• Lizzie Skurnick’s books on Goodreads

  Shelf Discovery
  

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• Don’t judge a book by its cover, nor a person by their custom t-shirts.

• Beginner’s Greek
  If I ever inaugurate an unintentionally dirty-sounding e-review series called “Straight to the author’s inbox,” the first one will be to James Collins, and it will read, “Hey James, how’s it going? LOVED THE FIRST HALF OF YOUR NOVEL! xo talk soon L.” (Note to all the publications who’ve cut their book reviews of late: I will provide these under your institutional umbrella for a reasonable fee.) Because while Beginner’s Greek contains some of the most devastating, vivid characterizations (and character assassinations) I’ve read in the past few years, its lovely prose is marred by the fact that the central characters, Holly and Peter–who meet on a flight, lose contact, and spend the next few years (and remainder of the novel) seeking the lost soulmate–are, compared to the surrounding cast, relatively anodyne constructions. While a bullying husband speculates about his ex-wife, visualizing the clotted hairbrush left out for guests that sums up her pitiable circumstances, Peter chases a veritable ghost, a lovely cipher with whom everyone is immediately enchanted, although all we know about Holly is that when Peter met her, she was reading The Magic Mountain. (“She’s a dead ringer for Garbo. She always beats me at chess. She’s first on every punchline. Her drink is Absolut.”) One of the things I love about Larry McMurtry is that he’s one of the few male writers who can portray difficult, irritating women whom men still manage to like. Collins crushes the women in his novel admirably, but his satire can’t hold up against someone who only gives other people crushes. James: EVERYONE is worthy of crushing. Leave the bewitching, blank siren for Roth. He’s probably trademarked her by now, anyway.

• Eat, Pray, Love
  A sad truth for those of you out there seeking greater ones: Nothing is more boring than your epiphanies. (Even worse, sojourners–the more particular they are to you, the more they sound exactly like everyone else’s.) Such is the problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey through the particulars of her digestive, spiritual and moral humors–located, for your corporeal information, in the regions of Italy, India and Indonesia, respectively. It’s a bit of a punt to say the book is self-aggrandizing–how could a book focused on one’s spiritual well-being not be?–but it’s the grand the Richard Bachian strokes that provoke the reader beyond speech: “Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely.” (Simply put.) However, we’re a girl! Fish-in-barrel elements aside, of course we loved that someone would eat pasta, meditate and tool around Indonesia for a year to get over a broken heart. There’s a lot to be said for pasta in general. P.S. we leave the 16th.

• Never Let Me Go
  If all butlers from England sound robotic and all English clones sound like butlers, does Kazuo Ishiguro need to stop giving characters affects flatter than a freshly ironed newspaper? These and other points of information plagued me upon my “completion” — you’ll get it — of the author’s sixth novel, wherein a prep-school love triangle worthy of a great piece of teen chick-lit is inexplicably ruined by the fact that the characters all have to give up their organs afterwards. Much has been made of this great “secret” — and, oops, spoiler alert and all — but it’s no more a secret than the fact that, if a girl tells you her boyfriend thinks you’re a slut, it’s a sure bet he has a huge crush on you. HUGE, Kathy, HUGE. Even a butler could see it.

• The Furies
  It’s hard to know how to treat the work of Fernanda Eberstadt, whose gusty prose leaves the reader staggering back and forth like a pilgrim in a very high wind. The setting is Manhattan, the parties Gwen, a high-powered Russophile aiding in the democratization of the former USSR, and Gideon, an earthy puppeteer with a sanctimonious faith both in social activisim and Shabbos. The lovers crash, procreate, clash, and spin apart, their once-hot polarities suddenly reversed. Though the prose is more high-spirited — and high Mandarin — than the stuff of Diane Johnson or Louis Begley, the novel leaves the reader with the same feeling of being plunged into a dinner party of international sophisticates — an itchy mix of alienation and admiration. (The author herself? New Yorker and Vogue clips — check. Oxford-educated? Check. Lives in the French Pyrenees? Mais oui!) It’s all as cut-glass and sparkling as an inch-thick goblet — and it still leaves the reader wanting a drink.

• The Position
  Meg Wolitzer gets no respect, and we have no clue why*. Maybe it’s because her novels are…clever? …Funny? ….Delightful? The Wife — not a novel within a novel, but a novel about a novel, a la Philip Roth — was not fluffy but skilled, the type of practiced comedy that fled the Borscht Belt stage right around the time duos singing from the soundtrack to Flashdance reached their height**. And speaking of the horrors of our childhood, The Position is also about a book; The Joy of Sex-esque Pleasuring, whose contents, like everything else that issues forth from parental fucking, destroy — or, at least, wholly render speechless for a few decades — the members of healthy nuclear family.

  * Does she really get no respect or did someone just talk smack about her to us once? Well, it matters not — NO ONE MAY SPEAK ILL OF THE WOLITZER. Didn’t she date David Letterman and write for the much lamented New York Woman magazine? Hmmm, that was Merrill Markoe for that first one, there. Either way, respect.

