Ghost Comics: A Benefit Anthology for RS Eden, edited by Ed Choy Moorman

Ghost Comics grabbed me for three reasons: it is full of artists I love like Corinne Mucha, Lucy Knisley and Maris Wicks, its topic is close to my heart and it was only ten bucks. The B&W collection, put together by contributor Ed Choy Moorman, covers ghostly ground in a myriad of ways, and with the exception of uninspiring one-pagers, none of the contributors took the easy way out. I appreciated the variance of tone in the stories; it kept the book readable for one sitting. In fact, there were so many standouts that, before this review, my copy looked like it grew little, yellow post-it feathers.

“Dear Dave,” Ed Choy Moorman’s tale of growing up probes both the anger and sadness of losing a formerly idolized family member to drugs. Toby Jones’ auto-bio take on becoming invisible in a relationship in a time of grief, “I Can’t Deal,” strikes the balance between funny and thought provoking. In “The Point” Alison Cole’s signature yeti-looking character finds a way to deal with the ghosts that plague her day—a nice meditation piece for the haunted! Jenny Tondera’s piece uses a single hazy image that gets progressively whiter over the single-sentence story to look at anger associated with certain memories. Monica Anderson’s gut-wrenching tale of abuse and neglect shows the legacy that that kind of treatment leaves behind, using only drawn lettering to tell the story, which makes the piece feel immediate, like she is speaking right into your ear. “This is a Ghost,” by Warren Craighead III is a fun, good lookin’ pencil exploration of the titluar subject in diagram form.

I really enjoyed this book. Since, as the subtitle says, part of the price of the book goes to support, RS Eden, a drug rehabilitation program in Minnesota, your purchase will be doing double duty.

Capacity by Theo Ellsworth

This handsome volume from Secret Acres houses the first seven issues of Theo Ellsworth’s brain-liquifyingly-detailed Capacity, as well as a few new things, including an amazing introduction written and drawn by the author. I enjoyed the few issues of the mini I picked up in the past, but the book treatment serves Ellsworth’s work well and it is interesting to see his artistic development while reading his take on it.

Ellsworth’s work calls out to me on a visual level. It is surreal without abandoning the depiction of direct, simple ideas like the difficulty of portraying emotions outwardly, the joys and perils of relating to others and finding the strength to continue doing what you love. His figures appeal to me on a visceral level; monsters, clowns, queens and in-betweens rivet my eyes to the page. I especially love the monsters, with their big eyes and dumb, happy demeanor—the kind of monsters you’d want to go on an adventure with. Everything object has its own pattern and the book is full of leaves, tress, eyes and misplaced mechanical elements, all of which are elements that I love to look at.

His work always warrants a few reads to take in all the intricacies of his black-n-white scapes. Unlike many comics, I actually enjoy going back to Capacity over and over.

Lucinella by Lore Segal

I picked up this Melville House edition at the Strand during a long search for a book for my mother for Christmas. I wanted a gift for myself for the three-day trip to Philly and I knew that the one novel I had already picked out wasn’t going to last long once the train ride(s) started.

Despite my love of the publisher’s curated collection of old-timey novellas and intriguing looking new ones, I was a bit worried about my choice. Lucinella is about a writer writing, a topic that seems to produce cold, nasty little books that have may superficial delights (especially is you hang with a lot of artists), but that often lack the heart that tends to endear me to books. Luckily, this book is fun, funny and engagingly loose in its plotting. The characterizations are dead-on and I loved the main character in all her iterations—though the story becomes increasingly fantastic, Lucinella is always a strong anchor.

I am looking forward to reading more of Segal’s adult work, especially if it is as smart and upbeat as this.

2009 is over?

This was a good year for reading. I read 48 books, not including stuff I read for reviews and stuff I forgot to put on this list.

