Soup and Salad: RIP Jim Harrison, Emily St. John Mandel and Laura van den Berg Talk Dystopia, “Difficult” Women Puzzle Margaret Dilloway, Susan Perabo Marvels at Tobias Wolff, Ghosts Haunt Elizabeth Brundage, What Novelists Should Worry About, Jodi Paloni Comes to Terms with “Too Many Books,” Glen Chamberlain’s Funny Valentine

On today’s menu:

1.  The death of author Jim Harrison (The Ancient Minstrel, Legends of the Fall, etc.) a week ago touched nearly all of us in ways great and small. I was stunned but not surprised by his passing. He’d worked hard and played hard and it showed in recent photos of the 78-year-old. You could hear the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe every time you looked at that face. Nonetheless, the passing of a legend is always a sad, regretful thing. Speaking of coulda-shoulda-wouldas, the Barnes & Noble Review was kind enough to publish my essay about a late encounter with the legend. It begins like this: I met Jim Harrison on a flight from Bozeman, Montana to Chicago three years ago. I say “met,” but as we soared over the wheaty heartland, not a word passed between us. It remains one of the greatest regrets of my life.  Click here to read the rest.

2.  “An idea I’ve been thinking about lately is that perhaps we’re drawn to these (dystopian) stories because we long for less distracted lives. We’re tethered to, distracted by, and addicted to our technology, and maybe there’s a certain longing for a world where our phones no longer work and we have to talk to people face to face again and spend more time alone with our thoughts.”
      ~Emily St. John Mandel in conversation with Laura van den Berg at FSG’s Work in Progress


3.  “Difficult” women? Novelist Margaret Dilloway (Sisters of Heart and Snow) pins ’em to the page over at Read Her Like an Open Book:

This whole concept of “difficult” women still puzzles me. Sometimes, the word “difficult” is a code word for “bitchy.” Someone you don’t want to deal with. To me, to be “difficult” means to be human—imperfect, struggling with baggage from the past, responsibilities, aging, expectations, dreams. In real life, every woman I know would be classified as “difficult” the way my characters are. The women I know are fierce and mercurial. Everyone’s got some kind of problem they’re trying to overcome. They complain and they struggle even while they love. And women mess up their lives just as forcefully and thoroughly as men ever have, thank you very much.

4.  At Beatrice, Susan Perabo (Why They Run the Way They Do) talks about why Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” is a prime example of how much can be contained in just three short pages:

I’ve decided that the only single word that can possibly define this short story is “audacious.” I’ve read the story maybe forty times in the last twenty years, and I still can’t believe Wolff pulls it off. The tightrope Wolff walks, bridging the gaping canyon of sentimentality that this story should be, is so thin as to be invisible. Only through sheer audacity could a writer take this character, and this plot, and create something this good.

Related:  My own take on “Bullet in the Brain” (a mini-review that consistently ranks as the #1 most-read Quivering Pen post of all time)

5.  Head Butler reminds me to levitate Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear closer to the top of the To-Be-Read Stack. If nothing else, for the haunting story-behind-the-story. As Brundage explains:

      It was the late 90’s and my husband had just joined a medical practice in Troy, New York. For Mother’s Day the year before, he took me to a beautiful inn in Columbia County – the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company – and over the course of that weekend I decided that Old Chatham, New York was one of the most beautiful places on earth and I wanted to live there. We decided to rent a house in nearby Malden Bridge, a historic hamlet that had been settled in the late eighteenth century. One afternoon, with my girls in the car (our son was just a twinkle in my eye back then) we drove past this old house with a For Rent sign hanging from a tree. It was a lovely white clapboard cape with a small front porch. I pulled over and we got out. There was nobody around; the place looked empty. We roamed around to the back yard, smelling sage and wild onion, and discovered a Dutch door. On impulse I tried the knob, but of course the door was locked. And then the strangest thing happened. The bottom half of the door eased open all on its own.
      We ended up signing a lease and moving in. Shortly thereafter, we discovered that we were not alone. Every morning on the way to school the girls told me stories about the ghosts, three little girls who had died in a fire and whose mother and father were up in heaven. They knew details that seemed beyond their ability to fabricate, including the names of the ghosts, and historic details about an old mill down the road with tainted water...

6.  Worry. We’ve all got it, we all learn to seamlessly incorporate it into our routines, our personalities, the very fibers of our bodies. Creative types, I think, are especially prone to anxiety. At Lit Hub, Susannah Felts delivers a nail-chewing list for writers:

I worry that I’ll never finish. I worry that I’ll finish a draft and never revise it. I worry that I’ll finish the book and no agent will pick it up. I worry that an agent will pick it up and fail to sell it and then dump me. I worry that it will sell and get bad reviews. I worry that it will sell and get no reviews. I worry about the attention I’ll get when it’s reviewed. I worry what people in my hometown will think of it. I worry that I’ll fail at bringing the ideas to life the way they are in my head.

Click here to finger the rest of the worry beads.

7.  One of the things I tend to worry about (needlessly, as all worries are at heart) is the fact that I’ll never live long enough to read ALL THE BOOKS. At Read Her Like an Open Book, Jodi Paloni (They Could Live With Themselves) says she, too, has ”more books than a person could ever possibly read.” But she’s come to comfortable terms with it:

      It doesn’t matter how many books. Books are not just for reading. They’re for viewing, touching, dusting, sorting, stacking, arranging, re-sorting, shelving, un-shelving. They’re a source of pleasure.
      My husband has twenty-two screwdrivers, thirteen wrenches, and sixteen wood files.
      My goat cheese-making friend keeps a couple of bucks around for kicks and, out of compassion, nurtures elder chickens that are all done laying eggs.
      My daughter has 2,178 songs on her iPod.
      That we are a species of excess is another topic. My point here is to say that we pay attention (and dollars) to what sparks passion, nourishes obsession, furnishes joy, soothes.

Click here to read the rest.

8.  Your Friday is about to get a whole lot better. A new issue of High Desert Journal is now online and chief among its contributors is Glen Chamberlain. I suggest you take time this afternoon to do two things: 1) Read the short story “Her Funny Valentine” and 2) Go buy Glen’s new collection All I Want Is What You’ve Got. There’s a very good reason I call her “the Alice Munro of our American West.” Here’s how “Her Funny Valentine” begins:

Cash Gunn was born in Pocket, Montana, at the tail end of the Depression, and he never got out of it. It wasn’t that he didn’t try: when he was 18, he was going to go to college, but the Korean War came along. When he survived, all he wanted was something familiar, so he returned to Pocket and married Agnes.

Click here to read the rest at High Desert Journal.

