny, by turns tragic and, ultimately, redemptive, The Standard Grand is a desperate masterpiece of a debut: honest, epic, constantly surprising, and relentlessly entertaining.”  (Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage)

Crossings
by Jon Kerstetter
(Crown)

Another promising book about war landed on my doorstep this month and has promptly hooked me inside its pages. Like The Standard Grand, the memoir Crossings reminds us that battles are not fought by faceless robots bent on clinical killing but by men and women with bodies that can bleed and souls that can break. Army physician Jon Kerstetter volunteered for duty in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bosnia and served three combat tours in Iraq. And then he came home and suffered a stroke. See, no robots here. The military may pride itself on its weaponized machinery, but its heart is still made of flesh and blood.

Jacket Copy:  Every juncture in Jon Kerstetter’s life has been marked by a crossing from one world into another: from civilian to doctor to soldier; between healing and waging war; and between compassion and hatred of the enemy. When an injury led to a stroke that ended his careers as a doctor and a soldier, he faced the most difficult crossing of all, a recovery that proved as shattering as war itself. Crossings is a memoir of an improbable, powerfully drawn life, one that began in poverty on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin but grew by force of will to encompass a remarkable medical practice. Trained as an emergency physician, Kerstetter’s thirst for intensity led him to volunteer in war-torn Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and to join the Army National Guard. His three tours in the Iraq War marked the height of the American struggle there. The story of his work in theater, which involved everything from saving soldiers’ lives to organizing the joint U.S.–Iraqi forensics team tasked with identifying the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, is a bracing, unprecedented evocation of a doctor’s life at war. But war was only the start of Kerstetter’s struggle. The stroke he suffered upon returning from Iraq led to serious cognitive and physical disabilities. His years-long recovery, impeded by near-unbearable pain and complicated by PTSD, meant overcoming the perceived limits of his body and mind and re-imagining his own capacity for renewal and change. It led him not only to writing as a vocation but to a deeper understanding of how healing means accepting a new identity, and how that acceptance must be fought for with as much tenacity as any battlefield victory.

Opening Lines:  A soldier lies in the sand, blood pooling beneath his head, mouth gulping at the air. His eyes fixed, head tilted off to one side, legs and arms motionless. He’s a young soldier in his early twenties, late teens, a young man who should be a freshman in college or finding a summer job while deciding what to do after high school. In less than five minutes he’ll probably die right there in the dirt, right at your feet. You will carry his bloodstains on your boots and on the sleeves of your uniform.

Blurbworthiness:  “The author’s emergence as a military doctor makes for interesting reading...but what is of greatest value in this narrative is Kerstetter’s ongoing, twofold recovery from a stroke on one hand and PTSD on the other...The author’s medical perspective on his own condition and critical therapeutic moments adds depth to an already solid story. An inspiring memoir.”  (Kirkus Reviews)

Fresh Complaint
by Jeffrey Eugenides
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Jeffrey Eugenides’ short story collection—his first in a writing career which began in 1993 with The Virgin Suicides—is a virtually gallery of great opening lines. I won’t list them all here—apart from the book’s very first lines (see below)—but as one example, here’s the bold, funny start to “Baster,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker:

The recipe came in the mail:

Mix semen of three men.
Stir vigorously.
Fill turkey baster.
Recline.
Insert nozzle.
Squeeze.

Ingredients:
1 pinch Stu Wadsworth
1 pinch Jim Freeson
1 pinch Wally Mars

There was no return address but Tomasina knew who had sent it: Diane, her best friend and, recently, fertility specialist.

Now, that’s funny stuff. The rest of the collection promises even more smart hilarity. No complaints here.

Jacket Copy:  Jeffrey Eugenides’s bestselling novels have shown him to be an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, self-discovery, family love, and what it means to be American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­––­­and intriguing­­––territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.

Opening Lines:  Coming up the drive in the rental car, Cathy sees the sign and has to laugh. “Wyndham Falls. Gracious Retirement Living.”
       Not exactly how Della has described it.
       The building comes into view next. The main entrance looks nice enough. It’s big and glassy, with white benches outside and an air of medical orderliness. But the garden apartments set back on the property are small and shabby. Tiny porches, like animal pens. The sense, outside the curtained windows and weather-beaten doors, of lonely lives within.


Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. 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: many of these books won’t be released for another 2-6 months; I’m here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books.

The Days of Our Lives

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

That’s the guiding quote by Annie Dillard at the Catching Days blog, run by Cynthia Newberry Martin. The blog is built on a simple, beautiful concept: that by describing the activities of one particular day, writers will reveal deeper truths about themselves. Combined, the micro events of our lives add up to the macro pattern of our biographies. I’ve long been an admirer of what Cynthia is doing at Catching Days, and so when she invited me to contribute to the How We Spend Our Days feature, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough.

The day I chose to write about—Friday, May 27—was typical in many respects: I rose early, wrote for a couple of hours, went to work at the Day Job, came home to make dinner, and spent the evening watching TV with my wife. I talked about my cat, the treadmill in my basement, a particularly tasty pork roast, and my favorite coffee mug:

     I am weird about my coffee mugs. Whatever I choose for the day greatly influences my mood. Nearly all of my mugs are book-themed: there’s the Banned Books mug, the “Read Harder” mug from Book Riot, the mug with Charles Dickens’ bearded mug looking out at me, and the mug I bought when I visited the Library of Congress, which has a quote from Thomas Jefferson (“I cannot live without books.”). But when I want to have a serious, crack-the-knuckles-and-get-down-to-it kind of writing day, I choose my William Faulkner mug. This is the one I’ve owned for the longest time (more than a decade at this point) and though there’s a worrisome hairline fracture along the top of the handle, it has somehow survived the near-droppings and over-caffeinated hard set-downs. I love this mug with the kind of affection people usually reserve for their pets. I can’t explain my romance with this ceramic cup except to say I think it’s because I like drinking out of William Faulkner’s head. Somehow, I’ve taken the notion that my coffee will be infused with his linguistic talent. Poppycock, of course…but try telling that to my heart.
     I pick Faulkner today. I’m on deadline to turn in a short story commissioned for a new anthology in five days. It is not going well. The editors need a completed draft of a story between 3,000 and 6,000 words. Five days before it’s due, I have 853 limp, aimless words that stubbornly keep bashing their heads against a concrete wall. I don’t have writer’s block—I can write plenty of words, goddammit—I have story block. This narrative doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. I am depending on coffee from William Faulkner’s head to help me figure out this story’s identity.

The details of my “caught day,” however, were selective out of necessity. When I sat down to write the essay, I realized there were so many—too many—other things that happened to me on May 27 that I would leave the maximum allotted word length in the dust long before I even reached 9 a.m. So, I had to pick and choose what to include.

A partial list of what you won’t read about at Cynthia’s blog: my choice of clothes for the day, my impatience when I got stuck behind slow drivers on my way to work here in Butte, Montana, commentary about all the interesting things I read that day (from online articles to the novel currently on my nightstand), the hour-long phone call with my editor to discuss my new novel, the snacks I munched on at work, the “conversations” I had with my cat (which involve tongue-clicks on my part and a cocked head on his), the way the house smelled of slow-cooked pork roast when I came home, and all the things my wife and I said to each other in the hours between “Good morning” and “Good night.” Nor did I mention the fact that May 27 was my birthday, and all that milestone implies (appreciation for all the Facebook messages balanced with the omnipresent gloom of mortality). There just wasn’t enough room to catch all of my day. And that’s probably a good thing because you would have been bored to tears if I’d somehow been able to catalogue 17 hours of activities. So, I just gave you a few glittering chips hewn from the day.

Click here to read the essay

Here are highlights from some other authors who told Catching Days how they spent their hours:

I manage to get offline and work from 9:30 to 1 pm. I don’t mean steady work. I mean little bursts of fifteen or twenty minutes when I’m actually with the characters, present in the room you might say. I have no idea if the story’s any good or not. That all comes later. I just have to show up and keep my heroine moving through the world and see if she can get herself into some kind of honest trouble.
          ~Steve Almond

Our new home—for living, for my family—contains no place for me to write. So way back in September I bought an old camper-trailer, a 1959 Dalton, and put it down on the creek. Ever since, I’ve been trying to find time to get it in shape: run a line for the propane to the stove, build a rack for the solar panels, wire them to the batteries, fix the busted windows, build some bench seats, install a desk, jack the whole thing up on blocks. Now, a week before the New Year, there’s still a gas leak somewhere and the solar panels aren’t giving me a charge, but god it felt good to sit down, open my computer, pour some coffee into my mug, stare out the hoar-frosted window for a second, listen to the shushing of the creek, and start.
          ~Josh Weil

