JR: I met Jonathan Santlofer in the South of France, when I was a teaching assistant and he was a visiting professor at a school in Lacoste. I’d been out of art school for about a year and really thought I wanted to become a working artist, like I really had what it took. Then I met Jonathan, and his paintings really blew me away. He was working with David Storey, and Jane Kent, who were also there teaching, (a New York downtown artist cabal), they had their son with them, and Jonathan and his wife had their daughter in tow. I often babysat their kids (and tried to teach Jane how to drive stick shift), and in return one night, (I
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 JE: D.R. “Duke” Haney’s Banned for Life is a great sprawling coming-of-age, with all the pitch and velocity of a punk rock adolescence. Banned is also, along with Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, the most “lived in” novel I read last year, and one of the most under-read, in my estimation. Here’s Duke on the books he first fell in love with:
My family has been in Virginia since the seventeenth century, and many in my line were farmers, including my grandparents on both sides. I was especially close to my maternal grandparents, and spent a lot of time on their dairy farm, which my grandfather designated Grand View after the land and the
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 When I Fell in Love – Greg Olear
I “fell in love” in the same manner that Mike Campbell, Hemingway’s drunken wastrel, went bankrupt: gradually, and then all at once. Here is a timeline of my formative years, with the year read in parentheses:
(Note: I’m skipping the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Charles Wallace, Boo Radley, the Tripods, the Chicken Man, various two-dimensional pilgrims to the Boulder Free Zone, and other childhood crushes for whom my ardor has not stood the test of time.)
1984 (1984) The first grown-up book I ever read, at age eleven, impacted me almost as much as the video for Macintosh that ran during the Super Bowl that January.
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JE: We love the spirit of independence around here, and it gives us great pleasure to cover indie releases that may not have the benefit of 100k print runs, and deep publicity coffers, books that won’t get waterfront placement in the chains, titles you aren’t likely to read about in People Magazine, but you might, with a little luck, and some word of mouth, see on staff picks and book club walls and blogs across America.
So, I hit up every indie editor I know (every one of whom is way cool), and I asked them each to preview a title or three from their upcoming spring list. This is a really exciting, and startlingly diverse list of titles which totally confirms
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 JR: Leslie Jamison approached me a while back wanting to join in the When We First Fell In Love series, and I was glad to give her a spot. I just started reading The Gin Closet, and it’s a novel that sounds like a memoir, that’s not really a memoir. But I’ll have more later. Check out Leslie Jamison…you’ll be hearing more from her.
 Leslie Jamison – When We Fell in Love
For me, discovering Faulkner had the pacing of a summer romance. I found him one June and couldn’t think of much else until September. But if our introduction had the timing of a
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 JR: For some reason Ms. Adams first novel, Harbor, slipped under my radar, and upon discovering The Room and the Chair, (thanks DH) I realized that it was impossible not to revisit her debut novel. I’m half way through The Room and the Chair right now, and I feel ashamed that it’s taken me this long to discover Ms. Adams and her quicksilver prose. She flirts with the thriller genre, while keeping the narrative grounded in Washington, DC, and doesn’t insult us with dyed in the wool characters we’ve seen before. I especially like Mabel, a central figure in this story, and her interactions with the men she stalks, Mabel is funny and sharp, painfully observant, and it’s this kind of writing that grabs me with an acute ferociousness, by reminding me that the literary novel is alive and well.
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 JC: John Dermot Woods’ The Complete Collection of People, Places and Things turned out to be one of the highlights of last year’s reading for me, serendipitously finding its way to my doorstep. The surreal little collection is a feast of animated language, whimsical tales and poignancy, and JDW’s many drawings throughout add to the fun. Here’s his contribution – prose and sketch – for our WWFIL series.
WHEN I FELL IN LOVE John Dermot Woods
The first time I read At Swim Two Birds, it took me two months to finish it, reading it every day. I was enamored with the idea of the book from the first scene of Dermot Trellis, the doomed author, whose
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Photo by Saeed Mirfattah
JR: I first discovered Eric Puchner when his debut collection hit the big time, Music Through The Floor. It reminded me of a young Tobias Wolff, especially poignant and heartfelt, but cold with realism, maybe like Carver and Ford. I know that’s heavy praise, and his new novel, Model Home is about to hit the stores, so check out this essay, as a kind of preview…
The Stories of…
It’s hard for me to name a single book that made me want to be a writer, since every good book I finish makes me want to sit down and write, but I do remember the first one I fell in love with
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 I first discovered Elwood Reid with his collection of short stories, What Salmon Know. It’s a tight collection of realist fiction from the margins of America. Elwood continues to write books, and recently delivered the fantastic DB, which gives a fictional account of DB Cooper and what a great mystery he really became by jumping out of that plane. The story follows Cooper after the jump and imagines his life had he lived, well, I mean we all know he lived, right? Elwood was one of my first choices when we got this series going, and I’m thrilled he’s involved.
