Front Porch Books: July 2019 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. 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, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.

Everybody’s Doin’ It
by Dale Cockrell
(W. W. Norton)

Jacket Copy:  Everybody’s Doin’ It is the eye-opening story of popular music’s seventy-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York’s spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely―to the horror of the elite. This rollicking demimonde drove the development of an energetic dance music that would soon span the world. The Virginia Minstrels, Juba, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin and his hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and the Original Dixieland Jass Band all played a part in popularizing startling new sounds. Musicologist Dale Cockrell recreates this ephemeral underground world by mining tabloids, newspapers, court records of police busts, lurid exposés, journals, and the reports of undercover detectives working for social-reform organizations, who were sent in to gather evidence against such low-life places. Everybody’s Doin’ It illuminates the how, why, and where of America’s popular music and its buoyant journey from the dangerous Five Points of downtown to the interracial black and tans of Harlem.

Blurbworthiness:  “Another scintillating gem from one of the rock stars of American musicology. Cockrell draws on sources we didn’t know existed to draw conclusions we couldn’t have foreseen. He not only illuminates the music of the title’s time period but also puts jazz scholarship on a different footing. Everybody should be readin’ it!” (Robert Walser, author of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music)

In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
(Graywolf Press)

Jacket Copy:  In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Opening Lines:  I never read prologues. I find them tedious. If it’s so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What is the author trying to hide?

Blurbworthiness:  “Carmen Maria Machado has re-imagined the memoir genre, creating a work of art both breathtakingly inventive and urgently true. In the Dream House is crucial queer testimony. I’ve never read a book like it.”  (Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body)

All This Could Be Yours
by Jami Attenberg
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Jacket Copy:  “If I know why he is the way he is then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman, strong-headed lawyer, loving mother, and daughter of Victor Tuchman—a power-hungry real estate developer and, by all accounts, a bad man. Now that Victor is on his deathbed, Alex feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who he is and what he did over the course of his life and career. She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra. As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children. All This Could Be Yours is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can tangle a family for generations and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free.

Opening Lines:  He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man, and he was tall, and he was pacing. Not much space for it in the new home, just a few rooms lined up in a row, underneath a series of slow-moving ceiling fans, an array of antique clocks ticking on one wall. He made it from one end of the apartment to the other in no time at all—his speed a failure as much as it was a success—then it was back to the beginning, flipping on his heel, grinding himself against the floor, the earth, this world.

Blurbworthiness:  “Set against the vivid backdrop of New Orleans, Jami Attenberg’s extraordinary new novel All This Could Be Yours is a deep dive into fractured family dynamics. In alternating voices, Attenberg expertly weaves together a chorus of love, betrayal and inheritance, each chapter a prism turned, revealing a new spectrum of secrets. Interspersed are gorgeous excavations into fleeting moments with strangers—the checkout clerks and ferry conductors passing through our lives—connecting this singular family into the larger web of life, where everyone is worthy of understanding and no one is without a soul.”  (Hannah Tinti, author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley)

The Story of a Goat
by Perumal Murugan
(Grove Atlantic)

Jacket Copy:  As he did in the award-winning One Part Woman, Perumal Murugan in his newest novel, The Story of a Goat, explores a side of India that is rarely considered in the West: the rural lives of the country’s farming community. He paints a bucolic yet sometimes menacing portrait, showing movingly how danger and deception can threaten the lives of the weakest through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands. As the novel opens, a farmer in Tamil Nadu is watching the sun set over his village one quiet evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man who seems more than human, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive. The farmer and his wife take care of the young she-goat, whom they name Poonachi, and soon the little goat is bounding with joy and growing at a rate they think miraculous for such a small animal. Intoxicating passages from the goat’s perspective offer a bawdy and earthy view of what it means to be an animal and a refreshing portrayal of the natural world. But Poonachi’s life is not destined to be a rural idyll―dangers can lurk around every corner, and may sometimes come from surprising places, including a government that is supposed to protect the weak and needy. Is this little goat too humble a creature to survive such a hostile world? With allegorical resonance for contemporary society and examining hierarchies of caste and color, The Story of a Goat is a provocative but heartwarming fable from a world-class storyteller who is finally achieving recognition outside his home country.

Opening Lines:  Once in a village, there was a goat. No one knew where she was born. The birth of an ordinary creature never leaves a trace, does it? That said, the goat’s arrival into the world was somewhat unusual.

My Red Heaven
by Lance Olsen
(Dzanc Books)

Jacket Copy:  Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters―some historic, some invented―crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg―as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts. Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable. A terrific read for fans of Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

Opening Lines:  Every evening the dead gather on rooftops across the city.

Blurbworthiness:  “Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive.” (Carole Maso, author of Ava)

Wild Game
by Adrienne Brodeur
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Jacket Copy:  On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me. Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms. Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.

Opening Lines:  A buried truth, that’s all a lie really is.

Blurbworthiness:  “It’s a rare memoir that reads like a thriller, but Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game manages to do just that. Beautifully written and harrowing, the book left me breathless.” (Richard Russo, author of The Destiny Thief)

Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
by Dexter Palmer
(Pantheon Books)

Jacket Copy:  From the highly acclaimed author of Version Control comes a stunning, powerfully evocative new novel based on a true story―in 1726 in the small town of Godalming, England, a young woman confounds the medical community by giving birth to dead rabbits. Surgeon John Howard is a rational man. His apprentice Zachary knows John is reluctant to believe anything that purports to exist outside the realm of logic. But even John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local farmer, manages to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John realizes that nothing in his experience as a village physician has prepared him to deal with a situation as disturbing as this. He writes to several preeminent surgeons in London, three of whom quickly arrive in the small town of Godalming ready to observe and opine. When Mary’s plight reaches the attention of King George, Mary and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences for the first time a world apart from his small-town existence, and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. All the while, Mary lies in bed, waiting for another birth, as doubts begin to blossom among the surgeons and a growing group of onlookers grow impatient for another miracle...

Opening Lines:  The convoy of nine decrepit coaches and wagons that constituted Nicholas Fox’s Exhibition of Medical Curiosities rolled into the village of Godalming on a Friday in early September 1726, soon after sunrise. Its herald, careening headlong before the horses that pulled the lead coach, was a young blond girl whose face was half covered by a port-wine stain, one of her sky-blue eyes peering out of an inky blotch of burgundy. “Tomorrow, witness a series of physiological wonders of which I am the very least,” she proclaimed to passersby, the men and women trudging out of town to begin the day’s harvest of the hop fields. “For the meager price of sixpence, gaze upon the horrific consequences that occur when the Lord God stretches out his mighty finger and lays a curse on Man. Educational for the mind; edifying for the soul.” The windows of the coaches had their thick black curtains pulled, proof against stray glimpses of their passengers. Education and edification would not come for free.

Blurbworthiness: “Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen is provoking in ways that reach well beyond the premise, anticipating as it does our own ‘world of ash,’ with all its spectacle, factionalism, and noise. It is vividly composed and audaciously imagined, filled with characters who do battle against a world that perceives them as strange—or who, conversely, assume strangeness as a mask in order to induce the world to see them at all. It is yet another wonder in Dexter Palmer’s cabinet of wonders.” (Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead)

Year of the Monkey
by Patti Smith
(Knopf)

Jacket Copy:  From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, comes a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year. Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs―including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” For Smith―inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing―the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world. Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.

Opening Lines:  It was well past midnight when we pulled up in front of the Dream Motel. I paid the driver, made sure I left nothing behind, and rang the bell to wake up the proprietor. It’s almost 3 a.m., she said, but gave me my key and a bottle of mineral water. My room was on the lowest floor, facing the long pier. I opened the sliding glass door and could hear the sound of the waves accompanied by the faint barking of sea lions sprawled out on the planks beneath the boardwalk. Happy New Year! I called out. Happy New Year to the waxing moon, the telepathic sea.

Blurbworthiness:  “A chronicle of a year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies. The titular year, 2016, set Smith, [who] refers to herself as the ‘poet detective,’ on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. Throughout, Smith ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday, and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her.” (Kirkus)

Wanderers
by Chuck Wendig
(Del Rey)

Jacket Copy:  A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. From the mind of Chuck Wendig comes “a magnum opus . . . a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together” (Kirkus Reviews). Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead. For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Opening Lines:  The world discovered the comet six months before it appeared in the sky, visible mostly to those on the west Coast of North America. The woman who discovered it, Yumiko Sakamoto, age twenty-eight, was an amateur astronomer in Okayama Prefecture, in the town of Kurashiki. She found it on a lark, looking instead for an entirely different comet―a comet that was expected to strike Jupiter.

Blurbworthiness:  “This career-defining epic deserves its inevitable comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand.” (Publishers Weekly)

Front Porch Books: April 2019 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. 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, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.

