THE ROVING EDITOR

PATRICIA ENGEL'S 'VIDA'

2010-09-16T15:48:00.028+01:00

You could have read it here first, but I'm delighted to see that with Michiko Kakutani's glowing review in the New York Times, Patricia Engel has well and truly arrived as an important new literary voice.

The occasion, of course, is the publication of Patricia's debut, Vida, a book which has more than lived up to my high expectations, and the promise of early pieces such as 'Lucho', 'Dia' and 'Desaliento'. All of these stories feature the same main protagonist, the Colombian-American Sabina; in Vida they are woven into a sequence of linked episodes in her life spanning two decades. The result is a highly satisfying hybrid of novel and short story collection that is particularly successful in portraying a multi-dimensional central character.

Patricia has a way with arresting opening lines, and a seemingly effortless, conversational style of narration that is brilliantly sustained. This creates a rare sense of immediacy and intimacy that is the mark of a gifted storyteller. Take the beginning of the title story:

'She told me her real name was Davida . . . She said she couldn't remember who started calling her Vida but that it happened here in Miami. In Colombia she was never called anything but her given name, but over here Vida stuck, which she said was okay with her because that plane ride over the Caribbean broke her life in two.'

There are a number of interesting pieces on Patricia and her work available to read online (including a mention this week in the New York Daily News!) but the best place to start is her website. I also recommend you take a look at the Q&A she did for The Roving Editor back in April last year.

I don't have as much time as I'd like for literary talent-spotting these days, as my regular job as an editor tends to get in the way. However I'm always interested to hear from and about promising new writers, so do get in touch via the blog or look me up on Twitter. In the meantime, get your hands on Vida here. I'm not sure if there are plans to publish the book on this side of the water, but I'm glad to see the Grove/Atlantic edition is available on UK Amazon also.

When we spoke last spring Patricia told me, 'I write stories for the pure thrill of it.' It's a thrill that will be shared by her many readers, I'm sure.

'WHY I WRITE' by Donald Ray Pollock

2010-06-11T13:45:00.010+01:00

‘I found myself, at the age of forty-five, feeling trapped and dissatisfied with a factory job that I’d held for twenty-seven years (I ended up staying thirty-two years). Don’t get me wrong, it was a good job, but I wanted to do something else with the rest of my life.

‘Since I didn’t really know how to do anything except factory work, and maybe because I loved to read, I decided to try to learn how to write, figuring that at least it wouldn’t cost anything other than time and a few reams of paper and a typewriter. Also, being a person who feels somewhat-to-very uncomfortable around groups of people and most “social” situations, writing appealed to me because of its solitary nature.

‘I would like to add that I was extremely naïve when I started. I thought that writing must be fairly easy and that you made a lot of money. Fortunately, by the time those two illusions were smashed, I’d already started to love sitting at the keyboard staring at the wall for hours at a time.’

Donald Ray Pollock is the author of Knockemstiff. A graduate of the MFA program at Ohio State University, he was the winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Award in 2009. He was recently awarded a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. His work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Berkeley Fiction Review, PEN/America, Washington Square Review, and Epoch. Visit his website here.

* More about 'Why I Write'.

'GOOD FOR NOTHING ELSE'?

2010-06-11T09:30:00.014+01:00

Of all the questions regularly put to authors by journalists and readers, it seems to me that the most important one is why they bother in the first place.

A number of years ago the French newspaper Libération published a special supplement in which they asked some of the great writers of the day to express themselves on the subject 'Pourquoi ecrivez-vous?' I remember Samuel Beckett's contribution was by far the most concise, reading in its entirety: 'Bon qu'a ca.', which could be translated as 'Good for nothing else.'

I thought it might be enlightening to ask some of the Roving Editor’s favourite writers to address this question under the heading ‘Why I Write’, after George Orwell’s famous essay on the subject, published in 1946. Orwell’s is an honest, revealing attempt at an answer, but ultimately he admits: ‘All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’

In dusting off this question and putting it in front of a new set of writers I am not expecting responses as terse or as self-deprecating as those of Orwell and Beckett. However I’d be surprised not to detect some echoes at least of how they felt. So, in what I hope will be the first in occasional series on the blog, I am delighted that Donald Ray Pollock has agreed to tell us ‘Why I Write’. Watch this space.

DISCOVERING TEA OBREHT

2010-06-03T09:49:00.008+01:00

The announcement of the New Yorker's '20 under 40' list of fiction writers worth watching has prompted a huge spike in traffic to the Roving Editor. Virtually all of the visitors are searching for one name: Téa Obreht, whose first published work was praised here almost a year ago. I'm delighted for Téa, whose debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, is due in March 2011.

In addition to the original post, I recommend you sample Téa's story 'The Laugh' and this interview, both published in the Atlantic magazine's 2009 fiction issue.

Congratulations also to three other writers on the New Yorker's list whose work has been featured in the Roving Editor: Wells Tower, Joshua Ferris and Yiyun Li.

ASK FOR SAM LIPSYTE

2010-05-06T09:48:00.025+01:00

It was Donald Ray Pollock who first drew my attention to Sam Lipsyte's work in a Q&A he did for the Roving Editor back in 2008. Don praised Lipsyte's 'great and quirky' collection Venus Drive. I sought out his work online and discovered the stories 'Cremains' and 'Flashback, or Why Nobody Won the Fight Between Our Fathers in Walt Wilmer's Toolshed'. Their pitch-black humour and terse, self-incriminating narrative voices reminded me strongly of early Beckett fictions (in particular First Love and Other Novellas) mixed with the earthiness of Bukowski.

Lipsyte has produced three novels since Venus Drive. His latest, The Ask, will appear in the UK next month, thanks to independent publisher Old Street. (Full disclosure: I occasionally do some work for Old Street in my capacity as a freelance editor.) The Observer has already flagged up what amounts to a major coup for a small UK publisher, given the widespread critical acclaim The Ask has enjoyed in the States, not to mention its respectable showing on the New York Times bestseller list.

On the evidence of what I have read so far, The Ask is that rarest of literary beasts, a comic novel that manages to be both funny and profound. Its beleaguered protagonist Milo Burke has echoes of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, while the world of work is depicted with the same merciless eye for detail that made Then We Came to the End so bracing and true. Milo is a fund-raiser for a university in New York he knows is second-rate, but for which he is obliged to make 'the ask', a role that puts him in touch with a wealthy former college friend who has questionable motives for making 'the give'. I'm hoping the working out of the plot is as satisfying as this premise -- and the promise of the opening chapters -- suggests.

If further persuasion is needed, take this endorsement of The Ask from another fine writer who has been featured on these pages, Wells Tower: 'One of the most hilarious and perfectly executed books that I've read in recent years.'

