Friday Freebie: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

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

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

Friday Freebie: Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward

Congratulations to Mary Jane Nealon, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Tales of the New World by Sabina Murray.

This week's book giveaway is Close Your Eyes, the latest novel to roll off the keyboard of one of my favorite contemporary authors: Amanda Eyre Ward.  Like her previous novels Sleep Toward Heaven, How to Be Lost and Forgive Me, Ward sinks the reader deep into domestic drama from the first moment we meet six-year-old Lauren and her eight-year-old brother Alex as they spend a summer night in their tree house.  Ward excels at creating engaging characters who are quirky, occasionally funny, and nearly always on the brink of tragedy.  I'll let the publisher's blurb explain what's going on in Close Your Eyes:

      For most of her life, Lauren Mahdian has been certain of two things: that her mother is dead, and that her father is a murderer.
      Before the horrific tragedy, Lauren led a sheltered life in a wealthy corner of America, in a town outside Manhattan on the banks of Long Island Sound, a haven of luxurious homes, manicured lawns, and seemingly perfect families. Here Lauren and her older brother, Alex, thought they were safe.
      But one morning, six-year-old Lauren and eight-year-old Alex awoke after a night spent in their tree house to discover their mother’s body and their beloved father arrested for the murder.
      Years later, Lauren is surrounded by uncertainty. Her one constant is Alex, always her protector, still trying to understand the unraveling of his idyllic childhood. But Lauren feels even more alone when Alex reveals that he’s been in contact over the years with their imprisoned father—and that he believes he and his sister have yet to learn the full story of their mother’s death.
      Then Alex disappears.
      As Lauren is forced to peek under the floorboards of her carefully constructed memories, she comes to question the version of her history that she has clung to so fiercely. Lauren’s search for the truth about what happened on that fateful night so many years ago is a riveting tale that will keep readers feverishly turning pages.

Justin Cronin (The Passage) said Close Your Eyes is "electrifying, a literary whodunit of the first order—breathless and disturbing and hopeful and true. You won't be able to look away. People will be talking about this book."

If you want to start talking about Close Your Eyes, all you have to do is answer this question to be entered in the drawing for a chance to win a copy of the book:

What happened in 1989 in Larchmont, New York which influenced the writing of Close Your Eyes?  (You can find the answer by visiting Ward's website.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Nov. 10--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 11.

Front Porch Books: April 2011 Edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly assessment of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch and other sources. Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mr. UPS, deliver them with a doorbell-and-dash method of deposit, I call them my Front Porch Books. Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. To see a larger version of the book covers, click on the thumbnails.

My American Unhappiness by Dean Bakopoulos (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):  Bakopoulos follows up his debut novel Please Don't Come Back From the Moon with this book which seems to put the "more" in "morose."  Zeke Pappas, a 33-year-old director of a humanities institute in Wisconsin, is conducting a survey of American unhappiness, a project he considers his life's work.  He's also a widower caring for his two orphaned nieces, with a mother who is dying of cancer.  Zeke learns she's planning to deny him custody of the girls unless he gets married before she dies.  So he begins a quest for a mate, with candidates ranging from a coffee shop barista to Sofia Coppola (yes, that Sofia Coppola).  Blurb worthiness:  "In Zeke Pappas, Dean Bakopoulos has invented a man for all rainy seasons--a horny, heartbroken cousin of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, telling a long, tall tale of anomie in the heartland." (Tom Piazza, City of Refuge)

He Said What? edited by Victoria Zackheim (Seal Press):  This anthology of twenty-five personal essays is subtitled "Women Write About Moments When Everything Changed" and it boasts an impressive contributors list, including Caroline Leavitt, Joyce Maynard, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Abby Frucht and Pam Houston--all of them focusing on significant turning points in their lives.  In her Introduction, Zackheim writes:

Whether the life-altering comment is made by a psychotic boyfriend, a dying father, someone's husband, teacher or doctor, a Russian journalist, a boss, or a frightened brother facing the threat of AIDS, the talented authors in this book offer everything from drama to delight, from havoc to the outright hilarious, from the philosophical to the whimsical, and they will remind you of that moment in your life--or, for some of you, the many moments!--when you thought to yourself, He said what? and it changed the way you looked at your life for that precise moment...or forever.

These Opening Lines from "Crazy" by Barbara Abercrombie should give you a good idea of the book's flavor:

     He's banging on the bedroom door that opens onto the deck.  When I let him in, he says, "You locked the doors."
     I say, "It's 4:30 AM."
     He says, "I forgot my keys."
     I say, "Where were you?"
     "It was a late dinner."
     "It's 4:30 AM."
     What he doesn't say is, I don't want to be married anymore.  I want to leave.  I think I'm in love with someone else.  Instead he says, "You're crazy."

Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward (Random House):  It's no secret I'm in love with AEW's fiction--ranging from her debut Sleep Toward Heaven (which I called "a novel that reads like lightning, but has the lasting roll of thunder") to her most recent book, Love Stories in This Town (which I said were "sharp-focused family snapshots, catching husbands, wives, children, parents, lovers and ex-lovers in moments of confusion, hope, paranoia, delight, resentment and all the other ingredients of the human stew").  Now Ward has returned with another novel of domestic unrest and moldering family secrets.  The prologue begins with a honey-colored scene from narrator Lauren Mahdian's life in 1986 which belies the horrible truth at the novel's core.  Opening Lines:

