Sunday Sentence: The Wasp Eater by William Lychack

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

At the bottom of everything, they were a family of silence—nothing but blind, black, coal-crumbling silence, his father never anchored or steady like his mother, his mother never sanguine or loose like his father.

The Wasp Eater by William Lychack

Front Porch Books: December 2019 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.

Cargill Falls
by William Lychack
(Braddock Avenue Books)

Jacket Copy:  There is good reason why William Lychack’s writing has been called “Precise, exhilarating, sometimes wonderfully funny and always beautiful” (Margot Livesey). In prose you can practically feel moving in your hands, Cargill Falls takes you through a series of unforgettable scenes that coalesce into an extended meditation on the meanings we give—or fail to give—certain moments in our lives. The story begins when an adult William Lychack, hearing of the suicide of a childhood friend, sets out to make peace with a single, long-departed winter’s day when the two boys find a gun in the woods. Taking place over the course of just a few hours, this simple existential fact gathers totemic force as it travels backwards and forwards in time through Lychack’s consciousness and opens onto the unfinished business in the lives of the boys, their friends, parents, teachers, and even the family dog. Cargill Falls is a moving conversation with the past that transports us into the mysteries of love and longing and, finally, life itself. Brimming with generosity and wisdom, this is a novel that reveals a writer at the top of his form.

Opening Lines:  We once found a gun in the woods—true story—me and Brownie, two of us walking home from school one day, twelve years old, and there on the ground in the leaves was a pistol. Almost didn’t even notice. Almost passed completely by. Had to be the last thing we expected, gun all black and dull at our feet, Brownie almost kicking it aside like an empty bottle or little-kid toy.
       But then we saw what it was for real and got those shit-eating grins on our faces. We looked back to make sure no one else was coming. Nothing but skinny trees and muddy trail in either direction. Not even a bird chirping that we could hear. We held our breath to listen, everything so quiet we were afraid to move, whole world teetering as if balanced on a point.

Blurbworthiness:  “Cargill Falls is an immediate classic. At once essential and profound and hugely entertaining, the story of the two boys at the heart of this book, and the men they become, follows in the tradition of great coming of age stories like Stand by Me, and then twists and reinvents and does the tradition better, upending all that we know and expect. It’s rare to come across books like this. A writer hopes that once in his or her life he or she can write something so honest.”  (Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children )

Why It’s In My Stack:  I’m a mega-fan of Lychack’s short story collection The Architect of Flowers, so this new short novel was an automatic add to the top of the To-Be-Read (TBR) stack that towers both physically (dead-tree books) and virtually (e-books) in my life. Any new Lychack book will roughly elbow other books aside, without apology. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a ride to catch to Cargill Falls where I’ll be following two young boys into the woods on a particular winter’s day.

Shakespeare for Squirrels
by Christopher Moore
(William Morrow)

Jacket Copy:  Shakespeare meets Dashiell Hammett in this wildly entertaining murder mystery from Christopher Moore—an uproarious, hardboiled take on the Bard’s most performed play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Pocket, the hero of Fool and The Serpent of Venice, along with his sidekick, Drool, and pet monkey, Jeff. Set adrift by his pirate crew, Pocket of Dog Snogging washes up on the sun-bleached shores of Greece, where he hopes to dazzle the Duke with his comedic brilliance and become his trusted fool. But the island is in turmoil. Egeus, the Duke’s minister, is furious that his daughter Hermia is determined to marry Demetrius, instead of Lysander, the man he has chosen for her. The Duke decrees that if, by the time of the wedding, Hermia still refuses to marry Lysander, she shall be executed . . .or consigned to a nunnery. Pocket, being Pocket, cannot help but point out that this decree is complete bollocks, and that the Duke is an egregious weasel for having even suggested it. Irritated by the fool’s impudence, the Duke orders his death. With the Duke’s guards in pursuit, Pocket makes a daring escape. He soon stumbles into the wooded realm of the fairy king Oberon, who, as luck would have it, is short a fool. His jester Robin Goodfellow—the mischievous sprite better known as Puck—was found dead. Murdered. Oberon makes Pocket an offer he can’t refuse: he will make Pocket his fool and have his death sentence lifted if Pocket finds out who killed Robin Goodfellow. But as anyone who is even vaguely aware of the Bard’s most performed play ever will know, nearly every character has a motive for wanting the mischievous sprite dead. With too many suspects and too little time, Pocket must work his own kind of magic to find the truth, save his neck, and ensure that all ends well. A rollicking tale of love, magic, madness, and murder, Shakespeare for Squirrels is a Midsummer Night’s noir—a wicked and brilliantly funny good time conjured by the singular imagination of Christopher Moore.

Opening Lines: We’d been adrift for eight days when the ninny tried to eat the monkey.

Why It’s In My Stack: I’m a fool for Shakespeare, I dig hardboiled crime fiction, and I need to laugh. I’m gonna tell the rest of the world to Puck off while I burrow into Christopher Moore’s latest pulpy production.

The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals
by Becky Mandelbaum
(Simon and Schuster)

Jacket Copy:  The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals is in trouble. It’s late 2016 when Ariel discovers that her mother Mona’s animal sanctuary in Western Kansas has not only been the target of anti-Semitic hate crimes—but that it’s also for sale, due to hidden financial ruin. Ariel, living a new life in progressive Lawrence, and estranged from her mother for six long years, knows she has to return to her childhood home—especially since her own past may have played a role in the attack on the sanctuary. Ariel expects tension, maybe even fury, but she doesn’t anticipate that her first love, a ranch hand named Gideon, will still be working at the Bright Side. Back in Lawrence, Ariel’s charming but hapless fiancé, Dex, grows paranoid about her sudden departure. After uncovering Mona’s address, he sets out to confront Ariel, but instead finds her grappling with the life she’s abandoned. Amid the reparations with her mother, it’s clear that Ariel is questioning the meaning of her life in Lawrence, and whether she belongs with Dex or with someone else, somewhere else. Acclaimed writer Pam Houston says that “Mandelbaum is wise beyond her years and twice as talented,” and The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals poignantly explores the unique love and tension between mothers and daughters, and humans and animals alike. Perceptive and funny, moving and eloquent, and ultimately buoyant, Mandelbaum offers a panoramic view of family and forgiveness, and of the meaning of home. Her debut reminds us that love provides refuge, and underscores our similarities as human beings, no matter how alone or far apart we may feel.

