Friday Freebie: Pity the Beautiful by Dana Goia and June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo

Congratulations to Thomas Baughman, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Cove by Ron Rash.

In honor of National Poetry Month, this week's book giveaway is a special double-prize package from Graywolf Press: Pity the Beautiful by Dana Goia and June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo (translated by Jeffrey Yang).  Both volumes of verse are well worth checking out.

Graywolf featured June Fourth Elegies at the front of its Spring 2012 catalogue and it's easy to see why the press is standing so proudly behind this book.  Here's the catalogue copy:

Liu Xiaobo has become the foremost symbol of the struggle for human rights in China. He was a leading activist during the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4, 1989, and an author of Charter 08, the manifesto of fundamental human rights published in 2008. In 2009, Liu was imprisoned for “inciting subversion of state power,” and he is currently serving an eleven-year sentence. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for “his prolonged non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” June Fourth Elegies presents Liu’s poems written in memory of fellow protesters at Tiananmen Square. In this bilingual volume, Liu’s poetry is for the first time published freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original.

In his foreword to June Fourth Elegies, His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote: "Liu Xiaobo pays a moving tribute to the sacrifices made during the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.  Considering the writer himself remains imprisoned, this book serves as a powerful reminder of his courage and determination and his great-hearted concern for the welfare of his fellow country men and women."

The day
seems more and more distant
And yet for me
it remains a needle inside my body

Pity the Beautiful is Dana Goia's first new poetry book in more than a decade; but, as Booklist has said, he "makes every collection worth the wait."  In its catalogue copy, Graywolf writes of this new book: "Its emotional revelations and careful construction are hard won, inventive, and resilient.  These new poems show Gioia's craftsmanship at its finest, its most mature, as they make music, crack wise, remember the dead, and in a long, central poem even tell ghost stories."  Here, for instance, is the first stanza of "The Road," lines which call for us to slow down and smell the roses.  Poetry like this has the power to make us better people...

He sometimes felt that he had missed his life
By being far too busy looking for it.
Searching the distance, he often turned to find
That he had passed some milestone unaware,
And someone else was walking next to him,
First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife.
They were good company--generous, kind,
But equally bewildered to be there.

If you'd like a chance at winning both books, all you have to do is answer this question:

What poet began "The Waste Land" by writing "April is the cruellest month"?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 19--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on April 20.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen 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).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Fobbit: 77-7-7

I don't normally participate in these kind of blog-tagging parties, but when fellow Book Pregnant author Erika Robuck sent out the invitation, I couldn't resist playing along.  By the way, before you do anything else, head on over to take a look at Erika's novel, Hemingway's Girl, which comes out on September 4--the same day as my novel, Fobbit.  Set in Depression-era Key West, it tells the story of Mariella Bennet, the daughter of an American fisherman and a Cuban woman, who goes to work as a maid for Hemingway.  The climax of the novel involves a hurricane (and, possibly, some six-toed cats).  I've pre-ordered it and can't wait for it to arrive.  Now, without further ado, here are the rules:

1. Go to the 77th page of your work-in-progress or latest book.
2. Count down 7 lines.
3. Copy the 7 sentences that follow, and post them.
4. Tag 7 other authors.

Since I don't have a finished copy of Fobbit at hand, I turned to the uncorrected proof.  These lines may not end up in the finished book on page 77, but they'll be pretty ding-dang close.  In this scene on Forward Operating Base Triumph in Baghdad, the company's top enlisted man is addressing his men as they stand in formation in the courtyard of Saddam Hussein's former palace, now an Army headquarters:

As the company first sergeant, a barrel-chested black man with a voice like raspy thunder, was fond of saying, “This is a ding-dang war, gentlemen, and don’t you ding-dang forget it.”  (First Sergeant was a semi-devout Baptist who avoided profanity whenever possible.)  “The ding-dang hajjis out there don’t give a hoot whether you want to be here or not.  They still be here when we’re packed up and gone home."

Now I'll tag these 7 awesome authors to give us a taste from their books:

1.  J. R. Angelella
2.  Linda L. Richards
3.  Susan Henderson
4.  Sandra Gulland
5.  Jenny Lawson
6.  Claire Bidwell Smith
7.  Myfanwy Collins

They may not have time or inclination to do a similar blog post (we're all busy these days, so I can hardly blame them if they don't), but I urge you to check out their blogs and their books.  Fine writers, every one of them.

"The Bones" by Henning Koch (Pt. 4)

This is the fourth of nine installments of "The Bones," the serialized novella which acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Henning Koch has made available exclusively to The Quivering Pen.  "The Bones" is a story about America's decline into a wasteland where crude oil serves as currency and violence rules the landscape.  Koch calls the novella "an oil-based scenario of future social decay" and it's easy to see the frightening trend he predicts for our society.  Just read the daily headlines.  Click these links to read the earlier installments of "The Bones":  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The Bones

6.

