American Short Fiction blog

There are a few things I didn’t get around to this summer, reading wise. Erm, make that a lot. OK, fine. There are, approximately, a whole ton of books (and magazines and journals…oh, the journals) that, despite my best intentions—and admittedly unrealistic ambitions—I did no more than glance at this summer.

Books I couldn’t (and still can’t!) wait to read this summer—books like Brando Skyhorse’s The Madonnas of Echo Park, Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, and Christie Hodgen’s new novel—all sitting pretty and pristine on my bookshelf, unread. In the living room, the stack of untouched New Yorkers on the coffee table has moved beyond decoratively erudite (does such a thing exist?) to plain old unsightly. And beside my bed, a Jenga-tower of half-read books and magazines has reached such epic and architecturally-unsound proportions that hitting the snooze button in the morning not infrequently results in some exceedingly unwelcome 6 a.m. crashing. Sigh. All over the house, all summer long, these piles have been accumulating, like (lovely) little cairns of summer reading failure.

Of course, to my mind, this is part of the allure of summer reading—and of summer in general: the making of Big Plans only to let those plans melt away in the haze of days too hot and lazy to do much of anything at all. I know I’m not alone in this. For every person who will actually finish Infinite Jest this summer (We’ve got two in the ASF office. Just saying.), there are at least a dozen others who are staring down another 400 (or 800) pages and wondering if it’s better to just cut their losses and go get a Slurpee.

And so, summer readers, I’d like to direct your attention to Bernard Malamud’s story “A Summer’s Reading.” First published in The New Yorker in 1956, the story centers around a young man named George Stoyonovich who, aimless and unemployed, boasts to his admiring neighbors that he will read 100 books before the end of the summer. He fails, of course. As the summer passes, in fact, George does anything but read, finding that it’s the idea of reading—the idea of the person that he might become after reading 100 books—that holds the real power.

It’s an older story, set in Depression-era New York, but Malamud’s evocation time slipping by in the swelter of days that are at once too languid and too quick still feels right on.

So check out “A Summer’s Reading” (you can listen to a podcast of it here) and take heart in knowing that sometimes not reading is what summer reading is all about.

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Any books you didn’t read this summer that you wish you had? What’s on your list for fall?

Some rights reserved by EJP Photo.

My urge to seek refuge from the blazing heat has me thinking, oddly enough, of winter, and those sufficiently blustery days when elementary school teachers declare “indoor recess.” No matter how vicious the conditions outside, those two words always sounded something like a prison sentence (No four square tournaments?! No endless games of No Touching Gravel?! No Truth or Dare behind the twisty slide?!). But now—let’s blame it on my inner goody-two-shoes, drawn out, no doubt, by the school supplies that are slowly edging out flipflops in the supermarket aisles—I’m beginning to think my teachers had it right: there are some days, in every season, that are best spent indoors.

Lucky for me, there are plenty of great coffee shops around town where I can hide out with a good book (or two: I’m currently working Doug Dorst’s The Surf Guru and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage). Sipping hot coffee in the cool of my own personal indoor recess, I can rev up for the last few weeks of summer without breaking a sweat (although I probably won’t be wearing a scarf . . . yet).

Here’s what some of my fellow indoor readers were spotted taking in recently:

King Kong Theory, Virginie Despentes

The Ticking Is the Bomb, Nick Flynn

Until I Find You, John Irving

The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Foundation, Isaac Asimov

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Bee Season, Myla Goldberg

I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow for a friend’s wedding. I’ve got my dress picked out and my quart-sized Ziploc stocked. Selecting reading material for a long flight, though, always poses something more of a challenge. Bring something too difficult and you find yourself watching some bad in-flight movie starring Nicolas Cage; too short, and you spend the last leg of your journey perusing Sky Mall.

A couple of days ago, while searching for a book to bring with me on my trip, I picked up Emma Straub’s charming (and appropriately titled) Fly-Over State—and ended up reading the entire thing.

The title story introduces us to Sophie, a New Yorker recently transplanted to suburban Wisconsin where her husband has accepted a teaching job. Sophie is a quiet, slightly off-kilter narrator who observes with curiosity and humor the predictable kinetics of her new neighbors’ daily routines. Surrounded by strangers and boxes, Sophie contemplates who she will be in this new life and how (literally) she’ll fill its empty spaces. Straub is spare and spacious in her telling of a story that, to me, is about the sense of possibility that transience—being in transit—engenders, however temporarily.

An excerpt from “Fly-Over State”:

We could have gone anywhere, that’s what we’d decided. Tucson. Miami. Detroit. Each time James presented me with a city, I’d walk to the bookstore on Seventh Avenue and sit down in the travel section. I’d find us a neighborhood, a coffee shop to frequent. I knew where we’d go for fun, to people-watch. There were the restaurants our parents would take us to when they came to visit; first mine, then his. There was the park I could take walks in, and the places we could meet for lunch during the day. The suits would take us there. I never imagined we’d actually leave New York.

