Review: A Pretty Mouth

Read 10/16/12 - 10/20/12
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to readers who enjoy sick twists on classic lit
Kindle Book
Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press

Lazy Fascist Press brings it again. And this should not come as a surprise to anyone. They've brought it before and will continue to bring it, forever and ever, amen. I've reviewed enough of their quirky, accessibly bizarre fiction to know that whatever they put out, I'm going to want - no, need - to get my greedy little hands on it.

This time I was wowed and cowed by Molly Tanzer's A Pretty Mouth. In this collection of interconnected stories, we are forced to bear witness to the dark and twisted history of the high-class  Calipash family. Black magic and treachery abound in these creatively manipulative tales. Beginning at the end and working their way backwards through time, each story introduces us to a new generation of Lord Calipash's and slowly pieces together the curse that has dogged their bloodline for generations.

Let me start by saying that the more you know about the literature for each time period Molly visits, the more fun you'll find yourself having and the more sting her satire will carry. For example, the opening story, "Dolor-on-the-Downs", pairs its current (and financially floundering) Lord Calipash with, of all people, Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. Now, promise you won't laugh when I confess that I had no clue this was a sick twist on the ACTUAL Wodehouse stories. How could I possibly know that when I'd never read one before? I just assumed Molly was poking fun at it by naming the valet after the famous savant manservant. But as I read on, and confessed my confusion to @booksexyreview, the story began to come into sharper focus and I quickly caught a whiff of what Molly was cooking up. And once I knew it was the actual Wodehouse men, the story took on a whole different meaning for me!

So we've got Jeeves helping our twenty-seventh Lord Calipash to solve the perplexing problem of the strange sea creature that lives in the bowels of the hotel in which they are relaxing. Then we've got the Bronte-like " The Hour of the Tortoise",  a creepy Gothic Victorian tale of a young lady called back to the residence of a dying Calipash, who finds herself in possession of a strange trinket that binds her to the family mausoleum in the most unexpected way.  A school aged Calipash and his band of bad-ass buddies appear in the title story, in which mad-scientist experiments and bawdy displays of power determine the fate of their hopeful classmate Henry. And the final story finds us knee-deep in Roman times where it all begins with the earliest Calipash, who has been shipwrecked on an island populated with strange barbarians, becoming the unfortunate recipient of this unshakable curse.

If you think A Pretty Mouth sounds like a lot of fun, it is. Molly's got a style unlike any other's. It's one that doesn't take itself too seriously while at the same time impressing upon the reader not to take it too lightly. Beware the enemy, even when it turns out to be you.

This goodreads review, by SP Miskowski, sums the collection up better than I could ever hope.

Many thanks to Lazy Fascist Press for constantly feeding my addiction for challenging indie fiction. Keep fighting the good fight and putting kick-ass literature out in front of our faces.

Out of True Blog Tour

Welcome to the next stop of the Out of True blog tour!!

I'm thrilled to be a part of this blog tour which is honoring the release of Amy Durant's (aka @lucysfootball) debut poetry collection, and is being spearheaded by Susie of The Insatiable Booksluts.

Despite a pretty nasty virus that may very well force my laptop into an early grave, I am here and bouncing up and down in excitement, you guys! I have an audio recording of Amy reading her poem "Fever" for you... but before I share, I wanted to gush a bit about her collection. 

You know what most people are thinking when they hear the P word, right? Oh, gasp, poetry! Horrible rhyming things full of clunky, awkward sentences that no one would ever speak out loud in public, unless they were drunk and possibly looking to get their ass kicked. Oh, ew, poetry! The sappy embarrassing outpourings of unrequited love that would be better kept to yourself except you're too hung up in the moment to see how sad and pathetic you sound. Or, for those of you had a bad time of it in high school literature, cringing and cowering in the corner upon hearing the P word, thrown back headlong into those excruciating memories of being forced to critique and "close read" individual lines of wickedly famous and practically undecipherable poems.

Well, snap out of it, man! If you weren't a fan of poetry before, you will be once you lay your eyes on Amy Durant's Out of True. This collection contains poignant, passionate perspectives on human relationships and celestial lovefests. She writes free verse, so each poem reads like flash fiction, a sweet one-two punch to the gut that has you all tied up in knots. 

