Susan Napier: Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art

Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art – Susan Napier – 9780300226850 – Yale University Press – Hardcover – $30 – September 4, 2018 — 344 pages – illustrated – ebook versions available at lower prices

If you don’t know about Miyazaki and his spectacular animated films, I recommend you immediately seek out and watch at least two or three of the best of his films by way of introducing yourself to one of the most original and influential cultural figures of the post WWII era.

And this book, Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, will be your guide to this creative genius’s oeuvre. Susan Napier brilliantly summarizes and analyzes Hayao Miyazaki’s life and work. She reveals much about the external influences on his work, his own particular life during and after World War II in Japan, and explores his cultural impact on Japan and the rest of the world, particularly the United States. Of course, if you are already familiar with Miyazaki, and have absorbed some or all of his incredible work, this book will illuminate much about the creator that you did not know before.

A thirtieth-century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red-haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, now well-known for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises.

Susan Napier is a professor at Tufts. She is a scholar specializing in contemporary Japanese culture. But this is not a dry academic explication of the master’s work. Napier is truly a fan, and she is a culturally adept explorer with a deep knowledge and understanding both of Japanese culture in general and of animated films and other key forms of Japanese pop culture. Napier brilliantly connects the multiple themes present in Miyazaki’s work, which features powerful female characters, is marked by environmental disasters, politically charged approaches to contemporary life, and a powerful sense of cultural and personal trauma and how to cope with it. She brings to life an understanding of an extremely complicated and sometimes mysterious individual, whose lifelong commitment to a unique artistic vision has transformed culture and art for millions of dedicated fans in Japan and all over the world.

Susan Napier is the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric and Japanese Studies at Tufts University. She is the author of Anime from Akira to “Howl’s Moving Castle”: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, among other books.

It was my pleasure to have the opportunity to explore Miyazaki’s work in conversation with Professor Napier. You can read more about Susan from the Tufts website here. There was an excellent review of this book in the Washington Post here. And here is a link to the book at the Yale University Press website.

The NY Times was kind enough to make a 2017 list of Miyazaki’s films in order of importance – here.

Movie still from “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” (gkids/1989 Eiko Kadono – Studio Ghibli)

 

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Philip Connors: A Song for the River

A Song for the River – Philip Connors – 978-1-941026-90-8 – Cinco Puntos Press – Hardcover – 256 pages – $22.95 – September 18, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

“The river that runs through the wilderness opens his heart: the mountains burn, friends die, and green shoots sprout from the ashes.”

Philip Connors, like some other fine writers of the desert southwest, notably Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Norman Maclean, has been a long time fire lookout. Phil has spent many years in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. He began working as a fire lookout in 2002, and wrote about his experience in an earlier book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout.

As it happens, I visited the Gila Wilderness for the first time in 2018, and was completely smitten by its beauty and the magnitude of the mountains, the vistas, and the Gila River. I’m sure I had read about the Gila at some point; it is famous for being the first wilderness area established anywhere in the world (in 1924), principally through the efforts of the great naturalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold was himself one of our best writers about nature; the Forest Service transferred him to Wisconsin, perhaps fortunately for the rest of us, as his Sand County Almanac has inspired so many to a better understanding of the natural world.

The Gila area is not only beautiful, but it is historically important as well. When we were there, we visited the famous Mogollon cliff dwellings, which are simply extraordinary. After that culture disappeared, the Gila was subsequently home to the Apache, and then the American pioneers, outlaws, and miners who displaced them. It’s an area which Connors knows intimately, and this powerful and emotionally gripping book reflects the depth of his knowledge of places and people, of the natural landscape and the depth of both human despair and our equally transcendent spirit.

There is a great deal of pain and sorrow in this book, but the spiritual and emotional power of Connors’ writing and his ability to transform experience into something resonant is important for himself and for his readers. The power of the writing is palpable and strong. It’s a beautiful book that I hope will be read by many.

Wilderness is where the heart grows stronger, or breaks, or both. No matter, we need these places and the writers who, like Connors, bring forth meaning out of pain, beauty out of loss.

Philip Connors was raised on a farm in Minnesota, went to the University of Montana for college, and spent a number of years working as a journalist. But he became disillusioned and made his way west, which clearly has become his true home and emotional center. His first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. His second book, All the Wrong Places, a memoir of life after his brother’s suicide, was published in 2015.

