Emerging Writers Network

Source of Lit - The Antioch Review

I picked up a copy of the latest issue of The Antioch Review (Winter 2012) last night and did so partially as it was the first time I'd seen an issue for sale in some time (at Barnes & Noble) and then additionally as it contains new fiction from Gordon Lish. His short story, "Gnat," starts as follows:

She said "Put it on. I want to see it on you," Or "see you in it." She perhaps said "in it," and not "on you," but in either event I complied, got into the shirt that I had purchased, what does one say, on the spot? By gum, yes, there had not been any of this frantic shopping around, that I can promise you, trying store after store, nor, when the saleslady had pointed it out to me, did I find myself the least uncertain, asking, as a person unsure of himself might, "Looks good, you bet--but what else do you want to show me? I mean, don't you think you should show me something apart from just this?"

Any time there is a new Lish work, you'll most likely find me picking the issue up, as it's always great reading through his sentences. This story was no different.

The issue is subtitled "Intimate Memoirs" and even the stories and poems that I've looked at so far have a memoirish feel to them.

The one essay I've read so far, "Reflections of a Book Reviewer," by Jeffrey Meyers was a fantastic read--he names names, going over a four decade long (so far) career as a book reviewer explaining both what he feels reviewers should do and shouldn't do, but maybe more interestingly getting into specifics of journals that killed reviews he'd written and why, good and bad editors to work with and why, ripping apart some reviews and books he felt were unworthy of the praise they'd received over the years and more. While there is more than a bit of a smartest guy in the room feel to the writing, Meyers definitely has me looking for some of his reviews online, as well as one or two of the biographies he's written.

So far the issue has started off well--but that's almost always the case when I buy a journal for specific reasons (in this case the Lish story). I'm looking forward to reading more from this issue over the next few days.

Book Review 2012-002 - The Guardians: An Elegy by Sarah Manguso

Book Review 2012-002
The Guardians: An Elegy by Sarah Manguso
2012 by FSG, 104 pages

(This book actually publishes in early March--this copy was sent to me as a review copy by FSG).

 

It's not often I grab something from my TBR pile that has the word memoir on it, and I can't even remember the last time I read an Elegy. However, this book that recently arrived in the mail, it was a) short, and b) written by Sarah Manguso, whose writing I remembered having enjoyed a great deal when reading a poem of hers in Unsaid a couple of years back.

So, I cracked this one open, intending on taking a peek at it. It's truly shorter than the 104 pages as the interior almost reminds me of a Large Print book, and I only note that so the fact that I set the book down less than 45 minutes later doesn't sound like I blew through it not paying attention to Manguso's wonderful writing, not enjoying the way she bounced around from various topics that while not immediatlely seeming cohesive, were very much so (somewhat like the book's cover, which I didn't really pick up on until seeing the book from a distance). That wasn't the case at all. I found myself completely immersed in The Guardians: An Elegy.

The work starts off with a note about a newspaper carrying a story of a man jumping to his death in front of a train. Manguso then writes that were she a journalist, she'd have interviewed everybody she could find that was on that train, that she'd talk to the man's family members and friends. But she's not a journalist, and in fact, she was one of the man's friends. Her friend, Harris, had left a facility that he had committed himself to and then had about ten hours of time to himself, time that remains unexplained, before jumping in front of the train that ended his life. The fact that Manguso is not a journalist makes this book a unique and very worthy read.

As one who has taken anti-psychotic medication for over a decade herself, Manguso is familiar, I'd say much more than the typical person (and seemingly moreso than some in the medical profession through this book), with potential reactions to certain medications. Especially when it comes to Akathisia, which is a difficult reaction to pin down with words, but to try from what I've read here, it makes the individual suffering from it very jumpy, feeling as if they need to crawl out of their own skin as the only way to relieve the pain and feelings they have. Akathisia usually comes as a result of having taken one form of an anti-psychotic or another. There are medicines that can relieve the symptoms if a person realizes what the individual is going through, which doesn't always seem to happen.