After my run, I pour a cup of tea, sit down with my laptop, and put on my headphones. I’m currently having a love affair with a Portland band called Fort Union. One of their songs, “That Part of Me,” was on repeat so much during the early chapters that I decided to name a place in the book after the band. I understand that other writers can’t listen to music with lyrics while they write, but I like it. I like hearing the rhythm of the words set to music while I write, and music can evoke atmosphere with the tiniest gestures: a change in key, an unusual harmony, the lilt of a singer’s voice, a cello behind the guitars, hand-clapping. It’s something I think about when I’m trying to translate the story I see and feel in my head into words on the page.
          ~Alexis M. Smith

I have seventy things to do, but one overrides them all: the copyedits of my new novel are due in three days. This is my last chance to incorporate any changes (beyond fixing typos) into the manuscript. I need to go over it with a fine-tooth comb and even change a last few major things for my editor. The novel is ninety thousand words long. I’m on page twelve. That’s twelve, as in one ten and two units. As in, three hundred pages away from the end.
          ~Rebecca Makkai

Click for the full list of Catching Days contributors

Trailer Park Tuesday: World Gone Water Jaime Clarke

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

Jaime Clarke, co-owner of Newtonville Books and author of Vernon Downs, has come out with a prequel to his debut novel. World Gone Water expands the character of Charlie Martens, first introduced in Vernon Downs, a young man grappling with how to navigate the world. For the trailer to promote World Gone Water, Clarke enlisted the help of some author friends--and by “some,” I mean “a lot.” For your convenience, here’s the list of cameos, in the order of appearance:
Mary Cotton
Alden Jones
J. Robert Lennon
Maile Chapman
Frederick Barthelme
Andre Dubus III
Brock Clarke
Molly Antopol
Ed Park
David Bezmozgis
Jac Jemc
Shelly Oria
David Ryan
Nathaniel Rich
Hannah Pittard
Dennis Lehane
Katherine Hill
Victoria Redel
Gary Shteyngart
Scott Cheshire
Joseph Salvatore
Celeste Ng
Matthew Specktor
Kent Wascom
Vendela Vida
Josh Weill
Darin Strauss
Max
Moon Unit Zappa
The trailer is narrated by actress Thora Birch (American Beauty, Ghost World) who reads from the opening chapter while a rapid succession of clips shows fellow authors silently reading from the pages of the book. It’s the same technique Clarke used for the Vernon Downs trailer. Nothing against Ms. Birch’s vocal talents (which are quite good indeed), but I think I would have preferred to hear the authors themselves reading aloud. Rather than concentrating on the words coming from Birch’s mouth, I found myself watching the readers, some of whom really read the words, others who just playact (the precisely-timed eyebrow arch, the studied turn of a page, etc.). I had to go back through the trailer a second time with my eyes closed to concentrate on what she was saying (the nervous excitement of a prom date, as it turns out). But maybe that was just me, maybe I allowed my attention to slip as I tried to identify the authors, maybe I was distracted by Kent Wascom’s scene-stealing peacock. The point of any trailer is to get me interested in the book and to make sure I remember it the next time I’m browsing a bookstore. If so, then well done, Mr. Clarke.

P. S. To read an excerpt from World Gone Water, head over to Lit Hub.

P. S. S. To read a group interview with Clarke and some of the authors in the trailer, head over to The Brooklyn Rail.

My Year of Reading: Best Books of 2014

When I sit in my favorite reading chair in December and think about all the books about to come my way over the next twelve months, there is, admittedly, a feeling both of dread and hope.  I want my reading to be something I look forward to each day, a feeling of can't-wait-to-get-to-the-page.  Sometimes the reading year turns out to have that kind of vibrancy....but there have been times when it seems every other book was heavy and dull as lead, the language uninspired and the characters flat.

Happily, 2014 was less dross and more gold.  In fact, it turned out to be one of the best reading years I've had in a long time--particularly for first novels.  Maybe I was just making better choices this year, or maybe the publishing stars were in full alignment.  Whatever the reason, my Library Thing catalog was dominated by four- and five-star ratings this year.

