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.

Mini-Interview with Hilary Masters

How the Indians Bury Their Dead is your first story collection in a number of years. Were the stories written during that long span of time, or did they emerge more recently?
The stories were written over the last decade; however, the story “Chekhov’s Gun” is the most recent story and I had intended that it be the cornerstone of the collection—even the name of the collection. It came from my complete disgust with our country’s behavior in the Middle East, Iraq, and what I consider to be the moral degeneration of our principles and history. However, the people at SMU did not agree with my choice for a collection title and chose the present one.

You’re also the author of several books of nonfiction, including Last Stands: Notes from Memory, a memoir. How do you articulate the difference between nonfiction and fiction? And do you still think of yourself as a fiction writer who writes nonfiction, or are the genres now equal in your eyes?
I think of myself as a novelist and essayist, the inquiring, self-questioning form of essay invented by Montaigne. Of course, each of the two genres follow different rules; however, the motivations and procedures followed in the literary essay are similar to the devices to be found in the novel. My sort of novel, anyway. What I do know about a subject, to rephrase Montaigne’s original question, is also the incitement experienced by the protagonist that launches him into the narrative.

What is the biggest challenge literary writers must face today, compared to when you first started publishing stories, poems, and essays?
My first novel was published in 1967, and it was a radically different community. Writers were respected by their editors and their publishing houses. Today we must deal with bookkeepers who are called editors. The shift in publishing in the 70’s to the all holy profit line has created, I think, the production of sensationalism and the “hit” syndrome. So, the challenge is to find a safe haven where one’s work is respected and encouraged and allowed to mature. These venues do exist, and at the moment some of the university presses meet the criteria.

What single piece of advice would you give to the young writer just now beginning the journey?
Above all and despite all—keep working.

Mini-Interview with Patricia Henley

Note: This is an excerpt from my interview with Patricia Henley, which first appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle and was later excerpted in the two-volume The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction.

You’ve published books of poems and stories, and two novels. How has each genre helped your development as a writer?
I started out writing poetry. I always say, half-kidding, that I wrote poems first because I couldn’t sit still long enough to write fiction. That lasted until my late twenties when an illness required sitting still. I began a novel then, about life in a back-to-the-land community. I had lived in one—Tolstoy Anarchist Peace Farm in eastern Washington—in the mid-seventies. But I had no idea of structure. I was just writing. That material turned into the first stories, the stories published by Graywolf Press, Friday Night at Silver Star. I enjoyed writing stories and admired and learned from Alice Munro and Andre Dubus and William Trevor and Richard Ford. Writing stories felt like something I could do combined with the hard jobs I held back then. Still, my work was sometimes called “quiet.” I took that to mean that not much happened.

I loved reading novels as a child. But I did not think writing one was possible for me. I saw myself as a short story writer who managed to incorporate poetic imagery in my work. I used the few poems I wrote as a way of seeing images and distilling what was really important to me at any given time. I went to Guatemala in 1989, casting about for some story ideas, partly. And I had followed the repression of the eighties and wanted to see for myself what had happened there. I was there about a week when a doctor told me the story of Father Stan Rother, who had been killed during the 1980s. The Mayan villagers he served asked his family if they could have his heart to bury near the church where he had been the pastor. This story electrified me. I knew right at that moment that I needed to write about Guatemala and that it was a bigger story, a story that needed to be a novel. I had no idea what I’d taken on.

That’s right—Hummingbird House, from the seed of an idea to publication, took ten years. What did you learn about fiction writing, about yourself as a writer, during that decade?
Writing Hummingbird House changed my life. Or perhaps, since it took so long to write, my life inevitably changed and was influenced by the writing process. I didn’t know a thing about writing a novel when I began. I threw out the first 200 pages—the voice wasn’t right and those first 200 pages were in first person. I don’t think I really knew, for sure, what I wanted to write about. Each new phase of researching would teach me that there was yet another layer required. Often that meant starting over or nearly starting over. I found out what it feels like to be obsessed with a project. I like that feeling.

I developed a profound respect for the men and women of the Catholic Church who have aligned their lives with the poor of Latin America. That led me back to the church—I’d been raised Catholic but had left the church at the age of nineteen in favor of a more bohemian lifestyle and an eclectic spiritual search that included LSD and living in the back-to-the-land community. While working on Hummingbird House, I dropped in to the local Newman Center across from Purdue’s campus and I just kept going back. Whatever its faults and warts—the church is a good venue for peace and justice work.

Another thing I learned while writing Hummingbird House—I’m capable of writing for long hours. Coming down the homestretch, while on sabbatical in New Mexico, I was able to write for six to ten hours a day, go out for a long walk, sleep, and get up and do it again the next day. The most difficult period—except for being nervous sometimes in Guatemala—happened during the two years between finishing the book and having it accepted. It was pretty much rejected everywhere in New York. I felt like a fraud as a teacher. I was wounded and grieved over what I thought of as the book’s failure. I felt fairly certain I wouldn’t write another novel since that one had taken so much out of me. MacMurray & Beck accepted the manuscript two years after I’d finished it. Their belief in the book and its subsequent success charged me up to write another novel. I like solving the problems inherent in writing novels.

ABC Rewind, October 2009

An impressive overview of a writer whose career is still climbing, Worship of the Common Heart allows us a rare opportunity to observe twenty years in the evolution of Patricia Henley, a writer of uncommon talent and heart. Emotionally complex, achingly real, these nineteen stories focus on the everyday, defining moments of life, celebrating the unsung and calling attention to the ignored. A young woman comes to an absolute and sad realization about her relationship at the very moment she gives birth. A woman enamored of younger men stumbles upon joy in the most unlikely place. A young nun takes a vacation with her earthy, unpredictable sister and learns a lesson in worship. Told with stunning confidence and honesty, the stories in Worship of the Common Heart revel in sensuality and the complexity of longings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Henley’s first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and The New Yorker Best Fiction Book Award. Henley has also written two books of poetry, Learning to Die and Back Roads, and two other story collections: Friday Night at Silver Star, which won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award, and The Secret of Cartwheels. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review, and anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Henley lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she teaches in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“[Henley's] stories turn on the strength of her elegant, homespun prose, rich with stunning images and quick wisdom…”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Post-hippie attitudes — disdain for conventional mores, a preference for relationships with like-minded free spirits and an appreciation of nature –inform this impressive third story collection by Henley. Set across the U.S. wherever loose communities of family and friends settle down, from hardscrabble rural Indiana to the Pacific Northwest, the 19 stories capture defining moments in otherwise ordinary lives. “The Secret of Cartwheels” is one of two tales about a large Catholic family, no doubt inspired by Henley’s own experience as the eldest of eight children. At age 13, narrator Roxanne and two of her younger sisters are sent off to a children’s home because their mother, an alcoholic, can’t cope with her many offspring. Roxanne, plagued by her inability to turn cartwheels and her habit of wetting the bed, dreams despite herself of the life she used to know. In “Cargo,” Roxanne reappears as an adult, settled in Montana. Her sister has called to say their mother is dying and the family is gathering. In attempting to decide whether she’ll go home, Roxie acknowledges that she’s left many places hoping for a new beginning, forgetting every time “that the things you hate the most are the things that travel with you.” Many of Henley’s characters live transient lives, work at menial jobs — mechanic, fruit picker, waitress — identify with the lyrics of country music and look to dope, booze and casual sex as palliatives. They recognize their weaknesses, but they don’t give up the game. The author’s sense of humor shines often. In “Slinkers,” Joanne, whose “laughter always made you feel good” is an “intuitive shopper” who proclaims, “If you find a pair of jeans that really fit, buy two pair.” These stories, by a marvelous writer who speaks from both the heart and the head, are as comfortable as well-worn denim.”
—Publishers Weekly

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

UP Pick, October 2009

The fourteen stories in Hilary Masters’s third collection, How the Indians Bury Their Dead, are set in New England, upstate New York, and various European locales. They range from a late-blooming romance between two shoeshine booth operators to uninvited mourners crashing the funerals of people they don’t know, from a felon-turned-chef watching his son sample his savory meatloaf to a dual tale involving two unlikely murders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hilary Masters is the author of nine novels, two other story collections, a memoir, a collection of personal essays, and a book-length essay on a Mexican mural. He is the recipient of an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Balch Prize for Fiction, and the Monroe Spears Prize (for his essays). His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is professor of English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

ABOUT THE BOOK
““Hilary Masters investigates relationships with such delicacy, he’s like the hummingbird of short story writers. I couldn’t put the book down. The story ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ is amazing. Masters’s many admirers have reason to celebrate the publication of this book; new readers will be fascinated.”
—Ann Beattie, author of Park City

“This brilliant new collection of stories by Hilary Masters is masterful. Always wise and tender, the stories’ beginnings embrace, their middles bewitch, and their endings trump our expectations. Throughout, a companionable intimacy holds our attention. Here is a book with no boring parts!”
—Kelly Cherry, author of We Can Still Be Friends

“I liked watching these stories peel away, layer by layer, the secrets and tensions that exist between parent and child, friend and lover, present and past. Masters has a keen sense of how to recapture the nuances of memory, via language or image, and while each story delivers its insights with satisfying force, some of them seem to me alarmingly wise.”
—Robley Wilson, author of The World Still Melting

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

Big House Pick, October 2009

Normal People Don’t Live Like This, the fiction debut by Dylan Landis, piercingly yet tenderly portrays the inner lives of a girl and her mother in New York City in the 1970s.

