Randy Susan Meyers's Blog, page 49

Does Size Matter?

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Guest Post by Dell Smith

McSweeney's just published The Instructions, a novel by Adam Levin. It's about four days in the life of ten-year-old Gurion Maccabee while he fosters a revolution against his Junior High. The Instructions has garnered comparisons to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in its ambition, spirit, and length. Here's Publishers Weekly: "Between the hubris it takes to expect readers to digest more than 1,000 pages about a tween who says 'the likelihood that I was seemed to me to be increasing by the second' and the shoving in of e-mails, diagrams, and transcripts of television footage, the idea that this could be a great novel is overshadowed by the fact that this is a great big novel, shaggy and undisciplined, but with moments of brilliance." The Instructions clocks in at 1030 pages. The review implies its length is both its outstanding feature and its weakness.

Big books have always intrigued me. In school I was a slow reader. I'd spend weeks reading a 150-page school-assigned book. In high school I realized that carrying the same slender paperback around for weeks was not the way to a girl's heart. Stephen King showed me the way when I discovered The Stand in my school library. I was intrigued by the cover illustration: two figures fighting in a barren landscape—evil against good. The size of it, 823 pages (expanded later by 400 pages), only added to its mystique.

Turns out my bodacious blonde lab partner, Lisa, had read The Stand and loved it. After I finally finished it, I took out other big books and brought them to class, a new one each week. I made cursory stabs at reading them, but generally they were for show. Still, the seeds were sown: I liked my books big. And so, in my mind, did the ladies.

So, what makes a book big? For the sake of this post, I've determined that a book over 600 pages in length is big. Big books have been written and read for centuries, starting with the Bible, whose various editions start at around 1300 pages. Don Quixote clocks in at 1120. Most editions of Moby Dick are over 600 pages. Same with Joyce's Ulysses.

Certain themes lend themselves to the big book. Take war. Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson: 624 pages; The Naked and the Dead by, Mailer: 721; Gravity's Rainbow, by Pynchon: 784; War and Peace, by Tolstoy: 1424 pages. The scope of war and vast characters and locations all beg for the longer format.

Social journalism is another area that apparently needs many, many pages to make its point. John Dos Passos' massive U.S.A. is really a collection of three novels totaling 1312 pages. James T Farrell's character and social study trilogy,Studs Lonigan, is 1024 pages. William T. Vollmann's Imperial, which tops off at 1344 pages, dissects a single southwest border county, and has been called "an intensely personal fever dream of an encyclopedia that makes a strange, northern companion to last year's giant borderlands masterpiece, Roberto Bolaño's 2666."

Vollmann (who seems to produce a big book annually) also published Rising Up, and Rising Down, comprised of 7 volumes that are "an extended inquiry into our motivations for and justification of violence." At 3298 pages, this book elicits dreams of grandeur in the big book reader. I long to own this book. I would put it on my sturdiest shelf, dust it each week, and constantly flip through the pages. But I would probably never read it. I only long to have read it.

So, while big books are fun to own, are they worth reading? I couldn't get throughStephen Dixon's Ulysses-like novel, Frog, which, at 784 pages was a mountain of alternative versions, time shifts, and fake starts that I never warmed to. I've been wending my way through Bolaño's 2666 for over a year, although my slack pace is due in part to the difficulty of the theme (Mexico's rampant murder rate) and knowing it was his last book and wanting it to last.

Perhaps most upsetting of all is my failure to read Infinite Jest (1104 pages). I bought it when it was first published in 1996—yes, I was with a girl, although I don't think she was impressed. I immediately became bogged down keeping up with the endnotes. The narrative structure overwhelmed me and I had to stop. Which is a shame because DFW was my generation (almost, he was older by a few years, but I'll take what I can get). He should have been talking right to me through his clotted pages and future-looking structure. Someday I'll try again.

Mostly men write big books, but there are female writers who blossomed in the longer format. Take  with The Fountainhead at 720 pages and Atlas Shrugged clocking in at 1200. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is over 1000 pages. Joyce Carol Oates tends to run long, usually well over 400 pages and occasionally straying above 600 (The Gravedigger's Daughter, 624, Blonde, 752). Some of JK Rowling's Harry Potters are over 600 pages. Every book in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (7 and counting) clock in at over 600 pages, with The Fiery Cross the page champion at 1472. Stephenie Meyer makes the list easily with Breaking Dawn at 756 and Eclipse at 640. New Moon squeaks over at 608. Taken in a lump as the Twilight Saga, the four Twilight books total up to 2560 pages.

So, finally I ask: are bigger books inherently better? No, bigger doesn't always mean better. And sometimes, bigger means not as good. Big books are more likely to suffer from structure problems, an over abundance of characters, and indulgences of folly that only a big book allows.

But there are just as many big books that reward readers with an experience that cannot be duplicated in a shorter book. Big books offer character richness with potential casts of hundreds. Big books give writers an expansive palette that can encompass the horizontal, linear tapestry of an entire war, the beginnings of man, or the complete history of a real or imagined place.

Alternately, big books incorporate the vertical, time-shift depth of a day (or four) in the life of a single character. For writers, composing a big book signals the freedom to keep every word that flits from brain to fingertips to page 1156, line 36, and column 12. Big book readers get to join a small but privileged club of readers who can say with pride: "I slogged all the way through to the end. I win!" Don't forget to yell this near your wife/husband/lover.

What are your favorite big books? Is there a big book you've always wanted to read, but never had the time or stamina? Or a big book you started but never finished?

