It usually goes like this:

1. Rockstar is born not a rockstar, but to a dismal family of chicken farmers or garbage pickers or libertarians.
2. Rockstar buys guitar and struggles. Suspiciously, Rockstar is surrounded by naysayers recommending more lucrative careers in livestock breeding or politics.
3. Rockstar gets really freakin’ good in a suspiciously short amount of time. Rockstar wins lots of fans. Naysayers turn to yaysayers.
4. Rockstar meets drugs. Drugs meet rockstar. It’s a match made in heaven until it’s not anymore. Suddenly, the simple life of trash picking seems like a step up from this gutter.
5. Suspiciously, Rockstar finds redemption in the form of a woman, an estranged child, or Ron Paul.

This story arc is so easy. That ease is why there are a million rock ‘n’ roll novels. It’s also why there are tons of forgettable rock novels.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of bands and once, even, toured with a group. I sold their t-shirts up and down the West Coast. In that time I learned touring rock bands are mostly boring. I also learned the above story arc is never the case. Thirdly, I learned rock bands love cigarettes. Who knew?

My point is, most interesting music stories are never tied up with a neat, redemptive bow on the final page. If this were true, Keith Richards would be passing out Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets a dozen times over. Good rock ‘n’ roll fiction avoids said arc like the rest of us avoid cutting in front of Axl Rose at the buffet.

When I began writing my novel, Broken Piano for President, six years ago, I managed to avoid the above cliché. Looking back, it’s all thanks to noise bands.

I was, at the time, a rock critic with Willamette Week in Portland, OR. I mostly covered weird, avant-garde, noisy music. After getting the scoop from outsider musicians and artists, I knew the standard rock book arc was about as realistic as a chicken farmer still owning enough fingers to even play a guitar.

Broken Piano for President is a comedy about the world’s worst rock band, productive alcoholism, hamburgers more addictive than crystal meth and conspiracy theories involving cosmonauts. What those countless interviews taught me was that the element making a noise band so exciting is the same thing that makes a rock book exciting: the element of surprise. Both take known formulas and torque them until something memorable and wonderful comes out.

Here’s a list of rock novels that got it right and avoided chicken farmerdom:

Great Jones Street by Don Delillo.
This is my favorite rock book. Supposedly based on Dylan’s frequent slips from the spotlight, Delillo’s Bucky Wunderlick is a mega-star-cum-NYC-Squatter just looking for some peace and quiet. However, it’s not going to happen as hangers-on, managers, and a commune selling a super drug all tug at Bucky’s jacket fringes. Like most of Delillo’s work, it nails America’s invasive culture perfectly without soaking the specifics in highlighter pen.

In addition, this is Delillo’s most solid pre-White Noise book.

I am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo by Nick Cohn.

I’m always surprised so few people know about I Am Still The Greatest… One of the earliest entries in the rock novel canon, Cohn’s Johnny Angelo rises from the muck to ridiculous, cult-like heights. This 1968 book finds little to no redemption in seeking out one’s artistic vision. It only offers trouble and pain and wonderfully black humor.

Even more incredible is the fact that Cohn, who’s gone on to a stellar career as a rock critic, was 19 when he wrote it. Supposedly, Angelo was based on the destructive Texan/Brit pop star, PJ Proby. Though, the darkness of the novel seems like it’s what could’ve happened if Scott Walker set his sights on conquering the teen pop market instead of singing tunes so dark they make Ingmar Bergman films feel like Kindergarten Cop.

Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison.

After an exhausting couple seconds on Google, I’ve determined this is the original rock novel. Written in 1961, Ellison’s (best known for his sci-fi work and general assholery) story follows the typical phoenix flight of Stag Preston to roots rock stardom. Based heavily on Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, the book eclipses those troubled singers’ tar blackest moments and rapidly unravels into a horrific mess.

It’s tough to tell if Ellison loved or hated rock music at the time of this book. It somersaults our innocent vision of the bobby socks era into its own special circle of Hell. While you know it’ll end badly, it’s impossible to stop reading Spider Kiss.

The Anomolies by Joey Goebel.

Picture it: a Wes Anderson movie about rock bands set in rural Kentucky. Goebel’s debut contains a wild cast of characters comprising the band, The Anomalies, including wheelchaired Satanists, geriatrics, little girls and Iraqi soldiers. What makes this book work is the heart with which Goebel draws them.

While it follows the above rock arc pretty close, you get the sense that Goebel owns that map and simply splices it to his liking.

Artificial Light by James Greer.

Easily one of the weirdest and most challenging rock books ever written. Greer, who was also the bassist for lo-fi rock gods Guided by Voices, crafts a dense story around mid-90s Dayton, OH. Indie rock geeks will rejoice in spotting the references to Guided by Voices’ inebriated singer Bob Pollard, alt-rock goddesses the Breeders, Brainiac and Swearing at Motorists—all bands that helped Dayton look like the new Seattle for a flicker of time. (I went to college in Dayton then, so I am one of those geeks.)

The story is told through the eyes of a librarian wading through the diaries of a Kurt Cobain-esque recluse who returned to his hometown, Dayton. Within, is the story of the singer, the strange lives of the Wright Brothers, and, maybe, the meaning of life.

Haunted Hillbilly by Derek McCormack.

Okay, wait, Artificial Light isn’t the weirdest rock novel. Well, maybe, considering Haunted Hillbilly is a country music novel. But you can’t have rock without Hank Williams, who is the surreal protagonist of McCormack’s wild ride. Here, we get a traditional up from nothing biopic arc, but retold with Seuss-like lyricism meeting brutal minimalism, all set in a 1950s Nashville plagued by a homoerotic vampire.

Nothing else reads like a Derek McCormack book. They rarely stack above 150 pages, but always manage to push boundaries thought impossible by raw words, queerness and even vampiric good taste. See his cartoonish old-timey music/funhouse novel The Show That Smells for further proof.

Never Mind the Pollacks by Neal Pollack

Probably the funniest rock novel ever written. Pollack lampoons pop music history and rock criticism by placing a character named “Neal Pollack” at the forefront of every major music movement known to man. Never Mind is a Zelig for record collectors and McSweeney’s subscribers.

