Front Porch Books: April 2012 Edition

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

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty (Riverhead Books):  If you put a gun to my head and said I could only have one channel on television for the rest of my life, I would quickly blurt out: "TCM."  The rest of the world can go away and if I can stay huddled in the dark in front of Turner Classic Movies, I'm a happy man.  I love movies made between 1900 and 1950 with an unbridled passion.  Cut me, I bleed black-and-white.  That's why when I heard Laura Moriarty had written a novel featuring one of Hollywood's most alluring (and relatively unknown) actresses of the silent era, I knew I had to get my hands on it.  The Chaperone follows future silver screen vamp Louise Brooks as she leaves her Midwestern town for a trip to the big city.  The concept is ripe for Moriarty to explore the character of an irreverent spitfire of a girl before Hollywood gets its hands on her (or, more accurately, before she gets her hands on Hollywood).  Here's the Jacket Copy to tell us why we should take this trip:

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip. She has no idea what she’s in for: Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever. For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might prove an answer to the question at the center of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in a strange and bustling city, she embarks on her own mission. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, it liberates her in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.

Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin Books):  Goolrick follows up his immensely popular first novel, A Reliable Wife, with this book which looks just as reliably good.  Once again setting a love story in the near-past (post World War Two, in this case), Goolrick delivers a tale about the dark side of passion.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

In Heading Out to Wonderful, an attractive and enigmatic stranger—Charlie Beale, a loner, recently home from the war in Europe—wanders into the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village of only a few hundred people nestled in the Valley of Virginia. He brings with him two suitcases: one contains all his worldly possessions, including a set of butcher’s knives; the other is full of money. Charlie quickly finds a job at the local butcher shop and through his work there meets all the townspeople, most notably Sam Haislett, the five-year-old son of the shop’s owner, and Sylvan Glass, the beautiful, eccentric teenage bride of the town’s richest man. What no anticipates is how the interaction of these three people will alter the town forever, and how the passion that flares between Charlie and Sylvan will mark young Sam for life. Told through the eyes of Sam, now an older man looking back on that time, this much-anticipated follow-up to A Reliable Wife is an exciting, erotically charged, and altogether unforgettable story of love gone terribly wrong in a place where once upon a time such things could happen.

Here are the novel's Opening Lines:

       The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things where you can pinpoint the day, the hour, and the minute. When you think about it, though, those things mostly seem to happen to other people.
       This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I’m going to tell it to you. It’s a true story, as much as six decades of remembering and telling can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don’t always get everything right. You might remember a little thing clear as a bell, the weather, say, or the splash of light on the river’s ripples as the sun was going down into the black pines, things not even connected to anything in particular, while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than some of the big things.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux):  I've been a fan of Keret's short, quirky fiction from the day I first laid eyes on his collection The Girl on the Fridge.  I began my review at The Barnes & Noble Review by saying, "The successful short-short story, also called 'flash fiction,' operates like an elite military commando team: get in, get out, take no prisoners.  But how do you reduce a universe of meaning to something smaller than the size of a breadbox?  Etgar Keret makes it look easy."  His latest collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, looks like it delivers more of the same flash-bang surprise of language.  It was first published in Keret's native Israel in 2010 and is now being put in American readers' hands by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which says in its Jacket Copy, "In his most playful and most mature work yet, the living and the dead, silent children and talking animals, dreams and waking life coexist in an uneasy world."  Keret's universe is an odd one, indeed, but I guarantee you'll come back from your vacation there feeling smarter--like you're walking around with a secret the rest of humanity is yet to discover.  Opening Lines:

      "Tell me a story,” the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must say, is anything but pleasant. I’m someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that isn’t something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret—I don’t even remember what exactly—and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But the situation is fundamentally different. Because my son doesn’t have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply trying to rob me of it.
      I try to explain to the bearded man that if he puts his pistol away it will only work in his favor, in our favor. It’s hard to think up a story with the barrel of a loaded pistol pointed at your head.

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. by Nichole Bernier (Crown):  Bernier's debut novel begins in the shattering aftermath of 9/11.  Kate and her husband drive across the George Washington Bridge, purposefully not looking at the gaping hole left by the World Trade Center.  But the absence is a presence, just as is the loss of Kate's friend Elizabeth who was killed in a plane crash shortly before the terrorist attacks.  The first chapter sets up the novel quite well, promising a potent stew of emotions for the next 300 pages.  Jacket Copy:

Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew. The complicated portrait of Elizabeth—her troubled upbringing, and her route to marriage and motherhood—makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her own deepest beliefs about loyalty and honesty at a period of uncertainty in her own marriage. The more Kate reads, the more she learns the complicated truth of who Elizabeth really was, and rethinks her own choices as a wife, mother, and professional, and the legacy she herself would want to leave behind. When an unfamiliar man’s name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn’t know about her friend, including where she was really going on the day she died. Set in the anxious summer after the September 11th attacks, this story of two women—their friendship, their marriages, private ambitions and fears—considers the aspects of ourselves we show and those we conceal, and the repercussions of our choices.

Blurbworthiness: "Women have secret lives—sometimes hidden in the corners of our minds, sometimes in dreams unrealized. One mark of friendship is when and whether these nightmares and ambitions can be revealed. This riveting novel fiercely captures this fulcrum of the public and private lives of American mothers."  (Randy Susan Meyers, author of The Murderer’s Daughters)

The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac by Kris D'Agostino (Algonquin Books):  On the surface, this book fairly reeks of The Royal Tenenbaums or The Family Fang.  And that's totally cool with me.  I like a little quirk in my morning coffee.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Calvin Moretti can’t believe how much his life sucks. He’s a twenty-four-year-old film school dropout living at home again and working as an assistant teacher at a preschool for autistic kids. His insufferable go-getter older brother is also living at home, as is his kid sister, who’s still in high school and has just confided to Cal that she’s pregnant. What’s more, Calvin’s father, a career pilot, is temporarily grounded and obsessed with his own mortality. and his ever-stalwart mother is now crumbling under the pressure of mounting bills and the imminent loss of their Sleepy Hollow, New York, home: the only thing keeping the Morettis moored. Can things get worse? Oh, yes, they can.  Which makes it all the more amazing that The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac is not only buoyantly fun but often very, very funny. In this debut novel, Kris D’Agostino has crafted an engrossing contemporary tale of a loopy but loving family, and in Calvin Moretti, he’s created an oddball antihero who really wants to do the right thing—if he can just figure out what it is.

I'm also drawn to The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac because it seems like it will take politically-incorrect chances.  I mean, you've gotta give props to a guy who is willing to start his debut novel with these Opening Lines:

      I work with retards.
      This is fact in more ways than one. It is fact because I am a teaching assistant at a preschool for autistic kids. It is fact because family, friends, and most of the people who populate my life are idiots.

