First Lines Friday... The Wedding People by Alison Espach

"...now Phoebe stands before a nineteenth-century Newport hotel in an emerald silk dress, the only item in her closet she can honestly say she still loves, probably because it was the one thing she had never worn. She and her husband never did anything fancy enough for it. They were professors. They were easygoing. Relaxed. So comfortable by the fire with the little cat on their laps. They liked regular things, whatever was on tap, whatever was on TV, whatever was in the fridge, whatever shirt looked the most normal, because wasn't that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal? To prove that every day, no matter what, you were a person who could put on a shirt?

   But that morning, before she got on the plane, Phoebe woke and knew she was no longer normal. Yet she made toast. Took a shower. Dried her hair. Gathered her lecture notes for her second day of the fall semester. Opened her closet and looked at all the clothes she once bought simply because they looked like shirts a professor should wear to work. Rows of solid-colord blouses, the female versions of things her husband wore. She pulled out a gray one, held it up in front of the mirror, but could not bring herself to put it on. Could not go to work and stand at the office printer and hold her face in a steady expression of interest while her collegue talked at length about the surprising importance of cheese in medieval theology.

   Instead, she slipped on the emerald dress..."

                                    The Wedding People by Alison Espach

This book has gotten so much great buzz and was a Jenna Book Pick in last August. It is in my TBR pile and I'm really looking forward to sinking my teeth into it. It's all about love and friendship... what do you think about the excerpt? Does it make you want to read more? It did me...

First Line Friday...

 

"Grace is hot. There's the sun, like boiled breath, on the roof of her car, but it's more than that. This feeling that from nowhere she's been set on fire from the inside out. Between her breasts a line of sweat is tracking a slow, itchy S, and she wants to jam a hand under the neck of her shirt and wipe it away. It's gridlock, though, and she's hemmed in on all sides, and there's the man in the Audi, whose car window is level with hers. He's staring at her like she's the distraction he needs in this. Screw you, she thinks. Screw you, screw you, screw you...."

                                                        ... Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood

Lots of positive buzz about Fran Littlewood's debut novel, Amazing Grace Adams. Words like "touching", "funny",  "heartbreaking" surround this book. From the publisher: 

"Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled—the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away." 

I'm ready to take a walk with Grace. She seems so relatable with honest feelings, disappointments, frustrations. Thanks to the publisher, Henry Holt and Company, I have a review copy of Amazing Grace Adams waiting for me in my eReader and I can't wait to start reading it! Thank you! 

Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood was just released this week and is available at your favorite bookstore! Stay tuned for my review...

The Sunday Salon and Tell Me a Story... Short Story Collections

When I was a kid, I loved bedtime stories! I still love them now, but they take the form of a different genre... Short Stories. Sometimes you just don't have time to invest in a full length novel, but you hunger to read all the same.

There are many great writers who love writing short stories. Ray Bradbury is famous for writing a short story every day. William Sydney Porter, also known as O'Henry, was such a beloved short story writer that there is an award in his name, the O'Henry Award. Who hasn't read Edgar Allen Poe or Washington Irving, both wonderful short story writers, during the month of October? Alice Munro even won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and she ONLY writes short stories.

Where to find some great short stories? Here are 3 newly published collections that may satisfy that late night snack called reading...

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel... Penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are fully on display in this collection of stories. Mantel's classic wicked humor in each story—which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture—brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage, class, family, and sex, cutting to the core of human experience. Unpredictable, diverse, and even shockingly unexpected, each story grabs you by the throat within a couple of sentences.

Hilary Mantel has won numerous literary awards, including 2 Man Booker Prizes, and now offers us up some of that great writing in smaller tidbits. This has gotten a lot of great press and I have put it on my TBR list! 

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood... A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet’s syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. And a crime committed long-ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion year old stromatalite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Margaret Atwood, famous for her speculative fiction (that's kind of like science fiction without all the interstellar travel) gives us a sampling of her writing with her take on short stories. No stranger to short stories, these stories from Margaret Atwood should prove satisfying as always. Another book on my wish list!

