This story was published earlier today via The Collagist. To be honest, I'd never heard of Erinrose Mager, let alone read her work before--something I will try to continue rectifying in the future. A shorter story (two pages if printed out), it reads like my favorite type of shorter story--that is, one that every time I read it I begin to think about it differently.

I call up my mother before dinner. I ask her, "What about cinnamon toast? I remember this breakfast distinctly."

I look through the window above the sink at the cat splayed out in the yard near the driveway. He's been chasing something in the grass all afternoon. The cat is fifteen years old and very daring, and I check on him sometimes. I run the green beans under the tap and pour them into the pan with the garlic.

"Of course not," my mother says. "I fed you steel cut oatmeal and salads. Salads and oatmeal and ice water for your circulation. You ate your breakfast and read chapter books under the covers before school. You loved reading. I soaked the oats at night and stirred in honey early in the mornings."

A mother and daughter on the phone, the daughter trying to recall what she'd eaten as a child, the mother tossing out things the daughter not only doesn't remember, but finds there's no way it would have happened that way. Later the daughter notes:

No, no, no. I do however recall the cinnamon toast. She kept a cinnamon-sugar shaker in the cupboard. She buttered the bread to the edges. The shaker had a girl's face on the top. The holes of the shaker were the girl's freckles. I do not dream these kinds of details. I do not have the mind to imagine a past.

I love that last little bit--is it really true that she doesn't have the mind to imagine this stuff? Or maybe she has the mind to imagine a scenario that she does NOT have the mind to imagine it? Is she reliable or not? Actually re-reading the story for about the fifth or sixth time today, I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be reading the story the way I have been--I think the conversation may really be one with more concern behind it--a daughter, not so close, worrying about her mother for more serious reasons. Again, I love the fact that the more I read this, the more that slowly opens itself up to me--I find it an aspect of very short stories that I enjoy a lot--that re-reading them over and over isn't something that can't be done.

Every now and then I plan on tackling a larger book--most likely a novel, but occasionally maybe something non-fiction. As I don't want to have 7 to say 20 or so Work of the Day posts about the same title, I' plan to do this concurrently with the Work of the Day project.

I remember enjoying Jeffery Renard Allen's short story collection, Holding Pattern, when Graywolf published it. I did not jump on his latest novel, Song of the Shank, when it was published after that and do not really remember why not. However, they've recently re-published his debut novel, Rails Under My Back with a really nice introduction from Charles Johnson. The novel was originally published by FSG in 2000 and from what I can stumble upon, received pretty glowing reviews.

I took a quick peek at the beginning of the novel:

Long before Jesus entered the world, blades of southern grass sliced up the soles of his grandmother's feet. Her blood leaped from the danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion. In step with the flowing sweep of her garments, an undercurrent of rhythm, she cut the final strings of attachment, her children, and on a rich spring day cut a red path to New Mexico--what business had a nigger there; New Mexicans had yet to invent the word--for a man eternally bound to a rakish fedora, his sweet face like a mask beneath it, pinstripe suit, diamond horseshoe tiepin, and two-toned patent-leather shoes. Drawn by the power of nostalgia--Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour--she swept back two years later without a word about her lover, the father of R.L., her oldest child. A decade later he would be thrown through the windshield of his sparkling green (red?) Edsel (Eldorado?)--the squeal before the thud, the skid after--his decapitated body slipping the surly bonds of earth, sailing kitelike over a California highway, arcing over and beyond a thicket of treetops, to touch the face of God. Jesus was convinced  that her exodus had strangled any impulse her surviving children--his mother and aunt--had to get close to her, and had ripped open his life, for an eye, like a shattered mirror,  multiplies the images of its sorrow. The years only deepened the sorrow his family had in common. Even a hatred like hot ice could not halt destiny.

I am greatly anticipating reading this one. The descriptions above, the rhythm of the sentences...everything about that opening paragraph excites me for this road ahead. As great as it is for publishers to find new authors, I find it just as great when a publisher "re-discovers" an incredible old book, or an author the big houses have decided didn't sell enough and bring back their backlist as well as new works (hey, that Dzanc rEprint series just to my mind for some reason!).

The folks at Engine Books did a really good thing making sure that Patricia Henley's short story collection, Other Heartbreaks, got published. Jumping in and out of this collection I've really enjoyed, and tried to savor a bit, each story I've began. "Kaput" is a story somewhere near the middle of the collection. Like most of Henley's work found in between these covers, she does a masterful job giving her readers a couple of women whose lives have interacted. And as is also the case in many of these stories, in less than 20 pages Henley gives us the background of their relationship, the current status, shows some of their loves, their losses, their achievements.

Meekly, I said, "We've been building a bridge, right?" We had talked every three months for the last fifteen years.

"Sure."

"I thought--when I saw you--that the last little bit of the bridge would click into place." I had to catch my breath, as if I said too much. "But there's still a gap."

This is a 58 year old woman, unemployed as the college she worked at closed up shop the previous year, talking to Kim, her much more successful friend, who has flown her to Mexico for a visit. Kim is also the woman  who was with Alex, the narrator's ex-husband, after the break-up (actually seems to have been at least part of the cause for the break-up), long enough to have had two sons with him. The two women have remained friends (Alex is now no longer with either of them).

Henley does a nice job of giving the background of the relationships without going into so much detail that the story lengthens unnecessarily. She gives her readers insight into the minds of both women, allowing for an understanding of why might continue to put up with the other. There are other characters--Willow, the narrator's adult-aged daughter, and various names of people that the narrator and Alex community farmed with back in the day. The inclusion of the farmers, in particular, allows Henley to go back and forth in time, to help her develop the narrator for the reader, and allow her readers to understand the level of loss that she's felt.

Henley's stories are really very layered. They should not be plowed through--they should be read slowly and allow for the details to be absorbed and thought about. "Kaput" is a great read with a wallop to the side of the head at the end (sorry, no spoiler here), and it fits right in with the other stories I've read so far in the collection. Looking forward to the rest.

So, if there's a writer I've mentioned here at the EWN more than any other, it's most likely Percival Everett as I believe I've written full reviews of 18 of his now 23 works of fiction, and 3 of his 4 poetry collections. So it should be no surprise that I've chosen one of the stories from his latest (Graywolf Press, September 2015) short story collection, Half an Inch of Water, to take a peek at.

In the story "Stonefly," a girl named Rachel drowns in the river. Her brother, Daniel, is 8 at the time. That and more background is given to the reader in the first paragraph. Then the story bumps forward six years and begins to really concentrate on Daniel. His parents naturally worry about him and have him seeing a therapist. A sample from one of their conversations:

"Any thoughts about your sister?" She cleared her throat. "Might as well get right to it, right?"

