The Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Work has been keeping my very busy these last couple of weeks.  I’m grappling with questions about my future and my job, all while trying to stay on top of myriad deadlines.  In the midst of all of that, my book reviewing and blogging have fallen behind a little, so to make myself feel a bit better, here’s a mini review of a new collection of short stories.

Heads of the Colored People is a debut that simply blew me away, particularly the titular story, which is a true powerhouse (with a nod to Eudora Welty). Subtitled “Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology,” it plays with the fourth wall, turns readerly expectations upside down, makes you laugh, and then utterly guts you. I mean, seriously sucker punches you.

I picked up this collection of stories because of the provocative title and stayed for the sheer writerly talent contained within.  Thompson-Spires’ narrative voice is so distinct, so self-assured, that it defies belief that this is her first book.  Edgy but always accessible, she’s a new literary talent to be reckoned with. Put this book on the shelf with Junot Diaz and Roxane Gay, where it will be in good company. Seriously. Just buy this book.

Heads of the Colored People went on sale in the US yesterday, published by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster.  I read an advance reading copy provided at my request by the publisher. My coworker and I liked this book so much that we made it a selection for my store’s signed First Editions Club, and I am very much looking forward to meeting Nafissa Thompson-Spires in person at the end of this month.

Last Month in Review: January 2018

January was a very busy month for me.  My reading stats are really decent this month but that’s thanks in part to a couple of days of travel, ratcheting up my YA reading, and working on a good audio book. I  got to attend the fantastic indie bookseller Winter Institute in Memphis, which was exhausting and exhilarating in pretty equal measure, but which led to lots of great book acquisitions.  I’ve also been dealing with some existing and potential career stuff that has resulted in rather more sleepless nights than usual that have also contributed to rather more reading than usual. In chronological order, then, here is what I finished reading in January:

1. Anatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles. This was a rewarding novel with conflicted and complicated characters -- just the way I like my fiction.  Review here.  Qualifies for my Diversify Your Life challenge. This book will be published in March, and I’m keen to introduce readers to this one.

2. Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.  My first nonfiction of the year, and which I also happened to have reviewed already. This was an amazing, but non conventional, biography of the artist and scientist, and I happened to listen to the audio version of it.  Also qualifies for my Diversify Your Life challenge.

3. Love by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Loren Long.  Damn, but it is really possible that I’ve written three book reviews for the first three books I read this month?  IT IS.  Color me surprised.  This picture book still makes me cry when I go back to it, and it makes me very happy indeed.  Also qualifies for my Diversify Your Life challenge.

4. American Histories by John Edgar Wideman.  This is a short story collection, and as primed as I was to love it, it was more miss than hit.  I hasten to add that it’s simply because it doesn’t dovetail with my own reading preferences, not because it’s not a good collection. I think it’s simply because I prefer my stories a bit more concrete.  That being said, the first story, which is a sort of dialogue between John Brown and Frederick Douglass, is very interesting, but the one that resonated most for me is the one with an autobiographical narrator in conversation with his sister about the death of their father.

5. The Universe is Expanding and So Am I by Carolyn Mackler. This was a very quick airplane read for me, and while I found it engaging, I also found it problematic.  I hope to get around to reviewing this one soon.  It’s the sequel to the YA sensation, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things.

6. The Dangerous Art of Blending In by Angelo Surveils. I picked this book up at Winter Institute and read it on the plane ride home.  This is another YA book that was a quick read, and while I warmed to it by the end, I also found a few problematic things about it.  I hope to review this one, too. Also qualifies for my Diversify Your Life challenge.

7. I Have Lost My Way by Gayle Forman. I’ve read and reviewed Gayle Forman here and here, but this was a bit different. Less emotionally hefty than If I Stay, but very engaging.  This book explores the way that having a friend who believes in us can help us discover, and be true to, the person that we are. It also qualifies for the Diversify Your Life challenge. Hope to review this one, too.

Book Review: The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora

I read this book very quickly over the course of a couple of days, and it's just SO GOOD.  I don't read many short story collections, but this one is a bit different in that the stories are interconnected.  Less like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (which I liked a lot) and more like Frederick Reiken's Day For Night (which I loved).  So maybe this is a novel in stories.

Anyway, author Lauren Acampora grew up in a wealthy Connecticut suburb and couldn't wait to move away for college.  When circumstances demanded that she move back to her hometown, she kept her sanity by imagining the dark, inner lives of her friends and neighbors, and thus The Wonder Garden was born.

