WEAVER will make a weaver of the reader in this post-apocalyptic tale

WEAVER
KELLY ANN JACOBSON
Livingston Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this Cloud Atlas-style speculative novel, humans are the alien invaders. The reader learns through many documents—police reports, legal depositions, speech transcripts, and diary entries—that a human company named HealthCorp has attempted to enslave two alien the Laffians stranded on a planet-wide ocean and the feline HoFe living on a bed of hofellium. Now, those same aliens have come to Earth in the hopes of using the planet to safely repopulate. The overriding question becomes whether these three groups can reconcile on Earth without killing each other first. . . .

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Definitely a message I endorse: anti-capitalist, anti-racist, greedshaming, selfish, tribalistic thoughts and actions disparaged and criticized in a post-apocalyptic novel that is very queer-inclusive. The author's previous two excursions into mostly YA storytelling but that are suitable for adults to enjoy too (ROBIN AND HER MISFITS, TINK AND WENDY) were favorites of mine earlier this year.

Author Jacobson's storytelling chops, in this book, are aptly held up against David Mitchell's famously fractured framework in Cloud Atlas and, while I wasn't a fan of that book, I felt this iteration of that multi-documentary style worked...and didn't work...in the same ways here. It makes the worldbulding, particularly important in a story with an alien species introduced to Earth, a bit spottier and harder to follow than is my personal sweet spot for reading.

What definitely works is Author Jacobson's certainty that all her queer-coded characters are central to the narrative of humanity's survival. It is by no means certain that humanity will survive, but we're giving it a good, solid go in our confict with the superior forces of an uncaring galactic horde. The story is moe than rich enough in detail to make the average teen reader use their pattern-spotting skills, keeping track of the many different threads of the story.

A terrific choice for the experienced SFF reader, the young queer or questioning reader will find themself in here too, and the grown person will enjoy this non-triumphalist, question-authority vibed tale of working for survival.
Highly recommended for the Booksgiving choice to unwrap and dive right into.

NOBODY KNOWS HOW IT GOT THIS GOOD, startlingly good debut collection from a Southerner to watch

NOBODY KNOWS HOW IT GOT THIS GOOD: Short Stories from the Deep South
AMOS JASPER WRIGHT IV
Livingston Press
$25.95 hardcover, available now
SALE ON HARDCOVER THROUGH PUBLISHER'S SITE (linked above) ONLY $13.95

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award

"A finely crafted collection that perfectly evokes a place and culture." - Kirkus Review

"He successfully combines the anarchic nihilism of Hunter S. Thompson with the deeper, exploratory writings of William Faulkner, identifying the cancers of his chosen corner of the American South and providing not solutions so much as requiems." - Kirkus Review

A used car salesman finds himself embattled with a local gang. A U.S. Census enumerator disappears in the Black Belt. A former Birmingham fire fighter is haunted by his involvement hosing peaceful protestors during the Civil Rights Movement. A riverboat captain recounts his time working for a mining company while sailing down the Black Warrior River. A newlywed couple’s honeymoon is botched by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A lynching survivor tells the story of his near-death experience.

Through sixteen stories sharing common environments and characters drawing heavily on the author’s experiences growing up in central Alabama, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good explores themes of racial injustice, class, the Civil Rights Movement, environmental catastrophe, imprisonment, suburbanization, and the perennial themes of love, life and loss. Though set in the Deep South, these stories aspire with humor and pathos to address national dilemmas.

My Review:

As is my wont, I will use the time-honored and very efficient Bryce Method to view the stories as they come.

The Jaguars of Southtown permaybehaps it helps to know that the stories are Birmingham, Ala., in it splendid decaying fetor; I know some folk from there so I wasn't lost, but I can think of many who'd struggle with specific location anxiety, what am I missing?-itis. Page 18 contains a w-bomb. I'd hand this a 3.5-star rating for its cruelly clear eye on a particular Rabbit Angstrom-y man manqué.

Nobody Knows How It Got This Good says the Mayor at the opening of the shiny new Wal-Mart ("before they took out the hyphen") he's been courting for years. Offering the usual roll-overs of lowered taxes and people desperate for a paycheck, any paycheck, even one "you cash all three figures of" at the payday loan place. I promise you most of these good folk don't have bank accounts anymore, banks do not want this tiny little pie even if it's all to themselves. So the spiffy obsequies of opening the place lead the narrator to reflect that:

It was some kind of Mardi Gras meets Donner party.
–and–
The parking stall stripes were white as a grand wizard's starched bed sheets.