The next thing she heard was a sharp, scraping sound, metal against metal. And feet swaddled in skin shuffling across a packed-mud floor. Also wind-blasted sand against the plank walls, trickling through in places.

These sounds were clearer to her, because she couldn’t see anything.

She realised her eyes were closed, but she took a deep breath before opening them, because she could feel she was naked, which had to mean something had gone badly wrong.

What she saw, when she opened her eyes and wiped away the rheum, was the blackened bottom of Arty Simpleton’s button-down long-johns, sticking out as he bent over a tap fixed onto a length of crude, dented pipe that came through a rough hole in the wall.

He was wearing a pair of sheepskin slippers, and his belly in his morning get-up looked like a big piece of fat strapped to the front of his chest.

As soon as she moved in the bed he peered across, and said, with a leery grin, “Oh my darling, you were wild last night.” And then turned the tap and filled a bucket with stinking oil.

She lay back for a second, until she noticed the filth on the sheets and pillow-case, even the tiny sand-fleas bouncing all round her head. At that point she sat bolt upright.

“What’s happening?”

Arty put down the bucket. “What’s happening here is you’re a woman and I’m a man and last night we proved it.”

Henrietta was never quite able to explain what happened next. What gave her the ferocity? Inside she felt a ball of pain, a small energy-charged thing bouncing from her liver to her pancreas to her lungs, pummeling her organs and occasionally shooting up into her brain like a tiny ice-pick into the gap between her lobes, grazing the fragile skin of her emotion.

But on the outside she was a paragon of stillness. She sat up and pulled on her underwear. “I guess I’d be a fool if I was surprised.”

When she stood up and put on her blouse, Arty Simpleton turned away and fetched another empty bucket. “I figured you were a tough one and I wasn’t wrong,” he said, turning the tap again and resuming his work. “That’s why I spiked your vodka, to keep you in line.”

She pushed her feet into her sneakers and then walked up to him, gently reaching out to put her palms against either side of his temples. “Arty Simpleton,” she said with a sharp smile, “you’re a real dog…”

Arty Simpleton was genuinely surprised, and he was too dumb to read her emotions, which he would anyway have viewed as deeply flawed. To Arty and his kind, there is nothing in the world that cannot be justified in the name of one’s own requirements.

“Shit, I didn’t think you’d take it so well, but I have to say I think a lot more of you now I see you got some common sense.”

She nodded at the buckets on the floor. “What’s this?”

“Just a local guy, needs twenty buckets’ worth for his boiler. Peanuts.” When Arty Simpleton looked down, proudly turning his fat-brimming eyes on the besmirched fruits of his wealth, Henrietta dug the points of her nails into the tops of his ears and ripped hard, neatly tearing them like sheets of paper down to his ear-holes.

The effect was dramatic: a deluge of rich blood pouring over his throat and shirt. She pushed him back and he fell like a skittle and lay writhing and yelling on the floor.

“Listen,” she said. “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you. Did you ever hear the man sing that?”

And before Arty managed to recompose himself and get back on his feet, she aimed a kick at his wide-open cakehole, breaking a couple of his teeth; then casually trod on his head and bounced up and down a few times before making her way to the door.

 

Ten minutes later she was outside Wyre’s house, and he let her in.

“I heard…” he said.

“You heard what?

“He spiked your drink.”

She paced across the floor. “I ripped his ears off.”

Wyre’s face registered a mixture of surprise and delight. “You did what?”

She showed her hands, blood-flecked and filthy.

The shower in Wyre’s house was at least built into a fragrant juniper booth, and there were sea-shells to scrape off any globules of oil that came out, and good soap to rub oneself with.

When she came out she threw her clothes in the bin and borrowed a set of sack-like garments which, he informed her, had once belonged to his mother. “I think I’ll call the police now,” she said, “I want to put Mr. Simpleton behind bars.”

“You can call them. Why not? They’ll make a report.” Wyre looked at her, nodding apologetically at what he was saying. “Call ’em today and you might see ’em next week, or the week after that. But Arty Simpleton will take his gun to you, if it’s true you stripped him of his ears.”

“I did.”

“Well, then.” He handed her a cold bottle of cola. “Drink this.”

She slumped in the sofa, lit a cigar and sighed loudly. “This place is sick.”

“It’s sick, yeah. But it shows its sickness, which makes it honest.”

“You defend the place as well, do you? Arty was giving me the same bullshit last night. The place is a dump but he loves it, sort of thing…”

Wyre tightened his mouth. “I’m glad you gave him a beating, Henrietta. I’m just disappointed you didn’t finish the job and drop a ton of lignite on his head.” They sat quietly watching the smoke of her cigar throwing a great pall of a shadow against the cracked ceiling. “I think we should probably leave. I was kind of expecting you. Last night when I heard, I packed the jeep. We can survive out there a while, maybe a month or more if we can find water, which I doubt.”

“And do you know where we’re going?”

“I think if we don’t go now we won’t be going anywhere,” said Wyre.

7.