     I can remember the taste of ocean, and the dark smell of impending rain.  Our parents had given us reluctant permission to spend the night in the tree house.  From our perch, high in an oak tree, we could see a faraway sliver of Long Island Sound.  I can almost see myself--the way I looked, before: a sweet girl, just eight.  I was sturdy, like my father, with his dark hair and olive skin.  My mother brushed my hair into pigtails, and I wore sundresses with bare feet, so I could climb.
     My brother, Alex, had stolen a can of Tab from the pantry.  We drank from plastic teacups, remnants of my girlhood set.  Clouds moved over the moon.  My L L. Bean sleeping bag was too warm, and in the middle of the night, I slipped one leg outside the heavy fabric and touched my brother's foot with my own.
     The tree house was a small structure shaped like a pirate ship.  My mother used to laugh and say it had taken longer for my father to build the damn thing than it had for her to grow and deliver a baby, but by the time I was two and could climb the ladder to the top, it was finished.
     We had a large, grassy yard; from the tree house, you could barely see the peeling paint on our back door.  No matter what happened inside, as it turned out, you wouldn't hear a sound.

"As it turned out," Lauren's father is busy murdering her mother inside the house on that night (or so the Jacket Copy would lead us to believe).  Trust me, it took all my willpower to stop reading at the end of the prologue--and even then it was only because I'm already simultaneously reading four booksin a long line of books which need to be accompanied by cardiac paddles.

Beautiful Unbroken by Mary Jane Nealon (Graywolf Press):  In a note accompanying the uncorrected proof which landed on my front porch, the publicist had written in thick black ink: "Montana author!"  While I'm an instant sucker for any author hailing from Big Sky Country (Nealon currently lives in Missoula), I'm even more susceptible to a well-written memoir.  Judging from the Opening Lines of Beautiful Unbroken, Nealon seems to know how to tell her life story in a way that's completely engaging and unforgettable:

     As far back as I can remember I wanted to be a nurse or a saint. I wanted to be heroic.
     In Jersey City, our backyard was a small square that met the backyards of our neighbors. The yards were as close as the houses. Our yard faced the backs of the houses on Fifth Street, and to our right, the backs of the houses on Erie Street. Everyone's clothesline criss-crossed. Mr. Cleary's roses were big white and yellow bombs on the fence. Pearl Manupelli's potted plants and rusted rocking chair with the rooster cushion pressed in on the right. Alice lived to our left with her children and her wild barking dog, Lady. Three doors down from Alice lived the Polish man with the dog who looked just like Lassie. We called to the dog through the fence, "Lassie, come home!" In the center of our backyard, there was a dogwood tree, planted by my great-grandfather, Bartley Kelly. Once a year it rained velvety white petals in the yard.
     One day my brother and I were playing catch in the backyard. My father was home, so it must have been a weekend. He had just come out to see what we were doing, or maybe to toss the ball around, but as he stepped from the back door we heard Lassie bark and then a scream that slit the leaves quivering in the tree. My father leapt the fences between us and the scream. My brother and I followed, but we were slow and afraid of Lady. By the time we got to the Polish man's yard, my father had cut him down from the shed where his wife had found him hanging. My father was trying to bring the man around, the wife was calling an ambulance, and Lassie was sitting back on her haunches, whining. Every few seconds the whines would escalate into a one-word bark. My brother held my hand, which he rarely did anymore, he was getting too big for that, but I was happy, because really I was holding his hand. I remember more people gathering at their fences and someone pulling us back over. I remember watching the superhero back of my father bent over the man. And the man's dark green janitorial pants. I noticed the bag of clothespins on the ground and the empty pulleys where the clothesline had been.
     I remember wishing I was my father, jumping over the fence, saving the man. The man lived but his voice box was crushed and he would glare at my brother and me as we passed his front gate. We didn't think we could pet Lassie anymore because of the looks he gave us. He never forgave my father for saving him. It didn't matter. I didn't want to talk to him or pet his dog. I wanted to remember my father leaping in the air, the scream in front of him, and his quick flight over the wire fences.

There is so much to admire in these opening paragraphs: the "one-word bark," the "velvety white petals," the scream that "slit the leaves," the man who cannot forgive another man for saving his life.  It's enough to propel me forward into the book. Nealon's story mainly concerns itself with nursing and how she tried to save her brother who was diagnosed with cancer around the time she entered nursing school.  I'm already hooked on this story of a girl who wanted to grow up to be just like Clara Barton.  And, for what it's worth, I love that cover with the photo of a Janus-like woman floating in water, symbolising the way Nealon is torn between wanting to save everyone, yet knowing we are all doomed to eventual death.

Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors (Ecco):  Connors' book has been gathering acclaim at the rate of a flame ripping through dry underbrush.  Jacket Copy:

A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke.  Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude.

I've been fascinated by the solitary life of fire lookouts ever since the day I saw an episode of Timmy and Lassie in the early 1960s when Timmy's Mom (June Lockhart) took a job in the Calverton Tower and Lassie, predictably, had to save her from smoke inhalation.  Reading Edward Abbey's Black Sun years later only deepened my fascination.  But Lassie and Abbey were fiction; Connors is the real thing.  Since I'm surrounded by forests which are dry as tinderboxes, this might just be the perfect summer reading for me.

What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell edited by Suzanne Marrs (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):  The Southern novelist and the New Yorker editor wrote letters (remember them?) for more than fifty years and now Marrs has edited more than three hundred of them for our enjoyment and edification.  Just by reading the first two letters in this collection, you know you're in for a literary feast.  On Dec. 22, 1942, Welty wrote:

Dear Mr. Maxwell,
     I will tell you the truth, your letter somehow got in my unabridged dictionary--do your letters often do that?--and was out of sight, out of mind, till just now when after a long arid period I again went to look up a word.  My apologies for not answering, though all I can answer is that I haven't any material at all right now.

