OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011

COMPLIMENTS OF

INSIDE
IRAQ
LEGO Lit
THE
RETURN
OF STEPHEN
STARK

68 SEPTEMBER 2010
what to read next in independent publishing
 “ A BRILLIANT,
SEXY, EDGY
THRILL RIDE
“
THE FINAL APPEARANCE OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE GIRL NEXT DOOR
Available now at the ebook stores below. Read a sample chapter in this issue of Shelf Unbound on page 9.
 do you ?
I DO
“
I wanted to write a textbook on enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems geared
towards college and graduate students since
the available texts were outdated. The big
publishing companies were interested, but
did not seem to understand the market or the
content. Since Lulu is several blocks from North
Carolina State University, I began investigating
them and self-publishing in general and found
that the flexibility and control over my work
suited my personality and style. Now in its 2nd
Edition, Modern ERP: Select, Implement and
Use Today’s Advanced Business Systems is
ranked #100 out of a million books on Lulu,
has reached an international audience, and is
currently being translated into Korean. I feel
confident about my decision to go with Lulu

”
and plan on a long working relationship.

—Dr. Marianne Bradford,

associate professor for the Poole College of
Management at North Carolina State University bring your brilliance to life

30 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 31

 The Butcher’s Boy
A Paranormal Chiller by best-selling author Michael Robb
staff
Not everyone is who they seem: even the DEAD.

Margaret Brown founder and publisher

Anna Nair editor in chief What to read next?

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“Keeps you on the edge of your seat.” —Books: Treasure or Trash

“A suspenseful page-turner.” —ForeWord Clarion Review

A “R EA DERS FAVOR ITE” 2011 F INA L IST

what to read next in independent publishing
Available at w w w.amazon.com
 Find a book fit for a...
a word from the publisher

WHAT TO READ NEXT

e launched Shelf Unbound magazine a year ago

with the idea that small presses and independent
publishers were producing some of the best books out there—books that
were largely not on the radar of big box book stores and mainstream review-
ers. In the past year, we’ve had the great joy and privilege of reading an array
of brilliant, beautiful, gripping, mind-blowing books, talking to many of the
writers who have created them, and sharing all of this in the pages of Shelf.

In this issue we talk to Ignat Solzhenitsyn about his father’s life and legacy;
to one of our favorite short story writers, John Jodzio, about his new book
of illustrated tales; to Celia Blue Johnson about the stories behind classic
books; and to Stephen Stark about his new novel The Final Appearance of
Foodie America’s Favorite Girl Next Door, which we found so blazingly smart and
entertaining that we decided to publish it as an ebook.

What to read next? I guarantee you’ll find something fabulous to put on your
shelf, virtual or otherwise, in this and every issue of Shelf Unbound.

Margaret Brown
publisher

Or for a... Tech Enthusiast Smarty Pants Adventurer

Detective Hopeful Romantic History Buff Soul Seeker

English Major Superhero Futurist Funny Guy

Wizard Health Nut Activist Lab Rat

Like what you read? Click on any
Environmentalist Single Mingler Alpha Male BookYap.com book cover to purchase from Powell’s
Books, or click on the publisher
website for more information.

Personalized Book Recommendations what to read next in independent publishing

TM
 october/novemember contents

30
MY KIDNAPPELEGO literature
our brick lit block party

34
GIVES A REALL
cult movie art
GOOD BACKRUB
your coffee table’s next
favorite book ILLUSTRATED BY RUBEN I

M
y kidnapper, Randall, gives a really good backrub. He’s got these long fingers that can r
that knot in my shoulder. He gives a way better backrub than my last kidnapper, Ted.

“You should think about massage school,” I tell Randall. “After you are done kidnapping
36 who begat gatsby? we get married, I mean.”

Randall takes a pull on his bottle of whiskey. He tells me that wasn’t a backrub, tha
the stories behind the stories
pinching my shoulder blade to immobilize me as he moved me back to my cage. I’ve
him three hours, but I can tell he’s just being modest. He’s the exact opposite of that jack
would not shut up about himself.

“I know what a good backrub feels like,” I tell Randall. “And that was an awesome one

DEPARTMENTS
Randall eats dinner with me in the tiny room he built below his basement. He tells me that this is as fast as he’s ever seen
Stockholm Syndrome. I tell him he’s never met my older sister, Janine. I tell him about the first time Janine got kidnapp
love with her kidnapper in ten minutes.

“That’s a lot to live up to,” I say. “That’s still a California record.”

7 a word from the publisher

Randall’s also a really great cook. Tonight there’s soup from a can, but I can tell it was prepared with a lot of affection.

“Maybe you should become a chef,” I tell Randall as he picks his teeth with his switchblade. “Maybe after this is over then m
ping could just become your hobby.”

40 indie now lll

Randall takes the coffee can that I pee in and dumps it out in the corner. I can’t believe how gentle he’s been with me since
pinky and sent it to my father. It’s all I can do from kissing him all over his beardy face.

FEATURES 44 poetry
“Your dad better pay up, Blondie,” Randall says as he turns off the light and leaves me in the dark to love him. “He better fu
soon or you are one dead bitch.”

8 final appearance 46 best of the book blogs

(finally!) a new novel
49 on our shelf
from stephen stark
51 book club find
14 short shorts
small, tall tales 52 toy story
from john jodzio
53 contributors
20 damascus
Cover photo: An Iraqi girl peeks out of a broken
a performance artist
classroom window to watch as U.S. Army Soldiers
walks into a bar... from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry
Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain
22 iraq perspectives: Division deliver new desks to her school in Nawaful,
the photography of Iraq, March 25, 2008. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff
Sgt. Samuel Bendet) (www.army.mil)
Benjamin Lowy

28 solzhenitsyn
an interview with the
author’s son ignat what to read next in independent publishing
what to read next

G
irl meets boy meets shark meets multi-verse in
this sexy, deeply romantic, literary page-turner
from New York Times Book Review Notable Book
of the Year author Stephen Stark. Read the following
excerpt and you’ll see why we jumped sky-high at the
chance to publish Final Appearance as our first e-book.

“Ellen Gregory in Love”

