Front Porch Books: February 2013 edition

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 Good House by Ann Leary (St. Martin's Press):  I'll admit I'm initially drawn to Ann Leary's novel by its cover design--the mustard-yellow house buried up to its roofline in snow, the bold black serif font, that solitary red cardinal perched on the eaves--but once inside, I stay for the writing.  Exhibit A, the Opening Lines:

      I can walk through a house once and know more about its occupants than a psychiatrist could after a year of sessions. I remember joking about this one evening with Peter Newbold, the shrink who rents the office upstairs from mine.
      “The next time you get a new patient,” I offered, “I’ll sneak to their house for a walk-through. While you jot down notes about their history, dreams, whatever, I’ll shine a flashlight into the attic, open a few cupboards, and have a peek at the bedrooms. Later, when we compare notes, I’ll have the clearer picture of the person’s mental health, guaranteed.” I was teasing the doctor, of course, but I’ve been selling houses since he was in primary school, and I stand by my theory.
      I like a house that looks lived in. General wear and tear is a healthy sign; a house that’s too antiseptic speaks as much to me of domestic discord as a house in complete disarray. Alcoholics, hoarders, binge eaters, addicts, sexual deviants, philanderers, depressives—you name it, I can see it all in the worn edges of their nests. You catch the smoky reek of stale scotch and cigarettes despite the desperate abundance of vanilla-scented candles. The animal stench oozes up between the floorboards, even though the cat lady and her minions were removed months before. The marital bedroom that’s become his, the cluttered guest room that’s now clearly hers—well, you get the idea.

The narrator of those sentences is Hildy Good, alcoholic Realtor and, from what I can gather from the first few pages of Leary's novel, a character to be savored like a fine after-dinner wine.  Here's the Jacket Copy for what looks like a very promising plot:

Hildy Good is a townie. A lifelong resident of an historic community on the rocky coast of Boston’s North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone. Hildy is a descendant of one of the witches hung in nearby Salem, and is believed, by some, to have inherited psychic gifts. Not true, of course; she’s just good at reading people. Hildy is good at lots of things. A successful real-estate broker, mother and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, staged an intervention and sent her off to rehab. Now she’s in recovery—more or less.  Alone and feeling unjustly persecuted, Hildy needs a friend. She finds one in Rebecca McCallister, a beautiful young mother and one of the town’s wealthy newcomers. Rebecca feels out-of-step in her new surroundings and is grateful for the friendship. And Hildy feels like a person of the world again, as she and Rebecca escape their worries with some harmless gossip, and a bottle of wine by the fire—just one of their secrets.  But not everyone takes to Rebecca, who is herself the subject of town gossip. When Frank Getchell, an eccentric local who shares a complicated history with Hildy, tries to warn her away from Rebecca, Hildy attempts to protect her friend from a potential scandal. Soon, however, Hildy is busy trying to cover her own tracks and protect her reputation. When a cluster of secrets become dangerously entwined, the reckless behavior of one threatens to expose the other, and this darkly comic novel takes a chilling turn.

Blurbworthiness: "Leary's genius is to give us a true original: Hildy, a not-so-recovering alcoholic/realtor who crashlands among a colorful cast of New England neighbors, but Leary also says a great deal about the houses we choose to live, the people we're compelled to love, and the addictions we don't want to give up. So alive, I swear the pages of this wickedly funny and moving novel are breathing."  (Caroline Leavitt, author of Is This Tomorrow)

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash (Ecco):  Ron Rash follows his last novel (The Cove) with a new book of short stories which firmly inhabit his distinctive Appalachian terrain.  I can't wait to take a trip to Rashland.  Here's the Jacket Copy for Nothing Gold Can Stay:

In the title story, two drug-addicted friends return to the farm where they worked as boys to steal their former boss's gruesomely unusual war trophies. In "The Trusty," which first appeared in The New Yorker, a prisoner sent to fetch water for his chain gang tries to sweet-talk a farmer's young wife into helping him escape, only to find that she is as trapped as he is. In "Something Rich and Strange," a diver is called upon to pull a drowned girl's body free from under a falls, but he finds her eerily at peace below the surface.

That last story ("Something Rich and Strange") comes from the opening of Rash's novel Saints at the River.  I was going to quote the first lines of that story here, but then I realized I'd already posted them to the blog a year ago.  They still grip me in a tight clutch every time I read them.  So, instead, I'll give you the Opening Lines (from "Cherokee," a story which first appeared in Ecotone):

With a green rabbit’s foot clipped on his belt loop, a silver four-leaf clover dangling from his neck, Danny has brought all the good luck he could find. As they drive past a billboard advertising Harrah’s Casino, his free hand caresses the rabbit fur, perhaps hoping luck really can rub off on you. Angie remembers a story about a magic lamp that, once rubbed, grants three wishes. Danny would settle for just one––make the one hundred and fifty-seven dollars in her handbag turn into a thousand.

The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls (Simon & Schuster):  You know Jeannette Walls as the best-selling author of the memoir The Glass Castle and the "true-life novel" Half Broke Horses, and now she's going Full-Throttle Fiction with The Silver Star.  Though the Jacket Copy may be full of spoilers, I'm still intrigued:

It is 1970. “Bean” Holladay is twelve and her sister Liz is fifteen when their artistic mother Charlotte, a woman “who flees every place she’s ever lived at the first sign of trouble,” takes off to “find herself.” She leaves her girls enough money for food to last a month or two. But when Bean gets home from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying antebellum mansion that’s been in the family for generations. An impetuous optimist, Bean discovers who her father was and learns many stories about why their mother left Virginia in the first place. Money is tight, so Liz and Bean start babysitting and doing office work for Jerry Maddox, foreman of the mill in town, a big man who bullies workers, tenants, and his wife. Bean adores her whip-smart older sister, inventor of word games, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, non-conformist. But when school starts in the fall, it’s Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens to Liz in the car with Maddox.

 I'm even more convinced by the novel's Opening Lines:

      My sister saved my life when I was just a baby. Here's what happened. After a fight with her family, Mom decided to leave home in the middle of the night, taking us with her. She put me in the infant carrier and set it on the roof of the car while she stashed some things in the trunk, then she settled Liz, who was three, in the backseat. Mom was going through a rough period at the time and had a lot on her mind--craziness, craziness, craziness, she'd say later. Completely forgetting about me--I was only a few months old--Mom drove off. Liz shrieked my name and pointed to the roof of the car. At first Mom didn't understand what Liz was saying, then she realized what she'd done and slammed on the brakes. The carrier slid forward onto the hood, but since I was strapped in, I was all right. In fact, I wasn't even crying. In the years afterward, whenever Mom told the story, which she found hilarious and acted out in dramatic detail, she liked to say thank goodness Liz had her wits about her, otherwise that carrier would have flown right off and I'd have been a goner.
      Liz remembered the whole thing vividly, but she never thought it was funny. She had saved me. That was the kind of sister Liz was. And that was why, the night the whole mess started, I wasn't worried that Mom had been gone for four day. I was more worried about the chicken potpies.

Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee (Algonquin Books):  Lee's debut collection of short stories arrived on my doorstep complete with some powerhouse Blurbworthiness: “Bobcat and Other Stories is nothing short of brilliant. Rebecca Lee writes with the unflinching, cumulatively devastating precision of Chekhov and Munro, peeling back layer after layer of illusion until we’re left with the truth of ourselves … This extraordinary story collection is sure to confirm its author as one of the best writers of her generation.” (Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk) and “[T]his is a great collection, so alive to itself that it made my skin buzz. Most stories are domesticated, pacing along step by step, but Lee's roam and dart like wild things and yet somehow wind up exactly where they intended to go. They are ardent, wayward, vigilant, heartbreaking, and, amidst all the trouble they explore, mysteriously funny.”  (Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead).  Like most advance review copies which arrive at Casa Abrams, Bobcat was also accompanied by a press kit from the publisher.  As a rule, my eyes glaze over when it comes to "Dear Reader" letters, but this one from Algonquin editor Kathy Pories really caught my attention:

      A few years ago, a good friend of mine, a writer, sent me a little chapbook written by a friend of hers. It contained just one story, "Bobcat," but it was the kind of story that I finished and then read again immediately. I couldn’t stop talking about it. I passed it on to a few people, and then it disappeared, kept by the last reader, who wanted to read it a few more times.
      That story, the title story to this collection, was set at a dinner party that revealed so much more about everyone there than they realized, in language that was precise, in sentences that cut to the heart. It was funny, but also heartbreaking, and mysterious as to how it worked. You could not help but be led by Rebecca Lee through the story, and then be as surprised as the narrator for where you ended up.
      So when Rebecca Lee’s agent sent me her story collection, I was thrilled to see that story making its way back to me, and I knew I’d like her others. But I wasn’t prepared for how much, nor how I would proselytize about them or force them into people’s hands. I wasn’t prepared for how each story was like a compressed little novel. I found myself using the words "brilliant" and "insightful" and then finally saying things like "she sees everything the way I wish I did" and then jotting down sentences so that I could remember them. And then I started to worry that I was maybe losing my mind a little bit and obviously using too much hyperbole.
      But then others at Algonquin and Workman started to read the collection, and I sent it out to writers for their thoughts. Still, I was trying to rein myself in; I said, "just read one, and see what you think." When you love something this much, it’s anxiety-producing, as you don’t want to hear anyone else say anything otherwise. So I felt a a profound relief as I began to hear their reactions (especially from those who claimed they weren’t short story readers). You can see some of those glowing blurbs here; what you can’t hear is how passionate people were as they talked to me about this collection. Let’s just say I heard the word "love" a lot.
      I’ll say it to you: if you doubt me, just read one. Start with the first, or second, or third. Or anywhere. Every year, there is a story collection that wakes us up—the one that we all remember, like Birds of America or Pastoralia or St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. 2013 is the year of the Bobcat.

I'm anxious to settle in with the collection to see if the hoopla is justified.  Judging by the one story in the book I've already read--"Fialta" when it was previously published in Zoetrope All-Story--I think it is.  Here are the opening lines to one of the stories ("The Banks of the Vistula"):

It was dusk; the campus had turned to velvet. I walked the brick path to Humanities, which loomed there and seemed to incline toward me, as God does toward the sinner in the Book of Psalms.

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee (Random House):  The publisher compares this new novel by Jonathan Dee (author of The Privileges) to the work of another Jonathan: Franzen.  Okay, I'm intrigued.  That curiosity is further piqued by the Jacket Copy:

Once a privileged and loving couple, the Armsteads have now reached a breaking point. Ben, a partner in a prestigious law firm, has become unpredictable at work and withdrawn at home—a change that weighs heavily on his wife, Helen, and their preteen daughter, Sara. Then, in one afternoon, Ben’s recklessness takes an alarming turn, and everything the Armsteads have built together unravels, swiftly and spectacularly.  Thrust back into the working world, Helen finds a job in public relations and relocates with Sara from their home in upstate New York to an apartment in Manhattan. There, Helen discovers she has a rare gift, indispensable in the world of image control: She can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances. Yet redemption is more easily granted in her professional life than in her personal one.  As she is confronted with the biggest case of her career, the fallout from her marriage, and Sara’s increasingly distant behavior, Helen must face the limits of accountability and her own capacity for forgiveness.

Here are the Opening Lines, a domestic scene which could have been lifted from one of a million suburban houses in America, but which is so well-written it compels me to read more:

      Helen tried not to look at her watch, because looking at your watch never changed anything, but it was already a quarter to seven and her husband’s headlights had yet to appear at the top of the hill. Evening had darkened to the point where she had to press her forehead to the kitchen window and frame her eyes with her hands just to see outside. Meadow Close was a dead end street, and so even if she couldn’t make out the car itself, the moment she saw headlights of any kind cresting the hill there was a one in six chance they were Ben’s. More like one in three, actually, because by turning her face a bit in the bowl of her hands she could see the Hugheses’ car parked in their driveway, and the Griffins’, and that obscene yellow Hummer that belonged to Dr. Parnell—­
      “Mom!” Sara yelled from the living room. “Can I have some more seltzer?”
      Twelve was old enough to get your own fanny out of the chair and pour your own third glass of seltzer. But it was Tuesday, and on Tuesday evening guilt always ruled, which was why Sara was eating dinner in front of the TV in the first place, and so Helen said only, pointedly, “Please?”
      “Please,” Sara answered.
      She couldn’t help stealing a look at the kitchen clock as she closed the refrigerator door. Six-­fifty. Mr. Passive Aggressive strikes again, she thought. She wasn’t always confident she understood that expression correctly—­passive aggressive—­but she referred to it instinctively whenever Ben failed to do something he had promised her he would do.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead Books): As regular blog readers know, I spent most of my time last September and October on the road in support of my debut novel Fobbit, visiting bookstores, speaking on panels at book festivals, and attending publishing industry trade shows (like the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association gatherings).  At those shows, publishing sales reps, editors and authors mingled, rubbed elbows, and chattered with fervent urgency about what they thought was the Next Big Book.  The one title that came up in conversation over and over was How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.  I can't tell you how many times Mohsin Hamid's novel was pressed into my hands by someone who, an excited spittle-mist flying from their lips, told me, "If you read one book this year, make it this one."  After the third such encounter, I started thinking that maybe this wasn't just publishing-industry hype, maybe I was holding a true gem in my hands, maybe How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia really was the Next Big Thing.  Since then, time and other obligations have conspired against me and I haven't had the chance to sit down with Hamid's novel, but believe me when I say it's very near the summit of my mountain of books to read (aka Mt. NeverRest).  As the Jacket Copy tells us, it's the tale of  “a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon” which  “follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his.”  I just took another look at the Opening Lines and was reminded why I suspected all those sales reps were onto something.  See if you don't agree with me that Hamid's style is the very definition of spell-binding:

      Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books. But some others might say that those who say that should be pinned to the ground and bled dry with the slow slice of a blade across their throats. So it’s wisest simply to note a divergence of views on that subcategory and move swiftly on.
      None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.
      This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since you’ve never in your life seen any of these things.

The rest of the novel continues with that same second-person point of view.  Rather than being a too-clever literary device which quickly wears thin, I think it works well here in this faux self-help, how-to book.  But don't just take my word for it.  None other than Jay McInerney, author of the landmark 2nd-POV novel Bright Lights, Big City, gave How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia this nice piece of Blurbworthiness:  “A dazzling stylistic tour de force; a love story disguised as a self-help guide, freighted with sly social satire.  As timely and timeless a novel as I’ve read in years.”

