2024: Best Books (I Read)

Time for my annual list, along with the accompanying list of caveats: these are, simply put, the best books I read over the course of the year. I try to narrow things down to 10ish books, which is awfully hard. I definitely read (and ADORE!) books by my writer friends, but I try to keep those books off this list. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: ALL lists are subjective. In my personal definition of “best,” I mean some magical alchemy of this book at this time that hit me this way. The order is chronological, so don’t spend time parsing out why one book is first, another last. Also, I had to eliminate some VERY EXCELLENT books to keep my list tidy, and YES, I feel terrible about doing so.

 

THE GUEST by Emma Cline

I pretty much spent the entire year recommending this dark and suspenseful book about an aging “party girl” who needs to find a way to get through a week in the Hamptons now that she has nowhere to live. Crashing parties, making bad decisions, meeting the wrong people, a phone she doesn’t fix…this book isn’t for everyone, as the reader needs some tolerance of characters you’d like to shake sense into. But this book I succeeds extraordinarily at carrying suspense until (literally) the very last word on the page. (And beyond, honestly; I thought about the ending for days.) I could never get enough of Cline’s nuanced—and tart—observations about socio-economic class and girls/women. This book is one of two on this list that earned a place on my Favorite Books bookshelf…which is saying a lot, as that shelf is jam-packed!

  

I AM ONE OF YOU FOREVER by Fred Chappell

Fred Chappell was a beloved North Carolina author, and this book—about growing up in western, rural NC—is possibly his most beloved book. Not exactly a novel, not exactly a collection of stories or essays, reading this book is like listening to a master storyteller weave tales about way back, carrying your mind to a time and place you can’t imagine actually existed even as you utterly believe it did. Flirting with magical realism, using an episodic structure which may not appeal to everyone—but persevere and you’ll be rewarded by delightful humor and insights into human nature. If you’re  a writer, here’s a master class in dialogue. Not to sound obsessed with last words and final lines, but when I mentioned on social media that I was reading this book, at least a dozen people commented that the last line is perfect. They’re right!

 

JAMES by Percival Everett

There should be more awards so this book can win them all. A novel in conversation with Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—but don’t stress if you haven’t read Twain or if it’s been a while because James (aka Jim, the runaway slave in Huck Finn) is his own man here, with his own agenda and agency. This book is smart in every possible way, written with an understated writing style that’s never show-offy, only perfect. Some hard, awful things happen in this book, as one would expect given the subject matter (so be warned), and that understated writing serves to make them all seem more awful. (A master class in writing about trauma.) This book absolutely must be in any conversation about The Great American Novel.

 

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng

Lots of levels to this novel, which I picked up at a used book sale. At first I thought I was getting a juicy story about family dysfunction in the 70s Midwest, complete with a missing girl, but the book expands to ponder secrets and love and women’s roles and racism. Don’t let the five (!) points of view scare you—Ng handles them all with panache. I was utterly immersed in this novel.

  

TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis

I admit that I’m a horrible person for wondering why Charles Portis rated a volume of Collected Works in the Library of America series. I mean, come on! The True Grit guy…really? Then I read this book, and now I know. What a stunner! Great voice, clear vision, funny as hell, so much plot (but not too much), awesome characters down to the minor folks. I hadn’t seen the movie before reading the book (I know…what’s wrong with me?), so then I watched the Jeff Bridges version. That movie gets 5/5 stars for sure, but the book gets 10/5. My husband wearied of my saying, “Well, that scene is much funnier in the book.”

 

LESS by Andrew Sean Greer

I read this on my birthday, which is perfect because at its core, it’s a book about age/aging and love/loving, though it’s also a sparkling, funny book about a writer on a crazy book tour where everything goes wrong, trying to outrun his broken heart. This book won the Pulitzer, which surely is a minor miracle—not because it didn’t deserve the honor, but because those committees are always so Serious & Important. Good for them for finding Serious & Important in the guise of funny and charming.

 

RULES OF CIVILITY by Amor Towles

Anyone who’s been following my lists knows I’m a sucker for this plotline: “girl comes to New York City to work in publishing.” So how could I not love this novel set in 1938 about a working class girl with gumption and sass who charms her way through Manhattan, first in the typing pool before eventually becoming an editor, all the while running with a glamorous crowd? I’m not saying this is the most literary novel ever written, but I found it literary enough with appealing characters. I know Amor Towles is a wildly popular writer, and I certainly understand why.

