Category: underappreciated books
“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.
“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.
“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.