Saturday, May 31, 2014

Courtney Moreno's "In Case of Emergency" (McSweeney's, Sept. 2014)



While in grad school at USF, I got to read a lot of really fantastic writing by people from all over the country. One of those people became a good friend and sometimes writing partner when we both needed someone to kick our asses into gear to pump out pages. Cue Courtney Moreno...EMT, dancer, writer, and a slew of other superlatives that would be far too long to post here.

I had the immense pleasure of having Courtney in my last two workshops, so I got to read the very early drafts of her novel that's coming out in September courtesy of the good folks at Dave Eggers' publishing imprint, McSweeney's. "In Case of Emergency," her debut novel, started off as a short story published first in LA Weekly (read here), which was then picked up and published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010, which I only found out about by accident while shopping at City Lights one evening. Pretty awesome surprise.

While I haven't had a chance to read the most recent incarnation of EMT Piper's story about ambulance work in South Central L.A. or her struggles in dealing with her lover's PTSD from the Iraq war, I'd bet my entire year's salary that it will knock your socks off based purely on what I was able to read in its infancy.



What others are already saying about the book: 

In Case of Emergency is a dark love song, dark as a bruise, for the L.A. no one seems to see, but it's also a careening, haunted, and hilarious ride. I will never look at a human ear, or hear a distant siren, the same way again.”
—Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here


“Piper may be a rookie with a lot to learn, but Moreno’s inspiring debut reads like it’s been written by someone with years of experience already under her belt.”
—K.M. Soehnlein, author of Robin and Ruby


In Case of Emergency is a fine novel about coping with trauma. The EMS scenes are raw and believable and struck me as not exaggerated or excessive in any way. And though it will most likely be classed as 'medical fiction,' what happens outside the ambulance is just as gripping. In the end I was left with a feeling of dignity and humanity. A heartfelt execution of an engaging story.”
 —Shannon Burke, author of Black Flies


“You can't decide whether you want to slap or hug Piper, but the pleasures of getting to know her are undeniable. You root for her in the hopes that the world is generous and that even the flawed will know love. A big-hearted novel that will make you vow to love, however imperfectly, that much harder.”
—Alice Wu, screenwriter/ director of Saving Face


“Moreno writes about physical and emotional damage with such precision that the reader feels supine, strapped into her own ambulance, careening from page to page. It's a story about the greatest emergency of all: the plight of being a human with a fragile heart, beating amidst all these dangers.”
—Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me


“In Courtney Moreno's In Case of Emergency the working class save the world and themselves. A wonderful first book!”
—Ali Liebegott, author of Cha-Ching!


In Case of Emergency is here for you. To startle you into awareness. To remind you once again of the visceral urgency of desire, the urgency of fear, of loss, and of the fear of loss. To teach you about the eerie structures that undergird all that desire and fear and loss: organs and city streets, nerves and neighborhood maps, bones and veins and arteries. The patterns we use to make meaning from chaos. Also: the mysterious allure of risk, fear, and disaster. The calamitous pleasures of a thumping heart. You’ll love this book.”
—Stephen Beachy, author of boneyard




Courtney has a website up (http://www.courtneymoreno.com/), which will continue to pump out information on reading dates and releases as they come, but I'm posting it all here as well. Keep checking her website for updates, future readings and future publications.

And seriously...go get this book. Pre-order it, buy it for family members, whatever.


Reading Events: 
June 6, 2014
LitCamp @ 7pm
Sports Basement, 1590 Bryant St.
San Francisco, CA. 

September 9, 2014
RADAR @ 6pm
Main Library, 100 Larkin St. 
San Francisco, CA. 

September 16, 2014
LAUNCH PARTY
Booksmith @ 7:30pm
1644 Haight St. 
San Francisco, CA. 

October 18, 2014
LitCrawl with the Rumpus @ 8:30pm
TBD
San Francisco, CA. 


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Sunday, May 4, 2014

Books on Deck / Up Next



"Bestario" - Julio Cortazar

“In these eight masterpieces there is no room for the smallest sign of stumbling or youthful undertones: they are perfect. These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to another dimension, one of nightmare or revelation. In each text, surprise and uneasiness are ingredients added to the indescribable pleasure of its reading. These stories may upset readers due to a very rare characteristic in literature: They stare at us as if waiting for something in return. After reading these true classics, our opinion of the world cannot remain the same.”




