Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Independent and University Presses FEATURED IN THIS E-MAIL: * "Bad Jews" by Gerald Shapiro * "House Fires" by Nancy Reisman * "The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldman" by Ingeborg Bachmann * "Taking the Wall" by Jonis Agee * "Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958-1998" by Clarence Major "Bad Jews" by Gerald Shapiro Publisher: Zoland Books http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1581950128/entertainmentsit In Gerald Shapiro's second collection of short fiction, the protagonists aren't bad people, exactly--they're just bad Jews, the kind who haven't darkened a synagogue door in decades, who in childhood endured Hebrew school as if it were one of the 10 biblical plagues. When Kenneth Rosenthal sets out to paint the plagues, in fact, he ends up adding two extra ones: "Call Waiting" and "Lack of Available Parking." Needless to say, the addition enrages the backers of the Kissner Prize for Jewish Art, which Rosenthal wins in spite of his overwhelming obscurity. ("Oregon! What an ironic place to live!" cries one of the judges.) Ad man Leo Spivak, on the other hand, sees himself as merely one more in "a long line of bad Jews, an age-old dynasty of skeptics and know-nothings, eaters of pork chops and treyf..." Nonetheless, in the title story he gives his father what's pitched to him as a "traditional" Jewish funeral, and in the process of reciting the Kaddish finds within himself a "bittersweet well of memory": "He could hum along, at least, and that had to count for something." Meanwhile, in "At the Great Divide" and "Shifman in Paradise," Spivak's coworker plays tough after a diagnosis of cancer. The patient's dirty little secret, however, is that he is actually enjoying himself--especially since his illness allows him easy access to the Teutonic charms of Greta Braunschweig. Previously, "if he touched her in anything resembling an intimate spot, she'd fix him with a dark Gestapo-like glare that made Shifman want to cry, 'My papers are in order!'" If these heroes share anything, it's that they feel most Jewish under duress. Illness, anti-Semitism, death, a sharp blow to the head from a garden rake--any of these are enough to drive them into the arms of their ancestors. Shapiro, obviously, is a very funny writer, but he also offers up moments of surprising pathos, pitch-perfect for the stories they inhabit: flocks of homing pigeons "floating up into the sky like ashes" before remembering their way home; the painting Rosenthal does in a dream, in which his ex strains to hold back Abraham's murdering arm; Spivak's apology to his wife, beamed through the Flaxman Voice Transformer Deluxe so that he sounds like a choked-up Gregory Peck. Shapiro may have the timing of a borscht-belt comedian, but his heart is conspicuously in the right place. If anyone can make slapstick a convincing agent of moral redemption, he's the man. --Mary Park "House Fires" by Nancy Reisman Publisher: University of Iowa Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0877456925/entertainmentsit Does the world really need yet another book of short stories about families in crisis? If the author in question is Nancy Reisman, the answer is yes. The winner of the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award, "House Fires" is the work of a gifted young writer quietly pushing the boundaries of domestic realism. In the title story, for instance, she intercuts the sureties of film criticism with scenes of a family falling into chaos after a daughter's death: And yet for me there is still the dream of making internal life visible. Of finding characters I can believe in.... There is the dream of wholeness. The dream of reconciliation. And there is my desire for a simple plot, for the unity that never quite arrives in daily life, for true closure. These days, I look for the sort of closure that is not false and is not death. Is there such a thing? In another's hands, these allusions would verge on the self-conscious; in Reisman's, the language of film is an intrinsic part of how her character frames--and thus understands--her world. Fiction's closure is false, she seems to suggest, but it is also necessary. There's little else we can do after tragedy but create meaning where there is none to find. Three loose groupings of stories follow the compressed, cinematic anguish of the title story. The first, called the "Buffalo Series," examines the complicated emotions between siblings in an upstate New York Jewish family; the less successful second group limns a series of young, aimless lives along the "Northeast Corridor"; and in the "Jessie Stories," a would-be beatnik goes off to Harvard, runs away to San Francisco, and eventually finds happiness with a nice Jewish girl. Reisman's vision of family can be bleak; this collection includes what are perhaps some of the most God-awful domestic dinners on record. (Most notably, the holiday meal of the aptly titled "Sharks," in which the protagonist Matt's stepmother makes a pass at him in the kitchen while his father glowers on the couch, "half-asleep or enraged, Matt thinks, both look the same on Charles.") Yet throughout, Reisman casts a compassionate eye on even her most unsympathetic characters. It's difficult to find heroes or villains here--only characters you can believe in and internal life made visible. --Mary Park "The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann" by Ingeborg Bachmann Publisher: Northwestern University Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0810112043/entertainmentsit