This week’s feature is Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel, The Green Shore, which is just out in paperback from Simon & Schuster. Bakopoulos, who we’re proud to call one of our Contributing Editors, has published work in Granta, Salon, the New York Times, Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, and Tin House. Her short fiction has received a 2010 O. Henry Award, a Hopwood Award, and the Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, as well as a residency from the MacDowell Colony. She received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches.

In Bistra Velichkova’s recent interview with Bakopoulos, the two talk about the origins of her novel, the role of literature, and whether writing can be taught. In response to a question about learning to structure a novel, Bakopoulos replies:

Originally I did attempt to make a structure. I said, “Well, here is Anna. I need to get her from 1970 into 1971, and then this has to happen.” I was thinking in terms of time and everything felt very forced. Then, I started to think about the character without that structure. Suddenly Anna made a bad choice, and then another bad choice, or a good choice, or whatever, and that was a plot. That’s how I started to structure the novel. It felt more organic. I realized that a character’s behavior creates the plot.

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be giving away a copy of The Green Shore to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Further Links and Resources:

• Read the rest of Velichkova’s interview with Bakopoulos.
• For more on Natalie Bakopoulos and her work, please visit her Simon and Schuster author page.
• Follow Bakopoulos on twitter @nbakopoulos.
• Here is an Op-Ed by Bakopoulos for the New York Times (May 10, 2012) on last year’s Greek elections, “The Choice That Wasn’t.”
• She has also written about Greece for Granta online: “Resist: A Letter from Greece.”

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Last week’s feature was NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut, We Need New Names, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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For the last several years, we’ve periodically explored the intersections between fiction and video games in these pixilated pages–they are, after all, both narrative art forms. Back in 2009, we published Christine Hartzler’s “Games Are Not About Monsters,” which was subsequently anthologized in Dzanc’s 2010 Best of the Web. In 2010, Mike Rudin argued that the Next Great American Novel just might be a video game (heresy!). And in 2011, Celeste Ng wondered, along with the Guardian, “Why aren’t more novelists weren’t writing vido games?”

Most recently, James Pinto sat down in March for an interview with Tom Bissell, who in addition to books of short fiction, essays, memoir, and literary journalism, has also written a title on this very subject: Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. And who has, in fact, recently co-authored a video game: Gears of War: Judgment.

So I was intrigued to read Chris Suellentrop’s review of the newly released game The Last of Us (Naughty Dog) in this morning’s New York Times. Not simply because the reviews of video games have begun to more closely resemble the reviews of literature, but because it so explicitly holds the game up to literary standards, and calls on literature to define its critical terms. In the opening, Suellentrop writes:

When The Last of Us begins, it pretends to be a video game about a teenager in Texas named Sarah, the kind of girl who wears rock T-shirts and loves her daddy and is impossible to find as a playable character in nearly every game ever made.

This being a video game, we already know it’s not really about Sarah. She’s not pictured on the box, for one thing. And yet, for a few fleeting minutes, I really did think I was going to play something different, a game that would transport me into the life of someone very unlike me, using what Austin Grossman in his new novel, You, calls the medium’s “physical link into the world of the fictional.”

Suellentrop goes on to discuss the portrayal (or lack thereof) of Sarah’s character, and to criticize the lack of female heroines in video games, in general, as well as the presence of women at this year’s E3 trade show in Los Angeles, in particular, noting:

[The Last of Us] does some things better than any other game I’ve played. But I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters.

The review goes on to reference Anita Sarkeesian’s YouTube series, “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” and to analyze tradionally literary issues in the game such as moral complexity, ambiguity, characterization, and point of view.

Closing, Suellentrop writes:

For a brief time, The Last of Us does become Ellie’s game, and the player is asked to direct her journey. As you would expect — it is the magic of the medium — I identified more with her character when I was playing as her. I became more interested in her. Her feelings became my feelings. And then she — or at least my ability to inhabit her — was gone. For a second time, the game surprised me, did something wonderful, and then took it away.

This is an obvious point I’m making here: that the criticism of video games has come to feel nearly indistinguishable from the criticism of literature, which–if criticism serves any higher purpose–should help push the form toward greater complexity and artfulness. But despite the often great criticism of games that has begun to appear in the Times and elsewhere from writers like Suellentrop and, even more regularly, Seth Schiesel, I was still impressed by what was being implied here. Though the word was never used in the review, what rests below the surface of Suellentrop’s assessment, it seems to me, is quite simple: “empathy.” A seeking for that “physical link into the world of the fictional,” which allows us the opportunity to empathize with another human being. To inhabit another life. And could there be anything more fundamental to–and defining of–art?

