Ian Frazier’s first novel, “The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days”
Like her columns, Mommy’s yearlong daybook chronicles her hopes, dreams, and frustrations with some aspect of daily life usually causing her to flip out, curse, break things, or give people the finger.
Click the image below to read my review in the October 10, 2012, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can listen to Cynthia Nixon read from “The Cursing Mommy” on the clip below.
You can buy The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days at Barnes & Noble
Davy Rothbart Regales with Tales of Drinking and Heartbreak
I review Davy Rothbart’s My Heart is an Idiot
Rothbart, a short story writer and creator of Found magazine, is funny enough to keep you laughing, and he occasionally shares an especially sad moment. I really felt for Davy as he searched for his soul mate. And I hoped some of his adventures might work out. But sometimes I wanted to hit Davy upside his head and knock some sense into him.
Click the image below to read my review in the September 26, 2012, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can buy Rothbart’s My Heart Is An Idiot from Barnes & Noble
I Review David Abrams’s First Novel “Fobbit”
Like Joseph Heller’s classic book, David Abrams’ first novel is a satire that lampoons the stupidity, terror and futility of war. Rather than World War II Italy, however, “Fobbit” takes place in modern Iraq, with satire as scathing and funny as “Catch-22.”
Click the image below to read my St. Louis Post-Dispatch review of Fobbit.
You can buy Fobbit at Barnes & Noble.
I Review “The Scent of Scandal”
Pittman portrays Kovach, the Adventurer, Selby’s staff and others as backstabbers who out of greed, jealousy, fear or egotism take sides and turn against each other. Two of the principals even planned to do reality TV shows about orchids. There’s also courtroom drama and a mysterious death that may have been suicide, accident or murder. What more could you ask for?
Click the image below to read my review of The Scent of Scandal in the August 26 edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
You can buy The Scent of Scandal at Barnes & Noble.
Nicholson Baker’s “The Way the World Works”
The essays in “Life” are mini-meditations on Baker’s life. In the allegorical “String,” Baker recalls the joy and challenge of flying a kite as a child and always wanting more from the kite, for it to fly higher. Baker plugs his phone-sex novel “Vox,” (1992) in a tiny and droll reminiscence on his fascination for the telephone; in another piece he makes treasure hunting at the dump sound thrilling.
Click the image below to read my review of Baker’s The Way the World Works in the August 19 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can buy Nicholson Baker’s The Way the World Works at Barnes & Noble.
I Review “A Case For Solomon”
Authors Tal McThenia and Margaret Dunbar Cutright piece together their tale from sometimes-dubious newspaper stories, reporters’ and stenographers’ notes, family letters, and other surviving official documents. And they succeed in pulling together a fascinating narrative about an ostensible kidnapping and a 90-year case of mistaken identity, fully steeped in the flavor of the era. Theirs is a narrative about the fierceness of parental love, the flaws of the legal system, and ultimately about how we derive our own sense of who we are.
Click the image below to read my review of A Case for Solomon in the August 8, 2012, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can buy A Case For Solomon at Barnes & Noble
I Review Paul Bailey’s “Chapman’s Odyssey”
When he’s lucid, Harry, a so-so former actor turned accomplished novelist, recites T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare for the nurses and orderlies who tend him. But his periods of lucidity are ephemeral, and it’s clear that he is dying.
Click the image below to read my review of Paul Bailey’s Chapman’s Odyssey in the July 18, 2012 edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
You can buy Chapman’s Odyssey at Barnes and Noble.
I Review Patrick Somerville’s “This Bright River”
Somerville’s The Cradle (2009) was a fine first novel telling two touching stories of familial love. But This Bright River is stylistically superior to and more ambitious in its portrayal of family love, pain and redemption.
Click the image below to read my review of Somerville’s This Bright River in the July 1, 2012, edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can buy This Bright River at Barnes and Noble.
