Death is a Cartoon: Dr. Seuss and War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite

What if Dr. Seuss went to war in Iraq?*

Of all the things to love about War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite (and there are many things to love about the novel), I was particularly struck by the colorful Seussian paintings one character, Mani, puts down on canvas as a way of dealing with her husband’s deployment to Iraq. Robinson and Kovite have said that Mani is swept up in an “emotional tornado” during this period of the book and the candy-colored cartoons which depict exploding Humvees and severed limbs are just one way the stateside spouse copes with the pain of separation.

I’ll have more on the paintings--and a conversation with Robinson and Kovite--in a minute, but first a bit about the novel in case you haven’t already read it (and if you haven’t, why not? This Veterans Day would be a good time to start reading one of the better works of fiction to come out of the Iraq War).

War of the Encyclopaedists tells the story of best friends Mickey Montauk and Halifax Corderoy who are living a comfortable life in Seattle as the novel opens. They throw elaborate monthly parties with themes arbitrarily lifted from encyclopedias; one bash centers around “conspiracy,” another is about “monocularity” (their apartment is decorated with cyclopean monsters, monocled British financiers and a chandelier made of periscopes while Mickey and Hal go around wearing eye patches). They’re dubbed “The Encyclopaedists of Capitol Hill” and are the hit of Seattle’s hipster crowd. When we first meet them, Hal and Mickey seem to have their futures sewn up neatly. As the jacket copy of the novel tells us, “At twenty-three, they had planned to move together to Boston for graduate school, but global events have intervened: Montauk has just learned that his National Guard unit will deploy to Baghdad at the end of the summer. In the confusion of this altered future, Corderoy is faced with a moral dilemma: his girlfriend Mani has just been evicted and he must decide whether or not to abandon her when she needs him most.”

In the short time he’s been dating her, Hal hasn’t quite progressed to the next level of commitment with Mani. As Robinson and Kovite write:

Corderoy loved Mani because he couldn’t figure her out, and he had a deep need to solve things. She was a Rubik’s cube with one too many sides. No matter how he manipulated her, twisting her colors this way and that, she would always present another face, not quite aligned.

During the night of the “conspiracy party,” other things happen which will shape the lives of these characters. After Mani falls asleep, Hal seeks Mickey’s advice on what to do about his girlfriend’s homeless situation; he’s not quite ready to ask her to move across the country to Boston with him--that’s just too fast too soon. “Look,” Mickey says, “you can love her and still leave.” And so that’s what Hal does: he slips away in the middle of the night, leaving Mani asleep at Mickey’s place. When she wakes up and learns she’s been abandoned, a distraught Mani runs out of the apartment into the street and is struck by a car. This, in a sense, is a major turning point in the novel, one which thrusts the characters into a strange love triangle which will eventually see Hal move to Boston alone and Mickey hook up with Mani (whom he has nursed during her recovery). Shortly before his deployment to Iraq, Mickey marries Mani even though they aren’t sure if they’re really in love with each other. It’s complicated and I’m not going to spell it all out for you here because you need to experience it through the book itself, but I wanted you to have the setup for this excerpt from War of the Encyclopaedists which shows how Mani, missing her husband and trying to deal with her complicated feelings about the invasion of Iraq, starts moving her paintbrush across a large canvas in bold and startling strokes.

The authors have generously allowed me to reprint these two excerpts from their novel. I hope you enjoy these paragraphs as much as I did (and then stick around for my interview with Robinson and Kovite to learn more about how they collaborated on this and their next novel).

*    *    *

Shortly thereafter, she moved into a studio in Allston.

It was fairly spacious and lit by large factory windows on the eastern wall. The floorboards had been coated and recoated with thick white paint over the years as they collected uncleanable grime. With all the new art supplies she bought, with the rolls of canvas, the frames in various states of construction, the stretched and half-painted canvases on easels, the tarps and sheets and oil paints, the stacks of sketchbooks and charcoals and brushes, there was not much room for actual living. She spent most of her days painting, smoking joints, and flipping through art books for inspiration. She trashed most things she began until mid-October, when, after writing a letter to Mickey, she began a painting that felt real, that felt important.

When the subject came to her, it was not at all surprising, and she knew exactly why she had chosen it: her nominal husband was an American soldier in a war zone, and the number one cause of death for American soldiers was the Improvised Explosive Device. After looking at images on the Internet and reading some firsthand accounts, she began painting a Humvee tilted onto its right wheels, the explosion from an IED lifting it off the ground, the terrified face of the driver who knew they would flip and burn and die.

What she couldn’t explain, what she began doing without realizing it, was painting this scene of extreme and sober violence in the cartoonish style of Dr. Seuss, a surreal and childish distortion of bright primary colors and silly elongated shapes: striped and bendy palm trees, fantastic dunes in the background, the Humvee disproportionate and bright green, sporting oddly placed knobs and gears, the explosion bulging like an image under a magnifying lens propelling the truck right out of the canvas and toward the viewer, the driver’s face squashed and birdlike, six eyelashes on his wide right eye, a small pimple on his nose, the mouth a black hole with the barest hint of a tongue, a dark red mass being sucked back into the throat, a few wisps of candy-blue hair curling out whimsically from his helmet. She was drawing from a sense of loss; it was not an overwhelming condition but a subtle one that resided in the nethermost regions of her consciousness.

.  .  .  .

The next day she began work on a second painting in the same Seussian style, this time of a few bodies on the street, soldiers, clods of dirt scattered like popcorn from the small crater left by a homemade bomb. Small Iraqi children with gigantic eyes looking on from the periphery, peering out the curved windows of wobbly buildings, smiling. One of the soldiers was clearly dead, his eyes squinched into outsized X’s; the other with his legs blown off, was still alive, pleading with an outstretched hand toward the foreground, the plump four-fingered hand of a cartoon, the pool of blood and oil and dirt behind him swirling like a rainbow of melted Starburst.

It took her a week to finish, and when it was done, she felt an after-shock of what she’d felt for the first painting, but it came with a greater sense of fulfillment, that she’d brought forth value out of nothing, created something alive; she realized that she was not finished, that these were the first two paintings in a series. Over the next month, she confined herself to her studio and worked simultaneously on three new paintings. These proved more difficult, and she progressed slowly, limning the outlines of a dreamlike Bradley flipped on its back, a twisting convoy of supply trucks and Humvees, a rusty late-eighties BMW bounding through the chain-link at a checkpoint. In a month’s time, though these three were still unfinished, her confidence, her feeling of impending accomplishment, had grown significantly, enough that she took high-resolution photos of her first two and submitted them to the curators of a few Boston galleries. From then on, she worked methodically, the precision of her surreal lines and colors increasing while the rate of her progress diminished. On December 31st, she got a phone call from Mickey, on leave from his tour of duty. The last time they’d spoken, he’d flipped out and she’d hung up. She was a little wary of seeing him, but how could she not? That night, just after ten p.m., she buzzed him in and began rolling a joint while he trudged up the three flights to her studio loft. When she heard his footsteps on the landing, she panicked and quickly threw a few sheets over her new paintings, uncertain what he would think of them.