The Big Impossible
by Edward J. Delaney
(Turtle Point Press)

Jacket Copy:  The short fiction in The Big Impossible explores guilt and redemption, aspiration and failure, and the stubbornness of modest hopes. The usual mileposts are fading, and choice is in the context of institutions and assumptions that are no longer holding steady. In “Clean,” a man waits for inevitable justice to come, as much as it will play against him. In “House of Sully,” a working-class family navigates the tumultuous year that 1968 was, as new perceptions shake long-held and dependable, if sometimes misguided, beliefs. Other stories examine the inner life of a school shooter, the comical posturing of writers at a literary party, a British veteran of The Great War living at a Florida retirement home but haunted by his losses, and a man’s bittersweet visits to past lives via Google Street View. In the sequence set in the West, an itinerant worker moves across the Great Plains, navigating stark landscapes, trying for foothold.

Opening Lines:  You think of that night endlessly from your imprisonment, the decisions made, the chain of mistakes. It had begun with your two buddies, a quart of cheap vodka and a half-gallon of orange juice; one of these friends had suggested the confrontation. Said this kid, Barry, was cutting in on your girl—well, she wasn’t even really your girl yet, the flirtation was just in its formative moments—was something that you, at sixteen, had no intention of allowing.
       He’d been walking home, at night. He worked at a burger place in that little scrub-oak town out near the Cape Cod Canal and, even drunk, you’d known a spot to intercept him. Again, at the suggestion of your friends. There he was, his backpack slung on his shoulder, looking at you as if not even sure who you were. You’d decided you would rough him up, and he decided to fight back, and you’d picked up a rock, and you’d swung it at his head. A minute later he was on the ground, dead.

Fall Back Down When I Die
by Joe Wilkins
(Little, Brown)

Jacket Copy:  Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan. His bank account holds less than a hundred dollars, and he owes back taxes on what remains of the land his parents owned, as well as money for the surgeries that failed to save his mother’s life. An unexpected deliverance arrives in the form of seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the mute and traumatized son of Wendell’s incarcerated cousin. When Rowdy is put under his care, what begins as an ordeal for Wendell turns into a powerful bond, as he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible. That bond will be stretched to the breaking point during the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in more than thirty years, when a murder ignites a desperate chase. Caught on the wrong side of a disaffected fringe group, Wendell is determined both to protect Rowdy and to avoid the same violent fate that claimed his own father. A gripping story set in a fractured and misunderstood community, Fall Back Down When I Die is a haunting and unforgettable tale of sacrificial love.

Opening Lines:  As the neighbor girl’s SUV disappeared down the road, Wendell watched the tire-kicked dust bloom and sift through shades of gold, ocher, and high in the evening sky a pearling blue. Harvest light, late-August light—thin, slanted, granular. At his back the mountains already bruised and dark.
       Wendell stepped back into the trailer and the screen door banged shut behind him. He considered the boy, sitting on the front-room floor, scribbling in a spiral notebook, pencil marks so dark and hard as to sheen to silver. Of a sudden the boy closed his notebook, jammed his pencil into the whorled spine. He looked right at Wendell, the dark of his eyes the biggest thing about him.
       —Bet you’re hungry, Wendell said. Let’s get us something to eat.

Blurbworthiness:  “The poetry of this beautiful novel isn’t only in the language―and it’s certainly in that―but also in Joe Wilkins’ keen understanding of the Bull Mountains in eastern Montana, of the people who have left their mark on the land there, or tried to erase it, and of the mysterious complexities of the human heart that drive us to one side of the law or the other.”  (Elizabeth Crook, author of The Which Way Tree)

Note: This one didn’t actually land on my front porch; I picked it up at The Well-Read Moose in Couer d’Alene, Idaho on my drive to Portland, Oregon for the annual AWP conference. But I’m sure glad I went with my impulse to buy this book.

Rabbits for Food
by Binnie Kirshenbaum
(Soho Press)

Jacket Copy:  Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization. It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum’s protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about what brought her there. Her story is a hilarious and harrowing deep dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of our most witty and indispensable writers.

Opening Lines:  The dog is late, and I’m wearing pajamas made from the same material as Handi Wipes, which is reason enough for me to wish I were dead.

Blurbworthiness:  “The female narrator I’ve been waiting for. Wickedly funny as well as seriously depressed, she waits while in the psychiatric hospital for the therapy dog that never shows up. Trying to read her face is like trying to figure out what a napkin is thinking. Her mania flies like a bat at night. A birthday card from her best friend Stella reads: You Put the Fun in Dysfunctional. Binnie Kirshenbaum, the great novelist of female neurosis, has given us, in Rabbits for Food, the only story that really matters—a troubled soul deciding if life is worth living or not.”  (Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary)

Red Birds
by Mohammed Hanif
(Grove/Atlantic)

Jacket Copy:  An American pilot crash lands in the desert and finds himself on the outskirts of the very camp he was supposed to bomb. After days spent wandering and hallucinating from dehydration, Major Ellie is rescued by one of the camp’s residents, a teenager named Momo, whose entrepreneurial money-making schemes are failing as his family is falling apart: His older brother, Ali, left for his first day of work at an American base and never returned; his parents are at each other’s throats; his dog, Mutt, is having a very bad day; and an earthy-crunchy aid worker has shown up wanting to research him for her book on the Teenage Muslim Mind. Amidst the madness, Momo sets out to search for his brother Ali, hoping his new Western acquaintances might be able to help find him. But as the truth of Ali’s whereabouts begin to unfold, the effects of American “aid” on this war-torn country are revealed to be increasingly pernicious.

Opening Lines:  On the third day, I find the plane. I’d been looking for something to eat or drink, anything of nutritional value really. I know that I can’t survive for long on the measly rations in my survival kit. A ripped parachute and regulation sunglasses were all I had found on my bruised ass when I came to. Roving Angels would be on their way to rescue me, but sometimes Angels can take their time and in order for this rescue to be successful I need to stay alive.
       I unzip my survival kit again to inspect its contents, the things that will keep me alive.
       Four energy bars.
       Two vitamin smoothies.
       A roll of surgical cotton.
       A roll of surgical gauze.
       Needle and thread.
     They give you a 65-million-dollar machine to fly, with the smartest bomb that some beam rider in Salt Lake City took years to design, you burn fuel at the rate of fifteen gallons per second and if you get screwed they expect you to survive on four energy bars and an organic smoothie. And look, a mini pack of After Eight. Somebody’s really spent a lot of time trying to provide the comforts of a three-star hotel. Here, have another towel. Now go die.

Blurbworthiness:  “Hanif has a talent for taking the most serious subjects…and, in a style indebted to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, emphasizing their fundamental absurdity through satire. Hanif’s authorial gifts are undeniable and Red Birds is written with ambition and powerful satirical anger.”  (Literary Review)

Deep River
by Karl Marlantes
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

Jacket Copy:  Karl Marlantes’s debut novel Matterhorn has been hailed as a modern classic of war literature. In his new novel, Deep River, Marlantes turns to another mode of storytelling—the family epic—to craft a stunningly expansive narrative of human suffering, courage, and reinvention. In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia’s imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino—are forced to flee to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin to catch fire. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness—climbing and felling trees one-hundred meters high—while Aino, foremost of the books many strong, independent women, devotes herself to organizing the industry’s first unions. As the Koski siblings strive to rebuild lives and families in an America in flux, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they left behind. Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an ambitious and timely exploration of the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.

Opening Lines:  A thread of light on the eastern horizon announced the dawning of full daylight and with it the end of a night the Koski family would never talk about and never forget.

Blurbworthiness:  “Karl Marlantes’ follow-up to Matterhorn does not disappoint. Deep River follows the lives of a family of Finnish immigrants who come to America in the late 1800s and tells the stories of the their friends and family from the beginning of the great American labor movements through the World Wars. Don’t be deterred by its door-stopping 800 pages. Deep River is a page-turner. It’s stunning, timely and all-consuming. The prose is exquisite. The characters are fierce and robust. And more than anything else, the novel is a history lesson and a warning, as its portrait of 1900s America is so startlingly similar to the present state of the country. Deep River is a revelation.” (Michelle Malonzo, Changing Hands Bookstore)

Bernard Pepperlin
by Cara Hoffman
(HarperCollins)

Jacket Copy:  The drowsy Dormouse from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is transported to modern-day New York City for the adventure of a lifetime in this middle-grade novel that’s perfect for fans of Stuart Little and written by critically-acclaimed author Cara Hoffman. When a girl in a blue dress crashes the Mad Hatter’s eternal tea party, the sleepy Dormouse feels more awake than he has in a long time. He wishes he could follow her and be a part of her adventure. And as luck would have it, a surprising twist of fate sends the Dormouse on an adventure of his own, where he must not fall asleep. For he is destined to save a magical world outside Wonderland, and it will take all his courage—and a few new friends—to do it.

