I haven't actually ever done any of those things (helped in part by the fact that I never had an ex and that I'm too uncool to know what channel "Jersey Shore" is on). But I suspect that anyone could look upon a blogger who enumerates her week's activities as a narcissist (for the record, I was just trying to make a point up there). Any memoirist (and heck, I've written five and am halfway through a sixth) could also be called one of those—you know—those. Any Facebooker who has ever logged a single status update could also get slammed with the term.
Before you get as offended as I did, allow me to explain. Sure, we're not all deranged homewreckers in pursuit of past glory. But if the era of Facebook and Twitter has fed any monsters, it's those of vanity, self-obsession, and immaturity. Who among us hasn't Googled an ex, or measured our own online social circle against that of a perceived rival, or snapped multiple "profile photos" in an attempt to find the best angle? Who hasn't caught herself watching an episode of "Jersey Shore" and thought, "I'm a grown-up. Why am I concerned with these people and their sex lives?
Movies don't do it justice—that's all I'm going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafes and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundreds of citizens who are pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down. But I didn't know that yet.
The day was breaking. There was still the tooth of the moon in the sky and that black fringe of storm, and she could hear the high slosh in the creek, the endless running forward to the sea. When she reached the footbridge, she stood for a moment and looked back toward the house—the big rectangle and the small one, the twin chimneys, the unsunk roof sloping forthright in two directions, the garden like a moat. Slick and stone and root.Steam had come in, a funnel of gnats and mosquitoes, the sudden gray heart of a squirrel on a limb above her head. Becca imagined the boy fishing for marlin in the stream, or sleeping on a bed of hawk-tail feathers. She imagined him alone in that room, that empty mirror, that barrette balanced on the apple’s glass stem, that jar of honey. The trees unfurled, a belligerent green. The crows were thick as thieves. On the prickle of the forest floor, Becca saw the wet back of a single beetle catching a nick of sun.
The novel is constructed of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the “meat grinder” of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind. The novel comprises mostly segments from his therapist- ordered memoir (or memoirs) and excerpts from his diary. These shards employ several narrative strategies. There are asterisked footnotes, italicized interruptions and self-reflexive comments about unreliability. There are first-, second- and third-person narrations, sometimes switching back and forth within a paragraph. This is a novel about struggling to find form for a chaotic experience. It pushes against convention, logic, chronology. But its disruptions are necessary. How do you write about war and the complications of memory? How do you write about dislocation, profound loneliness, terror? How does a human persevere?Truth is, I'd been eager to read Ismet Prcic's debut novel ever since I sat in the office of Lauren Wein, the book's editor, and listened to her read aloud from the opening passage. The book had only recently been released as advance reading copies and, judging from the number of brilliantly hued sticky notes attached to many of the pages, Lauren was still giving this book her extraordinary editorial attentions. I loved the sound of what she had read to me. I could not wait to read more. And then, caught up in the crazy swirl of my own life, I did wait, not buying the book until just recently.
I love a girl, Melissa. Her hair oozes like honey. It's orange in the sun. She loves me, mati. She's American. She goes to church. She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage. She volunteers. She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they're done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme. She's sharp. She drives like a lunatic. She's capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.
The question is frequently asked: Who are children's books for? I say the best of them are for all of us, at every age. And I can't think of a better family tale for this time of year than The Thanksgiving Visitor.
Tall for his age, a bony boy with muddy-red hair and narrow yellow eyes, he towered over all his classmates—would have in any event, for the rest of us were only seven or eight years old. Odd had failed first grade twice and was now serving his second term in the second grade. This sorry record wasn't due to dumbness—Odd was intelligent, maybe cunning is a better word—but he took after the rest of the Hendersons. The whole family (there were ten of them, not counting Dad Henderson, who was a bootlegger and usually in jail, all scrunched together in a four-room house next door to a Negro church) was a shiftless, surly bunch, every one of them ready to do you a bad turn; Odd wasn't the worst of the lot, and brother, that is saying something.
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.Read more...
The scent of jasmine drifts into the windows. Songbird season is over. No more gardenias: hurricane season. The trees have grown dense as rooftops; the plumeria hold their flower-tipped branches up like brides with golden corsages. Avis sits hunched forward, clinging to her tin: she can feel the metal chill through her blouse, all the way to the pit of her stomach. She'd forgotten to eat again.Read more...
The Grievers is a darkly comic coming of age novel for a generation that's still struggling to come of age.This Marc Schuster, I thought to myself, has a sense of humor.
When Charley Schwartz learns that an old high school pal has killed himself, he agrees to help his alma mater organize a memorial service to honor his fallen comrade. Soon, however, devastation turns to disgust as Charley discovers that his friend's passing means less to the school than the bottom line. As the memorial service quickly degenerates into a fundraising fiasco, Charley must also deal with a host of other quandaries including a dead-end job as an anthropomorphic dollar sign, his best friend's imminent move to Maryland, an intervention with a drug-addled megalomaniac, and his own ongoing crusade to enforce the proper use of apostrophes among the proprietors of local dining establishments.....Yes. That's right. An anthropomorphic dollar sign. It has glitter, people. It sheds. Charley Schwartz hobbles around inside it, conducting this memorial-making business by phone. The phone? It too is a character in The Grievers. I'm now quoting from the book itself:
Through no fault of my own, my cell phone played the theme from The Jeffersons whenever I received an incoming call, so when Neil got back to me, the sweaty silence of my big, boxy costume was broken by the sound of a gospel choir singing about moving on up to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.Seriously.
Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.Dr. Lepore, whose work in The New Yorker always thrills me and whose mind seems to track one curiosity after the other—Charles Dickens, Planned Parenthood, the Tea Party, Stuart Little, (she's even got a co-authored novel to her name)—is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American history at Harvard University. She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engaging Andrew Bacevich as a Distinguished speaker in the series.
Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.
At 17, he ran away from home. At 15, she married: she was probably pregnant, as were, at the time, a third of all brides. She and her brother wrote to each other all their lives: they were each other’s dearest friends. (He wrote more letters to her than to anyone.) His letters are learned, warm, funny, delightful; hers are misspelled, fretful and full of sorrow. “Nothing but troble can you her from me,” she warned. It’s extraordinary that she could write at all.
“I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed.
He would have none of it. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.” He was, sadly, right.
She had one child after another; her husband, a saddler named Edward Mecom, grew ill, and may have lost his mind, as, most certainly, did two of her sons. She struggled, and failed, to keep them out of debtors’ prison, the almshouse, asylums. She took in boarders; she sewed bonnets. She had not a moment’s rest.
And still, she thirsted for knowledge. “I Read as much as I Dare,” she confided to her brother. She once asked him for a copy of “all the Political pieces” he had ever written. “I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails,” he joked. He sent her what he could; she read it all. But there was no way out.
You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." That very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.
I have written many times here about my dear friend James Lecesne. I have written about his talents, his kindness, his soul. James stands behind the renowned and supremely humane Trevor Project—"determined to end suicide among LGBTQ youth by providing life saving and life-affirming resources." (Click here to watch Harry Potter's own Daniel Radcliffe talk, with James, about Trevor.) James also, as you know if you read this blog, was a pivotal force behind "After the Storm"—an arts-based initiative, a documentary film, and an ongoing effort to support the young people of Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. "After the Storm," not incidentally, is also full-on proof that the faith we place in the arts is wise and fertile.
I have watched the "After the Storm" trailers for a long time (repeatedly!), read the reviews, talked to James. But yesterday my own copy of the DVD arrived. Bill and I ate an early dinner so that we could sit and watch it.
This, my friends, is a movie that can change your life. This is also an opportunity to make a difference by investing in a DVD you will watch again and again.
Please do.
You Are My Only is an emotional powerhouse drawing redemption out of the shattered pieces of lives rendered asunder by a single event. Through faith and love these characters can begin the heal, rebuild, and flourish. What more could readers ask for? Stunning, precious, and captivating from beginning to end.Thank you so much, Serena. Read more...
This next and final version is, in my opinion, what the passage needed to be. The useless repetition of "sore" has been replaced with a more realized vision, and a small story.I nod. My breasts are swollen sore above the lump of you. I don’t get sick anymore. I don’t sit on the bathroom floor fisting the toilet, or lie there afterward, sobbing. I don’t. But everywhere I’m sore.
My sentence obsession was inspired by NaNoWriMo, and is part of this contest. A signed copy of Small Damages or You Are My Only will be sent to the winner, as well as a celebratory moment on this blog.I nod. My breasts are swollen sore above the lump of you. I don’t get sick anymore. I don’t sit on the bathroom floor fisting the toilet, or lie there afterward, sobbing. I don’t. But everywhere is the flail of you, your necklace of bones, your hardly skin, your fingernails; you already have them. In health class, eighth grade, we watched the movie, we saw how it is. The pearl squiggled out with a tail. The curl like a fish protecting. The webbing in between, just temporary.
Only the shadowsRead more...
know
the secrets
of closed houses,
only the forbidden wind
and the moon that shines
on the roof
She hid the photographs beside the Leica beneath the bed. She told Vin that she had been out in the garden and had turned to see a family of deer at the forest's edge. She gave great detail to a lie too easily spun: She had seen a buck and two does, and she had chased them.
She hid the photographs beneath the bed, made up some story. There had been deer, she said, at the forest's edge—a buck and two does by the stream. They had stood there not moving, or perhaps one cusped ear of the buck had shivered—a sign, Becca told Vin, a beckoning.Read more...
Read more...In Siena she drank the Chianti Vin ordered. She walked beside him, down the crowded streets, in the shuffle between shops and bicycles and flower vendors, rounds of cheese, painted porcelain, trays of marbled paper. She walked among the bright silk flags that marked out each contrade—Unicorn, Snail, Caterpillar, Goose, Tortoise, Dragon, Eagle, Ram, Owl, Shell, Porcupine, Giraffe, Wave, Wolf, Panther, Forest, Tower—each with its own emblem and history of pride. The colored silks hung from poles and windows. They were draped across the shoulders of women and wrapped around the heads of men, and in every contrade, Vin bought Becca a scarf and knotted it around her waist until she wore a skirt of all Siena, and when the wind blew the colors flew up into her frames.She photographed second hands and steeples.She photographed herds of butterflies.She photographed Vin asleep, Vin in the window, framed by the quivering moon.
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