The Picador Book Room

February 15th, 2013

ggantz

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In their February issue, VICE excerpts Yoko Ogawa’s story, “Sewing from the Heart,” from REVENGE: Eleven Dark Tales. Here, artist Kike Besada explains why he created the accompanying illustration.

While creating this illustration I took time to research and dig through old medical journals that I found in a New York City thrift store. I cut out pictures of bags, hearts, hospitals, and all sorts of other things in order to come up with just the right imagery for Yoko’s story.

At the same time I wanted to keep an abstract look and feel where the chosen images could have an important role over the rest of the composition.

Yoko works by accumulation of detail so I wanted to translate that somehow to the piece by using different kinds of discarded papers and textures.

February 6th, 2013

annadevries

theparisreview:

Roberto Bolaño on writing short stories. (via)

See? Simple.

Reblogged from The Paris Review

January 22nd, 2013

ggantz

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Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa is on sale next week. You can read one of the stories, The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger, on Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction Review.

If you need some convincing, here’s what the critics are saying:

From Japan comes Revenge, a spine tingling volume subtitled Eleven Dark Tales, from Yoko Ogawa … These are shiningly sinister stories that grab you by the vulnerable back of the neck and don’t let go.—ELLE

Revenge is a delicious mosaic that concerns much more than its titular subject…. Compulsively readable… Ogawa’s style is so spare and simple, so everyday and true, that her set-ups slide past your defenses and explode on target. These elegant, literate tales are unvarnished outtakes from reality, disturbing glimpses under the veneer of life at the inescapable calamities of urban existence.—Shelf Awareness

Every act of malice glows creepily against the plain background. It’s a book that ought to be distributed to every fiction-M.F.A. candidate who tends to overwrite: Ogawa is an expert in doing more with less.—New York

Japan’s best teller of macabre tales… Ogawa is such a master that she pushes the boundaries and suspends the mystery… You never know ‘why,’ only that humans are slaves to time, and we keep on with our lives so that someday we might understand.—The Daily Beast

Eleven creeptastic stories, complete with Murakami-esque weirdness.—io9

Interwoven stories from Ogawa involve murder, desire, jealousy, love, and torture, making for creepy but compelling experimental horror that stays with you long past the book’s last page. —The Atlantic Wire

Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. … an exceptionally well-done and well-balanced piece of horror-writing, disarmingly detached — and all the more unsettling for that.—Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review

September 21st, 2012

ggantz

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Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story “[is] much more idiosyncratic, intriguing, and enlightening than a generic Greatest Hits list, or another how-to book on the craft of short story writing. It also glitters with gem-like aphorisms and insights,” says Bill Morris in his interview with Paris Review deputy editor Sadie Stein.

In the interview, Sadie explains why she and Lorin Stein (Paris Review editor and of no relation) chose to compile a collection of short stories from the magazine’s past issues (with introductions from contemporary authors):

One thing that interests (Lorin Stein) and all of us at the Review is this conversation between being relevant while drawing on the richness of our archive.

… And what The Paris Review hopes Object Lessons will accomplish:

We hope it will remind people how pleasurable reading short stories can be. We hope it will introduce them to some writers they weren’t familiar with. I think you can learn a lot about writing from it, but I hope it’s pleasurable first and foremost.

You can read the interview in full at The Millions.

You can pre-order Object Lessons from these outlets:
Barnes & Noble, Amazon, IndieBound, BooksaMillion, and Powell’s.

July 3rd, 2012

danieldelvalle

The New Guy’s Guide to ThePicadorBookRoom (Part 1):

It’s not easy being the new guy, so to break the ice—and get a heads-up on their tastes—I decided to hound my coworkers for their absolute favorite Picador title. The assignment: Pick a book, or two, that knocked you to the floor. There was no lack of enthusiasm so The Newb’s Guide to ThePicadorBookRoom will be in two parts.

James, our Executive Director of Publicity, had me picking up this book of stories by his description:

One of my favorite books on the Picador list is John Haskell’s 2004 debut, I Am Not Jackson Pollock. When I try to describe this book to people I always mention Borges, but then immediately backtrack and end up (over)explaining what I mean by that. Jack Haskell’s not like Borges—no one is—but both Haskell and Borges occupy a space between fiction and nonfiction in their writing, with stories that read like essays (or are they fictional essays?).

