SUPER EXTRA GRANDE, Cuban SF giant Yoss's hilarious, trenchant space opera

SUPER EXTRA GRANDE
YOSS (translated by David Frye)
Restless Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Intergalactic space travel meets outrageous, biting satire in Super Extra Grande…. Its author [Yoss] is one of the most celebrated—and controversial—Cuban writers of science fiction…. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams—but even more so, the satire of Rabelais and Swift.” —The Washington Post

In a distant future in which Latin Americans have pioneered faster-than-light space travel, Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo has a job with large and unusual responsibilities: he’s a veterinarian who specializes in treating enormous alien animals. Mountain-sized amoebas, multisex species with bizarre reproductive processes, razor-nailed, carnivorous humanoid hunters: Dr. Sangan has seen it all. When a colonial conflict threatens the fragile peace between the galaxy’s seven intelligent species, he must embark on a daring mission through the insides of a gigantic creature and find two swallowed ambassadors—who also happen to be his competing love interests.

Funny, witty, raunchy, and irrepressibly vivacious, Super Extra Grande is a rare specimen in the richly parodic tradition of Cuban science fiction, and could only have been written by a Cuban heavy-metal rock star with a biology degree: the inimitable Yoss.

My Review: Page one, first paragraph:

"Boss Sangan, sludge al frente and a la derecha, ten centímetros knee," Narbuck peevishly announces through my earbuds.

His voice reminds me unpleasantly of a screechy old machine in need of lube job. But that's not the worst of it. Worst is, he seems to go out of his way to mangle the grammar and syntax of the Spanglish language, stubbornly dropping prepositions and mutilating verbs like he's doing a bad impression of a native in a third-rate holoseries.

That's all you need to know to determine of this is a read for you. If this grates or fails to strike an agreeable note, go away now, because it's not gonna change and I like it, so I'll be quoting more of it.

Okay, all ashore who's goin' ashore? Bueno. Andemos al ruedo.

I'm tempted to make a stab at writing this review in Spanglish just because it would be fun and would make me feel all cool and stuff. Then I realized that old white men, even ones with a decent command of Spanish, don't get to have that kind of fun. Then I realized that showing off really is a major hoot and fuck all the haters. They're gonna hate anyway, so....

Nope. Can't. #ReadingIsResistance all right, but the thing I need to resist is being the center of attention when this book is rightfully the star of this show. Yoss wrote this story seven years ago and is probably hazy, after all this time and all his intervening books, on exactly what he wrote and why. What he wrote is a comedic space opera set in a future where the González Drive, invented by an Ecuadorian Catholic priest who won two Nobel Prizes—Physics, Mathematics—for it, gave humanity unfettered access to the galaxy. Once out there, humanity discovered that one species made it out before us, and then five more followed in short order because that's how probability would arrange it, all the technologically capable species figuring the solution to the problem of how to run away from home around the same time.

That's enough right there for me to fall in love. Then add in the copious word-play, the multilingual puns, the rampant sexism, the unambiguous human male bisexual experiences, the interspecies communication in Spanglish because it's so much easier than trying to teach dimwitted Earthlings any one of the other species' languages (not to mention the hydrogen-breathing species' telepathy, a whole different level of impossible to teach), the narrator named Jan Amos Sangan Dongo (hint: if you speak any Spanish at all, if you know any Cubans, wear a lifter's belt while reading this book or your diaphragm will hurt like sixty tomorrow). I read the book in one uproarious sitting. It's like the slightly high, vaguely tipsy conversation you had with your Hispanic crush-object back in college. (Y'all had one of those, right?)

FIRST SYLLOGISM
First Premise: Garden planet with oxygen atmosphere, relatively nonaggressive fauna, and exuberant flora, third from a type G2 yellow dwarf star; that is, very similar to the humans' Sun. A tempting nugget for any colony scheme.

Second Premise: Planetary system on the border between the human and Cetian zones. Humans name the promising planet Canaan. Cetians call it Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan, which in the language of the Goddess means "we deserve this because we are who we are."

Third Premise: Both species are highly expansionistic and will not hesitate to turn to violence if they think it necessary to support and/or safeguard their interests.

Conclusion: To avoid sparking a large-scale armed conflict, in the years following the First Battle of Canaan (a minor skirmish that left thousands of casualties on both sides), neither race risks settling the tempting border world. They sign a solemn treaty sanctioning this unstable but reassuring equilibrium. A tiny joint garrison of troops from both species will oversee compliance.

Some points: First, the Cetians are not, as you're saying it in your head, SEE-shuns. They're SETTEE-uns, beings from a planet around Tau Ceti. Second, Jan Sangan (chuckle) is a biological veterinarian specializing in the biggest of the big creatures around the galaxy. He's almost eight feet tall and very strong. You gettin' the vibe for why this is Super Extra Grande? He's a graduate of the Anima Mundi (Animal Planet, get it?) University for Biological Sciences where he had to study logic, hence the syllogistic format. Up to speed? Okay:

SECOND SYLLOGISM
First Premise: Far, far from Canaan, the grassland planet Olduvaila, a First Wave human colony world, has barely eight-tenths the gravity of Earth. Its inhabitants, descendants of the Maasai people, average seven feet in height as adults and specialize in cattle ranching.

