Trailer Park Tuesday: Special World Book Night Edition: Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith--plus books by Jesmyn Ward, John Grisham, Lisa Scottoline, Hillary Jordan and Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  In the best cases, a book trailer can be a perfect marriage between text and video.

Okay, I'll admit it.  I'm obsessed with Glaciers, the debut novel by Alexis M. Smith published last year by Tin House Books.  By now you're probably sick of hearing me talk about how great the book is (hopefully, I've worn down enough of you that you've gone out and bought the book to see just what I'm talking about; if so, then my work here is done).  But when a book is filled with the kind of pure, crystalline prose, superbly-rendered imagery and engaging characters like those in Glaciers, then you'll have a hard time getting me to shut my yapper.  Just as The Quivering Pen has turned into something of a love letter to this particular book, Glaciers itself was written as a love letter to Portland, Oregon--or, actually, the entire Pacific Northwest, Smith explains in the trailer for the novel.  This short trailer is a video postcard of the City of Roses, a perfect complement to Glaciers' main character, the librarian Isabel who collects ephemera like vintage dresses, salt-and-pepper shakers, hand-sewn aprons, and, yes, postcards which stir up memories of her childhood years in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest with her father, mother and sister.  The book trailer has been out for well over a year, so I'm not exactly cutting-edge here; but I thought today of all days would be the perfect time to feature it at Trailer Park Tuesday.  If you haven't already heard the news, blaring like trumpet blasts from excited bibliophiles from coast to coast, today is World Book Night and Glaciers is one of the thirty books selected for the national giveaway.  I'll be handing out 20 copies of Glaciers at the Butte, Montana public library tonight, starting at 4 p.m.  If you're in the neighborhood, stop by for your free copy.  You can learn more about World Book Night by clicking here, where you can also find events happening near you.

In honor of World Book Night, I thought I'd post trailers to some of the other books which WBN Givers will be handing out today...

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward:




Look Again by Lisa Scottoline:




Mudbound by Hillary Jordan:




Playing for Pizza by John Grisham:




The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh:

Fobbit is a semi-finalist for First Novelist Award

The dream continues.  (Please don't wake me up.)

Fobbit was just named a semi-finalist in the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award competition.  My thanks to all the volunteer readers in the Virginia Commonwealth University English Department, the James Branch Cabell Library, and the Richmond literary community who spent hundreds of hours reading through a record-breaking number of submissions (nearly 140 first novels) and who chose Fobbit to be in such fine company.

Congratulations to all the other semi-finalists.  Here's the complete long-list (I've read some of these fine books and all the others have footholds on my mountain of To-Be-Read books sitting in my basement):

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk by Ben Fountain
Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman
When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man by Nick Dybek
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
Fobbit by David Abrams
No One Is Here Except All Of Us by Ramona Ausubel
The Girl Below by Bianca Zander
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung

My First Time: Rachael Hanel

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 Rachael Hanel, the author of We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter (University of Minnesota Press).  Memoirist Alison Bechdel calls it “Mesmerizing!” and novelist and memoirist Nicole Helget says the book “gently untucks dying, death, and mourning from the dark recesses of the drawer we Midwesterners, descendants of the stoic and neat, have kept it.”  Hanel’s work has been published in Bellingham Review and New Delta Review, and an essay was selected as a “Notable Essay” in the 2012 Best American Essays.  She lives in Mankato, Minnesota and blogs at We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down.  Click here to visit her website.

The First Chapter I Wrote

My book started in a creative nonfiction classroom at Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2000.  I was not an MFA student—I was getting my M.A. in history while working as a reporter at the Mankato Free Press.  Even though I was 25 years old, I only had vague notions of what an MFA was.  I was a journalist, after all, not a creative writer.  Heaven forbid that I mix the two.

I don’t remember what the assignment was, but I ended up writing about an image from my childhood that continued to grip me.  The image was of a gravestone—no surprise, considering my dad was a gravedigger and I spent long summer days in cemeteries.  This particular gravestone didn’t stand out in terms of size or color.  It was just a foot high or so, nondescript reddish-brown granite that blended in with the gravestones around it.

But on the top was a bronze clasp, a clasp irresistible to my young fingers.  I opened that clasp—a larger version of a locket a mother would wear around her neck—and found a photo.  The photo was of a teenager named Vicki.  She had pink cheeks and red hair.  She looked vibrant and healthy, and I couldn’t imagine someone like her being dead.

