When I worked for my college newspaper years and years ago, I had the idea of tagging along when a friend’s band went on tour. I’d ride in the van, help them load in and out and generally see what it’s like to be a touring musician. As the date of the tour approached, my friend worked to convince me that this wasn’t a good idea. I don’t recall his specific argument, but it amounted to “you’ll be bored out of your mind.”

He was probably right; his argument was strong enough that I decided not to go. But now I have Dean Wareham’s memoir, Black Postcards in hand, and it makes me wish I’d gone. Sure, you don’t populate a book with the boring parts, so his account of his years with Galaxie 500 and Luna is a bit skewed in favor of the exciting bits, but it still captures the romance of the road, and makes me wish I’d been a bit more adventurous in my youth.

For fans of what evolved from college rock to alternative to indie to whatever it’s called today, the book is a mother lode of information and backstage gossip. Wareham is most focused on his own bands, of course, but the two groups came into contact with a wide swath of the indie-rock world, and Wareham doesn’t hold back when sharing his thoughts – good and bad – about his peers.

For those of us who were fans of his bands, the book serves as the dream liner notes to a career. Why did Galaxie 500 split? Why was this song on this album? Why did this member quit? It’s all here, and in surprisingly crisp detail. Wareham is a smart guy who obviously has thought about his vocation to a high degree, and his thoughts are amusing, illuminating and somewhat sobering in spots.

The hook for the book – as evidenced by the subtitle, “A Rock ’n’ Roll Romance” – is the fact that Wareham fell in love with his bass player, left his wife and toddler son, broke up his band and embarked on a new personal and professional relationship. It’s a sad story that could probably be applied to hundreds of touring musicians with only an altered detail or two, but one with a hopeful ending in the form of a creative rebirth with Dean & Britta. It gives what could have been a standard rock memoir and/or tour diary a bit of emotional heft. This isn’t exactly “Behind the Music,” but it does make the story more worthy of publication by a big house than it might have otherwise.

Wareham took the time to answer a few questions about the book, his bands and the future.

TIRBD: Do you find it strange that a major reason Luna broke up was the inability to ever move to the next level careerwise, yet a major publisher is willing to sink money into publishing and promoting a book that is at least partially about that lack of commercial success?

DW: The publishing world is new to me, but I have to think they know what they are doing. As for the record business, on one level you could argue that Luna suffered from a lack of commercial success, because we never had a multi-platinum hit album, and that is what all major labels are looking for. But if you broke down the numbers from our years at Elektra, you would find that even as the band sank slowly into a pit of "debt,” we were selling hundreds of thousands of compact discs, and with licensing money on top of that the Warner Music Group did just fine with Luna. But the expectations are so different in the music business than in book publishing. 100,000 books would make your book a bestseller, but 100,000 copies of our second CD was considered promising, but not exactly a success.

Given the level of detail in some of your tour recollections, I assume you kept a pretty detailed tour journal. What was the motivation for that, and if at any time that motivation involved a project like this, did that have an affect on what you chose to record?

I kept a detailed journal in my late teens and early twenties, from my years at Harvard through the time in Galaxie 500. I'm not sure why I was did that (because I was lonely?), but I was sure glad to find those diaries in a box when I started writing the book. Then there was a period of five years, covering the first three Luna albums, where I didn't keep a regular journal -- all I had was tour itineraries and the music, and my own recollections. So I skipped through those years pretty quickly (to the chagrin of certain fans who have complained that I don't talk enough about the making of the second Luna album, or what it was like to meet Tom Verlaine). With the advent of the Internet revolution we launched a Luna website, fuzzywuzzy.com, and I started posting tour diaries on the site - I was writing again. But the official tour diaries were sanitized - there were incidents that were not fit for public consumption, indeed, things that I wouldn't even mention in my own private journal.

I kept waiting for the moment when you put down the drugs and talked about getting clean and sober and healthy (just like seemingly every other performer with a tale like this to tell), but it never came. Any thoughts about that, or better yet, second thoughts about that thread being simply one of many that make up the fabric of the story rather than a sort of through-line cautionary tale?

Maybe it appears from the book that I was ingesting vast quantities of drugs, because those nights made for some funny stories. Sure, I might have done a line or two of cocaine if someone offered it to me after a show (a fan perhaps, or someone from the record company, or management), and I certainly had a few drinks every night while on tour, but we didn't not travel around the country with a bus full of liquor and drugs, nor did we take drugs while we were in the studio -- we were there to make music, not to party.

So I don't feel like I have to apologize for having a good time once in a while (though certainly I saw other people very close to me whose lives were derailed by drug use). For the cautionary drug stories, I recommend the recent rock memoirs by Slash, Nikki Sixx, and Eric Clapton -- former junkies all. I was a mere dabbler.

There seems to be no love lost between you and dozens of your peers. I lost count of the number of people who are dismissed with a cutting remark, from bandmates to tourmates to casual acquaintances. It's one thing to feel this way, it's another to express those feelings so publicly and permanently. Any trepidation about that? Any backlash?

With respect to my peers, perhaps I was opinionated, but it's just music we're talking about -- and I don't have to pretend that I liked Lenny Kravitz or Bono. I don't imagine they would care too much what I think anyway. I was more concerned about my ex-bandmates. But being in a rock and roll band is about conflict. You push and shove, and argue about small things and large ones - that is an essential part of the experience. I made an effort be as fair and objective as I could, but I wanted to go into the conflict in some detail, to bring out the humor and the drama, not just gloss over it while citing the standard "musical and personal differences." At any rate, if I made cutting remarks, I made them about myself also.

Looking back on your career like this, do you see any points at which you wonder about the path not taken and where you might be otherwise? If so, where did these occur and what do you imagine might have been the ultimate destination of those alternate paths?

I could spend days trying to answer this question. I guess I could have taken a job working in the trading department at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1986, and my life might have turned out very differently indeed. But I didn't.

Spending this much time analyzing your own songwriting, recording and performing, will you approach future endeavors in all three arenas any differently?

Since I'm not in a rock band anymore, and I am no longer signed to a seven-record deal, I can take my time making records. I am no longer on an annual cycle of writing songs, making a new record, touring to support it, and then starting all over again. And with the changes in technology, I do more of the recording at home, on my own time. Songwriting does not get any easier, but with the two Dean & Britta albums I've chosen to record half original material and half covers, and it is easier to write six new songs than twelve, so I think I may stick with this formula - which is what everyone did before the Beatles started writing all their own material.

It isn't clear from your recounting of your earliest days as a musician whether you always wanted to be a professional musician or if it just became what you did because other people responded to it. What that your career goal coming out of high school or college, or did you have other plans? Was there ever a real long-term fall-back position?

I thought about going to grad school after graduating college, studying anthropology - but when I read Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, and he talked about bees crawling up his nose while he slept by the banks of the Amazon, I changed my mind. I didn't dare to think that I could be a professional musician - this notion would have seemed absurd in America in 1986 (though perhaps not so ridiculous in England). And anyway, I could barely play the guitar at that point, how could I be a professional musician? But then you learn (and perhaps this is the lesson of punk rock) that you don't have to be amazing players to cook up something beautiful. Still, I think in Galaxie 500 we were surprised every step of the way: surprised that we recorded a seven-inch single that sounded so perfect, and an album that we were really proud of, surprised when the record was played on college radio, amazed that Slash Records and Rough Trade wanted to sign the band.

