The Quivering Pen

Friday Freebie: The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:52:00 +0000

Congratulations to Michael Magras, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina.

This week's book giveaway is The Lost Daughter by Lucy Ferriss (read her "My First Time" story about rejections). The novel has just been published by Berkley Books to great acclaim. Novelist Francisco Goldman (Say Her Name) called it "an achingly beautiful novel about marriage and love....the work of a master American realist, up there with Richard Yates." Here's the jacket copy:

Brooke O'Connor--elegant, self-possessed, and kind--has a happy marriage and a deeply loved young daughter. So her adamant refusal to have a second child confounds her husband, Sean. When Brooke's high school boyfriend, Alex--now divorced and mourning the death of his young son--unexpectedly resurfaces, Sean begins to suspect an affair. For fifteen years Brooke has kept a shameful secret from everyone she loves. Only Alex knows the truth that drove them apart. His reappearance now threatens the life she has so carefully constructed and fortified by denial. With her marriage--and her emotional equilibrium--at stake, Brooke must confront what she has been unwilling to face for so long. But the truth is not what Brooke believes it to be.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Lost Daughter, all you have to do is answer this ridiculously easy question:

What's the title of Ferriss' memoir which is subtitled "The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante"? (Visit her website for the answer)

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 March 1--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on March 2. 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.

Barney Rosset (1922-2012)

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:25:00 +0000

Yesterday, the publishing industry came to a brief pause for shock and sadness at the mention of four words: "Barney Rosset is dead."

The newest publishing intern, still smelling like Wellesley and sipping her mocha-coconut frappuccino at the corner of Broadway and 54th, may say, "Barney who?" But those who have been around for more than a couple of minutes--especially those whose college education was fueled by by the names Beckett, Burroughs, and Ionesco--knew one of the brightest lights in the book world had flickered out. True, the bulb may have been dim for a number of years, but back in the 1950s and 1960s, Barney blazed. Oh, how he blazed bright.

In 1951, Rosset bought a fledgling literary publishing company called Grove Press. At the time, Grove had published only three books: The Confidence Man, The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw, and The Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn. In an interview with The Paris Review, he said, "I was doing nothing at the time and thought, This might be interesting. I think I paid fifteen hundred dollars for half—which included the inventory. I took the inventory to my apartment on Ninth Street, all of it, in three suitcases."

Rosset's ownership of the fledgling press was an act that reverberated and gathered speed, like a rubber ball going down a staircase, until it landed in my own lap six months ago. Grove was struggling when Rosset came on the scene but under his watch it would go on to publish the works of writers considered iconoclasts in their day but who are now regarded as central figures in our culture--names like Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Leroi Jones, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton, Hebert Selby Jr., Kenzaburo Oe, Kathy Acker, and David Mamet. As the introduction to his interview in The Paris Review states: "Attracted to books that in some way—through their form or content—challenged the status quo, Rosset published writers other presses passed up because they were too far out, too experimental, or violated the prevailing mores of the day."

He also kicked those prevailing mores in the balls. Anti-obscenity laws of the fifties made it illegal to publish the unsanitized texts of books like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (among others). Rosset set out to deliberately defy those laws by publishing those two books and, through a series of landmark court cases, gave us all the freedom to enjoy one of Miller's characters shooting "hot bolts" into a woman's nether-regions* and turning her ovaries "incandescent."

In a 2008 Newsweek article called "The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing," Louisa Thomas wrote: "The story of Rosset's life is essentially one of creative destruction. He found writers who wanted to break new paths, and then he picked up a sledgehammer to help them whale away at the existing order."

As one of the newest members of the Grove family, I realize any rhapsodic tribute I may write about Rosset is a little like admiring a dusty-framed oil painting of a great-great-grandfather which has always hung in the second-floor hallway of the mansion (or, in Rosset's case, maybe it's more accurate to call it a portrait in Day-Glo spray paint across a brick wall). But I can tell you this: even though I never met the man, his lasting effect on literature was felt on that day last September when I got the email from my agent saying Grove was interested in my novel and I shouted to my wife, "Grove! It's Grove!" Just ask her about the elevated, carnival-pitch excitement in my voice and you'll have some idea of the outstanding reputation Rosset helped establish.

Throughout the day yesterday as news spread about his death of complications from heart surgery, tributes from friends and fans lit up social media with words like "legendary" and "maverick" and "giant" and "hero." Rosset once told the New York Times, "All my life I followed the things that I liked — people, things, books — and when things were offered to me, I published them. I never did anything I really didn't like."

In a tribute yesterday in the New York Times, Douglas Martin wrote: "In 2008 the National Book Foundation honored him as 'a tenacious champion for writers who were struggling to be read in America.' Other mentions were less lofty. Life magazine in 1969 titled an article about him 'The Old Smut Peddler.' That same year a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post showed him climbing out of a sewer."

In his memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight (just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), editor Richard Seaver recalls the first time he met Rosset in Paris before going to work for him:

Barney was a slight, intense, wired-up young man, whom I judged to be in his early thirties, although his receding hairline made him look older. He was wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, and when he laughed--which he did often, though nervously, as if he weren't quite sure a laugh was appropriate to the remark--he looked strangely equine, baring both gums.

Seaver also recalls his wife's high opinion of his new boss:

True, he was opinionated. True, he sought and savored the limelight. True, he could be irascible, shoot from the hip, court trouble unnecessarily. But, boy, did he have guts! He also had brains. And what other publishing house was even remotely as exciting as Grove?

Rosset sold Grove in 1985 to Ann Getty, the oil heiress, and George Weidenfeld, a British publisher. Part of the deal was that he would remain in charge, but he was fired a year later. He sued, contending that the dismissal had violated the sales contract. The dispute was settled out of court. Grove's backlist was acquired by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993, bringing us to what we know today as Grove/Atlantic.

Rosset has been gone from Grove for years and now he is gone from us all for good. But the words for which he fought so hard remain:

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Beauty.
--Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

*Miller, of course, repeatedly used a much stronger "c" word in Tropic of Cancer.

Soup and Salad: PEN/Faulkner and LA Times Book Awards, Ann Patchett on Stephen Colbert, When Genre and "Literary" Marry, Airplane Novels, Martin Amis' Secret Book, In Which Lydia Netzer Discovers Books Are Not Like VHS Tapes, "So Many Books, So Little Time"

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:50:00 +0000

On today's menu:

1. Congratulations to the PEN/Faulkner Award finalists:
Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin
Steve Millhauser, We Others: New and Selected Stories
Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
The winner will be announced March 26.

1.5 The Los Angeles Times has also announced the finalists for its annual book awards. Happy to see a few of my favorites on the list, including The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach and Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman. The full list is here. The winners will be announced April 20.

2. If you missed author (State of Wonder) and bookstore owner (Parnassus Books in Nashville) Ann Patchett on The Colbert Report, here's the clip as she more than holds her own against S. C.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

3. For another conversation in which two literary powerhouses trade intelligent words, check out this dual interview between Peter Straub and Bradford Morrow at Beatrice. Morrow tells this story:

When I taught at Princeton, filling in for Russell Banks who was on sabbatical, Joyce Carol Oates invited Stephen King to give a reading. The auditorium was packed with not just students and other professors, but a coterie of devotees who rode in on motorcycles. When King got up to the podium, the first thing he did was hold up a copy of William Gass’ recently published novel, The Tunnel, and said something to the effect of Have you ever hear of this guy William Gass?, then proceeded to give a mind-blowingly inspired reading of a passage from the book that I had published in Conjunctions some fifteen years earlier. Pure magic. I sat there awestruck. The generosity, empathy, will always stay with me. When Gass and I were in Paris soon after, attending a highly literary conference, I told him that story, and I don’t think he believed me at the time. These genre and literary worlds truly meld more often than we might imagine. It’s ultimately about the dynamism of the writing itself, and of the vision.

4. In the New York Times, Dominique Browning writes about the time she was on a plane and had a quasi-religious experience:

      This breakthrough came after years of....buying paperbacks of world classics, meaning to reacquaint myself with the stuff of college classes. After years of being tethered to my middle seat too near the lav, struggling distractedly through great prose, tough reporting, clear-minded thinking, biting analysis — and understanding nothing.
      Instead of reading, I used to worry about how long a delay was going to last; fret over the awfulness of the dried-out sandwich that was meant to be dinner; gently shove back the head of a slumped stranger snoring on my shoulder; feel a miasma of germs settle around my head and travel up my nose, down my throat, into my eyes; imagine the incipient thrombosis that would clog my heart, just because I was too timid to ask two grumpy people to get up once again so I could walk down the aisle.
      And then I finally found the literature that stands up to the tests of travel. The secret, dear reader, lies in narrative drive. Plain, old-fashioned, unrelenting, compelling storytelling. You’ve got to reach for the best-seller shelves.

5. The Millions has the scoop on the book Martin Amis doesn't want you to know about. Hint: it involves a joystick.

6. When novelist Lydia Netzer (Shine Shine Shine) moved to a new house, she and her husband were faced with an emotionally gut-wrenching problem:

      In the mountain of stuff we no longer want that is now sitting grumpily in our new house, there are a mazillion VHS tapes. These are objects that should have been purged years ago. We haven't watched any of them since we moved the last time. We don't even have a VCR connected to our TV. If we did hook up a VCR, and managed to remember what the button "Rewind" does, I guarantee the tapes would look awful in 1080 resolution. It's at a point with these VHS tapes that I don't even think the Salvation Army wants them. I don't think anyone wants them. But every time we began to hustle them into bags to push them out the door, we got all oogly about it. Here's our copy of "The Long Kiss Goodnight," which we watched and rewound several times. Here's "Household Saints," one of the first movies I ever owned. "Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael." "Go." "Four Rooms." "Sweetie." Here's that copy of "City of Lost Children" that was almost impossible to get. "Evita." Shut up, I have the whole thing memorized. I have a romantic attachment to these objects -- they remind me of when we were younger, poorer, and dumber, when I was working at a 1/2 porn video store during graduate school, when our TV was small and given to fits of rage instead of large and austere and firmly in control of itself.
      So I put them, all, ruthlessly in the trash. I kept the ultrasound videos from my kids. I kept a couple of other personal things. But anything that I can get on DVD or download, I tossed.
      Then I had a horrifying thought. AM I DOING THAT THING THAT PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY ARE LIKE, "OH, WHATEVER, BOOKS ARE PASSE, I HAVE MY WHOLE LIBRARY RIGHT HERE IN THIS ELECTRONIC THINGER." Shudder.

7. I don't know if Deb Vanasse owns any VHS tapes, but at the 49 Writers blog, she writes eloquently about being cocooned in books: "I still shortchange myself when it comes to reading. It feels too much like an indulgence, a reward squeezed in over lunch or at bedtime, unless it’s research for “real work.” This is wrong-headed thinking. I need to expand the book time in my day, to acknowledge that the guilty pleasure of working with words includes sustained and joyful periods of doing what I love."

Trailer Park Tuesday: Echolocation by Myfanwy Collins

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:40:00 +0000

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.

Myfanwy Collins' debut novel Echolocation from Engine Books is about family tensions which rise to the surface when two sisters are reunited by the death of a relative. The novel has drawn high praise from other authors like Pia Z. Ehrhardt (Famous Fathers and Other Stories) who says, "Myfanwy Collins' debut novel calls to mind the grim and radiant work of Daniel Woodrell. From page one, I was chilled by the landscape, caught up in the trouble, and riveted by these women of northernmost New York who slam back together and figure out how to live with what's missing." Through a series of photographs seen through a rain-specked windshield, Echolocation's trailer gives glimpses of that "little patch of nothing made up of dairy farms in the valleys and boarded up iron-ore mines in the mountains, a town of old folks waiting to die and young people dying to leave."

My First Time: Lucy Ferriss

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:49:00 +0000

My First Rejections

It’s hard to reconstruct now, but a time existed when I thought everything would fall my way. An anthology had accepted three poems during my last semester in college. I had spent two years working for the most distinguished literary press in California. Moving on to grad school, I had the privilege of working with one of the best short-fiction writers in America, who had connected me with a New York agent. Finally, I had plucked a notice off the grad school bulletin board about a year-long fellowship in New Hampshire, and the next thing I knew I was the Fellow, with a year’s full support to write.

The following winter, bitter and snowless, I put aside the patchwork novel I had submitted for my degree and dove into “the real thing.” I worked all morning in my bathrobe (still do), then walked the dog through the New Hampshire village until my hands went numb from cold. My prestigious agent sent encouraging notes. She was shopping my short stories; she had great hopes.

One of those afternoons, I returned home brimming with new ideas for the book. A package sat on my front stoop. Opening it with frostbit hands, I found all my manuscripts inside, along with the rejection letters my agent had received from magazine and book editors over the preceding eight months. On the top was a brief handwritten note: Gone to Arizona to dry out. Closing the agency. Best of luck, P.

I felt like Wile E. Coyote, happily racing after the rabbit, only to discover that his legs are churning through thin air above an 80-foot drop.

Carefully I went through the contents. My stories, so carefully typed on 20% bond, seemed slight, amateurish. The novella I had composed in a fever before leaving for New Hampshire read like, well, a fever dream. The letters were mostly kind but dismissive—“Thanks for the opportunity,” “A voice with great potential,” “Sorry we have to pass.” Later, I would attend a Halloween party as a rejected manuscript, with such notes pasted all over my clothing and a post-office stamp of “Return to Sender” tattooing my face. But that winter, I was a rejection virgin. I had assumed that an agent was like a parent: they shielded you from the worst, and they never gave up.

I drank a couple of glasses of wine, did several tours of the little Fellowship house, and returned to the disaster that had landed on my porch. I plucked a rejection letter from the pile, one that seemed more sincere than the rest and invited my agent to keep in touch. In the dying January light, I rolled a sheet into the typewriter and began: Dear Ms. C--- . . . .

Two weeks later, I met Ms. C as she packed up the New York office where she had been downsized out of editing fiction. She gave me the name of another agent. That agent helped me dial back from the “real thing” project to the earlier work, which with two more years’ worth of rewriting became my first novel, Philip's Girl. There have been plenty of ups and downs since then. But when I think of the moment I joined the world of writers, I remember that package on the stoop; I remember exiting my comfort zone to write directly to that editor. Nothing was going to float my way, I realized then, except—on very lucky days—the words themselves. I was going to have to learn how to run through thin air.