My favorites, in no order, were:
* Lucinella by Lore Segal
* How Far is the Ocean From Here by Amy Shearn
* Ghost Comics edited by Ed Choy Moorman
* Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
* The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns
* The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla
* St. Lucy's School for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
* The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
* The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
* Capacity by Theo Ellsworth
* Pinnocchio by Carlo Collodi
* Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
* Labrador by Kathryn Davis

I guess I'd better hurry up and review them.

Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall

So, I’ve been thinking about female separatists recently. It has come up in a variety of ways—cookbooks, magazine interviews, friendly conversation—and I read this book right in the middle of this topic cloud. On the surface, the idea is very compelling, and to Daughters of the North’s main character, known only as Sister, the freedoms she imagines she will find in such a place are too seductive to resist, though we know from the first page of the book that she ultimately does not find what she is looking for.

Daughters of the North is set in a near-future England where a failing government has herded the population into work camps to produce fuel, and regulates all aspects of life. The threat of death or worse pervades the everyday. Sister wants out of the cruel, meaningless grind, and, almost as if daring herself, begins preparations to leave the camp, ditching her husband and “official” status in the process. Using childhood memories and a few squirreled away newspaper articles, Sister crosses the rugged and beautiful Northern English landscape, perfectly evoked by Hall, to Carhullan, a farm commune of women, long separated from the mainstream. I really enjoyed this section of the book because I think it shows perfectly how dehumanizing conditions twist people and how fear can be triumphed.

Though DotN does examine the failings of utopia, what I found more interesting was how Hall plops us inside of Carhullan and describes its inner workings to show both the beauty of an achieved dream and the dangers of idolatry and hatred. The plotting is brisk and you never, with the exception of some painful dialogue, feel thrown out of the story because of the themes or characterization.

I thought this book was excellent SF. Read it now.

2009ians

An inconsistent reviewing year, with many of my favorites left unreviewed.

* Lucinella by Lore Segal
* The Raw Shark Texts By Steven Hall
* The End of the Story by Lydia Davis
* How Far is the Ocean From Here by Amy Shearn
* The Shadow Year by Jefferey Ford
* Ghost Comics edited by Ed Choy Moorman
* Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis
* Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
* Logogryph by Thomas Wharton
* My Brain Hurts: Volume Two by Liz Baillie
* Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
* Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus
* The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno
* Low Moon by Jason
* Fugue State: Stories by Brian Evenston, Art by Zak Sally
* How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet
* My Alaskan Summer by Corrine Mucha
* The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns
* She's Such A Geek by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders
* The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla
* Animal Crackers: Stories by Hannah Tinti
* St. Lucy's School for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
* The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
* Jan's Atomic Heart by Simon Roy
* Saturn's Children by Charles Stross
* The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia
* The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
* Capacity by Theo Ellsworth
* Affinity by Sarah Waters
* Pinnocchio by Carlo Collodi
* Haweswater by Sarah Hall
* Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
* My Brain Hurts: Volume One by Liz Baillie
* Waterbaby by Cris Mazza
* The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
* Mc Sweeney's 30
* Labrador by Kathryn Davis
* Awesome by Jack Pendarvis
* Stripburek: comics from the other Europe by various artists
* The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke
* Hell by Kathryn Davis
* Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand
* The Summer of Love by Debbie Drecshler
* The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter
* The Woods by Tana French
* Tales of Woodsman Pete by Lilli Carre
* Kramers 7 by various artists
* The Tent by Margaret Atwood

The End of the Story by Lydia Davis

Since a bunch of her books arrived at once on the hold shelf at my library, I’ve been on a bit of a Lydia Davis tear. This book is her only novel and it was published in 1995, though the book feels like it could be set in the 1970s.

Like her short stories, The End of the Story is feels very much like an internal monologue happening in an unidentifiable time, cold and fluid. The main character is trying to write a novel about a love affair she had with a man 12 years her junior, a student at the college where she worked. She tells the story in bits, interspersed with ruminations on the relationship and on writing the relationship. It’s difficult to get a firm grip on the narrator, but passages like this one give you some idea, and also make you (me) laugh with recognition: “At first I thought this novel should be like the sort of novel I admire… In that novel, the characters only walk in and out of rooms, look through doorways, arrive at apartments, go up and down stairs, look out windows from inside, look in windows from outside, and make brief remarks to each other that are hard to understand.” At least if you think what kind of books a person likes tells you something about them, as does the narrator.

