Embrace the Mystery: Easter & Flannery O’Connor

March 28, 2016March 29, 2016 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ 2 Comments

Flannery O’Connor, Prayer Journal ($18), Wise Blood ($15), Mystery & Manners ($16), and The Complete Short Stories ($18)

Futurebirds, “Sam Jones,” Hampton’s Lullaby

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On Easter Sunday, this north Georgia Baptist sat in a New Orleans Catholic church thinking of Flannery O’Connor. I recently finished Mystery & Manners, O’Conner’s posthumous publication of essays and lectures about writing, religion, and peacocks. Mystery & Manners led me to several so-called “Southern gothic” short stories from The Complete Short Stories collection. So there I sat in St. Francis of Assisi’s stained glass-colored nave with a head full of Flannery O’Connor’s characters—murderers and grandmothers, a bigot barber, and a Bible salesman who ran off with a woman’s wooden leg after she seduced him, leaving her one-legged up a ladder in a barn’s second floor.

The priest’s sermon directed us to confront Easter confusion with Easter faith and, in full embrace, surrender ourselves to the mystery of life. The priest read from the Gospel of John, showing how Mary Magdalene walked in the dark before dawn and discovered that new life had risen from the tomb.

My wife and I recently read aloud O’Connor’s Prayer Journal, which she wrote when she was 21, away at college and drafting Wise Blood. It offers an intimate connection between reader and author because, in reading someone’s prayers, we recognize shared insecurities and fears. For example, O’Connor writes, “My mind is a most insecure thing, not to be depended on. It gives me scruples at one minute & leaves me lax the next.” She prays for divine strength to restrain her ego from eclipsing her view of God: “You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self as the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon.” She prays for grace and for faith. She admits confusion and prays for Christian principles to “permeate” her writing.

I asked Joe DeSalvo (owner of Faulkner House Books) about the Prayer Journal and he responded that, “Any writer who wants to be a great writer must read Mystery & Manners.” I quickly appreciated Joe’s advice when in the first chapter, “The King of the Birds,” I underlined and reread a dark truth: “Necessity is the mother of several other things besides invention.” Her clarity of verse draws us closer to understanding the human condition.

In her essay, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Connor discusses living with the teetotaler descendants of famous Methodist evangelist, Sam Jones. It reminded me of a song, “Sam Jones,” by Futurebirds, a critically acclaimed Athens, Georgia-based band. A full century after Sam Jones converted Tom Ryman, the riverboat casino and country music barroom owner, Futurebirds’ Sam Jones gives up on the mystery of life, scratches lottery tickets and waits to die.

O’Connor argues that Southern identity is found not at the surface of “mocking-birds and beaten biscuits [or] hookworm and bare feet,” but in the deepest “qualities that endure,” passed along generations of scripture-haunted people living in the balance of good and evil. Futurebirds’ Daniel Womack questions over a whining pedal steel guitar, “Sam Jones, are you liking what you see?” O’Connor may answer that the truth “is known only to God, but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist.”

O’Connor demands that artists and writers stare at everything possible to seek meaning worth extracting. She worries about her generation, which was groomed to eliminate mystery. She defends herself as a Christian writer because, having embraced the mystery of Christ’s resurrection, she is able to see other mysteries of life on earth.

During St. Francis’s Easter service, a little boy sat doodling in the pew behind us. At a quiet moment, he shouted to his mother, “I found the mystery!” In good manners, his mother shushed him.

O’Connor writes about people and their manners which, she argues, reveal to the reader—and writer—mysteries of the human condition. She claims that she did not know her Bible salesman would steal the woman’s wooden leg until five lines before he stole it. Like Mary Magdalene on the first Easter, O’Connor walks in the dark until she has discovered the story worth sharing.

Below is a sampling of her advice to writers about good writing.

–Alex B. Johnson, Faulkner House Books

On grace:

“In my stories a reader will find that the devil accomplishes a good deal of groundwork that seems to be necessary before grace is effective…. There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment…. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.”