Talking to Philip after reading this beautifully written, moving narrative of nature and loss was a great experience for me.

“Everything that is absent in the current political crises of this nation is abundantly present in Philip Connors’ A Song for the River: humility, quietude, forgiveness, and gratitude. His writing is pure, exact, compassionate, and often elegaic…I loved this book.”
—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, winner of the PEN/Faulkner for Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

Visit Philip Connors’ own website here and his outstanding, El Paso based publisher, Cinco Puntos Press, here.

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Bram Presser: The Book of Dirt (a novel)

The Book of Dirt – Bram Presser –  Text Publishing Company (Australia) – Paperback – 9781925240269 – 325 pages – $15.95 – September 11, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Personal and family history for most contemporary Jews is frequently fraught. Most of us have relatives who disappeared without a trace, except for scattered entries in German records of extermination. Some fewer of us have had living relatives whose lives were entwined with and defined by the Holocaust, almost always in horrific and devastating ways.

Bram Presser, an Australian punk rocker and practicing attorney who also happens to be a brilliant writer, spent eight years working on this novel, The Book of Dirt. It is a fabulous story that explores the real life story of Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, from the 1920s onward through the Holocaust and beyond. Presser addresses history in all its complexity with the only tool that could possibly make sense of it – imagination.

Presser starts with family stories and personal legends, combined with archival research and interviews to create this novel. Of course it becomes partly fact, partly fiction. Some is memory and much is imagined.

The relatively large number of characters and the movement between places can be confusing for the reader, but Bram Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, and his grandmother, Dasa Roubicek, and their immediate family are the focus of the book, and their story of survival shines through. The pain and suffering was immense and the power of humanity was as well.

You do not need to be Jewish to find this novel compelling and real. All of us can share through this novel what it means to find hope, and for the descendants of survivors of terror and loss to try to understand the stories of their forebears. This is a wonderful and transformative literary work.

The Book of Dirt has won a number of well-deserved awards in Australia. Bram Presser was born in Melbourne in 1976. He has been a punk rocker, an academic and a criminal attorney. He writes the blog Bait For Bookworms and is a founding member of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. His stories have appeared in Vice Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and Higher Arc. In 2011, Bram won The Age Short Story Award. Presser’s own website is very active and includes a great deal of material related to the stories behind The Book of Dirt; it is worthwhile to explore.

‘Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival.’
Mireille Juchau

I hope you enjoy listening to Bram Presser talk about The Book of Dirt, a book I strongly recommend you seek out and read.

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Ken Krimstein: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth – Ken Krimstein – Bloomsbury – 240 pages – Hardcover – 9781635571882 – $28.00 – September 25, 2018 – ebook versions also available at lower prices.

What a completely cool and unexpected pleasure it was to discover this amazing book! Yes, I had seen Ken Krimstein’s cartoons in the New Yorker, and I have even read a bit of Hannah Arendt’s powerful writing over the years, but neither Ken’s humorous work, nor my limited knowledge of Arendt’s life prepared me for the serial delight of this graphic novel biography of one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers.

Hannah Arendt is one of those intellectual figures whose reputation obscures her actual story. Her books were highly influential and widely read in the mid and late twentieth century, though I suspect in present times, now are consumed mostly by college students and scholars, as serious political philosophy does not have a broad readership anymore (if it ever did). We know of her mainly through her many famous books, including The Human Condition, On Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, among her many, many others.

Arendt’s writing on the nature and form of authoritarianism, couched in her direct experience with Hitler’s Germany, and the rise of Stalin after the war, certainly has become increasingly resonant today, for obvious reasons. And with the increase in modern day anti-Semitism, it is difficult to not draw comparisons between the 1930s world she inhabited and our current troubled experiences.

So it is timely to think about Hannah Arendt’s work, and especially to learn how that work was shaped by her extraordinary life and mind. As revealed in this wonderful biography, Hannah Arendt’s story is heroic and rich. The details about her life continually surprise and delight us. The men and women she knew are some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the century, and it is remarkable just how many now-famous people appear in her life. She knew and associated with so many,from philosophers like Heidegger and Jaspers, to political theorists like Walter Benjamin, writers like Mary McCarthy and geniuses like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and her own writing and thinking have influenced generations of thinkers and writers.

