My Year of Reading: Best Books of 2014

When I sit in my favorite reading chair in December and think about all the books about to come my way over the next twelve months, there is, admittedly, a feeling both of dread and hope.  I want my reading to be something I look forward to each day, a feeling of can't-wait-to-get-to-the-page.  Sometimes the reading year turns out to have that kind of vibrancy....but there have been times when it seems every other book was heavy and dull as lead, the language uninspired and the characters flat.

Happily, 2014 was less dross and more gold.  In fact, it turned out to be one of the best reading years I've had in a long time--particularly for first novels.  Maybe I was just making better choices this year, or maybe the publishing stars were in full alignment.  Whatever the reason, my Library Thing catalog was dominated by four- and five-star ratings this year.

Here are my favorite books published in 2014, in no particular order:

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

This was the year I vowed to read authors who'd been languishing in my To-Be-Read queue for far too long.  I started with Donna Tartt (The Secret History--one of the best non-2014 books I read in the past twelve months), and moved on to Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South) before diving into a deep pool of Anthony Doerr.  I couldn't have picked a better year to read my way through the Boise, Idaho writer's canon, because while Memory Wall and The Shell Collector were excellent examples of the short-story form, this year's novel All the Light We Cannot See proved to be his masterpiece.  A simple plot synopsis—blind French girl and Hitler Youth boy communicate via radio during World War Two—doesn't do Doerr's novel justice. This is a 500-page page-turner whose story lives and breathes at the sentence level.  Every word is a gem, placed with a pair of jeweler's tweezers into its place on the page.  The result is a story as intricate as the model city M. LeBlanc builds for his daughter Marie-Laure.  Just like that French locksmith, Anthony Doerr is a master craftsman.  I can't wait to read his other two books: the novel About Grace and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome.

My Life as a Foreign Country

by Brian Turner

Near the end of this gut-honest memoir about poet Brian Turner’s time in Iraq, he writes: “America, vast and laid out from one ocean to another, is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home.”  Likewise, this book and its 224 pages probably cannot hold all the rampaging emotions of Turner’s war experience, but damn if he doesn’t spill a lot of emotional blood in the course of these 136 short chapters.  As anyone who has read Turner’s two collections of poetry (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) will tell you, he’s able to turn even the most horrific topics--death, dismemberment, sexual assault, post-traumatic nightmares--into things of linguistic beauty.  In My Life as a Foreign Country, he once again brings the war home to us.  Are we bold enough to hold his words?

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

Victoria Wilson spent 15 years deep-sea diving into Barbara Stanwyck's life.  After I closed the 1,056th page of her book about actress Barbara Stanwyck, I wanted more, more, more!  Specifically, I wanted to read more about Stanwyck because Wilson only covers the first third of the screen legend’s life.  I’m praying that Volume 2 (which will begin right around the time Stanwyck is filming Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) is on its way soon.  We don’t often see a Hollywood biographer give the same kind of treatment to her subject like, say, Robert A. Caro devotes to his multi-volume look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s life; but Stanwyck seems to deserve it.  She was a tough pioneer in the Golden Age of Tinseltown (she was the first actress under contract to two studios at the same time) and Wilson paints a rich, full-bodied portrait of a woman who once self-deprecatingly said, “I have the face that sank a thousand ships.”  Maybe Stanwyck wasn’t the most conventionally gorgeous actress of her era (hello, Vivien Leigh!), but she sure could act her way out of a thousand wet paper bags.

Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Demon Camp tells the troubling story of a soldier named Caleb Daniels who turns to a "Christian exorcism camp" in Georgia as a way of getting rid of "the Black Thing" which has plagued him since his return from Afghanistan after a Chinook helicopter carrying sixteen Special Ops soldiers crashes during a rescue mission, killing everyone on board, including Caleb's best friend Kip Jacoby.  Back stateside, Caleb begins to see dead soldiers everywhere and is convinced he's been possessed by a demon.  To rid himself of these apparitions, he decides to kill himself...but veers off instead into the company of the bizzaro camp in rural Georgia.  At this point, Jennifer Percy, gathering notes for a story about soldiers suffering from PTSD, gets personally involved in Caleb's life.  That's when things get really interesting.  In her debut, Percy has delivered a book that's haunting, empathetic, and crackling with beautiful sentences.  Demon Camp reads like a fevered dream and, if you're like me, it will stay with you for a long, long time after you turn the final page.

Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

This was the year for Montana novelists and Malcolm Brooks' debut was among the best of them.  (Full disclosure: Malcolm lives just up the road from me and we've become good friends...but only after I finished reading Painted Horses, so I think my initial assessment is still relatively untainted.)  Set in the Big Sky state in the mid-1950s, Painted Horses gives us an American West on the cusp of change.  Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist hired to survey a canyon in advance of a major dam project; her job is to make sure nothing of historic value will be lost in the coming flood—a task that proves to be more complicated than she thought after she meets John H, a mustanger and a veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, who’s been living a fugitive life in the canyon.  Together, the two race against time to save the past before it is destroyed by an industry with an eye on the future.  Painted Horses is unlike any “western” I’ve read; it refreshes the genre while nodding back at its roots.  This novel should already be at the top of the list for Larry McMurtry Fan Club members.

The Great Glass Sea

by Josh Weil

Josh Weil's first full-length novel The Great Glass Sea, long-awaited after his debut collection of novellas The New Valley, is many things (apart from being great indeed).  It's about a giant greenhouse, mirrors floating in space, sibling rivalry, and a Russia unlike the one we know.  It is a story about the complicated love between brothers.  It is a multi-genre novel that takes meaty bites of science-fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and big Russian books by the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.  It is a superb meditation on individualism and the cost of courage.  It is a book with a chapter ("Heaven's Breast") which contains some of the most breath-taking imagery of ANY book I read in the past five years (I'd quote the entire chapter here if I could, but I can't, so you'll just have to go out and buy the book for yourself to experience the beauty for yourself).  And The Great Glass Sea is a book rife with beautiful sentences like these: "He breathed in.  If there was a faint redolence of mushroom and cigarettes and something fresh and sharp as a radish newly bit, on her it still seemed unlike anything he'd ever known."  And, "Nothing bold was ever built without someone deciding where to lay the first stone."  Or, "And the hail spilled down, a ceaseless clattering of pearls stripped off a broken string wrapped round and round the welkin neck, each one a whisper through the clouds, a multitude of last prayers mouthed, until the final stone slipped off the necklace end and down the breast of heaven and left the clouds all hushed."  The Great Glass Sea is a big book of 400 pages, but I found myself taking it slow, savoring the many delicious lines along the way to its wholly-satisfying finish.

Be Safe I Love You 

by Cara Hoffman

In Cara Hoffman's riveting novel, Lauren Clay has returned from a tour of duty in Iraq in time to spend Christmas holiday with her father and younger brother Danny.  All seems fine on the surface, but—as with Caleb Daniels in Demon Camp—there are some rough seas building inside Lauren.  Be Safe I Love You is populated with engaging characters and carries an urgent message about how we treat our veterans returning from war.  I also appreciated Cara Hoffman's exceptional novel for the way it portrayed female soldiers--characters of whom we see far too little in contemporary fiction.

