War-mocker: New Interview in Mount Hope magazine

There’s a new interview with yours truly in the latest issue of Mount Hope magazine, published by Roger Williams University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. My thanks to writer Hannah Little and editor Edward J. Delaney (author of The Big Impossible) for giving me the space to talk about my war novels Fobbit and Brave Deeds. Other topics of discussion: the transition from military to civilian life, James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, my second (and current) career with the Bureau of Land Management, the 4:30 a.m. alarm, and my two current works in progress (Happily and Dubble). Here’s how the conversation begins:

Mount Hope:  You’ve described yourself as a “people pleaser” in the past. Did you worry about what your fellow servicemen or colleagues would think of the satirical honesty in your first novel, Fobbit?

David Abrams:  I share the same pre-publication anxieties as most writers: Will readers appreciate what I have to say? Will they love my characters or loathe them? Will the book become a Frisbee that’s tossed across the room in disgust? This is all the needless worry and fretting creators are riddled with when it comes time to publicly unveil the creation.
       In my case, concern, and trepidation about what military members, veterans, and their families—particularly those who’ve lost loved ones in combat—would think about Fobbit was paramount in my mind in the months before it was released. This was a novel that, on the surface, appears to mock all that patriotic Americans hold dear to their hearts. Would they think I was ridiculing or diminishing what they or their families had sacrificed for this country? It kept me awake at night.
       As it turns out, I could have slept peacefully: Fobbit was embraced with open arms by my fellow servicemembers. I was surprised, humbled, and brought to tears on a couple of occasions when people came up to me after readings or emailed me to say how much they appreciated Fobbit and what it had to say. I learned a valuable lesson with that first book: trust your readers to “get it.” They knew I was mocking the bureaucracy of war, not those who were only carrying out their orders in a complex tangle of a war.

MH:  Would you say that writing acts as an outlet of sorts for expressing your frustrations through snark and sarcasm? Such as the parts of Fobbit that show the ridiculous bureaucracy behind each press release, or your short story “Thank You” (if I am remembering the title correctly), which is both funny and heartbreaking.

DA:  Oh, absolutely. Humor is a way for me to vent about issues that frustrate and anger me. Fobbit was a guided missile launched into the sky, aimed toward all the things that tied me in knots during my year in Iraq: the tangle of bureaucratic red tape, the clowns in the White House who never seemed to understand what was happening in the desert, and the blind American patriotism that vigorously waved the flag while glossing over the real questions like why were we there in the first place? I vented and vomited my anger all over the pages of Fobbit while, at the same time, I perfumed it with jokes.
       Don’t get me wrong—the United States did accomplish some good things in that country over the long slog of the war. And while I would never discount the value of the humanitarian projects the military undertook during my time in Iraq (which included building schools, upgrading and providing security for power plants, and repairing infrastructure—which U.S. forces had damaged and destroyed during the invasion-slash-liberation), I would characterize most of our efforts there as one-step-forward-half-a-step-back. It was that disconnect between the way the Fox News anchors seemed to sing The Star-Spangled Banner while reporting the news and what I saw actually taking place on the ground which was the ultimate driving force in writing this novel. One of my favorite quotes from Flannery O’Connor is about how sometimes you have to use “violent” literary ways to get your vision across to a hostile, ignorant, or reluctant audience: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” In my case, I loaded those guided missiles with whoopee cushions. It was totally cathartic for me and gave me a sense of comfort knowing that I’d vented my feelings. It just so happened that spew of anger manifested itself as humor.

Read the rest of the interview here

Where the Books Went

The books had become a burden.

That’s not a sentence I would ever have dreamed of writing when I was younger. “Younger” meaning eighteen months ago. Until recently, I went around saying things like “There’s no such thing as too many books, only too little time in which to read them.” I declared I would measure my coffin according to the number of volumes I could squeeze inside its piney confines. Part with my books? You might as well cut my arm off with a rusty saw.

And yet, the timbers of my Craftsman home in Butte, Montana groaned under the weight of paper and ink. The shelves lining the walls of my basement had long since been filled, and over-filled—like a corpulent guest at Thanksgiving dinner who, after the turkey and the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the cranberry sauce and the gravy, greedily cuts just One More Slice of Pumpkin Pie. With whipped cream.

The books were every-frickin-where in the 4,000-square-foot house: there were piles in the bathroom, stacks in the breakfast nook, and a haphazard litter of titles to be shelved weighing down the polished-wood bar in the basement. My collection, which had been built and curated over the past thirty years of my life, was out of control. It was the literary version of The Trouble with Tribbles.

Books came into the house, but none went out. I was saturated and oversaturated. By my estimate, and according to my Library Thing catalog, my shelves were stuffed with more than 13,000 books. The real “trouble,” of course was the fact that I could not stop buying books. I am, I guess, part magpie: I cannot resist a new, shiny object. I was a bookaholic in much the same way that many people struggle with grape and grain; I had to start avoiding bookstores like twelve-steppers vow never to step foot inside a bar again. As an author who frequently goes on book tours, this was impossible. But I tried to control myself. I tried, I really tried.

And failed.

It was a slowly-dawning awareness, but eventually, I reached—and passed—my breaking point. Long ago, I had crossed the line when I had more books than I could possibly read in my lifetime (in truth, more books than the most secluded hermit could ever read). A speed-reading course wouldn’t even make a difference. The tipping point came when my wife and I made the decision to put the house on the market and move into smaller quarters. The original plan was to live in our new 25-foot RV. We would travel the country and Live Small. We’ve since tapped the brakes on that idea—not entirely ruling it out, but not committing to that miniaturized lifestyle, either. (Plus, the house in Butte still hasn’t sold, so we’re biding our time here in Montana for now.) We had an estate sale and sold more than 80 percent of our worldly goods; we’re now living in this oversized house with just a sofa, a bed, two nightstands, and just a few sticks of furniture. Our three cats spend their days chasing dust bunnies and listening to the echoes of their meows bounce off the bare hardwood floors. (And no, before you ask, we’re not marching to the beat of Marie Kondo and all those decluttering books which currently clutter the aisles of bookstores; this is a long-brewing, personal decision which has nothing to do with popular trends.)