Or, as Ian McEwan once so aptly noted about writing and literature:

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This week’s feature is NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, which was just published by Reagan Arthur Books. Bulawayo’s stories have won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and were shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by J.M. Coetzee. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship, and, most recently, a lecturer of English. Bulawayo is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

In the introduction to Rebecca Scherm’s review of We Need New Names, she writes:

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, opens in Paradise, the Zimbabwe shantytown where Darling and her mother have lived since their house was bulldozed by the government. Starting in 2005, the government program Operation Murambatsvina (“Clear out Rubbish”) destroyed entire neighborhoods in a few hours, leaving more than 300,000 people homeless. But Darling doesn’t know any of this, only that their house is gone. She’s just ten.

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be giving away a copy of We Need New Names to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Further Links and Resources:

• Read the rest of Scherm’s review of We Need New Names.
• For more on NoViolet Bulawayo and her work, please visit the author’s website.
• Read “Hitting Budapest,” the first chapter of We Need New Names, in the Boston Review.
• Hear Bulawayo read from We Need New Names in this video.
• Read an extract from We Need New Names and a brief interview with Bulawayo in Granta.
• Read the New York Times review of We Need New Names.

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Last week’s feature was Jonathan Callahan’s debut, The Consummation of Dirk, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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Do you remember a while back when goat cheese became a Huge Culinary Thing? And it started appearing everywhere—on pizzas, in salads, in ice cream, even in cheesecakes. Everyone I knew loved it. “Try it,” they kept telling me. “It’s so delicious.” But when I did, I couldn’t stand it. “Try it again,” they’d say, the next dinner out. “You know, it takes 10 times before your taste buds really decide if they like something.”

They were so excited about it, and loved it so much, that I really, really, really wanted to like goat cheese. But I just didn’t. I tried it and tried it and tried it. And then I’d sit there listening to everyone rave about how delicious it was with honey or steak or whatever and my friends would feel bad that I didn’t like it, that I was missing out on something so amazing.

The same thing happens with books, and sometimes even authors. You know what I’m talking about: everyone RAVES about them, but that you, for some reason, feel just… meh. And every time those books—or authors—come up in conversation, you feel so guilty about disliking them, and figure you’re missing out on all the brilliance, and wonder if you should give them a second, or a third, or a tenth try.

Well, sometimes even 10 tries isn’t enough to make you like something. Sometimes, you just… don’t. And you wish people would let up. I’m guilty of it too: I keep trying to get my sister to eat broccoli, which I love (hey, it’s a superfood!) and she hates. I am always convinced that this recipe is the one that will change the tide. Eventually I stopped trying the goat cheese, no matter how amazing people said it was. And I stopped cooking broccoli for my sister. It’s okay. There are other things to eat.

It can be tough, disliking something universally beloved. People keep trying to get you to love it too when in your heart, you know it’s just not for you. So in an effort to remove the stigma, and as a reminder that there’s no such thing as a universally loved book, here are my three guilty displeasures—my personal literary equivalent of goat cheese. I believe my friends and fellow writers who tell me they’re great books. I believe that I’m missing out on something great. But they’re just not for me.

1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. No fewer than five separate friends have suggested this book to me. One of them even gave me her copy. None of them are much alike—one is a poet, one is in marketing, two are fiction writers, one is a research scientist—but they all loved this book. I keep trying it. I really want to like it. But about 15 pages in, I always seem to wander away to pick up something else.
2. The Game of Thrones series, by George R. R. Martin. Last fall, when he had to do a lot of traveling, my husband tore through these with heedless delight and, like about three-quarters of the world, is eagerly awaiting the next book. But every time he tries to explain what it’s about, I can feel my mind tuning out. I don’t know why this is. I devoured fantasy books as a kid, and the premise—political intrigue and power plays, with dragons?—sounds fabulous, figuratively as well as literally. No luck here. I can’t even get into the TV show. In this case, I won’t mind if he Netflix cheats. (The new Arrested Development, though? That’s another story.)
3. David Foster Wallace. I know, this is rank heresy from a fiction writer. When my husband and I got married, one of the groomsmen—my husband’s friend since kindergarten—pressed his battered copy of Infinite Jest into our hands. “This book changed my life,” he told us. I couldn’t get past page 2. Yet most writers I know speak Wallace’s name with the reverent tones that the very devout use for saints. I’ve tried more of his writing (the essays, the short stories) and keep waiting for the passion and excitement he elicits from every other writer. It doesn’t arrive. I’m sorry, guys. For me, DFW is a supposedly great read I probably won’t try again.