The escapes Krimstein documents so heart wrenchingly in this book were all determinative to the development of her thinking and writing, and shaped her individualistic, powerful thinking about what it means to be an engaged citizen in a modern world in constant strife. Reading this book was inspiring, and I give full credit to Ken Krimstein for bringing Hannah Arendt to life for me in a way I doubt a prose biography could have done.

Ken Krimstein’s cartoons have been published in the New Yorker, Barron’s, The Harvard Business Review, Prospect Magazine, Punch, The National Lampoon, the Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine and many others magazines. His writing has been published in The New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and a number of humor websites, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

Ken is also a teacher at De Paul University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can read more about him, his work, and The Three Escapes at his website here, where you can also see sample pages from the book.

It was a pleasure for me to meet Ken, and I think you will enjoy our conversation just as much as I did.

“Ken Krimstein’s deeply moving graphic memoir about the life and thoughts of philosopher Hannah Arendt is not only about Hannah Arendt. It’s also, through her words, about how to live in the world, the meaning of freedom, the perils of totalitarianism, and our power as human beings to think about things and not just act blindly. Krimstein explains Arendt’s ideas with clarity, wit, and enormous erudition, and they still resonate.” –  Roz Chast

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Ben Goldfarb: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter – Ben Goldfarb – Chelsea Green – 304 pages – Hardcover – 9781603587396 – $24.95 – July 5, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices

This amazing book completely captivated me from beginning to end. Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, a Yale Forestry School graduate, is a natural storyteller, and writes with a warm and inviting style. In Eager, he demonstrates how the actions of a single mammal species so thoroughly affects the ecology of rivers and landscapes we have come to take for granted, without understanding the effects of these amazing and inventive rodent environmental engineers.

Beavers have had wide-ranging effects on the landscape for aeons. When Europeans arrived in North America, beavers were everywhere, and the very nature of rivers was completely different than they appear to us today. Slowed in flow, and wildly marshy, because of all the beaver dam building, rivers were rich and varied environments for many species of wildlife, insects and plants.

And yes, beavers are rodents – but very special and important to us all. They were trapped and hunted for their fur in the 18th and 19th centuries. That demand created a hunting and trapping economy that caused beavers to be virtually obliterated from most parts of the United States. And their disappearance literally changed our landscape, allowing the open flow of rivers, thereby causing erosion and the loss of healthy habitat over many years. The river landscapes most of us have seen in our lifetimes simply did not exist 400 years ago.

Beavers have not been appreciated, much less loved, by farmers and ranchers in North America, and typically not understood or appreciated by most of us. But now, in a time of climate change, increasing heat, more drought, and lacking the money or will to build yet more infrastructure, beavers may represent a viable alternative to restoring the health of many river systems around the country.

Ben Goldfarb’s wide ranging and witty book teaches us a great deal about beavers, personalizes their appeal, and shows us why so many people are enthusiastic about beavers now, yet he also shows how difficult it is to change the way we think about beavers and what they can do to make our world a better place. I hope this book adds more than a few beaver enthusiasts to the world, and helps change the way we co-exist with beavers in the future.

It’s impossible to read this book and not come away with a changed perspective. And I really enjoyed speaking with Ben about the book and about his experiences with beavers around the world. Overall, this book is great fun, and I am happy to recommend Eager to readers of all interests.

“Eager takes us inside the amazing world of nature’s premier construction engineer…and shows us why the restoration of an animal almost driven to extinction is producing wide-ranging, positive effects on our landscapes, ecology, and even our economy.”―National Geographic

“This witty, engrossing book will be a classic from the day it is published.” –Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist and also a writer of fiction. His writing has been published in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, Audubon Magazine, Modern Farmer, Orion, Scientific American, and many other magazines and journals. He has a masters degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and was a 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology journalist fellow. You can learn more about his work at his website here.

If you are interested in learning more about beavers or becoming a beaver supporter, there are many organizations around the country. The Beaver Institute is a good one to start with.

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Justin A. Frank MD: Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President

Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President – Justin A. Frank, MD – Avery – 304 pages – Hardcover – 9780735220324 – $26.00 – September 25, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower cost.

Inside the mind of this president is a scary place to be, as Dr. Justin Frank aptly tells us in this frightening and compelling book. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Dr. Frank said: “Yes, we should be scared,” Frank, a clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, told the Guardian. “We have to accept that he is the president and we also have to accept that he’s never going to change because he can’t. Once we accept those things, we can then figure out what to do with our fears.”

