Among The Jumbled Heap

The Last Twelve Years

I'm a two pack a day man, smoke like a fiend Like a burned out bearing in a bad machine I cayn't breath in the mornin' till I get myself a cigarette lit Say, Daaaa aaaad Blame, anyways a man cayn't quit. --Roger Miller I did not meet her as a teenager, as so many others do. True, I saw her often, flirting with the gutter punks and metal heads, men, women, she was indiscriminate, flirty bitch, and I was not attracted to her. I was NOT. Paul introduced us. He had not known her very long...

Pamela Ryder – Correction of Drift

The Best Book You're Not Reading Pamela Ryder is a writer's writer. A quick Google blog search proves the point. Every writer-blogger has something good to say about Ryder. Ryder's story collection Correction of Drift also finds its place on many a young writer's short list of recent and influential books. Lydia Peele, whose story collection is a similar tour de force, mentions Ryder's book in a NYTimes interview and says the book "defies definition either as a story collection or a no...

Two by Amy Koppelman

Confession: I troll the internet for youngish writers that I've never heard of. My Google Reader is chalk full of contemporary fiction blogs. One of my favorites is the NYTimes Papercuts Blog, and I particularly like their semi-weekly segment Living With Music. Here they give a writer the chance to list his or her top ten songs, usually stuff that's had some affect on their writing. Most of the writers are young novelists from NYC. This is how I came to Amy Koppelman. Koppelman--look ...

In the Skin of a Lion

Michael Ondaatje is best known for his book turned movie The English Patient.  Yet before he wrote The English Patient, Ondaatje penned In the Skin of a Lion, a hypnotically evocative novel set in 1920's Toronto. The Subject Heading in WorldCat for In the Skin of a Lion says, “Poor—Ontario--Toronto--Fiction.” Assigning subjects to fiction inevitably falls short. A story that can be summed up with a simple subject is not one I want to read. It's true that welded to the frame of Ondaatje's n...

Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused

Chairman Mao is edited by the imminent sinophile Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt is that type of scholar who oozes love for his subject, and one senses this in his selections for Chairman, a book that, despite its title, is far from political. In his introduction, Goldblatt explains this: Mao must have know that the only truly dangerous writing in a totalitarian society is that which ignores politics altogether, literature that serves art, not society This thought forms the fulcrum on wh...

Gin Phillips, Hawthorne Books, Book Objects:

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right. My friend Anthony is--to put it mildly--a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she'll get mad.   (That's Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we f...

Ha Jin Redux

My first voyage into the storied world of Ha Jin was his Ocean of Words. I was not impressed. I found it to be truly an ocean of words, lacking that economy of language I expect in contemporary American fiction (Stephanie Meyer excluded). My major beef with Ha was that he was boring, conventional, afraid to take the risks that other Chinese writers (those in the mainland of China) were taking par for the course. Folks like Mo Yan and Yu Hua who contrive wild stories full of improbabilities...

Literary Defecation

Below is possibly the best literary description of a bowel movement that I've ever read. Okay, it's perhaps the only literary description of a bowel movement that I've ever read. It comes from Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Step Mother. Don Rigoberto half closed his eyes and strained, just a little. That was all it took: he immediately felt the beneficent tickle in his rectum and the sensation that, there inside, in the hollows of his lower belly, something obedient to his will was...

Real Presence

"Lead us not into..." Willie think 'bout temptation till his mind go blank Replaced with action and boldness to act. Thoughts wither like corn in a Texas drought. "Listen real hard you can hear da corn grow," His daddy say one summer in Indiana. But that was twenty years, two thousand miles, Thirty degrees ago, an' now Texas Gonna burn a hole in 'is soul. 'Turn dis soul ta bread. It might be useful. Ain't fit ta e'en put butter on now. Feed the body. Starve the soul. "Willie, maybe the body ...

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Karen Russell's story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girl's Raised by Wolves is, as the title implies, filled with stories imbued with the fantastic. Each story draws upon myth and mystery, but in a way that aims to lay bare very human obsessions. There is a girl tracking her possessed sister through a swamp, a young boy traveling Westward in a wagon train whose father happens to be a minotaur, a boy who sings down an avalanche as part of an ancient tribal ritual, and the lead story about a gr...