"I guess."

"You guess you've been thinking about her or you guess we should get right to it?"

"You're the one who put the question badly."

gives an idea pretty quickly as to Daniel's personality and thought process. And Everett has such precision with his language, I'd not be surprised to find out that the question the therapist asked might have been typed out accidentally, leading to Daniel's smart alecky reply. Daniel actually turns the tables on the therapist two or three more times during their session and a later meeting. The story turns a bit into a finding oneself story as Daniel does begin to focus a bit on his feelings about his sister, about how his parents hover over him (their only other child after Rachel's death). It uses elements from activities Everett has been known to both enjoy, and write about--the outdoors, horses and riding, fly fishing--and an abnormally large trout surfacing and shining near the area Rachel drowned to help propel Daniel forward.

As is typical with an Everett fiction, there's no hammering over the reader's head with a message or idea. Instead it's the combination of events, the writing, and the language that grab one's interest and keeps it. The ideas to mull over and consider for the next couple of days before moving on to the next story in the collection. About halfway through this most recent collection and placing it on one of my Everett shelves will be a pleasure.

"Once you counted eleven hundred days, you lot the desire to count." This opens the short story, "Journey's End," from Amelia Gray's short story collection, Gutshot (FSG, 2015). It's followed by:

"You threw out your notebooks, which freed up some space for fuel. Those days we were looking either for fuel or for places to store it."

A trio of lines that implies some sort of post-apocalyptic setting maybe? A shorter short story--only four paragraphs long--"Journey's End" still hits hard with some fantastic sentences:

"I began to fantasize what might happen if we discovered glowing cubes and cracked them open to find blistering stuff of the universe within."

"I found a cooler of urine buoying rotten cans, their metal bowed out, contents sunk in a haze at the bottom."

"We marveled; they had freed delicate glass from metal and filled each bulb, soldered to reattach, and affixed in place."

"You remembered your father obtaining a wood-boring drill-bit set; after he died, you found that every book in his house had been ventilated and the trees out back as well."

"I hooked up the generator and didn't immediately die."

"I wanted to break the screen and employ the services of its glass on my face but you warned me to be careful after all we had been through."

and ends with a killer: "You were thoughtful like that."

Me typing that could possibly ruin the story for you, but I don't think so. Every time I re-read an Amelia Gray story I catch little things I had missed on the previous reading. This one, which I've enjoyed four times in the past few days, is no different. The Los Angeles Review of Books has a conversation between two more of my favorite authors: Robert Lopez and Peter Markus. In it, they mention another friend, Andrew Richmond, saying "people doing people things" frequently. And that is what happens in Gray's stories, no matter how surreal the setting might be--people doing people things in as interesting a way as possible.

It's pretty amazing to me how long Dogzplot Flash Fiction has been around, consistently publishing great flash stories. I don't remember to check out every online journal as often as I used to, but this site is one I tend to remember to find my way to. A recent short by Joanna Arnow, titled, "A Legacy" caught my eye. It begins:

"They said to write whatever came to mind, but all I can think about is peanut butter."

What is never really established is who THEY are. Over the remaining 120 or so words, "peanut butter" is mentioned nine more times. It's an interesting use of repetition, one that I don't see that often in such a short story. It helps Arnow create a nice rhythm to the story if one were to read it aloud. It keeps the story very focused, which while you'd think it being such a short flash that it would almost have to remain focused, but it's not been that uncommon for me to read a flash that wanders and could have been tighter. Of course, Arnow also uses the word "orgasm" three times through the last half of the flash, which also makes the repetition of "peanut butter" seem that much more necessary.

2016-001: Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

115 pages, 2015 by Dorothy, a publishing project

Purchased direct from the publisher

Like all books published by Dorothy, a publishing project, I purchased this one as soon as it was published. Unfortunately, like most of the books I buy these days, it sat around for half a year before I picked it up to read it. I originally intended to read a story or three, choose one, and post on the Work of the Day. However, a combination of sitting at a car service department for longer than I'd hoped for, and the fact that I couldn't stop turning pages, led me to read the entire collection of stories by Joanna Walsh.

The collections focuses more on women in domestic situations more than anything else. Walsh's language is incredible--there's a dreamlike quality lulling the reader into a sense of security while at the same time writing about urgent situations--a mother in a children's ward waiting for news on her daughter; a woman dealing with the fact that her husband has developed online relationships with other women; a mother on a bus ride with her daughter to what she knows re her disappointed parents. It's a very interesting combination of situational tension being calmed down by the way Walsh writes her sentences and puts her paragraphs together.

Part of this is done through her usage of the ordinary. In "Online," the story with the flirtatious husband, the wife asks "How is your breakfast?" and "What do you like for breakfast?" The sort of things you don't typically see in stories. The second question does lead to the interesting point that she believes she's at a disadvantage with the collective that is the group of women he talks to online. She believes that because they can ask questions like this, where she sounds ridiculous doing so as she KNOWS what he likes to eat makes them more interesting to him than she is.

In "Young Mothers" a story wherein the mothers see their existence ebb and flow strictly through their children. They are not known by their names but as "Connor's mum, or Casey's mum." Walsh slides lines like:

"Colors were bright, so our children did not lose us, so we could not lose each other, or ourselves, no matter how hard we tried."

after couplets like:

"Fleece was warm and stretchy for growing bodies. Shoes were flat for running, playing.

A couple of nice, simple sentences describing the outfits of the children in standard terms and then just a hammer blow of truly getting inside a mother's head.

The collection has fourteen stories that are linked, not by character, or setting, but by mood, by language and the very smooth mixing of urgent situations with calming language. It's unlike any other collection I've read and I look forward to future works by Joanna Walsh.

4.5 paws

I didn't include any of these in my What I'm Looking Forward to Reading 2016 version for what should be obvious reasons. But each and every one of these titles is something that should absolutely be on your radar!

Just recently published

Triangle Ray by John Holman

Triangle Ray is a collection of short stories linked by the character of Ray Fielding, introduced first as a young black man coming of age in the 1980s and infatuated with his schoolmate, the brilliant, miraculous Marie. Against the wishes of their families, the two marry just out of high school, but the marriage falls apart within a few years as time makes them strangers to each other. Twenty years later, Ray is unmarried and still searching for a lasting connection—with his friend Dexter and his wife Olivia, whose name is so beautiful Ray has to ugly it up; with his cousin Barbara, raising her child while chasing an easy way out; and with passionate, mercurial Alma, a woman with whom Ray collides at right angles, a fleeting love affair neither of them can keep alive. 

