Category: underappreciated books
“I came upon Wesley Gibson’s You Are Here with delight,” Trueblood says. “It’s a hilarious, energizing misery-fest of a book, about the attempt to live and write in New York when you arrive not so young as all that and without the cushioning illusions, with good work already behind you, and have to be, every day, younger, sexier and way cooler than you feel. Gibson knows how to fake being an upbeat guy; he is a bumbling knight to his writing students (one of the jobs to which he brings his guarded-against born tenderness is teaching four adult students on Saturday in an elementary schoolroom). The jobs appear and fade, his own work goes on behind the scenes as he struggles to make a living, a potential landlord finds him “not gay enough,” the apartment he takes (or that takes him) gives him, and us, the lonesome shivers, the roommate–here the book begins to soar–the afflicted roommate coughs his way into our hearts. You Are Here, a Memoir of Arrival: it’s a sad book, full of joy, the joy of life and of sentences like this: ‘Then she gave me a smile that was as slow as six deliberate paper cuts.'”
Valerie Trueblood is a writer based in Seattle. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Northwest Review, and One Story, among others. Her first book, a novel in stories, will come out this year from Little, Brown.
“Elsa Morante’s History is a book that should be known by more readers,” Romano says. “It’s a brutally tragic story of a woman who is widowed and then raped by a German soldier in Rome during WW II. Her relationship with her two sons, both of whom she loses, is very touching. Morante’s prose (an anonymous bystander narrates) is powerfully depictive and full of pathos. A jewel of a novel.”
Marco Romano was born in Rhode Island. He lives in New York, where he writes freelance music reviews.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
“I would like to recommend Landscapes of a Distant Mother by Said, who, for security reasons, publishes only under his first name,” Treat says. “Landscapes of a Distant Mother is a memoir about exile and loss. A slight 112 pages, the book is spare but also wrenching. It centers on the reunion Said has with his mother whom he has only seen once since birth (he is 43). Exiled from his native Iran for political reasons, living in Germany, Said writes of the terrible anticipation of meeting his mother, the meeting itself, and its aftermath. Beautifully written, honest and at times, painful, Landscapes is written like a letter, addressed to his mother, “Alone with a note in my pocket, on which there is written the name of a stranger who is to lead me to you–to a mother I have never known.” It can be read as a love letter, a love that is full of misgivings.”
Jessica Treat is the author of two books of stories: A Robber in the House and Not a Chance.
“I recommend Gayle Brandeis’s The Book of Dead Birds. The novel won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize, an award in support of a literature of social responsibility, and earned praises from Toni Morrison who was one of the judges. This is an evocative and moving story narrated by Ava Sing Lo, the daughter of a Korean mother and African-American serviceman. Ava accidentally kills her mother’s pet birds before she begins to try and save endangered birds along the shores of the Salton Sea. Her story crosses cultures and merges generations. The author’s prose is pristine and I particularly appreciate the way in which she handles every character with dignity. The Book of Dead Birds is such a graceful story, as unusual as its characters.”
Sefi Atta was born in Nigeria, has lived in England and is now based in the United States. She is the author of the novel Everything Good Will Come and has completed her second novel Swallow.
“Four years ago I reviewed Larry Brown’s book of essays Billy Ray’s Farm for the Atlanta Constitution,” Hays says. “The essays were about how Brown spent his time when he wasn’t writing, which was keeping up the family farm. Brown was a hand-hewn writer who wrote five novels and a nearly a hundred stories before he ever published a single story. By the time the essays came out in 2001, he had published seven books. In Billy Ray’s Farm, one saw that his life was a balancing act between writing and delivering calves or chasing down coyotes or corralling stranded catfish.
The essays were muscular, full of life, an active portrait of a writer in progress. The last essay in the book is about a cabin he had been working on for some time, whenever he could steal a moment from the farm.
When Brown died recently, the first thing I thought was, Now he won’t get to finish that cabin. I thought how his death cast the whole book in a starker, historical light. Instead of being there with him in those essays, I felt as if I was watching him through a darkening window. It made me wonder if a writer’s death can not only change how we read his work but can it perhaps transform the writing itself? ”
Tommy Hays‘s most recent novel is The Pleasure Was Mine, published by St. Martin’s Press. He reviews books for the Atlanta Constitution and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
“For anyone who is unfamiliar with Rigoberto Gonzalez, it wouldn’t take many pages of reading Crossing Vines, his first novel, to suspect that his prior book was one of poetry, not prose,” Olivas says. “Every paragraph, each sentence possesses the clarity and music of poetry even in recounting the often harsh and always difficult lives of a crew of grape pickers. In a series of vignettes focusing on different characters, Gonzalez allows us into the lives and painful pasts of these workers, all the while steering clear of the melodramatic and cliche when it would be easy to fall into such traps. This is a beautifully rendered, powerful first novel.”
Daniel A. Olivas is the author of several books including most recently Devil Talk: Stories. His stories, essays and poems have appeared in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, The MacGuffin, Exquisite Corpse, THEMA, The Pacific Review, Red River Review and Web del Sol. His first children’s book, Benjamin and the Word, will be published this spring by the University of Houston’s Arte Publico Press.