Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

Though they lay in ruins, these early urban experiments live on.

The allure of the lost city is almost as old as cities themselves. Atlantis, The Lost City of Z, Xanadu, Shambala. Being so attached to the cities where most of us live, we fear one day they might follow their ancient or mythical counterparts into oblivion.

Part travelogue, part science writing, part archeological treasure hunt, “Four Lost Cities” traces the rise and fall of Çatakhöyuk, Pompeii, Angkor and Chokia. To answer the mystery of their abandonment, Newitz delineates the reasons people banded together in cities in the first place. Turns out, they weren’t so different from our own: entertainment, connection—whether it be on the social, commercial or spiritual planes.

Of the four, only Pompeii is a city as we know it, a place for commerce, a warren of small streets and grand public places walled off from the means that sustained it. The built environment/agricultural divide in the others was porous—small farms and villages tucked among grand ceremonial complexes. In Angkor and Cahokia, the principal attraction of these urban cores wasn’t commerce, but ceremonial entertainment. There, lavish theatrical events unified an enthralled citizenry and fostered an identity larger than village or tribe.

Newitz explains the principal of “survivance,” where cities fall, but the cultures they spawned remain. Viewed in this way, Pompeii was never lost. Its citizens simply duplicated their old life in new neighborhoods in Naples and other surrounding cities. The inhabitants of the others went on to found new towns or slowly returned to village life, oftentimes remaining near the decaying urban cores. Even these were never fully abandoned. When Angkor was “rediscovered,” Buddhist monks were living among the decaying temples. Both Cahokia and Çatakhöyuk were used for hundreds of years after their abandonment as burial grounds and sacred places.

True, exterior forces lead to their slow demise: environmental stressors, infrastructure breakdowns, the loss of cultural elites and their grand ceremonial performances. Though these urban experiments lay in ruins today, in their population’s descendants the ideas and worldview once collected there remains. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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The Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula Le Guin

Science fiction classic views Winter with an anthropologist’s eye

When I was a young man, I used to love reading ethnographies. I was turned on by the difference between clan and moiety, matrilineal and matrilocal. Later, I stumbled upon the heart-wrenching story of Ishi, the last of California’s Yahi tribe, and the anthropologist who “rescued” him, Alfred Kroeber. Which lead to my discovery of his daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin.

She was her father’s daughter literarily-speaking as well. Her books were like those ethnographies I loved to get lost in. Though the cultures and places she described were invented, they felt deeply grounded by an anthropologist’s understanding of human communal life.

Reading this book again today, I’m stuck by how contemporary it feels, as opposed to two other wildly popular science fiction titles of the era, “Dune” and “Stranger in a Strange Land.” For one, Le Guin’s speculations on the ambisexuality of the Gethenians, the inhabitants of a world also known as Winter, are a perfect fit for today’s discourse on gender non-conformity.

The organization of Gethen also resonates—the collectivized Ororeyn with its state-run farms and secret police. The increasingly militarized monarchal state of Karhide. Thick, political machinations dominate the first two-thirds of the book, first when the Envoy from the Ekumen confederation, Genly Ai, makes his case for alliance in Karhide, then when he does the same in Ororeyn. Adding to the complexity are discussions of competing religious philosophies.

The book soars in its final third—Estraven, Karhide’s disgraced prime minister, and Ai’s long trek across the polar ice. Le Guin studied accounts of polar explorers and every detail here vibrantly places us in a world of perilous beauty. The intimacy that develops between Ai and Estraven is the core of the book, one that elevates this final section beyond a tale of simple daring-do. 

It’s not an easy read. Le Guin rarely explains the terminology of her strange world. A glossary and map are good companions on this journey into the bewildering landscape of the human heart. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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Dominick Reading for Filth

by Dale Corvino

A warm-hearted romp and an ode to New York City in the early aughts.

The author gave me this book at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2017, but I put off reading it. I didn’t think I was queer enough for the book. Sex for me, at least for the last fifteen or so years, hasn’t been the main event. Thankfully, despite the hustlers, the johns, the buckets of cum, the outré events, sex isn’t the main event here, either. As with any good story, that is reserved for human entanglements. In this case, the relationships of compadres and clients of a thirty-nine-year-old escort, one who “found something to love about every single one of those men” he had sex with. One who convinced himself, quite rightly I think, that he “was doing God’s work.”