Acampora clearly has an eye for the bizarre and a taste that runs to the twisted side, and I had the feeling that I would love this book from reading the first story. The characters drop in and out, the point of view shifts for each chapter, and what the reader ends up with is a brilliant cross section of the dark underbelly of suburbia.

For example, in one story, a man is the house inspector for a young couple moving to this rarified and historic Connecticut town from New York City. The inspector turns up in a later story, as do the young couple, but now the husband has become a shaman and the wife takes a job in an antiques shop. There's a wealthy business man who bribes a brain surgeon to let him touch his wife's brain during a procedure, and all three show up one way or another in other chapters. There's the matron who is so dedicated to preserving her historical pre-revolutionary home that she can't understand why her children would rather go off to college to learn about post-colonial Africa than to stay home and learn how to make furniture by hand.  One of those children in a later chapter then attends a sort of love-in where the shaman has attained guru status. A wealthy couple become patrons of an art installation that infuriates the entire town, and pieces of the installation later find themselves at an antique shop for sale.

And so on.  While these myriad characters skim by on the surface, Acampora deftly exposes their secrets that writhe in the murky depths, stalking them from below.  Her overall vision of suburbia is masterful, occasionally verging on brilliant.  If you had David Sedaris take on the work of Edith Wharton, and if you added in a pinch of the madness from Where'd You Go Bernadette, you might have a good sense of The Wonder Garden.

I had the good fortune of meeting Lauren Acampora at Winter Institute a couple of weeks ago and attending a dinner hosted by Grove.  I was so taken with her description of her book and how it came to be that I read it as soon as it arrived home -- I flew home from the conference, but the books I collected in Asheville were shipped back via slow boat. Grove Atlantic will be publishing the book in May.  I happen to love the cover, which Acampora told me that her husband designed. He's a miniaturist and he created the scale model used in the photograph.

Review: Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman

I have a small problem: I will read a book, like it, and intend to review it.  "Intend" being the operative word in this scenario. Then, three months later when the book is actually published, I've forgotten most of what I want to say about it.  Also, I read the book on a digital ARC to begin with, and anything that I highlighted disappeared along with the entire text on the publication date, so that's just one more layer of obfuscation that I'm dealing with in trying to write a review.

I could resolve to review books I read in a more timely manner, I suppose, but I know myself well enough to know that it will never happen.  Not unless by some miracle I got hired for big bucks so I could quit my day job in order to write really vague and occasionally unprofessional reviews, and that ain't likely to happen.

Yup, that's me all right.

Thus, I give you an incoherent and rather hazy review of a book that I enjoyed when I read it in October: Almost Famous Women, a collection of short stories from Megan Mayhew Bergman. She takes as her jumping-off point the lives of real historical women who had their moment in the spotlight, but for whom their fame, if it ever came, was fleeting.  A few of these women I'd had actually heard of before: Beryl Markham, the aviator; Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in the film Gone With the Wind; and Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar Wilde, whose name became familiar to me in 2014 as the nom de plume of the protagonist in Caitlin Moran's novel, How to Build a Girl.   Oh, and I'd heard of Shirley Jackson, the author who is most known for her short story, "The Lottery," but I'd never read her before.

The other women comprising the characters in these stories were just as interesting: a set of Siamese twins from the 1930s; a daredevil boat-driving woman; Edna St. Vincent Millay's sister, Norma; Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter, Allegra, who was relegated to a convent; the artist Romaine Brooks; a troupe of integrated musicans traveling through the Jim Crow South; and in a chillingly poignant 2-page story, the nameless women liberated by Allied forces in the Bergen-Belson camp.

Bergman jumps around in her point of view with each story, sometimes narrating in a first person or close third person of the woman in question, sometimes through the eyes of their lovers, or from somebody entirely on the periphery of the woman's story. For the chapter on Shirley Jackson, she actually does a retelling of "The Lottery," and sacrilegious though it may sound, for my money, I prefer Bergman's. (I went back and read the original after I read the updated version, and to be fair, once the reader reaches the climax in one story, it's inevitably anti-climactic in the other.)

Each story is a snapshot, and an intriguing one at that, highlighting moments ranging from the quiet to the sublime. I also love that each chapter, with the exception of the ones on the Bergen-Belson women and Shirley Jackson, open with an portrait of the subject, and in most cases, literal snapshots. As with any story collection, the stories here are occasionally uneven, and some of them certainly resonated more with me than others, but this is a strong collection. I loved the concept behind it and would recommend it to any reader who enjoys historical fiction, literary fiction, short stories, or biographies of interesting ladies. So, pretty much everybody, in other words.

