Destiny’s Rider: RIchard Russo on Writing, a Review of The Destiny Thief (2018)

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Richard Russo is a star . . . in Bulgaria––to wit, a few years ago he was invited to their annual writers’ conference and when his flights got scrambled, he thought about saying sorry . . . until they told him he was the headliner. That’s what happens when you win a Pulitzer Prize. It also means publishers want books and are even willing to publish nine essays that barely hang together. Oh, by the way, Russo participated in the conference during which he meditated on the life of writers in a country where not long ago you had to remain silent lest you be imprisoned or worse for writing the wrong thing about the country’s rulers.

The Destiny Thief should be read by fiction writers, as well as by devoted Russo fans.

Book Review: Waiting for Eden

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Within the first few sentences of Waiting for Eden, readers realize they are in for something out of the ordinary when the first-person narrator says matter-of-factly, “I was sitting next to Eden and luckier than him when our Humvee hit a pressure plate, killing me and everybody else, him barely surviving.”

But out-of-the-ordinary has become the rule for the novels of Elliot Ackerman, author of the critically acclaimed debut Green on Blue, National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing, and now his latest, Eden, being released on September 25.

As a journalist, Ackerman was based for a number of years in Istanbul, starting in 2013, where he covered the Syrian Civil War. Among other publications, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories.

Rejection – Where Is Thy Sting?

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Writers face an inordinate amount of rejection as they pursue their craft. I’ve often thought there ought to be workshops at writers’ conferences on how to handle rejection letters. If we’ve been sending out queries frequently, we must have developed a thick skin or sense of humor. As my friend, a realtor says, the best response to rejection is to say, “Next?” Here are some truths about rejection.

My friend Robby managed her family restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. When they needed another server, she interviewed several and was particularly impressed by a woman named Sue. Sue was hired, but after several weeks, Robby noticed Sue wasn’t earning the tips she should. After a discussion, Sue turned in her notice and left.

HOW TO BE A GOOD BOOK CLUB MEMBER

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10 SEPTEMBER 2018 HOW TO BE A GOOD BOOK CLUB MEMBER

Although I’ve been an avid reader most of my life, I have never joined a book club. Until now.

In years past, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the reading pace of a club or the selections wouldn’t appeal to me and I would miss out on reading books I really wanted to read. But then I uprooted my life, moved to a new state, and decided to be open to whatever reasonable opportunities came my way. One of the first opportunities I saw was a book club in my new community, so I plunged right in.

Now here I am, trying to understand the workings of my particular book club and how to be a good contributor.

What’s On Your Bucket List of Books?

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What book is top on your bucket list of books? What book have you always wanted to read but somehow never have? And what book would you feel incomplete without reading?

Bucket List

Moving Beyond Auto-fiction to the Epic: Three Novel Recommendations

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The English publication of the volumes of Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle coincides with a renewed interest in “auto-fiction,” also known as the autobiographical novel. While I have read and enjoyed several of these works of auto-fiction, my favorite is Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, which seemed to draw on some auto-fiction elements, but also used other literary devices such as image patterning and developing character arcs, while incorporating motifs of class, politics, art, motherhood, friendship, and feminism.

Since finishing the Neapolitan series I’ve found myself wanting to read more novels that span generations, placing themselves in historical context, in which history itself (just as Ferrante’s working class post-war Italy) becomes a character. Three recent novels fit this bill, and I recommend them to anyone desiring epic historical novels that educate as well as entertain.

On V.S. Naipaul–Do Novelists Need to be Nice?

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Sir Vidia, the great Trinidad-born,  British novelist and travel writer is dead. You know he won the Nobel Prize, and the Booker, and I assume you’ve read his work. I admired it without loving it, but its importance is unquestionable: he’s one of the most influential of post-colonial writers. Paul Theroux, Sir Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis all owe him debts. I don’t know his entire oeuvre, so I’ll mention only his books that I do: A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. More knowledgeable critics than I have eulogised his work, so I needn’t do so here. What I want to talk about is what you’ve also heard: that he was a cad and a rotter, to use the sort of quaint Edwardian terms his father might have used.

Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III: A Review

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Half a century ago, readers of the New Yorker thirsted for the short stories of John Cheever for the window he opened into suburban life and the tensions he exposed between an emerging post-scarcity society and the vanishing World War II way of life that fertilized his stories. That role today might be assigned to Andre Dubus III. Best known for his novel House of Sand and Fog, the movie version of which, starring Ben Kingsley, earned three Academic Award nominations, in Dirty Love, as in his other works, Dubus mines the tension between generations and the widening gap between traditional behavioral norms and today’s technologically-driven anything-goes code.

Dirty Love consists of four interconnected novellas. In “Listen Carefully, As Our Options Have Changed,” Mark Welch, a fifty-year-old project manager, has discovered his wife is having an affair.

Bikini Atoll 1954, a Hydrogen Bomb Test, and The Handsomest Man in the World

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1954, offshore from Bikini atoll: Never mind radiation, naval crew, bored by days of waiting for a hydrogen bomb test, were taken ashore afterward to swim and drink so much beer that many couldn’t jump from the dingy to the hatch of the ship on their return, and their drunken bodies had to be piled en mass into netting and raised by a crane to the deck. So reports self-aware, precocious young naval officer Bill, a college graduate from Illinois. “We were a military attachment aboard a naval supply ship that had civilian officers…I chatted my head off with the second mate, who sometimes took his duty on hot days wearing only shorts. Not bad at all. But he ran a poor second to the third mate, who was really sexy.

Museums – Gold Mines for Writers

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Shabby row houses lined this block of Maryland Avenue, and a small sign identified one of them as The Dime Museum. Parking was easy—a space almost in front of the museum. We walked up to the door and knocked. We waited. An older man creaked it open and stepped aside to let us enter.

‘”That’ll be five dollars each,” he said. We dug the money out of our pockets as we stared at the overlarge coffin on the floor. Inside stretched a nine-foot-tall Egyptian mummy. “All fake,” the man said. We assumed he was the owner, curator, and docent for this odd little museum.

The Dime Museum in Baltimore closed awhile back. I hated to say good-bye to this unique bit of American history.

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10 AUGUST 2018

 

Is Poetry Necessary?

As a poet, I recognize poetry’s tremendous importance to a society. Still, I can get caught up in the complexities of modern life: I have classes to teach, papers to read and grade, writing projects demanding equal attention, a family to care for. Therefore, it’s easy to forget that poetry is as necessary to our well being as food, though when I say this to my students, they look at me skeptically.

Many have trouble with poetry, and I discuss this difficulty with them. “Why,” I ask, “in a class of twenty literate, intelligent young men and women do only two or three read or write poetry—even occasionally?”

They think about the question, and then a few raise their hands tentatively; they try to articulate why poetry is hard for them: “It doesn’t have anything to do with my life,” says a female business major from Hong Kong.

A Book That’s Music to the Ears

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The book group I facilitate at a senior center was humming with excitement at our recent meeting. Our book was The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce, and all ten readers loved it.

We’ve had plenty of lively meetings at which some members expound, politely of course, on why a book isn’t at all good and others on why it’s stunningly beautiful. The only dissension this time was over which character was the most interesting, which scene the most beautiful, or which description of music the most memorable. There were many to choose from.

In every chapter Joyce names at least one composer, composition, singer, or songwriter. I counted about 80 total in the book, ranging from Pérotin’s Beata Viscera of the 13th century to Michael Jackson’s Bad of 1987, the year before most of the book’s action takes place.

ASPIRATIONAL READING: MAKING A BUCKET LIST

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I’ve been hearing the term “aspirational” a lot lately. Aspirational recycling, aspirational eating, aspirational shopping, and so forth. “Aspirational” is a term applied to anything you do more out of hope than effectiveness. The other day when I confronted the stacks of books on my nightstand and environs, I realized that aspirational reading was also a thing.

And I was most definitely an aspirational reader.

Bucket List

Read Any Good Musicals Lately?

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1 AUGUST 2018 Read Any Good Musicals Lately?

There are so many beautifully written and compelling pieces of fiction in the world, I will never read them all. So I try to focus. One way I do that is to think, “What’s my tribe?” This is also helpful in choosing which Netflix or Prime series to binge on, hence, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is at the top of my list. Why? Because it’s about mid-20thCentury New York, and creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has a thing for playing Broadway cast albums on the soundtrack. (If you don’t know the difference between a cast album and a soundtrack, let me Google that for you…)

So, yes, one of my “tribes” is “The Tribe of the Show Queens.” Now, calm down, you don’t need to be a gay man to be a show queen (although it helps).

