Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Independent and University Presses If you love trouble, you'll love this month's small-press picks. A murdering despot tells all in Richard Lourie's "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin"; Judy Doenges's characters face off with the law--and their families--in "What She Left Me"; Melitta Breznik performs a fictional autopsy of a family gone terribly wrong; and Shena Mackay takes an acerbic look at love, talent, and delusions thereof in the London art scene. Finally, we offer an ode to TroubleTown itself--a new edition of E.B. White's classic essay "Here Is New York." "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin" by Richard Lourie Publisher: Counterpoint Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582430047/entertainmentsit In "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin," the translator and novelist Richard Lourie lets that chuckling despot tell his own story, from his obscure origins in the Georgian sticks to his bureaucratic apotheosis as ruler of all Russia. In part Stalin simply wants to get his life down on paper. But as he informs the reader, he's also trying to launch a preemptive strike against his archnemesis, Leon Trotsky, who's currently compiling a scurrilous (i.e., fundamentally accurate) biography of Stalin in Mexico City. Given this scenario, many a novelist would have turned Uncle Joe into an articulate monster, a kind of Bolshevik Iago. Lourie takes a different route. Oh, his narrator does have a gift for poetic doublespeak, which comes into play during his ruminations on the 1938 Moscow show trials: "In a certain highly literal sense of the word, most of these men are not guilty of most of these crimes. They may, however, be guilty of many other crimes, crimes for which the state has decided to spare itself the expenses of a trial but which would have cost them their head in any case." But Lourie's Stalin is very much a meat-and-potatoes stylist--perhaps "blood-and-guts" would be the more appropriate epithet, considering the number of corpses he leaves in his wake. His raw efficiency as a narrator does have its blackly comic charms, however, and his race to the biographical finish with Trotsky gives the book a powerful momentum. (Students of history will recall that the narrator's rival was brutally cut off in mid-sentence.) And what would be the moral of Stalin's story, at least in Lourie's version? There are two, which should surprise nobody: "Always watch your back" and "It's lonely at the top." --James Marcus "What She Left Me: Stories and a Novella" by Judy Doenges Publisher: Middlebury College http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0874519373/entertainmentsit The characters in Judy Doenges's edgy "What She Left Me" are self-appointed outsiders: gamblers, petty criminals, men and women on the fringe of both gay and straight worlds. Chic, gin-soaked mothers appear throughout these stories, as do cops, guns, dubious inheritances, and a pervasive sense of emotional anomie. In "MIB," the narrator's lover abandons her in search of someone who "lives here, outside, with the rest of us." Even the sense of family offered by the lesbian community is suspect. "As far as I was concerned"--according to the narrator of "Incognito"--"gay people made up an amorphous, loose, happy group, pairing up for love but still remaining outlaws. This family business seemed too familiar and dangerous. An old idea like that made the present very confusing." Of course, it's hard to write about alienation without leaving the reader disconnected as well. The two best stories in Doenges's collection sidestep this problem by anchoring themselves firmly in the physical world. In the title piece, a waitress named Sandra obsessively catalogs the contents of her dead mother's house: barware, swimsuits, two aging Great Danes, the father's leather address book that he abandoned along with his family. Doenges switches gears in the masterful final novella, "God of Gods," in which a touchingly unworldly butcher named Odin Tollefson struggles with the changing social landscape of Chicago in the '70s--and his own attraction to a male coworker. Odin is something Doenges's other characters are not: engaged, palpably eager to love, to be loved, and to do the right thing. His story concludes with the sweetly redemptive sight of a bed sheet being folded back: "To Odin it was as if the earth had burst open beneath him and brought forth a newly minted, gleaming city." It's the book's only happy ending, and its most satisfying one as well. --Mary Park "Night Duty" by Melitta Breznik Publisher: Steerforth Press http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/188364285X/entertainmentsit "Night Duty" gets off to a rather lurid start--the first sentence takes us into the middle of an autopsy--but it soon becomes apparent that Melitta Breznik is aiming for more than just shock value. As the novel moves from a graphic description of the meat and bones that make up the human body into the consciousness of the narrator (a young female physician), it sets up one of the central concerns of the book: the dichotomy between body and soul. Leaving the pathologist's laboratory to return to