In fact, she wonders if what and how her former lover read was what drew her him, one of the many possibilities she ponders. The fact that she has to wonder should tell you something about this book. In fact, the relationship seems quite trivial, and the man quite lame, despite all the thinking about it—since this book is really about writing and memory, it almost doesn’t matter. When the narrator reflects on the larger trajectory of her life, it all seems to follow from the obsession with the story she is trying to get out. Davis has a certain cutting way with these passages and they feel very real: “There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I do not think I could mange the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.”

Despite the distance I felt from the characters, I really liked this book. I wanted to slog through the thoughts and be immersed in a struggle I find really intriguing. The end was really well done and effectively pulls you out of the head of the narrator while confirming that that is where you’ve been all along. Cool.

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

A while back I was doing research on SF/Fantasy/Horror awards and came across The Shadow Year, which won 2008 Shirley Jackson award, the 2009 World Fantasy award, and was nominated for a Locus Fantasy award. It sounded intriguing and as you can tell by my shot of it, it was available at my library.

I read this book in two days, which speaks both to my enjoyment of it and the kind of book it is. Reviews compared this book to Stephen King’s work and I found this to be true in the most enjoyable way. There is a short passage in the book where the older and younger brother and their friends find a nudie magazine, and then sort of freak out, is very real and very King, as is the setting—a small town, a somewhat timeless American past, an amorphous taint spreading over the seasons.

The book concerns two brothers (the middle child is the narrator) and their younger sister, Mary, who is both very strange and also the least interesting character in the book. In fact it is her quirk, streaming math with imaginary friends, which may be at the crux of the strange and awful going-ons in the town. This was the disconnect in the book for me. I am all for a vague menace, it certainly heightens tension and gives a book a more universal spookiness, but here the connection between Mary’s powers (for lack of a better word) and the occurrences her brothers experienced did not feel thought out. Her entire character felt tacked on, and I don’t think it was an engineered blindness of the narrator as an older sibling ignoring the intricacies of a kid sister’s life.

Still, I enjoyed the book as a whole, especially the feeling of being out in the dark nights of the town, running alongside the kids as they stalked what was stalking them. Ford’s treatment of the mother’s alcoholism should be mentioned too. He sets up some great dinner table scenes with the kids and the mom that really showcase a child’s understanding of adult problems.

Some of Ford's other books look good as well and I think that I will check them out when I want a breezy, scary read.

**More**
Large-Hearted Boy's booknotes post about The Shadow Year was worth checking out.

Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis

Even as I feel the hot breath of the New York Public Library puffing down my collar, I don’t particularly want to give up the books I have of theirs in my possession. Among these is SJII, a collection of short stories that was first published by McSweeney’s, though I have flimsy Picador edition.

A ton of these stories are short shorts--the titular “Samuel Johnson is Indignant” is one sentence--which makes quoting them hard. I like that many of them are filled with a kind of tired fun, which mirrors my mod these last few months. In “Finances,” a story about worth in love, a man and a woman argue: “If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.” Of course, on paper, a relationship is never worth it; you can almost feel the sigh of the author. Most of these shorties are the thoughts of cold narrators, or statements that feel like they’ve dropped from the lips of slightly nasty characters that seem so bland on the surface, such a as a woman who calls her sister down the stairs because she finds it amusing to watch the sister struggle to move her weight down them. Maybe they have names and genders, perhaps a profession (writers and teachers, mostly), but no features that poke out and stay stuck in the mind.

