The New War Novel: I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby

I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them
by Jesse Goolsby
Reviewed by J. A. Moad II

I’ve spent two decades reading, critiquing and writing about war literature, and for the first time in years I found myself pausing to reread passages, reflecting on the language and lingering over a page as the images of I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them washed over me. By the time I finished reading this rich and compelling new novel, I realized something significant had occurred: the expectations of the genre have been transformed. The debut of this novel by Jesse Goolsby, nearly a decade and a half since 9/11, marks an important literary event. I’ll never view the fiction of our current wars in quite the same way.

As much as I wanted to reflect on this novel from simply a war literature perspective, I realized that doing so would be a disservice. Unlike much of the fiction emerging from a decade and a half of war, this novel defies expectations and transcends what many readers often expect from the genre. It not only captures the veteran experience, but it delves much deeper, mining the human longing for connection, a yearning for acceptance and the search for identity in this Twenty-First Century version of America. As the daughter of one Veteran reminds us in the book, “We’re only what we’ve been. What you want to be means nothing.”

Goolsby takes us on a journey with three soldiers. We’re transported back and forth across the years, from their shared time in Afghanistan to their days as boys growing up in a fragmented society, and to their lives years after the war. Through layered prose that resonates throughout the novel, he renders the complexities of young men transformed into soldiers. Unsentimental, with vivid and precise imagery, what emerges is a finely woven American tapestry — depictions of people struggling across the nation, from the East coast to the West, the small towns, landscapes and broken places within these young men, the soldiers they become, their families and the communities that helped define them. And yet, at its core, the work is about relationships, fathers and sons, lovers, sisters, mothers, and daughters, each of them rooted in a longing for acceptance and the desire to redefine a life forever altered by soldiers going off to war.

The novel examines the repercussions of our decisions as both individuals and as a nation. As a writer who understands the emotional toll of serving, Goolsby forces us to gaze unflinchingly inside the lives of these soldiers, the people who surround them, and the places they call home. Like all great literature, the work asks as much from the reader as it gives, prompting us to question, who are we, and how do move ahead in the aftermath of everything we’ve seen and done? As one character informs us:

He now knew that the pain of war, of the past two decades, of yesterday, would never recede all the way; the hurt simply finds new things to infect, things he has always loved—Christmas lights, interstate signs, hunting campfires, baseball games—but happiness and release also live somewhere among these things. He knew it was just a matter of finding them.

Whether it’s betrayal, the call of the sirens, sexual abuse, or the trauma of war, I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them examines the enduring mental and physical pain that resonates across generations. Goolsby’s piercing insights into these men’s lives allows us to walk alongside them — to discover what they and their families can teach us. Their experiences become ours, and what we discover and rediscover along the way is that joining the military is always about absence, about the search for a definitive experience, departure and loss, the changes that ensue, and a return to a place each soldier once called home. Each day becomes an attempt to reconcile between the life they once knew and a present that is inextricably scarred by their experiences.

This novel shows us all the scars, reminds us of the broken parts within each of us, and the fragile world on which we try to ground ourselves. It is a reminder that whenever we return, we listen for the call of our name, for some hint that we matter, an echo of who we were, always and forever searching for ourselves across the years in a place we’ve lost along the way.

J.A. Moad II is a former Air Force C-130 pilot and English Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He currently serves as the fiction editor and blogger for the journal, War, Literature & the Arts. His fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of the 2014 Consequence Magazine Fiction Award, and is currently editing a draft of a novel about an American military in a not too-distant future. He lives in Northfield, Minnesota with his family and flies for Delta Airlines.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee’s new novel can’t help but be a disappointment. Go Set a Watchman has a pole vault in hand, but it is bound to fall short of the high bar set by To Kill a Mockingbird. Readers have built such a wall of love around Mockingbird--a high, impenetrable wall--that any interloper who comes along, claiming the same pedigree, is immediately at a disadvantage. Fair? No. Inevitable? Yes. It doesn't help that Go Set a Watchman has a curious and rather dubious history. As the New York Times notes: “Though Watchman is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of Mockingbird. According to news accounts, Watchman was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Ms. Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became Mockingbird.”

I plan to start reading the Novel Everyone’s Talking About later today, and I’m going to give it a fair shake, but I’m a little worried about the rumblings I’ve heard from early reviews. Apparently, Go Set a Watchman transforms the beloved, square-jawed Atticus Finch character into a racist in his later years. Go Set a Watchman is set twenty years after the events of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel when Scout, now a grown-up Jean Louise, returns to Maycomb County, Alabama to visit her aging, ailing father. If what I’ve read is true, that visit will leave a sour stain on readers’ cherished memories of Atticus Finch, the character who was once voted the all-time seventh-greatest hero in literature. These are the times when I wish I could live in that proverbial cave so I could block out all the unnecessary noise surrounding the publication of Go Set a Watchman.

