VONNEGUT’S WAR: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five, fascinating story of a fascinating book's creation

VONNEGUT’S WAR: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five
SUSAN FARRELL
Bloomsbury Academic (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Banned, burned, and censored, Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is widely regarded as one of the greatest (and most controversial) novels of the twentieth century. Fusing vivid biography with popular history and close textual analysis, Vonnegut's War tells the fascinating story of the making of a modern classic and the writer that created it.

New archival discoveries and recently released oral histories give us the fullest account yet published of Vonnegut's real-life prisoner-of-war experiences at Stalag IV-B and Dresden, which heavily influenced Slaughterhouse-Five. A recently discovered trove of letters introduces us to his first wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, and her influence on his writing. Along the way, we also encounter UFOs and aliens, grapple with the shadow cast by the Vietnam war, and unearth the stranger-than-fiction tale of David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden, the historical reference behind Vonnegut's writing about the Dresden firebombing.

This book sheds light on one of America's most beloved writers and explores how cultural forces helped to shape a modern masterpiece of storytelling.

Susan Farrell is a professor of American Literature at the College of Charleston. She has published two previous books on Vonnegut and founded the International Kurt Vonnegut Society.

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My Review: Billy Pilgrim shaped many an internal landscape after his appearance in 1969. My older sister encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was fourteen or so; I did, and was genuinely not the same person after the read. I've always been sure war and other kinds of industrial-scale killing were wrong, and tools of oppression and manipulation used by "Them" (the ever-shifting, always-there overclass) to ensure no individual of any class ever truly feels secure for very long. It read to my young self like the bravest kind of art, made to tell ugly truth in carefully crafted images. It was sublime. (I stand by my 2014 review.)

As a middle-aged man I read the story again, on the fortieth anniversary (more or less) of the first read. Same story, different reader, similar conclusion reached...though with nuances like a shocked certainty that Billy Pilgrim was Vonnegut's PTSD personified, that the entire exercise was a therapy session shaped into a narrative of brutal honesty and deep personal exposure underpinning artifice, maybe art, maybe just the complete relatability of honest, truthful self-examination made public.

Twenty more years have passed. I'm not drawn to the text for another read, too few eyeblinks left to me and too much good stuff as yet unread. This book, telling the story of how Slaughterhouse-Five came to be over the course of more than twenty years in the eventful, interesting life of Kurt Vonnegut. It was a long-term, multi-partner effort to shape Vonnegut's trauma into the glittering form we possess now. Access to much material previously off-limits to researchers makes the role of Vonnegut's much-maligned first wife in shaping the narrative more evident. We all, in the twenty-first century, have a very, very different understanding of gender dynamics than was available to any but the most advanced academic thinkers during the years Vonnegut was composing Slaughterhouse-Five. His evident misogyny went well beyond the cultural norms of his era. It's not emphasized in the book nor is it glossed over; this is at heart an academic book, though, so it sticks to its lane more than a purely popular one would. As a factor in the creation of the work in question the reprehensible misogyny and abuse Vonnegut doled out are in the DNA of the story. It's discomfiting to read the clear-eyed portrait of Vonnegut in the throes of creation. Confronting the damage he (knowingly, deliberately) enacts on those around him is unpleasant, as I've grown my mind around the work he's done over the majority of my approaching seventy years on Earth. The older I get the more I realize how little has really changed since the men who wrote the "idol with legs of iron, and feet of clay" quote appearing in the Bible sharpened their styluses.

As Author Farrell's pursuit of the reality behind the making of Slaughterhouse-Five she does the hard work of giving perspective to the acts of its creation in the context of the times. Who was this WWII veteran trying to find perspective on his experiences reading, talking to, using as sounding boards? Could this specific novel have come to be in 1949, 1959, even 1965? I remember the ferment of those years, the way my older-than-most parents were constantly blindsided and upset by the world changing so much so fast...Vonnegut was younger than they were so I realized with a start in reading this book. It adds a piece to my vision of Slaughterhouse-Five that I'd never had. It takes reading a book written about a book getting written to bring perspective to my settled opinion of a story published almost sixty years ago. Do you need a better illustration of why reading, writing about reading, and close and careful analysis of stories are more important than ever in a world getting "AI" shoved down its throat?

What this read did for me it can do for you and for others. No "AI" (properly "LLM") can do what Author Farrell did here. Human brains make connections among data points derived from deep research. They're what creates the synthesis of information that synthetic entities steal to regurgitate to the uncritical as new and insightful ideas. It's true, they are new and insightful; but if you've read the stolen source material, you realize how the scam works. It's new to you, not freshly newly thought up. This is why controlling the world's IP is such an incredibly important part of the scam.

My proof is here, in this well-written, thoroughly researched story of the making of a story that defined the emotional state of a man, and thereafter of a generation.

THE LOOM TREE, a title I enjoy more after the read than I did before the read

THE LOOM TREE
ANGELA MI YOUNG HUR
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$23.80 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Ninth House meets Babel for fans of myth and folklore in this contemporary fantasy about a Korean-American college student at a magical university where fairy tales intersect with family heritage to unleash powers beyond imagining.“

You always wanted magic to be real.”

Sharon and her daughter V’s points of origin hold common threads—both Korean American teenagers, raised by single mothers and searching for identity in the California suburbs. But during a Finals week celebration, high schooler V, compelled by strange impulses, crawls into a hollow tree trunk. That night in a fever haze, she sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her body—flowing between her and her mother, leading to a long-forgotten diary.