(originally published in Beyond The Margins)

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Dell Smith is a fiction writer. He grew up on Cape Cod and left town to study filmmaking. He writes stories and novels, and works as a technical writer at a software company northwest of Boston. He has also worked as a videotape editor, cook, music video lackey, TelePrompTer operator, accounts receivable clerk, assistant film editor, caterer, roadie, flea market vendor, videotape duplicator, and wedding videographer. He has lived in Worcester, Bridgeport, Van Nuys, Billerica, Ithaca, Florham Park, Fairfield, and Simi Valley. He brings his life experience to bear in his fiction. His writing has appeared in Fiction, J. Journal, and Grub Street's 10th anniversary anthology Hacks. He is a regular contributor to The Review Review and maintains a blog, Unreliable Narrator at dellsmith.com, featuring essays on movies, writing, and the publishing biz, along with book reviews and author interviews. He is currently writing a novel. But who isn't?

First Pages Friday: IF I LOVED YOU I WOULD TELL YOU THIS

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A paperback release with a bonus track!

This week the celebrated collection of short stories by Robin Black, If I loved you, I would tell you this, came out in paperback—a year after its hardcover release, a year which People called the book "Exquisitely distilled tales of loss and reckoning," Vogue wrote about, "Characters so fully imagined you'll feel they're in the room," and Alan Cheuse declared in The Chicago Tribune, "Black delivers real emotion, the kind that gives you pause."

Each story in this collection sliced straight to my core, thus I was very excited when Robin told me that the paperback edition was added to her paperback. Excited and . . . curious.

Robin's explanation, followed by the beginning of that new story:

When Random House suggested to me that we add a story to the paperback of If I loved you, I would tell you this, a kind of bonus track, I didn't think of this story right away.  I thought of writing something new – this had appeared, with a different title, in Brain,Child Magazine in 2006 – and even started writing a story with the book in mind. But then, one day while transferring files, I happened on "Some Women Eat Tar" and realized it would be exactly right. The story is in some ways lighter than the majority in the book and I knew exactly where a little lightness might be a real asset to the collection.  And for all its more overt humor, it deals with a family at a point of change, as do all the other stories.  In this case, it's a pregnancy and not any kind of tragedy, but even a positive change can bring stressors.  And with the birth of a child come transitions and the need to reimagine one's life and one's identity as surely as with a loss.  I've come to see this story now as a kind of mirror image of the others in the book, and I like the way that reflected image expands the notion of what the collection is about.  It's about family life. Not so much what happens to us all, as how we all get through it with one another.

So, here is the opening to "Some Women Eat Tar."

Enjoy!

Some Women Eat Tar

When Artie suggested to Nina that they should have a baby, he did so at first kind of softly, just let- ting the idea slip in between them every once in a while, playfully, like a private joke shared from time to time. But gradually, his tone grew more serious and before too long Nina realized that he meant it. This was no joke. This was something Artie wanted. Very much. Really. Now. And without a lot of thought, Nina said okay, sure. Sure, they could become parents. It wasn't an unpleasant prospect, for her. Not at the time. Having a baby just wasn't Nina's idea; that was all. This wasn't something they would be doing be- cause of a burning need in her, but hey, that was no prob- lem. She was happy to go along with him, to answer his need. She loved him so much, that was fine. Men did this all the time, she told herself, let themselves be convinced it was the right time.

Why shouldn't she?

But then, when her next period never arrived and the first test stick testified to the success of Artie's plan with a blue plus sign and the second stick (Artie wanted the kind of certainty only using two brands, neither generic, can give) backed it up with two pink lines, Nina was shocked. More than shocked; completely flipped out. Those alien hormone hues on the pee-soaked magic wands charted for her a route she hadn't truly understood would be traversed: the distance between Artie tickling her thigh, joking about children's names—Uriah, Abednego, Job, Jezebel—and this: herself with another person inside herself.

Her alternatives, she understood, were terror or denial. She chose denial.

And so it was Artie who bought the seven pregnancy books he stacked under the bed on his side, and it was Artie who asked around at work—only people whose opinions he respected, of course—about pediatricians they should consider. It was Artie who knew to investigate, when they trooped together on interviews, where the doctor stood on the overuse of antibiotics for ear infections (or was it underuse? Nina was confused: How do you keep these things straight?), when kids need surgery for that, how soon or late babies should be weaned, and hey, what about circumcision? What's being recommended these days? Foreskin on or off?

And it was Artie who had already determined, going in, the answers he wanted to hear: Yes to antibiotics. Four ear infections in a season means the child needs tubes put in. There is no "should" about weaning, not from the breast, that is a highly personal, near-sacred, decision—as long as you nurse for at least six months. Before six months, it's not a personal deci- sion; it is The Only Right Thing To Do. And babies should be off bottles altogether by fourteen months and should never, ever, ever have one in bed with them. Never. Not even once. Or their teeth will grow in rotted and black. And then fall out. Breast-fed infants should be given their first bottle at around nine weeks, and then emphatically NOT by the mother and only sparingly, so there is no Nipple Confusion. And finally, these days, most doctors are pro-circumcision. Studies suggest it cuts down on diseases later on, and since Artie and Nina aren't Jewish so wouldn't use a mohel—because let's face it, those fellows are the best, it's all they do all day—the other way to go is a surgeon, which you have to request specially. And that can be difficult, arranging for that, but is certainly worth doing be- cause otherwise you get some bleary-eyed obstetrics resident cut- ting away, and who knows what can happen. Not often, but still . . . it isn't worth the risk.

The doctor who got every answer right—the winner— was a young, pretty woman who made Nina feel invisible from the moment they met. Especially when she repeated the phrase Nipple Confusion and Artie nodded knowingly. For just a second there, Nina thought that she would rather steal her own car, jump a plane, and take on a new identity than hear her husband discuss her potentially confusing nipples with this girl. (Nina herself had cast her quiet vote for Dr. Brown, the sixtyish rumpled guy who had suffered through Artie's questions, answering each with a shrug and a "Who knows? We all make mistakes. We try to do our best. Me. You. All of us. What more can we do?")

