When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew had at least a couple of James A. Michener's humongous historical-fiction tomes in their bookshelves, and it always made me curious to take some of them on once I got old enough and became a good enough reader to do so; but now that I have gotten old enough, Michener has profoundly fallen out of favor, and in the 2020s I doubt you'll find even one young person out of ten who has even heard of him. That's a shame, I discovered after finally reading my very first book of his, which happens to be the very first book he wrote, 1947's Tales of the South Pacific; because despite the daunting reputation of his books' page counts, this turned out to be one of the more pleasantly readable books I've taken on in the last year, a much more poetic and emotionally moving manuscript than I was expecting from Michener's reputation as "King of the Overlong Exposition."
Michener's one and only Pulitzer win of the over 50 books he published, and the source material for the Broadway musical of the same name, this is even more surprising when you realize that he was a simple high-school teacher with no publishing credits in the years leading up to World War Two, and that he only wrote this book in a personal attempt to capture all the crazy stories he witnessed as a Navy journalist during the war (a position he volunteered for because of otherwise being a pacifist Quaker, and a position only given to him because his commanding officers mistakenly thought he was the son of Admiral Marc Mitscher, and therefore needed to be handled with kid gloves). But once you read it, you immediately understand why the wartime Pulitzer committee would consider this irresistible catnip; because much like John Hersey's fellow Pulitzer-winning A Bell for Adano two years previously, Michener's main point here is to show how the benefits of a capitalist democracy like the US provided the exact entrepreneurial skills and "can-do attitude" that allowed the US to be the decisive factor in the Allies winning the war in the first place, a sort of paean to the kinds of quick thinking, solutions on the fly, and dogged persistence that allowed the American military to finally overcome a vastly superior Japanese force, one that already knew the tiny hidden islands of the Pacific Ocean with a kind of intimacy and mastery that the US still hasn't acquired even 80 years later.
But what sets this apart from previous wartime books -- and what truly made it so beloved when it first came out -- is that Michener digs down to find the beating heartbeat of humanity that lurks within these stories of battleship maneuvers and bombing raids, excelling at showing just how much downtime there is between battles in war, and the various good, bad, serious and silly ways the soldiers involved deal with these anxious downtimes. And in this, Michener is surprisingly critical of the very soldiers he means to champion, not shying away at all from the acknowledgement that alcoholism was rampant among the US military during the war, that there were many soldiers who used fascism as a convenient excuse to line their own pockets, and that American nurses had to be stationed literally on islands by themselves with no male soldiers in sight, for fear of otherwise being the perpetual victims of sexual assault the entire time they were there. It's the back-and-forth between this idealistic heroism and the sometimes ugly realities of human nature that provides the frisson that makes this book so readable, and it pretty much draws a line in the sand that demarks the way that all military stories were told before it, and the way all such stories were permanently changed after it.
Nonetheless, I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5, mostly as a way of acknowledging that younger readers and especially readers of color will find every single problematic element that's almost always found in books this old; for despite Michener's relatively progressive stance here that "rape is bad," he still loads this manuscript up with so many awkward cultural statements about race and gender as to give heart palpitations to any good Woke. I personally wasn't that particularly bothered by it; but with every passing year, I feel more and more compelled to follow up such statements with an acknowledgement that I'm a 51-year-old straight white male, so of course I wasn't that particularly bothered by it, but that others with different backgrounds than mine will find this a much more troubling book than I did. (And of course, the less said about the musical adaptation's "There's Nothin' Like a Dame," in which Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lighthearted joke about these soldiers' predelection for serially raping any woman who comes within grabbing distance of them [actual lyrics: "We feel as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Riding Hood"], the better.)