With sharp prose and startling insight, John Holman illuminates issues of race and class within the context of one man’s search for love and belonging, exploring the motives behind the ways we retell our stories and how we ignore or embrace the future that is already taking shape. 

February 9

Kafka's Son by Curt Leviant

Set in New York City and Prague in 1992, Kafka’s Son follows a documentary filmmaker whose life has been defined by the men he refers to as the two Ks: Danny Kaye and Franz Kafka. In a New York synagogue, he meets an elderly Czech Jew named Jiri, once the head of the famous Jewish Museum in Prague, with whom he discovers a shared love of Kafka. Inspired by this new friendship, he travels to Prague to make a film about Jewish life in the city and its Kafka connections.

In his search for answers, he crosses paths with the beadle of the famous 900-year-old Altneushul synagogue, where a legendary golem is rumored to be hidden away in a secret attic, which may or may not exist; a mysterious man who may or may not be Kafka’s son; Mr. Klein, who although several years younger than Jiri may or may not be his father; and an enigmatic young woman in a blue beret, who is almost certainly real.

As Prague itself becomes as perplexing and unpredictable as its transient inhabitants, Curt Leviant unfolds a labyrinthine tale that is equal parts detective novel and love story, captivating maze and realistic fantasy, and a stunning tribute to Kafka and his city. Initially published in France in 2009, Kafka’s Son was selected by the Association of French Booksellers as a Choice Book and chosen as one of 40 Best Foreign Books of the Year for 2009. 

March 15

Waste by Andrew F. Sullivan

A breakneck tour of a brokedown city littered with ruptured families, missing mothers, busted bowling alleys, and neon motels. 

Larkhill, Ontario. 1989. A city on the brink of utter economic collapse. On the brink of violence. Driving home one night, unlikely passengers Jamie Garrison and Moses Moon hit a lion at fifty miles an hour. Both men stumble away from the freak accident unharmed, but neither reports the bizarre incident. 

Haunted by the dead lion, Moses storms through the frozen city with his pathetic crew of wannabe skinheads searching for his mentally unstable mother. Jamie struggles with raising his young daughter and working a dead-end job in a butcher shop, where a dead body shows up in the waste buckets out back. A warning of something worse to come. 

Somewhere out there in the dark, a man is still looking for his lion. His name is Astor Crane, and he has never really understood forgiveness. 

April 12

Movie Stars by Jack Pendarvis

These stories are linked by humor, setting, themes, and recurring characters—cat lovers, murderers, gamblers, ghosts, and fools—but mostly by the movie stars, gods, and goddesses who look down on us struggling mortals with a mixture of benevolence and wrath. From Scarlett Johansson to Joan Crawford, Clint Eastwood to Jerry Lewis, they represent the impossible ideals to which lesser beings turn for hope in an otherwise baffling world.

April 12

Loreena's Gift by Colleen Story

A blind girl’s terrifying “gift” allows her to regain her eyesight— but only as she ferries the recently deceased into the afterlife. 

Loreena Picket is a blind young woman who lives with her uncle, a reverend at a small- town church. Loreena has a strange gift, which she’s not really sure is a gift at all. Her uncle has made good use of it, involving her in end-of-life “ceremonies,” during which she helps terminally ill people die in the most humane way. Taking their hands, she kills them with an invisible, painless power, but not before traveling with them to the other side. On her journey to the afterlife with her companion, she can see.

Loreena’s uncle believes her power is a gift from God, but when Loreena’s troubled brother returns to town, she saves his life by killing a drug dealer. Thrown deeper into her brother’s dark world and forced to survive being kidnapped and used for her power, she begins to wonder: is she an angel of mercy or just an assassin? 

May 10

Late One Night by Lee Martin

On a night no one will ever forget, Della Black and three of her seven children are killed in a horrific fire in their trailer. As the surviving children are caught in the middle of a custody battle between their well-intentioned neighbor and their father and his pregnant mistress, new truths about what really happened the night of the fire come to light. When the fire marshal determines the cause—arson—rumors quickly circulate as the townspeople search for answers. Ronnie Black is the kind of man who can leave his wife and children for a younger woman, but is he capable of something more sinister?

Ronnie and his girlfriend, Brandi Tate, maintain his innocence—he’s a loving, caring father who wants to do everything he can to protect his family. But as the gossip mounts, Ronnie feels his children (and, eventually, Brandi) pulling away from him. Soon enough, he finds himself at a crossroads—should he allow gossipmongers to seal his fate, or should he fight to prove that he’s not the monster people paint him to be?

In Late One Night, Lee Martin examines the devastating effect of rumors and the resilience of one family in the face of the ultimate tragedy.

May 10

Worthy by Lisa Birnbaum

Told in a language all its own, Worthy is a tale of love, deception, and the art of the long con.

Worthy is the story of Ludmila—or Worthy, as she comes to be known— a “former” con artist from Eastern Europe managing an eccentric, failing strip club in Tampa for her lover, Leo. Though there is much she won’t reveal, she gradually unravels the story of her love affair twenty years earlier with Theodore, an erratic literature professor who embraces an ideology built around what he calls the Four Books: Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Nabokov’s Despair, Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and Camus’s The Fall. Seduced by the scofflaws in these novels, Theodore and Worthy transform themselves into confidence artists, a tempest of shared madness that carries them from New York to Mexico City to the South of France. Despite her sly humor calculated to charm, Worthy’s picaresque narrative leaves the listener with deepening questions, from what happened to Theodore to the reasons she abandoned her son Mirek.

With the linguistic acrobatics of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and the confessional force of The Fall, Lisa Birnbaum weaves a lively tale of elusive truth about finding our way in the world, as love is inevitably lost and left behind. 

June 7

Movieola! by John Domini

A collection of linked short stories that delights in and exploits the language and paraphernalia of industrial Hollywood.

The collection delves into a night at the movies, featuring all the familiar types—the rom-com, the action-adventure, the superhero, and the spy—but the narratives are still under construction, and every storyline is an opportunity for the unimaginable twist. Motive and identity are constantly shifting in these short stories that offer both narrative and anti-narrative, while the stunted shop-talk of the movie business struggles to keep up.

With the wit of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville and the inventive spirit of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, John Domini offers a collection at once comical and moving, care- fully suspended between a game of language and a celebration of American film. 

June 7

Jamestown, Alaska by Frank Hollon Turner

Jamestown, Alaska is the story of Aaron Jennings, a bestselling novelist bored by his life of suburban monotony and increasingly disturbed by the stories of violence in his newspaper, who wakes one morning to find a small red book on his doorstep. There is no title, no author’s name on the spine: just the words The Survival Manifesto inscribed on the first page, and an invocation to a chosen few to abandon the society of the incompetent, lazy, and immoral and build a new utopia in the wilds of Alaska. Jennings is invited to the commune to write, or rewrite, the history of the imminent worldwide revolution.