With the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon’s memories spill onto the faded pages. V witnesses her mother map out her past through drawings, diagrams, and reclaimed histories of her brief time at Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college. Here, legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over family stories that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one—until her discoveries cracked open Alvsdahl’s secrets.

Sharon’s rewritten narrative—of classroom rivalries, animal professors, debauchery in the woods, threatening Godmothers, and world-shattering powers—unfolds line by line as V desperately tries to help her mother, ultimately learning how to wield Sharon’s story to transform them both.

Lyrical and tender, Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies connecting us all.

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My Review: Folklore, fairy tales, and fiction all contributed DNA to the central storytelling spine of Author Hur's tale told here. It was fascinating because the matter-of-fact presentation, and response within the story, to fantastical elements like erudite animal professors of magic thoroughly entertained me.

I was less sure of myself than I'm accustomed to being when it came to untranslated passages...I can get most European languages wrapped in my head but Korean's completely outside my familiarity zone. I had to work harder, and was not always in the mood to do so. Cultural blind spot detected! I realize how much of this story was context. I wouldn't give it to an average high-school kid because I wouldn't expect them to have enough familiarity with the fairy tales and folklore referenced just yet.

Plenty of adults who don't batten on story mechanics and cultural transmission of ideas are going to need Professor Wikipedia and Doctor Google as consultants, too. Which brings to mind a point I might be reading too much into: I enjoyed the inclusion of science in Author Hur's storytelling milieus. It's a very true observation, science is all about making data tell a story only it gets called a proof not a tale, theory not lore, and so on.

A fascinating way to make a novel. It resonated with me on most every level. I did not ever feel an emotional closeness to or connection with the characters; I believe that is Author Hur's design, as they're enmeshed in storytelling systems not simply responding to events messily and randomly as most people do. It's effective and, as soon as I clocked this explanation for why I felt...apart from...the characters I appreciated the subtlety of the effect. (Now, of course, someone will bring up a quote from Author Hur saying the opposite is true because that's how V and Angela both operate in this story!)

I enjoy dark academia stories. I thoroughly love school-set magical tales; I never left Roke Island after 1969. I think the truth of human intelligence being a function of pattern detection and creation is never more clear than in this area of storytelling. Even though I identified (or invented) why I felt distanced from the characters, I still can't offer that fifth star because that coldness, that remove from their inner workings, left me unmoored at key moments. It's not a fatal flaw, and it doesn't feel like an authorial oversight or a judgment error. It is always the case that the author writes the book they want to write not specifically the one I-the-reader want to read; but potential other readers should know where this specific reader found wants unmet in case they have similar storytelling needs.

Immersion into the systems of Story is as much fun as immersive storytelling, when one knows that's what's offered and is what one is in the mood for. A tale to enjoy, an experience of pleasure and satisfaction is within, so come and get it.

COUNTRY PEOPLE, latest Daniel Mason book after North Woods

COUNTRY PEOPLE
DANIEL MASON
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking work of lyricism and humor, about one family’s tumble into the unknown, from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of North Woods

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

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My Review: Absurd, overstuffed storytelling with the effect of making fun of tropey stories by being one.

California sophisticates uprooting themselves to follow the academic goldmine of research funding, tenure, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow...all of these ideas are really the same...and encountering wacky neighbors sound familiar? Put New York in for Cali, and it's Newhart; putthe 1960s in for today, it's Green Acres; it's not the structure that makes the tale fresh it's the characters. We're going to care about them, or the book falls flat.

I myownself wasn't terribly excited by the cast.

Kate the breadwinner, was longsuffering, Miles the dreamer was impractical, the kids (Olive and Wesley) were precocious, and will you look at the time? Suddenly it's 1980! I gave it the full four stars because there are loads of lines like: "But what was he to do, stay out of the woods? Then he met a man in camouflage in a tree who told him that if he didn’t get some blaze orange on him and his dog, their heads were going to end up together on someone’s wall," and set-pieces like the truffle-hunting dog in the weird national park no one's ever heard of that Miles the dreamer makes sure they visit.

It's a book version of a superior sitcom from pre-social media/reality TV days. I chuckled, even laughed out loud. Now that it's been a week since I finished the read, I remember literally nothing from it. If I had no notes I'd've sworn an oath I'd never opened the thing at all. It's not poor, it's not substandard on a craft level, it's just that it's doing something I do not care about.

I'd be glad to find this book in my summer rental's scanty bookshelf. I'd even be fine with checking it out of the library. If you want one for Yule I'll be happy to give it to you.

I won't ever re-read it, and if I recommend it to you it will be because you've asked for ideas for gentle, unchallenging reads.

BLACK BAG, award-winning poet/novelist tantalizes with identity-exploring novel

BLACK BAG
LUKE KENNARD
Zando (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 18, 2026

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Shortlist will be announced on September 22.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

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My Review: I...don't know about the impact, impression, image this one's left on and in my brain. It's kind of a lot as a read. Many will flinch at the punctuation and dialogue tags being unorthodox. Others (me among 'em) will get cold collywobbles from the fact this is based around a real experiment performed in an academic setting.

I'll never be fully easy around stories where people do bizarre, kind of abuse-enabling things for money. Please see Docile by K.M. Szpara for my perfect squeam-book. This story is worse...it basically happened, though this is not non-fiction about the real events.

The premise, as you've seen, is weird...the jacket illustration is about the best match for the subject one will ever find. So there is no ambiguity or misdirection in aesthetic or factual presentation. That's where unambiguous territory ends in this story. Our actor MC, hereinafter "Black Bag" because his name is never vouchsafed to us, is slightly desperate for a paying gig, but as we discover over time he is generally slightly desperate. Dr. Blend (!) chose him well, deliberately, and knowingly as we learn over the course of the story. His job is to be physically present in the back of this psychology class, featureless and silent, for some socially experimental purpose.