Everything, from the camcorder bought in 2010 to the massive antique wardrobe in the upstairs bedroom, was sold. If my wife could part with her pewter salt-and-pepper shaker collection, I knew I, too, needed to make my own hard sacrifices. The books had to go. But where?

For the past year, I had been carting fat bookbags to Second Edition Books in Butte where the owner, Ann, bought somewhere around 1,000 books (and God bless her for her generosity and patience with my bi-weekly trips into her store where I continually ask, like a scratched record, “Can you take any more off my hands?”).

But off-loading at the used bookstore was just one slice of the Thanksgiving-feast pie. After separating out the ones I wanted to keep—

[Oh, excuse me, did you think I would get rid of all the books? If so, you obviously don’t know me. It was an emotionally-difficult culling process, but I picked and I chose, I sorted and set aside, I boxed and then unboxed and re-boxed indecisively. Eventually, I preserved about 1,000 of my most treasured volumes. I kept all of the Flannery O’Connor; ditto with Dickens, Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, Lewis Nordan (you can have my Nordan collection when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers) and Raymond Carver, along with a handful of my favorite living authors—though I won’t name names to avoid any hurt feelings from someone who didn’t make the cut. I saved my Dell mapbacks collection and my Big Littles. I held on to a small shelf of beloved children’s books. I kept my Penguin Classics and all my Library of America volumes.]

The survivors of the Great Book Culling of 2019

I carried The Keepers to an upstairs bedroom and though they lined an entire wall, removing them from the basement only made a minor dent in the overall collection. How, and where, could I possibly unload a lifetime’s worth of books? The answer came in the most unexpected of ways.

My friend Christine Martin, board director of the local non-profit organization The Root and Bloom Collective, was at my house in late summer to buy several of my bookcases (the ones which had been recently emptied of their contents) and, knowing of my book “burden,” she looked at the rows and rows of spines and said, “You know, we might be interested in buying some of these from you...”

“We?” I said.

“The Root and Bloom. We’re in the early stages of building our own library and some of these books would make a good start for what we want to do.”

“Some?” I said, teasingly (but also seriously). “What about all? Would you be willing to take all of them?”

“Oh.” She stared at the two hundred tons of paper, ink and glue. “Well....Let me talk to our board and directors and see what they say.”

*     *     *

They said yes.

And so, the next week Christine returned with empty boxes and a few volunteers from the Root and Bloom to help pack what she later estimated were 180 boxes. “No one had to go to the gym that week,” she told the local TV news station.

For several days, the basement of my house was noisy with the rumble of heavy books dropping into cardboard boxes and the shrieks of packing tape sealing the flaps. Christine and her small army, the Book Brigade, arrived early each day and spent hours pulling, sorting, and cramming. I popped in on my lunch hour to check on their progress and I always went away feeling a little bad: my burden had become their burden. The sheer number of books was overwhelming and I felt sorry for the Book Brigade and their sweat-damp faces and sore muscles.

But eventually, everything was boxed up and carted off. I felt only relief.

That soon turned to joy when Christine told me of her plans for the books: “These will be the start of a new library we’re establishing at the Jacobs House. We’re going to call it the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library.”

I had to turn away for a minute. Suddenly, there was a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

*     *    *

Before his all-too-soon death this past July, Ed Dobb was one of the best word-slingers to ever come out of Butte, Montana. His articles about the troubled history of this copper-mining town, “Pennies From Hell” and “Dirty Old Town,” are revered as masterpieces of journalism; they’re the yardstick against which everything else written about Butte is measured. Ed was also the co-producer of the terrific documentary film Butte, America. The blood that flowed through Ed’s veins was the color of pennies.

Ed emailed me out of the blue one day in 2010, one year after I’d moved to the Mining City and shortly after my interview with Tom McGuane appeared in New West magazine. The subject line of the email was “Comparing Pens” and it opened like this:

Hey, David, I enjoyed your interview with McGuane in New West. Also noted with delight that you’re living in Butte. Clearly you’re mad....What sort of unspeakable crimes would condemn you to such a desolate place?....Doubtless you’ve now heard the old joke: One of the best things about living in Butte is that Montana is close by. I think how a person responds to the quirky, often forbidding island ruin of Butte says a lot about a person’s character and sensibility.

I leaned closer to my laptop screen. I’d found a kindred spirit, someone who removed his rose-colored glasses before sweeping his eyes across the scraped and scarred landscape of this town. Ed loved Butte, but he also understood its complexities: the ugly and the lovely.

Ed sent me more essays to read, including this one about cold-water swimming which began:

Although I had been swimming on and off since moving from southwest Montana back to San Francisco in mid-January, my new season officially started on April 17th, the day I turned 60. It was a bright afternoon, the sun partially obscured by high thin clouds, gusts churning the surface of Aquatic Park, a manmade cove bounded by curved piers on the waterfront. That’s where I swim, along with others whose notion of a swell time is plying chilly San Francisco Bay while wearing nothing but a cap and a Speedo. And chilly it was that day—water about 55 degrees, or 30 degrees cooler than the average municipal pool. Whatever pleasures await the cold-water sea swimmer—and they are incomparable, even, at times, transcendent—reaching them entails a certain amount of discomfort. Every swim begins with a double leap—the physical act of plunging into the water, the mental act of deliberately submitting to pain.

Going back over that article now, half a year after Ed died at 69 of complications from a heart condition, I read it as metaphor. Ed was writing about swimming, yes; but—and I hope he’ll forgive me for stretching his words—he could easily have been writing about the process of shedding my beloved books: the icy shock of the decision to rid myself of what I’d once held so dear, deliberately subjecting myself to the pain of loss.

