Trailer Park Tuesday: The World According to Garp, RIP Robin Williams

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

"T. S. Garp, huh?  What does the 'T. S.' stand for?"

Throughout the 1982 movie The World According to Garp, the question is answered several different ways: "Terribly Shy," "Terribly Sexy," and "Terribly Sad."

Today, like the rest of my generation who grew up holding out split fingers and saying, "Na-nu, na-nu," I'm Terribly Sad.  News of Robin Williams' death punched the wind out of my sails when I saw the email alert last night.  The words "Comedian Robin Williams found dead" just didn't make sense.  As Tom Shales noted in his tribute at The Daily Beast, "On television, the death on Monday of actor and comedian Robin Williams was hyped as 'Breaking News,' but they could justifiably have filed it under 'heartbreaking news' as well."  Though Williams' career had its peaks and valleys (perhaps too many valleys for a man of his gifts), the best years were his early ones.  In the late 1970s, when Robin Williams was unleashed on the world (in his stand-up comedy acts, the Mork and Mindy series, and even the under-appreciated movie Popeye), it was as if a furnace door had opened and we were caught in the blast of his improvisational heat.  He was a manic tornado of language and jokes--some of them sticking, some missing--in routines that literally left me breathless.  Words whipped past our ears at Tasmanian Devil speed; good luck catching all of them.

He dialed down the comedy a little bit for the big-screen treatment of John Irving's novel The World According to Garp, but he channeled the leftover energy into the dramatic side of T. S. Garp, a writer living in the shadow of his overbearing mother (Glenn Close).  The humor in both the movie and the book is dark...but delicious.  This may not be Robin Williams' best performances; but for me, it's one of the most memorable.  I can still remember when and where I was when I saw it for the first time: September 1982 in a Laramie, Wyoming movie theater.  As the movie opens, we see a baby being tossed in the air as The Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four" plays in the background.  Robin Williams died at 63--caught, perhaps, in the dark anxiety Garp calls "the Under Toad."

Today, while others remember Robin Williams with clips from movies like The Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, Mrs. Doubtfire and Good, Morning Vietnam (all good performances), I thought I'd pay tribute to him with the trailer and some clips from Garp--even though watching them makes me Terribly Sad.

The trailer:



"The chances of another plane hitting this house are astronomical.  She's been pre-disastered.  We'll be safe here."  (By the way, the pilot in this scene is the movie's director, George Roy Hill.)



And, in closing, the writer at work:

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Home Place by Carrie La Seur

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

Carrie La Seur's debut novel is set in central Montana and the book trailer for The Home Place takes full advantage of that rural windswept beauty in its two minutes.  As the author explains in her voice-over, "There are places in Montana where you have to travel hundreds of miles for medical care, for the most basic services, and what happens out on those homesteads, those home places, can make for for some very good stories."  According to Cathy Langer of the Tattered Cover Book Store, The Home Place has plenty of story to spare:

“A successful attorney living in a Seattle high-rise, Alma Terrebonne has distanced herself from her rural Montana roots and pushed painful adolescent memories and troubled family members as far away as she can manage. At the opening of The Home Place, Carrie La Seur’s gripping debut novel, Alma is jolted from her fast-paced, comfortable life when she hears the news of her younger sister’s sudden death. Back in Billings Alma must grapple with her sister’s demons, fight a predatory coal company and ultimately face issues that she has been running away from for years. Any novel of the West worth its salt honors the landscape as a character shaper and a character itself. The sweep of the land, the bitter winter cold and the endless sky populate The Home Place as memorably as its many quirky, troubled, compelling and very human residents. I loved The Home Place, a deeply satisfying page turner filled with heart, human foible and a transcendent link to the land.”

The Home Place is in the batter's box on my To-Be-Read list.  With a trailer as evocative as this one is, I think you'll be making the novel one of your must-reads for this year, too.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil

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

I am an unabashed fan of Josh Weil's first book, The New Valley, a collection of three novellas.  As I said in this review, “the writing is tight, complex and wholly original.  Symbolism marries Syntax and they have beautiful children.”  The New Valley came out from Grove (my publisher) in 2009 and I waited impatiently, through the radio silence and the cricket chirps, for Josh to bring out another book.  Through the Weil-less years, I would return every so often to The New Valley, open it at random and read a few paragraphs to console myself that when the time finally came for his next book, I would not be disappointed.  Ladies and gentlemen, that day is now upon us and, after reading the first few pages of his debut novel, The Great Glass Sea, I can tell you that Josh Weil does not disappoint.  One sip from its opening paragraphs will tell you that we're in for a real treat in this “epic tragedy of brotherly love...swathed in all the magic of Russian folklore and set against the dystopian backdrop of an all-too-real alternate present.”