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco):  The arrival of a new JCO book--on average, once every six months--is always a cause for confetti-tossing, but there's something about The Accursed which has me really excited.  Part of that anticipation starts with the way her 132nd* novel is packaged by her publisher.  Ecco has given the 667-page book an elegant cover design which uses a detail from Profile of a Young Woman by Giovanni Boldini to good effect.  The jacket spine and back are a deep cranberry red and even the paper stock feels....well, regal, I guess.  I can't properly describe for you how impressed I am by this book before I even open it.  You'll have to touch it for yourself to see what I mean.  But of course it's what's inside the cover that really counts.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton; their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man–a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up. When the bride's brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the university and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain–all plagued by "accursed" visions.

You know you are firmly planted in Gothic territory right from the Opening Lines of the Prologue:

      It is an afternoon in autumn, near dusk. The western sky is a spider’s web of translucent gold. I am being brought by carriage—two horses—muted thunder of their hooves—along narrow country roads between hilly fields touched with the sun’s slanted rays, to the village of Princeton, New Jersey. The urgent pace of the horses has a dreamlike air, like the rocking motion of the carriage; and whoever is driving the horses his face I cannot see, only his back—stiff, straight, in a tight-fitting dark coat.
      Quickening of a heartbeat that must be my own yet seems to emanate from without, like a great vibration of the very earth. There is a sense of exhilaration that seems to spring, not from within me, but from the countryside. How hopeful I am! How excited! With what childlike affection, shading in to wonderment, I greet this familiar yet near-forgotten landscape! Cornfields, wheat fields, pastures in which dairy cows graze like motionless figures in a landscape by Corot...the calls of red-winged blackbirds and starlings...the shallow though swift-flowing Stony Brook Creek and the narrow wood-plank bridge over which the horses' hooves and the carriage wheels thump...a smell of rich, moist earth, harvest... I see that I am being propelled along the Great Road, I am nearing home, I am nearing the mysterious origin of my birth. This journey I undertake with such anticipation is not one of geographical space but one of Time—for it is the year 1905 that is my destination.
      1905!—the very year of the Curse.

Blurbworthiness: “[The Accursed] is in addition to being a thrilling tale in the best gothic tradition, a lesson in master craftsmanship...The story sprawls, reaches, demands, tears, and shrieks in homage to the traditional gothic, yet with fresh, surprising twists and turns... Oates has given us a brilliantly crafted work .”  (Publishers Weekly, starred review)


*Just kidding.  This is actually her 39th novel.  I think.  I lost count somewhere back around the time of We Were the Mulvaneys.

2013 Academy Awards Prediction Contest

Welcome to the annual Oscars prediction contest at The Quivering Pen blog.  Once again, I'm rolling out the red carpet, giving you the opportunity to predict who will take home the little golden statuettes so coveted by anyone who lives in a 25-mile radius of Los Angeles.  This makes the third year in a row where I've given blog readers the chance to win prizes (see below) while dazzling us with their cinematic acumen--or really, really good luck as the case may be.

Before I get to the contest itself, I thought I'd share a couple of my favorite moments from the movies I saw this year:

The hospital stairwell scene in Flight: What's that old saying?  "There are no small parts, only small actors."  That was proved to me in a stunning way when I watched Flight (a terrific character-study of an alcoholic played by Denzel Washington).  Early in the film, as Washington's character, a career airline pilot, is recuperating from the white-knuckled plane crash in which he saves 96 of 102 souls on board, he sneaks out to a hospital stairwell where he comes across Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a junkie who's just come through a near-death experience of her own.  The two have a little bit of repartee and then they hear the door opening a couple of floors below and someone coming up the stairs.  Enter the actor James Badge Dale, a cancer patient toting an IV pole and likewise looking for place to have a secret smoke.  Dale is known in the credits as "Gaunt Young Man" and he gets less than five minutes of screen time, but his performance is seared in my brain.  He is electrifying as a sarcastic, smart, empathetic man at the end of his life.  In one interview, director Robert Zemeckis compared the character to a Greek chorus which comes in, tells the audience about the overarching theme of the story, then leaves the stage, never to be seen again.  For my money, James Badge Dale was perfectly cast as Flight's voice of conscience.

Anna Kendrick and "Cups" in Pitch Perfect:  On the whole, this Glee-ful comedy about collegiate a capella performers fell short of my expectations.  But I thought Anna Kendrick really held the movie together with her performance as a loner who's drawn into one of the singing groups on campus because she thinks it will be a way to please her controlling father (a professor on the same campus).  Pitch Perfect gave us a standard montage of would-be harmonizers trying out for the Barden Bellas--mediocre singers for the most part--but then Kendrick takes the stage and shows everyone how it's done, using only her voice and a plastic cup.  I don't have a clip from the movie, but here she is on David Letterman, schooling us with astounding hand-eye coordination:




So here we go...

Think you can forecast which way the wind will blow in Hollywood this year?  Show us what you've got, Tinseltown Genius!

The Rules:

1.  One entry per person.
2.  You must answer all the questions in the survey (in other words, predict a winner in each of the Oscar categories, and provide your name and e-mail address at the end of the survey).
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. 23, the day before the Academy Awards presentation.
6.  The winner will be announced here on the blog no later than March 8.

The Grand Prize

(the only prize, actually...I just wanted to make it sound, er, grand)

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

Viking/Penguin:

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio

 

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

 

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

 

Click here to take the 2013 Academy Awards Prediction Contest

We are Scripted by War: Fire and Forget

Some of the best fiction is written from the inside out.  That is to say, its authors have "been there, done that."  Nothing against great writers like C. S. Lewis who, to the best of my knowledge, never set foot in a land called Narnia; or Charles Frazier who, I'm certain, never walked across the cold mountains of a Civil War landscape; or even Mary Shelley who, I hope, never assembled a new man from spare body parts--their imaginations have transported us in remarkable ways.  But there is something about the authors who have lived their words that lends authenticity to novels, short stories and poetry.

Such is the case with all the contributors to Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, the anthology written by veterans and edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher, which is officially being published today.  Each of the writers has gone to war and gotten the T-shirt (or, in the case of Siobhan Fallon, has seen her husband deploy to the combat zone).  You know when Brian Turner writes in 'The Wave That Takes Them Under" of soldiers how "speak the grammar of sand now" he knows what the fuck he's talking about.  Been there, done that.

As a matter of full disclosure, I should mention that one of my short stories, "Roll Call," is included in Fire and Forget, and I'm trying not to let that taint my opinion of this excellent, necessary book.  And it is an important book which I hope all of you will take the time to read in order to better understand what happens when you send men and women halfway around the globe with orders to kill.

In his introduction to Fire and Forget, Colum McCann writes:

      All stories are war stories somehow. Every one of us has stepped from one war or another. Our grandfathers were there when the stench of Dresden hung over the world, and our fathers were there when Vietnam sent its children running napalmed down the dirt road. Our grandmothers were there when Belfast fell into rubble, and our mothers were there when Cambodia became a crucible of bones. Our sisters in South Africa, our brothers in Gaza. And, God forbid, our sons and daughters will have stories to tell too. We are scripted by war.
      It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us. It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom.