And the best part for me, as I read through the collection? She's scattered witty one liners throughout the collection that reach out and shake you awake as you read. "Poet's tongues are fat with lies" is one of my favorite lines. Or what about these? "I want everything you are made of to be a part of me" and "I want to touch him just for the reaction"? If you don't feel something when you are reading lines like those, you may as well jump into the grave with my laptop because you are dead or dying, my friend! 

While a good portion of her poems revolve around her own personal love and loss, there are others that are sprinkled here and there within the set that explore other, more impossibly delightful things, such as: XYZYGY which is the coolest little love story of the sun and the moon; Samson and Delilah which takes the tale we thought we knew and puts an interesting spin on it; and Fundamental Forces which attempts to blow your mind with the fact that even though we feel as though we are touching, it is a scientific fact that we actually are not.

As I read through the collection, I remember finishing a poem and going "man, that was the best one yet" and then reading the next one and going "oh wait, no no no, THAT was the best one yet".... 

But don't just take my word for it. 

Have a listen as Amy sets the stage for her writing, and reads you the poem titled "Fever":

As an additional treat, 

I've got one copy of Amy's poetry book, Out of True, to give away internationally! 

So do be sure to leave a comment down below to get your name thrown into the hat for it! 

And I do mean a hat, literally. 

I love pulling names the old school way! 

The giveaway will end on Friday, October 26th... best of luck to you all!!

Amy Durant is a writer living in the Capital District of New York. She writes for her own blog, about much less serious things than her poetry would lead you to believe, and for Insatiable Booksluts, about all things bookish. She is currently the artistic director of Albany Civic Theater and the proud owner of a very unintelligent and chubby, but very lovable, Siamese cat. 

Review: Cure All

Read 10/9/12 - 10/10/12
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to readers who appreciate vivid imagery and stories detailing with things you would never have imagined on your own
Pgs: 119
Publisher: CakeTrain

A revolver pining for a light bulb can only lead to disaster. A woman allows a spider to eat her face as a form of beauty treatment. Reflections that detach themselves from their reflectees.


The flash fiction contained within Kim Parko's Cure All infiltrates your brain like a fever dream. Images of dark hallways and wispy spiderwebs dance through your thoughts as you lose yourself in the unusual worlds she weaves.

Recurring themes appear throughout this collection of twisted realities - morbid, silent morticians gathering around situations; The Curtain, at once protective and deceiving, capitalized as though it is a proper name; and Molly and Bruce, a couple who sometimes hang out with our narrator and move in and out of the collection, like little children, touching everything and always in motion. 

For me, when reading stories such as these, I always wonder what the writer was like growing up. Did she stay up late and watch too many scary movies as a little girl? Did she spend a lot of time lost in her own head, troubling out amazing and outrageous universes for her toys when she played with them? Did she jot down her dreams upon waking in the hopes of deciphering their codes? Did she work long, lonely hours on a graveyard shift somewhere where her mind could wander and build these bizarre worlds for her characters to populate? Would I know her just by looking at her? 

Whatever the influence...Parko's surreal prose, intense imagery, and grim perspectives make this a collection worth consuming. 

Review: Mad Hope

Read 10/1/12 - 10/6/12
3 Stars - Recommended to fans of short stories that take a look inward and aren't always obvious
Pgs: 223
Publisher: Coach House

One of the things I like most about reading short story collections is the hunt for the connections. Sometimes, the authors make it extremely easy and connect the dots from story to story for you - every story might contain the same narrator (Jesus' Son); every story may take place in the same town (Volt); every story is a fantastical fable (A Hollow Cube...). Other times, the stories put on the appearance of being completely and confusingly separate of each other while hiding their ties just below the surface.

MAD HOPE is very much the latter. Grounded in familiar territory, Heather Birrell has created this incredibly tricky collection of stories that will either satiate or exhaust its audience. If you're a casual reader who appreciates a well told story, you'll find comfort and satisfaction in what she's written. If you're the type who wants to understand how these stories interact with each other - and they do interact with each other - you've got to read a little deeper to discover the connections that will allow you to put the book to rest.

