Fiction, poetry, and other good stuff

A poem by Sierra DeMulder, a short story by Maile Meloy, & a handful of other pieces

2012-01-25T20:53:00.000-08:00

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"The Perm," a poem by Sierra DeMulder, Used Furniture Review (January 9, 2012).

"My Particular Tumor," a short story by Josh Denslow, Wigleaf (January 22, 2012).

"Agustín," a short story by Maile Meloy, Ploughshares (Spring 2008), reprinted in her collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead Books, 2009, pp. 169-189).

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, a memoir by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2004) about her relationship with Lucy Grealy, the author of the memoir Autobiography of a Face (HarperCollins, 2003).

"Wolverine Way," a short story by Ryan Ragan, 971 MENU (December 2011).

"To the Long-Distance Caller Who Keeps Hanging Up," a poem by Jeff Worley, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, reprinted in his collection The Only Time There Is (Mid-List Press, 1995, p. 70).

"So Much Happiness," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press).

Sperm Donor X

2011-12-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

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This is for anyone who saw Sperm Donor on the Style Network recently. (In case you missed it, the segment of Style Exposed primarily focused on Ben Seisler, a Boston lawyer who has become the biological father of at least seventy-four children via sperm donation. It showed Ben, his fianceé, and the mother of two young children who were born using Ben's sperm grappling with a variety of questions about the role of a sperm donor.)

On a related but very different note, a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch Sperm Donor X, a film by Deidre Fishel about the experiences of four different women pursuing motherhood via sperm donation. The documentary footage was filmed over a period of several years, as the women very openly discussed their various reasons for the choice, went through the process of attempting to become pregnant, and reacted to the outcomes, which were different for each of them. It was a very thoughtful (and thought-provoking) piece of work. (56 minutes, New Day Films, 2010.)

Two poems from Inertia and Linebreak

2011-11-22T17:14:00.000-08:00

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"Paper-Thin Hotel" by Alex Stolis, Inertia Magazine, Issue 11.

"This Friday" by Susan Browne, Linebreak, November 22, 2011.

Fiction, poetry, and a very short story by Doug Paul Case

2011-11-11T18:24:00.000-08:00

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This was after I rolled the windows down, hoping rushing wind would rid my clothes of his cologne. This was after I slid into my car, having barely opened the door, as if I were afraid his neighbors would spot me.

From "Driving Home, I Imagined the Man I'd Just Met, Alone in His Apartment, Washing By Hand the Glass from which I'd Just Drunk," a short story by Doug Paul Case, published in Wigleaf (November 3, 2011).

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"Daddy?" Jennifer said when he went back to the living room.

"What?"

"Would you please read us the funnies?"

The shyness of this request, and the sight of their trusting eyes, made him want to weep. "You bet I will," he said. "Let's sit down over here, all three of us, and we'll read the funnies."

He found it hard to keep his voice from thickening into a sentimental husk as he began to read aloud, with their two heads pressed close to his ribs on either side and their thin legs lying straight out on the sofa cushions, warm against his own. They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him. Why couldn't April realize how simple and necessary it was to love? Why did she have to complicate everything?

The only trouble was that the funnies seemed to go on forever; the turning of each dense, muddled page of them brought the job no nearer to completion. Before long his voice had become a strained, hurrying monotone and his right knee had begun to jiggle in a little dance of irritation.

"Daddy, we skipped a funny."

"No we didn't, sweetie. That's just an advertisement. You don't want to read that."

"Yes I do."

"I do too."

"But it isn't a funny. It's just made to look like one. It's an advertisement for some kind of toothpaste."

"Read us it anyway."

He set his bite. All the nerves at the roots of his teeth seemed to have entwined with the nerves at the root of his scalp in a tingling knot. "All right," he said. "See, in the first picture this lady wants to dance with this man but he won't ask her to, and here in the next picture she's crying and her friend says maybe the reason he won't dance with her is because her breath doesn't smell too nice, and then in the next picture she's talking to this dentist, and he says..."

He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand. When the funnies were finished at last he struggled to his feet, quietly gasping, and stood for several minutes in the middle of the carpet, making tight fists in his pockets to restrain himself from doing what suddenly seemed the only thing in the world he really and truly wanted to do: picking up a chair and throwing it through the picture window.
(pp. 50-51)

From Revolutionary Road, a novel by Richard Yates (Little, Brown & Co., 1961).

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You live alone and earn a reasonable monthly sum that keeps you comfortable and with enough free time to keep your literary aspirations hopeful. You have a desk drawer full of story ideas written almost wholly on sticky notes, envelopes, and napkins. You bought a Mac, because you think that’s the instrument of choice for creative people like yourself.

From "Anatomy of Two Artists," a short story by Robert John Miller, published in Fiction365 (October 25, 2011).

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My son recounts the plot of a zombie film
from France. He forgets exactly why,
but one day the dead rise up
and shake off the dust--not ghouls,
staggering with stiff arms,
but as themselves.
They head back into the world willing
to do the usual stuff--eat, buy shoes--
but everything's out of synch. . . .

From "Horror" (p. 8), one of the poems in Recurring Dream by Avra Wing (Pecan Grove Press, 2011). "Horror" first appeared in Prime Decimals.

The Fall 2011 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2011-10-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

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The Fall 2011 issue of the journal features fiction by Dawn Paul; poetry by Simon Perchik, Joanna Kurowska (translated from the Polish by Joanna Kurowska), Jin Cordaro, Nausheen Eusuf, M.J. Iuppa, Xiwen Mai, Ann Neuser Lederer, and Rachel Gippetti; and artwork by Justin Snodgrass.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

"Composition 101" by Nicelle Davis

2011-09-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

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He writes how his best friend bled and died in his arms. He is twenty and at school on the GI Bill.

"Composition 101," a poem by Nicelle Davis, is continued at Broadsided (May 1, 2010). The poem is paired with artwork by Cheryl Gross.

"Telling You"

2011-09-21T18:27:00.000-07:00

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Life is like this: one minute you're lying by your air conditioner in the heat, reading haiku and wishing you didn't have to go to see your new therapist, and the next minute you're in his office blinking at him in surprise and thinking that he looks familiar, that you've seen him someplace before.

. . .

My Buddhist boyfriend wasn't the first man to dump me. The boyfriend before him did, too. His teenage sons instructed him to dump me because I'd declined their invitation to a game of Monopoly. I'd just eaten dinner at their house, and they asked me to play, and I said no. (I had my reasons.) Then, after I'd gone home, the sons held a family conference and told their father that he could do better than a woman who wouldn't play Monopoly. And so my boyfriend told me, in a gentle voice, "I have to let you go. Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you."

"Actually," I said, "there are three things you can do for me." But I will repeat only the first thing here, which was never to call me again.

These excerpts are from "Telling You," a short story by Jasmine Skye. The story is continued in The Sun (Issue 335, November 2003), pp. 42-46.

Liars and Saints

2011-08-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

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Liars and Saints, a novel by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2003). The first two thirds of this book were particularly good.

He said he was a photographer, and offered to take their picture for her husband; he said it was the least he could do for a man who was at war. So he came to the house, with a big flash umbrella and a camera on a tripod, and set his equipment in the living room. Yvette made him a highball, and because the bottle of ginger ale was open, she made herself one, too. On an empty stomach it went right to her head. It was three in the afternoon on a Saturday, and she'd dressed the girls up for the picture, but the photographer wasn't in any hurry. He was clean-cut with clear green eyes and looked like he could have been a soldier himself, in khaki trousers and a pressed shirt. They talked about the situation in Korea, and he told an off-color joke about war brides. He asked for another drink and she made him one, but Clarissa stalked in and said she wasn't wearing nice clothes another minute, so the photographer arranged them on the sofa and started to fiddle with his flash.

Clarissa sat on the ottoman, and Margot stood behind, with her hands on her sister's shoulders. Clarissa hated to be touched by Margot, and her hair was coming out of its curls. Yvette pulled the hem of Clarissa's skirt to cover her knees. Margot smiled serenely at the camera, and nothing about her was out of place. Yvette felt like her own smile might look tipsy, so she pressed her hand against her lips to try to straighten her mouth without smearing her lipstick.

"Over There" by Alan King

2011-08-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

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From Alan King's poem "Over There," which was published in Blue Lotus Review:

You said it, pointing

at the light, thick as gravy
and almost as edible, the way
the moon ladled it over you.

Maile Meloy, Half in Love

2011-08-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

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Half in Love, a collection of short stories by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2002).

A few highlights:

"Tome" (from Best New American Voices 2000) For eight months, I had been telling my client he had no tort claim. . . . Sawyer had worked active, outside jobs all his life, and suddenly he could do nothing. It seemed to be the idleness, more than the brain damage, that made him crazy. He couldn't read, because the words came out scrambled, and he could barely sit still to try. He phoned me three times a day. My secretary stopped putting his calls through, so he came to the office, on foot because they wouldn't let him drive. He was a big, graying, blond-bearded man, my father's age, muscular but getting fat without his work. He treated me like a daughter, scolding and cajoling me. He wanted to sue, demanded to sue.