Pizitz even figures in the introductory page, a list of the retailers now gone from the world , done in by the class war on labor that killed Fairfield, Alabama. What rises when incomes fall, children? That's right, reactionary politics and social attitudes do! Gold star, Muffin, for remembering what happened to bring us to 2020.

Settling Down in Peckerwood

Miscreant Populations and Their Effects on Jim Crow Methodologies of Street Paving in the Industrial South

Birmingham Goddamn

Deepwater Horizon

Tilting at Windmills

Wells Fargo

Twenty-Six People Per Square Mile

Ave Maria Grotto

The Song of the Abyss Eater

The Last Suppers of Violent Men Executed by the State

When Christ Returns to a Slave State

Down the Black Warrior I Sailed to Byzantium

Last of the Old Guardsmen

Long Hot Summer of 2018

LIZARD WORLD, a deeply bizarre Bizarro 4-star read

LIZARD WORLD
TERRY RICHARD BAZES
Livingston Press
$11.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dentist from New Jersey, marooned at midnight in the Florida swamps, makes the mistake of falling into the clutches of a hilariously depraved family of amateur surgeons devoted to a seventeenth century libertine whose discovery of an elixir has kept his evil presence alive for the past three-hundred years.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: Three centuries of bizarro nonsense in the Florida swamps, featuring dentists who rob teeth from cadavers or maps from old ladies, English earls with horrifying maladies, German hunchbacks with one-eyed daughters who give rise to a dynasty of detestable Southern crackers, and a buncha buncha croakadells. (Gators to thee and me.)

Oh, and fiction's only known were-horsefly.

Not a big bizarro reader, me. I wondered sometimes what I was doing wandering in the humid swamps of Bazes' imagination. I found such repulsive images there as people being farmed for their organs, clouds of gator-musk inspiring ick-ptui sex, and a claustrophobic sense on nausalgia vu...the dear and familiar stomach-roiling horror of having been here before...that Florida inspires in me.

So why rate it so highly? Because, dear reader, in an increasingly bland and featureless literary and cultural landscape, where gay couples are the normal ones on TV and wacky neighbors on sitcoms are largely indistinguishable from the leads in a vain attempt to spice things up, Bazes takes us into places we haven't been taken since A Modest Proposal. The adjective "Swiftian" has been waiting for this book for many long, lonely years.

So, go buy it. I promise you no one will fail to remark on the unique cover art, and the erudite among your acquaintance will be gobsmacked by the fact the BARNEY ROSSET blurbed it. (Frankly, after one repugnant scene involving a wire hair brush and the aforementioned were-horsefly, this was the only reason I kept reading.) Oh, so did Charles Palliser and Peter Coyote, but BARNEY! If not for him, we wouldn't have smutty books to read at all!

Enjoy.

CARE GIVER, an inside glimpse of the steady march towards nothing that is dementia

CARE GIVER
RICHARD BLANCHARD
Livingston Press
$7.00 SALE trade paper, available now

Gordon Lish praises CARE GIVER!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Care Giver leads us through a kaleidoscope of events as a failing old man pens unmailed letters to his lost love from a nursing home bed. A caring paperboy aids the man for a passage to his promised land, and becomes the unexpected inheritor of the man’s hallowed highlands. As the boy seeks to build his own life on those gifted lands, he too is haunted by visions of a lost soul, and finally makes ready for his own deliverance in the high peaks.

This strange story unfolds as we consider the man’s letters, the boy’s writings, and the photos and clippings all found among the boy’s belongings. If you’ve ever been troubled by someone’s incurable suffering, then read Care Giver. It is at once a testament to forbidden mercies and to the power of enduring faith. For me, it rings of the utter truth.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: In the emerging literary genre of dementia fiction, this short novel stands out for its brutal, unsparing honesty of presentation. In alternating sections, too short to be chapters, Bob Brown's stream-of-consciousness narration of his deteriorating grasp on his own mind juxtaposes with the short, sibylline utterances of John Fulton, a kind-hearted and shy young paperboy who becomes the living anchor of Bob's world.

Bob writes letters, from his addled 81-year-old brain, to his long-lost love Margo Jones. The more letters he writes to her, the more we are treated to a ringside seat in the spectacle of a mind's disappearance. The mixture of times present and past is complete and the distinction, for Bob, is gone; for us, the strands of meaning are tightly twined and are mutually supportive narratives, often seeming to merge like hairs in the plaits of a braid: Tightly spaced, closely woven, touching all down their lengths, forming one constructed object and still made up of discrete parts. The book emphasizes this joined-but-separate quality of narrative with the two men's voices alternating and with the liberal use of photos throughout the book.