NB: This book was published by Scriber on 6 January 2015, and I read a digital advance reading copy that was provided upon my request by the publisher. It qualifies for my "diversify your life" listing because many of the characters are women of color OR fall under the LGBT spectrum.

Book Review: Invisible Love by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Whew.  It's been so long since I've written a book review that I've been putting it off.  Seriously. Not since April--I just checked.  I've blogged a lot of bookish things since then, and I did several posts in the readalong for Caitlin Moran's forthcoming novel, How to Build a Girl, but an actual book review?  Nope.  This is embarrassing, and for those of you who come to this site looking for bookish things, I extend my apologies.

I'm an unabashed fiction reader, through and through, and while I love to read novels, I don't pay as much attention to short stories.  Oh, I might read one or two story collections a year and the occasional stand alone story in a publication like The New Yorker, but most of the time I really prefer to sink my teeth into a book and become immersed in its world. Let's face it, good short stories are more difficult to write than good novels--at least from this reader's perspective, since good short story collections seem a bit scarce on the ground, whereas good novels are being published every day. However, if all short story collections were as good as Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's book, Invisible Love, I would soon change my reading habits.

Every single story in this collection was very good, and a couple of them verged on excellent, but one of them?  Ahhh, one of them was nothing short of sheer perfection. The first story, "Two Gentlemen From Brussels," tells the twin narratives of two couples. One young couple is getting married in the town cathedral to much fanfare, whilst in the back, two men secretly murmur the young couple's wedding vows to each other, sealing their union under God, if not in the eyes of the state. The men take a proprietary interest in the young couple's relationship and guard over it, keeping watch over the baby they produce as the young boy grows up, showering him with treats and honoring him as a child they could never have themselves.

In another story, "Ménage À Trois,"  the young widow of a musician becomes increasingly convinced that her new husband has an unhealthy obsession with her dead husband's original music.  Uncomfortable, she goes about her life feeling like her marriage bed is a bit crowded, sandwiched between her current husband and the ghost of her first one.

It's the story called simply "The Dog" that broke my heart wide open and made me appreciate anew just how much emotional ground one short story can cover.  I'm not sure I've ever read a piece of Holocaust literature than has moved me more.  An old man kills himself within a week after his beloved dog dies, and his daughter and only friend are left to piece together the old man's history, which is quite different from what he's always told his daughter.  I think any reader would appreciate this story, but if you're an animal lover, and in particular a dog lover, I think this story will completely undo you. To say more would be to spoil, so I'll just say this: "The Dog" is, I think, the best short story I have ever read. If it's not the best, then it ties for first place with Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," which I haven't read since it was first published in The New Yorker seventeen years ago.  No other short stories have their equal for emotional heft.

These stories are exquisite little gems of literature that are full of philosophy and quiet moments of epiphany, those moments when the story pivots in the reader's mind to cast an entirely new slant of light on what has just been read. Each one left me with a sigh of satisfaction and contentment, but also a little bit slack-jawed with amazement that so much could be accomplished with such efficiency -- the longest story is only fifty pages. If you value fine writing and the remarkable execution of a difficult craft, this is a book you should purchase right away.

I don't make sweeping proclamations very often, but I will say this: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is the finest short story writer of our time.  I wish more of his books were translated into English, but thanks to Europa Editions, this is his fifth book available to readers like me.

NB: This book was provided at my request by my sales rep.

Three Mini Reviews: Literary Fiction

Well, I had three lovely mini-reviews all written out to my satisfaction.  I had them saved and ready to post on Monday morning. And now they're all gone.  I am supremely unhappy with Blogger and Google. To say that I am feeling quite put out would be to engage in careless understatement.  But I will try to retrieve them from my memory, if not from my bloody computer, and re-create them for you.

The whole reason I was doing three mini-reviews is because of how little time I have left in March: I have to go to Boston on Sunday for the Boston Gift Show for work, I have to drive to Albany on Tuesday to talk about books on the radio with the good folks at WAMC, and then on Wednesday I leave for Nashville for four nights with my husband to visit Vanderbilt, Ann Patchett, Parnassus Books, and my husband's nephews, not necessarily in that order.

Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi is one heckuva novel.  I started reading it back in January during Tika's minithon and became enthralled. Oyeyemi takes the Snow White fairy tale as a jumping off point for exploring a small 1950s town in Massachusetts. Boy, our narrator, has just escaped a terrible living situation in New York City and has gone off to seek her fortune on the train. Her narrative voice reminded me quite a bit of Katey Kontent's from Rules of Civility. In other words, she is self-assured, a little less worldly than she'd like her readers to think, bright, a little grating, a wee bit unreliable, and perhaps just the tiniest bit on the make.

Boy marries a man and becomes stepmother to Snow, a beautiful child. But when Boy has a daughter of her own, Bird is born with dark skin and it becomes clear to Boy that her husband and step daughter are Passing for White. This revelation unleashes the inner wicked step-mother in Boy, and the rest is mostly history. Oyeyemi stands things on their heads, the entire time stunning the reader with peerless prose. What is identity? What is beauty? What does it mean to be the fairest of them all?

I was so impressed with this book that it became my store's March selection for its signed First Editions Club.  But don't just take our word for it: read this review from the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review and see why other readers can see the rising international literary star that is Helen Oyeyemi.

I feel similar warmth towards Dinaw Mengestu's new novel, All Our Names, which I also first started reading at the same minithon as Boy, Snow Bird. Before I say anything about the novel, I first have to quote from The Millions: "A MacArthur genius, a 5 Under 35 awardee, and a 20 Under 40 recipient all walk into a bar and take a single seat because it's one person and his name is Dinaw Mengestu." Seriously, why aren't you reading him?  He is, without a doubt, the hottest ticket writing in the English language today.

Isaac (which may or may not be his real name), an immigrant from Ethiopia, by way of Uganda, and Helen, his social worker in a small unnamed college town in the American midwest of the early 1970s, are our two narrators.  They may or may not be in love; they are certainly a couple, but being in love implies a passion that neither one is really capable of showing, at least not there, at least not then. Isaac may or may not have been involved with the government overthrown in Uganda; Helen may or may not be deluding herself that life is satisfactory for her and that she and Isaac have a future together.  Very little is what it seems on the surface of this novel, and that's the brilliant subtlety of Mengestu's writing. He writes between the spoken and the unspoken. His characters live between present and the past. And their lives are haunted by the living and the dead.

I didn't pick up on this as I was reading the novel, but when Mengestu was at my store last week, he touched on the parallels between America and much of Africa during the early 1970s.  Both places had just undergone periods of major upheaval in the previous decade--the Civil Rights era of the US, the anti-colonial movement in much of Africa--and yet those years were also marked by hope and idealism. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the hope had given way to disillusionment in both places.

Mengestu's new novel is also a pick for my store's signed First Editions Club.  I couldn't have been prouder to welcome him to South Hadley.

I first requested a copy of Violet Kupersmith's short story collectionn, The Frangipani Hotel, when I heard that the author was a 2011 graduate of Mount Holyoke College. My interest stayed piqued, however, once I delved into the stories themselves. Kupersmith takes traditional ghost stories of Vietnam and re-creates them in a modern setting.The blend of supernatural lore and the country's history wouldn't be complete without the presence of that other, all-pervasive specter: the Vietnam war.

Most of the stories take place in Vietnam, either the countryside or in Ho Chi Minh city, and while the ghosts take many forms, they seem comfortable interacting with Vietnamese and visitors alike. The blend of creepiness and whimsy is balanced perfectly, and I love what publisher Cindy Spiegel writes in the note to the reader at the front of my advance reading copy: the spirits are "as ordinary as the neighbor next door, and yet they carry with them the weight of history in the Vietnamese immigrant experiences and are informed by a rich storytelling tradition."

I don't read much horror, and this isn't Horror with a Capital H anyway, but the more subtle, slowly-get-under-your-skin variety. If you've read the excellent story collection by Yoko Ogawa called Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, you'll have an idea of what to expect, but whereas those stories weren't really rooted in the specific culture of Japan, Kupersmith's are richly evocative of the atmosphere of Vietnam.

NB: I read all three of these books in advance reading copy form, which were provided upon my request from the publishers: Viking, Knopf, and Spiegel & Grau, respectively. The first two books are available now and the last one will be published on April 1, 2014. No foolin'. 

