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the children's hospital
~ by chris adrian Imagine Grey's Anatomy, set in a children's hospital floating upon seven miles of post-apocalyptic floodwaters, and penned by a writer of staggering talent and sensibility. I know, it sounded weird to me too. But when I finally cracked the cover of The Children's Hospital, I knew from the first 30 pages that I was holding a giant miracle of a book. The next 600 pages flew by in a majestic whirl of a story, indelible characters, and writing that makes you want to kiss the writer who brought it to the page. |
Part hospital-drama, part divine exploration, The Children's Hospital has one foot in this world and one in another, as its stunning cast of characters attempt to remake the world. Chris Adrian's writing is simultaneously irreverent and deeply tender, startlingly brilliant and beautiful, underpinned by a mix of all things good in the world, and a sense for our darkest evils. A novel of creation and destruction, The Children's Hospital is giant and epic in scope, but assembled from the most intimate graces and notions, making it one of the most remarkable novels of recent years. | |
| {615 pages} {McSweeney's Books} {2006} | |
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anagrams ~
by lorrie moore If you write fiction, or if you consider yourself a serious reader of modern fiction, Anagrams belongs on your best bookshelf. In this darkly funny and achingly wistful novel, Moore creates an anagram of a life, rearranging the elements to reveal a portrait of a woman that's more real than the mutable facts of her life. What could easily be a dense experiment with form is instead a seamless, deeply revealing and heartbreaking portrait of a woman, and a riff on the power of the imagination, how the secret stories we tell ourselves reveal more than our actual lives, and the ways in which our own stories save us from ourselves and the world. |
| It's rare to move a reader to both laughter and heartbreak in just a few lines, but Lorrie Moore does it over and over again with a jaw-dropping mastery of the craft — a craft that she manages to redefine in under 250 pages. Anagrams is so readable, so masterful, that it's difficult not to read it over again the second you've reached the last page. Originally published 20 years ago, it's just been reprinted in a new paperback edition from Vintage. | |
| {225 pages} {Vintage} {1986/reprinted 2007} | |
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the dud avocado ~ by elaine
dundy Originally published in 1958, and newly reprinted by nryb, The Dud Avocado is as fresh, sexy, and modern as today's best chick-lit. Imagine Holly Golightly just out of college, dropped off in Paris' bohemian Left Bank in the late 1950's, shaped by chatty, sparkly, bubbling prose, and you've got Sally Jay Gorce, Elaine Dundy's irresistible, semi-autobiographical heroine. |
| Witty, loveable, and sexy in a safety-pinned, broken-pearls, never-wearing-the-right-dress kind of way, Sally Jay sleeps with all the wrong men, a couple of the right ones, and manages misadventure after misadventure in a series of deliciously debaucherous months among artists, writers, and affected intellectuals. Not your typical American-in-Paris story, The Dud Avocado is a delightful romp through another side of the city in a rare era with an utterly endearing and most unexpected tour guide. | |
| {260 pages} {New York Review of Books} {1958/reprinted 2007} | |
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the collected stories of
amy hempel, 2006 There's only one bad thing about reading Amy Hempel's short stories: It becomes very, very difficult to read anything else. It's like drinking drip after you've acquired a taste for espresso. They're essentially the same beans, but the art lies in the extraction. How Amy Hempel gets these stories out of the same words that thousands of other writers pound away at every day, I'll never understand. Her invisible, flawless craftsmanship anchors the tender, messy undercurrents of loss and longing, as she writes to the steady backbeat of something that exists on the edges, just outside of the story. |
Amy Hempel's earlier collections have been out of print for quite some time, and for the past few years you had to open new lines of credit to secure used copies, if you could find one at all. So, finally, here they are, all together. But unlike some collections, a mishmash of stories that rattle around together between the covers, this one maintains the separations between the original single volumes, revealing the particular way in which Hempel's Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), Tumble Home (1997), and The Dog of the Marriage (2005), are each more like a really exquisitely produced album. I heard about Amy Hempel from a friend of mine. Many years ago I gave him my favorite collection of Raymond Carver's short stories. And all these years later, I consider this an even trade. | |