It doesn't take long for the students to attempt interactions with Black Bag. Could you resist a looming presence that's giving nothing of any human sort? No eyes? No face? No noises of normal body functioning...breathing, swallowing, sighing...all muffled by the bag? What sounds uncanny would naturally become deeply unsettling, irresistibly fascinating, unnervingly alluring, as it sat among, but not a part of, the entire class. There are characters attempting to get responses from Black Bag. There are characters thinking of Black Bag, not obviously gendered, as a sexual challenge. Others as a gender-wars provocation. Others still as a threat of undetermined severity and unknown nature. What those responses start as, and how they morph through Black Bag's unresponsive presence, is utterly unexpected to the participants in the experiment.

Is that an entire over-300-page novel's-worth of story? It's true I was always interested in the read. As it happened, the story flowed from sentence to sentence with pleasurable facility of expression as one would expect of award-winning Author Kennard. At the end of the chapters...and there are 89 of 'em...I'd lose steam in the reading experience and it would take a week or more for me to feel prompted to pick it up again. I'm not entirely sure this is not related to my own participation in the experiment through the read...was I ever not part of the experiment, as in did Author Kennard not envision that the act of reading this story was another facet of responding to Black Bag? Was he also responding to the experiment by getting fascinated by the story, writing it...always an act of externalization as writing requires, at its core, a version of narrative therapy?

As we travel through the course being taught, the effects of the experiment on Black Bag himself morph and grow more and more pervasive. It's not surprising, on the one hand, that he becomes really comfortable in the protective space of the black bag. He's a struggling actor. His career prospects, before the anonymity of the black bag, weren't great. But inside the black bag, his identity is mysterious, intriguing, alluring...all things an actor loves, relies on for securing and doing his job. He wasn't being seen as those things walking around in his normal condition and now he is.

So walking around the campus and the town as Black Bag makes perfect sense, then.

Not to my claustrophobic self. I battled a sense of desperate, breathless resistance every time he put the stupid thing on.

So that might explain why I found the ending...wanting. Justine, a true and complete freak, enters into Black Bag's orbit with the firm intent of making Black Bag a conquest. Claudio, more reserved but still excitable and into Black Bag (apparently platonically though there's ambiguity and vibey-ness enough to make my gaydar ping) is the other side character who interested me. Others are involved, but honestly, they're just not that fascinating to me. Squishy, blah Sophie most of all. All the way through the read he's Black Bag, he's there as a screen for these people to project fantasies, needs, fears onto all blank and visually heavy like black objects tend to be.

The experiment, the last one Dr. Blend will conduct as he is retiring after this course, is ambiguous in design by design. That means it ends ambiguously. I was expecting that. I felt, however, this iteration of the story left the events unresolved in the dramatic sense...the final scene as an ending wasn't, the real ending as in the place the story resolved itself was earlier, with this musing inner speech from Black Bag:

Have you ever met a man who got exactly what he wanted? They always seem a little confused, even shell-shocked, They speak at one remove, as if delivering their own eulogy.
I wish to be alive, to continue to live, even should that mean a state of constant deferral. How much do you want to appear in other people's thoughts at all? As little as possible, I think. If I could, I would take everything I have ever thought about anyone else and delete it forever.

I think the story is fascinating but the not-main characters less so. I'd say this is an ideal library borrow, one that will reward you for reading it but not compel most of us to revisit it time and again.

THE JOHN WILLIAMS PAGE: STONER; and THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life

THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life
CHARLES J. WILLIAMS
University of Texas Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An “engrossing” biography of a brilliant novelist underappreciated in his own time who became a twenty-first-century bestseller, from the New York Times–bestselling author (The New Yorker).

When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet the quietly powerful tale of Midwestern college professor William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish, eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C.P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.”

This biography traces the life of Stoner’s author, John Williams. Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams’s life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams’s development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after a Dutch publisher brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and sold over a million copies.

“Like Williams, Shields know how to tell a good story, one that will appeal especially to those interested in the ins and outs of the publishing industry and the ups and downs of a writer’s life.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

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My Review: My earlier reading of Author Shields' excellent And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life made me eager to read this book about John Williams. My as-yet unblogged review of Stoner is below, to add the needed context to my ideas about this book and its subject.

I think the reason this book never got to pop-culture awareness, in spite of Stoner's tremendous success in the twenty-first century, is simple: John Williams is a shitty human being. I mean, men of his generation more often than not were shitty, and abusive, and sexist...homophobic...by our standards of acceptability, irredeemable in ways even Armie Hammer and Neil Gaiman don't approach. Tempus fugit; sic transit gloria mundi.

No one would get away with Vonnegut's misogyny and sexism today, yet here's a man who wrote one of the most horrendous, harridanly women in literature...Edith Stoner...irredeemable even in victim terms, as her malevolence is obvious long before her husband rapes her. What I could never figure out is why she hated Stoner so much, he was never any kind of promising except of failure and disappointment. She wasn't duped; she married the real him, looking down on him every step of the way.

And Williams' life? He insisted Stoner was fictional. I myownself, after reading this book, think otherwise. The litany of grievances against life, work, colleagues (he had no friends that I thought deserved the name), all of it: Stoner. So how does he, Williams, get a pass from the literati? Beats me all hollow, though I suspect it's merely a matter of time.

