BookFox

Traveling with Bluebeard

2009-07-15T18:04:31-07:00

Hey Loyal Readers,

Posts will be slow in the next week because I'm backpacking through Costa Rica and working on an organic farm. I'll try to twitter some updates.

Book in my backpack: Vonnegut's Bluebeard.

Arundhati Roy follows Sartre

2009-07-12T19:27:11-07:00

Ever since Roy won the Booker for "The God of Small Things," fans have been wanting more fiction. She´s been heading resoluting in another direction, though, one of nonfiction and political activism. (Although she admits to working on another novel). She now has four books of essays out.

In a Guardian interview, she explains her political activism, which is comparable to Jean-Paul Sartre´s notion of committed literature, that literature needs to have political impact to have value (and he wrote his Roads to Freedom trilogy to back up that notion).

In her latest book, "Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy" Roy denounces what Indian politicians call "India Shining":

Roy sees [India Shining] as the destruction for multinational corporate profit of everything that her nation should care about. Her book begins with a question: "Is there life after democracy?" and goes on to count the ways that successive Indian governments and businessmen have waged a repressive war on the poor and on minorities, and have pursued devastating environmental destruction for economic and political gain.

Roy blames this political activism on the worldwide surprise success of "The God of Small Things":

"The prize," she says now, "was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition."

Ten Guidelines for Structuring a Short Story Collection

2009-07-07T16:26:56-07:00

One of the best articles about organizing a story collection comes from David Jauss, in an article he wrote for Writer's Chronicle, "Stacking Stones: Building a Unified Short Story Collection." In it, he writes, "The placement of a story in a collection can alter both its meaning and its affect." A bad order can ruin good stories, while a great order can actually improve them.

Ten guidelines for ordering a collection:

1. Benjamin Percy argues that you should put your best stories at the beginning (in his words, "strongest" or "most celebrated" stories), to hook the reader. He uses his own advice when he starts Refresh, Refresh, with the Paris Review published and Plimpton Prize story "Refresh, Refresh," then follows it up with the Glimmer Train story "The Caves In Oregon." The lead stories are my favorite ones in the book.

2. It's always tempting to squeeze one black sheep in at the end. Don't. I always disliked that Nathan Englander tried to shoehorn "In This Way We Are Wise," into the end of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. It didn't match the other stories in tone, style, and content. Make sure all the stories really cohere.

3. Build your own structure, and then order stories according to that logic. Jauss offers five possibilities:

Hourglass:

"According to Forster, an hourglass structure is one in which the characters and/or themes gradually change until they reverse themselves in the middle and go in the opposite direction for the remainder of the work." (Longstreet's Night-Blooming Cereus)

Möbius Strip:

John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse "would be strung together on a few echoed and developed themes and would circle back upon itself: not to close a simple circuit like that of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, emblematic of Victorian eternal return, but to make a circuit with a twist to it, like a Möbius strip."

Mosaic

"Amy Hempel's In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried is composed of brief, fragmentary, discontinuous sections that may seem relatively unrelated until, eventually, the reader is able to assemble them and the whole picture comes together."

Musical Improvisation

In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros "states an idea or image in the first sentence, flies away with it and returns to the same image (the way a musician returns to a chord) to ground the story in the end."

Instant Replay

"Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story," describes, again and again, differently each time, the death of a man who stepped on a land mine. The Things They Carried, the collection that contains this story, employs a similar structure. Several of its stories obsessively retell-and often revise-the events of earlier stories."

4. Daniyal Mueenuddin argues that the "last [story] should open the book out." That, and it should also leave your readers on a strong note, something that unifies the collection. Treat the last story as the last page of any of your stories. It has to make emotional sense of everything that's come before and wrap things up.

5. Put your novella at the end. Sorry Nam Le, but the whole novella-in-the-middle technique in The Boat threw me. I thought I was getting into a short story, but boy did I have a lot more coming. Follow Rattawut Lapcharoensap (Sightseeing) and George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline) and have it finish the book off.

6. If you have any overlapping characters, put these next to each other in the book. You'll create connections by juxtaposition. It's also easier to transition from one story to the next if we can stick with the same character.