So in these pages we get to know, Mr. Greet, the jaded effete. Dean Jonson, a hustler with a heart as big as his huge cock. Adam, a young john in upstate New York, a small-town undertaker. Cherry, a Manhattan marketer who Dominick services on his lunch breaks. Darryl, a regular and Upper East Side butler, and his jealous lover, Brad. Many others.

Though some of the pieces rise to the level of literature—not that they need to really—most exist as recollections, as storytelling. (They were originally read live at the Rapture, a bar on Avenue A in Manhattan.) I’m not prepared to debate the difference between literature and performance-based storytelling, but where the two merge here is, as I say, in their description of human entanglement. 

Corvino has a fine narrative style which he uses to render these closely-observed recollections. For example: “Darryl was a tall, solidly built Nordic man in his forties. He was naturally smooth, always clean-shaven, with a broad easy grin—but a clownish, tragic turn at the corners of the mouth.”

“Dominick Reading for Filth” is a warm-hearted romp and an ode to New York City in the early aughts. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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Ploughshares Spring 2021

Children wrestle with a mother’s anguish in first person narratives

This week, I finally got around to Ploughshares Spring 2021 issue, edited by Laura van den Berg. Van den Berg, a writer of both novels and short stories, has assembled an impressive group of fiction writers in this issue. (I’m not qualified to comment on the poetry and non-fiction.)

’Pemi Auguda’s “Imagine Me Carrying You” is a young woman’s touching account of her mother’s disapproval, one exacerbated by the older woman’s depression over having accidentally killed someone.

In Venita Blackburn’s “Ambien and Brown Liquor” a daughter deals with the aftermath of her mother’s anguish—this time in a conversation with her sister that masks “all the erratic chemicals of grief and abandonment.”

In Tania James’s fantastical and beautiful “Bark” yet another daughter processes her mother’s disintegration, of sorts, in a conclusion that feels, like all the best endings, unexpected and wise.

Fajer Alexander Hansa’s “Seaworthy” documents a mother’s anguish and her son’s desperate flight to Greece along with other Syrian immigrants, a group that, like the boat they sail upon, is anything but seaworthy. 

In Zora Mai Quỳnh’s “Her Infectious Laugh” a mother’s disdain for her daughter’s pregnant wife is no match for a good bout of laughter.

Seth Wang breaks the maternal theme with the gothic and outrageous “The Cacophobe,” an entertaining tall tale of a man who from boyhood is “deathly allergic to ugliness.” Literally.

There are more excellent stories here, all in first person narration, an editorial decision that unifies the wildly disparate pieces of this marvelous collection. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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A Memory of a Murder

by Nichelle Seely

Debut novel a thoughtful, well-written entry in the murder mystery genre

If we think of a machine as anything whose purpose it is to do work, then a book is such a thing. An engine to produce meaning, emotion, sometimes delight. We literary fiction types go to great lengths to hide the engine’s inner workings, but the appeal of genre writing, to me at least, is the joy the reader takes in the movement of its parts. 

Not usually my kind of thing, as the author of “Memory of a Murder” would be the first to tell you. (Disclaimer: Nichelle Seely is a friend.) Even so, I found myself absorbed by this debut novel, a murder mystery set in Astoria, Washington. It is a misty place, evocatively drawn—perfect for the concealment of secrets built on the legacy of trauma.

As is pretty much standard in police procedurals these days, the protagonist/narrator is damaged goods, but her particular flaw gives the novel its special crime-solving twist, one that will no doubt fuel future titles in the series.

In these pages, we step deeply into the mind of this disgraced police detective turned private investigator, the shrewd particulars of her problem-solving, the unfortunate recent incidents that continue to plague her.

“Memory of a Murder” is an excellent read, a thoughtful, well-written entry in the murder mystery genre. I look forward to future titles in the series. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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Debut published by Biblioasis

Revised July 29, 2023

My debut novel, Dreaming Home, was edited by renowned Canadian writer, literary critic and editor, John Metcalf, and was published by Biblioasis June 2023.

This exceeds all my expectations. Biblioasis is a small publisher that has made a huge mark since it was founded in 2004 by Dan Wells and John Metcalf. By focusing on works of the highest literary caliber, Biblioasis has become one of Canada’s most prestigious small presses. Their list contains an array of heavy-hitting authors—many who have won or were short or longlisted for Canada’s top literary prizes. In 2019 Biblioasis went on to wider acclaim as the North American publisher of “Ducks, Newburyport,” a book which received rapturous press and was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize. In 2022, they published “Case Study” by Graeme Macrae Burnet, which was longlisted for the Booker.