T he water was warmish (at least for

North Carolina in June) and you
could feel the warmth of the water at
the surface, and an icy bite from the
depths, almost as though the water
were swimming within itself. You could
see the beach. The taste of saltwater
was in her mouth and she looked at
Michael, his curly, dark hair matted
from the wet, his face full of joy. He was
just beyond her and he was laughing,
rising and falling in the swells—he
had that Midwesterner’s delight in the
ocean. Now he was floating on his back
and pointing at the gulls, which were
everywhere now.
The water caught a thousand mirrors
of sunlight, and for a moment, she
lost sight of Michael. The gulls were
everywhere, wheeling in the sky,
dipping into the water, floating. There
was a strange moment of panic as
she scanned the water for him—and
suddenly he was next to her, his mouth
right next to her ear.
Hi, he said.
Hi, yourself, she said.
You’re beautiful, he said and kissed
her.
Shelf Media Group | www.shelfmediagroup.com
8 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
Are you cold?, he said.
No, she said, It’s wonderful.
He kissed her again, and when he
moved away, she went to him and
kissed him again. This is what it could
be like, she thought, as he dove under
again and resurfaced a few yards from
her. He splashed at her and she ducked,
and then he went underwater again.
And then she was floating in the swells,
watching the gulls and other sea birds
dipping into the water, watching the man
she loved, his dark hair gleaming wet.
ELLEN GREGORY IN LOVE!!!
Michael had completely flunked
whatever litmus tests she’d had. He
was a nerd, a geek—good-looking—but
still. A scientist. A video-game-playing,
ABD Ph.D. professor-to-be, with geeky
friends, who argued passionately about
things she’d never heard of. And who
had never heard of her because while
he did own a TV, it was kept safely in a
closet, just in case something important
actually happened.
Love: Well, here it was, the strangled
breath when she was near him, this
waking up in the morning next to him
feeling like every day was Christmas.
UNBOUND 9
 They were not terribly far out—ten
or fifteen yards from shore. Not far
from here the bottom would fall off
and sweep deeper and deeper into the
cold darkness of the Atlantic, where
it would give way to shipping lanes
and container ships and vast unseen
storms and would not rise again except
to the sweet calls of some child across
the world, the endless thunder of surf.
She floated on her back, looked at the
blue, blue sky. Here she could watch
the irregular vortices of gull-flight, the
perpetual motion of the waves. Here she
could see her friends—blurs on the sand,
stripes of color. She thought of Michael
and wondered at the bizarre way that
life happens. You get to a place and
look at what surrounds you—sun, water,
sky—and marvel at the circumstances
that brought you here.
But where was she? On the precipice
between today and tomorrow, between
with him and without. She thought she
felt a cold current come up from the
deep and a chill of fear rode through her.
Michael was beyond her, his skin
darker than she had ever seen it, his
hair catching sunlight, blackly metallic.
He had been next to her a moment ago,
the warmth of him, the brush of his legs,
the cup of his hand on the back of her
head, treading water and kissing her,
and then he had drifted away, and she
knew he would swim back to her, and
that was the way she was thinking of it,
the future, or near-future. They would
drift away and come together. Lather.
Rinse. Repeat.
Until.
It was nauseating to think of it.
When the fish bashed scraping
against her leg, almost dragging her
10 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
under with its mass and speed, she
thought for a moment it was Michael,
being uncharacteristically rough. This
pissed her off—the scrape burned in
the saltwater and she could feel herself
going hot with anger she had never felt
with him. She shouted, but he could not
hear, and then suddenly that thought
dissolved into confusion. Just a few
yards away from her, he burst through
the surface, way too high speed, jetting
like a water skier almost, sideways, his
head rising up out of the water and
leaving a gorgeous arc of shimmering
water droplets, one arm flailing down
towards his hips, his legs, the other
grappling somehow to right himself. His
face had a broken, aghast look. Inhaled
water gagged his scream of Get out
now.
And in that hill of water, that wake-like
wave that thrust him sideways, she could
see the fish, could see how enormous it
was, bigger around than a barrel and
long enough that she couldn’t even
see where it ended. Just the fin itself
was enormous. At least as tall as her
arm. And she felt the way she felt when
Wayne Townsend had kidnapped her,
with absolutely no control over anything.
The fish thrust him out of the water as
high as his waist and drove him toward
shore, then sideways, and she froze
utterly, the reality of it just too bizarre
and monstrous to believe. And then the
adrenaline came and she willed herself
to swim.
From The Final Appearance of America’s
Favorite Girl Next Door by Stephen
Stark, Shelf Media Group 2011, www.
shelfmediagroup.com. Reprinted with
permission. All rights reserved.
Pushcart Prize winner Laura Kasischke calls The Final Appearance of America’s
Favorite Girl Next Door “entertaining, thought-provoking, and beautiful—like
no novel you’ve read.” We talked to Stark about the novel, the future of book
publishing, and his reputation for writing exceedingly hot sex scenes.
Shelf Unbound: Your previous novel, Second
Son, got great reviews but would not have been
described as a “page-turner.” What prompted
your change in style?
Stephen Stark: In a very basic sense, I just
wanted to tell a good story. It’s been a long time
since Second Son, nearly 20 years, and the world
has gotten weirder and weirder since then. It’s not
by any means an original statement, but it seems
to me that the kind of realism that I was working in
then just isn’t up to the task of reflecting the world I
see around me. Still, I don’t know that I’d say it was
a change in style so much as a change in approach.
From the start, with Final Appearance, everything
was on the table. I made the conscious decision
to use every tool I possibly could to open the story up and give depth to the narrative.
The main character, Ellen Gregory, is a public figure, a very public figure, and so you’ve
got parts that are newspaper stories, parts that are TV news reports, a magazine-style
interview with Ellen, and then there’s some “genre” stuff mixed in. Above all, I wanted to
entertain myself. Which isn’t to say that the earlier novels didn’t entertain me, only that I
was going through some very difficult life transitions during the time I was writing Final
Appearance and I wanted to laugh, but I also wanted to say something worth saying.
Shelf: How’d you come up with your the character of Ellen, a, stand-up comic
turned sitcom star?
Stark: To the best of my recollection, she just kind of came out of nowhere—this
killer comic from the Midwest with the black thong tutu, fishnet stockings, and
shitkicker Timberland® boots. This sort of thing happens all the time—I was
actually working on another novel entirely, and at some point, I began a chapter
that had Ellen in it and, bang, suddenly that other novel was history.
Like a lot of people who chase particular dreams, Ellen does a lot of self-
invention to get where she’s going. On one hand, she’s Ellen, the fresh-faced,
corn-fed blonde, girl next door from the Midwest, but on the other, she’s ELLEN!,
the take-no-prisoners comic, that crazy chick in the tutu. I’m totally fascinated by
this whole idea of being two people at once. To me, a significant part of the novel
is her terror at reconciling the two, the struggle she has with those two identities.
UNBOUND 11
 Shelf: Final Appearance is a deeply romantic, character-driven novel, with
some very hot sex scenes. Which is more of a challenge to write: intimate,
authentic dialog or intimate, authentic sex?
Stark: I’d say that intimate, authentic dialogue and intimate, authentic sex are
simply two facets of the same thing. I’ve gotten a certain amount of attention for
my sex scenes over the years, particularly regarding their alleged hotness, but it
almost makes me feel as though people are missing the point.
So much of what we do and how we think is suffused with sex that leaving it
out of a novel (or my novels) would be
... what we’re doing with a disservice to my characters. That
doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be
Final Appearance explicit, although sometimes it does,
which can be tremendously revealing
is, if not unique, then of character. When I approach a
sex scene, I write it as authentically
completely cutting edge ... as I can. What would Michael do
and how would Ellen react? Or the
obverse. The same is true of intimate dialogue. What would Michael say and how
would Ellen respond? Sometimes the circumstance calls only for something like,
“later, after they’d made love,” but sometimes the motion of the story calls for the
whole business of two adult human beings being naked together. And it’s almost
exactly the way I approach intimate dialogue, which is often, at least figuratively,
two people being naked together. It’s been said that character derives from action,
and of course that’s true, but I think that the right kind of dialogue—the confusions,
the caesurae, the misunderstandings, the nakedness or the guardedness—is also
hugely revelatory of character.