What Happened Here, a novella & stories by Bonnie ZoBell...  A  wildly different cast of characters living on the same block in North Park, San Diego, site of the PSA Flight 182 crash in 1978. The crash is history, but its legacy seeps in the stories of the neighborhood’s inhabitants, bringing grief, anxiety, and rebellion to the surface and eventually assists in burning clean the lives of those who live in the shadow of disaster. Amidst the pathos of contemporary life, humor flits through these stories like the macaws that have taken to the trees of North Park. The birds ensure that there’s never a dull moment in the neighborhood, and their outrageous colors and noisome squawks serve as constant reminds of regrowth.

I was excited to receive this short story collection to review because the stories sounded so grounded. Stories about real people dealing with real situations. The reviews for this book have been wonderful and Bonnie ZoBell, even though she is not a household name (yet), has won numerous accolades and awards for her writing. I'm looking forward to cracking the spine on Bonnie's collection of stories and will be reviewing it soon!

So, do you read short stories? I know a lot of readers who don't, because they feel that these collections are not "real" books. I don't prefer short stories, but it is a nice escape. Any recommendations for our short story reading?! Let me know what some of your favorite short stories are! In the meantime...

Happy reading... Suzanne

Memoir Monday presents... My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe

My Korean Deli : Risking It All For A Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe... "It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents' self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws' Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton's Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store's tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity."

I read the review of this book in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday, I knew I had to blog about it for Memoir Monday. This sounds like a fantastic read! Not simply because of the unlikely ownership of the Deli by Ben Ryder Howe who is a senior editor for one of my favorite literary magazines, The Paris Review, but because of the flavorful characters that we are promised to meet along our reading journey. Corby Kummer, who reviewed My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe for the New York Times Book Review on Sunday March 2o, 2011, points out that this memoir "places careful, loving attention squarely on other people rather than the author." And goes on to say that it's "a rollicking, made-for-the-movies story in a wonderfully funny deadpan style." This all adds up to a book worth reading to me! It was published earlier this month by Henry Holt and Co. And is available for Kindle too!

The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell... A Review

"The world is pretty much what she remembers, all burnt up and pallid - like someone came along with a sponge and soaked up all the color and the moisture too and left everything gray and bone-dry."

When I first opened the pages of The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew there were zombies, and I knew there was a young girl on her own trying to survive the post-apocalyptic world that the story takes place in. Were the zombies suppose to "lighten" the story up? There have been so many zombie mash-ups lately that I wasn't quite sure where this novel was going to fit in. I couldn't help thinking the story was Cormac McCarthy's The Road with a sprinkling of Zombies. But as I started reading I found out that this wasn't your average zombie novel. The Reapers Are The Angels is true Southern Gothic, that delivers a haunting story of survival and the longing for forgiveness.

This is the story of 15 year old Temple, who has always lived in this world where the meatskins, the disease carrying zombies, have over run the suburbs and the inner cities, and no one is safe. It's been 25 years since civilization had turned into a vast wasteland, and where the zombies amble along aimlessly, attacking any living creature they encounter. Temple has lived a lot in her 15 years. She has learned to survive with her wits and her knife. She's alone, traveling the roads by herself, and punishing herself for something she shouldn't really blame herself for, until she reaches out to a feeble minded young man, Maury, who reminds her of another innocent in her life. Maybe this time she can redeem herself for last time...

Alden Bell paints a vivid picture of a devastated world. Through Temples eyes we see the emptiness, the hopelessness, but the need to work together and move forward. It's eerie how whole cities seem untouched, yet no one exists there. And how some people have built communities in places that you normally wouldn't and have created "safe" zones in other places. Well written interesting characters whose instincts to survive and try to live a normal life are very realistic. The portrayal of what goes on in this world, and how Temple handles it all is what will keep you turning the pages. Temple herself has an interesting way of philosophizing about life that you wouldn't think a 15 year old with little education and who can't read would, but I chalk that up to having good common sense and having to grow up fast in order to survive her day to day life. The Reapers Are The Angels is gritty and harsh, but tempered with a young girls need for redemption.

The Reapers Are The Angels should appeal to people who enjoy dystopian fiction with a splash of the undead, but Temple herself may attract fiction readers who would enjoy reading about this one tough gal!

Thanks to Jason of Henry Holt and Company for sending along a review copy of The Reapers Are The Angels.

First Lines...

"God is a slick God. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe."

The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell

(coming August 2010)