As for John, in addition to serving as the fiction editor at Biblioasis, he has an imprint there with his own stable of artists. He comes to this by having been a major force in Canadian literature for fifty years. He is an accomplished fiction writer in his own right. Of him, Alice Munro once wrote, “John Metcalf often comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get.” John is also an irascible literary critic and champion of the short form. Arguably his most lasting achievement is his mentorship of Canadian writers who have gone on to have major, award-winning literary careers—including my own mentor, Caroline Adderson.

In other words, to be among such company my book had better be damn good.

I’ve been assured that it is. First by Caroline, who worked with me for nine months to refine the manuscript. She helped me to abandon some very bad writing habits and encouraged me to link my previously published short stories. After initially resisting that idea, I threw myself into the project, stripping the old stories to the bone and writing new ones on top of them. Two completely original stories were created to flesh out the overarching narrative.

When John Metcalf got ahold of the resulting manuscript, he encouraged me to surrender to my inner novelist. I’ve always thought of myself as a short story writer. I love the form’s “singularity of effect,” the unitary narrative arc that gives short fiction its impact. This great strength is also its weakness. Confined to that narrow arc, characters and their actions are walled off in place and time. Time, then, has become my central obsession in fiction. That and human entanglements, of course.

The result is Dreaming Home—not so much a linked short story collection, but a short novel in six parts that traces the forty year history of a broken family. Though each section has the unitary arc of the short story, all are tightly integrated in a single narrative that relates, often with humor, the legacy of childhood trauma and its effects on one Texas family.

Texas looms large in the work. It is a place both I and the characters in the novel thought we left long ago, only to find it is always with us. In this regard, Dreaming Home is about the immigrant experience, which fosters a kind of double vision, one common to many Canadians in my adopted home.

Caroline Adderson and John Metcalf have both been incredibly collegial. To chat with these writers who have considered fiction so long and so deeply is, for me, the ultimate pleasure.

Production of the novel went swimmingly. Vanessa Stauffer, Managing Editor at Biblioasis, was amazingly solicitous. Though technically above my pay grade, she sought my opinion on the book’s format and cover designs by graphic artist, Ingrid Paulson. John Sweet’s copyedits were insightful and thorough. Five amazingly gifted writers agreed to write blurbs: Caroline Adderson, Lori Ostlund, Lydia Conklin, Caitlin Horrocks and Patrick Earl Ryan.

The beautiful books were printed in March and released on June 6. Dreaming Home has received favorable reviews in The New York Times and in Canada’s two largest newspapers, as well as in a handful of literary journals. In addition, it was included in prominent lists as a “best read” or “most anticipated.” The awards season approaches, so cross your fingers!!

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Dear Evelyn

by Kathy Page
Biblioasis

Novel recounts long, interconnected lives in short stories

I was recommended this book as a possible model for my novella-in-progress. I’m doing something similar—using a series of short stories to tell a long tale that covers many decades. I love the short form for its unitary narrative arc, but chafe at its limitations. Alice Munro can pull off leaps in time in her stories, but in most others the characters are confined within their small worlds.

That’s why I found “Dear Evelyn” so appealing. Each chapter has that unitary narrative arc I love, but it’s at the service of a story of long, interconnected lives. Here, we get Harry Miles, from birth to death, who is deemed by the midwife who delivered him “a male, unremarkable.” When the bookish Harry, an educated young man of limited means, meets the irascible Evelyn Hill, the story begins in earnest. In measured prose, Page traces sixty years of their lives—their marriage just before Harry departs for WWI, their lives during their wartime separation, told in a series of letters from which the book derives its title.

At the close of the war, Harry and Evelyn are reunited and the tales ensue of parents and siblings, of the couple’s growing family. It’s all decidedly undramatic, no peak moments or epiphanies. What tension there is comes from Evelyn’s demanding nature. This Harry meets with agreeableness and compliance, traits for which he is chided by his bevy of grown daughters.

Underneath Harry’s unflappability lies a sense of loss. In order to provide his wife and daughters a solidly middle-class life, he has given up his boyhood dream of becoming a poet. He longs “to find his way back to the lovely slipperiness of words.” Though he never does, this aspiration grounds him throughout his long life.