In my writing class, I started to think about what it meant for me at age four or five to suddenly understand that death was not reserved for old, sick people—teenagers like Vicki could die, too.  The more I thought about my days in the cemetery with Dad, the more I realized there were many more stories like Vicki’s that influenced me and shaped my perspective on life, death, and loss.  A book was born.

Now, 13 years later, I hold the book in my hand.  I had to work on it in fits and spurts while I focused on other priorities: graduate school, work, my family, running marathons.  But the stories were always there, insistent, nagging at me.  I knew even in 2000 that the entire narrative would emerge at some point; I didn’t know when or how.  I just had to have confidence that it would happen.  Some writers know early in the process when they have a story that’s worth writing, and nothing will keep them away from it when they reach that point.

Sunday Sentence: The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman

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

The same old sky was blue and cloudless, vacant as a starlet's smile.

The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman

Postcards from L.A. and Iraq

Having a great time.  Wish you were here....

"Here" being the Los Angles Times Festival of Books.  Despite the heat (it's 8 p.m. and 74 degrees right now) and the poor choice of footwear (boat shoes) while walking around the USC campus, I've enjoyed my two days here at the annual California fest.  In the space of just a few hours, I bumped into lit-friends [name-dropping alert!] Maria Semple, Jonathan Evison, Paul Tremblay, Antoine Wilson, Adam Braver, and Pauls Toutonghi; I re-bonded with Book Pregnant gal pal Lydia Netzer; and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel called "Fiction with a Sideways Glance" with Jess Walter, Fiona Maazel and Diana Wagman.  Not to mention hearing a speech by the spry, graceful Margaret Atwood (she was on hand to receive the L.A. Times' Innovator's Award).

All in all, it's been the typical book-festival experience: an exhilarating, completely draining brain-blur of books, authors and craft talks.  As usual, I'm coming home loaded down with novels I can't wait to read.  In this case, my festival haul included two new Hollywood novels: Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed from Bloomsbury and American Dream Machine by Matthew Spektor from Tin House Books.

Soon after I arrived in the city yesterday, Diana Wagman and I met at the Sheraton and, after a gut-filling lunch at a local bar and grille, set out on a walking tour of downtown L.A.--places like the iconic City Hall (a fixture in all those film noirs I love), Grand Park with its neon-pink benches, and the Los Angeles Central Library where Diana and I craned our necks looking at the colorful murals lining the walls of the rotunda:

Diana was a lively and friendly tour guide for this rube from Montana on his first visit to the city.  And if I haven't mentioned it before, I'll say it now: if you like novels about kidnappings, temperamental seven-foot iguanas, vain game-show hosts, strained mother-daughter relationships, and rental-car-company mix-ups, then you should definitely check out Diana's latest novel The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets.  Even if you don't generally read kidnapper-iguana-dysfunctional-family novels, you'll probably find something to like in Diana's brightly-violent, darkly-funny novel.

Once Diana dropped me off at the hotel and I took a couple of short power naps, it was time for the raison d'etre for my L.A. trip: the L.A. Times Book Awards.  Last night, Lydia Netzer and I joined a few dozen other nervous nominees in the Broward Auditorium on the USC campus for the ceremony.  Here we are, pre-ceremony:

Fobbit was nominated for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and Lydia's Shine Shine Shine was up for the general Fiction prize.  Neither of us won (Maggie Shipstead's Seating Arrangements took the Seidenbaum prize and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk earned the Fiction award) but we sure had a blast seeing our faces and our books flashed across the big screen at the front of the room:

For a brief, giddy moment, we felt like royalty, like rock stars, liked stunned Academy Awardees.  I know it's a tired cliché, but it really was an honor just to be nominated.

As I sat there in the auditorium amongst the glittery literati, I started thinking about how far I've come in the past decade, both personally and professionally.  If you'd described last night's scene to me ten years ago, I would have scoffed, punched your shoulder and said, "No way--get outta here!"  So much has happened to me in the last year alone--not just the singular joy of having my novel brought to life by my dream publisher (thank you, Grove/Atlantic!), and not just the fun of traveling around the country to book-fests like this, and not even the deeply touching personal contact I've had from readers....but all of it, the whole supercalifragilisticexpialidocious mind-crumpling heart-squeezing surreality of this debut-novel party I've been living since last September.  I never take anything for granted.  I treat every day like it's a fresh surprise.  I don't know about Lydia or Maggie or the other nominees in my category, but I still feel like I'm in a Disney movie: birds are singing, mice are sewing my clothes, and it's still all so unbelievable.  Maybe I'll feel differently by the time the next novel comes out, maybe I'll be jaded and this will all be old hat.