Book Review: This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

When I travel, I particularly enjoy reading books set in the part of the world that I'm visiting, so it's a real pity that Kristiana Kahakauwila didn't write this book five years ago when I visited Hawai'i. Still, it's a good substitute read for the Caribbean, which is one reason the book ended up in my bag. It's not that I think all tropical places are interchangeable--I just like to read books that evoke the same kind of steamy heat when I'm between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.  And as with any tourist destination, this book is a not-always-gentle reminder to readers that just because we may be on vacation, it doesn't mean the rest of the world, with all of its troubles, is.

Kahakauwila's collection of short stories is pretty fantastic. I was drawn in from the first one, which is arguably one of the darkest ones.  In the titular story, we get a group narrative that acts a little like a Greek chorus, where the working class women of Waikiki closely observe a tourist girl and debate whether to interfere with her poor, unsafe choices. They do too little, too late, to the detriment of all.

In another story called "Wanle," Kahakauwila explores the underworld of cockfighting, which makes this the second book I've read in recent years that deals with that bugaboo of subjects that the middle class would rather not talk about (the first one is this incredibly thought provoking and disturbing book).

In "Portrait of a Good Father," we get a girl dealing not only with her father's infidelity but her brother's  death. Both things change her understanding of the world and her parents in heartbreaking ways.

The life of privilege, of white (haole) culture, is in constant conflict in these stories with the non-white Hawaiians--there is talk of water rights, eminent domain, and the overall gentrification of the islands to the point where most people who were born in the islands can no longer afford to live there. This, if nothing else, remains pertinent to my Caribbean travels today.

Throughout all of them, though, Kahakauwila explores themes of belonging, displacement, family, and tradition. Her use of pidgin for much of the dialogue grounds her stories as much as anything, but still is easy to read. She gives us a backstage tour of a world that most tourist never get a glimpse of, and yet it was a world that was intensely familiar to me, both because of my obsessive research for my trip to Big Island in 2008 and because so much of what she wrote resonates with my research and more extensive experience in the Caribbean.  I recommend this book to anybody who values good short stories, but in particular to readers who live in or travel to tropical, tourist destinations.

NB: Hogarth publishes this book this month. I read an advance reading copy of it, provided at my request by my sales rep. 

Book Review: Two Short Story Collections by Nathan Englander and Rahul Mehta

It wasn't my express intention to travel with two collections of short stories last weekend when I traveled to Jackson, but that's how the ball bounces sometimes.  The first, Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta is a backlist book from Harper Perennial that I originally purchased for vacation in October but never got the chance to read.  I bought it after reading a review on somebody's blog that I follow, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.  The stories in Quarantine are definitely discrete stories (in other words, this is not a novel-in-stories), but they are all explorations in character for young, gay men of Indian extraction.  I found the collection good; always thought-provoking and occasionally disturbing.  Family and cultural expectations weigh heavily on these young men, often resulting in unintentionally cruel or destructive behavior to both their partners and elders.  This appears to be Mehta's first published book, and his short stories are in the popular modern US style (think of the kind of short stories published in The New Yorker these days), which is not my preferred short story style (my two favorites are Jhumpa Lahiri and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt).  But just because it's not my cup of tea doesn't meant I'm not looking forward to his future work, and I think his is a voice to be reckoned with. (NB: This book qualifies for my South Asian Challenge)

The second collection I read on my trip, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander, gets the award for unwieldiest title of the year, all homage to Raymond Carver aside.   I very much admired Englander's debut collection of stories many years ago called For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and thus was happy when Ann Kingman, my Knopf sales rep, gave me an ARC of this new one to read. Like Mehta's, these stories are about the lives and times of a particular contemporary cultural group--in this case, American and Israeli Jews.  And like Mehta's, these stories are always thought-provoking and occasionally disturbing, and of a New Yorker-y style (I know for a fact that the titular story was published there earlier).

I didn't realize that I would be essentially writing the same review for two story collections that on the surface are quite dissimilar, but when you boil 'em down turn out to be surprisingly identical.  There's a certain narrative remove from each collection, and while Englander has an unconventionally structured first-person story that is presumably somewhat autobiographical, each book has a sameness running throughout it.  I used to think that Englander's voice was one to be reckoned with, too, but now I have to question my judgment.  This collection may be strong in terms of the writing, but it doesn't show much range.  Then again, I have a co-worker who levels that same criticism against Lahiri, whose work I love and emotionally engage in, so maybe you shouldn't pay attention to what I say.