Photo by John Marinelli Photography

Juggling for Nazis: Germania by Brendan McNally

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:36:00 +0000

In today's dispatch from the Department of Whatever Happened To?, I dug up an old review I wrote of Brendan McNally's novel Germania for The Barnes and Noble Review. Here's how that review began:

If the image of Albert Speer, a prominent Nazi, juggling rubber balls as a way to relieve stress in the waning days of the Third Reich doesn't make you sit up and say, "Mein Gott, vas is los?" then Brendan McNally's debut novel, Germania, might not be for you. On the other hand, if rollicking adventures of Jews masquerading as Nazis, secret wartime shipments of gold, SS officers dreaming of hunting walrus in Greenland, and the tense emotional dynamics of theatrical families intrigue you, then Germania will fit the bill quite nicely. At the heart of the novel are the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers, a popular German juggling act (in more ways than one, as it turns out), who split up just as Hitler is rising to power in the early 1930s....

To read the rest of the review, click here

I greatly enjoyed McNally's novel and often wondered why he hadn't published anything since Germania--which, frankly, didn't do as well in sales as Simon & Schuster was probably hoping. His debut seemed to have joined that long list of novels deserving better treatment by the reading public than ending up in the Barnes and Noble Bargain Books section. Sometimes you want to cheer for new writers, then cry disappointing tears when they don't take off like you'd hoped.

For that reason alone I feel some kinship with McNally. His background is in journalism--specifically, writing about the defense industry--so we have that in common as well. He's also worked as a merchant seaman, bookstore manager, and oyster shucker (trades I have yet to pick up). At his author page on the S&S website, he says one of his best qualities is his "endless curiosity," and that shows in his writing. He goes on to say:

After bombing out of Art School, I went to work on a tugboat hauling oil rigs around the Gulf of Mexico. It left me a lot of time of read and during that time I read Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer. It was all extremely interesting, but what put the hook in me was his description of being in Flensburg in the days immediately after the fighting had stopped. In particular Speer mentioned two very bizarre things: how he and Werner Baumbach planned to take a flying boat and fly away to Greenland where they would hunt walrus, and fish and write their memoirs together. Speer also mentioned having the United States Strategic Bombing Survey come visit him and how they staged a faux-collegial "University of Bombing" in order to get him to spill his guts about how he kept the German war machine working despite all the unending Allied bombing campaigns. This put the hook in me and I decided to learn all I could about this very oddball moment in history.

I was delighted to find Germania was not McNally's one-hit wonder. About a year ago, he came out with an eBook called Friend of the Devil, which has this description on Amazon:

Herbert T. Barrow (a cousin of Clyde Barrow of Bonnie & Clyde) is a reefer-smoking, 1930s jazz musician on the run from the law. He is on his way to Del Rio, a Texas border town rolling in dough, thanks to a quack doctor whose ‘goat-gland cure’ brings in well-heeled suckers by the trainload. And just across the river, the Doc’s got a million-watt “border blaster” that he uses to advertise himself along with yodelers, pitchmen, preachers, mystics, and singing cowboys. There Herbert figures he can hide out in plain view. But then Herbert does a favor for a stranger in a jam who turns out to be the Devil himself. Now the Devil owes Herbert a favor, something Herbert, a fervent atheist, has absolutely no interest in collecting on. Next thing Herbert knows, he’s stuck in the middle of a convoluted wager between the Devil and God, both of whom seem to take his refusal to acknowledge their existence personally. Herbert vows revenge. Luckily he finds an ally in Rose Dawn, an underage, pregnant radio clairvoyant prone to sneezing fits.

Who can resist a plot summary like that? I couldn't. I clicked, I downloaded, I started reading. I was pulled in by McNally's style right from the opening lines, set in Mississippi in 1933:

Old man standing at the side of the road, got on one of them black, old-time country preacher suits and he's waving at me, desperately, to please, please, stop and give him a ride. Now to begin with, I don't hold at all with preachers and I got my turn coming up in just a couple more miles. And being that I am presently a wanted fugitive, I don't want anyone slowing down my escapitude. Never mind the fact that with the Depression now in its fourth year, there's a million other dusty guys out on the road with eyes imploring and their thumbs out, and, like everyone else with any means, I stopped caring about them a very long time ago.

Chances are very good you never heard of Brendan McNally before you started reading this blog post. But chances are also very good that if you read either of his novels, you won't soon forget his name.

In Which I Wear My M-16 Like Jewelry

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:28:00 +0000

For the entire year I was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I never went anywhere without my M-16 rifle. As I write at the beginning of my novel, "All soldiers, including Fobbits, were required to carry their M-16s with them wherever they went: back and forth to work, when they took a shit, even if they were just stepping out onto their porch for a smoke." Yes, even us non-combatant Fobbit-types became welded to our weapons. They slept with us like cold metal lovers; they waited for us just outside the shower stall, ready to hand us a towel; they pulled up a chair and sat next to us in the chow hall; they clung to us like shadows. Some of us, slowly losing our minds in the sand and wind of Iraq even held long, lively conversations with our rifles.

I was skimming back through my war journal the other day and came across this entry, written exactly seven years ago:

Feb. 18, 2005: I carry my M-16 with me like I’m the father of a newborn baby. If I set it down, I keep a watchful eye on it, worried that someone might come along and snatch it. When I’m walking around camp, I sling it around my neck, muzzle pointing down at the ground, one arm and shoulder through the sling so that my hand can rest on the stock or trigger housing. The middle of the rifle falls comfortably around my torso, so that it feels like a large piece of jewelry--or if I were a woman I suppose I'd say, like a purse. If, for some reason, I were to wander off and leave it somewhere, I would feel like I’m walking around without any pants on. It wouldn’t take long for me to notice the extra-breezy sensation and realize something was wrong. I have only “left” my weapon once—when I was delivering the 3rd ID's Marne Express newspapers to 1st Brigade at Camp New York in Kuwait. Staff Sergeant Mills and I were carting bundles from the non-tactical vehicle into the Brigade Tactical Operations Center. I was in a hurry as I grabbed my bundle of papers and hustled into the TOC. A few seconds later, here comes Staff Sergeant Mills carrying his bundle, plus two weapons. He hands me mine without making a big deal out of it.

“Oh my God,” I whisper, “I can’t believe I just did that.” (Losing your weapon is grounds for an Article 15, by the way.)

“Yeah,” says Mills, “I saw you walking away and I thought to myself, ‘Hmmm….there’s something wrong with this picture.’”

Since then, I have coddled my baby, hugging it against me wherever I go. It’s getting a bit dirty and grimy by now, the handgrips sticky from all my palm-dirt and sweat. The sling is starting to dig a groove around the back of my neck. And the tip of the barrel is starting to get scratched from all the times I’ve banged it against a doorway. But, as I told Jean on the morning I left Fort Stewart, this is “my new best friend for the next year.” I hope my rifle never lets me down. I hope it never betrays me and just walks off like I did, leaving me sitting there defenseless in this hot, harsh country.

Friday Freebie: Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:29:00 +0000

Congratulations to Lauren Bufferd, winner of last week's Friday Freebie "threebie." Lauren will soon be enjoying her own copies of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop, and The Detour by Andromeda Romano-Law. By the way, in answer to last week's question, Lauren said her favorite historical novel is Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth.

This week's book giveaway is Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina, a novel I've previously spotlighted in the Front Porch Books feature here at the blog. The publisher's jacket copy describes the book thusly:

Richie Palumbo, the most prosaic of men, gets lost one night in 1969 while driving home with his family. He finds himself in the town of Norumbega—hidden, remote, and gorgeous, at the far edges of Boston’s western suburbs. He sees a venerable old house and, without quite knowing why, decides he must have it. The repercussions of Richie’s wild dream to own a house in this town lead to a forty-year odyssey for his family. For his son, Jack, Norumbega becomes a sexual playground—until he meets one ungraspable girl and begins a lifelong pursuit of her. Joannie, Richie’s daughter, finds that the challenges of living in Norumbega encourage her to pursue the contemplative life. For Stella, Richie’s wife, life in Norumbega leads to surprising growth as both a sexual and a spiritual being.

At NPR, Michael Schaub had these high words of praise for Giardina's novel (thus sealing the deal for me with the mere mention of the names Updike, Ford and Yates):

Norumbega Park, the beautiful, audacious fifth novel from author and playwright Anthony Giardina, follows the lives of Richie [Palumbo] and his family for 40 years....Giardina is a master of prose that’s engaging but never seems rushed—he covers four decades in just over 300 pages. But his pacing remains natural and unhurried. His characters are as emotionally rich and complex as any you’ll find in the novels of Richard Ford, John Updike and Richard Yates.....Like Updike, [Giardina] deals with some uncomfortable themes—much of Norumbega Park deals with the delicate, sometimes awkward intersection of family and sexuality—but he handles them beautifully. And while many authors reflexively lapse into despair and pessimism, Giardina sticks with a truer kind of realism. Things might be bad; they might even be worse than they seem; but there’s always at least a chance of redemption.....There are countless emotional pitfalls authors can fall into, but Giardina has avoided every one, and the result is majestic—Norumbega Park is one of the bravest, most memorable American novels in years.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Norumbega Park, all you have to do is answer this question:

According to this Paris Review interview, which author has had the most influence on Giardina?

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 Feb. 23--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 24. 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.

On the Wings of Words: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:30:00 +0000

I love Buster Keaton, I love The Wizard of Oz, but most of all, I love books. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, the Oscar-nominated 15-minute animated short film by William Joyce, combines all those elements (and more) to create a delightful visual experience about the curative power of words. Like this year's Best Picture nominee The Artist, it's essentially a silent film which proves that less is indeed more. I won't taint your viewing experience by saying else, except this: find the first available 15 minutes of your day and give yourself over to Joyce's colorful imagination.

Speaking of the Oscars, don't forget to vote in the 2012 Quivering Pen Academy Awards Prediction Contest.

Gambling on Love: The Odds by Stewart O'Nan

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:26:00 +0000

When it comes to putting American culture under a microscope, few novelists succeed as well as Stewart O’Nan. Time after time, novel after novel, O’Nan has focused tightly on particular microbes of our society—people like you and me, to be blunt about it—and examined the foibles, the follies, and the flaws of the Way We Live. In Songs for the Missing, he turned his attention to the grief of a family whose teenage daughter goes missing; in Last Night at the Lobster, it was the disappointment of the American economic dream; in Emily, Alone, it was the solitude of the elderly.

In his newest novel, The Odds: A Love Story, O’Nan puts a troubled marriage in the petri dish. As we're told in the first sentence, Art and Marion Fowler are headed for Niagara Falls on "the final weekend of their marriage, hounded by insolvency, indecision, and, stupidly, half-secretly, in the never-distant past rule by memory, infidelity." It's bloated with a few too many commas, perhaps, but that sentence works hard to jam a lot of information into the reader's head. This is O'Nan's forte: economizing language while filling his sentences with details. Here's another one just a couple of paragraphs down the page: "They weren't good liars, they were just afraid of the truth and what it might say about them."

In their early fifties and traveling along the time-worn ruts of their marriage, the Fowlers avoid the hard realities of their fizzled romance--to the point where this novel could be subtitled What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Love. The marriage is pocked with craters, a minefield of secrets which have brought them to the brink of divorce and, by consequence, the edge of bankruptcy. They're $250,000 in debt, Art is six months out of work, and they're facing foreclosure on their home in Cleveland. Now they're literally gambling on the future of their relationship in the casinos at the Niagara resort where Art has booked them a room on Valentine's Day. They spend the mornings playing tourist at hokey stops like Ripley's Believe It Or Not with disastrous results as they desperately try to rekindle the romance of their honeymoon 30 years earlier. At night, they make plans to gamble in the resort's casino (bright and "achime with ringing slot machines") with the last of their savings--the $40,000 they've smuggled across the border of Canada.

Both have cheated on the other. Art has confessed his affair to Marion, but she has kept hers buttoned-up inside (perhaps because it was with another woman). The adultery is the painted backdrop, but it's not the main action on the stage--the marital salvage effort is.

Art believes the marriage can be saved; Marion is less convinced, but is willing to give it one last shot. Art latches on to the smallest sign of her yielding to his plan. O'Nan masterfully illustrates a husband's delusion even in the face of disaster: "If, as he liked to think, his greatest strength was a patient, indomitable hope, his one great shortcoming was a refusal to accept and therefore have any shot at changing his fate, even when the inevitable was clear to him." This becomes abundantly clear when the day of the big gamble comes as Art sits down at the roulette table, systematically playing the black, refusing to budge in the belief that things would get better: "Because eventually, with near even odds, they'd win. It was a question of patience and the willingness to lose big." Marion thinks "his strategy was exactly like him, methodical to a fault."

O'Nan uses a telephoto lens, rather than a wide-angle, to zoom in on this one particular couple facing the romantic torpor common to so many long-term relationships. The Odds is a short book--less than 200 pages--but it says as much about marriage as any doorstopper the size of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary.

This is essentially a two-character novel--three, if you count the "tireless" Falls with their "monolithic roar" thundering and hissing outside their hotel window. You can bet O'Nan mines the Falls for every ounce of symbolism he can get: the marriage as a river, the precipice-and-plunge of adultery, the misty crash on the rocks below--it's all there, and told in grand literary style:

Here, hard by the rushing current, with a view of the rapids upstream, she could appreciate this wasn't just a river but a whole great lake pouring over a cliff. Feet from the edge, gulls stood on rocks as whitecaps surged past. The blue water turned a sea-green like the curl of a wave, broke and flew, foaming in overlapping sheets as it fell away, constantly, endlessly. She'd forgotten the raw force of it--the exhilarating danger the reason they were all there.

O'Nan also gets good mileage out of romantic metaphors. Niagara is, of course, the kitschy-tacky destination of honeymooners and is never more potent than on this Valentine's Day weekend. Then there's Art's first name, a truncation of "heart." Heart also shows up--the rock band, that is--putting on a show at the resort. And you can hardly turn around in this novel without bumping into the color red--in the nighttime floodlights on the Falls, in the rose Art buys for Marion, in the wine they drink, on the roulette wheel itself.