Shelf: Final Appearance is available only as an e-book. Is this the future of

book publishing?
Stark: No. It’s not the future of publishing, it’s the present. And it’s an unnerving and
uncertain present for a lot of people in the book publishing industry. It’s a moment of
great tectonic movement and, for me, tremendously exciting. I think that what we’re
doing with Final Appearance is, if not unique, then completely cutting edge, all of the
benefits of an indie publisher lashed up with the technology of self-publishing. There
will come a time, in the not-too-distant future, when all of this is figured out. But right
now, there’s a wave that’s swelling, but not cresting. I think we—Shelf and I—are on the
top of that swell with Final Appearance. I have no idea whether Final Appearance, or
other of my subsequent novels, will be riding that wave when it breaks. But I really think
it’s important to be a part of the gaggle of surfers who are out there, slightly ahead
of the swell, betting on when it’s going to break. Not just for the success of the novel
itself, but to shape the industry in some small way—get out there and paddle like crazy.
I think Shelf is out there, its board waxed, its toes curled right alongside of me.

12 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 13

short story
Paper Darts Press | www.paperdarts.org
JOHN JODZIO’s If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home was one of our
favorite books of 2010. “Every one of the stories in his debut collection is succinct,
funny as hell, and spot-on smart,” we said. Now Jodzio’s back with more in Get
In If You Want to Live from new Paper Darts Press. Free inside? Illustrations by 19
local and international artists. Jodzio graciously supplied some A’s for our Q’s.
14 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
Q& A
Shelf Unbound: Your new collection had me at “Recently I Passed a
Kidney Stone That Looks Like a Shark’s Tooth.” How do you come up with
your quirky yet profoundly human cast of characters?
John Jodzio: In this book, I think most of my characters have a clearly defined
idea of what they want, but they have a totally misguided idea of how to arrive
there. To me, there’s always a high level of comedy in that type of circum-
stance. While I sometimes challenge them by putting them in these weird
scenarios, I think a lot of my characters’ humanity is grounded in their ability to
soldier on in the face of that strangeness.
Shelf Unbound: How did the idea for an illustrated book come about?
Jodzio: One morning I started looking through all these comedic shorts I’d
written over the last few years for McSweeney’s and other places. They never
seemed like they were going to fit in a collection with any of the longer short
stories I was writing so I started to think about how they might end up in their
own fun book. I wrote a couple more of them and then approached a literary
magazine here in Minneapolis, Paper Darts, which is run by three youngsters,
Meghan Suszynski, Regan Smith, and Jamie Millard. They’re known for their
innovative art and design and I knew they were toying around with starting up
a press arm, so I shot them the manuscript with the idea of getting a visual art-
ist to interpret each of the stories. They loved the idea and then went bananas
gathering up all the artists and doing all the design work. I can’t believe how
insanely beautiful this book is. I love those three ladies so damn much.
Shelf Unbound: Any plans to go long-form and write a novel?
Jodzio: I’ve been thinking about it for a while and have an outline for one all
intricately plotted out on butcher paper. Whenever I start to work on it though,
I’m always pulled back to writing short stories. I try to have fun writing whatever
I am writing and right now the novel seems like work and the short stories seem
like fun, so I’ll probably just keep going with them for the time being.    
UNBOUND 15
 from Get In If You Want to Live

MY KIDNAPPER
GIVES A REALLY
GOOD BACKRUB ILLUSTRATED BY RUBEN IRELAND

M
y kidnapper, Randall, gives a really good backrub. He’s got these long fingers that can really get into
that knot in my shoulder. He gives a way better backrub than my last kidnapper, Ted.

“You should think about massage school,” I tell Randall. “After you are done kidnapping me and after
we get married, I mean.”

Randall takes a pull on his bottle of whiskey. He tells me that wasn’t a backrub, that he was just
pinching my shoulder blade to immobilize me as he moved me back to my cage. I’ve only known
him three hours, but I can tell he’s just being modest. He’s the exact opposite of that jackass Ted, who
would not shut up about himself.

“I know what a good backrub feels like,” I tell Randall. “And that was an awesome one.”
Randall eats dinner with me in the tiny room he built below his basement. He tells me that this is as fast as he’s ever seen someone get
Stockholm Syndrome. I tell him he’s never met my older sister, Janine. I tell him about the first time Janine got kidnapped she fell in
love with her kidnapper in ten minutes.

“That’s a lot to live up to,” I say. “That’s still a California record.”

Randall’s also a really great cook. Tonight there’s soup from a can, but I can tell it was prepared with a lot of affection.

“Maybe you should become a chef,” I tell Randall as he picks his teeth with his switchblade. “Maybe after this is over then maybe kidnap-
ping could just become your hobby.”
lll
Randall takes the coffee can that I pee in and dumps it out in the corner. I can’t believe how gentle he’s been with me since he cut off my
pinky and sent it to my father. It’s all I can do from kissing him all over his beardy face.

“Your dad better pay up, Blondie,” Randall says as he turns off the light and leaves me in the dark to love him. “He better fucking pay up
soon or you are one dead bitch.”

16 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 17

 from Get In If You Want to Live

I know I shouldn’t get too excited, but I really like how quick this
relationship is moving. That dummy Ted and I never had nick-
names for each other, but Randall and I already do. Randall ei-
ther calls me “Bitch” or “Blondie” or he simplifies everything and
calls me “Blond Bitch.” I usually call him “Honey” or “Randy.”

lll
A couple of hours later, I hear Randall upstairs on the phone.
The conversation sounds heated. You don’t have to tell me how
hard it is to deal with my father. He makes me so tired some-
times. He’s all like “we have that security detail for a reason, stop
trying to ditch them” and “that’s the third time you’ve been kid-
napped this year, are you trying to make it happen?” And then
once I get kidnapped he’s all screamy with the kidnappers saying
things like: “Gimme back my daughter or I’m going to track
your ass down and cut your head off.” It’s really embarrassing and
it makes me want to crawl into a hole deeper than that earthen
pit Ted kept me in.

lll
I fall asleep and dream of the life Randall and I will have with
each other, but then I wake when I hear the men yelling upstairs.
I hear Randall yelling that they’re not going to take him alive.
Then I hear gunshots. I wait for Randall to come downstairs to
get me and so we can hold each other and die some lovely in-
tertwined death, but instead of him walking down the stairs, it’s
my father and one of the FBI guys that I know, Agent Rizzotti.
Rizzotti helps me out of my cage and wraps me in a blanket.
My father holds out his arms for a hug, but I walk right past
him up the stairs and into the kitchen and I step over Randall’s
dead body and walk outside. I do not get into my father’s car
though, even when he yells at me. I just keep walking. I walk
straight toward the highway and I hold out my thumb and wait
for someone else new and exciting to drive by and abduct me so
we can fall madly in love.

