Fiction Brigade’s Espresso Fiction

What is Espresso Fiction you ask? Well, I pondered this very same question myself when I first encountered the book. The short answer (and also based on the subtitle of the book) is that it is a collection of flash fiction for the average Joe from Fiction Brigade. The longer answer (and the one I came up with all on my very own) is that it is a collection of quality, literary micro fiction that you can read on the go, which means you can squeeze in a story between all sorts of activities and responsibilities. The title is apt because you can get your literature fix in a short shot of words. In sum, it is brilliant, and I use this to describe both the concept of the project and the selections included in the collection, and you are bound to find something you like in the collection.

The book consists of a variety of contributions by authors with various writing experience. Some of the authors are award-winning writers, others are graduate students of English or creative writing, and still others seem to be dabblers in the craft; all are great. The stories themselves cover the gamut: enlightening and puzzling, profound and lighthearted, international and local, short and extremely short. Despite the breadth of author backgrounds and storylines, it really does cohere as a collection, especially because the selections all very modern. Because the stories are so diverse, it is rather like accelerating through a diverse list of novels. The stories are also, obviously, short, which is a the greatest boon to the project. People have been eating up 140 character microblogs on Twitter (in fact, Fiction Brigade has its own Twitter project), and it has been argued that the success of some recent books is largely based on chapter lengths that are easily digestible on, say, a lunch break or bus ride. Espresso Fiction straddles both of these trends. The chapters are longer and more developed than a tweet, but shorter than a chapter, and also a complete story unit instead of part of a longer plot. But that’s not all! To round out your artistic diet, the book also includes some art and haikus. How can you go wrong with a perfectly strange haiku titled “Wronged by the Circus, Again” by Ryan Moll?

What I’m trying to say is that this reading experience couldn’t have been more satisfying. There is everything to love about the concept behind this book project and nothing to hate. And, just like any coffee addict, I’d love a second serving. I can only hope that a volume 2 is in the works.

Ricci & Habinek (eds.). Espresso Fiction: A Collection of Flash Fiction for the Average Joe. FictionBrigade, 2012.

Alphabet Soup: PD at TOC, AAUP, and SSP

The students of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have returned, and that can only mean one thing: summer has come to an end. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you look forward to winter (which I don’t) or if you had a bad summer (which I didn’t). I got to go home this summer to visit friends and family, got to go on a few trips, and got an iPhone, which may as well be surgically attached to my hand. In the midst of all that fun, I also had some great experiences that helped me to sink my teeth a little deeper into the world of scholarly publishing. When you move halfway across the country for a job and then that job provides you with wonderful professional development (PD) opportunities, that is a very good thing. In addition to the University of Illinois Press sending a number of people from our marketing and acquisitions department to Mini O’Reilly Tools of Change Chicago (TOC), many of us were also given the opportunity to attend the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), which, in case you don’t know, is like Mecca for university press folks.

As if those opportunities weren’t enough, I was also a recipient of an early-career professional travel grant from the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP). To understand the level of excitement that came with the news that I received the grant, you will also need to know that I had applied for an SSP annual meeting travel grant multiple times as a student. Finally, this summer, victory was mine! Attending the conference was a valuable experience: I was able to immerse myself in scholarly publishing dialogues that extended beyond university presses, I was a part of an incredible cohort of fellow grant recipients, and I was paired with a generous and kind mentor. The only thing we were asked for in return? We were asked to write a letter after the conference to discuss our experience and provide overall feedback. If you are curious to hear my expanded thoughts on the meeting, they are here for your reading pleasure.