Here’s how I see it (in these last remaining hours before I actually read the book itself): I feel like a guy who’s just been told his favorite uncle--a smart, kind man who always told the greatest stories around the Thanksgiving table--has a son no one in the family had ever met. “Wonderful!” I think. “If he’s anything like his dad, I can’t wait to meet him.” And so I set a date to have this newfound cousin over for dinner, anticipating the fun times we’ll have together. But then, just before he arrives at my house, people start emailing me links to stories about Cousin Jack--disturbing accounts of unseemly behavior, lurid tales of his disreputable character, hints and allegations, scandals and rumors--all leading me to think he’s nothing like his father. One anonymous correspondent goes so far as to say, “You’ll wish he’d never been born.” As I set out the cheese-and-salami tray and uncork the chardonnay a few minutes before Jack is due to ring my doorbell, I try to push these negative insinuations from my head. I need to give him the benefit of the doubt. Having never met the guy, I feel he deserves a clean slate from the first handshake. Still, I know I’m in for an uncomfortable evening, given all I’ve been hearing.

Frankly, this video--a PBS American Masters “coda” from filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy who brought us the documentary Harper Lee: Hey, Boo--doesn’t do much to set my mind at ease. In fact, my trepidation is captured, unwittingly, by Lee’s dapper British agent Andrew Nurnberg when he says, “You can imagine, on the one hand, I was very excited that this existed; and on the other hand, as a professional, I was very wary because nobody ever knew about this. Perhaps this was something that shouldn’t have been published, perhaps this was something that wasn’t up to scratch....And the last thing you want to do in our profession is to milk something, or get enthusiastic about something that isn’t up to par.”

So, as I open the book to the first page, I am both excited and wary. But mostly wary. I have a feeling someone is about to kill my mockingbird. And we all know what Miss Maudie had to say about that: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

My First Time: Tom Williams

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 Tom Williams, the author of three books of fiction: The Mimic’s Own Voice, Don't Start Me Talkin’, and the new short story collection, Among The Wild Mulattos and Other Tales. His fiction has appeared in such online and print venues as Boulevard, Barrelhouse, The Collagist, Florida Review, and Cream City Review. Williams is the Chair of the English Department at Morehead State University. He lives in Kentucky with his wife and their two children.

My First Short Story Collection

I blame Raymond Carver. I blame Bobbie Ann Mason. I blame Reginald McKnight, too. And while we’re at it, Lorrie Moore and Sandra Cisneros—if you consider The House on Mango Street, as I did, back in 1990, a collection of stories. Of course, had I not taken a workshop with Lee K. Abbott, I might not have been exposed to so many authors who made their literary debut with short story collections: Buddy Nordan and Steve Yarbrough, Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg, to name a few more. I would have likely succumbed anyway in Houston, where I not only studied with Mary but also James Robison, and, learned, like many of my peers, to overlook or outright ignore novels and memoirs (they weren’t even a thing until Tobias Wolff and Beverly Lowry invented creative nonfiction). Instead, we shared with each other the slim volumes of Rick Bass, Pam Houston, Mary Gaitskill, Dagoberto Gilb, and Carolyn Ferrell.

Later, there were my contemporaries, those I came to know after I graduated from U of H and began my first academic job. The author of three published stories (it was a lot easier to get a job back then) and a creative dissertation yearning to be a collection, I reveled, as a reader, in the accomplishments of Cris Mazza, Jessica Treat, George Singleton, Tom Franklin, Junot Diaz. Kevin Brockmeier, Thomas Glave, Jhumpa Lahiri. ZZ Packer. As the so-called writer I was, however, I read one page with admiration, the next with envy. Some of these people were younger than I. When would my turn come?

It didn’t help either that the past offered so many remarkable debut collections: Goodbye, Columbus. Hue and Cry. The Little Disturbances of Man. Gorilla, My Love. Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Uncle Tom’s Children. In Our Time. Hell, before all those gigantic and ponderous best sellers, James Michener appeared on the scene with a modest collection (and soon Pulitzer Prize winner and source of Broadway and Hollywood musicals), Tales of the South Pacific. And who can overlook those titles that, while not first book length fictions, helped establish their writers in the pantheon? A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Nine Stories. The Magic Barrel. Lost in the Funhouse. Airships, oh my god, Airships. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Distortions. Rock Springs.

I could go on.

But I hope by now the reader has figured it out: somewhere in my early writing life I became consumed by the idea that my first published book of fiction should be, had to be, a collection of short stories. Perhaps it was the sheen of all those Vintage Contemporary covers. There was also the parallel between the record album and the story collection—we still listened to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Nevermind and Exile in Guyville then. Story collections possessed, frankly, a greater degree of cool than novels. Tom Clancy wrote novels. Lydia Davis wrote stories. Whom did you want to hang with? Furthermore, one assumed novels were always flawed, even a slim and elegant number of the most delicate construction. A short story collection, with eight to a dozen winners (previously published in all the right journals) could near perfection, a state which all we word-worriers were so eager to achieve.

It was with all this and more in my mind that I passed many a bookless year trying to craft my collection. I sent off a copy of my dissertation to the Drue Heinz or Iowa competition sometime shortly after graduation but little came of that, save for the debit from my checking account for the submission fee. Undaunted, I wrestled the next group of stories into into various book length manuscripts, which I submitted to contests. Individual stories saw their way into print, yet I saw little to indicate my talents at short story writing matched my ambition. No runner up or finalist accolades for my collections. No inquiries from smaller presses or agents. For a time I left behind short story writing entirely and drafted a novel (oh, the shame I felt when I walked past my copies of Dubliners and Labyrinths) but its fate mirrored that of my story collections, and I wondered if I might not get a turn, any turn, at all.