The Remedy for Love

by Bill Roorbach

When I think back to everything I read in 2014, Bill Roorbach's novel takes the prize for Book Which Most Bruised Strangers' Palms After I Shoved It Into Their Hands.  The Remedy for Love is definitely a "You must read this!" kind of book.  Here's a pithy plot synopsis (which is actually the blurby words of praise I gave the novel after reading an advance copy): Take two strangers—Eric, a small-town lawyer, and Danielle, a former schoolteacher turned homeless squatter—put them in a cabin in the Maine woods, spice it up with a little romantic tension, stir in the wreckage of past love affairs, sprinkle liberally with sharp, funny dialogue, then add the Storm of the Century which buries the cabin in huge drifts of snow, and—voila!—you've got The Remedy for Love, one of the best novels of this or any year.  I'm not a doctor, but I'll be prescribing Bill Roorbach's novel to readers sick of blase, cliched love stories that follow worn-out formulas.  What we have here is a flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller.  The Remedy for Love is good medicine which most readers will want to swallow in one dose.  I don't, however, have a remedy for those bruises on your hands.  Sorry about that.

Redeployment

by Phil Klay

Believe everything you've heard about this book--it deserves every syllable of praise!  Phil Klay's short stories put the Iraq War and its lingering after-taste right in our laps—which is exactly where the war needs to be.  Want to know what it was really like to fight a troubling, complicated war?  Read these stories and you'll be there in the sand with Klay's characters.  This fiction, true as anything else you'll read, penetrates to the heart of what it's like to serve on a modern-day battlefield (both overseas and back here in America).  Unflinchingly honest, these stories never blink.  It's no hyperbole to say the Iraq War has finally found its voice.

Thunderstruck and Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

Sentence-for-sentence, Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection of short stories (her first since 1993’s Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry) is the best value for lovers of fine, funny writing.  I can't tell you how many times I chuckled (and, on occasion, let go into a barking, clear-the-room peal of laughter) while making my way through these stories.  That's all well and good, but McCracken can also break the reader's heart--see, for example, the title story in which a family's trip to Paris is interrupted by their rebellious daughter's risky behavior; or “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey” where the now-dying subject of the documentary tries to turn the tables on the filmmaker years after their relationship was ruptured by betrayal.  Thunderstruck was the one book I read this year which brought me equal doses of joy and sadness.  I loved every minute of it.

Everybody’s Baby

by Lydia Netzer

One of the smartest books I've ever read about the hazards of parenting in the Golden Age of Facebook is, predictably enough, only available as an e-book.  You shouldn't let that stop you from downloading Lydia Netzer's wickedly funny novella Everybody's Baby and reading it on whatever platform you choose.  Just have plenty of screen wipes handy to clean up your laugh-spittle.  A tall, curly-haired Scot, Billy Bream is the expectant father in Everybody's Baby who just can't stay off his laptop and tablet--even as his wife, Jenna, is screaming through her labor pains in the delivery room. Admit it: we all have a touch of the Billy in us.  However, obsessively checking our social media feeds is where most of us stop.  Billy and Jenna take it two or three steps further by engaging a little too much with the online community.  Everybody's Baby turns into a cautionary tale for our times--a clever morality play where God is not just some deus ex machina flying in on pulleys and wires in the Third Act, but is really in the machine.  Jenna and Billy decide to pay for their baby by crowd-sourcing bits of the infant to strangers on the internet.  Every Kickstarter comes with perks, but in the case of "everybody's baby," those benefits turn into something that is, at heart, rather terrifying--things like: for $10, "You receive an invitation to appear waving in a crowd, captured on film for a segment in the baby’s first birthday video," or, for $30, "You can rub the pregnant belly, at a designated belly-rubbing station, on a designated rubbing day, to be determined," or, for $300, you can "Take home the placenta to do with as you will."  The problems Billy and Jenna face aren't the typical challenges of first-time parents, but they are fears which most of us have faced at one point or another: How much is too much?  How do we retain our identity in an increasingly-homogenized, flat-lined electronic world?  Where do we draw the boundaries of privacy?  This extends far beyond the screens on our electronic devices.  Even if you're not sharing kitten-and-dolphin videos on Facebook, chances are that someone in the grocery line has stood too close to you, poked you with a personal question, or asked to rub your pregnant belly.  For a longer treatment of modern romance (also available in the "dead-tree" print format) I also highly recommend Netzer's other 2014 novel, How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky.  Both books are sheer delights.

An Untamed State

by Roxane Gay

There are books you read, and then there are books which read you--the ones that go deep inside, each word a tiny mirror forcing you to question who you are and how you see the world.  Roxane Gay's debut novel is one of those books.  It is horrific, it is beautiful, it is uncompromising.  An Untamed State opens with the dissolution of a fairy tale.  Haitian-American Mireille Duval Jameson, daughter of one of the most powerful men of Port-au-Prince, is abducted while on vacation visiting her family.  Gay gets right down to it with the novel's first sentence: "Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones."  From that impossible-to-put-down opening chapter, we follow Mireille's captivity, blow by blow.  The chapter headings resemble stick numbers a prisoner might scratch on a wall and we are there with Mireille, chained to a bed as she is tortured and repeatedly raped, the kidnapping stretching to unendurable lengths when her wealthy father refuses to pay the ransom.  An Untamed State is a difficult book to read--those little word-mirrors burn, burn, burn--but once begun, it's nearly impossible to stop.  "When I closed my eyes, I was no one," Mireille says.  "I was the woman who forced herself to forget her husband, her child, all the joy she had ever known, who carefully stripped herself of her memories so she could survive."  Narratively-speaking, I'm in awe of what Gay has done here--especially when, midway through the novel, gears shift and it becomes a no-less-tense account of healing, recovery and the hard, seemingly-impossible journey toward hope--which, fittingly, is literally the final word of the novel.

The Martian

by Andy Weir

This science-fiction novel may be the most imperfect book on this list--some of the dialogue feels like it's cut-and-pasted from the lamest summer blockbuster movie and there are stretches where the science gets too heavy and I longed for more fiction--but The Martian was also the one I.  Couldn't.  Put.  Down.  Combining the best elements of Robinson Crusoe and the movies Castaway and Apollo 13, this is the white-knuckle read of the year.  Author Andy Weir's forte is the plot hook: a geeky scientist on a mission to Mars gets stranded after a dust storm forces a hasty evacuation by his shipmates.  When his fellow astronauts rocket off the planet without him (sort of a galactic Home Alone Moment), Mark Watney is left to fend for himself with very little food, dwindling batteries and zero communication with Earth.  His ingenuity in building a livable shelter, creating soil to grow potatoes, and jury-rigging a rover to travel across the planet is breath-taking and inspiring.

