Emerging Writers Network

Source of Lit (fun) - The UPS Man

A late day delivery that not only has lit, Ann Joslin Williams' linked story collection, The Woman in the Woods (Eastern Washington Univesity Press, 2007)--winner of the 2005 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, but also the movie, In the Soup--winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

I discovered the writing of Ann Joslin Williams via the writing of her father (a name you've seen around here the past week as I accumulate his books and you'll soon see a review of the first one read--Thomas Williams). I am looking forward to dipping into this collection and am pretty sure I won't be able to wait until May (National Short Story Month) to finish a couple of stories within at least.

I saw In the Soup at the Detroit Institute of Arts theatre probably not too long after it came out. I think about five of us went and a few of us loved it and a couple wondered aloud what they were just witness to.I've looked for it ever since and finally bit the bullet and ordered it online.  Directed by Alexandre Rockwell, the cast includes Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Beals, Seymour Cassel, Sam Rockwell, Stanley Tucci, Will Patton, Debi Mazar, Jim Jarmusch and Carol Kane. It's b&w, an absurd comedy. Buscemi's character has a 500 page movie script he can't figure out how to make and Cassel's character is a fast talker that says he'll take care of the money, and has some crazy ideas on how to raise the money (and make the film). Looking forward to watching it and the extras (3 different full-length commentaries, behind the scenes home-movies shot by Buscemi and deleted scenes).

Source of Lit - The Postman!

There were two packages in the mail box today and one very big andflat envelope propped up against the door--yes, propped up in a manner that meant I could not open the door without knocking it down, sigh.

I opened the flat envelope first--it was part of the Kickstarter reward for supporting Andrew Scott and his comic book project (at least I believe it was--it could be that Andrew simply was kind enough to send me this poster and postcards). As one still buying and reading at least a few comics every month, I was excited to see this project coming from a writer I admire.

The next package had Caitlin Hamilton-Summie's name on the envelope so I knew what was inside--a rarity when I'm opening up packages these days. It's the galley for Scott Elliott's forthcoming Temple Grove. If Caitlin is backing a book, I'm going to open the front cover and start it and I'd say over the past eleven or twelve years, there's about a 94% chance I'm going to keep reading until the back cover flips in front of me. Looking forward to this one.

The package saved for last I had zero idea of what it might be. It was the novel Ceremony of Love by Thomas Williams. His first novel and one a bit harder to track down than some of the other works I recently purchased. It gives me a chance to read the bulk of his work in chronological order now.

Morning Reading

Cynthia Ozick is one that I've got to make up a list of what I own and what I do not as junkets like Saturday's to a handful of used booksellers find me staring at shelves wondering--do I already have this one or not? This week I picked up Bloodshed and Three Novellas and have so far greatly enjoyed the first novella, "A Mercenary," and then this morning, the title story, "Bloodshed," from which this passage comes from:

He congratulated his memory, also of his grandfather's nose, thin as an arrow--the nose, the face, the body, all gone into the earth--and he went on piecing together his grandfather's face, tan teeth that gave out small clicks and radiated stale farina, shapely gray half-moon eyes with fleshy lids, eyebrows sparse as a women's, a prickly whiskbroom of a moustache whiter than cream.

Source of Lit - The Postman!

A few packages on the porch today, plus a couple of manilla envelopes.

First opened was the envelope with the signed contracts for Erin McGraw's Bodies at Sea and The Baby Tree which Dzanc will publish later this summer in eBook form as part of our rEprint series.

Next up was a copy of William Goyen's novel, The Fair Sister, which is another that we'll do this summer in the rEprint series along with seven or either other titles by Goyen.

Then two packages in a row that contained novels by  Thomas Williams. First up was Town Burning, his second novel and one that was a National Book Award finalist. The second package contained his Tsuga's Children, which takes the story that the protagonist of Williams' NBA Award-winning The Hair of Harold Roux told his children within the novel, and branches it out into a full novel.

The last item opened contained signed contracts for the rights to rEprint David Blum's Quintet: Five Journeys toward Musical Fulfillment.

Source of Lit - Bookstores! (and the Postman!)