I would like to start off by saying thank you to the Society for Scholarly Publishing for incorporating student and early career professional development grants into their yearly practice. The early career grant afforded me the opportunity to attend the conference, which I would have been unable to do otherwise, and I had a valuable, educational, and professionally fulfilling experience. I think the greatest benefit of the grant include the pairing with a mentor—my mentor, Alice Meadows, was very generous with her time and left such a positive impression that I would never hesitate to contact her in the future for mentoring and advice. The other great benefit of the grant is that the grant recipients functioned as a cohort throughout the meeting—this is an incredible bonus when you are attending a conference for the first time and you do not know anyone else. Dinner the first evening as a group was instrumental in forming ties, and it was wonderful to see familiar faces in the crowd as we attended meetings and events throughout the remainder of the meeting and discuss our thoughts and impressions of the sessions and our roles in publishing. I was even able to connect with one grant recipient and with the SSP President at AAUP in Chicago.

There were many ways in which my expectations of what I would learn at the SSP Annual Meeting differed from what I actually learned. In selecting the sessions to attend, it was obvious that the meeting was geared not only toward journals, but toward the sciences. I went into the meeting expecting to learn a great deal about journals; however, I was often surprised about how many of the topics discussed in relation to journals can be applied more broadly to scholarly publications overall—indeed, books can learn from the trials of journals in regard to open access, peer review, and using metrics. That being said, as a person who works in books in the humanities, I would have liked to see more panels on topics more related to my professional field. I was shocked to hear a gentleman in an elevator with an SSP name badge explain to a hotel guest that the meeting was about science journals—scholarly publishing is much broader than that! 

For me, a devoted reader of the Scholarly Kitchen blog, the absolute pinnacle of the meeting was meeting Kent Anderson. I got to shake the hand of the editor-in-chief of one of the best sources for scholarly news and discussion! Other highlights included the panels themselves. The session on libraries as publishers was interesting and made me think about how the University of Illinois Press can form a stronger relationship with the University of Illinois Library and perhaps utilize the strengths of the library in our projects, especially where ancillary content is involved. Perhaps the most exciting session was Publishers! What Are They Good For? This session made clear the conflict between the traditional ways of publishing and new theories and practices about activities like peer review. David Crotty of OUP and Jason Priem engaged in a lively debate about the interpretation and use of metrics in peer review. From this panel, I took away a sense that the future of publishing would never be traditional practices traded in for new technologies, but instead the future of publishing and peer review will pick methods that can enhance our foundational procedures and move them forward to be more efficient and useful to bettering scholarship. Another highlight was Making eBooks Easier. As a reader of electronic books, and as a person at a press who is moving into the ebook world, I thought this panel was fascinating, especially in how it drew attention to the benefits of having a universal but modular platform that would set standards and provide consistency for ebooks. 

As I returned to work after the meeting, I realized I was energized and full of ideas that I had been exposed to at the meeting. I was able to report to my department about the things I had learned, and although it has not led to the implementation of big ideas or changes (yet), I was able to take away from the meeting a more well-rounded view of how my sector within scholarly publishing can be more innovative, more adaptable, and to steal from the conference theme, be more social, mobile, agile, and global in how we approach some projects. In terms of professional development, I think one of the most important things I gained from the conference was the confidence to approach and engage in conversation with people in the publishing industry. As someone relatively new to the industry, this conference provided an ideal opportunity to mingle, network, connect, and trade stories about how other people do their jobs. 

So, what am I going to do next? I'm going to get back to reading some books!

Hungry for More: The Hunger Games

Like the rest of the people in the United States, I saw the movie The Hunger Games. Like the rest of the people in the United States, I loved The Hunger Games. Then, like all the people who hadn’t already, I read the book, devoured the second book, and ravaged the third book. By all accounts, this series is special—how could it not be when the stories stand for something so strong, which I will come to momentarily. Katniss is set apart from other series protagonists like Harry Potter, the Pevensie Children, and Taran (from Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain). First, perhaps, because she is a young woman, and secondly because her realm is totally devoid of the magical. The issue of magic perhaps makes my comparison to these series seem off the mark; however, they are the most logical comparison to me, because these are all series that have excited in me a similar passion for stories, adoration of adventure, and sense of personal loss when the series has reached its culmination—it is a rare treat to be presented with the work of an author who has achieved something akin to erasing the boundary between a fictional reality and a reader's reality. I think the allure, for me, of The Hunger Games trilogy, is even stronger in some ways than the other series I mentioned because the dystopian setting is a much easier reality to insert one’s self into than the magical; hunger, war games, survival: overcoming these are universal triumphs of the human spirit, and while Hogwarts, Narnia, and Prydain include similar profound qualities, they will always fail to exist outside of the confines of our imagination. The themes of social justice, the blurred line between right and wrong, and ideas of political unrest all serve Susan Collins’ work well. Even better, the trilogy has rekindled in me an insatiable desire to read that had recently been waning.

Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply

In case you’re wondering, the author's last name is “pronounced like shawn—not like chaos, though that would be more appropriate, perhaps” (or so Dan Chaon’s Twitter bio explains). If I were to supply Chaon with a bio it may be something more like “I write books that are so good, you will want to read all of what I have written.” In Await Your Reply, Chaon expertly combines complex, somewhat despicable characters, an ever increasingly insidious plot, and themes of identity—the plot revolves around identity thievery and identity repurposing by those thieves. As for the title, there are too many layers of replies, responses, and awaited responses to enumerate—all of which, though, contribute to how identity is constructed or deconstructed, especially in the digital world.

When I began this book, I had two reactions: I pegged the book as a light read, and I was wary of a book that had a rotating narrative structure given that my last read, Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, also had multiple narratives. To compare the two narrative structures, however, is a disservice to both books, which are both amazing in completely different ways, and I soon realized that there was nothing light about reading Chaon’s book: it is quite dark in topic, and has absolutely perfect literary moments. Without giving too much away, the book begins with a severed hand, a Lolita-esque scene with a teenage girl driving across country with an older man, and a twin obsessed with finding his likely psychotic brother. The biggest payoff is how these plots tie together: not all once, but along the way you see clues, and connections. There were surprises along the way, and I was tricked by an ending I never saw coming—and happily tricked because it was done so neatly without leaving a trail of plot holes in its wake.

There were a great many things to like about this book. The author has an excellent flashback technique, a propensity for suspense, and a sophisticated approach to questions about identity. How do we create ourselves, and how do we re-create ourselves? What is the mark that individuals leave on the world? Are we more then just a digital footprint, and is existence linked to more than birth and death certificates? Can we ever even be the same person our whole lives, even without consciously reinventing ourselves? To what extent do others contribute or affect our identities, and, how easy is it for someone to take on your identity or take away your identity?  Chaon’s answer to this final question is abundantly clear: easily. So easily, that we should not take permanence for granted.

Chaon is also the author of, among other works, You Remind Me of Me and most recently Stay Awake. I hope to read both of these, and tout de suite.

Chaon, Dan. Await Your Reply. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010.

Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist

After hearing all the buzz surrounding this book, I was very eager to read it, and I must say, it exceeded my expectations. I was unsure of what to expect exactly. I wondered if would be a veiled diatribe on the evils of polygamy, or, perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, a book about acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles. Neither of these suspicions proved correct. Instead, the book was about universal themes of loneliness, responsibility, and family. Perhaps most impressively, Udall drew together an impressive number of themes, characters, and narratives, which achieve a complexity that maintains a reader’s interest without creating a confusing story. As an added bonus, Udall has a true skill with prose that makes this novel a delight to read.

The Lonely Polygamist follows the life of Golden Richards: husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, and a man lacking backbone by all accounts. As Brady Udall tells the story of Golden, he weaves in the trials and tribulations Golden experiences as he deals with temptation, tells an ever-growing lie to his wives and community, and struggles with feelings of loneliness despite the fact he never seems to be alone. (The polygamist plot certainly offers a way to magnify the themes in the novel, especially loneliness.) To give more perspective to the story, Udall follows two other characters to expose how multiple Richards are experiencing the same disappointments in life. Insights into the lives of Golden’s fourth wife and one of his sons who is undoubtedly the black sheep of the family uncover a recurrent issue in all three major narratives: neglect—a neglect that permeates the lives of the Richards family. Not only do the parents neglect the children—there are simply so many—but the spouses neglect each other, the children neglect their siblings, and, worst of all, they all neglect themselves and neglect attending to things will that achieve fulfillment and contentment.

