David Abrams's Blog, page 79

My First Time: Margaret Malone

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 Margaret Malone, the author of the story collection People Like You from Atelier26 Books . Her stories and non-fiction can be found in The Missouri Review, Oregon Humanities, Propeller Magazine, Timberline Review, latimes.com and elsewhere. A recipient of...

Sunday Sentence: “Gun Notes” by David Huddle

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



          Violence-addicted gun-idiot
          America, I’d shed you like a rattlesnake
          scraping off its old skin except I’d still
          be a rattlesnake.

“Gun Notes” from Dream Sender: Poems by David Huddle

Friday Freebie: The OMG Big Box of Books Giveaway

Congratulations to Nancy Bekofske, Melissa Seng, and Seth Tucker , winners of last week’s Friday Freebie: American Copper by Shann Ray. Congratulations are also in order to Carl Scott who won the special midweek giveaway of The Beauty of What Remains: Family Lost, Family Found by Susan Johnson Hadler.

Brace yourselves, dear readers—this week’s contest is for one ginormous box of books with a little something for just about everybody. One lucky reader will win the following titles: Let Me Be Fr...

Our Bleak Big Sky: Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Fourth of July Creek
by Smith Henderson
Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

This is what I remember about Montana in the 1970s. We were at my grandfather’s house in Wichita Falls, Texas, and my father woke me up at four in the morning to go for a drive. We all piled into our forest-green Chevy station wagon and headed north. I was five or six years old, and nobody bothered to tell me where we were going or why. We drove all day, ending up at a small motel outside of Colorado Springs. I got carsick and th...

Death is a Cartoon: Dr. Seuss and War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite

What if Dr. Seuss went to war in Iraq?*

Of all the things to love about War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite (and there are many things to love about the novel), I was particularly struck by the colorful Seussian paintings one character, Mani, puts down on canvas as a way of dealing with her husband’s deployment to Iraq. Robinson and Kovite have said that Mani is swept up in an “emotional tornado” during this period of the book and the candy-colored cartoons whic...

A Veterans Day Story: Susan Johnson Hadler Searches For Her Father

Lt. Dave Johnson: Camp Lucky Strike, France–February 1945I knew I had a story but I had no words. Words come from listening and learning the connections between things and sounds. What I wanted to write about didn’t exist. There was no thing. I couldn’t find my way into the story, until...until I stooped to read a poem written to a father, who, like my father, never came home. It was Veterans Day and I’d come to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A red carnation rose out of a beer can and a...

Sunday Sentence: “Returning Home” by Floyd Skloot

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


                         But when
          my wife called from bed I knew
          I had gotten up only to return to her.

“Returning Home” from Approaching Winter: Poems by Floyd Skloot

Friday Freebie: American Copper by Shann Ray

Congratulations to Carl Scott, Kirsten Murchison, Thao Votang, Jerri Bell, and Melissa Seng, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie: The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller.

This week, I’m giving away three copies of the debut novel by Shann Ray, American Copper . Long-time readers of The Quivering Pen know that I am a huge (YUUUGE! in the words of Donald Trump) fan of Ray’s work. You might almost say I’m a Shann fanboy. His American Masculine is easily on my list of top 10 short story coll...

Megan Kruse’s Library: A Fortress of Books

Reader:  Megan Kruse
Location:  An attic space in Seattle
Collection Size:  In flux.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  I can only imagine that I’d be tumbling over myself to carry as much as possible. Some of my first great loves were books of poetry, including Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler and Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History . I might reach for those.
Favorite book from childhood:  I keep my old copies of Betty Macdonald’s Mrs. P...

Front Porch Books: November 2015 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, independent bookstores, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss....