Heartbroken SWM Seeks Bookstore To Love

A year ago, I had my heart broken.

It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that there were signs the relationship was going to fail from the beginning. We spent too much time together from the very beginning, basing our foundation in dreams. When the fallout came, it was long and painful for more than just me-I wasn’t the only one hurt by the dissolution, and by far wasn’t nearly the one who suffered most. If anything, I got out easy, left with a handful of great memories to look back on fondly.

I am, of course, talking about when Wordsmiths Books closed in March 09.

The bookstore, which had made its home in downtown Decatur, GA (for which I’d served as Marketing, PR and events director since its inception, and had, with my friend/boss Zach, seen the project from birth to death)-had been a daily/hourly/to-the-minute part of my life, and the lives of others, for years. This isn’t about those others. It, like everything I write, is about me, and how I flew my book-weary (“weary”’s an easy word, here, “exhausted” is better, “totally damn over it” is infinitely more accurate) heart from Atlanta to New York closed off to the book industry entirely…and found true love.

Let’s be frank: when Wordsmiths closed, it sucked. IT. SUCKED. And it left a lot of people in tailspins. For me, I’d then seen the glitzy, glamorous side of publishing, but I’d also spent, at that point, way too much time nose-first in the filth of the book world and I was over it-over what I viewed as the big publishing houses’ failure to understand retail, and for most indie bookstores to understand that they need to…well, to try harder.

I was burnt out on galleys and grids and Barbara Walters’ stupid string cheese needs & her massive lack of book sales-all of it left me wanting to run as far away from publishing, from bookstores, from caring about an industry made around stupid ideas about monetizing dead trees and stupider ideas to monetize electronic dead tress, as possible.  This would prove to be difficult, partially because my life plans post-Wordsmiths involved moving to New York and partially because the majority of contacts I’d amassed in the years I’d had my head up publishing’s colon were all, well, in the book biz.

But I was damned if I was going to give my heart to books ever again.

Then I came across a little bookstore called Word in a little area of Brooklyn called Greenpoint that reminded me of Decatur, GA done properly, and everything changed.

Like the great poet Kelly Clarkson once said, here’s the thing: we started out friends. The store’s manager Stephanie, basically the world’s most famous bookseller thanks to Twitter-also a friend of mine, also because of Twitter, bless you Twitter-forwarded me a position that had opened doing events at Word right when I was moving. Timing didn’t really work out, but in the process I became intrigued by the bookstore that I didn’t really know.  My first free day in New York, I Hopstop’d my way to Greenpoint. This was way more difficult than it might seem. Queens, where I was living (and still live now), to Brooklyn is a three-train trek, one that I’ve become quite accustomed to now but then? Less than a week into New York, three trains was NOT something I was prepared to navigate. Also, as anyone who knows me can attest, my sense of direction is…nonexistent.

New York requires a lot of its residents in terms of directional navigation.

Three Trains.

Dear Gentle Readers, I got lost on the G train.

As such, hours after I’d left, I arrived in Greenpoint-shaken, sure, but relatively unmolested (HEY Y’ALL THE SUBWAY’S NOT THAT SCARY!).

I came with my heart closed to Word Brooklyn, the bookstore with the name shockingly only two syllables away from that of the bookstore I’d recently seen shuttered. A small corner bookstore in a hip neighborhood not gunning for hipster cache (see: only one Bret Easton Ellis book stocked, which should be a total deal-breaker for me, no Joanna Newsom on the stereo in-store), basically just being itself: trade paperback fiction-focused with a small selection of new-release hardcovers, thoughtfully-stocked sections, a small and smart staff…
Yeah, love was inevitable, wasn’t it?

And it happened, it did-the store’s thoughtful, purposeful existence, the incredible events that have found me, amongst other things, gushing to Kate Christensen about how hot her sex writing gets me, the staff that takes a constant interest in not just hot books, or just important books, but in books. If the Word staff are to be believed, books are the stuff of dreams-a sentiment that a year ago would’ve had me spit on the ground and say “bah, humbug”, but right now? Right now, yeah, I can buy into that, thanks to the friends I’ve made at Word.

A good independent bookstore should do more than sit quietly-it should foster community. Word does just that-beyond book-related events, they have a basketball team, a group Sunday run, cooking events, this awesome date night that involved classic cocktails. Also, they helped me find the perfect Valentines card.

Oh…oh, yeah, about that… I found love, too, on their bookstore matchmaking board, but you can read about that elsewhere.

I may give off the general perception of being callous if not apathetic, but it’s been through the Word Brooklyn community that I’ve come back to seeing the publishing world with new, fresh eyes-eyes that don’t see how much money’s wasted on Stephanie Meyer but rather what falling face-first into a great book, like Emily Mandel’s Last Night In Montreal, can do to alter life permanently. Like the Grinch when whatever it was that made his heart grow ended up happening…yeah. You can read this however you want.

Word Brooklyn celebrates its third anniversary this month, the same month that will mark a year since my last bookstore community, Wordsmiths Books, shut its doors for the last time.  In that time, I’ve made and lost friends, fallen in and out of love, and read books both great and horrible.  I thought I’d given up on being giddy about publishing…and that, too, has changed. And, ok, maybe Word’s not responsible for all of that (as I am, ya know, given to over-romanticizing), but it’s amazing the little part of your heart, and your life that can be filled by the perfect bookstore.

Hey, Word? Thanks for being just that. I love you, you complete me, etc etc. And happy birthday.
Also what’s up I’m your mayor on 4Square.

Russ weighs in…

Russ’s Top 3 Novels of 2009, In An Order That Is Completely Arbitrary But Also Alphabetical:

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (my review)

Goolrick did it and did it well with this novel: a period piece, a love story and a mystery with fantastic writing and a plot that twists and rolls and plays with strings tied to both the heart and the brain.

Last Night In Montreal by Emily Mandel (my review)

It took me nearly the whole damn year to finally read this book, but oh god I’m glad I did. This is a wrecker, a heart-stopper, a book that aches long after you turn the last page. It’s as much about how to leave as it is how to love, and Mandel’s second novel, 2010’s The Singer’s Gun picks up the loving and leaving.

Swimming Inside The Sun by David Zweig

What a first novel this is-it’s Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman writing about each other, really. Zweig conjures a musician struggling with his art and with himself, and in the process has crafted a psychological treatise on depersonalization (we’re all over-exposed to media and are losing ourselves), as well as a tale of an everyman in New York falling in love on every corner.

Catching up with: Rivka Galchen

There’s something sort of unfathomably awesome about being able to make the statement “while I was interviewing BGB-beloved first novelist Rivka Galchen to see what she’s been up to in the year since her awesome Atmospheric Disturbances was published, before her reading at the Guggenheim for the ‘It Came From Brooklyn’ music/literature event, Julian Plenti, aka Paul Banks from the band Interpol, came into the cafe and glared at us over his mustache for a very, very long and uncomfortable time.”

But it’s true.

I met up with the lovely, warm and witty Rivka Galchen on an unexpectedly cold New York afternoon at a small, comfy cafe on Madison Ave, mere steps away from where she would be reading later that evening, to be followed by the first public performance of Julian Plenti.  (If you’re interested in reading about that aspect of the night, check this out.)

I had assumed Rivka would be as downplayed and friendly as she was. I didn’t assume I’d be stalked by Paul Banks.

But it makes for a great story. Apologies for the way the interview trails off at the end-blame the surprise mustache cameo.

BGB Interview Podcast (!) with Rivka Galchen:

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Rivka, reading at the Guggenheim from a book that wasn’t Atmospheric Disturbances.   (Photo courtesy Kristina Weise )

Upon approaching Lorrie Moore

There are a select few people from whom I view a book recommendation, done properly (impassioned, fervent, urgently, usually over drinks), as a lifeline. A postcard into a world that person desperately desires me to glimpse, to join them in, to become a part of. A good book, a really good book not simply a “pass the time where the heck is the G train oh wait it’s the weekend and that means the G is like a unicorn” book, is a permanent addition to your working psyche, a tattoo of a set of words placed in a distinct order by another forever embedded in you.

(That’s some heavy-handed waxing right there, but it’s the truth and you know it so deal.)

