David Abrams's Blog, page 119

Full-Frontal Fiction: Naked Me by Christian Winn

What does a wife's skin feel like under bathtub water?  Like rubber or hard-boiled eggs.

What does Puget Sound smell like in the summer?  Coppertone and grease.

How does it feel to be a single thirty-year-old woman in 1997, the year all the celebrities died?  Broken and haunted and lonely and mortal.

These may seem like random, insignificant things, but as any lover of short fiction can tell you, these small pointillistic details add up to make a deep, large portrait in a tiny fra...

Trailer Park Tuesday: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.




It's the end of the world as we know it....and we readers feel fine--that is, as long as we have novels like Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven by our side as we head into global oblivion.  Pandemic, social and economic collapse, panic in the streets....and it all starts with Shakespeare.  Here's the plot synopsis for Station Eleven:

One snowy night Arthur Leande...

Fiction Begins Here: Fobbit in the Wild (as Captured by Intrepid Photographers & Assundry Passersby With Smartphones)

Logan Schulke and his family live across the street from me.  Logan is a ridiculously smart young man with an altruistic drive to improve his community; I often see him mowing neighbors' lawns and planting flowers at the local city-owned Clark Park here in Butte, Montana.  Logan and I have had a nodding acquaintance--mostly at neighborhood garage sales and Christmas parties--but it wasn't until after he graduated high school, flew halfway around the world and picked up a copy of Fob...

My First Time: Carla Panciera

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Carla Panciera, author of the short story collection Bewildered which received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and will be available from the University of Massachusetts Press in October.  She is also the author of two collections of...

Sunday Sentence: Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, “Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,” and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Soup and Salad: Writers' Day Jobs, A Bro-Mancy Book Tour, The Nixon Tapes, Flaherty-Dunnan Shortlist, Margaret Atwood's Future Novel, Voices From War, Burgers With Cara Hoffman, Burgers With Hemingway

On today's menu:

1.  Like 97 percent* of my bretheren and sisteren, I'm a writer who supports himself with a Day Job.  In fact, I've always supported myself with non-fiction-related employment.  I currently work as a public affairs specialist for a government agency in Montana** but in the past, I've balanced writing novels and short stories with work as an elementary school janitor, pizza delivery driver, video store clerk, newspaper editor, stage actor, short-order cook, and s...

Friday Freebie: The Emily St. John Mandel collection

Congratulations to Yvonne Jefferson, winner of last week's Friday Freebie contest: The Bully of Order by Brian Hart and The Big Crowd by Kevin Baker.

This week's book giveaway is a special Emily St. John Mandel collection, in honor of her new novel Station Eleven .  The Millions calls it "her best, most ambitious work yet."  This week's book bundle features her earlier work published by Unbridled Books .  Two winners will each receive the following novels: Last Night in Montreal ,...

Stripping a Book to the Bone: Horn! The Collected Reviews by Kevin Thomas

Kevin Thomas is the haiku poet of book reviews.


As regular readers of The Rumpus know, Thomas has been deconstructing contemporary literature in nine-panel comics since 2010.  His Horn! reviews are spare, compressed works of art that infer the merits of a book rather than tediously bloviating about plot, character and theme like some reviewers (including this correspondent) are wont to do.  The first panel is usually reserved for Thomas' interpretation of the book's cover, then we're...

Bookstore of the Month: From My Shelf in Wellsboro, PA

From My Shelf Books & Gifts
25 Main St
Wellsboro, PA
(570) 724-5793
from_my_shelf@yahoo.com
From My Shelf on Facebook
From My Shelf on Twitter


This time it's personal.

Of all the Bookstores of the Month I've featured at The Quivering, From My Shelf Books & Gifts in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania hits closest to my heart.  I was born in Bloomsburg, 100 miles southeast of the bookstore, and spent many of my childhood summers at my grandparents' farm just outside of Wellsboro.  My grandfather...

Trailer Park Tuesday: Worn Stories, edited by Emily Spivack

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.




Oh, if our clothes could talk, the stories they'd tell.... That's the premise behind Worn Stories , a collection of "sartorial memoirs" edited by Emily Spivack.  In the clever trailer, we hear some of those voices revealing snippets from stories about articles of clothing: "When I flew to Chicago to be sentenced to prison, I had three choices of court attire in my suitcase...