Writing from Inside: “Nail,” by Danielle R.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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This piece from Danielle is an exercise in empathy, in which she finds a subtle connection between herself and an inanimate object–in this case, a nail that showed up (another story) in a little pink bag. –MW
NAIL by Danielle R
I started off shiny and new, freshly crafted, sitting high above the hayloft in the Smiths’ barn. That is where my home was. For decades, I stayed sturdy and strong, while the wood around me slowly decayed. Finally, I fell from my post and landed on the barn floor. I lay there collecting dust and being kicked about by the farmers and cowhands, until one day my point penetrated the sole of a pair of work boots. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: Eduardo Galleano’s “Children of the Days”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Throughout his writing life Eduardo Galeano has given voice to the silenced. Hopscotching the globe to elude the death squads of right-wing military dictatorships, he has offered up a steady succession of works of brilliance, mostly chronicling the history of the Americas. He has described himself as “… a writer obsessed with remembering the past of America… intimate land condemned to amnesia.” His newest work, Children of the Days, continues to expand notions of literary genre. Is he a journalist? An essayist, a historian or novelist? Certainly a poet… Children of the Days follows the days of the calendar to offer up vignettes from the forgotten annals of history. While it is impossible to adequately characterize the cumulative power of the writing, here is a small sampling: Continue reading →
Baseball, Joe Dimaggio, and Pacifism: Colbert, How Can You Resist?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Really? Joe DiMaggio? Another WWII novel?
I know. Like everything I write, this new novel, The Powers, just followed me around and insisted on being written till it wore down my resistance. It started during a conversation my then-draft-age sons were having about the Iraq War and whether they could in good conscience claim C.O. status. That topic led us to WWII, the one war we collectively tend to think of as the “good war,” which led me to think about 1941. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Ben Fountain
War is a petri dish for the creation of great literature. Setting aside the absence from the “forgotten war” in Korea, the United States‘ recent military engagements have inspired The Naked and the Dead and Catch 22 from World War II and The Things They Carried and Dispatches from the Vietnam War. Yet until recently there has been a glaring absence of a defining work from the War on Terror. Until now. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The River Swimmer,” by Jim Harrison
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Jim Harrison
As readers we all have our favorites–authors whose work seems to speak directly to us and resonate in our very bones. For me Jim Harrison is one of those writers and now we are graced with a new collection of novellas, The River Swimmer, that further enhances Harrison’s legacy as a writer with “immortality in him.” Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Astral,” by Kate Christensen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Kate Christensen, author of The Astral
Among the wealth of pleasures of working in a bookstore like Longfellow Books, with its family of literate customers and colleagues, is learning about treasures that might, in another lifetime, have passed unnoticed. A recent serendipitous connection led me to Kate Christensen’s The Astral and the acquaintance of her protagonist Harry Quirk, one of the more finely drawn and winsome characters to be found in recent fiction.
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Flamethrowers” by Rachel Kushner
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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In a recent review I shared E.L. Doctorow’s description of the novel as “the presiding art–in it’s intentions, if only occasionally in its realization, a major act of the culture.” And when that very occasional, serendipitous ‘realization’ occurs, it is important because of its power to impact both the worldview of individual readers and the very cultural petri dish from which it arose. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner is one of these rare books.
Author Kushner arrived on the literary scene in 2008 with Telex From Cuba, a National Book Award nominee that told the story of Castro’s revolution and the Americans forced to give up their tropical paradise and the riches it had afforded them. The Flamethrowers continues to explore the impacts of imperialism and the revolution that the inequities of imperialism inevitably spawn. Yet while politics may lie at the heart of much of Kushner’s work, the politics are often background, obscured by the sheer, dazzling beauty of her storytelling gifts. Kushner transcends questions of form because as James Woods points out in his scintillating review of The Flamethrowers in The New Yorker, Kushner has “… a natural, vivacious talent for telling stories and these stories… seem fictively real, cunningly alive. Novelistic vivacity, the great unteachable, the unschooled enigma, has a way of making questions of form appear scholastic.”
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: John Leonard’s “Reading for My Life”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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John Leonard
Book reviewing is an endeavor that hints at the undeniably mercenary aspects of the book business–you know, that distasteful transaction of exchanging filthy lucre for creations that can justifiably be labelled as art. Yet sometimes literary criticism transcends the quotidian role of simply selling books and can be said to attain artistic heights as lofty as the works being commented upon. Nowhere is this elevation of reviewing books to art itself more evident than in the writings of John Leonard. And now these works of astonishing erudition and wit and wisdom have been collected in a single paperback volume, Reading For My Life. Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: Lundgren’s Book Lounge
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Maria Semple
[This week we introduce you to Bill Lundgren, who has a thing or two to say about current books, and blogs books at LongfellowBooks.com. He'll be back!]
Where’d You Go Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple
While waiting on a mother and daughter at the bookstore recently I asked if they would like to join the customer program. When they responded that they were from Seattle I had to ask whether they’d read Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. “Everybody in Seattle has read that book,” the mother responded, “and it’s all true,” the 14 or 15 year old daughter added with the emphatic disdain that only an adolescent can produce. Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: A Look Back at Antonya Nelson’s Expendables
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Some years ago, in 2000, to be precise, I won a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. I rented a fancy tux and headed Milledgeville and a grand award ceremony. But the real prize was seeing my collection, Big Bend, beautifully published. This yaer marks the 30th anniversary of the prize, and the editors asked us winners if we’d write brief posts about one another’s books for their blog. They are also offering a pair of e-anthologies of work from all the winners, coming soon. And before long, an e-book of Big Bend will finally be available, hoorah! Below, I’ll offer my post for the “30 Days of the Flannery O’Connor award,” this one about Antonya Nelson’s winning collection from 1990, The Expendables. Continue reading →