From these select few people, I know the phrase “you have to read this”, said after 7 PM and in public places, is a huge deal. From these, book recommendations don’t come lightly, as a result of that friend everyone has (possibly even the same friend) who blathers on and on about, well, erm, The Kite Runner, telling everyone within earshot about how it’s “such a good book, y’all”. These people, one could say if one wanted to quote the 2009 social media phrase that pays, are “agents of trust” when it comes to recommending what to read.

One such person in my life is my friend Kelly, who I’ve known as a result of the magic that is the internet for ages now and under whose roof I lived when I first moved to New York. She’s getting ready to leave NY for greener pastures (literally-moving to Minnesota), and, out for drinks the other night, the conversation turned to Lorrie Moore-one of Kelly’s all-time favorite authors, with a new book out, a rare-from-Moore full-length novel A Gate At The Stairs, and someone I’d never read anything by. She insisted that Moore’s Who Will Run The Frog Hospital, at novella-length, was “perfectly crafted”,with every world “intentionally placed”.

(Full disclosure: not sure what Kelly’s actual verbiage was, but the essence of those quotes is 100% truth.)

I took a trip to my favorite friendly not-in-my-neighborhood bookstore, WORD, and the slim, tender size of the paperback version of Frog Hospital I purchased felt light and alive in my bag on the way home. I don’t read standing up waiting for the subway, ever (my balance isn’t good enough and I’m too clumsy, if I make a habit of reading while waiting for a train I’ll eventually meet my end toppling over onto the subway tracks), but I broke that rule and dived in.

The book is absolutely brilliant, beautifully crafted and paced in a way that causes progression to be less like page-turning and more like peeling. …Frog Hospital centers around two girls, Berie and Sils, told from the former’s perspective, and the summer when Berie was 15. Really, though, it’s a story about adolescence, growth, and, in the end, home and how it shapes a person.

What struck me most was Moore’s incredible use of language, her ability to tease and twist the very heart of a sentence:

Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore’s arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself; a house-shaped mine-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.

I know. I KNOW. Believe me, I know. One of Moore’s most impressive strengths is that she writes like the gorgeous red-head in your undergrad creative writing class who would string together lush words and compose stories that would drip off the page like jam, yet with Moore the words don’t just look and sound attractive, they hold meaning.

Since this is less about …Frog Hospital and more about my first bit of exposure to Lorrie Moore, rather than attempt to encapsulate the plot (too late), here’s an excerpt from my “I just finished this book and can’t move” email to Kelly:

i think there’s something inherently, intrinsically linked to the
female adolescent experience in this book that anyone not RAISED as a
girl-not meaning female-identified, no, but anyone very very much not
RAISED as a girl, in the society that is, the society of young girls
and their weirdness and awkwardness and quirks-will never have access
to. as such, the last chapter didn’t slay me, it merely allowed me to
close the book softly and breathe and accept what a fucking piece of
magic i’d just read. the end for me was her driving back from her
reunion, and if it’d ended there i’d have been happy but the story
wouldn’t have been told, it wouldn’t have ended properly, and i know
that.

So Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? Absolutely incredible 130 pages, perfect, flooring, a triumph of language.

Then I moved on to her new novel A Gate At The Stairs.

Oh, god, I hadn’t realized: see that cover there? The illuminated, well-crafted staircase leading into the air and eventually to a bright, shiny nothing? It’s unfortunate that that’s the perfect metaphor for the book itself.

A Gate At The Stairs is called a “post-9/11″ novel, which apparently is supposed to mean “discusses racial interaction, fear and tension in an awakened America”. If that’s the case, A Gate At The Stairs couldn’t be further from that label. For a tense, realistic pulse of race-relations in modern America, pick up H.M. Naqvi’s recently-published Home Boy. For a grab-bag of plot threads that never flesh themselves out fully, including the have-to-be-capitalized Ideas of Identity, Race, Love and War? Yeah, that would be A Gate At The Stairs. Feeling less like a novel written by a master of language and more like a very pretty series of digressions, Moore’s novel centers around college-aged Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a potato farmer, who becomes the nanny to a a restauranteur/chef and her husband. Moore would have us believe Tassie’s literature-obsessed, love-sick for a classmate and lost in her own impending adulthood, but somewhere she loses the plot (both literally and figuratively) and we’re left holding strings tied to nothing.

Very, very pretty strings, yes, very attractive strings that sing with heartfelt emotion, but nonetheless strings tired empty air. If this had been the first of hers I’d read, I’d be asking myself, and others (mostly others) right now “really? Really? This is the great, powerful, incredible Lorrie Moore?”

I feel, for those who have been waiting the 11 years since Moore last wrote, that I’m ruining a literary Christmas. I wondered if maybe my reading Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? immediately before beginning A Gate At The Stairs meant this disappointment was inevitable, but a hard and honest poll of friends have proven that to not be the case. The consensus is such:

Lorrie Moore is a genius of language, yes. A treasure of literature, and one who simply must be discovered. She writes the sort of stories, the sort of short fiction, that’s good enough to live on and live for. A Gate At The Stairs, stripped of its attempts at Important Themes, would have made for an intensely emotional short story. Stretched to over 300 pages (which isn’t what I’d consider “long” for a novel), A Gate At The Stairs feels bloated, tired, unimportant. And that’s a shame from someone who I’ve only recently come to realize is by far one of the most important voices and pens in modern fiction.

Fortunately, I have all of Lorrie Moore’s other works ahead of me.

100% Of My Love

I’ve found myself immersed in New York author David Browne’s new-to-paperback biography of Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century. Originally I picked it up in preparation for a book event I’m working on with WORD bookstore in Brooklyn on Sept 24 involving Browne, David Comfort, Greg Milner and Theo Kogan, but I’ve become absorbed in the super-conversational tone Browne uses to recount the earliest, haphazard way in which SY came together and their methodical crawl into the temple of noise.

Honestly, my first Sonic Youth album was Sonic Nurse. I know, I know, I know, I’m losing instant credibility here (the first time I ever heard my favorite SY song, “Mote”? Yeah, it was the Faint covering it live), but that one record-specifically its first song, the propulsive Kim Gordon vehicle “Pattern Recognition”-immediately caused me to start buying up as much of their back catalog as I could, and I’ve kept up with them since then.

Their newer stuff interests me less and less (Rather Ripped was slow-burning but soft (ironically, given the title) and The Eternal is a bit rote but may still yield some undiscovered classic), and, when I saw them live for the first time touring Sonic Nurse , it was the raging, blistered classic from their vaults “Brother James”, a song I had obviously been entirely unfamiliar with until that very moment Kim Gordon dropped to her knees on stage, bellowing, literally bellowing, the line “take my hand you might as well/we’re going STRAIGHT TO HELL”, that most floored me.

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Sonic Youth – Brother James

Forget the “dancing about architecture” stuff-I love reading about music. In some cases, like with James Brown or Animal Collective, I love reading about some music more than listening to the music itself. With the latter example, I scour fan forums, poring over accounts of Animal Collective fans having near-transcendent experiences with the band, and find the music to fall totally flat (kinda like if Dave Matthews discovered a sampler). But with SY and Goodbye 20th Century, I’m finding myself, oddly, falling in love with this band’s history through Browne’s fly-on-the-wall, hard-and-fast accounts of the way the band fell together, Thurston and Kim’s whirlwind marriage, their near-comical and Spinal Tap-esque inability to retain a drummer, etc-and, more importantly, falling in love with the old, old, old Sonic Youth stuff.

When “The Burning Spear”’s described in Goodbye 20th Century as the closest thing to a dance hit SY could have ever had, I had to seek it out. Noise+dance=win, to me.

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Sonic Youth – Burning Spear

“The Burning Spear” is absolutely amazing, and a song I’d never have hunted down if not for Goodbye, 20th Century, which I think is a greater literary testament to the band than, say, Dave Eggers writing 100 words on “Tuff Gnarl” for Starbucks. I also wrote a little about one of my other major Goodbye 20th Century revelations, SY’s “Ciccone Youth” project, over at Resonator. Sonic Youth’s history is a treasure trove of revelations for me (not the least of which is: Kim Gordon? Hot/amazing right now, used to be EVEN MORE OF A BABE), and I’ll always owe Goodbye 20th Century for the guided tour.

Let it all come down on the last night

I first met Emily Mandel at a book party after I’d just moved to New York. This is entirely sensible, as everyone in New York is in publishing, and everyone in publishing is always at a book party; as such, everyone in New York is always at a book party.