The Ploughmen

by Kim Zupan

On the surface, there’s not a lot of action in Kim Zupan’s debut novel: some shallow graves are dug, a sheriff’s deputy goes out with his dog to look for missing persons, and there’s one particularly harrowing chase through a field in a Montana prairie. Other than that, most of the “action” takes place in the lush language which fills the pages of The Ploughmen–primarily the late-night conversations between John Gload, a septuagenarian serial killer, and Valentine Millimaki, the aforementioned sheriff’s deputy who works the graveyard shift at the Copper County jail.  As the book’s jacket copy explains, “With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own.”  Most of the book consists of cat-and-mouse conversations between diabolical killer and sympathetic lawman (very Silence of the Lambs-ian), and I’ve gotta say, I was held spellbound for the entire 256 pages of the novel.  Zupan spins his tale with sentences that are rich in imagery and complex in construction.  This is a book which encourages readers to slow down and savor its near-poetic language.  At the same time, Zupan ratchets up the suspense with a menacing undertow that pulled me deeper and deeper into the novel.

Sisters

by Raina Telgemeier

I will always remember 2014 as the year I discovered my new Author BFF.  Included in the candy-colored pages of The Best American Comics 2014 was an excerpt from Raina Telgemeier's graphic novel Drama.  I was quickly drawn in (pardon the pun) by Telgemeier's terrific pen work which combines realism with occasional cartoon-y flourishes (she cites Hi and Lois as one of her influences, and it's easy to see traces of that classic comic strip in the curves and lines of her characters).   Drama is about the trials and tribulations of Callie and her junior-high friends as they rehearse for an upcoming school play.  Telgemeier brilliantly captures what it's like to be young, in love, and ripe for public humiliation.  I could totally relate.  In fact, I loved the excerpt from Drama so much, I immediately went out and bought it and Telgemeier's other books: Sisters and Smile (her best work to date).  I loved all of Telgemeier's Young Adult novels, but since this is about 2014, I'll say a few words on behalf of this year's Sisters.  Like Smile, it's largely (if not wholly) autobiographical and, as you might expect, centers around the sibling rivalry between Raina and her younger sister Amara.  The main narrative of Sisters revolves around a car trip from their home in San Francisco to a family reunion in Colorado, with flashbacks illuminating the dynamics between the characters.  In addition to the squabbling between the sisters (and the mutual endurance tests a younger brother brings their way), the story also adds some heavier adult themes as, on the periphery, we see growing cracks in their parents' relationship.  This lends the book an unexpected poignancy and realism.  Though it may seem that Telgemeier's books are geared toward middle-grade readers (especially girls), I'm here to tell you that this middle-aged, greying man thoroughly enjoyed every hand-drawn panel of Telgemeier's graphic novel.

Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

I finished out this year by finally succumbing to the battering-ram of praise for Jenny Offill's slim, sharp novel about a marriage beset by the pressures of parenthood and infidelity.  As it turns out, all those other yea-sayers knew what they were talking about.  Dept. of Speculation came at me like a bullet train whispering along the tracks--nearly silent in its approach, but tearing me limb from limb when it finally hit.  It is a book which can be read in a single sitting (though I took three or four) and it welcomes--almost demands--an immediate re-read.  The language has been honed and distilled to a purity not often found in contemporary writing.  Dept. of Speculation makes its strongest mark at the individual sentence level ("The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on."  Or, "A dog runs through the field, his dark fur ruffled with light."), but it's only when I finished the novel that I was able to appreciate the totality of its impact.  It's a jigsaw puzzle whose 1,000 pieces interlock perfectly.

My First Time: Marian Palaia

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Marian Palaia, author of The Given World, coming in April from Simon and Schuster.  Lorrie Moore (author of Bark) has this to say about the book: “In The Given World, Marian Palaia has assembled a collection of restive seekers and beautifully told their stories of love and lovelessness, home and homelessness, with an emphasis on both makeshift and enduring ideas of family.  It has been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world. She has a great ear for dialogue, a feel for dramatic confrontation, and a keen understanding of when background suddenly becomes foreground. She is a strong, soulful, and deeply gifted writer.”  Marian was born in Riverside, California, and has lived in Washington, DC, Montana, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nepal, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer.  Now living in San Francisco, Marian has been a teacher, a truck driver, a bartender, and a logger.  She is currently working on a new novel, The Hello Kitty Justice League.

My First Story

I was going to college in Olympia, Washington, at Evergreen, a perfect school (for this itinerant hippie) if there ever was one.  I was 25, having spent my early college years doing other things I won’t go into here, but which are extrapolate-able, I reckon, from stories in other places.  Anyway.

The second half of my sociologically split self worked in the card room at King Solomon’s Reef (café, saloon, poker).  In Washington then (I don’t know about now), a hard-liquor-serving area of an establishment had to be hidden from public view; hence, in the back, dark, no windows, booths of tucked and rolled red Naugahyde, on account of which my sister referred to the place as “The Jello Mold.”  The middle section of the Reef was inhabited by the café, indistinguishable from any other, and next to the cash register in front was the door to a side room containing three felt-covered poker tables, at which were seated a die-hard group of Texas Hold ‘em players and the occasional interloper.  There were windows.  It was a fishbowl and no one cared.  They only cared about the cards, the next turn, the flop, the river.  Me, I occasionally interloped.  And regretted it just about every time.

The silver lining: After I had a brief and seriously messed up tryst with one of the poker players, and he came over to my house to beat me up (I was rescued before he could do too much damage), I started to write.  Since it was so long ago, hard telling if these were my exact words (to myself), but they were something along the lines of, “If I’m going to do these stupid, stupid things, I might as well get some stories out of the deal.”  Also that summer there was an interview in Rolling Stone with Rickie Lee Jones, of whom I was in complete awe.  In the interview she said (again, something like), “Tom (Waits) always wanted us to be poor Mexicans with the kids in the backseat at the drive-in.  I guess I got to a point where I didn’t want to live like that.”  And she said, about writing from a place of pain and sadness, “What if you wake up one day and you’re happy?  Then where does the writing come from?”  There was no obvious nexus, no direct link, because I didn’t expect to suddenly, any time soon, wake up happy, but what I heard her saying was, You have to write through the shit, and you have to keep writing when the shit turns to something else.  AND it isn’t enough to be a tragic character, because that gets old fast.

I spent some years (too many) writing about stock tragic characters anyway—ranch girls, poker players, barmaids, twisted individuals behaving badly—because, basically, I didn’t know anything else.  I wrote my very first short story in a bar, and the opening line was, “There is something to be said for being sober.”  Meaning, I imagine, I was sober that day, and it felt pretty good, and I was lucid, at least for a while; lucid enough to start writing.  I knew nothing at all about craft, narrative arc, interiority, etc.  But I had just read Panama by Tom McGuane, and his voice got into my head, and into my writing.  That first story was about a girl who plays poker, who gets beaten up by another poker player.  She has a boyfriend, Mitch, who is a wonderful guy but if she doesn’t get her shit together, she is going to lose him.  She gets a gun.  Events conspire.  She shoots someone.  It ends with Mitch, the girl and their cat driving off into the mountains.  He asks where she wants to go, and she says, “The moon.”  He says, “Okay, but you know we have to come back.”  She does know this.  She has to face the music.  The cat is on the seat between them.  The end.