But now, as Christine told me of Root and Bloom’s plan for the books, I realized it wasn’t loss and grief I should be feeling, but happiness and comfort. My 30-year library would have a new life and find new readers and, best of all, it would carry my friend’s name and legacy with it into the future. I couldn’t have planned a better fate for the books.

*     *    *

Two months after the last box was packed and carried out the front door, I paid my books—my former books—a visit at the Jacobs House. Many of them were still in their cartons, stacked like a small mountain range in the middle of the floor; but enough had made their way onto the shelves—my old bookcases—for me to browse. I tilted my head and ran my eyes across the familiar spines. “Hello, old friends,” I whispered. “It’s good to see you again.”

I restrained myself: I did not shake the shelves and sweep the books into my arms and carry them out the door. Instead I felt a pang of guilt for holding them in a miser’s grip for all those years, knowing I could never read even a fraction of the collection—no, not even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg’s worth—before I died. Now, other visitors to the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library would have the chance to read what I built and saved over the decades.

I went back to Ed Dobb’s article on swimming in the icy waters near Alcatraz and his words took on fresh meaning:

How long it takes for the body’s internal heat to counteract the penetrating cold varies widely, depending on several factors—metabolism, conditioning, overall acclimation, how hard one swims. But whether the interim is measured in seconds or minutes, a kind of alchemy is at work, converting the forbidding into the ecstatic. What makes the shift possible is conviction, the belief that eventually the sting will recede, the shock replaced by something that cannot be experienced anywhere else.

What I once feared most—losing my books—had been converted to joy. A new refrain ran through my head: It is better to share than to hoard.

I was at peace with my loss.

Ed Dobb swimming toward Alcatraz

My First Time: Tony Ardizzone

My First True Writing Teacher

“I’m not here to be your friend,” he said as he stood before us, fifteen or so nervous undergrads sitting around a long wooden table in a windowless seminar room on the second floor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s creaky English Building. The faint smell of chlorine hung in the air. We could hear the occasional soft thuds of volleyballs and the muted whistles of referees. At the time, Illinois’ English department was housed in an old building that did double duty as a women’s gymnasium. Picture a doughnut with the women’s gym in the center, the English department’s offices and classrooms flanking the gymnasium’s sides. The odor of chlorine was strongest in the classrooms on the first floor, where the swimming pool lay, hidden like the motifs and symbols in the poems and stories and novels we were studying. Sometimes the doors to the volleyball court up on the second floor were left open and we English majors saw a splash of color, a sea of variously colored Danskins, countless young women leaping about in their leotards, spiking the ball, blocking it back down over their opponents’ heads. “I’m not here to be your friend,” the new professor told us. “I’m here to break your bones.”

We’ll get to why he was new in a moment. For now, let’s put his opening words into context. Though we immediately thought what he had to say was harsh, hindsight invites me to consider that he began in this way to make us focus on our class, on the task at hand, rather than sit glumly in our chairs dwelling on the tragedy.

The tragedy. Our course’s assigned teacher, the distinguished writer and editor J. Kerker Quinn, died of a heart attack halfway through our previous class session. Word was he was reading one of our manuscripts and in the middle of a sentence slumped to the table. I wasn’t there to witness it. I was taking a course in Shakespeare’s tragedies and had fallen behind in my readings, and since I knew that Professor Quinn was putting off discussing one of the two manuscripts I gave him on the class’s first day I decided that morning to take one of my three allowed cuts. Later, early evening, in the kitchen of the fraternity house where I worked as a waiter for my meals, I overheard the pots-and-pans man tell the dishwasher that he’d heard some professor dropped dead in class. Where? the dishwasher asked. I think it was English, the pots-and-pans man said. You know, in one of those classrooms up on the second floor where you have to know which staircase to take unless you want to be blocked by the women’s gym.

I was taking Quinn’s class because my previous creative writing teacher, a rough-and-tumble teaching assistant whose comments about our work made one writer rush from the room in tears, recommended him to me. The TA had a hard time figuring me out. He said my writing lay somewhere on the cusp between fiction and poetry. His class had us write both genres, and he was a good sheepdog, driving the poets to one side of the pasture, the fiction writers to another. Since I was good at neither he left me in the center, sort of lost. When my fiction was discussed I was told it was overly poetic–one of the harshest insults a prose writer can ever receive. When my poetry was discussed I was told it was ruined by too much narrative. Once again, ouch! Take a class with Kerker Quinn, my TA advised. If anyone can straighten you out, he can.

J. Kerker Quinn

On the first day of the semester I gave Quinn two short stories I’d written over the summer. I believe I did my best to not make them overly poetic. But then again, I really liked words. That was part of the reason why I wanted to be a writer. I liked the way words looked on the page. I liked the way words felt in the mouth. I liked the way they sounded. And once a word or sound earned its way onto my pages, I liked allowing it to live there. I was like the friendly soul living at the end of the block who seldom turned away a stray cat. After the first few weeks of the semester passed and my work hadn’t been discussed, I stayed after class one day and asked Quinn when he was going to get to me. He told me he was saving my stuff for later. I took this as a good sign since the stories he was reading to us seemed to me to be growing increasingly stronger. At least, at the time that was my hope.

This was back before writing workshops made physical copies of student’s work. Back then the workshop director sat at the head of the table and read the student story aloud, commenting along the way, more or less like the director’s critical commentary on a special edition of a DVD. So we learned by listening. Before Quinn began reading us our stories, he lent us copies of the literary magazine he edited, Accent, and had us read and talk about some of the stories he’d published. We learned why out of the hundreds if not thousands of short stories sent to him he’d selected these.