John, the boy who brings Bob his paper, is a shy kid of seventeen when he meets the old man. He's like all young people in that all things come back to himself in reference. He's a good man, though, because he spares moments of his life to spend with the slowly disappearing Bob. He listens. He asks questions, engages with the person before him. John straightens pillows and leaves the elder to sleep when he's been drugged and never flags in offering his precious gift of attention.

The beauty of writing this book from the PoV of the dying man and his care giver, his giver of caring beyond the physical, is wondrous. The end of the story is already known, the end is the ending...and the ending is a lovely thing. Only Bob speaks...we see the photos he cherishes enough to will them to his young best friend...we hear his letters, last ones ever, to his Margo....

This book is a lonely and frightened and confused old man's orison to the lost god of love.

FOR YOU, MADAM LENIN is on sale! A novel of the domestic life of a revolutionary

FOR YOU, MADAM LENIN
KAT MEADS
Livingston Press
$10.00 SALE PRICE trade paper, available now
Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin's comrade/wife, was an only child. Where she went, her mother went also. In Siberia and Europe, Lenin and the two Krupskayas shared close quarters: two- and three-room apartments.

Lenin obliged to live with an in-house, sharp-tongued critic, Nadya Krupskaya and Lenin trying to run a revolution while living with mom/mother-in-law, the daily rituals and domestic lives of subversives--fictionally promising territory.

For You, Madam Lenin covers pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the Soviet experiment post-Lenin. Trotsky with his abundant hair, Stalin with his webbed feet, Lenin's lovely mistress Inessa Armand, and half-blind Fanny Kaplan, Lenin's would-be assassin, are all present and accounted for.

But the novel belongs to the two Krupskayas. In this version of events, the male triumvirate Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin doesn't outshine Russia's long line of tough, resilient, radical female luminaries.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: I like historical novels, I'm interested in Russian history, and I'm culturally in tune with the idea of a husband being the butt of womanly disdain...it's such a common trope, after all. Mothers-in-law don't come much more beady-eyed and observant than Krupskaya Senior.

I don't know that I'd ever so much as given a second's thought to Lenin's domestic arrangements. If anything, I assumed pretty young cadres were at his beck and call. I can't say from my own original research how much of this novel was fictionalized, but I'd certainly say the *feeling* is convincing.

The narrative told from Matushka Krupskaya's point of view is, in fact, charming in its illusionlessness about Lenin's failings as a husband and as a leader. His susceptibility to a pretty Parisian piece, Inessa, surprises his mother-in-law not at all. She admits she thinks Inessa is a lovely, fun girl. But she remains her daughter's mother, so much so that she is Nadezhda's emotional ballast through the inevitable trials of being a famous man's wife. (This part I know to be fictional, as Krupskaya Senior died before the October Revolution.) What impact that has on the power couple, well, three is a crowd didn't become a cliché for no reason.

The other narrative voices, all anonymous omniscient and convenient, are there for the author to offer commentary on the events unfolding before the Krupskayas. It's handy from a plotting point of view, and the "interrogator" of history is at times amusing, but it feels a bit contrived. Krupskaya Senior is telling the story to some unnamed someone, us the readers; the omniscient narrator is too; then the interrogations by History of, for example, Marx's daughters is thrown in, and none of the scenes is terribly long...well, it's choppy out here on this Russian lake.

What sold me on the novel, concerns aside, is the delicate and ever-so-charming arabesque of a life Meads makes for the three women at the heart of things: Mother and confessor, critic and protector, sad survivor and acerbic battler; passionate advocate and wife, lover and beloved, widow and guardian of the flame; and soft, worshipful, accepting refuge for an aging man's sad and defeated needy heart. None of the three can be in any orbit except Lenin's, and in all their actions, they choose this course. They choose to be Lenin's womenfolk. Not because That's What Women Do. Because, first to last, each is committed to the vision of himself that Lenin shows her.

Tart, critical, practical, obsessive, and passionate. Not one of these women is ever less than herself in these pages. That's a lot to say for a trio of wildly different fictionalized people. I'm glad I read it.