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Come for the promise of Robert Pollard-like reclusive genius, stay for the soberingly articulate mediation on middle age and death. Stone Arabia centers around The Chronicles—a 30-year project by the main character’s brother to record albums, make fake band histories and even white his own record reviews. Arabia proves light on The Chronicles’ compelling potential rabbit hole of musical fun, and gets heavy with thoughts on mortality. Somehow, it all works. Thanks, likely, in part to Spiotta’s sharp prose.

The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews.

Again, not, technically, a rock novel. But, it’s about gospel. And you can’t get R&B without gospel. And rock would need Viagra without R&B.

So there.

Crews’ brutally weird South is at its finest in his debut. While everyone in the book is beyond emotional or societal repair, The Gospel Singer says a lot about the nature of celebrity. The musicians we worship aren’t the people we think they are. But we feed off their magic all the same.

It’s like saying you only think Bono spends his free time driving solar-powered cars and rescuing African villagers. If you don’t assume he also manages to snooze in Tahitian hammocks and pilot diesel-guzzling yachts, I have a Rolex to sell you.

But still, we need a Bono. And the folks of Crews’ Enigma, GA need The Gospel Singer. No matter what depths he sinks to.

Life by Keith Richards.

If this book is 100% nonfiction I will shave my eyebrows and smoke them. (I’m pretty sure Keith did the same on page 363). Two things are clear throughout this killer memoir: 1.) Richards has lived an insanely interesting life; 2.) Like most great oral storytellers, he is bullshitting the details to make a good yarn.

I’m okay with that, because the voice in this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Drug-tastic acrobatics, palling around with Jamaican warlords, Keith’s taste in nautical literature—it’s all there. Oh, also, he managed to write a bazillion amazing songs and dishes on their creation as casually as you and I brewing morning coffee.

JR: Being a devout Richard Ford fan, a Frank Bascombe junkie (I had the nom de plume Frank Bascombe for over ten years, as the book reviewer at Ain’t it Cool News) , a lover all things Ford, despite what Colson Whitehead has said, and believe me, he is entitled to his opinion.

Canada surprised me, and in a way introduced me to a new Richard Ford. I was sad when I heard the news that Ford was leaving Knopf. I know how much his career hinged on that publisher, in some ways their separate successes can be attributed to the other. I know Ecco has a great track record and Daniel Halpern is aces. I met Richard Ford once, I told him how much I loved his writing, particularly the first story in Rock Springs, and the ending of that story. Ford recited the ending to me, word for word, and thanked me for coming to the reading. That left me forever a follower of his writing. It might be the writer in me that loves his work so much, or it could be that my father introduced me to Ford years ago, I think it was the Rock Springs collection that he gave me, with sentences underlined, and notes in the margins.

Canada is a wild piece of writing, bold, exuberant, at times veiled with sadness but mostly a big-hearted epic. Dell Parsons is a kid when he begins to realize his parents aren’t anything like the rest of the adults he sees. It seems they are getting themselves in dutch with the law, a robbery which will change everything. His twin sister Berner is spry and full of wit. I was crestfallen when her character only gets half the book, but after all the story is narrated by Dell. This novel is split in three sections. The first hinges on the robbery and is where Dell and Berner really hit their stride, and I think the entire novel can be summed up in chapter 11, where Dell really see’s his father for who he is. The second part is deceptively slow, loose and purposefully uneven, but the third is where Ford wraps it up, carefully, in an almost whimsical and breathless fashion. We haven’t done this type of discussion in a long time, but DH, I’m curious to hear what you think.

DH: As readers, JR, we follow different drummers. I know that Ford is central to your literary imagination but he is not central to mine. This is the first Ford novel I have read. I want to make a crude distinction, a riff on Jane Austen, and say that there are novels of Sense and novels of Sensibility. I would put Richard Ford in the first camp while I principally read novels in the later category.

I am as far away from loving Hemingway as you can get but I still acknowledge the great H’s paramount technical skill. I’d choose Richard Ford as Hemingway’s most likely contemporary successor. But I sense echoes of other great strands of the American literary tradition in his writing as well. I think if Mark Twain were still with us he’d be a big fan of Richard Ford’s with Dell Parsons getting recognition as a distant cousin of Tom Sawyer.

Canada is in a crisp three-part form. The starting time: 1960. Part One takes place in Montana. It’s 50% of the story and could almost stand alone as a near flawless novela. By Part Two we are in Canada. The third part is shortest, about one third of Part Two and serves as a ruminative epilogue.

One of the fascinating aspects of Ford’s narrative technique is that he pre-figures decisive events in his story. It takes remarkable boldness and confidence as a writer to provide your own spoilers! We know the crack-brained attempt at armed robbery that Dell’s parents are going to commit will fail. The whole first part of the novel contains a meticulous analysis of Bev’s faulty reasoning and incompetent criminal technique. And how about giving Dell’s father a girls name? Beverly? This isn’t an English novel. Not even here on the East Coast do we name guys Beverly. But we are in a neo-Hemingway framework. Competence is one of the touchstones that define traditional masculinity. Beverly is a major fuck-up. I even get the impression that he becomes a criminal because he’s too lazy to be honest.

Neeva, his wife, was the most fascinating character for me. She has far more sense than her husband but she still agrees to take a crack at armed robbery, a decision that destroys her family. Neeva should have ended this mismatch of a marriage by walking out on Bev year ago. Ford speculates about an alternative history for her where she moves to a college town and maybe lives a good life as the wife of a professor.

But she is perhaps too timid to walk out on her marriage and, in effect, save her life. She’s attracted to the robbery because it’s a quick and dirty way to get away from her husband. After the robbery she’ll take her half of the loot and split with the kids for Seattle.

JR, you mentioned Dell’s non-identical twin sister, Berner. I also wanted to highlight the wonderful subsidiary character of Mrs. Reminger. Mrs. R literally provides the bridge to Part Two of the novel by smuggling Dell into Canada after his parents get busted. She’s a wonderful character reminiscent of those wrecked eccentrics with the funny names that you find in Dickens’ novels that help the hero to find their way in life.

