Front Porch Books: July 2014 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.

Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich (Little, Brown and Company):  We'll begin this month's edition of Front Porch Books with a few short story collections I regretfully missed highlighting in what was supposed to be the be-all, end-all list of 2014 collections--even the "Bigger Boat Addendum" missed these new and forthcoming releases.  Sorry, my fellow scribes!  First up is Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich, a by-all-accounts hilarious gathering of tales about the absurdities of our modern culture.  Take a giggle at the Jacket Copy:

Twenty years ago, Barney the Dinosaur told the nation's children they were special. We're still paying the price. From "one of the funniest writers in America" (The Daily Beast) comes a collection of stories culled from the front lines of the millennial culture wars. Rife with failing rock bands, student loans, and participation trophies, Spoiled Brats is about a generation of narcissists--and the well-meaning boomers who made them that way. A hardworking immigrant is preserved for a century in pickle brine. A helicopter mom strives to educate her demon son. And a family of hamsters struggles to survive in a private-school homeroom. Surreal, shrewd, and surprisingly warm, these stories are as resonant as they are hilarious.

Here are a few choice Opening Lines:

They buried my wife in a shoe box in Central Park.  ("Animals") 

When the nurses handed me my son, I couldn't believe how perfect he was. Ben was so robust, nearly fifty inches tall, including horns and tail.  ("Gifted") 

Okay, so this is, like, my diary or whatever.  ("Semester Abroad") 

I am not smart with words, but I work hard every day of my life.  ("Sell Out") 

So a guy walks into a bar one day and he can't believe his eyes. There, in the corner, there's this one-foot-tall man, in a tiny tuxedo, playing a sonata on a little piano.  ("Guy Walks Into a Bar") 

I love my father, but sometimes he can get on my nerves. It's hard to explain why exactly. It's just little things he does, here and there, that bother me. For example, sometimes he shits into his hands and then throws the shit into my face while jumping up and down and screaming. I know he's just trying to be funny--and it is funny, I can see that. But there's just something about it that annoys me. I've asked him politely not to do it anymore, but I always get the same reaction. He just rolls his yellow eyes and says, "I'm sorry, your majesty."  ("Family Business") 

There aren't a lot of jobs out there for elves. You can work in the toy shop, a nonunion hellhole, and handcraft Hess trucks until you get arthritis.  ("Elf on the Shelf") 

Mr. and Mrs. Carr had been dead for several months, but like most ghosts, they thought they were still living.  ("Upper East Side Ghosts")

Now that's some crackling, sparking, live-wire-dancing-in-a-rainstorm kind of writing.  I'm bumping Spoiled Brats closer to the top of my To-Be-Read pile.

Our Secret Life in the Movies by Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree (A Strange Object):  I'm a huge fan of Criterion, the company that has lovingly, smartly packaged classic and arthouse films for movie nuts like me since 1984.  That's one of the reasons I'm drawn to this collection of short fiction by Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree (the other attraction for me is that I think the Austin, Texas micro-press A Strange Object is doing some mighty interesting stuff).  It's a unique book about--well, I'll just turn the microphone over to the authors to let them explain how it came into being:

We wrote Our Secret Life in the Movies in San Francisco, in a shared sublet a block away from the Mission Dolores, the site of Carlotta Valdes’s grave in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We’d hatched a plan to watch every film in The Criterion Collection’s sweeping catalog of world cinema classics over the course of a single year, an obsession that fed off pizza boxes, sambuca fumes, and whatever is damaged on the Y chromosome. We watched film after film—as many as two or three a day—and wrote stories inspired by them. After completing a dozen sketches, it became obvious that we were writing a fragmented book of linked snapshots chronicling our parallel trajectories as the last children of the Cold War and the analog era, coming of age in the 1980s amidst the white noise of intercontinental-ballistic mayhem and Reaganomics. Nearly all of us have a secret life in the movies, in which the pictures seep through our dreams until fantasy and reality become hopelessly blurred. We are in the movies, and the movies are in us.

