Book Giveaway: Beatitude

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved.

It's the first of the month and you know what that means.

It's time to bring you February's Author/Reader Discussion Book!

We will be reading Larry Closs's

Beatitude

Larry has made a total of 20 copies of his book available for giveaway:

10 print copies (limited to US residents) and

10 digital copies (Mobi or Epub; open internationally)

Here's the goodreads description of the book:

New York City, 1995: Harry Charity is a sensitive young loner haunted by a disastrous affair when he meets Jay Bishop, an outgoing poet and former Marine. Propelled by a shared fascination with the unfettered lives of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, the two are irresistibly drawn together, even as Jay’s girlfriend, Zahra, senses something deeper developing.

Reveling in their discovery of the legendary scroll manuscript of Kerouac’s On the Road in the vaults of the New York Public Library, Harry and Jay embark on a nicotine-and-caffeine-fueled journey into New York’s thriving poetry scene of slams and open-mike nights.

An encounter with “Howl” poet Allen Ginsberg shatters their notions of what it means to be Beat but ultimately and unexpectedly leads them into their own hearts where they’re forced to confront the same questions that confounded their heroes: What do you do when you fall for someone who can’t fall for you? What do you do when you’re the object of affection? What must you each give up to keep the other in your life?

Beatitude features two previously unpublished poems by Allen Ginsberg.

This giveaway will run through January 8th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on January 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment here or in the giveaway thread over at TNBBC on goodreads, stating why you'd like to receive a copy of the book, what format you prefer (choose one option from above), and where you reside. Remember, only US residents can win a paper copy!. 

ONLY COMMENT ONCE. MULTIPLE COMMENTS DO NOT GAIN YOU ADDITIONAL CHANCES TO WIN.

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from February 16th through the 22nd. Larry Closs has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for him. 

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

GOOD LUCK!

Book Review: Cartilage and Skin

Read 12/16/14 - 12/30/14
2 Stars - Tread Lightly / A slow and strange book that leaves you wishing you you could face-punch the narrator
Pages: 328
Publisher: Starcherone Books 
Released: 2013


I've read my fair share of books that featured narrators who were incredibly immense jerks. Disgrace featured a world class jerk. Saturday featured a hoity-toity jerk. Both of these books grated on my nerves, and the leading jerkyhead jerks kept pissing me off, and yet... against my better judgement, being the optimistic reader that I am, I continued to read, hoping for some kind of final-hour-redemption, only to end up totally aggravated and stewing over the hours I had wasted on them.

You can go ahead and add Michael James Rizza's Cartilage and Skin to that list. This book failed to grab me from the get-go. The pace was excruciatingly slow and the main dude - Dr. Parker - was a total sleazebag. The book starts out with our Parker picking up the mail for a reclusive female neighbor. Except, instead of giving her all of it, he begins keeping the packages of photos that an apparent "admirer" sends her. And then he begins fantasizing about her. And when the lust becomes almost too much to bear, he beings to stalk and harass her at her front door.  Turns out she's this grotesquely large woman who used to be into this fetishist stuff and she knows he's been withholding those packages. Hell, she tells him that the dude whose been sending her the packages knows he's been keeping them, too.

So now he's all paranoid that this dude gonna come after him. Meanwhile, he's been humoring this sick little homeless kid - paying him to run errands for him so he doesn't have to leave the house - until the kid gets so sick that Parker has no choice but to call an ambulance, which suddenly brings this shitstorm of an investigation down around him. Apparently the boy's got a nasty history and had recently been abused pretty badly and Parker's the first one they're looking at. When Parker is called in and fails to offer the information the case worker and her investigators are looking for, his privacy is threatened.

In the midst of all this shit - the anxiety of the investigation and the paranoia of the photo fetish dude secretly stalking him - Parker meets Vanessa, who runs a vintage clothing store, and inadvertently but also kinda knowingly, pulls her naive ass into all of this shit too.

