His new book, Our Story Begins: New and Collected Stories, is reviewed in the Times. They've got "Bullet in the Brain" online as an excerpt here.

One of my favorite authors, Ron Rash, was a finalist for this year's Pen/Faulkner award for his book of stories, Chemistry, along with Annie Dillard, David Leavitt, and T.M. McNally, another interesting story writer. The award went to Kate Christensen for her novel, The Great Man.

Fiction reader and rising MFA program assistant director Christopher Arnold pointed me to this review in the NY Times. Donald Ray Pollack's "Knockemstiff" is a collection of linked stories about Knockemstiff, Ohio, a real town south of Columbus, and has "a concentrated focus on the lonely, the depraved, the neglected." The reviewer compares Pollack, who spent thirty years working in a paper mill before attending Ohio State's MFA program, to Pat Conroy (for the bad fathers), Harry Crews (for the gritty characters), and Chuck Palahniuk (for the attitude).

Bookninja points to this long blog post about why most of the stories in the recent Willesden Herald short story competition were rejected. As a reminder, that's the competition Zadie Smith judged and decided not to award a winner. That blog post is interesting and comprehensive, and feels especially relevant to me now that we're reading through all of the Wabash prize submissions. (Don't worry: unlike Zadie Smith, we are most definitely awarding and publishing the winner Richard Bausch chooses from the finalists, and probably publishing a second story from the pool as well.) I'd say the big thing that's making me pass on the entries, though, boils down to whether the story makes me care about it, which I think is the hardest thing a story writer has to overcome. No matter how well written, a mean-spirited or didactic or trivial story won't win over the reader, and no matter how generous and moving a concept is, a sloppily written story won't win over the reader. The polls are all showing people don't read as much, and the cold reality is that most readers are extremely busy, or emotionally distracted, or just have a bad headache and a low attention span, and the best fiction somehow manages to win those readers over (though if I knew how, I'd sell it and get rich).

Well the gala was a success on Friday. Many thanks to our sponsors, and to the locals who attended. Perhaps someone will post some photos, but for now congratulations to Mehdi on ushering in our 20th anniversary, and thanks to our events planner, Theresa D. Smith, and our nonfiction editor, Jessica Mehr, for months of hard work in planning the evening.

It's been a slow news weekend in the fiction world, so here's a lot of good reading out on the web. The NY Times publishes first chapters on their book page, and this week they have the first chapter of Stephen King's new novel, Duma Key, and of Charles Baxter's new novel, The Soul Thief. Over at the New Yorker's fiction page, you can check out stories by Richard Ford, Salman Rushdie, and TC Boyle, among others.

Robert Olen Butler has a new book of stories this spring that imagines the sex lives of famous political figures. The UK Times has the story. They focus on how he imagines sex between Charles and Diana, but also mention that he has a story about Bill and Hilary Clinton and George and Laura Bush. From the way it sounds, this book has the potential to be terrible or riveting (mainly because it sounds like a bad idea--I find well-handled bad ideas riveting).

I'll probably be in the minority with this, but I finally picked up Delillo's Libra, and I think it's the best I've read of his. I read almost half of it in one sitting, the kind of read a book hasn't compelled me to do in months or more. I've always had trouble really "getting" Delillo. White Noise has interesting ideas, but those ideas are foregrounded, making the plot and characters too satirical for my taste. Falling Man is better (check out the review in the new issue of Sycamore), but I didn't think the story lived up to the premise. And Underworld is great, but it's a monster of a book.

Libra is a manageable size, and unlike White Noise, the ideas are left in the background, in the subtext. On the surface is simply a compelling story, an imagined narrative for the JFK assassination that stretches from the early 1950s to the 1980s, from Dallas to Miami to the Bronx to Russia to Japan. Delillo gives Oswald a spot-on inner life, and the opening scene of Oswald riding the Subway from the Bronx to Brooklyn is especially haunting after last week's AWP vacation. But as you'd expect from Delillo, the ideas are there, and I say Libra's the best I've read of his because here form and content meld perfectly. He never lets go of the characters, the story, but the ideas about how we write history, reality as a construct, and postmodern whatever shine in the subtext. The entire book is a constructed reality, and part of the conspiracy involves CIA agents trying to fake an assassination attempt on JFK. Those ideas work in tandem with the plot, which makes the book absolutely compelling. And though it's been exactly 20 years since it was published, and we have new conspiracy theories to compete with Kennedy's assassination, Libra not only feels relevant, but necessary.

I think the conference was fairly successful, and I'm very glad to be back in the office amid piles of manuscripts. A three-floor bookfair and 7000 writers is a bit overwhelming, but here are a couple of books I found in my wanderings that look interesting:
Akashic Books has a "noir" series of anthologies--Brooklyn Noir, Chicago Noir, New Orleans Noir, Dublin Noir, etc--a collection of gritty stories, each labeled by its location in the city.
Another South: Experimental Writing in the South is published through the Univ. of Alabama Press and caught my eye while I was checking out the latest issue of Fairy Tale Review, edited by Kate Bernheimer.

The New Yorker has published Carver's story, "Beginners," which Gordan Lish edited to become "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." You can find Carver's original here, but what's more interesting, I think, is a copy with Lish's edits, here. Lish cut about five pages, chiseled the language throughout, and wrote a few new sentences, including the last. His edits change the feel story, but they really do sharpen it and make it stronger for the most part.