18 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 19

 S
perspectives

In the note below, Joshua Mohr explains

yl leaned down and
what he was trying to accomplish with his
new novel Damascus. We’ll tell you what snatched a live catfish
from the bucket. Held it
he did accomplish: the feat of bringing
a pathetic dying man, an alcoholic semi-
prostitute, and a naive performance artist
to full literary life while at once intelligently
up high over her heard. It
exploring various viewpoints on the war in flopped and bucked. Some people
Iraq. “I hope you dig it,” Mohr says. We do
indeed. Oh, do we dig this book. in the audience gasped. Revv

W
hat can I say about Damascus that won’t
sound like self-aggrandizing schlock, sure
cheered. Mutters from the corners.
to make you scamper off? I can tell you
what I tried to accomplish: I wanted to Concern. Shock. She said, “I’d
love to tell you that no animals
write about an oddball litany of players, from a berth
of backgrounds, varied demography, contradictory
social viewpoints ranging from veterans of Operation
Iraqi Freedom to performance artists. I wanted to
honor my father, who died of cancer, by writing about
were harmed in the making of our
history, but I can’t do that. We
an imagined cancer patient. I wanted to examine my
struggles with booze and drugs via a female char-
acter named Shambles, whom I absolutely cherish. I
wanted, in my own small way, to protest the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. I wanted to talk about the sim-
send soldiers off to die. Usually
ple self-esteem battles that every human fights day
in and day out, by featuring a character inexplicably for no good reason. And this fish
will die. It will die, not in vain,
hiding in a Santa suit. Most importantly, I wanted to
pen a wild, reckless romp, a weird world for a reader
to huddle in for a few hours.
I hope you dig it. There are lots of books out there,
and I appreciate you taking the time to dip into mine. but to help us all remember
something; people perish every
—Joshua Mohr

From Damascus by Joshua Mohr, Two Dollar Radio 2011,

www.twodollarradio.com. Reprinted with permission. All
rights reserved.
day in the Middle East.”
20 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 21
 feature perspectives

Duke University Press | www.dukepress.edu

I
n July 2005 I was being driven from an assignment—an endeavor that took two cars
and four heavily armed Iraqi guards. Iraq was a land of blast walls and barbed wire
fences. I made my first image of a concrete blast wall through the window of my
armored car that day. My only view of Iraq was through inches-thick bulletproof glass.
Metaphorically speaking, the windows represent a barrier that impedes dialogue.
The pictures show a fragment of Iraqi daily life taken by a transient passenger in a
Humvee; yet they are a window to a world where work, play, tension, grief, survival,
and everything in between is as familiar as the events of our own lives.”
[In my photographs taken through military-issue night vision goggles,] the urgency
and anxiety among the soldiers were as palpable as the terror in the faces of the Iraqi
civilians. More often than not, the rest of Iraq, like the rest of us, are left in the dark,
but I hope that these images provide the viewer with momentary illumination of the
fear and desperation that is war.”
—Benjamin Lowy, in Iraq: Perspectives, winner of the Center for
Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

From Iraq: Perspectives, photography by Benjamin Lowy, Duke University Press 2011, www.
dukepress.edu. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

22 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 23

24 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 25
26 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 27
translations Solzhenitsyn
Ignat Solzhenitsyn with his father Aleksandr (right) and family friend
Mstislav Rostropovich. Photo courtesy Ignat Solzhenitsyn.
APRICOT JAM
and other stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I
n his novels such as The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisov-
ich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted and renounced Soviet oppression, earning him
imprisonment, exile, a Nobel Prize, and an acknowledged role in the defeat of com-
munism. Some of his final published works are available in English for the first time in the
collection Apricot Jam and Other Stories; on the occasion of the publication of Apricot
Jam we are quite honored to present this interview with the author’s son Ignat Solzhenit-
syn, well known in his own right as the principal guest conductor of the Moscow Sym-
phony Orchestra and the conductor laureate of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.
Shelf Unbound: In the recent The Solzhenitsyn Reader, editors Edward E. Erickson Jr.
and Daniel J. Mahoney write, “Today most informed observers appreciate the central
role that Solzhenitsyn played in the defeat of communism. More than any other figure
in the twentieth century, he exposed the ideological ‘lie’ at the heart of Communist
totalitarianism.” How do you describe your father’s legacy and relevance today?
Ignat Solzhenitsyn: My father’s legacy lies first and foremost in his extraordinary con-
tribution to Russian literature at a time when many doubted its very viability. His novels
and stories have left an indelible impact on the world. As for the role that his writings
and his personal courage played in bringing down the Soviet dragon, he is routinely
listed alongside John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan amongst the
prime movers of that historic victory.
Shelf: Published in 1973, The Gulag Archipelago was banned in Russia until 1989.
Two years ago Russia’s education ministry made the book required reading in
28 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
Counterpoint Press
www.counterpointpress.com
Russian high schools. What does this turn of
affairs indicate for the state of Russian culture
today, and what, if anything, does it mean to
you personally?
Solzhenitsyn: That The Gulag Archipelago has
become required reading in Russian high schools is
not only a testament to its enduring relevance and
power, but also one of the most positive and hopeful
signs that today’s Russia is beginning, at long last,
to face her frightful past. It is very, very good news.
Shelf: The works in Apricot Jam and Other
Stories have until now not been available in
English. Tell us about the title story and about
what meanings your father was intent on con-
veying at this time of his life.
Solzhenitsyn: The title story is an eloquent indictment of the hypocrisy and cal-
lousness of the Soviet ruling class—not only its apparatchiks and henchmen, but
its lackeys in the cultural sphere. Here is a premier Soviet writer (widely recognized
as Aleksei Tolstoy) turning a willfully blind eye to the very social injustices that his
Communist ideology was supposedly trying to correct. Ego returns to the heroic,
though bitter, theme of the Tambov peasant uprising in 1920-21, and its brutal
suppression. Adlig Schvenkitten is a gripping autobiographical tale of twenty-four
harrowing hours on the Prussian Front in January 1945. The stories are amazingly
diverse in setting, plot, and style. If there is a common theme, it might be the per-
vasive effect of time in the shaping of individual character.
Shelf: What personal characteristics do you most remember about your father?
Solzhenitsyn: Well, I most remember him as a loving, supportive father. But,
speaking more objectively, he had a seriousness of purpose in his everyday life
and work that was deeply inspiring. He had a great respect for knowledge, for sci-
entific achievement, for language, but also a healthy skepticism of human nature.
Shelf: Your father died in 2008. At the end of his life, had he written every-
thing that he wanted to, or was there still more that he wanted to say?
Solzhenitsyn: One of the great blessings of his life is that, after decades of racing
against the clock to complete the enormous tasks he had set for himself (most
especially The Red Wheel), he not only succeeded in completing them, but had
ample time left over to tie up loose ends and to delve into unexpected, unplanned
projects, such as these binary tales.
UNBOUND 29
 feature

LEGO Lit A
s Baichtal and Meno point out, you can find more than
a million LEGO photos on Flickr. We discovered a few
with a literary bent created by Bruce Hietbrink. Why the
fascination with brick lit? “I like to tell stories in LEGO form, and
these are iconic scenes that we all recognize,” Hiebrink says.