Perhaps it's something in the air, or an ironic additive found exclusively in the Danube, but Central Europe seems to breed a certain kind of mordant and malicious stylist. Ingeborg Bachmann, who perished in a fire in 1973, surely fits into this lineage. A poet, librettist, essayist, and fiction writer, she made postwar Austria the object of her skeptical scrutiny. She saw a nation with blood on its hands and corruption in its heart, not to mention an ongoing gender war between Mann and Madchen. And nowhere did she address these conditions with more passion and penetrating wit than in "The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann." Neither work was quite finished at the time of Bachmann's death. But in both cases, translator Peter Filkins has assembled manuscripts and variants into a coherent whole, and turned the author's high-density prose into eminently readable English. "The Book of Franza" represents a pitched battle between the sexes--or more particularly, between the eponymous heroine and her manipulative psychiatrist of a husband. How could she have overlooked debris of Dr. Leopold Jordan's previous marriages? "Only now do I wonder about the other women and why all of them disappeared without a sound, why one no longer left the house, why another turned on the gas, while I myself am the third who amended herself with this name, becoming the third Frau Jordan." The novella-length "Requiem for Fanny Goldmann" transposes the same concerns--silence and sex, language and corruption-- into a lighter key, with a more satiric touch. But here, too, the heroine is seduced and abandoned. And again the accumulation of bad faith and broken promises seems like a national rather then merely personal affliction. Early and late, Bachmann seemed always to survey a defeated world. But her work remained adamantly alive to the end, which is just the sort of victory that every writer (and every reader) desires. --Ingrid Broun "Taking the Wall" by Jonis Agee Publisher: Coffeehouse Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566890888/entertainmentsit "You pay for your mistakes in racing," one of Jonis Agee's characters tells us. "You miss the set-up and take the wall." As one might expect, her short story collection "Taking the Wall" is full of men and women paying for their mistakes--not to mention their dreams, obsessions, and even ordinary bad luck. In this case, all four frequently boil down to the same thing: cars. The narrator of "You Know I Am Lying" sells the family farm to keep racing; the NASCAR devotee in "The Pop-Off Valve" ignores his marriage while his wife contemplates an affair; and the crippled ex-driver of "Over the Point of Cohesion" can't stop recalculating the mechanics of his final crash. Even their families aren't exempt from the madness. Managing a salvage business while her husband races, the narrator of "Good to Go" looks out over 20 acres of junked cars and has her own, peculiarly automotive Proustian moment: "It only took ten days to get us married. I was sixteen. Donnie was nineteen. But that isn't the car I'm talking about." These stories inevitably start with a rush ("I'm sorry, I always go with men with bad teeth, I want to tell my daughter, who is sobbing long distance at one thirty in the morning") and end just when you think they've left the gate ("He hoped that somehow, when he finally crawled into bed tonight, he could think of a way to convince Marie that he was as much Elvis as she might want or need on Christmas Day"). In between, the prose careens forward at a truly vertiginous speed, as Agee's characters learn that sometimes domestic life is the most spectacular car crash of all. You don't have to be a NASCAR fan to appreciate these powerful, fast-moving tales--just a student of human nature and its boundless ability to endure. --Mary Park "Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958-1998" by Clarence MajorPublisher: Copper Canyon Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556590903/entertainmentsit "Death ... is not all / she's cracked up to be," Clarence Major announces in "Love Against Death"--and indeed, the rest of "Configurations" makes a valiant effort to knock the old girl down a peg or two. Death may be a constant companion in this volume, but she's never allowed to take control; for this poet, you must accept mortality--not let it haunt you--to be truly alive. His poems approach this unlikely form of hope in numerous ways--through bursts of metaphoric images, through patterns of music and formal rhythmic structure, and through narrative interaction with others on the same inescapable journey. In the book's strongest pieces, such as "Love Against Death," all of these devices work together with moving results: With our love, dear, we fight death, and we fight unclear meanings. They are like air released in a broken scream-- at three in the morning when your legs feel wooden. Embrace night odors. Embrace each other. Rub your hands against the roughness of the whitewashed wall. For now, you are alive. While Major's poems are born out of the William Carlos Williams school of plain speech, they are equally inflected by bebop's syncopated rhythms and improvisational style. In this striking overview of his career thus far, Major fights both death and unclear meanings in language of uncompromising clarity and precision. For now, he seems to suggest, this is what it means to be alive. --A.J. Rathbun ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Literature & Fiction section at Literature & Fiction ******
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