The recording below comes from an essay published in a collection—The Death of the Moth and Other Essays—the year after Woolf’s death. The talk was called “Craftsmanship,” part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937, and it is the only surviving recording of Woolf’s voice. See the full article and a video of Patti Smith reading The Waves at Open Culture.
Category: Fiction (Page 29 of 54)
In my last blog <A list of sorts, and George Saunders> I mentioned Manuel Gonzales’ book of short stories, The Miniature Wife, on my to be read shelf. Well, I’ve been reading it, and liking it, a lot.
When blogging about a short story collection, I like to focus in on one of the stories, peripherally, skirting around it, and maybe give you a sense of his skill and meaning, rather than sum up the stories as a whole. This could be the wrong strategy, but, and if it is, well, sorry folks.
The story I want to give a brief sketch of is the first in the book, Pilot, Copliot, Writer. Think about: you are in a plane; it is hijacked. You and your fellow passengers stay in flight, circling the city of Dallas, for the next twenty years. This is the situation. It is left unexplained how this state has been extended, the logistics of fuel and food economy left to our wonder with hints of ‘perpetual oil’ and vials of clear liquid to be ingested, “two drops, two drops will do,” says the hijacker pilot. The point of these stories is not the science behind such ideas, Gonzales doesn’t waste time with that nonsense, rather the point is to create worlds not so unlike our own, but with these fabulist situations to aerate the philosophic soil and better allow us to explore our motives, our needs, wants, and desires. In short, Gonzales has crafted stories here that test our souls.
Dark and innovative. A total blast to read. This is the first book by Manuel Gonzales and I’m ready for his next.
I thoroughly enjoyed Indiscretion. I did not want to put this novel down; I even read it while on short breaks at work. I went in with really no expectations. All I could gather from the description was that this would be a tale about a love triangle, but as I read on, it became much more.
Charles Dubow is a debut author but y’all know how much I like reading first novels and Indiscretion did not disappoint.
From the beginning, the reader is wooed into wanting to be friends with Harry and Madeline Winslow. They have a wonderful life. They met in college, married, and have a wonderful son. Maddy’s family has a house in Southampton, where they spend summers and holidays. Harry has just won the National Book Award for his second novel and has won the Rome Prize to move to Italy and write his third. From the outside, who could ask for a more perfect life?
Walter, the narrator and Maddy’s best friend since childhood, tells the story. He is a subjective narrator; in some of the stories he was not even present at the time it happened. He begins the story during a wonderful summer weekend that a young woman, Claire, comes to Southampton, and meets the group at a party that the Winslow’s are having. They soon “adopt” Claire and she is spending every weekend in the Hamptons.
The decisions, good/bad, that the characters make that summer will affect the rest of their lives. it is a roller coaster ride learning the back stories and current stories of their lives. I just had to know where the story was going next. The journey to the end is riveting and I was sorry for it to finish.
Indiscretion will be released the first week in February, 2013.
by Kelly Pickerill
So Hannah and I were talking about short stories and how much we love them because of George Saunders’s new book and our First Editions Club pick, Tenth of December. I told her — because she’s new and may not have experienced this yet — that we as booksellers come across a lot of readers who don’t like short stories. After our event on Wednesday was so successful, Hannah was convinced otherwise.
Great turnout and enthusiasm aside, it is true that while George Saunders may be pardoned, the short story is still under scrutiny by the general reader. The day of our event at Lemuria, Adrian Chen at Gawker blogged that George Saunders “needs to write a goddamn novel already.” And he criticized lovers of the short story for being fetishists: “Short fiction is the Hard Stuff—pure uncut stories prized by real literature heads. Novelists are trotted out on talk shows and op-ed pages to give their thoughts on the issues of the day. Many are openly egomaniacal. But short story writers are noble craftsmen, painstakingly assembling flawless sentences into a delicate storytelling apparatus.”
Publishers can be biased, too; they know that a novel is often more marketable than a story collection. Being in the book business we know that many new writers are given a two book deal: the publisher will publish their stories as long they get a novel, too. But I often feel that for some writers, their stories are more focused. And of course that’s partly because a story is more focused than a novel. But there’s more to it than that. Hannah said it yesterday about Karen Russell. And the same is true of Kevin Wilson. His Family Fang was a great time, but in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth the quirkiness of his prose wasn’t as awkward; it confidently walked the tightrope between lighthearted and sober.