So all in all, like most books of this type, caution and an open mind is required when approaching Tales of the South Pacific here 74 years after its initial publication; but if you're able to do so, you'll find a surprisingly enjoyable, surprisingly sophisticated record of both the highs and lows of the so-called "Greatest Generation," and I have to admit that this did nothing but even further solidify my interest in reading yet more by Michener. (For those who don't know, by the '70s Michener had become much more famous for outputting enormous 1,500-page novels every few years about such specific subjects as the history of Poland, the founding of Judaism, and the establishment of America's space program, gaining accolades worldwide for his meticulous research and even-handed overviews; so there's a big part of me that feels like I haven't "truly experienced" Michener until I take on at least one of these.) That probably won't be coming until another year from now, though, so I hope you'll join me again in late autumn 2021 for that! ...more
I recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I thoughI recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I thought I'd track down the original story by William Harrison it was adapted from, which was first published in book form the same year as the movie, and was very nicely still available on a dusty back shelf of the Chicago Public Library. So what a surprise, then, to learn that Harrison wasn't actually a sci-fi author at all, but rather a veteran of literary fiction, a big admirer of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene whose own stories are mostly similar examinations of masculinity among world-weary globetrotters, but who dabbled in experimental science-fiction in the '70s (mostly through commissions from Esquire magazine) because it was the Countercultural Era and this is what literary fiction authors did during the Countercultural Era. So in this particular collection, the pieces are sometimes straightforward Modernist-style tales, set in a variety of interesting locations (Montana, the south coast of Spain, a small town in Missouri); but sometimes they reflect the magical realism that was so trendy at the time because of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (see for example the story of the magician who can literally make himself disappear), with only one or two pieces in this book that stretch all the way out into actual genre writing.
And as far as the title piece, it is way, way darker and more violent than the movie, which fans of the film will find hard to believe. In his original story, the balls are as heavy as bowling balls and are shot out of cannons at 300 mph, spinning around the top edge of the stadium track like a roulette ball and tempting players into possible suicide in order to get an edge over their opponents; and the whole point of the sport even existing is that somewhere between one and fifteen people are killed at every single match, thus better explaining the original story's title, "Roller Ball Murder" (as in, it's a combination of a roller derby, basketball, and murder for sport). He also makes the world that created this game a lot clearer than the movie does, picturing a time in the future in which a debilitating war between Europe and Asia has resulted in private corporations now being the new city-states (displaying shades of premonition that cyberpunk writers like William Gibson would grab and run with a mere decade later), and those corporations having had their own war of attrition that has resulted in a total of six global enterprises now running the entire world, which all now have Orwellian names like ENERGY, FOOD and LUXURY. Like all these stories, it's really not much more than a character sketch drawn out into a little longer of a piece; but Harrison was quite good at these elongated character sketches, and I found this entire book to be fascinating and really readable. It comes recommended to those who want to go to the trouble of tracking down this long out-of-print title. ...more
This is an intriguing take on the "Singularity" concept from early-2000s science-fiction; only instead of positing that the rapid rise of 21st-centuryThis is an intriguing take on the "Singularity" concept from early-2000s science-fiction; only instead of positing that the rapid rise of 21st-century technology will remake the human body and brain in radical new ways, author Kiran Bhat (who's had a quite interesting life himself) opines here that this technology is set to transform the way the global population of the human race sees both itself and its relationship to each other, independent of the arbitrary national and tribal boundary lines that have traditionally been used to mark our differences for the last 20,000 or so years. Unfortunately, though, Bhat's actual manuscript doesn't quite live up to the lofty ideas he's bandying about, although I'll be the first to admit that my disappointed reaction had a lot more to do with the fact that I personally don't care for many of the traits this book exhibits, not that the traits themselves are objectively bad or even done that poorly for what they're trying to accomplish.