Opening Lines:  The Dormouse had been trying hard to stay awake. First he ate a sugar cube. Then he pinched himself. Then he tried climbing on top of the rickety table instead of sitting in his chair. The table was set for a tea party and the cups and plates clattered as he moved past them. Crusts of toast were scattered over the white cloth and in the center stood a blue china teapot decorated with a picture of three bridges and a winding river that let out into the sea.
       He stood on a package of biscuits to look around but couldn’t see her anymore. The curious girl with the long blond hair must have left the party when he’d nodded off.

Blurbworthiness:  “Bernard and his newfound friends—revolutionary rats, wise-cracking cats, and coffee-chugging squirrels, to name a few—will delight and inspire readers of all ages. New York City will never be the same again!”  (Erin Entrada Kelly, Newbery Medal-winning author of Hello Universe)

Note:  If you are on Instagram, you can follow Bernard and his adventures in the city here.

Chances Are...
by Richard Russo
(Knopf)

Jacket Copy:  One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year old men convene on Martha’s Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn’t have been more different then, or even today: Lincoln’s a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin’ age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971. Now, more than forty years later, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives and that of a significant other are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery. Shot through with Richard Russo’s trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are... also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader’s heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship’s bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family or any other community.

Opening Lines:  The three old friends arrived on the island in reverse order, from farthest to nearest: Lincoln, a commercial real estate broker, practically cross-country from Las Vegas; Teddy, a small-press publisher, from Syracuse; Mickey, a musician and sound engineer, from nearby Cape Cod. All were sixty-six years old and had attended the same small liberal arts college in Connecticut where they’d slung hash at a campus sorority. The other hashers, invariably frat boys, claimed to be there by choice, because so many of the Thetas were hot, whereas Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey were scholarship students doing the job out of varying degrees of economic necessity.

Blurbworthiness:  “No one understands men better than Russo, and no one is more eloquent in explaining how they think, suffer, and love.” (Kirkus)

Friday Freebie: American by Night by Derek B. Miller

Congratulations to Michael Ferro, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: a big box of new releases from Algonquin Books.

This week’s contest is for American by Day by Derek B. Miller, author of Norwegian by Night and The Girl in Green. Here’s what Richard Russo had to say about this award-winning author: “Sure Derek Miller’s novels are smart and full of heart and savvy and hilarious, but even more than all of this, he’s fun. He’s as dedicated as any writer I know to the proposition that readers should enjoy themselves, should delight in the experience of life and language. If our hearts get broken along the way, so much the better.”

Keep scrolling for more information about American by Day...

American by Day is a gripping and timely novel that follows Sigrid—the dry-witted detective from Derek B. Miller’s best-selling debut Norwegian by Night—from Oslo to the United States on a quest to find her missing brother. She knew it was a weird place. She’d heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books. But now police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård has to leave her native Norway and actually go there; to that land across the Atlantic where her missing brother is implicated in the mysterious death of a prominent African-American academic. Sigrid is plunged into a United States where race and identity, politics and promise, reverberate in every aspect of daily life. Working with—or, if necessary, against—the police, she must negotiate the local political minefields and navigate the backwoods of the Adirondacks to uncover the truth before events escalate further.

If you’d like a chance at winning American by Day, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on April 19, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on April 20. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

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

Trailer Park Tuesday: Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo

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

Welcome back to North Bath, New York, population: 1. As in, one memorable character: Donald “Sully” Sullivan. The lovable, irascible, unforgettable character of Richard Russo’s 1993 novel Nobody’s Fool (played so memorably by Paul Newman in the 1994 film) returns to the page in Everybody’s Fool. In the trailer for the new novel, Russo explains why he decided to “sneak back into town” and eavesdrop on characters like Sully and other North Bathians after a 20-year absence: “It was a lot like what happens in real life with good friends: you don’t see each other for thirty years and your paths cross again, (it’s like) you ended the conversation yesterday and then you take it up again today, but between yesterday and today there’s thirty years.” By all accounts, today’s conversation is just as good as yesterday’s: in her New York Times review, Janet Maslin calls Everybody’s Fool “a delightful return to form.” I really like this trailer because it lets Russo’s warm and inviting personality come through. Plus, he has some interesting things to say about writing the book—in particular, what it’s like to write about a character after he’s been branded into our brains by such an iconic actor as Paul Newman: “I’m channeling my own memories of the character, but also channeling all those things he gave to Sully that weren’t on the page...Now the character’s only half mine, and maybe not even quite half.” Which is true: characters like Sully belong to all of us.

Front Porch Books: December 2015 edition

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

Montana, Warts and All
Scott McMillion, editor
(Montana Quarterly)

I’ll begin this month’s list with a gift-book suggestion (actually, when it comes down to it, every edition of Front Porch Books is just one big gift recommendation). If you or someone you know has always longed to get a taste of Montana’s places and people, this compilation of articles from the first decade of Montana Quarterly magazine is a good place to start. As an avid reader of the handsome publication, I can vouch for the quality of the writing in these pages (I hope to give myself the gift of time in the near future so I can read the book in its entirety). By now, over the past two centuries, every state in America has produced a compilation or two (or two hundred) of good writing from within its borders (yes, even Rhode Island has at least one state-centric collection), and the Big Sky state is abundant with anthologies. This new paperback assembled by editor Scott McMillion is especially rich in local color, with many of the essays and articles zeroing in on the small towns and residents which make this landscape so unique. Here, you can visit snowmobile-rich Cooke City (“a one-horse, 140-horsepower town,” writes Jeff Hull), Ryegate (where, four miles north of town, “a highway sign announces the end of pavement”) or the Jimtown Bar (“the kind of place where the whupass can is always open,” McMillion writes). No, it’s not all rosy sunsets and amber waves of grain in here—I mean, the title does have the word “warts” in it, after all—but the way the writers approach their home turf can often be beautiful. The bulk of Montana, Warts and All is non-fiction, but there’s a very nice section of fiction at the end, with stories by the likes of Pete Fromm, Craig Lancaster, Malcolm Brooks, Glen Chamberlain, and Allen Morris Jones.

Opening Lines (from “Butte’s Bad Cops” by Ted Brewer):  One evening in May 1980, Mickey Sullivan pulled a ski mask over his face, put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and walked into the Medicine Shoppe pharmacy on Harrison Avenue in Butte. Brandishing a .45, Sullivan forced the owner, his mother and two employees into a bathroom and propped a snow shovel against the door to lock them in. Customers watched as he filled a denim drawstring bag with prescription drugs and then pounded on the locked electronic cash register. That’s likely what set off the alarm, connected to the police station. Had he been at work that day, he would have heard the alarm at the station because Mickey Sullivan was a shift commander in the Butte-Silver Bow Law Enforcement Agency, a lieutenant. But it was his day off.

You Have Never Been Here
by Mary Rickert
(Small Beer Press)

Take a minute to admire that cover design. Notice how, through the magic of perspective, this woman seems to fly right at you with a pair of hands serving as wings. (The photo by Emma Powell is called “Angel.”) It’s the kind of off-putting, and yet beautiful, reaction one can get from reading Rickert’s fiction, short stories designed to scrape the skin from within. I first encountered Rickert earlier this year when I was doing my annual Halloween Read and came across her story, “The Chambered Fruit” (included here in this collection) in the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940’s to Now, edited by Peter Straub. So, it was with a tingle of delight (and delicious dread) that I opened a package from Small Beer Press last month to find this collection of “new and selected stories.” I can’t wait to be freaked out.

Jacket Copy:  Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.

Opening Lines (from “Memoir of a Deer Woman”):  Her husband comes home, stamps the snow from his shoes, kisses her, and asks how her day was.
     “Our time together is short,” she says.

Blurbworthiness:  “Rickert’s latest collection contains haunting tales of death, love, and loss. In stories that are imbued with mythology, beasts, and fantastical transformations, Rickert captures the fanciful quality of regret and longing....Rickert’s blend of dark and whimsy is reminiscent of Angela Carter. Perfect for readers looking for something unique, melancholy, and fantastical.”  (Booklist)

The Beautiful Possible
by Amy Gottlieb
(Harper Perennial)

Amy Gottlieb’s debut novel opens with an attack on an apartment in Berlin in 1938 which is startling and gripping and makes me want to immediately race through the rest of the book to find out what happens. I have high hopes for the beautiful possibilities of Gottlieb’s story of a war-torn love triangle.