7. Build what David Jauss calls Liaisons:

Liaisons are the principal cement that mortars our stories together into a unified collection. In his superb book Shakespearean Design, the scholar Mark Rose defines a liaison as a key word or image whose repetition links two seemingly divergent scenes in a play and thereby reveals their underlying connection and unity.
Ann Pancake's Given Ground contains an excellent example. Her story "Wappatomaka" concludes with the sentence "I drop my shovel because I am tired, heavy with this dirt in our veins," and the next story, "Dirt," repeats, in its very title, that sentence's key word.

8. Here's another piece of advice from Daniyal Mueenuddin: "The first story . . . should be bright and immediately appealing." Bright is key -- you don't want a super-depressing story to launch the collection. You also want one that appeals to the largest demographic (that is, if you want people to continue reading.)

9. If you have shorter stories, or ones that use a different point of view, or stick out in other freakish ways, consider placing these in the middle. It'll be a nice change-up for the reader, and yet the reader will have a chance to see your solid material and style again before they leave your book. A.M. Holmes does this with the title story in "Things You Should Know," which is even quirkier than the rest of the stories in the collection.

10. Don't feel that the title story has to come in a particular place in the collection. I've seen them as the first story (Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy), in the middle (Voodoo Heart, Scott Snyder), and at the end (St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell). The title story isn't the best story, just the best title. And if you lack a smash-bang story title, make up a title that doesn't come from a story (Like You'd Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard).

Review of "The Late Age of Print" by Ted Striphas

2009-07-05T16:40:19-07:00

Ted Striphas will challenge every entrenched notion you have about the publishing industry.

You think Big-box retailers like Borders and B&N have put independents out of business?

Striphas argues that other factors often contributed to the indie's close, that the big-box retailers rectify the social/financial inequalities present around indie's, and that big-boxers have a history and a sense of place, too.

Think the problem of books is on the consumer side, that people aren't reading?

Nope. Striphas argues it's on the supply side, with how books are printed and distributed, the inequality of supply/demand (books are "ubiquitous and mundane"), and how books have been commodified since the 1930's "bookshelf in every house" campaign.

You think the emergence of e-readers creates a new problem for the book industry?

Well, back in the 1930s, publishers fought tooth-and-nail against consumers exchanging books with each other, even holding a contest to create a derogatory name for book-sharers (the winner? Book Sneak).

You think e-piracy will be a problem for booksellers like it is for the movie industry?

If you do, it's rather ironic, given that in the late 1800s, America didn't respect international copyright, and thus pirated European books and sold them at a heavily discounted price here in the States.

I could go on, because there's a wealth of data, narrative, and ideas here, vaulting this slim volume into the heavyweight class of tome. Striphas discards canards about the publishing industry and creates his own narrative, which makes "Late Age" fascinating to read, even if I remain skeptical at some points. I remain skeptical that big-box retailers ever capture a place or maintain a history in the same way an indie bookstore does, simply on the basis of my many interactions with indie's and big-boxers.

And I'm not sure that big-boxers challenge social inequalities. If you want to talk about access to books, there's always the (free!) library, which levels the playing field.

Some of the material here is just helpful information, and doesn't steer the industry toward its next step. For instance, the third chapter exposing the King-Kong-like ascendancy of Amazon.com using draconian efficiency protocols on their employees is interesting from an employee-abuse perspective, but leaves you wringing your hands asking what's next.

Also, the fourth and fifth chapters detailing the aesthetics of Oprah's Book Club and Harry Potter's copyright-protection wranglings around the globe both are intriguing narratives about our current cultural moment, but are more observational than argumentative.

I should warn you that the book's a bit academic. Striphas teaches American Studies and Cultural Studies at Indiana University and he quotes Heidegger and Marx within the first few pages. He also has an annoying habit of telling you what he's going to write about rather than just writing it (as well as summarizing everything at the end). These are academic protocols, I realize, but you have to expect your readers to be smart enough to get it the first round.

There are also some patchy spots with language that's been infected by theory: "In 1891, the accession of the United States to international copyright didn't represent a Copernican revolution in its stance toward protecting foreign works inasmuch as it expressed the declining marginal utility of the discourse of civic republicanism relative to the development and consolidation of industrial capitalism."

