January 22, 2015 at 7:11 pm (Books, Calls, Dearest Mum, Family, Filipino Writers, Links, Memoirs, Publishers, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Filipino writers, Manila, Mayor of the Roses, memoir, memories
Towards the end, he couldn’t wear any clothes. They had to cover him in banana leaves.
It was in July he died — I couldn’t believe it. A voice on the phone told me.
“Rufino died na.” It was my mother speaking. Naturally, she had to be the one to break the news.
I was staying in a friend’s house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In the mornings, fog blanketed the hills. We heard the mournful mooing of invisible cows. One or another of us would look east, toward where we heard Neil Young had his ranch, wondering whether we’d catch a glimpse of his pink Cadillac that day.
* * * * *
Mayor of the Roses was published by Miami University Press in 2005. The press was known as publishers of the American Poetry Series. Self’s collection was the first book of fiction that Miami University Press ever published.
Heartfelt thanks to Brian Ascalon Roley for bringing the manuscript to the attention of the press and Keith Tuma.
The collection’s been taught at Bates College (Maine), Pampanga Agricultural College (Magalang, Philippines), Skyline College, and Stanford University.
One story, “Lenox Hill, December 1991,” was in the syllabus of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, in a course on Ethics and Medicine.
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January 12, 2015 at 4:29 pm (Books, Memoirs, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Writing)
Tags: memoir, memories, Mondays, short pieces, The Lost Language
At that time, I had a very old car that was ready to give up the ghost. I wanted to win something, something big. I was tired of living off garlic fried rice and scrambled eggs, which was the only food I could afford for a long time, when I was new to America.
– the title piece of self’s collection, published in the Philippines by Anvil: The Lost Language
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December 24, 2014 at 7:25 pm (Books, Links, Lists, Memoirs, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, essays, history, memoirs, nonfiction, novel, short story collections, The NYTBR
Did self ever mention how humongous her PILE OF STUFF is? LOL. Self has no clue how it got that big.
Nevertheless, she is making inroads.
Today, she finally gets to the huge December 2013 issue of The New York Times Book Review.
It is, naturally, full of reviews of interesting books self wants to add to her reading list. And it has the annual “100 Notable Books List.” A couple of selections from that list:
Fiction
- Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin, $28.95)
- The Color Master: Stories, by Aimee Bender (Doubleday, $25.95)
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra (Hogarth, $26)
- Dirty Love, by Andre Dubus III (Norton, $25.95)
- Duplex, by Kathryn Davis (Graywolf, $24)
- The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride (Riverhead, $27.95)
- The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, by Andrew Sean Greer (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99)
- The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton (Little, Brown, $27)
- A Marker to Measure Drift, by Alexander Maksik (Knopf, $24.95)
- Submergence, by J. M. Ledgard (Coffee House, $15.95)
- Want Not, by Jonathan Miles (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26)
- Woke Up Lonely, by Fiona Maazel (Graywolf, $26)
Nonfiction
- The Barbarous Years, The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600 – 1675, by Bernard Bailyn (Knopf, $35)
- The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco/HarperCollins, $19.99)
- The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, $25.95)
- Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink (Crown, $27)
- A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout (Scribner, $27)
- Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, by Katy Butler (Scribner, $25)
- Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, by Robert Kolker (Harper, $25.99)
- Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, by Mary Ruefle (Wave Books, $25)
- Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan (Harper, $28.99)
- Thank You for Your Service, by David Finkel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)
- This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital, by Mark Leibovich (Blue Rider, $27.95)
- Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf, $24)
There’s also:
- The Most of Nora Ephron, a collection of her essays (Knopf, $35)
- A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York, by Anjelica Huston (Scribner, $25)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 13, 2014 at 8:48 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Recommended, short story collections, Sundays, Writing)
Tags: happiness, short story, short story collections, summer, Sundays, writing conferences
The Squaw Valley Writers Conference ends tomorrow morning — WAAAAH!!!
Self had the greatest time.
Here’s a picture self took at the end of the last workshop today:
Members of Workshop # 6: Roxanne Barish (kneeling), Jean Bertelsen, Cathee St. Clair, Nicky Loomis, Today’s Moderator Michael Jaime-Becerra, Vish Gaitonde, Wei Wei Yeo, Catie Disabato
The week simply flew by!
Self bought a copy of Michael Jaime-Becerra’s story collection, Every Night is Ladies’ Night:
Michael Jaime-Becerra moderated her workshop today. He’s a fantastic teacher.