      Always the island had been out there, so far out over so much choppy water, far beyond the last gray wave, the groaning ice when there was ice, the fog when there was fog, so distant in the middle of such a huge lake that, for their first nine years, Nizhi—that church made of its tens of thousands of wooden pegs, each one as small as a little boy’s finger bones; those woodshingled domes like tops upended to spin their points on the floor of the sky; the priests’ black robes snapping in the wind, their beards blowing with the clouds, their droning ceaseless as the shore-slap waves—all might have been just another fairy tale that Dyadya Avya told.
      And then one day when the lake ice had broken and geese had come again, two brothers, twins, stole a little boat and rowed together out towards Nizhi...
      “Into the lake,” Dima said.
      “To hunt the Chudo-Yudo,” Yarik said.
      “Until they found it.”
      “And killed it.”
      They were ten years old—Dimitryi Levovich Zhuvov and Yaroslav Levovich Zhuvov—and they had never been this far out in the lake, this lost, this on their own. Around them the water was wide as a second sky, darkening beneath the one above, the rowboat a moonsliver winking on the waves. In it, they sat side by side, hands buried in the pockets of their coats, leaning slightly into each other with each sway of the skiff.
      “Or maybe it came up,” Dima said, “and crushed the boat.”
      “And they drowned,” Yarik said.
      “Or,” Dima said, “it ate them.”
      They grinned, the same grin at the same time, as if one’s cheeks tugged the other’s lips.
      “Or,” Yarik started.
      And Dima finished, “They died.”
      They went quiet.
      The low slap of lakewater knocking the metal hull. The small sharp calls of jaegers: black specs swirling against a frostbitten sky. But no wood blades clacking at the rowboat’s side. No worn handles creaking in the locks. Hours ago, they had lost the oars.
      They were losing last light now. Their boat had drifted so far into Lake Otseva’s center that they could no longer make out the shore. But there was the island. All their lives it had been somewhere beyond the edge of sight, and now they watched it: far gray glimpse growing darker, as if the roots of its unknown woods were drawing night up from the earth.

In the trailer for the book, Weil explains the genesis for the novel, which began with his upbringing (his mother's family is from Russia) when he grew up dancing folk dances and studying the Russian language (starting in seventh grade!).  He says he's always been interested in fables, folk tales and magic realism and the way that those elements can “open up a story and add different layers.”  Driving the novel forward is a “deeply felt” love story between two brothers--a reflection of Weil's relationship with his own brother.  I hope you'll join me in making The Great Glass Sea one of the must-reads of this year.  And if you're lucky enough to live near one of the cities Josh will be visiting on his book tour, please be sure to stop in and give a listen to what he has to say.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob

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

Here's a surefire way to get someone to pay attention to your book trailer: dress your cute-as-a-button five-year-old son in a tuxedo, film him asking you questions about your debut novel, throw in some witty pop culture references (penguins, Breaking Bad) and, PRESTO!, you've got an irresistibly-charming video like the one for Mira Jacob's The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing.  Ms. Jacob's son Zakir stars as the host of a talk show (theme song: "He really doesn't read, but he loves those books!") whose job it is to ask his mom some cue-card questions about her novel ("You are a first-generation American--how does that inform your writing?").  Sure it's a shameless gimmick, but somehow it works.  I'm definitely hooked into wanting to know more about The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing (as if I wasn't already there with that wonderful title).  It's a 500-page saga about an Indian-American family's journey from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom which has drawn comparisons to Meg Wolitzer, Mona Simpson, and--predictably--Jhumpa Lahiri.  Gary Shteyngart calls it “Punchy, clever, and stuffed with delicious chapatis.”  Zakir references this blurb in the trailer and it's nice to see that I'm not the only one who struggles to pronounce Shteyngart's name.  To be honest, though, as cute as Zakir may be in the trailer, it's his mother who charms me the most.  If her writing is as witty and wise as she is here on camera, then I'm ready to go dancing through these pages.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Liberty's Torch by Elizabeth Mitchell

