Emerging Writers Network

Source of Lit - The Postman!

One package today in the mail and unless I'm mistaken, it's the last of the books by Thomas Williams that I have tracked down--his first short story collection, A High New  House (which won a Dial Press Fellowship Award for Fiction).

Many of the stories in this collection saw previous publication in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post. One was an O.Henry Award winner, one was included in Best American Short Stories, and three others were listed in the back of BASS as Best Other Stories of the year.

Here is the Kirkus Reviews review from 1963:

The author is a master of the short story form (his earlier books, however, were two novels- Town Burning and The Night of Trees). Some of the titles in this collection have appeared elsewhere; one is an O. Henry prize winner and all have prize potential. The first story, A High New House, demonstrates Mr. Williams' unerring eye for the nerve- wracking detail as the hero tires for the small utopia of a perfectly arranged life and house, only to be invaded by the world, his neighbors, and life in general in all the small, instantly recognizable ways. The intensified conflicts of the old, the confrontations of middle- age, the abrupt insights of youth are all here and all well and tastefully revealed. These are today's problems examined and focused by a unique talent.

Aside from his National Book Award winner, The Hair of Harold Roux, I plan on reading Williams' oeuvre in chronological order, so this one will wait through my reading of two novels, but I'm really looking forward to getting to it.

Source of Lit - The Postman!

There were two packages in the mail box today and one very big andflat envelope propped up against the door--yes, propped up in a manner that meant I could not open the door without knocking it down, sigh.

I opened the flat envelope first--it was part of the Kickstarter reward for supporting Andrew Scott and his comic book project (at least I believe it was--it could be that Andrew simply was kind enough to send me this poster and postcards). As one still buying and reading at least a few comics every month, I was excited to see this project coming from a writer I admire.

The next package had Caitlin Hamilton-Summie's name on the envelope so I knew what was inside--a rarity when I'm opening up packages these days. It's the galley for Scott Elliott's forthcoming Temple Grove. If Caitlin is backing a book, I'm going to open the front cover and start it and I'd say over the past eleven or twelve years, there's about a 94% chance I'm going to keep reading until the back cover flips in front of me. Looking forward to this one.

The package saved for last I had zero idea of what it might be. It was the novel Ceremony of Love by Thomas Williams. His first novel and one a bit harder to track down than some of the other works I recently purchased. It gives me a chance to read the bulk of his work in chronological order now.

Source of Lit - The Postman!

A few packages on the porch today, plus a couple of manilla envelopes.

First opened was the envelope with the signed contracts for Erin McGraw's Bodies at Sea and The Baby Tree which Dzanc will publish later this summer in eBook form as part of our rEprint series.

Next up was a copy of William Goyen's novel, The Fair Sister, which is another that we'll do this summer in the rEprint series along with seven or either other titles by Goyen.

Then two packages in a row that contained novels by  Thomas Williams. First up was Town Burning, his second novel and one that was a National Book Award finalist. The second package contained his Tsuga's Children, which takes the story that the protagonist of Williams' NBA Award-winning The Hair of Harold Roux told his children within the novel, and branches it out into a full novel.

The last item opened contained signed contracts for the rights to rEprint David Blum's Quintet: Five Journeys toward Musical Fulfillment.

Source of Lit - Bookstores! (and the Postman!)

Trooper of the weekend might have to go to Stassie Wickett as she wandered through six different bookstores with me between 8 p.m. Friday night and 9 p.m. Saturday night (though she did get a zoo trip out of it).

Friday night we hit a Barnes & Noble and (as we always do) turned all of the Dzanc titles in the store face out (Matt Bell's How They Were Found; Jeff Kass' Knuckleheads, Roy Kesey's Any Deadly Thing; Jen Michalski's Could You Be With Her Now; and Steven Gillis, not-quite Dzanc title, The Law of Strings). I found Ron Rash's new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay. With my new VIDA buying rule, I wandered about a bit and found Caitlin Horrocks' collection, This is Not Your City. I KNOW I already have this somewhere, but having gone to see her read Wednesday night, I looked for my copy and can't find it anywhere. I certainly don't mind supporting her and Sarabande one more time.

Saturday morning Stassie and I were going to go to the Detroit Zoo. The weather was beautiful and the zoo had something called Bunnyville going on--the line of cars went a quarter of a mile deep minimum down the ramp of the exit from the expressway. We thought, let's go to a couple of used book stores and kill some time and see if we can't come back in an hour or two when the line is down.

