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Hiromi Goto's Half World: Momotaro (aka Peach Boy) Saw Bosch's Hell in Frida Kahlo's Bathtub

By Jeff VanderMeer

 
(photo of Hiromi Goto by John Endo Greenaway) 

Earlier this year, Hiromi Goto's phantasmagorical and often harrowing Half World was published as a young adult novel, although it's the kind of cross-over that deserves a wide readership among adults. It's already received the 2010 Sunburst Award and was just longlisted for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The cover sports a glowing blurb from Neil Gaiman. Goto has received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region, was a co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award, and has won the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. You can check out her blog here.

Half World is a potent, deeply felt mix of fantasy and stark reality, and beautifully written. It also avoids cliche by refusing to indulge in stock situations. We've run great short essays from Goto about the problems with romance in dark fantasy , relationship between fantasy and reality, and how fantasy is horror's best friend forever. Now, to end, she talks about where her ideas come from. Many thanks from Omni to Goto for so many interesting posts!

         

Momotaro (aka Peach Boy) Saw Bosch's Hell in Frida Kahlo's Bathtub

by Hiromi Goto

During Q & A's authors are often asked where their ideas come from. It's not so easy to answer this question, because, well, it depends, and, often it can be a combination of numerous things. Like a perfect storm.... Sometimes my ideas arise from something witnessed or experienced, and I can extrapolate upon the brief moment of life, and expand upon it in a fictional and imaginative way. For instance, I saw a woman in her thirties, wearing sunglasses and Capri pants, walking from her car to the elementary school to pick up a child. In her hand she clasped a replica gun, the same size and colour as a real gun, presumably her child's toy or a new present. She held it like she meant it. I could see the details well enough that it looked cheap and plastic, but I did a double-take, and thought, Holy smokes! What is she thinking? Sometimes the eye is snagged, or the ear lifts up words of someone's speech, and the moment is somehow fraught with story potential.

I also play the "What if?" game a great deal, inside my head. "What if a girl lost everything that's the most important to her in her life? How could she go on?" "What if all the cyclical suffering and struggle we see in our world, our lives, is because something is terribly wrong? What went wrong?" "What if it could be undone?" These are some of the "What if?" questions that I asked myself in writing Half World. After the main "What if?" questions are asked, all the other questions of who, why, how, etc follows.

I love playing the this game and it's a great way to creatively explore ideas when you're, say, waiting for the bus, or in the checkout line at the grocery store at 5 pm and you chose the wrong row because the cashier is wearing a button that says, "I'm New!" and you noticed too late....

My mum sometimes says, with a tone of wonderment, those ideas just keep coming out of your head! Whenever she says this I visualize her imagining me with a glossy and colourful ribbon of story ideas undulating out of my skull, an ever-lengthening strand, until the novel is completed.

I think my lifetime of playing "What if?" has developed my imaginary muscles, but those muscles need to be nourished by other imaginations, other art forms, images, music, novels, poems, plays, movies, news stories, folk tales, myths, religions, nature, my environment, the world, etc.

So, in Half World, references to Momotaro, the Peach Boy of Japanese folk legend, can exist beside allusions to Agamemnon. The concept of reincarnation can partner with purgatory. And The Garden of Earthly Delights can be glimpsed from the window from Frida Kahlo's bathroom.... The recombination of unlikely narratives makes the story resonate on different frequencies and, when it works well, may offer a unique sound. (One can only try, of course....)

Stories are birthed from stories birthed from stories birthed from stories.... I have this feeling that we exist, as self-aware beings, simply because we began speaking stories in a long ago time, in a long ago place, where the skies were much darker and the stars so brilliant, our dreams so vivid they became flesh and walked upon the land as we lay sleeping.