The Cult of Lego “It’s lovely to live

by John Baichtal
and Joe Meno on a raft. We had
No Starch Press the sky up there,
www.nostarch.com
all speckled with
ho can doubt the huge stars, and we
W impact of LEGO? The toys
are found in more than
75 percent of Western homes.
used to lay on our
According to the LEGO Group’s backs and look
website, an average of 62 LEGO
bricks exist for every person on Earth, with 2,400 different ele-
up at them, and
ments in 53 colors. With all these parts floating around, one discuss about whether they was
would think that there would be some neat things to see … and
there are. made or only just happened.”
As of this writing, more than 200,000 LEGO videos appear on
YouTube, and over a million pictures tagged with LEGO appear
—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
on Flickr. LEGO parts have been used to create 3D printers,
autopilots, and buckyballs. Architects have used LEGO bricks
to conceptualize structural models, and artists have used them
to create inspired museum-quality works of art. Tens of thou-
“...from Hell’s heart I stab at thee;
sands of LEGO fans attend worldwide LEGO conventions. for hate’s sake
How could a humble toy brick manufactured by a family-
owned company so profoundly impact the entire world? Find I spit my last
out in The Cult of Lego.
—John Baichtal and Joe Meno breath at thee.”
From The Cult of Lego by John Baichtal and Joe Meno, No
—Moby Dick
Starch Press 2011, www.nostarch.com. Reprinted with permis-
sion. All rights reserved. by Herman Melville

30 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 31

 LEGO: a love story
by Jonathen Bender

John Wiley & Sons

www.wiley.com

hen I was in fourth grade, I built a model of the Sears

W Tower using LEGO pieces and black spray paint with my

Iam-brick Pentameter?
EGO poetry is created by printing words onto clear mail-
father in our basement. It is the only thing we’ve ever built
together. Neither of us is particularly skilled in home improve-
ment projects. But for one glorious afternoon, using our tiny,
primary-color plastic bricks, we seemed as talented as the men
who build real skyscrapers.
The memory of wanting to be a master builder prompted me
to search online for those who earned their living with LEGO
bricks. I was surprised by the vibrant community I found. These
weren’t just master builders; they were minifig customizers and
LEGO car clubs that existed solely to build miniature hot rods
with working doors and hoods—and they were a community of
thousands. And then I discov-

L ing labels and sticking them onto standard LEGO bricks.

I developed it as a way to explore play-based learning
and literacy. The initial idea was to use them in classrooms to
ered the things they built: a
twenty-two-foot-long Titanic,
a mosaic of the Mona Lisa,
engage boys aged 7 to 10 in working with words and creating round spheres from rectangu-
their own poems, but then I obtained a position as a Geek-in- lar bricks. These were artistic
Residence for Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival (emerg- works of incredible size built
ingwritersfestival.org.au) and the idea was born to use LEGO by adults. I began to think that
poetry as part of the festival. I created installations of LEGO it might be okay for a guy with
poetry around Melbourne and photographed them and dis- no kids to start playing with a
tributed them through social media sites -- instagram, twitter, toy again.
posterous and foursquare. A collection of LEGO poetry was —Jonathan Bender
also left at the Festival Hub, where other writers could build
poems, photograph them and share them online. Today LEGO From LEGO: a love story by
poetry can be found at @legopoetry on twitter and legopoetry. Jonathan Bender, John Wiley
posterous.com. & Sons 2010, www.wiley.com.
—Daniel Donahoo, www.danieldonahoo.com, Reprinted with permission. All
contact@danieldonahoo.com. rights reserved.

32 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 33

 culture pop
URBAN
ARTISTS
GO TO
THE MOVIES
The best of the Crazy 4 Cult show
IF
you’ve never actually opened
that big book of French Impres-
sionism on your coffee table,
perhaps you should replace it
with Crazy 4 Cult: Cult Movie Art, featur-
ing the best of LA Gallery 1988’s annual
show of pop culture-influenced art by
today’s leading urban underground art-
ists. The fascinating, offbeat works in this
collection include paintings inspired by
such films as Pulp Fiction, Edward Scis-
34 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
Crazy 4 Cult: Cult Movie Art
Titan Books | www.titanbooks.com
Little Violet Beauregarde
by Shannon Bonatakis, acrylic on canvas
sorhands, TRON, and Willy Wonka and
the Chocolate Factory. “In the pantheon
of truly great ideas, only one stands out
as so perfectly obvious, brilliant, creative
and fun that I literally leapt into the air and
stamped down hard on the ground with
both feet—like a thwarted cartoon char-
acter,” says cult filmmaker Kevin Smith of
the exhibits.
So jump to it, hipsters. We know what
you really think of Monet.
UNBOUND 35
 author interview
O ne cold winter day, I
finished reading Mrs.
Dalloway for the third or fourth
time and decided to investigate
what happened before page
one. I traced the steps that
Virginia Woolf took to create
her polished socialite and soon
discovered that there was a real-
life Mrs. Dalloway, a woman
just as complex as her fictional
counterpart. Then I began to
speculate about the origins of all
my favorite books. So I set out
to track down the bright sparks
of inspiration that prompted
great writers to pen their
famous works of literature —
and Dancing With Mrs. Dalloway
is the result of that quest.
—Celia Blue Johnson
Perigee
www.penguin.com
Celia Blue Johnson talks bookworms,
Sherlock Holmes, and wild things.
Shelf Unbound: How did you decide which books to include in Dancing with
Mrs. Dalloway?
Celia Blue Johnson: I took great delight in picking classic books that I loved as
a child and then others that I couldn’t put down as a teen and an adult. Once
I’d tracked down the inspiration behind those works, I turned to my friends,
who mostly consist of bookworms, and they offered list after list of their own
36 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
favorites. I loved the conversations
that grew from those suggestions,
hearing all about why each person
was drawn to certain books. It made
me want to go back and read all of
the classics again, and to pick up the
books I hadn’t yet had a chance to
read. Not every book made the cut,
though. Sometimes authors fiercely
guarded their creative process and
preferred not to describe moments
of inspiration or their writing process.
And other times there was little for an
author to say about the idea behind
his or her book. I hand-picked the
best stories of inspiration to include in
this collection. Photo by Nicky Sahady
Shelf: What was the most surprising anecdote you found in your research?
Johnson: I was particularly surprised to discover that Sherlock Holmes was
inspired by Scottish doctor Joseph Bell. Holmes is a staple in the literary world
and it’s difficult to imagine there was someone who came before him. In the back
of my mind, I assumed that Holmes sprung from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mind
fully formed. Yet there was a real-life Sherlock Holmes and the stories I read about
Bell were unputdownable. He was just as remarkable as his fictional counterpart.
Shelf: If you did a sequel what book would be at the top of your list?
Johnson: Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. I’m the co-publisher of
Slice, a Brooklyn-based literary magazine, and we interviewed Mr. Sendak for our
latest issue, as he was a perfect fit for the theme (Into the Wild). We spoke to him
about the inspiration behind his most famous work and I loved that his response
was not what readers might imagine. He said the book was the result of a failed
project. The original title was Where the Wild Horses Are and his editor loved the
concept. But, according to Mr. Sendak, “It became terribly clear to both me and
her that I could not draw horses. That’s the only reason why we changed the title.”
So he decided to draw his relatives the way he remembered seeing them as a
child—they were a wild bunch!
UNBOUND 37
 The tale that begat Gatsby
SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE
O
ne “not-forgotten summer
night” in the early 1920s, F.
Scott Fitzgerald listened to a
story told by Robert Crozier Kerr Jr., a
fellow golf club member. When he was
fourteen years old Kerr had spotted a NO VE MB ER
20 11
OC TO BE R/
yacht preparing to moor in Sheepshead
Bay, Brooklyn. Eager to get a closer look
at the new arrival, Kerr rowed across
the water. As he approached the grand
vessel, he noticed that it was danger-
ously positioned. The boat would break
into pieces if it was not moved before the
tide ran out. Kerr, barefoot and shab-
bily dressed, tried to warn the captain, INSIDE
IRAOQ
who shooed him away. But the owner,
Edward Robinson Gilman, heeded his F. Scott Fitzgerald
advice and was so impressed with the
bold teen that he offered him a job on newspaper reporter named Ella Kaye,

