A New Story Sing-Along

It's taken an awful lot of fidgeting, but I think I've finally gotten the hang of this widget. It's easier than trying to find everything on YouTube (I was lucky I could find everything I wanted when I posted my last story playlist), and it looks so much nicer.

The last story I finished ended up being entirely too long for the Ploughshares contest, so my goal is to be more restrained this time around. I have until sometime in April to make their deadline, and then I can go about the business of sending it out as a regular non-contest submission to some other places. I don’t have any publications in mind just yet, but there’s still plenty of time.

Top Ten Books for Non-Readers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly event at The Broke and the Bookish. Since I’m on a MWF schedule, this is Top Ten Wednesday.

So, you say you don’t like to read? Then you’ve probably stumbled across the wrong blog. But if you’re a reader with a non-reader in your life, you’ve come to the right place.

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. If this book doesn’t make you laugh, please consider seeking medical attention. If it does make you laugh, there’s plenty more where that came from – Adams left us with a side-splitting five book trilogy. …You heard me.
2. Matilda by Roald Dahl. Dahl’s children’s books follow a basic formula – a kid is treated badly by the adults in his/her life, said kid has some kind of fantastic adventure that brings them to a heroic adult, and scene. Matilda is about a reader and the value of mental strength, so it would be almost criminal to leave it off the list.
3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. Perfect for the boy in your life who Just Doesn’t Read. Oscar is a devastatingly uncool comic book nerd who can’t get a girl; his family is in shambles because they were cursed a few generations back;  and there is a ton of beautifully interlaced Dominican history. Diaz’s tone is tough on the surface, vulnerable underneath, and bound to resonate with even the most reluctant reader.
4. The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. This 1950s sex comedy has enjoyed renewed popularity following its 2010 reissue by New York Review Books. It’s a lively, slightly goofy, coming of age story for the newly-graduated girl who dreams of being a jet-setter.
5. Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Vampires are still cool, right? You may have seen the movie, but the book is well worth your time – it’s absolutely packed with creepy (sometimes gory) details that weren’t on-screen.
6. Homework by Margot Livesey. A blended family drama that is creepier than your favorite Lifetime movie.
7. The Giver by Lois Lowry. If you know a middle-grade kid, you’ve probably heard of this one. It’s one of a reader’s first exposures to dystopian literature, a theme still going strong in books of all reading levels.
8. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It’s new, it’s trendy, it’s highly entertaining. Don’t be intimidated by its size because it’s also a very quick read.
9. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. Another creepy book. Creepy tends to have a really broad appeal.
10. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Is the world ready for a Hurricane Katrina novel? Yes. Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction. Don’t confuse award-winning for stuffy and difficult, though. This is a straightforward and heart-wrenching read that highlights the power of family in the face of one of the worst disasters in modern history.

Judging a Book By Its Cover – The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Have I learned my lesson about falling for hyped-up books, following my breakup with Skippy Dies? Not really. If The Night Circus has taught me anything, it’s that a pretty-enough cover can still sway me.

Okay, a pretty cover and a tantalizing excerpt. Random House knew what they were doing when they released a preview shortly before NaNoWriMo 2011. The Night Circus started as Morgenstern’s NaNo project one year, making her success a charming Cinderella story. As a young writer, I feel encouraged when I see major publishing houses promote the work of other young writers; my excitement ticks upward again when NaNo projects see the light of day as books that spent time with a professional editor and marketing team.

Few things warm my heart like a well-designed book, and this one sure is a beaut. The color scheme is clearly explained as the circus is being designed, and I’m glad the design team respected Morgenstern’s specifics. The stars and stripes and swirls make appearances throughout the book as end paper and chapter divider designs, also serving as little reminders that you’re in a special, magical place.

Read the rest at the Cobalt Review blog.

Top Ten Free-for-All

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly event at The Broke and the Bookish. Since I’m on a MWF schedule, this is Top Ten Wednesday.

This week’s topic is a freebie, so I’m going to do last week’s topic, which I postponed because of the SOPA/PIPA blackout. Last week’s topic was ten books I’d recommend to people who say they don’t read a certain kind of book. My list is for people who say they don’t read books by women.

1. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood is one of those unfathomably brilliant writers that everyone absolutely must read. She’s most famous for The Handmaid’s Tale, but the gender and sexual dynamics can be a turn-off for some readers. I  suggest getting over that hangup and reading it anyway. In the meantime, pay a visit to the failed utopia presented in Oryx and Crake. Just don’t snack on any ChickieNobs. They’re weird.
2. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. It’s a special writer who can be sexy, heartbreaking, and hilarious all at once. Realistically, you should read all of Aimee Bender’s work; even though her books don’t rely on any particular chronology, her debut collection is the perfect place to start.
3. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros. One of the best books I read last year. Probably one of the best books I’ve ever read. Everyone needs to be socked in the gut by a book once in a while.
4. The White Album by Joan Didion. Everyone should read Joan Didion at least once in their lives, and this is a great primer. The essays are a healthy blend of personal reflections and observations about the world, so you’re bound to find something that resonates with you.
5. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. The book that prevented 2011 from being the year of King Franzen’s coronation. There’s something for every reader; for the casual reader, you’ve got your sex, you’ve got your drugs, and you’ve got your rock ‘n’ roll. For the literature nerds, Egan presents a web of characters and playful structures to untangle.
6. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This is often held up as an example of how women’s health problems all seemed to boil down to being crazy. Once upon a time, a woman could be institutionalized just because her husband found her difficult to deal with; they called it hysteria, derived from hystera, the Greek word for uterus. If the history of women’s medical treatment isn’t your cup of tea, never fear for Gilman can write one hell of a scary story.
7. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. Remember when we all had excerpts from The Joy Luck Club shoved in our faces in high school? Yeah, forget that book. The Woman Warrior is infinitely better – focused on one family’s adaptation to American life and beautifully interlaced with Chinese mythology.
8. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I could have dedicated half of this list to Southern women, but I think McCullers occupies a very special place between the out-and-proud badasses like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, and the quiet power of Harper Lee.
9. The Street by Ann Petry. Many of the books on this list have an element of escapism to them. I’m all about escapism. But as readers, we need to ground ourselves in reality once in a while. If your main complaint about literary fiction is that “nothing happens,” then get ready for Ann Petry to knock your socks off with her grimy, intoxicating portrayal of 1940s Harlem.
10. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell. Fractured fairy tales for the modern age, in which boys and girls dream equally fantastic dreams and have spectacular adventures. The majority of the book gives as much weight to the inherent mysteriousness of the Florida swamps as it does to the complex and confused young characters, but it’s the final titular story that really shines. The focus of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” is all about the girls’ transformation from freewheeling to docile; some version this transformation is an uncomfortable reality for any girl, but Russell makes it feel so universal, an acknowledgement that we’ve all been tamed so we can fit into the world.

Judging a Book By Its Cover – The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates

Well here’s an interesting challenge. The Female of the Species was given to me as a gift this Christmas by a friend who has been following this column since I first started it here. It was chosen to counter my bad experience with another short story collection about women in the modern world. She absolutely knew that I needed a little Joyce Carol Oates in my life, especially after what we’ll call the Weldon Incident.

Of the books I’ve judged by their covers (for the purposes of this column), few have disappointed (and irritated) me as much as Fay Weldon’s Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide. While I’m typically a huge proponent of women writing about the female experience, I expect there to be a modicum of respect for the topic. As I mentioned in my review of Weldon’s collection, I didn’t feel that respect, and that was an even bigger turn-off than the quality of the storytelling.

After such an unpleasant reading experience, I’m not sure I would have picked up The Female of the Species on my own. Mystery and suspense typically aren’t words that draw me to a book. It looks a little cheesy on the cover and runs the risk of over-promising and under-delivering. Saying things like mystery and suspense upfront leaves the reader open to some disappointment. If I’m being told that I’m about to be teased and thrilled, but then I’m not, there’s going to be a problem.

But this book was a gift from a friend who has never steered me wrong. Sometimes she even knows me a little better than I know myself.

Click here to read the rest at the Cobalt Review blog.

Top Ten Authors I Wish Would Write Another Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly event at The Broke and the Bookish. Since I’m on a MWF schedule, this is Top Ten Wednesday.