But I hope not.  I hope I'll still be marveling at how the mice make my clothes.

Last night, after I got back to my hotel room, I decided to look in my journal to see what I was doing in Iraq in 2005.  You know, just for shits-and-giggles and to gain a little perspective on this whole weekend in L.A.  The contrast between the two days, separated by eight years, was striking.  Here's what I wrote on that long-ago April 19 from Baghdad when I was serving with the 3rd Infantry Division as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom:

Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices are becoming as regular as breakfast, lunch and dinner.  The Significant Activity Reports pour in—“1-184 reports VBIED on Route Irish 1035hrs,” “Patrol in vicinity of grid MB45003593 struck IED 1309hrs.  No casualties.  Minor damage limited to blown tire, shattered windshield,” and so forth with nauseating frequency.  The metronome of violence is ticking faster and faster as the insurgents (aka terrorists) grow more and more desperate…or more and more organized, as the case may be.  Yesterday, the entire crew of a Bradley was engulfed in flame—they all lived, but barely; two days ago, a female MP was riding in a humvee when an IED burst on the side of the road; at first, they thought she and her driver just had minor cuts from the shrapnel, but when she passed out, they realized a small jagged piece of metal had severed her femoral artery on the back of her leg; she died before they could reach the hospital. 

For the most part, however, it’s mostly Iraqi civilians dying out there on the roads.  The good people of the country who still have purple-ink thumbs from voting on January 30—they’re the ones falling victim to the remote-control-detonator hands of the terrorists, some of whom migrate to Iraq from other countries (like Syria).  As the new Iraqi government struggles to get on its feet, there is a power vacuum in the country.  The US is reluctant to get involved, for fear of the world accusing us of interfering in another country’s politics.  So, we hang back in the shadows at the sessions of the Transitional National Assembly meetings.  While the Iraqi politicians and religious leaders bicker about how control should be divided between the Sunnis and Shiites, the terrorists take advantage of the nothing-government and regroup for more attacks.

Walk around Camp Liberty for an hour and you're guaranteed to hear muffled thuds coming from beyond the borders of the camp, followed a minute later by the rising plume of death-smoke.  Tonight, as I was walking out of the chow hall after dinner, another IED went off.  The sad thing is, very few of the people walking across the gravel path ahead of me flinched.  We all looked to the horizon for the smoke, but only one or two of us twitched our shoulders up toward our ears and said “Whoa!”  We’ve become dangerously complacent about the distant thunder of bombs, the remote death of strangers bleeding out on Baghdad streets.  Most of the time I think, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s a controlled detonation by our engineers…”  I make a mental note to check the Sig Acts when I get back to the office, but then I go back to sipping my milkshake as I walk across the safe haven of Camp Liberty.

More and more, though, I’m hearing this isn’t the secure military fortress we’ve grown to think it is.  The Commanding General has said in more than one briefing he thinks the “bad guys are among us right now on an everyday basis.”  In other words, the attack doesn’t need to come from beyond the concertina-wire borders of camp—all it takes is one determined, smart terrorist to infiltrate one of the cleaning crews or other day workers—hell, maybe one of the merchants selling those cute carved camels down at the bazaar—to plot an attack.  It could be a bomb, or it could just be a guy with an AK-47 picking off soldiers one by one as they walk around camp sipping their milkshakes.

Then there’s the sporadically-lucky terrorists outside camp who launch mortar rounds with blind aim and a prayer to Allah.  The other week, a mortar whistled through the sky and landed on Camp Taji.  When it impacted against the ground, it exploded in a shower of hot, sharp metal.  A female soldier walking in the area took a piece of shrapnel and ended up with a fatal “sucking chest wound.”

Believe me, I think about these things as I walk around drinking my milkshake, but what can I do?  If it’s gonna get me, it’s gonna get me.  Apart from staying alert and walking fast (which I do), I just have to go on living as close to a normal life as I can, hoping for the best.

