Tag Archives: fiction

The Atlantic: Special Issue Fiction 2011

Posted on July 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

It’s rare that I come across a publication that is 100% perfect. Last week I found one while stuck in an airport in South Carolina.

The $6.99 cover price did make me pause, the magazine was very slim (but also sparsely inhabited by ads) and I haven’t been a huge fan of The Atlantic in the past. Two things made the choice for me: I really needed something else to read on the plane besides F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and the cover art. The cover art shows a grungy young man in a gross armchair reading in what looks like a garbage dump. Perched atop the chair is a cat and in the background a bright blue sky. Something about this image really appealed to me and made me want to see what else was inside.

What was inside was nothing short of remarkable. Every piece of fiction was flawless and engaging, beautiful pieces of art were scattered throughout, some illustrated for the stories some not, and two essays which took new perspectives on writing.

Each story was distinct from the others. Ariel Dorfman’s “The Last Copy” was about a man trying to stop his recently published book getting to a certain nun he once had an affair with 20 years ago, “Sold” by Wendell Berry is about an old woman selling off her farm and possessions as she nears the end of her life, Sarah Turcotte’s “Scars” is about a breast cancer survivor and a tattoo artist’s brief encounter, “Vigil” by Stuart Dybek is about a young boy and his father disposing of a large fish on Christmas night, “How to Win an Unwinnable War” by Austin Bunn is about a young boy struggling with his parent’s divorce, “Little Sister” by Jerome Charyn is a particularly creepy story about a woman finding out she has a violent sister locked up in a pricey asylum, “Someone I’d Like You to Meet” by Elizabeth McKenzie is about a young woman bringing her fiance home to meet her intense mother and easy-going father, “L’amour, CA” by Lysley Tenorio is about a Filipino family that moves to the United States and struggles with acclimation, and “The Great Zero” by Jonathan Walter is about a family (primarily father and son) struggling to survive/escape the dust bowl.

Obviously all of these stories are about much more than those brief descriptions, but I’ll leave the exploration of these stories to you. They are really worth reading, each one is compelling and unique.

Bret Anthony Johnston, in his essay “Don’t Write What You Know” dispels the age-old writing rule of writing from personal experience. Johnston discusses ways in which to use personal experience as a place to draw from, but also as a place that needs to be ignored sometimes.

“Do I Repeat Myself?” by John Barth, discusses how throughout history writers have felt trapped by the fact that everything has already been said or written about before.

Both essays are short and give an interesting perspective on these common writer’s problems. I highly suggest this issue to all readers and writers out there, it’s really fantastic and well worth the $6.99.

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The Paris Review: Summer 2011

Posted on July 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m not one of those people who pretends to read more than I actually I do. So I’m going to admit that I skipped most of the content in the most recent issue of The Paris Review. Is this because I am a lazy reader or is that the content just wasn’t particularly engaging?

I’m going to go with The Paris Review’s summer issue isn’t what it should be. It featured two long interviews with writers I don’t care about (William Gibson and Samuel R. Delany) and the second section of the Roberto Bolano’s serialized novel, “The Third Reich”. Once I have the entire novel I may read it, but too much time passes between issues for me to read each section separately.

One of the items I did enjoy was the poem “Churches” by Kevin Prufer. I’m a self-proclaimed poetry moron, but every now and again I read one that I like. It was a poem that read almost like a very short story about two kids standing in a gift shop in Arizona and the demise of his father.

Another poem, “Arabia,” by Frederick Seidel was more what I’m used to: annoying and contrived. I hate it when poets rhyme unless it’s for children’s books. The last line of the poem is “It looks like spring out there on Broadway meant/Barack Obama to be president.” Really? This is what The Paris Review is publishing these days? Ugh.

There were a couple unremarkable short stories about a drug-induced telephone romance and one about a bitter, divorced man whose daughter hates him. One story I enjoyed was Jonathan Lethem’s “The Empty Room,” a slightly creepy story about growing up in a house where one room is designated as forever empty. The narrator’s father insists it remain empty, but that anyone can use it for whatever they want. In the end, the father’s sanity has dwindled away and the room is used for stranger and stranger purposes.

The art in this issue was from two female artists, Laurel Nakadate and Mika Rottenberg. Rottenberg’s photos and film stills are at least interesting with vivid colors and unattractive people doing normal and sometimes strange things (like smelling flowers, or holding cloth up with toes). Nakadate’s work, however, struck me as being a huge waste of space. She did a series of photos called “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” which consists of photos of herself crying. Sometimes she’s naked, sometimes she’s just standing there in a t-shirt, but in all of them she looks like she needs a good slap. The photos are of poor quality and look like a teenager took them with her cellphone for her MySpace page. I’m not a professional art critic by any means, but I just don’t get it.

Needless to say my affection for The Paris Review has been waning lately, and when it’s time to re-subscribe I may decide to pass.

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Poets & Writers May/June 2011 Issue: Writing Contests

Posted on June 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

I vaguely recall the first time I picked up an issue of Poets & Writers. I was probably about eleven or twelve years old and I had just come to the conclusion that I was going to be a big writer. I picked up the magazine and set out to learn everything I needed to know from its pages.

At the time, Poets & Writers was what I would call a “fuddy-duddy” magazine, at least from the eyes of a twelve-year-old and didn’t get much out of it. Now, many years later, I couldn’t possibly recommend it more.

The most recent issue’s focus was on writing contests and included an extensive list of contests and due dates in the back of the magazine. The cover story was an interview with four people who run writing contests. While the interview was interesting, it didn’t really give any information I didn’t already know or that was useful to me personally. That said, the rest of the magazine’s content was extremely useful.