Almost everyone I know has thought about the psychology of Donald Trump. So in some ways he might be the most analyzed person in the history of the world. Ironically, that appears to be exactly what he wants. Funny how whether one loves or despises Donald Trump, he wins, because his narcissistic, empty soul requires the full attention of the entire world and still cannot be satisfied.

In this book, like his two previous books on Obama and Bush, Dr. Frank has applied the principles of applied psychoanalysis, which allows him to at least somewhat clearly understand the mind of Donald Trump. While it is true that the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule prevents psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not their own patients, Frank has invoked the moral responsibility that compels him to speak out, something which all of us can understand and appreciate. So much is at stake and so much is in the hands of someone who is demonstrably unstable, and as Dr Frank shows in this book, someone who is riddled with pathologies, and quite evidently, deeply disturbed.

From his close study of Trump’s patterns of thought, action, and communication, and an analysis of his personal life story, Dr. Frank uncovers a personality deeply distorted by mental health problems. His work reveals many insights about Trump and his behavior, including some highly disturbing glimpses into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and Trump’s unique way of literally inventing his own reality.

While most of us can see for ourselves that our president is wildly unhinged, Dr. Frank’s more clinical description and analysis of Trump’s narcissism, misogyny, racism, and untruthfulness are highly useful in helping us to understand more fully the reasons and causes behind Trump’s pathologically disturbed behavior. Whether it can help us prevent him from leading us into disaster is unclear. But this book should be required reading for anyone, supporters and opponents alike. It might also help us to better understand his appeal to those who do find him compelling. At least for me, it made me want to turn off the television and stop giving him the attention he craves. I wish the news media would do the same.

I very much enjoyed the opportunity to talk about this book with Dr. Frank, and to learn so much from a professional analyst.

Read more about the book at the author’s website.

“I’ve known Trump a long time and I have even tried my own hand at psychoanalyzing him on television. But, Dr. Frank has shown a more complete picture inside our 45th President’s mind than I ever dared to consider. Behind all Trump’s tough guy theatrics, his petty cruelties and bloated ego is a tangled knot of pathologies that should terrify us all. Trump on the Couch is a great first step to sizing up the President’s inner demons.”
—Donny Deutsch, Co-Host on MSNBC’s Morning Joe

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Gregory McNamee: Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest – Gregory McNamee – University of New Mexico Press – 256 pages – paperback – 9780826359049 – $24.95 – October 30, 2017 – ebook versions available.

According to the publisher, this book is an “entertaining history [of] the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest.” And while I do agree that the book’s style makes it a relatively compelling and easy book to read, I think its author, Greg McNamee, is trying to do much more than entertain. McNamee uses food and cooking as a lens to understanding culture, yes, but also to pinpointing the issues that face us in America as we try to grapple with climate change, to live reasonably and sustainably on the earth, and to work together with our fellow humans. There is no heavy handedness to his approach, but he never lets us forget the driving themes of his work, and his perspective.

McNamee starts off by going back to the earliest periods when humans arrived in the Americas, and takes us through the beginning of agriculture in Mesoamerica, and the ancient trade networks that evolved to connect peoples of the coasts, plains, and mountains. From there, he takes us through the various areas that comprise the loosely labelled southwestern region of America, up through the present day’s fusion of cultures and foodways from so many different areas that defines this cuisine now.

Covering just about everything edible in human cultures in what we consider to be the southwest region (which he defines a bit more broadly than most), from chili pepper and agave, to modern day cuisines that include Frito pie and other cross cultural inventions, McNamee traces a culinary journey through varieties of space and time, to get us where we are today and significantly, what the southwest and its food and people might look like in our emerging future.

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones is indeed, a masterful work of accessible anthropology that was recognized as one of the 2017 Southwest Books of the Year. Since I love the southwest and its food, reading this book was a great pleasure for me.

Greg McNamee is a writer, journalist, editor, photographer, and publisher. He is the author or editor of forty books and more than five thousand periodical contributions. He operates Sonora Wordworks, an editorial and publishing service, and is also the publisher of Polytropos Press.

McNamee is a research associate at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and a lecturer in U of A’s Economics Department of the Eller College of Management. Additionally, he teaches courses and gives talks on writing, publishing, journalism, media and technology, as well as cultural and environmental issues. He lives in southern Arizona. Learn more about him and his work at his website.