Some story collections to look forward to in 2013:
Lemuria loves Ron Rash, and we’re super stoked about the movie version of Serena that will be released this year, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. His novels are great, but his stories will leave you stunned. They paint a tragic but poignant portrait of Appalachia. His new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes out February 19th, and Ron will be at Lemuria for an event on March 22nd.
Before you start to think I hate those filthy novels, the last author I’ll tell you about is Jess Walter. His novel Beautiful Ruins was on several best of 2012 lists. I know many of you loved this one, and Jess has a new book of stories coming out this year, called We Live In Water. I got my hands on an advanced copy and so far it lives up to his standards — the stories are about broken people doing beautiful things.
Finally I’ll leave you with some George Saunders quotes from Wednesday night. I’m sorry if you missed the event; it was really the best way to start off 2013 at Lemuria.
George talks about writing only stories:
“Art is not all that generous of a thing, it doesn’t let you do what you want always. Like Flannery O’Connor said, ‘You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.’”
“If I have an eight page thing I kind of know what to do. I have strong opinions about it and I know how to compress it. If someone says take that eight pages and make it fifty, I don’t mind trying but I don’t have a strong sense of what to do. … So far anyway whenever I start to write something longer it will get to a certain point and the energy goes down and some little voice in my head will say just cut it, and compress it, and then it works out okay.”
George read the first part of the first story in Tenth of December, “Victory Lap.” Here’s what he had to say about his method of articulating the inner voice of a teenage girl:
“If you walk from here [Lemuria’s dotcom building] to that coffee shop across the way there [Broad Street] and it takes you forty seconds, there’s actual phenomenon occurring in your mind in those forty seconds. Can we articulate it? I don’t think so, but it’s a really fun thing to try. … It’s exciting to think about how you would come close to expressing actual mental phenomenon in prose. … So the first pass you do it for eighty pages and you go, ‘I’m a genius! Nothing happened — all he did was scratch his ass — but I got that down!’ And then you remember it’s a story, so you have to cross pollinate the mental phenomenon with some kind of physical action. That section I read was originally three times as long, but it was static. So on some fateful day you say, all right, I have to get this down to six pages, and at the end, something has to happen to escalate the action. So this guy shows up and then it goes from there.”
Last week I was in a meeting with some fellow Lemurians trying to convince Kelly that the best idea we could ever have would be for us to obviously get a liquor license and a cat to roam around the store. (I know, I know. Cats are trendy. Next year we’d look at the cat and be like, “Really? This cat is like, so 2013.”) As unproductive as this meeting may sound, there is one thing that we left determined to share with you, sweet fellow readers, and that is that these days just like the old days, the Southern short story absolutely refuses to be ignored, nor should it be.
In the wake of the George Saunders event we held last night in our Dot Com building for the release of his newest collection of short stories, Tenth of December, I realized that maybe I was mistaken about the seemingly waning following of the Southern short story. (If you weren’t at the reading, let me just tell you. You don’t want to keep missing events like this! Incredible.)
The event turnout and some of the discussions I overheard showed me that our friends here in the city not only like short stories, you people love short stories! You think they’re fabulous! And let me tell you guys, so do we. So what was originally conceptualized as a blog designed to plead with you all to open your minds to the smallest member of the fiction family, is instead going to turn into something of a greatest hits list.
If you read nothing else from this moving and sometimes hilariously disturbing collection of stories, read the opener story, a tidy little piece of work called “Gentleman’s Agreement.” Richard narrates the day’s events of the young boy the story centers around in a convincingly childlike manner. The storytelling, while simple, is startlingly sharp, offering little bursts of realization hidden among the sparse narrative. Beginning with the slow, steady plod of a tentative story that has yet to learn its own ending, the story reaches a wonderfully crafted crescendo as the reader realizes the gravity of the turn the story has taken.
With Mark Richard, when it comes to the mantra “less is more”, he is truly the king. This collection is filled with staccato storytelling, with deliciously interesting characters. Oh, and another must-read from this book? “The Birds for Christmas.” Yikes, that was good.
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen Russell
Y’all. Can we talk about how incredible this book is for a second? I mean, really. You probably recognize this name from her lovely first-ever novel Swamplandia– a book that we had a signing for here! (Again, hopefully you guys are coming to these things. Take advantage of having these great writers come visit our home. That’s Karen on the right with her friend.)
St. Lucy’s Home was Russell’s otherworldly and beautiful debut collection of dream-like stories, which have (not surprisingly) already made an appearance on Lemuria’s blog. So a refresher! I plead that you wouldn’t forget about the small beginnings that in one instance, created the inspiration for Russell’s novel. In a story called “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” Russell toys around with characters and ideas that bloom fully later in Swamplandia.