Jacket Copy:  This epic, enthralling debut novel—in the vein of Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love—follows a postwar love triangle between an American rabbi, his wife, and a German-Jewish refugee. Spanning seventy years and several continents—from a refugee’s shattered dreams in 1938 Berlin, to a discontented American couple in the 1950s, to a young woman’s life in modern-day Jerusalem—this epic, enthralling novel tells the braided love story of three unforgettable characters. In 1946, Walter Westhaus, a German Jew who spent the war years at Tagore’s ashram in India, arrives at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where he meets Sol Kerem, a promising rabbinical student. A brilliant nonbeliever, Walter is the perfect foil for Sol’s spiritual questions—and their extraordinary connection is too wonderful not to share with Sol’s free-spirited fiancée Rosalie. Soon Walter and Rosalie are exchanging notes, sketches, and secrets, and begin a transcendent love affair in his attic room, a temple of dusty tomes and whispered poetry. Months later they shatter their impossible bond, retreating to opposite sides of the country—Walter to pursue an academic career in Berkeley and Rosalie and Sol to lead a congregation in suburban New York. A chance meeting years later reconnects Walter, Sol, and Rosalie—catching three hearts and minds in a complex web of desire, heartbreak, and redemption. With extraordinary empathy and virtuosic skill, The Beautiful Possible considers the hidden boundaries of marriage and faith, and the mysterious ways we negotiate our desires.

Opening Lines:  Walter awakens to the smell of burning paper.

Blurbworthiness:  “I’ve never read anything quite like this lyrical and infinitely wise novel...It’s about faith and love and lust and mysticism and poetry and the eroticism of spices...Mostly, though, it’s about how a book can be a wonder. If books could shimmer, this one would.”  (Elizabeth Berg, author of The Dream Lover)

Goodnight, Beautiful Women
by Anna Noyes
(Grove/Atlantic)

Though I’ve never been there, I have a special soft spot for the Pine Tree State. Note to publishers: All you have to do is slap the word “Maine” on a book cover, and my knees buckle from the smell of Kryptonite. And it wouldn’t hurt if you included the kind of clear-cut, salty, cold-snap prose like I found skimming through the pages of Anna Noyes’ debut collection of short stories. Next year is already shaping up to be a good one for short stories and Goodnight, Beautiful Women is at the top of the heap.

Jacket Copy:  Moving along the Maine Coast and beyond, the interconnected stories in Goodnight, Beautiful Women bring us into the sultry, mysterious inner lives of New England women and girls as they navigate the dangers and struggles of their outer worlds. With novelistic breadth and a quicksilver emotional intelligence, Noyes explores the ruptures and vicissitudes of growing up and growing old, and shines a light on our most uncomfortable impulses while masterfully charting the depths of our murky desires. A woman watches her husband throw one by one their earthly possessions into the local quarry, before vanishing himself; two girls from very different social classes find themselves deep in the throes of a punishing affair; a motherless teenager is sexually awakened in the aftermath of a local trauma; and a woman’s guilt from a childhood lie about her intellectually disabled cousin reverberates into her married years. Dark and brilliant, rhythmic and lucid, Goodnight, Beautiful Women marks the arrival of a fearless and unique new young voice in American fiction.

Opening Lines:  Joni called the sheriff right after it happened. Her voice was clear and steady, and the line she gave was the right one. I believe my husband has drowned in the quarry by our house.

Blurbworthiness:  “Anna Noyes has the gift. Her sentences sing with a gentle perfection, almost as if to themselves, and her characters seem to enter the page cradling years of experience inside them. It is a joy—and the sweetest kind of heartache—to watch her making her swift way story by story to their hearts.”  (Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip)

The Books That Changed My Life
Bethanne Patrick, editor
(Regan Arts)

Yes, compendiums of readers’ favorite books, lists of writer’s breathless you must read these recommendations, frequently pop up in bookstores these days. In a way, they’re sort of mini-advertisements for the books surrounding them on neighboring shelves, prompting browsers to leave the store with not just one or two books, but armloads (which is a good thing, of course). Bethanne Patrick’s gathering of cherished books holds more than the usual attraction for me, however. Not only is this a nicely curated list of contributors who come from all walks of the arts: writers, actors, fashion designers, and musicians, among others, but I also like the book picks which aren’t the usual suspects you find in collections like this. For instance, in here you’ll find Keith Carradine on The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow, Dave Eggers on Herzog by Saul Bellow, Emma Straub on Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, Andrew Solomon on Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg, Ron Charles on Straight Man by Richard Russo and—well, I could go on, but you get the gist. I don’t know about you, but I’m really interested in seeing how these books changed these particular readers’ lives.

Jacket Copy:  One hundred of today’s most prominent literary and cultural icons talk about the books that hold a special place in their hearts—that made them who they are today. Leading authors, politicians, CEOs, actors, and other notables share the books that changed their life, why they love them, and their passion with readers everywhere. Regan Arts has teamed up with the literary charity 826National, which will receive a portion of the book’s proceeds to provide students ages 6–18 with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills. Contributors include Al Roker, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Eggers, Emma Straub, Eric Idle, Fay Weldon, Fran Lebowitz, Gillian Flynn, Gregory Maguire, Jeff Kinney, Jim Shepard, Laura Lippmann, Lev Grossman, Liev Schreiber, Margaret Atwood, Mayim Bialik, Nelson DeMille, Rosanne Cash, Susan Orlean, Tim Gunn, and Tommy Hilfiger, among others.

Opening Lines (from Margaret Atwood’s essay on Grimm’s Fairy Tales):  I had a reading mother. It’s the best thing. She did all the voices, and at one point we were living in Sault Ste. Marie and she would read to us each evening and she attracted an audience of all the neighborhood children. We would all sit on the porch and listen to her. She was basically broadcasting without radio or TV, to a rapt group of listeners.

The Never-Open Desert Diner
by James Anderson
(Crown)

Consider this: A soft-hearted trucker. A 100-mile stretch of lonely desert highway in Utah. A well-preserved (but no longer open) vintage diner that used to be the shooting location of Hollywood movies. The strange, irascible owner of said diner. A beautiful woman playing a cello with no strings in an empty house. A preacher dragging a large wooden cross along the highway. Relentless winds that scour the skin with sand. And mysteries upon mysteries upon mysteries. It seems there’s nothing uninteresting about James Anderson’s first novel. Open book. Read. Turn page. Repeat.

Jacket Copy:  Ben Jones, the protagonist of James Anderson’s haunting debut novel, The Never-Open Desert Diner, is on the verge of losing his small trucking company. A single, thirty-eight-year-old truck driver, Ben’s route takes him back and forth across one of the most desolate and beautiful regions of the Utah desert. The orphan son of a Native American father and a Jewish social worker, Ben is drawn into a love affair with a mysterious woman, Claire, who plays a cello in the model home of an abandoned housing development in the desert. Her appearance, seemingly out of nowhere, reignites a decades-old tragedy at a roadside café referred to by the locals as The Never-Open Desert Diner. The owner of the diner, Walt Butterfield, is an embittered and solitary old man who refuses to yield to change after his wife’s death. Ben’s daily deliveries along the atmospheric and evocative desert highway bring him into contact with an eccentric cast of characters that includes: John, an itinerant preacher who drags a life-sized cross along the blazing roadside; the Lacey brothers, Fergus and Duncan, who live in boxcars mounted on cinderblocks; and Ginny, a pregnant and homeless punk teenager whose survival skills make her an unlikely heroine. Ben’s job as a truck driver is more than a career; it is a life he loves. As he faces bankruptcy and the possible loss of everything that matters to him, he finds himself at the heart of a horrific crime that was committed forty years earlier and now threatens to destroy the lives of those left in its wake. Ben discovers the desert is relentless in its grip, and what the desert wants, it takes. An unforgettable story of love and loss, Ben learns the enduring truth that some violent crimes renew themselves across generations. The Never-Open Desert Diner is a unique blend of literary mystery and noir fiction that evokes a strong sense of place. It is a story that holds the reader and refuses to let go and will linger long after the last page.

Opening Lines:  A red sun was balanced on the horizon when I arrived at The Well-Known Desert Diner. Sunrise shadows were draped around its corners. A full white moon was still visible in the dawn sky. I parked my tractor-trailer rig along the outer perimeter of the gravel parking lot. The “closed” sign hung on the front door. To the left of the door, as if in mourning for Superman, stood a black metal and glass phone booth. Inside was a real phone with a rotary dial that clicked out the ten white numbers. Unlike the phones in the movies, this one worked—if you had enough nickels.
     Curiosity usually wasn’t a problem for me. I treated it like a sleeping junkyard dog. As a general rule I didn’t hop the fence. Jagged scars on my backside reminded me of the few times I had violated that rule. Just because you can’t see the dog doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Sure, I look through the fence once in a while. What I see and think I keep to myself.