People say the desert is the final outpost and they’re not wrong. After humans have swarmed and fought and fucked and dug and built and manacled everything they believe in, the desert will emerge: the underlying truth. The desert is the full stop, the desert is the bedrock. And humans can’t live in it, humans can only die there and leave their bones.

As they drove west across the dunes, avoiding the road and leaving the shacks and bobbing wells of Oil Town behind them, Henrietta had a feeling that she was leaving her old self behind. This decision to escape justice, as if she were the criminal, would have serious repercussions, no doubt about it.

Back home, the plants in her window would be wilting.  Her editor at the newspaper would be wondering where she was by now.

But nothing would change, the litter would still blow through the street outside her front door; the beggars would still congregate on the corner by the subway, their hands reaching out to her for silver and gold, neither of which were common currency any more. People only carried plastic cards; these could be switched off at any time, particularly if there was any suggestion that a law had been broken.

Henrietta was certain that as soon as Arty Simpleton went to the police to report her assault, the authorities would turn off her cards and wait for her to come in. 

Going into the desert had been her ultimate gesture, her farewell. She had stepped out of her skin and left it like a dirty pile of clothes on the floor. Everything behind her was consumed and blistered, her life in the city no more than passé imperfect.

“Where are we going..?” she said, shocked at the absurdity of her own question: “…and when we get there, what will we do?”

“You better let go of that,” said Wyre. “There is no ‘where’ any more...”

“I’m not so sure. How far does the desert stretch?”

Wyre grinned. “You’re funny. All you need to know is it goes further than we’ll ever get.”

There was a complexity in the way Wyre related to Henrietta, and he was fully aware of it. Why is it that some pills, however well we understand our need of them, cannot be accepted as a necessary cure?

For years Wyre had thought about making this journey into the desert. Gradually as their cemeteries had been ransacked and harvested for their bones, and as the Oilers implicitly accepted that the desert had a secret although they did their best to deny it to the outside world, Wyre had endured the Oilers’ jibes as he foddered his camels and exercised them on the dunes.

Oil Town was synonymous with the thorny presence of Arty Simpleton and his amateur militiamen – as good a reason as any for shutting up his house and heading out. How many times had Wyre dreamed of taking his shotgun to Arty, converting his flaccid body into a pile of stinking meat? He’d made it clear to Arty that if they strayed onto his land he’d open fire on 'em, treat 'em as trespassers. There was a state of undeclared war, ever since he’d fired over their heads one time as they drew too close to his boundary.   

Only after Henrietta’s arrival had he finally packed his vehicle, loaded his camels into the trailer and actually cleared out. He could not possibly admit to her that she had been the catalyst. 

Now he had less than a week to find the mountains; but at least they were big things, visible from afar and hard to miss. And for this reason Wyre spoke little on that first day, merely kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the horizon and did not tell her that they only had fuel to keep them going for days, not weeks. After that, they’d have to switch to camels, the very same camels that he’d loaded up in the trailer, which they had to stop to feed and water in the evenings.  

Of course Henrietta was not stupid, she was quite capable of calculating their predicament. On that first evening when Wyre parked and let out the camels and hobbled their front legs so they wouldn’t go too far, she was pleased to see them foraging and finding the odd bit of vegetation to eat. The desert was not quite as dead as one thought at first.  

They made their campfire under a flowering tree of some sort, a wonderful emanation of color in that sea of pale emptiness.  

She sat by their fire, watching Wyre cooking porridge and baking chapatti bread on a hot iron. The camels were outlined against the red sky, standing on a sandy ridge littered with sharp boulders and scree; the animals were pushing their noses between the rocks, finding tiny sprouting plants in the crevices.  

Henrietta stopped chewing, and looked at Wyre. “If we find the bone people, what will we do? Are they friendly? We haven’t thought about that. Maybe they’ll kill us?”

“You said it. If we find them. We’ll deal with that problem if we do…”

“I’m not convinced.”

Wyre put down his fork and wiped his mouth. “I’ll tell them I’ve come for my ancestors’ bones.”

“Have you?”

He shrugged. “Not really, but it sounds good.”

“What have you come for, then?”

“I’m a Miserable, Henrietta, nothing ever pleases me; you could put me in Paradise, I still wouldn’t be dancing the samba, you know. But one thing I can’t stand…” He spooned in some more porridge and kept his eyes fixedly on the camels, which were just disappearing over the ridge. He stood up, and she called out to him as he headed off in their direction.

“What can’t you stand, Wyre?”

He stopped and looked at the ground, his feet sinking into the sand. “I can’t stand ugliness. I can’t stand the sight of an Oiler who can’t see his shoes ’cuz his stomach’s too big, who spends his days eating imported shit ’cuz he’s ruined his own land. I can’t stand the sight of dead plants. I miss birds singing in the trees, Henrietta.”

“Well you won’t hear any birds here,” said Henrietta.

Later, she woke in her tent in the night. A traumatic memory was playing inside her, like a film that’s frozen, with the image stuttering,:the image of Arty in his shed, with his stained singlet and mozzarella stomach; Arty’s lips dribbling with saliva. She felt sick to her core, but she must not think about it. Must not!

