Much of Lydia Davis ‘ short fiction could fit on a postage stamp. Maybe a more modern comparison would be that her short stories fit nicely into a Facebook status update. When discussing her work, most of the discussion is spent trying to figure out how to catagorize what she has written–short story? parable? anecdote? prose poem?

Her short story, Insomnia, reads: “My body aches so–it must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.”

That’s all there is to it.

Lydia Davis has mastered her own invented genre with such success that she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize (worth roughly $90,000) in acknowledgement of her collected works.

Lydia Davis’ Collected Short Stories are a beautiful exploration in the power of editing. The stories are like model ships in glass-bottles–the larger world captured in minute detail, yet so concisely organized in the form. Davis is at her best when illustrating what is most familiar:

Disagreement

He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That it should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in.

Not all of Davis’ stories are this brief. But they are all tightly-cropped. Although her stories are not expansive, when read they  together, depict a multi-faceted portrait of life.

Ramona Ausbel’s short story collection, A Guide to Being Born, is a wonderful romp through magical realism, exploring the fabric of life itself. The curtain between life and death is as thin as that between the real and imagined.

The New York Times review says this:

Ausubel is sensitive to our precarious position between safety and peril — locked out of full access to one another’s inner lives, locked into the pitiless machinations of our own biological systems, left certain only of our uncertainties.

The collection opens with “Safe Passage,” a story of a ship adrift in at sea, captained only by hundreds and hundreds of Grandmothers. In “A Chest of Drawers” a father-to-be develops a series of drawers in his chest in which he can store any number of sundries, including his wife’s lipstick. In “Atria,” a high school freshmen blurs the line between truth and lies after she finds herself very pregnant.

Reminiscent of the fantastical and tragic of Ausubel’s first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, the characters in A Guide To Being Born are struggling through life-altering events and decisions in extraordinary and unusual ways. Ausubul handles the weaknesses and strengths of her characters with a deft touch, allowing their strangeness to be their salvation.

I am 3/4 of the way through Claire Messud’s newest novel, The Woman Upstairs and am having trouble putting it down long enough to finish this blog.

The narrator of this novel is angry–angry that she is moderately successful (an elementary school teacher), reliable (she calls her father every day and helped care for her dying mother), and boring. In short, everything your parents wanted you to grow up to become, but upon achieving, you realize it would have been a lot more fun to have messed around a bit.

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I’m a good girl, I”m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parent’s shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I”m over forty fucking years old, and I”m good at my job and I”m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone–every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead.

But this novel isn’t just a series of angry rants. It is a portrait of relationships–their saving and destructive power. Messud is at her best in describing the minutiae of life. The way light pools in a dark room. The feel of winter on a walk home. The way a new friend can rattle your daily life.

I read The Yellow Birds when it first came out last September. This novel has just come out in paperback and I am going to be rereading it this month. I don’t reread books very often, only the very best, and this book is getting it’s second reading faster than any book I’ve ever read. Kevin Powers’ debut novel is not the typical good book, it’s a stunningly beautiful book full of love and horror – the prose is simply a work of high art. Powers has stunned and challenged me with his ability. If you haven’t read this book, whether you’ve been awaiting its paperback version or by some miracle have not heard of it, come by Lemuria today and get your next i’ve-got-to-read-this-book-again book.

Also, check my precious post on this book HERE.

Think Gangs of New York meets A Clockwork Orange meets Mad Max and set in 2050 Ireland. 

The City of Bohane is located on the west coast and named after the river that runs through it. Bohane is divided into several districts that are ‘governed’ by a gang, the Hartnett Fancy. Logan Hartnett aka Albino/’Bino/H/Mr. H/the Long Fella is the current boss of the fancy

He had that Back Trace look to him: a dapper buck in a natty-boy Crombie, the Crombie draped all casual-like over the shoulders of a pale grey Eyetie suit, mohair. Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses. It was a pair of hand-stitched Portuguese boots that slapped his footfall, and the stress that fell, the emphasis, was money.

In Bohane, the way you carry yourself is everything.