To begin with, the book is not actually a three-act novel but rather a collection of linked stories, and it's a well-documented fact that I don't like either the short-story format or collections of stories that have been bound into a single book, which gave it its first strike when it came to me as a reader. Then second, the book is actually a social realist tale with a heavy-handed political agenda, and I am most decidedly not a fan of this genre of writing, which made the book even further outside my wheelhouse. (If I give a thumbs-down even to John Steinbeck, you better believe I'm going to give a thumbs-down to people who want to be the 21st-century version of him.) And then thirdly -- and what finally just sunk this book for me for good -- Bhat unfortunately indulges too much in New Agey woo-woo type prose to tell his story, being guilty (as many social realist authors are) of throwing in Randomly Capitalized Words at Randomly Capitalized Moments to make sure you understand that they're now talking about Big Concepts that you should Be Paying Attention To. I have a low tolerance for this type of prose, which combined with the other problems resulted in a book I didn't care for at all; but I also acknowledge that this is mostly due to my own personal biases, so I'm ultimately giving the book a higher score than I would otherwise when having this kind of reaction to it. I suppose the most honest thing to say here when all is said and done is "buyer beware," and that you can probably guess ahead of time whether you're the type of person who's going to like this or the type of person who's going to roll their eyes for 200 straight pages. To the former, I encourage you to pick it up anyway, despite my own eyerolling reaction. ...more
My parents are officially in the middle of the transition to assisted living these days -- and based on all the wellness books I've been recently readMy parents are officially in the middle of the transition to assisted living these days -- and based on all the wellness books I've been recently reading, I've come to realize that the lifestyle choices I make in my own life right now in my early fifties are largely going to determine what kind of health I'm in by the time I reach their age of late seventies -- so needless to say that I'm spending a whole lot of time and energy these days thinking about eldercare issues. That made John Leland's 2018 book on the subject a natural for me, an expansion of a series of articles he did for the New York Times in which he followed a group of people all aged 85 and above for an entire year, seeing what he could learn about end-of-life issues from them along the way.
The book is a bit guilty sometimes of the thing I was most worried about with a title like this, of sentimentalizing the often eyerolling pronouncements of such elders, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five; but in general I was surprised and pleased by how no-nonsense the book actually is, and how Leland most times actually interpreted his subjects' unedited thoughts into more sober and plain-language advice for the rest of us, which is generally helped by his decision to choose a wide variety of elder types who are in a wide variety of situations. (Particularly fascinating is the 91-year-old gay man in the group, a park-cruising swinger in the '70s who never expected to live this long in the first place.) For what it's worth, far and away the most common and useful thing he found through this experiment is what inspired the book's title -- that those who seemed to enjoy their elder years the most were the ones who defined them not through the filter of all the things they could no longer do, but rather through their ability to consciously enjoy what was still left, to shift their expectations as the circumstances of their lives forced them to, and to gently let go of the stresses that used to come with former pursuits like career, family and sex.
It's a lesson that Leland argues can be applied no matter where in our lives we are, along with the almost equally important lesson (known historically by everyone from the Buddhists to the Stoics) that we absolutely must come to an acknowledgement and acceptance of our own impending mortality, or else obsessively chase the fear of death with anxiety and unhappiness all the way until the moment they're putting our corpse into the ground. This also gets him into a common topic among eldercare books being published in the 2010s, which is the growing divide between our modern society's ability to keep someone alive and what exactly the quality of that life is going to be. This is becoming a full-grown crisis in the US right now, as more and more millions of people begin living old enough to officially run out of money, run out of friends, and run out of the energy required to persist through chronic pain and dementia; and like all the other books, Leland has no good answers here, other than to remind us how important it is to come to accept and adjust for this diminishing quality of life, instead of the paradigm that Western medicine has been promoting for the last thirty or forty years, that life is a game that you're constantly in the process of either winning or losing, that the proper response to diminishing faculties is to "fight" it so that you can "beat" it, and that the number-one all-consuming consideration in eldercare is how long you can put your pain-riddled, arthritic finger in the air and angrily scream, "Outlasted you one more year, Death!" That's getting us nowhere, he and many others are arguing in this genre these days; and this book provides a nice alternative, convincingly arguing that we're all better off by taking a very clear-eyed look at our strengths and weaknesses at any given moment in our lives, then with determination playing up the former while gracefully acknowledging the latter. It comes recommended in this spirit.
I have to admit, I wouldn't have bothered with Gillian Flynn's The Grownup at all if it wasn't for this Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge; it's quite literally a short story that was published as a standalone book for no other reason than to grab some of that sweet, sweet Gone Girl money, originally written by invitation from George RR Martin who put together an anthology in 2013 of famous genre authors deliberately writing outside of their comfort zone. But that said, this is a pretty great short story, which in the style of Flynn's other books makes several feints along the way to its main point, couched in a deliciously cynical milieu of a thirtysomething hipster who gives fake fortune tellings to middle-class women in the front room of a mini-mall store, then massages with happy endings to their oblivious husbands in the back room. Written in her usual witty, sharp style, a big part of what makes her otherwise grocery-store genre thrillers stand out so much against her peers, this is quite literally a book you can get through in a half-hour, just the ticket for pumping up a "read this year" list that needs some inflating. ...more
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politiAs friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This 1994 book, one of the "foundational texts" on modern Deaf culture recommended to me by Michelle Jay, founder of the StartASL.com online courses I'm currently taking, is mostly known for being one of the first (if not the first-ever) memoir about Deafness written by an actual MFA holder in creative writing, making it a much more literary and poetic manuscript than almost any other book on the subject that had been written up to then.