What Fiction is For–Beyond the Workshop by Carol Bly

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We’ve all heard someone say that the right book appears at the right time. That sounds mystical, as if there were a benevolent deity planning every detail our lives, which I think the Holocaust disproves. But it may be that the Taoist notion of simply paying attention to the universe, and let’s say ‘using the current’ (rather than the horrible cliché ‘going with the flow’) comes closer to what happens. In any case, I was very low, partly because I couldn’t write—at least I wasn’t writing anything worth a damn. Then by happenstance I came across Carol Bly’s Beyond the Workshop, a book I’ve owned for years, I believe, but had never read. And lo, it was exactly the book I needed.

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Review

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In the Soviet Union in 1922, men who had been counts under the Tzar were either dead or in exile, with one exception. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who had returned to Russia from exile to participate in the 1918 revolution, was brought before a tribunal, and when his answers were found wanting, he was confined on penalty of death to The Metropol, Moscow’s largest hotel. Why was he spared the firing squad? A revolutionary poem published under his name in 1913.

Count Rostov has little choice but to make the best of his situation. As it turns out, this gentleman displays¬¬ all of the attributes one would normally assign to that title, and thus accomplishes the necessary adjustment with relative ease.

It’ll Soon be Time to Enjoy HARD CIDER

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I’ve often written about my admiration of and appreciation for small, independent book publishers, those folks who are in the business much more because of their love of books than their pursuit of the next big blockbuster. Publishing these days has an ever-slimming profit margin amid fierce competition, and that makes things even more challenging for those who do this for love.

A small publisher that has drawn positive attention for its business model and a gratifying level of success is She Writes Press. In 2016, books from She Writes Press were awarded seventeen medals at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the most awards to one press in that year. Under the guiding hand of publisher Brooke Warner, the press has gone from a catalog of eight titles in 2013 to an impressively long list for both spring and fall in this, their six year.

Abandoned Homes, Vietnam, and Murder

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Abandoned Homes: Vietnam Revenge Murders  by Frank E. Hopkins looks back at the turmoil, deception, intrigue, and anger of the late sixties and early seventies in this engrossing, hard to put down mystery. It won first place for a mystery/thriller novel in the 2018 Maryland Writers’ Association novel contest.

The author dedicates the book, “To those individuals and families whose lives were disrupted, injured or lost in unwise and unnecessary wars.” That statement brought back memories. When the protests against the Vietnam War engulfed the University of Maryland, from which I had graduated just a couple of years before, I lived nearby. We marched and we housed anti-war protestors, but nothing seemed to sway this country’s leadership and that senseless, unwinnable war continued.

BAD HISTORY CAN MAKE GOOD FICTION

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10 JULY 2018 BAD HISTORY CAN MAKE GOOD FICTION

Inspiration for good novels can come from anywhere. Sometimes stories spring from experiences in the author’s life. Other times they explore experiences the author never had but wonders about. Recently I read two very good novels that were heavily influenced by horrific events of the recent past, and they started my thinking about how authors can use such events to give life to engrossing characters and spellbinding stories.

The first novel, Before We Were Yours, draws on the history of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, run by Georgia Tann in Memphis during the first half of the twentieth century. The Society was well respected until the 1940s when authorities discovered that Tann had destroyed most of the adoption papers to cover up how many children were taken illegally from their parents to be offered to film stars and other wealthy clients for exorbitant adoption fees.

Ali Smith’s Stunning Seasonal Quartet

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Ali Smith—Scottish, 55, fearless—has already made a reputation as one of most ambitious, offbeat, and mesmerizing novelists of our time. Now she’s pushing it a step further with an unusual “seasonal” quartet. The first two volumes, Autumn and Winter, are already out, and you better hurry up and read them because you want to be ready when Spring arrives. And it won’t be long.

The novels are being rushed out, but Smith has her reasons. She wants to put her mark on current events. Most writers of contemporary fiction struggle with an age-old dilemma: Is it better to be timely or timeless? Smith is one of the few with the talent to be both.

Autumn was published in 2017, barely eleven months after the Brexit vote, and it serves partially as a novel of protest over what Smith clearly believes was a misguided decision by Britain to leave the European Union.