In this collection of short fiction, there are terrible truths and moments of small beauty a-plenty.  Each story is a snapshot--grainy with sand, sticky with blood--of scenes which we must face, uncomfortable as they may be, if we are to start sorting out the two major wars of the past decade. While I enjoyed everything I read and think each story has merit, there were a few which really stood out in their intensity of emotion and skill of wordcraft.

"Redeployment" by Phil Klay, first published in Granta, has a stark, unforgettable opening:

      We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose and we called it "Operation Scooby." I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.
      First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, "Jesus," and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs.

I know I've probably just lost all the animal-lovers, but believe me when I tell you that Klay's story about the rocky transition of one soldier from the war zone to the living room is as heart-breaking as it is unsettling.  The soldiers' behavior is shocking, but who are we to judge what a person will do when faced with the horrors of an Iraqi torture house ("You see the body parts in the locker and the retarded guy in the cage") and the realities of the everyday ("The broken television and the haji corpse.  Eicholtz covered in blood.  The lieutenant on the radio.")?  Don't judge PTSD until you've walked a mile in its gore-caked boots.  The dogs are just more sad casualties of war.

On the day I read Mariette Kalinowski's "The Train," Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the Pentagon's proposal to officially allow women to served in combat-arms positions. Unofficially, of course, females have been at the forefront of firefights for years, serving as Apache helicopter pilots, medics, and other support roles which put them face-to-face with bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Bullets don't recognize gender; they don't stop in mid-air to check chromosomes or genitals.  Kalinowski knows this all too well.  A veteran Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, she often went out on convoys as a heavy machine gunner. In "The Train," she writes about a female soldier working at an Entry Control Point to a U.S. military base in Iraq whose job is to pat down the Iraqi women standing in line. "She couldn't help but feel edgy," Kalinowski writes. "That worry hovered all around her and in her mind until it became the standard sensation, until a day without fear was a bad day." It's a masterfully-told story which moves seamlessly across three timelines--the present (when the female veteran is riding a subway train in New York City), and two episodes from her past (a horrifying suicide bomber attack at the ECP, and the memory of her mother finding a dead bird in a field near their home in Vermont).  Here's a video of Kalinowski reading portions of the story:



Like Klay's "Redeployment," Andrew Slater's "New Me" is a gripping portrait of a soldier returning to "the world" after being discharged from the brain injury clinic at Walter Reed Army Hospital.  Slater had me glued to the page right from the story's first two paragraphs:

      I joined the Army after my girlfriend Renee drowned because I felt that some people in my hometown would be unable to not blame me. Something would have seemed wrong with the world if they didn’t. The Army was a way for me to leave Elberton for good without seeming like I was making a big spectacle out of it. Renee’s dad called me up about a week after the funeral to ask me why I didn’t go in after her. His voice was calm on the phone when he said it. It sounded like he was reading the question off a piece of paper he was holding with both hands. I think he’d been trying to not say it for a while.
      By the time I realized she must be down river I couldn’t see her at all. I had just got back to the riverbank from my car with a pair of foam water noodles and a CD player. I had been scrounging around in the back seat of my Corolla trying to find a CD, something I wanted her to hear. I stood there staring at the flat top of the river, unblemished blue-brown between the cat tails, a foot or two higher than normal with the past week’s rain, but the water was quiet that morning. There was a clear, quiet sky. I never made sense of it.

Here are some snippets from the other stories in Fire and Forget:

"Smile, There are IEDs Everywhere" by Jacob Siegel:

For us, there had been no fields of battle to frame the enemy. There was no chance to throw yourself against another man and fight for life. Our shocks of battle came on the road, brief, dark, and anonymous. We were always on the road and it could always explode. There was no enemy: we had only each other to hate.

Siegel also has what could be considered the thematic core of the book as a whole when he writes a paragraph later:

War stories are almost never about war unless they’re told by someone who was never there. Every now and then maybe you talk about something or listen to someone who needs to get it off their chest, but those aren’t the stories you come back to, not for telling.

"Tips for a Smooth Transition" by Siobhan Fallon:

      Colin and Evie have spent the week awkwardly trying to get used to each other after a year apart. Awkward because Colin has been working long hours at the base dealing with the accountability of the men, weapons, and vehicles that returned with him.
      Evie tried to adapt to his uneven schedule, mostly by taking time off from Florence’s Home Cooking Catering, sitting around the house waiting for Colin to get back while thinking about the money she should be making, and then smiling too much when he finally came through the door.

"The Wave That Takes Them Under" by Brian Turner:

The platoon moves forward in fits and starts as the wind drives hard against them, soldiers falling back or tumbling down dunes to roll into pits where the sand seems determined to bury them. Henderson can see Sgt. Gould yelling, but his voice barely registers above the wind’s cry and the crack of sand against his goggles. He thinks maybe Gould is cursing the sky itself, as close as any of them might come in their argument with God, or maybe he’s calling out to the men disappearing around him, yelling to be heard over the din of the world in its gritty erasure.

"Raid" by Ted Janis:

I needed to get the hell out of the community.  Bin Laden was fish food, but we were still chasing targets, hunting down lowlevel pipe swingers in the name of GWOT, an acronym and a concept that belonged to last decade. Two deployments ago, I drank the Kool-Aid—drank it like it was the blood of Christ.

"Play the Game" by Colby Buzzell (my heart absolutely stopped when I came to the last sentence of these paragraphs):

      Six months later, I got out of bed and stumbled over to the window. Out on the street corner stood a little blonde-haired girl, dressed like she was on her way to Sunday school. Was today Sunday? I thought about that a minute.
      Wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, a black metal bracelet around my right wrist with some names and dates engraved onto it, and my dog tags, I watched the little girl as she started to cross the street.
      Out of nowhere, a beat-up Ford pickup whipped around the corner and slammed on its breaks, smashing right into the girl and sending her flying onto the pavement.
      The truck idled for a couple seconds, then started to move again. Slowly it turned onto a side street and drove off. I tried to catch the license, one of those old black-and-yellow plates, but it was too late. It was gone before I could make the numbers.
      I looked back at the girl again, and stared at her lying there in the middle of the road. Then I felt kind of tired, so I got back in bed and went to sleep.

"Television" by Roman Skaskiw:

      When the attack was reported over the radio, a breathless private sprinted from the Tactical Operations Center to the Aid Station where the battalion surgeon, Major Roscoe, watched a DVD with the medics. Scraps of cardboard shaded the windows of their hooch, and the blue light from the television shone on their faces. Two medics watched from their cots, a third sat in a plastic lawn chair. Major Roscoe sat in his camping chair. He lifted the DVD remote from a mesh cup holder, paused the movie, and faced the private. He asked how long ago it happened, how many people were hurt, and what injuries there were. All the medics looked up.
      He couldn’t answer. He sprinted back to the Tactical Operations Center holding his slung M4 carbine against his hip with one arm, and swinging the other as he ran.
      Major Roscoe and the medics turned back to the movie, but it wasn’t there the same way it had been. When the private returned and told them a local boy was coming with a head wound, they turned off the television and walked to the bay to prepare for the boy’s arrival.

