Akashic Books

Wingshooters

brittany — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By the age of nine, Michelle LeBeau has already taken more than a few knocks. Her mom has disappeared—whereabouts unknown—and her dad has unceremoniously dumped her with his aging parents in tiny Deerhorn, Wisconsin and left town. Michelle is Deerhorn's first biracial resident—half Japanese, half white—and she is not allowed to forget it.

Her only friends are a loving spaniel and her grandparents, a charismatic retiree named Charlie, and his dutiful wife, Helen. At best, the kids in town are standoffish; at worst, they're violent and mean, treating Michelle like an inferior mongrel.

Perhaps that's why she turns to adults for friendship. From her first days in Deerhorn, Michelle has gravitated toward Charlie, a real man's man, more comfortable hunting, fishing, and shooting the breeze than attending to the emotional needs of a scared little girl. Yet somehow the two bond and while both benefit from the liaison, Charlie makes no bones about his belief that people should stick to their "own kind." At the same time, his unconditional affection for the child is clear to everyone.

Life in Deerhorn settles into a calm, though tense, stasis—at least until Betty and Joe Garrett move to town, she to work in a local clinic, he to fill in for a teacher on maternity leave. The problem? The Garretts are African American.

Although the action of Wingshooters takes place in 1974, Deerhorn seems untouched by either the civil rights or anti-war movements. Residents are perplexed—and angered—by the changes that have taken place in the body politic over the last decade. Among the unsettling events: Legalized abortion and LGBTQ Pride rallies in nearby Madison and Milwaukee. They're further befuddled by media commentators who posit people of color as the moral and intellectual equivalent of whites.

To say that Deerhorn isn't ready for the Garretts is a gross understatement and residents do everything in their power to make the newcomers feel unwelcome. Even the Catholic priest does his bit, preaching against integration and racial equality.

It's ugly stuff. And it escalates when Joe Garrett accidentally discovers bruises on one of his students. Indeed, when a prime mover-and-shaker in Deerhorn—Charlie's best friend Earl—comes under scrutiny for child abuse, many of the town's most prominent denizens scurry to defend him. What ensues can only be described as tragic, a near-epic battle between good and evil.

Along the way, Revoyr addresses multiple themes, from masculinity, to women's roles, to the meaning of loyalty. They're concepts Revoyr has mined before—in The Age of Dreaming and Southland—but never with such passion.

Wingshooters chronicles the events of one particularly tumultuous year, but more than anything else, this is a novel about love, a touching, emotionally-explosive assessment of the relationship between one child and one elder. A fresh take on the politics of family ties, it eschews easy answers as it reveals the complex web binding granddad and granddaughter.

Michelle's conclusion, articulated as an adult, is insightful: "He taught me how to punch, how to block incoming blows, how to throw rocks back with accuracy and strength. These lessons made my life easier, and the irony strikes me only now: it was my grandfather, the rural, prejudiced white man... who taught me how to survive as a child of color in America."

Wingshooters is a story with jagged edges that lets readers decide if some sins—like racism—are simply too heinous to ever be completely forgiven. It's a heartbreakingly beautiful book by an astute political novelist. Read it with tissues in hand.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, March 12th 2011

The Lesser Tragedy of Death

admin — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Cristina García

Akashic Books

The Lesser Tragedy of Death is the first collection of poems by novelist Christina García, author of the superb Dreaming in Cuban. The poems offers an anguished narrative detailing García's brother’s lifelong struggle with drug addiction. Despite the sorrow implicit in the material, the poems are so well-constructed that they are a pleasure to read.

García reaches back to her childhood in an attempt to trace the roots of her brother’s problem. She wonders about the cause: was it the fact that he was the youngest child, receiving less attention than his older sisters who had been coddled and adored? The family’s suffering under the Cuban revolution? Being beaten by his father and ignored by his mother? The hardship of beginning life anew in the United States?

García relates snippets of her brother’s life and her response to his downward fall, but also imagines his response to her pleadings. Particularly damning are “Brownstone” and “Respuesta (Response)." In the former she details an occasion in childhood when their father beat him at the urging of his mother for a minor infraction; in the latter her brother claims that his older sister, so good with words, could have pleaded for her father to stop.