LITERARY ADAPTATIONS IN THE WORKS

2010-02-25T07:44:00.034Z

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger, is one of a number of upcoming literary adaptations from British filmmakers. A long list of projects recently awarded funding was released by the UK Film Council this week.

Adiga, whose work has been featured on the Roving Editor, will see The White Tiger brought to the screen by fellow novelist Hanif Kureishi. Kureishi recently commented, not entirely seriously, one suspects: 'I needed the money for my children – to ensure that they have a better life. The lives of my children are much more insecure compared to mine. I need to make films like Slumdog Millionaire.’ Elsewhere he said 'The White Tiger is a rags-to-riches murder story. It is Aravind's extraordinary characters that make this one stand out above all others.'

Among other forthcoming attractions. . .

Conor McPherson is adapting Taichi Yamada's novel Strangers, with James Marsh(Man on Wire) set to direct. (There has already been a Japanese-language version.)
Lynne Ramsay, who was unfortunately bumped from the adaptation of The Lovely Bones in favour of Peter Jackson, will write and direct We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Schriver. John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton will take leading roles.
Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, (Slumdog Millionaire, The Full Monty), is adapting The Raw Shark Texts from the novel by Steven Hall, and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, from the novel by Paul Torday. Beaufoy recently told the Daily Telegraph: 'I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.'
Sadie Jones is writing the screenplay for her debut novel The Outcast for John Madden(Shakespeare in Love) to direct.
And finally, yet another debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is currently being adapted; this one by the venerable Christopher Hampton (Atonement, Dangerous Liaisons).

PETINA GAPPAH ON THE AGE OF INDEPENDENCE

2009-12-09T16:00:00.015Z

In what has been an exceptional year for the short story, the announcement of Petina Gappah as winner of the Guardian first book award is further cause for rejoicing. Her debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, is published by Faber.

You can read a brand new story called 'Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close' here. This is a quietly powerful piece about a child coming of age as Rhodesia transforms itself into Zimbabwe.

In her blog, the author describes the background to the story as 'the time that I find most interesting to write about, the move from settler rule to majority rule and the early days of independence. I am interested in exploring how independence materially changed lives, especially for the blacks who made it to the suburbs and whose children found themselves in the alien territory of formerly whites-only schools.'

Not only that: she also includes the video for the hit 80s record (by David Scobie, 'one of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe's early rock stars') her parents dance to at the end of the story. It takes you right back. . .

WILD ROVING

2009-10-08T19:25:00.037+01:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, the Roving Editor has not been on an extended summer break. There may have been no blogging of late (apart from via Twitter) but there's been plenty of browsing -- all the fine publications that usually yield the exciting new work featured here have been regularly frequented.

The trouble is, nothing has really grabbed me in the same way that Eleanor Catton and Patricia Engel did earlier this year, or Donald Ray Pollock and Wells Tower did in 2008. Admittedly, it's asking a lot to hold out for talent of that calibre, but that's why I write the blog -- and also why I don't write it that often. It may be that I've been looking in the wrong places; if so, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

In the meantime, to prove I've been a-roving, here are some pointers to work I've enjoyed in the last while but which hasn't quite fit the criterion of being by an emerging writer; while a couple of the names were new to me, all of the writers are established authors to some extent. . .

The excellent Fifty-Two Stories site will run until the end of the year, and I would recommend recent contributions by Lydia Peelle ('Phantom Pain') and the celebrated Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany ('The Kitchen Boy'). I came upon the distinctive voice of Glen Pourciau in the Paris Review last year; 'Nightblooming' by Kenneth Calhoun is one of the most entertaining pieces I've read in 2009. Finally, Five Dials is the most attractively presented online litmag out there; its latest issue has a Paris theme, and features fiction by Steve Tolz.

Do watch this space, and do get in touch if you've got any hot tips to share.

PATRICIA ENGEL DEBUT COMING IN 2010

2009-06-26T07:40:00.015+01:00

When she spoke to The Roving Editor back in April, Patricia Engel promised to keep us posted about two book projects she had in the works. Now comes the excellent news that her debut short story collection is to be published in the US by Grove/Atlantic in autumn of next year.

Publishers' Marketplace reports that the book, entitled Vida, 'follows a single narrator growing up in small town New Jersey and navigating her identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora'. It will doubtless include the stories 'Lucho' and 'Dia'. This is to be a two-book deal, and Vida will be followed by a novel, as yet untitled.

Here is how Patricia described what motivates her as a writer, and why she is drawn to short stories in particular: 'I love the vulnerability of the form and that there is nowhere for the author to hide. A short story requires swift seduction but can be as memorable and transformative as the drawn out affair of a novel. I write stories for the pure thrill of it. If it didn’t feel like a party when I sit down to write, I probably wouldn’t do it.' (Read the rest of her Q&A here.)

Congratulations, Patricia -- enjoy the party!

TEA OBREHT'S FEARFUL SYMMETRY

2009-06-17T07:33:00.023+01:00

Téa Obreht wasn't born that long ago (1985), but she is a born storyteller. Her literary launch is an auspicious one, taking place as it does in the pages of the New Yorker's recent summer fiction issue, among such luminaries as Jonathan Franzen, Aleksander Hemon and Yiyun Li.

'The Tiger's Wife', excerpted from Obreht's debut novel of the same name, has the elemental pull of a fable and the rootedness of a folk tale, but from the outset its concerns could not be more urgent and contemporary:

'Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days. The tiger did not know that they were bombs . . .'

As we follow the traumatised tiger through the war-ravaged landscape and to the ridge above the village of Galina, he becomes the embodiment of the fears, superstitions and myths of the local people. And for one little boy, the narrator's grandfather, he is Shere Khan come to life from the pages of his beloved Jungle Book.

This is a rich mixture, but the material is beautifully handled by Obreht. The story never gets bogged down in allegory; its resonances ring true. It is the work of an author who is destined for great things.

Obreht, who was born in Belgrade in former Yugoslavia and left in 1992 on the outbreak of war, has said in an interview that her novel is based on personal experiences: 'It’s a family saga that takes place in a fictionalized province of the Balkans. It’s about a female narrator and her relationship to her grandfather, who’s a doctor. It’s a saga about doctors and their relationships to death throughout all these wars in the Balkans.'

The Tiger's Wife will be published in the US in and in the UK in July next year.

(In a departure from The Roving Editor's usual practice, the featured work is not freely available to read online. However I thought the story too exceptional to miss, so I would encourage you to sign up for the New Yorker's free preview of its digital edition here.)

UPDATE: More on Téa here.