"Poughkeepsie" by Perry O'Brien:

It's 0300 and I'm sitting on the sidewalk in front of Port Authority, trying to make a plan. I can’t keep purchase on my thoughts with all this night traffic—taxis and limousines, garbage trucks, buses filled with vacant seats and harsh fluorescent light— this restless march of cars, all of them awake at crow piss and going somewhere. I was going somewhere, too.

"When Engaging Targets, Remember" by Gavin Ford Kovite:

You are a United States infantryman. An Imperial Grunt. The emblem of American militarism. Your rank is: Specialist. It is late 2004, and you are behind a machine gun in al-Anbar, Iraq, swathed in bulky armor and expensive gear and sitting—almost reclining—in a wide nylon sling slung across the roof of a Humvee that’s as cartoonishly bulky as you. Your job as a Humvee gunner is to provide rear security for a convoy of fuel tankers that’s currently wending its way from the Baghdad airport to a Forward Operating Base one hundred miles east.

"Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek" by Brian Van Reet:

There were a bunch of guys like me at Walter Reed—severe burn cases, the faceless. You would think we would have hung out together, but we avoided it as much as possible. We all looked the same; being around one another was like looking in a mirror. None of us wanted that. We wanted to forget.

"Roll Call" by David Abrams:

      We were standing around after the memorial service. Seven of us, the ones who’d made it this far.
      The afternoon wind kicked up and we bent our heads, tucking up under our Kevlars. Two of us realized the dust covers on our 16s were open and clicked them shut. To someone passing by, it might have looked like we were praying, huddled in a tight circle of faith and brotherhood.
      Bullshit. It was just the motherfucking wind.
      But yeah, God and the hereafter and all that come-unto-me crap was fresh in our minds, since we’d just wrapped up Carter’s memorial service. We could hear the dog tags clicking against the receiver on Carter’s downturned M16.

"And Bugs Don't Bleed" by Matt Gallagher:

      “You just told Grandma that you’re going to going to go to war.”
      “I did.”
      “War is the place where you kill people,” Sunny said. “I know about it.”
      “Yes. Bad people, though. I’m just going to kill the bad people.”
      “I’ve never killed anything. One time, though, I got super mad at Jamie Takemoto because he kicked my sand castle, and I told him I could kill him if I wanted to, and I made him cry. Have you?”
      “Have I ever what? Gotten my sand castle kicked? Of course.”
      “No, Jade. Have you ever gotten so mad you killed something?”
      “Do insects count? Like spiders and stuff?”
      “No,” Sunny said. “It only counts if they bleed. And bugs don’t bleed.”

"Red Steel India" by Roy Scranton:

It went like this: the first day you report for guard mount at 0750, then you’re on duty in the sun till 1400. Then you clear your weapon and walk back to the barracks and sleep until 0100. You get up in the dark, get ready, and make it to guard mount at 0150, pull duty until 0800. The sun’s come up. Then you go eat breakfast, jerk off, and sleep until 1300. Guard mount 1350, on duty till 2000, clear your weapon, walk back to the barracks in the dark, think of some other life you had once, sleep, get up at 0700, back to guard mount at 0750, and the cycle repeats. Light, dark, dark, light, night day whatever.

The term "fire and forget" refers to the type of missile system which doesn't need any more guidance after launching.  Firers can walk away and forget about the pending death on the other end of the trajectory.  Most of the writers in these pages, however, cannot shake what they saw through their rifle scopes or what happened when bullet met flesh.  I doubt readers will be able to forget, either.

You can read more about Fire and Forget at its website.

My First Time: Cinthia Ritchie

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 Cinthia Ritchie, author of the new novel Dolls Behaving Badly.  An Alaska resident, she is a former journalist with the Anchorage Daily News and a Pushcart Prize nominee.  Her work can be found at New York Times Magazine, Sport Literate, Water-Stone Review, Under the Sun, Memoir, damselfly press, Slow Trains, 42opus, Evening Street Review and more than 45 other literary magazines.  Click here to visit her website.  Don't forget to enter this week's Friday Freebie contest for your chance to win a copy of Dolls Behaving Badly (along with A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash).

My First Writing Assignment

I always wanted to be a writer, always knew I was a writer from the moment I opened a book at age four and letters veered and jumped and magically arranged themselves into words.

However, I grew up in a working class farming community where few went to college and even fewer bothered to study, myself included.  There were no literary or intellectual communities at that time, no appreciation of the arts, no book clubs or poetry circles.  There wasn’t time, not when crops had to be harvested, cows milked, factory jobs worked.  It was assumed that I would graduate from high school, work as a secretary and marry.  It was what a girl did back in those days.

Then I walked inside Mr. Blakeslee’s sophomore English class, and my life changed.

Clair Blakeslee was a tall bearded man who wore rumpled shirts and walked through the hallways reading books, so that he was forever bumping into walls and drinking fountains.  Students teased him, but he didn’t seem to mind.  He didn’t seem to hear.  He walked around so immersed in books that nothing else existed.

Once I leaned down and tried to read the title of his book as he passed, but the type was immense and heavy and printed with old, dull type.  The book was old, too, the binding ripped, the pages yellow and thin.  I had no idea why anyone would choose to read such a shabby-looking text when there were new books, shiny and smelling of sharp, dark ink, in the upstairs library.

I didn’t expect much from this class.  I didn’t expect much from life, really.  I was moody and sixteen years old.  I didn’t fit in.  I wrote poetry in cheap notebooks and stole a copy of The Bell Jar from the library and dreamed of lying dead in a rowboat covered with flowers, like a poem I had read the year before in my older sister’s college textbook.

So there I was, slumped at my desk, depressed and wearing too much blue eye shadow, because I thought blue was the color of rebels (I hadn’t yet heard of the beat poets and their black turtlenecks and black auras and black humor or, if I had heard, I hadn’t cared).

Suddenly, Mr. Blakeslee’s voice rang out: “You will write!”

My head snapped and I stared at him, at this man who seemed so old, though I realize now that he was only in his early thirties.  I stared as if at a revelation, an apparition, like those people who see the Virgin Mary in Pop Tarts.

“You will read, and you will write,” he boomed.  Someone snickered but I was transfixed; I was sure he was talking to me, and only me.  I copied his words in my notebook: You will read. You will write, and that page became my talisman.  I carried it around, folded, in my back jeans pocket (bright orange hip-huggers that hung low on my skinny, insignificant hips), and often when I skipped class and sat in the bathroom and tried unsuccessfully to smoke, I reached in and smoothed the edge of that paper, and always, always I felt better.

I don’t remember much of what I wrote for Mr. Blakeslee’s class--probably it was depressing and had to do with birds dying and flower petals moist (moist!) with dew--but I do remember the moment that changed my life, the moment when I knew, without a doubt, that I would grow up to become a writer.

It was spring and the air smelled of freshly-cut grass and everyone was restless.  Mr. Blakeslee talked on and on about a science fiction story we had supposedly read.  He talked excitedly, waving his arms and jumping up and down.  Behind me, someone yawned, and I doodled poems in the margin of my notebook.

And then Mr. Blakeslee spit, so caught up in his story discussion that he forgot to swallow.

A wad of saliva flew across the room and landed on the top of my head.

There was a stunned silence, but Mr. Blakeslee didn’t miss a beat.

“Now you will write,” he yelled, as if an order.  Then he turned back to his book and continued.

