Back in the early nineties, my not-yet-wife Rhian Ellis came up with an idea for a literary magazine: Five bucks would get you the magazine, a muffin, and the hot beverage of your choice, and it would take you around the same amount of time to finish all three. She devised a visual and literary aesthetic: offbeat, darkly comic, a bit oblique. The magazine was called Teacup. Rhian enlisted my help, and we sold it in the coffee shops and bookstores of Missoula, Montana, where we lived. The first few issues were stapled; the last couple, perfect bound. We were surprised at how many of our favorite writers were willing to throw in: Stephen Dixon, Heather McHugh, Charles Simic (“I like your little mag,” he wrote us in response to our pleading query). Friends destined for great things contributed: Ed Skoog, Andrew Sean Greer. Art came from our pal Science Woman, from Rhian’s sister, and from the children’s writer Aliki. We took real pleasure in gathering evidently incompatible works and combining them into a pleasing whole. It was less than a slick, but more than a zine. It was its own thing.
Teacup only lasted a few issues, but we’ve wanted to follow up on it for years. This past summer, I accidentally came up with the phrase “Okey-Panky” while pursuing a writing prompt, and Rhian joked that that should be our magazine. A month later, I was in Brooklyn, hatching a plot with the EL gang. Okey-Panky would be dedicated to brevity, eccentricity, and dark humor. It would publish every Monday morning, which is when you desperately need something short and weird. We recruited Skoog to hunt down some poetry, and Alice Bolin to find new and uncategorizable writers. I would look for cartoonists, because I love indie comics and have long thought they deserved to live alongside traditional literary forms. (Mainstream Lit? The MSL?)
We’re thrilled to have a few months’ worth of great new writing ready to go, and are eager to see what comes in when we open next month for general submissions. Each week we’ll bring you fiction, poetry, essay, graphic narrative, or whatever, followed by brief (of course) interviews with the writers, and audio and video clips of them reading and working.
Okey-Panky is going to be low-key, but, we hope, always interesting. We’re the spray of plastic flowers pulled from the magician’s tux pocket, the horse that can do long division, a dirty joke from the Mother Superior. We’re the streetlight that flickers as you walk underneath. We’re the robin building a nest out of Christmas tinsel. We’re Silly Putty, except when we’re Serious Putty. We’re a virtuoso tambourinist, a left on red, your hot French-Canadian cousin. See you every Monday at okeypanky.com.
Electric Literature is ringing in the new year with an innovative (and free!) storytelling iPad app by acclaimed Israeli author Alex Epstein. True Legends is a beautiful, interactive adaptation of a short-short story about a blind piano tuner with design and illustrations by Tsach Weinberg and music by Ulrich Ziegler. We asked Alex Epstein about the creation of the app, folktales, and artistic collaboration.
Alex Epstein: I know that many people still believe that digital age will have no effect on literature, on the way we tell stories and especially on the format of books. It’s nonsense. For me, exploring how literature might look in the next decades is one of the most important aspects in this app.
The question of free vs paid is one of the biggest challenges for artists today. I do believe that literature should be as free as possible — but I also believe that writers should be paid for their work. I don’t think that nowadays we have a good working model for settling this contradiction. In this particular case, however, its only one short story, one app, so it made a lot of sense to offer it for free.
BS: A lot of your stories have a fable-like quality to them, many feels like folktales. What about that perspective, that style, appeals to you?
AE: I live in very troubled part of the world. Sometimes, the legend / fable-like filter is just a way to write about the rivers of blood that my country and it’s neighbors are so keen to swim in each time, over and over again.
BS: True Legends is a multimedia production, with four artists working together. What was the collaboration process like? How involved were you in the art and music?
AE: The idea and the implementation came directly from [animator] Tsach Weinberg. He wrote to me that he used one of my short stories to make a draft for an IPad App, and that he is a bit afraid that I won’t like it. Within 5 seconds of looking at the app I called him to say that basically he is insane, because it’s one of the most beautiful things that someone ever did with my writing. Music came later–I am a big fan of Itamar Ziegler, and we got lucky that we could use his music. It was a bit tricky, since the story has a piano, and I think that Tsach did a great job of merging it with the text and the illustrations.
