Laila Lalami

“Tetched by Thaddeus Rutkowski is a fitting second punch follow-up to his debut novel Roughhouse, which also straddles the startling fine line between pleasure and pain. Erotic pleasure. Erotic pain. But this is not a playful foray into S&M–though it takes as many risks–Rutkowski’s journey is much more complex than that as he unravels both psychology and sexuality through one of the most memorable of protagonists: an awkward biracial youth who escapes the small town repressions (and oppressions) to explore the big city ones. Only the thick-skinned will resist the urge to flinch; and the meek will find it difficult to leave this enticing book of unconvetional lust and love. By the end of this novel, the real world will seem a little less shocking, and, thankfully, a little less dull. I highly recommend both these titles that connect preadolescence to adulthood in a most unusual and intelligent way.”

Rigoberto González is the author of four books, most recently the controversial children’s book Antonio’s Card. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a contributing editor to Poets & Writers Magazine, he is currently associate professor of English and Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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“One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.”

This is how Arturo Bandini introduces himself in John Fante’s 1939 novel, Ask the Dust. I’ve read the book several times, and with each re-read, I stop after this opening paragraph. This go-at-it, I tell myself, I’ll know what to make of this indifferent, slack writer who constantly refers to himself in the third person. But soon after, Bandini not only surprises me but also forces me to empathize with him.

Addressing himself, he says, “…you were born poor, son of miseried peasants, driven because you were poor, fled from your Colorado town because you were poor, rambling the gutters of Los Angeles because you are poor, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.”

A struggling writer with only a single story under his belt, Bandini goes to LA to make it. He barely gets by, eating oranges, stealing milk, all the while waiting for word from his editor out east, Hackmuth, who Bandini sees as a God–the man who will save him from a destitute life. To complicate matters, Bandini falls for Camilla Lopez, a Mexican bar maid, who is in love with another failed writer, a bartender who is dying. Eventually, Bandini achieves literary success, but his relationship with Camilla, not to mention his notions of the writer’s life, are ultimately doomed.

Charles Bukowski called Fante’s writing “superb simplicity.” He and others, including Carey McWilliams and Robert Towne, consider Ask the Dust as one of the greatest novels published in America. Fante’s been compared to Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Hemingway, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Saroyan and Nathanial West–and deservingly so. But unlike them, his classic novel is oft forgotten. It shouldn’t be. It’s at once tender, harsh, funny, sad. Ask the Dust is a kick in the pants, an eye-opener, a lesson in humility. Whenever I start to take myself too seriously, I pick it up and within minutes I am humbled.

Hayan Charara is the author of two books of poems, The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose, 2001) and The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His poetry has appeared in numerous publications, among them Chelsea, Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation. Born in Detroit, he lived for many years in New York City before moving to Texas. Like Arturo Bandini, he’s waiting to hear back from his agent about his first novel, Regret.

“I was thirteen the first time I read Frost in May by English writer Antonia White. I can’t even say how many times I have read this perfect novel. First published in 1933, and then rediscovered, reprinted in 1982 by Virago Modern Classics (a beautiful and unfortunately defunct press devoted to restoring the works of women authors), Frost in May tells the story of Nanda Grey, nine years old, who is sent by her convert Catholic father to receive her education at the formidable Convent of the Five Wounds.

Young Nanda is just my kind of protagonist: introverted and smart and painfully sensitive, always uneasy with herself and her circle of friends. She is also a tormented writer. At thirteen, Nanda secretly begins to write her first novel. When her work in progress in discovered by the nuns, the consequences for the aspiring author verge on tragic. Antonia White’s prose is both spare and engrossing. Her depiction of the convent’s rites, the kindness and the cruelty of the nuns, is positively fascinating, providing entry into a truly foreign universe.

White, who was plagued by both mental illness and writer’s block, continued Nanda’s story with three additional novels. Nanda Grey becomes Clara Batchelor. These additional volumes (“The Lost Traveler,” “The Sugar House,” and “Beyond the Glass”) also deserve to be read and reread. I certainly have.”