Maxwell begins his reply two weeks later with:

Dear Miss Welty:
     Some of my letters get into my checkbook, and some into my overcoat pocket (which has a hole in it, so that I don't know what happens to them after that) and some into The Milwaukee Settlement Cook Book, and some in the top dresser drawer, which is theoretically sacred to socks.  So I am in a perfect position to understand and condone your leisurely reply.

In no time at all, author and editor are on a first-name basis and their letters, according to the Jacket Copy serve as "a chronicle of the literary world of the time; read talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more.  It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations."

 

Don't Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon (Harper):  If nothing else, McMahon's novel got my attention with its arresting cover photo.  The eyes of that little girl seem to say, "Don't you dare walk past me without opening this book and reading at least the first paragraph."  Well, I did and found myself in the middle of a sexual tryst on a motel bed between a woman named Phoebe and a married man. The rest of the book seems to be about a little girl (she of the cover's pop-eyes) who disappears into a "world of fairies" on a "soft summer night in Vermont."  It's enough to make me take at least a second look.  Blurb worthiness: "Jennifer McMahon never flinches and never fails to surprise as her stories twist down unexpected roads. Don't Breathe a Word balances love and horror as McMahon weaves a young couple into a perverse fairyland where Rosemary's Baby could be at home." (Randy Susan Meyers, The Murderer's Daughters )

 

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (W. W. Norton):  Finally, finally, Skibsrud's novel which won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize is available to us in the U.S.  This is high on my Most-Anticipated list and has earned a place near the summit of my To-Read Stack (Mount NeverRest).  Jacket Copy:

Haunted by the vivid horrors of the Vietnam War, exhausted from years spent battling his memories, Napoleon Haskell leaves his North Dakota trailer and moves to Canada. He retreats to a small Ontario town where Henry, the father of his fallen Vietnam comrade, has a home on the shore of a man-made lake. Under the water is the wreckage of what was once the town--and the home where Henry was raised. When Napoleon's daughter arrives, fleeing troubles of her own, she finds her father in the dark twilight of his life, and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about his life; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge. Lyrical and riveting, The Sentimentalists is a story of what lies beneath the surface of everyday life, and of the commanding power of the past. Johanna Skibsrud's first novel marks the debut of a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction.

My suspicion that this will be something like a lyrical dream are confirmed by the Opening Lines:

The house my father left behind in Fargo, North Dakota, was never really a house at all. Always, instead, it was an idea of itself. A carpenter’s house. A work in progress. So that even after we moved him north to Casablanca, and his Fargo home was dragged away – the lot sold to a family from Billings, Montana – my father was always saddened and surprised if the place was remembered irreverently, as if it had been a separate and incidental thing; distinct from the rest of our lives. In this way, he remained, until the end, a house carpenter. If only in the way that he looked at things. As if all objects existed in blueprint; in different stages of design or repair.

News From the World by Paula Fox (W. W. Norton):  You've got to admire an author who starts her Preface with a sentence like this:  "My Father, Paul Hervey Fox, was a writer and a drunk."  Over the years, Fox has earned nothing but admiration from readers--especially fellow writers like Jonathan Franzen who ranked her above Roth, Bellow and Updike.  Jacket Copy:  "This complete gathering of Paula Fox's short works spans forty-five illustrious years of her career, from 1965 to 2010.  There are perfectly turned stories (two of which--'Grace' and 'The Broad Estates of Death'--won the O. Henry Prize) in which characters unexpectedly find themselves at a crossroads and struggle to connect with others.  There is memoir--a genre where Fox's honesty, grace, and perception set her apart--in which Fox revisits childhood ideas about art and reality, life in New York in the 1960s, and her relationship with her husband's family.  And there are essays--pointed, funny, relentlessly persuasive pieces on such topics as censorship and the corruption of language.  Enlivened by Fox's signature wit and electrified by her unsparing insights into human nature, News from the World is essential for Fox's loyal readers and perfect to introduce those who are meeting her for the first time."   Leafing through the book, I came across this essay, "Light on the Dark Side" whose Opening Lines snapped me to attention:

      One Manhattan mid-morning in the spring of 1967, I heard the crack of a gun going off below, along the broad reach of Central Park West.  I jumped up from the table where I was working on my second novel and looked down five stories to the street, on the other side of which breathed the quiet greenery of Central Park.  What I saw was a man lying in the middle of the street attempting to raise himself up from the waist, like a seal, collapsing, trying again, then falling flat.
      At the same moment that I looked down I saw Billy the doorman glance up at me.  We had both witnessed the murder.

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey (Penguin Books):  Published in Great Britain in 2009 and coming to America now for the first time, courtesy of the fine folks at Penguin, Roffey's novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (losing to Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna).  Jacket Copy:  "Monique Roffey's Orange Prize-shortlisted novel is a gripping portrait of post-colonialism that stands among great works by Caribbean writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Andrea Levy.  When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England, George is immediately seduced by the beguiling island, while Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill-at-ease.  As they adapt to new circumstances, their marriage endures for better or worse, despite growing political unrest and racial tensions that affect their daily lives.  But when George finds a cache of letters that Sabine has hidden from him, the discovery sets off a devastating series of consequences as other secrets begin to emerge."  Blurb worthiness:  "Heart-rending and thought-provoking, you will never again see the Caribbean as just another holiday destination." (Elle Magazine)