LEG Lit
the spot, and then he took him to buy just like Gilman and Bly.
a fancy new wardrobe. Gilman was a Fitzgerald replicated Kerr’s fairy-tale
wealthy and eccentric businessman, who beginning with Gatsby, but he knew lit-
was in an illicit relationship with Nellie tle about his character beyond the yacht, THE
Bly, the reporter who famously traveled and it showed. After reading a draft of RE TURN
around the world in under eight days. The Great Gatsby, editor Maxwell Perkins O F S T EPHEN
Kerr lived on the yacht as a personal voiced his concern that Gatsby was too S TA R K
assistant until his boss died, three and a mysterious and “the reader’s eyes can
half years later. This unusual work expe- never quite focus upon him.”
rience helped propel Kerr to success, Fitzgerald once acknowledged, “I t publishing
xt in independen
what to read ne
and he eventually settled in the prosper- never at any one time saw him clear 68 SEPTEM
BER 201
0

ous town of Great Neck, Long Island,
which was where he found himself talk-
ing to a promising young author.
Jay Gatsby followed in Kerr’s foot-
steps: he landed a job after saving a
yachtsman named Dan Cody from haz-
ards in the ocean. Fitzgerald even men-
tioned that Cody had a fling with a
myself—for he started as one man I
knew and then changed into myself.”
Reprinted from Dancing with Mrs. Dal-
loway by Celia Blue Johnson by arrangement
with Perigee, a member of Penguin Group
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
(USA) Inc., Copyright (c) 2011 by Celia Blue
Johnson.

38 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 39

 indie: elements of style
Back Bay Books
www.hachettebookgroup.com
[ Click here for more information
or to purchase from Lulu.com
40 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
The Disappearing Spoon
and Other True Tales of Madness,
Love, and the History of the World from
The Periodic Table of the Elements
by Sam Kean
S
am Kean waxes periodic in his fascinating,
entertaining study of the elements. Below, a few
questions for Kean. And an excerpt from the
book, in which Mark Twain goes sci-fi.
FAVORITE ELEMENT: Definitely mercury. I have some
great memories of it (from breaking thermometers when
young), and it’s such a gorgeous element—a shiny metal,
and yet liquid, able to creep and flow. Add to that its long
and fascinating history—in science, alchemy, medicine,
colonialism, etc.—and element 80 can’t be beat.
MOST INTERESTING ELEMENT FACT: That aluminum
was once the most precious metal on earth, worth far
] more than silver and far more than gold. Kings and
emperors lusted after it, and having aluminum items
became a status symbol—the French once had these
Ft.-Knox-like bars of aluminum they would display next to
their crown jewels, and Emperor Napoleon III had a prized
set of aluminum cutlery he reserved for his most favored
guests at banquets. (Lesser nobility ate with gold knives
and forks.) Even the Washington monument in D.C. has
a six-inch pyramid of aluminum on the very tip, because
we wanted to brag about ourselves as an up-and-coming
industrial power in the 1880s, so powerful we could afford
to put aluminum on public monuments!
AND THE BARBARA WALTERS QUESTION: IF YOU
WERE AN ELEMENT, WHICH WOULD YOU BE: No
surprise—mercury, for the reasons above. It looks cool,
and has the best history of any element.
M ark Twain wrote what we might recognize today as science
fiction. Really. In contrast to his laddish riverboat novels, he
It was genuine
news, but Twain
wrote short stories about inventions, technology, dystopias, space
and time travel, even, in his bemusing story “Sold to Satan,” the
perils of the periodic table. must have been
The story, two thousand words long, starts shortly after a hypo- pretty plugged into
thetical crash of steel shares around 1904. The narrator, sick of
scrabbling for money, decides to sell his immortal soul to Mephis- the scientific scene
topheles. To hammer out a deal, he and Satan meet in a dark, to incorporate all
unnamed lair at midnight, drink some hot toddies, and discuss
the depressingly modest going price for souls. Pretty soon, though, the cheeky details
they’re sidetracked by an unusual feature of Satan’s anatomy—he’s
made entirely of radium.
he did into “Sold
Six years before Twain’s story, Marie Curie had astounded to Satan.”
the scientific world with her tales of radioactive elements. It was
genuine news, but Twain must have been pretty plugged into the
scientific scene to incorporate all the cheeky details he did into
“Sold to Satan.” Radium’s radioactivity charges the air around it
electrically, so Satan glows a luminescent green, to the narrator’s
delight. Also, like a warm-blooded rock, radium is always hotter
than its surroundings, because its radioactivity heats up. This heat
grows exponentially as more radium is concentrated together. As
a result, Twain’s six-foot-one “nine-hundred-odd”-pound Satan is
hot enough to light a cigar with his fingertip.
Later, the story goes into some detail about refining radioactive
metals. It’s far from Twain’s sharpest material. But like the best sci-
ence fiction, it’s prescient. To avoid incinerating people he comes
across, radium-bodied Satan wears a protective coat of polonium,
another new element discovered by Curie. Scientifically, this is rub-
bish: a “transparent” shell of polonium, “thin as a gelatine film,”
could never withhold the heat of a critical mass of radium. But
we’ll forgive Twain, since the polonium serves a larger dramatic
purpose. It gives Satan a reason to threaten, “If I should strip off
my skin the world would vanish away in a flash of flame and a puff
of smoke, and the remnants of the extinguished moon would sift
down through space a mere snow-shower of gray ashes!”
From The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness,
Love, and the History of the World from The Periodic Table of the
Elements by Sam Kean, Back Bay Books, www.hachettebookgroup.com, avail-
able from Lulu.com.
UNBOUND 41
 indie: snapshot
In this most gently human of memoirs,
Sternbach traces the connections —
romantic kisses to pecks on the cheek —
that have defined her life so far.
Baseball as a Second Language
dget
Baseball by Harry Lewis
bout
as a Second Language “A memorable, laugh-out-loud, cry-out-loud
heir love
www.lulu.com
or just to
ed guide
Explaining the Game Americans Use
to Explain Everything Else
essay collection for both genders and all ages.”
e terms

Y
examples
s. ou can’t understand American culture without understanding — Kirkus Reviews
baseball. More than any other sport, baseball’s rhythms and
McKay customs reflect things Americans like to believe about themselves.
cience at “Flawless pitch and balance. Guileless,
has
Baseball appears everywhere in American speech and writing, from
rd
vard’s unaffected writing. A book club’s dream date.
. Lewis
Without
the coarsest slang to the most formal addresses. I loved this perfect little opal earring of a book.”
ion have a
ur Life, Out in left field, for example, is an idiom meaning odd, misguided, out
losion. He
udents
n baseball
Understand baseball
and baseball language!
of touch with reality. Out of left field is where a crazy idea might come — Joni Rodgers
3052-4
90000
Harry Lewis
from. Within the rules of baseball there is no difference between left field
24
Harvard University and right, so why isn’t the phrase “out in right field?” We don’t really
know. In the Western world, anything “left” has always been worse than
Baseball appears anything “right.” For example, “sinister,” the Latin word for “left,” means
“threatening” in English. Possibly the term “out in left field” recalls the
everywhere in days when a lunatic asylum was beyond left field in an old ballpark in
American speech Chicago and the patients used to gather near it to watch baseball games. Available in April
and writing, from All Americans use this phrase, even people who don’t know the game of
baseball—it is even used in England. Yet no one pauses to wonder why
the coarsest slang it means what it does!
to the most formal From Baseball as a Second Language by Harry Lewis, copyright Harry Lewis 2011. When a young woman goes missing,
addresses. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. a professional searcher with uncanny
empathetic skill works heroically to find her.