Like the ball skipping along the slots on the spinning wheel, O'Nan moves the novel's point of view between Art and Marion, gradually filling us in on clues to their past and what brought them here to the point of dissolution. Of the two, Marion seems the most recalcitrant and unforgiving. Art garners our pity, but also our dislike because he can be too passively inert. It's easy to understand why Marion is fed up with his non-committal, eager-to-please behavior. In truth, neither is a wholly likable person, but O'Nan gives just enough detail to make us sympathetic to their plight. By novel's end--which comes quickly and abruptly--we're rooting for this marriage to be saved. For such a short, 200-page relationship, I found myself incredibly moved by what happens to Art and Marion Fowler as they float down the river, calling for help from their barrel just before they go over the edge of the Falls.

A short story for Valentine's Day: "Love Pillow"

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

(Today, I bring you not flowers and chocolates, but a short-short story I wrote two years ago for the Significant Objects series. The editors asked writers to provide a backstory for objects which the S.O. editors purchased at garage sales and thrift shops. I was sent a photo of this pillow and in a flash, my imagination tilted off in a off-kilter direction.)

In the end, the pillow came between them. It was the last bone of contention, the impasse they faced after dividing the spoils of a nine-year marriage.

He said the pillow was his by rights; he’d bought it.

She took the stance that since he’d bought it for her, she could do with it as she chose.

He said he’d known from the first—the unmistakably crushed look in her eyes as he’d pulled it from behind his back—that she’d never really liked it, despite the fact it was her favorite color and plainly said LOVE in shimmering gold threads. He always prided himself on how well he could read her face.

She claimed she had too loved it, considered it one of the few valuable artifacts of their years together. And, archeologically speaking, this was all that was left of their marriage: artifacts. She pictured herself crawling on her knees, scraping with a little tool and blowing off the dust with a brush.

He said, if she loved it so much why did she leave it on the bed, untouched, and never said a word when he started using it to prop up his head while reading? See, see, there’s one of his hairs on it right now.

She said he was missing the whole point: it was a decoration, not an actual pillow. You were supposed to hang it somewhere, she’d just never gotten around to it. But now she had plans for it, had already picked out a spot in her new apartment.

He said, Oh yeah?

She said, Yeah! And then she challenged him to remember where he’d bought the pillow.

That had shut him up for a moment. He could remember it was Petaluma—or had they been in Susanville then? Damn! He knew he’d gotten it at one of those stores he’d always hated—home décor boutiques, the kind of places that made him itchy, like when she forced him to traipse after her into the lingerie section saying “Here, hold this” and “What do you think?” as she held the bras against her chest. Back then, he was still willing to do these things for her. He’d gone into the boutique, face burning, because he knew royal blue was her favorite color.

She said, I’m waiting. Can you or can you not remember when you bought me this pillow?

And he shot back, Maybe I can and maybe I can’t, but what’s it to you?

She called him a name, then he called her a name, and on it went.

So, when Judge Solomon Twain of the 25th Circuit Court gave them their options for property settlement, both knew what they would choose. They kept it to themselves—didn’t even tell their lawyers—but they harbored secret plans for pulling the LOVE pillow apart, seam by seam, thread by thread, until there was nothing left at all.

My First Time: Thomas Balázs

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:21:00 +0000

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 Thomas Balázs, author of the new short-story collection Omicron Ceti III. Kevin Wilson (author of The Family Fang) had this to say about the book: "Though many of the characters in Omicron Ceti III deal with isolation, either falling deeper into themselves or struggling to connect with others, each story is so unique in terms of voice, atmosphere, and narrative that they feel like undiscovered planets, strange new worlds. With this dazzling collection, Thomas Balázs boldly goes into unknown territory, and you should count yourself lucky to follow him wherever he travels." Balázs teaches creative writing, Western humanities, and literature at The University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including The North American Review, Soundings East, and The Southern Humanities Review. His work has also appeared in The Vermont College 25 Anniversary Fiction Anthology and Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology 2004. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, he was awarded the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for best short fiction 2010. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. He has also published scholarly work in The James Joyce Annual. He lives in Chattanooga with his family.

My First Book

There I was standing before a small crowd of friends, colleagues, students, and other well-wishers with my first book in my hand open to the title story of the collection, about to start reading, when I felt the strain in my eyes. It’s a generously-sized font, the type in my debut collection, Omicron Ceti III, but I had to call for a pause and fish in my pockets for the little half-spectacles I now try to remember to carry with me and lodge them on the end of my nose before commencing. I had wanted to be a prodigy, but here I was needing reading glasses at my release party. They put more than the letters in perspective.

I’ve wanted to be a writer, considered myself a writer, for almost as long as I can remember. I say almost because I do recall, or think I recall, the moment of vocation, sometime in second grade when I made the connection, when sitting at my wood-and-steel hinged desk—the kind where you lift the top to store books and pencils and crayons in, the kind with a chair permanently attached—when I realized, waking up from a reverie, that some people made a life out of daydreams, that what I wanted to be was not a reindeer, as I first told my parents, but a writer.

I figured I’d get a novel out by the end of sixth grade, if not sooner. And my teachers encouraged my dreams if not my delusions. They told me I was a good writer, better-than-average, talented. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Rose, went so far as to give me hours alone to write a story for a children’s writing contest. You were supposed to come up with text for an illustrated book. I don’t remember much about the book except for a scene in which the little white bunnies played leap-frog in their burrow--that and having to do multiple rewrites because my handwriting was so bad, and then having to wait months for the results, only to find that my entry didn’t even make the top five hundred. It was my first experience of literary rejection. I guess you can never start too soon.

Around fourth grade, I plagiarized Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever, penning a play called Diamond Rings Are Forever. Around fifth grade, I wrote a treatment for a comic-book character called “Moleculin, Master of Molecules!” that I mailed to Marvel Comics, but never got an answer on. And in Junior High I wrote a few chapters of a fantasy novel, whose name I can’t remember, but which was inspired by a combination of Heart’s song “Dream of the Archer” from Little Queen and one of my first experiments with marijuana. I still have the maps I drew somewhere.

The thing is, though I read a lot, and daydreamed about being a great author at a young age, I wrote comparatively little. Compared to who? Oh, I don’t know, Stephen King or the Bronte sisters or any one of those other writers we’ve all read about or heard of or met who began churning out fictions, however childish, as preteens, who filled leather-bound journals to bursting, or published their own 'zines using primitive ink-roller copiers. I wrote mostly for school, when we were assigned creative writing projects, and then I always, or almost always, got high marks for writing and imagination, but my spare time was devoted mostly to watching TV, reading the occasional fantasy, sci-fi or horror novel, and for just about all of my adolescence, getting high.

In college, I wrote maybe half a dozen short stories I showed my friends, did an independent creative writing class. But I wasn’t part of a writer’s community, didn’t participate in the college literary magazine, didn’t read stuff written by other writers my age or, for that matter, by other writers who were still alive, with the exception of Vonnegut.

I wanted to publish a book by the time I got my BA. I thought I’d write the definitive high-school novel or maybe a collection of linked short stories telling the truth about suburban teenagers, but it never happened. Too much assigned reading, too many papers, too much agonizing over the girl who loved me back just enough to make me crazy but not enough to make me happy.

After college, I thought I’d go away and spend a year in Paris, get myself a cheap little place on the left bank, and write the great American novel. I know, so derivative. But I couldn’t get my parents to back me, and I didn’t have the guts to just make it happen on my own, and, to be honest, I was a little afraid I’d get there and just spend twelve months drinking café au laits and staring at a blank pad. So I got a job as a reporter instead, which I loved, and which improved my writing, but which didn’t leave me time for my own work—or at least that’s what I told myself. And then I got my master’s in literature and went on for a PhD, all the while saying I needed to set myself up with a college-level teaching job, so I’d have time to write, conning myself that the ten years or so of immersing myself in literary theory and the scholarly study of texts would somehow lead to me writing that novel. And so went my twenties and most of my thirties.

Finally, I got myself into an MFA program and started writing in earnest. Then, not long after I finished my program, my father passed away, and I was left with a little money I used to quit my various part-time jobs and take a year to finally write that novel. I went to Israel to research it. It was to be a kind of spiritual quest novel, but instead of writing it, I actually went on a spiritual quest which led me to leave behind forty years of Christianity and embrace my Semitic roots. I spent the year I had set aside for writing a novel to learn what it meant to be a Jew instead, and then it was time to figure out a way to make a living, to go back to school yet again. I was going to get a teaching degree and work at a high school, since that PhD which delayed my writing career for a decade never got me the full-time teaching gig I was after.

And then I got a lucky break and landed a position teaching creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga and, because, it was a requirement of my job that I be published, and very much in my career interest to get a book out, I started working more seriously and diligently to complete a collection of short stories. I hadn’t given up on the novel, but all the novels I ever conceived were epic tomes, and I just didn’t have the time for that. The tenure clock was ticking.

And then I got lucky yet again and found a publisher and more than a year after getting the acceptance email and after months of back and forths on the galleys, the book came out last week.

It isn’t what I thought my first book would be. It isn’t an epic. It’s not even a novel. It isn’t, I think, destined to be a New York Times bestseller. Instead, it’s a collection of nine “literary” short stories, arranged as a triptych, that’s gotten some pretty good reviews and that, in the end, I’m proud of—even though I, who until my mid-forties had nearly perfect eyesight, now need glasses to read it.

I still hope to write that novel. I still have epic dreams. I also now have a wife and kid, two aging dogs, a needy cat, a 3,000-square-foot, 1954 house in endless need of repairs and improvements, three or more classes a semester to teach, independent studies, advising, a load of departmental administrative duties, committees, committees, and more committees, and a prohibition against working on Saturdays....I wonder what sort of prosthetic device I’ll require to read from my next book.

Photo by Carolyn Drake

Soup and Salad: Slinkachu, Sh*t Book Reviewers Say, Hybrid Books, A Commonplace Book, #writerwithadayjob, Book-Spine Animals, Shelf-Conscious, The Legitimacy of Paperbacks

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:49:00 +0000

On today's menu:

"They're Not Pets, Susan"

1. Have you seen Slinkachu? Good Lord, I am in love with his work ("Abandoning Little People on the Streets Since 2006") in which he creates miniature street scenes on real-life streets using small action figures integrated into "found props." I want him to design the cover of my next book. Here's another stunning example of his art:

2. It's the return of the Totally Hip Book Reviewer! Ron Charles is "luminous," "stunning," and "unputdownable" in Sh*t Book Reviewers Say. In fact, he may just be the next Edith Wharton.

3. Sorry, e-Book Haters, the Kindle may be hanging around for a while (in one form or another). This report at Publishers Weekly suggests "a hybrid market for books is developing in which readers will buy both print and digital books." PW crunches the numbers so you don't have to....

4. Book critic Harvey Freedenberg has been keeping a "commonplace book" for nearly 30 years. It began as a collection of newspaper clippings and "words scribbled on scraps of paper" and stuffed into his wallet. "Today," he says, "it’s housed in a battered blue Rite Aid spiral notebook, encircled by a rubber band to secure the cover and the pieces that threaten to tumble from it." He writes of its value in a moving personal essay at Beyond the Margins:

The book is a companion in times of both sorrow and joy. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s exhortation to “live your life as if it were a work of art,” provided inspiration for the eulogy I delivered at my mother’s funeral in 2005. The poet Danny Siegel’s vision of a life that “arrays itself to you as a dazzling wedding feast” helped enrich the celebration of the two great-grandsons’ circumcisions she didn’t live to see. And rereading an evocative essay by a writer friend inspired me to include E.B. White’s observation that “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer,” summing up in a single sentence the depth of a cherished friendship.
There are too many here to name more than a few, so many wise and thoughtful and creative minds it would take several lifetimes to absorb all their wisdom. Walker Evans’ admonition to “Stare. Pry. Listen. Eavesdrop,” urges me to be more mindful of the world I inhabit. Kurt Vonnegut knew that “We are here on Earth to fart around,” encouraging me not to take myself or my daily struggles too seriously. With time I’ve added some personal thoughts, though like Auden, “I have tried to keep my own reflections…to a minimum, and let others, more learned, intelligent, imaginative, and witty than I, speak for me.”

5. I don't talk much about my Day Job* here at the blog. It's not that I'm ashamed of it or want to keep my blogging a secret from co-workers (some of them are regular readers of The Quivering Pen), but it's more because I've always considered my writing to be a "pastime." I keep everything compartmentalized, putting the office and my creative keyboard into two separate cubicles, warning them, "Don't talk to each other. Unless the building's on fire--in which case, you can say something." This is one reason I get up at the ungodly hour of 3:30 am in order to blog and write creatively before I have to punch the clock at the office. With the publication of Fobbit, that "hobby" may mushroom into something a little larger (though I still have no plans to quit the Day Job). For now, I continue to live like Jekyll and Hyde, keeping the two halves of my life from ever meeting. At her blog, The Practicing Writer, Erika Dreifus talks about why she's grateful for her non-writing employment and why she often appends #writerwithadayjob to her Tweets:

It’s true that the structure and routine of being expected in an away-from-home office–doing work for someone else–every day from 9 to 5 isn’t always a writer’s dream. But the structure and stability of a regular paycheck, health insurance, a retirement account, and paid leave are wonderful things.

6. Go to your bookshelf. Look at the spines of the volumes lined up there. Chances are, you'll see a logo near the bottom of that spine. Chances are also good that it's an animal of some kind: a penguin, a kangaroo, a seagull, a dolphin. Ever wonder about the history behind the logos (called "colophons")? No? Well, I have. The Publishing Trendsetter blog enlightens us.

7. Speaking of shelves and spines, The Paris Review blog talks about writers' libraries and the history of bookcases in "Shelf-Conscious."

There are many varieties of nerd, but only two real species—the serious and the nonserious—and shelves are a pretty good indication of who is which. “To expose a bookshelf,” Harvard professor Leah Price writes in Unpacking My Library, a recent collection of interviews with writers about the books they own, “is to compose a self.”

Nicely said! One of these days, I'll get around to writing about my own library here in the basement of my house in Butte, Montana. For now, let me just say this: I have so many books, the thickness of the volumes insulates the walls and keeps me warm in the winter. One more thing: my wife is a friggin' saint for putting up with my bibliomania for nearly 30 years.

