Millions contributor Edan won second prize in StoryQuarterly’s Fall 2007 fiction contest for “Animals.” Congrats Edan! The story is now up on the site. You have to register (for free) to read the whole thing.
Appearing Elsewhere
New books: Clark, Cusk, Dermansky
As the Amazon review says, “it takes a world of confidence to name your debut novel The Great Stink,” but that’s just what Clare Clark did. Clark’s novel is set in the sewers of Victorian England as it follows the lives of William May, who has been hired to overhaul the decrepit system, and Long Arm Tom, who makes his living scavenging in the filth. According to a recent New York Times review, Clark is quite explicit in her descriptions of the vile sewer, but “Clark’s triumph is that she makes us see and smell everything we politely pretend not to, and she even manages to give the miasma its own kind of beauty.” The book has been shortlisted for the British Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for first time authors. You can read an excerpt here.Rachel Cusk’s Booker longlister In the Fold comes out in a few days. Despite the Booker nod, reviews have been mixed. Says Louise France the Guardian: “Cusk has a knack for scene-setting and handles certain setpieces with an unflinching eye for anything pretentious or fake; but throughout the novel, tediously little happens,” a sentiment echoed in the Independent: “at the novel’s heart there’s not very much going on.” An excerpt is available for those who’d like to see for themselves.The Village Voice compares the twin protagonists of Marcy Dermansky’s Twins to those of the Sweet Valley High books, but Dermansky’s twins “have acquired a fearsome host of modern ills: pill habits, self-injury, bulimia, a penchant for juggling.” Twins is getting good reviews on lots of blogs, as well, including at Collected Miscellany where Kevin describes it as “oddly compelling.” And Dermansky herself recently recommended a book at Moorish Girl. If you want to know more, Dermansky’s got her own Web site, and an excerpt of the book is available as well.
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A New Book, and a Book So New It Won’t be out for Months
I’m hearing from reliable sources that Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal is a wild thriller with an ending that is not to be believed. It takes place at the India / Pakistan border in the disputed region of Kahmir, so it also includes a good dose of the wider world for folks who are into that sort of thing. Also, Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, stopped in today and as he was signing his book, he mentioned that he will spend the next few months writing his sophomore effort in Italy. It is tentatively titled Absurdistan. Sounds interesting…. First took notice of Shteyngart in the New Yorker (he has contributed fiction and essays), and his book was very well recieved. He also has a great author photo, which I unfortunately can’t find on the web anywhere.
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A reading journal continued (Part 1)
[Ed. Note: Emre is back with another multi-part reading journal. Here’s the first installment. Enjoy.]Hello everyone, it has been a long time since I sent a post, but I go in spurts, so here it is. When I last left off, I had just finished reading Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, after which I was thirsty for a piece of non-fiction. What better, then, to turn to Ryzsard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War, which I had knowingly put off in an effort to not finish all his works at once. Upon reading The Soccer War, I understood better why Cem Ozturk, ambassador to Japan, refused to lend me his copy. The Soccer War is Kapuscinski’s most romantic work, especially with regards to the unbelievable stories he narrates and the naked truth and language with which it is related to the reader. The straightforward and brief history of the actual Soccer War is so interesting that I ended up going online and researching the event further out of sheer curiosity. Despite the title, Kapuscinski’s main focus is, again, Africa, but he also touches on life in Poland and there is a brief chapter on Cyprus after the Turkish invasion. The stories are, as usual, very humane and Kapuscinski’s tone and approach to his subjects is awe inspiring. I got the usual urge to go forth with the rest of Kapuscinski’s works, but am – probably for the last time – putting that urge aside for later pleasures.Next I turned to Karen Heuler’s Journey to Bom Goody. Forbes, the main character, is an ordinary man living in peace and harmony until one day he loses his family. As a result, he takes on a project long contemplated but never dared. When the reader meets Forbes, he is already in Latin America, traveling up the Amazon River to perform his tests. Forbes, however, is an aspiring scientist who lacks the training, and therefore makes rather ignorant and arrogant moves in the name of bold experimenting. Switching to a guide, Ping, who believes to be the love child of his mother and a dolphin and does not speak a word of English, is the first big move Forbes makes. Along the way, Forbes loses his guide and meets a white woman, supposedly doing medicinal research. While the Tina abhors the chummy, helpless white man, Forbes is both loving, and contemptuous of Tina for being comfortable and fluent in such foreign lands. One day, Forbes realizes that his experiments have long been out of control and starts observing the outcomes which weave together him, Tina, local tribes, Ping and the Amazons. Journey to Bom Goody takes a rather trite idea (what if Latin American natives examined us, instead of the opposite) and creates an interesting story around it. The novel is a mix of ordinary characters in unusual circumstances, usual ego wars in unlikely settings, and fresh viewpoints of the society that we live in.See also: Part 2, 3, 4