Friday Freebie: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Congratulations to Michael Cooper, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey by Shannon Huffman Polson.

This week's book giveaway is a multi-book prize package.  One lucky reader will win copies of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is Soffer's debut novel which was released earlier this week.  It's a book for foodies, like Like Water for Chocolate, designed to make mouths water while readers turn the pages.  Here's the publisher's plot synopsis:

This is a story about accepting the people we love—the people we have to love and the people we choose to love, the families we’re given and the families we make. It’s the story of two women adrift in New York, a widow and an almost-orphan, each searching for someone she’s lost. It’s the story of how, even in moments of grief and darkness, there are joys waiting nearby.  Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks, making croissants and chocolat chaud, seeking out rare ingredients, all to earn the love of her distracted chef of a mother, who is now packing her off to boarding school. In one last effort to prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother’s ideal meal, an obscure Middle Eastern dish called masgouf.  Victoria, grappling with her husband’s death, has been dreaming of the daughter they gave up forty years ago. An Iraqi Jewish immigrant who used to run a restaurant, she starts teaching cooking lessons; Lorca signs up.  Together, they make cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, kubba with squash. They also begin to suspect they are connected by more than their love of food. Soon, though, they must reckon with the past, the future, and the truth—whatever it might be. Bukra fil mish mish, the Arabic saying goes. Tomorrow, apricots may bloom.

For more about Soffer, read her contribution to the My First Time series here at The Quivering Pen: "My First Writing Award."

Since its publication at the beginning of this year, Me Before You has been gathering mountains of praise--and most of those mountains were built on the salt from the tears of readers caught up in the emotionally-ripe love story of two memorable characters.  Here's the jacket copy:

Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is.  Will is acerbic, moody, bossy—but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.  A Love Story for this generation, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?

Here's what the New York Times said in its review: “When I finished this novel, I didn’t want to review it: I wanted to reread it....Moyes’s story provokes tears that are redemptive, the opposite of gratuitous.  Some situations, she forces the reader to recognize, really are worth crying over....with Lou and Will she has created an affair to remember.”

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself is also billed as "love stories," but it's romance with a dark bite.  Petrushevskaya, who also wrote the collection of stories with a long-winded title There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, has a knack for turning our expectations on their heads.  The publisher's blurb goes likes this:

By turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya—who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King—is best known for in Russia.  Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people across the life span: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer.

Here's the praise from Kirkus Reviews: "Petrushevskaya’s short stories transform the mundane into the near surreal, pausing only to wink at the absurdity of it all."

If you'd like a chance at winning copies of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, Me Before You and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He Hanged Himself, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com.

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

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

Glaciers at the library: World Book Night 2013

Next week, patrons of the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library here in Butte, Montana will witness Glaciers moving through the book stacks.  Not the turquoise-blue icebergs of the Arctic variety, but something just as beautiful: the words on the pages of Alexis M. Smith's debut novel.

Regular readers of The Quivering Pen know that my love for Glaciers, published last year by Tin House Books, runs as deep and wide as the real things carving their way through the mountains of Alaska.  I named the book as one of my favorites of 2012 and, even before I turned the last page, I was singing its praises in person to anyone who will listen.

So, when the list of available books for this year's World Book Night was released, there was never any question about which title I would choose.  Sure, I love Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and I wouldn't mind distributing copies of Willa Cather's My Antonia, but given the opportunity to promote a debut novel published by a small, independent press, I'll pick the David over Goliath any day.

This year, on April 23, at thousands of locations around the United States, book lovers will simultaneously start handing out copies of selected books to random strangers.  It's like a literary Happening, a national bibliophilic flash mob, and every red-letter day rolled into one inky burst of enthusiasm for the written word.  I long for the day when World Book Night becomes a federal holiday.  Can't you just picture all those parades snaking down Main Streets everywhere?  Instead of marching bands, you can have entire platoons of readers, noses buried in books, walking in perfect lock-step while reading aloud--everyone from Walt Whitman to David Sedaris.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but you can't blame me for dreaming, can you?

Last year, during the first U.S. World Book Night, I had a great time handing out copies of Leif Enger's Peace Like a River to early-morning customers at the Butte Starbucks on Harrison Avenue.  This year, I came up with the idea of making the public library my distribution point because: a) Isabel, the main character in Smith's novel, works in a Portland, Oregon library; and b) the staff at the BSB library have been so supportive of my writing over the years, I wanted to return the favor.

