This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply.
1blackdogbooks
Hello again 75'ers!!!
This is my 11th year in the 75 thread - and we've covered a lot of ground over the years. I'm nowhere near as active these days in the thread, but you guys are on speed most days - who could keep up. I'm glad to see that the group has kept up my tradition of the October Halloween read. Maybe this year I'll come back and participate there.
For those who don't know me, welcome to the thread. I'm terribly behind on reviews from last year - I still owe for:
The Poems of Dylan Thomas by Dylan Thomas
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
So far, in the new year:
1. Faithful Place by Tana French
2. D is for Deadbeat by Sue Grafton
3. E is for Evidence by Sue Grafton
4. F is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton
5. G is for Gumshoe by Sue Grafton
6. H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton
7. I is for Innocent by Sue Grafton
8. J is for Judgment by Sue Grafton
9. L is for Lawless by Sue Grafton
10. M is for Malice by Sue Grafton
11. New Mexico’s Troubled Years by Calvin Horn
In addition to the reading, I am always busy writing. I just received word that my fourth story has been picked up for publication in a small literary journal out of Tampa called Torrid Literature. It should be available in February sometime on the journal's website http://www.tlpublishing.org/
or on Amazon. I've finished one novel, have almost finished a second, and am underway on a third.
I won't be on here as often as most of you, but I'm happy when you all pop in to check on me.
3blackdogbooks
Thanks, Doc!
4thornton37814
Glad to see you finally made it here. Happy 2018 reading!
5blackdogbooks
Thanks, Lori! Glad to see you made it over here, too.
6blackdogbooks
I need to update my list. I’m up through Q in the Grafton. And I’ve finished another NM history book - Memoirs: A New Mexico Item.
Also, I’ve had two more stories accepted for publication. One will go to West Trade Review and another to The MacGuffin. They should be available later in th3 year.
Also, I’ve had two more stories accepted for publication. One will go to West Trade Review and another to The MacGuffin. They should be available later in th3 year.
7blackdogbooks
Still chugging along on the Grafton - finished T this week. And I finished Great Dream of Heaven by Sam Shepard - which I can't recommend highly enough. If I had more writing time, I'd get a review up - but suffice it to say that he should be compared with Carver and Denis Johnson and William Maxwell. His death recently was a great loss.
ALSO - an update on my own writing
The home page for Torrid Literature, where one of my stories has been accepted, just advertised the issue in which my story, Mile Marker 49, will appear; Issue XXI, and it looks like they are shooting for a pub date in April, which is essentially now. So, stay tuned. As soon as it's available, I'll let you guys know if your interested. Here's the website: http://www.tlpublishing.org/home.html
ALSO - an update on my own writing
The home page for Torrid Literature, where one of my stories has been accepted, just advertised the issue in which my story, Mile Marker 49, will appear; Issue XXI, and it looks like they are shooting for a pub date in April, which is essentially now. So, stay tuned. As soon as it's available, I'll let you guys know if your interested. Here's the website: http://www.tlpublishing.org/home.html
8blackdogbooks
Book #24 Skulls of Istria by Rick Harsch
My Review on the book's home page:
Skulls of Istria churns in a fever pitch, soaked in liquor and crusted in dusty grit kicked up by the Slovene burja swirling through the pages. Rick Harsch, himself an American ex-pat residing in the regions highlighted in the book, has created a jolting contemplation on history and culture and violence. Sometimes it is bloody, genocidal violence but, more often in this frenzied, confessional tirade, the self-immolating variety.
As the book opens, we find an unidentified American, on the lam for sins not yet revealed, plying a local bar sot with endless buckets of local swill as he decompensates through his own checkered history. His story is accompanied by a burja – a feral wind roiling through the region that matches our man’s own discord. Early in his account, the mysterious narrator tells the story of Marjan, whose Greek fishing cap was lifted from his head by a similar burja to be blown away to a faraway inland landing spot. The hat’s improbable journey is an omen for the Odyssian voyage about to be described.
Like all epic journeys, Skulls of Istria is dissonant and abrasive at the outset, defying understanding; like a discordant jazz piece. But there are secret melodies to which the nattering storyteller returns, until the dissonance is synchrony.
As the harmony begins to resolve, the narrator announces a singular distaste for his home – America:
“Anyway in America the formative vary from one to one with little degree of significance. … America is the great fusion of classes by culture, the fusion of very little into nothing, a clear refutation of the more important laws of thermodynamics: there are many classes but a single caste, and money simply describes specific modalities of inertia.”
