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Interview: George Saunders

Amanda Davidson — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:51:30 +0000

George Saunders’s newest story, published only as an audiobook and Kindle Single, is told from the point of view of Fox 8, the title character who pens his tale of friendship and loss by way of a letter addressed simply: “Deer Reeder.” As the spelling gets weirder — and the voice dearer — Fox 8 implores his correspondent to “Reed my leter, go farth, ask your felow Yumans what is up.”

This is a really good question. Saunders doesn’t purport to have an “explanashun,” but as anyone familiar with his body of work knows — from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his breathtaking first story collection way back in 1998, to this year’s chart-topping Tenth of December, plus all the stories, novellas and essays in between — Saunders has a powerful knack for exploring the contradictions that drive our era, with an ear for the American idiom that is downright musical.

Happily, for those inclined to take their literature in the oral-tradition-meets-digital-publishing medium of audiobooks, Saunders narrates the audio version himself, adding warmth and wit to the listening experience.

eMusic contributor Amanda Davidson talked with Saunders over email about playing music, writing fiction, and reading stories out loud.

You’ve been on an epic book tour for Tenth of December. Are there any songs or albums that you’re currently listening to in order to refresh your spirits?

I pretty much blew my ears out in the 1980s when I worked on an oil crew and the Walkman had just been invented, so I try to minimize my headphone time these days. But we live an hour and a half from the nearest airport, so I get some good music-in-the-car time in on those drives. I’ve been listening to a mix that someone gave me, and it has on there “Peggy Sang the Blues” by Frank Turner, and “Stop Cryin’ About the Rain,” by Graham Parker. I’ve also been listening to After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, and (repetitively) “One Sunday Morning” by Wilco. Also “God I’m Missing You” — a Rodney Crowell-Mary Karr song done by Lucinda Williams on the Crowell-Karr album Kin. A really beautiful song, and an astonishing performance of it. Other than that — total silence.

There’s a connection between language and music in your new story, as Fox 8 trots past a house and hears “the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music!” Can you describe the genesis of Fox 8′s voice?

As far as I can remember, I’d written a humor piece where the narrator was a dog, and had some fun with that — he was kind of smart and also kind of dumb. And then I wrote another humor piece called “Coarse Evaluation” which was this course evaluation written by a high-school kid who was basically illiterate. It started like this:

At first this class was a pretty easy class to take. The readings were interesting but often tedious. The kids in class always seemed paranoid about being struck down by others. Unfortunately this factor led to an awkward vibe which both contributed and caused the demise of the teacher

And had soon descended to this, re. the class’s reading of “A Christmas Carol”:

When them ghosts came we did not find it scarry. Would have been scarier if one ghosts tongue had shot out and likked Mr Scrooge or Marley or whoever, that one guy who was such a tightass in terms of his money?

So I kind of combined the two: a fox who is only moderately literate.

I like to have some sort of self-imposed constraint when I’m writing. Somehow this has the paradoxical effect of freeing me up. So to be “constrained” to the bad spelling helped me — it seemed like it produced a possibility for a sort of extra level of poetry, if you see what I mean. If you say: “When the sun went down, the world went dark” — well, that’s one phrase. If you say, “When sun goes down, werld goes dark” — it’s got a different feeling. So I had a good time exploring what felt like a slightly new form of English — trying to find the hot spots and funny places and so on.

Fox 8 is full of sentences that are both funny and heated, critical and tender-hearted. Is there a way that your approach to language allows you layer these tones and feelings?

I think there is, yes, absolutely. That is the whole principle underlying the notion of style: that how we say something and what we say are not at all separate, and that there are untold levels of magic possible in the simple arrangement of words — that the human reading apparatus is deeply nuanced and perceptive, beyond our ability to explain or reduce.

But the pisser is, there are not any rules or guidance as to how or where or when to do this — I think you have to just wade in, phrase by phrase, and see what you’ve done and adjust accordingly. That is the fun part and the terrifying part, to me: it is all done (and can only be done) on the line-to-line level, by taste. And then you come back again and again, micro-adjusting each time — which will often introduce new possibilities, and so on and so on…

Was there any particular music, or musical style, that informed Fox 8?

It’s a funny thing. I love music, I play music, but I tend to keep music and writing very separate. Never (never) listen to music when I’m writing, and have learned to run away if a certain song is “inspiring” me too much. When it comes to writing, I am a purist. I think the prose has to do what it does all on its own — has to come forth out of complete silence and move the reader completely on its own, and so on.

All this by way of saying that when you asked that question, I drew a total blank. I mean, I could make something up, but honestly — nothing musical presents itself, related to that story. Or any of my stories.

Writing in silence makes a lot of sense, considering the relationship between silence and music, or silence and language. If you ever listen for dialogue, do you listen for the unsaid?

I think most dialogue is the unsaid. There’s a great comic energy in that move where two people talk around something, or talk past each other.

I’m interested in the way that Americans — well, probably people in general — tend to address their anxiety with yap. I know I do. This tendency to lack the self-confidence to simply not do anything — to refrain, to be silent, not react, not shoot, just stay out of the shit — that seems to be an American thing. It’s like we can’t tolerate being sidelined or inactive or inessential to any moment. We always have to be active and at the center of things. That’s a big generality, but I do sometimes wonder why it is that, if, say, a European gets pissed off, he gets drunk and falls asleep on the curb — takes himself out of the action. He can tolerate being abased, somewhat. But an American guy (again, generalizing like a big dog), especially your generic white guy, doesn’t like that. It’s as if he can’t say: “I am small/minor/temporarily losing.” If humiliated, he has to go out and do something. It’s like the worst thing that could happen is that, for a while, he might be…passive, or absent, or quiet, or inessential.

Except for me, of course. I am one of those virtuous, self-possessed white guys.

I read recently that you play guitar. How long have you been playing?

I started in seventh grade. One of our nuns was offering free lessons, so I went for it. They were basically teaching us to play for Mass, so we first learned “Kumbaya,” and then “We Are One in the Spirit,” with the iconic strumming pattern called, uh, “Down, Down, Up/Up, Down, Up.” And then I played in bands all through college and after.

Do you practice a lot? Does the repetition of that process connect with your writing?

I do practice a lot. When I was in college, for a certain period, I was playing an hour or so of scales a day. Now it’s more that technical approach called “just farting around.”

I think music has informed my writing in lots of (very complicated) ways. There’s an “ear” component in both — a way of training yourself in close listening. There’s also this idea that the real place of communication is sub-rational — just learning to trust that the real magic in a piece of art occurs in sub-conceptual places.

And then, as you suggest, there is no limit to the number of times one may have to play a piece of music before it’s satisfactory. Ditto with writing. Being involved with music taught me early on that, in art, you get no points for mere effort — the thing has to work at the end, or it’s back to the drawing board.

Are you currently working on any guitar pieces?

Lately I’ve been trying to write songs — I have this goal of writing, in my lifetime, one song that doesn’t revolt me. So far, no luck. But it is fun to work on them, and especially fun to work on the guitar parts. I have Logic Express on a dedicated computer in the basement, so I’ve been overdubbing and very slowly learning about recording — just as a hobby, or as a reminder of what “beginner mind” really feels like. (“Beginner mind” is a nice way of saying “How it feels to keep sucking even when you really want to be good.”)

Do the songs that you write and record have lyrics?

They do have lyrics. That is actually the part I’m most unhappy with. The lyrics I write tend to be kind of linear and logical and narrative — and not in a good way. I haven’t found any truths that I could only express via a lyric, I guess is how I’d put it. So that’s interesting to me — I know what a great song sounds like, I understand the qualities of allusiveness and so on, but just can’t seem to summon that up in this context. That’s what I mean by “beginner mind.” And that’s why I like to experience it. It’s good to be reminded that a lot of what I take for granted in prose writing might not be so obvious to, or easy for, a young student writer. And it’s also interesting (and frustrating) to see that diagnosing or recognizing a problem does not necessarily lead to solution of same.

You recorded your own audiobooks for both Fox 8 and Tenth of December. Did you enjoy the process?

I loved it. I said I’d be willing to, and Random House was nice enough to let me do it. I had a great producer, Kelly Gildea, and we just had a lot of fun with it. I do a good number of college readings, and I’ve come to understand reading aloud as a performance that is quite separate from writing but offers another opportunity to engage with what you’ve written, and also to sort of teach yourself what the next thing is going to be. I think I might also be a bit of a frustrated actor.

It’s an interesting question, this one of writing versus reading aloud. I remember when I was on tour with my first book — those were hard stories to read. They read better on the page than they did out loud — they had lots of strange phrasings and so on. And something about having to read them repetitively and never really finding the right way to do it forced out the first story in the second book. That story was called “The Falls,” and it was much more playful and colloquial and readable than the stories in the first book. I think that, at some level, I was giving myself something to read on the road. It was as if whatever it is in us that forms voice, pre-writing, had taken note, and was trying to come up with something a little more verbally interesting.

Do you make discoveries about the stories you’ve already written by reading them out loud, whether in the studio or at readings?

Yes, absolutely. You find out where the laughs are, you find out how to pitch a given character via the voice you give her (too much in this direction and she becomes a caricature; go too far back the other way and you start losing humor). Sometimes you can feel when a moment is powerful by the quality of the silence. There is also, I think, a really beneficial effect in that you are getting very close to that ancient storyteller mode: there you are, there’s your crowd, you’ve got 30 minutes; how much of a deep connection can you make? I’ve done a lot of readings since this new book came out in January and I can feel that I am really learning something about connection with an audience — for example, that you can trust them to get the subtle and deep things; that they really are interested in the things I’m interested in; that you don’t have to have a joke a minute to interest them. I can feel that all of this is going to come into play with the next book.

The live audience connection you mention is a rare treat, since there are so few forums in which adults get to listen to stories, together. Children, though, have this experience more often — Fox 8 even learns English by eavesdropping on bedtime stories.

Yes — Fox 8 started out as a kids’ book. But then, it turns out, kids’ books can’t have so many misspellings. I’d sent it out to a few editors and they all said the same thing. That was an interesting moment: What I’d thought of as a kids’ book was…not. For sure. So then I felt a door opening: Well, if it’s not a kids’ book, what is it that separates a kids’ book from one for adults? And I’ve always thought that a kids’ book should serve the function of assuring this scared, new little person that sometimes things turn out well; that goodness has a place in the world. And maybe a story for adults — especially in a fortunate, possibly smug culture like ours — might serve a different function: telling a powerful, self-assured person that sometimes things don’t turn out well, that they aren’t turning out well for some people even as we speak. So when I realized it was not a kids’ book, it gave me permission to change the function of the story, essentially; it allowed (or maybe required) some darkness to come in. And I liked the way that dark event resonated with the peppy kids’ book language — it was kind of like I’d made this complete sweetheart and then lowered the boom on him. A little harsh, but then I thought: Does that ever happen in the real world? Does a real sweetheart ever get the boom lowered on him? And I answered myself: Duh.

Fox 8 is a sweetheart, but he’s not simply a foil for human cruelty — he justifies his own aggression toward chickens, for example. Still, one layer of meaning I took away is that it would benefit all creatures if we humans were more aware and thoughtful about habitat destruction.

For me, the way fiction works is that it always occurs to a specific person (or fox), at a specific time under specific circumstances. So, to the fox, habitat destruction is a big issue, especially at this time. But he’s pretty willing to destroy a chicken habitat, or even a chicken, and then rationalize that. I think fiction works best when it is basically saying, “Ah, see? Sometimes it is thus.” So we can understand why malls get built and how that can be a good thing, and, at the same time, we can see that, whenever a mall gets built, stuff gets destroyed, which is a bad thing — and we can leave the scenario not saying, “Fuck it! Build malls anyway! Capitalism must be served!” and also not saying, “Evil mall-builders! Cease and desist! Never build a mall, if you love animals,” but rather, “Ah, see? Sometimes it is thus.”

Although, on the other hand, who can argue with “more aware and thoughtful”?

My feeling about the moral intention in fiction is: show characters in action, try to be fair to them, and tell the story in the most lively and truthful language you can; admit to ambiguity, and, as you write, try to move closer and closer to the natural energy of the story, and away from your conceptions/hopes about it — and good things will happen. To the reader and the writer.

Herman Koch, The Dinner

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:20:18 +0000

A comedy of manners with a dark moral heart

Don’t read this review before listening to Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner. Instead, try to imagine the love child of Hitchcock’s single-take thriller Rope, a New York Times Magazine cover story on the evils of helicopter parenting, and the prissily detailed menu from the latest farm-to-table eatery. OK, have you got the picture? No? Well then read on, but beware of spoilers.

Though it’s actually set in the Netherlands, Koch’s home country, the story could just as easily take place in Brooklyn or Berkeley. Two couples, of youngish middle age, meet for dinner at a well-regarded restaurant. The narrator, Paul, seems resentful of the evening ahead; the husband of the other couple, Serge, is a flashy guy of some celebrity (we soon discover he is Paul’s brother and the leading candidate for Prime Minister). Paul is annoyed by Serge’s need to show off and the fact that he can’t just enjoy a quiet night at a local café with his wife, Claire. At first it seems The Dinner will be a comedy of manners: Serge shows off his wine knowledge by gargling his first sip, and the restaurant’s host points a pinky finger at every carefully sourced item on their plates.

But some details are sinister: Babette, Serge’s wife, arrives with sunglasses covering red-rimmed, puffy eyes; Paul is preoccupied by an incident with his son Michel. Earlier that afternoon, he snooped on Michel’s phone, and whatever he saw there haunts him. Claire doesn’t know — or does she? And Serge and Babette’s own children may be involved as well. Especially suspicious to Paul is his sibling’s adopted son from Burkina Faso, Beau. It is Paul’s lack of empathy toward Beau’s very existence in his family — he refers to the adoption as a “rent-to-own agreement” — that tips the reader off. Something is very wrong here, though Paul may not be a reliable narrator. The evening darkens, the courses come and go, and the true moral vacuity of The Dinner’s diners becomes as obvious as the warm goat cheese appetizer.