THE BRICK MURDER: A Tragedy, and Other Stories earns my happy respect for quality writing that's still fun

THE BRICK MURDER: A Tragedy, and Other Stories
KURT JOSE AYAU
Livingston Press
$6.00 SALE PRICE trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: THE BRICK MURDER: A Tragedy, and Other Stories is a funnily tragic collection of stories that always borders on wondrously correct incorrectness. A manic and angered sub-sub-librarian learns about cultural differences from a manic and angered patron. A junior faculty member gets paid to befriend a senior star philandering poet. Three kids and a rabbi discover the awful truth that God really is a process God. A token black man Bob the Negro accomplishes revenge in his work place at a price. And, a brick plays a momentous part in a tragedy. This collection comes one short of a dozen, but nothing short in its style and reach.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: Sixth winner of the Ruby Pickens Tartt Award for First Fiction Collection Kurt Jose Ayau brings an outsider's eye (meaning he doesn't squint through the same Galileo-era telescope) to short fiction. He doesn't write plotless blobs of pretty sentences, like the Writerly Reviews publish, he writes STORIES, with beginnings, middles, and endings. Sometimes they aren't in the usual places, but they're there. Livingston Press grants this prize annually to an author who has never had a collection of short fiction published, naming it after a WPA Writers' Project worker who went all over Depression-era Alabama collecting the oral histories of former slaves. Tartt's work never appeared under her own name until after she died. The publisher honors her unsung service to literature by awarding the prize of publication to a previously unheard or ill-attended-to voice. Ayau's collection is eleven pieces strong, and there are far more hits than the few near-misses in these pages. The title story takes us to the last moments on Earth of a pompous, arrogant blowhard ex-military teacher. He's typical of most of the full professors I've ever known, completely oblivious to anything but him/herself and his/er hobbyhorse; well, this time, it costs the old fuffertut dearly. Like, everything. I took great Schadenfreude in this revenge tale. As Ayau is a professor at a military school, I wonder if it's not simply wish fulfillment....

"Official Friend", "Calling It Off", "Sand Castle", and "Culture Clash" all ring their various changes on the theme of identity and its roots; it's evergreen territory, this, and Ayau rakes through the fallen treasures to very good effect.

"At A Loss for Words", "Outsourcing", and "By the Numbers" are tales of betrayal of trust, the scales-falling-from-their-eyes moments that are physically and psychically painful; in at least two cases lethal....

"Murray and the Holy Ghost" and "Spawning" are told from the eyes of children, and are, to my mind at least, the least successful in the collection. Both revolve around those last moments of innocence before the quotidian world of adulthood crunches the child's illusions about himself, his universe, and his most treasured fantasies. Ayau's child voices are well presented. I just don't like that story's effect, no matter how well it's told, and I am also a little tired of kids carrying stories in fiction. Too many iterations of that here lately, and frankly I'm over it.

And then there's "Bob the Negro." What a story that is. I hope it's anthologized in every future work that pretends to deal with race in America. Hugely successful sales maven Bob takes a job in a regionally successful, all-white company in Podunk, New Enland. He energizes the sales single-handedly. He makes friends of one and all. He's on top of the world! So he thinks. Disturbing hints of a different reality make it through his oblivious, overachieving shell; he lays traps to discover exactly what his suspicions tell him could be going on; and then, when his worst fears are exceeded, he pulls a major bonehead maneuver and loses everything...except success, which he can't keep away with a barge-pole. This story is the chef d'ouevre and it alone is worth the $6 the book costs. Buy the book, read the story, and come tell me about it if you disagree...but I suspect you won't. It's that good.

DEEP TISSUE, stories that work you over

DEEP TISSUE: Stories
JEFF TAPIA
Livingston Press
$10.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jeff Tapia’s collection Deep Tissue is written in a preposterously excruciating style that mimics the often preposterous and excruciating everydayness of modern life. In the title story, a man seeks revenge against his soon-to-be ex-wife by destroying her new kitchen appliance. In “Fear’s,” a disgruntled security guard asks his good-natured buddy to help him cut off his foot. The middle-aged woman in “The Dark Continent” keeps the lump in her breast a secret from her new partner only to discover – belatedly – that he has a secret of his own. Mimicking the soulless rummage of the information age, Deep Tissue explores the poignant needs and desires of everyday people engulfed in a phony world.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: My favorite of these stories is "Horns Overflowing." In light of the recent Steubenville rape-story idiocy, the story of a married couple's Thanksgiving meal with the shade of their imprisoned son had an even greater impact on me than it might have otherwise.

Walter tells Rex not to worry about it. He says he really wants to come in. He says he can tell his wife wants to talk about their son again. Walter asks Rex if he ever told him he even had a son. Rex answers. Walter asks him if he remembers the story about the frat-house rape. Joan gets a sick look on her face. Walter tells Rex it was in all the papers. Joan gets up from the table. Her chair tips back against the buffet, and her napkin falls to the floor. Joan does not pick it up. Joan leaves the room. She goes into the kitchen. The kitchen has both a pantry and a closet. Joan keeps things like the vacuum and the ironing board in the closet. Joan really wants a new bagless vacuum.