On good fiction:

“A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.”

On mystery and manners:

“It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind…. The mystery [Henry James] was talking about is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.”

On the job of a writer:

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

On experience:

“If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.” (84)

On perception:

“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins.”

On drawing:

“Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.”

MLK Day & the Most Important Book of 2015

January 18, 2016March 29, 2016 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), $24

James Baldwin, Collected Essays (edited by Toni Morrison, Library of America, 1998), $35

Coates

The King family lost a husband and father with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His body was stolen, but he lives on in his writings and teachings. We honor his life and pursuit of justice today.

A half-century after the Civil Rights Movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a letter to his teenage son explaining the state of race relations in America. The letter was published as Between the World and Me and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. As Toni Morrison says on the dust jacket, it is “required reading.” It is the most important book of year.

Coates references James Baldwin only twice in the book, but his format resembles The Fire Next Time (1963)—a letter to Baldwin’s nephew—and many insights are Baldwin-inspired, updated for the 21^st century context of dash cams, private prisons, and the “new Jim Crow” (see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindedness, 2010).

Coates believes that a race-based society grows from historical power imbalances rooted in fear and control of the body. With clarity of language and brutal honesty, Coates shares personal stories to show how living in black skin renders life in America to be a struggle against disembodiment. He concludes a story about his father’s anger: “This was a war for the possession of his body and that would be the war of his whole life.”

Coates reads and writes in search of meaning and understanding. He discusses many authors and poets such that, in a sense, Between the World and Me is a literary treatise on race relations in American culture. Coates discusses the “narrative” of America that perpetuates our looking away. He calls this narrative “the Dream,” the idea that success in America derives from hard work instead of traditional power imbalances. Coates loved The Dukes of Hazzard growing up and offers the TV show as an example of how pop culture helps us look away from injustice and believe in “the Dream.”

“Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories.”

Pat Conroy seems to acknowledge Coates’s point by calling Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) a “singular, canonical moment in Southern mythmaking” (see Conroy, My Reading Life, 2010). For Baldwin, a belief in the myth of human inequality “protects moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality.” In 1955, Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son (1955) about history’s influence on the present:

“Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors…. Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”

Like Baldwin, Coates blames our lingering history—not individuals—for racial injustices today. “This is the import of the history all around us, though very few people like to think about it.” Coates explains to his son:

“The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from the police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight…. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.”

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates teaches his son about history, language, inequality, and opportunity. He reminds American readers that we can no longer look away.

“It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods.”

Let’s not forget our collective history as Americans. Let’s remember the good and the bad of how we arrived here. Let’s remember that Dr. King wrote to white clergymen in Birmingham from a narrow jail cell about the “interrelatedness of all communities and states,” proclaiming “[i]njustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (see King, Why We Can’t Wait, 1964). Today, let’s thank Coates for the reminder. Tomorrow, let’s not dare look away.

-Alex B. Johnson, Faulkner House Books

The Funniest Book of 2015: The World’s Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key

November 27, 2015March 29, 2016 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

This Thanksgiving, I gave thanks for a growing family, good friends, and The World’s Largest Man: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2015) by Harrison Scott Key.

The World’s Largest Man is the funniest book I’ve ever read. Also, it’s the only book that I’ve read almost entirely aloud, my wife and I only pausing to let uncontrollable laughter subside before reading the passage over again.
HSK World's Largest Man

Harrison Scott Key, The World’s Largest Man: A Memoir. HarperCollins, 2015. Signed, $26.99.

Key’s humor and creative nonfiction has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing, Image, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Outside, Reader’s Digest, and Salon. He is an editor at Oxford American where he writes a column entitled, “Big Chief Tablet”—a reference to Ignatius J. Reilly’s notes in A Confederacy of Dunces.