A highlight in the collection is “Elephant Feelings” which alternates between the stories of an elephant named Topsy who was electrocuted in Coney Island in 1903 for killing a man (true—Youtube has video of the execution, which was a public exhibition–ed. note video at bottom of post); the Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited as an oddity in Paris in the first half of the 19^th century (also true); and the Indian God Ganesha who had the head of an elephant (myth). My favorite line:

“Elephants remember so well because their experiences are stored in their bodies, and they have big bodies, and her big body was filled with unpleasant thoughts and emotions. “

John Haskell writes simply unlike anyone else.

PJ, assistant to the publisher and fellow new guy in the office, picked Wells Tower’s debut of short stories which I also enjoyed:

In Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower manages to write from numerous, wholly unlike perspectives convincingly. His stories are devastating and often feature cataclysmic circumstances, but tenderness and humanity is always present. Just when you start to think “wow, this guy really hates his characters,” he gives them a little redemption and peace. Just a little, though.

What is your favorite Picador title? See if you can guess what is coming in Wednesday’s installment.

Also, check out the footage shot by Thomas Edison in 1903 that inspired a story from I Am Not Jackson Pollock.

June 7th, 2012

ggantz

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If you like Eastern European and literary fiction, you’re going to love this short story collection. As it’s New in Paperback from Picador for June, you can find it online and in stores now.

East of the West: A Country in Stories by Miroslav Penkov

“Penkov’s teeming stories accomplish in phrases what lesser writers take chapters to convey… . A collection of triumphs.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“An agile and assured debut … In each of these stylistically old-school yet freshly envisioned morality tales, Penkov burnishes brute circumstances to surprising beauty.” —Elle

“Splendid … These stories are not the promising work of a first-time author. They are already a promise fulfilled—wise, bright, and deep with sympathy.” —Alec Solomita, The New Republic

A grandson tries to buy Lenin’s corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov’s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up this beguiling and deeply felt debut. Animated by Penkov’s unmatched eye for the absurd, East of the West is a brilliant portrait of a country with its own compass.

Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He arrived in America in 2001 and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He has won the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction, and his story “Buying Lenin” was published in The Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review.

May 31st, 2012

eliannakan

This is the final post in a week-long miniseries celebrating National Short Story Month. Our final featured collection is Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.

The first time I read this story, “Work,” its first lines stopped me, caught me off guard, bade me to re-read. I liked its directness and was immediately intrigued by the world Johnson was describing. Jesus’ Son was assigned reading for a creative writing course I was taking in college. Inspired by the way in which Johnson juxtaposes the raw with the strikingly poetic and surreal, I decided I too would write about the underbelly of the town where I grew up. Unfortunately, my fixation on my first love and cliché inclination towards all things sentimental—and absence of any serious drug addiction—resulted in terrible short stories that paled in comparison to the source of their inspiration. I still think Johnson does it best.

May 29th, 2012

david-rogers

This post is part of a week-long mini-series celebrating National Short Story Month. Today, we’re talking about Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel.

Angels, devils, the permeable barrier between life and death, the perception of the afterlife as last-hope (and sometimes lost-hope) – this collection of stories is staged upon a plane of imagination that is uniquely accessible to Adrian, a pediatric oncologist pursuing a master’s degree at Harvard Divinity. To me, the stories show how we are both darker and more redeemable that we may know.

In our Chris Adrian archives: watch him reading one-star Goodreads reviews of his works earlier this month here.

May 27th, 2012

james-meader

This post is part of an week-long mini-series celebrating National Short Story Month, continuing with The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

It’s difficult to think how very many people now know who Deborah Eisenberg is from a cameo appearance last month on Gossip Girl, but have likely never read one of her stories. Their souls are poorer for it.

