UP Pick, March 2009

n 2006, Jim Tomlinson’s Things Kept, Things Left Behind won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award. Kirkus called the book “a wonderful collection notable for its clean prose and tone of quiet, stubborn dignity” in its starred review. Now Tomlinson is back with a new book of short stories set in his fictional Spivey, Kentucky. The collection is published, appropriately, by the University Press of Kentucky as the latest addition to their renowned Kentucky Voices Series. Read a sample story.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jim Tomlinson was born and raised in a small Illinois town. He lives now in rural Kentucky with his wife, fiber artist Gin Petty. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Five Points, Bellevue Literary Review, Shenandoah, Sou’wester, New Stories from the South 2008, and elsewhere. Jim has been awarded a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, a teaching fellowship at the Wesleyan Writers Conference, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference. He has been a visiting writer at Tucson’s Pima Writers Workshop and most recently at Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Literary Festival.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
With his flawless ear for speech and great compassion and wisdom regarding measures of the human heart, Tomlinson drops us right into lives and situations that mesmerize and stun each and every time. Another fine collection from this very gifted writer.
—Jill McCorkle, author of Creatures of Habit: Stories

Jim Tomlinson’s work is very heartening evidence of the health of that beloved but often slighted form: the short story.
—Richard Bausch, author of Peace

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

Indie Pick, March 2009

Samuel Ligon’s new book, Drift and Swerve, is out now from Autumn House, a poetry publisher that began releasing story collections last year. In fact, Drift and Swerve is the winner of the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Samuel Ligon is the author of Safe in Heaven Dead, a novel. His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers, in Spokane, Washington, and is the editor of Willow Springs.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Drift and Swerve is an extraordinary collection—fourteen feverish stories propelled by Samuel Ligon’s vigorous, perfect prose. Darkly funny and surprisingly moving, these tales of collision and escape feature unforgettable characters, like Nikki, who careens through the book’s hard America with a ferocious, incurable case of hope.”
—Jess Walter, author of Land of the Blind

“Samuel Ligon’s writing does not drift and swerve, but remains ruthlessly clear-eyed and disciplined even as it depicts characters who find themselves at odds with grace. His worlds as rendered in this collection are grim, fascinating, devastating and, at times, hilarious. Ligon has an unerring instinct for human fallibility, for connections longed for and connections missed, for the stories we tell ourselves to survive.”
—Aurelie Sheehan, author of The Anxiety of Everyday Objects

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

Big House Pick, March 2009

You know her stories. You love her stories. It’s Mary Gaitskill, back with a killer new collection, Don’t Cry, her first in more than 10 years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mary Gaitskill is the author of Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998, and Bad Behavior, Veronica, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in New York.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
In “College Town l980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirrorball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in “The Arms and Legs of the Lake,” the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson — three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier’s uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls.

Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body — or of the intelligent body with the craving mind — that is characteristic of Gaitskill’s fiction. As intense as Bad Behavior, her first collection of stories, Don’t Cry reflects the profound enrichment of life experience. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths — “the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house,” as one character puts it — remain unchanged.

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

Online Readings

Readings in person are cool. What about readings online?

Lively Words, operated by Mr. Albert E. Martinez, is pretty sweet. He even let me play along.

Also, I learned of Apostrophe Cast by e-mail today.

Cool sites. You know what to do.

Nelson Reading in San Francisco

Antonya Nelson Reading
Thursday, Feb 26, 2009
7:00 p.m.
City Lights Bookstore
San Francisco, CA

Lunstrum Reading in South Bend, Ind.

Facebook status update for readers in Indiana and Chicago:

Kirsten Lunstrum is readying for her trip to beautiful South Bend. (Reading Monday, 7:30 p.m., Saint Mary’s College. Come one, come all!

Oh, Amazon

So a quick look at the Nothing Right listing at Amazon reveals two items worth discussing. First, as of this moment, Ms. Nelson’s story collection is #471, which seems incredibly high to me, but it’s still good news. Second, the average rating has come up in the last week or so, but when I looked through all of them, it’s clear that many of the reviews are from readers in the Amazon Vine Program. It’s nice to supply early reviewers with books, especially story collections. But don’t give cookbooks to people who hate food.

Representative lines from the reviews in question:

This book could of earned 4 stars if just someone was happy in this book.

I would have liked it if the author had described some feelings for these characters as liberal as she uses F words.

The stories are about people getting divorced, committing infidelities, sleeping with married people, drinking excessively, dying, and otherwise going through down times. One happy woman knows her husband cheats on her, but just doesn’t care. She’s about the happiest of the characters. She turns down the sexual advance of another woman….This reminds me a lot of literature I read while working toward my degree in English. At times, it got to me. This book did, too.

That last one sounds like a good review. I, for one, want books to “get to me” in some way. But it’s not; the reviewer is upset about all of the “depression” in the book. I am depressed that she has an English degree and is still complaining that literature is depressing. (And, looking deeper, I’m now depressed that she’s written a book about dog therapy, now in its second edition.)

An ABC commenter mentioned that we should all review the ABC selections at Amazon. Now would be a good time, I reckon.

The ABC Selections

Here is the ongoing list of ABC selections for archival purposes.