Opening Lines:  It was midnight in Kansas, and the bigots were awake.

Why It’s In My Stack:  That first sentence!

In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
(Dzanc Books)

Jacket Copy:  Drawing upon a long-suppressed episode in American history, when thousands of German immigrants were rounded up and interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, In Our Midst tells the story of one family’s fight to cling to the ideals of freedom and opportunity that brought them to America. Nina and Otto Aust, along with their teenage sons, feel the foundation of their American lives crumbling when, in the middle of the annual St. Nikolas Day celebration in the Aust Family Restaurant, their most loyal customers, one after another, turn their faces away and leave without a word. The next morning, two FBI agents seize Nina by order of the president, and the restaurant is ransacked in a search for evidence of German collusion. Ripped from their sons and from each other, Nina and Otto are forced to weigh increasingly bitter choices to stay together and stay alive. Recalling a forgotten chapter in history, In Our Midst illuminates a nation gripped by suspicion, fear, and hatred strong enough to threaten all bonds of love―for friends, family, community, and country.

Opening Lines:  Nina’s favorite moment was the hush, just before she pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen into the dining room of the restaurant, holding out her best Dresden platter, filled to its gold-laced edges with thin slices of fruitpocked Christollen, chocolate Lebkuchen, and hand-pressed Springerle in a dozen designs, fragrant with aniseed. Following close behind would be her husband Otto, bearing the large serving bowl brimming with Pfeffernusse, crisp and brown―each spicy nugget no larger than a hazelnut―ready to dip them up with a silver ladle and pour them into their guests’ cupped and eager hands. Next would come the boys, Kurt first, with two silver pitchers―one of hot strong coffee, the other of tea―and then Gerhard, carrying the porcelain chocolate pot, still the purest white and so abloom with flowers in pink, yellow, and blue that it seemed ever a promise of spring. Nina’s mother had passed it on to her in 1925, a farewell gift when she, Otto, and the boys―Kurt a wide-eyed three and Gerhard just learning to walk―had left Koblenz for the Port of Hamburg, bound for America.

Why It’s In My Stack:  I am drawn by the rich description of that hot meal coming through the swinging door into the restaurant―my mouth waters at the very words―which is such a pleasant scene...and one about to be destroyed by prejudice and hate.

Butch Cassidy
by Charles Leerhsen
(Simon and Schuster)

Jacket Copy:  For more than a century the life and death of Butch Cassidy have been the subject of legend, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. But who was Butch Cassidy, really? Charles Leerhsen, bestselling author of Ty Cobb, sorts out facts from folklore and paints a brilliant portrait of the celebrated outlaw of the American West. Born into a Mormon family in Utah, Robert Leroy Parker grew up dirt poor and soon discovered that stealing horses and cattle was a fact of life in a world where small ranchers were being squeezed by banks, railroads, and cattle barons. Sometimes you got caught, sometimes you got lucky. A charismatic and more than capable cowboy—even ranch owners who knew he was a rustler said they would hire him again—he adopted the alias “Butch Cassidy,” and moved on to a new moneymaking endeavor: bank robbery. By all accounts, Butch was a smart and considerate thief, refusing to take anything from customers and insisting that no one be injured during his heists. His “Wild Bunch” gang specialized in clever getaways, stationing horses at various points along their escape route so they could outrun any posse. Eventually Butch and his gang graduated to train robberies, which were more lucrative. But the railroad owners hired the Pinkerton Agency, whose detectives pursued Butch and his gang relentlessly, until he and his then partner Harry Longabaugh (The Sundance Kid) fled to South America, where they replicated the cycle of ranching, rustling, and robbery until they met their end in Bolivia. In Butch Cassidy, Charles Leerhsen shares his fascination with how criminals such as Butch deftly maneuvered between honest work and thievery, battling the corporate interests that were exploiting the settlers, and showing us in vibrant prose the Old West as it really was, in all its promise and heartbreak.

Opening Lines:  Start at the end, they say.
       The last member of Butch Cassidy’s gang, the Wild Bunch, went into the ground in December 1961. Which means that someone who held the horses during an old-school Western train robbery, or had been otherwise involved with the kind of men who crouched behind boulders with six-guns in their hands and bandanas tied around their sunburnt faces, might have voted for John F. Kennedy (or Richard Nixon), seen the movie West Side Story or heard Del Shannon sing run-run-run-run-runaway—that is, if she hadn’t been rendered deaf years earlier during the blasting open of a Union Pacific express car safe. Her outlaw buddies were always a little heavy-handed with the dynamite.
       Yes—she. The Wild Bunch, which some writers have called the biggest and most structurally complex criminal organization of the late nineteenth century, came down, in the end, to one little old lady sitting in a small, dark apartment in Memphis. Laura Bullion died in obscurity eight years before the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, revitalized the almost-forgotten semilegend in which she had played a minor but authentic part.

Why It’s In My Stack: Like many of you, my depth of knowledge about Butch Cassidy is only as thick as a daguerrotype photo print and about as long as a two-hour movie. Leerhsen’s biography of the outlaw looks like a vibrant and entertaining way to go deeper.

The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon
by Jane Kenyon
(Graywolf Press)

Jacket Copy:  Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets―celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon’s poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, “simply lasting.”

Opening Lines: (“From Room to Room”)
       Here in this house, among photographs
       of your ancestors, their hymnbooks and old
       shoes...

       I move from room to room,
       a little dazed, like the fly. I watch it
       bump against each window.

       I am clumsy here, thrusting
       slabs of maple into the stove.