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

Elizabeth Mitchell's history of the Statue of Liberty shines a beacon light from its place near the top of my To-Be-Read pile, and this witty, quick-moving trailer will give you a good idea why I'm really looking forward to reading the book.  Liberty's Torch is subtitled "The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty" and, as Mitchell tells it, what an adventure it was!  For years, the 305-foot-tall statue has been built upon as much myth and half-truths as it is copper, steel and iron.  For instance, everyone thinks La Liberte was a gift from France.  "This implies that the French government gave it to us directly," Mitchell says in the video.  "In fact, the French government only contributed a tiny portion of the money.  The rest of the expense had to be covered through funds raised by its sculptor--an energetic Frenchman named Frederic Auguste Bartholdi."  My favorite little-known fact about the Statue of Liberty, however, is this gem which Mitchell reveals in the trailer: "None other than Thomas Edison came up with the idea of installing a giant phonographic disc inside the statue.  It would allow her to deliver recorded speeches.  He thought people would be able to hear them all the way up in the northern part of Manhattan."  Can you imagine the monumental cacophony this would cause in today's city which is already blanketed by noise pollution?  Not only that, but I'd imagine that in today's world, those speeches would be sponsored by corporations, Infinite Jest style: "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...with the aid of RespirAir Nasal Strips."  Thank goodness Mr. Edison decided to stick with light bulbs.

Trailer Park Tuesday: How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer

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

When it comes to arranged marriages, most of us probably think of outmoded medieval practices where parents ruled by politics give the hand of their (weeping) daughter to an ill-matched suitor (usually a simpering, good-for-nothing prince).  It never ends well in those fairy tales, does it?  But what if this kind of marital engineering actually resulted in bringing together two soulmates in perfect harmony?  Or, if not "perfect harmony," then at least a couple of lovers who could carry a tune that wouldn't embarrass them on Karaoke Night.  This is the premise at the heart of How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky, the new novel by Lydia Netzer (author of the smash debut Shine Shine Shine).  In this new book, Netzer gives us a pair of awkward scientists, George and Irene, whose mothers were best friends growing up together.  Those two ladies hatched a plan to get pregnant together, raise the children together and then separate them so as to become each other's soulmates as adults.  How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky asks, "Can true love exist if engineered from birth?"  In the plain-and-simple trailer for the novel, Lydia explains the genesis of the book:

When I first got the idea for the book, I was sitting with my friend who had a daughter five days older than my son--they were one year olds--and we're watching them play on the floor, and of course they're adorable and we're planning how they're going to get married someday and wouldn't that be cool.  Then we kind of looked at each other and we're like, Actually, that would be great!  Because, no in-law troubles--we're both obviously awesome--and we could spend the next twenty-five years preserving their innocence, keeping them from having bad experiences, and helping them to be compatible.  From that conversation, I just couldn't let go of the idea of two friends programming their babies to be perfect for each other.

It is indeed the perfect idea for one of this year's most unique books.  I had the privilege of reading an advance copy of the novel and offered this blurb about what I found in its pages: "Lydia Netzer has a refreshing way of looking at the world that captivates me--it's as if she's leading me to a grassy hill far from the lights of a noisy city and there we lie on our backs, hands behind our heads, and stare at the star-pricked night sky in wide-eyed wonder.  In her novels, she combines math, magic, and science in a unique alchemy that gives us an entirely new kind of love story.  In How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky, she writes about 'twin souls who collide and love each other forever.'  I urge you, dear reader, to collide with this book.  It may just change the way you think about love."  If I'm guilty of arranging this marriage between reader and novel, then so be it.  I think two of you will live happily ever after.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night by Barbara J. Taylor