Parker plays like he's this anti-social, innocent victim of his circumstances but you get the feeling the whole way through that this guy is totally playing you. He's not an honest narrator and he's making everything worse by hanging around and instigating the situation.

It's not often I want to face-punch a protagonist. But the combination of Parker's sheer cluelessness, his ridiculous hyper-vigilance, disgustingly low self esteem, and the ease with which he lies and shrugs off the seriousness of his situation made me want to take him by the shoulders and shake him fucking silly. 

I've read some of the reviews on this book and had a good laugh at the ones that claim it's a creepy read. The only thing that I found creepy about it was our narrator, a Grade A creeper if ever there was one. The few relationships he had were odd and malformed. The only person he ever really seemed to give a shit about was himself. And then there were these horrid moments within the book where Parker would divert from the actual novel and philosophize for page after page about shit I could care less about. Some of these digressions were borderline torturous. At a minimum, they were just plain ole boring.

If I could go back in time, to December 16th, the day I started this book, I'd tell myself not to bother. I'd explain to myself that if I picked it up and read it, I wouldn't feel right putting it down, and that when I got to the final three pages or so of the novel, two entire weeks later, I'd only end up pissed off and frustrated. So frustrated, in fact, that I would go on to immediately review the book, still feeling the heat and hatred those final few pages created in me... 

John Mauk's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today, John Mauk, author of Field Notes for the Earthbound, contemplates what it'd be like to serve up his characters a couple glasses of coca wine, just for the hell of it:

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            I’ve tried a Jägerbomb, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, I’d like to buy the world a coca wine. Back in the nineteenth century, people drank it as a matter of course. They could walk down to the local apothecary, grab a bottle, and sail back home—yahooing into the sky or just humming quietly with a mix of pick-me-up and slow-me-down. Plenty of sources document coca wine’s popularity among those with means. Clergy, lawyers, teachers, and various writerly types consumed it openly and often. They celebrated its curative oomph—its power to eradicate headaches, calm nervous stomachs, or jolt groggy genitalia.

            Coca wine offered a unique glow, something more than a belly full of bourbon or a straight shot of stimulant. Apparently, the alcohol and coca bean joined molecular arms in the blood stream and spawned a euphorigenic creature known, in chemical terms, as cocaethylene. And I suspect that coca wine tasted better than any of our current liqueur-based beverages. I imagine it running over the taste buds with the same oozy refinement as tawny port—and I imagine that it induced a calm wakefulness, like zooming over a cartoon hillside on a wind-powered skateboard. No internal combustion, no high fructose aftertaste. Unfortunately, some good ol’ fashioned racism converged with the forces of temperance and made a bogeyman of coca wine. By the twentieth century, it was mostly gone. Racism was not.

            The characters in Field Notes for the Earthboundcome along in the mid-twentieth century. Their stories are set on the Ohio flatland just as alcohol starts showing up in small town grocery stores—a sign, for some, of the end times. They don’t have coca wine or anything close. In fact, I’d say they live in a culinary wasteland, an era fueled by potted meats, canned vegetables, and watery bottled beer. So if I could, I’d serve my surviving characters, especially the cranky ones, a coca wine. Now that they’ve finished their narrative chores, they deserve something other than tight-lipped temperance or Old Crown.

            After a second pour, a third for the cranky ones, my characters and I’d get all metaphorical. We’d talk hard about their stories. I’d claim that they dramatize the battle between euphoria and temperance, magic and reality. I’d say it just like that. Marigold Holloway would reluctantly agree and then sob, finally, for her dead husband. Jacob Ferrick, whose mother was a witch (a real witch), would argue that it’s no battle at all, that reality is always under the yoke of invisible forces most people cannot imagine. Peckerhead Phil, of course, would take the opposite stance and insist that stories are one thing, reality another. In the space between assertions, Walter Laney, the retired priest turned insult comic, would call everyone names and laugh himself stupid. Gene Whitman, the old Nazarene healer, would stay silent. He’d drink his drinks and smile from the corner of the room.

