The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

I had known of Sherman Alexie as a Poet, but until I saw the movie “Smoke Signals” and noticed in the credits that it was based on this book, I had never read Alexie’s short stories. I seldom read fiction at all, but upon starting “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”, I was immediately enthralled. The book contains 22 short stories, which take place on or near the Spokane Reservation in Washington State. In “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven“, Sherman Alexie does for reservation life what Jack Kerouac did for the Beat Poetry movement in novels such as “The Dharma Bums“.

The main characters are Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, two very different people. Victor, a former high school basketball star is a popular figure, while Thomas is a storyteller looked upon largely with contempt or amusement. Still, their lives are intertwined with each other and everyone else on the reservation. Through stories of their families and relationships, Alexie paints a vivid picture of the reality of modern Native American life on and off the reservation. Powwows, fry bread, and fancydancing are interspersed with basketball, alcoholism, and poverty in stories that invoke strong feelings of poignancy and longing; along with fatalism and injustice. Even within the reservation community, tensions are present between traditionalists and non traditionalists; urban and reservation dwellers; employed and jobless. Yet a close sense of identity surges through the stories like a tide. Even those who leave the reservation are pulled inexorably back.

With a backdrop of wit and bleak humor, Alexie masterfully uses dream sequences, flashbacks, and diary entries. Narratives will seem surreal and random, and then suddenly merge into the same tale. His stories are as deeply moving and lyrical as his poetry. “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” will resonate strongly with anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, or who wants a glimpse into the world of contemporary reservation life.

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Best ‘New to Us’ Books of 2012: Sharon S.’s Picks

I love to read nonfiction as well as fiction, so in presenting my best “new to me” books for 2012, I decided to use the categories of my favorite nonfiction, my favorite “how to” book, my favorite biography, my favorite novel, and my favorite collection of short stories. (You can see the full list of books I have blogged, too.) — Sharon S.

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
I found this book to be deeply reassuring! It’s OK to have cluttered desks and crammed closets, say the authors, and in some cases it may even be beneficial (up to a point, of course). Abrahamson and Freedman present many examples of successful scientists, business owners, politicians, homemakers, and people from many other walks of life who spend that time they could have spent organizing being creative and productive instead. Also, staying loose and not locked in to one system allows us the freedom to adapt quickly to changing events.

Barefoot Running Step by Step by Roy Wallack and Ken Bob Saxton
You’ve got to be kidding, I thought when I first picked up this book, but I ended up being a convert. I’m no runner, so I tried barefoot walking instead (which Ken Bob says is just like running except you always have at least one foot on the ground). There’s no doubt in my mind—heel striking is a bad thing for your joints. When you learn how to bend your knees like Ken Bob suggests, your calves act as shock absorbers that preserve your joints. Of course, you can do this even with shoes on, but when your foot is not cushioned with a running shoe, you have a constant reminder not to bang that heel down! Also, it adds a new dimension to the experience to learn to place your feet lightly and actually feel the ground under them.

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg
Steinberg was tired of being a free-lance writer and wanted a job that had health insurance, so he answered an advertisement for a librarian position at a prison on the outskirts of Boston. He ended up with more than he bargained for. What is or should be the purpose of a library in such a place? In trying to help the prisoners learn and prepare for lives outside of prison, he often runs afoul of the rule-bound guards. On the other hand, in getting too emotionally involved with those he is helping, he finds himself in some difficult moral dilemmas. There is no easy answer to the question of why people end up in prison, nor is there an easy way to help them get out and stay out.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
This slim novel set on the Nebraska prairie at the beginning of the twentieth century contains some of the most moving scenes I have yet encountered in literature. It is a story about love, friendship, betrayal, and the price of self-knowledge that readers will not easily forget. I am amazed at Cather’s ability to create characters that seem so real to me that I feel like I have actually met them. See my full review.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri also creates memorable, realistic characters in these stories, each one a view into the hearts and lives of people of different ages and cultures. A young married couple suffers a devastating loss that rocks their faith in each other. A school-age girl slowly learns to appreciate the fact that everyone does not live the privileged life she does. A young man and an old woman come to know and respect each other through mundane events that turn out to have been not so mundane after all. Each story shows us something unique about human nature, how and why we move toward or away from one another, how we mature and come to understand the meaning of life. See my full review.

Best New Books of 2012: Sarah K.’s Picks

I am an eclectic reader, reading across genres, with a focus on literary craft and vivid characters. I read to be transported. Below are five of my favorites from 2012. All of them were compelling and were either hard to put down, played with new forms of fiction, or left a lasting impression. Enjoy!  – Sarah K.