Do you have a favorite rock 'n' roll and/or tour memoir other than your own?

I really liked Dee Dee Ramone's memoir, Lobotomy, and Dylan's Chronicles. And White Bicycles by folk producer Joe Boyd. But my favorite book about a rock star is Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo, which is of course a work of fiction.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music

I've been saving up a lot of book-related news to share, so forgive me for this hodge-podge of news about a lot of forthcoming books from some of my favorite crime fiction authors.

Busted Flush Press will issue the U.S. debut of Ken Bruen’s novel London Boulevard. The book dates to 2001, right in the thick of – but separate from -- Bruen’s White Trilogy. This is a stand-alone that has a slightly different feel to me from his other books, but it’s no less visceral and rewarding than the rest. This edition, which comes from the same folks who rescued Bruen’s early work in the A Fifth of Bruen omnibus, includes a new introduction by Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) and other “additional bonus material.” Pay particular attention to the cover by artist Jeff Wong, which depicts Bruen and his Hard Case Crime collaborator Jason Starr acting out a scene from the book’s opening. The book is due in July.

Harlan Coben has a lot of news to report. First up, his forthcoming novel, Hold Tight, is being promoted with an online video trailer. It looks like a pretty standard Coben story from this angle, which means to say, I’ll be picking it up early and buzzing through it quickly. The book is due April 15. Meanwhile, for those wanting more Coben, he reports that “Hart Hanson, the creator and executive producer of the TV series ‘Bones,’ is writing a pilot for Twentieth Century Fox studios and Fox network to bring Myron and the gang to a TV near you. The working title -- and this could very easily change -- is ‘Promises And Lies.’” Coben is soliciting suggestions for casting; e-mail him at casting@harlancoben.com. Lastly, the French movie version of his novel Tell No One will finally see U.S. theatrical release in June with English subtitles.

Proving that an old dog can learn new tricks Lawrence Block has adapted two of his short stories for the stage. The one-act plays – “"How Far It Could Go," (shorted to “How Far” for the play) and “One Day I'll Plant More Walnut Trees” – are being performed at the Henry Lawson Theatre in Werrington, New South Wales, Australia, as part of a four-play evening. As Block reports in his newsletter, this stemmed from a theatrical producer in LA wanting to adapt “How Far.” Block offered to do it himself, and while it wasn’t ever staged, further conversations with an Australian friend about it led to the Lawson production. Both stories can be found in Enough Rope, and Block writes that anyone wanting to take a crack at the plays should contact him at LB@lawrenceblock.com. Meanwhile, his next Keller book, Hit and Run, is due June 24. He promises as “special philatelic edition.”

UPDATE: Block just released more info about this edition: "The Philatelic Edition of Hit and Run will consist of a copy of the hardcover first edition, bearing on the flyleaf or title page (I haven't decided yet) an imprint identifying it as such. All copies will be serially numbered and hand-signed by the author -- that's me -- and each will also bear a special genuine US personalized postage stamp showing the cover of the book, tied to the page with a hand-applied cancellation bearing the book's official publication date (June 24, 2008, my 70th birthday, and how's that for timing?) and the city (that'd be New York, duh). And there may be some further philatelic enhancement elsewhere in the book."

Michael Connelly was the author of the month at the Rara-Avis crime fiction e-mail list, and he was kind enough to log on and weigh in on the discussion. Reading through his responses to comments and queries, I was able to cobble together some interesting and new (to me) information. He was asked a lot about Harry Bosch and whether he plans to continue that series. He said that he enjoys writing the books in real time, letting Harry age with each book, but added that he has “planted many seeds about Harry in Vietnam, about Harry as a street cop during the Patty Hearst and SLA period, etc… I have gathered string on these times and events. I've done the research so that I could write the book. It’s just a matter of getting to them.”

He said he feels like he “stumbled onto the right ingredients of character” that sustained his interest through the Bosch series, and doesn’t feel like the newer Mickey Haller series – despite liking it “all right” – could sustain 10 or 12 titles.

Then again, he reports he was ready to give up on Bosch at least once (twice if you count the early arc that finished before his first stand-alone, The Poet. Phenomenal sales for that and subsequent books gave him the clout to pretty much write what he wanted, he said). That came in City of Bones, where Bosch walks out the door having quit the police force. “It was around this time that I made some dramatic shifts in my personal life as well and lo and behold, it was Harry who was one of the only things constant in my life. So I clung to him, re-energized the creativity associated with him and continued to write about him… Any day I get to write about Harry Bosch remains a good day for me.”

Connelly has had some good days lately, then. He follows his shortest book, The Overlook (which evolved from a serial in The New York Times), with his longest, the forthcoming 525-page The Brass Verdict. That one brings Bosch and Haller together. It’s due Oct. 14.

Labels: books, crime fiction

I had the pleasure of speaking with author Charles Baxter this week to discuss his new novel, The Soul Thief. I did so for my company’s new endeavor, CorridorBUZZ.com, an online arts & entertainment magazine for the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City area.

The piece I wrote previews a reading he will do tonight at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City. Despite the limitless nature of the web, there was plenty from our discussion that I had to leave out. Not wanting to waste it, I thought I would offer it here as either an addendum or a teaser, depending on which direction you’re traveling on the old info superhighway.

The book, Baxter’s ninth and his fifth novel, tells of Nathaniel Mason’s time as a graduate student in Buffalo, N.Y., where he, according to Baxter's web site, "is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. As love interests there is the alluring Theresa and the lesbian artist Jamie. Jerome Coolberg is the strangest, a young man who openly flaunts that nothing he says seems to be his own, and who tells Nathaniel soon after meeting him that he knows everything about him. He appropriates parts of Nathaniel's past, a practice that leads to Nathaniel's breakdown. The story returns 30 years later to find Nathaniel having reconstructed his life in a world of normalcy, a situation that is threatened by the return of Jerome, now a radio talk show host.

It's a daring, challenging book that didn't always satisfy me as a reader, but which has stayed with me much longer than most thanks to the twists and turns of Baxter's plot and prose.

TIRBD: You leave a lot of clues in this book as to what is really going on, and the more reviews I read written by people much better versed in literature than me, the more I grew to appreciate what you had done..

CB: You certainly don’t have to come to my book with a Ph.D in your hand. If you’ve read some of the other literature of doubles or identity switching, you may be prepared for what happens in this book. I hope it’s a good yarn. If you have read, say Conrad, or Dostoyevsky or Patricia Highsmith -- who wrote thrillers with doubles in them – you might notice some things.

You use Highsmith’s name, and others, incidentally in the book…

That’s not an inside joke. I needed some names at this point and thought that since Patricia Highsmith had written books about doubles that it was fitting.

Not everything is as we thought it is. It’s not meant as a trick.

What is the role of music in your work? I was particularly moved by your description of your characters listening to the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” which, on most days, is my favorite song.