The declaration gives the reader some of the first clues about the speaker’s reliability. For, in the explanation, he sheds light on the origins of his exile, and they are self-driven.
The reader is left to wonder – and wander – with him, whether his undoing will have anything to do with a woman. Will it be Rosa? Will it be Maja? Rosa lazily fades into his life during his days in American academia. But she just as lazily fades out of it when he decamps. Maja, the schemer, blows into his life like the burja from which he is constantly on the run. Manipulating him out of his passport, she appears the likely seed of his destruction. But as he accounts for himself, he ultimately blames Kronos, his history professor mentor. Here, the narrator’s earlier disdain for American mediocrity and homogeneity begins to make sense. Kronos was unable to ever write the historical treatise which would deliver on his promise. When Kronos dies, our unidentified Ulysses finds several chapters his mentor’s writing. He takes it for his own, rewrites and completes it, and has it published. When the plagiarism is discovered, he flees. Though he isn’t able to write his own book, he still mocks and derides his mentor’s failings. All the while, he uses his mentor’s unfinished book to complete a task he isn’t capable of himself. The incongruity sets him on a journey worthy of Homer.
In the last chapters – the tale is unclear enough even to the teller that he can’t decide on the chapter’s numbering – he follows a map in search of a subject for an original work; Giordano Viezzoli a Piranian soldier from the Spanish Civil War. With the map folded into his kit, it’s uncertain whether he can actually read the map and readers are wandering (wondering) again. Is redemption the quarry rather than Viezzoli? Redemption in the spiritual since, for his sins? Or intellectual redemption? During this odyssey, he falls into a pit of skulls. And, with all his knowledge, he isn’t even able to distinguish the origin of the remains – which historical genocide produced the mass grave. All the historical violence is indistinguishable, just as his own plight’s origins are indistinguishable to him.
Within site of the saga’s end, the narrator crawls from the pit of skulls as the burja blows its last exhale. Does this mark a self-realization? An understanding? Harsch puckishly refuses to engage in that sort of ending, resolving the tale with a coin flip that always comes up heads.
This is not a book to be nibbled at, but to be swallowed whole, chewed and mashed through. The poetic word-play and sardonic humor throughout will alone keep you busy. But the real value is in the constantly shifting flavors as you masticate long after the final bite.
Bottom Line: A feverish account of one man’s odyssey through the Balkans, and through the detritus of his own life.
5 bones!!!!!
It should be noted that this is the twenty-fourth book I've read this year, and the only one so far I've reviewed. Obviously. He's an LT friend, yes, but the book deserves some attention.
My Review on the book's home page:
Skulls of Istria churns in a fever pitch, soaked in liquor and crusted in dusty grit kicked up by the Slovene burja swirling through the pages. Rick Harsch, himself an American ex-pat residing in the regions highlighted in the book, has created a jolting contemplation on history and culture and violence. Sometimes it is bloody, genocidal violence but, more often in this frenzied, confessional tirade, the self-immolating variety.
As the book opens, we find an unidentified American, on the lam for sins not yet revealed, plying a local bar sot with endless buckets of local swill as he decompensates through his own checkered history. His story is accompanied by a burja – a feral wind roiling through the region that matches our man’s own discord. Early in his account, the mysterious narrator tells the story of Marjan, whose Greek fishing cap was lifted from his head by a similar burja to be blown away to a faraway inland landing spot. The hat’s improbable journey is an omen for the Odyssian voyage about to be described.
Like all epic journeys, Skulls of Istria is dissonant and abrasive at the outset, defying understanding; like a discordant jazz piece. But there are secret melodies to which the nattering storyteller returns, until the dissonance is synchrony.
As the harmony begins to resolve, the narrator announces a singular distaste for his home – America:
“Anyway in America the formative vary from one to one with little degree of significance. … America is the great fusion of classes by culture, the fusion of very little into nothing, a clear refutation of the more important laws of thermodynamics: there are many classes but a single caste, and money simply describes specific modalities of inertia.”
The declaration gives the reader some of the first clues about the speaker’s reliability. For, in the explanation, he sheds light on the origins of his exile, and they are self-driven.