*    *    *

Gavin Kovite (left) & Christopher Robin (right) share a laugh. (Photo by Erin Pollock)

I recently spoke to Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite via email between my home in Butte, Montana and their studio at Yaddo the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. To some degree, their own friendship mirrors that of their characters: Gavin was an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad from 2004-2005 and later attended NYU Law and served as an Army prosecutor; Chris is a Boston University and Hunter College MFA graduate, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist. Here’s part of our conversation:

I’m curious about the collaboration process on this book. The narrative seems divided between two ids: one of Hal and one of Mickey. I assume (perhaps wrongly) that Gavin handled the Mickey sections and Chris wrote the Hal portions...but were there overlaps? At the heart of it, I’m wondering how it was that two authors came to write a single novel and how that nuts-and-bolts process worked?

We talked over the plotlines, scenes, and characters extensively both before and during the drafting process, so each of us was on board for everything that happened in the book before it was actually drafted. We did split the labor roughly along the lines of character and setting—Gavin writing Mickey and Tricia in Baghdad, Chris writing Corderoy and Mani in Boston. There were some exceptions to this, though—where Chris would write a Baghdad scene and Gavin a Boston scene. The first section of the book, set in Seattle, and the final chapters back in Boston were joint efforts. For the most critical passages, we would actually sit down at a single computer swapping in and out at the keyboard. That said, even with the scenes that we drafted individually, we co-edited each other’s work so extensively that it’s not really correct to say that either one or the other of us wrote any particular scene—it was all a joint project.

We met in 2005 during a study abroad program in Rome through the University of Washington, and became good friends almost immediately. We started idly cooking up silly characters and mystery plots to entertain ourselves while we wandered the streets. Back in Seattle, we decided to write a novel based on those characters. Actually, it was Chris who really decided to write that book; Gavin mostly went along because it was a fun thing to do together; in this sense, we’re kind of like friends who both happened to play music and decided to form a band.

We never sold that first book, but it was a fun project and taught us a lot about writing novels. Chris had the idea for War of the Encyclopaedists in 2009 when we were roommates in NYC. Gavin was hesitant to commit to another large project, as he was in the midst of law school at NYU, but he gave in. Over the next four years, we worked on War of the Encyclopaedists mostly long-distance and in intermittent bursts; Gavin had joined the JAG Corps and was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington, and Chris was traveling around the country, living at artist colonies like MacDowell and writing nihilistic poems.

While I loved many things about War of the Encyclopaedists, some of the most indelible images I carried away from the novel were Mani’s Dr. Seuss-inspired paintings. Could you talk a little bit about where the inspiration for these paintings came from?

Many of our best ideas come from inhabiting character as deeply as possible. The more time we spent with Mani as the novel developed, the more we tried to refine her mode of thinking, to make her interiority distinct from that of the other characters. The most obvious distinction is that Mani processes her world in a much more visual way than someone like Hal, who attempts to fit things into boxes, creating truth tables for example.

Knowing that this mode of thinking was a deep part of Mani’s character also led to new developments in the plot that we had not originally anticipated. We knew she would be working on some paintings in Boston, but what those would be was a mystery to us at first. While Hal is mediating his experience through literature, though words, consuming rather than making, Mani deals with the emotional tornado in her head quite differently: she puts it into her art, she paints her way into understanding her lingering feelings of love for Hal, her guilt surrounding her fraudulent marriage to Mickey, and her fear for his life in occupied Baghdad. So the idea that she would make paintings of horrific violence (IEDs killing soldiers) and the terrifying threat of violence (the child with a hand grenade held behind his back), that seemed obvious. Painting them in the style of Dr. Seuss was less so. That insight (for us, and for her), came from turning back to one of the central themes in the book: the disjunct between the civilian understanding of war and its reality. Like Hal, Mani feels very divorced from the war, unsure of what is happening, if we are winning, or what it would even mean to win (which, notably, Mickey is unsure of as well!). And the two main narratives offered to Mani, the collegiate Bush-is-a-criminal narrative and the stop-Saddam-get-bin-Laden narrative, they were simplistic, absurd, explanations meant for a child. On top of that, all these characters are struggling to grow up, Mani included, and part of that struggle is a yearning for the safety and simplicity of childhood. Hence her choice to represent the horrific violence of the Iraq War in a cartoonish, absurd, and nostalgic style. She uses the tools of irony in her struggle to be sincere, to admit that she fears something that she is incredibly ignorant of, that most of us are ignorant of.

I know the two of you are collaborating on another novel. Can you tell us a little bit about it and if this current co-authoring process is any different from how you came together on Encyclopaedists?

The next book will be set in Detroit in the near future. The basic premise is that Amazon.com strikes a deal with the FAA to beta-test its drone delivery program in the city of Detroit. Problems and hilarity ensue. Drones get shot down, captured even. There are four main characters and dozens of secondary characters, but the plot centers on a battle of wills between two women, one an Amazon marketing exec responsible for selling the city and people of Detroit on the idea of Amazon and drone delivery, the other a local anti-drone activist who launches a guerrilla social media campaign against Amazon, drawing together a disparate group made up of graffiti artists, rappers, fashion designers, filmmakers and tech nerds. It’s a character-driven novel that explores this new technology, the rise of automation, along with race, class, and the character of our society in the post-industrial age. Tone-wise, it’s a bit farcical and comic, but with plenty of heavy and moving (we hope) material as well.

Like a lot of our ideas, we came up with this one in the kitchen during a house party (actually, it was the launch party for War of the Encyclopaedists). We pitched ten ideas to our agent, and this was the one that came out on top.

We’re attacking this book differently than the others in a few ways. First, we’re lucky enough to be full-time novelists now, which is pretty new and different, and should really shorten the timeline for this one. We’re currently working on it at the Yaddo artists colony.

Second, we did three drafts of an outline on this book, figuring out all the scenes and how it would end before setting down a single word. We’re not adhering slavishly to the outline, but so far we haven’t needed to stray too far. In six weeks at Yaddo, we’re about 200 pages in, which is hopefully about half-way to a complete first draft.

Click here to buy a copy of
War of the Encyclopaedists

*Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) did, in fact, “go to war” with some of his early illustrative work. Some of his political cartoons, geared for adults, urged Americans to buy war bonds during World War Two. They have been collected in Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

A Veterans Day Story: Susan Johnson Hadler Searches For Her Father

Lt. Dave Johnson: Camp Lucky Strike, France–February 1945

I knew I had a story but I had no words. Words come from listening and learning the connections between things and sounds. What I wanted to write about didn’t exist. There was no thing. I couldn’t find my way into the story, until...until I stooped to read a poem written to a father, who, like my father, never came home. It was Veterans Day and I’d come to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A red carnation rose out of a beer can and a half sheet of paper lay beside it secured with a stone. Squatting there at the wall I read the poem and knew there were hundreds, thousands of us who grow up in the shadow of wars that, for us, never end.

As soon as I got home I called a vet center and the man who answered understood. He gave me the name of a woman in Washington State who, like me, had lost her father in WWII. I flew out to meet her and we sat at her kitchen table and talked for a week straight. We put words to things neither of us had ever talked about–our mothers’ silence and who our fathers were and what happened to them. The silence was now broken and the words flew out of us and onto the page. Later, we interviewed others whose fathers had been killed in war and their stories were strikingly similar to ours. We found a publisher willing to work with us, and Lost in the Victory: Reflections of American War Orphans of World War II was published.