Second Premise: Bwana, a gas giant approximately the size of Saturn and the fourth planet in the same system, passes near Olduvaila every fourteen years, and with each pass it overwhelms the colonial world's weaker gravity and captures a bit more of its atmosphere. This process has been going on for millions of years...but after two or three more passes, the declining density of the local atmosphere will leave it too thin for the humans and their herds to breathe. Already the air on Olduvaila is barely equivalent the atmosphere at an altitude of five thousand meters on Earth.

Third Premise: The Maasai, a cattle-herding African people from whom the human colonizers on Olduvaila are descended, have a strong warrior tradition and have never resigned themselves to being defeated by drought, famine, other natural disasters...or any enemy.

Conclusion: The warlike and desperate inhabitants of the dying planet Olduvaila are seeking another world where they can move. Urgently and en masse, no matter where it is and no matter whose bodies they have to step over to get there.

Some points: The wonderful planet name Canaan/"we deserve this because we are who we are" now meets the equally wonderful "Olduvai-la." The Maasai do indeed count the Olduvai Gorge in their territory. The Cradle of Humankind, Lucy's backyard. Planet Bwana, "master," is stealing the very air from the Africans. If there's a more amusing and apt way to handle an info-dump, I've yet to encounter it.

And on goes Yoss for four more syllogisms, outlining the course of a cracking good space opera replete with battleships and explosions and feats of derring-do! And not one bit of that happens! Well, there's a battleship, but it's the place where the telepathic hydrogen-breathing Juhungans have offered to host a diplomatic summit (shades of the Enterprise, eh what?) to avoid the looming interspecies war. Enter Jan Sangan (chuckle), Biological Veterinarian to the Super Extra Grande, because the negotiators are trapped on Brobdingnag (Swift is spinning about now) inside a two-hundred-kilometer living lake of protoplasm called Cosita. (The closest English equivalent I can come up with for this in its intended nickname use is the Southern American affectionate contronym "Little Bit.") Bonus: the negotiators are both former employees of his! Added extra bonus: they're both female and desirable! But wait, there's more: they're each in love with Jan Sangan (chuckle), quite famously and publicly, even though he fired them because he won't sleep with the help!

This kind of playful, gonzo storytelling always gets my vote for escapist reading. Yoss's jabs at the Arab-Israeli conflict, his not-very-veiled anti-imperialism, and his willingness to subvert every convention he can find even while embracing them is more than the sum of the parts. He makes it very clear that, bumbling fools though we be, humanity survives and thrives in all its messy, smelly, squabbly squalor because.

Yep. That period is exactly where I intended it to be. And the ending Yoss made for the story is exactly where he intended it to be. Resist cultural blindness, read a genre not your usual, like science fiction. Resist social conformism, read a Cuban rocker-cum-writer's book publicly, displaying the cover for all your fellow commuters to see and wonder about. Resist your natural urge towards despair as the world, as it ever does and ever will, descends into ever-deeper chaos: Yoss reminds us that humanity is a glorious, idiotic, hyperbolic mess.

Thank goodness.

THE LONG SHADOW OF SMALL GHOSTS, an incredible story of failure and murder

THE LONG SHADOW OF SMALL GHOSTS: Murder and Memory in an American City
LAURA TILLMAN
Scribner
$12.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Cold Blood meets Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: A harrowing, profoundly personal investigation of the causes, effects, and communal toll of a deeply troubling crime—the brutal murder of three young children by their parents in the border city of Brownsville, Texas.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas—one of America’s poorest cities—John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already rundown, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

In 2008, journalist Laura Tillman covered the story for The Brownsville Herald. The questions it raised haunted her, particularly one asked by the sole member of the city’s Heritage Council to oppose demolition: is there any such thing as an evil building? Her investigation took her far beyond that question, revealing the nature of the toll that the crime exacted on a city already wracked with poverty. It sprawled into a six-year inquiry into the larger significance of such acts, ones so difficult to imagine or explain that their perpetrators are often dismissed as monsters alien to humanity.

With meticulous attention and stunning compassion, Tillman surveyed those surrounding the crimes, speaking with the lawyers who tried the case, the family’s neighbors and relatives and teachers, even one of the murderers: John Allen Rubio himself, whom she corresponded with for years and ultimately met in person. The result is a brilliant exploration of some of our age’s most important social issues, from poverty to mental illness to the death penalty, and a beautiful, profound meditation on the truly human forces that drive them. It is disturbing, insightful, and mesmerizing in equal measure.

***I RECEIVED THIS REVIEW COPY FROM SCRIBNER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.***

My Review: There is absolutely nothing easy about this book, not the story, not the agonized survivors, not the innocent dead children, nothing. I read In Cold Blood many years ago, and was very deeply affected by the story. The amazing writing, the very best thing Truman Capote ever made, seems suspiciously good...like Harper Lee, his cousin and collaborator, was a very very significant part of its creation. Laura Tillman touches me in many of the same places that In Cold Blood did, but she had no Harper Lee to wave the magic wand of genius over the text.

The genesis of the book came when Tillman began her journalism career at The Brownsville Herald, the big English-language newspaper of the Rio Grande Valley. A murder such as the Rubio case doesn't happen that often in the rinky-dink precincts of that rathole. (I spent formative years forty or so miles away in Mercedes, Texas, a horrible little wide spot in the road that exemplifies what city people never see and avoid even hearing about if they can help it.) Tillman describes her fascination thus:

The Rubio story was also especially affecting because it concerned small children. It grabbed hold of the reporters during these newsroom conversations, the revelation of each detail making the case suddenly raw, fresh, intense. A father and a mother killing three young children—three babies!—with the crude weapon of kitchen knives. The bodies in trash bags, the heads in buckets of water, washed clean of blood. For not one but both parents to be involved in such a horror was stunning and inexplicable.

