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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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By Eric Markowsky, on August 10th, 2010 [This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Bruno Schulz
1977, Viking Penguin
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
Originally written for an audience of one, Bruno Schulz composed the first draft of The Street of Crocodiles in a series of letters to a friend. After editing, publishing, republishing, and translation, these stories still retain the intimacy of personal correspondence. Each one invites you into the narrator’s life, his city, home, and family, and insists that you stay, not just for supper, not just for the night, but as a guest in one of the extra rooms at the top of the stairs.
It’s neither a novel nor a conventional story collection. While characters and conflicts reappear throughout, there’s no continuous narrative arc, and though each piece has its own peculiar preoccupations, the setting and the narrator remain constant from one to the next. It reads like both a childhood memoir and a work of mythology, at once willfully domestic and larger than life. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on August 2nd, 2010 [A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]
 The first years of my life that I can remember were spent in a sunny apartment on the edge of campus in a small New Hampshire college town. There was a big front porch we shared with the other families in our building, and a willow tree out back where the neighborhood kids gathered to start games of freeze tag.
Then, just before I started school, my family moved into a house farther out from the center of town. You couldn’t see our closest neighbors through the trees, and they wouldn’t have heard you if you shouted. The land behind us was part of a nature preserve, 163 acres of woods and wildlife. It was quiet at night and dark. There weren’t even any streetlights.
These are all things I love about the house I grew up in now, but I remember being scared of everything then, scared of the silence, scared when I heard a sound, scared of the dark woods at night, scared of the shadows beneath the trees in the day. My parents didn’t have much experience in the outdoors, and neither was much help dispelling whatever terror I saw when I stared out our kitchen windows. My mother worried about bears, and her worries only confirmed my belief that there was something out there. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on July 13th, 2010  Author: Nicole Krauss
2005, W.W. Norton & Company
Filed Under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Nicole Krauss was recently named one of the “20 Under 40” writers in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue. After reading The History of Love, it’s easy to see why. This is a beautifully crafted, multifaceted novel about love, survival, and deceit. The writing is consistently strong across a number of distinct voices, each one funny and lyrical without being indulgent. It’s a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to know that such a talent is at work today.
Leopold Gursky is a lonely aging immigrant living on his own in Brooklyn. Alma Singer is a lonely teenage girl living with her withdrawn mother and eccentric brother also in Brooklyn. Besides geography, all that connects them is a book called The History of Love, a book about another Alma and all the ways to fall in love with her. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on July 7th, 2010 
[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Bernard Malamud
1966, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings…..out of |
10 |
| Language….. |
9 |
| Entertainment….. |
7 |
| Depth….. |
9 |
I didn’t know much about Bernard Malamud before I read The Fixer. I’d heard his name before, but that was where it ended. Not one of his books appeared on any syllabus in any class I took in undergrad or in graduate school, and only one person ever recommended him to me. So now I’m a little miffed that I’ve only just discovered him. How did I miss this? Forget that Malamud won a couple of National Book Awards and the Pulitzer, forget that there’s a PEN award named after him, this is just some of the best prose I’ve ever read. His name belongs next to Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, and The Fixer belongs next to some of the most important books of the 20th century. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on June 10th, 2010 [This novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Edward P. Jones
2003, Amistad
Filed Under Literary, Historical
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
It’s difficult to decide where to start discussing The Known World. The novel opens and closes in 1855 on the plantation of Henry Townsend, a black slave-owner living in Manchester County, Virginia. In between, the narrative casts so far into the past and the future that beginnings and endings seem to merge. The past is ever present, and the future provides historical context for events yet to pass. The Known World begins and ends in nearly every paragraph.
I admit it’s confusing at first. The prose is full of time cues, reminding the reader of where the story is and of the order in which certain events fall. You’ll probably have to reread early passages or even the entire first chapter, but once you get used to the rhythm of it, my guess is you’ll be hooked. Jones’ manages to make all the temporal pointing sound like a refrain, and soon the novel starts to read like a long hymn to history. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on June 2nd, 2010  Author: Kurt Vonnegut
2005, Seven Stories Press
Filed Under Literary, Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Calling these pieces essays would be misleading. They’re more like rants, and, like most rants, they sometimes sound repetitive and oversimplified. But these rants are backed by too much gravity and experience to be dismissed. In tone and style, they offer everything fans have come to expect from Vonnegut, spare, humorous prose, overflowing equally with compassion and venom. In content, A Man Without a Country offers an unfiltered look into the mind of a master craftsman with a hell of a lot to rant about.
When the book came out in 2005, Vonnegut already saw so much wrong with the direction the US had taken into the twenty-first century. After everything he had seen and done in the twentieth century, he damn well wasn’t going to keep quiet. From American exceptionalism in general, to the Bush administration in particular, Vonnegut decries the recent actions of a country which he feels has abandoned him and the principles he once went to war to protect. …
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