Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

• Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
• Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
• Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

Everett’s prose does not aim at flowery. In fact, the only elevated passages deal with Walker’s one passion outside his job—fly fishing the mountain streams of his jurisdiction. The straightforward, dialogue-heavy style of Assumption creates a cinematic feeling, allowing for a quick read. This refusal to editorialize allows the author to depict the West’s underclass without judgment or condescension. Prostitutes, meth addicts, hayseed bigots—the people Ogden must deal with—typically antagonize him for being black, yet the deadpan narration conveys their straitened lives with empathy.

To Everett’s credit, these novellas stretch the mystery genre’s formula. Some of the series’ strongest moments are Ogden’s many conversations with his mother, a woman constantly fretting over her son, always foisting food on him. These tender scenes take what could have been a familiar, hard-bitten protagonist and push him into surprising, real, and—at times—humorous territory. For example, in my favorite exchange, Ogden’s mother needles him for developing a crush on the daughter of one of the murder victims.

If the first two novellas take an expansive view of what a mystery can be, the final installment aims to subvert it outright. Specifically, a shift in point of view promptly throws everything that comes before into question. I won’t spoil the twist, but once you close the cover of Assumption you can’t help but feel that the book has flown in the face of convention. Rather than neatly solving its final puzzle, Assumption leaves us more mystified than ever, wondering if there can ever be such a thing as “case closed.”

Extra

• Listen to “The Appropriation of Cultures,” an Everett story that deals with race and class tensions in a bar full of drunk frat boys, and a nineteen-forty Martin guitar with a Barkus-Berry pickup. It’s read here for Selected Shorts by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

It feels like the prerogative of an author with a career as long as Desai’s to take up the bureaucrat’s lament or the translator’s brief flowering. The novellas take place in the India of our time. The first story, “The Museum of Final Journeys,” has a whiff of Lovecraft; one keeps waiting for eerie tone to resolve into fleshly monster as a lonely bureaucrat wanders the rooms of an abandoned private museum, led by a caretaker as cryptic as any Poe imagined.

All three novellas contain these spidery characters, spinning webs from the slender stuff of lonely lives. The middle story features a translator plucked from obscurity, only to overstep her lucky break. Desai feels keenly aware of the Millennial generation’s yen for greatness, something to set the individual apart from the muddied masses. Of course, such longings are as common and ancient as the species.

In the title story, a hermit builds a secret bower, a beauty meant for himself alone. When strangers stumble upon it, he feels “Their gaze alone was a desecration.” Herein lies the tension of The Artist of Disappearance: does something only exist with an audience? Or does a witness spoil something noble? Desai plays coy; her most powerful moments are the hidden, unseen graces of her misfits, but here we are–reading a book that lays them bare.

Extra:

A domestic drama of the first rate, In Caddis Wood is the story of Hallie and Carl Fens and how they face Carl’s terminal illness.  The reader gets an intimate view on the Fens’s marriage, family and the attendant entanglements of romance, professional ambition, the inevitable stresses and strains of life.  The Fens and their twin girls struggle to understand one another. The daughters grapple with Carl’s workaholic nature, which often diverted attention from them. Through such understanding, these family members learn to forgive one another for the hurts inflicted over the years, intentional or not.

In Caddis Wood unfolds in third-person with chapters alternating between the perspective of husband and wife.  This choice allows the reader to know each character more intimately, richly describing their marriage. And, since one of the characters is unwell, this call and response steadies the boat of the narrative.

Though the themes – age, disease, death – are heavy, Rockcastle’s prose, while not as precise and succinct as Stegner’s, still carries a lyrical quality.

It is midafternoon and the snow is still falling–thick, papery flakes that paint the air with dots. The ground has been rising steadily; the new snow swallows the paths Carl shoveled only this morning.  Slowly, he peels an orange, arranges the cool, fragrant pieces in a meandering line along the window ledge.  It is an old habit.  Not that he does it on purpose to annoy Hallie.  He simply loves the sensuality of the fruit, its smell and taste and texture, the act of placing the peel in that particular place beside the glass.

Here, Rockcastle layers the past upon the present with the sure guide of Carl’s habit. Not only does the reader gain intimacy with these characters, they are profoundly known by each other.

In tone, both books convey the poignancy of aging, the slow disintegration of the body that ends in death.  Nostalgia and sentimentality, familiar to any writer who takes up mortality as a subject, enrich the book.  These emotions, often maligned, comprise human experience, and if genuinely rendered can be quite moving.