The two stories that I enjoyed the most, “In A Northern Country” and “The Furnace,” were both longer works with characters that throbbed. When I say I enjoyed them, I guess that I should also say that they were not enjoyable topics and in fact made me feel a little sad. But it is that absorption into a story is what I crave, and both delivered. “In A Northern Country” is about an old man in search of his brother, who sets off to a strange country with a dying language, only to become lost himself. I could feel the cold seeping in through the drafty lodgings the man found and the struggle to keep his memories in line with this unwanted, nightmarish present. “Furnace” is about an adult woman who keeps an unusual correspondence with her increasingly out-of-it father. As he looses his detailed stories of life to his daughter, she struggles to record them and not forget, as he is doing, a task that seems really out of place in her everyday life. I loved the descriptions of the notations he made on newspaper articles sent to his daughter. Without a ton of words, Davis is able to give us a feeling of this man, a really warm touch in a chilly book.

Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books by Thomas Wharton

On a whim I picked up this small, beautiful book from Gaspereau Press at the library. Besides the obvious care that went into making the book, and the idea that this is a book about books unwritten was very appealing to me. I expected something like A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem, which is a book of reviews of books that were never written (I need to reread this), but instead, Wharton’s approach to “imaginary” books explicitly includes imaginary worlds as well.



Malevolent books figure heavily in the collection. From three different stories:
“The novel swallows all that down without thanks and demands more.”
“It jumps and thumps on your bedside table after you’ve turned out the lights…” “Doggedly you read on, but eventually this novel that is not a novel loses you in turn…”
Unfortunately these stories all blur in to one featureless glob of nothing special and the few that contain more than cute turns of phrase get lost in the shuffle.
Stories of readers and societies driven mad by their literary activities are also favorite topics, as are the occasional description of the literary lives of fictional cultures, which I really enjoyed. Wharton is at his best when he allows characters to dominate: the stars of Atlantean literary history, the European monk being seduced in Mexico and the Canadian family poisoned with unfulfilled hopes. The last are the most human in the collection, and when I discovered that they were going to be a reoccurring subject I kept hoping that the next story I read would be about them. In these stories his writing is lush and beautiful, and his masterful setting and characterization appear effortless.

I don’t expect flash fiction to deliver any of the digressive delights that novels can. I do expect the form to take an idea, use powerful language to lodge it in my brain and leave me wanting to fill in the blanks. Instead I got a little bored. The bloodless, repetitive stories with book-as-_____ seem to be there to create a world for the titular mythical beast to saunter through, but instead leave big, blank spaces on the map.

Tales of Woodsman Pete: With Full Particulars by Lilli Carré

I love Lilli Carré. Before I read Tales I had only seen short work by her and had been entranced by her loopy line work and slightly sad narratives.

Tales provides not only the feel I associate with Carré’s work, but also a deeper look at one character, the jauntily bearded Woodsman Pete, though episodes packed with whistling birds, monologues on companionship and taxidermied animals. Folk heroes Paul Bunyan and Babe also make an extended appearance, perhaps as an example of the kind of relationship Pete could enjoy, if he didn’t seem to want solitude so much.

One of Bunyan stories leads to a tale of lands covered in salt, where the inhabitants use the mountains of white stuff to preserve the things they think are worth it. The trouble is the mountains shift and people begin to lose the things they hoped to retrieve, and instead reach into the salt with only the barest hope to find them, eventually doing a kind of cultural penance for what becomes purposeful loss. Amazing.

I like that Pete, with his skinny legs and giant beard, is not all twinkling eyes and eccentricity. When confronted by other living things, he is dangerous, and all the “holes” in his tales take on an unsettling cast.

Carré uses a few different styles in this book, but the most prevalent (and my favorite) is her usual expressive thin lines with minimal shading. This is not to say that when she juices up pages with inkiness that it doesn’t look good too. Pete’s small details change from episode to episode, but it works as the tone of the stories shift a bit too.

For seven dollars, this book packs quite a bit of fun that you can return to from time to time--especially if you are feeling lonely. Or maybe a little vengeful...