So Far Away by Meg Mitchell Moore (Little, Brown):  Meg Mitchell Moore's second novel (after last year's The Arrivals) brings three disparate lives together: 13-year-old Natalie Gallagher who is dealing with her parents' ugly divorce as well as the vicious cyber-bullying of her former best friend; Kathleen Lynch, an archivist at the Massachusetts State Archives and a widow estranged from her only daughter; and an Irish immigrant domestic servant from the 1920s who harbored a secret.  Those three worlds collide when Natalie finds the servant's diary in her family's basement and winds up at the archives where she'll do more research, and force Kathleen to confront her feelings about her own daughter.  The Opening Lines hold great promise for what lies ahead in the next 330 pages:

      It was a Friday when the girl came into the Archives for the first time, the first Friday after they'd changed the clocks. Spring ahead, fall back: Kathleen had once learned some rhyme about that when she was a school child, but she no longer remembered it. It had been some time since she'd been a school child. This was early November, the leaves mostly down, lying wet and slick all over Boston.
      Not so long ago, a few days, maybe a week, Kathleen had been out walking the dog in short sleeves, but today the sky--dark, glowering low--seemed to be readying itself for some sort of inhospitable eruption. The planet appeared to be in a muddle, and she waited (they all waited) for something to happen.
      Which it did. Not right away, but eventually.

Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux):  Yes, it's true: monsters have invaded the normally staid-and-stuffy category we label "literary fiction."  Fine by me.  If books like Justin Cronin's The Passage and Colson Whitehead's Zone One are any indication, a little bloodied tooth-and-claw will be a welcome shake-up for readers who normally take their fiction on the heavy side.  Not that the werewolves of fiction are about to disembowel Marilynne Robinson and eat her intestines, but there are some very inventive and sexy experiments being made with the cross-pollination of genres.  Case in point, Brian McGreevy's debut novel Hemlock Grove which looks like it sets out to turn the classic monster story--from Mary Shelley to The Howling--on its furry, scaly ear.  In addition to sporting a tasty neon-pink cover, Hemlock Grove has a mighty chewy storyline.  Here's the Jacket Copy by way of explanation:

The body of a young girl is found mangled and murdered in the woods of Hemlock Grove, Pennsylvania, in the shadow of the abandoned Godfrey Steel mill. A manhunt ensues—though the authorities aren’t sure if it’s a man they should be looking for. Some suspect an escapee from the White Tower, a foreboding biotech facility owned by the Godfrey family—their personal fortune and the local economy having moved on from Pittsburgh steel—where, if rumors are true, biological experiments of the most unethical kind take place. Others turn to Peter Rumancek, a Gypsy trailer-trash kid who has told impressionable high school classmates that he’s a werewolf. Or perhaps it’s Roman, the son of the late JR Godfrey, who rules the adolescent social scene with the casual arrogance of a cold-blooded aristocrat, his superior status unquestioned despite his decidedly freakish sister, Shelley, whose monstrous medical conditions belie a sweet intelligence, and his otherworldly control freak of a mother, Olivia.

Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (University of Iowa Press): Shifting gears a little (okay, a lot), I turn my attention to a non-fiction anthology which landed on my front porch with a thunk two weeks ago.  Calling itself "the first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind," this book with its thick, rich stew of content will appeal to those who are interested in "the theory, practice, and art of the essay."  There are plenty of books out there which collect essays on various subject matter--from whale songs to motherhood--but when was the last time you saw a group of essays whose subject matter was the essay itself?  Klaus and Stuckey-French have assembled four centuries of commentary and theory on the art form. The line-up includes plenty of marquee names: Samuel Johnson, Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, William Carlos Williams, Aldous Huxley, E. B. White, William H. Gass, Phillip Lopate, Susan Sontag, Ander Monson, John D'Agata and plenty of others.  I think the spirit and value of the anthology is best summed up in this passage from Virginia Woolf's "The Modern Essay":

      The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little volumes, containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short period under review something like the progress of history.
      Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.

The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead (Algonquin Books):  Olmstead is another name on my "Greatest Writers I've Never Read" list.  Due to the unstoppable flood of books into my house, my S-L-O-W reading pace, and the unavailability of the 28-hour-day, I've somehow managed to not-read his novels Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star.  I hope that's about to change. Scratch that--I know that's about to change.  Olmstead's newest book examines war and its impact on soldiers when they return to the United States.  You should know by now, this is fiction tailor-made to my tastes.  Here's the Jacket Copy for The Coldest Night:

Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly consumes him. But when young Mercy’s disapproving father threatens Henry’s life, Henry runs as far as he can—to the other side of the world. The time is 1950, and the Korean War hangs in the balance. Descended from a long line of soldiers, Henry enlists in the marines and arrives in Korea on the eve of the brutal seventeen-day battle of the Chosin Reservoir—the turning point of the war—completely unprepared for the forbidding Korean landscape and the unimaginable circumstances of a war well beyond the scope of anything his ancestors ever faced. But the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far. Robert Olmstead’s riveting new novel is not only a passionate story of love and war, it is a timeless story of soldiers coming home to a country with little regard for, and even less knowledge of, what they’ve confronted. Through his hero, Olmstead reveals an unspoken truth about combat: that for many men, the experience of war is the most enlivening, electric, and extraordinary experience of their lives.

It's not hard to figure out why this might just be the Olmstead novel to finally make it from the Not-Read column over to the Read column. Men, war and (pardon the pun) the Mercy of love. Sounds like a winner to me.

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka (Graywolf Press):  To be honest, the cover design for this novel about a cricket player in Sri Lanka doesn't exactly raise my pulse.  Neither does the somewhat daunting length (416 pages) for a book about a sport which has already been giving the literary fiction treatment in the critically-acclaimed Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.  But I'm willing to set those petty prejudices aside because of two things: that trio of wolves on the spine which reassures me that I've never been disappointed by Graywolf's taste in fiction; and the first pages which set the stage for what looks like what Michael Ondaatje calls "a crazy ambidextrous delight."  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Aging sportswriter W.G. Karunasena's liver is shot. Years of drinking have seen to that. As his health fades, he embarks with his friend Ari on a madcap search for legendary cricket bowler Pradeep Mathew. En route they discover a mysterious six-fingered coach, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about their beloved sport and country. A prizewinner in Sri Lanka, and a sensation in India and Britain, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is a nimble and original debut that blends cricket and the history of modern Sri Lanka into a vivid and comedic swirl.

And here are the Opening Lines:

       Begin with a question. An obvious one. So obvious it has already crossed your mind. Why have I not heard of this so-called Pradeep Mathew?
      This subject has been researched lengthwise and breadthwise. I have analysed every match our man has played in. Why, you ask, has no one heard of our nation’s greatest cricketer?
      Here, in no particular order. Wrong place, wrong time, money, and laziness. Politics, racism, powercuts, and plain bad luck. If you are unwilling to follow me on the next God-knows-how-many pages, re-read the last two sentences. They are as good a summary as I can give from this side of the bottle.

Bonus appeal: a drunk and unreliable narrator. Okay, fine, maybe this is my cup of Earl Grey.