Our Secret Life in the Movies is set up in such a way that McGriff and Tyree each write a piece of flash fiction about particular movies--which include Blade Runner, Mon Oncle, On the Waterfront, Donnie Darko and more than a dozen other films I'd never heard of (this shows how deep and wide The Criterion Collection really is).  I'm not sure if the authors collaborated on each story or who authored which piece of the pairs--but that's probably less important than the stories themselves which are written in a flowing, free-form dreaminess with often bizarre and jarring imagery (much like pieces of film, actually).  The stories aren't necessarily about the movies themselves, but about how the movies make us feel.  Here, for instance, are the Opening Lines to "The Man Who Married an Egg," inspired by Blade Runner:

After my father leaves us, he buys a dozen large eggs and takes a perfectly brown, perfectly egg-shaped egg for a wife. At night he places her in the robin's nest by their wedding photo, by day she sits on the kitchen table in a stand made from a coat hanger. They listen to classical music on the radio and complain about the lack of twentieth-century composers and the DJ's droning voice.

My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible by Gregg Cusick (Livingston Press):  Here's one other short story collection (out in October from this small press headquartered in Alabama) which came to my attention this past week.  Anything with a dirigible will always give me reason to take a closer look, but a quick tour through some of the stories' Opening Lines ensures I'll linger a little while longer in these pages:

Ever since she shot her husband, Bonnie has felt better about their relationship.  ("Balance") 

Alone in the house--his mother on second shift at the hospital--Hank scrapes his plate of congealing macaroni into the dog's dish.  ("Dozen Wheelbarrows") 

He is nothing like she remembers. She thinks the word husk when she first sees him, pictures a dried cornstalk barely upright in a muddy winter field.  ("Have You Seen Me?")

The Jacket Copy reveals some further tantalizing promise for what's ahead:

A small town suicide ripples through the lives of a series of acquaintances. An aging professor wavers before his class while reliving the sinking of his WWII troopship where hundreds perished. A middle-aged woman confronts her dying abuser of thirty years before. And in the title story, an old man recalls his boyhood view of his own father and the great rigid airship Shenandoah that passed over hours before its dramatic crash. In all the stories in this debut collection, ordinary, yet remarkable individuals face common human challenges in original, often surprising ways.

And none other than the great Lee Smith offers up this Blurbworthiness: "Poet of the everyday, connoisseur of hard times, spokesman for the down and out...there seems to be no end to the range of characters that Gregg Cusick can understand and articulate, often better than they can themselves."

The Happiest People in the World by Brock Clarke (Algonquin Books):  As an insane fan of Brock Clarke's previous two novels, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England and Exley, I was ecstatic to see The Happiest People in the World land on my front doorstep.  The Jacket Copy doesn't really let on too much about the plot--something to do with "the American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it" in a "story of innocence corrupted"--but frankly, I don't really care.  This is Brock Friggin' Clarke, people!  I will happily sink into his words, no matter what they're about.  If you're a newcomer to this novelist, then these Opening Lines (just a snippet of the dazzling, single-paragraph first chapter) will give you a taste of his style, which deliciously combines humor and heartbreak:

The moose head was fixed to the wall, the microphone in its mouth was broken, but the camera in its left eye was working just fine, and as far as the moose head could see, this was just another Friday night in the Lumber Lodge! Perhaps even more Friday night than most Friday nights. In fact, it was barely evening at all--the camera had just begun recording, as it did every night, at 5 p.m.--but it looked a lot like closing time. The smoke, for instance! New York State law had been insisting for years now that no one was allowed to smoke in this bar or in any other bar, but this law, like most laws--including the United States' laws preventing unauthorized surveillance of its citizens--was often ignored, and wow, was it being ignored tonight. The smoke was so thick the moose head was barely able to see the people it was intended to spy on. Finally, at 5:04 p.m., the smoke had thinned enough for the moose head to tell how very drunk all the people were. They were so very drunk that they were sprawled out on the floor, all of them--the boy who was clearly too young to be in the bar in the first place (another law broken, ignored); the blond woman who spent more time in the bar than anyone; the man who was wearing a red hat with a white letter C on it; the man who, along with the blond woman, the moose head had watched put up streamers all around the Lumber Lodge the day before; the woman and the man and the other man who had put the microphone and the camera in the moose head in the first place; the man with the ruined hand; the man with the garish shirt; the woman with the black hair who was clutching another red baseball hat with the white letter C on it; the man with the new haircut; the dark-skinned man the moose head had never seen before--all of them lying on the floor, obviously drunk, obviously completely plastered, grabbing at each other, reaching out for each other, yelling at each other (the moose head could not hear them but could see the O shapes their yelling mouths made), wrestling with each other, hugging each other, crawling away from and toward each other across the beer-and-booze-stained wooden floor. The stains were dark--darker than the usual stains--but then again these people were clearly drunker than the usual drunks, so they must have consumed alcohol darker and stronger than their usual alcohol. The moose head was not capable of judging these people; the moose head simply watched them the way the moose head had watched so many other drunks on so many other Friday nights.

