Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the latest installment of our “First Looks” series, which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

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This month’s First Looks picks take us in a decidedly international direction. Let’s begin with The Last Hundred Days, Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and is publishing in the U.S. next week. Especially for those of you—I know you’re out there!—who are too young to remember much about the Cold War and Eastern-bloc dictatorships, this novel will introduce you not only to a foreign city (Bucharest), but also to some not-so-ancient history (the novel takes place during the last months of the Ceausescu regime in 1989). Beyond that, McGuinness is another new novelist coming from a poetry background, and I’m always interested in the products of that cross-genre training.

Next, early June will bring the U.S. release of another debut novel: Francesca Segal’s The Innocents. Billed as a recasting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—but set within a modern-day London Jewish community—this one hits many of my readerly and writerly interests: reworkings of classics I’ve loved, Jewish literature, and the international accent.

P.S. In keeping with the internationalist focus: If you missed my recent reviewlet covering Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel The Unexpected Guest (set mainly in Paris), now is a perfectly fine moment to read it.

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Further Reading and Resources:

• Watch and listen: Patrick McGuinness recently visited Villanova University and read from his work there.
• Courtesy of The Man Booker Prize: a Reader’s Guide (PDF) for The Last Hundred Days.
• Listen to Francesca Segal read from The Innocents.
• Read Francesca Segal’s Granta essay, “In My Father’s Footsteps,” about her father, author Erich Segal.

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“I think the best stories start from something tiny. [...] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen.”

~ Wells Tower

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Wells Tower on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

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Yesterday, I saw a woman wearing a garment that straddled the line between shorts and panties. Her outfit was revealing, and it made me ask questions like, “how far will fashion go?” and “what was she thinking?” Perhaps author Steven Millhauser had a similar experience at some point, and that led him to write “A Change of Fashion,” a short story that originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine, May 2006.

What would happen if next season’s fashions did not favor a slightly shorter hemline or a higher heel, but hiddenness? What if dresses took on shapes larger than Victorian hoop skirts and less revealing than burkas? In Millhauser’s story, concealing is the new revealing. Fashion is freed “from its long dependence on the female shape,” as women no longer feel the obligation “to invite a bold male gaze.” Women favor dresses that disguise the body, conceal the face, and, in later incarnations, can serve their purpose at a lawn party without the wearer having to wear them at all.

Teenage girls in particular . . . embraced the [style] . . . for they could plunge down, far down, into layers of costume that sheltered them from sight, while rivers of twisting cloth allowed them to bring forth forbidden longings.

Like much of Millhauser’s shorter works, this piece of fiction is allegorical above all else. There is no dialogue. We don’t know much about the quizzical and sole character, Hyperion. It doesn’t matter. Like Millhauser, the reader delights in following the idea to its outright conclusion.

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Read Millhauser’s “Getting Closer,” first published by The New Yorker (January 3, 2011).

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Desire is the writer’s best friend. When you know what your main character wants, you have your entire story. When someone wants something–badly–he or she will get up off the couch and try to attain it. The object of desire might be a new winter coat (”The Overcoat” by Gogol), a boy (”City of Boys” by Beth Nugent), money for a family member’s medicine (”King of the Bingo Game” by Ralph Ellison), a business contract (”Like a Bad Dream” by Heinrich Boll)–it doesn’t matter, as long as the desire is concrete and the character can pursue it. The character’s desire not only will fuel the story’s prose, the fact that your character wants that thing will make him or her interesting (in some ways, desire is character) even if he or she isn’t “likable” (think of Humbert Humbert).

The desire will create suspense (will he or won’t he achieve his desire?) and provide your story with a simple, easy-to-follow structure. What’s the first thing someone who wants that object of desire might do to attain it? What if that doesn’t work? (A big advantage: Getting your character out of his head and out of the house and in contact with other characters.) The story’s turning point will be the scene in which the character either achieves his desire–or realizes he never will. And the final paragraph? Having achieved or not achieved his desire, what is the character thinking or feeling?

Here’s the exercise: Imagine you are your main character (or just write from your own perspective). What do you really, really want? Now, start talking about that object of desire. Don’t keep saying, “I want X, I want X, I want X” Rather, just talk about the thing you want, in all its desirable specificity. Let yourself get caught up in all that wanting. If you get stuck, reread the first few paragraphs of Lolita.

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Eileen Pollack is the author of Breaking and Entering; The Rabbi in the Attic And Other Stories; In The Mouth; Paradise, New York; and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. She lives in Ann Arbor and is a member of the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

• Get lost in our archives of “Get Writing” prompts.

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This week’s feature is Johanna Skibsrud’s debut story collection, This Will Be Difficult to Explain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of a novel, The Sentimentalists (2011), and two collections of poetry: I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being (2010) and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys (2008). She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is at work on another novel.

In his recent reviewlet of this collection, Ben Pfeiffer writes:

This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a slim, lime-colored book with a picture of a lackadaisical girl on the cover. It holds nine stories in just one hundred and sixty-nine pages, but although the book feels light in the hand, the stories pack a concentrated, emotional punch.