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Thomas Mallon on Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick: "What makes this novel such an absorbing achievement is not so much its slanted replications of the story line of 'The Ambassadors' (probably the least crucial component of the later James) but the witty, fierce way in which it goes about upending the whole theme and meaning and stylistic manner of its revered ­precursor.... 'Foreign Bodies' is a nimble, entertaining literary homage, but it is also, chillingly, what James would have called 'the real thing.'"
• Also on the cover: Leon Wieseltier on Saul Bellow: Letters: "The man is all here in this book, in his stunning, almost baffling plenitude. Bellow's letters are "” as anybody who corresponded with him must have expected them to be ... "” one of Bellow's greatest books.... Taylor has selected and edited and annotated these letters with exquisite judgment and care. This is an elegantissimo book. Our literature's debt to Taylor, if our culture still cares, is considerable.... The unruliness of existence was Bellow's lasting theme; but while he studied it, he never quite ordered it. In his fiction and in his life, he seemed to believe in the fecundity of disorder."
• Kakutani on Decoded by Jay-Z: "'Decoded' is less a conventional memoir or artistic manifesto than an elliptical, puzzlelike collage.... At the same time, 'Decoded' is a book that highlights the richly layered, metaphoric nature of the author's own rhymes (even those about guns and girls and bling often turn out to have hidden meanings, stashed like 'Easter eggs' in the weeds) "” a book that underscores how the pressures of Jay-Z's former life as a dealer honed his gifts as a writer, including a survivor's appraising sense of character, an observer's eye for detail and a hustler's penchant for wordplay and control."
• Judith Shulevitz on The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie: "What you learn when you read the works of the young Ann Beattie is that she loved men. She was an appreciator, a connoisseur, of men, in all their indefensible glory. Her male characters are often awful and usually irresponsible and almost always funny and touching. Those who become husbands are sure to leave. They will be replaced by gay men who become friends (friendship, in Beattie's world, is a more solid relationship than marriage) or by younger straight men who will become lovers and afford their partners a brief respite from loneliness, the way a moment in a poem can divert you from a grim reality."
• John Steele Gordon on American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 by H.W. Brands: "This is warts-and-all history, but the warts don't get undue attention.... Mr. Brands, a terrific writer who commands his material, handles this sprawling, complicated story with authority and panache. A book that might have been a worthy but boring tome turns out to be as close as serious history gets to a page turner."

Washington Post:

• Yardley on the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1: "The response in the press and elsewhere has mostly been genuflection and adulation, not surprising when one considers that this is a 'new' book by one of the very few American writers whose greatness is beyond question. Still, our gratitude for this book should be tempered by an objective reading of it, which yields less rhapsodic judgments.... His was one of the most interesting and unpredictable minds this country has produced, but this discursive ramble through his life proves nothing so much as that what interested him at any given moment is not necessarily of interest to anyone else. Reading the 'Autobiography of Mark Twain' too often is like being trapped in a locked room with a garrulous old coot ... who loves the sound of his own voice and hasn't the slightest inclination to turn it off."
• Anne Applebaum on When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman: "In 'When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone,' a fresh, surprising and exceedingly well-researched book, Gal Beckerman retells their story.... The need to save Soviet Jews, Beckerman argues - not the need to support Israel - taught American Jews how to use the tools that are so familiar today, from 'targeting local congresspeople to asserting influence on the Hill.' It's an unexpected thesis, and completely convincing."

Los Angeles Times:

• Nicholas Basbanes on Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris: "His extraordinary life, finally complete, is now fully accessible in these three seamless volumes. Morris' hand, it must be noted, has been sure and steady throughout, and not in any way to be compared with 'Dutch,' the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan he wrote in 1999 that featured, among other literary devices, the use of an imaginary character named 'Morris.' The TR trilogy is masterful, and can rightfully take its place among the truly outstanding biographies of the American presidency."
• Jon Fasman on Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie: "I did devour Haroun's tale in such a world-obliterating sitting, and I find that certain images from 'Midnight's Children' and 'The Moor's Last Sigh' still shine in my literary memory, many years after first reading those novels (Rushdie's two best, by far), and I still found it nearly impossible to race past the cloyingly false childishness, the canned sense of expectation that the first chapter sets up. Reader, persist. Rushdie may do bombast ('The Ground Beneath Her Feet') and he may do overwritten ('The Enchantress of Florence'), but he does not do boring, and he knows his way around a good almost-myth."
  

