FFB: OH, WILLIAM, Elizabeth Strout

( from the archives)

Elizabeth Strout is probably my favorite writer and Oh, William is a continuation of the story she began in MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON. I love her unadorned, plain-speaking writing style, I like her characters and find them completely credible, I love her affection for even the worst of them. Lucy Barton is introduced as a patient in a hospital after an operation went bad. She spends a month there ruminating on her life and especially on her horrific childhood. Her mother visits her-something unexpected because of the way she treated Lucy as a child. But William calls her in because it is hard for him to visit with a job and two children to care for.

Oh William picks the story up later. Lucy is now a successful novelist with two grown daughters and has just lost her second husband, who she adored. William was her first husband and she is thrown together with him when he finds out he has a stepsister he never knew existed and needs help coping with it. Lucy takes the journey with him despite herself. 

I am now reading the third story about this family (although written before Oh, William) and it is terrific too.Is anything nicer than being in the hands of a writer you love?

SSW: "The Fourth State of Matter" Joann Beard from the NEW YORKER in 1996

 

Beard combines the dissolution of her marriage, the squirrels in her attic, her dying collie and the murder of students at the University of Iowa by a discontent student into a powerful short story.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

This is also known as an essay since Beard was a student there in 1991 when this happened.

I am perhaps telling you too much about what happens when I shouldn't. It took me by surprise but all of the descriptions give it away too.  

George Kelley 

Jerry House (TV based on a short story)

Todd Mason 

Jerry House 2 

Monday, Monday

 

Aside from these two movies at the theater, I also rewatched SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE and something else that escapes me. (THE GREEN RAY by ERIC ROHMER) and the best of the lot. A real movie week. I am on the last season of MAD MEN, which I will miss. Maybe I will rewatch THE WEST WING. 

Getting ready to go to CA next Monday, so I will post blanks to put up on Monday and WEDNESDAY of both weeks because I so enjoy reading your posts on here. 

Finishing up the Lily King book and reading the Updike letters.  Last week, Megan zoomed with my very large book group-about thirty people-- about EL DORADO DRIVE. We don't usually read thrillers, but it went well.  

Hoping I don't get the horrible flu going around.  Would I go if sick. I don't know. Is it acceptable to fly with the flu? 

FFB: WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL, Lorrie Moore

 reviewed by Casual Debris in 2015

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)

Rating: 5/10



As an avid radio listener throughout my teens, I first came across Lorrie Moore by accident when I heard a live reading of her famous short story "How to Become a Writer." Normally, especially at that age, I would quickly seek out other works of newly-discovered writers I enjoyed, but in the case of Moore, though I continued to stumble upon the story throughout the years, along with one or two others, I never actively searched for more of her work. About a year ago I came across a bent copy of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, and finally read the book last week.

Moore's second novel, currently bookended by Anagrams (1986) and A Gate at the Stairs (2009), is a short work that reads like a memoir, a narrator's personal guide through a specific time in her life. (Memoir, however, is simply another kind of fiction, another kind of fabrication; while there are certainly elements from Moore's own life present in the work, it does not read like autobiography.) The narrator is on vacation in Paris in the midst of a seemingly failed marriage, and interspersed with brief conversations with and thoughts of her husband, hearkens back to a summer in the 1970s during which she was obsessed with popular best friend Sils.

The work focuses on the relationship, the narrator's insecurities and very much on the decade. Though it is well written (very well written), it is lacking. The plot is incidental and awakens late in the work, which generates an uneven read. (Ironically, this is one of the threads running through Moore's "How to Become a Writer," as protagonist Francie is being criticized for her lack of plot.) The ending is rushed through, acts as an epilogue and is unnecessary. I would have liked to have been left in the uncertainty of the past as mirrored by the uncertainty of the present, as the two narratives should coincide. Or perhaps the present should have also had its own epilogue? But not really.

