Roy Miller's Blog, page 195
May 9, 2017
Mother’s Day Fiasco | WritersDigest.com
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 9 May 2017 | 4:00 pm.
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To celebrate Mother’s Day, you’ve invited the entire family over to celebrate. But instead of bringing your mom to the celebration, your father brings someone else—and tells you that this woman is actually your mother. How do you react? Is it someone you know? Write this scene.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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17th Annual Short Short Story Competition Winner: The Removal
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 9 May 2017 | 10:00 pm.
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“The Removal,” by Lauren Schenkman, is the winning story for the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition. For complete coverage of this year’s awards, including an interview with Schenkman, check out the July/August 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. You can also view a complete list of winners and an extended interview with Schenkman. To read all 25 winning entries, check out the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition Collection. In this bonus online exclusive, you can read Schenkman’s winning entry.
The Removal
Everything nonessential would be removed, the doctor had said. Victor, desperate, had said Yes, yes of course, but now, as he was being laid out on the operating table, the doctor’s statement sounded frighteningly extreme. The doctor bent over him, the swivel lamp a supernova behind his green cap. His brown eyes with their bristling lashes peered down over his mask. The doctor was maybe ten years older than Victor, in his forties, and very successful, with a jogger’s physique. Victor wondered if the doctor himself had undergone the surgery at some point, but it seemed rude to ask.
“How long will it take?” Victor had asked.
“It’s impossible to tell before we open you up. But judging from the scan, there’s plenty to do.”
Now there was a sharp pinch at Victor’s forearm. The anesthetic flowed in. In minutes, it was as though someone had loosened the ribbon connecting Victor’s mind to his body. His consciousness hovered a few inches above the table, like one of those angels who are just a baby’s head and wings.
“We’ll get to the most recent things first,” the doctor said, his voice muffled by his mask. And he was right. Out came two rubbery lumps, like fat on the edge of a cheap steak, which Victor recognized immediately. One was the dental work he’d been overcharged for that summer; the other was the new woman at work who had been promoted to the position he’d been eyeing. Then came long, slender ribbons of stringy stuff, like linguine—his hatred of March, a pointless month, and of harmonica music.
“Just getting started,” said the doctor, whose gloved hands were already filthy with fluid, not red like blood, but a brownish liquid like the runoff from cooked meat.
The next piece was considerably larger—a softball-sized clump with many lobes, each like the cartilage on the end of a chicken bone. That was Olympia, his ex: her superior taste in film; the cheerful persona she put on for other people and stripped off, like a too-tight dress, the minute they got home; even her luxurious, caramel-colored hair, which, on the day they’d met, had grabbed his attention from across the cafe. He’d later come to hate it. It had continued to be arrestingly beautiful even after Olympia herself had become unbearable to him.
When this large item lay on the surgical tray, dribbling a clear liquid, Victor was sure the doctor would now sew him back up. But he seemed to double his activity. He pulled out a constellation of fossilized giblets—the girls who had refused to talk to, date, or have sex with him. Then two nearly identical lumps, bristling with little hair-like rootlets—his jealousy of his friend Tod, who was slightly taller than him, and of his friend Chris, who was slightly better at pool.
There were a number of lumps that resembled wads of overchewed gum: resentments against the tax code, at nice jeans for being both exorbitantly expensive and consistently unflattering, and at the infuriatingly familiar tone with which homeless people asked him for change.
Two nurses in green scrubs had been helping discard the fetid matter, picking it up from the metal tray with steel pincers and placing it in small paper bags for the incinerator. Now it was coming out so fast that they simply scooped it up by the handful and dumped it into a tall white bucket. In fact, the volume of meat and fluid in the bucket was clearly much larger than his body cavity. Victor began to panic. How would there possibly be anything left of him?