The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy (Hyperion):  On the face of it, Leroy's novel about a woman living on the Channel Island of Guernsey while her husband is off fighting in World War Two doesn't look like my cup of English tea.  There's the plot which seems ripe for a gooey Hollywood mess: British soldier's wife falls in love with German soldier; long tracking shot as they kiss; bombs burst over head; fade out, etc.  There's the cover which seems a little too gauzy, a little too sentimental, a little too perfume-y.  The Jacket Copy also doesn't bode well for anything that tickles my fancy, full of phrases like "As their relationship intensifies," "Though Vivienne knows the perils of her love affair with Gunther," and "A novel full of grand passion and intensity."  But then I turned to the first chapter and read a few paragraphs, which include these Opening Lines:

It's so peaceful in my house tonight. The amber light of the setting sun falls on all the things in this room, all so friendly and familiar: my piano and heaps of sheet music, the Staffordshire dogs and silver eggcups, the many books on their shelves, the flowered tea set in the glass-fronted cabinet. I look around and wonder if we will be here this time tomorrow--if after tomorrow I will ever see this room again. Millie's cat, Alphonse, is asleep in a circle of sun on the sill, and through the open window that looks out over our back garden, you can hear only the blackbird's song and the many little voices of the streams: there is always a sound of water in these valleys. I'm so grateful for the quiet. You could almost imagine that this was the end of an ordinary sweet summer day. Last week, when the Germans were bombing Cherbourg, you could hear the sound of it even here in our hidden valley, like thunder out of a clear sky, and up at Angie le Brocq's farm, at Les Ruettes on the hill, when you touched your hand to the window pane, you could feel the faint vibration of it, just a tremor, so you weren't quite sure if it was the window shaking or your hand. But for the moment, it's tranquil here.

I thought to myself, "Hmmm....maybe there's actually something good here, a realism buried beneath the postcard romance of another Summer of My German Soldier.  Maybe I shouldn't judge a book by its cover.  Maybe I'll give this one a shot."

The Druggist of Auschwitz by Dieter Schlesak (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):  Staying in World War Two for a moment, here's a book that's labeled "A Documentary Novel."  After picking up the package from my front porch and tearing it open, I started leafing through the pages.  This is a novel, but it's liberally peppered with photographs--horrific images of the Holocaust, some of which we've seen before.  It's always hard to read about the death camps, in fiction or otherwise, but I'm very curious to see how Schlesak blends fiction with the unbearable truth.  Jacket Copy:

Dieter Schlesak’s haunting novel The Druggist of Auschwitz—beautifully translated from the German by John Hargraves—is a frighteningly vivid portrayal of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of criminal and victim alike.  Adam, known as “the last Jew of Schäßburg,” recounts with disturbing clarity his imprisonment at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Through Adam’s fictional narrative and excerpts of actual testimony from the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963–65, we come to learn of the true-life story of Dr. Victor Capesius, who, despite strong friendships with Jews before the war, quickly aided in and profited from their tragedy once the Nazis came to power. Interspersed with historical research and the author’s face-to-face interviews with survivors, the novel follows Capesius from his assignment as the “sorter” of new arrivals at Auschwitz—deciding who will go directly to the gas chamber and who will be used for labor—through his life of lavish wealth after the war to his arrest and eventual trial.  Schlesak’s seamless incorporation of factual data and testimony—woven into Adam’s dreamlike remembrance of a world turned upside down—makes The Druggist of Auschwitz a vital and unique addition to our understanding of the Holocaust.

Blurb worthiness:  "A great book that hits you like a fist....An unforgettable tapestry of evil....[The Druggist of Auschwitz] shows that, as Melville said, the truth is more unthinkable than fiction." (Claudio Magris, Corriere della Sera)

The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Riverhead Books):  As this novel opens, Joseph Conrad's body is being lowered into his grave at Canterbury and another man starts to write about his encounter with the novelist:

       Here I shall tell you of implausible murders and unpredictable hangings, elegant declarations of war and slovenly peace accords, of fires and floods and intriguing ships and conspiratorial trains, but somehow all that I tell you will be aimed at explaining and explaining to myself, link by link, the chain of events that provoked the encounter for which my life was destined.
       For that's how it is: the disagreeable business of destiny has its share of responsibility in all this. Conrad and I, who were born countless meridians apart, our lives marked by the difference of the hemispheres, had a common future that would have been obvious from the first moment even to the most skeptical person.

From these lines alone, it's not hard to see why Mario Vargas Llosa called Vasquez "one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature."  Jacket Copy:  "In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel Nostromo, about a South American republic he named Costaguana.  It was inspired by the geography and history of Colombia, where Conrad spent only a few days.  But in Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel The Secret History of Costaguana, we uncover the hidden source--and one of the great literary thefts.  On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop.  Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail--from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments.  Conrad stole them all.  Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear--Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence.  As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, Vásquez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back."

There Is No Year by Blake Butler (Harper Perennial):  This odd, experimental novel by the editor of the website HTMLGIANT hit bookstores in early April and has been gathering praise like a magnet draws metal filings.  I'm still not quite sure what to make of the book which bears more than a little resemblance in plot and physical design to Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.  It could be the strangest thing I've ever read, or it could be the coolest.  The Jacket Copy, written in the style of the staccato-short chapters, should give you some idea of what to expect inside the book:

     A family of three: father, mother, son.
     A house that gives them shelter but shapes their nightmares.
     An illness that nearly arrested the past, and looms over the future.
     A second family—a copy family.  Mirror bodies.
     Events on the horizon: a hole, a box, a light, a girl.
     Holes in houses.  Holes in speaking.  Holes in flesh.
     Memories that deceive and figures that tempt and lure and withdraw.
     There Is No Year is the astonishing new novel by Blake Butler.
     It is a world of scare, a portrait of return, a fable of survival and the fierce burden of art.