In ten discrete installments, written from a variety of perspectives, we follow the uneasy yet magnetic relationships between Leah Levinson, a guarded teenager, and the delinquent girls she worships. Leah and her artistic mother, Helen, struggle against the confines of their pasts and personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are as they make repeated, touching attempts to break free. Just when they seem to have reached an impasse, each makes an impulsive change of place: Leah takes a trip abroad with an endearing young man, and Helen rents, and fantastically ornaments, a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from the patterns of their old existence, daughter and mother independently glimpse the possibility of a different, more vibrant life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dylan Landis has published fiction in Bomb, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere, and has won the California Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, the Writers@Work Fellowship and special mention for a Pushcart Prize. A former journalist, Landis covered medicine for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and interior design for the Chicago Tribune, and has written ten books on decorating and other subjects. She lives in Washington, D.C.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“Dylan Landis has a keen eye for the right detail, and is a master of deciding what to include–and what to leave out. Leah and her enigmatic mother Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose private truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments. Normal People Don’t Live Like This is a wonderful, intriguing, and original debut.”
—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

“In this bracing debut, Dylan Landis guides us into the harsh, secretive world of girls, where the mysteries of power and sexuality baldly govern, and adults and teenagers occasionally intersect across the barbed wire of a mutually earned mistrust.”
—Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

Mini-Interview with Anne Sanow

How early in the process did you know that Triple Time would become a collection of connected stories, and what did you learn about this form?
I always knew that I was going to write a collection set in Saudi Arabia, but the stories weren’t initially connected. I was experimenting with the style and form of the short story by trying different things: first-person narrators and a more grand and formal third, contained set-pieces, various prose structures and rhythms, sections and longer sustained momentum, and so on. Just having fun as a writer, seeing what I could do within each piece and what kinds of story arcs I could create. What happened is that three very strong characters emerged in the drafts: Gus, the WWII pilot who has a relationship with the son of a Bedouin chief; Thurayya, a Bedouin girl; and Kimberly, an expatriate from California. I knew then that these characters needed more space to be heard, and the idea of linking the collection by showing characters at different points in time and from different perspectives just felt organic.

But I also knew that I wasn’t going to switch to the novel form. Yes, I was conscious of trying to tell a larger, historical story about people in this country (and as a writer I tend to think in terms of big projects, things or themes I’m obsessed with). Larger stories are so often thought of as being told in novels, but why is that? I think that you can put worlds into short stories—like Alice Munro does, like Andrea Barrett or Katherine Anne Porter or Alistair MacLeod. So I felt a bit stubborn about sticking to the short form, actually. Not all of the stories are what I’d consider to be epic, but I hope that the cumulative effect does a little something like that for the reader.

American writers who write about other countries are sometimes accused of being “literary tourists,” with the implication that they can never know what life is really like in other cultures, other worlds. Were you conscious of this mindset while working on the book? Did it seem riskier to write about Thurayya than to write about Jill?
In the beginning I was overly conscious of that mindset, and thought I should abide by the “write what you know” adage. This led to early drafts wherein various Western expatriates went about their lives spouting pithy, jaded remarks. These were terrifically boring stories. “The Date Farm” was the first completed story that I truly liked, and because Jill’s experience was closest to my own in Saudi Arabia she was fairly easy to do. I didn’t want to keep writing the same story, however. From that point it was about continually daring myself to delve underneath and write what I didn’t know at all. I buttressed my confidence with a lot of research, but then I just had to let go, and the deeper I got the more nuanced and complex the situations and characters became. For me, nuance is honesty, and every writer owes that to the reader no matter where the stories are set.

Thankfully, when you get to a certain point in the writing your strongest characters just won’t let you disappoint them. That happened with Thurayya, a minor walk-on character who ended up taking over the narrative in “Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time”—the shifts into first-person and plural first-person are hers, and I think she in effect owns the entire piece. She also proved herself strong enough to narrate a story of her own, as an adult (“Rub al-Khali”). So while she is farther from me than is Jill, I think I grew to love her more, and that made writing about her (and in her voice) so satisfying that I just stopped worrying about how she’d be perceived.

Ann Patchett, who selected your book for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, said: “This is the kind of manuscript that reminds me why people want to become editors and agents, and why writers are willing to judge contests: you hope that among the bad manuscripts and the good ones and the very good ones there will be one that is great. This book is great.” It is a great book, larger in theme than “regular” collections of stories, with a subject matter that has perhaps never been timelier for American audiences. So why did it have to win a big prize to find publication? Had you approached agents with the project before submitting to the contest?
Can we insert wry laughter here? Ann Patchett’s comments are lovely and generous, and perhaps if she’d been an agent instead of a best-selling literary writer when I was submitting this book to agents a few years ago, or the market for short stories were better at the time, or . . . who knows? I did try that route and it just didn’t work out, and I won’t pretend that it wasn’t more than a little frustrating. (One question I got a lot was, “why isn’t this a novel?”) Having worked in publishing myself, however, I at least had a little insight into that process and therefore understood how subjective it can be. Winning the Drue Heinz was wonderful: I’d looked to that prize for years and thought, wow, this is part of what holds up the tradition of short-story telling in the United States. I see myself as a fairly traditional writer, so it feels just right.

Mini-Interview with Holly Goddard Jones

The stories in Girl Trouble are longer than average. Has this always been the case for you, or have your stories grown larger as you’ve learned more about structure and your own interests as a writer?
I didn’t always write long stories. As an undergraduate, I generally wrote around 12 pages a story, and my first workshop submissions at grad school were probably 16, 18 pages. It’s funny, though, because when I started finding my voice—when I started doing my own thing instead of impersonating writers I admired, or writers in Best American Short Stories—the stories immediately grew longer, and their pacing changed. I think this is also because my prose style adapted. I began my adult writing life pretending to be Bobbie Ann Mason, but that voice wasn’t ever natural for me. Take the present tense, for instance. Bobbie Ann Mason uses it so well, but that immediacy isn’t the right mode of expression for my point-of-view characters, who (like me) are worriers, dwellers, with a tendency to analyze their own situations. I realized that my characters, the types I’m drawn to, often have a heightened self-awareness; they don’t delude themselves. If anything, they wallow.

A possible exception in Girl Trouble is Theo from “Life Expectancy.” He’s a high school girls’ basketball coach who gets his star player pregnant. He’s the closest I come to a character who’s kidding himself, and you might notice that the story, though still longish, is one of the most compressed in the book. When you have a guy like that who chooses not to delve too deeply into himself, you just don’t need as many words.

Reviewers often praise a male writer’s ability to write from a woman’s point of view, but less is said about women who write from a man’s perspective. Since this is something you do well (“Life Expectancy,” for one example), can you share your thoughts about this aspect of writing fiction?
I hadn’t thought about this issue as a double-standard, which is interesting. If anything, it’s a compliment that I’m used to getting about the stories, and I appreciate it one-hundred percent, though that over-analyzer in me wonders if there’s a subtext to it. For instance, sometimes men react to the book’s title in a strongly negative way, because they don’t think it represents the stories, which are dark and violent and often male-driven. I understand the argument, and I struggled, along with my publisher, to decide if this was indeed the right title. But my niggling doubt is that what people are bristling at is the “girl” part, the suggestion that a girl’s trouble is less significant than a man’s. The irony, of course, is that the whole concept of “girl trouble” is lodged in the male perspective.

But I’m not answering your question. I think I write so often from the male perspective because, for this book, I wanted to look at these conventional acts of violence and aggression—but I didn’t want to always take the conventional victim’s perspective. The project rose out of intellectual curiosity first and foremost—not because I wanted to front an agenda or grind an axe. On the simplest level, it’s also just a really fun challenge. Can I sound like a man? Think like a man? You know, though, I generally just think of my characters as humans, first, and I figure out what they have in common with me, and that’s the foundation from which all else springs. And my husband won’t hesitate to tell me if I’ve gotten it all wrong. In this novel I’m working on now, I was writing recently about a thirteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend is kind of toying with him sexually – teasing him, tempting him, scaring him. I felt like I had a lock on her motivations, and I’d intellectualized his, but I relied on my husband to help me revise for some of the finest points—not language, of course, but motivation, physicality—in this one pivotal scene between them. There’s a lot of guesswork involved. You’d be surprised how far guesswork gets you.

When you sit down to write a story, how conscious are you of your past experiences at the desk? How do you try to separate what you’ve done before from what you’re writing now?
It’s not something I think about consciously, that’s for sure. I’d be paralyzed. My husband, who’s in the visual arts, works in series. He’ll do sketches, then he’ll focus on an aspect of a sketch and do more sketches of that, then he’ll do a sketch model, then he’ll build a more polished model. And one finished work prepares him for the next finished work. I can’t compare writing to that directly, at least in the sense that I don’t do the little exercises and journal entries and character profiles that some do, but I can identify with that belief that every work you create teaches you how to begin the next piece. I couldn’t have written “Proof of God,” the story of a murderer, without first writing “Parts,” the story of the mother of the girl murdered. I couldn’t have embarked upon the novel I’m now writing without first having written the stories in Girl Trouble.

Facebook Group Giveaway!

If you’re on Facebook, please join the Andrew’s Book Club group.

As an incentive, Andrew’s Book Club is giving away a copy of Anne Sanow’s Triple Time. Here are the rules.

1. Join the Andrew’s Book Club Facebook group, if you haven’t already.

2. Recruit at least 5 of your friends to join the group.

3. Once you can confirm that those 5 friends have also joined, send an e-mail to andrewscottonline@mac.com with their names.

4. Everyone who meets these requirements will be entered in the contest. One random winner will be selected. Please include a mailing address in your e-mail.

5. The deadline for this e-mail is 15 September 2009.

The winner is Heather Herr of Clarksville, TN.

UP Pick, September 2009

Triple Time, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, is the debut short story collection/novel-in-stories by Anne Sanow.

For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place—”sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it. Others don’t know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own. And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp speed: Thurayya, the daughter of a Bedouin chief, later finds herself living in a Riyadh high-rise where, she says, there are “worlds wound together with years.”

The characters in the linked stories in Triple Time are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction—of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole.

Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings—for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. Anne Sanow reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions, and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anne Sanow was born and raised in California and moved to Saudi Arabia for two years following her high school graduation. Her stories have appeared in Dossier, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, and Malahat Review, among other publications, and have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She currently lives on Cape Cod.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“This is the kind of manuscript that reminds me why people want to become editors and agents, and why writers are willing to judge contests: you hope that among the bad manuscripts and the good ones and the very good ones there will be one that is great. This book is great.”
—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Run

“Both gritty and poetic, with the place being the grounding of these stories. The unfolding of the overlap in place and character is so well done that once you have realized that this is the author’s intention, you have been so fully immersed in each story that it only complicates and enriches your sense of this book.”
—Rebecca Chace, author of Capture the Flag

“This atmospheric collection of stories gives us glimpses into the lives of a wide range of people–native Saudis and expatriates. The book pulls us in with the power of its details and evocation of places and emotions. We become immersed in the characters’ experiences of love, loss, and self-discovery. Sanow avoids exoticism and makes us understand that people’s concerns, sorrows, senses of loss and joy are similar, no matter what country they live in.”
—Nahid Rachlin, author of Persian Girls

“The Americans in this collection of exquisite dilemmas have farmed the Saudi desert and debauched themselves in the capital for so long that they have forgotten America. The Saudis, born in Bedouin tents and dying in Riyadh skyscrapers, have lived two thousand years of change in a single lifetime. By fusing all their concisely rendered but capacious lives into a single story, Anne Sanow has made a brief epic.”
—Salvatore Scibona, author of The End

“Sanow brings Saudi Arabia to life in seven windswept tales. Each character grapples with the strictures of Saudi society and the rapid changes affecting the nation, both from the outside and within . . . a fascinating glimpse into a world with which many Westerners are unfamiliar.”
—Booklist

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

Big House Pick, September 2009

Girl Trouble, a Harper Perennial paperback original, is Rona Jaffe Award winner Holly Goddard Jones’s debut short story collection, set around small-town Southerners caught in moral and sometimes mortal quandaries. Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories explore the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence.

A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant-with his child. The nightmare of a college student’s rape and murder is relived by both her mother and her killer, whose contradictory accounts call to question the very nature of victimhood. In these eight stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Holly Goddard Jones was born and raised in western Kentucky, the setting for her fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Epoch, and elsewhere, and they’ve been anthologized in two volumes of New Stories from the South (2007 and 2008) and in Best American Mystery Stories 2008. She was honored with a Peter Taylor Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2006 and was the winner in 2007 of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a prize of $25,000 given to only six emerging women fiction writers each year. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University, she has taught at Denison University, the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, Murray State University, and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives there with her husband, Brandon, and two dogs, Bishop and Martha.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“The eight stories collected here poignantly dissect a group of trapped people—mothers, lovers, students, dads—all doing the best they can….While the stories glow with intelligent empathy, Jones is never sentimental. All of her characters are damaged…but, through Jones’s sure telling, we understand the how and why of their lives and catch glimpses of the dreams that sustain their days….The beauty of these stories (and they are exhilarating) stems from how deeply we’re pulled into this complex world, nudged to recognize the thin line between missed opportunity and despair, inarticulate love and loss.”
—O

“In her debut collection, Jones roams deeply familiar short-story territory: small-town betrayal, violence, grief. Fortunately, she also seems to have mastered the genre’s best trick: a charismatic energy, down in the spaces between every word, that makes you feel like she’s the first to ever write about these things.”
—New York

“This masterful debut dramatizes the fortitude of small-town southerners confronting situations gone terribly wrong and the shadowed boundaries of love, morality, and violence….Jones’ seemingly effortless style makes the eight tales quietly powerful and achingly human.”
—Booklist

“The eight stories in this debut collection maintain a sense of isolation and loss while depicting and dissecting the lives of drifting characters making questionable decisions in a quiet Kentucky town….Throughout each, the fallible characters are handled with delicate honesty…. Jones writes with grace and ease, the selections adding up to a powerful sum of reflection, loss and regret.”
—Publishers Weekly

“No politician should ever again use the phrase ‘The American People’ without reading this book, preferably twice, so that they understand at last just who the hell they’re talking about. Holly Goddard Jones has a voice as expansive, complex, and beautiful as the country itself.”
—Joshua Ferris, bestselling author of Then We Came to the End

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

Mini-Interview with Michael Parker

Note: This is an excerpt of my interview with Michael Parker first published in Glimmer Train Stories in 2008.

Don’t Make Me Stop Me Now is your first story collection in more than a decade. You’re primarily known as a novelist. Did these stories emerge slowly over the years, or did you decide to write a collection of stories?
There was a time—an embarrassingly long time—when I thought I was done with short stories. I read somewhere that they were more suited to youthfulness, which is an odd idea, easily contradicted by the likes of William Trevor and Alice Munro and a host of other story writers still going strong well past the flowering of youth. Though it sort of made sense to me, in a way, that the world and its conundrums might seem more suited to shorter forms when you are young and that, as you age and you have more varied experiences, the longer forms with their leisurely pacing, their orbicular rhythms, might appear to be the more appropriate form for the stories you needed to tell. I thought that then; I don’t think that now. The problem with writing fiction is that we have all these experiences to fit into a very limited number of forms: short shorts, short stories, long stories, novellas, novels. I believe very much in a line from an essay by Frank O’Connor: every novel or story worth its weight establishes a rhythm and this is the rhythm of life itself. Finding the appropriate rhythm might be problematic, but it forces you to work with form, with narrative rhythm, and therefore what seems a problem becomes a blessing, because form is what distinguishes story—it is story—and what happens is far less important to me than “the music of what happened,” as William Goyen referred to the most important aspect of fiction making.

I wrote a couple of these stories ten years ago, though most of them were written in the past couple years. All of them are love stories—in that they are about love, or our attempts to love—but I didn’t really set out to collect a bunch of love stories. I just follow my obsessions. It seems I’m obsessed with love, how it defines experience, how it seems the only thing worth pursuing and yet the most difficult human act to perfect. I was thrilled to have a lot of stories to choose from, and it was wonderful fun to return to writing stories after such a long break, though I confess I love the rhythm of novel-writing, especially the feeling that there’s a long road ahead, and that I don’t have to worry, in three weeks or two months, what to do now that the story I’m working on seems have come to a point where abandonment is the only hope.

Do you feel pressure from the publishing world to write novels?
I used to think about the publishing world, but that was before I discovered triathlon and Netflix.

It is true that publishers want novels, and that they don’t get terribly excited when you mention you have a story collection you want to publish, and that they often treat stories as a consolation prize for a novel contract. Novels, they say, bring in more dough. Publishing companies are there to make money. I write both novels and stories, but I’ve published more novels than story collections, as you pointed out, and I am content to let them publish a story collection every ten years or so, given that I have one to sell, as a consolation prize for writing novels. If I were primarily or exclusively a story writer, I might be a bit more touchy about all this. Certainly I’ve seen story writers coaxed into longer forms by publishers with not so great results.

But back to my first, seemingly flippant response: I don’t pay too much attention to the publishing world. I have a good publisher now, a great editor, and I trust they’ll do what they have to in order to stay afloat and that they’ll do what they can to publish my book well. I don’t put too much energy into much besides writing. I don’t have a blog; I don’t have a website. I have nothing against other people’s websites, though I don’t ever look at them, preferring the sentiment expressed in that excellent Replacements song, “Seen Your Video”: “Seen your video/It’s only rock and roll/ I don’t want to know.”

Mini-Interview with Victoria Patterson

Drift is your first book. What is your background as a writer, and why did you decide to become a writer of short fiction?
Writing is what I do. I’ve been writing for years—I have to write. I wrote around jobs and kids, mornings and evenings, whenever I could. I sent out to literary magazines and journals and got rejected over and over, and the long periods of rejection helped my work, made me hone my craft and become more determined. So I wasn’t necessarily thinking in terms of short stories or a novel—I was teaching myself how to write, developing my voice, discovering what I needed to write, and the stories in Drift came through years and years of writing.

At what point did you decide to write a collection of linked stories? What discoveries did you make along the way, both about the formal decision and yourself as a writer?
I knew I had these stories—it just took time for me to figure out how to tell them. I wrote constantly, every chance I had—didn’t get published until my late twenties, and by the time I went back to UCR [University of California-Riverside] in my thirties to get my MFA, everything seemed to come together for me, voice-wise and stylistically and thematically, and I had enough material to concentrate on polishing the stories, linking the stories. It was a turning point. And while I was writing with the goal of getting published, at some point I knew that whether I got published or not, I would continue writing—that I could honestly call myself a writer because I was putting in the work regardless. So that was another kind of turning point.

Southern California is often depicted in American narratives, both in print and on the screen. When does your book align with, or differ from, some of the more common assumptions about the place? What new light does your book shine on Newport Beach?
My family moved to Newport Beach when I was in junior high school, and by the end of high school, the decision had solidified—I wanted to write about the area. There hasn’t been much written about the area in the way I know it and want to write about it, which is another kind of drive for me. And the shows (Laguna Beach, The Real Housewives of Orange Country, The O.C.) highlight the excess and self-seeking behavior and materialism, but they don’t even touch the dark side and the human cost. I’m attempting to write into those spaces, filling out a larger truth. The toll on not just the souls of the people doing the consuming—but on those around them: the kids, the servers, and the people on the periphery.

What’s next for you? More stories? A novel?
My agent is getting ready to send out my novel, inspired by Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. During the writing, I read everything I could get my hands on by Edith Wharton and Henry James, so the novel has a sort of elevated prose that juxtaposes with the Newport-in-the-’90s subject matter—both funny and tragic. I worked long and hard on this novel in between editing Drift, and during the publishing process, and it proved to me that writing is the best remedy from the business and publicity side of things. I’m not sure what’s next, but I want to know soon. Newport Beach continues to fascinate me. There’s a wealth of material, characters, images, to fuel my work.