1. Karen Russell. She’s young, so there is plenty of time for this to happen. But c’mon, hurry up *pokes with a stick*
2. Nikolai Grozni. I’m actually a little torn on this one because on the one hand, I think he did an amazing job tapping into a very specific place, time, and atmosphere for Wunderkind; but I don’t want to read a new version of the same book. It would be completely understandable – and maybe preferable – if there were a lengthy gap between Wunderkind and his next book.
3. Sandra Cisneros. There are other books of hers that I haven’t read yet, and I swear, they’re on the list. It’s just that some completely new fiction would be fabulous.
4. Gina Ochsner. I read her books over the last couple of months, and I am a little bit swoony. She’s the kind of writer who is equally powerful in the short story and the novel, which is a lot harder to pull off than I realized. Her last book came out in 2009, which is still pretty recent. I just know that whenever the next one comes out, I will pounce on it.
5. Elizabeth McCracken. Love her on Twitter, love her on paper. I haven’t read her memoir (and to be perfectly honest, I don’t know that I ever will), but consider this me getting on my knees and begging for some new fiction.
6. Molly Ivins. This is a writer I wish could write another book. She’s best known for her newspaper columns in Texas, but not a day goes by when I watch the news and wonder, WWMW?
7. Karen Bender. What is in the Bender genes? No, seriously. I love that Karen Bender’s work is so firmly rooted in the real world, while Aimee’s is more surreal. There’s really no comparison between the two, except to say that they’re both enormously talented.
8. Arundhati Roy. She’s given up fiction to focus on social and environmental policy advocacy in India. Certainly an admirable career change, but I’ll miss her.
9. Miranda July. I can’t wait to read her new book; the premise sounds so cool and the previews in The New Yorker were a lot of fun. I would love for her to do another fiction collection, though. Or a novel. I’m not sure. No, short stories. Definitely short stories. Please?
10. I forgot a tenth person – how did that happen? Nicole has the right idea. More writing, less…everything else-ing.

Judging a Book By Its Cover – When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

How I came to read When God Was a Rabbit is a tale of two covers. I first found the book when I was browsing online and loved the paper-cut silhouettes and brush-stroke title font. The color scheme was a simple black and tan with pops of white and robin’s egg blue. Where some readers would have dismissed the book as appearing painfully twee, I just wanted to hug it. So I put it on hold at the library.

What came to me was disappointingly generic – a scene of grass and half of a girl in a white dress with wobbly handwritten block lettering for the title. It’s clearly an attempt at the twee aesthetic, but there’s a part of me that reads this cover as a movie tie-in edition of The Virgin Suicides. But hey, the insides of the book are still the same. What’s an ugly cover between friends?

The novel is narrated by Eleanor Maud, who starts out as a precocious (though a little self-centered) child narrator and finishes as a worn-out adult narrator. We meet Elly shortly after her birth in 1968 and spend roughly half the novel watching as she clumsily navigates her childhood.

Elly’s first friend is an elderly man named Abraham Golan, a disturbed Hungarian immigrant who writes concentration camp numbers on his arm when he’s feeling sad. Concerned that Mr. Golan was just about the worst friend she could have, Elly’s brother bought her a pet rabbit. Said rabbit is named “god,” and he occasionally talks, but only Elly can hear him.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much as we see of the rabbit for quite some time.

Click here to read the rest (and see the alternate cover) at the Cobalt Review blog.

Back to the Angry Dome

Weren’t we just here a few months ago? Yup, it was in June to be precise. Time flies, doesn’t it?

ShortList released their list of the 50 coolest books ever, and it’s basically 50 books adhering to a very narrow definition of cool. With only a few exceptions, they’re all books by white men. Of course. Of couuuuuuuuurse!*

Here’s the breakdown:

Books by men – 46

Books by women – 4

Books by white men – 45

Books by white women – 4

Books by non-white men – 1

Books by non-white women – 0

Authors from the United States – 32 (34 counting one immigrant and one dual citizen)

Other countries represented on the list – Canada (2); England (5); Germany (1); Italy (1); Japan (1); Russia (1); Scotland (3)

Who We Talk About When We Talk About Ourselves

Do you remember that day I was kvetching about having to do a couple of rewrites? I’ve given up on one of them, which I mentioned at the end of that post, but I did finally finish the other one. You can read it at The Lit Pub. It’s about how I got into Jeanette Winterson, which was partly because of a class and mostly because there was this one really stupid boy.

Of course there was.

It’s been live for a couple of weeks, and I’m okay with that. I’ve thought about it a lot, and talked about it a few times, about how I don’t really like writing about deeply personal (potentially embarrassing) things. As much as I worry about making a fool of myself in front of others, there’s another layer of concern when it comes to writing – there’s the risk of outing someone else within a story.

