Mermaids and other monsters: October week three round-up

Story:

The Belle Isle Mermaid and the Rumrunner - At Passages North, Mary Alice Rapas takes us on a trip through Belle Isle's rumrunner days, when a sad mermaid passes her time in a grungy tank, and the rumrunner who falls for her. An enchanting tale, bizarre yet believable, romantic but not maudlin. Good work all!

Fairy Tales:
I've been reading Turkish fairy tales. Some are eerily similar to European tales, but they all have their own logic. The Rose-Beauty, for instance, starts with a simple premise: The youngest daughter wants to marry. From there it goes through a woodcutter, a prince, tears of pearls, death, switched brides, proxy childbirth, resurrection, and a happy ending.

Culture:
Over at Hobart Pulp, Matt Sailor contiunes his excellet series of great moments in cinematic drinking. This time, he examines world-weary drunk Morris Buttermaker in the classic kid-sport movie The Bad News Bears, which is anything but a kid's movie.

Schlock Movie trailer of the week:
I, Frankenstein looks like someone tossed the goth public domain library and every action-horror cliche into a Yahtzee cup and threw what came out - Frankenstein, Gargoyles, a centuries old supernatual feud, some hot babe - into a screen-writing guide, then threw money at a CGI sweatshop to do the heavy lifting. In other words, a perfect Hollywood movie.

This actually looks like a pretty good airplane movie, actually. Something to watch while dozing off.

Weekly Round-up

I'm trying a new feature here to get myself re-interested in this blog. It's a weekly roundup of things I find interesting on the web. I'll try to keep it focused on books, stories, and publishing, though I may throw in the occasional movie trailer or cat video, just to drive my links up. Enjoy!

Stories:
Nobody's Stranger
Maud Newton has a story in two parts on medium.com. It's described as 'Miami noir love story.' It starts out like the kind of story that would be dismissed critically as a male fantasy of easy sex with a gorgeous woman if a man had written it. And parts seemed designed to act as a discussion starter of inverted gender roles in po-mo fiction rather than as an actual story. But some part of me really liked this story, and it stuck with me, so I'm going to say you should read it as well.

The Impossible Man
On another end of the gender spectrum, in the Paris Review, J Robert Lennon writes about a guy's guy, in trouble with his girlfriend, who takes a walk and loses his memory. When it comes back, he forgets all the parts of himself that weren't very nice. Things go downhill from there.

You Invent this Incredible Invention
From Pank magazine, an incredible story with a great voice that illustrates an amazing worldview. You could call it the tale of a geek and the woman who loves him, but it's more than that. Molly O'Brien, stand up and take a bow!

Books:
It's compilation season for the year's best short stories. The Best American Short Stories 2013 is out. After a brief glance, it looks like once again The New Yorker, Tin House, and Granta are still in charge of American short fiction. The O Henry Prize Stories collection is also out, and they do a slightly better job of looking beyond the big names but not much. For more obscure stories by lesser known but no less talented authors, The Pushcart Prize is your best bet.

Dumb movie trailer of the week:
The Desolation of Smaug: The Hobbit Part II (or, The Lord of the Rings -2)
This movie has it all. Dragons! Giant Dwarf-knuckle walkways! Suspenseful droning music! Hot he-dwarves. Hot she-elves! Untippable barrel racing with whitewater ninja-fights! Eyebrows of all shapes and sizes! Gold-pile luge racing! Me wants it, precious!




No, but seriously, I need to see the physics behind those barrels. And the eyebrows.


Cats!

Jack's Boys Trailer - Give it a look!

Jack's Boys was my second novel, and the first one that's worth reading. It's about the kids of a man who turns out to be the lost genius Beat poet of the sixties, and what happens when his poems are discovered and published.

It's set in a fictional version of White Bear Lake, Minnesota and Binghamton, New York, where I was living at the time, which was, oh God, twenty years ago. Holy cow that's a long time.

Yes, that is my voice you hear doing the voiceover. Sorry about that. Next book, I'm gonna kickstarter me some voice talent.