While I did not care much for the work as a novel, it is a fast read and worthy of a read for Ms. Moore's writing skills are impressive. The characters are solid and real, and the small town universe they live in is constructed with great care.

Now to seek out more of those fine short stories...

Blog note: Moore has continued to produce fine work. 

Short Story Wednesday: Deal-Breaker, Allegra Goodman, From the New Yorker

 Pam is a woman in her fifties, unmarried but dating a man with a ninth-grade child. She has kept John a secret from her parents because she knows how excited they would be at the idea of a step-grandchild. On a visit, the truth comes out and they are thrilled to learn Pam and John are taking the child to a museum. But that doesn't happen because of a fall his ex-wife takes. Pam takes this hard because it's happened before. And you can see his first family will always take precedence over her and their relationship will probably not survive it.

This is part of a collection from Goodman about the Rubenstein family that is coming out soon. It didn't stand very strong on its own, there was too much you didn't know about the family, but it will probably be a good collection. What I have read from Goodman over the years has been enjoyable.  

Todd Mason 

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

TracyK 

Steve Lewis

Monday, Monday

 

Favorite TV: PLURIBUS, THE PITT, SLOW HORSES, ADOLESCENCE, THE LOWDOWN, THE STUDIO, MR. SCORCESE, THE GILDED AGE, PLATONIC,  TASK

Favorite movies 

• 

  1

• 

  2

• 

  3

• 

  4

• 

  5

• 

  6

• 

  7

• 

  8

• 

  9

• 

  Cannot remember a colder, snowier period this early. 

  Reading John Updike's letters and Lily King's new novel.

  What are you up to?  

Short Story Wednesday:DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE

From James Reasoner's blog

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, July 1936

Walter Baumhofer did some great covers for DIME DETECTIVE during this era, and here's another of 'em. The lineup of authors in this issue is top-notch, as well: Carroll John Daly with a Vee Brown story, T.T. Flynn, Frederick C. Davis, William E. Barrett, and Robert Sidney Bowen. Excellent writers, every one of them. DIME DETECTIVE was a consistently superb pulp during the mid-Thirties. 

 

Jerry House 

TracyK 

Monday, Monday

 

A very nice holiday with lots of good food, movies, reading, etc. Megan and I saw MARTY SUPREME, which was packed and I enjoyed it although it was not the best movie of the year for me. We went to Meadowbrook Theater with the whole family and saw A CHRISTMAS CAROL. They do it every year. Megan just beat the storm back to NY.

My arm is still hurting me so I might have to try and get a cortisone shot. Hope that works. I don't want to go to CA with a sore wing, as Phil always called it. And taking all this pain med (OTC)is making me nauseated. 

Sorry to see PLURIBUS end for the year. But glad THE PITT is coming back.  

Kevin did well his first semester at Madison. He is still hoping to design computer programs or games but so are all his classmates.  

What about you? 

FROM JEFF

 

I'm not sure I should bother with a long post as I have not been able to post anything here the last couple of weeks.  But I suppose I could send you a copy and have you post it for me.  For whatever reason, your blog seems to hate me.

Things are generally good, other than the weather, which is horrible. They predicted 4 to 8 inches of snow, with some forecasters going as high as 11 inches.  But we got lucky again, as Central Park got just over 4 inches and we only got an inch or two down here, enough to coat the streets and cover the cars, but not much more.  The plows came by repeatedly.

What with the weather, we've been staying in a lot. Jackie is plowing through SUITS. two episodes a day - she's near the end of season 6 - and I've been reading a lot of short stories.  We leave for Florida on Saturday morning, so will spend a couple of days before that packing. We're not from the Diane Kelley "Pack Two Weeks in Advance" school.

We watched various favorite Christmas episodes of British shows we like, plus A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Meet Me In St. Louis and Love Actually, and we have our usual New Year's Eve movies set - Two For The Road and When Harry Met Sally... .

