Tag: Janalyn Guo

My Friends Write Things: Hurricanes and Hauntings

Fiction

  • Kingdom by the Sea” by Amy Parker – I was lucky enough to see an early draft of this story, a glorious, intense reimagining of Lolita. It’s like a literary vivisection, using scalpels historical, critical, fictional to slice away twitching layers of Humbert Humbert and extract a personal narrative for Dorothy Haze.
  • The Invention of Separate People” by Kevin Brockmeier – Kevin is one of our greatest living fantasists, and if you’ve never read him before it’s time to start. This story was originally published in Unstuck, and is about a world where people are themselves, yes, but also everyone else. Everyone is one person, until someone (everyone) begins to learn how to be separate.
  • Skin Suit” by Janalyn Guo – The main character is a lump of dark, amorphous matter that must wear taxidermied suits to appear human, but its parents are two planes of brilliant light, and it’s time for a family reunion.
  • Horror Story” by Carmen Machado – This time Carmen’s penned a creepy tale of crumbling relationships and haunted houses. Read it in the dark.
  • The Game of Smash and Recovery” by Kelly Link – It’s a Kelly Link story. That should be all you need to know, but I’ll add that this story is Kelly’s take on space opera, and dedicated to Iain M. Banks.

Nonfiction

Poetry

Reading 2015: July

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Hard month. Here’s what I read.

  1. Pluto vol. 1 by Naoki Urasawa
  2. Pluto vol. 2 by Naoki Urasawa – These two were lent my by Janalyn Guo. It’s a science fiction manga, a murder mystery set in a future populated by both humans and robots, some of which have human-level AI. It’s also a reimagining of an Astro Boy story by Osamu Tezuka. I’ve never read any Tezuka; he’s an author I’ve long intended to binge on, but just never gotten around to. So reading these was enjoyable, but I was constantly feeling they were relying on allusive plot points and images which were lost on me. For example, the ending notes of both volumes are introductions of new characters whose design and name are clearly intended to thunder with recognition of their famous antecedents. As I’m not familiar with the source material, the effect didn’t land. But I’m still finding the story interesting, and will likely read more.
  3. The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson – Naomi was a classmate at Iowa, and having read many pieces of her short fiction I was excited for her debut novel. It’s a story of four women–two sisters from Brooklyn, their grandmother, and their mother–over a summer in Barbados when the relationships between all four oscillate, solidify, shatter. The book is written in a fluid POV that illustrates each facet of the characters’ shared emotional experience so that the reader has access to the whole, just as perpendicular shadows, though flat, can reveal a three-dimensional shape. It’s a very effective technique, pulled off with a sure and sympathetic hand. Naomi’s writing is evocative throughout, and frequently piercing, as in this passage that I particularly loved.
  4. Vox by Nicholson Baker – I get why people like this book. It’s a novel all in dialogue between two strangers on a sex chat line; a structurally interesting exercise in playfully obsessive eroticism. I understand why sexy fiction pursued with a joyous, intellectual abandon is attractive to people. But as with House of Holes, I had to struggle to finish this. It’s one-note, and once I’d grasped the algorithm of its experimentation, I just got bored. While it’s laudably enthusiastic and uninhibited, I found the book neither arousing nor surprising, and so had little to keep me invested. Baker’s fiction may just not be for me.

Reading at Malvern Books

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The reading a week ago was fantastic. We had an audience of about 45 people, a table of Asimov’s issues and other books featuring Jessica Reisman’s fiction, and snacks provided by the bookstore. The room was full of strangers, friends, and strangers who I hope will become friends. By the time the reading started it was standing room only.

Jessica read first, with two pieces: an excerpt from her story “The Chambered Eye” in Rayguns Over Texas and all of “Boneshadow” from Phantom Drift. Then Janalyn Guo read a slipstream short story “Soft Breast Mechanism” from Birkensnake that had the crowd cackling with hilarious discomfort.  She was tough to follow. I went up last, and read the first three sections of “The New Mother.” To my delight, the audience laughed in all the right places. After, it was all signing and selling and shaking hands, and then a contingent of us made the trip to Spider House cafe down the street for some triumphal drinks. My thanks to Malvern for hosting us, and to everyone who came to the event.