BS: Is working with a translator similar to working with an artist or programmer, someone who helps recreate vision in a new form?
AE: In a way yes, because — especially when the text is translated to a language I can understand, as English — I can have a feeling or a sense of whether something is working or not but without knowing how to correct it, to make it work. Actually, I would compare the translator to a God — but unlike some false gods, he does respond to your prayers…
BS: Have you worked with other artists before? Who would you love to work with, alive or dead?
AE: Since my short-short stories are very accessible online (in Hebrew) I am approached a lot by artist and art students. One of the most exiting projects was created by an Israeli jewelry designer, who made an exhibition of jewelry inspired by my stories. I never thought that something like this is even possible. David Polonsky’s illustrations in Recommended Reading were also wonderful. He was, by the way, one of the artists I always wanted to work with. If you can get Kate Bush to sing or read or even whisper one my stories, I think my mission on the planet will be done…
BS: You work in a variety of formats (print, digital, and Facebook are just a few). Do you have a format in mind when you’re working on a collection or story, and does that change how you write?
AE: At the first stages of writing I have only a silhouette of a format, a very vague feeling that the book can also exist outside of its expected form. It turns into real form only when I am close to finish, or even while editing. The handwritten book, for example, became a possibility while I was rearranging the order of the stories and suddenly realized that every copy of this book in a paper format can be unique. And it still took a lot of time to understand that what I really need to do in order to accomplish this is to forget everything I know about books in the last few centuries…
BS: Tell me more about this handwritten book.
AE:In the beginning of September 2014 my new collection of short short stories was published in Israel. 100 very short fictions, First Hand from an Author, it’s title. I am a big advocate of the digital format — my previous book was available only in digital form — for all the obvious reasons — books can be downloaded immediately, carried anywhere, cost less for the reader and turn higher profits for the writers. Almost all of the books today are digital, anyway — we write them on digital machines, they are being edited on screen, the cover is designed with software and so on. The transformation of all this to paper seems to me as a waste of energy and artistic means. For me, especially as a very short story writer, the screen — of an iPad or a kindle or even a computer — represents my work better.
But this time I decided to raise the conflict of paper vs digital — for myself and also for my readers, and create something else. I decided to offer the option to buy the book in a paper format, written, from scratch, in my own handwriting. First Hand, from an Author. Really to write them, with no copy paper, no reproduction, no trick. BTW, my handwriting is not “beautiful” but it’s readable by all means.
Fully aware of how crazy it sounds at first, I must add that this return to the pre-print era was also allowing me to achieve something which deeply interests me as a artist — the creation of a book that can not be reproduced — every copy of this hand written book is of course different from the other. (And I even decided to change few stories from one copy to the other). I choose a notebook that looks like a hard cover book and opens flat, so it’s easy to write in. I made a post to decorate the cover by hand.
Eventually me and my publisher set a price for this experiment — the digital copy would be around 7 US dollars, which is reasonable in Israeli current market conditions. The paper handwritten copy — around 100 US dollars, which is, if you don’t take into consideration the amount of work that each copy requires, is outrageous. I made several experiments and realized that it takes — only because my short stories are so short — 8 to 10 hours to write a single copy. But since the price seemed high enough, and nobody, as far as I know, made anything like this in recent years (or centuries), and especially because, yes, it does sounds crazy, I expected to write not more than 5–10 books in a period of a year, which seemed like something I can cope with.
And so we went online. On the first day 10 copies of the handwritten book were sold. After 10 days — 30 copies. As much as I would like to reflect more on this experiment, I will have to stop writing this post now. I have to go now and handwrite my own book, over and over again.
Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems… and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes — well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably… you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe… well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander… well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.
Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.
We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.
We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to the school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then… And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar — that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.