The reader is left to wonder – and wander – with him, whether his undoing will have anything to do with a woman. Will it be Rosa? Will it be Maja? Rosa lazily fades into his life during his days in American academia. But she just as lazily fades out of it when he decamps. Maja, the schemer, blows into his life like the burja from which he is constantly on the run. Manipulating him out of his passport, she appears the likely seed of his destruction. But as he accounts for himself, he ultimately blames Kronos, his history professor mentor. Here, the narrator’s earlier disdain for American mediocrity and homogeneity begins to make sense. Kronos was unable to ever write the historical treatise which would deliver on his promise. When Kronos dies, our unidentified Ulysses finds several chapters his mentor’s writing. He takes it for his own, rewrites and completes it, and has it published. When the plagiarism is discovered, he flees. Though he isn’t able to write his own book, he still mocks and derides his mentor’s failings. All the while, he uses his mentor’s unfinished book to complete a task he isn’t capable of himself. The incongruity sets him on a journey worthy of Homer.
In the last chapters – the tale is unclear enough even to the teller that he can’t decide on the chapter’s numbering – he follows a map in search of a subject for an original work; Giordano Viezzoli a Piranian soldier from the Spanish Civil War. With the map folded into his kit, it’s uncertain whether he can actually read the map and readers are wandering (wondering) again. Is redemption the quarry rather than Viezzoli? Redemption in the spiritual since, for his sins? Or intellectual redemption? During this odyssey, he falls into a pit of skulls. And, with all his knowledge, he isn’t even able to distinguish the origin of the remains – which historical genocide produced the mass grave. All the historical violence is indistinguishable, just as his own plight’s origins are indistinguishable to him.
Within site of the saga’s end, the narrator crawls from the pit of skulls as the burja blows its last exhale. Does this mark a self-realization? An understanding? Harsch puckishly refuses to engage in that sort of ending, resolving the tale with a coin flip that always comes up heads.
This is not a book to be nibbled at, but to be swallowed whole, chewed and mashed through. The poetic word-play and sardonic humor throughout will alone keep you busy. But the real value is in the constantly shifting flavors as you masticate long after the final bite.
Bottom Line: A feverish account of one man’s odyssey through the Balkans, and through the detritus of his own life.
5 bones!!!!!
It should be noted that this is the twenty-fourth book I've read this year, and the only one so far I've reviewed. Obviously. He's an LT friend, yes, but the book deserves some attention.
9blackdogbooks
One of the journals in which my work appears is available to purchase now. I got my complimentary copies for being a contributor and it's really well done. It's a university press, so the only way to purchase is to send in a check/money order with an order form from the site. Sorry. But I hope some of you are interested in supporting these smaller literary publications.
http://www.westtradereview.com/
Thanks again for the support you all offer.
http://www.westtradereview.com/
Thanks again for the support you all offer.
10blackdogbooks
That journal just established a way to order online thru Submittable. https://westtradereview.submittable.com/submit/a3d7653b-c7a4-428a-a8d6-2a84ddffb...
11blackdogbooks
In addition to the link above for the West Trade Review to purchase the most recent journal where I have a story published, I have another one:
https://www.amazon.com/Torrid-Literature-Journal-Vol-Rediscovering/dp/0692114580...
This one is on Amazon and is $9.
https://www.amazon.com/Torrid-Literature-Journal-Vol-Rediscovering/dp/0692114580...
This one is on Amazon and is $9.
12justchris
Ha! Just found you. I am really slow this year. Thanks for providing updates on your writing. Will check out recent stories. Hope your year has been going well since spring.
13blackdogbooks
Thanks, Chris. Things are good. Haven’t updated my reading but I have about 30 books I should post. Not much time from my writing exploits. A couple of new stories accepted, which I’ll put up here when they’re available.
Hope you and everyone else here has a good thanksgiving
Hope you and everyone else here has a good thanksgiving
14msf59
Happy Thanksgiving, Mac. Happy New Thread. Have you read Ron Rash? If not, check out his short fiction.
15blackdogbooks
I got a Rash, based largely on one of your previous reviews, I think. Haven’t gotten around to I yet.
16blackdogbooks
Book #42 Voices After Evelyn by Rick Harsch
My Review on the book's home page:
Twain’s quip that truth is stranger than fiction reverberates through Rick Harsch’s new novel Voices After Evelyn. It’s about possibilities – truth is not constrained to stick to possibilities. And neither is Harsch. But dip into any of his work, and you’ll realize Harsch exists in other stratospheres.
