Indie Pick, May 2009

Robert Boswell’s extraordinary range is on full display The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, his crackling new collection. Set mainly in small, gritty American cities no farther east than Chicago and as far west as El Paso, each of these stories is a world unto itself. Two marriages end, one by death, the other divorce, and the two wives, lifelong friends, become strangers to each other. A young man’s obsession with visiting a fortune-teller leaves him nearly homeless. And in the unforgettable title story, a man recounts the summer he spent on a mountain with a loose band of slackers, living in a borrowed house, abstaining from all drugs (other than mushrooms and beer)—and ultimately asking just what kind of harm we can do to one another.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books. His novels: Century’s Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and in many other publications. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“In this imaginative story collection, author Boswell examines the limits and losses of ordinary souls with technical mastery and profound sympathy.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Dealing with low lives, Boswell never abandons his insight or his storytelling verve. . . Heartbreakers from a writer who knows how to do it right.”
—Kirkus

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

UP Pick, May 2009

New from award-winning Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

The harsh Michigan winter is the backdrop for many of the tales, which are at turns sad, brutal, and oddly funny. One man prepares for the end of the world—scheduled for midnight on December 31, 1999—in a pole barn with chickens and survival manuals. An excruciating burn causes a man to transcend his racist and sexist worldview. Another must decide what to do about his meth-addicted wife, who is shooting up on the other side of the bathroom door. A teenaged sharpshooter must devise a revenge that will make her feel whole again. Though her characters are vulnerable, confused, and sometimes angry, they are also resolute. Campbell follows them as they rebuild their lives, continue to hope and dream, and love in the face of loneliness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm with her mother and four siblings in a house her grandfather Herlihy built in the shape of an H. She learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and make remarkable chocolate candy. She has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure tours in Russia and the Baltics, and all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria.

After earning a master’s degree in mathematics in 1992 she started writing fiction. Her collection Women & Other Animals won the prestigious Associated Writing Programs prize for short fiction; her story “The Smallest Man in the World” has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. For fifteen years she has put together a personal newsletter, The Letter Parade, which was written up in the Village Voice.

Bonnie Jo is six feet tall and practices Kouburyu karate and weapons training. She received her M.F.A. in writing from Western Michigan University, and now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo. In her spare time, she created a microbrew to go with her novel, Q Road. It’s called Q Brew.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“A strong collection. The pieces are rich in original detail, and highly atmospheric, while maintaining a sense of familiar territory, local voices.”
—Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes

“Welcome to rural Michigan, Campbell’s home ground, and a story collection of rare impact. These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of
events, and breath-taking insights.
—Booklist

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

Mini-Interview with Tracy Winn

Mrs. Somebody Somebody is your debut collection. How long has it been in the works, and what did you learn about writing—and shaping a collection—during the process?
Every story is such an accretion of memory and imagination, of recalled and invented details that the honest answer to the question would be “since I was born.” If what you are asking is, do I work fast, then the answer would be no. The first germ of the first story sprouted and withered ten years ago. It needed replanting. Because I’ve lingered with the work, I’ve learned everything I know so far about writing stories since I started the collection. Shaping the book, especially because it is linked more obliquely — and, I hope, more intriguingly — than a novel or a straight collection of stories has also been a long process. I realized that the pieces were related about four years ago when I was at the MacDowell Colony. I’ve spent the last six months working with Kathryn Lang, the very gifted editor at SMU Press, to strengthen the connections and make a distinct and complete whole of the ten parts. She didn’t ask that I rewrite more than a paragraph here or there, but the additions, the subtractions and the qualifiers had to be both subtle and clarifying. She called it lapidary work, and it was, in a way, the segment of the process that I enjoyed the most.

Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms?
To me, the most essential difference between the short story and the novel is flab. Each sentence in a story has to be a muscle strong enough to carry condensed weight. If you detect a preference, it’s true. I love short stories. I love to read them and to try to write them. Stories I respect are so sleek and complete in their build and their meaning that I feel as if I could hold them in my hands. I’m thinking of Robert Olen Butler’s “Salem,” or Grace Paley’s “Wants,” or any story by William Trevor.

Do you think of an specific audience when you’re writing a story? Who is your ideal reader?
The audience I write for is probably myself. I have to be pleased to read what I have written, and if I am not, the work gets the proverbial hook. With Mrs. Somebody Somebody, I was determined to write a book that I would like to read.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
Alice Munro has taught me more than any other writer, but I’ve been under the sway of Eudora Welty, Tillie Olsen, Stuart Dybek, Robert Boswell and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others. I’ve recently been a visitor to some undergraduate writing programs in Massachusetts, Vermont and Texas, and the students have made me excited about the future of literature. They are asking wonderful questions and thinking about issues of craft in a way that promises great writers in years to come. As for writers already in print, I look to the promising and very bright lights of Anthony Doerr, Steve Almond, Lara Vapnyar and Nicole Krauss.