Author Leah Hager Cohen uses the first chapter to explain her own situation -- how she herself is hearing, but grew up on the campus of New York City's Lexington School for the Deaf because of both of her parents being full-time staffers there, spending her childhood jealous of all the Deaf students who seemed to have a special bond she would never be able to share -- then devotes each chapter after that to standalone essays examining a series of students who are currently attending there in the early 1990s. As such, then, the book is about a lot more than just Deaf culture issues -- it also looks at immigration (many of the students are refugees from the then-Communist Eastern Europe), Judaism, financial disparity and how this affects the American educational system, and a lot more. I'm not giving it a perfect score, because Cohen's prose is just a bit too flowery for me, and I found some of the chapters just a bit too much of a tedious slog to actually finish; but certainly this is one of the more beautiful books about Deaf issues ever written, now considered a classic in the genre and that provides a valuable window into a very specific time in history, after the "Deaf Pride Revolution" events of the late 1980s but before ASL had become an accepted part of mainstream American culture like it had by the 2000s. It comes recommended in this spirit, but with the advice to keep your expectations low so that you'll be pleasantly surprised, not build them up and inevitably be disappointed....more
To make my biases known right away, Don Evans is a good friend of mine, and is also the man who very nicely asked me this year to join the Chicago LitTo make my biases known right away, Don Evans is a good friend of mine, and is also the man who very nicely asked me this year to join the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, so there's not really any way to see my write-up of his latest book as somehow an objective and disinterested critical review. I wanted to bring it to your attention anyway, though, because I just finished it myself and really loved it, and wanted to make sure it found more of its natural audience here this holiday season.
A series of stories about families of all types as they each enter the holidays, the tales here range from the sentimental to the bleak, strongly reflecting Evans' natural love for our city's strong history of gritty social realism. My personally favorite story of the collection, for example, "Tiny Flakes of Bone," is an ur-example of this, as two former school chums celebrate Christmas with a sybaritic gambling binge in Las Vegas, their hazy 48 straight hours at the casino slowly revealing the fractures that initially drove the two apart, and how one has been able in middle-age to shed himself of his addictive demons, the other lost in a permanent wallowing in them.
To one degree or another, all the stories in An Off-White Christmas share this intense character-building quality, although certainly many of them have much happier endings; each of them, though, are surprisingly deep dives into the dynamics that make up a family (whether biological or otherwise), Evans cleverly using Christmas as a gimmick off which to hang a whole series of diverse tales with diverse tones. I would've really enjoyed the book whether or not I was already friends with him, and I'd like to strongly encourage you to pick up a copy yourself as soon as you have the chance. ...more
It's clear right in the very first chapter of Nejoud Al-Yagout's new novel-in-stories Motorbikes and Camels, when we listen in to a group of teenage MIt's clear right in the very first chapter of Nejoud Al-Yagout's new novel-in-stories Motorbikes and Camels, when we listen in to a group of teenage Muslim girls talk about how to best take ecstasy and have premarital sex without getting caught, that the author is not that interested in presenting a shining example of the piousness of Islam; instead, this is a look at the practical realities of modern flawed humans when it comes to this ancient and sometimes antiquated religion, a thoroughly 21st-century story from this celebrated Kuwaiti poet and feminist pioneer.
A series of interlinked short stories, where we hop from one young person to the next within a group of acquaintances at a Muslim university, the novel is a soap-operaish yet deeply character-based look at the contemporary relationship problems inherent in a society that still largely practices arranged marriages; one person we follow is a closeted homosexual, one a secret alcoholic, one from an enlightened family but who suffers from everyone else's disdain for them, a series of warm bodies passing each other in the night while trying to figure out their place in their newly adult world. Their tales are always engaging and believable, and I suspect will be especially enjoyable to other young Muslims who find themselves in these same situations.