It’s significant that Dell and his sister Berner are twins. It suggests to me a alternative novel in which the women in this story would have moved to stage center instead of the men. I loved Richard Ford’s women. I just wished they could have been more of them in this story. This novel belongs to 15 year-old Dell. But I was grateful to see Berner make a poignant reappearance at the end.

JR, I need at least one more round in this discussion. I want to cover what happens in Parts Two and Three of Canada and then offer a general assessment or reassessment depending on what you have to say.

JR: I don’t really see part two as anything more than a rite of passage for Dell. He’s living in a rugged landscape, or structure, that Ford is dragging him through. For me, it’s not the book. It’s part one, the failed robbery, the copious attempts at making money, his father is a wuss, and a moron. Ford puts him down right away by giving him a woman’s name. Though I have heard that on the East Coast, not to be a ball breaker about it. This is a tragedy from page one. We know it’s a failed robbery, but with bated breath we hold on hoping it will work out. Even when the cops show up, it’s still better than the indians they hoodwinked on the meat scheme.

Ford is a very clever writer in the fact that he only tells the story from Dell’s point of view. It gets a little tiresome because Dell is holding the idea that things will work out. Ford is a genius storyteller with the way he folds part one in on itself over and over, and makes it look new every single time. I think what is most interesting about this book is Dell the grown up, and how my imagination fills in the blanks. Obviously Ford delivers the most indelible experiences for the sake of the novel. What happens to Dell when he gets older? Why did his sister fall out of the story, I wonder how she got old, and wanted to witness that. I would have prefered the story told in reverse, or at least a fractured chronological order; Robbery last, that beyond great murder, coming of age in Canada, Berner and her life, maybe even Dell as an adult. Why was Berner so bad a lover? Was it her teacher, Mom? Or the never was there Dad? When I lay my head down on the pillow at night, I want to know the answers to these questions, but only Mr. Ford has those answers.

This book is very reminiscent of the movie Days of Heaven, in tone and style, minus the love story that made the movie so heartbreaking. Ford has wrestled a big book to the ground, filled the pages with wonderful insights and flawless prose. It is a lot to take in, for sure, but worth the trip.

DH: There’s a lot of fascinating parallelism in this plot. I’ve mentioned the offbeat Mrs. Reminger, who as one of Neeva’s very few friends, smuggles Dell into Canada so he can avoid a Montana state home for juveniles. Dell is taken to a remote Nordic waste strip in Saskatchewan. He is to be placed under the care of her brother, Arthur, who owns a small fleabag hotel that caters to U.S. tourists who want to slaughter geese, the Sports.

This a a profound move on RF’s part; I marvel at it. Mrs. Reminger is a benign presence in the story but her brother is a psychopath. He’s on the lam in Canada for a terrorist bombing in the Midwest where a union official was killed. So Mrs. Reminger, well-intentioned, sends a naïve 15 year-old old boy to the devil.

I was intrigued by what I call the seduction scene. You don’t have to be physically present to seduce someone. Dell takes on housecleaning duties at the hotel and draws the lot of cleaning Arthur’s private apartment.

There’s a bed in the apartment, of course. But I’m not talking about a physical seduction but rather a spiritual one. There in Arthur’s rooms are a closet full of expensive suits, imported from Boston. Arthur is the only one in town who’s dressed to the nines this way. There’s a choice collection of literary texts sure to appeal to a budding bibliophile like Dell, as well as a wacked-out group of extreme political documents sure to add a note of disquiet.

But the ultimate talisman of seduction is an expensive chess set which Dell lovingly caresses. Dell is an avid chess fan although he’s never had the opportunity to play with another person, only with himself. He survives in the waste strip of a shack that he is quartered in by studying his chess magazines which chronicle the deft moves of his heroes, famous chess masters. This squalid residence is the very shack that Arthur lived in when he first escaped to Canada and it is full of cartons of his stuff.

Dell is being invited by the story to become like Arthur, to admire him, to aspire to him as a freak version of humanity. Dell is employed at this blot of a town butchering the geese that are hunted by the Sports, aided by Arthur’s handyman who a monster of maladaptation, a total carnival show and also gay, he wears lipstick while showing Dell how to butcher geese. It gave me pause. A touch of homophobia, perhaps, in this brilliant text.

Behind the wheel, Arthur mows down a flock a helpless pheasant because they are in his way on the highway. Dell. shocked, is in the car. The slaughter of geese and pheasants, this is sadistic stuff. It’s a prelude to more slaughter to come. Richard Ford, again prefiguring his plot, tells us again and again that Dell’s sojourn in Saskatchewan will end in disaster. The reader is left wondering what the disaster will be as the threads of plot are slowly pulled together like a garotte around your neck.

I need to escape to the last part of the story. It’s transcendent and short. Dell is an oldster now, we are in contemporary times. He is about to retire from high school teaching in Winnipeg. He’s has become a Canadian but heads south one last time to visit Berner. I won’t say more about that visit except that it was the highlight of the book for me.

To Hemingway’s masculine virtues of competence and bravery, both of which Dell learns to achieve, Richard Ford seems to add a component of his own: compassion and the recognition that the time comes to let go. Dell succeeds in becoming a true man, or as I would prefer to say, a mensch.

Is that a spoiler? Tough. Richard Ford has provided me with the precedent. Is Canada the True North of American literature? It greatly amuses me to think of Richard Ford as co-opting the entire classic tradition of American literature and delivering it to the Canadians as its true point of fulfillment.

But I know that’s not true. It’s just that Richard Ford has shown us, as he indicates himself in the masterful text of Canada, that the crossing of borders is important.

From Other People We Married: Stories, by Emma Straub

“Lets go interact with some nature.”

The two sisters of this story, who meet in Palm Springs for vacation, don’t really like each other. We’re privy to one side’s obvious endurance test of the other. As an only child I don’t have the luxury, but with siblings is this how it goes? One sister made her way into life and the other does stand-up. One has kids; the other only finds one-night stands. In the desert you’re punished for stupidity, and Straub makes sure that going out to see what’s what, is going to mean someone gets what they don’t want. In this case, it’s the sister who has it figured out.