8. At the Women's Fiction Writers blog, Sarah Pinneo ponders the implications of her book coming out in trade paperback rather than hardcover:

When my agent began to shop Julia’s Child, it was the editors of paperback imprints who showed the most interest. I’d always pictured the book as a hardcover, and not merely because I was having delusions of grandeur. The women’s fiction I’d read for years—Alice Hoffman, Jennifer Weiner, Jodi Picoult—was always hardback. Soft cover, I assumed, was for chick lit and genre romance.
So I decided to (very casually) ask my agent about it. “So…” I said, “is this because I’m a loser, and nobody will ever take me seriously?”

I've been asking myself the same question lately since--from what I've been told--Fobbit will be coming out in paperback. Like Pinneo, I'm just happy to be a published writer. I get down on my knees every morning and thank my lucky stars for the Grove gods who smiled upon me. And yet...I wonder if an original paperback release will reduce Fobbit's legitimacy in the eyes of book reviewers. No matter how many novels debut in paperback these days (and the number is rising sharply), there's still a wrongly-held impression they're somehow second-class books. But on the other hand, I wonder if a lower cover price will attract more readers. And that--readers' eyes--is the most important consideration when you come right down to it. I don't care if they're reading my words printed on the back of dried potato skins with blue ink, as long as they're reading, right? What do you think? Does format matter? Discuss in the comments section.

*If you really must know, I work for the Bureau of Land Management in Montana.

Book Radar: Lemony Snicket, George Saunders, Michael Chabon

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:08:00 +0000

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

In the most happy unfortunate news I've heard in a long time, Galley Cat reports that Lemony Snicket will return to bookstores this October. Mr. Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) makes his morose way back to the page in a four-book series from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers called All the Wrong Questions which will kick off with Who Could That Be at This Hour? Best news of all? Graphic novelist Seth will illustrate the “authorized autobiographical account” of Snicket’s childhood. While I'll miss Brett Helquist's exquisite renderings of the world of A Series of Unfortunate Events, if anyone had to replace him, my first choice would be Seth. Here’s more from the Little, Brown release: “Drawing on events that took place during a period of his youth spent in a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, Snicket chronicles his experiences as an apprentice in an organization nobody knows about. While there, he began to ask a series of questions—wrong questions that should not have been on his mind. Who Could That Be at This Hour? is Snicket’s account of the first wrong question.”

Publishers Marketplace reports that George Saunders' Tenth of December, his first story collection in six years, is set for publication by Random House in Fall 2012. Happy, happy news for fans of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline!

By now, news of Michael Chabon's next novel is as omnipresent as one of his wife's Twitter rants. But in case you hadn't heard, Telegraph Avenue will be making its appearance sometime this Fall, courtesy of Harper Perennial. The Huffington Post has a few details and several links to other stories. It's been described, at various times, as being " a contemporary adult novel set in and around the San Francisco Bay Area," "a 'naturalistic' novel about two families in Berkeley," and a story set in "the shifting restless polycultural territory manifesting in the joint between Oakland and Berkeley." Whatever the label slapped on the book, I've got one of my own: "PROMISINGLY FANTASTIC."

Friday Freebie: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop, and The Detour by Andromeda Romano-Lax

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:41:00 +0000

Congratulations to Carolyn Elias, the winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels.

This week, my pen is really quivering with excitement because I'm giving away not one, not two, not even two-and-a-half, but THREE books to one lucky winner: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop, and The Detour by Andromeda Romano-Lax. All share at least three traits in common: they're novels set in the past (the 1800s Gold Rush and World War II), they're chock-full of first-rate writing, and they're perched high atop my personal to-be-read list (aka Mount NeverRest).

The Sisters Brothers comes out in a gorgeous new paperback edition from Ecco on Valentine's Day, which makes it something like the publisher's love letter to readers. By all accounts, there's a lot to love about this picaresque Western which reminded some reviewers of True Grit, and others of Pulp Fiction. The jacket copy: Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living--and whom he does it for. The opening paragraph:

I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie’s new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and lately had been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

I've already mentioned my readerly anticipation of Obedience earlier at the blog, but here's Hilary Mantel (author of Wolf Hall) to tell you why you'll want to get this book about a nun in Nazi-occupied France in your hands pronto: "An intensely imagined novel about one of the defining questions of the century just past: where and how we choose to draw the line between innocence and guilt, ignorance and complicity. Obedience also asks us to consider what ghastly harm is committed in the name of love. It's rare to find a book that is seemingly so simple, but is really ambiguous and thought-provoking." The novel came out from Penguin at the end of January and, unless I'm mistaken, book clubs are already lining up to discuss what Stewart O'Nan (Emily, Alone) calls "the best kind of Occupation romance: forbidden, tortured and indelible." Here's the opening paragraph:

Mother Catherine knew the devil. He was twisted and dwarfish; his clawed hands were gnarled. His neck was short and his legs bowed. He had a hump on his back, heavy like a sack of walnuts. He was crafty, she knew that; she had heard how cunning he could be. But surely he could never stretch over five shelves of jars, pickles and conserves to take down the coffee and tempt her nuns?

Rounding out the Friday Freebie trio, Andromeda Romano-Lax's The Detour is another kind of romance: this time between a man and a statue--or, at least, his devotion to collecting it for the Fuhrer. Here's the jacket copy from the publisher (Soho Press):

Ernst Vogler is twenty-six years old in 1938 when he is sent to Rome by his employer—the Third Reich's Sonderprojekte, which is collecting the great art of Europe and bringing it to Germany for the Führer. Vogler is to collect a famous Classical Roman marble statue, The Discus Thrower, and get it to the German border, where it will be turned over to Gestapo custody. It is a simple, three-day job. Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The Italian twin brothers who have been hired to escort Vogler to the border seem to have priorities besides the task at hand—wild romances, perhaps even criminal jobs on the side—and Vogler quickly loses control of the assignment. The twins set off on a dangerous detour and Vogler realizes he will be lucky to escape this venture with his life, let alone his job. With nothing left to lose, the young German gives himself up to the Italian adventure, to the surprising love and inevitable losses along the way.

The Detour will also be released on Valentine's Day and I'm pretty sure you'll heart the writing in this novel. Here's the opening paragraph as proof:

The russet bloom on the vineyards ahead, the yellowleafed oaks, a hint of truffles fattening in moldy obscurity underfoot—none of it is truly familiar, because I first came here not only in a different season, but as a different man. Yet the smell of autumn anywhere is for me the smell of memory, and I am preoccupied as my feet guide me through the woods and fields up toward the old Piedmontese villa.

(If you haven't already done so, be sure to check out Romano-Lax's contribution to the My First Time series here at The Quivering Pen: "My First Time Hearing Fiction's Call")

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of all three of these novels, all you have to do is answer this question:

What is your favorite historical novel? (For the purposes of this poll, I'll broadly define "historical novel" as one which is set before the author's lifetime.)

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 Feb. 16--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 17. 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).

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Nursing Her Grief: Beautiful Unbroken by Mary Jane Nealon

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:02:00 +0000

A friend of mine tells the story of the evening he sat in the audience at last year’s Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and listened to Mary Jane Nealon read from her memoir Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse's Life, which would be published later that year by Graywolf Press. Nealon’s story of grief, loss and forgiveness in both her family history and her career as a nurse is a battering ram on the emotions. As she read from her pages, the Bread Loaf audience was visibly shaken. She read in a tone of voice that was both matter-of-fact and vulnerable. She read of how her cancer-stricken brother died when he was in his early 20s, she read of her parents’ headlong plunge into sorrow, she read of the brave but doomed AIDS patients she cared for during the height of the 1980s epidemic. The audience was held in the grip of her words. No one breathed. No one blinked. It was so quiet, you could have heard a tear drop. Nealon read of difficult lives caught in the grip of profound losses, then she went deeper into these lives, and still deeper. And then she went even deeper yet. At this point, my friend let out a loud, involuntary “Oh goddamn!” It cut the tension and relieved laughter rippled through the theater.

Such is the powerful effect Nealon’s words have on her listeners and her readers. I have to confess, at several points during my reading of Beautiful Unbroken, I was so overwhelmed by second-hand grief that I closed the book, put my forehead in my hand and echoed my friend’s two-word commentary. “Oh goddamn, that paragraph is just so overloaded with beauty and sadness and loneliness and love that I just can’t take another syllable right at this moment.”

I swallowed Beautiful Unbroken in small, measured doses.

It can be a hard book to read, yes; but I also found it was one of the most exciting and gorgeous interplay of words I’ve found on the page in a long time. Nealon’s background is poetry and that honed-down, boiled-down compression of language is strikingly evident throughout the story of her brother Johnny’s death, her mother’s estrangement, and her work in hospitals and clinics throughout the U.S. Here, for instance, is one description of what it’s like to die peacefully for one man with pancreatic cancer: “When he got cramping pain in his back we increased the morphine and he was fading and it was like the tide going out, an almost unnoticeable retreat, except suddenly the water was gone and the rocks were exposed and against the sand little minnows were jumping.”

Or this stunning passage from the moment of her brother’s death:

Throughout the day, as we took turns sitting beside Johnny, I focused on his lovely right hand. The way his fingers had given up all struggle. Tapered, I would say. This hand. This hand I held outside grammar school on his first day of kindergarten when he wore a seersucker jacket and short blue pants. Hand in the bathtub, hand in the catcher’s mitt….Hand lifting a corsage to his girlfriend’s dress on the day of the prom. My brother’s hand filling out his NYU application. Hand receiving the scholarship a few months later. Hand that stayed in the air as I drove away from Fourth Street toward Virginia one year ago. Hand that just last night wavered about his forehead as he leaned forward and spit blood into the tiny mustard-colored basin. Hand that clutched and held on this morning and finally flattened, like this, on the bed where his body was going away.

Nealon says she dreamed of being a nurse from the time she was a little girl who admired historical caregivers like Clara Barton and Molly Pitcher, as well as her own aunt: “I tried to mimic everything my aunt Frances did as a nurse. Sometimes I would put her white cap on my head and stare at myself in the mirror. I dressed up as a nurse on Halloween.”

As she later attended nursing school, her brother was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. It’s almost as if Nealon was hurrying through school in order to save Johnny, the clock of mortality ticking in her ears. Sadly, this was one patient she was unable to save. Nealon spends a good portion of the book going over the guilt and regret of not being able to do more to rescue her family from this time in their lives. After Johnny’s death, a kind of spiritual death comes over the family. Her mother is increasingly tight-lipped, her sister moves away, and her father spirals down into alcoholism (“[he] was broken and no one knew how to fix him.”)

As a nurse, Nealon becomes addicted to the pain of others: “I wasn’t sure I could be happy without the counterweight of suffering.” She becomes a traveling nurse working in New Mexico and Hawaii (where she also continues to study poetry under Galway Kinnell), she gets the job as a clinical research nurse working with AIDS patients in New York City, and she works in a homeless shelter on the Bowery.

The title of the book comes from a sentence at the end of the book: "The beautiful unbroken was the invisible line between the living and the dead. It was finding a way to be with them without sadness." Nealon eventually does come to the point where she can accept the death of those around her, but her journey to that place in her life is incredibly moving. She writes so convincingly of pain, both physical and spiritual, that it's almost as if we are the stricken ones and Nealon is the nurse at our bedside, holding our hand and saying, "I know, I know."

We all have sad stories to tell, but Nealon seems to have more than her fair share. How she learns to heal herself while treating the wounds of others is just one of the revelations of this marvelous book. The catharsis of grief which causes us to blurt “Oh goddamn” is another.

Front Porch Books: February 2012 edition

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:31:00 +0000

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

Dust to Dust by Benjamin Busch (Ecco): Benjamin Busch has led what appears to be a rich and varied life. He's the son of acclaimed novelist Frederick Busch, he's an actor who played cop Anthony Colicchio on The Wire, and he's a U.S. Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq. All three of those, along with the charred lighter on the cover, were enough to draw me to this book, which the Jacket Copy calls "an extraordinary memoir about ordinary things." During the composition of Fobbit, I've mostly avoided reading books about Iraq (with the singular exception of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate), but now that my novel is on its way to the typesetter at Grove, I'm ready to step into those waters. Busch's memoir will be a good place to start because I'm particularly fond of his father's fiction and I have a good feeling that the talent has been handed down a generation. Here are the Opening Lines:

I was not allowed to have a gun. My parents were fresh from Vietnam War protests, and they had no intention of raising a soldier. My mother was against the idea of toy weapons, and my father quietly supported the embargo. He had been a boy once, though, and was a war baby. His father, Benjamin Busch, had been a sergeant in the Tenth Mountain Division, fighting German troops in the Italian Alps. My mother's father, Allan Burroughs, had been a marine in the Guadalcanal campaign against the Japanese. He called me "Little Son of Gun," but I continued to have no guns at all.

Blurbworthiness: “Dust to Dust is a wonderful book, original in concept and stunningly written, a soldier’s memoir that is about soldiering and much else besides. The last two dozen pages are a tour de force, a breathtaking meditation on loss and remembrance, dust to dust.” (Ward Just, author of Rodin's Debutante)

Blind by Belo Miguel Cipriani (Wheatmark): Here's another memoir which caught my eye (no pun intended). It's relatively short page-wise, but it's long on poetic descriptions of our world. Which is not surprising when you learn that Cipriani is writing about his life adjusting to a world of darkness after 2007 when he was attacked and beaten so severely he lost his vision. He was literally robbed blind. To add a complex layer of drama on top of that, his muggers were his childhood friends. Okay, now I'm hooked. Jacket Copy: "Blind chronicles the two years immediately following the assault when, at the age of 26, Cipriani found himself learning to walk, cook, and date in the dark." Blurbworthiness: "Belo Cipriani's account of profound loss is both riveting and suspenseful, as we traverse with him into a new world." (Amy Tan)

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (HarperCollins): The first time I encountered Jess Walter, I was laughing so hard I thought I might need a diaper. It was two years ago at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula and Walter was reading a short story about a guy, a couch, and a disastrous love affair. At least I think that's what I was about. I don't know, I was giggling to the point where my throat seized up and my ears popped. So, maybe it was about a gorilla, a taxidermist, and a banana. It wouldn't have mattered because, based on that short story alone, I can safely say Jess Walter is one of the funniest writers in print these days. I don't know how much of a knee-slapper his new novel, Beautiful Ruins, will be, but he's already got a good track record of humor with The Financial Lives of the Poets and Citizen Vince. Beautiful Ruins begins on the coast of Italy in 1962, where Pasquale, a young proprietor of the Hotel Adequate View, a failing hotel on the Italian coast, glimpses a beautiful Hollywood actress filming on location and falls in love. Fifty years later, that same Italian man heads to California to find her, aided by a cynical movie producer and an idealistic young assistant. Funny or not, Beautiful Ruins has all the right elements for me: Hollywood, the Italian coast, unrequited love, and Jess Walter.

Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan (Knopf): This is one of two sequels I'm looking forward to this year (Justin Cronin's The Twelve, the followup to The Passage, is the other). Talulla Rising picks up where The Last Werewolf left off. Jake (the titular lycanthrope of the first novel) is dead and WOCOP, the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena, is in pursuit of his lover, the female werewolf Talulla. Given my enjoyment of The Last Werewolf, I expect I'll be howling with delight at Talulla. Jacket Copy:

Talulla, pregnant, grieving, and on the run, must face her werewolf future without Jake. Premature labor under a full moon leaves her near death, but with her newborn son in her arms, she believes the worst is over. Until the door opens--and a new nightmare begins. What follows tests her sanity, her motherhood, and her will to survive, in a race against time to recover her lost child, an epic struggle that sees her crossing paths with a psychotic new WOCOP leader, an unlikely human lover, blood-drinking religious fanatics, a pack of London werewolves, and (rumor has it) the oldest living vampire on earth...Talulla Rising pushes the werewolf myth further into new territory to give us a novel rich in action and ideas, delivering in the process the definitive twenty-first-century female of the species.

Hollywood Boulevard by Janyce Stefan-Cole (Unbridled Books): Here's a debut novel that combines several elements that have instant appeal to me: washed-up Hollywood celebrities, noir, and Unbridled Books. I've always looked forward to cracking open an Unbridled release soon after it lands on my doorstep and Stefan-Cole's novel definitely punches my ticket to Anticipation Land. Here's the Jacket Copy:

Ardennes Thrush is an award-winning movie star who suddenly and mysteriously quit acting at the height of her fame. She is in Hollywood now, at the Hotel Muse, visiting her husband Andre, a world-renowned director struggling through his latest film. Ardennes, a contemplative woman, is also something of a voyeur, and as she watches the comings and goings in the hotel she begins to fear that perhaps she is being stalked. Her period of anonymity ends after a box of dead roses is delivered to her suite. When a Beverly Hills detective comes to investigate, a powerful attraction turns unexpectedly unprofessional and quickly carnal. When the stalker turns out to be real, Ardennes's private journey escalates into real danger, and we watch rapt as she searches her past for the answer to how she brought herself here.

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): This year marks the centennial of the founding of the Girl Scouts of America. You can celebrate by gorging on Thin Mints and Tag-a-Longs, or you can read Hassman's debut novel about young Rory Hendrix who lives in the Calle de las Flores trailer park in Reno, Nevada. Rory is so obsessed with the Girl Scouts, if you cut her veins, she bleeds green. Hassam's novel is eye-catching--starting with that wonderful cover design of a library card poking out of a pocket overlaid on a green grim picture of what could be Rory's trailer. Inside, the chapters are most short and acute observations of grade-school life. This one is going straight to the To-Be-Read pile! Here's the Jacket Copy:

Rory Hendrix is the least likely of Girl Scouts. She hasn’t got a troop or even a badge to call her own. But she’s checked the Handbook out from the elementary school library so many times that her name fills all the lines on the card, and she pores over its surreal advice (Uniforms, disposing of outgrown; The Right Use of Your Body; Finding Your Way When Lost) for tips to get off the Calle: that is, the Calle de las Flores, the Reno trailer park where she lives with her mother, Jo, the sweet-faced, hard-luck bartender at the Truck Stop. Rory’s been told that she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom.” But she’s determined to prove the county and her own family wrong. Brash, sassy, vulnerable, wise, and terrified, she struggles with her mother’s habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good. From diary entries, social workers’ reports, half-recalled memories, arrest records, family lore, Supreme Court opinions, and her grandmother’s letters, Rory crafts a devastating collage that shows us her world even as she searches for the way out of it.

Blurbworthiness: “This first novel is not like anything you or I have ever read. Something between a shocking exposé, a defiant treatise, a prose poem, and an exuberant Girl Scout manual, it is always formally inventive and bursting with energy. Yes, this is an insider’s report confirming the worst you ever allowed yourself to think about lowdown trailer parks. And yet somehow Tupelo Hassman’s book is also a testament to joy and beauty, and to the saving power of language wherever it gets a foothold. She has irrepressible high spirits, which flow forth in this case as brilliance and lyricism. Tupelo Hassman loves life in spite of everything, and you can’t help loving this novel and her.” (Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule)

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco): The phenomenally prolific JCO (who, I secretly suspect is a robot cranking out words 24/7) lands another novel in our laps. This time, it's about "the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the 'public' and 'private' in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman." Here's more from the Jacket Copy:

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate—or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past. Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership that test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her. A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind.

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (Little, Brown): Each month, it seems I get at last one book that comes to my house with the outward appearance of something I need to read At All Costs. It's like a confident, smart, funny, gorgeous person entering the room at a cocktail party--you can't help but be drawn by the magnetic allure. Last month, it was The Evening Hour. This time around, it's Charlotte Rogan's debut novel The Lifeboat. These are books which make me wish, for the hundred-thousandth time, that I was a professional reader, a bon vivant who was paid to sit around and read non-stop for nine-hour shifts. Maybe then I could whittle down my To-Be-Read tower of books which teeters dangerously on the corner of my desk, swaying in the breeze from my slightest cough. Right now, The Lifeboat sits at the summit of that stack. From the time it walked into the room a week ago, I couldn't take my eyes off of it--starting with the gorgeous cover, and continuing with the Jacket Copy:

Grace Winter, 22, is both a newlywed and a widow. In the summer of 1914, the elegant ocean liner carrying her and her husband Henry across the Atlantic suffers a mysterious explosion. Setting aside his own safety, Henry secures Grace a place in a lifeboat, which the survivors quickly realize is over capacity. For any to live, some must die. As the castaways battle the elements, and each other, Grace recollects the unorthodox way she and Henry met, and the new life of privilege she thought she'd found. Will she pay any price to keep it?

I should also mention that I'm a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat; Rogan's novel seems to share some of the movie's moral-dilemma qualities. Here are the Opening Lines (from the first chapter):

The first day in the lifeboat we were mostly silent, either taking in or refusing to take in the drama playing itself out in the seething waters around us. John Hardie, an able-bodied seaman and the only crew member on board Lifeboat 14, took immediate charge. He assigned seats based on weight distribution, and because the lifeboat was riding low in the water, he forbade anyone to stand up or move without permission. Then he wrested a rudder from where it was stored underneath the seats, fixed it into place at the back of the boat, and commanded anyone who knew how to row a boat to take up one of four long oars, which were quickly appropriated by three of the men and a sturdy woman named Mrs Grant. Hardie gave them orders to gain as much distance from the foundering craft as possible, saying, "Row yer bloody hearts out, unless ye want to be sucked under to yer doom!"

A Stranger on the Planet by Adam Schwartz (Soho Press): I can't speak for the rest of Schwartz' debut novel, but I sure liked the Opening Lines:

My mother met Eddie Lipper in the Catskills on July 4, 1969, and married him in Las Vegas sixteen days later. She claimed they were pronounced man and wife at the exact moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I didn’t believe her, but I was twelve years old that summer and would have welcomed just about any man into our lives. My mother was thirty-five, and I know the same was true for her.
We were a family of four: me; my mother, Ruth; my twin sister, Sarah; and our younger brother, Seamus—a name recommended to my mother by our neighbor Mary Murphy from County Cork. My name is Seth. Seth Shapiro. Ruth said she selected all of our names because she wanted our initials to represent how strongly we were connected: SSSSSS. She called us her chain of love. She was right, of course—the four of us were deeply and painfully bound together—but over time I have come to see these letters as an ideogram for silence.

Here's the Jacket Copy for what looks like a pretty damn good book:

In the summer of 1969, twelve-year-old Seth lives with his unstable mother, Ruth, and his brother and sister in a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. His father lives with his new wife in a ten-room house and has no interest in Seth and his siblings. Seth is dying to escape from his mother’s craziness and suffocating love, her marriage to a man she’s known for two weeks, and his father’s cold disregard. Over the next four decades, Seth becomes the keeper of his family’s memories and secrets. At the same time, he emotionally isolates himself from all those who love him, especially his mother. But Ruth is also Seth’s muse, and this enables him to ultimately find redemption, for both himself and his family.

From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story by Ron Tanner (Academy Chicago Publishers): My wife and I live in a Craftsman home built in the early 1920s and over the years we have put a good amount of "sweat equity" into a few remodeling projects (and when I say "we," I mean "my wife, with some applause from the sidelines by me"). The two of us have nothing on Ron Tanner and his wife Jill, however. Back in 2000, Ron and then-girlfriend Jill discovered the house of their dreams: a landmark Baltimore brownstone that had belonged to a notorious fraternity. The result is, as the subtitle says, a love story between a man, a woman, and a house. Here's the Jacket Copy:

It was condemned property, had sat abandoned for nearly a year, and was such a wreck that no one would buy it. But Jill wanted the house and Ron wanted Jill. So he bought the 4,500-square-foot ruin. Neither he nor Jill knew anything about house repair or renovation. The bank gave them six months to get the house up to code. The neighborhood historians told them flatly, "You'll never bring that house back." Ron's realtor said, "This house will eat you alive." Ron's mother said, "Why do you always do things the hard way?" Impulsive and quixotic—and with two marriages behind him—Ron inspired little confidence. His life had been a series of mistakes and wrong turns. He recognized that taking on this wrecked frat house could be the biggest mistake of his life and he wondered if this time, in what seemed his final reach for love, he had reached too far. As soon as he and Jill started working on the house, they were at odds every day and it became clear to them both that the project would very likely ruin them financially and emotionally. Panicked, flirting with bankruptcy, and barreling through disasters, they had to learn how to live, love, and work together—and succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Tanner's book, liberally illustrated with his own charming sketches, is something like "This Old House Meets The Bachelor." If Tanner had had a camera crew following him around, he would have had a killer reality show on HGTV.

The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s MAD Inspired Satirical Comics edited by John Benson (Fantagraphics Books): Like many a young boy in the 1960s and 70s, I grew up on a regular diet of Mad magazine. I also grew up on a diet of pink Hostess Sno-Balls and Orange Crush. Of the two, Mad was certainly the more nutritious. I loved Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of...," Sergio Aragones' "A Mad Look at...," Don Martin's gags, Al Jaffee's back cover fold-in, and especially Mort Drucker's film spoofs (A Fistful of Lasagne, Dirty Larry, The Poopsidedown Adventure, et cetera). The latter were my first introductions to film criticism--this is how to poke holes in the pretensions of Hollywood, I thought. Of course, a word like "pretensions" didn't pass through my 12-year-old mind--I was too busy picking myself up off the floor from my giggle-fit. And now, Fantagraphics has packaged some of the best movie parodies in this ripely-colored book. But these aren't Mad comics. They're the imitators which popped up on newsstands in the 1950s--comic books like Whack, Nuts!, Crazy, Bughouse and Unsane. As Jay Lynch writes in his introduction to The Sincerest Form of Flattery, "The Mad clones never topped the Mad comics for pure, uncut satire. But to me, even the worst of them was more enjoyable and unpredictable than those from the other genres of comic books of the 1950s...they were still enjoyable in the same sense that it would be interesting today to see Rush Limbaugh try to do a George Carlin routine." Most of the comics in the pages of this book are understandably dated for today's web-weaned generation who may have never heard of I, Jury ("My Gun Is the Jury by Melvie Splane"), What's My Line? ("What's My Crime?"), or Come Back, Little Sheba ("Come Back Bathsheba"), but that doesn't drain these parodies of their punch.

An Unexpected Guest by Anne Korkeakivi (Little, Brown): In her debut novel, Korkeakivi channels the day-in-a-life structure of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway into what looks like a fascinating plot. Here's the Jacket Copy:

Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the unexpected arrival of her son and a random encounter with a Turkish man, whom she discovers is a suspected terrorist. More unnerving is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life. One she never expected to see again. But it can't be him--he's been dead for 20 years....

I particularly like the novel's Opening Line: "Time rained down on Clare." Simple, clever and full of tension. I expect good things to rain down on readers in the next 277 pages. Blurbworthiness: "Anne Korkeakivi writes wonderfully about embassy manners, food, and Paris, and she writes even better about the darker world that threatens to disrupt not just Clare's seating plan for dinner but her entire life. An Unexpected Guest, like its heroine, is a novel of great elegance, enormous surprises, and unexpected depths." (Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street)

Caring Is Creepy by David Zimmerman (Soho Press): To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, Zimmerman's novel about the summer in the life of a troubled teenage girl who flirts with strangers online had me at "hello." Here are the Opening Lines:

The most dangerous thing I ever did was tell a grown man my real name. I typed it for him. Lynn Marie Sugrue. When it happened, it didn’t seem like anything at all. Hardly something worth worrying over. Me and my best friend Dani were down in her basement bedroom on a night hot and thick enough to push in against the window screens. We were playing our favorite game of the moment, a sort of online combination of crank phone call and blind man’s bluff, but it was really more of a scheme to try out being bad in a place we thought it wouldn’t count. We just never expected to be the ones wearing the blindfold.
So this is August of 2005 in Metter, Georgia, population half of nothing. A million miles from anywhere good. So this is me and Dani, just turned fifteen and a couple weeks away from our sophomore year at Metter High. So this is me fucking up my life like you wouldn’t believe.

The Water Children by Anne Berry (Simon & Schuster): I also like the Opening Lines to Berry's novel which will be released in the U.S. in May. These sentences do a good job of setting the watery scene for the rest of the book:

It is the recipe for a perfect day. The sun beats down from a cloudless blue sky. The air fizzes with heat and salt. The sea glitters and shifts and curls and breaks along the three-mile stretch of pale, gold, Devonshire sand—Saunton Sands. It somersaults over mossy rocks and tangled tresses of tide wrack. It sends the beach into a nervous, excited jitter. The seasawing cry of gulls rises to a crescendo with their swoops and nose-dives, then quiets as the curved beaks snap at darting fish. Apart from a few surfers riding the breakers, and sporadic clusters of people guiltily enjoying their mid-week leisure break, this coastal paradise is deserted.