But Dr. Swenson, this Dr. Swenson with her perfect hair and makeup, her clean white coat, and the little sign on her desk that read "Because I'm the Pediatrician, That's Why" held no such views. There certainly was a right way to do this.

This: the baby.

This: the schedule.

This: the breast.

The breast? Nina could remember when Artie would moan to her about the sight and feel of her naked tits, begging to kiss them, stroke them, fall into them.

Oh well.

San Francisco Chronicle §  Irish Times Top Book of 2010  §  Short Listed for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize §  Long Listed for The Story Prize §  A Denver Post Bestseller  §  Winner, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Prize §  Summer Reading Pick, O:  The Oprah Magazine

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Robin Black's story collection  If I loved you, I would tell you this, was published by Random House in 2010 to international acclaim by publications such as O. Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Irish Times and more. The stories, written over a period of eight years, focus on families at points of crisis and of growth. Her writing is very much influenced by her belief that the most compelling act of creativity in which we all participate is the daily manufacture of hope. Though the book can be seen as a study of loss, it is also a study of the miraculous ways in which people move forward from the inevitable challenges of life.

Robin's stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Review, The New York Times Magazine. One Story, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Freight Stories, Indiana Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. I(Norton, 2007).  She is the recipient of grants from the Leeway Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Sirenland Conference and is also the winner of the 2005 Pirate's Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in the short story category.  Her work has been noticed four times for Special Mention by the Pushcart Prizes and also deemed Notable in The Best American Essays, 2008, The Best Nonrequired Reading, 2009 and Best American Short Stories, 2010.  She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Robin is currently working on her first novel, which is about a mother who flees the strains and the judgments of her suburban community, taking her disabled daughter out into the country and away from it all. The book will also be published by Random Hou

 

 

Book Trailer Thursday: THE TUDOR SECRET

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Book trailers are such a brave new media. Some are awful droning talking heads (you know what I mean) where the author looks like he'd rather be shoveling coal in Siberia than filming the interview. Some are almost good–but too long. And some, like Goldilocks found, are just right and manage to capture the spirit and genre of the book.

Today's trailer is very attention-grabbing, from author C.W. Gortner, for The Tudor Secret: In Gortner's latest riveting historical, the influential Dudley family sends orphan servant Brendan Prescott to serve their cruel son, Lord Robert, at King Edward's court, and the young man is soon caught up in intrigue, suspicion, and shifting loyalties. . . In Gortner's capable hands, Prescott is a believable and enjoyable hero. . .though readers familiar with the Tudor era will know the key players, they may be surprised by their depiction here. Gortner handles action with aplomb, adding a riveting, fast-paced thriller to the crowded genre of Tudor fiction.—Publisher's Weekly

Launch Wednesday: THE STORMCHASERS by Jenna Blum

 

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"Jenna Blum has done it again… terrific storyteller [Blum] brings authenticity and gripping suspense to a genuinely surprising tale of searching, secrets, and siblings.  Hang on; you're in for a wild ride." New York Journal Of Books

BOOK TRAILER FOLLOWING FIRST PAGES!

"Gut-churningly terrifying, frequently hilarious…both the extreme weather and extreme emotions of The Stormchasers will keep readers wide awake long past bedtime." Dallas Morning News

THE STORMCHASERS

By Jenna Blum

1.

Karena Jorge's birthday starts as a quiet affair, but she doesn't mind. That's the way she likes it. She does have a couple of treats planned for later, an onscreen revival of Gone with the Wind tonight, dinner tomorrow with her best friend, Tiff. But generally Karena tries to keep this day under the radar, and it has gone mostly undetected for years, which is why on the afternoon of July fourteenth she is truly surprised to be called into her editor William's office on the pretext of discussing a story and find most of the Minneapolis Ledger staff assembled there, along with a cake on William's desk so laden with flaming candles that Karena is fairly sure it's against fire code.

She laughs and sketches a little curtsy as they clap. "Thanks, everybody," she says. "Though I'm sorry to say somebody made a mistake. There are way too many candles on that cake—I'm only twenty-nine."

"Again?" someone calls.

"Really?" says Annaliese, the intern, looking anxious.

Karena's editor, William, a beautiful, haggard lion of a man, wiggles his eyebrows at her over his glasses. He knows very well Karena is thirty-eight.

"The question, young lady, is" he says, "are you going to make a wish so we can eat the damned thing?"

"Most definitely," says Karena, and gathers her long hair back behind her ears with both hands. Then she pauses. She takes wishes seriously and believes they are not to be made on the fly. Happy birthday, Charles, she thinks. I sure as hell wish I knew where you were. Then she fills her lungs and blows.

All the candles go out except one, which threatens to remain stubbornly alight and then extinguishes itself at the last minute—poof! Everybody applauds.

"Whew," says Karena. "Thank goodness I gave up smoking."

Annaliese starts cutting slices, which the reporters fall on and bear away to their desks, pausing, if they're not on a tight deadline, to give Karena their good wishes. She chats with them all, smiling, meanwhile mounding her cake—yellow, vanilla frosting—to one side of her plate with her fork.

"Sorry," says her friend Lisa when the room has mostly cleared. She leans in as much as she is able—Lisa is a week from maternity leave.

"I'll have you know none of this was my idea," she murmurs. "It was that intern. You know how overzealous they get."

Karena smiles. "That's okay," she says. "This was really sweet, actually. Plus I've been working on that Hot Dish! piece all day and could use the break."

Lisa gets what Karena thinks of as her reluctant-source look, head tipped back, eyes half closed as if to say, Go on, tell me another.

"You miss him, don't you," she says.

Karena is startled by the prick of tears, though she's not sure whether it's the reference itself or the fact that it's unexpected.

"I do," she admits. "Always, but today more than most days."

"Then it's time for your real present," Lisa says. "I think the coast is clear."

