Research Notes: Jurgen Fauth
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their research for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jürgen Fauth shares a reading list for his novel Kino, recently published by Atticus Books.
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“All it took was a straight face,” my narrator Klaus Koblitz says about the outrageous lies he used to tell about his life in the bars and cabarets of Weimar Berlin. And so it is with any fiction: more than anything else, it takes confidence to convince your audience that you’re trustworthy.
Double Time, a memoir by Jane Roper
Congratulations to Jane Roper, whose memoir Double Time: How I Survived — And Mostly Thrived — Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins is published today by St. Martin’s Press. Here’s a description from the publisher’s website:
Double Time is an entertaining, up-close and very personal look at Jane Roper’s first three years raising twin daughters. From trying to get pregnant to processing the idea of twins, from round the clock feedings and diaper changes to the joy of watching “twinteractions” between her girls as their (very different!) personalities emerge, Jane tells all. Meanwhile, she struggles to keep a history of depression under control—and find answers when her symptoms get worse. All this while falling steadily in love with her duo as they grow from sleepy newborns to mischievous toddlers with a penchant for potty talk.
For Out of the Heart Proceed by Jensen Beach is now available
Congratulations to Jensen Beach, whose collection For Out of the Heart Proceed is published today by Dark Sky Books. Here’s a description from the publisher’s website:
In his debut collection, Jensen Beach’s characters discover what it means to be individuals, colleagues, husbands and fathers in a world that too often complicates even the best intentions with sabotage and subterfuge. What’s most striking about these stories is the protagonists’ ability to continually make right, difficult decisions despite being placed in challenging, dangerous situations. Readers will delight in Beach’s powerful, deft prose, and the surprising warmth that radiates from his people. Each story is a robust chronicle that churns and evolves and offers glimpses into fully-realized lives. To say this marks the arrival of a gifted author is true but somehow misses the mark, as the maturity and sincerity that pulses throughout this collection signals a writer whose many talents have been developed and honed over time.
Contributors in the Wigleaf Top 50
The annual Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions list has been announced, and we’re proud to see our contributors represented. James Dunham’s story “In Winter” made the list, as did Chad Simpson’s story “Moussaoui Remembers Fire” both are included in the top 50, and Angela Woodward’s “A Story” and Myfanwy Collins’ “Snap” are on the long list. Also, two of these stories were selected by Kathy Fish during her month as Writer In Residence, so a special congratulations — and thanks — to her, for having such excellent taste.
Preorder My Mother Was An Upright Piano, by Tania Hershman
My Mother Was An Upright Piano, a collection of stories by Tania Hershman, is now available for preorder from Tangent Books. Preorders will be signed by the author, and there is also a limited edition available with an extra story included.
My Mother Was an Upright Piano builds on the strengths of Tania Hershman’s first collection of short stories The White Road which was commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Hershman’s fiction is inspiring, thought-provoking and witty.
A scintillating collection of 56 short fictions by one of the genre’s most daring exponents, whose economy of words cloaks her subtlety and power. Tania Hershman’s work is powerful, spiky and off-beat but with a distinct warmth and affection for her subjects.
Preorder No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear
No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear, a novel by JA Tyler and John Dermot Woods, is available for preorder from Jaded Ibis Books. Preorder now to receive a discount and limited edition signed artwork. Here’s an excerpt:
This is a remembering and we only want to be gone. We never want to be chained. We are fed. We don’t know what it is we, you and I, us, me and you we want. I don’t know what we want. You don’t know what we want, but I dreamt last night that we cut ourselves so deeply that rain poured out and the world flooded and we had the chance to be some kind of new absent.
Preorder May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks
May We Shed These Human Bodies, a collection by Amber Sparks, is now available for preorder from Curbside Splendor Books. Here’s the publisher’s description:
May We Shed These Human Bodies peers through vast spaces and skies with the world’s most powerful telescope to find humanity: wild and bright and hard as diamonds. Here is humanity building: families reconstruct themselves, mothers fashion babies from two-by-fours and nails, boys make a mother out of leaves and twigs and wishing. Here is humanity tearing down: a wife sets her house on fire in revenge, a young girl plots to kill the ghosts that stalk her, a dying man takes the whole human race with him. Here is humanity transforming: feral children, cannibalistic seniors, animal wives – a whole sideshow’s worth of oddballs and freaks.
Writer In Residence, May 2012
For the next month, we’ll be doing something unusual with the Writer In Residence section here at Necessary Fiction, as we host work by the high school students participating in a free community creative writing program at Emerson College (which, full disclosure, happens to be where I work). I’ve asked my colleague Mary Kovaleski Byrnes to tell us more about the program, and what to expect in May.
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At the beginning of a new school year, I spend a lot of time talking about building a writing community with my Emerson College freshman writing classes. I’m certain there are internal eye-rolls when I launch into the kum-bay-ya importance of having a place where you can take risks and try out new ideas. I talk about how writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and how much writers need other writers: people who have, for some crazy reason, a similar drive to take the complex and messy insides of our heads and turn them into something that reaches out to another person’s complex and messy world.
Research Notes: Sarah Falkner
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their research for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Sarah Falkner gives us a guided tour of her Animal Sanctuary, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.
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It is probably useful to explain that my initial and main formal creative training was in the visual arts, and I think about the plasticity of forms and narrative, character, temporal and spatial elements — and research, and craft — more like some other kind of visual or time-based artist or poet might, than as do most fiction writers I know. My longer pieces of writing can stand alone and stand-in as novels, but they are conceived of in community with other media; my first novel, Animal Sanctuary, released by Starcherone Books last November, is enmeshed with a related performance and installation cycle now in progress, in collaboration with the interdisciplinary artist Ryder Cooley; my second novel, Quarry: A Young Person’s Survey of Regional Natural History and Folklore With Familiar Phenomena Examined Through the Allied Sciences, also is intertwined with related projects. The other day I read that Lydia Lunch joined a punk band in the 1980s because that was the only/closest model she knew of at the time for what she intuited that she wanted to achieve by getting up in front of people and saying confrontational things, and only later realized she is actually a spoken word artist; maybe I’m a written word artist, as opposed to a writer. The forms of the texts I construct are engaged with and informed by many kinds of text forms, as well as other media altogether (most notably film), and I am interested in how we are able to parse out a narrative — or, more frequently, an alternative cohesiveness of some sort — from disparate elements.
A roundtable conversation with Mud Luscious Press
As the next installment in our ongoing, occasional series of roundtable conversations, we’re thrilled to present this conversation between JA Tyler, founder and editor of Mud Luscious Press and four authors whose books MLP is publishing this year: Gregory Sherl, Matt Bell, Ken Sparling, and Robert Kloss.
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To begin with, share a little about where your book started — how was it initially formed, how long did it take to write, what was your drafting process, and how did you decide when the manuscript was ready to send to Mud Luscious Press?
Our Writer In Residence is invited to spend a month onsite sharing fiction, interviews, reviews, ideas, or an ongoing project of some kind.
On The Blog
Book Review: Miss Fuller by April Bernard (Steerforth Press, 2012). Reviewed by Nancy Freund.
In this week’s Research Notes, Jürgen Fauth shares a reading list for his novel Kino.
Congratulations to Jane Roper, whose memoir Double Time: How I Survived — And Mostly Thrived — Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins is published today by St. Martin’s Press.
Congratulations to Jensen Beach, whose collection For Out of the Heart Proceed is published today by Dark Sky Books.
Book Review: The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel (Unbridled Books, 2012). Reviewed by Michelle Bailat-Jones.
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