Book Review: Short Story Perfection

There is one word that comes to mind when I think of Eric-Emmanuel Scmitt's new collection of short stories, Concerto to the Memory of an Angel--and I should stress that it is not a word that I commonly use when writing book reviews--and that word is "perfect." In the US, the short story seems to get short shrift and I'm not sure why.  Of the various literary forms, I consider it to be among those most difficult to execute well. Great novels are a dime a dozen, but not so the great short story collection.  They are far less common and thus all the more to be valued when I do come across one.  This work has achieved a perfect and rare balance.  To add or to take away anything would ruin it.  I could continue to heap superlatives on it, but I'm fairly sure that, in my native tongue at least, "perfect" is pretty much the highest praise. 

This is Schmitt's third collection to be translated into English from his original French, brought to American audiences courtesy of Europa Editions and Alison Anderson's fine translation (which surely adds much to the book's perfection).  Full of philosophy and quiet moments of ephiphany, these stories range from a father's intensely private ruminations on the death of a child to a portrait of a celebrity marriage very much in the public eye.  Each story leaves the reader a little bit slack-jawed with amazement that so much can be conveyed and accomplished with such efficiency.  If you value fine writing and the remarkable execution of a difficult craft, this is a book you should purchase for your collection right away.


The only negative point I can think to raise is that despite Europa's very high production qualities overall, Scmitt's works suffer from dreadful jacket design and a tendency toward awkward book titles. 


NB: I requested this book from my Penguin sales reps and received my complimentary finished copy in the mail last month. 

Review: You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

You Know When the Men Are Gone, a debut work from Siobhan Fallon, is a collection of loosely related short stories told mostly from the point of view of the women left behind at the army base of Fort Hood, TX, when their men deploy. (And yes, in this book it is invariably women who are left behind.) Unlike, for example Olive Kitteridge or In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which are really more novels told in stories, Fallon's stories are more disjointed, and though the theme of waiting is carried on throughout, the effect is one of disconnect, which serves to highlight the alienation that all of the characters seem to feel.

Occasionally we get a man's perspective, but I found those narrative shifts a bit jarring, especially a story called "Leave," in which a soldier breaks into his own basement to stalk his wife during an unannounced leave because he suspects she has been seeing somebody else.  In "Inside the Break," a woman waits to hear whether her husband has survived an insurgent attack; delirious with worry, she logs into his email account and is bewildered to find evidence that he is not only alive, but is possibly having an affair.  Her short-lived relief takes on the ugly edge of suspicion, leaving her feeling worse than before. In another story, the reader learns why one widow avoids the Gold Star reserved parking--the words of gratitude and sympathy contrive to make her feel like she has lost her husband all over again.

Every once in a while, Fallon strikes literary gold with her insight into the double burdens of being part of a military couple, leaving me wanting to know so much more than the short story format is able to provide.  It makes me wonder how she might fare if she set her sights on a novel instead, really freeing herself into the lives of her characters instead of restricting her access in a short story.  I suspect that the longer form might be her strong suit and I look forward to reading more from her.

You Know When the Men Are Gone is forthcoming in January from Amy Einhorn Books, which is part of Penguin.  I received my copy from my sales rep, the lovely Karl Krueger, who raved about it to me and pressed it into my hands.  It's good, verging on the very good, and I think we can expect more work that is provocative from Fallon in the future.

Two new books to consider!

Gearing up for inventory at the bookstore, both the intense behind-the-scenes prep work and the actual counting of every item for sale in the store, has taken up a lot of my time this month. So I'm abandoning the Anguilla trip report for now and telling y'all about a couple of new books that are just published that I hope will enjoy a wide readership.


THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK IN THE WORLD by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a new paperback original from Europa Editions, the good folks who brought us The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I don't read very much short fiction, as I prefer to really sink my teeth into a book and get absorbed by its world. However, if all short stories were as good as this collection, I would have to change my reading habits. These stories are exquisite, elegant, and enchanting--perfect little gems of literature that explore the nature of happiness across age, gender, and class boundaries. Each story left me with a sigh of satisfaction and contenment.



LABOR DAY by Joyce Maynard. Imagine, if you will, the loneliness and alienation of an unconventional and withdrawn single mother, and then picture her 13 year-old son who will try anything to make her smile. Over the course of a holiday weekend their lives change irrevocably when they meet an injured man who turns out to be an escaped convict. Part coming-of-age, part love story, this moving tale is about learning how to trust yourself and others and about the devastating consequences even the most seemingly harmless actions can have. This title was selected as the top August publication by independent bookstores across America and featured in the most recent IndieNext List.