One minor quibble: at the outset, supporting characters are introduced quickly and keeping those characters and relationships straight took work. These characters are important: this book is about more than husband and wife; but the way a marriage becomes enmeshed in kin and kindred. But that hardly detracts from this sensitive, clear-eyed portrayal of a union that has lasted more than thirty years – the joys, healed-over wounds, and love that endure in spite, perhaps because, of the ambitions and secrets that have threatened along the way.

Extras

Mary François Rockcastle, via author site

• On maryfrancoisrockastle.com find the usual goods + background on the Pushcart Prize-winning literary journal, the Water~Stone Review, which Rockastle founded at Hamline University in 1997.
• Speaking of place and the brevity of human life, Wallace Stegner’s “Wilderness Letter,” written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission of California in 1960, remains a testament to a writer’s passion for wildness – keeping our enjoyment of it out of the equation.

Up From the Blue returns to the epicenter of the Harris family’s disaster: Washington, D.C., 1975, when Tillie – an off-kilter eight-year-old – must navigate her mother’s mental illness. Colonel Harris adopts a Greatest Generation silence about his wife’s problems. Tillie’s older brother Phil retreats into sullen dutifulness. Her mother Mara’s absence – physical, psychic – weighs heavily on the household.

Set against a backdrop of deep societal change and unrest, Henderson’s crisp prose mimics Tillie’s nimble mind. That mix of childhood inexperience with an adult knowledge carries the novel into the revisionist territory of memory.

My brother worked so hard to listen and to do what he was told, but while he knew more of what was happening than I did, he was never a part of what was happening. He was so quick to understand and cooperate that he faded into the background.

The inherent conflict between child and adult in the prose parallels Tillie’s reality where order is simply a disguise for disarray and what seems to be true, isn’t.

Henderson centers the brief glimpse of pregnant, adult Tillie on the crisis of her labor, but these pages expose the repercussions of that distant, harrowing year. In this juxtaposition, we behold Tillie’s frightening similarities to Mara, see the paths that could have been and yet aren’t —

A part of me will always be eight years old, living that last year we had Momma with us. And my story of that year always ends with our walk because that’s when there was hope. That’s when we could still choose any ending.

Henderson gives the reader an ending, the defining moment of Tillie’s childhood, that is also her beginning – that great, slow elimination of alternate versions of the self: adulthood.

Extras

• Visit Susan Henderson’s website – LitPark – for more information about Up From the Blue, including author appearances, her blog, interviews and raves, and book club resources.

Caroline Preston’s fourth novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, seeks to recreate that feeling. Preston put together hundreds of pages of hand-cut photos and captions to create the story of her 18-year-old heroine, who receives her father’s Corona typewriter and a blank scrapbook from her mother as a high-school graduation present.

To assemble the materials that would make up Frankie’s life, Preston trolled antique stores and eBay for Bakelite bracelets and ticket stubs, a war medal and a flapper purse, a cigarette holder and a pair of driving glasses, bobby pins and fortune-telling cards. She put these items into a scrapbook: “over 600 pieces of 1920s vintage ephemera, and that’s a lot of stuff,” she says in an interview on her website—and then pasted typewritten text around them to create Frankie’s narrative.

The thrill of that chase is evident in her voice during the interview; it’s the voice of an excited collector, someone who figured out how to translate her passion for ephemera in general and the 1920s in particular into a work of fiction that’s part literary fiction and part graphic novel. The book jacket deems it “a novel in pictures,” but it’s really the typewritten text that forms the story of an 18-year-old girl in 1920, leaving her hometown to see the world.

Through the pages of her scrapbook, readers learn that Frankie Pratt is the smartest girl in her small New Hampshire high school. She initially passes up a scholarship to Vassar because her family can’t afford it, but a failed romance provides an unexpected avenue out of her town and off to college, Greenwich Village, and Paris, not to mention brushes with Charles Lindbergh and Ernest Hemingway.

Frankie is believable and interesting, and it’s fun to spend a few hours in her world, but the unusual format of the book becomes its most interesting character. Imagining the joy it must have brought Preston to assemble this book—the countless hours of searching, the endless eBay surprise packages, the clack of the vintage typewriter, careful cutting and pasting, rubber cement on her hands—might even be a touch more enjoyable than reading the book itself. But for those of us who want to believe that agents and publishers truly are open to novel formats and creative risk-taking, and may be willing to venture into uncharted waters (even with a tried-and-true author), The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt offers a glimmer—a frisson, maybe—of hope.

