Fiction: Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt

2009 has been an incredible year -- a breakthrough year, perhaps -- for fiction that pushes the boundaries of storytelling and, certainly, of genre. Perhaps the most visible of these was China Miéville’s incredible The City and the City. If you liked that one and have been hungering for something that approaches the tone and originality of Miéville’s most recent creation, it seems quite possible to me that you’ll also like Laird Hunt’s fourth novel.

In most regards, the two books are almost nothing alike, but for a few important things. In both novels, dynamic young authors have reached beyond what is usual and what has been done to tell their imaginative – and entirely different -- stories in new and compelling ways. In both of these examples, they are mostly -- though not always -- successful.

Like The City and the City, Ray of the Star (Coffee House Press) is set in an imaginary European city. In Hunt’s book, however, the city we think of most is Barcelona. The stories are as reflective of the cities they’re not set in, as well. Where The City and the City is skillfully cold and distant, the world Hunt creates here seems to vibrate with warmth and light.

Fiction: The Chief Factor’s Daughter by Vanessa Winn

I had the rare delight of traveling to the city of Victoria on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island twice during the time I was reading The Chief Factor’s Daughter (Touchwood Editions). It’s not that I’m a super-slow reader, either. Rather, my life aligned in such a way that, not only was I in the city on which the action in Vanessa Winn’s debut novel centers, I even had cause to sit near historic monuments and some of the locations in the book and just contemplate the rush of time while her story swirled through my mind, fresh: still at the ripest point of enjoyment. That’s the biggest pay off on historical fiction. It takes your hand and walks with you. Actually strolling the sites was an unnecessary bonus, but it enhanced even that.

Though The Chief Factor’s Daughter starts off dry and distant, the rhythms of the lives of Winn’s characters sweep you along, if you let them. Winn has worked closely with history and it shows. Her detail has a rich and authentic feel that doesn’t always lend itself to breathtaking storytelling. Never mind, though. Once the reader is immersed, it’s an easy story to find your stroke with and swim along.

The daughter in question is Margaret Work, a proper young lady raised in good English fashion who is socially hampered by the matter of her birth. Though Margaret’s father is the chief factor at Fort Victoria, her mother is Métis and so Margaret and her siblings find the pool of potential mates in Victoria to be limited. To make matters more difficult, Margaret has set her mind on a marriage that will involve her heart, something her mother approves and so we find Margaret in her mid-20s and heading ever more deeply into spinsterhood.

The Chief Factor’s Daughter is a quiet, elegant book. It deals with an important piece of regional history but, even that falls second to what this book does best and the thing that all successful historical fiction must do: it transports us out of time, out of mind.

New This Month: The Midnight Guardian by Sarah Jane Stratford

On the off-chance that you’re not yet totally sick of vampires, debut novelist Sarah Jane Stratford serves up an interesting new take on the blood-sucking mythos. A sort of alternate history, with vampires, The Midnight Guardian (St. Martin’s Press) opens on Hitler’s Germany, right at the bloody center of the Second World War. By 1940, Hitler has managed to kill all the vampires in Europe and Britain’s vampires are outraged and incensed and determine to disrupt the Nazis from their course of destruction.

Stratford’s fiction clearly owes a debt to the most senior of vampire lore weavers: both Bram Stoker and Anne Rice though, certainly, her creations show little resemblance to the Twighlightish teens of recent efforts by others. This may be in part due her education: Stratford holds a Masters degree in medieval history from the University of York and the depth and clarity with which she approaches these aspects of her material really come through. You get the feeling that, in building her particular lore, Stratford is on very solid ground.

Stratford’s story is tight and she can certainly write but one just wonders if -- really? -- the world is ready for still more vampires after we’ve seen so very many. Still The Midnight Guardian is a worthwhile and in some ways thought-provoking book.

New This Month: When Autumn Leaves by Amy S. Foster

You might not have heard her name before but, chances are, you’ve heard her words. Amy S. Foster has written lyrics for Josh Groban, Diana Krall, Eric Benet, Michael Bublé, Destiny’s Child and Andrea Bocelli. Even with that kind of star power and international coverage, When Autumn Leaves (Overlook Press) is Foster’s debut novel.

The magic in When Autumn Leaves is sweet and charming. Even, in an odd way, calming. The book takes place in a tiny Pacific Coast hamlet called Avening, where there is magic in the every day.

When Autumn Leaves is a gentle, intelligent book. Foster’s premise here provides opportunity for escape, but her lovely prose brings it right home. A lyricist’s touch, a poet’s heart and the gift for helping us delve into our own personal magic.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

No one reading this lives under a rock, so I won't insult you by announcing that Dan Brown has a new book out. Heck, by now you’ve either read the book or a few of the reviews. So why am I bothering to review a book that you’ve either read by now or, if not, have little interest in reading? I suppose because, having read the book and some of the reviews myself, I’m starting to wonder if some of the reviewers actually read the same book I did.

Look, I thought The Lost Symbol (Doubleday) was really good. But it's not another Da Vinci Code, and it’s not the second coming of the genuinely brilliant and innovative Angels & Demons. It’s probably somewhere in between, if you want to know the truth. There’s no question Dan Brown can write, although his pace sometimes feels more like a rocketing roller coaster than a novel, and his characters, well, they’re sketched more than written. And I have to say, the man loves his italics, which he seems to think is an acceptable form of punctuation.

As I sit here, thinking about The Lost Symbol, this is what pops into mind: There’s this joke about some guy who says, “I was thinking in my head the other day...” blah blah blah. My kids always laugh at that -- because where else would the guy think but in his head? And there was a TV ad for Cadillac a few years back in which the announcer said something like, “This new Cadillac is longer in length than ever before.” I thought then (and still do), longer in length? As opposed to what? Longer in color?

I mention these because they illustrate the level of The Lost Symbol. The book feels, oh, it feels like we’ve all been here before. It feels so logical (in the Brownian world, at least) that it borders on the obvious. Ancient symbols. Langdon in his dependable tweed jacket, thrust into a situation he doesn’t understand. Clues that should be clear to him from the moment he sets eyes on them, except if he did there’d be no suspense (and thus, demanding that we suspend our disbelief from a much higher hook). Skeptics galore and faux bad guys. A couple of sacrificial lambs. And the inevitable, beautiful, and brainy girl whose life’s work is somehow threatened by the villain, who in this case isn’t quite a religious freak but whose freakiness is almost a religion to him. Except that Judeo-Christian artifacts and dark rituals are switched out for American-slash-Masonic ones, it’s all so damn familiar.

I can’t say I didn't enjoy The Lost Symbol. I got on the ride, I bought into the whole thing, I had a good time, and when it was over, it was very, very over. But can I ask -- and no one has, to my knowledge -- why Brown felt the need to add the ridiculous plot twist? I won’t spoil it for those two or three of you who haven’t read the thing. But my God, Dan! You had the book chugging along at a pretty good clip, and then you toss in that bit about -- well, you know -- the thing about the victim and the villain’s shared past -- and it was like you kicked me square in the pants and hurled me off the train. What gives? Let me tell you a truth your editor was afraid to: You absolutely did not need that bit. And I'll tell you something else: Your book would’ve been a lot smarter if you’d found another way to link them -- or just forgot about linking them altogether.

Here’s the thing about books like The Lost Symbol (and then I’ll shut up). You can’t argue with its sales. But in the end, it’s not really The Lost Symbol that anyone’s buying. What they’re buying is The Next Book From That Da Vinci Code Guy. The sales, in this case, have nothing to do with this book. I mean, Brown could have written a romance novel and sold a million copies the first day.

Come to think of it, maybe Brown should try that next time. Then, at least, the ride would be one we haven’t taken before.

Fiction: Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk

First of all, as near as I can tell, the title of Thomas Trofimuk’s latest novel has nothing at all to do with the 1978 album by Little Feat. It’s also a bit of a red herring. The main character in this novel set in a contemporary mental institution in Spain isn’t actually waiting: he thinks he is the explorer, inexplicably come to ground just at what he seems to feel is the worst possible time.

Waiting for Columbus (Doubleday/McLelland & Stewart) is told from three clear perspectives: the man who is not Columbus himself, comfortable with his delusion if not always his incarceration; his nurse, Consuela, who against her better judgment finds herself romantically drawn to her unusual patient; and Emile Germain, a French Interpol officer on the trail of an elusive prey. His path leads to Spain where Emile finds a mystery larger than the one he anticipated.

This is Trofimuk’s third novel after The 52nd Poem and Doubting Yourself to the Bone. All three have been memorable and quite worthy of the deep notice and attention they’ve been paid. Trofimuk is a writer worth watching, he has a delicate touch and a lot to say.

New in Paperback: The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley

The Right Mistake (Basic Civitas) begins:

“Yeah, brothah,” Billy Psalms said before he downed half a paper cup of Blue Angel red wine, “Freddy Bumpus made a big mistake when he married Vanessa Tremont.”

“Vanessa Tremont.” Martin Orr repeated the words lustfully, licking his lips and moving his head to silent music.

The other men sitting around Socrates’ card table nodded and raised their paper cups in a toast.

Whether you love or hate Walter Mosley’s work (and these days it seems, there are more people who love it than those who do not) you have to admit: the man knows just how to plop you right into the middle of a scene. It’s one of the enjoyable things about just about any Mosley book. His characters are never wooden. They race across the page. They live, they breathe. And, sometimes, they die.

Fewer people die in The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow than in some other Mosley novels. That might even be why this book has not received the attention that’s been given to other recent releases by this author. It’s a thoughtful book, in many ways, focused as it is on a group that Socrates and his friend, Billy Psalms, put together and call the “Thinkers Club.” Made up of people from many walks, together they ponder life’s big questions and Socrates -- ever the philosopher -- encourages the Thinkers to look closely at issues of personal and social responsibility as they bring change to the world and themselves.

I know, right? Not the stuff of which bestsellers are made. And yet, The Right Mistake is thought-provoking fiction. Even, sometimes, compelling.

“In the face of gangs, drugs, poverty and racism,” Publishers Weekly wrote in a starred review, “Mosley poses the deceptively simple question -- ‘What can I do?’ -- and provides a powerful and moving answer.”

New Last Week: John Dies at the End by David Wong

At a time when many writers are pushing at the edges of the novel, trying to redefine what the word means and what it is, David Wong sort of does. This comes in part from the publication history of his first novel, John Dies at the End (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne), one of those weird Internet success stories you hear about. In fact, this might be one of the best yet.

John Dies at the End started out as a Web serial in 2004. The story appeared in book form for the first time in 2007, as a paperback from “Horror and Apocalyptic Book Publisher” Permuted Press, an independent publisher whose area of specialization you can pretty well guess at. John Dies at the End would have fit right in with their line.

The action in John Dies at the End all centers around soy sauce, a mysterious and fairly unstable drug that alters not only the mind, it seems to have an effect on time and eventually opens a portal to a pretty hell-like place. After you take it, Wong tells us, “You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden.”

The story is a first person narrative from the viewpoint of the author who actually isn’t David Wong, but says he is throughout the novel. In real life (and it’s not even a secret) he is National Lampoon contributor and Cracked.com editor-in chief Jason Pargin. That CV might make you think that John Dies at the End is hilariously funny. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s deeply disturbing and even horrifying. And then it’s funny again. In between there are some starkly -- and even surprisingly -- human moments. And all of that sounds like too much for one little debut novel to hold up under, but wait: this is a book that reportedly had over 70,000 downloads when it was free on the Internet. Since it was free, you might think “big deal,” but think again: try to give away 70,000 of anything on the Internet. I promise: it won’t be as easy as it sounds.

And so, is John Dies at the End high art? Not exactly. Or maybe, not even. But it’s interesting, compelling, engaging, arresting and -- yes -- sometimes even horrifying. And when it’s not being any of those things, it’s funny. Very, very funny. Next stop for David Wong (or maybe he’ll be back to being Jason Pargin by then), who knows? But, whatever it is, I feel very confident that a lot of people are already waiting to see what he dreams up next.

New in Paperback: 2666 by Robert Bolaño

The book so many media outlets called the literary sensation of 2008 is likely to be one of the most awaited paperback publications of 2009.

2666 (Picador) was the book that occupied -- some have said preoccupied -- the last five years of Robert Bolaño’s life. Initially published in Spain to wide acclaim the year after the author’s 2003 death, the American edition -- translated by Natasha Wimmer -- brought the literary world to its knees. 2666 won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Translation Prize and was a New York Times bestseller. “A masterpiece,” raved Time. “Strange and marvelous and impossibly funny,” said the Los Angeles Times, while Slate said 2666 had “the confident strangeness of a masterpiece.”

A philosopher, a reporter, an author and a detective take on the mysterious disappearance of many woman over the course of many years. That is, of course, condensing the nearly 1,000-page novel quite beyond where it can be compressed. Never mind: if you wanted to read 2666 last year but couldn’t face that big ol’ hardcover, think it over again now. The book is still almost impossibly intense, deliciously convoluted and starkly unreal, but in paper, it’s much, much easier to carry around.

New Last Week: The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

Stephanie Barron, Jane Austen mystery maven (Jane and the Barque of Frailty, Jane and the Ghosts of Netley), here turns her eye and heart to another well-loved English writer: Virginia Woolf.

The White Garden: A Novel of Virignia Woolf (Bantam) is a clever tapestry of past and present: think The Hours, but with a strong focus on the weeks between Woolf’s mysterious disappearance and the recovery of her body in the River Ouse.

Well-imagined and beautifully rendered, Barron’s nine Austen mysteries have all been bestsellers, but it’s difficult not to think this wonderful book steps things up.

New This Month: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

On a recent visit to my local independent bookseller, I noticed a handsome stand-up display based on the work of Jane Austen. It was filled with beautifully bound works with lovely cover illustrations. Collectors editions of Emma and Mansfield Park were nestled in between selected versions equally beautifully produced editions of books written in the style of Austen’s work, a sub-genre that controls a huge share of the market.

And then there it was, within this unashamedly Regency display, hardly looking at all out of place with its brilliantly executed cover artwork, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Quirk), the only hint that something was amiss being the tentacles flowing down the side of the hero’s face like so many rubbery locks.

And you see this display and you can’t help but say, “What’s wrong with this picture?” It just bubbles out of you.

While it’s difficult not to ask “why” when you see all this Austen-ish loveliness lined up in this way, it’s not a question many people are asking these days. Quirk has dropped two books into the sea of Austen take-offs this year. This new Sea Monster book and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies earlier in 2009. Both have been massive hits. I can’t imagine that anyone could have anticipated how big this thing would get.

There’s a great deal I could tell you about this book, but none of it will alter what you already know and feel. You’re either open to this sort of playfulness... or you’re not and, probably, you already know into which camp you fall. The most basic information, then, can come from the back of the actual book, which sets things up quite well and which I can’t resist quoting:

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters expands the original text of the beloved Jane Austen novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, and other biological monstrosities .... It’s survival of the fittest -- and only the swiftest swimmers will find true love!

Love it or hate it, ambivalence is not an option. And as far as crass spoofs go, this one is very, very good.

New This Month: Climbing Patrick’s Mountain by Des Kennedy

If Des Kennedy’s name is familiar to you, it’s just as likely to be due to his work as a journalist as it is to his novels. Not that they haven’t attracted a following: they have. But these are sweetly esoteric books. Lingering looks at matters of importance in the middle of life, all cored by a sensibility in rough tune with the environment. As a journalist, however, Kennedy is the go-to guy for matters of the garden. With all of these things under consideration, Climbing Patrick’s Mountain (Brindle & Glass) is not a surprise, but it’s often a delight.

Ex-pat Irishman Patrick Gallagher is a world-class breeder of roses. And a bit of a nut. Under duress, he accepts an invitation to return to Ireland to lead a garden tour. Along the way he encounters ghosts past, threats present and a future that often seems to sweat under the pressure of uncertainty.

Kennedy is a fine writer -- a novelist, indeed -- and Climbing Patrick’s Mountain is an enjoyable ride. It manages to be both a taut and gentle book. It will be loved especially by those who are entranced by all things Irish.

New Last Week: Spooner by Pete Dexter

In the advance reading copies of Pete Dexter’s long-awaited new novel, Spooner (Grand Central), the author himself not only tells readers what took so long, he also manages to tacitly tell us exactly why he’s worth the wait:

As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There was many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s more -- including a Dexter-style summary of the trouble to the business of publishing a book three years late can present -- but you get the idea. Dexter is vivacious and his voice is light and bright but he manages at the same time to bring his words home with some weight. Not everyone can manage this neat feat: light and bright and weight.

To my mind, the story in Spooner is less important than the journey. We are immersed in the troubled life of Georgia-born Warren Spooner. A coming-of-age story on one level. The tale of the possible connections between men on another. But this is Pete Dexter, so it’s really none of those things. And more.

There are whispers that Spooner is at least semi-autobiographical. “The novel he was born to write,” says his publisher. Never mind that: the book is terrific. If you’ve not read this National Book Award-winning author before, Spooner is a great place to start.

Author Snapshot: Gyles Brandreth

A Snapshot of ... Gyles Brandreth

Most recent book: Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile (Touchstone)
Born: 1948 in a British Forces Hospital in Germany
Reside: London and Paris
Birthday: March 8th
Web site: oscarwildemurdermysteries.com


What’s your favorite city?
London, because in my head I am living in the 1890s when London really was the capital of the civilized world. (Followed by Paris, New York and Venice.)

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Walk along the north bank of the River Thames, from Chelsea embankment, where my hero, Oscar Wilde, lived, to Tower Bridge, near the Old Bailey courthouse where his public life was brought to an end.

What food do you love?
Italian.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Dates. I cannot stand them!

What’s on your nightstand?
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, my favorite comfort reading. And a pencil and pad in case inspiration strikes in the night!

What inspires you?
The amazing imaginations of the great late-Victorian writers: Wilde, Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson -- and from a generation before, the mind and spirit of Edgar Allan Poe.

What are you working on now?
My next Oscar Wilde mystery. He knew everyone and traveled widely: his life was so turbulent: the possibilities are infinite!

Tell us about your process.
I am disciplined. I plot carefully. I visit all the locations while I am plotting -- all of them, whether it is a morgue or the Sistine Chapel. And then I write at the computer, from 7:30 am to 7:30 pm usually. I aim to complete 1,000 words on a good day.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
The London subway. As chance has it, I am writing this on my laptop at Baker Street Station. Oscar Wilde used the London subway: it was very new in his time.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was about 8. My first book was an attempt at a life of William Shakespeare. I was 11 at the time!

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Running -- or ruining! -- the country. I used to be a politician.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
None. I am constantly dissatisfied! That said, I am honored and excited by the fact that my mysteries are now translated into 19 languages and appear around the world. From Peru to Russia, people are fascinated by murder and the story of Oscar Wilde.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Being able to disappear into a different world, a different era, and to meet extraordinary people, without having to leave my study.

What’s the most difficult?
Beginning. Starting the next one. Writing page one.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Is everything you write about Wilde and his world true? Yes is the answer. All the details are accurate. The mysteries come from my imagination, but the world they inhabit is real.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
How does it feel to be Number One on the New York Times best-seller list, Mr. Brandreth?

What question would you like never to be asked again?
Is that really your age?

Please tell us about Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile.
It’s a murder mystery featuring some of the most fascinating figures of the late-19th century: from Wilde and Conan Doyle to P.T. Barnum and Sarah Bernhardt. It takes you to the Midwest and Paris and places of laughter and darkness.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I am descended from the last man to be beheaded for treason in England and from the first man to identify Jack the Ripper.

Graphic Novels: The Color of Heaven by Kim Dong Hwa

The Color of Heaven (First Second) is the third book in a coming of age trilogy by celebrated Korean manhwa artist, Kim Dong Hwa. In an interview with Newsarama earlier this year, Hwa said that he was deeply influenced to tell the mother-daughter story in his Color of Earth trilogy by the aging of his own mother:

Since I was very young, I’ve been interested expressing the growth and change (mentally and physically) of a girl in manhwa form. I consider the process of a girl becoming a woman one of the biggest mysteries and wonders of life. And one day when my mother was sleeping in her sickbed, I looked down at her wrinkled face and suddenly realized that she must had been young and beautiful once. Then I started imagining her childhood and youth. What would she have looked like in her 60s, 50s, 40s and etc.? These thoughts inspired me to put my hand to the plow. Ehwa is the result of tracing back my mother’s youth.

Delicate, poetic and sometimes deeply -- though obliquely -- sensual, The Color of Heaven concludes the story of young Ehwa and her own mother. Older in this third book -- she’s a young woman now -- Ehwa is anticipating a love of her own and softly rebelling against the boundaries and realities her mother is trying to set.

Reading, one understands the thorough esteem with which this artist is regarded in his own country. It’s a delight to be able to all three books in the 2003-published trilogy -- The Color of Earth, The Color of Water and The Color of Heaven -- in their English translation.

New in Paperback: The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig

About a year ago, January Magazine contributing editor, Lincoln Cho, really liked veteran novelist Ivan Doig’s The Eleventh Man, out in paperback this month from Mariner Books. Here’s what he said about Doig’s book when it was first out in hardcover:

There’s something sweetly sentimental in all the testosterone lurking not far beneath the covers of The Eleventh Man (Harcourt), a football novel that melds into World War II from Ivan Doig (This House of Sky, The Whistling Season). That would seem a contradiction in terms -- sweet sentiment. Masses of testosterone -- but somehow it’s not. Somehow it works in a book that manages to be epic in scope and fact.

The January Magazine review is here.

New Today: The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott

Paris, 1815. After Waterloo. A Scottish medical student makes his way to the city by mail coach. He is traveling there to study anatomy. In his care are “three rare fossils and the bone of a mammoth.”

During the journey he is joined by a magnetic woman. They speak at length and over many miles. Finally, she tires. “I can’t keep my eyes open any longer,” she tells him. I shall sleep. You should too.” And he does.

When he wakes an hour later, she is gone, “along with my travel bag and the small case containing the specimens. She had left me only my identity papers and my wallet, which had been placed under my arm as I slept.”

This is the set-up for The Coral Thief (Spiegel & Grau) a beautiful and oddly haunting novel by Rebecca Stott (Ghostwalk). Cut loose without his belongings but strangely intact, the young man sets out to find the woman and discovers instead a city on the verge of itself.

The Coral Thief is quite wonderful. Part love story, part mystery, part steampunk-tinged discovery of the scientific. As PW said in their starred review, it is “a novel of ideas.” One finds it difficult to think of higher praise.

New Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Two years from now -- perhaps three -- you will stop and remember this day. You will be at a saturation point with everything to do with Freemasons and you’ll think back fondly to the point in time when you had only the vaguest idea of what one was. (“Free who?”) You’ll be tired of hearing how wonderful Dan Brown’s books are. You’ll be tired of hearing how stinky they are. You’ll be weary of hearing how this author is single-handedly rescuing a genre. And you’ll be fed up with hearing about how he’s killing it.

While the brouhaha is fairly new and meltingly hot, however, consider this interesting stuff: in North America, The Lost Symbol’s first run of five million copies is the largest ever. And in a bold move for a big publisher, Random House is releasing the hard cover and the e-book versions of The Lost Symbol at the same time, providing a big, visible test case around e-books at a time when such things are of extreme interest. (Don’t ever forget: the sky? It’s falling.)

New in Paperback: The Toss of A Lemon by Padma Viswanathan

We loved The Toss of A Lemon when it first arrived in hardcover last year. In fact, we loved it so much, it was selected as one of January Magazine’s top books of 2008. Here’s what we said about it at the time:

Padma Viswasathan’s debut novel pads in on little cat feet and rips you along. You don’t realize you’re on an epic journey in the midst of a generational saga until you’re well along and it’s far, far too late to turn back. Not that you’d want to. Not that you even could. Inspired by the author’s own family history, we join Sivakami in a village in India in 1892, the year of her marriage to the healer, Hanumarathnam. She is ten. What astonishes here is Viswasathan’s virtuosity. In The Toss of A Lemon, we join India at a time of great social and political upheaval. Nevertheless, we experience this only at a distance. The way, in fact, Sivakami might experience it. Our concerns are more immediate, more domestic, though never more mundane. The marriage of a daughter, a granddaughter. The obedience of a son-in-law. The disturbingly progressive thoughts of a son. These concern Sivakami exclusively and, with her as our proxy, they are all that concern us, as well.

With the paperback released this month, Mariner makes the book even better. How? Well, now it’s easier to take along!

January Magazine’s original review is here.

Fiction: The Year That Follows by Scott Lasser

I love the dust jacket for The Year That Follows (Knopf). Look at it, right over there. A beauty, isn’t it? Really made me want to read the book.

And, oh, how I loved the first chapter. Kyle, a young New York City professional, is late for a morning meeting. At the World Trade Center. On September 11. He’s in the elevator when the plane hits. And the moment it happens is one of the most thrilling pieces of fiction I’ve read in a long time. It’s just a few lines, but when I’d read them I actually thought: “Holy crap.” Scott Lasser has a terrific writing style: crisp, knowing, even cunning. He knows how to set up a scene, what to reveal, and what not to. Love that.

After Kyle’s death, his sister, Cat, who lives in Detroit with a son of her own, decides she needs to find Kyle’s son. Though Kyle and the child’s mother weren’t together when he died, Cat feels the need to fashion a connection with his flesh and blood. At the same time, she also wants to reconnect with her father, who lives in California. And she longs to connect with someone in a romantic way.

The book, as you’ve probably surmised, is all about connections. The ones based on blood. The ones forged by law. The ones bound by love. It really is a beautiful little book. And when I finished it, I should have been satisfied, swooning. Instead I was angry. I was at my neighborhood pool when I finished the book, and I almost threw it in.

I was on the ride for all of it. I went with the various connections. I went with Cat to California to see her dad. I went with Cat when she rekindled a relationship with her only serious flame, a high school boyfriend who became a doctor. I went with Cat when she finally found Kyle’s son. I even went with her when she convinced the child’s grandparents to let her have him, raise him, far away from them.

And then Lasser ruined it. Killed the whole thing. I won’t do that for you now, but I will say that there are several ways to end a book. Usually, the best way is to say as little as possible, avoid the nice neat package tied up with string. Better to leave the reader some room to imagine. But Lasser really blows it here. Not only does he give us too much ending, he gives us the worst possible ending. I keep trying to figure out why in the world he would have torpedoed his own book. I keep wondering if I’m missing the point. But I’m sure I’m not. Actually, what I think is that Lasser missed it.

There are books I don’t like, and that’s fine. I don’t expect to like everything. But this book I really loved. I admired it, and I admired Scott Lasser. Until the moment he betrayed me -- and worse, until the moment he betrayed the characters he’d so lovingly created. The Year that Follows could have been a sweet book, almost a fairy tale. Damn him.

Fiction: A Novel by Ara 13

On the Web site for Fiction: A Novel (Covington Moore) there is a link to Wikipedia’s explanation of metafiction. It is explained thus: “Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually, irony and self-reflection.”

Somehow Wikipedia’s explanation encapsulates Fiction: A Novel rather perfectly. I’m still not sure that’s a good thing. I acknowledge that it might be, but for more sophisticated palates than mine.

I understand there are places in writing -- spots in the craft -- for work that is so self-aware it is experimental, in a way. Work, one might say, that pushes the envelope. For many of us, however, just getting through it is painful. This may just be a matter of perspective.

I’ve thought about all of this a lot since reading Ara 13’s novel and here is what I came up with: when I read, I’m looking to be filled. My life is challenging; is filled with challenges. I don’t require -- or even desire -- strongly traditional story-telling, but neither do I want to expend large quantities of energy on the books I choose. I give the reading experience time. In return, I want the book I’ve chosen to experience to reward me in some fashion. Fill me, as I said. Share knowledge, even of human nature or spirit or heart. A review from an outfit called The Trades Book Review said this about Ara 13’s book, “Fiction has a lot to say, and it takes a heady mind to process just what the message is at times,” and so I think it’s possible my own mind is just not that... er... heady. If you think yours might be, here’s what the publisher says about Fiction: The Novel:

Father Daniel journeys deep into the harsh forest, with romantic notions of converting the fierce Oquanato cannibals to Christianity, but his heroic sense of mission clashes with the farcical antics of sophisticated savages, whose beliefs originate from a peculiar source -- a source that rattles Daniel into an introspective, yet dubious narrative.

New Today: Tall, Dark & Fangsome by Michelle Rowen

Apparently our appetite for post modern vampires is insatiable. The latest comes from Michelle Rowan who also brought us literary lights such as Bitten & Smitten and Stakes & Stilettos. If you’re sensing a theme here, you’re right. I love the way publishers talk about books like this. And this one is too good not to share. Check it out: from the back of the mass market paperback Tall, Dark & Fangsome (Grand Central):

Sarah Dearly’s vampire life is not all B-positive cocktails. A curse made her a nightwalker, the most vicious vamp there is; the charm she wears to curb her deadly tendencies is losing its juice; and a hunter from hell is turning up the heat.

There’s more, but I’m pretty sure you get the idea. Vampire hunters unite… and so on.

Author Snapshot: Philippa Gregory

Six novels after she swept us away with The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory brings us The White Queen and the magnificent Plantagenet family.

In some regards, The White Queen isn’t new territory for Gregory, whose 14 previous novels have covered a broad swathe of history but are nonetheless bound by their author’s tight attention to detail.

In a CBC interview around the time the film version of The Other Boleyn Girl was released, Gregory said that “It gives me a real authority to talk about the period. There’s nobody going to say to me, ‘Did you know such and such?’ and I won’t know it. The pleasure for me, then, is that I can then relax and write the novel. I don’t start writing the novel until I am as confident of the historical record as if I was going to sit down and write a biography.”

One can imagine, then, the place where the research ends and the magic begins. Research will take you a long way, sure. But Gregory’s powers as a storyteller are what has entranced so many millions of fans over the years. Some of those fans will get the chance to hear Gregory up close and personal as she tours in support of The White Queen. In Canada, Gregory will be in Toronto on September 17th and in Victoria on September 28th. Event details and US tour dates are here.


A Snapshot of... Philippa Gregory

Most recent book: The White Queen
Born: Kenya
Reside: Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Birthday January 9, 1954
Web site: PhilippaGregory.com


What’s your favorite city?
London.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
I get my hair cut, I go to the National Portrait Gallery and see the original paintings of the faces that I now know so well. I go to the London Library and read, I end up in the Berkley Hotel for the night.

What’s on your nightstand?
At the moment [The] Biophilia [Hypothesis] by Edward O. Wilson, and The Kingmaker’s Sisters, by David Baldwin.

What inspires you?
The history and the gaps in the history.

What are you working on now?
I am working on book two of the Cousins War series which will be about Margaret Beaufort, mother to Henry Tudor, and titled The Red Queen. I hope it will come out next year.

Tell us about your process.
I write on a laptop wherever I happen to be, I don’t need silence or study conditions, I write in airports and in my bed. I follow the historical record exactly wherever it is certain, and see my work as in a sense recreating the events that we know took place. When there is a gap in the record -- as happens so often especially for women's history -- I write the most likely, the most congruent with the facts we know, or the one that makes sense to me.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I am in my study overlooking the North York Moors so I see a great side of hill with some trees, some craggy outcrops of rock and a big expanse of cloudy grey sky.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I never really wanted to be a writer, I wrote little stories from early childhood, but I did not know I would make my living from writing fiction until my first book was accepted by a publisher. Even then, I thought I would do it alongside my chosen profession of teaching history. But the history post never came up, and the next book did.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
There are so many things I would love to do. My first love was journalism and I would love to work in radio still. I would like to teach history in a university, I would like to run a conservation sanctuary in Africa, or train horses, or run an orphanage, or be a lady of complete leisure in a big house in the country...

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
I get a lot of pleasure when I have finished a book and I feel that it is as good as it can be. The Boleyn Inheritance was a very easy book to write; The Queen’s Fool, and The Constant Princess were very interesting to research and write too. I think The White Queen may be my best book and it has been endlessly fascinating to me.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The hours and the work conditions -- just as I want.

What’s the most difficult?
I can’t honestly say anything is difficult. Sometimes the interviews are uncomfortable.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where do you get your ideas from.

What’s the question you'd like to be asked?
I like to be asked complicated questions about history by people who are genuinely interested.

Please tell us about The White Queen.
It is the story of Elizabeth Woodville whose beauty, and (according to accusations at the time) witchcraft skills seduced the 20 year old King Edward IV into marriage. An attack by the rival House of Lancaster forced him to run for his life into exile and her into hiding in sanctuary in Westminster Abbey while his cousin, Henry VI recovered the throne. But Edward’s military brilliance meant that he returned to England, recaptured the throne, in two successive set piece battles, and rescued his wife from sanctuary where she had given birth to their first son. The royal couple had ten surviving children before the King’s death when Elizabeth decided to secure the safety of her thirteen year old son by seizing power. The king’s brother, Duke Richard of York, suspecting foul play from the newly widowed queen, captured her precious son. The boy was lodged in the Tower and Elizabeth again fled into sanctuary with her remaining children -- her younger son, Richard, and her daughters.

The conventional history (commissioned by the Tudor victors) says that she handed over her children to Richard III who was Richard Duke of Gloucester. I don’t believe it. I think she smuggled him out of the country into Flanders, in the care of his aunt, the Duchess of Burgundy. Many historians agree that one of the princes may have got to safety, but we have no evidence to show it was done, nor how it was done.

In The White Queen I suggest that she sent a changeling into the Tower in her son’s place. Elizabeth survived the reign of Richard III and clearly became friends with him, releasing her daughters into his safe-keeping while she went to live in the country. The novel ends on the eve of the battle of Bosworth with Elizabeth certain that her hidden son Richard, will be the York heir.

Review: The Love Children by Marilyn French

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Love Children by Marilyn French. Says Leach:

Marilyn French spent the bulk of her writing career beneath the shadow of her magnificent first novel, the semi-autobiographical The Women’s Room. Published in 1977, the book is no less searing today than when it first appeared. And while it afforded French deserved fame, the five works of fiction that followed were uneven, ranging from excellent -- The Bleeding Heart, Her Mother’s Daughter -- to the downright bad: Our Father, My Summer with George. The Love Children, French’s final novel, falls on the weaker end of this mighty woman’s output.

The full review is here.

New This Month: The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin

What is the price of success? That’s the unspoken question in Orange Prize-winning author Valerie Martin’s latest outing, The Confessions of Edward Day (Nan. A Talese/Doubleday). In a blurb, actor Blythe Danner notes that the book “reminded me of how exciting New York theater really was in the seventies.” It is that world that we come to know through Martin’s well drawn characters.

Though an actor’s New York in the 1970s provides the physical backdrop for The Confessions of Edward Day, a love triangle provides the emotional one. That triangle consists of Edward Day, the title character; the beautiful Madeline Delavergne and Guy Margate, an actor who saves Edward’s life on a fateful evening that alters the trio’s life.

The 13th novel by the author of Mary Reilly and the Orange Prize-winning Property, The Confessions of Edward Day reveals a journeyman storyteller exploring yet another new-to-her world. And aren’t we lucky to have such great seats for the ride?

Review: Swimming by Nicola Keegan

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Swimming by Nicola Keegan. Says Leach:

Philomena Ash, of Glenwood, Kansas, is a swimming prodigy. She’s tall and strong, with enormous feet and broad shoulders. Her coaches watch and whisper as she steadily breaks Kansas swim records like bundles of dried twigs. By the time she’s sixteen, the word Olympics is being whispered. But other things are going on.

The full review is here.

New in Paperback: My Name Is Will by Jess Winfield

The subtitle offers a superb summary: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare. Based on that alone, it’s clear that Jess Winfield’s debut effort isn’t simply another biography of the Bard.

In cleverly wrought twinned threads we meet a young William Shakespeare teaching Latin to youngsters in the England of yore. In another thread, we’re introduced to William Shakespeare Greenberg, a grad student in Santa Cruz in the 1980s. The realities of these two Wills are connected, of course. Those connections are often amusing, sometimes startling but always sharply shared.

Readers who noted My Name Is Will when it came out in hardcover last year but who didn’t get around to it then might like to know that there’s an very good reading guide bound into the newly released paperback edition.

Fiction: Fragment by Warren Fahy

Fragment, the new novel by Warren Fahy, arrived with not a little hype. A bidding war at the 2008 London Book Fair. Gushing comparisons to Jurassic Park and The Ruins. Jeez! I thought, Gotta read that one! And I'm about 80 per cent glad I did.

Fahy has created a rip-roaring, nature-gone-awry, cautionary tale. See, there’s this island in the middle of the Pacific, and no one’s been there for hundreds of years -- and when the last people were there, they didn't last long. They ended up in the ripped-to-pieces category. Before that, no one had ever been there. What that means is, this island's ecology has developed, since the beginning of time, along a different path than the rest of the planet. And what that means is, every square foot of the place is crawling with creatures -- animal, insect, and eye-popping, nightmare-inducing combinations -- that don't exist in our world, even though they exist on our planet.

Take disk ants, which are sort of like Frisbees on a terrifying diet of killer steroids. They roll around on their edges, then hurl themselves through the air to avoid predators or attack their prey, whom they latch onto with claws. Then they chow down. Oh, and their surface is coverered with bazillions of baby versions, little buggers which really know how to get under your skin—literally. Or take spigers, eight-legged tiger-like creatures whose ferocity makes hungry great white sharks look tame.

Fahy's catalog of the wild gone wild -- ingenious and entirely convincing -- goes on and on. Until about four fifths of the way through, which is when I came upon something that pulled more bile into my throat than all the killings and gross-out monsters combined: a character who's charming, funny, adorable -- and completely out of place in this book (and this world). What the hell, I thought, is this thing doing here? Does Fahy make it work? Yeah, sure. But that's just it: He makes it work, where the rest of the book just works on its own. The character -- in full and clichéd villain-turned-partner mode -- comes on the scene like a badly tuned piano in the middle of a piano-heavy symphony, and it damn near kills the whole thing. (My two cents for Hollywood: When you make this movie -- and you should -- find another way to energize the last section, or suffer the fate that Jar Jar Binks brought to the Star Wars prequel trilogy.)

The story? Oh, can't you guess? After millions and millions of years with virtually no human visitors, a group of hapless visitors happens upon the place (are there ever hap-ful visitors?) triggering a killing spree, global curiosity, and a master plan that puts many lives in harm's way. They also give the author a chance to do his soapbox dance about the danger of letting humans ruin our otherwise lovely planet, thank you very much. (I piled the lecturing into that same 20 per cent.) Is Fahy the new Crichton? He might be, one day. For now his characters are as thin as insect wings (so you sort of root for the creatures who've put them on the dinner menu), but he knows how to tell a story that makes you stay up way past your bedtime.

Fiction: Better by John O’Brien

Better is what it sounds like inside the head of a man drinking himself to death. Overconsumption is a common theme in the work of John O’Brien (who also gave us Leaving Las Vegas) and, sadly, in his foreshortened life as well. In Better (Akashic Books), O’Brien’s final novel, he tells part of his tale within the surreal confines of a mansion owned by a man known only as “Double Felix.” William is a slacker who drifted into Felix’s orbit, and wound up staying. His only duties are to drink Morning Vodka and share an evening libation with Felix. The rest of his day consists of imbibing gin, watching Love Boat reruns and bedding the various female guests of the mansion, including partygoer Maggie and one-time call-girl Zipper. When he’s not doing those things, he sleeps a booze-induced sleep on the back deck.

But then another girl named Lisa arrives and upsets Felix’s perfect little world of hedonism. Felix is obsessed with her, and her presence alarms the other women (and one other man). She even drives Zipper to try and get William to quit drinking.

Better is a bizarre story written in a jarring style. O’Brien seems to be invoking F. Scott Fitzgerald, another writer who battled demon rum and lost. However, this novel, with its aimless pursuit of pleasure, also suggests influences from another literary heavyweight, Jack Kerouac, in its abandonment of the real world in exchange for meaningless sex and endless booze. The cracks are showing at the beginning, however, when Felix declares that things are not entirely well with his source of income. Lisa seems to be at the center of it all, her connection to Felix eroding his control over the house. She even causes a rift between Felix and William. By the end of the story, William is pondering running off with Zipper, the whore who ironically loves him, and drinking himself to death.

I don’t think Better is an appropriate title for O’Brien’s last novel. The destruction of Double Felix’s private pleasure dome over the course of a day invokes yet one more literary masterpiece.

Paradise Lost.

READ MORE: “John O’Brien’s Better,” by Devin Tanchum
(Book Soup Blog).

Fiction: The New Valley by Josh Weil

In his new collection of novellas, The New Valley (Grove Press), Josh Weil uses beautiful, stunning words to define men who don't have the first idea how to define themselves. Each tale unfolds in what appears to be the remotest areas of Virginia and West Virginia, and the geographical remoteness serves as a rich, telling metaphor for the remoteness of the men themselves.

How many collections like this have we read? How many authors use collections like this to establish their own distinct voice? Here, in his first collection, Weil seems to be sprinting in the opposite direction, doing all he can to avoid creating a distinct voice. He doesn’t seem interested in his own voice. Rather, all he seems to care about is crafting a voice for each story. The result is three pieces of work that live between hardcovers and rustic hills, but otherwise live on their own. It’s quite an achievement.

In sentence after sentence, on page after page, Weil hammers out these men on nothing less than an anvil of language. You can almost feel the searing heat as the tales are pounded into shape. So much seems to have been stripped back, the superfluous peeled away until almost the bare skeleton of story and character remain. Yet he leaves us telling details too -- and they sing. In high contrast to the hard edges of these stories, the author sprinkles in gentle, striking images. The language around them makes them all the more tasty, of course. “The moon was gone,” reads one, “but the stars still pinned up the night sky.” We’ve seen this image countless times before -- but when was the last time it was written in a way that took your breath away? It’s clear Josh Weil adores the power of words.

The New Valley is stark. The stories are sharp-edged, as I’ve said, but they’re much more than that. There’s an enviable depth to these characters, a layering of ideas that brings them to life in ways that might very well surprise even them. The tales walk up to you with confidence and look you square in the eye, unflinching. I am here, they say. Take me or leave me. The novellas aren’t like the men they portray; it feels more like they are the men they portray. In langauge that’s sure, quick, and almost magical in its ability conjure dimension from flat paper, Josh Weil has created portraits of hard lives that will stand the test of time.

Review: A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. Says Leach:

Yglesias’s unabashedly autobiographical novel is an homage to his wife, artist Margaret Joskow, who died of bladder cancer in 2004. By turns heartbreaking, amusing, depressing, and joyous, A Happy Marriage is the evocation not only of the couple’s 27 years together, but of Margaret herself, a vibrant, imperfect, loving woman.

The book shifts between the couple’s first three weeks together, with their amusing if agonizing attempts to negotiate dating’s formalities, and their final three weeks of married life, when Margaret, decimated by cancer, is saying her final goodbyes. The contrast of the healthy, beautiful young Margaret and the bald, shivering shadow enduring horrible suffering is a shattering one, made more poignant by Yglesias’s painful attention to detail.

The full review is here.

Fiction: Godmother: The Cinderella Story by Carolyn Turgeon

In a season of reimaginings, Carolyn Turgeon (Rain Village) delivers Godmother: The Cinderella Story (Three Rivers Press). Turgeon’s retelling finds Cinderella’s fairy godmother banished from her fairy world and working as a bookseller in New York. For her fairy faux pas, she has been pulled away from her life, though if it seems to her that if she can contrive one selfless and beautiful act, all will be forgiven.

Godmother is exquisite: oddly chic, dark, sweet and elegant... and not a zombie in sight. Turgeon has a light but meaty touch. The author has said that after her challenging debut, she was determined to work on something simpler. “I just wanted to work with something wonderful -- a fairytale -- and play,” Turgeon has said.

Godmother is a delicious departure.

New This Week: Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

Clearly, a novel where the action focuses around life in a 16th century convent is not going to be a laugh riot and, in that regard, Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts (Virago) delivers no surprise.

Over the last two decades, Dunant has been quietly building an international reputation as one of the most watch-worthy historical fictionists writing today. Sacred Hearts is Dunant’s ninth novel, but the third in a triptych set in the Italian Renaissance, after The Birth of Venus and The Company of the Courtesan. But Sacred Hearts is a jewel of a novel. Not a tiny, delicate one, either. But a big, robust, showy diamond that will hold its own with any going. Dunant is the whole package: trained historian, seasoned storyteller, fabulous writer.

“Before the screaming starts,” Sacred Hearts begins, “the night silence of the convent is alive with its own particular sounds.”

Sacred Hearts might be the very best of a the superior field of historical fiction published in the summer of 2009.

Author Snapshot: Jennifer Weiner

Though Jennifer Weiner might wriggle under the appellation, if chick-lit has a champion purveyor, she looks like this: gentle eyes, calm of disposition, with a razor-sharp understanding of everything she observes.

Weiner’s books have been judged alternately empty and insipid and fully engaged with the pulse of contemporary American womanhood. Whatever busloads of critics might have said since the publication of Weiner’s debut novel, 2001’s Good in Bed, a lot of people would probably vote for the latter. Over 11 million copies of Weiner’s books are in print in 36 different countries. Her second novel, 2002’s In Her Shoes, was turned into a movie with Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz. The author was actually in one scene of the film.

Weiner’s latest book, Best Friends Forever (Simon & Schuster), explores the impact of love, desire and familial loss on a friendship between two young women. “Former mousy types, rejoice!” writes People. “In Weiner’s delicious latest, a popular girl hits trouble long after high school and only the geeky pal she once shunned can help.”

If you can’t get enough Jennifer, you need not despair. The author signed a development deal with ABC Studios last year. She says she’s working with “many fine writers to come up with comedies and dramas that feature my kind of characters and humor (i.e., smart, snarky, soulful, possibly larger than the average leading lady).”

A Snapshot of... Jennifer Weiner

Most recent book: Best Friends Forever (Simon & Schuster)
Born: DeRidder, Louisiana
Reside: Philadelphia
Birthday: March 28
Web site: www.jenniferweiner.com


What's your favorite city?
I love Philadelphia, but I always love visiting San Francisco.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Go to Yank Sing for dim sum. Go to the Ferry Building farmer’s market for flowers and bread, and the Cowgirl Creamery for cheeses. Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge to build up an appetite. Take the cable car back to the Fairmont Hotel, and have wine, and cheese, and a nap.

What food do you love?
What food don’t I love? I'm a big fan of staples, cooked well: a good roast chicken and mashed potatoes, rib roast, grilled fresh vegetables

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Oh, there’s nothing I won’t eat again -- I’m all about second chances -- but I just had a bad run-in with macadamia nuts and sake, so I probably won’t be mixing those two again.