AIRSHIPS by Barry Hannah
I was an ex-jock slash bouncer slash carpenter getting my guts up to actually admit
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JR: Somehow Paul A. Toth and I became Facebook friends, and I don’t know how. At a very insecure moment I sent him a short story to read, and he gave me some great feedback, insightful and on the mark. Paul is a writer who doesn’t seem to do anything else, in fact, I don’t know if he ever leaves his computer. His novel about the World Trade Center, as I like to think of it, sounded more intriguing the longer I thought about it, and I think it will interest you, so here is the first chapter for your reading pleasure.
1. The Perfumes of All Gardens
This is an airplane novel, written on the fly and out the window. You are busy and
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 JE: All Keith Dixon does is write some of the tensest, most delectably dark character studies out there, in sentences strung as tight as piano wire. Check out Ghostfires, his 2005 debut, a wicked southern gothic-esque crime thriller, which pits father against son, amidst a sordid web of deceit and addiction.
Keith Dixon—The book that made me a reader
We had just moved to our house in rural Pennsylvania, which would make me about nine or ten years old, when I stole my brother’s copy of Where the Red Fern Grows off his bookshelf—I have no idea where he got it, or if he’d read it, but I do know that I’ve never
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 JR: I met Riley after I inquired about his book, Our Beloved 26. He had done a reading with Patrick DeWitt, who is a friend of the blog. Riley seemed like a no bullshit guy, which was refreshing, to say the least. Once we started this series of guest posts, When We Fell In Love, I thought he would be perfect for it. -JR
RMP: I have lived my life in books, have been an avid reader since my youth, and I have been affected by so many great authors – my behavior and outlook of any given year directly corresponding to the fiction I was reading. To try and pin-point when it
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 DH: Caitlin Macy’s collection, Spoiled, was one of the most delightful reads that I had last year. I still remember the plots of many of the stories which is a very good sign of how much I enjoyed them. They’re ingenious, early 21st-century stories, about the coastal upper class.
There are two ways to consider what the word “spoiled” means. The more obvious meaning is of a character who has had it too good. But my favorite connotation is “spoiled” in the sense of being ruined, of being a deeply flawed character.
In that connection, one of CM’s most effective techniques is the unreliable narrator. CM’s timing is impeccable as the reader gradually realizes
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 DH: Kyle Beachy’s heartland debut, the coming-of-age novel The Slide, was published by the hyper-selective Dial Press in January of 2009. The Slide takes place in St. Louis and I joined a St. Louis Cardinals fan club while I was reading that book. I’m not even a baseball fan. But I was carried away by The Slide’s uplifting regionalism.
Right now, Kyle is gearing up to teach a course in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I was able to catch up with KB between semesters and he provided the Guys with the knockout post below. Reading Kyle’s post made me wish I could audit his class.
When We Fell in Love by Kyle Beachy
My
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 JC: Matt Bondurant is the author of two fine novels. His first book, The Third Translation, is the story of a soused cryptologist in the British Museum is a funny and smart romp through the streets of London, and made me think of Harry Crews writing with an English accent. His most recent novel, The Wettest County in the World, is recently out in paperback. It’s the Depression-era story of the Bondurant family, bootleggers in Franklin County, VA, as revealed through the three brothers personalities and the outsider observations of Sherwood Anderson. It’s a rugged and riveting read that I highly recommend.
Here is what Matt had to say about the books that made
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Upcoming Posts
- “This Other Us” by Deborah Willis
- When We Fell In Love – Deborah Willis
- How to Live by Sarah Bakewell, revisited
- Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko
- When We Fell In Love – Mark Safranko
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When We Fell In Love - Tom Rachman
When We Fell In Love - Hesh Kestin
When We Fell In Love - Joshua Mohr
When We Fell In Love – Stacey Levine
When We Fell In Love - Gina Frangello
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