Blurb worthiness: "Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power, a fairy tale of an ordinary family subjected to the strange, lonesome agony known as daily life.  There is No Year is a merciless novel cleansed of joy, pumped full of fear and awe." (Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String)

Great Beginnings: "Love Stories in This Town" by Amanda Eyre Ward

First lines are the handshakes writers give their readers.

As we slide into the story, we’ll always remember that first impression of the opening sentence's firm, self-assured grip.  If we don’t remember those first lines, it’s probably because the author gave us a clammy, limp-fingered greeting.  In her debut story collection, Love Stories in This Town, novelist Amanda Eyre Ward has no problem with “gripping” first lines.

Readers familiar with Ward’s previous works of fiction—the novels Sleep Toward Heaven, How to Be Lost and Forgive Me--already know she can plot herself out of a paper bag with ease.  With a relaxed, witty style, she has a way of burrowing right to the heart of her characters—ordinary folks who find themselves caught in the turbulence of unexpected circumstances.  The same holds true for Love Stories in This Town.  The majority of these tales open like a bullet coming from the barrel of a gun.

I have always been a sucker for first sentences.  I can remember moments in my life when opening lines stopped me short (and then pushed me forward, as all great beginnings should do): specifically, Raymond Carver

My friend Mel McGinnis was talking.  Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
(“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”)

and Richard Ford

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

Ward, in my humble opinion, is their equal (at least in the First Lines Dept.).  The dozen tales in Love Stories in This Town are sharp-focused family snapshots, catching husbands, wives, children, parents, lovers and ex-lovers in moments of confusion, hope, paranoia, delight, resentment and all the other ingredients of the human stew.

A young couple, still reeling from a miscarriage, searches for a new home in a strange town.  In another story, it’s the anticipation of a pregnancy that provides the suspense as a young woman working at a dot-com tries to sort out conflicted feelings of motherhood.  Lola, the character at the center of connected stories in the book’s second half, spends most of her life looking for her place in life.  The pall of 9/11 hangs over several of the stories, as do the dark clouds of romance.

Yes, I said “dark clouds.”  Despite the breezy nature of Ward’s style, there’s an underlying effort to strip away the happy, shiny veneer of love, Hollywood-style.  The title of the book, after all, is taken from a line of dialogue spoken by a cynical bartender: “There are no love stories in this town.”

I could go on at length about the many charms of the book, but I’ll just use this space to pinpoint some of Ward’s excellent opening lines:

They told us the baby was dead, and two days later we were on a plane to Texas.  (“The Stars Are Bright in Texas”)


A woman had drowned in the lake, but that did not make it any less picturesque.  (“On Messalonskee Lake”)


I had heard about the rib, of course, but did not expect it to be at the Smiths’ Christmas party.  Yet there it was, on the mantel, sandwiched between a bowl of cinnamon-scented potpourri and a holly sprig.  Merry Christmas!  Here’s our daughter’s rib.  (“The Way the Sky Changed”)


The man Lola loved wasn’t marrying her, and she didn’t know what to wear to the wedding.  (“Miss Montana’s Wedding Day”)


Lola thought the baby shower would be canceled due to the beheading, but she was wrong.  (“Motherhood and Terrorism”)

And this, from my favorite story in the collection—“Butte as in Beautiful”—which, if memory serves me right, was the very first sentence of Ward’s I ever read, years ago when someone sent me a link to an on-line version of the story.  The rest of the story, as with all of the other examples I cited above, more than fulfills that tantalizing handshake promise of its opening words.  I dare anyone to stop reading after a sentence like this:

It’s a crappy coincidence that on the day James asks for my hand in marriage, there is a masturbator loose in the library.

Dzanc gets its day

These two gentlemen have every reason to be smiling.  They do good things for the world.  They put books into readers' hands, they mentor unpublished writers, they put authors in schools to talk with students, they rally the community to support cash-strapped literary journals.  In short, they run into the burning building we call the Publishing Industry and rescue writers, readers and books.  So when you have  humanitarian hearts this big, you just can't keep that grin wiped off your face.

Steven Gillis (left) and Dan Wickett--who, now that they're in the same room, could pass for twins--are the founders of Dzanc Books and are the justly-deserved subjects of a feature story at the Poets & Writers website.

I've mentioned Dan W. and Dzanc Books before here at The Quivering Pen, but Jeremiah Chamberlin's article for Poets & Writers neatly charts the indie publisher's history--which had its origins in 2003 with Wickett's enthusiastic book review e-mails to a group he called the Emerging Writers Network.  When reader Wickett met writer Gillis in 2005, they recognized in each other a spirit which championed under-read, overlooked writers.  Dzanc Books was born and, along with its imprints, has gone on to publish more than 50 works of fiction.  Most significantly, however, they also brought a sense of community service to an industry which, let's face it, is typically self-serving.  Chamberlin really sums it up well when he writes:

...perhaps nothing captures why Dzanc exists, or what it hopes to accomplish as an organization and a publisher, than (Gillis') response: “There’s really no purpose in life except helping other people.  That’s the bottom line.  I mean, there really isn’t.  That’s how I look at it.  I don’t understand when people don’t think that way.  You know, I got lucky early on with investments.  I live in a comfortable house.  I could live in a mansion, but I don’t.  I save my pennies and I do charitable work instead.”

How fitting—and natural—then that Gillis and Wickett would work so well together. Because during the five years prior to their initial meeting, the only compensation that Wickett had received from writing hundreds of reviews, interviewing dozens of writers, and creating a Web site to promote the work of these individuals, was the free copies of books he’d received from authors and publishers.  What mattered to him was championing good writing.  That, and the friendships that had naturally developed along the way.