“These are probably the parentals,” the doctor said, holding up two tumors as though they were a pair of newborn twins. “They’re smaller than average.” Victor wasn’t surprised: it was just his mother’s self-conscious laugh that he hated, his father’s dogged good cheer. The resentments against his siblings—slimy masses like calf liver—were small as well. He was the oldest and most intelligent of the three, after all, and had mostly gotten his own way. His little brother was, by some accounts, better-looking, though, and his sister had recently called him sexist for suggesting that the new woman had been promoted because of affirmative action.
The doctor slowed. Victor couldn’t feel anything, exactly, but he could sense an enormous pressure, as if something was being torn out by the roots. Finally, with a grunt, the doctor raised a huge grayish lump the size of two fists, wrinkled and striated like a brain or an underdeveloped fetus. This one had countless secret folds, its own organelles and cancers, each of which Victor could recognize and name. It had been growing in him since birth. It was his outrage that he, like everyone else, would never be completely happy. That life was both cruelly short and unbearably long, an eternity of never quite getting what he wanted, moment by moment by moment, until it ended.
“I think that’s everything,” the doctor said, panting. His green scrubs were splattered from neck to ankle, and he wiped his forehead with his arm, leaving a brown greasy smear. “How do you feel now?”
Victor could not respond. But if he could have, he might have said something like this: there was a wind blowing from somewhere, a warm wind fragrant of gorse and maybe rosemary, and this wind was blowing through a large and ancient shell. The shell, Victor knew instinctively, was extremely, inordinately old—older, somehow, than the earth itself, because by the time it had washed up on the universe’s first beach, it was already empty and clean.
Though Victor hadn’t spoken, the doctor smiled as if he had. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it. It’s the same with all of them.”
And the wind continued to blow.
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Stephen King on Paul Theroux’s Portrait of a Truly Horrible Mother
This content was originally published by STEPHEN KING on 9 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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And still, I sort of liked it. As with some of the more gruesome Thomas Hardy novels (“Jude the Obscure” comes to mind), reading “Mother Land” is like watching a slow-motion car crash. As I trudged my way through Jay’s long-winded jeremiad about his belittling, cozening, lying, scheming mother (who is never named; she’s just Mother) and his backbiting, gossiping, unpleasant siblings, I repeatedly found myself thinking about the old joke that goes, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” This led me to consider the fine line between humor and horror: It stops being funny when it starts being you.
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There’s no story here, really, just a situation: Mother sits on her throne (a leather chair in the living room), carves birds, does crosswords and boasts about her good health. “What am I awn?” she asks when her children are comparing their various drug treatments. “I’m not awn anything.” And she’s a genius at playing favorites. “We were most loyal to Mother when we were being disloyal to each other,” Jay writes. “Mother feasted on failure.” He refers to her children as a savage tribe worshiping a goddess. They bring her gifts, but always separately, so they don’t have to run into one another. “She was propitiated with presents.”
Theroux can tell a story when not occupied with his narrator’s need to enumerate old hurts and settle old scores. One of the best has to do with his henpeckedshoe-salesman father, who briefly frees himself from his wife’s suffocating influence by taking the part of Mr. Bones in a minstrel show. During the rehearsals, he becomes a different man, amusing and vaguely sinister. “Swanking in the role of a comical slave,” Jay writes, “he’d become a frightening master to us.” The Mr. Bones tale was new to me, but will be familiar to many Theroux readers, as it has previously appeared in both The New Yorker and Theroux’s short story collection of the same name.
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The story of Jay’s older brother Floyd’s bedwetting is less funny (that fine line between humor and horror). “Years later he still spoke of it with bitterness and shame.” He’d been “terrified in anticipation of Mother’s screech. ‘Again! You’ve done it again!’ ” Eventually, she makes Floyd sleep on a rubber sheet.
Anything Jay says in “Mother Land” is worth saying at least twice (or a dozen times), and one of these repetitions has to do with what he sees as his family’s uniqueness: “I never saw … any group of people as tangled, as rancorous, as my own family.” Yet many of us will surely feel empathy rather than horror when Mother threatens Floyd, declaring she’ll “hang that rubber sheet around your neck” and make him “wear it to school.” Most adults, your reviewer included, can remember similar shamings from parents who have simply reached the end of their rope. Philip Larkin more succinctly knew how they screw you up, “your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” I was reminded of my wife’s grandmother, watching me with gimlet eyes as I — then a very young man — staggered into her house with a load of luggage and baby paraphernalia. “If you stuck a broom up your bottom,” she helpfully informed me, “you could sweep the floor as you go.”