• The Interruption of Everything
  One of our first jobs as an editorial assistant at the Book of the Month Club was to write flap copy for a reprint of Terry McMillan’s Mama It was a classic first novel: autobiographical, a little clumsy, but with bite — not exactly the lead-in you’d expect for Waiting to Exhale, spot-on genre fiction, one of the great examples of a classic four. We had to give up after Stella, though, a great example of someone listing CDs they bought and what they ate for 200+ pages. Now we’re back, 3/4-heartedly. Interruption has all the McMillan tropes — the semi-distant mother who wants to be called by her first name; genial, well-meaning sons; buddies of varying levels of annoyance; dips into the ghetto from middle-class anomie. Marilyn, like most McMillan heroines, is trying to get her life together after realizing her sons are gone and her husband is boring; but she’s on a great quest to pursue a life of crafting, which, hot-glue aside, is not engaging. On the other hand, there’s a miscarriage, a senior romance, two kids with a methed-out mom, and a few other characters that keep the story moving. The boring husband, who remains boring and is inexplicably redeemed at the end, is a trope McMillan, like her character, should drop — not only does it never ring true, the marriage she slap-dash saves in the novel bears too strong a resemblance to McMillan’s own bond with the page.

• I’m Not The New Me
  “If you’re a female and over 125 pounds, then you can have a fat girl story.” Lawd, ain’t that the truth. We’ve been terribly slow at getting Wendy McClure’s — aka Poundy’s — novel up here, mainly because we’re fat and lazy, or, at least, could find ten or twelve folks who’d tell you so. As you can guess by the title, McClure’s memoir is not a “Not only did I get thin, I got a book deal” memoir, but a meta-critique of the genre, an explosion of it, if you will. It’s also an explosion of the blogger-cum-memoir genre, since the book HAS stuff from the website but also talks about the process of BUILDING the website, so that if you look to your left for even a second, you might find that your ratty IKEA couch has been sucked into a black hole along with a cat and half the sandwich you were eating. (Wendy has been updating her blog with her book tour, too — this web stuff will BLOW YOUR MIND!!!!!) We realize we’re making it sound horrifying. It’s not; the book is FABULOUS. “We know how it happened,” McClure writes. “We get the ‘ate too much’ part. Now tell us the rest.” *

  * Some of the rest includes the part about the boyfriend who steals the size-20 Lane Bryant Venezia bootcut jeans which turn out to look okay on him, which we know is on the website, but we can’t find it. Also these. You still have to buy the book, though.

• A Changed Man
  In 1998, Francine Prose wrote an article for Harper’s reflecting on the massive inferiority of “domestic” women’s fiction entitled Scent of a Woman’s Ink. We have held it against her ever since, to the extent that we a) never read any of her fiction and b) as a student, smirked at her from the back row as she guest-lectured (as we have since, sadly, been smirked upon ourselves, though at far less illustrious institutions and only because we are boring). In any case, we have since been forced to reflect on our own massive inanity, as A Changed Man is easily one of the most delightful novels of the past year. As Mel Brooks proved long ago, for sheer entertainment, you CANNOT beat a Nazi — or skinhead, in this case, especially if he is under the wing of a great Jewish humanitarian, living in the spare room of a sex-starved single mother of two, and allergic to nuts.

• Misfortune*
  It’s unfortunate that a book centered on a hermaphrodite should also peter out halfway through, but that’s the case with the debut novel of Wesley Stace, a.k.a. musician John Wesley Harding, possessor of one of the most beautiful web sites in recent memory. A kind of Victorian Middlesex — we don’t even want to think how many times that got dropped in marketing meetings — Misfortune has the juicy, tri-generational, multi-national breadth of the former without its narrative authority, as heroine Rose struggles to regain both her mansion and her (spoiler alert!) manhood. Artist Sylvie Covey’s delicate drop caps (you can see the book’s last illustration here) are almost worth the price of admission, though.

  * This is one of the reviews we did while inhaling way too many fumes from a very expensive hair gel, or something. Read the corrections here.

• To the Power of Three
  We have a problem with Laura Lippman. A few problems, in fact, the first of which is that NONE OF HER BOOKS HAS BEEN MADE INTO A MOVIE YET. C’mon, Hollywood: Teens, Murder, Mad Writing Skillz*. Second on our list of complaints is the title, which we could never have thought of and which, for a book about three teen girls and a mysterious shooting, IS THE BEST TITLE OF ALL TIME. Thirdly, we would like to object to this. Stasio, just because a book is longer than 180 pages does not make it “boring”. That is all.

  * The fact that we have seen many a Lindsay Lohan movie with the author herself should not be taken as a vote of confidence for teen movies, mean girls, or Lindsay Lohan, but only the act of giving Laura Lippman more money in general. Let us just add that that goes double for Lindsay Lohan.

