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By Eric Markowsky, on June 28th, 2011  Author: Richard Goodwin
2011, Seedpod Publishing
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Short-Run.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
Here’s a pretty good set up for a short story: Wicker, a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker trying to get to Vegas, scores a ride from Edna, a senile retired school teacher looking for the Pacific Ocean. There’s plenty of comic potential in the contrast of characters, but more than that there’s an opportunity to explore the strange ways that people use one another, taking turns lending direction and meaning to each other’s lives, helping and being helped, exploiting and being exploited.
Scattershot is what happens when you stretch that premise into a rambling novel by adding an irrelevant subplot about Edna’s unhappy son, Andrew, and refusing to see her senility as little more than a punch line. She bumbles along, always certain that she’s doing just what she means to be doing, never doubting, never angry, never afraid, ready to follow Wicker wherever he thinks they should go. The problem is, once he loses his bankroll in Vegas, Wicker is just as aimless as she is.
After that, all the aptly named Scattershot has to offer is the impulsive leading the senile with the sad tagging along. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 25th, 2011  Author: Jim Shepard
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Short Stories, Historical, Horror, Literary.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
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. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 2nd, 2011  So, okay, for starters, a deserted island book should be long. And sure, it should be complicated enough to make it worth reading and puzzling over again and again. Of course it should be both dense and entertaining in nearly lethal doses. But how about this? I want to be able to read it in any order I like, flip it open to any page and start anew, as if the first sentence my eyes landed on were the beginning of a whole new book, without any loss to the coherence of the whole.
It would also be nice if the book gave me something to do other than simply reading it for comprehension, a project beyond finishing it and then finishing it again. I’d like a book I that leant itself to memory, something with a little form and rhythm, so I could read it and read it until I knew it by heart.
That’s right. I’m talking about a book of poetry. Specifically, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on April 13th, 2011 Author: Téa Obreht
Random House, 2011
Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
With all the hype about the New Yorker’s 20 under 40, it’s nice to read a debut novel by one of their young authors that lives up to the marketing. The Tiger’s Wife is a captivating combination of history and fable. In her own life and in her grandfather’s stories, the narrator confronts questions of belief in the face of desire for understanding, for relief, and for release. Rather than resolving the world of the novel into one ruled by magic beyond human comprehension, the book’s fairytale elements only accentuate the challenges inherent in faith and doubt.
Natalia is on her way to a medical mission at an orphanage across the border when she receives news of the strange circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s death. Having lied to his wife about going to meet Natalia on her mission, he dies from an illness he’d long concealed, alone in the small town of Zdrevkov near the coast. Figuring out why he chose to slip away from his family to die among strangers drives his granddaughter out to the coast and into his past, into one story she knows and one she will learn. …
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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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