AUTHOR Q&A: PATRICIA ENGEL

2009-04-23T17:27:00.025+01:00

If you haven't heard of Patricia Engel yet, you haven't been reading The Roving Editor. She is a gifted exponent of the short story, at a time when the form is at last gaining the recognition and audience it deserves. (Read James Lasdun on this encouraging phenomenon here.)

So far Patricia has only published in literary journals, albeit in titles of the calibre of Guernica and the Boston Review, where her talent was first noticed by Junot Díaz.

It can’t be long until her work appears between covers. Indeed Patricia tells me that she is currently working on two book projects, and has promised to keep us posted about their publication. In the meantime, it is my great pleasure to present this Q&A with a rising literary star.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background, and what led you to become a writer?
My parents are Colombian and I grew up in New Jersey, among an extended family of musicians, painters, and a grandmother who was a writer. I sketched, painted, and read constantly, particularly biographies, books about mythology and the paranormal. Writing was a way to entertain myself, build a bridge to another life. I'd never let others read my work, though. My stories were only for me. Eventually the compulsion to write swallowed most of my other brewing dreams and I complied.

What attracts you to the medium of the short story?
I love the vulnerability of the form and that there is nowhere for the author to hide. A short story requires swift seduction but can be as memorable and transformative as the drawn out affair of a novel. I write stories for the pure thrill of it. If it didn’t feel like a party when I sit down to write, I probably wouldn’t do it.

Which writers do you admire?
I admire any writer that goes into the page raw-hearted, but the first heroes to blow my mind during adolescence were Marguerite Duras, Anaïs Nin, Albert Camus, Maryse Condé, Gabriel García Márquez, Esther Freud, Alexandre Jardin and Romain Gary.

Where and when do you write?
Usually at desk or table at home, starting early in the morning. I prefer silence, solitude, and natural light. I rarely write at night.

How did you first come to be published?
In college, I majored in French and Art History, not Creative Writing, and had no sense of the publishing path for a very long time, which was a good thing because it allowed me to focus only on the writing. Then one day I sent ‘Lucho’ to the Boston Review and the fiction editor liked it.

How has being published affected you as a writer?
Placing a story in a journal is like finding a home for a stray cat. Not exactly a miracle, but no small deed either. I'm extremely grateful every time it turns out well.

Your stories seem to feature recurring central protagonists (I’m thinking of Sabina, who narrates both ‘Lucho’ and ‘Día’) and a large and colourful cast of more peripheral players. Can you say something about your approach to creating characters?
The Sabina stories are part of a collection that follows her over two decades. In creating characters I try to give readers the friends they never knew they wanted or needed. I enjoy characters that are tender and cruel, confronting their humanity, who manage to form profound bonds despite personal chaos. My stories are built on the idea that we are the sum of the people we’ve allowed ourselves to care about. We test one another, and we make each other better.

Have you come across any new writers whose work you would recommend?
I wouldn't say they're new, but the voices I've recently pushed on friends are Jorge Franco, Philippe Grimbert, Faïza Guène, Chimo, and Fernando Vallejo.

MEET PATRICIA ENGEL

2009-04-15T16:49:00.025+01:00

I first came across Patricia Engel last year when her story, 'Desaliento', won the Boston Review's annual prize for fiction. I enjoyed her unhurried storytelling and unfussy prose, and made a mental note to look out for more of her work.

The opportunity came via the latest email bulletin from the always worthwhile Guernica magazine. The current issue features 'Día', a beautifully observed vignette of an awkward encounter between two friends who could have been lovers but never were.

Unconsummated relationships are something of a motif in Engel's work, at least on the evidence of the pieces she has published online. 'Lucho', her earliest published fiction, is narrated by the teenage Sabina, whose grown-up voice we hear in 'Día': 'He was 16 and I was 14, which meant we could be friends on our block but had to ignore each other at school. He had squishy lips and a small round nose, smooth shiny skin and greasy dark hair. All the girls checked him out. But Lucho was kind of dirty for a town like ours.' In this story, tragedy intervenes, and is all the more affecting for the suddenness with which it interrupts the leisurely unfolding of what could otherwise be an unremarkable tale of adolescent infatuation.

Engel's knack of drawing the reader into the everyday world of her characters, then revealing in passing an incident that catches the reader unawares, is also evident in 'Prison Letters', an excerpt from which appears in Slice magazine: 'Victor would go on benders, disappear for days, but always turned up on Sunday mornings and went to mass with my mom even when he was still with his first wife, a Jewish girl named Rebecca who died before I had a chance to meet her. They were on the rocks and she was pregnant. She went to see her parents after a big fight with Victor and an eighteen-wheeler smashed into her Datsun on the Long Island Expressway. Victor blamed himself and jumped off the roof of his house but didn't get so much as a scratch.'

Is it fanciful to extrapolate from this a literary kinship between the Colombian-American Engel and Gabriel García Márquez? Perhaps. Engel is no magic realist, but she is a natural storyteller, and if I can risk invoking the name of another literary titan, she has something of Salinger's way with vernacular and feel for family relationships. Like both writers, she can also be very funny.

Patricia Engel is an exceptional talent, but as far as I know she has yet to be signed up by a publisher. It is surely only a matter of time.

THE PERFORMANCE IS ABOUT TO BEGIN

2009-04-09T08:18:00.030+01:00

I've written before in praise of Eleanor Catton's short stories. Now comes the welcome opportunity to sample her debut novel. This extract from The Rehearsal appears on the newly relaunched website of Granta, who will be publishing the book in the UK in July.

It is a vivid, multi-layered creation, a performance in every sense of the word. By combining intense theatricality with the raw emotions and experiences of her teenage protagonists, Catton appears to be doing something truly extraordinary with the novel form. For me, the writing has more in common with the drama of Pirandello or Beckett than a work of prose fiction. I'm thinking in particular of Six Characters in Search of an Author. But this is no mere exercise in style: the novel's ingenious framework is there to serve a purpose, not to be noticed or admired for its own sake.

On this evidence Catton has a compelling tale, or tales, to tell in The Rehearsal, and I for one am impatient to read more.

READ WELLS TOWER

2009-03-23T10:35:00.033Z

Of all the writers featured on The Roving Editor, Wells Tower is the name that attracts most visitors to the blog, thanks to a brief post back in November. This augurs well for the success of his debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which is shortly to be published on both sides of the Atlantic.

If I were asked to identify the qualities in Wells Tower's writing that make reading these stories such a rewarding experience, I would say that what impresses me most is the depth of his characterisation and the freshness of his language. The essence of good short story writing is economy, and in the same way that Picasso could conjure life from the simplest of lines, Tower has the gift of creating flesh and blood people out of a handful of words.