Fires of Our Choosing by Eugene Cross (Dzanc Books):  Here's another new book from a trustworthy publisher.  Dzanc Books is always scanning the literary horizon with high-powered binoculars to find fresh and exciting voices.  Eugene Cross' debut collection of short stories could be one of the year's finest, solely based on these Opening Lines (to "Rosaleen, If You Know What I Mean"):

      The day after his brother left the house for good, Marty Hanson picked out the smallest boy in his sixth grade class and waited until the boy was alone. He approached him, telling him that he’d found a dead dog decomposing in a far corner of the school’s courtyard. The boy, who was new at the school and whose name Marty could not remember, stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, nearly to the elbows, and said, “So?” He was looking at a dandelion near his sneaker’s toe.
      “‘So?’” Marty said, staring at the boy. “So I dare you to come over and have a look.”
      The boy kept his eyes trained on the ground, his head tilted forward. Marty saw the cowlick in the boy’s hair. Probably that morning his mother had tried to comb it down with a wet brush, Marty thought.
      “I knew you were a pussy. Jimmy Dinuzio told me so.” Marty had seen the two hanging around.
      “Jimmy didn’t say that.”
      “Whatever,” Marty said. He began to turn away. Before he’d taken two full steps he heard the boy say, “Where is it?”
      Marty led him to the southeast corner of the courtyard where two evergreens stood like sentries. He pointed to the base of one of the trees where the branches hung low and bare and darkened the ground. Dry pine needles were scattered everywhere.
      “Over there,” Marty said. The boy walked slowly, waving his hand in front of him as though he was blind. Marty followed close behind, and by the time the boy realized there was no dog, it was too late, Marty already had him on the ground. He straddled his chest and pounded his head and torso with his fists. He had trapped one of the boy’s hands with his knee, and when the boy tried to shield his face with the other, Marty tore it away. He dropped his bony elbows onto the boy’s chest and ribs and he spit on him until his mouth went dry. The boy’s screams sounded to Marty like a car peeling out, like the high-pitched squeal of rubber on asphalt.

Blurbworthiness: "Eugene Cross's book of stories is beautifully made: eloquent and at times darkly comic, these stories are particularly alert to the ways that working people cope with what's been given to them. The stories also are wise and scary about American violence. I loved this book; it's a brilliant debut."  (Charles Baxter)

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (The Penguin Press):  Here's a novel that puts its litmus test right at the beginning. Thayil's debut about Bombay's underbelly opens with a single sentence that unrolls like a bolt of cloth bouncing down a staircase across seven pages.  I don't have the space to give you the entire mesmerizing prologue called "Something For the Mouth," but here is just a small narcotic taste of the Opening Lines:

Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story, and since I’m the one who’s telling it and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now, because now there’s time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I’ll have to stop, these are nighttime tales that vanish in sunlight, like vampire dust— wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my, and another for the nostrils, and a little something sweet for the mouth, and now we can begin at the beginning with the first time at Rashid’s when I stitched the blue smoke from pipe to blood to eye to I and out into the blue world— and now we’re getting to the who of it and I can tell you that I, the I you’re imagining at this moment, a thinking someone who’s writing these words, who’s arranging time in a logical chronological sequence, someone with an overall plan, an engineer-god in the machine, well, that isn’t the I who’s telling this story, that’s the I who’s being told, thinking of my first pipe at Rashid’s, trawling my head for images, a face, a bit of music, or the sound of someone’s voice, trying to remember what it was like, the past, recall it as I would the landscape and light of a foreign country, because that’s what it is, not fiction or dead history but a place you lived in once and cannot return to, which is why I’m trying to remember how it was that I got into trouble in New York and they sent me back to Bombay to get straight, how I found Rashid’s, and how, one afternoon, I took a taxi through roads mined with garbage, with human and animal debris, and the poor, everywhere the poor and deranged stumbled in their rags or stood and stared, and I saw nothing out of the ordinary in their bare feet and air of abandonment, I smoked a pipe and I was sick all day,

Okay, you get the picture.  By that point, you'll either bail or sail with Thayil across the rest of the novel's 288 pages (don't worry, he starts compartmentalizing language into manageable sentences in Chapter One).  The publicity materials accompanying my copy of Narcopolis compared it to the writings of William S. Burroughs and Baudelaire.  To me, it looks like a sweet curl of smoke going up the nostrils to blow the mind.  Here's a taste of the plot from the Jacket Copy:

Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city’s underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works and patronizes the venue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and husband whose addiction is violence; Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman; and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters.

Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi (Crown):  Okay, here's the thing.  I live in Butte, Montana, hometown of 1970s motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.  Every year, for the past eleven years, the Mining City has held a mini Sturgis rally called Evel Knievel Days.  Furthermore, I like baklava.  So, how could I possibly resist Toutonghi's novel which not only features Butte front and center (for at least the first half of the book) but also Egyptian cooking?  I can't and I won't--Evel Knievel Days is going straight to the summit of my To-Be-Read pile (aka Mt. NeverRest).  Here's the Jacket Copy to explain more of its engine-revving appeal:

Khosi Saqr has always felt a bit out of place. Butte, Montana, is a somewhat homogenous town, and Khosi--half Egyptian, full of nervous habits, raised by a single mother, owner of a name that no one can pronounce--sticks out dramatically. His only solace is his work at the Copper King Mansion Museum, the former home of his ancestor, copper baron William Andrews Clark, and his bond with (and unrequited love for) his best friend, Natasha. But after Natasha gets engaged to her longtime boyfriend and Khosi's mother announces that she has finally, after twenty years, divorced his father, Khosi decides that it is time to make the leap: he goes to Cairo to find his father and connect to his heritage in a way he's never been able to before.

Blurbworthiness: "Evel Knievel Days is so good, I want to dress it up in a star-spangled jumpsuit, leap it over the pyramids of Giza on a Laverda American Eagle 750cc motorcycle, and watch it stick its landing before an audience of millions in downtown Butte, Montana.   A funny, heart-warming, compulsively readable novel about the unbreakable bonds of family--and baklava.  This is one you shouldn't miss.   Terrific!" (Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain)  "Evel Knievel--the great American daredevil whose spirit presides over Pauls Toutonghi's masterful coming-of-age novel--broke his shoulder, his arm, his collarbone, several ribs, his pelvis, and more: 433 bones in all.  Toutonghi takes as many risks, but what he breaks, and puts back together, is the human heart.” (Ben Greenman, author of What He’s Poised to Do)

Gilded Age by Claire McMillan (Simon & Schuster):  In her debut novel, McMillan uses Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth as a high-dive from which to springboard into a story about "one woman's struggle for independence and love."  Under McMillan's pen Wharton's Lily Bart becomes Ellie Hart and Cleveland substitutes for New York City.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

Eleanor Hart had made a brilliant marriage in New York, but it ended in a scandalous divorce and thirty days in Sierra Tucson rehab. Now she finds that, despite feminist lip service, she will still need a husband to be socially complete. A woman’s sexual reputation matters, and so does her family name. Ellie must navigate the treacherous social terrain where old money meets new: charitable benefits and tequila body shots, inherited diamonds and viper-bite lip piercings, country house weekends and sexting. She finds that her beauty is a powerful tool in this world, but it has its limitations, even liabilities. Through one misstep after another, Ellie mishandles her second act. Her options narrow, her future prospects contract, until she faces a desperate choice.

And here are the very promising Opening Lines:

      I’m a native Clevelander. I went east to school, as we do. And I married the loveliest man from Charleston, South Carolina, and convinced him to move back to Cleveland and start a family with me. Nothing is more usual than Clevelanders of a certain ilk leaving, seeing the world, and then dragging a spouse back to settle down. My husband, Jim, calls himself in jest an import—used to vary the breeding stock.
      And variety is needed here. I've known most of my Cleveland friends since we were infants, since crawling around together on faded Oriental carpets and cartwheeling in the grass at country club picnics. My parents knew their parents, and my parents' parents knew their grandparents, and so it goes back to the very beginnings when Cleveland was considered the West, and nice families had to stick together. So imports are needed, as few things are less exciting than kissing someone you've known since kindergarten.
      I tell you all this so that when I tell you that Eleanor Hart moved back to Cleveland without an import, you have a sense of the problem this presented.

