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By Eric Markowsky, on January 31st, 2011  Author: Millicent Borges Accardi
2010, Mischievous Muse Press
Filed Under: Poetry, Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Injuring Eternity offers readers a variety of voices, techniques, and subjects. There are first person confessions, third person narratives, and linguistically adventurous lyric poems. The work addresses family, love, politics, art, and religion. It tackles current events, popular culture, and spares a few asides for Miles Davis. It’s an ambitious collection that takes a lot of risks.
Unfortunately, that ambition isn’t always realized, and the risks don’t always pay off. Reading Injuring Eternity, I found myself starting and stopping, entranced one moment, puzzled the next. The good poems are good enough to make the weaker ones all the more disappointing. There’s a lot of talent in these verses, and a lot of promise, but overall the whole collection leaves an impression of potential rather than accomplishment. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on December 16th, 2010 
Author: Mark Helprin
1983, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Filed under: Fantasy
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Since the cold weather has settled in for the winter, I’ve been thinking about good seasonal reads. You can’t do much better than Winter’s Tale. It’s an epic urban fantasy set largely in New York City, first at the end of the 19th century and later vaulting deep into the 20th. Filled with orphans, thieves, priests, police, machinists, wise old men, and powerful women of incomparable beauty, Winter’s Tale offers a classic adventure story in strangely modern dress.
The long and winding plot is a little difficult to summarize. The novel is divided into four sections, each one seeming to reset the story in a new place or time. Its nearly seven-hundred page bulk might turn away some potential readers, but I found its size made it an even better winter read. It’s a great book to lose yourself in when it’s cold outside. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on November 18th, 2010 [Every day this week, we're posting a quick description of a story from The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology. Comment on this post---or any other post before Friday (11/19/10) at midnight---for a chance to win a paperback copy of the anthology. More details here. Follow the whole series here.]
The Next Thing on Benefit, by Castle Freeman, Jr.
 Sharon isn’t in the habit of running away to tropical islands with strange, wealthy men, but when she wanders into the seemingly charmed life of Duncan Munro, it seems like a good time to try something new. Her last real lover is only a memory, and Duncan isn’t like any other man she’s ever known. He’s honest about keeping secrets. He says nothing about his business or his family life. He tells her that there are things he isn’t telling her. Going with Duncan may not be the best idea Sharon’s ever had, but it’s the one she has now. Joining Duncan and his British valet, Patrick, she takes off on the first private jet ride of her life to find out what can happen when you go to a private island in the Caribbean with a man you hardly know.
Read “The Next Thing on Benefit” in its original environment at the New England Review. Download the entire Chamber Four Fiction Anthology for free here.
By Eric Markowsky, on November 15th, 2010 
[Follow this series here. We're also compiling all our best books in one easy-to-browse page; find it by clicking the stamp, at left or anywhere else you see it on the site. That page will get updated as each new post comes out.]
If you’re looking for the Best Poetry of 2010, you might check out this year’s National Book Award nominees, or you might see who won this year’s William Carlos Williams Award or Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. If you’re a reader like me, then you know there’re piles of good poetry collections published every year, more than we could hope to read before the next batch starts appearing.
But, if you’re still looking for more good poetry, here are three of my personal favorites from 2010 and one to get excited about in early 2011.
Charles Simic is one of my all time favorite poets. His often short lyrics are frank and funny in a way that never seems forced or merely ironic. One of his most memorable poems (maybe especially for a male reader) is called “Breasts,” and its power lies in the sincerity of its declarations:
I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,
That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For the one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.
Master of Disguises offers familiar sincerity and humor in its imagery. In the title poem, on the lookout for the Master of Disguises, the speaker says, “I wouldn’t even rule out the black cat crossing the street.” It’s a funny line because it’s not a joke. Because in this poem and others like it, “Scribbled in the Dark” and “The Elusive Something,” poems about confrontations with mystery, no potential clue can be ruled out, not “The face of a girl carrying a white dress” or “the sight of a building blackened by fire / where I once went looking for work.” …
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By Eric Markowsky, on November 8th, 2010  I’m a habitual rereader. I love revisiting favorite sentences and scenes, and I love rediscovering moments in a story I’d forgotten. So it was a special surprise when rereading A Clockwork Orange last week to find a final chapter I didn’t remember at all. How had I missed this?
Anthony Burgess explains in his introduction to this 1986 addition:
My New York publisher believed that my twenty-first chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don’t you know. It was bland and it showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil.
The first time I read A Clockwork Orange in high school, I must have borrowed an older American edition from my local library. Kubrick’s screen adaptation sticks so closely to the American version that it never occurred to me that anything might be missing from either the novel or the film.
But there is something missing. The American version ends with Alex’s deconditioning. The British version and this new(er) American edition reveals what happens after Alex regains his capacity for evil: in Burgess’s words, “my young thuggish protagonist grows up.” He decides to give up his violent ways to look for a wife.