I'm proud to say that mine was one of those many friendships.  I can't remember how or when I joined EWN and started getting Dan's e-mails (though it must have been sometime in 2004, just before I deployed to Iraq), but I do know in all the correspondence I've had with Dan, I've never heard anything but generosity, selflessness, and evangelical zeal for books and writers.  He and his battalion of EWN disciples (including, but certainly not limited to, Pinckney Benedict, Allison Amend, Erin McGraw, Philip Deaver, Greg Michalson, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Amanda Eyre Ward, Jim Nichols, and Masha Hamilton) generously supplied me with care packages and notes of encouragement while I was in Baghdad.  Dan's support of my writing continued after I returned to the U.S. and we remain close friends to this day (even though I've never met him in person).  It's impossible for me to adequately express the gratitude I feel for Dan, EWN and all of Dzanc for my growth as a writer.  I'd been writing for years before I found EWN, but never took myself very seriously.  Dan and the other EWN'ers gave me encouragement and led me to believe I could start running stronger and faster as a writer.  In geologic terms, if I was the fish crawling out of the ocean and sprouting legs, Dan Wickett was the oxygen in my gills.

So, as a small way of thanking Dan and his team, I'm asking that you put your weekend activities on pause for another fifteen minutes, read Jeremiah Chamberlin's article and, after you feel that gush of goodwill spread through your chest, check out some of Dzanc's charitable efforts:

Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions

National Dzanc Workshop Day

Dzanc Writers-in-Residence Program

Disquiet International Literary Program

The Collagist on-line literary journal

While you're at the Dzanc Books website, think about adding a book or two to your shopping cart.  You can thank me later.


Photo credit: Jeremiah Chamberlin

More Pretty Young Things

As I mentioned earlier, The New Yorker has released its list of "20 Under 40" promising fiction writers to predictable hue and cry. Since I'm on the far side of 40 and the shy side of 50, I'm trying not to take this as a personal affront (he says, shaking his fist at the Manhattan skyscraper, spitting on the sidewalk, and yelling uselessly up to the 15th Floor, "You haven't heard the last of me yet, New Yorker!").

I bought the "20 Under 40" issue and spent the better part of a month reading the stories from "writers I should be watching."  Excuse me while I stifle a yawn and check to see if my socks are still on (Yep).  The stories aren't bad (in the way a tuna-fish sandwich left out in the sun all afternoon is said to be bad), but they also aren't great (as a Five Guys double-patty cheeseburger with jalapenos and mayo is great--nay, tongue-curlingly great!).  I've seen more electricity at a Luddite Convention.

But The New Yorker list is beneficial if for nothing else than to spark another of those one-upping debates the lit-blogging community loves so well.  "You think '20 Under 40' is so great?  Well, I've got the '10 Over 80' list right here, buddy!"  I could fill an entire blog post with nothing but hyperlinks directing you to lists of the over-looked and under-appreciated writers, but here are two of them which have piqued my interest:  for the British perspective, check out The Telegraph's 20 Under 40 list; for the indie-publishing perspective, go to The Emerging Writers Network's 20 Writers to Watch list (many, many unfamiliar writers on there I need to check out!).

As for my list?  Previously, I'd trumpeted 9 under 40, but now I've reconsidered and expanded my choices.  Taking the liberty of adding a decade to The New Yorker list to include my fellow fortysomethings, here are my 20 personal favorites, keeping in mind there are plenty of other very good writers (or so I've heard) whose works I've never read--including Dave Eggers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Here's my list, in no particular order:

Chris Ware
I've read my fair share of graphic novels (though less than I should), and Ware is still the one who touches me deepest.  I haven't read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which has piled up the accolades, but for my money nothing can beat Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth for sheer beautiful misery.  Published in 2000, one year before our national tragedy, it chronicled the awkward, lonely life of the titular loser who must deal with father issues in the bleak midwinter of his life.  Imagine Richard Yates' characters trapped in the panels of a comic strip and you'll have some inkling about the depth of wallow in Jimmy Corrigan.

Laura van den Berg
I've had my eye on van den Berg for more than two years now, ever since I read the issue of One Story featuring the title story from her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, about a teenage girl accompanying her scientist mother on a trip to Madagascar to study lemurs. I haven't had the chance to read the rest of the stories in this new collection, but the jacket copy at publisher Dzanc Books' website hints at the odd and beautiful ways that van den Berg uses myth and humor to reveal the human condition: A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator.  A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster.  A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo.

C. J. Box
I don't read a lot of contemporary mysteries.  I mostly prefer the locked-room puzzles of Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen and Rex Stout.  But when I do reach for murder and mayhem, one of the first places I go is Box's Joe Pickett mysteries, books which combine my love for the Rocky Mountain west, and the morbid beauty of blood-spatter on snow.  Pickett is a Wyoming game warden whose cases usually revolve around the uneasy intersection between man and nature--elk poachers gone awry, kidnappers retreating from society, etc.  He is one of the most interesting "detectives" working in fiction these days.  I especially like Box's stories for their depth, complexity, and genuinely-earned emotional pitch.  Click here to read my review of Nowhere to Run .

Joe Hill
To paraphrase Willie Nelson, the guy can scare the paint off a trailer hitch with his ghost stories.  Sure, as the son of horrormeister Stephen King, Hill comes by his talent honestly.  But swing a cat in a crowded room and you'll hit plenty of talentless offspring of artists (Drew Barrymore, anyone?).  Hill creeps under the skin quietly and unforgettably, especially in the short stories of 20th-Century Ghosts.  Hill makes horror feel as fresh as the day his father published 'Salem's Lot.  In 20th-Century Ghosts, the frights come by way of a haunted movie theater, a museum which collects the "last breath" of famous people and "Pop Art," a sad, bizarre tale of an inflatable boy.

