A couple weeks ago The Millions released their “Most Anticipated” book preview for the second half of 2011, and there are some really great books on the list. Some of these forthcoming releases are pretty exciting. You should check out their article for the full thrust of the season, but, nonetheless, here are the ones that have me on tenterhooks.
Don DeLillo will publish his first collection of short stories in November with The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories. The stories included were written between 1979 and 2011, so it’s a pretty big range to draw from–and is clearly a collected stories kind of thing with a different label. It is a new book from DeLillo, however, so I’m eager to read it.
Dan Chaon, probably my favorite contemporary writer of short fiction, comes out with a new collection early in 2012 called Stay Awake. I liked his novels okay, but, for me, Chaon’s short story collections are where it’s at.
Colson Whitehead wrote a post-9/11 zombie novel–Zone One–that comes out in September. It looks pretty interesting. Whitehead’s The Intuitionistis one of my favorite novels, and one I highly recommend checking out if you haven’t yet read it.
Denis Johnson‘s Train Dreams comes out in August. It’s a novella that was originally featured in the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories anthology.
Roberto Bolano has yet another posthumous release with The Third Reich. The title refers to a war game some Germans get caught up in while vacationing in Spain.
Lauren Groff comes out with Arcadiain 2012, a novel about a utopian sect in rural New York that falls apart.
Yannick Murphy‘s The Call. I’ll be reading this over the weekend. A novel written as diary entries about a family’s difficult year after a son goes into a coma following a hunting accident.
DBC Pierre‘s Lights Out in Wonderlandis also an August release. An international, satiric romp that takes its aim on the largesse and iniquities of late capitalism.
Last week on Memorial Day, on the way home from a Schneider family reunion in East Iowa Amish country (Nicole’s side), we stopped at Forest Lawn Cemetery in north Omaha. For a long while now I’ve been meaning to find the grave of Tom Dennison, who plays a major role in my historical novel-in-progress, The Hyphenates of Jackson County.
Tom Dennison with his second wife, Nevajo Truman.
The Forest Lawn website has an awesome database that helped immensely with this. (There’s also a walking tour of the cemetery, for anyone interested in Omaha history.) Of course, when we followed a whim and decided to stop after a day’s driving, we didn’t have any of the necessary information, but it didn’t really matter. We found it anyway, after an hour of walking and deductive reasoning. (Nicole is especially adept at graveyard searches. We usually end up in cemeteries on our vacations and are seldom disappointed. Some of our favorites include the Cimètiere Notre Dame-des-Neiges in Montreal (in a snow storm!), the Key West Cemetery, and many of the solitary headstones we came across while on our fern-thick honeymoon in the Green Mountains of Vermont.)
Over the months anticipating a visit to Dennison’s grave, I had these ideas in my head of a massive tomb, or an iron-doored, stained-glass mausoleum. As the longtime Boss of a wide-reaching political machine, Dennison was massively wealthy, so it stood to reason that he would have erected a memorial to celebrate himself. Forest Lawn, as the final resting place to many of Omaha’s founding fathers and first families, is home to many extravagant mausoleums and statues. I’d even worked up this day-dream where people would go to Dennison’s grave and take a shot of bourbon in some archaic ceremony of patronage. The reality, however, was much different from what I’d expected, as there is merely a large family headstone denoting the Dennison name, and then three smaller markers for Tom, his first wife Ada, and one shared by two sons who, presumably, died in their infancy. It was all very simple. No last words, no statues, no inscriptions.
I’d like to find out more about this, as there seems to be a story here. On the one hand, Dennison typically dressed simply, he came from very humble beginnings and was by most accounts a quiet, private man. So it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities that he would eschew a flamboyant mausoleum. But on the other hand, there were over a hundred cars in his funeral procession, a fact suggesting that his interment was anything but quiet and private. I hypothesized that perhaps the original gravestones were damaged, destroyed or vandalized—and the simple markers were replacements—but I have no evidence to support this. It was strange, too, that none of his children who survived to adulthood were buried there either, which goes against much of what I’ve learned about his private life. Maybe they’d moved away from the area by then. If anyone knows about this, I’d love to hear from you.
Dispatch from The Hyphenates of Jackson County
“Word among those hanging on along the streets, afterwards, was that Tom Dennison had summoned the enforcers to reestablish control after the uprising, and that he’d been slow to give the order because he was vacationing in California and had to be wired with the news. They said that he was on a yacht off the coast of San Diego and they had to wait until he returned to harbor. Johann didn’t believe these stories, he speculated that Dennison was probably in his office downtown, or his mansion west of Benson, that he’d tried to keep things in control but couldn’t. Johann interpreted the delay as yet another breach in the Old Man’s armor—and, after what they’d witnessed from the bathroom window of the Potsdamer, more than a few of their friends agreed with him.”