The hot air and the cloudless vista bathe our sexy heroines and create a canvas that is more like a prison. I liked how the sister with the most to say has nothing to lose, and the other, well, she’s just in it for the sunshine. When she admits to herself that the only coping mechanism she has is to make fun of her sister in a stand up comedy routine. What would you think? There is only one way out, and she better take it.

The House on Paradise Street was published in March by Short Books. I’ve never heard of the press but they look to be a small press based in London. It’s meant as no disrespect to Short Press to say that The House on Paradise Street could credibly have been published by Knopf. But it wasn’t, so you may have a problem finding this debut novel in every indie bookstore.

That’s a shame. I’m trying to puzzle out what makes SZ such an accomplished novelist on her first attempt. Maybe it helps that she’s been a student of anthropology and that she has published two critically esteemed nonfiction works.

The ancillary material appended to the back of this novel is at least half as interesting as the story. There’s a brief history of Greece in the 20th century. It’s extraordinary to attach an essay on the history of a country to a novel. I found that I knew more about what was happening in Athens in 500 BC than I knew what was happening in the same place in 1944.

I almost always skip the acknowledgements section of a book except in that very rare case in which I am in it. But this novel’s acknowledgements section is worth a perusal. Most of the events and characters in the novel are based on true occurrences. That’s a good definition of a realist novel…right? Sofka discuss the people who impacted her novel with their life histories. But she also demonstrates how the writer transmutes that material. Fragments of real lives break up before your eyes and become parts of fictional lives. Names, events and people undergo morphosis, yet their essence, their pith or melos, is somehow transposed into Sofka Zinovief’s story.

There’s an effective dual first person narrative strategy. Chapters are named after either Maud or Antigone. Whoever the chapter is named after is the narrator for that part of the story. The connecting link between the women is Nikitas, in his early sixties, husband to Maud and Antigone’s son. Antigone is in her eighties when the story opens.

It’s as if SZ held a Maud doll and an Antigone doll, each in one hand, as far apart from each other as possible. As the story unfolds, the two figures are slowly brought closer together until, at the end, their life histories cohere.

Since Nikitas dies in the first sentence of the novel, that disclosure can hardly be considered a spoiler. Not to worry, we meet him alive in flashbacks. His death in a traffic accident (DUI) is the spur that gets the story going.

Antigone gave birth to Nikitas in prison where she was being held as a political prisoner. She gives him up to her older sister Alexandra’s family to raise and leaves the country for 60 years, making a life for herself as a radio broadcaster in Moscow.

No one escapes politics in The House on Paradise Street. Antigone was a communist insurgent during WW2, fighting in the mountains to rid Greece of the Nazis. Her sister Alexandra swung to the opposite pole and is traditionally religious and conservative. Her husband, Spiros, was a Nazi sympathizer, something that Alexandra doesn’t want to admit to herself or to anyone else.

I loved the burnt letter. Antigone leaves Athens, abandoning her infant son. She is also blamed for the death of their younger brother, Markos, who died in a Fascist raid on a safe house where leftist guerrillas were holed up. Alexandra had already told her younger sister, Antigone, that she shouldn’t return to the family home on Paradise Street at all unless she brings back Markos, their teenage brother, safely.

Alexandra is the recipient of the burnt letter. When she opens the envelope she sees the edges of the missive are burnt black. The letter falls into fragments as she reads it. Its black soot stains her dress. Antigone has disowned her family in the letter. She will never return. To her family, receiving such a letter has the force of black magic, a satanic anathema has been pronounced upon them.

Nikitas death means that Antigone will never see her son alive again except as the infant she once knew and abandoned.

But Maud is left wondering what kind of a marriage she had to that son. Nikitas has died drunk in an accident on a remote country road. It’s a mark of the growing estrangement in her marriage that Maud doesn’t know why her husband was there. It’s makes Maud realize something that she hasn’t conceptualized before. That for years, she and her husband had been growing farther apart.

Nikitas is a charismatic figure, a noted journalist beloved by the literary community of Athens. Maud is also Nikitas’ third wife. I was wonderfully chilled by the weirdness when the funeral for Nikitas is attended by all three wives, each remarkable in her own way. Nikitas, that total charmer, would never have married anyone boring. But you do get the impression that he was a serial husband.

N never neglected Maud. But he kept a life apart from his wife that she was never invited to share. Maud slowly realizes this when she opens her late husband’s office to go through his papers. She finds a lipstick case that she later realizes belongs an associate, Danae. It doesn’t help that Danae is reluctant to meet with Maud at all and says she had promised Nikitas never to discuss his research with anyone, including her.

So Maud has the experience of being excluded from her husband’s life by Danae who seems closer to much of that life than she was. Maud, stonewalled by Danae, struggles to make sense of the mysterious research that occupied Nikitas at the end of his life.

The house on Paradise Street has belonged to the family for generations. Nikitas grew up there, raised by Alexandra and an antagonistic Spiros. Now the widowed Alexandra lives downstairs with her housekeeper/companion, the somewhat weird Chryssa, a native of their old village in central Greece, Perivoli. Maud lives on the second floor with her daughter Tig, short for Antigone. She had named her daughter after Nikitas’ mother.

The grey slate floors have fossils embedded in the stone. The window shutters are red. There is a spiral staircase at the back of the house that leads to the garden where a old lemon tree practically abuts the stairs. The lemon tree was planted by the paternal founder of the house. It’s great to have her aunt Alexandra so close. Maud sends Tig downstairs for hours when she needs to go out. You get to know this house, and the aromatic smells from Alexandra’s kitchen, very well.

Greece: On the way to her husband’s funeral, Maud and her family cross the threshold of the house on Paradise Street. When they do so, Maud is handed a large jug and told to smash it on the steps. The explanation? “It’s the custom.”

There’s lots of great Greek food in this story. I could practically taste it. Vivid colors, vivid smells, intense light, characters doing impulsive drama framed by time-chastened folkloric traditions. That’s how Greece is presented to us in this story. I also had the impression of a country that’s been battered near to death by history since Alexander died. And of characters whose lives seem to embody that tragic past.