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

The true-life story behind Barbara J. Taylor's debut novel, Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night, is so dramatic that I'll just let the author tell it in her own words: "The story takes place in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1913-1914.  That was the time of coal mining, vaudeville, evangelism--so there was a lot happening in Scranton at the time.  I got the idea for my novel from a family story.  My grandmother's sister Pearl, on the day she was baptized--it happened to be the Fourth of July--she and her friends were playing with sparklers in the backyard and her dress went up in flames.  She survived for three days and, according to the stories, she sang hymns.  As sad as it was what happened to Pearl, I was always interested in her sister Janet who was in the yard that day.  She was only six years old, but nobody ever talked about the tragedy in front of Janet.  She didn't have a very happy life.  I always wondered how much of that stemmed from what she saw in the yard that day."  Taylor fictionalizes her family history and focuses on the repercussions suffered by eight-year-old Violet Morgan for the death of her nine-year-old sister, Daisy.  It's all about guilt, ostracism and the crumbling breakdown of a family in the wake of tragedy.  The book trailer, narrated by Taylor, is a smoothly-edited slide show of newspaper clippings and family photos--including a haunting, heartbreaking one of Pearl and Janet, wearing white dresses and smiling at the camera on the morning of the accident.  Here's what Sara Pritchard, author of Help Wanted: Female, has to say about the novel: "Not since reading Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley fifty years ago have I felt such empathy and love through fiction for a place, a time, and a people.  Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night is a book of equal power and beauty, a bittersweet tale set in early-twentieth-century Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, the heart and soul of America's anthracite coal-mining region, a place where Grace and Grief--now, as then--walk hand in hand."  Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night is perched high in my To-Be-Read pile and I have a feeling it will be in yours as well.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Bees by Laline Paull

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

The temptation to pun around with Laline Paull's debut novel is hard to resist--things like, "Buzz is building for The Bees" or "Hive really been looking forward to reading this book!"--but I'll avoid cheap stuff like that.  I wouldn't want to bumble my way through a lame opening to this Trailer Park Tuesday blog post.  It's true, though, The Bees looks like it could be the best anthropromorphic novel of the year.  From the little I've read in its opening pages, it could do for drones when Richard Adams did for rabbits in Watership Down.  As the clever trailer informs us, the plot centers around Flora 717, a sanitation worker in the hive whose curiosity and courage are both her assets and her flaws in a world where order and discipline rule the day as sure as the Queen sitting on her throne.  The video for the book zips along at a nice pace--aided by the perhaps too-obvious Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov--and is bound to get us all (....wait for it...) swarming to our local independent bookstore for The Bees.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

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

It's pure coincidence that, just before I play the trailer for Kate Racculia's new novel Bellweather Rhapsody, I'm listening to the soundtrack for The Grand Budapest Hotel.  Alexandre Desplat's jaunty, jingling score for the new Wes Anderson movie seems to be a good fit for Bellweather Rhapsody, which is also set in a hotel and features hijinks both deadly and gleeful.  The short, obscure trailer for the book is little more than stop-motion tarot cards crawling across the screen and tells us little about the plot.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along.  But it also has a slice of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt for its background music--which is equally appropriate, judging by what little I've read so far in these pages.  How to describe Bellweather Rhapsody?  Hmm...well, there's a murder-suicide, see.  And it's witnessed by a twelve-year-old bridesmaid.  And then, flashing-forward fifteen years, we have a bunch of teens who've gathered for a statewide music festival in that same hotel, along with Minnie, that once-traumatized bridesmaid.  There's a bassoonist named Rabbit Hatmaker and his twin sister Alice (hello, Lewis Carroll!), a missing girl, and a "colossal snowstorm."  Oh, and the book's epigraphs are from Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace, hinting that what follows will be smart and gloomy.  (I'm also curious about the alternate spelling of "bellwether" in the title, but assume it will eventually be explained somewhere in the 340 pages.)  In short, Bellweather Rhapsody has all the makings of a genre-twisting page-turner with nods to The Shining, Agatha Christie and Glee (according to the book's jacket copy).  I don't know about you, but I'm putting this one high on my To-Be-Read list.  She had me at "bassoonist."