Wall Street Journal:

• Donna Rifkind on An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin: "If the characters are so flimsy, then what holds this novel aloft? It turns out that the main event is a series of disquisitions about modern art, accompanied by reproductions of the works"”by the likes of Milton Avery, Andy Warhol and Robert Gober"”under discussion.... But despite Mr. Martin's diligent efforts they are, by fiction-writing rules, only information dumps, distracting readers again and again from Lacey's story."

Globe and Mail:

• Janice Kulyk Keefer on Ozick's Foreign Bodies: "Foreign Bodies, like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, may bow to the master whose work inspired it "“ not Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but Henry James's The Ambassadors "“ but it also kicks over the master's traces, introducing new characters and fresh elements of plot, and uncovering supplementary, sometimes radically different meanings in the events narrated.... For a consummate celebration of Paris and for a profound exploration of the tragic disjunction between what we wish to be true and what we can't escape knowing to be real, read The Ambassadors. But for an evocation of unspeakable loss and unfathomable love rooted in the nightmare of a history James couldn't begin to imagine, you couldn't do better than Foreign Bodies."
• Robert Buckman on The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee: "Interesting and thorough though it is, it isn't a biography of cancer, because such a thing cannot be written. A useful analogy could perhaps be drawn from another area entirely: automobiles. If you set out to describe in detail the several hundred different ways in which cars can break down or fail to work properly "“ running out of gas, oil or water, overheating, seizing up, spark plugs failing, the steering going wonky etc. etc. "“ such a book couldn't be called Breakdown: A Biography of the Car That Goes Wrong."

The Guardian:

• John Banville on Bellow's Letters: "Oddly, the collection is not as exciting or stimulating as one would expect from this most incandescent and opinionated of writers. Although there are some wonderful set-pieces ... it would seem that, unlike his greatest creation, the maniacally epistolary Moses Herzog, Bellow in his letters tended to relax the force of his personality.... Yet what a writer, and what a man. Who, reading these letters, could not but love him? He was fearsome and kindly, tolerant and unforgiving, committed to his art but dedicated to the world."
• Tim Radford on Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life by Richard Cohen: "This extraordinary book is informed by the most prodigious reading, and the most fabulous detail.... Some will call it eccentric in its discursiveness: a better word would be concentric. The journey is unpredictable, but always at a proper distance from its subject. It's a glorious literary walk in the Sun."

The New Yorker:

• George Packer on Decision Points by George W. Bush: " Here is a prediction: 'Decision Points' will not endure. Its prose aims for tough-minded simplicity but keeps landing on simpleminded sententiousness. Though Bush credits no collaborator, his memoirs read as if they were written by an admiring sidekick who is familiar with every story Bush ever told but never got to know the President well enough to convey his inner life. Very few of its four hundred and ninety-three pages are not self-serving."

--Tom

Thrilling Wonder Stories 2: In Which Omnivoracious Goes to London

By Jeff VanderMeer

Your faithful Omnivoracious correspondent, through luck or living right, has been asked to participate in the Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 conference (London, AA School of Architecture, this Friday). In addition to co-organizer Geoff Manaugh, whose BLDGBLOG book we have featured on Omnivoracious, attendees include novelist Will Self, Wasteland creator Antony Johnston, Freakangels writer/artist Paul Duffield, and many more.

My own presentation is entitled "Finch: The Story of a Novel as the Narrative of Historical Consequences, an Occupied City, and a Failed State." Sounds wondrous, doesn't it? Sounds kind of...thrilling? Well, at the very least, it fits the brief of telling a story.

Next week, I'll come back to Omnivoracious bearing the gift of thrilling wonder stories about Thrilling Wonder Stories 2. In the meantime, check out the full line-up...

      
(The BLDG BLOG Book and Finch, together again.)

Organised by Liam Young
Thrilling Wonder Stories 2: Stranger than Truth
Date: 26.11.2010, Time: 12:00:00

Coordinated by Liam Young [Diploma 6/Tomorrow's Thoughts Today] and Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG]

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined they offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

Thrilling Wonder Stories gathers an ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, digital poets, speculative gamers, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries to spin stories of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales.