The Diviners by Libba Bray
It’s 1926, and Evie O’Neill is thrilled when her parents send her to New York City after she sparks scandal in her small town using her hidden gift of reading objects. However, her plans for a free-wheeling flapper lifestyle are dampened by her living situation at her Uncle Will’s museum of the occult, and the discovery that a supernatural serial killer, Naughty John is on the loose. As the killer gains power, Evie realizes that her secret gift may be the key in stopping Naughty John from striking again.

NW by Zadie Smith
Using altering perspective and shifts in tone and style, NW follows the intertwining lives of four former classmates who once lived in a housing project in northwest London. Leah, Felix, Natalie (née Keisha), and Nathan represent the intersections of class and culture and the transformations one makes through life. Smith is also concerned with the movements of time and place, the role of memory and the constraints of identity, and uses experimental prose forms to explore the nature of her characters in new and exciting ways.

The Yard by Alex Grecian
Reeling from the failure to solve the Jack the Ripper murders, Scotland Yard’s newly formed “Murder Squad” suffers another setback when they find one of their own detectives stuffed into a trunk. Newly hired constable Walter Day must overcome his own self-doubt and the derision of greater London to find the killer. With the help of forensic specialist, Dr. Bernard Kingsley, Day explores the darker corners of Victorian England to solve the crime.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
When it comes to women, Yunior is a feckless connoisseur, constantly sinking relationships though his cheating despite his best intentions. These nine interlocking stories follow Junior though his romantic travails and his turbulent relationships with his mother and older brother, who is even more of a Don Juan than Yunior. Diaz’s lively prose, fabulous descriptions and clear love for his characters despite their flaws make this book a must-read.

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is probably best known for her novels Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, she is also an adept essay writer. Though not a light read, When I Was a Child… is a satisfying exploration of the intersections between solitude and community, faith and politics beyond simple polemic. Robinson’s essays are wide-ranging in topic from the nature of austerity to the power of older hymns, and present provocative ideas such as, “community…consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know….”

The Wild Side by Mark Van Name

“Meet the author! As part of our Haunted Happenings series of ghostly events for adults,    Mark Van Name will be at Cameron Village Regional Library on Thursday, October 18 at 7 p.m. Please call 919-856-6710 to RSVP or for more information.

The sub-title to this collection of stories by ten talented authors is “”Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge”" and the fantastic cover art by renowned artist Dan Dos Santos certainly conveys that message. In his introduction Van Name tells us that the name for this anthology comes from Lou Reed’s song “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”.

Urban Fantasy is a very popular genre these days (see the books we’ve previously blogged) and includes urban and modern landscapes of varying sizes and “”urban-ness.”" When Van Name invited his fellow authors to write these stories, he asked only that they combine Urban Fantasy and an erotic edge. How these elements were combined, he left up to each author. Each story is also followed by an afterward about the story and what inspired it.

The opening story, ‘Songs Sung Red’, is by one of the biggest names in the book, Tanya Huff, and it is a story featuring private investigator – and vampire – Victoria Nelson. The Vicki Nelson series begins with Blood Price, and was made into a TV series in Canada a few years ago. In this story, Vicki is at a nightclub hunting her prey amidst the bumping and grinding young men and women when the club’s singer seizes all of the attention in the club with her voice. Vicki can’t understand how this can be a more powerful seduction than her vampiric charms, and when she goes backstage after the show to confront the singer, she finds herself at the mercy of this woman – and for the first time she is not in control.

Van Name’s contribution to the collection is ‘The Long Dark Night of Diego Chan’, in which Diego gets a text from the wife of a good friend he hasn’t seen in a while saying that she needs his help because her dying husband has suddenly decided to become a vampire. Sam swore to his wife and his friends that he would never want to “”live”" as a vampire and that he’d rather die as human. Diego suspects that Sam was “”taken”" as a vampire against his will and that the effect will become permanent within 24 hours. Diego must travel from Raleigh to San Francisco to hunt down who took Sam and try to save him – if he can find him in time. The prime suspect is a former friend of Sam & Diego’s named Matt, who runs a legal & above board vampire/human sex club.  I definitely want to read more about Diego Chan down the road!

As with any collection of short stories, some will appeal to readers more than others, but I don’t remember any stories that I didn’t like. Two of my other favorites are ‘Careless of the Night’ by Gina Massel-Castater and ‘Love Knot’ by Dana Cameron. I first heard about the book from Mark when he came to one of our book club meetings and he showed us the cover art on his tablet. We were all suitably impressed as many of us enjoy Urban Fantasy. If you do too, or if you like Erotic Stories (or both!) you’ll want to take a walk on The Wild Side.

Oh, and if you like Mark Van Name’s writing, you may also want to check out his Jon & Lobo series of science fiction novels.