Big House Pick, August 2009

Victoria Patterson’s sly and subversive stories in Drift expose the underlying misery and crisis in the ostensible Elysium of Newport Beach, California. Rosie, a troubled teenager who grows up to be an alcoholic college student, acts as the story’s common thread, and the cast of characters she encounters includes an addled drifter, a lesbian psychologist who falls for Rosie’s mother, a duplicitous trophy wife, and a damaged but wise transvestite.

You can read one of the stories in Drift, “The First and Second Time,” at the Freight Stories website, where it was published in June.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Victoria Patterson is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various literary journals, including The Southern Review, Santa Monica Review and The Florida Review.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“If I could write just a single story as beautiful and heartbreaking and intelligent as the thirteen linked together in Drift, I’m pretty sure I could die a happy man. Victoria Patterson makes me envious as hell, and I applaud her for it.”
—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

“Drift is one of the truest depictions of Southern California I’ve read yet. Set fifty miles south of Los Angeles, amidst the rampant materialism and manicured malls of Newport Beach, Patterson depicts characters simultaneously at odds with, and in sync with, the cultural void around them. The work is subtle, honest, and a great pleasure to read.”
—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia

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

ABC Rewind: Michael Parker

Friends: I’m introducing a new feature to Andrew’s Book Club. ABC Rewind will spotlight story collections that may have been slightly overlooked when they were originally published, as well as story collections that are reissued after falling out of print. I’m pleased to select Michael Parker’s Don’t Make Me Stop Now as our inaugural book—it’s a dandy.

These eleven arresting, comic, and moving stories by acclaimed writer Michael Parker testify to the driving force of love, the lengths to which we’ll go to claim it and pursue it, the delusions we’ll float to keep it going, the torment that goes part and parcel with it. And despite all of the above, the absolute necessity of it, no matter its consequences.

Whether it’s a college student undone by the boy who leaves her, or the boyfriend intent on leveling old scores from high school for his lover, or the husband who discovers—in the grocery store—the woman he should have been with all along, every character, no matter how off track, wants to believe in debt and credit and payback and making the messy world—and the messy world of love—turn out neatly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Parker’s recent novel If You Want Me to Stay was a 2005 Book Sense Pick and winner of the Goodheart Prize for Fiction. Previous novels include Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, and Hello Down There, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. His stories have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South. He is a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
What makes Mr. Parker so satisfying a writer: his bone-deep affection for his characters; his love of clear, crisp, pungent language; . . . his confidence in the possibility of redemption.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“In prose that is languid and mysterious . . . Parker writes descriptions as precise as line engravings, more revealing than recordings or photographs.”
—The Washington Post

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

Everyone Has an Opinion

Mini-Interview with Jean Thompson

Is the short story the form of first impulse for you? You’ve written several novels, of course, but many of your most faithful readers seem most excited when you have a new story collection. People are excited about Do Not Deny Me.
Stories and novels are actually different and quite separate impulses for me. And it’s true that my first love is stories. Maybe it comes from growing up in the early days of television and its many dramas packed into thirty minute spots. I have a clear memory of turning off an episode of “Captain Midnight” when the action got too suspenseful, and rocking and whimpering in my little chair. I was probably about three years old. In any case, I love the compression of the form, the chance to begin and complete an entire dramatic cycle within a finite space. It can be a little like solving a puzzle to fit all the apparatus of a story (conflict, characterization, resolution, etc.) into a more or less finite space.

How does a certain group of stories become a book for you? What are your thoughts as you try to shape a collection?
I was most conscious of shaping a collection in the case of Throw Like a Girl, which had a particular thematic identity—stories about girls and women. I wanted some variety within that framework, and so tried to find stories about girls and women of different ages, circumstances, etc. With Do Not Deny Me, I felt the need to stretch myself a little further, and write in different forms and tones, not to mention genders. More of a grab bag.

Do your novels begin as stories? Many authors talk about how their novels were stories that just kept growing.
No, as mentioned, novels seem to come from a different part of my brain. Most often, when the tale I want to tell will stray over greater periods of time, or greater geographical distance, or perhaps a multitude of characters who must be given voice, then a larger canvas seems called for.

Finally, please share a few authors —story writers, in particular —who you feel should be more widely read today.
Such an embarrassment of riches. Out recently: Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, Antonya Nelson’s Nothing Right, and Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Also very fond of last year’s National Book Award nominee, [Jim Shepard’s] Like You’d Understand, Anyway. All of these are short story collections, but let me also mention Pete Rock’s terrific novel, My Abandonment.

Mini-Interview with Suzanne Burns

Misfits and Other Heroes 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 Misfits about four years ago. It took a year to get the basic ideas of the story structure outlined in my head. I pitched the first two stories to Dzanc as a collection before I’d written the collection. By the time I heard the good news from them (an offer of publication) I had finished the collection. I learned that a strong collection ties together, whether it be theme or tone or something more abstract. I learned that writing is damn, damn hard, not always rewarding, but worth it in the end, each and every time.

I wrote this entire collection by hand in a spiral notebook in bed late at night while my husband snored beside me. Our happiness at being together is what enabled me to write such dark and distraught and somewhat disturbing characters and plots. I felt safe playing this game of pretend, dealing with the overwrought female archetype in new ways. One of my friends recently told me I should market myself as “Hemingway for women.” I like that.

You also write poetry. How soon do you know when a certain impulse—an image, maybe, or a remembered bit of language—will become either a poem or story?
Poetry is a stone bitch to get right, first of all. I try and try, but I think fiction is so much more rewarding because I can have these flashes of story ideas and mill them over in my brain for awhile. Poetry strikes fast and furious and you better get those lines down before they disappear in the ether.

Do you think of an specific audience for your work? Who is your ideal reader?
My ideal reader is the ghost of Shirley Jackson. I try not to think of audience. Thinking of an audience feels too much like auditioning for a play without being told which part you’re up for.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Kafka, Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the authors of Betty Crocker cookbooks. Oh, and Rod Serling, the underrated father of Americana magic realism. (And damn handsome, too.)

I am excited about up and coming authors like Kevin Sampsell, Matt Bell, Riley Michael Parker, Barry Graham and c.vance.

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Indie Pick, July 2009

Dzanc Books and its imprints have published many compelling debut short-story collections in the last year or two: Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory, Michael Czyzniejewski’s Elephants in Our Bedroom, and Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love, just to name three. To this growing and impressive list, add one more: Misfits and Other Heroes by Suzanne Burns.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Suzanne Burns has previously published two collections of poetry: Blight and The Flesh Procession. Her writing has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and she is the recipient of two poetry fellowships. She is a freelance editor who is currently working on a new novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“This is no ordinary collection. In Misfits and Other Heroes Burns writes of disproportion, excess, reinvention, and lack as a means of magnifying outward physical irregularities to better reveal the inner irregularities of her characters. Burns is unafraid to explore the dark territory of human heart where love and hate are twins for desire and dread. The many brilliant moments of character, language, and startling observations indicate Burns is a keen observer of the wretched and wonderful human creature. In Burns’ capable hands the grotesque becomes achingly familiar: the misfits she writes about are us.”
—Gina Oschner, author of People I Wanted to Be

“Suzanne Burns’s “heroes” in Misfits and Other Heroes may at first seem just the other side of real, but in their obsessions with food and love and their stories’ perfectly odd specificity, they’re as real and credible as Americans can be, whether they’re a tiny husband carried around in a bird cage by his wife or a woman who prefers to eat glass rather than dumplings or a couple attached to a dollhouse. Who would have thought that Oregon’s misfits could be as deluded and cruel as Flannery O’Connor’s Southerners and even more bizarre?”
—Tom Whalen, author of Winter Coat

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

Big House Pick, July 2009

Jean Thompson, heralded as “America’s Alice Munro…one of the best contemporary short-story writers” by Kirkus, delivers twelve exquisite new stories that combine her beloved trademarks of dark humor, seductively sharp wit, and uncanny observations on human nature. Do Not Deny Me is a fictional primer on how Americans live day to day: Thompson’s characters—a middle manager in the midst of midlife crisis, an urban single visiting her best friend turned suburban mother, a grieving woman looking for guidance—are instantly recognizable in their predicaments, foibles, and sensibilities.

A brilliantly wrought exploration of the myriad circumstances that Americans are experiencing right now, this superlative collection perfectly captures the joys and amusements, trials and sorrows of its fictional inhabitants. Do Not Deny Me should be savored, word by word.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jean Thompson is the author of Throw Like a Girl as well as the novel City Boy; the short story collection Who Do You Love, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction; and the novel Wide Blue Yonder, a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection for 2002. Her short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, and been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Jean’s work has been praised by Elle as “bracing and wildly intelligent writing that explores the nature of love in all its hidden and manifest dimensions.”

Jean’s other books include the short story collections The Gasoline Wars and Little Face, and the novels My Wisdom and The Woman Driver. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and taught creative writing at the University of Illinois, Reed College, Northwestern University, and many other colleges and universities.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“If there are ‘Jean Thompson characters,’ they’re us, and never have we been so articulate and worthy of compassion. These stories confirm that no one is beneath her interest, or beyond her sure and seemingly limitless reach.”
—David Sedaris, author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Her stories linger and seep into your dreams.”
—Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill from My Father

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

Dzanc Compiles Essays on Short Stories

Short Story Month may never end: Dzanc Books is publishing a “collection of no less than 160 essays” about individual stories. Many of these appeared online over at the Emerging Writers Network, but you can get your own copy for a “minor tax deductible donation.”