And what well-chosen words they are. Take this pen-picture of the narrator's father, abandoned by his much younger lover, in 'Executors of Important Energies': 'My father felt astonished in his grief -- pushing fifty, the silver tufts bursting from his ears, to find his heart broken for the first time in his life. That was the one time he tried hard to be my friend. He had me over on weekends. He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to be got through early because it could really kill you in your later years.'

This quote also hints at a trait shared by many of Tower's protagonists: a sense of humour and self-knowledge in the face of adversity. In one of the best stories in the book, the carnival-set 'On the Show', there is a rare moment of tenderness between the new attendant on a ride called the Pirate Ship and one of his customers, a blind woman: 'The ride ends, and Jeff goes to her and helps her down the platform. She is warm against him, and cannot stop laughing. "Thank you, thanks very much," she says, and Jeff Park feels glad to have found work on the Pirate, a machine that draws joy out of people as simply as a derrick draws oil from dirt.'

Indeed, there is a strong case to be made for Tower as a comic writer, for all the bleakness of the lives and landscapes he depicts. The comedy is there in the grotesque tableau of a man obliged to void his dog's bladder using a kind of Heimlich manoeuvre ('Retreat'); in the uneasy conversation between a violent man and his ex-wife's hippy lover, suddenly thrown together on a road-trip ('Down Through the Valley'); and, most flamboyantly of all, in the Pythonesque but ultimately poignant title story, an everyday tale of marauding Vikings who speak in modern American: 'A hydra flew in last night and ran off with Rolf Hierdal's sheep. We can't be putting up with this shit. It comes down to pride, is what it comes down to.'

Uncomfortable encounters and strained relationships are something of a Tower speciality, as are sudden explosions of violence. All of these elements are present in 'On the Show', which for me is the key story in the collection. Its fairground setting seems a perfect metaphor for the desire for thrills and transcendence that drives the characters in the stories, a desire that the gaudy rides can only satisfy fleetingly before disappointment takes hold again. Jeff Park has an assignation with a girl with a fondness for phosphorescent candy whom he meets on the Pirate Ship. She doesn't show. Eventually he tracks her down: 'He goes to her quickly, puts his hand on her shoulder, and pulls her toward him, hard enough that her head jerks back. People turn. Her jaw hangs wide and pretty, but the light in her mouth has gone out.'

I could go on, but the main point of this blog is to direct readers to the work itself. You can whet your appetite for the book by sampling two of the stories online: 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned' and 'Wild America'. You won't be disappointed.

THE ESSENCE OF ADAPTATION

2009-03-03T12:21:00.032Z

The Guardian Review has an excellent, thought-provoking essay by Salman Rushdie on the subject of literary adaptation. Rushdie's contention is that the aim of any such enterprise – whether it is the translation of a poem or the transfer of a novel to film – should be to capture the essence of the original work. Slavish "fidelity" to the source material is both misguided and futile, hence his apparent respect for what he describes as the "creatively savage" approach taken by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's 2002 film.

However Rushdie also wishes to examine the notion of adaptation in its broadest sense. To do so, he says, "is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential – in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives."

In the course of the article, Rushdie reveals that he is working on a screenplay of Midnight's Children, which is to be directed by Deepa Mehta. It will be fascinating to hear his further thoughts on the adaptation process once this project comes to fruition.

THE TALENTED MR ROSSET

2009-03-03T09:16:00.013Z

Barney Rosset, legendary New York publisher, is the subject of Obscene, a documentary film released in the UK this week. View the trailer here, and read a New York Times feature here.

Though Rosset relinquished Grove Press some years ago, he is still Editor in Chief of the Evergreen Review, which made its first appearance in 1957. The magazine now publishes most of its content online, and there are several short stories by new writers in the current issue.

INTRUDERS IN THE DUST

2009-02-06T09:02:00.013Z

The latest New Yorker fiction offering is from a veteran of the magazine, Steven Millhauser. 'The Invasion from Outer Space' is a witty exploration of what occurs when our most deep-seated fears are made manifest, when events of which we have dreamed or which we have only experienced through books and films become reality.

The imagery of 9/11 was so disturbingly familiar from popular culture that it has become difficult to revisit the cliches of the disaster movie, for example, without evoking that day. Millhauser turns this phenomenon on its head by taking as his subject a version of The War of the Worlds in which the long-dreaded alien encounter turns out to be a bit of an anti-climax. The narrator wants 'terror and ecstacy', but all he gets is a coating of yellow dust.

It's a tribute to the author's sensitivity and sense of humour that the story itself doesn't disappoint, and, unlike the extraterrestrial visitation, at just over 1500 words it doesn't outstay its welcome either.

Steven Millhauser's most recent collection is called Dangerous Laughter.

VENICE OR LAS VEGAS

2009-01-30T09:18:00.038Z

A welcome online fiction showcase has been launched by Harper Perennial, as reported by 3:AM. Curated by Cal Morgan, Fifty-Two Stories will publish new work every week this year by both established and emerging writers of the form.

The series got off to an auspicious start with its first offering. Simon Van Booy's 'The Missing Statues' has a classic storytelling set-up: two strangers meet and fall into conversation about events from another time and place that are somehow connected to the here and now. One of them tries to comfort the other, saying: “I simply want to know why a missing statue has reduced a young American businessman to tears.”

Like the statues of the title, everything in the story is at one remove from reality: the narrator speaks of Venice, but only as it is reimagined in Las Vegas. His tale involves a man who pretends to be an Italian gondolier, mimes the voice of Enrico Caruso and recognises his own daughter in a woman whose small child he befriends.

British-born Van Booy's writing is highly coloured and romantic, but manages to skirt sentimentality. There is real feeling behind these facades, these masks and wishful imaginings.

The story is taken from a forthcoming collection called Love Begins in Winter, which is published in the US in May, and in the UK in November. It should be worth investigating, as should the rest of Cal Morgan's choices for Fifty-Two Stories this year.

F SCOTT HOT IN HOLLYWOOD

2009-01-27T07:14:00.025Z

The Roving Editor started life blogging about the links between literature and movies under the title The Word on Film. It seems appropriate to return to this relatively unexplored zone via Zoetrope All-Story, the literary magazine published by Francis Ford Coppola.

This time last year we knew of two forthcoming films based on F Scott Fitzgerald stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttton and Pat Hobby. Here is screenwriter Eric Roth in the current issue of Zoetrope on adapting Benjamin Button. The magazine also carries the story itself, though it's not available to read online. It was originally published in the collection Tales of the Jazz Age.

Meanwhile the only update on Pat Hobby is that it is being lined up for production this year; the film company's synopsis reads: 'Fitzgerald’s beloved hack fights for a writer’s buck in the Hollywood studio system.'