When a journalist for the Washingtonian interviewed me about the book, I gave her my personal manuscript about the search for my father. The editor, someone who had also lost his father at a young age, published a chunk of it in the magazine. Reader’s Digest excerpted the story and hundreds of emails filled my box daily; messages from others asking for help to find out where their fathers were buried. Fifty years after the end of the war and the children of the men who died, like me, didn’t know where their fathers were buried. With a touch of my finger on the keyboard I could send them to the right place, but I was staggered to realize the power of words to move into the unknown, open the silence and make connections.

The article that carried the story of my search for my father and his picture traveled the world. My unknown father was now known and seen in Australia, China, France, and India. I was in the airport in Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas when a young woman in a blue sari tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I know your father. I read about him in the Reader’s Digest and I want to be a writer like you.”

Silence exists where pain is unbearable. When I broke the silence surrounding mention of my father, my mother’s pain erupted into rage and I was excluded from the family for several years. Writing about family secrets and ghosts can do that. I found that writing changes the story. It changes those who write it and those who read it and part of my story turned into one of reconciliation. I’ve written about that and about finding my mother’s two sisters who were also lost to silence in a new book, The Beauty of What Remains: Family Lost, Family Found, now out from She Writes Press.

The silence has been replaced by stories, the story of my father and the story of my remarkable aunt who survived over 70 years in a mental hospital with her wits and her humor still intact when I found her alive at age 94, the story of reuniting my shattered family, and the story of finding the words to tell it.

Susan Johnson Hadler, PhD is the co-author, with Ann Bennett Mix, of Lost in the Victory, a book that broke the silence surrounding mention of fathers who died in WWII and how their deaths affected their children. She has published articles in the Washingtonian, Reader’s Digest, and The Mindfulness Bell, and appeared in the Ancestors series on PBS. She formerly lived and taught in Tanzania, East Africa. Hadler worked for over twenty years as a psychotherapist in Washington, DC. Find out more at her website, www.susanhadler.com

Sunday Sentence: “Returning Home” by Floyd Skloot

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

                         But when
          my wife called from bed I knew
          I had gotten up only to return to her.

“Returning Home” from Approaching Winter: Poems by Floyd Skloot

Friday Freebie: American Copper by Shann Ray

Congratulations to Carl Scott, Kirsten Murchison, Thao Votang, Jerri Bell, and Melissa Seng, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie: The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller.

This week, I’m giving away three copies of the debut novel by Shann Ray, American Copper. Long-time readers of The Quivering Pen know that I am a huge (YUUUGE! in the words of Donald Trump) fan of Ray’s work. You might almost say I’m a Shann fanboy. His American Masculine is easily on my list of top 10 short story collections, and I loved the poetry of Balefire, too. Now, along comes American Copper, which might be his finest work yet. It’s a stunning work of fiction which begs the reader to sit quietly, block the loud static of everyday living, and slip into the gulfstream of an author’s sure-handed prose which is at once muscular and gentle. American Copper, which is partially set here in my adopted hometown of Butte, Montana, gets my highest recommendation. If you don’t win the contest, you owe it to yourself to go out and buy your own copy (maybe even two, because you’ll want to share this beautiful book with another reader hungry for big-hearted literature). Read on for more information about the novel...

As Evelynne Lowry, the daughter of a copper baron, comes of age in early 20th-century Montana, the lives of horses dovetail with the lives of people and her own quest for womanhood becomes inextricably intertwined with the future of two men who face nearly insurmountable losses—a lonely bull rider named Zion from the Montana highline, and a Cheyenne team roper named William Black Kettle, the descendant of peace chiefs. An epic that runs from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to the ore and industry of the 1930s, American Copper is a novel not only about America’s hidden desire for regeneration through violence but about the ultimate cost of forgiveness and the demands of atonement. It also explores the genocidal colonization of the Cheyenne, the rise of big copper, and the unrelenting ascent of dominant culture. Evelynne’s story is a poignant elegy to horses, cowboys both native and Euro-American, the stubbornness of racism, and the entanglements of modern humanity during the first half of the twentieth century. Set against the wide plains and soaring mountainscapes of Montana, this is the American West re-envisioned, imbued with unconditional violence, but also sweet, sweet love.

For more about the writing of the book, please see my interview with Shann at the NW Book Lovers Blog.

If you’d like a chance at winning American Copper, 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. This contest is limited to those with mailing addresses in the U.S. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Nov. 12, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 13. 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.

Megan Kruse’s Library: A Fortress of Books

Reader:  Megan Kruse
Location:  An attic space in Seattle
Collection Size:  In flux.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  I can only imagine that I’d be tumbling over myself to carry as much as possible. Some of my first great loves were books of poetry, including Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler and Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History. I might reach for those.
Favorite book from childhood:  I keep my old copies of Betty Macdonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series around. I love the magic in the everyday, the simultaneous tranquility and surprise in those stories.
Guilty pleasure book:  I have a deep love for pop fiction of all types. I do a Bachelor recap podcast called After the Rose, with writer Molly Laich, so I’m currently reading Bachelor host Chris Harrison’s novel, The Perfect Letter. The podcast is one of the most ridiculous and delightful things I’ve ever done.

I recently found a journal from when I was eight or nine, and it is almost entirely an account of my library books—which ones were coming in, which were going out, and where I was hoarding them at given times. For several years I slept on a lumpy, shifting pillow—I kept exactly twelve books underneath, curated anew each night. They were a physical insurance policy against the potential of waking up lonely in the night. I’ve always thought of books that way, as safeguards and tickets. I like to keep a near-fortress of books surrounding me.

There is really no rhyme or reason to my stacks of books, and they tend to rotate out regularly. Since I was seventeen, I’ve never lived in a single place for more than a year or two at a time; I think I’m going on three in Seattle now, a record. I’ll collect books from used bookstores, the library, free boxes, thrift stores, and I live in and around them. Having a varied and nearly inexplicable collection on hand is one of the things that helps me to write—to pick something up and thumb through it; to start something and then start something else.

Since my novel Call Me Home came out, I’ll admit things have gotten a bit out of hand. I toured in bookstores, first of all, and then I’ve been meeting a lot of incredible writers, whose books I want to collect and read. Most of all, though, I’ve eased up on myself—for a while, I would try to keep myself contained to novels, to literary fiction that would help me in my writing. Now, though, I’ve given myself this gift of lavishness, of reading things I’d never considered before. Dystopian novels, even more pop fiction, young adult novels. I’m also always collecting books that are relevant to my current projects, and right now that includes a novel set in the Midwest in the aftermath of World War II, so I’ve got a sort of oddball collection of historical fiction and nonfiction that relate to that time period.

Eventually, the tide goes back out and I worry about fire hazards and have to cull what I want to keep from the collection; I build it up and then I let it go. I remember leaving Missoula, Montana and filling up crates that I couldn’t bring with me, and people would stop by and rifle through all of these lovely books, taking what they wanted. I felt this warm, sustaining currency so powerfully, threads of words that would hold me to this place and these friends even as I moved west. I think that will always be the greatest solace to me. All these worlds and emotions you can hold and then pass on.