Because truth is so often stranger, the true crime genre has exploded in today’s world of podcasts, and movies, and podcasts made into movies. But, in Voices After Evelyn, Harsch engages in something subtler than scatter-gunning lurid violence and over-the-top, hard-to-believe-even-though-they’re-really-real personalities. This book is about the very possibilities that cannot constrain truth. Evelyn Hartley’s body is missing; still missing, some 65 years later. She disappeared one humid autumn night, from the Midwestern home where she was babysitting. A blood smear here, some panties there – none dispositively belonging to the enigmatically vanished girl. Rivers and swamps are plumbed, houses scoured. All that remains of her, as Harsch’s chorus floridly recounts, are possibilities.
The town is small enough to be changed by the vacuum left by Hartley’s disappearance, and the vacuum left without an explanation for the disappearance. Usually these are voids felt personally, individually. But in a sleepy heartland burg like this one, frozen in 1950’s Pyrex provinciality, the empty shell is a collective experience. And Harsch claws his way over that vast landscape through the eyes of those who felt it deepest – the addicts and criminals and drifters; the fringe, the usual suspects; a Denis Johnsonian cast, even if Harsch might not appreciate the comparison.
The set-up – again, all the real facts of Evelyn’s abduction? Murder? Escape? – is straight noir. And much of the book feels like a noir vamp, not Spillane or Hammett noir, but the noir of a Thomas Wolfe love child with Spillane or Hammett. Expansive and baroque on one page, like Wolfe; claustrophobic on the next, maybe like whatever resting place Evelyn’s body inhabits now. It’s confusing and complex, like a real abduction/murder investigation, replete with false leads, or voices here, and red herrings. Without a body, everything’s possible – that’s the truth, and it is strange. And wonderful.
Bottom Line: A noir vamp through a real mystery that engages the possibilities so vividly it’s hard to put down.
5 bones!!!!!
My Review on the book's home page:
Twain’s quip that truth is stranger than fiction reverberates through Rick Harsch’s new novel Voices After Evelyn. It’s about possibilities – truth is not constrained to stick to possibilities. And neither is Harsch. But dip into any of his work, and you’ll realize Harsch exists in other stratospheres.
Because truth is so often stranger, the true crime genre has exploded in today’s world of podcasts, and movies, and podcasts made into movies. But, in Voices After Evelyn, Harsch engages in something subtler than scatter-gunning lurid violence and over-the-top, hard-to-believe-even-though-they’re-really-real personalities. This book is about the very possibilities that cannot constrain truth. Evelyn Hartley’s body is missing; still missing, some 65 years later. She disappeared one humid autumn night, from the Midwestern home where she was babysitting. A blood smear here, some panties there – none dispositively belonging to the enigmatically vanished girl. Rivers and swamps are plumbed, houses scoured. All that remains of her, as Harsch’s chorus floridly recounts, are possibilities.
The town is small enough to be changed by the vacuum left by Hartley’s disappearance, and the vacuum left without an explanation for the disappearance. Usually these are voids felt personally, individually. But in a sleepy heartland burg like this one, frozen in 1950’s Pyrex provinciality, the empty shell is a collective experience. And Harsch claws his way over that vast landscape through the eyes of those who felt it deepest – the addicts and criminals and drifters; the fringe, the usual suspects; a Denis Johnsonian cast, even if Harsch might not appreciate the comparison.
The set-up – again, all the real facts of Evelyn’s abduction? Murder? Escape? – is straight noir. And much of the book feels like a noir vamp, not Spillane or Hammett noir, but the noir of a Thomas Wolfe love child with Spillane or Hammett. Expansive and baroque on one page, like Wolfe; claustrophobic on the next, maybe like whatever resting place Evelyn’s body inhabits now. It’s confusing and complex, like a real abduction/murder investigation, replete with false leads, or voices here, and red herrings. Without a body, everything’s possible – that’s the truth, and it is strange. And wonderful.
Bottom Line: A noir vamp through a real mystery that engages the possibilities so vividly it’s hard to put down.
5 bones!!!!!
17blackdogbooks
Finally, something available to read. Today, a new publication of one of my stories went live on the Slushpile Magazine website, here: http://www.slushpilemag.com/#/twenty-three/
Encourage you all to check it out, it’s a small website/journal. The editor founded it after/while working for Harvard Review, and they can use all the traffic you can give them.
Enjoy.
Encourage you all to check it out, it’s a small website/journal. The editor founded it after/while working for Harvard Review, and they can use all the traffic you can give them.
Enjoy.
18drneutron
Wow, that was a heckuva good story! The mag looks pretty good - gonna poke around a bit more.