Here's the Jacket Copy from the UK edition (which, frankly, I prefer to the more muddy one from the U.S. publisher):

Four lives. Four defining moments which will bring them together. Owen Abingdon is haunted by nightmares of the Merfolk. He believes they have stolen his little sister who vanished while he was meant to be minding her on the beach, but he was only a child himself. Is it fair for his mother to blame him? Catherine Hoyle's perfect Christmas with her cousin from America was blighted when they went skating on thin ice and Rosalyn nearly died. Somehow, instead of being praised for raising the alarm, Catherine gets blamed. Sean Madigan grew up on a farm in Ireland. Learning to swim in the Shannon was his way of escaping the bitter poverty of his childhood, but it also incurred his father's wrath. He flees to England, but his heart belongs to the Shannon and her pulling power is ever near. Unlike the other three, Naomi Seddon didn't fear the sea. She'd been orphaned and placed in a children's home in Sheffield and cruelly abused. The sea offered her a way out and she revelled in its cruel power. The "water children" meet in London in the searing hot summer of 1976 and Naomi uses her siren's charm to lure Owen, Catherine and Sean into her tangled web of sexual charm and dangerous passion. A holiday in the Tuscan mountains with a flooded reservoir and its legend of the beautiful Teodora who drowned there brings this emotional drama to a powerful climax.

This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud (W. W. Norton): I still have Skibsrud's prize-winning novel The Sentimentalists sitting high in my To-Be-Read pile, but in the meantime I'm looking forward to dipping into this new collection of her short stories. Take a gander at the Jacket Copy:

In the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud’s new book, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life—these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (Amy Einhorn Books): I recently stumbled upon Lawson's popular blog, The Bloggess, and--as they say in Hollywood and Amway brochures--my life will never be the same again. Why was I wasting so much of my internet time dillying and dallying when I could have been coming straight to the Bloggess for the web equivalent of Our Daily Bread? One will never know. But here's one thing I do know: Lawson's grabbed me like a snoutful of cocaine right from the Opening Lines of the book's introduction:

This book is totally true, except for the parts that aren't. It's basically like Little House on the Prairie but with more cursing. And I know you're thinking, "But 'Little House on the Prairie' was totally true!" and no, I'm sorry, but it wasn't. Laura Ingalls was a compulsive liar with no fact-checker, and probably if she was still alive today her mom would be saying, "I don't know how Laura came up with this whole 'I'm-a-small-girl-on-the-prairie' story. We lived in New Jersey with her Aunt Frieda and our dog, Mary, who was blinded when Laura tried to bleach a lightning bolt on her forehead. I have no idea where she got the 'and we lived in a dug-out' thing, although we did take her to Carlsbad Caverns once."
And that's why I'm better than Laura Ingalls. Because my story is 90% accurate, and I really did live in a dugout. The reason why this memoir is only mostly true instead of totally true is because I relish not getting sued. Also, I want my family to be able to say, "Oh that never happened. Of course we never actually tossed her out of a moving car when she was eight. That's one of those crazy things that isn't quite the truth." And they're right, because the truth is that I was nine. I was sitting on my mom's lap when my dad made a hard left, the door popped open, and I was tossed out like a sack-full of kittens. My mom managed to grab my arm, which would have been helpful if my father had actually stopped the car, but apparently he didn't notice or possibly thought I'd just catch up, and so my legs were drug through a parking lot that I'm pretty sure was paved with broken glass and used syringes.

From looks of it, Lawson is like David Sedaris, but with hair-curlers. I'm prepping my throat for laughter even as we speak.

The Dark Side of Dickens

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:09:00 +0000

The Biography Project, Day 38

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Charles Dickens the Writer was a genius but Charles Dickens the Man was an asshole.

I've now reached the point in Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life where the nasty side of his nature can no longer be denied. In fact, at one point Tomalin warns the reader: "You'll want to avert your eyes from a good deal of what happened during the next year, 1858."

On this day, the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth, it may seem a little sacrilegious to pause in our adoration of the writer whose works, the Economist once pronounced in 1852, "are [as] sure to be sold and read as the bread which is baked is sure to be sold and eaten." It is, in fact, a little troubling to me that his bicentennial fete arrives just as I'm reading about Dickens the dick.

If you prefer the "happy hearth and home" version of the novelist, you might head over to Google where you'll find a cartoonish representation of scenes from the books as today's "Google Doodle" on the main search page:

While we may best remember Dickens for the caricature of Mr. Micawber or the tear-sopped sentiment of Little Nell, the truth of the Dickens household is much harder to swallow and taints the reputation of his literary works. So, if you want to honor the joyous spirit of Dickens in your hearts, like Scrooge does with Christmas, then I urge you to look away now, as Tomalin suggests.

Make no mistake, my love for Dickens' novels runs deep and unshakable, and so it pains me to re-type these passages from Tomalin's biography in which he demonstrates an unforgivable callousness toward his children and an even more egregious attitude toward his wife Catherine. I'm not out to be a pedestal-smasher, but I can't go through this year-long Biography Project wearing blinders. I know there are even harder, idol-crushing revelations in the other biographies I plan to read (see: Carver, Raymond), but the dark side of Dickens is especially distressing to me, the lifelong worshipper at his feet.

Even though Dickens became one of our best chroniclers of domestic life in 19th-century England, perhaps he was not best suited for family life himself. Some writers are better off without the distractions of family (certainly not me--I cherish my wife and three children--but there are other artists who are more cut out for the solitude of an ivory tower). Dickens was so dedicated to his art that eventually everything else of consequence (paternal duties, husbandly fondness) was shoved to the sidelines. His imagination was a dynamo at the hot, humming center of the engine that drove him to write at such a rapid pace. In one letter to his friend Miss Coutts, he writes, "I have been so busy, leading up to the great turning idea of the Bleak House story, that I have lived this last week or ten days in a perpetual scald and boil." To touch Dickens the man at work was to be burned by his focused fever.

He was, Tomalin tells us, a man who often overreached his physical limits: "Dickens kept going by taking on too much. He knew no other way to live, and no day went by in which he did not stretch himself, physically, socially and emotionally."

He was, as Tomalin tells us in detail at agonizing length, a pretty rotten father to his ten children.

There was...the feeling that he had too many sons needing to be educated and launched into the world, boys he found noisy and difficult to communicate with, boys who seemed to be inheriting the worst characteristics of both sides of the family--indolence, passivity and carelessness with money. He disciplined them hard at home, insisting on tidiness and punctuality, gave them tasks and inspected their clothes, which led to "mingled feelings of dislike and resentment" and whispers of "slavery" and "degradation."

And there is this comment in a letter on the occasion of the birth of his son Plorn (full name Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens): "on the whole I could have dispensed with him." It is jaw-droppingly awful in nature. I don't care how strictly-run Victorian households were at the time, there is little excuse for such a cold-hearted statement.

But Dickens' affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior, was the straw that would break his family's back. He first met Ellen, affectionately known as "Nelly," when she, her mother, and her sister helped him stage a production of The Frozen Deep, the melodrama he and Wilkie Collins wrote in 1857. The play is a fictionalized version of the doomed Franklin expedition to the arctic. On the stage, Dickens played the self-sacrificing explorer Wardour; Nelly was his lover waiting for him to return from the frigid north. When Nelly held Charles' head in her lap during the final overwrought scenes where his character is dying, it planted the seed for a love affair which would soon move off the stage into real life. As Tomalin writes: "It led to changes in every aspect of his life: the wing of a butterfly flapped, and a whole weather system was unsettled."

He separated from Catherine, treating her cruelly as he banished her from their home, and split their children's loyalty in the process. Until his death 12 years later he sent Catherine only three short letters, all in reply to inquiries from her, and did not even contact her when one of their sons died. It was an emotional earthquake that cracked the foundation of the home.

It also took a toll on Dickens physically, Tomalin notes:

He was always able to sparkle, charm and command admiration, but he aged in appearance now and began to look older than his years. The keen and lustrous eyes were sinking in their sockets and losing their brilliance, lines appeared across his brow and his cheeks were cut across by diagonal furrows. His hair thinned, his beard grizzled....And through these years bad health wore away Dickens' strength, neuralgia, rheumatic pains, unspecified but unpleasant and persistent symptoms he associated with bachelor life, trouble with his teeth and dental plates, piles. Then first his left foot, and then his right, took to swelling intermittently, becoming so painful that during each attack he became unable to take himself on the great walks that were an essential part and pleasure of his life. Presently his hand too was affected. The decline was resisted, denied, fought against, but not to be stayed.

Those "unspecified but unpleasant and persistent symptoms," by the way, were most likely gonorrhea, Tomalin speculates (with some compelling evidence). There was no hiding the physical and spiritual decline of Charles Dickens. As he neared the end of his life, his body was reaping what his spirt had sowed. A family friend who had known him since 1840 went to hear him read A Christmas Carol in November 1858 and found he had "withered and dwindled into a smaller man."

In that turbulent year when Tomalin urges us to look away, Dickens went half out of his mind:

His daughter Katey said, decades later, that there was misery at home and that he behaved like a madman, although at the time she found it impossible to protest. She saw her mother humiliated, ordered to call on the Ternan family at Park Cottage, and urged her to refuse, to no effect, and Catherine went. There is another story of an engraved bracelet Dickens had made for Nelly being wrongly delivered to Catherine.

Dickens' reputation was stained as his domestic troubles came to public notice (though the affair with Nelly would be a closely-guarded secret until well after his death). His shocked readers learned he was less Bob Cratchit and more Paul Dombey (the hard-hearted father of Dombey and Son). In a letter to a family friend, Dickens wrote, "Constituted to do the work that is in me, I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go, is often--at the best--wild enough." I have to agree with Tomalin when she writes: "You can feel sorry for him as he struggles, but it is impossible to like what he did."

As I mentioned, my heart has been heavy as I've read these pages of the biography. Today, I'll be celebrating the genius not the asshole, but if there is any cake to be had, it will be dark chocolate with bittersweet frosting.

My First Time: Andromeda Romano-Lax

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:55:00 +0000

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 Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of The Detour (out next week from Soho Press), a novel about art, adventure, and second chances, set in pre-World War II Italy. Romano-Lax is also the author of The Spanish Bow, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007. She lives with her husband and children in Anchorage, Alaska, where she co-founded and now teaches for a nonprofit organization, the 49 Alaska Writing Center. Visit her author website here.

My First Time Hearing Fiction's Call

I tried writing some fiction in my late teens and early twenties. But then my tastes veered sharply toward travel writing, features journalism, and literary essays. I was so passionate about creative nonfiction that by the time I graduated college, I read little else. I worked as a freelance journalist. I wrote one work of literary nonfiction and thought—until a day in early 2002—that I was on my way to writing a second.

Ten years ago this month, I traveled to Puerto Rico to visit the archives of a world-famous cellist, Pablo Casals, who had taken a public stance against fascism in his native country of Spain. In the months following 9/11, I was both fascinated by politics and in need of a heroic story, and Casals’s life fit the tale I was determined to tell.

But in Puerto Rico, my research took a surprising turn. I stumbled across a letter that questioned the stance Casals had taken, a stance that required him to sacrifice his own happiness for a cause. I also read more broadly about the time period and discovered that this particular artist’s dilemmas and experiences were not unique. I found myself with fewer answers and more questions than ever: troublesome for the kind of writer I was at the time, but exciting for the new kind of writer I’d soon become.

Nonfiction can be both flexible and complex, but I found myself—unexpectedly—wanting to tell this story an entirely different way. I wanted freedom: freedom to include other people and places, to mix the imagined with the historical, to include characters who wouldn’t necessarily have met in real life. Luckily, there was no James Frey impulse in me. I did not feel tempted to lie in my nonfiction. Instead, I felt a giddy impulse to jump the nonfiction ship altogether. The story itself seemed to be directing me away from my own preconceptions and toward its optimal, novelistic form.

That was exciting, but also intimidating. I hadn’t been reading much fiction for the last decade. I didn’t have a clue how to structure a novel. I didn’t even know where to begin. My husband, who had been supportive of the idea for the nonfiction book concept, threw up his hands and laughed. We were already living simply, and now I was turning my back on the one thing that I knew— sort of— how to do. If I planned to write fiction, a vow of poverty was in order. My husband and I officially declared ourselves “downwardly mobile.”

That spring, I learned what all apprentice novelists know: begin anywhere. As E.L. Doctorow has said, writing a novel is like driving a car at night: you only have to see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. The first few scenes I wrote didn’t end up in the book. A character who led me into the story later disappeared. It took me many pages to find the right approach, voice, and even setting—and another 18 months to do the research that was required, in Spain and France. But somehow, I never doubted it would come together.

Perhaps my lack of doubt was made possible by my exceedingly modest expectations. I couldn’t picture this first effort ever being published or read. Still, with the joyful determination of naïve youth—such happy days!-- I was ready to let the story lead the way. I also supplied myself with intense, remedial education, ashamed I had lived in the literary dark for so long. I kept a fiction log, in which I recorded every novel I read and what it had to teach me, what aspects of craft I admired and what I was still puzzling over or hoping to do differently in my own work. I attended conferences and workshops. I pitched the first fifteen pages, and later a hundred pages, to an agent, who would end up representing and selling the book. But most of all, I just kept listening: listening to the story itself, and how it needed to be told.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as good a listener since. Like any convert, I’ve become a zealous, wholehearted devotee to fiction. It’s what I most love to read, and what I most love to write.

But I do try to remind myself: that project worked because I was paying attention, and I was willing to jump out of my rut. Now, when I’m working on a new story idea, I at least try to consider: would this be better in a different form, does it need to be long or short, would it work better as a screenplay? Am I telling it from the right point of view; have I chosen an effective narrator? And, as far as my continuing education: am I doing everything I can to improve my own writing and reading skills? The impulse does not come from wanting a book in a bookstore (and good thing, since there are fewer bookstores every day). The impulse comes from the story itself and from the desire to discover the story’s best form, as well as the impulse to better understand, through fiction’s empathic lens, our place in the real world

To my utter astonishment, my first novel, The Spanish Bow, was published in 2007. It’s been translated into eleven languages.

My second novel is about to be published. It tells the story of a five-day Italian road trip that changes the life of young German art lover in 1938.

But the title of that second novel—“The Detour”—tells my own writer’s story as well. Ten years ago, I took an entirely unexpected detour from nonfiction into fiction. I haven’t looked back.