 

LIGHT YEARS by James Salter

One of those books that writers are always insisting writers should read. I listened to this sage advice and bought the book…so long ago that my copy contains a bookmark that refers to the bookstore in the World Trade Center. (!) All these years later I’ve finally cracked it open to read, and wow! The first paragraph caught me, promising an extraordinary book ahead. While the plot (such as it is) seems basic—the story of a marriage—this book’s ambition is to capture life in all its seasons and complications, which it does exquisitely. Yes, it’s episodic—yes, there’s a weird lack of transitions—yes, I found myself wondering if this book would survive the gauntlet of agents and marketing departments today—yes, this book requires close and careful attention. Yes, this book went straight onto my Favorite Books bookshelf.

 

THE LINE OF BEAUTY by Alan Hollinghurst

Oh, the power of the New York Times Book Review and its list of the 100 best books of the 21^st century. Somehow I had never heard of Alan Hollinghurst, which surprised me as I like to think I’ve at least heard of everything and everyone! (I haven’t, but as I said, I like to think I have.) So, off to the library to check this out, in every sense of the word. I found the going slow at first—too many characters; set in 1980s London, so I lacked a frame of reference for many allusions; the pace felt leisurely aka tediously slow. And yet. Such smart sentences! Such depth of character! I persevered, and about 2/3 of the way through I encountered a brilliant and hilarious chapter (summer holiday in France, if you’ve read the book), followed by another brilliant and even more hilarious chapter (party with Margaret Thatcher), and I was ALL IN to the end, which was so brilliant and perfect that I sobbed. So, I returned the book to the library and bought a duplicate hardback edition from AbeBooks so I could have my own copy forever.

 

TRANSIT by Rachel Cusk

And, again, the power of the New York Times Book Review and its list of the 100 best books of the 21^st century which also included Rachel Cusk. I have heard of her, but I realized that I perpetually confuse her with Rachel Kushner, whose work I’ve read and not connected with. So, I thought I should see what’s what with this other Rachel. Oh, goodness—lots! Zero confusion now! (To be clear, this isn’t the book that was on the NYTBR list, but this is the book the library had.) I found myself admiring the autofictional feel of this novel—the second in a series about a recently divorced writer/mom living in modern Britain, basically getting through modern life (in this book, moving into a new [and awful] flat). But beyond those concrete concerns, the book ponders movement and “transit” in a brainy, thinky way that creates an elegant arc. One of those deceptive writing styles that feels so natural, that’s actually hard AF to pull off.

 

Three endnotes:

 

For my short story book club, I did a presentation on the Irish writer William Trevor, whose stories are stealthily devastating. If you’re not familiar with his work, here are three that will turn you into a fan:

“A Choice of Butchers”

“After Rain”

“A Day”

 ~~~

I have a standing free-flow writing date on Thursday afternoons, and I start each session by reading poetry (a strategy I highly recommend). Here are the books that kept me company throughout 2024 (to be transparent, these are writers I know IRL). If you’re looking for more poetry in your life, I suggest starting here:

 

CHARM OFFENSIVE by Ross White

WHIPSAW by Suzanne Frischkorn

BORN BACKWARDS by Tanya Olson

IF IN SOME CATACLYSM by Anna Leahy

A LITTLE BUMP IN THE EARTH by Tyree Daye

~~~

Finally, I'll indulge myself and mention some recently published novels/story collections/essays by friends that I absolutely ADORED:

 

