In his recent review of this collection, Shawn Andrew Mitchell writes:

There are plenty of writers who attempt to work in George Saunders’s style, one of absurdity and satire and capital letters, but what they often miss is the morality and heart at its core. Moffett misses nothing. He follows his own advice and listens closely, to the detail, to the mystery, and to his characters’ plights.

We’re giving away a copy of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events 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!

Further Reading

• Read the rest of Mitchell’s review.
• Read an interview with Kevin Moffatt conducted by the University of Pittsburgh.

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!

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!

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.

And now, W.W. Norton hopes, This Will Be Difficult to Explain, a new collection from Johanna Skibsrud, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists.

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. Throughout, the writing follows a particular kind of literary formula, a type of late-century naturalism mixed with minimalism, meaning the ingredients include unpretentious language, ordinary characters, and simple situations that, as the characters live through them, grow increasingly difficult. Instead of pyrotechnics, though, or melodramatic confrontation, the stories fade away with an image meant to convey the deep profundity of the human condition. Take, for example, the end of “French Lessons,” when the narrator reflects on a past employer. The Madame, an old blind woman, reveals that her son committed suicide, and later the narrator can’t stop thinking about it:

Later, she couldn’t help wondering if the boy had really done it like that (Madame’s forefinger, aimed at her throat), or if perhaps it had been performed somewhat differently, or even not at all, but that Madame could think—at that time—of only one foolproof method by which so great a sadness might be explained, or conveyed.

Many of the stories contain moments such as this, where a character’s small interaction with someone else leaves an enduring echo. The characters colliding with one another don’t share a pattern, and include many different types of people in different situations, from a father and his daughter to a visitor at a hotel and the waitress who serves him. Usually, though, these people remain strangers, at least in some sense, even though they are also drawn together by circumstance or accident, and each person is changed in the encounter.

So although Skibsrud has defied industry expectations by releasing a novel and then a collection, she will have no trouble amassing a following. And no one will question how or why she has appeared as a rising star among those who love literary fiction—in fact, it won’t be difficult to explain at all.

Extra

• Read an interview with Johanna Skibsrud on Maison Neuve.

The book turned out to be Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Harper/Ecco 2006), and as I read its stories I desperately wished that I’d been the one who wrote them. His characters—ranging from a grad student in ornithology who gets kidnapped in Columbia to a soldier who marries a Haitian voodoo deity—seemed to leap into abysses of their own creation, and Fountain followed them all the way to the bottom before watching them climb painstakingly out. I wasn’t the only one who loved the book, as it earned its author a bevy of decorations, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Thanks to Che I’ve been on the lookout for Fountain’s debut novel for quite some time, and have occasionally pestered him by email to find out when it would be published. So when I heard about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, published by Harper/Ecco just this month, I had to be the first kid on my block to read it.

From the first page, I wanted be the one who’d written Halftime even more desperately than I’d wanted to be the one who wrote Che. The novel grabbed me, started running, and didn’t give me a chance to ask where we were going. Halftime unfolds on Thanksgiving day during a Dallas Cowboys (a.k.a. “America’s Team”) football game, when a group of American soldiers on leave from Iraq are celebrated for their bravery in battle. It turns out that an embedded TV news crew caught a fierce battle on tape, which turned the “Bravo Team” into temporary celebrities.

At the center of this is Billy Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texan who earned a Silver Star in Iraq but must, like the rest of his fellow Bravos, return there after his Thanksgiving reprieve. Fountain drills into Billy’s life and psyche, not relenting until he has brought all of his protagonist’s dreams, fears, contradictions, alliances, and assumptions to light. The pointlessness and release of war, his own virginity, his miserable wheelchair-bound father, the patriotism that he wishes would be simpler than it has become, the sister who wants him to go AWOL from the war.

Along the way Fountain sends us into the lives of Lynn’s comrades and the smorgasbord of people he meets at Texas Stadium. There’s Sergeant Dime, who rides his men non-stop but often appears like a mythological trickster, a Loki or Coyote who sees through the world’s folly. There’s Shroom, poor dead Shroom, who expired in Billy’s arms in Iraq and who still offers him, beyond the grave, an alternative way to make America and human life itself add up to more than the sum of its parts. We meet a movie producer who can’t quite land a deal to get the Bravo Squad’s story on the big screen, Beyoncé Knowles (from a discreet distance), the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and a bunch of angry roadies armed with pipes. Along the way, Billy and his fellow soldiers will gradually learn just how completely they’ve been sucked into the American spectacle-making machine.

It’s as kaleidoscopic and unflinchingly absurd as the novel with which it will most often be compared—Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—or as Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night. Fountain’s language, from start to finish, takes brave chance after brave chance as it rages through the book like a storm. I don’t like to throw the “G-word” out casually, but let me say this: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the first great novel of America’s twenty-first century wars.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: May is national short story month, and you’ve made your name thus far as a short story writer. Can you describe your experience of making the transition from one mode to another?