Did I ever get close? Let’s say a terrific and uncommonly helpful writer (he’s named somewhere above) once told me he would aid me as best he could to get that debut collection in the world. Imagine I wasted no time in mailing him a copy, which he then praised and said I should send it with his recommendation to one university press who still published fiction. Pretend that press said no and the author recommended another university press, who kept my stories almost a year before offering some faint praise and a big fat no thanks. (At least they returned the manuscript.) If I didn’t think ninety-five percent of the writers my age have a similar story, I’d pull this one out at every AWP and just wait for the free sympathy drinks to come at the hotel bar.

In the end, though, what prevented my publishing a debut short story collection should be counted as a success: I published a novella, The Mimic’s Own Voice, which had once been part of a collection. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little bit sad watching my dream of book publication come at the expense of my dream of a debut story collection. This is ridiculous, of course. There is never a time to say no to a book being published when the publisher’s not a scam artist. I’m so grateful that book came out. I’ve heard from real readers that they feel the same. And I’m honored that my second book, Don’t Start Me Talkin’, a novel (that coincidentally started as a short story), is on bookshelves other than my own.

So it is now—nearly three full decades since I harbored the dream of seeing a short story collection come out—that my wish has come true. While in no way my first written collection, it is my first published collection: Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales. And as the good people at Texas Review Press have done such amazing work to get it ready, I feel it is my most representative book, constructed of tales as recent as two years ago and others conceived of and written in the previous century. Moreover, its existence clarifies to me exactly why I once viewed the debut collection as so indispensable to the writing life: the short story itself was and still is a form only a writer cares about. No one in the seat next to you says on the plane, “You’re a writer? Lemme tell you this idea I have for a short story.” Your third cousin doesn’t say at the reunion, “Living with my fourth wife was stranger than any short story you could write.” Yet when I made my commitment to writing fiction, it was through a short story. A bad one. One that even revised I could only muster a B plus from a generous instructor. Yet that achievement established, in my mind, the notion that I could do this again. That I might even do better. Which is why when those stories I read—“Where I’m Calling From,” “Shiloh,” “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse,” “How to Become a Writer,” “Hairs”—led me to the books they could be found in, the stories I wanted, no, needed to tell, started to appear.

So forgive me for getting a little lyrical and nostalgic: but the book I hold in my hands, my first published collection of stories, seems to have on every page some emblem of the writer I was when I didn’t know what I was doing, when every story I read entered my imagination in a way that altered what I might do with characters, plots, point of view, scene and setting. Don’t get me wrong: I think I’m a pretty good novelist. I want to write more. My best book might be a novella. But the short story got to me first. It made me want to be the writer I am today.

Sunday Sentence: “The Sick Wife” by Jane Kenyon

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.*

               Dry cleaning swung and gleamed on hangers
               in the cars of the prosperous.

“The Sick Wife” by Jane Kenyon, from Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

*I’m going to break my rules this week with a note of explanation. For the past six weeks, I’ve made my way through Otherwise in deliberately slow fashion so I could savor Jane Kenyon’s poetry. Today, I turned the last page--an act of both joy and melancholy, as happens whenever I finish a great book and am loath to leave it. “The Sick Wife” is the last poem Jane wrote before her death. I’ll turn this over to her husband, the poet Donald Hall, who writes in an Afterword positioned just before this final poem:

     Jane died of leukemia on 22 April 1995. The disease was diagnosed in January of 1994, in a virulent form; chemotherapy could induce remission but could not sustain it, and only a bone marrow transplant (BMT) offered hope for extended life. In October of 1994, we flew to Seattle where the Fred C. Hutchinson Cancer Center takes on hard cases. A new marrow from an anonymous donor was infused on November 18th, Jane was discharged to a Seattle apartment December 20th, and we returned to New Hampshire with good hope on 24 February 1995.
     For six weeks her blood counts improved. She was weak and impaired, as expected after a BMT; it would take a year for her to recover. She could read little, and she could not write because an anti-rejection drug disabled her fingers. Nevertheless, she began work on this book, proposed by Graywolf in November as she underwent the transplant. Jane wanted to omit early poems that she had later outdone, and slighter things from all her books. Following her directions, I photocopied selections from her books and assembled new uncollected poems; she had published six, and there were fourteen more in her study--more finished poems than she had remembered. She intended to complete the book as her strength came back. But on 11 April 1995, bloodwork revealed that leukemia had returned. There was nothing to do and she died eleven days later, at home in our bed as she wished.
     In the first five days of her dying, we finished this book. I read her titles of poems selected and omitted. I read passages aloud when I argued for the inclusion of a poem she doubted....
     Of the twenty finished new poems, only “Eating the Cookies” came after her illness, on the occasion of my mother’s death in March of 1994. In late May and early June....[Jane] enjoyed a good patch. Her mental and physical energy allowed her sessions at her desk. After readmission to the hospital, 21 June 1994, she finished no more poems.
     She started one in March of 1995, back in New Hampshire before the leukemia returned, but she did not survive to finish it. On March 8th, with Jane slowly improving, I left her for eight hours. Our friend Mary Jane Ogmundson stayed with her, and Jane dictated a draft of “The Sick Wife.” Typed, it lay on a reading table beside her chair. On several occasions she dictated a revision, and a new draft replaced the old. She would have made more changes if she had lived. I put it here as her last word.

