Laila Lalami

“Leora Skolkin-Smith’s Edges was featured this year at the Virginia Festival of the Book, but it doesn’t seem to be noticed much. I hope more people will read it. Written in lyrical and arresting language, it bridges a rift between the “political” and the universal, telling a story about mothers and daughters and a young woman’s sexual awakening. The geography and tensions of Israel and Palestine before the Cold War are especially glowing in this book. Leora Skolkin-Smith is very gifted at expressing complex, nuanced moments with rare precision. I highly recommend this unusual and brief novel.”

Jamie Callan’s fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica 2002, The Missouri Review, Story Buzz Magazine, American Letters and Commentary, OntheBus, The Baffler, and Turnstile. Callan teaches fiction at Yale University, NYU, and Wesleyan University. She is also a Master Teaching Artist with the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

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“A Good Place for the Night by Savyon Liebrecht, Persea Books. I found this Israeli author’s short story collection at the Independent and Small Press Book Fair back in November. The first story, “America”, had me hooked after the second page. The collection is made up of seven short stories, each taking place in a different locality (America, Germany, Hiroshima, a kibbutz, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and a post-apocalyptic world.) The book blurb says that the collection focuses on “place, on men and women physically or emotionally distant from home.” I would go further and say that place is, in these stories, often an imagined construct (most obviously in “America”). The collection also seems, to me, to be about the precarious lies we tell ourselves to make our lives bearable, and what happens when these lies fall apart. To summarize: “America” is told from the point of view of a little girl whose mother runs off with another man and his daughter to America, and her and her father’s attempts to cope with this betrayal. “The Kibbutz” is about an orphaned child of a mistreated and mildly handicapped couple, and his eventual discovery of the truth behind their deaths. “Germany” focuses on an Israeli reporter in Munich who is covering the trial of a former Nazi commander responsible for his father’s death. “Hiroshima”, one of my favorites in the collection, is about an Israeli woman’s nine years’ stay in Japan and the terrible forces that drive her to leave. And “A Good Place for the Night”, the title story, is about a post-apocalyptic world, an inn where several survivors take refuge. I would highly recommend this book.”

Michelle Lin writes for New York Brain Terrain, a cultural events blog for NYC.

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Bill Lychack writes in to recommend The Lost World of the Kalahri by Laurens Van Der Post. Says he: “Surely, it must be true, everyone has a book that truly changes their lives. There’s always a context to how this book finds you-a context which probably isn’t that interesting or magical to anyone except yourself-so I’ll spare you the story of how a stranger handed me this book, how forlorn and lost I must have seemed, how this strange quest of Van Der Post’s spoke directly to me. But I would, if I could, give you a copy of the book, if I saw you in such a state right now in front of me. And I’d make you wait a moment until I found a brief passage I’ve all but memorized. I’d tell you that you don’t need any context for it, but then I’d probably say that, in the book, Van Der Post, who’d dreamed from boyhood of finding the nearly-exterminated Bushmen, had just committed to organizing his expedition into the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana: I’d tell you it’s a spiritual quest for him and would read this to you:

In fact all the aspects of the plan that were within reach of my own hand were worked out and determined there and then. What took longer, of course, was the part which depended on the decisions of others and on circumstances beyond my own control. Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished. I say ‘amazed,’ but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulness, doubts and hesitations was, as Hamlet put it so heart-rendingly to himself: “the readiness is all.” If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one’s readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one’s side.

“Then I’d hand the book to you and simply disappear, just as someone handed the book to me and never appeared again. And maybe you’d read it. And maybe it would speak to you the way it did for me. You never know. ”

William Lychack is the author of The Wasp Eater, a novel.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Amanda Filipacchi’s Nude Men may be the funniest novel I’ve ever read and you’ve never heard about. Please, introduce this to your mother’s book-club: the story of 29-year-old Jeremy Acidophilus and the eleven year-old girl who seduces him. Not sold yet? How about this: it includes a dancing magician. C’mon. Just listen to Acidophilus, who at the start of the novel believes his lunch at a crowded Manhattan café ruined when a beautiful woman asks to share his table. “I am a man without many pleasures in life,” he says, “a man whose pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another reading while eating.” After that, what writer could deny Filipacchi a lunch companion?

Stephan Clark’s fiction has been published by, or is forthcoming in, The Cincinnati Review, The Portland Review, Night Train, Barrelhouse, Fourteen Hills and Drunken Boat. He is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship in Ukraine, where he’s researching and writing about the “mail-order bride” industry.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening was published in 1998 and while it was by no means ignored–as I recall, it received glowing reviews and was nominated for some major awards–it’s a book hardly anyone seems to know about just seven years later. Thus I am always giving people copies of it as gifts, and everyone I’ve given it to (a group that includes other writers and artists as well as lots of civilians, including both of my parents–and my father never reads “this sort of book,” i.e. “literary fiction,” unless it’s one I’ve written) has fallen in love with it.