What made me enjoy this book so much was the factual reporting of his life story: The multiple infidelities and marriages; his early infatuation with theater; his early love for Look Homeward, Angel, that adolescent's dream book; his admiration for Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the film of A Tale of Two Cities (I shudder even typing that sentence fragment, go look at the link to see why; oleaginous much?). These facts and many more make as comprehensible and clear a picture of the man who could author Stoner as well as the proto-Blood Meridian Western-but-don't-tell-him-you're-calling-it-that Butcher's Crossing as one could ever hope to find.

Violence, in John Williams' œuvre, is less physiologically present than in McCarthy's. It's not dwelt on with loving, prurient, in my view pornographic lingering money shots of prose. It's, well, I guess my best match between vocabulary and feeling is clinical. John Williams was undoubtedly an acoholic, an abusive and distant man, and the way to be all those things is to be removed from one's emotional states, to devalue and deny empathy while, paradoxically, demanding that very feeling for one's characters as they enact worse and worse things on their victims.

Should one who has not read any Williams, but would like to, read this biography? Not with any expectation of still wanting to read his work. It's a good way to learn how you'll respond to the work itself though. I don't know how knowing about the real person doing the writing of the books we know and love should make us feel. It varies, I suppose, from reader to reader, from writer to writer.

I'll go out on a limb and say that, for $2.99 on Kindle, the answer in this case is "absolutely do read it." Author Shields is enough of a talented storyteller to make time spent learning how nasty one person can get worth one's time.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

STONER
JOHN WILLIAMS
NYRB Classics
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 2, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

I BOUGHT A PAPERBACK FROM THE PUBLISHER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. THANK YOU, PAST SELF.

My Review: I went into this read thinking it'd be another wildly overpraised midcentury modern grimfest. I was happily proved wrong, though that is the last time I will ever use the word "happy" in conjunction with this tale.

A story about a small Prufrockian man, doomed from the get-go to a disappointing existence unworthy of the descriptor "life" by any but the most generous definition of the subject. Author Alex Preston (Goodreads profile link), in a 2015 review he blogged, said of Stoner:

With each of Stoner’s defeats, he backs further and further away from us, his voice becoming more distant, his character less alive on the page. At the start of the novel, I was yelling at him to grow a pair. By the time he lets his wife sacrifice their daughter on the altar of her motiveless malignancy, I’d given up on him entirely. I read through to the end because I wanted to see if...there would be something elegiac, a note of quiet redemption in the final passages of the book. There wasn’t.

Scathing! Angry, upset, and not wrong in any way. Yet, as Author Preston's fury warms my heart, I am required by my own appreciation of the story to admit that I found these very things to be the raison d'etre of the novel, and the beating heart of John Williams' artistry. He told a failure's life in a failure's language; he accepted Stoner as the small, ungreased cog in a small, janky machine full of others like him that Williams himself was.

So, while very aware of this divisive thematic and stylistic choice will not be to everyone's taste, I can honestly and wholeheartedly say it was very much to mine.

Casey Affleck was set to portray Stoner in the film! (Although ten years on, I think we're safe to assume the project has spluttered out.) This was excellent news! I...enjoyed, liked, all those words seem full of misplaced chirpiness applied to Stoner's small, cramped life...resonated with this novel and after seeing Mr. Affleck in Manchester by the Sea I can only be happy and grateful he might yet assume the leading role in it.

LESSER RUINS, shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses

LESSER RUINS
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3 very grouchy stars of five

Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses Winner announced 12 March 2025

The Publisher Says: From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I connected with this sad-sack whiner in his grief for his dead wife, and his beautifully evoked love for coffee.

Apart from that, I loathed him and wanted him to shut his moan-hole.

I live (involuntarily and with poor grace) in proximity to a grievance-led, dementia-addled, old drunk. This is like reading the smart version of him venting his legit sadness and tiresome regrets in the key of "they done me wrong" on endless repeat.

I think this book is better than I perceive it to be, due to my own life's issues and difficulties. It has to be, to have elicited from me the degree of irritated disgust with its protagonist that it did. Had it been simply a poor job of writing or storytelling, I'd simply have Pearl-Ruled it and moved on with my day.

Read the free sample that Kindle offers you, you'll know right away if this resonates with you, and if the resonance is on a frequency you enjoy reverberating to. I very much did not like this read. The reasons I've given suggest to me that others without my life circumstances will feel otherwise.

My rating being an expression of my personal pleasure in the read explains its paltriness. You will most likely, or so I hope, disagree with me.

PROVIDENCE, first novel of gay psychological suspense

PROVIDENCE
CRAIG WILLSE
Union Square & Co.
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An introverted English professor falls for an enigmatic sophomore and is lured into a web of chaos and deceit.

Mark Lausson, a professor stuck in the middle of Ohio, is smart enough to get a job at an elite liberal arts college but not smart enough to know better when he meets charismatic sophomore Tyler Cunningham. In Tyler, Mark sees another way of being in the world—he finds Tyler’s self-possession both compelling and unsettling. Caught in the rush of sex and secrets, Mark ignores the increasing evidence that Tyler can’t be trusted. But by the time Mark comes to his senses, the irreparable damage is done. Providence shows how feeling trapped in our own lives can lead us to make choices we otherwise would not and the ways in which sexual desire can distort our senses of self and other, right and wrong.

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

My Review: A slow, suspenseful read that takes on gay intergenerational relationships. It does it in a very squicky way, as the power dynamic between teachers and students is (even when inverted as here) very, very fraught. There is a lot of pornography in the gay-male pornosphere that centers on incest...a thing that causes me no little discomfort for obvious reasons...and then, one step lower on the transgression ladder, a fair bit of teacher/student porn.