Personal Rejection Notes, Requests for More, and Other Nice Versions of No Thanks
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. If you like the following things, this book is probably not for you: quotation marks, paragraph breaks, chapter breaks, short simple sentences. Otherwise, this is really an engrossing read. Some great sections involving European priests who use falconry as a means to stop pigeons from defecating on cathedrals and on the intersection of artistic patronage and military authoritarianism in Chile.
Netherlandby Joseph O’Neill. This is one of my favorite books, now, and I highly recommend it. The best writing about cricket I’ve ever encountered, which makes this sound like a lesser accomplishment than it really is, since I don’t recall reading about cricket ever before. There was a lot of talk about this being a post-9/11 novel with echoes of The Great Gatsby, but I didn’t really find these elements that central to the story.
There’s still one more recap post about my Kimmel Harding Nelson residency on the back burner, but I wanted to get a weeks in review post in here too. And since I had two stories accepted for publication last week, this seemed like a good time to do that.
On Tuesday of last week I learned that MARY Magazinewill be putting “Let Your Hair Hang Low” in their summer edition. This is a story I’ve been working on since the fall of 2002 and am very glad to find a home for it. Then, on Wednesday, I received an email from the Kenyon Review letting me know that “How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter” will be running in their Spring 2011 issue. This was another story I’ve had for a long time, starting it in the spring of 2005. It was originally written as a flash piece in the format of an actual step-by-step manual, basically what the title says it is, but I soon scrapped that idea and wrote it as more-or-less a traditional short story. I’m so excited for the opportunity of being in TKR. I’ve had a few big publications before—in Best New American Voices, twice in Boulevard—but adding the Kenyon Review to my credits feels like another breakthrough. It’s doing something with consistency, rather than isolated flourishes.
Needless to say, both of these stories have gone through countless drafts and rewrites, and have been in and out of the hands of editors for a long while. These stories have received ninety-seven rejections between the two of them, in their different forms. I’ve read that, on average, published stories receive around twenty-five rejections before being accepted by a journal. And even that number surprises other young and emerging writers when I bring it up. In that context, ninety-seven seems absurd, a number too embarrassing to admit to. But there it is.
At some point I probably should have given up on these pieces. But there was one thing that really kept me going—besides a stubborn belief that they are good stories and that I could make them work—and that was encouragement from editors. Of those ninety-seven rejections, twenty-nine were of the “nice” variety. The notes that said the piece was close or requested that I send more work their way. I’ve come to feel differently about these notes after reading for Prairie Schooner the past couple years. I used to disdain them a little bit, saw them a tease, I guess. It upset me that I could be close to publication without actually getting in, because there’s no consolation prize. But now I know how complimentary these encouragements really are. As a literary journal reader or editor, there are so many stories you enjoy reading over the course of a year, but only a small percentage of these can even be sent on for final consideration. And only a select few of those can be printed. So I’ve learned to appreciate the notes as the encouragement they are, and take heart to keep trying because of them.
Dispatch from “How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter”
“I didn’t tell anyone this, but if it had somehow been necessary that Brandon die at that particular time, then I wished that he would have killed himself. Then there would have been something to blame. Somehow this was a more acceptable cause and effect. Suicide was a seductive death full of self-hate that seemed more gratifying to an adolescent mind. I’d heard of this happening, at least, learned about it on TV. There would have been physical satisfaction in imagining this. The cool metal slipping between his lips. The buzzing, blooming sensation at the back of his cranium. Then the click. I could have understood that. It would have made sense for him to jump off a boat into the mouth of a waiting shark, but not asthma. How Brandon died was obscene, but it fit the surroundings. I had to remind myself that it was late November in Nebraska and the dirt would soon be frozen. My half-brother hadn’t wanted to die, after all, he hadn’t planned any of this.”
Personal Rejection Notes, Requests for More, and Other Nice Versions of No Thanks
Ploughshares for “On a Train from the Place Called Valentine”; Post Road and One Story for “The Day After This One”; Avery Anthology for The First Night of My Down-and-Out Sex Life”; Contrary, Eleven Eleven, and Spectrum for “You Know That I Loved You.” Also, “On a Train from the Place Called Valentine” was a finalist in the Summer Literary Seminar Unified Fiction Contest, as judged by Fence.
