Trailer Park Tuesday: The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon

Two women, a city boiling with heat and hate, and a simple misunderstanding: these are the driving forces at work in Siobhan Fallon’s novel The Confusion of Languages. The story follows two military spouses, Cassie and Margaret, who join their husbands in their new duty location: Amman, Jordan. As anyone who has traveled to Countries Other Than America can tell you, foreign culture can sometimes be a shock. Fallon (an American living in the Middle East with her Army officer husband) plunges us into that unfamiliar way of life with the ease and authority of someone who has walked in her characters’ shoes. The sights, sounds and smells of Jordanian streets rise off these pages like they were loaded with special effects for our senses. Beyond those rich, sensual details, The Confusion of Languages moves forward at a waste-no-time pace, sparked by a traffic fender bender that quickly spirals into a grave situation involving both Cassie and Margaret and tests the limits of their new friendship. The book’s trailer, created by Fallon herself, gives a sense of that frenetic, jangling, jarring pace of life in a foreign country. The video basically consists of three elements: a jazzy Middle Eastern song, a slide show of images taken around Jordan, and excerpts from praise for the book (including a blurb from yours truly). That’s really all Confusion needs for this short video. Those three pieces—song, pictures, words—work together to make this a terrific trailer for an outstanding book.


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

Friday Freebie: The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon

Congratulations to LuAnn Ritsema, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton.

This week, I’m thrilled to be giving away one of my favorite novels of recent years: The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon. I was an early reader of this novel set in contemporary Jordan and said it has “the irresistible force of a whirlpool: it sucks you in, pulling you ever closer to the mystery at the heart of the vortex. As the two narratives of friends Margaret and Cassie overlap and begin to merge, the pages turn faster and faster. The Confusion of Languages is intricately plotted, perfectly paced, and impossible to put down.” This week, one lucky reader who doesn’t mind getting paper cuts from a page-turning novel will win a new paperback copy of The Confusion of Languages. Keep scrolling for more information about the book and how to enter the contest...

The Confusion of Languages is a searing debut novel from the award-winning author of You Know When the Men are Gone, about jealousy, the unpredictable path of friendship, and the secrets kept in marriage, all set within the U.S. expat community of the Middle East during the rise of the Arab Spring. Both Cassie Hugo and Margaret Brickshaw dutifully followed their soldier husbands to the U.S. embassy in Jordan, but that’s about all the women have in common. After two years, Cassie has become an expert on the rules, but newly arrived Margaret sees only her chance to explore. So when a automobile fender-bender sends Margaret to the local police station, Cassie reluctantly agrees to watch Margaret’s toddler son. But as the hours pass, Cassie’s boredom and frustration turn to fear: Why isn’t Margaret answering her phone, and why is it taking so long to sort out a routine accident? Snooping around Margaret’s apartment, Cassie begins to question not only her friend’s whereabouts but also her own role in Margaret’s disappearance. With achingly honest prose and riveting characters, The Confusion of Languages plunges readers into a shattering collision between two women and two worlds, affirming Siobhan Fallon as a powerful voice in American fiction and a storyteller not to be missed.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Confusion of Languages, 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 July 5 at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on July 6. 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.

My First Time: Siobhan Fallon

The First Time I Made It Through

The first time I set foot in the Middle East, I knew I would write about it.

I remember it so clearly right now, sitting at my computer, seven years later. I got off the plane at Amman amid chaos, confusion and noise. I entered the vast lines of Immigration with my three-year old daughter, the smells and the people crushing me on all sides. I knew my husband was waiting for me on the other side of Customs, but how to get there?

A man in a suit spotted the American passport in my fist and came up to me, told me in passable English that he would do all of my “very difficult” paperwork, and get me in the “fast” line for about $100 American. I smiled, clutched my passport and my daughter even tighter, and got in line with everyone else.

I made it through.

That seems to sum up just about everything for me when it comes to living abroad. I made it through. And it also seems to sum up everything to me when I think of my writing. There is the total confusion of facing this wild, unknown place. There is the total confusion of facing this wild, blank page. But somehow the writing can save me.

