Algonquin’s 25th Anniversary Edition of their great New Stories from the South anthology hit the shelves last week, this time edited by none other than Amy Hempel, who knows a thing or two about stories, her geographical origins notwithstanding. Her Collected Stories was one of my favorite books of 2007, and still gets pulled off of the shelf from time to time.
Hempel selects twenty-five stories, some from writers you know – Dorothy Allison, Padgett Powell, Ron Rash, and one of my favorites, Wendell Berry. Some are relative unknowns, to me at least, like Adam Atlas, whose story “New Year’s Weekend” opens the collection. The unnamed narrator, an American living in Naples,
Continue reading New Stories From The South edited by Amy Hempel
DH: A star is born, a raw red giant in the constellation of Queens, New York. Matt Burgess has such a great word vault that he seems at war with being a writer who is also such a great noticer. The prose turns a bit purple a times, like Matt is straining, eager to let his imagination loose onto the streets of his beloved Jackson Heights.
I was trolling around somewhere online and heard a ton of people say that these early stories of Updike’s were his best. I’m listening to the Rabbit books right now on audio, and they’re nothing short of amazing. I’ve had this ARC of The Early Stories sitting on my shelf for more than ten years, every time I move I seem to take it with me, I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it, why I’m thinking of doing that is beyond me.
This isn’t a story so much as it is a tale about what happens when the carnival comes to town, and no one knows about luck and chance, and what happens when you bet your money, hoping that luck and chance collide over your head like a storm cloud.
In this wafer-thin missive, Updike brings us through the working class suburb of Olinger. Johnny shows up at his neighbor’s house with an interesting proposition: he’d like for the Lutz family to go down the street to buy him a bottle of wine. Johnny isn’t any older than sixteen and when he approaches the apartment screen door, he spies the bare leg of Thelma, a girl he knows from around the neighborhood. This refreshingly honest approach to the story makes me think that there is nothing wrong with Johnny, except he just wants a bottle of booze to help him waste away the day. I remember when I was that age, booze seemed like a good idea
DH: It’s a bright moment for any reader of contemporary American literature when they discover a debut novel as self-assured, as well-disciplined, as You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin.
I’m not sure why I avoided this great novel for as long as I did. I just started a part time job where I’m working with a few twenty somethings that all love the idea of London crime, especially movies like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (and are fond of quoting lines from these movies while we work, it’s very funny, maybe not in this context, but I guess you have to be there). I certainly appreciate those movies, and when I realized I had this book laying around I brought it in and gave it to the one of the guys I work with, I said, “You might like this, if you
DH: Barcelona is a city I can imagine leaving…for the beach. If Barcelona is in the mind of James Salter, then the reader can be set down in the streets of the city, even if they’ve never been there. As for my friend JC, who recently set off for Berlin, Zurich and Vienna, he can have them.
When this gem arrived I thought, “oh cool, I’ll read this someday”, like I do with almost all non-fiction that comes my way. Once I picked it up, and it’s got a great feel to it, weight, touch, even smell, I knew I was going to be sucked in. I’ve been dragging my feet in finishing it, like any good book, you don’t want it to be over, and this is no different. There are books about television shows, some with pictures, and not much else, and others that sort of brush over the television show with little or no substance. Natasha Vargas-Cooper, or NVC as I call her, (my interview with her will run
DH: Iris Murdoch, the mid-20th century British novelist, was the true inheritor of the great Victorian tradition of moral psychologists. Her complex stories turn on questions of what’s the right thing. Only in contrast to today’s dogmatic moralists, who are so convinced that they know exactly what you should be doing, IM wrote stories where good and evil are real but meant to be puzzled over.
DH: If you back-flip The Lovers by Vendela Vida you will find six blurbs. What the blurbs say is of no importance. Also of no importance is whether the authors of the blurbs have read The Lovers. There are no negative blurbs, which would be a crime against nature.
Once I heard Franzen had a new book, (I read the two “stories” in the New Yorker) it was all I could do to get my hands on an advance copy. If you know me, even a little, then you know I love The Corrections, which was a book that hit me right in the sweet spot, at a time in my life when things seemed to be coming up roses. Then 9-11 hit, and it’s been downhill ever since.
DH: This is the last of my three posts on Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, How to Read the Air. It’s about the lying at the heart of the novel, in the creation of the character, Jonas Woldemariam. If this were a 19th century novel, a novel by Dickens, then Jonas Woldemariam , like David Copperfield, would be the best title for it. But Jonas is no hero.
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