Back then I knew only a handful of facts about J. Kerker Quinn, and it was only after his unfortunate death that I learned more about his life. Quinn was the founder and editor of the distinguished literary magazine Accent (1940-1960), which published and helped to launch the writing careers of, among many others, Richard Wright, E. E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, Henry Miller, William H. Gass, and Langston Hughes. He was the first editor to publish Flannery O’Connor, then a student at Iowa. Other writers he supported during the early and middle days of their careers included Nelson Algren, Eric Bentley, Walter Van Tillburg Clark, Malcom Cowley, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, J. F. Powers, Wallace Stevens, and Eudora Welty. What I learned from Quinn during the time that he talked about our stories was that all too often our work resembled essays and it was not uncommon that the real story we had to tell actually began on page five. I also learned that the first page of a story was its most important page. If the first page wasn’t good, the editor wasn’t likely to read the second.

Before the new professor walked into the room you could hear our pencils idly scratching on our yellow legal pads as we sat around the seminar table, waiting. None of us talked. I never learned whose manuscript Quinn had been reading when he died, and I never asked. I often thought that if it had been mine I would have considered never writing again. Of course I was sad that he’d died but at the same time I was also selfish enough to feel disappointed that he’d never told me what he thought of my work. Of course I wanted his praise. I wanted this great editor, who recognized before anyone else the genius of Flannery O’Connor, to confirm that I was a fiction writer. Or, if he felt it was in my better interests, to kick me to the curb, send me to the opposite side of the English building and the vast, deliberately lined, then-confessional alien planet of poetry.

The professor who took over for Quinn was Daniel Curley, a tall man, rugged, with a ragged crew cut, flannel shirt, brown belt and corduroy pants. Decades later, with the help of his good friend and former writing student Roger Ebert, the distinguished film critic, Curley founded and edited a literary magazine titled Ascent, a clear nod to Quinn’s Accent. And years after that, Ebert, who confessed to having taken every course Curley offered and looked upon him as a father figure, co-wrote a lovely memoir with his former teacher, The Perfect London Walk. After introducing himself, Curley said a few words about Quinn’s passing, but only a few words, as I remember–this wasn’t the memorial service–and then he delivered the stunner, how he was there to break our bones.

Daniel Curley

Being a working-class kid from Chicago, what today we’d call a first-generation college student, Curley was speaking in a language I could understand. He spoke with what sounded to my ear like a slight British accent, though later I learned that he’d been born and raised in a town not too far south of Boston. Despite his flannel shirt and crew cut, he seemed to me to be quite a formal man. He took his seat at the head of the seminar table, then added, “Not all of them, mind you. Not all of your bones. Just the ones that have grown crooked. Just the ones that over the years have set themselves wrong.”

He then described how doctors moved through the Middle West in the early 1800s, traveling from town to town, treating the farm boys and farm girls who’d fallen from trees and broken an arm, who’d been kicked by a mule or cow and fractured a leg, who dislocated a shoulder, and so on, and as a result ended up funny, twisted, since the body has a way of healing itself regardless and broken bones, no matter how they’re set, harden back solid into bone. As a result the lands these doctors tended were full of people with gnarled and twisted limbs. In order for the doctors to make their patients’ arms and legs straight, the crooked bones they found would have to be broken. This would be true of our writing, Curley told us. Whether we realized it or not we each had taken on habits, bad habits, quirks. We came to rely on language that was easy and inexact. We embraced stereotypes. Clichés. We’d watched too many TV shows, read too few books. It was his task to break us of these habits, habits that didn’t do service to our purpose, which was to write strong, engaging fiction.

I don’t know whatever happened to the two stories I’d given to Professor Quinn – more than likely both were really lousy–but I immediately headed for one of the back tables in the Illini Student Union cafeteria, which at the time served as my writing room, and wrote a story for Dan Curley. At the time I was in a Nelson Algren phase and as a result I wrote a story about a wino in a neighborhood just south of where I lived, Uptown on Chicago’s North Side, a neighborhood known for its bars and pool halls and flashing neon lights, a neighborhood inhabited by hookers and hustlers and winos. In my story my central character, an unnamed wino, lay passed out in an alley when another wino spots him and then kneels down at my wino’s side and looks for a few moments at his face, then pulls off my wino’s boots, which my wino had been quite proud of, then stands up and walks away.

When Curley read my story aloud to the class and came to this climatic scene he paused for a moment, staring out into the air, and then said, “I can’t quite see that.”

He read the passage aloud again, this time more slowly, then pushed back his chair and stood and had us move about the room so that we could see him as he knelt near an empty space near the door. The unconscious man is lying here, he said, gesturing to the empty space before him. He had one of the other students read the section again. Curley played the part of the second wino. So here I am kneeling over the other man, he said, and now I’m looking at his face. What comes next? He steals the wino’s boots, the student said. Curley reached out an arm, miming the action. How? Curley said. I can’t quite reach them. Still kneeling, Curley swung his left arm down and then scooped it up. I can lift one of the man’s legs, he said, but I can’t reach his boots. He turned back to face the class. And even if I could touch one of his boots, he said, how could I pull it off? Standing now, he walked to where the first wino’s feet might lay and mimed lifting a leg and pulling off a boot–one hand at the toe, the other grasping the heel. Then Curley sat back down at the table and read my story’s final few paragraphs, though by that time I wasn’t listening. My ears rang with his words, his judgment. “I can’t quite see that.”

I learned more than I can explain that afternoon up on the second floor of the University of Illinois’ old English Building, as the sound of volleyballs thumped gently in the air. I learned that truly good creative writing teachers don’t so much teach how to write as they teach how not to. I learned that the best lessons a teacher can give a young writer are specific to the writer’s work. I learned that as a young writer I was too much in my head, not enough in my body. I came to understand that I was writing more from idea or concept than from my five senses. I learned that as a writer I had to see. Later I would generalize the lesson and add hear, smell, taste, touch. Perhaps I came closer to being a fiction writer that day as I sit here remembering–as my mind’s eye still sees–Dan Curley miming the actions necessary to realistically steal another man’s boots.

