When I was looking through my stack of advanced readers’ copies shortly before Christmas madness happened, I picked up my copy of Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures and read a few chapters. Not until January rest occurred did I pick it back up again and become pleasantly surprised at Chevalier’s treatment of the early 1800s in London and south of there in the small seaside village of Lyme Regis.

Based on the life of Mary Anning, a “before-her-time” fossil explorer and rare prehistoric sea creature discoverer, this little novel offers an unusual and provocative read. Insights into the male dominated academic geological community and exploration into the church’s role of rare acknowledgment of extinct fish or animals created by God propel the book’s premise. Add to that an often close, but tumultuous friendship between Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, a middle age spinster newly arrived from London, who is also captivated with fish fossils,and the plot thickens. A shared interest in a complicated man adds jealousy and envy to the emotional mix between the socially diverse  women. Comments on English society of the times, social class differences, as well as educational differences, provide abundant details and additional interest in this time period.

Although I did not read Chevalier’s popular The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which was published in 2005, I saw the beautiful movie. True to this previous read, Chevalier dapples in historic fiction, and does quite a good job. I had never heard of Mary Anning and remembered few details of this period of time in English history, so reading this book was an eye opening experience for me. Conversational in tone and method, the writing flows easily; chapters are told alternately between Mary and Elizabeth. Flowery descriptions of the English seaside village add to the enjoyment. Even the  book’s cover pulls the reader in!  Remarkable Creatures provides a nice little read for a cold January’s weekend.

-Nan

by Kelly Pickerill

The fab review by Jonathan Lethem in the Sunday Times Book Review convinced me to pick up Lorrie Moore’s novel, her first in eleven years, the day I read it.  Then the book sat on my bookcase for two months while I was distracted by the barrage of holidays during this time of year.  I picked it up again halfway through December, and even amid nights of holiday and retail exhaustion I found myself unable to read less than thirty pages in one sitting.

Tassie Keltjin is a Midwestern farmer’s daughter who, while in college in a liberal university town (her semester docket includes such fare as “The Neutral Pelvis,” “Wine Tasting,” and “Soundtracks to War Movies;” though the latter two are self-explanatory, it bears mentioning that the first is a yoga class), is hired as a nanny by an enigmatic couple on the verge of adopting a mixed-race little girl.  All this is happening in the fall of 2001, just after the September 11 attacks, and during the semester following the winter break, when Tassie begins to work for the Thornwood-Brinks, bonding with little Mary-Emma as if she were her own, and she meets darkly handsome, supposedly Brazilian Reynaldo in her “Intro to Sufism” course, embarking on a blinding infatuation with him, she becomes enmeshed in a culture of extreme political correctness, experiencing the consequences of emotional inattention and detachment that are an inevitable result of that culture.

At this point you may be nodding your head and thinking such smug thoughts as, “I know where this is going.”  Well, you don’t.  Not really.  Well, you sort of do.  But not in all the most important ways.  The reason Moore’s book ended up being one of my favorites this year goes deeper than its narrative.  The reason can be found in the subtle ways Tassie learns that she’s not so unlike her sometimes-lunatic employer Sarah Brink, because a life-changing event can be caused by inaction, and too late Tassie realizes that she has let her indecision become a crutch, and that there are forces that can take destructive advantage when one has let herself become mired in insouciance.

A Gate at the Stairs is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes darkly sarcastic, sometimes heavy and tragic, and always brilliant.  And Lemuria has autographed copies.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is hard to ignore with its bright orange cover, and it was particularly hard for me to ignore since I had never even heard of her before while her stories had already been collected and bound for sale. I took the chance on Lydia Davis after reading a New York Times Book Review on The Collected Stories:

Years before National Public Radio elevated flash fiction into contest fodder for the terminally distracted, Lydia Davis was batting out stories the length of an earthworm. But size matters less to Davis than timbre: these 198 stories, brought together from four previously published volumes, present 198 divergent voices to taunt the complacent reader. Davis nervily inhabits obsessive and haunted personas, her intonation shifting with unsettling precision from the sly to the sinister. She nabs the chilling poise of a pedant whose dispassionate analysis chokes the life out of schoolchildren’s get-well notes to a classmate; the ennui of a stay-at-home mom startled to learn that Glenn Gould shared her ardor for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; the angst of Franz Kafka as he dithers over whether to fix his date beet or potato salad. Davis approaches the short-story form with jazzy experimentation, tinkering with lists, circumlocutions, even interviews where the questions have been creepily edited out. You don’t work your way across this mesa-sized collection so much as pogo-stick about, plunging in wherever the springs meet the page. Amid such an abundance, it would be folly to play favorites. In the absence of better sense, special pleas go out for the persnickety nattering of “Old Mother and the Grouch,” the hate-thy-neighbor paranoia of “The House Behind” and the rueful introspection of the woman who stink-bombs a family outing in “Our Trip.”