They canvass the room. Everyone has filtered out except the intern, who is stuffing paper plates into a garbage bag, and William, who is hunched over his desk devouring an enormous slice of cake without apparently chewing it, like a dog.

Lisa leads Karena downstairs into the little-used ladies' bathroom in the Ledger basement, where she presents her husband's plaid fishing thermos. In it Karena finds a very dirty vodka martini, complete with three bobbing olives. She laughs.

"Thank you," she says. "You always know just what to get me."

"Cheers, birthday girl," Lisa says. She rubs her belly, which is at the stage of pregnancy that fascinates Karena, so enormous it seems like an optical illusion. "And don't forget you're drinking for me too."

She watches Karena take a swallow. "What's your brother's name again?" she asks.

"Charles," says Karena.

"It must be so weird, being a twin."

"I don't know," says Karena. "I've never not been one, so I can't tell. It is strange not knowing where he is, though."

Lisa wrinkles her nose sympathetically. "What is that like? I've always meant to ask. If you don't mind talking about it, I mean."

"No, that's fine," says Karena. "It's kind of like tinnitus. You're always off balance, but you learn to live with it."

She smiles down at her friend's stomach. "Can I say hi?" she asks.

"Go ahead," says Lisa, and Karena bends over Lisa's belly button.

"Greetings," she says. "This is your aunt Karena speaking."

A knob pokes at Lisa's stretched wine-red shirt, then streaks across it.

"Whoa," says Karena. She laughs. "I love that. It's so amazing. Elbow or knee?"

"Heel, I think," says Lisa. "He loves you. He's always super-active when you're around. You're going to be such a good mom."

Karena rolls her eyes. "I don't know about that."

"Well, I do," says Lisa. She winks and tips a finger at Karena like a politician. "All you need is a good baby daddy. Now drink up."

Back in the newsroom Karena swims pleasantly through the afternoon's primary task, which is interviewing a source for her Hot Dish! feature on Minnesota's regional foods. The source is sharing her recipe for lutefisk casserole, which combined with the vodka makes Karena's stomach churn. She is Norwegian through and through; she and Charles were fed floury rommegrod pudding and lefse bread in their high chairs, but this has only enhanced Karena's fear of the traditional rubbery cod boiled in lye. She smothers a martini belch with a hand and says, "Hey, here's something I've always wondered. What's the difference between a hot dish and a casserole?"

The source tells Karena that a casserole is covered and a hot dish is not. Karena thanks her and goes on to the next question on her list, commenting at appropriate times, writing the answers by rote. Meanwhile she keeps checking the Storm Prediction Center website, always open on her laptop, peering at the green computer-generated clouds as if she could see beneath them to where Charles is. And she finds herself thinking throughout the afternoon of a birthday back when she did eat cake, when she and Charles were—what, three, four? Young enough to still be in booster seats, anyway, bumped up to the table on their red plastic thrones side by side, in the dining area of their New Heidelburg house. Karena very clearly remembers seizing a fistful of cake, examining it, then reaching over to stuff it in her brother's ear, and Charles turning to boggle at her with comical surprise, then bursting into his deep baby chuckle and doing the same to her. Back and forth they went, mashing cake into each other's hair and eyes and mouths, laughing and laughing, until the adults quit snapping pictures and their mom, Siri, had to drag them apart, scolding, You two never know when to stop. The memory makes Karena smile, but as the afternoon wears on she feels herself descending into melancholy, a sadness at play in her like a wind. It is not like her. She is normally a very cheerful person. She blames it on the date and the alcohol.

 

[image error]JENNA BLUM is the author of the New York Times bestseller Those Who Save Us(Harcourt, 2004) and The Stormchasers (Dutton, 2010).  Jenna is also one of Oprah's Top Thirty Women Writers (view Oprah's Top Thirty).  Jenna attended Kenyon College and Boston University, where she taught writing for five years and was the fiction editor for AGNI literary magazine. Currently, Jenna divides her time between Boston, where she runs master novel workshops for Grub Street Writers, and Minnesota, where she writes in the town where her mother and grandmother weree born.  Jenna spends her non-writing time on the road talking to book clubs and at events about The Stormchasers and Those Who Save Us, which in addition to being a New York Times bestseller was a Boston Globebestseller, the winner of the 2005 Ribalow Prize, a Borders Book Club pick, and a favorite with book clubs across the country (Jenna has visited over 800 book clubs in the Boston area alone). Jenna is currently touring with the critically- and reader-acclaimed The Stormchasers, a novel she researched by chasing tornadoes for five years with the stormchase company Tempest Tours.

Simply Wonderful Books ( A Reprise)

[image error]I woke up thinking of how many book I hadn't yet mentioned here . . . they swirled through my head in a tornado. If I didn't have a pile seven feet tall of books on my nightstand, here are the top five books I'd re-read today:

A Fine Balance by Rohintin Mistry

"Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power . . . A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams. " Kirkus.

All that and also a page-turner. All his books are wonderful.

A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

"The Goodwins, Howard, Alice, and their little girls, Emma and Claire, live on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Although suspiciously regarded by their neighbors as "that hippie couple" because of their well-educated, urban background, Howard and Alice believe they have found a source of emotional strength in the farm, he tending the barn while Alice works as a nurse in the local elementary school.

But their peaceful life is shattered one day when a neighbor's two-year-old daughter drowns in the Goodwins' pond while under Alice's care. Tormented by the accident, Alice descends even further into darkness when she is accused of sexually abusing of a student at the elementary school. Soon, Alice is arrested, incarcerated, and as good as convicted in the eyes of a suspicious community. As a child, Alice designed her own map of the world to find her bearings. Now, as an adult, she must find her way again, through a maze of lies, doubt and ill will." From the book jacket.

And written so well you could bathe in her words. Another page-turner.