"The Bestiary" - Nicholas Christopher

“From “a writer of remarkable gifts,” “Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny—the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark.

Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.


Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.”





"Blow-up and Other Stories" - Julio Cortazar

“A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams . . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.”

Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.


Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.”






"The Club Dumas" - Arturo Perez-Reverte

“Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world.”





"Cronopios and Famas" - Julio Cortazar

“’The Instruction Manual,’ the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator's family, including the lodging of a tiger-just one tiger- ‘for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity.’ Finally, the "Cronopios and Famas" section delightfully characterizes, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, ‘those enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity-a band of literary Marx Brothers.’ As the Saturday Review remarked; ‘Each page of Cronopios and Famas sparkles with vivid satire that goes to the heart of human character and, in the best pieces, to the essence of the human condition.’”




"Locke & Key" - Joe Hill

“Locke & Key tells of Keyhouse, an unlikely New England mansion, with fantastic doors that transform all who dare to walk through them, and home to a hate-filled and relentless creature that will not rest until it forces open the most terrible door of them all! Acclaimed suspense novelist and New York Times best-selling author Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box) creates an all-new story of dark fantasy and wonder, with astounding artwork from Gabriel Rodriguez.”





"Icelander" - Dustin Long

“A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie — a madcap mystery in the deceptive tradition of The Crying of Lot 49 — Pale Fire meets The Da Vinci Code? Icelander is the debut novel from a brilliant new mind, an intricate, giddy Icelandic lore and pulpy intrigue.


When Our Heroine’s dear friend is found murdered, it’s an obvious job for her mother, a legendary crime-solver and evil-thwarter. But her mother is dead, and Our Heroine has no interest in inheriting the business, or being chased through a sewer, or listening to skaldic karaoke, or fleeing the inhuman Refusirkir, or — But Evil has no interest in her interests, and thus: adventure ensues.”




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Saturday, March 1, 2014

Upcoming Publications in 2014

So this year is shaping up to be a good one for me, at least in terms of publications. Had some good news come my way in January about some new writings that have been picked up for upcoming publication.


I.

Fox Spirit's "Girl at the End of the World" anthology. My piece "Only So Far" will be in Book 1 of a two-book series. Click the link below for more information. Check the cover art below that. I'm not sure if the books will be available on Amazon, but they will most certainly be available through the site. 








II.

Arriving in the Spring 2014 issue of the Serving House Journal is a brand new piece from the newest collection of stories I'm working on (tentatively titled "The Machinery of the Heart: Love Stories"). The piece itself is called "The Department" and is told in a reverse narrative. I'm pretty happy with it and I'm glad it got picked up as quickly as it did. 





III.

Later this Summer, the Eunoia Review will be publishing "The Memory of a Gypsy Moth," a story about a rural family forced to live in an unthinkable way with unthinkable results. A pretty dark piece, even for me. 







IV. 

Sometime later this summer, Lunch Ticket, an online journal based in Los Angeles at Antioch College, will be publishing the title piece of my last collection, "Scaring the Stars into Submission." It will be spotlighted in the "Amuse Bouche" section of their site they call a "bi-monthly literary offering to whet your appetite." 







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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Books on Deck / Up Next


 "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" by George Saunders

"In this debut collection of seven dystopian fantasies, some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper's, America in the near future is a toxic wasteland overrun by vicious thugs and venal opportunists who prey on the weak and misshapen. Saunders's feverish imagination conjures up images as horrific as any from a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a field full of braying mules toppled over from bone marrow disease; a tourist attraction featuring pickled stillborn babies; and cows with Plexiglas windows in their sides. The black humor and vision of American enterprise and evangelism gone haywire are reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's early works. In the novella "Bounty," for example, the clawed-foot narrator, who flees slavery under the "Normals" to find his sister, sees a McDonald's that is the headquarters of the Church of Appropriate Humility, aka "the Guilters." "In Guilter epistemology," he observes, "the arches represent the twin human frailties of arrogance and mediocrity." Despite the richness of the vision and the occasionally heart-melting prose, however, there is little difference in voice to distinguish one story from another. Read in one sitting, they blur into a bleak and unsettling vision of the world to come."