While I await the angry Murakami/Game of Thrones/DFW-loving mob to gather their pitchforks and look up my house on Google Maps, tell me: what are your literary guilty displeasures?

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This week’s feature is Jonathan Callahan’s debut collection The Consummation of Dirk, which was selected by judge Zachary Mason as the winner of Starcherone Press’s 8th Prize for Innovative Fiction and has just been released by Starcherone, an imprint of Dzanc. Callahan’s fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Pank, Unsaid, Witness, The Lifted Brow, Quarterly West, Keyhole, >Kill Author, Used Furniture Review, Western Humanities Review, Underwater New York, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Essays on Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, LeBron James, and David Foster Wallace can be found in The Collagist, Wag’s Revue, and here at Fiction Writers Review. He grew up in Honolulu, spent a few years in Japan, and currently lives in New York.

In the introduction to his recent interview with Callahan, acclaimed fiction writer Rick Moody writes:

My requirement for literature is that it harbor some deep engagement with the verifiable complexities of human consciousness. Almost all books, in my estimation, fail at this engagement. Jonathan Callahan, who feels he is doomed sometimes, who can’t keep his shit together exactly, spins out this deep engagement as though it were easy, or natural to him. That means: he has lots and lots of talent. Which is why I keep talking to him, and why we did this interview that I didn’t really have time to do.

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be giving away a copy of The Consummation of Dirk to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Further Links and Resources:

• Read Part I of Moody’s interview with Jonathan Callahan.
• And here is Part II of Moody and Callahan’s conversation.

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Last week’s feature was Slice Magazine, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books and journals out there!

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“Above all, it must be compelling,” James Salter told the Paris Review in 1993 when asked about his idea of the short story. “You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.”

Long before I ever read those remarks by Salter, I’d already come under the influence of his short stories and, in particular, his crystalline opening paragraphs.

When I am turning the raw material of a new story in my mind, I often pull down one of Salter’s story collections—Dusk and Other Stories (1988) or Last Night (2005)—and skim through them to re-read over and over his opening lines. Salter’s opening paragraphs throw a net around the reader with the kind of lyrical precision often found in poetry.

Salter’s stories brim with the emotional resonance achieved by his accrual of fragments—his writing doesn’t charge ahead so much as it unfolds. Salter’s balance of short declarative and longer lyrical sentences is sharply observant, such as in the opening of “Am Strande von Tanger” (from Dusk and Other Stories):

Barcelona at dawn. The hotels are dark. All the great avenues are pointing to the sea.

The city is empty. Nico is asleep. She is bound by twisted sheets, by her long hair, by a naked arm which fall from beneath a pillow. She lies still, she does not even breathe.

Salter achieves a similar resonance of accrual with the opening paragraph of “Akhnilo” (from Dusk and Other Stories):

It was late August. In the harbor the boats lay still, no the slightest stirring in their mast, not the softest clink of a sheave. The restaurants had long since closed. An occasional car, headlights glaring, came over the bridge from North Haven or turned down Main Street, past the lighted telephone booths with their smashed receivers. On the highway the discotheques were emptying. It was after three.

Salter has another kind of opening paragraph that I admire, too, one that ends with a kind of explosion. The celebrated Russian short story master Isaac Babel once described this possibility of ending a paragraph “like a flash of lightning.” Writing about Babel’s charged opening paragraphs in her stellar craft book Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose may as well have been writing about my own feelings on Salter. The paragraph, Prose writes, is a bit of “literary respiration… Inhale at the beginning of the paragraph, exhale at the end.” At a paragraph’s end, Salter, like Babel, has a gift for introducing an element of unease: a flash of lighting. The stunning opening of “My Lord You” (from Last Night) is a perfect example:

There were crumpled napkins on the table, wineglasses still with dark remnant in them, coffee stains, and plates with bits of hardened Brie. Beyond the bluish windows the garden lay motionless beneath the birdsong of summer morning. Daylight had come. It had been a success except for one thing: Brennan.

And again in the same collection’s title story, “Last Night”:

Walter Such was a translator. He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke’s translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty. He was a sociable but also sometimes prickly man, who stuttered a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked. But Marit, his wife, was ill.