her ward, the physician passes an elderly man who is dying in a ward storeroom: "His wife is leaving as he gasps for air and his face turns a deeper and deeper shade of violet. Rats always leave a sinking ship; we are no longer used to being there when someone dies. I stay, his death doesn't really mean anything to me. It will gnaw at me later, right now there is nothing more I can do." The unnamed protagonist's sense of futility in her profession extends to her private life, as well; her job has returned her to the small Austrian town where she was born and raised and where her father, a hopeless alcoholic, is slowly dying. As she juggles the exhausting responsibilities of work with the exigencies of caring for her elderly relative, the narrative slips back and forth between memories of her childhood and the present moment. Neither place is particularly hopeful. The victories are small: at age 60, the narrator's mother finally leaves her abusive husband and starts a modest life of her own; the narrator herself achieves some kind of rapprochement with her dying father; and the disappointments are great. Yet this spare, sad novel traces the contours of blighted lives sympathetically--resolutely, without pity. It is not about victims; it is simply about life. --Alix Wilber "The Artist's Widow: A Novel" by Shena Mackay Publisher: Moyer Bell Ltd. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559212292/entertainmentsit Many adjectives have been applied to the work of Shena Mackay, but "sentimental" is not one of them. "The Artist's Widow" is a fine example of Mackay's brand of acerbic storytelling--who else, one wonders, would have the chutzpah to end a novel with the death of Diana, neatly skewering popular sentiment about "the People's Princess" with her title character's dry remark that "we're in danger of genuine grief being whipped up into something ugly." Indeed, the line between genuine feeling and its ugly counterfeit is the underlying theme of Mackay's fifth novel, and she sets the tone right from the start as she plunges us into a retrospective of the work of recently deceased artist John Crane, attended by his friends and family. Chief among these are Lyris, his widow, also a painter, and Nathan, his great-nephew, an artist-poseur long on posturing and woefully short on talent. Lyris, who nurses no illusions about her relation, remembers him "as a little boy at a family party loading his paper plate with cocktail sausages, chocolate fingers, gherkins, cake and crisps until it collapsed, and with white powder on his nose at her husband's funeral." Nevertheless, she harbors a fondness for him. Nathan, on the other hand, regards her as an "old bat," but is willing all the same to suck up to her, his eye always cocked on the main chance. Eventually he manages to convince Lyris that there's a real bond of affection between them--an illusion that nearly costs her everything. But Lyris is not the only character suffering from delusions-- all are suffering in various degrees from a disconnect between what is real and what they'd desperately like to believe. Mackay masterfully mixes and mismatches her creations, leaving them with at least as many loose strings dangling as ones that have been tied up. Readers looking for an uncomplicated happy ending, beware: the world-view expressed in this gleefully black domestic comedy has far more in common with Evelyn Waugh's than Jan Karon's. --Alix Wilber "Here Is New York" by E. B. White Publisher: The Little Bookroom http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1892145022/entertainmentsit "On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." So begins E.B. White's classic meditation on that noisiest, most public of American cities. Written during the summer of 1948, well after the author and editor had taken up permanent residence in Maine, "Here Is New York" takes a fond glance back at the city of his youth, when White was one of the "young worshipful beginners" who give New York its passionate character. It's also a tribute to the sheer implausibility of the place--the tangled infrastructure, the teeming humanity, the dearth of air and light. Much has altered since White wrote this essay, yet in a city "both changeless and changing" there are things that will doubtless ring equally true 100 years from now. (To wit, "New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience--if they did they would live elsewhere.") Anyone who's ever cherished his essays--or even "Charlotte's Web"--knows that White is the most elegant of all possible stylists. There's not a sentence here that does not make itself felt right down to the reader's very bones. What would the author make of Giuliani's New York? Or of Times Square, Disney-style? It's hard to say for sure. But not even Planet Hollywood could ruin White's abiding sense of wonder: "The city is like poetry: it compresses all life ... into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines." This lovely new edition marks the 100th anniversary of E.B. White's birth--cause for celebration, indeed. --Mary Park ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Literature & Fiction section at Literature & Fiction
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