Let's start with the cover. I admit that I love the green of the frogs against the brilliantly burning red background. It's really quite striking. And so the first question I ask myself is... why frogs? Where will they make an appearance in the stories? Will it be an obvious 'gimme' or is Heather going to hide this answer like an Easter egg? As if in response to the question, upon turning back the front cover, you immediately notice that the endpapers are designed to look like millions of little tadpoles swimming across the page. A few pages in and there is this oddly phrased quote about a frog by Anonymous. And in just a few more pages, you see that her stories are grouped together into chapters which are identified by frogs. (One frog - chapter one. Two frogs - chapter two.) And then, of course, there is the story that is titled Frog. That was pretty easy, right?

But it wasn't enough for me. I continued to wonder if there was a deeper significance to her use of the slimy green suckers. Frogs, as you know, appear all throughout our written history - in folklore and fairytales, most commonly. They are gangling and ungraceful and though they appear to be simple-minded, they are assumed to have a trick up their sleeve. They are usually not what they appear. A quick peek on Wiki reminds me of the old Looney Tunes cartoon where the man finds the singing, dancing frog and attempts to make a buck off of him by showing him around town. But the frog acts like a frog in front of the audience, donning his top hat and doing the high-kick only when he and the man are left alone. Another example would be the classic fairytale  prince who was turned into a frog and tricked the princess into kissing him, thus breaking the spell and regaining his handsome, arrogant human form.

But, alas, trickster frogs have no place within Birrell's collection. Heather's tricks are slightly less obvious than that. Her frogs, or the connections between stories that otherwise do not appear to be connected, are not so quickly identified.

As you read through the collection, you'll begin to notice that many of her stories revolve around children - siblings witness a murder, a mother-to-be miscarries, another mother-to-be decides to abort, a pregnant woman prepares for the birth of her baby. This similarity, the familiarity of the characters, their struggles and situations, gives birth to an unspoken undercurrent of human resilience and our ability, or built-in survival mechanism, to cope with and overcome just about anything.

This same sense of inevitability appears again in a set of stories, smack in the center of the collection, that are told from the points of view of a brother and sister - who each must deal with and share the news of their father's passing. Again, Heather uses her characters to subtly backlight the irresistible and difficult decisions we make in order to get back to life and move on. Because we have to move on. Because we must retain our mad hope.

I guess the moral of this review is that there are always connections to be found within short story collections, if you only take the time to look. However, you might also be chasing ghosts and grasping at straws that aren't even there, and forcing connections where there were never meant to be any, but then again, isn't that the fun of reading fiction? To take away from it what you will. Make it your own.

Kathe Koja's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Books & Booze is a new mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC that will post every Friday in October. The participating authors were challenged 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. 

Drink yourself UNDER THE POPPY

Being as Under the Poppy is a louche and intoxicating brothel, it follows that liquor must be involved: intoxicants just naturally go together that way. For several of the immersive performance events we created, based on the novel, refreshments were indeed served - first, wine and chocolate, and later a more elaborate outlay of period-appropriate food (including lavender cookies with rosewater frosting) and drink (Champagne for a toast, and a pretty ferocious rum punch. Those Victorians knew how to party).

For the final event, one which will pull out all the stops, let all the puppets out to play, and leave all sorts of stains on the knickers of your heart, I knew that we would need something special for the Poppy patrons.

So of course I turned to my readers, and invited them to submit their concoctions to a create-a-drink contest for the Poppy.

And of course they came through.

Not only were the drinks delicious-sounding, they had some amazing names, among them "The Pearl Necklace", "Puppet's Folly", "Courage & Passion", and (staff favorite) "The Blow Job". But there were two cocktails between which I simply could not choose, so they were both winners: the "Vera," named after one of the Poppy's more enterprising floozies, and the romantically decadent "A Kiss, From Ashen Lips". Below are the recipes for those of you over drinking age.  If you have a top hat or a pair of frilly knickers, now is the time to put them on.

   

Herewith, the winning cocktails:

James Taylor Jr.'s "VERA"

1/2 tbsp vodka

 1/2 oz strawberry liqueur

 1/3 oz toffee liqueur

 1/2 oz milk

 Blend the ingredients in a cocktail class with ice. Garnish with a white clover flower.

* * * * *

Charles Henke's "A Kiss, From Ashen Lips"

A seductive confection of poppy seed syrup with no sense of moral integrity.