And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly, I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.
The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.
I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.
One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of —
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I would not.
We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the window.
They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.
As far as resolutions go, drinking less or working out more seem so familiar, so perennial, that they’re impersonal and doomed for failure. For my New Year’s resolution I looked for one that spoke to my individual excesses and shortfalls directly. So as 2014 came to a close I turned to my bookshelves as a way to take inventory of my life and look for ways I could improve myself. I’ll make this admission: if my bookcases were submitted to a VIDA count, I’d have a lot of explaining to do. Reading better seemed like a more worthy goal for 2015.
What what would “reading better” look like? I remembered learning that Alexander Chee read only books by women authors for three years, and that seemed like an experience I could benefit from. But improving the diversity in my reading list shouldn’t stop with gender. For the next 12 months, I won’t read any books written by straight white men. I plan to enrich my daily life by making certain there’s room for diversity in my reading life. And hopefully that experience will influence my reading choices and general outlook for years to come. By making this resolution public but publishing it here, I’m holding myself accountable and doing what I can to make it stick.
While creating a more inclusive TBR pile for 2015 (please feel free to suggest titles by tweeting them at @benasam), I wondered if there were more folks making literary resolutions. So starting with Alexander Chee, I reached out to writers, editors, and others in the literary world to see what changes they were planning and was happy to receive an enthusiastic response. These responses may inspire you to make similar resolutions for yourself, but don’t be afraid to add some new ones in the comments.
“My resolution is: I am handwriting the 1st draft of my new novel. I have resolved to handwrite first drafts next year for everything I can. Also to read more alone in bars.”
– Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh, and The Queen of the Night, forthcoming 2/16 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, The New York Times Book Review, and The Morning News, among others. He teaches writing at Columbia University.
“My literary resolution is to stop being so precious about writing and treating it like this fraught important thing when really it is just a job. I have a bad tendency to only write when I have a lot of hours free and conditions are good, and I want to get better at taking little scraps of time where I can. The way I treat it now is as if a prep cook decided she could only chop 10 lbs of onions if she had a perfectly sharpened knife and could take the time to get the ideal angle on each little slice. If I keep acting like that, the onions will never get chopped. So to speak. Man, if I’d thought about it a little bit longer I could have come up with a better metaphor but, in the spirit of my resolution, WHATEVER!”
– Emily Gould is the author of Friendship and the co-owner, with Ruth Curry, of Emily Books.
“My literary resolutions are the same as my non-literary ones (namely, nonexistent). But let’s say hypothetically: Make every (literary) decision with the knowledge that death awaits and there is no time for the inessential. Stop being so morbid. Lighten up for Christ’s sake. Overcome the crippling ambivalence I feel toward pretty much everything except Leonard Michaels and coffee. Drink less coffee. Or, on occasion, more.”
– Yelena Akhtiorskaya has written a novel called Panic in a Suitcase, which came out this summer and caused her both elation and stress. She also writes short stories about her parents’ friends, most of which have appeared in N+1. She grew up in Brighton Beach. She now lives on the upper west side with her cat, but it is not as bad as it sounds.
“My new year’s resolution is to finally finish building my time machine, so I can travel 20 years back in time and convince my younger self to never write about time travel.”
– Alex Epstein was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight. He is the author of ten works of fiction in Hebrew, and in 2003 was awarded the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. His work has appeared in Guernica, Iowa Review, Electric Literature, Words Without Borders, Kenyon Review, PEN America, and elsewhere. He lives in Tel Aviv. Two of his collections of micro-fiction, Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time, are available in English from Clockroot Books.
“I resolve to read more work in translation. Two of my favorite author discoveries last year were translated from another language. As a writer, I think it’s a great way to learn about voice.”
“My goals are to set aside at least one hour a day for uninterrupted personal reading, read more women, and to write everyday — none of which I have done with any consistency. Oh yeah, I’d also like to learn a few new words every week. I’m pretty good with attending readings, so no resolutions to that end. Just need to stay consistent.”
– Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years was praised by publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Times of London, and The Sydney Morning Herald. The novel was honored with the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the Center For Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First novel prize, the PEN/ Hemingway Award For First Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. Jackson has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, The Center For Fiction, and the Urban Artist Initiative. Jackson teaches writing at New York University and Columbia University. Find him at www.mitchellsjackson.com or @mitchsjackson.
“I recently had something of a probate hearing for all my books: each was considered and recommended for continued inclusion in my collection — or not. I kept those I’ve read and loved; I kept those I haven’t read but intend to; and I kept those given to me by someone important to me, whether or not I plan to read them. The others were sold to the local used bookstore. I received $99 for them, which purchased groceries, sixty pounds of timothy hay pellets for my large rabbit, and a glass of tempranillo. I like thinking that the unwanted books were nevertheless consumed, via conversion into food and drink for me and my family. My literary resolution this year is to buy no new books until I’ve read all the books I already have, and I don’t expect one year will be nearly enough time for the task.”
– Merritt Tierce is the author of the novel Love Me Back (Doubleday). She is a 2013 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree and a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She lives in Texas with her husband and children.
“I need to ritualize my writing habits in 2015. What that means is every day, at a certain time, for a certain amount of time, I need to be working at my desk. I usually write pretty regularly, but right now writing occupies the same head space in my life as “going to the gym.” Fingers crossed, in 2015 it’ll be closer to “brushing your teeth.”
– Bill Cheng is the author of Southern Cross the Dog.
“Although I knew it in theory, the events of this year really brought home the fact that reading is a political act. For 2015, my goal is to read 2:1 — two books written by or about people of color for every book by or about a white person. In 2014 I read more internationally, which got me beyond my own country; now it’s time to get beyond my own skin.”
– Jenn Northington has worked in books since 2004, as a bookseller and events planner. She’s also the co-founder of the Bookrageous podcast and a freelance writer and reviewer.
“Until relatively recently, I worked in film. During these pre-publishing days, I made sure to keep a notebook full of impressions, sentences, dates, titles, and threads of thought inspired by what I was reading. Now that books are work-related and part of my daily conversations, I’ve become lazy about this kind of record-keeping, about making sure there is a personal account of what I’ve consumed, learned, loved, and hated. In 2015, I’d like to make sure I return to putting my book-related thoughts in a notebook, because tracking how and why and what and where I read means, for me, a return to the love of it, rather than just a mercenary plowing through the TBR pile.”
– Lisa Lucas is the publisher of Guernica, an online magazine of art and politics. Lucas also serves as co-chair of the nonfiction committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival.
“My literary new year’s resolution is to read slower. I want to try and re-discover the kind of reading where you savor every page instead of thinking about unread emails, progress through the book, progress through the to-be-read pile, and the quantity of remaining tea bags in cupboard.”
– Jonathan Lee is the Associate Editor of A Public Space and author of the forthcoming novel High Dive
“My resolution is to read fewer books. I finished 161 books in 2014, which is just too many. I know it sounds like I’m bragging (I am, a little), but staying up on lit means reading quickly and voraciously. Thinking back on all 161 of those books, I’ve retained so little of any of them. In 2015, I’m going to do less — read slower, more deliberately. In a way, my resolution is to be more patient.”
– Kevin Nguyen is the Editorial Director of Oyster and edits The Oyster Review.
“In honor of the read-a-thons that brought me such joy in elementary school, in 2015 I’ve resolved to have a monthly personal read-a-thon. No errands or grading or dishes. Just me and some snacks and a pile of books. Maybe I’ll go for a run at some point during the day, but probably not.
– Kirstin Valdez Quade received a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, she currently teaches at the University of Michigan. Her debut story collection, , is due out this March from W. W. Norton & Company.
