Flash Reviews + Other Updates

by Weston Cutter

Some from-wherever stuff:

1. Still going strong @ the Kenyon Review blog: interviews with the fantastic Roxane Gay and Richard Buckner, and some mild ramblings about one of the year’s absolute best books: Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I wanted to write more about the thing, but nothing I could write would be as interesting as what Kahneman already has. Get and read that book pronto.

2. Not only do I have new work in Nashville Review (which is totally, totally badass: check their archives for some serious mind-blowing), but see that image to the left? That’s the cover art for the new issue. I’ve been waiting years to have my name noticeably on the cover of something. That may make me sound preeny and whatever, but I don’t care: it’s a thrill.

3. Also new work in Devil’s Lake, a badass mag I’ve been excited about for a long while.

It occurs to me there’s been this stack of books I’ve had next to me for a bit, books I’ve wanted to write long things about but which, given the year’s coming end and that I’d rather these things at least just get mentioned, I’m gonna flash review here, for now:

Damascus by Joshua Mohr. Roxane Gay interviewed Mohr @ HTML, which you should absolutely read. I’ve liked Mohr’s stuff before (Some Things that Meant the World still floors), but I wasn’t wilded by this one. It’s good, yes but didn’t knock me sideways—it’s a lot kinder book than his previous burners, but also the language feels less leper-y, less fall-apart-at-the-touch, and also moderately less torqued. It’s still—that said—10x the book most other books are—a 2 Dollar Radio/Mohr book’s head/shoulders above the bulk of what passes for bookery otherwise.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion. You’ve seen this one written about elsewhere, over and over. Fine. And of course you’re a fool to miss anything Didion, and of course you know the tragic awfulness of things, how, immediately following publication of her Year of Magical Thinking her daughter died and so she lost *all* family at age like 77 all in the span of like 3 years. She looked like a wizardy gnomic seen-too-much being when I saw her read in NYC in 2005. And so now Blue Nights, about the loss of her daughter, and here’s the thing: Didion’s been writing of world-ending issues forever, or _______-ending issues forever (lest you believe this is the second big thing she’s written after the death of someone close to her, recall After Henry, about her editor), and so the shock of this thing’s not the circumstances or specifics of the loss, and it’s not even Didion’s style, or whatever’s left of it after she’s had so many aspects of her life shocked into unrecognizable new twists—it’s that she still fights her way into dashing to and for and around meaning. This book’s a pricey miracle.

Pulp and Paper by Josh Rolnick. Great stories expertly done. I don’t know that much necessarily to say about a book like this—years back when Thisbe Nissen’s Out of the Girl’s Room and Into the Night hit, I thought I’d never read anything like it again, but then, of course, one does—one reads, again and again, well-crafted, gorgeous books in which characters take center stage and you close the thing feeling as if you’ve fully entered, smelled, touched certain lives other than your own. It’s a book you close feeling full, larger than when you’d begun.

 

 

 

A Plague of Prisons by Ernest Drucker. If you’re at all interested in social justice, and if you’re looking for the scariest but maybe most necessary companion read to the all-time great social-problem-non-fiction books (Random Family, of course, but also last year’s crazy excellent Just Like Us plus also maybe that great old Fist Stick Knife Gun), Plague of Prisons is what you’ve got to get to next. It’s of course terrifying: Drucker’s looking at prisons themselves as a social sickness, instead of just focusing on the crime and violence we believe leads to prisons. It seems to this reader not remotely coincidental that Sheriff Joe, in Maricopa County, has just been called out for being the racist f*ck he is: his ability to get away with what he’s for years gotten away with would, Drucker’d argue, be almost predictable: given the sickness of overprisoning in this country, Sheriff Joe’s an almost automatic result. The book’s scary and genius like that, and it came out in September and I should’ve mentioned it a long long while ago. Read the thing.

Perfection / Termites / Books

by Weston Cutter

The Perfection Point by John Brenkus

John Brenkus’s The Perfection Point is a hell of a fun read, the sort of breezy and hell yes of a book some of us may need these grayer autumnal days. The host of ESPN’s Sport Science, Brenkus has written a book which is one big glance out to distances unlikely to be attained: what’s the limit of human sport capability? How far could a baseball be hit, a golf ball driven? How about the longest someone could hold her breath under water, or the fastest one could swim a 50?

Here’s why this book ends up being fascinatingly readable: Brenkus begins chapters with false newspaper stories set in the future, speculative fictions which cover the imagined narratives Brenkus is breaking down the numbers for in present tense. What’s strange about that little ploy is nearly everything: if I were to tell you there was a great book which, on page 34, included a story set in Russia in the year 2344, you’d likely not be guessing the book was written by an ESPN guy, yes?

