Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Hannah B. for getting a free copy of The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The Beijing of Possibilties by Jonathan Tel. Blending elements of the surreal with carefully observed details of life in present-day Beijing, Jonathan Tel’s short stories offer a rich and highly entertaining guide to the city and its many and varied inhabitants–from a modern-day Monkey King to an equally contemporary indentured servant, from a boy tasting his first cotton candy to a Ming Dynasty princess posting her first online profile. The stories offer a vicarious tour through modern Beijing and a long view of Chinese history. The reader flies through the book, chuckling over one character’s trickery, moved by another’s plight, and horrified at another’s unwitting actions, until reaching the culminating novella, which brings the whole book and its take on China back to the Western reader with a stunning immediacy. Americans’ newly minted fascination with China, stoked by the 2008 Olympics, can find both intellectual and artistic satisfaction in this collection. You can read an excerpt here.
that picture is awesome, b/c authors no longer get angry. everyone is looking coy & smart in their jacket photos. not since hunter thompson looked angry, yelling & shooting stuff. mailer looked angry sometimes, yelling & swinging his fists. maybe william vollman is now ticked off.
The photo at left was taken by two, in Salinger’s words, “shitty literary kids,” who essentially ambushed him for the sake of the photograph. “The wonder is that I have any kind of face at all left, grim or otherwise,” he said. “Piss on ’em all.”
There’s definitely a certain appeal about the “angry” writer. I don’t think I’m the only one intrigued with this idea; the Examiner recently put out a much talked about list of the best “author vs author put-downs of all time.” Maybe the “angry writer” appeals to us because in an oblique way the idea reminds me of some of the literary greats–yes, Salinger, and also Hemingway and Vonnegut and Twain, among others–writers who generally didn’t give a damn about what people thought of them and weren’t preoccupied with their sales ranking in The New York Times Book Review. If only we could be so free.
Times have changed, I guess, and like deckfight said, no one really gets angry anymore. But I still get a kick whenever authors “let loose” and refuse to censor themselves. Accordingly, I’ve put together a few of my favorite “angry writer” quotes. Hope you enjoy: Read more »
WKE has a new “Story Time” online: Portland novelist and songwriter Willy Vlautin reads an excerpt from his new novel, Lean on Pete, accompanied by his band Richmond Fontaine. Give it a listen.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Ben for getting a free copy of Windward Passage by Jim Nisbet.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm. In 1969, a young girl makes a trip from Coney Island to the swampy coastland on the rural outskirts of Helsinki, Finland. There, her death will immediately become part of local mythology, furnishing boys and girls with fodder for endless romantic imaginings. Everyone who lives near the swamp dreams about Eddie de Wire, the lost American girl. . . . For both Sandra and Doris, two lonely, dreaming girls abandoned in different ways by their parents, this myth will propel them into their coming-of-age through mischievous role-playing games of love and death, in search of hidden secrets, the mysteries of the swamp, and the truth behind Eddie’s death. The girls construct their own world, their own language, and their own rules. But playing adult games has adult consequences, and what begins as two girls just striking matches leads to an inferno that threatens to consume them and tear their friendship apart. Crime mystery and gothic saga, social study and chronicle of the late sixties and early seventies, a portrait of the psyche of young girls on the cusp of sexual awakening, The American Girl is a bewitching glimpse of the human capacity for survival and for self-inflicted wounds. Fagerholm is a modern-day heir to the William Faulkner heritage of family tragedy, with a highly musical and literary prose style that is rich with wit and literary allusions. The American Girl will teach you the meaning of trust as you give yourself entirely to the original storytelling style of Monika Fagerholm. You can read an excerpt here.
It’s time for a history lesson. In 1815, Mount Tambora, a composite volcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, reached a cataclysmic eruption that killed scores of people with its eruptive fallout and tsunamis. It also threw the Earth’s seasons out of whack, creating a long-term negative effect on the global climate.
North Americans and Europeans were acutely affected, and livestock deaths resulted in the worst famine of the 19th century. 1815 became known as The Year Without a Summer, the Poverty Year, and, the ever popular, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.
1815 was also the year that Mary Shelley had planned to spend the summer of 1815 in a cabin on Lake Geneva with her husband, Percy, and close friend, Lord Byron – every English major’s fantasy sleepover. But because of the fluke in weather, the party was forced to spend the entire summer in doors, ultimately leading to the creation of Frankenstein, one of the most heralded science fiction stories ever written. Read more »
Developing your own style: Like searching for that perfect shirt.
I started really gettinginto girls in middle school. Like most boys my age, I was clueless. Had no idea what they wanted or what they were looking for.
This improved a bit in high school –– after countless mishaps making for great stories between my friends –– where I came to a better understanding of what it takes to attract a female. The best lesson I learned during that trial and error period is the importance of a unique personal style.
This isn’t a fashion blog and I’m definitely not a fashion blogger, but I think my lesson in personal style transgresses quite well into the literary world.