The Dinner has been a bestseller in Europe for several years already. However, the issues it raises — social responsibility, class conflicts, racism, violence, and the use of new technology — feel universal, as do Paul, Serge, Claire and Babette’s ultimately selfish and self-protective form of parenting.

Sam Sheridan, The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse

Patrick Rapa — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:21:33 +0000

Seeking a plan for the end of the world

Sam Sheridan could have been Batman. The dude is a former wilderness firefighter, merchant marine and EMT who graduated from Harvard, studied with a muay thai master in Thailand, and did construction work in Antarctica — and all of that came before he started working on The Disaster Diaries.

A renaissance man’s guide to surviving the end times, this book depicts Sheridan jumping through all kinds of hoops in pursuit of preparedness — not just shooting ranges and firebuilding, either. We’re talking stunt driving, knife fighting, bugout-bag packing, elk hunting, igloo building and more. He traipses through bleakest Arizona with primitive-living expert Cody Lundin. He learns how to steal cars from an ex-con in Los Angeles. He gets some long, hard lessons on dog sledding from Inuit guides in Nunavut. Still, The Disaster Diaries transcends its straight-up usefulness at every turn. A skilled storyteller with a journalistic mindset, Sheridan is always sneaking in some telling details about this survivalist’s paranoid monologues, or that thief’s regret, or some tough guy’s considerable ego. And the author’s own wild flights of fancy — chapters frequently begin with him battling zombies, escaping super-quakes, beating back mutant gangs, or dodging alien spider robots — give the book an occasional touch of the surreal that’ll either heighten your own paranoia or put your mind at ease.

As readers, we can enjoy the book as a true-life first-person adventure story while taking solace in the fact that Sheridan is preparing for an apocalypse that will probably never happen. Probably.

Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then

Sara Jaffe — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:21:08 +0000

A lyrical, insightful investigation of the ways hate and love come together in a small-town New England family

The painful tension between hate and love, the two strongest and most complicatedly intertwined of emotions, drives See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s newest novel. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet live in a small New England village with their two children, “the young Heracles” and “the beautiful Persephone.” Mr. Sweet hates (or loves) his wife enough to compose a nocturne entitled “This Marriage is Dead,” or, “This Marriage Has Been Dead for a Long Time Now.” Mr. Sweet also hates the young Heracles enough to engage in frequent fantasies of his beheading, but he makes clear that he doesn’t want to murder his son, only to kill him. Heracles worships his mother, who loves gardening and writing and who arrived from an island in the British West Indies on a “banana boat,” yet at the same time finds her deeply ridiculous. And Mrs. Sweet? She is at once a victim of her families’ enmity and a conscious participant in it: She knows what she does to make herself hated, and, though she won’t apologize for her ways, she doesn’t blame her family for the hate her ways inspire in them.

Readers with a cursory knowledge of Kincaid’s story will recognize the Sweet family as bearing a deep resemblance to her own: Mrs. Sweet’s first name is Jamaica; she quotes from Autobiography of My Mother and Kincaid’s other previous books; and Kincaid, like Mrs. Sweet, grew up in Antigua, and lived in a small town in Vermont with her two children and composer husband, who she later divorced. This unignorable resemblance adds to the novel’s tension, which is both heightened and balmed by Kincaid’s precise, lyrical sentences, heady with repetition.

It is hard to imagine the audiobook being voiced by anyone but Kincaid, who reads the text the way she wants us to understand it; words like hate and kill sound as casual as the weather, while words that define our contemporary lives — Crate and Barrel, Verizon, Ninja Turtles — are pronounced with a kind of denaturalized incredulity. It is this pervasive denaturalization of what we have come to expect as normal — that family members should love and not hate each other, that one should not accept hate as if it were love — that makes See Now Then a source of great insight and wonder.

The Luck of the Fictional

eMusic Editorial Staff — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:43:38 +0000

We’ve all heard about the luck of the Irish, that mythological good fortune that clings to the Emerald Isle and all of its inhabitants. But we’d wager that the luckiest people around aren’t Irish at all…nor are they, technically, people. Fictional characters have the highest good luck-to-mishaps ratio around, finding themselves in the most impossible of impossible situations and then, just as unexpectedly, coming out unscathed (and maybe even enlightened) on the other end.
There’s something about good fortune that’s intensely appealing to writers, a notoriously down-on-their-luck group, and they can’t help but grant their creations with the deus ex machine they themselves could use so much. Here, we’ve gathered five of our favorite lucky characters, a disparate group connected by a common good fortune.

Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarty

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On the Road

Jack Kerouac
2008 | Unabridged
When you’re 15 or 16 and you read On the Road for the first time, no one has ever been luckier than Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they careen from adventure to adventure, taking in women, drugs, and cities like so much fuel to be burned through and discarded. Depending on your own longings and inclinations, you either end up thinking that Sal’s the lucky one — the one with the... modicum of stability and skepticism, the one for whom the road is a choice, not a necessity — or Dean, who, for all the chaos of his life and his eventual descent into madness, bears the mythology of the True Prophet. To revisit Kerouac’s freewheeling epic as an adult is to realize the ways in which, as a kid, you were likely to equate luck with unaccountability, or recklessness, but also to remember how fiercely those old longings once burned. Even if you can no longer think of Sal or Dean as lucky creatures, you realize that you were lucky to have once thought of them that way. — Sara Jaffe
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Brian Robeson

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Hatchet

Gary Paulson
2011 | Unabridged
One might not think of a boy as terribly lucky when the plane he’s on (ferrying him between divorced parents) crashes in the wilderness. However, in many ways, 13-year-old Brian Roberson is lucky: Not only does he survive the crash (the pilot does not), he lands in a forest of plenty. During his 54 days in the wild, Brian learns how to create fire, make shelter, and hunt, all using the titular... hatchet that his mother had just happened to give him right before the trip—luckily, it took place before TSA restrictions went into effect. After a tornado hits Brian’s campsite, he’s able to access the crashed airplane and its survival kit, which includes an emergency transmitter that, happily for Brian, still works. Ultimately, he’s rescued and brought home. If you have to be stranded alone in the woods, having luck on your side certainly helps. — Claire Zulkey
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Piscine Molitor Patel

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Life of Pi

Yann Martel
2013 | Unabridged
First, how lucky is the little boy who has a zookeeper for a father? You always have playmates, you’ve always got something for show and tell, and you’re never bored. However, Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel’s luck momentarily runs out when the freighter that’s ferrying his family and their zoo animals from Japan to Canada sinks, taking his family with it. Lucky for Pi, he manages to escape the shipwreck, along with a... hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger. The animals aren’t terribly lucky— they all, save the tiger, kill each other.But Pi is fortunate enough to survive not just by fishing and obtaining fresh water but because of his experience with animals, as well, for he’s able to train the tiger to refrain from killing him or capsizing the boat. Ultimately, the boat washes up in Mexico and, luckily for them, both Pi and the tiger survive. — Claire Zulkey
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Raoul Duke

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Hell's Angels

Hunter S. Thompson
2012 | Unabridged
To call Hunter S. Thompson (or his fictional alter ego, Raoul Duke) a daredevil would be a gross understatement. The original gonzo journalist wrote exclusively about situations that would scare ordinary people; if they weren’t scary enough, he’d just add more drugs to the mix. In 1967, when Hell’s Angels was originally published, the eponymous motorcycle gang inspired fear and loathing throughout America. The intrepid Thompson decided to investigate their outlaw lifestyle... and hateful worldview by going to their parties, interviewing them, and getting intoxicated alongside them. This electrifying first-person narrative could have resulted in his incarceration or death, but it didn’t, and that alone made Thompson a very lucky man.

Thompson’s good fortune also came in another form: the creation of Raoul Duke. Toward the end of the book, Thompson names his alter ego as a true outlaw in the vein of Alexander King or Elizabeth Taylor. Duke later took Thompson’s luck and ran with it, emerging as the protagonist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which cemented his (and Thompson’s) status as American rebel icons. — Arianna Stern
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Clarissa Dalloway

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Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf
2010 | Unabridged
Mrs. Dalloway, famously, begins with flowers and closes with the eponymous flower-getter entering, finally, the room in which her long-awaited party is being held, while all the loves of her life look upon her entrance with anticipation. Luck — blooming flowers, steadfast admirers — pervades Clarissa Dalloway’s life. But so does pain, and it is that struggle — how to acknowledge oneself as a lucky person in a world so rife with... pain that one has caused and felt and witnessed — that provides one of the book’s central conflicts. Clarissa is lucky to have experienced the love of Peter Walsh and Sally Seton and luckier still to have chosen the simpler, solid Richard over both of them. She is lucky to have experienced the horrors of World War I only indirectly. But one gets the sense throughout the book that Clarissa feels a deep guilt over the luck that has been afforded her. She is lucky is to be alive, but suffers, too, the guilt of living. — Sara Jaffe
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Teddy Wayne, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Adam Rathe — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:33:48 +0000

A sharp, funny book about the perils of the music industry

Even at 11 years old — almost 12, he’d tell you — tween-pop phenom Jonny Valentine is afflicted with a certain Hollywood ennui. The singer, who shot to fame thanks to YouTube videos and a ferocious dipsomaniac of a momager, might be not-so-patiently waiting for puberty to arrive, but he’s already well versed in sleeping pills, publicity stunt relationships and websites that count down the days until he’s 18 and therefore “legal.” He’s also juggling lagging concert attendance, life on the road, and the sudden reappearance of a father who’s been missing for most of his short life.

In Teddy Wayne’s sharp, funny book, young Jonny serves as a carb-counting, video game-obsessed ragdoll for the music industry, consumers included, to play with until boredom — or a voice change — sets in. Valentine’s thisclose to being a Justin Bieber stand-in (he does have a signature haircut), but in the book he lags in popularity behind Tyler Beats, a slightly older, acne-prone crooner whose career he wants to emulate. Being second place — as well as lacking the professional and personal structure that seems to let Tyler function as more teen than machine — gives Jonny something for which to strive, giving the book a satisfying arc. A journey as smooth as Jonny’s own yet-to-explode skin wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable to read.

And while some of our protagonist’s observations seem beyond his years and parallels between his life and the hard-to-complete video game he can’t stop playing are a bit heavy-handed, it’s not hard to forgive these missteps and let Jonny Valentine‘s sugary charm win you over. That’s the whole idea.

Scientology Showdown

Scott Esposito — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:13:20 +0000

South Park dissed them big time in a memorable episode. You’ve probably had them offer you a free e-meter audit at the mall. And maybe you were even one of those unlucky few who got snookered into watching Battlefield Earth. Yes, Scientology is nutty as hell — but it’s also undeniably fascinating, in the best tradition of American nuttery.

This winter, curious readers were blessed with the publication of two books on the infamously secretive (and litigious) religion. In Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, the New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner offers a comprehensive history of the religion, digging up plenty of dirty secrets in the best tradition of investigative reporting. Beyond Belief, written by Jenna Miscavige Hill — niece of Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige — is in many ways the opposite: It doesn’t have Wright’s historical breadth, but it does give the personal details of day-to-day life in one of the religion’s most high-profile enclaves that Wright’s book lacks.

While Going Clear hits harder than Beyond Belief, both make it clear that Scientology is a frighteningly repressive, conformist institution that has done all sorts of bizarre and nasty things, ranging from the merely immoral to the flagrantly criminal. Just as clear is the fascination that Scientology has held for (possibly) millions of adherents over the years, as well as its undeniable impact on the modern world. You’ll probably be shocked and disgusted after reading these books, but you’ll also come away with an understanding of how Scientology embodies much of the subconsciousness of postwar America, channeling our fascination with science fiction, authoritarianism, and self-help into a religion that represents many of our best and worst tendencies.

Arguably the Most Awful Thing L. Ron Hubbard Did, Out of Many Candidates

By the time you reach the end of Going Clear, you’re likely to think that there’s not a single awful thing that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t do. From adultery to kidnapping, theft, pathological lying and child abuse, it’s all here. It’s hard to choose the single most despicable deed, but this is my pick: With the publication of Dianetics in 1950, Hubbard’s career was finally beginning to take off after a series of failures, and he realized that in order to reach the next level it would be more advantageous if he were not married (at the time he was with his second wife, Sara Northrup Hollister). But he also realized that divorcing his wife would be a bad career move, so he found a simple solution: Hubbard asked Sara to commit suicide to further his career. When Sara, understandably, declined the offer, Hubbard then abducted both her and their child, attempted to have her committed to an insane asylum, and then claimed to the FBI that she was a communist, a serious allegation at the height of the Red Scare. Ultimately, Hubbard was given a divorce due to Sara’s “gross neglect of duty and extreme cruelty.” Point: Going Clear.

Strangest Form of Child Abuse

Miscavige Hill was a church member from age seven, when she was asked to sign its infamous “billion-year contract.” (Since all Scientologists know that we live one lifetime after another, forever, just pledging one lifetime is hardly a sign of dedication.) She details all sorts of acts perpetrated on her by the church as a youngster, from brainwashing to hours of manual labor to being forced to stare for hours at Hubbard’s “policies” written on the wall. Here’s one of the oddest: Miscavige Hill attended one of the church’s schools, where classes featured an OCD-level focus on looking up words. As Hubbard explained, all failure to learn derives from not knowing the meaning of words, so it logically follows that students who are having trouble must look up every single word they don’t know. Because of this, Miscavige Hill and many of her fellow students came to dread school, which was essentially hours of searching through the dictionary that made it impossible for her to actually learn anything. Point: Beyond Belief.