"Aqua Boulevard" (from The Paris Review, winner of the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction) Tati gave me the leash, a long orange strap, and the children kissed Oliver good-bye and went out the door. . . . I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, "This is the happiest day of my life." Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.

"Kite Whistler Aquamarine" (from Witness) Then the temperature dropped overnight to twenty below, and a Thoroughbred filly was born at our house, early, before we expected her.

"Last of the White Slaves" In the house in Saudi Arabia they employed two Arab servants, Eugénie said: a cook and a butler, both discreet and understanding about the sleeping arrangements. It was an embassy house, marble-floored against the heat, with a wing for the servants. The cook, a widow, kept to herself. An older man named Ahmed was butler and valet; he had worked for the old ambassador, and Miles considered him a friend. But Christopher disliked the old man, and finally threw a fit about the way the laundry was done.

Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, and Alice Munro

2011-07-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

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State of Wonder, a novel by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2011). A surprising, often beautiful book.
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Imperfect Birds, a novel by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2010).
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Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (first international edition by Vintage Books, 2010; originally published in Canada by Toronto's McClelland & Stewart and then in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

From Alice Munro's story "Deep-Holes": Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

I'd read several of these stories before--they were all from either The New Yorker or Harper's--but most were new to me. "Too Much Happiness," for example, which closes the collection, is about Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist.

Parenting anthology

2011-07-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

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Last year, one of my poems appeared in an anthology called Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, edited by Alys Masek and Kelly Mayhew (City Works Press, 2010).

Here are a few other pieces from the collection:

Often I dream I have forgotten
you somewhere.
Like a parcel, I leave you
in the backseat of the car . . .

An excerpt from "Long Night," a poem by Sharon Dornberg-Lee, pp. 205-206.

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Lump

Of coal. In your stocking. Solid mass in the toe. Or in your throat if you're a coal miner right before the rush of rock like rain . . .

"Lump," a prose poem by Julie L. Moore, is continued p. 222. It was originally published in Alaska Quarterly Review. (Two other poems by Julie L. Moore appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of the Apple Valley Review.)

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I knew something was wrong as soon as the baby was placed, warm and sticky, on my chest. Something failed to click. . . .

It was one of those moments that made me wish I'd never seen a movie. Other moments like this include: the moment my father told me he was dying, the moment my father actually died, the moment my mother stopped breathing, let go of my hand and started to turn purple. No soft-focus was there. No voice-over telling me how to feel, no cut away to rain running down a windowpane to give me time to digest the scene I had just witnessed. Just one brutally continuous shot, hard light and worst of all, reality.
. . .
We got home and went straight to bed. Four of us: husband, dog, baby, mother. Everyone fell asleep and I awoke to find my dead mother wearing a blue and pink stripy hat and crying. I pulled the covers up towards my face and stuffed the comforter between us. I did not want to touch her, whoever she was.

An excerpt from "403 Days Later," an essay about post-partum depression by Ella Wilson, pp. 199-204.

Two memoirs, a novel, long and short films, and two poems

2011-06-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

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My name is Howard Dully. . . . In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick," lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some "tests." It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

. . . I hadn't been a bad kid. I hadn't ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgotten—something so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

From My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
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Scaredycat, 2006, a 15-minute short film (and official selection at the Sundance Film Festival) which was included on the DVD Fifteenth and Taylor: Dispatches from a small apartment and packaged with the full-length film The Adults in the Room, a thoughtful documentary/drama hybrid by Andy Blubaugh.
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Pauline said, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who had a birthday."

Michael stopped pouring his cereal and looked across the table at her.

"It was January fifth," Pauline said. "The woman was twenty-three."

"Why, that's your birthday, too!" Michael's mother told her. "That's how old you turned, only yesterday!"

"And because this woman happened to be at a low point in her life," Pauline went on, "she was feeling very sensitive about her age."

Michael said, cautiously, "A low point in her life?"

From The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

I recently reread this one, along with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Celestial Navigation.
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"The Lost Strudel" (originally published in The New York Times) and "On Rapture" (originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine) from I Feel Bad About My Neck: and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2006).
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"Your Marriage Gets Louder as You Get Older," a poem by Amorak Huey, and "Half-hearted Apology," a poem by Nicole Koroch, from Ramshackle Review, March 2011.

Just when I think I can't like Tina Fey more than I already do...

2011-05-09T08:27:00.001-07:00

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...she writes a book. There were a lot of funny and quotable moments, but I've read two good reviews of this book, so I'll just link to them. One review is at The Buffalo News ("Tina Fey delivers the laughs in 'Bossypants'" by Emily Simon), and the other is from the Los Angeles Times ("'Bossypants' by Tina Fey is funny and heartfelt" by Mary McNamara). There are also many other reviews, op-ed pieces, and blog posts about the book with regard to humor, feminism, etc., and two excerpts in The New Yorker. (I've only read the first, re: working moms, and felt it didn't do the book justice. McNamara mentions the excerpts in her review.)

Bossypants by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

The Spring 2011 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2011-04-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

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The Spring 2011 issue of the journal features fiction by Glen Pourciau, Gregory J. Wolos, and Kevin Carey; poetry and prose poetry by Ryan Ragan, Michelle Valois, Nick Ripatrazone, Neil McCarthy, Tamara Grippi, Karen Skolfield, Danielle Hanson, Regina Faunes, Svetlana Cârstean (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea), Linda Benninghoff, and Tammy Ho Lai-Ming; and artwork by Sarah Walko (photographed by Christopher Keohane).

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Happy poetry month!

2011-04-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

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Mention poetry, and people tend to divide into two camps: the ones who have a well-worn copy of The Bell Jar on the bookshelf and an opinion about Billy Collins's place in the literary canon, and the ones who still remember Mrs. So-and-so, the English teacher from hell, and her fixation on Emily Dickinson or her impossible test questions about the meaning of some poem or other.

"A Few Painless Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month" is continued here.

Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

2011-03-31T09:36:00.000-07:00

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What should she say? It must be the most unendurable thing to lose a child. Shouldn't he say something of this? It was his turn to say something.

But he would not. And when they finally reached her classroom, she turned to him in the doorway and, taking a package from her purse, said simply, in a reassuring way, "We always have cookies in class."

Now he beamed at her with such relief that she knew she had for once said the right thing. It filled her with affection for him. Perhaps, she thought, that was where affection began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone's having unexpectedly but at last said the right thing. We always have cookies in class.

(Excerpted from "Agnes of Iowa," which originally appeared in Elle. This quote is on page 88 of the Vintage paperback.)

From Birds of America, short stories by Lorrie Moore (1998).

What a great collection. I was going to type out more of my favorite segments, but there were just too many. Seriously.

Two stories from Guess Again by Bernard Cooper

2011-03-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

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Guess Again, short stories by Bernard Cooper (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

"Exterior Decoration" (originally published--in slightly different form--on August 25, 1999 in The LA Weekly): "Standing at the living room window, Ray looked up from his morning coffee and saw that the garage door of the house across the street, which just yesterday had been a shade of beige, was now painted a sumptuous red. Ray froze mid-sip. He suspected that Cliff, still asleep in their bed, had sneaked out and done it in the middle of the night." (pp. 140-152 in paperback)

"A Man in the Making" (pp. 125-139 in paperback)

Three stories and an essay from The Saint Ann's Review

2011-02-22T13:59:00.000-08:00

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These are all continued in the Summer/Fall 2008 issue of The Saint Ann's Review.

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Now, if I may be permitted another small comment on a matter so large as art, I only wish that, in casting me as the pedantic, spinsterish anti-heroine in your book, you'd given me a fuller head of hair; baldness in women is so difficult, so tragic, that I think you, as a writer, might have misstepped in failing to imagine my character's suffering sufficiently. But, no matter—the book was hilarious and at one of our Friday seminars everyone in our department concluded that your fame was indeed well deserved after we'd read and exhaustively discussed it, the book I mean, from the first sentence to the copy accompanying your author photo. Do you remember our Friday seminars?

(From the short story "Eleven, the Spelunker" by Diane Greco, pp. 12-24)

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She had been sitting at a table in the evening, having a drink. She recalled feeling very much like a vulnerable woman, sitting at that table alone—she felt it described her well—that was how someone watching her would have put it, and it didn't matter to her to have been thought of that way. Anyone could have come up to her. She looked good—she knew it, too. Tan from the first few days of the vacation and she wore most all clothes very well. She had never had a problem with weight and she thought of that as a talent which had a certain shelf-life—eventually it would give out, it would become exhausted, and she intended to use it while she could. She was having a Corona. She was a woman who could drink beer. She always felt this was a skill, too. And then this man, wide-cheeked, narrow-jawed, extremely athletic, extremely masculine, salt-and-pepper stubble on a kind face, asked her if she'd seen a billiards ball roll under her table.

