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Paris is a city of passion. Passion for art. Passion for love. Passion for trouble. Often all three are wound together, and never tighter than in the Belle Epoque. It’s passion that leads Lucien Lessard to pursue painting instead of following in the family business of breadmaking, and it’s passion in the guise of a mysterious man and his femme fatale associate that seems to be killing painters left and right. Lucien might be next to fall, but thankfully he’s got his studio-mate and friend Henri Toulouse-Lautrec working to help him—whether he likes it or not. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Book of Madness and Cures,” a debut novel from Regina O’Melveny, begins in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century. Gabriella Mondini is a physician, trained by her father and influenced by her maid who has a talent for the application of herbs. She and her father were jointly compiling a book of diseases and their cures until her father left Venice on a long journey to visit and study medicine elsewhere in Europe. A decade after his departure and spurred by increasingly bizarre letters, Gabriella sets out to find him along with her maid, Olmina, and maid’s husband, Lorenzo. Read the rest of this entry »

By Naomi Huffman

Anyone who attended the Beautiful, Words event at Beauty Bar on March 2nd during the AWP Conference could attest to the crowd’s rowdiness. To be fair, by that time, much of the audience had enjoyed their fair share of booze-laden late-night readings and had listened in on hours of panel discussions with authors, editors, publishers and other industry experts. Perhaps attendees were too hung over or tired to care. Even from where I stood at the front of the crowd, just fifteen feet from the readers, it was difficult to hear.

Maybe it was the sparkling introduction given before he read, maybe it was that he just looked worth listening to, in his jacket and black fedora, or maybe it was that before he read, he called to the people at the back of the room: “Jesus, would you just shut up?” but when Jonathan Evison took his place behind the microphone, most everyone stopped talking.

Evison is currently touring to promote the January paperback release of “West of Here,” his widely celebrated novel that entwines the past and present of a fictional town called Port Bonita, located on the coast of Washington. Evison is the executive editor at “The Nervous Breakdown“ and blogs at “Three Guys, One Book.” I had the chance to share a conversation via email with Evison about ”West of Here” and the challenges of structuring a story of such a large scope. Read the rest of this entry »

Cory Doctorow is very worried about the future. So is Jimmy Yensid. Doctorow is worried about the ways in which copyright laws are not only changing our personal freedoms as consumers and creators, but also our political ethics and our technological development. Jimmy is worried because his father re-engineered him as an immortal post-human biologically paused at the cusp of puberty, and if he can’t find a way to reverse the process he’ll never be able to grow up and have sex.

In “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” a new novella from PM Press’ Outspoken Authors series, Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction come together in a thought-provoking package. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve got to love the concept: reimagine Chicago historical figures, prominent contemporary personalities and even inanimate icons speaking their mind on subjects germane—or not.

The result: Michael Czyzniejewski’s “Chicago Stories,” forty fictional monologues riffing on the common culture of the Windy City’s shared history, projected forward into a possible future. Not quite historical fiction—more like historical jazz.

With each monologue accompanied by free-form sketches by Rob Funderburk, it is easy to picture the pieces staged as a series of one-person, one-act plays. Individually, the stories are often audacious, even poetically musical; taken together they are simply great fun, stirring up the reader’s imagination. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In post-Classical literature, there is perhaps no better demonstration than the legend of King Arthur of the idea that it is not the destination but the journey that is most important. For, in almost any version of the tale, the end is the same: “Here lies Arthur, the once and future King.”

The appeal of Arthur has endured for three-fourths of the Christian era, and we can speculate on some reasons why. First there is the mystery of this figure’s historical origin, assuming he actually existed. There have been several candidates proposed, mostly British or Welsh, of a remarkable king who united vast portions of Britain after the Romans. He may have dated back as early as the fifth century. A ninth-century writer spoke glowingly of one contemporary ruler but added the reservation that he “was no Arthur,” so we may assume he was well-known then. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Finally! We lady folk get to see men without any clothes on, metaphorically. Naked and exposed, with all their weaknesses, desires, fears and insecurities finally out in the open. Reading “Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience,” a compilation of short stories by women about men and their sexuality, you realize that men are just as complex and screwed up as us, but even more so because they try so hard to hide it. With a foreword by Steve Almond and edited by Stacy Bierlein, Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza and Kat Meads, this juicy volume is an eye-opener. As Mazza notes in her introductory essay, “Literature should allow us to imagine people who are unlike ourselves—to slip into their lives, their minds, their perspectives, not for the sake of parodying alleged deficiencies, but to discover both our innate similarities and our enigmatic differences, and thereby appreciate them more.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Hayat Shah is a young boy when his mother’s best friend Mina arrives in Milwaukee with her four-year-old son Imran. Mina is fleeing her failed marriage and repressive family life in Pakistan, and it’s an event that changes Hayat’s life, and his faith, forever. Mina is beautiful, spiritual, full of life—and broken by her past, “ground to dust” by her faith, and ashamed of the divorce that left her son without a father. Still, she is every bit of the larger-than-life person Hayat’s mother described in stories of their shared girlhood. And when Hayat meets her, he is transfixed and earnestly attaches himself to Mina.

Likewise, Mina takes a special interest in Hayat, who has been raised between parents bound by hostility, resentment and a refusal to divorce because of their Muslim faith. Hayat’s father Naveed is a brilliant neurologist, seasoned in the ways of the world and, as is quickly made apparent, other women. Hayat’s mother Muneer abandoned a degree in psychology to marry her husband, and seems to have no lack of Freudian wisdom to share with her son about how to not end up like his father. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Leela’s Book” by Alice Albinia, was inspired by the British author’s three-year stint in Delhi and the “Mahabharata,” an ancient Sanskrit epic ten times longer than the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” combined. That tale of two warring families is written by Vyasa, but dictated by Ganesh. Albinia’s modern-day re-imagining (although a fraction of the size) tracks some of the characters and themes of the “Mahabharata.” Vyasa is the head of one family, the widower of Leela’s sister, Meera. Even Ganesh makes an appearance, taking human form to pull the strings of his puppets. “It happens to gods at strategic moments in history,” he says. “Krishna did it; Jesus tried it; and I, too, took my turn. In the beginning, up on Kailash, I debated with myself only briefly about the type of avatar I should choose. A holy man? A warrior? A merchant? No. I need to be able to influence events, to get my errant characters back on track, to wrest control from Vyasa. And how to do that? Through my pen.”

These male characters are conniving, somewhat rapscallion characters in “Leela’s Book,” but it’s the women whose humanity provides the power. Read the rest of this entry »

By Francesca Thompson

Wednesday, February 29

Writers in general tend to be solitary beings, which is why a gathering of almost ten thousand writers at this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual Conference in Chicago is slightly (okay, very) overwhelming for me.

Ten-thousand is a lot of any kind of people, but ten-thousand writers feels manic. There’s something electric about the way people are gathered alone or in small groups on the stairs, constantly scribbling in little black notebooks or bright yellow legal pads. There are also a lot of good-looking and well-dressed people around, which invigorates and intimidates me at the same time. There are so many similarly wired brains squashed together in a relatively small space.

This is my first time at AWP. When I first looked at the schedule I thought I must be reading it wrong just because of the sheer number of panels and events. There are up to ten panels scheduled during each of the six one-hour fifteen-minute blocks in the day. And in each block of time there are at least three or four panels I’m interested in going to. Making decisions proves difficult. Read the rest of this entry »