But if you can overlook the occasional academicism, I highly recommend this book. It'll have you chewing over the book industry for a good spell.

Short Story Censorship

2009-07-01T01:27:41-07:00

In a high school English class unit called Love/Gender/Family Unit, Kathleen Reilly taught short stories by David Sedaris, Laura Lippman, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway. But not anymore. She recently resigned, after parents demanded she remove the stories from the curriculum.

Parent Sue Ann Johnson was one of the more vocal objectors to the stories, arguing kids are being harmed:

“There is an agenda, people. Wake up,” she said. “We are desensitizing our children to violence. We’re desensitizing them to sex. We’re desensitizing them to drugs. We’re talking about the hearts and minds of the future of America.”

I can only wag my index finger of shame. This is a simple error, to suppose that exposing someone to violence/sex/drugs is the same as desensitization. Certainly desensitization is something to avoid, but would anyone say that visiting the slums in Kenya risks desensitizing students to poverty? The exposure would probably lead them to become more sensitive, perhaps even to act in positive ways on their sensitivities.

I'm reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's defense of Fight Club, how he argued that portraying violence in all its real, mucky messiness was the best antidote for the glorified fakery in movies that leads to desensitization.

Literature is the best possible place to expose students to such things. You can't help but think that most acts of censorship are a failure to read properly; in other words, a form of illiteracy. It's a failure to read literature as it's meant to be read -- not as a nonfiction book advocating a particular lifestyle, but an interaction and exploration of life itself.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has also picked up the story. There's a you-go-get-'em editorial in the local newspaper, too, from a recent graduate arguing that his alma mater should keep the short stories in the curriculum. It's cute because it's so winsome.

Perhaps we need some kind of Short Story Superhero that can defend against these censorship mafias. With a suit and a spiffy motto, nothing could withstand Short Story Man! He could leap tall parents in a single bound. He could cast protective webs around the banned books.

Okay, I'll stop now.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize

2009-06-29T11:55:28-07:00

The shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story prize is out, and they did much better at creating a shortlist than last year, when the Jhumpa Lahiri coup took down the prize.

An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)
Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
Ripples and other Stories by Shih-Li Kow (Malaysia)
Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy (United States)
The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip O Ceallaigh (Ireland)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (United States)

Nice international selection, and love to see my boy Tower representing. Winner of the 35,000 Euro prize will be announced Sept. 20.

The E-Book Revolution Approaches

2009-06-29T11:25:54-07:00

Brilliant and lengthy article at Fast Company on the changing landscape of books, publishers and e-books.

The book industry is especially vulnerable because it is a "hits" business, with a small number of breakaway titles (Harry Potter, The Tipping Point, Twilight) subsidizing all the rest. Take away publishers' best-sellers and you're left with stacks of money-losing operations. But authors such as Dan Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer, and J.K. Rowling would all thrive in a system that let them skip advances in exchange for higher royalty rates. Instead of a star author getting the standard 15% on a hardcover, for example, Amazon could simply skim a 20% distribution fee, and the author gets the rest. In this model, "the whole thing is structured so that you, as the provider of intellectual property, get the lion's share of the revenue after costs, not the publishers," Maneker says. If e-books take off, Amazon could cherry-pick the biggest-selling authors, and publishers would suddenly find themselves cut off from their most bankable sources of revenue.

Review: "Fugue State" Brian Evenson

2009-06-29T10:29:50-07:00

The stories in "Fugue State" will haunt you. Brian Evenson has a remarkable ability to come up with creepy tales that won't be extracted from your head. For example, take "Invisible Box." Imagine a girl sleeping with a mime, a mime that's still dressed up with the gloves and the face paint. During the completely silent sex, the mime draws a box around the two of them, and for days afterwards, the girl can't shake the feeling that the box still traps her.

Try sleeping on that one.

If the stories were odd in certain genres or patterns, they would be easier to shake, but these are wholly original creations that frighten in unexpected ways. In "Younger," there's this horror of a father leaving his two young girls alone with the strict instruction not to answer the door if anyone comes. The way that the unknown knocker knocks traumatizes the younger sister for the rest of her life. There's nothing intrinsically scary about the storyline itself -- it sounds pretty prosaic. But Evenson invests the story with such tension it might as well be vampires and zombies at the door.