• Citizen Girl
  It’s not clear why Random House threw such a big hissy fit over publishing this novel. (Is it possible that publishing execs, a bit cash-strapped for nannies, felt this novel’s outing of rampant Xerox-and-memo abuse against lowly staffers hit a little too close to home?) The authors’ depiction of your average underutilized college grad’s first years out — first in a hemp-ish feminist nonprofit, then in a O-type startup that degenerates into a porn site — is un petit peu over-le-top, but that was the charm of Nanny Diaries, too. Like a teenage girl with her first tube of Maybelline, the authors color wildly — but charmingly — outside the lines. * **

  * The REAL credibility problem with CG’S heroine is she’s a size 4 who “could be a model” who’s main concern with appearing in a bikini is her self-respect, not her cellulite. Let’s keep our character further than one bad hat away from Carrie Bradshaw, people.
  ** Unrelated: Why is one cover blue, one cover red? Can’t we leave that shit to Dave Eggers?

• Aloft
  One day, someone will discover why Chang-Rae Lee’s psyche is tuned exclusively to the “I’m pushing 50 and my family hates me even though I tried to be a good father except I never really talked to my kids and all” channel (is it all the golf?), but until then, luxuriate in the densely crafted and crotchety person of Jerry Battle, whose internal stream of irritation keeps the novel’s melodramatic plot from, shall we say, (No.– Ed) going into a tailspin.*

  * On a personal note, we would like to thank Mr. Lee for making moving back in with your folks — kids in all — and then putting in a pool fashionable again. The “Battle” was a little obvious, but that pool’s metaphorical significance hit us like twenty-ton bag of fish (Stop. — Ed) at the end — not easy in the era of The Swimmer and all. Salud.

• Point Of No Return
  Have you been looking for a book that combines an anthropological examination of a small New England town with the vaguaries of lost rich-girl love with a desperate, almost frantic crisis revolving around a promotion at a bank? Have you ever suspected that such a book could be the best book in the world, with a heart-stopping last line that rivals Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider closing (“Now, there would be time for everything”) with its simultaneous blast of redemption and cruel irony? Well, have you? Look no further.

• The Easter Parade
  There are only a few characters in all of Richard Yates’ fiction: the tippling mother with the lipstick edging out around the lines of her mouth; the weak, sensitive boy who is a constant trial (most of all to himself); the brutal alpha male who preys upon a former beauty; the women whose love affairs spin them into orbits ranging farther and farther from happiness. The worst thing to be in Yates’ fiction is a liar, and nearly all his characters cannot live up their ideas — much less ideals — of themselves. This is especially true in the story of Sarah and Emily Grimes, who wind up, respectively, as the dowdy battered wife of a useless brute and a spinster who, at 50, “still understands nothing.” It’s more fun than it sounds. It also may be the only novel in which a character teaches — as Yates’did for many years — at the Iowa Writers’ workshop. I would give my left pinkie to know if Yates, like the unsuccessful poet Jack Flanders, was left behind by his small-breasted girlfriend after a long, nasty winter, or if he merely filled in the lines around an actual poet he detested. There’s something both lovely and terrible in the idea of Yates creating an entire narrative to house the memory of a lover who left him.

• The Plot Against America
  SPOILER SPOILER * We’d put down a serious wad of long green on the hunch that the plot of “The Plot Against America” did not, as many suggested, originate in a flight of fancy about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had become President during Hitler’s rise to power, but rather in the child-inside-the-man Roth’s wish that the heroic aviator was not, as he assuredly was, a fascist sympathizer, but had actually been blackmailed by Nazis holding his supposedly kidnapped child through every horrendous concessionary speech. We only think that because it’s more fun to think so, but also because this thrillingly labyrinthine plot establishes that Professor Roth could definitely have a job writing for the TV series Alias, if he ever had a mind to.

• B.F.’s Daughter
  We’re more than a little disappointed that we’ve reached the age of 31 without someone taking us aside, shaking us vigorously by the shoulders and hissing in our face, “You goddamn little fool, what are you doing walking around like an acceptable person when you haven’t read BF’s Daughter?” Like the souped-up Chevy that is John Cheever to Richard Yates’ Mercedes, B.F’s Daughter puts its wan shadow, Marjorie Morningstar, to shame. Though it takes place during WWII, it’s somehow indisputably modern. Also, it contains the line, “Nobody cares what happens to a girl if she’s on a yacht.”

“I think it’s clocks.” [The Bat Segundo Show, mp3]

“Has done just about everything you can and should do to remain gainfully employed” [WYPR's The Signal, 88.1 in Baltimore, MP3]

“A very busy person” [MBToolbox]

“We do want to point out she is not, in fact, an old hag” [WYPR's The Marc Steiner Show, 88.1 in Baltimore, MP3]

“One of the smartest bloggers on the Web” [Forbes.com]

“Who reads ‘blogs’?” [Telegraph]

“There’s no uniformity about the literary blogs and no editing either, which is sometimes painfully obvious.” [The Denver Post]

“Karaoke.” [New Yorker]

“Already I’m feeling betrayed — and a little bored.” [Washington Post]

“You will learn a lot about the drinking patterns of articulate twentysomethings.” [Village Voice]

We enjoy it. You can reach Old Hag for any good goddamn reason at all at theoldhag AT theoldhag DOT com.