“I don’t typically resolve at the end of the year, because I put too much arbitrary pressure on myself as it is. That said, one thing I’m starting to realize I’d like to do more is: I need to remember that no one expects anything from me, writing-wise. If I gave up forever or wrote seven unimpeachable novels in the next year, the global/historical impact would be minimal to zero. So, if I’m going to keep at it, I should allow myself to do what I want, and try not to worry too much about what a thing is or how it might fit into the rest of the world. If this last year has taught me anything, it’s that that part is out of my control anyway.”
– Colin Winnette is the author of several books, most recently Coyote (Les Figues Press). His new novel, Haints Stay, is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in 2015. It’s a western. A quick google search will reveal that his website is colinwinnette.net.
“My literary resolution for 2015 is to read more books by dead writers. As an editor, there is a constant pressure to read the hot young literary bestseller, and I don’t have anything against writers who are alive, but reading (or even rereading!) more classics would be a wonderful way to recalibrate and try to consider the big picture. I hold out hope that some of the books that I work on will be read in, say, thirty years’ time, so I really should be measuring them against those that have already proven themselves truly enduring reads. The list of masterworks of literature that I’ve never read is too long and embarrassing to list here, but Moby-Dick and Confederacy of Dunces come to mind…”
– Peter Blackstock is an editor at Grove Atlantic. His acquisitions include Fobbit by David Abrams, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris, the forthcoming debut novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and a collection of stories by actor Jesse Eisenberg. He lives in Queens, New York.
“My resolution is to buy more books. I mean that literally. I don’t pirate books, but as a writer/editor/critic I receive a lot of review copies and I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped supporting writers, presses, and bookstores as much as I should. We have to support the things we care about if they are going to continue to exist, and (for better or worse) that tends to mean spending money. Books are more important to me than a few more extra cups of coffee each month. I also aim to read more diversely, in every sense of the word. As a writer, I hope to finish that one almost done novel, finish a draft of that other novel, work on that one short story, finally finish that other thing, do a few more of those things, maybe work on that big thing, and write those other things at least a few times.”
– Lincoln Michel is the online editor of Electric Literature and the coeditor of Gigantic. His debut collection, Upright Beasts, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
“My resolution for this year is the same as every year — read and mark my thoughts on the stories in Best American Short Stories, write letters to Steven Heighton, attend at least two Selected Shorts, excavate the spirit of Jack Kerouac and ask him what he thinks of the new draft, attend readings, tell person reading they did a good job, and special for this year: screw up courage to begin this reading series I’ve been thinking about. This is in addition to my goals for writing, being a human, erring on the side of kindness or absence, getting bangs, etc, etc…”
– Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut novel 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS is a Barnes & Noble Fall ’14 Discover Great New Writers pick and an NPR Best Book of 2014. Her debut collection of short stories SAFE AS HOUSES received The 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named an Outstanding Collection by The Story Prize. She teaches at NYU and in the low-residency MFA program at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts). For more information, please visit: www.mariehelenebertino.com.
“I was a little embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of Patrick Modiano until he won the Nobel Prize in 2014. So this year I’m set to familiarize myself with his oeuvre, starting with his 1978 novel Missing Person. A detective thriller + meditation on identity? That’s my jam.”
“My resolution is to read or reread a handful of classics that I either haven’t had the chance to pick up or that I read in high school where I’m guessing I skipped through a lot, and didn’t quite appreciate the book as much as I would now, ten pages a day until I finish. I recently did this with Don Quixote, and now I’m looking at a few George Eliot books I’d like to check out, some Dickens, and a handful of books Melville House reissued in the Neversink Library series.”
– Jason Diamond is the founder of Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He’s an Associate Editor at Mensjournal.com, and a columnist at Electric Literature.
Each month we gather some news headlines that are strange enough to be fiction. Here’s yet another batch of headlines to get your creative juices flowing along with suggested genres:
Mark Gluth’s No Other details a family’s downfall. Irreparably split by its patriarch’s suicide early in the novel, the family attempts to cleave together, but these misunderstood characters never quite learn each other’s motivations.