I Review Wiley Cash’s First Novel, “A Land More Kind Than Home”
After one of those healings years ago, an elderly woman died, but her death could never be directly connected to the church, since her body was dumped in her own garden. But now, Jess’s brother Christopher has died, and Jess may have been a witness. Adelaide, who is deeply mistrustful of Chambliss, has tried to protect the children from him following the woman’s death. She considers Chambliss “the face of evil.” Eventually, she finds herself part of Barefield’s investigation. Soon, accident, betrayal, and violence emerge in a remarkable tale that falters primarily because two of the narrators — Jess and Sheriff Barefield — prove less than credible as characters.
Click the image below to read my review in the May 5, 2012, edition of the Boston Globe.
The Best American Short Stories 2012
Here’s a partial list of authors whose stories will appear in The Best American Short Stories 2011, guest-edited by Tom Perrotta.
Let me know if you know of or are the author of an included story. I’ll be adding to the list as I discover more about stories that’ll be included.
Here’s the partial list:
Carol Anshaw, “The Last Speaker of the Language,” New Ohio Review
Taylor Antrim, “Pilgrim Life,” American Short Fiction
Roxane Gay, “North Country,” Hobart
Mike Meginnis, “Navigators,” Hobart
Lawrence Osborne, “Volcano” Tin House
Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew,” Orion Magazine
Eric Puchner, “Beautiful Monsters,” Tin House
Jess Walter, “Anything Helps,” McSweeney’s
Adam Wilson, “What’s Important Is Feeling,” The Paris Review
I Review “Arcadia,” by Lauren Groff”
Groff is a talented writer with a novel, the widely praised “The Monsters of Templeton,” and a book of short stories, “Delicate Edible Birds,” to her credit. From start to finish, “Arcadia” is poetically delivered through Bit’s eyes.
Bit is Ridley Sorrel Stone, an endearing, diminutive character nicknamed from the phrase “Our Littlest Bit of a Hippie.” Groff begins in 1968 with a two-page prologue of Bit’s earliest memories from the womb. This mystical recounting of Bit’s prenatal recollections becomes a legend among the hippies.
Click the image below to read my review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can buy Arcadia at Barnes and Noble.
Another 100,000 Galleys–On the State of Indie-Book Publishing
In The Los Angeles Review of Books, I talk with writers, Robert Bausch, Polly Frost, Nina Vida, Molly MacRae; newspaper book editors Laurie Hertzel, Ron Charles, Greg Cowles, and freelance book critics, reviewers, and more about the state of indie-publishing.
I look forward to reading your comments here on my blog or on the LARB site.
Editors, reviewers, and even many authors believe that if you self-publish, you’re branded a sinner of sorts. You wear a scarlet S-P, signifying that you can’t get published because your work is inferior. If you promote your own work on the Internet, you must sheepishly precede the phrase “self-promotion” with “shameless.” It’s difficult to quantify the extent of the stigma, but we all know that publishing your own work has been frowned upon by writers for decades. Recently, genre authors Amanda Hocking (who writes young adult vampire novels) and John Locke (pulp thrillers) have had so much success independently publishing and selling hundreds of thousands of their own books that you’d think the self-publishing wall would’ve been kicked down and lying in a crumbled mess by now. But the stigma attached to publishing, promoting, and selling your own written word persists. Most writers, like Susan Shapiro, who’s written for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and has conventionally published eight books, including comic novels and nonfiction though St. Martin’s Press and Delacorte, remain convinced that it’s better to get a mainstream publisher. Shapiro, who’s helped hundreds of her students get published, recently told me she would consider self-publishing, but only “if everybody else turned me down.”
Click the image below to read more in the March 17, 2012 edition ofThe Los Angeles Review of Books.
I Review Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “Birds Of A Lesser Paradise”
Megan Mayhew Bergman is a top-notch emerging writer. In this first book, “Birds of a Lesser Paradise,’’ a collection of a dozen stories, she portrays in fine realistic prose female characters balancing relationships with their fathers, mothers, and partners, as they fight their own foibles and insecurities. Her characters are strong, sensible, but vulnerable.
Bergman’s stories take place mostly in the South – on a prison farm, in the Carolina swamp, and on the road. (A North Carolina native, Bergman lives now in Vermont.) But no matter the locale or the humans involved, there’s always an animal of some sort – a dog, a bird, a cow, a wolf – that influences her characters’ lives.