There was a bird singing somewhere; harsh and not very melodious, but a bird nonetheless. You stupid woman, she told herself. You always think you have the smart answer, the quick answer. And you do. You have the quick answer, but it’s wrong.

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

Decisions, Decisions: A Stranger on the Planet by Adam Schwartz

A Stranger on the Planet
by Adam Schwartz
Soho Press
336 pages
Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

Writing is about making decisions.  You start writing by making the decision to write—the decision to turn off that rerun of House and fire up Microsoft Word and open up a new file.  Every word that you take out and every word that you leave in is a decision, whether it’s conscious or not.  If you’re writing something simple or humble—a grocery list, a Facebook update, a book review—you’re not making that many decisions, and maybe they don’t matter that much.  If you’re writing a novel, you have a lot more decisions to make, and at least some of them, like deciding what sort of narrator to use, are important.

The advantage of using the third-person narrator is that you get to use your own voice and your own style.  If you take the first-person route, you can still bring your voice and your style to bear, but it has to go through the filter of the character.  If you have an ordinary, everyday sort of character, that’s fine, but you will have to have him use ordinary, everyday sort of language, at least if you want him to sound believable.  If you don’t want to use ordinary, everyday language—if your prose tends towards the literary or the fantastic—then you have to use an unconventional narrator, something like an autistic teenager, or a space alien, or a psychopathic clown.  That’s a lot of work, too, because you have to do a lot to not only get inside that character but to infuse his thought patterns with the sort of literary quality you need to pull off the project.

What Adam Schwartz has done in A Stranger on the Planet is something fairly common, but you wouldn’t be too much out of line if you called it cheating, at least a little bit.  If you (as a writer) want to use your own voice and style, but still want the personal touch of a first-person narrator, then the simplest way to accomplish that is to make your first-person narrator a writer.  That way you get the best of both worlds.  You get to tell your story from a perspective that makes sense, but you get to add in all the descriptive stuff and the asides and the explanations and all that good stuff.  It is a nice trick, and not that hard to pull off, except for one tiny thing.

You see (or maybe you don’t) the problem with making your first-person narrator a writer is that now you’re stuck writing about a writer.

This is a two-part problem.  The first part is that what writers do is inherently not very interesting.  Take me, for instance.  I am writing this (right now!) on my laptop, which is sitting on a white plastic IKEA stand.  It’s a little after ten in the evening, and I am going to have to get up in a minute and check on my daughter in the next room, who is bawling because she kicked her covers off and you don’t really care about any of this, and I don’t blame you one bit.  Writing is a solitary pursuit for a reason.

The second problem is a bit trickier to write about, because it involves (unfair) generalizations about who writers are and what writers do.  Setting aside for a moment the vast number of writers who are warm, personable and loving, there are (you have to admit this) some of us who don’t exactly have the whole personal-relationship thing down cold.  And Seth Shapiro, the main character and narrator of A Stranger on the Planet, is one of those people.  We meet Seth as an awkward New Jersey teenager, dealing with a prickly father, a shrewish stepmother, and a flighty, voluble, needy mother.  He has rotten relationships with them, as well as with his introverted younger brother and a twin sister who is going through her own adolescent struggles.  Seth has a bad hand to play in the family department, and he doesn’t play it all that well.

The novel follows Seth as he goes to college and graduate school and has disastrous relationships with women and mentors, and as he goes into teaching and has a failed marriage.  If this all sounds vaguely depressing, it is.  A Stranger on the Planet is not that much more than a catalogue of bad relationships told from the perspective of a deeply alienated and troubled character.  The story arc coincides too closely with Seth’s maturity, and to the extent that there is redemption, it only comes after Seth’s put-upon and resentful mother dies, which is more than a bit self-serving.

What redeems A Stranger on the Planet is the writing, which is detailed, insightful, and intricate.  As a writer, Seth is (and again, this is a bit of a stereotype) driven by self-doubt and angst.  If Schwartz ever had those feelings, they are unwarranted.  He is talented and deft, all the more so when writing about loss, heartbreak and secrets.  And if all Seth’s relationships are failures, they are failures with interesting, fully realized characters with their own sorrows and cares.

Writing, as I said, is about decisions, and I can quarrel with a few of the decisions that Schwartz has made here but not with the overall quality and excellence of the work.  If you make the decision to purchase A Stranger on the Planet, that would be a good decision as well.


Curtis Edmonds is a writer and critic living in New Jersey. He is seeking representation for a new novel.  You can follow him on Twitter at @Curtis_Edmonds

Help Me Win a Trip to Book Expo America

Dear Loyal Blog-Reader-Who-I'd-Hug-the-Very-Breath-From-Your-Lungs-and-Bake-You-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies-Every-Day-If-I-Could:

The Quivering Pen is one of 800 blogs entered in the Independent Book Blogger Awards competition, sponsored by Goodreads and the Association of American Publishers.  Your vote could help send me to the annual Book Expo America shindig in New York City this June.  Not only would I get to rub elbows with industry professionals (and slip Advance Reading Copies of Fobbit into their book bags when their backs are turned); but I'd also get to hear literary heroes like Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz and Zadie speak; finally meet my editor at Grove; and taste a New York bagel for the first time.  Surely that's worth a mouse-click of your time.