The author himself was no stranger to penury, of course, but these days he'd have found it a lot less difficult to make a beautiful dollar in Tinseltown: as well as the aforementioned adaptations, there is also news of yet another remake of The Great Gatsby, this time by Baz Luhrmann. However Variety has this cautionary tale of the mixed artistic and box-office fortunes of F Scott on screen.

Francis Coppola should be watching all of this with especial interest: he wrote the screenplay for the faithful but unloved 1974 adaptation of Gatsby.

ONE TO WATCH IN 2009

2009-01-09T07:15:00.010Z

Among a handful of literary names on the Observer's 'hotlist' for 2009 is the young New Zealander Eleanor Catton. From what I have seen of her work, the interest is entirely justified. 'The Outing' has the mingled humour and menace of a Hitchcock movie in miniature, while 'Necropolis' is a beautifully observed depiction of a dead-end job. It's no surprise to see that the author is a fan of Muriel Spark.

'The Outing' has apparently been reworked as a scene in Catton's debut novel The Rehearsal. According to the Observer this is due to be published by Granta in the UK in July, though this edition is not currently listed on Amazon, and the publisher does not appear to have a website at present. More details when we have them.

THE BEST STORY OF THE YEAR?

2008-12-17T19:08:00.016Z

BookFox's choices for best short story collections of 2008 include a number of books that were featured on The Roving Editor. It is especially gratifying to see Glen Pourciau's Invite on the list, as this a strong debut from one of the most interesting new writers to emerge this year.

Donald Ray Pollock has attracted more coverage than Glen, but he deserves all the praise he has received. The challenge for him now will be to produce a worthy follow-up to Knockemstiff. Nam Le's debut collection, The Boat, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth are also excellent choices.

One story I managed to overlook on its appearance in the New Yorker in September was 'The Noble Truths of Suffering' by Aleksandar Hemon. Set in Sarajevo, this is a darkly funny exploration of the writing life which shows how creativity can find inspiration in the midst of death, destruction and domesticity. I am grateful to another of our featured authors, Joshua Ferris, who has named it as 'the best story of the year' in Granta's year-end round-up.

I would welcome nominations from readers of their favourite writers of short fiction in 2008, or for names we should be looking out for in 2009. Judging by the interest I have had in my post on Wells Tower, I fully expect him to feature prominently in next year's literary lists.

'DON'T WORRY ABOUT ME'

2008-12-03T10:42:00.021Z

Amos Oz is an another of those eminent living writers whose work I have only just sampled for the first time.

'Waiting', in this week's New Yorker, is a profound and powerfully atmospheric tale. Set in an almost deserted Israeli village on a sleepy Friday afternoon, it reads like an existential ghost story. The ghost in question is Benny's Avni's wife Nava, who has disappeared leaving only a note that says, 'Don't worry about me.' (That's a hell of a note to leave. If Raymond Carver had written the story, that's probably what it would have been called.)

Benny, head of the District Council and pillar of the community, doesn't so much wait for Nava as embark on a journey in search of a woman he has never really known. All the while he is shadowed by a stray dog, which appears to be showing him the way:

'He asked himself, Would it not be better to go straight home? After all, she might have returned and was perhaps resting, puzzled by his absence, maybe even worried about him. But the thought of the empty house terrified him, and he went on, limping, following the dog, who never looked back, his muzzle lowered as if sniffing the way.'

I was reminded of the mundane, yet menacing terrain of John Cheever's 'The Swimmer'. In Oz's story, Benny's wanderings take him to a bomb shelter and the school where his wife teaches: 'The school’s metal gates were already locked for the Sabbath. Both the building and the playground were surrounded by an iron fence topped with barbed wire.'

I don't know if 'Waiting' is from a forthcoming collection, but there is at least one volume of Amos Oz's stories in print, which I look forward to investigating further.

LONDON CALLING

2008-11-29T11:05:00.015Z

I've recently come across two excellent magazines offering online literary content. The Drawbridge has published work by the likes of Tobias Wolff, Siri Hustvedt, Irvine Welsh and DBC Pierre. The current issue features an excerpt from José Saramago's new novel, though, as with most of the articles, you'll have to purchase the print edition to read the full text.

I first came across Salena Godden's name in a mailing from Litro magazine. Her writing has also appeared in The Drawbridge, and you can read her entertaining story, 'The Walrus and the Diamond Ring' here. Like The Drawbridge, Litro is a London-based publication. It was 'founded in 2005 by Mike Fell to provide commuters and office workers with a short story every week. Mike came up with the idea of Litro after finishing Dubliners by James Joyce somewhere near Mornington Crescent.' An admirable enterprise. I was glad to discover interesting work by two new names, Carol Farrelly and Deborah Nash.

THE READING WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

2008-11-14T15:18:00.011Z

The Roving Editor spends rather less time in New York than in North Yorkshire, so unfortunately I missed Deb Olin Unferth's event at the MercBar this week. If her readings are as entertaining as this YouTube clip suggests, it would have been well worth going along. Her phrasing and delivery of a story entitled 'Deb Olin Unferth' reminded me, weirdly, of Gil Scott Heron, though the content is uniquely (and literally) her own.

I heard of Deb Olin Unferth through Ron Hogan's always diverting blog, Beatrice, and discovered a few short pieces by her here, and here. The themes of theft and tourism seem to loom large in her work, and the sense of humour is bone-dry. I look forward to her debut novel, Vacation, though this doesn't appear to have been picked up by a UK publisher as yet.

MEET WELLS TOWER

2008-11-07T13:07:00.020Z

There's more than a touch of Saki in 'Leopard', a short story by Wells Tower in this week's New Yorker. Both writers seem to share an instinctive understanding of the battle lines separating children from adults. In 'Leopard', as in the collection Beasts and Super-Beasts, the animal kingdom is a metaphor for the forces of nature that can invade the most ordered human existence.

Wells Tower is a new (and unusual) name, but something tells me we will be hearing it more often in the future. Oh, and I must also thank the author for adding a new word to my vocabulary: everything about his story is copacetic, in fact.

UPDATE: Read The Roving Editor's review of Wells Tower's debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, here.

A DREAM COME TRUE

2008-11-05T07:20:00.018Z

On this momentous day, some amazing non-fiction for a change.

A WRITER RECOMMENDS: GLEN POURCIAU

2008-11-03T08:14:00.019Z

"Finding new writers is hard." This is how Glen Pourciau responded when I asked him to name any emerging authors whose work had impressed him recently. He's dead right, which is why I don't post every day of the week. The Roving Editor welcomes recommendations from readers, and particularly from readers who happen to be writers too. Recently Donald Ray Pollock gave us his choices, and now it is the turn of Glen, author of the fine short story collection, Invite.