This first book pulls up a chair for Key at the table of Southern humor, a supper club still led by the prolific author and speaker, Roy Blount, Jr. The World’s Largest Man is a book-length love letter to his complicated and imposing, yet caring, father. It’s a collection of personal stories from childhood in rural Mississippi to adulthood in Savannah, all sewn together with threads of evolving relationships between Key and his parents and, in the later chapters, Key’s wife and daughters. However, there is nothing that I can say to enhance Key’s voice, so below is a sampling of what he brings to the table.

Key joined us in October for the 2015 Words & Music conference and signed a case of his books. Come buy one, and laugh as you read it aloud to your family over the holidays.

The first chapter begins with a context for storytelling:

They say the South is full of storytellers, but I am unconvinced. It seems more accurate to say that it is full of people who are very, very tired. At least this was my childhood experience is Mississippi, where there was very little to do but shoot things or get them pregnant. After a full day of killing and fornicating, it was only natural that everyone grew weary. So we sat around. Some would sit and nap, others would sit and drink. Frequently, there was drinking and then napping. The pious would read their Bibles, while their children would find a shady spot to know one another biblically, or perhaps give birth to a child from a previous knowing. Eventually, though, all the sitting led to talking, which supposedly led to all the stories, or at least the beginnings of stories.

In my family, we were unable to finish any. Until now.

His answer to the question, “What’s Mississippi really like?”

I can tell what they really want to ask is, What was it like to grow up around crazy people who believe that whatever can’t be shot should be baptized? But they are afraid to ask, because they are not yet sure if I am one of those people.

I am.

Kind of.

Not really.

Sometimes.

I do believe in the power of Jesus and rifles, but to keep things interesting, I also believe in the power of NPR and the scientific method. It is not easy explaining all this to educated people at cocktail parties, so instead I tell them that it was basically just like Faulkner described it, meaning that my state is too impoverished to afford punctuation, that I have seen children go without a comma for years, that I’ve seen some families save their whole lives for a semicolon.

While deer hunting with his brother, Bird:

I did what my brother said and climbed down, because while he may have lacked the ability to conjugate verbs, he would’ve known how to kill those verbs if they had been running through the forest. He was sixteen now, and he’d already killed his first, and his second, and third. Actually there was no telling how many he he’d killed. He obeyed so few hunting laws, largely as a result of his believing that he had Native American blood, which he believed absolved him from all state and federal hunting and drug statutes.

“Cherokee didn’t need no fucking hunting license,” he’d say.

What was the Trail of Tears like, I wanted to ask. Had that been hard, watching all his people die of the measles? But also, I wanted to believe. It was a story our grandmother had told us about being descended from a Cherokee chieftain, a version of the same fairy tale told to most poor whites and blacks across the South, a way of making us feel better about genocide and gambling. I’d heard that such blood could earn me a college scholarship, which I believed was my passage out of this alien land, while Bird used this story to explain his preternatural desire to learn things about animals by smelling their feces.”

As for hunting, Key prefers the grocery store:

Borden’s was our ice cream, and it came in a bucket the size of an above ground pool. How could hunting deer ever compare to hunting vanilla ice cream, which is generally docile and will let you pour syrup on it without running away?

His father’s beliefs:

My father believed a lot of crazy things: that men with earrings were queer, that the pope got to pick the Notre Dame football coach, that we couldn’t possibly have made all those expensive calls on the telephone bill. He would sit in his recliner and review the bill like some Old Testament scholar with a gift for high blood pressure….

Pop especially hated the Boy Scouts….

His only real belief about urban design was that houses should be far enough apart to let a man stand in his own front yard and relieve himself in relative privacy….

In my father’s house, having indoor pets was always a sign of moral decay, assumed to be clear evidence of mental illness and possibly drug addiction. If you wanted to get an animal into his house, you had to tell my father that you intended to eat it.

About learning to be a husband and a father:

If there is anything I learned out in the country, it was that the things that can kill you make you alive, and that you are never more alive than when you are getting beaten by your father because your mother thought you were dead.

And while to the casual observer I may not have turned out much like my father, I came to see in the first years of my marriage that I have proudly carried on this tradition of scoffing at women who are concerned for my safety, as I did with the woman I would marry….

