Lorrie Moore’s love of masterful wordplay shows in her award-winning short story collection, Bark

BARK, Lorrie Moore’s collection of eight short stories was one of the three finalists for the 2014 Story Prize. Although the prize was won by Elizabeth McCracken for THUNDERSTRUCK, Moore’s BARK was named A Notable Book by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Book Page. Not shabby recognition.

Moore’s first story collection in fifteen years, BARK plays with the various meanings of the word: the sound a dog makes, marijuana as “sparky bark”, the bark of trees, characters barking orders, the outer

Read Cara Black's Newest Mystery – Then Join Her on a Trip to Paris

By SHARON BADER

Guest contributor

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Bonjour, fans of Cara Black!

Her 15th mystery, MURDER ON THE CHAMP DE MARS, pits protagonist Aimée Leduc's new maternal instincts against her determination to finally solve the mystery surrounding her father's murder. The story unfolds in 1999 in the seventh arrondissement or neighborhood, of Paris, home to the elite of the city.

The spark that enflames the investigation is the appearance of Nicu, a French gypsy boy (manouche). He convinces Aimée to go with him to see his dying mother, who wants to undo a past injustice by revealing a secret that involves Aimée's father's death.

But, when Aimée and Nicu arrive at the hospital, the boy's mother has vanished and cannot survive for long without the medicines and procedures necessary to keep her alive. When Nicu is killed, Aimée

Remembering Natalia Revuelta

Natalia Revuelta Clews as a young
beauty (above) and in 1998 (below)

Natalia Revuelta Clews died last week at the age of 88. Who, you may ask? “Naty” Revuelta was a beautiful (and married) Cuban socialite who became enamored of a imprisoned revolutionary, the also-married illegitimate son of a Cuban landowner: Fidel Castro. Naty wrote to him while he was in prison after the failed attempt on the Moncada barracks. He wrote back and a passionate exchange of love letters ensued. She sent him books, gave money to his compatriots, and allowed them to hold meetings in her home. When Castro was released from prison, he very briefly met her, consummated the relationship and then went off, leaving her pregnant with their daughter who was born in 1956. She expected him to come

Politically Incorrect and Hilarious

It seems like some politician or celebrity is always apologizing these days for having “misspoken” about someone or something. The apologies usually are along the lines of, “I’m sorry you were offended by…” as opposed to, “I was a stupid doofus and deserve to be put on an ice floe and shoved out to sea for having said…”

Today, I’m going to write about a book that might possibly be considered offensive by some uptight folks – mostly Free Will Southern Baptists – in today’s climate. Certainly, some of the reviews on Good Reads did seem awfully prissy. But, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Clyde Edgerton is NOT a stupid doofus. Far from it. He’s a treasure and does NOT deserve to get anywhere near an ice floe. So, all you grim and scowling “Gotcha’ Squads” should go look somewhere else because I have no intention of saying, “I’m sorry you were offended by…”

Edgerton’s very first novel, RANEY, written in 1985 is, simply, hilarious. It is also, less simply, very wise.

Then, too, it has the best jacket blurb I’ve ever read. From Roy Blount, Jr.: “A funny, deft, heartening book. If I were single, I’d marry it.” Me, too. I not only laughed out loud, I kept following my husband around the house yelling, “You gotta’ hear this. Lemme read this to you.”

The book details the engagement and marriage of Raney Bell and Charles Shepherd. Raney and her family worship at the Bethel Free Will Baptist Church where folks know what’s right and what’s just plain wrong. Her daddy owns the Hope Road General Store. The Bells are small-town, conservative folks who don’t drink demon alcohol or curse or look at dirty magazines or socialize with African-Americans. Raney attended Listre Community College and, as the book opens, is newly engaged to Charles Shepherd, the assistant librarian at the Community College.

Charles’ family is from big-city Atlanta. His father’s a doctor. His mama’s a vegetarian. They’re Episcopalian and liberals and involved in

Elizabeth McCracken’s Prize-Winning Collection

Elizabeth McCracken’s THUNDERSTRUCK & OTHER STORIES (which won the 2015 Story Prize) is her first collection of short stories in twenty years. It was worth the wait. There are nine beautiful, finely crafted stories.