This past May’s celebration of the short story produced an extraordinary number of great articles, blog posts and reviews in support of Short Story Month. We at Dzanc thought what a wonderful resource it would be to compile some of these essays into one publication. In partnering with Matt Bell of www.mdbell.com, Aaron Burch of Hobart, Steven McDermott of Storyglossia, and our own Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network, Dzanc has put together a collection of no less than 160 essays, covering over 320 pages, into one book. Each essay explores a specific story and/or collection by authors both heralded and overlooked, all deserving of a first – or second, or twelfth – read.

As we are all readers and lovers of great writing, the chance to have a compilation of essays that champion some of the great stories and story collections of our time, provides an invaluable tool to turn to when wondering what to read next. Dzanc Books – as part of its mission as a nonprofit 501(c)3 press dedicated to bringing literature and lit programs to a wider audience – will mail you a copy of these Short Story Month Essays for a minor tax deductible donation. On top of publishing great works of literary fiction, Dzanc Books provides workshops for students in the public schools free of charge. Our Dzanc Writers In Residency Programs matches writers with students whose schools do not otherwise provide students the opportunity to explore their own creative voices. Dzanc covers all expenses for these programs, which run several thousand dollars each. All monies donated to Dzanc for the purchase of our Short Story Month Essays will go 100% to our charitable programs which Dzanc conducts nationwide. A ten dollar donation will cover our costs (printing and shipping) on our SSME and, understanding these harsh economic times, we wont appeal to you for anything beyond which you can afford. We believe these essays provide insights and recommendation for books and authors which can be turned to again and again. Dan and I thank you in advance. To get your own copy, please visit our support page at http://www.dzancbooks.org/support and make a tax deductible donation of ten dollars or more. Please email Dan at info@dzancbooks.org if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve Gillis
Dan Wickett
Dzanc Books
www.dzancbooks.org

Mini-Interview with Josh Weil

Your agent had the idea to approach publishers with a collection of novellas, The New Valley, and it sold within the week. Did you ever think your first book would be novellas? It’s such a rarity, especially for debut authors.
Honestly, I was a little shocked when my agent, PJ Mark, suggested we go out with the novellas first. I had a novel, and a bunch of stories, and, though I had written “Sarverville Remains” with the idea that it would be part of the novella collection, I showed it to him first with the idea that it could be a short stand-alone novel. But one of the things I love about PJ is that he has a knack for seeing what shape something is meant to take, and he knew it was meant to be a novella. Almost with chagrin (because you’re right: it’s very rare for anyone—especially debut authors—to publish novella collections), I mentioned that I had written it as part of a collection of three novellas. He said, Show them to me. He read them and came back and said, This is what we should go out with. I think he saw what I knew, too: that, of all my work, the novellas were closest to my heart, and, perhaps because of that, my best work at the time. And he wasn’t afraid of the idea of a novella collection. That’s another thing I love about him: he isn’t afraid to try stuff, to break the mold. But, you know, I should have known the novellas would be the first book I’d publish. A while ago, when I was about to head off on some rough solo traveling/researching in Uganda, I sent my father a makeshift will. In it, I asked that, if I died, he try to get the novellas published—not anything else of my writing: the novellas. When you feel that way about something, you know in your gut it’s what should be out there. And that’s what you should try to get out there, no matter how unlikely it might seem at first.

What do you find so compelling about the novella form?
So many things. I love short stories, and I love novels, and I love reading and writing both. But novellas exist in a unique middle ground that has all the intensity and focus of a short story, yet also has the generosity of a novel. I love that there is time for moments to breath, for the things that make up the world of the story be deepened, made a little more full. I love that characters have time to live, to exist in that world for long enough that I—and readers, hopefully—can really grow close to them. And yet there isn’t the room for detours and multiple, swirling plots that there is in a novel, so the novella is particularly clean. That doesn’t mean—as I think some people take it to mean—that it’s tied to a classic, simple approach to story. Because it’s so clean, there’s a lot of room to experiment, perhaps more than in a novel. A reader will read pretty much anything—so long as it’s good—for 20 pages in a short story, regardless of whether it fits her expectations of classical story structure. But it’s hard to sustain structurally inventive stuff over the course of a four hundred page novel. Some brilliant writers can, of course, but even with them, they lose a lot of perfectly smart readers. But over the course of eighty or a hundred pages, there’s the freedom of the short story, combined with the depth of the novel. That, more than anything else, is what draws me to the form.

How long did it take you to write The New Valley? Why do these three novellas, in your mind, comprise the entirety of a book? Why not two novellas, say, or four?
That’s a good—and complicated—question. First, the easier part (how long it took) though that’s not as straight-forward as it might seem. Once I get writing, I tend to write quickly, at least the first draft, but it often takes me a long time to get to the point where I’ve thought about a story enough, and mapped it out enough in my mind, and, most crucially, hit that point where my subconscious can crack whatever blocks my conscious mind has put up to letting the story start to roll. For instance, the central image and idea of “Ridge Weather” was gleaned from a failed short story I’d written years ago. I had thought about it and mulled it over and then one day, in December 2001, down at the cabin in Virginia, the whole novella just came to me. I wrote the first draft in about a week. I beat my head against the wall blocking “Stillman Wing” for a long time, and failed at a couple attempts at it, but then, one fall, the wall broke and I wrote that quickly, too. “Sarverville Remains” was similar, though of all the novellas, that one came to me most complete and required the least revision. Once Geoffrey’s voice was in my head, it kind of wrote itself. Except for the usual tightening and careful editing and sentence by sentence stuff, which I do with all my writing, and which I believe in very strongly. I write a fast first draft, but I spend a lot of time honing it afterward. I guess I wrote the novellas in short spurts over a period of about five years.

Why three? Well, two would have set them up as a pair, and drawn parallels too closely; they would have been expected to mirror each other in some ways, and to be tied together in ways that, I think, would work against the overall feeling of isolation and disconnect that is so central to the book. Originally, I had thought of it as four (one in each season in the valley). But once I wrote “Sarverville Remains,” I knew it would be three. In part, because that one is so long (there’s just not really space for another). And in part because it covers both spring and summer (the story is told in the present, looking back at the events of the previous season, but the present also follows its own arc through summer). But, truly, I think it just felt done with the three of them. I can’t put it any more clearly than those three just felt of a kind; they belonged together. One more would have made the book feel crowded. And if there’s anything The New Valley shouldn’t be, it’s crowded.

What’s next? A novel? More novellas?
I’ll definitely write more novellas sometime. And I’ve been wrestling with a novel for a while. But just recently I began something that, frankly, I don’t know what it is. I wanted it to be a novella; but I think it wants to be a novel. It will probably win out. That scares me a little, but excites me more. And it’s the first thing since The New Valley that came to me the way those novellas did, and feels as close to my heart, so I’m driving through to the end of it—and then we’ll see.

Mini-Interview with Midge Raymond

You began by writing nonfiction. How did you come to write short stories, and what does writing fiction offer you?
In graduate school, I fell in love with literary journalism, with telling true stories with all the nuance and style of fiction. I worked with Caryl Rivers and Mark Kramer, and Mark in particular taught me how to look at every word in a sentence and get it just right. He also taught me how to look for stories in everyday life, and once I began to see stories in everything, it made transitioning to fiction very natural.

I first started writing fiction because I had a full-time day job in New York, was freelancing a lot to make ends meet, and had little time leftover for the fieldwork that narrative nonfiction requires. If I was going to write, I needed to do it in short bursts: on the subway, during my lunch hour, for a few minutes before bed. So, quite simply, since I couldn’t tell true stories, I began making them up — and I had so much fun with it. Most of my stories stem from moments or people that intrigue me — seeing an interesting person on the street, watching two people interact, reading a bizarre news blurb. With nonfiction, you’d research, interview, and report a story; with fiction, I envision it and bring my own imagination and curiosity to it.

Several of your stories are set in far-off locales. What is the importance of place in your work? How do you talk about place in fiction?
For me, place is important mostly for what it reveals about character, which for me is what drives a story. In Forgetting English, place is obviously essential — these stories look at how being out of one’s element can actually bring certain things into a sharper focus — how we see things more clearly, for better or worse, once we’re away from our usual routines and distractions.

But I think that sometimes place will play a role in a different way. For example, one story I wrote, “Water Children,” which isn’t included in this collection, is about twins, and where they live in the story isn’t as important as the fact that they shared the same physical space before they were born. So “place” can mean a lot of things in a story, and emotional space is often more important than physical space. But I find it’s always fairly central because that’s where a character is truly coming from, and if we want to understand our characters — and if we want readers to connect with them — we need to find this sense of place in a story.

Forgetting English is a small book, some might say, with eight stories across 116 pages, and you’ve published far more stories in journals and magazines. How did you shape this particular collection? And, given that your manuscript won the Spokane Prize, I wonder how it changed after you submitted to the contest.
When I first started writing stories, I thought I’d be able to simply put them all together as soon I had enough for a collection — and what I ended up with was so completely random that it just didn’t work. So I knew I had to find a common theme, that I needed a thread to tie the pieces together, even loosely. I published my first story in 1999 — and here I am with my first collection ten years later. Although the stories in Forgetting English were all written in the past five years, it took me that long until I had enough stories that fit well together.

So when I found myself with several stories about Americans abroad, discovering things about themselves and about their relationships that likely wouldn’t have happened if they’d been at home, I knew I had a theme that would work. During this time, I wrote many stories that don’t appear in the collection, but if I found myself with a piece set outside a character’s usual setting, I’d finish it with the collection in mind. And eventually it all came together.

After it won the contest, the individual stories didn’t change much, but the manuscript as a whole took on a more graceful shape. The editors suggested omitting one piece, changing the title of another, and re-ordering the stories, which worked out really well. They had a fresh perspective and were able to see, in ways that I hadn’t, how to arrange them in a way that would flow better. The Press’s managing editor, Pamela Holway, is an amazing editor and proofreader, and she had some wonderful suggestions, all of which I feel improved the book as a whole.