Ultimately, the results of the neglect manifest as feelings of being encumbered. The Richards clan is burdened by the oppressive feelings of neglect, burdened by their pasts, and burdened by each other. In the end, though, the situations the characters saw as burdens outside their control, they now see as responsibilities chosen out of love. While the characters do not necessarily find the happiness they expected, and without giving too much away, they do find ways to accept the choices they have made and do so with a greater appreciation of the boundlessness of love. And so, I will end with a quote from the book that, to me, captures the beauty of one of the message of the book:

          Because this, after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that love was no infinite       

          commodity. That it was not subject to the cruel reckoning of addition and subtraction, that to give   

          to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart, in its infinite capacity .  . . 

          could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like 

          the heart of God itself, vast and accommodating and holy, a mansion of rooms without number, 

          full of multitudes without end. (545)

Udall, Brady. The Lonely Polygamist. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

From the Desert to the Prairie

Today, for the first time ever, I was unable to open the window of my car because it was frozen shut. There was too much ice, and the poor little motor in my window just couldn’t do it. Yes, folks, this is my first winter, and I don’t like it one bit. This whole season thing has taken me quite by surprise. To make it worse, it seems undeniable that this is one of the mildest winters in recent memory! What will I do when winter sets in for real?

Fall had its perks, but the short days, dreadful weather, and ice that stays in the shadows to surprise you when you slip on it are just are not fun! I hail from a place where there are two discernable seasons: hot and less hot, and right now is the wonderful, glorious, spectacular less-hot season in Phoenix—and Facebook posts keep reminding me that I am missing it. There are so many new things to deal with in this climate! The newish, often-challenging job at UIP is cake compared to the meteorological issues! Just off the top of my head, here is a list of things I’ve had to obtain since moving to Illinois that I’ve never had to own before, and most things on the list I never even realized other people had to buy.

Cuddl Duds

ear muffs

fur-lined boots

ice scraper

lawn waste bags

non-AZ driver’s license and plates

rake

snow shovel

yak traks

My feet haven’t even slipped into my comfy flip-flops in weeks, if not months, and it is such a strange adjustment! The cute, fashionable mittens that were always just right for riding my bike in the cool, December, Tempe air now don’t even cut it for a walk out to the car to scrape the ice of my windshield. I know I am lucky to be able to ease into winter with unseasonably reasonable weather this Champaign-Urbana winter, but, I must ask, when does winter end?

Kate DiCamillo's The Magician's Elephant (Among Other Things)

I met Kate DiCamillo once. It was the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2009, and I had just read The Tale of Despereaux and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. (If you haven’t read them, you should. Despereaux is a mouse with boundless heart and courage, and Edward Tulane is rabbit figurine whose epic journey parallels the journey of growing up.) I waited in line to have books signed for my mother and my aunt, who both share the courageous spirit of Despereaux, and when my turn came, I was elated that Kate DiCamillo was as kind and sincere as the stories and characters she creates.

The best part of a Kate DiCamillo book is the warm, fuzzy, familiar feeling you get once you are drawn into a simple, charming, meaningful tale. It is something like the way you felt reading The Velveteen Rabbit or Charlotte’s Web: completely enamored and a little better for having read and understood it, an experience that is nothing less than magical. The Magician’s Elephant, the story of an orphan looking for answers, delivered on the magical front—both the literal aspects of magic in the story and the bewitching effect the story has. The book is short and amazingly illustrated. The pictures tell almost as much of a story as the words, and as the happy conclusion approaches, the picture themselves get brighter and lighter, representing the growing spark of hope and wonder of the orphan Peter, and, in my opinion, of children in general. The success of the illustrations in The Magician’s Elephant makes me very excited that DiCamillo is a contributor to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. In the book, fourteen authors each tell their version of a story based on Chris Van Allburg’s collection of illustrations, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, originally published in 1984. The collection includes contributions from Louis Sachar, Steven King, and Sherman Alexie, and the diverse genres of the contributing authors are undoubtedly a boon for the book.