It was a pleasure for me to get to speak with Greg, who is a great storyteller and conversationalist, and a I only wish we had been able to speak in person, and for a much longer period of time. And I was very pleased to learn how to pronounce “tiswin” too.

This book feels like sitting down to a dinner with Diana Kennedy and Jim Harrison, tequila in hand and great conversation going long into the night. It’s alive, a love story, a timeless journey. I absolutely loved reading it and will treasure Gregory McNamee’s words for a long time to come.

— Tracey Ryder, cofounder of Edible Communities and coauthor of Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods

Tortillas, Tiswin, and T-Bones sends the reader on a riveting adventure, tracking the origins of Southwestern ingredients and culture to reveal American history through food. McNamee’s prose is deft and authoritative, and this is a highly original, timely book.

—Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose

 

 

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Gordon Ball: East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg – Gordon Ball – Counterpoint Press – 416 pages – paperback – 9781619020177 – $18.95 – December 11, 2012 – ebook edition available at lower prices

It’s been a great pleasure for me to be able to interview  writer friends and editors about their work for the Writerscast and Publishing Talks podcasts. I first met writer, film-maker and now professor Gordon Ball soon after moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the very end of 1973. I knew almost no one in North Carolina, but in those still counter-cultural days of boomer history, it was relatively easy to make friends, especially within the fairly small community of like-minded poets and writers that laid-back college town oasis attracted.

Gordon Ball was in Chapel Hill for graduate school, after spending several years as the amanuensis and farm manager for Allen Ginsberg at his funky farm refuge in Cherry Valley, New York. How Gordon got to be there, and what happened during his time among the heroes of the Beat Generation and the hippie revolutionists who followed them is the subject of his excellent and enjoyable memoir, East Hill Farm.

Allen Ginsberg was unique, as a poet who became a cultural icon, a political and spiritual leader whose writing has influenced millions of readers. East Hill Farm was his attempt to build a refuge from city life – “a haven for comrades in distress,” especially friends whose lives were being ruined by hard drugs like iconic beat poets Herbert Huncke and Ray Bremser, who both spent time at the farm in the late sixties. Gordon recounts his first hand stories of the refugees who arrived there as well as the many local upstate characters who helped make the dilapidated farm into a livable home and a functioning farm of sorts. This story is emblematic of so many “back to the land” excursions from the sixties, when hippies from the cities and suburbs arrived uninvited in small town farm communities in places like Vermont, Maine, northern California, Oregon and of course, upstate New York.

But he also tells us about his own journey, his family, the loves and losses that he experienced in this heady era when millions of young people all around the world revolted against the constraints of post-War modern capitalism, all trying to find a different way to live. His experiences and those of his compatriots help us understand how that special moment in our history was lived, and perhaps also, why it could not last or lead to the kind of social change its participants believed in and hoped for.

But what a great experience it was. And so much of what happened there will not be lost or forgotten because of this book.

“I couldn’t stop reading East Hill Farm and learning so much of what really went down on that farm in that so crucial period in the lives of the Beats. I visited the farm just twice but wish I had had Ball’s innocent yet so perceptive eye.” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of Mind.

“In the late 1960s, poet Allen Ginsberg bought an isolated, broken-down farm in upstate New York as a retreat for himself and his worn-out, burned-out friends. Ginsberg hoped to create an Elysium where they could escape from the urban pressures and drug addictions that had laid Kerouac, Corso, Orlovsky, and Huncke so low. Only a masterful story-teller like Gordon Ball could turn a depressing tale of poets at rock bottom into a triumph of the human spirit.”—Bill Morgan, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg

Gordon Ball photographed Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation for many years. As well as being exhibited at five conferences on Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, at one-man shows at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and other venues, Ball’s photos have appeared in many publications. Gordon is the author of 66 Frames: A Memoir and a volume of prose poems, Dark Music. He lives in Lexington, Virginia, taught at VMI and now is teaching at Washington and Lee University. Author website here.

East Hill Farm is a charming, warm memoir that will be a compelling read for anyone who wants to know what it was like to live through the sixties with a cast of some amazing characters, many of whom helped create the culture we still experience today. It was great fun for me to reconnect with Gordon after so many years, and to share his experiences and memories through this wonderful book.