            Tweaked up and dreamy on cocaethylene, we’d carouse through the night. We’d invent theories about Kathryn Mueller’s famous final flight, how she went from night bird to dead girl facedown in a field. We’d raise glasses and toast her lucidity, her absolute certainty about what people are and how they work. And then we’d roll along until sunrise listening to everything Jeremy could not divulge in “The Electric Nowhere,” all the things he omitted about his uncle, his yearning for Helen, and his final violent act on the flatland. He’d say terrible things about Len Polk’s last seconds on the planet, and maybe we wouldn’t care so much because, damn it, Len Polk was a lowdown scoundrel.

            And maybe at the end, we’d hear from Helen and Joel’s child—a woman now, someone most of us never got to meet. She was just a slight bulge when she was carried off. I would recognize her, of course, because she’d have Joel’s and Helen’s features—his fierce jaw, her crystalline eyes. I would say that I’ve wanted to hear her voice for years, that I’ve wondered what tales she’d heard about all of these crazed flatlanders. And with all of us leaning in close, she would describe her life in California—after all these stories and far away from her own beginning. She would tell us—I’m certain of it—how she sometimes, on calm nights and for no apparent reason, lifts her window and howls into the air, back to the east and through the decades.

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John Mauk has a Masters degree in literature from the University of Toledo and a PhD in rhetoric from Bowling Green State University. He writes and works at the intersection of rhetoric and fiction. He has three college writing textbooks, published by Wadsworth/Cengage. In 2010, his short collection "The Rest of Us" won Michigan Writer’s Cooperative Press chapbook contest, and its first story, “The Earthbound,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His debut novel, Field Notes for the Earthbound, was a finalist in the Hudson Prize contest. For more info, visit www.johnmauk.com.

Stephen Kozeniewksi On Being Indie

On "Being Indie" is a blog series, here on TNBBC, that introduces us to a wide variety of independent authors, publishers, and booksellers as they discuss what being indie means to them.  

Stephen Kozeniewski (pronounced: "causin' ooze key") lives with his wife and two cats in Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the modern zombie.  During his time as a Field Artillery officer, he served for three years in Oklahoma and one in Iraq, where due to what he assumes was a clerical error, he was awarded the Bronze Star.  He is also a classically trained linguist, which sounds much more impressive than saying his bachelor’s degree is in German. You can find him on Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, at his Blog, and join his Mailing List.

I don't know what being indie means.  I don't know if I am indie.  I guess I am.

I don't mean this in any sort of a smartass way.  And I certainly don't mean it as a political statement, which, trust me, lots of people do.  Imagine, if you will, a professorial type, black plastic frames to his glasses, a jacket with leather elbows, smoking at a pipe of pungent tobacco.

"Indie?" he proclaims, nearly choking on his $200 bottle of cognac, "Poppycock!  Certainly not!  I'm traditionallypublished, old sport."

And then he breaks into a rousing rendition of "Boola Boola."

On the other hand, picture a hipster, one finger to his upper lip to show off his moustache tattoo, the other desperately clutching a can of PBR.

"Traditional, maaaan?" he cries over the Arcade Fire anthem pumping in the background, "You mean legacy publishing?  Dead pulp matter?  Hell to the no, droog, I'm indie all the way!"

And at this point about half of you reading (aka the readers) are going, "What the hell is this guy on about?"  And the other half (aka the writers) are nodding along in pained sympathy.

It's a minefield out there, you see.  First of all, nothing means anything.  If you write but don't have a book out you could be "pre-published" or "unpublished" or "a writer but not an author" or an "aspiring author" or just a damn "author."  Not to mention "agented" or "unagented."  If you have a contract with the Big 6 (or "Big 5+1", or just "Big 5"), sometimes it's called "traditional publishing" and sometimes it's called "legacy publishing" and sometimes it's just called "publishing" as though nothing else counts.  And if you released your book yourself, my God, you could be an "author-publisher," an "indie author," "self-published," or just damn "unpublished" as far as some people are concerned.

