Lit Bits-5/21/2014 Wallace Stegner, Herman Koch, Matthew Revert

Aleathia says:

When I was living in Seattle, after getting comfortable in a new big city, I decided to embark on a journey of reading going against the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover".  I was feeling a bit rebellious and decided that for an entire year I would only choose books based on the cover art.  I would not read anything about them so as to know what I was getting into.

I found that you could judge a book by its cover and that a nice looking one often tells you visually something about your own aesthetic in the world.  One of the books I chose was a book called "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner.

I had never read any of his work before and I fell in love with his writing style.  Over the years I sought out many of his other novels.  I will never forget the day I finished his book "Angle of Repose" which won him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It changed the way I looked at writing and about the human condition.  It solidified my love for pushing west, pioneer, down on your luck stories.  After reading that book I decided that I was then going to read all the winners of the Pulitzer for all time.  I have not completed that goal yet, but I have collected all but 25 of the novels and read about 30 of the 80.

Wallace Stegner shapes characters that you can't help but love.  You want them to succeed even when you know in your heart of hearts they are destined to fail.  You feel their pain as if it were your own.  I close the back cover of his books with a sense of satisfaction, that everything ended up where it was supposed to be.

He is one of my top five authors of all time.  You should check out his work if you haven't already.

Addendum by Joe:

If you want to judge books by their covers, pick up anything designed by Matthew Revert. He is a god of graphic designing and has been doing an amazing job of dressing the small press world in dapper outfits for publication.

Ally says:

I like unreliable narrators.

I like them because I feel like when they’re telling me a story it’s not all altruistic bull. You ever notice that about reliable narrators? They’re just dying to have someone fall in love with them – to have someone root for them. They’re like Tom Brady. Or any quarterback. Just a touchdown behind, seconds unraveling from the clock, desperate for that Hail Mary pass which they pray for and then we pray for and then it happens – sails through the almighty air like it’s guided by the hand of whatever god we’ve conjured up for the time being and lands right in the receiver’s hands who is guided over the line, dance and all. We stand, we cheer, we pump fists.

Everybody wins.

Right?

Sure. Except sometimes isn’t it nice to sit at the feet of someone deliciously deceptive and hear a tale that sounds a little bit more like the kind of thing that we would tell? Mostly truthful. A bit of a lie. We’ll pepper it with misconceptions - small things that bend the favor toward us. Altruism is a word we do not understand and therefore we do not obey.

Is it an American thing? Our constant need for happy endings even when life itself dishes up nothing but?

Herman Koch wrote a book called The Dinner. Here’s what it’s about:

A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Except it's also about so much more. Cue vicious curdled laugh. Mwha-ha-ha!

Besides chances are good some of your favorite narrators are already unreliable. Hello? Holden? Huck Finn?

It’s easy to love the good guy. Let’s all fall in love with the decidedly complicated human guy for a change. Come on, he's just like you and me.

Lit Bits-5/14/2014 Josh Myers, Willa Cather

Joe says:


Warm greetings from the blog-o-sphere! Today's contribution is an excerpt from the impeccable new novel GUNS by Josh Myers, author of FEAST OF OBLIVION. Myers' second novel is a crime story with a hellish bend: one reviewer described it as a "slick page-turner about well-dressed people who do very ugly things."

The book is also illustrated by the fantastic Justin Coons, who worked with the also amazing Matthew Revert for the book cover you see above. All of the elements come together to create a gritty leap into this strangely familiar world of jobs gone bad and priests gone worse. So without further adieu, here is the first chapter of GUNS. And of course, if you like what you see, be sure to check pick up the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or anywhere you can get great indie titles.

CHAPTER ONE

SPELL WITH A SHELL

A lone figure walked the streets of downtown Manhoo with a sense of purpose.

One foot fell after the other as he kept his head up, scanning the signs on every street corner, looking for the address a small scrap of paper had directed him to.

The scrap of paper now rested in the interior breast pocket of his greatcoat.

It said, in an elaborate scrawl:

822 Bellyeye Ave,

Manhoo, NJ

Apt. 42

Clean hands and shiny shoes.

-W.B. Amen

Having never before been to the little riverside city of Manhoo, the man on the street didn't know exactly where it was he should be headed.

This didn't deter him.

He would seek the place out, wherever it was.

He would meet with whomever it was he was intended to meet with.

He had done this type of things many times before.

Receive a mysterious note from an anonymous source, trace down the address to some remote location, receive your orders, follow your orders, ask no questions.

Once he had gone through the motions the first few times, it became second nature. There would be minor variations factored in here and there, but it was generally the same process. It got to where it felt like a ritual.

But this time it felt a little different.

The notes usually only contained an address, occasionally an obviously fake name to contact (John Smallberries? Dixon Meteor? Give me a break.), but this one had more than that. Quite a bit more.

There was the addition of grooming instructions (requirements which would have been met regardless) and, even more troubling, a signature.

He had never gotten a note with a signature before.

He didn't know what to make of that.

It was assumed that this “W.B. Amen” was the one he would be meeting, but with this organization he could never tell.

Whatever the case may have been, he chose to treat it with even more care and precision than usual.

As per the note’s request, he made sure to polish and shine his best pair of black-and-white patent leather shoes and was careful not to scuff them up or in any way soil them.

His hands had been meticulously cleaned before leaving for his destination.

Inside one of several interior coat pockets was a small bottle of hand sanitizer, kept on his person at all times just in case.

Like all of those who answered to AICE, Ltd., he had heard the rumors about the strict sanitary restrictions enacted by the higher ups in the mysterious organization.

He didn't want to know what happened if you disobeyed.

However, to say that one actually answered to AICE would be misleading.

What the man actually did was follow orders and not ask questions.

Employees, if they could be called that, were expected to adopt a “Yes, and?” attitude toward their appointed responsibility.

To the outside world, to their family, their friends, their coworkers, they were just typical people doing their jobs. But beneath the normalcy of their day-to-day lives, something altogether different transpired.

Something they couldn't talk about.

Not to anybody.

And if they did, their entire world would come crashing down.

He knew.

It was part of the job.

The man stopped. He looked up.

The sign above him read ‘Bellyeye Ave’.

He adjusted his tie.

He always took great care to look his best. In this line of work, you never knew who you’re going to meet. It was best to appear professional at all times.

The man turned and started walking down Bellyeye Avenue, keeping track of the numbers on each building, getting closer to number 822 with every step of his spotless shoes.

The man was called Organ.

He flew planes.


Aleathia says:

Willa Cather is one of my favorite writers of all time.  When I was a little girl I started out reading the Little House on the Prairie series.  I gobbled them up as fast as I could.  I remember someone giving me a children's adaptation series of famous novels and Willa Cather's "O Pioneers" was part of that group.

That book set the tone for what I would spend most of my life reading.  I decided that I loved a great pioneer story.  I loved the idea of forging into new lands and pushing up against the odds; for finding success when everyone said you would fail.

Cather also has perfected the art of a strong female character who is quietly stubborn and elegant at the same time.  I respect the characters in these pages.  I want to embody what they bring to the table.  Over the years my love for Willa Cather's writing as leaked over into similar writers such as Steinbeck and Stegner.  

If you ever get the chance to read a Willa Cather book you should take it.  You won't be sorry.