My First Time: Tom Williams

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Tom Williams, the author of three books of fiction: The Mimic’s Own Voice, Don't Start Me Talkin’, and the new short story collection, Among The Wild Mulattos and Other Tales. His fiction has appeared in such online and print venues as Boulevard, Barrelhouse, The Collagist, Florida Review, and Cream City Review. Williams is the Chair of the English Department at Morehead State University. He lives in Kentucky with his wife and their two children.

My First Short Story Collection

I blame Raymond Carver. I blame Bobbie Ann Mason. I blame Reginald McKnight, too. And while we’re at it, Lorrie Moore and Sandra Cisneros—if you consider The House on Mango Street, as I did, back in 1990, a collection of stories. Of course, had I not taken a workshop with Lee K. Abbott, I might not have been exposed to so many authors who made their literary debut with short story collections: Buddy Nordan and Steve Yarbrough, Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg, to name a few more. I would have likely succumbed anyway in Houston, where I not only studied with Mary but also James Robison, and, learned, like many of my peers, to overlook or outright ignore novels and memoirs (they weren’t even a thing until Tobias Wolff and Beverly Lowry invented creative nonfiction). Instead, we shared with each other the slim volumes of Rick Bass, Pam Houston, Mary Gaitskill, Dagoberto Gilb, and Carolyn Ferrell.

Later, there were my contemporaries, those I came to know after I graduated from U of H and began my first academic job. The author of three published stories (it was a lot easier to get a job back then) and a creative dissertation yearning to be a collection, I reveled, as a reader, in the accomplishments of Cris Mazza, Jessica Treat, George Singleton, Tom Franklin, Junot Diaz. Kevin Brockmeier, Thomas Glave, Jhumpa Lahiri. ZZ Packer. As the so-called writer I was, however, I read one page with admiration, the next with envy. Some of these people were younger than I. When would my turn come?

It didn’t help either that the past offered so many remarkable debut collections: Goodbye, Columbus. Hue and Cry. The Little Disturbances of Man. Gorilla, My Love. Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Uncle Tom’s Children. In Our Time. Hell, before all those gigantic and ponderous best sellers, James Michener appeared on the scene with a modest collection (and soon Pulitzer Prize winner and source of Broadway and Hollywood musicals), Tales of the South Pacific. And who can overlook those titles that, while not first book length fictions, helped establish their writers in the pantheon? A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Nine Stories. The Magic Barrel. Lost in the Funhouse. Airships, oh my god, Airships. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Distortions. Rock Springs.

I could go on.

But I hope by now the reader has figured it out: somewhere in my early writing life I became consumed by the idea that my first published book of fiction should be, had to be, a collection of short stories. Perhaps it was the sheen of all those Vintage Contemporary covers. There was also the parallel between the record album and the story collection—we still listened to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Nevermind and Exile in Guyville then. Story collections possessed, frankly, a greater degree of cool than novels. Tom Clancy wrote novels. Lydia Davis wrote stories. Whom did you want to hang with? Furthermore, one assumed novels were always flawed, even a slim and elegant number of the most delicate construction. A short story collection, with eight to a dozen winners (previously published in all the right journals) could near perfection, a state which all we word-worriers were so eager to achieve.

It was with all this and more in my mind that I passed many a bookless year trying to craft my collection. I sent off a copy of my dissertation to the Drue Heinz or Iowa competition sometime shortly after graduation but little came of that, save for the debit from my checking account for the submission fee. Undaunted, I wrestled the next group of stories into into various book length manuscripts, which I submitted to contests. Individual stories saw their way into print, yet I saw little to indicate my talents at short story writing matched my ambition. No runner up or finalist accolades for my collections. No inquiries from smaller presses or agents. For a time I left behind short story writing entirely and drafted a novel (oh, the shame I felt when I walked past my copies of Dubliners and Labyrinths) but its fate mirrored that of my story collections, and I wondered if I might not get a turn, any turn, at all.

Did I ever get close? Let’s say a terrific and uncommonly helpful writer (he’s named somewhere above) once told me he would aid me as best he could to get that debut collection in the world. Imagine I wasted no time in mailing him a copy, which he then praised and said I should send it with his recommendation to one university press who still published fiction. Pretend that press said no and the author recommended another university press, who kept my stories almost a year before offering some faint praise and a big fat no thanks. (At least they returned the manuscript.) If I didn’t think ninety-five percent of the writers my age have a similar story, I’d pull this one out at every AWP and just wait for the free sympathy drinks to come at the hotel bar.

In the end, though, what prevented my publishing a debut short story collection should be counted as a success: I published a novella, The Mimic’s Own Voice, which had once been part of a collection. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little bit sad watching my dream of book publication come at the expense of my dream of a debut story collection. This is ridiculous, of course. There is never a time to say no to a book being published when the publisher’s not a scam artist. I’m so grateful that book came out. I’ve heard from real readers that they feel the same. And I’m honored that my second book, Don’t Start Me Talkin’, a novel (that coincidentally started as a short story), is on bookshelves other than my own.

So it is now—nearly three full decades since I harbored the dream of seeing a short story collection come out—that my wish has come true. While in no way my first written collection, it is my first published collection: Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales. And as the good people at Texas Review Press have done such amazing work to get it ready, I feel it is my most representative book, constructed of tales as recent as two years ago and others conceived of and written in the previous century. Moreover, its existence clarifies to me exactly why I once viewed the debut collection as so indispensable to the writing life: the short story itself was and still is a form only a writer cares about. No one in the seat next to you says on the plane, “You’re a writer? Lemme tell you this idea I have for a short story.” Your third cousin doesn’t say at the reunion, “Living with my fourth wife was stranger than any short story you could write.” Yet when I made my commitment to writing fiction, it was through a short story. A bad one. One that even revised I could only muster a B plus from a generous instructor. Yet that achievement established, in my mind, the notion that I could do this again. That I might even do better. Which is why when those stories I read—“Where I’m Calling From,” “Shiloh,” “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse,” “How to Become a Writer,” “Hairs”—led me to the books they could be found in, the stories I wanted, no, needed to tell, started to appear.

So forgive me for getting a little lyrical and nostalgic: but the book I hold in my hands, my first published collection of stories, seems to have on every page some emblem of the writer I was when I didn’t know what I was doing, when every story I read entered my imagination in a way that altered what I might do with characters, plots, point of view, scene and setting. Don’t get me wrong: I think I’m a pretty good novelist. I want to write more. My best book might be a novella. But the short story got to me first. It made me want to be the writer I am today.

Front Porch Books: October 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.

Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon by Cindy Ott (University of Washington Press):  Though this isn't a new book (Pumpkin came out a year ago), it's new to me.  After picking up a copy from the King's English bookseller's table at last month's Utah Humanities Book Festival, I knew I'd be including it in this month's Front Porch Books feature.  I mean, really, the timing is just too perfect.  Cindy Ott's cultural history of the large orange squash has appeal far beyond jack-o-lanterns and pies.  Like recent food histories (see Salt by Mark Kurlansky and The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson), Pumpkin smartly takes a common ingredient in our society and wraps an entire book around one author's curious investigation of its history.  I've put Pumpkin high atop my perpetually-teetering stack of books To Be Read.  With all the other books I'm (happily) obligated to read in the next month, I don't know if I'll be able to actually get to it before Thanksgiving--though that's my hope and prayer.  You, however, should dig in to this book with enthusiastic knives and forks.  Here are the Opening Lines to the Introduction:

      In the fall of 1995, I helped a friend, David Heisler, sell pumpkins in front of his farmhouse in Comus, Maryland—more a crossroads than a town—located about forty miles northwest of Washington, D.C.  Heisler was raised on a nearby dairy farm that had since been sold to developers and divided into large estates.  Intent on keeping his tractor a useful piece of equipment instead of merely a yard ornament, he raises fruits and vegetables on a couple of acres adjacent to his house and on fields near where he grew up just down the road.  While he drops off peppers, green beans and corn at the local Safeway grocery store for resale without any fanfare in the summer, the piles of pumpkins he sets around his yard amid crates of local apples, Indian corn and a variety of colorful squash are an autumn spectacle.  His pumpkin stand draws crowds of thousands every weekend in the month of October.  From about ten in the morning until sunset, carloads of visitors wander the pumpkin patch.  They playfully hold up specimens of several sizes and shapes for their companions’ inspection and take pictures in the middle of the patch before leaving with armloads, along with bags of the other fall produce.
      After my immersion in the pageantry of the pumpkin stand for five weekends in a row, I no longer just walked, drove, or turned magazine pages past pumpkins, but rather stopped, stared, and wondered what the fuss was all about.  There were not only the crowds flocking to the fall stands to consider, but also the time-honored pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving dinner.  Unlike most people around the world who eat pumpkin unceremoniously throughout the year, Americans hardly eat it at all except for at this one national holiday feast.  Instead of eating fresh pumpkin, they set them out in front of their houses as decorations every autumn and carve them into jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween night.  Small towns across the country hold annual festivals named in the pumpkin’s honor, though few have any real historic ties to the crop.  Suddenly, pumpkins, from farm-grown meaty orbs to hollow plastic jack-o’-lanterns, were fascinating objects.

Pumpkin tracks the vegetable's history from 10,000 BC (the planting of the first pumpkin seed in the Americas) to today's pumpkin festivals.  From pumpkin beer and pumpkin pie to the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Linus' undying faith in the Great Pumpkin in the Peanuts comic strip, Cindy Ott cultivates the entire patch.  Brief aside: While browsing e-bookstores for more information about Pumpkin, I followed a rabbit trail to another book which caught my attention: Inventing the Christmas Tree by Bernd Brunner.  It looks like the perfect reading companion piece.

The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):  Laura van den Berg's new collection of short stories begins with a plane crash and ends with a hurricane.  If that isn't enough to send you running to the nearest bookstore to pre-order The Isle of Youth, then I just don't know what it is you're looking for, my friend.  Van den Berg burst onto the literary scene with her debut collection of short stories What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us four years ago. And now, at last, she returns. I feel like going outside with a trumpet and announcing the news to everyone in my neighborhood.  Karen Russell (author of Swamplandia!) calls her "freakishly talented;" Victor LaValle (The Devil in Silver) says she is "ridiculously talented."  I just say she's a helluva lot of fun to read. Here are the Opening Lines to the first story ("I Looked For You, I Called Your Name"):

The first thing that went wrong was the emergency landing.  My husband and I were both reading In Flight Magazine and enjoying the complimentary wine in first class—I’d never flown first class before, but it was our honeymoon and we thought that was what we were supposed to do; drink in the daytime, luxuriate in our good fortune—when the plane lurched and oxygen masks fell from the ceiling and a passenger in the back screamed.  We didn’t know it then, but the pilot was already steering the plane toward an empty brown field, preparing for our descent.

(To hear van den Berg read from the beginning of this story, go to the Poets & Writers podcast webpage.)  In the press materials accompanying the book, this "Dear Reader" note described what I'd find in the pages ahead of me:

The stories in The Isle of Youth are linked by young female narrators, and they all have some element of crime to them—yet they're not traditional crime stories.  They are highly charged, and there is always something big at stake.  Van den Berg takes us inside the heads of these women, who are all mired in secrecy and deception, and tells their stories with hypnotic yet searing prose.  She writes with the most elegant urgency and rhythm, revealing the inner lives of these marginalized young women, all grappling with the choices they've made and searching for the clues that will unlock their lives.  One of the coolest things about these stories is that they always start in one place and end up somewhere entirely different.  Every time you think you know where a story is going, it takes a turn down a completely unexpected road.  Van den Berg's writing is so self-assured; while there's something deeply unsettling about the contents of the stories, the writing itself remains controlled and grounded.

You Only Get Letters From Jail by Jodi Angel (Tin House Books):  This month, my To-Be-Read pile had a growth spurt, thanks to not only Laura van den Berg, but also this compelling new collection of short stories by Jodi Angel.  It's Angel's second book (her first, The History of Vegas, came out in 2005), but she didn't really ping on my radar until You Only Get Letters From Jail came on the scene.  I think I first heard about her when "A Good Deuce" was featured at Electric Literature last year.  (And by the way, if you're not already subscribed to Electric Lit, then you need to mend the error of your ways posthaste.  See also: Saguaro by Carson Mell below)  Here's Tin House editor Rob Spillman's Angel-ic endorsement:

Two years ago, at the Tomales Bay Writers’ Workshop, north of San Francisco, I went to a reading with Tin House favorites Ron Carlson and Dorothy Allison, both of whom we’ve published multiple times, beginning with the very first issue of the magazine fourteen years ago.  Another author was sandwiched in between whom I had never heard of—Jodi Angel.  Carlson and Allison are both astonishing, captivating readers, yet Angel somehow upstaged them both with her reading of “A Good Deuce,” her story of a rural California teen dealing with the aftermath of a mother’s overdose.  She pulled us into a lower-class world of emotionally stunted teens, a bleak yet vibrant land a million miles away from the shiny, happy America of TV and advertising.  I was blown away.  But I wondered if it was only her delivery—deadpan, direct, through a veil of dark hair hanging over her face, her leather jacket adding to her overall vibe of “Why’d you drag me out of the biker bar to make me tell you this story?”  Afterward, I took the story out of Angel’s hands to see if it was as good on the page as it was in the ether.  It was.  And is.  Later, she told me she wrote the story in one sitting, only a few days before, because she needed something new to read.  Angel works stories over in her head, sometimes for months at a time, without writing down a single word, then, when she can’t take it anymore, gets it all down.  “A Good Deuce” needed hardly any edits or copy edits.  Her “first draft” was nearly flawless.

