Friday Freebie: The Collector of Leftover Souls by Eliane Brum

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Ordinary Girls by Jacquira Díaz.

This week’s giveaway is for The Collector of Leftover Souls by Eliane Brum. Subtitled “Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections,” the book recently made the National Book Award longlist for Translated Literature (good luck to translator Diane Grosklaus Whitty!). Keep scrolling for more about the book and how to enter the contest....

Eliane Brum is a star journalist in Brazil, known for her polyphonic writing that gives voice to people often underrepresented in popular literature. Brum’s reporting takes her into Brazil’s most marginalized communities: she visits the Amazon to understand the practice of indigenous midwives, stays in São Paulo’s favelas to witness the joy of a marriage and the tragedy of young men dying due to drugs and guns, and wades through the mud to capture the boom and bust of modern-day gold rushes. Brum is an enormously sensitive and perceptive interlocutor, and as she visits these places she provides intimate glimpses into both everyday and extraordinary lives: a poor father on the way to bury his son, a street performer who eats glass, a woman living out her final 115 days, and a hoarder rescuing the “leftover souls” of the city. The Collector of Leftover Souls showcases the best of Brum’s work from two books, combining short profiles with longer reported pieces. These vibrant missives range across current issues such as the human cost of exploiting natural resources, the Belo Monté Dam’s eradication of a way of life for those on the banks of the Xingu River, and the contrast between urban centers and remote villages. Told in the vibrant and idiomatic language of the people Brum writes about, The Collector of Leftover Souls is a vital work of investigative journalism from an internationally acclaimed author.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Collector of Leftover Souls, simply e-mail your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please (or, two if you share the post—see below). Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Oct. 3, at which time I’ll draw the winning names. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 4. 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 e-mail 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). P.S. Since I’m downsizing my own book collection, I’ll occasionally toss an extra book into package. If you aren’t interested in reading the extra “Freebie,” please consider donating it to your local little free library.

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.

Soup and Salad: Larry Levis peels the wallpaper, Story Prize finalists announced, Andria Williams pays attention to her characters, The Proust Book Club, Katey Schultz teaches you how to flash

On today’s menu:

photo by George R. Janecek

1.  Before this year’s publication of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, I wasn’t familiar with the works of the late poet Larry Levis. Shame on me, I guess, because Levis—who died of a heart attack in 1996—appears to have had many admirers: among them, Pam Houston, who was getting her doctorate degree at the University of Utah while Levis was teaching fiction writing there in the 90s. Over at the Graywolf Press blog, Pam has a wonderful story to tell about Levis’ appearance at the 1990 AWP conference in Denver:

      The Utah contingent sat near the front of the ballroom, feeling cool by association. In a few minutes Larry was going to peel the fleur-de-lis off the wallpaper with his poetry, and with the misguided smugness of grad students, we considered him ours.
      Except then it was fifteen minutes after the scheduled time of the reading, and there was no sign of Larry. This did not surprise us. He’d be there, we assured each other; time wasn’t really his best thing. But then another fifteen minutes went by.
      We looked around the room nervously. Nobody seemed to want to go to the podium and call the reading off.
      Just when the din of chatter seemed to have reached maximum volume, the doors to the ballroom crashed open and Larry stepped in. As distinctive as everything else about him, his walk was a little like a cartoon dog’s—think Pluto, or Marmaduke—he took big strides during which his feet never seemed to quite touch the ground. He float-loped to the podium in this fashion, and everyone fell quiet. He was wearing his uniform of a black motorcycle jacket, black jeans, and boots. He tucked the half cigarette he’d been holding behind his ear and looked down at his hands, as if a book might appear there. He felt around in all of his pockets, and came away with nothing.
      In the second row we stole glances at each other. No one in the room seemed to be breathing. Then he put one hand on either side of the podium, bore down on us, and recited Caravaggio: Swirl and Vortex—all 4 glorious long-lined pages of it-- from memory. The room burst into applause. Our little cadre of grad students swooned. It was one of those moments—there are a few in every young writer’s life—that let you see exactly what you have signed up for.

2.  The three finalists for The Story Prize were announced earlier this month: There’s Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter, Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson, and Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann. The winner will be announced on March 2.


3.  At the Time Now blog, Peter Molin appears to have loved Andria Williams’ debut novel, The Longest Night, as much as I did:

Williams notices what her characters notice, but also much that they don’t understand or only half-intuit; this close attention to their interiority as much as the period detail makes The Longest Night come alive. In many ways, though, the strictures of military service and culture portrayed in The Longest Night might be said to be timeless, for Williams casts a net around military families and military duty and pulls in many fine fish in the way of still relevant insights about life in uniform. Readers who never served or veterans who served only a tour or two can make of Williams’ portrait of military domesticity what they will, but readers who have tried to keep a marriage together over the long haul of a military career will marvel at her acuity at describing the rewards and pleasures, such as they are, while also conveying a more pervasive feeling of disappointment and perhaps even of life wasted.