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All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps edited by Dave Isay

Remember those how-we-met vignettes that punctuated the 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally? The two who were born days apart in the same hospital and grew up in the same apartment building but never met until, as a young adult, he rode up nine extra floors just to keep talking to her? The man who married his high school sweetheart, then divorced her, then fell in love with her all over again and re-married her thirty-five years (and several wives) later?

If you were charmed by those, you will probably also enjoy All There Is : Love Stories From StoryCorps, edited and with an introduction by Dave Isay. Unlike most of Wake County Library’s audiobooks, there are no readers or actors in All There Is — just real people telling their own love stories in their own words to their children and families. The stories were recorded through Storycorps, an oral history project that allows regular people 40 minutes to interview a loved one about any topic in a recording booth. The best interviews are edited and then broadcast and podcast on National Public Radio. The one-disc, one-hour audiobook retains the documentary-style sound and the feel of a radio interview or podcast. Each 40-minute session is edited down to three or four minutes and most contain the voices of both interviewer and storyteller.

Some stories are stranger-than-fiction fun, like the pair who meet only because their email addresses are separated by just one character, though their physical addresses are oceans apart. And some are tear-jerking and poignant, like the Army widower who dispatched his own wife to the war zone where she died. All of them end with several seconds of mood music to guarantee that listeners experience the emotional after-effects they’d expect from any expertly-crafted short story.

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The Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals, once said that what he loves the most about Isaac Bashevis Singer, is the vulnerability and bravery of his writing. Moreover, Singer can be described as an honest author, and he is also a deeply humane and compassionate writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s writing career began in his native Poland, but in his early 30s, he left his home country and emigrated to America. Singer arrived in New York in 1935, and the shock of the move and life in exile were changes he never got over. He had lost his country, and if his audience had been small in Poland (Singer wrote in Yiddish), it was even smaller in New York. However, the old country proved to be a rich source of inspiration. For decades, Singer returned to the pre-World War II life of the Eastern European Jews. In this world, imps, dybbuks, and demons are as real as the baker next door is, and the devil himself is frequently the teller of the tale. In “Zeidlus the Pope,” the Evil One manages to lure a brilliant Jewish scholar away from his faith, claiming that if Zeidlus embraces Christianity, he may one day become the pope. The story ends in hell.

When Singer eventually, especially in the 1960s, began writing about life in America, the irrational element remained intact. However, in the new land, the imps, dybbuks, and demons were often replaced by neurotic behavior, delusional, love-driven deeds, and existential confusion. The supernatural aspect and the closeness to Singer’s spiritual roots never went away though. In “The Cafeteria,” corpses walk on Broadway, and in “Alone,” a nameless visitor to Miami Beach, mysteriously evicted from his hotel, drifts aimlessly and imagines that he’s in the midst of a Biblical disaster, “I was like Noah – but in an empty ark.”

Singer is a master storyteller. He never hides behind false originality (which, according to the author, “often reveal nothing but a writer’s boring and selfish personality”), and his writing is precise, transparent, and straightforward. At the same time, Singer combines the everyday experience with philosophical and theological depths, and even if his stories may be filled with human confusion and conflicts, the eternal mysteries are always present – Singer writes about them with grace and understated awe. As here, in “The Letter Writer:” “The night had ended like a dream and was followed by an obscure reality, self-absorbed, sunk in the perpetual mystery of being.”

Taken together, the components of Singer’s short stories give them the weight of great novels.

WCPL can offer the following short story collections by Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, and Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories; find and reserve these in our catalog.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

These stories by Jhumpa Lahiri are so quiet and subtle that, as one reviewer put it, “you forget that you are reading.”  These stories could be happening to you, or your next door neighbor.  The fact that many of the characters have Indian names or come from a different culture only adds richness to the story of their struggles, sometimes triumphant and sometimes humiliating, to navigate their way through life’s challenges.

The point of view changes with each story, taking us into the minds of characters with different ages and circumstances.  Often, the main details of the story unfold as we observe them through the eyes of a peripheral character.  In “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” a young girl from a privileged Indian-American family gradually comes to understand the ways in which the Indian-Pakistani war is affecting the people in her life.  In “Mrs. Sen’s,” a young boy is cared for after school by an Indian woman who is far from home and trying to become familiar with a new culture.

Although many of the stories deal with the dissonances between American and Indian culture, there are universal themes throughout.  In “A Temporary Matter,” we observe with compassion a young couple who are grieving over the loss of their first baby.  We see how complicated a process grieving is, how each of us grieves in our own way, and how a shared grief may draw us together or push us apart.  The title story, “Interpreter of Maladies” deals with a middle-aged man’s quest to bring some meaning into his unsatisfying life.  Isn’t this what we all do?  We try to interpret our maladies, understand what ails us and what ails the other people in our lives.  Only then can we find a “cure,” if such a thing can be found.