Megan Kruse is the author of the acclaimed novel Call Me Home, released by Hawthorne Books, with an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert. Megan is the 2015-2016 Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Eastern Oregon University’s Low-Residency MFA program, and one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for 2015. She currently lives in Seattle. Click here to visit her website.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

Author photo by David Lattimer

Front Porch Books: November 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: many of these books won’t be released for another 2-6 months; I’m here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists.  Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.  I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books. 

And Yet...: Essays
by Christopher Hitchens
(Simon and Schuster)

I have yet to hitch a ride on the Christopher Hitchens train. He’s an essayist I feel certain I should be reading, but I just haven’t gotten around to him. All shame and pity on me. Now, the good people at Simon and Schuster have considerately packaged a gallery of the late, great Hitch’s essays into one 560-page volume for my pleasure and edification. I’m adding And Yet... to my Five-Year Reading Plan of The Essentials.

Jacket Copy:  The death of Christopher Hitchens in December 2011 prematurely silenced a voice that was among the most admired of contemporary writers. For more than forty years, Hitchens delivered to numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic essays that were astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative. The judges for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, posthumously bestowed on Hitchens, praised him for the way he wrote “with fervor about the books and writers he loved and with unbridled venom about ideas and political figures he loathed.” He could write, the judges went on to say, with “undisguised brio, mining the resources of the language as if alert to every possibility of color and inflection.” He was, as Benjamin Schwarz, his editor at The Atlantic magazine, recalled, “slashing and lively, biting and funny—and with a nuanced sensibility and a refined ear that he kept in tune with his encyclopedic knowledge and near photographic memory of English poetry.” And as Michael Dirda, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, observed, Hitchens “was a flail and a scourge, but also a gift to readers everywhere.” The author of five previous volumes of selected writings, including the international bestseller Arguably, Hitchens left at his death nearly 250,000 words of essays not yet published in book form. And Yet… assembles a selection that usefully adds to Hitchens’s oeuvre. It ranges from the literary to the political and is, by turns, a banquet of entertaining and instructive delights, including essays on Orwell, Lermontov, Chesterton, Fleming, Naipaul, Rushdie, Pamuk, and Dickens, among others, as well as his laugh-out-loud self-mocking “makeover.” The range and quality of Hitchens’s essays transcend the particular occasions for which they were originally written. Often prescient, always pugnacious, and formidably learned, Hitchens was a polemicist for the ages. With this posthumous volume, his reputation and his readers will continue to grow.

Opening Lines:  When, shortly after the triumph of the Castro revolution, Ernesto Guevara took over the direction of the Cuban National Bank, it became his duty to sign the newly minted ten- and twenty-peso notes. This he did with a contemptuous flourish, scrawling the bold nom de guerre “Che” on both denominations. By that gesture, which made those bills a collectors’ item in some quarters of the left, he expressed an ambition to move beyond the money economy and what used to be termed “the cash nexus.” It was a stroke, at once Utopian and puritanical, that seemed to sum up his gift both for the improvised and the determined.

The Flood Girls
by Richard Fifield
(Gallery Books)

Two months ago, I sat in a hard plastic chair at the Imagine Butte Resource Center here in Butte, Montana, a coffee mug full of cheap box-wine in my hands, listening spellbound as Richard Fifield read from his debut novel’s second chapter. It was a fierce, flamboyant, funny twenty minutes spent inside the current of his voice as he took us on a tour of the fictional Quinn, Montana (loosely based on his own hometown of Troy, Montana). Long before Richard’s voice stopped and he sat back down, I resolved to make The Flood Girls one of my must-reads of 2015 (2016, if my well-laid plans go awry). The book will officially hit stores, libraries and e-readers in February. I suggest you all get in line for the Flood right now.

Jacket Copy:  This snappy, sassy redemption story set in small-town Montana is “a wild and crazy debut novel by a talented young writer” (Jackie Collins), filled with an uproarious and unforgettable cast of characters you won’t want to leave behind. Welcome to Quinn, Montana, population: 956. A town where nearly all of the volunteer firemen are named Jim, where The Dirty Shame—the only bar in town—refuses to serve mixed drinks (too much work), where the locals hate the newcomers (then again, they hate the locals, too), and where the town softball team has never even come close to having a winning season. Until now. Rachel Flood has snuck back into town after leaving behind a trail of chaos nine years prior. She’s here to make amends, but nobody wants to hear it, especially her mother, Laverna. But with the help of a local boy named Jake and a little soul-searching, she just might make things right. In the spirit of Empire Falls and A League of Their Own, with the caustic wit of Where’d You Go, Bernadette thrown in for good measure, Richard Fifield’s hilarious and heartwarming debut will have you laughing through tears.

Opening Lines:  Every night, Frank played harmonica for the cats.

Blurbworthiness:  “Reading this novel is like unwrapping the wackiest birthday gift you’ve ever received: The Flood Girls is a heart-shaped box filled with broads, softballs, drunks, Jackie Collins’ paperbacks, music, guns, and, most vibrantly of all, humanity. I started this book laughing out loud; I finished it grieving and grateful. Richard Fifield is the handsomest writer in North America, and perhaps its most compassionate.”  (Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac)

People Like You
by Margaret Malone
(Atelier26 Books)

Sometimes the biggest surprises come from the smallest places. Margaret Malone’s debut collection of short stories, People Like You, arrived at my doorstep from Atleier26 Books, a small press in Portland, Oregon, which has a tiny catalog (less than a dozen titles). Even the book itself is small (150 pages). But boy oh boy, the stories are big—large in all the best ways. I did a quick browse through some of the opening paragraphs and, within a matter of words, I was struck by the precision of details, the at-ease dialogue, the author’s depth of feeling for her characters. As Atelier26 founder M. Allen Cunningham says at the press’ website: “Malone is the real thing, and her work is funny, unsettling, subtle, and moving.” Moving, indeed; I moved People Like You to the summit of my ever-towering To-Be-Read pile (aka Mount NeveRest).

Jacket Copy:  Malone’s people exist, like most of us, in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies, and they are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. They win us over completely although we know they are bound to break our hearts with each confused and conflicted decision they make. Each of these stories is so beautifully controlled and alive to its own truth, readers will hardly know what hit them.

Opening Lines:  The invitation is from a friend, though I use this term loosely: we have no friends. We have acquaintances from work, or old friends who live in other cities, or people who used to be our friends who we either borrowed money from and never repaid or who we just never bother to call anymore because we decided we either don’t like them or we’re too good for their company. We are not perfect.