But all this leads me to consider the way in which children’s books appeal more and more to adult interests. Nothing suggests the crossover potential of a children’s book more aptly than The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick being made into a film by Martin Scorsese, a director absolutely associated with productions characterized by very adult content. The movie is garnering acclaim, and adults everywhere are enjoying what was intended for a younger audience. In the same vein, DiCamillo’s books constantly reaffirm that a children’s book is not only for children, and prove that a well-written children’s book is worth reading for children and adults alike.

DiCamillo, Kate. The Magician's Elephant. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2009.

Richard Adams' Watership Down

I consider myself to be extremely lucky because I have a few good friends who have excellent taste in books, and whose book recommendations I therefore deem worthy of consideration. Several years ago, my good friend Sarah gave high praise to Watership Down. Being somehow under the impression that the book was about a submarine in peril and on the verge of being wrecked, or down, I was surprised that she had so liked it. After my friend set me straight that it was actually about the adventures of a warren of rabbits, it was a book that continued to cross my mind, and when my local Borders closed, I took advantage of the deep discounts and snatched up the book. It has taken me about a year to get around to reading it, but like any good book, it was certainly worth the wait.

This book married all of the aspects I hope for in a novel: an unusual and creative well-told saga that had me hooked from the opening chapters. It is a tough feat to make a five-hundred-page book feel like a quick read, but this had twists and turns of the plot that had me so nervous for the characters that I could barely wait to turn the page (but too nervous I would miss something if I turned the page too soon). The book had the added perks of a few maps, which I always enjoy, and even a glossary to help remind you of the peculiar and cute Lapine (rabbit) language. The book was more than just a story; it drew you into to the idea of a distinct rabbit culture, complete with a social hierarchy, where each rabbit contributes to the community and has a distinct personality and skill. Even more delightful is the rabbit lore that is woven into the story. In the midst of a fearful situation, such as a fox attack, the rabbits are often put to ease when one of their comrades relates one of their well known and loved rabbit myths. Almost as wonderful as the myths are the aptly chosen epigraphs that introduce each chapter. Not only are the quotations pithy and interesting, they successfully foreshadow what is to come without completely giving everything away. It is indeed an impressive balance.

I was nearing the end of Watership Down as I waited to meet a friend for dinner, and when she saw what I was reading, she reminisced about reading it in high school for a religion class where the teacher claimed that aspects of the rabbits’ story paralleled the persecution of the Christians. In fact, most people I have discussed the book with have had someone tell them what the book was “really about.” They are surprised to learn that the book is simply a story, written by a father who invented the tale for his two daughters and later decided to write it down. As soon as I read about the origin of the story in the introduction, and found out it was not intended to have a deeper meaning, I almost felt a sense of liberation. I like a good, symbolic story as much as the next readosaur, but sometimes it is nice to enjoy rich, well-crafted writing and plot, and have a respite from trying to discern some intended allegorical meaning from the book. The only caution I would give is that you may never again be able to spot a rabbit without experiencing the sincere disappoint that you will never know the story of its life and the adventures and perils it has faced with its rabbit friends. 

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. New York: Scribner, 2005.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

One of the things I value highly is thriftiness. Thrift is the reason I read a lot of non-mainstream books: they are the ones on sale. Thrift is also the reason I tend to be a little behind the times on contemporary novels. I certainly know about the books, but I typically wait until a book comes out in paperback. Wolf Hall was a book a desperately wanted to read, and excitedly waited for the paperback edition. When it came out, I used a coupon for a discount at Changing Hands, and I bought it and started reading it. It is always a bad sign when your friends hope you finish a book quickly so that you will stop complaining about it.