I just finished rereading this second novel by South Carolina novelist, Mark Powell. I read it when it first came out last year, after it won the Peter Taylor prize, but I've been rereading it slowly because Powell is good at things I'm trying to do with my thesis: a) it's set in South Carolina, and makes good use of setting, and b) he's a very patient writer, and gives his characters and images room to breathe on the page.

The novel tells the story of the Burden family around 1970. The eldest son, James, has just returned from Korea after drifting around the country for twenty years. He's addicted to morphine and unable to reconnect with his wife and family. The middle son, Roy, is having an affair with a debutante scheduled to marry a Navyman. The youngest son, Ennis, is trying to marry the debutante's younger sister and deal with his family history. This family is well-drawn and memorable, but what really strikes me about the book this time through is the cast of secondary characters: an orchard keeper, a teenage hooligan, a traveling preacher/conman, a weary sheriff, a firetalker, and Old Man Joseph Cory, who tries to fake his daughter's death after she runs off with off with a woman.

Powell delivers haunting lines of grace and wisdom and loss. For instance, of the eldest son, he writes, "That lodestone--what it is to be human--he had lost it somewhere that day south of Chosin [in the Korean War]." The mother ruminates, "She lived an entire lifetime with James, she felt. Something she would never be able to wholly repeat: she had been so young then, and never again would she be able to love like that, so reckless with her affection. Her love for Roy and Ennis was just as deep, just as real, but never again had she imagined love tumbling physically from her breast." The father, too, has similar conclusions: "You love recklessly only once. That, Will thought, is the great tragedy of this life.

This is Russo's first novel since Empire Falls in 2002, and appears to be in the same vein, what Stephen Metcalf, in the NY Times calls the "schlub stays put" plot: working class guy in small town New York, a formula that's served Russo well. The Times also has the first chapter, and the opening lines are reminiscent of The Sportswriter:

"First, the facts.

"My name is Louis Charles Lynch. I am sixty years old, and for nearly forty of those years I've been a devoted if not terribly exciting husband to the same lovely woman, as well as a doting father to Owen, our son, who is now himself a grown, married man."

A related note: maybe I'm misreading things, but it seems like people (mainly fiction writers) are debating two kinds of aesthetics--"literary" stories where not much happens (in the spirit of Carver) and stories as entertainment (a movement spearheaded by Michael Chabon in Best American Stories 2005). I'm all for entertainment, but as I'm getting into my own first novel I'm discovering that writers like Russo or Bret Lott or Anne Tyler or Charles Baxter--people who can make the mundane shimmer--have a real gift. I'm finding it much harder to write a simple family dinner scene than a car chase.

Just watched Badlands this evening, Terrence Malick's 1973 film with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. It's loosely based on the Charles Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate murders. I highly recommend it, mainly because Sheen is so charismatic that he makes the killer likeable. It's truly a model for how to create sympathetic characters, by convincing the audience to like the character, even if he's despicable.

Along with this movie, I'd also recommend Liza Ward's 2004 novel, Outside Valentine, which is fictionalized account of the same murder spree, set in three time periods and told in three alternating voices--the voice of Caril Ann, which is definitely the most haunting, the voice of two of the victims' son, and the voice of his future wife. An eerie and utterly convincing read. More information about the novel is at Henry Holt, here. A good interview with Liza Ward is here.

His new novel, Work Shirts for Madmen, is now avaible. You can read about it and Singleton here. I've been following Singleton's stories since he began popping up in the New Stories from the South anthology--they're funnier 'n hell local color pieces about odd characters in small South Carolina towns (Forty-Five, Gig, Gruel), and there's a generosity in them that can be downright heartbreaking. I guess his second collection, The Half Mammals of Dixie, is his breakout book, and at readings he always swore up and down he would never write a novel. Now he's published two.

Reviewed favorably in the NY Times Michiko Kakutani writes:

"Compared with Mr. Roth’s big postwar trilogy ('American Pastoral,' 'I Married a Communist' and 'The Human Stain'), which unfolded into a bold chronicle of American innocence and disillusionment, this volume is definitely a modest undertaking, but it has a sense of heartfelt emotion lacking in 'Everyman' and 'Dying Animal,' and for fans of the Zuckerman books, it provides a poignant coda to Nathan’s story, putting a punctuation point to his journey from youthful idealism and passion through midlife confusion and angst toward elderly renunciation."

I'm very excited to see that Stephen King, editing Best American Stories 2007, and Carl Hiaasen, editing Best American Mystery Stories 2007, have both picked a William Gay story for their anthologies. Originally published in Tin House last year (Issue 26), "Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?" is about a guy--the "Jeepster"--addicted to crystal meth and whose girlfriend has recently been murdered. William Gay isn't for everyone, I guess (his stories are in the southern gothic vein), but I think he's my favorite story writer working right now. He's relatively new on the scene (maybe ten years?), and hasn't published as many stories as bigger names have, but I haven't read one of his stories I didn't like. I'll even dare to say that his collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, might be the south's finest book of stories since A Good Man Is Hard to Find. His secret--beyond pitch-perfect sentence rhythms, interesting characters, and a mature voice--is plot. He simply tells a good story. I wish him a hearty congratulations for these awards.

Update: I found an interview with him here. He has some interesting things to say, especially since instead of going to college and then a writing program, he worked construction for twenty years. Of workshop stories, he says, "It's more professional than the way I started out. But it doesn't seem as vital."