Mine too. I don’t listen to music when I’m actually writing. I have a writing studio that’s about two miles away from here, and I listen to music when I’m walking down there and after I’m done, when I’m walking back. Who was it that said, “Life would be unbearable without music”? I believe that. It’s a great stimulus and solace.

You’re especially successful integrating music into your prose. Many times it seems like a lazy way for a writer to tell us something about their character – he listens to Springsteen, so he’s a contemplative working man, for example. How do you make it work?

When it doesn’t work, it feels like you’ve brought it in as a kind of brand name.

Those characters (in The Soul Thief)are listening to “God Only Knows” when they’re heading back from Niagara Falls… it’s about losing your soul.

How did the film of Feast of Love change things for you?

The film didn’t do very well, so it didn’t expand my audience very much. There were honorable people involved in the film, but there were so many stories in that novel, when they tried to get them all into an hour and a half movie, all of the relationships started to seem superficial.

A lot has been made in past weeks about free digital distribution of books. What do you think, as an author who has weathered numerous changes in the publishing industry, of such plans?

My own feeling as a writer who hopes to make some income from my work, it’s not OK with me if anyone can download my book at any time. I work for years on these, and I hope that people will be willing to shell out a little bit of cash for what I’ve done. I like books as objects. I like them better than screens. I like going to bookstores and buying books. Certainly there has been a change during my lifetime about it… I don’t know if it’s for the better.

Labels: books

I'm not sure how prestigious this is given that I've never heard of it before, but the Story Prize has been awarded to Jim Shepard for his short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway. The prize includes a $20,000 cash award, which is a nice little boost for a great writer who doesn't sell a lot of books. Oh, and he received an engraved silver bowl, too.

It's certainly a worthy book, an adventurous and ambitious collection that was among the best books I read in 2007. In my Monday Interview with Shepard in December, we talked about his stories, and I noted that they seemed like the result of challenges he had issued to himself.

"I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination," he said. Going on to talk about a story in his previous collection, Love and Hydrogen, he continued, "A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out."

The Story Prize itself is a bit of a mystery. Information about its provenance on its web site states that it is "an annual book award honoring the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a $20,000 cash award. Each of two runners-up will receive $5,000. Eligible books must be written in English and first published in the United States during a calendar year."

Past winners are Edwidge Danticat in 2004 for The Dew Breaker, Patrick O'Keeffe in 2005 for The Hill Road and Mary Gordon in 2006 for The Stories of Mary Gordon.

There is some credibility behind the effort, however. Shepard was up against Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories and Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, while the contest was judged by author and critic David Gates, librarian Patricia Groh and editor and poet Meghan O'Rourke.

Labels: books, criticism

"It was Clockers that allowed me to go into that territory that made me feel that I could go that way, that I could write crime novels that were entertaining on one side of the equation but on the other side were about something else."

That's George Pelecanos talking to the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass about Richard Price's novel and its impact on him as a writer. The post is part of the blog's "In Retrospect" series, which is taking a look at Price's book this week. It's a fitting appetite-whetter for Price's forthcoming novel, Lush Life, due next month. As I wrote back in December, Price gave a reading here in Iowa City from the book that made me wish it was available at that moment. It was gritty, funny, incisive and spot-on. The passage he read is actually available as the short story "Night Fishing on the Delancey" in the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review.

The Critical Mass blog also features a talk with Dennis Lehane about Clockers, who calls it "one of the few Great American Novels in the American canon."

Both Lehane and Pelecanos write with Price for HBO's "The Wire," and Pelecanos is quick to say that without Clockers, there would be no "Wire."

An in-depth interview with Price is promised later this week on Critical Mass. Stay tuned.

Labels: books

The Morning News Tournament of Books is back, with 16 books set to square off bracket-style starting March 7.

There is an honest-to-God crime fiction novel among the picks, though I guarantee Laura Lippman's fine novel, What the Dead Know, will be tagged with the phrase "transcends the genre."

Who will win? My money is on National Book Award winner Denis Johnson. I haven't waded through his tome yet, but plan to the next time I have several days of uninterrupted reading time ahead of me... or after my sons graduate high school, whichever comes first.

I've read four of this year's picks thus far, and in addition to Lippman's gripping read, I can attest that Joshua Ferris's book is good but not a book of the year contender, Ian McEwan's book was perfectly fine but far from perfect, and Jonathan Lethem's book was a dreadful stumble by an otherwise wildly talented writer.

The tournament is fairly simple. Books are paired up in brackets, with a different judge for each pairing. The judge picks a winner, and that book moves on until there is only one. The three previous winners are David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

This year's contenders are:

Run by Ann Patchett
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Petropolis by Anya Ulinich
Ovenman by Jeff Parker
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
New England White by Stephen L. Carter
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

Labels: books, criticism

It's an understatement to say the stories of Elizabeth Crane are interesting. The Chicago writer has filled three short-story collections to date with tales that seem spun from the idea notebooks of dozens of writers. "What if a person took the back off their TV and found people living there?" one idea might read. "What if a woman who turned into a zombie was conflicted over the fact that she subsisted on human flesh?" might read another.

Hearing that such situations populate the stories in her new book, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, might turn off some, and with good reason. The world has more than enough "too-clever-by-half" stories to last until the end of time, with more produced daily. But these are not those. Crane's stories also have that other important ingredient: People you care about. Betty the zombie may seem like one of those too-clever characters until you actually read "Betty the Zombie," and then you see how Crane has skillfully grafted the woes of a flesh-eating zombie onto a real, three-dimensional character, and used that odd juxtaposition as a muscular vehicle to propel her fiction.

Crane debuted in 2003 with When the Messenger is Hot, then offered the linked story collection/novel in stories/insert new classification here All This Heavenly Glory, which offered episodes in the life of Charlotte Ann Byers. With You Must Be This Happy to Enter, Crane has moved from major publisher Little, Brown, to indie upstart Akashic (in a partnership, in this case, with Punk Planet Books). It's a move that might be seen on the surface as a step back careerwise, but as the pleasantly aggressive publicity push she's been getting would suggest, her reasons for making the leap are sound and already bearing out.

She took the time to answer a few questions about switching publishers, the way promotion has changed since her debut and the genesis and evolution of her stories.

TIRBD: You're with Akashic Books now after two books with a larger publisher. Was this a conscious decision to go with a smaller house? What can Akashic do that someone else maybe could not?

EC: It was of course, a very considered decision. Without going into long stories, I had been disappointed in the way a few things went with my second book (yet I always want to add the disclaimer that I adore my previous editor Reagan Arthur and always will), and at the same time, the people at Punk Planet/Akashic actually sought me out before they even knew I had anything in the works. I had known about the huge success they'd had with Joe Meno, who had nothing but good things to say about them and who had also been ultimately disappointed with larger publishing houses. Basically, what a smaller press potentially has to offer, which has completely been bearing itself out in terms of what I know Akashic has been doing to promote the book, is to give me a focused attention that you're just not guaranteed at a large house unless you're already a superstar.