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Floyd the Bedwetter (even in his 60s, afflicted with other assorted ailments, his brothers and sisters never let him forget his childhood failing) grows up to be a university professor, a poet and a sometime critic. Upholding the family tradition of hostility, he agrees to review one of his brother Jay’s novels for Boston magazine and trashes it: “At best a beach read, a middlebrow brick just a step above Judith Krantz or Belva Plain… a bizzare chiasmus, a Rumplestiltskin prank,” its author a “name-promoting, self-absorbed” hack. And so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah. All of this seemingly in revenge for Jay’s failure to tell him that Jay had become seriously involved with a woman and had offered her a commitment ring.
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“Mother Land” is an exercise in mean-spirited score-settling. It’s also fun. The party to celebrate Mother’s 90th birthday is only amusing, but the clambake in the assisted living facility where she celebrates her 102nd is downright hilarious, with the elderly children still sniping at one another in grammar-school argot. When Jay arrives for the festivities, one of them exclaims, “It’s doo-doo head.”
Theroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humor, at its best when Jay is describing Mother’s execrable cooking: ”Everything Mother made looked like cat food, including the mittens she knitted, so her gifts were all a form of mockery.” Even better — I’m laughing as I write it — is his description of Mother’s pea soup, “so thick a mouse could have trotted across it.”
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Is style enough? Shall we read this Bible-size rant for its prose? The reader must decide for him- or herself. As for me, I enjoyed “Mother Land” against my will. Jay’s family is far from unique, and a version of his cozening, calculating mother can be found in many homes, but I also found a little bit of myself here. Theroux ends up assassinating all of his characters, but I still enjoyed the play.
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The post Stephen King on Paul Theroux’s Portrait of a Truly Horrible Mother appeared first on Art of Conversation.
European Commission's New E-book Rules Worry Booksellers
This content was originally published by on 9 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The Commission ruled last week that booksellers must now fulfill orders from customers anywhere in the European Union. Some fear the shift will force small and medium-sized booksellers out of the e-book business.
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Extended Q&A with WD’s Short Short Story Competition Winner
This content was originally published by Karen Krumpak on 9 May 2017 | 10:00 pm.
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“The Removal” by Lauren Schenkman is the grand-prize winning story in the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Fiction Competition. It bested more than 5,200 entries to win $3,000 and a trip to the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City, among other prizes. For complete coverage of this year’s awards, check out the July/August 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. Click here for a complete list of winners from this year’s awards. You can read “The Removal” here. To read the top 25 stories from the competition, check out the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition Collection.
Schenkman is a 30-year-old writer and former staffer for Science magazine. She recently spent a year in Nicaragua as part of the Fulbright Student Program, and she is currently at work on a novel about a Nicaraguan gold mine.
When did you start writing?
I had that classic thing where I probably wrote my first story when I was seven or eight. I think by the time I was ten, I was trying to write a novel. By the time I was in high school—this is a very common story for writers—I just kept trying to write, to do this crazy thing that I had no idea how to do. I’ve always been addicted to it.
What drew you to writing and science?
Being a very idealistic teenager, I thought, “Well, I want to know everything, so I’m going to major in physics, and I’m going to major in creative writing.” In a strange way, I think they have the same project. They’re trying to get at the same questions. Physicists are fundamentally trying to understand, “What are the laws that govern the universe?” and they’re probing the most mysterious, incomprehensible aspects of our existence. And writers are also probing the most mysterious, incomprehensible aspects of our existence, but they’re getting at it from a totally different way.
What have you learned as a writer from science and science writing?
The more we’re aware of what’s out there, the further we can push the boundaries in our own writing. The more experience you have and the more you know, the more tools you have and the more ways that creativity has to get out and express itself.