Skeptical but insatiably curious, Jennings sets out for Alaska in the company of the seven mysterious members of the Committee, pursued by a sinister figure (his next- door neighbor?) who seems to oppose the Committee’s mission. But the human vices have reached Jamestown first, and the foundation of the commune is already faltering. As Jennings becomes entangled with the secrets of Jamestown, falling out of touch with his family and the life he left behind, he grows increasingly paranoid about what kind of game he’s stumbled into, and whether anything in Jamestown is as it seems.

With spare prose and sharp insight into the fallacies of the human mind, Frank Turner Hollon’s Jamestown, Alaska walks the line between ludicrous and ominous in the style of Karen Russell, Jim Shepard, and Kurt Vonnegut.

So, hours after writing about what books I look forward to reading that will be published this year, I jump back to a short story collection that won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction back in 1984, Why Men Are Afraid of Women--only 32 years ago. If there is a series I try to make sure I pick up every year, it's the Flannary O'Connor Award for Short Fiction titles. I've probably owned this collection for half a dozen years and today is the first time I've cracked the covers open.

I opted for the story "A Hunk of Burning Love" because it was originally published in The Missouri Review, a journal I've enjoyed in the past. It begins:

Gene is already there when I come through the door of the New Deal Cafe and Bar.

Nothing overly special. Concise and in the not too distant future of the story, Camoin allows the reader the knowledge that the narrator is Larry, a male co-worker of Gene's. Also that Larry is sleeping with the waitress at the New Deal, Rita. While the title of the collection notes how men are afraid of women, and dipping into a few more of the stories this evening, it is a common topic, "A Hunk of Burning Love" looks a little closer at how relationships between men can veer hard toward awkward.

Gene and Larry do outdoor work--on the particular day in question they are putting up fencing on a pasture. The conversation in the diner is a little odd; then the conversation while Gene drives Larry to the property they'll work on gets a little more stilted as Gene accuses Law-rence (as he calls him) of not understanding Elvis because he's from Chicago--among other things; and during the day while they work it all but disappears as they work mainly in silence. A key bit of information about Rita comes about and I think from that point forward Camoin has the reader feeling just as awkward listening in on their conversation as they seem to be themselves, which makes for a great read.

Besides creating some great characters, Camoin writes deceptively simple prose--in that it's not simple at all, but very accessible and clean. He's got some great descriptions:

...the sky is like a TV screen when the station is off the air, a blank waiting to be filled in.

And not long after that:

...the sky is like a page from a book that hasn't been written.

He looks at relationships, at working men, at small daily events that we all recognize but don't frequently see in stories. This story and the others I've had the chance to read so far are excellent. And in good news, the University of Georgia Press has republished this collection in paperback and as an eBook as of late 2013 and it's widely available again.

Nine days into 2016 and I've received some galleys, seen many lists, and began to take notes for books that I really hope to get to during the upcoming year (while also trying to catch up on the books from similar lists in 2013, 2014, and 2015 that I've still not read)!

January

Rachel Cantor              Good on Paper (Melville House)                    Novel

Garth Greenwell           What Belongs to You (Sarabande)                 Novel

Amber Sparks                The Unfinished World (Liveright)                  Short Story Collection

February

Amy Gustine                 You Should Pity Us Instead (Sarabande)        Short Story Collection

Brian Evenson                A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House)            Short Story Collection

Allison Joseph               Mercurial (Mayapple Press)                        Poetry Collection

March

Desiree Cooper            Know the Mother (Wayne State University)    Short Story Collection

Brian Oliu                    I/O: A Memoir (CCM)                                   Non-Fiction

Chris Bacheldor            The Throwback Special (Norton)                  Novel

Danielle Dutton            Margaret the First (Catapult)                        Novel

C. Dale Young               The Halo (Four Way Books)                          Poetry Collection

April

Stephen Dixon             Letter to Kevin (Fantagraphics)                    Novel

Francine J. Harris        Play Dead                                                    Poetry Collection

Jamaal May                 The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James)    Poetry Collection

May

Lydia Millet                 Sweet Lamb of Heaven (Norton)                    Novel

Pamela Erens               Eleven Hours (Tin House)                             Novel

Stephen Graham Jones    Mongrels (William Morrow)                        Novel

Jensen Beach              Swallowed by the Cold (Graywolf)                Short Story Collection

July

Donald Ray Pollock        The Heavenly Table (Doubleday)                  Novel

August

Rosa Likson                    Compartment No. 9 (Graywolf)                   Novel (in translation)

September

Matt Bell                        A Tree or a Person or a Wall (Soho)            Short Story Collection

Anne Raeff                     The Jungle Around Us (Georgia Press)         Short Story Collection

Colson Whitehead            The Underground Railroad (Doubleday)        Novel

October

Anne Valente                    Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (Harper)       Novel

Now, I'm positive I've missed MANY titles--I don't see Two Dollar Radio, or Unbridled, or Dorothy, or Hobart, or Tyrant, or Engine Books, or The Cupboard, or many other publishers that I love. I also don't see names like Percival Everett (who generally publishes something every year) or the new novels by Richard Russo or Don Delillo on here either though I'm sure I'll want to read them. And there will be dozens of books that I'll stumble onto in stores, or on Facebook or via David Abrahms or other reviewer/readers that I trust. And this says nothing of the Dzanc Books list that I know is forthcoming and is amazing. It should be a great year ahead for reading.

I'm sorry but I will NOT be re-typing that title again. This story was first published in Yankee Pot Roast in May of 2006, nearly a decade ago, yet it was the very FIRST thing I thought of earlier today on my drive home from work when I heard a little Paul Stanley patter on the radio.

Dave Housley writes about pop culture better than anybody I've read, and does so in what is both a satirical AND an admiring manner all at the same time. Seemingly impossible but while Dave realizes what needs to be skewered, he can't help but hold it in a soft spot close to his heart. I only wish I could skewer these things Dave writes about nearly as well as he does. In all honesty, it frightens me that no matter what he writes about, I know exactly why it needs to be skewered, but also semi-revered, as, like Dave, I seem to watch way too much tv, listen to way too much music, see or read about way too many movies, etc.

