Alex Kudera's Blog, page 111

Clemson University literary reading

Award-winning faculty read fiction and poetry in Daniel Studio on Wednesday, September 30 from 3 to 4 p.m. Join Professor Emeritus Skip Eisiminger, 2015 Best of American Poetry winner Candace Wiley, and award-winning novelist Alex Kudera for a fun free literary reading you won't want to miss!

http://calendar.clemson.edu/event/literary_reading_222#.VggWOXmPLIU

https://www.facebook.com/events/178927182441340/

we're not all Jenny Zhang's parents, but

"[My father] sure as hell was not jumping with joy and support when I said I wanted to be a writer. My mother cried for weeks and threatened to tell Stanford I was a convicted criminal so they would revoke my admission if I didn’t promise that I would not try to be a writer. I didn’t promise and my mother never made good on hers. They were scared for me. . ."

~~from "They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist" by Jenny Zhang

A less discussed aspect of Jenny Zhang's buzzfeed essay, I think, is as a parent, would any of us react much in the way her parents did when she told them she planned to become a writer? Zhang's father is possibly somewhere on the spectrum of "failed writer"--a spectrum that includes Melville, Nietzsche, Kafka, and some of the other most successful writers of all--although the graduate program he left was in linguistics, not fiction, and he sounds like a very accomplished person. At the very least, he helped raise a daughter who could gain admittance to Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop. But both parents sound absolutely terrified that she is insistent on such a dubious career path.
It reminded me of what my parents would say to me, how my father would often try to move me toward a more practical major, in a reasonable way with only a hint of panic in his voice, when I was an undergrad, and how even on his death bed, that last summer, ten years after I finished college, somehow we got to talking about writing, and he was telling me that people like Paul Auster are "special," one of a kind. Neither of us even knew, at the time, how well connected Auster was or how he'd be able to write and publish 10 to 20 more books--watered-down versions of the same book?--for another fourteen years. My mother once described fiction writing as "avocational" not "vocational"; she never spoke against the liberal arts though.

Now when my 7-year-old says she wants to be an "artist" I enjoy it; it makes me happy that she likes to draw and paint and make a mess, and to read and write and be read to, but if she told us she wanted to go to NYU or Bennington or something like that for creative writing after 12th grade? I don't know. In a way, even beyond the terrifying idea of NYU total costs in 2025, I hope she doesn't become someone who wants to go to NYU or Bennington. Stanford, to study anything she wants, would likely be okay with me. For writing in general, I'm uncertain, and for now, we're working on the second month of second grade.

Fight for Your Long Day: Classroom Edition

Hi Folks,

We're in the early stages of preparing a Classroom Edition of Fight for Your Long Day . It will be published by Hard Ball Press and will include the full text of the novel and additional essays on higher-education and contract-worker issues. It will also include author and other adjunct interviews as well as an extended listing of texts for additional reading. Feel free to share or please comment here, e-mail, tweet, or message me (I do check my "Other" folder at Facebook) if you have writing you'd like to offer or suggest for inclusion. Limited funds are available to pay for reprints or new material. Included articles will address student debt, adjunct narratives, labor organizing (pros and cons), impact of pay-per-course contracts on teaching, the denigration of literature, and more. I'm also interested in adding an essay that considers, as the novel does, the relationship between American contract work and the more global, transnational struggle of workers, with particular interest in educational and literary workers such as teachers, translators, reviewers, etc.

I'll edit this post as necessary.

Best of luck this fall.

coming soon: Turquoise Truck

a car-sales e-single from Mendicant Bookworks

Romanian hit

Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, with cover art by Nathan Holic, managed to sneak into a Romanian literary journal (left middle), but no one from the Carpathians has come to anoint, kill, or otherwise congratulate me on this success. . . so, tentatively, I'm uncertain of what this means or whether I should lay low, smile high, or merely continue with life's daily routines.

"Turquoise Truck" on the way from Mendicant Bookworks

#tbs: Rabbit Is 1979

‪In Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike wrote,

"Poor old Eagles out of their misery, Jaworski went down flinging" (498).

Rabbit Is Rich takes place in 1979 and includes quite a bit of Philadelphia, including a funny paragraph about suburban white folks getting lost in a part of West Philly near where I grew up. 

In my University City in 1979, I remember my father as in and out of work during the late seventies. Once we found five dollars near the corner of 44th or 45th and Larchwood or Osage, and instantly, my father knew this could be gas money to get us to Hershey Park. I can't remember if he held a job at the time. If you're here now, you've probably seen my earlier reports about searching for an affordable Christmas tree. I have hundreds of pages written about my father, most of it written as rough draft in 2002, about a year after he passed, and I hope to get more of it into print.

Exley, Almond, End Zone, and a 3rd round pick for Frank Gifford and future considerations

On Sunday, fittingly, I read that Frank Gifford passed on, and soon after that I googled to learn that many were commemorating Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes for helping keep the legend of Frank alive. Dylan Stableford's piece for Yahoo News captures many of the tweets that recognize Exley's contribution to Gifford lore, and quite possibly, of course, vice versa.

Earlier this summer I read Steve Almond's Against Football and learned that his favorite football novel was Don DeLillo's End Zone (I briefly evaluated the Almond at Goodreads). It's a very understandable selection, and it's also a shame DeLillo's "big books" often crowd out this early slim volume when it comes to shelf or blog space, but I was also disappointed Almond didn't mention Exley in the back section with DeLillo and other writers he acknowledged. So it was with some relief, even satisfaction, when I did see consideration of Exley in the middle of Almond's book. As you might imagine, I recommend all three books.

Since Gifford's passing, I've also considered how there is somewhat of an analogy between Exley's narrator (fictional Ex)'s relationship to Gifford and "Frade Killed Ellen"'s narrator Alan's relationship to Roger Frade (although Alan is no Alex, and Alex no Alan, not even in their dreams). In case that's not clear, what I mean is that Alan is to Frade as Exley is to Gifford. Anyway, I'd recommend my story too.

I may return to this to edit and add more.

Frade Killed Ellen around the web

"Frade Killed Ellen" is featured at GoodKindles today and received a full review at Goodreads earlier in the week.



Look for it soon in the "museletter" of musician and songwriter Cassendre Xavier.

one-sitting reads

Both "Frade Killed Ellen" and The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity fall under the category of one-sitting reads, although increasingly, I find that I enjoy returning even to the shortest stories to consider them over several sittings, often rereading earlier passages, the beginning, etc.

But here are lists of classic short reads, longer novellas and short novels, one of "The 20 Best Novellas in the History of Mankind" and another of "17 Brilliant Short Novels You Can Read in a Sitting."
Some of my favorites that didn't make either list are Yuri Olesha's Envy , Herman Melville's Benito Cereno , Kate Chopin's The Awakening, John Fante's The Brotherhood of the Grape , and Dan Fante's Chump Change.