SEX ROMP GONE WRONG by Julia Ridley Smith

A SEASON OF PERFECT HAPPINESS by Maribeth Fischer

OUR KIND OF GAME by Joanna Copeland

MISS SOUTHEAST by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

THE MARY YEARS by Julie Marie Wade

GREENWOOD by Mark Morrow

~~~

 

Hope your 2025 is filled with good books and a Favorite Books bookshelf that expands an inch or two or ten!

 

 

On Hiatus

My author interview series is on hiatus until January 2025. Keep an eye out for my annual list of "Best Books (I Read) in 2024."

TBR: The Mary Years by Julie Marie Wade

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

The Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of Julie Marie Wade.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

My students tell me about writing fan fiction, how satisfying it is for them to take characters that exist in books and films and video games and create additional stories, even alternative stories, for their lives. Mistakenly, for years, I’ve thought I didn’t know anything at all about fan fiction, but the truth is, The Mary Years is a work of fan nonfiction, and I think I felt compelled to write it for similar reasons to those that inspire fan fiction: I wanted to explore how a fictional character (many, actually—a cast of fictional characters) can have as much influence over our lives as the real people who live and breathe alongside us.

 

Maybe we all live between real and fictional realms anyway, so this memoir, arranged in chapters that were individually published as “essays in episodes,” is my attempt at showing the ongoing straddle between my personal history and the television show that has been a touchstone for it since The Mary Tyler Moore Show first premiered on Nick at Nite in 1992. I’m not sure if the writing of this collection exemplifies any kind of courage, but I knew I had to write the book after Mary Tyler Moore, the real person who embodied the fictional character who deeply informed my real coming-of-age, passed away in early 2017. The Mary Years is nothing if not an elegy to her and for her as well.

 

I loved writing each essay in episodes, considering my own childhood in an insular Seattle suburb called Fauntlee Hills as an analog to Mary Richards’s Roseburg, the fictional Minnesota town where the character was from (“Fauntlee Hills Was My Roseburg: An Essay in Episodes, Prairie Schooner, 2020); exploring my first residence as an autonomous adult in Pittsburgh, the early years of wondering whether my partner Angie and I would “make it after all” in a place neither of us had ever visited before moving across the country together and starting a new life there (“Pittsburgh Was My Minneapolis: An Essay in Episodes, Tupelo Quarterly, 2018); and of course these more recent years in Miami, my life as a professor and mentor, taking on a kind of work where I might become a role model for others in the way Mary—both the person and the character—became a role model for me (“Miami is My Tipperary: An Essay in Episodes,” The Normal School, 2020). Let’s hope!

 

I might have had the most conspicuous fun writing “Lamonts Might Be My WJM” (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 2019) which explored my first real job—the one that wasn’t babysitting or teaching piano lessons or walking neighbors’ dogs—the first job where I earned a proper paycheck on a grainy blue background with those little perforated tabs you have to tear along the sides. The Mary Tyler Moore Show kindled in me a desire not only to work as part of a professional team but a desire for the friendships and camaraderie that might be forged because of working together. At seventeen, just before graduating from high school, I was hired by the (sadly now-defunct) department store Lamonts as a sales associate. Even the title sounded fancy to me! And I started meeting all these people—mostly middle-aged and older women—who had so much life experience in addition to their decades of retail experience, and most of whom were more than willing to share that experience with me. I wanted to bring my initiation into that workplace—but also into that new realm of womanhood—onto the page. I still think so often about my colleagues at Lamonts, who were really mentors, and all that I learned from them. They didn’t seem like Mary Richards, not one of them, but they shaped my life in significant ways, too. And when I finally left that job and moved onto a commissioned position selling shoes for JCPenney, I remember one of my mentors hugged me good-bye in the break room and said, knowing my deep love of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (everyone knew about that!), “We’re going to miss you, our sweet Mary girl.”

 

Probably the hardest part of this book to write was near the end of the essay-chapter “Miami Is My Tipperary,” the night I learned Mary Tyler Moore had died. I was teaching when it happened, which seemed fitting—I was doing the thing I love most—and my phone was filling up with voicemails and texts offering condolences from people across my life. But I didn’t see these messages until hours later. Usually, as a writer with strong commitments to memoir, I’m writing at a distance from my memories, not trying to document events so close to when they actually happened. As I was writing that part of the essay, splicing the messages I hadn’t seen yet with what we were talking about in class—ekphrasis, of all things—writing in response to various kinds of art, including television—I realized I was crying. Tears were pouring down my face as I typed. It may be the first time I have ever experienced such an immediate and intense catharsis while shaping memory into scene on the page.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

I’m actually astonished—and so grateful, beyond grateful—that Michael Martone chose this book for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2023. I don’t remember offhand how many times I circulated the book to various possible publishers—mostly memoir and nonfiction book prizes—or even what possessed me to send The Mary Years to a novella prize. It’s about 40,000 words, so it qualifies as a novella length-wise, but I wasn’t sure if novellas were restricted implicitly to fictional works. Then again, Mary Richards is a fictional character, and WJM is a fictional workplace, so certainly this is a nonfiction work that interacts in a sustained way with fiction—just the fiction of someone else’s creation!

 