What’s on your nightstand?
About 30 books that I’m either reading or re-reading: Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Julie Metz’s Perfection and Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three.

What inspires you?
Real life; my family and my friends. My daughters are both very funny.

What are you working on now?
I’m in the early stages of a novel about three different women -- young, middle-aged and old -- who find themselves thrown together, in the wake of various personal crises, in a big old house on the beach in Connecticut and I'm starting to gather the pieces for a potential non-fiction piece, which would be a big change for me.

Tell us about your process.
My process is necessarily dictated by my kids, and the ensuing lack of time. Most of my work happens in the afternoons (when I have a sitter), on a laptop, in a coffee shop, where the kids can't find me. I really need to leave the house in order to get any serious work done, and I try, as best I can, to replicate the atmosphere of a newsroom when I find a workspace -- I like a little hustle and bustle, and music and conversation, not to mention latte and scones.

But really, I'm working all the time -- there’s always a part of my brain that's thinking about the work in progress, whether I’m at the park, pushing my baby in a swing, or in the minivan, waiting to pick up my big girl from school.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I’m working at my kitchen table, so ... a stack of bills I’m about halfway through paying. A bag from Target filled with sunscreen and sippy cups and Season 2 of Arrested Development that I need to unload.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I think as soon as I learned how to read. I remember being six, and my first-grade teacher Mrs. Palen giving me extra paper and letting me stay in for recess so I could keep writing a story.

If you couldn't write books, what would you be doing?
Hmm. Not sure that newspaper gig would have worked out, long-term. I
probably would have gotten a PhD in something and taught.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
The day I got to go home and tell my mother that Simon & Schuster was
publishing my book. The joy only lasted a few seconds. Then I had to tell
her what the title was.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Writing has always been the thing that I love best and came most easily to me. I love just about everything about the work I do.

What's the most difficult?
The business of publishing: dealing with marketing and promotion and knowing that, as far as some reviewers are concerned, whatever I've written is just a big spun-sugar pink nothing.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
“Where do you get your ideas?” “What time of day do you write?” “Longhand or
laptop?”

What’s the question you'd like to be asked?
Nobody’s ever asked about all of the water imagery and swimming in my books. That would be fun to talk about.

What question would like never to be asked again?
“How do you feel about your books being called chick lit?” Not great. Next question!

Please tell us about your most recent book.
Best Friends Forever is the story of two girls who are best friends all through high school, then have a tragic break-up, and reunite on the eve of the 15th reunion, after the glamorous friend who skipped town does something terrible, and shows up on the doorstep of her mousy homebody ex-best-friend, saying that she's the only one who can help.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
Is this really the time to mention the third nipple?

Fiction: The Best of Men by Claire Letemendia

Even in a season reasonably stuffed with weighty works of historical fiction, The Best of Men (McClelland & Stewart) stands out. Debut author Claire Letemendia has the right sort of academic pedigree to get the details right in her vast epic tale of England in the middle of the 17th century. But even with a doctorate in Political Theory, Letemendia doesn’t write like an academic. Rather, she drops us deftly right into the center of her story and we find ourselves in England in 1642, with Laurence Beaumont, newly returned from the wars that have changed the map of Europe.

For all of Letemendia’s knowledge and the intricacies of her plotting here, there are times when the reader is aware of every single one of the book’s nearly 700 pages. The reduction -- or even elimination -- of some of the less important storylines would have created a more tense, exciting read. As it stands, there are times when the action seems to come almost to a standstill.

Fortunately, the bogged down moments in The Best of Men are infrequent and, for the most part, the reader is swept away in the world Letemendia shares. And that’s a good thing as The Best of Men won’t be a one-off: the author has promised a trilogy.

Fiction: A Pathless Land by Robin Porecky

It wasn’t until I was well into A Pathless Land (Austin & MacAuley) that I realized I’d never before read a novel set in Finland. And with the cultural smugness of my kind, the book brought me to some conclusions. I will acknowledge that it is possible that they are wrong but, here they are in any case: Finland is dark, cold and is scored by a fold of violence. Fins are hardy, hearty and capable of that same violent edge. A Pathless Land does not say these things, but it implies them, or such was my reading. It sketches the shape of a dark and lonely land and a great journey undertaken with high hopes and few other provisions, at least not of the kind that will prove of any use.

A Pathless Land is Robin Porecky’s debut novel. His bio material is sketchy enough to make me suspect the persona might be an alias: “Robin Porecky (pronounced Poretzki) is of Polish origin, but was born and brought up in England. He now works in northern Sweden as a knife-maker.”

So we are to believe that A Pathless Land is a Swedish knife-maker’s debut novel? Yet the book is ethereal enough and -- in a dark and experimental way -- skilled enough to make me think it could be the work of a better known writer. In either case, it’s a worthwhile introduction to a cold, dark land.

Fiction: The Road to Jerusalem: Book One of the Crusades Trilogy by Jan Guillou

Though not at all well known in North America -- yet -- Jan Guillou is one of Sweden’s most popular literary personalities. A journalist and broadcaster, he is also the author of the Coq Rouge novels, one of the most popular series of Swedish spy novels ever created. Guillou’s Crusades Trilogy has been translated into 20 languages and has sold 2.5 million copies in Sweden alone.

The first book in the trilogy, The Road to Jerusalem (Harper), has just been released in English. Steven T. Murray did the skillful translation. Since it was Murray -- using a pseudonym -- who translated the first two of Stieg Larsson’s books to be published in English (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire), it seems a safe guess to call Murray the top Swedish translator working today. And in The Road to Jerusalem, once again, the translation is seamless. One never senses a falter or a misstep.

The Road to Jerusalem tells the story of a young Swedish nobleman who ends up conscripted into the Knights Templar. But this is a thick and engaging novel: I’ve taken a very short route to tell the story. Guillou’s path is much less direct, and far more exciting. And while details of a U.S. film production will likely be announced soon, Swedish film and television productions are at various stages, and have been for several years.

Fans of historical fiction -- particularly those with an interest in Crusades-era material -- simply must read The Road to Jerusalem. The huge international following this series has attracted will only continue to grow now that it’s available in English.

Fiction: The Lie by Fredrica Wagman

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Lie by Fredrica Wagman. Says Leach:

The Lie opens with 17-year-old Ramona Smollens sitting on a park bench, smoking. Her father, the monstrous Nathan Smollens, has been dead exactly one week.

Ramona is joined by Solomon Columbus, an older man who offers her another cigarette. The two begin talking, with Ramona mesmerized by Columbus’s thick peasant hands, culminating in ten “astonishing penis fingers.” Their conversation continues even as the withering August heat gives way to a torrential rainstorm. The couple talk and smoke through the pelting rain, finally returning to the house where Ramona now lives with her mother, the self-absorbed, obnoxiously rude Trixie. The couple brush off her jeering welcome, working their way to the attic, where they spend four days making love and exchanging confidences.

Written in broken, elliptical prose, bristling with bold print and exclamatory remarks, The Lie is reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates’s more incantatory, dark works.

The full review is here.

Fiction: Going Ashore by Mavis Gallant

To say that Going Ashore (Douglas Gibson Books/McClelland & Stewart) may well be the most important work of fiction that will be published in Canada in 2009 sounds like hyperbole of the highest order. And, actually, it pretty much is. Yet immerse yourself in Mavis Gallant’s world. Read these 31 stories -- some of them never before published intact in book form -- and try to imagine anything finer.

This is the writer that Fran Lebowitz has called the “irrefutable master of the short story in English,” and whom Michael Ondaatje said was one of “the great short story writers of our time.” Even the uninitiated won’t find it difficult to understand the praise. For the passionate reader, Going Ashore is pure pleasure. For the writer, it is that and education, as well. This is some of the very best work of a writer whose career spans over 50 years.

Douglas Gibson, who has published Gallant in Canada since 1978, tells us that Going Ashore began to take shape when Gallant let him know that not all of her short stories were still in print.

“Intrigued,” he writes, “I encouraged her to compile a list of the ‘missing’ stories, and promised to publish them. She was delighted, and asked me -- in a typically direct way -- if I could bring the book out before she died. We are such old friends that I felt able to answer with another question: ‘What are your plans in this regard, Mavis?’ She laughed, and started to make research enquiries.”

And so it is that, in Gibson’s words, he was able to publish a collection “that will delight [Gallant’s] admirers, who will find that, at eighty-six, she is able to bring out a book of distinctive yet unfamiliar stories that are full of surprises.”

New Today: Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice

In 2008, Carleen Brice was named Breakout Author of the Year at the African American Literary Awards Show. The book under discussion at that time was her debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey (which has, incidentally, been optioned for film by the Lifetime Movie Network).

Though Orange Mint and Honey was Brice’s debut novel, that well-received work was not her first book. She is also the author of the non-fiction works Lead Me Home: An African American’s Guide Through the Grief Journey; Walk Tall: Affirmations for People of Color and she edited Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife. As can be gleaned from the title of those books, Brice is deeply concerned with issues of race and how those issues manifest themselves in contemporary America.

That concern shows again in her most recent book, Children of the Waters (One World). Here Brice introduces us to Trish Taylor, a white woman married to a black man with whom she is raising a child. When Trish’s marriage ends, she returns to her family home in Denver where she begins to unlock a series of secrets spiraling out from one that is central to her understanding of her family. Trish had been told her mother and baby sister, Billie, died in a car crash many years before. But Trish discovers that her sister didn’t die. Billie was put up for adoption because her mother’s parents didn’t want to raise a biracial child. There are other secrets. And deep misunderstandings and a lot of ground to cover before those misunderstandings and hurts decades old can be put to rest.

Children of the Waters is, for the most part, an enjoyable journey. Are there times when it seems that Brice’s concern for issues of race overtakes her story? Perhaps. But it’s a good story and Brice is a wonderful writer. How can one fault passion when that passion is part of what makes the tale exactly what it is?

Author Snapshot: Clea Simon

We engage with the work of the authors we love on many levels. In the case of fiction, that engagement is often about a careful blend of passion and voice. In non-fiction, it seems to me it’s about heart and sincere understanding of the material under study. It’s why the authors who excel at both fiction and non are rare. Those four things -- passion, skill, heart and research -- are unlikely to surface in a single person. When it does crop up, more often than not, the writer in question is a journalist.

Clea Simon is not the exception to the rule. A respected journalist whose credits include The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Ms. and Salon, Simon wrote three critically acclaimed works of non-fiction before penning her first novel, 2005’s Mew is for Murder, the first in a series of popular mysteries featuring Boston rock journalist, Theda Krakow and her well loved cat, Musetta. The fourth book in the series, Probable Claws (Poisoned Pen Press), was published in April. Despite the punny titles and the strong cat connections, Simon points out that the cats in her books don’t talk. In fact, Simon has referred to the books featuring Theda and Musetta as “kitty noir,” something she says with a smile but is only half-joking about. And she’s right: there is a whiff of the darkness at the edges of the tales she’s chosen to tell here. Murder, mystery and music via the Boston club scene that Simon herself knows very well. A strong core of animal rights and welfare run through Simon’s books, though never in a self-righteous way. Readers knowledgeable about animal protection issues will find themselves nodding in agreement, those who aren’t will find knowledge shared in an interesting way.

Mystery, music, nightclubs, animals in danger: on a certain level, it’s an unlikely combination, yet, somehow, it works very well. And why? That special blend, I think: passion, heart, understanding and voice, voice, voice. Simon’s is as strong and clear as the passion she brings to the stories she tells.


A snapshot of... Clea Simon
Most recent book: Probable Claws
Born: East Meadow, NY
Reside: Cambridge, MA
Birthday: July 27 (I’m a Leo!)
Web site: www.cleasimon.com



What’s your favorite city?
Well, I adore Cambridge, where I live, but I’d have to say New Orleans. Not sure I could live there, but I need regular fixes, for sure.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Eat oysters at Acme, browse the “early novel” shelves at Beckham’s Books (where I have found many wonderful, sentimental turn-of-the-20th century finds), stop in at Louisiana Music Factory, and then head out to Tipitina’s, where through some marvelous happenstance Rebirth is opening for, oh, let’s say Dr. John. If there’s any time left, I’d end up at Coop’s or Clover Grill before the celestial ride home.

What food do you love?
Easier to say what I don’t... um, all seafood? Pheasant, quail, and andouille gumbo? Spicy boiled crawfish? (Can you tell I’m recently back from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest?)

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
The pre-cooked crawfish that a dear friend had shipped to me as a present. Very well intentioned. Very scary.

What’s on your nightstand?
Lens cleaner, a glowing squirt frog to squirt water at the cat when she gets rambunctious at four a.m. (the fact that it’s a glowing squirt frog helps), the books from the pile up the side of the nightstand that are leaning onto it for support. Clock radio set on the local college station.

What inspires you?
Talking with friends about making art (music, painting, writing).

What are you working on now?
I have just sent the sequel to Shades of Grey off to my agent. I’m sure she’ll suggest more revisions before we send it to my editor, but right now, I’m catching up on a lot of freelance and other things that had been pushed aside. Shades of Grey is the first in a new series, slightly paranormal, that Severn House will publish in September, but the sequel, tentatively titled “Grey Matters,” is due on May 31. It’s very odd to be finishing up the sequel before having any real-world feedback on the first book, but I’m grateful for Severn’s interest! At some point, I want to start revising my tongue-in-cheek pet noir, find a publisher for that...

Tell us about your process, please.
Although I try to write mornings, these days I find myself needing to get the money work (editing, mostly) done first and the creative stuff really kicks in mid-afternoon. I usually write to a word count (i.e., 1,000 words a day), five days a week. And although I have a basic idea of the book’s direction and a white board with sticky notes all over it of ideas I’ve had that often make little sense within 24 hours (such as “He has green eyes!” Or “Lloyd shows up at Bullock’s”) I tend to need to write the book out, then revise it to make sense.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
My iPod recharging, my various cat fetishes. A wilting daffodil and the cereal bowl from my breakfast.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I always knew that’s what I wanted. It just took a few years (as a journalist, an editor and in various other publishing jobs) before I realized it was feasible.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Pulling my hair out? I don’t know. Probably just cooking a lot more, or maybe studying zoology. I always wanted to be a herpetologist. But that’s because I love frogs and toads. I hated having to dissect them.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
This one changes. But I still have saved, on my answering machine, my agent singing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas...” from December, when we got the Severn House offer.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The dress code. Right now, I’m wearing sweats and big fuzzy socks. Several years ago, I gave away all the suits I had from my days working as a magazine editor.

What’s the most difficult?
The waiting. I don’t even mind the rejections so much as the waiting. When someone rejects something, you can revise it and send it out again. But not knowing? The worst.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where do I get my ideas? To which I don’t have a good answer. Also, if my heroines are me. To which I can only say, all my characters are part of me.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
I’d like to be asked about specific plot or character developments in the book -- why did this character do that? More generally, how do your stories/characters develop?

What question would like never to be asked again?
“Why don’t you send a copy to Oprah?”

Please tell us about Probable Claws.
It’s the fourth, and I suspect maybe the last, Theda Krakow mystery. Theda has reached a turning point in her life. Her friends’ lives have all changed: Bill, her boyfriend, has retired from the police and is managing a jazz club, a job that takes a lot of his time. Bunny is about to become a mother. Violet is fully ensconced in her own relationship and her shelter work. The newspaper business is changing. Theda has to figure out where she stands in this new world, and there are no easy answers. It’s funny, because my editor thought it should be obvious that the next step for Theda is to get married. I don’t think it’s obvious. I think that things cannot stay the way they have, but that she has legitimate concerns and interests pushing her various ways.

This is all set against a backdrop of a very real, and possibly unresolvable conflict in animal welfare: the issue of euthanasia. Nobody wants to kill healthy animals, but there are too many cats, dogs, etc., for shelters to care for. So lots of places are trying innovative campaigns to reduce the necessity of euthanasia -- better matching people and pets, fostering animals, etc. -- but it’s an asymptotic approach to the absolute of eliminating the practice. And there is a lot of tension between shelters with different philosophies, a tension ratcheted up by the struggle for funds. Well, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that in this conflict, you might have a murder. A “no kill” murder, if you will.

Because, oh yeah, there’s also a murder!

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I was about to type, “I’m very lazy at heart and only write out of fear of deadline.” But a lot of people know that. So, um, I’ll have to come up with something else. But then I’d have to kill you.

Review: A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. Says Leach:

Dorothy Trevor Townsend is starving herself to death. Her cause is not anorexia, but suffrage. The year is 1914, and though a war is on, the brilliant Townsend is doing her best to make a statement, to be heard of above the horrible din of war. She is willing to die for her cause, heedless of her children, Evelyn and Thomas, of her lover, William Crawford, of her mother, who will be stuck with her orphaned children. Dorothy dies for her cause, and is immortalized on a commerative postage stamp, a burden or honorific to be borne by her descendants.

Author Kate Walbert has created an interleaved narrative of five generations of Townsend women, moving across time from England to San Francisco to New York City. In each era another Townsend finds herself fighting for her place among men.

The full review is here.

Fiction: Fishing for Bacon by Michael Davie

I’m beginning to think that 2009 might well be remembered as the year that potential Canadian YA masterworks got lost in the waterfall of mainstream fiction.

First there was Alan Bradley’s lively but clearly juvenile The Sweetness of the Bottom the Pie (Doubleday Canada). Now comes Calgarian Michael Davies’ cheerfully abrupt Fishing for Bacon (Newest Press). The book features fresh-from-high school lost youth, Bacon Sobelowski who claims, almost from the very first, that he has bad timing. He gets stuck with the name “Bacon” during his birth, when his mother can think of nothing but her breakfast.

Afterward, when a nurse informed my mother that I was a boy, she curled around her pillow and sighed, “Bacon.” When the nurse asked her if she had a name for Baby Boy Sobelowski, my mother starred at the cold, grey wall and sniveled, “Bacon.”

The writing is crisp and sharp and though the story is somewhat thin, so is the book. While some of the theme’s are clearly adult, Bacon’s youthful verve would have been much tougher to resist in a slightly refocused package.

New This Month: The French Gardener Santa Montefiore

As I sniffled and sighed my way through The French Gardener (Touchstone Fireside), I longed for the beach. It’s just the sort of book that begs a quiet cottage on a rainy day, or a languid one on sand and under an umbrella.

The French Gardener has it all: an attractive mysterious Frenchman -- named Jean-Paul, of course -- arrives to repair both a garden and a damaged family. It’s not just romance, but also family drama traditionally done so well by fellow Brit Rosalind Pilcher, with whom Montefiore is often compared.

“Posh tosh,” said The Mirror when The French Gardener was published in the United Kingdom early in 2008, “but oddly gripping.” Just the thing to gnaw away at while under that umbrella.

Author Snapshot: Denise Dietz

You don’t see her without a smile. That’s not a surprise. People who have read her books suspect that the author, too, will be humor-filled, that she will be wicked smart and that the smallest of her comments will drip with a good-humored wit. In person, Denise Dietz, author of the Ellie Bernstein Diet Club mysteries is all of these things, and more.

Though Strangle A Loaf of Italian Bread (Five Star) is Dietz’s 14th novel, it is the fourth to feature diet club leader Ellie Bernstein who has replaced her eating habit with one for solving mysteries.

“Denise Dietz is like Robert B. Parker on estrogen,” author Marshall Karp has written. “Her heroine, diet guru Ellie Bernstein, is fiendishly clever, blatantly sexy, and uproariously funny. Trust me, ladies, this is not your maiden auntie’s murder mystery.”

Dietz lives on Vancouver Island off Canada’s westernmost coast with her husband, novelist Gordon Aalborg. Like most of Dietz’s work, her current novel in progress sounds deliciously funny. Called Gypsy Rose Lieberman, the books stars “a Vaudeville ghost who was -- oops! -- sawed in half by her magician husband.”

Dietz’s fans are likely already laughing in anticipation.


A Snapshot of... Denise Dietz
Most recent book: Strangle A Loaf of Italian Bread (Five Star)
Born: Manhattan, New York
Resides: Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Birthday: January 29
Web site: www.denisedietz.com


What’s your favorite city?
Colorado Springs, Colorado. I chose to live in Colorado, inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which I “borrowed” from my mom’s bookshelf when I was a kid. I don’t agree with Rand’s ideology, but she’s one heck of a wordsmith!

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Only six hours? Inhale and absorb the scenery, especially Garden of the Gods, say hi to the librarians at the Penrose Library, and browse my favorite thrift/consignment shops.

What food do you love?
A perfect meal would be raw oysters, prawns and lobster, and New York cheesecake.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Cottage cheese.

What’s on your nightstand?
Potpourri. I’m rarely sick, knock on wood, but when I get the flu, my nightstand holds a copy of Stephen King’s The Stand. When I read The Stand I feel much better.

What inspires you?
Change the question to “who” and my answer is readers. I once had a long wait at the DFW airport and started chatting with a young woman. When I told her I was an author, she said, “Have I ever heard of you?” Exhausted, I merely said, “I doubt it.” She wanted to know my name. I said “Denise Dietz” and she said, “OMG, Beat Up a Cookie! I loved that book! My dad loved it, too.” That happened more than 10 years ago and it still inspires me. Another, more recent inspiration is Susan Boyle.

What are you working on now?
Gypsy Rose Lieberman, starring a Vaudeville ghost who was -- oops! -- sawed in half by her magician husband. I’m also writing the second book in my Sydney St. Charles apothecary series. Title: Toe of Frog. Working title: “The Da Vinci Toad.”

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
A huge, framed poster of Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, a photo of my husband, novelist Gordon Aalborg (Dining with Devils), and a stuffed “deadline” vulture named Michael Seidman.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I wrote a story for my high school magazine called “Is the Bronx Zoo in Brooklyn?” and it made everyone laugh. That was cool. In my second story, “Red Corduroy,” I killed a dog. Everyone wept buckets, including me, but I’d never kill a dog, or a cat, today, I swear, Girl Scout’s honor, cross my heart...

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I can’t imagine not writing books, but I suppose I’d be looking for singing gigs. In my next life I want to be a stand-up comedian. Or the first woman to win racing’s Triple Crown.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Seeing my first published book -- Throw Darts at a Cheesecake -- in the library. It was shelved with the new books. I ran up and down the aisles and shouted, “Come! Come! Come!” over and over. Several people followed me and when I reached the shelf, I pointed to the book and said, “Me! Me! Me!”

For you, what is the easiest thing about being a writer?
To be perfectly honest, I don’t find writing easy. It’s gobsmackingly gratifying -- especially when you hit page 170 and realize there was a good reason for the three wonky paragraphs you wrote on page 30 -- but it takes an incredible amount of self-discipline. That’s why, when people say “Someday I’m gonna write a book,” I try to stifle my snort.

What’s the most difficult?
Waiting for reviews! You send your “baby” out into the world and hope someone doesn’t say, “What an ugly baby!” I’ve been lucky with starred reviews for The Landlord’s Black-Eyed Daughter (written as Mary Ellen Dennis) and rave reviews for Footprints in the Butter and Fifty Cents for Your Soul. However, I’ll always remember a lazy reviewer who, obviously, hadn’t read my book. She compared me to Diane Mott Davidson: Colorado locale, 40-ish sleuth, food title, and then wrote: “So I suggest you buy a Diane Mott Davidson book, instead.” Diane is a fellow Coloradoan and a friend, but our “voices” are very different. Before I could vent my ire, I discovered that my sales had spiked. It seems the only thing people remembered was the comparison to Diane.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
It’s a toss-up between “How long does it take you to write a book?” and “Have I ever heard of you?”