The Great Perhaps: A Novel by Joe Meno

The Great Perhaps is about a family of people that aren’t doing so well not doing so well. At first one thinks that the book is going to focus on the sad sack father, Jonathan Casper, whose head is so far up the ocean’s butt with his obsessive study of the colossal squid that he can’t see that his family needs him. Then we discover that not only is he a giant nerd, but that he also has a terrible epilepsy, now treated, that is triggered by clouds. Straight away, this is not a character that I really like. He has too many “wacky” things in his basket for me to see beyond them, though Meno does try to humanize Jonathan by providing some episodes from his youth and the perspectives of the other characters.

It’s the perspective of so many other characters, interesting at first, which ultimately tears this book apart. Not only does Big Daddy J get a part, but so does his wife, Madeline, their two daughters Amelia and Thisbe as well as his father, Henry. I like Henry’s character the best, despite some quirkiness-tics by the author. He is in a nursing home, becoming increasingly more silent, and planning not only for his escape, but for his legacy—a group of letters explaining telling his story to himself. It was a great conceit, amply fleshed out in passages from Henry’s childhood, time in a German-American internment camp and young manhood. I’ve been digging on older characters recently, but, despite my current interest in seniors, I think I would always have wanted more of Henry.

There is a section of Amelia’s, big sister and high school radical wannabe who thinks that college will save her, that perfectly captures an occasion in many a young woman’s life—the sad blowjob. It is kind of perfect.

After Chapter Five, when everyone has had a chapter, there are sections titled Additional Remarks of a Historical Significance (and further permutations of that title), that tell tales of different ancestors of Jonathan--all male and all defeated. If this book had focused on Jonathan (or one of his antecedents or decedents or a relationship between two of them), these stories might have fit in better, but instead distract from the main narrative and don’t add anything to the characters. That said, the settings in these passages were lush, even if the characters aren’t, and perhaps all of them would have worked in a companion book of related short stories or something.

The strangest thing about this book is that, with some plot differences and characteristic swapping, I felt like I already read it. The Sleeping Father does the multigenerational family drama with a dash of fantasy thing better. TSF also is haunted by clouds, lame dads, religious daughters, angry wives, medical environments and many shades of sex. It was the echoes to Matthew Sharpe’s book that brought me the most pleasure, which is unfortunate but true.

Low Moon by Jason

I was so excited for the release of Jason’s newest book that I dragged my ass down to the Strand to wait in line during his book signing. I was early and chose two books for me and SEC. When I got to the table, all intelligent remarks left me and I just grunted out my name and waited to see what Jason would draw in my book.*

Low Moon is a handsome hardcover of five short stories. Already a bit of disappointment—I want to see Jason attempt a sustained narrative. For the sake of this review, I’ll just have to get over that and focus on the content. “Emily Says Hello” and “&” are further explorations of hardboiled tropes by the author. Both include men that are killing to get closer to a woman, and, despite the dubious morality of the noir world, neither gets more than a distortion of love. Unfortunately as a reader I don’t care either way really because the characters aren’t given enough of a story to create investment.

“You Are Here” and “Proto Film Noir” play with temporal funny business, much like Jason’s longer work I Killed Adolph Hitler. "Proto Film Noir" is a one-note gag about an unkillable husband that is meant to provide comic relief, but just sits there. "You Are Here" uses alien abduction to facilitate a story about finding one’s lost mother too late to stop a familial cycle of broken relationships. The father in the story spends his life building a rocket to go find his bride. I really like Jason’s fat, riveted, spacecraft, but the pathos here did not quite penetrate my hull. Again, he did it better in I Killed Adolph Hitler.

The title story is a western set in a past where chess, not gunslinging, is the true test of masculinity. The main character, the sheriff, is a simple man with a drinking problem and a secret whose like is upended when his last chess challenger gets out of jail and saunters back into town. It’s okay.

Compared to Jason’s longer work, Low Moon feels like a bunch of B-grade material jumbled together to meet a deadline.

* He drew a sheriff wearing a deconstructed pirate hat. Sigh.

