fiction review

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine (A Review by Lynne Weiss)

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Tonga Books/Europa Editions

176 pages/$15.00

Anyone who loves reading has discovered at some point the book or the character that seems to offer a model for how to live. Some find it in Dostoevsky, others in Austen, or Bronte, or Lawrence, but almost no adult finds it in Robert Louis Stevenson, except the unnamed narrator of Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! a sweetly sad spoof on the literature-as-self-help/self-improvement genre (How Proust Can Change Your Life or Shakespeare on Management). Such books have their place. If people need or want advice on how to improve their lives or themselves, why not get it from great literature?

Whether or not Proust or Shakespeare can help anyone achieve their goals, Levine takes this phenomenon to the point of absurdity with this first novel narrated by a 25-year-old woman with a college degree, a phobia for driving, a series of low-paying jobs, and no sense of purpose who thinks she has found a guide for living in the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  Her younger sister, a third-grade teacher, dismisses Treasure Island as an “adventure book,” and explains that the trouble with adventure books is that they are “all action and no feeling” and have the moral complexity of a baseball game. Of course, one could argue that this is also the problem—and the appeal—of many self-help books, but our narrator, bored with her job and her own lack of direction, finds inspiration in the story of a boy who abandons his ordinary life, steals a boat, kills a man, and risks all in search of gold. The narrator’s voice in Treasure Island!!! is credible enough to have convinced a Library Journal reviewer that the book was a rather alarming memoir. Her blurb on the inside page retracts her earlier comments to praise the book now that she understands that is fiction.

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Living Arrangements by Laura Maylene Walter (A Review by Dawn West)

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BkMk Press 

175 pgs/$12

Laura Maylene Walter’s Living Arrangements is a collection of finely honed stories, all deeply concerned with place and memory. Her stories are quietly resonant–beneath the everyday veneer of each of her characters, Walter clarifies their internal tempests; their struggles with identity and belonging, desire and grief. I’m proud to say Walter is also a heartland lady, living an afternoon car ride away from me in Lakewood, Ohio.

Her book opens with “you,” years ago, when “you” were “a newborn, a wrinkled girl confined to your crib, the high chair, the stroller,” in the book’s opener, the titular Living Arrangements. I was immediately taken in by this second person narration, this plain focused care. The story Living Arrangements takes us through the life of a woman, to each of the places and times that hold magic for her, that are still sharp, years later, the living arrangements almost characters themselves, the way places that have held us can become in our minds. I simply cannot narrow down my choices for a quote, so you will just have to trust me. It’s badass.

The vast majority of Walter’s protagonists are women and girls, but her male protagonist in The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena is a true marvel. It is always hard for me to pick favorites (see above), but The Ballad Solemn of Lady Molena may be the crowning jewel of this debut.

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Creatures Here Below by O. H. Bennett (A Review by Martin Macaulay)

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Agate Bolden

272 pgs/$10

O H Bennett’s Creatures Here Below is an accomplished and compelling novel. Structured around character-titled sections, the author pushes us into the lives of Mason and his mother Gail. They share top billing in terms of the number of sections dedicated to them, but not at the expense of an impressive supporting cast whose fears and dreams are as central to the plot as they are to the human condition. Mason is seemingly about to go off the rails. His higher-achieving brother Tyler has had the benefit of growing up alongside his father Dan, even if his parents no longer live together.

By breaking the novel into sections titled ‘Mason’, ‘Gail’ etc, Bennett greatly increases the scope of authorial control, skilfully using it to shift the time frame, introduce and develop narrative strands, and heighten tension. It is subtly controlled and never invasive or contrived. At the end of the book’s (and Mason’s) first section we learn Mason has issues, a gun and a need to resolve these with someone called Pony. Pony, it turns out, is his father.

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A Cloth House by Joseph Riippi (A Review by Thomas Michael Duncan)

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Housefire, 2012.

94 pgs/$7.99

Everyone has the capacity for several different types of memories, one of which is the flashbulb memory. A flashbulb memory is a highly precise snapshot sort of memory, one that sticks with a person for a very long time, perhaps even for a lifetime. What is interesting about flashbulb memories is that, unlike the more widely known photographic memories, flashbulb memories are often inaccurate, skewed, or warped, and not just by time, but by the root cause of the memory and that event’s emotional and physical significance.

One way to read Joseph Riippi’s A Cloth House is as a series of interconnected flashbulb memories. The novella is made up of very short passages from the perspective of the protagonist, an unnamed woman, and most passages cover a brief memory of a person, thing, or event from her childhood.

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They Hover Over Us by Richard Fellinger (A Review by Dawn Zera)

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Snake Nation Press

$25.00

In his solid collection of short stories, They Hover Over Us, the 2011 winner of the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for fiction, Richard Fellinger writes about Pennsylvania’s rust belt so vividly that I nodded and winced and smiled all at once, recognizing the telltale clues of the western region of my home state.  “Charcoal-brown buildings in tight rows;” politically conservative characters with their rifle bags, drinking from cans of Keystone Light and bottles of Rolling Rock; a town “that might be forgotten” if not for the local college; and, of course, the first cousins who want to wed, and the English professor with the S&M dungeon. Ah, home sweet home.