Mandel was introduced to me at this party by a mutual friend who’d recently read her debut novel Last Night In Montreal. The novel was described to me as being “strangely beautiful” by said friend, and upon meeting the slight, quiet, reserved and polite Emily Mandel, she didn’t seem the person who would have penned a first novel of the striking emotional scope and quiet grandeur I’d eventually find in Last Night In Montreal. I didn’t think this at the time; I’d not yet read Last Night.  All I recall thinking is “this Emily Mandel author person is nice but strange, I don’t even think she’s drinking. Who doesn’t drink at a book party?”

Eventually, though-and by “eventually” I mean in the past few months-Last Night In Montreal, published by small, growing with a firm handhold Unbridled Books, has become a sort of literary fever amongst people I know, people I respect, complete strangers, the New York Times.

I tend to avoid (and this is me admitting this here, this is like my AA, so be kind) hot of-the-minute works of fiction that I didn’t catch on their rise; falling under the hypnotic spell of, say, Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down would have seemed like a less personal experience to me if it’d happened after the Times’ cover feature had run.

So I met Last Night In Montreal on skeptical terms, finally cracking the book’s spine for the first time after I asked Emily to be my August author guest at my bi-monthly “Just Working On My Novel” reading series (shameless plug!).

On a rainy, muggy afternoon, I found myself instantly hooked.

At its core, Last Night In Montreal is a story about place. Lilia Albert leaves-and has always left. It’s what she does, it’s who she is, and it’s all she’s ever known, though she’s relatively unsure as to why. A willing participant in a muddled, cloudy kidnapping by her birth father when she was very young, Albert’s adult life has seen her traveling the entirety of the U.S. entirely guided by her own whims.

When Lilia decides to settle in New York, she, through a chance café encounter (there are many chance encounters in Last Night In Montreal, making it, amongst many other things, a book that speaks volumes to a belief in the romance of fate), meets Eli, a Brooklynite working on his thesis of dead and dying languages. They burn instantly, quietly, strangely, cohabiting in Eli’s tiny apartment and with Lilia at times out late at night chasing rainstorms with her waterproof camera. In Eli’s life, he’s felt surrounded by people who’d rather critique art than make it, and with Lilia he finds beauty in both her person and her passion. At night, she slowly unravels, in story after story, the discordant fragments she can recall about her past.

Then one day she goes out for the paper and doesn’t come back.

Throughout the rest of Last Night In Montreal, Lilia’s life slowly pieces together in fits and starts, in a thread that pulls Eli to chase her to Montreal via a letter from the mysterious Michaela. The prose is taut but lush, filled to the brim with writing that way too often punched my throat, grabbed my heart and forced me to put the book on my lap simple in order to catch my breath.

It could be said (and was, by Publisher’s Weekly) that the characters in Last Night In Montreal, Lilia specifically, are nothing more than amalgams of neurosis. I dispute that. Young Adult author John Green has made a career writing great books with the same female archetype-the “crazybeautiful”-in each one, and Lilia is by far a more fully realized, flesh-and-bone character, that also happens to have a very raw emotional linchpin. This is proven in many incredible moments throughout the book, but my favorite is also the first that made me realize the utter visceral reaction I would have to Last Night In Montreal. When she decides New York is calling her, Lilia is living with a woman named Erica in Chicago. She tells Erica she’s leaving for NY:

“Do you have a place to stay?”
“No.”
“A job?”
“I’ll find something.”
“There, you see?” Erica leaned back in her chair as if she’d just proved something. Her smile bordered on smug. “That’s courage,” she said, “whatever you want to call it.”
“You don’t understand.” Lilia found at that moment she had no patience for anything: for this city, this street, this relentlessly trendy split-level bar, the identically dressed waitress gliding between tables, this blue-haired girl across the table with the beer. The sadness of the waitress’s blue-green snake tattoo, circling forever on the same tired wrist…”It isn’t courage, Erica, it’s exactly the opposite. There’s nothing good about it. It’s exactly like running away from everything that matters, and I wish I could make you understand that.”

That scene, which continues, wrecked me-there, in about two pages, Mandel had encapsulated what, for me, was an incredibly personal feeling that I’ve been consumed with ever since I left Atlanta for New York-a feeling that only worsens when I’m “congratulated” on a “move” that feels at times more like I ran away from something than towards something. The Montreal-based Sub Pop band Handsome Furs’ song “Handsome Furs Hate This City”, with its lyrics of “oh, life is long…and hollow” and “baby we can get you anything you want anytime you want but you won’t know what it’s for” rang through my head as a soundtrack to this part, too, and I’ve since become a bit compelled to make a Handsome Furs-centric soundtrack to the book (though Mandel herself, over at Largehearted Boy, gives a great BookNotes soundtrack to Last Night).

The end of Last Night In Montreal I had to, unfortunately, read on the N train heading from Queens into Manhattan, due to not wanting to be a horrible human being and end up canceling on plans to, well, to read a book. I recommend, if this should happen to you too, that you choose book-nerd over good person, and keep yourself out of social interaction until you’ve turned the last page and let the entirety of the sweeping, emotional ending pass through you. Last Night In Montreal is a fully-realized piece of powerful literary fiction-as such, it demands your full attention, and unless you enjoy sobbing in public, you’d better give it what it asks for.

So, to everyone who I ignored by waiting this long to read Last Night, here’s your one for the year: you were right. So very, very right. Last Night In Montreal is the harbinger of massive works to come, I hope, because this book, tender and powerful though it is, only makes me want more.

Bonus Track:

Handsome Furs – Handsome Furs Hate This City

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An Interview with Joe Meno

My introduction to Joe Meno was through his heartbreakingly awesome novel The Boy Detective Fails – ZOMG! – check it out if you haven’t already. When the chance to interview Meno presented itself, I was on it like the proverbial thing that is on that other thing.   Oh, and be sure to check out Tim’s rave review of Joe Meno’s new novel The Great Perhaps.  Read on…

Baby Got Books interview with Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps

Baby Got Books: Your books, particularly the new one, are all very, very
character-driven-the characters are incredibly fleshed out and real,
with frighteningly well-thought-out eccentricities. Who are some of your
favorite characters in literature-”classic” or newer?

Joe Meno: Thanks so much for the compliment. To me, stories about characters, and their relationships to one another, so that’s where I always start. The ones that live on in my imagination always seem to have a real sense of complexity about them—Byron Bunch from Faulkner’s Light in August, Salinger’s Fanny and Zoey, Pecola Breedlove from Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I have stolen liberally from each of those authors for my own books and stories—how Faulkner uses place to reveal character, what Salinger does with dialogue and gesture, how Morrison can give the reader a new understanding of a character through a single object.

BGB: Regarding the new book-clouds and squids: did you have to do much
research into either topic to make the imagery/meaning factually
accurate (is it factually accurate?)

Joe Meno: I worked on The Great Perhaps for about four years—the research for the novels was pretty extensive, ranging from looking into the prehistoric giant squid, German-American internment camps, radio serials of the 1940’s, social bird dominance, Marxism, the development of the F-4 phantom jet, and epilepsy, and I tried to make it as factually accurate as I could, although that is never the goal I have when I write. I just kept following my curiosity, looking for connections between the lives of the characters I was describing and what already existed in the world. For me the most interesting thing I discovered was how prevalent and, at the same time, how little we know about epilepsy. In the book, Jonathan has seizures which are triggered by clouds, which seems pretty absurd. But in reality, there are all sorts of cases of people whose seizures are triggered by these incredibly specific cues—lights, movement, sounds, one woman in Germany is stricken whenever she hears a certain piece of music by Brahms.

BGB: What was the impetus for Boy Detective Fails? That novel ranks in my
favorite books of all time, ever, and it’s so funny and aching and strikingly original that I’d be remiss in not asking about how it came to be.

Joe Meno: Thanks again. I actually started working on the book some time after September 11^th, and at the time I was turning thirty, and in that way, the book is about how terrified I was that the world had become this random, violent, disorderly place. Usually, when I feel lost, I turn to books and music. In this case, I started thinking back to The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and bands like Belle and Sebastian: there’s something incredibly sad about children who are smart, which Belle and Sebastian seem to capture in their music. Like all my books, it was a way for me to come to some kind of understanding about the world: why mystery was something important, something necessary.