How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

When I read the discussion over at Citizen Beta, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of How the Dead Dream. I am used to Millet being funny and exact, her stories steeped in the research behind them and the book they were describing seemed much more vague and traditional.

Instead of presidential obsessions and ghost physicists, Millet looks into the life of a money-obsessed boy named T. who turns into a calculating man with few attachments, the kind of guy who thinks things like this: “The market made a fool of you by giving you what you wanted. But this did not make him resent I; it merely earned his respect. From the day you were born you were called upon to discern what to choose.” I don’t read many books with unlikable protagonists so I was interested to see how T. and I would get along.

Of course, this being a novel, things have to change. T.’s emotional stillness is shaken up by increasingly uncomfortable events, culminating in a desperate bid for peace in a wild and dangerous landscape where money means nothing. The problem with this book is that I could anticipate every dip in T.’s fortune and even the means of each; it was boring to have guessed right every time. Millet seemed to want to give T. some depth and humanity with these turns in his fate and his subsequent actions, but it didn’t really work for me.

Millet’s writing kept me reading once I gave up on anything unusual happening with the book, but by the last section I just wanted to move on.

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns

I picked up this book at Housing Works a few months ago during one of their epic sales. It was attractive not only for its publisher, NYRB, but because of the introduction by Kathryn Davis, a writer that I love and whose work I’ve plowed through in the past two years.

Though the introduction is a bit too straightforward and quotes too heavily from Comyn’s own introduction, I’m glad to have read it because Davis uses the perfect word to describe the voice of the book’s main character, Alice: spellbound. Thought the prose is not as eerie as the book’s copy would have you think, especially not for a reader of magic realism or science fiction or new wave fabulism or or or, the voice used feels barely connected to earth and though Alice is quite observational and insightful, her thoughts seem to brush daintily on the grotesqueries of her life and not leave a mark: “It was after breakfast, and I went into the dining-room to clear away the remains of Father’s kippers. The sun came slanting in through the window an touched the mantelpiece, where the monkey’s skull used to lie.”

The story has the structure of a fairy tale with its dead mother and evil stepmother, unpleasant chores and threatening monsters, its hints at uncertain parentage and ladies locked away. But still, there are dogs to be walked, friends to visit and cooking to do and Comyns strikes a good balance between the fantastic and the mundane, moving the story along with believable actions by believable characters. Alice seems like a real young woman, but living in a time long before the 1959 publication, giving the story an otherworldly setting for a modern reader.

My favorite thing about The Vet’s Daughter is the sense of place that Comyns seems to effortlessly set in each phase of the book. Dreamlike, the story leads you through the rooms that Alice inhabits and hint strongly of the characters within. Her father’s house changes from oppressive and horrible while he is there, to curious and comfortable when he is not. Her protector’s house if full of Christmas novelties and cheery but cheap things, but ultimately proves unable to contain Alice’s strangeness. IN a place that is a refuge for Alice, the steel skeleton of the house hints at the sad and strange history of the inhabitants. The detail of Alice’s steps ringing out as she goes down the stairs in that house is mentioned off the cuff, but hints at the hard-to-keep secrets that live there.

I also enjoyed all the natural details Comyns uses. Naming the woodlouse and the cricket, feeling the sun, or lack of it, in every setting and hearing the cries of a deranged parrot or the scratching of a Cochin hen through Alice give her a connection to the earth that is never explicit but contrasts greatly with that of her looming, uncaring and violent veterinarian father. It’s a subtle touch and I really appreciated it.

She’s Such a Geek! edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders

I picked this up because I like the editors’ work on io9. Here they’ve collected essays on loving stereotypically geeky (and male) interests like math, science and internetery. I love essays, so I was hoping for some passionate writing about the subjects to which, years after education in them was easily available to me, I finally see the allure.