I'm not going to label this read as a one-handed reading story, but a few judicious pacing changes and a bit more descriptive instead of allusive language et voilà!

Mark gets tangled up in his history...not fully explored or explained...and Tyler uses his youthful beauty to make that history come alive; the results are predictable. The story isn't groundbreaking, the pacing isn't thrilling, so it sounds like my hatchet's about to come out, doesn't it? Nope. No hatchet job, this.

I'd label this a psychological suspense novel not a mystery or a thriller. The crime doesn't need solving; the pace is not thrilling. There is a lot of suspense, however, in the psychology of the developing relationship between Mark and Tyler; what is this kid after, and why did her target Mark, for starters. Had Author Willse and/or his editors developed Tyler and his motivations more, I'd be five-star hollerin' about this book. Tyler is the weakest part of the narrative: A kind of ambulatory "why, how come". Tyler's calculating nature is seen solely in its results and that leaves me thinking only about the nasty results of his manipulations for those he doesn't notice or even care about. Mark's perfectly nice, if boring, life gets upended and ruined from the outside. His boyfriend, whose name utterly escapes me, gets his world crashed by the narrative equivalent of a rock from space...for what? I'm not advocating for an excuse for Tyler's actions. Just a reason.

That said, this is a first novel and so gets most of a pass on some structural issues. I recommend the read to fellow old gay men who have much younger men in their lives; to those seeking a weekend's immersion into the consequences of a disastrous affair; and psychological suspense readers needing a fresh angle on their preferred genre.

HOW TO MAKE A SLAVE and Other Essays, a finalist for a National Book Award

HOW TO MAKE A SLAVE and Other Essays
JERALD WALKER
Mad Creek Books
$19.95 paperback or ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The reason we read essays, as readers, is almost the opposite of why we read fiction of all stripes, not to broaden our experience of humanness but to particularize it. Dr. Walker's essays about being Black in academia, in the slums of his boyhood, of being a small-town dad of sons who are Othered by their skin color, of being his own unique self in a world that wasn't ready with a place for him to fit, are as particular as one can hope to find. And that is why they resonate so fully with my older, whiter, place-was-made-before-I-cared self. How often have I wondered what in the hell I should say when my half-Black Young Gentleman Caller makes a joke about hair (I have next to none, his is abundant, and the contrast tickles him to no end. Ha ha ha) or his (pale) skin color..."I am closer in hue to a banana than a plum," says Dr. Walker at one point...and am left shtumm because, well, no matter that he's chosen an old white man for his confidant and bedmate, I can still hear the hurt in his voice or see it in the frozen-for-a-second smile when someone's comment is a microaggression. To my delight, my silence or my simple smiling and laughing without comment have kept me from experiencing that swallowed hurt at my words.

So far.

The years Dr. Walker spent in seeking an MFA were spent being mentored by James Alan McPherson, a monadnock of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and one of the most admired and sought-after guides to the unforgiving world of seeking literary excellence. His story collection, Elbow Room, won him the first Pultizer Prize for Fiction awarded to a Black person. Who better to create another Black male artist? And so he did, in Dr. Walker, after some rough moments at the beginning of their association. He was capable of delivering great advice, and making it go down like a spoonful of sugar instead of the bitter and damned toxic draft of reality that it truly was:

"Stereotypes are valuable," he said. "But only if you use them to your advantage. They present your readers with something they'll recognize, and it pulls them into what appears to be familiar territory, a comfort zone. But once they're in, you have to move them beyond the stereotype. You have to show them what's real."

"And what's real?" I asked.

Without hesitation, he said, "You."

That one sounds so innocent...and the one-word lance through the armor and into the heart is why so many deeply talented and delightful writers don't ever quite make it, get past the early parts of a career. How cruel it is to have to commit to endless hours of honing and polishing and rending one's psychic flesh for a few grand on a good day, and free on a bad one! But success is all in practice and work, and no one in American history has known that more than our unappreciated and unsupported artists. So few make it....

But some become epoch-defining superstars. Memories of Michael Jackson, unsurprisingly, loom large in Dr. Walker's youth as it coincided with the man's inescapable pop-culture presence in the later 1970s and early 1980s. I drove around with Michael Jackson on the radio because he was what was playing, what was in demand, whose talent and sound were *exactly* what the Whitegeist wanted. He sounded, I realized from reading the essay about him, very different to a young Black boy in the Chicago ghetto. Dr. Walker and his brothers were caught up in a different stream of the times than I was, and this passage tells me what I need to know: We shared the planet, for better or worse, in ways that can't be fully reconciled but can be felt, deeply, in our love of someone who made something powerful and lasting:

While I do not know if this is true, I have a vague memory that the three of us, in 1983, watched the Motown 25 television special together, and maybe we rose at some point to to attempt Michael's moonwalk before collapsing back into our seats, succumbing to the dope coursing through our veins, much as dope would course through Michael's, nearly three decades later, and stop his heart.

Mine stopped, for a moment, when I heard the news. And in that pause before grief, I had a vision of the Walker Six, dancing and singing...and then it was gone.

How we all mourn our quiet fantasy lives being rendered impossible by death...and who hasn't dreamed of What Might Have Been?