Describe your typical writing routine.
I use the Pomodoro method—25 minutes of absolute focus, then 5 minutes to stretch, wash the dishes, walk around, etc. I find that keeping email and phone turned off for long periods of time allows me to get into the depths of thought necessary to make progress. I write no matter how inspired I feel, which I think is important. Rather than waiting for inspiration to strike while I’m doing something else, I make a habit of sitting down every day, whether I feel like it or not. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t come until twenty minutes or an hour in; sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
Where do your ideas come from?
If you look at what I write, you can see where my own experience has come in, but I think, as a writer, everything you experience goes in there, everything you read goes in there, the news goes in there, stuff your friends tell you goes in there. And then your own preoccupations stir the pot, and what comes out is this thing that is maybe recognizable, and you can trace it to here or there, but it’s become strange.
Write a one-sentence summary of your story, describing it for someone who hasn’t read it yet.
A man, suffering from an unnamed malady, decides to have a drastic operation that turns out to affect much more than just his body.
What is your writing process?
[“The Removal”] was written for a good friend of mine who puts on these monthly writers salons. Her prompt was “only the essentials.” On purpose, I usually wait until the day of to write the story. It’s a process that’s changed for me a lot in just the past year. I thought I had to sit there and frown really hard, and the words would come out perfectly formed. That doesn’t lend itself to creativity because the inner critic is on full alert. Another friend suggested, “No matter what comes out in the first draft, write it down. No matter how stupid it is, no matter how embarrassing it is, you give yourself, or that part of you that’s writing, full permission to come up with whatever it wants.
What is your writing style?
I really try to make the style serve the story. Some stories come with a particular voice. I don’t think of myself as having a particular style, I just try to shape the style to the needs of the story.
What is your writing style in “The Removal”?
It has an overly educated, removed, intellectual voice. It sticks pretty close in third person to the main character. And he thinks a lot of himself, so that’s why it has this overwritten, intellectual vocabulary—even though he wouldn’t actually talk like that, that’s how he thinks about himself.
What drives your writing?
Curiosity, wonder, and thinking that being alive is the strangest, most ridiculous thing.
What are the best aspects of writing a short story?
It’s something you can hold in your brain because it’s small enough. Since there’s a short commitment, you sometimes feel less fear.
What are the most challenging aspects of writing a short story?
It has to be more muscular, more distilled. You don’t have any room to include something just because it’s interesting to you. Everything has to be serving the story.
What are your strengths in writing?
I feel like writers shouldn’t comment on their own strengths.
What do you strive for most in your writing?
Elegance, plotting and pacing, knowing what to include and what not to include.
What do you struggle with in writing?
I struggle with plot and conflict. I came to writing through a love of sensual detail and language, and I’m guilty of writing many a pretty, pointless paragraph. Thanks to great readers, I’ve learned to at least ask myself, “Is there a conflict here? How does this scene change the character’s fortune?” If there’s no conflict in that scene, it probably doesn’t advance the story at all, and needs to be cut.
What are you working to improve in your writing?
I tend to be overly wordy. My cousin, he’s a musician, he told me, “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” I’m the kind of person who—when I pack for a trip, I bring three extra outfits I don’t need, an extra pair of shoes, I think I’m going to read five books, I don’t even read one book. So I’m trying to get better at that, both with the packing and the writing. Because it’s so clear to me that I do the same thing in my writing—I over pack.
What can’t you live without in your writing life?
Community. Having people read my work and respond honestly. And knowing other people are doing this, too.
What is the best writing advice you have received?
The critic needs to be out of the room [during the first draft]. Also, from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, don’t waste time wondering if you’re a writer or if you’re allowed to be a writer—just give yourself the permission slip.
What are your goals as a writer?
To be ever braver and stranger and freer. To articulate things for people that they have often thought but never been able to articulate for themselves. And to be in a position to be able to help expand the voices that we hear in writing.