The book is divided into six chapters: growing up nerd, high tech, in the lab, geek, interrupted, games and superheroes. Essentially, all the stories belong in “geek, interrupted” first and foremost. All these women’s stories of loving whatever nerdy thing they love involve interference by sexism in its various guises: parental expectations, harassment, rejection by peers and lovers, casual put-downs, academic glass ceilings and self-confidence issues. The best ones, like Newitz’s “…When Diana Prince Takes Off Her Glasses” and Wendy Seltzer’s “The Overloaded Activist,” take a firm idea and see it through with a mix of analysis an anecdote. The majority, however, are linear biographies without much craft. Many focus on the trouble of getting a lover who understands and respects a brainy lady, and the inclusion of so many of this type of story was both a sad statement on the romantic mores of our times and frankly a little boring. They pile up and bog down the interesting bits of scientific description scattered throughout the collection. As a non-science type, I wanted to hear what they actually do and why it is so different from, say, being a lawyer.

The excellent introduction by the editors set my expectations high. The rest of the book left me to wish that they had exercised their whittling skills and cut the bloat by presenting essays that worked--not only as individual stories but that fit together into a larger picture of the wonderful women of science.

Addendum: When I say this title in my head, I hear it to the beat of the Go Go's We Got the Beat. Say it with me now: She’s Such a Geek! She’s Such A Geek! She’s Such a Geek! This is more annoying than charming. This is my own problem, but a problem nonetheless.

The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla

When I ordered this book from the library I expected a novel. What in the buzz I heard about The Withdrawal Method led me to believe this, I am not sure, but obviously I wasn’t reading too closely. I also forgot that this book of 13 short stories was published by Soft Skull Press (no longer of New York, sadly, but with the same crappy website). These two things weren’t the only surprises.

The first story, “The Slough” is a two-part affair with a character named Pasha struggling through a changing relationship. Oh no, I thought: young author, same name character, relationship story equals boredom with possible disgust. However, the author’s quietly assured descriptions, like the inhabitants of a park on a gloomy day being “ambitious folks… young couples pushing strollers or middle-aged women being dragged around by dogs,” and “improbable bed-sand” littering former lovers’ beds. This story also takes on the irreality of the illness of a loved one; the first half is a surreal telling of a girlfriend shedding her skin, the second is about a girlfriend in the hospital, dying from metastasized skin cancer.

I am glad I persevered because The Withdrawal Method contains some amazing stories. In “Pushing Oceans in and Pulling Oceans Out,” a young girl with burgeoning OCD and a handicapped brother struggles with the desire to control, and turns an Easter egg hunt into something a desperate scream of a test. Malla writes in first person here and it he gets the tone--tentative yet gossipy, annoyance battling fear--exactly right. There are sharp details like nobody’s business: my favorite is that the girl calls her father “my dad Greg” in her mind.

“Respite” is another man-woman relationship story. Womack unknowingly disappoints his lady by spending a lot of time on his novel, asking her about her work and basically just being himself. When his girlfriend pleads for him to “do something,” he decides to do some volunteering, choosing to care for a dying boy one day a week. His physically intimate, repetitive work is explained in loving detail by Malla and worked effortlessly into the relationship story. It’s magic.

Alternate present gets a go here to with “Being Like Bulls.” Set on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, years after the attraction has been turned into a multinational garbage dump, the story focuses on Paul, a second-generation immigrant living off his dead parents’ investments and moldering in the dead stock of their souvenir store. The story is a subtle, beautiful take on obligation, the emptiness of a landscape bereft of nature and hope and the tensions of a globalized world.

Check it out now. I hope this guy puts out a novel soon.

Hell by Kathryn Davis

I picked this up in Austin at Half Price Books. Luckily for me, it seems that Austinites actually like to read, so the pickings were good for fiction.

Hell is like a fever dream. Reading it feels like dropping into the stream of consciousness of a desperately lost ghost, one that uncontrollably flitting through space-time and doing the best it can to cope. After awhile this restlessness got tiring for me. While I loved the idea of hell as a horrible confusion instead of a fiery pit, there was one to many elements jostling for attention in the story to make it work for me.