If you already know and love Russell or would like to, rejoice! She has a new collection of short stories titled Vampires in the Lemon Grove coming out on February 12! My heart will always belong to St. Lucy’s though- my favorite story from her first inspired collection? “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers.” And no, that has nothing to do with the fact that my boyfriend read it out loud to me in while I was in college and I was like, super totally smitten with him.
Music of the Swamp, Lewis Nordan
My hope is that you’re rolling your eyes because I’m putting this in my blog. I hope you’re like, “Really Hannah? We’ve all read this a thousand times. We already know how amazing it is.” Yes! Good for you! I’m so glad you have such amazing taste in books. If, however, this is one of Nordan’s greatest hits that you haven’t gotten around to yet, then get around to it, my friend.
Using absolutely scrumptious descriptions, Lewis Nordan takes pieces of the South that were before only grey and over-written and turns them into magical people and places we never imagined were possible. With childlike imagination, he tells his stories with a wealth of beauty and hopefulness that does not shy away from sadness. Truly heartbreaking and whimsical all at the same time, the stories from Music of the Swamp follow the life of Sugar Mecklin, at first a child filled with wonder and imagination, and then later, a man who begins to realize the beautiful ache that comes from loving and losing the people he loves.
I’ll never forget reading this book for the first time. It filled me with the most rapturous longing, a desire to just be in the sticky heat that surrounds me and my family and all of this whole, hot place we call home.
I was truly heartbroken to hear about Lewis Nordan’s passing last year, but I am happy to say that I will never hesitate to pick up this book, over and over again, to re-read these stories that will never cease to feel fresh and new.
So, lately I’ve been reading a lot. And yet, my TBR (to-be-read) shelf is still way out of hand and growing larger and wilier by the day, and so, the necessity of reading a lot of books has become, well, a necessity. What I would like to do here is share some of the books I’ve read, am reading, and will be reading. Maybe this will help me, and you, in some strange subpsychic and or metaphysicomental way. And so a list of sorts:
Recently read:
Neuromancer _ William Gibson
All the Pretty Horses _ Cormac McCarthy
The Moviegoer _ Walker Percy
Snow Country _ Yasunari Kawabata
*Tenth of December: Stories _ George Saunders (see below for asterisked items)
Infinite Jest _ David Foster Wallace
Red Country _ Joe Abercrombie
Currently reading:
Fevre Dream _ George R.R. Martin
Murphy _ Samuel Beckett
A bacon sized slice of the hog that is The TBR shelf:
The Virgin Suicides _ Jeffrey Eugenides
*The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories _ Manuel Gonzales
May We Be Forgiven _ A.M. Homes
Geek Love: Katherine Dunn
The Broom of the System _ David Foster Wallace
Storm Front _ Jim Butcher
Ghost Written _ David Mitchell
Gravity’s Rainbow _ Thomas Pynchon
So about those starred titles.
The Tenth of December is our first editions club pick of the month, which also happens to be one of the
best collections of short stories I’ve read in a long time – a long time. These stories are set in the near future (my favorite type of future) and are very satirical (satirical is my favorite type of satire). George Saunders will be here THIS MONTH <January 23> @ 5 o’clock. He will read and sign and it will be very fun. And 1dolla beers.
The Miniature Wife is a collection of short stories by new 
author Manuel Gonzales. I don’t know much about this book other than I want to read it. But it is new, came out this month, and I’m always looking for a great new author to follow.
And, don’t forget <January 23> @5!
I love that The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan is my first book blog of 2013. I absolutely loved this story and cannot wait to get it into your hands. While The Painted Girls is a novel, it is based on the true story of the three Van Goethem sisters’ lives. Marie and Charlotte were both ballet dancers in the Paris Opera dance school. Antoinette, the oldest, works as an extra, having been dismissed from the dance school.
The dance school at the Paris Opera was a place where young girls had a chance to be lifted out of poverty. The young girls would work their way up through the ranks and if they were “lucky”, catch the eye of an abonee, a rich older man. These alliances were very common place, and the girls were very hopeful that an abonee would come along and to pay their rent and give them gifts. It was survival.
We follow the stories of the sisters in The Painted Girls as they try to survive and keep their family together. Their father has recently passed
away and their mother, who works as a laundress, seems to be found in the bottom of an absinthe bottle more often than not. Antoinette is desperately looking for love, Marie for security, and Charlotte for success. We follow all three girls on very bumpy but interesting road. Along the way, Marie is noticed by the artist, Edgar Degas, who frequents the Paris Opera looking for girls to model for him. She is very excited to be able to earn extra money, and even more so when she finds out about the sculpture he is creating. Marie is the model for Little Dancer, 14 Years.