"The writers that come to mind are Cate Kennedy, Benjamin Percy, and Ander Monson," he told me. "Cate Kennedy had a story in the New Yorker a couple of years ago that I thought was significantly good. It was called 'Black Ice' and it has also been published under the title 'Cold Snap'. ... Her collection is called Dark Roots.

"Benjamin Percy has gotten pretty well known. He's published two collections [Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk] and has had a couple of stories in the Paris Review. He won their Plimpton Prize. One of his Paris Review stories was reprinted in The Barcelona Review."

And finally... "Ander Monson published a distinctive collection a couple of years ago called Other Electricities."

Thanks for these pointers, Glen. Watch this space for more word of mouth from writers we admire at The Roving Editor.

ARAVIND HAS ARRIVED

2008-10-21T10:56:00.012+01:00

The Guardian Review is quick off the mark by publishing an absorbing short story by this year's Man Booker winner, debut novelist Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger.

In 'The Sultan's Battery' Adiga creates a character called Ratna who could surely carry an entire novel. A hard-nosed huckster by trade, he is preoccupied with the need to marry off his three daughters but ultimately finds that human feelings and frailty cannot be ignored:

'He walked fast towards the white dome of the Dargah, a fold-up wooden stool under one arm, and in the other a red bag with his album of photographs and seven bottles full of white pills. When he got to the Dargah, he walked along the wall, without paying any attention to the long line of beggars along the wall: the lepers who were sitting on rags, the men with mutilated arms and legs, the men in wheelchairs and the men with bandages covering their eyes, and the one creature, with little brown stubs like a seal's flippers where he should have had arms, a normal left leg, and a soft brown stump where he should have had a second leg, who lay on his left side, twitching his hip continuously, like an animal getting galvanic shocks, and intoning, with blank, mesmerised eyes: "Al-lah! Al-laaaah! Al-lah! Al-laaah!"' (Continue reading...)

42 WRITERS ON 42 DAYS

2008-10-13T16:18:00.011+01:00

In 'Waiting', Hisham Matar brilliantly employs the metaphor so memorably mined by Samuel Beckett to give a sense of the mental torment suffered by those imprisoned without charge.

His story is one of 42 short pieces contributed by writers in support of Liberty's campaign against the UK government's proposed extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days. Other prominent names whose work appears on the 42 Writers for Liberty site include Julian Barnes, A.L. Kennedy, Michel Faber, David Mitchell, Monica Ali and Mohsin Hamid.

Matar's debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

AUTHOR Q&A: DONALD RAY POLLOCK

2008-10-06T11:52:00.035+01:00

James Joyce once claimed that if Dublin were ever to be destroyed it could be recreated from the pages of Ulysses. In his debut short story collection, Donald Ray Pollock performs his own remarkable act of literary resurrection by putting an Appalachian ghost town back on the map.

His book, Knockemstiff, is reminiscent of Joyce’s Dubliners both in the way its downtrodden characters reappear in different stories and in the paralysis that prevents them from ever getting away. Though its raw honesty can make for an uncomfortable reading experience, Knockemstiff is one of the most intimate and vivid portraits of a place and its people that I have encountered in fiction. It is a major achievement and deserves to be read long after the 'holler' from which it takes its name has disappeared.

It is my great pleasure to present this brand new author interview. Don is a quietly inspiring character, as you will see. And for those of you who missed it first time around, here is a previous post which links to 'Pills', one of the stories in the book.

How and why did you become a writer?

I went through this mid-life shift or crisis or whatever you want to call it when I was 45 years old. I had been working in factories around 28 years by then, and I was just disappointed in my life, I guess. It hadn’t turned out like I had planned, in other words. So I asked myself what I’d like to do for the rest of the time I’ve got left in this world and the only thing that really appealed to me was being a writer. I had always been a big reader and I had a degree in English literature (the paper mill where I worked had a programme in which they paid for most of your tuition if you wanted to go to school part-time). So I told my wife that I was going to give it 5 years and see what happened. I didn’t know any writers and had never taken a creative writing course or anything, so I wasn’t sure how to start. For a year or so, I typed out stories by other writers that I liked, along with working on my own stuff. At the end of the 5 years, I had published maybe 6 stories in small literary magazines and been accepted into a MFA program at Ohio State University. I made the big leap and quit my mill job then, in 2005.

What can a short story do that a novel can’t?

That’s a good question. For me, as a writer, short stories appeal to me more than novels simply because there is a quicker payoff for one thing. Also, I tend to like stuff that is cut to the bone and short stories are much easier to revise 10 or 12 times than a full-length novel.

Which writers have made a difference to you?

Well, there are so many, but I remember reading an article about William Gay, the southern writer from Tennessee, publishing his first novel when he was in his early 50s. This was right around the time I was going through that mid-life bullshit, and he was a big inspiration. Gay had pretty much been a carpenter and worked odd jobs all his life. I’m fairly certain he didn’t go to college or anything like that. I think his story got me to thinking that maybe I, too, could do this thing if I really worked at it. As for other influences: Carson McCullers, John Cheever, Richard Yates (especially The Easter Parade), Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Denis Johnson, Larry Brown, Will Self, and Magnus Mills, among, as I said, many others.

What is your writing regime?

Mostly, I try to get up around 6:00 AM and work until 11:00 AM (I work in my attic, which is the only place I’m allowed to smoke in the house). If I’m revising, I find that I can go longer, so I’ll work a couple more hours in the evening (in the evenings, I allow myself to listen to music). Of course, a lot of days I don’t really get much done, but I still make myself sit in front of the computer or the typewriter. I think it’s good training, forcing yourself to sit there even if nothing is happening. If you can’t sit in the chair for an extended period of time every day, then you probably won’t make it as a writer because that’s really the hardest damn thing about it.

Over how long a period of time did you write the stories in Knockemstiff?

I wrote a couple of them (‘Bactine’ and ‘Fish Sticks’) pretty early, maybe after I’d been writing for, say, 18 months. Then I tried to write stories for a couple of years that were about people I really didn’t know anything about, for example, nurses and lawyers and rich people. I eventually figured out that, at least for the time being, I better stick to the people and the place that I know. So I started focusing on the holler again. I had maybe 7 of the Knockemstiff stories finished when I entered graduate school and wrote another 10 or 11 in the next 16 months or so (from August 2005 until November 2006).

How have people from Knockemstiff responded to your book?

Surprisingly, the reaction has been pretty positive, though I’m not sure how many people out there have actually read the book. I think I’ve only heard of one person who really hated the book. I tried to make sure that everyone in my county was aware that the book is fiction and not some memoir about growing up in the holler. I think a lot of people in Knockemstiff decided not to read it after they found out that it was fiction.