Blurbworthiness:  “High, dry and severely beautiful that’s the terrain Ben Jones sees from the cab of his 28-foot tractor-trailer rig in The Never-Open Desert Diner, a wondrously strange first novel by James Anderson. Ben’s route is a 100-mile stretch of State Road 117 in a desolate section of Utah’s high desert. His customers are isolated cattle ranchers and ornery desert rats who depend on him for their bales of barbed wire and cases of chili. The best part of his run is always a stop at Walt Butterfield’s pristinely preserved but permanently closed vintage diner in the middle of nowhere. There’s a sad story behind that, but there are a lot of sad stories on Ben’s route (including his own), and Anderson tells them in a voice that’s...well, high, dry and severely beautiful. Ben’s dull life takes a dangerous turn when he happens on the model home for an unbuilt housing development and discovers an attractive woman inside, playing a cello with no strings. There’s a sad story behind that too, so let’s just say that Anderson is one fine storyteller.”  (New York Times Book Review)

Adios, Cowboy
by Olja Savicevic
(McSweeney’s)

I’m initially drawn to Adios, Cowboy by the magnificent cover design, which, upon learning more about the novel, seems to be a terrific reflection of the complicated, disjointed Croatian landscape against which it’s set. Like the zig-zag path we see in that artwork, Savicevic’s plot and characters promise no easy, straight-line answers. I’m ready to start walking on the diagonal.

Jacket Copy:  Dada’s life is at a standstill in Zagreb—she’s sleeping with a married man, working a dead-end job, and even the parties have started to feel exhausting. So when her sister calls her back home to help with their aging mother, she doesn’t hesitate to leave the city behind. But she arrives to find her mother hoarding pills, her sister chain-smoking, her long-dead father’s shoes still lined up on the steps, and the cowboy posters of her younger brother Daniel (who threw himself under a train four years ago) still on the walls. Hoping to free her family from the grip of the past, Dada vows to unravel the mystery of Daniel’s final days. This American debut by a poet from Croatia’s “lost generation” explores a beautiful Mediterranean town’s darkest alleys: the bars where secrets can be bought, the rooms where bodies can be sold, the plains and streets and houses where blood is shed. By the end of the long summer, the lies, lust, feuds, and frustration will come to a violent and hallucinatory head.

Opening Lines:  Summer 2009 came too early. This meant that ferocious heat had been building up ever since the beginning of May: the spring roses were expiring in the parks and stone troughs.

Blurbworthiness:  “The publication of this dazzling, funny and deadly serious novel will bring nourishment to readers hungry for the best new European fiction, and to those wondering where the new generation of post-Yugoslav novelists are...It shines...with the help of a flawless translation from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth...With this novel, which lodges itself in your chest like a friendly bullet, a glorious new European voice has arrived.”  (The Guardian)

The Fugitives
by Christopher Sorrentino
(Simon and Schuster)

This novel by National Book Award finalist Christopher Sorrentino would seem to have all the right elements to tickle my fancy: a tough and sexy detective, an unsolved theft, and a writer who leaves the big city for a small town so he can finish that novel which has been plaguing him for years. Especially that last part. Unfinished manuscripts. The story of my life. Or, I should say, the stories of my life. I’m just glad Sorrentino finished his, so I could read it. How very thoughtful of him.

Jacket Copy:  Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that’s maimed his public reputation, he’s retreated from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library. But Salteau is not what he appears to be—a fact suspected by Kat Danhoff, an ambitious Chicago reporter of elusive ethnic origins who arrives to investigate a theft from a nearby Indian-run casino. Salteau’s possible role in the crime could be the key to the biggest story of her stalled career. Bored, emotionally careless, and sexually reckless, Kat’s sudden appearance in town immediately attracts a restive Sandy. As the novel weaves among these characters uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories, we learn that all three are fugitives of one kind or another, harboring secrets that threaten to overturn their invented lives and the stories they tell to spin them into being. In their growing involvement, each becomes a pawn in the others’ games—all of them just one mistake from losing everything. The signature Sorrentino touches that captivated readers of Trance are all here: sparkling dialogue, narrative urgency, mordant wit, and inventive, crystalline prose—but it is the deeply imagined interior lives of its characters that set this novel apart. Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is at once a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller. It is also a cautionary tale of twenty-first century American life—a meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections in a world that’s connected in almost every way. Exuberantly satirical, darkly enigmatic, and completely unforgettable, The Fugitives is an event that reaffirms Sorrentino’s position as an American writer of the first rank.

Blurbworthiness:  “The language of The Fugitives is at once remarkable, startling and invisible. I was completely sucked into the worlds of these characters. It takes a master to make me forget I’m holding a book. Well, I forgot that for more than 300 pages. Brilliant.”  (Percival Everett, author of Half an Inch of Water)

Try Not to Breathe
by Holly Seddon
(Ballantine)

Here’s another arresting cover design. To say nothing of the plot. And those opening lines. Note to self: Keep breathing.

Jacket Copy:  For fans of Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman, and Paula Hawkins comes Holly Seddon’s fiction debut—an engrossing thriller full of page-turning twists and turns, richly imagined characters, and gripping psychological suspense. Alex Dale is lost. Destructive habits have cost her a marriage and a journalism career. All she has left is her routine: a morning run until her body aches, then a few hours of forgettable work before the past grabs hold and drags her down. Every day is treading water, every night is drowning. Until Alex discovers Amy Stevenson. Amy Stevenson, who was just another girl from a nearby town until the day she was found unconscious after a merciless assault. Amy Stevenson, who has been in a coma for fifteen years, forgotten by the world. Amy Stevenson, who, unbeknownst to her doctors, remains locked inside her body, conscious but paralyzed, reliving the past. Soon Alex’s routine includes visiting hours at the hospital, then interviews with the original suspects in the attack. But what starts as a reporter’s story becomes a personal obsession. How do you solve a crime when the only witness lived but cannot tell the tale? Unable to tear herself away from her attempt to uncover the unspeakable truth, Alex realizes she’s not just chasing a story—she’s seeking salvation. Shifting from present to past and back again, Try Not to Breathe unfolds layer by layer until its heart-stopping conclusion.

Opening Lines:  Music thudded through Amy’s body and seized her heart. Music so loud that her eardrums pounded in frenzy and her baby-bird ribs rattled. Music was everything. Well, almost everything.

Blurbworthiness:  “A razor-sharp, fast-paced plot and wonderfully complex characters...Not since The Girl on the Train have I been so captivated by a work of suspense.”  (Tess Gerritsen, author of Playing With Fire)

The Mysteries of Paris
by Eugene Sue
(Penguin Classics)

Do I really need to read another 1,392-page, 19th-century novel about Parisians struggling to bridge the gap between rich and poor? Why, yes! Yes, I do! And that cover art? Ooo, la, la!

Jacket Copy:  This new addition to the Penguin Classics family is the first new translation in over a century of the brilliant epic novel that inspired Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Sensational, engrossing, and heartbreaking, The Mysteries of Paris is doubtless one of the most entertaining and influential works to emerge from the nineteenth century. It was one of France’s first serial novels, and for sixteen months, Parisians rushed in droves to the newsstands each week for the latest installment. Eugène Sue’s intricate melodrama unfolds around a Paris where, despite the gulf between them, the fortunes of the rich and poor are inextricably tangled. The suspenseful story of Rodolphe, a magnetic hero of noble heart and shadowy origins, was spun out over 150 issues—garnering wild popularity, influencing political change, and inspiring a raft of successors, including Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo. At long last, this lively translation by Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg makes the riveting drama of Sue’s classic available to a new century of readers.

Opening Lines:  In the slang of murderers and thieves, a “joint” is the lowest sort of drinking establishment. Ex-cons, call “ogres,” generally run these taverns; or, when it is an equally debased woman, she is known as an “ogress.” Serving the scum of Paris, inns of this variety are packed with freed convicts, swindlers, thieves, and assassins. Whenever a crime has been committed, the police first cast their nets in this mire, so to speak. And here they almost always find their man.
     This opening should alert readers to the sinister scenes that await them. If they proceed, they will find themselves in strange places, foul urban abscesses that teem with criminals as terrifying and revolting as swamp creatures.

Front Porch Books: October 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, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, 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: 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.

Rooms by Lauren Oliver (Ecco):  What is it about ghost stories that whisper to us, make us lean closer to hear the story?  Whatever it is, Lauren Oliver seems to have tapped into that secret with her first novel for adults.  The author of the bestselling young adult novels Before I Fall, Panic, and the Delirium trilogy, Oliver runs her icy literary fingers along our spine with a story about a house and its inhabitants--both corporeal and spiritual.  Here's the Jacket Copy to give us the shivers:

Wealthy Richard Walker has just died, leaving behind his country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His estranged family—bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna—have arrived for their inheritance. But the Walkers are not alone. Prim Alice and the cynical Sandra, long dead former residents bound to the house, linger within its claustrophobic walls. Jostling for space, memory, and supremacy, they observe the family, trading barbs and reminiscences about their past lives. Though their voices cannot be heard, Alice and Sandra speak through the house itself—in the hiss of the radiator, a creak in the stairs, the dimming of a light bulb. The living and dead are each haunted by painful truths that will soon surface with explosive force. When a new ghost appears, and Trenton begins to communicate with her, the spirit and human worlds collide—with cataclysmic results.