1.5 oz rum

 1 oz cranberry juice

 1 oz poppy seed syrup*

 Garnish with fresh blueberries

*1/2 cup orange juice

 1/4 cup water

 2 tablespoons sugar

 1 tablespoon honey

 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

 1 tablespoon poppy seeds

 Heat the orange juice, water, sugar and honey in a saucepan. Bring to a boil for 1 minute and remove from heat. Let the syrup cool. Add the poppy seeds.

* * * * *

  Update from the brothel: At an exclusive patrons' event in late September, these drinks were in fact prepared, premiered, and enjoyed! To wit: http://underthepoppy.com/archives/the-alchemy-of-desire-part-one/

This is Kathe Koja, writer and Detroit native.  She has written 15 books including THE CIPHER, SKIN, BUDDHA BOY, TALK, HEADLONG, UNDER THE POPPY - which I recently reviewed and loved! - and its sequel, THE MERCURY WALTZ (forthcoming in 2013). UNDER THE POPPY has been adapted for immersive performance. 

Where Writers Write: Sean Lovelace

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where some of TNBBC's favorite authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen.

This is Sean Lovelace. 

Sean lives in Indiana, where he eats nachos and plays disc golf and teaches creative writing at Ball State University. He recently dropped Fog Gorgeous Stag (Publishing Genius Press) and a flash fiction collection with other authors, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves (Rose Metal Press), on the world. 

He writes for HTML Giant. He blogs at seanlovelace.com. He likes to run, far. 

Where Sean Lovelace Writes

I don’t eat any meat that I didn’t personally scout, stalk, kill, butcher, and cook. So? Well, this means I spend a lot of times in trees, with a bow and a book and an iPhone (oh, and with doe urine and flashlight and grunt tube and skinning knife and snort wheeze and…oh, never mind. This isn’t a hunting blog. Or is it?) Sometimes deer meander along, but not often. That’s hunting. Mostly you wait in the cold, maybe twenty or thirty feet up in the air, silently. A few branches stir, a cumulus billows by, but, for a long while, nothing much happens. So I read books. And I write.

(Photo of me reading last year. This is PANK.
Do you read PANK? You probably should. )

Reading and writing from high in a tree has many advantages. First, it’s pretty difficult to disrupt my writing time. I’m not going to suddenly go make a pot of coffee or get a beer from the refrigerator. I’m not going to jump online to see what new tragedy/celebrity is on CNN or to peruse helicopter crash videos on YouTube (oddly mesmerizing) or surf eBay for nacho bowls (I prefer wide, green ceramic bowls for nachos) or, you know, other internet things (OK, porn). I’m not answering any phone calls (I sometimes do reply to texts, since this activity is mostly silent). I’m not watching any TV. I’m not going to discuss with my wife the awful sound the car is making (it’s near the left rear wheel and resembles a tumbling bison). I’m not going to go find my lost four year old (she’ll be in the dog’s cage, most likely, playing with an assortment of toy rabbits). In a word, I’m not going to be disturbed (unless a deer shows up, and as I’ve said—that’s a rarity). So I actually have time and space to write.

(OK, sometimes deer pass below. This is a small buck.
Yes, I did shoot him, but relax—I only shot him with my  camera.
Then I let him walk right by.)

And what a space! See this photo? This is a hollow alongside a ridge of oak trees, a series of dense thickets, and a flowing creek. Here we have what deer admire: food, water, thick cover. And what I admire: nature. The rich smell of soil and leaves. The creek gurgling by in a lovely fashion. The air is clean, the sun a bright coin in the sky. I feel, right. I’m a distance runner and when I’m running I think, “Humans have run for eons.” As a hunter, I think, “Humans have hunted for eons.” I feel my ancestry in my bones. But I digress. Or maybe I do not digress. Maybe feeling right clears the mind for writing? Who knows. 