COUNTERFEIT ARCHAEOLOGIES
Dunne and Raby [Design Provocateurs]; Gavin Rothery [Concept artist for the film Moon and Rockstar Game's Grand Theft Auto]; Paul Duffield [Artist and Author of Freakangels and Signal comics]

APOCALYPTIC VISIONS
Antony Johnston [Author of the post-apocalyptic graphic novel series Wasteland and Daredevil comics] [Designers of the Ark, the war stricken floating refugee city from the game Brink]; Splash Damage; Johnny Hardstaff [Filmmaker and designer for Ridley Scott Associates]

CAUTIONARY TALES
Will Self [Author of The Book of Dave, Psychogeography and Walking Through Hollywood]; Geoff Manaugh + Nicola Twilley [Founders of BLDGBLOG, Edible Geography and Future Plural]; Joep Van Lieshout [Founder of Atelier Van Lieshout and the speculative free state of AVL Ville]

NEAR FUTURES
BERG London [Technologists, Futurists and RFID magicians]; Rachel Armstrong [Biotechnology and Sci Fi Squishiness]; The Why Factory [Urban futures think tank]

ALTERNATIVE PRESENTS
Ant Farm [Architectural super group and counter-culture heroes]; Cedric Delsaux [Photographer of the Dark Lens series]; Jeff VanderMeer [Author of the fantasy novels City of Saints and Madmen and Finch]; SPOV [Motion graphics artists for Discovery channel's Future Weapons and Project Earth]

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More on Jaimy Gordon, But Not Much More

By Tom

I've searched high and low (well, for a few minutes at least) but I can see no sign that Jaimy Gordon has given any interviews since she won the National Book Award for Lord of Misrule last Wednesday (once again, here's my barely-pre-award appreciation). So instead, while you are waiting for your copy of the book to arrive (after the reprint), you can look back to a lengthy interview Gordon gave to the literary journal Gargoyle in 1983, as many folks have linked to recently (I first saw it in the Paris Review), and to a profile her local paper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, ran after her nomination. You get two quite different portraits of the artist, which I'm tempted to chalk up to two very different points in her career, although it could just be the difference between a literary journal and a local newspaper.

In Gargoyle, she's voluble and gleefully baroque, confident in her powers and even in her ability, should she choose to, to cross over into the mainstream:

This will sound odd, but I like having a mind, I like thinking, though I'm aware that I think eccentrically and often ridiculously, so that my thoughts threaten to isolate me even though they take shape in the common tongue. I do have confidence that what goes on in my mind, including but by no means featuring its review of personal experience, can be turned into something made of language that will be arresting to those who are susceptible to splendors of rhetoric....

In the past, as I hinted above, I have not pursued trade publication energetically, but I will soon, and don't expect to be turned away. 

She mentions a book called The Adventuress as the book in progress she expects to make that pursuit with, but I'm not sure what happened to it. Did it become her next novel, She Drove Without Stopping?

In this year's profile, she comes across as someone closer to her own characters in Lord of Misrule, who have seen so many chances come and go that they almost don't believe the one that comes and stays:

"Certainly, for the last 10 years, I felt like I was going to end my career admired by other writers, but without much of a public reputation," she said.

"I'm getting up there in years, so I was really beginning to think, 'This is a career that is not ending with a big bang.' And I was just getting used to that idea. And all of a sudden, there was a big bang."

And, as many people have done with her underdog story but, understandably, with more depth, she recognizes the connection between her characters' stories and her own:

"What's really richly ironic is this book is exactly about that," she said. "It's about, as I say, trying to figure out what the shape of your luck on Earth is and, one way or another, come to terms with that.

"The best that most of the characters of the book do is survive, and some of them don't even do that. It's very much about courting that message from the gods that you were destined for something special, and most of the characters of the book have to settle for what they get."