The family’s disappointment and hurt is chronicled as much as his misdeeds. In “Mugging” García recalls a time when her brother was arrested for trying to steal the purse of an elderly woman, noting that no one in the family would bail him out of jail. Told from his perspective, the powerful “Ode” describes the joys of getting high, making a temporary alteration of consciousness seem like transcendence:

Sweet mother love shoots me skyward burning high with the moon and Orion and all the other heavenly dudes who orbit, orbit, orbit Planet Earth.

These instances allow readers to relate to this troubled man as something more than a hopeless loser, and to understand his motivation for engaging in risky behavior that ultimately alienates his family and friends.

Coming near the end of the volume, the heart-wrenching “Apologia” explains why García's parents did not to invite him to their fiftieth wedding anniversary party: a combination of fear of his behavior and shame of him. “Apologia” would have seemed harsh at the beginning of the collection, but by the time we reach it on page eighty-nine, we’ve seen how the brother has brought about such low expectations of his behavior. The Lesser Tragedy of Death succeeds because we are able to feel the hurt of the excluded son, as well as the family’s suffering due to his self-destructive behavior.

For those who find poetry inaccessible or out of touch with everyday life, The Lesser Tragedy of Death offers a story that is immediately resonant, told in short poems that say volumes. García is by turns tender, frustrated, and empathetic in laying bare her painful relationship with her brother, and her language is simple, direct, and achingly honest.

Written by: Karen Duda, August 27th 2010

Mesopotamia

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Arthur Nersesian

Akashic Books

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 5th 2010

So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0000

Edited by Kwame Dawes, Colin Channer

Akashic Books

Each May for the past ten years, poets from all over the globe converge in Jamaica for the Calabash International Literary Festival. So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets brings together the work of poets known and unknown who have read at the Festival or are Calabash Writer’s Workshop Fellows. The 100 poems in this vibrant anthology are organized into sections by length, and inspired by the editors’ intention that the book be enjoyed in a flexible manner, I took great pleasure in sampling poems at random and finding breathtaking imagery, emotional tone, meaning, and joy in each piece.

The voices of the colonized, the war-torn, the oppressed, and the hopeful shine in this collection of poems that are political, visceral, inspired, sorrowful, courageous, and essentially, beautifully human. In Li-Young Lee’s “The Children’s Hour,” Lee captures all of the above. With armed soldiers at the door, an elder narrator advises the children in shape-shifting ("Sister, quick. Change into a penny.") and gives forbearance to survive the assault:

Don’t listen when they promise sugar. _ _Don’t come out until evening, _ _or when you hear our mother weeping to herself.

“10 Haiku” by Sonia Sanchez is a prime example of the fluid, timeless, earthy rhythm of many of the Calabash poems:

as you drummed your hands kept reaching for God

One of the longer poems, Tim Seibles' “The Last Poem About Race” is a departure from the more organic imagery and tackles the complexity of being mixed race personally, in relationship, and as a society:

I never want to think being American is impossible, but the truth is

some silly mothafuckas still fly Confederate flags and maybe it’s all _ _too much for any one man.

In his sparkling introduction, Kwame Dawes most perfectly and poetically sums up the spirit of the Calabash Festival: “At once you are in a timeless place in which the spoken word represents an incantatory ritual that creates and affirms community... Imagine stories dropping like seeds into the ground and growing rapidly and wildly all around you.”

Fortunately for those for whom an annual sojourn to Jamaica isn’t necessarily possible, that enchantment is immediately accessible in this collection. Indeed the story of the festival and of this anthology coming together in just one month is a testament to the magic that is spun at Calabash each year, and I prize my Advance Uncorrected Proof of So Much Things to Say like a collector’s item.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, July 13th 2010

Jesus Boy

admin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Preston L. Allen

Akashic Books

Star-crossed intergenerational love between a Christian matriarch and a young church pianist sounds like an unlikely fictional masterpiece, but in Jesus Boy, Preston L. Allen’s empathic, intricate storytelling skillfully unfolds this improbable tale of religious conviction, sexual desire, and social pressure to conform.

While striving to maintain a virtuous private life—and wholly failing to do so—Elwyn Parker struggles with his public image as a young preacher. At the tender age of sixteen, his childhood crush becomes pregnant by another boy, confusing his chaste heart. At the same time, his aged mentor dies, leaving a grieving widow with whom Elwyn takes up, despite their twenty-two year age difference and to the great surprise of them both. Suddenly, sexual vices overwhelm a story of deeply religious believers, who struggle to make sense of the contradictions between spiritual dogma and physical and emotional desires. Most of the story’s characters live hypocritically at best; yet, their humanity is striking and a clear reminder of what it means to live with wholly unrealistic expectations of oneself and one another.