If you want a free eBook copy, just send me your email address and what brand reader you have - nook, kindle, or whatever, and I'll drop it in the email for you.

Or, if you have 3 bucks to spare, go buy it on Amazon (click here) and avoid the hassle of all that file copying nonsense.

Cheers!



PS: Also, you can download it in pdf, ePub or mobi format. Enjoy!

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Tournament of Books Review

Manhood, Football, the Media, and Cheerleaders

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain

Being one in a probably never-to-be-completed series on the Morning News Tournament of Books, scheduled to start in March

A squad of American soldiers deployed in Iraq find themselves national heroes, circa 2004. They were the victors of a brief, glorious firefight on the streets of Iraq that FoxNewsed them all to superstardom at a time when the national psyche could use a lift. So they return home on a 'victory tour' that includes adoring crowds, an over-promising agent offering a movie deal, and a semi-secret re-deployment to Iraq. Over the course of a single Thanksgiving Day, this novel unfolds in and around the confines of one of America's great secular cathedrals - old Texas stadium, during a football game between the Cowboys and the Bears.

From that brief run-down you can probably figure out that this book is a perfect storm of male jock culture,  military life, and a satire of American war-frenzy disguised as patriotism. It's a long, crazy trip with a dozen balls in the air, and Ben Fountain masterfully guides us through the whole thing. I'm kind of speechless at his accomplishment, really.


Last June, when I read this book, it easily held the coveted spot of Grebmar's Book of the Year for about two weeks. At that point I'd read some underwhelming things, and this one came across as heartfelt, richly imagined and executed, and amazing all at the same time. It's still in my top two or three, of course. But:

By the next week, a few flaws began to tarnish the award: 1) The cheerleader, Faison, is a typical male-genre fantasy woman, under-developed in character, existing mainly, to validate Billy's manhood and to offer herself as sexual salvation. 2) the owner of the Cowboys, a strange alternate of the real-life owner, is smarmily one-dimensional, as are, come to think of it, any characters not named Billy Lynn. 3) The end is actually quite good, though a single weird random act of cinematic wtf violence seemed completely unnecessary.

As I said, this was one of my favorite books of the year. Now, in the Tournament of Books, it faces a single elimination against two other Middle-East War on Terror books (neither of which I've read), and just from eyeballing, Billy Lynn faces an uphill battle to move on.

Tournament of Books 2013: The quick and dirty rundown

The Morning News recently announced the final list for their annual Tournament of Books, the only award where the judging is transparent and competition is nearly literal. This year, eighteen books will be entered into a playoff-style bracket, and each matchup will be judged by a celebrity reviewer whose only mission is to determine which book should advance to the next round. In the most general sense, that means which book is better, but in the Tournament of Books, as in most competitions, better does not necessarily mean advancement.

You can check out the entire list with summaries and links on my Goodreads page here. I'll be reposting reviews of books I've read here in the days approaching the tournament, and as soon as the brackets are announced I will make my semi-annual Uninformed Predictions. Although this year I've read a remarkable five books in the field, more than double last year's total.

Okay, let's take a thumbnail look at the shortlist: Books with stars (*) are ones I've read.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn *
A brilliant thriller, well written but a bit shaggy, with an end I found to be a bit tidy and disappointing.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green *
Two precocious cancer teens team up to fight the injustice and horror show that is Cancer.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff *
A minor disappointment. Hippies who grow up and try to stay hippies during the end of the civilized world.

HHhH by Laurent Binet 
Something to do with Nazis, World War II, and an assassination attempt.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich 
None of my attempts to read Erdrich have ended well.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti 
"... is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the..." zzzzzzz ... zzzzzz .... zzzz 

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes 
A.M. Homes is creepy and disturbing, but not in a way that makes me want to read her books.

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson 
This novel is set in Korea, where I've lived for two years, and I've only just now heard of it. My shame can only be excused by my illogical disdain for titles that use the template of "The X's [family member]." I will promptly shortlist this novel.

Ivyland by Miles Klee
Dark satiric sci-fi in a near-future dystopia? Sign me up!