I cannot think of any book or collection of stories I have read that more accurately captures this process.  This is Lahiri’s first book.  If all her books are this wonderful, I want to read them all.

See my colleague Clare B.’s review of Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth.

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Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman

I know you. You think you don’t like to read short stories. You’re not sure why, since you haven’t ever really read a collection of short stories penned by only one author, just the various stories you were assigned in school. But you’re pretty sure you don’t like them.

I’m a huge fan of short stories. I love their compactness, their conciseness, their ability to slay you with just a sentence, a phrase, a word. If I were in charge, the New York Times would have a bestseller list just for short story collections.

I want to issue you a challenge. This summer, in addition to your usual beach read of choice — mystery, romance, biography, bestseller — mix it up a little. Make a librarian happy and try a short story collection. Specifically, try Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise.

I loved so many things about these stories. I liked that many of the tales are set here in North Carolina. Bergman is a native and it shows. She chooses just the right details to make you not only see, but feel and taste North Carolina. The overarching theme of how we relate to each other within families resonated with me, especially the stories centered on parent/child relationships. The emphasis on nature and how people experience it is also used to great effect. But what I liked best about this collection is that each one is memorable. I cannot choose a favorite. I recommend you read them all.

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All the Time in the World by E. L. Doctorow

My book club has been doing a series on short stories. We always have lots to discuss; everyone has their favorites, and even the most time-crunched folks in the group find time to read a few stories.

One collection we read recently is E. L. Doctorow’s All the Time in the World. In his introduction, Doctorow explains that what draws these stories together is that they deal with people who are “in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.” In “Wakefield,” a man who feels emotionally estranged from his family decides to start spying on them instead of living with them, and in the process learns a lot about himself as well as about them. “Jolene: A Life” helped me understand how a well-meaning person can become trapped in a series of bad decisions and how hard it is to reverse the trend.

These stories are so well crafted that they can be frightening in their power to take you places you hope you will never go. “Walter John Harmon” is told from the point of view of a man who is deeply brainwashed by a cult leader, and through his twisted logic you can see the makings of a disaster like Waco’s military standoff or Jim Jones’ mass suicide. “Willi” presents the horrifying spectacle of a 13-year-old boy coming face to face with his mother’s infidelity at a crucial point in his own adolescent development, and the grim humor of “A House on the Plains” makes the grisly details of that story barely palatable.

I think “The Writer in the Family” might be the best short story I have ever read. It succinctly demonstrates how other people can manipulate us and how difficult it is to extricate ourselves. On the other hand, I could not make any sense of the title story, “All the Time in the World.” Perhaps that is that the point? Maybe someone out there can explain it to me.

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Summer Morning, Summer Night by Ray Bradbury

Ah!  There’s nothing like a breath of summer to chase away the late-winter chill.  Bare feet in the clover, fireworks going up on a sultry night, lovers walking in the moonlight—they’re all here in this collection of short stories.  For those of us who think of Ray Bradbury as a science-fiction writer, these stories come as a pleasant surprise.  Green Town, Illinois—Bradbury’s fictional rendering of his own hometown of Waukegan,Illinois—seems in these stories like a place you can visit on your next Sunday drive.

This is small-town Americana at its best and sometimes at its worst.  A ten-year-old boy falls in love with the town librarian in one charming story, but another involves two old spinster ladies who make “love potions” you would do better not to try.  In one story, a woman who has lived alone for decades is visited by someone from her past, while in another story two jealous little girls compete to see who has the most interesting tragedy in her life.

Although some of the stories have elements of the fantastic, the emotions and actions of the characters are very true to life.  In “The Death of So and So,” two older couples who are visiting each other just can’t get enough gossip about who has died and who is about to die.  Then there is the young man in “The Beautiful Lady“ who is so sick of hearing old folks brag about how much better everything was in the old days that he sets out to prove them wrong once and for all.

Several stories brought tears to my eyes, such as the bus driver who makes his lonely rounds until one night a girl gets on his bus who he just knows in his heart is the one and only girl for him.  Will he have the courage to speak to her?  Then there is the fourteen-year-old boy who adores his twenty-four-year-old teacher, and she, in her own way, returns his feelings.  Can they ever be more than friends, or can they even be friends in this small-town world?

This is a beautiful book, inside and out, filled with that special storytelling magic that Bradbury can do so well.  It may be a few weeks before you can really sit out on your front porch, sip some lemonade, and watch the world go by—but in Green Town you can do it any time you want.

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