It seems as if most short story writers place all of the stories in a collection with magazines and journals before collecting them in a book, but you always have a healthy dose that were not. What is behind that difference, and do you ever worry about the stories that weren't given that extra seal of approval?

Hm, I didn't worry about it until now! I'm not convinced that's universally true, anyway, and in my case, it's not anything that's super thought out; in fact, unlike when I was starting out, I don't submit stories too extensively these days. In fact, mostly I only send them to publications that request stories from me. So actually, I would have no problem publishing a book of stories where none of them had been previously published. We all want approval, but it's my own confidence that is what allows me to put them out into the world anywhere, whether in a collection or a journal.

In reading the bios in each of your three books, you went from being someone who "lives in Chicago," to someone who lives in Chicago, teaches at Northwestern and has won awards, to, with this new book, someone who does all that but now does so "with her husband, Ben." Just from this bit of information, it's clear your life has changed from book to book. Is that reflected in your writing in a way that is noticeable to you, and more to the point, in a way that you think could be noticed by close readers?

I think the changes in my life reflect in my writing, sure, just as surely as they would if circumstances had gotten worse instead of better. I have had a great deal of joy and sorrow in the last 10 years, and one of the things that really interests me in life is the way those things are not at all mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure that folks will notice that many of these stories are way more out there than ever. I don't know that that has anything to do with anything, though.

Though your first book came out just five years ago, what we're able to glean about authors now, thanks to the Internet, is considerably different from what we could then. We're no longer limited to the brief bio in the back of the book. You blog and have a web presence. What affect does that have on you as a writer, if at all? Does having a greater public profile -- with the potential of greater interaction with your audience – affect you?

Ah, I don't think I have a super huge blog readership, and I've had less and less time to keep it up. I'm also much more guarded about what I put on there, personally speaking, being very aware of the nature of the Internet. I will say that it is fantastic to be able to be easily contacted by readers, whether it's via my blog, web site, MySpace, Facebook or Goodreads. But you know, even the most well-known writers, I suspect, walk down the street, as I do, unrecognized. So in more respects than not, my simple life (style) is not very different than it ever was.

Your stories read at times like experiments: "What would happen if..." situations brought to life. Do they start that way? At the same time, they end in surprising ways, not necessarily reaching the place the reader might expect. I found that exhilarating as a reader, but I wonder as a writer if it's difficult to rein yourself in, to not take things to what might seem their logical conclusion.

Yes, actually sometimes they do start that way! I'm glad to hear that they end in surprising ways; it's usually a surprise to me. I generally start with just a notion of what a story might be, or who a character is, and then see what happens. But as you say, yes, if I start with a zombie, I think, what if she was a remorseful zombie? Which is how she ended up on a reality show. (Because isn't that the next logical step?)

Religion is a common topic through these stories, something that a lot of other writers tend to shy away from. Was there something in particular you were trying to get at with regard to religion? Do you have any worries about losing readers who might not want to read about it one way or the other?

Oh, I'll try not to go on for too long on this because it's so interesting to me. I tend to think of “god” as being the theme more than religion, but yes, I think that there are a few things that interest me about the subject. One is that I think there's such a negative association with religion, among many people I know anyway, and yet, I think that it can be a misconception to think that completely defines a person. You hear “Christian” and if you're not a Christian yourself, chances are you think “right-wing.” But in fact, I don't think anyone is just one thing, and knowing some very politically liberal Christians, I think it's unfortunate that that is the general idea of that religion. And that's just one religion. Also, it's a subject that interests me on a personal level. I seem to have a history now of constant tweaking, if you will, of what seems reasonable to me on the subject of god, and I don't expect that will change anytime soon.

As for losing readers, I don't concern myself with that too much at all, whatever the subject – that's out of my hands. I just write what interests me and hope it'll interest someone else too.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

While the oral history form has its charms, it's a flawed method of recording events in book form. The writer steps back, letting his or her subjects tell the entire tale, the hand on the rudder a light one, steering the narrative by the choice of who says what and when. It worked to a certain extent on Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me, an oral history of the New York punk scene. As each of the musicians, critics and fans weighed in, they accomplished a sort of safety-pinned version of the blind men describing the elephant, the various tangents somehow a fitting way to describe such a strange movement.

I picked up Jim Walsh's The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting, with trepidation. How much could I possibly learn anything new what was my favorite band for well over a decade, a band for which I unashamedly still keep a file folder full of magazine and newspaper articles ripped from publications in my teens on the off chance I might need to refer to them again someday? Still, the prospect of hearing the words of those who were there in the early days -- my hippest friend turned me on to the band when I was a sophomore in high school, the year Tim came out -- was appealing. While there are moments of personal reportage that offer interesting tidbits, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

I knew to be worried in the preface when Walsh was recounting the reasons the Replacements were the best band in the world. After many passages that start "Because..." he starts one like this: "Because one night in 1989 the 'Mats were booked on something called The International Rock Awards on ABC..." Ah, here we go, I thought. Having watched the band's performance on that show at least 25 times in my life, I knew what was coming. Or so I thought. He gets it right that the announcer says, "We apologize, here they are -- the Replacements," and recounts some of what happened in the performance, but misses two key moments. The first he alludes to when he reports that censors bleeped Paul Westerberg's reference to "We're feeling good from the pills we took," writing that "Paul rolls his eyes, finishes the lyric and plows ahead."

I nearly put the book down right there, knowing that if it wasn't going to get this right, the whole thing might be flawed. Yes, Westerberg rolled his eyes, but more than that, at the end of the song when on the recording he sings, "It's too late to turn back, here we go," he instead sings "It's too late to take pills, here we go" again and again, smirking all the while. Walsh is trying here to write about the band's eternal status as out-of-step misfits unwilling to play the game, and misses a perfect chance to make the point. The other funny moment came during the song's brief breakdown. On the recording there's the sound of bottles clinking and Tommy Stinson saying something inaudible. Here, Stinson steps to the microphone and says, "The Elvis? Ha ha ha ha...!" mocking the statuette being given by this one-and-done awards show. The band doesn't just bite the hand that feeds; it pisses on it for good measure.

All that in a section where Walsh was doing his own reporting, not relying on others. If a guy who had been there from the very beginning could miss a softball like that, how good could the rest of the book be? Answer: It's about as spotty as that missed opportunity would indicate. Once gets a sense of the band and its members, but it's a flawed sense made more confusing by Walsh's decision to intercut fresh interview fodder from observers with old interview snippets from the band. Two-decade-old reminiscences are mixed with contemporaneous proclamations, and rather than illuminate things, the practice just makes things muddier.

It doesn't help that Westerberg and Stinson didn't participate, that drummer Chris Mars responded with an e-mailed paragraph or that guitarist Bob Stinson is dead. In fact, the only Replacements who truly contributed -- latter day guitarist Slim Dunlap and drummer Steve Foley -- offer the best dirt here, recounting what it was like to join a band full of promise as it climbed into its own coffin.

Then again, perhaps this is more fitting a tribute to the 'Mats than I've been willing to admit. The band subverted possible success at every turn, frustrating fans who knew there was better to be had if only Westerberg would let himself loose. In the same way, there is a better Replacements book out there for the writer willing to do more than cobble together quotes from magazine interviews and the nostalgic reverie of fans, confidantes and hangers-on.