It’s a bizarre turn, and it’s the ending Burgess intended, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he gets the last word. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on November 2nd, 2010  This election season, I haven’t been reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the New Yorker or the National Review. Not too much anyways. I’ve been reading All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s political saga about the rise and fall of Willie Stark, a pig farmer turned Governor based on Louisiana’s Huey Long. It has been, in turns, assuring and infuriating.
You don’t have to look any further than this classic to see that the winning narrative in American politics has long been the same. A newcomer can always score points by shouting about what the incumbent isn’t doing. It’s easy for an outsider to align himself with the people who aren’t in charge—most everyone else—by saying that he’s one of them and his opponent is different (rich, elitist, Muslim, etc.).
It’s a familiar story, and it wins elections, but it fails once the disenfranchised becomes the franchise. Populism is always and everywhere about not having to choose, because “we” are right, and therefore should compromise nothing. But governing is always about having to choose, and until you’ve compromised you’ve never had to make a choice. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 28th, 2010 [Eric had to read this book and review it because of reader votes in Junk Novel Roulette. Find more JNR here.]
 Author: Bertrice Small
1997, Ivy Books
Note: [We're not scoring or filing JNR books as reviews--that's just too mean.]
When I received my Junk Novel Roulette assignment, I made it my mission to love Hellion. I promised the other C4 editors I would write a glowing review, and I would do it without my tongue in my cheek. No irony. No sarcasm. Just pure adoration.
It was an impossible promise, but during my MFA I heard a lot about genre fiction versus literary fiction. Usually, people made the distinction as an off-handed dis, like “It’s just chick-lit” or “Doesn’t this seem science-fictiony?” All I learned from these accusations was that I never wanted to be one of those readers who presumed to hold a monopoly on taste.
Whether I like it or not, though, I am one of those readers. I thought I could love a mass-market medieval adventure romance about a “brazen beauty” named Belle because I assumed, without ever having read a romance novel, that I knew what cheap thrills I would find there. Having finished Hellion, I can’t say I loved it, but I was surprised by it, by all the ways it did and did not fit the mold in my head.
I expected sex; I did not expect porn. I expected bad writing; I didn’t know the half of it. I expected plot; I never imagined I would find it, even if only in part, so gripping. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 4th, 2010 [This is the first in our series of interviews with authors featured in our anthology of outstanding stories from the web, The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology. You can find more information about the anthology and download it for free here, and you can find all interviews and bonus content here.
Angie Lee is the author of "Eupcaccia,"* which originally appeared in Witness.
Eric interviewed Angie by gchat.]
The Chickens’ septic system had always been a “ball breaker,” and the way it “worked” had all three of them practicing the ancient art of inhalation and retention before crossing the threshold. Even without the contributions of Mr. Chicken over the last few years, the tank “kept its own way of thinking,” and Mrs. Chicken tried everything (short of liquefying the load before sending it down, and Malchicken had to threaten her with a kitchen knife before she conceded to let go of the blender) to keep the flow moving.
eric: Where did the idea for this story come from?
angie: I guess I need to start out by saying the story is part of a much larger piece/novel that I’ve been working on for a long time. My roommate in art school (who I think is responsible for every great idea I have) told me about the Eupcaccia bug from Kobo Abe’s book. I based the story on the memory of her description. I didn’t actually read the book until after I finished writing the story. I had the name misspelled for years.
eric: So the whole story sort of emerged from that reference to a bug that lives on it’s own feces? What struck you about this image?
angie: Shall I admit to loving poo? …
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By Eric Markowsky, on September 1st, 2010  Author: Thom Jones
1995, Little, Brown, & Company
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
I loved Thom Jones’s debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest, so I was thrilled to find parallels to his previous work everywhere when I started Cold Snap. His protagonists are still hyped up on life and drugs, desperate, terminally ill, caught in extreme situations or else throwing themselves into disaster. His prose still manages the precision of surgery with the pacing of a car chase. Ad Magic, the amnesiac hero of one of my favorite stories from the previous collection, even makes an appearance.
So if you liked Pugilist at Rest, then there’s a lot to like in Cold Snap. Unfortunately, there’s not much else. For me, these stories were a confirmation of Jones’s talent and a strange disappointment. No single story disappointed me completely, but neither did any deliver with the same force as the best stories in Pugilist, and most of the stories here offered only echoes of Jones’s earlier work. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on August 19th, 2010  Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers
2009, Penguin Books
Filed Under: Literary, Fantasy, Horror, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Here’s one thing not to do with these stories. Don’t leave them on your bedside table so you can read one each night before going to sleep. They aren’t the scariest stories you’ll ever read, but they are warped little tales that will send your dreams off in strange directions over barren, unmarked terrain.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is one of the best-known Russian authors writing today, and this collection offers English-speaking readers an introduction to the supernatural side of her work. These stories range from classic ghost stories to apocalyptic allegories, with a few lighter touches in between. They all bring the straightforward manner of a fairy tale to a contemporary Russian landscape, where there are asylums and hospitals instead of dungeons, and where destiny can take the form of true love or mandatory government service. …
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