Between the evangelical language and the geography, the novel had additional resonance for me personally. Set in South Florida towns like Lakeland and Plant City, I could easily imagine not only the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters congregations and their church buildings but also the two-lane highways that connect some of the small cities mentioned. My maternal grandparents, retired ministers, have lived in that area for the last decade and attend two church services every Sunday: one in their trailer park, where grandpa leads the worship service, and one at a Church of God in Lakeland.

The book takes many turns, and sometimes I would be reading for several pages about a newly introduced character before all the pieces fell into place. Allen layers themes of familial obligation and incest with religious judgment and piety, all the while undoing any assumption you might make about essential underlying elements of a functional intimate relationship blossoming in the shadow of slavery and racialized poverty. Feminist in the sense that the author exposes the humanity of each character equally, Jesus Boy will encourage the most progressive thinker to reevaluate their moral judgments about love, parenting, pregnancy, and May-December romances.

Akashic Books consistently publishes quality fiction, and Jesus Boy is just one more must have title in their catalog. If you only read five novels this year, this should be one of them.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 27th 2010

Heart of the Old Country

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Tim McLoughlin

Akashic Books

Mike’s life isn’t going anywhere quickly. A townie car service driver who lives with his widower father, he barely tolerates his girlfriend of four years, Gina, and spends most of his time contemplating an escape from his South Brooklyn stomping grounds. After a friend is brutally murdered with Mike driving the assailants’ getaway car, Mike doesn’t flee. Instead, he accepts a coveted job working for one of the local mob bosses running packages—contents unknown—between an Ethiopian hustler and a house full of Hasidic Jews.

His tough guise doesn’t last long, though. While some of the guys on the block take his avoidance and silence for stoicism and strength, Mike has never been so unsure of himself. But if there’s a feminist lesson hidden in this novel about macho neighborhood alliances and the strains of father-son relationships, it is that being uncomfortably pushed to understand the essence of your place in this messy world can yield a breakthrough in personal consciousness—and maybe a bit of happiness in the end.

Writer Tim McLoughlin, a Brooklyn native, has a keen eye for detail and balances romanticizing class stasis, mid-20s existential dilemmas of upward mobility, and being true to one's past. His writing is engaging without extraneous detail, and his fiction is so wholly believable that it almost reads as memoir.

Heart of the Old Country is a thoroughly enjoyable novel that kept me up reading into the night on several occasions. It’s easy for a writer to slack off at the end of a book—after all, your audience is either still with you or long gone. But a final plot twist mere pages from the story’s end was such a perfect, genuine surprise that I nearly clapped my hands in glee. Rather than being depressed by the novel’s potentially disheartening themes, I could barely put this book down and was genuinely disappointed when it ended. I highly recommend this page-turner to anyone looking for a tale of youthful angst, unfulfilling work, and complicated relationships.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 24th 2010

The Ravenous Audience

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Kate Durbin

Akashic Books

I’ve always thought that at its best, art in some way disturbs us: out of complacency, ignorance, or innocence that has become a liability. The Ravenous Audience by Kate Durbin is a deliciously disturbing collection of poems that delivers a sensory-emotional feast ripe with smells, sounds, and flavors of the sacred and the profane. I was enchanted by the visual and visceral quality of the collection and was thoroughly engaged by Durbin’s command of language.

The book is divided into four Scenes (sections), and many of the poems are inspired by the works of other artists, including films, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. One section contains a thirty-page poem originally published as a chapbook. The poems vary greatly in form and include orderly stanzaed quatrains and couplets among other, less obviously ordered free verse. Deliberate spacing and line structure provide emphasis and cadence, while some poems span several pages, making effective use of white space and the pause as the reader turns the page.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is "36 Fillette." Taking its title from Catherine Breillat’s 1988 film, the poem's lines are taken from the film's dialogue. As the page-long poem progresses, repetition increases, lines lose their punctuation and merge, and by its end the poem has picked up such speed that I was completely drawn into the cyclone of experience it creates.

The Ravenous Audience also brings to life several mythic and iconic women of the early twentieth century (Amelia Earhart, Clara Bow, and Marilyn Monroe), and Durbin gives a fresh voice to these women of troubled lives and tragic destinies. Exhaustive research informs an imagined interview with Marilyn, a listing of the worldly possessions she left behind, and a final-days journal of the wrecked, stranded, and menstruating Amelia Earhart.