Twenty-five years later this story, called “The Last House in East Missoula” was published in a lovely but now-defunct literary journal called River Oak Review.  The editors mentioned some overwritten parts, some potential editing, but they never did send me any edits, so it was published the way I sent it to them.  And, yes, it was overwritten, among other flaws, but it was still way better than it had once been.  Because I had used it for my education, had gone back to it in the years between first draft and last.  I had worked on it a great deal.  This story.  My first one.  I became an inveterate revisionist.  I could revise the same paragraph for, like, months.  With this and one or two other of my early short stories (by no means all, because some of them were truly awful), it is how I taught myself to write.  Also by reading, of course.  I did this, at least partially, in sort of a perverse manner.  If something in a story or a novel bugged me—and this normally was because it seemed that a shortcut had been taken, or some other kind of “cheating” was going on—I would go back to my own work and see if the something I didn’t like was a thing I was also guilty of.  Nine times out of ten . . . yup.  So I would change, fix, revise to death.  But I got better.  It was my apprenticeship.  My 10,000 hours.

I still love that first story, maybe because there is so much of the girl who wrote it, damaged as she was, still in there.  I love that first line (though it is no longer the first line).  I tamed it, made it better, and in the process it lost some of its rawness.  Raw is a hard thing to add back into a piece; it might even be impossible.  But what I learned was that raw (talent, writing, whatever) isn’t enough.  A collection of clever lines is not enough, though they often indicate a feel for language, which is good, but it is only a starting place.  I think many writers mistake it for a destination, and I did that very thing for a long time.  Then I went out into the world and discovered something far bigger than me and my peripatetic/”tragically romantic”/Punk Western life and my oh-so-very-clever way with words.  And then I started, again, to write.  And, yes, being less of a wild thing helps, but this, here, is not that kind of a story.

Sunday Sentence: Station Zed by Tom Sleigh

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

There was a Bay, there was a Pig, there was a Missile.

"Songs for the Cold War"
from Station Zed by Tom Sleigh

Front Porch Books: December 2014 edition

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

Suitcase City by Sterling Watson (Akashic Books):  Sterling Watson wastes no time in filling us in on the downward spiral of his main character in his new novel's Opening Lines:

Jimmy Teach left professional football at the age of twenty-four, and his life went into a fast fall. He squandered money on bad friends and foolish business deals and the drink and drugs that went with them. He lived hard and the months passed and it became a slow suicide. He woke up one morning in a car he didn't own in the driveway of a fashionable house in Atlanta with a policeman at his window. Teach had no idea who owned the house or why he had come to it. He had passed out with the engine running. A half-open window and an empty fuel tank had probably saved him from a blue-lipped death.

It's a great expository start to what looks like a white-knuckled thriller.  The publisher mentions Alfred Hitchcock and Carl Hiaasen in the same breath in the press materials which came with my copy of the book, so there's that hook which is already dragging me to shore.  Here's more from the Jacket Copy:

A man gets himself into a little bit of trouble, then a little bit more, then a lot. And then his whole world becomes a nightmare. How does he get himself out of this mess of his own creation? The answer involves the end of an extramarital affair, reconciliation with a daughter he has neglected, and a deadly encounter with a man who comes out of the past bearing bad news and the keys to a new life. Set in Tampa, Florida, in the late 1980s, Suitcase City captures the glitter of the high life and the steamy essence of low places in the Cigar City.

Blurbworthiness: “Sterling Watson is an American treasure.  If this taut literary crime novel doesn’t center him on the map, we should change maps.”  (Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter)

A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston (Bloomsbury):  By all appearances, this is not your typical military history book.  As you can see by the triptych on the cover design, A Higher Form of Killing takes three distinct modes of lethality--poison gas, the torpedo, and zeppelin attacks--and looks at "six weeks that changed the world" during World War I.  I'm fascinated by this micro-examination of warfare and am really looking forward to reading Preston's account of 1915.  Here's more from the Jacket Copy:

In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. Though Germany’s attempts to quickly win the war failed, the psychological damage caused by these attacks far outweighed the casualties. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, celebrated historian Diana Preston links them for the first time, revealing the dramatic stories behind each through the eyes of those who were there, whether making the decisions or experiencing their effect. She places the attacks in the context of the centuries-old debate over what constitutes “just war,” and shows how, in their aftermath, the other combatants felt the necessity to develop extreme weapons of their own. In our current time of terror, when weapons of mass destruction—imagined or real—are once again vilified, the story of their birth is of great relevance.

By looking at where we've come from, maybe we'll see where we're headed.  In other words, will we ever learn from the past?  Probably not.  But it's worth a shot anyway.

I Refuse by Per Petterson (Graywolf Press):  2015 just got a little brighter with the news that we'll have a new Per Petterson novel in our hands soon (April, for those of you marking your calendars).  Any release of a Petterson book from Graywolf Press here in America is cause for celebration.  I Refuse, in particular, looks like it will satisfy long-time fans (like me) and possibly entice some readers who've never encountered any of Petterson's previous books (Out Stealing Horses, To Siberia, I Curse the River of Time, etc.). As TIME magazine once noted, “Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting—all shafts of light and clear palpable chill.”  Check out the Jacket Copy for I Refuse:

Per Petterson’s hotly anticipated new novel, I Refuse, is the work of an internationally acclaimed novelist at the height of his powers. In Norway the book has been a huge bestseller, and rights have already been sold into sixteen countries. In his signature spare style, Petterson weaves a tale of two men whose accidental meeting one morning recalls their boyhood thirty-five years ago. Back then, Tommy was separated from his sisters after he stood up to their abusive father. Jim was by Tommy’s side through it all. But one winter night, a chance event on a frozen lake forever changed the balance of their friendship. Now Jim fishes alone on a bridge as Tommy drives by in a new Mercedes, and it’s clear their fortunes have reversed. Over the course of the day, the life of each man will be irrevocably altered.

Refuse a Per Petterson novel?  Hardly.  I'm going to embrace this one with all the fervor of a fanboy.