| {409 pages} {hardcover} {Scribner} | |
other electricities and vacationland ~ by ander monson, 2005 | ||
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If there is a radio station that plays out into the ether, a station that streams static and snow, a place where there are no days and only memories of days, where unreceived sound waves sent out to the dead unfold from their concentric circles and lap against snow-packed, icy shores, it's playing Ander Monson's stories and poems every day at 3 a.m. |  |
| You
could either think of Other Electricities as interconnected stories,
or a novel made up of stories, and then Vacationland as their
footnotes. Or appendix. Or some other vital organ belonging to the same
whole. Really, the collections work very much as an album of requiem and
elegy, parcels of obsession and sorrow, slices of regret and forewarning,
where snow and electricity and radio waves store the bits and make them
beautiful, like the way slow dust gets stuck in the light of warmer climates,
swimming delicately in a haze just outside of everything else. The weather
of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in Monson's stories is less a setting
than it is a factor by which everything is multiplied, or a looming and
obvious unknown for which we are always solving. The ones who are gone
left through the ice on prom night with the radio on, or misjudged the
freeze of the ice or the intent of their boyfriends, they are cancerous
from the mines, they are disappeared in the way one imagines disappearing
through the water, mysterious and mythical, always floating somewhere
on the edges, the tragedy embroidered by the stories told about it afterwards.
Accompanied by diagrams of electrical circuits with love notes attached, the stories and poems are marked by language that drives on hard and fast to the last lines, like car wheels over the rhythmic bumps on the highway they push on, the lyricism and force made all the more swift by the clean-swept writing, by the thru-line that draws like a fine-point arc that connects through the center of each piece. I should like to never, ever be done reading either one of these books. |
||
| excerpt from Other Electricities excerpt from Vacationland | ||
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play it as it lays ~ by
joan didion 1970 A grim and disturbing landscape of the human psyche and soul as vast, gleaming, and white-hot as the the cracked deserts which surround its characters. In this quintessential, dawn-of-the-seventies Los Angeles novel, a manic, and prismatic view rises out of the clean, spare architecture of Didion's trademark style. And there's not really a story. Just small chapters spliced together, a movie without sound, not composed, just there. |
| Loaded
with the mesmerizing content of emptiness, poured into the absence of
a story, Play it as it Lays is, despite all this stuff about
psyche and emptiness and storylessness, infinitely readable. All that
stuff is just what happens, by effortless consequence of Joan Didion's
brilliance. You could read it on a chaise lounge seated by the harsh rectangle of the glittering pool of a mid-century L.A. house, and down some Percocets or what have you with a sloppy martini, wearing a simple shift from Saks, but really, just open the first chapter, and you're halfway there. read excerpts return to top | |
| {214 pages} {paperback} {Noonday Press} | |
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extremely loud & incredibly close ~ by jonathan safran foer, 2005 Yes, yes, and yes. Yes I loved it, yes I would marry it, and yes, I can totally see how some of you will not love it, and will not want to marry it. Some of you will not like the pages that are not text - before you even read it you will thumb through it and make a sound in the back of your throat. Whatever. Get over yourself. Don't be mad that he's only 27 or something ridiculous like that. Many years from now we will point to this book and see where fiction changed, where a new possibility opened wide. So rarely does a novel of greatness emerge that's also compulsively readable. |
| Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close
requires a little bit of forgiveness, a little indulgence, and a thoroughly
delightful abandonment of your knee-jerk disbelief. It pushes out all
the edges of fantastic, and like all good fiction and fantasies, digs
heartwrenchingly deep into the trenches of our deeply guarded fears and