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
“Would you be our Toastmistress at Left Coast Crime (or Bouchercon or Malice)?”

What question would you like never to be asked again?
“My life would make a great book, will you write it?” To that end, an attorney once asked me to ghost-write his John Grisham rip-off. He offered me 50 per cent of his royalties.

Please tell us about Strangle a Loaf of Italian Bread.
The title is from a quote by the late, great Gilda Radner. She said: “Eating is self-punishment; punish the food instead. Strangle a loaf of Italian bread. Throw darts at a cheesecake. Chain a lamb chop to the bed. Beat up a cookie.”

Sara Lee, a waitress at Uncle Vinnie’s Gourmet Italian Restaurant, plans to try out for the John Denver Community Theatre’s production of Hello, Dolly! Before she can, she’s strangled with a Daffy Duck necktie and trashed in her restaurant’s Dumpster.

Diet club leader and mystery maven Ellie Bernstein wants to know why everybody didn’t like Sara Lee. At the same time, Ellie -- who has never owned a dog -- is dog-sitting a diet club member’s Border collie and coping with her cat, Jackie Robinson’s reaction to the canine guest. Then Ellie discovers that the dog’s owner has disappeared into thin air.

Eventually, Ellie’s search for Sara Lee’s killer lands her at the Hello, Dolly! auditions. Only problem is, Ellie can’t sing or dance.

This is the fourth book in the series but, like all of my books, it stands alone.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
My life is an open book (hee!) But very few people know that I sang on a cruse ship with a British rock and roll band. Our most popular song was “Happy Anniversary, Mr. and Mrs. Abramowitz...”

New this Week: East of the Sun by Julia Gregson

Julia Gregson’s debut novel puts one instantly in mind of The Far Pavilions, M.M. Kaye’s epic 1978 novel of mid-19th century India. While there are similarities, they are largely on the surface. As befits its early 20th century setting and the sharp, smart voice of its journalist author, East of the Sun (Touchstone Fireside) takes a grittier run at India during the time of the British Raj. It’s an enjoyable and transporting experience.

East of the Sun introduces us to Viva Holloway who travels to India in the fall of 1928 aboard the Kaisar-l-Hind as chaperone to a young bride on her way to marry a man she barely knows, and her two friends.

East of the Sun was a Richard and Judy pick in the UK last summer, where the book became an instant bestseller under the duo’s Oprah-like bounce. It seems likely that, now that the book is available in North America, it will continue to stun readers on the far side of the pond.

Gregson delivers 1928 India in livid, vivid color. East of the Sun is a fantastic book, one that endures in the mind long after the final page is turned.

Review: A Thousand Deaths Plus One by Sergio Ramirez

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Pedro Blas Gonzalez reviews A Thousand Deaths Plus One by Sergio Ramirez. Says our reviewer:

Reminiscent of Borges in its maze-like complexity of shadowy figures and surreal situations, A Thousand Deaths Plus One is as unpredictable a work as it is intricate in construction. Sergio Ramirez’s novel is essentially a work of intrigue. In 1987 the author found himself in Warsaw on a state visit. Ramirez was vice-president of Nicaragua from 1984-1990. This visit to Europe serves as the fuel that feeds the plot of the novel.

While in Poland’s capital, Ramirez, who doubles as the narrator, discovers the work of a compatriot photographer named Juan Castellon. Castellon, he is pleased to discover, had worked in Europe from 1880 to 1940. The author becomes curious as to the identity of this Nicaraguan photographer and the circumstances that brought him to Europe. The action of the novel begins with this otherwise inconspicuous revelation. The animated plot sequences and narration oscillate between Ramirez’s description of the world around him, his psychological desire to understand Castellon and Nicaraguan history, and Castellon’s own part in telling his side of the story.

The full review is here.

New in Paperback: Beginner’s Greek by James Collins

First in late 2007 when James Collins’ debut came out in hardcover and now that Beginner’s Greek (Back Bay Books) makes its way to my desk again in paper, I can’t help wondering: what’s with all the fuss?

Sure, the writing is somewhat sharp and the premise is slightly original but, for me, Collins’ contemporary comedy of manners never moves beyond the quirky. And quirky is fine -- even fun -- for a little while. But for a whole book? It just can’t help but get old. And it does.

Here’s the set up: 27-year-old Peter Russell falls in love with seatmate Holly Edwards on a flight between New York and L.A. But fate twists, and Peter loses Holly’s phone number. They get on with their lives, fall in love with other people, enjoy the usual ups and downs. Eventually they reconnect in order for us to come to a happy-ish ending.

Clearly, this is the stuff of which romantic comedies are made. Personally, I could never get past the vaguely 19th century echoes of Collins’ prose. You might not have that problem. When the book first came out, The New York Times’ James Kaplan called Beginner’s Greek “a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel.” Kaplan clearly likes lemon chiffon pie better than I do: it’s actually a very positive review.

If you, also, like lemon chiffon pie books and a plot that will remind you of one of the classic 1990s-style romantic comedies, then this one may well be for you.

Fiction: Etta by Gerald Kolpan

It’s astonishing to think that Katherine Ross’ searing portrayal of Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was 40 years ago this October. Part of the success of that film -- and that particular character, in fact -- had much to do with Ross’ interpretation of Etta and her relationship with Harry “Sundance Kid” Longbaugh. In reality, not much was known about Place, where she’d come from, who she’d been and who, ultimately, she became.

In his debut novel, Emmy Award-winning Philadelphia television reporter Gerald Kolpan tries to give Etta’s character depth and humanity ... and mostly succeeds.

Though not all of Etta (Ballantine) feels entirely believable, every moment is completely enjoyable. The flaw is not with Kolpan’s history, just some of Etta’s experiences push the envelope of believability. For example, Etta runs into several historical figures including Eleanor Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. Rather than enriching the narrative, I found these cameos somewhat jolting; pulling me back from an otherwise almost completely compelling journey.

Etta is terrific. History entwined with a talented writer’s magic. I look forward to more adventures in Kolpan’s skillful company.

New this Month: Sea Changes by Gail Graham

At the beginning of this journey, you think you’re heading off on a beach read. You know what I mean: standard issue relationship novel. A dead husband, a woman’s personal crisis, a lot of angst and wringing of hands. And, honestly, as wry as that assessment might sound, there’s nothing wrong with any of that (which is no doubt why so many books that vaguely fit that description are published every year) but that’s just wouldn’t describe Sea Changes (Jade Phoenix) at all.

When Sarah Andrews tries to kill herself (All that angst, remember?) by drowning, she discovers a civilization under the water. When she wakes up on the beach, alive, Sarah quite understandably thinks It Was All A Dream. Further developments convince her this was not the case.

Sea Changes is about transformation and rediscovery. Incredibly difficult to describe, it’s also very hard to put down. Sea Changes is about loss and rebirth and, in certain ways, it’s about resilience of spirit and of fact. It’s a magical book.

Fiction: Perfecting by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer just keeps getting better. And that’s saying something, because everything she’s offered thus far has been worthy of note.

Kuitenbrouwer’s debut novel, The Nettle Spinner, was included in January Magazine’s 2005 Best of the Year. “Here is a very clever tale that bites as much as the nettle,” said January’s reviewer at the time. “Kuitenbrouwer writes with such confidence and authority that discovering this is her first novel seems almost as astonishing as the feat of those nettle spinners, separated in time by centuries but joined by shared themes.”

Four years later, Kuitenbrouwer is back with an intensely ambitious tale that moves her readers over 30 years, from New Mexico to Ontario and from roadside crime to the community and machinations of a rural cult.

Perfecting (Goose Lane) is slender, but there are hints of the epic here and though Kuitenbrouwer’s style is muscular and spare, one gets the feeling that more would have been better. Perfecting is tight, certainly and it’s not that anything has been left out, but I found myself wanting more.

Still, that’s a quibble and, indeed, a high class complaint. Kuitenbrouwer has fulfilled the promise of The Nettle Spinner. This Toronto-based author continues to be one of the hot new Canadian voices to watch.

New this Week: Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes

Readers familiar with Barnes’ work before 2006’s Great Sky Woman (released in paperback just last month) will have an understandable challenge in knowing what to do with Shadow Valley (DelRey). On the one hand, Barnes is best known as a genre writer. That’s actually an understatement: Barnes is an esteemed and much awarded author in the twinned worlds of science fiction and fantasy. And since he’s also married to yet another esteemed author of speculative fiction -- Tananarive Due -- it’s a sort of familial thing. We have our expectations of Barnes. But does he deliver? Well, yes. But in unexpected ways.

Like Great Sky Woman, Shadow Valley holds not the merest thread of SF/F. No matter how hard you try to find it, it just isn’t there. This is straight up historical fiction, but more Jean Auel than James Michener: this is creation historical fiction. Or maybe most accurately prehistorical fiction. In Shadow Valley we go way back to ancient Africa where Sky Woman and Frog Hopping -- first encountered in Great Sky Woman -- are dealing with life beyond the devastating eruption of Father Mountain that concluded the last book.

This is exciting stuff. Epic, page snappingly thrilling, not to be missed. The literati have a way at holding their nose when they sense the faintest whiff of SF/F nearby. My hope is that Barnes’ literary pedigree won’t overshadow the excellence of this work. It’s a worthwhile book that has the potential to help a lot of people gain an understanding of their distant roots.

New this Month: Twilight of Avalon by Anna Elliott

How is it that the Arthurian legends never seem to run out of steam? Hemlines can rise and fall, hairlines can decline and cultural mores can change from generation to generation, but somehow we always come back to the comfort of the grudges, wounds and triumphs of King Arthur’s golden court.

In her debut novel, Anna Elliott focuses on the story of Trystan and Isolde, freshening things up by going back to the roots of the tale. Elliot has based Twilight of Avalon (Touchstone Fireside) on the earliest written versions of the story of a misunderstood queen and her unlikely love.

Twilight of Avalon is the first novel in an intended trilogy. Elliott is off to a great start here, with a sharp magic that rivals that found in Arthur’s court.

New this Month: Love Stories in This Town by Amanda Eyre Ward

Though it’s early to be thinking this way, Love Stories in This Town (Ballantine) strikes me as the perfect beach read. Though Amanda Eyre Ward has been building her reputation on some really wonderful novels (including 2003’s extraordinary Sleep Towards Heaven, since optioned for film by Sandra Bullock and FOX Searchlight) this is her first collection and she proves here that she has an eye for the short take, as well as the longer haul.

In an interview, though, Eyre Ward explains that she came to short fiction first. “By the end of college,” she says, “writing a beautiful short story was the only thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be Raymond Carver, Rick Bass, and Richard Ford, so after a year abroad, I moved to Montana.”

Montana turns up in Love Stories in This Town, as do many of the places Eyre Ward has lived: San Francisco, Savannah, Texas: in a dozen stories, the author explores women and love with razor-sharp wit and a dazzling eye for detail.

Fiction: Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy

“I think I was dealt a good hand,” Maeve Binchy told the UK’s Saga magazine last year. “I have happy genes.” That would explain a lot. Despite the fact that her books seldom have happy endings, there is a positive beat at the heart of each one. Maeve Binchy’s books, then, would seem to have happy genes, as well.

The latest of these is Heart and Soul (Knopf), which, boiled down to its essence, is the story of St. Brigid’s Hospital, a heart clinic in Ireland. But this is Binchy -- classic Binchy -- and so, of course, there is more.

In one way, the clinic itself is a kind of moral center and the people who inhabit it -- doctors, nurses, residents, out-patients -- are its community. If we follow the metaphor, Dr. Clara Casey -- newly arrived as the book begins -- is the clinic’s spiritual leader. It is through them that we see the growth and feel the change that can happen when many hearts beat for the same goal.

Heart and Soul is classic Binchy, here in top form. Now almost 70, the author recently told The Irish Herald that both she and her husband are battling heart disease:

The much-loved writer has put her writing on hold to look after her husband who is recovering from a serious operation.

And Maeve has revealed that her own health is ailing and that she regularly attends a “heart failure clinic”.

However, the Dalkey-based author said that her main focus has been on caring for her husband, Gordon Snell, who had an operation just over a month ago.

“Gordon had a bypass but he’s grand after it,” revealed Maeve. “He’s now able to go out and go for a walk. He had it over a month ago.”

It seems likely that at least some of the research for Heart and Soul was done at uncomfortably close quarters. The book does not suffer for it: fans will adore Heart and Soul, quite possibly the book of Binchy’s own heart.

New This Month: Gladiatrix by Russell Whitfield

In their review, Publishers Weekly came up with an elevator pitch for Gladiatrix (St. Martin’s Press) that eclipses almost anything else that might be said about the book. “Think: girls gone wild -- with swords.” Really, what more need be said?

Nineteen-year-old Lyssandra is a Spartan priestess with martial training. Oh, and she’s super hot. As Gladiatrix opens, she’s in the arena performing as a female gladiator. Her life as an arena slave is short-lived, however. She is scouted by the successful and beautiful gladiatrix, Eiranwen, who takes the young slave into her school and -- ultimately -- her bed.

Gladiartix is occasionally so overwritten, I had to avert my eyes. Take these two lines from the very first page:

The roar of the crowd was a living thing as it assaulted her and she staggered beneath its violent intensity. Row upon row of the screaming mob surrounded her, the ampitheatre stuffed full, as if it were a massive god gorging upon base humanity.

You don’t have to go far to find lines like that, either. These are from the first page, but I could have just opened the book at random.

But then, this is not high fiction. No one is going to be rushing in with any literary awards for debut novelist Russell Whitfield on this one. But if you like this sort of stuff at all, you’ll probably enjoy Gladiatrix. Intense action, gore, sex, Gladiatrix has it all. Could a movie be far behind?

Review: Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips. Says Leach:

Read this book slowly. You’ll want to speed up, because you’ll want to know what happens next, but you’ll be making a mistake. Set over three days in Korea, Winfield, West Virginia and Kentucky, Lark & Termite is comprised of slowly unfolding sentences that, for all their southern drawl, are honed down to essentials: the way a stray cat’s underbelly sounds dragging along dead grass, the rattle of freight trains, the muffled sounds of tunnels, the secrets families keep. Read too quickly, and you’ll miss something crucial.

The full review is here.

Author Snapshot: Kamran Pasha

Some people -- critics and supporters alike -- are watching the debut of Kamran Pasha’s Mother of the Believers (Washington Square Press) with deep political interest. Viewed a certain way, so much is at stake. Recently, on his blog, Pasha wrote that “controversy is inevitable when it comes to writing about Prophet Muhammad, who has the distinction of being simultaneously the most beloved and hated man in world history. Revered by his followers as God’s last messenger to humanity, and vilified by others as a false prophet, the founder of Islam has always been a figure that excites passionate emotions. So in writing a novel that looks at his life from the perspective of the woman he loved most, I have no doubt that I will become the target of those feelings.”

There’s more of that kind of thing swirling around Pasha’s novel. Doubtless, none of that will be bad for sales, which just a few days after the book’s publication date already look quite brisk. But, right here and now, none of that matters. What does matter: Mother of the Believers is a fascinating and beautifully crafted work of historical fiction. Set in Arabia in the seventh century, it is the story of Aisha, the favorite of the Prophet. Aisha tells his story with sharp and affectionate eyes. “I have been blessed -- and cursed -- with perfect memory,” Aisha tells us early in the book. “I can recall words said forty years ago as if they had been uttered this morning .... The Messenger ... used to say that I was chosen for that reason. That his words and deeds would be remembered for all time through me, the one he loved the most.”

As far as narrative devices go, having a beloved mate tell the story from her eyes is not a bad one. It gives her license to indulge her poetic heart and gives the author space in which to cloud his imaginings.

Mother of the Believers works on all levels. A deeply entertaining fiction -- nice and thick, just the way those of us who love historicals like ‘em -- as well as a bridge to understanding a way of thought and life that will be at least somewhat foreign to many of the book’s readers. Has there ever been a better time for both of those things?


A Snapshot of Kamran Pasha...
Debut novel: Mother of the Believers
Born: Karachi, Pakistan
Reside: Los Angeles
Web site: kamranpasha.com


What’s your favorite city?
Medina, Saudi Arabia.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Go to the Tomb of Prophet Muhammad. Pray. Meditate. Go to the neighboring cemetery, Jannat al-Baqi, and visit the grave of my novel’s heroine, Aisha, the Prophet’s wife. Medina is the most peaceful city I have ever known. Six hours inside its sacred precincts would feel like both an eternity and a blink of the eye.

What food do you love?
Spinach. I have been addicted to spinach since I was a child. Sautéed or cooked in curry sauce, I could eat spinach for every meal!

What’s on your nightstand?
A copy of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. This is one of the most important books for any writer -- in fact, any artist. It explores why we procrastinate as artists, why put off doing what we love, and inspires the reader to overcome his or her blocks and live a creative life.

What inspires you?
Women and words. I have a work of art that hangs over my writing desk, symbolizing my two sources of inspiration. It is a black-and-white photograph of a beautiful woman wrapped in a veil of cursive script. The beauty of women and the power of words -- they are inextricably linked in my heart. Perhaps that is why I primarily tend to write about strong women, and why my first novel is told from a woman’s point of view. The Sufi mystics of Islam teach that the beauty of God is manifest in the feminine form, and my fascination with women has very deep spiritual roots. It is the never-ending quest to probe the depths of the female psyche, to explore the mysteries of the divine feminine, that keeps me creatively inspired.

What are you working on now?
My second novel, Shadow of the Swords. The book will follow the battle between Richard the Lionheart and the Muslim king Saladin to conquer Jerusalem -- and the heart of a beautiful woman.

Tell us about your process.
I am a night owl and normally don’t start writing until 10 PM, and then work until 2 AM in the morning. I am a screenwriter and I usually write a screenplay version of my novel first as an outline. With the dialogue and action already written in the screenplay, I turn to descriptive prose and shape the story into a novel.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I can’t remember anytime that I wasn’t a writer. One does not choose to be a writer. In fact, I would say most writers don’t “want” to be writers. That’s just who we are, we can’t help it. We may in fact hate the compulsion to write, since it takes us out of the social world and locks us into a private -- and sometimes lonely -- place.

There are times when I wish that I had some other passion, as writing is an exhausting process, both physically and emotionally. But words have power over me, and no matter how much I may want to resist, they summon me back to my writing desk. In Islam, creation comes from God using words. He says, “Be” and it is. It is therefore the power of the word that connects us back to our source, the ultimate creative force that imagined the universe into being. Words give me the fuel to live, to breathe. I cannot imagine doing anything else. Being a writer is more than a job. It is the essence of my soul.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I would be planted six feet under the earth. Writing is life. If I could not write, I would be like a plant denied water and sunlight. I would wither away and disappear.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Securing my first book deal after spending nearly six years desperately trying to get agents and publishers to look at my manuscript. There is nothing as fulfilling as a victory that is long in the making.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
There is nothing easy about being a writer. I have no idea how I do it, nor perhaps why. Writing is very much like channeling spiritual energy. It feels like a force greater than myself takes possession of me and moves my hand across the computer keyboard. I often read over my words and am shocked, because I have no memory of having written them. That is usually true with my best writing. And as a result, I can’t really take credit for the best of my work. My conscious mind has nothing to do with the act of creation. Something deeper, something far more ingenious than my limited human mind, is doing the work. I’m just renting it the use of my hands.

What’s the most difficult?
Surrendering to that force, that muse, that is doing the creative work. My conscious mind is terrified of giving up control, and I will procrastinate for hours, days and weeks, before the internal pressure becomes too great and I force myself to sit at my computer and start typing. And the moment that happens, I go into a trance and lose myself in the process. My conscious mind checks out and the muse takes over. Writing is truly a form of possession, no less terrifying than Linda Blair’s experience in The Exorcist. If I had a choice, I would never allow that surrender of my mind to another power. But I don’t have a choice. I was made for this purpose, so I guess I have to just suck it up and deal.

Please tell us about Mother of the Believers.
My first novel is a historical fiction tale that follows the birth of Islam from the perspective of Aisha, the teenage wife of Prophet Muhammad. I was inspired by Anita Diamant’s wonderful book The Red Tent, which tells the biblical story of Jacob and his 12 sons, the forefathers of Israel, from the point of view of the women in their lives. I wanted to do a similar style novel within the Islamic tradition.

Aisha is such a remarkable figure in Islam that it was a tremendous pleasure to write about her. She was a scholar, a poet, a statesman and ultimately a warrior who led armies into Iraq. And at the same time, Aisha was the Prophet’s closest confidante and most beloved wife, and he died in her arms. Aisha single-handedly shatters every stereotype of subservient Muslim women, and I hope that my book will serve as a starting point for a much-needed dialogue about the role of women in Islam.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I have a crush on Audrina Partridge from the MTV series The Hills.

Fiction: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Robert Goolrick’s first novel, A Reliable Wife (Algonquin Books), isn’t your normal, everyday thriller. Normal, everyday thrillers, as you’ve probably noticed, are propelled by action. Villain threatens with A. Hero retaliates with B. Villain, wounded, strikes back with C. And so on. My point is, it’s action all the way.

A Reliable Wife is a thriller of another kind. In this brief, brilliant book, it’s not what the players do that matters; it’s what they feel, what they think. The considerable action isn’t physical. Rather, it’s mental and emotional. The threats the characters wield require not bigger guns and sharper knives and smarter gadgets, but bigger hearts, sharper insights, and smarter dialogue.

Writing in an eloquent, precise, and sometimes repetitive style that mimics the meandering double-backs of thought, Goolrick sets his primary characters against each another as if they’re archetypes in a painting -- but they only look like archetypes. The middle-aged businessman, rich but lonely. The younger woman, come to bitterly wintered Wisconsin in 1907, having answered the man's ad for a reliable wife. It’s a snapshot, how they are at this moment. But what brought them here? What do they want? What are their secrets? And how will all of that propel their tale forward, knotting up their lives? By turns tantalizing, surprising and shocking, A Reliable Wife shows us how the past and its echoes can change one’s life as easily as a new realization can change one’s mind.

Author Snapshot: Gordon Aalborg

Gordon Aalborg began his writing career as a reporter, columnist and bureau chief at The Edmonton Journal in his native Alberta, Canada. In the 1970s, he followed his muse to Australia where he spent many years as a freelance journalist, radio and television broadcaster, ultimately reinventing himself as bestselling romance author, Victoria Gordon.

Though Aalborg is back to writing under his own name, Victoria Gordon survives 20 books in. The most recent novel to be published under that name, 2004’s Finding Bess, was co-written by Aalborg and the author who is now his wife, Denise Dietz (Strangle A Loaf of Italian Bread), before they married. Aalborg and Dietz wrote the book via e-mail when he was still living in Tasmania and she was living in Colorado. “What a hoot -- she kept wanting to kill people off and I kept wanting to get them into bed together.”

While Aalborg became what may have been the first man to write serious category romance, I would suspect that the Victoria Gordon novels were not the books of his heart, romance or no. Aalborg’s own passion seems closer to the surface in books like the newly published Dining With Devils (Five Star). “Thriller writing is much, much more difficult,” than writing romances he has said.

Though Dining With Devils stands alone, it follows up 2004’s The Specialist, a novel Booklist said hit “the creepy jackpot with his villain, a transcontinental Hannibal Lector wannabe with an appetite for the well-muscled thighs of comely female cyclists.”

The protagonist in that book, Tasmanian Police Sergeant Charlie Banes, is back again in Dining With Devils. “Don't start it at night,” warns author Jeffrey Cohen (It Happened One Knife), in a blurb for Aalborg’s book. “You won’t get much sleep!”