I was astonished every time one of the individual essay-chapters found a home in a literary journal (and ultimately, they all did), but I wasn’t sure if the idiosyncratic nature of my project would set it apart from other manuscripts in an enticing way or a limiting way. As writers, we never really know, do we?

 

I circulated this book as a book for far less time than many of my other collections, and I’m used to waiting a long time for a project to find the right home. So I think it was all highs really, the biggest high being the fact that I wrote it, the homage I needed to write, and in the process, I discovered so much about my own history that I would never have learned without my eye poised to the lens of the MTM kaleidoscope.

 

Sometimes people ask memoirists, or those who work broadly in the self-referential arts, how we don’t “run out” of material. I think it’s not about the quantity of material at all but about finding new ways of looking at our lives and considering all the lenses we have available to facilitate that looking.

 

An ekphrastic lens is so exciting and revelatory to me that I’m actually building a multi-genre graduate seminar around this expansive concept. In “The New Ekphrasis,” I want to consider with my students some recent innovative works of contemporary ekphrasis including—but not limited to!—Ander Monson’s Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies (literary ekphrasis), Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us (aural ekphrasis), Sibbie O’Sullivan’s My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I’m not sure it was intended specifically as writing advice—maybe as life and writing advice—but when I was graduating from college and preparing to head to my first graduate program, one of the great mentors of my life, Tom Campbell, said this: “Let nothing be wasted on you.” Tom was my undergraduate English professor and advisor, an exemplary teacher who I still channel in my own classrooms.

 

I take his words to mean, simply put, use everything; learn from everything; value everything. If you love a particular television show, write about it. If you have a strange or surprising hobby you think no one would else appreciate, write about it. Whatever is important to you in your life can be shaped for a reading audience. Your reader will care if you care enough and are artful enough in translating your own experience to the page.

 

And in another sense, don’t let rejections and disappointments (which every person and every artist experience) stop you from pursuing what you love. I am thousands of rejections deep in my 21 years of submitting work for publication. I have lost far more contests than I have won or could ever hope to win—as is inevitable—but I work hard to learn from those rejections, to let them spur me forward rather than hold me back.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

Oh, that’s wonderful advice! I’m always surprised when writing. I look forward to being surprised. In The Mary Years, I was surprised by the small things I discovered through sustained attention. For instance, I discovered that WJM, the newsroom where Mary Richards works for all seven seasons on the show, mirrors my own name’s initials, each time I am asked to print my last name first, followed by first and middle. Also, after all those years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and reading biographies (and autobiographies!) about her life, I had realized the framed picture on Mary Richards’s table, the one just outside her balcony doors, was a picture of her real-life son, Richie Meeker, but it did not dawn on me until writing this book that her character’s last name Richards was most likely an homage to her son, whose given name was Richard.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

My book’s title—The Mary Years—comes from an idiosyncratic reference that I have used since I first became a devotee of the series as a twelve-year-old. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we meet Mary Richards when the character is 30 years old, and the series ends, seven seasons later, when she is 37. So all those years as I was moving through my adolescence and then through my 20s, I was anticipating my own “Mary years,” wondering what my 30s would be like—and how they would differ from Mary’s. I always talked about people, specifically women, in that age range as being “in their Mary years.”

 

Here’s a sweet story that also appears in the book: when I entered my own Mary years, I was a PhD student living with my long-time partner in Louisville, Kentucky, and some of our friends from my academic program conspired with Angie to surprise me with a Mary-themed birthday party. Our friend Carol hosted, and she served Brandy Alexanders as the signature cocktail—which all you MTM fans will recall is the drink Mary asks for on her job interview with Lou Grant when he insists she have a drink with him. Our friend Elijah listened to the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love is All Around” so many times that he learned the song by heart and then brought his band to Carol’s house to play that song as I walked through the door.

 

Then, when I reached the end of my own Mary years, Mary Tyler Moore passed away, and I knew it was time to write—from the other side of that milestone era—what my own journey toward and through “the Mary years” had meant to me.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)  

 

https://www.liquor.com/recipes/brandy-alexander/

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.juliemariewade.com

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://texasreviewpress.org/submissions/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680033885/the-mary-years/

 

READ A SELECTION FROM THIS BOOK, “PITTSBURGH WAS MY MINNEAPOLIS: An Essay in Episodes”: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/prose/pittsburgh-was-my-minneapolis-an-essay-in-episodes-by-julie-marie-wade/

 

 

TBR: The Decade of Letting Things Go (A Post Menopause Memoir) by Cris Mazza

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