Freakiest Tom Cruise Moment

You knew we couldn’t get through a feature on Scientology without mentioning Tom Cruise, right? As Wright reports in Going Clear, Cruise is an admirably dedicated member, even helping so-called pre-clears take the steps necessary to reach the status of “clear,” a major milestone in one’s progress through the church. Wright explains that on one such occasion, Cruise was unable to get a reading from a pre-clear on the church’s e-meter in order to begin a session. In a sweet-but-unseemly moment of personal generosity, he offered the pre-clear a snack from an array of goodies the church provides its Hollywood elite with. As the pre-clear sat in amazement, Cruise offered up all sorts of treats, not realizing that he had been given special treatment and that normal members of the church subsisted on barely adequate, tasteless offerings. The most bizarre of the special dispensations made for Cruise? The church planted a field of wildflowers in its rural California enclave so that he and then-wife Nicole Kidman could run through them, apparently a long-held fantasy for the couple. Point: Going Clear.

Most Heartbreaking Moment

Miscavige Hill makes being raised by the Scientologists sound like something out of 1984: The kids are encouraged to rat out one another; they get “chits” for minor infractions that quickly add up to draconian punishments (a mere three chits means you have to clean your room well enough to survive a white glove inspection); they are made to endure painfully hot saunas and drink cups of vegetable oil for bizarre health rationale; and their school, named “Chinese school” after Hubbard’s experience with the Chinese, was a not-so-subtle form of brainwashing. As she tells it, Miscavige Hill did her best to endure these trials, but she had it worse than most: Her parents were high-ranking functionaries, which meant that she was separated from them for months at a time, and when they did visit they received whitewashed reports of how she had been treated. This all adds up to the book’s saddest moment, when Miscavige Hill and a friend decided to run away. Trying to escape on tiny legs and with their pockets stuffed full of croissants, they have no chance whatsoever, but that still doesn’t stop the grown-ups from humiliating them by blaming the ruination of a song and dance show on the little girls. Maybe instead of pulling out all the stops to punish them, they might have wondered why the girls felt pushed to such a drastic step. Point: Beyond Belief.

Biggest WTF? Moment

In Scientology no one is too young to work, nor, apparently, is anyone too young to do jobs they’re ridiculously unsuited for. Case in point: As a child, Miscavige Hill was appointed to perform medical duties for her fellow Scientologists. Fortunately, Scientology’s cure for most ailments involves eradicating bad thoughts from one’s system and hiding oneself away behind closed doors, à la the 18th century, so there was only so much damage our young doctor could do. But, as Miscavige Hill points out, had one of her “patients” been seriously ill, there’s a good chance she wouldn’t have realized or would have known what to do. She might have had a death or a lifetime disability on her hands — thank God nothing happened. Point: Beyond Belief.

A Few Final Facts About L. Ron

Lawrence Wright has done his research, and it really shows. Among other revelations, he tells us that on numerous occasions Hubbard declared, “I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.” (Wright also explains that self-help is only so lucrative, because once you solve a person’s problem you lose their business — but with religion you can have them for their whole life, or a billion years.) He also informs us that upon hearing of the apparent suicide of his son Quentin, he exclaimed, “That little shit has done it to me again!” Even by the time Hubbard was becoming an infirm old man and Miscavige had taken over day-to-day operations of the church, he could still spend: ensconced in a mobile home in California, he reportedly received $1 million from Miscavige every week. Scientology may tell us the secrets of where all our bad thoughts come from, but it surely can’t tell us how an old man in a trailer can spend $1 million every week. Point: Going Clear.

Result: TIE. But there’s enough Scientology wackiness to fill a library, let alone these two books. Both are essential reading.

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Going Clear

Lawrence Wright
2013 | Unabridged
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Beyond Belief

Jenna Miscavige Hill
2013 | Unabridged

Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree

Claire Zulkey — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:19:25 +0000

An unexpectedly inspiring look at the difficulties of parenting children who are different.

There may be no perfect time for a parent to listen to Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree — any number of terrifying challenges can arise in a child’s life, regardless of age. But listening while a child is in utero, when expectant parents’ emotions and fears are running high, is especially scary. This isn’t to say that Solomon’s exhaustive but engaging book is meant to frighten. Certainly, its tales of children who are significantly different from their parents — children who suffer from autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities — can be frightening, heartbreaking and disturbing, but Solomon’s stories of the parents who love them are truly optimistic.

For the few incidences of parents who give up on or fail their children, there are many more who surprise themselves with their capacity to love — including Solomon himself, who became a father over the course of writing the book. The book is an enlightening look at parental hardship, community and endurance, and the hopeful decision to turn illness into identity. While it may alarm, overall this tome inspires and will lead parents and children alike to count their blessings.

eMusic Welcomes Brilliance Audio

eMusic Editorial Staff — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:31:57 +0000

Over the past few months, our audiobooks ranks have been growing even more than usual. The reason? We’re thrilled to welcome our newest publishing partner, Brilliance Audio, who have been creating great audiobooks for nearly 30 years in all genres, from bestsellers like Dean Koontz and Lee Child to award-winning nonfiction and memoirs, classics, and more. The one thing they have in common is a focus on marrying the author’s voice with the narrator, creating a listening experience that’s thrilling or emotional, instructive or inspiring. We’ve rounded up some favorites from the first crop of Brilliance titles below for you to start exploring; there are many more to come.

And the Oscar Should Go To…

Regan Hofmann — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:50:30 +0000

We all know there are no new stories left in the world — hell, Shakespeare himself had trouble coming up with something original 400 years ago when he was writing Romeo and Juliet. But it’s a problem that is running particularly rampant over the movies today. There are the obvious: sequels, reboots, adaptations of the novel based on the Broadway play. But beyond those, every story we’re being told has been told before. Producers just dress them up in different clothes, or reverse the genders, or set it on the moon, and hope nobody notices. So while the Oscars have an official category to recognize adapted screenplays, we’re pulling back the curtain to recognize the debts all the other Oscar nominees owe to literature.

The Master / Going Clear

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Going Clear

Lawrence Wright
2013 | Unabridged
As director Paul Thomas Anderson and Best Supporting Actor nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman have said over and over again in interviews, The Master is not about Scientology. It's a fictional film about the 1950s founding of a cult-like religion by a charismatic writer, an organization based on a potent combination of supernatural backstory, atomic-age science and tight-fisted, often violent control that just happened to call a massive ocean liner home base for... tax evasion purposes. Nope, nothing at all like the Scientology Lawrence Wright describes in his expose, Going Clear. Wright's book is a brilliantly thorough look at the short, fascinating history of the religion, with stunning revelations about the early days of its pompous, fame-obsessed founder, L. Ron Hubbard, that could serve as blueprints for Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd. Was it the fictional character or the real-life leader who invented naval medals to claim he was a decorated war hero? Only one way to find out.
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Zero Dark Thirty / No Easy Day

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No Easy Day

Mark Owen
2012 | Unabridged
While the Kathryn Bigelow-directed Best Picture nominee is ostensibly based on a very well-known true story, its version of the CIA's hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the years after 9/11 has been criticized by everyone from the current CIA director to anti-torture journalists and Republican senator John McCain. Rather than wade into that moral morass, get your facts from one of the guys who was there on the day:... "Mark Owen," a member of the storied SEAL Team 6 who stormed bin Laden's compound in Pakistan and killed him. The book was published under a pseudonym without undergoing review by the Department of Defense in order for "Owen" to tell the full story without redaction; when the author's identity was revealed, a response written by a number of ex-SEALs criticized the author for fame-seeking, but not one of them questioned his version of the events.
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Django Unchained / The Count of Monte Cristo

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The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas
2009 | Unabridged
A man spends years unjustly imprisoned, gains his freedom, then embarks on the single-minded pursuit of the bad dude who stole his woman? Could be Quentin Tarantino's newest genre-skewing blockbuster, sure, but it could just as easily be Alexandre Dumas's classic tale of revenge. While Tarantino's slave Django is freed by Best Supporting Actor nominee Christoph Waltz's German bounty hunter, Dumas's Edmond Dantes is unfairly sentenced to 14 years in prison by... some conniving so-called friends and has to break out on his own. Both set in times of political turbulence, both stories follow our heroes on their epic quests for revenge. But while Django's hunt takes him into a couple of small-time gang fights, Dantes's full vengeance takes years of life under assumed names, accumulating a massive fortune, and ruining the lives of multiple conspirators, driving one to suicide. Even Waltz's character has to acknowledge their mirror-image stories in the film, during a conversation with main baddie Leonardo DiCaprio. Advantage: Dumas.
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No / To Sell Is Human

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To Sell Is Human

Daniel H. Pink
2012 | Unabridged
As Daniel Pink so convincingly explains in his book To Sell is Human, sales is not a distinct industry but a behavior that we all engage every single day. You sell your girlfriend on seeing the movie you want to see. You sell your boss on letting you take over the big project. You sell your kids on eating their broccoli. It's all a question of strategy — and Pink's book is... all about new strategies to go about the old business of selling, no matter what you do. In No, a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, ad exec Rene Saavedra is hired in 1980s Chile to use his marketing and sales savvy to run a referendum campaign against the ruling dictator Augusto Pincochet. His controversial ads focus on selling the public on the image of democratic freedom rather than relying on the soapbox rhetoric of the past, opening up a new world of political messaging we can see today. Looks like he could have taught Pink a thing or two about innovative selling.
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Frankenweenie / The Island of Dr. Moreau

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The Island of Doctor Moreau

H.G. Wells
2008 | Unabridged
Of course Tim Burton's Best Animated Feature-nominated stop-motion kids' romp is based on Mary Shelley's granddaddy of corpse-reanimating horror stories, Frankenstein. But take a step back and you'll see that this tale of a young boy whose success at reanimating his dearly departed dog, Sparky, leads the neighborhood kids to try their hand at playing god with their pets, creating a pack of mutated monsters who wreak havoc on the town,... owes a lot to H.G. Wells's early grotesquerie, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Rather than by accident, Moreau's half-animal, half-human monsters, the Beast Folk, are created in the cold name of science. But both tales have the same, powerful message: Don't mess with nature, or nature will mess you up. Unless it's to get your best friend back, that is.
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Interview: Eddie Huang

Elisa Ludwig — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:00:49 +0000

A Vice TV host with a law degree, a hip-hop obsession, and a NYC restaurant called Baohaus (serving Taiwanese buns, named for his favorite architects), Eddie Huang is a walking culture clash. In his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, he charts the circumstances that conspired to make it so: a Florida childhood in a soulless suburb, restrictive Asian-American stereotypes and repressive parenting, street fights, racism, football, drugs, trips to Taiwan, a family restaurant business and Tupac. His search for identity led him to law school, a stint as a streetwear impresario, and a trial run as a standup comic before he settled on food as his primary vehicle for expression.

Yet Fresh Off the Boat proves that what he has to say is just as compelling as the way he says it. In this surprisingly moving story of self-invention, Huang gives even the most familiar tropes of the American immigrant experience his own original flavor, spiced with equal dashes of ’90s hip-hop lyrics and postmodern literary references and finished with a huge dollop of swagu. While Huang admits that it’s all very “idiosyncratic and personal,” his singular voice is speaking to plenty of people: On the day he talked with eMusic contributor Elisa Ludwig, he’d just found out the book hit The New York Times extended bestseller list.

Huang also gave us a list of his top 5 hip-hop records of all time. Find out which ’90s album made him proud to be a Chinese hip-hop head here.

What were your inspirations for writing this book?

My main inspiration was that I didn’t think this story was getting told enough, and that includes the multiple parts of my identity. No. 1 was being Asian in America — there’s no [The Brief Wondrous Life of] Oscar Wao for Asian people, no coming-of-age story that represented what I went through. No. 2 was the whole hip-hop story — there are plenty of books and bad movies about the hip-hop generation, but none that represented what the music meant to me, how it got me through the tougher times in my life. I also just wanted to talk about identity politics and culture. Writing this book was like Professor X putting on the Cerebro to find the mutants — I’m trying to speak to the other people like me out there.

You mention Junot Diaz. Is there a particular literary tradition you’d like it to fit into?

I never read his work until I finished this book and my editor was like, “Dude, you should really check out Junot.” My writing is influenced by lyrics, by hip-hop more than anything, but it’s also influenced by Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. My audience tends to be people in their 20s, or at least those are the people that are coming out to events.

The cover of this book really sets it apart from just about anything out there. What’s the story behind it?

We worked on it for a long time. I brought in my boy Justin Thomas Kay to design it. I wanted it to be very ’90s hip-hop magazine-looking. We used the family photo to show the three generations of Chinese migration: my grandparents from China, my parents from Taiwan, and me and my brothers, American cats.

Your use of language is very fluid, mixing dialects and slang — is this true of your cooking, too?

If you’re a real artist, your personality permeates everything you do. If you come to my restaurant, it’s very loud and there’s always one of my playlists on. It’s rough around the edges, but everyone’s having a good time, telling jokes. Noise is important to me. I need fire trucks and cop cars and the TV in the background to sleep. My food is very soulful, in your face and full of flavor, and I think I write the same way — rhythmically, with a lot of flow and start and stop, a lot of movement in the words.

You can see that in the structure of the book; it’s not always linear.

For the most part we wanted it to be linear, but there are flashbacks, tangents and footnotes where I’m trying to connect the dots for readers. It’s a lot of vernacular that older people aren’t going to understand but I want them to be part of it, even if it’s not their language. My editor and I made the conscious decision not to clean up the slang or translate the Chinese or do anything that would disturb the flow. We wanted it to be unique and idiosyncratic; we didn’t want it to be about the “supposed-to’s.”

It’s obvious that the question of authenticity — in food, identity, culture — is an important one for you. How do you know when another chef’s food is for real?

When I say “authentic,” I’m not judging someone’s food, like, asking whether it’s what real Chinese people eat or whatever. I’m wondering whether the experience is authentic to this chef and if what he’s doing is telling his own story. Lots of restaurants I go to, it’s not necessarily for the food. I like the experience of eating there, the energy of the room. There might be a cat walking on the counter, but you feel like you’re home.