Extras

Finding these unlikely correlations between worlds, Mehta blurs cultural distinctions in the hyphenated Asian-American identity. In “Ten Thousand Years,” he sees Hindu lore in a Western relationship. The narrator recalls a poem in which Kali straddles the corpse of Lord Shiva, aligning the act with his lover’s infidelity: “Kali was fierce—a string of severed heads around her neck, her blood-stained tongue exposed, machete drawn as she lowered herself upon Shiva’s dead, but erect, penis.” The protagonist likens that image to “[his lover] and Miss Andhra Pradesh taking turns practicing corpse pose in the sand.”

Mehta’s simple yet striking imagery becomes most effective in “The Cure” and “What We Mean.” Situated in the middle of the book, the stories provide brief repose from Mehta’s predominantly character-driven works. Instead, Mehta uses these pieces to showcase his mastery of language. “What We Mean” considers the varied manifestations of meaning: “When… dogs bark, they are trying to communicate something vital. Someone is trapped in a burning house… Someone is holding onto a branch in a fast-flowing river heading for a waterfall, the branch about to break.” Though they lack the driving plot of the surrounding stories, these pieces command reader attention through spare, evocative language.

Ultimately, Quarantine becomes less a meditation on sexuality and race and more an investigation of human connections. While the collection does not shy from sex, it also marvels at the restorative effects of platonic touch. In “Ten Thousand Years,” the narrator’s boyfriend, Thomas, forms a deeper connection with his grandmother than the grandson ever had. In Thomas’s touch, the elderly woman finds a tenderness her grandson could no longer give. She dozes to his “hand on her forehead, gently stroking it until she [falls] asleep.” Similarly, “A Better Life” explores the sympathies between a college graduate and the wife of his host family. Mehta’s gentle, emotional prose culminates in one of the collection’s most tender scenes when, wordlessly, Lala offers Sanj the only comfort she can through her embrace.

Further Links and Resources

Enter the Motherwells. Theo and Raquel are a smart and worldly young couple, the newest and most stimulating presence in this sleepy town. In their home, Ginger is treated like an adult, allowed to partake of their wine and their grown-up conversations on sex and mortality. To the chagrin of their parents and the puzzlement of everyone else, Ginger and Cherry spend all their spare time with the couple. But there’s more to the Motherwells than meets the eye. Ginger uncovers some cryptic details of their background—how they met and why they neither work nor want for money. It seems their reasons for settling in Wick are wrapped up in the town’s own secrets, and lead all the way back to the Salem witch trials.

As the story proceeds, a series of lines are crossed. Theo’s interest in Ginger turns from friendship to something more dubious. Cherry has a change of heart and severs ties with the Motherwells. The unlikely threesome of Ginger, Raquel, and Theo breach the town’s taboo spaces: the locked-up old mill, the male-only Social Club, and the reservoir—where the ruins of another town lurk somewhere below the surface. At the novel’s apex, Wick’s norms prevail violently upon the Motherwells, and Ginger is reduced to the innocent and impressionable young girl the town still wants her to be—a victim rather than an accomplice.

The plot of this book plays second fiddle only to its atmosphere. A master of mood and tone, Wolff is able to conjure up a wicked cross of fear and intrigue upon every page. The term ‘gothic’ is thrown around with abandon when it comes to contemporary fiction, but this novel adheres to some of the key elements of that genre, as practiced by the likes of Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe: a blending of horror with romance, a fascination with cryptic architecture, and the pervasive charm of magnetic outcasts.

Wolff manages to get her hands around some of the slipperiest aspects of the adolescent experience. She makes real Ginger’s dreamy escapes into books, her burgeoning sexuality, her infatuation for the Motherwells, and her subtle superiority towards other adults in her life. Ginger’s intelligent first-person narration splices the limbo between childhood and maturity. It is a rare and refreshing thing: a novel that takes teenagers seriously, that reminds us of how surreal our world appears to fifteen-year-old eyes.

Her prose style is also rare: a formidable lyricism that understands restraint. The music of Wolff’s sentences does not recall jazz so much as an old-time Appalachian folk ballad—full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless, with the haunting images and lonesome sounds that hint at something sinister lurking beneath America’s bucolic surfaces.

Further Links and Resources

How refreshing, then, to read a novel like Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, which she describes in interviews as written for a younger audience, but whose broad appeal transcends both gender and age. Indeed, short of Beard’s interviews, nothing about this book suggests it isn’t marketed for adults. Like the rare kid in school who is popular with all the cliques, In Zanesville can hang comfortably with anybody: the story perfectly captures the tenor of early high school without ever condescending to its characters or isolating its readers.

