Good Books in 2009

I am not good at writing about fiction. I generally use the word "awesome" over and over again. But I did read some awesome books this year and thought I'd mention some of them that I especially loved.

It was a good year for short story collections. I loved Cliff Garstang's In An Uncharted Country, Paul Yoon's Once the Shore, Lydia Peelle's Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, Holly Goddard Jones's Girl Trouble, Skip Horack's The Southern Cross, and Laura van den Berg's What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.

Two of my favorite books of the year were written by Blake Butler and Shane Jones. Scorch Atlas was mesmerizing, thrilling, and scary as hell. Light Boxes felt like a perfect fairy tale that twisted and expanded into something even more amazing. These are two books that would not leave my brain.

Josh Weil's The New Valley, a collection of three novellas, was such a wonderful, tightly-written book, one of the few books that I managed to read more than once.

Jedidiah Berry and Paul Tremblay wrote two amazing novels (The Manual of Detection and The Little Sleep) that happened to have private detectives as the main character. I can't recommend these two books enough.

My three favorite books that I read this year were, in order of my liking them:

3. Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: I read this in manuscript form a while back and sometimes a student would come to my office to talk about Padgett's story from the Ben Marcus anthology and I would bring up the word document for this book and read paragraphs from it to them. It never failed to blow people away, even if they couldn't figure out what the hell it was all about. I could read pieces of this book everyday for the rest of my life and be happy. I wish someone would give Colonel Powell a television show called The Interrogative Mood and simply let him read questions for thirty minutes. Or, even better, give him one of the Late Night slots and let him interview celebrities in the same manner as the questions in this book.

2. Nami Mun's Miles From Nowhere: This is such an awesome book. There are elements of Jesus' Son in it, but it's more than that. She writes with such precision about incredibly grim events and then, as if by magic, turns it all into something you don't ever want to forget.

1. Chris Adrian's A Better Angel: I love Chris Adrian's work. Gob's Grief is one of my favorite books of all time and this collection highlights why I think he is such an amazing writer. The stories are heartbreaking, bizarre, and yet the way that Adrian handles these characters, in the midst of such pain, is so beautiful and affirming to me. If there was one book this year that rearranged the precise machinery inside of me, it was this one.

Roaring 20's

I just finished up my Beginning Fiction Workshop and had the chance to read some great, strange stories from the students. There was animal sacrifice, a son watching his dad put baby powder on his thighs in order to slip into a pair of tight leather pants, a girl trying to trick her sister into eating deer feces, and organ harvesting.

For the second half of the semester, I always use the Ben Marcus anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, which I think is fantastic. It has stuff from George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Christine Schutt, Padgett Powell, and Jhumpa Lahiri. It's weird and funny and the students generally struggle with it at first but ultimately come around on the anthology. But I've been thinking about adding some other stories to the class, ones that deal with people their age, dealing with the ramifications of impending adulthood. So I was hoping to appeal to the two or three people who read this blog and see if you had any recommendations for great short stories that involve people in college. I've tried to think of some and haven't had much luck. I can find all kinds of amazing stories about teenagers dealing with the horrors of high school, but not much about college. Any help would be appreciated.

American Vampire

I promised myself that I wouldn't write another post about comic books after I made a pathetic request for a comic-book-pal and netted not a single response. My wife said that it was brutal to read the post and she felt very bad for me.

However, I wanted to mention that an amazing fiction writer, Scott Snyder, has landed a ongoing series with Vertigo called American Vampire. Snyder wrote the really, really awesome story collection Voodoo Heart and when I started my subscription to One Story back in 2002, the first story I got was Snyder's story "Happy Fish, Plus Coin" which is still one of my favorite stories from that journal.

Snyder wrote a Human Torch one-shot for Marvel, and is doing some work on an X-Men series, but this American Vampire series is going to be a huge deal. Stephen King is co-writing the first five issues. So, yes, this is going to be big.

NBA

The National Book Award Finalists were announced last week and when I met with my students on Thursday, I read them the first paragraphs of each book and had them vote on their favorite. We're going to see if, based on just the first few sentences, we can predict the winner.

The winner was Marcel Theroux's Far North. The first few lines for that book are:

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.

I've been doing it so long that I'm shaped to it, like a hand that's been carrying buckets in the cold.

The winters are the worst, struggling up out of a haunted sleep, fumbling for my boots in the dark. Summer is better. The place feels almost drunk on the endless light and time skids by for a week or two. We don't get much spring or fall to speak of. Up here, for ten months a year, the weather has teeth in it.

Two books tied for second with my students, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

Louisiana Book Festival

If you live in Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, or if you were thinking of heading that way this weekend, I'm going to be at the Louisiana Book Festival. On Saturday morning, I'm on a panel with Juyanne James and Geoff Wyss about New Stories From the South 2009 and then I'm giving a reading at 1:00 pm by myself. And I have a real concern that I will be reading by myself, that not a single person will be there. And then I'd have to walk to the signing pavilion and sit there for thirty minutes. While I am there, I plan to eat many, many roast beef and gravy po' boys. And there's a place near my hotel that has boudin pizza. Oh, yes.

Prompts

I've been happy to see some more of my stories appear in the last month in some great journals. A year and a half ago, some friends and I started a monthly writing contest where we each wrote a 1,000-word story based on a prompt. Because I've been focusing on the novel, this has turned out to be a great way for me to feel somewhat productive. Even if I didn't get anything else written, I had a 1,000-word story at the end of the month. Here are the prompts that led to the stories that got published.

Morass: "A Pile of Shirts, Ripped from the Body" in Clapboard House

Buck: "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D." in Barrelhouse

Rickshaw: "Blue-Suited Henchman, Kicked Into Shark Tank" in SmokeLong Quarterly

Misogyny: "My Hand, Dead Tissue, Severed at the Wrist" in Hobart

You can read another story from our group (The tar prompt that made me write the story in Juked) here at Pindeldyboz from P. Terrence McGovern.

NYU

For anyone that might be interested, I'm going to be in New York tomorrow for this:

Thursday, September 24th, 7:00 p.m.

The New Salon: Fiction Writers in Conversation

Kevin Wilson

Kevin Wilson is the author of his debut story collection, "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth" (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), and teaches at The University of the South. In conversation with Darin Strauss.

Location: Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues