What is The Glister? To my dismay as a reviewer but my delight as a reader, John Burnside’s seventh novel defies encapsulation. The title itself suggests the book’s strangeness: the word, a synonym of “glitter,” seems composed of equal parts “glisten” and “blister.” In the way it compounds beauty and ugliness, it is a microcosm of the book as a whole. The Glister is neither a straightforward horror story nor an allegory à la Animal Farm, though at times it masquerades as both.

Mary Westbrook talks with award-winning author Janet Peery about the particular process of expanding stories into novels, what being a “writer’s writer” really means, how she’d respond if a student professed love for The Da Vinci Code, and more.

At Sewanee everyone mingled with everyone else—poets with playwrights with fiction writers, famous and not, published and not, emerging or well established. It didn’t matter. Therefore, when it was Andrew Hudgins’ turn to give a craft lecture, I was one of the first to go, eager to absorb what I could smuggle back to those students in my undergraduate workshop who had more of an ear for poetry than me, their fiction-writing professor. I needed to be at that lecture for professional obligations; I wanted to be there for personal desires. But just as I was beginning to reach towards the trellises of poetic symmetry, grasping for that hanging fruit, I heard Hudgins say, a mocking lilt to his voice, “…and then he became a fiction writer, like all failed poets tend to do.”

As a creative writing professor at Boston College, I frequently use collections of flash fiction, stories which usually run 1000 words or less. Given time limitations and the varying writing experience of my students, these versatile, word-limited pieces are a very approachable and satisfying form to work within. However, I always find myself floundering about when I try to explain and define this genre for the first time. It was therefore with keen interest that I picked up The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, an unprecedented gathering of 25 brief essays by experts in the field that includes a lively, comprehensive history of the hybrid genre by editor Tara L. Masih.

In her latest novel, The Believers, Zoë Heller once again proves herself a master of the unsettling. If conflict is the seed of narrative, then Heller’s storytelling is a Black Forest of strife. Aging radicals Joel and Audrey Litvinoff live in Greenwich Village, a perch from which they still hold sway over their three adult offspring. The Litvinoffs are a messy, complicated family who face a crisis when Joel, the patriarch, suffers a stroke in the middle of a courtroom–while defending a man accused of a terrorist plot; his stroke uncovers the family’s dissatisfactions.

Lyrics 1964-2008 (Simon & Schuster, Nov. 2008), the first collection of every word to every song Paul Simon has written in the past forty-four years, reads like a collection of short-stories, something reminiscent of Grace Paley or Richard Ford.

Like a cold, northeastern version of Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade, Lee Polevoi’s impressive debut novel, The Moon in Deep Winter, is the story of a misguided homecoming gone wrong. After years spent as a bit player on the margins of Southern California’s criminal underworld, Parker returns to his rural New England town, hoping to reconcile differences with his mother, his younger half-siblings, and his dictatorial step-father. He soon finds that his family secrets run even deeper and darker than he thought.

Let’s face it: fiction writers do not have a reputation for being carefree, untroubled souls. Even
our fellow artists consider us broody navel-gazers who are overly introspective and perhaps even in love with our own problems. (We do, after all, tend to keep writing about characters whose psychic profiles overlap significantly with ours.) The general public is hardly more charitable, usually assuming that (a) we study them to gather material, or (b) we all write thinly-veiled autobiography, and are so blind as to not even be aware of it. Do we deserve assessments like these? Probably so…

In her impressive debut collection, Forgetting English, Midge Raymond sets her stories in a variety of locations outside the continental United States. How many other collections can you think of that contain eight stories spanning four continents: Africa, Asia, Antarctica, and North America (mainly Hawaii)? Alongside personal, human histories, Raymond incorporates larger traditions. Marriage rites. Fertility symbols. The meaning of jade. The natural history of the penguin.

I love controversial books. Banned books, books by authors with pseudonyms and false identities, fictional books that have been passed off as non-fiction, books that take risks, and even books that play with a reader’s mind. I love these types of books because they push the envelope and help to expand our concepts of what makes something worth reading. They are experimental, and just as in the scientific world, these experiments may bring more questions than insights. Jon Paul Fiorentino’s first novel, Stripmalling, is one such book.