Click here to read “The Sick Wife” in its entirety

Advice: That’ll Be 5 Cents, Please

Opinions: just like certain anatomical parts, we all have ’em. I was recently invited by the good folks at Bloom to dispense a few. Specifically, I was asked to share the best writing advice I ever received. I don’t know if this is the best advice I’ve ever packed in my toolkit (which is full of hammers, screwdrivers and pliers from Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Stephen King, Dani Shapiro and others), but it’s certainly something which has stuck with me over the years:

       I attended grad school in Fairbanks, Alaska—a cold, winterdark place to hone one’s craft. Because I worked during the day as an active-duty soldier stationed at Fort Wainwright, most of my classes were at night. Though it’s been 25 years, I can still remember stumbling out of the bitter, below-zero air into those classrooms where other workshop students waited to tear apart my stories (which, in hindsight, deserved to be shredded to pieces). Once my fingers thawed and uncurled from tiny wooden claws and I was able to hold a pen upright, I started taking notes with the earnest sincerity of a young writer who knows he’s an empty vessel. Our instructor was Frank Soos (author of Unified Field Theory), a tall, thin Virginian whose soft, gentle voice could take the sting off the very worst criticisms. Frank chose his words carefully, so when he did dispense advice it came like slow drips of honey. I bent over my notebook and took down as much as I could with my half-numb writing hand. I remember one night in particular when Frank was on a roll, he gave us three things to think about that have stuck with me over the past two decades:

       1. Don’t let characters off the hook in uncomfortable situations. Stay with the scene until the resolution. Keep the characters in the situation.

       2. What does each character want? To what degree will he or she go to get it?

       3. Each sentence should reward the reader. If nothing is happening in the sentence, if it’s just spinning its wheels, then it needs to be cut.

I was joined at Bloom by four other talented writers (including Marian Palaia, author of The Given World). I think my favorite of all the nuggets of wisdom comes from Robert Gipe (Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel) who offers this writing tip (a variation on something movie director Billy Wilder once said):

Come up with a character people care about.  Put that character up a tree.  Set the tree on fire.

Anyone got a match?

Friday Freebie: I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby

Congratulations to Sabrina Holland, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Ana of California by Andi Teran.

This week's book giveaway is I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby. Not only does Goolsby's debut novel have one of the best titles of the year, it comes loaded with outstanding writing which burrows into the lives of soldiers before, during and after war. It's one of the best novels about the veteran condition in America I've read in years--right up there with Phil Klay's Redeployment.  Here's more about I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them from the publisher:

In this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life. Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could at any second turn out to be foes. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing. Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway. Jesse Goolsby casts backward and forward in time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Hailed by Robert Olen Butler as a "major literary event," I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them is a work of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom, and a debut novel from a writer to watch.

If you’d like a chance at winning I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them, simply 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 July 16, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on July 17.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week 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.

Book Radar: Ron Rash, Geraldine Brooks, Rick Moody, Mark Lawrence

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.


1.  From Publishers Lunch comes the announcement of this sale:

Ron Rash's untitled novel, about two brothers who share responsibility for a murder, and a collection of poetry, to Megan Lynch at Ecco.

If it weren't for the Oxford comma, I might have thought this was a single work about two killers who also write poetry. But I assume this is a two-fer deal, which means we'll get a novel and another poetry book from one of my favorite contemporary authors. Here's hoping this new collection follows in the footsteps of his earlier release, Waking, which I particularly enjoyed.

2.  This next novel coming from Geraldine Brooks (author of People of the Book and March) really has me intrigued: Horse, about a famous racehorse and a missing masterpiece, moving from match races in the antebellum South to the salons and paint-spattered studios of the 1950s New York art world at the dawn of abstract expressionism, set as the Civil War ignites, threatening both a beloved horse and an irreplaceable painting. It's forthcoming from Viking....in 2020. In the meantime, Brooks fans can anticipate this Fall's release: The Secret Chord, a novel about Biblical King David's life. Cue "Hallelujah."

3.  Here's another book to put on your long-range radar: Rick Moody's The Long Accomplishment, a new memoir on marriage and love. It will be a month-by-month account of the first year of his second marriage, to artist Laurel Nakadate,  and will be published in 2017.

4.  Finally, of possible interest for those of you who are fans of Nuns With Guns literature comes Red Sister by Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns. This new one is billed as an "epic fantasy trilogy about a girl of unique abilities who is taken away by an abbess to join an order of fighting nuns" and is scheduled for publication in Spring 2017.

My First Time: Naomi Elana Zener

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 Naomi Elana Zener, author of the novel Deathbed Dimes as well as satire fiction, which is posted on her blog Satirical Mama. Naomi blogs for Huffington Post and her articles have been published by Kveller, Absrd Comedy, and Erica Ehm’s Yummy Mummy Club. She’s currently working on her second novel. You can connect with Naomi on her website or on Twitter @satiricalmama.