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Marriage By the Book (NPR’s Best Books of 2008, 12/29/2008)
If previous years’ bookshelves were crowded with woeful tales of single living, 2008 marked the year of marriage; even Anna Karenina, the ne plus ultra of domestic dissatisfaction, got back into the act, returning as a resident of Rego Park in Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K.

Revolutionary Road (The Chicago Tribune, 12/27/2008)
I discovered Richard Yates under circumstances the author would have found irredeemably precious, on a residency at Yaddo, working my way through the library of former residents. The desiccated copy of “Revolutionary Road,” its spine half-flaked off, told the unapologetically bleak story of Frank and April Wheeler, a husband and wife in 1950s Connecticut suburbia who are alternately battened by insecurity and misplaced superiority. “Revolutionary Road” was dire without being maudlin, erudite without being show-offy, and cruel yet correct. It was masterful and it was not pleased with itself in the least, and it was exactly unlike every character it depicted.

When Will There Be Good News? (NPR’s Books We Like, 9/29/2008)
Most thrillers cast their murderers from a dependable trinity: Lecter-like mastermind, garden-variety psychopath or misfit bent on revenge. But in the third in a series of mysteries featuring the shambling, world-weary detective Jackson Brodie, novelist Kate Atkinson takes on a depressingly real-life boogeyman: the guy who kills women and children.

Just After Sunset (NPR’s Books We Like, 11/13/2008)
After years of advocacy from fans and critics, several appearances in the New Yorker, and the 2000 publication of his marvelous On Writing, it is now generally agreed that Stephen King is as “literary” as any moody Whiting-award nominee. If King’s new short-story collection, Just After Sunset, is any indication, he too seems to consider the matter settled. Like a character in one of his own novels who has vanquished the bogeyman and emerged into daylight unharmed, the author has deemed it safe to put down his highfalutin pen and return unapologetically to his lurid, gore-spattered roots.

A Better Angel (The Los Angeles Times, 8/10/2008)
WHEN does the tragic cross into the lurid — and the lurid become simply horrid? Interested parties might take Chris Adrian’s collection of short stories, “A Better Angel,” the follow-up to his critically acclaimed novels “Gob’s Grief” and “The Children’s Hospital,” as something of a case study.

Stephenie Meyer: The Twilight Series (The Chicago Tribune, 8/2/2008)
Roughly once a decade, one or another of the media’s form of the undead — genre — struggles to reinvent itself. This usually takes place in the teen market, the only slice of the pie that receives a crop of newbies with some regularity. Even still, lately, an enormous number of replicants has been served up to the unsuspecting.

Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (NPR’s Books We Like, 7/29/2008)
Kitchen-table fiction, wherein a cozy author tells the story of a culture through its food, is as easy to find as a packet of Splenda. But Lara Vapnyar’s second short-story collection, the follow-up to her debut, There Are Jews in My House, is a stunning petit four (it’s a slender 160 pages) in a world of saccharin.

Certain Girls (NPR’s Books We Like, 6/30/2008)
Jennifer Weiner’s 2001 debut smash, Good In Bed — which is the kind of book you buy for a plane ride, then are surprisingly pleased you did — introduced us to the agreeably mordant Cannie Shapiro, who, overweight, scorned, and inadvertently on the way to motherhood, writes her way out of a hole and into a career and marriage with a naughty best-seller. (Yes, it’s meta.)

The James Boys (The Los Angeles Times, 7/6/2008)
A biographer’s task is simple: to make history into a compelling tale. But the novelist who chooses to add his own layer to the palimpsest of real-life events has a far more complex challenge — to make sure story isn’t overwhelmed by back story. And telling a rollicking saga that never happened using people and events that did is yet another animal altogether.

The Brotherhood of S.E. Hinton (The Chicago Tribune, 5/31/2008)
“S.E. Hinton is a girl?” my friend’s husband, incredulous, asked me last weekend. It wasn’t the first time. Given the fact that the author’s “The Outsiders,” her iconic work, is still read in classrooms across the country, and that her particulars—she published the work when she was 17 as, yes, a girl—are splashed on nearly every copy, it’s a perplexingly enduring question. Perhaps for readers of any age it’s still difficult to believe that this profoundly diligent explorer of male adolescence, the woman who brought philosophizing, switchblade-bearing toughs with way too much hair oil and free time onto every teenager’s bookshelf, probably did it in a bra.

Fine Lines [Jezebel.com]
Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.