Tony Ardizzone is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Arab’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, an updated edition of his previously published collection, Larabi’s Ox. His novels include The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. His work has received the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and two NEA fellowships, among other honors. A native of Chicago, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Click here to visit his website.

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. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

Giving Thanks for Books

At this uncertain and unsteady Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things: family, health, a stable job, and the food I’m about to eat in T-minus two hours. Somewhere on that list, though, are the thousands of books which line my basement walls. They are my comfort, my inspiration, and my escape hatch (down which I frequently find myself sliding these days). Where would we be without the music of words?

Bookish recently asked several authors (including yours truly) to name the one book for which they’re thankful. I could have plucked any number of books from my shelf. I mean, just a casual perusal yields this harvest of books which have comforted, inspired, etc. over the years: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. I could go on and on, but Bookish demanded a single book and so I tried to narrow it down as best I could. My response:

Just one book? Impossible. Narrowing it down to just one shelf of my nearly 40 shelves? Next to impossible. Maybe I could pick just one author out of the dozens who’ve held sway over my imagination for 50 years? Doable, but still difficult. Okay, okay, okay… (takes deep breath, stares long and hard at his library) I’ll choose… David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I could have easily picked ten others from my Dickens shelf (one of the longest in my library), but I’ll settle on this bursting-at-the-seams bildungsroman about a thinly-disguised C.D. as D.C. who makes his way from abused waif to accomplished author over the course of three inches of pressed and bound pages. I am particularly thankful for Dickens’ masterful marriage of plot and character whose happy union always sharpens both my imagination and my pen—never more so than in the personages of Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, all the Peggotties, Mr. Micawber, Dora, David and, oh, the shudder-worthy Uriah Heep. David Copperfield is a triumph! And God bless us, everyone! Oh wait, that’s from another favorite of mine.

Click here to read the picks from my fellow authors

What books are on your most-thankful list? Let me know in the comments section below.

Front Porch Books: June 2016 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, independent bookstores, Amazon and other sources. Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books. In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss. Note: many of these books won’t be released for another 2-6 months; I’m here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books.

A Tree or a Person or a Wall
by Matt Bell
(Soho Press)

Let the bells ring! There’s a new Matt Bell book in town (or will be when the marvelously-titled A Tree or a Person or a Wall is released in September). I look forward to the release of new work by the author of Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods with all the fervor of the devout listening for cathedral bells on a Sunday morning calling them to worship. To stretch this metaphor to its end, let me just say this collection of short fiction is the answer to our prayers.

Jacket Copy:  A Tree or a Person or a Wall gives us Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and acute takes on the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, lingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.

Opening Lines:  Even before the man with rough hands brought the boy to the locked room, even then there was always already the albino ape sitting on the chair beside the nightstand, waiting for the man and the boy to come.

Compartment No. 6
by Rosa Liksom
(Graywolf Press)

How about some chilly Russian literature for your summer reading? Rosa Liksom’s highly-acclaimed novel looks like it will be just the ticket. From the outside at least, Compartment No. 6 looks like it will marry the snowy vistas of Doctor Zhivago with Chekhovian intimacy on the relationship between two strangers in a train compartment. Liksom’s book, which is making its American debut in a translation by Lola Rogers, was previously published in 2011 in Finland and won the Finlandia Prize.

Jacket Copy:  In the waning years of the Soviet Union, a sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment—No. 6.—but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed former soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colorful stories, recounting in lurid detail his sexual conquests and violent fights. There is a hint of menace in the air, but initially the woman is not so much scared of or shocked by him as she is repulsed. She stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn’t cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he’s brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her silent gloom. As their train cuts slowly across thousands of miles of a wintry Russia, where “everything is in motion, snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people and thoughts,” a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of compartment No. 6. When they finally arrive in Ulan Bator, a series of starlit and sinister encounters bring Rosa Liksom’s incantatory Compartment No. 6 to its powerful conclusion.

Opening Lines:  Moscow hunkered down into a dry, frozen March evening, sheltering itself from the touch of an icy sun setting red. The girl boarded the last sleeping car at the tail end of the train, found her cabin—compartment number six—and took a deep breath. There were four bunks, the higher two folded against the wall above. There was a small table between the beds with a white tablecloth and a faded pink paper carnation in a plastic vase. The shelf at the head of the beds was full of large, clumsily tied parcels. She shoved the unprepossessing old suitcase that Zahar had given her into the metal storage space under the hard, narrow bunk and threw her small backpack on the bed. When the station bell rang for the first time she went to stand at the window in the passageway. She breathed in the smell of the train: iron, coal dust, smells left by dozens of cities and thousands of people. Travelers and the people with them pushed past her, lugging bags and packages. She touched the cold window and looked at the platform. This train would take her to villages of exiles, across the open and closed cities of Siberia to the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator.
     When the station bell rang the second time she saw a muscular, cauliflower-eared man in a black working-man’s quilted jacket and a white ermine hat and with him a beautiful, dark-haired woman and her teenage son, keeping close to his mother. The woman and the boy said goodbye to the man and walked arm in arm back towards the station. The man stared at the ground, turned his back to the icy wind, pinched a Belamorka, lifted it to his lips and lit it, smoked greedily for a moment, stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, and stood there, shivering. When the station bell rang for the third time, he jumped on the train. The girl watched him walk towards the back of the car with swinging steps and hoped he wasn’t coming to her cabin. She hoped in vain.

Blurbworthiness:  “This unlikely couple...accompany one another across the plains as if progressing through a film by Andrei Tarkovsky.”  (Svenska Dagbladet)

The Loved Ones
by Sonya Chung
(Relegation Books)

As a long-time admirer of Sonya Chung’s whip-smart editorial work at The Millions and Bloom, I was happy to see the front-porch arrival of her new novel, The Loved Ones. I have not had the chance to read beyond the first few pages, but I have the sneaking suspicion that The Loved Ones, due to hit bookstores in October, is bookstore-vigil, be-first-in-line, and call-in-sick-to-work worthy. Read on to see why you should put the novel at the top of your must-read list...