The First Time I Discovered Someone

(Other Than Family) Had Read My Novel

Six years ago, when I embarked on the journey to write my debut novel (or as I lovingly think of it as my third child) Deathbed Dimes, doing so was never more than an exercise in checking off a bucket list item. It was an attempt to do something outside of my wheelhouse—I’m an entertainment lawyer by day—something that I thought would be nothing more than a futile attempt to try my hand at an endeavor that would never see the light of day. After my beta readers (i.e., my husband, mother, and father) read an early draft of my manuscript and obviously gushed all over it (i.e., thought I had a modicum of talent but had to do considerable work to get anyone else to read it), I passed it along to an editor friend of my husband’s who advised that I “had talent” and should pursue eventual publication of the novel. After spending five dry years toiling on draft after draft of my book, much to my surprise, Deathbed Dimes was published, by a bona fide independent publisher. Besieged with a surge of postpartum hormones raging through me—I’d given birth to my second child during the pre-publication editorial period—I wondered, like any mother would, whether when my book breached the cold, harsh light of day of this cruel world, would anyone be kind to my literary child. Moreover, I questioned if anyone, other than those obliged to read it by virtue of their kinship to me, would actually read it.

Leading up to my baby’s publication date, I held readings for audiences, atheistically praying that at least one of the attendees would eventually buy my book, or at least invest the effort into borrowing it from the library, when it came out. To describe the groupings of people in attendance, as “crowds” would be an embellishment of elephantine proportions—after all, my small, independent publisher was woefully plagued by the similar anorexic marketing support experienced by authors at many independent presses—but nonetheless I was and am grateful to these blood-unrelated individuals who came out to support my effort. I was delighted when some even asked me questions about the actual book and writing process, instead of the usual questions I did my best to dodge about what I was paid as an advance, or whether I’d sold the film rights to Deathbed Dimes, or how well I thought the book would do. I remind you, I’m an entertainment lawyer, not a swami. I celebrated my novel’s release with an intimate launch party, where I did not sell copies of my book, mostly because I had nary a clue as to who reads paperbacks versus e-books, and didn’t want to turn off any potential consumers by not having the format they preferred. Thus, apart from the editorial team at my publisher and my obliging family members who had no choice but to read version upon version of my pre-publication manuscript, I had no guaranteed book buyers. Again, I found myself wondering whether anyone would read Deathbed Dimes.

Then one magical day, not long after my book’s release, I was waiting in line to pay the cashier at Toys R Us, blowing through the non-existent royalties I had yet to receive on non-descript “Made in China” toys for my kids, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. My kids were off somewhere destroying the place with my husband, so I had no clue who would be invading my personal space when it clearly was not yet my turn to pay. I turned around to face a smiling woman. I didn’t know this person.

“Hi,” I offered with trepidation.

“Aren’t you Naomi Zener?” she asked.

“Yes. Do I know you?”

“I was at your book reading!” She tugged at her husband’s arm. “It is her, honey.”

My sceptical scowl, the one strangers are generally met with as my mother always taught me not to talk to strangers, vanished and was replaced by a goofy grin. My first fan, I thought to myself.

“I just loved your book.”

“Thank you so much. That it entertained you means I did my job.” I began to rummage through my purse to see if I had a pen, not bothering to stop and realize she probably didn’t carry my novel with her everywhere she went.

The man standing in line with her spoke up: “See, honey. I told you not to be afraid to ask her if it was her. Writers like to know people are reading their books.”

“Your husband’s absolutely right,” I said.

“I just really loved the characters and the story,” she went on. “Oh my god, that Coco. When can I read the sequel?”

“Next!” the cashier bellowed. It was my turn to pay for my items. But, who was I to cut off my sole reader from asking me questions simply to allow the cashier to do her job and not piss off everyone in the ten-person deep line? I shifted uncomfortably. My fan continued to rattle off a litany of questions, but I was distracted by the cashier’s need for me to pay for my stuff.

“How did you come up with the idea for the estate case? Did you do a lot of legal research? Are you Joely? What’s going to happen in the sequel?”

“Sequel? Oh, I haven’t thought that far ahead…”

My eyes darted around, searching for my husband to take care of the pesky matter of paying for the toys, but he was nowhere in sight. I turned to face the cashier. Hastily, I dumped the contents of my cart on the table without first sorting through the crap my kids had included in what was originally supposed to be a one-item per child haul. I then turned back to my first fan.

“Ma’am, do you think you could focus?” the cashier asked. She tapped her nails on the cash register as she masticated her gum.

“Um, sure.” I returned my attention to my fan. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I have to sort through the stuff my kids threw in the cart.”

“No problem. I totally understand. I’m a mom, too.” She pointed to her kids in the cart behind her being attended to by her husband.

“Thanks for understanding. Listen, once I’ve finished paying, I’d be happy to sign your copy of my book if you have it with you.”

Suddenly, it was her turn for her grin to evaporate and be replaced with a grimace.

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said quickly. “I shouldn’t have expected you to have it with you.” I’m such a schmuck, I thought.

“It’s not that. I bought the e-book. Sorry.”

“Next!”

Sunday Sentence: “The Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

It was an hour of thaw, with spring voices in the warm wind, and wherever there was light enough you could see drops glistening and falling. You could feel the cold melting out of the stars and the bare trees and shrubbery toward Stony Brook turning lush in the darkness.

“The Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Friday Freebie: Ana of California by Andi Teran

Congratulations to Emma Cazabonne, winner of last week’s big 33-book giveaway.

This week’s book giveaway is Ana of California by Andi Teran. This new novel is sure to appeal to fans of Anne of Green Gables...or anyone who likes a fresh take on classic literature...or anyone who enjoys a good book--frankly, anyone who likes to read. And now, a word from the publisher on the merits of Ana of California...