And pretty much every single one of these terms is emotionally charged to certain segments of the population.  (I'm not even kidding.  Try calling someone "self-published" when they describe themselves as an "author-publisher."  Let me know how that pans out for you.)

So.  What the heck am I?  Well, I guess I'm an "indie."  That's fine if someone wants to call me that.  If someone wants to call me "traditionally published," too, I'm fine with that.  The only time I really worry about it is when a reviewer specifies they don't accept...some kind of books...in which case I call myself the one they do accept. 

I went with a small publisher for all three of my novels.  One was published with Red Adept Publishing, a very new and impressive press out of Raleigh, NC.  The other two were with Severed Press, a well-regarded horror publisher out of Hobart, Australia.  (Fun fact: if I ever have a dispute with my publisher, by contract I have to present at the courthouse in Tasmania.)

My publishers took care of all the crap work as far as I'm concerned.  They did the covers, the editing, the accounting, and some of the marketing.  I still have to market quite a bit myself.  For instance, um, writing blogposts like this.  (Beats genetically engineering an albino gorilla to shout "BUY BRAINEATER JONES!" from the rooftops, I guess.)

So I'm kind of a hybrid?  But I'm also not that, because "hybrid author" is a whole other thing I don't even want to get into right now.

But here's what I want to say about being "indie" if that is what I am.  ("Jesus," I can hear you all saying, "Only took you until 500 words into your 800 word essay to get to the point, huh, Hemingway?")  The people that I have met in this business are a point of joy in my life.  There are fellow Red Adept authors, like Mary Fan, Elizabeth Corrigan, and Claire Ashby, who I speak to literally every day for support.  There are Severed authors like Ian McClellan and H.E. Goodhue who I can commiserate with on how to fix a scene, how to get the most gore out of my zombie, what, exactly, would come out if you ripped someone's face off, all that important stuff.

And then there are the fans.  No screaming groupies yet.  (Although you know where to find me, ladies.)  But I have people who message and e-mail me to say they like my work.  Or they leave reviews and say, "I never left a review before, but I wanted Steve to know..."  And then there are professional reviewers, people like Shana Festa, who, despite putting me at the kiddie table, I still tolerate, and Syliva Bagaglio and Sharon Stevenson and Nikki Howard and and and (and hopefully Lori if I haven't rambled on too long already.)  People who eagerly gobble up my books, tell the world about them, and even talk to me afterwards.

So, whatever "indie" means, if being indie means I get to be a part of this community, then I'm indie all the way, baby.  *shotguns can of PBR*

A TNBBC Twist on "Top 2014" Lists

We've been putting our own little spin on Top End-of-the-Year Lists for three years running. In the past, we had asked small press authors to share some of their favorite reads from the year. This year, we're shaking things up again and asking our review contributors to share theirs....

TNBBC Review Contributor Series: Top Reads of 2014

Lavinia Ludlow (author)

Ludlow’s Top 3 Books Read in 2014

If you’ve been (un)fortunate enough to know me up close and personal this year, you probably know I am lucky on many fronts: to be alive, to be alive with all parts intact, to have been well enough to write this, and to have been well enough to have read some phenomenal books by a few writers I have always respected, and new writers I’ve come to respect just the same.

Rope by Matty Byloos
Full review at The Collagist

A must-read. Unconventional story telling and storyline, and not without Byloos’ notorious dark humor. This book will knock you out, and when you regain consciousness, you’ll secretly be asking for more.

The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Volume I
Full review at Nailed Magazine

McClanahan’s small-town stories are life-lessons embedded in dark-humored, jaw-dropping tales. You feel sorry for his protagonists (in most cases, it’s McClanahan himself) but you’re also laughing and simultaneously enlightened by the painful yet hilarious conundrums.