Once we were married, she became even more like my mother, which I made sure not to tell her….

What I didn’t say was, I had very important reasons for throwing my child into the ceiling fan, and those reasons were that I wanted to see what would happen. This was my responsibility, as a man, to endanger the people I love in the service of knowledge that seems important at the time.

She asked me to stop it and all sorts of other silly things, such as to not let the baby stand on the counter and to keep the fireworks away from their faces and to lock the doors.

Lock the doors! Ridiculous!

-Alex B. Johnson, Faulkner House Books

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

November 6, 2015January 26, 2016 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ 1 Comment

Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandel. Vintage.

When I recommend this book to customers, they are often wary when I describe it as a work of science fiction. Somehow, sci fi has become a dirty word among a certain literary set, signifying socially awkward middle schoolers and Star Trek conventions. I want to join a growing group of readers in making a case for sci fi as an essential literary genre, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a perfect example.

A 2015 National Book Award finalist and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, this novel is undeniably literary in its scope. Mandel tells the story of the Georgia Flu, a deadly pandemic that wipes out 99.9% of the human population. The setting shifts among the weeks just before the pandemic, the days after, the years before, and twenty years afterwards. The tale follows Kristen, who was a child when the illness struck, and is now, twenty years later, a member of a traveling symphony, whose slogan, “Survival is insufficient,” comes from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. One of Kristen’s only memories of the time before the plague is from a production of King Lear, in which she was a child actor alongside the movie star Arthur Leander.

Leander, who is long-dead by the time of the novel’s present moment, links together a cast of unexpected characters who play roles of varying significance to the post-apocalyptic world: his best friend; his son; an ex-paparazzo; two ex-wives, one an actress, another an illustrator; and, of course, Kristen. As the story unfolds, the connections are revealed, while at the same time we learn more about the scope of this new world. Here, there is no electricity; no readily available medicine; no cities. People live in settlements, devoting their lives to the necessities of survival.

The traveling symphony is a light in this darkness, bringing performances of Shakespeare to inhabitants of the settlements, giving them a brief respite in the form of great art. This book, though post-apocalyptic, reminds the reader of the beauty and persevering spirit of humanity. Station Eleven gets at a fundamental truth of the human condition: the indomitable will not only to survive, but to thrive. This novel brings to mind a quote from Bertolt Brecht:

In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

-Jade Hurter, Faulkner House Books

What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

September 18, 2015January 26, 2016 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Frank Stanford has long been a kind of enigma in the poetry world: an underground legend, with a cult following, whose work has always been notoriously difficult to find. Though he died in 1978, at only 29 years old, this is the first time that his collected works have been available for purchase. What About This will hopefully usher in an era when Stanford’s work is rightfully regarded as seminal American poetry for generations to come.

Stanford is a writer unlike any other American poet of his time. His work is reminiscent in its scope and dialect of Whitman, but he was also heavily influenced by French and Latin American Surrealism. This collection includes not only all of Stanford’s published work (except for the epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, which is excerpted throughout the collection), but also his many unpublished manuscripts, one of which, titled Automatic Copilot, is composed entirely of poems written after the work of other artists. This manuscript is one of the great gifts of this book, as Stanford shows us the work that was most important to the creation of his own art. His poem “Cave of the Heart,” after Lorca, exemplifies that surreal, almost Romantic influence:

            Drenched in the lost blood of the moon, yawning

           In the furrows turned after dark, your thick legs long as feathers,

            Stout as brooms, the earth you sleep on

            Too young to call a grave.