White Man's Problems by Kevin Morris (Grove/Atlantic):  It seems like every other book which has landed on my front porch the past couple of months has been a short-story collection.  This is not a problem; in fact, it's damned exciting to see publishers are increasingly "take a chance" on short fiction.  I refuse to believe that old publishing adage that "there's no market for short stories"--but that's a diatribe for another time.  What I have here in front of me right now is Kevin Morris' debut collection, White Man's Problems.  Morris, an entertainment lawyer living in L.A., originally self-published the stories before Grove/Atlantic picked it up to bring it to a wider audience.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

In nine stories that move between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working class East Coast, Kevin Morris explores the vicissitudes of modern life. Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation's capital, the heroes of White Man's Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up, and getting older. The themes of these perceptive, wry, and sometimes humorous tales pose philosophical questions about conformity and class, duplicity and decency, and the actions and meaning of an average man's life. He writes characters and dialogue equally at home in in an office in the Empire State Building, a driveway in Brentwood, or a working class taproom. Morris's confident debut strikes the perfect balance between comedy and catastrophe—and introduces a virtuosic new voice in American fiction.

This Blurbworthiness from Eric Roth, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Forrest Gump, is enough to convince me to put these Problems near the top of the To-Be-Read pile: “Kevin Morris’s voice is Updike and Cheever and Carver.”

Empty Pockets by Dale Herd (Coffee House Press):   I had a Breece D'J Pancake Moment when I got a copy of Dale Herd's collection of "new and selected stories" from Coffee House Press.  Like Pancake, Dale Herd is a voice from a distant decade (primarily the 70s in his case) who seems to have slipped off the literary radar for far too many years (at least my radar hasn't had many Herd blips recently).  Unlike Pancake, who committed suicide when his talent was at full burn, Herd is still with us and, thanks to Coffee House Press, he's pinging back on our radars, loud and clear.  Empty Pockets collects stories from his previous books--Early Morning Wind (1972), Diamonds (1976), and Wild Cherries (1980)--and tops it off with 19 new short fictions.  Most of the stories are very short--a page or a paragraph at most--while others take a little more time to burrow into Herd's characters.  Here, for instance, are the Opening Lines to the book, the story "Eric" in its entirety:

She had a kid asleep in the bedroom. I asked her if she wanted to ball and she said yes. She got her gun six times. I told her I was selling my car and all my belongings and buying a sailboat and sailing to Australia. I said she could go but she’d have to pay. How much she said. A dollar thirty-seven I said. She said not bad. Then she said how much for Eric. I said ten thousand dollars.

Man, there's a lot to love in that handful of sentences whose blood tingles with the jazz of Hemingway and Carver.  In a review of Herd's three collections (filed under "Neglected Books") in a 1983 issue of American Book Review, Lewis Warsh wrote: "(S)ome of Herd's best stories are simply speeches, people saying what on their minds....Herd keeps himself at a distance from his characters--there's nothing blatantly autobiographical about his work--but it's a professional distance, he's at least as close as the next room.  His art is the ability to create authentic voices, while packing the greatest possible intensity into the smallest possible space."  Here's some more great Blurbworthiness for Herd's work, from a 1976 review in the San Francisco Review of Books by Keith Abbot: "Diamonds is an apt name for Dale Herd's latest book of prose.  The tale are often quite short, and are formed by great pressure."  Please join me in re-discovering this gritty, unsparing and fresh (!!) voice from the past.

White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon (New Harvest): You've gotta love a story collection that begins with something called "Man-Boob Summer" (Opening Lines: "I was spending some time at my parents' place that summer.  I was thirty-eight and out of ideas.").  By all appearances (i.e., "from my quick page-skim"), David Gordon's White Tiger on Snow Mountain proceeds to get even better from that point on.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Thirteen hilarious, moving, and beautifully brutal stories by David Gordon, the award-winning author of Mystery Girl and The Serialist. In these funny, surprising, and touching stories, Gordon gets at the big stuff—art and religion, literature and madness, the supernatural, and the dark fringes of sexuality—in his own unique style, described by novelist Rivka Galchen as “Dashiell Hammett divided by Don DeLillo, to the power of Dostoyevsky—yet still pure David Gordon.” Gordon's creations include ex-gangsters and terrifying writing coaches, Internet girlfriends and bogus memoirists, Chinatown ghosts, and vampires of Queens. “The Amateur” features a cafe encounter with a terrible artist who carries a mind-blowing secret. In the long, beautifully brutal title story, a man numbed by life finds himself flirting with and mourning lost souls in the purgatory of sex chatrooms. The result is both unflinching and hilarious, heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Blurbworthiness: “I wish I could read this book forever, and maybe get David Gordon to narrate the events of my own life.  He is the funniest, most intelligent companion.  This book got me reinterested in everything—men, women, heartbreak, cities, language, stories.”  (Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories)

Hit Count by Chris Lynch (Algonquin Young Readers):  Here's a young adult novel that's as timely as a news story you'll read about the next NFL linebacker plagued with memory loss, depression and, at its root, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  No matter which side of the field of controversy you line up on, it's hard to deny that concussions are a serious health matter that impact not just professional football players, members of the military or daredevil bikers who refuse to wear a helmet--they're a problem for all of us in one way or another.  National Book Award finalist Chris Lynch (Inexcusable) tackles--pardon the pun--this subject head-on in Hit Count, set on the high school football field where brain trauma is particularly worth guarding against.  Take a look at the Jacket Copy:

"I hit him so hard, the clash of helmets and pads sounded like a gunshot across the field. I crushed him with the hit, held on to him, and crushed him again when I slammed him into the ground...I had arrived." Arlo Brodie loves being on the football field, getting hit hard and hitting back harder. That's where he belongs, leading his team to championships, becoming "Starlo" on his way to the top. Arlo's dad cheers him on, but his mother quotes head injury statistics and refuses to watch. Arlo's girlfriend tries to make him see the danger; when that doesn't work, she calls time-out on their relationship. Even Arlo's coaches begin to track his hit count, almost ready to pull him off the field. But Arlo's not worried about collisions. The cheering crowds and the adrenaline rush convince Arlo that everything is OK--in spite of the pain, pounding, dizziness, and confusion. In Hit Count, Chris Lynch explores the American love affair with contact sports and our attempts to come to terms with clear evidence of real danger.

Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian (Algonquin Books):  What does a man drowned in a vat of dye in Turkey have to do with an old woman in a Los Angeles retirement home?  This is the question which fuels Aline Ohanesian's intriguing debut novel.  As Algonquin Senior Editor Kathy Pories says in a "Dear Reader" letter at the start of my advance copy of Orhan's Inheritance: "One of the huge rewards of being an editor is that moment of surprise when you begin to read a manuscript and realize that a writer has caught you; you start reading and you can't stop.  From the minute I started Aline Ohanesian's debut novel, I was transfixed."  Dip into the Opening Lines and you'll see what Pories is talking about:

They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky. His arms and chin were propped over the copper edge, but the rest of Kemal Turkoglu, age ninety-three, had turned a pretty pale blue. Orhan was told the old men of the village stood in front of the soaking corpse, fingering their worry beads, while their sons waiting, holding dice from abandoned backgammon games.