The POV shifts between several characters: a young girl in the 50s, dollhouse dolls, a nineteenth- century chef and a Civil War bound-to-be widow named Edwina. The chef voice is overblown and food obsessed, and was a dissonant element. The whole cooking thing didn't really fit in with the details of the other sections and I wish had been left out. Edwina’s story is a lead weight on the narrative and I couldn’t wait to get through her chapters. Even with all these, a bit of a mystery story emerges, involving the aforementioned young girl and the murder of her frenemy, and that’s the story I really wanted to read. That her loss of innocence is not exactly as it seems was quite compelling; I love how Davis writes about girls and women. Her Hell is fueled by the unspent energy of the lives these women could have lived.

Bonus: Hell mentions both the neighborhood I grew up in and spends a good bit set near the creek where I have spent countless hours having fun, both mild and wild.

Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand

I picked this up in Austin at Half Price Books after having one hell of a time finding a good independent used bookstore there. Where did I go wrong?

Anyway, Mortal Love was a great airplane book. Though it flirts with fairydom and myth, it is essentially a book about artistic inspiration and the dangers of courting such a tempestuous thing. Through a triple narrative following the lives of three men tortured by their relationship with art and their eventual relationship with a very seductive woman, Hand questions the relationship between madness and art, ponders the difference between a genius and a mere craftsman and works the phrase “scent of green apples” to the bone. By creating a world where inspiration is a ravenous, immortal being on a quest for her counterpart, Hand offers one view of a complicated subject. I have read few genre authors whose stories have art and artists as their central subjects and I find Hand’s dedication to excavating that world in inventive ways to be compelling despite some occasional clunky writing.

Some of her passages focusing on the aforementioned seductive woman and her witchy ways lean just this side of purple prose, but Hand does manage to deftly portray other kinds of characters: the asshole brother, the former rock star, the settled-for woman, the lost child. She is also great at setting a scene. Whether in a present-day London bohemian throwback apartment or wandering in a lonely dream home, the details seem to come alive—an important thing for a book about people who interpret sensation.

My only complaint is about the one-sidedness of this particular take on art. By having the wild woman crave only the art-juice of men, it excludes female creators from the discussion and put a dent in my appreciation of Hand’s inventiveness. Someone else will just have to write that book I guess.

The Tent by Margaret Atwood

I hated this book. Almost every minute of reading the bloodless short shorts and poems within it I spent waiting to get to something strong and vivid and Atwoody. Instead the stories are vague and unmemorable and are almost entirely in one of my least favorite voices: the mythmaker.

The mythmaker voice is almost always a distant first person and uses the word “we” a lot. The rhythm is slow and sing-song, all the better to lull one to sleep:
“The young look up at you, wide-eyed. Or maybe they look down at you: they’ve become very tall. How young are the young these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old. But they are still credulous, because you were there, once upon a time, and they weren’t.” (“Winter’s Tales”)

“The Heritage house is where we keep the Heritage. It wasn’t built for that—it was once a place where people really lived—but the way things need to be done was cumbersome, what with the water coming out of the well, and the light coming out of oil lamps and tallow candles, and the heat coming out of a stone fireplace, and then there were chamber pots to be emptied and the tin bathtubs to be filled.”” (“Heritage House”)

“But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? Is that them, landing in their illicit boats, at night?...It’s a constant worry, this we, this them.” (“Post-Colonial”)

This voice is usually employed when there is no real story, and the author wants to add weight to a story that’s clichéd, characterless, or just plain boring, or wants to write an essay, but doesn't have enough facts. I realize that this entire short work could be taken as an exercise, but that doesn’t mean that I want to read it. Even I in a mood more indulgent toward such wifty tales, the themes matter and none of Atwood’s take on themes in The Tent—including aging, aging as a woman, the problems of modernity--did much for me.

The only good of this collection is its high object value. The cover and design are beautiful and it’s a great size for toting around. Why you’d want to I’m not sure.