Kevin Barry writes like a poet chewin’ loonies. His prose is so good, and his story telling is… so good. He writes with this street slang that is totally believable. And this is one of the few times a ‘twist’ really caught me unawares, and it was cool. It was as subtle as his narrator, yet when looking back it was set up really well. Not one of those times that leave you like “okay, well, didn’t see that coming, but who the hell could have?” More like: Whoa… Barry is fracking great!

Right from the start we learn that the guy who had holdings of the fancy prior to the Long Fella is back and 25 years gone, the Gant Broderick, is still one bad dude – fifty years old, he’s still aka the Big Unit – “He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks.” This book is one of an insular city of vice and all of the people (there are some really great ones in here) reflect it. There is love and violence and distrust. There is cold maneuvering and hot syrupy sentiment. The Gant <a bastardized form of giant> is one of these that suffer from attacks of sentiment, looking for the past, for the ‘lost-time’. But, this doesn’t stop him from being one big bad ghoulie _ he still carries his blade around.

The characters are what really solidify this book for me. They are kind of like Barry Hannah’s characters, maybe a bit more fantastically so. Oh, and the women in this book are just great:

Jenni Ching is one strong female, a bad chic. She’s sexy, smart, and kicks ass all day. “Jenni took a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up. Torched the motherfucker.”

Macu, the Long Fella’s wife, is “dark-complected and thin, with a graceful carry of herself, and a sadness bred into her. One of her eyes was halfways turned in to meet the other, but attractively so.”

Girly Hartnett is the Long Fella’s mum. “… eighty-nine years of age, and in riotous good health. Girly was the greatest rip that ever had walked the Trace but she resided now in a top-floor suite at the Bohane Arms Hotel. The Curtains hadn’t been drawn back in decades.” *Girly is not just some old hag in this tale.*

I’m just going to list a few names from the book at this point, because they are just wonderful:

Ol’ Boy Manion,        Eyes Cusack,    Sweet Baba Jay,

Big Dom Gleeson,     Wolfie Stanners & Fucker Burke.

Bohane is a city that “builds sausages & beer” for the fierce winters. It builds fierce people for the blackness that seeps in from the river. If you want to read a great story, you could do worse.

I’m going to give this one a 5/5 ***** and I’ll deff be reading his short story collection that comes out later this year.

My friends have been frantically buzzing about the second season of the HBO series Girls. They generally feel ripped off: the characters’ dark sides and relationships are unraveled at breakneck speed, when all that devoted viewers wanted was more reason to love those quirky, young New Yorkers from season one. The characters have turned no new corners; loose ends have simply curled up into balls at the conclusion of the season; and everyone is getting back together with their old boyfriends. How can we experience empathy among all this mess? Who do we root for?

Regardless of what their opinions say about Girls as we await season 3, they say a lot about fiction. We want fiction and television to make us see a familiar world in a fresh way. We want to empathize with the world, and in turn to feel our burden is shared. This is what good writing does for us, whether or not we ever talk about it. Here’s some news, bros: I have a novel that does this super well. (And it, like Girls, is written by a woman.)

With each “turn of the screw” in A. M. Homes not-quite-so-new-anymore (sorry!) novel May We Be Forgiven, something clicks, something charms, and I laugh. I mean, it’s no funny novel – more like an epic, but our narrator, Harry, says and does things that are framed in such a way as to make me laugh. He is losing his mind and regaining it over and over again just like I do nearly every day; unfortunately, I don’t laugh at myself quite as much. A wild thing about humanity is that even among suffering, mental illness, death, we still have to brush our teeth and bathe the dog. Here, Harry takes care of a dog (among other things) that belongs to his mentally unstable, murderous brother, and Homes writes the relationship to be both beautiful and funny (not quite so heartbreaking as it was in The Dog Stars). At the halfway point, I am already grateful for this novel. As Homes’ novel forgives the characters – convinces us to see the heart in Harry, we remember to also care for the demons, fears, and the heart in ourselves.

And greatest of all, by virtue of its being a book, the entire saga is written BEFORE you start reading it. I wouldn’t say to give up on Girls, but good luck suspending your judgment until the end of the next season. Whether you feel that you lose or win at that point, don’t forget that novels are here for you, loyal as the family dog.

by Whitney