Right. Here she is. In all of her glory. Our little space on the world wide web to discuss three of the most mind-blowing, bone-crushing, spine-chilling, mouth-watering, eye-popping, cake-baking, chimney-sweeping, crime-fighting books set to be published in the coming months.


Read, enjoy, and feel free to post any of your thoughts or questions about the books or anything else!

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Read the New York Times review of Jubilee City!

Books of the Times

JUBILEE CITY

A Memoir at Full Speed

By Joe Andoe

Illustrated. 207 pages. William Morrow. $22.95.

Living and Painting by His Own Rules

Published: August 9, 2007

Joe Andoe grew up in Tulsa, Okla., living a life straight out of Chuck Palahniuk’s twisted imagination. Mama was a gum-popping cutie. Little Joe was “a big slug of a baby.” His mother says she didn’t see much of him during his formative years. “My only explanation,” he writes, “is that I tried to stay the hell out of the way.”

One afternoon he was watching a Popeye cartoon with his grandfather, a “silver-tongued womanizer” who was 6 feet 5 inches tall and part Cherokee. Popeye inspired the boy to start drawing. He drew versions of Popeye’s tattoos on his grandfather’s arms and chest. Later, after the wild times that his book revisits, he would grow up to parlay this gift into a career as a cowboy artist.

“Since the late ’70s I have fancied myself a landscape painter, and a painter of the things that hang around on the landscape,” Mr. Andoe writes in “Jubilee City.” This memoir, an expanded version of a book he published privately in 2005, includes enough pictures to convey what he means. The style of the paintings is “psychedelic but real,” reminiscent of the music of the Byrds circa 1969. These compositions aspire to an eerie, evocative stillness, “like the stillness at twilight when animals come out into the open.”

Not every painter of lonely landscapes and stark, haunting creatures has a readable story to tell. But Mr. Andoe makes this book a natural offshoot of his art, combining cool understatement with brass-tacks candor. “ ‘Jubilee City’ is about a kid from the edge of town and his curiosity and hunt for some kind of ideal redneck grandiosity and how he operated and got by under a law of his own,” he writes. “Mostly this book is a testament to weaving sticks and trash into something that can hang in a nice place.”

As a man who “caught the art virus” from an Andy Warhol poster and eventually accomplished something not even Hunter Thompson could do — get himself thrown out of the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen, Colo., a place where Mr. Thompson could set off firecrackers with impunity — he had no gift for towing the line in Tulsa. At an early age he “mastered the low art of coming unmoored.”

His book — which is divided into short anecdotes given painterly names (“Spontaneous Radiance,” “Keepsake,” “Tire Patch,” “Head Case”) — catalogs these teenage antics with aplomb. One involves having been handcuffed by the police after a mishap involving his motorcycle. About this, he writes: “Sometimes it’s too late to make a first impression.”

Mr. Andoe’s teenage years were wild enough to leave some of his friends lost forever. One of the happier stories here describes how a buddy with a bottle of whiskey in his back pocket sat down, felt something break, sensed liquid flowing behind him and said, “God, I hope that’s blood.” Without aggrandizing the train-wreck aspect of these memories, Mr. Andoe conveys a strong sense of how his own success, in the arts of both painting and survival, amounts to a lucky roll of the dice.

“Jubilee City” also gives him a forum for settling old grudges. And he does this with malevolent glee. “My mother-in-law was these two things: the meanest person I have ever known, and the one who has hated me the most.” As for his wife, he describes their moment at the altar with nothing if not visual imagination. “She looked at me and she gave me a look like a dog that’s fixing to bite my face,” he recalls.

There is similar bile for the Tulsa museum that refused to hang his work until it had to, after Mr. Andoe was one of the artists included in a traveling show from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eventually this would become reason to leave Tulsa and head north.

He describes joyless married life in both Jersey City and downtown Manhattan, and a workaholism that struck his more entitled artist friends as foolhardy. “There were always millions of reasons not to paint and it looked like some of them felt they didn’t have to anyway, because it was really just a matter of meeting the right person and then getting hooked up with the right gallery,” he writes. He himself was more focused. “I was lucky enough to know that my strength lay in my hands, not in my social skills,” he writes. “My only choice was to make my next painting better than the last.”

It worked — to the extent that he got the Cinderella treatment from the Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann, developed a following, quit drinking, became a doting father and started having better luck with women. This choppy, jet-fueled book ends with one last symbolic joy ride on his motorcycle. But it suggests no end to the rebellious streak that got him out of Tulsa and allowed him to live life on his own terms. Mr. Andoe’s whole career and his penchant for painting pensive-looking horses began as an expression of that independence.