Poster from Joe Duncan

To support our upcoming reading at Malvern Books, Janalyn’s friend Joe Duncan has made us this eye-catching poster. For more of Joe’s illustration work, check out his website. And if you’re in the Austin area, check out the reading this coming Saturday. It is guaranteed to put happy faces on all of your cells.

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Malvern Books Reading – Saturday, April 4th

MeJanalynJessIf you’ll be in Austin on the fourth of April, consider coming to A Speculative Evening at Malvern Books to hear me, Janalyn Guo, and Jessica Reisman read our fiction. Malvern is a lovely little bookstore that specializes in small press books, both fiction and poetry. I’ll be reading from “The New Mother,” and have copies of Asimov’s for sale. Reading starts at 7:00pm. Hope to see you there.

Reading 2015: February

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Travel and illness slowed me down a bit this month. I had a lovely trip back to Iowa City, several less lovely trips to doctors’ offices and med labs, and a fully unlovely bout with strep throat and fever. As such, a lot of my downtime was spent on mentally undemanding television rather than books. Thanks to having read nine books last month, and by leaning towards graphic novels and shorter collections, I’m still on pace for 100 for the year. But I’ll have to pick it up in March (which was my best month last year).

  1. Tenth of December by George Saunders – As I expected from how celebrated it was when it came out, this collection is Saunders at the height of his incomparable game. The standout story for me was “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” a science fiction tale with as nuanced a look at poverty as any I’ve read. Other memorable pieces were “Escape from Spiderhead,” which I’ve previously quoted on this blog, and the titular “Tenth of December,” which I had read before on it’s initial publication in The New Yorker. I also found myself tearing up occasionally, notably during the story “Exhortation,” which adopts the voice of an abusive person in power exhorting propriety when the request itself is really a plea for absolution, one that carries with it the sense that, just by making the plea, absolution is earned. The subtext, “I’m hurting you, but I know I’m hurting you and I feel bad about it, so that makes it sort of okay, right?” is one that reminds me of some of the more severe times I have found my trust misplaced, and so his fictional evocation of it hit hard.
  2. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud – There are few things I enjoy more than huge, trope-aware graphic novels that use narratives of waxing and waning interpersonal relationships to explore complex, clever themes. Books like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. This new book by McCloud, his first fiction in 20 years, hits somewhere near the center of that aesthetic target. The main character is David Smith, a down-and-out, nothing-left-to-lose sculptor offered a deal by the personification of death: he can have the power to perfectly sculpt anything in the world using just his imagination and bare hands, but he will die in 200 days. What follows is a story of an artist interrogating what he values about art and life, and how his answers change when their relation to mortality is concrete rather than abstract. The story frequently seems only a step or two away from being overwrought, but for me it avoided ever tumbling over that edge. The art is a consistent pleasure, the story heartfelt. This is a completely earnest book, which redeemed narrative moves that I might have found cliched from another author.
  3. Get In Trouble by Kelly Link – I had read four of the nine stories in this collection before, because I am nowhere near patient enough to wait until the books come out to read Kelly Link. I’ve bought entire anthologies just because they contained a new short story of hers. It’s hard to pick standout stories from this one, because everything Kelly writes is so weird and fascinating. But “The Summer People” is a rare treatment of fairies that I don’t find annoying, “Secret Identity” and “Origin Story” are superhero fiction like nothing you’ve ever read before, and “Light” is basically what Welcome to Night Vale would be if it were exactly as crazy and yet somehow subtle at the same time. This is fiction to get lost in and come back changed. (A funny thing: I write these little capsule reviews after I finish the book, and post them at the end of the month. Since I wrote the preceding, my friend Carmen Machado has published a much more in-depth review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, in which she expressed an almost identical sentiment to my last one.)