We went to the smaller John King store in Ferndale where Stassie made friends with the store cat ("I shall name you Snickers") and found books by Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, as well as a book by Chelea Handler and one titled Cat Speak (yes, how to speak to your cat...). I picked up a load of books:  The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson, The Point by Charles D'Ambrosio, The Actual by Saul Bellow, The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick, Mischief Makers by Nettie Jones, Aureole by Carole Maso, a trio of Max Apple titles for Dzanc's rEprint series, and Illinois Short Fiction series titles by Peter Makuck and  Sara Vogan.

We then hit Royal Oak Books and I found Bloodshed and Three Novellas by Cynthia Ozick, two more Illinois Short Fiction titles (Erin McGraw and Susan Enberg) plus Thomas Williams' NBA winner, The Hair of Harold Roux. Stassie found two more cats to befriend (with the new names of Milky Way and Twix).

After a quick respite at home, where I found Leah, New Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams in the mailbox, we headed to Ann Arbor, with our first stop at Dawn Traeder where there were no cats for Stassie to befriend, but I found Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow and In Search of Nixon by Bruce Mazlish. From there on over to West Side Books where Stassie picked up more Shakespeare, The Lovely Bones, Jane Eyre, and a collection of stories by Jack London and I picked up Brian Evenson's The Wavering Knife and a signed copy of George Singleton's The Half-Mammals of Dixie.

We also wandered the Vault of Midnight comic store for a few minutes before heading over to a pretty well attended pre-opening get together by the folks at Literati, Ann Arbor's soon to be newest open bookstore! It looks wonderful there.

 

Source of Lit - Postman!, and $

Hit a store last night and picked up The Appointment by Herta Muller (sorry, I've yet to figure out how to put accents into my posts when it comes to accented letters within names or words). This was translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm and also seems to include a complete transcript of Muller's 2009 Nobel Lecture.

Yesterday the postman brought me The Night of Trees by Thomas Williams (whose NBA award-winning The Hair of Harold Roux I am currently reading on eBook and aside from a typo or a dozen, am really enjoying)  and Pagan Babies by Greg Johnson (which I loved a decade ago and bought it to scan it for the Dzanc rEprint series). Plus a contract for a couple of new rEprint titles we'll publish by Natalie Handal.

Today the postman brought the latest issue of n+1 (which I already read with a combination of interest and sadness over my lack of intelligence), and Scott Garson's forthcoming collection, Is That You, John Wayne (Queen's Ferry Press -- next month) as well as a contract to Dzanc  for Thomas Berger's next novel, which we'll publish in summer 2014.

Source of Lit - Postman!

The postman brought a package from Noemi Press yesterday! It included a few things I ordered only a few days earlier: A Compendium of Domestic Incidents by Joanna Ruocco, Salton Sea by George McCormick (this may actually have been a gift from Noemi as I don't remember ordering five items), Three Plays by Norman Lock, Critique of Pure Reason by Gabriel Blackwell, and In the Colorless Round by Joanna Howard with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet.

Looking forward to digging into all of these just as soon as possible.

Source of Lit - The Postman!

This is a book that I've mentioned at least once before, probably when the galley arrived. It will get another mention next month when I review it. For now though, it's arrival today in the mail (hardcover!) is more than good cause for me to remind you all--go to your favorite bookseller this weekend and pre-order this book.

Stern is a magician with words and sentences. One highly praised over the years by both Gordon Lish and Cynthia Ozick. The NYTBR has called him a "... prodigiously talented writer." Recently the wonderful Tom Williams raved about Stern's writing. And look at where his last quartet of books has been published (Viking, Melville House, Algonquin and this one's from Graywolf Press--some pretty great publishers).

If you've not had the pleasure of reading Mr. Stern's work, well first of all shame on you, then this is a perfect jumping into it point--The Books of Mischief is compiled of New & Selected Stories. 17 stories total, 10 of which were previously published in a trio of Stern's collections, 6 of which have been published in various journals or anthologies, and one brand spanking new story, "The Tale of a Kite," that leads this new book off.

The stories are not thrown together in the Table of Contents by their original locations, instead they're sorted by the locations where the stories take place:  North Main Street, Memphis; The Lower East Side, New York; Europe; and The Catskills.

Whether you read some of these stories in their original books or journals or not, the compiling of them in one simple to find 380 page hardcover is reason for excitement, and purchase, and do so now so that you can mark September 4, 2012 on your calendar down as "Reading Stern--all night."