Blurbworthiness: “A chilling ghost story, and much, much more: Rooms is a magnificent gothic fugue on the themes of longing and buried secrets.”  (Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians)

The Future for Curious People by Gregory Sherl (Algonquin Books):  Zoe Symon's cover art for Gregory Sherl's debut novel features silhouettes of a man and a woman, a heart between them, a computer motherboard and rabbits, lots and lots of rabbits--a wink to "breeding like," I suppose.  The Future for Curious People is all about love and computer programming; specifically, what would happen if a person could see their romantic destiny.  Would they continue on their same course, or would they ditch their current lover in favor of the prince or princess waiting for them in the happily-ever-after future?  It's an engaging question and one which hooks me right into the book and its Opening Lines:

I'm breaking up with Adrian on the corner of Charles and Mulberry where he's passing out half-sheet advertisements for his band, the Babymakers. He's pale and weedy-looking, permanently anxious. His cheeks are flushed, his boxy nose red. It's cold and has just started to snow. The snow is partly the reason I've decided that today is the day. The air has taken shape, and everything suddenly seems like it's in motion, full swirl.

Here's the Jacket Copy for those who are curious about Curious People:

What if you could know your romantic future? What if an envisionist could enter the name of your prospective mate into a computer that would show you a film of your future life together? In The Future for Curious People, a young librarian named Evelyn becomes obsessed with this new technology: she can’t stop visiting Dr. Chin’s office because she needs to know that she’ll meet someone and be happy one day. Godfrey, another client, ends up at the envisionist’s office only because his fiancée insisted they know their fate before taking the plunge. But when Godfrey meets Evelyn in the waiting room, true love may be right in front of them, but they are too preoccupied—and too burdened by their pasts—to recognize it.

Based on the excerpt and plot synopsis, The Future for Curious People reminds me of the cosmic goodness found in Lydia Netzer's novels How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky and Shine Shine Shine.  So it's not surprising that Netzer herself offered up some Blurbworthiness: “A love story about love stories...The pages burst with laugh-out-loud scenes and crisply original set-ups.  I loved it!”

Find Me by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):  After publishing two highly-successful short story collections (What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth), Laura van den Berg has delivered what will undoubtedly be a highly-successful novel.  Find Me has a fascinating set-up, as you can see by the Jacket Copy:

Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy’s immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients—including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel. As winter descends, the hospital’s fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself.

Judging by the Opening Lines, the payoff will be every bit as good as the plot:

On our third month in the Hospital, the pilgrims begin to appear. They gather outside the doors, faces tipped to the sky, while our Floor Group watches at the end of the fifth-floor hallway. The windows have no bars on the outside and we have to tilt our heads to get a good view. Sometimes the pilgrims wave and we wave back. Or they hold hands and sing and we hear their voices through the glass. Some stand outside for hours, others for days. We don't understand what they could want from us.

I think I speak for the majority of readers when I say Find Me has easily found a place in my Most-Anticipated Books of 2015 list.


The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac by Sharma Shields (Henry Holt):  Speaking of Most-Anticipated....The day I received Sharma Shields' debut novel, I was so excited that I took the book outside, threw it on a pile of leaves and Tweeted about it:

Okay, so I get a little moist in the voice sometimes when I'm spreading booklove around social media, but in this case, every drop of my passion for The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac is genuine.  I was at the Get Lit! festival in Spokane earlier this year when I first fell in love with Sharma Shields' fiction.  She read a short, fabulous fabulist tale during the Pie and Whiskey event (free pie! free booze!) and I was completely won over by the way she manipulated the language and tropes of mythology and fairy tales.  As J. Robert Lennon said of her previous collection of short stories, Favorite Monster, “By all rights, these comic tales, with their cyclopses and serial killers, werewolves and writers, medusas and managers, ought to collapse into lighthearted whimsy. Instead they unfold into objects of extraordinary beauty and darkness, rendered in prose that can turn on a dime from the deadpan to the profound. Sharma Shields is a cutup, a sneak, and a badass--she will crack you up with these charming beasts, and then, in a stage whisper, reveal who the real monster is. (Hint: it's you.)”  The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac, her long-awaited (and most-anticipated) novel looks like it will be full of badassery and beauty.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Eli Roebuck was nine years old when his mother walked off into the woods with "Mr. Krantz," a large, strange, hairy man who may or may not be a sasquatch. What Eli knows for certain is that his mother went willingly, leaving her only son behind. For the rest of his life, Eli is obsessed with the hunt for the bizarre creature his mother chose over him, and we watch it affect every relationship he has in his long life--with his father, with both of his wives, his children, grandchildren, and colleagues. We follow all of the Roebuck family members, witnessing through each of them the painful, isolating effects of Eli's maniacal hunt, and find that each Roebuck is battling a monster of his or her own, sometimes literally. The magical world Shields has created is one of unicorns and lake monsters, ghosts and reincarnations, tricksters and hexes. At times charming, as when young Eli meets the eccentric, extraordinary Mr. Krantz, and downright horrifying at others, The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac is boldly imaginative throughout, and proves to be a devastatingly real portrait of the demons that we as human beings all face.

Here are the Opening Lines:

     Eli Roebuck lived with his parents, Greg and Agnes, in a tiny cabin near Stateline. Greg arranged a little rock border right where the line ran so that Eli could stand with one foot in Idaho and one foot in Washington and sense through the soles of his boots the difference between the two.
     Washington sap smelled sweeter. The soil was softer and less rocky. Idaho earth baked and hardened and stank like eggs. Or so Eli imagined. In reality, the environment was seamless, dry white-pine forest littered with decomposing needles and loose rock, and, above, a hawk wheeling in the beryl sky. In the winter, snow fell and transformed the uneven terrain into a smooth white plain. Then it melted and the world returned to him as it had always been: faded brown and faded green, jagged and inviting.

Blurbworthiness: “The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac is deeply strange and strangely moving.  Like Kafka's The Metamorphosis, it demands and rewards surrender.”  (Richard Russo, author of Bridge of Sighs)

The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain (St. Martin's Press):  T. S. Eliot once said, "If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper."  If that's so, then Diane Chamberlain has fired a volley of cannons with the Opening Lines to her latest novel.  I was so completely snagged by The Silent Sister's prologue that I'm going to give you the whole thing here:

January 1990
Alexandria, Virginia
      All day long, people stopped along the path that ran through the woods by the Potomac River. Bundled in their parkas and wool scarves, they stood close to one another for warmth and clutched the mittened hands of their children or the leashes of their dogs as they stared at the one splash of color in the winter-gray landscape. The yellow kayak sat in the middle of the river, surrounded by ice. The water had been rough the night before, buffeted by snowy winds, rising into swirling whitecaps as the temperature plummeted, and the waves froze in jagged crests, trapping the kayak many yards from shore.
      The walkers had seen the kayak on the morning news, but they still needed to see it in person. It marked the end of a saga that had gripped them for months. They’d looked forward to the trial that would never happen now, because the seventeen-year-old girl—the seventeen-year-old murderer, most were sure—now rested somewhere beneath that rocky expanse of ice.
      She took the easy way out, some of them whispered to one another.
      But what a terrible way to die, others said.
      They looked at the rocky bank of the river and wondered if she’d put some of those rocks in her pockets to make herself sink. They wondered if she’d cried as she paddled the kayak into the water, knowing the end was near. She’d cried on TV, for certain. Faking it, some of them said now as they moved on down the path. It was too cold to stand in one spot for very long
      But there was one woman, bundled warm, gloved hands in her pockets, who stood at the side of the path for hours. She watched as the news chopper collected fresh aerial images, its blades a deafening dark blur against the gray sky. She watched as the police milled along the banks of the river, pointing in one direction and then the other as they considered how they’d retrieve the kayak from the ice . . . and how they would search for the girl’s body beneath it.
      The woman looked at the police again. They stood with their hands on their hips now, as though they were giving up. This case was closed. The woman pulled her jacket more tightly around herself. Let them give up, she thought, pleased, as she watched a police officer shrug his shoulders in what looked like defeat. Let them wrest that kayak from the river and call it a day.
      Although a yellow kayak stranded in ice proved nothing.
      They were fools if they thought it did.