It’s about loss… the growing load of losses we carry, some without even realizing, both the expected (parents, pets, relationships, keepsakes, homes) as well as losses we don’t realize are being lost, such as identities (daughter, sibling, even author). And it’s about continuing the search for meaning and contentment through what seems like the loss of hope.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Perhaps “Northwoods Nap” was the easiest … so did I enjoy it most? It was easiest because there was a particular mini event to supply shape and movement: my dog continually waking me during a nap until I realized what was bothering him. But the writing journey of discovery just in unpacking this small event was both satisfying and comforting -- because it made me feel even closer to my dog.

 

The most difficult could be the last one, “Day of Reckoning,” because while I was exploring how a childhood perception that I was decidedly not the “preferred” child in my family had created unhealthy and even ugly adult tendencies, behavior, and sensibility … something happened in my personal relationship that was so germane that I had to include it, but was something deeply personal to my partner. So I wrestled with it, knowing I did have to include it, but how? … and I ended up putting it into a text box, almost an aside, and said that it might be the biggest day of reckoning of all.

 

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

The high was definitely being taken by the University of Georgia Press CRUX CNF series. What a powerful list of names came before me!

The lows were being outright ignored by agents and some larger independent publishers, even when I was personally recommended.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Yours! (Below.) Because it’s how I’ve learned to work. I was probably surprised by something in every essay, then surprised all over again when the essays made a whole story, with repeating characters, threads of continuing story, repeated motifs, etc.  Many times, while writing, the surprise discovery or thought did signal “this is the ending” and I knew to just stop there. Other times the surprise(s) helped me. So I’ll just say your advice in a different way: don’t have a hard-and-fast ending planned before you start to write.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

As alluded to above, the biggest surprise was that separate essays written over a 10+ year span – never thinking they would be in a book let alone make a book – were actually a woven-together story. I like to think this is represented in the cover art. I told the designer to look for an image that was a “single line,” where the artist never lifts the pencil until completely finished. It represents the “unbroken-line” threads that can be tugged in one essay to reel-in other parts of the same story in other essays, but also the designer tripled the line, so it represents multiple pull-through threads.

 

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

 

I want readers to know that there’s drama, tension, discovery and relief to be found in stories that are not victim-to-victory narratives. Searching for complicity is a foundation of the kind of exploration I do in nonfiction writing. In fact, sometimes realizing one’s own complicity is itself a personal gut punch to stagger away from and then try to stand up again.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

 

 

In “The Summer of Letting Things Go” there’s a vignette that was originally published in Brevity, titled “Feeding Time.” It describes my family’s custom of family dinner, and ends with a description of having fresh coconut for dessert, starting with the hard brown fruit, progressing through the drilling, cracking it with a hammer, then prying the white meat from the shell.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://cris-mazza.com/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820367545/the-decade-of-letting-things-go/

 

READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “Oneiric (another word I’ve never said)”:

https://therumpus.net/2014/03/23/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-oneiric-another-word-ive-never-said/

 

 

 

TBR: In the Sky Lord by Mary Troy

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

A restaurant worker steals from a donation jar meant to collect money for a dying boy; a young woman held up at gunpoint is asked to choose which of her coworkers should be shot; a woman in her fifties suffers near debilitating guilt over all the small things she should have done, the times she looked away; a woman who believes herself to be mean operates a kennel for  stray and dumped dogs against a city ordinance; a newlywed hides her dying husband from his mother; a woman takes her father to the Kalaupapa leper colony for what they both know is a non-existent award; a former Archangel from the Pearly Gates Men’s Cub tries turn her life around as she operates a marina in a poverty stricken area of Missouri. These stories and more are in IN THE SKY LORD. All ten stories are about inventiveness, resilience, survival, yearnings, strength, and hope, but mostly they are about the strong need to connect to another.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The title story, “In The Sky Lord,” gave me the most trouble because the character, Belinda, became more complex with each draft, never stopping to become someone I could grasp. Not for years. And though she is the second oldest woman in here, she changes in unanticipated ways, maybe changes more than others. Because “In The Sky Lord,” was the hardest, it was also the most enjoyable, that is if enjoyable means frustrating and haunting. Also “Rent-to-Kill,” the first story in the book, is about Millie Kick, formerly Millie Holmes who was the protagonist in “Do You Believe In the Chicken Hanger?” a story I wrote 20 something years ago that was one of the runners up for the Nelson Algren Award. It was fun to do a sequel.

 

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