Blurbworthiness:  “The poems of Jane Kenyon are lodestars. I can think of no better way to navigate life than to keep her work close, as I have always done. It’s thrilling to now have this great parting gift from Donald Hall―his loving, intimate, discerning selection of the best of her poems.”  (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance)

Why It’s In My Stack:  Otherwise, Kenyon’s collection of “new and selected poems,” which was published shortly after her death in 1995, remains one of my absolute favorite collections by a poet, contemporary or otherwise. Like Dani Shapiro, I keep Kenyon and her lodestar words close to me and within easy reach. I don’t know how many of the “greatest hits” collected here will be new to me, but a return trip to her work is overdue.

The Splendid and the Vile
by Erik Larson
(Crown)

Jacket Copy:  On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson (author of The Devil in the White City) shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments. The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, in the face of unrelenting horror, Churchill’s eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.

Opening Lines:  No one had any doubt that the bombers would come. Defense planning began well before the war, though the planner had no specific threat in mind. Europe was Europe. If past experience was any sort of guide, a war could break out anywhere, anytime.

Why It’s In My Stack:  Though I’ve yet to read any of Larson’s books (they’re all in my TBR pile!), his treatment of the Blitz looks like a good place to start. Bombs away and here we go!

Dressed All Wrong For This
by Francine Witte
(Blue Light Press)

Jacket Copy:  Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, had this to say about the new collection of flash fiction by Francine Witte: “Dressed All Wrong For This is a splendid demonstration of the depth and range of the short-short story, an art form whose relevance and influence are rapidly growing in this digital age of compressed communication. Francine Witte brilliantly illuminates nuanced truths of the human condition in this collection, truths that could be expressed in no other way.”

Opening Lines:  She became like a fish out of it. Dizzy. Always dizzy. And dry.
       She would ready her arms for floating. Let them stretch out long and perpendicular. But nothing. Always nothing.
       She thought of how she got here. Days and days of scorching sunlight. And other obvious signs. In fancy restaurants, when conversation turned to global warming, for instance, she said she would rather talk about film.
          (From the opening story “When There Was No More Water”)

Blurbworthiness:  “With Dressed All Wrong For This, Francine Witte has created an illuminated manuscript of life at a slant: where we encounter a woman who loses her “husband weight,” Suzo the clown and his many wives, a shadow that takes matters into its own hands. Rarely does one come across a story collection so astonishingly original, language so fresh, and surreal writing so rife with what is real to us all.”  (Robert Scotellaro, author of Bad Motel)

Why It’s In My Stack:  I’ll make this quick: Francine Witte writes with tectonic plates, pressing and squeezing words until they are compressed into gems. Her flash fiction short-short stories sparkle. I plan to pair Dressed All Wrong For This with Witte’s new poetry collection, The Theory of Flesh.

The Center of Everything
by Jamie Harrison
(Counterpoint)

Jacket Copy:  For Polly, the small town of Livingston, Montana, is a magical ecosystem of extended family and raw, natural beauty governed by kinship networks that extend back generations. But the summer of 2002 finds Polly at a crossroads. A recent head injury has scattered her perception of the present, bringing to the surface events from thirty years ago and half a country away. A beloved friend goes missing on the Yellowstone River as Polly's relatives arrive for a reunion during the Fourth of July holiday, dredging up difficult memories for a family well acquainted with tragedy. Search parties comb the river as carefully as Polly combs her memories, and over the course of one fateful week, Polly arrives at a deeper understanding of herself and her larger-than-life family. Weaving together the past and the present, bounded by the brisk shores of Long Island Sound and the landscape of big-sky Montana, The Center of Everything examines with profound insight the nature of the human condition: the tribes we call family, the memories and touchstones that make up a life, and the loves and losses we must endure along the way.

Opening Lines:  When Polly was a child, and thought like a child, the world was a fluid place. People came and went and never looked the same from month to month or year to year. They shifted bodies and voices—a family friend shaved a beard, a great aunt shriveled into illness, a doctor grew taller—and it would take time to find them, to recognize them.
       Polly studied faces, she wondered, she undid the disguise. But sometimes people she loved disappeared entirely, curling off like smoke.

Why It’s In My Stack:  I’ve been looking forward to holding Jamie Harrison’s next novel in my hands ever since the release of The Widow Nash two years ago. Based on Harrison’s other work, The Center of Everything is bound to delight and satisfy. Side note: I made my home in Livingston for a brief, windy spell in the mid-1980s, so I automatically gravitate toward any book set there.

The Impossible First
by Colin O’Brady
(Scribner)

Jacket Copy:  Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support and completely human powered. Yet, Colin O’Brady was determined to do just that, even if, ten years earlier, there was doubt that he’d ever walk again normally. From the depths of a tragic accident, he fought his way back. In a quest to unlock his potential and discover what was possible, he went on to set three mountaineering world records before turning to this historic Antarctic challenge. O’Brady’s pursuit of a goal that had eluded many others was made even more intense by a head-to-head battle that emerged with British polar explorer Captain Louis Rudd—also striving to be “the first.” Enduring Antarctica’s sub-zero temperatures and pulling a sled that initially weighed 375 pounds—in complete isolation and through a succession of whiteouts, storms, and a series of near disasters—O’Brady persevered. Alone with his thoughts for nearly two months in the vastness of the frozen continent—gripped by fear and doubt—he reflected on his past, seeking courage and inspiration in the relationships and experiences that had shaped his life. Honest, deeply moving, filled with moments of vulnerability—and set against the backdrop of some of the most extreme environments on earth, from Mt. Everest to Antarctica—The Impossible First reveals how anyone can reject limits, overcome immense obstacles, and discover what matters most.

Opening Lines:  I started thinking about my hands.
       That was my first mistake.
       After forty-eight days and more than 760 miles alone across Antarctica, the daily ache of my hands—cracked with cold, gripping my ski poles twelve hours a day—had become like a drumbeat, forming the rhythm of my existence.