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Wax Bullet War by Sean Davis

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

When the guns fall silent, the air fills with the sound of stories.  Veterans returning from battle in Iraq and Afghanistan are, each in their own way, trying to make sense of an often-nonsensical duet of wars.  Many will hold their silence, some will try to work it out in therapy or conversations with loved ones, and a few will find their path through storytelling.  Sean Davis is one soldier who searches for healing through the medicine of narrative.  His memoir, The Wax Bullet War, tells of how he found a new sense of purpose in the Global War on Terror.  The day after 9/11, Davis--who'd just left the Army 18 months earlier--walked into a National Guard recruiting office and reenlisted.  But, as the book's jacket copy tells us, “what he finds in Iraq is nothing like what he expected.  He discovers the oddities of a pop-up America in a hostile desert wasteland and is confronted with more questions and contradictions than answers.”  I haven't had the chance to read The Wax Bullet War beyond the first couple of pages; but what I found there, along with what's presented in the four-minute trailer, convinces me this will be an unforgettable reading experience.  Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph:

The morning Simon Scott was killed he sat in the back of our Humvee with his elbows on his knees and told me his theory on life. He said he'd figured it all out. Everything we take in or put out goes through a hole. It didn't matter if a person fought in a war, drank himself to death, chased girls, or risked his life to be a hero; every action was made to fill one hole or another. We laughed and threw rocks at stray dogs while waiting in the Iraqi heat for our final combat mission, the mission that would take his life and send me home on a stretcher, bone-broke, bruised, and soul-wrecked. I skipped right over what he was trying to tell me that day and didn't think about it for a couple months after the ambush, but now I think about it all the time. When I remember each decision I made leading up to that one afternoon, I think about the hole I was trying to fill.

Powerful stuff there in those sentences--and that's just the first page.  The trailer is little more than a slide show of photos from Davis' tour of duty and a series of blurbs from fellow writers laid over a haunting song playing in the background.  It's nothing flashy, but it draws us in nonetheless.  Then, near the end of the video, Davis reads a harrowing scene from the book in which his conversation with a fellow soldier about the Crusades, Pulp Fiction and Baroque art is interrupted by a mortar landing near them: “A small patch of earth shattered like glass and shot rocks, shrapnel and debris in all directions.”  Davis had been in the midst of shaving and even as he stands there with his face half-covered in lather, he hears the approach of another mortar round, whistling and Dopplering through the air.  “I couldn't process the fact that intelligent human beings were attempting to kill me.”  To many Americans, war is something that happens elsewhere to other people.  Perhaps The Wax Bullet War can serve as a tour guide to that foreign country, helping us open our eyes to at least one warrior's reality.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

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

If you were tempted by my tease of Tom Rob Smith's new novel in the latest edition of Front Porch Books, then this slick, haunting video should firmly set the hook.  The trailer for The Farm is one of the best of the year; if you didn't know this was for a book, you'd swear it was promoting a new Hollywood movie.  Though some of us can't afford the bundles of money which have been sunk into The Farm's trailer, it's nice to see a marketing department believing so strongly in a novel that they're willing to go all-out with its promotion.  The plot of the novel in a nutshell: Until he receives a disturbing phone call from his father, a young man believes his parents are enjoying a peaceful retirement on a farm in Sweden.  The father tells him that his mother has had a psychotic breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital before she checked herself out and disappeared.  The son prepares to fly to Sweden, but then he's contacted by his mother who tells him that everything he just heard from his father is a lie and that he's the dangerous one.  It's a great setup for a story that's bound to keep readers wobbling on shifting ground, trying to guess what's true and what's false.  The trailer provides some clues to the sinister truth behind the parents' conflicting stories and culminates in a series of disturbing images worthy of filmmaker David Lynch.

Trailer Park Tuesday: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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


I love the story Anthony Doerr tells at the beginning of the trailer for his new novel:

In 2004, I came up to New York City, went into Penn Station, and the man in front of me started complaining about the reception on his cell phone. We're eighty feet underground, he's bashing on his little device, and I'm thinking, "What you're forgetting, mister, is that this is a beautiful miracle--you're talking to somebody very far away with this little transmitter and this little receiver in this device, and all around us this electromagnetic radiation is carrying messages. And that's kind of an amazing thing." So when I started this book, I wanted to capture the magic of hearing the voice of a stranger in a little device in your home. Because for the history of humanity, that was a strange thing. I started with a boy trapped somewhere and a girl reading a story to him over a radio.