For one thing, the unnamed narrator is hilarious. Never cutesy or precocious, her dry wit and off-hand observations compliment a lyrical and authentic vulnerability. Her best friend Felicia (Flea) is – to borrow a term from Charles Baxter – an ideal counterpoint character. Their friendship is a reminder why everyone needs a war buddy in the trenches of high school. Whether negotiating the politics of a cheerleader sleepover, deserting marching band mid-parade, or cutting deals with God in order to effectively sneak out of her house, the plucky protagonist’s voice is sharp as a tack. And though the material is beautifully age-specific (the bananas-and-mayo diner orders, the atrocity of Mom bras), the implications of time and place are significant and far-reaching.

Set in a small Illinois factory town—perched between the rural obscurity of corn fields and the glittering architecture of Chicago, the landscape mirrors that in-between feeling the narrator experiences so acutely.

In addition, the tightness of Beard’s prose undercuts any potential sentimentality of her subject matter. The opening and closing sentences of this novel struck me as the best opening and closing lines I’ve read in recent memory (the first and last scenes both take place around fire, a lovely symmetry). Each chapter starts and ends with killer one-liners. The same is true before and after the white space within chapters. This book, on top of everything else, is a craft lesson in precise, elegant compactness.

Beard, whose gorgeous and heartbreaking The Boys of My Youth also bridged a literary canyon—that between short stories and memoir—clearly understands that good writing tells the truth through whatever medium the narrative demands. And like a good friend, her work stays with you as you age, taking on new meaning and reminding you of earlier selves with each new stage of life.

Further Links and Resources

George Saunders by jrmyst, on Flickr

George Saunders is dangerous. A friend once said, “Whenever I read him, I can’t stop writing like him.” I’d go further: I can’t stop thinking like him. Every bizarre object I encounter starts to resemble a Saunders dystopic landscape, terrifying and hilarious.  The Game Bus: a seatless, windowless vehicle filled with videogame equipment, where teenage boys enjoy the absence of all human and environmental contact. The Make-Over Playdate: a day spa for little girls with cucumber facials and pretend Botox. The list is endless.

The last book I read that made the world over in its image was The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God by Etgar Keret. I couldn’t get on a plane without recounting the plot of one of the stories to my unsuspecting seatmate—flight attendant claims love at first sight, jet nose-dives toward doom. Wells Tower made me see everyone as anti-hero. But Saunders’s ability to leave a dent, to filter not only what I read and write next, but what I see, is all his own.

It helps that I live in Virginia. This is Civilwarland–driving distance to a dozen battlefields, walking distance to statues of Confederate generals. Of course the theme park in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” the title story of Saunders’s first collection, doesn’t exist. Can you imagine? An employee/actor in full military garb pretending to be a soldier in the Civil War, trying to convince tourists it is still 1863? (OK, I’ve seen it, too, at Appomatox.)

The Civilwarland story is so goofily and scarily realistic that Saunders’s supernatural addition—the ghostly McKinnon family—feels like a wink to assure us it’s not real. He wants readers to be absolutely sure this is fiction, not Nostradamus for the 21^st century.

Saunders writes satire, but he does it with heart. His characters commit awful deeds, they hack off a boy’s candy-stealing arm, stuff “a Baggie full of human ears,” pose as conservations and fill mass graves of raccoons, and slice a boy to bits in a wave machine. But they are also capable of atonement and even self-sacrifice.

The narrator of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” erases forty years of his memory to care for an aging stranger. Characters feel “sick in [their] guts as the guiltless stars wheel by.” In “The Wavemaker Falters” the dismembered boy, Clive, reassembles all his minced body parts to visit his murderer. A“400 pound CEO” concludes: “At least I’m not cruel to the point of being satanic.”

Thank you, George Saunders, for giving me this mantra. Because I’m so entrenched in your really weird and weirdly real world—of Verisimilitude Directors and personal interactive holography and Centers for Wayward Nuns—I’m starting to lose all perspective.

I told you this guy is dangerous.

Further Links & Resources

• Read “George Saunders’s Wild Ride.” In this December 2010 conversation with Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker blog, Saunders says, “I think the writer’s main job is to provide a wild ride for the reader. So most of what I’m doing on a given day is just trying to ensure that the wild ride happens, trusting and hopeful that the thematics will take care of themselves.”
• For all things Saunders, visit his website: Saunders!Saunders!Saunders!
• On The Colbert Report, Saunders explains the concept behind his latest book, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays in terms of a cocktail party. Enjoy.