Marcy is the author of Twins, a MacDowell Fellow and the winner of the 2002 Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award, and the 1999 Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize. Her stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including McSweeney’s, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Indiana Review, and included in the anthology Love Stories: A Literary Companion to Tennis. She is a film critic for About.com and belongs to the New York Online Film Critics Society. She lives in Astoria, New York. She is not an identical twin.

“Rarely do we get to peek into the pornography of great writers,” Castellani writes. “Not so with E. M. Forster. In fact, many readers and admirers are not aware that Forster wrote his own porn — a dozen or so short stories collected in the bawdy little volume The Life To Come.

Forster wrote these stories ‘not to express myself but to excite myself’ and knew they (like Maurice) dealt too candidly with (homo)sexuality to be published in his lifetime. Unlike Maurice, though, the stories are far from romantic or sentimental. They are brutal, eerie, ironic, damning of a hypocritical society, and more than a little twisted, even by today’s standards all without resorting to a single explicit sex scene. As in allgreat literature, the characters in The Life to Come are fully human and encounter various emotional obstacles; most of them just happen to involve illicit trysts.

You may want to keep a copy on your nightstand.”

Christopher Castellani was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents immigrated to the United States from a small village in Italy in the years following World War II, and their experiences have been a significant inspiration. Castellani’s first novel, A Kiss From Maddalena, was published in 2003, and won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction in 2004. His second novel, The Saint of Lost Things, is published this month.

“Every time I try to describe David Grossman’s See Under: Love, I get the same reaction: raised eyebrows and skeptical laughs,” Row says. “One writer, after hearing my attempt at a plot summary, said, ‘That sounds like the worst novel I can possibly imagine.’ OK, so I don’t have much of a future as a book publicist, but I’m going to keep trying to spread the word about this remarkable novel, which seems almost unknown outside Israel, though it’s been available in translation for fifteen years.

See Under: Love is about the Holocaust, about the origins and future of Israel and the persistence of Eastern European Jewish culture in the most extreme circumstances, but it’s so radically ambitious and makes such strange demands on the reader that to call it a “Holocaust novel” is almost beside the point. It’s been compared to The Tin Drum, The Sound and the Fury, and Midnight’s Children, and it certainly belongs in that company. It’s one of the most hallucinatory and transporting experiences I’ve ever had as a reader.”

Jess Row is the author of The Train to Lo Wu (Dial, 2005) and a professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey. His story “For You” will appear this fall in an anthology of Buddhist fiction from Wisdom Publications.

“I would very much like to recommend William Trevor’s novel Other People’s Worlds,” Li writes. “Trevor may not be an underread author but often when he is mentioned, he is called a master of short stories. He is also a master of novels. Other People’s Worlds was published in 1980, Trevor’s eighth novel and twelfth fiction work–just think how many authors’ twelfth book would be considered an early work. (As of last year, Trevor has published twenty-nine books.) It starts with a slightly unconventional wedding between a forty-seven-year old widow and a young, attractive, second-rate actor in a tranquil stone house where everyone tries to stay positive about the marriage, while a sales assistant in a department store in London drinks every night and dreams that the actor, who was the father of her only child, would come to her like a husband. The narrative then moves from one character’s world to another’s and unfolds the most horrible tragedy in a very humane and sympathetic way. Unlike a lot of novels where, by the last chapter or two, we can feel the authors’ eagerness to wrap up everything, Trevor is very patient and makes every line matter till the very end. Read slowly and marvel at this perfect novel.”

Yiyun Li grew up in China and started to publish in English in 2002. She is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

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“With all that is going on in Iraq and the world, all the Harry Potter and chick Lit discussions need to take a hiatus,” Desousa says. “Not that I do not read strictly for entertainment. But we are running out of time and in this frame of mind I went out and bought The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. It’s a story of a white South African woman’s journey to the village of her Muslim lover. I think there is no way to understand a religion without experiencing the culture that nurtures it and this book takes its time (another virtue one needs to develop when reading serious lit). It’s a slim novel and it’s amazing how I am not feeling rushed to finish it, but instead am savoring it, one awkward compromise at a time. Ever since I read The House Gun, I have liked Gordimer’s writing. Her treatment of gay men in the novel was so subtly woven into the broader conflict of race.”