Here are my favorite books published in 2014, in no particular order:

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

This was the year I vowed to read authors who'd been languishing in my To-Be-Read queue for far too long.  I started with Donna Tartt (The Secret History--one of the best non-2014 books I read in the past twelve months), and moved on to Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South) before diving into a deep pool of Anthony Doerr.  I couldn't have picked a better year to read my way through the Boise, Idaho writer's canon, because while Memory Wall and The Shell Collector were excellent examples of the short-story form, this year's novel All the Light We Cannot See proved to be his masterpiece.  A simple plot synopsis—blind French girl and Hitler Youth boy communicate via radio during World War Two—doesn't do Doerr's novel justice. This is a 500-page page-turner whose story lives and breathes at the sentence level.  Every word is a gem, placed with a pair of jeweler's tweezers into its place on the page.  The result is a story as intricate as the model city M. LeBlanc builds for his daughter Marie-Laure.  Just like that French locksmith, Anthony Doerr is a master craftsman.  I can't wait to read his other two books: the novel About Grace and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome.

My Life as a Foreign Country

by Brian Turner

Near the end of this gut-honest memoir about poet Brian Turner’s time in Iraq, he writes: “America, vast and laid out from one ocean to another, is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home.”  Likewise, this book and its 224 pages probably cannot hold all the rampaging emotions of Turner’s war experience, but damn if he doesn’t spill a lot of emotional blood in the course of these 136 short chapters.  As anyone who has read Turner’s two collections of poetry (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) will tell you, he’s able to turn even the most horrific topics--death, dismemberment, sexual assault, post-traumatic nightmares--into things of linguistic beauty.  In My Life as a Foreign Country, he once again brings the war home to us.  Are we bold enough to hold his words?

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

Victoria Wilson spent 15 years deep-sea diving into Barbara Stanwyck's life.  After I closed the 1,056th page of her book about actress Barbara Stanwyck, I wanted more, more, more!  Specifically, I wanted to read more about Stanwyck because Wilson only covers the first third of the screen legend’s life.  I’m praying that Volume 2 (which will begin right around the time Stanwyck is filming Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) is on its way soon.  We don’t often see a Hollywood biographer give the same kind of treatment to her subject like, say, Robert A. Caro devotes to his multi-volume look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s life; but Stanwyck seems to deserve it.  She was a tough pioneer in the Golden Age of Tinseltown (she was the first actress under contract to two studios at the same time) and Wilson paints a rich, full-bodied portrait of a woman who once self-deprecatingly said, “I have the face that sank a thousand ships.”  Maybe Stanwyck wasn’t the most conventionally gorgeous actress of her era (hello, Vivien Leigh!), but she sure could act her way out of a thousand wet paper bags.

Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Demon Camp tells the troubling story of a soldier named Caleb Daniels who turns to a "Christian exorcism camp" in Georgia as a way of getting rid of "the Black Thing" which has plagued him since his return from Afghanistan after a Chinook helicopter carrying sixteen Special Ops soldiers crashes during a rescue mission, killing everyone on board, including Caleb's best friend Kip Jacoby.  Back stateside, Caleb begins to see dead soldiers everywhere and is convinced he's been possessed by a demon.  To rid himself of these apparitions, he decides to kill himself...but veers off instead into the company of the bizzaro camp in rural Georgia.  At this point, Jennifer Percy, gathering notes for a story about soldiers suffering from PTSD, gets personally involved in Caleb's life.  That's when things get really interesting.  In her debut, Percy has delivered a book that's haunting, empathetic, and crackling with beautiful sentences.  Demon Camp reads like a fevered dream and, if you're like me, it will stay with you for a long, long time after you turn the final page.

Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

This was the year for Montana novelists and Malcolm Brooks' debut was among the best of them.  (Full disclosure: Malcolm lives just up the road from me and we've become good friends...but only after I finished reading Painted Horses, so I think my initial assessment is still relatively untainted.)  Set in the Big Sky state in the mid-1950s, Painted Horses gives us an American West on the cusp of change.  Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist hired to survey a canyon in advance of a major dam project; her job is to make sure nothing of historic value will be lost in the coming flood—a task that proves to be more complicated than she thought after she meets John H, a mustanger and a veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, who’s been living a fugitive life in the canyon.  Together, the two race against time to save the past before it is destroyed by an industry with an eye on the future.  Painted Horses is unlike any “western” I’ve read; it refreshes the genre while nodding back at its roots.  This novel should already be at the top of the list for Larry McMurtry Fan Club members.