Read Steve Almond’s glowing review of Mrs. Somebody Somebody.

Mini-Interview with Kevin Wilson

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is your debut collection. How long has it been in the works, and what did you learn about writing—and shaping a collection—during the process?
I started writing these stories in college, so the collection was built up over a nine-year period. In college, I wasn’t thinking of the stories as a collection; I was just writing them in order to meet the requirements of the fiction workshop. And even after that, up to the point that I compiled these stories into a collection, I was never really thinking about how they fit together or shaping the collection in order to achieve some larger thing. I was just writing as much as I could and most of it was bad and whatever was not bad went into a folder. And then I looked at that folder and I realized that some general themes, obsessions, kept showing up in my work and that was it. I gave the stories to my agent and said, “Here’s the collection,” and she then cut out half of the stories and said, “No, here’s the collection,” and I said, “Yes, you are right.”

Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms?
As a reader, I think length is the only essential difference between the two forms. A well-written story has the same potential payoff as a well-written novel. It seems to me that the only difference is how long it takes to get there. As a writer, I also think length is the only essential difference between the two forms. I’m trying to achieve the same things with the novel I’m writing that I wanted the stories to accomplish. The only difference is the length of the story being told.

Do you think of an specific audience when you’re writing a story? Who is your ideal reader?
I don’t think of a specific audience. I think I’d go a little crazy if I did that. Actually, when I first started writing and had no idea what I was doing, I had a specific audience and that was the population of the world that did not know who I was and who might be convinced by a well-written story to have sex with me. It was indeed crazy-making. It was desperate. And it never reached the proper audience.

Now, when I write a story, it’s like sending it up into space, hoping that some unknown lifeform will respond to it, knowing that it might never happen, and being okay with that because I enjoyed the process of writing it.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
Too many to list. But if I start at the beginning, I found Steven Millhauser and went crazy over what he was doing. He was the first American writer I read that was doing these fantastic, weird things with fiction and I really responded to that. From Millhauser, I found George Saunders and Aimee Bender and I saw how they too were doing crazy, unique things with their fiction and how, underneath that craziness, there was genuine emotion, and that made me really happy.

And there are too many writers to list that make me excited about the future of literature. But if I just focus on the immediate future, the upcoming year, I’m excited to read debut collections by Laura van den Berg, Holly Goddard Jones, Blake Butler, and Matt Bell. Their books are going to be really good and, after I read them, I will think, “The future of literature is safe for at least one more year.”

Mini-Interview with Paul Yoon

Once the Shore is your debut collection. How long has it been in the works, and what did you learn about writing—and shaping a collection—during the process?
I started Once the Shore in the early fall of 2004. I was living at the Ledig House Writers’ Colony in upstate New York, begging Benjamin Anastas every week to allow me to stay longer so that I could finish the title story, which was the first story I wrote for this book. But I didn’t know it was going to be a book then––I had another story collection in mind––so I think one of the most important lessons I learned during this process for me was that the art of fiction writing is something that constantly changes shape and form, and rather than try to gasp it and control it in some way to make it fit some initial vision I might have, it was better for me to explore all the corners and sides, everything. So I wrote a lot of stories set in Europe and the US and other places, too, and then, afterward, sifted through all that and saw the book, and the island, then.

Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms?
I see no difference. They’re all stories, contained within a fictional world the storyteller has created. It just depends on how long (or short) it takes to tell whatever it is one wants to share. It’s like studying paintings by the size of their canvases––that doesn’t seem as important to me. It’s the world on the canvas that matters, taken on its own terms.

Do you think of an specific audience when you’re writing a story? Who is your ideal reader?
I’m not sure if I had a specific audience in mind while writing Shore. I’m not even sure if I was thinking in those terms. I think it’s dangerous to be aware of some kind of audience while you’re deep in the process, at least for me; it would distract me from that fictional world too much. That said, I do think I write sometimes because I feel compelled to respond in some way to the books I have loved––to create some kind of dialogue with them. So I do hope that the readers who have been moved by the fictions I have been moved by would enjoy my book.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
Too many to name. But the books I would like to be buried with were written by writers like John Berger, Michael Ondaatje, Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, John Williams, William Maxwell, Maria Dermout, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tove Jansson, Tissa Abeysekara, and so on. I used to be on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and all the fiction writers and the poets who have passed through there have left me in awe of the future of literature. I’d especially like to mention a young writer named Ethan Rutherford who will appear this coming fall in the Best American Short Stories 2009, and whom I have been following for many years now in an obsessive, cultish fashion. Dear Readers, Prepare for him.

For additional reading about Paul, check out this review/interview at The Rumpus.