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The post Extended Q&A with WD’s Short Short Story Competition Winner appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Bloomsbury Bohemians in the British Countryside
This content was originally published by FRANCINE PROSE on 9 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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I could never have visited the area without making a literary pilgrimage to Monk’s House, Woolf’s last home, where she spent summers beginning in 1919, where she lived full time after her house in London was bombed in 1940, and where she drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse in March 1941. Located in the tiny village of Rodmell, it’s a short drive from Charleston. Michael Cunningham, who came here in connection with his novel “The Hours,” in which Virginia Woolf is a principal character, said that Woolf’s house looks like a graduate student’s apartment compared with her sister’s home. Monk’s House is lovely, but smaller, more restrained, almost spartan in comparison to the exuberance of Charleston. At the bottom of the garden at Monk’s House is the writing studio where Woolf worked, and which is set up to recreate the objects she liked to have around her and the atmosphere in which she wrote.
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There was one more trip that I wanted to make, to Farley Farm House, also a short drive from Charleston. This was the home where the great American photographer Lee Miller lived with her husband, Sir Roland Penrose, the British Surrealist painter, and their son. It was a vacation place and party house for Max Ernst, Miró, Picasso, Man Ray, Saul Steinberg, Dorothea Tanning and Dylan Thomas. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the strikingly beautiful Miller was a fashion model before departing for Paris where she lived with, and learned from, Man Ray. She became an intrepid war correspondent and was among the first photojournalists to document the Allies’ entry into Nazi concentration camps. Her photographs were initially published in Vogue magazine.
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In Tunbridge Wells, Kent, is the Pantiles Cafe.
Credit
Andy Haslam for The New York Times
It was sheer good luck that our last free afternoon in that part of Sussex happened to fall on the day (the last Sunday of each month) that Farley Farm House is open to visitors. Miller and Mr. Penrose’s son, Antony Penrose, graciously took us around a place that is a working farm, a living memorial, a handsome dwelling and an astonishing small museum. Like Charleston, its walls are covered with art and decorated with murals, and scattered throughout the rooms are stunning examples of art from Asia and Africa. He pointed out the iconic photograph of Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub, taken by her wartime colleague David Scherman, after the liberation of Munich.
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Documents, mementos, sketches, paintings and photographs illustrate the art-historic guest list. In the last decades of her life, Lee Miller became a hugely ambitious cook; Antony Penrose’s book “The Home of the Surrealists” includes photographs of dishes that his mother made, among them, two cauliflowers tinted and made to look like a pair of pink breasts surrounded by deviled eggs resembling eyes, a creation that demonstrated her fondness for making Surrealist sculptures of food. Miller’s handsome, functional kitchen at Farley Farm House has been left exactly as it was.
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17th Annual Short Short Story Competition Winners List
This content was originally published by Karen Krumpak on 9 May 2017 | 10:00 pm.
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Writer’s Digest would like to congratulate the winners of the 17th Annual Short Short Story Competition, where writers submit their very best short stories of less than 1,500 words. Please join us in congratulating our winners!
For complete coverage of the 17th Annual Short Short Story Competition, see the July/August 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. You can read all 25 stories in the 17th Annual Short Short Story Competition Collection.
“The Removal” by Lauren Schenkman (extended Q&A)
“Nearly Dead” by Nikki Chin
“Warm-Blooded Animals” by Kathleen Lane
“Fact Sheet” by Tamara Titus
“Millisecond” by Sarah Wilson
“By Whatever Means” by Stephen Hunt
“27 Jars of Mustard” by Joan Freitag
“Blue Sky” by Richard D. Carlson
“Reductio ad Absurdum” by Sabine Sloley
“Accidental Death” by Stacy Whittemore
“Abuelito” by Julia Dupuis
“Just In Case” by Brittany Kopman
“Disruption” by Dionne Peart
“A Life Investment” by Charlie McDowell
“Mama” by Linda McHenry
“Value” by Carl Pogue
“123” by Felicia Morrissey
“Salt” by Laura Lewis
“The Lure” by Rhonda Beauchemin
“The Crow’s Nest” by Heather Sparks
“Flicker” by Samantha Marquis
“Fishing for Secrets” by Pat McCaw
“A Killer App” by Fred McGavran
“Hateful Games” by Gary Sharpe
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Books for Those Who Love Sports or Just Love to Read About Them
This content was originally published by NICOLE LAMY on 9 May 2017 | 9:50 am.