The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

Josh Weil's first full-length novel The Great Glass Sea, long-awaited after his debut collection of novellas The New Valley, is many things (apart from being great indeed).  It's about a giant greenhouse, mirrors floating in space, sibling rivalry, and a Russia unlike the one we know.  It is a story about the complicated love between brothers.  It is a multi-genre novel that takes meaty bites of science-fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and big Russian books by the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.  It is a superb meditation on individualism and the cost of courage.  It is a book with a chapter ("Heaven's Breast") which contains some of the most breath-taking imagery of ANY book I read in the past five years (I'd quote the entire chapter here if I could, but I can't, so you'll just have to go out and buy the book for yourself to experience the beauty for yourself).  And The Great Glass Sea is a book rife with beautiful sentences like these: "He breathed in.  If there was a faint redolence of mushroom and cigarettes and something fresh and sharp as a radish newly bit, on her it still seemed unlike anything he'd ever known."  And, "Nothing bold was ever built without someone deciding where to lay the first stone."  Or, "And the hail spilled down, a ceaseless clattering of pearls stripped off a broken string wrapped round and round the welkin neck, each one a whisper through the clouds, a multitude of last prayers mouthed, until the final stone slipped off the necklace end and down the breast of heaven and left the clouds all hushed."  The Great Glass Sea is a big book of 400 pages, but I found myself taking it slow, savoring the many delicious lines along the way to its wholly-satisfying finish.

Be Safe I Love You 

by Cara Hoffman

In Cara Hoffman's riveting novel, Lauren Clay has returned from a tour of duty in Iraq in time to spend Christmas holiday with her father and younger brother Danny.  All seems fine on the surface, but—as with Caleb Daniels in Demon Camp—there are some rough seas building inside Lauren.  Be Safe I Love You is populated with engaging characters and carries an urgent message about how we treat our veterans returning from war.  I also appreciated Cara Hoffman's exceptional novel for the way it portrayed female soldiers--characters of whom we see far too little in contemporary fiction.

The Remedy for Love

by Bill Roorbach

When I think back to everything I read in 2014, Bill Roorbach's novel takes the prize for Book Which Most Bruised Strangers' Palms After I Shoved It Into Their Hands.  The Remedy for Love is definitely a "You must read this!" kind of book.  Here's a pithy plot synopsis (which is actually the blurby words of praise I gave the novel after reading an advance copy): Take two strangers—Eric, a small-town lawyer, and Danielle, a former schoolteacher turned homeless squatter—put them in a cabin in the Maine woods, spice it up with a little romantic tension, stir in the wreckage of past love affairs, sprinkle liberally with sharp, funny dialogue, then add the Storm of the Century which buries the cabin in huge drifts of snow, and—voila!—you've got The Remedy for Love, one of the best novels of this or any year.  I'm not a doctor, but I'll be prescribing Bill Roorbach's novel to readers sick of blase, cliched love stories that follow worn-out formulas.  What we have here is a flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller.  The Remedy for Love is good medicine which most readers will want to swallow in one dose.  I don't, however, have a remedy for those bruises on your hands.  Sorry about that.

Redeployment

by Phil Klay

Believe everything you've heard about this book--it deserves every syllable of praise!  Phil Klay's short stories put the Iraq War and its lingering after-taste right in our laps—which is exactly where the war needs to be.  Want to know what it was really like to fight a troubling, complicated war?  Read these stories and you'll be there in the sand with Klay's characters.  This fiction, true as anything else you'll read, penetrates to the heart of what it's like to serve on a modern-day battlefield (both overseas and back here in America).  Unflinchingly honest, these stories never blink.  It's no hyperbole to say the Iraq War has finally found its voice.