4.  File under: In Search of Lost Reading Time.

While in college, I promised myself that one day I would read the entirety of In Search of Lost Time after graduation. I made this vow, as all 21-year-olds must, knowing very little of the realities of full-time employment, commuting, and Sunday brunch plans. I also made this resolution at a time when my daily Internet activity consisted of checking my email and maybe, if I was really hungry, the dining hall menu. I had no idea that reading would one day become an activity that I would have to plan....And so, here I am, 10 years (!) later, trying again to finish one of the best novels I’ve ever read, possibly the best novel I’ve ever read. (I’ll know for sure when I finish.) The world (i.e. the Internet) has only gotten more distracting and, having become the mother of a three-year-old, my daily responsibilities have increased and become less negotiable. At the same time, one thing I’ve learned over the past decade is that you can accomplish a lot by doing a little of something every day. You can raise a child, write a book, make a life with another person. Almost everyone I know who has completed In Search of Lost Time (and to be clear, most of these “known” people are those who have written about the experience, not anyone I’ve met personally) did it slowly, reading just 10 to 20 pages a day, usually in the morning. At a pace of 10 pages a day, it will take me about a year and two months to finish, a period of time that doesn’t seem as long as it did 10 years ago.

Over at The Millions, staff writer Hannah Gersen is knuckling down, buckling up and saying “To hell with the distracting internet!” as she embarks on a plan to read Proust. Will you join her journey? I see you’ve bought a box of madeleines, so you’re already halfway there.

5.  The 49 Writers Center in Alaska always has a good lineup of classes, but if you can't afford to travel all the way to Anchorage, I have good news for you: you can get your schooling from the comfort of your lawn chair in Boca Raton. The Center has a series of online courses, including one on flash fiction taught by Katey Schultz (Flashes of War). Here are the details:

This four-week online course will focus on flash fiction—short stories that range from 250-750 words—often described as “stories of the moment” or “a work of art carved on a grain of sand.” Writers who are unfamiliar with the genre will find enough challenge and support to come away with new knowledge and guided practice, as well as a very clear understanding of scene. More experienced writers will enjoy the intellectual challenges of the lectures and discussions, as well as in-depth prompts from the instructor. Each week includes guided discussion forums, assigned readings, a brief lecture, and prompts. Participants should plan on 2-3 hours of work with the materials per week (or more depending on personal engagement), in addition to writing time. At the end of the month, turn in 1 polished flash fiction to the instructor for feedback (and participate in the optional peer-review process, if desired). The course concludes with an optional livestream Video Chat.

The first class bell rings on Feb. 29. Go here to see the syllabus.

Phil Klay wins National Book Award

“I can’t think of a more important conversation to be having....War is too strange to be processed alone.”

~Phil Klay

Congratulations, Phil, on winning the National Book Award for Redeployment, and for continuing the national conversation in such a thoughtful and deeply-moving way.

Soup and Salad: Murakami stickers, PEN shortlist, Joe Sacco's The Great War goes underground, the Consequence of war, a new Sun also rises, GIFing The Scarlet Letter, hugging John Green, staging The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, walking Hammett's San Francisco, win Press 53 books for life(!!)

On today's menu:

1.  The Guardian is rightly critical of the "ludicrous marketing campaign" for the new Haruki Murakami novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: first editions of the novel will include a special sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators.  This is obviously a move designed to stir the juices of eBay collectors rather than sticker-obsessed youngsters who won't have a clue as to what's going on in Murakami's 400-page novel.  Still, you have to admit those stickers are pretty cool-looking.

2.  My, my, my....this year's shortlist for the PEN Literary Awards is a tasty one.  Though I've only read one of the books on the list, Victoria Wilson's excellent biography of Barbara Stanwyck, many of the others are perched near the top of my To-Be-Read stack: Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley (which I purchased directly from the publisher, Five Chapters), A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, Brief Encounters With the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Godforsaken Idaho by Shawn Vestal (which has been TBR'ed for way too damn long), Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon, and The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko.   Congratulations to all the nominees--and well done, PEN!

3.  Another book which has been in my To-Be-Read stack for too damn long (TBR4TDL, my ongoing lament, is going to be the next vanity plate for my vehicle) is Joe Sacco's The Great War, the 24-foot-long graphic novel about the Battle of the Somme.  David Ulin in the L.A. Times reports that a single-panel from The Great War has become a mural in the Montparnasse station of the Paris Metro, stretching 500 feet--almost double the length of the Bayeux Tapestry, which was one of the inspirations behind The Great War, Sacco says.  For those not up on their World War I history, the Battle of the Somme saw more than 20,000 British troops and 10,000 Germans killed on a single day.  Did you catch that?  A single day.  In his book and especially in the 500-foot mural in the Paris subway, Sacco notes, “I wanted to give an idea of the size of the massacre, an idea of the losses and the human suffering.”