That simple concept of the daily miracle we all take for granted eventually grew into this majestic novel we now hold in our hands: All the Light We Cannot See (I would also posit that taking words from a writer's head and transmogrifying them into ink on a page is also a kind of breathtaking miracle).  I've had an advance copy of the novel for several months now.  Though circumstances (always those damned circumstances) have so far prevented me from reading Doerr's novel, I will say that it is high on my To-Be-Read pile (aka Mt. NeveRest)--so high, it's at an altitude where I need an oxygen tank just to reach my copy.  Someday soon, I will get to it.  And yes, I'm stabbed with guilt and longing every time I read this priceless blurb from J. R. Moehringer (Sutton): “Doerr sees the world as a scientist, but feels it as a poet.  He knows about everything—radios, diamonds, mollusks, birds, flowers, locks, guns—but he also writes a line so beautiful, creates an image or scene so haunting, it makes you think forever differently about the big things—love, fear, cruelty, kindness, the countless facets of the human heart.  Wildly suspenseful, structurally daring, rich in detail and soul, Doerr’s new novel is that novel, the one you savor, and ponder, and happily lose sleep over, then go around urging all your friends to read—now.”  You can start losing sleep over All the Light We Cannot See when it publishes in early May.  Here's the plot synopsis of the novel:

      Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure's reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel.
      In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie- Laure's converge.

I also have to say that the cover design of All the Light We Cannot See is one of my absolute favorites of the year so far.  Though it's awash in blues and greens and grays, it feels like it glows with inner light.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Joe (from the novel by Larry Brown)

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

Larry Brown, the late, great chronicler of the South's darker corners, gets another big-screen treatment (after 2001's Big Bad Love).  This time, Brown's 1991 novel Joe fills the screen with heavy drinking, domestic abuse and ornery men yelling, "The hell you lookin' at?"  Nicolas Cage (who physically looks like Brown--perhaps intentionally?) plays the titular role of an alcoholic ex-con forester who hires a boy (Tye Sheridan, last seen with Matthew McConaughey in Mud) to work with him on his crew.  When Joe discovers the 15-year-old boy is nothing but a punching bag for his alcoholic father, that ole ex-con rage starts to build inside him and you just know somebody's gonna get his ass whupped--or worse--before the end credits (a fact highlighted by a lawman coming across our anti-hero slumped against a wall and saying, "What have you done, Joe?").  All ingredients are in place for this to be a decent-to-good (possibly bordering on great) movie.  I'm especially intrigued by the fact that David Gordon Green is the director.  I'm a big fan of his films George Washington and Prince Avalanche and think his quiet, resonant style will serve Joe well.  Now, will somebody please, please, please make a movie out of Larry Brown's final, posthumous novel, A Miracle of Catfish?  I think it was one of his best.

A sad coda to this story: The actor cast as the abusive father did not live to see his work on screen.  Two months after filming ended, Gary Poulter, a homeless man plucked from obscurity when Green cast him in the movie, was found dead....submerged in three feet of water after a night of heavy drinking near Austin’s Lady Bird Lake.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Commandant of Lubizec by Patrick Hicks

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

Six months ago, I was privileged to read an early advance copy of a debut novel which is going to electrify and polarize readers.  Patrick Hicks' The Commandant of Lubizec is, on the surface, a difficult book to read--just as Schindler's List was difficult to watch in certain places and just as most literature about the Holocaust is rightfully hard to swallow.  But The Commandant of Lubizec is also an important, hard-to-put-down book which should be topping this season's reading lists.  In the book trailer, Hicks gives a small glimpse of his motivations behind writing the novel.  When some of his college students admitted they'd never heard of the Nazi "death camps," Hicks knew he had to do something about that.  Rather than writing a straight-up non-fiction history, or even a novel set in an actual death camp, Hicks took a different approach: he fabricated his own prison camp called Lubizec.  The novel is so rich in detail that you want to praise Hicks for meticulously researching a piece of forgotten history.  But it's a false history--a lie soberly grounded in truth.  Briefly, here's how the publisher describes the plot of the novel (which will be released at the end of March): "The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have in the Nazi state.  It is a sensitive, accurate retelling of a place that went about the business of genocide.  Told as a historical account in a documentary style, it explores the atmosphere of a death camp.  It describes what it was like to watch the trains roll in, and it probes into the mind of its commandant, Hans-Peter Guth.  How could he murder thousands of people each day and then go home to laugh with his children?" As I mentioned, I was honored to lend a few words of praise on behalf of the book.  Here's what I said then (and what I'll go around saying now): "Out of the cooling ashes of Holocaust history, Patrick Hicks manages to break our hearts with a story we thought we already knew.  The Commandant of Lubizec is profound, provocative, and profane in all the best ways.  While reading The Commandant of Lubizec, one question kept running through my mind: 'Was it really this bad?'  Through his all-too-real fiction, Patrick Hicks convinces me that, sadly, the answer is 'Yes.'  The Commandant of Lubizec is important and unforgettable."

