When I drove across Montana, the landscape lingered long after I crossed the border. Elegant and gritty; it is a country requiring hard work. Even with towering trees, and grass up to my knees, I was always aware that underneath all the growth was rock; the edges were softened only on the surface. I could never crack the crust.

Smith Henderson captures this hardness in his debut novel, Fourth of July Creek. His characters are as pitted and solid as the ground they walk, broken along fault lines difficult to map. Henderson plumbs human dysfunction, measuring not only what makes us fail, but how we succeed; what we overcome in order to accomplish seemingly mundane things.

The novel follows Pete, a social worker with troubles of his own—divorced, missing daughter, borderline alcoholism—and the families he tries to help. His job takes him to the edges of human experience, to what we are all capable of. Kindness and gentleness spring from surprising hosts; violence and hate roil under the surface of us all.

The cop flicked his cigarette to the dirt and gravel road in front of the house, and touched back his hat over his hairline as the social worker drove up in a dusty Toyota Corolla. Through the dirty window, he spotted some blond hair falling, and he hiked in his gut, hoping that the woman in there would be something to have a look at. Which is to say he did not expect what got out: a guy in his late twenties, maybe thirty, pulling on a denim coat against the cold morning air blowing down the mountain, ducking back in to the car for a moment, reemerging with paperwork. His brown corduroy pants faded out over his skinny ass, the knees too. He pulled that long hair behind his ears with his free hand and sauntered over.

Henderson captures the spirit of the West in Fourth of July Creek. A land uninhibited by its human residents, a spirit unbridled, an unbroken horizon that gives human struggles their proper scope. But under Henderson’s deft hand, a sensitivity to the human condition pulls to the surface. Hope does prevail; a small dose is often enough.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite novelists, is credited with a tidy 8-item list for would-be fiction writers. Number two is simply, ”Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.” Sounds reasonable enough. But then, in item six, writers are commanded to be “sadists” and “make awful things happen” to the character whom we readers are supposed to pull for.

Smith Henderson must have been paying attention to Vonnegut when working on his debut novel Fourth of July Creek. Set in rural Montana, the novel follows Pete Snow, a social worker who rescues children from abusive and dysfunctional families and accidentally stumbles across Benjamin Pearl, son of paranoid homesteader Jeremiah. We like Pete. He does good work, despite the fact that he himself is broken. He gets kids out of dangerous houses with drug-dealing parents. He slowly gains the trust of Jeremiah Pearl, whose paranoid delusions forced him and his family into the wilderness, eventually sharing much-needed medicine and food with them. Pete does this all while in the background, his personal life is falling apart: his brother is in trouble with the law; his crumbled marriage threatens his relationship with his daughter; the interactions with his dad are too complicated to summarize. These bad things boost Pete’s “good-guy” credibility with us.

But then, we don’t like him, too. He slugs a client in the stomach. He admits to alcoholism but does nothing to correct himself, and his drinking often flings him into violent blackouts. He’s a bit of a misogynist.

The complexity of the book’s main character is just one of the highlights, though. The rest of the cast is just as delightful in their varying degrees of dysfunction and likability. They are all quite real. My mom is a retired social worker and, while she never punched a client (to my knowledge) I can assure you that the crazy people Pete encounters do honestly exist in real life. All of these characters are presented to us through Henderson’s lively prose, which allows us to follow several sub-plots at once without getting confused.

It might sound like a bleak book, but it’s not. Without spoiling the plot, I can assure you that Fourth of July Creek is suffused with hope, stubborn and fleeting it may seem at times. Pick up a copy and see for yourself.

Smith Henderson will be at Lemuria signing Fourth of July Creek on Wednesday, July 16 at 5:00.

When we first read The Dog Stars in 2012, we were fired up for Heller’s unique style–sparse prose, wide landscapes, and characters that seem more comfortable in the natural world then they do in company. Here was a book for all of us itching to just get away for awhile.

Well, Peter Heller is BACK. And not only has he written another lovely novel, he’s coming back to Lemuria (and  as our FEC pick for May) June 10th at 5 PM.

We love first novels; it’s a chance for us to meet someone new, to go to a place nobody has written us into yet. Second novels are a bit trickier to pull off. Peter Heller has done a bang up job; The Painter is a bit of Dostoyevsky and a bit of Hemingway.

“I never imagined I would shoot a man. Or be a father. Or live so far from the sea.

As a child, you imagine your life sometimes, how it will be.”

And so we are off with a gunshot. Jim Stegner, the novel’s protagonist splits his time between Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico. He is a painter, but he is also a fly-fisherman. This division is Stegner’s strength and flaw–he paints in a fury as untamable as his temper and fishes with the patience of a monk.

We never do see the artwork Jim Stegner paints. Each chapter is headed with a placard of the work that makes an appearance in each chapter:

I’m pleased that we don’t see the paintings. Something would be stolen from us. Peter Heller works well with the negative space of the story–sometimes what isn’t shown is just as important as what is. Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Jim Stegner can’t help but give himself away when his inner turmoil works its way onto the canvas.

John Ashbery wrote a poem titled “The Painter.” I happened to read it while I was reading Peter Heller’s The Painter. The two share a similar spirit–the artist at odds with the world around him (and inside him):

by Kelly Pickerill

We are so excited to have two amazing authors coming to the store on March 27 at 5:00!

Lorrie Moore, winner of the O’Henry award and an old favorite of ours, will be here to read from and sign her new collection of short stories, Bark.

Joining her will be Susan Minot (also an O’Henry award winner!) for her new novel, Thirty Girls. Both of these talented women are old friends of the bookstore and we think so highly of their work that we have chosen these two books to be our February and March First Editions Club picks.

