[This is the final entry in our Deserted Isle Books series, in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
I can’t honestly imagine being stranded on a beach. Woman verses the elements? Not this girl. I’ve never roughed it; I didn’t take Survival in high school and my Girl Scout troop vacationed on Cape Cod. All of my experience with camping has involved masses of friends. Running water. Coolers of beer. Bug spray. I’ve stayed up all night on the beach, but in the morning we drove to a diner for breakfast. Aside from Martha’s Vineyard I’ve never even been on an island.
Like Shannon on Lost, I have asthma and allergies. I burn easily and too much sun gives me migraines. I’m clumsy and would never be able to steady my stance long enough to catch a fish. I’ve never been able to shimmy up a tree so I’d have nowhere to hide from hungry animals. I’m not especially fast. I’d be easy prey—the carnivores would take me down the first night. Or I’d make it a week and be so beat up by the experience that I’d give in and float myself face-down out to sea.
I wouldn’t want my favorite book along for this miserable journey. And I don’t think I’ve read the “best” book out there. But I do have a story that soothes me, a style that comforts me, a buddy book. … Continue reading »
A pair of journalists try to track down the kidnapped wife of an oil executive, and embark on a dangerous journey through the Nigerian river delta. They discover a country—not to mention scores of people—ruined by the no-holds-barred Nigerian oil industry. Civil wars, crimes against humanity, a political expose, and a suspenseful adventure “set in a haunting world of mangroves, floating villages, and jungle shrines” (PW)? Yes, please.
In 2032, dozens of private mercenary armies fight for anyone with money (especially oil companies). The most powerful group, a Blackwater-like global corporate army called Force Insertion, is led by a megalomaniacal ex-U.S. general with plans for vengeance that only his right-hand man can stop. Supposedly, Pressfield’s extensive research makes this thriller great.
British comedian Watson’s third novel looks at a gaggle (roughly a dozen) of disparate characters tied together by cutesily self-monikered late-night radio DJ Xavier Ireland. When Ireland witnesses a “bullying incident,” the consequences unfold in a semi-postmodern narrative, but one that you won’t need a full semester and a PhD to unravel. This could be excellent or it could be terrible. Reviews say Watson’s not trying to be funny (ignore the flap copy); if all else fails, at least Steve Martin has the makings for a lawsuit. … Continue reading »
After reading Patrick deWitt’s excellent new Western, The Sisters Brothers, I went straight out and found his only other book, Ablutions. It did not disappoint.
Ablutions follows a nameless Hollywood bartender, a degenerate drunk on a steep downward trajectory. He spends his nights drinking free Jameson and warring with regulars at the bar he works at and hates; he spends his days suffering atrocious hangovers and fighting with his wife. Generally, he mislives his life.
I don’t entirely know how deWitt sold this debut novel, because that thumbnail description doesn’t begin to do justice to this funny, lovely, tragic, gripping book. … Continue reading »
The Redwall books were among my favorites when I was actually a young adult reading YA books. Salamandastron stands out in my memory because it was the first I ever read. I remember first seeing the cover with the badger holding the spear, and just lighting up. I was a pudgy little dork who really liked Watership Down and the Final Fantasy games, so this book screamed awesomeness to me. I wasn’t let down, and I devoured the rest of Jacques’s books with ever-increasing voracity.
I still have all my Redwall books. The covers are worn, the pages yellow and tattered. They’ve survived moves from apartment to apartment, been lent out and miraculously returned more than once. I’ve always said I would revisit them at some point but never did. When Brian Jacques died in February, I finally decided to return to them. My initial thought was to hit the three core books (Redwall, Mossflower, Mattimeo), but then I saw that cover again and knew it had to be Salamandastron. Just look at that badger –he’s not some goofy Looney Toon. He stands there in armor, holding his pike and helmet and seeming, well, somber. … Continue reading »
You Think That’s Bad offers 11 stories inspired by a diverse array of subjects, from flood control and avalanche research to World War II and the Japanese film industry. Each one is thoroughly researched, tightly written, and full of compelling, hopeless characters. As a collection, though, You Think That’s Bad strikes the same emotional chord a little too often to make the whole something greater than its best parts.