Instead of interviewing every person that was on that train, or that knew Harris, Manguso jumps around, first writing of meeting Harris and various stages of their lives as friends, blending in facts about Akathisia, various medications, her own (as well as her family's worries about it) dealing with the feeling of wanting to commit suicide earlier in her life, her beginnings of a marriage and moving from New York to Los Angeles, and more.

Manguso does a fascinating job of blending all of these in short sections that compel the reader to keep moving forward, to keep trying to understand her grief, which seems to be the true meaning behind this book, Manguso understanding her own grief and how it's working. Everybody deals with death of family and friends differently and through the writing of this book, Sarah Manguso seems to be working through her own grief over the death of her friend--the wondering if she'd been around (she had spent a year in Rome on a grant for her writing) would things have been different, was Harris having a reaction that might have been something akin to Akathisia that nobody else understood, why couldn't it have been somebody else?

I also wonder if timing has anything to do with how one will read this book. I picked it up two weeks to the day that my ex-wife passed away in her sleep. Did watching Manguso deal with grief through these pages hit me differently than it would have had I picked it up 13 months ago, shortly after my mother died, or than if I read it four months ago, many months away from the death of somebody close in either direction? I'm not sure. I do believe though that no matter when I picked this book up, I'd have read it straight through because Manguso's writing is that compelling.

4 stars

 

An excerpt was published yesterday by The Paris Review

Vol 1. Brooklyn posted a vimeo trailer for the book yesterday as well.

Book Review 2012-001 - Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-It® Notes by David Hawkins

Book Review 2012-001
Lorraine Nelson: A Biography In Post-It® Notes by David Hawkins
2012 by The Cupboard, 58 pages

 

I love The Cupboard. A quick description from their website: "The Cupboard is a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose published in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each volume features a body of work by a single author." I've enjoyed each and every one and am a very happy subscriber. The eleventh such volume recently arrived in the mail and reading it twice the past day and a half I was struck by how much it reminded me of Michael Martone's The Blue Guide to Indiana (which has a big note, at least at Amazon.com, that it is NOT a member of The Blue Guide series). Martone's book contained fictitious essays, sprinkled, I believe, with true information, about the state of Indiana, the type of information tourists would be interested in (I especially recall a description of a maze of a system of pipes in which the state product of mayonnaise was distributed) that he frequently published in small town newspapers. While reading David Hawkins' Lorraine Nelson: A Biography In Post-It® Notes, I had a similar feeling of rarely knowing if I was reading truth or fiction or a blurring of the two. Upon looking up the website to find a cover image, I have to say I was less than surprised to find out that this particular volume of The Cupboard is a contest winner, and the judge, Michael Martone.

Hawkins does a fantastic job of putting together twenty-five short pieces that combine into one long essay (what I've determined this truly is, perhaps foolishly) using, mainly, lousy jobs and bits and pieces of trivia to write of both language and to a point, survival. At one point in the first short piece, Hawkins writes:

     Alas, I had never met the hero of my story, Lorraine Nelson. Or read her letters. Or spoken to her parents or friends. Or seen her, for that matter--not even in a picture.

Which all makes sense, for Lorraine Nelson is the standard fictitious (?) name used on proofs for products created by DDS, the Direct Mailing firm that our protagonist (assumed David Hawkins) is temping for during the bulk of this essay. Every single proof that comes his way (copy editor/proof reader) is addressed to Lorraine Nelson, 322 Palm Beach Blvd., Pompano Beach, CA 90525. He sees her name hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Well, "her" name, as if there were a her.

Much of Hawkins' tale hits on the mundane daily routines that slip into the corporate world, often finding him slipping away to sit for two hours in a stall in the bathroom until his rear end  numbs to the point that he needed to waddle back from the restroom, or at one point shredding a package of lunchmeat he found in the kitchen, piece by piece. Describing the temporary worker industry:

As long as I continued to punch-in and refrained from urinating in the company watercooler or setting my head afire on the printroom floor, I retained my status as ideal temp employee.