November 2009
Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness

October 2009
Dylan Landis, Normal People Don’t Live Like This
Hilary Masters, How the Indians Bury Their Dead
Patricia Henley, Worship of the Common Heart (ABC Rewind)

September 2009
Holly Goddard Jones, Girl Trouble
Anne Sanow, Triple Time

August 2009
Victoria Patterson, Drift
Michael Parker, Don’t Make Me Stop Now (ABC Rewind)

July 2009
Suzanne Burns, Misfits and Other Heroes
Jean Thompson, Do Not Deny Me

June 2009
Midge Raymond, Forgetting English
Josh Weil, The New Valley

May 2009
Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage

April 2009
Kevin Wilson, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Paul Yoon, Once the Shore
Tracy Winn, Mrs. Somebody Somebody

March 2009
Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry
Sam Ligon, Drift and Swerve
Jim Tomlinson, Nothing Like an Ocean

February 2009
Antonya Nelson, Nothing Right
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Swimming with Strangers

January 2009
Allison Amend, Things That Pass for Love
Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds

Interview Excerpt: Antonya Nelson

From my interview with Antonya Nelson, published in the current issue of The Cincinnati Review. (If you’ll be at the AWP Conference in Chicago this weekend, stop by the journal’s table and pick one up.)

Do you still feel a lot of pressure from editors to write novels, or to only write novels?

I think people are more interested in the novel because it tends to be a more optimistic form. Again and again, I finish reading a novel and feel an uplift rather than the truncated sense of despair that stories often leave you with. I have pondered that and written about it and talked about it before, but I do think the novel is more optimistic because it privileges a group in a society rather than an individual. A society’s trajectory, in general, is to sustain itself, even if it consumes the individuals within it. And an individual’s trajectory is to die, even if the society continues.

The narrative of the individual is the story of mortality; the narrative of the community is sustenance. That’s neither cynicism nor optimism. Those are simply facts in my mind.

My sense is that we are not particularly comfortable with the short story because it’s a little more depressing. My students will always say that: Why are these stories all so depressing? They don’t say that about the novels I teach (well, except for Revolutionary Road; that one bums them out). They read the novels through, and they can be moved or saddened by an exclusive event, but at the end they say, That was very satisfying. Even the saddest novels, in the end, are satisfying because novelists, to generalize, tend toward optimistic closure. It’s a weird sensation. You might evaluate your own reaction to the last novel you read and the last short story you read to see if your responses match my impression.

If You Love Short Stories…

You may want to read the new issue of Freight Stories, the online quarterly I co-edit with Victoria Barrett. The fourth issue is now online, with new work by Lee Martin, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Daniel Wallace, Patrick Nevins, Shasta Grant, Donna D. Vitucci, Andrew Roe, and Jim Tomlinson.

Big House Pick, February 2009

This next author needs no introduction to readers who love short stories. Ireland has William Trevor. Canada has Alice Munro. We have Antonya Nelson. Her latest effort is Nothing Right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Antonya Nelson is the author of three novels—Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell—and five story collections: The Expendables, In the Land of Men, Family Terrorists, Female Trouble, and Some Fun. Her work has earned many prestigious awards, among them the Rea Award for Short Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, and the PEN/Nelson Algren Award. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. She now teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and lives in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“In this powerful collection of 11 short stories, Nelson’s brilliantly constructed characters negotiate love, family, home and truth. Nelson consistently pays exquisite attention to detail, resulting in rich, vivid characters and settings… Nelson writes with wonderful grace and skill, each word carefully chosen, each passage carefully constructed. This beautiful collection is another remarkable accomplishment for awriter often hailed as one of our most talented storytellers.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“I scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson’s name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again. She’s absolutely one of my favorites among story writers today, and I envy the reader who has yet to discover her work.”
—Michael Chabon

“Nelson has a pitch-perfect ear for the rhythms and unspoken subtexts of domestic life, and especially for the ways a family balances old grudges with the need to practice forgiveness.”
—Francine Prose

“Any lover of realistic narrative fiction about actual and unglamorous people will be greatly rewarded by the work of Antonya Nelson. Her voice is sure, her wit is quick, her observations continually resonate and her honesty is unwavering.”
—Dave Eggers

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

Indie Pick, February 2009

Chronicle Books released Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s second collection, Swimming with Strangers, a few months ago, right before the publisher elected to stop publishing literature, a decision that forced her editor, Jay Schaefer, to find work at Algonquin Books. Published writers hear this and cringe: another worthy book lost to the abyss. This is a perfect selection for Andrew’s Book Club. Rally the troops! Or the dogs! Let’s get the word out about this one.

We can quibble about the term “indie” as it applies to Chronicle, a publisher based in San Francisco. But put simply, they’re better known for publishing cookbooks and quirk-books than literature. (But Chronicle did publish my all-time favorite novel, Don Kurtz’s South of the Big Four.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short fiction. This Life She’s Chosen was published by Chronicle Books in 2005, and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for the year. She is also editor of the anthology The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Writers on Forerunners in Fiction (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008).

Kirsten’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, The American Scholar, and Willow Springs, among other journals. She has been the recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She teaches at Purchase College (SUNY).

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Usually I read like a glutton — one sitting, that’s my style. But after finishing the first two stories in this collection, I chose to parcel the others out, one per night, the better to make them last. These stories, brimming with insight and subtlety and emotional suspense, completely took me over. How does a writer so young turn up such wisdom on every page? I LOVED these mature, humane, enthralling stories — every single one.”
—Monica Wood , author of Any Bitter Thing and Ernie’s Ark: Stories

“There is a bittersweet and real pressure at the outset of each of these stories, and we read thinking it will ease, but it will not. Kirsten Lunstrum writes well about longing and the aching distance between hearts, which at times is so close yet still unbridged. This is a terrific book of engaging fiction about real people.”
—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies and A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

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