Oh, IN THE SKY LORD has a great story. In 2018 it was accepted as a collection, nine stories I had published over the previous 6 years as I was working on the novel, Swimming on Hwy N. The publisher, though, soon decided he would prefer to use the new work in a larger book of New and Selected, highlight it as part of the press’s 50^th anniversary celebration.  I was excited, humbled but excited. But the press was connected to a university, and as COVID lingered, the press lost funding. The publisher told me not to worry, at first, as they were getting endowments and would continue to publish as an independent. But alas, that never quite worked. In the meantime, partly because I had just retired and partly because COVID kept me isolated, I decided to take each of the nine stories apart and make them even better. So I did, eventually dropping two of them but writing two new ones. I saw a chance—with lots of changes—to connect the stories, and I enjoyed that, too. So sometime in ’21 I sent the new collection to Braddock Avenue Books.  Why Braddock? I had just read Kerry Neville’s collection, and discovered not only her but also Braddock, a press I’d not heard of yet, but one that does great stuff. Nine months after I sent the manuscript, it was accepted, but set for publication two years away. I continued to refine the stories in those two years, and even at the very last minute added a very new one set in the town of Wolf Pass, Illinois, a town I created for the book.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

True characters are flawed and frightened and weird and absurd and confused and much more, just like us. If they are squinted at just right, though, seen from different perspectives, their stories told “slant,” as Emily Dickinson advised, their uniqueness can come through. Not one of us, not one character, is what they seem.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

That the endings changed so from the way they were originally published, that they all now end in a sort of hope. I don’t normally consider myself a hopeful sort, but I believe in the inventiveness and inner strength of all these women.

 

How did you get the title?

 

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is a hymn from 1907 or so, yet more than a hundred years later still recorded by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Neville Brothers, the Staple Singers and many others. The lyrics tell us there is a better world a’waitin’,  “in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”  That line always made me laugh. A world in the sky! A better one! I said long ago, someday I will write a book titled IN THE SKY LORD. This was long before I wrote the short story with that title, and decades before the book was even an idea.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

Many of my previous books, most especially Beauties, about two women running a café, are about food and recipes. In fact, my cousin makes my meatball recipe from Beauties every year over the holidays, and his children call it Mary’s meatballs. But this book is full of diner fried fish and chips, waffles and home fries, pulled pork and macaroni salad, delivered pizzas, fast foods, canned chili and cheap hot dogs, etc.. I had not realized that until you asked. Maybe because these are all foods I no longer eat but did like at times. Well, “Butter Cakes” is about a man who makes butter cakes for last meals in prisons, but he has not revealed the recipe except to say each contains a pound of butter.

 

*****

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://shop.braddockavenuebooks.com/pages/books/133/mary-troy/in-the-sky-lord

TBR: The Book of Losman by K.E. Semmel

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

THE BOOK OF LOSMAN is about a literary translator in Copenhagen with Tourette Syndrome who becomes involved in a dubious and experimental drug study to retrieve his childhood memories in a tragicomic effort to find a cure for his condition.

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Daniel P. Losman—who goes simply by Losman—was very much a fun character to write. I’ve written 7 completed manuscripts over the past 30 years, five novels and two collections of stories (there were more manuscripts I simply abandoned). Nearly all of those manuscripts contain stories and characters that involve background research. This is especially so with one manuscript, a retelling of Beowulf set in the Southern Tier region of New York State. I spent 10 years writing that book, which is called IN THE COUNTRY OF MONSTROUS CREATURES. To do it properly, I had to read and reread Beowulf, I had to research the process of fracking (which plays an outsize role in the novel), and I had to invest a great deal of time learning more about this region of the state. I am from New York State—I love New York!—but I grew up in the Finger Lakes. There are great differences between these regions. Since I was after a certain degree of verisimilitude, research was necessary.

 

I pitched agents and eventually signed with one who loved the Beowulf retelling. He shopped it around and I got a lot of wonderful responses from major editors and publishers, though all of which were, ultimately, rejections. So I ended up giving up on the novel. Now it’s just a lonely Word doc on my laptop. I mention all this because, with The Book of Losman, I wanted to tell a simpler story, one that didn’t take a decade to finish or force me to spend countless hours doing research. I felt I knew Losman from the start. The two of us share some commonalities. He is a literary translator with Tourette, like me, and because of this his character traits slotted into place rather easily. Also, he lives in Denmark as I once did. Losman is not me, far from it. But because my life experiences are close to his, I didn’t have to do as much research. As a result, I was able to write the first draft in less than two years. 

 

The hardest character for me to write was Losman’s crush, Caroline Jensen. She’s an artist, and a bit of an odd duckling. I had to figure out a way to create her character without resorting to caricature. I didn’t want to write a story with a traditional romance, either, so there’s this awkward tension between them throughout the novel. Balancing that tension took some effort.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

One interesting tidbit: this book actually started as a memoir. But the writing felt forced, and I limped along, not certain how to go about putting together a memoir. Besides, I kept asking myself, who wants to read a sad story about a boy with Tourette? I sure didn’t. I wanted to write something that contained both sadness and humor but was still entertaining. I’d been chewing on one particular idea for years—What if there was a pill that could return our childhood memories to us?—and it dawned on me that this was the perfect story for that idea. So I pulled one small scene from the memoir, the “truest” scene, and reimagined the entire book as fiction. Once I did that, the flood gates opened and the writing gushed. Fiction has always been my preferred medium. (Though I will add that I published a personal essay in HuffPost that served as all I wanted to say, or would have said, in a memoir.)

 