(From the short story "An Overqualified Woman" by Peter Levine, pp. 131-144)

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Whether you like it or not, that's not the problem with us. It's the lint trap. Or at least, with her it's the lint trap.

It was on a Sunday. I put my clothes in the dryer and walked out of the utility room.

"Did you clean out the lint trap?" she asked.

How many times has she asked me that? She never gets tired of asking me, but I'm tired of answering. She knows the answer and she knows my position.

"Did you?" she asked again. "The lint can catch fire."

(From the short story "Trap" by Glen Pourciau, pp. 154-158)

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Earlier in the day my brother and I had asked my grandfather if it was all right to put on the casket a large photograph of my father and his motorcycle, a red and white Yamaha YZF R-1, one of the fastest superbikes in production. He agreed, and that was the first thing you saw upon entering the room: this photo of my father smiling behind the machine that killed him.

(From the essay "Of Men and Motorcycles: An Inquiry into the Death of My Father" by William Giraldi, pp. 183-195)

"Late Afternoon" by Joanne Page

2011-02-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

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The phone rings. I hold the phone to her ear while she says goodbye.
I can hear someone crying at the other end. She does not say who.

"Late Afternoon," a poem by Joanne Page, is continued in Queen's Quarterly (114/4, Winter 2007), pp. 530-533. The poem, which is about Bronwen Wallace, is accompanied by photographs of the letter and bracelet Page describes in the text.

"Pulse" by Grete Tartler

2011-02-04T09:17:00.001-08:00

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In Athens a woman threw herself
in front of a train
as people were rushing to the Olympics
and all shouted, "No, no!
Couldn't she find a better time?" . . .

This is an excerpt from "Pulse," a poem by Grete Tartler (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Grete Tartler). It was originally published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review (Winter 2010) and reprinted today (Friday, February 4, 2011) at Poetry Daily. The full poem can be found here.

Short fiction by Christopher Boucher

2011-01-28T13:09:00.000-08:00

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. . . The van was parked right out front. I could see that the family was of Asian descent. The man was talking on his cell phone. The wife was reading a magazine. The kids—one boy and one girl—were sipping juice boxes in the back seat.

Soon I began seeing that van everywhere: parked outside the organic grocery store where I worked, idling outside the hospital when I went to pick up some test results.

Then the family showed up at Bowling Night, in the lane right next to my team’s. I turned to see the mother writing on the score sheet and the daughter swinging her feet from the chair. I watched the father—a man of about forty, I’d say, with longish black hair—pick up the ball and stare down the lane. I could tell from his delivery that he’d bowled before. Sure enough, he knocked down eight pins.

I was furious—enough was enough. This was a league night! When the man sat down I leaned back and whispered, “Hey.” . . .

"Family," a short story by Christopher Boucher, is continued online in Web Conjunctions.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

2011-01-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, a collection of stories edited and introduced by David Sedaris (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

I read this as slowly as I possibly could, hoping that he'd have a new collection of essays out by the time I finished, but no dice.

Some of the stories that really stuck out to me were ones I'd already read (e.g., "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri; "People Like That Are the Only People Here" by Lorrie Moore--who every once in a while has a wonderful, perfect sentence; and "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma) but this was an interesting collection.

Among others, Sedaris also included "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" by Richard Yates, "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter, "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield, "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro, "Applause, Applause" by Jean Thompson, "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith, "Song of the Shirt, 1941" by Dorothy Parker, "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates, "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Irish Girl" by Tim Johnston, and "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.

Side note: Purchase of this book helps support 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center in Brooklyn, New York.

"Aboriginal" by Willie Lin

2010-12-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

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Like guillotines, every lesson from childhood
taught me about precision and punishment. . . .

"Aboriginal," a poem by Willie Lin, was published on November 16, 2010, and is continued online in Linebreak.

Collections of short stories and novellas, and a poem

2010-12-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

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No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July (Scribner, 2007).

(If you visit the website for the book, look for the tiny pink arrows at the bottom right of each page. The site is quirky, just like her writing.)

She does occasionally go off in a direction I don't love, but she's such an interesting writer. A few of my favorites:

"The Man on the Stairs" (originally published in Fence): "The man on the stairs pauses for such incredibly long periods of time, I almost wonder if he is having a problem. Like maybe he's disabled or very old. Or maybe just really tired. Maybe he's already killed everyone else on the block and now he's all worn out." (pp. 36-37)

"Something That Needs Nothing" (published in Bridge, The New Yorker, and My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I blogged about here).

"The Boy from Lam Kien" (published by Cloverfield Press)

"Birthmark" (published in The Paris Review, Spring 2003)

"How to Tell Stories to Children"

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Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror, a collection of three novellas by James Hynes (Picador USA, 1997).
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"Across a Great Wilderness Without You" by Keetje Kuipers, probably my favorite poem from her collection Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA Editions, 2010). "Across a Great Wilderness Without You" first appeared in 42opus and on p. 36 of Beautiful. (I think it goes without saying that I also liked "At Stanfield Reservoir and Wildlife Preserve," which first appeared in the Apple Valley Review and is on pp. 44-45 of the book.)

The Fall 2010 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2010-10-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

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The Fall 2010 issue of the journal features poetry by Alana Ruprecht, Laura Merleau, Bernard Henrie, Chris Anderson, Laura Drell, M.J. Iuppa, Karen Schubert, and Margaret Rozga; prose poetry by Sarah Frost; fiction by William Grigg and Kimberly Long Cockroft; and artwork by Mary Erickson.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

2010-08-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

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Angela's Ashes, a memoir by Frank McCourt (Scribner: New York, 1996).

Wrenching, but also funny and poignant and, at times, quite beautiful.

Unaccustomed Earth

2010-08-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

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Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of short stories is just phenomenal.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

A short story collection and a novel

2010-07-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

~
"An hour later, a couple lingered in front of a death mask that cost several hundred dollars. They both wore shorts and sandals and carried mesh tote bags. They spoke in a foreign language; the man kept touching the space between the woman's shoulders. Joyce watched them from behind the register. They were young, early twenties, and looked happy. She both envied and pitied them."

This segment is from "We Are Calling to Offer You a Fabulous Life," a short story by Laura van den Berg. It was first published in the Northwest Review and then in her first book, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009). The story collection also includes the title story (first printed in One Story), which I discussed in a previous post, and "Where We Must Be," about a failed actress who takes a job pretending to be Bigfoot.

I also recently read Jhumpa Lahiri's first published novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

The Reader

2010-06-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

~
I read this novel (by Bernhard Schlink) many years ago, but I just watched the film a few days ago. The novel is an intelligent rendering of issues that are quite complicated, especially in a moral sense. Although I haven't read it again in the intervening years, I thought that the film captured the sense of the book quite well. I was particularly impressed with David Kross, who played the younger Michael.

The Reader, based on the novel The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, directed by Stephen Daldry, written for the screen by David Hare, and starring Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz, David Kross as a younger Michael Berg, and Ralph Fiennes as an older Michael Berg.

News of the Spirit (short stories by Lee Smith)

2010-05-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

~
Nice to reread out on the back porch on a lazy summer day (or an unseasonably warm spring evening).

"A Meditation in Tweets"

2010-04-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

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I never, ever thought that I would print or in any way promote a poem written in such a distorted style. I admit, I was biased against this poem from the moment I read the title. But ultimately I was impressed by the language and the way the poet used the form to her advantage.

Pasted below is the last stanza of the poem (because, as mentioned in the addendum, the poem is intended to be read in reverse order, beginning with the last stanza).

"A Meditation in Tweets"
by Kimberly Grey

. . .
Birdbath out back but we r the birds of this tub, our little boat almost sunk & us beneath it;
necks smeared w/a pithy brightness. Let this

"A Meditation in Tweets," a poem by Kimberly Grey, was published on April 13, 2010, and is continued online in Linebreak.

Two from Knopf's Poem-A-Day (April 2010)

2010-04-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

~
"A Remedy for Insomnia"
by Vera Pavlova

Not sheep coming down the hills,
not cracks on the ceiling—
count the ones you loved,
. . .

"A Remedy for Insomnia," a poem by Vera Pavlova, from If There Is Something To Desire (translated from the Russian by her husband, Steven Seymour), was sent on April 9 and is continued at http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/2010/04/09/remedy-for-insomnia-pavlova/.

~

"Seven Horses" by Marge Piercy

When I was a pencil of a girl
I had seven horses, one
for each day of the week.
. . .