I’m terrible about keeping a journal in my ordinary, American life. Why bother? I think to myself, I mean, this is just ordinary American life, right? But when I travel, I take notes, lots of notes, because I know my life in this place is transitory, and, in having an expiration date, it is somehow more valuable. Perhaps this is not a good way to live a life, but fortunately I have spent a lot of my life living abroad. In the little notebook I kept in my purse while living in Jordan, my first entries are about that first airport arrival. How the men who helped with baggage all wore blue jumpsuits with numbers on their backs and looked like jailed prisoners, how the young man who helped me with my suitcases was #38 and, though polite, never once looked me in the eye. How the policemen outside who tried to direct traffic wore little pointy metal hats and too-tight uniforms, and for all of their dramatic gesticulating and whistling, cars were braking, honking, pulling up on the sidewalk, parking any way they liked.

I depended on this little journal while writing my novel, The Confusion of Languages. When I was frustrated with plot and structure and wanted to taste Jordan again, I’d flip through those stained pages and images would come at me, seconds, minutes, days, all so vivid; some wonderful, some painful. And I’d start writing, rejuvenated, starting small, with a random recipe I’d found, or a description of a fruit stand at the corner of a busy Amman city street, or how a lamb carcass hung from a hook in a window of a decidedly un-airconditioned butcher shop.

I lived in Jordan for less than one year, and it took me nearly five years to write a novel set there. Readers, life abroad can be difficult. And writing a book, well, it can really suck. So start small. You will fuck up. You will get lost. You will get almost every single word wrong. You’ll hit dead end after dead end but, trust me, you’ll turn around, retrace your steps, and slowly, painstakingly, happen upon a place that is more beautiful than you could have ever imagined. And it wasn’t even in the guidebook.

You’ll lose faith in yourself. But you’ll find it again.

You’ll make it through.

Siobhan Fallon’s novel, The Confusion of Languages, will be released in paperback Summer, 2018. She is the author of the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction winning You Know When the Men Are Gone. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, The Huffington Post, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She and her family moved to Jordan in 2011, and they currently live in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My Year of Reading: Every Book I Read in 2016

This Was the Year

This was the year I killed it, reading-wise: 130 books, a new record since I started keeping track of my habits in 2005 (the year I was deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army, I had loads of free time on my hands, and I read what now looks like a paltry 50 books).

This was the year when I read fewer new books (i.e., those released in the past 12 months) than ones published in other years: 56 vs. 74. Part of that had to do with my commitment to making headway on my Five-Year Reading Plan of the Essentials (though I still have a long way to go on that list), but part of it also had to do with the fact that I occasionally let my fancy go free and footloose through my library, pinballing from one book to the next, no matter what the publication date.

This was the year I re-discovered audiobooks. Rather than listening to Bruno Mars, Electric Light Orchestra, or Sia on my daily commute to and from the Day Job, I opted for Audible.com and the aural pleasures of Timothy West rolling the prose of Anthony Trollope trippingly off his tongue through The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne and Can You Forgive Her?. Richard Armitage also brought David Copperfield back to life for me on my second time through the classic novel (which now might just be my favorite Dickens of all time, nudging Dombey and Son from the top of the list).

This was the year of Anthony Trollope. When I go all in, I go really deep.

This was the year I got a library card. After being appointed to the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library Board earlier this year, I realized—with a bucketload of chagrin—that I had rarely darkened the doorway of our beautiful 122-year-old library here in Butte, Montana (and never to check out a book—gasp!). I quickly corrected the error of my ways by taking out a book by Lee Child.

This was the year of Lee Child. For years, family friend Marilyn has politely badgered me to read the bestselling author. “I think you’ll really like him,” she says every time she sees me. I mean every frickin' time, without fail. Finally, caving in and attempting to silence Marilyn’s hectoring once and for all, I checked out a copy of A Wanted Man from the library. Within twenty pages, I was convinced Marilyn was the smartest person on the planet. Not only did I “really like” Child, I loved him. I immediately started binging on Jack Reacher. He turned out to be the Lay’s potato chip of action heroes. At our Christmas party a few weeks ago, I pulled Marilyn aside and told her of my new-found love for all things Lee Child. “Great!” she said. “Now, let’s talk about David Baldacci...”

This was the year I read a book about a horrific plane crash (Fireball) while I was flying cross-country from Montana to Georgia. I survived my flight; Carole Lombard, unfortunately, did not walk away from hers.

