Book of the Week: Stranger Will by Caleb J. Ross

Posted on November 13, 2011 by kwohlrob

Having already been a fan of Caleb J. Ross from his short story collection, Charactered Pieces, it was nice to see him make a big leap with his first novel, Stranger Will. In fact, he jumped himself right into Ira Levin territory with this macabre tale of evil that lives right next door (if not right inside the protagonist). It’s been a while since I have read a solid, eerie tale of actual human depravity — let’s face it, most writers are too zombie and vampire obsessed these days — but Stranger Will hits the mark perfectly. As Levin did with Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, Ross sets Stranger Will in a our world, one too familiar, where a slight twist, a nudge in the wrong direction send’s the protagonist Will into the presence of secret movement that exists just beneath the surface. Their plans… well, without giving anything away, are as nefarious as the old folks in Levin’s satanic opus.
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Book of the Week: Rampart & Toulouse by Kristin Fouquet

Posted on November 5, 2011 by kwohlrob

I’m not sure which came first: the photography or the writing. What I do know is that Kristin Fouquet’s love of photography infuses her storytelling. Her tales have that feel of old photographs you discover in a thrift store bin — you don’t know these people, but you can see their lives boiled down into that moment. It’s because of this that the stories in Rampart & Toulouse and her previous collection Twenty Stories never feel over-told. They unfold simply and capture that poignant moment for the character. You don’t need to know the rest. Everything is in that snapshot.

“Becoming Obsolete” and “Paris is the Pretty One” — two of the short stories in this collection that also includes a novella — both capture that quality in Fouquet’s writing. The former is a tale of refrigerators and New Orleans social hierarchy, the latter is a story of two sisters and a horror-show trip to Paris. For the characters in each, there is a line of demarcation, a point of no return that comes to them not as a sudden surprise but a moment they can only accept with resignation. The author doesn’t force them upon the reader, but with some confidence, lets us see what ultimately becomes obvious to the character, even if they are powerless to change that fateful day.

In all these stories, there are wonderful scenes that Fouquet conjures up, never forced, suddenly unraveling in the midst of a story. A woman standing in her bedroom window, watching a bottle of wine in she left in the courtyard, waiting for it’s intended recipient to appear. A Soprano, dressed in a robe and towel, waving her arms while practicing an aria in the privacy of her Paris apartment, unaware of the spectator watching her from across the street. A procession of ad hoc mourners singing “Sweet Sue Just You” as they march from the St. Louis cemetery in New Orleans, honoring a woman they never knew.

Like a perfect photograph, Fouquet’s stories leave one feeling as if they’ve only caught a glimpse of these lives, but that’s enough to tell the tale, and to know the fates.

Book of the Week: A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

Posted on October 8, 2011 by kwohlrob

Jesuachristo, the prose! More than any other writer I have read, Salter could do so much with so little. He has a scalpel-like precision with his prose — it is always just enough, nothing more. Quite a few writers should read Salter if for no other reason than studying how a few simply crafted sentences can say more than endless flowery paragraphs that serve more as literary gymnastics than good writing. The opening chapters of A Sport and a Pastime, where the narrator is travelling via train through the French countryside, read like a Van Gogh painting.

“Canals, rich as jade, pass beneath us, canals in which wide barges lie. The water is green with scum. One could almost write on the surface.

Hayfields in long, rectangular patterns. There are hills now, not very high. Poplars. Empty soccer fields. Montereau — a boy on a bicycle waiting near the station. There are churches with weathervanes. Smalls streams with rowboats moored beneath the trees…. The pattern of fields is passing, some pale as bread, others sea-dark.”

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James Salter on Writing and Travel

Posted on August 24, 2011 by kwohlrob

James Salter discusses the relationship between writing and travel from an old Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER: Does the travel help your writing?

SALTER: It’s essential for me. There is no situation like the open road, and seeing things completely afresh. I’m used to traveling. It’s not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It’s the curtain coming up on another act.I’m not the first person who feels that it’s the writer’s true occupation to travel. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural. Furthermore, many men of ancient times died on the road, and the image is a strong one. Kings of Arabia, when they are buried, are not given great tombs. They are buried on the side of the road beneath ordinary stones. One thing I saw in England long ago struck me and has always stayed with me. I was going to visit someone in a little village, walking from the railway station across the fields, and I saw an old man, perhaps in his seventies, with a pack on his back. He looked to be a vagabond, dignified, somewhat threadbare, marching along with his staff. A dog trotted at his heels. It was an image I thought should be the final one of a life. Traveling on.

Book of the Week: For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed… by Hosho McCreesh

Posted on August 21, 2011 by kwohlrob

Don’t let the title of this book, or the those of the 20 poems in this collection, fool you. Hosho McCreesh is razor sharp in his poetry. Not a word is wasted. And flying through all 20 in one sitting, you get caught up in McCreeh’s view of the world. It’s soaked in whiskey-and-wine and the disappointment of every challenge that we’ll never be able to overcome. Yet, it has a beauty to it, like a good Mark Lanegan song.

In the first nine poems, McCreesh has an axe to grind. Not with you, or me for that matter, but with us. In McCreesh’s eyes we’ve pissed it all away, or are incapable of redeeming the pile of crap that was handed to us. It’s dark, hell-bent, screaming, confrontational poetry, and in most hands it would be an clichéd and ridiculous homage to Bukowski. But McCreesh has heart and as angry as he is, he empathizes with us. He knows we can’t help it:

“We are forced to search out
small fires, a little light,
some warmth, &
a little bit of
madness
to help drag us through
all this so-called
sanity
It’s usually not much.
It usually doesn’t last
But it helps…

In the second batch of poems, McCreesh gets optimistic, but in his own cynical way. Sure, we’re still screwed, but there are the small victories. And again, it is McCreesh’s economy with words that wins you over. Such as the simple argument he makes in “Seems Everyone These Days Wants Some Magical Cure for Death…”

I want a
cackling, drunken
cure
for lives
poorly
lived…”

Amen to that brother.