Labels: books, music

Like every other sensible blogger out there, I plan to take a few days away from this to enjoy the holidays. In the meantime, I decided today's post, which will likely be the last of '07, should include all the little tidbits I've been saving for possible longer posts over the past few weeks. Here goes:

Shearwater plans a new album in early '08. Rook, if the photos on the band's web site of the recording session are any indication, will include strings and woodwinds, meaning Jonathan Meiburg's creative muse should be fully engaged yet again. Meiburg told me in an interview earlier this year that he has been excited by the range and ability of the band. "Sometimes it feels like every time we play, the whole thing opens up just a little bit more. We got together and rehearsed a few weeks ago and I was just delighted at the way this group of people works together musically – it's very special."

Harlan Coben's next book will be another stand-alone thriller, Hold Tight, due in April. As he describes it: "In a quiet suburb, the lives of five families collide in surprising, tragic and even violent ways." He also shares that Cope, the lead character in The Woods, has a "small part" here, so the ending of that book might make a bit more sense after you read Hold Tight.

Cover art and a publication date have been posted for the forthcoming third collaboration between Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, The Max, from Hard Case Crime. The book, which follows Bust and Slide, is due in September.

The Hard Case folks also share that they'll kick off 2009 with yet another Lawrence Block reprint, promising that "not even seriously dedicated Block fanatics, know about this book; and it is quite possibly the single most audacious book we'll ever publish."

Michael Connelly's next book will be a follow-up to The Lincoln Lawyer featuring attorney Micky Haller. That novel, tentatively scheduled for October, finds Haller taking over the law practice of a colleague who is murdered. Continuing Connelly's engaging way of crossing the paths of his key characters, Harry Bosch catches the case.

The ever-prolific Robert Pollard can't stop won't stop in 2008, with three releases already on the schedule. First comes a solo mini-CD, Superman Was A Rocker in late January, followed by a second Psycho and the Birds album in late February, We've Moved. Finally, he also plans another Circus Devils disc with the Tobias brothers, Ataxia, to be released sometime later in the year.

Nick Lowe's back catalog has been ripe for reissue for a long time, and his current label, Yep Roc, will start things off with a reissue of his first album, Jesus of Cool. The disc was issued as Pure Pop for Now People here in the U.S., but will come out under its original name with the February reissue (marking its 30th anniversary!). Press about the reissue claims it contains 10 rare bonus tracks, but any fans of the Basher have long since heard these still-worthy tracks.

Labels: books, music

I trekked out in the snow tonight to hear Richard Price read, and while it was worth the effort, the result was bittersweet, because now I must wait three months to read his forthcoming novel.

Price, best known for Clockers and Freedomland -- as well as for the films based on those books and for his work as a writer on HBO's excellent series, The Wire -- read from Lush Life, his latest novel, due in March. It's still far enough in the future that one link on the web page of his publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, for the book takes you to information about David Hadju's similarly titled biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. Another, luckily, sends you here.

That low-profile won't last long. The book, which Price said tonight is about the contemporary Lower East Side of New York -- a place populated by those who streamed in as they left Ellis Island, and then immediately tried to escape from, he added -- is told through the eyes of two young men who face a life-changing experience. According to FSG's promotional copy, the book "tears the shiny veneer off the 'new' New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour." Few authors could live up to that description, but Price can and, if the passages he read tonight are any indication, does.

I didn't get a Wire fix tonight -- Price read from his book but didn't really talk much beyond that -- but did get one thanks to Amazon.com, which has three short "prequel" video clips on the page selling the fourth season DVD of The Wire. They're interesting looks at Proposition Joe and Omar as kids, as well as a peek at the day McNulty and Bunk became partners in the homicide unit. The fifth and final season of the show starts in January.

Labels: books

Jim Shepard popped onto my radar in 2004 when I received simultaneous review copies of his short story collection, Love and Hydrogen, and his novel, Project X, while working as a reviewer at a daily newspaper. I hadn’t heard of Shepard, but the books sounded interesting, so I took them home and added them to the stack.

A year later, I went to hear Shepard read in Iowa City when he was on campus as a finalist for the director’s position at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He read from Project X, a novel about a young man drawn into a Columbine-type incident, and it was hilarious, terrifying and heartbreaking. I went home, pulled the book out of the stack and read it. I followed with Love and Hydrogen, and have counted myself a fan ever since.

His new story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, is another gem. Some fan I am; I had to learn about it by reading a small blurb/review in a magazine two months after its publication. Such is the fate of writers with Shepard’s talent. It is admittedly daunting to pick up a book of stories that tell stories about excursions through Tibet and Australia, follow the first female Russian cosmonaut and tell of the conflicted nature of France’s Revolution-era executioner. Feel-good lit this ain’t. But it’s a bravura performance that finds Shepard fully inhabiting each of these protagonists in his prose, and easily one of the best books of the year.

I was disappointed when Shepard didn’t land the position at Iowa, if for no other reason than that I was looking forward to hearing him read more often. But, as he mentions below, not getting the job meant there was one less demand on his time, time that ought to be spent writing more stories like these.

TIRBD: Your career seemed to get a kick-start in 2004 with the simultaneous publication of the story collection Love and Hydrogen and the novel Project X, your first books in at least six years. Was it a conscious move on your part to re-enter publishing after a break, a publisher's marketing ploy or perhaps a combination?

JS: Very little that happens to me represents a conscious move on my part. It was mostly a publisher's marketing ploy -- or a better way to put it might be a publisher's despairing attempt to find something that worked, when it came to trying to sell my work. I'd finished Love and Hydrogen earlier than that, but Knopf had conceived of the idea of publishing it together with a novel, and trying to make the publication more of an event in that way. Their plan worked to some extent, I guess.

Is it at all safe to say that thanks to the presence of publications like McSweeney's and the success of writers like George Saunders that there is a sensibility on the rise that is more accepting of your work than you've enjoyed in the past?

I'm not sure. I know that my work does seem to be considered too weird -- too boyish, too childish, too something -- for some markets, so I'm glad for magazines like Tin House and McSweeney's that offer readers -- and writers -- an alternative that's more out of the mainstream. They also seem less bound up with literary celebrity than some magazines. Or maybe they just conceive of celebrity in a different way, given their demographic.

Your short stories seem almost like challenges to yourself, with you inhabiting the heads of a staggeringly disparate cast of characters. The acknowledgment pages of your collections, meanwhile, look like the citation section from a thick academic book. Do you do research on topics that interest you and then decide to write stories based on that information, or do you conceive of the story and then do research to help with the writing?

I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination. A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out. As for research, I read on subjects that interest me, first. Sometimes that sets off something that begins to feel like a story -- almost always because of some mysterious or elusive emotional resonance that I begin to register (as opposed to because I feel like the elements in front of me would make a good story.) Once I've begun to feel that what I've been reading might generate a story, my reading changes, and I begin to do more focused research.

How difficult is it to weave in the parts you have to create from thin air with the details you've learned from your research? Do you ever find yourself having to pull back from injecting unnecessary details simply because you went to the trouble to learn them?