What do I have to say about the stories of Lydia Davis? I don’t think I quite know yet. I do know that once I started reading them I could not stop. It’s the best bed-time reading ever because I can make it through a short story of a few sentences before I fall asleep. Take the two sentences of “Odd Behavior” as an example:

You see how circumstances are to blame. I am not really an odd person if I put more and more small pieces of shredded Kleenex in my ears and tie a scarf around my head: when I lived alone I had all the silence I needed.

(We might all feel like stuffing our own ears with Kleenex and tying scarves around our heads after the holidays.)

As I have given up on describing Lydia Davis, I appreciate the good work of Zach Baron of The Village Voice:

Collected Stories has a lot of this type of philosophical churning, much of it revelatory and even more of it, probably, inconclusive. You do not read Lydia Davis in the hopes of finding someone like, say, Mrs. D, the writer-protagonist of Davis’s caustic “Mrs. D and Her Maids,” whose “approach to writing is practical” and in whose stories a change inevitably takes place, usually followed closely by an epiphany. You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity.

Style is character, Joan Didion once observed. And over eight austere books—including the story collections compiled here, Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001), Varieties of Disturbance (2007), and one novel, The End of the Story (1995)—Davis’s prose has been unmatched in mirroring the workings of the mind. Few are better than this writer at representing thought on the page; she captures not just the peculiar rhythm of internal speech but also its cycling, digressive mechanics. Here’s one character, waiting for a phone call from a lover: “When he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband.”

Hey Everybody!!  Well Christmas is right around the corner and these are some novels that I think everyone would like to have under the tree….

Wolf  Hall by Hilary Mantel

Henry VIII’s challenge to the church’s power with his desire to divorce his queen and marry Anne Boleyn set off a tidal wave of religious, political and societal turmoil that reverberated throughout 16th-century Europe. Mantel boldly attempts to capture the sweeping internecine machinations of the times from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, the lowborn man who became one of Henry’s closest advisers. Cromwell’s actual beginnings are historically ambiguous, and Mantel admirably fills in the blanks, portraying Cromwell as an oft-beaten son who fled his father’s home, fought for the French, studied law and was fluent in French, Latin and Italian. Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players: Henry VIII; his wife, Katherine of Aragon; the bewitching Boleyn sisters; and the difficult Thomas More, who opposes the king. Unfortunately, Mantel also includes a distracting abundance of dizzying detail and Henry’s all too voluminous political defeats and triumphs, which overshadows the more winning story of Cromwell and his influence on the events that led to the creation of the Church of England.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel.

Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself–through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.

The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry

Bestseller Berry deftly blends contemporary suspense and historical mystery in his fifth novel to feature former U.S. Justice Department operative Cotton Malone (after The Charlemagne Pursuit). Danish billionaire Henrik Thorvaldsen, a friend of Malone’s, has become consumed with finding out who masterminded the slaughter outside a Mexico City courthouse two years earlier that killed seven people, including his young diplomat son. Once he learns that a wealthy British aristocrat was behind the outrage, Thorvaldsen gets entangled in a conspiracy that involves an elite group of ruthless financial experts planning to destabilize the global economy, a terrorist plot to destroy a European landmark, and a legendary cache hidden by Napoleon. Malone soon finds himself in a desperate struggle to save not only Thorvaldsen’s life but the lives of countless innocents as well. While the plot takes a few predictable turns, this well-crafted thriller also offers plenty of surprises.

Maggie, one of two mighty front desk managers, has a knack for knowing what each of us likes to read.  She said, “Hey, Pat.  I think you’ll like Spooner. It’s funny and a bit quirky and by Pete Dexter, National Book Award winner for Paris Trout.”

The first few chapters spelled magic for me. When Spooner, our reluctant protagonist, was born along with his twin who died at birth, their mother grieved that loss over a lifetime. Spooner sees himself as second fiddle and even further down the line after genius siblings are born to mom and her new husband named Calmer after the death of Spooner’s father. If it weren’t for Calmer, a navy captain who makes a disaster of a funeral at sea with prestigious onlookers shocked by a coffin that won’t sink, Spooner may have ended up much worse.  Calmer provides enough unspoken support for this stepson that Spooner often survives rather poor choices that keep us laughing and cheering for the not obviously loved and often rejected Spooner.

Who amongst us has not felt rejection? To survive, most of us have enough laughter and success to weather those pitfalls and poor choices. To celebrate such a life may be even harder. The strong pull in this book is the character driven plot that just won’t let us give up on Spooner. We won’t put this book down until we find out how it all turns out. It probably deserves some most worthy awards because it is wonderfully original and very well crafted by a unique voice in American literature.

-Pat

By now, just about everyone in America is aware of our culture’s inundation with vampire references. Even those wandering souls out there who remain unconnected to twitter/facebook/googlewave/etc. feel the dreadful, looming presence of these noble undead in the collective consciousness. You can’t check out at the grocery store without seeing glittering teen vampire Edward Cullen (Rob Patinnson) peering into your soul, and you might even hear a song from Vampire Weekend playing while you’re in line. Or if you’re like me and live in Jackson, you can’t see The Road in theaters right now because New Moon is playing on 12 screens at each venue. Scary.