UP Pick, April 2009

By turns funny and sad, the linked stories in Tracy Winn’s debut collection, Mrs. Somebody Somebody, intersect in surprising ways. Winn draws us into the last sixty years of an old mill town where her unforgettable characters are down on their luck, but making the most of it. The man-crazy young mill worker of the title story forms an unexpected friendship with a lesbian labor organizer; a plucky immigrant child finds faith that her sister will return safely from Iraq; and a secretive old bookie has reason to hide a fragment of bone in his pocket. Connecting them all is the decidedly upper-class Burroughs family whose stately home holds years of unspoken compromise and regret. In clean, sensuous prose, Winn delivers the truths of our experience, unfolding these all-too-human lives, showing how little race, class and age matter when it comes to the grace that connects us all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tracy Winn, who earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Trust, and the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, The New Orleans Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter, and works with Gaining Ground, an organic farm for hunger relief. Mrs. Somebody Somebody is her debut collection of stories.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“A dying mill town, beautifully evoked in all its gritty reality and lost luster: this is the setting for Tracy Winn’s remarkable collection, Mrs. Somebody Somebody. Winn writes with clarity and keen perception; her stories come together like a mosiac to create a compelling, deeply textured world. You won’t easily forget these characters, mill owners and union organizers, hair dressers and immigrants, whose lives are full of loss and discovery, regret and beauty, and whose stories brush against one another, overlap, and intersect in unexpected ways. These are deeply satisfying stories, subtle, intelligent, and beautifully crafted.”
— Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

“It’s with extraordinary grace and subtlety that Tracy Winn crafts the interconnected stories that make up Mrs. Somebody Somebody. We’re immersed here in varied and individual lives, born of and shaped by the industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, but these stories as a whole tell an insightful and historically sweeping tale of labor and class in modern America. To achieve that kind of scope while rendering the smallest gestures and exchanges of dialogue with such acuity is more than remarkable—it’s inspiring. When characters are brought to life with this vibrant nuance, they continue to live far beyond the page.”
—Thisbe Nissen, author of Osprey Island and The Good People of New York

“I love how fully Tracy Winn understands her characters and the complicated transactions between them. And I love the wit and eloquence of her prose. From the opening story, with its account of an unlikely friendship between two mill workers, to the final story in which a man struggles to find a proper resting place for his lover’s last remains, Mrs. Somebody Somebody is rich in surprises, complications, and moments of unlikely beauty. This is a splendid debut.”
—Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street

“Tracy Winn’s evocation of the lives of mill-workers—and their neighbors—is a rare achievement. Her characters struggle with unexpected losses and damaging habits, rarely triumphing over the troubles that fill their lives, but always questioning the hard truths that hold them in place.”
—C. Michael Curtis, Senior Editor of the Atlantic Monthly

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

Indie Pick, April 2009

With Once the Shore, Paul Yoon delivers an astonishing debut of linked short stories set on a South Korean island. Spanning over half a century—from the years just before the Korean War to the present—the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single place in its entirety. An elderly couple embark on a fishing boat in a harrowing journey to find their son, hoping that he has survived a bombing in the Pacific. A Japanese orphaned woman’s past revisits her with devastating consequences in a wartime hospital. A case of mistaken identity compels a husband and wife to question the foundation upon which their lives have been built. An AWOL American soldier finds refuge in a small farming community, unknowingly endangering its inhabitants. And in the celebrated title story, a horrific accident at sea becomes the catalyst for an unlikely friendship between an American widow and a young waiter at a coastal resort.

These stories capture, with lyrical precision, the moments in which lives shift and unravel—where loss is ultimately turned into a search for reconciliation, and where the silences that pass between lovers and siblings, between parents and their children, are as powerful as the reverberations of war. Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a remarkable new voice in international fiction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Yoon was born in New York City. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Best of the Web 2008 and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Paul Yoon writes stories the way Fabergé made eggs: with untold craftsmanship, artistry, and delicacy. Again and again another layer of intricacy is revealed, proving that something as small as a story can be as satisfying and moving as a Russian novel.”
—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Run

“These are splendid stories, at once lyrical and plain-spoken and full of unusual realities. Once the Shore is a kind of fantastic Korean gazetteer that tours us confidently through unpredictable incident and often startling conversations—Paul Yoon’s writing is erotic, haunting, original and worldly.”
—Howard Norman, author of Devotion and The Bird Artist

“These are lovely stories, rendered with a Chekhovian elegance. They span from post–World War II to the new millennium, with characters of different ethnicities, yet each story has a timelessness and relevance that’s haunting and unforgettable. Yoon is a sparkling new writer to welcome and celebrate.”
—Don Lee, author of Wrack and Ruin and Yellow

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

Big House Pick, April 2009

Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.

Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kevin Wilson’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has twice been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best anthology. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you’ve read before. Wilson displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity…Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“…captivating debut…a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling…fresh and darkly comic”
—Publishers Weekly

“A dazzling and important new writer.”
—Ann Patchett, best-selling author of Bel Canto and Run

“Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers. Bow your heads! Jesus Christ is this guy good.”
—Owen King, author of We’re All In This Together

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