I sat there, his spit slowly dripping down my hair, and I didn’t feel disgusted or gross or even slighted.  I felt blessed, as if this odd man, the only person I knew who dared become excited over books, had singled me out, given me a gift, not of saliva or spit but of courage, the tenacity to be yourself, to follow your dreams.

Later that week I submitted my first poem.  It was about what horses talked of when locked in the barn at night, and it was appallingly bad, though I didn’t realize this at the time.  I carefully printed it, in ink (which smeared over my wrist), signed my name and mailed it off to Reader’s Digest.

A rejection letter immediately came back, so I sent it off to Ladies Home Journal  and McCalls.

I wish I still had those rejection letters.  They were kind, in their way; it was no doubt evident that I was a child.  And sometimes, when I submit poems and essays to magazines, I still think of Mr. Blakeslee waving his arms and spitting, and maybe it sounds crazy but I feel a connection to him, a kinship, the way we often feel connected to those rare individuals we meet who seemingly love books more than they may love themselves.

Judging a Book: I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro

Aluminum foil was invented in 1910, but it wasn't until this year that it found its true calling: a spot-on perfect design element on the cover of I Want To Show You More, the debut short story collection by Jamie Quatro coming from Grove/Atlantic in March.

I've just started reading Quatro's stories and they are eyebrow-raisingly good. The first, "Caught Up," is a short-short about a married woman standing on the precipice of commiting carnal adultery (she's already been having phone sex with "the other man" for ten months). This despite the fact that:

I grew up and married a good man who cries at baptisms and makes our children carry spiders outside instead of smashing them, as they’d like to; who never goes to sleep without kissing some part of my body. He says he wants to know, on his deathbed, that his lips have touched every square inch.

In the second story, "Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives," adultery becomes a literal rotting corpse on the marital bed.

Quatro's style has the terse, stabbing power of Raymond Carver in his finest hour, but at the same time there's the fuller lyricism of something by Alice Munro humming below the surface of the words.  If the rest of the book is as good as these two opening stories, then I'm in for a real treat.

The cover design for I Want to Show You More is also a feast for the eyes, using the mono-chrome of grey and silver to its advantage.  The fabulous art is by Rachel Perry Welty; you can see more of her work here.  With everything encased in foil--including all but the head and arms of the blonde-haired, droop-winged angel--it's like the book is ready to be broiled in the oven.  I also think it was a smart design decision to use a cursive "font" for the words, making it seem like the ribbon of Reynolds Wrap is endless (in some of Welty's other work, she does indeed use one sheet of foil).

I haven't held a hardcover copy in my hands yet, but I'm certain this is one cover that's going to shimmer on the New Books table at your bookstore.

Friday Freebie: A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash and Dolls Behaving Badly by Cinthia Ritchie

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau, Black Flower by Young-ha Kim, and The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell.

This week's book giveaway is another plural prize offering.  One lucky reader will win copies of A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash and Dolls Behaving Badly by Cinthia Ritchie.

I've been touting the excellence of A Land More Kind Than Home quite a bit here at the blog.  There's a reason for that: it's excellent.  In his debut novel (set in North Carolina), Wiley Cash has a way of immediately sinking his readers into the lives of characters who range from sympathetic to terrifying.  Here's what the book is about:

For a curious boy like Jess Hall, growing up in Marshall means trouble when you get caught spying on grown-ups. Adventurous and precocious, Jess is protective of his older brother, Christopher, a mute whom everyone calls Stump. Though their mother has warned them not to snoop, Stump can't help sneaking a look at something he's not supposed to—an act that will have repercussions. It's a wrenching event that thrusts Jess into an adulthood for which he's not prepared. He now knows that a new understanding can bring not only danger and evil—but also the possibility of freedom and deliverance.  Told by resonant and evocative characters, A Land More Kind Than Home is a haunting tale of courage in the face of cruelty and the power of love to overcome the darkness that lives in us all.

“A Land More Kind Than Home is a powerfully moving debut that reads as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” (Richmond Times-Dispatch )

Another author, Cinthia Ritchie, is making her debut this month with her novel Dolls Behaving Badly.  Ritchie's world is about as far away from that in A Land More Kind Than Home as you can get; it's set in Alaska, where the author also lives.  (Cinthia and I may or may not have taken a creative writing class together at the University of Alaska Anchorage--both of our memories are a little fuzzy; but I do remember reading her excellent reportage for the Anchorage Daily News during the time I lived in Alaska).  Here's what's in store for you inside Dolls Behaving Badly:

Carla Richards is a lot of things. She's a waitress at Anchorage's premier dining establishment, Mexico in an Igloo; an artist who secretly makes erotic dolls for extra income; a divorcée who can't quite detach from her ex-husband; and a single mom trying to support her gifted eight-year-old son, her pregnant sister, and her babysitter-turned-resident-teenager.  She's one overdue bill away from completely losing control-when inspiration strikes in the form of a TV personality. Now she's scribbling away in a diary, flirting with an anthropologist, and making appointments with a credit counselor.  Still, getting her life and dreams back on track is difficult. Is perfection really within reach? Or will she wind up with something even better?

"Reader, you hold in your hands a novel so true and heartfelt you'll want to buy it for everyone you know."  (Jo-Ann Mapson, author of Solomon's Oak and Finding Casey)

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of A Land More Kind Than Home and Dolls Behaving Badly, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Feb. 14—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 15.  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 blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

No More Rainbowfarts or Sparklepoop: Why Unicorn Drinks by C. W. Moss

Thanks to C. W. Moss, unicorns are no longer the snow-white beasts of our youth who prance through forests and fart rainbows.

If, like me, you're still scarred from watching the horrid, horrid animated version of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, in which the titular beast was voiced by Mia Farrow, then the outrageously insulting Why Unicorn Drinks is the book for you.  Among other things, Moss' pathetically-funny Unicorn is an alcoholic, a porn addict, and a murderer.

As he did in his earlier book of comics, Unicorn Being a Jerk, Moss takes the horned beast out of myth and plops him down in contemporary, dysfunctional America. In the debut, we see Unijerk doing things like smashing kids' sandcastles at the beach, parking in handicapped spaces at the mall (then rollerblading away from the car), and feeding bacon to pigs.

In Why Unicorn Drinks, Moss answers his opening page ("Because:") with 65 four-color illustrations like this:


His first kiss was with his cousin.

Or this:

Putting in overtime didn't pay off.

You can see more unicorn comics at Moss' website.  Trust me, I haven't even shown you the most untamed illustrations.

There are plenty of sight gags in these pages (my favorite is the one where Unicorn is standing on the side of a hill with a bass drum strapped to his chest looking out over the rubble of uprooted trees, overturned cars and houses buried in mud; caption: "He accidentally started the landslide that killed seven families, including one that had adopted two orphans, another that had a special needs child, one with a war veteran of three tours, and the last had some kids who play on their cell phones all day.  He didn't care about those last kids though.").

But for all the easy laughs, there are deep pangs of sorrow and depression (Unicorn waving goodbye to a drunk girl at a party; caption: "He thought it was cupid.  She thought it was vodka."). 