Vote

The fine print: Voting continues until 11:59 pm EDT, Monday, April 23.  The polls allow one vote per person in each of the four categories, and voters must be Goodreads members (it's free and relatively painless). When polls close, the top 15 blogs in each category will become finalists. Winners will be selected from among the finalists by a panel of industry judges. Each of the four category winners will receive a pass to BookExpo America (June 5-7, 2012) with airfare and hotel accommodation in New York City.

Here's the complete list of entrants, which also includes several of my own favorite blogs, including Sophisticated Dorkiness, We Wanted to Be Writers, Indie Reader Houston, Muse, The New Dork Review of Books, Dead White Guys, and Diane Prokop's blog.  If you don't vote for me, please consider dropping your ballot in one of their boxes.

Thanks from the bottom of my ever-lovin' heart.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss

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.

If a good book trailer incorporates diverse elements like narrated excerpts, blurbs from other writers, and a little conversation from the book's author herself, then the video for Lucy Ferriss' The Lost Daughter is first-rate.  The filmed scenes--an empty swingset, a motel parking lot, a wheelchair in a field of grass--all lend themselves to the mood of the book and the praise from writers like Francisco Goldman and Tom Perrotta speaks to the novel's qualities.  "In years to come, I'll remember my mom's disappearance as the day I began to understand the world...."  It sounds like we will all find something of ourselves in The Lost Daughter.

(Note: The trailer has one f-bomb, but is otherwise safe for the workplace and the company of children.)

My First Time: Janyce Stefan-Cole

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 Janyce Stefan-Cole.  Her debut novel, Hollywood Boulevard, has just been published by Unbridled Books.  A finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, Janyce Stefan-Cole is included in the Boston Globe bestselling anthology, Dick for a Day (Villard Books), Being Human: Call of the Wild, The Healing Muse and Knock Literary Arts Magazine.  A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and resides with her husband in Brooklyn, NY, and Freedom, NH.  Her website can be found here.

My First Disappearance

There’s a saying in Hollywood: when the phone stops ringing you’re done.  Once they stop taking your calls, silence tells the story.  For someone who spends vast amounts of time alone tooling with words, the internet as follow-up avoids the vulnerability of voices across the wire, but emails are easier to ignore.

Story submissions used to be sent snail mail.  Manila envelopes, various stamps, query letter copies to be filed, and then the long wait, three months typically, for the return envelope containing, 99.9 times out of 100, a mass-produced rejection letter.  With luck, an intern touched pen to paper with a wispy word of encouragement, sometimes only initials.  Those were rare and meaningless but they gave rise to hope large enough to have kept the Titanic afloat even after hitting the iceberg.

When I first started writing short stories I was so full of naïve hope the Titanic would have missed the iceberg altogether.  Buoyed but not remotely ready for primetime, I hand-delivered my first submission to The Paris Review.  I started right at the top.  The rejections piled up from there.  I learned to weather the doom of "no."  I did not turn to drink or whine to friends and family.  (Okay, maybe a little.)   Writing is so hard anyway—what was a little rejection by comparison?

The anonymous refusals almost never said what was wrong with the submissions.  It was possible to convince myself the reader was in a bad mood, or that it was all rigged toward friends or friends of friends anyway.  Sometimes I was able to see that some of the work I’d sent needed work.  Enlightenment comes in many packages.

Eight years or so after that first hopeful hand-delivery to The Paris Review I received a letter from the fiction editor.  It came via email, though I’d sent my story via snail mail.  I trembled that day reading her words.  The editor liked my piece but had suggestions. I don’t remember if I was offended that she wasn’t utterly smitten or if I thought, I’ll do anything: change the characters, the plot, sell my soul and give away my car.  I wrote back, perhaps lightly defending my literary choices but I saw her points and wanted to work them into the story.  I don’t remember if I sent re-worked pages or not.  It didn’t matter, she never responded to my email.

She’s busy, I thought, or on vacation.  I waited.  Had there been a clerical error?  I waited.  Had I done something wrong?  Like what?

I waited.

Why would she take the time to write and then ignore me?

I waited.

Why encourage me?  Why throw me a rope if I’m not going to make it?

Finally, I stopped waiting.

I just disappeared off her radar.   This was baffling.

Disappointment was bad enough, but that silence at the other end of the Ethernet was a kind of void; an abyss where all hope died.   I had no way to respond.   I couldn’t stalk the editor or call her up and tell her that was no way to treat a writer.   I’ve disappeared from other literary radar since, surprised anew each time by such shabby behavior.   But that first time was like being invited to sit down and then having the chair thrown at my head.   Ouch.