Making stuff up is always the fun part. And it's hard, sometimes, to let go of researched details that are amazing, but part of the revision process involves going over and over the narrative with a ruthlessness towards anything that's thematically redundant or that seems to be retarding the narrative drive.

To that end, have you ever done so much research for a work of fiction that you considered pursuing the story in non-fiction form instead?

Every so often I've considered that. But a non-fiction piece like that, coming from me, would be a kind of an odd thing. I usually don't have enough of a thesis to shape something like that as an essay. Maybe my interest in the material is more visceral, and emotional.

Three of the stories in Like You'd Understand, Anyway – “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian,” “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” and “Courtesy for Beginners” -- seem different because they're not based around historical figures or events. Did you give any thought to how they would fit with the rest?

No. I was actually happy that they helped vary the collection somewhat. And they're still all about weird people in extremis.

You were a finalist for the director's post at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a position eventually given to Lan Samantha Chang instead. What might such a high-profile teaching position have done for your career, good or bad, and how much did that weigh on your decision to pursue it in the first place?

I pursued the position, once I was invited to do so, because I thought if I was ever going to consider leaving my current job, I should at least consider Iowa. It's a chance to be a part of a program that's central to modern American literature. As for the issue of a raised profile, well, that seemed like both a good and a bad thing. And certainly the responsibilities involved in running a program were daunting, to say the least. I feel like I have little enough time to write as it is. And it's one thing to lose writing time to teaching; it's another to lose it to administrating.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

The New York Times issued its list of the 10 best books of the year today, and if good intentions count, I have four of them covered.

Truth told, I've read only one of the 10, Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End. I interviewed Ferris about his debut novel earlier this year. The Times and I aren't alone in our praise for the book; it was nominated for a National Book Award this fall.

The second of the fiction books I plan to read is Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award for fiction this year. The book has been in my possession, but I let it go for the time being because I doubt I'll be able to carve out the time to dedicate to its 600+ pages anytime soon. Someday...

The two nonfiction books on the list that I hope to get to soon are Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, an overview and analysis of music in the 20th century, and Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, a book that promises a look at the "Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression." My grandparents lived that life, and I'm curious to learn more about it.

The best-of season is now in full swing, and it will be interesting to see if any consensus is reached.

Labels: books, criticism

I don’t recall where I came across Bob Hicok’s poetry, only that it immediately struck me as something I wanted to more fully explore. I had the chance to hear Hicok read a couple of years ago, around the time of the publication of his collection, Insomnia Diary. What I loved about Hicok’s poetry was that it was funny while making a point. There was wry social commentary going on here, the humor a bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.

As an untrained writer of poetry and fiction, I also appreciated Hicok’s background. He was a laborer who wrote poetry. He had no MFA, no academic pedigree. He proved that a guy with talent and wit and a way with words could succeed in a world dominated by academics.

When I picked up his latest collection, This Clumsy Living, I learned that some things had changed. Hicok now has degrees and teaches at Virginia Tech University. Though he initially came from the outside, he has been taken into the fold somewhat. The other thing that I noticed is that humor is not the first thing I detect about these poems. There is wit here; it seems to come too naturally to Hicok for him to simply turn it off. But there is a depth and seriousness to these poems; the wit seems incidental, or tactical – pulled out to drive a point home with a subversive laugh.

It is clear that at least one major factor in this change is the war in Iraq. Hicok seems fed up and has found inventive ways to convey his disgust, dismay and disappointment with the effort. “Happy Anniversary,” with the date noted as “March 19, 2006, the third anniversary of the beginning of the war, begins with the lines

There is a war.

This is a brand of minimalism: there are many wars.

Whenever you are reading this, this is the case:

people running and screaming and sharp things and dull pains.

In “A letter: the Genesis poem,” Hicok offers a short personal essay about the book, writing “We’re at war as I write. In Iraq, in case we’ve moved on to Iran by the time you read this. Most of the talk right now is about gas prices and illegal immigrants. Many people here don’t want elsewhere people to become here people.”

Elsewhere, however, Hicok seems to be coming to grips with the shift in his own life, from working guy who wrote poems to poet who used to be a working guy. “My last factory job” is a poem that details his job “pushing a rod. Steel rod/in a v-channel with a stick.” In “Beasts,” he writes a meeting with a former co-worker where he finds himself trying to explain tenure, “to convince him that the six weeks I have to myself/ between semesters isn’t a layoff. ‘I gotta get me some of that,’/ he says again, lighting a smoke with a smoke.” Later, “I long ago gave up/ trying to explain poetry to people like Carl,/ and have recently given up trying to explain people like Carl/to professors.”

At the same time, life just seems to have given Hicok a kick in the pants in the past few years, and he is challenging himself to find new ways to express these new feelings and sentiments and thoughts, unwilling to let the same old tactics express these new subjects. It makes for a book that was different than I expected – and I’ll admit, differed from what I initially wanted – but one that is obviously Hicok’s best.

Labels: books, poetry

Describe the opening premise of Antoine Wilson's debut novel, The Interloper, in a sentence or two, and you get the feel of a great short story: Relative newlywed Owen Patterson is frustrated at his wife's inability to deal with the grief she feels after the murder of her brother. Paging John Updike, right?

Wrong, for Wilson uses that as a springboard into a compelling, disturbing novel that finds him deftly walking a tightrope as he keeps Owen on an internal even keel at the same time the reactions of those around him reveal that he might be the one who is listing dangerously.

Owen decides that the best way to help his wife and her parents deal with the murder of their brother and son, C.J., is to inflict pain on the man who killed him, Henry Raven. He decides the best way to do this is to create a fictional lonely woman to write letters to Raven in prison. Thus, Lily Hazelton is born. Wilson allows all of this to unfold methodically, dropping in details as needed to expand our understanding of Owen at the same time Owen is trying to flesh out Lily. Things spiral out of control, as one might expect, but not in predictable ways. The result is a strange psychological ride that blends the typical suburban strife novel that the outset promised with some near crime/thriller elements to create an interesting, highly readable hybrid. Wilson earned a blurb from Jess Walter, whose novels -- particularly the great Citizen Vince and The Zero -- traverse similar ground.

Wilson is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and currently teaches creative writing from time to time at the UCLA Extension Writing Program. He has a diverse background, though has called California home more often than not. In an interview/reading done at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City in September, he said three books made him want to be a writer: ' Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, James Baldwin's Another Country and V by Thomas Pynchon. Hear the interview here. Meanwhile, Wilson was kind enough to answer a few of my questions for the Monday Interview, which follow.

TIRBD: I could see this starting as either an idea of a husband avenging his brother-in-law's death or one that involves corresponding with a killer in prison. Was that the case, with the story then evolving to include both strands, or did you have the full idea from the outset?

AW: Actually, the idea for Owen’s plan, writing to the murderer in order to avenge the brother-in-law’s death, pretty much came to me as it does to Owen in the book. It dropped into my head whole and egg-like. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I recognized in it the potential for engaging questions about how we obtain justice, not to mention an opportunity to create a character who would create a character of his own. I wasn’t 100 percent confident about the idea at first. I called a writer friend of mine to ask whether he thought Owen’s cockamamie scheme would make a better novel, short story, paragraph or doodle. He said “novel,” so I set about trying to find a voice, a situation, etc., that would take what seemed to me like a fairly high-concept idea and bring it to life.