Blurbworthiness:  “Suspenseful, soul-searching, and at times metaphysical as O’Brady endures an endless sheet of white and ice...The book is a testament to the human soul and the amazing feats we can accomplish with training, willpower, and the singular resilience of the mind. You will learn from and be inspired by it.” (Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights)

Why It’s In My Stack:  Earlier this year, I traveled across the vast icy desert of Antarctica. I wasn’t alone: I was accompanied by Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his classic adventure book The Worst Journey in the World—a narrative of walking and sledding across the continent in the early 1910s with details so intense I braved frostbite to turn the pages. So, Antarctica has been on my mind a lot. O’Brady’s solo account is now perched near the icy peaks of my towering to-be-read mountain. I can’t wait to freeze again.

Afterlife
by Julia Alvarez
(Algonquin Books)

Jacket Copy:  Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife, the first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including—maybe especially—members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

Opening Lines:  She is to meet him / a place they often choose for special occasions / to celebrate her retirement from the college / a favorite restaurant / and the new life awaiting her / a half-hour drive from their home / a mountain town / twenty if she speeds in the thirty-mile zone / Tonight it makes more sense / a midway point / to arrive separately / as she will be driving down from her doctor’s appointment / she gets there first / as he will be driving from home / he should have been there before her / she starts calling his cell / after waiting ten, twenty minutes / he doesn’t answer

Blurbworthiness:  “Ravishing and heartfelt, Afterlife explores the complexities of familial devotion and tragedy against a backdrop of a world in crisis, and the ways in which we struggle to maintain hope, faith, compassion and love. This is Julia Alvarez at her best and most personal.” (Jonathan Santlofer, author of The Widower’s Notebook)

Why It’s In My Stack:  I was blown away by the Prologue, whose opening lines I quoted above. It continues on in that fashion / fragments sliced by backslashes / for three pages / titled “Broken English” / the parts adding up to the whole. It reflects, in concrete form, the stuttering thoughts which swirl and dive-bomb our minds in times of grief. And it made me sit up and take notice that here was something fresh, something visceral, something that might make me cough up tears as the pages go on. (The rest of Afterlife is told in the “normal” way, sans backslash interruption.)

William Lychack Recommends: The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post

When a book plucks a chord inside you--the metal harp string humming and going blurry as it vibrates--and you connect with the words on a visceral and/or intellectual level, then there comes a moment when you can't keep that book bottled up inside any longer.  You burst out of the house at a run, or pop your head over the cubicle divider, or dial your daughter's phone number, and blurt out, "Listen, I just read the best book!"  And then, for the next five minutes to an hour, you badger, bug, and berate your poor, trapped audience with the high points of this Best Book Ever.  Has that ever happened to you?  Or am I the only one who loses all sense of social bearing when I talk about books that really matter to me (Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, the poetry of Brian Turner, anything by Lewis Nordan, etc.)?

William Lychack recently wrote me an email which, in essence, reassured me that I am not alone.  Lychack (author of the short-story collection The Architect of Flowers and the novel The Wasp Eater) seems to exhibit this same kind of passionate behavior for at least one treasured book (I'm sure there are others in his personal library which are equally well-worn with love).  Here is his recommendation for the 1958 classic The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post (1906-1996):

Surely, it must be true, everyone has a book that truly changes their lives.  There’s always a context to how this book finds you--a context which probably isn’t that interesting or magical to anyone except you yourself--so I’ll spare you the story of how a stranger handed me this book, how forlorn and lost I must have seemed, how this strange quest of Laurens van der Post’s spoke directly to me.  But I would, if I could, give you a copy of the book, if I saw you in such a state right now in front of me.  And I’d make you wait a moment until I found a brief passage I’ve all but memorized.  I’d tell you that you don’t need any context for it, but then I’d probably say that, in the book, van der Post, who’d dreamed from boyhood of finding the nearly-exterminated Bushmen, had just committed to organizing his expedition into the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana.  I’d tell you it’s a spiritual quest for him and would thumb through the pages and read the following passage to you:

In fact all the aspects of the plan that were within reach of my own hand were worked out and determined there and then.  What took longer, of course, was the part which depended on the decisions of others and on circumstances beyond my own control.  Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished.  I say "amazed," but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulness, doubts and hesitations was, as Hamlet put it so heart-rendingly to himself: “the readiness is all.”  If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one’s readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one’s side.

Then I’d hand the whole caboodle of this book to you and simply disappear, just as someone handed a hardcover copy to me.  I was fresh out of college and working in a bookstore at the time on the upper east side of Manhattan--the long-gone Madison Avenue Bookshop--and I had never felt more adrift in my life, trying to find my feet as far from home and the life I wanted to live as I might have ever been.  Maybe I'd recognize some of that same kindred feeling in the way you look, maybe that's why I'd hand the book to you, maybe that's why you'd read it, and maybe that's why it might speak to you in the life-saving way that it did for me.  You never know.  Stranger things happen.

Author photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis

My Year of Reading: The Best Books of 2011

These are the ones I loved.

These are the ones I tried to persuade others to love.

These are the ones that, when I was asked "Whatcha reading these days?", would cause my eyes to spark, my hand to leap out and clutch the other person's forearm, my face to press close to theirs within socially-unacceptable distances, and these words to tumble out of my mouth: "I'm glad you asked."

These are the ones that stood out, the electric-blue mountains upthrusting from the beige prairie.

These are the ones whose language skyrocketed above the dull, the insipid, the unnecessarily dense words found on other pages I read this year.

These are the ones still burning bright in my memory after twelve, ten, three months, like a match-flare in the dark of a coal shaft.

In short, I fucking went apeshit for these books.

In a year of great turmoil within the publishing industry--a bankrupt Borders, a groundswell of e-books (which for the first time outsold hardcovers), a bestseller "written" by Jersey Shore's Snooki--one thing remained stable: writing that soared and the writers who gave it wings.  Oh sure, there were plenty of instances where I opened books and found lazy, pedestrian writing (in some of the year's most lauded books, I might add); but I can't remember another year when I was more moved, provoked and entertained by what I read than I was in 2011.  Book after book, I found myself marveling at superior craftsmanship--both at the sentence level and in the narratives as a whole.  And many of those books did this in the tight, constrained spaces of a short story.