Trailer Park Tuesday: One More Thing by B. J. Novak

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

HuffPo called it "the most hilarious book trailer ever."  I don't know if I'd go quite that far...but the faux French New Wave treatment for B. J. Novak's One More Thing is good enough to draw out a chuckle (or two or three) from moi at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday in the dark dead of winter.  Novak, aka Ryan the temp on The Office (as well as the show's occasional writer, director and producer), enlists the help of fellow Office mate Mindy Kaling in a short comedic sketch full of existentialism, ambition, romantic longing, Sartre and cigarette smoke.  You've gotta admire comedy that can drop references to Ecclesiastes and Rhianna in the space of two minutes.  Novak's collection of short stories (some of them extremely short, page-long vignettes) has been getting a big publicity push and I'm naturally wary and slightly allergic to this kind of hoopla surrounding the publication of celeb-lit like this.  However, Novak won me over with his smart wit in stories published in The New Yorker (about the man who invented the calendar) and One Story (about the man who wrote the "two trains" math problem)....so I'll happily read One More Thing (subtitle: "Stories and Other Stories").  Besides, we could all use a chuckle/laugh/guffaw in the bleak midwinter, don't we?

Trailer Park Tuesday: This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash

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

I weep with pity for those of you who missed Wiley Cash's debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home.  A thunderbolt of a novel about faith and family, it garnered critical praise, readerly love, and cannonballed onto the New York Times bestseller list.  If you didn't discover Wiley C. last year, now is your hour of redemption.  His new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, lands in bookstores this month and, from the little I've read of it, Wiley has proved that lightning does strike twice in the same place.  Set in Cash's own hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, This Dark Road to Mercy is about two young sisters, Easter and Ruby Quillby, who are placed in foster care after their mother dies.  Then along comes their ne'er-do-well father Wade, an ex-minor league baseball player, who steals the girls away and takes them on the road with him.  Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, sets off to look for them.  Also in pursuit: Robert Pruitt who, as Cash explains in the book's trailer, was blinded by one of Wade's wild pitches.  He's now out for revenge and you just know he's not going to settle for a simple "I'm sorry."  Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins) calls This Dark Road to Mercy, "Harper Lee by way of Elmore Leonard."  Watching the trailer, you get a good sense of the emotional conflict at stake in these pages.  As Cash admits, putting children in peril is "exciting, but also worrisome."  To me, the only thing more worrisome is the thought that you don't buy and read Wiley's novels.  So please set my mind at ease; go out and get your hands on some Cash.

Trailer Park Tuesday: In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell

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

There's nothing particularly ominous about a man chopping wood.  Unless, that is, you are Red 14 Films and you're making a trailer for Matt Bell's novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods.  Then it's creepy as Jack Nicholson chopping a hole in a door and scaring the shit out of Shelly Duvall.  The In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods trailer begins with a flannel-jacketed man walking out of his house (which, yes, is on the dirt, among trees, and next to a lake).  He picks up an axe and starts cutting firewood.  That's it.  That's the entire "plot" of the trailer.  And yet, by the time we reach the two-minute mark, our nerves are as splintered as that kindling.  You just know there's something hot and dark simmering beneath the surface of this guy.  The same could be said about Bell's debut novel, a meditation on love and parenthood which comes to us in the form of a modern fairy tale--a twisted, often grotesque fable which is probably not something you want to read to the kiddos as a bedtime story.  You'll get an idea of the novel's intensity from the critical praise which is expertly injected into the trailer (I can't remember the last time blurbs were used to such good effect in a trailer): "a gripping, grisly tale of a husband’s descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell" (The New York Times).  This trailer does for cabin life what Alfred Hitchcock did for showers in Psycho.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

