
I’m not inebriated…the buildings are. They’re barely standing up. They were about to sink into the streets that undulated chaotically, as if dark subterranean god moved them at their leisure. Santa Teresa is drunk….The archdiocese is drunk out of its gourd. The cathedral is high as a kite. The Metropolitan Chapel is inebriated. The churches are looped, and the civil buildings and convents are wasted. The city is drunk—-the entire city, the bells, the clocks, the staircases, the domes, the belfries, the streetlights, the crosses, absolutely everything…The only one who is sober is me.
When you’re drunk, everything and nothing makes sense. It’s a wonderful/horrible state of forgetting the world and remembering every bad and good thing that has come before. Part of the University of Texas’ Pan American Literature in Translation Series, And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Center is Gonzalo Celorio’s second novel. Originally written in 1999 this newly translated version from Dick Gerdes brings Celario's works to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Simultaneously brainy and sunk into the muck and grime of contemporary urban life it’s about alcoholism and lost chances and, oh hell, sit back and have a drink, there's a whole lot more....<< MORE >>
I may be wrong about my history, but I believe this is Rikki Ducornet’s first story collection in around ten years. So I was kind of pumped when I picked up the advance copy. I’ve been able to follow some of her work in the pages of literary journals. The first story in One Marvelous Thing, “Wild Child,” I recall appeared in AGNI, a very solid biannual out of Boston University. When another of the stories, “The Dickmare,” turned up in Tin House, I became pretty sure there would be a collection in stores before long, but it was still a while longer before Dalkey Archive announced it would be putting The One Marvelous Thing into print. All of this is a way of saying that Ms. Ducornet’s stories were pretty well road-tested before hitting the market.
If I had to pull together a list of my favorite short story writers from the last ten years, all of whom I’ve learned about through journals and quarterlies (stop reading the New Yorker if you want to find greatness), the names would be mostly women. Here goes, in no particular order: Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, and Rikki Ducornet.
The common thread here is that these women all write sublimely inventive stuff, and Rikki Ducornet is the veteran of the pack. The rock star, if you will.<< MORE >>
Pulp thrillers, procedural dramas, and cable news have steeped most stories of missing children in sensationalism and suspense. Not having any personal experience with such a tragedy, I’ve always just taken this version of events as reality. Efrem Sigel, in his second novel, explores the disappearance of a child by keeping a tight focus on character psychology but still giving us a whodunit. This approach is interesting and took me in a direction I wasn’t anticipating but in the end he isn’t fully able to deliver a strong plot when it’s wrapped in a even stronger character study.
The book "The Disappearance” centers on Joshua and Nathalie, New York transplants to a small town, whose son Daniel vanishes without a trace on a clear beautiful day. This is plot territory that numerous books have trod in the past but it's the turmoil and agony into which Daniel's disappearance thrusts the marriage that becomes the focus of Sigel's narrative...<< MORE >>


Here's a link to my Star Tribune review.

knew nothing about Micheline Marcom before picking up The Mirror in the Well. I confess that I read her newest novel for no better reason than it carried the Dalkey Archive seal, a simple right-angled spiral that rests at the base of the spine, a conjuration of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the first few turns of a hedge maze, an icon that’s synonymous with quality fiction. Ms. Marcom’s work validates and revalidates my claim about the press.