4.  Speaking of war, if you haven't subscribed to Consequence, then you're missing out on some first-rate war literature.  (Full disclosure: I had a story published in a previous issue.)  To get a feel for what you might find in the annual journal's pages, let's eavesdrop on this interview with editor Catherine Parnell:

George Kovach founded the magazine in 2009, and he asked me to come on board in the spring of 2010.  We’re a team, co-conspirators, so to speak, working to expose the myths, sentimentality and knee-jerk patriotism associated with the wide spectrum of violence and combat—to not only enrich reality, but to effect change.  CONSEQUENCE’s subject is war and how it affects us at every level of society, in every country in the world.  Our mission statement—to focus on the culture and consequences of war—lends itself to an eyes-wide-open approach.  Initially, we published work that was anti-war, not hippie peacenik, but informed and subjective reflections on battle.  But we’ve grown with every issue, not just in page count, but in terms of considered outrage and range.  Diversity—gender, faith, ethnicity, point of view—is critical to our mission.  We tackle these issues on a national and international scale....Sadly, there’s a wealth of war material available to writers from the battlefields of ancient Greece (Margaret Luongo’s “History of Art”) to the bases in Afghanistan (Tony Schwalm’s “Combat Anthropology”).  As Bob Shacochis (author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, excerpted in Volume 4) said at our panel discussion in April of 2014, “We want peace and yes, we are willing to kill for it.”  I’m not naïve; I understand the algorithm at work, but on a personal level I weep when I read some of our submissions.

5.  Think you know the first line of The Sun Also Rises?  Guess again.  The New York Times reports Hemingway's earlier draft of the novel did not start with “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”


6.  Need a good literary laugh?  (Or, at the very least, a mildly-amused "hmf!")  Check out this mash-up of GIFs and classic literature--like this one for The Scarlet Letter--courtesy of the bemused folks at Ploughshares.


7.  What happens when an excited fan impulsively hugs an author?  You can read about one woman's embarrassing embrace at Reddit's TIFU (Today, I Fucked Up):

I went to see The Book of Mormon Saturday night in Indianapolis. At intermission, I hit the loo, got another beer (a mistake, it seems), and met up with my husband to head back to our seats. Spotted John Green ahead of me. Told my husband who he was and SPRINTED toward him. Realized midway that I didn't really have a plan. What was I going to say when I got there? By the time I formed the thought, it was too late and I was tipsy and excited, so I did the first thing that came to my mind. I said, "I'm sorry, but I have to do this." And hugged him. Him: "That...was very nice of you." Me: "No, that was very nice of YOU." Then I ran away before he had a chance to call security on me.

There's more to the story, including a generous response from John "The Fault In Our Stars" Green himself (posting as thesoundandthefury), so be sure to scroll all the way through the comments.

8.  Word has reached Quivering Pen Headquarters that a Seattle repertory theater is staging a five-hour production of Michael Chabon's 636-page novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  (*swoon*   *thunk*)  Even though Brendan Kiley, writing in The Stranger, gave it a mixed review ("It's a wild story that maintains a cliff-hanging tension, but it doesn't contain any deeply transcendent moments.  As a golem, it's a little more clay than spirit."), I would still pay good money to see it.  If only I had spare change, as well as spare time.  As Kiley writes: "In a recent fit of ambition, Book-It Repertory Theatre decided to adapt this mammoth story for the stage. (The adapter, Jeff Schwager, says Chabon was a good sport about the project—the theater pitched the idea, Chabon said okay and was totally hands-off throughout the process.)  The result is a five-hour saga with 18 actors that maintains the page-turning action of the original and energy that only occasionally flags (mostly in the third of its four acts)."

9.  In The New York Times' travel section, Dan Saltzstein takes us on a tour of Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco:

Perhaps no spot better celebrates the San Francisco-noir association better than a speakeasy-style bar secreted within another speakeasy-style bar — and in the Tenderloin no less. Heading down Jones Street toward O’Farrell, I passed a pane of frosted glass labeled the Wilson and Wilson Private Detective Agency. With a password, I gained entry to Bourbon and Branch, a dimly lit and bustling cocktail bar. After a quick right through a fake wall, I headed into Wilson and Wilson, a love letter to noir, Prohibition-era drinking and, as the name indicates, the detective trade.

10.  Press 53 is going all Willy Wonka on us.  Pre-order Wendy J. Fox's debut collection of short stories, The Seven Stages of Anger, and inside you might find a lucky Orange Ticket "worth FREE Press 53 books for the life of the ticket holder, beginning with the first book published after The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories.  One copy (signed when available) of every book published by Press 53 (hardcovers and limited editions not included) will be automatically shipped free of charge to the holder of the Press 53 Orange Ticket."  See, those Press 53 marketing gurus are pretty smart: "for the life of the ticket holder."  If I got the Orange Ticket, I'd probably drop dead of a heart attack right on the spot.  But seriously, folks....I think Fox's collection is worth a pre-order.  Check out this praise from Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics: “What happens when a still life speaks?  Wendy J. Fox invites us to eavesdrop.  These beautiful, lyrical stories describe ordinary lives: speckled eggshells, creeping vines.  Here’s the threat of fire out east and endless rain when the map meets Seattle.  Here are characters so real you know them already.  They’ve misplaced your keys and borrowed your car.”

