Person by Sam Pink

What an awesome read. I'm too lazy to explain all the reasons why but I enjoyed every page of it. Dark funny mean sad weird. I recommend.

Museum of the Weird

There would be no more appropriate title for Amelia Gray’s bizarre array of fiction (mostly flash) pieces than Museum of the Weird. Trailer: two men, one in love with a paring knife and another with a bag of frozen tilapia, each learn about sacrifice throughout their oddly touching friendship; a nervous woman on a first date worries about the pile of hair on a plate the waiter has served her; an armadillo attempts conversation with a penguin over drinks at a dive bar; a cube arrives, unexplained, into a town and befuddles its clueless inhabitants; and so on.

One trait that marks a powerful and seriously potential writer is singularity, the idea that these hatched plots, these fictive people, these stylistic choices could never have come from anyone but this writer. And greetings, Amelia Gray, you are the perfect example of what I mean. Certainly, there were some stories that resonated with me less than others, but as a whole, she has a style (pithy length, lucid prose, contemplative characters in bizarre, unexplainable worlds) that is her own. The stories have running themes – I noticed almost every story used food in some perverse way, the grotesque juxtaposed with edibles (toe soup, eating tongues, swallowing hair, etc). The pieces also played with absurd twists on Christianity and domesticity.

I can yammer on about esoteric themes, but more importantly than all that, Museum of the Weird was impossible to put down. If my eyes fell on the first sentence of the next story, I had to read it. Examples:

“One morning, I woke to discover I had given birth overnight.”

“Roger’s assigned route had him picking up medical waste at most of the plastic surgery offices in town.”

“My first week on the force and that crazy guys starts killing men, digging into the chest cavity – with an actual bonesaw, we think, the cut is so clean – and removing a rib.”

I blew through this book. It piqued and puzzled me, and was unlike anything I’ve ever read. Amelia Gray is a young writer, too, who has already published another anthology of short stories, which I must now get my hands on. Her work has been published in many excellent small-press journals and webzines, which can be read online for free here.

This was one of the most fun short story collections I’ve read since Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders (also a damn fine book with stories I'll never forget). Like Saunders, Gray knows how to balance the thoughtful and the entertaining, the bizarre and the mundane, the hilarious and the resonant. And as a writer, I found her stories inspiring. She dares me to be a little stranger.

The Awesomest Cookbook in the Universe

On my walk home from work the other day, I strolled into a mysterious secondhand store and found this book:
Writ in the fine year of 1962. Indeed, many of its recipes have turned out to be conversation pieces. For example:

And this enchanting dip:

Mmm ... dinner party, anyone?

"Girl with Curious Hair" by David Foster Wallace: A Fifty Word Book Review

About one third of these stories = staggering brilliance. Hooray.

Another third = decent, exemplifying DFW’s versatile stylistic ability. Tepid applause.

The third third, his novella with a long name I don’t care to remember, = the worst kind of pomo: all-style-no-story, all-head-no-heart. Boo.

Read the stories, skip the novella.

"Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace: A 50-Word Book Review

Porn star awards galas, lobsters' feelings, Prescriptivist grammarians, talk show radio hosts, McCain, Updike, Kafka, Dostoevsky – in this essay collection, DFW digs into amazing array of subjects with his unmistakable writing style. Disadvantage: his vocabulary trumps mine so I had to consult my dictionary constantly. But well worth it.

Industry Changes + Internet Authors

This SF Chronicle article from last month provides some good news for those motivated to self-publish, and bad news for those hoping for a break via the traditional publishing industry.

Slush Pile Hell

Ever wonder what kind of idiotic/ comedic query letters a literary agent gets to sift through on a daily basis?

Well, here's a little peek.

Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven": A Fifty-Word Book Review

This short story collection set on a Washington Indian reservation blew my literary socks off. Tragic yet hilarious, magic yet real, and delightfully preoccupied with the oral tradition of storytelling. Fascinating characters. Impeccable rhythm. Sentences that hurt. Unpretentious, stark, frank, and freaking lovely. Don’t just read this book, study it.

The Stone Diaries: A Fifty-Word Book Review

I found Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries in a typical pile of Berkeley curbside junk, read it, and back to the curbside it shall go. Sharp prose, singing sentences, experimental form, but none of that matters because the book lacks plot and compelling characters. Pretty words alone don't make stories.

What Would David Mamet Do

Here is David Mamet's take on writing according to a memo that was circulated during his stint writing for The Unit. Although it's talking about scriptwriting, it's more generally about the construction of drama. If you can get past the blaring nonstop capital letters, there are some interesting and arguable tidbits of writing advice here. My favorite:

"DO NOT WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT"

Illuminating.

I recommend his book Three Uses of the Knife. In fact, I should reread it myself because I can't remember much specifically, just that I liked it. It's been a long time. And I forget things.

I Love Shirley Jackson

I've managed to -- I know it's a foreign concept as an English major -- actually read for fun recently. And I've discovered I would so much rather be reading Shirley Jackson than any more critical theory or Middle English renditions of saints' lives. This past summer I read a collection of Jackson's short stories and The Haunting of Hill House, which were absolutely marvelous, dark and thrilling and even sometimes hilarious, and Hill House made its way onto my nonexistent list of favorite books. Last week I finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I'm currently reading her comedic non-fiction book Life Among the Savages that chronicles her travails as a writer/ housewife/ mother in the forties and fifties. The more I read by Shirley Jackson, the stranger I find it that no one I know seems to read her, besides her short story "The Lottery" widely anthologized for high school students. While Jackson was popular in her time, she seems to have disappeared off the contemporary face of the literary map. She's best known as a "horror" writer, but that title doesn't do her justice. Any definitive supernaturalism is hard to pinpoint in her work. Instead, much of her short fiction and Hill House and Castle center around domestic spaces and awkward female characters, with an overwhelming darkness threatening below the surface of these kitchens, houses and small New England villages. Like Hitchcock's movies, Jackson's fiction works to expose the perverse and subversive desires that exist behind the artifice of the everyday, the malignant capabilities of average people, and the brutish danger of mob mentality.

Also, sidenote: I'm perplexed and impressed by the adverb-heavy style of Shirley Jackson's prose. In writing workshops everyone always scorns the adverb, which I get, since most people throw them around thoughtlessly. But I've always thought the right adverb has its place as long as the writer knows how to use it. Toni Morrison and other famous fancies have written the adverb off as a weak and lazy choice for the writer who can't find an appropriate verb to do the job. I've always been a little wary of general writing rules like that, and think a good writer can find a way to use adverbs -- or anything, for that matter -- appropriately, albeit sparingly. Rules are made to be broken, right? I study Jackson's prose to better understand the artful use and misuse of the adverb. Her adverbs -- while maybe a little incessant -- sometimes add quite a bit to her prose.

To sum up: Shirley Jackson = highly recommended. If you've never read her, start with The Haunting of Hill House or The Lottery and Other Stories and move on from there.

A couple links to her work online:

"What a Thought"

"The Lottery"