A Snapshot of Gordon Aalborg...
Most recent book: Dining with Devils
Born: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Resides: Sidney, British Columbia, Canada.
Birthday: February 5th
Web site: gordonaalborg.com


What’s your favorite city?
I am not a city person, but if I had to choose: Hobart, Tasmania. I spent half my adult life in Australia and most of that in Tasmania, which I still think of as my spiritual home. Good people, good climate, spectacular scenery and world-class trout fishing.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Go bush. With fly rod.

What food do you love?
I am a dedicated carnivore.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Various and sundry TV dinners.

What’s on your nightstand?
I have no such animal.

What inspires you?
The work of other writers, usually much better than I am. And of course my esteemed wife, Denise Dietz, who is also a mystery writer. I was forced into the genre in self-defense after multi discussions about which was easier/harder to write, mystery or romance.

What are you working on now?
The third and perhaps last in my Tasmanian mystery/thriller series. I’ve been back in Canada nearly ten years now, and it’s time for a change. Might try fantasy if I live long enough.

Tell us about your process.
Get up, have morning coffee, indulge in evasive strategies such as checking news, weather, crossword puzzle, etc. Having exhausted all possible excuses not to write, I eventually confront my computer, review the last efforts, usually rewrite some part of that, and then carry on bravely.

Cannot plot as such. I begin with a vague concept and let the story (hopefully) tell itself. If I plot at all, it is more a matter of searching for ways to link individual episodes in my characters’ journeys.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Books, more books, still more books, some pictures, in a messy office with a computer that rules my life when Deni isn’t doing that.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’m not sure I ever wanted to be a writer. I fell into journalism at a tender age (long before there were computers), and it was downhill all the way after that. I woke up one morning and realized I was a storyteller. Once you realize that there is no going back -- you are doomed.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Tell stories in hell, probably to people who’ve heard them before. Or write the stories -- I’m positive computers were invented by the devil. Or not be able to tell stories -- that would be hell!

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Going over the page proofs of Dining With Devils and finding myself generally pleased with it. Realizing I’ve actually learned something about story-telling, even if I won’t live long enough to learn it all.

The worst, strangely enough, was during my romance-writing heyday, when I got a huge royalty check one day, having done little for the previous six months, and found myself wondering: Is this all there Is to being a writer? Lots of money -- but no satisfaction!

In those days, Harlequin didn’t acknowledge that any man could write category romance. I went to [a Romance Writers of America] conference back in the 1980s with the admonition: “Keep your head down and your mouth shut and remember you don’t exist.” That is an awful situation for a writer. We all crave attention, recognition, balm for our fragile but outsized egos.

And in recent years I’ve been doing a lot of freelance editing, which gives me immense satisfaction along with equal frustration. But when it’s good, there is no greater joy than finding and helping to shape raw, genuine talent in someone who’ll be a significant writer, if they work at it hard enough, long after I’m dead.

I was -- just for the record -- Kelli Stanley’s editor for her Nox Dormienda (A Long Night for Sleeping) Bruce Alexander Memorial Mystery Award Winner at Left Coast Crime just recently. I bathe in her reflected glory and thank my lucky stars for having had the sense to recognize a damned good book in its infancy. Some of my other authors have gained crash-hot reviews, but this is the first to actually get an award ... and for a first book, too!

For you, what is the easiest thing about being a writer?
You get to be your own boss -- and everyone else’s.

What’s the most difficult?
You get to be your own boss.

About once a year I would sell my soul just to have somebody else make the decisions for a change. Thankfully, that doesn’t last more than about half a day. More seriously, I believe writing is something that gets more and more difficult the better you become at it, because the challenges never stop -- they run right over you without even slowing down.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Deni often asks why I’m pestering her instead of doing my own work.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
“If we offer to pay you enough, will you come to ??? and address/teach/discuss….?”

What question would you like never to be asked again?
“You’re a writer? Have I ever read your books?”

Please tell us about Dining With Devils.
As I said earlier, Dining With Devils is the second in what might or might not end as a trilogy. The book is a standalone, but follows on from my earlier book, The Specialist.

On a remote Tasmanian grazing property, a gundog judge is murdered, at first glance by a blind man shooting blanks at a dead pigeon in an incident seen but not understood by Police Sergeant Charlie Banes and his close friend, visiting Canadian author Teague Kendall. Kendall’s almost-lover, Kirsten Knelsen, an ardent caving enthusiast, is kidnapped elsewhere in Tasmania, with nothing to even suggest the two incidents might be related. Then Kendall himself goes missing.

It takes all of Charlie’s “country cop” skills to discover the links, which involve Kendall’s vengeful Tasmanian ex-wife, a psychotic, American-hating ex-Viet Nam sniper, and a killer believed to have been dead for more than a year.

The killer everyone thinks perished in a Canadian cave is seeking revenge on Kirsten, the woman who trapped him there and left him to die. This time -- as before -- he intends to have Kirsten for dinner, and when Kendall’s ex-wife contributes Kendall to the menu, the killer fairly drools with anticipation.

Charlie’s rush to save his friends and end the killing spree is a race against time through the eucalypt forests of Tasmania’s east-coast highlands. Aided by a cranky old bushman and his Jack Russell terrier, Charlie also has help from the ubiquitous Tasmanian devils ... world-class scavengers with their own ideas about appropriate table manners.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’ll pass on that. If two people know something it isn’t a secret anymore.

Fiction: A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing by Cecelia Frey

I’m a big believer in the contract between an author and her readers. I thinks it’s important that, early on, the author lets the reader know just what kind of journey to expect. It’s a subtle thing and it can be a small one, but, to my mind, it’s often the difference between a successful book and one that is not so much.

Whether by instinct or design, in A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing (Brindle & Glass) Cecelia Frey nods her tacit agreement to this principle. By way of proof, I offer the opening lines:

Terrabain Street goes around and around in my head like a song I can’t get rid of. It’s driving me crazy, I said to Zeke. It’s like a stuck CD.

Write it down, Zeke said. Get it out of your head and down on paper.

I don’t know how, I said.

Write it like a song, he said. You’ve written a hundred songs.

With these few lines, Frey skillfully establishes a sense of rhythm and place for A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing because, even if we don’t know right away where Terrabain Street is fixed on terra firma, we understand spiritually where it is: almost every major city has one, or did at one time. A street or a district overcome by youth culture, the rhythms and spirit of a time.

And these are rhythms that are impossible to resist. At least, they were for me. Frey’s characterizations are raw and sweetly familiar. The reckless and daring Lilah Cellini in love with musician Jamey Popolowski. The realities of traveling with Jamey’s band ultimately help Lilah to a better understanding of what she herself needs.

Those who were moved by Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo will find resonance in A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing. It’s a very different story and, certainly, a very different type of book but, in a few important ways, the journey is similar. Frey’s novel is a beautifully told coming of age story set against the grimy backdrop of the Western Canadian music scene. A hypnotic, memorable book.

Review: The Believers by Zoë Heller

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Believers by Zoë Heller. Says Leach:

Heller’s fine novel takes on the Litvinoff family, a tribe of New Yorkers utterly certain in their beliefs until, abruptly, they aren’t.

Patriarch Joel is a famous radical lawyer known for defending controversial individuals, most recently an American Muslim suspected of Al Qaeda ties. Joel, an ardent socialist and judgmental moralist, glories in his outsider status, gleefully scanning the morning papers for disparaging publicity.

Joel’s English-born wife, Audrey, fled her humdrum life as a typist to marry this American hotshot. Shy, overwhelmed by America, she constructed a protective carapace, a sharp-tongued, fiercely leftist character that has hardened into a vicious woman.

The full review is here.

Fiction: Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand by Gioconda Belli

Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand (HarperCollins) feels like celebration; feels like the first day of spring.

Memoirist, poet and novelist Gioconda Belli here looks at the Western creation myth and weaves it into something magical and self-reflecting. We begin at the very beginning:

And he was.

Suddenly. From not being to being conscious that he was. He opened his eyes.

He touched himself and knew he was a man, without knowing how he knew. He saw the garden and he felt someone watching him. He looked in every direction hoping to see another like himself.

It should be remembered -- and once you begin to read, you won’t be tempted to forget -- that, despite mounds of research, Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand is fiction. As Belli tells us in a note:

This novel is not Creationism, it’s not Darwinism. It is fiction. Fiction based in the many fictions humankind has woven around this story since time immemorial. It is a close look at the difficult and dazzling beginning of our species.

It is also wonderful. Unforgettable. Ambitious. And even, as Salman Rushdie has said, it is sly. Your belief system does not matter here. This is good and beautiful storytelling, plain and simple. A perfect book. Simply nothing I would change.

Author Snapshot: C.E. Morgan

There is something extraordinarily timely about C. E. Morgan’s debut novel, All the Living (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). She finds beauty and hope in spareness and poverty. Like the answers she offers us up here, Morgan’s writing is spare and thoughtful.

“Lack is everywhere in All the Living,” writes Bookforum. “Lack of rain, lack of cash, lack of other, less tangible things. From the first pages of C. E. Morgan’s gripping, sensual debut novel, the contemporary Kentucky countryside sprawls into view .... Morgan paints a lush portrait of love in a bleak landscape .... there is a sense of conjuring in her language; her prose is both earthbound and hymnlike, with the slight inflection of southern scripture.”


A Snapshot of C. E. Morgan...
Most recent book: All the Living
Born: Ohio
Reside: Kentucky

What’s your favorite city?
Los Angeles.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Get drunk with Agnes.

What food do you love?
Pepsi.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
No Coke since 1984.

What’s on your nightstand?
Some Daniel Mendelssohn criticism, Beatrix Potter, Theatetus, Moby Dick, tattered case for The Big Lebowski. A photo.

What inspires you?
I’ve never understood what this question means.

What are you working on now?
A novel about horse racing and race relations.

Tell us about your process.
Nothing is, or ever has been, the same from day to day.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Green oxalis. Oxblood oxalis. Pepsi.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
At the age of seven, when I learned to read.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Working as a singer.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Writing.

What’s the most difficult?
Not writing, but thinking about it.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Actually, no one ever talks to me about my writing!

What question would like never to be asked again?
That inspiration question, I think.

Please tell us about All the Living.
A young woman, Aloma, goes to live on an isolated tobacco farm with her boyfriend, who has just inherited the land when his family dies in an accident. Orren is quiet, grieving, difficult. Aloma takes a job as a pianist in a local church, where she finds herself drawn to the charismatic and warm preacher, Bell. Over the course of a long, drought summer, she must decide whether she will stay or go.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
Oh, like hell...

Pow Wow edited by Ishmael Reed with Carla Blank

Pow Wow (DaCapo) is an important book. Edited by the incomparable Ishmael Reed -- novelist, poet, playwright and essayist -- with help from Carla Blank, a writer and artist whose work you will be hearing about soon, Pow Wow’s subtitle offers a broad overview of the book: “Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience -- Short Fiction from Then to Now.” As that subtitle implies, the reader is in for the journey of a lifetime.

The contributors represented alone make Pow Wow a collection of interest. Russell Banks, Cecil Brown, Stanley Crouch, James T. Farrell, Benjamin Franklin, Ellen Geist, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Bharati Mukherjee, Ty Pak, Grace Paley, Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain and more and more and more besides. In all, 63 pieces represent a diverse view of American writing over the past 200 years.

“In assembling this anthology,” Reed tells us in his foreword, “I have read over four hundred short stories written by American writers of all backgrounds. It is a journey I recommend for all readers who want to know where American civilization has been and where it is going.”

Pow Wow sets us on that journey in a collection intended to mark our consciousness and our hearts.

Author Snapshot: Jill Mansell

While it’s possible you haven’t heard of Jill Mansell, that’s likely about to change. The Bristol-born author’s books have sold over three million copies in almost every place outside of North America. January Magazine caught up with her on the eve of her U.S. debut to ask her a few silly questions, a few important questions and a few that seemed designed to do little beyond determine what a good sport she is.

Twenty books into an exciting career, Sourcebooks today debuts An Offer You Can’t Refuse.

Says Booklist: “Mansell’s novel is the perfect read for hopeless romantics who like happily-ever-after endings.”



A Snapshot of Jill Mansell
Most recent book: An Offer You Can’t Refuse (Sourcebooks)
Born: Bristol, UK
Reside: Bristol, UK
Birthday: June 16th, many moons ago...
Web site: www.jillmansell.co.uk


What’s your favorite city?
Venice, Italy.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Gaze around in awe and wonder, and fall in love with the place all over again. Sit outside a café in St Mark’s square and people-watch. Take a trip along the Grand Canal. Get lost down narrow side-streets. Look in the windows of real estate agencies and wish I could live there.

It really is completely magical. One warning though, that teeny-tiny cup of coffee at the café in St Mark’s Square will probably set you back 25 dollars...

What food do you love?
I’m a huge potato fan. (I don’t mean I’m huge, I just love them a lot.) Roast potatoes, creamed potatoes, fries, chips, sliced and baked with heavy cream and cheese... I’ve never found a way of cooking a potato that I didn’t like!

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
I was doing back-to-back phone interviews from an Australian hotel room earlier this year. I was really hungry, so during the minute-long break between calls I ripped open the packet of wasabi-coated peanuts I’d saved from my flight on Singapore Airlines. Briefly pausing to wonder what wasabi might be, I emptied the packet into my mouth... and my head nearly exploded. I then had to do a live radio interview with my mouth on fire and sweat breaking out on my forehead, whilst acting as if nothing was wrong. I think we can safely say I shall be steering clear of wasabi in future.

What’s on your nightstand?
Books, lip-balm, nail file, alarm clock. What should also be there is a notepad and pen for those brilliant plot ideas that always occur to you in the middle of the night, but the moment I put them there, you can guarantee someone will come along and steal the pen. A member of the family, that is. I'm not implying a burglar will break in and make off with it.

What inspires you?
The fear that if I don’t produce a book, my publishers will demand their advance back, which would be awkward as I’ve already spent it. Then they’d dump me and I’d have to go back to working in the real world. And I’d really hate that to happen because I like it too much in this unreal one!

What are you working on now?
My current book is about a female limo driver -- I was being driven to an event last year and got chatting to my chauffeur, who told me such amazing stories about his job that I knew I’d have to put some of them in a book. Some snippets of gossip are just too good to pass up...

Tell us about your process.
I write by hand, with a Harley Davidson fountain pen. I write the book itself in A4 pads, and keep notes and plot ideas in beautiful decorative notebooks. Weirdly, my handwriting is completely different in the notebooks. My mum used to type the novels up for me. Now my daughter is doing it. This is why there are no explicit sex scenes! Plot-wise, I tend to know what’s going to happen in the next chapter or two, but that’s it. If I try to plan out a whole book before writing it, I’ll get better ideas as I go along, so there’s no point. It’s scarier but more fun to improvise.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I’m writing this in bed, with a great view from the window of the sports ground beyond our garden. It can be distracting sometimes, having fit hunky men playing soccer and tennis out there all day long, but I just have to tolerate it!

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I used to write a lot when I was a kid but never imagined I’d get to do it for a living -- it was a fabulous dream, right up there with wanting to be Miss World and sob photogenically on stage in a swimsuit and diamond tiara.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I’d go back to my old job -- I was an electroencephalographic technologist, which means I recorded the electrical activity in people’s brains. I worked in a neurological hospital for 18 years and loved it.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
The day my editor phoned to tell me that I was number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list. I burst into tears.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Getting stuck in commuter traffic on the way to and from the hospital every day used to drive me nuts, so being able to work from home is an absolute joy.

What’s the most difficult?
Getting the book written is all down to me -- I can’t ask someone else to take over when I get to a tricky bit or realize I’ve made a hideous mistake that needs sorting out. I wish I could!

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
“Jill, my angel, would you pleeeease let me buy the film rights to your book and allow me to star in the movie?”

And I’d like George Clooney to be the one saying it.

What question would you like never to be asked again?
“Have you never wanted to write a serious book?”

(No, I haven’t wanted to! Never ever! Stop asking me!)

Please tell us about your most recent book.
It’s romantic comedy, feel-good fiction about a girl who runs a bookstore in London and is desperate to win back the love of her life. If you enjoy movies like Notting Hill and Four Weddings, you’ll like my book. And if you don’t like those kind of movies, you’ll really hate it!

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
George Clooney is madly in love with me and has asked me to marry him. But it’s a secret, so don’t tell anyone I told you.

New This Month: A Sandhills Ballad by Ladette Randolph

It strikes me that A Sandhills Ballad (University of New Mexico Press) is a nearly perfect book. The harsh Nebraska landscape is a complete character in its own right. Unforgiving. Somewhat distant. Aloof. Home. The human characters are more yielding, but only just. And the sum of what author Ladette Randolph creates here is unforgettable.

We meet Mary Rasmussen as she’s awakening from a six week coma after an accident in which the bride lost her husband.

In that deep sleep she dreamt about the wind. She heard it whistle under the windowsills and through the cracks of an empty house, heard it rattle the loose No Hunting sign on a weathered post, and slam open and shut again the sagging door of an old barn.

A husband is not all Mary lost in the accident and, over the fullness of A Sandhills Ballad, her emotional awakening is like a rebirth.

The most startling thing about A Sandhills Ballad is the fact that Randolph does not have a wider following. A winner of the Nebraska Book Award (for the collection, This Is Not the Tropics), she is also the recipient of a Norcroft fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and the Virginia Faulkner Award. With the publication of this exquisite novel, perhaps her name will become better known.

Fiction: In the Hands of Anubis by Ann Eriksson

Despite an epic canvas and a delicate touch that sears the heart, there’s something sweetly naive about In the Hands of Anubis (Brindle & Glass) a novel that looks at love and unhappiness in entirely new ways.

Trevor Wallace is a tractor salesman from Calgary on his way to Africa on business. In a German airport he has a chance encounter with a woman in her 70s, and they end up traveling together to Cairo. Constance is traveling the world with the ashes of her three husbands in plastic containers -- their names carefully lettered on the lids -- in her suitcase.

The pair end up stuck in Cairo, just long enough to tour the pyramids. Trevor returns home to Calgary not long after, but she’s touched him somehow -- or those ancient structures have -- emotionally, spiritually: it’s all the same. Only his world, his life are different.

In the Hands of Anubis is a lovely little book. It seems at times to touch on all the humor, the sadness, the joy of the human spirit.

New This Month: Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

If you were to somehow meld the stylish dysfunctional humor of Lisa Lutz and the arms akimbo stylings of Miriam Toews, it would likely look something like Jessica Grant’s debut novel, Come, Thou Tortoise (Knopf Canada). When I say this, keep in mind that -- as different as they are -- I love the work of both Lutz and Toews. I love Come, Thou Tortoise, as well. And the three are not at all alike. But they are, in a way, equally quirky, equally funny and equally deep, and in a darkly sneaky way.

As Come, Thou Tortoise opens, Audrey Flowers is boarding a plane. She’s deathly afraid of flying (“I remain vigilant and concentrate on having a future. On a plane if you don’t concentrate on having a future, you won’t have one.”) but she must leave Oregon and return to Newfoundland because her father is in a coma. She’s been forced to leave her pet, Winnifred (mentioned in the title), in not very dependable hands. But she must return to the Maritimes to discover who her father actually is.

Grant uses lists, diagrams and a charming, staccato voice to tell Audrey’s story. One suspects a deeply serious skill -- and perhaps a talent deeper still -- beneath Audrey’s naive and weirdly charming voice.

New this Month: Advice for Italian Boys by Anne Giardini

Sometimes the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree, as The Reader recently pointed out when they listed several proud literary parents and their bookish offspring.

One of the connections they mentioned was the one between former National Post columnist and fairly new novelist Anne Giardini and her famous author mom, the late Carol Shields.

Giardini’s second novel (after 2005’s The Sad Truth About Happiness), Advice for Italian Boys (HarperCollins Canada) is breathtaking. Inspired by the author’s own relationship with her mother-in-law -- the “Giardini” comes through marriage -- Advice for Italian Boys introduces us to Nicolo Pavone and his Italian-Canadian family -- and especially his grandmother -- bent on bringing him safely through to manhood on the strength of their hard-won experience:

Nonna referred to her store of lozenge-shaped adages as proverbi, but Nicolo, the quietest of her three grandsons, understands them to be the old timers’ way of administering advice, like a poultice applied in advance against trouble.

Advice for Italian Boys is richly layered, with a cast of deeply textured and enjoyable characters. This second outing for Giardini is quietly stunning.

Author Snapshot: Lisa Lutz

Comparisons seem inevitable, at least in part because no one seems exactly sure what kind of books she writes. Some have argued that they’re not mysteries simply because, well, they’re not all that mysterious. Yet the action takes place entirely around a fully dysfunctional family of private investigators who do PI work on each other just as a matter of natural course.

The family, of course, are the Spellmans and the comparisons all leave much to be desired. They do, however, instruct in one regard: if an author is repeatedly compared to Carl Hiassen and Janet Evanovich, you understand that the books in question are funny. And Lisa Lutz’ Spellman books are certainly that.

Lutz’ humor is darker than Hiassen’s, though. More subtle than Evanovich’s and more sophisticated than either of those authors. In some ways, these are the books Meg Cabot’s grown up readers have been waiting for. The gentle subversiveness that Cabot displayed in her earliest books for young adults is here, but overrun and run amok without the constraints that might be put on an author concerned with offending an audience… or their parents.

Lutz has said she wrote The Spellman Files, her first novel, after a movie script she’d worked on for a decade was made into a dreadful film. It’s a story she told engagingly in Salon in 2005.

After that experience, she vowed (though I can almost see the laughter in her eyes when she reads that “vowed”) to turn her writing to projects over which she would have full control. Clearly the results of that experiment have paid off... for all of us.

The third Spellman book, Revenge of the Spellmans (Simon & Schuster), is published today. A fourth is in progress and all of that is good news because a lot of us just can’t get enough of those crazy Spellmans.



A Snapshot of Lisa Lutz...
Most recent book: Revenge of the Spellmans
Born: As far as I know
Reside: San Francisco (for now)
Birthday: March 13th
Web site: lisalutz.com


What’s your favorite city?
I think it’s Edinburgh, Scotland.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
I don’t know. I’ve never been there.

What food do you love?
Licorice.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Poutine.

What’s on your nightstand?
NyQuil, aspirin, dust, an alarm clock, a lamp, some books.

What inspires you?
Coffee and fear of having a real job.

What are you working on now?
I’m “working” on the fourth book in the Spellman saga -- The Spellmans Strike Again.

Tell us about your process.
I’m a total computer girl -- can barely use a pen anymore. I’m the most lucid first thing in the morning and then I go downhill after that. I write until I feel my mind slipping and then I call it quits. I don’t outline in detail, but I keep a giant bulletin board and I feed it with index cards that can include anything from a joke to a major plot point. When I begin a novel, I just have a vague arc which I add to as I write. I use a daily word quota to keep me on point, as well as some mental threats. Sometimes I nap and hope that inspiration will hit me. I use booze only when necessary.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
A giant cement pillar, a computer, and a box of SpongeBob Band-Aids.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I realized that any other job I could get sucked.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Temping, most likely. Or motivational speaker.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
The day I got my first book deal.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Work attire. I’ve always wanted a job where you can wear pajamas all day.

What’s the most difficult?
Touring. More specifically, the travelling/sleep deprivation part of book tours and the not-wearing-pajamas part.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Are your novels autobiographical? (My mom likes to ask that question whenever she’s at a reading.)