What are you working on now? More stories, or something longer?
I’m always working on stories! I have a couple of new pieces in the works, but I’m also working on a novel. I’m in the very early stages, which is a rather stressful place to be — getting to know the characters, doing a lot of research, figuring out where it’s headed. I enjoy writing stories at the same time because it’s nice to tackle something smaller and more manageable when I feel overwhelmed by the book. It’s like returning to a friendly and familiar place that, at the same time, still allows you to lose yourself a bit.

Mini-Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell

This is your second story collection. How long has it been in the works, and what did you learn about writing—and shaping a collection—the second time around?
Oh, Lordy, you’re opening a can of worms here. I’ve written most of these stories in the last eight years. I like to say that when it comes to the recession business, Michigan has been ahead of the curve; we’ve been in recession for a decade already. On the other hand, I might confess to you that I’ve been working on one of the stories in the collection for twenty-four years. I started the story a few years out of college, but I didn’t have the writing skills to complete it. Over the last couple decades I’ve continued to pick it up now and again and fiddle with it. I finally got it right. That story is “Bringing Belle Home.”

This collection, American Salvage, required a lot more shaping than Women & Other Animals. When the collection was accepted by Wayne State University Press, I still didn’t quite have a clear idea of what the collection was, but the prospect of getting it published was a kick in the butt to figure it out. Wayne State was very patient while I fiddled with it; I swapped out a couple stories, and I wrote an entirely new story that tied together some of the other pieces. “King Cole’s American Salvage” was added to the collection very late in the process.

Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms?
For me, a short story is something I can hold in my head in its entirety. When I’m working on a novel, I’m working on one part of a piece of writing, but every time I mess with a word or a piece of punctuation in a short story, I feel I’m working the whole piece. My background is in mathematics, and in a short story, I feel I’m creating something akin to a mathematical proof.

Do you think of an specific audience when you’re writing a story? Who is your ideal reader?
My friend Heidi Bell is my ideal reader. She reads carefully, notices and applauds all good things she reads in my work, and she also notices where I’ve screwed up. I would like a reader that has a high standard for fiction, on the sentence level and the story level. I know that if I’ve written a story that pleases Heidi, I’m in good shape. She edited American Salvage, and it is much better for it.

The second most important reader is my brother Tom. He’s a pipefitter, and he doesn’t read much fiction, but he reads and appreciates my work. I want to make sure that my stories speak to him as well as to the more typical literary reader.

Some other people I keep in mind are Carla Vissers and Lisa Lenzo, who are in my writing group. It is helpful for me to anticipate what they might say about a piece; that helps me improve it before I share it with them.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
I can’t say for certain who my influences are, beyond my party-loving story-telling mother and my socially conservative (politically liberal) storytelling Irish grandfather. I hope I’m influenced by John Steinbeck, because he is such a humanitarian in writing about tough situations; Flannery O’Connor taught me that it is okay to be brutal. William Faulkner taught me that one can write richly about a particular region of the world, and that region will keep giving richness to the author who keeps looking closely.

I’m always excited to read Alice Munro and Aimee Bender—every time I read one of Bender’s stories, I feel the top of my head is coming off (à la Emily Dickinson). I love Lucia Perillo, especially her poem “The Shrike Tree.” I’m excited about Mark Bragg, a western writer who writes like Cormac McCarthy with a bit more mushy love. My pal Andy Mozina can write about sex in a way that makes you queasy and fully awake with your new knowledge of human nature.

Big House Pick, June 2009

The three linked novellas that comprise Fulbright-winner Josh Weil’s debut, The New Valley, bring us into America’s remote and often unforgiving backcountry, and delicately open up the private worlds of three very different men as they confront love, loss, and their own personal demons.

Set in the hardscrabble hill country between West Virginia and Virginia, The New Valley is populated by characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—from a soft-spoken middle-aged landscaper and beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s suicide; to a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; to a mildly retarded man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each novella is a vivid, stand-alone examination of uniquely romantic relationships. As the men struggle against grief, solitude, and obsession, their desperation slowly leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation.

Written with a deeply American tone and in empathetic, meticulously crafted prose, The New Valley is a tender exploration of resilience, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Josh Weil was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia, to which he returned to write these novellas. His short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, New England Review, American Short Fiction, Narrative and other journals. He has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and written for Poets & Writers, Guernica, and other magazines. Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright Grant, fellowships and scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dana Award in Portfolio. As the 2009-2010 Tickner Writing Fellow, he will be the writer-in-residence at Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. He currently divides his time between New York City and a cabin in southwestern Virginia, where he is at work on a novel.

Read his short essay “Breathing Room,” written for Glimmer Train.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Josh Weil’s debut book The New Valley has a sense of the notable on every page. This is the very rare but clear case of the sky being the limit for a young author.”
—Jim Harrison, author of The English Major and Legends of the Fall

“I was captivated and moved by each of these finely made novellas. The quiet, mostly ordinary lives of the characters who populate The New Valley shine with a strange and intense luminosity that is at times heartbreaking, at other times triumphant. There is a magic and gentle beauty in this book that makes me remember why I had always wanted to be a writer.”
—Tim O’Brien, winner of a National Book Award and author of The Things They Carried and July, July

WHERE TO BUY:
Your local independent bookstore
Powell’s [SPECIAL SIGNED EDITION]
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

UP Pick, June 2009

Midge Raymond’s story collection, Forgetting English (Eastern Washington University Press), received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. She stretches the boundaries of place as she explores the indelible imprint of home upon the self and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm who we are.

From a biologist navigating the stark, icy moonscape of Antarctica to a businesswoman seeking refuge in the lonely islands of the South Pacific, the characters in these stories abandon their native landscapes—only to find that, once separated from the ordinary, they must confront new interpretations of who they really are, and who they’re meant to be. Read a sample of her work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Midge taught communication writing at Boston University for six years, as well as creative writing at Boston’s Grub Street Writers. While living in Southern California, she co-founded and taught at Metropolitan Writing Works as well as San Diego Writers, Ink, where she served as vice president of the board of directors. She now lives and writes in Seattle, where she teaches at Richard Hugo House. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Ontario Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Passages North, and other publications.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“When you forget English, you might learn to speak the forbidden language of your sister’s Tongan lover — you might find you understand the sweet murmur of the Gentoo and the ecstatic cry of Emperor Penguins. When the man you saved from the sea chooses the icy water a second time, you may bend to the universal posture of grief, recognizing the way your body echoes a bird’s in a wild communion of sorrow. Midge Raymond’s stories are a revelation and a delight, a journey from the frozen desert at the bottom of the world to the lush rainforest of Hawai’i. Prepare yourself to think in Chinese, to start over, to reveal your worst crime and discover you are a stranger to yourself, born again into a world where all things become wondrous and new, terrifying and possible.”
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body

“Midge Raymond’s exquisitely written stories turn on relationships, and not just of one kind — between lovers, yes, but also within families, between sisters, among friends, or forged in chance encounters with strangers — and the turning often occurs in moments when the utterly mundane had abruptly conjured itself into crisis….Raymond’s eye for telling detail is very fine, as one expects of an accomplished writer, but to this she adds the informing eye of a natural historian of place.”
— John Keeble, author of Nocturnal America

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

A Few Updates to ABC

The June selections will be unveiled tomorrow, as is custom around these parts. In July, however, a new feature: ABC Rewind, where not-new story collections are allowed to shine. The ultimate goal of this endeavor is to help bring attention to deserving books and writers. It is increasingly obvious that plenty of good books of stories slip past readers, and every so often, ABC Rewind will try to drum up interest for a good book that may have flown under your radar.

Also, to clarify my definition of story collection, as some of you may wish to nit-pick one of tomorrow’s selections: a story collection brings together any number of small-, medium-, or large-sized fictional narratives by one author which would not normally be published in book-form without the act of collecting them together.

And ABC is finally on Twitter (@andrewsbookclub). We have a nice Facebook group, so join us. No MySpace, though.

Mini-Interview with Robert Boswell

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is your third collection of stories, but your first in fifteen years. How has the process of shaping stories into a collection changed for you over the years?
My process for shaping a story collection hasn’t changed at all: I write as many good stories as I can, and then I stack them together. It’s my process for writing individual stories that determines this, my insane process that requires writing thirty to fifty drafts of every story. I don’t write to polish, but to permit the narrative to move away from my initial intentions, to become complex and strange—or at least not boring. I call each of these changing versions a transitional draft, and I don’t quit until the story stands on its own hooves and turns around to glower—meaning that it’s fully alive and no longer mine. Such a process makes the idea of shaping a collection as I’m writing the stories all but impossible. It’s like asking a blind man how he prefers his darkness.

Having said all that, I’ll now admit that I’m writing a series of connected stories about two characters, a novel-in-stories that I hope to finish this summer. I’ve been working with the characters for more than a decade, and the book keeps changing shape. It’s a dark, funny story of a man, a woman, and a shared obsession.

This collection showcases your range as a story writer. A few of the stories are more experimental than your earlier work (“A Sketch of Highway on the Nap of a Mountain” comes to mind), and several others are much longer, almost novelistic, such as the title story and “A Walk in Winter.” I wonder how you approach a story in progress. Do you make decisions early in the process? Do you set out to write a longer novelistic story, or a shorter experimental piece?
I always set out to write a story of twelve pages. This is my dream length, and if you look at the table of contents, you’ll see that I’ve failed with every story. None is on target. They have their own ideas about how long they ought to be, and they have their ways of making me listen.

The stories that are generated by language or that rely heavily on some stylistic curveball tend to be short. They poke their heads into the book and then reach for their coats. “A Sketch of Highway on the Nap of a Mountain” is a voice story, while “Guests” is an attempt to use lyricism and imagery and even rhyme to capture a state of being. Some people have generously said that my language in such stories is very poetic; these utterances typically come from big-hearted citizens who don’t read contemporary poetry.

