October Update!

No, I have not abandoned my first book in favour of a new project called Capsular Dispatches from a Library Addict - in fact, things are going quite well:

• I'll be reading my featured story "Eyesore" at the launch party for Sterling Mag #3 this Thursday, October 25 at No One Writes to the Colonel (460 College St., Toronto). Things get underway around 7:00 p.m - details here! - and the magazine is already available to order, in print or digital.

• Michael Callaghan, publisher at Exile Editions, interviewed me in advance of Exile Literary Quarterly #36.2's release this fall, in which my short story "Mercy" will appear. Check it out!

• I can't help myself: when I see my work in a bookstore (Book City in The Annex, this time), I snap a photo. I like this issue of The Dalhousie Review (91.3) more than any previous ones because my name is on the cover - leftmost on the second line - and my short story, "Ode," is on the inside.

As for the book, it's nearly finished: the above are three of the 16 stories it includes, and the most recently-written one that rounds out the collection may have given it a new title: Nobody Looks That Young Here. This weekend I took the penultimate unfinished story in for an overhaul with the Toronto Public Library's Writer-in-Residence, Farzana Doctor - very helpful meeting! - and today I found out that though another new story, "The Territory," didn't win The Puritan's first-ever contest, it did get through several tiers of judging, which is encouraging... let's call it a (perhaps very) long list. By this time next month, all the stories should be printed as one manuscript and in hand for my final edit, as - yikes - a whole book this time. The self-imposed completion deadline is still December 31, and after some mild summer despair I've realized I'm going to hit it. I look forward to having more news to pass on - and more book reviews, hope you're enjoying them - between now and then. Thank you for reading!

Reading Journal: The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson (2011)

A truly rare novel, one that is as heartbreakingly hilarious as its premise suggests: the adult children of performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang return home from their careers - Annie, an actrees, and Buster, a writer - and confront their parents about the childhood they spent as unwilling participants in their parents' experimental works. The central metaphor is of course a stroke of brilliance - all child-rearing is an experiment, and one that, if flawed, will produce damaged (if well-intentioned) products like the Fang children. The novel's written in a language that's plain and accessible, and the chapters alternate in focus from Annie to Buster and back, separated by flashbacks to the various projects that the children took part in and making of them an elephant in the room that reminds you of the damage done to the children at every step. You'd think from that sentence that it's a heavy read, but it's not, and it's not as flippant as a family chronicle by, say, Douglas Coupland, either. It's laugh-out-loud funny, particularly in its first half, and a book I loved, one of the last year's overlooked gems. Watch for its profile to rise now that Nicole Kidman's attached herself to a film adaptation... and before that, read it. Put it on your can't-miss list.

Reading Journal: Saints and Sinners, by Edna O'Brien (2011)

I will still, eventually, read her controversial - at the time, in 1960 - first book, The Country Girls, but unfortunately this was not the collection for me. In many cases - a common complaint with short stories I've read lately - I found O'Brien layering on the detail, and my eyes glazing over as she did. I'd like to know when exactly Alice Munro said the line quoted on the cover, that O'Brien "writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere," because her style struck me as almost out of date. There's a classicism in her work, though, and I can pick up the same elements of Chekhov and Woolf in these stories that we find in Munro, Cythia Ozick, etc., particularly in "Manhattan Medley" where Woolf is referenced directly. The stories among the 11 that I did enjoy were the grittier "Shovel Kings," in which a man comes unwound in the wake of job-site fatality; "Madame Cassandra," a more mystically-styled tale of visiting a fortune-teller, and the aforementioned "Medley," whose action turns around an affair. When the author stepped out of her default and somewhat flat style is when I liked her best, and though she nailed the old style in "Medley," in the other stories it just didn't grab me.