The graphic story in this collection, "Dread," lives up to its name. Illustrated in stark black and white panels, the main character has a schizophrenic struggle after being haunted by a phrase in a unmemorable book: "He no longer resembled me." The graphic novelist Zak Sally, who drew wonderfully for this story, also created a header for each of the other eighteen stories, but these are too small and too infrequent. A full page graphic for at least some of the stories would be an improvement.

Not all the stories are frightening. If you want a satire of the publishing industry, "Ninety Over Ninety" is hilarious. It's a spoofed version of "Entourage" for the publishing world. Kossweiller, a hard-working editor at the Entwinkle House, publishes works of literature that don't sell, and then is routinely hammered and abused by his commercial-fiction-seeking boss, "Cinchy," who is deathly afraid of dolls. (Entwinkle = Entrekin? You make the call).

The title refers to esoteric tortures "Cinchy" uses to abuse editors who displease him, like making an editor get ninety contracts in ninety days, and then once he got them, ripping them all up in front of him.

Overall, Fugue State is highly readable and highly entertaining (if you don't mind being freaked out for a week or so). Evenson plays with notions of self and authorhood, while never giving up the emotional core of fear. If I had some kind of star system or a BookFox "Read This!" award, Evenson would get high marks.

Review of Damion Searls "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going"

2009-06-23T01:14:56-07:00

In the fourth story of this collection, "A Guide to San Francisco," the narrator says, "I have to admit I have never been as moved by the realists or the world-creating fabulists as I am by the pattern-makers." If you agree with that aesthetic preference, you should read Damion Searls' "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going."

The book is slim enough to be a fiction chapbook, with five first-person stories about writers, and relies on complex patterns and beautiful prose to carry the pieces. Rather than a casual series of events, a slow accumulation of acutely rendered details moves the stories forward.

Lovers of literature should lap up the frequent references to literary titans like Hawthorne, Nabakov, Gide, Orwell, and Fitzgerald. There's also a good bit of Borges in some of the stories, with literary criticism about stories that don't exist, and meta stories commenting upon themselves, and fiction not only mirroring reality but creating it.

Here are a few treasures that I enjoyed mining:

"The trees drip with green: the air is too saturated to hold more color."
"[The angels] loom, like the buried first memory of a parent."
"Her high, thin gaze would sweep down from above her crucifix necklace or pearls like a frigid Arctic wind to cool anyone's faintest interest in mentioning [sexuality] around her."

"The Cubicles" chronicles the career struggles of a technical writer, and the deflation of expectations and dreams: "I no longer aspired to see my name blazoned on title pages, meanwhile achieving such fame nevertheless: my name on the credits pages of dozens of books, read by thousands, books explaining how to use a certain database or manage client ROI in a B2B e-business footprint or design a Customer Call Center (CCC)." The third story, Goldenchain, shows the rattling gasp of an expiring marriage during a trip to Puget Sound. All five of the stories bear of the mark of careful, deliberate thought about character and language, and give fruits to those intrigued enough to return for a second (and third) reading.

If nothing I've said has convinced you one way or another, take another look at the cover. It's a stenciled car driving into a kaleidoscopic square. Yeah, reading this book can kind of feel like that.

Cao Naiqian: There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night

2009-06-22T00:40:41-07:00

Before I get to a micro review of the collection itself, I have to admit that I'm impressed by Naiqian's bio. Growing up in a rural section of China, he didn't start writing until 37, as a result of a bet with a friend. He still has his day job as a detective (!) for the government. He actually lived before starting to write, by working in a mine and in a factory and with music and as a farmer.

With a bio like that, you can't help but be interested in the fiction.

"There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night" describes the hardscrabble life of peasants in a rural cave-dwelling town in China. Each of these thirty stories is short -- think flash fiction, or short shorts -- but accomplishes much with a Carveresque-style minimalism. Desperate lives generate stories about simple elements like food and sex, which reoccur frequently: growing food, cooking food, destroying food, and adultery, bestiality, incest. The reappearing characters, with names like Dog, Grunt, Zits We and Widow San, don't want modernization or political progress or the afterlife, they want little more than pride and honor; full bellies and sated sexualities.