It’s the kind of book you do fall in love with, a book that is not only written gorgeously but is full of truths–that is, actual wisdom–and the main characters (Schiller, an obscure novelist/intellectual; Heather, the bookish, brazen girl who half-falls in love with him as she sets about trying to write about him; and the Schiller’s daughter, Ariel, an ex-dancer turned aerobics teacher) are so lovingly and brilliantly drawn it is almost unbearably sad to come to the end of the book.

The character Heather remembers that her life was changed when at 16 she discovered Schiller’s first novel, Tenderness: “It was as if Schiller had explained her life to her more sympathetically than she’d been able to explain it to herself.” That’s exactly how I felt reading Starting Out in the Evening, a novel that does something that hardly any contemporary novel (and for that matter hardly any contemporary art) troubles to do: it looks at the goodness in–and of–life. This is not to say that it is sentimental, or “soft.” In fact Starting Out in the Evening is full of in-passing, apparently throw-away observations (”You desire the woman who intimidates the woman you desire,” says one character) that are startling in their shrewdness. A novel that is this smart and this generous, with characters who feel entirely real, is so rare that I have never understood why it isn’t more generally acknowledged as one of the best novels of our time.”

Michelle Herman is the author of the short novel Dog and the memoir The Middle of Everything.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“As far as I’m concerned, everybody in America should read Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea. It strips the ugly political rhetoric around immigration and reveals the very human face of this issue. The book came out in 1993, but I think it’s more relevant today than when it was published. More than sociopolitical analysis, though, Urrea has created a heartbreaking, tough and compelling narrative in this collection of essays. (Try to read the section titled “Father’s Day” without crying. I dare you.) This work is a testament to survival, and to hope, but never becomes sentimental. Urrea is a storyteller to be envied and emulated.”

Samantha Dunn is the author of Failing Paris, a finalist for the PEN West Fiction Award in 2000, and the memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life, a BookSense 76 pick. Her most recent memoir, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation, is published by Henry Holt & Co.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“I spent a gray February morning in bed reading Darcey Steinke’s Milk. After the last page, I sobbed so long and hard my partner thought it had something to do with him. He pulled me out of bed, took me to the Sunday farmers’ market to feel the harvest of the world. Still I was changed, in whatever small way a really good read does. Steinke’s language is so gorgeously sensual and succinct. She illuminates the struggle of reconciling the sexual with the spiritual, as well as how they pull from the very same places.”

Lisa Teasley is the author of the award-winning story collection Glow in the Dark and the critically acclaimed novel Dive. Forthcoming spring 2006 is a story in Black Clock, and in the summer, her new novel Heat Signature. She lives in Los Angeles.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“I’ll recommend two books,” Turow writes via email. “Frances Sherwood’s The Book of Splendors, a fantasy about the golem of Prague, published a few years back to almost no notice, and Scott Simon’s Pretty Birds, which is a magnificent novel about the Bosnian war from the point of view of a 16 year old female sniper. It’s a significant book which didn’t get its full due.”

Scott Turow is a writer and attorney. He is the author of seven best-selling novels, including his first, Presumed Innocent and his most recent novel, Ordinary Heroes published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in November, 2005.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“One of my favorite modern works, Notes of a Desolate Man by Chu T’ien-Wen, perfectly captures the alienation and internal ruminations of many gay men; that it was written by a Taiwanese woman is no less remarkable, although Chu T’ien-Wen–acclaimed in her homeland as a novelist, intellectual, and screenwriter–has long been one of the best-kept literary secrets (at least in the West, surely due to so little of her work having been translated here). Free-flowing, non-narrative in the traditional sense, rich with metaphors and allusions, the narrator, Shao, reflects on, among other things, the death of a childhood friend from AIDS, Fellini, Levi-Strauss, and, ultimately, himself.”

Mitch Cullin is the author of seven books including A Slight Trick of the Mind and The Cosmology of Bing. His novel Tideland is now a motion picture by Terry Gilliam. Besides writing, he continues to work on projects with his partner Peter I. Chang, among them a documentary about Hisao Shinagawa and the forthcoming Howe Gelb concert film This Band Has No Members.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

“Zoger Zalazny’s Lord Of Light is a science fiction novel about a world run by a super-advanced human like race that has adopted all the attributes of the Hindu pantheon. They ruthlessly use their technology to oppress the lower castes, while taking god like privileges for themselves. Lord Kalkan, once one of the ruling elite, decides to teach Buddhism and to become a revolutionary. I suspect that Lord of Light is a homage/parody of Lord of the Rings, but it stands on its own as a wonderfully funny, thoughtful and beautifully written book. Though I don’t write science fiction, this book meant the world to me when I discovered it in high school. I grew up in south central LA in the seventies and this book somehow made sense of the world for me and my pootbutt, nongangbanging friends. I just reread it and its still holds up as a call to speak truth to power.”

Born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, Jervey Tervalon is the author of five books including Understanding This for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voice’s Award. He was the Remsen Bird Writer in Residence at Occidental college. His current novel is Lita and his current project, The Cocaine Chronicles was published in April, 2005. Currently he teaches at Occidental College, and the Center for African American Studies at UCLA.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.