Amanda Eyre Ward
Some bookstores might shelve Ward with the Picoults and Kinsellas and Weiners in the ill-named "Chick Lit" section, but Ward has far broader appeal and, frankly, more smarts than the average writer of "women's fiction."  I also love Ward's sure-footed, off-handed way with humor.  She excels at the self-deprecating zinger, even in stories about Death Row, post-9/11 terrorism, and miscarriage.  Among other things, she knows how to open a short story with unforgettable sentences--as in the one from "Motherhood and Terrorism":  Lola thought the baby shower would be canceled due to the beheading, but she was wrong. I could go on and on about the merits and pleasures of Amanda Eyre Ward, but perhaps you should just read my reviews here and here of her books Sleep Toward Heaven and Love Stories in This Town.  If you do nothing else this week, hunt down the latter collection and read her classic story of a masturbator on the loose in the Butte Public Library ("Butte as in Beautiful").

Kevin Brockmeier
With his fabulist tales of spirituality and magical realism, Brockmeier comes close to being our American Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In my review of The View from the Seventh Layer, I wrote:  In his 2006 novel, The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier gave readers a dazzling vision of an afterlife where residents of a city are kept "alive" only as long as someone back on earth remembered them.  In his new collection of short stories, Brockmeier again proves to have a boundless imagination when writing about matters of the spirit.  He takes readers on a series of magical mystery tours through worlds that only resemble ours on the surface; scratch deeper, and you'll find a place that's a delirious mix of science fiction and religion.  It's no accident that some of these stories are labeled "fables."  Brockmeier's tales are surprising, meaningful, and sentimental in all the right places.  I can't wait to read what he writes next.

John Brandon
Brandon's first novel, Arkansas, flew under the radar two years ago, and here's hoping his newest one, Citrus County, gains elevation and starts showing up as a major blip on reader radars everywhere.  Here's what I had to say about Arkansas (in a mini-review at January Magazine) when it was first released:  Drug-running gangsters are at the heart of Arkansas, John Brandon’s debut novel from McSweeney’s Books; however, as the title reminds us, the shady business is carried out not in Harlem, Miami or Vegas but the rural Southeast.  This allows Brandon to indulge in the kind of quirky writing that distinguishes Southern grit-lit and, true to its McSweeney’s roots, this neo-noir novel is cynical and hip.  Kyle Ribb and Swin Ruiz are petty criminals who, for lack of anything better to do, start working for a black-marketeer named Frog in the land of trailer parks and deep-fried breakfasts.  The two run packets from an Arkansas state park where they have phony cover jobs as assistant park rangers.  Brandon keeps the pace brisk and tense.  The violence, when it comes, surfaces quickly, snaps at us in the space of a paragraph, then recedes just as fast.

Kyle Minor
Gritty, unsparing, and wincingly funny, Minor goes places with his stories where you might think twice about setting foot.  Click here to read one of his short stories, "The Truth and All Its Ugly;" then, after you've picked your teeth up off the floor and shoved them back into your bleeding gums, check out his debut collection In the Devil's Territory (also from Dzanc Books).  Want more encouragement?  Here's the first line of the first story in that book:  I hate Christmas, but this year is different because there is a small chance my wife will die and take our unborn child with her.

Rebecca Barry
I totally dug Barry's debut short story collection Later, at the Bar.  I said it was "inspiring fiction which just happens to be set in a room filled with smoke, sad songs and slurred words."  That book came out in 2007.  I've been keeping my eyes peeled (ouch!) for more Barry to hit the bookstores.  However, there's been nothing but crickets since then.  Ms. Barry, when are you coming back?

Adam Braver
It's a tricky thing to make historical fiction fresh without slopping into the pedantically dull or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, bizarre-for-the-sake-of-bizarre.  Braver's first book, Mr. Lincoln's Wars made me look at five-dollar bills in a whole new light.  The "novel" shone a kleig light on Honest Abe's complex inner life from thirteen different perspectives in as many short stories.  The tales of Lincoln were just varied enough to be "fresh" and were technically stunning in their execution.  His subsquent books have done the same literary psychoanalysis on Jackie Kennedy and Sarah Bernhardt.

Michael Chabon
Maybe it's unfair to give a literary titan like Chabon a slot on a list filled with under-known and over-looked writers, but the simple fact remains that Chabon is under 50 and he is one of the best damned American writers in that age group.  'Nuff said?  I think so.  For more of my love for MC's work, you can check out my reviews here, and there, and here again.

Roy Kesey
Dzanc Books strikes again!  Three years ago, Kesey's short story collection All Over was the first book to roll off their presses.  It's been nothing but reams of excellent literature ever since.  I waxed rhapsodic about Kesey's talents for January Magazine back then.  Here's part of what I said:  In these 19 stories, Kesey takes the reader on a tour of post-modern fiction that is at once bizarre and completely familiar.  Here you'll meet a man named Martin who thinks he's a guitar string, honeymooners who are threatened by llamas, a homeless couple who initially thrive during a garbage strike, and two girls who build a castle -- complete with crenellated parapets -- out of the ingredients at a Pizza Hut salad bar.  His story "Wait," about an airport boarding lounge from Hell, is an out-and-out masterpiece.  It's a story that starts out in recognizable territory, then slides into the Twilight Zone, and ends on something out of Ray Bradbury, except bleaker and weirder.