Mudbound by Hilary Jordan

"In 1946, Laura McAllan, a college-educated Memphis schoolteacher, becomes a reluctant farmer's wife when her husband, Henry, buys a farm on the Mississippi Delta, a farm she aptly nicknames Mudbound. Laura has difficulty adjusting to life without electricity, indoor plumbing, readily accessible medical care for her two children and, worst of all, life with her live-in misogynous, racist, father-in-law. Her days become easier after Florence, the wife of Hap Jackson, one of their black tenants, becomes more important to Laura as companion than as hired help. Catastrophe is inevitable when two young WWII veterans, Henry's brother, Jamie, and the Jacksons' son, Ronsel, arrive, both battling nightmares from horrors they've seen, and both unable to bow to Mississippi rules after eye-opening years in Europe." Publishers Weekly

I dare you to start this book and not immediately fall in love.

Jump at the Sun by Kim McLarin

"With a big house in an upscale Boston suburb, a doting scientist husband and two cute daughters, Grace, heroine of this penetrating novel of family affection and disaffection, is living the middle-class black woman's dream. But as she tends to her kids' wearying demands, fends off her husband's desire for a son and watches her sociology Ph.D. go to waste, she feels like "a claustrophobic in a mining shaft" and fantasizes about ditching her family. It's no idle daydream—her grandmother Rae repeatedly abandoned her children to search for whatever satisfactions life had to offer a Mississippi sharecropper's daughter, while her mother, Mattie, who sacrificed her happiness for her children's, offers an object lesson in the toll that family devotion can take. McLarin (Taming It Down) weaves the stories of three generations of mothers and daughters in astringent prose ("You couldn't be expected to live without them, but you'd better remember at all times, even with the good ones, that it was you against them," Grace muses of the wild cards that are men). Her characters chafe against the bonds of poverty, racism and feminine stereotypes, but their deeper struggle is to resolve their longing for fulfillment with ties of the heart." Publishers Weekly

All of McLarin's books belong on your 'to read right now' list—a wonderful and engaging writer.

At Home in The World: A Memoir by Joyce Maynard

"If you don't want to invade the privacy of J. D. Salinger, you can shun altogether Joyce Maynard's memoir, AT HOME IN THE WORLD. Or you can skip the rest of the chapters and move on to her remarkable life. But if you follow either of the above paths, you'll miss a portrait of a comic genius, Salinger himself. Perhaps Ms. Maynard didn't intend to draw humor from a painful episode, but that's what she did for me and I laughed over the eccentricity of the hermit of Cornish. Surely he's laughing himself, unlike the solemn asses now shooting their squibs at this wry, painful, engaging book." Frank McCourt, author of ANGELA'S ASHES

I loved this book when it came out, not just for Maynard's portrait of Salinger, but for the all-to-believable portrait of a far too young woman caught up way beyond her own level of understanding by her relationship with the far older Salinger.

The Valley of the Shadow: Bringing Grief to Fiction

 

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A Guest Post by Paul Elwork

Almost twenty years ago, when I was still nineteen years old, a very close friend of mine (let's call him Ray) committed suicide. Ray was everything I wasn't: athletic, handsome, outgoing, and courageous in a way that staggered me, both in terms of physical and emotional risk. His disarming grin and willingness to be goofy—to expose himself to embarrassment and then wear it all with confidence—drew girls to him. I had spent so much of my life hiding from life, but Ray rushed in. I admired him, I envied him, I wanted to be more like him.

And then one day Ray got sad. It seems like such an oversimplification, and is—I don't presume to unpack what went on inside him. A sudden chemical imbalance in his early twenties, perhaps; maybe things in his past that caught up with him. However it happened, sadness came for Ray and suddenly my friend with a gusto for life was talking about his fear of the future and sharing thoughts of despair. He even made an attempt on his own life with over-the-counter drugs, but ended up surviving a weird night of hallucinations.

He told me he would never do it again, and I believed him. I needed to believe him. Ray couldn't give up on life—it was unthinkable. Without ever consciously deciding this, I was content to think of Ray's suicide attempt and grappling with depression as a phase he'd gone through, something that didn't track for anyone who had known him from childhood, an anomaly and an aberration. He gave me his self-deprecating smile and told me he'd never do it again and I believed him.

Then one afternoon Ray drove to a distant corner of an old cemetery in northeast Philadelphia and shot himself. His mother had called me looking for him; Ray had gotten his father's gun and disappeared. Another friend and I searched for him, and we almost found him at the cemetery. But we were too late. I watched the fire emergency truck drive slowly out of the gate and onto the street.

My friend and I gathered the rest of our group and we went to Ray's family's house. His parents looked like they had been in a car accident—one they hadn't survived but had walked away from anyway. During the terrible time after his death, I suffered bouts of survivor's guilt. I should have kept Ray on the phone. I should have thought to check the cemetery sooner. And I—self-pitying, gloomy, introverted kid that I was—should have been dead, not him. I feared I had somehow poisoned him with my own unhappiness and cynicism. I forgot how much time I had spent laughing with Ray, even in the deepest conversations. I forgot how Ray would tell me I had the highest aspirations of anyone he knew, despite my often dark outlook.

I remember thinking if I could just die myself, it would all just pass into oblivion. I wanted to forget the life I had ahead of me.

And the years passed. Along the way, I sometimes encountered Ray's parents, and every time I wanted to apologize for being alive when their boy was dead. In their eyes I saw the look I'd seen the night Ray died—I felt like a kind of ghost myself, standing before them.

And more years passed. I completed two degrees, got married, started a family. No matter how much time passed, I would surprise myself with the punched-in-the-gut pain I'd sometimes experience at thoughts of Ray, of what he would say about this or that. As I type, approaching forty with a head of graying hair, I can summon him before me as if I just saw him. And it makes me smile, most of the time, because of all the qualities I listed above before the sadness came for Ray. So many stories. That guy was a goddamn pisser.