Love Songs of the Revolution by Bronwyn Mauldin
Full review pending

Don’t let the title turn you off, this is an amazing and well-written novella about a seventy-year-old man reflecting on his life as a political refugee. A heart-breaking and humbling thriller, and I quote, “Read this story as your passport demands: a love story, a murder mystery, a story of political intrigue. Perhaps by the final page, those stories will converge.”

2015 is going to be a big year. I’m thankful for the opportunity to kick it off in style at The Next Best Book Blog. Thanks Mrs. Hettler for keeping the faith, and for keeping me going. Here’s to many more.

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Drew Broussard (Raging Biblioholism)

4 Favorite Overlooked Reads:

* The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero 

A really fun adventure story, using just about every gimmick or affectation it could think of (from things like video transcripts in the text to character tropes like the sassy female sidekick) and somehow ending up super-successful instead of frustrating.  Cantero's imagination just goes bonkers and I can't remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book.

* Tigerman by Nick Harkaway 

Harkaway continues to be relentlessly inventive, writing one of the best superhero origin stories in a long time.  He comes armed with humor, heart, and a savvy geopolitical eye to boot.  And the UK cover is just the most beautiful thing.

* See You in Paradise by J. Robert Lennon 

An excellent collection exploring the malaise of the middle American suburb.  Smart, well-crafted, and just vaguely unsettling - just like the suburbs...

* The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner 

Flying way under the radar comes this well-crafted tale about a clan of lobster-catchers in Maine.  It takes a lot of inspiration from King Lear (down to the names and some of the character traits) but it's also a celebration of local American mythology - both the truly magical and the self-made magic of self-made men (and women).

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Melanie Page (Grab The Lapel)

Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

Because Robbins was born long before TV (in 1932), storytelling is a vital part of who he is, and Tibetan Peach Pie demonstrates the oral tradition in a way that makes you want to read the vignettes aloud to those around you. Robbins may be 82 now, but he’s kept up on pop culture just fine. He makes fun of Sarah Palin and e-books (how can his writing be reduced to those tiny 0s and 1s??). This is not a guy frozen in time wishing for “the good old days.” Each day is a new adventure, a new challenge, and I’m not even sure Robbins suggests he’s ready to slow down. Robbins is hilarious, yet slows life down so that you can enjoy it.

Scoot Over Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology edited by Donna Jarrell & Ira Sukrungruang

The editors of this anthology, self-proclaimed “Fat Americans,” choose pieces that explore the love of fat, the disgust and guilt; the essays are written from the perspective of the fat and the skinny; the entries are humorous, serious, and sad. In an ever-fatter America, this collection is great to gain some perspective from all voices.

Off Courseby Michelle Huneven

The setting of Off Course is the Reagan-era recession, but how is that different from the 2010s? People study and work hard, and as the end of that schooling nears, reality becomes an abstract thing, a toothless monster that makes moving forward seem impossible and bends adulthood into an undesirable shape. Because Off Course is so long (and the pages are densely packed), there is so much for each reader to take from this book. It’ s a novel that made me look at the pieces, picking each one up and turning it over for inspection.

Limberby Angela Pelster

A whole book of essays about trees; how is that even possible? Angela Pelster makes it happen in her sleek collection containing 17 essays, usually around 5 pages each. With titles like “Temple” and “Ethan Lockwood” and “Artifacts,” you may not immediately get the connection to trees. More so, you may not have a sense of direction with the content. But Pelster leads readers along and takes us to unknown territory that opens up like the door through which Dorothy crosses from black-and-white into a color-filled world in Oz.

Her Own Vietnam by Lynn Kanter

A young woman volunteers for Vietnam to go in her brother’s place in the hopes that being a nurse will be awful, but not deadly. Kanter captures the brutal details of war, including the graphic descriptions and unimaginable feelings. She craftily sidesteps clichés and predictable territory and instead focuses on the female perspective, one that is sorely underrepresented.