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Another story about a New England sports team, the Lady Hurricanes of Amherst, Mass., will satisfy your desire for a book with a sharp human-interest angle — competitive girls becoming women — and game-time excitement. During the 1992-93 season Madeleine Blais followed this high school basketball team through their championship season. Her account, “In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle” (1995), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
Two sports classics, very different from each other, would also be at home on your shelf. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Wait Till Next Year,” her unsentimental 1997 memoir about growing up in Rockville Centre, N.Y., in the 1950s and learning to be a Dodgers fan (sorry), reads like a cultural history told through baseball. The posthumously published memoir of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, on the other hand, draws its power from personal revelations. Written with the Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad, “Days of Grace” grapples with the sorrow of the tennis star’s early life, his career and his social activism. The book ends with a letter Ashe wrote to his young daughter in the months before his death from AIDS in 1993.
Two poker books, both by writers who entered World Series of Poker tournaments for magazine assignments, remain linked in my mind. Colson Whitehead’s “The Noble Hustle” started as an article for Grantland in 2011. Whitehead surveys Las Vegas with his novelist’s eye, skewering and savoring the characters and lingo of the strip. James McManus, also a novelist, based his poker drama, “Positively Fifth Street,” on an essay he wrote for Harper’s Magazine. His book plunges headlong into the seediness of Las Vegas, weaving his participation in the 2000 World Series of Poker with the story of the mysterious, sordid death, in 1998, of the casino owner Ted Binion. If McManus’s poker odyssey leaves you wanting another kind of sports adventure, consider reading his novel from 1996, “Going to the Sun,” about a diabetic woman named Penny on a cross-country bicycle trip.
Another novel to add to your list, Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-winning “Lord of Misrule,” is a richly metaphorical book about horseracing at the fictional Indian Mound Downs in West Virginia. Divided into four parts — one for each of the novel’s races — Gordon’s book makes nuanced characters out of both horses and humans. And it’s the relationship between the animals and people that reads most true.
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Borrowing heavily from the novelist’s toolbox — a fictional narrator, suspenseful scenes — Kerry Howley’s “Thrown” tells true, brutal stories about mixed martial arts. Her unconventional, darkly funny book follows the lives of two Midwestern cage fighters — one just starting out and one in the twilight of his career.
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“Barbarian Days,” William Finnegan’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about his lifelong dedication to surfing, is not a traditional sports story. The athlete’s compelling narrative arc — training and preparation leading to the big event — gives way to a sprawling, introspective, socially engaged around-the-world travelogue about an athlete/wave artist who, though he doesn’t make a living through surfing, chronicles enough dramatic rides, emotional journeys, and brushes with death within the sport to make a life.
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Yours truly,
Match Book
⬥
A Sports-Themed Book Club’s Reading List
This week’s reader was kind enough to share her book club’s backlist with us — 42 titles that cover almost all the bases.