Blurbworthiness:  “This is the book I am personally going to put into peoples’ hands the moment it gets born. The stories in Margaret Malone’s collection People Like You will blow your mind, steal your heart, and leave your DNA rearranged. Her writing is brilliantly urgent and alive. The biggest mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of storytelling I’ve seen in years.”  (Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children)  ...AND: “There are moments in Margaret Malone’s collection People Like You when it’s hard to breathe. Because People Like You are people a lot like you, disturbingly so: awkward, petty, flawed, full of hope and monotony, yearning. Malone is a master of the minimal....Whether it’s a dying mother at a slot machine, a drinking pregnant mother stalking sex offenders, or a husband who’s having his prostate checked—every story is flawlessly told, the reader brought to the knees again and again by luxurious moments of intimacy and estrangement....And did I mention hilarious? Don’t let these wonderful stories pass you up. Margaret Malone is a name that will soon be up there with the best and brightest.”  (Tom Spanbauer, author of I Loved You More)

All Things Cease to Appear
by Elizabeth Brundage
(Knopf)

The chilly winter months beg for a page-turner of a book that invites me to lose myself in its plot and characters. This new creepy novel by Elizabeth Brundage looks like it will be the perfect way to spend a few hours curled up in my favorite reading chair. It opens with a father holding his pajama-clad daughter as they stand in the snow outside their neighbor’s house. I think it will just get even better from there.

Jacket Copy:  Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife murdered and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room down the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at the private college nearby teaching art history, and moved his family into this tight-knit, impoverished town. And he is the immediate suspect—the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally served. At once a classic “who-dun-it” that morphs into a “why-and-how-dun-it,” this is also a rich and complex portrait of a psychopath and a marriage, and an astute study of the various taints that can scar very different families, and even an entire community.

Opening Lines:  This is the Hale Farm.
     Here is the old milking barn, the dark opening that says, Find me.
     This is the weathervane, the woodpile.
     Here is the house, noisy with stories.

The Mark and the Void
by Paul Murray
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Paul Murray’s previous book Skippy Dies might just be the best novel I never read. Oh sure, I talked a big game about being all excited to read it...way back in 2010, but take a look at my pile of books marked To Be Read—See it?—No, keep going a little farther down in the stack—There it is. I’ll get to you soon, Skippy. I promise. Now along comes a new novel by the acclaimed Irish author, and this time it’s all about the money. I can’t say for certain, but I hope 2016 will be my Year of Murray.

Jacket Copy:  What links the Investment Bank of Torabundo, www.myhotswaitress.com (yes, with an s, don’t ask), an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a six-year-old boy with the unfortunate name of Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB agent? The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original breakout hit, Skippy Dies. While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul’s fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But Paul’s plan is not what it seems―and neither is Claude’s employer, the Investment Bank of Torabundo, which swells through dodgy takeovers and derivatives trading until―well, you can probably guess how that shakes out.

Opening Lines:  Idea for a novel: we have a banker rob his own bank. He’s working alone; at first, it’ll look like a classic inside job. This man, however, is not what you’d call an insider. He’s French, not Irish, and although initially he might look like a typical Parisian—black suit, expensive shoes, hair neat but worn slightly long—as the story unfolds and his past comes to light, we find out he never quite fitted in over there either. He didn’t grow up in a leafy suburb, didn’t attend a fancy grande école of the kind that bankers tend to come from; instead he spent his childhood in a run-down corner that the city prefers to disown, and his father’s something blue-collar—a welder maybe, a veteran of 1968, a tough nut.

Everyone Brave is Forgiven
by Chris Cleave
(Simon and Schuster)

World War Two. Three friends. A love triangle. Someone goes away into battle and comes home damaged. Sound familiar? Of course it does; it’s an old story, oft-told. Will Chris Cleave’s new novel be any different? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m swayed to believe it will be better than the average Love in the Time of War story we’re used to reading—if nothing else, by the impassioned personal letter included at the front of my advance copy of Everyone Brave is Forgiven in which Cleave explains the genesis of this book (his grandfather’s service on the island of Malta during World War Two) and his motives behind telling this story: “When I was beginning the project I might have said that by writing a small and personal story about the Second World War, I hoped to highlight the insincerity of the wars we fight now—to which the commitment of most of us is impersonal, and which finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy. I wanted the reader to come away wondering whether forgiveness is possible at a national level or whether it is only achievable between courageous individuals.”

Jacket Copy:  It’s 1939 and Mary, a young socialite, is determined to shock her blueblood political family by volunteering for the war effort. She is assigned as a teacher to children who were evacuated from London and have been rejected by the countryside because they are infirm, mentally disabled, or—like Mary’s favorite student, Zachary—have colored skin. Tom, an education administrator, is distraught when his best friend, Alastair, enlists. Alastair, an art restorer, has always seemed far removed from the violent life to which he has now condemned himself. But Tom finds distraction in Mary, first as her employer and then as their relationship quickly develops in the emotionally charged times. When Mary meets Alastair, the three are drawn into a tragic love triangle and—while war escalates and bombs begin falling around them—further into a new world unlike any they’ve ever known. A sweeping epic with the kind of unforgettable characters, cultural insights, and indelible scenes that made Little Bee so incredible, Chris Cleave’s latest novel explores the disenfranchised, the bereaved, the elite, the embattled. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a heartbreakingly beautiful story of love, loss, and incredible courage.

Opening Lines:  War was declared at eleven-fifteen and Mary North signed up at noon. She did it at lunch, before telegrams came, in case her mother said no. She left finishing school unfinished. Skiing down from Mont-Choisi, she ditched her equipment at the foot of the slope and telegraphed the War Office from Lausanne. Nineteen hours later she reached St. Pancras, in clouds of steam, still wearing her alpine sweater. The train’s whistle screamed. London, then. It was a city in love with beginnings.

The Quality of Silence
by Rosamund Lupton
(Crown)

Having lived in Alaska for nine years, courtesy of the U.S. Army, I have a special place in my reader’s heart for novels set in the Last Frontier. Rosamund Lupton’s latest novel pulled me in from the very first page when young Ruby and her mother land at the Fairbanks airport (a terminal with which I am all too familiar). At least from the opening lines, it's clear that Lupton gets the frigid-cold details just right. I look forward to going even deeper into The Quality of Silence.

Jacket Copy:  Thrillingly suspenseful and atmospheric, The Quality of Silence is the story of Yasmin, a beautiful astrophysicist, and her precocious deaf daughter, Ruby, who arrive in a remote part of Alaska to be told that Ruby’s father, Matt, has been the victim of a catastrophic accident. Unable to accept his death as truth, Yasmin and Ruby set out into the hostile winter of the Alaskan tundra in search of answers. But as a storm closes in, Yasmin realizes that a very human danger may be keeping pace with them. And with no one else on the road to help, they must keep moving, alone and terrified, through an endless Alaskan night.

Opening Lines:  It’s FREEZING cold; like the air is made of broken glass. Our English cold is all roly-poly snowmen and “woo-hoo! it’s a snow day!”—a hey-there friendly kind of cold. But this cold is mean. Dad said there were two main things about Alaska:
     For one, it’s really really cold and
     For two, it’s super-quiet because there’s thousands of miles of snow and hardly any people.