Thunderstruck and Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

Sentence-for-sentence, Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection of short stories (her first since 1993’s Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry) is the best value for lovers of fine, funny writing.  I can't tell you how many times I chuckled (and, on occasion, let go into a barking, clear-the-room peal of laughter) while making my way through these stories.  That's all well and good, but McCracken can also break the reader's heart--see, for example, the title story in which a family's trip to Paris is interrupted by their rebellious daughter's risky behavior; or “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey” where the now-dying subject of the documentary tries to turn the tables on the filmmaker years after their relationship was ruptured by betrayal.  Thunderstruck was the one book I read this year which brought me equal doses of joy and sadness.  I loved every minute of it.

Everybody’s Baby

by Lydia Netzer

One of the smartest books I've ever read about the hazards of parenting in the Golden Age of Facebook is, predictably enough, only available as an e-book.  You shouldn't let that stop you from downloading Lydia Netzer's wickedly funny novella Everybody's Baby and reading it on whatever platform you choose.  Just have plenty of screen wipes handy to clean up your laugh-spittle.  A tall, curly-haired Scot, Billy Bream is the expectant father in Everybody's Baby who just can't stay off his laptop and tablet--even as his wife, Jenna, is screaming through her labor pains in the delivery room. Admit it: we all have a touch of the Billy in us.  However, obsessively checking our social media feeds is where most of us stop.  Billy and Jenna take it two or three steps further by engaging a little too much with the online community.  Everybody's Baby turns into a cautionary tale for our times--a clever morality play where God is not just some deus ex machina flying in on pulleys and wires in the Third Act, but is really in the machine.  Jenna and Billy decide to pay for their baby by crowd-sourcing bits of the infant to strangers on the internet.  Every Kickstarter comes with perks, but in the case of "everybody's baby," those benefits turn into something that is, at heart, rather terrifying--things like: for $10, "You receive an invitation to appear waving in a crowd, captured on film for a segment in the baby’s first birthday video," or, for $30, "You can rub the pregnant belly, at a designated belly-rubbing station, on a designated rubbing day, to be determined," or, for $300, you can "Take home the placenta to do with as you will."  The problems Billy and Jenna face aren't the typical challenges of first-time parents, but they are fears which most of us have faced at one point or another: How much is too much?  How do we retain our identity in an increasingly-homogenized, flat-lined electronic world?  Where do we draw the boundaries of privacy?  This extends far beyond the screens on our electronic devices.  Even if you're not sharing kitten-and-dolphin videos on Facebook, chances are that someone in the grocery line has stood too close to you, poked you with a personal question, or asked to rub your pregnant belly.  For a longer treatment of modern romance (also available in the "dead-tree" print format) I also highly recommend Netzer's other 2014 novel, How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky.  Both books are sheer delights.

An Untamed State

by Roxane Gay

There are books you read, and then there are books which read you--the ones that go deep inside, each word a tiny mirror forcing you to question who you are and how you see the world.  Roxane Gay's debut novel is one of those books.  It is horrific, it is beautiful, it is uncompromising.  An Untamed State opens with the dissolution of a fairy tale.  Haitian-American Mireille Duval Jameson, daughter of one of the most powerful men of Port-au-Prince, is abducted while on vacation visiting her family.  Gay gets right down to it with the novel's first sentence: "Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones."  From that impossible-to-put-down opening chapter, we follow Mireille's captivity, blow by blow.  The chapter headings resemble stick numbers a prisoner might scratch on a wall and we are there with Mireille, chained to a bed as she is tortured and repeatedly raped, the kidnapping stretching to unendurable lengths when her wealthy father refuses to pay the ransom.  An Untamed State is a difficult book to read--those little word-mirrors burn, burn, burn--but once begun, it's nearly impossible to stop.  "When I closed my eyes, I was no one," Mireille says.  "I was the woman who forced herself to forget her husband, her child, all the joy she had ever known, who carefully stripped herself of her memories so she could survive."  Narratively-speaking, I'm in awe of what Gay has done here--especially when, midway through the novel, gears shift and it becomes a no-less-tense account of healing, recovery and the hard, seemingly-impossible journey toward hope--which, fittingly, is literally the final word of the novel.