--Tom

Hiromi Goto's Half World: Fantasy's BFF Is Horror

By Jeff VanderMeer

 
(photo of Hiromi Goto by John Endo Greenaway) 

Earlier this year, Hiromi Goto's phantasmagorical and often harrowing Half World was published as a young adult novel, although it's the kind of cross-over that deserves a wide readership among adults. It's already received the 2010 Sunburst Award and was just longlisted for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The cover sports a glowing blurb from Neil Gaiman. Goto has received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region, was a co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award, and has won the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. You can check out her blog here.

Half World is a potent, deeply felt mix of fantasy and stark reality, and beautifully written. It also avoids cliche by refusing to indulge in stock situations. We've run great short essays from Goto about the problems with romance in dark fantasy and the relationship between fantasy and reality. Today, the subject is how fantasy is horror's best friend forever...

         

Fantasy's BFF is Horror...

by Hiromi Goto

Or maybe Horror is Fantasy's evil older sister.... They are definitely closely related, at least in my creative approach. The fantasy and horror elements in Half World are permeable--and I think it's a natural combination that l experience, frequently, when I go to sleep. And, perchance to dream....

I often have vivid and detailed dreams, and I love the otherly qualities of them (though sometimes the nightmares are horrendous), the rich symbols, and the almost mundane ease with which we can experience something utterly fantastic and mind-altering, so viscerally, all inside our own head! Without drugs! (Say no, to drugs!)

How rich that realm where we can plummet to the earth without dying, or slide through water, breathing, like we move through air.... I can be shot by a dart gun and feel the slam of impact, the barbed sting, the burn of the spreading poison. There is a silent dog in a dank and dirty hallway, watching me, and he is uneasy. I am uneasy.

Elements of the fantastic and the horrific entwine in Half World, because the realm itself is like a nightmare come true; the nightmare that does not end. A kind of purgatory where the long-ago dead have been endlessly suffering and re-suffering their most traumatic moment, Melanie must witness their awful repeat half lives, and discover why they are trapped in this torturous cycle. There is no waking up, for Melanie. She must fight for her life, for her spirit, in order to survive.

Our senses tell us our world is "real", the tangible is our proof. We believe in it more than we believe in words. So, to make the fictional world (created through words!) come alive, I take care to detail the visceral experiences of the character's body and her world. Once I begin doing that, the fantastic can easily slip into the horrific. I think my narratives of the fantastic can veer readily into the horrific, because of my desire to depict an image or scene "realistically". I pull the viewer in, close, instead of casting the scene from a more distant and softer view. A romantic veneer can be stripped away by bringing something into sharper focus. The Swedish film, Let The Right One In, is my favourite vampire story. Humane, monstrous, realistic and heart-breaking, it stripped away all the glamour from the image of Hollywood vampires, and approached the trope with a realistic lens.

To actually be a vampire would not be so sexy and exciting.... The daily reality would, well, actually suck. Big time....

One of the key horrific scenes in Half World is around the paying of tolls.... What are the limits of the physically bearable, I wondered? What can be endured?

I've had various responses from audiences about the level of horror in Half World. A group of Grade 7 students laughed aloud when I asked them if they didn't find it too horrific. A woman from a book club said that she was so disturbed that she had to place the chair back beneath her bedroom doorknob at night....

This past year I've been writing the companion novel to Half World. I don't call it a sequel because the story picks up sixteen years later, and there's a new hero. Again, fantasy entwines with horror, as I delve into the ideas of the complexities of the monstrous. Especially when the monster is the one inside of you....

Come, slip inside.

What things these eyes have seen....

End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup

By Paul

Quick links from around the kid-lit blogosphere:

A Presidential picture book. It's not every week that a sitting U.S. President releases a picture book! The Horn Book's Roger Sutton had an early take on Barack Obama's Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, which in part went like this: "The question, as always, is: would this book have been published had it been written by someone else? The answer, as it usually is, is probably not, but the pictures do give the book some claim to legitimacy (something [Loren] Long managed once before when he illustrated a not-bad picture book by Madonna, Mr. Peabody's Apples )."