I know there are some readers out there who claim they're allergic to the short form, but I've never understood why this is so.  Our increasingly-distracted culture should be ripe for reading in short bursts.  But I'll save that sermon for another day.  From where I sat, 2011 proved to be the Year of the Short Story.  In fact, seven of the fifteen books on the following list are collections of short fiction.  I was impressed not just by the quantity of story collections, but by their quality.  I'll spit in the eye--ptui!--of anyone who tries to tell me the short story is "dead."  Not according to what I read this year.  It's alive and kicking, baby!  In fact, it's doing a wild Charleston across the dance floor right now, so get out of its way you big lumbering lead-footed novels!

So, without further ado, here are my favorites published in 2011, from among the 55 books I read this year.  They're in roughly the order in which I read them, from January to December.


Quiet Americans
by Erika Dreifus
Last Light Studio Books

This debut collection of short stories is the first book I started and finished in 2011 and even back in January, I knew it stood a good chance of making my year-end "best" list.  It's a small book from a small press, but Quiet Americans is powerful in its delivery.  The stories draw their soft rage from the atrocities of the Holocaust.  The death-camp horrors are only seen on the periphery, but Auschwitz and Buchenwald never stop echoing in the lives of the Jews who populate the book.  Dreifus doesn’t shy away from hard subjects, but she addresses the unthinkable--the broken histories of European Jews--with a remarkable mastery of form and sensitivity for her characters who have suffered through so much.  She’s a storyteller in the classic sense of the word and it's possible to trace a clear, direct line from Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud to her 21st-century keyboard.
Click here for the full review


Volt
Alan Heathcock
Graywolf Press

Take the Old Testament, then add healthy doses of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.  Stir vigorously, then plunge the sparking end of a live wire from a downed power line into the mixing bowl and you'll come close to the hair-raising energy of Heathcock's fiction.  In the course of this short-story collection, a father embarks on a cross-country odyssey after he kills his son in a farming accident, bored teens vandalize a neighboring town with bowling balls, a pastor wrestles with guilt over his son’s combat death in Iraq, yet another father enlists his son’s help in disposing of a man he’s killed when their trucks come to an impasse on a single-lane road, and--in my favorite story, "Peacekeeper"--Sheriff Helen Farraley conceals the discovery of a murdered girl’s body from fellow citizens who, she thinks, would be devastated by the truth.  As I said in my review, "Volt makes us think, makes us feel, and makes us believe in the power of short fiction once again...Sin, guilt, regret, redemption, forgiveness, and mercy wrestle like naked, greased angels of God in these pages."  Go ahead, stick your tongue on the end of Volt's live wire and see if your imagination doesn't ignite.
Click here for the full review


The Tiger's Wife
by Tea Obreht
Random House
Layered in myth, memory and folklore, this novel is one of those rare books which are full-immersion experiences. It begins with Natalia, a young doctor working in an unnamed Balkan country, who learns of her grandfather's death then makes it her goal to learn the truth about his fate.  When she does, she unleashes a flood of memories--most of them involving long walks with her beloved family patriarch and repeated visits to the zoo.  As we unpeel the many narrative layers of this novel, we also learn about a lonely butcher's wife, a marauding tiger, the superstitious residents of a snowbound village, and a certain “deathless man” who never seems to age but who always shows up just before a person’s demise.   The Tiger's Wife weaves a remarkable spell as it moves across the boundaries of time and imagination.  Obreht has paid special attention to the way a story is built.  Every truss is carefully set in place, the floorboards are squared and true, each nail is pounded with the strongest, surest blows.  The sentences in and of themselves are miniature works of art and you keep thinking each one is greater than the one before and Obreht could never top herself.  And yet, she does.  Just look at the beauty packed into the short space of this one sentence: “It was late afternoon when they came across the tiger in a clearing by a frozen pond, bright and real, carved from sunlight.”  There are many more sentences like that waiting for you inside this masterpiece of a book.
Click here for a link to the full review


So Much Pretty
by Cara Hoffman
Simon & Schuster

Set in the fictional upstate New York town of Haeden, So Much Pretty revolves around the disappearance of Wendy White, a well-liked hometown girl in her early 20s.  We've seen this sort of thing before in other books, movies and every third episode of Dateline: a woman goes missing, a family mourns, the case goes cold.  It's a sad sub-genre of fiction (see also: The Lovely Bones) which is all too often happening in real life outside the covers of a book.  But in her fierce, fiery telling of Haeden's latest crime, Hoffman makes this entry into Abduction Lit all her own.  Hoffman tells the story through testimony from characters, shifting points of view, flashbacks, and pieces of forensic evidence.  Throughout the novel, we move from head to head like a parabolic mic, picking up conversations and burrowing ever deeper into the lives of Haeden's residents.  So Much Pretty builds slowly--it took me a few dozen pages to really get into it--but it wasn't long before I found myself deep, deep inside the world Hoffman created, unwilling to be pulled away for any reason.  But yet, for all its appearance of a mystery-thriller, this is really a novel of ideas.  So Much Pretty opens its arms to hug some pretty big themes--the depravity of mankind, the lost Utopia of rural living, the moral cost of single-handedly trying to cleanse society of sin, and the creeping rot of rumor in small towns--but at every turn Hoffman manages to turn social commentary into a gripping, white-knuckled read.  Of all the books I read this year, this is the one which has haunted me the longest and deepest.
Click here for the full review


The Architect of Flowers
by William Lychack
Mariner Books

Long after you've finished reading The Architect of Flowers and set it aside to move on to other books, the cadence of William Lychack’s prose will continue to click like a metronome in your head.  You may forget the plots of these stories (an old woman trains a crow to steal for her, a boy confronts memories of his father at his funeral), you may forget some of the characters (a ghost-writer, a pregnant woman raising chickens, a mother and her gun-toting son), but I’m willing to bet you’ll have a hard time shaking loose Lychack’s distinct voice. For example, consider the opening lines of "Hawkins":

      Killed a deer last night. Kate and me and this creature almost completely over us. Flash of animal, tug of wheel, sound we felt more than heard, poor thing lying on the side of the road as we pulled around.
      Should have just kept driving, gone home, felt bad. Don’t know what possessed us to get out of the car. November and nothing but trees around. No cars, no houses, deer small and slender, tongue powdered with sand.