A place where I felt Dr. Walker's essayistic honesty let me, his happy reader, down was in a passage about an older gay man who offered cold, wet Jerald a ride to where he didn't much want to walk. He was treated to a request for sex, and handled that unwelcome advance with apolmb. He wasn't pressured or forced, he just got out of the car where he was going...was seen...and was later upbraided by his brother (whose own trajectory wasn't as happy as Dr. Walker's) and required to explain himself. Dr Walker goes on to tell us of the many signs of gayness that he and the Black community just...overlooked...because:

Blacks had had their fill of emasculation over the centuries of slavery; the need to not see male homosexuality in our community was strong.

I chose a comedy slap GIF, and one with two white men as its actors, to emphasize how deeply out of my sense of the essayist's carefully acquired sense of honest and effortful inclusion this passage is. I was gobsmacked by the casual assumption in that minor sentence, not in any way led up to or made the point of the piece, that gay men are not masculine and that to be gay is to be, like the slaves of yore, less than a man.

I can only assume that the espousal of this calumny isn't so; it's really out of character from all the other work in the book; but it left a sour place in my opinion of both work and man.

But the scars of disrespect for the community I live in are as nothing to the fears Dr. Walker woke in me with his horrifying brush with medical racism as his young son is having seizures...and the ignorant idiot in his small town's hospital, without drawing blood or doing anything at all except looking at two horror-struck Black parents of a child whose world needs to be fixed, now, or they're never ever going to be happy again, and says, "It could be syphilis."

SYPHILIS. Congenital, obviously, he's a child; and a Black child, obviously from a Black parent and we all know how THEY are about sex, so hey, maybe your child has it, what do you think?

What they thought was that a trip to Boston would get them the help they needed without the side-trimmings of racist bullshit. Paroxysmal Kinesigenic Dyskinesia is the diagnosis, a "neurological disorder that can trigger petit (mal) seizures when the body is suddenly thrust into motion." Move too quickly, get thrown into a seizure. Wow, there goes that whole school athletics program, and no way will you be getting swimming lessons, son...don't jump a lot...dancing? mmm...maybe not....

But a diagnosis. And with it, a way forward, a way to be your son's dad as he needs you to be, the one he turns to to fix the things that are wrong in his world. And that is a way forward. The meditation on being a father in that kind of terror-stress, of having the responsibility to make your child whole, cannot be more universal. Cannot be more particular. Cannot be better, more bravely, more fully honestly Himself, Dr. Jerald Walker; and that's why I rate this fascinating and touching and brutally honest collection of essays as high as I do, and hope he wins a National Book Award for 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.

BRIGHTFELLOW by Rikki Ducornet is a deeply pleasurable summer read

BRIGHTFELLOW
RIKKI DUCORNET
Coffee House Press
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. A fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and the many ways we are both visible and invisible to one another.

My Review: Why do people read Rikki Ducornet's novels? That's not the beginning of a takedown. It's a question that, in the final analysis, will tell the reader why a certain reviewer is likely to highlight factors of equal importance to potential Ducornet reader and reviewer alike. It's sad that I feel the need to say this, but there is no right or wrong answer to the question; one looks for whatever one wishes, for whatever personal reason, and de gustibus et coloribus non disputandum est.

I'm always up for a trip to the effervescent fountain of Ducornet's verbal effusions. I love the simple, natural way she uses words to create images that less gifted writers can only envy. Her work is filled with glorious and gorgeous moments that are invisible to most people and all but the most fortunate muse-chasers:

Sometimes when the snow falls she says: How I love weather. And he loves her for it. Loves her for it so much his heart blooms like a tiger lily and he roars his happiness; he roars and runs about and his pleasure delights her. In these moments their friendship is secure, eternal, luminous; their friendship rings the hours. These words of hers give him hope; he too loves weather, the safety of seasons, each bringing a gift: snow, rain, sun, wind. But because he is a dreamy child, fall is his favorite. Perhaps it reflects the best moments of family life: days of color, of clement weather--and this before the first mornings of heavy fog; the first blizzard when the sky is wiped away and the sun dissolves in brine; the first ice storm, one of many, when he can hear the world outside shattering.

My favorite season is also fall, but never in a million years could I have conjured such a gorgeous litany of reasons it is so. And although my own difficult mother and I shared a love for the weather and the progress of seasons, I wouldn't have thought of this as cement for a friendship that would make her inevitable betrayal of the mother/child bond (after all this is Rikki Ducornet's novel we're talking about and this is her evergreen trope) all the sharper and more painful.

It's very clear that Ducornet grew up in Canton, New York, for some of her childhood. It's not a very interesting place despite the presence of St. Lawrence University, with SUNY-Plattsburgh nearby. It is, however, a place that would logically create a passion for nature in its natives. It seems to have imbued Ducornet and her writing with a sense of place that underpins even her most shatteringly painful life events, as foreshadowed here:

Along the Hudson River, the world goes on forever, unspooling, and just when you think you know it, something happens, the summer is snatched away by an ice storm, a blizzard dissolves the spring, there are moths in sudden numbers, an unprecedented migration of geese. Autumn arrives unparalleled in its beauty. The river gleams, there are shad and snapping turtles, quantities of water chestnuts, and under porches: copperheads.

If America has gods, this is where they dwell--under rocks, in the branches of trees, in ivy, skunkweed, the hearts of fish, the flight of geese. But--everyone says it--things no longer shine as they once did. Ever since the war, everything is dimmer.

Ever since we, the people, learned that there is no place far enough away to hide from the evils that frightened people will support for the frayed, flimsy illusion of security. Ever since the end of our collective childhood. How cruel that maturity, the loss of illusion, rips the gloss of the natural world away from us as well as the comforting lie that people are good and kind instead of behaving in good and kind ways when it suits them to. Yet the sense of the uniqueness of a place, once learned, is impossible to put aside or have torn from you. It is, I suppose, why exceptionally calm and generous people are called "grounded," since all of such people I've met have this inalienable sense of place. Come to think of it, they also have lost their illusions about the benignity of both nature and humanity. They've been Ducorneted.

