Indie Pick, November 2009

The stories in Laura van den Berg’s rich and inventive debut, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.

A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.

Barnes & Noble recently selected What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us as a holiday season pick for their Discover Great New Writers Program.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. Formerly an assistant editor at Ploughshares, Laura is currently a fiction editor at West Branch and the assistant editor of Memorious, an online journal of new verse and fiction. She has taught writing at Emerson College, Grub Street, and in PEN/New England’s Freedom to Write Program. Her fiction has or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications. She is currently at work on new stories and a novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“”In her affecting debut collection, van den Berg taps into her characters’ losses with an impressive clarity. Each of these stories is meticulously crafted, and often the protagonist is recovering emotionally from a staggering life’s blow. In ‘Goodbye My Loveds,’ two siblings are reeling from the death of their parents, scientists fatally snake-bitten in the Amazon; a sister leaves college to take care of her 12-year-old brother and recognizes the need to suppress her own needs in order to help her brother face their new lives. In the beautifully elegiac ‘Where We Must Be,’ a failed actress gives up on L.A. and finds work as Bigfoot in a theme park; her love affair with a young neighbor dying of cancer underscores the preciousness of time’s passing. In the title story, a young woman learns to face her fears while spending time with her scientist mother observing endangered lemurs in Madagascar. These tales are the work of a notable author finding her voice.”
—Publishers Weekly

“These characters lose themselves, intentionally and otherwise, but they’ve got the courage to go about finding themselves, or changed versions of themselves, in the elegant process of drowning, cleansing, and rebirth.”
— The Believer

“In her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, Laura van den Berg finds the tension between science and magic and walks it like a tightrope. These stories find the common ground between myth and the human condition, exploring the inner lives of men and women who cross paths with the Loch Ness monster, or Bigfoot, or lemurs in Madagascar whose screams can turn a heart into stone. It is a fantastic and fascinating world, full of discoveries and moments of wonder, a book meant for the explorer in all of us. Any reader will be glad to have found it.”
— Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

“What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is a lovely, remarkable book, full of people who strive mightily to believe in things ”Bigfoot, the Lochness and Lake Michigan monsters, a tunnel leading to the other side of the world, husbands, wives, lovers, parents” they shouldn’t. But Laura van den Berg lets her characters believe, and believes in them, and makes us believe, and care, too. Calm, wry, and compassionate, somehow all at once, this book is impossible to resist, and I’d bet big money that we’ll be talking about Laura van den Berg and her fiction for years to come.”
— Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

Big House Pick, November 2009

Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness. Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“Munro’s latest collection is satisfyingly true to form and demonstrates why she continues to garner laurels (such as this year’s Man Booker International Prize). Through carefully crafted situations, Munro breathes arresting life into her characters, their relationships and their traumas. In ‘Wenlock Edge,’ a college student in London, Ontario, acquires a curious roommate in Nina, who tricks the narrator into a revealing dinner date with Nina’s paramour, the significantly older Mr. Purvis. ‘Child’s Play,’ a dark story about children’s capacity for cruelty and the longevity of their secrets, introduces two summer camp friends, Marlene and Charlene, who form a pact against the slightly disturbing Verna, whose family used to share Marlene’s duplex. The title, and final, story, the collection’s longest and most ambitious, takes the reader to 19th-century Europe to meet Sophia Kovalevski, a talented mathematician and novelist who grapples with the politics of the age and the consequences of success. While this story lacks some of the effortlessness found in Munro’s finest work, the collection delivers what she’s renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

Mini-Interview with Dylan Landis

You worked for many years as a journalist. How did that experience prepare you to write fiction? Did it, in some part, influence your decision to use the third person, as well as the present tense, in these stories?
Reporters learn to hunt details. I remember Rick Bragg’s New York Times profile citing the verse to which an old woman’s Bible fell open after a lifetime of hard use. In stories you just take it deeper, reporting from the imagination and the subconscious, not only from life.

But when I began writing fiction, 15 years of journalism lessons were useless until I understood what fiction is, what it does. Madeleine L’Engle said in a workshop that nonfiction is about things that are true, but fiction is about truth. Jim Krusoe, an L.A. novelist, teaches about enabling details: the one or two unexpected things you give a character or a room that allow a reader to fill in all the rest. Now all that training runs together—when I give Bonita Prideau all-black furniture in Normal People Don’t Live Like This, it’s because Bonita would only have black furniture, not just because I covered interior design for the Chicago Tribune and find black furniture intriguing.

Any decisions about third person or structure, or revealing and withholding information, are purely in the service of fiction.

Your collection was a finalist for the AWP prize for short fiction. Did you enter a lot of contests before finding your agent, Joy Harris? Or did she encourage you to enter the contests?
Joy is a true defender of the faith. She took me on originally for a novel manuscript that’s also about Leah Levinson, the hyper-observant, science-obsessed girl from Normal People. Joy’s agency sent out most of these stories individually before I had a collection, and those she couldn’t place, I entered in contests on my own. Sometimes they won. Then she sent out the collection. After a couple of impassioned rounds she said: Let me put it aside and sell it with your next novel.

But I was turning fifty; I was starving for this book. I asked her blessing to try a few small presses and contests on my own. Joy suggested the Drue Heinz contest. I added AWP’s Grace Paley competition, and submitted directly to Persea Books. Joy never stopped representing the book.

This fall you’re making many appearances in bookstores and other venues to promote Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Do you enjoy this part of the process? Some authors just want to crawl back in their caves.
There’s a cave?

I love this book, I love the troubled girls and their struggling mothers in this book, I want to give them voice. I’ve been rasping since September, but my Q&A’s go on so long the bookstores have to stop them. This is the second most fun I’ve ever had, where writing is concerned. The first most fun is when the writing itself is working.

Some authors stay in the cave because they’re so artistically focused. Or maybe their work sells itself. I’m in awe.

But some writers are in the cave because of a huge misunderstanding: They think their publishers will handle everything, an impossibility in this economy, or that publicity starts when the book comes out. Yikes, no. Publicity starts five or six months in advance, and a writer without a name needs to kickstart it herself. I chose to do readings, because that’s my strength. And I chose to relish it. If I could type more—it hurts my hands—I’d be writing essays and guest-blogging a lot more.

Finally, don’t you think some writers stay in the cave from stagefright? I know many of us struggle with that.

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but what are you working on now?
A novel about an Irish cook in 1907 New York who was told she was spreading typhoid. When she refused to believe it, the city locked her in quarantine and the press called her Typhoid Mary. But Mary Mallon, who was only responsible for three deaths, has her own story to tell, some factual and some that I’m channeling. I spend a lot of time now in the early 20th century, writing about food and sex and disease and dogs—Mary loved dogs—and relishing that too.