Big Springs, Beers, Back Talk, & Ergo Sums
Carriage Return, 2/7/2018
Carriage Return is a round-up of recent Literati Bookstore staff favorites, as well as an occasional place for useful links and news from around the literary web regarding upcoming events at the store.
Recent Favorites (In Hardcover)
Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions, by Robert Coover
A classmate recently recommended the title story of this collection, and ever since I’ve been thirsty for more: more of the playful invention, more of the comic energy, more of the startling emotion that Coover miraculously packed into this (only 1,100-word!) gem. Little did I know there was sixty-five years worth of Coover to discover, which Going for a Beer mercifully whittles down to thirty stories. Besides his enviable range — martians and invisible men on one end, babbysitters and grandmas on the other — Coover has a knack for discovering absurdity in the mundane and mundane in the absurd, for conjuring catharsis from even the silliest premises. Imagine George Saunders and Steven Millhauser at their least inhibited, then multiply by one-hundred — now you’re in Coover territory. I won’t be leaving anytime soon. — Sam
The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream, by Bryan Mealer
Bust and boom, drought and flood, gushers and sandstorms: not much about West Texas isn’t extreme. Bryan Mealer has written his own family’s saga from his great-grandfather to present day, and given us a regional history of West Texas to boot. These are diasporas of desperation, bungee tethered to oil town Big Spring, as cotton and cattle die, and oil wells and reservoirs run dry. The prayers of their Pentecostal congregations can’t stop their ranches from going seven years without rain. Bob Wills’s Western swing band makes an extended appearance, as does an unforgettable wildcatter amalgam of James Dean’s Jett Rink and “Dallas’s” Cliff Barnes. But you’ll keep reading most for the family members, like sixteen year old Homer, who drives a cattle trailer solo from Texas to the L.A. stockyards and back. — Carla
I Am, I Am, I Am, by Maggie O’Farrell
Told through a series of near-death experiences, I Am, I Am, I Am breaks from a chronological narrative to mimic memory itself, each chapter rising to the surface before becoming sensory and deeply visceral. While the subtitle suggests a preoccupation with death, O’Farrell’s title & epigraph (a line from The Bell Jar) reveal the memoir’s true heart: an unconventional and revelatory delve into what it means to be alive. As O’Farrell revisits each of the times when her life nearly ended but didn’t, I was left considering all of the other everyday moments in between, and how thinking of life in such impermanent terms changes their hue. Yet, written as guidance to a daughter living with a life-threatening illness, O’Farrell’s memoir isn’t only asking us to appreciate life, but also to see that life will hurt, for all of us. Nevertheless, being truly alive means taking big, gulping breaths of it anyway. — Kelsey
Recent Staff Favorites (in Paperback)
Vengeance, by Zachary Lazar
A tale so true and raw, that you’ll swear that it is non-fiction…..rich in detail, elegant in its telling, the story that unfolds will have you reminding yourself “This is fiction” on repeat. One of the most daring and important true-to-life tales to be imagined. — Shannon
A Separation, by Katie Kitamura
Kitamura has masterfully, and with a haunting kind of precision, crafted a whip-smart and beautifully atmospheric novel of the secrets we all carry and the questions we are constantly asking. The book revolves around our unnamed narrator and protagonist and her search for husband who has gone missing on a Grecian coast that, like her marriage, has quietly burned to the ground. I was blown away by this novel and its constant, delicate simmering, every character calculating and visceral. Kitamura’s story didn’t take long to boil over and when it did, it was a fast and satisfying burn. A Separation is not to be missed. — Claire
Back Talk: Stories, by Danielle Lazzarin
With each successive story, I fell deeper and deeper in love with the tender, passionate, elegant and powerful writing of Lazarin’s debut collection. Most of the stories are told from the perspective of a young female in the throes of growing pains of some sort or another. They struggle to establish how they fit in with their contemporary, and therefore, often nontraditional families, while at the same time, are attempting to carve out a space that is uniquely theirs — a place from which they can flout the rules and test the waters of impending adulthood. They are equal parts fear and daring where sex and intimacy are concerned; they long for connection, yet often skeptically retreat from intimacy based on what they’ve observed from the adults in their lives. These young women are fierce, yet vulnerable, strong, yet tender, and we can all learn something from each of them. I loved these stories. — Jeanne
