Vouched Books

When I saw that Rachel B. Glaser had a story up at Barrelhouse Online (the same Rachel B. Glaser whose short fiction collection, Pee on Water, was one of my favorite favorites last year) I had to click and read immediately.

And I was not disappointed. This story, Lena Adler, will hurt to read. And in a good way. And the last sentence–ouch. Good ouch, but ouch. Truth ouch.

Read.

And the excerpt from Robert Kloss’s newest book is an absolute must-read. Well worth your time, promise. It may even momentarily distract you from the heat.

I am so excited for John Minichillo’s first book, The Snow Whale,  published by Atticus Books. Read this excerpt and you will be, too.

Beautiful human-as-animal stories, fable-like, but sharp, talon edges. Gorgeous language, lush and built up like layers of embroidery, etched secret meanings under secret meanings. Sensuality, sexuality, no separation of the body and mind in these lovely, deadly stories. Experimentation, but with form rather than subject matter–formulae, repetition, one sentence stories, play–never two stories quite the same, never a dull moment, despite the shared themes of love, sex, food, bodies.

A life’s love told through an avocado in a burrito bowl. A woman who gnaws off her arm rather than be trapped in a relationship. Word art scattered like glass shards about Gustav Klimt’s art, reclaiming his women’s bodies. Perception through a mirror’s reflection.

Strong, but sensuous, not strident beings, women as they are, as they are expected to be, as fantasy, desire, and drab reality. Men trying to find themselves in all that silk and lipstick and steel. Couples at play, in roles, in disguise as themselves. Pinter-esque partnerings. Women using the archetype, succumbing to the archetype, overcoming the archetype, but never in conventional or expected ways.

It’s like Rae Bryant has invented a whole new literary feminism, one that expects more from you than you’ve been asked to give before, but one you’re glad to swim languid in. Offer whatever thanks you can to the maker of such fine and fancy tales as these. Pre-order today and dive in to stranger waters.

I just saw Scott McClanahan read for the second time a few weeks ago in Baltimore, and I’m about to see him read for a third time this upcoming Sunday. He is without a doubt my favorite writer to listen to.  In Baltimore he wore a white summer suit and looked a little like one of those traveling preachers, the kind that used to put up their tents all over small towns in the South and the Midwest. He sang and chanted and even danced a little, and wove the audience into a vast silent spell, just like those preachers used to do. Watching him read is like watching a magic spell unfold. You have to hold your breath, terrified that if you make a sound you’ll break the spell and send the audience crashing back through the doors of reality.

All this is to say that Scott McClanahan, maybe more than any other writer I can think of, truly deserves the moniker of storyteller. He is a consummate teller of tales, both on the page and on the stage, and Stories V!, like his other Stories collections, is full of tales, full of a storyteller’s stories.  Stories V! is not just full of stories; it is about stories. It is about the stories people tell about others, themselves, the world–call it tall tales, call it believing, as McClanahan opens the book by asking us to do, as if we were small children again at our mom or daddy or grandaddy’s knee, pressing our ear to the air to absorb more tellings. McClanahan’s characters are always learning it’s a thin line between stories and lies. Disillusion is a common theme in nearly every story in the collection: that point as a kid or a teenager where for the first time the thin veneer of the world cracks open and you see the rot, the empty, the malice. The disgust and then you wonder why you bother.

But here’s the magical part. McClanahan is clearly a little bit of a secret optimist, or a least not quite a pessimist, and he can see the beauty behind that rot and emptiness. Which is why he’ll tell a story that gives the ugly to you straight, end it–and then, he’ll start again, reassure you that the story didn’t end there after all. In fact, he seems to be saying, the story’s never really ending, never really over. We are the story, the long long string of stories that get told as we navigate our strange little lives. Stories V! is really one big tale about disappointment in ourselves and in each other, but also about the love we choose to share despite that disappointment. Despite our own and constant, tragic human imperfections.

The saddest part of Stories V! is, of course, the Farewell at the end.  I guess it means for now their won’t be any more Stories collections–but it certainly can’t mean, for McClanahan, that there won’t be anymore stories. I imagine a born storyteller has no choice but to get up there, on the page or in person, and spin a yarn a mile long but tight enough to trap us, to net us till we lose ourselves inside the story, inside the sentences that add up to the telling.

Have you read them yet? All the stories are excellent reads, and it was really refreshing to read fiction from a part of the world that I don’t typically read fiction from.

When I first opened Ben Tanzer’s new book and read some (well-written, of course) sentences about a selfish jerk sleeping with an intern, I was tempted to close it back up again. Because as a thirty-something year-old myself, I’ve got enough thirty-something year-old friends behaving like hormone-crazy teenagers that I didn’t want to read another book celebrating that. I thought, this is a book for those people–mostly men. I thought, this is not a book for me.

But then I read on, and was really, incredibly glad I did. Because my initial impression was very wrong. This is not a book about glorifying the man-child. This is a book about giving the man-child a swift kick in the ass, forcing the man-child to grow up and be honest with himself and the people he loves.  Keith, the main character, has fantasies and random thoughts and fears and hopes just like all of us. As a guy slightly past his prime but feeling pretty lucky that he’s married to a woman he loves, he still sometimes wants something else–and we like him because he’s humble enough to admit that. He admits that he’s not a movie star, that his life isn’t script-worthy, that he’s just stumbling through trying to find his way in the world and find meaning in his work–and sometimes doing a piss-poor job at all of it.

What makes the book work so well is the way that Tanzer writes his characters, particularly Keith, with incredibly depth and honesty. Like all of us, they are diffuse and distracted and shaped not only by important events (babies, elections) but also by pop culture, by music and movies and sports trivia and TMZ. Tanzer is willing to acknowledge that sometimes, even during the most difficult moments of our lives, we may be thinking about the most trivial things imaginable–and that it doesn’t mean WE are trivial. It merely reflects our culture, our methods of coping, our way of floating out of the world even while fully immersed in it.

Tanzer’s skill in writing Keith made me really like this character. I felt for this poor everyman, trying so hard and failing himself in so many ways. So much of Keith’s personality is revealed in scattered, almost stream-of-conscious monologues that not only made me think about him, they made me think about the way TV, music, news, and pop culture has affected us all and the way that we reason, talk to ourselves and our loved ones, every single day. In modern society, it gets harder and harder, I think, to be a “grown-up”–especially when we realize there really isn’t any such thing. There are only people like us, people trying to do the right thing in their small orbits of lovers and friends and co-workers and responsibilities and personal demons. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the book for me is the moment when Keith sees his father, taking expert, loving care of his (Keith’s) new son, and thinks, “Who is is this fucking guy?” It’s the realization we all have, at some point, when we have finally separated our adult selves enough from our child selves to briefly, momentarily glimpse our parents as just people, too. And to realize that they were just like we are now: doing it all for the first time and stumbling like mad until they found the proper footing.

You Can Make Him Like You, by Ben Tanzer, is available for purchase at Artistically Declined Press.