This was the year I should have revived The Biography Project here at the blog since I read books about The Lives of Others (author Anthony Trollope, baseball legend Ted Williams, film actress Carole Lombard, and author Sinclair Lewis—the latter which I haven’t completely finished, so I’m carrying it over to my 2017 book log).

This was the year of Sinclair Lewis. I originally read Main Street as part of my Five-Year Plan, but enjoyed it so much, I moved on to several other time-tested classics by the Midwestern satirist. I binged him hard. Like Lee Child hard, like Anthony Trollope levels of intensity. (Come to think of it, this was the Year of Binge.) I’m not through with Lewis yet. I plan to read at least two more of his before this year is out: It Can’t Happen Here (because, sadly, it did, it did) and Dodsworth.

This was the year I was surprised by how bad some books could be, given their popularity and the bestselling reputation of the author (the children’s classic The Black Stallion and Alan Furst’s A Hero of France to name just two), but I was also pleasantly surprised by how truly great some relatively-unheralded titles turned out to be (Searching for John Hughes; Not All Fires Burn the Same; Wilderness; and every book by Nickolas Butler, which I gobbled down in quick succession—by the way, The Hearts of Men, which comes out this March, is the best of them all). I was also left feeling flatlined by books I expected to love but only liked (The Sisters Brothers, Zero K, Then We Came to the End, I’m Thinking of Ending Things).

This was the year my wife, feeling like a “book widow,” sighed in exasperation, “You know, you’ll never be able to read ALL THE BOOKS.”

This was the year I turned to her and replied, “Maybe not, but I’m gonna try.”

Crunching the Numbers

Sure, I read a lot of poetry books which typically clock in at less than 100 pages. And, yes, I read quite a few stand-alone novellas (mostly from the fabulous Ploughshares Solo series) that were often less than 50 pages. But for every whisper-thin poetry chapbook or novella, there were books the size of small Pacific islands (I’m looking at you, Mr. Anthony Trollope Novel!). The proof in my book pudding comes when I crunch the numbers to determine the average page count (yes, I note the number of pages in my book log—don’t you?). In 2016, I read a total of 32,584 pages (not counting the 606 pages in the Sinclair Lewis biography, which I’m rolling over into the 2017 book log). That puts me at an average page count of 251, lower than last year’s average of 304 (note to my 2017 self: fewer novellas, more Trollope). But nearly 33,000 pages still feels like a whole helluva lot. I mean, I could never eat 33,000 Oreos in one year no matter how hard I tried.

More stuff which is possibly interesting only to me:

• The shortest book was Confession (24 pages) by Bill Roorbach, the longest was David Copperfield (877 pages) by Charles Dickens
• 44 of the 130 were e-books
• 5 were audiobooks
• 56 were published in 2016, 3 were advance copies destined to be released in 2017 or beyond, and the rest were from prior years
• 89 were written by men, 37 by women, 4 were a mix of both (anthologies or collaborations), and 0 were written by cats

And now, without further ado, I give you...