Chumwell “YOU BELIEVERS examines the anatomy of a

by Elon Salmon horrific crime from every angle: the victim,
www.lulu.com the perpetrator, the family members left
behind, and the tenacious searcher whose

C humwell is rather a bargain, and not just for its $2.99 e-book job it is to bring closure ... a strong song of
price. It’s actually three stories in one, all of them well told. It’s love, loss and human resilience.
a character study of Vivian Chumwell, a retired publisher navigating A gripping, intense read.”
widowhood, retirement, and challenging relationships with his two
children. It’s a mystery involving secrets revealed in a manuscript and — Jodi Picoult, author of House Rules
a neighbor with a dark past. And it’s a study of violence and tragedy.
Author Elon Salmon’s greatest accomplishment with this book is his
portrayal of Chumwell, a seemingly unknowable fellow who is slowly Read more at unbridledbooks.com
revealed to the reader if not to his own family and confidantes.

Unbridled
U N B O U N D 43
42 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
Available in May Books
 poetry
Beauty is Always a Surprise
by J.T. Ledbetter
The video was supposed to be Beautiful Kansas,
but turned out to be “The Volvulus Colon”
with diagrams of innards with names
I associated with islands or the middle names
of Presidents. No cows looking over a fence,
small tractors in their eyes, or peonies hanging
in their strings beside a ruined porch.
I can only hope the person planning an operation
takes some comfort in fields of black-eyed susans
on winds blowing up from Texas, with maybe
old photos of a thin woman standing in the yard,
watching a tornado forming over Missouri as I watch
bloody hands lift and set aside coiled tubes to show
the camera the tangled bit that must come out.
Beauty is always a surprise.
A woman’s name is on the package with my
address—so I won’t send the video back until
I get my Kansas, or a phone call asking if the
woman standing on the porch is my wife, and I’ll
ask if she’s ever seen Kansas in May. It may take
awhile. I’ll watch the mails while she waits for the
phone to ring, not wanting to presume, or say
From Old and Lost Rivers by J.T. Ledbetter, Lost Horse Press, www. how it is alone as the leaves fall.
losehorsepress.org. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
44 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
poetry
Purchase
by Ida Stewart
We slipped into the beginnings
as nightly into the neighbor’s pool —
the moon, a cool pulse on the water,
fluttering begin again, again,
again and kindling in us
a taste for the indeterminate.
The water was dark and bright
like granite or a sip of birch beer.
We were treading, next to nothing.
I watched your lips go. You said
blood is only blue as the sky,
and I felt a sunset in my wrist.
“Purchase,” copyright © 2011 by Ida Stewart is reprinted from
Gloss, with the permission of Perugia Press, Florence,
Massachusetts, www.perugiapress.com.
UNBOUND 45
best of the

So You Know It’s Me

book blogs
by Brian Oliu

Tiny Hardcore Press

This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey www.tinyhardcorepress.com
by Steve Almond

M
issed Connections. Everyone has them.
www.stevealmond.com That glance, that shy gesture, that unex-
Book available at the Harvard Book Store, CLICK HERE
pected brush of fingertips with a stranger

T
who just may be the one that gets away. Everyone
his Won’t Take But a Minute,
has them, but not everyone writes a Missed Connec-
Honey distills in its purest form
tion post on Craigslist, and I’m almost certain that
author Steve Almond’s literary
only one person has written a whole book of them.
aesthetic by collecting a series of micro-
That person is Brian Oliu, and the book is So You
essays on the ins and outs of writing and
Know It’s Me, a 54-page collection of Missed Con-
then exemplifying those ins and out with
nections originally posted on Tuscaloosa’s Craigslist
a brief selection of flash fiction. The result
website from September to November 2010. The 23
is what may be the most concise and
pieces of flash nonfiction were originally serialized,
helpful book on how to write fiction ever
one every two days, but as a collected work they
published—a pocket-sized catechism for
coalesce into a single story. The trajectory is beau-
writers at every stage of the game.
tiful in its subtle movement: At first, single images
Early on, Almond offers a definition
echo through distant pieces, hinting at the ghost of
of writing that calls to mind the advice
something greater, until the final few essays vibrate
Grady Tripp offers his students in Michael
with a resonance that links everything together.
Chabon’s Wonder Boys. According to Almond, “Writing is decision making. Noth-
Even with those capstone pieces, there is noth-
ing more and nothing less. Where to place the comma? How to shape the para-
ing easy or simple about Oliu’s book. In fact, one
graph? Which characters to undress and in what manner? It’s relentless.” From
of its strengths is its refusal to tread water, sinking
here he goes on to discuss the various decisions that writers need to make with
one minute into an uncomfortable extreme only to find buoyancy the next. For
respect to plot, style, point of view and a host of other issues.
instance, Oliu’s attention to detail creates a rather creepy narrator who borders on
In the shortest of his “essays,” Almond offers a one-sentence definition of
obsessive in early pieces like “Roll—Bryant Denny Stadium,” where he has been
plot: “Plot is the mechanism by which your protagonist is forced up against
watching this presumed stranger so carefully that he can comment on her “black
her deepest fears and/or desires.” In the event that this definition needs further
and white checkered hounds tooth: alternating bands of four black and four white
elucidation, he goes on to offer a supplemental essay on the subject titled “A
threads in both warp and filling or weft woven in a simple 2:2 twill.” But later that
Quick Survey of Where Your Plot Went Wrong.” (Hint: it probably has something
same focus on specifics becomes touching, even endearing, when it conveys the
to do with your characters and how you treat them.)
depth of feelings rather than an off-kilter fetishization of a shirt.
As with all books on writing, the best the author can do is provide guidelines
So You Know It’s Me evokes thoughts about one’s own missed connections
for writing the kind of fiction he likes to read. Fortunately, Almond’s tastes run
and how they can and do affect one’s life. It’s a message that Oliu wanted
a fairly wide gamut, and his talent as a fiction writer—as evidenced not only by
to convey, as he stated in an interview on his website: “To think about these
the flash fiction included in this brief volume but also by his excellent short story
missed scenarios is extremely healthy—it makes you realize the life that you
collections—renders his an opinion worth considering.
have and what can be done to make it even better. But to pine for them makes
If you’re a writer, buy this book. If you’re a reader, buy this book. If you have
you ignore the life that you do live: to say if you’re entirely relying on missed
either writers or readers in your life, buy all of them this book.
connections, you’re going to miss every connection.”
—Marc Schuster, www.marcschuster.com
—Matthew Merendo, www.hipsterbookclub.com