"The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind" 
by Michio Kaku 

"For the first time in history, the secrets of the living brain are being revealed by a battery of high tech brain scans devised by physicists. Now what was once solely the province of science fiction has become a startling reality. Recording memories, telepathy, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis are not only possible; they already exist. 
The Future of the Mind gives us an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world—all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics.  One day we might have a "smart pill" that can enhance our cognition; be able to upload our brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; send thoughts and emotions around the world on a "brain-net"; control computers and robots with our mind; push the very limits of immortality; and perhaps even send our consciousness across the universe. 
          
Dr. Kaku takes us on a grand tour of what the future might hold, giving us not only a solid sense of how the brain functions but also how these technologies will change our daily lives. He even presents a radically new way to think about "consciousness" and applies it to provide fresh insight into mental illness, artificial intelligence and alien consciousness.  

With Dr. Kaku's deep understanding of modern science and keen eye for future developments, The Future of the Mind is a scientific tour de force--an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience."




"Galveston" by Nic Pizzolatto 

"From the creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO crime series True Detective, comes a dark and visceral literary debut set along the seedy wastelands of Galveston.

On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.

Before Roy makes his getaway, he realizes there are two women in the apartment, one of them still breathing, and he sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a fateful decision. He takes her with him as he goes on the run from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas—an action as ill-advised as it is inescapable. The girl’s name is Rocky, and she is too young, too tough, too sexy—and far too much trouble. Roy, Rocky, and her sister hide in the battered seascape of Galveston’s country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes. Any chance that they will find safety there is soon lost. Rocky is a girl with quite a story to tell, one that will pursue and damage Roy for a very long time to come.

Recalling the moody violence of the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, this powerful, potent, and atmospheric thriller is impossible to put down. Constructed with maximum tension and haunting aftereffect, written in darkly beautiful prose, Galveston announces the arrival of a major new literary talent."




"MaddAddam" by Margaret Atwood 

"The final entry in Atwood's brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire. The novel begins where Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood end, just after most of the human species has been eradicated by a man-made plague. The early books explore a world of terrifying corporate tyranny, horrifying brutality, and the relentless rape of women and the planet. In Oryx and Crake, the pandemic leaves wounded protagonist Jimmy to watch over the Crakers, a humanoid species bioengineered to replace humankind by the man responsible for unleashing the plague.

In The Year of the Flood, MaddAddamites wield science to terrorize corporate villains while God's Gardeners use prayer and devotion to the Earth to prepare for the approaching cataclysm. Toby, a God's Gardener and key character in the second book, narrates the third installment, in which a few survivors, including MaddAddamites, God's Gardeners, Jimmy, and the Crakers, navigate a postapocalyptic world. Toby is reunited with Zeb, her MaddAddamite romantic interest in Year of the Flood, and the two become leaders and defenders of their new community. The survivors are a traumatized, cynical group with harshly tested self-preservation skills, but they have the capacity for love and self-sacrifice, which in a simpler story would signal hope for the future of humankind.


However, Atwood dramatizes the importance of all life so convincingly that readers will hesitate to assume that the perpetuation of a species as destructive as man is the novel's central concern. With childlike stubbornness, even the peaceful Crakers demand mythology and insist on deifying people whose motives they can't understand. Other species genetically engineered for exploitation by now-extinct corporations roam the new frontier; some are hostile to man, including the pigoons—a powerful and uniquely perceptive source of bacon and menace. Threatening humans, Crakers, and pigoons are Painballers—former prisoners dehumanized in grotesque life-or-death battles. The Crakers cannot fight, the bloodthirsty Painballers will not yield, and the humans are outnumbered by the pigoons. Happily, Atwood has more surprises in store. Her vision is as affirming as it is cautionary, and the conclusion of this remarkable trilogy leaves us not with a sense of despair at mankind's failings but with a sense of awe at humanity's barely explored potential to evolve."