Photo by Scott Neary

My Books, My Burden: a photo essay

"There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime. You have to draw the line somewhere."
--Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

"My problem is, every time I draw the line, a new book catches my eye and I have to reach forward and draw a new one."
--David Abrams

The Desk

Clearly, we have a problem.

The Biography Project Queue

So many lives, so little time.

A Short Stack of Short Books

In an ideal world, I could read these in one sitting.

Mine is not an ideal world.

The Thrift Store Haul

My wife: "Would you mind taking a quick trip to the thrift store with me to look at furniture?"
Me: "Sure, no problem. I might take a quick look at the books, too."

She: "OK, but please promise not to buy anything you don't need."
Me: "I promise."

 

The Kindle

Currently holding 504 ebooks.

It's a wonder my desk doesn't collapse under the weight.

The Real Problem

This is my basement.

This is the bar in my basement.

These are the books I've "acquired" in the last month.

They are waiting to be shelved.

I need to build more shelves.

Friday Freebie: The Cove by Ron Rash

Congratulations to L. C. Sterling, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Hollywood Boulevard by Janyce Stefan-Cole.

This week's book giveaway is The Cove by Ron Rash.  I'm very excited to be able to offer Quivering Pen readers a copy of the novel by the same author who wrote what I think is one of the most superb works of fiction in the last 25 years: Serena.  Of that novel, I once wrote: "Rash's novel reminded me, in a good way, of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Tim Gautreaux's The Clearing. I don't throw the word 'masterpiece' around lightly, but when I toss it at Serena, it sticks."  I haven't had the chance to start reading The Cove (can you say "overcommitted and spread thin"?), but it--like so many other fantastic 2012 releases--is near the top of my To-Read Pile.  I'm fully confident it will be just as good (or better) than Serena.  But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself.  Here's the plot synopsis for The Cove:

The New York Times bestselling author of Serena returns to Appalachia, this time at the height of World War I, with the story of a blazing but doomed love affair caught in the turmoil of a nation at war. Deep in the rugged Appalachians of North Carolina lies the cove, a dark, forbidding place where spirits and fetches wander, and even the light fears to travel. Or so the townsfolk of Mars Hill believe–just as they know that Laurel Shelton, the lonely young woman who lives within its shadows, is a witch. Alone except for her brother, Hank, newly returned from the trenches of France, she aches for her life to begin. Then it happens–a stranger appears, carrying nothing but a beautiful silver flute and a note explaining that his name is Walter, he is mute, and is bound for New York. Laurel finds him in the woods, nearly stung to death by yellow jackets, and nurses him back to health. As the days pass, Walter slips easily into life in the cove and into Laurel's heart, bringing her the only real happiness she has ever known. But Walter harbors a secret that could destroy everything–and danger is closer than they know. Though the war in Europe is near its end, patriotic fervor flourishes thanks to the likes of Chauncey Feith, an ambitious young army recruiter who stokes fear and outrage throughout the county. In a time of uncertainty, when fear and ignorance reign, Laurel and Walter will discover that love may not be enough to protect them.

Booklist had this to say about The Cove: "Rash effortlessly summons the rugged Appalachian landscape as well as the small-mindedness and xenophobia of a country in the grip of patriotic fervor, drawing striking parallels to the heated political rhetoric of today.  A powerful novel that skillfully overlays its tragic love story with pointed social commentary."  Amazon picked it as a Best Book for this month and had this mini-review:

Hank and Laurel Shelton live in a lonely Appalachian valley, on the same broken homestead where their parents toiled and died years before. Locals shun Laurel for her witchy birthmark, and Hank struggles to maintain the farm without a hand he lost in the Great War. When a mute stranger arrives, both (especially Laurel) allow themselves hope for a future outside the cove, away from small-town superstition and wartime fervor. But whose skull is that in the well? In the lyrical prose that won him such acclaim with Serena, Ron Rash washes this novel's languid spaces with bucketfuls of atmospheric dread, pushing his characters into the currents of their fate with determined empathy. Murky and deliberate, The Cove solidifies Rash as master of modern Southern Gothic.

If you'd like a chance at winning your own copy of The Cove, all you have to do is answer this question:

On this webpage where he talks about the "story behind the book," Rash said The Cove began with the image of a young woman seeing something when she peered through the branches of a rhododendron bush.  What did that woman see?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 12--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on April 13.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen 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).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

"The Bones" by Henning Koch (Pt. 3)

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 Parts 1 and 2 here and here.

The Bones

4.

Some people always have to give you the run-around. They reveal a few things, then back off, gloat at you, tell you it’s meaningless anyway.

It’s a way of making themselves feel important.

People want to be cornerstones – not stepping-stones. But when you think about it, what’s a house without a staircase? You’d be better off not building it in the first place.

The life of a journalist is a misery from start to finish. You go out there to get the story, but the story grows and in the end it’s bigger than you; it would take your whole life to tell it properly, the way it deserves.