Ben Fountain: The transition started around 1992, and has been painful, slow, and riddled with failure. I’ve got two complete novels in the drawer, along with a big chunk of another, and my only excuse is that I must not be very good at this, and what I’ve managed to figure out about writing novels took me a long time to learn. I think one of the main problems with the defunct novels is that I felt the need to set everything up in logical, painstaking detail—so much backstory before the real story got going, which was maybe my way of being lazy, of avoiding coming to grips with the real story and all the gut-it-out work that would involve.

They say that every project teaches its author how to write it. What was the process like of learning how to write Halftime, and how did that differ from learning how to write Che?

Handling “time” in Billy Lynn was much more of a challenge than I remember it being in any short stories I’ve written. Billy Lynn takes place over the course of one day, but to do what I wanted to do I had to figure out how to slide in significant chunks of past action without, hopefully, slowing down the speed and momentum of the present-tense narrative. There’s one long flashback in the book, but otherwise I found myself going for bits and pieces of flashback, layering those fragments within the present narrative. So maybe I learned a little bit more about how to deal with time in the novel form.

Your relationship to language in Halftime differs from that in Che. It has a load of F-bombs, not only in the mouths of the soldiers but in the narrative voice as well. There’s a go for broke-ness to your language, a verging toward the edge of control. How did you arrive at that?

I arrived at it by the seat of my pants. With pretty much everything I write, the conception of the story seems to arrive with a sound in my head. It’s supposed to sound a certain way, and part of the challenge in writing the story is tuning into that sound, finding the words and rhythms that will get it on the page. It’s always very rough at first, trying to locate that signal, trying to find the right language, and for most of the time you’re flying blind, basically picking your way along.

To write Billy Lynn correctly it seemed I had to find this dense, rude, pummeling, in-your-face sound that maybe–and this is the rationale I arrived at in the course of writing the book—is the sound of the basic insanity of American culture.

From what I can tell of your biography, you don’t seem to have been in the military. But there are soldiers in Che, and Halftime is entirely immersed in the soldier’s world. How do these characters enter your imagination, and how did you inhabit their language and worldview?

You’re right, I was never in the military. So I did what writers always do to appropriate experience that’s not their own—I read everything I could get my hands on, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the soldiers and ex-soldiers who I came across, and generally tried to immerse myself in that world. In other words, research, but that’s just laying the foundation. Ultimately, if you’re to succeed in this type of endeavor, it takes an act—or maybe serial acts would be a better way to put it—of imagination, but you can’t launch unless you’ve done that sort of immersive research. And then you’re also bringing in pieces of your own experience, episodes that might be comparable with the experience you’re trying to imagine your way into. Say, the writing equivalent of method acting? I’m the kind of desperate writer who will use any and every thing that might help me write the story.

After the success of Che, you had a novel called The Texas Itch that never made it off the ground. What happened with that book, and what did you learn from the experience that you could bring to bear in writing Halftime?

The short answer to what happened to that book is that it wasn’t good enough. I’d started that book a long time ago, when I was a much different, and dare I say less able, writer, and despite all my lumbering efforts I couldn’t quite drag it up to whatever level I was operating on once Che was done. Too much backstory, maybe too much labyrinthine plot, and a voice that didn’t quite ring true, or at least fell short too much of the time. I spent a lot of years on that book, many more than I care to admit. The cliche about your greatest strength always being your greatest weakness? That seems to be true in my case—I’m stubborn as hell and find it hard to walk away from anything, but the same hard-headedness that kept me writing long enough that I seem to have arrived at some sort of “career” was also the trait that kept me at The Texas Itch long after I probably should have put it away.

What did I learn that I brought to bear on Billy Lynn? Well, maybe I learned something about compression, about economy of backstory and present narrative. And that I could take a hit like that—having a novel crash and burn in the most spectacular way—and move on to the next thing.

The midpoint sequence of the novel involves the Bravo Squad meeting Dallas Cowboys owner Norm Oglesby, who whips a room full of cheerleaders into a calculated frenzy for media types. You write “The bullshit part of it, isn’t that part of the story too? But not a word, not a murmur, not a peep from the press about how thoroughly they’ve been used this day.” It’s hard not to see this is a critique of American media. I suspect you don’t have a specific “message,” but I’m curious to hear what’s roiling around in your head about media and war.

Right. Well, so much of what passes for “news” in our culture is actually marketing of one form or another, these premeditatively staged public events or PR verbiage that are spoon-fed to and dutifully swallowed by the media, to be in turn shat out into the wider world. I remember something Hunter Thompson wrote about a Super Bowl he was covering, how with all the hundreds or thousands of reporters on hand, with all the tonnage of copy and video stories produced that week, there might be only a couple of stories in which the writer alluded to the actual story that was unfolding, namely, that it was a huge, carefully staged corporate PR event that happened to have a football game attached, and the media were serving as the tacit delivery system for the message that would generate the profits.