Source of Lit - The Postman!

It would have been quite easy to trip over the six packages on the porch this morning had I not been careful. Small mailbox and a locked front door lead to a pile on the porch at times.

Top left is Conjunctions: 41, ordered online last week. This issue has work from EWN favorites such as Steve Erickson, Madison Smartt Bell, Bradford Morrow, Renee Gladman, Carole Maso, Brian Evenson, and a portfolio on William Gaddis including writings from Paul Auster, Susan Cheever, Mary Caponegro, Robert Coover, Don Delillo, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph McElroy and William H. Gass, among others.

Top middle is Conjunctions: 30, ordered online last week. This issue has work from Anne Carson, Joy Williams, William T. Vollmann, William H. Gass, Robert Coover, Paul Maliszewski, Joanna Scott, and more.

Top right came from Graywolf, a final copy of Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, which I'd not heard of, which yes, means I did indeed miss the front page review via the NYTBR a couple of weeks back.

Bottom left is The House Enters  the Street by Gretchen E. Henderson. This galley was sent by Starcherone, the book hits the world September 1  and looks to be pretty great.

Bottom middle is Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Matt Bell recently referred to this as the best collection of poetry he's read in a long time--no other reason needed to immediately order it from Action Books.

Bottom right is Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy from his agent. Dzanc has recently acquired the eBook and paperback rights to this one to go with the other great McElroy titles we'll be bringing to you soon.

Source of Lit - The Postman!, Nicola's Books, A to Z Comics, and John King Books

Apologies if I mentioned one or two of these earlier--the past week has seen an explosion of OHMYGODIWANTTOREADTHATNEXT moments around here causing me great confusion on an hourly basis.

From the postman recently I've received Steve Stern's forthcoming The Book of Mischief: New & Selected Stories (Graywolf Press, September 2012), Wilfrido D. Nolledo's But for the Lovers (Dalkey Archive) w/an introduction by Robert Coover, A Theological Positiion: Plays by Robert Coover (Dutton), the galley for Victor LaValle's forthcoming novel, the devil in silver (Spiegel & Grau, Fall 2012), and some smaller Coover items--individual stories or mini-story collections, published in low print runs from the 70's {The Convention, The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Conrad), In Bed One Night}. Oh, there was also the nice package from Gary Fisketjon containing the two new Alix Ohlin books, Signs and Wonders (short stories from Vintage) and Inside (novel from Knopf).

I'm a huge Steve Stern fan and to see all of these older stories (and novellas) combined with newer efforts is fantastic--let's hope that Graywolf is the publisher finally successfull in finding a readership for this great writer. The Nolledo, I'll admit, I stumbled onto when searching for Coover items but the description made it all but impossible to pass up. "This extraordinary novel is no less remarkable for the power and the beauty of its language than for the exotic and magical world it creates. Ranging from hallucinatory lyricism to documentary realism, But for the Lovers is a rich and complex exploration of language, history, and mythology." The LaValle is one I can't wait to get into after having loved his other three books. And the Coover are a) cool little items and b) by an author that I can't get enough of.

From A to Z Comics comes Batman: the black mirror, written by Scott Snyder with art from Jock and Francesco Francavilla. This constitutes the last 14 (I think) issues of Detective Comics prior to DC's New 52 started up. It's an incredible run that I assume led to Snyder being set up as the writer on the new Batman series. The writing is fantastic, the art is great and works well with the script.

I went to a couple of readings at Nicola's last week (more about  each in later individual posts) and walked out with Richard Russo's Interventions (Down East Maine), Leni Zumas' new novel, The Listeners (Tin House), Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Knopf) and Oxford American's The Best of the South issue. I've already blogged a bit about the Russo. I loved Leni Zumas' story collection and have seen bits of The Listeners and look forward to the whole thing. And Gilbert's one of the few poets published frequently in The Quarterly that I liked every time so getting a decade's worth all put together in one collection is something I'm looking forward to. And Oxford American is one of my favorite regularly issued magazines that also includes literature. I've not read all of this one yet, but did read the obituaries of William Gay and Lewis Nordan right away.