Style is just as important in writing as it is in getting that special lady –– or guy –– friend. If you think about it, what are you really trying to do with that manuscript you’ve slaved over for x amount of months or years? Sell it right? And how do you go about doing that? Make it attractive. Give it a style that’ll stand out from the rest. Developing a unique style of prose is a key ingredient to becoming a good writer. It makes you recognizable to readers, and helps you develop a following. Read more »
AMERICA
That a giant economy-sized box of “Supreme—Three Ply—Extra Soft—De Luxe” cleansing tissues only costs 39¢ ought, it would seem, to restore one’s faith in something.
PEOPLE
If I’m as normal as I think I am, we’re all a bunch of weirdos.
There is little more harrowing, more ecstatic or strange, than to find oneself plunged into a world in which words—-which had hitherto been so prized, so steadfast (perhaps), which could be trusted to bubble up to the surface of the mind’s pool in those moments of dire necessity and slip as spindrift from the tongue’s crest to fall, with variable accuracy, upon the ear of a listener, and to often be understood in some half of their intent—-become utterly useless.
Nothing so starkly brings out that grunting, that gesticulating and speechless animal, lying seemingly clothed within language, yet pulling always nakedly the body’s strings beneath, as this. I am become prehistoric man, stubbled, scrawling hieroglyphs of lamps and computer adapters, modems and cooking pots, among intelligent, effortlessly communicable individuals, gripped again by that frustration, that immediacy of thought and absence of object, which led us first to construct signs to describe our common experience of this place…
For in April—-which is, of course, intolerable—-when the trees (which I have no way to describe save by pointing, so look, if you will, at the trees!) when the trees have gone from bare to a fire of blossom to bare again in a matter of some two weeks, and the trunks and branches rouge slightly with a blush as if of blood from heat returning and days of rain and the tiny leaf buds and every limb upraised and waving—-what word is there between us to describe what moves them? What sound but the close-cropped mane of every hill a horse’s neck bowed running?
Even with a common tongue their are vast discrepancies in our understanding. Imagine if I were from Gansu, China, and you from the Great Gold Plains, and we two stood suddenly in an immense and empty whitewashed room with no paper or pen between us, how quickly we would exhaust our conversation. There is a saying here: Dak so bodeut, so dak bodeut (“as a chicken looks at a cow, as a cow looks at a chicken”). We would be as two animals, mute, occupying space. Perhaps we would mumble something unintelligible now and then, gesture with our arms, begin to talk eventually to ourselves, but the rift between us would be impassable.
That is until we began to construct a new system of signs. For our old ones would be impotent here, in this space bereft of referential objects, from which our strange words could bounce and become illumined to the observer. Here, however, if I crook my right arm, and splay my fingers perpendicularly to the incline of my forearm, it means the Ga Chi bird will bring a welcome guest. It means my neck aches; the floor is hard. And if you distend your stomach, grinning foolishly, stand on your right leg, and wave your left arm in circles above your head, index finger alone extended and pointing down, you are telling me the ornamental rug has been misplaced, and the walls are caving in.
This is all just to say how wonderful, how positively improbable it is, that you have some idea what I mean when I say, “I’ve dropped my notebook”, “My glass is empty”, “I will see you at 5:00″.
Allow yourself to lose yourself, be it at your lamplit desk, or your moon-washed backyard. Find us out there, mumbling aloud, wandering around, asking to listen.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Barbara S. for getting a free copy of Evangeline by Ben Farmer.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Windward Passage by Jim Nisbet. In the parallel near-future, a ship named for a jellyfish sinks into the Caribbean with its captain chained to the mast. Left behind is a logbook missing ten pages, presidential DNA hidden in a brick of smuggled cocaine, and a nearly-completed novel. Tipsy, the dead sailor’s sister, and Red Means, his erstwhile employer, travel from San Francisco to the Caribbean and back as they attempt to unravel a mystery that rapidly widens from death at sea to international conspiracy.
I’m nearing the end of my first year of graduate school, where I’m getting my M.F.A in writing. Needless to say, I have lots of reading and writing to catch up on. My long-distance partner is gone for three weeks, which is the longest we’ve ever been apart (I know, we’re terribly spoiled). My refrigerator is broken so I haven’t been doing my beloved nightly routine of relaxing through cooking. (I know, I know, you’re wondering why all this has anything to do with literature. Patience.)
So what does this all mean? It means that for the last two weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time alone. I’ve been eating mediocre take-out. I’ve been ending my nights without my partner. I’ve been catching up on tons of reading and writing as I near the end of my semester.
And I’ve been wildly productive. My to do lists have been shrinking as I check off items that had been stagnant for weeks: do taxes, fill out the FAFSA, revise my workshop submission, pitch my story idea to a local magazine, read for my Russian poetry class, write a response to Wolff’s memoir for my family matters class, the list goes on.
All this and I should feel great. But, honestly, I don’t. Read more »
Last week Vol 1. Brooklyn 
It’s time for a history lesson. In 1815, 