This will be the second year for the U.S. version of World Book Night (it began in the United Kingdom in 2011 and the book-lovin' fever quickly crossed the Atlantic to our shores).  In a nutshell, here's how it works: each year, 30 books are chosen by an independent panel of librarians and booksellers. The authors of the books waive their royalties and the publishers agree to pay the costs of producing the specially-printed World Book Night U.S. editions.  Readers like me apply to be "givers" and, once approved, receive a box of 20 copies of their selected book--like this:

I picked up my box from The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman a few days ago and snapped this photo of the bookstore's promotion of World Book Night:

It's up to givers to figure out a way to hand out their WBN books to members of the public. Last year, some givers gave out books while surfing off the coast of California; others took them to schools, prisons, or walked the streets of New York City wearing a sandwich board that read "Hate Reading? Talk to Me!"

My plan this year is to start reading Glaciers from page 1 and I'll keep reading until all 20 copies of the book have been handed out to folks stopping by the library.  It will be an honor to read Smith's gorgeous prose aloud to this random audience in Butte.  I figure even in the worst-case scenario where no one shows up, I'll have spent a great evening reading a good book.

So, if you happen to find yourself in Uptown Butte on April 23 between the hours of 4 and 6 pm, please stop in the library and pick up your absolutely-free, no-strings-attached copy of Glaciers.  For those of you who live elsewhere, be sure to check out the WBN events nearest you and go support this exciting way to put good books into new readers' hands.

The Most Terrifying Town in the World: Horace McCoy's I Should Have Stayed Home

In two days, I'll be jetting across the sky, bound for L.A. for the Los Angeles Times Book Award ceremony and the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  Fobbit is up for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction on Friday and on the following day, I'll be on a panel called "Fiction With a Sideways Glance" with Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins), Diana Wagman (The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets) and Fiona Maazel (Woke Up Lonely).  I'm looking forward to the festival, but I have a feeling my head is going to explode at the thought of all those must-see panels and readings.  I mean, just take a look at the schedule!  Short of last-minute miracle-cloning, there's no way I can be everywhere I want to be on Saturday.  As with other festivals I've attended this past year, though, I know I'll be happy with the panels I do attend.

This will be my second trip to L.A.  The first--an all-expenses paid two-day "vacation" in Hollywood after I won an Oscar-prediction contest from the Anchorage Daily News--was too brief and too long ago to make much of a lasting impression (other than putting my palms in Cary Grant's handprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater and "enjoying" a few neck-snapping rides at Universal Studios).  Between the awards ceremony and the festival events, I won't have time to see much of the city--sadly, not even these literary hotspots--so I'll depend on books to vicariously take me through the streets.

I can't think of a better tour guide than Horace McCoy.  I recently stumbled across his almost-forgotten noir novel I Should Have Stayed Home (first published in 1937).  McCoy is also the author of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, one of the many dark, hard-boiled novels I read during my deployment to Iraq in 2005.  Trust me when I say there's nothing like a sweaty marathon-dance competition to take your mind off the threat of possible mortar attacks on your Forward Operating Base.

And now I've found I Should Have Stayed at Home.  As soon as I got it, I flipped through the first pages (or, more appropriately, "scrolled" through the pages since I was reading it on my Kindle, courtesy of Open Road Media).  Thanks to my novel-in-progress, Dubble, I've been drawn to novels about Hollywood.  In the past couple of decades (the gestation period for Dubble), I've absorbed books by Bruce Wagner, Budd Schulberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald and, of course, Nathanael West whose The Day Of The Locust remains one of my favorite bleak-funny novels ever written.  I Should Have Stayed Home looks like it will be a welcome addition to that Tinseltown shelf.  I'll be packing it in my carry-on bags as I head for L.A.  Hopefully, I won't feel like I should have stayed home.