Granted, the book has its problems, mostly related to this poetry veteran still finding her mature voice as a writer of prose; the dialogue can sometimes get stilted, the pacing is often uneven (in the first story, we watch a girl lose her virginity, get married, get divorced, go through a spiritual reawakening, then eventually become a New Age vegan, all in the space of a few thousand words), and I wish that Al-Yagout had established its Middle Eastern setting earlier in the manuscript than she does. (This story comes across very differently if imagining it taking place within a diasporic community in a secular Western country; for example, we don't even find out that alcohol is illegal in whatever place they are until almost a quarter of the way through the book, which gives a whole different flavor to the early scenes where 19-year-olds swig whiskey before having sloppy, drunk sex.)
Still, though, I was highly entertained by Motorbikes and Camels, as well as legitimately moved in several sections, an earnest and relatively daring look at Muslims who are always in their hearts trying to do the right thing, but who so often get sidetracked by hormones, controlled substances, politics, and the other diversions of our modern times. It comes generally recommended, and especially to other young Muslims looking for something highly relatable. ...more
[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree eac[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history. ...more
[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree eac[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history. ...more
[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree eac[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history. ...more
[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree eac[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history. ...more
[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree eac[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history. ...more
Now that I'm no longer reviewing 200 contemporary novels every year for the CCLaP website, 2018 has been giving me a chance to go back and read a lot Now that I'm no longer reviewing 200 contemporary novels every year for the CCLaP website, 2018 has been giving me a chance to go back and read a lot of classic books I've never gotten around to reading before; in January, for example, I finally took on what's now known as The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, which started life as the two short novels The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which aren't actually novels at all but rather collections of related short-story-style vignettes. It's mostly known now for being one of the first books to explicitly examine the growing threat of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, a first-person survey of the creative chaos of Weimar Germany that was used as the source material for the '70s musical Cabaret; and while, yes, the book does mention Nazis here and there, I was surprised to learn when finally reading it that it's much more a deep, poetic examination of complex character, a look by Isherwood at the fascinating, complicated real people he was surrounded by during his youth as an openly gay liberal artist, during a brief window in Germany's history when such a thing was openly tolerated.
As such, then, Isherwood's sensitive writing covers everyone from the wilting hothouse flowers of the former aristocracy he was hired to teach English to, to the petty criminals now attracted to the burgeoning Communist Party (and the manipulative intellectuals who were their supervisors), the charming rogues who ran Germany's thriving inter-war black market, and the many still-closested homosexuals who used all these devices as a way to facilitate then hide their illicit gay affairs. Yes, Nazis pop up in the middle of these shenanigans on a regular basis; but Isherwood's point was much more to focus on these particular people themselves, in prose that is both plain-spoken and wonderfully dripping in Romantic melancholy, the equivalent of watching a teenage girl in a white dress stand in the middle of a rainstorm, patiently waiting for a lover who will never arrive. Come for the delicate examination of the social experiment that produced Weimar Germany; stay for the look at the violent right-wingers who ruined it all. ...more
My first-ever exposure to Mid-Century-Modernist horror writer Shirley Jackson, and generally a disappointment; almost all of the stories in this collection just basically tread water on an uninteresting narrative for five to ten pages, until we finally get to a single line in the last paragraph designed specifically to shout, "AH-HAH! BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, HAH? HHAAAAHHHHHH?????" Easy to see why she was a favorite of Rod Serling, whose show "The Twilight Zone" also trafficked in these kinds of final-moment left-field revelations. I downloaded her entire oeuvre as a torrent all at once, so I'm not ready to give up on her yet -- I'm going to read at least two of her full-length novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in the hopes that they're not as underwhelming as her short fiction. Those reviews coming later in the year.