You'll laugh, you'll  groan, you may even sell this book for 25 cents at your next yard sale, but I guarantee you'll never forget Unicorn.  His trials and tribulations are ours--Moss makes him an Everycorn--and, through the bitter chuckles, we recognize ourselves in the reasons for his drinking.

Moss' anthropomorphism turns Unicorn into a Raymond Carver character with hooves.  Despite his rainbow-colored horn, he becomes a whiskey-soaked representative of our deepest fears and disappointments.  Frankly, I feel much better about myself after meeting Unicorn.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Big Sur

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

I've mentioned before how I first met Jack Kerouac (in book form) at City Lights bookstore when I was in San Francisco for a publishers' trade show.  The book I plucked off the shelf on the bookstore's second floor--the late autumn light streaming hot and heavy as syrup through the windows--was Big Sur, the Beat writer's 1962 semi-autobiographical novel.  At the time I thought to myself, "This is good stuff, but they'll never make a movie out it--the writing is just too loopy and stream-of-consciousness."  Famous last words.  Now comes news from the Sundance Film Festival that Big Sur the Movie will indeed hit screens later this year, following on the heels of last year's On the Road (which suffered from mediocre box office receipts, despite the tease of a topless Twilight actress).  The trailer for Big Sur predictably features lots of crashing waves, excessive drinking, clouds of bar smoke, and big trees.  It's all very navel-gazey--pretty to look at, but meandering as a serpentine coastal highway.  My suspicions that this might be a difficult movie were confirmed when I learned the director is Michael Polish who, along with his twin brother Mark, has made some ponderous films like Northfork and Twin Falls Idaho.  While intriguing, those movies crawled along at a stubborn snail's pace.  Mefears the same will happen with Big Sur.  The cast includes Jean-Marc Barr as Kerouac, Josh Lucas as Neal Cassady, Kate Bosworth as Willamine “Billie” Dabney, Radha Mitchell as Carolyn Cassady, and an unrecognizable Anthony Edwards as Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  Big Sur fans will recognize one thing right off the bat: while Kerouac thinly disguised his cronies with fictionalized names, the movie tears off that veil and calls a Cassady a Cassady and a Kerouac a Kerouac.  Does this make the movie more honest?  I don't know, maybe the verisimilitude will help, maybe it won't.  I'm reserving judgement until I sit down with my popcorn and watch it.  Make that popcorn and whiskey.  Strictly for verisimilitude's sake, of course.

My First Time: Jan Richman

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 novelist and poet Jan Richman whose book, Thrill-Bent was recently published by Tupelo Press.  Her poetry collection Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything (LSU Press, 1995) was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.  Richman received an NEA grant in Literature, a Nation/Discovery award, and the Celia B. Wagner prize from the Poetry Society of America.  She lives in Oakland, California.  Click here to visit her website.

My First Literary Scandal

and Subsequent Disgrace

Like Truman Capote, I met with literary fame at a ripe young age—complete with the requisite pomp and circumstance.  For me, it was not Bennett Cerf who crowned my talents with a laurel wreath and a Random House contract, but Mrs. Aisles, a nice old lady who smelled of Aqua Net and tuna fish (not necessarily in that order).

In second grade, we had been learning to scan poetry for rhyme and meter—mostly haiku and Jabberwocky—when Mrs. Aisles suddenly threw down a gauntlet: prizes would be given for the first, second, and third place winners in a limerick-writing contest!  This declaration elicited exaggerated eye rolls from many in the class, and the cross-talk quickly drifted off-topic to tetherball face-offs and Knox Blox, but I vowed to reign supreme at Friday’s awards ceremony.

Truman Capote taught himself to read and write before he was five, at which point he could often be seen carrying around a dictionary and a notepad.  My mother had given me a copy of his award-winning roman à clef “Old Mrs. Busybody,” which he wrote when he was eight, along with a fancy flowered journal and an astronaut pen.  I think she was trying to encourage me to aim high, but so far I had mostly just traced my hand while lying on the floor of the living room.

Frankly, I don’t remember trying to write a limerick that night.  I have no memory of struggling with anapaestic meter or alternate punchlines.  I remember only balancing atop the headboard of my parents’ bed so I could snatch the Big Book of Limericks off the top shelf.

Lest you think I was lazy, let me assure you that choosing a limerick that was neither too ribald nor too sophisticated for a child credibly to have written, not to mention trying to discern which ones might be known to Mrs. Aisles, was its own kind of hard labor.  Eventually, I found one by Anonymous that featured a French town I doubted Mrs. Aisles had been to:

In a house in the town of Champagne
Lived a very thin lady named Jane
In her bathtub one night
She received quite a fright
For she found she had slid down the drain.

I adored the off-hand hyperbole of the last line.  I copied it out carefully with my space pen, intentionally misspelling “Champane.”

By Friday morning, I was sure I was about to be kicked out of school. I sensed that my parents’ forced smiles hid a painful knowledge of my plagiaristic ways.  And Mrs. Aisles had been adorning my homework with uncharacteristic smiley faces all week.  But when she announced my name and pinned the blue ribbon on my dress, she was gushing with pride and awe.  She told the class that she’d never read such a wonderful limerick by a student, and that I was clearly destined to be a great writer.  Then she bade me to perform my masterpiece aloud, and I gladly obeyed, making sure to alter my cadence and interject a playful pause before the final phrase.  Some kids laughed, and a few even seemed puzzled and/or impressed.

The “Scandal/Disgrace” part of this story refers only to my private reaction when I remembered the scenario many years later.  Disgrace, outrage, followed almost immediately by a shiver of recognition (I can’t believe I… yeah, that sounds like me), and the vague feeling that Mrs. Aisles might not have been the sharpest tool in the shed.

Truman Capote slowly killed himself with alcohol and tranquilizers after the massive success (and some have said deception) of In Cold Blood, trading the writing life for the talk-show circuit.  My own trajectory from the heights of my first literary success has been less pharmacological and more ink-stained.  Today, I try to employ my (ahem) ingenuity toward more authentic fictional ends, but I still struggle with punchlines.

Look What I Found: Heaven Can Wait by Leonore Fleischer

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.

To this day, if you say the words "liver-and-whey shake," I'm bound to get a little choked up.  Or if I hear plaintive notes coming from a soprano sax, my eyes get a misty drizzle.  And if someone were to tell me that a Concorde supersonic jet transports us to heaven when we die, I'd believe 'em.

Such is the impact Heaven Can Wait made on me when I was a sophomore in high school.  I was a skinny, stuttering, shy teenager--especially when I was around girls who, it seemed, exuded some sort of chemical that clouded my confidence and made me fumble words like they were slicked with butter.  When Warren Beatty and Julie Christie finally got together up on the screen at the Jackson Hole Cinema, it was like Love Potion No. 9 had just been unbottled and spilled in the aisles of the dark theater.  I swooned, I clutched my chest, I palpitated.  I looked around to make sure no one had seen me.