In what ways has being a published writer changed your life?

I get a lot more emails! And believe me, I appreciate them. Also, I did some travelling that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, especially when the book first came out. But really, it hasn’t changed things much for me, as far as what I do. I live a pretty simple life: I write in the morning and then take a long walk and sit on the porch and talk to my dog a lot. Sometimes I don’t see anyone but my wife for several days at a time (one reason I like getting the emails). I try to read at least one or two books a week. With that said, I know that I was extremely lucky to find a publisher like Doubleday. I know lots of writers who are better than me and are still looking for that first break.

How would you feel about a movie adaptation of your work?

I’d love it! Heck, I figure the movie version always gets more people to buy the book. Then, of course, there’s the money aspect, which would make it possible to just keep writing for another year or two without worrying about ending up in the soup line. But, though there have been several good movies made from short story collections, like Short Cuts and Jesus’ Son, I realize that’s a long shot for Knockemstiff. I mean, I can see it as a movie, but then I know nothing about film.

What are your future writing and publication plans?

Right now I’m working on a novel which I hope to have completed by the end of February 2009. That’s it, really. I’m not a person who can work on several projects at once. To finish something, I need to get obsessed with the story and I can’t do that if I’m bouncing around. After the novel is finished, I’m writing a short story for Peter Wild in England for an anthology of fiction inspired by music from The Velvet Underground. I’ve also got three or four short stories that I’d like to revise and try to get published. Then, if everything works out, I’ll begin another novel next May.

Are there any new writers out there whose work you admire and would recommend?

I can't say enough good stuff about Keith Lee Morris' recently published novel, The Dart-League King (Tin House). Also, look out for Kyle Minor's short story collection coming out in November, In the Devil's Territory (Dzanc Books). Any short stories by Keith Banner, including his collection, The Smallest People Alive. And if you haven't already, check out Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive, another great and quirky short story collection, and Jason Brown's Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work: Stories.

IGNORANCE AND BLISS

2008-09-25T14:17:00.036+01:00

Since starting this blog I've come to realise that it's as likely to advertise my ignorance as it is to show off my impeccable literary taste. So this is the moment to admit that until today I had never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates.

The opportunity to rectify this embarrassing gap in my reading came via an email from Narrative magazine about its Story of the Week. (I encourage you to take a moment to register for this free service on the Narrative website.) Gargoyle is an urgent monologue about loneliness, infidelity and betrayal in which the perspective of the narrator shifts disconcertingly from mistress to wife and back again. Its theatricality, circularity and theme reminded me of Play by Samuel Beckett, seen here in a screen adaptation by the late Anthony Minghella.

Gargoyle led me to another Joyce Carol Oates story, this time in the New Yorker. Spider Boy is just as impressive, and again features a central character who is haunted by a kind of doppelgänger.

Narrative magazine doesn't indicate whether Gargoyle comes from a forthcoming collection, but Spider Boy can be found in last year's High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories. Yet another one to add to the must-read list.

AN ALTERNATIVE AMAZON

2008-09-23T17:20:00.038+01:00

Once again I am indebted to the Guardian Books blog, this time for drawing my attention to Untitled Books, which describes itself as 'a young, hip, discerning new literary service and online bookshop.' Not only that, it 'also aims to find, support and promote the work of up and coming and new authors'. Good on them, I say.

As evidence of the latter pledge, the website features a number of short stories by writers whose names were new to me. I enjoyed Katy Darby's Mufti Day, a touching and funny exploration of how a sober city gent comes to terms with the loss of his job and the death of his wife. Bugs Bunny, karaoke and sartorial experimentation all play a part.

NEW WORK ON THE HORIZON

2008-09-17T09:11:00.025+01:00

The Guardian Books blog has welcome news about the launch of the Horizon Review, a new online literary magazine with a venerable old name. The debut issue features six short stories, which I am looking forward to sampling.

Meanwhile another famous literary name, Hamish Hamilton, is behind the magazine Five Dials. This is a produced as a very attractive downloadable PDF. I particularly recommend Arthur Bradford's story in the second issue, which has just been published. Called 'Travels with Paul', it reads like the plot of a Jim Jarmusch road movie. I hadn't read anything by Bradford before, but would be encouraged to investigate his collection, Dogwalker.

BENGALIS AND DUBLINERS

2008-09-15T11:11:00.028+01:00

As mentioned previously, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award will be presented to Jhumpa Lahiri later this month. In a controversial decision, the jury decided to dispense with the traditional shortlist and announce her collection, Unaccustomed Earth, as the outright winner. You can read an illuminating interview with Lahiri here.

The success of the book—it went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list—is enough to gladden the heart of any lover of the genre, or cure any publisher of the prejudice that short story collections do not sell. Fortunately the work itself more than lives up to expectations. Lahiri has a calm, beguiling style that immediately draws the reader into the lives of her characters, a hidden world of Bengali immigrants transplanted to suburban middle-America: 'I spoke to no one of your arrival; I almost never revealed details of my home life to my American friends. As a child, I had always dreaded my birthdays, when a dozen girls would appear in the house, glimpsing the way we lived.'

The narrator's use of the second-person singular address in Once in a Lifetime, from which the above excerpt is taken, is masterly. In Hell-Heaven, also published in the New Yorker, the sadness of a woman who has loved and lost is conveyed through the prism of her daughter's childhood memories. The quietly devastating denoument of the story reminded me of 'The Dead' in James Joyce's Dubliners. I can think of no higher praise.

AUTHOR Q&A: GLEN POURCIAU

2008-09-08T12:49:00.048+01:00

One of the great pleasures of blogging is the opportunity to have a conversation with one's readers. It is always gratifying to get a positive response to a post about a featured author, but especially so when the response comes from the author concerned.

I am delighted to have struck up a correspondence with Glen Pourciau, whose debut collection of short stories, Invite, I showcased last month. I am also grateful to his publisher, the University of Iowa Press, for sending me a review copy of the book, which I am currently enjoying. The Roving Editor’s aim is not to engage in literary criticism, but to highlight literary excellence. In other words, to let the writing speak for itself. Just occasionally, we may be fortunate enough to hear directly from the author, as in this characteristically concise interview with Glen.

How and why did you become a writer?
I decided to become a writer after I read The Trial by Kafka. That’s what did it. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever read.

What, for you, is the essence of a good short story?
I have to hear the voice of the narrator to start writing a story. I think there should be complete unity between the voice telling the story and the story that is being told. As I see it, detail should be limited to what’s right for the voice and relevant to the story. Tone is the most important aspect of the voice.

