NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Chuck Augello.

In the opening story in Gwen Goodkin’s debut collection A Place Remote, a character references Bruce Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch,” but the Springsteen song that best captures the spirit of these stories is “The Ties That Bind.” In “Winnie,” an ambitious scholarship student at an elite college is drawn to a childhood friend, a construction worker chasing jobs across the country and over the Mexican border. Goodkin is a sharp observer of class distinctions; her working-class narrator has a comfortable sense of where he belongs while Winnie struggles for acceptance among her affluent peers. Describing Winnie’s reaction to her classmates’ wealth, the narrator observes, “I could tell she liked it in a way, being around all these people. Maybe she thought their money was going to rub off on her.” The story’s ending is sad yet hopeful, Winnie’s life bringing her to unexpected places.

Goodkin’s dialogue is witty, earthy, and real, and her first-person narrators are unique and memorable.  The tension between staying and leaving is woven throughout the book.  In “A Boy with Sense,” a mother celebrates escaping her rural roots: “‘Best day of my life,’ Mom says with a cigarette between her lips, ‘was the day I left that shithole . . . .'”  Yet her son sees the beauty in what his mother has forced him to leave: “Farming’s what I love. What I’m best at. Mom can think what she wants. I’d stay at the farm for good.”

Over the past five years there’s been a near obsession with the “Red State-Blue State” divide.  A Place Remote is set firmly in the “Red,” but what matters most is the grace and dignity afforded these characters. Fiction allows readers to see into the lives of others and Goodkin makes an excellent tour guide into the remote places where her characters live, love, and dream.

A Place Remote by Gwen Goodkin. West Virginia University Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: Chuck Augello is the author of the novel The Revolving Heart and the story collection The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love.

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Guest Post by Kimberly Diaz.

I stumbled upon amazing author Lucie Britsch via “Murder me Nicely,” a witty story in The Sun literary magazine. It charmed and delighted me so much that immediately after consuming it, I went looking for more. I found her on Twitter and great news—she had a novel coming out. I sent her a few highly complimentary tweets, ordered the book, and patiently reread my complete collection of Stephen McCauley novels as I waited for it to arrive.

Sad Janet is about a youngish woman who is depressed yet resisting constant pleas from family and coworkers to go on medication for it. She feels her depression is just the logical result of being aware. Every day she forces herself out of bed, laces up her Doc Martens and heads off to her job in a dog kennel in the woods “like a goddamned hero.” She has mixed feelings about the guy she lives with referring to him only as “the boyfriend” and admits that when he wants sex, sometimes she would really just rather have a sandwich.

With the holidays coming, the pressure to be happy is growing. Big Pharma has come out with a drug trial for a pill that will let you have a happy Christmas and Janet reluctantly signs up. You’ll have to read the book to find out how that goes. The novel is filled with Janet’s thoughts which are dark and hilarious. They’re already playing Christmas tunes in the mall, so Britsch’s brilliant debut novel, Sad Janet, is the perfect choice for gift-giving or your next book club meeting.

Sad Janet by Lucie Britsch. Penguin Random House, June 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kimberly Diaz studied creative writing at Eckerd College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Montana Mouthful, Eckerd Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction. Read her most recent publication: https://entropymag.org/the-fish/

Guest Post by Samantha Kolber.

This is the second novel I have read by Melanie Finn, and I am simply in love with her writing! It is smart and atmospheric, with the pull of a literary thriller but with meat and heart.

In her new novel The Hare (available now for pre-order), Rosie is an amazingly complex character, and Finn captures her porous self so well. In the beginning, we are coming-of-age with Rosie as she struggles to find her voice, her artistic vision, and her Self in a world dominated by men—men’s desires and needs have always come first, and Rosie is no stranger to that sublimation. But as the book moves through time, we see Rosie gaining strength, getting strong in the woods where she hunts and forages to keep herself and her infant daughter alive after they are left by the wealthy castaway boyfriend, Bennett.

The book takes some twists and turns, and Rosie grows older, hardened, yet still a loving soul, just like Finn writes of the trees on the barbed wire fence line in the forest: “The trees absorbed the cruel wire, grew straight and tall, regardless.” What an apt metaphor for women in this world: we absorb the traumas, the violence, the sleights to our sex, and grow strong, regardless.

I felt so close to the setting, too, I could often hear the fallen leaves crunching underfoot, or smell the woodstove smoke on a crisp winter evening. The complicated relationship between mother and daughter, cocooned together in a life of survival and secrets in a cabin in Vermont, is also captured well here.

Finn is a master of complication made visible through taut and beautiful words. I highly recommend this book.

The Hare by Melanie Finn. Two Dollar Radio, January 2021.

Reviewer bio: Samantha Kolber of Montpelier, Vermont, is a poet, editor, and author of a poetry chapbook, Birth of a Daughter (Kelsay Books, 2020). Learn more at www.samanthakolber.com.

Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise

If you’re hunting for some fresh fiction from a small press, check out Gilbert Allen’s newest book, The Beasts of Belladonna. This book features fifteen linked tales of quirky characters in a South Carolina foothills community. Expect the unexpected in these unsettling yet often hilarious stories, in which characters rub up against their own failures, yearnings, and secrets.

A minister nails a bird to a couple’s front door; a woman accidentally kills her cat and finds an unconventional way to grieve its loss; a man’s foxy neighbor goes to outrageous lengths to destroy his marriage. Domestic animals have a hefty influence on these people’s lives, sometimes comical and sometimes tragic; the same could be said about church as we’re introduced to the Mosquito Ministry, the Faster Pastor Challenge, and couples who pass witty notes during sermons. We meet “treenappers,” a Grandfather Against Garbage, and a character known as the Jesus of Malibu, and in these encounters are powerful flashes of raw humanity in all its complexity.

The Beasts of Belladonna by Gilbert Allen. Slant Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

Guest Post by Robert Lamb

It was Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman who said, “War is hell.” If you have any doubt that the general was dead right, run and get a copy of The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. You’ll see war up close and personal in his excellent account of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Hamilton, a Richmond, VA writer and former Peace Corps volunteer, shows us through the eyes of a young Christian girl in Armenia how war unleashes unspeakable human savagery in the name of ethnic cleansing.

It is April 1915 and the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, which has lasted for centuries, is on the verge of defeat by the allied forces of Great Britain and the Arabs. In the novel’s first few pages, the heroine, Valia, a teenager, sees her parents, siblings, and neighbors, all Christians, murdered by Turkish “police soldiers,” and flees for her life.

Thus begins an odyssey the reader won’t soon forget. The author’s account of Valia’s struggle to stay alive and hopeful is a hymn to the human spirit, and the story is nothing short of realistic and gripping.

Adding a nice touch of realism, even Lawrence of Arabia and Arab Prince Faisal make cameo appearances near the story’s end.

OK, film producers; you can’t say I didn’t give you a heads up on this novel.

The Wishing Tree by Matthew A. Hamilton. Winter Goose Publishing, September 2020.

Reviewer bio: Robert Lamb is the author of four novels and a book of short stories; he review books for the New York Review of Books; and he has a website at www.robertlamb.net.