desires. So if you jump in running fast and headlong you will find this one of the best new novels you've read in a very long time, and be thrilled by the unprecedented way Foer tells this story in a collage of very raw, tender writing paired with a collection of images and manipulations of text which are the very opposite of contrived, which approach and surpass at many points, breathtaking grace. read excerpt |
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| {326 pages} {hardcover} {Houghton Mifflin} | |
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red
ant house ~ by ann cummins, 2003 Nothing I read about this book prepared me for it. No one said "these are the best stories you've read in a long time". I feel about these stories and the characters in them the way I feel about kids with smudgy elbows, tangled hair and sad shoes. They have a grit that's determined, organic, and without artifice, a sigh that's whole-hearted and a half-smile that tries hard at the smallest thing. I want to hold onto them because their joys are at once so tiny and so heartfelt. And not an unripe nor rotten one in the bunch. Through and through these are the best of anything new I've read this year. I cannot wait to read anything else by Ann Cummins. Ann, please send me your grocery lists. |
| read excerpts return to top | |
| {179 pages} {paperback} {Mariner Books} | |
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delta of venus ~ by anaïs nin Anaïs Nin is to erotica what La Perla is to lingerie. Sophisticated. Exquisitely attentive to detail. Acutely aware of the senses. Subtle. Seductive. Sexy. Baroque. European. Exotic. Luxurious. The very best of its kind. Which is not to ignore their deliciously nasty, explicitly erotic nature. Where other erotica makes you cringe for its awkward use of nouns, rushed verbs, pool-boy-variety stories, and embarrassing attempts at adjectives (think Frederick's of Hollywood, polyester lace, and lucite heels), Anais Nin writes with colorful, rhythmic intensity, and emotional characters whose desires and obsessions blossom into very potent little tales, made all the more potent by the language and details spun as finely as the lace edging on your $500 La Perla merry widow. |
| Part
of the Library of Necessary Books, because of its usefulness and rarity
of form. And because it will soon be among the most worn and ragged books
on your shelf. return to top |
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| {286 pages} {paperback} {Harvest Books} | |
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the
solace of leaving early ~ by haven kimmel, 2002 The Solace of Leaving Early is part of the text of what is the only religion I know, the closest I get to church or prayer, as luminous and full of miracle as the ocean or twilight. |
| So much so that when I met Haven Kimmel I forgot the name of her book. I actually stood there and told her how much I loved her novel. Her NOVEL. I said I LOVED YOUR NOVEL. Oh god. Oh well. Can I redeem myself here? Flocked with enviable wit and fleshed out with characters so full of flaw and humanity you want to be them, woven into a story of simple tragedy and everyday miracles and the reconciliation of intellect and spirit, The Solace of Leaving Early is the best new novel I've read. |
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| {288 pages} {paperback} {Anchor Books} | |
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half in love ~ by maile meloy, 2002 I fell all the way in love by the second story, Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976. I was on my way by the end of the first, but then the haunting melody of "All in Green Went My Love Riding" started in, and by the end of Four Lean Hounds I was gone. One after the other the stories blaze quietly, sadly on. They end strong, like fine poems, but their middles too are flawless and selfless in character, dialogue, and story. I usually don't read short story collections all at once, but this one I couldn't stop reading, and finished in one July day that I'm sure was hot and bright, but that I clearly remember as cool and still, melancholy and gray. |
| Maile
Meloy gets out of the way of the story, and just tells it, without affectation
or sentimentality. The writing is clean, but not too spare, detailed but
not labored, quiet, but certainly not detached. For a writer these stories
are example of true craftsmanship, and for a reader they are just plain
good. Good short stories are hard to come by, and good collections among
the rarest things. The fact that there are two absolutely exquisite new
collections by young new writers on this page is cause for celebration. read excerpts return to top |
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| {174 pages} {paperback} {Scribner} | |
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breakfast