We want to make this event a real party, so if you chose any event to attend this season, let this be the one! Keep your eyes peeled for more posts and updates about the event, because I have a feeling it’s only going to get more exciting. We’d love for you to join us in a giant hangout session with these two amazing ladies. Mark it on your calendars!

Philipp Meyer’s most recent novel, The Son, is a multi-generational saga documents the breaking of the American West. The country is violent–Comanches take scalps, settlers murder their neighbors, Mexicans are pushed from their land, children are kidnapped; the land is washed in blood.

The novel follows three narrators–Colonel Eli McCullough, a character of mythological proportions, his more reserved son, and his great-granddaughter.

Meyers plumbs our American mythology–the spirit of a people pushing upwards. But what is captivating in Eli McCullough–the boy stolen from his own family and raised as a Comanche, surviving only to watch those he loves caught in the cross-fire of the battle for land–is weakened by the ease of life later on. His son is more compassionate and the voice of reason, yes, but he is incapable of taking action.

Reading The Son, I was reminded of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Meyers does not write as politically as Rand–his voice is notably absent from the novel–but their books share strong characters that live outside morality. They are fallen characters whose faults are also their successes.

It was prophesied I would live to see one hundred and having achieved that age I see no reason to doubt it. I am not dying a Christian though my scalp is intact and if there is an eternal hunting ground, that is where I am headed. That or the river Styx. My opinion at this moment is my life has been far too short: the good I could do if given another year on my feet. Instead I am strapped to this bed, fouling myself like an infant.

The Son is this month’s First Edition Club pick. Philipp Meyer will be here June 26th at 5 PM to sign and read.

From conception to publication, writing is a true labor of love. That’s Adam Johnson getting ready to sign The Orphan Master’s Son at Lemuria on January 27, 2012.

Please indulge this bookseller–It’s not every day that the novel you care so much about wins the most coveted prize in literary fiction.

The amount of reading a Lemuria bookseller does is considerable. This does not even count the amount of time we spend thinking about what to read and sifting through novels that will not matter five years from now.

We also value the hard work of our publisher reps in helping us find some of the best contemporary fiction. Toni Hetzel of Random House put The Orphan Master’s Son in my hand. I was wowed by it and wanted everyone to read it. Because we got to work on this book early, we were able to hold a signing and reading with Adam Johnson in January 2012 and select it as our January First Editions Club pick. We have been so proud to champion Adam Johnson’s work.

USA Today reports that Adam Johnson found out he had won the Pulitzer through a mere text message on his phone. Adam says:

“How can you be prepared for this kind of news? It will mean so much to the readership of the book, and I hope, will get more people to contemplate what’s happening there. North Koreans aren’t allowed to tell their own story. Others have to do it for them.”

Read the full article here.

To close, here’s an essay by Adam Johnson about his travel to North Korea, originally posted in January of 2012 with the author’s permission.

“We are all Korean”

Upon arriving in Pyongyang, one of our first stops was the National Museum of Korean History. It was a large museum with no one in it. To save electricity, which was quite scarce, the museum used motion sensors that turned out the lights when you left a room and flashed them on when you entered the next, so the cavernous journey was taken one flashing glimpse at a time. The first exhibit they showed me was what they claimed was an old skull fragment. It was displayed in a Plexiglas box atop a white pedestal. They informed me that the skull was 4.5 million years old and that it had been found on the shores of the Taedong River in Pyongyang. I was new to such tours, so my brain was filled with dissonance. I asked the museum docent, a middle-aged woman wearing a beautiful choson-ot, if humanity didn’t originate in Africa. “Pyongyang,” she said. I’d taken a course on human origins when I was an undergraduate, and a hazy memory came to me. I said, “So is this a skull fragment from an australopithecine?” She said, “No, Korean.” And I understood that she was a person trained to give a tour and recite prescribed information, not a scholar or curator. In North Korea, whenever evidence is lacking for something, they use a big painting or an elaborate diorama as proof. They had both on hand to explain via arrows and diagrams, how humanity had originated in Pyongyang, with the following Diaspora moving north into Asia and west into the Middle East and Europe. Finally, according to the diorama, humans populated Africa and North America. We had several minders with us, all watching my response to this new information. Finally, our tour guide concluded her lecture by informing me that the World was Korean (by which she meant North Korean) and by informing me that I was actually Korean. A friend of mine, a fellow professor on the tour with me, turned to me and said, “Did you hear, Professor Johnson? You are Korean. Do you feel suddenly Korean?”

I pat my arms and sides. “Yes,” I said, “I feel a little more Korean.”

He said, “You look a little more Korean.”

I rubbed my cheek and chin. “Yes,” I said, “I believe I’m a little more Korean.”

Our tour guide and minders all nodded, with some gravity, at my dawning realization.

So the lesson I learned in the National Museum of Korean History was that there was no irony in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Since Jamie Quatro is a new name for many of us, I’d like to share an interview with her from The Leonard Lopate show on New York Public Radio. Jamie talks about her collection of short stories I Want to Show You More and the recent enthusiasm for the short story form. Her stories deal with infidelity in the digital age, individuals who “wrestle” with their faith and find grace amidst loss and struggle.

I love Jamie’s stories. I cannot remember feeling so much shock and comforting reassurance between two covers. I read them over a month ago and I am still thinking about them. Oh, and I think the cover is marvelous. (Rachel Perry Welty is the artist; You can see more of her work here and here.)

It certainly is a wonderful year for the short story: Lemuria is fortunate to have had George Saunders in January, Ron Rash in March and now we are honored to have Jamie Quatro. Join us Monday evening at 5:00 for a signing with Jamie. A reading will follow at 5:30.

Listen to the Leonard Lopate interview below:

Also see: Barry Hannah leads the way for a stunning new voice in Southern Literature