Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 40
January 9, 2015
January 8, 2015
Stielstra. Adcox. Kelly. Tanzer. Curbside Reading. University of Chicago. Next Thursday. January 15th.
Seriously. More here. A lot more. Totally.
January 7, 2015
January 6, 2015
This Book Will Change Your Life - Drinking From A Bitter Cup - A Novel by the Angela Jackson-Brown.
We suppose we could tell you Drinking From A Bitter Cup - A Novel by the Angela Jackson-Brown spoke to us in much the same way The Bluest Eye or Bastard Out of Carolina did, breaking our hearts with stories of brutality forged into song. Which might tell you what you need to know, though it wouldn't capture how Jackson-Brown's fluid prose turns a tale of pain into a page turner. We may at times avert our eyes, but from start to finish, we are always moving forward and wanting to know more. Which is what we could tell you. But we don't want to. What we want to do is tell you about how we sat by our older son on a plane returning from a trip East where we celebrated his 13th birthday. How there was a party, and there was passage, nominally into manhood, though the idea of that still seems impossible. As impossible anyway, as the fact that our father missed this milestone as he has so many others, his loss forever looming, even as the years continue to pass. Yet, life continues as well, and so there we are, thinking about fathers and sons and milestones and loss, but celebration too, and passages, and there's the protagonist in Drinking From A Bitter Cup, finally able to scatter the ashes of her stand-in father across the beach as he requested, even as her actual father looks on, and there is so much joy in that, and we are so moved, that all we can do is cry. All the while not wanting our son to see it, and for no other reason than we are embarrassed to feel these things so intensely, though we do, and all the more so since his birth, and our father's loss. And so there it is, life, and birth, pain, and loss, and the possibility, as always, that the right book just might come to you at the right time, and when it does, it just might change your life, if only briefly at that.
January 5, 2015
Lost in Space is Pete Lit: Good Reading 2014. And most appreciative we are.
January 4, 2015
January 3, 2015
"Phenomenal." Lost in Space goodness.
And quite appreciated it is. Excerpt? Word."The writing is superb, as is everything else Ben Tanzer writes. I'd recommend this to anybody, parents or not."
January 2, 2015
"What We Talk About When We Talk About the Flood" is all After the Flood excerpt and the new kick-ass Mark Cronin joint The Heavy Contortionists.
And quite appreciative we are. So please do take a look and please don't hesitate to revel in the rest of the stellar line-up as well. Cool? Cool. Excerpt? Word."It is Bill, Jenna, Holly, and me and we are talking about love.
Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, what we are talking about is the flood. They say it is the storm of the century, and who are we to argue, especially when we’re talking about love, and have more important things to argue about anyway.
“Are we out of gin?” Holly says lifting the gin bottle in front of her, turning it upside down, and shaking it.
Holly is my second wife.
Not that we are married, it’s just that we might as well be.
Holly has these long, red ringlets of hair, it’s like fire, and she had been my receptionist, but I would go home at night after work, and all I could think about was seeing her hair draped across my pillow in the morning.
My ex-wife’s hair was fine, black as night and nearly translucent, but it didn’t look like fire, and that wasn’t going to work.
Plus, she didn’t drink."