ALL THE BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR

Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Escape and Reverse by Chelsey Johnson
Confession by Bill Roorbach
Over on the Dry Side by Louis L’Amour
The Revenant by Michael Punke
Wilderness by Lance Weller
Up From the Blue by Susan Henderson
The Detroit Frankfurt Discussion Group by Douglas Trevor
All I Want Is What You’ve Got by Glen Chamberlain
This is What I Want by Craig Lancaster
The House on the Cliff by Franklin W. Dixon
Selected Poems by Theodore Roethke
A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown
Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink
The Darkening Trapeze by Larry Levis
Hollywood and the Holocaust by Henry Gonshak
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
The Other Felix by Keir Graff
Zero K by Don DeLillo
Galaxie Wagon by Darnell Arnoult
Tin House #66
Building Stories by Chris Ware
Look by Solmaz Sharif
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A Wanted Man by Lee Child
By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair
Make Me by Lee Child
Dead Man’s Float by Jim Harrison
Daredevils by Shawn Vestal
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Men Be Either Or, But Never Enough by Andria Nacina Cole
Killing Floor by Lee Child
Cordoba Skies by Federico Falco
Unquiet Things by James Davis May
Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me by Andy Martin
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley
The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed
Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed
One Summer by Bill Bryson
Battle Rattle by Brandon Davis Jennings
Poems: New and Selected by Ron Rash
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Into the Sun by Deni Ellis Bechard
Mississippi Noir edited by Tom Franklin
They Could Live With Themselves by Jodi Paloni
Still Come Home by Katey Schultz
56 Counties by Russell Rowland
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Soul in Paraphrase by Robert Boswell
Beach Plum Jam by Patricia Buddenhagen
The Art of Departure by Craig Lancaster
They Were Strong and Good by Robert Lawson
McWhinney’s Jaunt by Robert Lawson
Canoe Country by Florence Page Jaques
Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
Sketchy Stories by Kerby Rosanes
The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses edited by Cecily Parks
Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith
ShallCross by C. D. Wright
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
Liar’s Code by Rich Chiappone
Beneath the Bonfire by Nickolas Butler
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Walking Dead #1 by Robert Kirkman
Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover by Paul Buckley
There Now by Eamon Grennan
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Exceptional Mountains by O. Alan Weltzien
Glimmer Train Stories #96 Spring/Summer 2016 (with a story by Yours Truly)
Melancholy Accidents by Peter Manseau
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
99 Poems by Dana Gioia
Searching for John Hughes by Jason Diamond
Nancy’s Mysterious Letter by Carolyn Keene
Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams
The State We’re In by Ann Beattie
Splitting an Order by Ted Kooser
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Footing Slow: A Walk with Keats by Eli Payne Mandel
Trending Into Maine by Kenneth Roberts
The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones
Koppargruva by Hugh Coyle
Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier
Landscape with Headless Mama by Jennifer Givhan
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
The Iliad by Homer (Robert Fagels, translator)
A Hero of France by Alan Furst
Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen
Anthony Trollope by Victoria Glendinning
Not All Fires Burn the Same by Francine Witte
Night School by Lee Child
Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope
The Door That Always Opens by Julie Funderburk
The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri
Snowflake by Paul Gallico
Miracle in the Wilderness by Paul Gallico
Afterward by Edith Wharton
One Who Saw by A. M. Burrage
The Crown Derby Plate by Marjorie Bowen
The Diary of Mr. Poynter by M. R. James
The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James
Waterlines by Alison Pelegrin
The Signalman by Charles Dickens
Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson
Wintering by Peter Geye
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.

Front Porch Books: July 2013 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.

Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):  This November marks the welcome return of Robert Stone whose last novel was published in 2003 (Bay of Souls).  A new book by Stone is always a cause for celebration ...at least on my bookshelves it is.  In Death of the Black-Haired Girl, he examines the sticky moral questions of illicit romance and campus politics.  Jacket Copy:

In an elite college in a once-decaying New England city, Steven Brookman has come to a decision. A brilliant but careless professor, he has determined that for the sake of his marriage, and his soul, he must extract himself from his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late and too long yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.

Blurbworthiness: "Stone imbues his characters with a rare depth that makes each one worthy of his or her own novel. With its atmosphere of dread starting on page one, this story will haunt readers for some time." (Publishers Weekly)

Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford (Ballantine Books):  Here's another long-awaited return by a beloved author.  It's been four years since Jamie Ford brought us Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a smashing debut which hit the New York Times bestseller list.  What has the Seattle native been doing in all the years since then?  Well, for starters, he's been busy speaking to the hundreds of book clubs which took Hotel to heart.  But he's also been at work on Songs of Willow Frost.  Was the wait worth it?  This novel moved Pat Conroy to tears (see blurb below), so that should tell you something.  Exhibit A, the Jacket Copy:

Twelve-year-old William Eng, a Chinese American boy, has lived at Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage ever since his mother’s listless body was carried away from their small apartment five years ago.  On his birthday—or rather, the day the nuns designate as his birthday—William and the other orphans are taken to the historical Moore Theatre, where William glimpses an actress on the silver screen who goes by the name of Willow Frost.  Struck by her features, William is convinced that the movie star is his mother, Liu Song.  Determined to find Willow and prove that his mother is still alive, William escapes from Sacred Heart with his friend Charlotte.  The pair navigate the streets of Seattle, where they must not only survive but confront the mysteries of William’s past and his connection to the exotic film star.  The story of Willow Frost, however, is far more complicated than the Hollywood fantasy William sees onscreen.  Shifting between the Great Depression and the 1920s, Songs of Willow Frost takes readers on an emotional journey of discovery.  Jamie Ford’s sweeping novel will resonate with anyone who has ever longed for the comforts of family and a place to call home.