My agent loved this manuscript too, and he gave me some feedback that I incorporated. The book went out on submission but, like with the Beowulf retelling, I ended up getting only rejections. They were nearly all uniformly praiseful of my writing, but such praise often feels hollow when it’s accompanied by the words “it’s not right for us” or “we hope it finds the right home.”

 

While the book was out on submission, I began writing a middle grade novel. Once it became clear that The Book of Losman was going to suffer the same fate as In the Country of Monstrous Creatures, I made the decision to drop my agent (it was an amicable split; he does not represent middle grade books). I assumed, wrongly, that I would be able land another agent. I still don’t have an agent—and it’s not for lack of trying!

 

But I never stopped believing in The Book of Losman, so I submitted the manuscript to SFWP’s Literary Awards Program two or three years ago. I’ve known the publisher, Andrew Gifford, for years. SFWP published my translation of Simon Fruelund’s collection of stories, Milk, in 2013, and I even published a number of interviews with translators at SFWP’s online literary journal for a few years (“Translator’s Cut,” I called my interview series). Since I playfully incorporate stories and characters (and themes) from Simon’s work in The Book of Losman—the opening chapter is very much a reimagining of Simon’s story “Kramer” from that collection—the manuscript found fertile soil at SFWP. The manuscript didn’t win the contest, in fact it only made the longlist, but Andrew liked the story and decided to take a chance on publishing it. Around the same time, another indie publisher offered me a contract to publish the book, but I knew SFWP was the right choice. This has absolutely proved true.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Don’t take rejection personally. Your work can be rejected for many reasons, but you’ve got to keep plugging away, chasing your vision, and getting better. Once you find your stories, good things will happen. It may take 30 years, as it did for me, but if you’re patient and willing to work through all the rejections, you’ll publish your work eventually.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

I don’t write with an outline. I put a character in a situation and see what happens, building the story as I go along. So in this sense, everything that happens is a surprise. It’s this kind of creativity that excites me enough to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get back to work. It’s not until after the draft is complete that I go back and make sure things connect properly. Sometimes I have to rewrite or remove scenes, but generally speaking, in the first draft, I want to write as though I’m a reader engaging with this story for the first time. Which I am.

 

The biggest thing that surprised me in this particular novel is just how much Simon Fruelund’s work influenced the story. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, since I’ve known him for more than fifteen years and I’ve translated three of his books. Simon’s ideas on literature and fiction have also proven hugely important to me. And he’s a friend. The Book of Losman is, in a sense, an homage to his work.

 

Still, even though I deliberately began The Book of Losman with a reimaging from one of his stories, I didn’t quite anticipate that Losman would share certain character affinities with Pelle, say, the main character from Simon’s novel The World and Varvara (published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2023) or that Losman would also be working on a book, like Pelle, with a publisher breathing down his neck. It was only after writing the manuscript that I realized how deep the connection ran. I don’t mind this at all. I love Simon’s books, and I think it’s wonderful that my novel is engaged in a dialogue with them.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

The Book of Losman has been the title for as long as I can remember, though I did hem and haw a bit once I realized there were already a lot of books that included “The Book of—” in the title. I debated just calling it Losman. But I couldn’t shake one important thematic significance that would justify me calling it simply Losman. There’s a kind of meta-quality to this novel, right from the opening sentence:

 

“When he moved to Copenhagen with his Danish girlfriend, Kat, fifteen years ago, Losman imagined his life like a Fodor’s guidebook, rich with possibility and adventure.”

 

Simply put: As a character, Losman is a kind of “book” to be read, translated, and understood. The narrative follows a circular pattern that only becomes clear at the end. So, to me, The Book of Losman always had to be the title. I’m happy with it.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

My favorite Danish pastry makes an appearance: Tebirkes! They are hunks of buttery deliciousness.

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://kesemmel.com/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Losman-K-Semmel/dp/1951631374/

 

 

 

 

TBR: Blood on the Brain by Esinam Bediako

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

Akosua, a young Ghanaian American woman, struggles to confront the challenges in her life, including a head injury, a breakup, and the reappearance of her absentee father. She deals with her problems the best way she knows how—by rushing headlong into new ones—until the accumulation of unresolved trauma finally catches up to her.

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Akosua and I have demographics in common—Ghanaian heritage, Detroit origins, suburban upbringing, coming of age in New York City. But most of the decisions Akosua makes are the opposite of what I’d do, for better or worse. She’s outspoken and impulsive; I’m shy and make way too many lists. It was fun to create an alter ego.

 

Akosua's mother challenged me (just as she did Akosua). For a while, all I had was her laugh, "a spooked flock of birds, a flutter of wings escaping to the sky." I had a sense of who she was, but it was hard to translate that onto the page.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

