+ books, bookstore, event, literary, literary festival, literary journal, New England, reading, small press, writers
Upcoming Readings
Saturday, September 18, 2010 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm I’ll be at the Salem Literary Festival, where I’m delighted to be among the readers for Quick Fiction’s Utter Amazement:
Meet us at Gulu Gulu for a phenomenal line-up of readers whose work has appeared in the literary journal Quick Fiction, including Steve Almond, Brian Evenson, Kim Chinquee, Myfanwy Collins, Michael Thurston, and William Walsh. We don’t even know what to expect, other than a whole lot of utter amazement.
Here’s the info on Newtonville Book’s Small Press Saturday, October 2nd:
SMALL PRESS SATURDAY | October 2 | Five authors published by four local and national small presses will show major publishers exactly what they’re missing. Adam Golaski (Rose Metal Press), Joseph McElroy (Small Anchor Press), Sumanth Prabhaker (Madras Press), and William Walsh and Myfanwy Collins (Dzanc), plus others, will read their work. | Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newtonville | 2 pm | Free | 617.244.6619 or newtonvillebooks.com
+ books, literary, Matthew M. Quick, novel, reading, storytelling, writers, writing books, young adult
Sorta Like A Rock Star, by Matthew Quick
This one is for all of the kids who live outside the edge of normal, all of the kids who have secrets behind what their faces show at school each day, all of the kids who have been picked on, and especially for all of the kids who when faced with the worst, offer up their best.
This one is for all of you who are rock stars of hope, just like Amber Appleton the winning heroine of Matthew Quick’s charmingly heartbreaking YA novel Sorta Like a Rock Star
I’ve been a fan of Quick’s writing for a while now and I expect a lot from his work. I expect honesty and humor and a wacky set of characters doing interesting things: and, boy, does this book deliver all of those things in spades. Most importantly, this book delivers a great big heart, all packaged within the body of Amber Appleton–who is one part Dorothy in Oz, one part Alice in Wonderland, and one part all her own. She’s a girl who has been pushed down into a dark place due to circumstances beyond her control and when life deals her an unfair and devastating hand, even though she wants to give up, she refuses to.
Partly she keeps going because Amber is not alone in her hardships; through her dark times she has her friends (a group of misfit kids, a haiku writing war vet, a Nietzsche quoting nursing home villain, and a Catholic priest among others). In her darkest hour when all she wants to do is be alone, they will not give up on her. They fight for her in the way no one else ever has–not even her parents.
Amber teaches us to never give up yearning for a better future. She teaches us what it means to survive. Most importantly, she gives us hope.
Buy this book for your favorite high school kid. Buy this book for your mother and father. Buy this book for a complete stranger who looks like he is having a crappy day and needs a reason to believe. Buy this book.
I worried through the entirety of my pregnancy. How, I fretted, could I bring a child into this world? How could I protect him? What did he have to look forward to but melting ice caps, tsunamis, wild fires, genocide, floods, hurricanes, drought, war, war, war, serial killers, crazed gunmen in schools, bullies, etc. Now that I am a parent, I realize I can’t protect him from these things. I can only protect him from what I can control, and even then I am often left powerless.
We will do as we wish, we humans.
Ron Currie’s daring, humorous, poignant, heart-wrenching, and, ultimately, joyful second novel, Everything Matters!
It is from there, his foreknowledge, that we witness the choices he makes in his life–when does he choose to give up and when does he choose to push beyond his limits. When does he choose to live and accept all of the beauty that life has to offer him even though he knows it will one day be taken away.
Yes, on the surface this is a book about mass destruction, but it’s not about hopelessness. Rather, it’s about what we wake up and choose to do each day–put one foot ahead of the other and move forward even though we know that one day we will cease to be. We are all brave to live, to choose to live.
Some books you read to be entertained, others to learn something, and some you read to change your life. Everything Matters! was all of these books for me. I finished it just as my two-year-old was waking up from his nap. I was crying as I picked him up from his crib, not because I was sad, but because I was so happy and grateful that he was alive in this beautiful world where everything matters.
Jordan Rosenfeld has posted an awesome offer on her blog–here are the details:
I’ll ship you up to three copies with no shipping charge, at only $12/copy. They’re regularly $14.95 plus tax and shipping.
My book is good for the beginner or intermediate writer, since it offers not only refreshers on simple scene architecture, but detailed information on scene types.
To take advantage of this deal–I’ve only got 22 copies left–email me: jordansmuse (at) gmail (dot) com with the subject “Make a Scene deal” and tell me how many you want. We can work out the mailing/payment details from there.
BONUS DEAL: Add a copy of my book with Rebecca Lawton, Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life, and I’ll send you both books for $20, plus FREE shipping.
I first encountered the work of Mary Mill when I was guest editor for SmokeLong Quarterly and my friend Katrina Denza suggested I check out her writing. I did and asked her to submit for the issue. She sent us this: A Blind Dog Named Killer and a Colony of Bees.
All this is to say that before I even cracked the spine of Big World I had a feeling that I’d love reading it.
And that feeling was right on. Miller can write the hell out of a story. Most (if not all–I think there may have been one in 3rd person) of the stories within the book are written in 1st person, told from the point-of-view of a self-conscious and yet feisty female narrator. These are women who understand precisely where they are on the food chain and sometimes they like just where they are, but more often than not, they’d rather be elsewhere:
She prayed to St. Jude, she told me, the patron saint of lost and hopeless causes, and I didn’t mind being lost but hopeless bothered me. Hopeless was going too far. Someone was going to have to tell her.
