What to Buy Your Friends and Relatives - Corey Mesler

What with yesterday being the biggest shopping day of the year, and this being a litblog where, at least in theory, people come for suggestions, I've asked some of today's most exciting authors to let me know what book or two they intend on giving to friends and relatives this year.

  First up to play along is Corey Mesler, author of more chapbooks than any living author I know of, as well as the novel, Talk:  A Novel in Dialogue (Livingston Press, 2002), not to mention proprietor of Burke's Books in Memphis, TN.  What can be said about Corey's work?  Well, here's what John Grisham had to say:  "Talk is original and evocative.  Mesler has a sharp ear not only for how we say things, but, more importantly, for what the words really mean.  A unique reading experience."

Here is what Corey's giving away this year:

Two books stand out that I am promoting this selling season.  The first is Selah Saterstrom's remarkable  novel, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press, $14.95 paperback).  This is experimental writing with a heart and it tells a powerful story in electric, poetic prose.  Normally, I cringe at the phrase "poetic prose," but Selah's book is good enough to shake the cliche for its fruits.  This novel is a singular experience.  I can't even think of what to compare it to, so confidently does it create its own world, its own method, its own rhythms.

The other book I'd like to pump is Charles McCarry's Christopher's Ghosts (Overlook, $25.00 hardcover).  McCarry has been writing spy novels since the 70s that transcend the genre, smart, gritty, human stories that, mostly, happen to be about the sort of men and women he knows from his experience with the CIA.  This new novel takes his hero, Paul Christopher, back to his childhood and gives us the elements, which include suffering at the hands of the Nazie, that formed the espionage agent he was to become.  But, what really makes a McCarry novel great is his smooth-as-milk prose.  You only have to read one of his books to be hooked and Overlook has done a marvelous job of reissuing them all in handsome hardback and paperback copies.