Born in 1966, I was between 8 and 13 when KISS was in their heyday. I don't think many of us boys that age escaped having some fondness for the band. I've never lost that fondness, no matter how snooty I've ever gotten about music (and that's been pretty snooty at times). I've probably listened to those first two KISS Alive albums more times than I'd truly care to know--the sort of listening that I know every guitar note in solos, know where a drum beat has been missed, etc. And as much as Ace Frehley's solos were what originally pulled me in, Paul Stanley's banter in between songs is simply amazing. Excited, bombastic, drawing the crowd to a frenzy and saying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Housley absolutely nails the pacing, the tone, and the excitement in these Stanley parodies. He simply sneaks in some Shakespeare into each lead in, matching plays with individual KISS songs in a sneaky way.

Assembly Center
Tulsa, Oklahoma, January 26, 1977

Paul: Yeah! You all are crazy, Tulsa! I think … I think … I think Tulsa might be the craziest place we played ON THIS TOUR. That’s right, Tulsa! You know what gets me crazy, Tulsa? You wanna knooooooooow what gets me CRAAAAA-AAAAA-AAAA-ZEEEEEE? I get craaaaazeeee when I see them young girls, Tulsa. I see ’em walkin’ down the street so young and clean and I just can’t help myself, people! Remind me of another young boy couldn’t help himself when he saw them young girls. And I ain’t talkin’ about just anybody Tulsa! I ain’t talking about you … or me … or Peter or Ace or even Gene, people! I’m talking bout a man named Romeo, Tulsa! ROOOOO-MEEEEEEE-OOOOOOH! My man Romeo he loved them young girls, Tulsa, oh YEAH, he loved ’em! And this one girl he loved her special. You know who I’m talkin’ about … shout it out Tulsa … tell me Romeo and …
Audience: JULIET!
Paul: What you say Tulsa? I can’t HEEAAAR YOU.
Audience: JULIET!
Paul: That’s right, Tulsa. This song is about a Juliet all my own, a little girl named … CHRISTINE SIXTEEN!

There is NOTHING off about this. The mentioning of women or young girls from the city the concert is in...the ridiculously drawn out words...the back and forth with the crowd...and especially the rising sounds leading to his booming out the upcoming song. This time just with a little Romeo and Juliet references fitting perfectly within.

The thing that kills me reading Housley's works are how effortless he makes it seem. Reading this story had me hearing Paul Stanley's voice--just nothing out of place at all. The only way something can read this effortless to me, well, I can't imagine just how much work Housley put into it. Nearly a decade since I first read this story and it came to my mind in a heartbeat this afternoon. That doesn't happen all that often.

Both the best, and hardest, aspect of selecting a story from Amber Sparks' new collection, the unfinished world (Liveright/Norton, January 2016), was just that--trying to decide on which story to have as the Work of the Day. What it actually led to was me reading a good 60% of the book. I can't really say that "The Process of Human Decay" is my favorite--each time I started a new one, or accidentally re-started one I'd read, it immediately became my favorite (sometimes, again).

If nothing else was involved but the table of contents, the choice would be difficult--Sparks has some of the best short story titles around:

The Janitor in Space

The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies

The Cemetery for Lost Faces

Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World

Birds with Teeth

and they continue. Rare is the title that doesn't cause you to think you'd really want to find out what happens.

So, I ended up picking "The Process of Human Decay" because I've read it three times now, and it was the last story I was reading when I decided it was time to start this post. It's EXCELLENT!

The story is brought into four sections: Fresh; Bloat; Delayed Decay; and Dry Remains

Each of the sections has one or two paragraphs. They follow the death and stages afterward and Sparks does not spare any details. It gets right to it:

Something is wrong. Your heart, it seems, has become a fish. It leaps, flutters, flops sideways a few times, then stops. You fall down.

One thing I found Sparks doing very well in this story was ending each section with a killer sentence--one that really helped lead to the next section:

1. An army of blowflies is already on the way.
2. There is a reason several wives have left you to die--and finally you have.
3. Here come the worms.
4. You always were better with plants than with people.

Actually there really isn't much that Sparks does NOT do well in this, or any of the stories in this collection that I've read so far. Great titles, great ideas, those ideas investigated and expounded upon. Great sentences, great transitions, and great endings. Nope, very very little that isn't done well in this collection (by "very very little" I believe I really mean "nothing") including this fantastic dedication:

For Isadora

May you grow into every hero, defeat every villain, and

show kindness to every misunderstood monster

Buy this book. Read this story and the many others within its covers.

I'm actually going to simply give you the opening paragraph here:

I first met Ray up in the mountains at the I-40 rest stop, where I used to cruise sometimes. I found him leaning against a wall, albino-pale, with these watery fish eyes. We messed around in a stall for a bit, and then he said meet him at the red truck by the ravine.

And then the final sentence:

"So long as we find a dry bag of crystal," I said, because--here's how sober I was--I could feel high tide in my veins, srging toward the moon, cresting like it must have done every day of my life.

In between is one manic story where our protagonist continues seeing Ray, then doesn't see him for some time, then stumbles back into him and many others, mostly pretty sketchy. The crystal mentioned in the last sentence fuels both the characters and the pace of the story as there are times that the time jumps two or three months in a single sentence.

This story comes from the third of John McManus' collections (along with a great novel, Bitter Milk), Fox Tooth Heart (Sarabande, 2015), and the few stories I've read so far take that excellent starting point of those prior collections and raises up the level of the stories a bit--deeper characterization, crazier situations, even slightly more interesting writing itself. Look for this collection!

Please be kind in your reading of this post--it's the first Work of the Day that is poetry and no matter how much poetry I read and try to discuss, I still don't feel overly comfortable in doing so. The poem, "Clorox," can be found in Nickole Brown's wonderful collection, Fanny Says (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2015).

Fanny would be Nickole's grandmother and this collection of poems, prose and otherwise, is Fanny's life story, frequently in her own words. It's a fantastic tribute to her grandmother and a collection I highly recommend. "Clorox" is a poem in five parts, with each beginning with a description of the word. The first section begins:

A noun,

            as in a commercial disinfecting agent,

but also a verb,

            an action to make the water grow

            teeth--tiny, crystalline, color-eating teeth--

The second section begins:

A noun,

            but also a verb,

            as in to clorox:

to clorox that carny tub and toilet,

to clorox the chicken-grease backsplash and hand-smudge light switch,

as in to clorox the cup

            Donosan drank from

            when he visited

Other sections begin by describing it as a smell, and as a chemical agent designed to eliminate color, and a formula, genius in design as it is designed to poison, and then disappear nearly immediately.

What Brown does is follow these openings with little anecdotes about Fanny cloroxing the shit out of somebody's clothes, or about her Baptism, or having many white things in her home with no fear to hide behind darker colored objects. The anecdotes align with the opening with a nice subtlety and she ends the poem with a powerful blow to the reader's gut. I have to be honest, I read many of the poems in this book again looking for a nice, "easy," prose poem to post a sentence or two from as an example of Brown's great writing, but kept coming back to "Clorox" to read and re-read five or six times. While many of the prose poems hit on an aspect of Fanny's life, "Clorox" hits on more than a few (including a reminder or two that not all was pretty about Fanny or her life) and does so while fitting very nicely into the collection as a whole.