Born in Kenya, raised in Goa, corrupted and educated in Bombay, Neale Desousa now lives in Los Angeles. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Slipstream, and is forthcoming in Swink.

“Wright Morris published more than thirty books and won a National Book Award before he died in 1998, yet his work was never widely read and now seems–alas–in danger of slipping entirely from sight. The Works of Love was my introduction to Morris, and it remains my favorite among his novels,” Arvin says. “It is a strange novel, although strange in a manner that is not currently in fashion. Its protagonist, Will Brady, is a Midwesterner, gentle, quiet. He is lonely, but has little bitterness. The book has almost no plot–which usually I cannot bear in fiction, but in Morris’s beautiful, descriptive prose, as the novel drifts on the intense but curiously disengaged observations of Brady, it attains a unique power. Brady rarely knows quite what to make of the world around him or how to react to it, which has a tragic aspect, but it is also unexpectedly liberating, and it allows the novel to explore that extraordinary emotion–difficult to write about and often neglected in fiction–called wonder.”

Nick Arvin is the author of a collection of stories, In the Electric Eden, and a novel, Articles of War, which was published in February.

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“I strongly recommend the book Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War,” Shihab Nye says. “It’s edited by his son Kim Stafford, who also provides the introduction. Poetry and prose by a dedicated, articulate conscientious objector, one of the most beloved poets of the 20th century. Mandatory reading, I think, for anyone troubled by the “news” and deeply helpful for thought processes in a time when “patriotism” has been maligned and misinterpreted in all sorts of dubious ways.”

Naomi Shihab Nye’s books of poetry and prose include Going Going, A Maze Me, Habibi, Sitti’s Secrets, among many others. She lives in San Antonia, Texas.

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“Last year I went through a Polish phase,” Alarcón says. “At one point I was doing some serious ethnic profiling, buying almost every book I came across by an author with a Polish surname. Janusz Anderman, Tadeusz Borowski, Bruno Schulz, Maria Kuncewicz, Jerzy Andrzejewski and of course, Ryszard Kapuscinski. I’m not really sure how to explain this, and I can’t really remember how it began. It’s a strange way to come to know a country, a people, a culture-necessarily incomplete of course, especially given that my knowledge base of Polish history is limited to what I learned in high school and whatever I picked up the summer I stayed with a friend in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. But I don’t really know any Polish folks, have never been there, don’t speak the language-but what struck me was how much I recognized in the work. They say that winners write history, but losers write the literature: I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Poland has lost quite a bit throughout history. My own country-Peru-has done its share as well. Maybe that’s what I recognized: the dark humor, the fatalism, the savage beauty of the prose and the strong, unflappable, acidly funny people these authors described. Everything. I won’t lie. I loved all of it. These writers could be Peruvian, I thought. What’s more, I wished they were. We have our own masters, but still.

The novel that has stayed with me most is A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki. The copy I found at University of Iowa Library was from an old one, but it turns out it has been re-released by Dalkey Archive Press (God bless Dalkey Archive Press) in an the same excellent Richard Lourie translation. I don’t think I’ve ever read a funnier, sadder, stranger novel. When the novel opens, a older man, a writer, is visited by some Communist dissidents: you’re done, they say. You’ve accomplished all you’ll ever do, probably more than you could have hoped, but let’s face it, you might as well kill yourself. They propose he set himself on fire in front of the Congressional building that evening, in protest. The writer agrees to spend the day thinking it over. And so he does, and we follow him as he half-heartedly prepares for his death, writes his last will and testament (which is outrageously funny) and wanders around a crumbling, chaotic Warsaw that is as much a character as any in the novel. Bridges collapse around him, no one seems to know if it’s warm for fall, or cold for spring-but everyone agrees the weather is very, very strange. People stroll onto the scene, disappear, the action and dialogue is almost continuous with very few breaks. Everything is negotiable, everything is unstable, as the narrator gets drunk, falls in love, avoids friends, makes enemies, and prepares for the inevitable. It’s trite to say that I didn’t want this book to end, but it’s true. Konwicki is the real deal.”

Daniel Alarcón is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight.

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