I do not want to give to many of the details away but I will say that I really loved this book. I feel like the author did a fantastic job in describing Paris during this time and the struggles people faced just to survive everyday living, especially young girls. This quote seems to sum it all up:
No social being is less protected than the young Parisian girl–by laws, regulations, and social customs.
–Le Figaro, 1880
To see other works of art by Degas referenced in The Painted Girls please click here.
George Saunders by David Winter of The New York Times
Well, you can imagine a bookseller’s delight upon hearing that the author scheduled at the bookstore that month has written the best book of the year, well, even if it is January. January may be a sparse month for new fiction but it seems there is always a diamond or two to cheer us on through the winter. This year we are lucky to have George Saunders’ new collection of short stories Tenth of December due out January 8. I have to add that I did get the novel chance to start reading an advanced copy on December Tenth.
I started reading and then I had to put this collection back down and let the storm of the holidays pass. Saunders’ kind of whipped me a round a little bit, but I think that’s a good thing.
Joel Lovell writes in The New York Times:
Aside from all the formal invention and satirical energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant (sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family avert a tragic future that she has foretold.
Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”
And “Tenth of December” is more moving and emotionally accessible than anything that has come before. “I want to be more expansive,” Saunders said. “If there are 10 readers out there, let’s assume I’m never going to reach two of them. They’ll never be interested. And let’s say I’ve already got three of them, maybe four. If there’s something in my work that’s making numbers five, six and seven turn off to it, I’d like to figure out what that is. I can’t change who I am and what I do, but maybe there’s a way to reach those good and dedicated readers that the first few books might not have appealed to. I’d like to make a basket big enough that it included them.”
* * *
Joel Lovell’s article and interview is not just about George Saunders. It also provides insight into the current state of literature. The full article is well worth the read.
I felt comforted by Saunders’ commentary on literature:
“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.” -George Saunders (from the October 2007 issue of O The Oprah Magazine)
George Saunders signs and reads at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 23 at 5:00 and 5:30. Tenth of December is our January First Editions Club pick.
We’re a little tuckered out after the holidays but our brains are slowly starting to settle down for the new year. The first fun thing that comes to my mind is our event with George Saunders on January 23. I’ve been catching up by reading some of his short stories and essays. On the 23rd, Saunders will be signing and reading from his newest short story collection Tenth of December published by Random House. Check out some early commentary from David L. Ulin at the LA Times. Tenth of December is our January First Editions Club selection and goes on sale next Tuesday the 8th.
George Saunders is the author of the short story collections “Pastoralia,” “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (both New York Times Notable Books) and, most recently, “In Persuasion Nation.” “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. “In Persuasion Nation” was one of three finalists for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection of the year. Saunders is also the author of the novella-length illustrated fable, “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil” the New York Times bestselling children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” illustrated by Lane Smith, (which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands), and a book of essays, “The Braindead Megaphone.”
His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, and Harpers Magazine, and has appeared in the O’Henry, “Best American Short Story,” “Best Non-Required Reading,” and “Best American Travel Writing” anthologies. In support of his books, he has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report.
Writing for GQ, he has traveled to Africa with Bill Clinton, reported on Nepal ‘s “Buddha Boy” (who is said to have gone without food or water for months on end), driven the length of the Mexican border, spent a week in the theme hotels of Dubai, and lived incognito in a homeless tent city in Fresno, California .
In 2001, Saunders was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 top most creative people in entertainment, and by The New Yorker in 2002 and one of the best writers 40 and under. In 2006, he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
They say the best things come in small boxes. I just think, the best things come in boxes. Take, for example, Chris Ware’s new graphic novel, Building Stories.
Included in the New York Times list of the best books of 2012, this novel is actually a box full of little books and pamphlets that can be read in any order. They all tell the story of a Chicago house–the residents that live there, the bee that pollinates its flowers, the house itself, and the lives that have begun and ended there.
This is a comic for the existentialist.
Chris Ware’s illustrations are simple (maybe you saw them in the NYTimes book review a couple months ago) and have been described as “potatoes with legs” but they are strikingly descriptive. Plus, let me again remind you, it’s a box (think Monopoly gameboard size) full of intricately designed books–the construction of the book alone is a work of art.
Building Stories by Chris Ware, Pantheon Books, 2012