The Martian

by Andy Weir

This science-fiction novel may be the most imperfect book on this list--some of the dialogue feels like it's cut-and-pasted from the lamest summer blockbuster movie and there are stretches where the science gets too heavy and I longed for more fiction--but The Martian was also the one I.  Couldn't.  Put.  Down.  Combining the best elements of Robinson Crusoe and the movies Castaway and Apollo 13, this is the white-knuckle read of the year.  Author Andy Weir's forte is the plot hook: a geeky scientist on a mission to Mars gets stranded after a dust storm forces a hasty evacuation by his shipmates.  When his fellow astronauts rocket off the planet without him (sort of a galactic Home Alone Moment), Mark Watney is left to fend for himself with very little food, dwindling batteries and zero communication with Earth.  His ingenuity in building a livable shelter, creating soil to grow potatoes, and jury-rigging a rover to travel across the planet is breath-taking and inspiring.

The Ploughmen

by Kim Zupan

On the surface, there’s not a lot of action in Kim Zupan’s debut novel: some shallow graves are dug, a sheriff’s deputy goes out with his dog to look for missing persons, and there’s one particularly harrowing chase through a field in a Montana prairie. Other than that, most of the “action” takes place in the lush language which fills the pages of The Ploughmen–primarily the late-night conversations between John Gload, a septuagenarian serial killer, and Valentine Millimaki, the aforementioned sheriff’s deputy who works the graveyard shift at the Copper County jail.  As the book’s jacket copy explains, “With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own.”  Most of the book consists of cat-and-mouse conversations between diabolical killer and sympathetic lawman (very Silence of the Lambs-ian), and I’ve gotta say, I was held spellbound for the entire 256 pages of the novel.  Zupan spins his tale with sentences that are rich in imagery and complex in construction.  This is a book which encourages readers to slow down and savor its near-poetic language.  At the same time, Zupan ratchets up the suspense with a menacing undertow that pulled me deeper and deeper into the novel.

Sisters

by Raina Telgemeier

I will always remember 2014 as the year I discovered my new Author BFF.  Included in the candy-colored pages of The Best American Comics 2014 was an excerpt from Raina Telgemeier's graphic novel Drama.  I was quickly drawn in (pardon the pun) by Telgemeier's terrific pen work which combines realism with occasional cartoon-y flourishes (she cites Hi and Lois as one of her influences, and it's easy to see traces of that classic comic strip in the curves and lines of her characters).   Drama is about the trials and tribulations of Callie and her junior-high friends as they rehearse for an upcoming school play.  Telgemeier brilliantly captures what it's like to be young, in love, and ripe for public humiliation.  I could totally relate.  In fact, I loved the excerpt from Drama so much, I immediately went out and bought it and Telgemeier's other books: Sisters and Smile (her best work to date).  I loved all of Telgemeier's Young Adult novels, but since this is about 2014, I'll say a few words on behalf of this year's Sisters.  Like Smile, it's largely (if not wholly) autobiographical and, as you might expect, centers around the sibling rivalry between Raina and her younger sister Amara.  The main narrative of Sisters revolves around a car trip from their home in San Francisco to a family reunion in Colorado, with flashbacks illuminating the dynamics between the characters.  In addition to the squabbling between the sisters (and the mutual endurance tests a younger brother brings their way), the story also adds some heavier adult themes as, on the periphery, we see growing cracks in their parents' relationship.  This lends the book an unexpected poignancy and realism.  Though it may seem that Telgemeier's books are geared toward middle-grade readers (especially girls), I'm here to tell you that this middle-aged, greying man thoroughly enjoyed every hand-drawn panel of Telgemeier's graphic novel.

Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

I finished out this year by finally succumbing to the battering-ram of praise for Jenny Offill's slim, sharp novel about a marriage beset by the pressures of parenthood and infidelity.  As it turns out, all those other yea-sayers knew what they were talking about.  Dept. of Speculation came at me like a bullet train whispering along the tracks--nearly silent in its approach, but tearing me limb from limb when it finally hit.  It is a book which can be read in a single sitting (though I took three or four) and it welcomes--almost demands--an immediate re-read.  The language has been honed and distilled to a purity not often found in contemporary writing.  Dept. of Speculation makes its strongest mark at the individual sentence level ("The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on."  Or, "A dog runs through the field, his dark fur ruffled with light."), but it's only when I finished the novel that I was able to appreciate the totality of its impact.  It's a jigsaw puzzle whose 1,000 pieces interlock perfectly.