"Seven Horses," a poem by Marge Piercy, from The Crooked Inheritance (Middlemarsh, 2006), was sent on April 2 and is continued at http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/2010/04/02/piercy-seven-horses/.

~

Every day in April, in celebration of National Poetry Month, Knopf Poetry sends a free poem via e-mail. You can sign up for these mailings on the Knopf website at http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/?ref=poemaday_poetrynl.

Happy Poetry Month!

2010-04-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

~
"Cat Love" by Lyn Lifshin

if you had a favorite
pillow or worn cotton
shirt it would be ok
about loving it. But
cat love is a risky
choice. It sounds so
sentimental and this
isn’t even a dead or
dying cat. Let’s say it
is not a cat but say
an old bathrobe you
feel comfortable in. . . .

"Cat Love," a poem by Lyn Lifshin, is continued in the Apple Valley Review (Fall 2006).

~

"Jane Austen's Toes" by Rob Hardy

Jane Austen never mentions toes,
although she must sometimes
have thought about her own—
blistered, perhaps, and sore
from walking in pattens with wooden soles. . . .

"Jane Austen's Toes," a poem by Rob Hardy, is continued in the Apple Valley Review (Fall 2007).

~

"This Morning" by Bonnie Bolling

Another morning and I wake
hungry for something I cannot name.
I walk out to the grass and everywhere
there are gifts—the tree hangs with
lemons. . . .

"This Morning," a poem by Bonnie Bolling, is continued in the Apple Valley Review (Fall 2007).

Madame Tutli-Putli

2010-03-30T14:35:00.001-07:00

~
This little gem, created using stop-motion animation, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short. (It also won a handful of other awards.) The animation is phenomenal in parts. One of the creators mentioned in the extras that they didn't intend it to be a novel, so to speak, but more of a little poem, and that they were really trying to create a certain mood. Nonetheless, there are some interesting theories about the meaning of the film on the message boards at IMDb.

Madame Tutli-Putli (17:21), without words, written and directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, with special visual effects by Jason Walker; puppets, sets, and animation by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski; choreography by Laurie Maher; and music direction by David Bryant and Jean-Frédéric Messier.

"Compassion and Mercy" (and other stories)

2010-03-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

"Clare scrabbled in the bottom of her bag for the house key, furiously tossing tissues and pens and Chap Sticks and quarters onto the walk, and thinking with every toss, What's your hurry? This is your last moment of not knowing, stupid, slow down."

This is a section of "Compassion and Mercy," a short story by Amy Bloom, from her new collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Random House, 2010). The book includes four stories about William and Clare, four (three of them reprints from earlier collections) about Lionel and Julia, and four unlinked stories. "Between Here and Here" is a real standout, as was "By-and-By," originally published in Ms. in 2004.

The Spring 2010 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2010-03-04T05:54:00.000-08:00

~
The Spring 2010 issue of the journal features fiction by Wendy Fox and Courtney McLean; poetry by Vince Corvaia, Simon Perchik, Avra Wing, G. L. Grey, Darlene Pagán, Cal Freeman, Elizabeth Levinson, April Lindner, Jim Murdoch, Pat Daneman, Floyd Cheung, Linda King, Dan O’Brien, T. J. Jarrett, Anthony Liccione, Hal Sirowitz, and Joanne Lowery; essays by Jennifer A. Howard and J. W. Young; and artwork by Yevgenia Nayberg.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

"Erasures" by Sharon Bryan

2010-01-15T07:25:00.000-08:00

"My best lover ever
is dead. . . ."

"Erasures," a poem by Sharon Bryan, is continued in The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor (October 8, 2009). It is reprinted from Sharon Bryan's book Sharp Stars (BOA Editions: Rochester, 2009).

"Between Here and Here" by Amy Bloom

2010-01-14T12:46:00.000-08:00

~
"I had always planned to kill my father. When I was ten, I drew a picture of a grave with 'Alvin Lowald' on the tombstone, on the wall behind my dresser. From time to time I would add a spray of weeds or a creeping vine. By the time I was in junior high, there were trees hung with kudzu, cracks in the granite, and a few dark daisies springing up. Once, when my mother wouldn’t let me ride my bike into town, I wrote 'Peggy Lowald is a fat stupid cow' behind the dresser, but I went back the same day and scribbled over it with black Magic Marker because most of the time I did love my mother and I knew she loved me. The whole family knew that my mother’s feelings were Sensitive and Easily Hurt. My father said so, all the time. My father’s feelings were also sensitive, but not in a way that I understood the word, at ten; it might be more accurate to say that he was extremely responsive. My brother, Andy, drew cartoon weather maps of my father’s feelings: dark clouds of I Hate You, giving way to the sleet of Who Are You, pierced by bolts of Black Rage.

Most of the mothers in our neighborhood were housewives, like my mother. But my mother was also a very good cook and a very accomplished hostess and even if the things she made and the way she entertained is not how I would have done it (red, white, and blue frilled toothpicks in lamb sausage pigs in blankets on the Fourth of July, trays of deviled eggs and oeufs en gelée—with tiny tulips of chive and egg yolk decorating each oeuf—to celebrate spring)."

"Between Here and Here," a short story by the incomparable Amy Bloom, is continued in Narrative Magazine (Winter 2010). The story is from Amy Bloom’s most recent story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Random House, 2010).

"A Crossing" by George David Clark

2010-01-13T16:05:00.000-08:00

~
"Giant salamanders, blue-black and purple-black, lie
along the bottom of this stream in Northern China —

I cannot even balance the place’s name on my tongue.
They lie like bruises in the stone-strewn pools, . . ."

"A Crossing," a poem by George David Clark, is continued in Linebreak (January 12, 2010).

Two poems by Jason Heroux and a film by Woody Allen

2010-01-05T05:35:00.000-08:00

~
"Windows" and "Brief Case" by Jason Heroux (prose poems from his chapbook Leaving the Road, Mercutio Press, 2003)

Match Point, written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chris Wilton, Emily Mortimer as Chloe Hewett Wilton, Matthew Goode as Tom Hewett, Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton as Alec and Eleanor Hewett, and Scarlett Johansson as Nola Rice.

(There are also some very talented supporting actors including Margaret Tyzack as Betty Eastby, Ewen Bremner as Inspector Dowd, James Nesbitt as Detective Banner, and Rupert Penry-Jones, who played Captain Wentworth in the BBC version of Persuasion, as Chris's friend and former tennis rival.)

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

2010-01-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

~
Bel Canto, a novel by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins: New York, 2001).

Cherry Blossoms

2010-01-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

~
Kirschblüten - Hanami (English title: Cherry Blossoms, French
title: Un Rêve japonais), in German, written and directed by
Doris Dörrie and starring Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner as Rudi and Trudi Angermeier, Aya Irizuki as Yu, Maximilian Brückner as Karl Angermeier, Nadja Uhl as Franzi, Birgit Minichmayr as Karolin Angermeier, and Felix Eitner and Floriane Daniel as Klaus and Emma Angermeier.

Labor Day

2009-12-05T06:39:00.000-08:00

~
Labor Day, a novel by Joyce Maynard (William Morrow/HarperCollins: New York, 2009).

There seemed to be a couple of very tiny continuity goofs here: a maternal grandmother dies when the boy is old enough to remember, leaving his mother an orphan (49-50), then had died "so long before," when he was at least too young to remember (146); a man is shirtless (151), then wearing a shirt (154).

I don't know why I get so distracted by such tiny details, but they pull me right out of the story. (This reminded me of a 12/02/2009 Publishers Weekly blog post by Elizabeth Bluemle, in which she said that reading the acknowledgments page(s) in a novel kick her "right out of the world of the story and its magic.") It's so difficult to maintain a reader's suspension of disbelief.

But beyond that, I ended up putting aside the other books I was reading after the first two pages of this one.

Poetry by Sandra Beasley

2009-12-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

~
"Unit of Measure" by Sandra Beasley (poem from Poetry, July/August 2009; reprinted at Poetry Daily on July 7, 2009)

Fiction by Valerie Vogrin

2009-11-25T16:08:00.000-08:00

~
"Sisters-in-Law" by Valerie Vogrin (short story from The Summerset Review, Fall 2009)

Poetry and short fiction

2009-11-17T13:43:00.000-08:00

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"Local Attraction" by Billeh Nickerson (poem from his collection McPoems, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009)

"The Golden Age" by Piotr Gwiazda (poem from Linebreak, November 10, 2009)

"Her Untold Story" by Jean Thompson (short story from her collection Do Not Deny Me, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009)

From pp. 280-281:

On her way home Lynn detoured to drive past Jay's new house. She guessed that if she kept doing this, there would eventually be some kind of restraining order. Jay and Margot had purchased a woodsy, faux chalet in a desirable district. . . . She rolled slowly past, noting the dim light in the no doubt spacious kitchen, and the illuminated upstairs window where Jay massaged his pregnant bride's swollen feet. Or consulted with her over the hipster version of What to Name the Baby. (Elijah? Paola?) Or any of the other things he'd never done with her. . . .