Man, oh man.  I myself once wrote a story in which a taxidermist spied on his ex-wife through the eyes of a mounted elk head, but my words read like a Dick and Jane primer compared to Brock Clarke's fiction.  Here's some nice Blurbworthiness for The Happiest People in the World from Richard Russo: “Brock Clarke’s hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York.  The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder.”

Tinseltown by William Mann (Harper):  As evidenced by my 20-year work-in-progress--a novel about a midget who finds work in Hollywood as a stuntman--I am obsessed with Hollywood history, particularly that era between 1910 and 1950.  And so, when I see a book with the word "Tinseltown" diagonally blazed across the front cover, you can imagine the chain of tickles that sets off inside my chest.  William Mann's book focuses on one particular shady, seamy, unsolved chapter of H-wood's history: the unsolved murder of movie director William Desmond Taylor in 1922.  Taylor's death was just one of many scandals which rocked Hollywood around that same time (see also: Fatty Arbuckle--another personal obsession of mine).  It is one of Tinseltown's most perplexing cold cases and this book promises to finally find an answer in a tale of "murder, morphine and madness."  Mann has a James Ellroy-like grab-you-by-the-lapels style, as we can see in the Opening Lines of the book's introduction:

      This is the story of a murder, of a single soft-nosed bullet that traveled upward through a man’s rib cage, piercing his lung and lodging in his neck, after being fired by an unknown assailant 92 years ago on a cold Los Angeles night.
      This is also the story of three beautiful, ambitious women, all of whom loved the victim and any of whom might have been his killer, or the reason he was killed. It is also the story of one very powerful man, who saw the future of a very profitable industry hanging in the balance and kept the truth about the murder obscured and camouflaged for nearly a century.

The publisher is billing this as “The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”  It makes for a nice marquee--and indeed, you had me at "Nathanael West"--but we'll see how well Mann handles the material.   I, for one, can't wait to time-travel back to a Los Angeles full of "party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime."

Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder (HarperCollins):  This new novel by the author of The Juliet Stories and Hair Hat begins with the irresistible voice from a resident of a nursing home who evidently has a story to tell.  Let's eavesdrop on the Opening Lines:

      This is not the love song of Aganetha Smart.
      No, and don't talk to me of being weary and claiming one's well-earned rest.
      All my life I've been going somewhere, aimed toward a fixed point on the horizon that seems never to draw nearer. In the beginning, I chased it with abandon, with confidence, and somewhat later with frustration, and then with grief, and later yet with the clarity of an escape artist.  It is far too late to stop, even if i run in my mind only, out of habit.
      You do what you do until you're done. You are who you are until you're not
      My name is Aganetha Smart, and I am 104 years old.
      Do not imagine this is an advantage.
      I have outlived everyone I've ever loved, and everyone who ever loved me. Nor have I aged well. Just look at me.

Yes, just look at her sitting there in her wheelchair: mind as spry as a a spring, voice as smart as a whip.  This is going to be one of those books driven by its narrator's voice and, based on these first opening lines, I think it's going to be a crackling success.  --What's that, you say?  Who is Aganetha Smart?  Sorry, I guess I should have properly introduced the two of you.  Here's the Jacket Copy to explain:

Girl Runner is the story of Aganetha Smart, a former Olympic athlete who was famous in the 1920s, but now, at age 104, lives in a nursing home, alone and forgotten by history. For Aganetha, a competitive and ambitious woman, her life remains present and unfinished in her mind. When her quiet life is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of two young strangers, Aganetha begins to reflect on her childhood in rural Ontario and her struggles to make an independent life for herself in the city. Without revealing who they are, or what they may want from her, the visitors take Aganetha on an outing from the nursing home. As ready as ever for adventure, Aganetha’s memories are stirred when the pair return her to the family farm where she was raised. The devastation of WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, the optimism of the 1920s and the sacrifices of the 1930s play out in Aganetha’s mind, as she wrestles with the confusion and displacement of the present. Part historical page-turner, part contemporary mystery, Girl Runner is an engaging and endearing story about family, ambition, athletics and the dedicated pursuit of one’s passions. It is also, ultimately, about a woman who follows the singular, heart-breaking and inspiring course of her life until the very end.