While I stopped reading after a page or two, I only did so reluctantly (all those other books demanding my attention); but I could see how, if I had a more relaxed expanse of time in front of me, I'd want to immerse myself in the vat of Ohanesian's prose.  There are such lovely images in that opening paragraph--even while talking about this poor man's death.  Here's the Jacket Copy to hook you, the time-on-her-hands reader, into the novel:

In her extraordinary debut, Aline Ohanesian has created two remarkable characters--a young man ignorant of his family's and his country's past, and an old woman haunted by the toll the past has taken on her life. When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather Kemal--a man who built a dynasty out of making "kilim" rugs--is found dead, submerged in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But Kemal's will raises more questions than it answers. He has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in an Armenian retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather willed his home in Turkey to an unknown woman rather than to his own son or grandson. Left with only Kemal's ancient sketchbook and intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There he will not only unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards but discover that Seda's past now threatens to unravel his future. Her story, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which his family has been built. Moving back and forth in time, between the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the 1990s, Orhan's Inheritance is a story of passionate love, unspeakable horrors, incredible resilience, and the hidden stories that can haunt a family for generations.

Compulsion by Meyer Levin (Fig Tree Books):  Meyer Levin's blockbuster 1956 novel about the Leopold-Loeb child murder case of 1924 gets a handsome reissue from Fig Tree Books.  As famed prosecutor and author Marcia Clark says in her new introduction to the book, "Before In Cold Blood, before The Executioner’s Song, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion was the standard-bearer for what we think of as the nonfiction novel.  I was eight years old when I read it for the first time.  I’d found the paperback, already yellowed with age, on a nightstand.  Though I could not possibly grasp the depth of the storytelling or recognize the beauty of the prose, the experience proved to be indelible.  The story haunted me from that day forward."  Compulsion is one of those mid-century books which have lingered at the edges of my "must read someday" list; but this fresh package of the book might just urge me to read it sooner rather than later.  Here's the Jacket Copy for those of you who are unfamiliar with the story:

Part of Chicago’s elite Jewish society, Judd Steiner (the fictional version of Nathan Leopold) and Artie Straus (Richard Loeb) have it all: money, smarts and the world at their feet. Obsessed with Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily murdering a boy in their neighborhood — for the sheer sake of getting away with the crime. Compulsion is narrated by Sid Silver, a budding journalist at the University of Chicago and a fictional surrogate for Meyer Levin who was a classmate of Leopold and Loeb and reported on their trial himself; like Sid, Levin became enmeshed in the case while covering it. Early on, a pair of Judd’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses is found at the scene of the crime. Authorities slowly begin to unveil other pieces of evidence that suggest the young men’s guilt. When their respective alibis collapse, Artie and Judd each confess. Fearing an anti-Semitic backlash and anxious to be viewed first and foremost as Americans, the Jewish community in Chicago demands steadfastly that justice be served. Desperate, the Straus and Steiner families seek the counsel of the famed Jonathan Wilk, who is based on his real-life counterpart Clarence Darrow. Wilk hires a slew of psychoanalysts and begins to construct a first-of-its-kind defense: that Artie and Judd are not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Here, too, the novel’s documentary qualities shine through as the narrative shifts into a deftly paced courtroom drama where the legal and psychiatric delineations of insanity— and even more controversially for its time, homosexuality— are introduced.

The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger (Little, Brown):  The mountain may be able to wait, but I can't.  After reading just a few sentences from the Opening Lines of this debut novel by Canadian writer Sarah Leipciger, I'm already racing to finish the other books at the summit of the To-Be-Read stack (aka Mount NeveRest).  Check 'em out for yourself:

      The night was still black when Curtis pulled his Suburban away from the curb and turned toward the mountain highway, leaving his apartment, his sleeping street behind him. He would have preferred to ride his bike but the tire was flat and anyway it was too cold, and rain was coming. He would find some side road up the mountain where he could park and stay warm until the sun rose, and then he'd hike for as long as his legs could carry him. Ascend to a place where the view was different and things that towered and loomed down here would narrow to pin shadows and then to nothing.
     With his windows rolled down, he tickled the curves slowly, and the high that had been fading in him came back up. Calm poured through his body and the wind was music. The cold, dewy air tasted like spring moss, like pine. The needle on the speedometer slipped across seventy kilometers and he slowed down to forty. But minutes later, when he glanced at the needle again, it was back up at seventy. The road began a long-curved descent and he pulsed the brakes.
     He engaged the dashboard lighter and lifted his right thigh, and wedged his fingers into his back pocket, feeling for his small tin box. It wasn't there. He reached farther and excavated the gap in the back of the seat. The road was a tunnel. He glanced at the emergency-brake pocket but saw only a badly folded road map and a refillable plastic coffee mug that he had stopped using because he'd lost the lid.
     Her face in the headlights flashed like a coin, the features etched in silver blue. She was an instant, the sulfuric flare of a match, and though he had time to hit the brakes his foot found the accelerator instead. And there was a dull slap. Something white seemed to pause in the air. The sound of a broad, square nose of metal pummeling muscle and bone was flat and without ring. He stopped the truck with its nose pointing into the middle of the road and, confused, felt for his tin in the other pocket, as this somehow still seemed important.

Are you with me?  Are we going to the Mountain together?  Here's the Jacket Copy for those of you who remain on the fence:

Tragedy erupts in an instant. Lives are shattered irrevocably. A young man drives off into the night, leaving a girl injured, perhaps fatally so. From that cliffhanger opening, Sarah Leipciger takes readers back and forward in time to tell the haunting story of one family's unraveling in rural logging country where the land is still the economic backbone. Like the novels of Annie Proulx, this extraordinarily lyrical debut is rooted in richly detailed nature writing and sharply focused on small town mores and the particularities of regional culture. Marrying the propulsive story of a father and son who, in the wake of catastrophe, must confront their private demons to reach for redemption with an evocative meditation on our environmental legacy, The Mountain Can Wait introduces Leipciger as a talent to watch.

Blurbworthiness: "In this assured debut novel Leipciger beautifully captures the tender and mercurial relationship between father and son, Tom and Curtis Berry.  These are characters you care about, flawed and haunted by regret, existing in the harsh yet undeniably radiant world of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.  Leipciger writes with great compassion and precision, her language is an exquisite mix of muscle and grace.  The Mountain Can Wait resonated with wonderful imagery which will stay with me for a very long time."  (Michele Forbes, author of Ghost Moth)

The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits (Doubleday):  On a shelf in the musty, dusty basement of my home here in Butte, Montana, there's a red three-ring binder, its plastic cover sticky with age and ancient spilled soda.  Inside that binder are more than 200 pages of typewritten diary entries by yours truly, a transcript of my life between the ages of 16 to 20.  If I had an ounce of bravery and/or a momentary lapse of judgment, I'd get up from the desk where I'm currently writing this blog post, descend the three flights of stairs and excavate that diary so I could give you a taste of how truly terrible a writer and how incredibly silly a person I was back in the 1980s.  But I won't.  Because I'm a coward.  Heidi Julavits, on the other hand, is courageous enough to return to the journal she kept as a kid and take a look at a life which undoubtedly seems so oddly foreign to her 2014 self.  The Jacket Copy reveals all about The Folded Clock (which is such a great title, isn't it?):

Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor." The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. After reading the confessions of her past self, writes Julavits, "I want to good-naturedly laugh at this person. I want to but I can't. What she wanted then is scarcely different from what I want today." Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition. Concealed beneath the minute obsession with “dailiness” are sharply observed moments of cultural criticism and emotionally driven philosophical queries. In keeping with the spirit of a diary, the tone is confessional, sometimes shockingly so, as the focus shifts from the woman she wants to be to the woman she may have become. Julavits's spirited sense of humor about her foibles and misadventures, combined with her ceaseless intelligence and curiosity, explode the typically confessional diary form. The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.