If you’re fortunate enough to lay hands on a copy of The House on Paradise Street, you won’t forget the people you have met in it. And you won’t forget what happens when Antigone returns to Greece, after an absence of 60 years, to attend the funeral of the son she has only known as an infant. The characters struggle to uncover the truth of their family’s history. And they struggle not to uncover it. What readers want to know about a book is up to them. But when the characters sometimes don’t want to tell them; that’s one ideal of a great read.

Francois Vigneault is editor at an innovative and maverick press, Scout Books / Good Ink, which is based in cool, counter-cultural and utterly green Portland, one of my favorite places. I have to thank Francois for bringing his press to my attention. His WWLWWD is below.

Why We Love What We Do – François Vigneault – Scout Books | Good Ink

Pinball Publishing | Scout Books headquarters in SE Portland, OR.

I’m delighted to be heading up Scout Book’s new Good Ink imprint, which is the literary and publishing side of Scout Books, a part of Pinball Publishing (lots of layers here!). I started here doing production, and now I focus solely on editorial work to grow our publishing side with Good Ink while still Scout Books continues to make our  great notebooks and custom projects.

Good Ink grew out of the Scout Book format, a pocket-sized, efficient, and all-around great format that was developed in 2009 to offer as a marketplace for custom notebooks and books. We’ve had a great response from the public, who loved the ability to easily create their own pocket notebooks and books. During the summer of 2011 we began discussing releasing more original content under the Scout Books banner, and the Good Ink imprint was born. The goal for us is to both publish work we are excited about and to inspire other creators to expand their ideas of what the Scout Book format can do.

Me with the press sheet for “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with art by Eleanor Davis

Our focus with Good Ink thus far has been on matching up classic short stories in the public domain with contemporary artists to create a unique, on-the-go reading experience. We started off with a ten-part series of American Shorts, since we pride ourselves on producing these books in the U.S.A. and love to highlight the best that America has to offer. With that in mind, we selected stories from over a century of work, from Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle”) to F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Jelly-Bean”) with many stops in between. Most of these public domain stories had long been on my personal “favorites” list, such as the ultra-creepy mini-masterpiece “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; but in seeking out stories that would fit the small format of the Scout Book I was delighted to discover new tales like the hilarious “Eve’s Diary” by Mark Twain that turned out to be lesser-known gems and have now made their way onto that ever-expanding list. Our newest releases are expanding the Great Shorts line, looking to the best classic short literature in a variety of genres and from all over the world. Our new releases for Spring 2012 include Fantastic Tales, which draws from the world’s fables, folktales, fairy tales, including works by Oscar Wilde and the Brother Grimm, and History of Mystery, a trio of immortal detective tales from Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton.

Sketch and final illustration by Roman Muradov for “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe

With my background in comics (I’m a cartoonist myself and have long worked with creators in the field), I was able to tap into an amazing pool of talent to illustrate these books; and each artist really added something to each story, creating a sort of creative collaboration across the decades with each classic author. Some of the pairings just made sense, like matching the animal portraits of Ryan Berkeley with Aesop’s “Fables,” or having Roman Muradov’s elegant 19th century aesthetic grace the pages of the seminal mystery “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. Others match-ups have had a delightful artistic friction between the prose and the illustrations, such as the combination of Jack London’s grim survival tale “To Build A Fire” with Michael C. Hsiung’s detailed and hilarious drawing style.

Pages from “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with art by Eleanor Davis

Even more so than the chance to publish my favorite classic authors, the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented illustrators and cartoonists has been amazing fun. Each artist brings his or her own style and vision to the project, and the final book that emerges can make even a familiar text pop with energy that is unique to the Good Ink project. I just finished doing the layouts for the Fantastic Tales, and I’m particularly pleased with how “The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Stories” by the Brothers Grimm turned out. Eleanor Davis (The Secret Science Alliance) kept sending me more and more drawings, and the final book ended up with little illustrations on almost every page; Eleanor’s art adds a whole other layer to these classic tales, which is of course our goal with the whole Great Shorts project. I can’t wait to get started on our future titles!

In addition to our literary titles, we’ve got some big plans to expand our publishing arm into doing guides and other sorts of titles as well. First up is The Cocktail Hour, which is a series of spirit-specific pocket guides for the home or professional bartender, featuring dozens of recipes from some of the best bartenders, distillers, and cocktail-savvy folks out there. The first three titles will be the trio of Rum, Vodka, and Gin. Each volume is just jam-packed with recipes from cover to cover, including sub-recipes for infused liquors and homemade bitters; and just like the Great Shorts books, each volume of The Cocktail Hour is lovingly hand-illustrated (the artists for Rum, Vodka, and Gin are Tuesday Bassen, Anna Hurley, and Trevor Alixopulos, respectively).

And of course, a huge reason why I love what I do is the chance to work with such and amazing small team. Since everything we do at Scout Books is handled in-house, from the editorial work I do straight through to design and production of the books, everyone here at Scout Books gets the chance to understand and contribute to our continuing success in a really community-minded way, we really are like a family. And you’ve gotta love that. Below I’ve included a nice little video my colleague Andrea Raiger made showing some of our team at work on the production of “Rip Van Winkle,” which featured the art of our long-time friend Bwana Spoons.

Scout Books & Bwana Spoons: The Making of Rip Van Winkle from Scout Books on Vimeo.

Recall the first time you saw The Indian Runner, or Rumble Fish. If you are anything like me, it was a chemical experience, and you left the theater changed right down to your fibers. I feel the same way about Dan Chaon’s writing, particularly Await Your Reply. If a poker hand included these three cards, and I was dealt The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel, it would be hard to beat. Ms. Mandel is in the same class as Dan Chaon, and it is a rarified place. Chaon’s last novel sent him to the big time. I believe the same thing will happen with The Lola Quartet, and its author, who I like to call The Terrence Malick on independent book publishing.

Mandel’s writing contains countless lines that might get overlooked, and it is not because of fast prose. She wanders, politely, and pauses just as you would in the middle of your day when your mind darts to something pure or radiant. For instance Sasha, a character with whom I would have spent at least a few hundred more pages, is a washout gambler, addicted to risk, and slings hash to make the rent. She is on the bottom of society, someone who you never, ever, would think twice about, and Mandel fuels her with this line, “She moved like a ghost through the caffeinated hours”.