Common themes become apparent: children are lost, bullied, starved, wounded. There are fraught relationships between parents and children. Happiness is elusive. Tragedy lies in wait and catches its victims by surprise.

But, as Sylvia Brownrigg wrote in the New York Times (6/5/14): “The fact that there is nothing depressing about the ubiquity of accident and disaster in ‘Thunderstruck and Other Stories’ is a powerful testament to the scratchy humor and warm intelligence of McCracken’s writing.”

“Something Amazing” is a grim (and somewhat Grimm) story of two mothers. The first is laid low by grief and haunted by her young daughter who has died from lymphoma. She has sealed off the girl’s room but Missy is “everywhere in the house, no matter how their mother scrubs and sweeps and burns and purges.” The dead girl’s brother is left to cope with his mother alone:

“ ‘I would die without you,’ she tells her son one morning. He knows it’s true, just as he knows he’s the only one who would care. Sometimes he thinks it wouldn’t be such as bad bargain, his mother’s death for his own freedom."

Because of her odd behavior and appearance, the neighborhood children believe this grieving mother is a witch. A dirty, bullied child comes to her door. She takes him in and bathes him (even though her inner voice tells her ‘you can’t just bathe someone else’s child’). She unseals the dead

Beauty and truth of language elevate Anya Seton's historical fiction classic, Katherine

By CAROL PHILLIPS

Guest Contributor

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Katherine Swynford (née de Root), orphaned daughter of a favored knight, arrives at Queen Phillippa’s court on an ancient, balking horse, excited and hoping for a good marriage. The prioress whose poor priory has cared for Katherine hopes to receive compensation for that care. Neither is satisfied. The Queen is ill and has no thoughts for either the priory or Katherine.

But the coarse Sir Hugh Swynford has had thoughts since first seeing Katherine. Finding her alone, he forces himself on her, only to be stopped by his lord, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and future king of Castile. John is repulsed by Katherine’s grey eyes and happy to approve Swynford’s face-saving request to marry Katherine. Only later does John remember the grey eyes he loved as a boy, those of the woman who raised him and died of the plague.

So begins the love affair between John and Katherine that spanned thirty-five years. Their four children, legitimized by both king and pope after their marriage three years before John’s death in 1399, were the ancestors of the Stuarts and the Tudors—the royal line of England.

Ann Seton, writing under the pen name Anya Seton wrote a definitive story of their relationship in KATHERINE. In continual print since it

My crush on Allan Gurganus

Having confessed to a major writer’s crush on Allan Gurganus, I thought I’d add a few words of explanation today. Well, of course, for starters, how could you not love a man who founded “Writers Against Jesse Helms?”

­But there’s more, much more. Damned if I can find it again, but somewhere I read a quote from Gurganus that went something like this, “I write the funniest books I know how to write about the most terrible things I can imagine.” I can’t find where I read this and maybe I made it up because I wanted him to say it. It’s certainly evidenced in his writing. As a native Alabamian, I recognize this from deep in my roots: the storytellers I grew up with, the ones I later read: Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor – all of them mixed humor and the "terrible things" of life.

Of course, Gurganus can write pure hilarity. “Nativity, Caucasian,” one of the twelve stories in WHITE PEOPLE, is an example. It begins:

“(What’s wrong with you?” my wife asks. She already knows. I tell her anyway.)

I was born at a bridge party.”

Tell me you aren’t hooked by that opening. HA! What follows is a laugh-out-loud (maybe even slapstick?) story that perfectly captures Southern

Edmund de Waal traces a century of heartbreaking family history through a set of tiny, beloved figurines

Edmund de Waal, Geoff Dyer and John Jeremiah Sullivan, have won the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction. Each of them will get a $150,000 award to be presented at Yale in September.

Photo by Hannah Jones

De Waal is the author of THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES: A FAMILY’S CENTURY OF ART AND LOSS. If you haven’t read it, please get up right now and go to your nearest library or book store and get a copy. We’ll wait right here until you’re back.

Edmund de Waal is a British ceramicist whose work has been exhibited in major museums around the world. (As an aside, I should say that I have seen a few examples of it in the excellent collection of post-1940 pottery and ceramics at the Mint Uptown Museum in Charlotte – worth the drive, indeed.)

THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES is a family memoir tracing the history of the wealthy and influential Ephrussi family. As de Waal has written, “It is the story of the ascent and decline of a Jewish dynasty, about loss and diaspora and about the survival of objects.”

The Ephrussis were bankers who spread their empire from Odessa to the capitols of Europe in the 19th century. Charles Ephrussi eschewed the family business to study and collect art. He moved to Paris and became an early supporter of the impressionists and is said to be pictured in Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party.” He is also said to have been Marcel Proust’s model for Swann in

Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

All right, here’s your assignment. In as few or many words as you need, please explain to me why Alice Walker told her audience at the San Miguel Writers Conference that Elizabeth Gilbert’s THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS is a “wonderful” book. Please. I’m serious.

The first hundred pages read as if Gilbert had come across some botany books and wanted to make sure she stuffed every single fact they contained into this novel. Amongst the botanical esoterica are sketches of the 19th century Whittaker family: the crude, low-born patriarch who has made a fabulous fortune in botanical pharmaceuticals; his stolid Dutch wife, Beatriz; and their only surviving child, Alma. Alma is a large, homely, awkward girl who grows up to be a large, homely, awkward but accomplished botanist, the author of several well-received scholarly books.

Then there’s Prudence, neé Polly, an incredibly beautiful child, whose father, a worker on the Whittaker estate, has murdered his wife and killed himself. She is taken into the Whittaker’s stately home, not as a

Anthony Doerr: All The Light We Cannot See

I may have been the last person on earth who had not read Anthony Doerr’s ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE. Forty-one weeks on the New York Times Print/Hardcover Best Sellers List and counting. National Book Award Finalist. One of the Ten Best Books of 2014 selected by the New York Times Book Review.

Well, I finally remedied this lamentable lapse in my reading life this week. It’s a page-turner, all right. Laundry, cooking, feeding the (very patient) dogs – everything was ignored while I read. And read. And read.

Set mainly in France and Germany in 1934-1945 (with brief chapters in 1974 and 2014), it interweaves the stories of two young people: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind, motherless girl who lives with her father, the

Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter’s newest collection of inter-related short stories, THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO DO, is mesmerizing.

There are ten stories. The first five are “Bravery”, “Loyalty”, “Chastity”, “Charity” and “Forbearance”; the remaining five are “Lust”, “Sloth”, “Avarice”, “Gluttony” and “Vanity”. In each, a character asks another – a friend, a lover, a stranger – to do something for him or her. Characters appear and re-appear in several of the stories at various stages of their lives. An event that occurs in one story is explained, from another character’s point of view, in a later one.

“Baxter’s characters muddle through small but pivotal moments, not so much confrontations as crossroads between love and destruction, desire and death…”

I kept thinking of Alice Munro as I read these very quiet but very moving stories. Like Munro, Baxter relates, in simple language, what

THE TUTOR by Andrea Chapin

I have to admit that historical fiction is not my favorite genre. However, Andrea Chapin’s new book held my attention from beginning to end.

Set in Elizabethan England at a time when the persecution of Catholics and confiscation of their lands and property were in full swing, it features a young childless widow, Katharine de L’Isle, who has returned to the estate of her uncle, Sir Edward, where she was raised. Sir Edward, who

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR!

THE FOUR CORNERS OF PALERMO by Sicilian crime reporter Giuseppe di Piazza is a book of four somewhat related novellas set in the 1980s. It is unintentionally hilarious. The main character is (ahem) a Sicilian crime reporter who is constantly bedding Italian models and other beauties, as, you understand, an antidote to the Mafia violence all around him.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

Describing a Savoy torte: “…a circular tablet of pure pleasure, drenched in a lava flow of chilled cocoa.”

“He liked the Uzi submachine gun, too: short as a celery stalk, light as a

Wiley Cash

Photo by Tiffany B. Davis

If you haven’t already read his books, you need to crawl out from under that rock and discover Wiley Cash.