Stanford was constantly in conversation with the work of other poets, while at the same time forging his own unique place in American poetics. He used local diction from his ancestral homes of Mississippi and Arkansas, illuminating a world often unseen by the majority of America. Throughout his collections Stanford writes “Blue Yodel” poems; for example, “Blue Yodel of Her Feet” in the collection You:

            Your chest gives ground

            Like an island on a river

            And as they yodel in the song of songs

            Your nipples taut as raisins

            Killdeers try to fly from your eyes

            I wish I could nail your shoes to the floor

            And lose your socks

Stanford combines, in poems like this, the surreal, the local, the beautiful, and the mundane, building it all up to create a narrative of love that seems something out of a dream. The poem is a “yodel,” a mountain song echoing, yet it is about a woman’s feet, literally her lowliest part. Stanford does not differentiate between the high and the low; rather, he sees the poetry in everything, and reveals it to the reader through inventive language and free-flowing form.

In Constant Stranger, perhaps the strongest of his published manuscripts, Stanford writes of love and death as equally strange and familiar, the two most inevitable aspects of life, which haunt his poetics in equal measure. This collection begins with “Death and the Arkansas River,” a long poem in which death is portrayed as a sort of local legend, who is simultaneously powerful and quotidian:

            Some say you can keep an eye

            Out for Death,

            But Death is one for fooling around.

            He might turn up working odd jobs

            At your favorite diner.

            He might be peeling spuds.

These poems are truly, in the words of the New York Times’ Dwight Garner, “death-haunted.” It is impossible to wholly separate the work from the life of the artist, whose death at 29 of three self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the heart, as well as his precocity and style, make him comparable to a sort of American Rimbaud. In the poem “Time Forks Perpetually toward Innumerable Futures in One of Them I Am Your Enemy,” Stanford begins with the line, “I am going to die.” He goes on,

            Death is an isthmus, you can get there on foot.

            But love had made its island.

            …

            Tell it:

            There is a fear without age or Christ

            That goes through us

            Like moonshine in a coil.

Stanford consistently takes those two most ancient poetic themes–love and death, that which is most feared and most desired–and infuses them with the freshness of his language and imagery. These poems are suffused with images of the Ozarks: the moon shining on water, boats, catfish and alligator gar, trucks and small-town bars. To read his figuration regarding the moon, in particular, is an almost transcendent experience. For example, in “Women Singing When Their Husbands Are Gone,” from Ladies From Hell:

            Flies wanting a warm place to stay

            And the threequarter moon

            Quieter than a child slicing a melon

            Like dirt smeared over with seeds

And in the titular “What About This,”

Things are dying down, the moon spills its water.

Dewhurst says he smells rain.

In these poems, the moon, like love and death, becomes more than a symbol; it is almost a character in itself. The poet constantly doubles back over and around the same themes and images, creating a kind of dreamscape of Southern mountain surreality. There is something undeniably sublime about the best of Stanford’s work. This is the kind of book to read before bed, so that his images may permeate your dreams.

-Jade Hurter, Faulkner House Books

Hannah Sanghee-Park’s The Same-Different

July 27, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

The Same-Different. Hannah Sanghee Park. LSU Press, 2015. 16.00.

The first full length collection by poet Hannah Sanghee-Park, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, is a book that forces the reader toward truth through language. Park pushes at linguistic boundaries in order to wring fresh meaning out of her words. In the first section, “The Same-Different,” the poems are built almost entirely on wordplay. For example, “And A Lie” begins,

I’ll take the untrue,

the tried and true, the ruing

and the ruining. And you?

Here we see Park’s ability to find truth in language based not only on meaning, but on sound, that most basic quality of speaking and writing. These are definitely poems to read aloud, to fully appreciate the use Park has made of rhyme, alliteration, and pun. These poems are almost Medieval in their dependence on aurality, but Park also manages to make the alliteration and rhyme distinctly modern.

These are poems about language and truth, but they are also poems about love and loss. The reliance on form belies a collection of work that is deeply sad, mourning the loss of a lover. In section II, “A Mutability,” the poems become more outright in their emotional content. In “The Deer Woman in December,” Park writes,

Your touch was all it took. Nothing to do

but now move on. No use aching over

something there that never did begin.