BGB: What books do you recall reading as a child that first pushed you to want to write?

Joe Meno: With my daughter, I’ve been revisiting some of those books, like Where the Wild Things Are, and Madeline, and Ferdinand, and you realize how all the basic storytelling techniques that work for adults are there: character, place, action, change. It’s actually really helpful to see that, even as adults, I think we go to books for the same reasons: to have a moment to daydream, to experience something outside of ourselves, and be reminded of the possibilities of things.

BGB: What music are you listening to as of late?

Joe Meno: I’ve been listening to a lot of Beatles lately. My daughter is a year and half old and she just started asking to hear them by name, which is pretty exciting. I feel like whatever mistakes I make as a father, that at least I passed on something important, like an appreciation for “Hey, Jude.” She gets very serious and sings the Na-na-na parts at the end of the song, and it makes you realize what the point of making art is all of a sudden.

If you’d like to have Joe Meno read a part of the first chapter of The Great Perhaps just for YOU, click here.

Gone Bookin’

This is the Javitz Conference Center in New York City:

In about 48 hours, it will NO LONGER BE THERE BECAUSE DAVID COPPERFIELD IS MAKING IT DISAPPEAR.

Kidding. The truth is only slightly less exciting:

In about 48 hours, book people from all over the world will be descending on the above conference center for what is, basically, the publishing industry’s version of a multi-ring circus-Book Expo America. Hundred thousand trillions, or w/e, of publishing industry professionals (read as: drunks) will all gather to discuss the future of the industry, and to marvel at Steven Tyler’s lips.

No, really, he’s going to be there.

AND SO WILL BABY GOT BOOKS.

That’s right-Baby Got Books will be the ONLY place to get the on-the-scene BEA coverage from Operative Agent Russ Marshalek…me. Yeah, third person, all that jazz.

I will also attempt to cover my own BEA afterparty, the BEA Tweetup. That may be really difficult as I’ll be drunk.

This is what my BEA schedule looks like:

Written on scrap paper, held in place with wine. Perfect.

See you starting Thursday.

Life on the shelf

I’ve been talking lately about books that operate, in some form or fashion, as a paean to a love of literature. One of the most excellent, moving books to cross my path this year on such a topic is The Whole Five Feet, by Christopher Beha.

Harper Magazine assistant editor Beha, undergoing an incredibly difficult time in his life-cancer-recovery, family death, a stillborn novel-decided to tackle the task of completing the collection of classic works known as the Harvard Classics, aka the “five foot shelf”. The chronicle of his excursion into the classics, the past and, ultimately, himself, is what comprises the brief, touching The Whole Five Feet.

I was really intrigued as to what Beha had found in the days and months following his completion of the Harvard Classics, and so he and I exchanged a few emails about his time living inside the five-foot shelf.

Interview with Christopher Beha

BabyGotBooks: The Whole Five Feet picks up as a very, very specific project and a very, very specific time in your history as a reader. What books did you read as a child/young adult that had a formative impact on you?

Christopher Beha: When I was young, my mother read a great deal to me and my two siblings –Madeline L’Engle, the Narnia books — and this was certainly formative. But I’ve never been much of a literary nostalgic. I don’t have particular affection, really, for books that meant something to me earlier in life, unless I can return to them and they still say something to me now, rather than serving as mementos. So I don’t tend to revisit or even think much about children’s books, even ones that were once quite important to me.

A friend told me the other day that she’d seen a statistic that suggested that the physical presence of books in a house is actually more important to a child’s development than being read to, and if this is the case, then I can fairly say that the set of the Harvard Classics on my grandmother’s shelf played a formative role in my early life, even though I didn’t start reading them until a few years ago.

Now, if we’re using “young adult” not in its more recent demographic sense of “pre-adult” or “late adolescent” but in a more literal way –in which case I maybe still am one — I can say with some certainty that the single most important writer in my reading life has been the late David Foster Wallace, whom I began reading as a sophomore in college and to whom I still return with great frequency now. He wrestled so movingly with one of the major issues I’ve tried to deal with in my book, that is, the place of the didactic in imaginative literature. Put in that clumsy way, it doesn’t sound like so thrilling an issue. Put differently: to what extent is literature supposed to teach you something about the world and your place in it, and to what extent is it supposed to give you an aesthetic experience, to provide what Goethe called the highest human faculty — the shudder of awe? Are these two goals in some opposition, or is it possible to do both in equal measure? In The Republic, Socrates says that all the knowledge in the world is useless without the wisdom to know what knowledge is for. Wallace, who was thought of while he was still alive as an encyclopedic writer, was so wonderful not because of his knowledge but because of his wisdom. Since his death, it seems to have become obvious even to those who once thought of him as cold and brainy that he was fundamentally a moral writer whose main concern was the possibility of connection. But that was there in the books all along. When I started reading the Classics, I chose quite actively not to read them in an academic way; that is, to read them for their wisdom, not for their knowledge. The result is that the book is not a work of literary criticism, but a book about the part that books can play in one’s life.

BGB: Since the completion of The Whole Five Feet, have you reflected back on your time with the Harvard classics-and, if so, what of the collection has stuck with you the most?

CB:On my website, I’ve been posting some things I wrote about the books while I was first reading them, and as The Whole Five Feet has come out, I’ve been re-reading some of the volumes, particularly the volumes of poetry. As my answer above would suggest, I’m more interested in what they have to say to me now, not in remembering what they said to me then. Just this morning I returned to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, which is fitting in this context, because it is in part about the extent to which you can or can’t revisit earlier selves, return mentally or physically to a past experience for nourishment:

That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence.

BGB: Your read of Ben Franklins’s Autobiography was refreshing to me-I’ve always read it (and commiserated with those who have similar viewpoints) an incredibly egotistical piece of work, and tend to miss the good stuff in it. Do you think Autobiography still is worth reading in today’s day and age?

CB: Franklin’s Autobiography is the very first work in the first volume of the Classics. I found it instructive, for reasons touched on a bit above, that the set would begin with such an unapologetically didactic work. You’re not going to get a shudder of awe from Poor Richard, but you might learn a few practical lessons. I found it worth reading at the time, but it’s not one of the volumes I would go out of my way to recommend. I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone to put down Shakespeare or Dante to pick up Franklin. Even from a purely practical point of view, I think you’d learn a lot more about how to live from Marcus Aurelius than from Franklin.

BGB: Do you feel, having subscribed to the Harvard Classics reason for being and stepping through them, bit by bit, that the five foot shelf achieves the purpose it was created for?

CB:The Shelf is idiosyncratic in many ways. To the extent that part of its purpose was canon-shaping, I think it was probably flawed to begin with, and it’s certainly outdated now. (I’m setting aside entirely the question of whether such a purpose is even worthwhile; I happen to think it is, but that’s a fight for another day.) To the extent that it’s purpose was to collect together a kind of curriculum and make it widely available, it certainly succeeded. And of course, it was a commercial venture — for the publishers, at least, if not for the editor — and it succeeded incredibly as that. Several people have written to me to say that after reading my book they tracked down a set of the Classics. I found this extremely gratifying. There may now be better ways to receive an all-in-one-place experience of the “great books,” but they’re aren’t many, and if my book sends others to the Five Foot Shelf, I’m thrilled.

BGB:What are you working on now?

CB:More than one writer friend gave me the very good advice to get as far along as possible on my next project before this one came out. I finished The Whole Five Feet nearly a year ago, and in the meantime I’ve managed to write a draft of a novel. A very messy draft, which will take much revision before it’s remotely presentable.

[text excised]

Sean Dixon’s The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal takes its seat at the banquet table in the middle of the venerable great hall of books that exist, primarily, to celebrate a love of reading. Tristram Shandy, Special Topics In Calamity Physics (yes I did just group those two together), The Book Thief, that Allegra Goodman book that I should probably read one day but at this point never will – all of these, in some form or fashion (and my list is sadly lacking, I know, I’m sure I’ll think of a bunch more to add to this list as soon as I walk way from it), elevate the act of reading, and the love of loving literature, to a high art form in and of itself. Even the forthcoming How I Became A Famous Novelist, which will assuredly make waves in the book world for the number of recognizable characters, has, at its snarky core, a love for the printed page. Canadian writer Dixon has that same bookish heartbeat pulsing through The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal.