The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman (Viking):  Sometimes you just want to sink deep into an historical novel full of witches, spies, orphans and cannibals.  Am I right?  If that's the kind of book you'd pull from your shelf on a rainy afternoon, then Zimmerman's novel about Colonial America intrigue should be the first spine you crack as the rain pelts the window outside your reading nook.  Though she shares the unfortunate coincidence of being released in the same year as Adam Johnson's highly-praised The Orphan Master's Son, Zimmerman has penned an entirely different novel.  Exhibit A: the Jacket Copy:

It’s 1663 in the tiny, hardscrabble Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now present-day southern Manhattan. Orphan children are going missing, and among those looking into the mysterious state of affairs are a quick-witted twenty-two-year-old trader, Blandine von Couvering, herself an orphan, and a dashing British spy named Edward Drummond.  Suspects abound, including the governor’s wealthy nephew, a green-eyed aristocrat with decadent tastes; an Algonquin trapper who may be possessed by a demon that turns people into cannibals; and the colony’s own corrupt and conflicted orphanmaster. Both the search for the killer and Edward and Blandine’s newfound romance are endangered, however, when Blandine is accused of being a witch and Edward is sentenced to hang for espionage. Meanwhile, war looms as the English king plans to wrest control of the colony.

Windeye by Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press):  Evenson's name has been circling around the periphery of my brain for a number of years, but somehow I've never crossed paths with his words until this collection of short stories landed on my doorstep.  Evenson is well-known in certain circles as a master of modern literary horror.  I'm excited/scared to take his tales for a test drive.  Here are the Opening Lines to the collection's title story:

      They lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, an old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake. In the back, where an oak thrust its branches over the roof, the shake was light brown, almost honey. In the front, where the sun struck it full, it had weathered to a pale gray, like a dirty bone. There, the shingles were brittle, thinned by sun and rain, and if you were careful you could slip your fingers up behind some of them. Or at least his sister could. He was older and his fingers were thicker, so he could not.
      Looking back on it, many years later, he often thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest.
      His sister would turn around and smile, her hand gone to knuckles, and say, “I feel something. What am I feeling?” And then he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the expression on her face change as she tried to make his words into a living, breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half-giggling, half-screaming, she whipped her hand free.

Yowza!  There's lots of skin-crawling promise in those three paragraphs.  The other stories, according to the Jacket Copy, include "a woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; and a transplanted ear with a mind of its own."

Zombie by J. R. Angelella (Soho Press):  Sticking with the unsettling things of this world, the next book atop Mt. NeverRest on my desk also holds a lot of potential to be a breakout hit of the summer.  The back cover blurb says Angelella's debut novel will appeal to fans of Jonathan Safran Foer, Wes Anderson and Chuck Palahniuk.  I've read the first chapter and I think Zombie will also appeal to fans of tight, snappy, funny fiction.  Thanks to The Walking Dead and Zone One, zombies are hot right now.  Angelella is about to make things even hotter for fans of the undead.  Here's the Jacket Copy:

      Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker is obsessed with zombie movies. He attends an all-boys Catholic High School where roving gangs in plaid make his days a living hell. His mother is an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and his father an ex-Marine realtor who disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy navigates it all with a code cobbled together from Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, Zombieland and Dawn of the Dead:
* Avoid Contact
* Keep Quiet
* Forget the Past
* Lock-and-load
* Fight to Survive
      The code is put to the test when he discovers in his father's closet a bizarre homemade video of a man strapped to a bed, being prepped for some sort of surgical procedure. As Jeremy--troubled but ever-optimistic--attempts to trace the origin of the video, this remarkable debut moves from its sharp, precocious beginnings to a climax of almost unthinkable violence, testing him to the core.

Sounds like a novel that has a lot of heart and (....wait for it....) braaains.

"The Bones" by Henning Koch (Pt. 2)

The Quivering Pen continues the exclusive 9-part serialization of a novella by acclaimed short-story writer and novelist Henning Koch. "The Bones" is a funny, frightening vision of an unspecified future in which America is a wasteland society whose currency is oil.  Mad Max would be right at home in Koch's neo-Western Apocalypse.  Read Part 1 here.

The Bones

2.

The Oilers were shocked when they heard that Wyre had gone to the foreign journalist to spill himself. It was like him, of course, he was a turncoat and loser whose family had never played by the book, which admittedly was hard in Oil Town because there was no book. The most effective laws, the Oilers knew tacitly, were those that had never been written down, and therefore lodged in the system like an evil solvent, building up in people’s fleshy gizzards. Those things weren’t really laws, they were principles. Most of the Oilers believed that Wyre’s origins were cussed from the very start – Oil Town was obsessed by bad genes, a more popular topic than the weather or football scores.

His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jeremiah, a freed slave, had been given a small freehold by a grateful employer, whose daughter he’d saved from drowning. On this patch of land he built with his own two strong arms a solid wooden cabin with two rooms on the bottom and one on top under the slanted roof-beams; and good windows with carved splash-boards and a pretty efficient-looking roof with copper drainpipes that still worked fine. He also extended an already fairly decent apple-orchard, and was known for his fizzy cider which he sold in earthenware pots.  

But he kept himself to himself, sat around smoking his pipe and reading books. Books! He worked less and less, of course, they all did. Once the oil boom started up and he drilled in his hay meadow and found rock like tarred sponge, he had enough to keep him in food, clothes, candles, books and anything else he wanted.

The apple trees grew tall and bushy, then dry and diseased. Finally, a hundred years later, they were felled by his great-grandson Richard, who was a keen wood-carver. The house was still filled with his sculptures of eagles, foxes and wash-bears.  

Wyre was just the same as his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather – the same obstinacy, the same dogged reluctance to belong. His beard fluttered in the breeze like trailing lichens. He always had a cigar in his mouth, and where the smoke rose there was a brown streak of nicotine that had dyed his facial hair from the corner of his mouth across his cheek.

Wyre did not shower very much, none of the Oilers did. The water had largely dried up and most of it was contaminated with oil. You came out of the bathroom filthier than when you went in.  

To be honest, Henrietta hadn’t been too taken with Wyre either, when he first showed up.

The dirt on him was mythical in proportion, even the smell had scared itself away. His skin lay folded like yellow leather over his misshapen skeleton.

When he came back the following morning she liked him better, reminding herself that most truly unpleasant people make a very good first impression – unless they’re thugs. Wyre was not unpleasant and not a thug either. He was just bloody ugly. But his eyes were alive and darting, with a whiff of humor.

He waited outside without knocking; it must have been about nine thirty in the morning, which is a civil hour. She was making a cup of tea when she felt the rich smell of a really good Havana coming in through the window.

It made her happy. Henrietta was a lover of the brown weed, and she was glad someone else was too.

“Morning.” She stuck her head out of the door, and the moment hit her; the moment when her undertaking crystallized. “So you came back, I wasn’t sure you would.”

“You smoke.” It wasn’t a question. He offered her a hand-rolled magic wand, encapsulated forest, sun and rain.  