This second section, made up on sonnets based on myth, is my favorite in the book. This is the kind of thing poetry is for: timeless forms and themes made new, much like suffering is made new each time it is experienced. Park makes fairy tale of loss in poems like “The Fox-Bead in May,” which ends,

And every day they kissed to swap the bead

and for a month he waned and wans,

and when he learned the truth about her tongue,

he downed the bead: her true form a nine-tailed

fox who could have turned human, had he kissed on.

The final section of the book, “Fear,” is made up of one long poem titled “Preface to Fear/False Spring.” This is the most confessional section in the book. The wordplay is still prevalent, but here the speaker’s pain is not clouded by it, but rather brought into sharper relief. Park writes,

I amuse you for only so long.

So long–

To fear the past’s grasp on the future.

Everything must and will come to its end.

This is a book that is both linguistically stunning and emotionally wrenching. Park brings out the best in what poetry has to offer, delving into the mysterious truths of language while also reminding us of the painful truths of being human.

Tom Cooper’s The Marauders

June 24, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

The Marauders. Tom Cooper. Crown, 2015. 26.00. Call us or visit us to buy a copy!

In his debut novel, local author Tom Cooper delves into the heart of the Bayou in the aftermath of the BP oil spill. This story follows Lindquist, a one-armed oxycontin-addicted shrimper searching for Jean LaFitte’s treasure in the thick and swampy backwoods of Louisiana’s Barataria region. Along the way, he becomes involved with a cast of characters converging on the Bayou from New Orleans to New York in a time of national emergency, when Louisianans are left to fend for themselves in the wake of an environmental crisis.

Cooper is quick to paint a realistic portrait of the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting on one another for money. The characters in this book are all deeply flawed, forced to make bad decisions out of poverty and physical suffering. Desperation, Cooper shows, can drive a man to do just about anything. Cosgrove, for example, finds himself involved in a drug stealing operation with a man he meets while doing community service in New Orleans–community service that consists of sprucing up a dying woman’s home so it will be worth money when the city reclaims it, and stealing her valuables from the attic while they’re at it. The novel begins with two murderous twins, the Toup brothers, debating whether or not to murder Lindquist for his innocent forays into the swamp, where the Toups grow hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of marijuana. The teenage Wes Trench meets Lindquist after he leaves his father’s shrimping boat, in a fight brought on by the tensions of the oil spill, which has left the residents of the Barataria destitute, depending for their livelihoods on a shrimp trade that has dried up. Wes’s mother drowned during Katrina, when his father insisted against her will that they stay in the Bayou to weather the storm. Grimes grew up in the Barataria and hated every minute of it, leaving for New York as soon as he could. He is back in his hometome representing BP, getting desperate fisherman to sign gag orders in exchange for $10,000.00. And Lindquist is broke, divorced, with an estranged daughter who works as a stripper and visits him only for money, depending on pain medicine to get him through the physical agony of a lifetime of backbreaking work on shrimp boats, for hardly any money.

Cooper manages to take this cast of characters and weave them into a complex and vivid portrayal of life in the modern Barataria. The setting is one of the most compelling parts of the book: for many readers, the swamps are a distant dream. In the city it is easy to forget that there are wild places just a half an hour away, where alligators grow larger than men and poisonous snakes slip through the brackish tides. But after the oil spill, none of this is left untouched: this book is suffused with the scent of crude oil rising from the bayou, fish belly-up in the water, pelicans soaked in petroleum. The characters are quirky, often funny, lovable in their own messed-up ways, but reading about the state of the swamp is truly heartbreaking, and gives this story its weight.

Although this is in many ways a book about the Barataria after the oil spill, Cooper never lets us forget that we are in Louisiana, where a kind of magic, at least in the fictional world, might always have its small victories over the grating of reality. All the seemingly fantastical elements of Louisiana lore come to life in this story, from killer alligators to voodoo curses to Jean LaFitte’s long-lost treasure. And this is the crux of the tale: Louisiana is a place that cannot be defeated, even in the face of years of tragedy. The swamps hold something magical, something terrifying and intangible that refuses to break, even under the weight of crude oil, poverty, and flood waters.