Focusing on the shock factor of much of the thematic material in The Ravenous Audience would be to overlook how well this collection reflects the overall experience of being a woman and boldly embracing the messiness of corporeal life. The raw descriptions of bodily juices, incest, transgressive sex, and violent objectification punctuate a collection of poems that bears unflinching witness and plays with and annihilates boundaries. The carnality and grossness of life are not ignored, but included simply as part of the whole.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, December 16th 2009

Anna In-Between

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Nunez

Akashic Books

The premise of Anna In-Between is simple: Anna Sinclair, a thirty-nine-year-old editor at a big book publishing company in New York City returns to the (unnamed) Caribbean nation where she was born and raised in order to visit her parents, Beatrice and John Sinclair. While there, she learns her mother has advanced breast cancer, but refuses to go to the United States, which has better hospitals and equipment, for the operation that could save her life. Far from being melodramatic, Nunez's straightforward prose and subtle characterizations give the story a sense of truth.

Anna has always felt she is not good enough for her mother. Her failed marriage is a bone of contention between the two women—as is Beatrice's lack of physical affection towards her daughter—and her feeling that she is now an outsider in the land of her birth is a recurring motif. Afraid of disappointing her mother, Anna allows her to believe she is an editor at the large publishing company, Windsor, rather than at the small Windsor imprint, Equiano, which prints “urban lit” by and primarily for people of color. We get a glimpse of Anna's struggle with the ghettoization of her authors into racial categories and her efforts to promote serious works by authors of color to a wider audience.

In addition to exploring the complicated relationships between an adult child and her parents, Anna In-Between touches on issues of colonialism and collaboration. Anna's father became one of the top men at the British-run state oil company shortly before England granted the island independence. He is seen as a traitor by some, but explains his decisions towards the workers with dignity. We also see how his new job affected his wife and young daughter as they moved away from the neighborhood and people they knew, but were not accepted in their new surroundings, providing an incisive depiction of intersecting class and racial prejudices.

The Sinclairs' domestic help—Singh the gardener and Lydia the maid—are well-drawn, compassionate portraits. Anna feels that her mother talks down to them, but they protest that they are used to her mother's sometimes harsh tone. With Lydia, in particular, we see how despite her outward appearance of strictness and conformity Beatrice truly cares for her maid, going out of her way to protect her from an abusive ex-husband and providing school uniforms for her grandchildren. The message is clear: even the people we have known the longest may surprise us.

Beatrice's illness allows for an intimacy between mother and daughter that is much closer than they've experienced before and the two reveal aspects of their lives that were previously hidden. Nunez does not give these revelations too much weight; she allows them to shift the characters' feelings and viewpoints to a degree, but not to cause a complete seismic shift in the relationships. And not all of Anna's problems—her relationship with her mother or her struggle to better advocate for her authors— are solved in 347 pages.

Nunez has written a contemplative and absorbing examination of a woman standing in two worlds: the land of her birth and the country she now inhabits. While I felt I gained a new perspective on life in the Caribbean, the well-drawn characters are what ultimately make this story resonate.

Written by: Karen Duda, December 11th 2009

Anna In-Between

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Nunez

Akashic Books

In her newest novel, Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez explores the complexity of relationships between parents and grown children as well as the delicate nature of a marriage and the complexity of place. This moving novel charts the many obstacles that arise when an adult child becomes the caretaker for a parent. Anna is a Caribbean-American in her forties visiting her folks on the island of her childhood when she learns that her mother, Beatrice Sinclair, has cancer—and not just the beginning of cancer, but a fully developed and bleeding tumor that has been ignored by both John, her father, and her mother for quite some time.

Anna cannot comprehend such an avoidance of this life-threatening illness and spends much of the novel in upheaval over the decidedly cautious ways her parents seem to relate. She does not understand their patterns, and she struggles to find a correlation between her own feelings about relationships and the marriage her parents share. In some ways, what her parents see as quiet respect for each other is viewed by Anna merely as caution and fear. She now lives in America where marriage can be temporal and she sees her parents’ restraint as weakness rather than strength.

A sadness and fury falls over Anna as she comes to realize that Beatrice hides from her sleeping husband in a darkened bathroom to say nightly prayers over the rosary. This is her mother’s manner of attending to the illness. Anna’s anger is deepened by John’s admittance that he knew of the tumor, but stayed quiet out of respect for his wife’s privacy. Nunez writes through the view of the father, “Privacy matters so much he will guard his wife’s secret even from herself.”