My First Time: Kevin P. Keating

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 Kevin Keating, author of The Natural Order of Things, a finalist for the L.A. Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.  After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, Keating became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, Lorain County Community College, and Lakeland Community College.  His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, including The Blue Lake Review, The Fifth Street Review, The Mad Hatter's Review, The Avatar Review, The North Coast Review, The Licking River Review, The Red Rock Review, Whiskey Island, Juked, Inertia, Identity Theory, Exquisite Corpse, Wordriver, and many others.  The Natural Order of Things is his first full-length book and garnered praise from Publishers Weekly and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, who called it "a dark and utterly compelling work."  Keating currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio and is working on a second novel, The Captive Condition, scheduled for a hardcover release with Pantheon in 2015.

My First Trip to Los Angeles

From Culver City in the northeast to Venice Beach in the southwest, the immense concrete slab of Venice Boulevard runs diagonally through some of the least scenic terrain in all of Los Angeles, passing under Interstate 405 and bisecting the Mar Vista neighborhood until it reaches, after seven interminable treeless miles, the freakiest beach in North America where middle-aged men wearing floral pattern Speedos do drug-induced dances on the boardwalk with their 1980s boomboxes pressed to their ears and where thickly muscled acrobats hopping around on pogo sticks mesmerize large crowds of weekend sun-worshipers.

As I boarded the number 33 bus near Culver City I asked the driver, “How long does it take to get to the beach from here?”

The driver was strangely evasive.   “Uh…maybe…oh…twenty minutes or so,” he said, and I knew he was lying.

“Really?  But it’s only seven miles away.”

Standing behind me, swaying back and forth like a deckhand in stormy seas, a stout man of fifty tugged on his stylish el capitán mustache and slurred with indignation, “Twenty fucking minutes, my ass.  We’ll be on this fucking bus for an hour before we get close to the fucking beach.  Twenty minutes.  Fuck.  Ain’t no twenty minutes on this bus.”

Even though his breath already reeked of high octane gasoline and a carton of stale cigarettes, the poor fellow was probably parched and desperate for another cold cocktail, it being two in the afternoon and an unusually warm April day, but he seemed a far more reliable source of information than our duplicitous driver, and I appreciated his honesty.  The man tipped his greasy baseball cap, and for the next seven miles he shouted insult and slander at anyone who dared cross his path.

His colorful language would have been a lot more amusing, of course, had it not been for the fact that accompanying me on this impromptu excursion to the sea were my retired parents, my wife and my impressionable ten-year old daughter who, I’m ashamed to report, began to weep after mile three.  The bus was hot and overcrowded and stank of fast food.   Passengers taunted and threatened each other.  Infants wailed.  A man in a wheelchair kept fiddling with his colostomy bag.  A teenage couple molested each other with impunity.

All of this was my fault.  I had been warned.  Moments earlier, at the Metro stop, I had inquired about which bus went to the beach.  A jowly police officer leaning against one of the turnstiles looked at me for a moment, his sleepy eyes slowly growing wide with mirth, and answered, “Oh, you wanna take the number 33, pal.  I’ll tell ya what, you’re really gonna enjoy that ride.  You sure will.  You and your little girl.”  As a college instructor I’ve come to abhor sarcasm from my eighteen-year old students, and I wasn’t especially impressed when it came from a cynical civil servant.

This was my first visit to Los Angeles, and because I was unfamiliar with the lay of the land, as it were, I had to rely on luck and instinct, neither of which has ever served me well, to navigate this labyrinth of dusty thoroughfares and chaotic bus lines.  I was in town because my novel The Natural Order of Things (Vintage Contemporaries, 2013) had been selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize/First Fiction Award, and during my brief stay I had grown accustomed to the finer things.

The ceremony took place on the beautiful campus of the University of Southern California (“The old joke,” a graduate later told me, “is that USC stands for the University of Spoiled Children”), and for the first time in my career as a struggling scribe I felt like a pampered brat.  For an entire weekend I had the extraordinary and rather disquieting experience of being treated like a celebrity, a very minor one needless to say, the sort of celebrity who has to tell people that he’s a celebrity, but I soon discovered that there is something truly magical about possessing even a modicum of fame.  For example, if someone important casually dismissed me at a reception I would simply lift my chin and say, “But, sir, I’m a finalist for an L.A. Times Book Prize,” at which point the sycophantic smiles and vigorous handshakes and embossed business cards and free drinks would appear.

Over the weekend I attended swanky parties, participated in panel discussions, hobnobbed with scholars, signed a whole box of books, and gorged myself on the fantastic food in the so-called “green room,” which turned out to be an enormous banquet hall with beveled glass doors, crystal chandeliers and stained glass windows.  Anyone craving humility in that ostentatious setting could find, conveniently located next door, the Little Chapel of Silence where for a small fee they could purchase white votive candles and beg God’s mercy for these neo-Gilded Age excesses.

My own lesson in humility came early on.   Prior to the awards ceremony, the finalists and their guests were treated to an informal reception on the outdoor patio of the hotel where I imprudently imbibed in a glass or two or three of pretty decent red wine.  I was giddy and spoke to a man at length about his biography of James Brown.