She turned a corner and veered around the block to make a second pass. Stupid and degrading behavior. How long did she intend to keep it up? The child would be born, learn to walk, head off for school, develop questionable friendships. The saplings in the yard would grow to mighty shade trees. The neighbors would wave at her as she made her rounds. Jay would be balding and fiercely deaf. She would have long ago forgotten the different layers of their life together: love, married struggle, boredom, acrimony, but still her curses would gather round him like crows on a wire.

Lynn changed directions and headed home. What could you tell from the outside of a house anyway? Wouldn't her own look just as peaceful and welcoming, no matter how forlorn the life inside it was?

"Her Untold Story" is sort of a continuation of Jean Thompson's story "Wilderness," which was near the beginning of this collection. I read that one when it came out in One Story.

Le temps qui reste

2009-10-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

~
Sometime in the past few months, I saw a movie about a very attractive, very successful man who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Now, how will he spend the time he has left? Etc., etc. For a variety of reasons, it was an absolutely dreadful movie.

A few days ago, in my pursuit of other films starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who was mentioned in an earlier blog post), I started watching Le temps qui reste (English title: Time to Leave). It was in French and the main character was gay, but otherwise, the basic plot was exactly the same.

I admit, I wasn't exactly thrilled about the prospect of seeing another trite handling of the topic. This was a good film, though. It was very interesting to compare the two movies because the starting point was so similar and the details (and the effect) were so different.

Le temps qui reste, written and directed by François Ozon and starring Melvil Poupaud as Romain, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (credited as Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) as Jany, Jeanne Moreau as Romain's grandmother and Daniel Duval and Marie Rivière as his parents, Christian Sengewald as Sasha, and Louise-Anne Hippeau as Sophie.

Willful Creatures (stories) by Aimee Bender

2009-10-31T09:47:00.001-07:00

~
Willful Creatures was published in 2005 by Doubleday. My favorite stories in here were "Dearth," "Off," "Fruit and Words," "The Leading Man," "I Will Pick Out Your Ribs (from My Teeth)," and "Ironhead," which was peculiarly sad and satisfying at the same time.

Now I want to go back and reread The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (stories) and An Invisible Sign of My Own (novel).

Call Me By Your Name

2009-10-29T14:04:00.000-07:00

~
To me those hours spent at that round wooden table in our garden with the large umbrella imperfectly shading my papers, the chinking of our iced lemonades, the sound of the not-too-distant surf gently lapping the giant rocks below, and in the background, from some neighboring house, the muffled crackle of the hit parade medley on perpetual replay—all these are forever impressed on those mornings when all I prayed for was for time to stop. Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play forever, I’m asking for very little, and I swear I’ll ask for nothing more.

From Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2007), p. 30.

There is also a lovely segment starting with the bottom paragraph on page 237 of the hardcover edition (“And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta—”), but it gives away too much of the story’s ending to type it out here.

Oh, and if you see this, thanks for the recommendation.

Poetry by Tania Pryputniewicz and David O'Meara, Fiction, Films, and David Sedaris' tour

2009-10-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

~
"She dressed in a hurry (Lady Di)" by Tania Pryputniewicz (poem from Salome Magazine, September 28, 2009)

"Airport" by David O'Meara (poem from his collection Noble Gas, Penny Black, Brick Books, 2008)

"Looking American" by Tai Dong Huai (short story from Raving Dove, Summer 2009)

"Margaret Lives in the Basement" and "Duck Blind" by Michelle Berry (short stories from her collection Margaret Lives in the Basement, Somerville House Publishing, 1998; "Margaret Lives in the Basement" was originally published as three separate stories in TickleAce, Ash, and The Malahat Review)

5x2, in French, directed by François Ozon and starring Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi as Marion and Stéphane Freiss as Gilles. Early on, this film had a scene that I really could have lived without. Still, I thought that overall it was excellent. It was also a pleasant surprise to see the wonderful Valeria Bruni Tedeschi again; I'd just seen her in Il est plus facile pour un chameau... (English title: It's easier for a camel...), which she wrote and directed. (She is sometimes credited as Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi or Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi.)

The Savages, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon Savage and Laura Linney as Wendy Savage, and Philip Bosco as Lenny Savage, Peter Friedman as Larry, and Gbenga Akinnagbe as Jimmy. This was the second time I'd seen this one. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are two of my favorite actors, so I'd really looked forward to seeing this the first time around, but some of the themes were so painful that I couldn't appreciate all of the beauty and humor.

Considering that I briefly considered leaving home in order to attend the rest of David Sedaris's tour dates, I suppose you could say that I enjoyed seeing him live. Some of the appearances are already sold out, but if you like his writing and he's going to be visiting a city near you, I'd strongly recommend getting a ticket. He's great on the page, on CD, and on television, but truly, he's even better in person. Ticket information is available on the website of the Steven Barclay Agency: http://www.barclayagency.com/speakers/appearances/sedaris.html.

The Fall 2009 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2009-09-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

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The Fall 2009 issue of the journal features prose poetry by Luiza Oleszczuk; poetry by Michael Lauchlan, Marge Piercy, Jin Cordaro, Ioan Flora (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Elena Borta), David LaBounty, Bernard Henrie, Gail Braune Comorat, Mary MacGowan, Yun Wang, Anne Britting Oleson, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Laura McCullough, and Melissa Adamo; fiction by Elaine Barnard and Kathleen Thomas; essays by J. W. Young and Erika Kleinman; and artwork by Jacob Collins.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

"The Bats" by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

2009-09-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

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First published in Zyzzyva (Spring 1993) and subsequently included in her short story collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor/Doubleday 1995).

Jane Austen's Persuasion

2009-08-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

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"[Lady Russell] could not imagine a man more exactly what he ought to be than Mr Elliott; nor did she ever enjoy a sweeter feeling than the hope of seeing him receive the hand of her beloved Anne in Kellynch church, in the course of the following autumn."

(This passage--from the end of Chapter 17--is one of my favorites despite the fact that it's about her cousin rather than Captain Wentworth.)

Fiction and Poetry

2009-08-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

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"The Motherhood Poems" by Beth Alvarado (short fiction from Necessary Fiction, June 3, 2009)

"Death of the Right Breast" by Bernard Henrie (a poem from Stirring, September 2005)

"Yes" by Barbara Crooker

2009-07-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

"So I said yes to everything, yes to the green hills
rolling out ahead, yes to the hayfield tied up in rolls,
yes to the clouds blooming like peonies in the sky’s
blue meadow, the long tongue of the road lolling
out before me, yes to the life of travel, yes to the other
life at home, yes to the daisies freckling the ditch, . . . ."

Continued in The Anglican Theological Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Winter 2009), p. 113. Also available online at FindArticles.net and in Serenity Prayers: Prayers, Poems, and Prose to Soothe Your Soul, compiled by June Cotner (Andrews McMeel, 2009).

The last line is reminiscent of Molly Bloom's wonderful soliloquy from the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The Lives of Others

2009-06-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

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Das Leben der Anderen (English title: The Lives of Others), in German, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and starring Ulrich Mühe as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, Sebastian Koch as Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Christa-Maria Sieland.

IMDb has a good summary of the basic plot:
In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.

Two poems, a movie, and another David Sedaris collection

2009-06-11T07:47:00.000-07:00

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"House Fire" by Allison Seay (poem from Born Magazine, originally published in Blue Mesa Review, No. 18, Fall 2006)

"Advice for Women on the Graveyard Shift" by Karen J. Weyant (poem from Broadsided Press, May 2009)

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2008)

La Tourneuse de pages (English title: The Page Turner), in French, directed by Denis Dercourt and starring Déborah François as the adult Mélanie Prouvost, Catherine Frot and Pascal Greggory as Ariane and Jean Fouchécourt, and Antoine Martynciow as Tristan Fouchécourt. This was not the best film I've ever seen, but the music alone is worth the price of admission (or rental, I guess, in this case). It was billed as a thriller and I was expecting a climax along the lines of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but this was much more subtle.

A Few Books and a Few Movies

2009-05-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor by Perri Klass (Basic Books, 2007)

Naked by David Sedaris (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 1997)

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2004)

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 1994) [though in reality I'd more strongly recommend the essays, especially "SantaLand Diaries"]

Instead of linking these books anywhere, I'm going to take an opportunity to recommend IndieBound, which has a pretty slick Indie Store Finder located at http://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finder.

Now, a few movies:

The Painted Veil, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, directed by John Curran and starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as Walter and Kitty Fane.

