2016 Best of the Net nomination for "Building the Perfect Wings"

Decomp magazine has nominated my piece, "Building the Perfect Wings" for the 2016 Best of the Net. Thanks to the editorial staff at Decomp for selecting my work!

As well, my first official published poem, "Reversal", will be appearing in Crack the Spine Literary Magazine next month. Thanks to them, and to all the editors who have given these votes of confidence for my work, now and over the last eleven years.

Memorable Nonfiction 2010

Reading feeds the desire to write, and writing in itself is often an extension of reading. This explains why I read novels above most other works. Since I read so few biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and letters, I’m more selective, though maybe I ask of these works the same thing I ask of novels: that they feed my thinking and get me motivated to write. Three non-fiction books stood out for me this year.

The best biographers give you the life complete, baggage and all, written with no distracting bones to pick with their subject. The biographer takes on the self-erasing task of subsuming themselves in the life story, and sifting through the expected mundanity in order to reveal the exceptional. This could be difficult to accomplish for anyone compelled by their subject and trying to interpret the life, yet a degree of fandom is essential, as well as restraint. One of the best literary biographies for having covered this ground, and yet not shying away from either critical assessment, or candid and sometimes difficult judgment, is Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. Though I was mostly a casual reader of Cheever’s well-known short stories before I picked this bio up, I came to admire the conflicted writer who, at heart, made a unique and solitary venture of his fictional output over a long and sometimes troubled life. This reading sent me to Cheever’s overshadowed novels.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto had me riffing on its provocations. Like any good book of philosophy, this one forces a reader’s reaction. The numbered paragraphs are widely borrowed from attributed sources and compiled to construct a number of dubious arguments (the novel is dead, “sampling” is the future of literature, truth is more worthwhile than fiction). Nevertheless, the resulting compendium is provocative for the daring of the broad sampling ( a preponderance for several quotable essayists), often rewritten to make Shield’s points, which proves or at least validates that his de-contextualization experiment might just be a hybrid form of memoir-slash-manifesto. Though it also provides a convincing case that the novel is alive enough to provoke diatribes against it.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, are almost too specific, direct and intimate, like catching one side of an eavesdropped conversation, that a guilty taste of voyeurism is unavoidable. What comes through the young Beckett’s missives is a hubristic certainty, a kind of unassailable arrogance, as well as an authority tempered by doubt and perseverance, as when he declaims to his cousin Morris Sinclair: “Here I strut about, I cannot and will not do otherwise, and have no idea if God helps me or not.” One would have been honored and maybe intimidated to have received from Beckett a multi-lingual letter laced with multiple literary references. But even a partially committed Beckett completist will be curious to thumb through this first of four projected volumes for prime examples of an endangered, if not yet extinct, form of writing from a modern master.

Memorable Novels 2010

I read with intent and interest quite a few novels this year, notably those New York Time Book Review front pagers, and for all of the complaints about the imperiled state of publishing and the apparent evidence of a lack of good novels out there, I must conclude that the hype in that hallowed reviewed selection is often well-deserved. I thought about making a best of list this year, but I always find that it’s too difficult to narrow down, and ignores the likelihood of reading selectively. So here, in lieu, are five standout novels that I found memorable and generally enjoyable this year. The recession may be dipping again, but the novel is alive and well in 2010.

Tom Rachman’s first novel, The Imperfectionists, with its intersecting character stories, conveys a historical mosaic of the lives of journalists working for a fictional Herald-Tribune-like paper based in Rome, and is compelling for its readability, humor and O’ Henry type blunt traumas. Rachman’s journalism background, with an emphasis on the concrete and the compressed, helps him to keep the numerous and at times confusing character’s stories--surprisingly dialogue heavy--from fading. Initially, I thought this was a misleadingly marketed “novel in stories,” though in fact few of the chapters could stand alone very well. The international locales give its occasionally flat characters a welcome dose of color, though the misery he inflicts on some of them has tinges of unnecessary cruelty.

Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut, also a first novel, which drew me in by its persuasive opening, almost doesn’t fulfill its promise. Ross carries through the premise of his story, however, a la, “Did David kill his wife?--and if so, how?” and is deft at calibrating the interactions of the main couple, David Pepin and his obese and ambivalently adored wife, Alice. The compounding details paint an evocative though wildly unbelievable event, and the use of the competing narratives of the two policemen who also happen to have a desire to dispatch their wives into oblivion, is overly contrived, but Mr. Peanut holds its sway in spite of the loose tying together that concludes the novel with a thud.

Ian McEwan’ Solar is an indulgent feast of satire that harkens back to Amsterdam, operating in a comedic-tragic register which recalls the bold mischief of his early short stories. There, the characters are young and depraved, making sense of the world from a limited understanding of it. What those life lessons earn the protagonist of Solar, Michael Beard, is a deficit. Youthful curiosity and glory is eventually replaced with the fading returns of post-middle-age survival. Beard isn’t a character easy to like, but he seems prototypically human, and it is as easy to laugh at him as it is to have hope for him in his failings.

Skippy Dies, by Irish novelist Paul Murray, is one of the best written, compulsively enjoyable books I’ve read all year, and possibly my favorite long novel (at 600 plus pages) of the year, of the kind that I couldn’t stop reading and yet didn’t want it to end. The story takes place among a boys’ boarding high school (here known as a “College”) with its resident students, teachers, and the complications of the much longed for creatures glanced across the lawn of a neighboring girls’ school. What almost halts some of the pleasure of the tale comes after Skippy does finally die, a foregone conclusion from the opening pages. But what works is Murray’s well-drawn characters, specifically Skippy and the inner torment of a pill popping fourteen year old mediated in a Joycean stream of consciousness.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is a welcome step beyond The Corrections, though the novel that will probably top everyone’s best of lists has a few false logic notes with some of the character’s traits, and takes one through an oddly chosen many pages long narrative of the main character’s unlikely autobiography written in third person. For its many flaws, the novel is engaging, especially when the stakes are high and the specter of social grievances--infidelity, politics, and alcoholism--rear their subtextual heads. To use a broad adjective that Franzen seems so enamored of that it serves as an ineffective short-hand for the character’s assessments of each other, the novel is interesting. Franzen has a comic timing for hilarious turns of phrase, and the novel is at times guffaw out loud funny. The broad scope and convergence of the Bergland family’s self-involvements and misapprehensions of their own desires as they attain and rail at their freedoms, keep the novel rolling entertainingly forward.