"Museum of the Weird" by Amelia Gray 

"Cannibalism, serial killing, a snake farm, and medical oddities are among the topics covered in Gray's (AM/PM) award-winning second collection. Resisting conventional advice as to what should serve as legitimate fuel for fiction, Gray allows taboos and curiosities (including animals conversing in a bar) to hold court with viscerally affecting scenarios that rival Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not. A delicious taste for the absurd (a man who marries a bag of frozen tilapia; a woman who births a child per day over the course of several days) results in an accomplished take on the increasingly popular flash fiction form. Gray's 24 tales go well beyond the amuse-bouche, presenting eclectic personas with a macabre wit, challenging readers to suspend their disbelief, and mining deep emotional reserves beneath initially eye-catching material. What could be mistaken for sameness is instead a purposeful vision, relentless in its inquisitive march along the fringes of human solitude."



"Tenth of December" by George Saunders 

"George Saunders' first short-story collection in six years, Tenth of December is as profound and moving as it is entertaining. Saunders' wonderful ability to portray a character's inner monologue--the secret voices, the little fantasies, the inside jokes, the spots of sadness--might be his greatest talent as a writer. But he is also expert at parceling out details to hook the reader and nudge the story in whatever direction he wants it to go. While these stories are generally more straightforward than we’re used to seeing from this author, the turns they take are constantly surprising. Saunders is an American original, a writer gifted at expressing the irony and absurdity all around us and inside us, but his ultimate goal is to show us something deeper: Our lives are composed of genuine experiences that deserve to be taken seriously."



"The Great Frustration" by Seth Fried 

"Channeling Steven Millhauser by way of George Saunders, The Great Frustration is a sparkling debut, equal parts fable and wry satire. Seth Fried balances the dark—a town besieged, a yearly massacre, the harem of a pathological king—with moments of sweet optimism—researchers unexpectedly inspired by discovery, the triumph of a doomed monkey, the big implications found in a series of tiny creatures.

In “Loeka Discovered,” a buzz flows throughout a lab when scientists unearth a perfectly preserved prehistoric man who suggests to them the hopefulness of life, but the more they learn, the more the realities of ancient survival invade their buoyant projections. “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” meditates on why an entire town enthusiastically rushes out to the annual picnic that ends, year after year, in a massacre of astonishing creativity and casualty. The title story illuminates the desires and even the violence that surges beneath the tenuous peace among the animals in the Garden of Eden.

Fried’s stories suggest that we are at our most compelling and human when wrestling with the most frustrating aspects of both the world around us and of our very own natures—and in the process shows why he is a talent to be watched."




"What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us" by Laura van den Berg

"Containing work reprinted in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010, the stories in Laura van den Berg's rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.

A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses path with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forest of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.

Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching -- for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives."



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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Don't Kill Your Darlings - Cannibalize Them!



"Kill your darlings" is one of those quotes that's become so pervasive in writing culture that it's almost comical while still retaining a great deal of truth. We've all got lines we really love, whole passages and pages or even chapters of writing that, when reread, make us feel like we'd really been in the zone for those particular moments. And it's a fantastic feeling that doesn't come as often as we'd like (if we're being honest here).

The problem is that these passages don't work for the overall narrative you're working on. So you scrap them, put them in a separate Word document for safe keeping later, or just delete the hell out of them and let the words disappear out into the digital ether. All of these are correct reactions, but it's the option of safekeeping that I'd like to explore.



I've kept pretty much everything I've ever written. I've got it all saved (and backed up on triplicate external hard drives) and one day, when I'm dead and gone, someone will go through all those files and think "My god...some of this is absolutely terrible!" Yet I cling to it all because it is all of my own creation. They are my projects, my children, my....darlings, if you will. Sometimes it's fun to go back and read old projects. Often, I can remember where I was, what I was doing, and how I was feeling during the writing of a particular piece. This is both good and bad as the emotion of the "then" can affect the editing of the piece in the "now."

My most recent short story collection ("Scaring the Stars into Submission") was a byproduct of this cannibalization of old works. I realized I needed a new project to focus on once I'd finished my masters thesis, so I found a kind of common thread that wove itself throughout the narratives of a few different pieces that were two to three pages long each. Thirty pages quickly became two hundred and seventy-four.

With the personal success of that project, I've decided to cannibalize more of my old pieces that would never see the light of day without serious revision and expansion. This time, I'm going for a more romance/love themed collection of short stories. Of course they'll still be in my typically strange/surreal style, but they will be love stories of a sort. Certainly not like any love stories you've read before; no sparkling vampires, no awful Nicholas Sparks storylines, no melodramatic nonsense, no cliched tripe (hopefully).