“It was like of all the eight million people in New York, no one remembered the plainness of culture before disco,” he writes about the city in the 1980s. “Everyone in New York was different from me and horses became shorthand for that.”

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The Zero to be released into paperback!

The Zero

Jess Walter’s book, The Zero, is coming out in paperback in a mere week. The paperback will include a P.S. that has interviews, insights, and more. To get farther into the mind of Jess Walter, here are some of his events coming up…

UPCOMING EVENTS

AUGUST 15: Paperback of The Zero is released

SEPTEMBER 23: Reading at Powells in Portland.

OCTOBER 5: Spokane--Washington Association of Library Educators Conference.

OCTOBER 18: Spokane--Spokane is Reading Citizen Vince. North Spokane Library.

OCTOBER 19: Seattle--Humanities Washington Bedtime Stories fundraiser.

OCTOBER 23: Cheney, WA--Cheney Library book discussion group, 7 p.m.

NOVEMBER 1: University of Idaho, reading, 7:30 p.m.

NOVEMBER 12: National Book Award Reading, New York

This book is definitely dark and really captivating, exploring a post 9/11 world and a man who is finding himself more and more lost in it. While it is fiction, its thriller like quality keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Some of his other books include:
FICTION:
Citizen Vince (2005)
Land of the Blind (2003)
Over Tumbled Graves (2001)
NONFICTION:
Every Knee Shall Bow (1995 re-released in 2002 as Ruby Ridge)

at last, some thoughts on 20 grand, grand, grand

I've been meaning to blog about 20 Grand for a while now. One of the nice things about the way Curtis writes is that it isn’t simply the plot that grabs the reader (though that certainly helps), but the writing itself that pulls you in. Her characters are very well-developed; the reader can relate to these characters--no matter how far their lives are from the reader’s own—precisely because they are so well thought out. The solitude of the main character in “Hungry Self,” for example, is positively crippling, as Curtis describes a loner in her own terms: “I went downstairs to the basement. It was vast and unlit and I liked it, because down there I was just a person in the basement of a Chinese restaurant.” (11) The reader is privy to this solitary narrator’s unsettling thoughts, and empathizes with the vulnerable girl. But Curtis is careful not to play the sympathy card too heavy handedly. At times her description of the girl is poignant, but other times the narrator’s loneliness is described more lightly, to a rather overall tragicomic effect. “I was terribly in love with [Johnny], but we were separated by race and by the fact that he hated me.” (3) The narrator’s own matter-of-fact-life-sucks-confession is so raw and accepted that it is almost funny.

The key to Rebecca’s writing, however, isn’t just the plot, the characters, or the carefully crafted setting Curtis has created, but the very language and form with which she describes them. One of the author’s strongest assets is her use of transitions. Great writing makes every sentence as strong as that first captivating line, and that’s something Curtis certainly pays attention to. From one paragraph to the next, each opening sentence is as strong as the last, creating powerful paragraphs that continually pull the reader into the story. Take, for instance, this sequence from Hungry Self, where the narrator recalls a therapy session gone wrong, and is later snapped back to the present:

Two-sixty, he said. You weigh two-sixty and you think you can tell me what to do, how to discipline my own daughter, how to talk to my own daughter? The lesbian counselor cried pretty soon after that. There might have been more words on my father’s part—“manipulative,” maybe “controlling,” “disappointing,” and “freakish aberration of nature.” These were words that we both liked. We drove home in a happy silence, almost a camaraderie, in which he said, Beautiful day, and How is school, and How is track—a mood which would last approximately until midnight, when I would puke in the kitchen sink and he would walk downstairs from where he had not been sleeping and tell me that I was a shitty little mess who was destroying the family, which was his family, and had I not considered taking myself away to somewhere not this house, because if I did not he surely would take himself away, and how did I imagine my brothers and my mother would feel about that?

My order was up. I got the chicken worbar into its vat and trucked the hot iron plate out and set it down on the prep tray and produced a Sterno can from my pocket. I held the match high for drama before I lit it, and when the Sterno caught the two women clapped. Then I put the can on the plate and poured the chicken from the vat onto the plate, being careful not to pour any into the can itself.

The stark change in time and place makes for a powerful transition, yet the undertones in the two paragraphs speak to more than just a snap back to reality. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and curtis does well in writing it.