And that’s why she always ended up telling her editor she needed time off. She had to cool her heated mind, she had to immerse herself in silence, sit in the moonlight for a few weeks, let her thoughts settle back into some kind of fermenting harmony. And smoke good cigars.

Wyre was right, it was like a barrel of maturing whisky. The men she’d had were all bad, one of them had been toxic, and her instinctual drives were all enemies that came whispering in the night; enemies such as the myth of the child, the myth of the milk in her breast, the tinkling waters of the river, the oasis, the soft bed guarded by a fierce man who loved her.

Lies. All lies.

Henrietta had never got the distillation process right.

The whisky came out smelling like an old shoe.

Later, she went to a small boarding hotel and asked if she could pay for a shower. The gummy man behind the counter grinned as if it was funny and took her money, but when she turned on the shower and stood there trying to clean herself, the water came out all grimy and full of small globules of black tar, which melted against her skin and left her sooty as a chimney-sweep. She dried herself, went back and roared at the old man, then went back to the camper van and wiped herself down with wet tissues.

Afterwards, while smoking a cigar outside, she decided that when investigating a town of shits, one had to go to the stomach sack and greater intestine, where the shit was made.

5.

She saw Arty Simpleton as soon as she stepped into the bar that evening. He was unmistakable. What was it Wyre had called him? A tub of blubber with pork-fat eyes?

It wasn’t a bad description.

He was sitting on a tall stool at the bar, apparently engrossed in conversation with the barman, but not so engrossed that he stopped himself from turning round and giving her an invasive stare.

She ignored him and ordered a cranberry vodka. The barman was vaguely hostile, everyone in there was hostile and they were all men.

She couldn’t help turning her head slightly, and shooting out, in her best New York voice: “If you have something on your mind, buddy, keep it to yourself.” It was a good ploy, she had found. If you really wanted someone to talk, the first thing you had to do was tell them to shut up.

Arty did not wait long to open his ugly mouth: “Oh, not much, thanks. I’m not big on unpacking myself, and I don’t go to other folks’ homes and make them unpack themselves, either. I have some scrupulosity about that…”

“Fine with me, I only came for the truth.”

“Yeah,” said Arty Simpleton. “The truth about nothing.”

“An empty cemetery? You call that nothing?”

She let the cold vodka dribble down her throat, and momentarily enjoyed the feeling of watching him squirm on the end of her skewer. But she had not figured on the way his rampant stupidity rose up like a one-armed zombie. “A few old bones, who gives a damn about ’em? If all I can say in two hundred years is ‘Hey, these are my bones and you better go to my grave every week and holler out your prayers’ – then fuck me what a sad man I’ll be. ’Cuz when you gone you gone. See?”

Arty nodded at the barman, who brought him another large hot chocolate smothered in clumps of whipped cream. “I don’t drink, lady. And I ain’t no Muslim. That’s a double negative.” He burst into strenuous laughter. No one else in the bar made a sound, though she heard a chair scraping in a corner and a drawling voice: “Shut the fuck up, Arty…” After that, the bar went back to its usual state, which was rather like the recovery room of a psychiatric ward, where the patients were brought to recuperate after their hysterical outbursts had passed.

She decided to change tack, for the moment. “What about the robberies?” she said. “You issued a statement in the local press.”

“You bet,” said Arty.

“I was confused by it,” she said, deviously. “On the one hand you’re saying to any robbers out there that if they come back you’re all willing to fall on your swords rather than hand your money over. That’s passivity, in my book, Mr. Simpleton. But on the other hand, you’re telling them you’ve bought enough weapons to start a small war…”

Arty stood up and his stool scraped agonizingly against the floor. “Come on guys, let’s show her the real story!”

A couple of semi-intoxicated amalgamations of dirt held up by their trousers stood up and flustered along beside Arty and Henrietta, as they went to a door at the back. Arty flung it open with some pride and flicked on the lights.

Inside was a long gun rack studded with carbines, pump-action shotguns and semi-automatics; even a long sniper’s rifle.

There was a long exhalation from the Oilers, as if they were looking at their pride and joy, which in a real sense they were. Guns were like jewels to them or chronograph watches, intricately made; precious status symbols.

The colour had risen into the congealed fat of Arty’s cheeks. “We got night patrols set up.”

“And day patrols too, right Arty?” someone added in a squeaky voice.

“Night, day, noon, you name it,” said Arty. “Any robbers come out here again we’ll blow ‘em away.”

“So you all got together and paid for this? To protect yourselves…”

“You bet we did,” said Arty, flicking the lights off again and closing the door.

Henrietta sat down and waited for him to recompose himself before she threw another pebble into the pool.

“Let me get this right…you buy guns and even go out on patrol to protect your property. But someone comes in the dead of night and digs up your cemetery and steals the bones…the bones of your fathers and mothers…and all you have to say about it is ‘fuck that’ and ‘nothing happened.’ Am I right?”

