‘Monstress’: The Beautiful And The Damned

Reviewed by Alexander Chee, NPR Books, Feb. 1, 2012

FROM NPR BOOKS:

The first story in Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection begins in the seats at the Primero theater in Manila, where “they use a bedsheet for a screen.” The last opens in Lemoore, Calif., a suburban town named phonetically for love. Taken together, this is the unique territory in which Tenorio sets his stories, where Filipino traditions meet Californian modernity again and again, each encounter revealing something unexpected about both cultures.

… Tenorio, born in the Philippines and raised in California, has taken a uniquely Filipino-American perspective, polyglot and glittering with cinema dreams, and used it to make a bold collection of stories of the rejected, the helpless and the lost. “Montress” is the debut of a singular talent.

Read the full review at NPR Books

With last week’s news of James Franco’s forthcoming novel, Actor’s Anonymous, getting picked up by Amazon publishing, we thought we’d compile a list of some other brave actors and celebrities who also moonlight as authors. Continue reading "Actors Write, And So Can You!"…

Paper Conspiracies

By Susan Daitch

City Lights, 380 pp.

An underworld of intrigue thrives at the center of Susan Daitch’s new novel, Paper Conspiracies, surrounding the Georges Méliès film L’affaire Dreyfus (1899). A lonely film restorer in New York working against the clock to repair the lost Méliès film, a mysterious 20th-century Zola named Jack Kews (J’accuse).  The novel jump-cuts through space and time, revealing pockets of characters on the fringe of L’affaire and secret histories–from the 1890s, 1930s, and 1968 Paris. The world Susan Daitch spins is like uncovering a lost history first-hand through the eyes and ears of those who were there. An engrossing novel for the age of censorship and redaction. We haven’t been able to put it down.

We also recommend watching Méliès’s L’affaire Dreyfus as a reading supplement.

In light of Tea Obreht’s NBA nomination for The Tiger’s Wife, we got to thinking about the other debut novels that have received the honor. Past winners have been Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1953), Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1960),  and more recently Three Junes (2002) by Julia Glass. But there are many others that we’re fans of.

From Here to Eternity (1952)

James Jones

James Jones’s meaty debut novel follows a group of soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sensational in its time, it remains vital today; our nation once again suffering through an economic depression, and our military filled with soldiers who might otherwise be unemployed. And just in time for the repeal of “dont ask don’t tell” the author’s estate recently released the restored edition of the novel* that contains gay sex references which were too controversial to be included when it was first published. Don’t bother with the film. The book is darker and dirtier, and it is long enough to keep you company through the winter.     —Jason Porter

*Only available as an e-book.

Continue reading "National Book Award Winning Debuts"…

Fragoso plumbs the depths of the human condition with her first book, Tiger, Tiger. It has stopped people in their tracks; readers have been outraged by the portrayal of a perpetrator, a pedophile. She has shown us, through the eyes of her child-self, how human a pedophile truly is. Continue reading "Interview with Margaux Fragoso"…

Emma Straub’s debut, Other People We Married, is a story collection to be savored. Read it too quickly and you’ll run the risk of missing the small moments that come to shape Straub’s characters and her stories. A subtle shift portends a larger upheaval; a small jab becomes emblematic of a deeper rift; a word said or unsaid derails an entire conversation. Those moments—identifiable in life only in retrospect, when everything is irrevocably different—when things begin to change, are Straub’s strength, and their accumulation is one of the virtues of Other People We Married. (Straub’s sharp characterization and cool, clear sentences can be counted among the many others.) Continue reading "Interview with Emma Straub"…

Maybe it was the mouse carnival that did me in. Or was it the factory where virgins are made, or grocery shopping with Bob Dylan, or could it have been the moment when a man turned into a rainstorm? Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”

Helen is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Meridian Editors’ Prize, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, PEN America, and Salt Hill, among others. She lives in Brooklyn. Helen and I went to college and graduated school together, and this interview took place over the past month.

Continue reading "Interview with Helen Phillips"…