“Thanks.” She sat down and lit it. “So..?”

“You asked about the bone people.”

“And you know where I can find them?” she said, continuing last night’s conversation where it left off.

Wyre looked flustered, and his way of showing it was a flurry of puffing on the cigar. Finally he sank back in his deckchair. “That’s what I came to tell you. No one knows where to find them. But I know they are there, that’s what I came to tell you. I know they are there.”

“Where?”

His smile was like someone who has lost everything, and was now reconciled to his wistful soul. “Yes, where?”

Henrietta was not impressed. “That’s all you know?”

Wyre pointed indistinctly at the rolling sands. “I can tell you they’re out there…somewhere. And that’s all I know.”

“You don’t know a lot, then.”

“No. I don’t know a lot. Do you?”

Henrietta thought about it. “I don’t know a damned thing…”

A few weeks earlier she had woken as always in her metal bed by the window, and parted the curtains to look out at the city waking up, the flatulent buses, the intensifying streets, an ant-hill stirred with a stick; ruminating clouds hanging motionless above.  

She had felt tired of the view; of the perspective, in fact.

This was also the slant she put on it when she spoke to Andy, her editor at the newspaper. “I need to see something new,” she told him. “I can’t just hang about here all the time.”

“It’s what everyone else does, Henry,” Andy told her, standing wide-legged before her, fiddling with his colorful braces. 

“Yeah but I’m not like them,” Henrietta said. “I can’t make a life out of trying a new Chinese restaurant, or…you know…going for a blind date with a well-hung Ukrainian.”

Andy grinned. “So what’s your big idea this time?” He sat down in his revolving chair and put his feet on his desk, because that was what newspaper editors did, apparently to demonstrate their complete disregard for hygienic recommendations.

“I want to go out to the Oil Basin.”

Now Andy was looking perplexed. “There’s nothing going on out there. I thought you had something interesting in mind.”

She walked up to the big plate glass window and looked down twenty-three storeys to street level, as always with a flashing image in her mind of an aircraft flying right into them, forcing her to jump, flailing her arms and falling, falling…

She recomposed herself. “I’ve heard rumors of natives out there, in the desert. Bone people, they call them.”

“Oh give me a break! Give me an honest story, Henry, go to Scotland, drink lots of Scotch and write me a piece on the Loch Ness Monster.” 

“They come into the towns at night and dig up the graves.” She turned round and glared at him. “They take the bones.”

“Even if it’s true…so what?”

“I don’t know if it’s true,” said Henrietta.

Andy shrugged, and then, knowing there was no changing her mind and anyway Henry was the best reporter he’d ever had, added: “When are you leaving?”

She checked her watch, spun round and on the way out called over her shoulder: “I’m already gone.”

The only sort of job Henrietta could hold down was one you could walk out of – anytime you liked.

After they had finished their cigars and drunk two more cups of coffee and eaten a couple of blueberry muffins which she’d brought in a tin from the city, Wyre showed her the cemetery.

There wasn’t much to see, just a ragged line of razor wire partially buried under a bank of sand, which had built up along the fence-posts.

Inside, on account of the sand, they did not use headstones any more, and anyway – at least the way Henrietta saw it – the idea of putting those people’s names there seemed vainglorious. Once they died you were better off forgetting them; all they’d ever done was ooze argumentatively in their chairs, chomping on their burgers and filling the air with intestinal gas whilst issuing their stinking words, usually something to the effect of how such and such a person should be shot and another strung up; occasionally if a politician threatened to raise the taxes they’d howl in protest. Such people were best thrown into the ground and covered up, like landfill.  

To mark the graves, the sexton or whoever did the job, drove long pieces of metal into the ground – old pieces of railway track, for the trains had long since gone, just like the trees. And metal was cheaper than wood.    

Wyre stopped and lit another cigar. “The only advantage of the desert,” he said with a wink, “is you can’t set fire to it.”

Henrietta was already bored by the cemetery, which was non-descript to the point of derision. “There’s nothing here.”

“Yeah. That’s the whole point,” said Wyre. “Someone dug up the bodies and took them away.” He pointed to a recently erected mound, planted with a few wilting bushes. “They left the heads, the feet and the hands in a pile. We put a guard on the place. But whoever came here only came once and made sure they took what they needed. If you’re going to break the law, do it once. Don’t be a recidivist.”

Henrietta reacted to his use of that word, recidivist, and looked at him with curiosity. “Where did you go to school, Wyre?”

“We don’t have schools here, we have a building with a teacher and some students sitting there, but they make sure no one learns anything. I stayed at home and read books.”

They stood in silence, gazing at the bleak scene, buffeted by a blast-furnace wind.   

“They must have come up here in the night when it was stormy, so no one heard them. We figure they left with no less than two hundred skeletons and corpses,” said Wyre, with a mischievous grin.

“Why would they do that? Who are they?” Her eyes narrowed analytically, but they collided with his fuzzed, yellow pupils, which seemed almost naïve in their simplicity. 

“Now you’re asking me things. Lots of people ask things but there ain’t no point if you don’t have answers.” He puffed, keeping his eyes on her. “That’s what people do. They ask. But they never bother finding out.”

 

3.

There’s only so much you can do in a cemetery. You kick through the leaves on the ground, except here there were no leaves, not even any twigs.

From time to time Henrietta stopped and perused some dusty bunch of plastic flowers. The custom here seemed to be to tie a couple of pastel-coloured roses to the iron posts, where they dangled in the wind and wore themselves ragged.

For the most part, there were only pieces of frayed plastic left.

Oblivion dwelled out there in the desert, it blew in and filled people’s minds, drove them not to madness but insignificance. 

Wyre followed her at a discreet distance and eventually, when he felt she had finished snooping about, spoke out: “That’s my house you see down there.” He pointed.

She saw a roof scarcely visible across the dunes. Like all the other Oilers, Wyre kept a bulldozer parked outside, to clear the sand after a blow.

Lazy people had steep dunes round their houses; they didn’t bother to flatten out the sand, just pushed it away until it started building up. Once every few months they paid a heavy-duty guy to bring a big machine and do the job. That was why, in the local dialect, a “sand-topper” was someone who did no work.  

Wyre’s garden was reasonably clear, owing, he explained, to a rise in the ground onto the prevailing wind, which diverted the sand. As they walked up to the house, Henrietta noticed a few skeletal tree trunks, flanking the path in straight rows. They made an eerie impression on her. “Apple trees,” he told her, “at least that’s what they used to be…planted by my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather…I should cut them down, but I like to remember things, even things I never saw.”   

When they stood before the sunken, wooden house with its grey, sun-bleached timbered walls and carved gables, she looked at him and said: “Are you the kind of guy who invites women back to his house and rapes them?” As soon as the words came out of her mouth she wondered at herself, wondered why she always had to be such a crazy bitch? Wyre didn’t take offence, in fact he hardly blinked. “I’m not, but some of the others might. You can’t rely on people here.”

“So why the hell should I trust you, then?”

He shrugged. “If you don’t want to, don’t.” Then went inside.

She followed him, of course, because once you pick up a piece of string you have to figure out how long it is and where it ends. And as soon as she stepped over the threshold she was reassured by his house, which was far neater and more homely, somehow, than the man himself.