Marital cruelty. Material escape. Maternal avoidance. Masterful.

I read the collection slowly because there is only one style the author is working in, and you're looking at it. I like it. I don't, however, want to read all twelve stories in a gulp because comma-phobic sentence building isn't restful reading for me.

I'd say the author's strength is also his weak point, in that his style is so very integral to the stories being told. Everyday sentences adding up to quotidian revelations of petty emotional crimes. And the effect of all of them together is less than the pleasure of each considered in its own space.

Pick this book up, the Kindle edition's only $8, and read it story by story between longer books. These stories are very good, this writer has a voice (how rare that is!), and we should be happy to support him so we can see what he does next.

JANEY by Richard Matturo on sale now! 4-star review

JANEY
RICHARD MATTURO
Livingston Press
$9.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Twelve Labors of Hercules might seem an easier task than warming up to someone as caustic and misanthropic as Janey. If you hate her at the beginning, though, be warned: by the end you may very well fall in love with her.

Richard Matturro (author of four previous novels: Leslie, Luna, Perseus, and Troy) is a native of Rye, New York. He holds a doctorate in English with a specialization in Shakespeare and Greek Mythology. After sixteen years at the Albany Times Union, he now teaches literature in the English Department at the University of Albany, and lives on an old farm in the foothills of the Berkshires.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: Author Matturro wrote three previous novels that were takes on classical subjects, and now gives us misery-guts Janey Heracles, a sculptress (she'd smack me one for saying that) and a general all-around Pain In The Ass of a woman. For those Louise Penny fans out there, think Louise Penny's deathless old-lady-with-a-tude Ruth Zardo before menopause calmed her caustic wit down.

No, no lie not kidding not exaggerating. Serious.

Janey's Twelve Labors are nothing short of reinventing herself in her late forties. She's got a great gallery show to prepare a piece for, but to navigate her way to that Promised Land, she must unload her literal and metaphorical baggage: Sell the empty hotel her dead parents left to her and her conventional, estrangedish sister Laura; empty the said hotel of its Augean Stables-level hoarded crap; cope with her husband divorcing her; cope with a new man, DJ Bugs Mudge, bringing his gray-ponytail-having gerontological tantric sex and laid-backness into her life; cope with Stanley the Evil Gay Imp in whose adjacent studio to hers he makes paintings of naked boys that bring him, well, something he wants...but not enough to keep him from renaming himself Stanislav. Which Janey, with her usual People Person attitude, ignores and calls him, at every opportunity, Stanley.

I found the author's breaking the book into twelve two-chapter segments named after the Twelve Labors of myth a wee bit forced, but I think for many it might be a useful way of calling attention to the point of the book: Janey is, like her namesake, laboring mightily (if in her case more than a little unwillingly and for no clearly defined purpose) to master and contain her own power, her self-transformation, her life.

In a “review” of Janey's sculpture Pillars, created for her big gallery show, author Matturro sums up Janey's journey, and a fundamental insight into human nature and life results:

The Ionic column is polished smooth and gleaming white. The Doric is discolored, stained, chipped, and pockmarked, the object of a thousand injuries and indignities. Worse, there's a diagonal crack that threatens at any moment to split it in two. ...these are the dual natures we all share after a certain age. That ideal, upright pillar we wish we were, and that damaged, blemished old post that we are. And yet one is as necessary as the other for our “life support.”

...Art indeed may not change anything, and yet on some very basic level, life is insupportable without it.

(p183, softcover edition)
A very nicely phrased way to say something that, as readers, I suspect we all agree with; and as good a summation of the reasons one would want to read this novel as any I can write. I recommend the book to your readerly mercies.

THE GALAXIE AND OTHER RIDES, winner of the sixth Tartt First Fiction Award

THE GALAXIE AND OTHER RIDES
JOSIE SIGLER
Livingston Press
$10.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dozen stories of the searing pain that being alive is for many of us. The horrors of war? Nothing compared to the horrors of hatred. The joys of sex? Nothing compared to the life sentence of parenthood, the misery of loss and abandonment that always follow.

Winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, this collection of slices of life—sliced by blunt knives from still-living flesh—collects Sigler's bleak, clear-eyed visions of life in these United States for the first time in book form. Some stories appeared in the cream of the small magazine crop, such as Roanoke Review, Silk Road, and Copper Nickel, all of which represent the diametric opposite of Reader's Digest. Stories, my friends, are alive and well in the hands of writers like Sigler. They are still doing what the best stories have always done: Gone somewhere, done something, and made the reader experience the going and doing, and emerge changed from the trip.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: A tiller of literary soil broken generations ago by such realist-mythspinners as Erskine Caldwell and Carson McCullers, Sigler finds her angles and corners in a poverty-stricken stratum of America that grows steadily (according to the census). It makes her grim visions, so angry and so hopeless as to make one wish for literary cataracts, all the more important for those of us who can afford computers and have the education to know what to do with them, and with the books we come to this place to talk about, to read and heed. She's Donald Ray Pollock and Bonnie Jo Campbell's literary love-child. The boy in the trailer on the next lot is Wells Tower.

I have one cavil with the collection as a whole. The joke here is that the stories all involve particular car models, linking the tales with the decline and fall of the US auto industry. This feels forced to me, though I must admit that having a collection of stories organized around cars made my gearhead heart warm up. But in the end, the cars are integral to the stories about half the time, and integrated into a narrative spine not at all. It won't matter to most of y'all. It was only mildly disappointing to me.

Pay attention. Truths are told here, and we all benefit from that. Read Josie Sigler's work. Now, without further ado, I'll discuss them using the Bryce Method:

Deep, Michigan (Caprice)–what does it mean to be a misfit gayboy with friends who rape you? “Buddies” who abuse you? What does it mean not to have a place at any table? 4.5 stars

My Last Horse (Mustang)–a gift of healing horses marks one woman as different, and her life's work consumes her every moment. When love finds her, how can she make the compromises and adjustments love requires when lives are at stake? 5 stars

Chicken (Comet)–when there is no future, why pretend the present matters? 3 stars

Woods (El Camino)–what happens when one smart, determined young woman escapes grinding poverty, only to return when her Iraq War-veteran brother finally dies? Can she find a way to fit the past into a future she wasn't allowed to dream of having? 4 stars

Breakneck Road (Reliant)–when a man walking home from the liquor store with his last dollar's worth of booze finds a baby in a box abandoned by the roadside, can he leave it to die? Is taking on a child when you can't find food money at the bottom of your bottle a ticket out of Hell, or a short trip to the grave? 4.5 stars

The Johns (Chevelle Malibu)–when your mother turns tricks for a living, what can possibly be the last straw that forces your childhood to end? 5 stars

The Last Trees in River Rouge Weep for Carlotta Contadino (Galaxie)–when you have nowhere to go, can you make home mean something by betraying your fellow bottom-dwellers to get what you want? 4 stars

Even the Crocuses (Impala)–when a good man bores you so bad that only a bad man will keep you afloat in your bottle, can you trust yourself not to give in and sink into the mud? 3 stars

The Ride (Hog)–what makes a good biker chick...toughness, or the fear that if you stop you'll never make it out? 3 stars

Tether (Town & Country)–what can a system designed to control and intimidate expect its victims to do if not rebel...even at the cost of their lives? 4 stars

The Black Box (Falcon)–the existential cry, “why?” answered with “why not?” 2.5 stars, weakest in the collection

A Man is Not a Star (Silverado)–what happens when a man, not very bright and not very educated, but a man with love and pride in his heart for all the things he's done to build a life for his wife and daughters, finds himself unwanted and unnecessary? One man's way out is unforgettable. But you'll want to. 5 stars, the star of this show.

AMERICANISATION, academia-set picaresque immigrant comedy

AMERICANISATION: Lessons in American Culture and Language
ANGUS WOODWARD
Livingston Press
$8.50 trade paper at the link above, $4.95 Kindle edition

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Biti Namoeteri, an enterprising young man from "South America's Lichtenstein," comes to the US to get a graduate degree in Spiritual Geography, never expecting to become a multi-level marketer or to fall in love with a woman named Janet Broccoli. But he does just that, and then discovers that personal injury lawsuits can be the keys to both success and failure. Woodward's narrative strategy is both accessible and experimental in this comic novel posing as a textbook.

