“The Goldfinch”
Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be. Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?”…this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” Read more
“If I’d Known You Were Coming”
Everybody needs somebody. Just one other person who is as faithful to them as they are to themselves.
Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award (the John Simons Short Fiction Award) in 2013, If I’d Known You Were Coming is a collection of 12 short stories written by Kate Milliken. Although each story stands alone, many of the colorful characters reappear in several of the narratives which makes parts of the book appear to be a novella. The common theme that runs through all the stories is the dysfunctional characters – people who abandon or neglect their children, chase addictions, skirt responsibility, or succumb to their fears or desires – whose flaws impose great harm upon others.
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“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”
In these times, strange times that they are, seeing someone do something that’s not patently selfish and fucked-up is like a breath of fresh air, good clean fresh air, not that any one of us would know good clean fresh air if a vial of it swooped down and bit us on the ass!
George Saunders has a way with words that makes his short stories both horrific and hilarious. A writer with a message, Saunders writes of modern-day culture – corporate greed, authority, inequality, socio-economic class, narcissism, hate, racism, helicopter parenting, plastic surgery, obesity, physical perfection – and magnifies them a thousand times to make a point: we live in one messed-up world. Read more
“Memory Wall”
Seven decades of stories, five decades of marriage, four decades of working…..spatulas and salad forks, novels and recipes, nightmares and daydreams, hellos and goodbyes. Could it all really be wiped away?
Where do our memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them? Read more
“Leaving The Atocha Station”
No writer is free to renounce his political moment but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.
Ben Lerner was 24 years old when he traveled to Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2003. A recent graduate of Brown University with a B.A. in Political Theory and an M.F.A. in Poetry, Lerner may have chosen Spain because of its troubled past – many poets writers, and artists were murdered, jailed, or forced into exile during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) – or because the country offers a unique perspective on politics, fascism, and terror – all of which make Spain a rich playground for those in the arts. Read more
“How To Be Alone”
I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism – our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution – isn’t intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube. Read more
“You Are Not A Stranger Here”
You and all the inheritors of wealth who think life is a matter of perfected sentiment. You are wrong.
Adam Haslett’s first published book, You Are Not A Stranger Here was a both a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. – a notable achievement that few writers attain. A collection of nine short stories, You Are Not A Stranger Here was written by a master storyteller who skillfully weaves psychosis, devotion, death, clairvoyance, neglect, suicide, abandonment, and homosexuality into the lives of his characters. Cleverly written, many of the stories contain a train wreck the reader rarely sees coming which is the beauty of Haslett’s writing – the element of surprise. Read more
“Glow”
It is October 31. Halloween. I have long lost my love of masks and phantoms.
So says, 26-year old Amelia “Mia” J. McGee, a woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and a writer for the NAACP and WEB in Washington, DC who has returned to Hopewell County, Georgia to find her missing 11-year old daughter, E.F. “Ella” McGee. Three days prior a rock had been thrown through the McGee’s window with a note that said “The next one won’t be a rock.” Fearing for her daughter’s life, Mia put Ella on a bus to Georgia and arranges for her brother, Buddy to pick up the child at the bus station. But when Ella doesn’t make it, Mia decides to vacate her plans to march in the largest picket in Washington, D.C.’s history on October 31, 1941 and return to her childhood home to find the little girl she named after Elizabeth Freeman, “the great suffragist and speaker.” Read more
“That Old Cape Magic”
A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
58-year old, Jack Griffin is a grumpy former screenwriter turned college professor who “has been trying for a long time to understand and resolve his almost pathological resentment towards his deceased parents.” The only child of two Ivy-League educated parents who spent their lives teaching at a college in the “mid-fucking-west,” Griffin has spent his entire life trying to get away from his parents to no avail. They occupy his thought process and influence his opinions even though they’ve been reduced to ashes in urns stored in the trunk of his car. Read more
“We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
Once upon a time, there was a happy family – a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters. The older daughter was smart and agile, …..and very beautiful. The younger was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both.
Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austin Book Club recently had her sixth novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves published – a book so full of surprises that writing a book review is difficult and challenging without giving away details that shouldn’t be told. Suffice to say, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a powerful story that will break your heart but also make you smile for the ending is so amazing, so touching, and so perfect that tears will come to your eyes. Read more
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