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a giant, sprawling tale condensed to the barest emotional bones of a story about the bonds that books form, and destroy, between people. The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is the most elite, exclusive, and eccentric book club ever formed, ever-to the point where their meeting location changes based on what they’re reading, to encourage the members to have fully immersive experiences with their texts. As the book begins, there’s dissent and unrest amongst the group:

“All I know is,I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cozy little book, but I can’tread them anymore, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.”

That quote comes from Emmy, one of the initially least interesting members of The Lacuna Cabal who blossoms in unexpected, interesting and truly jaw-droppingly creative ways.

Into this meeting busts Runner Coghill (after a highly-auspicious opening scene involving her crashing through a floor), who proceeds to produce 10 stone tablets as a suggestion for their next reading selection.

From that moment on, The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a darkly comedic paen to friendship, love, and, most of all, books. Not to get all Reading Rainbow, but I won’t tell you what the group ends up reading, where they end up or how a little “fitzbot” robot ends up playing a vital part in the story. Linguistically, thematically, emotionally-every facet of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal sprawls and is loaded with inter-textual references and winking narrative play that’s fun and engrossing.

Sean Dixon maintains a pretty thorough blog about the book over at the Lacuna Cabal-I recommended making your way through the book once, and then checking it out.

Oh, Timmy Christ-an ANOINTED event

So you say that you just don’t want to attend your “average”, “every-day” book reading (yet you’d pay 30 bucks to see Amy Hempel and Chuck Palahniuk talk about sneakers)? You say you want entertainment and awesomeness and…and…Decatur’s favorite gay acoustic indie-pop folk singer Wayne Fishell, all as a part of your literary evening?

Well, by gosh by jingle, I have something for you!

As you had better know by now (because otherwise as a publicist I suck), Zachary Steele’s debut novel Anointed: The Passion of Timmy Christ, CEO is both funny AND has a very wordy title. But did you also know that he will be “in conversation” (not about sneakers) with one Wayne Fishell TONIGHT (April 23) at Bound To Be Read Books in East Atlanta?

From the write-up on the event’s Facebook page, which I wrote and is therefore brilliant promotional copy:

Zachary Steele’s book event at East Atlanta Village’s Bound To Be Read bookstore on April 23rd at 7:30 PM will find him in conversation with a fellow reader, fellow ponderer/questioner and fellow animal-lover who also happens to be a beloved, brilliant local award-winning folk-singer- Wayne Fishell, of the wayne fishell experiment. Their topics of conversation will range from Anointed’s deep, controversial and far-reaching themes of the corporation modern religious practice has become, how to market a book and what it’s like being a first-time novelist to, in fact, the best sorts of cheeses to pair with other foods. It will, indeed, be a night of a round table. Possibly incorporating an actual round table.

Both Wayne and Zachary are hilarious, offensive, witty and opinionated on their own, so this evening is certain to be informative and incendiary for anyone interested in writing, religion, or, of course, cheese. They might even duet on a rousing rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, so bring your rotten tomatoes, your communion wine and your ukuleles.

Go on. You know that little part of you that KNOWS what kind of a freak show this is going to be really, really wants to be up front and center and ask Zach things like “your character names…REALLY? Chipper? Do you ever think of things not cheese or baseball related?”

You know you want to. And you need to. Because I won’t be there to heckle him

Wet Marshy Land Mass Area

Fitting, in a way, that I pick a time around the passing of British novelist JG Ballard to even remotely attempt to tackle Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands. Like Ballard’s Crash (admittedly the only thing of his that I’ve ever read, and, for me, it’s enough), Wetlands uses base humanity (as in lust, desire, bodily functions, bodily fluids) to convey something more, something deeper. Unlike Crash…um, there’s no hot car-crash sex. Ok, so that’s a huge and distinct difference, but give me this one.

Wetlands is an infamous-in-basically-every-country story about a young girl-Helen Memel-who is hospitalized for, erm, an anal lesion. And, given the fact that a one-sentence summary of the plot can’t even come out without the phrase “anal lesion,” you have an idea about exactly how explicit Roche’s novel is.

Much has been made about Wetlands and its explicit, rated triple-x content, consisting entirely of the narrator’s musings on her sex life, her body and its functions. Within the first three pages of the book, there’s the most graphic, skin-greening description of Helen’s hemorrhoids that…well, granted, it’s the only literary description of hemorrhoids I’ve ever had this (mis)fortune of reading, but it, out of the gate, sets a tone of topics and language used to discuss said topics that inevitably will find many a reader who picks up the book out of morbid curiosity closing the cover before they ever see page number 5 (or possibly anything past 2).

And that’s an unfortunate thing.

What Wetlands masks with its immediate gross-out is an absurdly moving and painfully self-aware narrative of mental illness and need for emotional validation that’s as moving as it is grotesque. Helen Memel is an unforgettable, tormented and lost every-youth, and Roche’s done an admirable job wrapping her in filth as a reflection of the deepest, darkest, nastiest desires of humanity. If the act of reading a book that is a completely immersive experience reflects quality of material, Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, constantly inciting subconscious, guttural and visceral reactions from the reader, is of a high, high nature.

Some may disagree with me on this. Some may find Wetlands entirely too much to take to ever consider it “true literature.” To those naysayers, I simply suggest re-reading their copy of Ulysses and telling me it’s not 100% more disgusting than Wetlands-or, actually, just try some letters from Joyce to Nora on for size.

Those who run for the exits at the first sign of feces in Wetlands ends up missing out on a tender heart bearting what, underneath all the shi…ok, I’m not going to make that joke. But gah, I want to.

Compelled by practical, not romantic reasons

There are precious few books that beckon for a re-read immediately after the last page is turned. My relationship with Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife (published by the always-reliable Algonquin Books) has seen the book less beckon and more demand, forcefully and insistently, to be read again, a mere month after I initially finished it.

The set-up of this, Goolrick’s first novel (following his highly-acclaimed memoir The End Of The World As We Know It, which I’ve not yet read), is simple enough: Wisconsin businessman Ralph Truitt, seeking what we’ll call here a “new beginning”, places a newspaper ad reading as follows:

Country Businessman Seeks
Reliable Wife.
Compelled By Practical,
Not Romantic Reasons.
Reply By Letter.
Ralph Truitt. Truitt. Wisconsin.
Discreet.

He finds his “practical”, “reliable” wife in one Catherine Land who, hungry for more than the emptiness she currently knows, after a brief correspondence with Truitt leaves her life behind to join him in his.

Simple enough of a plot, indeed. But if plots are owls, in A Reliable Wife the metaphorical owls are not what they seem. In the book’s second chapter, at the first encounter of Land, Goolrick writes

Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she likes endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.

Instantly, a strange and ominous finality is draped across the image of Land, only further enhanced by the way Goolrick writes her precise activities, both mental and physical, as she, traveling by train from her past life to that of Wisconsin, Truitt, and her future:

She knew all the details of her new life. The details were not a problem. She had rehearsed them for hours and months. The phrases. The false memories. The little piece of music. She had so little life of her own, so little self, that it was easy to take on the mannerisms of another with ease and conviction. Her new self may have been no more inhabited, but it was no less real.

Still, despite the slow and early coloring of Catherine Land as a shade of gray (an interesting juxtaposition of middle-ground given her stated preferences for beginnings and ends, skipping the center entirely), the true threads of tale in A Reliable Wife unwind slowly and surely, as Goolrick, with a master’s pace, allows his story to be told by the characters in it.

And, speaking of characters-with Catherine Land, Goolrick has crafted one of the most compelling female characters in recent literary fiction. Not to give the game away too much, but her fire, passion, drive and sheer force of will reminded me near-immediately of Ron Rash’s Serena, from his powerful 2008 book of the same name.

When I went to see Goolrick read from A Reliable Wife a week ago at Barnes and Noble on…Broadway and something (oh come ON I’m new to New York, these cross-streets and avenues and all that haven’t gelled for me yet. Give me a Peachtree and a Sycamore and I’ll know how to find my way home), he read the second chapter-essentially the brief, compelling introduction to Catherine Land (the tip of the iceberg, really).