I've been mentioning throughout this spring how CCLaP's submission policies are set to change later this year, once we start accepting new books for rI've been mentioning throughout this spring how CCLaP's submission policies are set to change later this year, once we start accepting new books for review again, and Mathieu Cailler's story collection Loss Angeles is a perfect example of why; for while this is a perfectly fine book of short stories, if not on the overly earnest and expected side (most of these pieces could stand to be either more surprising, darker in tone, or ideally both), the fact is that I have barely anything to say about it analytically or critically, because I'm mostly a reviewer of novels and find it difficult to come up with something overarching and conclusive to say about such little pieces that come and go without making much of an impression. That's unfair to both short-story authors like Cailler and to fans of short stories in general, which is why this will be one of the last story collections CCLaP will ever review; because I never seem to have anything better to say about such collections than, "Sure, okay, it's fine, whatever," which is a waste of both my time and yours. As always, this comes generally recommended to short-story fans, but don't blame me if you read it yourself and sort of shrug your shoulders at the end.
When CCLaP goes back to accepting outside submissions again in 2017, I think one of the new rules we'll be making is to no longer accept story collectWhen CCLaP goes back to accepting outside submissions again in 2017, I think one of the new rules we'll be making is to no longer accept story collections, the reason for which is illustrated perfectly by Tony Rauch's what if i got down on my knees?; for while the pieces I read were, you know, whatever, just fine, they also rarely lasted more than a few pages apiece, and as a guy who primarily does long-form analytical looks at full-length novels, I find it nearly impossible to do reviews of such "blink and they're gone" work that doesn't somehow sound like a patronizing aunt who never wanted to read the book in the first place ("It was fine, dear, just perfectly lovely"). Short-story authors deserve a better review than this for their collections, and it's becoming clear that CCLaP is not the place to get such better reviews, so I'll just leave it for today at a general recommendation for those who are specifically seeking out little throwaway pieces that can each be read during a typical bathroom visit, while admitting that this is easily skippable for those without such an interest.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers know that I find it difficult to write reviews of short-story collections -- the shortness of each piece makes it hard to do a really good analytical look at the book as a whole, while the nature of such collections means that some pieces might be great while others are terrible -- and Vanessa Blakeslee's Train Shots is a great example of what I'm talking about. Not particularly great nor particularly terrible, these slice-of-life character-heavy pieces sometimes are long and engaging, sometimes tiny and that barely make a blip on the consciousness; and like most story collections I review here, it comes recommended for those who are already a fan of the author, but can be easily skipped by those who aren't. A middle-of-the-road score to reflect the uneven nature of story collections in general, some of these pieces deserve a higher score than this, while others deserve a lower one, averaged out in the end as a symbol for me shrugging my shoulders once finished and saying to myself, "Meh."
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Giallo Fantastique is the second in a series of titles we received this year from horror publisher Word Horde, and is pretty similar in makeup to the first title we reviewed, Children of Old Leech; it's another anthology consisting of previous Word Horde authors, in this case combining the Italian "lurid detective" genre known as "Giallo" with the otherworldly supernaturalism known as "Fantastique." And so as such, much again like Children of Old Leech, it's difficult to give one analytical summation of the entire book -- since this is made up of stories from twelve different authors, the quality ranges from okay to great depending on which piece you're talking about -- although in general I can once again confidently state that the overall quality of this anthology is well worth its purchase price. I look forward to starting to tackle the individual novels by individual Word Horde writers we have coming up in our "to-be-reviewed" queue; but for now, here's another compilation that's highly worth your time.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
I admit, I was not expecting the unrelenting harshness and bleak outlook of April Ford's The Poor Children when first picking it up, and it took some getting used to before I was finally into the swing of things and along for the ride she clearly meant to set up for her readers; imagine the rural lawlessness of a Bonnie Jo Campbell story combined with the gothic blackness of Sam Shepard, with a healthy dollop of Dennis Cooper sexual transgression thrown into the mix. As such, then, this short and intense story collection is absolutely not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and you deserve to ask yourself whether you're even up for reading the the kinds of mental baseball bashings these pieces represent; but if you are, you'll find a lot to like here, an unblinking and sometimes surprisingly poetic look at the seedy underbelly of the American spirit, right up the alley of existing fans of Kathy Acker and others. Strongly recommended, but only to a highly specific crowd; you know who you are.
Out of 10: 8.6, or 9.1 for fans of transgressive literature ...more