My question is, why shouldn’t that be part of the story that’s reported? The experience of the reporting itself, and the varying degrees in which it might be authentic or artificial? Do pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

As for including this line of thought in the book, it wasn’t so much that I have a “message” as that it’s part of the story. To write the story correctly, this needed to be a part of it.

One of your most intriguing characters is Sergeant Dime, who has a complex relationship to the war and to his men. On one hand, he berates his men for representing their country poorly. On the other, he’s an absolute scofflaw who ruins several takes of a publicity video by revealing the true level of violence behind the Iraq war. How did he come to you, and what is he all about?

I don’t think it’s so much that Dime is berating his men for representing the country poorly as it is he stays on their ass because he’s their sergeant, and that’s his job. And, face it, 20-year-old males probably need that kind of constant harassment to stay on task. Dime is part of the machine, but he also has an acute awareness of what the machine is about, and he doesn’t mind sharing that awareness with his men in his own, ah, unique way. I think Dime takes tremendous wicked pleasure in pointing out stupidity—the stupidity of particular individuals, and of the culture at large, and his main method of doing this is speaking the truth. Maybe it’s not so much that he’s on a mission for truth as it is that’s where he gets his pleasure and his energy, by rubbing our faces in it.

Let’s say you can give three bits of advice for short story writers who want to take on the novel. What would they be?

I’m probably the last person who should be giving advice on how to go about writing a novel, but since you asked:

First, and this is obvious but still worth saying, make a close study of the good writers and see how they do it. Read with a pen or pencil in your hand and mark the hell out of the page. Pay attention to the decisions the writers are making, what they decide to leave out just as much as what they put in, and where, and how much, with what degree of directness. Their “technique,” if you will.

Second, don’t wait for that huge block of time to materialize, that chunk of days or weeks or months where you’ll have little or nothing to do besides work on your novel. Those big blocks of free time are hard to come by—harder to come by every year, it seems, the way the culture demands more and more of us. If all you can do is chip away at it for an hour or two a day, well, that’s what you have to do. Maybe it’s the interior equivalent of sailing a small boat by yourself around the world. It’s a long haul, and on any one particular day you aren’t going to make much progress, but if you can string together a bunch of days where you push the book along, after a while you start to see yourself getting somewhere.

Third, don’t make all the mistakes I made.

Further Links and Resources

Short Story Month countdown: 7 days to May!

Fiction Writers Review will host the third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections.

How to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project:

(1) Blog about a recently published short story collection (or two, or three).
Long or short, review or rave. Only rule: you, the blogger, read and loved the book(s).

(2) Offer a copy (or copies) as a giveaway to one lucky commenter.
You choose the winner – via drawing, wittiness, dartboard – whatever method you choose.

Note for blogger-authors: You can absolutely give away a copy of your own collection—but in an effort to keep CGP community-focused, please also offer a second book that isn’t yours.

(3) Announce the winner(s) by May 31, 2012, and arrange to send out copies of any books you are giving away.

(4) Email Lee [at] fictionwritersreview.com with a link to your giveaway post. We’ll add you to the list of participants and link to you from our CGP homepage (look for the CGP icon on our homepage on May 1).We’ll update the list throughout May.

Please spread the word, and thanks in advance to all participants!

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!

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!

In her recent interview with Nadelson, Contributor Julie Judkins speaks with the author about the early influence of Bob Dylan on his literary life, how he balances teaching and writing, why poetry matters to his work, and more. They also discuss the role of place in his fiction. In particular, why nearly all of his stories are set in his native New Jersey, despite the fact that he’s lived in Oregon since 1996. In response, Nadelson says:

When I started writing, I never thought New Jersey would become such a central part of my fiction, but now I write very few stories that aren’t set there. And hardly any of my stories have characters who haven’t come from the place where I grew up. I do think part of this is familiarity, or at least that’s the way it started. But more important is how the setting has evolved in my imagination over the past fifteen years. New Jersey has become less an actual place in my fiction than a state of being, a kind of limbo between the great city and the vast continent, where people are caught between retreat and full engagement with life and all its uncertainty. What the place offers me is a setting ripe with quiet tension and internal conflict, as well as a metaphor for the illusion of safety and security amidst the chaos of human intimacy and connection.

I sometimes send my New Jerseyans off into foreign lands, and a different kind of tension arises when they bring their baggage of fear and repressed desire into places where they can no longer contain the contents. In the new book, for example, I’ve got a kid with his grandparents in Jerusalem, and there all hell can break loose when his family conflict plays out against the backdrop of a much wilder setting than the one he’s left behind. But the conflict is still one that evolves in and out of his New Jersey state of being—I can’t imagine him coming from anywhere else.

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