In this the reader is a participant, of sorts. These are lives told through the compressive form of the short story. The interludes between stories, the reader must fill in. It is a task worth the effort. When we come to the ending are hearts are full. For me, this is one of the tasks of storytelling, one Kathy Page admirably accomplishes. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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Dune: the Graphic Novel #1

by Frank Herbert

Sci-fi classic comes to life in graphic novel

Like a lot of you, I suspect, I’m excited about Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming version of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” Both his sci-fi films “Arrival” and “Blade Runner 2049” managed to be slick, artful and smart. How to prepare myself for this new “Dune”? I didn’t love the book enough to slog through it another time, so I thought a beautifully-illustrated, condensed version might be just the thing.

I have been let down on two counts. First, the movie has been delayed because of COVID. Second, my ambivalence about the story has, if anything, increased over time. I can’t get over feeling that it is terribly out of sync with the moment. The appeal of widespread messianic movements lost its oomph around the 7th century CE. Plus, what with western xenophobia (boo!) and female badassery (yay!) both in ascendency, this Bedouin-inflected tale of the rise of a male savior might be a little off-putting to modern audiences. It will be interesting to see how Villeneuve and his screenwriters handle it.

That said, the muscular appeal of this space opera benefits, in this illustrated version, by a tightening of the baroque story by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. The beautiful illustrations by Raúl Allén and Patricia Martin have lost David Lynch’s steampunk aesthetic, taking on instead a spare techno-Moorish flavor, at least when House Atreides arrives on Arakeen.

Book 1 has all the elements of its predecessor: the slow menacing build, the betrayal, murder and treachery, ending with the sojourn in the wilderness, a component in many messianic traditions.

Whatever the story’s failings, it can still get your heart pumping and this lavishly produced volume by Abrams Comic Arts is a feast for the eyes. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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Stoop City

by Kristyn Dunnion

First person stories get real

One way to tell a story is at a distance—third person, past tense, for example. That remove sounds authorial and gives the narration the ability to observe, to opine. But in most of the stories in this collection, Kystyn Dunnion is, like, screw that shit! I’m writing about real people, crawling up inside their brains to show, not just a story, but a particular, and often peculiar, worldview.

In some ways, the book reads like a report from the street. You have your teenaged gay drug-addicted hustlers, your undergraduate budding eco-terrorists, a person living with mental illness whose possession by demonic shoes leads to a fatal encounter and the drugged-out entourage of mourners after. They talk like they fucking walk. You got a problem with that, go read Henry James!

For all my retreats into narrative distance, I love voice in fiction. In my novella-in-progress I have girls—an eight and a twelve year old—teenage boys, all of them talking smack in the slang of the period. So, you’d be right to guess, that I love “Stoop City.”

I admit, it can sometimes be like Chinese water torture, all this crazy and/or drug-addled patter, but it feels fresh. And, under all the characters’ stylistic bravado, you feel their beating hearts. Hoofy, the young, gay street kid in “Fits Ritual,” who runs a scam with the love of his life, a boy who is as transactional as he is beautiful. Later, the nurse in “Four Letter Word for ‘Loose’” who tries to keep Hoofy from overdosing. Or in the devastatingly beautiful “Tracker and Flow,” the couple afflicted by another sort of possession, one reflective of their disintegrating relationship.

Kristyn Dunnion, is a Toronto-based performance artist and many of these pieces have the kind of verbal bravura you find in performance art or slam. Through voice, Dunnion takes you into worlds strange, frightening and beautiful. I, for one, am very happy to have gone along for the ride.

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One Headlight

by Matt Caprioli

A love letter to a young man’s flawed, but caring family

In my experience, there is no greater or more abiding love for a gay man than the one he shares with his mother. She is, at turns, confidant and best friend, tyrant and tormentor, someone to turn to for deep comfort and to flee at all costs.

It is this deep vein of humanity that Matt Caprioli mines in his memoir, “One Headlight.” It is a paean to his rough and tumble Alaska childhood, his early struggles with poverty, with his sexuality, and his ultimate blossoming into a sexy, confident, young gay man. But it is more than another coming-of-age story. It is a love letter to his mother, Abby, a lively woman, who navigates the world with humor and humility, doing her best with the hand she was dealt, both for herself and for the son she so clearly adores.

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The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Cannibalizing one’s life for art

I just read this book. In it Hemingway abuses his friends for art. His friends didn’t like it. They’re all dead now, but the book lives on. Advantage Hemingway. Advantage art.

In Paris, they drink a lot at swell cafes with zinc bar tops. Then it’s off to Spain to drink a lot more. They drink while they fish. They drink at the big party in Pamplona. The bullfights sober them up somewhat. Bullfighting, we are told, is very serious stuff. Afterward, they get drunk some more and have a go at each other. Black eyes and wounded prides.