"Love cracked across Pete Wender two days after his forty-seventh birthday, when the medical center where he worked as a technician held its June picnic, an event Pete liked for its ruthless, middle-aged softball and numberless margaritas." This is the wonderful opening sentence of Erin McGraw's "The Imaging Center," or One Story issue 170.

McGraw is a favorite writer of mine in both story and novel form (her, The Baby Tree, is one of those answers I routinely give for the old Desert Island question), and I think this story fits for many of the reasons I'd say that is the case:

--great dialogue. McGraw tends to create some pretty intelligent characters in her work and this tends to come to light in the snappy, sometimes even cruelly humorous, dialogue.

--interesting premises. In this case, middle-aged attraction and how it can affect previous standing relationships.

--different settings. This story is mainly set in Pete's workplace, an imaging center where MRI's and X-Rays are taken and while looked at by the technicians, still sent out to Doctors for actual readings.

"The Imaging Center" is full of little threads that pop in and out throughout, bringing little smiles of recognition to this reader--both within the story and from life itself. Again, if you see Erin's name on a cover or within a Table of Contents, snag whatever it is you're looking at and give it a read.

Any time I hear that there is new work from Dawn Raffel, I try my best to track it down asap. She's got an essay in the new issue of More. Dreams from My Mother: Following in Mom's Footsteps can also be read online.

It seems to me that much of Raffel's fiction starts with family memories and with this in mind, an essay that begins:

Cleaning out my mother’s house after her death, I discovered a cache of her delicate Ferragamo and Saks-label shoes from the 1960s. They ranged in color from baby’s breath to midnight, and they were nested in their original boxes, some still in tissue. They also lived right at the edge of my memory.

seems to fit in nicely with her fiction. That paragraph also is a perfect introduction to the essay. It allows the knowledge of the mother's passing. It gives some insight into her as a person with her meticulous collection of shoes and how well cared for they were. And those shoes bring back the author's memories.

The essay goes into memories of how her mother dressed, and comported herself and how the author saw how others saw her mother. She explains how she dressed very differently from her mother--able to admit now, years later, that she most likely knew she couldn't compete with her.  Finding the numerous boxes of shoes--the one thing the two shared was a similar shoe size--allowed her to truly walk in her mother's footsteps.

In typical Raffel style, not an extra word, or even syllable, is used in this essay. The language is as precise as possible. And it all leads to a very sweet last paragraph and sentence. It's a good read simply on an interesting level, but also one for a great way to construct an essay.

Some re-inspiration for the EWN thanks to a) David Abrams noting that he tried to stop blogging last year but couldn't, and b) Michael Czyzniejewski's new blog dedicated to a story a day.

So, beyond showing photos of what books I've bought or received, I'm going to try to get back to actually reading something every single day (it's been a long time since that has happened--too long), and maybe try to get back to shining some light on books, authors, stories, poems, essays, and journals that I really enjoy.

I do not believe I've read any of Courtney Sender's earlier publications but I will now be looking for them. Her short, Prophetess, is in the new issue of Diagram (15.6--one of my favorite online journals in general). Prophetess is only four short paragraphs but is quite a powerful little piece of writing. It's hard for me to decide on a single line or two to share so I'm going to snip the entire first paragraph here:

The boy I love has put a child inside me, which died inside me last night. He doesn't know the child is dead. He felt the pit of my stomach grow hard as an unripe mango, but he thought I was hungry. He tried to feed me soft mashed peaches. I refused.

The impersonal aspect of "The boy I love..." hit me right away. No name. And with that bit of impersonal writing, followed by "has put a child inside me" had me thinking it might be a bad thing. To have that followed by ", which died inside me last night" had me completely in my head. One not so overly simple sentence, but really just sixteen words and I already had three or four ways I thought I could read the story.

So Sender had me intrigued right away and then her writing, her descriptions, kept me really interested. The unripe mango contrasted a sentence later with mashed peaches for instance. From that "I refused" forward the story continues to intrigue and the language stays impersonal but extremely strong. As I said, these four short paragraphs have put Sender on my radar for sure as a writer to track down earlier works of and to keep an eye out in Table of Contents in the future.

Book Review 2015-002

Benchere in Wonderland by Steven Gillis

Copy via MS Word from Steve (wherein I disclose that I obviously know Steve)

This is the fifth novel of Steve's that I've read and the seventh book overall. It's the best of his that I've read, which is saying quite a bit, especially after the last trio of Temporary People, The Consequence of Skating, and The Law of Strings.

Benchere in Wonderland seems to "simply" ask What is Art? and What is Art's role in the world? I think it goes beyond that though and pushes the reader to think about what it means to be human--what it means to think, to act, to love, to grieve, to admire.

The Benchere in question is Michael Benchere--world renowned architect, and sculpture. I don't want to spoil anything for any readers of this wonderful novel and will simply say that Benchere ends up deciding to build a huge sculpture in the Kalahari Desert in Africa and while he simply wants/hopes to do it for the sake of the sculpture, it turns into much more--a media event, a place for people to converge, to make their own comments about art and about politics and love and ...

And Gillis has infused this novel with plenty of humor and entertainment. It's a novel that will entertain you greatly while causing you to think.

5 stars

So, I've explained, probably more on Facebook than here at the blog, why now when I"m purchasing books, be it at a store, a used store, online, or even from quickly set up booths on a street, or when I'm requesting a review copy from a publisher, that I will not buy or ask for more male authored books than I will female authored books.

It comes down to the fact that I know that more books are being reviewed and touted that are penned by males than are so when penned by females. I know that if I look at the list of titles that I'm looking forward to based on past interactions with the author's work(s), that it has a male-penned slant to it for those very same reasons--for the 20-30 years I've been a heavy reader, I had greater opportunities to find out about books written by men.

Based on recent events, I think I'm going to have to change my policy. Well, at least in the cases of purchasing books--I don't think I'd feel right in changing this policy when it comes to requesting galleys or review copies as on a regular basis, the best PR that publisher/author/book gets out of me is a mention that I received the book here and on FB and Twitter--I don't find the time to review every one of them, no matter how much I'd love to.

But, I do believe that the new policy when buying is going to have to change to that I purchase at least one MORE title penned by a female than those penned by males. And the thing is, this policy doesn't hurt male writers; I'm still going to buy works written by men that I've enjoyed books by in the past, or have heard great things about. I'm just going to have to continue developing a better library of female authored titles. Which isn't going to hurt me at all either as since I've begun this policy I've done nothing but find wonderful novels and stories to read. So this upgrade to the policy is one I look forward to.