at tiffany's ~ by truman capote, 1950 Capote's prose is not so much like diamonds, but like a really good string of pearls - breathtaking in their understated way, each one word exquisitely formed and singular, yet resting in perfectly knotted harmony with the others, crafted not of labor, but of supreme instinct and love. These pearls are the mantle under which Holly Golightly gallivants in her sorrowful way, spilling out a story of breathless humanity and awe. You can wear pearls with everything, but there are maybe 5 or 6 women in the world who need pearls so much it makes your heart ache. I don't need pearls, but I needed this story so bad after I read it I couldn't believe I ever lived without it. |
| Truman Capote's
Holly Golightly is what would happen if you shone light through Audrey
Hepburn's crystal Holly and a spectral rainbowed Holly appeared in the
beyond. So, in case you think you can get away without reading this just
because you've seen the movie and Audrey was so great you couldn't believe
it and Mickey Rooney was so horrid you couldn't forgive it, I beg of you
to have another think coming. As if you needed a 2 for 1 deal, three short stories follow in this edition, including A Christmas Memory, which may very well be the most tender, pitch-perfect thing you have ever read. (And re-read, and read again.) Melancholy and magnificent, this slender little volume will remind you of the possibility of perfection. And isn't that, after all, all we could ever want? read excerpts return to top |
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| {178 pages} {paperback} {Vintage Books} | |
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what we talk about when
we talk about love ~ by raymond carver, 1981 I don't know what to tell you if you haven't read Raymond Carver. You either get it or you don't. It's been a good litmus test for me over the years. I often give this book as a gift. Those who like it usually stay on as my very most precious friends. They also go out and read everything Carver ever wrote. Those who don't, they usually shrug their shoulders and say, "Yeah. The stories were okay. Kind of depressing, though." These people, I don't usually see them a lot. When I do, we have nothing to talk about. |
| What to say about
these stories… They are, I guess, very American. They take place mostly
in the small spaces of the ineffable in largely defined and meaningless
lives. Suburbs, trailer parks, just outside of nowhere very important.
These are people stories, just stories of people, a husband and wife,
a father and son, a dinner party. Spare, grim, painful, but stitched with
a very tiny, un-glamorous moment of something I can only describe as twilight.
That one, brief moment of possibility and the end of possibility at the
same instant. Of notion, revelation, grief - where something exists just
outside of what you've got. At the end of it all, Raymond Carver is one of my favorite writers ever, and I think this is the best collection to start with. This is also in the Top Five Ingredients in the Library of Necessary Books. You may notice this list contains a few more than five, but nevertheless, they are still all in the top five. read excerpts return to top |
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| {159 pages} {paperback} {Vintage Books} | |
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cat's eye ~ by margaret
atwood, 1981 I have often wanted to photocopy this entire book and wallpaper my house with it. Just to be surrounded by a constant reminder of what the product of this writer's life could be, just to look at something so good, to watch the black and white evidence of a writer's mind work out into a story. A rare species exists, one in which a poet's mind coexists in the mind of a storyteller, and Margaret Atwood is the mama of this strange and magnificent breed. Cat's Eye is a novel with complex inner-workings - a tight, clean web of observational detail spun into a story that moves like the most graceful jungle cat. Economy of movement makes for organic, hypnotic rhythm, and great, effortless, leaps. |
| Both
a coming-of-age and a coming-of-middle-age novel, the story of Cat's
Eye radiates from the narration of the most fully intellectually-fleshed
character I've ever read. The inner-life, the voices, observations, and
being of Elaine Risley develops into intense character formation, one
that resonates with detail, authenticity and gorgeous, raw humanity. There are many books recommended in these virtual pages that exclaim about perfection and favorites, and all of these words are true. This is a different kind of favorite. This is the novel I would have liked to have written. If there is a price I could pay to read this book again for the first time, please name it. read excerpts return to top | |
| {480 pages} {paperback} {Anchor Books} $13.95 | |