For those who have never had the pleasure of seeing the 1978 movie (I pity you!), here's a brief recap: Beatty plays a quarterback for the L.A. Rams named Joe Pendleton who's killed when he enters a dark highway tunnel on his bike and meets head-on with a van coming in the opposite direction.  Unfortunately, it wasn't his time to die--he was snatched from this life 50 years too soon by an over-zealous angel.  Oops!  When Joe arrives in heaven and sees all the passengers boarding the Concorde for their "final flight," he protests to head angel Mr. Jordan (James Mason) and, heaven being the forgiving place it is (along with being quite embarrassed about the angelic error), he decides to give Joe a new body back on earth.  And so, he's reincarnated into the just-about-to-be-murdered millionaire Leo Farnsworth.  While dodging his "personal private executive" (played by Charles Grodin) and his wife (Dyan Cannon), scheming lovers who can't figure out why Leo didn't stay dead after they killed him, Beatty falls in love with an environmental activist named Betty (Julie Christie) who's upset that Farnsworth's corporation is polluting the world's oceans--especially the waters near her small English town of Paglesham.

Heaven Can Wait had everything my love-yearning heart was waiting for: eyes sparkling in the moonlight, last-second touchdowns, a butler named Sisk, and liver-and-whey shakes.  On that day in 1978, I put the film in my then-fledgling Lifelong Top 10 Movies List.  Since then, it may have slipped down to Number 14 or 15, but it still ranks among the sweetest, funniest movies I've ever seen.

And so, imagine my surprise and delight when I was browsing the shelves of books in a thrift store here in Butte, Montana yesterday and I came across this paperback, the official movie-novelization by Leonore Fleischer:

Faster than you could say "James Mason," I'd plunked my 49 cents down on the thrift store counter and went home with my own little slice of movie nostalgia heaven.

I've written before about "movie novels" and how I agree with Joe Queenan who once said "Authors of film novelisations, not unlike pornographers, rarely get the respect they deserve."  I haven't read enough of Fleischer's treatment of the screenplay by Beatty, Elaine May and Buck Henry to pass full judgement, but at first glance it does seem like some fairly ordinary movie tie-in porn.  For instance, take a look at the opening lines:

This was the time of the day that Joe loved best, the hours before the morning had been burnished to a gleam.  When he rolled out of bed at first light, there was still a chill in the canyon air, and the moon was only just disappearing reluctantly from the pink sky.  The day smelled fresh and newborn and ready for anything; Joe could sense it.

Or consider these pages in which Leonore Fleischer allows herself some flights of literary fancy as she describes the accident that kills Joe just when he's getting ready for a big game against the Dallas Cowboys:


The Pulitzer Prize committee probably won't be ringing Ms. Fleischer's doorbell any time soon.  But maybe she doesn't care.  Maybe she just wants to collect her paycheck.  Maybe she just wants to recreate the movie experience on the page, something for film fans like me to take down off the shelf and relive at any time of day or night (this was even more significant back in 1978 before instant Netflix streaming* and the omnipresence of VCRs).  A quick Google search of "Leonore Fleischer" tells me that, for a brief period in the 1970s and 1980s, she was the queen of movie novelizations, transmogrifying scripts into books for movies like Fame, Rain Man, Ice Castles, The Rose, Flatliners, The Fisher King, and several others.  I suppose it was good work if you could get it, and I'm actually glad she took these writing gigs because 34 years later here I am, replaying one of my favorite movies in my head courtesy of some words on an age-yellowed page--no matter how flowery the prose (as purple as a Maxfield Parrish sky!).

I'm still not quite ready to drink a liver-and-whey shake, though.


*I just checked Netflix and Heaven Can Wait is not available--streaming or on DVD.  How can this be?  We must correct this crime!

Friday Freebie: The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau, Black Flower by Young-ha Kim, The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell

Congratulations to Laura Hatfield, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Thrill-Bent by Jan Richman.

This week's book give-away is another Friday "Threebie."  One lucky reader will have the chance to win a trio of terrific novels: The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau (out in paperback at the end of this month), Black Flower by Young-ha Kim, and The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell.

Stephen Dau's debut novel The Book of Jonas has been called "a literary tour de force" by Kirkus Reviews; it also comes highly recommended by Library Journal: "A sobering and accomplished read meant to prick the conscience."  Here's the synopsis:

Jonas is fifteen when his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. An international relief organization sends Jonas to America, where he struggles to assimilate—adapting to his foster family, high school, a first love. Jonas meets Rose Henderson, the mother of the U.S. soldier responsible for saving his life. Christopher Henderson disappeared after the raid that destroyed Jonas’s village, and Rose yearns to know the truth. Gradually, a shocking and painful secret emerges. In spare, evocative prose, debut novelist Stephen Dau crafts a virtuosic novel about memory, the terrible choices made during war, and what happens when foreign disaster arrives at our own doorstep.

Earlier at the blog, I raved about the novel's opening paragraphs.

Black Flower by Young-ha Kim is also about the consequences of war, though it takes place a century earlier than the conflict in The Book of Jonas.  Here's the plot summary:

In 1904, as the Russo-Japanese War deepened, Asia was parceled out to rising powers and the Korean empire was annexed by Japan. Facing war and the loss of their nation, more than a thousand Koreans left their homes to seek possibility elsewhere—in unknown Mexico. After a long sea voyage, these emigrants—thieves and royals, priests and soldiers, orphans and entire families—disembark with the promise of land. Soon they discover the truth: they have been sold into indentured servitude. Aboard ship, an orphan, Ijeong, fell in love with the daughter of a noble; separated when the various haciendados claim their laborers, he vows to find her. After years of working in the punishing heat of the henequen fields, the Koreans are caught in the midst of a Mexican revolution. Some flee with Ijeong to Guatemala, where they found a New Korea amid Mayan ruins. A tale of star-crossed love, political turmoil, and the dangers of seeking freedom in a new world, Black Flower is an epic story based on a little-known moment in history.

Young-ha Kim's debut, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, earned him critical acclaim.  Since then, he has published five novels and four collections of short stories.

Screenwriter Lisa O'Donnell's debut novel, The Death of Bees, is also gathering a lot of good buzz (hey, you knew the pun was coming, right?).  The Spencer Daily Reporter had this to say: "The Death of Bees reminds me of Emma Donoghue’s Room. Maybe it’s because both authors originated from the United Kingdom. Maybe it’s because both stories carry a darkness brightened only by the innocence of the main characters."  Booklist gave it a starred review: "O’Donnell’s finely drawn characters display the full palette of human flaws and potential. Told in the alternating voices of Marnie, Nelly, and Lennie, this beautifully written page-turner will have readers fretting about what will become of the girls."  Library Journal wrote: "Quirky characters with distinct voices enliven this sometimes grim and often funny coming-of-age story in the vein of Karen Russell’s best seller Swamplandia!"  Here's the plot summary:

Marnie and her little sister, Nelly, are on their own now. Only they know what happened to their parents, Izzy and Gene, and they aren't telling. While life in Glasgow's Maryhill housing estate isn't grand, the girls do have each other. Besides, it's only a year until Marnie will be considered an adult and can legally take care of them both. Lennie, the old man next door, realizes that his young neighbors are alone and need his help. Or does he need theirs? Lennie takes them in—feeds them, clothes them, protects them—and something like a family forms. But soon enough, the sisters' friends, their teachers, and the authorities start asking tougher questions. As one lie leads to another, dark secrets about the girls' family surface, creating complications that threaten to tear them apart.

Here at the blog's "My First Time" series, Lisa recently wrote about her early encounter with war poetry.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Book of Jonas, Black Flower and The Death of Bees, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Feb. 7—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 8.  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 blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.