Synecdoche, New York, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, Catherine Keener as Adele Lack, Samantha Morton as Hazel, and about a thousand other people. Maybe literally. This movie was huge in scope and subject matter, though maybe you could boil it down to a discussion of the meaning of life and death. I found it a little intense.

Lost in Translation, written and directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Bill Murray as Bob Harris, Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, and Giovanni Ribisi as John, Charlotte's husband. I saw this again recently. It didn't have quite the same effect this time, largely because I had seen it before, I think, and knew where it was going. But I still think that Sofia Coppola very effectively recreated the quiet, lonely world that seems so intimately entwined with extended bouts of insomnia.

A Little Poetry (and Fiction) for Poetry Month

2009-04-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

~
"Inside Joke, Explained: Jerry" by Scott Garson (short fiction from The Northville Review)

"Poem for the Adoptive Mother" by Amanda Auchter (a poem from Linebreak, April 29, 2008)

"At the Optometrist's Office" by John Hodgen (a poem from Slate, November 28, 2006)

And two pieces of short fiction by Tai Dong Huai, whose story "Backwards" appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of the Apple Valley Review:

"Thirteen" by Tai Dong Huai (SmokeLong Quarterly, Issue 23, December 15, 2008)

"Clasp" by Tai Dong Huai (The Rose & Thorn, Spring 2009)

The Spring 2009 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2009-03-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

~
The Spring 2009 issue of the journal features fiction by Matthew Grice, Tai Dong Huai, Lydia Williams, Arrie Brown, and Jozefina Cutura; an essay by Suzanne Cope; poetry by William Robert Flowers, Leslie LaChance, Sarah White, Gregory Lawless, Roger Jones, Ruth Foley, Steve Klepetar, Linda King, Lyn Lifshin, James Richard Brown, Chris Anderson, and Asha Choubey; and artwork by Mikel Glass.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Four Films

2009-02-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

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Two (at least obliquely) about writing:

Ficción (English title: Fiction), in Spanish, directed by Cesc Gay, written by Tomàs Aragay and Cesc Gay, and starring Eduard Fernández as Àlex, Javier Cámara as Santi, Montse Germán as Mònica, and Carme Pla as Judith. I liked this film so much that I watched it again the next day, though my sympathies were different the second time around.

Comme une Image (English title: Look at Me), in French, directed by Agnès Jaoui, written by Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui, and starring Marilou Berry as Lolita Cassard, Jean-Pierre Bacri as Étienne Cassard, Agnès Jaoui and Laurent Grévill as Sylvia and Pierre Millet, and Keine Bouhiza as Sébastien. This was the second time I had seen this film as well. The first time, I have to admit that I couldn't relate to it somehow and found Lolita less than sympathetic as a character. However, this time, I thought that it was an interesting take on what it means to be successful as a writer, parent, spouse, and person in general.

The other two were darker in terms of subject matter but visually stunning:

Da hong deng long gao gao gua (English title: Raise the Red Lantern), in Chinese, directed by Yimou Zhang, written by Su Tong and Ni Zhen, and starring Li Gong as Songlian, Caifei He as Meishan (Third Wife), Cuifen Cao as Zhuoyan (Second Wife), and Shuyuan Jin as Yuru (First Wife). This film was absolutely gorgeous.

Aimée and Jaguar, in German, directed by Max Färberböck, written by Max Färberböck and Rona Munro, and starring Maria Schrader as Felice Schragenheim (Jaguar), Juliane Köhler as Lilly Wust (Aimée), and Johanna Wokalek as Ilse.

Poem: "Gate C 22" by Ellen Bass

2008-12-14T12:14:00.000-08:00

At gate C 22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after

the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like satin ribbons tying up a gift. . . .

[Continued on the website of The Missouri Review,
where "Gate C 22" by Ellen Bass was published in 2002.]

A Few Books, Mostly Memoirs

2008-12-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

~
Despite loving Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, I hadn't read any of her books that dealt more with religion than writing. Recently, though, I read all three of them, and found that, like Bird by Bird, each was at least as much memoir as how-to manual.

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

Trust me when I say that this was the first time I'd ventured into the Religion section of a bookstore for some new reading material.
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Also very late in the game, I finally read David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. I'd had two of his books on my shelves for years; I'm now moving on to the second (more recent) one.

A few months ago, I bought a book of essays that was supposed to be witty and wonderful, and I don't know--it just didn't work for me. I plowed through the entire book trying unsuccessfully to understand what the reviewers were raving about. So I tried not to pay attention to all the hype about Me Talk Pretty One Day to avoid being similarly disappointed, but this book was terrific.
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I meant to add this to one of my blog posts a long time ago: a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press called The Terrible Baby, a collection of poems by Rebecca Cook. The cover is what initially drew me to that particular chapbook; it's a painting by Lauren Matthews Levato called "Maternal." (The second draw was the tantalizingly provocative title of the chapbook.)

The Fall 2008 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2008-09-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

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The Fall 2008 issue of the journal features fiction by Alex Myers and Rachel Ephraim; memoir by Panteha Sanati; prose poetry by Julie Babcock; poetry by Vince Corvaia, Keetje Kuipers, Philip Matthews, M.J. Iuppa, Miranda Steffens, Andrew Slattery, Richard Stolorow, Margaret Rozga, Naira Kuzmich, Jim Murdoch, Susan Culver, and Heather Mercer; and artwork by Rob Evans.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

A Short Collection of Poetry

2008-08-14T08:55:00.001-07:00

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While I was at the conference in New York, I bought a copy of Late Wife by Claudia Emerson (from the Southern Messenger Poets series, Louisiana State University Press, 2005). This book also won The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2006, though I was (ever shallow) first drawn to its appearance.

These four were my favorites from the collection:

"Pitching Horseshoes" (originally published in Blackbird, Spring 2003, Volume 2, Number 1)

"The Practice Cage"

"Driving Glove"

"Buying the Painted Turtle" (originally published in Shenandoah)

Two Stories from One Story, One from Steve Almond, and a Novel

2008-08-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

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Given the reasonable subscription price and the time-friendly format, it's not difficult to read everything published by One Story. The stories are also consistently excellent, so I feel like it's saying something that these two have stood out in my mind:

"Culottes" by Eileen FitzGerald (One Story, Issue Number 82, October 20, 2006)

"What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us" by Laura van den Berg (One Story, Issue Number 102, March 10, 2008)

I finally finished Steve Almond's The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005). Steve Almond's stories typically feature great beginnings and witty, acerbic observations. I'd read some of his other writing (e.g., the novel he co-wrote with Julianna and many of his dead-on essays for Poets and Writers) and admired his style. In The Evil B.B. Chow, though, he does use language and subject matter that are more graphic than he might use in, say, a P&W essay. At any rate, the story that really got me was one toward the end: "Wired for Life," which originally appeared in The Missouri Review.

And I'm going to add one other book here, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (first published in 1847). I just find it remarkable that this novel, comprised of plot points that make it seem almost impossibly dated, can still strike a chord.

"The Happy Memories Club"

2008-07-21T13:45:00.001-07:00

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Best of the South: From the Second Decade of New Stories from the South (1996-2005), edited by Shannon Ravenel, with stories selected and introduced by Anne Tyler, has been on my nightstand for years now. It sounds silly, but there are certain books that I've looked forward to so much that I don't want to spoil the anticipation by actually reading them.

Anyway, I've read some real clunkers lately and needed something good. So I finally opened Best of the South yesterday, and immediately read a short story that I've read numerous times: "The Happy Memories Club" by Lee Smith. It was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, and it's one of my all-time favorite stories.

The writing is good, of course--sharp, sometimes funny, perfectly wrought--but there is also something about this story that is just so poignant.

LINKS:

"The Happy Memories Club" at The Atlantic Monthly online

Lee Smith reading "The Happy Memories Club" in the audio archive for the WUNC 91.5 FM show "The State of Things"

News of the Spirit (a collection of short stories by Lee Smith), New Stories from the South (1996), and Best of the South (1996-2005), all of which include "The Happy Memories Club"

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

2008-07-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

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It's taken several weeks, but I've finally finished every story in the anthology I've been reading: My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides (HarperCollins, 2008).

Intimidated by Eugenides's introductory description of Robert Musil's "difficult and rather punishing 'Tonka,'" I read it last, though I mainly found the story intriguing. There were quite a few familiar stories in the anthology (Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog," Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta," Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") combined with several authors/stories which were refreshingly new, at least to me (Eileen Chang's "Red Rose, White Rose," David Bezmozgis's "Natasha," Richard Ford's "Fireworks," Milan Kundera's "The Hitchhiking Game").

This was a strong collection overall, but my two favorites were "Something That Needs Nothing" by Miranda July and "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro. One other story that stood out in my mind was "Jon" by George Saunders.