The visit to John King resulted in some very tired arms on my part. I walked out with a Rocky & Bullwinkle coffee table book that will be my dad's Father's Day gift (he finally gets email, I doubt he'll see this before Sunday), the Knopf hardcover of Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, a novella by William Gass with an incredible layout design--somebody was damn busy considering the length of this book, a couple of back issues of Conjunctions, 14 with a section on "the new gothic" edited by Patrick McGrath including work from Coover, Bradford Morrow, Mary Caponegro, William T. Vollmann, and also has non-new gothic work from Diane Williams, and issue 21, the credos issue, which has novel excerpts from Coover's John's Wife and Carole Maso's The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, as well as stories from Mary Caponegro and Scott Bradfield and poetry from Forrest Gander.

Also taxing my arms were a couple of titles from Merrill Joan Gerber: An Antique Man and Chattering Man: Stories and a Novella, and a duo from Tony Ardizzone, the novel Heart of the Order and his Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award-winning short story collection, The Evening News. I found a ridiculously priced first edition of Steve Yarbrough's debut story collection, The Family Men, one I've kicked myself for over a decade over selling in a big move purge of books and then have been unable to find a nice copy for anywhere less than $50 or more--this one was $10. I'm going to scan the author photo and see if I can't get Steve to give me $10 just to keep that off of Facebook later this week! Found a copy of Scott Bradfield's Greetings from Earth: New and Collected Stories and Steve Stern's Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (which we needed for our rEprint series at Dzanc Books!). Also found a copy of Jennifer Allen's Better Get Your Angel On, a Knopf/Lish edited story collection with a great Chip Kidd cover (or a scary one, depends on your tastes I suppose), plus the Advanced Uncorrected Proof to Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle (an incredible novel) that also had a pamphlet Algonquin included with their review copies, an essay by Nordan, "Growing Up White in the South" telling why he HAD to write this novel. I think the last item I walked out of there with was Robert Coover's "Charlie in the House of Rue", a collectible single story published in 1980--this one of the 300 special edition (of the full editon of 1000 copies--the 300 were signed and numbered--this is 112). Whoops, forgot about Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, which I reviewed yesterday here at the EWN.

So, you tell me, where to start?

Source of Lit - The Postman!

No cool logos for this, though maybe I should ask somebody to make one. In the past couple of days the postman has been very nice, swinging by a few times to drop off a bunch of cool packages and envelopes.

Elsewhere, California (Counterpoint, 2012) by Dana Johnson in paperback form. This has blurbs of praise from TC Boyle, Mat Johnson, Danzy Senna, Aimee Bender and Michelle Hueven. This follows Dana's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winning Break Any Woman Down, which I really enjoyed, and in fact, a character from that collection is the protagonist of this novel. The description:

We first met Avery in Dana Johnson's Break Any Woman Down. As a young girl, she escaped the violent streets of Los Angeles, relocating to suburban West Covina. When her cousin Keith moves in, he triggers a series of events that will follow Avery: to her studies at USC, to her career as an artist, and into her relationship with a wealty Italian in the Hollywood Hills. Elsewhere, California illustrates the complicated history of African Americans across the neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Wunderkind (Counterpoint, 2012), a paperback novel from Nikolai Grozni. I'm not familiar with Mr. Grozni but the description of Fifteen-year old Konstantin, a fantastic pianist, confined to the militaristic Music School for the Gifted in Bulgaria in the 80's sounds very interesting.

Dawn Raffel's memoir-in-objects, The Secret  Life of Objects (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012) with art by Sean Evers. I've had the pleasure of reading a few of these  short pieces prior to receiving the book and they're wonderful. I love the blurb from Priscilla Warner:

Dawn Raffel puts memories, people and secrets together like perfectly set gems in these shimmering stories, which are a delight to read. Every detail is exquisite, every character is beautifully observed, and every object becomes sacred in her kind, capable hands. I savored every word.

Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005), a collection of poems by Sarah Gridley, that was recommended to me by Joseph McElroy. To be honest, that recommendation was all I needed--these will be being read site unseen as I didn't try to find any of her work online prior to ordering the collection.

Signed  conracts for those Coover deals you've been reading about, plus John Domini's wonderful non-fiction we'll be publishing.

J&L Illustrated 3, which has short stories or novel excerpts from the likes of the aforementioned Joseph McElroy, William H. Gass, Steve Stern, Michael Martone, Stephen Dixon, Scott Bradfield and others, having been edited by a favorite of mine, Paul Maliszewski.

Lastly, the recent issue of Conjunctions as I just signed up for a two year subscription (that next issue in the fall will have material from and edited by Coover, letters from Gaddis, and a new Matt Bell short story, why hasn't everybody subscribed to this already?