New Year’s Eve, Redwood City

The ball has long since dropped on Times Square. Son is with a group of friends in the City. Self is on the couch, sipping Yogi Sleepytime Tea and watching Charlie Sheen on “Two and a Half Men” (in light of recent events, admittedly a rather creepy experience).

Just before this, she stopped watching Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet,” which arrived only today from Netflix. She got to only about a third of the way through. Mel Gibson is just about the most scenery-chewing Hamlet ever. Which is terrible because the role of Hamlet is all about interiority. At least it is, in self’s humble opinion. Finally, dear Mel rolled his eyes just one too many times and self quit watching and turned back to cable. About the only reasons for dear blog readers to rent this version of Hamlet would be a) to see how astonishingly beautiful Glenn Close is in the role of Hamlet’s Mum; b) to see how astonishingly beautiful Helena Bonham-Carter is in the role of Ophelia; and c) to see how astonishingly beautiful a young man named Nathaniel Parker is in the small role of Laertes.

Self can hear firecrackers popping, somewhere in the distance. She is three-fourths of the way through Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, which she started reading right after Alexandra Fuller’s (wonderful) Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. She finds that Kafka’s stories need to be read in a pell-mell rush, preferably in one sitting. For the paragraphs are thick and dense and continue for pages and pages without a break. And if self stops reading in the middle of a story, she can never find the place where she left off, and the story makes no sense.

There have been some beautiful stories — “The Metamorphosis”, of course, but also “The Judgement” and, self’s particular favorite, a truly shattering story called “A Country Doctor”. Self read this book all through Christmas and the week leading up to today. Never since son’s birth (when self was reading Dickens’ Bleak House) has self’s reading matter been so at odds with her reality.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

NYTBR 13 Dec. 2009: The 10 Best Books of 2009 Issue

Books self is interested in reading after perusing the 13 December 2009 issue of The New York Times Book Review:

1.    After reading the list of “10 Best Books of 2009”, the following books:

• Maile Meloy’s short story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
• Lorrie Moore’s first novel in more than a decade, A Gate at the Stairs
• Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses, a “novel based on family lore”
• Kate Walbert’s “exquisitely written novel” about “a British suffragist and a handful of her Anglo-American descendants”, A Short History of Women
• David Finkel’s book about the soldiers (average age 19) posted to Baghdad at the height of the surge, The Good Soldiers
• Carol Sklenicka’s “prodigiously researched” biography, Raymond Carver:  A Writer’s Life

2.    After reading Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s review of Woody Holton’s Abigail Adams :

• Woody Holton’s Abigail Adams

3.    After reading Marilyn Stasio’s Crime column, the following mysteries:

• Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions (1971), Hollywood Station, and Hollywood Crows (2008)
• the newest in Charles Finch’s “beguiling Victorian mysteries”, The Fleet Street Murders
• P. D. James’ Talking About Detective Fiction

4.    After reading Ruth Scurr’s review of novelist Louis Begley’s “retelling the story of the Dreyfus Affair”, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters:

• Louis Begley’s Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

Story Self Is Currently Writing

Here’s the beginning of the story self is currently working on. It’s set in Georgetown.

At first he was afraid. Chesapeake, Dumbarton Oaks, their dark spaces. Rock Creek Park seemed wild. So vast

Blindsided

Not as cold today. Let me tell ya, the last few days, it’s been so cold in the San Francisco Bay Area that everyone self sees has been wearing Ugg boots and down parkas, and self’s bathroom is at the moment chock-full of potted bougainvilleas and geraniums that she’s

Upcoming for Self, 2010

Reading with poet Steve Fellner and Jawbox’s J. Robbins: at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, Friday, Feb. 19.  Part of the Story/Stereo series, a program which brings together writers and musicians.

“Witness” appearing in Necessary Fiction, February 2010

“Ghosts” to be published in Hotel Amerika, The TransGenre Issue, Spring 2010

Booksigning at

Thursday Before Halloween (2009)

Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which means the weekend will be very fun.  Fun, fun, fun, fun.

It is chilly in the house.  In the interests of conserving energy, we keep the thermostat down.  Self walks around all the time in sweats, scarf, and furry socks.

Son took his GRE yesterday: apparently, now you can see how you scored, immediately after, and he got 1400.  Happy happy joy joy!  Self has no idea where son plans to apply to grad school, hubby hopes Stanford but self thinks it isn’t the school for him.  She hopes University of Washington, as Seattle is a very cool city.

Story of the day is from One Story, lit mag which self realized (in a flash of insight, earlier this month) would never publish her.  The story is called “Stag.”  Once again it is set in some lonely Midwestern locale, where men are all like Cormac McCarthy protagonists.  Setting very bleak, very rife with anomie, and that unique American angst.