Girl Runner will be released in the U.S. in early 2015, but Canadian bookworms can get their hands on the novel in September (lucky Canucks, eh?).  Now, aren't you glad you dropped by the nursing home?

Alphabet by Kathy Page (Biblioasis):  Speaking of Canada, have I ever mentioned how much I love Ontario-based publisher Biblioasis?  If not, then let me correct that lapse right now.  Biblioasis has been putting out high-quality, hand-crafted literature for a number of years and I always love it when their books sneak south across the border onto my doorstep.  Kathy Page's new novel is no exception.  Like Girl Runner, Alphabet is driven forward by voice and character--but the person inhabiting these pages is very different than the 104-year-old Aganetha Smart in that earlier novel.  Here's the Jacket Copy to paint a portrait for us:

Simon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. "Dumb Cunt." "Waste of Space." "A Threat to Women." "Murderer." Simon Austen has strangled his girlfriend. For the next thirteen years, Simon Austen will be serving life. Barely out of his teens, his past a grim assembly of foster homes, Simon is cagey, reserved, and highly intelligent. He's been told he has trouble relating to women. But what kind of woman would want to relate to "him"? Determined to resolve his issues on his own terms, and at great personal risk, Simon begins writing illicit letters to women under assumed identities. And though short-lived, his letter-writing triggers a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. "Who is Simon Austen," he is forced to ask, and "who do his psychiatrists want him to become?" A jolting portrait of modern prison regimes, Alphabet is the story of a man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation.

Blurbworthiness: "I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed, and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel."  (Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests)

The Most Terrifying Town in the World: Horace McCoy's I Should Have Stayed Home

In two days, I'll be jetting across the sky, bound for L.A. for the Los Angeles Times Book Award ceremony and the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  Fobbit is up for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction on Friday and on the following day, I'll be on a panel called "Fiction With a Sideways Glance" with Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins), Diana Wagman (The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets) and Fiona Maazel (Woke Up Lonely).  I'm looking forward to the festival, but I have a feeling my head is going to explode at the thought of all those must-see panels and readings.  I mean, just take a look at the schedule!  Short of last-minute miracle-cloning, there's no way I can be everywhere I want to be on Saturday.  As with other festivals I've attended this past year, though, I know I'll be happy with the panels I do attend.

This will be my second trip to L.A.  The first--an all-expenses paid two-day "vacation" in Hollywood after I won an Oscar-prediction contest from the Anchorage Daily News--was too brief and too long ago to make much of a lasting impression (other than putting my palms in Cary Grant's handprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater and "enjoying" a few neck-snapping rides at Universal Studios).  Between the awards ceremony and the festival events, I won't have time to see much of the city--sadly, not even these literary hotspots--so I'll depend on books to vicariously take me through the streets.

I can't think of a better tour guide than Horace McCoy.  I recently stumbled across his almost-forgotten noir novel I Should Have Stayed Home (first published in 1937).  McCoy is also the author of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, one of the many dark, hard-boiled novels I read during my deployment to Iraq in 2005.  Trust me when I say there's nothing like a sweaty marathon-dance competition to take your mind off the threat of possible mortar attacks on your Forward Operating Base.

And now I've found I Should Have Stayed at Home.  As soon as I got it, I flipped through the first pages (or, more appropriately, "scrolled" through the pages since I was reading it on my Kindle, courtesy of Open Road Media).  Thanks to my novel-in-progress, Dubble, I've been drawn to novels about Hollywood.  In the past couple of decades (the gestation period for Dubble), I've absorbed books by Bruce Wagner, Budd Schulberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald and, of course, Nathanael West whose The Day Of The Locust remains one of my favorite bleak-funny novels ever written.  I Should Have Stayed Home looks like it will be a welcome addition to that Tinseltown shelf.  I'll be packing it in my carry-on bags as I head for L.A.  Hopefully, I won't feel like I should have stayed home.