Nothing is inexplicable. We might not like the explanation. We might reject the explanation in disgust, horror, terror. But an explanation there always, always is.

A mentally ill, psychologically abused, sexually pimped out by his mother, young man of good looks and no significant intellectual capabilities, gets hooked on drugs...self-medicating, in my opinion...finds and clings to a balsa-wood raft in the form of a pretty, even less intelligent girl-child who was being abused by a variety of men in her life. Hey presto! Children arrive, work doesn't, help ain't, and huffing paint is the only road to some tiny moment of pleasure. A lifetime of psychological disturbances, seeing people not visible to others, obsessions and violence, just don't merit institutional help. Especially in a place like Texas, where Medicaid is out of reach to anyone not licking the asphalt in the hospital parking lot to avoid starvation. It is disgusting what is NOT done with the Federal dollars sent to help the citizens of the state.

At the moment of John Rubio's massive psychotic break, this is what he reports believing:

According to John, something told him that killing the children was imperative, that he was engaged in a battle of good and evil, and he was on the side of good. He said that he had long seen himself as exceptional, chosen by God for some purpose, and had dreams where he battled demons. Where those thoughts and the message to kill his children came from is debatable, but John said he believed at the time that it was divinely sent. Regardless of whether the culpable influence was psychosis or a spiritual force, there was no contradicting intervention at the final moment.

The source of Tillman's meditation is the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible. It is one of the more appalling, disgusting passages in a book chock-a-block with horrible bar bets (eg, Job's trials set on him by God to win a wager with Lucifer) and reprehensible narcissistic tantrums (eg, destroying the whole of the world in a flood because his itty fee-fees was hurted by...what, I can't remember, something like impiety?). John's religious mania had been life long, and somehow no one anywhere connected to this case sees or says they see the central and vile role that this God person and the stories told to impressionable children about him played in this nightmare crime.

A friend of Angela and John's explains the bitter, scalding, bone-rattling terror of desperation.

"But when a difficult time comes and nobody helps you, no one listens to you, they leave you alone...I don't know how to explain it...You go to your neighbor's house and ask if they could lend you three dollars to eat and they say they don't have it. You go to another [neighbor] and they don't have it, no one has it. You're frustrated and you have hungry children. And you kill them. That's how people think."

You cannot know the power of desperation, Felix was saying, until you experience it in its raw form. Desperation can fuel acts that would otherwise be incomprehensible. And if you've never been filled with that kind of quaking, hysterical desperation, you simply cannot fathom the way it can make you behave.

Yep, been there. Try living at the complete legal, social mercy of a screaming emotional volcano, abusive in inventive and creative ways, who makes up to you with sex. And I was her son. I have been down there. I understand John's insanity from the inside, though blessedly I'm smart and almost incredibly tough so I survived. Just. John had none of my strengths, poor lad, and he cracked wide open. What he did can't be fathomed by the normal mind. The key words there are "normal mind." He didn't have, and never had, one of those. The State of Texas, in its rednecked viciousness, condemned this poor, broken, horrible person to die. To do what? To solve what? In order to serve what noble legal principle? We already know the Christians who argue for the death penalty are merely emulating their vile petty god, so can safely be discounted as moral forces.

Angela was represented by a court-appointed lawyer whose unique perspective on the central facts of Angela's participation in the murders probably served her in great stead:

In May of 2008, five years after John and Angela were arrested, Gamez said he saw demons for the first time. "I didn't imagine it." Gamez had suffered a heart attack that left him legally dead for several minutes, and in a coma for six days after that. "There is no rational, logical medical explanation, other than the grace of coming back and giving me a second chance." To him, the demons are not a vague vision, but a specific memory.

"They were compelling to take me to hell. They were reaching out. They wanted me but they couldn't get me. The grace of God wouldn't let them get me, but they let me know they're there."

Gamez believed he'd been enlightened to another dimension.

"There is an inner being, soul, within us and wants to live and wants everlasting life. And it fears the abomination of everlasting darkness. I really appreciate, when I crossed over, my ranches meant noting, my property meant nothing. I'm left with nothing. Nothing was important. You speak, not with your mouth, but your mind. You have no physical form. And I can prove it because I was dead. And all that spirit of yours wants is to reach that light I couldn't reach."

His voice commanded the empty room, rough and croaking, pushing past my attempts to ask questions during the long pauses between phrases.

"So I cannot say that what she saw wasn't real," Gamez said. "I don't make that judgment anymore—if she's crazy or sick or mentally retarded—no, I know they're there, and they make people do very bad things. Evil things. Demons' purpose in life is for us—to compel us to do bad things. There is no love with these creatures."

Gamez's experience, judge its merits how you may, very likely informed Angela's fate. She will be eligible for parole in 2045.

The fate of the children I cannot bring myself to recount.

In John's version of events, he decapitated the children because they seemed to rise and revive after being choked and stabbed.

That is really all you need to know.