It was almost time to go when the Xanax started to kick in.  Feeling confident that the prize was in hand, I marched with the other finalists along the cobblestones of the picturesque campus and turned to the genteel old lady walking next me and said, “Aw, to hell with this silly awards ceremony.  Hey, whaddya say we sneak out and grab us a drink at the bar?”  The scandalized septuagenarian pursed her already tight lips, adjusted her silver-stranded bouffant, and with a practiced flourish of her silk scarf (evidently she was used to dealing with bores and vulgarians) she pulled ahead of me by about ten strides.  An omen.

That evening my novel did not receive the prize for First Fiction, and after two hours without an intermission the ceremony started to drag.  I squirmed in my seat and loosened my tie.  Jet lag was beginning to play terrible tricks on my mind.  Finally, at the end of a very long night, a star-struck presenter introduced the recipient of the prestigious Innovator’s Award.  “Ladies and gentleman, Margaret Atwood!”

Imagine my horror as the old lady who only hours earlier regarded me like some kind of insect took to the stage and quietly regaled the reverent audience with stories about her charmed life as a writer.  “Oh, I do so love Loose Angeleeez,” she said.  “Loose Angeleeez has been so very kind to me,” etc.  I stewed in my seat, my cheeks burning with this ritual humiliation.  I have a knack, you see, for always sticking my foot in it.

For the remainder of my stay I tried to purge from my mind all memory of this embarrassing encounter with Ms. Atwood, and I did all of those touristy things one is expected to do when in La La Land--the studio tours, a stroll along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a guided tour in an open air bus to ogle and envy the homes of Lucille Ball and Joan Crawford, a drive through Beverly Hills with a quick stop on Rodeo Drive to admire a fleet of Maseratis parked outside the boutique shops and stylish cafés.  We visited old friends who lived in the city and had cocktails in the hotel lobby and dressed up like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for an uproarious night on the town.  But nothing seemed to do the trick.  Until I boarded the number 33 bus for Venice Beach.  And then nothing in the world mattered except the survival of my family.

The bus dumped us a few blocks from the beach, and from there things got progressively worse.  Instead of the plentiful hyacinths that scented the palatial homes in the Hollywood Hills, the infamous boardwalk of Venice Beach reeked of urine and medical marijuana drifting from newly established dispensaries.  As a twenty-one year old kid fresh out of college I would have been in heaven, but as a forty-one year old dad with a miserable little girl clinging to my arm, I thought I was in Dante’s third circle of hell.  In Canto VI of his Inferno, the inimitable Florentine poet tells us that it’s in the third circle where, in the Robert Pinksy translation, “the triple sparks of envy, greed, and pride ignite the hearts” of the damned.  And so it was for me.

Perhaps as punishment for my unwarranted pride, for daring to believe even for a single moment that I might have a real shot at taking home the coveted Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, I was transported to this madcap place so I could say to my whimpering daughter, “Look, honey, look what Daddy has accomplished.”  The Festival of Books had been a fantasyland of celebrity writers, but here, on the cigarette-strewn boardwalk of Venice Beach, I had an opportunity to see the real stars of L.A., a spinning constellation of spaced-out drifters, derelicts and drug peddlers, a vast pinwheeling galaxy of bronzed bodybuilders, tattooed ladies and Spandexed drag queens gracefully shimmying in and out of pedestrian traffic on rollerblades, my kind of people, the same genuine and unpretentious characters who on sweltering summer days roamed the wicked streets of my hometown and who always managed to worm their way into my fiction.

Several days later, back in Cleveland and confronted by the blank pages of my novel-in-progress, I thought often of my bus ride along Venice Boulevard and how I inadvertently managed to offend a highly esteemed Booker Prize-winning author.  My fifteen minutes were over, but still I craved celebrity, fame, recognition, and somewhere in the back of my disordered little brain I heard the unrepentant sinners of the third circle beckoning to me.  Then I remembered.  While in Los Angeles I reluctantly visited Madame Tussauds where my wife photographed me sitting next to an unnervingly realistic wax figure of Jack Nicholson decked out in a tux, bowtie and signature black shades.

Now I couldn’t help myself.  I logged into Facebook and posted the picture with the caption: “Look who showed up to the L.A. Times Book Prizes ceremony.”  Within seconds the comments started pouring in: “I am so jealous!”  “That’s a definite framer for the living room!”  “It doesn’t get any better!”  “This is fantastic on so many levels!”  “It looks like he’s negotiating a role for the movie adaptation of your novel!”  “By far the most incredible moment of your trip!”  Ah, yes, the timeless allure of stardom meets the brave new world of instant gratification.

I let the gag run its course for twenty-four glorious hours before guilt got the better of me, and then with my ego in check I meekly confessed to my Facebook friends the disappointing and unremarkable truth.

Fobbit is a semi-finalist for First Novelist Award

The dream continues.  (Please don't wake me up.)