Here's how it begins:

Sitting, sitting, sitting: I had been sitting since I came back from the courtroom, alone and friendless and frightened in the most terrifying town in the world. Looking out the window at that raggledy palm tree in the middle of the bungalow court, thinking Mona, Mona, Mona, wondering what I was going to do without her, that and nothing more: What am I going to do without you? and all of a sudden it was night (there was no purple or pink or mauve), deep, dark night, and I got up and went out to walk, going nowhere in particular, just to walk, to get out of the house where I had lived with Mona and where her smell was still everywhere. I had been wanting to get out for hours, but the sun had kept me in. I was afraid of the sun, not because it was hot but because of what it might do to me in my mind. Feeling the way I did, alone and friendless, with the future very black, I did not want to get out on the streets and see what the sun had to show me, a cheap town filled with cheap stores and cheap people, like the town I had left, identically like any one of ten thousand other small towns in the country—not my Hollywood, not the Hollywood you read about. This is what I was afraid of now, I did not want to take a chance on seeing anything that might have made me wish I had stayed home, and this is why I waited for the darkness, for the night-time. That is when Hollywood is really glamorous and mysterious and you are glad you are here, where miracles are happening all around you, where today you are broke and unknown and tomorrow you are rich and famous...
      On Vine Street I went north towards Hollywood Boulevard, crossing Sunset, passing the drive-in stand where the old Paramount lot used to be, seeing young girls and boys in uniform hopping cars, and seeing too, in my mind, the ironic smiles on the faces of Wallace Reid and Valentino and all the other old-time stars who used to work on this very spot, and who now looked down, pitying these girls and boys for working at jobs in Hollywood they might just as well be working at in Waxahachie or Evanston or Albany; thinking if they were going to do this, there was no point in their coming out here in the first place.

Trailer Park Tuesday: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  In the best cases, a book trailer can be a perfect marriage between text and video.

Trust Joe Hill to turn a place called Christmasland into a kingdom of horror.  As he mentions in the trailer for his new novel NOS4A2, eternal Yuletide is all well and good...up to a point. "Christmasland is a place where the fun never stops; every morning is Christmas morning and every night is Christmas Eve....[It's] a place that any child would like to spend the rest of their days in.  When you get to it, you never want to leave--which is a good thing because once Charlie brings you to Christmasland, you never do leave."  That would be Charlie Manx who drives around in a 1938 Rolls Royce that runs on souls, not gasoline.  Hill's novel brings together two fascinating characters: the creepy Charlie, and a young girl named Victoria who has a gift for finding lost things.  One day, Vic finds herself in the back seat of Charlie's car.  And that's when the nail-biting fun really begins.  Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about the book: "NOS4A2 is a brilliant exploration of classic and modern monsters and dark fantasties, all cut up, restitched and retooled."

Pulitzer committee shocks literary world, hands out Fiction Prize

In a stunning turn of events, the Pulitzer Prize committee decided to break with tradition (begun last year) and hand out an award in the Fiction category this year, thus confirming the notion that, yes, fabricated narratives are still a force to be reckoned with.

So, congratulations to Adam Johnson who not only emerged victorious from this year's Tournament of the Books, but can now add a P.P. to his already-crowded awards shelf for The Orphan Master's Son.  Well done, sir, well done!

Double thumbs-up also go out to the two finalists: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander.  Like many of you (I'm guessing), these three books are still in my towering, teetering To-Be-Read pile but I hope to get to them soonishly.

My First Time: Jessica Soffer

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 Jessica Soffer, author of the debut novel Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots which will be released tomorrow by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Here's how Vogue described the book: "Teenage Lorca, who has been cutting herself since she was six, still can’t win the attention she craves from her beautiful and inaccessible mother, and so she concocts an impossible scheme to save herself from being sent to boarding school: She’ll re-create the best dinner her mother ever ate, featuring an Iraqi dish called masgouf that here is as fraught with significance as Babette’s feast.  Lorca is a diligent dreamer, enlisting the help of a bookstore clerk named Blot and cooking lessons from a grieving Iraqi widow.  But in this novel of shifting point of views, you want to linger longest with Lorca; both her shortcomings and her desires are so identifiable you can’t help but root for her."  Soffer earned her MFA at Hunter College.  A Hertog Fellow and recipient of the Bernard Cohen Prize, her work has appeared in Granta and the Tottenville Review.  She teaches fiction at Connecticut College.  Her father, a painter and sculptor, immigrated from Iraq to the US in 1948.  Click here to visit her website.