I've got 11 old pieces picked out that have some very serious potential (some are already at the six and seven page marks after a bit of brainstorming for ideas this weekend) with another 15 pieces as possibilities. I find this kind of work really fun and challenging. The original pieces contain their own ideas from long ago, but it's time to break down the walls of what they were and mold them into something new, something longer, something deeper and worth reading.

While I loved the original pieces I had written, the revamped stories in "Scaring the Stars into Submission" were of a quality that spoke more loudly and proudly to me. There was more depth and complexity to the characters and the situations. Fattening up the stories also fattened up the meaning which fattened up the experience of the reading.

So don't be afraid to remove whole passages from whatever you're working on, whether it be an essay, short story, or novel. The words remain yours, you continue to hold power over them. Just find a better place to put them and let them grow in whatever manner they choose. You'll be happy you didn't put all your darlings in your digital trash bin.



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Thursday, December 26, 2013

Books On Deck / Up Next

"Codex Seraphinianus" by Luigi Serafini


"An extraordinary and surreal art book, this edition has been redesigned by the author and includes new illustrations. Ever since the Codex Seraphinianus was first published in 1981, the book has been recognized as one of the strangest and most beautiful art books ever made. This visual encyclopedia of an unknown world written in an unknown language has fueled much debate over its meaning. Written for the information age and addressing the import of coding and decoding in genetics, literary criticism, and computer science, the Codex confused, fascinated, and enchanted a generation.

While its message may be unclear, its appeal is obvious: it is a most exquisite artifact. Blurring the distinction between art book and art object, this anniversary edition-redesigned by the author and featuring new illustrations-presents this unique work in a new, unparalleled light. With the advent of new media and forms of communication and continuous streams of information, the Codex is now more relevant and timely than ever. A special limited and numbered deluxe edition that includes a signed print is also available."




"Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman


"In May 2012, bestselling author Neil Gaiman delivered the commencement address at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, in which he shared his thoughts about creativity, bravery, and strength. He encouraged the fledgling painters, musicians, writers, and dreamers to break rules and think outside the box. Most of all, he encouraged them to make good art.

The book Make Good Art, designed by renowned graphic artist Chip Kidd, contains the full text of Gaiman’s inspiring speech."




"Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes" by Maria Konnikova


"No fictional character is more renowned for his powers of thought and observation than Sherlock Holmes. But is his extraordinary intellect merely a gift of fiction, or can we learn to cultivate these abilities ourselves, to improve our lives at work and at home?

We can, says psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova, and in Mastermind she shows us how. Beginning with the “brain attic”—Holmes’s metaphor for how we store information and organize knowledge—Konnikova unpacks the mental strategies that lead to clearer thinking and deeper insights. Drawing on twenty-first-century neuroscience and psychology, Mastermind explores Holmes’s unique methods of ever-present mindfulness, astute observation, and logical deduction. In doing so, it shows how each of us, with some self-awareness and a little practice, can employ these same methods to sharpen our perceptions, solve difficult problems, and enhance our creative powers. For Holmes aficionados and casual readers alike, Konnikova reveals how the world’s most keen-eyed detective can serve as an unparalleled guide to upgrading the mind."




"The Hundred Headless Woman" by Max Ernst


"Max Ernst's early-twentieth-century collage-novel calls upon the reader to interpret captions and surrealistic illustrations—created from old picture books and journals—to create a story."




"Maidenhair" by Mikhail Shishkin


"Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter’s own reading: a his­tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son “Nebuchadnezzasaurus,” ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions—of truth and fiction, of time and timeless­ness, of love and war, of Death and the Word—and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys."




"The Obscene Bird of Night" by Jose Donoso


"This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a masterpiece" by Luis Bunuel and "one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time" by Carlos Fuentes. The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader's mind."




"S." by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst



"One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

S., conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand, and it is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to the written word."




"The Box Man" by Kobo Abe

"In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity.

Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders."




"The Machine" by James Smythe


"Haunting memories defined him. The machine took them away. She vowed to rebuild him. From the author of The Testimony comes a Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.