Want more?  Okay, just look at all the enthusiastic Blurbworthiness Jodi Angel has been getting:

"Jodi Angel writes like an angel—in the full sense of the designation--which is to say someone fallen out of the armpit of a restless deity—sharp-eyed, ruthless, and tender at the same time. I'd walk a long way to hear her read these stories, and plan to buy a half dozen copies just so I can give them away saying, 'Look at this. You have never before read anything like this.'" (Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina)

"Jodi Angel embodies this pack of low-rent, no-count, hard-luck, heart-tugging teenage boys so thoroughly that one can only conclude she was one, in this or some former lifetime. Plus, she really knows her way around a paragraph. In these stories, child support never gets paid and guns go off too often and deciding to love something almost guarantees its immediate departure or death. These are hard, wonderful, compassion-inducing stories, laced with surprising and surprisingly powerful grace notes, flashes of heat lightning in the dark." (Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted)

"You Only Get Letters From Jail is one of the finest and truest collections of 'American' short stories I have ever read. Set in small towns among muscle cars and grange halls and rock and roll and damaged vets and divorced parents, Jodi Angel's stories explore in sharp and often funny prose the lives of teenagers trying their best to make sense of things in this world that, more often than not, remain inexplicable." (Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time)

If you crack open You Only Get Letters From Jail to the first story, the aforementioned "A Good Deuce," you'll see why all these esteemed authors are waxing enthusiastic for Angel.  Here are the Opening Lines:

I was on my second bag of Doritos and my lips were stained emergency orange when my best friend, Phillip, said he knew a bar in Hallelujah Junction that didn’t card, and maybe we should go there.  We had been sitting in my living room for eighteen or nineteen hours watching Robert Redford movies, where Redford had gone from square-jawed, muscled, and rugged to looking like a blanched piece of beef jerky, and we had watched it go from dark to light to dark again through the break in the curtains.  The coroner had wheeled my mother out all those hours ago and my grandma Hannah had stalked down the sidewalk with her fists closed and locked at her side, insisting that a dead body had every right to stay in the house for as long as the family wanted it there.  My mother was no longer my mother; she had become Anna Schroeder, the deceased, and my grandma Hannah had been on the phone trying to track my father down.  The best we had was a number for the pay phone at the Deville Motel, and only one of two things happened when you dialed that number—either it rang and rang into lonely nothing or someone answered and asked if this was Joey and hung up when the answer was no.  My grandma called the number twenty-two times, and the only thing that changed was the quality of the light, and my mother went out, and Phillip came in, and my sister, Christy, packed her things so she could go, and I did not.

Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior by Brandon R. Schrand (University of Nebraska Press):  Like Pumpkin, Brandon Schrand's Works Cited is not minty-fresh new (it was released this past Spring), but it's new to me--and, I'm willing to bet, new to you.  I was late getting to the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book this year, so I slipped in quietly to the tail end of Schrand's reading in one of the ballrooms.  He was midstory--something about how a gift of the illustrated Children's Bible from his glassy-eyed, pot-smoking parents segued into an apocalyptic vision of Mount St. Helens exploding--but I knew right then and there in that hot, smoking-chest moment that I'd be heading right out to the festival's bookstore and buying a copy of Schrand's memoir.  His voice (both literally and on the page) was so commanding, so rapid-fire, so goddamn funny that I really had no choice.  In Works Cited, Schrand uses books to chart the growth of his life--sort of like progressive pencil marks on the wall to mark a child's height.  It's a fascinating angle at which to approach a memoir and I'm totally hooked.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

“Doing things by the book” acquires a whole new meaning in Brandon R. Schrand’s memoir of coming of age in spite of himself.  The “works cited” are those books that serve as Schrand’s signposts as he goes from life as a hormone-crazed, heavy-metal wannabe in the remotest parts of working-class Idaho to a reasonable facsimile of manhood (with a stop along the way to buy a five-dollar mustard-colored M. C. Hammer suit, so he’ll fit in at college).  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn informs his adolescent angst over the perceived injustice of society’s refusal to openly discuss boners.  The Great Gatsby serves as a metaphor for his indulgent and directionless college days spent in a drunken stupor (when he wasn’t feigning interest in Mormonism to attract women).  William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky parallels his own dangerous adulthood slide into alcoholism and denial.  With a finely calibrated wit, a good dose of humility, and a strong supporting cast of literary characters, Schrand manages to chart his own story—about a dreamer thrown out of school as many times as he’s thrown into jail—until he finally sticks his landing.

Other "works cited" include Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, Beloved by Toni Morrison, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff.  I can't wait to read about this particular boy's life via books.

Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce (A Strange Object):  For those of you who got a taste of Luce's collection of short stories via the earlier Trailer Park Tuesday post here at the blog, I thought I'd give you an even bigger mouthful of this relatively slim book.  As the publisher notes at their website, "Hana Sasaki will introduce you to many things—among them, an oracular toaster, a woman who grows a tail, and an extraordinary sex-change operation.  Set in Japan, these stories tip into the fantastical, plumb the power of memory, and measure the human capacity to love."  Here are some Opening Lines from the stories in the collection:

      Over the course of that interminable weekend after Jun died, Asian lady beetles overtook our place in shadowy Totsuka-cho.  Orange, winged bodies coated the ceiling and left yellow stains, carapaces crunched underfoot against the bathroom tile.  The air smelled like rancid walnuts. ("Reunion")

      Yumiko jiggled the handle and thought, break, broke, broken.
      "Toilet's broke," she called, testing him.  She waited, imagining the serrated tone he used to correct her English when he was upset.  BrokEN.  ("Pioneers")

      It is her thirtieth birthday.  She wakes alone.
      Her right hand reaches around to feel a soft length of hair that wasn’t there when she took her bath the night before.
      She shuffles to the full-length mirror, cranes her neck.  The tail is three inches long, and gleams silver with a lavender tinge, one end thin and flyaway, the other thick as rope.  It sprouts from the asymmetrical dark button at the base of her spine—what her mother used to call her Hydrangea Mole.  Her mother loved hydrangeas, but Hana found them a bit over-the-top.  Hana prefers tulips. ("Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail")