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New book previews: Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Christian Bauman, T.C. Boyle, Jill Ciment
The Prophet of Zongo Street is the debut collection by the Ghanian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali. The collection of ten stories has garnered a number of high-profile reviews, including in the NY Times, the SF Chronicle and the LA Times, in which Merle Rubin wrote, “Although many in these stories are misled by philosophies, faiths and ideas that promise to provide all the answers, Ali shows time after time how ordinary human kindness is the one quality capable of redeeming it all.” You can read an excerpt from the book here, and Ali’s story “Mallam Sile” was in the New Yorker a few months back.Christian Bauman’s new novel features a prominent blurb on the front cover from Robert Stone – a good sign if you put stock in such things. Bauman’s first novel, The Ice Beneath You, was “a war story for the new millennium,” according to PW, about the US effort in Somalia. Bauman’s new book, Voodoo Lounge takes on similar themes, set this time in Haiti. From the review in Booklist: “The term ‘voodoo lounge’ refers to the machine-gun nest on the port bow of a ship. Reading this startling novel is the literary equivalent of standing watch on that perch.” Bauman’s Web site is here. The book comes out around Sept. 1.T.C. Boyle, an old favorite of mine, has a new collection of stories coming out shortly called Tooth and Claw. All of these stories have been previously published in various periodicals, including several in the New Yorker – here, for example, is the collection’s title story. Boyle also has an excerpt up at his Web site. And, by the way, if you are a fan of Boyle at all and haven’t visited his site, I suggest you check it out. It features a very active message board that includes frequent appearances from the author himself.John Irving isn’t the only one who’s written a novel about tattoos lately. Jill Ciment’s latest, The Tattoo Artist, is about an artist couple – Sara and Philip, enmeshed in Manhattan’s avant garde scene in the 1920s, who travel to the South Pacific in search of inspiration. Once there, they are forcibly tattooed by the natives and then trapped by WWII – a castaway story. The book has recently been reviewed in the NY Times and somewhat more favorably in the SF Chronicle.
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New Books: Ben Ehrenreich, Jeffrey Ford, Kate Grenville
The Suitors, a debut novel by Ben Ehrenreich, draws from Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The story is another rewrite of those famous epics – there are so many, but then again it’s a fertile place to start – set, as PW puts it, “in a never-never land equal parts contemporary America and classical antiquity.” Ehrenreich is best-known as a widely published journalist whose work regularly appears in the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and The Believer. Ehrenreich is the son of participatory journalist, Barbara, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, in which she tried to get by on minimum wage.Jeffrey Ford’s excellent novel The Girl in the Glass is currently being discussed in exhaustive detail at the Litblog Co-op blog, but he’s got a new book out, too. The Empire of Ice Cream is a collection of stories. Ford, as I recently had the pleasure of discovering, is like very few others writing today. Though he might be labeled as a writer of “speculative fiction,” his work doesn’t really need a label at all, as it is sure to be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good story told well. To see what I mean, check out a few stories from The Empire of Ice Cream: “The Annals of Eelin-Ok,” “The Empire of Ice Cream,” and “A Man of Light.”Kate Grenville’s novel, The Secret River, has already won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been shortlisted for the Miles Frankin Prize awarded to the year’s best Australian novel. The Secret River is a historical novel about the convict settlement of Australia and follows the story of a particular convict named William Thornhill. The Guardian writes: “There isn’t much underlying moral ambiguity in this book: the costs of settlement are appalling, which makes Thornhill its villain, even while he carries its sympathetic weight.” Grenville previously won the Orange Prize in 2001 for her novel The Idea of Perfection.
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Appearing Elsewhere: The Rooster Croweth
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be appearing as a judge in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. (Click through to see the other, far more distinguished, judges, as well) It’s exciting to be a part of what just might be my favorite ongoing series on the web. Stayed tuned for my second-round judgment once the Tournament kicks off in a few weeks.And by all means, get your bracket (pdf) now and start handicapping.
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