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July 02, 2007
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING LATELY
MY OWN STORIES! In the Salt Flats Annual that arrived, with its bold cover and lovely format. Salt Flats Annual Issue 2, 2007
AGNI: This issue, 65, is a treasure trove of reading. From Swen Birkerts introduction about memory and retrieval, to the wonderful fiction--Magdalena Tulli's excerpt from her novel; the stories of relationships are so fresh -
Split Up On A Dark Sad Night, Agreeing It Was Best by Vince Passaro; a Lia Purpura essay that touches again on memory and how it refracts over time.
LOST AND FOUND:At the Atlanta AWP, I bought a copy of fellow Zoetroper, Jim Tomlinson's book Things Kept, Things Left Behind, last years Iowa Fiction prize winner, and promply lost it during my travels. When it surfaced last month, I sat down on a wet weekend with this solid collection of stories from the lives of working-class families.
SEDUCED ON A BOOKSTORE SHELF: Around the corner from the cafe that my husband owns/runs is the Brunswick street bookstore. As the Borders bookshop has become more popular and less interesting (for me) in the offereings on its shelf, I was attracted here and ended up purchasing McSweeneys 23, hardcover and packed with great fiction--Anne Beattie and Deb Olin Unferth among my favorites.
MORE: The New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue was a blast during a week of intense cold in Melbourne. Are we drifting closer to the polar cap?
3/4 OF THE WAY THROUGH SACRED GAMES BY VIKRAM CHANDRA
This has to be the heavyweight of this genre, literary fiction and crime novel all at once. The version I have does not have a glossary for the Indian terms sprinkled all the way through but I did not mind at all. I no longer speak the South Indian dialect I grew up with and the terms were unfamiiar but I found they added to a sense of place and immediacy. He has to be a master of setting story within story, all 1000 or so pages of it.
My husband read the earlier novel Red Earth Pouring Rain and loved it (so did my teenage boys). Of the two, he found the earlier one stronger. The second one more titillating. The book of short stories in between, however, did not, in my opinion, did not make the grade.
JUST READ: The July Harper with awesome writing-fiction by Daniel Mason - Death of the Pugilist.
SHOULD I? Buy the Collected Works of Leonard Michaels? I first heard about him from David Bezmoggis - Natasha And Other Stories and I liked the story we were talking about - Murderers. In a thread in Zoetrope, other writers had mixed reactions. But I think I am buying it.
Posted by girija at July 2, 2007 12:08 PM