The Jacket Copy gives a few more clues to that mystery woman on the shore and her relation to what may or may not be the body under the river ice:

Riley MacPherson has spent her entire life believing that her older sister Lisa committed suicide as a teenager. Now, over twenty years later, her father has passed away and she's in New Bern, North Carolina cleaning out his house when she finds evidence to the contrary. Lisa is alive. Alive and living under a new identity. But why exactly was she on the run all those years ago, and what secrets are being kept now? As Riley works to uncover the truth, her discoveries will put into question everything she thought she knew about her family. Riley must decide what the past means for her present, and what she will do with her newfound reality, in this engrossing mystery from international bestselling author Diane Chamberlain.

And, by the way, don't you agree that the gorgeous cover design is just as enticing as the novel's prologue?

When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds (University of Iowa Press):  Kathleen Founds' collection of fictional pieces might just be the most original book to land on my front porch in a long time.  Certainly, it promises to be one of the most fun.  It's always a good sign when "delight" is the primary factor bringing you back to a book day after day.  Read the Jacket Copy and I think you'll agree that When Mystical Creatures Attack! certainly has the Lay's Potato Chip Factor going for it:

In When Mystical Creatures Attack!, Ms. Freedman’s high school English class writes essays in which mystical creatures resolve the greatest sociopolitical problems of our time. Students include Janice Gibbs, “a feral child with excessive eyeliner and an anti-authoritarian complex that would be interesting were it not so ill-informed,” and Cody Splunk, an aspiring writer working on a time machine. Following a nervous breakdown, Ms. Freedman corresponds with Janice and Cody from an insane asylum run on the capitalist model of cognitive-behavioral therapy, where inmates practice water aerobics to rebuild their Psychiatric Credit Scores. The lives of Janice, Cody, and Ms. Freedman are revealed through in-class essays, letters, therapeutic journal exercises, an advice column, a reality show television transcript, a diary, and a Methodist women’s fundraising cookbook. (Recipes include “Dark Night of the Soul Food,” “Render Unto Caesar Salad,” and “Valley of the Shadow of Death by Chocolate Cake.”) In “Virtue of the Month,” the ghost of Ms. Freedman’s mother argues that suicide is not a choice. In “The Un-Game,” Janice’s chain-smoking nursing home charge composes a dirty limerick. In “The Hall of Old-Testament Miracles,” wax figures of Bible characters come to life, hungry for Cody’s flesh. Set against a South Texas landscape where cicadas hum and the air smells of taco stands and jasmine flowers, these stories range from laugh-out-loud funny to achingly poignant. This surreal, exuberant collection mines the dark recesses of the soul while illuminating the human heart.

Here's just one part of the book's Opening Lines, in which Ms. Freedman uses the journaling prompt: Write a one-page story in which your favorite mystical creature resolves the greatest sociopolitical problem of our time.

How the Minotaur Changed the Legal Drinking Age to 16
by Danny Ramirez
He’d be like, “Citizenry of congress, teenagers are going to drink anyway, so you need to learn to trust them, and not have the janitor break open their lockers because you think they have your diary hidden under their gym clothes,” which I didn’t, Ms. Freedman, so I hope they make you pay for my lock. Then the Minotaur would decree that any teacher who, in the heart of per personal journal, describes students as "feral raccoons devoid of impulse control" is maybe not cut out for education. Then the Minotaur would get hired as a Spokes-Minotaur for King Cobra. He'd be in commercials with all these big blonde Amazonian chicks, drinking forties, doing a topless carwash. In a maze. 

How the Unicorn Stabbed Danny Ramirez in the Heart Seven Times, Which Is What He Deserves, for Breaking Up with Me Like That
by Andrea Shylomar
I don't believe in anything mystical, Ms. Freedman. Not even God. You made us build that diorama of Mount Olympus, and you made us paint that mural with unicorns and butcherbirds and sand toads. You said it was to show that books transport us to different worlds, where there are different rules, and there’s magic in everything. Well, what you forgot is that when you shut the book, you’re back in this world, and the bell is ringing, and wadded-up paper is thrown at your head, and Adam Sandoval is poking at your crotch with a pencil, and later Christina Sackburn’s bitchy flunkies climb into your bathroom stall and threaten you with scissors. What you need is a book that takes you out of this world permanently. Which is called a gun, I think.

I'm reminded here of some of my favorite short story writers like George Singleton, Lewis Nordan, and maybe a splash of George Saunders.  I can't wait to be stabbed by Ms. Founds' unicorns.  Repeatedly.  Right in the heart and in the funnybone.

The Wonders by Paddy O'Reilly (Washington Square Press):  I came for the cover, I stayed for the plot.  Actually, my curiosity was whittled to a fine point when I read Ashley Hays' wonderful summary of the novel in an August article in The Australian.  Rather than listen to me natter on about The Wonders, I'll hand the mic over to Ashley.  Here's part of her review:

     If it’s one mark of a good book that it grabs you from the very first, then Paddy O’Reilly’s slightly creepy new novel is the business. It begins thus: “Leon was twenty-six when the true fragility of his body revealed itself. A week after his birthday he died for the first time.”
     And off we go.
     The Wonders, O’Reilly’s third novel, is a surreal and exotic thing, a finely wrought interrogation of the ways we navigate being human and the presumptuous shambles we make of much of it. Its four main characters — three “wonderful” human beings and the mega-manager who massages and propels them towards a strange superstardom, and beyond — are nothing if not extreme: big stories, big features, big circumstances, all laid down in sharp, fast lines.
     There’s Leon, the man who brings us into the story and who, fewer than 10 pages later, is being kept alive by an illegal mechanical heart (installed by mysterious researchers in a secret basement). Set in a cage of titanium ribs, it’s utterly visible, whirring and thrumming in a hollow, inorganic cavity. There’s Christos, a Greek performance artist who has had ceramic “lilies” implanted in his back, into which can be slotted a pair of frighteningly realistic, frighteningly mobile angel’s wings — he has trained his muscles to make them flex and move.
     There’s Kathryn, a woman cured of Huntington’s disease only to find one side effect of her gene therapy has left her covered in pure black wool. And there’s Rhona, the vaudevillian manager who brings them together to make them “The Wonders.” A person of murky circus provenance, she jangles and hustles her way through the book, rhinestones flashing and spurs a-clatter. There are touches of X-Men, touches of Cirque du Soleil.
     As Rhona assembles her troupe, she installs them in a glamorous Vermont mansion behind “a wall of thick cypress hedge, six foot high” and “curls of rusty razor wire [crowning] the inner fence of cyclone wire.” A stony stretch of “no-man’s land” runs between. The thick specificity of these barriers combines with a smattering of slightly unreliable retired circus animals also living in the compound and serves to underscore the fact the real world has been well and truly left behind.
     Yet in many ways the real world, and all of us in it, drives and defines the stories of the three Wonders. Because for all the extremity of Rhona’s performing trio, the showiness and slight gimcrackery of the modifications they have endured (willingly, and for the sake of “art”, like Christos; unwittingly, like Kathryn; or simply to stay alive, like Leon), the people who drive this story are, in the main, those who make up the pulsing negative space beyond them: the public, who fawns over them, hates them, abuses them, promotes them, stalks them, traduces them, adores them.
     The energy, the thrust, the twists and spikes of the narrative itself, are impelled by those not sketched in, not fully shown: the observers and the commentators, the protesters just outside the Vermont mansion’s gates. In other words, the audience — or us.
     At its heart, this is a book about fame and celebrity, and the worst reactions they engender.

Click here to read the rest.

Tell by Frances Itani (Grove/Atlantic):  The dark days of winter are drawing near, and you know what that means: nights of crackling fires, tumblers of smoky bourbon, and the pages of a good book.  Or maybe that's just me.  In any event, one of this winter's drinking companions is bound to be Tell by Canadian author Frances Itani.  Tell is on the shortlist for this year's Scotiabank Giller Prize and after reading the Opening Lines, it's easy to see why:

Toronto: November 1, 1920
     Zel glances around the room: oak floor, oak desk, wooden cabinet, two windows that look down over city streets three storeys below. Shelves behind the desk are stuffed with black binders. These, she suspects, are guarding secrets stored for generations.
     She is in this room with three other women, a man and a baby. The baby, six weeks old, sleeps while nestled against her mother’s arm. Papers are arranged neatly before a woman who wears a tailored jacket over a grey dress. Zel sees compassion on her face; she senses it from her manner and her voice. A brooch in the shape of a miniature sleigh, with silver slats and curved gold runners, is pinned to the woman’s jacket. A tiny gold chain droops from the crossbar to represent a rope attached to the front of the sleigh. It’s as if the woman, who has introduced herself as Mrs. Davis, has a playful side, though not here, not as the official who will ensure that the documents on her desk are duly signed. In other circumstances, Zel would ask Mrs. Davis about the brooch, its origins, its maker.