Fobbit was just named a semi-finalist in the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award competition.  My thanks to all the volunteer readers in the Virginia Commonwealth University English Department, the James Branch Cabell Library, and the Richmond literary community who spent hundreds of hours reading through a record-breaking number of submissions (nearly 140 first novels) and who chose Fobbit to be in such fine company.

Congratulations to all the other semi-finalists.  Here's the complete long-list (I've read some of these fine books and all the others have footholds on my mountain of To-Be-Read books sitting in my basement):

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk by Ben Fountain
Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman
When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man by Nick Dybek
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
Fobbit by David Abrams
No One Is Here Except All Of Us by Ramona Ausubel
The Girl Below by Bianca Zander
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung

Postcards from L.A. and Iraq

Having a great time.  Wish you were here....

"Here" being the Los Angles Times Festival of Books.  Despite the heat (it's 8 p.m. and 74 degrees right now) and the poor choice of footwear (boat shoes) while walking around the USC campus, I've enjoyed my two days here at the annual California fest.  In the space of just a few hours, I bumped into lit-friends [name-dropping alert!] Maria Semple, Jonathan Evison, Paul Tremblay, Antoine Wilson, Adam Braver, and Pauls Toutonghi; I re-bonded with Book Pregnant gal pal Lydia Netzer; and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel called "Fiction with a Sideways Glance" with Jess Walter, Fiona Maazel and Diana Wagman.  Not to mention hearing a speech by the spry, graceful Margaret Atwood (she was on hand to receive the L.A. Times' Innovator's Award).

All in all, it's been the typical book-festival experience: an exhilarating, completely draining brain-blur of books, authors and craft talks.  As usual, I'm coming home loaded down with novels I can't wait to read.  In this case, my festival haul included two new Hollywood novels: Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed from Bloomsbury and American Dream Machine by Matthew Spektor from Tin House Books.

Soon after I arrived in the city yesterday, Diana Wagman and I met at the Sheraton and, after a gut-filling lunch at a local bar and grille, set out on a walking tour of downtown L.A.--places like the iconic City Hall (a fixture in all those film noirs I love), Grand Park with its neon-pink benches, and the Los Angeles Central Library where Diana and I craned our necks looking at the colorful murals lining the walls of the rotunda:

Diana was a lively and friendly tour guide for this rube from Montana on his first visit to the city.  And if I haven't mentioned it before, I'll say it now: if you like novels about kidnappings, temperamental seven-foot iguanas, vain game-show hosts, strained mother-daughter relationships, and rental-car-company mix-ups, then you should definitely check out Diana's latest novel The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets.  Even if you don't generally read kidnapper-iguana-dysfunctional-family novels, you'll probably find something to like in Diana's brightly-violent, darkly-funny novel.

Once Diana dropped me off at the hotel and I took a couple of short power naps, it was time for the raison d'etre for my L.A. trip: the L.A. Times Book Awards.  Last night, Lydia Netzer and I joined a few dozen other nervous nominees in the Broward Auditorium on the USC campus for the ceremony.  Here we are, pre-ceremony:

Fobbit was nominated for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and Lydia's Shine Shine Shine was up for the general Fiction prize.  Neither of us won (Maggie Shipstead's Seating Arrangements took the Seidenbaum prize and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk earned the Fiction award) but we sure had a blast seeing our faces and our books flashed across the big screen at the front of the room:

For a brief, giddy moment, we felt like royalty, like rock stars, liked stunned Academy Awardees.  I know it's a tired cliché, but it really was an honor just to be nominated.

As I sat there in the auditorium amongst the glittery literati, I started thinking about how far I've come in the past decade, both personally and professionally.  If you'd described last night's scene to me ten years ago, I would have scoffed, punched your shoulder and said, "No way--get outta here!"  So much has happened to me in the last year alone--not just the singular joy of having my novel brought to life by my dream publisher (thank you, Grove/Atlantic!), and not just the fun of traveling around the country to book-fests like this, and not even the deeply touching personal contact I've had from readers....but all of it, the whole supercalifragilisticexpialidocious mind-crumpling heart-squeezing surreality of this debut-novel party I've been living since last September.  I never take anything for granted.  I treat every day like it's a fresh surprise.  I don't know about Lydia or Maggie or the other nominees in my category, but I still feel like I'm in a Disney movie: birds are singing, mice are sewing my clothes, and it's still all so unbelievable.  Maybe I'll feel differently by the time the next novel comes out, maybe I'll be jaded and this will all be old hat.

But I hope not.  I hope I'll still be marveling at how the mice make my clothes.