  4. The Deep by John Crowley – Earlier this year I started reading Crowley’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel Little, Big. I got about 80 pages in, and thought the writing was great but the story mildly irritating. It seemed coy, like it was likely to be 500 pages of tiny glimmers of fairyland shining through the worn fabric of the mundane world, which I was not in the mood for. (As mentioned previously, fairies are a hard sell for me.) I’ll likely revisit it someday soon, but decided instead to go back to Crowley’s first novel, something more SFnal and thus more aligned with my aesthetic preferences. My copy of The Deep carries a glowing blurb from Ursula Le Guin, which makes sense; it has a lot structurally in common with Left Hand of Darkness. The writing is crisp and frequently lyrical, and the plot skips along at great velocity. Political schemes and reversals of fortune that would unfurl over 200 pages in, say, Game of Thrones happen in mere paragraphs, and the whole book is less than 200 pages long. Crowley also does a fascinating thing where early in the novel we are introduced to what strikes the reader as a primitive cosmology destined to be overturned by the visitor from space, but in the end, this cosmology is basically correct, and it’s the reader’s assumptions that are unfounded. But while I found this book intellectually interesting, I remain somehow passive to it. I feel the same way about a lot of Le Guin’s work, too: clearly brilliant, inspires great admiration, but fails to enflame my imagination the way my favorite fiction does.
  5. The Wilds by Julia Elliott – I was not previously familiar with Julia Elliott, but this was recommended by Janalyn Guo, who’s a fan of her stories. As am I, now. This is an excellent collection, and one that seems to be mostly off the radar of the Spec Fic community, despite many of these stories being science fiction. (I’d say entirely off the radar except the VanderMeers did publisher her in the inaugural Best American Fantasy.) It’s very “literary” science fiction, by which I mean that these are interiority-driven stories with ambiguous endings that resist plot resolution–cadences that are more common to realist fiction than SF. But here’s an incomplete list of the speculative conceits in this book: powered exoskeletons for the elderly, nanotechnological cures for dementia, urban society overrun by wild dogs, a biological regeneration spa that medicinally afflicts clients with suppurating infections, a mutated form of toxoplasmosis that causes internet addiction, a robot subjected to iterated biochemical simulations of love as its language database is constantly upgraded. She has a novel coming out soon, The New and Improved Romie Futch, which I’ll definitely be reading.
  6. Mail Order Bride by Mark Kalesniko – This graphic novel was bad in ways that make it tempting to psychoanalyze the author. The titular mail order bride is a Korean woman who moves to Canada to marry a 39-year-old, comic book store owning, geek loving, jock hating, virginal manchild. Obviously, he has an Asian fetish too, and spends two-thirds of the book volubly exoticizing her and complimenting her on stereotypical Asian traits she doesn’t actually possess. While his racist fetishizing and disinclination to learn anything personal about his new wife is positioned as a character flaw and the main driver of the book’s conflict, this criticism is undercut by the fact that the narrative never reveals any of his wife’s actual identity. This might work if the story was from the husband’s point of view, but it’s primarily from hers, and while she grows to hate her husband’s blunt objectification, “Doesn’t enjoy being objectified” is very nearly the only thing the reader learns about her that her husband doesn’t. In the end, after a violent confrontation, they are both too cowardly to leave each other, and persist in a loveless marriage. This unambitious, repetitive story is perpetrated at such length and with such little subtlety that I came away feeling like the whole thing was an act of self-flagellation. Looking around online, most of the contemporary reviews of this book are positive, which I can attribute only to the OGN readers of 2001 being so eager to celebrate the “literary” within the medium that even a work this meager–but with nudity and without triumphalism–would be feted as mature.
  7. Trash by Dorothy Allison – I had read about half of this before, and finally finished it. It’s a largely autobiographical collection of stories about poverty, abuse, and 1980s-era lesbian culture. The first story, “River of Names,” about how differences of class and traumatic history separate two women in love, was among the more memorable assigned in my first college creative writing class. My other favorite one was “Violence Against Women Begins At Home,” about schisms within progressive communities and how people grow apart. Some of the stories didn’t strongly grab me narratively, though I understood their importance as part of the thematic and autobiographical project of the whole. Tonally, I was more able to appreciate what Dorothy Allison was doing by having read Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, the early parts of which depict a contemporaneous community similar to the ones in Trash (and were also published by Firebrand Books).
  8. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard – I’ve now read this book every year for the last three. I guess I like it.