Stylistically, Naiqian has this habit of repeating an exact phrase twice: "It grew darker and darker. It grew darker and darker." Also, in dialogue, he gives attribution for every single line, so sometimes you read "Heinu said" four times in a row without any other characters speaking. By piling on the words the particular information grows in significance. It's reminiscent of the way Hebrew poetry in the Psalms moves elliptically around a subject by describing it in at least two and sometimes four different ways. But since Naiqian doesn't vary the expression at all, it lacks the kind of aesthetic variation of Hebrew poetry. Instead, it captures the bare-bones existence of his characters -- even the words to describe them, and their words themselves, are limited, spare, and can only repeat identical lines for emphasis, rather than by any kind of linguistic flourishes.

The details of this collection, especially about animals, come straight from the source. There's true-experience tidbits about flies, such as the fact that fly droppings on food can't immediately be seen, but turn black after a period of time, and also that a fly can still buzz around even after it's been decapitated.

There's also a spot-on description of a lesbian hen, and the way Naiqian describes her mating ritual in this excerpt is precise, especially the last line (I raised chickens, so yes, I know):

"Whenever the village hens saw Fluff Ball coming, they would stop what they were doing and hunker down, lift their tails exposing their red rumps, and allow Fluff Ball to mount them. Fluff Ball would strut, its chest thrust forward, over to the most attractive hen. It would spread its right wing like a fan and circle the hen. Round and round it would go before leaping on the hen's back to do it. To maintain its balance, it would grasp the feathers on the hen's neck in its beak."

The translator, John Balcom, who also wrote an introduction, mentioned that the dialogue is particularly difficult to translate, since Naiqian uses heavy dialect. How it comes out in English is full of curses. There's plenty of "fuck your mother to death" and "fuck your ancestors." For example, this exchange in the first story, "The In-Law":

Blackie said, "That fucking In-law is here for you."
The woman said, "Don't let him in. Wait till I put on my pants."
Blackie said, "Shit, what difference does it make?"
Blushing, the woman said, "Why don't you just tell him I'm sick? It is that time of the month, anyway."
"How can I do that?" asked Blackie. "We Chinese always keep our word."
Blackie went out to meet the In-Law.

A lot of cultural nuances are probably lost in translation, but the issue of class comes across loud and clear. The stronger pieces in this collection are the ones that don't rely excessively upon dialogue, like "Widow San" and "Heinu and Her Andi." Coincidentally, they're also the slightly longer ones.

If you'd like to explore rural Chinese culture, this book will give you a look that is almost too close for comfort.

John Freeman on Literary Journals

2009-06-20T15:39:05-07:00

Here's John Freeman brilliant description of the role of literary journals:

Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Narrative Has Competition! (Hello, Electric Literature)

2009-06-16T13:23:51-07:00

Narrative has become the current gold standard for online literary magazines, wading in the fray and dominating the competition in a relatively short time.

Well, watch out. Electric Literature just launched, and it looks like a doozy.

True to the name, EL is distributing electronically, through a host of formats: e-book, Kindle, and iPhone, plus print-on-demand. It seems a smart new path for literary journal distribution. Plus, EL actually provides a business model that might work, as stories are sold for .99, a much better distribution model than wrangling a few copies into independent bookstores, many copies of which are unsold and scrapped.

Might I mention the lineup is as strong as that first issue of Black Clock that took the literary world by storm?

Michael Cunningham
Jim Shepard
T Cooper
Lydia Millet
Diana Wagman

As far as money, they say this on their submission page (a backhanded jab at Narrative?):

We pay writers, they don't pay us. We are proud to support writers who entrust us with their work.

They also pay at a Subtropics rate ($1000 smackers a story). But it's pretty hilarious that a journal with "Electric" in their name doesn't accept electronic submissions. [CORRECTION: Though initially confused by the set-up of the submissions page, I have now verified that they do accept electronic submissions.]

Plus, if all that isn't enough, they have pictures of hot girls doing weird things on their website (But not as explicit as Fence, though).