Ray looms large in my novel The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead (Amy Einhorn Books). The loss of a friend and the shattering effects of grief on myself and my friend's family deeply informed my thinking. It's not overstatement to say that short of this experience, I couldn't have written the book. I could have written a book using this subject matter, sure, but not this book. In my novel, a twin sister and brother pretend to contact the dead during the summer of 1925. It all begins as a game for children interested in thrills of the unknown, but when still-grieving adults become involved, the twins find themselves in deep, dark waters of longing and desperation.

All of which is to say, when the time came for me to write about people who never existed and the ghosts of loved ones and regrets that haunted them, I felt ready. I felt a personal connection with their grief and dismay at this overarching mover in mortal life, so practical and imminently present from any beginning—and yet an appalling stranger when it comes. When the time came for me to write about lost sons, about the longing for forgiveness and connection beyond this world, this old matter of life and death hardly needed any dusting off in my mind.

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Paul Elwork lives in Philadelphia and is the father of two sons. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Philadelphia Stories, Short Story America, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Word Riot. His novel The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead (Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Group) is available online and in bookstores everywhere. For more information and links to short fiction and other content, please visit www.paulelwork.com.

 

First Pages Friday: THE HYPNOTIST by M.J. Rose

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First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's book—from ones long on the shelves to those newly launched, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

Today's First Friday is The Hypnotist by M.J. Rose, a story of an FBI agent, tormented by a death he wasn't able to prevent, a crime he's never been able to solve and a love he's never forgotten, discovers that his true conflict resides not in his past, but in a past life.

"Stunning Page-turner" -PW Starred Review and Review of the Week 3/15

"Riveting! MJ Rose is at the top of her game in this fast paced, literate and stylish tale set in the international world of art, archaeology and intrigue. The Hypnotist is, dare I say, mesmerizing," -Jeffrey Deaver, New York Times bestselling author

The Hypnotist

by M.J. Rose

Twenty Years Ago

Time played tricks on him whenever he stood in front of the easel. Hypnotized by the rhythm of the brush on the canvas, by one color merging into another, the two shades creating a third, the third melting into a fourth, he was lulled into a state of single-minded consciousness focused only on the image emerging. Immersed in the act of painting, he forgot obligations, missed classes, didn't remember to eat or to drink or look at the clock. This was why, at 5:25 that Friday evening, Lucian Glass was rushing down the urine-stinking steps to the gloomy subway platform when he should have already been uptown where Solange Jacobs was waiting for him at her father's framing gallery. Together, they planned to walk over to an exhibit a block away, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When he reached the store, the shade was drawn and the Closed sign faced out, but the front door wasn't locked. Inside, none of the lamps were lit, but there was enough ambient twilight coming through the windows for him to see that Solange wasn't there, only dozens and dozens of empty frames, encasing nothing but pale yellow walls, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to be filled like lost souls looking for mates.

As he hurried toward the workroom in the back, the commingled smells of glue and sawdust grew stronger and, except for his own voice calling out, the silence louder.

"Solange?"

Stopping on the threshold, he looked around but saw only more empty frames.Where was she? And why was she here alone? Lucian was walking toward the worktable, wondering if there was another room back there, when he saw her. Solange was sprawled on the floor, thrown against a large, ornate frame as if she were its masterpiece, her blood splattered on its broken gold arms, a still life in terror. There were cuts on her face and hands and more blood pooled beneath her.

Kneeling, he touched her shoulder. "Solange?"

Her eyes stayed closed but she offered a ghost of a smile.

While he was thinking of what to do first—help her or call 911—she opened her eyes and lifted her hand to her cheek. Her fingertips came away red with blood.

"Cut?" she asked, as if she had no idea what had happened.

He nodded.

"Promise," she whispered, "you won't paint me like this…" Solange had a crescent-shaped scar on her forehead and was forever making sure her bangs covered it. Then, catching herself, she'd laugh at her vanity. That laugh now came out as a moan.

When her eyes fluttered closed, Lucian put his head on her chest. He couldn't hear a heartbeat. Putting his mouth over hers, he attempted resuscitation, frantically mimicking what he'd seen people do in movies, not sure he was doing it right.

He thought he saw her hand move and had a moment of elation that she was going to be all right before realizing it was only his reflection moving in the frame. His head back on her chest, he listened but heard nothing. As he lay there, Solange's blood seeping out of her wound, soaking his hair and shirt, he felt a short, fierce burst of wind.

Lucian was tall but thin… just a skinny kid studying to be a painter. He didn't know how to defend himself, didn't know how to deflect the knife that came down, ripping through his shirt and flesh and muscle. Again. And then again. So many times that finally he wasn't feeling the pain; he was the pain, had become the agony. Making an effort to stay focused, as if somehow that would matter, he tried to memorize all the colors of the scene around him: his attacker's shirtsleeve was ochre, Solange's skin was titanium white… he was drifting…

There were voices next, very far-off and indistinct. Lucian tried to grasp what they were saying.

"…extensive blood loss…"

"…multiple stab wounds…"

He was traveling away from the words. Or were they traveling away from him? Were the people leaving him alone here? Didn't they realize he was hurt? No, they weren't leaving him… they were lifting him. Moving him. He felt cool air on his face. Heard traffic.

Their voices were becoming more indistinct.

"…can't get a pulse…"

"We're losing him…quick, quick. We're losing him…"

The distance between where he was and where they were increased with every second. The words were just faint whispers now, as soft as a wisp of Solange's hair.

"Too late…he's gone."

The last thing he heard was one paramedic telling the other the time was 6:59 p.m. A silence entered Lucian, filling him up and giving him, at last, respite from the pain.

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M.J. Rose www.mjrose.com) is the international best selling author of several novels and two non-fiction books on marketing.  