Junot Diaz
I missed the buzz-and-hype for Diaz's award-winning debut collection Drown.  But I was fully on board when, eleven years later, he delivered unto the world The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  In my review of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel for January Magazine, I wrote:  Meet Oscar de Leon, dubbed “Oscar Wao” by bullies who liken him to the foppish Oscar Wilde.  Our Oscar is a fat, virginal Dominican-American teenager who carries a Planet of the Apes lunchbox to school, spends hours painting his Dungeons and Dragons miniatures, and who knows “more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee.”  If Nerd was a country, Oscar would be its undisputed king.  Oscar is the kind of kid we would avoid on the subway -- sweaty, mumbles to himself, inevitably invades personal space, probably has bad breath.   In Junot Diaz' debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, however, Oscar is the flame and we are the moths.  An earnestly open-hearted protagonist, he draws us to him until we incinerate in the intensity of his character.

Sherman Alexie
On the page (as well as in person), Sherman Alexie pops and sizzles and does double-cartwheel flips with language.  I haven't read everything of his (Indian Killer and Flight remain untouched), but what I have read, I've really, really liked.  The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is required reading if you want to know the chemistry for a story fueled by jet-propulsion sentences.  But I also pretty-much liked his other collection Ten Little Indians.  I once wrote (and still stand by my words):  If there's a bone in Sherman Alexie's body that isn't funny, I'd like to know where it is.   The left metatarsal, perhaps; or maybe the coccyx...Take a look at the author photo on the back of his latest book, Ten Little Indians, and you'll see what I mean.   His eyes are squeezed shut and his mouth's wide open in mid-guffaw; the teeth practically leap off the dustjacket.   That laughter often leaps right back onto the page.   Alexie's sentences are jazzed with jokes, the paragraphs pop with the pleasure of puns.

Jhumpa Lahiri
When I first read Lahiri's collection Interpreter of Maladies, it had as big an impression on my writer's psyche as anything I'd read since Flannery O'Connor.  Ten years ago, I wrote in a review that "This is the kind of prose that turns aspiring writers several shades of green in the time it takes them to read one paragraph."  Though that early review of mine slops over the rim of the cup with googly-eyed praise, I still count Lahiri as one of the best stylists around.

Benjamin Percy
Okay, I'm going to be perfectly honest here (as opposed to the imperfect honesty scattered throughout the rest of this blog post):  I have not actually read a complete work of fiction by Benjamin Percy.  However, I'm including him on this list because: a) I read the first three pages of his forthcoming novel The Wilding and the ONLY reason I put it aside was because I'm in the midst of reading two other books and I want to be able to devote my complete attention to the story of three generations of flawed males bonding and breaking in the Oregon wilderness; b) those three pages were pretty fucking good; c)  I like elk and Percy's debut collection was called The Language of Elk; and d) I've been told by several people whose opinion I trust that I will love Percy.  I've been kicking myself from here to Regretsville for not reading Refresh, Refresh when it came out a couple of years ago.  To put it bluntly, Benjamin Percy is the best writer I haven't read....yet.

Josh Weil
I've raved elsewhere on this site about the excellence of Josh Weil's collection of three novellas, The New Valley.  If you saw that blog post and haven't yet started reading those three stories about misfits in rural Virginia struggling with loneliness, depression, and turbulent romance...well then, shame on you.  Why am I even shouting into the blog-o-sphere if you won't take my advice when I dispense it?

David Foster Wallace
Technically speaking, since he's dead, DFW isn't a "writer to watch," but when I sat and pondered excellence in fiction writing, then got up out of my chair and scanned the 5,000-plus works of fiction on my bookshelf, and then started winnowing the list and narrowing my choices, I couldn't not include the genius who breathed new breath into the art of the footnote.  The first thing I ever read by Wallace was the 1996 "non-fiction" essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (then titled "Shipping Out") in Harper's Magazine.  I started choking with laughter and the ONLY reason I'm still here today writing to you is because a co-worker knew the Heimlich maneuver.  Later, when I was in the midst of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, more strenuous methods had to be applied in order to bring me back from the dead.  I'm still pissed that Wallace hung himself in 2008 when he was 46.  He robbed us of his greatness.  What remains, however, we must cherish.

Gary Shteyngart
His contribution to the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" issue was easily the best story in those pages.  It's an excerpt from his newest novel, Super Sad True Love Story, which is a weird and wonderful and hilarious tale of a dystopian future.  Based on that story alone, I really need to check out Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook.  I may need to have the cardiac paddles within easy reach.  In his Washington Post review of Super Sad True Love Story, Ron Charles writes, Gary Shteyngart has seen the future, and it has no room for him -- or any of us. His new novel, a slit-your-wrist satire illuminated by the author's absurd wit, follows today's most ominous trend lines past Twitter and Facebook addiction to a post-literate, consumption-crazed America that abhors books, newspapers and even conversation.  "In other words," Shteyngart notes, "next Tuesday."  This zany Russian immigrant loops the comedy of Woody Allen's "Sleeper" through the grim insights of George Orwell's "1984" to produce a "Super Sad True Love Story" that exposes the moral bankruptcy of our techno-lust.  He had me at "slit-your-wrist."

Justin Cronin
Yes, I'm jumping on The Passage bandwagon....but what an exhilarating ride that bandwagon is giving!  I'm a little more than halfway through the apocalpytic-vampire-child savior novel, but I can tell already it's going to be one of my favorites for this year.  Cronin has a beautiful way with horror.  Take for instance, these sentences about a vampire attack:  Anthony fell on him swiftly, from above.  A scream and then the man was silent in wet pieces on the floor.  The beautiful warmth of blood!  I'll probably post more about The Passage after I finish it, but for now let me just close with this unpardonable pun:  it's the kind of novel that sinks its teeth into you and never lets go.

So, there you have it: my 20 picks.  What are yours?  Feel free to post them in the comments section.