Beth lives alone on a desolate housing estate near the sea. She came here to rebuild her life following her husband’s return from the war. His memories haunted him but a machine promised salvation. It could record memories, preserving a life that existed before the nightmares.

Now the machines are gone. The government declared them too controversial, the side-effects too harmful. But within Beth’s flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back, that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece."




"The Suicide Shop" by Jean Teule



"With the twenty-first century just a distant memory and the world in environmental chaos, many people have lost the will to live.

Business is brisk at The Suicide Shop. Run by the Tuvache family, the shop offers a variety of ways to end it all, with something to fit every budget.

The Tuvaches go mournfully about their business until the youngest member of the family threatens to destroy their contented misery by confronting them with something they've never encountered before: a love of life."




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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

2013 Reading List

If you keep up with this blog, then you know I post up the books I read all year long. This year felt particularly anemic until I see that I read the exact same number of books this year as last year. Apparently I've found my yearly average. It could definitely be better.

I took some big chances on authors this year, more so than previous years. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and hopefully find some new favorites, which happened with Matt Bell, Brian Evenson, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Amber Sparks. I returned to some classics from my childhood like "Ender's Game," "A Wrinkle in Time," and later loves like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I was not disappointed with my return to these works.

I opened up more to the world of non-fiction. Einstein, the life of Joy Division's bassist Peter Hook, the graphic novel of Bertrand Russel's descent (ascent?) into philosophical madness, the dissection (track by track) of Coltrane's classic album "A Love Supreme." All excellent, all compelling. So...without further ado, here's this year's list.



2013 Reading:

January

01.) Madeline L'Engle - "A Wrinkle in Time" (245pgs)
02.) Rick Moody - "Demonology" (306pgs)
03.) Blake Butler & Sean Kilpatrick - "Anatomy Courses" (126pgs)
04.) Diane Williams - "Vicky Swanky Is A Beauty" (118pgs)
05.) Brian Evenson - "Fugue State" (205pgs)
(1,000 pgs)

February

06.) Blake Butler - "Sky Saw" (248pgs)
07.) Blake Butler & Lily Hoang - "30 Under 30 Anthology" (289pgs)
08.) Witold Gombrowicz - "Cosmos" (166pgs)
09.) Witold Gombrowicz - "Pornografia" (191pgs)
10.) John Barth - "Lost in the Funhouse" (201pgs)
11.) Ricardo Piglia - "The Absent City" (147pgs)
(1,242 pgs)


March 

12.) Donald Barthelme - "Come Back, Dr. Caligari" (183pgs)
13.) Walter Moers - "The City of Dreaming Books" (461pgs)
14.) (reread) Robert Pirsig - "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (540pgs)
(1,184 pgs)

April

15.) Bernard M. Patten - "The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking in Wonderland" (336pgs)
16.) Carlos Ruiz Zafon - "The Prince of Mist" (200pgs)
17.) Carlos Ruiz Zafon - "The Shadow of the Wind" (487pgs)

 (1,023 pgs)


May

18.) Carlos Ruiz Zafon - "The Angel's Game" (528pgs)
19.) Carlos Ruiz Zafon - "The Prisoner of Heaven" (278pgs)
20.) (reread) Jedidiah Berry - "The Manual of Detection" (278pgs)
21.) Matt Bell - "How They Were Found" (238pgs)
(1,322 pgs)


June

22.) Amber Sparks - "May We Shed These Human Bodies" (147pgs)
23.) Dennis Cooper - "The Marbled Swarm" (194pgs)
24.) David Markson - "Vanishing Point" (191pgs)
25.) Joshua Mohr - "Fight Song" (250pgs)
(782 pgs)


July

26.) Rajesh Parameswaran - "I Am An Executioner: Love Stories" (260pgs)
27.) Neil Gaiman - "American Gods" (588pgs)
28.) Nick Bantock - "Sabine's Notebook" (48pgs)
29.) Nick Bantock - "The Golden Mean" (46pgs)
30.) Nick Bantock - "The Gryphon" (58pgs)
31.) Nick Bantock - "Alexandria" (58pgs)
32.) Nick Bantock - "The Morning Star" (60pgs)
33.) Nick Bantock - "The Museum at Purgatory" (128pgs)
34.) Nick Bantock - "The Forgetting Room" (106pgs)
35.) Nick Bantock - "The Venetian's Wife" (132pgs)
36.) Nick Bantock - "The Egyptian Jukebox" (48pgs)
37.) Apostolos Doxiadis/Christos H. Papadimitriou - "Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth" (344pgs)
38.) Peter Hook - "Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division" (370pgs)
39.) (reread) Blake Butler - "There Is No Year" (401pgs)
40.) Ashley Kahn - "A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album" (224pgs)
(2,871 pgs)