Lots of talented people have said some nice things about Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail.  Here is just some of the Blurbworthiness: “Let us all now append one more syllable to the list of the most acrobatic imaginations in contemporary American fiction: Saunders, Bender, Link, and Luce!  This book in an incantation, and I adore it.” (Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn)  “In Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate, glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun.  Readers: here is your new favorite short story writer.” (Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination)  “Kelly Luce writes rings around most writers, and this is only her first book.  Hana Sasaki is bold, strange, funny, and tender.  These stories are just such a pleasure to read—so forget this blurb and get to the damn book.”  (ubiquitous blurber Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine)

Saguaro by Carson Mell (Electric Literature):  Subscribers to Electric Literature received the following email from the lit fic site's editors earlier this month:

Many of you may remember Carson Mell from his story “The West,” which we published back in Electric Literature no. 5.  Right before publication, Carson came to our office and handed us a copy of Saguaro, his self-published novel about Bobby Bird, a degenerate rock legend seeking redemption.  That lone paperback circulated among our staff.  We praised it, we fought over it, and eventually we lost track of it.  Now we know we’re not the only ones trying to get our hands on a copy.  The book became almost as mythical and elusive as its protagonist: Carson sold-out a 1,000-copy print run on his own, and for a while the only place you could find Saguaro was on eBay (for sixty bucks a pop).  Until now.

Knowing a good thing when they read it, the smart folks at Electric Literature snatched up Saguaro and released Mell's weird, short novel as an ebook earlier this month.  "And since the epic of Bobby Bird cannot be contained in print alone, the digital edition of Saguaro will include illustrations and animations also created by Carson Mell," the publisher added.  I grabbed a copy of the novel, downloaded it, and started reading.  It took me .001 of a second to get sucked into that numbing vortex we call A Good Read.  Judge for yourself.  Here are the Opening Lines to Saguaro:

      When I was twelve years old I was best friends with a baby.  The upside to that kind of a situation is that the baby is always down to hang out, the downside being that you can’t take him anywhere but out in the yard.  We spent a lot of time out there though, fiddling around with the bugs and whatnot, maybe even eating one now and then, but I wanted to take him somewhere else; somewhere better.  I imagined having a black motorcycle with a breadbox sidecar, him bopping around in there all pink and goofy.  I can still see it—two boys a rocket down that long dusty road.  The little tiny helmet and racing goggles.  Us getting into adventures, sticky situations that he’d get us out of by squeezing through a hole the exact size of a baby.
      I made up my first songs for him too. His favorite went like this:
          What I call a shower don’t take too long
          I hop in the water and I sing me a song
          No soap or shampoo so I’m out like a whip
          Ain’t got a towel so I drip, drip, drip.
      I pushed him around his house in a stroller at top speeds and just about spilled him, soft spot and all, into the linoleum every time we rounded a corner.  His beautiful mom never stopped us though—just watched from the couch with her legs crossed, all soft smiles and sipping.  She told me she liked it because it left marks in the carpet that made her girlfriends think she vacuumed every day.

The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Philip Hensher (Faber and Faber):  Some time ago here at the blog, I was lamenting my handwriting, simultaneously complaining about the fact that it was bulbous and ugly while also praising it for the way in which it physically brought me closer to the act of creation.  And so, when Philip Hensher's new book about "the lost art of handwriting" arrived on my front porch, I knew I was born to read this book.  The Opening Lines to the introduction:

      About six months ago, I realized that I had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend of mine looked like.  I had known him for over a decade, but somehow we had never communicated using handwritten notes.  He had left messages for me, e-mailed me, sent text messages galore.  But I don't think I had ever had a letter from him written by hand, a postcard from his holidays, a reminder of something pushed through my letterbox.  I had no idea whether his handwriting was bold or crabbed, sloping or upright, italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash.
      The odd thing is this.  It had never struck me as strange before, and there was no particular reason why it had suddenly come to mind.  We could have gone on like this forever, hardly noticing that we had no need of handwriting any more.
      This book has been written at a moment when, it seems, handwriting is about to vanish from our lives altogether.  Is anything going to be lost apart from the habit of writing with pen on paper?  Will some part of our humanity, as we have always understood it, disappear as well?

It's a generously-illustrated book about an "endangered art."  Here's the Jacket Copy for more illumination:

Hensher introduces us to the nineteenth-century handwriting evangelists who traveled across America to convert the masses to the moral worth of copperplate script; he examines the role handwriting plays in the novels of Charles Dickens; he investigates the claims made by the practitioners of graphology that penmanship can reveal personality.  But this is also a celebration of the physical act of writing: the treasured fountain pens, chewable ballpoints, and personal embellishments that we stand to lose.  Hensher pays tribute to the warmth and personality of the handwritten love note, postcards sent home, and daily diary entries.  With the teaching of handwriting now required in only five states and many expert typists barely able to hold a pen, the future of handwriting is in jeopardy.  Or is it?  Hugely entertaining, witty, and thought-provoking, The Missing Ink will inspire readers to pick up a pen and write.

Front Porch Books: December 2012 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.

Donnybrook by Frank Bill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):  When it comes to grit-lit, there's no one giving Donald Ray Pollock and Chuck Palahniuk a run for their money more than Frank Bill.  His debut collection of short stories, Crimes in Southern Indiana, smashed readers with a right hook as powerful as the one pictured on the cover of his first novel, Donnybrook.  You'll notice that fist has no glove.  That's how Bill writes: smack! smack! smack! without letting up.  Wrack and ruin.  Drugs, sex, blood.  These pages aren't for the timid.  Jacket Copy:

The Donnybrook is a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks of southern Indiana. Twenty fighters. One wire-fence ring. Fight until only one man is left standing while a rowdy festival of onlookers—drunk and high on whatever’s on offer—bet on the fighters. Jarhead is a desperate man who’d do just about anything to feed his children. He’s also the toughest fighter in southeastern Kentucky, and he’s convinced that his ticket to a better life is one last fight with a cash prize so big it’ll solve all his problems. Meanwhile, there’s Chainsaw Angus—an undefeated master fighter who isn’t too keen on getting his face punched anymore, so he and his sister, Liz, have started cooking meth. And they get in deep. So deep that Liz wants it all for herself, and she might just be ready to kill her brother for it. One more showdown to take place at the Donnybrook.

Sure, there are a lot of characters, but I'm wagering that Bill can make each one of them stand out in their own nasty-tender way.