Soup and Salad: Super Bowl Books, "The greatest blog post about blurbs in the history of publishing," Dani Shapiro: Get Out of the Way, Stay the F*ck Awake, Sundays With Nathan Englander, The Greatest Books of All Time, Hierarchy of Book Publishing, Why You'll Never Find a Title like "Sucky Book," When Mommy and Daddy are Writers

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:57:00 +0000

On today's menu:

She should be holding a book in her other hand

1. Are you ready for some football...novels?! You’ve got your chips and Ro-Tel-and-Velveeta dip prepped. You’ve painted your face blue and red. You’re wearing your best pizza-stained jersey and you and your best buds are already clinking beer bottles in a pre-coin-toss toast to victory. You are ready for the Big Game. But have you done your literary football homework? Today at Book Riot, I go into a huddle about the quintessential Super Bowl XXLVI novel: Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes. (Last year, I kicked off Super Bowl Sunday with a look at the classic Chip Hilton books.) And while you're at Book Riot, check out Victor Wishna's list of The Best Football Books That Aren't Really About Football.

2. Galleys of my novel Fobbit went out to about a dozen authors this past week in hopes they'd say nice things about the book which Grove/Atlantic could then use in its publicity campaign. I'd already gotten one nice blurb from Aaron Gwyn (author of The World Beneath) who called Fobbit "the first major work of fiction about America's war for Iraq." But....does anybody care about blurbs, those endorsements which sometimes border on over-the-top enthusiasm? Nicole Krauss took a good deal of ribbing for her operatic praise of a novel by David Grossman: "Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude." At The Millions, Alan Levinovitz delivers a robust history of blurbs (stretching back to ancient Rome and moving forward to Rebecca Skloot with a stop along the way to visit Ralph Waldo Emerson's blurb for Walt Whitman: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career"). It is, bar none, the best review of blurbs you'll read all year. And you can quote me on that.

3. At her blog, Dani Shapiro has some very inspiring words about "getting out of our own way," which apply not just to writers but anyone who goes around practicing self-sabotage. Here's how it begins:

Here's the way an ideal writing day goes: I wake up early and do the knapsack/lunchbox/breakfast/off-to-school thing and my family toodles down the driveway while I still have a clear, unperturbed mind. I make my second cappuccino of the morning and climb the stairs to my office where I do a quick email check, find nothing aggravating, then a scan of the news, and by eight a.m. I have settled in to work. I turn the software program "Freedom" on, disabling the Internet on my computer, in the event that the lure of checking Facebook or Twitter proves too much for me. I work, uninterrupted, for a couple of hours. I head back downstairs, take the dogs out for some air, then throw ingredients for a stew into the slow cooker. Back upstairs I go. Another hour or two of work on my book. A one-hour yoga break at lunchtime. Revision, and the business of writing in the afternoon. By the time four o'clock rolls around, I'm spent, feel good about the work I've done that day (not to mention the dinner in the slow cooker, the yoga) and I drive to my son's school to pick him up, cheerful and available for quality family time.
How often does a day like this happen? Well, I had one yesterday, which is why this description is so fresh in my mind. But really--how often? Probably about once every two weeks, if I'm completely honest. Something usually gives. I struggle with getting to the page in the morning, and it's noon before I begin to accomplish anything. I get sidetracked by a disappointing email, or an exciting email. It almost doesn't matter what the content, a full in-box is always over-stimulating. I don't get to the yoga mat. I don't make dinner. My work suffers. Four o'clock rolls around and my head feels like it's about to pop off my shoulders, and when I pick my son up at school, I am in a fog, emotionally unavailable and hating myself for it.

4. It was only a matter of time before Mad Magazine got around to parodying bestselling children's literature: Stay the F*ck Awake.

5. The New York Times gives us Nathan Englander's Sunday Routine (Note: puppy-dog alert!):

I’m a workaholic. So I really tried this year to take off that week between Christmas and New Year’s. I enjoy working. I like to write; that’s what I do. So inevitably I want to work some in the afternoon....Not that many writers really have a good grasp on sanity, but the only way to aspire toward sanity is to build a routine.

6. The Atlantic tabulates The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors based on responses found in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. The usual suspects show up--no huge surprises--but it's still fun to take a look at rankings like these if you are list-obsessed (which I am).

7. Speaking of lists, Paul Bogaards' "Hierarchy of Book Publishing" had me laughing and nodding in agreement. Brand-name authors like Stephen King and Jodi Picoult are on the top rung. Others farther down the chain include George R. R. Martin (#5), Literary Agents (#11), Laura Miller when she is cranky (#46), Laura Miller when she is not cranky (#47), the Steig Larsson estate (#75), 12-year-old in Iceland operating BitTorrent site and netting 50 grand a day selling pirated editions of Stieg Larsson (#87), book publicists (#98) and You (#100).

8. My agent was allergic to the title of my novel. This threw me into a tailspin and I spent several days fretting about "Fobbit"and wondering if I was too close to it after a six-year relationship to ever give it up. I even went so far as to put it out to Quivering Pen readers for alternate title suggestions. Thankfully, Grove/Atlantic seems to like "Fobbit" and it's stuck to the cover as we go to press. Other authors, however, haven't had as much luck with their titles. At Beyond the Margins, Randy Susan Meyers tells us that in her "unscientific study," only 17 percent of authors got to keep their original title:

Robin Black wrote, “My original title was YESTERDAY’S NEWS. Random House rejected it on the theory that you never give reviewers a title they could, if so disposed, use against you. (Which is why you don’t see more books out there called things like, “SUCKY BOOK.”) And then there are the titles you didn’t know were taken: Cathy Marie Buchanan: “The original title for THE DAY THE FALLS STOOD STILL was THE RIVER WIFE. Sadly, my agent let me know Jonis Agree had just published using the title. Broke my heart for a hundred years.”

9. At his blog Many Thrones, One Pretender, Michael Magras has this nice reflection on what it's like for a child to grow up with parents who are both writers (Magras' wife also writes fiction):

Our son is one of a handful of five-year-olds in Maine with writers for parents. He has spent much of his childhood listening to Mommy and Daddy discuss their respective manuscripts, offer suggestions for improvements to each other’s work, and wonder aloud whether anyone other than two or three trusted readers will ever see the novels we spend months and even years crafting. More than most children, he is aware of the joys and frustrations that are a part of creating fiction—the thrill one feels when moribund passages come to life, and the hours of sleep lost when one, two, three months’s writing and rewriting has to be discarded, and self-doubt is all that’s left.
Actually, he doesn’t see the insomnia. But he does see the stacks of printouts and the backed-up files and the ideas for future stories scribbled on legal pads. We write when he’s at school or asleep, but occasionally we need to edit when he’s around. That means he’s been a witness to Daddy’s mad dashes toward his laptop to type up a good idea before the idea disappears forever, and Mommy revising her ninth draft during his bath time.

Sometimes They Come Back: Stewart O'Nan's The Night Country

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:38:00 +0000

Happy Birthday to Stewart O'Nan, who--if he doesn't mind my saying so--just keeps getting better with age. As O'Nan blows out the candles on his cake today, he'll have good reason to celebrate. His newest novel, The Odds: A Love Story, has just hit bookstores, libraries and Kindles and it's as good as anything he's already given us. I'll have a full review posted here to the blog sometime in the coming week or two, but for now I give you my highest endorsement.

I also give you this review of O'Nan's haunting novel, The Night Country, I wrote more than eight years ago for January Magazine. If you aren't already reading O'Nan's books, then you are, sadly, in the majority. O'Nan is this nation's greatest under-appreciated living novelist. He's criminally under-read and deserves a much wider audience than he usually gets (though his previous novel Emily, Alone earned some good critical attention). Start with The Odds (it's very short), then move on to Songs for the Missing, The Names of the Dead, Last Night at the Lobster (another quick read), Snow Angels and The Circus Fire (a non-fiction account of the Hartford, Connecticut tragedy). Or, after reading this review, maybe you'll want to pay an immediate visit to The Night Country....

* * *

Every small town in America has a tragedy that goes something like this: a car full of teenagers crashes on a dark road and young lives turn to legend. Maybe some live while others die horribly, maybe they're on their way home from the prom, maybe they've been drinking, maybe they're stone sober and an evil patch of black ice is the culprit. Whatever the circumstance, the teen car crash is a sad part of our nostalgic culture. In death, the teens take on a grandeur and status they probably never enjoyed in life, their legacy a smiling yearbook photo and a small white cross erected by the side of the road. In the Wyoming town where I grew up, a sweet-faced girl, one year younger than me, died when her brakes failed on an icy turn less than two miles from her home. Even today, I can't picture that stretch of road without the words "snuffed out" coming to mind.

Avon, Connecticut knows all about candles prematurely snuffed. The town's latest tragedy took place on Halloween night when a Camry loaded with five teens wrapped itself around a tree on a country road, instantly killing three, leaving another severely brain damaged and the fifth miraculously unhurt. Now, exactly one year later, the town is painfully reliving the memory of that October night.

That's the premise for Stewart O'Nan's novel The Night Country, a tale that literally haunts the reader from page one. The story is narrated by the ghost of Marco, who died in the crash along with Toe and Danielle. The trio of restless spirits roams the town, watching over their parents, their friends, the police officer who responded to the crash and especially the survivors, brain-damaged Kyle and unscratched Tim. In the course of the 24 hours covered by the novel, Brooks the cop will try to come to grips with decisions he made a year ago, while Tim will put into motion a plan he's been plotting for the past five months, an act he thinks will bring him peace and redemption. The ghosts serve as our guides and Greek chorus as we watch the day's events unfold. In O'Nan's hands, the sentences pop and crackle and are never less than enthralling:

Brooks remembers jumping out of the Vic and running for the tree and the Camry -- unbelieving--and then stopping once he'd gotten there, his training evaporating at the sight of us. (Because the car was small and we weren't pretty.) His first instinct was to look around for someone else who could help. In the backseat a boy's voice was trying the same hurt vowel sound over and over, a cat meowing.

As in his masterful The Circus Fire, O'Nan displays an uncanny knack for describing common tragedy--there, the 1944 Hartford fire; here, the Halloween car crash which killed three teens nobody cared about while they were still alive (now "we're the kids in that car wreck"). Like Ray Bradbury (to whom the book is dedicated and whose influence whispers across each page), O'Nan uses the horrible, chilling events of our lives to show how we humans continue to press on undaunted through this mortal coil.

O'Nan's imaginative vision is intriguing, convincing us we're overwatched by ghosts--the just-killed and the long-dead, who haunt our steps, trail their foggy fingers through our heads. Parenthetically interrupting their narration, O'Nan's teenage ghosts are sardonic and wise ("One week we're history, martyred gods, then forgotten"), as if the afterlife has given them X-ray vision into the hearts of the living. Witness the book's hypnotic opening words:

Come, do you hear it? The wind--murmuring in the eaves, scouring the bare trees. How it howls, almost musical, a harmony of old moans….Come with us, out into the night. Come now, America the lovesick, America the timid, the blessed, the educated, come stalk the dark backroads and stand outside the bright houses, calm as murderers in the yard, quiet as deer. Come, you slumberers, you lumps, arise from your legion of sleep and fly over the wild woods. Come, all you dreamers, all you zombies, all you monsters. What are you doing anyway, paying the bills, washing the dishes, waiting for the doorbell? Come on, take your keys, leave the bowl of candy on the porch, put on the suffocating mask of someone else and breathe.

The Night Country drives relentlessly forward to a conclusion that seems inevitable, though we wish it weren't. As Tim and Brooks hurtle toward one final intersection, we secretly hope their paths will split and that everyone can go home--unredeemed, yes, but also still alive.

O'Nan knows that very few things in life turn out the way we'd hoped, so why should fiction be any different? In The Night Country, just as in the world beyond books, there are impulsive, regrettable last-minute decisions. There is the slippery road, the short yelp of brakes, the acrid stench of burnt rubber and the sudden sad silence that continues to haunt long after the last chapter is written.

Friday Freebie: The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:58:00 +0000

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau.

This week's book giveaway is The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels, just released by Bloomsbury. I've already expressed my enthusiastic anticipation of Sickels' debut novel, so your appetite should already be fully whetted (if, in fact, you haven't already gone ahead and clicked through to order the book). But for those out there who still need a little more convincing, here's Aryn Kyle (author of The God of Animals) to tell you why The Evening Hour may be one of the first great must-reads of 2012: "In this stark, beautiful debut, Sickels writes with gentle grace and cutting honesty about characters as wounded as the condemned land on which they live. The Evening Hour is a raw, aching book that gleams with moments of unflinching truth and unexpected tenderness, casting light into dark corners, revealing both damage and dignity. It's a stunning novel." Need more convincing? Try this: "A refreshing cry from the populace, Carter Sickels' The Evening Hour captures the spirit of America's New Feudalism. The setting is West Virginia and Heritage Coal has a monopoly: on the land, on the lives of the people who work for them, and on the families who live downhill from the toxic sludge pond. Life is hell and survival is all there is. Some have the Bible, some have booze and pills and sex, and some still dare to have a dream." (Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon)

What's that you say? Your arm still isn't twisted? Okay, Mr. Dubious-pants, here's the plot summary:

Most of the wealth in Dove Creek is in the earth--in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become an aide in a nursing home. He's also a drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him to a younger crowd looking for different kinds of escape. In this economically depressed, shifting landscape, Cole is floundering. The mining corporation is angling to buy the Freeman family's property, and Cole's protests only feel like stalling. Although he has often dreamed of leaving, he has a sense of duty to this land, especially after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather is not the only loss: Cole's one close friend, Terry Rose, has also slipped away from him, first to marriage, then to drugs. While Cole alternately attempts romance with two troubled women, he spends most of his time with the elderly patients at the home, desperately trying to ignore the decay of everything and everyone around him. When a disaster befalls these mountains, Cole is forced to confront his fears and, finally, take decisive action--if not to save his world, to at least save himself.

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

In what subject did Sickels earn his master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? (Visit the author's website to find the answer.)

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 Feb. 9--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll announce the lucky reader on Feb. 10. 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 Death-Virgin Meets the Grim Reaper

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:40:00 +0000

In February 2005, I was a death-virgin. I'd deployed to the Middle East with the 3rd Infantry Division as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As a nation, we were young in the war. Within the unit, some of us were also infants when it came to the business of bullets and bloodshed. A minority population of the division was untested in combat while the rest of the nearly 3,000 soldiers were on their second tour of duty to Iraq. They'd been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

By this point, I'd served in the active-duty Army for seventeen years, but I'd never "gone to war." Panama, Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Afghanistan had all carried on without me (though I did come close to deploying in 2003--even received orders to report to Fort Benning, Georgia for overseas processing, but a previously-undiagnosed hernia kept me stateside). Now, however, the time had come and I had to go.