Recent developments you may inquire? This has happened two times in a row now but I'll only go through the details of this last incident. When you purchase books at a Barnes & Noble, they give you a little attachment to your receipt headed with "YOU MAY ALSO LIKE..."

The titles I purchased were:

Barbara the Slut, a debut short story collection by Laura Holmes

Make Your Home Among Strangers, the debut novel and 2nd title from Jennine Capo Crucet

Gangsterland, Tod Goldberg's best-selling novel, fairly deep into his career now (not at all to imply he's nearing the end, just that this is more than his first or second title published)

The titles recommended to me:

There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme, a novel, one of at least a few by Barthelme (now this one does have Goldberg's Gangsterland pop up on the Amazon page for it as "one other people purchased."

In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume, a novel that only has the fact that it was authored by a woman as a similarity with any of the above.

Redeployment by Phil Klay, which is a wonderful short story collection and so has that in common with the Holmes titles I guess.

Perfidia by James Ellroy, which I suppose has L.A. in connection with Goldberg's novel.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon.

So, I buy three titles, two by women, and am suggested to run back in and purchase five titles, four of them by men with not much tying them together to make me understand WHY I'd like those particular titles. They didn't think to suggest Mia Alvarez's collection, or Rebecca Makkai's--both of which, like Holmes', are debut AND STILL ON THEIR NEW TITLE SHELVES? Maybe Patricia Engel's It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, also a debut novel published after a very well received debut story collection? Or dozens and dozens of other titles that are undoubtedly more like what I purchased than the five they suggested? And this is not meant as a sleight to any of that quintet suggested. It just seems to one more means of having books by men suggested more frequently than those by women.

Hence, the upgrade to my policy.

At around the 2:45 mark of the video of Norm MacDonald roasting Bob Saget, he tells a ridiculous joke about Saget looking "like a flower...yeah, a cauliflower" and he then repeats and somewhat explains the joke. Not a stand-up comedian, it is my determination that MacDonald does this repetition/explanation to hammer home just how absurd this joke (and the others in this fantastic routine) was. In other words, he HAD A REASON to do so.

Maybe my biggest recent pet peeve in reading is when an author does NOT trust their own writing, or apparently believe that their reading audience is of a junior high school level or below. After writing a beautiful passage, with a nice subtle point to it, they'll follow that passage and period up with the explanation. WHY??? Why not trust that you've made the point with your writing? Why not believe that the person reading your work has the ability to piece together what you've sewn?

I'll show no example of this as it would be incredibly rude, but I think it's something younger writers especially should pay attention to--TRUST YOUR WRITING//TRUST YOUR READERS--it will make your work stronger.

Reading the short story "Missionaries" by Jeremiah Chamberlin (truly a great story, very hard to believe the Author Notes that it was his first nationally published story) in the Winter 2007 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, the first page alone had me realizing there are different means of offering information to your reader and Chamberlin had used a couple quite well already.

There's the simple idea of what is currently going on given to us by the narrator's thoughts:

"I'm pumping the gas. My brother-in-law, Chris, is washing the windshield."

There's information from the past given, again, through the thoughts of the narrator:

"Chris was born again in high school, though he isn't any more."

There's observation of what others are doing and possibly thinking, again, through the thoughts of the narrator:

"Then she turns to her blonde friend and they laugh, as if we'd taken some kind of bait."

And there's also via dialogue, which can also be used to give some information from the past, though more in the line of the action, as opposed to from somebody's recollection:

"'Holy shit,' he says. '1979 Pontiac Phoenix. This was my first ride.'" (from Chris).

Each of these, and there are others, just not from the first page of this short story, have their reasons for being used. The current through the narrator's thoughts is a simple and easy way to catch the reader up to what is going on and get the story started. Some of that information from the past can be filled in through the current action (Chris pointing out the girls are driving in the same model as his original car) and other material from the past, if it's necessary for the reader to know, might need to be dropped in through the narrator's thoughts if there's no clean way of doing so in the current action. It seems most frequently this type of information will be useful as a bit of foreshadowing that maybe could have been slipped in through current action later in the work, but then it might seem almost too conveniently brought up.

I think Chamberlin has made great choices with all of these examples and again, hope to see this story in a full collection in the future if this, again, his FIRST, is any indication of what other stories he's written might be like.

One thing I've learned the last decade or so as a reader--make sure to have at least two things to read at all times when leaving the house and it's not a horrible idea to have something that you have been holding off starting sitting in the back seat of your car to boot.

The vast majority of the time I'm out and about, I don't care at all if I get to where I'm headed and there's a big line--that's reading time. Go out for a walk--reading time (be careful though). Even the dreaded traffic jam--while I'm usually a little more upset as I'll most likely be late to where I'm going, it's still reading time.

However, make SURE you have at least two things to read. A couple of books, a book and your eReader, at least a couple of new choices on the eReader, a journal or two. ONE TIME is all it took--maybe 7 or 8 years ago I only took one book with me to the  bank. It was a Friday after work and there were probably 60 people in line ahead of me. I finished what I had been toting around with a good 20 people still ahead of me. I'm all for re-reading great stuff, but rarely do I start up the second I finish. Since then, at least two things with me every time I go out.

Today I was toting around a couple of story collections I probably should have been toting around at least a few years ago:  May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks (Curbside Splendor) and Other Heartbreaks by Patricia Henley (Engine Books)--two great writers representing two fantastic publishers.

You want your manuscript, your novel, your short story, your poem, or your essay to have a great opening line--I'm sure you've heard that before. There are numerous lists and FB posts about great first lines--lines that grab the reader and say YES YOU WANT TO READ ME. Well, picking up a fantastic short story collection earlier today, Shannon Cain's Drue Heinz Prize winning The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), reminded me of just how important second lines are as well. I can promise you there have been novels and stories that absolutely sucked me in with grand slam opening lines that saw me quit reading when the promise of that start was horribly deflated by a second line so uninspired, so uninteresting, that it made me feel the author has played a trick on me with their opening line. They knew they'd written something so fantastic that anybody that looked at it would certainly keep reading--they had you and apparently figured that was all they needed to do.

To me, if the promise of that first sentence/line isn't followed at least pretty closely by the second, I start to have great fear that maybe the author only had one great sentence in them. That what I was about to spend what I consider precious time invested in the reading of, was simply not going to be able to be justified. However, when that second sentence is just as promising, if not even a little moreso, than the first--well, then I'm much more confident that I'm spending my time wisely.