Here’s an excerpt from “Lopez Trucking Incorporated,” one of the stories in the collection:
Evelyn’s going nuts in the passenger seat because Mario still isn’t done with her wedding dress. My sister’s too nervous to drive, and since I’m the only one home, I’m taking her for her fitting. Evelyn’s wedding is in four days, on Saturday, and she’s the kind of person who plans everything in her life, from buying wrapping paper for next year the day after Christmas to ordering all her keys by color and size. She gets her craziness from our mom, and while I’ve had sixteen years to get used to it, Lupe’s only had two.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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May 19, 2014 at 1:50 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Plays, Recommended, short story collections, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: artists residency, discoveries, interviews, Ireland, Irish writers, Mondays, short story collections, The Lost Language, travel
The writer today is David Park. Here’s a short bio:
Oranges From Spain, a volume of short stories, set against the background of the Troubles, was first published in the 1980s. Since then, David Park has written five novels: The Healing, The Rye Man, Stone Kingdoms, The Big Snow, and Swallowing the Sun. A teacher, he lives in County Down with his wife Alberta and their two children.
Park was interviewed in Netting the Flow, “the first anthology of work by members of the Comber Reading and Creative Writing Group.”
Which of your books gave you the most satisfaction to write?
I don’t often dwell on past books and I never go back to them after they’re written. There is an element of fear in this because I’m probably frightened that they’ll disappoint me and when they’re out in the world it’s too late to call them back to try and remedy real or imagined imperfections. This feeling of apprehension is both a positive and a negative because it’s the constant dissatisfaction that acts as the spur to try and try again. So when I’m asked about favourite books, the truth is that there are only books that dissatisfy me less than others.
Speaking of favorite books, self brought copies of two of her collections — Mayor of the Roses and The Lost Language — with her on this trip. One copy of The Lost Language went to Joan McGavin (the 2014 Hampshire Poet) and her husband, who so patiently put self up, when she first arrived in the UK. She’d never been to Southampton before; Joan met self at the station and then took self to see a play staged in Her Majesty’s Prison in Winchester, in which all of the male roles were acted by prison inmates, and the female roles by students in the University of Winchester. (This would never have happened in the States, let her tell ya. They’d be too worried about the young women rehearsing with inmates.) It was a very excellent play. Set in World War I, about conscientious objectors and how they were reviled.
She’s managed to give away all her copies except one, her last copy of Mayor of the Roses. She offered poet Csilla Today a choice of which of self’s collections she wanted to trade her poetry collection for, and she picked The Lost Language. Interesting choice! Then self went into her usual disclaimer, telling Csilla the stories were rather “dark.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 11, 2014 at 6:09 am (Books, Lists, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: biographies, book lists, history, inspirations, Mondays, praise, reviews, short story collections, Women's Review of Books
Self really loves the Women’s Review of Books. She devours each issue passionately.
The latest one to arrive in her mailbox is vol. 51 No. 1.
Here are a sampling of the books reviewed:
- Book of Ages: The Life and Chronicles of Jane Franklin, by Jill Lepore: Reviewer Martha Saxton describes it as “original, affectionate, and smart.”
- The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, by Margalit Fox, a book “about the writing on tablets unearthed in Knossos, Crete, in the first years of the twentieth century and about the crucial contribution of Alice Elizabeth Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, to their eventual decipherment decades later.” The review is by Susanna J. Sturgis.
- The review by Mako Yoshikawa of two new collections of linked stories: Horse People, by Cary Holladay and The News From Spain: Variations on a Love Story, by Joan Wickersham. Yoshikawa describes Horse People as “beautiful” and “engrossing,” and calls The News from Spain “wise and wonderful.”
- The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis, by Julie Kavanagh, is about the life of “the Parisian courtesan” who fled “poverty, abuse, and the depredations of old men” and whose genius lay in always presenting “the beautiful appearance, the polished surface, the opera box, the pink champagne, the fine sensibilities and insatiable appetites.” The review is by Carole DeSanti.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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December 25, 2013 at 6:26 am (Books, Links, Lists, Recommended, short story collections)
Tags: book lists, nonfiction, novel, San Francisco Chronicle, short story collections
Of the five fiction, the one by Donna Tartt leaves self cold. Self was excited about Rachel Kushner’s until she discovered it was set in the “heady 1970s.” Self has lived through the 1970s, and the word “heady” really does not apply. Here are the three self wants to read:
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra (Hogarth): The SF Chronicle calls it “an astounding debut novel . . . told with great empathy . . . “
- The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride (Riverhead): Self has read two previous books by this author, and liked them both. The SF Chronicle says: “It might seem like an absurd set-up — a satirical yarn about a cross-dressing freed slave boy fighting alongside John Brown — but McBride pulls it off in this hoot of a novel . . . “
- Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders (Random House): Ever read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline? Self thought that book was a game-changer. In one stroke, changed the landscape of the contemporary American short story, which until then had been Raymond Carver/Lydia Davis. She will read anything by George Saunders. Anything.