Another thing about writing in the woods is the way it affects my actual creative thinking. I’ve noticed nature appearing more often in my prose and poetry, especially the juxtaposition of nature and the modern world (anti-nature). This can be a powerful concept, I feel--as humans, we are, and are not, animals. We are in nature and simultaneously stand removed from its essence. While hunting, I will see red foxes and opossums and squirrels and crows and owls and all other types of animals. I get to observe them. I’ve listened to the trees howl and the leaves rustle (are they waving at me? Maybe.) I’ve seen a hawk snatch a squirrel. A three-legged coyote loping along. One time a raccoon climbed into my tree! I’ve seen two bucks fight. I’ve sat for hours in the brilliant whisper of a snowfall. I think there’s something in all of this that informs my art, especially juxtaposition, as I’ve noted. Some mornings I come in from the woods and walk into the kitchen and then drive into the city to teach class. I pass clanking cars and garish billboards and listen to sports radio (the most banal medium in the world—I am rather addicted to it) and later I stand with a coffee mug in front of my bright university classroom and think, “Hours ago I was deep in inky woods.” I mean it’s absurd, but amazing. If that makes any sense.

Want to see something cool? Sometimes I hunt from a ground blind. This really makes for easy reading and writing, since I can more easily move my hands. It also makes for startling images, an almost unexpected abstract art. See how strange and wonderful it can be?

Check back next week to see where Barbara Richardson writes.

So this happened today....

Checking the mail this afternoon, I found an advance copy of Mark A. Rayner's THE FRIDGULARITY. Flipping through it, I noticed a section in the back that features information on Mark's other books. And squealed with delight when I saw that I had been blurbed! What a way to make a girl's day!

If you haven't checked out his stuff yet and you dig fabulist satire, I highly recommend Marvellous Hairy.

Audioreview: The Leftovers

Listened 9/24/12 - 9/29/12
2 Stars - Recommended Lightly to readers who are already familiar with (and know they enjoy) Tom Perrotta's stuff
Audio Download (8 CD's; approx. 10 hrs)
Publisher: St. Martin's / Macmillian

I should have known better. I really should have known. One of TNBBC's first group reads was Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher. And against all my better judgement, I read it along with the group and ended up disliking it immensely. It was a little too preachy for my taste, for starters. The title was really quite misleading - I was expecting to read a book about a teacher who was getting grief over their choice of sex-ed curriculum, which is bad enough, but instead I got a book that talked about Soccer and dating and made me want to claw my face off - and the writing was a little too formulaic.

Funny, and not surprising, that I disliked The Leftovers for very similar reasons. Perrotta is nothing if not consistent. The title, and blurb, would have you thinking that this is a book about a rapture-like event - what Tom's characters refer to as the "Sudden Departure" - and the lives of those who are left behind. And you'd be somewhat right. But my issue with the novel lies more in what I was expecting those lives to look like, I suppose. Instead of the "Sudden Departure" kicking off a series of plagues and world wars and bringing the antichrist to light (I blame The Left Behind series for this!), we find ourselves milling around the sleepy little town of Mapleton, where some people have decided to quit what's left of their families and join the silent "Guilty Remnant" group, and others quit bathing and travel around as Barefoot People, and others still follow a self-professed prophet named Holy Wayne. The rest, well, they get back to life as usual. And what boring, vanilla lives they are.

So nothing more gets said about where these people just vanished away to. Sure, those who are left behind mourn the missing, and pine for them, and talk about them from time to time, but the event itself seems to fade away and becomes less than the sound of static in the background. And it was really kind of frustrating for me... listening to the audio on my drive back and forth to work, I kept pleading with the discs to bring the event back and get off of the boring ole lives of Mayor Kevin and his estranged wife Laurie, who became a  member of the Guilty Remnant. I couldn't find it in myself to care about Kevin's teenage daughter Jill, who shaved her head and starting hanging with a rougher crowd, or his son who was driving around the country escorting Holy Wayne's pregnant girlfriend to a safe-house, or Kevin's own horribly uncomfortable attempts at dating Nora, a woman who lost her entire family on that fateful day. I was, however, DYING to know what the hell happened on October 14th when tons of people just up and disappeared.

Oh. My. God. Please. Make. Something. Happen. Before. I. Scream. This is what I found myself thinking over and over and over as I continued to place each disc into the cd player of my car. Please. Please. Please. And then suddenly, I was on the last disc, and the story just fucking ended. No resolution to anything. Everything just left hanging out there, blowing around in the breeze. If I had been reading the print copy, I would have thought for sure that the publisher forgot to include the final pages. And of course,  I went on mini tweet rage about it:

THE LEFTOVERS should come with a Reader Warning.