Just Finished
31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan. An antebellum New York murder mystery. A lot of fun to read with interesting characters and a great setting. Highly recommended for those who like more commercial historical fiction. I may be writing a review on this but I haven’t decided for sure yet. There’s a very quaint handling of race that I gives me some pause.
The Underworld Sewer by Josie Washburn. I was reading this mostly as research for the novel I’m writing, and I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it too. It’s basically a compilation of early 1900s street pamphlets decrying the social evil of institutionalized prostitution, but it has some nice information on the Nebraska and Omaha of that era. It also looks like I can work Washburn in as a character in the novel, which is pretty fun too! There are a few years of her life when she’s in Omaha, after the book has been published, and they just so happen to be unaccounted for in the historical record—which is really a great gift to a writer.
The Unnamedby Joshua Ferris. I was going to write a fancy review of this book that talked about the perils of having a narrative structure that imitates the mental disorder of its main character, but decided against it. For one, this book has been reviewed a bunch of times already, and secondly, most of those review were negative too. No need to pile on at this point. Ferris is still a talented writer and hopefully his next book will be great.
Novel Work
Doing the final work on the rewrite of Part I. It’s taken since March to get to this point, but I feel much more comfortable with what I’m doing now. Having gone from 100-pages of a third-person POV focusing on one character to 115-pages of a first-person narrator (who is a minor character) writing through the POV of three other characters, it feels like a pretty big accomplishment just to make it back to this point. Still not quite where I need to be, probably, but I’m getting there. Expanding the POV and playing with the notion of a first-person narrator acting as an omniscient third-person narrator has been very freeing in terms of character development. It came about from two main catalysts, the first being my agent’s suggestion that I had been writing the novel as if it were a really long short story—meaning, among other things, that I was locked too strictly into the limited POV of one character, ignoring potential angles other characters could add to the story. Second, was the need to kind of energize the voice, giving the voice of the story an angle within itself by allowing the narrator to have a stake in things, biases, etc. Basically, taking advantage of the big canvas I’m working with. The work seems to be much better and more interesting too. I’m looking forward to starting on Part II soon!
Dispatch from The Open City
“The animal pushed its pink nose out the sleeve to sniff the air, its rat nose twitching as Michael watched with disgust from a few feet away. Michael rubbed the knot on the back of his head, he ran his fingers through his hair, then reached back, realizing that books too can be weapons, tapping the bindings of the volumes near him until he found a thick one.”
Short Story Work
Put the finishing touches on a draft of “Never, Ever Bring This Up Again” and submitted it to the Esquire Fiction Contest just before their deadline. They mandated the title, by the way. I kind of like how it ended up, but it was a little frustrating to have to send off this version. With the generous help of one of my readers (Travis) it became apparent that the story should be set in the main character’s office building rather than his apartment. I’ll have to do a rewrite before the year is over.
Dispatch from “Never, Ever Bring This Up Again”
“The girl didn’t run when she saw Andy walking towards her, but held to the door handle dumbly, kind of pinching her legs together, bending at the waist. She wore old tennis shoes, the laces gray and dingy, and had a skinned knee, a bloody spot turned black on her dark legs. Up close, Andy assured me later, there was a dovish quality to her eyes. The girl had orange irises that flashed desperation.”
Kind Rejection Notes and Near Misses Indiana Review for “How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter.” McSweeney’s and One Story had previously sent very nice personal emails rejecting “The Current State of the Universe.” These near misses can often be misleading, but hopefully a big publication is on its way soon.
Just Finished The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer. After reading this novel, it makes me think that maybe 2666 was mostly finished after all. Bolano definitely has a propensity for ending narrative threads in an abrupt and ragged manner. Probably another “ambitious but failed novel,” but Bolano is just so pleasurable to read I didn’t really care. Great book!
Now Reading Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle. About half-way through and really enjoying it, despite some reservations. In her Times review, Maria Russo notes that the collection is “remarkably consistent in pacing and tone,” which seems to be its biggest failing, in my eyes. Each story is great, but they all seem to hit the same notes and almost all are written from a first-person POV. Peelle is obviously adept at finding and inhabiting a character’s voice, which is a highly enjoyable aspect of her work, it’s just that when each story reads and feels the same, they kind of lose their power, I think. I’m hoping the second half of the collection offers a little more variety.
Dan Chaon, probably my favorite contemporary writer of short fiction, comes out with a new collection early in 2012 called Stay Awake. I liked his novels okay, but, for me, Chaon’s short story collections are where it’s at.
DBC Pierre‘s Lights Out in Wonderland is also an August release. An international, satiric romp that takes its aim on the largesse and iniquities of late capitalism.
Theodore Wheeler 