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
“Can I buy you a drink?”

What question would like never to be asked again?
“Do you have your license and proof of insurance?”

Please tell us about Revenge of the Spellmans.
It’s the third installment of the Spellman series. My main character finds herself involved in therapy, blackmail, an SAT cheating scandal, and, well, revenge.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I refuse to answer that question.

Review: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Tony Buchsbaum reviews The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. Says Buchsbaum:

While I was waiting for an advance copy of Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones, winner of the 2006 Prix Goncourt, I satisfied my curiosity by reading articles about it and interviews with its author (in which he came across as prissy and mean-spirited: it was made clear that once he answers a question in one interview, he won't answer it again in another). Anyway, when it finally arrived in the mail, I dove right in.

Then promptly hit a submerged boulder that all but snapped my neck.

By any measurement, this is not a lightweight book. Measured page-wise, it's a 975-page behemoth. Measured plot-wise, it's a complex, detail-laden brick that's a memorable -- but far from great -- read. The subject matter is controversial, unpleasant, even incendiary. Its author is an American who wrote the book in France, in French (that's what qualified it for the Goncourt).

The full review is here.

New This Month: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Think 50 First Dates without all the zany antics or Memento without the buckets of blood and you have the central conceit of The Housekeeper and the Professor (Picador) the latest translation from contemporary Japanese literary icon Yoko Ogawa.

The title’s Professor is a brilliant mathematician whose mind is stuck in the 1970s and whose short-term memory is only 80 minutes long. The Professor shows the Housekeeper the poetry in numbers and the magic in the everyday.

While The Housekeeper and the Professor lacks some of the controlled madness that spiked Ogawa’s previous translation, the short story collection The Diving Pool, there is a certain sweet delicacy here -- a sure hand, a subtle touch -- that gives this novella more resonance than its slight stature would indicate.

The Housekeeper and the Professor was first published in 2003 in Japan where it has sold 2.5 million copies and been adapted into a feature film.

Review: The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. Says Leach:

Wolitzer’s terrific novel follows the lives of four women who have left the workforce to raise children. Amy Lamb, Jill Hamlin, Roberta Sokolov and Karen Yip are all talented, highly educated, happily married New Yorkers when their babies arrive. And those babies change everything. Suddenly the twelve-week maternity leave is insufficient; each woman, with varying degrees of remorse and financial security, leaves the workforce to tend her offspring.

Wolitzer’s over arching theme is the arguable failure of Feminism: yes, women can now be nearly anything they wish (glass ceiling notwithstanding), but somehow somebody forgot about childcare. Yes, men are getting better about equal parenting, but the workforce in general is achingly slow to accommodate those women who, at the height of their careers, are also anxiously feeling their biological clocks ticking. So the hot young lawyer/doctor/statistician/artist “drops out.” It’s only temporary, she reassures herself. Besides there is the child, or children, who, when small, demand every waking (and often sleeping) moment.

The full review is here.

Author Snapshot: Elizabeth Kelly

Elizabeth Kelly’s overnight sensation status need not come as a surprise: a magazine editor and award-winning journalist, Kelly has spent a lifetime wrangling words. That shows in her debut novel, Apologize, Apologize!, an in-depth visit with the dysfunctional Flanagans, an old money Massachusetts family with many branches and quite a lot of dogs. Apologize, Apologize! is charming, funny, accomplished and oddly muscular.

And it seems likely that Apologize, Apologize! will only be the beginning for this Ontario, Canada-based author. The book has thus far been sold to five countries and the film rights have been optioned by Daryl Roth and Richard Gladstein who produced Finding Neverland, The Bourne Identity, The Cider House Rules and others.

In her Author Snapshot, Kelly tells January Magazine that the easiest thing about being a writer is... writing, something she can’t imagine not doing.



Most recent book: Apologize, Apologize!
Born: Brantford, Ontario

What’s your favorite city?
I’m too untraveled to have a favorite city unless you count Hamilton [Ontario]. My favorite place isn’t a city but a beach town in southwestern Ontario called Long Point, miles and miles of practically deserted sand and surf. The poor man’s Malibu.

You only have six hours to spend there what do you do?
Sit on the beach and drink tea.

What food do you love?
Chocolate.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Chocolate.

What inspires you?
Other people’s courage.

What are you working on now?
The screen adaptation of Apologize, Apologize!

Tell us about your process.
Computer, computer, computer. I can’t remember how to write in longhand. Morning, noon and night, when I’m on a roll.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was too little to formulate any sort of proper plan for my life -- eight, nine years of age, I knew I was going to be a writer.

If you couldn’t write books what would you be doing?
Probably not much of anything. Daydreaming and hoping someone else would do the healthy lifting. So, nothing -- or I would be a wildly celebrated performer in the musical theater.

What’s the easiest thing about being a writer?
Writing.

What’s the most difficult?
Getting paid.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
What’s your book about?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Has anyone ever told you that you look like Annette Bening?

What question would you like never to be asked again?
Has anyone ever told you that you look like Broderick Crawford?

New this Month: Rifling Paradise by Jem Poster

It sounds like hyperbole but I don’t care: Jem Poster’s sophomore effort, Rifling Paradise (Overlook) is as near perfect a book as I have encountered in a very long time. It is a work of historical fiction and the history here -- Australia in the Victorian era -- is pitch perfect. Rifling Paradise looks like a book, but it is not: it’s really a time machine.

The story finds minor English landowner, Charles Redbourne, heading to Australia to make an impression as a naturalist, at a time when that was a weirdly competitive field. If Rifling Paradise was just Redbourne’s story, it would be interesting enough: it would be a good book. But when Redbourne’s specimen collecting takes a terrifying turn, we find ourselves with a page turner on our hands.

So what is Rifling Paradise? Is it historical fiction? Literary fiction? Is it a psychological thriller? Or the portrait of an age? Well, actually, it’s all of those things. And more. A wonderful book.

Author Snapshot: Alan Bradley

Most recent book: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Born: Toronto, Ontario
Reside: Kelowna, British Columbia
Birthday: October 10th
Web site: www.flaviadeluce.com


What’s your favorite city?
London, England.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Squeeze in a visit to all of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s remaining churches. That’s a church an hour.

What food do you love?
Egg salad sandwiches.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Mushrooms.

What’s on your nightstand?
Conceit, by Mary Novik, and The Frozen Thames, by Helen Humphreys.

What inspires you?
What Peter Ackroyd (and others) have called “Albion” -- the idea of England as part of the collective imagination. Ackroyd wrote: “I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks .... Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond?”

By observing myself, I can see that this sense extends not only throughout time, but through geographical space; that I am linked to England by more than genetics.

What are you working on now?
I’ve just finished the second book in the Flavia de Luce series, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. And begun work on the third.

Tell us about your process.
For me, inspiration springs from the thinking process. I might be ploughing through a rather dry old chemistry text, when I spot a certain suggestive phrase, such as “the egg shell will now be seen to assume a reddish tint,” and I think -- or rather Flavia thinks -- “Aha!”

As others have pointed out, plot springs from character, and character springs from plot, and they both spring from that kind of book-browsing inspiration. It’s rather like the recycling symbol: a circle of arrows that recycles, in itself, the idea of the alchemical Ouroboros, or Uroboros: the snake that swallows its own tail.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Two cats cuddling, one teakettle boiling.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I began a novel at the kitchen table when I was five, but never got much past the first couple of paragraphs.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Reading books. For years I longed to be a theatre projectionist, but now I’ve done that.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
The moment when The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie won the Debut Dagger Award.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The actual writing -- and the research.

What’s the most difficult?
Forcing myself to stop researching and get writing.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
“Do you actually get paid for doing this?”

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
“Would you be willing to provide a good home for a Steinway concert grand and a complete collection of Chums annuals?”

Please tell us about The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
It’s a book about how far youthful idealism can carry you if it’s not stamped out, as it so often is. And besides that, I like to think that it’s a rattling good mystery, too -- the sort of book that makes you feel better when you’ve finished than you did when you started.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
That I share, with hawks, the ability to see into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum (at least, with one eye).

New Today: Mr. Darcy’s Dream by Elizabeth Aston

One of the most amazing things about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is how, almost 200 years after the death of the author, her characters continue to inspire others to enter her world, sometimes in the most public of ways.

Some of the fanfic inspired by Austen’s work is the very worst of fanfic of any kind: weak little pastiches that barely captures the flavor of Austen’s work, let alone the comforting majesty.

And then there’s Elizabeth Aston. With Mr. Darcy’s Dream (Touchstone Fireside) she’s six novels into an internationally acclaimed series inspired by characters who first breathed in Jane Austen’s most famous work.

Aston describes herself as a “passionate Jane Austen fan” who also happened to have studied at Oxford with Austen biographer Lord David Cecil. But Aston is more than a studied fan: she’s also personally talented and assured, as a growing readership for her series will attest.

In Mr. Darcy’s Dream, Darcy’s niece Phoebe has returned to Pemberley after a failed romance... only to hook up with her uncle’s brilliant landscape designer.

Eighteenth century chicklit... Regency style, but man: this stuff has legs.

Author Snapshot: Maria Semple

Most recent book: This One Is Mine
Born: Los Angeles
Reside: Seattle
Birthday: May 21, 1964
Web site: www.mariasemple.com


What’s your favorite city?
Aspen, Colorado

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Anything, so long as I'm outside and covered with sunblock.

What food do you love?
What food don’t I love, is more the question. I'm a vegetarian and I consider bacon one of my favorite foods.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Chocolate chip cookies made substituting white sugar for brown sugar. I did this once. It was midnight and I had to eat something really bad for me, so imagine my good fortune to find a bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard. I went through all the ingredients and miraculously I had everything except brown sugar. It seemed harmless enough to use white sugar instead. Well, I don’t know what the chemistry of it was, but even the smell of them baking made me nauseous. I took one bite and I spent the whole next day vomiting. I have to stop writing about it, because I can taste it now.

What’s on your nightstand?
The galleys for Sarah Dunn’s new novel, Secrets to Happiness. It’s hilarious.

What inspires you?
Renouncing all praise and criticism. Knowing that I’m not special and the only way I can distinguish myself is by working hard.

What are you working on now?
My next novel. I’m so happy to be back writing after doing press for This One Is Mine. I love doing readings, and feel like it's important to honor you work by doing readings and press. But there’s nothing like succumbing to the madness of living in the world of your novel.

Tell us about your process.
I start every writing session copying poetry or part of a short story into a notebook. Then, I copy a random page of the dictionary. That gets me connected with words and the great writers who came before me.

I sketch out the scene I’m writing by hand, with a pencil on a yellow pad. When I get enough down, I move to the computer. In the larger sense, I’m a big believer in outlining and, as we say in TV, “breaking story.” Before I begin the novel, I know the big beats of the story, and where it’s going to end. I start my drafts at the beginning, and from there lots of cool stuff can pop up which can change everything, so I’m constantly revising the outline as I go.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
A fabulous map of Aspen, Colorado circa 1893. My next book takes place in Aspen and so I hung a map of the town across from my computer.

Out the window is Elliot Bay. Container ships and the Bainbridge ferry are doing their things. It’s actually sunny today.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
My father was a writer. And I idolized him. So I never thought about becoming anything else.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Being an executive assistant. I’m very organized and like being in the whirl of things, but don’t necessarily want the responsibilities and focus that comes with the whirl. Anytime there’s somebody I admire, I never think, “I want to be that person.” I usually think, “I want to be that person's assistant.”

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
When I got the call that Little, Brown wanted to buy my novel. I hung up and went downstairs to tell my boyfriend. On the way, I passed my daughter’s room. She was three at the time. I saw all her little dresses hanging from her closet and I thought, “Her mother is a novelist.”

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The writing! I’m sorry to say that, but I really do love figuring out the story and the characters and the sentences.

What’s the most difficult?
Finding the time to write.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
How much of that is autobiographical?

What question would like never to be asked again?
Has Oprah read your book, because that would be really good for you, if your book got picked by Oprah.

Please tell us about This One Is Mine.
It’s a modern-day Victorian novel about marriages and relationships in LA. It’s funny and serious and passionate and surprising. People seem to really like it.

War and Peace and War and Peace and War and...

For all of my adult years, I have been searching out new-to-me translations of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. It’s like a hobby with me, or some odd type of life mission. (Odd, at least, to judge by the faces of people when you tell them such a thing. “Oh,” they most often say. “Really.”)

Reading multiple translations of War and Peace becomes a study in linguistics and a crash course in the power of words. It was deeply interesting to me to discover that each new translation I threw myself at was like reading a whole different book. The choices the translator makes are dreadfully important and you discover how certain word choices can alter a sentence, a paragraph or even whole pages of text.

Here’s another thing that reading War and Peace -- a lot -- has shown me: any time we trust translators, we are at their mercy. And so, for instance, from reading War and Peace I have deduced that highly religious people who place great confidence in their English language Bible are taking a lot as given. I’m not saying their translations are wrong, mind you. But it does stand to reason. With so much of translation apparently a subjective art, how could anyone ever trust completely in the words they’re served up? Some would call it “faith” I guess. But if they do, they haven’t read a lot of translations of War and Peace. You get over that faith -- that trust -- real early. It doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the work, but it lets you dance with the nuance of language and understand just how terrifcally subjective translation is.

So why War and Peace? Why not some other weighty tome? Well for one thing, it’s a very, very long book. I save my new translations for high stress times in my life. Times when a really, really, really long novel can become a sub-plot of my own existence. Times, I guess I should say, when I invite the opportunity of being wrenched out of my own reality for weeks at a time. Fortunately, my life is such that it doesn’t happen often. But when it does? I’m ready with a new-to-me translation of War and Peace.

Here’s another reason: if there’s another more translated non-religious work, I don’t know what it is. You can find many translations of War and Peace because they exist. Not only that, for the most part they’re credible translations: done by a long line of scholars and linguists and other noteworthy wordshifters.

And another still: War and Peace neatly slices off a tasty piece of the human condition. All sorts of things happen in this weighty work. OK, it’s true: with that many trees giving up their lives, something better happen. But, as the title promises, there are healthy chunks of war and peace in Tolstoy’s epic. And the book was written prior to the Revolution, but not eons before. Tolstoy finished the first draft of War and Peace in the early 1860s and poked away at it for many years after that. However, War and Peace was a historic novel: it takes place 60 years before the book was written. And thus you have a semi-romantic look at the Napoleonic war-era -- written by an aristocrat, no less. As a forward-thinking resident of the 21st century, you get to see, really, why the Russian Revolution ultimately happened. Tolstoy’s main characters are, for the most part, not nasty people, but they are aristocrats and they act in a way that is in keeping with both their time and Tolstoy’s own: they treat their underlings like so much furniture. Those without status don’t matter at all. Viewed from this inside track, revolution, of one form another, seems inevitable.

And so, at its very best, War and Peace becomes a magic prism with which to view a place in time that has since been altered completely beyond recognition. (Thankfully, really, because -- from all accounts -- pre-Revolution Russia was not a lot of fun for most people.) The spirit of tsarist Russia is here though, in all its oblivious, beautiful ugliness. Kept intact by an ever-growing phalanx of talented translators.

The latest batch are talented, indeed. Husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated some of the most important works of Russian literature over the last couple of decades. For War and Peace, I’m recommending the Vintage paperback edition of their efforts. At over 1200 pages, this is a heavy book, even in paper. If you read in bed sometimes, it is inevitable that you will, at some point, fall asleep while reading this one. It seems just a little safer to do that with the paperback. The hardcover edition, published late in 2007, is quite capable of knocking you out on your way to slumberland.

New in Paperback: Life Class by Pat Barker

It’s difficult to imagine a more perfectly soft backdrop over which to juxtapose the harsh outlines of war: an art class -- actually, a life class -- in the summer of 1914 and a group of friends in art school forever touched and altered by the onset of war: the first Great One.

Pat Barker, winner of the Booker Prize (for 1995’s magnificent The Ghost Road), here revisits some of the territory she covered in her ground-breaking WWI trilogy, Regeneration (of which The Ghost Road was the third and final novel).

When Life Class (Anchor) was published in the U.S. in hard cover last year, the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani (whose birthday we remarked upon in this space last week) said:

After several intriguing but lumpy novels set in the present or near-present, it becomes clear to the reader that World War I resonates with Ms. Barker with special force, for “Life Class” possesses the organic power and narrative sweep that her recent books with more contemporary settings lack.

While I’ve not heard many (any?) others ever describe Barker’s work as “lumpy,” Kakutani is correct here: Life Class is certainly possessed of both power and sweep. There is perhaps no one who conveys the horror of that terrible war.

Author Snapshot: Laura Benedict

Most recent book: Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts
Born: Cincinnati, Ohio
Reside: Southern Illinois
Birthday: July 2
Web site: laurabenedict.com


What’s your favorite city?
I’ve never been there, but I think it would probably be Florence, Italy.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Visit the Uffizzi, the Galleria (where Michelangelo’s David is), and the Ponte Vecchio.

What food do you love?
Dark chocolate.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
Olives. My grandfather was mad for them and I tried to eat them many times when I was little so I could be like him. But I gave up after he died because, really, it probably never mattered to him whether I liked them or not.

What’s on your nightstand?
A half-chewed WWII plastic army guy (the puppy did the chewing, not me), a booklight that needs new batteries, two fresh tissues, an alarm clock, a dental appointment card from three months ago and the following books: The Bible, Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables; For Your Eyes Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies; David Corbett, Blood of Paradise; Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger, The Letters; Collected Poems of WB Yeats; Joyce Carol Oates, Mysteries of Winterthurn; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Palmistry; Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (poems); Michelle Gagnon, Boneyard.

What inspires you?
My children, the woods, music, artwork and good writing. Dreams. My intense desire to be able to afford fashionable clothes.

What are you working on now?
A horror novel based on the tale of The Gingerbread Man

Tell us about your process.
Definitely a “pantser” and not a “plotter.” I start with a strong image, then depend on my characters and the setting to lead me from there. I would be lost without a computer, though I’m not tied to a particular one. Sometimes, if I feel like I need to be more intimate with a scene, I’ll write it out in pencil in a notebook. I have a stack of eight or nine spiral notebooks of various sizes in a drawer at hand -- notes on stories and novels are scattered throughout them, though I usually settle into one when I get going on a novel. But there are also grocery lists, volunteer notes from the last couple Thrillerfests, dreams I’ve had, phone numbers and notes on my income taxes.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Myself in my hairstylist’s mirror, my head beneath a big domed hair drier: no makeup, much of my hair in little foily thingys, a stuffed monkey, a bag of chocolate and hair stylist paraphernalia.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I had the first hint that I wanted to be a writer in 1985. I was sitting in my studio apartment near Washington University in St. Louis and I suddenly began writing a monologue for a woman who might have been a deranged character from a Tennessee Williams play. The apartment building, a bizarre art deco confection called The Castlereagh, had certainly been there when Williams lived in U City, so maybe he was looking over my shoulder. I confess that I have a weakness for Southern Gothic, so, maybe...

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Perhaps living under permanent psychiatric observation or playing solitaire for hours at a time on my computer or working as a caterer or studying the habits of raptors.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Finding out that the paperback reprint of Isabella Moon will be featured in Target beginning in mid-February. Target is my happy place.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Revising.

What’s the most difficult?
Reading unpleasant reviews of my work. I’m all for hearing someone’s thoughts on my writing, even if they’re not crazy about it. I know my work won’t please/amuse/entertain everyone. But some reviewers seem to take a distinct pleasure in being particularly cruel. Now, I understand that I’ve put the work out there so folks get to say whatever they want. But it hurts sometimes and, yes, it can make me cry.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
How can you write the stories you write? You look like such a nice person!

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Why aren’t there any talking animals in your work? (I’m working on it!)

What question would like never to be asked again?
Do you think you’ll get to be on Oprah?

Please tell us about Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts.
It’s the story of three women who told a very cruel lie about a handsome priest back when they were teenagers and ruined his life and career. The priest takes his revenge by enlisting the aid of a demon (Satan himself, if you like) to wreck their lives. It’s not a book for children or the easily offended. It contains much sex and violence and disturbing imagery. Then again, it’s a horror novel and horror novels are supposed to, well, horrify.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’ve never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Best Books of 2008: Fiction

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow) 960 pages
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is a weighty tome which completes, in part, his spelunking through the underpinnings of the current century. The avout live in a Concent regulated by time. It becomes necessary for one of them, Erasmus, to venture into the world where he discovers that some of the core beliefs are based on untruths and comes into contact with aliens who ask the same questions that he does. It concludes the philosophical explorations of the Baroque Cycle, but begins more questions than it has answers. Set in the far future on a world which is earth-like, this is Stepehnson’s most deeply envisioned landscape in terms of characters, land and language and manages to read differently each time. Weighty but worth the effort. -- Iain Emsley

Arkansas by John Brandon (McSweeney’s) 224 pages
Drug-running gangsters are at the heart of Arkansas, John Brandon’s debut novel from McSweeney’s Books; however, as the title reminds us, the shady business is carried out not in Harlem, Miami or Vegas but the rural Southeast. This allows Brandon to indulge in the kind of quirky writing that distinguishes Southern grit-lit and, true to its McSweeney’s roots, this neo-noir novel is cynical and hip. Kyle Ribb and Swin Ruiz are petty criminals who, for lack of anything better to do, start working for a black-marketeer named Frog in the land of trailer parks and deep-fried breakfasts. The two run packets from an Arkansas state park where they have phony cover jobs as assistant park rangers. Brandon keeps the pace brisk and tense. The violence, when it comes, surfaces quickly, snaps at us in the space of a paragraph, then recedes just as fast. -- David Abrams

Beside a Burning Sea by John Shors (New American Library) 448 pages
Over two weekends at the pool last June, I lost myself in the wondrous Beside a Burning Sea, by John Shors. Set during World War II, just after a medical ship is torpedoed, nine survivors make their way to a nearby island. Sure, the set-up sounds a bit like the TV series Lost -- but Shors takes this almost conventional conceit to rare heights, casting his novel with castaways who a perfectly opposed to one another. The nurse sisters, the Japanese POW, the heroic doctor, the mysterious loner, the innocent girl. Each has a deep inner life the island sets afire -- again, very Lost-like. The love story that blossoms against very bitter prejudice propels the tale, allowing the characters to define themselves according to their loyalty (or lack thereof) to the POW. The question isn’t whether these people will ever get rescued; truth is you don’t want them to because this is such rich territory for fiction. The ticking bomb is that Japanese forces are combing the area for places to settle troops. So are they coming here ... or aren’t they? If they do come, will they free the POW and capture the others? Dramatic stuff, but what makes this novel sing isn’t the threat that these people will survive the Japanese, but whether they’ll survive each other. With love scenes, gripping action and miraculously telling character details it all blends brilliantly to create a novel that’s easy to admire and impossible to dismiss. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey (Harper) 502 pages
I came to Bright Shiny Morning fully prepared to loathe it. How could it be otherwise? Frey had gotten his shot with a couple of well-published and well-promoted biographies. He’d gotten his shot and blown it in a grand and noisy style. Shouldn’t Frey, in the tradition of historical wannabes everywhere, just go off with his tail between his legs and leave us alone on our various paths to finding books that matter? But he did not. Instead, he took himself quietly off and emerged with a stout and ambitious book. Inevitably, fire was drawn. Like many others, and with an admittedly jaundiced eye, I started to read. And was astonished. Bright Shiny Morning is not perfect. There are weirdly wide flaws. But it is utterly, completely original. More: the book’s flakey, broken narrative and bumper-to-bumper pace captures the feeling that is Los Angeles while its sharp little vignettes grab some of the context. -- Linda L. Richards