Here are the memorable Opening Lines:

William Eng woke to the sound of a snapping leather belt and the shrieking of rusty springs that supported the threadbare mattress of his army surplus bed. He kept his eyes closed as he listened to the bare feet of children, shuffling nervously on the cold wooden floor. He heard the popping and billowing of sheets being pulled back, like trade winds filling a canvas sail. And so he drifted, on the favoring currents of his imagination, as he always did, to someplace else--anywhere but the Sacred Heart Orphanage, where the sisters inspected the linens every morning and began whipping the bed wetters.

Blurbworthiness: “Ford is a first-rate novelist whose bestselling debut, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, was a joy to read.  With his new book, he takes a great leap forward and demonstrates the uncanny ability to move me to tears.” (Pat Conroy, author of South of Broad)

The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes (Pamela Dorman Books): After the breakout success of Me Before You, Moyes returns to American readers with a new novel that has an enticing hook (at least my attention has felt the snag of the hook's barb).  Behold, the Jacket Copy:

France, 1916: Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front.  When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant.  As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything—her family, her reputation, and her life—to see her husband again.  Almost a century later, Sophie’s portrait is given to Liv Halston by her young husband shortly before his sudden death.  A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and a battle begins for who its legitimate owner is—putting Liv’s belief in what is right to the ultimate test.  Like Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress and Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key, The Girl You Left Behind is a breathtaking story of love, loss, and sacrifice told with Moyes’ signature ability to capture our hearts with every turn of the page.

Havisham by Ronald Frame (Picador): We all know the story of the lover jilted at the altar, the bitterly insane woman holed up in the house--still clad in her wedding dress and surrounded by cobwebs and a moldering wedding cake.  Charles Dickens created a singularly unforgettable character in Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.  But what do we really know about the woman?  Nearly a dozen film adaptations have tried to interpret Miss Havisham in different ways, but now Ronald Frame breathes new life into a character that Dickens describes as a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton.  Frame also gives her a first name: Catherine.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Before she became the immortal, terrifying, wedding dress-wearing Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, she was a young woman named Catherine, with all her dreams ahead of her.  Catherine Havisham was born into privilege.  Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer, and lives in luxury in Satis House.  But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall—havisham.  A reminder of all she owes to the family name, and the family business.  Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers literature, music and masquerades—elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family's new money.  But for all her growing sophistication Catherine is anything but worldly, and when a charismatic stranger pays her attention, everything—her heart, her future, the very Havisham name—is vulnerable.  In this astounding prelude to Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations, Ronald Frame unfurls the psychological trauma that made young Catherine into Miss Havisham, and cursed her to a life alone roaming the halls of the mansion in the tatters of the dress she wore for the wedding she was never to have.

Blurbworthiness: “Frame makes Dickens' ghostly Miss Havisham a real woman of flesh, blood, pain and guilt. He gives us a hopeful girl, caught between loss and class, and in doing so he makes her demons all the more powerful.  A rich, evocative and poignant work.”  (Stella Duffy, author of Theodora)

Unremarried Widow: A Memoir by Artis Henderson (Simon & Schuster): I'll start by giving you the Opening Lines to this memoir which is scheduled to hit bookshelves next January:

     My husband dreamed of his death in the fall of 2005, nine months before he deployed to Iraq.  He was twenty-three years old.  He told me about the dream on a Saturday morning as he dressed for work on Fort Hood, and I listened from the bed while he pawed through the BDUs hanging in the closet.
     "Our helicopter crashed," he said.
     He took a pair of camouflage pants off a metal hanger, shook them out by the waistband, and stepped in one leg at a time.
     "John Priestner and me."
     Already the Texas day was warm and our air conditioner chugged an unconvincing stream of cool air.  I squinted at Miles as he talked, trying to shake the sleep from my brain, while he disappeared back into the closet and returned with the jacket to his uniform.
     "We floated above the helicopter," he said, "while it burned to the ground."
     He pulled a pair of socks out of the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed.  He turned to look at me and I rested my fingers against the side of his face.  He covered my hand with his, and we sat for a time without speaking.  Then he pulled on his socks, laced up his boots, and walked into the living room.  I heard the metallic clink of his dog tags slip around his neck and the front door opened and a shaft of sunlight spilled in.  The door closed and I was alone.