Blurbworthiness:  “A forbidding Alaskan winter is the setting for this ambitious and imaginative novel…Narrated in part by Ruby, who is a delightfully realized character, (her deafness is treated with great sensitivity), the landscape, wildlife and bitter climate of Alaska are powerfully drawn. Chilling in every sense, you won’t want to step away from this story.” (Sunday Mirror)

Numero Zero
by Umberto Eco
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

I’m used to seeing big, chunky novels coming from Umberto Eco, so it was surprising (and refreshing) to open the mailing envelope from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and find a knife-slim book by the renowned Italian writer, weighing in at 190 pages. Numero Zero looks like an equally knife-sharp satire about contemporary media and gossip. It’s numero uno on my To-Be-Read list.

Jacket Copy:  1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can’t refuse to ghost-write a memoir. His subject: a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns the paranoid theories of Braggadocio, who is convinced that Mussolini’s corpse was a body-double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It’s the scoop he desperately needs. The evidence? He’s working on it. Colonna is skeptical. But when a body is found, stabbed to death in a back alley, and the paper is shut down, even he is jolted out of his complacency. Fueled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, love, corruption and murder, Numero Zero reverberates with the clash of forces that have shaped Italy since the Second World War. This gripping novel from the author of The Name of the Rose is told with all the power of a master storyteller.

Opening Lines:  No water in the tap this morning.
     Gurgle, gurgle, two sounds like a baby's burp, then nothing.

Blurbworthiness:  “Eco combines his delight in suspense with astute political satire in this brainy, funny, neatly lacerating thriller…. Eco’s caustically clever, darkly hilarious, dagger-quick tale of lies, crimes, and collusions condemns the shameless corruption and greed undermining journalism and governments everywhere. A satisfyingly scathing indictment brightened by resolute love.” (Booklist)

Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo
by Boris Fishman
(Harper)

I’m easy prey for just about any book set in Montana (possible exception: Softly Comes the Hard-Muscled Horseman), and Boris Fishman’s new novel definitely has that target on my chest in its sights. I’m a goner.

Jacket Copy:  The author of the critically admired, award-winning A Replacement Life turns to a different kind of story—an evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what she’s given up to make both work, and the universal question of how we reconcile who we are and whom the world wants us to be. Maya Shulman and Alex Rubin met in 1992, when she was a Ukrainian exchange student with “a devil in [her] head” about becoming a chef instead of a medical worker, and he the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life. Twenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex his father’s second in the family business. The great dislocation of their lives is their eight-year-old son Max—adopted from two teenagers in Montana despite Alex’s view that “adopted children are second-class.” At once a salvation and a mystery to his parents—with whom Max’s biological mother left the child with the cryptic exhortation “don’t let my baby do rodeo”—Max suddenly turns feral, consorting with wild animals, eating grass, and running away to sit face down in a river. Searching for answers, Maya convinces Alex to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max’s birth parents—the first drive west of New Jersey of their American lives. But it’s Maya who’s illuminated by the journey, her own erstwhile wildness summoned for a reckoning by the unsparing landscape, with seismic consequences for herself and her family. Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a novel about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong.

Opening Lines:  Maya had been early to pick up Max the day he didn’t come home with the school bus. Usually she was still powering up Sylvan Gate Drive when the old yellow bus sputtered to its crown, the doors exhaled, and Max tumbled out, always before the Kroon girl because Max always took the front seat.

Enchanted Islands
by Allison Amend
(Nan A. Talese)

The first line of Allison Amend’s novel warns us “You’re not allowed to read this.” Being the defiant person that I am, my knee-jerk reaction is: Watch me now. Truth is, I’d want to read Enchanted Islands anyway–not just for Amend’s name on the cover, but for the irresistible plot description. Spies on the Galapagos Islands during World War Two? Watch me zoom right over to page 1...

Jacket Copy:  Inspired by the mid-century memoirs of Frances Conway, Enchanted Islands is the dazzling story of an independent American woman whose path takes her far from her native Minnesota when she and her husband, an undercover intelligence officer, are sent to the Galápagos Islands on the brink of World War II. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1882 to immigrant parents, Frances Frankowski covets the life of her best friend, Rosalie Mendel, who has everything Fanny could wish for—money, parents who value education, and an effervescent and winning personality. When, at age fifteen, Rosalie decides they should run away to Chicago, Fanny jumps at the chance to escape her unexceptional life. But within a year of living in the city, Rosalie commits an unforgiveable betrayal, provoking Frances to strike out on her own. Decades later, the women reconnect in San Francisco and realize just how widely their lives have diverged. While Rosalie is a housewife and mother, Frances works as a secretary for the Office of Naval Intelligence. It is there she is introduced to Ainslie Conway, an intelligence operator ten years her junior. When it’s arranged for Frances and Ainslie to marry and carry out a mission on the Galápagos Islands, the couple’s identities—already hidden from each other—are further buried under their new cover stories. No longer a spinster living a lonely existence, Frances is about to begin the most fascinating and intrigue-filled years of her life. Amidst active volcanoes, inhospitable flora and wildlife, and unfriendly neighbors, Ainslie and Frances carve out a life for themselves. But the secrets they harbor from their enemies, and from each other, may be their undoing. Drawing on the rich history of the early twentieth century and set against a large, colorful canvas, Enchanted Islands boldly examines the complexity of female friendship and how those whom history has neglected to record have been shaped by, and in turn helped form, modern America.

Opening Lines:  You’re not allowed to read this–I’m not even really allowed to write it. But now that Ainslie is gone and I will surely follow before too long, I don’t see that much is the harm. I suppose the government will censor what it will.

Suburban Gospel
by Mark Beaver
(Hub City Press)

Throughout his career as a Baptist minister, my father perched solely on the American Baptist branch of the denomination. On the liberal-conservative spectrum, we were somewhere between Episcopalians and Southern Baptists. As I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, the Southern Baptists always seemed to hog the media attention with all those tight-collared, red-faced televangelists shouting at the cameras, railing against women’s lib, music lyrics “written by the devil,” the moral rot of movies, and homo-sex-shoo-als. They seemed a strange breed who gave us regular Baptists a bad name. But now I find myself in possession of what looks to be a side-splitting memoir, drenched in 80s nostalgia, about a young boy raised among the Southern Baptists in Atlanta who ate hellfire for breakfast and had damnation for dessert every night. I can’t wait to dig into Mark Beaver’s gospel of growing up among the straight and narrow.

Jacket Copy:  When the deacons at Mark Beaver’s Bible Belt church cue up an evangelical horror flick aimed at dramatizing Hell, he figures he’d better get right with God, and soon. Convinced he could die at age seven and spend eternity roasting on a spit in the fiery furnace of Hades, he promptly gets Saved. But once the ’80s and his adolescence hit, the Straight and Narrow becomes a tight squeeze. Suburban Gospel offers more than a look inside the Southern Baptist religion circa Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority—it’s a tale of faith and flesh. Beaver invites us into a world filled with Daisy Duke fantasies and Prince posters, Nerf Hoops and Atari joysticks, raggedy Camaros and the neon light of strip malls. As much about the adolescent heart as the evangelical mind, the story explores similar emotional terrain as coming-of-age classics like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Mary Karr’s Cherry. Suburban Gospel is a tale of growing up Baptist, all right—but also of just growing up.