There were plants everywhere, plants carefully tended and scarcely alive in spite of it, half-wilted and shriveled.

“These could do with some water.”

“Yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “Thanks, I know. I do what I can for them but it’s never enough. People like to drink oil, but plants don’t.”

They sat down in the main room, which was lined with deformed paperbacks, all at least a hundred and many two hundred years old.

Wyre tossed her a can of beer and collapsed into a leather armchair that formed itself comfortably round his body.

“Okay, time to come clean,” he said, snapping his beer open and sipping it with a grimace, and adding under his breath “Shit! I hate beer!”

“Clean about what?”

“I guess you came here to unpack yourself?”

She laughed. “Unpack? In what sense?”

“In the only sense. You must have had something you was carrying.”

“Don’t we all?”

“No one carries anything round here. I don’t either. You’re in a majority of one.”

“Majority?”

“You exist. We don’t.” He drank again, grimacing and repeating to himself: “Shit I really do hate beer.”

“What do you care who I am?” she said. “All you need to know is I’m after information, and my newspaper will pay you if you help me get it.”

“Pay me!” said Wyre with a twisted face. “How you going to pay me? I have money and I don’t want nothing.”

“You must want something?”

“No. All I want is to know who you are,” said Wyre, getting off the difficult subject of himself and moving onto far more fertile ground: the analysis of someone else. He’d have liked to tell Henrietta that he hadn’t spoken to anyone the way he was speaking to her – not in twenty years. But he knew it might be counterproductive to tell her. She might clam up, that’s what people usually did when you told them you liked them.

“I’ll tell you what I see,” he said. “I see a tall, handsome man. A big-shot. Good car, good clothes, always ready to flash his Visa card. But never sharing his time, never giving you what you want. And I see you having hopes of things working out…He’s the kind of man who wants a woman on his arm to make him look good, but he’d like to hang her up in his wardrobe with his coat when he has no use for her. Someone who makes promises, and they’re so damned sweet, the woman ends up thinking there’s something good in him, and it’s going to mature like a barrel of whisky. But when you tap it off in the end, it’s gone sour.”

“You seem to know all about it,” said Henrietta, unnerved about the accuracy of Wyre’s description. “You should have been a woman.”

“I practically am a woman,” said Wyre. “That’s why I almost laughed when you said that thing about raping you. I couldn’t rape you if I tried…”

He stopped and she waited, then finally said, “Why not?”

“’Cuz I don’t have my privates no more. I had an accident when I was a kid. I had a friend who drove a car into a wall and a piece of metal went through me. It sort of finished me off down there. I never touched a woman.”

She waited.

“But you know…what is a man?” he said. “In the village they call me the dickless wonder…”

“That’s not nice.”

“The one who drove the car used to be my friend at school, he’s called Arty Simpleton. Outsiders laugh about his name, but the Simpletons are a big family round here. Arty finds it funny now, what happened to me; he felt bad about it in the beginning, I guess. I mean, he was tanked up on booze when he drove into that metal spike. But now he’s turned it around. He tells people I had it coming to me.” Wyre looked at her, with a slight air of warning. “If you go into the bar you’ll see him. He’s a six-foot tub of white fat topped off with a shaved head and a pair of pig’s eyes so close-set you’ll think you’re cross-eyed when you look at him – people tell me it’s a sign of stupidity and I believe them. Arty reckons he’s a bit of a gentleman, which means he wants to give women the benefit of his attention. Until he gets bored of it, he gets bored pretty fast, and then he goes back to the bar.”

“You’re very charming,” said Henrietta.

“I am, yeah, but he’s not, so just avoid him if you run into him.”

There was a long silence. Grains of sand rattled against the window panes and the wind whined round the gables like an itinerant child.  

Henrietta steeled herself and then said: “Look, I need a four-wheel vehicle and I need a guide. I’m going into the desert. Are you willing to do it?”

“Oh, you know…everyone wants the desert.”

“Meaning what?”

“It’s the ultimate, everyone wants the ultimate. In theory they do; they like the idea of it. But in practice they prefer to do nothing.”

“Listen Wyre, you seem like a man with a thing or two on your mind, and that’s fine with me. But I didn’t come here to talk, I am not here for your story. I’m here to go into the desert and find the bone people.”

Wyre’s eyes filled with anger. He eased back in his chair. “No, you listen,” he said. “I don’t give a shit about your Enlightenment ideals. There’s not going to be any progress here, you are not going back to your home on earth…or reaching your destination…or improving yourself…or achieving the revolution. The Revolution Will Not be Televised, okay? This is not a project, I’m not the means for you to do what you wanted…I’m…”

She cut him off. “Like I said, I’m looking for a guide and all I need is a yes or no.”

“I’m not prepared to say more than maybe,” said Wyre. “I never do anything with people who are a pain in the ass.”

“Neither do I,” said Henrietta.

“You know, I was waiting for someone like you to get me going,” said Wyre. “Now that you’re here, I realize I don’t need you.”

“I’m starting to feel the same way.”  

Wyre seemed pleased with her; something about her alacrity. “I hope you don’t try and make me like you, it won’t work…” he said.

“Don’t worry yourself about that…”

“Because I really don’t like you much.”

Henrietta decided to play his game. “Don’t worry, I don’t like you much either. I find you sanctimonious…” Putting on her coat and focusing on the practicalities, she dropped her voice and said forcefully: “How long do you need to make up your mind? And when would you be able to leave?”

“I don’t know,” said Wyre. “It depends on you.”    

She walked out without saying goodbye but she left the door open, and heard the wind slam it behind her.

Henning Koch's writing started with screenplays. Between 2002 and 2007, he worked as a translator and dramaturge for Yellow Bird Films, makers of Henning Mankell's Wallander series for television/cinema in Scandinavia, Germany and the UK. In 2005, Koch moved to Sardinia, off the coast of Italy, where he spent three years writing the short story collection Love Doesn't Work and the novel The Maggot People (forthcoming in September from Dzanc Books). Follow him on Twitter: @henningkoch

Thanks for Asking: So, How Was the War? by Hugh Martin

I was remiss in announcing the start of National Poetry Month (belated trumpet blast, cymbal crash), but one thing which I haven’t been lax on is my Poem-a-Day habit.  Every day, as part of my morning constitutional, I open the latest volume of verse I’m reading and ingest a few stanzas of Grade-A, 100-proof poetry.  So, for me, every month is Poetry Month—maybe that’s why I overlooked its in-like-a-lamb arrival on Sunday.

I’m working my way through the 762-page The Poets Laureate Anthology.  I started reading it last April.  At 1-3 poems per day, I proceed at the pace of molasses moving across a glacier.  But that’s the speed which suits me best.  Ingesting more than three poems in a single sitting makes my head too crowded.  I mean, all those words bumping into each other, throwing elbows--it's too much linguistic cacophony.

Last weekend, I took a short break from the poets laureate for a quick trip through a 28-page chapbook published last year by The Kent State University Press: So, How Was the War? by Hugh Martin.  It was a quick read, but it was also an unforgettable one.  Let's put it this way: if these poems were drinks, then I spent the weekend tossing fiery shots of whiskey down my gullet.