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 
Part 2 of an epic medieval saga. On my longer list of "Books I should want to read."

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Iliad fan-fic from Patroclus's point of view. He and Achilles were lovers. Tragedy ensues. *Sigh*

Dear Life by Alice Munro 
Like seeing your elementary school teacher in the grocery store, it's always a surprise to find out Alice Munro exists outside The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. Like, for instance, she has her own books! Amazing.

Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple
The Family Road Trip goes to Antarctica. Why not?

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter *
My pre-tournament favorite. Perhaps the best book I read last year.

Building Stories by Chris Ware
Graphic Novel by a media darling. I'm nodding knowingly.

The sixteenth spot will be filled by the surviovor of a Pre-Tournament Playoff Round. All of these books are about America's citizen soldiers fighting the Afghan/Iraq adventure. A shame they have to come home and face more bloodshed in the Tournament of Books, but as they say, the Rooster demands blood. They are:

Fobbit by David Abrams
War as seen from the command center well behind the fighting.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain *
War as seen from soldiers home on leave, as heroes, at Dallas Cowboy Stadium, Thanksgiving Day. A frickin' riot. I loved this book.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
War as seen on the ground, by soldiers living and dying in combat.

Well, stay tuned for more! The tournament itself starts in March, but happy reading to those of you who enjoy it as much as I do.

Book Review: The Fault in our Stars, by John Green

The Fault in our Stars, by John Green: 

Moody, precocious Cancer Teens team up to fight hypocrisy, search out the meaning of the universe, converse with an utterly fallible God stand-in, and fall in love. Tragedy inevitably strikes. 

Much of this novel's success lies in its adherence to an emerging sub-cliche of cancer struggle, which is that the uber-cliche of cancer victims as stoic hero-fighters is itself an unrealistic bullshit tripe intended to solace those who don't have cancer. The feedback loop of heroic anti-heroes works pretty well, however, mainly due to the earnestness of Green's overall plot and prose, and only if your bullshit meter is properly calibrated for "Teen Fiction." 

Sure, The Fault in Our Stars is often overly clever. Sure, it's cloyingly romantic, and it's often manipulative in a way that its own heroes would cynically disdain. But none of that kept a certain middle-aged curmudgeon from tearing up a couple of times. You've been warned.

The new Man of Steel Trailer breakdown

A close reading of the new Man of Steel (Or, as I call it, Superman) Trailer.

Intro: Serious, somber music. Those of you hoping for a fun superhero movie, keep waiting.

:18 seconds
Some guy is floating kind of like Jesus, or Tom Hanks in Castaway.

:22
Whiny kid with agorophobia cries to mom for help. Mom enables his fear.

:25
Pencil bouquet. A blackboard. I'm getting flashbacks to college calculus. Will this movie assign me homework?

:40
Waves on rocks. Nothing says Superman more than waves on rocks.

:45
Guy looks guilty for saving a school bus from a lake. Wait, what?

More ominous black-screen transitions.

:50
Dad gives Clark a hard time for saving a school bus full of kids. Dad is not an enabler.

:59
Bearded guy with a faraway look in his eyes. Sort of a macho Bon Iver.

1:12
S stamp available at fine stamp stores everywhere.

1:19
A cape sighting on an ice flow. Music continues to be somber and joyless. I remember when superhero movies used to be fun. Like last summer.

Superman punches a mountain, flies really fast.

Dad is still preachy. Mom's advice to "Make things small" apparently meant nothing, as Superman is now in space.

1:50
Montage! Generic flames, a villain-like person. Maybe it's dad, come to teach Clark a lesson for saving that school bus full of kids. People running from explosions like every movie ever made.

Superman in handcuffs. Stop me before I save more lives!

Macho Bon Iver lifts something heavy.

2:00
Christopher Nolan's name solemnly invoked. So that's where the fun went...

2:30
Overstylized S, as if it were simple people would wonder where all the money went.

Fade to black.

No, seriously, this could be a good movie. Really, it could. It just looks a little serious. If I want serious, I'll go see Lincoln. So, I'm waiting with fingers crossed.