Blurbworthiness:  “In Suburban Gospel, Mark Beaver proves to be a kind of down-home David Sedaris. This isn’t your great-grandfather’s Southern memoir; instead of red clay and moonshine, Beaver offers Bubble Yum and break dancing, suburban malls and 80s sports cars, Baskin-Robbins and Prince. In the midst of all the fun, Beaver trains his sights on two familiar Bible Belt subjects—family and religion—with intelligence, humor, and warmth. An entertaining and absorbing read.” (Keith Lee Morris, author of Travelers Rest)

Noonday
by Pat Barker
(Doubleday)

I have yet to read anything Pat Barker has written (my list of Unread Authors is tediously long), but this new novel, which completes the trilogy begun with Life Class and Toby’s Room, looks especially intriguing. My interest in the London Blitz has recently been piqued by Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life...and then Noonday throws a “grotesque” spirit medium into the mix. I lean closer.

Jacket Copy:  A new novel from the Booker Prize winning Pat Barker, author of the Regeneration Trilogy, that unforgettably portrays London during the Blitz (her first portrayal of World War II) and reconfirms her place in the very top rank of British novelists. London, the Blitz, Autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul Tarrant works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three reach out for quick consolation. And into their midst comes the spirit medium Bertha Mason, grotesque and unforgettable, whose ability to make contact with the deceased finds vastly increased demands as death rains down from the skies. Old loves and obsessions resurface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville begun with Life Class and continued with Toby’s Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.

Opening Lines:  Elinor was halfway up the drive when she sensed she was being watched. She stopped and scanned the upstairs windows—wide open in the heat as if the house were gasping for breath—but there was nobody looking down. Then, from the sycamore tree at the end of the garden, came a rustling of leaves. Oh, of course: Kenny. She was tempted to ignore him, but that seemed unkind, so she went across the lawn and peered up into the branches.
     “Kenny?”
     No reply. There was often no reply.
     Kenny had arrived almost a year ago now, among the first batch of evacuees, and, although this area had since been reclassified—“neutral” rather than “safe”—here he remained. She felt his gaze heavy on the top of her head, like a hand, as she stood squinting up into the late-afternoon sunlight.

The Bed Moved
by Rebecca Schiff
(Knopf)

The first lines of Rebecca Schiff’s short stories are simple—deceptively so—frank, and barbed with fishhooks. In addition to the one I cite below from the collection’s titular story, here are a few others which snagged me in the gills as I skimmed through the pages:
     The Comfort Inn was across the street. But we were sleeping by the side of the road.  (“Tips”)
     Dear Student A, I’m sorry I put a sentence from your recent essay up on the SmartBoard without explaining to the rest of the class that they were critiquing writing by a fellow classmate. It was not smart of me, no matter what the board is called.  (“Communication Arts”)
     They came every day with their prayer books and coconut candies.  (“Another Cake”)
     My friend is marrying a man against violence.  (“Men Against Violence”)

Jacket Copy:  The audacious, savagely funny debut of a writer of razor-sharp wit and surprising tenderness: a collection of stories that gives us a new take on adolescence, death, sex, on being Jewish-ish, and on finding one’s way as a young woman in the world. A New Yorker, trying not to be jaded, accompanies a cash-strapped pot grower to a “clothing optional resort” in California. A nerdy high-schooler has her first sexual experience at geology camp. On the night of her father’s funeral, a college student watches an old video of her Bat Mitzvah, hypnotized by the image of the girl she used to be....Frank and irreverent, these stories offer a singular view of growing up (or not) and finding love (or not) in today’s ever-uncertain landscape. How to form lasting connections in a world saturated by insincerity? How to transcend the indignities of middle school? How to build a strong sense of self while also trying to figure out online dating? In its bone-dry humor, its pithy observations, and its thrilling ability to unmask the most revealing moments of human interaction--no matter how fleeting—this collection announces a new talent to be reckoned with.

Opening Lines:  There were film majors in my bed—they talked about film. There were poets, coxswains, guys trying to grow beards.

The Rope
by Kanan Makiya
(Pantheon)

A novel about the Iraq War told from the perspective of “the other side” will always interest me; but one which starts with a trapdoor that opens and releases Saddam Hussein to his hanging death is a little more than just “interesting,” it’s practically imperative that I read this new novel by Kanan Makiya.

Jacket Copy:  From the best-selling author of Republic of Fear, a gritty, unflinching, haunting novel about Iraqi failure in the wake of the 2003 American war. Told from the perspective of a Shi’ite militiaman whose participation in the execution of Saddam Hussein changes his life in ways he could not anticipate, the novel examines the birth of sectarian politics out of a legacy of betrayal and victimhood. A nameless narrator stumbles upon a corpse on the day of the fall of Saddam Hussein. Swept up in the tumultuous politics of the American occupation, he is taken on a journey that concludes with the discovery of what happened to his father, who disappeared in the tyrant’s gulag in 1991. His questions about his father, like those surrounding the mysterious corpse outside his house, were ignored by his mother, and by his uncle, in whose house he was raised. But he is older now, and a fighter in his uncle’s Army of the Awaited One, which is leading an insurrection against the occupation. Clues accumulate: a letter surreptitiously delivered to his mother during his father's imprisonment; stories told by his dying grandfather. Not until the last hour before the tyrant’s execution is the narrator given the final piece of the puzzle. It comes from Saddam Hussein himself. It is a story about loyalty and betrayal, victims turned victimizers, secrecy and loss—and identity: the haste with which it is cobbled together, or undone, always at terrible cost. It is a story that will stay with readers long after they finish the final page.

Opening Lines:  I checked my watch over and over again, determined to catch the precise moment when the lever would be released. I still almost missed it, the trapdoor clanging open before he had finished reciting his prayers.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither
by Sara Baume
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

I received an advance copy of Sara Baume’s novel nearly a month ago. Since then, I’ve been haunted by its remarkable Prologue (see below). If the rest of the book holds up to the promise of these 362 words, then we’re all in for a real treat indeed.

Jacket Copy:  It is springtime, and two outcasts—a man ignored, even shunned by his village, and the one-eyed dog he takes into his quiet, tightly shuttered life—find each other, by accident or fate, and forge an unlikely connection. As their friendship grows, their small, seaside town suddenly takes note of them, falsely perceiving menace where there is only mishap; the unlikely duo must take to the road. Gorgeously written in poetic and mesmerizing prose, Spill Simmer Falter Wither has already garnered wild support in its native Ireland, where the Irish Times pointed to Baume’s “astonishing power with language” and praised it as “a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite.” It is also a moving depiction of how—over the four seasons echoed in the title—a relationship between fellow damaged creatures can bring them both comfort. One of those rare stories that utterly, completely imagines its way into a life most of us would never see, it transforms us not only in our understanding of the world, but also of ourselves.