"Language is continuously on the move," Hawkins notes mid-book. And he shows this rather incredibly through the Direct Mailing industry. Short pieces on how specific words like "real", or like in this sentence usage of unnecessary quotation marks can cause the reader to react more positively. He uses  puns and wordplay to describe both the work day and the industry in general, even showing examples of how important the double entendre is to the industry--in response to an add from the beef industry stating Beef. It's what's for dinner, the pork industry replied with a billboard that featured:

...a model Madison-Avenue couple standing at a barbecue. As he fusses over chops on the grill, she smiles broadly and fauns just a little too intently over her hubby.

     The slogan above the scene reads: Pork The one you love.

Somewhere in here was my intent to really make readers want to read this book and to be honest I'm not sure I've done so. It truly is a fascinating bit of writing, getting me to not only enjoy the writing itself, causing me to laugh, to think, to google names to try to determine if it were non-fiction, but most of all it made me want to flip it right back to page one and start over when I finished page 58--and to me that's the sign that I've just read something really wonderful.

4.5 stars

Looking Forward To ...

Some 2012 titles I am looking forward to getting my hands on (or in a few cases simply finding the time to read the galleys I have in hand):

Boleto by Alyson Hagy (Graywolf Press, May 2012)

A former teacher of mine, as well as the person whose book was the impetus behind the Emerging Writers Network, I always look forward to new work by Hagy. I refer to her as a quiet writer--she doesn't write flamboyant sentences, or use any post-modern techniques. Nor does she tend to start off with massive and weaving plotlines (her last novel was about two brothers  with a sheep farm in Wyoming--there was more to it, but you have to be a damn good writer to keep my attention with that as the starting point). This one is tops on my current TBR pile.

The Law of Strings by Steven Gillis (Atticus Books, June 2012)

Okay, I've read this one. Not in book form, probably not even in manuscript form, but I've read every story in this collection a few times and absolutely love them. I thought Giraffes, Gillis' last collection, was top notch and know that this one is better. A fantastic writer (his latest book, The Consequence of Skating was the silver medalist in the 2010 IPPY Awards for Literary Fiction) who is at the top of his game with this collection. You'll want to snap this one  at your earliest convenience.

Nixon's Darkest Secrets by Don Fulsom (Thomas Dunne Books, January 2012)

I need to hit the store to pick this one up as it's already out. Non-fiction--you're not going to slip a new book on Richard M. Nixon into the world without me picking it up--probably two full sized bookshelves worth of books about or by the man, not to mention too many dvd's and videos to count. I attribute the fascination to the fact that when I was between the ages of 3 and 5, he was probably on television more than any other person. That and the fact that he was somehow involved in every major political event in this country from WWII on up through to his death and the first funeral with four living Presidents to attend.

More titles to come in this ongoing feature here at the EWN.

Quick Look 2012-001 - Omicron Ceti III by Thomas P. Balázs

Quick Look 2012-001

Omicrom Ceti III by Thomas P. Balázs

Published 1/28/12 by Aqueous Books, 258 pages

 

The Quick Look here will not be a full review as it will signify I've not read the whole book but wanted to get word of it out to EWN readers. A quick search of the title so that I could find a cover image for this post helped explain a thing or two--this comes from an episode of Star Trek in which the protagonist has a thing about the number three. The collection contrains a three sections of three stories each. The two that I've read so far, "Niddah," and "The Sea of Faith," both deal with characters that have others in their lives but are also pushing themselves toward being more isolated than maybe one would expect.

Balázs has an interesting style through the stories I've read--he's somewhere between black humor and bleak while keeping his characters more upbeat while they work toward being alone. It's a highwire act and he's able to make it all the way across each time. His characters seem headed to places his readers wouldn't want to go but we follow them very willingly as he gives us ample reason to.

I'm looking forward to finishing the collection and writing more about it.

Back!

Well, I don't know how many of you feel the need for that exclamation point but I'm excited to be back doing the EWN on a regular basis--and by regular I do NOT mean the one post per month rate since October 2011. I plan on getting back to posting daily, and discussing a number of books, authors, publishing issues and of course Dzanc Books here in the days to come.