In the story "The Steam Room," Cain starts the story with a pretty simple, yet informative, sentence:

"Helen was unhappily married to the mayor of their midsized American city."

It's not a wowser, but it's clean, it's informative and I'd keep reading. However, the second sentence:

"Sometimes she masturbated in the steam room of the downtown YMCA."

I'm in and not even necessarily for the perv factor so much as for the fact that I'm pretty sure at this point that Cain has created a very interesting character--one with a bit of darkness and something going on in her head. I want to read more.

Later in the collection, in "The Queer Zoo," Cain starts with:

"There's no actual policy at the Queer Zoo against hiring straight people: that would be illegal."

A sentence I would say that pulled me in a bit stronger than the opener of "The Steam Room." However, again, it's the following this up with another strong sentence that has me believing enough in the author to want to devote more time to the work, in this case:

"Sam is alert to rumors about the existence of other hetero employees, but so far none have turned out to be true."

It's a pattern for Cain in this very fine collection (more on that with a review soon) as really only one of the second sentences isn't pretty great even standing alone--and the one that isn't is exactly what it needed to be to move the story forward, which is exactly what I want each sentence I read to do.

In an earlier post I noted the following: "...--as a publisher, as a reader, search for what Jynne Dilling Martin referred to in a conversation with Roxane as "urgent, unheard stories." Between the end cap essays and this one in particular, it's got me thinking about my own reading habits and how they've changed since 2000 and the inception of the EWN--these essays have me thinking that those changes have been in the right direction, just maybe not fast and harsh enough."

Elsewhere, I have expounded a bit on my still fairly recent (2nd half of 2014 or so) book purchasing policy--no matter what the situation, be it in a new store, a used store, an online store, or requesting review copies from a publicist, I will make sure that there are at least as many female authored titles in my hand, cart, or email request as there are male authored titles.

The thought process behind this certainly kicked in after some VIDA sponsored numbers and reports started to come out. As one who had named his blog the Emerging Writers Network, I had obviously geared my reading since 2000 toward newer writers, or "mid-list" writers that I still felt were under-recognized and under-read. A lot of the authors I read in that first decade plus as a blogger, reviewer, etc. had me relying on other bloggers, on publicists, on literary journals, and reviews in order to "discover" these writers. And then, as I began to read much more than I had been the previous five to ten years, I began developing certain tastes, but also began to recognize names much more. I loved Brady Udall's first novel so of course I was going to buy his second novel. I loved the story collection of Anthony Doerr so it was only sensible I'd buy his novel, his memoir, his next novel. And what I slowly came to realize was that while yes, I tried to "even things out" in my own reading numbers, but MY OWN READING HISTORY was going to skew future numbers if I didn't consciously make an effort to dissuade that fact.

There were many more male authors whose "next book" would be a book I'd head into the store to purchase than those of female authors, simply because I'd read more of their "last books." The only way I could think to counter that was the buy one, at least buy one scenario detailed above. Heading into the store KNOWING I'd be picking up the new Benjamin Percy and TC Boyle novels meant that I'd need to search for two books penned by females.

A side project this spring as well as a personal issue has led to not a ton of reading for personal pleasure so far this calendar year, but at the halfway point of the year (yes, this post is a couple of weeks late) I had only reviewed three titles in more than simple posts showing their covers online somewhere---two by women (Trudy Lewis' The Empire Rolls, and Roxane Gay's Urgent, Unheard Stories) and one by Matt Bell (Baldur's Gate II). At the halfway point I had mentioned 90 different titles via Facebook--books I'd purchased, that I'd received in the mail, that I had downloaded to my kindle. 45 were by women and 45 were by men. There were most likely more titles, percentage-wise, by writers of color, and/or having been translated to English, than in past years as well. And while I haven't read many things I've purchased or received this year in full, I can say that there isn't a title I've bought that I haven't dipped into at least a page, or story, or chapter, and I cannot wait to get past this last little hump of non-personal reading time and to dig into all of these. The dips into titles by women whose books I'd never heard of but stumbled upon because I "had" to make sure I was leaving the store with a female penned title have been wonderful---exciting, wide-ranging, different--and I'm extremely happy that I made this "purchasing/requesting policy" change this last year. It's not a policy that has hurt anybody--I'm still buying the books that I would have bought (or asked for) before...I've just added a bunch of other urgent, and unheard, stories to my pile to enjoy.

Book Review: 2015-001 Urgent, Unheard Stories by Roxane Gay (Harper Perennial)

This review copy was purchased at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, MI

It seems odd to note that it's book review number 1 on June 28, but with the site pretty much being dormant for over a year, such is the case. I'm glad this is the first book though to get the treatment this year. While Roxane Gay is pretty well known, I'd suggest she is still an Emerging Writer. This title is a Limited Edition Autographed Copy, which is the type of thing we've always liked around the EWN. And it's really a great little (64 pages plus with no ruler in hand, I'd guess maybe 4.5 x 7") book with 5 essays and 2 interviews within. It's great because it's both well written AND it is a book that causes some thinking; I'd like to think especially so for a voracious reader.

It is set up very well too, with the end pieces both explaining something of Roxane's career to date as a published author in two very different ways. The interviews fit in nicely with a large part of what Roxane seems to want to say and the title essay, second to last piece in the book, really hammers home what I believe is the point of the book--as a publisher, as a reader, search for what Jynne Dilling Martin referred to in a conversation with Roxane as "urgent, unheard stories." Between the end cap essays and this one in particular, it's got me thinking about my own reading habits and how they've changed since 2000 and the inception of the EWN--these essays have me thinking that those changes have been in the right direction, just maybe not fast and harsh enough.

The first essay, "Two Damn Books: How I Got Here and Where I Want to Go," describes aspects of the publishing industry itself through Roxane's experiences publishing her first two books. One is with a smaller, independent publisher and the other with a much larger house. Working with both she notices their structure, who else they're publishing, who they have working for them--where there is diversity and where there isn't and how much more climbing still needs to be done. The last essay, "The Books That Made Me Who I Am: I Am the Product of Endless Books," goes through some of the books that have influenced Roxane as a writer. As she notes in the essay "A list could not contain me." While she's able to come up with many titles that had an effect on her, she's well aware that there are dozens, or probably hundreds, of others that did so as well. I love that she includes children's books on her list--something I don't think many other writers have been brave enough to do when asked to make up their own list.

Beyond giving her readers something to think about in regards to who and what they are reading and why, Roxane's essays and interviews also generously gives her readers dozens of authors and titles to read as suggestions. While I've enjoyed many of the authors or books named in these essays, there are many others that I'm now looking forward to--including more of Roxane's work.

4.5 stars