Lychack’s strength lies in his ability to render details in language so precise--at once familiar and fresh--that the stories demand multiple re-reads just to savor the gorgeous flavor of the words.
Click here for the full review


The Sojourn
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press

Set in the years surrounding World War One, The Sojourn is an instant classic of war literature and fully deserves a place on the shelf next to Remarque and Hemingway.  Krivak's style is simple, direct, and sedate, but when violence appears, it comes in unforgettable detail:

Miro was killed in a wave of shelling by the Russians, blown in half, this man who fought in their company said, but taking some time to die as his legless trunk of a body lay against the stump of a fallen tree and he clawed at the sky, pleading for someone to help him.

Wow.  Try shaking that image from your head.  The Sojourn is told in three parts, and Krivak paces his cadence to the beat of a three-act play, beginning with a prologue set in 1899 in a Colorado mining town, moving to the Hungarian Empire, and eventually landing its protagonist, an Austrian sniper named Jozef, on the battlefield fighting the Russians on the eastern front.  Along the way, the sharpshooter undergoes a metamorphosis from starry-eyed recruit to hollow-eyed veteran.  In The Sojourn, war can be beautiful on the page, but hell in contemplation.  As a writer, Krivak approaches combat with the placid nature of a Zen master--calmly, patiently knocking down the marble statues erected to glorify battles.  His Jozef is on an odyssey from gung-ho Soldat to steel-hearted sniper to conscience-stricken prey-on-the-run to bedraggled prisoner-of-war.  The Sojourn is an important, contemplative, necessary work of fiction--mandatory reading for those who want to gain some understanding into the psyches of our men and women in uniform returning from a long, bedraggled war in Iraq.
Click here for a link to the full review


You Know When the Men Are Gone
by Siobhan Fallon
Putnam

Here's another landmark of war fiction which comes to us at just the right time.  In her debut collection of short stories, Fallon has a fresh perspective on another side of combat: the homefront.  As the wife of an Army officer, the author knows all too well about the often-impenetrable society of stoic, buzz-cut soldiers and their families.  Yes, these eight stories are about life inside the gates of Fort Hood, Texas, but they're not the cozy, frou-frou tales of a left-behind wife who fills her lonely hours baking cakes and gossiping at coffee klatches, nor are they the wildly-exaggerated soap operas of Lifetime's Army Wives series.  The Sojourn may put us in the trenches, but You Know When the Men Are Gone takes us to a place where fiction rarely ventures: the paper-thin walls of military housing through which you can hear babies burp, chairs scrape on kitchen floors, and wives sob in the days after the husband leaves.  In these stories, people try too hard, or they don't try enough; lovers are stymied by the intermittent static of phone lines between Texas and Iraq; children act out their anger and loneliness by playing hooky from school, leaving a terrified mother to wander the neighborhoods family housing calling their names; wives endure the sickly-sweet platitudes offered by chaplains at the Family Readiness Group meetings; and, in one of the most startling stories ("Leave"), a soldier comes home from Iraq unannounced and breaks into his basement where he lives for a week, hoping to catch his wife having an affair.  If Fallon was merely an accurate chronicler of the military's domestic side, then You Know When the Men Are Gone would be little more than a literary curiosity to read and forget within a year's time.  Thankfully, this is fiction than transcends novelty as it explores the universal themes of love, jealousy, anger and loyalty.
Click here to read the full review


American Masculine
by Shann Ray
Graywolf Press

Here's yet another strong debut from a writer who knows his way around a short story.  Like his fellow Graywolf author Alan Heathcock, Shann Ray scrapes away the frills of language and goes all the way to the bone.  His tales are set in the American West--primarily Montana--and they are populated with tough men and tougher women, souls knotted hard by the blistering circumstances of domestic abuse and alcohol. Ray writes not to entertain with clever plots or pyrotechnic language; his intent is to blast our souls loose with simple tales built on old-fashioned morality.  Though the stories stop short of preaching and proselytizing, some readers might be put off by the uncompromising spiritual center to be found throughout the book, but that would be their loss if they walk away from American Masculine.   This is one of the more challenging set of short stories I've read in a long time--it pokes my conscience and gently leads me to self-examination.   Am I better man for reading American Masculine?   I don't know, but I do feel refreshed and invigorated.
Click here for the full review


The Last Werewolf
by Glen Duncan
Knopf
Not everything I read this year was a deep, ponderous exploration of the human condition.  Sometimes I just wanted a kick-ass, sexy thrill ride about a 200-year-old werewolf.  Glen Duncan's novel The Last Werewolf was the ticket to that amusement park.  As the story opens, Jake Marlowe is given the news by his human "handler" that the only other known member of his monster-species has just been assassinated.  From there, we're off: dodging silver bullets and replacing ripped-at-the-seams clothing every full moon.  At times, the novel reads like an espionage thriller (complete with double agents and secret identities) from John Le Carre or Graham Greene, but sprinkled with a liberal dose of sex and violence.  It's a fun ride, yes, but it's also smart in ways that a certain other twilit novel could never be.  Duncan has crafted a novel that, like last year's The Passage, could transform paranormal literature for the better. The Last Werewolf goes deep and metaphysical with frequent references to Kierkegaard and Freud, but remains entertaining enough at the Stephen King level.
Click here to read the full review


We the Animals
by Justin Torres
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This exhilarating debut novel also has some animals at its core.  In this case, however, they are the three wild boys of a Puerto Rican father and white mother living in upstate New York.  Narrated by the youngest of the brothers, We the Animals is written with the density of poetry and the intensity of a drug trip.  Structured in a series of short chapters, the novel plants us in the fragile bubble of a family who breaks and mends and breaks again.  The parents, volatile and in love, frequently fight ("they made thunder, stomping above us, chasing each other, tumbling furniture") and sometimes put their children in danger with risky behavior.  They aren't necessarily irresponsible, they're just tired and frazzled to a nub.  Of their mother, we're told: "She worked graveyard shifts at the brewery up the hill from our house, and sometimes she got confused.  She would wake randomly, mixed up, mistaking one day for another, one hour for the next, order us to brush our teeth and get into PJs and lie in bed in the middle of the day; or when we came into the kitchen in the morning, half asleep, she'd be pulling a meat loaf out of the oven, saying, 'What is wrong with you boys?  I been calling and calling for dinner.'"  Torres' prose is so mesmerizing and addictive that by the time you reach the end of this short book, you may find yourself quoting the first line of the novel: "We wanted more."