Which writers do you admire?
Kafka and Beckett. I greatly admire Kleist’s novella, Michael Kohlhaas. I’m conscious of an influence from Harold Pinter. Thomas Bernhard is also in the top handful of writers I admire.

What is your writing regime?
Weekdays, I’m at my job. I manage a public library. I write very regularly on the weekends, about four hours each day, and sometimes at night during the week. I tend to pick things up at night when I’m absorbed with something. This can have to do with getting something down while a scene is vivid or it can have to do with editing.

Can you tell us about your new book, Invite? How, for example, did you decide which stories to include?
The question of which stories to include in a collection is complex. This is what I did. I got a group of stories together that I thought of as the core. I asked myself what connected those stories. In my opinion, if there isn’t a connection between some of them, the ones that are not connected have to go. They hurt the team. A story collection, as I see it, should not necessarily be a group of the writer’s best stories but the group of a writer’s stories that go together best. After settling on the core, I looked at my other stories and picked ones that best shared a kinship with the core. Ideally, each story in the group should make the other stories stronger.

What about your future writing and publication plans?
My plans are to keep writing stories and submitting them to literary magazines. I'm working on a second collection that I think could be ready, if I can decide which stories to include.

NO LONGER THE POOR RELATION

2008-09-02T08:46:00.015+01:00

The short story often seems to be a neglected or undervalued literary genre. But not at the Munster Literature Centre. This is the home of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, 'currently the world's richest prize for the short story form.' The 2008 prize (worth €35,000) will be awarded to Jhumpa Lahiri at a festival in Cork beginning on 17 September. Amongst those attending will be Yiyun Li, Clare Wigfall and Bernard MacLaverty.

Bucharest-based Irish writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh was on the 2006 shortlist for his debut collection, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse. As its Short Story of the Month the Munster Literature Centre website features a new story by Ó Ceallaigh called 'Thomas and Mohommad', an unsettling account of a tourist's quest for redemption in the narrow streets of Cairo. A similar sense of dislocation pervades 'The Retreat from Moscow', one of the stories from the book, which was first published in the Dublin Review.

LESBIAN VAMPIRES ET AL

2008-08-25T15:56:00.024+01:00

'You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans—and New York painters with haemorrhoids.'

I'm not sure if this is an accurate decsription of the contents of Nam Le's debut collection, The Boat, but I do know that 'the Vietnamese thing' is very much to the fore in at least one of the stories in the book. 'Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice' (from which the quote is taken) was first published in Zoetrope: All-Story, and is a beautifully layered meditation on the nature of memory, identity and creativity. The author's biography on the Zoetrope website applies equally to his narrator, who is also called Nam: 'Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He practiced as a corporate attorney before coming to America to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop.' (Keen-eyed readers may even spot a reference in the story to Yiyun Li, a fellow Iowa graduate, and subject of a previous blog post.)

The story begins with the narrator dreaming about a poem he is working on; Le himself writes with the precision of a poet. Take this perfectly wrought sentence: 'On Washington Street, a sudden gust of wind ravaged the elm branches and unfastened their leaves, floating them down thick and slow and soundless.'

The Bridge has just been published in the UK by Canongate. I am looking forward to investigating the rest of the collection, lesbian vampires or not.

LATE TO THE PARTY

2008-08-19T12:40:00.020+01:00

Joshua Ferris may not be a new name, but it's taken me until now to catch up with his work, thanks to a story in last week's New Yorker called The Dinner Party. This reminded me to check out his debut novel, Then We Came to the End, for which I'd seen glowing reviews when it appeared last year. Good comic writers are rare, but Ferris is a painfully acute observer of everyday rituals, and genuinely funny with it. Read the first chapter of his novel in the New York Times.

Tobias Wolff, on the other hand, is a writer I have long admired. The publication of his latest collection, Our Story Begins, is an excellent excuse to link to Awake, which is in the current edition of the New Yorker. Wolff is arguably the finest living exponent of the short story form. If you are discovering him for the first time, you have a treat in store.

CHINESE WHISPERS

2008-08-11T12:18:00.014+01:00

'To me, I just feel that always the most interesting or exciting thing about a story is not the drama, but people who watch that drama happen. . . I'm always very much more interested in, I guess, the onlookers. I wanted to write about these people who watched everything without doing anything.'

This is Yiyun Li speaking in an interview in Saturday's Irish Times, ahead of her event that evening at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. She is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today.

Li has won major awards for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, her debut short story collection. Two excellent examples of her work can be read via the Gettysburg Review and the New Yorker magazine. In What Has That to Do with Me and A Man Like Him the themes of passive and covert complicity in tyranny reminded me of Orwell's 1984 and the recent film The Lives of Others. Li's achievement is all the more remarkable when you consider that she is writing in English, a language she could barely speak when she moved from Beijing to the United States in 1996.

PARIS, BARCELONA, MISSISSIPPI

2008-08-08T08:30:00.011+01:00

The Roving Editor's researches have taken him to the above locations this week, or at least to the websites of the literary reviews that bear their names. The common denominator is that they have all recently published stories by Glen Pourciau, a writer new to me. Pourciau appears to specialise in short, unsettling fictions set in a world where Larry David intersects with David Lynch. I highly recommend sampling Claim, Window and The Dangerous Couple. And a little Cake for afters.

Pourciau's debut collection, Invite, is coming out in the States in October. If there are any enterprising UK publishers reading this, you know what to do. . .

PILLS & THRILLS

2008-08-05T08:39:00.018+01:00

The idea behind the Roving Editor is to do for new writing what the best mp3 blogs do for music — to seek out quality, keep the commentary to a minimum and let the work speak for itself. There are enough critics out there as it is. What is harder to come by is the opportunity to read a sample of the work of a writer whose name you may have come across in a review somewhere.

By way of illustration, I recently read good things in the Guardian about an American author called Donald Ray Pollock, whose first book, Knockemstiff, has just been released in the UK. I was intrigued enough to take a look online and discovered that one of the stories from the collection has been published by the Barcelona Review. This in itself is a sign of quality, as the Barcelona Review is one of the best outlets for new fiction on the internet. The story is called Pills, and is a beautifully observed account of a teenage boy's doomed attempt to escape from small-town America.

RENTON GOES TO REHAB

2008-08-04T12:47:00.009+01:00

Dublin resident Irvine Welsh is the latest author to contribute to a weekly series running in the Irish Times. The paper is publishing stories and essays to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Welsh has fun with the notion of Mark Renton cut adrift from his Trainspotting cohorts and consigned to a rehab clinic in the depths of Fife. Enjoy.

The series is a collaboration between the Irish Times and Amnesty International and has so far featured new work by the likes of Colm McCann, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright. Enright's deadpan surrealism can be savoured in her story Grace in a Tree.