The Late Show (The Lost Angeles Times, 11/11/2007)
“Mother is gone / only Things remain” reads the epigraph to “Classic Layer Cakes,” one of the central poems in David Trinidad’s confection-laced collection, “The Late Show” (Turtle Point Press: 110 pp., $16.95 paper). The Denise Levertov quote could easily serve as the epigraph to the entire work. Trinidad is a meticulous curator of pop-culture flotsam — silver-screen sirens, Barbie, ’60s-era lip gloss — and his autobiographical verse is a graceful, merry wink to gay culture. (In “A Poem Under the Influence,” he goes so far as to declare, “To this day, if I can fit ‘pink’ in a poem, I do.”) But “The Late Show” is an hommage to both Hollywood and Trinidad’s own ghosts flickering across the screen. Chief among these are his mother, dead of cancer, and his lover, poet and artist Joe Brainard, whose 1970 work “I Remember” used that phrase as a jumping-off point and spawned a poetry workshop standard. “The Late Show” is a kaleidoscopic “I Remember” where now-gone players from the poetry world — James Schuyler, Tim Dlugos and Rachel Sherwood — make apperances, bracketed by Trinidad’s usual ready referents: actress Thelma Ritter, the Lana Turner version of “Imitation of Life” and Water Wiggle. Trinidad uses a jumble of forms to evoke them all: sonnets, odes, sestinas, free verse, with nods to Neruda, Wilde, Dickinson and Plath. (At times, quotes from Trinidad’s friends rival the snappy patter of screenplays: “He’s been crossed off guest lists I didn’t know existed.”) It’s no accident that the forms at which Trinidad excels — pantoums, sestinas — do not propel a narrative forward but circle back, repeat, emphasize. “The Late Show” is less a monument to the past than a salvage. Like the adult narrator of “Classic Layer Cakes,” who scours flea markets to acquire the complete set for a Deluxe Reading Barbie Dream Kitchen, Trinidad scours his own past for each cracked, orphaned accessory.

TimesCouplets (New York Magazine’s Daily Intel)

Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.

Fiction Chronicle (The New York Times Book Review, 4/8/2007)
Take a young man, successful but lacking in experience. Add a woman, opaque and mysterious, her past a dark negative the narrator holds up to the light, finding only his own reflection. Throw in a war, a disillusioned journalist as the antagonist whose world-weary asides counter the young man’s tedious ignorance. It’s an old story, made fresh by the first-time novelist Michael FitzGerald….

Chick Lit, the Sequel: Yummy Mummy (New York Times, 12/17/2006)
EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain.

Confessions of a Memory Eater (The New York Times Book Review, 9/17/2006)
Is it a coincidence that an author who seemed to have reached the apex of her popularity a decade ago has come back on the scene with a novel in which a memory pill allows a professor to return to his own golden days? Possibly, though the literary chameleon Pagan Kennedy charges into the future with impressive dexterity, even as her latest character is sucked back into the past.

Digging to America (Baltimore’s WYPR, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, 8/02/2006)
Is it going too far to suggest that Anne Tyler is Baltimore’s literary equivalent of the Domino sign? A bona fide Baltimore institution, she is both kitschy and strangely beautiful—a beacon of sheer endurance, if nothing else. Such omnipresence is great for fans: we’ve only got to reach the last page of one Tyler installment before we turn around to find the next one on the shelf. But it’s bad for Tyler: after a while, we stop expecting anything new of her.

Hot, Hot, Hot (Baltimore’s WYPR, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, 7/21/2006)
Face it, cold is overrated.
Sure, if all this heat abated
We’d retain the polar regions,
And those other pesky seasons…

Wiretapping (Baltimore’s WYPR, Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast, 7/06/2006)
Since it’s, at best, a minor sin
To cock your ear and listen in
Should we condemn the NSA
For simply caring what we say?…

Talk Talk (The Baltimore Sun, 7/23/2006)
What’s the cost of being 20 minutes late for a dentist’s appointment? Running a stop sign? Having a cross word with your boss? In the real world, maybe an extra hour in the waiting room; a $40 ticket; getting the fish-eye for a week at work. But in T.C. Boyle’s new novel, Talk Talk, these inconsequential events do not pass into the realm of the quickly forgotten. Instead, they are the small jagged snips that unravel three people’s lives.

The Whole World Over (The Baltimore Sun, 6/11/2006)
One might think that a novel spanning the art of cookery and Sept. 11 (or, as the Library of Congress has it, “1. Women cooks-Fiction. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001-Fiction.”) might take its title with a decent pinch of salt as well. But Julia Glass’ The Whole World Over, the follow-up to the National Book Award-winning Three Junes, means to live up to its title, double connotation and all.

Carry Me Down (The Baltimore Sun, 4/9/2006)
If we got rid of the child narrator, would anybody miss him? Surely his characteristics have gone from enduring to inuring. First and most foremost, there’s his fractured family, usually in the form of a drunken father and an ineffectual mother – one overly close to her charge, mourning a great and fragile beauty. His parents have often produced an alternately raging and principled older brother, already dead or soon to die, and a preternaturally innocent young sister, who utters gnomic statements and, if the older brother lives, is not long for this world herself.

Rust and Bone (The New York Times Book Review, 12/25/2005)
It may, as the conventional wisdom goes, be harder to write comedy than tragedy–but it’s also easy for a writer to shoot for the second and hit the first. That’s what happens in Craig Davidson’s short-story collection, where the author plunges a child under the ice and into a permanent coma, rips the face off a dog, lets a killer whale bite off his trainer’s leg and finally snaps a character’s manhood in two in a series of unsuccessful attempts to win the reader’s sympathy that are equal parts amusing, appalling and just plain gross.