The themes here are raw and meaningful.  Fellinger takes bare-knuckled swings at contemporary relationships between men and women, landing solid punches. He deftly zooms in for tighter focus, so that each of the thirteen expertly woven tales expounds on how even the smallest personal choices between couples can have rippling effects. A wife too-long tolerant of an alcoholic husband finally exposes him when he hurts someone else.  A divorced couple arguing over how to protect a bullied son is a catalyst to a teacher’s important decision.

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A Hollow Cube is a Lonely Space by S.D. Foster (A Review by David Atkinson)

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Eraserhead Press

108 pgs/$9.95

 

 As a preliminary matter, I am not an expert on bizarro fiction. In all honesty, I’ve never been able to truly define what it is, or is not. I’ve never been able to really be sure whether a story is truly bizarro fiction or whether it is just strange.

I do happen to enjoy bizarre and absurd stories. In fact, I adore them. However, a great deal of what people tell me is bizarro fiction ends up confusing me. I can appreciate good writing when it is there, and I can enjoy the absurdity, but often I am left puzzled as to what exactly the story is. This is not a fault of the particular story in question, or at least not most of the time, but is actually an indictment of my apparent ability to understand a majority of the bizarro fiction that is out there.

Frankly, I find a lot of bizarro fiction incredibly difficult to follow. I am not a casual reader. I’ve enjoyed books such as Infinite Jest, In Search of Lost Time, The Recognitions, House of Leaves, and many other such books that could not possibly be considered light reading. Still, a lot of bizarro fiction seems to me to be more experimental, very convoluted and complex in both language and structure. In a great deal of cases, it seems incomprehensible to me.

You can imagine my hesitancy when I considered picking up Foster’s A Hollow Cube is a Lonely Space. However, the buzz I’d heard about the book piqued my interest to the point that I couldn’t refuse. My interest overcame my fears.

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Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events by Kevin Moffett (A Review by Amye Archer)

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Harper Perennial

240 pgs, $10

I first met Kevin Moffett on a cool April evening when he cracked open my skull with an ice pick and settled into my brain for the next three weeks.  Okay, so maybe he wasn’t physically inside of my head, but for the weeks I was immersed in his collection of short stories, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, it sure felt that he was speaking directly to the fears that had nestled into my subconscious over the past thirty-some years.

To say that the opening story of Moffett’s collection, whose title bears the name of the book, is Seinfeldian in its approach to plot would be undercutting the seriousness of the story’s theme.  However, I could not help but notice that while this story, much like Seinfeld itself, is “about nothing”, it is also about everything.  All at once.

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God's Autobio by Rolli (A Review by David Atkinson)

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Now or Never Publishing

233 pgs/$17.95

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I picked up God’s Autobio by Rolli. I hadn’t heard a lot of talk about the book. In fact, I hadn’t really heard much at all. Frankly, I’m not sure what I expected. One thing I am sure of is that I did not expect to have this much fun reading.

Rolli seems to have a particular talent for off-hand humorous manner. There is just such a effortless, droll quality to the way that some of the stories in this book are presented that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. The very first opening paragraph from the first story of the collection, Von Clair and the Tiger, is a perfect example:

Having never been swallowed by a tiger before, Professor Von Claire wasn’t sure what to do about the situation. Strange—whenever one of his colleagues presented him with a dilemma, he could come up with ten solutions on the spot, with plenty of literary allusions, and quotes running gleefully from his pores. It had occurred to him, more than once, that this might be the reason others referred to him as “Tweedmouth,” if that was the term.

 Seriously? This guy is swallowed by a tiger and that situation takes a backseat to his colleagues opinion about him? Frankly, the professor’s approach to the whole set of circumstances is so off-kilter from what it should be that I couldn’t help getting interested in the story. As a reader, I admit that I love the loveable oddball characters.

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Shenanigans! by Joseph Michael Owens (A Review by David Atkinson)

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Grey Sparrow Press

100 pgs/$9.99

I’ve heard that by the time Bukowski was really into the swing of things as a writer, he had stopped reading much of anything.  He did not feel that most of what he came across had life; he thought it felt dead.  As such, he couldn’t read it.  I can’t really say for absolute certainty because I didn’t know old Buk’, but I believe he would have felt very differently about the writing in Shenanigans!  If there was ever writing with life, Shenanigans! is it.

In some cases, I mean this quite literally.  The writing in “Contemptibly, A Hair” blasts out of the page with more energy than a hyperactive toddler on meth, though with considerably much more pleasurable results. Consider the opening:

       CONTEMPTIBLY, A HAIR—not one sprouted from Ben Manley’s own largish pores—floats, follicle and all, atop the khaki-colored surface of his steaming cup of white- label coffee, flavored artificially with powdered non-dairy hazelnut creamer, the kind that tends to clump together when introduced to a liquid, rather than dissolve completely, since creamer and powder are two mutually exclusive substances. Continue reading →

Hot Pink by Adam Levin (A Review by Joseph Michael Owens)

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McSweeney’s

256 pgs/$18

Sometimes, other people really sum up your thoughts more perfectly than you can—at least in a single statement:

 Dude just got his foot off everybody’s throat and now he’s back ALREADY.

That’s what Adam Novy (The Avian Gospels) said when McSweeney’s announced Adam Levin’s Hot Pink would ship out early to readers who ordered the book directly from them. And it’s true what Novy said—completely accurate and undeniable. It’s honestly impossible for me to think of a writer bringing half as much fire right now as Levin (and there is a ton of great writing out there right now). Continue reading →