Last night, after I got back to my hotel room, I decided to look in my journal to see what I was doing in Iraq in 2005.  You know, just for shits-and-giggles and to gain a little perspective on this whole weekend in L.A.  The contrast between the two days, separated by eight years, was striking.  Here's what I wrote on that long-ago April 19 from Baghdad when I was serving with the 3rd Infantry Division as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom:

Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices are becoming as regular as breakfast, lunch and dinner.  The Significant Activity Reports pour in—“1-184 reports VBIED on Route Irish 1035hrs,” “Patrol in vicinity of grid MB45003593 struck IED 1309hrs.  No casualties.  Minor damage limited to blown tire, shattered windshield,” and so forth with nauseating frequency.  The metronome of violence is ticking faster and faster as the insurgents (aka terrorists) grow more and more desperate…or more and more organized, as the case may be.  Yesterday, the entire crew of a Bradley was engulfed in flame—they all lived, but barely; two days ago, a female MP was riding in a humvee when an IED burst on the side of the road; at first, they thought she and her driver just had minor cuts from the shrapnel, but when she passed out, they realized a small jagged piece of metal had severed her femoral artery on the back of her leg; she died before they could reach the hospital. 

For the most part, however, it’s mostly Iraqi civilians dying out there on the roads.  The good people of the country who still have purple-ink thumbs from voting on January 30—they’re the ones falling victim to the remote-control-detonator hands of the terrorists, some of whom migrate to Iraq from other countries (like Syria).  As the new Iraqi government struggles to get on its feet, there is a power vacuum in the country.  The US is reluctant to get involved, for fear of the world accusing us of interfering in another country’s politics.  So, we hang back in the shadows at the sessions of the Transitional National Assembly meetings.  While the Iraqi politicians and religious leaders bicker about how control should be divided between the Sunnis and Shiites, the terrorists take advantage of the nothing-government and regroup for more attacks.

Walk around Camp Liberty for an hour and you're guaranteed to hear muffled thuds coming from beyond the borders of the camp, followed a minute later by the rising plume of death-smoke.  Tonight, as I was walking out of the chow hall after dinner, another IED went off.  The sad thing is, very few of the people walking across the gravel path ahead of me flinched.  We all looked to the horizon for the smoke, but only one or two of us twitched our shoulders up toward our ears and said “Whoa!”  We’ve become dangerously complacent about the distant thunder of bombs, the remote death of strangers bleeding out on Baghdad streets.  Most of the time I think, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s a controlled detonation by our engineers…”  I make a mental note to check the Sig Acts when I get back to the office, but then I go back to sipping my milkshake as I walk across the safe haven of Camp Liberty.

More and more, though, I’m hearing this isn’t the secure military fortress we’ve grown to think it is.  The Commanding General has said in more than one briefing he thinks the “bad guys are among us right now on an everyday basis.”  In other words, the attack doesn’t need to come from beyond the concertina-wire borders of camp—all it takes is one determined, smart terrorist to infiltrate one of the cleaning crews or other day workers—hell, maybe one of the merchants selling those cute carved camels down at the bazaar—to plot an attack.  It could be a bomb, or it could just be a guy with an AK-47 picking off soldiers one by one as they walk around camp sipping their milkshakes.

Then there’s the sporadically-lucky terrorists outside camp who launch mortar rounds with blind aim and a prayer to Allah.  The other week, a mortar whistled through the sky and landed on Camp Taji.  When it impacted against the ground, it exploded in a shower of hot, sharp metal.  A female soldier walking in the area took a piece of shrapnel and ended up with a fatal “sucking chest wound.”

Believe me, I think about these things as I walk around drinking my milkshake, but what can I do?  If it’s gonna get me, it’s gonna get me.  Apart from staying alert and walking fast (which I do), I just have to go on living as close to a normal life as I can, hoping for the best.

Pulitzer committee shocks literary world, hands out Fiction Prize

In a stunning turn of events, the Pulitzer Prize committee decided to break with tradition (begun last year) and hand out an award in the Fiction category this year, thus confirming the notion that, yes, fabricated narratives are still a force to be reckoned with.

So, congratulations to Adam Johnson who not only emerged victorious from this year's Tournament of the Books, but can now add a P.P. to his already-crowded awards shelf for The Orphan Master's Son.  Well done, sir, well done!

Double thumbs-up also go out to the two finalists: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander.  Like many of you (I'm guessing), these three books are still in my towering, teetering To-Be-Read pile but I hope to get to them soonishly.

Soup and Salad: Ben Fountain's Dead Novels, The origins of the English Department, Jenny Milchman's neverending book tour, Yaddo is officially historic, Hollywood calls on Calling Me Home, Jennifer Spiegel's confidence, Women's Prize for Fiction longlist

On today's menu:

1.  At Bloom, Ben Fountain talks about the novels he wrote before last year's masterpiece Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk:

Is the novel dead?  I don’t know about the novel, but I have two dead ones sitting on the shelf in my office closet, representing, between them, more years of work than I’m willing to admit.  It’s a cliché, but one of those true clichés, that your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness.  Over the course of my writing life I’ve discovered that I am, for better or worse, insanely stubborn—I’ll keep going back to a piece over and over until I think I’ve gotten it right, and this hardheadedness helped me bust through a lot of the inevitable obstacles that confront anyone who attempts this kind of work.  I wouldn’t have had anything like a writing career if I hadn’t been so stubborn, but that same stubbornness kept me going on those two novels for years after I should have set them aside.