This is surely a dysfunctional family: Karen, the mother is a drunk. Tuesday, her oldest daughter, finds her father dead after he commits suicide. Hague, their son, observes his damaged family and berates himself for not knowing how help or to fix it. When Karen falls and Hague gets hurt, we see Karen’s selfishness:
Something slipped and she was back on her back. His balance was off and he fell forward. It was his brow that hit the coffee table’s edge. He heard it as it happened. Karen yelped. He was kneeling, reeling. He touched his head where it hurt. His skin peeled back. Something stuck to his brow. Her voice was this dull him beneath the ringing in his ears. What she said was that she was worried that she had really hurt herself.
Karen has been dealt a bad hand, but she is mean to her children. Hague internalizes the family’s lot. “Karen slapped Tuesday.” Gluth tells us. “She thought it was reasonable though she’d forgotten the reason. It was how drunk she was.” So it goes for most of the book, but a few revelations in the second half show us that we can’t take any of the character’s actions at face value. There is more to Karen than her role as the nasty drunk or the bad mother. Gluth’s strengths as a writer elevate this story above being a simple tale about how a family falls apart.
Gluth’s direct and declarative writing style gives No Other a stream-of-consciousness touch despite its constantly shifting third person point of view. The first part of the book is told from the perspective of Hague.
He poured some dog food into a bowl. He walked outside and set it down. The sky was a screen. It was all faded spray from the sun. He walked inside, flicked the knob on the TV. It was static. He stood in the kitchen and opened the fridge then the cupboard. The stove smelled like it was burning while he made macaroni and cheese. He dumped ketchup in a mound on his plate. He walked around the house. When he got into the static it was because he didn’t hear it until he forced himself to. He thought that meant that it was everywhere. It awed him.
Gluth’s narration allows us to understand how it is that his family misreads Hague. As well, the piling-on of these simple sentences also provides opportunities for striking, poetic observations. Often a sentence describing setting or character action is followed up with an explanation: “The sun hit the bleachers but he couldn’t feel it. It was the air.” Though these almost child-like statements aren’t meant to function as anything symbolic, their collective effect shows us that these characters create meaning out of the observable. Their lack of concern for metaphor is, itself, revealing.
No Other is structured in such a way that important facts come too late and often to the reader, rather than the characters who need the facts the most. This is the tragedy of No Other: Gluth uses the element of time to downplay major plot points. This echoes the way his novel works on a sentence level; he downplays his subjects using understatement. About midway into the book we switch from Hague to Tuesday, and learn, simply, “When Tuesday was alone she turned on the furnace and all the lights. On Christmas she just slept because she didn’t have to work. When she woke up it’d been a year…” Another tragedy had befallen the family. Tuesday, by then also self-destructive and repeating her mother’s behaviors that drove her away, is powerless against the tragedy her family has piled on.
This is a beautiful novel on a sentence level, and certainly a book for anyone who likes fiction without overdone narration or forced metaphor. The candor of Gluth’s narrative style makes for many striking passages. “Her thoughts were images strung from moods,” he says at one point, and later, “She said It will only be a couple of days. She said she loved her. After she hugged her Tuesday was emptied of everything except anxiety.” In No Other, Gluth shows us that the world doesn’t need to be forced into literary form to have meaning. His aim is to have us watch the family split along the hairline cracks forming between each bond. Once it begins, there is no stopping their undoing and watching it happen is sad. But the beauty of Gluth’s prose offers many opportunities for pause. He finds beauty in simple observations, often in the gaps between things. “The door opened,” he says. “It let in people and light.”
To purchase No Other, click here to be directed to Sator Press’s site.
While Peter Jackson has chosen to adapt a normal-length children’s book into an interminably long three-part film series, the above video takes a shorter approach. CGP Grey sums up the vast Tolkien mythology of Middle-earth in under 5 minutes. Watch above.
It’s Christmas Eve and what better way to celebrate than listened to acclaimed author Neil Gaiman read “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens? The above audio courtesy of the New York Public Library.
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