His debut novel, A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME, was a NY Times Best Seller. His debut novel. It’s set in Appalachian North Carolina in a charismatic church where poisonous snakes are handled and an elderly woman is bitten and then left to die alone behind her house. In the book, the voices of three characters alternate: the adolescent Jess Hall, the sheriff, Clem Barefield, and the elderly Adelaide Lyle who represents “the moral conscience of the community”. The minister is a shady, ruthless and dangerous character but Jess’ mother has fallen prey to his charms.

“... Cash is ultimately interested in how unscrupulous individuals can bend decent people to their own dark ends ...”

As Steve Yarbrough wrote in The Washington Post (5/8/12): “The story has elements of a thriller, but Cash is ultimately interested in how unscrupulous individuals can bend decent people to their own dark

Congratulations are in Order!

Nancy Peacock, a fine North Carolina writer, has won first place for Mainstream Fiction in the 22nd annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for her novel, THE LIFE & TIMES OF PERSIMMON WILSON. (NancyPeacockBooks.com)

Peacock’s first novel, LIFE WITHOUT WATER, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and her second one got a stellar review in the New York Times Book Review, which noted Peacock’s “simple prose that possesses a rhythmic,

Pat Shipman’s Newest Book

Pat Shipman’s newest book, THE INVADERS: HOW HUMANS AND THEIR DOGS DROVE NEANDERTHALS TO EXTINCTION, has just come out and is already generating excitement.

It’s one of anthropology’s big questions: what happened to the Neanderthals? They flourished for at least 200,000 years in Eurasia but, some time after humans moved into their territory, they vanished from the earth. In recent years, research has shown that they were far more like humans than previously recognized. They inbred with humans, produced art and tools and may have been more intelligent than was once thought.

Pat Shipman, a retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Penn State, espouses a fascinating new theory based on recent paleontology research showing that dogs were domesticated by humans at least 36,000 years ago. She questions what advantage humans with a semi-domesticated ‘wolf-dogs’ would have had in the hunt for food and theorizes that it gave them the competitive edge over Neanderthals.

I asked her what had fueled her interest in this question and she replied,

The San Miguel Writers Conference Begins

One of the few remaining joys of air travel is having mostly uninterrupted time to read. On the way down, I read DIRTY LOVE by Andre Dubus III (andredubus.com). The first novella in this book, “Listen Carefully As Our Options Have Changed,” bowled me over with such amazing images as this: a husband watches a video, made by a detective, of his wife and her lover having sex – “his heart kicking like a hanged man’s feet.” And this line, describing his wife as she was when he first met her: “And it was the way she smiled at him in the realtor's office, as if she’d been waiting for him for years and now that he’d finally come she was shy about it.”

We’re in Mexico!

We made it as far as Léon late last night. We stayed in a little hotel near Silao Aeropuerto and, this morning, God willing and the creek don’t rise, a shuttle will pick us up for the hour and a half drive to beautiful San Miguel de Allende, with its cobblestone streets, colonial mansions, art galleries, and wonderful food.

One of the workshops I’m taking at the conference will be led by the prolific novelist Nicholas Delbanco. It’s called “The Sincerest Form” and, I assume, will be based on the method he describes in his book: THE SINCEREST FORM: WRITING FICTION BY IMITATION. 

Delbanco’s theory is that, as writers, we learn by studying the choices made – the “aesthetic strategy” – of the best authors. One way to understand these strategies is to try to copy them, much as art students copy Old Masters to advance their own technical skills. The point is to learn from our betters – not to adopt their voices in lieu of our own.

The Good, The Bad, and The Why-Did-I-Bother?

Writers need to read. Voraciously. The good, the bad, and even the why-did-I-bother.

I had a friend once who dragged me to high-end antique stores and galleries. When I protested, saying I could never afford a $25,000 cabinet anyway, she said, “It doesn’t matter. You look at things to educate your eye.”

In a similar way, I think, we read to educate our ear. We listen to the language; we hear the cadence. Our ear is jarred by the sentence that doesn’t work, the word that doesn’t fit. As writers, we often read twice. Once for pleasure and a second time for the underpinnings: the scaffolding, the technique, the craft.

We’ve all heard writers say, “Oh, I never read anything when I’m writing. I don’t want my voice to be influenced.” And the thought always crosses my mind, “Honey, I’ve read your stuff. A little influence couldn’t hurt.”