Trooper of the weekend might have to go to Stassie Wickett as she wandered through six different bookstores with me between 8 p.m. Friday night and 9 p.m. Saturday night (though she did get a zoo trip out of it).

Friday night we hit a Barnes & Noble and (as we always do) turned all of the Dzanc titles in the store face out (Matt Bell's How They Were Found; Jeff Kass' Knuckleheads, Roy Kesey's Any Deadly Thing; Jen Michalski's Could You Be With Her Now; and Steven Gillis, not-quite Dzanc title, The Law of Strings). I found Ron Rash's new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay. With my new VIDA buying rule, I wandered about a bit and found Caitlin Horrocks' collection, This is Not Your City. I KNOW I already have this somewhere, but having gone to see her read Wednesday night, I looked for my copy and can't find it anywhere. I certainly don't mind supporting her and Sarabande one more time.

Saturday morning Stassie and I were going to go to the Detroit Zoo. The weather was beautiful and the zoo had something called Bunnyville going on--the line of cars went a quarter of a mile deep minimum down the ramp of the exit from the expressway. We thought, let's go to a couple of used book stores and kill some time and see if we can't come back in an hour or two when the line is down.

We went to the smaller John King store in Ferndale where Stassie made friends with the store cat ("I shall name you Snickers") and found books by Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, as well as a book by Chelea Handler and one titled Cat Speak (yes, how to speak to your cat...). I picked up a load of books:  The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson, The Point by Charles D'Ambrosio, The Actual by Saul Bellow, The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick, Mischief Makers by Nettie Jones, Aureole by Carole Maso, a trio of Max Apple titles for Dzanc's rEprint series, and Illinois Short Fiction series titles by Peter Makuck and  Sara Vogan.

We then hit Royal Oak Books and I found Bloodshed and Three Novellas by Cynthia Ozick, two more Illinois Short Fiction titles (Erin McGraw and Susan Enberg) plus Thomas Williams' NBA winner, The Hair of Harold Roux. Stassie found two more cats to befriend (with the new names of Milky Way and Twix).

After a quick respite at home, where I found Leah, New Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams in the mailbox, we headed to Ann Arbor, with our first stop at Dawn Traeder where there were no cats for Stassie to befriend, but I found Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow and In Search of Nixon by Bruce Mazlish. From there on over to West Side Books where Stassie picked up more Shakespeare, The Lovely Bones, Jane Eyre, and a collection of stories by Jack London and I picked up Brian Evenson's The Wavering Knife and a signed copy of George Singleton's The Half-Mammals of Dixie.

We also wandered the Vault of Midnight comic store for a few minutes before heading over to a pretty well attended pre-opening get together by the folks at Literati, Ann Arbor's soon to be newest open bookstore! It looks wonderful there.

 

Source of Lit - Postman!, and $

Hit a store last night and picked up The Appointment by Herta Muller (sorry, I've yet to figure out how to put accents into my posts when it comes to accented letters within names or words). This was translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm and also seems to include a complete transcript of Muller's 2009 Nobel Lecture.

Yesterday the postman brought me The Night of Trees by Thomas Williams (whose NBA award-winning The Hair of Harold Roux I am currently reading on eBook and aside from a typo or a dozen, am really enjoying)  and Pagan Babies by Greg Johnson (which I loved a decade ago and bought it to scan it for the Dzanc rEprint series). Plus a contract for a couple of new rEprint titles we'll publish by Natalie Handal.

Today the postman brought the latest issue of n+1 (which I already read with a combination of interest and sadness over my lack of intelligence), and Scott Garson's forthcoming collection, Is That You, John Wayne (Queen's Ferry Press -- next month) as well as a contract to Dzanc  for Thomas Berger's next novel, which we'll publish in summer 2014.

Dzanc Books - The Hysterectomy Waltz

Very happy to be sending the following letter out tomorrow with galleys of Merrill Joan Gerber's The Hysterectomy Waltz, which Dzanc Books is publishing May 14, 2013.

Dear Reviewer,

I am happy to send for your consideration our next release, Merrill Joan Gerber’s novel The Hysterectomy Waltz, scheduled for publication May 14, 2013.