Between your blog and the book and your Vice show, you’re selling yourself as the product as much as the food — how much of that is deliberate?

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I actually market myself well. I mean, it’s not much of a strategy, trying to sell Eddie Huang, the short fat Chinaman. But the thing I do market is my ideology and opinions. I’m a very unlikely TV host, but on Vice I just try to drop a few gems in every episode and make people think about culture and the world. My generation, it’s like this embarrassment of riches, all the stuff we have: Internet and organic markets and wine and cheese shops on every corner. We could be doing more, but having everything at our fingertips desensitizes us and we’re letting other people do our thinking for us. I want to wake people up from the midsummer night’s slumber situation.

So is this it for you, the writer/chef/TV host niche? Or do you think you’ll continue to reinvent yourself?

I was just emailing my parents to tell them that I found out today that my book hit the bestseller list. That’s very fulfilling — when I think of everything I went through and all the people that counted me out, it’s like Tupac “Picture Me Rollin’.” But I’m 33 years old, and I’m really excited. I’m teaching a winter class at my old college, making sweatsuits with my friend for fun. I’m interested in film, so maybe I’ll do some screenwriting. I remember how big it was for me to read coming-of-age stories when I was a kid so if I wasn’t a chef or writing or hosting Vice TV, I’d go teach high school. I have no idea. But either way, people are going to be surprised.

Eddie Huang’s Top 5 Hip-Hop Albums

Elisa Ludwig — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:00:29 +0000

Eddie Huang, celebrity chef, TV host and author of the memoir Fresh Off the Boat, is pretty sure that hip-hop saved his life when he was a bullied, racially “other” kid growing up in Florida. Even now, the influence is obvious in everything from his restaurant’s playlists to the cover of his book to his Source-esque wardrobe.

Here, he shares the top five albums that got him through his formative SPAM-launching/skateboarding/security fence-hopping years.

Camp Lo, Uptown Saturday Night

Uptown Saturday Night

Camp Lo
1999 | Arista

I can't even explain it — this album is just my a-alike. From the first time I heard it, I never stopped listening to it, every week. It doesn't even speak to me as literally as it does subconsciously. I've listened to this album over and over, but I think the flow on the tracks just taps into my idle mind. A lot of the lyrics are nonsensical, but Cheeba and... Geechi just sound like two kids in high school, talkin' shit, and it transports me back to childhood.
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Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die

Ready To Die The Remaster

The Notorious B.I.G.
1994 | Bad Boy Records

Lyrically, this is my favorite album of all time (this and Illmatic). It's hard to say anything about B.I.G. that hasn't already been said. I related a lot to his story about coming up by any means, owning how he was a fat ass and still having more game than any pretty mofucker out there. "Heartthrob? Never! Black and ugly as ever! However, I stay Coogi down to the socks." I... mean, peep the rhyme scheme, the swag, and the Coogi.
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The Diplomats, Diplomatic Immunity

Cam'Ron Presents The Diplomats - Diplomatic Immunity

The Diplomats
2003 | Roc-A-Fella

"Put your two arms up/ Touchdown." The Ramones ran downtown NY in the '80s from Forest Hills; Diplomats ran it in the '00s all the way from uptown.

Wu Tang Clan, Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers)

Enter The Wu-Tang

Wu Tang Clan
1993 | RCA Records Label

I was never as proud to be Chinese as I was the day I heard Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I was always a hip-hop head, but a lot of people tried to tell me I couldn't be part of the culture. When these brothers from Shaolin took over the game — with inspiration from Shaw Brothers Films — we felt like we belonged. THANK YOU, RZA.

Outkast, ATLiens

ATLiens

Outkast
1996 | Arista/LaFace Records

People know OutKast post-Stankonia, for the most part, but down South we were bumpin' Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and ATLiens. Outkast was the defining group from the Field that repped for flip-flops and socks and sweatpants. This was the perfect album to smoke to, listening to André and Daddy Fat Sax drop knowledge about Jazzy Belles and Elevators.

Youthful Fumblings: A Pre-Sexual Revolution Valentine’s Day

Elizabeth Isadora Gold — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:16:07 +0000

The late great British poet Philip Larkin once wrote: “Sexual intercourse began/ In 1963/ (which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP.” In other words, before the ’60s really hit, sex between consenting, possibly madly in love young people, was furtive, fumbling and shameful — even if it was also hot. In this collection, listen up for cringeworthy boudoir scenes and the euphoria of new freedom. From premature ejaculation to creepy nicknames to diarrhea, happy Valentine’s Day.

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Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth
2008 | Unabridged
Before becoming the Grand Old Man of American literature, Philip Roth built his career on chronicling the sexual frustrations of the Jewish man (see Portnoy's Complaint — the protagonist infamously masturbates with a piece of liver!). Goodbye Columbus was his first book, including short stories as well as the title novella about Brenda Patimkin, the perfect Jewish princess and Neil Klugman, her swain from the wrong side of the (New Jersey) tracks.... Theirs is a doomed love, from the first mention of Brenda's nose job to silent lovemaking by the flickering shadows of her family's basement rec room TV to Neil's extravagantly loose bowels brought on by overconsumption of plums and cherries from the Patimkins' designated "fruit refrigerator." Romeo and Juliet they're not, but the tragedy is just as clear: Assimilation is stronger than passion. And too many unwashed nectarines can really catch up on a guy.
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The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis
2010 | Unabridged
Oh, Martin Amis, you are the only man in the world who can detail the sexual misadventures of British college kids in 1970 and make the reader feel dirty about Jane Austen. The Pregnant Widow's plot is classic love triangle: Lily loves Keith, who might love Lily but really wants to bed her busty best friend, Scheherazade. Then along comes Gloria Beautyman, whose proto-Kardashian "arse" is already legendary (her bikini bottoms were... "sucked off" in a Jacuzzi). The gang's summer in Tuscany is all very mad dogs and Englishmen, until Keith's obsessive lust becomes his undoing. As the now aging Keith recounts the '70s' downward spiral, Gloria — poor, misunderstood, spectacularly rear-ended — transforms from sexual consolation prize to…wife? Part comedy of manners, part dirty-birdy romp, The Pregnant Widow turns unexpectedly dark, much like the transforming decade it chronicles.
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On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan
2007 | Unabridged
If ever there was a book that argued the case for premarital sex, it is On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. In 1962, Florence and Edward are newlyweds, both virgins, and their wedding night is…British. Perhaps that's an unfairly pejorative adjective, considering the Anglophone romps of other books in this group, but this wedding night is definitely of the "Close your eyes and think of England" variety. McEwan's writing is meticulous yet... florid — the candied cherry garnish atop the bride and groom's appetizer cantaloupe becomes a succulent symbol of Edward's desire and Florence's fear. When she gives him the fruit to suck off the tip of her finger, he assumes it indicates her lust, while in fact she is nervously ill with fear. It is a tribute to the writer that the reader feels equally touched by both characters.
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An Education

Lynn Barber
2010 | Unabridged
Lynn Barber was 16 when she met Simon Goldman, an older man of mysterious means and origins. For two years — those crucial pre-sexual revolution years, from 1960-62 — Simon squired Lynn to restaurants and plays, and took her for "dirty weekends" in Paris. Her parents, upright middle-class Brits, seemed not to mind their daughter's slow seduction. Instead, they welcomed Simon into their home and family, until the day all of his... tall stories finally fell apart. Barber's prose is both biting and self-deprecating. When Simon refers to himself as "Bubl" and to his schoolgirl paramour as "Minn," Barber wrings the full sexual ickiness out of the nicknames; deflowering her, she writes, he asks if "Minn would do Bubl the honour of welcoming him into her home." Ewww.
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Miss O'Dell

Chris O'Dell
2009 | Unabridged
On the other side of the decade — from the late '60s through the even more free-lovin'
'70s — is Miss O'Dell. Now 20 years sober, O'Dell recalls her days of working for the Beatles' Apple Records and "assisting" the Rolling Stones (finding girls for Mick to bed — herself included — and scoring drugs for Keith). Longtime best friends with Pattie Boyd, she was present when George Harrison lost Boyd to his... friend Eric Clapton. And O'Dell herself slept with Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and…Was she a groupie? Well, when it comes to the mores of Sexual Revolution (mis)behavior, is that even a relevant question? Unlike the fictional heroines of Amis, McEwan, and Roth, O'Dell is not overtly symbolic. Like Lynn Barber, she was just a girl —one who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right people: post 1963, after the Beatles' first LP.
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Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

Mark Peikert — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:41:21 +0000

An adventure through the surprisingly grown-up world of the beloved children's series

Though the 1970s TV series starring Michael Landon cemented its status as a classic, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie was also undone by that family-friendly program. When she tried to revisit the cozy inner life she created as a child in conjunction with the books, author Wendy McClure realized Wilder’s world was a lot more textured and adult than the happily-ever-after TV show — and the truth behind the books is even odder still.

McClure is at her best when she’s reveling with contagious giddiness in the strange backstory of Wilder’s books, but her return to what she dubs “Laura World” isn’t done solely via research. McClure also tries out authentic Little House recipes — the kind that call for two pounds of lard — and visits as many Ingalls family homestead sites as she can find. Her physical recreation of frontier life can drag the book down into navel-gazing hipster nostalgia — her trips to long-gone homesteads are self-consciously elegiac as she searches for meaning in her life from young adult novels — but McClure is so genuinely funny in recreating fellow fans’ strange love for a pre-electric-age world that the occasional dips are forgivable.

George Saunders, Tenth of December

Sara Jaffe — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:25:55 +0000

Hilarious, trenchant short stories from a master of human empathy

In Tenth of December, George Saunders uses satire to hilariously and trenchantly critique societal institutions and our roles in them (with a special emphasis on the class system, which many Americans still insist does not exist). But to focus on Saunders’s use of satire is to potentially overlook the deep faith in humanity that pervades these masterful short stories.

Put simply: It is clear that Saunders has never written a character that he does not, in some way, love. This goes for the self-involved teenager in “Victory Lap” as well as the man who comes to kidnap and rape her. Saunders’s empathy is apparent both toward the working-class mom who ties her unruly son to a tree in “Puppy” and to the middle-class mom who comes to buy a dog from the woman and is horrified to see the son straining against his tether. In one of the collection’s strongest stories, “Home,” a veteran of an unnamed Middle East war returns home to a penniless mom being evicted from her house and a sister and ex-wife shuttling quickly up the ladder to bourgeois comfort. In every “Thank you for your service” awkwardly uttered to him by numerous civilians who don’t know what else to say, one discerns Saunders’s respect for the plight of the platitude-giver and the plight of the destroyed veteran, for whom those words are more than meaningless.

Even the tone of Saunders’s reading voice, which is frequently witty but never mocking, makes clear that individuals, whether rich or poor, victims or perpetrators, are not to be blamed for the problems of Where We Are Now. We’re all caught up in the same oppressive systems, and we could do much worse than to take a cue from Saunders’s overwhelming generosity of spirit.

Both Fan and Not

Amanda Davidson — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:36:23 +0000

What's not to love about a posthumous collection of Wallace's essays — and why we love it anyway

Both Flesh and Not rounds up a mélange of David Foster Wallace’s essays — sports reportage, surveys of contemporary authors, movie and book reviews, grammar pointers, and cultural criticism — never published in book form during his lifetime. Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and who can say what he would have chosen to include in this collection had he been alive to edit it. But what we have been given is by turns hypersmart and hypertender, infuriating and inspiring, allowing Wallace’s energizing, rigorous, and formally wide-open perspective to remain in the conversation about the future of American literature.

The book opens with the gorgeous title essay, about tennis phenomenon Roger Federer. “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” originally published in 2006 in The New York Times’ sports magazine and by now almost canonical, showcases Wallace’s most agile and compelling moves as a prose stylist, philosopher and innovator of the essay form (those infectious footnotes!), along with his novelist’s eye (and ear) for human vulnerability and pleasingly down-to-earth colloquialisms.

In the penultimate essay, “Deciderization 2007 — a Special Report,” Wallace presents a visionary piece of literary criticism under the guise of an introduction for The Best American Essays 2007. Ever the meta-critic, Wallace uses this intro as an opportunity to reflect on the editing process, take the temperature of his cultural moment, and pose difficult questions. Here and in other essays (“Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960,” for example), Wallace argues passionately for new writing that displays intellectual breadth, emotional vitality, and formal risk. He is especially preoccupied with “the connections between literary aesthetics and moral values.” In other words, he asks how and why we consider certain types of writing good or beautiful or literary, and what this says about our shared ethics.

These questions become useful when navigating some of the collection’s problematic moments. After the title essay, the collection moves through the remaining pieces in chronological order, starting in 1988, and the backward jump proffers some jarring claims. There is, for example, the deeply vexing “Back in New Fire,” from 1996, in which Wallace argues that since the AIDS epidemic arose from nature, it is therefore neither good nor bad. Instead, he argues, “the specter of heterosexual AIDS” might be seen as a cautious opportunity to reinvest sex with its proper gravitas by erecting new and exciting “erotic impediments” (aka safe sex practices). His framework leaves out the political dimensions of the travesty, the inadequate federal and public response to the marginalized communities most affected by the crisis — it’s akin to calling Hurricane Katrina a natural disaster that ought to be cautiously celebrated for its potential to reawaken people in, say, Rhode Island to the awesome power of weather.

Other prickly ethical/aesthetic moments occur more quietly. In “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” from 1988, tucked away in his roll call of promising new talent Wallace mentions only three female authors, and their brief, collective cameo occurs under the banner of “bitchy humor.” It’s a fairly reductive and belittling lens, though in context (it seems) the phrase is meant to be a compliment. Overall, the piece parses well the problems of a TV-saturated culture, yet here and throughout, moments like this grate.