Brett Amory’s Dark Light

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

I was lucky enough to catch the showing of Brett Amory’s new “Dark Light” series of paintings at the Jonathan Levine gallery in New York City this past weekend. Quite amazing stuff. I was completely hooked by Amory’s use of shadow and light — scenes of lonely denizens drifting in and out of the lamplight, past rundown stores, as they move down rundown streets. Think Edward Hopper’s darkest hour.

Check out one of the video interviews with Amory posted on the Levine gallery blog.

So To Speak – Brett Amory, Episode 1 from lenny gonzalez on Vimeo.

My Publishing Heritage

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

With a Ferry Boat by Mario J Della Torre Believe it or not, I am not the first writer in my family. Granted, I don’t come from literary stock. The kids in my generation were the first family members to actually make it to college. And even my own writing history is less than traditional — no MFA, no creative writing classes, not even a single writing workshop. I just had a crack at it as they say.

But I was not the first…

In 1975, Mario J. Della Torre, Sr., a cousin of mine who in that strange Italian twist was the same age as my parents, published his magnum opus, With A Ferry Boat They Robbed The Bank — Italian Style. Two years in the making, this comic crime-caper told the story of Meme, Co-co, Pepe, and Senor Dadone, a pack of feisty Italian immigrants who want to stick it to the man by robbing a bank in New Jersey. They make their getaway in… you guessed it, a Ferry Boat on the Hudson River. Not just a crime novel, there are endless inside nods to the Italian-American community. And comedy, New Jersey Italian style:

Just then, something happened which you would never expect at a Bank robbery. Co-Co had developed severe gas pains. He had to go to the toilet.
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Vinyl Find: The Hidden Hand’s Divine Propaganda

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

The Hidden Hand Divine Propaganda

This is a rare and hard to find gem. The very first album by Wino’s post-Spirit Caravan outfit, The Hidden Hand. It was only released on vinyl in Italy via Beard of Stars Records (Meteor City released the CD version in the US). And what a stellar album it is. Obviously fueled by the breakup of his previous band, Wino returned with a sound that was a little less doomy but a bit more hard-charging. The tempos are a bit faster than Spirit Caravan and the Hidden Hand had a much looser feel, driven by the chemistry between Wino and bassist Bruce Falkinburg (who also produced the record). As expected, Wino’s guitar playing is unmatched. “Sunblood,” “Tranquility Base,” “Bellicose Rhetoric,” and the title track are packed full of beefy riffs. Over three albums these guys would keep getting better. Sadly, that was it, as The Hidden Hand broke up after the release of The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote. Thankfully, Wino’s now back with Premonition 13…

Song samples and images below. You can check out more found vinyl here.
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Book of the Week: You Can Make Him Like You by Ben Tanzer

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

You can run but you can’t hide. At least not from your own life. Keith, the self-absorbed protagonist of Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You, is sucker-punched by this lesson over and over again. Yet, as one can expect from Tanzer, the blows are at turns funny, tragic, and often spot-on in revealing the anxieties that scratch beneath our own skins.

What ails Keith is life itself. Or rather an adult life with all its complications and irresolvable issues that always require a bit of character sacrifice. His life is neatly ordered and sorted, a well-crafted mix of job, friends and a wife. But there’s temptation everywhere Keith looks. And sure, he would never do anything to ruin his marriage, right? Right? Liz, headstrong and the adult of the two, also won’t budge on having a child, an event that Keith views more as an intrusion than bundle of joy. Order is quickly becoming uncertainty and a lack of control. Keith, who never wants to confront anything and would prefer to suppress these difficult issues with a jog in the cool Chicago air, is better at avoiding life or trying to hide in the checklist of cultural touchstones he surrounds himself with. He ties his emotional issues to romantic comedies, Hold Steady songs, Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey character on The Shield, and even Patrick Ewing. So when the kid finally does arrive, and things don’t go as planned, not even Vic Mackey can save him.

At first impulse, if you read the plot on the back of a book, it would all sound a little too cliché. Yet, Tanzer’s love of writing pop stories, that reveling in what can be new and poignant in oft-tread ground, wins the day. His greatest skill — and it’s been this way through all of his novels and short stories — is to take the normal, the everyday we all know and live through, and to turn that into great tragicomedy. Like his protagonist, Tanzer is obsessed with the art of a great pop song: Three chords, three minutes, and out. But the emotion is so pure, you can’t deny it. You Can Make Him Like You hits the reader like that and hits it just right.

Ask anyone who has tried: often those are the hardest songs to write.

Vinyl Find: Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Ken Wohlrob

Electric Wizard - Dopethrone

To me, this is the album that redefined doom. Other than Sleep’s Dopesmoker, I can’t think of a more massive slab of heaviness than Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone (picking up on the theme here?). Released in 2000 on Lee Dorian’s Rise Above Records label, this was the penultimate album from Electric Wizard’s classic early lineup. Dopethrone was unbeatable in terms of shear heaviness, angst, and that wall of sound. Take Saint Vitus’ songs of self-destruction and make the sound 700 times thicker and drop the despair to a whole new depth. A high water mark that the band wouldn’t hit until ten years later with Black Masses — which is also quite stellar. Unfortunately, this lineup disintegrated in 2002, shortly after the release of Let Us Prey. Still, they left us with Dopethrone, a literal Doom testament.

Song samples and images below. You can check out more found vinyl here.
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