In the Opening Lines of The Folded Clock, Julavits asks, "What is the worth of a day?"  We're about to find out.

The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James (Knopf):  The striking image on the cover of Tania James' new novel is just the first thing to love here.  That elephant demands you pay close attention to what's about to happen.  Go a little deeper and you'll encounter these Opening Lines:

      He would come to be called the Gravedigger. There would be other names: the Master Executioner, the Jackfruit Freak, Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan. In his earliest days, his name was a sound only his kin could make in the hollows of their throats and somewhere in his head, fathoms deep, he kept it close.
      Other memories he kept: running through his mother's legs, toddling in and out of her footprints. The bark of soft saplings, the salt licks, the duckweed, the tang of river water, opening and closing around his feet. He remembered his mother taking him onto her back before launching herself from the bank. In this way, their clan would cross, an isle of hills and lofted trunks.

The Jacket Copy lets us know this is going to be an unforgettable novel in so many ways:

From the critically acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns and Aerogrammes, a tour de force set in South India that plumbs the moral complexities of the ivory trade through the eyes of a poacher, a documentary filmmaker, and, in a feat of audacious imagination, an infamous elephant known as the Gravedigger. Orphaned by poachers as a calf and sold into a life of labor and exhibition, the Gravedigger breaks free of his chains and begins terrorizing the countryside, earning his name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries. Manu, the studious younger son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger’s violence and is drawn, with his wayward brother Jayan, into the sordid, alluring world of poaching. Emma is a young American working on a documentary with her college best friend, who witnesses the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and finds herself in her own moral gray area: a risky affair with the veterinarian who is the film’s subject. As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and betrayal, duty and loyalty, and the vexed relationship between man and nature. With lyricism and suspense, Tania James animates the rural landscapes where Western idealism clashes with local reality; where a farmer’s livelihood can be destroyed by a rampaging elephant; where men are driven to poaching. In James’ arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage blends the mythical and the political to tell a wholly original, utterly contemporary story about the majestic animal, both god and menace, that has mesmerized us for centuries.

I'm excited about a lot of upcoming 2015 fiction, but The Tusk That Did the Damage is probably at the top of my list right now.  Blurbworthiness: “The Tusk That Did the Damage is one of the most unusual and affecting books I’ve read in a long time.  Narrated by a poacher, a filmmaker, and, most brilliantly, an elephant, this is a compulsively readable, devastating novel.”  (Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated)

Recipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca Barry (Simon & Schuster):  I'm going to leave you with what is my MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of 2015.  Walk with me for a moment and let's have a little chat....Has this ever happened to you?  You read a story, a book, a poem, and you are so swept up in the writing that you immediately make an emotional connection with the author and put that person at the top of that rarified mental list you keep--you know, the one where you immediately start building a pedestal.  You decide right then and there to purchase everything that author writes from that day forward.  Every so often, you might go back and re-read that debut novel or that sole collection of short stories just to remind yourself how great this author really is, and you keep checking publishing industry announcements and lists of new and forthcoming books on the web.  Then you sit back and wait, flicking frequent glances at the calendar, hoping for news of the next book to come from this new Most Favorite Writer of yours.  But two years pass and nothing.  Three years go by and still, radio silence.  Five years, six years....crickets chirping in a barren field.  You turn gloomy, become depressed and vow never to fall in love like this again (but of course you do).  Does any of this sound familiar?  That's what happened to me with Rebecca Barry.  I lost my heart to her debut collection of short stories, Later, At the Bar, published in 2007.  The linked stories revolved around the barflies of Lucy's Tavern in upstate New York and were rife with the kind of drama found in soap operas and country-western songs: failed marriages, one-night stands, terminal illness, scrapes with the law, loneliness, bitterness and pent-up anger.  I sang its praises elseweb, calling it "inspiring fiction which just happens to be set in a room filled with smoke, sad songs and slurred words."  I simply couldn't wait for the next thing to come from Ms. Barry.  But, as I outlined above, I endured a long, empty-handed wait.  I was all prepared to send out a Literary APB for her, like I did with Jon Billman.  UNTIL a couple of weeks ago when I saw an e-galley of Recipes for a Beautiful Life was available on Edelweiss.  I couldn't click "Download" fast enough.  As it turns out, this new book isn't a novel or a short-story collection, but a memoir (mixed with recipes) of Barry's life with her husband and two boys.  In this case, real life might just be better than fiction because it will help explain where Barry has been for the past seven years.  The Jacket Copy shines a light:

When Rebecca Barry and her husband moved to upstate New York to start their family, they wanted to be surrounded by natural beauty but close to a small urban center, doing work they loved, and plenty of time to spend with their kids. But living their dreams turned out not to be so simple: the lovely old house they bought had lots of character but also needed lots of repairs, they struggled to stay afloat financially, their children refused to sleep or play quietly, and the novel Rebecca had dreamed of writing simply wouldn’t come to her. Recipes for a Beautiful Life blends heartwarming, funny, authentically told stories about the messiness of family life, a fearless examination of the anxieties of creative work, and sharp-eyed observations of the pressures that all women face. This is a story of a woman confronting her deepest fears: What if I’m a terrible mother? What if I’m not good at the work I love? What if my children never eat anything but peanut butter and cake? What if I go to sleep angry? It’s also a story of the beauty, light, and humor that’s around us, all the time—even when things look bleak, and using that to find your way back to your heart. Mostly, though, it is about the journey to building not just a beautiful life, but a creative one.

I hope I haven't made Ms. Barry blush with all this talk about literary longing and pedestal-building.  I mean, I wouldn't want to embarrass her into another seven-year silence.

Friday Freebie: The Kept by James Scott, Glyph by Percival Everett, What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell, All I Have In This World by Michael Parker, Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha, Our Senior Year by John Abraham-Watne, The Gods of Second Chances by Dan Berne, and Harm's Reach by Alex Barclay

Congratulations to Michael Cooper, winner of last week's Friday Freebie contest: Closed Doors by Lisa O'Donnell and Keep Your Friends Close by Paula Daly.