The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming (The Baltimore Sun, 12/25/2005)
At these times Perlman often attempts to save himself with a poetical flourish. The widow in “Manslaughter” lies down among dusty salad leaves in a supermarket after the jury renders a not-guilty verdict, her “life marked down, drastically reduced.” In “The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine,” the narrator, a lawyer, intones that the “terms of the contract” with his ex-love were “partly oral, partly implied and partly imagined. It has been breached in a way that makes its further performance impossible. I am entitled to treat it as an end, but I am unable. There is damage.”

On Beauty (The Baltimore Sun, 9/18/2005)
When an established author updates a classic, it’s generally considered bad form to spend the great majority of your reading sniffing out salient “Aha!” moments. But On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, a vigorous homage to Forster’s Howards End, not only invites, but demands, such sniffing. The author — whose debut, White Teeth, catapulted her into the kind of galactic literary orbit of which lesser authors, crashing and burning through unearned advances, can only dream — has transposed her countryman’s novel of love and class in turn-of-the-century England into a treatise on race and class in current day America.

An Atomic Romance (The Baltimore Sun, 8/28/2005)
When we begin Bobbie Ann Mason’s An Atomic Romance — the author’s first book in a decade — the life of hero Reed Futrell, ladies’ man, chemistry buff, and outdoor enthusiast, is, both metaphorically and literally, up in the air. The self-dubbed “Atomic Man,” a longtime employee of a uranium-enrichment plan, has just found out that his workplace may or may not have stockpiled its own employees with neptunium and plutonium. His girlfriend Julia, an amateur biologist, may or may not have completely called it quits with him, peeved not only at Reed’s blind trust in his superiors at the plant, but at his choice of a contaminated camping ground for their recent romantic excursion.

Lunar Park (The Baltimore Sun, 8/21/2005)
Bret Easton Ellis needs no introduction. Not because his first novel, Less Than Zero, was a “zeitgeist touchstone,” or because he has been profiled in “every magazine and newspaper that existed,” or because his name is as “recognizable as most movie stars’ or athletes’.” No, it is because, for those of you who may not be aware of these facts, the author notes all of the above and more in his handy 30-page preface to Lunar Park, which constitutes his sixth novel, or, if you will, a gathering of “controlled, cinematic haiku.”

We’re in Trouble (The Baltimore Sun, 5/1/2005)
In the sizable acknowledgments section of this debut short story collection, it is safe to say that only the dentist has been cast out of the warm circle of the author’s gratitude. Christopher Coake gives the ubiquitous nod not only to current and former partners, his family, his agent, and his editor, but also to the entire writing faculty of two MFA programs, all of his fellow workshop participants in each…

I Got Somebody in Staunton (New York Times Book Review, 4/10/2005)
A story that rides on its own melting also runs the risk of dissolving entirely. In William Henry Lewis’s second collection of short fiction — his first, ”In the Arms of Our Elders,” was published by Carolina Wren Press a decade ago — the slow, lyric stories of love, loss and longing have a sensuous appeal, but they often threaten to disappear into the ether before they get off the ground.

The Professor’s Daughter (The Baltimore Sun, 2/13/2005)
The author whose biography nearly mirrors that of her protagonist plays a dangerous game. Memories have as good a chance as imaginings to bloom into a successful piece of fiction, but a novel in which circumstances and characters are readily identified can seem like a half-hearted memoir. In Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter, the sections that diverge from the author’s life are by far the most absorbing, and the specter of the author – who, like Emma Boudreaux, was raised in Princeton, attended Yale and, as the product of a black father and a white mother, looks neither white nor black – rises so frequently, one wonders why one genre won out over the other.

Home Land (New York Times Book Review, 1/30/2005)
Few activities are as likely to bring on a fit of depressive jealousy as leafing through the back pages of one’s alumni magazine. While you molder in a studio apartment, stuck in a dead-end job, your former classmates are founding clinics in Thailand, cranking out best sellers and unveiling major new paintings — as well as bearing exceptional children. You thought you’d be a success, or at least have a chance to make a decent stab at it while you were still young. Sorry.

In Praise of Slowness (Urbanite, Feb/March 2005)
It’s not the junk food that’s killing you. Not the ozone layer. Not that you don’t jog three miles a day, take enough vitamins, or know what your Qi is, much less how to balance it. Nope. According to Carl Honoré, author of the recent “In Praise of Slowness,” the cause of your dissatisfactions and those of the industrialized world at large is the same thing responsible for its strength and success: Speed.

Check-In (Caketrain Books, 2005)
Winner of Caketrain Journal’s 2004 Poetry Chapbook Competition. Forthcoming in August 2005 from Caketrain Books. Check website for updates and ordering information.

Shadowed (Bantam Books For Young Readers, November 2004)
SOPHOMORE YEAR. HARDER classes. Nicer dorms. Stronger friendships. And Sydney Bristow’s biggest mission yet: retrieve top-secret KGB research in Berlin. But someone else is on the job. Someone people keep confusing with Sydney.