That's the setup for what looks like a heartbreaking book--especially heartbreaking if you're a military spouse who's always on edge, waiting for the dreaded arrival of the chaplain and casualty assistance officer at your front door delivering the worst news you never want to hear.  Here's the Jacket Copy for Henderson's memoir:

In the tradition of The Year of Magical Thinking and What Remains, this breathtaking memoir by a young Army widow shares her heartbreaking, candid story about recovering from her husband's death.  A world traveler, Artis Henderson dreamed of living abroad after college and one day becoming a writer.  Marrying a conservative Texan soldier and being an Army wife was never in her plan.  Nor was the devastating helicopter crash that took his life soon after their marriage.  On November 6, 2006, the Apache helicopter carrying Artis’s husband Miles crashed in Iraq, leaving her—in official military terms—an “unremarried widow.”  She was twenty-six years old.  In Unremarried Widow, Artis gracefully and fearlessly traces the arduous process of rebuilding her life after this loss, from the dark hours following the military notification to the first fumbling attempts at new love.  She recounts the bond that led her and Miles to start a life together, even in the face of unexpected challenges, and offers a compassionate critique of the difficulties of military life.  In one of the book's most unexpected elements, Artis reveals how Miles’s death mirrored her own father’s—in a plane crash that she survived when she was five.  In her journey through devastation and heartbreak, Artis is able to reach a new understanding with her widowed mother and together they find solace in their shared loss.  But for all its raw emotion and devastatingly honest reflections, this is more than a grief memoir.  Delivered in breathtaking prose, Unremarried Widow is a celebration of the unlikely love between two very different people and the universality of both grief and hope.

Blurbworthiness: “Artis Henderson’s remarkable memoir allows readers into the seldom-seen and unexpected world of the war widow.  Henderson’s eloquently rendered grief honors the soldiers lost and the resilient widows who carry on, all while she reassembles her life by pursuing a dream of writing.”  (Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone)

The Fifty-First State by Lisa Borders (Engine Books): I was so impressed by the Opening Lines of Lisa Border's new novel that I immediately wrote to the publisher and asked if I could quote the entire opening section here at the blog, believing that readers would be as gripped by the words as I was.  Victoria at Engine Books was kind enough to give me permission.  So here it is, the opening section called "The Accident":