Death: A Life by George Pendle (Three Rivers Press) 250 pages
“My earliest memory is of my mother. She was a heavyset lady, the size of a small mountain. Everyone knew her as Sin.” So begins Death: A Life, a clever, thoughtful and surprisingly funny quasi-autobiography of the grim reaper. “My father was Satan. He was Mother’s father, too, which led to some awkward introductions at parties.” These snippets from the very first chapter (“The Beginning of the End”) capture the spirit of Death: A Life quite perfectly. It is, of course, a novel -- it’s all made up -- even though it’s delivered just like a biography. Death is even given a bio on the back cover (though, alas, no author photo). Death is darkly funny, surprisingly moving, deeply charming. It’s an enjoyable -- albeit unlikely -- read. But don’t expect a sequel. As good as it is, once is probably enough. -- David Middleton

Duma Key by Stephen King (Scribner) 592 pages
In recent years, Stephen King has begun to be accorded the respect he deserves. For example, in 2003, he was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Even so, one can still draw concerned scowls when one mentions his name among certain factions of the literati. I’ve never really understood this. Many of the books King writes have frightening elements, but I’ve never been tempted to dismiss him as a horror writer. King is a fabulous stylist and a wonderful storyteller. He wields a mean metaphor and he always finds the right word. And if I have to get frightened in order to read him, so be it. Through the years I’ve often said that I would read King no matter what he chose to write about. One gets the feeling that, if Stephen King decided to write about light bulbs, the journey would be satisfying: he’s just that good. And he is once again that good in 2008’s Duma Key. There are shards of King’s own 1999 accident in Duma Key, where we meet Edgar Freemantle, the owner of a successful construction company who meets with a life-altering accident on a job site. When, while he is recovering, Edgar’s marriage collapses, he rents a house in the Florida Keys where he intends to learn to deal with his injuries and teach himself to paint. Longtime fans might be reminded of King’s earlier vacation-gone-bad book, The Shining, but Duma Key is a much better book. The author has more miles on him: he understands human nature better these days and he understands his talent. It’s tough to say this is King’s best book ever -- there are so many good ones, after all. But Duma Key is quite, quite wonderful. A masterwork from a journeyman at the very top of his game. Bravo! -- Linda L. Richards

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (Random House) 368 pages
Niccolo Vespucci, aka Mogor dell’Amore and sundry other aliases, arrives at the court of Akbar the Great, “the Great Great One,” descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and emperor of the Mughal empire that encompasses vast swathes of 15th-century India. Vespucci, a Florentine, has a story to tell that only the emperor can hear, as it concerns the fate of his relative, the Princess Angelica of legendary beauty, and the adventures that befell her when she abandoned the subcontinent for the western world of the Near East and Europe, all for the love of the indomitable warrior Argalia. If that sounds like something from The Arabian Nights, then that’s the intention -- Rushdie’s latest novel is a multifaceted fairy tale that embraces mythology and history, legend and fact, fictional characters and historical figures, magic, illusion and self-delusion. The novel fully deserves the accolade of tapestry, so finely woven and dazzling are its constituent parts. The prose, of course, is beautifully detailed, but Rushdie leavens the erudition with coarse dialogue that is at times hilariously profane and blasphemous. Above all, what leaps off the page is Rushdie’s sheer enjoyment of storytelling just for the hell of it. This is an exercise in imagination, an artful and irrepressibly playful cornucopia of tales, myths, digressions and narrative non sequiturs. Even the peripheries of the story teem with vibrant, larger-than-life characters straight from myth. It’s a sumptuous read, fabulous in both senses of the word. The deceptively simple art of storytelling may have fallen out of favor among self-consciously literary writers, but Rushdie is determined that we should not forget its pure joys entirely. -- Declan Burke

Exit Lines by Joan Barfoot (Knopf Canada) 336 pages
Dark and funny and dangerously nuanced, in Exit Lines Joan Barfoot manages another notch on an already impressive double bandolier of high impact Canadian novels. Four new guests at a retirement home form a pact of “pleasurable rebellion.” The concept is funny and, on the surface of things, the approach is lighthearted. However, Barfoot deals here with topics most of us would much rather skate past: mortality, morality and a diminished twilight as a footnote to a vibrantly lived life. As in her previous novel, the Giller-finalist Luck, Barfoot captures humanity in a way that both resonates and makes one wonder at a world slightly askew. Barfoot’s vision is always worth watching, and there’s no exception to that rule in Exit Lines.
-- Monica Stark

The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 196 pages
The successful short-short story, also called “flash fiction,” operates like an elite military commando team: get in, get out, take no prisoners. Writers have a particular challenge when trying to create believable plot and characters in stories which typically range from just a few sentences to a few pages. How do you reduce a universe of meaning to something the size of a breadbox? Etgar Keret makes it look so easy. In his previous collection, The Nimrod Flipout, and now with The Girl on the Fridge, the Israeli writer hits us with one flash-bang surprise after another. These perfect little gems range far and wide across the human experience. While some are strange and off-kilter, Keret never leaves us scratching our heads in bewilderment. The short-shorts take us to places we recognize, but then detour our assumptions in the space of a single word. -- David Abrams

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane (Morrow) 720 pages
While a case could be made that Lehane’s fat new novel belongs in the crime fiction and mystery section of bookstores (the main characters are cops and the story could not exist as it does without the crimes involved), it probably doesn’t. The author has done a great deal to burnish the reputation of the detective story; his five Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro private-eye novels (including 1999’s Prayers for Rain) have been celebrated widely. But he’s been moving farther away from the genre ever since Mystic River was published in 2001, and followed by Shutter Island in 2003. The Given Day is a large-canvas historical yarn about Boston and Boston cops, which may remind some readers of Robert B. Parker’s underappreciated 1994 novel, All Our Yesterdays. While Parker’s compass pointed him in the direction of early 20th-century violence and cynicism, Lehane steers a more twisted and intriguing course through a post-World War I America that’s preoccupied with racism, sports and fear of communist incursions, beset by disease and divided by class. In these pages, he tells parallel stories about Luther Laurence, a young black man -- smarter than most people think -- who falls in with the wrong crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and flees both murder charges and a pregnant wife, landing in Boston and the employ of the Coughlin family. The Coughlins aren’t long off the boat from Ireland, but they’ve established themselves within the local police ranks. In addition to Laurence, Lehane focuses here on Danny Coughlin, a rather idealistic but far from naïve young cop, the rising son of an influential police captain, who supplies a window through which we witness the misnamed “Spanish flu pandemic” of 1918 to 1919; the Woodrow Wilson-era campaign against radicals; and the notorious 1919 Boston Police Strike. Lehane even manages to mix into his story the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, though I understand he eventually edited out much of that subplot. There’s so much story in The Given Day, that the reader may have trouble keeping a handle on it all. But Lehane does an exceptional job of moving his plot along, whether with the romance between Danny Coughlin and a young Irish woman holding too many secrets; or the low-boil confrontation between Laurence and powerful, conniving cop Eddie McKenna; or the rivalry between Boston’s mayor and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would eventually ride his much-inflated role in ending the police strike directly to the White House. And the author’s portrayal of baseball star Babe Ruth, who winds through this yarn like a lazy river, popping up periodically for comic relief or to assist in illuminating the era’s culture, is marvelous. If Lehane ever gets around to writing a Given Day sequel (he is reportedly writing another Kenzie and Gennaro novel first), I hope he’ll find a place in it for the Babe. He’s a character who often seems as if he could only exist in fiction. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine (Alfred A. Knopf) 528 pages
In 2001, Rabih Alameddine’s novel I, the Divine was published. I still haven’t read it, but I love the idea: the novel is a series of first chapters about the life of a woman. Like the opening minutes of Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, she keeps revising the way she tells the story, yet each way reveals something more about her. The Hakawati, Alameddine’s new novel, is equally fascinating: it’s a long tale about a teller of tales, a hakawati. At its core, this is the story of three generations, a son, his father and his grandfather -- and the familial conflicts that define their lives. Osama al-Kharrat and other family members gather as Osama’s father is dying. Written in a sort of magical realistic style, Alameddine layers the history of this contemporary family with the history of Lebanon -- including generous helpings of regional folklore -- and the result is a stunning, unforgettable tour de force. Ultimately, Alameddine creates a delicious soup that almost overwhelms you. But in a good way. Self-deprecatingly, Alameddine calls this book a “story,” but he might just as well have called it a “tale.” As for me, I call it a big, sprawling epic that begs to be savored slowly and considered deeply. No matter what anyone calls it, it’ll leave you tingling. -- Tony Buchsbaum

In the Light of You by Nathan Singer (Bleak House Books) 238 pages
I used to think that the 1998 film American History X was hardcore, that it pushed the envelope and was a really brave story about what hatred can do to you. But then I read Nathan Singer’s masterpiece. Now American History X seems like a Disney flick. In the Light of You takes place during the mid-1990s, around the time of Los Angeles’ Rodney King riots, the Rampart police scandals, and O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. It features Mikal Fanon, a 17-year-old kid in a nameless Ohio city. He has no identity and a very scary home life, with distant and abusive parents. He craves an identity, the comfort of people like him. Now, most teenagers put on different identities like a snake sheds skin; but Mikal makes the very unfortunate decision to be friendly with the local skinhead, a charismatic young man named Richard Lovecraft. Lovecraft is the leader of an up-and-coming skinhead gang called the Fifth Reich, and author Singer doesn’t shy away from exploring that subculture. Now, I have to go back to American History X, because that’s what this story will most likely be compared to, once it gets the attention it deserves. In that movie, we’re shown what today’s skinheads look like, but we never live with them, never feel their filth or understand why young people enlist in their ranks. Singer uses first-person narration in In the Light of You, so we’re with Mikal every step of the way. The biggest myth is that the leaders of modern neo-Nazi organizations are stupid. Wrong and ignorant and very often evil, yes, but they’re not stupid. To build their numbers, they have to be smart and charismatic. They have to sell their dream of racial pride and segregation. Lovecraft repeats often that he doesn’t want black people killed, just separated from the whites. In one very interesting scene, he calls a black preacher an intelligent man, because he preaches about living away from white society. He is a good salesman, and Mikal buys in slowly but surely. Lovecraft finds out at one point that the kid is interested in the environment, so he concocts a story about how Adolf Hitler was very concerned with preserving nature and Earth’s health. In another scene, so intimate that it approaches the erotic, Lovecraft shaves Mikal’s head and gives him his uniform, promising that he’ll be tattooed to signify that he belongs to his new “family.” This is very much a coming-of-age story. Mikal is like every other sarcastic American teenager out there, angry and confused, but also humorous on occasion. You have to ask yourself, how could such a funny kid take part in so many ugly things, just because his leader says it’s the right thing to do? This should be required reading for teenagers, but only if they can talk with their parents about what happens in it. It’d be educational for both sides. -- Cameron Hughes

The Joker by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo (DC Comics) 128 pages
It’s a myth that murderous psychopaths are actually diabolical geniuses like Hannibal Lecter. They’re really more like Ted Bundy or the BTK killer, smart enough to blend and charming enough that you’d expect nothing. But in a comic-book world, it is perfectly acceptable that the Joker could talk his way out of the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane by convincing the doctors he was cured. It’s a neat idea and while I’m pretty sure it’s been done before, it’s never been done this well. The Joker is a hard villain to write. Use him too often, and he loses menace (much like Lecter, who isn’t nearly as scary, now that we know more about his origins); write a bad story about him, and you wonder why he’s held up as the ultimate Batman villain over the last 68 years. Brian Azzarello, creator of the brilliant neo-noir conspiracy comic 100 Bullets, likely knew these facts about the Joker as well, and set out to make him a scary character again. I knew it was going to be a different kind of story right from the start, because it begins not with the Joker, but with a low-level mobster sent to pick him up, who also serves as our narrator and guide through the Joker’s triumphant return to Gotham City. The Joker’s plan is very simple: he will gather allies and promise them big things if they help him become the king of criminals again. Our narrator, Jonny Frost, is seduced by this idea. He’s on the fast track to nowhere with his current crew, and Joker promises him big things. This could very easily be a sequel to the film The Dark Knight. Azzarello’s Joker is clearly the same character, complete with mouth scars and pancake make-up and old, ratty, but weirdly formal clothing. What we’re offered here isn’t “I have an insane plan” Joker; this is a grounded Joker with very clear goals. Writer Azzarello is smart with his pacing; you expect the Joker to snap and do something evil, but instead, his actions grow progressively worse and worse. In a stroke of genius, Azzarello has him snap at about the same time as Batman shows up. And at the same time Jonny realizes just how sick his new boss is, we’re sucker-punched by what the Joker does. I’d be a fool not to praise Bermejo’s illustrative work on The Joker as well. It’s dark and moody with enough flair that it achieves a sort of hyper-reality; his designs for characters such as Killer Croc and the Riddler are the traditional looks of the characters, while still real enough that you almost think they could be real. I now know why Johnny Depp is considered the perfect choice for the Riddler -- it’s such an obvious spin, that I can’t believe I ever doubted the idea of that casting for the villain. Who knew that the Joker could star in his own story, let alone be really great? I certainly didn’t. Bravo. -- Cameron Hughes

The Little Book by Selden Edwards (Dutton) 416 pages
I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up Selden Edwards’ The Little Book. All I knew were two things: that I liked the soiled-old-photograph-like cover (designed by Ben Gibson), and that the author had spent 33 years on his manuscript, beginning when he was still a young English teacher in 1974. Such labors of love either turn out to be masterpieces of development or messes of over-thinking. Fortunately, The Little Book is one of the former. It’s part of a subgenre of unlikely time-travel tales, like Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back (1990) or Allen Appel’s Time After Time (1985), in which the “how” of transportation through the years is pretty much ignored in favor of appreciating the consequences of the journey. In Edwards’ story, teenage baseball star-turned-California rock musician Stan “Wheeler” Burden, attacked by an unknown assailant in 1988 San Francisco, tumbles backward to 1897 Vienna. There, he must adapt as best he can, striking up the most unlikely association with Sigmund Freud, encountering Mayor Karl Lueger (who advocated racist policies and would be an inspiration to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism) and meeting not only his own father -- another victim of this time dislocation -- but his grandparents as well, who did happen to be in the Austrian capital all those years ago. In addition to discovering more about his father’s life and that of a former mentor, Burden helps fill out a vivid picture of Vienna before World War I, when it was still considered the intellectual capital of Europe. He must also contend with one moralistic dilemma after another, as he falls in love with a woman from his future and considers the opportunity of killing Hitler while he’s still a boy. Author Edwards obviously had fun in contriving the lengthy arc of circumstances that will lead to Burden’s attack in 1988, but he shows even more delight in re-creating a long-ago and ostensibly promising era. If it took him 33 years to write The Little Book, I fear we won’t see another work of fiction from this author. Thank goodness his first novel is so memorable. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster (Henry Holt) 192 pages
Paul Auster writes so quickly, seeming to release a novel a year, that you’d be tempted to think the man just can’t have any more ideas. But rather than a fiction factory primed to pump out surface ideas for our momentary enjoyment, Auster instead reaches deep into the human psyche every time, finding new ways to express the humanity we share and lacing his novels with ideas we wrestle with long after the last page is turned. Man in the Dark is a stunning meditation on loneliness. A man lies in the dark, assessing his life, and imagines the life of another man caught in what seems to be a time warp, dropped into a spot where he recognizes little except the shell of the life he used to have, What’s more, he’s on a mission he doesn’t fully understand -- but we understand that he’s been tasked with the murder of the man in the dark. This all-too-brief cat-chasing-its-own-tail novel is startling in its simplicity and remarkable in its depth of character and action. It’s further evidence that Paul Auster isn’t just one of our most effective novelists, but also one of our most insightful thinkers. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House) 288 pages
Olive Kitteridge is the kind of woman you would duck across the street to avoid meeting. She’s abrasive as sandpaper rubbed across a scab and unapologetically rude. In the hands of Elizabeth Strout, however, the retired Maine schoolteacher is one of the year’s best tour guides to the human heart. The novel is a series of linked short stories, any one of which can be plucked at random and enjoyed in their own right. Just as she did in her previous two novels, Amy and Isabelle and Abide With Me, Strout distills universal human behavior down to the miniature scale of one particular town and its residents. -- David Abrams

On Account of Conspicuous Women by Dawn Shamp (St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne) 320 pages
Dawn Shamp’s debut effort takes place in Roxboro, North Carolina mostly in the early 1920s. It focuses on the lives of four young conspicuous women who are moving from girl to womanhood at a time of great change. And so we see the first time American women may vote, we see racial strife and inequity as well as the introduction or increasing acceptance of inventions that will change the world -- telephones, motion pictures, automobiles -- all from the safe vantage of the eyes of these four young women who really have much more important things on their minds. On Account of Conspicuous Women is the exact opposite of an epic novel. It is quiet, unassuming, even gentle yet ever so worthwhile. In one way, it is more like a tool for time travel than almost any book I’ve ever read, offering up a simple -- and, yes, sweet -- peek into the lives of four conspicuous women in a very different time. -- Linda L. Richards

One More Year by Sara Krasikov (Spiegel & Grau) 229 pages
In a blurb for Sara Krasikov’s debut collection, novelist Yiyun Li said that Krasikov “treats every story as a novel,” which somehow sums up the collected work here ever so well. It is the rare writer who brings this kind of weight and importance to every short story character, yet I find myself, months after reading the book, casting my mind back again and again to Krasikov’s varied cast of the disenchanted and displaced. Like many of the major characters in One More Year, Krasikov was born in the former Soviet Republic. The current NYC resident is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received the O. Henry Award and is a Fulbright scholar. If this is the first you’ve heard of Krasikov, I hazard that it will not be the last. -- Monica Stark

The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell (Algonquin) 320 pages
As The Resurrectionist opens, a pharmacist named Sweeny has just had his young son, Danny, transferred to the Peck Clinic, a place where they specialize in comatose patients. It does not take us long to realize that, though the Peck Clinic has a good record for awakening patients in comas, there is a lot swirling just below the surface: just slightly out of our grasp. There is more to Sweeny, too, than meets the eye. The Resurrectionist begins on a sharp and steady noir/crime fiction beat, and becomes ever more surreal until, by journey’s end, it’s difficult to keep track of what’s real and what is not. O’Connell’s work has been compared to that of Kafka, William Gibson and Wambaugh. While he does not suffer under such comparison, it isn’t entirely fair. While, for me, there were moments when The Resurrectionist bent under its own weight, this was a journey I enjoyed from end to end. More: while I read, there was no voice to whom I felt O’Connell’s must be compared. This is great stuff: and unlike anything you’ve probably ever read before. Highly, highly recommended. -- Lincoln Cho

Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost (Del Rey) 272 pages
Frost writes beautifully. Lyrically. He writes as though he’s going to a place there is no coming back from. It seems to me to be the only place from which fantasy should be approached. On his Web site, Frost describes the fictional place we encounter in Shadowbridge as “a world of linked spiraling spans of bridges on which all impossibilities can happen. Ghosts parade, inscrutable gods cast riddles, and dangerous magic is unleashed.” And… “Monstrous creatures drain the lives of children and for a price, you can sample their fleeting quintessence -- provided the creatures don’t sample you instead.” And, truly, aside from the whole fleeting quintessence thing, that works for me, as well. Frost, who is also the author of the virtuous and awarded collection Attack of the Jazz Giants, has been a finalist for pretty much every award offered in his field of interest. In Shadowbridge, he proves himself to be a powerful writer here at the top of his game. If you love the sort of vibrant fantasy that relies as much on the skill of its creator as the complexity of his imagination, you will love Shadowbridge. -- Lincoln Cho

Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan (Viking) 320 pages
A teenage girl goes missing. Search parties are formed. Pale-faced parents speak to television cameras in quavering voices. Rewards are offered, flyers are taped to store windows, hopes rise and fall. By now, we’re sadly all too familiar with the unique cadence of events that follow an abduction. Most of us can pinpoint the exact moment when our optimistic faith turns to grim certainty the victim is not only missing, but murdered. In one of the best novels of his varied career, Stewart O’Nan charts the case of one family whose college-bound daughter vanishes into thin air while driving to work in a small Ohio town. With an almost forensic efficiency, O’Nan examines the effect of the mystery on the family, friends and the entire town. What happened to 18-year-old Kim Larsen is less important than how her parents and sister deal with the emotional aftershocks. -- David Abrams

The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt (Henry Holt) 320 pages
Hustvedt’s exquisite, elegiac novel layers past and present, creating a complex story of loneliness and loss. Narrated by Erik Davidsen, a psychiatrist, The Sorrows of An American is a novel of secrets and ghosts: father Lars Davidsen’s ghosts, which follow him back to Minnesota after World War II, Erik, divorced, lonely, plagued by a patient’s suicide, his sister, the widowed Inga, who learns her husband, famous writer Max Blaustein, led a secret life during their tumultuous marriage. Even Sonia, Inga’s 18-year-old daughter, carries painful burdens, including what she saw from her schoolroom window on September 11, 2001. September 11th is one of many psychological traumas folded into the novel. Lars is haunted by the killing of a Japanese soldier who assumed a position of prayer rather than aggression; Erik treats several patients suffering the aftereffects of parental abuse. Inga is triply traumatized by Max’s death, September 11th, and the intrusive, threatening Linda Fehlburger, a reporter claiming to know secrets about Max. Continual subtle references remind us that those fighting Iraq war are enduring the same suffering. Hustvedt’s ability to incorporate so much material so seamlessly makes reading Sorrows like drinking a wonderful old burgundy: rich, complex, lush, smooth (I will refrain from comparisons to oak, honey, or long finishes). Memory, love, loneliness, death, dreams, ghosts, fame -- all are here in a beautiful story that deserves more attention. -- Diane Leach

The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan (Random House Canada) 640 pages
Padma Viswasathan’s debut novel pads in on little cat feet and rips you along. You don’t realize you’re on an epic journey in the midst of a generational saga until you’re well along and it’s far, far too late to turn back. Not that you’d want to. Not that you even could. Inspired by the author’s own family history, we join Sivakami in a village in India in 1892, the year of her marriage to the healer, Hanumarathnam. She is ten. What astonishes here is Viswasathan’s virtuosity. In The Toss of A Lemon, we join India at a time of great social and political upheaval. Nevertheless, we experience this only at a distance. The way, in fact, Sivakami might experience it. Our concerns are more immediate, more domestic, though never more mundane. The marriage of a daughter, a granddaughter. The obedience of a son-in-law. The disturbingly progressive thoughts of a son. These concern Sivakami exclusively and, with her as our proxy, they are all that concern us, as well. -- Linda L. Richards

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf) 331 pages
Lahiri’s Bengali heritage informs this magnificent novel of linked stories, communicating worlds through the smallest of details. Saris fight slacks, a mother’s accumulated gold, intended for a future daughter-in-law, is lost to that most American of addictions, alcoholism. Food is a lush battleground of dals, rice, chocoris, bitter melon and Darjeeling tea. The drinking of tea or coffee represents more than taste; one is tradition; the other, cultural abandonment. Alcohol is tantamount to the worst kinds of assimilation, representative in all cases of disaster. But Lahiri’s God always reside in the details, transcending the particulars of immigrant experience to the universal. Ruma, of is adrift. She has married an American and is forgetting her Bengali. Her son speaks only English, eating with utensils rather than fingers. When her widowed father pays a visit, father and daughter, absent Ruma’s deceased mother, can communicate only in generalities. Sudha moves to London, where she meets Roger. The couple fall in love and get engaged. When Sudha returns home to inform her parents her news is overshadowed by Rahul, languishing at home. He vanishes soon afterward, his mother’s jewelry in his pockets. Sudha marries Roger and bears a son; the couple acquires a home. Rahul appears for a visit moving from auspicious to disastrous, as only visits from addicts can. Lahiri nails the hope, despair, and confusion of all families coping with the alcoholism’s immense destruction. The second half of Earth, “Hema and Kaushik,” is comprised of three linked stories, Hema narrating the first, speaking to Kaushik, the second by Kaushik, responding to Hema, “Going Ashore” bringing them together. The children of Bengali immigrants, Hema and Kaushik have known each other since childhood. Each has experienced the wrenching divisions of Bengali and American cultures. When Kaushik’s family returns to American from India, Hema’s parents welcome them for an extended stay, only to be shocked by their old friends, who wear American clothing and keep an open bottle of scotch nearby at all times. The ending is inexorable, dreadful, and made me weep. -- Diane Leach

Under Control by Mark McNay (Doubleday Canada) 310 pages
If you’re looking for a read that’s light and sunny to pull you through the winter doldrums, just keep skating on through: you’re not gonna find it here. Mark McNay’s second novel (after 2007’s Fresh) is muscular, hard and oh so bleak. Think Trainspotting meets Requiem for a Dream, then plop it onto the grimy streets of Norwich, England and you’ve got the basic idea. Especially if you can spin in some mental illness, drugs (of course, if you got the comparables) and dialog so sharp, watch out for papercuts. Under Control will not be everyone’s cup of English Breakfast, those that like this sort of thing, will like it a lot. -- David Middleton

Holiday Gift Guide: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

I’ve often thought that the early death of Robert E. Howard is one of the great tragedies of American literature. Howard committed suicide in 1936 at the age of 30.