In a way, Anna’s parents do not have to accept the terrifying potential of the illness if they do not discuss its presence. They may carry on with their quiet and pleasant life in chosen ignorance. Avoidance seems to be a theme in the novel, as Anna’s mother will not go to America for treatment because Blacks are mistreated in the country. While Anna struggles to defend America, she finds herself reviewing the many ways racism runs deep in her new country, and is torn apart by memories of the racism that defined her childhood on a Caribbean island under British rule.

Anna In-Between outlines the many ways Anna cannot comprehend her parents, and sometimes cannot understand herself. She lives torn between the island of her homeland, its tropical mannerisms that revive precious memories, and the life she has built as an American. With starkly poignant language, Nunez paints a picture of Anna’s confusion about her place between these two worlds and how to understand her bond with both lives.

Anna In-Between carries a heavy weight, but is written with a light hand. Nunez knows just how to paint a picture with both depth and breadth while remaining accessible in her use of language. The novel tells a poignant tale that will bring out feelings of intensity for the reader, and these strong emotions are well worth the time invested.

Written by: Djuna A. Davidson, December 11th 2009

Will Work for Drugs

admin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:38:00 +0000

By Lydia Lunch

Akashic Books

I have always wanted to like Lydia Lunch. I’ve always admired her assertiveness and her dark attitude, and at times, even her severely sarcastic wit. I couldn’t ever get into her music though, so I thought I would try moving on to reading some of her short stories in Will Work for Drugs, a collection of Lunch’s fiction, personal essays, and interviews.

The beginning part of this book drags on and only slightly picks up towards the end with Lunch’s interviews. My favorite part was the interviews because, strangely enough, this was where Lunch seemed the most sincere, the most candid, and the most herself. The stories and essay sections were jumbled together, and they were not labeled as to which was which, so I never really knew if I was reading about some true event in Lunch’s little known past or peeking into her fantasies.

Regardless of whether they were stories or essays, in each one it was also extremely difficult to understand what was going on, where the action was, or the overall message Lunch wanted the reader to come away with. Lunch relies heavily on overtly flowery metaphors for everything, so much so that each story seemed to be mostly descriptions rather than actual stories. This section read more like prose, much like the style of Patti Smith, which was done well at times; however, overall I found Lunch’s choices similar to excerpts from a teenage goth girl’s diary: trying too hard to impress the reader with her darkness and toughness. Maybe her die-hard fans will appreciate Lunch’s newest work, but this reader remains unconverted.

Written by: Jen Klee, September 4th 2009

Portland Noir

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by Kevin Sampsell

Akashic Books

Noir is easier to recognize than to define. The best dictionary definition I found was, “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled cynical characters and bleak sleazy settings.” Portland Noir, then, has a self-explanatory title: it is a collection of short, dark stories that take place in Portland, Oregon. Akashic Books has published a whole series of similar collections set in numerous cities in the U.S. and around the globe.

Reading this book made me want to immediately find a copy of Chicago Noir. Since I’ve never been to Portland, I felt like I was missing out. I was unfamiliar with the neighborhoods and businesses mentioned, and could not judge the accuracy of Portland’s portrayal. It was clear that the city was more than just a setting; Portland is almost another character in many of the pieces.

Despite my ignorance of Portland, I still found the stories very creative and enjoyable. Some of the tales were more traditional noir pieces, with Philip Marlowe-type protagonists and centering around crimes. Other stories had the feel of noir, but might not fit the classic definition.

As with most short fiction collections, the stories vary greatly. Few readers will enjoy every story, but many will enjoy several. Characters include cops and private eyes, drug addicts and prostitutes, murderers and artists, hipsters and activists. Stories involve murder, blackmail, burglary, torture, vandalism, and even a little romance. There is even a comic book style illustrated story, “Gone Doggy Gone” by Jamie S. Rich & Joëlle Jones. Truly, this book has something for every noir fan.