Though it is cold outside, self will walk the li’l crits.  In addition, she will see if she can find the following two books in the local Barnes & Noble:

• Helen Oyeyemi’s first novel, The Icarus Girl:  According to the New York Times Book Review, this is about “the troubled daughter of a Nigerian mother and an English father . . .  who develops a malevolent imaginary friend.” (Yes!)
• Chieh Chieng’s first novel, A Long Stay in a Distant Land which is described by NYTBR as “a generous family saga about an unlucky Cantonese-American clan from Orange County, Calif.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Aung San Suu Kyi Biography Reviewed in Upcoming Issue of Women’s Review of Books

Self’s review of Perfect Hostage, the Justin Wintle biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, is forthcoming from the Women’s Review of Books in the November/December issue.

Among the highlights of the current issue (September/October 2009) are:

“Anomie in the New China,” Xujun Eberlein’s review of Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

In an intimate, nonjudgmental voice, Leslie T. Chang’s refreshingly rendered Factory Girls opens up the fascinating and gritty world of female migrant workers. While many of the young women find economic improvement, their rudderless lives raise the question of whether this new migration is a progression or regression in Chinese women’s emancipation.

“Sticky Tables,” Rebecca Meacham’s review of Antonya Nelson’s latest story collection, Nothing Right: Short Stories

My introduction to Antonya Nelson’s fiction began with shooting dogs. Specifically, it began with one dog, a fictional pet in a short story I was revising during graduate school. As a writer, I was itching to try something stark and violent. In my story, a suburban couple required an irrevocable act to divide them. My new ending seemed perfect: in the last scene, for various reasons, the husband would shoot his wife’s dog.

Also featured:

• “Woman of Valor,” Sherrilyn A. Ifill’s review of Mia Bay’s To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells; and Paula Giddings’ Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
• “Girl Delinquents,” Miroslava Chavez-Garcia’s review of Catherine S. Ramirez’s The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory
• “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” Martha Nichols’ review of Heather Jacobson’s Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference

Participate in the on-line discussion about these articles on the Review’s new web-blog, Women=Books.

Here’s the Thing

Yesterday was quite an amazing day as self got the absolutely amazing news that a story of hers was a finalist in a flash fiction contest. Self’s been trying for years to get into this journal, with no luck. And now she’s a finalist?

The prize was $500.

Unfortunately or perhaps just unluckily, the story was “Appetites,” which is in the current issue (# 31) of cool website Cafe Irreal.

Alas!  She had so little faith in her chances (or is perhaps too much a creature of impulse) that, yes indeed, amazing as it may seem, she submitted the exact same piece to the contest and to Cafe Irreal, which published it. (Then again, dear blog readers, what are the odds? Of you becoming a finalist in a contest? Given the fact that there are hundreds of writers equally or perhaps more talented than you, all of them also submitting to contests? Isn’t becoming a contest finalist then akin to the rich man going through the eye of a needle, or whatever analogy the Bible used to illustrate the difficulty of getting into heaven?)

Self had to withdraw from the contest, today.

Here are a couple of thoughts that presented to self:

There is always a first time for everything. So now self has the unique honor of knowing how it feels to have to excuse herself from a contest in which she has become (quite improbably) a finalist.

Also:  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?  Hopefully?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Insomnia & The NYTBR of 13 September 2009

Self had another awful bout of insomnia last night. She told herself she would not allow herself to read any more of the Alice Munro collection after a certain time of night, because then she’ll want to stay up reading, so enthralling are the stories (Runaway). But it didn’t work last night. In the wee hours of the morning, self was still wide awake, the only difference from nights previous was that she was now reading The New York Times Book Review of 13 September 2009. So, here are the books self thought she’d be interested in reading, in the wee hours of this morning:

1. After reading Liesl Schillinger’s review of a new novel by E. L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley:

E. L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley

2. After reading Dexter Filkin’s review of Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman:

Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

3. After reading Lisa Scottoline’s review of Ethan Brown’s Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder That Rocked New Orleans:

Ethan Brown’s Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder That Rocked New Orleans

4. After reading Louisa Gilder’s review of Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom:

Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

5. After reading Andrew Ervin’s review of Nigeria-born fiction writer Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching:

Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching

6. After reading Caryn James’ review of Philippe Claudel’s latest novel, Brodeck (translated from the French by John Cullen):

Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck, translated from the French by John Cullen

7. After reading William Giraldi’s review of Terrence Holt’s first story collection, In the Valley of the Kings:

Terrence Holt’s In the Valley of the Kings

8. After reading Jonathan Lethem’s end-paper essay, “Poet of Desolate Landscapes,” about the stories of J. G. Ballard:

The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

Self Thought About This Earlier Today

. . . while she was at the Writing Center (There were students! Hallelujah!). She was reading a short story about people who work at a garbage dump, who make a horrific discovery and — whoa! Self! Stop right there! Have you forgotten, it is almost time for dinner ???

Well, the point is:

Self also has a severed hand story!!!

Apologies if this is just too much for you, dear blog reader.  Self really really likes this story, it had its genesis in an on-line writers group that