 

Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in many magazines and reviews including Oprah Magazine. She has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today and on the Today Show, and NPR radio.

 

 

 

 

The television series PAST LIFE, was based on Rose's novels in the Renincarnationist series. She is one of the founding board members of International Thriller Writers and created and runs the first marketing company for authors – Authorbuzz.com.

Rose lives in CT with her husband the musician and composer, Doug Scofield, and their very spoiled and often photographed dog, Winka.

 

 

Book Trailers, Book Promotion & Marriage

GUEST POST BY MIDGE RAYMOND

Book promotion makes writing look like the easy part. Let's talk about book trailers. I debated whether or not to make a trailer for Forgetting English when the book came out in 2009. Even as a writer and reader, I must confess that I've always found the concept of a book trailer a little strange; while movie trailers for films are an obvious marketing strategy, I think it's a challenge for most writers (particularly fiction writers) to do justice to their books in a media that isn't an obvious match with the product, i.e., words and story and the imaginative collaboration they create with the reader. How to translate this into video was a mystery to me. Actually, it still is.

The main problem for fiction writers, I think, is how to portray our stories visually. We write because we love words, after all, and not all of us are also actors or have a great visual sense or have the budget to hire professionals. I've also found that attempts to dramatize a novel for the tiny screen can backfire in a huge way if not done just right. That said, I'm not sure what that "right way" is.  Many writers get around this challenge by focusing on something else other than the story itself, such as the author or book's backstory — a great solution in that it gives readers a little something more than what they already know from the jacket copy or author bio.

Challenges aside, there are definitely a lot of great book trailers out there. One of my all-time favorites is Dennis Cass's award-winning trailer, Book Launch 2.0 — which is not only hilarious, but it does everything a book trailer needs to do: engage, entertain, and pique interest in the author and the book. The trailer doesn't actually mention his book, Head Case, which I might have done — but it's still a great one.

Another favorite is bestselling author Jenna Blum's trailer for her new novel, The Stormchasers. Instead of trying to visually capture the story itself, the trailer takes the form of an interview with the author — a great way to promote a book, as readers are usually curious about the origins of the book, the writing/research process, and other things that don't appear on the jacket copy. Jenna answers these questions, tells us about herself and the book — and also adds the atmospheric details that give us a sense of what the story is all about, both literally and metaphorically.

I also like Judy Reeves's book trailer for A Writer's Book of Days — the trailer does a wonderful job of showing us what's at the heart of the book: writing and inspiration, creativity and compassion. Even though the book is nonfiction, it tells a story — one that perfectly fits the book's themes.

As Alan Rinzler points out in a blog post on book trailers, research indicates that you've got a viewer's attention for about three minutes — but I'd go even shorter than that. I rarely watch anything for more than a minute or two — "Book Launch 2.0″ was an exception because it was so funny, and you'll note that both Jenna's and Judy's trailers are almost exactly two minutes long.

Yet even after watching a few good book trailers and more than a few bad ones, I came up with no great ideas for my own book. Promoting a short story collection from a university press has plenty of marketing challenges, and creating a book trailer seemed to be among the bigger ones. So Forgetting English went trailer-less for nearly two years, and in the meantime my husband, John Yunker, published a novel, The Tourist Trail, and he too began to wonder if he should do a trailer. Because he self-published his book and needed all the promotion he could get, we began thinking of ideas, all of them terrible. While we both agreed, naturally, with the reviewer who called John's book "epic, sprawling, and strikingly cinematic," we still couldn't find a way to create a trailer that wasn't melodramatic and lame.

Then he had a great idea — one that had nothing to do with the subject, content, characters, or themes of his book. But it didn't need to. And best of all, his idea incorporated my book, too. So we put together a script, picked up John's iPhone, and did the whole thing over Thanksgiving weekend. It cost us nothing but time.

And this is one of the important things to consider — how much time and/or money are you willing to invest in a book trailer? For us, the answer was a holiday weekend and zero money — so we had the perfect budget. But authors do have to be aware of the costs involved and to know that it might not be a great investment, especially since no one really knows how well book trailers sell books. Also, once you have a book trailer, the next challenge is to find ways to get people to view your book trailer. We were fortunate that many in the literary community showed it some love, including Poets & Writers, Shelf Awareness, GalleyCat, The Seattle Times, and many generous bloggers, Facebook friends, and tweeters (we thank you all). And we've noticed a slight uptick in book sales (we're thankful for that, too), but nothing overwhelming, which makes us glad we didn't spend a fortune. Still, it was worth doing in that it got our names and our books out there, and from the feedback we've gotten, it's given people a few moments of fun.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what makes a good book trailer — send them along!

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Midge Raymond's short-story collection,Forgetting English, received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, theLos Angeles Times, and many other publications. Her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and received an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, along with her husband and an opinionated orange cat. Visit her Web site atwww.MidgeRaymond.com.




Forgetting English

(Almost) Weekly Wednesday Launch: HUSBAND AND WIFE

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Wednesday Launch offers a taste of an author's book—from ones long on the shelves to those newly launched, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

Today's pages come from Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart.

"Stewart creates a crisis of faith where adult reality collides with youthful dreams, "the people we were and the people…we always thought we should be." The writing is tactile, elemental, even comical, providing readers with a situation that could so easily be their own. Highly recommended." —Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal*Starred Review*

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HUSBAND AND WIFE

by Leah Stewart

My name is Sarah Price, and I'm married to a fiction writer. He's published a couple of books, and one of them did quite well, so you might recognize his name if I told it to you, which I won't, because I don't want you thinking, oh yeah, that book, I read that, it was good. This is not about that.