The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch (Unmediated Ink):  You may not recognize the publisher of Clinch's new novel (his fourth, after Finn, Kings of the Earth, and the pseudonymously-published science fiction novel called What Came After).  That's because it's a new imprint started by Clinch himself (I'm bucking tradition here to highlight a self-published book, but I'm fascinated by this novel's premise and Clinch's chutzpah in breaking away from a traditional publishing route).  Though his first two novels were published by Random House, Clinch decided to take the steering wheel in his own hands this time.  At his blog, he wrote:

(W)e’re on the cusp of some kind of revolution, right here and right now. I’ve never been much of a revolutionary, myself. To tell the whole truth—and you can see this in my work—I’m a traditionalist. A believer that the old values and the tested principles and the enduring systems remain the best. It meant a lot to me to be published by Random House, for example. It meant even more for one of my books to be named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. And seeing my work in my favorite indie bookstores remains a thrill. But I’ve always been self-reliant, and I’ve always gone pretty much my own way. So I suppose that if anyone was well-suited to tossing aside the conventions of big literary publishing and going it alone, I made a pretty fair candidate.

For more on his long path toward publishing his first novel, Finn, I encourage you to read the account at the end of his Readers Guide (pdf) to his latest book.  Clinch's ballsy independence prompted Washington Post book critic Ron Charles to write: "Traditional book publishing hasn’t collapsed yet, but you can see signs of erosion everywhere."  Striking off on a new path is all well and good, but for me, the proof is in the pudding.  To my delight, after receiving an advance copy of The Thief of Auschwitz, I found it was a very tasty pudding indeed.  I was immediately drawn in by the Opening Lines:

      The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.
      This was 1942. I was fourteen years old but tall for my age, and I’d spent a lot of time outdoors, so I lied and I got away with it. My father and I passed through that barbed wire gate and presto, I was eighteen. It was his idea, and if I hadn’t followed through on it they’d have been done with me in an hour, not a year. Maybe less than that. I was just a boy, after all. I was too young to be of any use.

Here's the Jacket Copy:

Told in two intertwining narratives, The Thief of Auschwitz takes readers on a dual journey: one into the death camp at Auschwitz with Jacob, Eidel, Max, and Lydia Rosen; the other into the heart of Max himself, now an aged but extremely vital—and outspoken—survivor. Max is a world-renowned painter, and he’s about to be honored with a retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. The truth, though, is that he’s been keeping a crucial secret from the art world—indeed from the world at large, and perhaps even from himself—all his life long.

As with any of the titles I spotlight at Front Porch Books, I'll reserve complete judgment until after I've had a chance to read the whole thing, but for now I hope your curiosity is as piqued as mine and that you'll order a copy of Clinch's daring new novel.

Life Form by Amelie Nothomb (Europa Editions):  Belgian writer Amelie Nothomb is not exactly a household name in the U.S. (at least not in my household), but that could change with the publication of her nineteenth novel.  It's a slim book with a fascinating, topical subject matter at its heart.  Just take a look at the Jacket Copy:

One morning, the heroine of this book, a well-known author named Amélie Nothomb, receives a letter from one of her readers--an American soldier stationed in Iraq by the name of Melvin Mapple. Horrified by the endless violence around him, Melvin takes comfort in over-eating. He eats and eats until his fat starts to suffocate him and he can barely fit into his XXXXL clothes. Disgusted with himself, but unable to control his eating, he takes his mind off his ever-growing bulk by naming it Scheherazade and pretending that his own flesh will keep an increasingly intolerable loneliness at bay. Repulsed but also fascinated, Nothomb begins an exchange with Mapple. She finds herself opening up to him about her difficulties with being in the public spotlight and the challenges of her work.An epistolary friendship of sorts develops, one that delves into universal questions about human relationships, one with an unexpected (to say the least!) final twist.

Here are the Opening Lines to this small-but-astounding novel:

That morning I received a new sort of letter:

Baghdad, December 18, 2008

      Dear Amelie Nothomb,
      I'm a private in the US Army, my name is Melvin Mapple, you can call me Mel. I've been posted in Baghdad ever since the beginning of this fucking war, over six years ago. I'm writing to you because I am as down as a dog. I need some understanding and I know that if anyone can understand me, you can.
      Please answer. I hope to hear from you soon.

Melvin Mapple

 

      At first I thought this was some sort of hoax. Even if Melvin Mapple did exist, what right did he have to speak to me like that? Wasn't there some sort of military censorship to prevent words like "fucking" from being used in conjunction with "war"?

So there you have it: straightforward, witty and intriguing.  I can hardly wait to read the other 124 pages.

We Live in Water by Jess Walter (Harper Perennial):  They tell us short story collections don't sell.  When I say "us," I mean writers; and when I say "they," I mean literary agents, editors, and prognosticators of the coming collapse of the publishing industry.  But I happen to believe that short-form fiction is very much alive and, in some cases, thriving.  (Want proof of life?  For starters, check out Larry Dark's excellent blog for The Story Prize.)  If anyone can make a successful run at proving "them" wrong, it's Jess Walter.  Fresh on the heels of this year's critically-acclaimed novel Beautiful Ruins, We Live in Water is Walter's first short story collection and it looks as good as everything we've come to expect from Walter.  According to the Jacket Copy, these stories "veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing."  Here are the Opening Lines from the title story, which originally appeared at Byliner:

Oren Dessens leaned forward as he drove, perched on the wheel, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, open can of beer between his knees. He’d come apart before, a couple three times, maybe more, depending on how you counted. The way Katie figured—every fistfight and whore, every poker game and long drunk—he was always coming apart, but Oren didn’t think it was fair to count like his ex-wife did. Up to him, he’d only count those times he was in real danger of not coming back.

I had the pleasure of hearing Walter read the collection's final story, "Statistical Abstract For My Hometown of Spokane, Washington," at this year's Montana Festival of the Book.  Believe me when I tell you it was nothing short of an incredible magic trick, as if Walter was standing up there at the front of the room, sawing a story in half, splitting it apart with finesse, keeping us spellbound and breath-held, then putting it back together again with a final, devastating sentence that even had the author choking up.  We all left the room shaking our heads and saying to ourselves, "How did he do that?"