In the grand tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Andi Teran’s captivating debut novel offers a contemporary twist on a beloved classic. Fifteen-year-old orphan Ana Cortez has just blown her last chance with a foster family. It’s a group home next—unless she agrees to leave East Los Angeles for a farm trainee program in Northern California. When she first arrives, Ana can’t tell a tomato plant from a blackberry bush, and Emmett Garber is skeptical that this slight city girl can be any help on his farm. His sister Abbie, however, thinks Ana might be just what they need. Ana comes to love Garber Farm, and even Emmett has to admit that her hard work is an asset. But when she inadvertently stirs up trouble in town, Ana is afraid she might have ruined her last chance at finding a place to belong. Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers, had this to say about the book: “Andi Teran’s first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms.”

BONUS!  The publisher will also include this lovely edition of Anne of Green Gables in the Friday Freebie prize package. Shirley you’ll want to enter the contest now!

If you’d like a chance at winning Ana of California (and the Penguin edition of Anne of Green Gables), simply 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 July 9, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on July 10.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week 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.

Front Porch Books: July 2015 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, independent bookstores, 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 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 note that, in nearly every case, I haven't had a chance to read these books.  I'm just as excited as you are to dive into these pages.

The Perfect Son
by Barbara Claypole White
(Lake Union Publishing)

Imperfect families are my bag and Barbara Claypole White seems to have perfectly tapped into that domestic dysfunction in her new novel. The Perfect Son is next up in my ebook reading queue, elbowing aside other books I’d been planning to read. Take that, Donna Tartt and Judy Blume!

Jacket Copy:  From a distance, Felix Fitzwilliam, the son of an old English family, is a good husband and father. But, obsessed with order and routine, he’s a prisoner to perfection. Disengaged from the emotional life of his North Carolina family, Felix has let his wife, Ella, deal with their special-needs son by herself. A talented jewelry designer turned full-time mother, Ella is the family rock…until her heart attack shatters their carefully structured existence. Now Harry, a gifted teen grappling with the chaos of Tourette’s, confronts a world outside his parents’ control, one that tests his desire for independence. As Harry searches for his future, and Ella adapts to the limits of her failing health, Felix struggles with his past and present roles. To prevent the family from being ripped apart, they must each bend with the inevitability of change and reinforce the ties that bind.

Opening Lines:  Passengers in the row behind muttered the Lord’s Prayer. Ella, however, had no plans to make her final peace with God or die in the clouds.

Blurbworthiness:  “With empathy and heartbreaking clarity, Barbara Claypole White explores a family on the precipice of collapse. With the unexamined past coloring their present, a father’s only hope to accept his son’s limitations and be strong for his ailing wife is in finding the resilience to face his own imperfections. The Perfect Son offers insight, compassion and hope.”  (Randy Susan Meyers, author of Accidents of Marriage)

Kitchens of the Great Midwest
by J. Ryan Stradal
(Pamela Dorman Books)

I suppose it would be a lazy way out to call J. Ryan Stradal’s debut novel “Garrison Keillor meets Like Water For Chocolate”—lazy because every quirky-literary book set in Minnesota gets the Keillor comparison, and every “foodie” novel is likened to Laura Esquivel’s 1989 bestseller—but I think the Keillor-Esquivel treatment might be rather apt in this case. Kitchens of the Great Midwest looks like great fun, set in a place “where all the cooks are strong, all the stovetops are good-looking, and all the lutefisks are above average.”

Jacket Copy:  When Lars Thorvald’s wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine—and a dashing sommelier—he’s left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He’s determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter—starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. From Scandinavian lutefisk to hydroponic chocolate habaneros, each ingredient represents one part of Eva’s journey as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club, culminating in an opulent and emotional feast that’s a testament to her spirit and resilience. Each chapter in J. Ryan Stradal’s startlingly original debut tells the story of a single dish and character, at once capturing the zeitgeist of the Midwest, the rise of foodie culture, and delving into the ways food creates community and a sense of identity. By turns quirky, hilarious, and vividly sensory, Kitchens of the Great Midwest is an unexpected mother-daughter story about the bittersweet nature of life—its missed opportunities and its joyful surprises. It marks the entry of a brilliant new talent.

Opening Lines:  Lars Thorvald loved two women. That was it, he thought in passing, while he sat on the cold concrete steps of his apartment building. Perhaps he would’ve loved more than two, but it just didn’t seem like things were going to work out like that.

Blurbworthiness:  “Tender, funny, and moving, J. Ryan Stradal’s debut novel made me crave my mother’s magic cookie bars...and every good tomato I’ve ever had the privilege of eating. Kitchens of the Great Midwest manages to be at once sincere yet sharply observed, thoughtful yet swiftly paced, and the lives of its fallible, realistic, and complicated characters mattered to me deeply. It’s a fantastic book.”  (Edan Lepucki, author of California)

Speak
by Louisa Hall
(Ecco)

I’m drawn to novels that push the envelope and this new one from Louisa Hall has all the makings of a damn fine pusher. Fans of Cloud Atlas, take note!

Jacket Copy:  A thoughtful, poignant novel that explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence—illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding. In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive. A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend’s mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls. Each of these characters is attempting to communicate across gaps—to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them. In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human—shrinking rapidly with today’s technological advances—echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people. Though each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, all five characters share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.