The longer stories got long despite my best efforts. They’re like dogs that won’t stay on a leash. They run away and by the time they eventually show up on your porch again, they have something putrid coating their fur. Well, you can’t leave them like that. So you take them out again, this time with a washtub and vinegar and tomato juice, and just when you think you’ve got them under control, they smell a distant backyard barbecue and are out of your hands and down the street snacking off a grill. Such stories continually find ways to humiliate you. “Yes, I have a brand new one,” you say to the editor who called to ask for a story, “but it’s fifty-four pages long…Hello?”

“No River Wide” was originally a twelve pager, set at a party in Florida, and I was pretty sure that it was good enough to be published, but I wasn’t quite happy with it. I thought I might be able to squeeze a little more oomph out of it if I gave more of the main character’s background. Thirteen years and, quite literally, a hundred drafts later, I finished it, and I believe I got that oomph, but the story is thirty-five pages. The party is still in the story, but “No River Wide” bears little resemblance to that early draft. I believe it’s the best story that I’ve ever written—not the one that’s best liked or will be most loved, but the one that is the most beyond my abilities.

You’ve written more novels than story collections. Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms?
Stories have a devastating left hook, while novels are all rabbit punches, kidney shots, some nifty footwork, and relentless jabs to the head and the heart that accumulate over fifteen rounds. Both can knock you out, but the way they go about it is different.

The essays in your book about writing fiction, The Half-Known World, list the stories and novels you use as examples, and you provide a list for additional reading at the end of the book. It can’t be the case that you’ve mentioned every important book in your development as a writer. Tell us a few books younger writers need to read that you don’t mention in The Half-Known World.
My son is eighteen and reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for his Senior English class. He loves it, but the reading assignments are incremental, and to satisfy his teacher, he won’t let himself get more than one assignment ahead of the class. So he’s reading each section over and over. By the time the class has inched through Africa with Marlowe, my son will have read the book five times.

I was in college by the time I read Heart of Darkness, but I was in its thrall in much the same way. This kind of an experience with a book feels very a lot like falling in love, and it is this experience that made me want to be a writer.

I like to think that I didn’t fall in love easily, but I sure as hell fell often. I was insanely obsessed with Moby Dick when I was twenty. Every event in my life seemed related to the novel. Roadkill on a desert shoulder would make me see the carcass of a whale, and, to make things worse, I’d have to tell everybody about it. I had the same experience five years later with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In another five years, I’d find Anna Karenina, White Noise, Housekeeping, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Remains of the Day. I’d list more, but you might think me a trollop.

My suggestion to younger writers is not necessarily to read the novels that I recommend, but to find the stories and novels that transport them and turn them upside down and change the way they see the world. My advice is to keep falling in love.

An Appreciation: Alice Munro’s “Differently”

Dan Wickett and others are promoting May as Short Story Month. (Check the cool graphic.) The Emerging Writers Network is posting various appreciations of short stories, written by readers and other writers. Here’s my contribution, for what it’s worth. Munro’s quotes on writing are from the introduction to her Selected Stories.

Like many readers, I am always grateful to come upon the kind of story Alice Munro calls “durable and freestanding,” one that forever alters my experience as a reader. Munro has written many such stories. Her story-as-house metaphor is aptly realized in her best fiction, especially after she consciously abandoned the epiphanic shape of her earliest stories, such as those found in Dance of the Happy Shades. Her stories will endure for a number of reasons—for their complexity, yes, as well as for Munro’s willingness to construct a “house” that always reveals more rooms upon re-reading. Her awareness of readers’ expectations drives many of her most compelling craft decisions.

“Differently,” a story from Friend of My Youth, is a fair representation of Munro’s post-epiphanic work. Her stories often contain a multitude of narrative forms (shapes), in much the same way a novel can simultaneously employ various shapes. This is what we mean when we say her stories are novelistic or expansive. Many of her stories are quite long, some over forty pages. “Differently” is not one of her longest stories, however; at 28 pages in the Vintage edition, it is only the fifth-longest story in Friend of My Youth. Yet “Differently” does have the feel of a novel because there are many characters whose entire lives (or the bulk of their lives) are revealed for readers, and its shapes vary widely, from the journey to the gathering and more.

Munro is conscious of her desire to pack entire lives—not mere moments—into her stories. “Differently” opens with this paragraph:

Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.

Munro, like the creative writing instructor, realizes the importance of the reader’s expectations. Unlike the instructor, however, Munro does not hedge toward simplicity or oversimplification. Her sense is that readers can rise to meet the work on its own terms without it being “dumbed down” for them. In “Differently,” Munro is thinking about what readers should pay attention to, about what is the important thing. Her answer is simple: she asks that readers pay attention to everything, that they see the importance of each aspect of the story.

One possible reason for Munro’s decision to move away from the epiphanic structure is that, after a century of encountering them in books and magazines, readers can find the epiphanic pattern and predict, before the story’s ending, the ways in which the character will view the events in a new light. In short, readers’ expectations in an epiphanic story are not openly challenged. For a story to be “durable and freestanding,” to use Munro’s terms, for it to hold up after many and various kinds of re-reading and examination, Munro insists that the story contain “more than you saw the last time.” Epiphanic stories may have the effect of surprise during the first reading, but the epiphany is rarely as powerful the second time through, and if the story has little else but the epiphany, it will be hard for it to remain durable. That house will need to be knocked down.

The plot of “Differently” is fairly straight-forward. Georgia travels to visit Raymond. The front story—that is, the story that does not occur in flashback or memory—occurs in Raymond’s house. Georgia’s visit is the occasion for story. She and Raymond talk, remember old times, some of which were better than others. Then Georgia leaves. During the course of the afternoon discussion in the front story, which is told in the present tense, Munro weaves in decades of back story. As a result, readers are never really sure what to expect. The first section, which begins the front story, also contains numerous moments and memories of Georgia and Raymond’s pasts—shared and not. Numerous sections keep the reader guessing as to what will come next. The sections are organized only in an associative fashion. Munro navigates through time as needed, and not in any predictable way.

The second section, for example, moves one year back from the time of Georgia’s visit to Raymond, to the moment Georgia learned of Maya’s death. Maya was Raymond’s wife. Georgia’s had been angry with Maya for many years because Maya slept with a man Georgia had been having an affair with.

At this point, readers might think a pattern is developing, that Munro will return to the front story in Raymond’s living room, thus establishing an alternating pattern of sections: front story, back story, front story, and so on. Instead, the third section moves even deeper into the past, back to the time Georgia and her husband first visited Maya and Raymond’s house. The fourth section remains deep in back story, but moves forward from the third section to characterize the development of Georgia and Maya’s friendship. The fifth section continues with this, and establishes the start of Georgia’s affair; the sixth clarifies their friendship and the downfall of Georgia’s affair; the seventh section, which is longer than the previous five sections, details the emotional breakdown and distance within Georgia and Maya’s friendship.

The eighth section returns readers to the present-tense front story, the conversation between Georgia and Raymond. But quickly readers are moved through to the ninth section, to Georgia’s final memories of Maya. The tenth and final section brings readers again to Raymond’s living room, where Raymond asks Georgia how they should behave:

“Differently,” says Georgia. She puts a foolish stress on the word, meaning that her answer is so lame that she can offer it only as a joke.

The moment is like an epiphany. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would become an epiphany. But Munro moves past epiphany, as even Georgia realizes the “lame”-ness of the moment, of her answer, putting that “foolish stress” on the word.

A writer analyzing the craft of Munro’s stories can expect a long and rewarding journey. Her stories’ structures are often not easily visible. We writers examining her craft are consciously studying how the stories are put together; a reader engaged in her work simply for enjoyment will likely never know the exact reasons for its complicated construction. That is to say, such readers may read and re-read her stories only with pleasure and wonder.

“Too many things,” the creative writing instructor said. The opening is revelatory regarding Munro’s approach to craft. But what reader would expect to encounter the story that follows? Munro’s approach is in direct contrast to much of the simple Poe-derived craft advice passed among short story writers for over 150 years. Rust Hills, in Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, reminds his readers that “Poe spoke of the short story as providing ‘a single and unique effect…[and if the author’s] very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then [the author] has failed in [the] first step.’” Few of Munro’s first sentences tend to the unity of the work, yet her work is always unified.

There are other stories as intricately designed as Munro’s best work; James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is one such story. Munro’s design is responsible for its durability, and readers will always be excited about her work because our expectations are never easily met. If it’s true that we never want what comes too easily to us, then that is another reason Munro’s fiction will endure long past her lifetime. Reading her work can, at times, frustrate readers—especially students and readers encountering literature for the first time—because readers must surrender completely to her narrative control. But when readers finish her stories, we cannot deny that we’ve been permanently altered.

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

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

STAT 101

Nearly 2,000 page views in the first month. Not too shabby. Let’s try to double it in February. Tomorrow: the new ABC selections!

Some Thoughts on ABC

One visitor to the ABC blog has shared his opinions about the endeavor. Generally speaking, I appreciate his careful considerations. And, as he says: “I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading, certainly, and I also don’t particularly want to criticize what seems a well-intentioned if underconceived gesture.”

Here are a few excerpts from his post.

That said, I see a fundamental problem with Scott’s approach: by explicitly arguing against a “scattered” approach to book-buying in favor of the “One Book” model popularized by Oprah’s Book Club and various city libraries, he encourages the already messed-up economics of the trade publishing industry by deliberately seeking to focus sales solely on two books per month, rather than offering his readers a wider sampling of disparate books they might buy. The trade publishing industry is predicated on such bulk purchases; one hyped or high-profile book will cover the unearned advances of many other books—and also based around promoting the blockbuster to the detriment of these other books.