Click the image below to read my review in the March 7, 2012, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can buy Birds of a Lesser Paradise at Barnes & Noble.
I Review “Mr g” By Alan Lightman
To hear Him tell it, He, Mr g, awakes one day from a long sleep in the Void, and, finding himself bored, decides to create the universe, actually myriad universes. He concentrates His efforts on one He especially likes and develops it on His own, despite interference from cranky old Aunt Penelope, who worries that He might really mess things up.
Click the image below to read my review in the January 26, 2012, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can buy Mr g at Barnes and Noble.
I Review “Smut” by Alan Bennett
In August, Nicholson Baker blurted out a new book, “House of Holes,’’ his adolescent-like narrative of the sexual escapades of several one-dimensional characters frolicking through an extended dirty joke that might’ve aptly been titled “Smut.’’
“Smut,’’ though, happens to be the new book by British writer Alan Bennett. If Baker’s sense of humor in “House’’ is unrestrained, and ahem, smutty, Bennett’s is subtle and often wry, full of clever word play, innuendo, and decidedly British. Oh, and there are naughty bits, too.
Click the image below to read my review in the December 28, 2011, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can buy Smut at Barnes and Noble.
I Review Paul Theroux’s “Murder In Mount Holly”
Paul Theroux’s publishers market his new book as a comic-mystery-thriller. It’s comic, but it’s not new and the only mystery is why the publisher doesn’t hawk it as satire.
Click the image below to read my review in December 25, 2011, edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
You can buy Murder In Mount Holly at Barnes & Noble.
I Review “Before the End, After the Beginning” by Dagoberto Gilb
“What is it I gotta do?’’ the Mexican asks the cop who suspects him of burglary but has no actual evidence. Several cops arrest him on the catch-all charge of disturbing the peace and resisting arrest, although it appears the cops are doing the most of the disturbing and all of the fighting. The unnamed Mexican narrator is not entirely blameless – he’s been fooling around with his married ex-girlfriend, and like many of the characters in these stories, has a checkered and shady past. “You were born,’’ the cop answers. “Until you die, the rest is on you.’’
Click the image below to read my review in the December 5, 2011, edition of the Boston Globe.
You can buy Before the End, After the Beginning at Barnes & Noble.
I Review Richard’s Burgin’s “Shadow Traffic”
Often, Burgin’s characters miss the meaning of all they’ve undergone, and they’re left with memories of regret and anguish. They’re obsessive, eccentric, sometimes sociopathic. Yet, from the smartest college man to the murderous drunk, from the drug dealer to the harmless but conflicted housebreaker, they’re mired in thought, “grappling with some of the painful riddles of the world.” They worry about money, they try to find love without much success and, of course, they worry about death.
Click the image below to read my October 9, 2011, review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can buy Richard Burgin’s Shadow Traffic at Barnes and Noble.
I Review Floyd Skloot’s “Cream of Kohlrabi”
The book includes stories about athletes and wannabe athletes, a three-story middle section peopled with a hodgepodge of characters, and a final group of stories about the elderly and the dying. Of these 16 stories, Skloot’s most successful combine pathos with humor, farce with terror. His most convincing characters suffer from some sort of physical illness: heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and other dementia that accompanies old age – Skloot himself is disabled by viral-borne brain damage.
Skloot’s best stories are about the elderly. They take place in retirement homes or under hospice care, where the characters face death sometimes with bravery and pragmatism, sometimes with delusion and optimism.
Click the image below to read my October 7, 2011, Boston Globe review.
You can buy Cream of Kohlrabi at Barnes & Noble.
I Review “Best American Short Stories 2011″
The 2010 and the 2008 collections of “Best American Short Stories’’ chosen, respectively, by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo and Salman Rushdie, delivered some of the truly best stories of this century. This year’s collection, picked by another Pulitzer Prize winner, Geraldine Brooks, fails to match the excellence of the two earlier volumes, though “BASS 2011’’ isn’t as weak as the 2009 Alice Sebold edition.
Click the image below for my October 6, 2011, review in the Boston Globe.
You can buy Best American Short Stories 2011 at Barnes & Noble.