      At the same time a white Dodge Ram pickup truck driven by Donald Corson, 66, of Oyster Shell, New Jersey drifted across three lanes of traffic on Route 42 in Bellmawr and grazed the side of a green Ford Taurus, Corson’s 17-year-old son, Josh, stood on line in his high school cafeteria in Floyd, New Jersey, pondering one bad offering after another— Sloppy Joe meat that looked like dog food, Chow Mein that looked like vomit—and opting for an apple and a carton of milk as his lunch.  While Corson’s second wife, Brenda, in the passenger’s seat of the pickup truck, was trying frantically to pull the steering wheel to the right, out of the way of the fast-moving traffic, even as she wondered at her husband’s sudden slump, the distant look in his eyes, their son stood in a corner of the cafeteria near a girl named Missy Dalton, a girl he’d been in love with since ninth grade, a girl who Josh knew was out of his league but he couldn’t help himself—she was just so, so.  While Missy was smiling, not unsweetly, and walking to her table of friends and Josh was internally berating himself for always saying the most incredibly lame things in the universe to Missy Dalton, Brenda Corson lost control of the steering wheel and the truck skidded in a few dizzy arcs.  While the truck was still spinning, Donald Corson’s daughter from his first marriage—a girl he and his wife had named Holly, but who had lived in New York for nearly twenty years and reinvented herself as Hallie—had just finished a photo shoot in the Lower East Side for a music magazine called Lush Life, a magazine that, as far as Hallie could tell, was highly regarded in New York and unheard of anywhere else in the country.  As Hallie was packing up her camera, lenses, light meter, shoving the flash and cord into her bag, cars piled up on Route 42 as a result of the Corsons’ skidding truck.  A red Toyota Tercel driven by a nineteen-year-old Rowan College sophomore with a heavy foot on the gas pedal who also happened to be text messaging her boyfriend while the Corsons’ truck went out of control in front of her and who, when she looked up and saw the skidding truck, hit her brakes far too hard and far too late, slammed into the Corsons’ pickup just as Hallie was getting into a taxi which would take her to Soho, where she was having lunch with a photo editor at Interview.  As Hallie was fretting in the cab that, at thirty-seven, she was too old to get work at a magazine like Interview—the photo editor would clearly see how she had squandered her youthful promise, would see that she was just Holly Corson, a nobody from a crappy little town on the Delaware Bay—a minister from an A.M.E church in Philadelphia’s Germantown section hit the side of the Tercel with his baby blue Honda Prelude after he tried, unsuccessfully, to steer around the wreck.  The moment Hallie pulled her cell phone out to let the editor know she might be late, that her taxi was stalled in traffic on Bowery Street, was the same moment the minister saw a tractor-trailer fast approaching in his rearview mirror with a horror that Donald and Brenda Corson and the college student—all three of them dead—were spared.
      As the tractor-trailer plowed into the three vehicles twisted together on Route 42—white, red, and blue, a macabre abstract Americana sculpture—and ignited a small fire, a brown-and-white dog, curled on the floor in an upstairs front bedroom of the Corsons’ comfortably run-down house—a neighbor’s long-suffering pet which Josh had snuck in the night before—kicked its leg four times in its sleep, growled slightly, then was still.

I don't think I need to say anything else to convince you to buy this book when it comes out in October, do I?

The Virgins by Pamela Erens (Tin House Books): The cover of Pamela Erens' new novel shows the torso of a young woman, handing cupping her crotch, as she lies on a bed of grass.  The designer has given us this titillating glimpse through a round circle, as if we're looking at the girl through a peephole. This, it seems to me, is entirely appropriate given the fact that The Virgins is narrated by what the Jacket Copy calls a "repentant narrator" (I like the complexity of that set-up):

It’s 1979, and Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are notorious at Auburn Academy.  They’re an unlikely pair at an elite East Coast boarding school (she’s Jewish; he’s Korean American) and hardly shy when it comes to their sexuality.  Aviva is a formerly bookish girl looking for liberation from an unhappy childhood; Seung is an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs and a covert rebel against his demanding immigrant parents.  In the minds of their titillated classmates—particularly that of Bruce Bennett-Jones—the couple lives in a realm of pure, indulgent pleasure.  But, as is often the case, their fabled relationship is more complicated than it seems: despite their lust and urgency, their virginity remains intact, and as they struggle to understand each other, the relationship spirals into disaster.  The Virgins is the story of Aviva and Seung’s descent into confusion and shame, as re-imagined in richly detailed episodes by their classmate Bruce, a once-embittered voyeur turned repentant narrator.  With unflinching honesty and breathtaking prose, Pamela Erens brings a fresh voice to the tradition of the great boarding school novel.

Here are the Opening Lines of the novel, which is set in 1979:

      We sit on the benches and watch the buses unload. Cort, Voss, and me.
      We’re high school seniors, at long last, and it’s the privilege of seniors to take up these spots in front of the dormitories, checking out the new bodies and faces.  Boys with big glasses and bangs in their eyes, girls with Farrah Fawcett hair.  Last year’s girls have already been accounted for: too ugly or too studious or too strange, or already hitched up, or too gorgeous even to think about.
      It’s long odds, we know: one girl here for every two boys.  And the new kids don’t tend to come on these buses shuttling from the airport or South Station.  Their anxious parents cling to the last hours of control and drive them, carry their things inside the neat brick buildings, fuss, complain about the drab, spartan rooms.  If there’s a pretty girl among them, you can’t get close to her for the mother, the father, the scowling little brother who didn’t want to drive hundreds of miles to get here.  We don’t care about the new boys, of course.  We’ll get to know them later.  Or not.