You've mentioned elsewhere that your older half-brother was murdered, which gave you an interesting perspective on the grief of others. That's obviously an important undercurrent of this book. Could you have written this without that experience? If so, how might it have been different?

I wouldn’t have written the book without that experience, but for the sake of argument, I’d guess that had my half-brother not been murdered, I would have been more conventionally minded about the ways in which tragedy and humor aren’t supposed to mix.

In the story, you must balance the reality of your protagonist as related to the way he perceives everyone else reacting to him, conveying others' points of view through his interpretations. That's tricky business – practically fighting against your own unreliable narrator – that you handle very deftly. Was it difficult to pull that off or as easy as you make it look?

I made it look easy? That’s nice to hear. It was as difficult as anything else. Mainly it had to do with taking stabs at things, stepping back to look at them, panicking, mulling, and revising – the same old story. There’s an old saw, attributed to everyone from Hemingway to Dick Francis: “I don’t like writing, I like having written.” That’s not my point of view per se, I mean I like writing well enough. But let’s just say that some days… I appreciate the sentiment.

You're living proof that not everyone comes out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop with the same style of prose. Is that because you approached things differently, or is that notion just sour grapes from those who didn't get in?

The homogenization bugbear is alive and well, I see. All I can say is that while I was at the workshop, I saw lots of different kinds of writing. Of course, there was a while there when a bunch of people were peeing their pants over Alice Munro (and justifiably so). That resulted in a few Munro-ish stories on the worksheet. But imitation is part of a writer’s apprenticeship anywhere; Iowa’s no different in that respect. Proust was a master at pastiche before he was a master at being Proust. As far as my approach went, let’s just say I knew I was a young writer with a lot to learn. I set out to make each story different from the previous one, in technique, tone, approach, etc. I wanted to stretch my muscles, get some chops. It served me well enough, but I didn’t exactly leave the program with a collection to sell.

You teach and help edit A Public Space. Do these endeavors have any impact on your own writing in terms of seeing things to either try or avoid? Does your own writing provide you with fodder for teaching?

A Public Space is based in Brooklyn, and I’m out in L.A., so I’m not involved in the day-to-day running of it. In other words, I’m not reading manuscripts out of the slush pile. It’s been rewarding in the opportunity to help publish a few writers I really admire. (In the past, I have read slush piles, contest entries and fellowship applications – a practice I highly recommend to anyone interested in writing short fiction. You quickly see what works and what doesn’t, what turns you on and what turns you off. If you’re lucky, it can turn into a crash course in your own nascent aesthetics.)

Balancing teaching and writing is a tricky – there’s always a subtle pressure pushing the two apart. I’m constantly trying to bridge the gap between my daily experience as a writer and what I can impart to my students about “Creative Writing.” My first semester at Iowa I took a seminar with Stuart Dybek, who was visiting at the time, and he seemed to be able to teach stuff he was currently thinking about – it kind of blew all of our minds. Of course, that was at the MFA level. It’s different when you’re teaching an intro to fiction writing course at the local university extension. Still, I try to connect the teaching and the writing. Otherwise, you end up spouting a bunch of guidelines and rules that you yourself have long ago abandoned. It turns into a kind of fake thing, a hackneyed version of teaching. Beginning writers deserve better than that, especially if they’re motivated enough to show up and talk fiction for three hours after being at work all day… and pay for the privilege, no less.

You've now published short stories and a novel. Do you prefer one form over the other, or find one more satisfying than the other? Now that you know you can write a novel-length work, does that change your willingness to spend the time and ideas on short fiction?

I love writing short stories, but since switching over to novels, I can’t seem to remember how to write them. I’ve always wanted to write novels, and at the outset, at least, I considered short story writing a way to practice as I geared up for longer forms. Now I’m in love with short stories. I’d like nothing more than to stop writing this novel I’m working on and go back to stories for a while. Plus, since The Interloper came out, people have been asking me for stories. But I can’t seem to find my way back in to the short form right now. I don’t tend to work on a bunch of different things at the same time. I like writing one thing at a time. Reading is the opposite. Twenty books is not out of the question. I read them all as if they’re part of the same big book. It’s a problem.

You mention on your web site that you are "deep in the woods of a new novel." Any more hints than that? Has your experience with The Interloper, both in terms of bringing it to completion and the reaction to it once it went out into the world, affected the writing of this second work?

I’d love to give more hints, but that’s the thing about being deep in the woods – you have no idea where you are. It’s cold, it’s uncomfortable, night is falling and when you walk you tend to walk in circles. So all I can say with any certainty is that I’m surrounded by trees. Also, first person, ostensibly comic, no magic realism. My experience with The Interloper has for the most part been fantastic. Other Press has been very supportive about the book, and the publicity squad over there has done wonders. I threw parties in L.A. and New York, and returned to Iowa and Wisconsin for readings. Lots of good reviews. What more could I ask for, other than a healthier environment for literary fiction and for independent bookstores? It’s funny, some days I’ll be obsessing over my Amazon.com ranking and thinking numbers, numbers, numbers, and then I’ll get a random e-mail from a random reader about how much they enjoyed the book. I’m reminded that it’s not a numbers game at all, but a secret little connection between my words and other people’s brains. Which makes me want to retreat back under my rock and get to work.

Labels: books, Monday Interview

Maybe now someone will bother to actually read it.

Angry parents in Cumberland, R.I., convinced officials there to ban an essay originally assigned in a high school class. The essay, "How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes," was written by author Will Clarke and is featured in the anthology When I Was a Loser, edited by John McNally.

The mother of a 14-year-old girl who had received the assignment led the charge. She claimed that Clarke's essay was pornographic, and said that it wasn't enough that the teacher quickly agreed that her daughter could complete the assignment by reading something else. She thus appointed herself the school district's morality police.

"I'm not willing to lower my morals to prove a point," she told the Pawtucket Times. "I feel it is my duty to ensure that not just my child is never handed this kind of vulgar material, but (that) your children never receive it as well."

I wonder if she or any of the other detractors has actually bothered to read the essay. Probably not, since most keep referring to it as a "story" as opposed to an essay, and never seem to mention details beyond the satiric title and a few key juicy bits. Thing is, the piece, in which Clarke tells of his early school days as someone mercilessly picked on before he applied a lesson about subliminal advertising and used it to win a life-changing student body office, is just the kind of thing high school students should be reading.

McNally has risen to the defense of his book and Clarke, pointing out that many classic literary works -- including those by Shakespeare, Chaucer and Salinger -- contain bawdy language and questionable passages that can be taken out of context to prove a similar point. Here's hoping that argument doesn't backfire with this populace that seems unable to understand irony, satire or literary allusion, driving them to move to ban the work of those and others right along with Clarke. The hope of course, is that just as with everything else people ban "for the good of the children," it will spur those kids to seek it out all the more.