I felt deep disdain for the narrator of the opening story, “The Clown and the Bard,” by Karen Karbo, in which a sexist low-life gets away with killing his ex-girlfriend. But,I was captivated by the next story, “Julia Now,” by Luciana Lopez, in which a woman becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to a previous tenant of her home. I was strangely captivated by “The Sleeper” by Dan DeWeese, a wandering tale of a newspaper delivery man with a possible substance abuse problem. “Virgo” by Jess Walter is a surprising, and surprisingly funny, story about a disgruntled newspaper employee who alters the horoscopes to harass his astrology-believing ex-girlfriend. The narrator is completely unlikable, yet laugh-out-loud funny:

We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath…

“Burnside Forever” by Justin Hocking–which opens with the two-word sentence, “Fuck Hawaii.”–reminded me strongly of Michael Hornburg’s novel Bongwater, which is also set (mostly) in Portland. “People Are Strange” by Kimberly Warner-Cohen, is a disturbing story about a woman determined to track down her missing identical twin sister. I’d hate to ruin the twist, but know this: Happy endings are rarely found in noir.

Written by: Kellie Powell, September 1st 2009

Alice Fantastic

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:04:00 +0000

By Maggie Estep

Akashic Books

“I read faster than I breathe,” panted Maggie Estep. The author furiously delivered her signature sassy staccato while reading recently from her sixth novel, Alice Fantastic, at Inquiring Minds independent bookstore in Saugerties, New York. Estep quickly seduced the audience with her sharp tongue, much the way she first seduced me with her spoken word at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s. As a performance poet Estep was infamous for her feisty feminist anthems like “Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere” and “The Stupid Jerk I’m Obsessed With,” and she brings that same frantic energy and dark humor to her narrative prose.

In Alice Fantastic, we meet the women of the Hunter family. Alice is a 36-year-old professional gambler working at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York. Her life is happening to her, but in a moment of unexpected clarity she decides to take charge and ditch her fungus of a boyfriend, Clayton, who she refers to as “The Big Oaf.” Alice asks her racetrack buddies to “take care of” of Clayton, but when things don’t go as planned she retreats to hippie enclave Woodstock, New York to be with family. Family, in Estep’s complex configuration, is Alice’s younger half-sister Eloise, a toy designer whose boyfriend has just died in an accident, and her mother Kimberly, a recovering addict and on-again, off-again lesbian caring for seventeen rescue dogs. Alice Fantastic is full of over the top, bizarre and impossible drama, plus lots of torturous sex (Alice and Eloise accidentally bed the same man), trips to the dog park, chain smoking, and bisexuality (Kimberly reverts to heterosexuality; Eloise becomes a lesbian). Underneath Estep’s colorful imagination is an emotionally honest portrayal of family, and the ever-fraught relationship between mother and daughter.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, June 28th 2009

Ruins

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:23:00 +0000

By Achy Obejas

Akashic Books

Upon reading Ruins, I was struck by the urgency of the content. Set in post-revolutionary Cuba the characters exist in a state of stagnant ideologies and hopes. Throughout the narrative Achy Obejas exposes a world that is startlingly familiar, one in which political values change according to the realities in which they exist. Obejas is an award-winning novelist and poet who translated Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into Spanish. A native of Havana, Obejas’ Cuba is both fantastic and forcefully real; this combination is precisely what makes her narrative so potent.

The protagonist of Ruins is a man who came of age during the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Usnavy has never let the patriotic ideals that were indoctrinated during youth escape his aging heart. Named both tragically and comically after the U.S. Navy ships moving in and out of the port of Havana, he has never been able to evade the “long shadow of the north” that haunts his life.

Usnavy lives in a dilapidated house with a wife and a daughter that have resorted to eating torn up carpet seasoned like meat in place of the real thing. Despite their real need for American currency, Usnavy refuses to participate in the growing dependence on the U.S. His dreams of Cuba’s past often conflict with his families hopes for the future. With more and more friends taking the dangerous journey to the shores of Miami, he does not merely give in. Usnavy fervently rejects the implication that America could hold anything greater than his beautiful revolutionary homeland.

Usnavy’s preoccupation with the past is manifested in his obsession with an antique lamp passed down to him from his deceased mother. The lone source of light in their otherwise dismal room, the lamp’s absurd garishness becomes a source of resentment for the two women in Usnavy’s life. Transfixed by the illuminated images of Africa created by the stained glass, he is content to live through the unpleasantries of life in post-revolution Cuba. It is not until the discovery of another lamp similar to his precious family heirloom that Usnavy begins to experience the desires that many of his fellow compañeros have expressed through their preoccupation with American wealth.