Unlubricated (New York Times Book Review, 10/24/2004)
It might not seem possible — to say nothing of advisable — to write a comic novel about Sept. 11 and its aftermath, but that’s what Arthur Nersesian has given us with ”Unlubricated,” his sixth novel, an urban caper about a would-be actress…

Runaway (New York Magazine, 10/23/2004)
No one would ever mistake Alice Munro for an author of delicate sensibilities. (In “Carried Away,” from 1994’s Open Secrets, a man plucks a recently decapitated head off a factory floor.) Still, a grim streak runs through Munro’s new collection, Runaway, greater than the physical carnage of her earlier work…

The Summer Guest (Washington Post Book World, 8/22/2004)
The telling moment in Justin Cronin’s debut novel, the 2002 PEN/Hemingway award-winning Mary and O’Neil, occurs when the female half of the title heads out to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.

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Old Hag is the work of Lizzie Skurnick, a writer, editor and current reluctant resident of perhaps the greatest failed industrial city of all time...more...

32 Comments »

1. What if it’s not G rated — heck, it might now ever be R (but it was defiantly the “best”).

   Comment by Brittany — 2/14/2007 @ 7:04 pm

2. I’m not sure this blog has EVER had anything G-rated. Post away.

   Comment by altehaggen — 2/14/2007 @ 7:05 pm

3. GUY IN 1987 WITH MULLET, COMB IN BACK POCKET, SLEEVELESS T-SHIRT, AND PUPPY DOG EXPRESSION: Uh, is anyone sitting here?

   (Posted for effectiveness, as he’s still sitting here. Sadly, the mullet, comb and t-shirt are long gone.)

   Comment by erin — 2/14/2007 @ 7:42 pm

4. I heard a man say this (not to me) once: “Did you get hurt when you fell from heaven.” I thought it was lame. Is it?

   But really, what’s better than: “Je t’aime mon bebe.” Nothing beats this.

   IMHO.

   Comment by Khalil A. — 2/15/2007 @ 12:53 am

5. It’s late so the only I can come up with at the moment was a note delivered to me by the wunderkind’s friend at a party.

   “Your hair is long
   Your skirt is short
   I want to get under it
   and into your heart.”

   Definitely the worst.

   Comment by Imani — 2/15/2007 @ 2:09 am

6. “At least you can be sure I don’t have some crazy STD from the 70s!”
   – Adorable 23-year-old, nine years my junior, practicing some ace rationalization. It may or may not have worked. (He just turned 25. I’m so going to hell.)

   Comment by sklarra — 2/15/2007 @ 2:39 am

7. man on corner by vacant lot, watching small, weak me straining to push granny cart overflowing with perhaps 100 lbs of laundry uphill, on miserable grey winter day:

   Hey Baby, You and me get together, you could do my laundry.

   (We all know that’s how it would work out, but don’t lead with it. Geez.)

   Comment by old-skool marm — 2/15/2007 @ 9:18 am

8. You know, we feel like we should lower the bar and open this up to plain old polite on the street — which is a huge accomplishment! We don’t have large breasts, so we have actually experienced this.

   1. “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Yeah.” “Leave him!”
   2. “Hello, miss. You look very pretty today.”
   3. [Whipping by on subway] “Hi, beautiful.”
   4. [Pulling on weight-lifting gloves] “Want me to help you move? I haven’t worked out yet today.”

   Hmmm….that last one gave men like 598 points. Book boxes.

   Comment by altehaggen — 2/15/2007 @ 9:47 am

9. More in the polite on the street category than the pick up line category, advice from a man walking by myself and two friends: “Do your husbands treat you like princesses? You ladies deserve it.”

   That we do.

   Comment by Elfin April — 2/15/2007 @ 11:52 am

10. “You got boobs. You too old for Harry Potter!”

    - Man on the Chicago El, summer of ‘05

    Actually, maybe he was trying to inform rather than to pick up.

    Comment by Ellen — 2/16/2007 @ 9:20 am

11. Omigod–extra credit for literary angle!!!!

    Comment by Old Hag — 2/16/2007 @ 9:21 am

12. This isn’t the best—it’s actually kind of the best of the worst comment I’d ever received… It’s packed with heartbreak and compliments and plain old stupidity.

    He said: I care for you very deeply but I can’t be a boyfriend right now

    I said: Why are you with me? What is it about me?

    He said: Well, you’re very thin.

    And that was that.

    Strange.

    I dated him for almost two years and all because I was very thin. He should come with a warning label.

    In retrospect, it’s hilarious—but still mystifying—I can’t believe people like that are allowed to date.

    Comment by JI — 2/16/2007 @ 1:34 pm

13. Ok, a friend reminded me of this one that happened at Starbucks. Also with a children’s book, coincidentally enough, but no boobs comment so not quite as awesome.

    German-old-enough-to-be-my-father: Ah, what are you reading there?

    Me: “The Chronicles of Narnia”. I’m reading it before the movie comes out.

    German: It has a very nice cover. And what a big book! You must be very intelligent, ah?