There is the pregnant Anna, the runaway of the bunch, who bolts for reasons that aren’t unusual, but she does it so quickly that we hardly get to know her. On her way out she takes a sack of money from drug dealer she’s shacked up with. Anna moves like a bruised banana, and isn’t at all attractive to this reader.

And then there is Gavin, who pines for Anna, he romanticizes their relationship years after it’s evaporated. Gavin is a wild card, a sad-sack deadbeat liar. He has been handed the Jayson Blair role, as Mandel investigates that ripple on our cultural landscape; reporters who write fiction and call it truth. I liked this, but I was glad when he got fired.

Gavin moves in with his sister Elio, a real estate broker of foreclosed property, another fascinating corner of our civilization. Elio takes a picture of a little girl in a house that is being foreclosed on, and this little kid looks just like Gavin.

Remember that tight little group of kids that you hung out with in high school, and how it seemed the world was yours, and you would be together forever? Gavin ran a jazz quartet, and the music still serenades him. The quartet scattered, and Mandel gives us a slow reveal. Sasha, Anna and people to be named later weave their way through this mysteriously magnetic novel. The rain in Gavin’s apartment at the start of this story leaves a strong aroma that lingers on every page. It reminded me of Lilia from Mandel’s breathtaking debut, Last Night in Montreal (the best introduction to her magic), where a girl disappears, again and again, leaving foot prints in the snow, or a dangling pay phone receiver, which gives me chicken skin just thinking about it. Reading the Lola Quartet is like trying to hold smoke from a bonfire, both thrilling and compelling.

photo credit: Dese'Rae L. Stage

JC: While several of the guys have loved Emily St. John Mandel’s novels, Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun, JR has been singing her praises far and wide for years. Her new novel, The Lola Quartet, goes on sale this week, and she recently answered some of JR’s questions.

Jason Rice: If you could travel one year in time, in either direction, which would it be, and why?

Emily St. John Mandel: In all honesty, I’d prefer not to travel a year in either direction. But if I HAD to go one way or the other, I’d go backward. I was just looking at my calendar, and at this time last year I went to see a play I really liked (Tony Kushner’s Perestroika) with my husband and two of my dearest friends. It was a nice evening and I wouldn’t mind seeing that play again.

JR: Do things change or do people?

EM: Both. But I think the external world changes more frequently and radically than people do.

JR: If you were never published, which profession would you pursue?

EM: If I were never published, I’d still write. I feel strongly that commercial success and artistic achievement are two very separate things; it’s nice when they overlap, but some writers only experience one or the other. But that said, I’ve always harbored an interest in diplomacy, and would perhaps find a way to pursue a career in that world if I weren’t spending all my time writing and promoting novels.

JR: Where do you take your writing now that you’ve written three books? Do you have The Corrections in you? Or would you rather remain the Terrence Malick of publishing?

EM: I would be honored to think I was the Terrence Malick of publishing. Thanks. If I break that question down, it sounds like what you’re asking is whether I’d like to continue to do idiosyncratic work that interests me, or if I’d rather write a bestseller. I’m not specifically trying to write a bestseller, but I refuse to believe that it’s an either/or proposition. I’m of the belief that The Corrections is a truly great book.

JR: You often write about loneliness, and the mysterious decisions that people make. Are they always surprising you?

EM: Yes, they are. We’re an irrational and unpredictable species.

JR: I know you spend time in the city observing things, do you feel like life’s reporter, seeing things and then imagining their outcome, and writing about it?

EM: I do like to see things and imagine their outcomes. I’ll see an interesting moment in the city — a man sitting alone on a bench on the subway platform listening to music, for instance, while train after train goes by — and I’ll catch myself automatically working up a narrative: “in the fictional version of this moment, he’s waiting because of X, and then later on he’s going to do Y…” [Where X, which will come as no surprise to anyone who's read my work, involves a situation where lives and/or entire futures are somehow at stake.]

JR: Is it possible for anyone to ever really disappear? It is a running story line in your novels.

EM: I think it’s very possible to disappear. Practically speaking, disappearance in this day and age is a matter of stealing someone else’s identity, which in my understanding isn’t that hard to do. But I would hope that very few people actually have the will to do this, since it seems to me that there are very few circumstances under which disappearing from the lives of everyone around you wouldn’t be an absolutely horrible thing to do.

JR: Where do novelists fall in this culture? There are endless distractions vying for readers’ attention. Who is your audience?

EM: We’re undeniably obscure in this culture. The overwhelming majority of “famous novelists” are only really famous within the literary world; my suspicion is that a poll of the general population would report that Snooki has a higher level of name-recognition than, say, Jennifer Egan. I think of my audience as anyone who likes their fiction both literary and plot-driven.

JR: In addition to your reviews on The Millions, do you ever want to write a non-fiction book? Is there something really compelling in your landscape that begs to be written about it?

EM: I’ve sometimes thought about writing a book of essays. Essays and reviews are about the only non-fiction writing I do.

JR: The Lola Quartet reminds me of Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon. But your book is much more optimistic about the state of human nature. There is a similar kind of desperation in your story, that is wildly on display in Chaon’s novel. You cover a disgraced journalist, drug dealer, gambler, and a wayward mother and child on the run. All the while you bind them under the spell of music. This book is a slow dance, or the end of a dance contest. From cradle to grave how did this story come about?

EM: Thanks for the kind words. Await Your Reply is one of my very favourite books, and I’m flattered by the comparison. The Lola Quartet came together from a number of angles. The first involved a plumbing problem. When I was eighteen and nineteen I had a studio apartment in Toronto, and at a certain point the shower started leaking hot water. Every now and again I’d call my landlord and someone would come and fix it, but the problem always recurred.

The bathroom had no ventilation, so the room filled quickly with steam and then the condensation created a situation that I can only describe as a permanent light rain. The ceiling dripped constantly. There may have been mushrooms. Eventually I stopped calling my landlord, because that was a moment in my life when indoor rain didn’t bother me that much, and because the water damage seemed like a reasonable payback for the landlord’s failure to do anything about the cockroaches.