The novel had been my MFA thesis, and after graduation, I got some encouraging responses from agents but didn't land one. Imposter syndrome plus anxiety about getting a "real" job and paying back my student loans led me away from writing. I gained a truly rewarding career as a teacher and educational writer, but I lost my confidence as a writer.

 

But then (~15 years post-MFA) the pandemic happened. Of course it was terrible and scary and felt like the end of the world; at the same time, during that period, I found my way back to writing. My husband convinced me to revise Blood on the Brain and submit it to Red Hen's Ann Petry Prize, and shockingly, I won the prize, which included publication.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

To help me combat my anxiety about whether my writing was “good enough” for publication, my therapist said, “Remember the little girl inside you who just loves a good story? Write for her.'"

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

This is a story about identity, but initially, I also saw it as a story about a broken father/daughter relationship. As I wrote, I realized that it’s less about Akosua’s father and more about her dynamic with her mother. The final pages surprised me, too—but once I realized what the story is and isn’t about, the end made perfect sense.

 

How do you approach revision?

Teaching high school English helped me appreciate revision as an opportunity to re-see my work through fresh eyes. When students came for one-on-one help, I’d guide them to really dismantle their drafts and put them back together. Then I realized, “Ahh, I don’t take my own advice!” The new novel I'm working on has undergone radical transformations, which is a good thing.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Wisdom’s Fried Tilapia

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:  www.esinambediako.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: Bookshop

 

TBR: Japa & Other Stories by Iheoma Nwachukwu

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

Japa & Other Stories is about Nigerian immigrants yearning for a self in America, and sometimes in other parts of the world. One character bilocates in the heat of their yearning, another folds himself into a box on a journey to the fulfillment of his deepest desire. Others embark on a treacherous trek across the Sahara Desert trying to find home in foreign cities.

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

 

 Ahamefula (in “Japa Boys & Japa Girls”). A character who shows up in two stories, and in one of the stories he appears in different locations at the same time. He is deeply mutilated and frustrating, constantly making bad, humorous decisions. From the POV of a reader, a fantastic companion on the page.

 

And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Rasaki. The protagonist who travels to Russia in “You Illegals” to watch the World Cup. Throwing a Nigerian character into a landscape I had never visited presented obvious problems of believability. Trying to figure out how he might act in his interactions with Russian culture, and the Russian people was difficult to accomplish. Eventually I read hundreds of blogs written by Nigerians living in Russia, and watched Vlogs by Nigerian immigrants in Russia to become comfortable enough to render this character with the kind of easy intimacy I look for in characters when I read fiction.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing?

 

To be honest, I enjoyed writing all the stories, though I might be slightly partial to “Japa Girls” in which a character bilocates.

 

Why?

 

I like working out the supernatural in fiction. It’s such an important fabric of my understanding of the world, and also something which I do not fully understand—so it’s always giving. I believe every human being is part-spirit; whether you believe it or not, you’re what you are. The uncanny is a kind of wildness that attacks our sense of order, though we find it infinitely stimulating.

 

And, which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Two stories gave me the most trouble. The frame story, “To You Americans,” and “Spain’s Last Colonial Outposts” where I switch perspectives—third person/ first person plural. Frame stories are by their very nature like matryoshka dolls. A story inside a story. Rhythm inside rhythm. The outside story and the inside one have to be expanding at just the right pace so that, in the end, the story doesn’t tilt. That’s usually difficult to do.

 

Switching narrators in a story can be confusing for the reader. So again, the rhythm has to be weighed right. The switches happening in a way that feels necessary, that makes the reader believe they’ve received a burst of energy and promise.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

In the three years before I won the Flannery O’Connor, my then-agent tried to sell my collection to several publishers with little success. I entered a few book contests, too. At some point it occurred to me that I needed to rearrange the stories in the collection and write new ones. I had a couple of stories that had been published in stellar journals but didn’t really belong in the book. It took tremendous courage to cut them out. I sought out a unity in the collection. It took about six months to arrange the stories in what I thought was the right order. Then I prayed for success.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Without conflict fiction is just a boring rendition of details. Which is another way of saying, your character must yearn for something. Every human being wants something. And to seek is to suffer.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

The incredible amount of research I had to do for each story. For “Urban Gorilla” I had about a hundred pages of research. Images included. I’m a very visual writer.

 

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

 

This is serious fiction that also makes you laugh. I appreciate humor in fiction. One of my wrting professors, Elizabeth McCracken used to say, “Don’t be afraid to be funny.”

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

 

I drank a mix of hibiscus tea, plus ginger and garlic while writing this book. It improved my eyesight considerably.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://iheomanwachukwu.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://ugapress.org/book/9780820367279/japa-and-other-stories/

 

READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “Hosanna Japa Town”:  https://oxfordamerican.org/authors/iheoma-nwachukwu