Here's how it begins:

Sitting, sitting, sitting: I had been sitting since I came back from the courtroom, alone and friendless and frightened in the most terrifying town in the world. Looking out the window at that raggledy palm tree in the middle of the bungalow court, thinking Mona, Mona, Mona, wondering what I was going to do without her, that and nothing more: What am I going to do without you? and all of a sudden it was night (there was no purple or pink or mauve), deep, dark night, and I got up and went out to walk, going nowhere in particular, just to walk, to get out of the house where I had lived with Mona and where her smell was still everywhere. I had been wanting to get out for hours, but the sun had kept me in. I was afraid of the sun, not because it was hot but because of what it might do to me in my mind. Feeling the way I did, alone and friendless, with the future very black, I did not want to get out on the streets and see what the sun had to show me, a cheap town filled with cheap stores and cheap people, like the town I had left, identically like any one of ten thousand other small towns in the country—not my Hollywood, not the Hollywood you read about. This is what I was afraid of now, I did not want to take a chance on seeing anything that might have made me wish I had stayed home, and this is why I waited for the darkness, for the night-time. That is when Hollywood is really glamorous and mysterious and you are glad you are here, where miracles are happening all around you, where today you are broke and unknown and tomorrow you are rich and famous...
      On Vine Street I went north towards Hollywood Boulevard, crossing Sunset, passing the drive-in stand where the old Paramount lot used to be, seeing young girls and boys in uniform hopping cars, and seeing too, in my mind, the ironic smiles on the faces of Wallace Reid and Valentino and all the other old-time stars who used to work on this very spot, and who now looked down, pitying these girls and boys for working at jobs in Hollywood they might just as well be working at in Waxahachie or Evanston or Albany; thinking if they were going to do this, there was no point in their coming out here in the first place.

The Next Big Thing: Dubble

My friend and fellow novelist Laura Harrington recently invited me to participate in the blog-tagging "Next Big Thing" which is currently making the rounds among writers.  Since I'm knuckling down on revising my own NBT (or will be when I'm not writing this blog post), I figured I'd join the party.  At the end of this post, I'll tag-team a few other authors in hopes they'll tell us about their own works-in-progress.  Here are the standard questions:

What is the working title of your book?
Dubble.

What genre does your book fall under?
I suppose it would be "Literary Fiction," but you could probably also find it in the "Hollywood Screwball Comedies of Epic Length" section at your local bookstore.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
This is always a hard question for me to answer because, as much as I love movies and TV, my mind always freezes to a blank when I try to play "fantasy casting."  Because my main character is a little person, a lot of friends tell me I should have Peter Dinklage's agent on speed dial.  He might be too old for the part of the 21-year-old, though.  Same with Danny DeVito.  So, I guess I'd cast an unknown.  For the role of Eddie Danger, the temperamental child actor, I'd choose Mickey Rooney, circa 1937.  But then that might be too obvious because the Mickster is sort of the original inspiration for the novel.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
In 1940, David Dubble, a 21-year-old little person and stuntman for child actor Eddie Danger, has to cover up the fact that the kid accidentally killed a rival studio's canine mascot.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
From first letter to last period, the initial draft took me six years.  But that was 14 years ago, so it's had a two-decade life.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
First and foremost, there's The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West, which is probably the greatest novel ever written about Hollywood.  But I'd also include the novels of Bruce Wagner, The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald and What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg.

The Terror of Tiny Town (1938)

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I like to think about contradictions and juxtapositions; the way they rub up against each other can often lead to some bizarre and, hopefully, funny situations.  One day, for whatever reason, I wondered what it would be like if an adult got a job as a stunt double for a child actor.  And what if the adult is basically a good guy and the kid is a spoiled brat whose behavior causes him no end of agony?  I kind of liked that odd scenario.  Then around that same time, two other things happened: I saw an old Mickey Rooney movie and I heard about The Terror of Tiny Town, the all-midget Western (though I didn't actually watch that movie until last year).  Things started clicking, and I started typing.