My Review: The son of goatherds from a country described only as "South America's Liechtenstein" comes to an unnamed American university in an unnamed American city to get a Master's degree in "Spiritual Geography." (Now I want a degree in Spiritual Geography, but not a one of the local universities seems to have such a major. Blast and damn it all!) He arrives, Candide-like, with nothing but a few clothes and a shaky grasp of English. Soon he falls (literally) afoul of the predatory and transactional nature of capitalist society's definitions of intimacy...falling in love (?) with the dreadful and materialistic Janet Broccoli; becoming a mule for smarmy, unctuous Paul Roasted's Amway equivalent Ponzi scheme; providing the memorably named slimy lawyer, Angelo Tongue, with several personal injury cases. But even without Dr. Pangloss, all comes out for the best in this best of all possible profit machines...but at what cost? You are never told...but you can guess.

I fear Angus Woodward. He sees too much. He's the one-eyed man in the country of the blind, and it's very hard not to flinch and squirm as he reports his visions to us docile, dimmed-down drudges.

This book, his first novel after a collection of short fiction set in South Louisiana, Down at the End of the River, appeared in 2008, is written in the vein of a foreign-language textbook, with "Dialogues" and "Vocabularies" and "Activities" that illustrate the author's caustic disdain for what is shown to be a hollow, anti-nurturing culture Americans have allowed to be created in their name. It's scathing. It's abrasively angry. It's impossible not to laugh at lines like "Lobster Shell: Crack!" which pepper the Dialogues, reminding the reader that the author is letting you in on a joke, not simply hollering at you to PAY ATTENTION FOR ONCE and notice the lack of spiritual value in the fake friendliness that we've allowed to kudzu its way into the place once held for friendship.

Seriously y'all...pay attention...or Angus Woodward will be forced to write again...and that's gonna be uncomfortable, yet memorable.

DIRTY LITTLE ANGELS, a bitter draft of honest and unflinching observation

DIRTY LITTLE ANGELS
CHRIS TUSA
Livingston Press
$8.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in the slums of New Orleans, among crack houses and abandoned buildings, Dirty Little Angels is the story of 16-year-old Hailey Trosclair. When the Trosclair family suffers financial hardship and a miscarriage, Hailey finds herself looking to God to save her family. When her prayers go unanswered, Hailey puts her faith in Moses Watkins, a failed preacher and ex-con.

Fascinated by Moses' lopsided view of religion, Hailey and her brother Cyrus begin spending time at an abandoned bank that Moses plans to convert into a drive-through church. Gradually, Moses' twisted religious beliefs become increasingly more violent, and Hailey and Cyrus find themselves trapped in a world of danger and fear from which there may be no escape.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: The thing about receiving author-supplied DRCs is that one never knows whether they're the author's own files or the typeset and formatted files the publisher sells on ebook sites. Luckily for me, I'm acquainted with this publisher so I asked for and received a tree book copy of it.

When you start reading this bitter, sour-faced story of a family's complete collapse, you're expecting more Southern Gothic. Failed fathers, hate-stuffed mothers, frail, failing children, all the usual trappings...set in New Orleans, a place that (to me) reeks of failure on a generational time-scale...and what more fertile ground can there be for a teenage girl to discover the nasty, brutish, short nature of most of humanity's lives.

Hailey is desperate. She's trapped in a web of emotional blackmail and the sticky sap of rage and blame in a marriage that failed the test of character. She's savvy, sensing the sap is slowly turning into amber as pressure and heat build in her parents. Not very surprisingly, she opts to try putting her faith in the christian god. She's from the South, and it's a space hag-ridden by the manifold evils of that religion's ripeness for exploitive behavior. Of course Hailey falls in with an abusive, evil preacher called "Moses" (how original that alias is!) whose plans are just loopy enough to seem visionary to a desperate girl.

The problems that the adult reader sees instantly Hailey sees as positives...the idea of a drive-through church is simply ludicrous...but only long enough to discover that Moses is not there to help her but to use her. It's a horrible realization and it's an angry world that popped Hailey up, so it's no surprise how she ends up behaving in the end.

It's not a long story, and it's not a cheery one, but it's very tellingly presented as a slice of life. Hailey's growing into her full power of womanhood doesn't, in the end, break the mold set by her unhappy family.

It takes a fucking sledghammer to the whole structure.

If you're up for a bracingly told, frankly and honestly observed coming-of-age story set in an iconic if still catatonic since Katrina location, this is a story you'll love. I did.