These women are bar flies and usually they are in bad relationships. Or these aren’t women at all, they’re lost little girls, wanting love, comfort, something. Whoever and whatever they are, the story that pulls together the common threads of this collection, is the gloriously painful title story, “Big World”:
You want it too much, I told her. You want it so much no one’s ever going to give it to you. We were tipsy and someone was dead and I was under the impression we could be honest.
They are telling the truth about all of their pain, sharing it openly, wielding it like a weapon:
I liked to say things to shock him, the truth. Like my father, he had sent me out into the big world all alone and I was going to show him how ugly it was.
You might think this book sounds bleak, but I promise it’s not. It’s funny and, at times, hopeful about the future. As it is rooted in a sense of reality, this book doesn’t try to show us a beautiful, sugar-coated world. Does not strive to show us an optimistic and wonderful world. Instead it offers us a big, ugly, real world and even then, it’s still one well worth living and surviving in.
Read this book.
It’s not surprising to me that I loved Steward O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster
On the surface it’s a book about a day in the life of Manny, a Red Lobster manager whose restaurant is closing. Beneath, there is much more going on. Manny is a good guy who genuinely loves his job and tries to do well by the folks who work for him. He’s far from perfect, though. His girlfriend is pregnant and he cannot commit to her. Not because he doesn’t want to do the right thing, but because he loves another.
That beloved is one of his staff, a beautiful waitress, who along with a few others of the motley crew, shows up for the Lobster’s last night–not because she cares about her job, but because she cares about Manny.
I’d venture to say that anyone who has ever worked minimum wage, worked service industry, worked retail, worked in a restaurant, will find themselves within this book. You will understand the frustration, the ribbing, the improbable love. You will remember customers who were a pain in the ass, the dysfunctional relationships between coworkers. You will remember the times you laughed with the odd-ball group of people who became family to you.
From a merely human standpoint, this is a book about yearning–hope for a more beautiful future, desire to relive the past. For me, it was the perfect way to spend New Year’s Eve: surveying the past, living in the present, and looking forward.
I read Anne Enright’s The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)
If you have ever grieved (which we nearly all have or will at some point in our lives), then this book will speak to you. Directly, honestly. If you have ever grieved a family member, one you remembered as a child, then this book will speak to you. If your family has secrets, then this book will speak to you. If you have loved and lost, then this book will speak to you.
Basically, I can’t imagine an adult who would read this book and not find some connection within. Can’t imagine who would not experience a moment of “ah ha” as she read.
On the surface, it’s a book about grief (a sister for her brother), but beneath there is a lifetime of grieving. Veronica has witnessed much and even that which she has not witnessed, she feels she knows. As she moves through the layers of her life, she shows us how her family fell apart, came back together, fell apart, came back together. For what else is there in a family but the pushing away and the pulling back close?
And in Veronica’s large family, we are able to see our own:
There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends, of course, and, like trends they shift. Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them – at least I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odds and I will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.
Maybe I’m wrong and this book will make no sense to you. Even so, the writing is a glory to behold as is the story it uncovers.
Philadelphia is not only the home of the quintessentially American Liberty Bell, cheese steak, and Rocky, but now Philadelphia offers us another American original: Pat Peoples, the neurologically-damaged, ex-wife pining, mother-loving, uber Eagles fan protagonist of Matthew Quick’s dazzling debut novel The Silver Linings Playbook
You might think that a book about a guy who has lost so much–his wife, his home, his job, and many years of his life in a mental health facility–would be depressing. Far from it. In fact, this book is uplifting. For what Quick offers us is not just the brutality of life–a father who won’t talk to his son, a cheating wife, many violent tempers–but also the beauty of it–finding love in unexpected people. Basically, Quick shows us that no matter how far down you fall, there are people willing to help you pick yourself back up. Quick gives us hope.
Does everything turn out the way Pat wanted it to? No. But it does turn out just as it should: with two broken souls coming together, hoping, and believing in the silver lining.
In short: a gorgeous, poignant, funny and uplifting book. Read it.
My mother always told me, “Friends may come and go, but a sister is forever.” She had six sisters, so she knew what she was talking about. My father had four sisters and I have three. I grew up in a world of sisters and feel like I have a pretty good handle on sisterhood, and so does Ellen Meister.
At the core of her charming, thrilling, and often hilarious new book–The Smart One
It is only when they bond together to try to solve a decades old mystery that they learn the truth about each other: and that is that they no longer need these labels. In fact, maybe they are all smart, pretty, and wild. What’s most important is that they love each other and they are there for each other (even when irritated with each other).
Like Ellen herself, this book has a lot of heart and these characters will stick with you long after you have finished reading. Like sisters to you, they are forever.
Read this book.
+ books, fiction, flash fiction, Kathy Fish, literary, Pia Ehrhardt, small press, storytelling, writers
A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness — my review at Quick Fiction
I’m delighted to direct your attention to my review of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women over at Quick Fiction.
I loved the book and so will you. So please do order yourself a copy. I promise you will be captivated.
The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
A deeply moving, unforgettable memoir of a truly hard-scrabble life. What I admire most about this book is that Jeannette Walls never paints her family as victims. Nor does she portray her unbearably narcissistic parents as evil (even though it would certainly be easy to do so–her drunken father, her childlike mother. Oh, how I was enraged in the scene where the mother hides the candy bar she’s eating from her starving children!!!). Instead, she shows the world as she saw it growing up: the good, the bad, the hideously ugly.
But mostly this is a book about hope and strength and finding the courage to overcome.
In a nutshell, this book will haunt me for a long time.
myfanwy collins 