fwriction

from The Book Beast:

Dan Chaon’s intent in his chilling new short-story collection is clear. In the opening line, “Gene’s son Frankie wakes up screaming.” We learn that Gene is a UPS deliveryman trying to escape his past, and his son’s bloodcurdling screams are reminders that “something bad has been looking for him for a long time, he thinks, and now, at last, is growing near.” In these haunting tales, Chaon writes about the tragic fallout of broken families; the loss of a child, parent, or spouse often drives the narrative. In one story, a foster child moves in with a couple and sleeps in their dead son’s bed. As he grows older, his traumatic childhood catches up with him, chipping away at his grip on reality until his demons come eerily into view. Chaon excels at inciting a gripping sense of foreboding; just as the reader realizes there’s a monster in the closet, its shocking revelation only stirs the imagination further. While the notorious severed hand from his 2009 novel, Await Your Reply, is absent from this new collection, the author’s fans will delight in discovering a few stray fingers and other signature motifs.

patricksomerville:

To me, the penultimate paragraph is the most interesting part of the review, and I will end this empathy ramble there, noting that fiction writers, I think, should pitch a tent within these temporary episodes if they want to write well and continue to understand characters:

At the core of this deceptively simple book is the question of the nature of cruelty. In the last and most philosophical chapter Dr. Baron-Cohen discusses situations in which an individual who is not otherwise lacking in empathy may behave cruelly. Citing the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s term “the banality of evil,” and discussing the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in which ordinary people exhibited cruel behavior, he acknowledges that in most of us empathy may be suspended temporarily, under certain circumstances.

At fwriction : review, we love scrappy journals. What a fantastic list (PANK! Electric Lit! Unstuck!) and shout-out in The New York Times!

Consider the literary magazine. Cloaked in pointy-headed obscurity, it almost always loses money. And now, with printed media on the endangered list, it may seem especially at risk to go extinct (or online-only). But these scrappy journals are actually enjoying something of a renaissance in print, buoyed by on-demand publishers like Lulu and CreateSpace — which make them cheaper than ever to produce — and print fetishists who treat them like sacred art objects. (Some, like the hand-bound, screen-printed Birkensnake, undoubtedly are.) Travis Kurowski, who covers lit mags on his blog, Luna Park Review, estimates that there are now as many as 2,800 magazines. What distinguishes these 10 is that they’re not only intello-chic statements for your side table. They’re also really good reads.

But then I picked up Eugenides’s new novel, “The Marriage Plot,” an exuberantly bookish book that offers the clearest account to date of his cohort’s collective aspirations and anxieties. There is, it turns out, a unifying thread; it’s just not a matter of form. The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer “How should novels be?” but “Why write novels at all?” […]

The idea that “the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness” crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group: in Franzen’s nonfiction, and in Wallace’s, and in Smith’s beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, “Changing My Mind.” It also helps to explain these writers’ broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed, when we consider the web of influence that connects them to old roommates and friends and lovers and students — a list that includes David Means, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Donald Antrim and Jonathan Safran Foer — and to newer work by writers like Karen Russell or the Irish novelist Paul Murray, “Here is a sign that you’re not alone” starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today.

A really interesting read, as a writer and reader, in this week’s NYT Sunday Magazine.

A must read, for all those who love books, writing, reading, and the interaction that the three inevitably need to be whole.

Though it’s under siege, such real-life literary culture exists in unexpected places. A few miles down the road from where I live on the coast of Maine, a talented young bookseller named Lacy Simons recently opened a small bookshop called Hello Hello, and in her blog she wrote eloquently about her relationship to “everyone who comes in my store. If you let me, I’ll get to know you through your reading life and strive to find books that resonate with you. Amazon asks you to take advantage of my knowledge & my education (which I’m still paying for) and treat the space I rent, the heat & light I pay for, the insurance policies I need to be here, the sales tax I gather for the state, the gathering place I offer, the books and book culture I believe in so much that I’ve wagered everything on it” as if it were “a showroom for goods you can just get more cheaply through them.”

Scott reminds me what happened the last time someone stood up to Amazon. Nearly two years ago, the Macmillan publishing group adopted a new sales model that would cost Macmillan in the short run, but allow other companies to enter or remain in the e-book market without having to take a loss on every sale. Amazon’s response to more competition? They refused to sell not merely Macmillan’s e-books, but nearly every physical book Macmillan published. Amazon eventually backed down, but its initial response helped shape a widespread sense that it envisions a world in which there will be no other booksellers or publishers, a world where, history suggests, Amazon may not use its power benignly or for the benefit of literary culture.

This puts me in mind of stories about the days in Old Hollywood when the studios controlled everything. A director friend told me about a particularly ruthless studio head who, as my friend put it, would sell his mother for a bent farthing, and was, as a result, universally feared and loathed. But here’s the thing: the exec shared a common language and a common passion with those he steamrolled. Why? They inhabited the same world. Those days, my friend concluded wistfully, are gone. Movie studios have been subsumed by media empires. And when you try to have a conversation with the new Hollywood, it quickly becomes clear that you’re talking about movies and they’re talking about refrigerators.

As I see it, the problem with Amazon stems from the fact that though it started out as a bookseller, it isn’t anymore, not really. It sells everything now, and it sells it all aggressively. Maybe Amazon doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe because it’s simply too big to care. In a way it’s become, like the John Candy character (minus the eager, slobbering benevolence) in Mel Brooks’s movie “Spaceballs” — half man, half dog and thus its own best friend.

longreads:

Elliott Holt is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who is almost finished with her first novel. (See her Longreads page here.)

***

I love short stories, so I decided my picks should be mostly short fiction.

This is a pretty wonderful thing, with some damn fine writers behind it (including former and future fwriction : review contributors Sam Rasnake, Susan Tepper, and Nicolette Wong). Please, check it out.

Thirty powerful stories from around the world to benefit two children’s charities: PROTECT: The National Association to Protect Children (www.protect.org) and Children 1st Scotland (www.children1st.org.uk).

Stories by David Ackley, Kevin Aldrich, David Barber, Lynn Beighley, Seamus Bellamy, Paul D. Brazill, Sif Dal, James Lloyd Davis, Roberto C. Garcia, Susan Gibb, Nancy A. Hansen, K.V. Hardy, Gill Hoffs, Fiona “McDroll” Johnson, J.F. Juzwik, MaryAnne Kolton, Benoit Lelievre, Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw, Vinod Narayan, Paula Pahnke, Ron Earl Phillips, Thomas Pluck, Sam Rasnake, JP Reese, Chad Rohrbacher, Susan Tepper, Luca Veste, Michael Webb, Nicolette Wong and Erin Zulkoski.

Here are some highlights from Blue Fifth Review’s Flash Special Issue. You should definitely check it out:

“I turn up the music and slip into drone, rock it like a tunnel in canary. When that does not erase his face, I cup my breast with one hand and let my hair fall.” - Nicolette Wong, “As Pleat”

“I’m sure it was the rescue that ushered in the affair.” - Foster Trecost, “Table Thoughts”

“She wasn’t naked when I met her, not to look at anyway.” - Gil Hoffs, “Baring up”

“He’ll want explanations: why she’s crying, why the suitcase, why he isn’t enough (why nothing ever is), and why she isn’t wearing shoes.” - Christopher Allen, “The Shoes, the Girl and the Waves that Washed Them Away”

“Or maybe he just wanted to be king of his own castle a little while longer? To stamp away the heat and the cold, to find peace alone, master of his own domain. Maybe all he’d ever wanted was choice.” - Martha Williams, “White Smoke”