Maybe this blog seems to be taking place about a month later than it should be, but the reason I wanted to write about vamp lit comes out of just having gone to see New Moon. New Moon is one part teen phenomenon and one part hipster guilty pleasure (see soundtrack lineup). Not having seen the first movie or read any of the books, I took a chance and went to see it. I was excited to see this movie because, like any good 24-year-old American who wishes he lived in Europe, I’ve always loved Bram Stoker’s Dracula , and was hoping that there was maybe, just maybe more to the Twilight saga than just promotional hype and hormones.

With my hopes up, I went to see the movie, and then read the first two books. Long story short, the books are pretty fun to read. If you want something you can blaze through, feel good about, and then watch some pretty cool movie adaptions of then give it a try.

If you’re looking for something more insightful in regards to humanity, alienation, loss and religious anxiety, go for the classics. I know some people complain about the epistolary style of Dracula, but I think it’s an interesting approach that draws you into more than one character’s perspective; it creates suspense as you see letter’s arriving late, never being read, etc.

I am personally interested in our culture’s fascination with vampires. I think it says a little bit about the isolation we feel coupled with the American dream of living forever. Twilight brings the masses in by doing it all within an archetypal school years/coming of age genre. I think this is similar to the success of Harry Potter (fantasy wizarding world meets modern times boarding school experience); it’s the whole idea of bringing the fantasy/horror into everyday life, which is what we kind of all really want.

So, if you’re wondering what to get your vampire loving teen for the Holiday Season, think about Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a gift for a vampire purist, here’s two lesser known and older options that have withstood the test of time:

Illustration from The Dark Blue by D. H. Friston, 1872

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (appearing in The Dark Blue magazine) (1872) predates Bram’s masterpiece.

William Polidori’s The Vampyre was first published in 1819, and is considered a progenitor of sorts.

-Hunter

“A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Reality” is the way one critic referred to Dave Eggers’ book about the Kafkaesque “trials” of a Syrian immigrant caught up in the chaotic  and often brutal aftermath of Katrina. This work of nonfiction is entitled Zeitoun (pronounced “zay-toon”) and came out in July of 2009.

Before Katrina hit, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American with a wife and four children, is living the American dream.  The owner of a successful painting and contracting business in New Orleans, he is well-liked and respected by both his neighbors and his customers.  When the storm comes and the flooding begins he sends his wife and children to stay with relatives in Baton Rouge.  But he himself decides to stay behind to protect his home and rental properties and to help out as best he can.  And for the first few days, paddling through the city in his second-hand canoe, he does just that—lending a hand to neighbors, rescuing some stranded souls, even feeding some pets left behind by their owners.  Then things take an ominous and ultimately horrific turn.  He is arrested by armed officers in one of his own rental houses and taken to a make-shift jail in the old Greyhound Bus Station where he is locked in an outdoor cage.  The guards there are both brutal and sadistic.  But his surreal nightmare is just beginning.  He is not allowed a phone call nor given any real explanation for his arrest, though at one point he is told that he is suspected of being an al Qaeda terrorist, principally, it would appear, because of his ethnic background.  Eventually he is transferred to a maximum security prison, still without being allowed any access to the outside world.  Meanwhile, his wife Kathy’s experience is as harrowing in its own way as Zeitoun’s.  With no word from him for days, which eventually stretch into weeks, and after many failed and frantic attempts to secure information, she fears the worse.  Even when Kathy is finally able to locate him their ordeal is far from over.

At several points during his experience Zeitoun asks himself—how can this be happening in America—and the reader is likely to ask himself the same question.  It seems that the magnitude of the catastrophe, the fragility and ineptitude of our response system and the post 911 atmosphere all came together into a perfect storm, which swept into its vortex a totally innocent man.

This is a story that could easily have descended into pure melodrama.  But Eggers manages to escape such a fate by allowing the story to virtually tell itself—no flourishes, no gimmicks–just clear, measured, unadorned prose. His tale is, in many ways, an intimate and narrowly focused work—the story of Katrina through the eyes of one man and his family.  Yet it is this approach that gives the catastrophe an immediacy and a poignancy that more sweeping accounts cannot hope to achieve.  All in all it makes for a powerful and gripping read.

-Billie

In a recent article in Austin’s local online newsource, the Statesman, Jeff Salamon tells the curious journey of a novel from the first spark of an idea to the final published work entitled Woodsburner by John Pipkin. Read the article and about midway you’ll see that Lemuria even gets a mention. We were proud to choose Woodsburner as our April First Editions Club selection in addition to hosting a reading for John Pipkin.

I am thankful for Salamon’s article for it gives me another opportunity to give another “shout out” for this wonderful debut novel! It is definitely one of my favorite novels of the year. Click here to read my review of Woodsburner.