During Q&A with an appreciative audience (most of whom had, seemingly, read and loved the book), Goolrick revealed that Catherine’s surname was chosen to be indicative of her true lust: for power. At her base, in many levels, Catherine Land is a hole to feed, a hungry force of nature that is just one of the many facets of what makes A Reliable Wife such an incredible book.

As I said at the outset of this, I’m going to re-read A Reliable Wife very, very soon. And then, undoubtedly, again-it’s like walking head-first into blinding but gorgeous blizzard: ensnaring, harrowing, and an all-encompassing experience. Watch those best of ’09 lists for this one.

They all float down here

I’m the sort of person that enjoys doing things that really, really freak me out. Roller coasters. That giant thing at Huntsville Space and Rocket Center that sends you plummeting into nothingness and slingshots you back up. The “Super Mario Brothers” movie.

So when I saw a Largehearted Boy review of Will Elliot’s The Pilo Family Circus that begins with this:

The Pilo Family Circus is horrifyingly surreal, the story of clowns who take an apprentice into their otherworldly circus. Elliott has earned comparisons to Chuck Palahniuk and Stephen King, but his fresh creative (and chilling) approach to fiction stands on its own.

I was almost, but not quite, obligated to hunt this book down. Then I saw the cover.

A clown. An effing clown, glowing eyes, stupid creepy smile-the scariest possible thing in the world.

Game. On.

The back-story to The Pilo Family Circus, Elliot’s first published novel, reads almost like twisted dream itself. After dropping out of law school and being diagnosed as schizophrenic, Australian Will Elliot began experimenting with sleep deprevation and other self-torture methods to produce ideas and concepts from the brink of sheer insanity.

And this book, finally brought to American soil (after a multiple-award-winning Australian tour of duty) thanks to Underland Press, shows it. In a nutshell, The Pilo Family Circus is the story of Jamie, a boy who finds himself trapped amongst the lost and adrift souls in a horrific, hellish circus. After being slowly broken down by his new family, a group of freakish, sadistic clowns, Jamie splinters an alternate personality as JJ, a clown that uses youth and innocence to protect himself. Jamie spends his time attempting to pull at the thread of what the Pilo Circus is really about, with its grotesque freaks, a matter manipulator that can turn flesh into the most disgusting things, and the seemingly mindless mob of sheep that are the circus’s patrons, called “tricks”, but immediately upon applying his clown make-up all semblance of self disappears as JJ takes over-and horrific things begin to happen.

There’s not much, not much at all, that I can say about The Pilo Family Circus without giving away bits of the gorgeously grotesque layers of theme and meaning that Elliot lays, one on top of another, within the book. Addiction, sadomasochism , um…copulation with ferns…it’s all there. And it makes for a terrifying hell-ride of a read.

Futureproof: An interview with N. Frank Daniels

Reading N. Frank Daniels’ first novel futureproof left me shaking and stunned, as though I’d just collided head-first with solid concrete. Thinly-veiled references to places I encountered during my adolescence in Marietta, GA are juxtaposed with Daniels’ intriguing, infuriating narrator slowly growing up and failing, time and again, to be in the right place at the right time to advance himself in his life, all adding up to a story that (yes I’m going to say it) serves as my generation’s Catcher In The Rye-namely, a hyper-focused narrative on the all-important meaninglessness of what happens during our teenage years.

Despite the rampant and blatant language, drug use and (at times violent) sex within futureproof, I’d recommend it as a high-end young adult novel for a teenager looking for a book that holds more truth about their world and speaks to their experiences or those of their peers, or if they genuinely need a book that won’t talk down to them. That said? This is a violent, at-times-hard-to-read, incredibly powerful and emotional experience. It’s a wild and worthwhile ride…straight into the pavement.

Frank was kind enough to take some time out of his hectic schedule and life to answer a few questions (admittedly written when I was still deliriously book-drunk over having just finished futureproof, adrenaline pounding my veins as a result-read the book, you’ll see what I mean) for Baby Got Books.

Baby Got Books interview with N. Frank Daniels, author of futureproof

Baby Got Books:I was first pointed towards futureproof as a result of it being compared to one of my favorite authors of all time, Bret Easton Ellis. In the book, though, I see less of Ellis and more of what Catcher In The Rye would be if it still had the ability to speak to modern adolescent experience. What books would you point to that you first read that really, really moved you?

N. Frank Daniels: I’ve always been surprised that more people haven’t made the connection between the style I employed in futureproof and that of Catcher. That book was hugely influential on me, and was, aside from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, probably the book that impacted me the most in high school. Also Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows. That book still destroys me. The last time I read it was a few years ago when I read it aloud to my son. Still breaks me up. In fifth grade as an assignment we were to write a letter to a favorite author. I chose Wilson Rawls. He never responded. I never blamed it on him though. I always figured the publishers in all of their infinite wisdom found something lacking in my 10 yr. old writing ability.

BGB:Where did you grow up, and how much do you feel the events of your childhood influenced futureproof?

NFD: Well, as Luke does in futureproof, I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs. Prior to that I lived in bumfuck south-central PA. I always like saying ’south-central PA’ because despite the fact that I did grow up close to Harrisburg, which is geographically south-central PA, somehow when you say ’south-central’ it evokes grit. Thank you Tupac (who isnt even from Cali), Eazy E, and Snoop. Yeah, south-central Pennsylvania is more Amish and northern rednecks than it is anything else. Also a giant hub for Richard Petty fans. So it wasn’t much of a change when my parents moved us down to Atlanta. Except without the Amish. They stay up North, but for some inexplicable reason decided at some point to migrate west to Ohio.

BGB urely on a personal level, I have to tell you I was immediately hooked, from the level of “I can completely relate”, when I read about the school that you in the book call Peckerbrook. I know the school you’re talking about-as a high school theater kid in Marietta we did many a one-act competition there-and I always had the same thoughts about the juxtaposition between the theatrical side and the rest of the school. Nicely written.

NFD:Well, Russ, this isnt really a question, but I feel I need to respond anyway. First, thanks for the compliment. Second, if you went to Marietta H.S., and were there at the same time I was attending ‘Peckerbrook’, then you will also relate to how much we hated you bastards, with Eric Zeier at QB on the football team, with his unbelievable numbers and his goddam 10,000 touchdowns a season. But, just like the Amish, he ended up in Ohio, and the Cleveland Browns destroyed his NFL possibilities. And believe it or not I took no solace in that. It just felt like he was yet another casualty of the Atlanta bad luck I’d grown accustomed to by that point.

BGB:The character of Luke-I’ve talked to some people who’ve read the book who feel that Luke’s hell-bent on self-destruction. My read on him is that he’s simply exposing a side of modern teenage angst that too often gets either ignored or glossed over. What’s your take on your character’s desire to end himself in any way possible?

NFD:You know, this is an impossible question to answer honestly. I don’t know what to say on this. I mean, I wrote the book, the book is admittedly semi-autobiographical, and I am somehow supposed to analyze whether or not the main character is suicidal in small increments or just a symbol of modern, completely fucked-up teen angst?–I guess I think it’s both. Because as teen angst has been allowed to progress over the decades since we haven’t been forced to work in factories at the age of eight, we have been given more time to realize what a shitty hand we’ve been dealt. And if that doesn’t make you suicidal nothing will. I also think that Luke wants to live and can’t figure out how to do that in a positive way because he’s never been given a positive role model in that arena. So it becomes live in this fucked up way or die in that fucked up way. In the end, remember, he only chooses life because his son is born and had no choice in the matter. So Luke really only ends up continuing to live for THAT life, that innocence that has yet to be corrupted.

BGB:The book’s graphic depiction of the circle of abuse of/by and addiction to drugs hit me really, really hard. I literally put the book down shaking and stunned. Were any points of futureproof more difficult emotionally to get down and then go back and edit/tighten up than others?

NFD:So strange to get this question now, as I was asked something very similar in an interview conducted by Frank Reiss of Atlanta’s A Capella Books on a GPB radio interview that aired this past Sunday. I can speak more freely here though, since I couldn’t cuss on public radio. Yeah, writing parts of this book fucked me up big time. There are parts of this novel that I still have trouble reading because they trigger a despair in me that is bottomless. I remember my wife telling me that I needed to walk away from writing it because it was so obviously traumatizing me. She would have to hold me at night for hours sometimes. When you are really tapping demons like this it is really hard to reconcile your stable life with the chaotic life being depicted. My wife has since left me and there are still nights when I don’t know how I am going to make it through. This book is in many ways a testament to everything that has ever haunted me, and its repercussions still reverberate through my life now. Even answering this question now is traumatizing because it forces me to acknowledge everything that I try to force myself to ignore on a daily basis. Is there a fucking therapist in the house? Please tell my wife I am dead on the inside…or do therapists not do that?

