Alex Awards

I just found out that Tunneling to the Center of the Earth received an Alex Award for "the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences". I'd heard about this award last year because Hannah Tinti's novel The Good Thief had been selected, so it's really cool to get picked and I hope tons and tons of teenagers read the stories now. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start making little gold Alex Award stickers and going to bookstores to put them on copies of my book.

Cynthia Schad

A few years ago, I found an issue of Ploughshares from 1988, a special issue titled “Fiction Discoveries” that was edited by George Garrett. Established writers such as Fred Chappell, Andre Dubus, James Alan McPherson, and Pamela Painter nominated emerging writers who had yet to publish a book. While it was interesting to read early work from Noy Holland, Susan Straight, and Josip Novakovich, the most intriguing and memorable story in the issue was by a writer I had never heard of, Cynthia Schad.

Richard Yates provided the nomination for Schad, then a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Emerson College. The story, “Close to Autumn”, is a an impressive piece, a brief portrait of a young girl, Edie, who lives alone with her devoted father. Edie finds the outside world to be a suspicious, sometimes terrifying, place, and her fear is the engine that drives this story into uneasy places. School makes her nervous. At church, the sudden sound of the organ startles her so much that she begins to scream and her father has to carry her out of the building. And when, at a Dairy Queen, she is forced to walk past a group of laughing teenagers on her way to the bathroom, she becomes so paralyzed with fear that she wets her pants. In short, simple lines, Schad conjures up an exaggerated world that, through Edie’s eyes, hums with potential danger.

Teenagers hung out at the Dairy Queen, loud kids who smoked and chewed gum at the same time. They sat on top of the booths and put their black boots on the seats. They took up three or four booths in the back of the Dairy Queen and they never ate any ice cream. They kept cans of beer tucked between their legs that they’d tip to their mouths when no one was looking. The boys wore black leather jackets and white T-shirts, except for one boy who never had a shirt on under his coat. The few girls seemed just like the boys, smooth, hard, and unbreakable…She was in the middle of their booths now and their laughter swarmed around her. Their voices lowered to mutters and her eyes crept up to the table next to her. The boy with no shirt slid from the top of the booth to the seat and leaned toward her. “Hey baby,” he whispered. He smirked with one side of his mouth and greasy sweat dotted across his nose and under his eyes. He leaned closer and for a moment she was afraid he’d touch her. He reached out his hand and someone behind him snickered.

Her father, who has recently started dating a woman with whom Edie connects, seems to have his own issues. He accosts, with startling violence, those same teenagers in the Dairy Queen after the incident with his daughter and then, on his 30^th birthday, reacts to the sight of his girlfriend with a cake she has baked for him by shouting, “Get that thing away from me,” and hiding in the kitchen. In short, Edie and her father seem wounded by circumstances just beyond the edges of the story. Yates addresses the story in his introduction by saying that “almost nothing is explained to the reader, but then, explanations have little value in the dynamics of the heart.”

Since reading this story, I have searched for more work by Cynthia Schad but have come up empty. I think that she might have published a story in the literary magazine Witness in the same year as her Ploughshares publication, but have been unable to find a copy of the particular issue. I can find no books attributed to her. And perhaps she never wrote again, but the amazing promise of “Close to Autumn” makes me wish I had the chance to discover more of her work. Schad, in her contributors note in Ploughshares, says, after attributing the shape of the story to “repeated playings of a record album by Tom Waits,” that “I don’t really think of writing as a career; it’s just what I am.”

Having spent a good portion of my life feeling like I am a failure if I don’t write, that if I don’t produce stories then I’m just this lazy guy who reads comic books and argues about different kinds of barbecue, I feel a strange joy at the idea of someone, twenty-one years old, writing a nearly perfect story and moving on, doing something else. If there will never be any other stories by Cynthia Schad, there is “Close to Autumn”, and I am happy for that.

If I learn from one of you that Cynthia Schad got married, took her husband’s last name, and subsequently published dozens of books, I am going to feel very happy that I have the chance to read more of her work and, also, very stupid that I wrote this entry.

CellStories and X-mas Loot

"Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D." is the story of the day at CellStories, "a daily story delivered straight to your iPhone. iPod Touch, or other mobile device." This feels like the 25th century.

My Christmas haul included a lucha libre mask from Corazon Fair Trade (to replace my previous Batman mask for particularly rough writing days), the complete set of the new Hammer of Thor Heroclix, and this print by Patrick Leger to go with this print by Patrick Leger that I already have in my office. I find it helps put my students at ease to have them walk in and see a print of a man punching another man in the face so hard that his head seems to have exploded. I may be wrong about this, but I don't think so.

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.