Amazon's page for the book includes Q & A with Jeffrey Eugenides, including a note about a story he selected but wasn't able to include ("Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx) and information about the student writing programs offered by 826 Chicago (which will receive all author proceeds from sales of the anthology).

Short fiction by Thomas Kearnes

2008-06-30T08:59:00.000-07:00

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I recently read "The Game of Memory," a short story by Thomas Kearnes, at Pequin (where the writing is "hotter than habanero"). I liked the story so much that I looked around for some of his previously published work. Below are links to a few other stories:

"Last Dance" by Thomas Kearnes (SmokeLong Quarterly, Issue 15)

"A Failed Story About My Father" by Thomas Kearnes (Thieves Jargon, May 11, 2008)

"Girl on the Floor" by Thomas Kearnes, read by Ann Rushton (Bound Off: Literary Audio Podcast, Issue 11, December 15, 2006)

Eat, Pray, Love

2008-05-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I think I've finally caught up with everyone else in America by reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. For some reason, I was under the impression that this was a self-help book, but it is (of course) really a memoir about divorce, depression, travel, enlightenment, spirituality, and amazing Italian food, among other things.

This is a book that has really stuck with me; I've been reading it since the end of April, when I picked up my sister-in-law's half-finished copy and couldn't put it down. I ended up thinking about it for the entire hour that I was stuck in traffic in Toronto on the way home, and as soon as possible I got a copy for myself so that I could continue reading. It was slow going, though; there was too much to think about and process. It may not be a self-help book per se, at least not in the sense that I thought it was, but it did speak to a lot of things I've been thinking about over the last couple of years.

For anybody who's already read Eat, Pray, Love and was as bewitched by it as I was, Elizabeth Gilbert's website has a page of frequently asked questions about the journey she took. There are also photographs of some of the people and places she described in the book. Good stuff.

Lars and the Real Girl (and other stories)

2008-04-21T10:17:00.000-07:00

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Last December, I saw Lars and the Real Girl (2007) in the theatre, and then again yesterday on DVD. This film is really charming, with a strong story line and a pitch-perfect cast. Nancy Oliver's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar and several other awards, and Ryan Gosling and Emily Mortimer also received recognition for their respective roles.

One of Ryan Gosling's earlier movies, Half Nelson (2006), is also one of my current favorites. It's a lot darker than Lars but also an intensely well-crafted piece with its own string of award nominations/wins.

To add to this tangential list, one of Emily Mortimer's earlier movies, Lovely and Amazing (2001), also features really strong performances from her, Catherine Keener, and virtually everyone else in the movie, including a young Jake Gyllenhaal. This movie was written and directed by Nicole Holofcener and was described in one quote on the cover as a "witty moving comedy!" Lovely and Amazing was witty, and it was moving, but in my opinion, it was definitely more of a drama.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006) featured Will Ferrell in a straight role. I think the man is a talented comedian, but after watching him on Saturday Night Live and later in a string of occasionally funny comedies, I wasn't sure he could carry this off. I was very pleasantly surprised by his acting in this movie. Maggie Gyllenhaal (Jake's sister) played the baker that Will Ferrell's IRS agent character is auditing, and Emma Thompson played an author with writer's block.

I don't know if I can continue the connect-the-actors element of this post, but there are a few other strong scripts I'd like to add to the list:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, and--in a minor role--Mark Ruffalo),

The Truman Show (1998, also starring Jim Carrey and the lovely Laura Linney, who starred in 2000's You Can Count on Me with Mark Ruffalo),

Love Actually (2003, with a large ensemble cast including Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant),

Sideways (2004, with the underappreciated Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh),

and Little Miss Sunshine (2006, with Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Alan Arkin as the grandfather you might not want your kids to hear, the incomparable Steve Carell, and Bryan Cranston in a small but pivotal role).

Happy Poetry Month! (Part 2)

2008-04-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

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A couple of days ago, I posted links to some poetry online, and today I wanted to highlight some alternatives to traditional print reading:

Visit Born Magazine, "an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media." One of Born Magazine's recent collaborations featured a poem called "What Afterlife" by Keetje Kuipers paired with an interactive design by Andrew Kostuik. In addition to the multimedia version, there is an option to view the poem in a static form.

Sign up for Knopf's Poem-a-Day mailing list and receive one poem via e-mail on each day in April. To subscribe, send a blank e-mail message to sub_knopfpoetry (at) info.randomhouse.com or visit www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/poemaday.
The first poem to be featured this year was "A Phone Call from the Future" by Mary Jo Salter, from her book A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems. Knopf's site also has links to the poems, broadsides, and a podcast, which includes Mary Jo Salter reading this poem.

Listen to more poets reading on the web. The April is National Poetry Month podcast features a number of poets reading and discussing their own work. One of my favorite poems I've heard so far was "The Big Picture" by Ellen Bass. (You can get to this one by scrolling down toward the bottom of the page and clicking on the accompanying Play button.)

Become a vector (or just print a lovely broadside for yourself) at Broadsided. Their current feature is "Among Trees (or) The Heart Is a Bee Hive" with art by Elizabeth Terhune and poetry by Cindy St. John. (Please click here to view this broadside as a pdf).

Then, when you're tired of cruising around on the web, go outside! It's finally April. Walk to your local bookstore and buy a literary journal or a book of poetry, or attend a reading or other event celebrating Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets has a calendar of events happening throughout the United States, and the League of Canadian Poets has a readings calendar for Canada.

Happy Poetry Month!

2008-04-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

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Now that we're into April, I wanted to post links to some poetry:

"Purple Peruvian Potatoes" by Rosa Salazar (a poem from r.kv.r.y., Winter 2008)

"The Lake Oswego Girls' Soccer Team at the Hilton Pool" by Keetje Kuipers (a poem from From the Fishouse, December 2006)

"The Sleepwalker's Wife" by Zachary Greenwald (a poem from The 2River View, Summer 2006)

"Swallowed" by Anne Haines (a poem from Valparaiso Poetry Review, Spring/Summer 2007, and reprinted in Best of the Net 2007)

"Dreaming Your Death" by Karen Buckley (a poem from Orbis, Spring 2005)

"she told me her mother slept with a revolver" by Justin Hyde (a poem from The Orange Room Review, October 2007)

Money and Class in America

2008-03-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

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Penguin had a table at the book fair in New York City, and one of the books I bought was a collection called The Haves and Have-Nots: 30 Stories About Money and Class in America (edited by Barbara Solomon).

A couple of weeks ago, then, while I was still in the middle of The Haves and Have-Nots, I found a copy of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This is a compulsively readable book, and a video of the author discussing it can be found on the website for Simon & Schuster (simonsays.com) and apparently also on Amazon.

The Glass Castle has its dark moments, but in a larger sense it is about resilience, and what it means to be a parent, and the effect alcohol and other vices can have on a family. Again, too, it is about money and class in America.

When I finished it, I finally got a copy of a book I've been meaning to read since it was published in 2001, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. I'd highly recommend this book, which is, to use one of the author's most poetic lines, about "the juxtaposition of terrible heat and cool, inaccessible water" (p. 88).

The Spring 2008 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2008-03-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

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The Spring 2008 issue of the journal features fiction by Kathy Anderson and John Lowry; poetry by Pat Daneman, Anna Evans, Lucia Zimmitti, Laurie Junkins, Brian R. Lutz, Lyn Lifshin, David N. DeVries, Elizabeth Barbato, Lori Huskey, George Moore, Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Julie L. Moore, and Mark Thalman; and artwork by Cynthia Tom.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

AWP in NYC

2008-02-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

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On Sunday, I returned from the AWP conference in New York City. It was an amazing experience all around, and I was able to hear readings by some of my favorite writers. This seems like a great excuse to post links to some of their work.

Billy Collins read on Saturday afternoon, and he was paired with Frank McCourt. Because of Angela's Ashes, I expected Frank McCourt to be somewhat dour, but he wasn't at all. The two men were good friends, and they were both wildly entertaining readers. I enjoyed everything they read, but the piece that sticks out in my mind is one of Billy Collins' poems, "The Lanyard." This has always been one of my favorites, but his delivery made it ten times better. The long pause before "and I gave her a lanyard" left me laughing so hard I cried. (Then, at the end, I really did cry a little. I'm getting more sentimental as I'm getting older.)
Link: The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems (which includes "The Lanyard") by Billy Collins.

I was really, really looking forward to the reading by Joyce Carol Oates. Seriously. I sat outside the room for the entire previous session so that I could dash in and get a good seat for her reading. And it was worth it. I can't imagine anything more gracious than the way she began her speech: "It's a pleasure to be in the company of so many fellow writers."
Link: Joyce Carol Oates' new novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter.

Mark Strand. The woman I was sitting next to at the Mark Strand reading asked if I had ever heard him read before. When I said no, she said, "You're in for a treat." He was tall and elegant, and had a voice to match.
Link: The book that made me a fan of Mark Strand, Blizzard of One.