BGB:In the back of futureproof, you thank “the futureproof 500.” For those who don’t know, your book has a really interesting story about how it came to be a Harper-Perennial paperback. I’m sure you’re sick of talking about it, but would you care to summarize, briefly, how it came to catch the attention of a major publisher?

NFD:You’re right, I am sick of telling this story, Russ. More than anything because I only recently realized that the ’story’ behind futureproof’s being published was the main reason why HarperCollins decided to pursue me to publish this book. They saw this story–me wrecking my entire life in order to get my lauded novel ‘traditionally’ published–as a good way to sell it in the market. I guess this was what was decided on as what would be my book’s gimmick. Look back on any of my blogs prior to August of ‘07 and you can see how disillusioned I am with Big Publishing, in that they couldn’t see how futureproof would speak to many readers. I only realized a few weeks ago that their main interest was in the immediately exploitable angle of my having gone from self-published wunderkind to mainstream published phenom. These people could give a shit about the real emotion and craft behind the book. They want to make the fast buck and get out. Which is fine, I guess. But it makes me angrier and even more disillusioned, and makes me question motives and true intentions even more. But maybe I was born to fill that place. I just want to meet one motherfucker embedded in the mainstream publishing industry who is what (s)he says (s)he is.

BGB:you submitted a brief piece for one of the most interesting collections I saw last year, Santi-The Lives of Modern Saints. Talk about how you came to be involved in that collection and how your piece in that came to be

NFD:I became involved with that anthology in much the same way that I got my book deal with Harper–I was approached by the people behind the scenes. Unlike my deal with Harper, I don’t have a bad taste left in my mouth, in gratuitous need of a sorbet to get that taste out of my mouth. Luca Dipierro, the editor of Santi, read a self-published copy of futureproof, and asked me if I’d be interested in both contributing a story as well as co-editing the anthology with him. I jumped at the chance. I will always jump at the chance to do something outside of mainstream publishing like that. Unfortunately the shitty economy has closed the doors (for now) on Black Arrow Press (Santi’s publisher), but I would still recommend that anthology to anyone, and not just because I am its co-editor. That anthology of stories is still one of the tightest, most-well-written anthologies I have ever come across. When I saw the roster of writers Luca had secured for that collection I immediately signed on. It was a win-win situation. I still wish I had the resources open to me to make that collection more well-known. Please link it to Amazon or whatever when you publish this.

BGB:What are you reading AND listening to right now?

NFD:I am currently severely limited in my reading, as I am couch-hopping like a shell-shocked kangaroo and am therefore very limited in how many books I can carry with me. But I was in L.A. last week for the final reading of my book tour and while out there I met with Henry Baum, of Self Publishing Review (selfpublishingreview.com). He gave me his recently re-released THE GOLDEN CALF, which I find to be just stellar writing. I’d recommend it to anybody. I would also be reading Jerry Stahl’s PAINKILLERS if he had offered to give me a copy (I read with him at my L.A. Book Soup reading). But he didn’t. So I’m not. I was disappointed by that at first, then realized it was probably a blessing as it would have made my duffel bag another pound heavier and my back is breaking as it is.

Music-wise I’m not as limited, what with downloadable tunes. I’m currently obsessing over old pre-Postal Service Death Cab for Cutie. And Fleet Foxes, who I fear have seen their zenith come and go, because really, how far can bluegrass go, outside of the odd Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack?

Books by Southwest (or “more news from nowhere”)

The publishing industry model as a giant, archaic dinosaur lumbering towards its own demise? Maybe so, maybe not, depending upon who you are, where you stand and who cuts your checks. At the very least, our beloved bookish folks can be counted on to give good face at the current epicenter of the new & social media world, namely South By Southwest (aka SXSW), going on in Texas right now, yes?

Not so. From a spine-tingling, enraging and enlightening recap of a publishing industry SXSW panel by Booksquare:

Let me be clear. Absolutely clear. Not one word spoken in that session, either from the panelists or from the audience, was new or innovative.

You seriously, absolutely MUST read the rest of this post here. It both lays very clearly on the table how much room for innovation exists in the book world and makes it clear that we should all just listen to Kreepie Kats.

today i wrote this thing about this collection

I’ve been strangely fond/jealous of the Brooklyn-based writer/poet/hipster lit media it-boy Tao Lin for some time now. His first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, was about, um…hang on, I have to consult my notes…ok, here, I found my review of that book, written right after I read it:

Tao Linn’s (sic) first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, if listed by plot points, would include: Elijah Wood, dolphins, pizza delivery, sadness, more pizza delivery. At times painfully mundane, at times razor-sharp with emotional truth, Linn’s novel is the sound of ennui on an iPod being listened to on the morning train to somewhere. Is this the result of the 20something overeducated hipster putting pen to paper? Yes. Does his voice sound like anyone else’s ever could, or would? No.

Obviously, I was so struck by the book that I couldn’t even spell Lin’s last name properly. He didn’t care, however, and sent me this as a “thank you”:

In case you can’t make it out, that’s a copy of Lin’s first poetry collection, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am, inscribed to me and with a picture of a squid and a puffball looking thing.

Given how frequently Lin pops up on Gawker these days (he recently sold profit shares to help finance his forthcoming novel and there’s a bit of bluster that he might be the force behind my current favorite “scenester” blog, hipster runoff), I could probably sell that on e-bay for a pretty penny, or at least a $50 American Apparel gift certificate. Also given his cultural near-ubiquitousness (at least for those of us whose sole definition of “culture” is “what’s going on at Galleycat at the moment?”), it makes sense that Tao Lin would swoop in and take some of his over-educated under-paid chain-smoking vegan friends and publish them, as Muuumuu House.

(Full disclosure: I want to be one of Tao Lin’s friends.)

The first of those books is Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, a prose and poetry collection by Ellen Kennedy. Despite the fact that her bio lists her as living in “northeast Pennsylvania”, I’d peg her as a Brooklynite on par with Tao Lin, if, you know, I had enough of a schema about such things to make such statements.

I say that because Ellen Kennedy writes the sort of pop-culture stream-of-consciousness-if-your-consciousness-is-both-emotionally-wounded-and-deficit-of-attention prosaic poetry that instantly reminds me of Tao Lin. In fact, if I didn’t know Tao Lin was Kennedy’s publisher, I would write to Tao Lin and say “Tao Lin, you need to read Ellen Kennedy. She has a poem in her book called ‘I Went to the Grocery Store Today’ and the first line goes ‘I bought blueberries, raspberries, pears, grapes, a pizza/and a giant orange’. You would like it. You are a lot more famous than I am and so you can probably afford to buy a copy but I am sure she would send you one.”

That’s what I would say, but I needn’t.

Kennedy’s collection obsesses over the mundane-sex and bodily functions and food and heartbreak. Hers, akin to Lin’s and very much a product of an emergent literary scene, is a writing style that requires appreciation of self-absorption to the point of laceration, pretense, and heartbreak. It’s conversational and tossed-off and possibly trite and also possibly brilliant at the same time. If beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, why can’t those obnoxious Moulin Rouge themes of truth and love and justice and brilliance and all that other stuff be, also? Poems like “I Like Every Time We Have Sex” are everything and nothing, depending upon the way you read them. Some will see nothing, some will see everything.

The two pieces that bookend the collection, “Eoody Mobby” and “Norm Macdonald”, are rapid-fire Gilmore-Girls-dialogue paced celeb-namechecking pieces of Gawkerpoetry that basically serve as gatekeepers for the intimate flesh-and-blood beating in the rest of the book. If you can make it through the door, you’re the type of person who needs what Kennedy’s writing is serving. If random dips into Woody Allen taking out cash from an ATM machine seem too much like fan-fiction to you, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs will be lost on you. It’s all just a matter of perspective. For me? That title poem broke my heart.