Laura Tillman backs up at the end of the book:

The building drew me in, but the real pull was not the structure, it was the questions. I thought after all this time they would be resolved. Instead, I find myself more unmoored than when I started. Yet that doesn't bother me: resolution doesn't seem to be the purpose of questions like these. They open journeys, within and without, daring us after each step to go still further.

And here is where that fifth star, wavering in and out, went out for the last time. It seems to me a...bloodless...response to this journey through a layer of society that one can not see, still less live within for any length of time, and emerge unchanged in profound and irreparable ways.

Reading is resistance...even to the internal prettying-up and makeover that we call "denial."

THE VOYAGER RECORD: A Transmission, genre-bending idea-provoking essay/novella

THE VOYAGER RECORD: A Transmission
ANTHONY MICHAEL MORENA
Rose Metal Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Late summer 1977: two identical robotic spacecraft launch from Cape Canaveral. Their divergent paths through the solar system take them past gas giants, icy moons, asteroid belts, and eventually into the unknown of interstellar space. There, they will continue to travel on forever, the fastest moving objects ever created by humans. The Voyagers carry a message from Earth, a phonograph record plated with gold containing 27 songs, 118
images, and greetings in 55 languages meant to summarize all life on our planet for the extraterrestrials who might one day encounter the crafts. The Voyager Record: A Transmission is the record of that record: a history in fragments exploring how legendary astronomer Carl Sagan and his team attempted to press the entire human race into a single groove. Combining elements of poetry, flash fiction, and essay, Anthony Michael Morena
creates a collage of music, observation, humor, and alienation. Giving the 38-year-old original playlist a B-side update, Morena’s The Voyager Record calls out to its namesake across the billions of miles of emptiness: Send more answers.

My Review: Things that aren't what they seem are worrisome to most people. If it's got upright rectangular covers and printed words and no illustrative charts and/or graphs, it's fiction. If there are weird line breaks, it's poetry. If there are pages with one or two lines of text and no pictures, it's incomprehensible pretentious modern poetry.

But The Voyager Record isn't really any of those things. And that's going to bother a lot of people. They don't have a place to slot this square block. How do you read something that introduces you to its concerns and conceits with this mini-essaypoem?

"Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven, and Mozart tells you what its like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe." A quote pointed out to me re: all the Bach. The quote, I was told, came from Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt. The internet thought so too.

I thought that maybe the Voyager people knew about the quote when they loaded the record the way they did. Or maybe it was the other way around.

When I looked, I didn't find one word about Bach in my copy of The Salmon of Doubt.

Well? Ideas, class? Where are we, reflective essay or prose poem (five-buck talk for "pretty writing that doesn't have to make sense to the likes of you") or narrative fragment that finishes itself off before you're even really going?
Don't get too wound up, there's more:

Hip hop still hadn't left the South Bronx when Voyager took off from Earth.

Now that right there? That stopped me dead for a good two minutes. Voyager left an earth that flat doesn't exist anymore, an earth with rotary-dial phones, microwave ovens the size of your sofa, Cadillacs twenty feet (six-ish meters) fin to fin...cell phones that cost $5 a minute to use in the few places you could use 'em and gasoline was 75¢ a gallon. I hadn't really thought much about that. Yowza, what a world!

Author Morena moves on from blowing old men's minds to the real meat of his meditation. Voyager's on its way to places and encounters that we really and truly cannot imagine. Leaving aside the seemingly endless debate as to whether the dratted thing has made it into interstellar space or is still within some ever-more-tenuously tethered portion of the Solar System, the machine will probably make alien contact at some point. Morena offers this possibility:

The aliens who discover Voyager are a corporate form of life. Like corporate personhood here on Earth, these aliens exist in a non-corporeal, Platonic state: no matter how hard you twist your hands you cannot choke them, they have no necks. They'll appreciate our attempt to raise brand awareness across the interstellar medium. According to the prospectus on the record, Earth is a going concern that will present a low-risk investment. They understand the song lyrics perfectly: "Earnings potential client in a high-yield equity market merger option backed by bond and bundled securities commodity rate. Attractive luxury addition to portfolio G5 champagne blowjobs..."

Hell, if that's all V'ger's a-gonna find, whyinahell'd we send it out there for? Sounds like Washington DC. Or London, or Moscow, or Paris.

Another possibility that occurred to Author Morena:

The aliens who find the Voyager record are a paranoid military culture. The propaganda on the record is seen as an existential threat to their way of life. Some of the alien generals disagree It's not propaganda, they say, it's a trap. Not one of these images shows a weapon of any kind, so it's obviously a trap. Scientists who wish to study the record lose their positions and are thrown in jail. Anyone caught listening to a copy of the Voyager record is considered an enemy sympathizer and detained. When they are released, their identification scans show this black mark in the form of a golden circle next to their names. They have trouble finding jobs, getting into schools. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, someone writes graffiti on their doors: Go Back to Earth! Sometimes, their houses are set on fire.

Again...for this we sent the thing into outer space? Coulda shipped it to Beijing, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Islamabad. Been cheaper, if less exciting, what with all that rocket fuel flaming and all those nerds with bad haircuts and worse glasses jumping around, proving that white people really, really, really shouldn't dance in front of cameras. It was the Seventies, after all.