Perhaps these criticisms are, after all, of a piece with Wallace’s own provocation to think. As he writes: “But of course you’ll see how hard the reader is required to think about all this.” And this is where the collection’s central pleasures reside. In “Twenty-Four Word Notes” (a total pleasure read for grammar and usage geeks), Wallace tries on multiple positions in the great post-modern language debates, limning words as “both symbols for real things and real things themselves.” Another way to pose this dilemma is as follows: Does language reflect the world, or does language (at least in part) make it? Wallace plays the spectrum, proposing an ambitious, expansive role for prose in general, and fiction in particular, as innovative, evolving art forms. This constant evolution is bound to be dotted with missteps alongside the revelations, and as Wallace’s work is full of revelation, so, too, is it our job as readers to engage with his mistakes. “We are heirs to a gorgeous chaos,” he writes, listing a rowdy proliferation of literary forms and conveying his broad vision of fiction’s potential energy. In the end, it’s this expansiveness of vision that makes the tour through Wallace’s own gorgeous chaos well worth it.

eMusic’s Best Audiobooks of 2012

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:05:37 +0000

A good book is a funny thing. Sometimes we know from page 1 that a book is going to be a classic, while others are a slow burn, and we’ve made it through to the end – perhaps a few times – before we realize we just can’t stop reliving that one climactic scene or fixating on a turn of phrase.

Over the course of 2012, this happened to us a lot. Most of our favorite books were slow-burn stunners, ones that woke us up in the middle of the night weeks later. There were a few showpieces and, for once, a few books that deserved every second of the publicity they received. By December we were walking around brimming with all of the fantastic books we’ve read – like burning sage, this list is a cleansing opportunity to let them all go and get ready for next year.

With only 40 slots to fill, it was inevitable that some great books got left off, and we hope you’ll fill in the gaps with your favorites in the comments. Here are our best books of 2012.

40. David Levithan, Every Day

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Every Day

David Levithan
2012 | Unabridged
David Levithan has spent the last 10 years writing about teenagers in love in many different forms — from the whirlwind angst of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist to the sensitive happy-go-lucky treatment of gay teen life in Boy Meets Boy. His most recent novel complicates the theme, following A, a character who wakes up inside a different person's body every morning and must learn to live their life... without disruption before starting over again the next day. Falling in love with Rhiannon upends all of A's coping mechanisms, as he foregoes normalcy to be with her every day. Meanwhile, her reciprocation questions both the characters' and our deep-seated beliefs about attraction, sexuality. The result is a beautifully crafted allegory for the confused, all-consuming, thrilling, baffling nature of first love.
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39. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon
2012 | Unabridged
After five long years, Michael Chabon came back with this sweeping novel of the collision between nostalgia and progress in the borderlands between historically black Oakland and hippie-white Berkeley. With a jazz-funk soundtrack, a cameo appearance from soon-to-be President Obama, and the creation of the greatest black action hero since Shaft, no novel has had such a deep respect for the way pop culture shapes our identities since High Fidelity.

38. Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Mark Leyner
2012 | Unabridged
It was the mid-’90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we’re all now accustomed to.
In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher,... but also the story of the universe’s very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike’s fate.
The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story — your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack — has been predetermined.
In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.
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37. Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint

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Salvation of a Saint

Keigo Higashino
2012 | Unabridged
It seems as if Japanese detective novels as a whole are more finely crafted than their American counterparts, with a flair for bone-dry absurdity and psychological twists that would seem forced in less skilled hands. Case in point: Keigo Higashino's Salvation of a Saint, the latest installment in the adventures of Detective Galileo, an erstwhile physics professor who made his first appearance in The Devotion of Suspect X. Galileo's calculations point... the police in ever-more-preposterous directions as they try to unravel the murder of a philandering CEO. The minutiae of modern Japanese urban life coupled with astonishing flights of logical speculation combine to make a truly gripping, original thriller.
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36. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Maria Semple
2012 | Unabridged
The story of a family of flawed geniuses, written as a semi-epistolary novel in diary entries, letters, fragments of conversations, and government reports, Where'd You Go, Bernadette could easily veer into uber-twee Wes Anderson territory; instead, it's a sharp, hilarious delight made even better by one of the best adult-playing-teenager narrations we've ever heard. It helps that author Maria Semple is a longtime comedy writer — most recently for the beloved Arrested... Development —and that the story is a searing satire of life in Seattle.
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35. Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

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Hope: A Tragedy

Shalom Auslander
2012 | Unabridged
The title of Shalom Auslander’s debut novel is as tersely comic as the prose it contains. If a previous book of short stories (Beware of God) suggested that the author might deserve a place within the hallowed tradition of literary Jewish pessimists, his newest effort confirms it. Hope, a gutsy book with a gutsy premise – begins when a man named Solomon Kugel hears tapping noises coming from his attic. Kugel follows... the sounds and discovers a living, elderly Anne Frank residing in the uppermost reaches of his farmhouse in upstate New York. She’s working on a novel; what Kugel heard was the typewriter.
To this living arrangement, add one tyrannical hypochondriac of a mother, one semi-sympathetic wife and one toddler. Then stir. The result is a satire that transcends its clever conceit thanks to Auslander’s unmistakable voice. That voice, incidentally, is one that some listeners will recognize from This American Life, where the writer often pops up with stories that bridge the territory between soul-crumpling and hilarious. What make for a brilliant radio piece, it turns out – economy, rhythm, stylishness without frippery – make for an equally beguiling novel.
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34. Richard Zacks, Island of Vice

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Island of Vice

Richard Zacks
2012 | Unabridged
Island of Vice is like a greatest hits of the tropes of historical nonfiction; you've got a skeptical look at Victorian mores, an investigation of the seamy underbelly of a city, an age-old struggle that still echoes today, and a beloved historical figure playing an unexpected role. Like Rudy Giuliani a century later, it turns out that Teddy Roosevelt spent years attempting to clean up New York, which was apparently nothing but... brothels and opium dens in the 1890s. Roosevelt was New York police commissioner at the time, and his attempts were mostly thwarted by Byzantine regulations and double standards. A compelling portrait of a town at a turning point, the book moves quickly along, buoyed by anecdotes and letter excerpts that add levity and character to the essential plot.
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33. James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress

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The Cocktail Waitress

James Cain
2012 | Unabridged
OK, so this one's kind of a cheat. James M. Cain, the classic noir author, wrote The Cocktail Waitress in the 1970s, right before his death. But the novel languished in fragments for 30-plus years, and was only just assembled and published this year by intrepid editors, so we get to count it as one of the best books of 2012. While it's not Cain's best (with Mildred Pierce and ... href="http://www.emusic.com/book/james-m-cain/the-postman-always-rings-twice/10026306/">The Postman Always Rings Twice just a few of his many, it's a tough crowd to compete in), the master of dark, moody suspense still looms large over contemporary mystery authors.
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32. China Mieville, Railsea

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Railsea

China Mieville
2012 | Unabridged
Moby Dick has retained a particular hold on the global literary imagination in the century-and-a-half since its publishing. Some writers have been seized enough by Melville’s epic to spin off new stories based on its characters, while others have taken on the theme of Ahab’s suicidal single-mindedness to frame new tales of obsession. China Mieville’s Railsea is a new literary heir on the scene: fantastical, post-apocalyptic and, like its predecessor, packed with... equal parts exhilarating chase and incisive reflection on the nature of the chase itself. In this case, the one doing the reflecting is Sham ap Soorap, a bumbling young introvert who finds himself taken on as a doctor’s assistant aboard the Medes, a mole-hunting train on the railsea. In this never-stated, probably-future time, the earth (if it is the earth) is covered with mile after mile of snared and tangled rails, and, like the seamen of yore, those who ride the rails form a culture unto themselves. And, oh yes, I said “mole-hunting” – out of the ground on which rails are laid come all manner of vicious, burrowing creatures, from pesky carnivorous rabbits to vicious ferrets to the bounty of the Medes: the moldywarpe, a bad-tempered giant mole. One particular moldywarpe, an ivory-colored one, no less, has taken the arm of the Medes captain, and it has become the life’s aim – the “philosophy,” as Mieville puts it – of Captain Naphi to track down said moldywarpe and harpoon it to kingdom come. At heart not a hunter but a dreamer, a would-be salvor (salvager of ancient junk), Sham gains a quest of his own when he learns of a place that’s unsullied by the endless snarl and clatter of the rails. Railsea enchants by its language alone, and reader Jonathan Cowley proves expert with Mieville’s invented vocabulary and his rollicking, alliterative sentences. Intended for readers of all ages, Railsea will enchant any reader who understands what it’s like to want something and to burn with the dream to discover it.
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31. J.R. Moehringer, Sutton

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Sutton

J.R. Moehringer
2012 | Unabridged
Wake up in Attica, go to bed at the Plaza. Fuckin’ America. Such was the life of bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton, an Irish kid from Brooklyn who came up during Prohibition and stole an estimated $2 million during his career. The con was released from Attica Correctional Facility on Christmas Eve 1969 to the acclaim and notoriety that a nickname like “The Actor” might have earned earned him – or... so Moehringer would have us believe. Sutton (who died in 1980) granted a single post-prison interview, though the resulting article, Moehringer writes, contained several errors and “few real revelations.” To, in effect, give a fascinating subject the profile he deserves, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and memoirist (The Tender Bar) has imagined Sutton’s first day of freedom, being followed around New York City by an unnamed reporter and photographer.
Flashing between Sutton’s Christmas ’69 and his Prohibition-era bank schemes, Sutton is a witty, whiskey-soaked romp through a Gotham populated by Chesterfield-smoking hustlers and surly newsmen. Sutton is undeniably the story’s moral center, less a thuggish Dillinger clone than a romantic and intellectual who reads Cicero behind bars. Leading a tour from the Brooklyn waterfront to Times Square, Sutton is struck by the vanished landmarks of his criminal career and haunted by memories of his former love, Bess Endner. The wealthy daughter of a shipping magnate and the poor Irish son meet as kids at Coney Island, but her family disapproved and Bess disappeared around the time Willie entered the racket. He muses: “Money. Love. There’s not a problem that isn’t caused by one or the other. And there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by one or the other.”
Narrated by actor Dylan Baker, Sutton shines a light on the class divide while affectionately adding to the legacy of a famous antihero.
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30. Alice Munro, Dear Life

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Dear Life

Alice Munro
2012 | Unabridged
Alice Munro has been quietly, guilelessly dominating the field of the short story for nearly 50 years and shows no sign of slowing. Maybe it's her Canadian-ness that keeps her flying below the radar, even after having won PEN, O. Henry, National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker awards. Or maybe it's the finely drawn, intimate quality of her work – no showy flights of language, no mystical beings or tricksy maybe-real-maybe-imagined... characters, just people writ small living lives that are at once infinitely relatable and emotionally universal. This collection is no exception, which is to say that it is essential reading.
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29. Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

Etgar Keret
2012 | Unabridged
It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret’s collection a delight; it’s 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there’s a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who’s who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci and Neal Stephenson, Keret’s stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely... different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions — where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.
Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation’s psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In “Healthy Start,” one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one’s lover? Keret’s stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.
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28. Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black

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How to Be Black

Baratunde Thurston
2012 | Unabridged
Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly... accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.
“In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”
From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.
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27. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo
2012 | Unabridged
Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning work could be described as Slumdog Millionaire without the Bollywood flash, but that would be missing the point. Yes, it's an unblinking look at life in the Mumbai slums, but it's at once much bigger and much smaller than that. It's a piece of journalism that shows how the unfathomable economic disparity of modern India is complicated by a new myth of upward mobility, drawing into relief... the concept of the American Dream and its own devastating effects. It's also a personal story of a handful of people; some happy, some not, living mundane lives and affected by grand tragedy. Not just pawns in a reporter's chess game, they are allowed to exist on the page in all of their complicated, human nature — a rare feat, indeed.
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26. John Hodgman, That Is All

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That Is All

John Hodgman
2012 | Unabridged
John Hodgman, Daily Show Resident Expert and celebrity glasses-wearer, completes his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge with this compendium of fake facts about wine and sports, tips on being a deranged millionaire and how the world will end. More comedy album than straightforward audiobook, That Is All features celebrity cameos from Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Rachel Maddow and more, skits and original music. Fans of Hodgman’s highly formatted, stylized print books may... hesitate about listening to what is essentially a book of lists and trivia, but wonder no more — by the time you get to the audio wine tasting, you’ll be hooked.
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25. Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

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The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker
2012 | Unabridged
What if you woke up one morning to discover that the earth’s rotation had begun mysteriously slowing overnight? And what if you were also a sixth grader, unable to do anything but watch while your world changed around you? This is the premise of Karen Thompson Walker’s compelling debut novel, in which 12-year-old Julia tries to navigate the difficulties of middle school in a world where tides, fault lines and magnetic fields... have all gone awry; days stretch into weeks; and animals and plants are dying en masse.
If The Age of Miracles were a standard-issue sci-fi yarn, the story would center on the race against time to save Earth from certain doom. Instead, Julia is stuck in her California suburb, the lengthening days and nights merely one more uncontrollable thing. So what if the slowing forewarns the end of all human existence? It’s exactly as incomprehensible and inevitable as adolescence itself. The earth is slowing down, and Julia’s best friend will barely speak to her anymore; the birds are falling dead from the skies and her parents’ marriage is falling apart; people are crazy and people are crazy.
The story is narrated not by adolescent Julia, but rather by a 20-something Julia, recalling the events of that pivotal summer. “I remember,” she says, often, and, “That was the last time.” She is prone to pensive, melancholic metaphor: After the slowing, she says, “We all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?” Hers is that wistful nostalgia earned only by time, one in which the meaning of small things is acquired in hindsight. Would you watch more closely the last bird you ever saw in flight? Would you say goodbye to the people you love?
Despite its dystopian urgencies, the book moves quietly, softly, driven by characters rather than plot: a state of affairs both odd and fascinating for a book whose central premise conflates adolescence and apocalypse. But then, how does adolescence end? There is no satisfying denouement. There is only the gradual slide of one self into another, and the matching realization that one’s world will never again be quite the same.
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24. Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