Blurbworthiness:  “Like the unforgettable Aviva Rossner, The Virgins is small but not slight—intense, sublime, vivid, uncanny, irresistible.  It joins the ranks of the great boarding school novels while somehow evoking the twisted, obsessive narrations of Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Wharton’s Ethan Frome.  Pamela Erens is that rare writer who can articulate—and gorgeously—the secrets we never knew about ourselves." (Rebecca Makkai, author of The Borrower)

The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):   The backstory to the publication of this whopper of a novel (685 pages) is as intriguing as the book itself.  Written by Goliarda Spaienza, an Italian actress and novelist who died in 1996, The Art of Joy languished for several years after being rejected by publishers.  As her husband Angelo Pellegrino notes in his foreword to the novel, "the manuscript lay for decades in a chest in my office, awaiting more fortunate times."  Though the thought of rejected pages gathering dust in a trunk seems conveniently dramatic and ready-made for a publishing Lazarus story of resurrection and redemption, there's no denying The Art of Joy looks like a big, bold, fascinating tale.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Rejected by a series of publishers, abandoned in a chest for twenty years, Goliarda Sapienza’s masterpiece, The Art of Joy, survived a turbulent path to publication.  It wasn’t until 2005, when it was released in France, that this novel received the recognition it deserves.  At last, Sapienza’s remarkable book is available in English, in a brilliant translation by Anne Milano Appel and with an illuminating introduction by Angelo Pellegrino.  The Art of Joy centers on Modesta, a Sicilian woman born on January 1, 1900, whose strength and character are an affront to conventional morality.  Impoverished as a child, Modesta believes she is destined for a better life.  She is able, through grace and intelligence, to secure marriage to an aristocrat—without compromising her own deeply felt values.  Friend, mother, lover—Modesta revels in upsetting the rules of her fascist, patriarchal society.  This is the history of the twentieth century, transfigured by the perspective of one extraordinary woman.  Sapienza, an intriguing figure in her own right—her father homeschooled her so she wouldn’t be exposed to fascist influences—was a respected actress and writer who drew on her own struggles to craft this powerful epic.  A fictionalized memoir, a book of romance and adventure, a feminist text, a bildungsroman—this novel is ultimately undefinable but deeply necessary; its genius will leave readers breathless.

Here are the electrifying Opening Lines:

     I'm four or five years old, in a muddy place, dragging a huge piece of wood.  There are no trees or houses around.  Only me, sweating, as I struggle to drag that rough log, my palms burning, scraped raw by the wood.  I sink into the mud up to my ankles but I have to keep tugging.  I don't know why, but I have to.  Let's leave this early memory of mine just as it is: I don't want to correct or invent things.  I want to tell you how it was without changing anything.
     So, I was dragging that piece of wood.  And after hiding it or leaving it behind, I entered a large opening in the wall, closed off only by a black curtain swarming with flies.  Now I'm in the dark room where we slept and where we ate bread and olives, bread and onions.  We cooked only on Sundays.  My mother is sewing in a corner, her eyes wide in silence.  She never speaks, my mother.  She either shouts or keeps quiet.  Her heavy fall of black hair is matted with flies.  My sister, sitting on the ground, stares at her from two dark slits buried in folds of fat.  All her life, at least as long as their lives lasted, my sister tracked her constantly, staring at her that way.  And if my mother went out — which happened rarely — she had to lock her in the toilet, because my sister wouldn't hear of being separated from her.  Locked in that little room my sister would scream, tear her hair and bang her head against the wall until my mother came back, took her in her arms and silently stroked her.

Blurbworthiness: “This massive book, unpublished when Sapienza died in 1996, first printed in a limited edition spearheaded by a friend, then reprinted to become a sensation in France, finally appears in English.  It’s easy to see why it . . . has such passionate promoters now: the story of Modesta, born poor in Sicily in 1900, passionate reader, lover of men and women, and fighter against fascism and patriarchy, is a stirring and potentially shocking tale of a woman’s awakening . . . The strong first section introduces Modesta just when she’s discovered the art of self-pleasure.  Surviving rape and fire, she’s taken into a convent where she discovers another source of pleasure: words, and the ability to manipulate others . . . With its specificity of place, experimentation (Sapienza switches between third- and first-person points of view, sometimes on the same page), and pugnacious determination to use one woman’s life to show a tradition-bound world struggling toward modernity, Sapienza’s singular book compels.” (Publishers Weekly)