Train Dreams
by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Like We the Animals, Johnson's novel is short but potent.  Technically, it's a novella, but you'll come away from Train Dreams with a tingle-dizzy sensation, as if you've been reading the book for weeks, meeting memorable characters, wholly baptized in story, and floating through the pages like you were in a passenger car of a lightweight locomotive as it smokes across the rolling landscape.  Its main character is Robert Grainier, a day laborer working in the Idaho panhandle at the start of the 20th century and its central action is the consumption of his wife and infant daughter in a "feasting" forest conflagration, "a fire stronger than God."  Grief sets Grainier drifting across Idaho and Montana working odd jobs.  Johnson presents Grainier's biography in broad strokes that sometimes go off the canvas in Biblical panoramas of misery.  At only 116 pages, Train Dream's brush strokes might strike some readers as too sweeping and Grainier's story too rushed, but this is not intended to be a sprawling tale in a thick book designed to sprain your wrist; it's an epic written on a bullet that smacks you quick and hard between the eyes.  It's told in scenes written with the dynamism of billboards.
Click here for the full review


In This Light
by Melanie Rae Thon
Graywolf Press

You don’t read Melanie Rae Thon’s short stories so much as you experience them.  Her characters are junkies, vagrants, and castoffs; they’re lonely Vietnam vets, concentration camp survivors, and Civil War slaves; and for the space of 30 or 40 pages, they are you and you are them.  Once you start any story in this volume of new and previously-published works, you're immediately pulled into the current of her energetic and uncompromising language.  It's been said that Thon is among the most criminally-overlooked writers of our time.  I have to confess I was one of those guilty as charged....until this year when I read In This Light and found myself performing a series of self-administered kicks to my butt for waiting so long.  As I mentioned in my review, I felt like an unwashed sinner wandering into an evangelist’s revival tent at the height of his sermon, blasted by the heat of salvation.  The entire collection is coated in a style which is expressionistic and highly internalized.  Put simply, Thon’s stories exist on a different plane than most fiction you’ll read.  The language is breath and smoke, keenly tuned to matters of redemption and healing.  At the end of one story, I made a note in the margin: “These stories are prayers, petitions to God for understanding and clarity.”  If you've never read Thon before, may you all come to the light and discover what all the fuss is about.  And then start kicking yourself in the butt.
Click here for the full review


The Art of Fielding
by Chad Harbach
Little, Brown

College baseball, sexual politics and Herman Melville sound like uneasy bedfellows, but in Chad Harbach's hands, they combine into one of the richest novels of the year.  Like the other buzz-hyped debut author of 2011, Tea Obreht, Harbach comes out of the starting gate at a full, confident gallop in this never-dull novel about Henry Skrimshander, the up-and-coming shortstop for Westish College's Harpooners.  The small school on the shores of Lake Michigan is famous for the discovery of some of Melville's unpublished papers.  The undergrad who found those papers, Guert Affenlight, is now Westish's president who is also tortured by lust for Owen Dunne, the Harpooners' Zen-like player (and Henry's roommate).  The Art of Fielding is populated with wonderfully-drawn, idiosyncratic characters--not a single one of them are given short shrift by Harbach.  I won't give away too much of the plot for fear of ruining the wonderful surprises to be found on these pages.  Suffice it to say that these are flawed characters who commit errors both on and off the field and spend a good portion of the book working out their emotional tangles.  The comparisons to Bernard Malamud's The Natural and John Irving's The World According to Garp are equally apt.  Harbach throws his words with an easy grace and wit, his fingers barely breaking a sweat as he makes the white-knuckle process of writing look effortless.


The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt
by Caroline Preston
Ecco

Easily one of the most unique reading experiences I had all year, Preston's novel is told entirely through the pages of a young woman's scrapbook she kept during the 1920s.  The fictional Frankie Pratt saves relevant scraps of her life and pastes them in an album, giving us a window into the heady, champagne-bubble whirl of Jazz Age life.  Preston, an archivist and scrapbooker herself, lovingly reproduces pages which burst into life with actual keepsakes like postcards, sheet music, wine labels, playing cards, charm bracelets, gum wrappers, swatches of fabric, photographs and ads for freckle cream.  When we first meet her in 1920, the titular heroine is a spunky high school senior with worldly ambitions.  The first page of her scrapbook is headed with the paper label “The Girl Who Wants to Write.”  On the next page is a picture of her father’s old portable Corona typewriter (“Mice had chewed the case but it still works!”).  And from there, we’re off on a whirlwind tour of Frankie’s life as a blossoming woman which will take her to Greenwich Village, Paris, and straight into the heart of her readers.
Click here for the full review