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

Bogie and Bacall.  Gable and Lombard.  Jay-Z and Beyonce.  And now...Franco and Shteyngart?  In this four-minute Super Funny Love Story, Gary Shteyngart and James Franco are a married couple clad in pink bathrobes who not only share the passion of "an erotic journey," they also share the livelihood of writing: Franco with his "50 Shades of Gary," and Shteyngart with his (actual and not-aptly-named) Little Failure.  The trailer moves from a marketing session for Shteyngart's new memoir at Random House to an intimate conversation with Shteyngart's "husband" Franco in which the actor-author reveals he's written his own memoir about their relationship.  The dejected Shteyngart finds no solace anywhere--neither from his psychiatrist (a surprisingly funny Jonathan Franzen) nor at a local coffee shop where everyone is reading Franco's "50 Shades."  Little mention is made of Little Failure's contents--in fact, it's almost beside the point.  A quick skim of the opening paragraphs to Shteyngart's new book reassures us he sustains the 3jpp (jokes per paragraph)--"On his first visit to Oberlin my father stood on a giant vagina painted in the middle of the quad by the campus lesbian, gay and bisexual organization, oblivious to the rising tide of hissing and camp around him, as he enumerated to me the differences between laser-jet and ink-jet printers, specifically the price points of the cartridges.  If I'm not mistaken, he thought he was standing on a peach."--so why bother going into all that when there's an equally-funny parody to be had here?  Shteyngart is firing a signal flare to all other authors: this is the book trailer to beat this season.  Clever, funny, self-deprecating and full of celebrity cameos (Alex Karpovsky, Rashida Jones, and Sloane Crosley, among others) the vid for Little Failure is yet another champion in what's becoming an annoyingly long string of successes for Shteyngart: Super Sad True Love Story #1 (also with James Franco) and Super Sad True Love Story #2 (this time with Paul Giamatti).  Hell, he could probably do a promo for A Field Guide to North American Mushrooms and make it super funny.  Who cares if the books are any good?  As long as the author keeps typing manuscripts in order to support these Funny or Die-worthy short films, I say, "Keep 'em coming!"  Shteyngart seems to have tapped into the secret sauce of book trailers: celebrities + self-loathing + jokey dialogue = x copies of books sold.  It goes something like this:

Shteyngart: "Little Failure?  After the hundreds of books I've sold for Random House!  After I've been translated into one language!"
Franco: "Canadian isn't a language, baby."

Back in the day, Dostoevsky and Turgenev probably could have learned a thing or two from Gary Shteyngart.

Trailer Park Tuesday: A Christmas Carol

Have you reached the saturation point of Seasonal Charles Dickens Syndrome?  No?  Okay then, this will put your SCDS into overdrive (don't blame me if you get the hives).  In the spirit of the Ghost of Christmas Presents, I thought I'd round up a few of the many different theatrical versions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol for this special Christmas Eve version of Trailer Park Tuesday.  Here's everything from one of the earliest Carol films (from 1901) to the Jim Carrey-ed A Christmas Carol of 2009--with a few interesting stops along the way--Scrooge & Marley ("make the Yultide gay!") and...um, Barbie (apologies in advance).  I'm leaving out several noteworthy examples--among them, the Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, and Mr. Magoo versions--mainly because I couldn't find adequate trailers for them online.

So, sit back, raise a glass of wassail, and enjoy these clips.  God bless us, everyone.



Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost (1901)


A Christmas Carol (1910)


A Christmas Carol (1938)


Scrooge (1951)


Scrooge (1951)--Colorized Version


A Christmas Carol (1984)


Scrooged (1988)


The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)


Barbie in A Christmas Carol (2008)


Scrooge & Marley (2012)  


A Christmas Carol (2009)

Trailer Tuesday: Fobbit

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



For nearly two years, I've told you about promotional trailers for other authors' books....and now it's time for me to cue the spotlight, step to the center of the stage, clear my throat for the microphone, and announce: "Ladies and gentlemen.... Fobbit, the trailer!"  Yes, that's right, I finally got my act together and made a book trailer for my novel which debuted over a year ago.  More accurately, I hired the services of the wonderful team of Liz and Rob at The Montana Movie Factory, a great production company right here in Butte, Montana.  I gave Rob just a few sketchy ideas and let him take it from there.  I'm very pleased with the end result (Rob even managed to sneak in a Monty Python homage at the very end).  I hope you'll like what we came up with.  Consider it a Christmas gift to all the Fobbit fans out there.