Blurbworthiness:  “Speak is that rarest of finds: a novel that doesn’t remind me of any other book I’ve ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human.”  (Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven)

Excommunicados
by Charles Haverty
(University of Iowa Press)

I can always count on the University of Iowa’s John Simmons Short Fiction Award to consistently deliver some of the best short story collections to my doorstep (see also: Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino, Dancing in the Movies by Robert Boswell, When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds, and Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes by Merrill Feitell, among many others). Charles Haverty’s Excommunicados looks like it will be another winner.  From the first line (see below) to the last (She smiles and speaks one horrible syllable. “Next?”), this is a collection I could fall in love with at the whisper of one horrible syllable.

Jacket Copy:  By turns haunting, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Charles Haverty’s debut collection charts the journeys of men, women, and children cast out of familiar territory into emotional terra incognita where people and things are rarely what they seem. These twelve stories are populated with ex-nuns and Freedom Riders, Chaucer scholars and strippers, out-of-work comedy writers and presidents, navigating their way through bedrooms and emergency rooms, backyard burial parties and airplane crash sites, the Piazza San Marco and the post-apocalyptic suburbs of Boston. A sixteen-year-old boy unearths grisly evidence of his genteel grandfather’s racist past. At his sister’s booze-soaked destination wedding, a recovering alcoholic English professor is finagled into ghostwriting their unreliable father’s nuptial toast. A small town lawyer’s Edenic existence is jeopardized when his wife’s younger brother is arrested for a rash of local burglaries. In the wake of her daughter’s brush with disaster in the Haiti earthquake, a mother finds herself drawn down a dark neighborhood sidewalk toward what might or might not be a dead body. And in the title story—the first of three linked stories—a pious altar boy confronts the twin mysteries of sex and death through the auspices of a classmate’s divorced mother. There are secrets at the center of each of these daring and original stories—secrets that separate these characters from one another but grow in the mind and the heart, connecting them with all of us.

Opening Lines:  The happiest moment of my father’s life was finding his name on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

Blurbworthiness:  “Charles Haverty drives right into the heart of the storm—storms of doubt, storms of anger, storms of perverse desire, storms of regret. Here are stories that ask enormous questions about faith and doubt, love and death, justice and forgiveness, questions that are always anchored to real human characters in a gorgeously rendered physical reality. I loved the pointillist precision of Haverty’s descriptions: ‘sudsy’ flowers cover caskets, telephone receivers smell like ‘cigarettes and Juicy Fruit,’ pink salt flies through red taillights. You might hear echoes of Jesus’ Son and Flannery O’Connor and Bruce Springsteen and the Book of Ecclesiastes, but these tales belong to Haverty. His scenes are charged with emotion and wonderfully, discomfitingly true to life, whether they unfold inside a Catholic church or a couple’s bedroom. Haverty blurs the sacred and the profane, with plenty of jokes in between. (A father admits to his son at a destination wedding: ‘I know I’m the last resort at this resort.’) Haverty does a beautiful job of revealing how the present moment is always haunted by past and future. In every one of his artful stories, you’ll hear ‘the ghost of another conversation bleeding through the wires.’” (Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia)

The Small Backs of Children
by Lidia Yuknavitch
(Harper)

Sometimes all you need is an impassioned Tweet from a trusted reader.  Lidia Yuknavitch’s new novel was already in my ever-growing To-Be-Read pile (aka Mt. NeverRest), but Michele Filgate’s holy-shit Tweet bumped it up to a spot near the summit. It also doesn’t hurt to have a bold and brilliant cover design to nudge me even closer.

Jacket Copy:  In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds—east and west, real and virtual—collide? A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

Opening Lines:  On a winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other. It is a year after the blast that has atomized her entire family in front of her eyes. She is six. It is a house she has lived in with a widow woman who took her in—orphan of war, girl of nothingness.

Blurbworthiness:  “There are a handful of books that have changed the way I move through the world. The Small Backs of Children is one of them. Lidia Yuknavitch writes with sly, subversive, nervy, compassionate madness. She is one of the great American writers.” (Chelsea Cain, author of One Kick)

Honey from the Lion
by Matthew Neill Null
(Lookout Books)

At least on the surface, Matthew Neill Null’s debut novel bears some resemblance to my favorite historical novels: Serena by Ron Rash, The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux and Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent. I’m really looking forward to getting lost inside Null’s pages. Judging by the opening pages, I might get so deep into this book, I should carry a bag of breadcrumbs to mark my path so I can find my way back out.

Jacket Copy:  In this lyrical and suspenseful debut novel, a turn-of-the-century logging company decimates ten thousand acres of virgin forest in the West Virginia Alleghenies and transforms a brotherhood of timber wolves into revolutionaries. After fleeing his childhood farm in the wake of scandal, Cur Greathouse arrives at the Cheat River Paper & Pulp Company’s Blackpine camp, where an unlikely family of sawyers offers him new hope. But the work there is exacting and dangerous with men’s worth measured in ledger columns. Whispers of a union strike pass from bunk to bunk. Against the rasp of the misery whip and the crash of felled hemlock and red spruce, Cur encounters a cast of characters who will challenge his loyalties: a minister grasping after his dwindling congregation, a Syrian peddler who longs to put down his pack and open a store, a slighted Slovenian wife turned activist, and a trio of reckless land barons. Cur must accept or betray the call to lead a rebellion and finally reconcile a forbidden love.