What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?
How many screwball-comedy novels about Hollywood stuntmen do you know that have won a blue-ribbon at the state fair?  Well, mine did. When I was living in Alaska in 1993, I entered what was then Dubble's first chapter in the Tanana Valley State Fair and, to my surprise, I won the 1993 Grand Champion in the Creative Writing Division.  I'll always think of Dubble as the prize-winning monster cabbage of my novels.

When and how will it be published?
Nothing's a guarantee in this business, of course, but I'm crossing all my fingers that my editor will think the world is ready for a funny book about a little guy trying to survive Hollywood's golden age with his body and sanity intact.  After that, it's anybody's guess when (or if) it will make it into print.

And now here are some of my friends who have agreed to talk about their Next Big Things:

Jennifer Spiegel, author of The Freak Chronicles (Dzanc Books) and Love Slave (Unbridled Books).  Here's Jennifer talking about her Next Big Thing, a novel called Sappho Unspoken.

Craig Lancaster, author of 600 Hours of Edward and Edward Adrift.  Here's Craig talking about his Next Big Thing, a novel called Julep Street.

Anne Leigh Parrish, author of All the Roads That Lead From Home (Press 53).

John Clayton, author of The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart. Here's John talking about his Next Big Thing, essays about Montana.

Melanie Thorne, author of Hand Me Down.

Soup and Salad: "The Man Who Loved Children," Teen Stieg, Go West, "The Squickerwonkers," Bookshelf Porn

On today's menu:

1.  When Jonathan Franzen writes so passionately about a 70-year-old novel, you really feel like you have no other choice but to run out, barefoot and bareheaded in the rain to the nearest bookstore ten blocks away, dodging traffic, bike messengers and other perils, to buy the damned thing:  Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

2.  Science-fiction stories by a very young Stieg Larsson come to light, just in time for the current global Stiegmania.  The article's money-quote comes from Sweden's deputy national librarian:

Gram said it would be up to Larsson's estate-holders -- his father and brother -- whether to publish the works, but said they should think twice before doing so, since the early works could potentially harm the author's reputation.

Remind me to tell you sometime about the novel I wrote when I was 13:  Mrs. Winter and the Pool of Teeth, a mystery in which a Miss Marple knockoff investigates the death of a Hollywood director who fell into a swimming pool stocked with piranha.  Some things should remain unpublished.

3.  The Library of America is offering a free download (.pdf) of a Nathanael West short-short: "Business Deal."  It's pretty funny, as far as satires of Hollywood go.

4.  Speaking of Hollywood and unintentional laughter:  "Lost" star Evangeline Lilly (aka Kate, aka "Freckles") plans to write a children's book.  Working title: "The Squickerwonkers."  No further comment.

5.  And, finally, I leave you with a new site I just stumbled across, courtesy of Like Fire:  Bookshelf Porn, featuring photos of bookshelves doing scandalous things!  In all sorts of positions!  Some of the books might even be French!

Pity the Novella: Neither This Nor That

Ah, the novella.  The awkward cousin at the wedding reception who, in his suit-straining obesity, grazes at the buffet table while eyeing the slim, sharp young things having a good time out on the dance floor.  Someone should tell that fat cousin he's still loved, even though he has crumbs on his necktie and no one ever asks him to dance.

The novella is fiction at that awkward stage: Too plump in plot and character to be called a short story, but often too thin to warrant its own publication as a stand-alone book.  It is both "more than" and "not quite."

But what sets the novella apart from its thinner cousins, the short story and the anorexic short-short?  And what about those other fellows, big and solid as linebackers queueing up for dollar dances with the bride--the ones who call themselves novels?  Does the novella dream of someday bulking up to their heft?

Someone please take pity on the novella.  He needs a lot of love to remind him that, yes indeed, he is a valuable member of the family.

And that's precisely what Dan Wickett and the good folks over at The Emerging Writers Network are doing by celebrating June as Novella Month. Wickett writes, "I've always been fascinated at the range of different ideas behind exactly what makes a novella a novella." All this month, EWN is posting capsule reviews of contemporary novellas and asking guests to offer up their interpretation of "what makes a novella a novella."  Coming fresh off the maypole dance of Short Story Month, June seems the perfect time to sit back in the hammock with a glass of lemonade (or gin-and-tonic if you're reading John Cheever's Oh What a Paradise It Seems) and delve into the foggy world of the novella.