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Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

Timothy Egan
2012 | Unabridged
In the hierarchy of historical eras, turn-of-the-century America is about as low as it gets; it's all dusty frontiersmen and hoop skirts, long stretches of open country and stilted Victorian talk from politicians with ludicrous facial hair. Not so for Timothy Egan, the gutsiest, most balls-to-the-wall chronicler of the American experience writing today. Winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time, Egan has a knack for... cutting through the flowered speech and dirt to craft page-turners from decades of bureaucratic red tape. Short Nights is a biography of a little-known photographer who set out to, grandiosely, document every Native American nation on the continent. Surprise, he failed, and his failures both professional and personal make for a compelling narrative of a country in flux.
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23. Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine

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Shine Shine Shine

Lydia Netzer
2012 | Unabridged
Lydia Netzer creates a sci-fi folk tale with her debut novel, weaving together an epic love story that transcends (literal) space and time, vibrant characters, and, naturally, robots.
In Shine Shine Shine, Sunny, a congenitally bald little girl and Maxon, an autistic boy, fall in love and eventually get married. Flash-forward to the future, when Maxon becomes an astronaut on a risky, high-profile mission to the moon while Sunny remains at home, raising... their lovably robotic son, Bubber, gestating their second child, worrying about her dying mother and relinquishing her reliance on wigs as she struggles to maintain a normal life at home. Except that “normal” in this story is so not normal. There’s a recurring theme of learning how to be human and learning how to read emotions that applies sweetly to both the robots and the humans in the book.
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22. Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

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The Dog Stars

Peter Heller
2012 | Unabridged
We thought we were done with apocalypse novels too, really. But then along came Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, which somehow manages to be full of hope and beauty in the midst of the hideous struggle for survival. After an epidemic wipes out most of humanity and leaves the survivors infected with a deadly virus, our hero Hig spends as much time remembering the good from his former life and admiring the... natural beauty that remains (and in fact flourishes) in civilization's absence as he does fighting off marauders and searching in vain for friends in a savage wasteland. It's a potent reminder to stop and smell the roses — even if you're not being chased.
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21. David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not

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Both Flesh and Not

David Foster Wallace
2012 | Unabridged
This posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays as published in various outlets over almost 20 years of his prolific career has its faults, as so many posthumous publications do. But while some of the 15 essays included have not aged well, when it works, it’s a reminder of the startling joy that truly great nonfiction The book draws its title from Wallace’s gorgeous essay on tennis phenomenon Roger Federer, which... opens the collection and which showcases his most dexterous moves as a writer — the breathtaking descriptive prose, the philosophically rigorous language interrupted by funny, humane, and surprising colloquialisms. It’s a rigorous and pleasing read, one that offers satisfactions and challenges both (as the title implies) material and abstract.
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20. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

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Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan
2012 | Unabridged
We’ll go on record as never having been particular Ian McEwan fans, especially when he writes female characters. Maybe that’s why Sweet Tooth’s Serena Frome is such a delight – her simultaneous arrogance and palpable need for guidance post-Cambridge will ring painfully true for anyone who was once a know-it-all college graduate. Tied up in her personal development is a labyrinth of a story about the crumbling British espionage system in the... 1970s, at the end of the empire, as the old boys’ methods lost favor and they scrambled to stay current. While the gimmick of the final chapter’s reveal is bold choice that, understandably, lost this book a lot of fans, it’s a charming twist that belies the book’s real strength: as a fairy tale of a young woman’s self-discovery.
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19. Zadie Smith, NW

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NW

Zadie Smith
2012 | Unabridged
The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (nee Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and... Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”
NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.
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18. Paul French, Midnight in Peking

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Midnight in Peking

Paul French
2012 | Unabridged
It’s very easy to write a decent true crime story, and very difficult to write a great one. Paul French’s Midnight in Peking should be required reading for all who plan on attempting the genre at some point; it’s a remarkably drawn tale of the end of the era of white decadence in the “exotic Orient” circling around the sensational murder of a young British woman in Peking (aka Beijing) in the... 1930s. Government officials from both sides confounded the investigation, which French details for the first time in 80 years. Overwrought and not entirely academic in places, the story is so gripping and evocative that factual vagaries go by unminded.
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17. Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

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How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran
2012 | Unabridged
Since the end of the Riot Grrrl glory days of the early ‘90s, the word “feminist” has somehow made its way back onto the list of slurs thrown like a hot potato at women who talk about gender equity, make uncommon personal grooming decisions or simply speak seriously about anything unpopular. Caitlin Moran, the British essayist who has been writing hilariously opinionated, outspoken, confessional criticism since the age of 16, takes this... regression to task, weaving an appeal for more strident feminists around her formative lessons on femininity. Moran describes it as “an update of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a bar stool” — while it is exactly as boozy and profane as that sounds, it’s also more touching, more hilarious and, ultimately, more convincing. Moran may singlehandedly haul feminism off of the scrapheap and back into the public discussion, where it belongs.
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16. Patrick Somerville, This Bright River

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This Bright River

Patrick Somerville
2012 | Unabridged
Patrick Somerville’s fourth book is one of those novels that’s both epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives – all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious – the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former... high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.
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15. Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

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Sorry Please Thank You

Charles Yu
2012 | Unabridged
Charles Yu is very smart. Some might argue too smart for his own good, but hiding under the formalist gymnastics and technical jargon in the stories in Sorry Please Thank You is a deep well of empathy and tenderness. Toying with sci-fi tropes, Yu turns the genre on its head with a deadpan stare into the heart of modern alienation as he effortlessly describes impossibilities like a machine designed to fulfill one's... greatest desires, a corporation that outsources the experience of pain, and the day-to-day realities of living inside a video game. Full of bleak humor and conceptual absurdities, Sorry Please Thank You is a delight that will surprise you with its ability to inspire some serious soul-searching.
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14. Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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Narcopolis

Jeet Thayil
2012 | Unabridged
If you aren't already convinced that Indian literature is more than tales of colonial bad behavior, languid tropical scenery and upward-striving urchins, stand back and let Jeet Thayil drive the final nail in that coffin. Narcopolis is about Mumbai, yes, but more importantly it's a narrative of addiction, masterfully told from a multitude of perspectives in a beautifully harsh, poetic language. The city's underworld shift from genteel opium dens to the rough... desperation of the heroin trade serves as a mirror for the protagonist's descent, riots in the street serving as a backdrop to his ruin and rebirth. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this meticulously crafted book dazzles with its skill without ever feeling forced.
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13. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

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Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel
2012 | Unabridged
In two consecutive books, Hilary Mantel has succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, a feat neither Shakespeare nor Showtime could achieve: making the political machinations of the reign of Henry VIII as gripping as a Tom Clancy thriller without resorting to heaving bosoms and bloody murder scenes. Following Thomas Cromwell, Henry's personal fixer who dealt with everything from arranging that first fateful divorce to prosecuting would-be traitors, all the while avenging the murder... of his own mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the novels are relentlessly modern, told entirely in the present tense. Throughout, Mantel weaves in historical detail as effortlessly as she might mention Will & Kate. No wonder Bring Up the Bodies brought Mantel her second Man Booker Prize; we'd put money on the yet-to-be-published third part of the series taking the trifecta.
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12. Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

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A Hologram for the King

Dave Eggers
2012 | Unabridged
Dave Eggers’s latest protagonist, A Hologram for the King‘s Alan Clay, is a hollow man. Not in the T. S. Eliot “this is the way the world ends” sense, but the in the globally emasculated, forever-middle-management sense. He’s Willy Loman without the rage. In his past fiction, Eggers has often had an international focus. Unsurprisingly, his latest work retains that focus — but twists it around the average, recession-era American businessman.
The down-on-his-luck... businessman may be the trope of American fiction in the last 70 years, but in presenting Alan Clay as such, we’re more aware of his everyman qualities. A “ghost” to his family, he’s holed up in King Abdullah Economic City (also known as the Arabian desert), designing holographic communications software with a team of contractors. Ruminating on his place in the world, we see the hints of a drive behind Clay — a new technology in a new economic power may make him a wealthy, and potentially worthwhile person.
But truthfully, A Hologram for the King is all about emptiness. The vast tracts of the desert, the literal insubstantiality of connecting-via-hologram — not to mention the bland quality of Dion Graham’s narration all underline the degree to which Eggers’s Clay claws at relevance as the cohesive bonds of his life come apart.
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11. Louise Erdrich, The Round House

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The Round House

Louise Erdrich
2012 | Unabridged
Returning to the some of the same characters and geographies as in her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning book is a wrenching work centered on three members of the Native American Coutts family in the aftermath of the rape of Geraldine Coutts, wife of tribal judge Bazil and mother of Joe.
In a departure from Erdrich’s prior novels, The Round House’s sole narrator is the 13-year-old Joe,... voiced with honesty and conviction by Canadian First Nations actor Gary Farmer (best known for his featured role as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 acid western Dead Man). As his mother’s rape forces Joe to try to reconcile his own teenage desires with the reality of sexual violence, the crime finds itself in a dead zone of prosecution due to the overlapping jurisdictions of tribal, state, and federal law. The Couttses must balance their need for closure with their longtime efforts toward tribal sovereignty. As the investigation drags on, Joe remarks of his mother that “with all that we did, we were trying to coax the soul back into her. But I could feel it tug away from us like a kite on a string. I was afraid that string would break and she’d careen off, vanish into the dark.”
Erdrich’s prose offers a compelling look at the grey areas of justice, sex, love, family and ethnic identity, while Farmer’s narration allows the Coutts’s North Dakota reservation to creep slowly under your skin until you feel an integral – if silent – part of the community.
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10. Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Carol Rifka Brunt
2012 | Unabridged
Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel, about a teenage girl coming to terms with her uncle's AIDS-related death in 1980s New York, is an unapologetic tearjerker. It's also a beautifully painted coming-of-age story and a nuanced, intimate portrait of the AIDS epidemic in its early, shadowed days. Protagonist June is caught up between taking care of her late uncle's partner, himself dying, and keeping peace with her family, whose rabid disapproval of their... relationship belies their fear and confusion about the disease. It's easier to blame one person for being the source of infection than to try to grasp the political magnitude of the epidemic's vicious spread and pernicious misinformation; as June uncovers these nuances, she finds herself further and further distanced from her parents, whom she once believed infallible, and from the childhood innocence we all enjoyed once upon a time.
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9. Moshe Kasher, Kasher in the Rye

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Kasher in the Rye

Moshe Kasher
2012 | Unabridged
Crammed into comedian Moshe Kasher's semi-preciously titled memoir are at least four separate, well-wrought memoirs: of being the hearing child of two deaf parents; of the parenting paradigm shift between his mother's secular liberalism and his father's deepening involvement in an orthodox Jewish sect; of growing up white in the predominantly black, relentlessly poor city of Oakland, proving ground for some of the '80s' most brutal, tell-it-like-it-is hip-hop; and of becoming an... addict at age 13, hitting rock bottom before his senior year of high school. Somehow Kasher manages to tell all of these stories well, with a hard self-awareness that leaves no room for the self-pity that could (rightfully) permeate the exposure of such painful experiences. Shot through with Kasher's dry wit and featuring some truly laugh-out-loud scenes, Kasher in the Rye is the disabled/religious/racial addiction memoir you didn't know the world needed.
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8. Cheryl Strayed, Wild

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Wild

Cheryl Strayed
2012 | Unabridged
At 26 years old, Cheryl Strayed was lost: A recent divorcee (and recent/former heroin user), she couldn't find her way out of a years-long funk after losing her mom to cancer. So she decided to do what very few 26-year-olds would think to do: got rid of all her things and with little hiking experience set off on a solo, 1,100-mile trek through the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Oregon. In... Wild, Strayed beautifully tells the story of her adventure with Monster, her over-stuffed backpack, and the people she meets on the trail — most importantly, herself.
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7. Lauren Groff, Arcadia

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Arcadia

Lauren Groff
2012 | Unabridged
All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.
Still, for little Bit Stone, the first... kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.
Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.
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6. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

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Mortality

Christopher Hitchens
2012 | Unabridged
Originally published as a series of extended essays in Vanity Fair, the seven chapters that make up the meat of Mortality are vintage Christopher Hitchens: robustly philosophical, witty, blunt. The astonishing part is that their subject is Hitchens' own impending death. Begun shortly after his diagnosis with esophageal cancer and ending with a chapter of fragments left unfinished on his deathbed 18 months later, Mortality is mostly memoir, a clear-eyed self-assessment threaded... through with the stubborn refusal to resort to exceptionalism or fatalism. While dying with dignity has long been upheld as the ideal way to go, Mortality shows there's an even more desirable end: death with honesty.
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5. Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

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The Middlesteins

Jami Attenberg
2012 | Unabridged
In the depths of the obesity crisis, beset on all sides as we are by first ladies urging healthy habits and celebrity chefs revealing the hidden costs of fast food, it takes serious bravery to write about eating as lovingly as Jami Attenberg does in The Middlesteins. At the center of this family drama/black comedy is Edie Middlestein, whose relationship with food has been bringing her unequivocal joy from the liverwurst of... her childhood to the suburban Chinese food of her present. Diabetic, under strict orders to change her habits or die, Edie continues to eat in a noble, grandiose way. With her waffling, doubting husband gone and her grown children dealing with their own unhappinesses, Edie is free to draw a future for herself we're taught to believe is pitiable – until you see how happy it makes her. An entertaining portrait of suburban Jewish life and an eater's rhapsody, The Middlesteins' Edie may just be the most heroic character of the year.
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4. Anthony Shadid, House of Stone