I am—or maybe was—a writer, too. For a long time I called myself a poet. As a child I concentrated on rhyming fun and sun, and then in high school I devoted myself to metaphors featuring storm clouds and the moon. For college workshops I wrote sonnets about what I saw as the real subjects—time and death and the end of love, although what did I know, what did I know, about any of that. Both my notions and the poems that emerged from them were ludicrously abstract. By the time I went to grad school I'd given up the effort at profundity and gone back to writing free verse that was more or less about myself. That I proved to be good at. I published in Poetry, won a prize and a grant, got a note that said, Try us again from The Paris Review.

Now I'm thirty-five, and these days most people would call me a working mother, a term I don't much like. That I have a job and two small children is a better, if less succinct, way to put it. Someday I'll look back and thirty-five will seem much younger than it does now. I don't feel old, exactly, though I do, at times, feel weary. But in the last couple of years I've begun to experience the signs of impending age. The stray white hair and the inability to drink more than two beers without a hangover. The bad knee and the cracking in my hip joint and the desire to say "oof" when I sit down in a chair. The whims of my increasingly agitated hormones. And, most disturbingly, the dawning conviction that such infirmities will only increase in number. Judging by the way these things surprise me I must have believed age would never happen to me. For a long time, perhaps longer than I should have, I thought of myself as young. My adolescence was prolonged, in the way all the magazines have been insisting, by the fact that I waited until my thirties to get married and have children, that I waited so long to get a regular job and start worrying about my credit card debt. I'm a grown-up now. There's no disputing that, especially not to the two small people who call me Mommy.

I take back my claim that at twenty and twenty-one I knew nothing of time and death and the end of love. I shouldn't offer up such a commonplace untruth. It's easy, isn't it, to fall into the trap of devaluing what we once knew and felt, as though the complicated and compromised experiences of adulthood are somehow more authentic than the all-consuming ones of youth. Certainly I knew the pain and vulnerability of the end of love. Of course I did. Most of us learn that early.

*

We were late for a wedding, or if not late yet in imminent danger of being so. And as usual I was ready and my husband was not. I'd been ready for half an hour, during which time he'd spent twenty minutes worrying about a small red wine stain on the tie that matched his suit, and ten minutes locating one of his shoes. The children were in the kitchen with the babysitter, a teenager whose blank youthfulness made me nervous. I could hear the baby crying, and I was as clenched as a fist, because I was still breastfeeding and the hormones made it painful to hear him cry. I wanted to go get him, but I knew if I picked him up he'd want to nurse, and I was wearing a dress already—a silk dress, at that, easily stained by breastmilk—and besides I'd been thinking for half an hour that surely my husband would be ready to go any minute and I didn't want to hike up my dress and settle down with the baby only to have him say, "Oh, you're not ready to go?" and then disappear to his study to read music reviews online.

So I was annoyed with my husband, and getting more annoyed by the minute, but I was trying to keep that in check because I'd been looking forward to this wedding. I didn't want to fight in the car all the way there and then spend the whole wedding struggling against the urge to make dire comments to the other guests about life with a man. Life with my man, in particular, which at that moment consisted of crawling around on the floor in my dress, searching for his missing shoe under the furniture and the discarded clothes and the pile of New York Times he'd left there since Sunday. Meanwhile he sat on the bed holding the one shoe he'd been able to locate, staring blankly at the wall. I remember thinking, "Why in God's name doesn't he put that shoe on?"

[image error]Bio: Leah Stewart is the author of the novels Body of a Girl, The Myth of You and Me, and Husband and Wife. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati.

The Panacea of Reading Novels

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What's the word for impotent worry activated by reading the morning paper? When your mind swirls with horror at people's pain and you think of how you can effect, perhaps, if you work very hard, a fingernail's length of change.

Perhaps the word should be horror-fever. Symptoms: choking on overseas flood worry, aching with news of increased world temperatures, and experiencing persistent chest pain, potentiated by guilt at inability to sacrifice entire life to help war-torn refugees.

There are a few honorable (as opposed to marathon sessions of Law & Order) ways to treat horror-fever.

1) Donate more money & volunteer more time (depending on the time and wallet-point of your life, your giving scale will tip one direction or the other.)

2) Write letters to the editor, spreading the concern you feel, allowing media-folk to acknowledge that, yes, someone is listening.

3) Realizing that every fingernail counts—and a million individual dollars add up to . . . a million dollars.

And then:

4) When the anxiety has reached emergency room levels and you're personally tapped out for time or money, but you need some psychic relief, pick up a novel. In a novel, you can live through pain and reach conclusions. Perhaps they aren't the one you've been rooting for, or maybe they are, but at the very least, like an armchair athlete watching football (is that what it's about?) you can immerse yourself in tragedy and drama for a few hours, without deserting your family and joining the Peace Corp (another option.)

My author choice of the week: Rosellen Brown. If you've not yet had the pleasure of her company, her books satisfy like a well-made home-cooked meal. All the ingredients are there, nothing is over-done or show-off fancy, and yet it provides everything you want for a perfect reading experience. Great plot. Elegant writing. Turn-the-pagability.

Go to her site and discover all her work—poetry, short stories, essays—or start with my favorites (repeatedly re-read.)

Before and After. Forget the Meryl Streep-Liam Neeson movie if you saw it (not that there's anything wrong with it) and sink into this story of a family shattering page by page. What happens to parents when a child is accused of an awful crime? What happens when the parents fall on opposite sides of how to support that child?

This book is the best example I've read of how fiction can reveal individual members of a family, POV by POV, providing the reader with exacting portraits of the ways we each live in our own reality—even when we share our home, DNA, or a bedroom.

Tender Mercies breaks your heart, and it breaks it without adornment or fancy footwork. The story of a man who severely injures his wife through an accident of bravado, told from his point of view, explores with the brightest of lights the inside of a marriage after tragedy.

We all need to find our causes, help, donate, and do as much as possible

Then don't we need to rest?

Some of us rest by safely experiencing intensity.

I do it by reading someone like Rosellen Brown.

Which author is your panacea?