I love that beautifully-rendered detail of the sleigh brooch.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

The international debut sensation Deafening launched the story of Grania, deaf from the age of five, and her sister Tress, who helped to create their secret language. Tell picks up from the return of the sisters’ husbands from the war, and follows Tress’s partner Kenan, a young shell-shocked soldier who confines himself indoors, venturing outside only at night to visit the frozen bay where he skated as a boy. Saddened by her altered marriage, Tress seeks advice from her Aunt Maggie. But Maggie and her husband, Am, have problems of their own. Maggie finds joy singing in the town's newly created choral society. Am, troubled by the widening gulf in his marriage, spends more and more time in the clock tower above their apartment. As the second decade of the twentieth century draws to a close, the lives of the two couples become increasingly entwined. Startling revelations surface as layers of silence begin to crumble. Told with Itani’s signature power and grace, Tell is both a deeply moving story about the burdens of the past, and a beautifully rendered reminder of how the secrets we bury to protect ourselves can also be the cause of our undoing.

Where Wicked Starts by Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Patricia Henley (Lacewing Books): Engine Books, one of my favorite small presses, has decided to branch out to young adult fiction and I couldn't be more excited about the news.  The new imprint, Lacewing Books, will publish two books per year.  Where Wicked Starts follows on the heels of the first release, The Book of Jack Kerouac by Barbara Shoup; The Book of Laney by Myfanwy Collins is on deck for a 2015 release.  As you can see, the press is starting out with some top-notch authors.  Where Wicked Starts is the collaboration between Elizabeth Stuckey French (The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady) and Patricia Henley (Other Heartbreaks), which is about as ideal a combination as chocolate and peanut butter.  The Jacket Copy for the novel opens with a startling excerpt that will leave you both cringing and wanting more:

     That's when I noticed the couple we later named Bony and Mr. Creep sitting two rows in front of us. He had his arm around her, not like a father would do, or like I imagined a father would do--slinging his arm over the back of her chair. No, his arm was around her shoulders like she was his date. Bony kept wriggling but he would just grip her harder. Finally she gave up and sat still.
     He leaned over and licked her cheek.

When stepsisters Nick and Luna suspect that a girl they meet at a Florida alligator farm is being held captive, they enlist an older boy with a set of wheels to help rescue her. Their parents are too busy renovating a bed and breakfast to realize the girls are in real danger.

My, my, my, that's quite the set-up for what looks like a sure-fire Unputdownable.

The Spark and the Drive by Wayne Harrison (St. Martin's Press):  Here's a novel which came out in July, but somehow swam below my radar until it showed up on my doorstep.  Perhaps you're already ahead of my curve and have read The Spark and the Drive--if so, feel free to weigh in at the comments section below.  The press release accompanying my copy of the book is filled to the brim with praise from writers I respect.  Here's just some of that Blurbworthiness:

"There's nothing I enjoy more than entering a fictional world over which an author demonstrates complete mastery.  That's exactly what Wayne Harrison offers his lucky readers in The Spark and the Drive."  (Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls)

"Young men will always idolize the father substitutes who promise them a way out of the familiar.  Ever volatile, such relationships fuel some of our best literature, and to this category we must now add Wayne Harrison's gorgeous and grittily poetic debut novel.  Set in an auto shop in working class Connecticut at the end of the golden age of the American muscle car, The Spark and the Drive has all the horsepower and headlong beauty of the extraordinary machines at its center."  (Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier)

"The Spark and the Drive is a potent accomplishment: a novel about how quickly the shape of a life can change and about the years a person can spend trying to sort through the pieces.  It's written with acuity and grace, and best of all it knows how to hold its power in reserve, shifting and accelerating at the most surprising moments, so that it has the rhythm and momentum of a good street race."  (Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade)

"This novel vividly renders the cult-like world of muscle car enthusiasts, but the author's ultimate concerns are the sparks and misfires of the human heart.  Wayne Harrison is an exciting new voice in American fiction."  (Ron Rash, author of Serena)

Those are great, but what really caught my attention was the setting and plot as described in the Jacket Copy:

Justin Bailey is seventeen when he arrives at the shop of legendary muscle car mechanic Nick Campbell. Anguished and out of place among the students at his rural Connecticut high school, Justin finds in Nick, his captivating wife Mary Ann, and their world of miraculous machines the sense of family he has struggled to find at home.But when Nick and Mary Ann’s lives are struck by tragedy, Justin’s own world is upended. Suddenly Nick, once celebrated for his mechanical genius, has lost his touch. Mary Ann, once tender and compassionate to her husband, has turned distant. As Justin tries to support his suffering mentor, he finds himself drawn toward the man’s grieving wife. Torn apart by feelings of betrayal, Justin must choose between the man he admires more than his own father and the woman he yearns for.A poignant and fiercely original debut, with moments of fast-paced suspense, Wayne Harrison's The Spark and The Drive is the unforgettable story of a young man forced to make an impossible decision—no matter the consequences.

Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin (Seven Stories Press):  And here's yet another book which escaped my notice when it was released earlier this year (I'm a pretty alert and aware bookworm, so I blame a crowded marketplace and, maybe, overworked publicists).  Not only was I happy to discover Lizzie!'s existence, I was surprised to find Maxine Kumin, in addition to being a world-class poet, was also the author of children's books (Seven Stories Press will also re-release four of her out-of-print children's books for kids ages 5 to 8, co-written with Anne Sexton: Eggs of Things, More Eggs of Things, Joey and the Birthday Present and The Wizard's Tears).  Well, slap me and call me Martha, I had no idea!  At any rate, I'm happy to have Lizzie! in my hands.  Maxine Kumin passed away earlier this year and this seems a fitting tribute to her talents.  She may be gone, but she will never be forgotten.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Lizzie, age eleven, does not let her wheelchair get in the way of her curiosity. After she is partially paralyzed in a diving accident, Lizzie and her single mom are starting life over in a small town in Florida, where Lizzie’s thirst for knowledge and adventure makes her some unlikely friends and gets her into some sticky situations. Resilient and precocious, Lizzie has a passion for learning new words (especially those with Latin roots) and a propensity for finding trouble, which is how she ends up stumbling upon criminal activities involving seedy characters, beautiful golden monkeys, and murder.

Our young narrator won me over right off the bat with these Opening Lines:

If you think this is just some sweet sappy story about two kids in wheelchairs and a dear patient single mother, get over it. You could live your whole and not have this much stuff happen. This is my AUTOBIOGRAPHY! It took me almost a whole year to write it and I promise you it is not boring. So either start reading or shut this book now. It's up to you.

Honestly, what choice do I have but to obey?  Author Barry Moser seems to agree with me in this bit of Blurbworthiness: "Lizzie Peterlinz might just pull her wheelchair up to the table and take her place alongside Anne Shirley and Pippi Longstocking.  She’s smart.  She’s sassy.  She’s curious.  She’s courageous.  And she loves Latin and words of all kinds.  Told by one of the great American poets, Lizzie! is a flat-out wonderful read.  I couldn’t put it down."

A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan (Picador):  A tasty, unsettling novel that calls to mind Patricia Highsmith is always a good bet.  Phil Hogan's new novel has a Talented Mr. Ripley vibe to it and I, for one, can't wait to start reading about the Grade-A creepazoid character Mr. Heming at the center of the book.  Here's the Jacket Copy to run some icy fingers down your backbone:

You won't remember Mr Heming. He showed you round your comfortable home, suggested a sustainable financial package, negotiated a price with the owner and called you with the good news. The less good news is that, all these years later, he still has the key. That's absurd, you laugh. Of all the many hundreds of houses he has sold, why would he still have the key to mine? The answer to that is, he has the keys to them all. William Heming's every pleasure is in his leafy community. He loves and knows every inch of it, feels nurtured by it, and would defend it--perhaps not with his life but if it came to it, with yours...

Here are the Opening Lines:

If you were to put a gun to my head and ask me to explain myself, I suppose I might begin by saying that we are all creatures of habit. But then, you might wonder, what creature of habit is a slave to the habits of others? All I can say is that the habitual is what I love most and am made for; that the best I can do is hang on, have faith, and hope what has lately blown through our unremarkable but well-ordered town will be forgotten and all will be calm again. Right now I feel lucky to hear myself breathe. The air is dangerously thin. It seems to rush in my ears. And yet the scene is peaceful here in the half-lit, slumbering pre-dawn: a white coverlet glowing in the room, a discarded necklace of beads, a shelf of books, one face down, splayed on the bedside-table, as though it–like the whole town at this hushed time–is dead to the world. I cannot make out the title but the sight of this book with its familiar cover image (the shape of a man in raised gilt) returns me to that day, not too long ago, when the wind changed and the sky blackened and ordinary life–startled by the sudden thunderclap of the unusual–reared, kicked over the lantern and turned the barn into a raging inferno whose leaping, thrilling flames could be seen from a hundred miles away.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I just heard someone open my front door.  I'd better go see who's there...