In January, I flew to Kuwait with a duffel bag stuffed with three sets of uniforms, a bag of toiletries, my memory-foam contour pillow, a framed photo of my wife and I on our wedding day, and The Complete Works of Charles Dickens. I thought I was ready to for a year-long camping trip to the desert but, as it turns out, I wasn't prepared for the daily barrage of death. I was unwise to the ways of the Grim Reaper who, I was soon to learn, tirelessly walked the streets of Baghdad, his awful face hidden in shadows beneath the black hood, his blood-specked scythe swinging through the air non-stop. I didn't know he'd soon be following me everywhere, sitting with me in my office cubicle as I typed press releases, walking beside me as I returned to my hooch, eating with me, showering with me. He was my uncomfortable companion and I resented him for even being there in the first place. And yet, I had no say-so in the matter. Death will go where he wants to, and to hell with anyone who tries to stop him.

IED in Baghdad, 2005

Since I was part of the division's "advance party," I remained in Kuwait as the staggered waves of incoming soldiers, who arrived in flights known as "chalks," spent a couple of weeks training and getting acclimated to the sand and heat before heading north to the urban battle of Baghdad. I worked out of a large tent whose canvas walls were buffeted by desert winds. The two dozen of us who sat at the folding metal desks in the room found our sanity eaten away every day by the non-stop soundtrack of hiss, moan, whistle, hiss, boom, pop. It's as if we sat inside the billowing sails of a clipper ship rocked by trade winds. There was no relief.

As the 3rd Infantry Division soldiers flowed north into Iraq, I soon found there was little relief from the death reports sent back to us by those who were setting up the division's headquarters at Camp Liberty. It started as a trickle, then became a stream, and turned into a river long before summer arrived. Eventually, the terms KIA (Killed in Action) and WIA (Wounded in Action) would become part of my lexicon, the three callous letters slipping too easily from my tongue in conversation, stripped of all meaning and certainly bearing no connection to soldiers whose bodies had been shredded by bombs.

Several times a day, I pulled out a little green book in which I made notes for the daily journal I was keeping--scribbled diary entries which would later be transmogrified into the fiction of Fobbit. I watched, I listened, I absorbed. As the canvas walls of my temporary office in Kuwait moaned and popped, I--the death-virgin--was keenly open to all these new, raw experiences.

Years later, when it came time to write it all down, I chose fiction as my avenue of approach. It allowed me to stuff the truth into a sack which flexed and grew, even as it condensed and thickened. I could use my imagination to make my point sharper and clearer. The result--the 350-page book now known as Fobbit--is a satire, a wild exaggeration of events, a dark cartoon that, I hope, is somehow more truthful than any memoir I could ever write.

And yet, many of the notes I took down in 2005 remain in Fobbit, some transcribed almost verbatim. Here, for instance, is a scene from early in the novel where Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. is working out of the Division Tactical Operations tent in Kuwait and gets some bad news. Gooding is a public affairs soldier (PAO) and, like me, he is a death-virgin, a late-career non-commissioned officer on his first combat tour of duty. These are words which started out as journal notes, but were later pumped full of fiction steroids....

from Fobbit

Once, when Gooding was still down in Kuwait, waiting to deploy north to Iraq and join the rest of the division which had already been in-country for three weeks, a captain from the G-2 Intelligence section walked up to him in the makeshift Tactical Operations Center and said, “You PAO?”

Gooding had looked up from the Dickens novel he was reading, then quickly got to his feet, heart pounding. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Thought you should know we just got word from up north. Division took some fatalities earlier this afternoon. A vehicle out on patrol rolled over into a canal in south Baghdad. Two dead on impact. Another one trapped in the wreckage. Two other soldiers jumped in to rescue the vehicle crew, but they got swept away. Monsoon season up there is a bitch, apparently. Anyway, last I heard, we’ve got three dead and two missing.”

Gooding dog-eared a page in A Tale of Two Cities with trembling fingers and said in a hoarse voice, “Thanks, ma’am. I appreciate you letting me know.”

Back then, he’d slumped against the wall, reeling from his first deaths as a public affairs soldier serving in his first war. He pictured the humvee tipping, tumbling into the water, the two soldiers on the bank, shouting, acting on instinct, jumping into the water, misjudging the current and getting sucked down into the muddy swirl of the Euphrates (in his mind, the canal had become the mighty Euphrates), their mouths trying to snatch air, but filling instead with dirty water. He pictured those two soldiers flailing against the pull of the water, soon losing all strength as their lungs filled with the Euphrates, and their limp bodies floated downstream, their personnel files quickly pulled from the division’s records and labeled “Killed In Action,” their ghosts quietly falling out of company formations, their names laser-etched on a memorial plaque back in Georgia.

Not many days and three U.S. KIAs later, Gooding had written in his diary:

February 13: This is how a death is announced. In the midst of the hum and buzz of idle boredom in the Division Tactical Operations Center, you hear one officer, bent over the back pages of The Stars and Stripes, ask another, “What did you get for 17 Across?” Two people are arguing about which Matrix movie was the best. Another soldier in his early 20s is surfing the Internet looking at engagement rings and wondering aloud what difference a half carat made in the quality and price and—most importantly—a chick’s response to the bling. Then, like a blade swishing through the air comes a sudden sharp voice from the other side of the room, cutting through the growl-buzz of the generator and the fist-thump of wind against the tent walls. You look over and an NCO is pressing a telephone receiver tighter against his ear and saying, “Repeat that last transmission. What did you say?” He waves his hand at another NCO to get him a pen, whereupon he scribbles on an index card. Two or three others cluster near him, heads are pressed in a tight circle, one head pops up and catches the eye of the battle captain sitting in his leather office chair at the front of the room. He rises from the chair—he’d been watching a NASCAR race on the TV—and walks over to the growing knot of huddled heads. At this point, something like cold fear creeps around your heart like icy vines. The information on the index card is read back into the phone for confirmation, then the battle captain grabs the card and strides to the front of the room, yelling, “ATTENTION IN THE DTOC! ATTENTION IN THE DTOC!” All sound and motion in the tent stops. Someone mutes the NASCAR race. The battle captain reads from the index card: “We have reports of one IED in the vicinity of Scania along the convoy route. One KIA. Battle-damage assessment still being made. That is all.” He reads it as carefully and dispassionately as someone quoting stock market prices, then he turns and writes the information on a large sheet of paper taped to the wall at the front of the room where all significant activities—the loss of an M-16, the arrival/departure of a convoy, the publication of an operations order—are recorded. As you watch him write with the magic marker, the conversation-buzz of the room gradually returns to its former volume. Some drop their heads in sorrow, shaking them back and forth as if that will counteract the loss and bring the KIA back to life, or at least change his status to WIA. But the magic marker ink is permanent, seared there by the heat of an IED blast. No wounds can be reversed. The battle captain returns to his leather chair. A couple of officers return to their crossword puzzle. Someone turns up the volume on the TV and the NASCAR race resumes.

Finding a Home in Richard Ford's Rock Springs

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:13:00 +0000

Outside the public library, the wind was scouring the streets of Livingston. Again. It was nearly 8 p.m. and God’s furious wind machine had been at it since 6 a.m. that day.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. In Livingston, Montana, the wind never stops; it only pauses to take another deep breath before it blows metal trash cans a-clattering down the alley and snatches the toupee clean off the Rotary president’s head as he stands on the street corner talking to the PTA treasurer whose dress flies up and everyone learns the rumors about her thong underwear are, disappointingly, untrue. On really bad days, featherweight toddlers who haven’t been tied down by precautionary mothers are sucked skyward, never to be seen again.

So yes, Livingston really blows.

On this particular night in 1987, I was temporarily safe from the wind, but my hair was still bedraggled from the long walk between my house on D Street and the public library nine blocks away. I sought shelter in the middle of the adult fiction section. It was warm and breezeless in the library; but inside my head, a wind still howled.

I was 24, just out of college, married, the father of two children with a third on the way, and about $200 this side of being broke. Our budget was so lean, Jack Sprat looked like a glutton. To conserve gas, I walked to work, head down and collar up as the hard winds of south-central Montana scraped the streets. I was distracted, disconcerted and on my way to a depression that would grey my life for a number of years.

The ink was still fresh on my English degree from the University of Oregon and I was constantly going around fanning the flames of my ambition to be a Great Writer—a fantasy which, even at that time, I knew was hollow. Despite my higher education and la-ti-dah literary airs, I’d ended up at a minimum-wage job: the copy editor at the town’s newspaper. I worked 10-hour days five days a week, which left almost no time to write the Great American Novel. I thought about my novel a lot, but I had yet to write a single sentence.

On the night the wind blew me into the library, I was looking for consolation and inspiration. I came there not knowing what I’d walk out with, but I knew I wanted to read a great piece of literature--one that would make my heart pound, my palms sweat and the little hairs on the backs of my hands stand up. I wanted fiction that would take me away from my life.

Little did I know I was a character straight out of Richard Ford’s stories.

I roused myself from my gloom and looked at the shelf just above my head. Rock Springs. The title on the spine glowed in the fluorescent light and I thought of burning bushes, parting clouds, choirs of trumpets. I reached up, took the book in my hands, and opened it to a random page.

I swear to all that is holy, these are the words my eyes fell on: "This is not a happy story. I warn you." That’s how "Great Falls" opens.

The words were like an opera aria and this is what the diva was singing in my ear: "This writer knows you." I had never heard of Richard Ford before that night, but somehow he had wormed his way into my life. The hairs on the backs of my hands stirred, the dusty ten-foot stacks leaned overhead like trees, and the front door of the library banged open as another person stumbled inside. I kept turning pages, skimming the opening paragraphs to the other stories in Rock Springs.

      I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying good-bye to her ex-husband, Bobby. I had already been out to the stores for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.
     This was not going to be a good day in Bobby's life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail.
          --"Sweethearts"

Narratively-speaking, these openings are rather flat, loaded with exposition, and documentary in nature. It's as if each narrator was sitting across from you in a diner, elbows resting on the Formica-topped table, and unspooling the story of his life--stark, naked facts at first, but then gradually turning more complex and colorful as the teller becomes engaged in the telling. These were lives as grim and bleak as mine and it made me happier than you can imagine to find them here on the page. They were me, I was them.

Later, this would become one of my favorite opening paragraphs in Rock Springs:

All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever--ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life.
--"Optimists"

These first lines in the stories of Rock Springs give just enough intriguing detail and turns of phrase that you read the second paragraph, and the third, the fourth, until you finally reach the end and then circle back around to that first paragraph to take a second look at how confidently Ford sets up an entire story's worth of character and conflict in a remarkable economy of space. There are entire worlds in these few words.

They are enough to keep you standing deep in the stacks of a library for nearly an hour--until the muscles in your lower back start to throb, until the librarian announces the building will be closing in fifteen minutes and patrons should bring all materials to the check-out desk at once, until the winter night wind rises in pitch and intensity, warning you of the threadbare walk home. I knew there were bills waiting for me on the kitchen counter, diapers needing to be changed, and a wife wondering where I’d been all evening. But, for the moment, all those cares burned away like sun-warmed fog. I was in Rock Springs and I never wanted to leave.

This article originally appeared at Book Riot.

My First Time: Myfanwy Collins

noreply@blogger.com (David Abrams) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:29:00 +0000

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 Myfanwy Collins, author of the novel Echolocation (forthcoming from Engine Books). Collins lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with her husband and son. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, Potomac Review and other venues. Ron Currie Jr. (author of Everything Matters!) had this to say about her debut novel: "Myfanwy Collins has the goods. It's that simple. Echolocation is about love in all its magnificent slipperiness; it's about how secrets bind us rather than rend us; it's about the endless series of personal reinventions we call a lifetime. And these are things we had all better be thinking--and reading--about, if we plan to try and get out of this alive." A collection of Collins' short fiction, I Am Holding Your Hand, is also forthcoming from PANK Little Books in August. Please visit her website for more information.

My First Acknowledgments

In my mind, I had written acknowledgements dozens of times, always hoping that someday I would write them for real. I imagined how satisfying it would feel to finally be able to publicly thank all of those people who had helped me and believed in me along my path to publication. I couldn’t wait to let my husband know how much I appreciated all of his years of sacrifice and to let my family and friends know how much I appreciated their dogged support.

I firmly believed that if I were ever so lucky as to have a book published, that writing the acknowledgements would be the easiest, most natural part of the whole process.

I was wrong.

When it came time to write the acknowledgements for my forthcoming debut novel, Echolocation, I found myself flustered, baffled, and afraid. These words were no longer fantasy. They were real and everyone who read the book would potentially read them as well.

Once I started writing, some of the fear fell away. I remembered that I was writing these words to express my thanks to people and organizations who had helped and/or inspired me. I was thanking people for their belief in me. I was thanking people for lending me their strength. That part was easy enough.

I felt satisfied with the first draft and walked away from it for a couple of weeks. When I opened the file again, I knew it would be the last time I worked on it before I sent it to my publisher. I was either on the verge of tears or actually crying as I worked. The emotions I was expressing on the page were real. I reached a hand out and touched each of these people and thanked them as best as I could. I hoped that they would feel that.

It was not until I sent the file to my publisher that the panic resurfaced. What if I forgot someone important? After I sent it to her, I read it again and asked her if she would let me know before she sent the book off, just in case I needed to make changes to the acknowledgements. She kindly agreed. As I write this, the acknowledgements are still with her. I’m not sure I’ll be able to take a deep breath until the book is gone and I can make no more changes.

Like all first times, this one has been a mix of joy and fear. When I am ever so lucky to write acknowledgements again, I will look back on how I feel now and, I hope, be able to use what I’ve learned in shaping my new experience. And what I have learned is this: what your family and friends give you as you work is a gift. Like all givers of gifts they have likely given what they have given you expecting nothing in return other than you are enriched by their generosity. Your gratitude is shown through your perseverance in putting the words on the page and never giving up on yourself. Your acknowledgements are merely the sweet icing on the hard-earned cake.