I hadn't seen Julianna Baggott in person in about nine years. She was as lovely and sweet as ever, and I really enjoyed catching up with her again. She participated in a couple of panels and signed copies of her newest book, Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, on Friday afternoon at the bookfair.
Link: Julianna Baggott's first collection of poetry, This Country of Mothers.

Sharon Olds has a beautiful voice. I was one of the 100+ people sitting or standing at the back of the room during her reading, and I was too far away to see her clearly, but she had a microphone and she sounded terrific.
Link: In addition to some more recent work, Sharon Olds read the poem that I always think of when I think of her, "I Go Back to May 1937."

Amy Bloom is one of my all-time favorite writers (please see my previous blog entry for more about her and her new novel, Away). On Thursday morning, I attended a panel subtitled "Being Crazy Doesn't Make You Interesting" (an evocative title that was apparently her idea). This was a good panel in general, and I discovered that she's as interesting in person as she is on the page.
Link: Amy Bloom's first published collection of short stories, Come to Me.

Amy Bloom's New Novel

2007-11-27T12:36:00.000-08:00

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Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I read Amy Bloom's new novel, Away.

There are times when the reviews or blurbs for a novel can be more elegantly written than the text of the book itself. In this case, Away was described as a "beautiful, effulgent book" (Ron Carlson), "amazingly dense" (Kirkus Reviews), "raunchy, funny, and touching" (Caryl Phillips), "urgent, riveting, fabulously entertaining" (Emma Donoghue), and a "book full of tender wisdom, brawling insight, sharp-edged humor, and--if it's possible--a lovely, wayward precision" (Colum McCann). Christopher Tilghman said that "Amy Bloom's work has always revolved around what love and desire can make us do. In Away, she paints filial love on an immense geographic and historical canvas. The result, a story of loss and survival, is gripping."

I've been a fan of Amy Bloom's work since I read her first short story collection, Come to Me, and I'd been anxiously awaiting the release of Away. Even so, the blurbs were so effusive that I actually felt skeptical before I'd even turned to page 1.

Now, though, I think this is one of those rare instances where the praise seems, if anything, inadequate. The book isn't for everyone--it's rife with coarse language, very dark themes, etc.--but she handles the material deftly.

Anyway, I'm not even going to attempt to spin a poetic web of praise for the novel. Here's what I have to say: I read it feverishly within a span of 24 hours, and now it's several days later, and I'm still thinking about the book. That's about the highest praise I can give.

It may not mean as much out of context, but this quote--about a woman who is physically alive yet emotionally dead, and haunted by memories and thoughts of loved ones who are physically dead--was my favorite from the book:

"But here, in the basement of the Goldfadn [Theatre], among the dead, it doesn't seem to be a question. She can feel them underneath her, pushing at her, pressing at the backs of her knees, lifting her up and out of the grave. Yaakov, closest to the top, straightens her skirt and brushes a last crumbled leaf from her cheek, so she can join the living, not just to do what they do, which even the dead can manage, but to feel what they feel and keep on, which even the living find hard." (quoted from Away by Amy Bloom, page 82 in hardcover)

Two New(ish) Novels

2007-10-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

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I've been reading novels again, an almost forgotten pleasure. Supposedly you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but two of my recent favorites were beautifully designed:

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

This didn't even make a dent in the piles on my nightstand, of course, but I'll just have to keep on going. . . .

The Fall 2007 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2007-09-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

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The Fall 2007 issue of the journal features fiction by Miriam Sagan, Barry Jay Kaplan, Fraser Sutherland, and Robert Miltner; essays, memoir, and creative nonfiction by Jo Barney, Chantel Acevedo, John Taylor, and Cathy Warner; an author interview with Sue William Silverman conducted by Angela M. Graziano; poetry by Kenneth Pobo, Rob Hardy, David Cazden, Kevin McLellan, Martha Christina, Bonnie Bolling, Bob Bradshaw, Francine M. Tolf, Rodger LeGrand, Maureen Tolman Flannery, Michael Trammell, Jennifer Armentrout, Richard Stolorow, Kendra Aber-Ferri, Deja Earley, Perry Higman, Christine Vovakes, Shoshauna Shy, Kyle Hemmings, Christopher Kelen, William Reichard, Kimberly L. Becker, Janice D. Soderling, Chris Anderson, Matthew Schoesler, Thomas D. Reynolds, Randall Horton, Daniel Sumrall, M.L. Liebler, C. Delia Scarpitti, Gloria J. Bennett, Karen Schubert, Katie Fesuk, and Tom Harmon; and artwork by Michael Abraham.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Two Poems, Two Short Shorts, and an Essay

2007-05-31T10:01:00.000-07:00

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"Sometimes I still dream about their pink bodies" by Kelli Russell Agodon (a poem from Poetry Southeast, Fall 2006)

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (a poem from Angle of Ascent: New and Collected Poems, copyright 1962, and reprinted for the Favorite Poem Project)

"Refreshing Like Diet Coke" by Jacinta Nandi (a short short story from Cautionary Tale, April 2007)

"One Day I Cried" by Oren Miller (a short essay from Word Riot, November 2005)

"Drowning" by Janet Thorning (a short short story from 971 MENU, May 2007)

Four Short Pieces by Kate Hall

2007-05-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

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I just discovered a cache of writing by Kate Hall. The content tends to be a little heavy; the writing is excellent. My favorites so far:

"My Mother Sees Me," "A History of Addiction," and "A Lecture on Infinity" by Tryst Emerging Writer Kate Hall (three short pieces from Tryst, Issue 17, Spring 2007)

"Girl" by Kate Hall (a piece of flash fiction from 3:AM Magazine, April 10, 2007)

A Handful of Poems

2007-05-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

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"Bringing My Son to the Police Station to Be Fingerprinted" by Shoshauna Shy (a poem from from Poetry Northwest, Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2001, and reprinted at Poetry 180, Poetry Daily, etc.)

"Commuting in Summer" by Gary Patick (a poem from anderbo.com)

"My Mother's Body Knits Itself Into a Nest of Pain" by Barbara Crooker (a poem from Triplopia, Volume 6, Issue 2, 2007)

"The Night We Decide on Divorce" by Ona Gritz (a poem from Literary Mama, July 26, 2005)

"You Should Avoid Doctors" by Diane Lockward (a poem from Stone Table Review, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2006)

Another Five Favorites, Some Recent and Some That Have Stuck in My Mind

2007-03-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

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"The Dead Boy at Your Window" by Bruce Holland Rogers (a short story which originally appeared in The North American Review in 1998 and is reprinted online at Tales of the Decongested; there is also a short student film by Ian Schranz based on this story, and it is available on YouTube)

"Favors" by Beth Ann Fennelly (a poem from Blackbird, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2004)

"For a Newly Divorced Friend Whose Ex-Husband Claims She Stole His Favorite Tupperware Bowl" by Jeff Worley (a poem from Indiana Review, Volume 19, Number 2, Fall 1996, and reprinted in Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, ed. by Ginny Lowe Connors)

"Disconnect" by Donna Vorreyer (a prose poem from Flashquake, Volume 4, Issue 3, Spring 2005)

"Dinner Parties and Post Nuptials" by Emilia A. Phillips (a poem from The Pedestal Magazine, Issue 38, February/March 2007)

The Spring 2007 issue of the Apple Valley Review

2007-03-04T17:03:00.000-08:00

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The Spring 2007 issue of the journal features an essay by J.W. Young; fiction by Jenny Steele, M. Thomas Gammarino, Kerri Quinn, Srdan Papic (translation by Marija Panic), Eva Eliav, Julia Curcio, Patricia Gosling, Danielle Lapidoth, Peggy Duffy, and Wayne Scheer; prose poetry by Sean Lovelace; poetry by Karen Schubert, Rosa Salazar, Ona Gritz, Brian Gilmore, Anna Evans, Adam Tavel, Mary MacGowan, James Cihlar, Simon Perchik, Raymond Wachter, Shaindel Beers, Diane Tucker, Bob Bradshaw, Gina Marie Mammano V., Sandy McIntosh, Terrance Wedin, Rachel Bunting, Anca Vlasopolos, Edward Byrne, and Christine Vovakes; and artwork by Sarah Browning.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

The First Five

2007-02-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

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"I Am Waiting for My Dogs to Die" by Davin Malasarn (a short story from Smokelong Quarterly, Issue 15, December 2006)

"Just Something You Do" by Anna Evans (a poem from the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2006)

"Picnic After the Flood" by Rachel Cantor (a short story from One Story, Issue 80, September 2006)

"Saints in Her Backyard" by Theresa Boyar (a poem from Salome Magazine, November 6, 2006)

"The Venus Game" by Patricia J. DeLois (a short story from Storyglossia, Issue 17, December 2006)