Jacket Copy:  In this masterful novel of inheritance and loss, Sonya Chung (Long for This World) proves herself a worthy heir to Marguerite Duras, Hwang Sun-won, and James Salter. Spanning generations and divergent cultures, The Loved Ones maps the intimate politics of unlikely attractions, illicit love, and costly reconciliations. Charles Lee, the young African American patriarch of a biracial family, seeks to remedy his fatherless childhood in Washington, DC, by making an honorable choice when his chance arrives. Years later in the mid-1980s, uneasy and stymied in his marriage to Alice, he finds a connection with Hannah Lee, the teenage Korean American caregiver whose parents’ transgressive flight from tradition and war has left them shrouded in a cloud of secrets and muted passion. A shocking and senseless death will test every familial bond and force all who are touched by the tragedy to reexamine who their loved ones truly are—the very meaning of the words. Haunting, elliptical, and powerful, The Loved Ones deconstructs the world we think we know and shows us the one we inhabit.

Opening Lines:  The boy was six, the girl nine. Their father, Charles Frederick Douglass Lee, was himself one of five children; each had looked after the next while Charles’s mother worked night shifts and his grandmother worked days at the same corner store owned by a cousin. He’d come up fine and didn’t believe in babysitters. It was his wife, Alice, who insisted the girl was not old enough to be left alone with the boy. “What if there’s an emergency,” Alice Lee said to Charles. She often made statements in the form of questions. She said “emergency” in a near whisper.

Blurbworthiness:  “Sonya Chung’s prose is elegant, sparse, and heartbreaking in a way that reminds one of Elena Ferrante or Clarice Lispector. In this novel of two very different but interconnected families both named Lee, she tells the story of love against the twin inheritances of shame and grief. This book is a complication of the immigrant narrative in a way that is long overdue and necessary. A gorgeous and important second novel.”  (Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us)

Half Wild
by Robin MacArthur
(Ecco)

After reading Jodi Paloni’s wonderful They Could Live With Themselves—short stories set in Vermont—I find myself jonesing for more literature about the Green Mountain State. Robin MacArthur’s Half Wild looks All Great. I can’t wait to start exploring the terrain populated by her characters. Reviewers have compared her style to Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty—high praise indeed—so that seals the deal for me.

Jacket Copy:  A powerfully authentic new literary voice debuts with stories that carve out a distinctive vision of the wildness and beauty of rural Vermont. Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the hopes, dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul. In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric, rough-living mother. “Maggie in the Trees” explores the aftershocks of a man who surrenders to his passion for a wild, damaged woman—his longtime friend’s partner. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.” In striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters cleaved to the land that has defined them—men and women, young and old, whose lives are inextricably intertwined with one another and tied to the fierce and beautiful natural world that surrounds them.

Opening Lines:  “You want to jump in the creek?” my mother asks. It’s a Tuesday night in late July and we’re on the porch drinking Myers’s rum doused with lemonade. She’s wearing cut-off cargo pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt full of holes; her cracked toenails are the chartreuse of limes.
     “No,” I say, to which she snorts and throws her cigarette butt into the wet grass, where it hisses before losing its flame. Mist rises from the field. Baby grasshoppers pop. Clouds drift.
     I don’t want to go down to the creek with my mom. Nor do I want to be living here at sixteen in this deciduous/coniferous northeastern no-man’s-land of Vicksburg where we were both born, forty square miles of intersecting roads, intersecting streams, failing farms, and rocky ledge.
     Populated by ghosts and animals and lonely women. Frickin' heaven, my mom calls these woods.

Blurbworthiness:  “MacArthur writes with the ear of a musician and a classic, pure command of the short story form, like a dispatch from Eudora Welty in the great north woods.”  (Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women)

Froelich's Ladder
by Jamie Duclos-Yourdon
(Forest Avenue Press)

I can say, without hesitation, that Froelich’s Ladder is the most unusual book to come across my desk this past month. Too few novels these days involve ladders (not to mention the world’s fourth-tallest ladder!) and there’s certainly a lack of Confederate Army assassins, general store magnates and “unfortunately-named” girls named Lotsee in our contemporary literature. There is, indeed, a lot to see in this novel set in the fog-shrouded Pacific Northwest.

Jacket Copy:  Froelich nurses a decades-old family grudge from his permanent perch atop a giant ladder in this nineteenth century madcap adventure novel. When he disappears suddenly, his nephew embarks on a rain-soaked adventure across the Pacific Northwest landscape to find him, accompanied by an ornery girl with a most unfortunate name. In their encounters with Confederate assassins, European expatriates, and a general store magnate, this fairytale twist on the American dream explores the conflicts between loyalty and ambition and our need for human connection, even at the highest rungs.

Opening Lines:  It was November 1851 when Harald and Froelich arrived in Oregon Country. Disembarking at Fort Astoria, they journeyed inland by foot, hiking over the Cascades in a gale that swept off the ocean like an enormous push broom.

Blurbworthiness:  “From the first page to the last, Froelich’s Ladder brims with color, intrigue, and verve. At once a fantastical, madcap adventure and a poignant meditation on independence and solitude, it’s the kind of book that captivates you quickly and whisks you high into the atmosphere. I was in thrall to the surreal Oregon landscape, populated by tycoons and grifters, cross-dressers and hungry clouds. This debut is clever, irreverent, and ultimately unforgettable.”  (Leslie Parry, author of Church of Marvels)

The Girl in Green
by Derek B. Miller
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Wars are never fully left behind on the battlefield, are they? They’re carried home like burrs in a soldier’s clothing. And they prick and scrape the skin for years and years and years. In Derek B. Miller’s new novel, a soldier and a journalist each witness a terrible attack during Operation Desert Storm and carry those burr-like images with them long after they return home....until another war comes along and they finally have to confront their feelings about what they saw. As an author of a novel about Operation Iraqi Freedom, I get a steady flood of war literature cascading across my desk each month. The Girl in Green has managed to rise above the tide—thanks to the tantalizing story and the promise of the opening lines on the first page—and I’ve put it near the top of my summer-reading pile.