Opening Lines:  He is running, running, running.
     And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever run before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. He’s tripping into hoof-rucks. He’s slapping groundsel stems down dead. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock.
     This time, there’s no chance for sniff and scavenge and scoff. There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back. This time, he’s farther than he’s ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart.
     It’s the season of digging out. It’s a day of soft rain. There’s wind enough to tilt the slimmer trunks off kilter and drizzle enough to twist the long hairs on his back to a mop of damp curls. There’s blood enough to gush into his beard and spatter his front paws as they rise and plunge. And there’s a hot, wet thing bouncing against his neck. It’s the size of a snailshell and it makes a dim squelch each time it strikes. It’s attached to some gristly tether dangling from some leaked part of himself, but he cannot make out the what nor the where of it.
     Were he to stop, were he to examine the hillslope and hoof-rucks and groundsel and dandelions and chickweed and nettles and dock, he’d see how the breadth of his sight span has been reduced by half and shunted to his right side, how the left is pitch black until he swivels his head. But he doesn’t stop, and notices only the cumbersome blades, the spears of rain, the upheaval of tiny insects and the blood spilling down the wrong side of his coat, the outer when it ought to be the inner.
     He is running, running, running. And there’s no course or current to deter him. There’s no impulse from the root of his brain to the roof of his skull which says other than RUN.
     He is One Eye now.
     He is on his way.

Blurbworthiness:  “A tour de force.... No writer since JM Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy has written about an animal with such intensity. This is a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite. Again and again it wows you with its ambition…At its heart is a touching and inspiriting sense of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits. Boundaries melt, other hearts become knowable…This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness.” (Joseph O’Connor, for The Irish Times)

Cities I’ve Never Lived In
by Sara Majka
(Graywolf Press)

I’ll close out this month’s already-overstuffed Front Porch Books with one more short story collection. As with the previously-mentioned books by Margaret Malone and Rebecca Schiff, Sara Majka demonstrates a strong, steady hand with her stories’ opening lines. Browsing the pages, I couldn’t find a single word that didn’t carry its own weight. These sentences are champion draft horses.  They pull, they pull, they pull...

Jacket Copy:  In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka’s debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator’s life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I’ve Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.

Opening Lines:  Maybe ten or eleven years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city. We were both moving often during this time, as if it were the best solution to a shattered life: to move from place to place, trying to thread together, if not our marriage and our lives, then something in ourselves.

Blurbworthiness:  “Like Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Sara Majka writes stories of people on society’s ragged edge—in money trouble, work trouble, heart trouble—and does so with tremendous subtlety and a grave sophistication all her own. Every one of the spare sentences in this book is heavy with implication and insight. It’s impossible to read these stories too closely.”  (Salvatore Scibona, author of The End)

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

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

Stephen King watches over us as we sleep. And sometimes he shrinks himself to Fantastic Voyage size and enters our head through our ear canals, our nostrils, or, if he’s especially daring, our open mouths. He travels light: just a notebook and a pen he uses to write down our dreams. Then, when he’s satisfied he has enough for another story about our dark inner lives, he exits our head and writes another bestselling book. His latest, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories, is out today and, as you can see from the brief trailer above, it’s full of butterflies and Grim Reapers. Other citizens of King’s dreamscape include: a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, doomed to repeat his mistakes over and over again; a married couple who makes a pact with the devil; a journalist who kills people by writing their obituaries; a sheriff troubled by the Old West justice meted out to a man condemned to hang; and a boy who canoes to a deserted island and finds names written in the sand, the names of people who then die in freak accidents. Sleep tight, dear readers. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.

My First Time: Lincoln Michel

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 Lincoln Michel, author of Upright Beasts, a collection of stories Vanity Fair said is “full of monstrous surprises and eerie silences.” Lincoln is the editor-in-chief of electricliterature.com and a founding editor of Gigantic. His work has appeared in Granta, Oxford American, Tin House, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of Gigantic Worlds, an anthology of science flash fiction. He was born in Virginia and lives in Brooklyn. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and on Twitter @thelincoln.

My First Publication and What I Did After

There are two literary success stories we like talking about: the prodigy who shoots to stardom after getting her first big break and the underappreciated writer who toils away in obscurity until suddenly finding success (often after death). It’s easy to see why. The former allows emerging writers to imagine writing success will be easy and quick, and the latter allows writers who haven’t found success yet to believe it’s still in the cards for them. And both of those things do indeed happen. For me and most writers I know, though, the journey is bit more of a long but steady slog.

A couple weeks ago my first book, a story collection called Upright Beasts, was published by Coffee House Press. It was published, almost to the day, eleven years after my first literary magazine acceptance. My first two acceptances, actually.

On October 6th of 2004, I got my first short story accepted by email. On October 7th, I got another email from a different journal accepting my first poem. October 8th is my birthday. I think I was feeling pretty great that week. I was a senior in college, and those publications helped me believe that writing was something I could do once the “real world” kicked in. (Not that I had much of a back-up plan…)

It would be nice here to craft a story of how those first publications inspired me to new heights of creativity, or else imparted an unrealistic idea of success that sent me into the artistic wilderness for years that I came out of with important life lessons to give you now. Yet nothing very interesting happened. I didn’t print out the acceptances, wrap them around a brick, and toss them through the window of the writing teachers who doubted me. I didn’t go on a two-month soul searching journey to another country. I didn’t get wasted and kick down the front door of The New Yorker’s offices, shouting “I have arrived!”

Here’s what I did do: I kept working. And I made submitting a job.

I didn’t make writing a job. Probably to my detriment, I still think of writing as a magical art that thrives on inspiration, new ideas, and trying out different styles and constraints. So I kept writing with no particular direction except what I enjoyed and what challenged me. But submitting? I made that a rigid routine.

I read and studied lit mags. I figured out which were the ones I liked and wanted to be published in, and then I submitted to all of them. When I got a rejection, I waited a couple weeks and sent a new story. I stole office supplies to mail submissions with. I bought a notebook and drew columns for each story, and watched the accumulation of crossed out names. When a story was accepted, I highlighted the accepting journal and made a new column. If a story never got accepted, I revised it. If I couldn’t figure out how to revise it, I scratched up the column and moved on. I didn’t carpet-bomb magazines—sending the same story to thirty places at once—but instead tried to have a story out at no more than three to eight places at once. Years passed. Acceptances accumulated and solicitations started to trickle in.

I still have the notebook.

I got far more rejections than acceptances, but I knew that was the way of things. In one of my first creative writing classes, before I’d ever submitted, we read the previous year’s Best American Short Stories. In the back, the authors talked about their publication journey. I remember one author said she had been rejected thirty times before being accepted. Thirty times! However, she’d not only been accepted, but had been accepted by one of the best literary magazines out there, Tin House. And then she had been picked for one of the most prestigious year-end anthologies. It was a good thing to read before I started submitting, made me regard rejection as the norm and not take it personally. Well, mostly.

Again, I know this is not a very interesting story. But it is a typical one, and one that I think writers should remember when they are discouraged by rejection, or shrug off submitting because they believe nothing comes out of the slush. The latter is simply not true. I was published out of the slush with zero connections dozens of times before anyone ever solicited me. Lit mag editors really do read the slush. Rejection, on the other hand, is just a part of the life. You have you to accept it like a fish accepts water. And then get back to work.

Sunday Sentence: The Girl Who Slept With God by Val Brelinski

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

She could hear, but no longer see, his footsteps, so she had to trust that he knew the way, and that any of the ground’s rough spots or upheavals had already been worn away by years and years of her father tracing his careful, deliberate orbit through the darkness.

Final line of The Girl Who Slept With God by Val Brelinski