An emphatic indeed is what I’m hoping you’ll be now mouthing. What these little fictions (which thread through each chapter; the stories begin each chapter and, usually, end each chapter as well) accomplish is the tricky, fascinating task of gounding sports accomplishments in historical contexts. Most of us are pretty keenly aware of the more overt ways these things are manifest (see Bonds, Barry), but there are smaller, less-overt ways things like these come up, too (LZR swimsuit; carbon fiber golf clubs, etc.).

Maybe best about the book? It weds its futuristic speculations with Brenkus-penned absolutes—that no one will ever swim a 50 faster than just more than 18 seconds. Is there a single reader, anywhere, who won’t automatically think I want to do that or (much more likely) I’d like to see someone else do that? There is not one single reader anywhere who won’t feel that way. Read on.

 

Termite Parade by Joshua Mohr

 

Oh good lord. Do you remember Some Things That Meant the World to Me? From last summer? How Mohr, with his madfurious language and the ground shaky undernearth Rhonda as he made his strange and hallucinatorially freaked way through certain worlds? Remember how nothing else came close to that novel for sheer is-on-fire language (Blake Butler’s stuff, certainly, actually, up there and close)? And how it was this fantastic new-ish press, Two Dollar Radio?

Of course to all that. Of course to another year, another Mohr book, this one, Termite Parade, even better if scarier (Blue Velvet/Mullholland not Scream scary), if less holy-shit-that’s-one-flourescent-life and more wait-wait-I-can-imagine-that. Is anyone else lobbing sentences which feature such fragmentingly wild ordnance? Is any other press putting out such dynamite, gorgeous, suck-you-in books? No and no. Final question: what more will it take for you to get this book now?

 

Bound To Last, edited by Sean Manning

 

This is strange: Manning’s got a bizarre little niche for himself now, having edited several nonfiction collections (and written a memoir as well, which I’ve not read). The cool thing is, he’s editing anthologies which are fairly fun and interesting to read—famous folks (mostly writers, though also Craig Finn of the Hold Steady) writing about their favorite baseball players, for instance—and this latest anthology might be the best, though “best” deserves some unpacking. What it is, in simplest terms, is exactly what it’s cover claims: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. Take a second, when you get to this cover, and note two things: 1) Catcher in the Rye doesn’t show up in-text, but this anthology’s cover is the ultimate in homage, and 2) take careful note of that word cherished. You’d be surprised how slippery it’ll be.

What do I mean? Well, the thing starts with Jim Shepard, whose piece is not just phenomenal but fantastical—much like all of what Shepard writes—and the books he cherishes (Crying/49, Heart/Heart/Country) come through strange channels. There’s the phenomenal Terrence Holt talking about his Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, there’s Hadju talking about his copy of Ellison’s masterpiece Invisible Man, there’s Jim Knipfel’s entry on Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which entry is the second-most emotionally compelling entry of the bunch. What’s the first most compelling? Here’s a line from it: “I was asked to contribute to this anthology because I am the widow, via hanging, of the writer David Foster Wallace.”

Good lord.

So that’s in there, which means this book’s got a guaranteed audience from all the DFW-heads out longing every minute for some new bit to chew: here’s KGreen talking about Amy Hempel and grief. Maybe there’s no need to say much else: certainly if you’re here, looking at book reviews on a tiny book-review site, you already love books; this book’s made for all of us who do so.

Mega updates, over and over

by Weston Cutter

Alright, let’s be totally honest: I hate multi-book reviews as much as the next book dork. I hate them for not giving each book as much space as it deserves, and for not doing any justice at all to the actual experience of reading the damn things (because what the hell could one say about, say, Lorrie Moore’s astonishingly great new one, A Gate at the Stairs, in one paragraph?), and for etc. Basically, the only good part about multi-book reviews is that you may see books coupled together in ways that bring new ideas to mind re: those books.

You could see all this coming, right? That I’m being something of an apologist, and that I’m gonna have to do multi-book reviews for a little while here just to cut through some of the backlog? Well, it’s what it is. All of these books merit much more of your time and attention than they’re here receiving; spend yr book-reading time acccordingly.

The Essays of Leonard Michaels by Leonard Michaels

 

            I’ve already and elsewhere written about how great dear old gone LM is (at least his fiction), but the moment of LM’s re-emergence has drawn out long enough now to convince FSG to come out with a book of his essays, and so every reader’s now in the exceptionally lucky position of being able to just buy two handsome, black-and-white-photograph-covered hardbacks and have a pretty good percentage of Mr. Michaels’s total output.

            Which output is, I think, more staggering for the fiction involved (seriously, those first two collections: holy cow), but the Michaels’s nonfiction’s all sorts of interesting and lucid and fun to follow. An analogy, maybe: there are drivers who are competent map-readers and there are drivers who are competent at getting lost and finding their way out of getting lost. Michaels’s best stuff is a schizy little combo of the two: he almost seduces you into believing that he’s lost, that the essay’ll just wander and he’ll find his way through, muddling and curious and eyes wide…and then you realize he actually knew exactly what he was doing, down to each last turn of phrase.