Remind me sometime to tell you about my early failed novel which, like Fountain's, died a merciful death.  It was called The Last of Anne and it was written out of my anxiety at being a new husband.  It was horrible--the novel, that is, not my marriage (Jean and I will celebrate 30 years of wedded bliss this December).


2.  Check out this post at Alaska's 49 Writers blog.  In the first half, novelist Andromeda Romano-Lax talks about the just-concluded Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference--to which I didn't go (yes, I wish I was in Boston; and no, I just couldn't afford to take time off from the Day Job; and yes, I'm already making plans to be there at AWP when it's held in Seattle next year).  It's the second half of Andromeda's blog post which I found to be most fascinating, however.  To wit: the history of the study of creative writing, as reported by D. G. Myers in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880.  I gleaned several cool nuggets of trivia, including:

• The study of English--literature or composition--was not part of American higher education until after the Civil War.
• When the study of English literature was finally added, it tended to stop at Shakespeare and Milton.
• In America, early literature classes tended to be about literature (hard dry facts, historical dates, and so on), without requiring the actual reading of literature--and certainly no enjoyment of it!  Actual reading was considered an extracurricular activity.

3.  At Shelf Awareness, Jenny Milchman (Cover of Snow) is writing regular dispatches from the road where she's on what looks like it could be the Longest Book Tour Ever.  Between now and August, she estimates she'll have logged 40,000 miles on her auto odyssey from bookstore to bookstore across America.  She and her husband will be "car-schooling" their children on the trip (which, I'm assuming will include lots of reading....and maybe counting license plates).  In the latest installment, they encounter blizzards, a pearl-encrusted statue of a bison, and foot-stomping readers.

4.  Yahoo for Yaddo!  The renowned writing retreat is now an official National Historic Landmark.

5.  Congratulations to my fellow Book Pregnant gal pal Julie Kibler.  Her debut novel, Calling Me Home, has just been picked up by Warner Brothers.  The book is inspired by events in Kibler's family and revolves around the relationship between 89-year-old Isabelle McAllister and her hairdresser, a black single mother named Dorrie Curtis.  McAllister enlists Curtis’ help to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati.  Along the way, McAllister reveals the secrets of her past, in which she fell in love with the black son of her family’s housekeeper to tragic consequences.  I'm sure Hollywood picked up on the whole "marriage between The Help and Driving Miss Daisy" angle, but can you blame them?  I, for one, can't wait to see the movie.  But I'll read the book first.


6.  Virginia Pye (River of Dust) has a great interview with Jennifer Spiegel (Love Slave, The Freak Chronicles) at her blog.  I was especially struck by what Jennifer had to say about self-confidence: "I will say—and I don’t mean for this to sound cocky—I believe that writers who make it are confident in their abilities.  They think they’re good.  They have to believe this.  If you’re going to make it, you have to think, I’m good and people should read me."


7.  The longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) has been released and it is bursting at the seams with strong contenders, among them Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Gillian Flynn, Shelia Heti, Kate Atkinson, A. M. Homes, and Maria Semple.  The shortlist will be announced April 16; the winner will be announced June 5.  One thing's for sure: I would not want to be a judge in this year's competition.

And the Oscar (contest) goes to...

Congratulations to Sharon Borrege, the winner of the annual Quivering Pen Academy Awards Prediction Contest.  Sharon was one of two entrants to correctly predict an impressive 21 out of the 24 winners of this year's Oscars (both names were then entered into a blind drawing).  She'll soon be enjoying her prize package of the books Les Miserables, Argo, Life of Pi, and The Hobbit.

Overall, Quivering Pen readers did a good job of predicting this year's Academy Award winners.  Here are the percentages of the voting results from the respondents to the poll:

Best Picture: Argo (78%)
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln (96%)
Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook (70%) 
Best Supporting Actor: Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln (49%)
     Actual Winner:  Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained (10%)
Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway for Les Miserables (93%)
Best Director: Steven Spielberg for Lincoln (75%)
     Actual Winner: Ang Lee for Life of Pi (13%)
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained (45%)
Best Adapted Screenplay: Chris Terrio for Argo (62%)
Best Animated Feature: Wreck-It Ralph (49%)
     Actual Winner: Brave (44%)
Best Foreign Language Film: Amour (93%)
Best Original Score: Life of Pi (74%)
Best Original Song: "Skyfall" from Skyfall (91%)
Best Production Design: Les Miserable (36%)
     Actual Winner:  Lincoln (12%)
Best Cinematography: Life of Pi (90%) 
Best Costume Design: Anna Karenina (79%)
Best Documentary Feature: Searching for Sugar Man (79%)
Best Documentary Short: Open Heart (52%)
     Actual Winner: Innocente (29%)
Best Film Editing: Argo (84%)
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: The Hobbit (63%)
     Actual Winner: Les Miserables (36%)
Best Animated Short Film: Paperman (75%)
Best Live Action Short Film: Curfew (61%)
Best Sound Editing: Zero Dark Thirty (44%), which tied with Skyfall (14%)
Best Sound Mixing: Les Miserables (83%)
Best Visual Effects: Life of Pi (91%)