WARNING: THIS BOOK CONTAINS LOOSE ENDS. SO MANY, IN FACT, THAT YOU'LL WANT TO PUNCH IT IN ITS FACE.

or this: WARNING: THIS BOOK USES 'THE SUDDEN DEPARTURE' AS A PLOT DEVICE BUT IS REALLY JUST ABOUT A STUPID GROUP OF MAPLETONS.

The writing still feels as though it came out of a can, too. It's like "How to Write a Book 101". There wasn't much passion or feeling in his sentences. It felt clinical, sterile, and again, quite vanilla. Not that there's anything wrong with clinical, sterile, vanilla things - if you're in a doctor's office, say, or eating at a restaurant, you know? But I don't want my literature to be clinical and sterile. To feel as though it was written by a non-human, incredibly robotic, emotionless thing.

Though I suppose I should thank Tom for sparing me the preachy, christian interludes. I really appreciated that!

Indie Spotlight: Greying Ghost

How does one begin a love affair with a small press? I don't know about you, but for me, it all began with Twitter...

I'd been following Greying Ghost on Twitter for quite awhile, but it was only a few months ago that I actually checked out their Tumblr and etsy store. And that was all it took to kickstart my intense obsession with this Massachusetts chapbook publisher!

Founded in 2007, Greying Ghost is an all-hands-on-deck, do-it-yourself  publisher who creates all of their books in-house - from printing to binding to shipping. Each book is released as a hand numbered limited edition (usually of 75 or 100) and  feature covers that are hand stamped or pressed with some of the coolest and most unique designs I have ever seen. The end papers, some of which are vintage news articles and sheets of music, are TO DIE FOR. This publisher has quite the eye for art. And that's one of the things that really hooked me - their books are works of art. Sure, you'll want to read them, but mostly, you'll be lusting after them as physical objects.

When I initially checked them out online, I unabashedly requested a few titles (they have 57 at the moment) for review. Their chapbooks run anywhere from page counts in the mid-teens to high twenties. And they read like swift sucker punches to the gut and violent slaps in the face, which is to say, I had severe physical reactions to their content.

Of the chaps they sent me - Treesisters, Going Attractions, Pistachio & Iris, and Profil Perdue - Treesisters was my favorite story. Joseph Riippi writes the most amazing prose... "When they find you, tell your reasons with your fingers." Pistachio & Iris is the most lovely looking with its dark grey cover and  circular punchout, the electric blue end papers... if their books don't make you feel SOMETHING, you must be dead.

Greying Ghost goes beyond the chapbook, though. Recycling as much as they can, they create and sell gift tags, greeting cards, and other gorgeous items in their etsy store, by using leftover and unused paper from their books. I dare you not to fall in love with this publisher!!

Andrez Bergen's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Books & Booze is a new mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC that will post every Friday in October. The participating authors were challenged 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. 

Andrez Bergen, a TNBBC super-fan, was all over it! Here's his boozey take on Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat and One Hundred Years of Vicissitude: 

I’LL DRINK TO THAT!

In my first book Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, it was “any drink goes” - basically, our hero Floyd Maquina would guzzle anything with a smidgeon of alcoholic content.

He rises high at times, when straight Johnnie Walker whisky is in the offering, along with a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne. Otherwise Floyd scrapes the barrel with synthetic brandy (this is an apocalyptic, dystopic future world we’re talking up) and rot-gut liquor of various kinds.

Floyd does, however, draw the line at Siamese vodka.

“I’d owned two bottles of Siamese vodka in my life, drunkenly bought one night from the back room of a seedy bar I used to regular,” Floyd confesses. “The first bottle left me without a voice for a week, like the Devil himself pissed down my throat. The other has gathered dust for years - even at my drunkest I knew better than to touch the stuff.”

James Bond also can’t abide by Siamese vodka. If you watch the 1967 movie You Only Live Twice, you’ll see Sean Connery’s horrified reaction to the drink.

My second novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, coming out in October, has a more even-keel, shall we say sophisticated approach to the drinking thing. While Japanese moonshine - called katsutori- does enter the picture, mostly we’re blessed with quality saké. And the two people towing the story, Wolram and Kohana, have expensive palates.

At one point, in a swinging ’60s Tokyo bar, Kohana orders for Wolram a Vesper - the classic 007 martini. “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of shōchū, half a measure of Kina Lillet,” she tells the bartender. “Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?” It’s Ian Fleming’s original recipe to a tee, except that vodka is replaced with Japanese shōchū. Of course.

But the truly original drink in One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is the one that Kohana, our former geisha, orders for herself. While I have no idea what’s in the thing, I do dig the name. The passage reads thus:

Kohana held up her drink. It had a blood-coloured cocktail in it, with shards of ice arranged like sharp teeth around the top.

“It’s a house speciality: The Piranha.”

“Ahh, of course. Well, bon appétit!”

“Kanpai.”

We clicked glasses.

Andrez made his TNBBC debut back in January for our Indie Spotlight series, where he shared how his book Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat came to be. He's also shared his writing space with us for our Where Writers Write series. He is Senior Writer and Editor at Impact Magazine (UK) and Writer and Editor at Forces of Geek. His new novel, 100 Years of Vicissitude is coming soon.

Audiobook Review: Jesus's Son

Listened 9/30/12 - 10/2/12
5 Stars - The Next Best (Audio)Book
Audio CD (3 discs; approx 3 hrs)
Publisher: Picador / Macmillian Audio

WOW. Oh wow. I want Denis Johnson to write my life story and I want Will Patton to narrate it.

Wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow. Oh my god, I think I've lost my words.

Where Writers Write: Letitia Moffitt

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where some of TNBBC's favorite authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen.

This is Letitia L. Moffitt. She was born and raised in Hawaii. She received a doctoral degree in English/Creative Writing from Binghamton University, and she taught creative writing at Eastern Illinois University for six years. Her novel-in-stories, Sidewalk Dancing, has been accepted for publication by Atticus Books and will appear in print in summer 2013. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry is forthcoming and has been published in literary journals including PANK, HTMLGiant, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, The MacGuffin, Aux Arc Review, Dos Passos Review,and many others.

Where Letitia Moffitt Writes

I’ve never understood the need to go far away to write. Writers’ retreats seem like literary boondoggles to me, and I can’t fathom the desire to pay a lot of money for a room in the desert, a cabin in the mountains, a cottage on the beach, for a week, a month, a year, all ostensibly to work on your novel-in-theory. I get the basic idea of these retreats, in the way they allow time and space for writers to do what is often denied us in our everyday existence.  Most writers don’t get paid to write, and most aren’t independently wealthy, so we all have other things to do that claw up the day and leave us mere shreds of time to focus on our real work.  Yet I’m suspicious of anything that pairs writing with an outlay of money.  The only thing that makes you a writer is writing; everything else is noise.

In one of my previous writing groups, there was a woman who adored the noise.  She loved talking about writing, she bought books on writing, she hosted our writing group more often than anyone else, she even convinced me to sign up for my one and only writer’s retreat.  We and the other writers would spend one week in a small town in the Languedoc region of France; we would meet in the morning in a workshop led by a well regarded if lesser known South African novelist (there are hierarchies in writers’ retreats, and we weren’t paying top dollar for this one) and then have the rest of the day free to work. 

I went there fully expecting not to do any writing, and in that way at least I wasn’t disappointed.  I went because I wanted to see France.  If I wanted to hang out with wannabe writers, I’d have stayed back in New York.  You can’t get away from them there, and apparently I wasn’t to get away from them in France either.  True to the nature of retreats, this one was so isolated that it would have taken me hours on multiple busses and trains to see any of the interesting things I’d excitedly marked in my guidebooks.  What’s more, I’d have needed to leave first thing in the morning to catch the one bus out of town, and I couldn’t do that; I had to meet with a bunch of writers to talk about all the writing we weren’t doing. 

The retreat town itself was a bit of a sham, too; it had been a nondescript village that only recently transformed itself into a destination for book lovers in order to rake in some tourist dollars.  The little shops along the cobblestone alleyways were calculatedly adorable, the little inn insistently quaint.  There was a very old cathedral—there’s always a very old cathedral—but its architecture wasn’t especially notable, and instead of frescos or marble statuary, the stations of the cross were depicted with cheap plastic figurines, the kind you might see on the lawn of a particularly devout suburban neighbor back in the States around Christmastime.  Moreover, the retreat took place in August.  If I learned anything from that week, it’s that I will never, ever, not for one minute even think about going to Europe in August.  The heat was brutal.  The half-mile walk from the farmhouse where some of the writers were staying to the inn in town where the morning sessions took place would have been refreshing and pleasant in October or May but instead felt like a death march, the stream beside us transformed into the River Styx, the locals with their wary but not necessarily hostile Gallic stares morphing into demons with pitchforks.  It was too hot even for cheese, much less writing.  Why go to Franceif you can’t enjoy the cheese?