Why? Because the men all fall in love with the same woman. Why? Because every story needs an engine.

The partying masks the damage accrued during the First World War. Their interior lives are severely implied. The technique must have seemed revolutionary at the time. Also the narration. Snarky, simple, declarative sentences, like this. Every bit as mannered as something florid. After Joyce and James, Proust and Faulkner, though, it was a revelation. An enduring one. We all still write in Hemingway’s shadow, more or less.

The book sure casts a spell. Old Hem makes me want a bigger life. The bullfighting is a non-starter, but running off to live in Paris, yes. Even though I’d be late to the party a hundred years, I’m sure people there must still get themselves into a pretty mess.

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The Water Diviner & Other Stories

by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer

Quiet stories that consistently astound

How did I miss this 2018 Iowa Short Fiction Award winner by my friend Ruvanee Vilhauer? The stories in this collection are a wonder, excavating layers of concealment to reveal the rawness of a past that still smarts, the difficult negotiations required to navigate an ordinary life.

Ruvanee and I were in Nancy Zafris’s section at the 2012 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. There, we wrote to prompts daily and assembled, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, each morning to discuss what we’d come up with. What Ruvanee came up with, I recall, were quiet, solidly-built explorations grounded in the ordinary, in contrast to my tattered ventriloquist’s suitcase of voices, my klugdy attempts to dramatize, with the stakes amped up high.

Not that the stakes weren’t high in those stories she workshopped each morning, just as they are in those in this marvelous collection. They explore the intersection between the quotidian and the sometimes harsh realities confronting immigrant Sri Lankans around issues of race, ethnicity, or social hierarchies. Around the violence from civil strife in the home country or from prejudice in the States. There are human dramas here as well, ones all people suffer—the loss of a loved one, the incursions of sickness and old age.

In this collection we find an astonishing range of human entanglements. A lonely widow neglects her life and is torn between prophesies of end times and an urge to reconnect. A boy faces bullying at school with a determination to tough it out and fit in. A Meals on Wheels volunteer’s fateful delivery brings her face to face with the terrible loss she and her family experienced during the internecine violence in Sri Lanka. A young woman and her best friend’s lives are upended by the prejudices surrounding skin color in their tight-knit Sri Lankan community. A literal-minded young woman on the spectrum carves out a life amid ambiguity through a love of butterflies.

With straight-forward language that rarely draws attention to itself, the invention and humanity of these quiet stories consistently astounds.

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McSweeney's, No. 60

Edited by Claire Boyle

Painting by numbers

Beginning, middle and end—who needs it? Presenting problem, impediment, a resolution that goes aha!—we’re so over it. At least that was the argument at a recent City Lights Bookstore event with experimental storytellers Lidia Yuknavitch and Lance Olsen. I am attracted to the proposition and anxious to read their new books, “Verge” and “My Red Heaven.”

In contrast, McSweeney’s Issue 60 collects eight stories that are actualized by their conventional structures in ways that feel lively, lived-in and organic.

Set in the vibrant African immigrant community of Urbana, Illinois, “Variety African Healing Market” tells the story of a girl whose well-intentioned family gets swept up by forces beyond their control.
Anyone who has read Leigh Newman’s Alaskan memoir “Still Points North” will be on familiar ground with “High Jinks.” It’s a loving account of a father-daughter float trip that is at once light-hearted, funny and imbued with loss.

Through poetic language, in “In This Life or Another” we are plunged into the perspective of a boy who “lives between the world and his head,” who pines for his “mother who forgets she is a mother.”
“The Tum-Boon Brigade” takes us into a Bangkok that feels both exotic and intensely familiar, where volunteer accident responders nightly embark on a Buddhistic quest to accumulate boon or karmic merit.

“A Fresh Start Ruined” opens a window onto one evening of a family who has one foot firmly planted in contemporary American life and the other in Osage tradition.

“A Little Like God” weaves issues of national security, archetypal fear and Armageddon with the downward trajectory of a love affair.

One of the pleasures of reading McSweeney’s is every issue’s uniquely beautiful book design. Here the photo illustrations by Holly Andres act as visual commentary to each of these exceptional stories.

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McSweeney's Quarterly, Issue 62

A rollercoaster ride through queerness

I’ve been reading the modern masters of short fiction—Munro, William Trevor, Proulx, Chekov, Cheever, Saunders, Strout, Lorrie Moore—attempting, like them, to write in tightly constructed narrative arcs that still manage to feel lively and organic.