Mantel has a way with words: many, many, many words. Perhaps she should have borrowed some of my thrift and put it towards an economy of expression. The wordiness itself was not the only problem, though (keep in mind I am a Dickens girl, and his wordiness has only made me love him more). The wordiness seemed only to be alleviated through the use of pronouns, which actually became problematic. For instance, in a passage with three male characters, it does not help to use the pronoun he consistently throughout the page. I consider myself a savvy reader, and I also consider myself a descriptivist when it comes to language and grammar; however, I struggled so much through certain passages in this book that I spent a great deal of time contemplating and championing the fact that grammar rules exist for a reason. A pronoun is useless if it has an unclear antecedent, and a pronoun is useless if it can possibly refer to three different things in a given context. The he pronoun was such a consistent problem throughout the text that it made the read less enjoyable, and, in case you are doubting me, yes, the issue indeed warranted a discussion of this length. Overall, the book was too dense: too dense with words, pronouns, characters, locations, politics, and loosely explained historical references.

I would not say this is a bad novel, though. After all, Mantel had a lot working against her with a book of this nature: weaving history with imagination, dealing with the preconceptions people bring to the historical figures, and dealing with the excessive amount of people with a role in the historical situations. The character list of this tale would rival even [SPOILER ALERT: another Dickens reference] that of Bleak House. I cannot say I learned much history from this work of historical fiction, but I can say I learned something timeless: sometimes things are not worth the wait, and the less you pay for something often directly equates to less disappointment when something is not what you expect. Thriftiness saved the day here, because if I had shelled out for the hard cover, this review may have had a lot more complaining and a little more snark.

Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009.

Week the First

Whenever I get a substantial amount of hair cut off, a strange sort of phantom hair syndrome happens for the next few days. I go to wash or brush my hair, and my hands and fingers and arms are used to a certain motion. After all, they have been brushing hair that has imperceptibly gotten longer for several months. I get ready to brush that same length of hair, but after the haircut, several inches are gone, and the brush slips into nothingness. For me, moving and starting a new job has been a little like that sensation: I try to do something, and I get started as I usually would, but then nothing is there. Instead of a direct relationship between needing yogurt and beer and going to Sunflower Market to get it, now when I need groceries, I have to do a Google search for a grocery store and write down directions. When asked to mail something at work, I go to do it, then realize I do not know where envelopes are. There is a disconnect between what I want to do, and the knowledge I have for doing it.

The offer for the Assistant Acquisitions Editor position at the University of Illinois Press came almost a year to the day I completed graduate school. The year in between was filled with an impossible work schedule with approximately three jobs at any given time, feelings of failure, and the adamant support of friends and family I have now left to come and pursue my publishing career. The Press is fantastic, but because I have never had a job I have so sincerely thought was a perfect fit for my skills and pursuits, it comes with a massive feeling of pressure. My first day was a total high: I met new people who were beyond welcoming and I was put to work. I could barely believe that on my first day I got to conduct research on peer reviewers, attend a meeting, do some filing-type tasks, and begin organizing my very own office. It was a pleasant surprise to feel utterly comfortable on the first day of a new job in a new environment. On my second and third days I was put to even more work and the first day high diminished. It is hard to feel successful or productive when every task takes several times longer than it should as I learn my way around a new building, new procedures, and a new copier (I swear, no two are ever the same). However, as I left messages with prospective peer reviewers, was shown how to prepare packets for the bi-weekly meetings, snatched my favorite pens from the supply area, sent rejection emails, and drafted descriptions for manuscripts, I knew I had found a place I will soon feel is my professional home.

After my first week, I woke up Saturday morning with a great deal of anxiety of all the things I could have done better over my first three days. I was worried I should know things already and not have to ask questions, and I had convinced myself I made a terrible blunder during a confused phone call. Then I walked to the Urbana farmer’s market, and I did it without getting lost. Image that! Last weekend I had never been to Urbana, and this weekend I navigated it. Contemplating that progress led me to this conclusion: I got embarrassingly lost my first few days in Urbana, and I will get lost and make mistakes at work. It may take time to navigate my new position at UIP, but it will happen eventually, and I reassure myself that, just as my hair always seems to grow back, surely but gradually, my confidence, efficiency, and knowledge in my work will grow as well.