Labels: books, criticism, Idiocracy

The capacity of people to misread satire is alive and well. Author John McNally reports on his blog that When I Was a Loser, a collection of essays about high school and adolescence that he edited, has raised the hackles of some overly literal parents in Rhode Island.

The essay in question, "How to Kill a Boy That Nobody Likes," might sound provocative and unfit for high school reading, but if you bother to read beyond the title, it becomes clear that it is exactly the kind of thing high school kids should be reading. In the essay, Will Clarke writes about a how, as a high school student, he realized that the language of marketing can change people's perceptions. He uses that new skill to run for class office, a move to "kill" the boy nobody likes, namely, himself (not-so-affectionally referred to as "Will-tard").

A teacher had assigned the essay, it seems, causing some parents to balk, calling the piece "pornographic," and demand that it be removed from the lesson.

While the reactions are perfect examples of knee-jerk political posturing at its best, it does give McNally's book some well-deserved exposure.

Clarke weighs in on his blog, offering tongue-in-cheek support to the would-be book banners: "String up that teacher and the principal, too. They're just trying to get them kids to love reading and who needs that? That might actually get them to thinking, and we all know where thinking leads you....straight to hell or Harvard."

Labels: books, criticism

Maybe I'm making too much of this, but I've been reading a lot of crime fiction this year, and reading a lot about crime fiction, and I've found that not everyone sees eye-to-eye on the genre. Most highbrow types -- those who read literary magazines, for instance -- dismiss it. Fans are understandably defensive, and seem content to spend most of their time reading only in that small subsection of the world. Both are clearly missing out.

So it was a pleasant surprise to come across Richard Lange. Most of the stories in his debut collection, Dead Boys, were first published in those small literary journals, yet most of the blurbs he landed for the book come from some of my favorite crime writers, such as Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. The other names under quotes on the dust jacket are perhaps most revelatory, because they come from people who, in my estimation anyway, have bridged the gap between those two worlds, weaving tales that are so well-written that few could sneer at the fact that crimes are committed and bad people do bad things: Chris Offutt, Daniel Woodrell and others.

What does all of this have to do with Lange? Simply that his book, no matter where you put it on the shelf, stands alongside the works of all of those mentioned above. There certainly are crime elements -- one story, about a bank robber with a conscience was selected for the Best American Mystery Stories 2004 -- but anyone who dismisses the book because of that is a fool, for this is one of the best books of 2007, regardless of genre.

Lange is a graduate of the USC film school, but fiction classes with T.C. Boyle seem have had a greater impact on him. His professional background is in edgy magazines and book editing, pursuits that, as he says below, left him the time and the willingness to write.

The people who populate his books aren't people I'd want to spend much time with, but I'm glad Lange was willing to stick with them long enough to tell their stories. He also took the time recently to answer a few questions about his work. Do yourself a favor, read this interview, then head to the bookstore and get Dead Boys. You won't be disappointed.

TIRBD: These dozen protagonists are a pretty depressing bunch. How did you steel yourself to want to spend this much time with them? Did you get attached enough to any of them that you felt bad about the fate that befell them?

RL: I actually enjoyed writing these characters quite a bit. They have extreme personalities and go through some pretty intense experiences, but at their cores they are all sensitive men trying to cope with the chaos that surrounds and permeates them. A trick of the light can elate them or throw them into deepest despair. A disapproving glance from a loved one can break their hearts for good. They walk through the world with raw nerves and wide open eyes, furiously alive.

As for the second part of your question, it wasn’t so much that I grew attached to the narrators as it was that I became them for a while. I had to embed myself in their minds in order to create them, and so I felt their dread when things weren’t going well and their joy when they were. A pretty intense emotional experience at times.

You're championed by some heavy hitters in the crime fiction world, though all of these stories were published in pretty traditional short story journals. Is genre a consideration for you? Do you identify with crime writers or mystery writers?

I didn’t think about genre when writing these stories. That the book is considered by some to be a work of crime fiction is fine by me, but I wouldn’t call it that. I do admit, however, to co-opting the language of crime fiction, particularly the hard-boiled stuff, and injecting it into stories that might have been fairly quiet “relationship” pieces without it in order to heighten the tension and describe the violence being done to the characters’ psyches.

I don’t read a ton of crime fiction – a lot of detective books have too many scenes of people talking in offices for my taste, or they’re tough-talking iterations of Chandler or Ross MacDonald. I love Elmore Leonard, though, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, and Clockers was great.

While short stories don't always have a tidy ending, many of those in Dead Boys are very open ended; much more so than most. Was that an organic development of these stories, a conscious choice to try something different or perhaps a bit of both?

One of my intentions with these stories was to see how little actual plot I could get away with and still make readers feel like they’d had some sort of experience with the narrators. People who consume media are such experts in narrative nowadays that it’s possible to discard a lot of the old machinery and jump straight to the emotional core of a story, trusting that readers will be able to fill in the blanks. The open-ended endings are an extension of that. Do you really need me to tell you what happened next? And does it even matter?

People often say that place is an important character in their work, but for you, to say Los Angeles is absolutely integral to the stories is no stretch. Have you written stories based elsewhere? Assuming you don't spend all your time in the city's seediest parts, do you explore areas in search of settings for your stories?

I haven’t written any stories set elsewhere because there’s still plenty to write about here. L.A. continues to fascinate me and provide me with a wealth of characters and images to fuel my fiction. I’ve lived here since I was 17, on the east side, south side and in Hollywood, so I know the turf pretty well. The stories in Dead Boys are all set on streets I’ve walked and in apartments and houses I’ve lived in or visited and establishments where I’ve worked or done business. I could point most of them out on a map or drive you past them. I used these various real sites as stage settings for the fictional events that transpire there.

Did you always have fiction writing in mind, or was that a detour while in film school? How did your work for magazines impact your writing, if at all?

Film school was the detour, I guess. Shortly after I started, I realized that I didn’t enjoy the collaboration involved in the process. Too many cooks. I took some fiction writing classes from T.C. Boyle and found my niche. The screenwriting classes I took were helpful, however. They got me thinking about pace and structure and how to manipulate them. I learned a few important rules so I could break them later. I do love film though. Certain movies have been as important in my artistic development as any book I ever read.

As for the magazine work, I never took a job that required me to write, preferring to save that energy for my stories. I worked as an editor for years, and the skills I developed definitely improved my fiction. I’m absolutely merciless about cutting out the fat.

The second book of your deal with Hachette is reported to be a novel. Anything you can share about that project? Beyond the obvious, how is the writing process different with a book-length work as opposed to crafting a short story?

I’m almost finished with the novel. This time I’m actually trying to write crime fiction, so it’ll be interesting to see if I’m successful. It’s called The Kissproof World, and it’s set in L.A.

The writing process for the novel has been much different than it was for the stories. I’ve found that I have to be much more direct and explain things a lot more than I’m used to. I also had to open up my style, because the kind of compression I used in the stories would exhaust a reader (and me) over the course of a novel. In a short story you only need the most important scenes. There’s a lot more connective tissue in a novel.

For more, check out Lange's "Book Notes" post at Largehearted Boy.

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