How old-fashioned!

Nowadays, many stories remind me of my neighbor’s English ivy that tries to invade and take over my pristine garden. Tendrils warp and intertwine. They ramble, unconcerned with extracting meaning from the story’s soil. Stuff just happens; get over it.

You’ll find that in McSweeney’s 62: the Queer Fiction Issue. A few of the stories stand out for me from the seeming chaos. In “Palaver,” told, as the title suggests, almost entirely in dialog, we eavesdrop on a mother and son contest. It’s clever and funny and has a lot of heart.

“Docile Bodies” is a master class in misdirection, turning assumptions upside down in the clever and affective ending. “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” is evocative, poetic, funny, a meditation on the ever-present past, the complications of lovers, the beauty and destruction of nature.

“Papi” is a fun, bi-lingual romp, a slice of life of modern Bogotá, with an ending that feels helicoptered in, but that still packs a punch. “Short Stack” is another slice-of-life story that shines, a sad one where pancakes and Grand Theft Auto figure prominently. The fable, “Peppersoup,” another exercise in misdirection, sneaks up on you just like the protagonist does his prey.

The “Geodic Body”— a sodbusters tale of madness and longing—is the outlier, only because of its setting out on the bald prairie of yore. It reminds me of a slightly more experimental version of Karen Russell’s “Proving Up.”

McSweeney’s 62 is a rollercoaster. It made me a little queasy, but I’m glad I went along for the ride.

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The Paris Review, Issue 235

To answer the call of the Spirit

For some time now, I’ve been writing tight little stories about characters who have tight little narrative arcs. Does that make me an uptight writer? Possibly. But I like these roman candles that go airborne with a bang, arc and fizzle out. Beginning, middle and end. Presenting problem. Impediment. Something that goes aha at the finish.

In contrast is writing that is loose, that wanders. Plot’s not really its thing. Not necessarily stream-of-consciousness, but close.

I dusted off No. 235 from my stack of unread copies of The Paris Review and found that most of the prose pieces in this issue were like the latter. I say pieces, since a lot of them are play excerpts that fragment and recombine like dreams, where, as one of the issue’s authors says, “people vanish and appear like magic.”

In “Help,” a black woman confronts othering and privilege in her encounters with white men. “The Stumble” is built around witty conversations that the composer Oscar Levant has in his head with George Gershwin. In “The First Line of Dante’s Inferno,” a woman searches for her sister in a forest that may very well be her own mind.

The fiction in the issue has an equally absurdist bent, although, it being fiction, one more grounded in specificity. The standout for me is, oddly enough, not the most conventional of the three pieces (“The Loss of Heaven”), but the speculative “River Crossings.” It’s an absurdist parable that mirrors our present predicament in a tribalized America: a people long separated who no longer recognize each other.

The Paris Review Interviews are the literary equivalent of a national treasure. In this issue, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks stands out for me—a writer who often doubts himself—as a role model because of her prodigious output and work ethic. Her admonition is one I need to hear: just get out of your own way, answer The Call of The Spirit and let your words roll.

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The Neapolitan Quartet

by Elena Ferrante

Beautifully written novels open a window onto a host of fascinating characters, place and time

Being a short story writer, I long resisted reading these book just because they were novels, and lengthy ones at that. Mostly, I didn’t want to succumb to the weight of their popularity. But with so much pandemic time on my hands, I thought, why not see what the fuss is about? I’m on board now. These are beautifully written novels, an open window onto a host of fascinating characters in a unique, even exotic (to me, at least) place and time.

Contributing to their popularity is a technique Ferrante borrows from genre novelists, concentrating principally on the action, fragmenting the long story into very short chapters, almost all of which end on what television writers call a button—a spiffy bit of dialog or a precarious plot turn. You keep saying, what’s one more tiny chapter, then find yourself still reading at three in the morning. It’s the literary equivalent of binge-watching NETFLIX.

In case you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know this, here goes. Refracted through the story of two friends—one naturally brilliant, one merely very smart, but persistent—is the nearly sixty-year history of post-war Neapolitan life.

Class and the attending language conflicts, poverty, organized crime, an archaic and discriminatory educational system, the ‘60s student revolts and the violent factions rising out of them, politics, motherhood, womanhood, ambition, the pettiness of the academe, betrayal, shoes, only a little love, even less sex. Did I leave anything out? Oh, yes. Vendetta, violence, murder.