Some of the topics discussed that I found interesting were e-book lending/pirating, social media for authors, and navigating literary magazine contracts. Each of these articles were very well-written and informative.

There were also a few author spotlights that discussed each author and gave an excerpt of their work which was nice to read about, though these particular writers weren’t hugely engaging for me personally.

Both the print issue and website are fantastic resources for writers and I highly suggest getting a subscription or at least checking out the website. The website alone has an extensive database of literary journals to submit to (including Line Zero), information on literary agents and grants, and even job listings.

 

 

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Posted on May 3, 2011 | Leave a comment


Reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is kind of like going on a fantastic journey through time where you not only get to see what happens to the main characters, but also what happened to them in the past, what happens to their children, their assistant’s children, and any other random person (who, of course, is never really random) in the story.

A Visit from the Goon Squad was sitting on my shelf (I bought it after reading a review of it on TheMillions.com) when I saw that it recently had won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

I had purchased the novel because from what I read about it online, it was about the music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. Having grown up in the (albeit early 2000) Bay Area music scene I was intrigued.

I was both disappointed and incredibly pleased. Egan’s version of the Bay Area music scene was not the same as my own memories of it (how could it be?) but it was also about so much more than music. For starters, most of the novel takes place in New York City, with interludes to San Francisco, Italy, and Africa. It also follows a menagerie of characters from the aged music tycoon Bennie to the young daughter of Bennie’s ex-assistant, Sasha. While I think it’s impossible to quickly summarize the plot of a novel with so many characters, I’ll attempt to do my best here:

A Visit from the Goon Squad is about people growing up.

Egan’s novel follows the lives of many characters, all intersecting at some point, but each character is only given a short amount of time in the spotlight. Bennie and Sasha are the two characters that we see the most of (Bennie and Sasha as teenagers, young adults, and adults) while many of the people they know and will know swirl around them.

After reading this novel you want to go back and read it all over again, making mental notes of each mention of each character. I often found myself recognizing names in later chapters that I was certain I had read about (usually very briefly) in earlier chapters.

At times it proves a little difficult keeping track of all the different characters, but generally Egan does a good job of keeping us in the loop. She bounces around in time as well as characters point of views, (here Bennie is a teenager in a crappy punk band, here Bennie is happily married and at the top of the music business, here Sasha is Bennie’s assistant, here Sasha is a teenager in Italy, here Bennie is tired of the music biz and divorced, etc) It’s these time changes that keep the reader so involved with the story. Each character’s lives (usually dark and full of regrets) become extremely gripping when given such extensive back story.

The only drawbacks to this novel were its last two chapters, where Egan goes a little experimental with format and jumps ahead a little too far into the future. Chapter 14, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” is written entirely in Powerpoint slides from the point of view of Sasha’s young daughter, Alison. While I could still easily follow the story through the slides, it felt very contrived and didn’t really add anything for me. The last chapter, “Pure Language” takes place in the future, but the reader knows it can’t be too far in the future because the characters we have been following are still alive and well. Egan takes our current obsession with texting and amplifies it in this dystopia science-fiction chapter. While she maintains her way of stringing characters together, this lurch into science fiction is jolting and unbelievable. I found it hard to buy that so much had changed in such a short amount of time, although with our society’s current technological developments I suppose anything is possible. In this last chapter, Egan paints a world where everyone almost solely communicates through texting using “handsets” and where the music industry has been given a second wind through the buying powers of young children, called “pointers”. Because it is the last chapter, and rather brief, Egan doesn’t develop this futuristic world as much as it would have taken for me to buy into it.

It would be impossible for me to summarize this entire novel, or even to speak to half of its devices and motifs. It’s very complex, often depressing, but always engaging. I highly recommend it to anyone who has made a mistake or two in their lives.

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Gambler’s Quartet by Brad Summerhill

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 1 Comment

Gambler’s Quartet follows the tragic story of an estranged mother and son trying to survive their own demons and defects in Reno, NV. Johnny Drake is struggling to come to terms with his father’s recent death after months of taking care of him. He is also struggling with his mixed feelings towards his gambler mother, Jenna, whose addiction and selfishness has caused him nothing but pain. Meanwhile, Jenna chases the god of luck in craps, sports bets, and a shady business venture in a new strip club/prostitution ring.

This short, dark novel jumps from p.o.v. between Jenna and Johnny, which allows the reader insight to each of their (often) misguided motives. The ability to see into both character’s minds helps to flesh them out; Jenna is more than the troubled gambler, she also has dreams and a dark history. Johnny is not just the grieving son with a resentment towards his mother, but is also still a child wishing for his mother’s love and attention.

While these inside views help the characters round out a little, it’s hard to feel much empathy for either of them. At first Johnny seems the good son, the one with his head on straight, but that quickly unravels. Why that unravels is unclear and never really shown, although one might guess it’s due to his father’s death, lack of a decent role model, and poor choice of friends (mostly his friend Bone, who introduces Johnny to cocaine). My trouble with Johnny’s fall from grace is that it happens too quickly and too drastically; the Johnny of chapter two is almost an entirely different character from the Johnny of chapter one.

That said, Gambler’s Quartet is an interesting novel that gives an insight into the dark side of Reno. The gambling, the loan sharks, the desperation to win, are all described in a straight forward and clear way. Summerhill doesn’t go overboard with it with gloomy language, but paints a picture that is easy to see, especially if you have any familiarity with Reno. It’s also the story of a dysfunctional, yet unique, mother-son relationship.  And while it’s difficult to have much empathy for characters so determined to destroy themselves, the bite of their losses and destroyed lives is still palpable.

Gambler’s Quartet is a strong and captivating first novel from Summerhill. I am interested to see what he comes out with next.

 

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