Book by its cover and all that

I’m pretty sure Tim really didn’t like Beginner’s Greek as much as I did. I say this because when he traded the book in as “used”, he gave me a nasty look and made some snarky comment about “never listening to my recommendation again, ever” and then forced me to wash and wax his car while making dinner for his entire family.

Some of the above things are true.

Regardless of anyone else’s opinion, I loved it. Beginner’s Greek, the debut novel from 48-year-old former Times editor James Collins, wrench’d my heart and tear’d my eye and provided one of my favorite quotes for my GoodReads page: “If you look over to see what the beautiful young woman sitting next to you is reading, and it turns out to be a book about angels, then you can with perfect justification refuse her entry into your life.”

That said, and having been in a bookstore at the time of the book’s release, I don’t think it ever really took off the way it deserved to. Critics fawned (unless they didn’t, at which point their opinions don’t count right now), people gasped, ladies dropped hankies and men bent to pick them up and everyone I suggested read Beginner’s Greek swooned (unless they didn’t).

So it’s fitting, then, that the book’s publisher should want to breathe new life into it for its release in paperback this year. In publishing, “breathe new life” always means “try to target another market.”  The original US hardback release of the book seemed aimed at readers of quirky, off-set modern fiction.

Now, Beginner’s Greek makes absolutely no bones about being a full-blooded “he gets the girl but bumbles along the way” love story. But, dear reader, the atrocity and insult done to Collins’ work by this new paperback cover…

…just breaks my heart and causes me to choke a little.  It was originally viewed by yours truly as the first page of a press sheet that had me, literally, screaming “what are they doing?”

I can understand the desire to prominently feature quotes from paragons of literary criticism like Entertainment Weekly, but really, that Meg Ryan-movie cover? Oh, wow.

So please, please, if you haven’t read Beginner’s Greek, I implore you to do so, despite the fact that it now looks like something you’d find between the greeting cards and the dish washing soap at your local grocery store. Don’t judge a book by…

Anointed

In the immortal words of the beloved Irish poet Bono: Hello Hello hola hola. I’m elated to join the illustrious ranks of the bloggers no no scratch that out I mean writers no no cross that out too I mean bloggers…bliters?, no that doesn’t work…bloggers. I’ll stick with bloggers.

Take two:

I’m elated to join the illustrious ranks of the bloggers for Baby Got Books. As you may or may not know, for full disclosure’s sake, since we’re all journalists around here and value intergrity, in my former role as Marketing/PR director for Wordsmiths Books, I collaborated with the BGB folks often, so this feels like a natural fit.

This week sees the launch of Wordsmiths’ Zach Steele’s first novel, Anointed: The Passion of Timmy Christ, CEO, published by Sandy Springs, GA’s own Mercury Retrograde Press. It’s a religious satire/comedy/labeled “speculative fiction” by the publisher/labeled “sci-fi/fantasy” by the Publishers Weekly review, concerning itself with the big business of religion. If you like Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore, Anointed is your cup of tea/coffee/rum. The book officially hits your local Hudson News airport bookstore on March 3, but Wordsmiths will be throwing a typical Wordsmiths-y book launch for Anointed this Saturday, Feb 21st. The whole shebang begins around 7/730-ish, but it’s basically going to be a “show up whenever, start drinking once the drinks show up, eat when the food shows up, and pretend to pay attention to Zach as he reads from his book and make sure you laugh in the appropriate places” sort of thing.

Oh, I should mention: in my new capacity doing freelance book PR, I’m the publicist for Anointed.

Oh, I should also mention: I’m quite good friends with the publisher. Her name’s Barbara. I hear tell she makes mean brownies.

Oh, and also: I’m serving as a sort of “project manager” for the book’s massive online marketing campaign.

Oh, and to quote Steve Jobs at the end of every MacWorld other than this last one: one last thing. I’m the one who brought Anointed to said publisher’s attention. So I kinda acted as the agent? Only, you know, without making a lot of money on the deal and saying “ciao” in that Eddie Izzard voice.

To keep the aforementioned journalistic integrity of myself and the credibility of Baby Got Books intact, I, the publicist for Anointed and former employee of Wordsmiths, did a brief interview with Zach about his book for this book blog right here. So when I say “it’s a hilarious romp through the corporate-driven world of religion and you should buy ten copies and read them all simultaneously”, you know I mean it.

A completely non-biased and properly-punctuated interview with Zachary Steele, author-type person of Anointed: The Passion of Timmy Christ, CEO

Baby Got Books: Describe in 5 words the plot of Anointed. In another 5 words, tell me why i should read it again. Then, in 5 more words, tell someone who hasn’t read it why I should read it again.

Zach Steele:Reluctant man becomes corporate Christ.
Because it’s freakin’ funny, man.
You won’t get it anyway.

BGB: Who all would you say you ripped off in writing Anointed? And by ripped off I mean in terms of both intellectual content and money.

ZS:I ripped off a lot from God, you know. He’s pretty much the author of the Bible, right? So, I have to include him. Aside from the that, it was pretty easy pickings with Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore, Kyle Watson (though you wouldn’t have heard of him) and some finely-detailed intellectual hotness from Marisha Pessl. As far as money, that’s pretty easy. I ripped off my publisher, but she won’t figure that out for a while, and likely all of my readers (once they’ve read it and realize what dreadful crap it is).

BGB: On a scale of 9 through 10, how awesome is Anointed?

ZS:All of my scales go to 11, so that’s pretty much where I’d put it. It completely redefines “awesome”. In fact, the use of “awesome” is now outdated and has been replaced by “Anointed”. As in, “Man, that sure was an Anointed movie, wasn’t it?” I would wager that, when I am old and fading away–or perhaps even dead already–people will still be discussing how Anointed completely altered the methodology of writing and saved the publishing industry. But I’m pretty modest about it all, actually. I’d rather not discuss it any further.

BGB: If you end up on Bill O’Reilly, and he’s all screaming in your face and cutting your microphone’s signal and stuff without listening to you at all, what will you have for dinner after?

ZS:After? How about during? I’ll be sidestepping his questions while waving a fork in the air and taking my time dining while he rants about stuff I surely won’t be listening to anyway. Steak au Poivre with Dijon Cream Sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, a nice Chardonnay, and a bowl of cheese to throw at him when he stops talking. No wait. I wouldn’t do that to cheese. Maybe I could get a soufflé or something instead. After, I might go for an Icee.

BGB: In terms of your writing style, what books would you say influenced your second novel? oh wait you haven’t written it yet.

ZS: Ha! Good one coming from the man who hasn’t even written his first book yet! Look out David Sedaris! This guy’s a riot!

BGB: You solicited quotes about the book, aka “blurbs”, from your Facebook friends. Are you just too lazy to actually hunt down famous people?

ZS:”Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” ~Winnie the Pooh~ There’s a famous quote for you. Happy?

BGB:Your press materials all begin with “Satan and the Antichrist walk into a bar”. Tell me a good joke about a pope and a rabbi. Or a pope and a rabbit.

ZS:The Pope (not ‘a’, you idiot) walks into a bookstore to look for a book about Catholicism, because he doesn’t understand any of his followers, but before he can make it to the section oddly marked “religion”, he is distracted by a sharp sound from the back of the store. When he goes to investigate, he finds a large cage with a fluffy, bouncy rabbit inside, and a sign atop the cage that reads, “Cadbury Rabbit, Bookstore Bunny”. The Pope smiles and leans to the cage and says to the rabbit, “Hello there, little rabbit. I am the Pope. How are you today?” To which, the rabbit bounds in a quick circle, stomps a foot in a loud thump, stares at the Pope, and says, “Nom, nom.” The end, joke over. A POPE AND A RABBIT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? Do you get paid to come up with these questions or did you pawn it off on an 8-year old?

BGB: How freakin’ awesome is your publicist?

ZS:Question #7 may answer that better than I can. It’s very difficult to answer this question though, now that Anointed has completely redefined what is understood to be “awesome” and taken over its use entirely. I suppose I can say that my publicist is less than Anointed, more Anointed than “awesome” (in its former form), but not as Anointed as my book minus me. Hope that helps.

Anointed: The Passion Of Timmy Christ, CEO is officially available only at the launch party on Saturday, Feb 21st at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA, and will then be available at your local library for free reading on March 3rd. Ask for it by name.