“Fly-Over State” has me thinking about the places planes take us—new cities, new jobs, new lives. And about the places they don’t. The fly-over places, appearing first as pinpricks of light as we approach them from above, and growing into the discernible landmarks of any number of hypothetical lives: traffic patterns, cul-de-sacs, swimming pools, before receding again, far, far below.

At just 77 pages, this slim, two-story volume won’t weigh down a carry-on. But it’s also just too easy to devour in one gulp, so be careful or you might finish it before you even board the plane.

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This post is part of a series exploring the relationship between place and fiction. Got a favorite story about being on the move? Let us know.

Photo by Michael Coté. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons.

Despite predictions of rain, we enjoyed some pretty nice weather here in Austin this recent holiday weekend. On Monday, after all the fireworks had been launched and all the sparklers sparkled, I headed down to Barton Springs Pool to spend some quality time with my current summer reading project: David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair.

I wasn’t the only one toting a book inside my beach bag. From classics by Steinbeck and Fitzgerald to current bestsellers like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and from decidedly beach-y reads to more challenging works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the spectrum of poolside picks was impressive.

Here’s a sampling of what folks were reading last weekend:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald  (Lauren, 15, was dipping into this classic for the first time.)

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver  (Kingsolver seems to be a popular choice this summer; I spotted multiple people reading this memoir of the author’s year-long experiment in eating locally, as well as her most well-know work, listed below.)

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, Vincent Bugliosi

The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel, Paul Coelho  (“Not as good as his other work,” according to reader Kat, 24.)

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert  (A movie based on this 2006 bestselling memoir will be released this summer.)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro  (Also being made into a film, to be released in the fall.)

(more…)

Much has been made of literature’s ability to transport readers to other worlds. As the famously reclusive Emily Dickinson wrote: There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away./Nor any coursers like a page/Of prancing poetry. Even those of us less housebound than Ms. Dickinson can appreciate the imaginative entrance that books allow into unfamiliar emotional and geographic realms.

Summer, especially, finds readers seeking escape, and right now the Internet is jam-packed with summer reading lists that promise a bit of respite from the workaday world. For those seeking the vicarious thrills of armchair travel, the New York Times offers this list of recently published travel writing. Billing historical fiction as “the ultimate summer getaway,” NPR recommends a list of novels sure to carry readers through both space and time.

Escaping into the pages of a book is lovely. But reading, I think, also has the wonderful ability to put us into closer contact with our immediate surroundings. Though (as Meredith Blake argues over at the New Yorker) summer doesn’t always mark a dramatic shift in what we read, rising temperatures do usually mean a change in where we read. With any luck, even the most harried and desk-bound among us will find time in the coming months to savor a story or two in true summer reading fashion: on the beach, under a shady tree, or (my personal favorite) poolside, a cool, refreshing drink in hand.

Indeed, the where of summer reading seems just as important as the what of it. Over at the L.A. Times’ Jacket Copy blog, book lovers recall favorite summer reads, and the places–a crowded public pool, a plane to Ireland–they first encountered them. And in last Sunday’s special summer reading issue of the New York Times Books section, authors offered up their memories of books discovered by chance on summer vacations (Dogwalker author Arthur Bradford recalls reading Charles Portis’s “Dog of the South” near Austin’s Barton Springs Pool!).

As I scan my own bookshelf, I realize that I’m reminded not only of the imaginary landscapes contained between the covers of the books, but also of the particular place where I read each one. Holding my worn copy of Lolita I’m transported to the unseasonably warm spring of my senior year of high school that I spent sunbathing on my parents’ lawn perplexed and awed (but mostly perplexed) by Nabokov’s dense language. A couple of summers ago, I carried Tropic of Cancer with me to cafés all over Paris, and I took silent, self-satisfied delight in Miller’s every mention of a restaurant or street name I recognized. And I will never forget reading Joan Didion’s Run, River in the apartment I rented in L.A. my first year out of college, the El Niño-year rain playing a loud and inexhaustible dirge for the myth of an always-sunny California on the metal carport outside my window.

I like to think of these memories as constituting a map of sorts, a smattering of coordinates that add up to something like a personal literary geography. Sure, some of the sites are mundane (my old green couch dominates the topography like Mt. Everest). But some strike me as quite remarkable for the irreproducible synergy that is created between the site of reading and the site of fiction, or (to appropriate Willa Cather’s phrase) the city of place and the city of feeling.

This summer, as I make my way through the ever-growing stack of books in my office, I’m eager to add new landmarks to this map. I’m excited to explore the fictional worlds of the stories I’ll read, but I’m also ready to find the yet-undiscovered places around town, where, with my head in a book, I can experience the strange kind of escape that is being simultaneously both here and there.

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This is the first in a series of posts exploring the relationship between place and fiction. Do you have a favorite place to read in Austin or beyond? Let us know.