We're basically trying to finish shows where we're in the middle of a series - watched the last two BLUE LIGHTS episodes last night, and it was excellent.  Also have CHICAGO FIRE (season one), NCIS (season 21, I think), THE ASSASSIN, PLURIBUS, THE MORNING SHOW, LANDMAN (series 2), among others. If episodes are separate, we don't worry about it.  We'll be able to watch Netflix and the Amazon-related channels in Florida, but not Peacock (Chicago Fire).

Merry Christmas

 

Happy Chrismas Eve

 

Monday, Monday

Ralph Nase. Boy, did I love that man. We are watching the electric train circle the tree. A very tiny space for it. I always had a doll in my arms. I believe I thought it was my job to keep them alive. 

 Weapons was an unusual movie, not what I expected until the last thirty minutes, which were terrifying. Much funnier than I expected--for a while. 

Sorry that PLURIBUS (Apple) is ending its first season this week. I really related to the central character. Just started a TV version of Anne of Green Gables. I have never read or seen it before. Off the Poirot kick. They run together after a while. I am enjoying Tony Shaloub's show on bread (HBO). Still rewatching  MAD MEN. No doubt for me it was the best show ever penned for TV. 

Hey, Kevin is taking me out to lunch today. What a great present.  

Reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans I don't usually like epistolary books so it may not work. 

What about you? Done your holiday shopping?  

Friday's Forgotten Books: THE RETURN OF THE TWELVES, Pauline Clark

 The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clark

Written in 1962, this was a book I read to my children. I usually chose books with a fantastical element since they didn’t choose such books on their own.

Together we read Tom’s Midnight Garden, Tuck Everlasting, The Indian in the Cupboard and so on.

The Return of the Twelves is a favorite.

Max finds a box of twelve toy soldiers in the attic. The soldiers come to life at night and Max eventually learns the soldiers were the playthings of the Bronte children who endowed them with a magical ability to come alive. (Branwell Bronte actually wrote a story about his soldiers called “The History of the Boys”).

Tying the story to a real and literary family was especially delightful to me and leads young (or old) readers to an interest in the Brontes. Highly recommended.

Short Story Wednesday, A Manual For Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin

 

I have been reading at this collection for more than a decade. A great writer but the stories feel too similar to read all at once. "Mourning" is about a woman who cleans houses (mostly empty ones) for a living. Especially houses where people have recently died. She's cleaning the house of a black mailman in this story. His son and daughter arrive and they are trying to decide what to keep, what to give away. Their mourning becomes more palpable as they discuss various objects. The woman is rude to the cleaner; the man is kind. 

There are terrific stories but don't read them all at once.  

Jerry House 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK 

George Kelley 

Monday, Monday

So cold, grocery shopping was a horror show. Ice is terrifying, big hulking chunks of it everywhere. And yet I was out three nights because in June it seemed like it didn't snow much in December or get this cold (-2). Did I mention I do not do well on ice. 

Saw the worst movie of the year, Ella McCae. Poor James Brooks. who financed this mess? 

Very disappointed in the Dick Van Dyke American Masters. Couldn't they use better talking heads to weigh in on his contribution to television than his co-stars who mostly said, he was a nice guy. What about  using TV critics instead of Martin Short? People who study it. 

Still loving PLURIBUS but it is not for everyone, I think. I can watch anyone go through their day in silence.  I find it endlessly fascinating. And the guy crossing South America is going to save us all.

Still looking for a great novel to read.  

What about you? Hope you are keeping warm and dry. 

                                    My mother and Josh and Megan circa 1975
 

 

FFB: THE DEAD LINE, Philip McCutchan

 (from the archives)

 reviewed by Bill Crider

Forgotten Books: The Dead Line -- Philip McCutchan

 Back in the '60s I read spy novels by the metric ton.  I wasn't the only one, as there were more spy series being published than I care to count.  The reason, as you all know, was James Bond.  Every publisher wanted to find "the next Bond," and as you can see by the blurbs on this book, Commander Esmonde Shaw was one of the guys that reviewers thought might fit the bill.  I'm not sure how many books in the series Berkley published, but I read a lot of them.  I ran across this one the other day and picked it up to see what it would be like to read one again.  Or re-read.  I have an idea I read all the Berkley editions with this particular cover style.