Stub, our PoV character, has been Ducorneted. His childhood was scraped off him with a wood-rasp, leaving blood and exposed nerve endings. He's free, in other words. Like many people he finds freedom a little bewildering at first, and sets out to create something recognizable as a life in the most familiar environment he can find. The college, unnamed but full of rich, privileged kids, has dominated Stub's world since he can remember. Ducornet's description of the place makes it clear she's modeling it on Bard College where her father was a Professor after World War II. Stub's father was a maintenance man at the college, so after his father's death it feels natural to him to take up a stealth existence there. He feasts on the leavings of others, the rich kids' carelessly tossed aside possessions that they'll never miss. He eats what he can scrounge. He's an unseen part, but a part nonetheless, of the college's life. He sees everything and is affected by little of it, as he's never been part of such a normal world. Then comes the emotional entanglement that ends Stub's existence:

The first time he saw Asthma she was in a tree. He had already seen Blackie, a hot machine made of rivets and spinning gears, like a pressure cooker and a robot combined. She was like his own mother, always heating up and letting off steam. Asthma was better off in the tree than in the house.

And so is born the curiously asexual passion of a young man for a child. It's more than a little bit creepy.

It is also the event that fractures the shell of Stub's isolated hunter-gatherer existence. It necessitates a new identity, so Stub becomes "Charter Chase." He foregoes his wandering freedom and accepts the kind charity of an elderly retiree, Billy, who lives next door to Asthma and her horrid mother Blackie. He sings for his supper, taking as his score the work and life of a reclusive former professor and writer called Vanderloon. His youthful haunting of the college library had introduced Charter to Vanderloon and his bizarre life and works. The college possesses the entire archive of Vanderloon's career squirreled away, uncatalogued, in the library where no one is interested in it or ever consults it. Charter takes this as his identity for Billy's sake. He creates himself as a scholar of this unpopular writer, giving himself wide latitude to invent tales tailored to suit Billy's lonely old heart:

Vision is one thing, Vanderloon liked to say, and observation is another. When on Easter Island he had learned of the bird's superiority over the fish, he understood in a flash what informed the entire culture. He saw that the Easter Islanders were themselves like raptors, snapping away at one another until there was nothing left. Easter Island, he wrote in Rules of Rage, is the mirror of all that is wrong with a species that again and again snaps up the fish rather than attempt to understand it. Today Charter puzzles over this. He thinks he does not want to be either one. He wants to survive but not snap anybody up in the process. A hare is what he wants to be. The one that with a leap, disappears.

He will make sure that he gives value for value received, but there is no way for Charter to know what "forever" or even "sometimes" means in relationship to others. He is a raptor, denying his raptor's nature. It can't and won't last.

While it does, at least in reference to Billy, Charter's unique passion has a safe harbor. His window overlooks Asthma's bedroom, and he makes full use of his perch to view his obsession's object in all phases of her life, from quotidian tasks to wild fanciful play:

Asthma plucks [the crocodile] from the crowd [of toy animals] and sets him down in front of the bees.

"Tell the crocodile why you have come all this way to celebrate First Snow and stay here with us forever and ever!" The bees begin to buzz and to hum. (If you looked very closely, you would see that each carries a tiny musical instrument--a harmonica, zither, xylophone, castanets, and so on. One holds a baton.)

"Honey!" the bees sing. "Bee cake. Royal jelly!" The bees sing in harmony. Their music is prestissimo!

Nothing is more intoxicating that seeing a child at concentrated personal play. I'd guess that every parent has seen that deep, what-world? kind of play with the same wistful desire to experience it again, knowing that to insert oneself into the magic is to destroy it. Here's Charter, barely older than Asthma to jaded adult eyes, deeply engrossed in how deeply engrossed she is in a world of her own making. It's the most relatable part of Charter's verging-on-Lolita-level passion. It's completely understandable from that point of view, but still is a bit squicky.

He's chosen Asthma to be his Lolita and not the other faculty daughter living near both of them, called Pea Pod. Her mother is called Goldie, and seems to be perfectly suited to raise such an ordinary unremarkable little shrew. She is prone to fight with Asthma, to Charter's distress. Billy perceives all children as more or less interchangeable, since he's never been a father. They're merely noisy little savages. He has no idea how it hurts Charter to lump his precious Asthma in with a brat like Pea Pod. Why, even Pea Pod's own father has deeply mixed feelings about her (as well as the rest of his life):

Everything is so tiresome, so tedious. If only Pea Pod were an easier child to live with. And Goldie, too, is difficult. When they met he thought her handsome. He admired her heavy skeleton. She was clearly made to last. But now her size exhausts him. Living with Goldie is like living with a boa constrictor or a large piece of farm equipment. She's a tyrant, when you think of it, and when she sits down at the piano the world trembles.

The apple don't fall to far from the tree. Asthma has discovered Charter, as has Pea Pod, though without any joy such as Charter's presence and storytelling ability brings to Asthma. He spins sophisticated tales of wonder for her, amusing her with the concept of the queen of the beetles that live under a log in the front yard as "La Papesse," the Lady Pope, who is attended by courtier beetles bearing balls of cinnabar-infused beeswax to polish Her Holiness with. Shades of the relationship with Billy! Charter tells him equally fanciful tales that make about as much sense as this one. Because it is Charter telling it, the old man and the little girl who are loved by and in love with Charter accept the words, concepts, images he feeds them. Much like a reader and a writer, don't you think? As Pea Pod isn't fond of Charter, is even jealous of Charter's hold on Asthma, she doesn't stretch outside her ordinariness to play along.