“The Art of Fielding,” by Chad Harbach
“Born to Run,” by Christopher McDougall
“Fever Pitch,” by Nick Hornby
“Swimming to Antarctica,” by Lynne Cox
“A Different Kind of Daughter,” by Maria Toorpakai with Katharine Holstein
“Hell on Two Wheels,” by Amy Snyder
“The Soul of Baseball,” by Joe Posnanski
“Portage,” by Sue Leaf
“The Miracle of Castel di Sangro,” by Joe McGinniss
“The Match,” Mark Frost
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“The Blind Side,” by Michael Lewis
“The Card,” by Michael O’Keeffe and Teri Thompson
“A Necessary Spectacle,” by Selena Roberts
“Major,” by Todd Balf
“Fastnet, Force 10,” by John Rousmaniere
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“Race Across Alaska,” by Libby Riddles and Tim Jones
“The Amateurs,” by David Halberstam
“Playing the Enemy,” by John Carlin
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“Skyline,” by Tim Keown
“Penguins Stopped Play,” by Harry Thompson
“High Adventure,” by Edmund Hillary
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“The Great Match Race,” by John Eisenberg
“Kook,” by Peter Heller
“Girl Hunter,” by Georgia Pellegrini
“Muhammad Ali,” by Thomas Hauser
“Odd Man Out,” by Matt McCarthy
“The Kids Got It Right,” by Jim Dent
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“An Accidental Sportswriter,” by Robert Lipsyte
“Long Distance,” by Bill McKibben
“The Emerald Mile,” by Kevin Fedarko
“The Boys in the Boat,” by Daniel James Brown
“Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand
“The Closer,” by Mariano Rivera with Wayne Coffey
“Outcasts United,” by Warren St. John
“Imperfect,” by Jim Abbott and Tim Brown
“A Voyage for Madmen,” by Peter Nichols
“Dream Team,” by Jack McCallum
“The Three Year Swim Club,” by Julia Checkoway
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“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain
Do you need book recommendations? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.
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Jeff Kinney marks 10th anniversary of ‘Wimpy Kid’ series
This content was originally published by Associated Press on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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NEW YORK (AP) — Jeff Kinney remembers when his goal was to write a book, one big book, for grown-ups.
“I thought I’d write about a year in the life of a typical kid,” says the children’s author known to millions for his “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. “I’d write one book that was between 700 and 1,000 pages long and I’d look at every aspect of childhood within that time frame. Furthermore, I was writing for the humor section of the bookstore, not the middle grade section.”
Kinney spoke to The Associated Press recently as he looked back at the decade since “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” made him one of the world’s most popular writers. The first 11 novels have sold more than 180 million copies and the series has been the basis for four movies, with the latest, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul,” scheduled for May 19. Abrams Books told the AP on Wednesday that the 12th book, coming Nov. 7, will be called “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway.”
The misadventures of middle schooler Greg Heffley, sketched in readers’ minds as a skinny boy with a round head and precious few strands of hair, have stood out in two ways in the book world — they appeal equally to girls and boys (sometimes known euphemistically as “reluctant readers”), and they have consistently sold more than 1 million copies in hardcover, an achievement few books attain anymore thanks in part to the rise of e-books and the fall of the Borders superstore chain.
“The books are funny and appeal to all levels of readers,” says Judy Bulow, lead buyer for the children’s section of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver. “And we’ve seen a plethora of stories from other authors (Rachel Renee Russell’s “Dork Dairies,” Tom Watson’s “Stick Dog”) like that, with a lot of illustrations and clever humor. The kids eat them up. If there’s not a new ‘Wimpy Kid’ book, they want something like it.”
Kinney, 46, is a Fort Washington, Maryland, native who studied at the University of Maryland, College Park, and while in school created a comic strip that ran in the campus newspaper. Kinney, speaking by phone near the bookstore that he and his wife, Julie, own in Plainville, Massachusetts, recalls how Heffley had been on his mind for years before he finally got a book deal. He liked the idea of a kid defined not by heroics, but by “flaws and imperfections,” not unlike what the author saw in himself.
Heffley was introduced to many in 2004 through a funbrain.com web series that Kinney published for free that attracted millions of visitors. Two years later, Kinney attended the first New York Comic-Con. He stopped by the Abrams booth, purchased a copy of Brian Fies’ graphic novel “Mom’s Cancer” and spoke to Abrams editorial director Charles Kochman, who recalls Kinney asking him if he would look at his work.
“At these shows you’re constantly getting pitched stuff, and most of it is forgettable,” says Kochman, who still edits Kinney. “As he handed it to me, he said, ‘I have this web comic called ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid,’ and the image he showed me was the image we used for Book One. I remember thinking, ‘I wish something like this had been around when I was a kid.’”