Martin is a veteran of the Iraq War and, as the title of the chapbook implies, his poems are all about war, the preparation for war, and, more pressingly, how to deal with the post-war aftermath of what happened over there.  In “The War Was Good, Thank You,” Martin begins with this couplet

In the college cafeteria, a young girl asks,
“So, how was the war?”

I don’t know for certain, but I assume that's an incident lifted directly from his own life.  Nearly every veteran gets asked that question, in some form or another—maybe not as directly or as cavalierly, maybe it’s a “God bless you for your service” and a hard handshake, but the question is there in the eyes, swimming back and forth like a goldfish in a small bowl.  Everyone wants to know what it was like to be in a place where, in Martin’s words, insects fly “with ferocious speed [and] excitement” around a suicide bomber’s corpse in one poem and soldiers routinely hand out Ziplock bags of candy to children in the next.  Everyone back home in America wants to know, “Is it like what I see on TV and my computer screen?  Is it better?  Is it worse?”

In “The War Was Good, Thank You,” Martin answers the chapbook’s titular question by not answering it.  Instead, he gives us six disparate stanzas, snapshots from a year in the desert, which cumulatively try to answer the unanswerable.

On Sundays, I read about where I am at in magazines
and on the Internet. I feel I should understand more,
but being here only makes it harder, like adding more pieces
to an impossible puzzle. All we want is to be lucky,
to stay lucky. In afternoons, I lay outside shirtless on my cot
and to relieve the headache of here,
place ice cubes on my closed eyelids and let them melt.

“Show and Tell,” a prose poem, describes what happens when a veteran is invited to speak to a seventh-grade class, the students sitting in their “identical desks” and looking at him like he was “a blank chalkboard.”  How to describe a war which is only survivable through the profane camaraderie with your fellow soldiers, a war where roadside bombs pop like balloons, a war where your home for an entire year is a small steel hooch shaped like a boxcar?  How to put that into show-and-tell words?  He pulls a six-inch piece of twisted shrapnel from his pocket and passes it around the room.  To him, it’s a tangible scrap of his experience, proof that he’s alive and narrowly missed the bomb which sent fragments “flying blindly at our soft bodies of skin.”  But the kids in the classroom wrinkle their noses and pass around the shrapnel like it was “a smelly sock.”

No one can fully understand the rhyme or reason of war.  Sometimes, not even those who were in it.  It's a mind-blowing thing, this mobilization of countries who clash and kill, whether it's over ideology or real estate.  That sense of disturbed wonder really comes across in these poems.

Iraq can be a surreal place where, in “Mortars,” those payloads of death take on a primitive beauty:

At night they fly like javelins,
slicing through clouds and sky,
soaring past moonlight and minarets.

And then, a few pages later, stark dirty realism dominates the grisly “Sampson’s E-mail With Attachment” which begins

I accidentally deleted the e-mail
of the head you sent me
from Afghanistan.

There is no turning our own heads away from that photo of the dead suicide bomber, no denying the the undeniable there-ness of the face which has shriveled and deflated “because the blood had gathered/in a puddle to his right.”  A hundred successful projects to repair power plants, a thousand smiles from kids with baggies of candy, and a million “Mission Accomplished” banners could never erase a gory sight like that from the haunted veteran’s mind.  (I’m speaking here as someone who saw photographs like the one attached to Sampson’s e-mail on a regular basis during my tour of duty in Baghdad.)

And what do you do with the war after you return to the States?  How do you deal with the hot, clanging memory of friends lost and enemies killed?  You drink so much coffee that your hands vibrate "like the cones of subwoofers."  You wander the aisles of Wal-Mart as blue-vested employees insist you have a nice day.  You try to forget about doomed children calling "Mister!  Mister!"  Or, if you're like Martin, you seek healing in poetry.

Writing from a foxhole at infantry-grunt level, Martin has brought the war home and dumped it in our laps.  Never again will we casually ask, “So, how was the war?”  Now we know.  Now we see it was hard, brutal, frustrating, and an unshakable stink for those who returned.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. by Carole DeSanti

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

As the publisher's synopsis for The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. by Carole DeSanti states, "Love, war, and commerce converge in this lush, epic story of a woman who follows her love to Paris, only to find herself marooned, pregnant, and penniless. Set around France's Second Empire, where absinthe, prostitution, vast wealth, and cataclysmic social upheaval abound, this novel delicately explores the contrary requirements of a woman's survival."  Though some of the text in the trailer flies by too quickly for me, I am magnetically drawn to that image of the back of the woman's neck--the cover design which the video integrates so well.  Eugenie has turned away from us; but by doing so, she beckons us to follow.

My First Time: Anne Korkeakivi

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 Anne Korkeakivi whose debut novel is An Unexpected Guest, published by Little, Brown.  Korkeakivi was born in New York City and currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.  Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published by The Atlantic, Yale Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (UK), Gourmet, Ms., Travel & Leisure, and many other periodicals.  She recently was made a Hawthornden Fellow.  Visit her website here.

My First Time Reading In Public

Many years ago, I went to Venice Beach to see Mary Gaitskill read from her first collection of short stories.  I was familiar with her work, I liked it, but my mind began to wander.  The previous reader had been a new doctor-author named Ethan Canin, and while half of my brain listened to the pale stern Gaitskill read, the other half was picturing lusty Canin writing short stories while studying anatomy.

Suddenly, as her story approached its harrowing climax, Gaitskill reached up and shoved her almost-white hair off her delicate face.  A brief movement, but one full of such impatience, such passion, such sudden violence, it was like a page out of her beautiful but brutal fiction.  Gaitskill had become her writing.  I have never forgotten it.

I put off reading my own work to an audience for years.  I worked as a non-fiction writer for newspapers and magazines before publishing fiction and, as far as I was concerned, one of the perks was the ability to communicate while remaining invisible.  But, as I moved increasingly into the world of fiction, I realized how instructional it is to read your work aloud: passages you thought were fine feel sticky or, if you are lucky, flow better than expected.  I realized this by reading aloud alone, with the doors closed.  But reading before others is a finer test and also a way of celebrating literature.  Besides, participating in a reading is nearly prerequisite if you want to be taken seriously as a novelist—unless you are, say, J.D. Salinger.

I had to do it a first time, and get it over with.

I picked the opening banquet of the 2010 Geneva Writer’s Conference, attended by over 100 people.  The counterbalance to the size of the crowd was that I would be one of more than ten readers.  I could meld in.  Then I chose a subtly erotic passage from an early draft of my novel, An Unexpected Guest, with dialogue that mingled a Boston “Southie” accent, a straightforward American accent, and a Nor’n Irish accent.  (No, it was not about a ménage à trois.)  This may also sound like an odd choice.  But, I liked the passage; it made me laugh a little, inside myself, not least because of the unlikelihood of my having chosen it.  I have a fondness for both risk and absurdity.  Plus, the pages stood on their own, an important element for a successful reading.

I e-mailed the evening’s organizer.  This was my first time reading in public, I confessed.  May I please be slotted in early?  Sure, he wrote back.  Then he put me next to last on the roster.

By the time it was my turn at the podium, my hands were so slippery that the text was difficult to hold onto.  I am not a person whose hands sweat normally.  In fact, I often sit on them to warm them.  But I hung on.  I read slowly and deliberately, side-stepping the accents that I could hear so clearly in my head but hadn’t yet mastered expressing, but keeping the patois, heightening the sections with double-entendre.  I felt as though I’d entered a dream in which I was merely a conduit, as on my wedding day, and found myself speaking the last line in what seemed only moments.  I grinned and heard the clapping.  As I walked back to my seat, people slapped me on the back, touched my arm, congratulated me.  “That was brave,” my seatmate told me.  “Next time, do the accents.”