Further to the "holy gawd when and how did I get so fucking old" moment above, following is another list of things that simply did not exist when Voyager left Earth:

Additions to update the "Sounds of Earth" audio collage: mouse clicks, keyboard typing, a 56k modem connecting to the internet, a Facebook message notification dook. The strange recording of an underwater sound known only as Bloop, which was so loud that not even a blue whale, the largest creature ever to live on the planet, could have created it. Some insinuated that Bloop was made by a massive, Lovecraftian monster. The truth is actually much worse: Bloop is the sound of sea icequakes, as the planet begins to melt.

Bloop is the single most terrifying thing that has happened in my lifetime. I was alive during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest we have come yet to mutually assured destruction being put into practice. This is WORSE. This is a sound that indicates we've committed suicide on behalf of all the living creatures now extant.

That should ruin your day.

I haven't got anything uplifting to say after that bitch-slap, sorry. Author Morena offers us some perspective:

You are getting so far away now. Does your distance mean your irrelevance? How the further away you hurtle from Earth, the less you become about us. You will be about another people, not who we are. Faerie elves exist only to supply meaning to words like "flit" and "folk." This is you to us. A boogeyman encased with stellar dirt with a golden eye that, in ideal conditions, sings.

I don't know what you'll make of this book. I don't know if I can do more than encourage you to read it as a way to resist your inner censor's diktat that you don't know what it is so you won't know how to read it.

Don't let anyone, anyone at all, not even—maybe especially not—yourself limit your experience of reading, thinking, getting up close and personal with inappropriate thoughts and feelings and people. Don't close yourself off to new experiences in a world ever more hostile to learning and growth.

BESSARABIAN STAMPS, a Moldovan Magical Realist treasure

BESSARABIAN STAMPS
OLEG WOOLF (translated by Boris Dralyuk)
Phoneme Media
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Reminiscent of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, Oleg Woolf’s Bessarabian Stamps — a cycle of 16 stories set mostly in the village of Sanduleni — is a vivid, surreal evocation of a liminal world. Sanduleni’s denizens are in permanent flux, forever shifting languages, cultures, and states (in every sense of the word). Woolf has relocated magical realism to Moldova. With the turmoil in current Russia and the post-Soviet world, Bessarabian Stamps emphasizes the absurdity of the mundane.

My Review: I am not entirely sure that I even knew there was a place called "Moldova." It's on my literary radar now. My review of The Good Life Elsewhere was suffused with my sense of the proceedings as almost cartoonish in their surreal yet inevitable zaniness. This collection of tiny tales does nothing to alter that basic impression. But Woolf's microstories add a layer of sophistication to my gloss on his state (in the several senses of the word that pervade the book):

It was raining the kind of rain that exhortations can't help, and try as one might, one won't manage a thing against the water.

This is on the very first page of Oleg Woolf's very first story, "Aurica and Van Gogh." Now's probably a good time to mention that I can't use my normal story-by-story review technique because the stories themselves are shorter than any analysis that would prove useful to the reader. So instead, the gestalt of the collection is what I'll talk about.

I've already published a public appreciation of Phoneme Media and its more-necessary-than-ever mission to bring American audiences the best work of people from other cultures. It is an urgent and necessary corrective lens to the myopic, nativist recrudescence we're seeing already...and have been able to see, had we the eyes to do so, since the time of de Tocqueville. Literature and film in translation in the US amounts, at the optimistic best-case scenario end of the statistics, to three percent of the total market output. And that data is probably the optimists' bible, since the University of Rochester, who collects the data, is reliant on voluntary reporting and has no power of compulsion to back it up.

It's a damned shame, too. The pleasures of reading Oleg Woolf's Bessarabian Stamps are many. The description of a village elder as "...well over a hundred, and remained a person of such openness, kindness, and strength that she was impossible to bear," for example, is pitch-perfect, precise, and funny as hell. We've all thought that someone was too good to be true, like Mother Teresa that old ambulatory accusation of avarice. Woolf makes many such arc-lights to illuminate his characters' essential reality. His is a gift of economy of praise and an abundance of clarity.

One thing that Woolf makes sure we know about Moldova is it's rain-forest-level wet all the time, and populated primarily by the oldsters who have been left behind by history:

Brăndulescu just watched and listened in silence to the rain, and it seemed that this rain would slowly transform into the murmur of some bygone voices, expired and empty. And suddenly he felt not so much sad, as somehow for nothing. He peered into the torrents of rain seriously and attentively—as if leaning over them—while they, in the usual manner of old men, forgetfully withdrew into themselves.

Americans are entering this population crash, well underway in Europe for a generation. Young people all over the world have migrated to cities since World War II, rural depopulation is exacerbated by the mechanization of farming, the collapse of the value of such labor as farming still requires, and the consequent rise in economic migration from Third World countries changes the sociopolitical landscape forever. Look at the Mexican migrant workers doing American farming scut-work in slave-labor conditions...almost sixty years after Harvest of Shame was broadcast. Unprovably, it's been asserted that this horrible exposé fueled the rise of what became Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. If nothing else, the attention of the culture was focused by that one show.

It takes many books to equal one television show. Just ask Sănduleni's poet Ivan Markov:

The day was full of the kind of clouds one rarely sees in Moscow—sour cream-like, made of human souls. Shaggy Markov walked across the Bolshoy Kammeny Bridge, and each of the piers was more governmental than three railroad stations. Many of those he passed on the bridge may have read his books, but without love, grief, pleasure, separation, or regret, as one reads before bed: so as to fall asleep. So as to, just think, nine hundred pages—your eyes fall on any of them and the author says: you just read my thoughts. And me, what are his thoughts to me—they've just put me aside for a rainy day.