Later:

It seems a shame for a medium such as a blog—isn’t “democratic” the cliché generally invoked in this case?—to replicate trade publishing’s sales model.

No one person or book club can change this publishing model. Andrew’s Book Club attempts to work with it, for better or worse, by drawing attention to two books of stories each month. Most of the chosen books will probably fall into what this blogger calls “high-profile, middle-of-the-road examples—books that will receive plenty of attention regardless of [my] efforts.” To this, may I please remind everyone that three of the four writers given as examples in the initial post are college professors, and one worked in a paper mill for 32 years before going to graduate school. My point? Almost no story writers make their living from writing alone. As such, EVERYONE who writes stories could use a little extra help in promoting his or her books. If “plenty of attention” means one or two prominent book reviews, that’s simply not enough.

As for my two January picks — wow, they’re far from “high-profile,” I’d say. Yes, Lauren Groff has received a lot of attention in her short writing career, but Delicate Edible Birds is just her second book. It sure would be nice if she could have a third book, and a fourth. As for Allison Amend’s book, I’m glad this blogger rightly calls OV Books “a fine small press,” but it’s not like I can find her book at any of the Borders or Barnes & Nobles in Indianapolis, a city of more than a million people. (I tried.) Things That Pass for Love is Allison’s first book, and it took a long time for it to find print, despite her success at placing the individual stories with excellent literary journals. (Update: She’s just sold her novel, however. Congrats!)

My point: I appreciate the thoughtful consideration given to Andrew’s Book Club. I made it clear in the initial post that readers should buy all books that they deem worthy of reading. But by focusing on two picks each month, I can take a few small steps toward helping the future of the short story collection — not as an art form, but the tangible product so many of us love to have next to our beds, reading chairs, and desks.

Three days until the February picks. You will come back, won’t you?

Delightful Samples

At the market the other day, I watched a man sample four types of chicken salad, and we’ve all used a little pink spoon to try a new flavor at Baskin Robbins. (This month’s flavor: Premium Churned Light Raspberry Chip.)

Just in case you’re the kind of reader who likes to take small bites before making a commitment, here are sample stories from the January selections, no pink spoon required:

Allison Amend

Lauren Groff

Only One Week Left in January

I’ll unveil the February picks for Andrew’s Book Club next Sunday. In this final week of January, be sure to pick up one or both of the current selections, Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love and Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds. In the meantime, check out these two authors elsewhere on the Webbernet:

*An interview with Allison Amend about “Stations West,” her story that evolved into a novel
*A podcast interview with Allison from The Bat Segundo Show
*Allison’s advice for writers, featured on the Glimmer Train website

*Amherst College’s interview with alumna Lauren Groff
*Video of Lauren discussing her novel The Monsters of Templeton
*Info about Lauren’s upcoming visit to Wild Iris Books (1/27/09)

Groff’s Collection Now Available

Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds is now available. Amazon says the title will be released on January 27, but a Borders here in Indianapolis has many copies on the new fiction table. Please ask your bookstore to stock the book.

Meanwhile, Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love is doing well. Dzanc Books reports that they’ll soon receive more copies to fill orders. (Edit: This applies only to orders straight from Dzanc; obviously, Amazon and other outlets still have copies of the book.)

Less than two weeks until the February selections are revealed. Thank you for your strict adherence to the first two rules of Andrew’s Book Club. Hundreds of visitors have dropped by, the silent majority.

Early Feedback

Thanks to everyone who’s stopped by the blog, and to the ever-growing Facebook group for Andrew’s Book Club. If you have a Fb profile, please join the group. Add me as a friend, while you’re there. I promise I won’t say no.

Also, thanks to everyone who has left a comment. The template of this blog is pretty cool, I think, but it’s not user-friendly for leaving comments — you have to first click the title of the post you wish to comment on. As new posts are added, they publish to the left-most column, and the older posts shift to the right.

A FEW POLITE REQUESTS

1) If you have your own blog or website, please link to Andrew’s Book Club.

2) If you’re an author and have a mailing list, consider giving a shout-out to ABC (catchy, no?). The link is more powerful than the sword.

3) If you are already part of the ABC group on Facebook, please tell five of your friends about the group/blog. If not, please send a brief e-mail to five of your friends who read books, especially story collections.

I’ll post supplemental material about this month’s selections, Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love and Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds, soon.

Big House Pick, January 2009

In January 2009, Hyperion/Voice will publish Delicate Edible Birds, Lauren Groff’s collection of nine short stories of widely different styles and structures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lauren Groff was born in 1978 in Cooperstown, New York, and grew up one block from the Baseball Hall of Fame. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Five Points, as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. She was awarded the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and fellowships at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, published in February 2008, was a New York Times and Book Sense bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“L. De Bard and Aliette” recreates the medieval tale of Abelard and Heloise in New York during the 1918 flu epidemic; “Lucky Chow Fun” returns to Templeton, the setting of Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, for a contemporary account of what happens to outsiders in a small, insular town; the title story, “Delicate Edible Birds,” is the tale of a group of war correspondents, a lone woman among them, who fall prey to a frightening man in the French countryside while fleeing the Nazis.

“The details make the difference in this sophomore effort. They range from specific realities, as when a lonely teen swimmer watches her breath rise in ‘a great silver jellyfish-bubble of air’ before her small town falls apart in ‘Lucky Chow Fun,’ to dreamlike metaphor, as when another young woman feels her depression as ‘this black sack filled with cobras’ in ‘Majorette.’ ‘Lucky Chow Fun,’ which returns to Templeton, the fictionalized Cooperstown, N.Y., of the author’s debut novel, was previously published, as was the vivid ‘L. DeBard and Aliette,’ a retelling of a tragic romance, set in New York during the flu epidemic of 1918. As a collection, the stories are loosely connected by their themes of metamorphosis, as girls grow up, lose their illusions and, often, find unexpected happiness. Images of water and fire run through these tales as well: Aliette, the Heloise substitute, regains her strength after polio via swimming lessons with the handsome L. DeBard, and, in ‘Watershed,’ a diver tells of an elderly couple who end their pain by diving into a waterfall. ‘There is no ending, no neatness in this story,’ the narrator offers. ‘There never really is, where water is concerned.’ The ‘wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous’ nature of the elements may serve to explain the power in these stories, which could have faltered in the hands of a lesser writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews

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

Indie Pick, January 2009

OV Books released Allison Amend’s debut collection, Things That Pass for Love, a few months ago, an excellent pick (if I do say so) for the first selection of Andrew’s Book Club.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Allison Amend, a Chicago native, currently lives in New York City. She attended Stanford University and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has received awards from and appeared in One Story, Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner and Other Voices, among other publications. She keeps a semi-regular blog here at WordPress.com.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Alison Amend is a gifted storyteller whose view of contemporary life is often wonderfully acute, original, and surprising.”
—Alison Lurie, author of Foreign Affairs

“I love this book. The stories in Amend’s Things That Pass for Love are such good company that I found myself reading more and more slowly so that the collection wouldn’t end. Amend’s voice is so compelling, easeful and polished you feel that the stories almost rise up off the page and tell themselves. And, as we all know, the hardest thing a writer can do is make it look easy.”
—Alison Smith, author of Name All the Animals

“Allison Amend is a gifted storyteller — no, more than gifted. Her writing is powerful enough to create its own kind of weather. Her characters are so real it’s as if you could reach between the pages and shake hands with them. If you want to read good stories, read this book.”
—Hannah Tinti, author of Animal Crackers and The Good Thief, and editor of One Story

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

Note: The publisher is having a sale on this title; as of this moment, the book is only $8.48 through their website.

About Andrew’s Book Club

Each month, I select two or three short story collections that readers and writers of short stories should support. The idea is simple. We should buy short story collections and support this important art form, especially if we’re writers and ever hope to publish our own books of short stories. But if I buy Antonya Nelson’s new collection and you buy the new Jim Shepard book of stories, our mutual friend Sally buys Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock, and your mom buys Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter, then the publishing numbers are scattered all over the place.

Move over, Oprah. I’m taking over. You do a fine job. I’m glad you’re back to selecting living writers for your book club. But you haven’t chosen a book of stories, to my knowledge, so I’m asking you to step aside. I’m sure you’re relieved. (Edit: Let it be forever known that in September of 2009, just nine months after the start of this book club, Oprah caved and finally chose a story collection, Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them.)

Here are the rules.

1) The first rule of Andrew’s Book Club is you should talk about Andrew’s Book Club.

2) The second rule of Andrew’s Book Club is you should talk about Andrew’s Book Club. Spread the word.

3) Each month I will select two short story collections to be released that month, give or take a few weeks. One will be from a NYC publisher, while a second selection will spotlight a book from an indie or university press. I will also occasionally choose a selection from the past — a collection finally finding a paperback release, or one that was somehow overlooked (ABC Rewind). Buy at least one of these books each month. 12 books a year (24 if you buy both selections) is not too much to ask. It would be great if you also supported your local independent bookstore. But you may prefer Borders or Barnes & Noble, or maybe you live in the middle of nowhere and rely upon Amazon or Powell’s. But buy the story collections. If your bookstore doesn’t have the book, order it. Talk to the owner about the book, and about how much you love to read (and buy) story collections. Put your mouth where your money is.

4) Read beyond the Andrew’s Book Club selections. In reality, there are likely dozens of worthwhile books for you to read and support each month. Buy one of my selections in order to bring the power of short story readers together and make our collective voice heard by publishers. Buy the books of your choice to quench your other readerly thirsts.

5) Stop by this blog every so often and post your thoughts.

FTC Disclosure
Andrew’s Book Club does, from time to time, receive free books from publishers and/or authors. Some of these books are chosen for ABC, but not all; some are pretty awful. If you would like to read more about the FTC’s new guidelines for blog endorsements (because you simply don’t have enough to read these days), here’s the link.