Doing the Devil’s Work

February 7, 2015February 7, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Bill Loehfelm. Doing the Devil’s Work. Sarah Crichton Books, 2015. 26.00. Stop by Faulkner House Books or call us to purchase your copy!

Bill Loehfelm’s newest novel, Doing the Devil’s Work, the third in the Maureen Coughlin series, is both thrilling and gritty, a story you will want to devour in one sitting, but which will stay with you for days afterward. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the book’s sense of place is created with hyper-realist precision. From an Audubon Park mansion to a Central City sidestreet to Coughlin’s own home in the Irish Channel, Loehfelm takes the reader on a tour of the city through the eyes of a cop who has recently moved here from Staten Island. Loehfelm includes a murder outside F&M’s, an interview at the Rose Nicaud, and a late night drinking at Ms. Mae’s, among other local markers. This book never lets you forget its setting, and locals and tourists alike will enjoy this gripping journey through what might be the closest thing to the real contemporary New Orleans ever portrayed in fiction.

In this installment of the series, Maureen has finished her police training and is finally a real New Orleans cop, but she is far from out of the woods. The department, and the city, is rife with corruption. They are understaffed, publicly disliked, and overworked, and these obstacles, as well as departmental politics and unwanted attention from the federal government after the 2013 consent decree, frustrate any neat solution to the murder mystery that begins with a dead body in an abandoned Central City home. Maureen finds herself torn between her instincts and a department that encourages her to stay out of it. And as an isolated murder quickly spirals into something much bigger, Maureen struggles to toe the line of police department ethics and politics while doing all she can to solve the crime.

Maureen herself is a character worth spending time with. She is both gutsy and empathetic, and her cop instincts are what drive this plot forward. Though she is no saint, Maureen is unphased by the social hierarchies of her newly adopted city, and her integrity is near unshakeable. As she says to her colleague, “The consent decree is going to change everything. That old-boy network stuff, that who-you-knew-in-high-school shit is going out the window.” Her New York attitude reflects the very real changes happening in a city that sometimes feels as if it being forcibly dragged into the twenty-first century, for better and for worse. And as a female protagonist, Maureen’s sharp tongue and tough attitude, not to mention her competence as a police officer, are nothing short of refreshing. Both her flaws and her virtues are realistic. Loehfelm is a master of characterization. He writes dialogue that is quick and witty, and from this dialogue spring dazzlingly realized characters.

From the police department, to the characters, to the city itself, this is a book in three dimensions: sparklingly real, never romanticized, never gratuitous. Doing the Devil’s Work is a highly satisfying read. My only regret is the wait for the sequel.

Calvino’s Cosmicomics

January 23, 2015February 7, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Italo Calvino. The Complete Cosmicomics. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. $24.00. Call (504) 524-2940 or visit us to purchase a copy!

This beautiful new edition of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics brings together all of the Cosmicomics for the first time in one place, including a few stories that have never before been translated into English. If you have never read these stories before, you are in for a treat: Calvino’s vision of a primordial universe as playground for his protagonist Qfwfq is transportative. We follow Qfwfq and his friends from the Big Bang through to the creation of life on earth and evolution. One of the most beautiful stories is the first, “The Distance of the Moon,” in which Qfwfq remembers when the moon passed so close to earth that he and his companions would take a boat out to the sea and climb a ladder to its surface. He tells us,

On those nights the water was very calm, so silvery it looked like mercury,

and the fish in it, violet-coloured, unable to resist the Moon’s attraction,

rose to the surface, all of them, and so did the octopuses and the saffron

medusas. There was always a flight of tiny creatures–little crabs, squid, and

even some weeds, light and filmy, and coral plants–that broke from the

sea and ended up on the Moon, hanging down from that lime-white ceiling,

or else they stayed in midair, a phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off,

waving banana leaves at them.

Calvino’s prose is where poetry and science mingle, and these stories, collected for the first time in their entirety, tell not only of the creation of the universe, but of love and loss. These tales are richly imagined, and the stunning images of the early universe as envisioned by Calvino will stay with you for a long, long time.