What’s not to like? I devoured the books in less than a month and was sad when it was over. That said, I can’t count myself a true Ferrante fan. Her books are a little overstuffed for me. Still, I’m glad I spent time with Elena Greco, Lila Cerullo, Maestra Oliviero, with the families—Sarratore, Solaras, Caraccis—with Enzo, Antonio, Pasquale and the gang. With all the messiness and menace of Naples.

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Ellen In Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

A funny and perceptive novel in stories

I’m a short story writer and for fifteen years I’ve mostly avoided the novel. I prefer what I call the “Roman candle” school of storytelling—a singular unitary arc.

Enter the linked story collection—novels for people who prefer the short form, but who want to spend more than five minutes with a story’s characters.

Nowadays, there are many of these linked story collections. (Full disclosure #1: I’m writing one.) (Full disclosure #2: Caroline Adderson is my editor.)

The linked collection that people usually talk about is “Olive Kitteridge.” Not to take anything away from Elizabeth Strout’s inspiring and luminous work, but the stories in that collection are pretty weakly linked. In some, there is not even a trace of Olive. It seems at least possible that their linkage was an inspired afterthought.

In contrast, Caroline Adderson’s sassy and irreverent Ellen McGinty permeates every page of “Ellen in Pieces.” Her life is laid out in two acts, through twelve stories told by five POV characters. Built around its own narrative arc, each story illuminates the loves and travails of this quirky woman and her circle. After spending a year finally succumbing to the novel, I get why people love them. There is a great joy in falling in love with a character, in seeing their story unfold over a long period of time (here, several decades). It’s something most short story writers, with our singular unitary arcs, are loath to do. Time in this collection is fluid. Many of the stories dip deftly into the past to inform present action, while never slowing the narrative flow.

Like Lorrie Moore, Adderson will make you laugh and rip your heart out in the same sentence. Be prepared to be entertained and to deeply penetrate the lives of Ellen, her wacky family and friends.

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If We Were Electric: Stories

by Patrick Earl Ryan

Serious magic - debut collection takes 2019 Flannery O'Connor Award

This debut collection of stories by Patrick Earl Ryan set in and around New Orleans is pure magic. By that I mean, its primary concerns are magical, whether it be fairy lights, Shaolin-esque warriors, voodoo love spells, tall tales of demon possession, or just the magic of being a gay nineteen-year-old and touching another boy for the first time.

Like runes cast for purposes of divination, the wordcraft is concise, poetic, capitalizing on a strong southern voice. Many of the stories are also like poems, tending to the short. And they are deeply queer—queer to the bone—which is where this collection is most at home.

Add to all this a serious New Orleans-thing going on, and you’ve got some potent voodoo. Apparently, Roxane Gay thought so too, awarding the collection the 2019 Flannery O’Connor Book Series Award.

And for good reason. We are deeply imagined into a kind of Prospero’s Island. Here there be swamps. But also moonlight and old Cajun ways, a ratty New Orleans apartment, a roadside convenience store.

The opening story, “Before Las Blancas,” is one of the finest I’ve read in recent years. It is a tale of jeopardy and first love, heightened by the hot mess of hope and desperation that is the road trip. In it, a twenty-eight-year-old man and his thirteen-year-old lover are on the lam, hightailing it to Mexico. Lurking just below the surface is a sense of peril, due to the lovelorn narrator’s young age, and the fact their road trip exists both as a romantic getaway and a perceived kidnapping.

Subverting a reader’s expectations is a time-honored technique and Ryan uses it to good effect in two stories, “Cargo” and “Feux Follet.”

“Cargo” begins as something sweet, conventional: two men, long-time lovers, along with one of the men’s nephews drive a load of crabs to the market in Lafayette. The constant rain, alligators crawling out of the bayous, the threat of rising water, all contribute to the burgeoning sense of menace. After the lively setup, the story sours and curdles toward its luminous end.

“Feux Follet” introduces us to a superstitious man, proudly parochial, content within the confines of his one square mile of land. Our expectations for an imminent comeuppance unravel when the tale turns into one of repressed grief.

Exploring grief and remorse more overtly, “The Blue Son” is a story of a gay man with AIDS—veteran of the San Francisco bacchanalia—who has come home to New Orleans to die. Complicating this is the resentment of his mother, the anger and homophobia of his dead brother’s ghost, as the three bicker toward a begrudging acceptance.