Of the Nonfiction, self skips over the story of The Black Russian, as she doesn’t find nonfiction about Russia as compelling as fiction about Russia, who knows why. And though Jesmyn Ward’s book (self heard) is a powerhouse, she wants to delve into something other than “poverty and violence.” And the third book she skips, by Eric Schlosser, is about nuclear accidents. And since there’s not much self can think of to stop nuclear accidents (other than banning nuclear power), she thinks reading Schlosser’s book might just be an exercise in frustration.
Here are the two nonfiction self would like to read:
- Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, by Jill Lepore (Knopf): Because Ben Franklin had a sister. And it’s high time people found out.
- Thank You For Your Service, by David Finkel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): “Much has been written about the lingering effects of war on American soldiers who have come home, but Finkel’s narrative of time spent with these men and their families has a singular emotional depth.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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December 6, 2013 at 11:26 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Niece, Personal Bookshelf, Places, postaday, Recommended, short story collections)
Tags: Fridays, Lydia Davis, memories, Palo Alto, postaday, postaweek, short story collections, The Philippines, Wordpress
Self chose these three photos to interpret this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: Grand. They are all Grand (i.e. Awe-inspiring), but for very different reasons. The first was taken with her cellphone, which perhaps accounts for it’s odd shape.
Apple Store, University Avenue, Downtown Palo Alto, the Sunday After Steve Jobs Passed Away
Kanlaon Volcano, in Dear Departed Dad’s home province of Negros Occidental
Lydia Davis signed 2 copies of her COLLECTED STORIES: one for self, the other for Niece G
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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November 8, 2013 at 12:37 am (Books, Lists, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: advice, essays, humor, interviews, Just published, lists, novel, reviews, San Francisco, short story collections, The NYTBR
The Pile of Stuff is humongous! Actually humongous!
There are issues of The New York Times Book Review dating as far back as September!
But self cannot bring herself to end her subscription, which she’s kept up for over a decade.
Anyhoo, she is as usual very short on time, so she does a quick browse-through of aforementioned issue of the NYTBR, and is so excited to discover (from reading the “By the Book” interview with Richard Dawkins) that he recommends a book called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, because self absolutely needs to have guidance in this area. And Dawkins recommends another book that self thinks would really help her in her social interactions: Avoid Boring People, by the eminent Nobel-Prizewinning molecular biologist James D. Watson.
Dawkins also mentions that he has not interest in reading Pride and Prejudice because “I can’t get excited about who is going to marry whom, and how rich they are.” But self IS greatly interested in the topic, so she adds Pride and Prejudice to her reading list (She read it decades ago; it’s definitely time for a re-read!)
This issue of The NYTBR also has a funny story about Gary Kamiya, and it turns out he is a pack rat, just like self. His new book has a fabulous title: Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.
This issue’s Fabulous Author Photo (There’s always at least one, in every issue) belongs to Chinelo Okparanta. Kudos for not only having a Fabulous Author Photo, but for actually being exotic, Ms. Okparanta! She migrated to America from Nigeria at the age of 10, and the first part of her book, Happiness, Like Water: Stories — the “more powerful” part, according to reviewer Ligaya Mishan — is set in Nigeria.
There is also another fabulously titled book: an essay collection called Sister Mother Husband Dog (Etc.) by one of the fabulous Ephrons (Nora passed away recently, but thank goodness she had writing offspring like Delia Ephron to perpetuate the legacy).
At the very back of the issue is a section called “The Shortlist,” and here are four International Thrillers, which includes The Kill List, Frederick Forsyth’s latest, and Masaryk Station, which sounds like it ought to be by Martin Cruz Smith but is actually written by David Downing.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 20, 2013 at 5:46 am (Books, Links, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, short story collections)
Tags: book lists, discoveries, memoir, nonfiction, novel, reading lists, Saturdays, short story collections, The NYTBR, translation
- a translation from the French by a writer whose name self encountered for the first time only a few hours ago: Daniel Arsand. The novel is Lovers.
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis
- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (perhaps self’s favorite book of her childhood. Other than The Hobbit)
- a book about the terrible things that happened in a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina: Five Days at Memorial, by Katy Butler
- a story collection by Tom Barbash: Stay Up With Me
- a memoir, by Amanda Lindhout, of what happened after she was kidnapped and held for ransom in Somalia: A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett
- A Thousand Pardons, a new novel from Jonathan Dee (Malcolm Gladwell recommended it in the By the Book interview)
- Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
- James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
- James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity
- Tim Parks’s 2011 memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still
(The list is made up of books reviewed in the September 8, 2013 and October 6, 2013 issues of The New York Times Book Review.)
Self is still on The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin. Sometime in the near future, she’s going to switch gears. She’s just added Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum, to her reading list. Let’s just hope she doesn’t wind up reading them during the Christmas holidays: it might result in the blog developing a rather schizophrenic feel. Especially if she starts interspersing images of holiday festivity with images of human cruelty.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers.
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