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Lori Hettler (TNBBC)

The Best Small Press Books I've Read in 2014

Above All Men - Eric Shonkwiler

It's a bleak tale of the beginning of the end of the world. Of a family man who feels the weight of everyone's worries on his shoulders. Of this man who, regardless of consequence, is determined to make sure everyone is alright, even if it means hurting the ones he cares about most. It's a tale of survival as much as it is one of destruction. And Shonkwiler pulls it off effortlessly. It's a killer read. It does all of the things you want it to and some of the things you don't. And that's what makes it so powerful. That's what makes it THE one.

Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness - Heather Fowler

The stories in Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness, Heather Fowler's fourth collection, hold a scalpel to the brain of each of its protagonists, in an attempt to differentiate true mental illness from what is natural and normal. When does a simple crush become an obsessive desire? At what point do we decide that these paranoid thoughts in our head are no longer innocent, no longer healthy? After you read her stories, your guard will be up. Your eyes will turn their suspicious gaze left and right, left and right, all day long. You'll automatically diagnose everyone around you, and begin to keep your distance. But I promise it won't last long. Because the unease will wear off. The routine will suck you back in. And that's ok. Because it's the norm. And because sometimes, we find mental illness a little thrilling, a little sexy.

Deep Ellum - Brandon Hobson

Brandon Hobson's Deep Ellum is very much a sentimental look back at that broken childhood, at family relationships gone bad (and getting worse), at why they say "you can't go home again", and rightly, who the fuck wants to? It also details, more specifically, a reluctant last-gasp attempt to pull the pieces back together when three siblings are called back home after their mother's most recent failed suicide. Hobson is at his best when creating wholly uncomfortable familial situations and is also a master at word economy, expressing only what's necessary and trusting, or simply allowing, his readers to infer the rest. He isn't afraid to hold a mirror up to all the ugly shit families are famous for pulling on each other, either. Whether you've lived a similarly messed up life or not, you certainly know someone who has, or can relate to some of the circumstances here.

Apocalypticon - Clayton Smith

A post-apocalyptic novel that makes fun of itself and every book or film that's ever come before it? Uh, yes please! Clayton Smith knocks it out of the park - The Magic Kingdom's parking lot, to be exact - with this hilarious tale of two BFF's who've managed to survive the apocalypse (which was brought about by Jamaican 'Flying Monkey Missiles' if you can believe it) by apparent sheer dumb luck. Time and time again I found myself wishing I could hop inside Clayton's world and tag along with these guys. Their "laugh in the face of danger" attitude and incredibly poorly timed curiosity made APOCALYPTICON an edge-of-your-seat fun house ride. Sprinkled throughout with pop culture references and served with a heaping dose of well written dialogue, I'm naming APOCALYPTICON the must-read book for fans of post-apoc literature.

Hold the Dark - William Giraldi

Set in an Alaskan village so far off the map you'd never know it existed unless you were born there or beckoned there, during the teeth-chattering and snot-freezing dead of winter, Hold the Dark is a twisted, chilling thriller of a story. It is an extremely dark and violent, slow moving, tension-filled tale that's meant to mess with your mind. William Giraldi's careful prose and simplistic world-building go a long way to pulling the reader in, despite it's slow place. His willful withholding is actually part of the book's charm. And the near-tender descriptions of his characters' violent acts render them almost beautiful. Kudos also to Blackstone Audio, for finding a reader capable of conveying the quiet fierceness of Giraldi's words.

Honorable Mentions:

Suckers - Z. Rider

Winterswim - Ryan W Bradley

The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide - Schuler Benson

The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World - Brian Allen Carr

Starship Grifters - Robert Kroese

Romance For Delinquents - Michael Wayne Hampton

Sarah Yaw Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed  (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...