It is ever thus with poets and writers. It is ever thus with publishers and translators. Shunted aside, left for a rainy day.

It's raining as hard as we're ever likely to see it rain, ladies and gentlemen, in a time when a man who openly and publicly said he grabbed women by their private parts had his statement brought to light and still won the presidency of the United States of America. We are all in need of reinforcement, of feeling understood and supported by every means at our disposal. We are in urgent need of the fellow feeling that reading translated works brings us. We need to support the work of companies like Phoneme Media, so that they can afford to bring us comfort and understanding from the places in the world we simply don't know anything about.

Bessarabian Stamps is an excellent book. It is a great place to bolster your inner resistance to philistinism and enforced ignorance.

Guess what? There's MORE! I write for The Coil, and at Medium, too

I wonder...does everyone, or anyone, who reads the blog know that The Coil also publishes pieces I write?
5 Novels to be Thankful Came Out in 2016
5 Novels by 21st Century Warriors
5 Alternate History Novels About American Politics
5 Novels About Immigrants and Immigration
The Coil is a webzine that treads the lightly beaten path of independent literature. It's curated by the unbelievably busy Leah Angstman of Alternating Current, which is also a micropublisher of outstanding books. I don't think the woman sleeps.

My piece on publishers in the Mittelstand. This is an area I'm very passionate about. I think this is the place where the best work in publishing is, and always has been, done. That's a German economic concept, one that we here in the USA have ignored. It's quite probable that this neglect has caused a great deal of the economic distress that we're in.

Wikipedia provides this list of core Mittelstand values:
Family ownership or family-like corporate culture
Generational continuity
Long-term focus
Independence
Nimbleness
Emotional attachment
Investment into the workforce
Flexibility
Lean hierarchies
Innovativeness
Customer focus
Social responsibility
Strong regional ties
Can anyone argue with these values as models for any company to emulate? The immense size of the US small business sector makes it a primary driver of consumer spending, aka the bulk of economic activity. Publishing's Mittelstand has given us the careers of Hemingway and Faulkner, among others. The modern independent publishing scene is more urgent than ever. In an emerging authoritarian regime, the big publishers can be very easily compelled to sing Horst Wessel because they have so much to lose and are famously un-nimble. With the advent of print-on-demand technology and e-books everywhere there is a screen, nimble and determined indies can evade all but the most determined government harassment. (Like Sander Hicks went through when he published James Hatfield's Fortunate Son, which horrendous governmental abuse of power is detailed in Horns and Halos.)

I've published two profiles of publishers I regard as exemplars of some of these admirable, almost Utopian, industrial values. Outpost19, a California-based emerging publisher of fiction and non-fiction that's outside the business model of the media conglomerate dominated publishers. I've reviewed Hope for a Cool Pillow in that profile.

I've also profiled Phoneme Media, whose novel BAHO! is the first Burundian novel to be published in the USA. My review is posted here. The publisher is a deeply creative soul, David Shook; his and his partner's outstanding aesthetic eye is evident in each and every thing that Phoneme does.

My next profile will be of my long-standing favorite publisher of gorgeous books, Chin Music Press.

It must be a decade now that I've read and reveled in their deluxe output. As objects, the books are uniformly handsome to gorgeous; as entertaining reads, they're uniformly excellent. So stay tuned...January brings a special treat of Seattle-y goodness.

It's 2017...do you know where your principles are?

Hey, guess what? There's more!

Hello my friends! I'm here to tell you some news about my life, my blog, my plans, and my needs.

First and foremost, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for reading my reviews! About 500 of you look at the blog daily, and that's the most wonderful feeling I can imagine. To put my words out there, to express my opinions about other people's creative and business decisions, is both simple and scary. Simple because a rudimentary grasp of HTML is enough to get me on the web; scary because what I have to say isn't always popular, and the internet is chock-a-block with folks who don't hesitate to say really hateful, and often enough openly threatening, things to people whose ideas they disagree with or dislike. Many people on Goodreads, on Facebook, and on Twitter have taken me to task for expressing opinions not to their liking. While that's their Constitutionally protected privilege, it's irrelevant. If you disagree with someone, fine...move on. If they annoy you enough, block them from accessing your social media feed. But why bother airing it publicly, still less rudely?

Secondly, the political and cultural landscape of 2017 has just changed. It's my opinion that it hasn't changed for the better. The president elect is a crude, loudmouthed, ignorant buffoon whose political supporters were aptly characterized by the failed primary-rigging ambulatory PR disaster of a Democratic nominee as "a basket of deplorables"—a loose confederation of religious nuts, racists, know-nothing radical reactionaries all funded by the cynical and horrifyingly sociopathic billionaire Economic Royalists. Read my 5-star review of THE CRASH OF 2016 here for that definition. My response to this change I did not create, do not support, and will not accept is to read and review more books. Shocking, isn't it. A man who has posted over 1,500 reviews on Goodreads alone, and over 500 on this blog, thinks reading can change the world. The thing is that it can. Ask all those Protestant christians. Their primary cult recruitment tool is a little backlist number called "The Bible," and generations of jokes aside, the main reason people subscribe to the cult is their encounter with its well-told tale of rebellion, execution, and resurrection. That is a supremely appealing meme, one that's served many religions before this one. Modern cult hits include The Little Red Book, which over a billion Chinese have read and from which many still quote; Dianetics, that unnerving artifact of a drunken argument among Golden Age SF writers; The Turner Diaries, a vile and evil call to arms for the lowest of the low-class, low-IQ, low-brow white supremacists; an exhaustive list would be exhausting to produce, so go do some research. It's my hope that my reviews of books that support progressive political causes and attitudes will bring them to the attention of the reader of discernment, taste, and a positive, engaged social conscience. (I can go get some more butter to butter you up with if it will help.) From there, I hope the books I've chosen to review will make it to your TBRs, and will inspire you to take action appropriate to your condition: read, review, give away, join a "splinter" party, get active in your local Democratic party, if that's all you can think of to do. Permaybehaps reading some of my reviews will lead you to more effective and agreeable ideas and actions!