Obejas’ Ruins is full of contradictions that bring to light the complications of real life. She addresses the fluidity of values and ideologies when a young man returns from Miami as a woman, or when Usnavy’s role as caretaker is subverted when his wife’s resourcefulness saves the family. As time passes the hopes and dreams of a nation sway accordingly. Those who are lost in the past find themselves clinging to values that no longer hold the meaning they once did. Ultimately, Obejas reveals that political ideologies are as fluid as anything else, and they are not immune to the wearying effects of old age, a sentiment that resonates today.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, May 13th 2009

Like Son

admin — Tue, 08 May 2007 22:59:00 +0000

By Felicia Luna Lemus

Akashic Books

I was surprised to realize, after I turned the final page and perused the back jacket, that Like Son was not Felicia Luna Lemus’s first novel. It reads like a debut, in good ways and in bad. It’s ultimately an earnest but uneven book, and it seems to spend much of its time casting about for an identity, and a voice, that suits it best.

Lemus’s story centers around Frank, the transgender protagonist thrust back into the throes of familial drama with news of his father’s terminal illness. A gift from his dying father sets Frank on an unsettling cross-country path, as he picks up and moves from his native California to the unfamiliar terrain of New York City. There he meets Nathalie, and their long-standing relationship begins to generate some drama of its own after the catastrophe of September 11th. Frank struggles to make sense of his life, his relationship, and his past while everything around him seems to careen out of control.

Many novels live and die by their narrators. The storyteller within the story is the entrance point – the guide e follow. Frank proves difficult to engage with, if only because his voice is so chameleon-like. One minute, he’s speaking directly to us, in strained slang like “okay, please don’t laugh, but I swear…” and the next minute he’s waxing poetic with sentences such as “I feared that all that gold, all that shimmering glory we’d once been, had transformed into a shattered mess of dead weight.” The resulting narrative suffers from stylistic schizophrenia, and its unevenness becomes distracting.

From a feminist viewpoint, a book with a transgender protagonist that doesn’t make a big deal out of that fact is a great thing. However, this quality is mitigated by the blithe sexism with which Nathalie is portrayed by Frank throughout the story. Nathalie never comes across as more than two-dimensional, despite Frank’s continual odes to her eccentricity, her charisma and, of course, her dainty, fragile, über-feminine beauty. Frank worships her, but ultimately objectifies her. We never get a good sense of why he loves her, other than that she turns him on. So, while the politics of how this transgender man loves a femme woman prove problematic on a feminist level, the up-side is that it opens up space for discussion and debate about the rocky relationship between feminism and transgender issues.

Written by: Kate Dixon, May 8th 2007

New Orleans Noir

admin — Fri, 04 May 2007 20:10:00 +0000

Edited by Julie Smith

Akashic Books

Unlike every other volume of short stories I've read, none of the stories in this book disappointed me. Written by authors who live or have lived in the Big Easy, New Orleans Noir digs below the surface and into the social fabric of a city that had its troubles long before Hurricane Katrina. To say that it pushes the reader out of her comfort zone would be a major understatement.

The collection is divided into two parts: pre- and post- Katrina. Each of the 18 stories is set in a different neighborhood in the city. In Part I, "Before the Levees Broke," the reader travels from a modern day bar in Mid-City to a brothel in the Swamp in 1833, and back again. Characters range from a burnt-out police detective who helps a colleague get away with murder; to a former slave who is a doctor, but must support himself by playing piano in the pre-civil war South; to a seemingly innocent female co-ed who, with a friend, lures a man to his death during Mardi Gras.

Part II, "Life in Atlantis," is equally grim, with more looting, murder and death. The common theme in both parts is, essentially, violence; whether it's a shady real estate hound getting burned to death or a ten-year-old who bleeds to death in a cemetery after shooting at the police, the stories tear at your gut. Racial tension and discrimination, before and after the hurricane, is also a recurring and important theme. Significantly, it's not always easy to determine who is or isn't justified in their actions; I found myself sympathizing with both cops and thieves.

Despite the fact that this collection is gritty, often bloody and frequently depressing, it's a fascinating portrayal of a city that has always had social troubles ignored by the rest of the country. In that it is a call to action.

Another reason to get buy this book: a portion of the sales support the New Orleans Public Library and K.A.R.E.S., which awards grants to writers affected by Hurricane Katrina. Despite all that they had gone through, many of the writers waived their fees to make this possible.

Written by: M.L. Madison, May 4th 2007