No, I don’t go away to write, not ever.  Where I write, always, is at a desk in my home office, and I intersperse writing with doing laundry, going running, grading papers, buying groceries, cooking dinner, and obsessively checking my email for acceptances or rejections.  It’s just another part of my life, in other words, and that’s just how I want it.

Check back next week to see where Sean Lovelace gets his writing done.

Book Review: Familiar

Read 9/24/12 - 9/29/12
4.5 Stars - Highly Recommended to fans of never-knowing-where-the-story-is-going who enjoy that through-the-looking-glass feeling
Pgs: 208
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Release Date: Today!!

What good is a second chance if you aren't going to take advantage of it?

In J. Robert Lennon's Familiar, Elisa finds herself driving home from her youngest son's grave when everything suddenly changes - her car is different, her clothes are different, her body is different. Pulling into the driveway, her husband comes out to greet her and even he appears different. Yet everything seems so... familiar.

She soon discovers that in this reality, she and her husband are struggling to stay together while both of her sons are alive, though estranged from them. Unsure whether she's slipped into a parallel universe or losing her mind, Elisa tries to acclimate herself to this new life as best as she can while attempting to make it as similar to her old life as possible.

Lennon's got a knack for fucking with my mind. I'm going to just put that right out there. When I had listened to Castle on audio, I tried like hell to guess where the story was going to end up. And every time I thought I had it nailed down, he threw another curve ball and left me standing in the dark, scratching my head. Things were no different with Familiar. As Lennon allowed Elisa to fall further and further into his rabbit-hole, I realized that I was less and less certain of what was taking place. Was Elisa really living in some mirror-version of her old life? If I found myself leaning that way, Lennon would do something that made me ask if she was suffering a nervous breakdown instead and losing touch with reality. Would she ever find her way back to the life she left behind, and did she even want to? As Elisa memories from the old life started to merge and blend with those of the new, and she began questioning her sanity... I decided to simply let the story take me where it wanted.

It's a book that means to get inside your head and nestle down in there, nice and cozy-like. The characters are deliciously flawed, the situations they put themselves in are sometimes maddeningly robotic, and with each turn of the page, you're forced to ask yourself "what if this were happening to me"....

Though Lennon gives good suspense, he continues to leave me aching for more with his endings. With Castle, I found it sort of frustrating. Now, with Familiar, I think I'm starting to see what he's up to. Why put a nice little bow on things when you can make the reader do a little post-read homework, right? In this way, the story doesn't end with the final sentence of the book. It continues to breathe and expand as you chew on it...

Book Giveaway: How To Get Into The Twin Palms

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.    

I'm excited to be partnering with Two Dollar Radio 

to bring you next month's Author/Reader Discussion book!

We will be reading and discussing

How to Get into the Twin Palms with Karolina Waclawiak

In order to stimulate discussion

Two Dollar Radio has agreed to give away 10 copies

to US residents only

Here is the Goodreads description: 

It was a strange choice to decide to pass as a Russian. But it was a question of proximity and level of allure. Russians were everywhere in Los Angeles, especially in my neighborhood, and held a certain sense of mystery. I had long attempted to inhabit my Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it. I would never tell my mother. She only thought of them as crooks and beneath us. They felt the same about us, we were beneath them. It had always been a question of who was under whom.
Anya is a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, struggling between retaining her parents’ Polish culture and the American-ness she was submerged in growing up. She decides to blaze a new path, and attempt to assimilate within her adopted community, epitomized by the exclusive club the Twin Palms. It is Anya’s goal to gain entrance to this club.
How To Get Into the Twin Palms is hilarious and deeply moving, providing a humorous twist on the typical immigrant tale of belonging.

This giveaway will run through October 8th. 

Winners will be notified here and via email on October 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment stating why you would like to win a copy.

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from November 15th through the end of the month. Karolina Waclawiak has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for her. 

 *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!!!