“That’s right,” said Arty Simpleton, slurping his whipped cream. “You know what I do, lady? I drill oil and I tap it and I salt my money away, that’s what I’m about…”

“Okay, that’s understandable,” said Henrietta. “You don’t care about your ancestors, but what about your kids? What are they going to do in this place after you’ve gone, what are you leaving them?”

“Well I’m leaving them a shitload of dough to start off!” said Arty, slamming down his cup. “We Simpletons have been in this place for five hundred years, lady, so don’t you come here telling me I don’t care about my ancestors, though I tell you I do not care a barrel-pin for a sack of old bones…”

He stared into the gnarled wood of the bar, then added laconically: “Anyways, what fucking kids you talking about? Ain’t no fucking kids round here last time I looked, all I got is a nephew and he’s lucky enough not to be born here.”

“So Oil Town’s not such a great place, then?”

His red-rimmed eyes grew heated. “Oil Town is the best fucking spot on earth! I wouldn’t change it for nothing!”

“The heat, the desert, the flying sand…the lovely filthy water…you love it all, do you?”

“That’s right. It’s my home; I love it.”

Henrietta smiled, filling up with pity. “Oh you’re a sorry collection of instincts, aren’t you, Mr. Simpleton?”      

“Now hear me good, lady journalist. You think you have something to say about a place you know nothing about? You think by writing it down it’ll change anything?”

She thought about it. “Yes. In the long run.”

“Oh, Jesus, in the long run we’re all dead. And then some asshole comes and takes your bones. Just so you’re clear about it, if I saw the folks what did this I’d take my gun off the wall and have a pot-shot at them ’cuz they deserve nothing but lead. But I won’t see ’em because they take care I don’t. And I’m not going to let them take my composure from me, ’cuz bones ain’t my core area. I’m a driller and an oiler and that’s all that counts for me.  Anything else is decoration.”     

Henrietta felt, for the first time, a sort of despondency creeping into her system; an area of glum darkness with a whispering voice inside it, telling her it was all futile. These men are right, said the voice. Everything is gone, everything is broken, nothing can ever be whole again, nothing works and nothing ever will work.

She sat on her stool, breathing the glutinous air with difficulty.      

“Hey Arty,” someone piped up from a table at the back. “You gonna tell her about the spruce-jumpin’?”

“No,” said Arty. “No I ain't gonna tell her.”

“Tell her, Arty, or I’ll tell her,” said the barman.

Arty seemed to waver, or maybe it was just the hot chocolate and cream making him oozy and pliant. “Go ahead, I’m not stopping you, if you want to talk about stuff that don’t make no difference no more.”

The barman’s face split into a big grin and then, while wiping glasses and bustling about, he started talking. “You know, lady, this guy here, Arty, he got the mind of a true original. He don’t care about a thing, not even his own skin, and he won’t stop at nothing to prove a point.”

Henrietta tried to show interest, but her mind was swaying.

“Why is that?” she said.

“Oh ’cuz he used to stand on a tall rock and jump off into some trees and catch hold of a branch and then hang there like a damned tree-rat twenty metres off the ground. Know what I’m saying? And he did it for dares, he did it to prove stuff.”

“Once he jumped to prove to Daisy Lopez that he loved her.”

“Shut the fuck up about that!” said Arty, his face turning livid.

“I already know about it, Wyre told me,” said Henrietta, who knew the only way to get one’s story was to stir up the hornet’s nest.

“I’m not saying nothing about Daisy Lopez. She’s history…”

The bar was jumping now. Everyone was laughing, tears running down their cheeks. Some were banging their tankards against the tables. This was a highly specific kind of steam-letting going on, she knew. Depressed people used laughter to let out their anger and disappointment, and nothing could be sadder than the sound of a roomful of broken souls.  

Henrietta’s head was spinning terribly now. She wondered what kind of screwy vodka this was.

The barman’s poison-ivy face loomed close again. “We can’t do the spruce-jumpin’ no more, ‘cos they cut down the trees forty years ago or more. They’re gone…like Daisy Lopez.”

The laughter intensified.

The barman continued.

“The timbers ain't all bad. I used them for roof-beams on my extension, and every time I look at them I think of Arty here, he was still a slim stripling in those days, fit as a bug he was, you should have seen him throw himself off. Hey Arty, you should have joined the army and killed yourself some Chinese, you would have made a General for sure and then you’d have yourself a nice little wife who appreciated your killing ways and your pot of gold and garden full of grass and Oil Town wouldn’t have been in your compass, you know…you’d be free of it…free, know what I’m saying, man? There’d be grass under your feet and cold water to drink without no fucking ice machine…”

Henrietta had a final lucid moment.

She saw the barman standing before her, his shoulders hunched up to his ears, wiping his glass so energetically that it broke in his hands and sliced his thumb open. 

The bar went silent again, as he wiped a rag round the gash, cursing as he did so.   

“I don’t fucking care about no goddamn grass under my feet. I’m wearing my fucking boots anyways,” said Arty. “What fucking difference does it make?”

And then Henrietta passed out.

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