It's in this passage that Charter receives a new identity, that of "Brightfellow," from his adored Asthma. It suits her image of him as a bright fellow, and it suits Brightfellow because he was given it by his Asthma:

Asthma. Asthma in the glass! A grain of sugar in his eye. Today she is leaping like a colt from the floor to her bed, bed to floor, floor to bed, then dashing through the house. Her feet are bare and her spare cotton dress billows like petals around her small frame. When he hears the front door slam he gets up to find and follow her. But when he hits the Circle she is simply in the front yard beside the beetle log, poking at it with a twig.

"So where are they, Brightfellow?" she asks.

"They live eventful lives."

And in his hands they do indeed. In her eyes, as in a sympathetic reader's, he is perfectly named Brightfellow.

In the end, and you know that it has to end, Brightfellow can't fool all the people all the time. His world on the Circle ends, but we are left with the clear knowledge that another begins for him. This is the source of my half-star hit on the story's rating. It's much of a Ducornetness with her other works, not that there's anything wrong with that!, but this ending simply feels incompatible with the rest of the book. It doesn't launch Brightfellow deeper into his strange inner world, nor does it drag him out of it. The event that wraps the story up is a set-up for more of the same. That doesn't really satisfy this reader. I am picky, I admit it, but I've seen La Ducornet pull much healthier rabbits out of her hat than this.

Still and all, still and all--this is a pleasure read and a perfect way to wile away a few hours on a hot summer afternoon.

SAVING THE HOOKER, a lot funnier than the films it satirizes!

SAVING THE HOOKER
MICHAEL ADELBERG
The Permanent Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Matthew Hristahalois (Hrist-a-hal-E-os) is a not so scholarly scholar. He's obsessed with the "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" character that keeps turning up in movies like Pretty Woman and The Hangover—the beautiful and kind fallen woman who can only be saved by Prince Charming. Matthew wins a post-doc to see if real fallen women can be saved by a good man. He casts himself as Prince Charming and sets out to study and rehabilitate real New York City prostitutes, at least until he meets a fiery auburn-haired prostitute who calls herself Julia Roberts.

Saving the Hooker is a fast-paced assault on male hubris and the recycled fairy tales at the core of so many of our favorite books and movies. It is also a bawdy tour of lower Manhattan's escort service prostitution scene, a poke in the eye of academic orthodoxy, and a not-so-subtle send up of cable television talk-news. Centered on the combustible relationship between Matthew and Julia, Saving the Hooker makes comic hash out of modern America's show horse institutions and sacred cow issues: academia, high and low media, political correctness, misogyny, and sexual assault.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't at all enjoy the way women are portrayed in major-budget films. They're scheming scum, out to hurt every man they meet, or they're saintly supporters, human jock straps meant to keep Their Man's balls in the air no matter how hard gravity pulls on 'em. Thus there are mothers and wives, there are sex workers and assistants; there are not rivals and partners.

This sends the message that women exist for men, and have no valid existence aside from their relations with men. That being arrant nonsense, I long ago stopped enjoying any film that doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, and there are precious few of them. As the years pass, and as I grow to realize how few women actually think about men all that much, I realize that someone like Michael Adelberg is on to something. He's also almost alone in talking about it. I hope he's not as alone in thinking about it.

Sadly I suspect that he is.

I lied to my father about having a real girlfriend: I conned my old friends into thinking I was a dude with fun friends; and I pulled this off by financing sexual favors, including the loss of my own virginity, with the center’s research funds.

What makes the story of Matthew's search for the roots of the "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" tale as funny as it is, is the pace the author sustains. Humor needs speed. Slow, ponderous things aren't usually funny, or at least not intentionally. Here we're careening all around Manhattan as Matthew bounces off the pachinko bumpers of misogyny (presented humorously but not played for laughs) and its stablemate political correctness...condescending mealy-mouthed nonsense with a genuinely important impetus, to stop cruel and belittling stereotyping...thus ramming at speed into clueless men and resigned, angrily despairing women.

For four nights, I imagined introducing myself to Ms. Caliente and telling her that I was a researcher. I imagined buying her a cup of coffee and talking with her about Mexico and how she fell into hooking. I imagined her telling me that I was the first truly nice man she’d ever known.

Matthew's Pilgrim's Progress is speeded up by the connections his academic focus makes a variety of stake-holders take an interest in his purpose. The "Wolf News Channel" episode made me laugh very scornfully, I admit. But the problem, as any grown-up knows, is that this lifestyle is expensive and deep pockets aren't common in academia...or not for very long, anyway. And worst of all, when he snags a perfect research subject he discovers that he's what he always was: A means to someone else's end.

This is a funny, bitter, cynical read that has big ambitions and only just falls short of realizing them fully. While Matthew's research is on the right track, he's still just a guy without a clue when it comes to women. He doesn't see, and doesn't see that he doesn't see, the hard truth that he comes across as the kid who fell off the pickle truck as it made a hard left onto Tenth Avenue. When life makes it too obvious for him to ignore, he responds in the stereotypical man way.

I trust all my readers will remember why The Pilgrim's Progress came to be. Now apply that here. And there you have the missing stars! Not everyone will feel as I do, so by all means adventure a bit and pick one up.

I got so much of what I wanted that I'm really annoyed I didn't get it all.

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.