Click, read, buy

1) The Rumpus has been kicking it out 70s-Heart-style. So many of their offerings help me think better. Here are a few of my recent favorites:
The Throwaways by Melissa Chadburn
When Barbara Jean Was Missing by Rebecca K. OConnor
Night Shifts by Elissa Wald
Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship by Emily Rapp

2) In other excellent news, Roxane Gay, one of my favorite essayists, is now their essay editor. This can only mean good things.

3) Here are some books that I am looking forward to reading:
At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson--I've heard many of these stories on various science fiction podcasts and I hope that they will be as good on paper.
Baby Geisha by Trinie Dalton--I really enjoyed Wide Eyed in 2010.
Three Messages and a Warning Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris. N. Brown, editors--Short stories from authors I've not heard about before, published by Small Beer Press. Sign me up.
Nurse Nurse by Katie Skelly--Being the jerko that I occasionally am, I never picked up Nurse Nurse while it was in minis. Now we can get the book from Sparkplug Books and support Skelly and a great press.
The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford--NYRB rarely lets me down. Plus an afterword by Kathryn Davis, what could be better?

4) Dang, Red Lemonade has republished Lynne Tillman's Haunted Houses? I loved that book, especially when the characters kept going to the movies. If you aren't going to get it from the library check it out in this way with one caveat--if you buy the print version, expect the cover to be wimpy. Seriously, the pages of Zazen were creamy and strong, but the cover curled like dead leaf in the autumn of everyday toting. Come on with that.

5) I am working on two things right now that I am excited about. This is unusual and probably means that both are terrible writing. Still, finishing things is the main thing for right now.

What is your thing for right now?

                                                 

hit submit; the library; Shiga's Empire State

I submitted my first flash story to [redacted] today—my first fiction pitch ever. Though I know that I won't hear anything about it for several months, I still feel very excited about the whole thing. I know that the story will be a tough sell, but I am hopeful.

///\\\

When it became clear that more time in front of the computer wasn't going to be good for me, I went to the library. I finally returned some books I've had for months and headed to Fiction for something to distract. As I wandered the stacks, composing a post about how browsing in the BPL Central branch is not pleasurable because there are so few books by the authors I am interested in and many, many copies of Lauren K. Hamilton novels, I ran across two small press books in the New Fiction section that I was drawn to: Isle for Dreams by Keizo Hino, published by The Dalkey Archive Press and Follow Me Down by Kio Stark, published by Brooklyn's Red Lemonade. I remembered that there was a Karen Joy Fowler story collection from the 1990s, Black Glass, which was of course not on the shelf in Fiction or SF, but in the basement stacks. After filling out the slip I sat down to read a comic and wait for it to appear on the shelf in the Popular Library.

///\\\

I read Empire State by Jason Shiga.  The first thing I noticed was the book's color pallet, matte shades of red and blue, done digitally by John Pham. The story skips back and forth through time and the colors help place the reader in time. While this worked well as a narrative strategy, the colors felt drab to me and sapped the settings, such as the library, Lake Merritt(?), and NYC, of strength. Since this book is so much about the contrast between places, and the connection between where we choose to live and the way we live our lives, the coloring choice ultimately reduced the power of the story. The book begins in Oakland, CA and follows the main character, a homebody named Jimmy, on an impulsive, love-fueled Greyhound trip to New York to visit Sara, Jimmy's best friend and crush. He convinces himself that the trip is a step towards adulthood, but from the moment he arrives in New York, wide-eyed and Greyhound-stinky, it becomes clear just how much growing up he has to do. Overall, Empire State, while cute, felt too slight for the treatment—more like a mini than a book. More time spent fleshing out the days and nights on the bus and how naive Jimmy responded to them would have served to make the book more satisfying.

reading ZAZEN and complaining

I am reading Zazen by Vanessa Veselka right now and it is making me edgy. I can actually feel the anticipation in my arms and legs, buzzing away while I am on the subway or getting into bed at night. Twitter made me read the book and it is very good so far. It is about a woman who is having "lifetime problems," as Zane and I might say to one another, and her problems are not being helped by the bombings that begin to crowd her imagination and then her reality. It also has many good vegan cupcake jokes.

I think my reaction comes from both the building dread in the book and the fear that it will stop being good. When you have a burnt out, kind of crazy, first-person, narrator, there is a chance of that their misery will overwhelm the action of the story, and just become repetitive. Each time Veselka veers towards that she pulls it back in nicely. But what if, next time, she doesn't? WHAT IF? I guess I have just been reading too many pretty good books--A Visit from the Goon Squad and Our Tragic Universe,* I'm looking your way--when I want to be reading great books.

Toting Zazen around confirmed my conclusion that the covers of these Red Lemonade books do leave something to be desired. Not the design, but the paper stock. They just curl and curl, making me look like a sloppy book mangler with pancakes for hands.

*Both of these were excellent airplane books, however. Except the part where there is a dead brother and I cry and cry.

Two things about Lynne Tillman's Some Day This Will Be Funny

1. In this book there are stories that include characters making tea, drinking tea and watching the things in your house move or not move ('That’s How Wrong My Love Is'). This is important to me. it is diffcult to write about thoughts and the spaces between them.

2. Sometimes Tillman uses words like "trousers" and "make love" and loses me ('Love Sentence'). But then, the perfect description of a feeling will pull me right back in. She writes about psychoanalysis and I don't care. It is too New York to be real, so I discard it. In 'The Substitute,' however, the character's time with the analyst, scraping away at him and herself, is part of an altered reality, so it works for me.

i am a house

After much crybabying-around I changed my password for the BPL and went a-holds-placing. This weekend I was rewarded with two books instantly on the hold shelves for me, proving yet again that I am either a resourceful lady sleuth or simply so out of step that I get what I want when I want it. (A good strategy for the urban brunette with many needs).

I walked and walked this weekend with Lynne Tillman's new collection Someday This Will Be Funny. The first story that I opened to, “The Way We Are,” is exactly the thing, my coping and not coping and living. It is also a story about going to the movies in another country. I am dipping in and out of the book, rationing it while I cook foods and clean corners and plan. To distract myself, I ran to the aforementioned shelves and got Haunted Houses by Tillman (1987) and seemingly the only freely had, non-library-use-only, non-The Hearing Trumpet copy of Leonora Carrington's fiction in English in NYC—The House of Fear. I took one of the houses, the haunted one, with me on the train and almost missed my stop because, really, who wants to get off in Midtown when you've got a good book and a seat and possibilities?

I am trying to write fiction, I am writing fiction, really for the first time these days. Since I've returned from Vermont I feel excited about trying new stuff, about failing and failing and finishing thoughts. It is distracting and fun and awful. When I feel like talking I talk too much and when I don't will stare at you all spooky. Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, my mind is elsewhere.