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

Hard Case

I really love old crime novels. I've read them since I was a kid, and the only real problem was finding copies of stuff that was long out of print. I have Strange Pursuit, by N. R. De Mexico, which is one of only three entries by Suspense Novel, falling apart. And I've found old books from publishers like Phantom, Popular Library, Gold Medal, and Red Seal.

Earlier this year, I found a publisher that I can't believe I hadn't seen before, Hard Case Crime. Oh, god, is it good. They publish novels that have been out of print for more than 50 years by authors like Cornell Woolrich and Lawrence Block and David Goodis, kings of pulp. And they have new books by authors that I've loved like Max Allan Collins. I've read 24 of the books so far and I've loved every one of them. They are so much damn fun to read.

As I've been reading them, I've tried to remember to write down lines that I really liked, so here are some of them:

...I heard him say he wanted to see the senior partner. He said it with the air of a man who always demands the best, and then settles for what he can get.

Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner

People generally take their time putting two and two together, and even so they generally come up with five.

Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block

That old boy has teeth you simply would not credit.

Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips

She was a big, soft-looking girl with energetic brown eyes, and she still trusted everybody she met and believed every story she heard. I was always glad to see Joanie, because it meant nobody had killed her yet.

Fade to Blond by Max Phillips

The figure she cut had nothing to do with speech.

Shooting Star by Robert Bloch

That was his privilege, his prerogative, as the man of the house, to answer the phone if it rang when he happened to be there; rather than hers. It was a mechanical instrument, it was an electrical thing, it was a thing of wires, it still fell more within the masculine domain than the feminine.

Fright by Cornell Woolrich

She looked hot enough to catch fire, but too lazy to do anything but just lie there and smoke.

The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer

And there are pages and pages of these great lines in every one of these books. And the books themselves are beautiful, with the mass-market style format with salacious art by guys like Robert McGinnis, who is one of the most legendary cover painters.