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House of Stone

Anthony Shadid
2012 | Unabridged
It’s a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone; strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn’t have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent,... Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death’s stead and gives it meaning.
House of Stone‘s narrative concerns the reporter’s efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house’s water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid’s trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself (“Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact,” he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid’s keen reporter’s eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.
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3. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

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The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver
2012 | Unabridged
There's no question about it: Nate Silver is this year's big winner. With the possibility of a sophomore slump gleefully held over his second presidential election at the helm of his blog, FiveThirtyEight, by pundits from both sides of the spectrum, Silver had a lot riding on his math. Thankfully, as he elaborates in his book, The Signal and the Noise, that math is basically foolproof. While the book is... not the victory lap he so richly deserves, it's just like Silver to give us something better, a measured call for continued logic in all arenas of speculation, from weather to finance to, yes, politics. As public debate becomes less about fact than about manufacturing drama, this call for open-eyed analysis may be our last hope for sanity.
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2. Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz
2012 | Unabridged
Some books, like some songs and movies, can be so achingly sad they’re pleasurable, and that’s the perfect balance Junot Diaz strikes with This Is How You Lose Her. The melancholy and pain of the displacement, romantic breakups and losses of loved ones in Diaz’s collection of loosely connected short love stories is balanced out perfectly by the writing’s snappy dialogue, dark wit and frank sexuality.
Diaz fans will recognize Yunior, the subject... of several of the stories, from Diaz’s first collection, Drown, as well as from parts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz reads his own work in the audiobook, lending an even more distinctive tone to some already memorable narrative voices. Latin idioms are sprinkled throughout the stories with only context in the way of explanation, making the listener feel as though he or she is eavesdropping on a hyper-intelligent, vulgar person telling a really good story – to interrupt for clarification would throw things off entirely.
This Is How You Lose Her will make listeners appreciate the simple joys of friends, lovers, work and the home, as well as the poetry that can be found when any of those can fall into discord.
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1. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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Gone Girl

Gillian Flynn
2012 | Unabridged
We will confess to reading the print version of Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, before listening to the audio version, tearing through it hungrily one lost weekend, feeling resentful of all interruptions, staying up later than usual to read just one more chapter. It is a book of twists and turns — page after page keeps the reader enthralled — but at the end of the book, when all is revealed... in this tale of a marriage gone awry with the wife gone missing, there’s a sensation of finally knowing everything at last. All the mysteries were revealed — why would one need to listen to the audiobook?
And yet Gone Girl — a New York Times bestseller that has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon’s production company — is so engaging and funny, and the narrators Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne do such a knock-out job with the quick-witted prose, that it was simple to get sucked right back into the story all over again. Time flies with this audiobook, just as it did with the novel. Start listening, and suddenly it will be two days later.
As for the plot, well, this is one of those books the less said, the better, so as to not reveal too much to the reader. But if we must: It is about Nick and Amy Dunne, two writers, late of New York, who move to North Carthage, Missouri, when the money runs out. Nick says of himself, “I have a face you want to punch.” Amy used to make up quizzes for women’s magazines, and is the child of two famous children’s book authors who made a fortune off writing about her. Gone Girl alternates between their perspectives. And whether you love them or hate them (and you will likely feel all kinds of emotions with this book), you will not stop listening until you get to the very end.
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2012′s Overlooked Books

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:24:45 +0000

When you read as much as we do, it’s inevitable that some of our favorite books will come and go without so much as a whimper of recognition, much less the great bang they deserve. Critical praise is never a great predictor of public success — and public success doesn’t always bode well for a book’s critical reception, either. Then there are those books that don’t get much of either, books that might be a little weird, or of a genre that never gets much respect, or that just came out on the wrong day. Whatever the reason, even though the rest of the world passed these books by on the first go-round (frankly, sometimes we did, too), we just can’t stop singing their praises. Here are our favorite unsung gems of 2012, each personally vouched for by one of our writers. It’s always a good time to discover your next favorite book; we’re willing to bet yours will be one of these five.

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Immobility

Brian Evenson
2012 | Unabridged
Judging Brian Evenson's books strictly by their titles is enough to give you a good idea of the kind of dark, thrilling experience you're in for when you read him — Contagion, Dark Property, Father of Lies and, of course, Altmann's Tongue, whose extreme violence led to Evenson's exit from Brigham Young University. But Evenson is no mere horror novelist; his cerebral, visceral thrillers have racked up praise from everyone from bestseller... Peter Straub to postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze. But while Evenson has had a cult following for years, Immobility deserves a wider audience.

Here's the deal: A cataclysm known as the Kollaps has left the Earth all but destroyed, and it is into this reality that Josef Horkai awakes after having been in stasis for 30 years. He's promptly informed he'll soon die of an awful disease: "Eventually you'll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility." Josef has been awakened because only he can withstand the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic radiation that poisons anyone who is exposed for too long, and he is needed to perform a task that might save what remains of humanity, a ragged community known as the hive. In the process, he's given a difficult choice that puts the fate of the human race in the balance.

Though Immobility is, like so much of Evenson's work, a riveting horror story of bleak survival, it is so much more — the sharp prose and terse dialog probe deep questions about how we know things and what we believe. Josef comes across as a post-apocalyptic version of Camus's Meursault, a man struggling to remember who he is while dealing with a much more pernicious question: Is the human race worth saving? — Scott Esposito
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Office Girl

Joe Meno
2012 | Unabridged
A wisp of a novel, Office Girl was easy to miss when it arrived in summer, its intimacy and quirky charm quickly overshadowed by the year's fall blockbusters — liken it to the indie film that plays for a week and lives on through word-of-mouth hype. Joe Meno's story of a romance between two 20-somethings during a Chicago winter is best savored as a few hours' escape from the cold. It's February... 1999 when Odile, the titular girl and an art school dropout, meets Jack working in adjoining cubicles at their dreary third-shift gig answering phones. She gets her kicks biking around the city and vandalizing signs, while he's up for anything if it means she might fall in love with him. Written in short, angsty bursts — which are narrated with eye-rolling perfection by Julia Whelan — Meno's novel sets these two dreamers in dank cubicles and cozy walkups late at night and captures the optimism and nervous energy of the Y2K moment. — Kate Silver
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I Am an Executioner

Rajesh Parameswaran
2012 | Unabridged
Why didn't everyone I know rush me and demand that I read I Am an Executioner back in April when it came out? Were the sturdy, hilarious narratives too accessible for the experimentalists I sometimes run with? Was the formal playfulness too weird for my fellow fiction devotees? After all, in this debut collection, tigers, cinematographers, aliens and humans bray, mate, devour, love and write. Even so, Rajesh Parameswaran's fiercely imaginative plots... and hyper-precise prose add up to a must-read. Parameswaran tests the line between nature and culture — or between one culture and another — to ask, what happens when that dividing line shifts?

"Demons" tells the darkly humorous tale of an immigrant couple, using realist conventions to discuss the assimilationist potential of Thanksgiving turkey. In other stories, an elephant dips her tusk in ink to write a memoir and an Indian stationmaster pines over his peculiar clerk in a queer retelling of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." What unites these varied characters are the ever-present forces of love and death. As one extraplanetary being muses, pondering the fatal culmination of his mating ritual, "Life feeds other life. It is equal with the act of love." — Amanda Davidson
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When I Was a Child I Read Books

Marilynne Robinson
2012 | Unabridged
Marilynne Robinson's essay collection illuminates what matters to the author about philosophy, literary criticism, U.S. history, and religion. These may sound like heady matters and, indeed, this is not an audiobook for bopping around town doing errands. Read by Robinson herself (in exactly the voice devotees of Housekeeping and Gilead would expect her to have — considered, warm, a tinge of prairie) this is the audiobook to savor on a long solo... car trip, preferably through some wide open spaces, when you've got the time and headspace to contemplate the big questions.

When I Was a Child garnered critical praise upon its release, but I was one of many, I think, who were interested but ultimately turned off by the extent to which the book is informed by Robinson's Christianity. Wrongly so; it turns out that for Robinson, religious belief is not mere dogma. To her, it is an opening up of thought, rather than a circumscribing, and the essays in this volume provide ample evidence to support her belief that religion, like literature and like America itself, is about generosity, wonder, and possibility. — Sara Jaffe
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Zoo

James Patterson
2012 | Unabridged
I'll admit it, there are some formidable reasons James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Zoo does not belong on a list of unsung literary gems. For one, while legit reviewers of literature wouldn't touch this thing with a 10-foot quill, the book was a bestseller, read by — and I'm just guessing here — 100 million people, many of whom had just learned their flight was delayed. And as for its "gem" qualifications,... Zoo is a deadly serious adventure yarn about, basically, a full-on global war between animals and humans. Yeah, OK, the Man Booker Prize people probably needn't waste their time.

The thing is, lit nerds like myself — OMG, George Saunders just accepted my friend request! — have been shamed away from reading Patterson (and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, etc. etc.), but maybe that sort of snobbery is outdated. Surely we can switch our brains to energy-saver mode and just have fun with a book like Zoo, despite its clichés and inconsistencies and parts where the scientists don't seem to know much about science. Because it's wild and weird and unexpected. Because guilty pleasures are still pleasures. Freed from shame and pretense, we can all admit that a scene in which thousands of dogs take over Manhattan and have a giant, disgusting orgy is just plain awesome. Sometimes, that's what a gem looks like. Like a giant dog orgy. — Pat Rapa
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Five Debut Novelists to Watch in 2013

Scott Esposito — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 22:23:45 +0000

As we slide gracefully into 2013, here are five first-time novelists who made impressive debuts in 2012. Fitting for the year the Mayans prophesied the world would end, two of these novels deal with the apocalypse, though both are more concerned with our reactions than with the mechanics of destruction. Another one of these debuts is quite magical — what else would you call a child made out of snow? — but reigns it in with beautiful evocations of day-to-day life in a harsh Alaskan setting. And the last two deal with tragedies as American as apple pie: In one, a tour of duty in the Iraq War forever changes a young man, and in the other a wealthy East Coast family slowly unravels in the best tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Liza Klaussmann

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Tigers in Red Weather

Liza Klaussmann
2012 | Unabridged
Perhaps great writing runs in the family: Liza Klaussmann, whose first novel Tigers in Red Weather has been winning raves for its innovative structuring and subtle narration, is the great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville. Though Klaussmann, like her legendary ancestor, found literary inspiration in Martha's Vineyard, this debut novel is much more reminiscent of another American giant: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rather than write a novel about the epic exploits of an insane... whaler, Klaussmann has instead told a riveting, insightful story of a gin-soaked, upper-crust brood crumbling beneath the pressure of forging a family narrative. In order to embody how competing truths pull this family apart, Klaussmann narrates the novel in five sections, each from the perspective of a different family member. The result is a complex narrative that artfully embodies the totality of family life.

Klaussmann, a longtime New York Times journalist, moved to London in 2008 to pursue a creative writing degree, and this is the first fruit of that labor. With the accolades Tigers has been racking up, it's hardly going to be her last — after an eight-way bidding war for the book, Klaussmann was reportedly offered a six-figure contract for two novels, of which Tigers is the first. The second is said to deal with artists in 1920s France and will also owe a debt to Fitzgerald, whom Klaussmann has recognized as a major influence.
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Peter Heller

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The Dog Stars

Peter Heller
2012 | Unabridged
As a longtime contributor to NPR, Outside Magazine, and Men's Journal, Peter Heller is used to describing some of the most amazing things on Earth. He's explored Tsangpo Gorge in China (three times as deep as the Grand Canyon) and interdicted Japanese whalers with an eco-pirate ship in Antarctica. Now, with The Dog Stars, Heller enters the realm of fiction in order to write about something not even an adventurer like him... can see firsthand: a post-apocalyptic world in which a killer flu has eliminated 99 percent of humanity and climate change has utterly transformed the environment.

No doubt Heller would relish the challenge of going it alone after the apocalypse, but hopefully he wouldn't be quite as gruff as his protagonist, Hig, who feeds human carcasses to his pet dog and commits murder from time to time. Hig flies a small airplane, and one day receives a signal from far away – farther away, in fact, than he could fly with enough gas for the return trip. He is thus faced with a decision: live out his years in relative solitude or risk seeing what's left (if anything) of humanity.

With an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop and two books of poetry on the way, The Dog Stars won't be Heller's last venture outside the realm of nonfiction. He told the Denver Post that he's halfway through a second novel, adding, "Once you start making it up, there's no going back." And with raves from everyone from Oprah to Junot Diaz, how could a thrill-seeker like Heller turn down the challenge of exceeding his fiction debut?
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Eowyn Ivey

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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey
2012 | Unabridged
With a first name inspired by a character from Lord of the Rings, it's hardly surprising that Eowyn Ivey tends toward the fantastical; the seed for her first novel was planted by a Russian fairy tale. That book has since topped bestseller lists, been translated into more than 20 languages and was a Washington Post Notable Book for 2012. Ivey here uses her decade as a journalist for the Frontiersman, as well... as her experiences shooting moose and raising turkeys in Alaska's wilds, to imbue The Snow Child with an intimate understanding of life in cold climates. These gritty details ground a sometimes magical story of parents who try to construct a daughter out of snow. Ivey's descriptions of the Alaskan wilderness — equal parts beautiful and deadly — set this book apart, as does her carefully balanced plot, which skips over sentimentality in favor of pathos and subtle surrealism.