We’re giving away a copy of This Will Be Difficult to Explain next week 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 Reading

• Read the rest of Pfeiffer’s review.
• Read an interview with Johanna Skibsrud on Maison Neuve.

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Last week we featured Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection Monstress, 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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Friends say they saw our bromance bloom.

I took them aside and said, admiringly, “that Nick Ostdick is alright.”

Nick took them aside and said, wistfully, “Shawn seems like a cool dude.”

There was a beer here, a beer there, always with chaperones. Then mano-a-mano happy hours that spilled into dinners that spilled into the manliest of frozen desserts that spilled into more happy hours. His fiancé called me his man-wife and warned me not to take him away. I was a groomsman in his wedding; he listened to my unnecessary dating life bemoanings. When I left for a semester abroad, I worried he might leave me for his new, thinner best friend, the one with the Jesus-hair. But soon I returned and Jesus graduated and we were buds again, beating the dung out of each other at racquetball, cheering over publications, glutting on churros.

There’s a genre of story about loves like ours. It involves men at work, men at home, and men at play; fishing, hunting, and camping; burping, farting, public urination, and private regurgitation; women-ogling, beer-guzzling, verbal sparring, aggressive hugging, and fraternal punching. Sometimes the story goes wrong (Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow”). Sometimes it goes right (Alan Heathcock’s “The Born Agains”). Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s friendship reads like one mean bromance, with Hemingway declaring that Fitzgerald couldn’t handle his drink, that it turned him into a “small, well-dressed monster”; and what’s Kerouac’s On the Road but one epic bromantic road movie? The genre keeps going strong, with contemporary examples like Joe Meno’s “Happiness Will Be Yours”, Jim Shepard’s “Poland is Watching”, John McNally’s “Sweetness and the Fridge”, Ben Percy’s “Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This”, and “Beautiful Places” by Brady Udall, and will continue to do so for as long as men befriend men.

Nick and I have graduated and soon our man-love will go long distance. He’ll drink with other men and I’ll go a-wassailing overseas and over dale. But before we part we’ve decided to culminate our friendship in an anthology celebrating male friendships and the buddy story. It’s called The Man Date: 15 Bromances, and will be out from Prime Mincer in 2013.

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Got a bromantic masterpiece in the drawer? Deadline’s June 1^st. Submit here.

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Most stories we read, hear, even tell — we forget. A scant few haunt us across years. The best ones never leave.

I still remember the first time I read One Story issue #141 on the F train. Early November in New York, when wet, bare branches foreshadow winter. It begins:

Freda weighed eighteen pounds when she was born. Her feet were each six inches long. At ten, she was taller than her father. Five feet eleven and one-half inches standing in her socks. I can’t keep you in shoes, her mother would say, and they went to Woolworth’s for men’s cloth slippers. Her mother cut them open up front to leave room for Freda’s toes. She’d stitch flowers in the fabric to pretty up the seams, forget-me-nots and daisies and yellow bushel roses.

It wasn’t imagining a giantess for a daughter that seared “Nephilim” on my mind, but the love story at its raw, ragged heart.

Freda loves a little boy named Teddy. Their relationship – like Freda’s skeleton – grows over the course of L. Annette Binder’s story. I know what you’re thinking – sentimental! weirdness that plays on the reader! – that isn’t it at all. It’s a story so old it predates writing: I’m a monster, who will love me? And we hold our breath for the answer, every single time.

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• Read an interview with L. Annette Binder on One-Story, where you can also order a copy of “Nephilim.”

• Oh, bliss: Sarabande Books will publish L. Annette Binder’s debut collection, Rise, in August 2012.

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“With short stories, you never really expect the World at Large to care one way or the other. It’s a labor of love, and no one disputes that, and I think the purity of that endeavor is very liberating.”

~ Valerie Laken

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Valerie Laken on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

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Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, in the case of London’s story, that “the man” won’t break through the ice—and that the fire won’t go out.

Perhaps part of the story’s great appeal is how very different it is from my own lived experience and writerly tendencies. My version of the great outdoors is Manhattan’s Central Park. My stories are set in New York and Berlin and Paris. I’m not particularly fond of animals (and neither, it seems, are my characters, since I cannot think of a single one who even has a pet). So it is difficult to imagine myself somewhere to the side of “the main Yukon trail” in subzero (way subzero) temperatures, let alone accompanied only by “a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, grey-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf.”

London’s story makes me feel life-threatening cold. It makes me visualize unfamiliar geography and landscape. Like Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new collection, it teaches me about animals and their instincts—without requiring me to get up close and personal with them. In short, “To Build a Fire” accomplishes one of fiction’s most noble goals: allowing me to broaden my understanding of life and experience. Even if, in the end, the man always dies, and the dog always turns around, trotting “in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.”

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Further Reading:

• Read “To Build a Fire” online
• Want more Stories We Love? Read the whole series—and keep checking back all month for more as we celebrate Short Story Month
• Like Erika’s taste? See more of her recommended reading.

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