"Funny Prize" winners. The winners of the annual Roald Dahl Funny Prize are always a safe bet for some serious kid-lit humor (or, in the words of Booktrust, "rip-roaring belly-laughs, sniggers and chortles"). This year the prize went to Dog Loves Books (ages zero to six) and Withering Tights (ages 7 to 14). (via achuka)

Finding "rainforest-safe" books. Just in time for holiday book-buying, the Rainforest Action Network has come out with a consumer guide to buying books from forest-friendly publishers, and avoiding books "printed in Asia using paper that is closely linked to the loss of rainforests in Indonesia." Several publishers, however, have taken issue with RAN's rankings.

Michael Rosen Q&A. Publishers Weekly has a nice interview up with the always-entertaining former UK Children's Laureate Michael Rosen, with a lot of talk about poetry and his clever new book Tiny Little Fly.

National Book Awards wrap-up. Curious about the National Book Awards? Consider yourself covered between Tea Cozy and Fuse #8. Liz B at Tea Cozy did a good recap beforehand ("Comparing awards and finalists can be fun, but bottom line, often it's comparing apples, pineapples, and pine trees"), then Betsy Bird covered the ceremony itself. (Who knew Elmo and Jon Scieszka would riff?)

Review: Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly. Late in the week, 100 Scope Notes reviewed the charming Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly in recipe form:

"Harry Potter Actors Speak American." Also found via 100 Scope Notes, this great video of the Harry Potter actors speaking "American." (Who doesn't want to see Emma Watson say "Olive Garden" and Daniel Radcliffe trying to do a convincing "Glenn Beck"?)

--Paul

Machine of Death Anthology: Amazon #1 Ranking, But Does It Live Up to the Hype?

By Jeff VanderMeer

"Existentialism was never so fun. Makes me wish I could die, too!" - Cory Doctorow

Perhaps Machine of Death editors Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki should have subtitled their self-published anthology "The Resurrection" or "Not Dead Yet!" Pursuing an aggressive guerilla PR and marketing campaign, they recently managed, through strength of fan/reader support, to shoot to the top of Amazon's book ranking system. Along the way, they dislodged heavy hitters like John Grisham and Glenn Beck, creating a maelstrom of discussion, chaos, and discussion in places like the Atlantic Wire.

Now that the dust has settled, what about the anthology itself? The premise is simple: it's a collection of speculative stories about a machine that can tell you the cause of your eventual death, but not the time or place. The book also contains copious illustrations/comics.

Personally, I found Machine of Death a lively, self-assured, and diverse read. The stories aren't as similar as you might think from the premise, the editors have done a good job of breaking up the text with the art, and the whole enterprise has an air of subversion and energy that supports the outrageously cool way in which they managed to get the book world's attention. This is DIY publishing at its best, and a perfect example of the way in which creative, clever editors can use to their advantage the new leveling of hierarchies, existence of more accessible means of distribution, and diversity of ways to make a project visible to readers.

But, when it comes down to it, you have to have the quality to back up the hype. You have to bring the heat, and Machine of Death does bring the heat. Not only that--it showcases a lot of talented writers you might not have encountered before. I know I have a few more "check out their other work" names after reading the anthology.

           

Three Views of Matt Bell's How They Were Found by Three Literary Creeps

By Jeff VanderMeer

Matt Bell first got my attention by imbuing the titular videogame character from Super Mario Brothers with a kind of sadness and depth in "Mario's Three Lives," a story ultimately chosen for reprint in Best American Fantasy. His stand-alone chapbook The Collectors confirmed the impression of an interesting new talent, one working in the same gray area as writers like Brian Evenson: a kind of middle ground between the real and the unreal that writers like Kafka also inhabit.

So it was with anticipation that I read his debut collection How They Were Found. While the tone of many of the stories is similar, the subject matter is wide-ranging, and as the cover copy reads, "Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found."

The collection has received praise from a number of sources, including The Believer: "Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there's the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic." Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times: Stories, wrote, "You're a robot if the stories in Matt Bell's debut collection don't exhilarate, frighten, and unalterably change you."

The book seemed like a good choice for the next read for the impromptu book club, Three Literary Creeps, that sprang up initially because of interest in Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps. The other two members of this troika are literary bloggers Paul Charles Smith (Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream) and Larry Nolen (The Of Blog), who have an interest in Decadent and cross-genre fiction. In reviewing the books we chose, we do not compare notes ahead of time.