Deborah Eisenberg is in a very small group of artists whose work does things that no one else’s does. She writes short stories—only short stories—and when we collected all 27 of them (written over a 30 year period) in one volume in 2010 it was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Her stories are quite long, often 25-40 pages, and in them she packs all the characters and incident of an entire novel. One is half-tempted to ask: who needs novels with short stories like these?

One of my favorites is “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,” and its opening is one of my favorite paragraphs in literature:

“I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I’d poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan’s voice, and when I glanced back at the man on my sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band—a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one’s consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away.”

May 26th, 2012

justinhargett

Under the red ideal…

This post is part of an ongoing mini-series that will feature a different collection of Picador’s short stories each day for the last week of May, National Short Story Month. Today we’re talking about Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West.

I was recently contacted by a journalist writing a column about the books that inspire us to travel. Naturally, he wasn’t soliciting my opinion, but I’ve been turning over my answers anyway. There are the obvious ones, Hemingway for Spain, Simenon for Paris—two locales whose total existence beg for travel, not just on the recommendation of 20th-century, spare prose novelists. So it was reading Miroslav Penkov’s collection of short stories, East of the West, that presented a destination I would never have considered without the help of a book: Bulgaria.

From the story “Buying Lenin:”

Monuments under the red ideal were being demolished all over the country. Statues, erected decades ago, proudly reminding, glorifying, promising, were now pulled down and melted for scrap. (p.65)

Yet Bulgaria still bears some markings of its communist past. I’m particularly fascinated by the idea that these monolithic, abandoned, and vandaled Soviet-style edifices are the closest thing we have to contemporary ruins (excepting the Astrodome, and Six Flags New Orleans). Unlike the Parthenon and Machu Picchu, which have been the object of preservationists for decades, its hard to imagine any future generation of Bulgarians doing more than razing these structures. Yet, because of their sheer size and the inherent durability of concrete slabs, buildings such as the Museum of Socialism, the UFO-shaped structure in the photo above (abandoned since 1989), stand to outlast generation upon generation of Bulgarians. Equally thought-provoking (in a—”what does art mean and how does that meaning change over time as we interact and engage with it”—kind of way) are the alterations that have been made to these monuments since the fall of the communist government.

So read Penkov, he’s great. You’ll spend hours researching Balkan history if, like me, you were previously unacquainted.

PS. Here are some similar structures found throughout the former Yugoslavian countries that are now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

May 25th, 2012

ggantz

Continuing our series celebrating National Short Story Month, my pick is The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.

Rick Moody once called Lydia Davis “The best prose stylist in America.” Dave Eggers says Davis “Blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.” What I love about Lydia Davis’s writing is her ability to pack a punch in a few sentences. Her stories are concise but never frivolous. Her observations, subtle, are often unsettling and her wit, sharp. This collection is perfect for a commute to work, those moments in between, or a gloomy Sunday on the couch.

The Thirteenth Woman

In a town of twelve women there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door; the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned on her, the night never fell for her; for her the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unnumbered, her garden untended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, pg. 155 (Picador 2010)

May 3rd, 2012

ggantz

I put that word on the page,
but he added the apostrophe.

“Collaboration with Fly” / The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis,p. 508 (Picador 2010)

Find more excerpts from The Collected Stories on NPR, check out a new story from Lydia at The Telegraph, and read an interview from 2008 at The Believer.

BLVR: Flash fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts, very shorts, prose poems, proems—do you think the solution to sorting the chaos is to create more categories?

LD: Where a need is felt for another category, I think it will be created and accepted, although that may take time. There is some acceptance of the terms flash fiction, sudden fiction,etc. But I think people may still be expecting a kind of miniature short story when they begin reading a piece of flash fiction, rather than the less usual offering that it might be—meditation, logic game, extended wordplay, diatribe—for which there is no good general name. Robert Walser was described by one critic (rather diminishingly, I think) as a “feuilletonist.” He sometimes referred to his work simply as “short prose pieces.”

April 17th, 2012

james-meader

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As for a number of readers, Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is one of my favorite story collections of the last few years. This line was a gut punch when I first read it, and only becomes more powerful with each year. (Tower sprinkles a number of lines this good throughout the collection.)

The Picador Book Room

Under the red ideal…

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