Today, Sarah Yaw takes it to the toilet. Sarah Yaw’s novel YOU ARE FREE TO GO (Engine Books, 2014) was selected by Robin Black as the winner of the 2013 Engine Books Novel Prize; her short work has appeared in Salt Hill. Sarah received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and is an assistant professor at Cayuga Community College. She’s the mother of Jed and Ella, the best bathroom invaders ever. She lives in Central New York.

Confessions of a Bathroom Reader

My View

In the bathroom over the last five and a half years, I have started and not finished the following: Eat the Document, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, The Pale King, The Burgess Boys, that really brilliant article in The Atlantic about race in America, Ulysses, Transatlantic, Swann’s Way, Love Medicine, The Pale King, that other really cool Atlantic article about kindness, Salvage the Bones, The Presence Process, Absence of Mind, Mountains of the Moon, The Pale King, myriad New York Times pieces (forget the New Yorker), and any article you posted on Facebook that I thought, Ooh! I want to read that.

I have 5 ½-year-old twins. The bathroom is a refuge where for the length of my twins’ lives I have read the first pages of books or a tease of each interesting article trending in my social networks, but almost never a whole anything. I try to finish. I decide, I’ll take my reading to the couch, flanked by watchers of that curious monkey or that cute tiger or those morons on Kickin’ It, so that I can finish what I started in the bathroom. It almost never works. They always ask for juice. It’s all fits and starts. The bathroom remains my best hope. And yet…

their view

Have you ever tried to go to the bathroom with young kids around? I have used the potty, a word I now reflexively use because I’ve become an idiot in certain aspects of my life, with not one but two babies on my lap. Never have I ever gone to the bathroom and not told my kids where I was going. Never have I ever arrived in the bathroom and not been asked in a yelling voice from a very far corner of the house, “Mama, where are you?” “Mama, what are you doing?” “Mama, are you done?” “Mama, mama, mama, mama, mama. I forgot what I was going to say, but where are you?”

I always spend too long. You posted something wildly exciting, and I got lost in it or I made it to page two in Swan’s Way, and then the thundering footsteps, the busting open door and…

I'm semi-informed. I know just enough to know what's going on, but not enough to feel included in deeper cultural conversations. This has lead to a general sense of interruption. This has lead to an ongoing lack of satisfaction. This has resulted in a state of stoppage, which I can tell you is no way to leave the bathroom.

The best days are poetry days, when one of you reposts a poem of the day and I have the time to read it, reread it, let it resonate and lift me up before, well, you know. On those days, my daily constitution is given a rare sense of completion, and I’m told I have a spring in my step, a certain glimmer in my eye.

Audio Series: Stewart Dudley

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. This feature requires more time and patience of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Stewart Dudley reads an excerpt from The Cutting Room. He spent more than 20 years as a film and video director, scriptwriter, cameraman and editor before leaving the industry to focus exclusively on writing. His credits include hundreds of scripts, ads, speeches and websites. The Cutting Room, his first novel, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Click on the soundcloud link below to hear Stewart reading from The Cutting Room:

The word on The Cutting Room:

Jeff Whittaker has been a trusted communications advisor at the highest levels of government and industry. Now, no one seems to want his advice. Unemployed at fifty-five, Whittaker volunteers at the Jamieson International Documentary Film Festival, where greater value is placed on his clean driving record than his strategic public relations expertise. He is assigned to chauffer one of the festival’s biggest draws—Margaret “Terror” Torrance, a Hollywood star at the top of her game and the bottom of most casting lists. Although inhabitants of different worlds, Whittaker and Torrance share the scars inflicted by personal and professional slings and arrows: Torrance self-reinvented by sheer force of will; Whittaker an unapologetic introvert still scouring his life for meaning. Across five days of film screenings, media interviews, workshops and parties, the actor and the communications expert clash and click, challenging each other to stave off the entropy of middle age.
*Lifted with love from goodreads