One story is about a Black World operative who can’t talk to his wife. One is about a Dutch hydraulics engineer who can’t talk to his wife. There’s a particle physicist who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Japanese special effects designer who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Polish mountaineer who does a better job talking to his wife, but not nearly good enough to save either of them from himself. It’s tragic watching these obsessed men ruin their lives one after the other, but some things start to feel repetitive. … Continue reading »
In Pee on Water, Rachel Glaser’s debut short story collection, you will find updated fairy tales, post-modern love stories, surreal dips into a mix of real and imagined history, and narratives sketched from the point of view of the book you are holding—and all of this in one ten page story, “The Magic Umbrella,” an endlessly inventive piece of writing in which Glaser uses a series of internal “About the Authors,” to allow each section build on the previous and take these fantastic turns.
“The Magic Umbrella” leads Glasers’ collection, and is an excellent introduction to her mercurial stories. Over the course of 143 pages the author covers a wide range of subjects: A lonely youth becomes deeply engrossed in, and then beholden to, an interactive video game about John Lennon’s life in “The Jon Lennin Xperience.” “The Kid” starts as a burn-out love story, but quickly becomes a surreal nightmare. My personal favorite, one of the most touching and, oddly enough considering the subject, conventional stories in terms of form is “The Monkey Handler,” a tale chronicling the misadventures of a group of astronauts and their amateur crew whose star-crossed love affairs lead to their abandonment in space.
The title story, “Pee on Water,” a droll history of the world, suggests that nothing has really changed but what is contained in the story’s title:
This is the nice time of early men and monkeys, before cigarette butts cozied fat into the grass. No plastics, no prayers. Wood isn’t sliced into slats, it’s still living it up in trees. The rain is surprising, usual. Men and monkeys leave their lives with their bodies. Early men paint, cry, stare into fire meditatively. Pee on grass. Pee on dirt. Wear furs, have babies, catch dogs. Fall in love with dogs. Pause at oceans and their rambling edges. Sticks complicate grass. Grass complicates sand. The ground and every thousand thing on top of it. Curves and lumps. Uneven clouds. But click the clock radio through am to pm, spin the equal sphere like a sonic hedgehog. The leaves live the leaves fall, the leaves live the leaves die.
This story, so far removed in psychic distance, is at an extreme pole of Glasers’ style: hyper self-conscious, dripping with irony, full of subtle and not-so-subtle pop-culture references. At times this combination can pull the reader from the story, but far more often Glaser manages to implicate the reader in her imaginative tales instead. A recent nod as one of the top twenty fiction titles of last year by The Believer‘s readers (alongside such venerable heavyweights as Martin Amis, Jennifer Egan, and some guy named Franzen) speaks to this success. The result is a collection that is inventive and original, touching as well as hilarious, and surprising in all the best ways.
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
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Walking to Hollywood, by Will Self. Reviewed by Paul Di Filippo (Barnes and Noble Review).
This book sounds a bit to me like The Erasers, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, which I like very much. Still, descriptions like “Surreal, scurrilous, solipsistic, sarcastic, and sardonic” make me a little wary, since I don’t want to read any Tao Lin. You can check out the review and decide for yourself what you think, but how can you not want to read a book described thusly?:
If Neorealist gloom-puss Michelangelo Antonioni had directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, from a script by J. G. Ballard, S. J. Perelman, and Jean Baudrillard, starring Scooby Doo, the Marx Brothers, Laura Harring, and the ghost of Orson Welles, the result might very well have approximated Will Self’s latest offering, Walking to Hollywood
Embassytown, by China Miéville. Reviewed by James Purdon (Guardian).
I’ve got 2 or 3 of Miéville’s books on my shelf, but can never seem to get around to reading them. The descriptions of his novels tend to hook me enough to pick up the books, then release me from the line before I can actually open them. Most every major paper has a review of this sci-fi book out, so there’s a fair degree of hype. And once again, I find myself pretty intrigued: Purdon describes Embassytown as a work that “reminds us so ingeniously and enjoyably of the conditions of fiction, and of the power that fictional language retains to shape and reshape our transactions with the world” and relates it to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and works by political writers like Orwell, Burgess, Delany, and Lessing, among others. Seems pretty heavy for a book that takes place on a far planet and is chock full of aliens. I’m into it.
Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino. Reviewed by Wendy Smith (Los Angeles Times).
I’ve been long fascinated with ancient sculptures. It’s not uncommon for me to spend an enitre museum trip walking circles around the rooms with the ancient Greek and Roman marble figures that once adorned temples and coliseums. Of course, in order to get them to that museum, someone more or less had to steal these sculpture from ruins. These days, there’s more or less a process for doing this legitimately (namely, pay the country that houses the ruins), but there’s still plenty of room for nefariousness, even on the part of major museums. Chasing Aphrodite is a “scathing account” of the Getty Museum’s “ethically dubious activities in the antiquities market over the course of more than a quarter-century.” The book sounds pretty interesting, almost like a slow-mo art heist caper. The review’s worth a look to see if the book is up your alley.
[Deserted Isle Books is our latest series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
My choice for a deserted isle book was immediate, and so were my doubts. I read poetry every day. The bookshelves in my bedroom (not to mention the bedside tables and several stacks on the floor) are all poetry. I feel like a traitor to the cause at the mere thought of choosing a novel over Rilke’s Duino Elegies or Alan Dugan’s Poems 7. But there was no other choice; it had to be Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years Of Solitude.
Perhaps this is because I’m taking the premise literally. I’m not choosing a favorite book. I’m choosing the one book I think might best stave off madness and despair if I had nothing else to read (and little else to do) for the rest of my life. I would need intrigue, tragedy, politics, humor, mystery, romance, and violence. I would need memorable scenes, great dialogue, and some way to hang elements of my lost life and lost world on this one book.
An excellent book of poems will give you all of those things. But only the epics such as the Odyssey or the Aeneid (come on, David Ferry, we’re waiting!) give you a long, complex story with many characters to keep you company. And it is precisely those two things: company and a story, that are necessary. Left with nothing but the four walls of my mind to scratch against in an exile of unknowable, perhaps interminable, duration, I would need a sense of time passing, the this, then that of plot to give structure to my life. … Continue reading »
Issue #1 is probably the best thing you'll ever read (until you find your own writing in Issue #2)
After the success of our first issue, we’re excited for what’s to come in Issue #2 of our new literary magazine C4. We’re currently looking for more fiction, poetry, nonfiction, visual art, and almost anything else you might like to submit. As with the previous issue we’ll be publishing accepted pieces in a variety of formats: on a dedicated page, in an ebook available through several major ebookstores, and as a paperback version available from the Harvard Bookstore.
Issue #2 is planned for a fall launch, so we’re looking for submissions ASAP, and we’re giving special consideration to pieces submitted before July 1.
And hey, while we’re at it: in addition to our first issue, we also put together a pretty slick collection of some of the best fiction from around the web in 2009/2010. The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology is still available as a free ebook, or as a paperback.
Irish Thoroughbred is Nora Robert’s first novel. My book club chose it as a vacation from all the backbreakingly serious books (Townie, Just Kids) we’ve been mucking through. As expected, it’s an easy read, crushable in a single day. And although it’s a vapid book,it offers several steamy moments and a comfortably predictable plotline (much like a Lifetime Original movie).
We follow Adelia, a poor Irish orphan who immigrates to the US to work with her uncle, a handon a horse ranch. Aside from the uncle, the only other character worth noting is the young boss, a wealthy landowner and horse breeder named Travis. Predictably enough, Travis and Adelia are beautiful, bull-headed, and destined to be together, just as soon as they overcome a few obstacles.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t only the love story that was predictable. Roberts’s characters embody every old-fashioned romance-novel stereotype possible. Adelia is the quintessential damsel in distress. She’s tiny, feisty, and rather dumb (it’s 1981 and, OK, she’s a country bumpkin, but still, she’s excessively impressed by the airport, a dishwasher, indoor fountains at the mall…). … Continue reading »