Opening Lines:  Conflict begets commerce, and theirs was the American Civil War.

Blurbworthiness:  “This novel is a master performance. Industry, capital, religion, class, race, and unionization are all rendered through the fully realized loggers, vigilantes, industrialists, and preachers that Matthew Neill Null conjures so utterly and empathetically. You will be awed and emptied by this book, and the truth and humanity within it. Honey from the Lion isn’t just beautiful—it’s important. Read it now.”  (Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek)

Scrapper
by Matt Bell
(Soho Press)

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the decline and fall of Detroit (from autopsies to beautiful terrible ruins), but the one person I really want to hear from is Matt Bell. He follows up his previous novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, with what looks like will be a beautiful autopsy not only of a city but of its citizens as well. Of course, the announcement of a new Matt Bell novel on our shelves is always a great and wonderful thing. As Benjamin Percy notes: “Matt Bell does not write sentences—he writes spells.”

Jacket Copy:  Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again. Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, Its lost houses and its shuttered factories, its boxing gyms and storefront churches, anywhere hope lingers. With precise and powerful prose, it asks: What transgressions would we allow if we believed they would ensure the safety of the people we loved? What do we owe for our crimes, even those committed to protect our charges from harm?

Opening Lines:  See the body of the plant, one hundred years of patriots’ history, fifty years an American wreck. The remainder of a city within the city, a fortress of squared buildings a mile long and five blocks wide.

Blurbworthiness:  “Like the very best novels, Matt Bell’s dark and suspenseful Scrapper works on so many levels that it’s difficult to describe in just a few words, but what I can tell you is that it’s ultimately about love and death, and that people will still be reading it when all of America, not just Detroit, is crumbling under the weight of its mistakes.”  (Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time)

The Sweetheart Deal
by Polly Dugan
(Little, Brown)

My wife and I often talk about who will take our place when one of us dies. After much thought and a couple bottles of wine, we come up with an answer: no one. We agree I’ll spend my widowerhood shuffling, unshaven, down the sidewalks of Butte, Montana in my slippers, mumbling the lyrics to our favorite love songs; while Jean will stare vacantly at a TV screen which plays increasingly inane “reality” shows over the years. Neither of us will be completely happy, but we’ll get by, emotionally limping through the rest of our lives. In her debut novel, Polly Dugan suggests another option for happily-married couples: make your best friend (preferably a bachelor/bachelorette) sign a contract to be the one who’ll step in when you die. I’m sticking with my original slippers/shuffle/mumble plan, but I’m also very interested in reading Dugan’s bittersweet romance to learn how someone else might work out their life-after-death melancholy.

Jacket Copy:  Leo has long joked that, in the event of his death, he wants his best friend Garrett, a lifelong bachelor, to marry his wife, Audrey. One drunken night, he goes so far as to make Garrett promise to do so. Then, twelve years later, Leo, a veteran firefighter, dies in a skiing accident. As Audrey navigates her new role as widow and single parent, Garrett quits his job in Boston and buys a one-way ticket out west. Before long, Audrey's feelings for Garrett become more than platonic, and Garrett finds himself falling for Audrey, her boys, and their life together in Portland. When Audrey finds out about the drunken pact from years ago, though, the harmless promise that brought Garrett into her world becomes the obstacle to his remaining in it.

Opening Lines:  I know Garrett never thought I was serious when I told him, If I die, I need you to marry Audrey. Make my wife your bride—she’s meant to be a bride, not my widow. And I know she didn’t think I was either, but I’d never been more serious about a thing in my life.

Blurbworthiness:  “The Sweetheart Deal hits all of my favorite topics: loss, pain, friendship, betrayal—but ultimately love. It’s the most romantic story I’ve read in years.”  (Elin Hilderbrand, author of Beautiful Day)

All This Life
by Joshua Mohr
(Soft Skull Press)

I love books that take chances—novels reaching out with both hands to grab great heaping armloads of characters, narratives, and ideas. Starting with that key word in the title—“All”—Joshua Mohr’s new novel looks like it will “go big or go home.” Based on its first few pages (especially that terrific verbal rush of the first chapter’s first sentence), I think this one will be a bona fide winner. It’s going straight to the top of Mount NeveRest.

Jacket Copy: Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line. In land-locked Nevada, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he—or his online profiles—claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form. With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.

Opening Lines:  It’s another brittle day, all of them inching over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, their typical trek to cluttered desks, schlepping with their hangovers, their NPR, carpools and podcasts, prescription pills and nicotine patches, their high-def depressions, Lasik so they can see all their designer disaffections, lipstick smeared on bleached teeth, bags under their eyes or Botox time machines, bald spots or slick dye jobs, bellies wedged in pants or carved Pilates bodies, their urges to call in sick, their woulda coulda shouldas.

Blurbworthiness:  “Joshua Mohr is a rabble-rouser whose first four novels have earned him a near cultish following. Now, with All This Life, Mohr wades into the dark territory of cyber voyeurism, internet shaming, tweets, YouTube, and streaming anger. Trouble spreads like wildfire in this compelling novel, and with brutal honesty, and empathy for his diverse cast of characters, Mohr refuses to flinch.” (Tom Barbash, author of Stay Up With Me)