August

41.) Cormac McCarthy - "Blood Meridian" (351pgs)
42.) Juan Carlos Ortiz - "Shorts" (143pgs)
43.) Brian Evenson - "Dark Property" (132pgs)
44.) Matt Bell - "In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods" (312pgs)

(938 pgs)

September

none

October

45.) Brian Evenson - "Altmann's Tongue: Stories & a Novella" (278pgs)
46.) Albert Einstein - "Ideas & Opinions" (377pgs)
(665 pgs)


November

47.) Orson Scott Card - "Ender's Game" (226pgs)

(226 pgs)


December

48.) Marisha Pessl - "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" (514pgs)
49.) Martin H. Greenberg - "The Further Adventures of the Joker" (462pgs)

(976 pgs)



12,229 pages for the year




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Friday, December 6, 2013

8 Ways to Unblock the Creative Mind




* Share new work through voicemails with another writer friend, especially one that writes differently than you. Fiction vs. poetry, traditional vs. experimental, verbose vs. minimalist, etc. If nothing else, you’ll have new work to listen to at the end of a long day. My good friend Karen over at Conceptual Reception and I have done this a few times recently and my work has been inspiring hers the way her work has been inspiring mine. Plus, hearing the written word spoken aloud gives it a special kind of energy.

* Find two or more friends. All of you write a paragraph on a particular topic. Once everyone’s finished their paragraph, trade them around and add to the piece, giving it your own voice. Depending on how many people are involved, do this until everyone has added their own paragraph to every piece. Read the results out loud.


* Via email, give your writer friends a writing prompt (a story based on a single word, the inclusion of certain phrases, focus on a single color, etc.) and have everyone share them. Allow each person involved to create their own prompt for the next round, so on and so forth. Create word limits, page limits, formats, whatever. The sky's the limit here, but I've found that the more constraints there are, the harder I have to work at a piece, which makes the end result much more worth my time. And typically, the story ends up being fairly interesting.

* Take a day out of your normal routine. Visit a park with a bottle of wine and simply converse or air out creative grievances with other creatives whether they be artists or musicians. The creative mind gets blocked the same way, no matter the medium. Luckily, it can be unblocked just as easily given the right circumstances. Every creative needs an outlet that doesn't involve their primary focus. For instance, visiting a museum for a few hours tends to unblock me the best.

* Watch a movie by a more out of bounds/experimental filmmaker (Lars Von Trier, Terrence Malick, Darren Aronofsky, Ingmar Bergman, etc.) and deconstruct it with each other after. Discuss what worked and what didn’t, what was confusing and what made perfect sense. Honest critiques of other work can lead to more honest critiques of our own while giving us ideas on how to improve stories. The goal here is to get out of your wheelhouse, submerse yourself in something with which you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

* Write in a group. This may sound weird, but I know that I’m almost shamed into writing if there are others around me writing as well. Not to mention, you’ll have a built-in critique session once everyone’s reached a good stopping point with their work. I found this incredibly vital during my first two years of grad school. 

* Cross-pollinate with other disciplines. Find a photographer or artist or musician whose work you admire, see if they’d like to collaborate; your words inform their art or vice versa. Superimpose both creative halves to create one supra-whole.

* Take classic passages from timeless books and rewrite them with different and iconic characters from other novels. How would Ender Wiggins act in the time of Huckleberry Finn? How would Gregor Samsa fare in the Hunger Games?


There are obviously thousands upon thousands of ideas that can be beneficial in breaking down creative blocks, but these are just a few that have worked for me. When I first started taking writing classes in college, I would shrug off the idea of brainstorming exercises or things that would elicit story ideas, firmly believing that I didn't need them. Now, 15 years later, I utilize them all the time. Maybe it's because I take this discipline more seriously than I did as a 19 year old sophomore, but I think it's because they've simply worked.

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