As befits the Southern Gothic tradition from which many of these stories spring, most tend to the dark. There are several lighthearted tales, though. In “An Undisturbed Dark Place” two friends both have a crush on Kent. Kent, though, has the hots for a drag queen waiter/performer at a Chinese restaurant. So to win Kent over, the friends construct a magic love charm. From there, things slide into some big-hearted fun.

Magic casts its spell over two remarkable stories, heartbreaking and elegiac.

In “Where It Takes Us,” there are two brothers—one straight, though dying from AIDS, one gay. Add into the mix a fast car, a racetrack, a warm sunset, Led Zeppelin and you have all the ingredients for a magic even stronger than fairy lights or voodoo incantations.

In the astonishing titular story, the twenty-three-year-old virginal Christopher goes cruising for men and awkwardly snares the high-strung Mark, a boy who “takes life by the hair” (p. 111), a boy who says he is electric. Lightning strikes. Literally. And this exuberantly sad and gorgeous tale spills out.

There are other fine stories here as well, including the long, dream-like concluding one. Under the fantastical elements, in all of them the human lurks—grief, betrayal, love, fucking, violence—lensed through the conditions of poverty, desperate circumstances and class. There are no learned English professors here. No high-toned gatherings of the rich and famous. No circuit-party A-listers. But a convenience store clerk, a couple of down-on-their-luck stoners, a water-level inspector, a stock boy, a pump jockey and—thank God!—a martial arts and tai chi instructor currently living in San Francisco (Ryan), who through his writerly skill has conjured this delicious magic to life.

{ Cross-posted at goodreads. }

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By Nightfall

by Michael Cunningham

A funny, penetrating novella by the author of "The Hours"

“Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.”—Michael Cunningham, “By Nightfall”

There are some works that keep the reader at a remove from its characters’ inner workings. We have to deduce thought and feeling through the finely delineated action and, in doing so, become almost a co-author of the material. They are like little plays going off in your mind.

Other works minutely detail its characters every thought and feeling. This absence of withholding can be exhilarating—all that beautifully wrought insight—but it’s a bit like watching a movie with a too forward soundtrack sawing away at you, telling you what to feel at every frame.

“By Nightfall” flirts with this. There are long, ruminative passages on the characters’ motivations, histories, idiosyncrasies—observations that mine each moment in all its intricate depth. There are long passages, too, on art, art-making and selling. On New York, its various neighborhoods and streetscapes. Even freighted with all these asides, this short novel manages to have the singular, unitary arc that I admire so much in the short story.

The method of conveyance is beautiful language. Here it’s usually not so far removed from the conversational as to be ponderous. All this observational prowess is also leavened by a serious dollop of humor. Especially in the frequently hilarious, if poignant, dialog, and in the witty and urbane interior monologues. Wryly observed is the expression usually applied to this sort of thing.

You may not like the constant arrests in the narrative so the author can wax wise about the human condition, but I’m a sucker for it. It’s one of the things I love about literature. I want all that smart-alecky prose to spring me, even if only for a few moments, from the confinement of my own peculiar and overweening consciousness.

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Finder

by Will Ferguson

Entertaining spellbinder by 2012 Giller Prize winner

File this book under the category of a romp/literary thriller, not exactly a who-done-it, but a how-does-this-crazy-thing-end.

I confess up front, this kind of book isn’t really my thing. The short chapters, almost always ending on a button, as screenwriters say, or a cliffhanger, grow wearisome over three hundred plus pages. Ferguson’s wordsmithing, delectably noirish and hardboiled, is, often to a fault, itching to please. Aren’t all writers trying, at bottom, merely to entertain, even us snotty literary types? We hide the vaudeville under our vaunted observational prose, whereas the thriller writer is unabashed, inviting the reader to sit back and revel as the gears turn.

Ferguson is a winner of a Giller Prize, no less, and his stylish, inventive prose powerfully delves into the humanity of his characters, into the particulars of the book’s many exotic locations. It’s just all at the service of so much nonsense.

What nonsense, you say? An international mastermind, a finder of lost, and therefore immensely valuable, things, who will stop at nothing and who at times may not even exist, ensnares a raft of characters in his diabolical schemes.

Still, all the international settings, the insights into the worlds of travel writing and conflict reporting, all the buttons and cliffhangers did their duty, kept me flipping the pages until the end, however hastily. In the middle of a one-hundred-year pandemic with a seemingly interminable amount of time on our hands, a good romp may be just what we all need.

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