Ivey's already at work on a second novel, concerning three men who attempt to travel up Alaska's Copper River in the 19th century. She's said that it will be "more adventurous and more epic," than The Snow Child. That's easy to believe: She and her husband traveled 100 miles of the river — the United States's tenth largest — in an inflatable raft in order to research the forbidding terrain. It's that kind of deep, personal knowledge of the land that will likely make Ivey's second book stand out as much as her first.
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Kevin Powers

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The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers
2012 | Unabridged
Garnering a National Book Award nomination and a fat advance from David Foster Wallace's legendary editor, Michael Pietsch, isn't too bad for a first novel. Drawing on Kevin Powers's 2004-05 tour of duty in Iraq, The Yellow Birds is an in-your-face account of the war that centers around a young man who's just trying to keep up with the chaos. It's a tall order for a soldier who got beat up in... high school for reading poetry, and here Powers makes it into a lyrical, singular coming-of-age in the most demanding crucible imaginable. Though his next book likely won't draw so directly on his war experience, look to Powers, who was a Michener Fellow in Poetry while earning his MFA at the University of Texas at Austin, to again utilize his capacity for language and shifting narration to great effect. With Pietsch on the editorial duties and Powers just 32 years old, the sky's the limit.
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Karen Thompson Walker

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The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker
2012 | Unabridged
Random House reportedly paid $1 million for this debut from Simon and Schuster editor-turned-novelist Karen Walker, who plugged away at The Age of Miracles in the morning before work for three years. In this spare, well-observed novel, the rotation of the Earth is slowing, forcing massive changes to humanity's way of life. Walker here steps confidently into the decade-old trend of American authors writing novels about the apocalypse, yet, like Tom Perrotta's... The Leftovers, Walker is less concerned with the fire and brimstone of the end times than with how such a fundamental event would impact daily life; the voice of her 11-year-old narrator casually blends observations about the trials of growing up with ones about dealing with much more cosmic happenings.

In interviews, Walker has admitted to being hard at work on a follow-up to her bestselling debut, but she's reticent to give details out of superstition. Regardless of just what she's up to (Walker has said it will, like Miracles, deal with "people facing an extreme situation" and will feature "science fiction elements"), with a husband enrolled in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she'll be in the right environment to produce a fitting follow-up.
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Caroline de Margerie, American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop

Mark Peikert — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:06:50 +0000

A frothy biography of the Georgetown hostess that focuses on the boldfaced names she knew.

Nancy Mitford modeled a character on her, but it was as a comically priggish American. As revealed in Caroline de Margerie’s bonbon of a biography American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, however, Susan Mary Alsop was far from the typical American in post-World War II France. Married to an American diplomat, Susan Mary was enjoying an affair with the British ambassador – one that didn’t impede her friendship with his wife. Later, she would return to America and marry political columnist Joseph Alsop, despite knowing that he was gay.

De Margerie stresses her gifts as a hostess, intermingling different strata of first Parisian and then Georgetown society, and her book is similar. Susan Mary’s great skill was as an observer, not in making history, and de Margerie’s great skill is in combining the boldfaced names amongst which Susan Mary moved into an entertaining look at the second half of the 20th century. The result is frothy fun, light on interviews and quotes and heavy on the authorial voice. American Lady isn’t exactly scholarly, but for those interested in anecdotes about the Kennedy White House or newly liberated Paris, it’s a gossipy treat.

Brom, Krampus: The Yule Lord

Kate Silver — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:53:11 +0000

A bold fantasy imagines a dark shadow lurking below some beloved Christmas traditions.

Giving “Christmas spirit” a new meaning, Brom’s bold fantasy novel just might make you think differently about that familiar figure in red. Krampus opens on a desolate Christmas morning in a West Virginia trailer community. Struggling songwriter Jesse Walker is outside his home, drunk and depressed over losing his wife and young daughter to Dillard Deaton, the local police chief. He’s pointed a .38 down his throat, ready to make this his last Christmas, when he spots a bunch of small, devilish men chasing a man in a Santa suit. Moments later, a velvet sack drops from the sky and crashes through the roof of his trailer. Turns out, not only does the sack contain the dolls his daughter wants this year, but it will restore order to the dark Yule Lord, Krampus. As the story goes – and feel free to muffle the kids’ ears – Santa Claus imprisoned the Krampus, and this year, he and his men are back with a vengeance. If Jesse makes a deal with the Krampus, he might get his family back.

Brom has a talent for drawing dark shadows underneath beloved stories. With The Child Thief, the writer and illustrator added a touch of the macabre to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. And while this tale of evil retribution appeals to horror fans, it’s grounded in a domestic drama that wouldn’t be out of place on the five o’clock news. Kirby Heyborne adds robust narration that recalls your favorite holiday stories, but with plenty of new twists.

Emma Donoghue, Astray

Sam Adams — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:46:10 +0000

Far-flung tales of immigration and exile linked by a common humanity.

Loosely organized around themes of displacement and exile, Emma Donoghue’s follow up to her shattering Room is something of a palate cleanser. Its 14 tales are historical in origin, spanning from the American Revolution to the 20th century, and most are set in or at least point toward the New World, mirroring Donoghue’s status as an expatriate Irishwoman living in Canada.

As one would expect from a collection whose origins span more than a decade – the earliest were published in 1998, the latest in 2012 – the stories vary widely in tone. The notes that follow each one, detailing their factual bases and often serving as an extra-textual epilogue, also serve as speed bumps, reminding readers to pause and reset before continuing on. From “Man and Boy,” in which a British elephant trainer’s prized animal is sold into P.T. Barnum’s care, to “What Remains,” wherein Canadian sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle cope with their descent into dementia, each brief episode is an undiscovered country with its own rules, its own way of being.

The stories in Astray never wear out their welcome, and the best use their brevity as a weapon. “Counting the Days” interweaves the thoughts of a husband and wife separated by a transatlantic crossing. As she flees the Irish famine, he lies dying, choleric, in Montreal, the story’s structure fashioning a reunion that will never be, a dream cut short. “The Hunt” finds its way into the redcoats’ ranks via a young German mercenary, little more than a slave himself. As the British soldiers systematically rape every woman and girl they come across, the young boy absents himself, leaving the worst atrocities outside his field of vision but well within the range of our imagination.

So it is too with the connections between Astray‘s far-flung tales. There’s little overlap, but together they form a partly finished map, leaving readers to chart their own course and navigate the wilds between them.

Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country

Arianna Stern — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:28:13 +0000

Marries poetry and prose in a straightforward, in-depth personal history of the little-discussed Nigerian Civil War

There Was a Country, Chinua Achebe’s firsthand account of the Nigerian civil war, which lasted for almost three years and claimed more than a million lives, marries poetry and prose to create a straightforward, in-depth history. No background knowledge of Nigeria is needed to understand the story – Achebe carefully explains every link in this complex chain of events.

In short, the Igbo ethnic group, of which Achebe is a member, emphasized education, which brought them prosperity and a pathway to assimilation under British colonial rule. Their successes made other Nigerians resent them, which culminated in widespread massacres that went overlooked by the Nigerian government. When the Igbo people pronounced Biafra, the eastern region of Nigeria, their own independent nation, it catalyzed a civil war and a series of scarring humanitarian tragedies.

Achebe’s passion is clear throughout the book, whether he’s discussing Nigeria’s potential for democratic rule or the artist’s role in contextualizing political conflict. At times, it can seem like Achebe is trying to cover too much ground. Still, his ambitious storytelling style makes sense in context: He’s a high-profile writer who’s been embraced by a Western media that isn’t exactly preoccupied with Nigerian politics. In a sense, his writing helps to fill a void. As Achebe puts it, “I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead. The story is dead.’ I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.” In There Was a Country, Achebe both tells his story and emphasizes the right of others to do the same.

Discover: The Books We’re Giving Thanks For

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:58:55 +0000

The whole “giving thanks” part of Thanksgiving rarely gets the attention it deserves. Too often it’s wedged into an already overlong family meal by your aunt Maude, who insists on putting everyone around the table on the spot, or it’s co-opted by jewelry commercials that are prematurely, maddeningly, already hustling Christmas gifts. Under those circumstances, it can be hard to get into the thankful spirit. But in a holiday based on a questionable colonial history and a remarkably unhealthy binge-and-gorge cycle, the reminder to take full stock of all you’ve got going for you is pretty special, and worth observing.

Books are something we are always, always thankful for. Over the years, we have found books that have changed our worldview, opened doors and reminded us that no matter what we’re going through, we’re not alone. When you have a moment to yourself this week, maybe while traveling to the aforementioned family meal or while reveling in the quiet afterward, queue up a book and try exercising some gratitude. Need some inspiration? This year, we’re giving thanks for:

A New Silver Age of Reason

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The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver
2012 | Unabridged
The age-old struggle between brainiac fact-huggers and go-wit-yer-gut soothsayers rages on, but I'm grateful to find that, at least right now, the good guys appear to be winning. Pundits who, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, predicted a Romney landslide are still licking their wounds after on-air meltdowns, while author/New York Times blogger/sabermetric poll interpreter Nate Silver is taking his best-selling The Signal and the Noise on a victory book tour. He... deserves it, and we deserve him, after keeping our heads as elderly frat-boy candidates lined up to volunteer dubious factoids about reproduction, climate change, and other indisputable points of science. I'm not saying we're definitely in a new age of enlightenment, but Silver's entertaining dissections – of punditry, yes, but also of chess, poker, earthquake analysis, et al. – have given me hope that logic is making some real headway. Of course, I might be deluding myself. People keep on letting me down. But not you, statistics. You've always got my back. â€”Pat Rapa
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Ambitious Parents

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Little Women

Louisa May Alcott
2012 | Unabridged
My mother tried to read me Louisa May Alcott's Little Women when I was two. I remember it, vaguely. Her edition was from her girlhood, one of those volumes nestled in a cardboard slipcover, color plates each lined with a translucent sheet. I was too little then for a chapter book, let alone the story of the four March sisters and their patient Marmee. But I eventually read Little Women, then repeatedly... read it through the years – even in a college Women's Studies seminar; my shaven-headed classmates were surprised by how much they liked it.

Did Alcott inspire my love of reading, my desire to be a writer? Probably. What about having a mother who thought her toddler needed Little Women? That pushed me over the edge. Now I have my own two-year-old daughter. She'll sit patiently enough for Where the Wild Things Are, but I can't imagine making it through a page of Alcott. I have my mother's old edition on my shelf, though. I'll try soon. â€”Elizabeth Isadora Gold
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Happy Endings

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Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories

Patricia Highsmith
2011 | Unabridged
On the one hand, Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (first published pseudonymously in 1952) has all the trappings of a pre-Stonewall lesbian pulp novel. There's plenty of abjection, discrimination, and closeted identity to go around, as ingenue shopgirl Therese falls head over heels for wealthy, married Carol. Twenty-first-century queer readers can be grateful that, today, we can assign names to our desires and speak those names out loud, and that coming... out might not result in being spurned (or worse) by our loved ones. Here's the other thing, though, and it comes with a spoiler alert: The Price of Salt actually has a happy ending. At a time when the gay protagonists in most novels ended up alone or dead, Highsmith's choice to end her novel with Therese and Carol together and in love was a brave and radical act. And that's something to be really grateful for. â€”Sara Jaffe
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Heroines Without Borders

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Dealing with Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede
2008 | Unabridged
The year I was nine, I stumbled upon a copy of Dealing with Dragons at the local library. I started reading it that afternoon and didn't stop until I'd hit the last page. The story was wry, charming and hilarious: a delightful, rollicking adventure about a beautiful princess who is totally exasperated by being a beautiful princess – she'd rather learn Latin and magic and cook cherries jubilee. So she runs away... and arranges to become the official cook and librarian for a local dragon; an arrangement that would have worked out perfectly if only she didn't keep getting bothered by princes determined to "rescue" her, and if only there didn't also seem to be evil, oily wizards wreaking havoc everywhere with nefarious plansâ€¦Before I had the words to know why I was grateful, I was relieved to be able to spend hours lost in a fantasy adventure land where the princess was no distressed damsel, but rather a smart, strong, kickass heroine. Twenty-plus years and hundreds of re-reads later, I'm still thankful. â€”Jess Wilson
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Quiet Acts of Humanity

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Middlemarch

George Eliot
2008 | Unabridged
Whenever I read George Eliot, I come away feeling refreshed and improved as a person. She has helped me reckon with issues that have loomed large in my life, as well as spiritual quandaries that I scarcely recognized before her penetrating insights brought them into view. Give this outstanding audio recording of her most complete, accessible book an hour of your time and you will be hooked by the naive, youthful Dorothea's... foolish decision to marry the aging Casaubon. Contrasting this ill-fated marriage, Eliot gives us the upwardly mobile Lydgate and his attempt to make a wife out of the beautiful but utterly materialistic Rosamond. Rounding out the cast of main characters is the plucky Will Ladislaw, whose maturation over the course of the book must be one of the most satisfying coming-of-age stories ever told.
What Middlemarch makes me most grateful for is its willingness to find the value in the most prosaic of lives – the title isn't Middlemarchfor nothing. Eliot's ability to make their reckonings feel substantial despite the smallness of their town and the anonymity of their struggles drives home the book's core insight: that the battle to live a good life is important, no matter who wages it. â€”Scott Esposito
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Families, Real and Adopted

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I Feel Bad About My Neck

Nora Ephron
2007 | Unabridged
When Nora Ephron passed away in June, her friends spoke of her romantic view of life, as inspirational as her storied career. Among her essay collections (all worth seeking out, as well as her novel, Heartburn), I Feel Bad About My Neck boasts enough bon mots to fill a Zabar's shopping cart. She exults in favorite cookbooks, apartment living, the light on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (better than the West... Side, she says). Like many, I first discovered Nora through her films – autumnal postcards to New York City – and in my years spent living there, I thought of Nora when visiting little Village bakeries or passing the landmark Apthorp condominium building, which she writes about in "Moving On." Listening to Nora narrate, with her warm, knowing voice, she reminds me of a beloved aunt visiting for the holiday, who can't wait to tell you about a great book or delicious new dish. Every conversation with her is a gift. â€”Kate Silver
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