 

My First Writing Award

I was not—I am not now—a poet.  I love and respect poetry immensely, but I’m not built for it.  It is far too exacting of a form for me.  I like to stretch my arms and legs.  I like breathing room.  I like meandering.  Poetry does not.  I did not know this when I was fourteen, however, and wrote a lot of poetry: naively, in the dark, and (because I didn’t know better) because it felt less intimidating than writing a short story or novel.  I wrote without editing, without feedback, and very much in a bubble.  The bubble burst when I turned in three poems for an English class, and my teacher asked if she might submit them for a contest, and one poem won the contest and things fell directly, effortlessly into place--more than they have ever since, writing-wise.

It was the first time I was recognized for my writing.  More than that, however, it was the first time that anyone other than my parents, grandparents, and English teachers came within earshot of my poems.

I was, of course, honored to win something, anything, but more than that, I was shocked.  The poem didn’t feel particularly honest, or pretty, or unique.  But when the committee asked me to read at the awards ceremony, and the awards ceremony was at a convenient time and place, I couldn’t say no.  My teacher would have been heartbroken.  My parents would have demanded a good excuse.  This was an award for adults, and I wasn’t one.  There was money involved, and I could have used some.  The committee offered to pay for my transportation, and that didn’t happen all the time.  Everyone kept saying, “This is a big deal.”  I tried to let that sink in.  But I was in equal parts not proud of the work, not certain I deserved recognition for it, and not familiar enough with myself to be representing that self with a poem that I didn’t like—really didn’t like, hated, in fact.  So, I felt weird and a little bit like a fraud.  It didn’t help that I wasn’t used to winning things: awards or raffles or swim meets.

Too, a funny thing had started to happen that gave everything a sudden weight: friends and family, having heard the news, revealed that they’d always known I’d be a writer.  And this award, small and surprising as it was, had validated that belief.  “You’d always thought that?” I’d say.  “Didn’t you?” they’d answer.  I guessed that maybe yes.  Now that I thought about it.  And now, I was thinking about it.  Though I’d never known I wanted to be a writer, I’d always known I’d wanted to write.  Call it a lack of vision, call it a lack of enterprise, call it teenage spirit: I’ve never been one to imagine, really imagine, the future in concrete terms, plotted out and colored in and shaded.  I’ve always been too busy imagining different versions of the past and present.

All that said, I’d won this award and maybe I was going to be a writer, but no matter how I felt about the poem, I was most definitely going to the ceremony.  And I was most definitely, I decided (like a big fat idiot), not going to practice reading aloud.  Ever.  Because I couldn’t stand the poem.  Because I was a big fat idiot.  And because I wasn’t one for public speaking or school plays, when I say “ever,” I mean ever.  Ev.  Er.

So at the ceremony, I winged it.  Wung it.  Wunged it.  Whatever.

And, I failed.  Very very soon into the reading, I broke down in tears.  Then worse: sobs. Big, guttural sobs.  So big that I could barely continue reading.  And eventually, I couldn’t continue reading.  I had to stop thirty seconds in, not anywhere close to midway through.

Of course everyone was very nice about it.  There was ample clapping as I walked off the stage, slapping at my eyes.  The poem was about losing a person that I loved and at the reception that followed, the committee and other honorees said how moved they were by my emotion.  Of course, this made me feel worse.  I wasn’t crying about grief or sadness, but about the poem itself, and about my own shame for writing something I felt was awful.  But I couldn’t admit the truth to them.  So I just kept nodding and apologizing, feeling exposed and misrepresented, both.

It was my first time.

Some things have changed since then, thirteen years later.  That I no longer write poetry seems like the most and least important fact of all.  Certainly, I practice reading aloud.  (My editor, bless her, is coaching me when to pause, look up, slow down.)  I try to commit emotions to words only when I fully believe in those emotions—whether they belong to me or to a character.  Maybe there’s no distinction there.  But most of all, I am careful—very, very careful—not to show my work to the light too soon.  So much of writing is an exercise in imagination. Merely that.  An exercise.  And when it’s something more, when it has the heft of something significant, when it has legs worth stretching, it’s worth fighting for, which requires editing, editing and more editing.  Always.  And after that, even then, there are certain pieces that should and must remain in the dark: tucked away in the farthest, dustiest reaches of a desk drawer, or nestled into a creatively-named, totally conspicuous electronic folder.  The test for this, I’ve realized, is to read those pieces aloud: if you can’t get through them, for whatever reason, they are not ready.  It is not right.  It is not time and may not ever be.  You can have your reasons.  I most certainly had mine.