Did I give up a Mary Gaitskill moment?   I don’t think so.  But I learned something important about reading: you give more than just your words—you give a little bit of how you fit in with them.  The selection I’d chosen said more about me than I’d intended, and maybe so had the grin with which I’d ended.  And, very importantly, I’d gotten over the hump.  The first time was behind me; the next would be, and was, easier.

Reads Like a Prayer, Sings Like a Hymn: The Voice of the River by Melanie Rae Thon

Here at the blog, I've already talked about the impact of Melanie Rae Thon's fiction has on the unsuspecting reader.  Her stories are grounded in reality but pull you out of your body with her poem-dense prose.  In an earlier review of her short story collection In This Light, I wrote: "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."  You don't read Thon's fiction so much as you experience it.  The Billings Gazette has just posted my review of her novel, The Voice of the River, released last Fall from Fiction Collective 2.  Here's how the review starts:

      Melanie Rae Thon’s newest novel, The Voice of the River, begins with a heart-in-throat scene which could have been clipped from the front page of any Montana newspaper: a squirrel runs across a river’s thin ice, a joyful dog flies after it, a boy cries “No!”, and there is the sound of ice like glass shattering.
      “Kai sees the dog swept down and under, too impossible to believe, and he doesn’t believe, not exactly — doesn’t stop to think — only loves and leaps and follows, slides out onto the ice and crashes through it.”
      This is Kai Dionne, “seventeen years old, almost a man, six feet tall, but only 146 pounds, a child willing to die to save an animal.” When Kai breaks through the soft springtime ice on the river, he sets in motion a search party that will involve dozens of characters from his unnamed northwest Montana town. Friends, relatives and strangers are drawn to the river as the novel unfolds across a single day. It is a search-and-rescue at the edge of the human spirit.
      “Hundreds here, even now, silent pilgrims, loving the lost boy, loving one another — believers moving up and down the shore on both sides, still hoping — footsteps like prayers laid one inside the other — hundreds whispering to God as if he might come down as wind or light and change this — as if he might appear disguised: the air they breathe, the space between them.”
      That passage is a good example of Thon’s style, which looks light as condensed breath but weighs heavy with meaning. Each word is chosen carefully, placed in the sentence only after solemn deliberation, geared toward the greatest, deepest effect. The result is a novel that reads like a prayer and sings like a hymn.

Click here to read the rest of the review

Soup and Salad: John Kennedy Toole's Lost Manuscript, Patricia Ann McNair's Inspiration, Steven Millhauser Takes the Prize, The Birth of a Book, Running With Dickens, Lemony Snicket's Cover, Steve Almond Heads to Alaska

On today's menu:

1.  The Millions has the account of a biographer's dream--the discovery of a lost manuscript.  In this case, the original manuscript of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.  Cory Maclauchlin, whose book about Toole, Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, has just been released--Biography Project Alert!--describes his quest for the Dunces grail:

      I have been researching and writing about Toole for seven years, digging through archives, interviewing his friends and family, trying to decipher Toole’s character, his fears, his desires, his angels and demons. And I have often contemplated that missing manuscript. His mother claimed she discarded all the “[Robert] Gottlieb edits” in order to showcase her son’s “pure genius.” Still, seeing how Toole altered the creation that he felt defined him would certainly offer insight into his final years. But no one I interviewed seemed to know its whereabouts. The Toole Papers at Tulane University does not have it, nor does the Walker Percy Papers at UNC Chapel Hill. Some of Toole’s friends had heard that Percy’s typist threw the “badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon” away after she retyped it. Walker’s wife, Bunt, didn’t believe that story. She suspected it might be in Walker’s miscellaneous papers that had been boxed-up after his death in 1990. But the family scoured the boxes and found nothing.
      I had nearly given up on the question of the original manuscript until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of Toole’s best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.” I nearly dropped the phone as she explained Toole’s mother had given it as a gift to her brother after the novel was published. When her brother passed away in 2008, she acquired it. It had a few penned-in edits, she explained, but not drastic revisions. “I don’t know what to do with it, really” she said. “I considered selling it at auction.” Christie’s estimated its value up to $20,000, if deemed authentic. She hadn’t called Sotheby’s yet. “Please” I begged, “just hold on to it. I’m on my way down.”

2.  At The Story Prize blog, Patricia McNair has an evocative account of where she finds inspiration for her short stories.  It begins like this (and gets even better as it goes on):

      I sit with my husband at a restaurant, and across the way near a large, haunting, abstract painting on a brick-face wall, another couple lean in toward one another, then away. The man leaves his hand on the table between them, palm up; the woman pulls her shoulders back and crosses her arms over her chest. She is weeping.
      I lived in a house in a small subdivision between two lakes in Iowa, and the wife of the couple next door was badly scarred. A deep caving in of flesh was where bone and muscle should have been, but wasn't. I found out later that her husband shot half of her face off. A hunting accident. They gave up hunting. She stopped eating meat.

3.  Speaking of The Story Prize: Steven Millhauser won for his collection We Others: New and Selected Stories. The other finalists were Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman.  Congratulations to all three for reminding the world that sometimes the best things in life come in smaller packages.

4.  And now for a peek behind the wizard's curtain....The birth of a book, from start to finish:




5.  Good luck to 61-year-old Iain Dempster who will attempt to complete the 26-mile London Marathon "whilst performing a dramatic reading from the works of Charles Dickens" in order to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society.  (Pun alert)  He has great expectations that he'll get through the hard times of the race without twisting his ankle.

6.  I've already told you about my high hopes for the next Lemony Snicket book, the first volume in a new series which will be released in October.  Now my excitement soars because Little, Brown has unveiled the cover of the book.  It's illustrated by one of my favorite graphic artists, Seth, and it's splendid indeed:

News of the cover came with this warning from Snicket (aka Daniel Handler): "I suggest extreme caution....The distribution of this cover image should be on a need-to-know basis, limited to librarians, booksellers, readers, e-readers, educators, journalists, muck-rakers, bloggers, tweeters, men, women, and children."

7.   Steve Almond is on his way to Alaska for a quick, frozen tour.  The 49 Writers blog has a short 4.9-question interview with the author of Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, God Bless America and other books without "America" in the title.  As the author of an an absurd novel myself, I really appreciated Steve's response to what role humor plays in fiction:

Look: everyone has a particular sense of humor. That's just how people work.  Humor isn't some tool in our writer's toolkit. It's an evolutionary adaptation we developed to deal with the bad data of the world around us and inside us. What I exhort people to do is simply let their sense of humor onto the page, to not withhold from readers one of the central facets of their personality. I don't mean to make jokes as a way of avoiding the serious stuff of literature. In fact, I mean just the opposite: that sometimes the only way to get to the darkest stuff is by coping to the utter absurdity of yourself and the world. That's what humor is.

What really freaked me out was when Steve mentioned he almost went to grad school at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks 15 years ago.  That would have put him there at the same time I was getting my MFA from UAF.  Under the right circumstances, I think we could have been BFFs.