That's proven particularly interesting this time around, as all three of us had different reactions, with some variation between what we felt were stronger and weaker stories. This suggests to me that Bell's collection has more variety than any of us acknowledge in ou review. Here are excerpts from those reviews, with links to the full versions. Definitely check out the collection.

     
 

"The opening story, the best in the collection, The Cartographer's Girl, marries loss and longing to Bell's experimental style that works on every level, and I can see why Larry chose it for considering for Best American Fantasy. Careful and precise exposition goes hand and hand with spatial awareness to create a story that I felt was genuinely moving. For me, when dealing with these very human situations is when Bell is at his best, like in Dredge, in which a man traumatised by a similar situation in the best hides the body of a drowned girl in his freezer and attempts to find her killer, despite lacking the funds or facilities to succeed. The same is also true of A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths, in which a young boy comes to terms with his mother's suicide and his father's subsequent withdrawal through memorizing the contents of housing catalogues." - Paul Charles Smith (read more here)

"The highlight of this collection definitely is the first tale, "The Cartographer's Girl."  Originally appearing in the journal Gulf Coast, this story immediately captured my attention soon after I began my series editorship for Best American Fantasy 4.  From the first paragraph, with the cartographic symbols used to signify the narrator's relationship with his ex-girlfriend and the times and places where they moved into, through, and out of each other's life, to latter passages where it felt as though narrative was beginning to dissolve into an intense, interior mindscape, Bell's story captivated me.  The deliberately formal, detached narrative set the stage well for the story to explore an interior vista where the symbols expressed on a map correlate precisely with the emotions that the narrator experiences as he explores where he became 'lost,' both in the symbolic landscape of his romantic past and also in regards to his current position." - Larry Nolen (read more here)

"A story like 'The Receiving Tower' reminds me in tone of Stephen Graham Jones' amazing 'Little Lambs,' among others, but has its own starkness and strength. The mysteriousness of some of the events in the story, the sense of unspoken ritual, the broken ending, is compelling, and enough to satisfy the reader without the kind of traditional story arc or shape another writer might have given to the same material. It's also one of the stories where emotion leaks into the text through the first-person narrator, to good effect. Another of the strongest stories, 'The Collectors,' which previously appeared as a stand-alone chapbook, includes lists of objects in a way that has a cumulative effect in part because the story makes a strange family come to life through these descriptions." - Jeff VanderMeer (read more here)

Dallas Clayton's Top 10 Things to Be Thankful For

By Lynette Mong

With less than a week until Thanksgiving, we asked children's author Dallas Clayton to tell us a few things he's thankful for.

But first, a little bit of backstory: Dallas, whose new picture book, An Awesome Book of Thanks!, came out yesterday, is pretty awesome himself. When he self-published his first children's book, An Awesome Book (originally written for his son), he also founded The Awesome World Foundation, which donates a free copy of An Awesome Book to schools, hospitals, libraries, camps, and shelters for every copy sold. Watch his video for An Awesome Book of Thanks!, and you'll see why he's become such a popular author for kids (and adults) of all ages.

 
Like An Awesome Book, An Awesome Book of Thanks! is filled with wonderfully quirky drawings and clever rhymes that are sure to charm young readers. In the spirit of the season, we asked the author/illustrator/skater/poet/dad to share the top 10 things he's thankful for. Here's what he came up with:

1. Wet Cement
2. Scented Magic Markers
3. The fact that you can grow food out of the ground for free
4. Animals that can be trained to talk
5. People who still practice to be magicians
6. Songs that make you think about people you miss
7. Everyone I have ever met or ever will meet
8. People who do things day in and day out that are hard and thankless but slowly help make the world a better place.
9. Waking up without an alarm clock.
10. My son.

An Awesome Book of Thanks! is full of filled with fun and funny illustrations, and it's the type of book kids really latch onto--every page has whimsical, colorful illustrations to enjoy. Here's one of my favorites:

 

--Lynette