There was something kind of interesting about the condition of indoor rain, and I always knew I wanted to work it into a novel. (The scene’s recreated in the first part of The Lola Quartet.) I was also fascinated by the Jayson Blair story — you know, the New York Times journalist who disgraced himself a few years back — so I started writing a scene about a disgraced journalist with an indoor-rain problem, and in the meantime I’d read a couple of articles that I’d found interesting, one about Florida’s exotic wildlife problem and one about the strange world of brokers who deal in foreclosed real estate, and I knew I wanted to write about those things.

I also knew I wanted to write about the economic catastrophe that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, that surreal period when American banks were failing at a rate of one or two a week. At the same time, I was reading Whitney Balliett, who was a wonderful chronicler of the New York jazz scene in the ’70s. There’s a passage in his book New York Jazz Notes wherein he describes the final performance of a jazz guitar duo, two men who performed together quite successfully for a while until they gradually came to dislike one another and finally called it quits after a particularly stormy gig. And I was going to a local music venue regularly to listen to a gypsy jazz guitarist.

All of the above elements — indoor rain, disgraced journalist, gypsy jazz, guitar duo, exotic wildlife problem, foreclosed real estate — made it into the final draft of the book. I’m going to stop now before this answer turns into my first non-fiction book.

JR: Zadie Smith talks about writers being a macro or micro writer. Which are you?

EM: I just read the speech where she made a distinction between macro and micro writers, and I actually think it’s an imperfect division. Smith wrote that macro writers (she calls them Macro Planners) have their books entirely outlined, organized, and structured before they sit down to write the title page, and that the existence of the overarching master plan allows them the freedom to make radical changes that Smith says she wouldn’t dream of—”moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example”, or switching the order of chapters, or swapping out different endings.

She calls herself a Micro Manager, someone who figures out the story as she’s going along and can’t progress to the next section until the previous section is perfect and complete. She wrote that “[i]t would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it. …”

There are elements of both Smith’s types in the way I write. There’s most definitely not a master plan when I sit down to write—I’m figuring it out as I go along, and at the very beginning I know nothing about the book beyond the next sentence or two—but on the other hand, I start making reckless edits long before the first draft is done. I switch the order of chapters all the time, delete or add characters at will, and would have no problem moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin. I don’t know how my book’s going to end until I’m pretty close to the finish line, but see no reason why that would prevent me from choosing among three different endings once I get there. I start writing with very little idea of where I’m going, revise continuously, and end up with spectacularly messy first drafts that have to be revised for a year before they’re even remotely presentable.

JR: What’s next?

EM: Another novel. I’m a hundred and sixty pages in, but I don’t know how it ends. I’ve also been working on a couple of short stories lately.

JC: I’m reading Bruce Holbert’s Lonesome Animals now and enjoying it. The marketing materials told me it would be like True Grit and The Sisters Brothers, which is a damned happy reading place.  Seriously, though, Holbert’s main character Russell Strawl has a natural mean streak stronger than Rooster Cogburn’s, but I don’t know yet if he can ride with a gun in each hand and the reins in his teeth.  Here’s Bruce’s essay on the books that made him a reader and writer.

When We Fell In Love by Bruce Holbert

I grew up in a bookless house, a trailer, actually. My father worked construction and we followed the work. Books are wonders, but they are heavy and my parents were a practical people. Grand Coulee was as close to home as I knew. Grandparents on both sides resided there. My maternal grandparents owned an enormous house, at least to my sensibility, and they owned shelves of books. Downstairs were encyclopedias and dictionaries and upstairs pulp fiction novels from the Thirties and Forties, but the print was small and I was more interested in the lurid covers anyway.

My father’s mother, Dot, pioneered the country I came from. Her name appears in all but the most sterile of regional histories. She taught school in one room school houses and traveled by sled to teach in homes. The canyon bracketing her farm is still named after her father. She retired the ranch and in a small house in town, perched at the side of the canyon overlooking the dam, where she farmed a series of gardens: roses and pansies, tulips and vegetables in rows on ledges carved into the hillside. She adopted so many cats she couldn’t keep their names straight. They became colors instead: Whitey, Old Blue, the Gray Ghost.

By then my aunts had scattered like dandelion hair under a hard breath. My father, alone, remained in shouting distance, and it was then I discovered that all our travel was just the first act of returning.

Eloise, the middle sister, burned through her days like a wind-driven prairie fire. Her mouth was a lipstick smear and her mascara-penciled eyebrows wings in flight over smoky green eyes. She put flowers in her hair and donned loud print blouses and frightened everyone but her children, whom summers she deposited with my grandmother. Nights, they would sleep under the stars and smoke and hyperventilate and sniff model glue from the bottom of paper bags and shoot pistols at random sounds in the dark. Some are still alive, though Eloise herself succumbed to liver cancer some years ago.

Marge, the oldest, wandered into and out of a pair of short-lived marriages and, later entered that low- level political toil in which widows and intellectual divorcees engage. She once said she found men far more satisfying as well-dressed ideas than bumbling husbands or lovers without pants. She wore her hair short, which made her sharp features more severe. At family gatherings, she perched cross-legged on a stool in my grandmother’s backyard, smoking ladies cigarettes, dropping her eyes into a novel or literary magazine when the conversation became especially tedious. She was beyond debating her family, which seemed to her purposefully misinformed, though she would occasionally chastise me with philosophical questions I could never fully consider until hours later. In my family, she was most like me, displaced by the same malady.

It must have been in 1969 when she gave me two books: Catch 22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She offered them to me not as gifts but as assignments. “You should read these if you’re anything like I think you are.” I wasn’t sure what she thought I was, but I read the books. They intimidated me. I had to stop and consider the events and ideas after three or four pages. I didn’t always get the jokes. Often I read through parts I didn’t understand, hoping that reading ideas in context would work a little like my elementary teachers were instructing me to read difficult words by examining their surroundings. It worked well enough to keep me curious and I acquired enough from the books to know there was tenfold that I had not yet parsed. The project occupied my summer. My aunt never inquired about my progress, never commended me for packing one or the other book with me from place to place.

Then, six months or so later the wife of a minister in our town and a substitute teacher, handed back essays she’d assigned us the day before. She set my paper on the desk and it contained the same marks as the others, but she whispered quietly, “You are a writer.” I have never thought of myself as anything else since.