    Me: uuhh…right

    German: Maybe we could have a nice night, you could teach me about lions?

    Me: *coffee spew*

    I don’t know if that one was a pick-up line either. I’m sure the sight of coffee and whipped cream sprinkled on his notepad and the rest on my chin didn’t do me any favours.

    Polite on the street? I’ve had polite in the grocery store.

    Comment by Imani — 2/16/2007 @ 2:40 pm

14. “Trap me in your amber”

    Comment by tayari — 2/17/2007 @ 2:36 pm

15. Friend of a friend at the end of a very long Preakness Day:

    “You’re really attractive, and I thought that even before I was drunk.”

    Strangely, it was like a little time bomb. Utterly indifferent at the time, I decided ten months later that he was attractive even when he WAS drunk, which was often.

    I was wrong.

    Comment by Laura — 2/18/2007 @ 3:27 pm

16. “Thinking of you, but very little.”

    It was a note in a collection of James Baldwin essays that my now-husband gave me when we were dating after I asked him to slow things down because he was too intense.

    He moved in a month later and we married two months after that.

    Comment by Carleen — 2/18/2007 @ 5:35 pm

17. comment by altehaggen at age 4: All roads are connected.
    another comment by altehaggen, maybe age 6: There is only one universe.

    Comment by Mom — 2/18/2007 @ 7:40 pm

18. Mom, you’re not allowed to comment if you do not actually read what the challenge is. Next time, I’m recalling one of your advanced degrees.

    Comment by altehaggen — 2/18/2007 @ 10:56 pm

19. I have been married too long to remember any of the lines my swains used to employ. I suppose that “You wanna be on top tonight?” is not going to be a contender.

    Comment by Kate Dino — 2/19/2007 @ 10:52 am

20. I guess it’s more gallant than not asking at all.

    Comment by Old Hag — 2/19/2007 @ 11:02 am

21. I’m gonna try the amber line on Mrs. Beck–I’m thinking it’s a home run.

    Comment by Jimmy Beck — 2/19/2007 @ 12:51 pm

22. Oooo, a man! Jimmy, real line please. Or I will reveal your real name.

    Comment by Old Hag — 2/19/2007 @ 3:15 pm

23. Some of my most beloved faves from men I grew to adore:

    Upon the arrival of a first date: “I’ve got reservations at three restaurants, today’s movie listings and two hundred bucks in my pocket. My buddy’s having a barbeque. Or I’ve got a cold case of beer and a tape of Sly and the Family Stones Greatest Hits. Whatever you want to do. I just wanted to go out with you.”

    I like you. I’m not sure how else to say it.

    The bartender said you had amazing breasts.

    When I wake up tomorrow, I may not want to call you. And when I call you, you may not want to go out with me. But I’m gonna call, so you should think of what you’re gonna wear.

    Comment by shannon — 2/19/2007 @ 5:14 pm

24. [in discussion of whether we should get another round...]

    Me: I dunno, how drunk are you?

    Him: Drunk enough to make a pass at you.

    Comment by sarah — 2/19/2007 @ 7:27 pm

25. The best line I ever used on a guy:

    After getting a light from a stranger in a bar, I gave him a kiss.

    Then I said, “If I did that for fire, can you imagine what I’d do for water?”

    It rained that night, so he never found out….

    Comment by superfanny — 2/19/2007 @ 9:18 pm

26. Worst line I used on a guy that actually worked:

    “Make it worth my while.”

    Comment by Sarah — 2/20/2007 @ 12:42 pm

27. From a facial plastic surgeon, on a blind date:

    “I wouldn’t change a thing about your face.”

    Comment by Casey — 2/20/2007 @ 2:16 pm

28. I know it’s too late for the contest, but…

    He said, “I’m going to woo you. I’m going to woo you and I’m going to win you.”

    How could I resist a man who used the word woo?

    Comment by Stephanie — 2/21/2007 @ 12:50 pm

29. “With every drop of rain, you know I love you moreeeee…”

    That’s Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, right? Right? Yeah, ok, who cares; it rocks!

    Comment by Khalil A. — 2/21/2007 @ 1:17 pm

30. A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I started making out in her kitchen. I dragged her into her bedroom by her panties and somehow we wound up standing on her bed. Then she pushed me down and back, at the same time coming forward to get on top of me. My knee went up into her chin and I wound up chipping her front tooth.

    A few days later I sent her a Valentine’s Day text message:

    “Roses are red. Violets are blue. You are a filthy slut. And I’m going to smash your teef up.”

    Comment by mervis — 2/21/2007 @ 5:52 pm

31. So I guess I’m just going to go ahead and observe that the lines are better BEFORE THEY SLEEP WITH YOU.

    ladies and gentleman, an actual old hag relation. Now you know it’s CATCHING.

    Comment by altehaggen — 2/21/2007 @ 5:56 pm

32. A friend of mine’s son, age 2, likes to say, “Hi, I’m Big Boy Dash — do you want to know me?”

    Incidentally, this is the same line Jimmmy uses.

    Comment by CAAF — 2/24/2007 @ 6:32 pm

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