This Close by Jessica Francis Kane (Graywolf Press):  The title of Kane's debut collection of short stories makes me think of a man squinting, holding up two fingers just micro-millimeters apart.  This close.  Judging by what I've read of the book so far, I'd say that the gentleman should go ahead and press those fingers together because Kane isn't just close, she's all the way there.  She's a generous storyteller--by that, I mean she doesn't write in spare, minimalist prose.  She gives readers full, rich portraits of her characters and their worlds, even in the shortest of stories.  Here are the Opening Lines to "Lucky Boy," the first story in the book:

Something about New York City makes a lot of people understand you should try to look your best. Tourists, for example, often wear brand-new shoes and socks. They buy them after they arrive, I think, probably spending more than they should. When they step off a curb or into a cab, you sometimes see a flash of their unscuffed soles, the socks fresh and fitted. Recently I was buying a pair of new shoes myself when I heard another man in the shop proudly decline to take his old shoes with him. "No," he said, pointing to the store entrance, a determined look in his eye. "I'm going to wear my New York shoes right out that door." New York shoes, indeed. He seemed ready for a fight.

I love how that last line propels us into the rest of the story, even if that new-shoes man never makes another appearance.  I should also mention how much I love the cover design by Kyle G. Hunter.  It's a stroke of genius to put the blue-paint sample strip up against a blue sky.  Kudos to the Graywolf team for choosing this cover!  Blurbworthiness: "This Close is timeless, humane, vulnerable, and compulsively readable.  Jessica Francis Kane has a fierce, keen eye and a gentle, sure touch.  I devoured this collection.  More, please..." (Jennifer Gilmore, author of Something Red)

The Annotated Brothers Grimm (The Bicentennial Edition) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Maria Tatar (W. W. Norton):  Just in time for holiday gift-giving, Norton trots out another sumptuous volume of classic literature, annotated with enriching notes and gorgeously illustrated.  Norton is re-issuing this edition of Grimm fairy tales in honor of the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Children's Stories and Household Tales.  The Annotated Brothers Grimm includes an introduction by A. S. Byatt, who writes: "This is the book I wanted as a child and didn't have."  (For other great annotated books from the publisher, check out The Annotated Wizard of Oz, The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Annotated Christmas Carol)  Though I'm a lukewarm fan of the contemporary Grimm TV series and have more than a passing acquaintance with Disney-fied fables, I've never actually read the original tales from the Brothers Grimm.  This thick, rich book will provide a perfect gateway into their world.  Here's the Jacket Copy from the publisher:

Publication of the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales in 1812 brought the great European oral folk tradition into print for the first time. The Annotated Brothers Grimm returns in a deluxe and augmented 200th-anniversary edition commemorating that landmark event. Adding to such favorites as “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” and “Rapunzel,” Maria Tatar includes six new entries, among them “Four Clever Brothers,” “The Water of Life,” “The White Snake,” and “The Old Man and His Grandson.” The expanded edition features an enhanced selection of illustrations, many in color, by legendary artists such as George Cruikshank and Arthur Rackham; annotations that explore the historical origins, cultural context, and psychological effects of the tales; and a biographical essay on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Opening Lines (from "The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich," the first story in the collection):

Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, there lived a king who had beautiful daughters. The youngest was so lovely that even the sun, which had seen so many things, was filled with wonder when it shone upon her face.

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel (Graywolf Press):  Maazel's 2008 novel Last Last Chance ranks high among the many critically-acclaimed unread books in my library.  So many books, so little time....You know how it goes.  Maazel's new novel is enough to make me give Last Last Chance one more chance.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon—and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely—for his ex-wife, Esme, and their daughter, whom he hasn't seen in ten years. Esme, for her part, is a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, she recruits four misfits to botch a reconnaissance mission in Cincinnati. But when Thurlow takes them hostage, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that will change all their lives forever. With fiery, exuberant prose, Fiona Maazel takes us on a wild ride through North Korea's guarded interior and a city of vice beneath Cincinnati, a ride that twists and turns as it delves into an unsettled, off-kilter America. Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.

I particularly like the Opening Lines for their fragmentary, stop-and-stutter rhythm which serves to pull me into Thurlow's story:

They were together. In their way. Dad on a bus, gaping out the window at a little girl and her mom. The pair not five feet away. He swiped the glass with his palm. Stop the bus, he said, though no one heard him. Stop the bus. His wife and daughter tromped through the snow. His wife? His ex-wife, bundled in down, soldiering on. His daughter, whom he had not seen in nine of her ten years. She jumped a puddle of slush. Wore a hat with braided tassels. He told himself to get up. Get up, Thurlow. But he couldn't. He was stuck being someone else. A man to whom life had become a matter of seconds, to whom a bus was the universe, and the instinct to watch, all that there was to being in love.

The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns (Blue Rider Press):  Dobyns is another of those writers who has a huge following but mostly flies under the radar.  He's certainly flown "nap of the earth" (to use a military pilot's term) below my radar.  I have a few of his more than thirty published books (ranging from novels to poetry collections), but they remain unread.  All that could change with his newest novel, The Burn Palace.  Take a gander at the Jacket Copy and tell me if you, too, aren't hooked:

At two-thirty in the morning at the local hospital in the small town of Brewster, Rhode Island, Alice Alessio--also known as Nurse Spandex--is given the surprise of her life. Coming back from a secret tryst with a doctor, she peeks in to check on the newborn baby she was supposed to be watching, and finds a huge, writhing red-and-yellow snake in the bassinet instead. So begins the series of strange and disturbing events that start to plague this sleepy little community and confound the police. Woody Potter, the detective on the case, simply can't put it all together:  What is the thread that connects a missing baby, a dead insurance investigator, and a local Wiccan sect? Why do all roads seem to lead to the town yoga center? And what exactly is going on with Carl Krause, the local man who works at the funeral home, who has taken to growling at his neighbors?

Want more?  Okay, here are the Opening Lines:

Nurse Spandex was late, and as she broke into a run her rubber-soled clogs went squeak-squeak on the floor of the hallway leading to labor and delivery. It was two-thirty on a Thursday morning, and if Tabby Roberts--Tabitha, she called her to her face, because she'd never liked the head nurse--ever learned she had left those two babies alone, she'd be royally screwed, which made her laugh because that was why she was late, she had been getting royally screwed back in 217, where that poor colored woman had died in the afternoon. That's where Dr. Balfour had pushed her, and that's where she'd gone--to a bed stripped of sheets and pads--because she'd worked hard to get Dr. Balfour motivated and once she got him unzipping his fly, she wasn't going to complain where he took her; she let him screw her in the toilet since that's what he wanted, like Dr. Stone last March, but then Dr. Stone took a job at Providence Hospital and so nothing had come of it except a few teary phone calls with her doing the crying, but it didn't do any good because Dr. Stone had stayed where he was.