Reading Journal: Coronado, by Dennis Lehane (2006)

For a mystery/thriller writer, Lehane's chops pass for seriously literary in Coronado, and though he stays close to the subject matter we expect, he also strays into new settings and - perhaps more importantly - new styles. His clipped rhythms are even more successful when it comes to writing the somewhat elliptical short story, as in "Mushrooms," a postcard from some small-time crooks that offers no resolution: what you see is what you get. The collection's two money makers, I would say, are the first two stories, particularly the opener, "Running Out of Dog," in which a man tasked with controlling a small-town's pet population creeps ever closer to the edge. In "ICU," we join a particularly chilling chase in which a mysterious figure keeps turning up on our hero's tail - it made me think of A History of Violence, and because so little is explained, Kafka. The book's rounded out by "Until Gwen" and its adaptation for the stage, "Coronado," in which a son gets out of jail and has to face his father, who is obsessed with finding the proceeds of the son's last crime. The story was elliptical, almost too much so, and though the play left some things to be desired - the staging seemed almost too minimalist for the increased number of characters - I found that I liked the theatrical ending better, perhaps because a dramatic adaptation has to show you more, more obviously, and thus the final action's significance was much clearer. In all, for a paltry five stories and one play, Coronado provides a great introduction to one of today's more prolific bestsellers while also being a surprisingly literary accomplishment.

Reading Journal: Savages, by Don Winslow (2010)

Already trumpeting its upcoming film adaptation on its front cover, this book came to me by way of my flight attendant girlfriend. (Note to self: start hipster-chic Tumblr called Books People Deliberately Leave On Planes.) So what is it? To take Stephen King's blurb off the cover - one sourced to a reference in the text, which makes it one of those rare worthwhile blurbs - "This is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on autoload": two young pot growers, mild-mannered Ben and hot-headed, ex-military Chon, produce the best stuff in Cali and wile away their off-hours getting stoned and shagging Ophelia, sometimes one at a time, sometimes together. But when the Baja Cartel refuses to let them out of the racket and kidnaps "O" as collateral, our heroes are left to come up with either a ton of money or a much riskier plan for a head-on rescue. The book's written in short bursts - shorter "chapters" than even The Da Vinci Code - and though its machine-gun fire storytelling is a too self-aware and too self-consciously trying to be cool, no given element lasts long enough for you to really get bothered by it, and the pages practically turn themselves. Solid pulp, and a good choice of subject matter; if there's one place we should hear more stories of, it's the war zone the drug trade has created in Mexico, right under its (and the American) government's noses.

Reading Journal: The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht (2011)

Every time I put this book down, I didn't want to... and I think I put off picking it up for a few days at a time because I didn't want it to end. In her debut novel, Obreht gives us a narrator - a doctor, now - who carries the seeming folktales her grandfather told her when she was a girl into her understanding of her new place in post-war (former) Yugoslavia. And using frequent references to Kipling's Jungle Book, the most gripping of the stories is of a deaf-mute woman who, (through events I won't spoil!), comes to be known as the title character... also, there's a deathless man who is an absolutely enchanting creation, rendered like the rest of the story in lyrical-but-not-too-lyrical language. A spell-binding read worthy of all the acclaim it received.

Reading Journal: Chew, Volume 1: Taster's Choice, by John Layman and Rob Guillory (2009)

The collected first five issues of this comic, about FDA agent Tony Chu, a cibopath - someone who, when he eats something formerly alive, (except beets, for no obvious reason), can see what they went through before becoming food. In the near future he inhabits, the FDA is the most powerful government agency in America, and after 23 million people are killed by Avian Flu, chicken has been outlawed and has consequently spawned a black market. Inventive and filled with betrayal, intrigue, love, and - of course - blood, this angularly-drawn world is original and uses lots of oranges and grays to its advantage. If it has a genre, I'd call it spec-noir, if such a thing exists - I suppose it does, i.e., Blade Runner - and though the writing's a little juvenile, the premise is interesting, the humour's cynical, and the arc it's building is full of promise... particularly in Issue 4, where some distant planet explodes without an explanation. It bodes well; I'll have to read on, now.