46 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011 UNBOUND 47


THE ABSENT SEA
M ario Vargas Llosa calls
The Absent Sea “one of
the most original novels that
modern Latin American literature
has produced.” It is a stunning
book—stunning in its thematic
scope and searing brilliance, and
in its unflinching exploration of
violence, justice, and individual
morality. The novel begins with
Laura Larco returning to Chile’s
Pampa Hundida after a 20-year
absence to confront her past,
the atrocities committed by a
major in charge of Pinochet’s
concentration camp there, and
her daughter’s question: “Where
were you, Mama, when all those
horrible things were happening
in your city?” An intense, eye-
opening read. —Ben Minton
The Absent Sea by Carlos
Franz, McPherson & Company,
www.mcphersonco.com
48 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
on our shelf
CALLING MR. KING
P art Dexter, part The
Talented Mr. Ripley—but
all its own, Calling Mr. King is
the story of a burned-out hit
man opening his eyes for the
first time to the view outside of
his rifle scope. Assuming the
role of Peter Chilton, a well-to-
do British bon vivant, he devel-
ops a passion for Georgian
architecture and an interest in
fine art. Coming upon a Turner
painting, he thinks, “This is
where I want to be. This is
where I want to live. The calm.
CARRY YOURSELF BACK TO ME
The beauty. The river. The
S
golden light. This was it.” But inger-songwriter Annie Walsh
does he have a shot at it? sits on her porch with an old
dog and a broken heart. And
Calling Mr. King by Ronald de
while her man did, indeed, do her
Feo, Other Press,
wrong, this novel does not hang
www.otherpress.com
on twang. The writing is tender
and elegiac, a languid unfolding
of characters, betrayals, frailties,
and breaches of love. Deborah
Reed is a talented storyteller with
a lovely use of language. Carry
Yourself Back to Me is both sus-
penseful and moving, and I found
myself caught up in its mood and
characters long after finishing it.
[The Dandy Warhol’s Zia McCabe
penned the title track of her band
Brush Prairie’s new EP after read-
ing the book; click here to watch
the video.]
Carry Yourself Back to Me
by Deborah Reed, Amazon
Encore, www.amazon.com
UNBOUND 49
 book club find

Repeat It Today with Tears

by Anne Peile
Serpent’s Tail
www.serpentstail.com

O range Prize nominee Repeat It Today

with Tears initially brought to mind
Francoise Sagan’s classic 1954 shocker
Bonjour Tristesse, a first-person narrative
of an emotionally neglected 17-year-old’s
tragically obsessive relationship with her
father. But while the setup is somewhat
similar, and while “Hello Sadness” might
have been a more apt title for this book,
Repeat It Today with Tears is its own
wrenching, singular story. And one not
to be missed.
“The first time I kissed my father on
the mouth it was the Easter holiday,” the
book begins. You know right away where
this is going, so that when it gets there it
is not particularly shocking. Anne Peile
under-sensationalizes the mechanics of the incest, the inherent lewdness, focusing
instead on drawing an observant, specific portrait of the emotional complexity of the
young girl Susanna, who grows up desperate for the love of her perfect, absent father.
And then finds him, and his love, or at least an approximation of such. “People would
say different, but I know there was nothing else I could have done,” she reflects at one
point. “I believe that for a time I was blessed because the person that loved me so was
the person always so loved by me; nothing else.”
This novel has yet to get the attention in the U.S. of other novels on this year’s
Orange Prize long list such as Emma Donoghue’s Room, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from
the Goon Squad, Nicolle Krauss’ Great House, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, and
winner Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. But, like nominee Kathleen Winter’s Annabel, a
favorite of our editorial staff, Repeat It Today with Tears is an elegantly written, tender,
memorable book—a marvel.
—Margaret Brown

50 SEPTEMBER 2010 UNBOUND 51

 october/november
JOHN JODZIO is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship.
His stories have appeared in One Story, Opium, The Florida
Review and a number of other places, both print and online.
TOY STORY He’s won a Minnesota Magazine fiction prize and both the
Opium 500 Word Memoir competition and Opium Fiction
Prize. He’s published two short story collections: If You
Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home (Replacement Press)
and Get In If You Want To Live (Paper Darts Press).
“
CELIA BLUE JOHNSON is the editor of two poetry
anthologies, 100 Great Poems for Girls and 100 Poems
Growing up
to Lift Your Spirits. She is also the co-founder of Slice
Literary, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that has
been featured in Time Out New York, the New Yorker, and
the New York Times. She has interviewed several bestsell-
without LEGO,”
ing and award-winning writers for Slice magazine.
SAM KEAN’s stories have appeared in The New York
Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Smithsonian Air &
Space, and The New Scientist. He currently works as a
she tells Steppa,
correspondent for Science magazine. He has worked on
fellowships in the United States and Europe and was the
national runner-up in the National Association for Sci-
ence Writer’s award for best young science writer.
“I literally can’t
J.T. LEDBETTER holds a B.A. in English from California
State University Long Beach, and an M.A. and Ph.D in
”
English from the University of Nebraska where he studied
under Karl Shapiro and the critic Lee Lemon. Dr. Ledbet-
imagine it. ter is currently Professor Emeritus at California Lutheran
University in Thousand Oaks, California. His poems can
be found in numerous literary journals and anthologies.
Underlying Premises, Ledbetter’s collection of poems,
was published by Lewis Clark Press in September 2010.
His latest collection, Old and Lost Rivers, won the Idaho
Prize for Poetry 2011.
— from Room by Emma Donoghue BENJAMIN LOWY is a freelance photographer based in
Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from Washington
University in St. Louis in 2002 and began his career in
2003 when he was embedded with the U.S. Army’s 101st
Airborne Division to cover the Iraq War. Lowy’s career as
a conflict photographer has also taken him to Haiti, Darfur,
and Afghanistan, among other places. Lowy’s photographs
have appeared in such publications as The New York
Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, GQ, and
Rolling Stone. Lowy’s photographs from Iraq were chosen
from over two hundred entries as the fifth winner of the
biennial CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.
52 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011
contributors
JOSHUA MOHR is the author of the novels Termite
Parade, which was an Editors’ Choice on The New York
Times Best Seller List, and Some Things that Meant the
World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009.
He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and
has published numerous short stories and essays in pub-
lications such as The New York Times Book Review, 7x7,
the Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, and The Rumpus. He lives
in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing.
IGNAT SOLZHENITSYN is principal Guest Conductor of
the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Laure-
ate of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. A winner of
the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ignat Solzhenitsyn serves
on the piano faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music. Born
in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn resides in New York City with his
wife and three children.
STEPHEN STARK is the author of the novels Second Son
and The Outskirts. Second Son was a New York Times
Book Review Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discov-
er New Writers pick. He is also a bestselling ghostwriter.
His essays, short stories, and criticism have appeared in
The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Washington Post
and the New York Times Book Review, among other jour-
nals. Honors include fellowships from Bread Loaf and the
National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Virginia and
is a graduate of George Mason University and the writing
program at Hollins University.
IDA STEWART’s poems have appeared in a number of
journals, including Field, The Laurel Review, Linebreak,
and Mayday Magazine, and have been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in creative writing from
The Ohio State University and is currently pursuing a PhD
in creative writing at The University of Georgia. She’s a
co-editor of Unsplendid and has also served as an edi-
torial assistant at The Georgia Review. A native of West
Virginia, she currently lives in Athens, Georgia.
Shelf Unbound is published bimonthly by Shelf Media Group
LLC, P.O. Box 601695, Dallas, TX 75360. Copyright 2011
by Shelf Media Group LLC. Subscriptions are FREE, go to
www.shelfmediagroup.com to subscribe.
what to read next in independent publishing
 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011

INSIDE
IRAQ
LEGO Lit
THE
RETURN
OF STEPHEN
STARK

68 SEPTEMBER 2010
what to read next in independent publishing