Among The Jumbled Heap

Jose Saramago 1922-2010

This seems to be a big year for the literary dead. Jose Saramago, Nobel prize-winning author, died last Friday June 18th. Check out the NYTimes obit. I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day. Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly ...

Paul Yoon — Once the Shore

Once the Shore is Yoon's first book, and it brings together many of the short stories that have made him a writer of note. All the stories in Once the Shore take place on a small island belonging to South Korea. Each story captures a different moment in the island's history, from World War II and the Japanese occupation to the present day when the island is overrun with tourism. Yoon has a subtle touch in depicting his characters. He can speak volumes in a few words or gestures. He invests ...

Herta Muller and the Book of Revelation

The Literature of Oppression The current wave of obsession with the Christian notion of the Rapture and the Apocalypse, on the surface, has little to do with literature and certainly even less to do with the writing of Herta Muller, the Nobel Prize winner of 2009. Rapture literature is low-brow fiction, for sure. The Left Behind series written by Christian hacks Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye in no way participates in what the Nobel committee calls the “great conversation of world literature.” ...

Michelle Huneven

There are novelists whom I read for the pleasure of their words, others I read for the beauty of the stories, and, if I'm honest, there are some I read simply because I feel like it's a cultural must (that damned Western Cannon), but then there are novels that I seem drawn to for psychological reasons--often as not with no rational basis. Michelle Huneven's books fall in this category. I read her to be a better human. I read to find some solace. Huneven's novels are positive, weighty thing...

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...