Men in the Making
by Bruce Machart
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This is one of the last books I read in 2011 and it turned out to be one of the most wrenching (it's neck-and-neck with Heathcock's Volt as Gut-Gripper of the Year).  As he did in his debut novel The Wake of Forgiveness, Machart sets these short stories in the fertile land of Texas and populates them with hard-bit men who go all soft for women and babies (at least some of them do).  Here you'll find guys who work in lumber mills, hospital burn centers, refineries, and in one particularly memorable story ("What You're Walking Around Without"), the front seat of a car as a medical courier delivering body parts on his daily route.  In another stand-out story, "Among the Living Amidst the Trees," Machart writes: "These are rough-hewn and heavy men, men with calluses thick as rawhide, men who aren't afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts."  Machart's style slips easily from the vernacular ("Teeth on him, he could eat corn on the cob through a picket fence") to achingly beautiful sensual details ("With the windows down, the forest smells akin to what you might get if you boiled Pine-Sol on the stovetop while roasting a sack of rain-soaked soil in the oven").  I was so moved by his fierce prose that, midway through reading Men in the Making, I posted an enthusiastic message on my Facebook Wall: "I can only read one story per day because they are like miniature razor blades bumping through my bloodstream. This is fiction that excoriates and scrubs the reader from the inside out."  Well now I've finished this sharp-edged collection and I'm still bleeding--in a good way.  I'll have a full and proper review of Men in the Making sometime in the near future, but for now I'm going around to everyone I see, my eyes sparking, my fingers grabbing their forearms, and insisting they do themselves a favor:  Buy.  This.  Book.


For what it's worth, here are the books I never got around to reading, which may or may not have made this list:

What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories by Frank Bill
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean

These are just some of the many, many books I couldn't squeeze into my schedule.  I mention them because I think they're books you'll want to make time to read.

One more thing: here's a link to my favorite books of 2010.

Re-enchanting the World: The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack

Long after you have finished reading The Architect of Flowers and set it aside to move on to other books, the cadence of William Lychack’s prose will continue to click like a metronome in your head.  You may forget the plots of these stories (an old woman trains a crow to steal for her, a boy confronts memories of his father at his funeral), you may forget some of the characters (a ghost-writer, a pregnant woman raising chickens, a mother and her gun-toting son), but I’m willing to bet you’ll have a hard time shaking loose Lychack’s distinct voice.

It’s a style that boldly announces itself on the first page of the first story, “Stolpestad,” which is told from the second-person point of view, putting us in the shoes of a small-town cop as he patrols the streets:

      Was toward the end of your shift, a Saturday, another one of those long slow lazy afternoons of summer—sun never burning through the clouds, clouds never breaking into rain—odometer like a clock ticking all those bored little pent-up streets and mills and tenements away. The coffee shops, the liquor stores, laundromats, police, fire, gas stations to pass—this is your life, Stolpestad—all the turns you could make in your sleep, the brickwork and shop fronts and river with its stink of carp and chokeweed, the hills swinging up free from town, all momentum and mood, roads smooth and empty, this big blue hum of cruiser past houses and lawns and long screens of trees, trees cutting open to farms and fields all contoured and high with corn, air thick and silvery, as if something was on fire somewhere—still with us?
      That sandy turnaround—always a question, isn’t it?
      Gonna pull over and ride back down or not?
      End of your shift—or nearly so—and in comes the call. It’s Phyllis, dispatcher for the weekend, that radio crackle of her voice, and she’s sorry for doing this to you but a boy’s just phoned for help with a dog. And what’s she think you look like now, you ask, town dogcatcher? Oh, you should be so lucky, she says and gives the address and away we go.

Away we go indeed.  We drive over to the house with the cop, past “the apartments stacked with porches, the phone poles and wires and sidewalks all close and cluttered,” and answer the call which turns into an emotionally wrenching event—both for Stolpestad the cop and for us the reader.

Each of Lychack’s thirteen stories is a miniature emotional event.  We read a story and then, overwhelmed, we put the book aside to go walk the dog, cook the dinner, or just stare blankly into space, giving ourselves time to process what we just went through.

The action in these stories is relatively small, contained in moments of compressed drama. Witness, for instance, the way “Hawkins” opens:

      Killed a deer last night. Kate and me and this creature almost completely over us. Flash of animal, tug of wheel, sound we felt more than heard, poor thing lying on the side of the road as we pulled around.
      Should have just kept driving, gone home, felt bad. Don’t know what possessed us to get out of the car. November and nothing but trees around. No cars, no houses, deer small and slender, tongue powdered with sand.

Lychack’s strength lies in his ability to render details in language so precise—at once familiar and fresh—that the stories demand multiple re-reads just to savor the gorgeous flavor of the words.  In “Chickens,” we sit in a “house so quiet you could hear the clock chewing minutes the way an insect chews a leaf.”  In “Thin Edge of the Wedge,” a lawn is “the green of frozen peas.” In “Like a Demon,” a roadside diner has the “slushy sound of cutlery and voices, walls of quilted aluminum.” And in the title story, which centers around a plant hybridizer and his wife trying to hold the family together, Lychack turns a mere buttonhole into poetry:

Back in the city he worked in buttons. Glass buttons, plastic buttons, buttons of silver, copper, brass, coral, leather, lacquer, amber, pewter, gold. Buttons of broken china. Buttons of shipwrecked coins. Five, seven, eleven years in buttons and beads and able to recite the breathless rise of the lowly button in his sleep, its underdog days as hopeless decoration, early alliance with suspender and belt, marriage to buttonhole, love affairs with safety pin and clasp hook, mentor to the metal snap, arch-nemesis of the zipper.

In some stories, like “Griswald” in which an elderly neighbor takes a too-keen interest in a nine-year-old boy, a feeling of menace hums like a barely-discernable bass note below each sentence.  The language is beautiful but you can’t shake that clammy unease.  This is how Lychack gets us—he lulls us with music, then turns us sharply around to face the mirror.  Why do you think “Stolpestad” is told in that direct-address narrative style?  Lychack’s characters are us.

I can think of no better way to summarize The Architect of Flowers than this description which can be found on Lychack’s website: “all the characters in this collection yearn to somehow re-enchant the world, to turn the ordinary and profane into the sacred and beautiful again, to make beauty serve as an antidote to grief.”

Lychack takes all the hard, ugly, misshapen realities of our world, waves his pen like a magic wand, reaches into the hat, and pulls out—not rabbits or doves, but something infinitely better: words.  Language like we’ve never seen before and probably won’t see again for a long time.  At least not until Lychack's next book.