As you'd expect, Commander Shaw is pretty much a Bond clone, except even more suave and attractive to women.  He's a magnificent physical specimen, and he has a great car.  He smokes, too.  Everybody did, back in the old days.  The book opens (as a lot of spy novels did) with Shaw recovering from wounds received on his previous assignment.  He's doing some surfing to tone up, and of course all the young women on the beach swoon over him.  Also of course in only a short time he's become one the best surfers around.  Now, however, it's time to get back to work, so he gets put through some tough exercises by his handlers and proves that he's aces.


Then he learns about his assignment.  This is a very '60s novel, with the commies stirring up "the Coloured elements" and doing a bang-up job of it. Shaw's sent to Harlem, where a woman falls for him at once and gets involved in some really serious action that even includes a tiger.  In an apartment.  Things get even more bizarre later on.  (Spy novel plots got more and more outrageous as the years went on for writers not following the Le Carre model.)  It's kind of hard to get past the racial elements of the plot here.  It might have been good fun in 1966, but it's not so much now.  Still, McCutchan had a flair for this kind of thing, and the book zips right along. 

 

(I wonder what Bill would think about how far backwards we have traveled in terms of racial elements in 2025)

Well, I'm Here

 Remembering Sandra Seamans

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Well, I'm Here

Okay, so I've finally surrendered to the world of blogs. Welcome to my little corner of the world, pull up a chair, get comfortable, and let's see if we can find something to talk about. 

And Sandra Seamans indeed found a lot of things to talk about. I doubt there was ever a blog that celebrated short story writing as well and a fully as MY LITTLE CORNER. Nor one that served a community as thoroughly and as selflessly as hers. She found her niche surprisingly quickly and although she claimed she mostly started a blog so she could participate in flash fiction challenges (remember those) it required hours of work for Sandra to pull up the information she did so willingly.
And it was also clear that she read many blogs herself and there were a lot of them back in 2008. 

If you go through the ten plus years of entries, you will see names come and go, zines come and go, contests come and go. And nobody was a bigger champion of other people's success than Sandra. Her "little Snoopy Dance" was always joyous. If someone wanted to a history of the online crime short story community over the last twenty years, her blog would be the place to start. A place to collect every contest, every call for submissions, the writers, the ups and downs of the business, and on and on.

In 2015, in the course of a week, Sandra lost her husband and mother and a lot of the joy went out of her. Although she came back to blogging, it was not about writing short stories so much as continuing her service to her fellow short story writers. How brave.

I only ever knew Sandra online but somehow it seemed like I knew her pretty well. She was candid on her blog. And we shared a year of reading short stories. Brian Lindenmuth suggested the challenge and initially there were quite a few participants, but by the end it was mostly Sandra, Brian and me. (Why wasn't Jeff in on this?)

Reading a short story every day doesn't seem like an onerous task but the mere chore of finding 365 stories you are willing to read was harder than we thought. Anyway, through her blog and through flash fiction challenges and through this assignment, I felt like I knew Sandra well.

Here are a few words from short story great, Art Taylor.

"In my writing courses at George Mason University and in any workshop I led elsewhere, I regularly devoted a section of my PowerPoint to resources for writers trying to market their short fiction. At the top of the first slide was My Little Corner, and I felt like I could never say enough about Sandra’s expertise on short story markets, her dedication to staying on top of market news, and her advocacy always on behalf of the authors, finding opportunities for us and warning us about venues to avoid. I never met Sandra in person, sadly, but she and I chatted sometimes, mostly in the comments section of My Little Corner. When she included something about me in her posts, she called me a “friend of the blog,” but in our own way in this age of online interactions, I felt like she and I were actual friends. I’m sorry I missed the chance to let her know how very much I appreciated her and her work." 