Jacket Copy:  From the author of Norwegian by Night, The Girl in Green is a novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before. In 1991, near Checkpoint Zulu, one hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones in part to avoid his lackluster marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Arwood is a midwestern American private who might be an insufferable ignoramus, or might be a genuine lunatic with a death wish—it’s hard to tell. Desert Storm is over, peace has been declared, but as they argue about whether it makes sense to cross the nearest border in search of an ice cream, they become embroiled in a horrific attack in which a young local girl in a green dress is killed as they are trying to protect her. The two men walk away into their respective lives. But something has cracked for them both. Twenty-two years later, in another place, in another war, they meet again and are offered an unlikely opportunity to redeem themselves when that same girl in green is found alive and in need of salvation. Or is she?

Opening Lines:  Arwood Hobbes was bored. Not regular bored. Not your casual, rainy-day, Cat in the Hat-style bored that arrives with the wet, leaving you with nothing to do. It wasn’t post-fun or pre-excitement bored, either. It was, somehow, different. It felt rare and deliberate, entire and complete, industrial and inescapable. It was the kind of bored that had you backstroking in the green mist of eternity wondering about the big questions without searching for answers. And it wasn’t in short supply, either, because it was being dispensed like candy on Halloween to Arwood and others like him at Checkpoint Zulu at the rim of the Euphrates Valley, in the heart of Iraq, by the world’s largest contractor of boredom: the United States Army.
     How long had he been bored? How long was he destined to be bored? Arwood couldn’t even muster the motivation to care as he melted over his machine gun under the hot, hot sun that was pressing down on the sandy sand around him without a raindrop in sight and no one offering to cheer him up.
     The M60 machine gun was the perfect height for leaning on. It was probably the perfect height for firing, too, but Arwood had no proof of that because he hadn’t fired the gun since qualifying on it, and there was nothing to aim at because everything was far away, apart from a camel; and while he did point the gun at the camel for a while, it ultimately seemed a mean thing to do, so he stopped. That was eons ago. Nothing fun like that had happened since. Even the camel had gone away.

Faithful
by Alice Hoffman
(Simon and Schuster)

I’ll round out this month’s list of Most-Highly-Anticipated Books with the happy news that Alice Hoffman has a new novel on the horizon. Faithful will arrive in bookstores in November. And legions of the faithful shouted, “Amen!”

Jacket Copy:  From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate. Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Opening Lines:  In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 110, on the side of the road that slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are candles set inside paper bags, surrounded by sand, and they burn past midnight. They shouldn’t last for that amount of time, but that’s part of the miracle. On the second anniversary of the accident, a gang of boys creep out their windows and gather at two in the morning to see if Helene’s mother, Diana Boyd, drives along the road replacing each melting pool of wax with a fresh candle. They’re hoping to reveal a con in process and dispel the myth of a miracle, but after keeping watch for a while the boys all flee. In the early morning hours, safe in their beds, they wonder how much of the world can never be understood or explained.

My First Time: Jill McCroskey Coupe

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 Jill McCroskey Coupe, author of True Stories at the Smoky View, now out from She Writes Press. Library Journal has this to say about the novel: “With intricate story lines involving murder, library research, road trips, and Vrai’s and ­Jonathan’s quest for justice, and motifs including motherhood, love, marriage, betrayal, and true friendship, there is something for everyone in this light/dark Southern novel by a writer to watch.” A former librarian at Johns Hopkins University, Jill has an MFA in Fiction from North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College. She lives in Baltimore. Visit her online at jillmcoupe.wordpress.com or on Facebook.

My First Agent (and My Second, and My Third)

My first agent, Elizabeth McKee, had been Flannery O’Connor’s agent. In the 1970s she was also J. R. Salamanca’s (best known for his novel Lilith). Salamanca was then teaching creative writing at the University of Maryland, where I was enrolled in the master’s program in library science, and I was fortunate enough to take two of his classes. This kind man even agreed to read a novel l’d written over the summer.

It’s a good read, was his somewhat curt assessment, which I interpreted to mean: it won’t win you any literary prizes. He then asked if I’d like for him to send it to his agent.

Of course, I said, completely dumbfounded.

Elizabeth McKee didn’t ask me to sign a contract before she began sending my manuscript out to publishers. The polite rejection I received from Knopf was handwritten by Robert Gottlieb. Other rejections followed.

It occurred to me that this well-respected agent was simply doing a favor for one of her authors, and most likely she was. But several years later, when I sent her another novel, a short one, she wrote back saying that of course she remembered me, I wrote about interesting characters with complicated dilemmas. In her experience, she went on, novellas were extremely difficult to sell; this was why she was declining mine.

In the early 1990s I acquired my second agent as part of a package deal with an editorial service. The fees I paid for editing included, once the novel was deemed publishable, an agent. Yes, I remember the agent’s name, and yes, she did send my novel out to editors, one of whom complained: another marriage down the drain, who wants to read about that?

When this agent no longer returned my calls, I wrote to her, enclosing a stamped postcard and asking her to check the appropriate box:

1)  I’m still sending the novel out, or
2)  I’ve completely given up on it.

Well, I asked for it, didn’t I?

I began a new novel, about a forty-something art history librarian named Vrai (short for Vraiment) and a ten-year-old boy named Jonathan. A friend here in Baltimore, who read several early versions, suggested an additional scene or two at the end. But, after working on it for five years, I was confident that the novel ended precisely when and where it should. So, keeping detailed logs, I started sending query letters to agents.