Some things have hung around for a while. These Days Are Ours by Michelle Haimoff is one, and I meant to say something by now. This book reminds me of a young Richard Price, circa Ladies Man. Someone has to write about 9-11 NYC and their name doesn’t have to be McInerney. There is this weird light that is captured in a few novels, especially ones about NYC in the last ten years. I’m sure that’s a generalization. Certainly, it is not to be overlooked because it is actually being published. Haimoff is a very slick and polished writer, and I can’t figure out why this book didn’t get more praise.

I relish the chance to read The Uninvited Guests, from Sadie Jones, 5-12, and flipped it open briefly wondering how she’s gotten past me all these years.

Vintage sent me something way early, The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, which is rather mystifying, because I don’t know why McSweeney’s does not publish this themselves, some of the notables included in this book: Ben Greenman, Jesse Eisenberg, Stephen Elliott, David Rees, and many more. I think when you put your head down on the pillow at night, a book about politics and musicals is certainly something you can feel good about.

The new Jim Lynch just arrived, about Seattle (Maslin likened it to the Parallax View, which is a tall order, as that movie is one sharp tack), called, Truth Like The Sun, and it seems to be packing so much between it’s covers that I’m in awe. Being a Seattle native and a Lynch fan, it is really nice to have a new novel from him.

Finally, J. Robert Lennon has a new book, coming 10-12, called Familiar. I picked it up in my travels to the independents, and can’t put it down.

A recent conversation with a prominent bookseller, who, well, it doesn’t matter who it is, just that we agreed that there hasn’t really been a novel that has blown us away. It is hard to recall the last time that happened. Mr. Peanut, The Imperfectionists? I might faint if Tom Rachman wrote a new book, actually I might anyway…faint.

Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter releases on April 24 from Europa Editions in trade paper. I’ve already reviewed it on Three Guys. But having discovered that extraordinary vista of social isolation and its struggle for connection, I had to have another fix of Gardam so I’ve backtracked to Europa’s 2006 release of Old Filth which I hear is her best novel.

Old Filth did great sales in its 2006 release. But since then it’s been relaxing on the Europa backlist. I’d recommend that stores stock it again as a backup to Crusoe’s Daughter. Okay compromise if you want, and see how well Crusoe’s Daughter sells, then restock Old Filth.

It’s easy to say that the best stories are character driven but it’s much harder to detail how that works. It’s striking, now that I think about it, that both novels are named after a character…like Jane Eyre.

Is Old Filth a remarkable character? As if I were to say to the reader: Okay, now I’m going to tell you the story of a man with two heads and you’re going to be transfixed! Well no, not really, he isn’t.

Old Filth was a very wealthy and successful lawyer who ended up as an eminent judge. He specialized in commercial law, property law, contracts… As WW2 was ending, Filth realized that there would have to be epic rebuilding and that property and other commercial disputes would provide ample opportunities for a lawyer to become very rich. Our hero is shrewd in that practical way which allows you rate a Rolls early in your career.

Turn the page to the end of life’s story. We are introduced to Filth in his eighties, living in a fine English country house with his sometime neglected wife, Betty.

Here’s a scene I loved: Betty is gardening, digging holes to plant tulip bulbs. She’s wearing a strand of pearls. Lately she’s gotten careless. One night she even wore the pearls to bed. She’s never worn jewelry to bed before. Gardam excels at showing those small human eccentricities that indicate that the personality is finally fraying under the stress of a long life.

These pearls are quite interesting. They are not the real set. They are the secret set. Betty has two sets of pearls. Her husband thinks she only has the one set that he has given her. This other, secret set, were given to Betty by someone else. Her husband, being a man, can’t tell the difference. She sometimes wears the sets interchangeably.

But at this end-time in life Betty wants to deal with loose ends. In a sudden inspiration, she slips off the precious pearls and buries them under the tulip bulb she is planting. An old transgression is buried and order is restored. Now Betty has only one set of pearls.

Somethings wrong with Old Filth, isn’t there? You see the crack in the character. The marriage isn’t perfect. It’s outwardly successful because it stays emotionally neutral. Old Filth and Betty are a power couple, a successful couple possessing a highly qualified happiness. But it’s a compromise marriage and Betty has had to look for some kinds of emotional fulfillment elsewhere.

Only in a Gardam novel have I discovered characters who are unwilling to have sex with such panache. Usually the opposite happens with panache. As a young man, Eddie (before the Old Filth moniker) finds a woman in his room at the country house where he is staying. She has entered his bedroom in the middle of the night to offer herself to him. Frightened, he throws her out.

The central character is a compass that points in many directions from it’s central locus. Or it’s like the beacon of a lighthouse that illuminates reality, including other characters, with its own distinctive coloring as it sweeps around the circumference of the social ocean.

This is accomplished in Old Filth with a flashback technique that aces the technique. As the elderly life of Old Filth moves forward through the novel (It’s a chronicle of the character’s last days.), a series of sequential flashbacks light up Eddie’s earlier life as if those flashbacks were explosive  blasts revealing the bedrock beneath.

Truths are revealed about the character that you never expected, from his childhood through his teenage and early adult years. Very little of the novel deals with Old Filth’s legal career. Only at the end of the novel, when we have reached the final flashbacks, is the start of his career in the law revealed before the final fade out.

The flashbacks are tied back into the story by Old Filth’s final quest to restore the lost contacts  of his youth. To recall is to mourn. But some of the central players of Eddie’s youth are still alive.

If you’ve ever decided to look up an old friend, you realize how nonsensical this activity is. But you might do it anyway. Your old friend doesn’t exist anymore even if the body is still warm. We all move on and become someone else. And we don’t realize how much unless we are brought up short and reminded by these encounters with a lost planet.

One more note of eccentricity. I’ll never forget the hard-luck character who keeps artificial flowers in her house but still places them in vases full of water because she thinks that looks more realistic. Life examined reveals itself as weird and strange and we are all putting up a front to make our life seem more normal than it is.

I hope I’ve sparked your interest in reading some Jane Gardam…either Crusoe’s Daughter or Old Filth…from the wonderful Europa Editions.

Now I want you to go check your family’s garden to see if any pearls are buried there.