With the openings of both “My Lord You” and “Last Night,” Salter delivers in a single-breath-of-a-paragraph everything a reader needs to compel them to continue reading. With these concisely compressed openings, the reader is invited to lean into the glow of the campfire of literature as Salter methodically builds a foundation word by word.

When considering what the opening paragraph of a short story can hold—and perhaps should—the influence of James Salter is worthy of close consideration.

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Further Reading:

Until the publication last month of All That Is—James Salter’s first novel in more than thirty years—he was best known for the shimmering and erotic novel A Sport and a Pastime. The opening paragraph of that novel was the first writing by Salter that contributing editor Joshua Bodwell ever read:

September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.

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I’m not the kind of bibliophile who owns multiple copies of the same book—first editions, paperbacks, reprints, limited editions, and so on. I’ve never really had the living space to accommodate such a habit, but more over my books are littered with margin notes, end notes, notes for stories I’m working on, notes for stories I want to work on, so many red and blue-inked annotations that purchasing a new copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories or Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago would feel like cheating on the marked-up copies, betraying some long-term, intimate relationship.

So there was no reason to purchase a hardcover edition of Elizabeth Crane’s debut collection When the Messenger is Hot a few weeks ago at a used book sale. I own the paperback version, have lived with it, have scribbled my way through the stories time and time again since I first picked it up as a sophomore creative writing major in college. But as I plucked the yellowing-covered volume from a row of crime novels and began to leaf through it, I was struck with the same kind of awe at the collection’s opening story as I was when I first encountered it all those years ago.

“The Archetypes Girlfriend” is a breathless, hurried story. Rendered in second person, it chronicles the love life of an unnamed narrator through the catalog of various women he’s dated. As the story progresses, we see the life of our narrator unfold via the types of women he chases after. Relationships blur and become an oddly singular experience in the narrator’s mind. We learn through the precise, slicing way in which he describes (and defines) these women the kind of relationships he gravitates toward (tumultuous, maybe obsessive) and the kind of life he’s seeking.

You love her because she can talk about cars or dogs or wild game or politics, about which she has a point of view that you may or may not agree with, and because she never asks what you’re feeling, for which she is exalted until you realize that this is because she isn’t about to tell you either.

The story is stuffed with digressions. Insights incased in parenthesis. Asides trapped between emdashes. It’s a voice-driven fiction, often comical, and so goddamn truthful that at times you transcend seeing yourself in the fiction and begin seeing the fiction in yourself. And sure, these and the story’s many other attributes (pacing, structure, an intentional avoidance of the futile task of trying to describe places or settings) were wonderful things to rediscover, but what hit me hardest was the adrenaline-slapped feeling that, in fiction, anything is possible. It was the same heart-in-the-throat feeling I had when I read the opening passage as an undergrad, so sure of what a short story was: third person narration, high-flown language, everyone is unhappy, everyone is alone, so much pain, bird imagery, clouds, a late-game epiphany.

Jesus, what a sad conception. And I thank Crane’s opening passage for pulling the wool from my eyes to the limitlessness of a great short story:

Sarah or Anya or Max is five foot ten, five foot nine or five foot eight, but never shorter, and she’s naturally thin. She’s thirty or she’s twenty, or she’s almost forty and looks ten years younger even when she rolls out of bed in the morning. She’s not a flawless beauty, but you think she is, and she has perfect skin and wears no makeup, or she won’t leave the house without eyebrow pencil and blood-red lipstick, her trademark.

Time has passed. I’ve got gotten older, finished college, completed my MFA, gotten married, moved around the Midwest, worked a 9-5 office job, watched my student loan debt flicker and shrink like the flame on a trick candle. And while I’ve certainly grown as a fiction writer, this story still impresses upon me the importance of being open-minded with your own work: of not being afraid to question your aesthetics, your voice, your style, your ideas about what your fiction can look like, sound like, feel like. In many ways, the more we write and read and complete MFA theses and publish work, the threat of becoming cross-armed and entrenched in certainty about how to define the short story form grows.

This is dangerous thinking. This is confusing the difference between understanding the tools needed to build a satisfying, poignant piece of art and always relying on the same tool no matter the job. This is where the value of Crane’s story nests. All these years later “The Archetypes Girlfriend” still excites me, still makes me wonder, still breathes possibility.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I did buy the book sale edition of Crane’s book, and I’ve been carrying it around in my backpack ever since, revelling in the knowledge that it’s nearby. So maybe there is something to owning multiple copies of the same title, and maybe there’s something I can learn from it.

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Further Links and Resources:

• Visit Elizabeth Crane online.

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