The novella lives an ill-defined existence.  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as "a story with a compact and pointed plot" and "a work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel."  Novellas usually range in length from 20,000 to 40,000 words.  The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction even more precisely defines the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000 (what's up with that odd 17,500, guys?).

Setting aside word counts for a moment, we still find plenty of debate about the social status of novellas.  In his Afterword to Different Seasons, Stephen King called the novella “an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic.”  He goes on to say, "Now, artistically speaking, there's nothing at all wrong with the novella.  Of course, there's nothing wrong with circus freaks, either, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus."

King, of course, knows a thing or three about novellas; a good majority of his "short stories" are really those fat cousins in disguise.  In fact, I think the first time I ever heard the term "novella" was when I picked up a copy of Different Seasons in 1982.  That particular quartet of "longish stories" has produced two great movies (The Shawshank Redemption from "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" and Stand By Me from "The Body") and one really mediocre movie (Apt Pupil from the story by the same name).  The fourth novella from that collection, "The Breathing Method," is perhaps unfilmable thanks to its horrific cover-your-eyes scenes of childbirth.

King's latest "book," Blockade Billy, is nothing more than two novellas gussied up by the publishers to cleverly withdraw $10 from your wallet while insisting you're really getting your money's worth with this handsome little hardcover.  Eh.  I've read Blockade Billy and I'm not convinced it's King at his peak ("Morality," a noirish lesson in greed, is better than the titular tale of a creepy baseball catcher), but I'm also not convinced they're novellas.  I've read other King short stories which were longer, wider in scope, and deeper in character.  But maybe that's just the cynic in me speaking--the one who's pissed at the $10 pickpocketed from his wallet.

The point here is, even publishers are at a loss to properly catalogue and classify the novella.  Is it just a question of length and lack of chapters?  Is it structure as much as it is content?  Defining "novella" forces us to examine the short story even more intently for how it executes its blade-sharp, blink-quick effect.

On the eve of publication of his much-lauded collection of novellas, The New Valley, Josh Weil wrote a paean to the form in the July/August 2009 issue of Poets & Writers:

Just as the brevity of the short form lends itself to particular purposes and demands particular strengths, just as the expansiveness of a novel allows for different approaches to story and unique potentials for what it can accomplish, a novella is shaped by the restrictions of its length, but it should be defined by what those restrictions allow it to do. It is a different animal altogether: Though worded as concisely as a short story, it has room for scenes to breathe. Moments can linger. The fist that squeezes the world of a short story into a few compact scenes can be unclenched a little--bits of backstory let in, descriptions filled out, characters lived with longer. But the novella embraces not too many characters, and not too wide-ranging a plot, not too vast a scope--those are the realm of the novel. A novella compresses the world with a short story's focus, but it explores that smaller space with a novel's generosity.

Still unsure as to what, exactly, constitutes a novella?  Take heart, dear reader--you are not alone.  For most of us, it's sort of like the classic definition of pornography: you know it when you see it.  At John Madera's hitherandthitheringwaters website, he offers up an incisive look at the novella's origins, sorts through the many definitions of the form and--frosting on the cake--provides links to dozens of "my favorite novella" lists by writers he polled.  Their answers won't help resolve the muddle of definition--one man's long short story is another woman's novella is another person's short novel.  But, at the very least, you can compile a pretty extensive reading list from all their suggestions.

Here are some literary works which most folks agree can be called novellas (though I'll admit I've always considered some of these to be novels):

The Dead by James Joyce
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Bear by William Faulkner
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Miss Lonleyhearts by Nathanael West
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

As for me, I'm going to do my part to further EWN's cause by committing to reading at least one novella during the month of June.  Better yet, I'll read three--the trio of novellas in Josh Weil's The New Valley.  I've been wanting to read that book for nearly a year.  I can't think of a better time to pull it off the shelf.  Thanks, Dan Wickett, for the friendly shove.

And what about you, dear reader?  Do you have a list of favorite novellas?  Feel free to share with the rest of us in the comments section.