Quotes from writers in new Opium Magazine. I submitted a line from George Saunders and he replied with a line from Pushkin. They're both in Opium 9, along with some great writing and an interview with Jonathon Keats. Worth checking out.

The Obscene Bird of Night

There are few novels that one senses more than they read, and "The Obscene Bird of Night", by Jose Donoso, is one of them. Mr. Donoso, who passed away in 1996, was a novelist, journalist, and professor, and his style reflects all three vocations. He writes from the perspective of a deformed mute who does not so much tell a story as let the story be told by those who surround him. In long, scattered paragraphs, sometimes four, five voices will speak, and we know that the mute is in the room as he will sometimes interject with his thoughts. I have seen this before in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano", but Donoso is challenging the reader even more by asking us to listen as the other characters--nuns, priests, inmates, old women, lovers, doctors--speak to the boy, and to each other, and as the boy speaks to them (though they cannot hear him), and narrates the action of the scene. We sense the entire scene that Mr. Donoso has imagined, and in this case, the word creates the frenetic feeling of being stuck in a crowd.

The boy comes from a wealthy family, however, because he is born deformed, the Don of the family manages to surround his son with other freaks in a Casa run by nuns, so as not to expose himself and his aristocratic family to ridicule. The boy, Mudito, is not allowed to leave the Casa and so has no knowledge of the outside world. The story moves through history and time the way our memory sometimes recalls a moment from yesterday and then another from twenty years ago while walking a single city block. The boy has created a character who assists the father in these plans, and through a short novel within this novel, we learn about the development of the Casa. Characters in Mudito's novel and Donoso's reflect each other, and sometimes become each other in the nightmarish world that develops in the boy's mind once he has his first glimpse of the city streets outside the Casa.

Ideas of hoarding objects play a significant role in the novel, and both religious and personal artifacts--a Eucharist light, the finger of Saint Gabriel, a button, a board game--are treasured equally by the "inmates", who have, since Mudito's birth, become accustomed to the Casa, which, as the novel progresses, is rumored to be torn down so that developers can build and profit off the land.

Sex, Dogs, Pumpkins and Giant Paper Mache Heads, also permeate this novel that, in my reading of it, asks whether it is ever possible to erase the now proven corruption of our past, and if those who were responsible for its creation can ever be punished.

Last Days in America

Dear Readers,

Thank you for continuing to check in with this website and for your support. My hope is to post frequently about those books which might go unnoticed, or worse, be forgotten.

I also hope to share my own work with you, especially any work that appears in literary journals I have often wished to be a part of over the years. One of those journals is KNOCK Magazine, published out of Antioch University Seattle and edited by Bryan Tomasovich.

My story: "Last Days in America" appears in the magazine's new issue.

You can buy individual issues or subscribe here

The magazine is also available in bookstores across the country

The Boat, Gallatin Canyon, Bear and His Daughter

A few weeks of fighting the short story, made it possible to explore it once again through the eyes of three very different authors--one young, two old.

The sentimental is stripped from the work of Robert Stone's "Bear and His Daughter", while McGuane still puzzles in a way that at times aggravates me as a reader, but then, in no less than a short sentence, illuminates the power of the short story: heart, humor, mystic observance. "No longer the country crossroads of recent memory, Four Corners was filled with dentists' offices, fast food and espresso shops, and large and somehow foreboding filling stations that looked, at night, like colonies in space..." (From the story Gallatin Canyon). McGuane propels the narrative forward with a rare language that is true as a woodcut, yet understands the need to lighten moments with non-sequiter dialogue and exposition that often traces the cruel, strange, and funny line of a man's life:

"The seas were ever less violent, and within an hour the skies had cleared entirely and the Gulf had regained its characteristic dusty green placidity under towering white clouds. It occurred to Errol that his drinking days were behind him. Oh, joy! Not another shit-faced, snockered, plastered, oiled, loaded, bombed, wasted minute ever again! No more guilt, remorse, rehab, or jail! Free at last!

"Calming down, he remembered that his hope lay in his visit to Florence Ewing, the good witch." (From the story The Refugee).

I often look back to the two stories that have always stayed with me: Ishiguro's "A Family Supper" and Richard Ford's "Rock Springs". Both speak with such honesty and clarity, they are sometimes too difficult to finish for how masterfully written they are.

I wonder then after finishing a book of stories like "The Boat", will I ever remember the plot, the characters, a line even, from that work. It is with me now, so I'll say that the risks Nam Le takes are wonderful, and the ability to enter the worlds unknown, such as in "Cartagena", where a drug lord's pawn is forced to make a crucial decision concerning his life and the life of a friend, inspire to let go of the fear of writing about something you don't know, and embracing the idea that strikes us in dreams or in early morning silence, the calling, the source. I enjoyed five of the seven stories, though the one that seems to have propelled his book toward its lauded reviews, "Love and Honor and Pity, etc.", a narrative one knows is true yet stripped and sculpted into an arc, felt very out of place once I had finished the book, which is strange considering it's clearly used to establish unity in the collection.

It would not be fair to match Le's work with the work of McGuane and Stone, nor to match McGuane and Stone, though both do embrace the chaos of chance. While I can see the conflict, climax, reverse expectations, and resolution of Le's work very clearly, Stone fires out like a shotgun spray, as if a journalist just picked up along a dirt road and entered into a world he had no idea he was about to record. Stories like: "Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta" begin in the scene, offer only the most minimal exposition, and reveal the characters through one of the strongest forces of fiction, dialogue. There is always the possibility of each story collapsing under its grandiose conditions, but the thrill of reading Stone is that the characters work themselves up to such a state that if they didn't snap, we may as well for them. So, I'm invested.

