Among The Jumbled Heap

Also Read…

My good friend the Hamster unwittingly helped launch this blog.  He was visiting Arkansas and we were sitting together at a chicken shack sharing a pipe and talking about books.  "You read all these books, but how much time to do you spend thinking about 'em?"  His challenge was that I write a blurb about each book I read.  Thus, the blog was born. Unfortunately, I read books faster than I can write about 'em.  My desk is littered with books that are awaiting a blog post. In an effort to clea...

The Yankee South

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankee...

Bring Out Your Dead

R.I.P. Donald and E. Lynn I am the database jockey for a medium sized library. My title is Technical Services Supervisor, and my tasks are legion, but one of my primary jobs is to attend to the library's catalog. A library catalog is a giant relational database that connects information about authors, books, and ultimately people like you and me who use the library. In this role of database jockey, every year I have the gruesome honor of tallying up all the dead authors and entering the...

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...

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...

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...