The writhing snake shows up just a few paragraph later and starts Nurse Spandex on a screaming jag--"a high, awful noise she'd never made before," and she "kept screaming like she meant to shatter glass."  Yes indeed, I've grabbed the lure between my teeth and I'm being pulled to shore.

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Picador):  In keeping with the creepy chill of suspense fiction, here's a new collection of short stories which, by the looks of it, can scare the color right out of your hair.  Jacket Copy:

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon’s jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon’s neighbor---who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders---their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web.

Here are the Opening Lines to the first story in the book, "Afternoon at the Bakery."  The imagery is beautiful but you just know something dark is lurking beneath the surface of all that sunny light:

      It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings.
      Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard from a man off in the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him, entranced. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried over to gather the child in her arms.
      You could gaze at this perfect picture all day—an afternoon bathed in light and comfort—and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing.

Blurbworthiness: “Yoko Ogawa is an absolute master of the Gothic at its most beautiful and dangerous, and Revenge is a collection that deepens and darkens with every story you read.” (Peter Straub)

Y by Marjorie Celona (Free Press): From the beautiful cover design to the intriguing plot synopsis, this debut novel has me saying "Yes!"  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Marjorie Celona’s exquisitely rendered debut is about a wise-beyond-her-years foster child abandoned as a newborn on the doorstep of the local YMCA. Swaddled in a dirty gray sweatshirt with nothing but a Swiss Army knife tucked between her feet, little Shannon is discovered by a man who catches only a glimpse of her troubled mother as she disappears from view. That morning, all three lives are forever changed. Bounced between foster homes, Shannon endures abuse and neglect until she finally finds stability with Miranda, a kind but no-nonsense single mother with a free-spirited daughter of her own. Yet Shannon defines life on her own terms, refusing to settle down, and never stops longing to uncover her roots—especially the stubborn question of why her mother would abandon her on the day she was born. Brilliantly and hauntingly interwoven with Shannon’s story is the tale of her mother, Yula, a girl herself who is facing a desperate fate in the hours and days leading up to Shannon’s birth. As past and present converge, Y tells an unforgettable story of identity, inheritance, and, ultimately, forgiveness.

I'm going to give you two sets of Opening Lines--the "author's note" which opens the book with a beautiful brushstroke of lyrical prose, and the first two paragraphs of Chapter 1.  I think you'll agree that there's some first-rate writing on these pages....

Y

      That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? Me with my arms outstretched, feet in first position. The chromosome half of us don’t have. Second to last in the alphabet: almost there. Coupled with an L, let’s make an adverb. A modest X, legs closed. Y or N? Yes, of course. Upside-down peace sign. Little bird tracks in the sand.
      Y, a Greek letter, joined the Latin alphabet after the Romans conquered Greece in the first century—a double agent: consonant and vowel. No one used adverbs before then, and no one was happy.

*     *     *

      My life begins at the Y. I am born and left in front of the glass doors, and even though the sign is flipped “Closed,” a man is waiting in the parking lot and he sees it all: my mother, a woman in navy coveralls, emerges from behind Christ Church Cathedral with a bundle wrapped in gray, her body bent in the cold wet wind of the summer morning. Her mouth is open as if she is screaming, but there is no sound here, just the calls of birds. The wind gusts and her coveralls blow back from her body, so that the man can see the outline of her skinny legs and distended belly as she walks toward him, the tops of her brown workman’s boots. Her coveralls are stained with motor oil, her boots far too big. She is a small, fine-boned woman, with shoulders so broad that at first the man thinks he is looking at a boy. She has deep brown hair tied back in a bun and wild, moon-gray eyes.
      There is a coarse, masculine look to her face, a meanness. Even in the chill, her brow is beaded with sweat. The man watches her stop at the entrance to the parking lot and wrench back her head to look at the sky. She is thinking. Her eyes are wide with determination and fear. She takes a step forward and looks around her. The street is full of pink and gold light from the sun, and the scream of a seaplane comes fast overhead, and the wet of last night’s rain is still present on the street, on the sidewalk, on the buildings’ reflective glass. My mother listens to the plane, to the birds. If anyone sees her, she will lose her nerve. She looks up again, and the morning sky is as blue as a peacock feather.
 

My Ideal Bookshelf, edited by Thessaly La Force, art by Jane Mount (Little, Brown and Co.): This has been the year of books celebrating books.  In just the past twelve months, we've seen Read This!: Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores; My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop; Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores; Joe Queenan's One for the Books; Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels; Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere; and Robin Sloan's highly-praised novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.  Whether it's a case of synchronicity or a universal cri de coeur against the shuttering of independent bookstores, it seems everyone wants to convince readers to keep on reading.  Because, let's face it, that's who's buying these books about books: die-hard bibliophiles who yearn for that warm-maple-syrup-in-the-throat feeling of nostalgia for well-loved books.  My Ideal Bookshelf is, first and foremost, a love letter to those treasured volumes many of us have on our own shelves.  Contributors share their own favorite books which are illustrated by paintings of their spines-out shelf.  It's artfully designed and would be ideal for your coffee table.  You could, you know, casually place it there where your boorish brother-in-law normally puts his feet as he watches Monday Night Football and spills potato chip crumbs all over your couch.  Maybe, you think, just maybe you can catch his attention and get him interested in books (it will help if you keep the book open to contributor Tony Hawk's ideal bookshelf where the skateboarder lists everything from Lance Armstrong's It's Not About the Bike to Nick Hornby's High Fidelity).  In their preface to the book, editor Thessaly La Force and artist Jane Mount describe the assignment they gave more than one hundred creative people (chefs and architects, writers and fashion designers, filmmakers and ballet dancers): “Select a small shelf of books that represent you—the books that have changed your life, that have made you who you are today, your favorite favorites.”  Not an easy task for anyone, but the results in this 200-page book span a satisfying range of literature--from Middlemarch (selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) to the Hardy Boys' The Secret of the Old Mill (selected by William Wegman).  If you're looking for the perfect gift to buy a book lover (or even a Pringles-munching sportsfan), I could think of no finer book to put under the Christmas tree.  To give you a taste of what's inside this vibrant album of book spines, here's David Sedaris' shelf:

Add Moby-Dick, The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a couple of Charles Dickens novels and that would be close to my own ideal bookshelf.  I love what Sedaris had to say in his accompanying remarks:

Tobias Wolff is America's greatest living short-story writer. Sometimes I meet ministers, and I always say to them, "If I had a church, I'd read a Tobias Wolff story every week, and then I'd say to people, 'Go home.'" There's nothing else you would need to say. Every story is a manual on how to be a good person, but without ever being preachy. They're deeply moral stories; the best of them read like parables.