Prolific, gifted and, driven, Howard’s work has been admired by Lovecraft and King. It’s possible this author altered the course of macabre writing. Some of his characters will perhaps be better known to you than the author himself: Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn all sprung from Howard’s fevered imagination.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (Del Rey) collects the very best of Howard’s work (including the seminal “Pigeons from Hell”) making this a great gift for fans and students of the macabre. Insomniacs ought to avoid this one like the plague.

Author Snapshot: Diana Spechler

Most recent book: Who By Fire
Born: Boston, Massachusetts
Reside: New York, New York
Birthday: June 15, 1979
Web site: dianaspechler.com


What’s your favorite city?
Jerusalem

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
I’m stressed just thinking about it. Six? Really? Six? Okay, I’d definitely get a falafel -- in lafa, rather than in pita. And I’d order it in Hebrew, because that makes me feel bilingual and worldly. And then…I don’t know! How much time do I have left? I’m freaking out.

What food do you love?
I love Cool Ranch Doritos, even though I’m a vegetarian. I know. That’s gross.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
I don’t eat pork, but one night in a bar, I ate fried pork rinds thinking they were Funyons. And then I felt dizzy with disgust.

What’s on your nightstand?
Stacks of books

What inspires you?
I’m inspired by people, especially the ones who feed pigeons from park benches with fresh artisan bread, or keep mini bottles of liquor in their purses, or squint their eyes at me and tell me about the colors of my aura, or wear too much perfume or laugh too loudly, but have no idea that they’re laughing too loudly.

What are you working on now?
A novel about transformation through loss, set at a weight-loss camp for kids in North Carolina.

Tell us about your process.
I wish I had a process. A person with a process is a person with a mission -- a person with a good ponytail and the right lipstick and a briefcase. Definitely computer. No pen. Morning, nighttime, afternoon ... whenever I can get to it. Free form. Definitely free form. People who outline are my heroes.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Wow. My apartment is a mess.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’ve been writing since I was four years old. I’ve always done it. I’ve always wanted to do it.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Feeling jealous of people who could ... maybe making Voodoo dolls of them.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Selling my novel. It was amazing. I had a pretty good idea that the offer was coming in that morning, so I was electrified with nervous energy. I went to a kick-boxing class at the gym, but kept my cell phone propped against the wall. Sure enough, it rang while I was fighting an imaginary villain. It was my agent. I ran outside while she read me the offer and I sobbed and jumped up and down outside New York Sports Club, wearing green jogging shorts and two sports bras.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
“How much of it is autobiographical?” One of the protagonists in my novel sort of ... um ... finds her solace in the arms of men. People are always really curious about how I came up with her. They ask, “How much of this is autobiographical?” But I think half the time they’re really asking, “Are you a slut?”

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
I’d like to be asked many questions: “Are you comfortable?” “Is there anything I can do to make you happier?” “Can I take you shopping?” “Will you lick the bowl?” “Would you care for a foot massage?” “May I book you on Oprah?” “French fries or onion rings?” “Shiraz or Chianti?” “Can you hold my puppy for a minute?”

Please tell us about your most recent book.
My novel, Who By Fire, is a family story set in Israel in 2002 that explores what happens when we try to rescue the people we love.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

The timing of the mid-November release of The Hour I First Believed (Harper) leads one to think that this is the moment -- this holiday moment -- that the PR mavens at Harper had in mind when they thought things through all those months ago.

A two-time Oprah pick, (for She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True) Wally Lamb tends to sell a lot of books and a lot of people seem to like them. A lot. It makes a new Lamb release a pretty safe pick for someone casting about for a last minute gift for the favorite reader in their life. More: this one is really big and fat and it has a lot of words, making it a terrific bargain by the pound. And if your giftee loved earlier books by Lamb, they’re quite likely to love this one, too.

Here Lamb takes on all the familiar Lambish tropes with matters of faith and race and love and loss and even, this time out, a smattering of danger. It is in places a dark novel, but it’s shored up by intense flashes of light. And, like previous works by this author, much of the writing is truly lovely. Even that which is ugly is given to us with the clear immediacy of the master craftsman. This is one for the list.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A Graphic Novel

Just in time for the holidays, a sort of weird movie tie-in that stands entirely on its own merits, the graphic novel of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Quirk Books) is only slightly short of wonderful, and only then so because I don’t like to rave.

The original story was, of course, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a delicious afterword to the graphic novel, Fitzgerald himself explains his muse in this instance:

This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial.

Even so, 86 years after the fact, a feature film starring Cate Blanchette and Brad Pitt is doing well at the box office.

In my opinion, the graphic novel adapted by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir and illustrated by Kevin Cornell deserves to do even better. This is a complete package: Cornell’s illos are nothing short of stunning and -- clearly -- his work deserves an even wider following. The story has been skillfully adapted by DeFilippis and Weir. One just can’t imagine a better job. If you liked the movie, you’ll love the graphic novel; it’s nothing short of brilliant.

Holiday Gift Guide: This One Is Mine: A Novel by Maria Semple

It’s possible to know too much about an author before you read the book. For example, while reading This One Is Mine (Little, Brown and Company) I kept thinking it was very filmic and that, for various perfectly good reasons, it would probably make a terrific movie. And, of course, I knew going in that, not only is the book set in the glitzy glam world of west side L.A., this is the debut novel of a former sitcom writer.

Maria Semple has worked on many hit television shows, including Mad About You, Ellen and Arrested Development. So she knows about funny and she knows about story and she knows about the place where those things fit together. Enter This One is Mine’s Violet Perry, a rock ‘n’ roll wife with a perfect toddler, perfect home, perfect life. She’s also perfectly miserable, but that’s not so bad, because she’s fairly close to the time when she’ll find the perfect affair. In fact, we’re there when it happens.

I predict two things about This One Is Mine: considering the subject matter, the location and the core themes of the book, it’s possible that Semple’s debut novel will not find this author a huge following. Considering the journey the United States has been on during the last 12 months, This One Is Mine seems slightly out of touch. In a time when people are losing their jobs and overwhelmed by the reality of their shrinking 401Ks, many of Violet’s concerns seem petty. Understand, though, this is no reflection at all on the author and her touch on reality. Lead times being what they are, when Semple handed this book off to her editor, there was no recession rapidly deepening into Depression. There was no Obamamania. And it’s even possible that “subprime” was still a word only ever used at the butcher’s.

In short, then: This One Is Mine doesn’t really work, but the writing? The writing really, really does. Semple carts us away to her world: and it’s a place a lot of people really love to go. Even so, I’m betting that this author will make her mark with the book she’s working on now.

Holiday Gift Guide: City Wolves by Dorris Heffron

Though City Wolves (Blue Butterfly Books) has a lot going on, at its core, Dorris Heffron’s latest novel is about the secret lives of wolves and how they relate to humans. Fascinating stuff. There’s more to this historical novel, of course. Quite a bit. It’s the entirely fictional story of Meg Wilkinson, Canada’s first woman veterinarian. And though the life she has chosen provides inspiration at every turn, she opts to take the best of it from the sled dogs she encounters when her work and her travels take her to Canada’s frozen north.

Though City Wolves could have used a sharp edit, (and the author’s bio’s reference to a “fiction novel” almost saw this reader defenestrate the book even before page one) Heffron delivers a story of ideas and heart.

Those with an interest in or passion for women’s issues or Canada’s history -- or both -- will enjoy City Wolves.

Holiday Gift Guide: Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K. Hamilton

Laurell K. Hamilton is relentless. Since 1993, she has been dishing up her special blend of paranormal eroticism. Clearly, not everyone’s cup of hot beverage, but millions upon millions of fans line up, mostly, for new books in one of two series: the ever popular Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter books -- the most recent of which was Blood Noir (Berkley) -- and her lesser known and more recently launched Merry Gentry series, of which Swallowing Darkness (Ballantine) is one.

In this series, a faerie princess has turned private investigator and is hiding out in L.A. I must share something from the press material, because it’s just too rich to keep all to myself: “Between dark faerie magic and the deepest desires lies the world of Meredith Gentry -- princess, private investigator, and powerful player in a game of supernatural sexual intrigue.”

You see what I’m saying?

In this new book, Gentry is determined to fulfill her destiny and deliver an heir... or more. Again: not everyone has a taste for this sort of reading, but chances are, if your giftee is one of Hamilton’s many fans, this is the one they’d be delighted to find a copy of under their tree.

Holiday Gift Guide: Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins isn’t widely known in North America, which is a shame, as Novel About My Wife (Bloomsbury), her fourth book, is amazing. Tom Stone, a foundering screenwriter, is trying to piece together what went wrong with his wife Ann, who we know at the outset is dead. We don’t know the how she died, or why, but as this almost gothic story unfolds, it’s impossible to put down until we learn the truth.

Ann is everything Tom is not: a beautiful, unconventional Australian, a talented sculptress with a past she refuses to discuss. Tom, is English and more conservative than he’d like to admit, less fortunate in his field and besotted by his red-headed wife. Their relationship is intensely, almost violently sexual in ways Tom chooses to overlook. He also overlooks the jagged scar on Ann’s upper arm, a past pregnancy (aborted), and her literally insane response to Australian Film Producer John Halliburton, whom Tom is longing to work with.

The couple extends themselves financially, purchasing a large fixer-upper in the seedy London neighborhood of Hackney. Ann becomes pregnant, reason for joy, but she also beings unravelling, certain she is being stalked and that malevolence lurks in their crumbling new home. Even the birth of son Arlo fails to calm her increasing hysteria, leading to an inexorable ending.

Perkins’ takes a wry view of English life, of the young couple scrabbling madly for real estate, the right cars, the properly-kitted-out strollers, drinks in the right bistros. That these couples must live beyond their means, chased by envy, is a matter of course, and many American readers will nod in grim recognition. But it is Perkins’ chilling rendering of Ann, mercurial, moody, ultimately unknowable, that truly frightens. Ann’s fears overwhelm both Tom and the reader, moving a novel of domestic unrest into the realm of true horror: hitting us, literally, where we live.

New in Paperback: Lion Eyes by Claire Berlinski

What one feels, throughout the pages of Lion Eyes (Ballantine Books) is a sort of disconnect, almost disassociation. For the most part, the feeling is delicious. It’s a sensation of wondering, throughout much of the book, “Is this real?” or “Is this part fabrication?” We know that both things are a possibility and therein lies that pleasurable confusion.

Like author Claire Berlinski, the main character is called Claire and she is an American living in Paris. Also like the author, Claire has written novel called Loose Lips. You see where all of this is going, right? Claire gets e-mail from a Persian archeologist who says he’s read her book. They begin a torrid electronic affair and when he proposes coming to visit her in Paris, Claire looks forward to finally meeting the man who by now embodies all of her fantasies.

When he arrives, however, Claire finds herself lifted from her romantic fantasy into a world of intrigue and espionage. Berlinski’s prose is charming. Sometimes wildly funny, sometimes oddly innovative, sometimes marvelously insightful. Lion Eyes is quite wonderful and should not be missed.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Fire by Katherine Neville

While a few reviewers have been somewhat cool about Katherine Neville’s long-awaited sequel to 1988’s The Eight, we predict that The Fire (Ballantine) will still manage to find its way under a lot of trees this holiday season.

The Fire features Alexandra Solarin, the sole daughter of the heroic couple we first met in The Eight. The Fire covers a lot of fictional ground between 1822 and 2003 while Solarin searches for a piece of a legendary chess set that -- in its own context -- has the capability of transforming the shape of the world.

The best news for fans could come at the very end: it seems possible that the game might continue at some future point. The possible bad news: will we have to wait another 20 years?

Meyer and Harris Give Vampires a New Stake

Young fans of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (Little, Brown Young Readers) will be unsurprised to hear that the first movie based on one of Meyer’s books is expected to be an unqualified hit with its target audience. From Newsday:

The love-after-death movie “Twilight” is going to be so huge it would take a stake through the heart to stop it. And the reasons seem so obvious they make you say, "D'oh!": A heavily computer-generated, blood-flecked, teenage soap opera set in the hormonal chaos of high school. A ready-made fan base of rabid Gothic/chick-lit readers cultivated by Stephanie Meyer's four-book series. And a not-so-secret weapon named Kristen Stewart.

Back in August, Meyer’s fans celebrated the publication of Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight series, with the kind of enthusiasm that hasn’t been seen since Harry.

Despite the extreme success of the series, Meyer recently told Entertainment Weekly that her next project might not be in the world of Twilight at all:

I have two projects I want to work on. But the movie has been so time-consuming — all the publicity and the merchandise to approve. But I want to get in and write something totally different, a whole new world, and lose myself in that. I think that will be the most healing thing for me. So that's my goal.

By the time the movie opens on November 21st, media interest should have reached a frenzy. Shoot a silver bullet in any direction and you’ll hit a story about Twilight, Stephanie Meyer or one of the much ballyhooed cast of the film. Business Week brings a different angle, however, sharing the Cinderella story that led to the making -- and well-timed release -- of the film.

All of this comes on the heels of the success of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Series, recently reimagined as the hit HBO series, True Blood. Writing for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, back in October, Oline Cogdill wrote:

In her novels, vampires have come out, so to speak, thanks to a synthetic blood manufactured in Japan. But not everyone is so accepting of vampires who have been know to, well, be vampires. Sookie Stackhouse, however, is sympathetic. She’s a waitress in a small town and, because of her ability to read minds, she knows what it’s like to be different.

Harris’ novels re-imagined as a series has become a perfect fit for HBO, with Sookie Stackhouse played by Oscar-winner Anna Paquin and the executive producer Alan Ball, who created the hit Six Feet Under and won an Oscar for the screenplay of the 1999 film American Beauty.

True Blood airs Sunday nights on HBO with numerous encores.

Fiction: Entitlement: A Novel by Jonathan Bennett

Canada owns a contemporary tradition of producing authors who are also working poets. In recent years wordsmiths like Helen Humphries, Andrea MacPherson and Anne Simpson have made room between books of poetry to write novels that are understandably quite unlike those being created by authors whose backgrounds are less focused on the sound a single word makes when dropped upon the page.

Now understand: this is not a bad thing. But it does explain the almost ethereal tone that Jonathan Bennett’s Entitlement (ECW) takes on occasion. And it’s an interesting juxtaposition -- ethereal -- because in some ways, Entitlement could almost be called LadLit (if that was a term that was still being used, which of course it is not), focused as it is with the concerns of men and boys.

The men and boys in Entitlement, however, are of a rare and almost invisible breed: they are of the ruling class of Canada’s moneyed establishment. And so Entitlement evolves to a discussion of class in a culture that does not discuss it. It’s not a lesson, though. Nor even a social comment in a big picture sort of way. Bennett may be a poet, but he’s also a damn fine storyteller, as he proved with his first novel, After Battersea Park, which he proved again in his collection of short stories, 2003’s Verandah People, and which he proves conclusively in Entitlement.

Was there ever a question that Jonathan Bennett was fast on his way to cementing his place in Canadian literature? There isn’t anymore.

Holiday Gift Guide: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Half a century on, Holly Golightly is as fresh and compelling as she was the day Truman Capote first skated her across the page.

Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, turns 50 just as holiday shopping gets going in earnest. Vintage has published an anniversary volume that goes on sale today. The film, of course, won’t join the anniversary for another couple of years. According to The New York Observer, Capote didn’t want Audrey Hepburn for the part:

Conjure Audrey Hepburn, if you like, but my Holly Golightly has less polish, more sizzle. (Truman Capote thought Hepburn was wrong for the part; he wanted Marilyn Monroe, which is maybe too much sizzle, if there can be such a thing.) Yes, she’s beautiful, but what makes her irresistible is the wild jumble of words that comes pouring out of her mouth:

“I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing. My complexes aren’t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually it’s essential not to have any ego at all. I don’t mean I’d mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and some day I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Also on sale today, the paperback edition of the very splendid Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (Modern Library), another good holiday gift giving choice.

Fiction: The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

The Book of Lies (Grand Central Publishing) is an interesting, even arresting read. I can’t say I loved Brad Meltzer’s new novel, but I sure wasn’t bored. I read somewhere that Meltzer said this was the book he was born to write and that he was actually sort of afraid to do it ... though I can’t imagine why. I mean, yeah, the plot’s a stretch -- to say the very least -- but since when is that a reason not to write?

Follow me, if you can: In the early part of the last century, young Jerry Siegel, misfit Jewish kid, invents Superman, possibly our nation's most enduring super-icon. How did this come about? Meltzer posits that it was a direct result of the boy's father's sudden death. Was it a heart attack, as official reports have it? Or was it murder (which makes for a much better story)? And if it was murder, was it somehow linked to the old Cain and Able story from The Bible? You know, the one where God creates a mark of Cain after he murders his brother?

Add in a present-day frame about the novel's hero and his dad -- from whom he has been estranged since boyhood -- and you have the makings of a trifecta of parallelism. Siegel pere and fils. Frere et frere. And hero Cal and his dad. Nice, huh? Except it's a bit too nice, too neat, and too convenient. And perhaps even a bit too far-fetched. I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good yarn, but I do expect a good-looking sweater at the end of the day, if you know what I mean. And unfortunately, The Book of Lies, while not exactly a bad-looking sweater, doesn't exactly fit in all the places it should.

New This Month: The New Annotated Dracula by Leslie S. Klinger

In 2004 he rocked us with The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a look at the classic fictional detective that was closer -- and in some ways more intimate -- than any that had gone before. Author Leslie S. Klinger offered up an almost line-by-line commentary on the great work. In the process, he unearthed bits and pieces that had been left behind over the years -- a bit of literary archeology, if you will. Fans were floored at the offering of riches about the much celebrated Holmes. On the one hand, the book seemed to cover every possible corner of Holmes legend and lore. On the other, it brought it all together in a handsome volume worthy of gift-giving and collection. The only question left, really, was: What comes next? How do you follow up that sort of action? And with what? After all, not every literary icon is worthy of the Klinger treatment. But, certainly, there are a few.

Klinger found one worthy of his attention in Bram Stoker’s original Dracula. And here again, Klinger follows Stoker’s tale line by line, offering up trenchant observations and tidbits of all sorts of information about this classic novel. We begin with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. “Dracula is a book that cries out for annotation,” Gaiman tells us. “The world it describes is no longer our world.”

And Klinger responds, in a way, with his annotations: perhaps making our worlds collide. As he says in his own preface, “My principal aim ... has been to restore a sense of wonder, excitement and sheer fun to this great work.” He succeeds.

There is a fiction is Klinger’s annotations, however: he proceeds as though Stoker’s Dracula were a historical non-fiction. The device works -- adds, somehow to Klinger’s magic -- and while reading The New Annotated Dracula (Norton) you often feel transported, as though to a world that never existed, an in-between world where magic is real... and ever so frightening.

Ironically -- or perhaps not so much -- Eric Nuzum’s very successful 2007 non-fiction work The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula (St. Martin’s Press) is released this month in paperback. January Magazine reviewed that book favorably when it was published last year, but I mention it here because, while Nuzum and Klinger’s books are very, very different what we have here is not an either-or type of proposition. In fact, you may just find that one fuels the need for the other: there is no duplication between the two books, only an ever-broadening knowledge in a fascinating -- and fictional? -- field.

New This Month: The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack

If your tastes run to beach reads or other light going that makes you smile in the sun, give The Show That Smells (ECW Press) a wide berth. Toronto artist, author and fashion journalist Derek McCormack here pushes the envelope on what is fiction, what is story and what is satisfying read. And while such envelope pushing can often be tiresome and even yawn-inducing, in this novella-length tale, McCormack delivers a staccato epic with punch and verve. The Show That Smells is a story that, even if you try to forget it, it’s tough to make go away.

Cowering, cringing, crying -- Chaney acts like an actress.
“You’re afraid of perfume?” Carrie lords the bottle over him. She drips a drop onto him. It burns like battery acid. Blended with bleach. Skin smokes. Seared skin. Seared seersucker. Stinks. Chaney No.5.

“Hillbillies, high fashion, and horror!” trumpets ECW, which sums it up tightly, yet in some ways doesn’t even come close. It doesn’t, for example, convey the beat rhythms and the aberrant -- yet present -- story lines. McCormack’s previous book, The Haunted Hillbilly, was named a best book of the year by both The Village Voice and The Globe and Mail. Those wanting to see if The Show That Smells will repeat that performance will have to wait a while: the book is available now in Canada, but U.S. readers will have to wait until next summer when it is published in America by Akashic Books.

New Today: The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig

There’s something sweetly sentimental in all the testosterone lurking not far beneath the covers of The Eleventh Man (Harcourt), a football novel that melds into World War II from Ivan Doig (This House of Sky, The Whistling Season). That would seem a contradiction in terms -- sweet sentiment. Masses of testosterone -- but somehow it’s not. Somehow it works in a book that manages to be epic in scope and fact.

The war licked its chops over the battle of Leyte Gulf, as it came to be called, with the inevitability from day one that history would speak of such a gang-fight of fleets in the same breath with the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, Jutland, and Midway. Ben all but moved into the wire room at East Base to follow reports of the military struggle shaping up around the Philippine Islands. It proved to be like reading War and Peace standing up.

Ben Reinking is the 11th man, left behind to chronicle the exploits of his former football teammates as they make their way through various theaters of war. An exciting book with all the right stuff. The Eleventh Man might well be the very best thing Doig -- an acclaimed and respected author -- has done to date. I loved every word.