An interview from 2012 on DO SOME DAMAGE.
Some words from Paul Brazill 
Sandra on PULP CURRY 
Here are some words from Kate Laity
And from Sandra Ruttan 

Sandra's collection of stories COLD RIFTS is out of print, but it won't take much effort to find many of her stories online. A particular favorite of mine was one she wrote for a flash fiction challenge I ran a long time ago. The challenge was to write a story that uses the song  "SWEET DREAMS." Hers was clever and beautifully rendered. Google "Repeat Offenders" if you care to sample it. It's just a thousand words after all. Just a short story. But for Sandra and a few others, a good short story is the gold standard of writing.

Goodbye, Sandra. We will miss you. 

 

George Kelley 

TracyK 

Jerry House 

Monday, Monday

 I was lucky enough to see MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG on Broadway in June of 24 so I was eager to see the filmed version. Seeing everything in closeup rather than as you see an a stage sort of threw me off. Still it was worth seeing if you like Sondheim, which I do.

The weather here is awful. So cold that everything is icy and a fear of falling makes me walk even less assuredly.

Saw two concerts one with the DSO with a terrific violinist and the other was Detroit Chamber Orchestra.

Watching the Beatles Anthology on HBO.  So much footage I don't remember seeing before.

2019

 My street in Philly in the fifties. 

What about you?  

FFB: CONTINENTAL DRIFT, Russell Banks

 

Continental Drift, Russell Banks.

It is hard for me to choose between AFFLICTION and CONTINENTAL DRIFT as my favorite novel by Russell Banks. But I am going with this one today. You may have seen the filmed version of AFFLICTION, a tremendous film with Nick Nolte and James Coburn.

Bob Dubois is a furnace repairman in a blue-collar town in New Hampshire, a state the American Dream has bypassed. Although Bob has a wife, three kids and a steady, if low-paying job, he is persuaded to look for a better life in Miami by his brother.

Bob is a good man although not a smart one. The sixties has persuaded him that there is something better out there. That it is foolish to be satisfied with a meager living in a depressed town.

Another character is also seeking a better life in Miami. A female Haitian refuge, who truly does need asylum and comes to the U.S. in a perilous manner. These two lives intersect in a Florida that is the antithesis of paradise, both characters suffering tragedy. This is not a happy book or one to escape into, but it is one that presents characters and situations that seem real and compelling.

(And sadly the life of a Haitian refuge would be even more precarious today). 

Short Story Wednesday: "Elephant" Raymond Carver

 First I read "Safety" by Joan Silber, which was so depressing I had to wash it down with a second story. Briefly it recounts the bad deeds of ICE and how similar it is to what went on in eastern Europe nearly a century ago.

 A late in life tale by Carver relates the story of a man who cannot stop loaning and giving his family members money to keep them going. It is just about that. Over and over again until you fear for his sanity. I am sure such things happen in families but I would disown them all. Mirian Toewles reads and discusses it. I am going in for another try and what the title means. There is no tragedy here and yet...

TracyK 

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

Monday, Monday

 Saw Wake Up Dead Man, (slept through some of it) and Eternity (same). Enjoyed seeing Kevin and celebrating his turning 19. He is taking quite a group of classes next semester. One in music, one in art, one in writing, one in philosophy and one in math.  He's trying out all the family businesses.

Saw the movie Lurker, which was strange but interesting. (Apple) 

Trying to settle into a book. Maybe THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY. Or A Pale View of Hills. 

Watched a Poirot-- FIVE LITTLE PIGS, which is one of my favorites and so beautifully made. Also watching the many episodes of THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY on Disney. Also watched Sad Cypress. What's your favorite Christie. 

Snow here. Ugh. 

What about you?  

Apparently sending out three group emails with 20 names on each has meant friends are getting things from other friends and not knowing what is going on. Sorry if you've had that happen.