This has been on my mind for the last week or so because of the whole Marie Calloway/”Adrien Brody”/Tao Lin thing. A lot of very smart people have written excellent essays on why Calloway’s story is problematic (I recommend Roxane Gay’s essay at HTMLGiant and Alana Noel Voth’s essay at PANK) and I really don’t have much to add to the conversations about being asked to accept something that apparently really happened as a work of fiction, and all the sexual politics of young women and older men/mentor and student relationships/starfucking. The one idea that won’t go away is the one about how our stories don’t exist in a vacuum. Once we write about ourselves, other people find their way in. That’s just how life works.

In Marie Calloway’s case, she wrote about her own long-distance boyfriend and the famous guy she slept with and by extension, the famous guy’s girlfriend. Everything started to spiral out of control because when Calloway first wrote about it, she posted it on her blog as fact – with real names, phone numbers, email addresses. That post has since disappeared, but I’m sure there is someone out there who is crafty enough to resurrect it. Sometime last month, it resurfaced on Tao Lin’s website labeled as fiction; the names and phone numbers and email addresses were all edited, either changed (hence “Adrien Brody”) or left as a series of x’s.

Calloway has gotten a fair amount of attention for the story, a considerable amount of that attention being positive it-girl chatter. I’m really not sure why. Putting aside her stylistic choices, I think it’s monumentally unfair and plain old selfish to just put that shit out there like it’s no big deal. Part of the story’s allure is that the real identity of “Adrien Brody” is obvious to people who are in the know. I must not be one of those people, but that’s okay. If people know who this guy really is, then it probably isn’t too hard to figure out who the girlfriend really is.

That’s just too intrusive. She didn’t ask for this kind of attention. She also didn’t ask for a 20-year-old girl to want to fuck her 40-year-old boyfriend. There’s a comment on an interview with Calloway that talks about the girlfriend writing to an advice column about the situation (this post was also retracted soon after publication) and it was apparently a pretty heartbreaking letter. I can’t even begin to imagine that level of pain; not only was her relationship ruined, but people are applauding the girl who did it as a budding literary superstar (and yes, it completely grinds my gears that no one is holding the famous guy accountable; after all, it does take two to have an affair).

All in all, Calloway has created a really tangled situation that people will probably talk about and try to pick apart for a little while. When the story first posted, the responses were more along the lines of excitement over juicy gossip. Now, it looks like people are stepping back and examining the whole situation more critically. This has been my sticking point for a long time. Isn’t it enough to keep some stories to yourself? Keep the memories and let their impact be felt in other ways.

Which brings me back to Jeanette and me being 19 and stuck on a boy who had some problems. This is all anyone really needs to know for my essay to make any sense. If you know me well enough, you know the gory details, but the essay isn’t about those details. Knowing that information doesn’t make the essay any better, and not knowing doesn’t make it worse.

I honestly don’t know what is gained by exposing other people through writing. Sometimes, I’m fairly certain I don’t understand ultra-confessional writing in general. A lot of it smacks of attention-seeking, especially those examples that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. Unless you’re already in the habit of being discreet, your stories will eventually spill over into other people’s lives and that can get really messy.

At some point, it’s not just about what you wrote and how you intended it to be understood; if someone feels wronged by it, you have no control over their reaction. Or the audience’s reaction. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. I’m generally a risk-averse, attention-averse person, so the thought of leaving myself open to that much scrutiny and criticism kind of gives me dry heaves.

But that’s just me. Other people don’t have the same aversion. It’s something we all have to figure out at some point. I just wonder how you go about figuring it out when you’ve already gotten so much attention for putting it all out there. It’s next to impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

Judging a Book By Its Cover – Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Happy new year! Today’s post originally appeared at the Cobalt Review blog on 12/26/11, so we’re playing a little catch-up today.

You know a book is bad when ou realize that the dead character is the luckiest one in the bunch. I am exactly 18% of the way through Skippy Dies, and have been since mid-November. After 118 pages, I still didn’t care about what was going on; maybe that’s my shortcoming as a reader, maybe it’s Paul Murray’s as a writer, or maybe this little bookmance just wasn’t meant to be.

I chose the book more on my friends’ recommendations than on the cover. Frankly, the cover doesn’t give us a whole lot to work with. I originally thought Skippy was a dog. I’m not sure why, but it sounded good in my head. The US edition of the book you have, the cover doesn’t do much to dispel this idea, unless you notice the two portraits on the spine – a green boy, Skippy, and a purple girl, love interest Lori. The UK edition has these portraits, plus a pink rendition of Skippy’s hopelessly geeky roommate, Ruprecht, on the front. That cover probably would have dispelled the dog idea.

Click here to read the rest at the Cobalt Review blog.