All three I recommend. Beautiful books unconcerned with anything other than the line, the beat, the voice.

Crabgrass Frontier

I've been seeking a book to explain the development of the American landscape as it is now and have found it in Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier". I believe the book is classified under urban development but it is as much a book about American History as it is about suburbanization. Beginning with Brooklyn and Brookline and covering the entire country with only a handful of exceptions, the book addresses the American need to get out of the city and into the "country", the need for space (freedom), and those who suffered to create it. What I found most interesting about the study is the development of municipalities, how new towns were connected to the cities that spawned them and that the poorer classes left in the cities were now paying for sewage, water and electricity in these new, extravagent towns. Jackson shows how race, poverty, disease, industry, wealth, and the automobile built the America(n) we see now, one that is isolated rather than part of a community. Or at least the America we saw in 1985. At that time, I walked most places. Now, the lenght of those walks to the store is about the length of a Target. Recently I visited Manchester, Vermont and saw how they had spread their mall throughout the town, so that chain stores were run out of Cape style cottages and neatly paved sidewalks where local restaurants, offices, and trade shops also operated. I'm not sure if this is better or worse, but it seems that the town should have a say in how these businesses appear, no matter the dangers and comforts that lurk inside.

Mo Yan and Ma Jian

"Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out", where did you come from? I haven't read a work of literary fiction with such excitement since first reading "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene, and as with Greene, I went and found Mo Yan's (pictured left) other works. His epic "Big Breasts and Wide Hips", although far too long, was equally captivating, mixing humor with horror.

"Stick Out Your Tongue", a short book of stories, the last like sketches for the monumental "Red Dust", a searching for some sense of purity in land under Buddha, grabbed me as it would

any traveler who expects the journey to be linked with the spirit, and instead becomes disillusioned by what is seen. Spirit-killer. Not all journeys, but the ones planned. And though never on the run, never hiding, lost in America, crossing state lines, when they ask "where are you from?" that place is another country, with its own people and customs and rituals, its history is short and wide, no way to dig into the graves and pry out the memories of the dead. "Red Dust" is truth, as best it can be told by an individual of a place and a time past, its history still seething somewhere underneath.

I have been enjoying the recent introduction to Chinese authors, and herald the unreal translations by Howard Goldblatt (a professor at Notre Dame) of Mo Yan's incredibly complex works, Zhu Wen's gritty and humorous "I Love Dollars", Leslie T. Chang's "Factory Girls", and to reach back to the brilliant "Soul Mountain", a book I pick up at random when the written word becomes a heavy load. But I have been dissapointed by two recent, epic novels out of China: Yu Hua's "Brothers", which I believe suffers from a tired translation and a lack of necessary editing (There are only so many times in a book that boys can peep at the female haunch), the other being Jian's most recent work "Beijing Coma". I must come back to this book because its subject implores me to, but I was lost by the he said she said dialouge to open the novel, reading much like reportage, stunted, its details at times uninteresting, though I trust he is leading me somewhere because he has before.

Books recommended here: Zhu Wen's "I Love Dollars"; Ma Jian's "Red Dust"; Mo Yan's "Big Breasts and Wide Hips" and "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out"; Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain".

The Natural Order of Things

A novel by Antonio Lobo Antunes, "The Natural Order of Things", with an excellent translation by Richard Zenith. Antunes seems more accessible to me than the work of Jose Saramago, mainly based on the text. Saramago imbeds intricate story lines into block text that sometimes confuse me as a reader, though his characters and their place in the nameless city are masterfully portrayed. Antunes, likewise, plays with text, but it is written in the voice of the speaker, not the writer, and includes tangents into dreams, memory, and history that I find remarkably honest to how we think and communicate with ourselves and each other. I'm excited to read more of Antunes' work. He seems to have a penchant for the horror of circus shows.  

Writing is like a drug. You begin [to do it] just for the fun and you end up organizing your life around your vice, like the addicts. That’s the life I lead. It is the same with my own pain. I look at it like a schizoid: there’s the man who suffers and the writer who asks himself how he can use that suffering in his work.
–António Lobo Antunes

The Beginning of Sorts

A web presence, good to have. There's a photo, links to stories (support the journal, support your local book store), and links to authors I enjoy reading who have a website.  

My most recent story appears in Quay: a journal of literature and art. It is called "The Sufferers". It is an uplifting summer time read. 

I've recently finished some excellent books worth noting: 

Geraldine Brooks' "Year of Wonders", another uplifting summer time read about the Plague in 1666. An excellent novel, precise and genuine. 

Mo Yan's "Life and Death are Wearing me Out", an amazing novel that holds tight for nearly 600 pages.

Joseph O'Neil's "Netherland", a novel of the city with great clarity and purpose, a truly enviable narrative. 

Charles D'Ambrosio's "Dead Fish Museum", stories from a far off place, right around the corner.

Some other notables include: Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley", Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke", Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger", Jon Raymond's "Livability", John Banville's "The Sea", Robert Olmstead's "Coal Black Horse", and William Gay's "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down".

I've read plenty of terrible books recently, but this is not the place for that. I have to think that even a bad book has the hours of a life inside it and so must be worth something.