 

Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer

 

            Hold yr head hard on reading this book. In fact, that might double nicely as (the phenomenal) Two Dollar Radio‘s secret motto: hold yr head hard on reading these books (Current tagline: Books Too Loud to Ignore. Accuracy: 100%). I feel slightly late to the game with these guys–they’ve been publishing for a bit now–but they blew my mind with Mr. Mohr’s Some Things That Meant the World to Me, and now they’re publishing Wurlitzer—not just Nog, his debut (from 1968, and of course published–like all the classic cult-and-out-of-print books–by Random House), but Quake and Flats as a 69′ed edition. Someone should be keeping score; someone should be noting that Two Dollar Radio’s pushing hard + fast into rarified heights of awesomeness re: small presses (Graywolf- and McSweeney’s-level heights, honestly, and in no time).

            Back to Wurlitzer’s Nog though…honestly, it’s hard to talk about this book in the exact same way it’s hard to talk about, say, Blake Butler’s stupendous Ever or about Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way or anything by Caren Beilin or Deb Olin Unferth. There’s a certain glow in the eye of people who’ve read those folks, and the spark’s untransferable. What must you know about Nog to actually just sit down with it? A dude with few memories. An octopus. The sort of breezy, scrubbed-clean takes on things (people, towns, views) one must work awfully hard to get. Here’s the nastier truth, though: none of what I can here say will come near what Wurlitzer does in the surprisingly few pages of Nog. Buy seven copies + give most of them away. Here’s a first for me: I’d urge you to go so far as to buy a Two Dollar Radio shirt. Seriously: support them any way yr able.

 

Stupid Hope by Jason Shinder

 

            Here’s sorrow: Shinder died in 2008; he was barely past 50. Here’s the hardest line to live by, but also maybe, in the end, one of the few which really mean anything or are in any way helpful: you desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering (Henri-Frédéric Amiel). Here’s something approaching courage: Stupid Hope, Jason Shinder’s third and final book of poetry, is a gutsy, gimlet-eyed, frustrating book of poetry, out now from Graywolf. Why frustrating? Because of the kind of moves he could make, the moves that are gone now. From “Killing Frost”:

 

In that private hospital room,

 

Which I paid for, I could not sleep,

because the bed was small

 

and its white sheets too thin.

 

            Dig that brutal, exhausted comedy, the double entendre of ‘paid for,’ the fact that the Frost of the title could be the poet or the wintery element. It’s all like that, page after page in this book. I’m sad as hell I didn’t know Shinder’s stuff before; I’m thrilled I do, now, at all. Life’s harder without poetry like this.

Look Out

by Weston Cutter

Some Things That Meant the World To Me by Joshua Mohr

 

            So here’s what’s awesome: I actually don’t know if I should begin with how great this book is, just as a narrative thing, or how great the writing is, which is, sentence by sentence, tough and jangly and which sometimes stretches wildly to these insane and tense lengths and the sentences get so long you’re all but holding yr breath and racing as you finish them, or if I should mention, first and foremost, that the book’s a release from the new and fucking amazing press Two Dollar Radio (a cool V.Voice article about them here). So does it matter what comes first? Not really.

            Then let’s just go: the sentences. You know how good writers are capable of treating the reading experience like a rollercoaster, how they’re able to, sentence by sentence, ratchet or slow tension and explosivity? Mr. Mohr—whose first book this is, and who, if the world’s remotely lucky, will be writing and publishing lots more and soon—must be a geniunely good person, I’m guessing, but he can be a fucking monster in this book: I can think of few recent books which pace better and run tighter. Short sentences caboose onto the tails of longer, switchbacking sentences. Pages get stuttered with dialogue that can go from making you grin to making you cringe in half a second. And, scariest, the long sentences: I can’t remember how many there were, but that word people mutter about great fiction, about how it feels ‘inevitable’? Some of Mohr’s sentences, the really long ones, have the inevitable feel of being pushed over a ledge. I mean that as the highest possible compliement.

            And the story itself? Good lord. Sidewinders. A house which expands. Brutality of all sorts. I have dishing on plot stuff in reviews, simply because, really, what’s the point? Does it matter that the main character’s named Rhonda (as in: Help Me), and that he’s thirty, and that he’s “suffering from depersonalization” (that’s flap copy)? No, it doesn’t matter, I don’t think–none of that stuff’s vital. What’s vital is that the book’s alive and a breathing and vivid and intense and real thing.

            And maybe best? The great candle on top of the already great cake? Two Dollar Radio. This is the first I’ve seen of them, and holy shit. Seriously: holy shit. If one Two Dollar Radio starts up for every ten jobs gets slashed at the big conglomerates, please join with me in pleading: slash more jobs at the conglomerates. We need more Two Dollar Radio. Send them yr money. Write to yr favorite authors and convince them to publish their next book with this press. They’re that good. Cross yr fingers they last.

(Joshua Mohr took part in Largehearted Boy’s always-great Book Notes series)