Andy Young’s All Night It Is Morning

January 4, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Andy Young. All Night It Is Morning. Diálogos Books, 2014. Call (504) 524-2940 or visit us to purchase a copy!

Faulkner House Books wishes you all a happy and healthy 2015. We are beginning the New Year with a review of local poet Andy Young’s new collection from Diálogos Books, All Night It Is Morning. If you haven’t yet committed to a new year’s resolution, reading more local writers and supporting your local literary community is a great way to kick off 2015. And Young’s book is a fantastic place to start.

All Night It Is Morning is a book rich with beauty and disaster. Young, who was born in West Virginia, has spent most of her adult life in New Orleans, and lived for two years in Cairo after marrying into an Egyptian family, weaves together narratives of Katrina, the Egyptian revolution, the BP oil spill, and mining disasters in a way that feels surprisingly seamless. The poems are organized not by topic or time period, but organically, so that poems from different places and times are juxtaposed throughout the book. The reader is immersed in what becomes a single narrative of the human experience. Young’s language is precise and careful, creating a kind of restrained lushness of landscape, in which no word is superfluous.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is a three-part poem titled Cleopatra. In it, Young details Cleopatra’s pregnancy, creating a stunning narrative of a woman whose womb holds, literally, the future of Egypt. It is an apt conceit for a modern Egypt transformed by a revolutionary younger generation. Young writes, in the voice of Cleopatra,

His empire is my body now.

Sovereign, he proclaims

me ill or well.

I bow to the triumvirate

of his metu,

sinew, flesh

to the advancing armies

of his blood.

And yet, as the reader knows, Ptolemy Philadephus will not fulfill this destiny. Cleopatra and Marc Antony will commit suicide and Octavian will conquer the empire, torturing the orphaned royal children by forcing them to walk through the streets in heavy chains. Even children are not spared the horrors of war. In As You Sleep, the Dead Multiply, Young juxtaposes the casualties of war with the innocence of a new baby:

Your infant face is still

like glass as the children

of Qana are wiped of their dust.

Young does not shy away from the brutality of revolution, but neither does she deny that it is essential. In Warning, she lists the inconveniences of revolution:

the revolution is not

good for personal hygiene

not good for sleep not good

for business the revolution is not

good for bill paying…

And so on. The poem ends, “Though poetry is fine,” reminding the reader that poetry is more than a quotidian pleasure; it is essential, and becomes even more essential in times of upheaval.

Her poems about Katrina illustrate this truth as well, that poetry is sometimes the only coherent way to respond to tragedy. Her poem Lower Nine is a dirge for the Lower Ninth Ward, for the lives and homes lost in the flooding. She writes,

the moon a smudge above the wreckage

here is the peace of the grave

….

oh lady of ruins, your head crushed to dust

where are the ones you have no eyes to see

where did they go, dragging their bags

across the bridge to find ground

where do they rest if they rest if they rest

and where would they be if they returned

the canal and its ships drift on, drift on

the canal and its ships drift on

Young looks to tragedy with a panoramic vision, seeing both the egrets, “white as bone,” and the “store lifted onto a truck.” The commerce of the canal goes on even in the face of horror, of death, of loss, but poetry immortalizes that which has been washed away.

In this book, Young gives beautiful insight into what it means to love and be a part of places that are beset by environmental and human tragedy. And for her, inevitably, tragedy is bound up with a kind of triumph: the poet’s voice rises from the ashes, the community rebuilds, the lives of the dead are celebrated, the people fight for freedom, the landscape, once broken, heals. But our responsibility to work for a better world always remains. The stakes are unavoidably high: as she writes in Deepwater Horizon, the second of her Oil Sonnets series,

The earth will not die, though it

might shrug off a continent,

convert and re-form us: fossil and dross.

In this beautiful collection, Young reminds us that we do not deserve the world if we are not willing to fight for it.

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