Lastly, me and my life. I am a disabled person. I (along with about 15 million other Americans) live on Disability, which I paid for with many years of FICA tax payments by me and my various employers. There is an immense amount of misinformation and disinformation floating around the right-leaning communities about this Federal program. As with so many disasters in today's world, the root of the problem most people have with it is the Reagan administration's vicious class war against the middle class. This isn't a simple subject, but it involves me deeply and personally. I have severe tophaceous gout (images here for the stern of constitution, to be avoided for the squeamish). It is constantly painful and it is incurable. I've been on maintenance medications since 1981. They have a number of unpleasant side effects, including gastric horrors, erectile dysfunction, and increased risk of kidney stones. Which are a whole different level of painful. This means I am unemployable; my age makes it impossible for me to get a good job anyway. As a result of this constellation of factors, I live in an assisted-living facility.

The State of New York requires the facility to house and feed me, though they don't feed me in that it's run by religious Hasidim who refuse to offer a gluten-free low-purine diet. It isn't legally required of them...and offering a kosher diet (despite the fact that there are few Jewish residents) is more important to them. I use my Federally mandated personal allowance of $213 a month, plus food stamps, to feed myself the proper gluten-free low-purine diet, buy my soaps and sundries, and pay for an annual Amazon Prime membership to keep myself amused and provisioned. My medical care, medicines, and hospitalizations are all paid for my the constellation of Medicare and Medicaid. Without them, I would be unable to pay for the $300 a month that colchicine (the best treatment for gout) now costs; it was $20 a month as recently as the 1990s, and $40 a month in the early 2000s. I leave it to you to work out what happened there. (Hint: the Bush administration "reformed" certain Federal programs.)

So there are some fundamental facts of my life. The net result is that I am opposed with every fiber of my being to any and all "conservative" (actually from the radical reactionary fascists) calls for abolishment/restriction/reduction of government spending on social programs when there are many millions, including me, who depend on them. As we've already paid for them with our many years of payroll taxes, reducing spending on these programs is a gross violation of our capitalist right to return on investment.

The other side of that, the beneficial result of all of it, is that my time is my own; my life is mine to structure as I please. The facility where I live is on the boardwalk in a beachside town. I live well by world standards. I am rich by third-world standards: I have hot water and clean drinking water and a warm/cool place to sleep. Luxury it isn't, but far better than it could and would be if my existence was left to what I laughingly refer to as my "family" or to private (read: religious) charity.

In 2017, I'm using that time to read and review books that support and advocate social change for the better. My energies are focused on re-rigging the rigged system, and steering the ship of state off the shoals of corporatist class warfare's upward distribution of prosperity. In a time where the bulk of humanity is becoming obsolete due to ever-increasing automation and the exponential improvements in artificial intelligence, the only use for a lower class now is as bottom-feeders whose grubbing in the ever-thinner mud left from the runoff from the economy's heights stirs up a bit more stuff for the feasters to mine. A country that can support over 100 billionaires can support its people in decent style, not in poverty, simply by redistributing that absurd imbalanced accumulation downward.

And that is what my reading of fiction and non-fiction this year will support. I ask publishers for review copies of their books because I can't afford to buy many books, and because exposure on a blog with an average of 500 or so daily viewers is worth the $50 (being generous) that a review copy, packing and shipping, and staff attention might cost. For those whose attitude is "no thanks, little flea" or "here's a file, read it on a screen," there are lots of books published every year, and I won't be reviewing yours. If I buy a book, my job is done; I've paid you and your author.

But it's my hope that many more professionals will see the value of having an unpaid, unpressured by institutions voice offering to make their work and their authors' work a bit better known.

I'm asking anyone who reads a review and likes it to talk it up. Follow this blog! Subscribe to the posts via RSS or Feedly. Pin it to your book board on Pinterest (where I can be followed as Expendable Mudge). Tweet it to your followers (follow me there as @expendablemudge). Post it on your Facebook feed. Give it a +1 on Google Plus (I'm Richard Derus there), recommend it on Reddit. Not because I'll make a profit, because I won't earn a dime off the traffic, but because books and reading matter more now, in this time of change, than ever. Voices of dissent and inclusion and fairness and change need to be heard! Boost the signal every chance you get. My signal is clear. I want many more people to receive it. The only way I can do that is with help, and yours...you're here, therefore you're like-minded...is the most crucial help I can get. Please do me the enormous favor, the deeply appreciated kindness, of boosting my call for change and fairness to each and all of your friends and followers.

THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS, a local-color author's portrait of changing times

THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
Dover Publications
$4 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In scene after memorable scene of Sarah Orne Jewett's fictional masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, the Maine-born author recorded what she felt were the rapidly disappearing traditions, manners and dialect of Maine coast natives at the turn of the 20th century. In luminous evocations of their lives--a happy family reunion, an old seaman's ghostly vision, a disappointed lover's self-imposed exile and more--Jewett created startlingly real portraits of individual New Englanders and a warm, humorous and compassionate vision of the New England character.

My Review: There aren't all that many loud, public admirers of Sarah Orne Jewett's fiction. Willa Cather, she of Death Comes for the Archbishop fame, was an admirer, but that's most of a century ago. I think that's too bad. Jewett's lovely, lapidary prose is a treat. She's more than likely a gay lady, given her "Boston marriage" *snort* to Annie Adams Fields from 1881 until her death in 1909. That makes enjoying her work incumbent on me, I suppose, though I can honestly say that I've enjoyed her way with words and her sharply observed and economically told tales since I found out about her in high school forty years ago. This novella is, in my never-remotely-humble opinion, one of the nineteenth century's literary high points, right up there with Silas Marner and The Aspern Papers.

From the minute our narrator addresses us, the tone and the tenor are set:

When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

We are launched on a voyage of discovery in love. We have as our captain a lady of a certain vintage, not old and not young, who is hiding in Dunnet Landing, Maine, in order to meet her publishing deadline...which she has already blown past, as she tells us early on. Her landlady Mrs. Todd has presented her with to tempting a distraction as she tantalizes the narrator with reminiscences of her long-ago lost love and his subsequent marriage, her subsequent marriage....

And then, after the narrator moves her workspace to the local schoolhouse (it being summer, the building is unused) to reduce interruptions and avoid gossiping time-sinks, comes the fascinating old man, Captain Littlepage, to tell his own love story:

"It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure," said I, with redoubled interest.

"It was a dog's life," said the poor gentleman, quite reassured, "but it made men of those who followed it. I see a change for the worse even in our own town here; full of loafers now, small and poor though 'tis, who once would have followed the sea, every lazy soul of 'em. There is no occupation so fit for just that class o' men who never get beyond the fo'cas'le. I view it, in addition, that a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper. In the old days, a good part o' the best men here knew a hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They saw the world for themselves, and like's not their wives and children saw it with them. They may not have had the best of knowledge to carry with 'em sight-seein', but they were some acquainted with foreign lands an' their laws, an' could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet; they got some sense o' proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and their houses were better within an' without. Shipping's a terrible loss to this part o' New England from a social point o' view, ma'am."

Shipping...anything that takes a person out of a narrow area of interest...is a terrible loss for the world's average people. We have the internet now, thus we have almost instantaneous access to information and news and opinions from every corner of the globe. But we don't have any particular reason to seek it out, since the fact is most Americans are un- or underemployed compared to generations gone by, and thus are unlikely to seek beyond the dark alleys of CNN and Fox "News" for news and views on world and national events. With the inevitable bad results.

Captain Littlepage continues:

"No, there's nothing to take the place of shipping in a place like ours. These bicycles offend me dreadfully; they don't afford no real opportunities of experience such as a man gained on a voyage. No: when folks left home in the old days they left it to some purpose, and when they got home they stayed there and had some pride in it. There's no large-minded way of thinking now: the worst have got to be best and rule everything; we're all turned upside down and going back year by year."

"Oh no, Captain Littlepage, I hope not," said I, trying to soothe his feelings.

There was silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the noise of the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange warning wave that gives notice of the turn of the tide. A late golden robin, with the most joyful and eager of voices, was singing close by in a thicket of wild roses.

Ladies and gentlemen, everything old is made new again. Captain Cassandra Littlepage sings a lament at the end of the nineteenth century that many of us have been reprising here in the twenty-first. Or, as the old Frenchman had it, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

After a lovely summer outing to Green Island, in the bay off Dunnet Landing, Mrs. Todd welcomes to her herb-gardeny home an old friend, a Mrs. Fosdick. The narrator and Mrs. Todd have now the extra-strength bonding compound of family approval. Green Island is home to Mrs. Todd's mother and younger brother, a wight of some sixty summers; both the Blacketts of Green Island love the narrator as soon as she steps ashore from the dory, and she them. Into this mutual admiration society steps Susan Fosdick, contemporary of Mrs. Todd, and plants herself for a long afternoon's gossip. When you've known someone all your life, the words come easy if they need to come at all:

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.

Jewett's gift is to limn a lovely scene against a delicately scented and lit background. It is a great deal like that rooted-in-the-past conversation that is so relaxing and welcome, reading this...and her other...work. Direct and unfussy. Lovely and simple. A vase of daisies on a linen cloth, not a candelabra gleaming over a cornucopia of pineapples on fine lace...each beautiful, one way or the other.

I believe that the pleasures of reading a novella are as rich and gorgeously textured as any novel's are. The difference, for me at least, and in the instance of this novella, comes down to the writer's ability to evoke a place, a time, a season, a slant of light; at greater length, her strength could become a weakness, a surfeit, when piled on a larger plate. As it stands, though, this serving is a beautifully balanced, perfectly presented summer picnic on the cool, seaside meadow of a Maine island. Your eyes and ears and nose all attune you to a simple pleasure, a familiar scent, a welcome patch of emotional shade in a hot summer of life.

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.