The series debuted in April 2007 with a first printing of 25,000 copies and early praise from Publishers Weekly, which cited Kinney’s “gift for believable preteen dialogue and narration.” The book was on The New York Times’ best-seller list by May and remained there long after. Kinney, meanwhile, learned that his work had caught on with an unexpected audience.
“Once the book came out, I started getting emails from teachers thanking me, saying almost 95 percent of the time, ‘You got my reluctant reader to read,’” Kinney says. “I had never heard that phrase before. And I found out that it was a big deal, that ‘reluctant readers’ was code for boys. The letters I got from kids would simply say they thought the books were funny.”
According to Abrams, Kinney’s next “Wimpy Kid” novel will find Greg on a holiday trip, although “what’s billed as a stress-free vacation becomes a holiday nightmare.” The author hopes to complete at least 20 in the series and likes that Heffley, unlike Harry Potter, can always stay the same age. Kinney still thinks about writing books for adults and nonfiction projects, but for fiction he is sticking with kids.
“I’ve learned that I’m a children’s writer,” he says. “I didn’t know it when I was starting off, but I know it now.”
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The post Jeff Kinney marks 10th anniversary of ‘Wimpy Kid’ series appeared first on Art of Conversation.
In Dennis Lehane’s ‘Since We Fell,’ a Troubled Woman Seeks Answers
This content was originally published by JANET MASLIN on 8 May 2017 | 9:45 pm.
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Strong and smart as she is, Rachel needs a man in her life. She marries a producer named Sebastian, who works at the Boston TV station where she is a rising star. He’s irritable when Rachel endangers her career, since he cares mostly about her status. She goes to cover the Haitian earthquake and can’t be chirpy enough to satisfy her bosses. “Our viewers need hope,” they tell her. “Haitians need water,” she replies. One on-air meltdown later, Rachel has been fired and is a public pariah.
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The author Dennis Lehane.
Credit
Gaby Gerster
Already subject to panic attacks, which are exacerbated by the horrors she saw in Haiti, Rachel stays in her apartment for 18 months. Sebastian drops out of her life. And it leads to Rachel becoming reacquainted with Mr. Right, Brian Delacroix, who she’d known casually and now looks at with new interest. He is tall, dark and handsome, and he is the first lover who really wanted to help her. Rachel falls gratefully into his arms, and they are married.
Their marriage ushers in a string of wall-to-wall spoiler alerts. Suffice it to say that this second part of “Since We Fell” is sharply different from the first. Instead, it’s packed with signs that Lehane sold this story to the movies, which he did, in 2015, and that he loves the Hitchcock classics that prey on mistrust. Suddenly, he begins delivering nonstop suspense only loosely rooted in Rachel’s story and its foundations.
Like so many mystery authors who have been drawn into screenwriting, Lehane writes best when he’s thinking solely about a book. “World Gone By,” the elegiac 2015 novel that preceded this one, had a tragic grandeur that is never approached by this less credible, more action-oriented thriller. But “World Gone By” had none of the tricks, shocks, visual effects, mad coincidences and disguises that propel “Since We Fell.” And Lehane is no slouch at those, either. He remains one of the great, diabolical thriller kings who seems intimately acquainted with darkness and can make it seep from the page or screen. A line of dialogue like “Oh, ho, ho, my man, let’s not push me tonight,” delivered with brittle levity, carries more menace than any outright threat could.
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Rachel works extremely well as the focus of the book. Lehane has always written wrenching female characters into his stories, and he has no trouble giving center stage to one. The question is never whether she will escape her past. We know she’s got the moxie to do it, but where is she headed? Her options narrow as the book becomes more crime-centric and throws her into life-or-death situations rather than contemplative ones. But she’s as much of a pragmatist as anyone Lehane ever dreamed up. She comes a long way through the twists and turns of “Since We Fell,” which takes its title from a love song about desperate dependency. By the end of it, she’s learned how to depend on herself.
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The post In Dennis Lehane’s ‘Since We Fell,’ a Troubled Woman Seeks Answers appeared first on Art of Conversation.