Two-and-half years later, in May of 2003, an agent I’d found online told me a novel couldn’t have more than one point of view and asked me to eliminate Jonathan’s. With reluctance, I complied. She then gleefully insisted on further changes. Of my ending she proclaimed, “Yes! Now Vrai has it all figured out.”

We signed a contract at the end of June. I was excited but also apprehensive. My full-length novel was turning into a novella. Elizabeth McKee, with all her experience and contacts, hadn’t wanted to try to sell a novella. Did this third agent, who’d never sold anything, know what she was doing?

In July she hand-delivered my shrunken manuscript to big-name editors at Random House, Viking, Bantam Dell, Anchor, and a few others. “It’s so short,” she complained to me.

In mid-August she sent me an e-mail proposing that we part company. That night she called and refused all further contact with me. She cursed at me and said I was “nasty.”

The part of me that had hoped she might actually find a publisher was so upset that I called my ex-husband. The rest of me was glad it was over. I soon learned, from a chat room or two, that I wasn’t the only writer she had dumped in exactly this way.

Revising had never been so much fun. I restored a lot of what she’d taken out. A novel can, of course, have multiple points of view, but I decided to stick with Vrai’s. Score one for the third agent.

During 2001-2004, I sent out 126 queries. Twenty-three (18%) of these agents responded with a request either for sample chapters or for the entire manuscript. The only contract I was offered, however, was the one I should never have signed.

Discouraged, I started yet another novel. I took the first chapter to John Dufresne’s workshop at the 2004 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference and the completed novel to his 2006 Master Class in Taos.* I also received a critique from Richard Peabody, legendary editor, teacher, and publisher in the DC area.

Fortuitously, the feedback for this new novel opened my eyes to a major problem with the novel about Vrai and Jonathan. The third agent had been wrong about the ending. My first reader had been spot on: the story wasn’t quite finished.

Chagrined, I began working on what is now the final third of True Stories at the Smoky View. I took the new, improved version to John Dufresne’s 2010 Master Class in Taos. Between October 2010 and March 2012, I queried 103 agents, of whom only eight (7.8%)–two of them referrals from John–asked to see more.

I’d been hearing that publishing was changing. I felt like living proof.

In 2013 I enrolled in the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program’s One Book Semester and spent six months working with Jenna Johnson, senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, on revising and polishing my novel. Based on her final critique, I added two new scenes.

Of the sixteen agents I queried in 2014, only one intrepid soul expressed interest. My novel was in the best shape ever, but traditional publishing was going in another direction.

I, too, changed course. On December 23, 2014, I sent off a submission to She Writes Press.

Having joined She Writes, an online community of women writers, the previous year, I had been keeping an eye on She Writes Press. As a former librarian, I wanted the opportunity to have my book in libraries, the usual prerequisite for which is a review in Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus, or Publishers Weekly. With She Writes Press, such a review was at least possible.

Despite the holidays, the publisher, Brooke Warner, got back to me in the promised two weeks. On January 6, 2015, an astonishing e-mail arrived in my inbox. True Stories at the Smoky View had been accepted for publication in 2016!

It was a long and winding road, but I feel that I’ve ended up in exactly the right place. My experience with She Writes Press and with my publicists, Caitlin HamiltonMarketing & Publicity, have made me realize that the kindness, courtesy, trust, and professionalism extended to me decades ago by my first agent, Elizabeth McKee, still exist in the world of publishing.

And did I mention acceptance?

That bitter-cold night in January, I celebrated the red-hot news at my favorite Chinese restaurant. What wisdom, on this long-awaited occasion, did my fortune cookie dispense?

The efforts have the potential to pay off handsomely today.

I’m still smiling.

*The UNM Summer Writers’ Conference has now moved to Santa Fe.

A Year of Reading: Best Gift Book of 2015 for Bookworms

Books take us on journeys. Whether it’s down a rabbit hole, across the windswept moors of England, floating on a raft down the Mississippi River, or circling the world in eighty days, we go places when we read.

Some books, particularly those in the fantasy and historical fiction genres, provide literal maps in their endpapers; but for the majority of novels, readers navigate the terrain freestyle, using their imagination to picture the latitude and longitude of story.

In Plotted: A Literary Atlas, Andrew DeGraff maps his own vision of literary landscape and the result is a sumptuous, colorful feast for the eyes. That’s why I’m nominating Plotted as the gift book for readers this holiday season. If I didn’t already own a copy, I would be delighted to find this wrapped and waiting for me beneath the Christmas tree.

DeGraff sketched and painted nineteen maps for classic works of literature, ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin. In between, he also visits the sea of Moby-Dick, the warrens of Watership Down, the New York of Invisible Man, the London of A Christmas Carol, the Georgia countryside of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and many others. Each map is preceded by a very smart, engaging essay by Daniel Harmon.

To give you an idea of the beauty of DeGraff’s work, here are three maps from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (click each map to enlarge it):

As you can see, perspective is shifted and length is foreshortened, so actually traveling to these locations (even the real ones) is out of the question. Not that we’d even want to do that. The point here is to interpret the plots of classic books in fresh and visually exciting ways. By following the arrows and dotted lines on these pages, we gain a new perspective on well-trod stories we’ve walked through over the years.

DeGraff illuminates as much as he navigates. As he notes in his Introduction, “these maps provide a sense of contour—sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical—for their literary inspirations.” And later, he writes: “These are maps for people who seek to travel beyond the lives and places that they already know (or think they know). The goal here isn't to become found, but only to become more lost.”

I can't think of a better book in which to lose yourself this holiday season.

To see more of DeGraff's work, visit his website.


Related posts:
A Year of Reading: Best Books From Other Years
A Year of Reading: Best Poetry of 2015
A Year of Reading: Best Short Stories of 2015
A Year of Reading: Best Book Cover Designs of 2015
A Year of Reading: Best First Lines of 2015