TAUVERNIER STREET, a collection of short portraits of a place and time

TAUVERNIER STREET: Stories
JAY ATKINSON
Livingston Press
$9.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Jay Atkinson's riveting new story collection, TAUVERNIER STREET, the writer that Men's Health magazine called "the bard of New England toughness" uses a variety of narrative voices, characters and styles to express a single, central truth: you are where you came from. In these stories, some written in "Technicolor" and others in "black and white," a young boy learns to cherish the solid, unremarkable presence of his own father when he gets to know the charismatic dad next door; an ex-Marine finds the strength to deal with his wayward young bride in the pages of an ancient book; and a young gangbanger with a keen sense of history seeks protection from a tough hombre named Jesus.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF THIS COLLECTION FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: The collection by a writer who says: "...I realized that my old haunts were the starting point for nearly all my characters. It was a neighborhood of steep hills, rickety houses, and long lazy afternoons spent waiting for my father to pull into the driveway," had better deliver on the Sense of Place in every single story. Author Atkinson almost does. I'll go into details as we come to each story, à la the Bryce Method.

The Art of War

Dancing the Presidents

The God of This World

The Tigers in Argentina

God's Work

The Landscapes of Dr. Aboud

The Tex Cameron Show

Sages

Two Mississippi's

Latin Kings

Fear of Earnshaw

The Philosophy Shop

The Messenger

Radio Call

Pinholes

Jailbird

The Thorndikes of Tauvernier Street

THE MADE-UP MAN, short & sweet Faustan-bargain tale in 1980s Manhattan

THE MADE-UP MAN
KAREN HEULER
Livingston Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.95 Kindle edition, availale now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Self-pity will only get you so far. When Alyson Salky finds that her lover is having an affair with her best friend and he takes the dog with him when he moves out and a man with worse credentials is hired over her at work, it's time to make some major life decisions. She keeps running into the neighborhood fortune teller, Madame Hope, who promises she can make Alyson's wishes come true any wish, so why not a big wish? As far as Alyson can determine, the problem with her life is that she's getting all the crap that women get, and none of the free passes that men get. It's time to switch it's time to see what life is like as a man and while Madame Hope can get that done for her (in exchange for her soul), nothing really goes as planned. The devil, it turns out, has a sense of humor. But who will have the last laugh?

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Alyson Salky lives in 1980s New York with her beloved, Peter, their dog Dingo, and a few friends that Alyson can't really account for liking. One of those friends, Maggie, snatches Peter out from under Alyson, which is as we all know a painful experience. So what does Alyson do? She sells her soul to the devil, here called Madame Hope the fortuneteller. Several stinging ironies in that, eh what?

So now we get to the title: Alyson chooses, as her first step in this revenge of hers, to become a man. Yes, actually become a man, as in physically transforming herself into the enemy. Madame Hope, an evil glint in her eye (I confess, it's a horrible pun, but it had to be said), agrees with relish to the proposal and *poof* Alyson becomes Bob. Everyone still remembers Alyson, but Bob is part of each memory now, too. Bob is friends, through Alyson, with Maggie and Peter; Bob is now part of the magazine staff where Alyson once worked; and it's these things that allow Bob to wreak his devilish (!) havoc on the lives of Maggie and Peter.

He does a damn fine job of his revenge! Oh my my, does he do a good job! I was quite awed by Heuler's vicious imagination, and I'd hate to be a character at *this* author's mercy. In the end, though, Alyson passes through her revenge fantasy, and her dark night of the soul, and emerges as a fascinating, multi-dimensional character one would like to have on the next barstool. That would be one interesting conversation.

Heuler, a well-published short-story writer and novelist, has a deft hand with prose. There's a nice economy to her storytelling, as she brings this sardonic take on the Don Giovanni story home in under 230pp. It's very easy to see how the characters, all of them, fall into the pits and traps and snares that await all humanity. It's a lot harder to judge them for it than it is other writers' characters precisely because Heuler has such a keen sense of what to say and what to leave out.

There are two problems I have with the book: First, as Bob, the author has some characters think he's gay and in love with Peter, while others don't think so at all, including Peter; second, the last paragraphs of the ending seem to me a cheat, an added-on afterthought that adds nothing to the character or the story.

My first issue is a serious one. Structurally, this mooshy-splooshy confusion isn't dealt with in any kind of story-advancing constructive way. Emotionally, it makes little difference, really, simply keeping two characters from getting inconveniently involved at a certain point; and it gives little depth to any of the interactions Bob has. I took a whole star off because of the unnecessary complication and confusion it caused me in reading the book.

The ending, well, it's not in me to spoiler it, but I can say it bothered me a lot less than the botched gay subplot because it was so short-lived, only a few sentences at the very end of this wicked little book.

A nicely made how-the-other-half-lives cautionary tale, a sharp and sarcastic "Mephistopheles in Manhattan," and a darn good candidate for the title "Love's Labours Won and Lost and Won and Lost and...." Read it soon.