I first encountered Gerber’s writing a little over a year and a half ago while reading her earlier novels and short stories that Dzanc is publishing as eBooks in our rEprint series.  I realized, while reading her work, that she has been an important writer since the early sixties, when she published her first novel, An Antique Man.  Her stories have won many prizes, including an O. Henry Award, and her novels likewise, have won a Pushcart Editors’ Book Award as well as the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah Magazine “for the best English language novel on a Jewish theme.”

Merrill has been writing about sexuality from a woman’s point of view long before it became fashionable. She has also been a fantastic addition to the Jewish American library of literature. My thoughts upon entering the world she’s created in The Hysterectomy Waltz is that we are publishing a female version of Steve Stern, with her usage of black humor to delve deeply into a subject that has seemingly scared other writers away over the years— hysterectomy and what it does to a woman’s life. Gerber’s tale is definitely one that will cause you to reconsider everything you might believe you knew about this surgery—all of it presented with a wild, funny, and sometimes dark and biting humor.

Fiction writer, critic, and essayist, Cynthia Ozick, wrote of The Hysterectomy Waltz: “It's truly powerful, and acrid, and barbed, and filled with wonderful, and unexpected, turns of phrase, and above all it's shocking in its directness and understated anger and sadness and fear. In short, it's an amazing piece of writing. It will fly into print!”

Merrill Joan Gerber has published over two dozen titles including the award-winning King of the World and The Kingdom of Brooklyn. She teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

If you need any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact me directly, by email or by phone. Thank you for your consideration!

Sincerely,

Dan Wickett
Executive Director
Dzanc Books

Merrill is also seeing the majority of her backlist (16 of her past works) being re-published through Dzanc's rEprint series--eight of which are currently available.

Source of Lit - Postman!

The postman brought a package from Noemi Press yesterday! It included a few things I ordered only a few days earlier: A Compendium of Domestic Incidents by Joanna Ruocco, Salton Sea by George McCormick (this may actually have been a gift from Noemi as I don't remember ordering five items), Three Plays by Norman Lock, Critique of Pure Reason by Gabriel Blackwell, and In the Colorless Round by Joanna Howard with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet.

Looking forward to digging into all of these just as soon as possible.

Dzanc Books Receives Matching Donation

Last week Dzanc Books sent out an email and announced at their website that they had received an anonymous matching donation up to $6,000 for any donations received before December 31, 2012.

Any size donations are helpful--a dollar means two dollars, five means ten and so on.

Truly, ANY amount helps--that five that turns into ten helps us get two to three review copies of our books our to reviewers; money goes  to our publishing, our promotion of literature, as well as our programs like the Dzanc Writer in Residence Program with a writer visiting/teaching the same class of children once per week in the schoolroom about the power of words--to write and read creatively.

 

www.dzancbooks.org/support/ is the place to visit and donate. ALL donations, no matter the amount, will see the wonderful person donating to Dzanc put into a drawing to potentially receive a copy of every title we published in the year 2012.

 

Thank you.

Poem by Norene Cashen

A little over a month ago, I saw Norene Cashen read and really loved one of her new poems. She's been kind enough to allow me to post the poem here at the EWN:

 

WAR
By Norene Cashen

I’ve never seen peace.
I’ve seen a foxhole, combat boots, a drill sergeant
and a gun. I’ve heard the gun rattle
and talk and talk and talk
in its fast language, the clink of brass casings
spit out after each syllable.
I’ve seen girls in dog tags and dust
crawling under the barbed wire of the world
as if their mothers waited for them
on the other side, but there is no other side.
That’s what you learn.
There’s only more war.
There’s war outside and inside
war speeding on the highway
to get to work on time.
There’s war in our mouths, our hair,
our eyes. The best wars are in the movies
where we eat popcorn and tell ourselves
nobody dies. Then somewhere in the middle
of Afghanistan a boy from Wisconsin
is smeared inside a turret
just like the old poem says. It’s possible
we’re all walking cages
and it’s our job to keep ourselves closed
to keep the violence
from shaking out of our bones.