This week's book giveaway is an eclectic grab-bag of titles to stuff your Christmas stocking (though, by the time the books arrive at the winner's house, it will be more like a New Year's gift).  Up for grabs: paperback copies of The Kept by James Scott, Glyph by Percival Everett, What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell, All I Have In This World by Michael Parker, Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha, Our Senior Year by John Abraham-Watne, The Gods of Second Chances by Dan Berne, and Harm's Reach by Alex Barclay.  Read on for more information about each book:

The Kept takes place in the winter of 1897, when Elspeth Howell treks across miles of snow and ice to the isolated farmstead in upstate New York where she and her husband have raised their five children.  Her midwife's salary is tucked into the toes of her boots, and her pack is full of gifts for her family.  But as she crests the final hill, and sees her darkened house and a smokeless chimney, immediately she knows that an unthinkable crime has destroyed the life she so carefully built.  Her lone comfort is her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, who joins her in mourning the tragedy and planning its reprisal.  Their long journey leads them to a rough-hewn lake town, defined by the violence both of its landscape and of its inhabitants.  There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood, as he slowly discovers truths about his family he never suspected, and Elspeth must confront the terrible urges and unceasing temptations that have haunted her for years.  Throughout it all, the love between mother and son serves as the only shield against a merciless world.  A scorching portrait of guilt and lost innocence, atonement and retribution, resilience and sacrifice, pregnant obsession and primal adolescence, The Kept is told with deep compassion and startling originality, and introduces James Scott as a major new literary voice.  BONUS: Click here to read about James Scott's "first time."

In Glyph, by the consistently-underappreciated and under-read Percival Everett, Baby Ralph has ways to pass the time in his crib—but they don’t include staring at a mobile.  Aided by his mother, he reads voraciously: “All of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke,” along with a generous helping of philosophy, semiotics, and trashy thrillers.  He’s also fond of writing poems and stories (in crayon).  But Ralph has limits. He’s mute by choice and can’t drive, so in his own estimation he’s not a genius.  Unfortunately for him, everyone else disagrees.  His psychiatrist kidnaps him for testing, and once his brilliance is quantified (IQ: 475), a Pentagon officer also abducts him.  Diabolically funny and lacerating in its critique of poststructuralism, Glyph has the feverish plot of a thriller and the philosophical depth of a text by Roland Barthes.  If anyone can map the wilds of literary theory, it’s Ralph, one of Percival Everett’s most enduring creations.  And now, thanks to Graywolf Press, this 1999 novel is back in print (released in paperback earlier this year)!

What Happened Here delivers a wildly different cast of characters living on the same block in North Park, San Diego, site of the PSA Flight 182 crash in 1978.  The crash is history, but its legacy seeps in the stories of the neighborhood’s inhabitants, bringing grief, anxiety, and rebellion to the surface and eventually assists in burning clean the lives of those who live in the shadow of disaster.  Amidst the pathos of contemporary life, humor flits through these stories like the macaws that have taken to the trees of North Park.  The birds ensure that there’s never a dull moment in the neighborhood, and their outrageous colors and noisome squawks serve as constant reminds of regrowth.  Praise for What Happened Here: “Bonnie ZoBell’s luminously intersecting stories of artists, musicians, teachers and assorted shimmering misfits in a North Park neighborhood that happens to be the site of a historic plane wreck, beautifully chronicles the struggles of the living to survive–emotionally and physically–in the shadow of wreckage and ghosts.  Her characters’ connections, madnesses, kindnesses and demons are startlingly poignant and resonant.”  (Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men)  BONUS: Click here to read about Bonnie ZoBell's "first time."

In Michael Parker's All I Have In This World, two strangers meet over the hood of a used car in Texas: Marcus, who is fleeing both his financial and personal failures, and Maria, who after years of dodging her mistakes has returned to her hometown to make amends.  One looking forward, the other looking back, they face off over the car they both want.  And after knowing each other for less than an hour, they decide to buy it together.  All I Have in This World is a different kind of love story about the power of friendship.  The New York Times calls it "a Springsteenian ode to the promise and heartbreak of the highway."  More praise for the novel: “Parker’s skillfully rendered story rolls like a restless, unpredictable west Texas river—calm depths here, turbulent shallows there—as Marcus and Maria communicate and lurch toward an imperfect union....Which feels a lot like real life.” (The Denver Post)  BONUS: Click here to read about Michael Parker's "first time."

In Arts & Entertainments, handsome Eddie Hartley was once a golden boy poised for the kind of success promised by good looks and a modicum of talent.  Now thirty-three, he has abandoned his dream of an acting career and accepted the reality of life as a drama teacher at the boys' prep school he once attended.  But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it's one disappointment too many.  Weighted down with debt, Susan's mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-Web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star.  In an era when any publicity is good publicity, Eddie imagines that the tape won't cause any harm--a mistake that will have disastrous consequences and propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved.  A hilariously biting and incisive takedown of our culture's monstrous obsession with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man's belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.

In Our Senior Year, the debut novel by John Abraham-Watne, Minneapolis writer Jason Wareheim never expected to go back to his ten-year high school reunion, but what he found back in his hometown changed the way he saw everything.  The journal left behind by his best friend, Jack Wayne, brings back all the memories of their senior year, inspiring Jason to finally tell the story of "the three musketeers" and their lives in the small town of Clarmont, Iowa.  Theirs was a story crossed by love, tragedy, friendship, loyalty, and simple cruising on gravel roads.  This is a story of high school.  For more information about John Abraham-Watne and his debut novel, click here to visit his website.  BONUS: Click here to read about John Abraham-Watne's "first time."

In The Gods of Second Chances, a novel by Dan Berne released earlier this year by Forest Avenue Press, family means everything to Alaskan fisherman Ray Bancroft, raising his granddaughter while battling storms, invasive species, and lawsuit-happy tourists.  To navigate, and to catch enough crab to feed her college fund, Ray seeks help from a multitude of gods and goddesses—not to mention ad-libbed rituals performed at sea by his half-Tlingit best friend.  But kitchen counter statues and otter bone ceremonies aren’t enough when his estranged daughter returns from prison, swearing she’s clean and sober.  Her search for a safe harbor threatens everything Ray holds sacred.  Set against a backdrop of ice and mud and loss, Dan Berne’s gripping debut novel explores the unpredictable fissures of memory, and how families can break apart even in the midst of healing.

In Harm's Reach, which will be released in early 2015, FBI Agent Ren Bryce finds herself entangled in two seemingly unrelated mysteries.  But the past has a way of echoing down the years and finding its way into the present.  When Bryce discovers the body of a young woman in an abandoned car, solving the case becomes personal.  But the more she uncovers about the victim's last movements, the more questions are raised.  Why was Laura Flynn driving towards a ranch for troubled teens in the middle of Colorado when her employers thought she was hundreds of miles away?  And what did she know about a case from fifty years ago, which her death dramatically reopens?  As Ren and cold case investigator Janine Hooks slowly weave the threads together, a picture emerges of a privileged family determined to hide some very dark secrets whatever the cost."

If you’d like a chance at winning ALL THE BOOKS, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Dec. 25, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on Dec. 26.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

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