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Joanna Cantor: Alternative Remedies for Loss (A Novel)

Alternative Remedies for Loss – Joanna Cantor – Bloomsbury – Hardcover – 9781635571714 – 320 pages – $26.00 – May 8, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices. Paperback comes out

One of the great things for me about doing this podcast is that I have been introduced to such a varied range of books and writers. When I started this series, my intention was primarily to make myself a more regular reader. Like so many other people, I have found the intrusion of devices and media of all kinds distracting (in an enjoyable way for the most part), taking so much of my time away from the pure pleasure of reading, that I thought a regular schedule of talking to writers about their books would give me the discipline I generally lack, and make certain that I both read more books, and think more reflectively about what I read.

In many ways, of course, that intention has succeeded. But one of the surprises for me in this process has been that so many publishers and authors have approached me to read and interview an amazingly wide range of books. I have done my best to read books that are outside my “normal” range of interests. And that has been incredibly rewarding. Today’s interview, with the author of Alternative Remedies for Loss demonstrates one of those enjoyable discoveries that being a book podcaster has enabled.

Joanna’s story revolves around Olivia, who leaves her senior year at college to be with her mother through her terminal illness. The through line of the book is Olivia’s effort to cope with this unexpected loss. She takes a job in media in New York City in a sort of dazed state, and while it appears the rest of her family is moving on with their lives, Olivia cannot quite figure out what is going on now. Then she accidentally discovers that her mother might have been involved with a man other than Olivia’s father, and this emotional shock triggers Olivia’s quest to more fully understand her mother, come to terms with her own self in the world, and essentially to work through the emotions that are blocking her from being at peace.

There’s a great energy to this book, and because the writing is so good, the characters believable and fully formed, it is easy to get wrapped up in Olivia’s effort to become a fully formed human being in challenging emotional circumstances, perhaps her first in a fairly privileged upper middle class upbringing that many readers will recognize, and perhaps identify with themselves. Author Cantor refuses to whitewash her main character and gives her flaws and weaknesses that bring her to life. A good novel solves problems we sometimes did not realize we were able to engage with, and this one does that for me – I am glad to have had the chance to engage with Olivia’s story, and it was a pleasure to meet and speak with Joanna.

Joanna Cantor is a very talented writer. She lives in Brooklyn, teaches yoga and continues to write fiction. I really enjoyed reading this book and talking to her about writing, first novels, and of course, this book.

Joanna Cantor’s website is worth a visit.

(Production note: in doing this interview, I had a problem with the recording device, and we had to finish the conversation by phone, so you will notice some variations in the sound during the course of this particular podcast. I’ve got a new recording device now and hope to avoid problems like this in the future.)

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Rae DelBianco: Rough Animals (A Novel)

Rough Animals – Rae DelBianco – Arcade Publishing – hardcover – 9781628729733 – $24.99 – June 5, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices.

I’ve long believed that Cormac McCarthy is the most recent heir to the position held previously by William Faulkner, being the most intense and stimulating writer of his generation. Having read this first novel by the young writer, Rae DelBianco, I believe she will be the next in line to wear that particular literary crown. I do not believe I have read any fiction recently that is as powerful and hallucinatory as Rough Animals. The book grabs you by the head and heart immediately and simply never lets go. It can be painful, even horrific in places, to read this book. But I was captivated by the writing, the characters and the story – and found it impossible to put the book down. I needed to take breaks from reading this book, a sort of breath-catching effort is required for the reader to regather oneself, and be ready for the next emotional ride. And the descriptions of landscape, of animals and of people are simply stunning.

Intense is not quite enough to describe this novel. So after reading this book, and gathering my wits about me, I was really interested to talk to author DelBianco. I honestly don’t know how she managed to pull off this high-wire effort – writing a novel with this level of luminescence is just hard to do. Rough Animals is about a brother and sister who grow up hardscrabble on a small ranch in the very isolated Box Elder canyon of Utah. When the novel opens, and it does so with a scene that is at once powerful, artful, violent, and gripping, in a way that presages so much of the writing and storyline of the rest of the book, we are simply unprepared for the range, the depth of language and vision DelBianco exhibits.

The book goes on from there, McCarthy-like, in a spiritual saga of sometimes unexplainable violence and tenderness, across a brutal moon-like western landscape. The people in this book are sometimes like aliens, blasting themselves through a foreign galaxy on their way to discovering what it means to be a human being, while never really understanding how they got here in the first place.

Amazingly, for someone who has captured the language and beauty of the western landscape so well, DelBianco is actually not from the west. She grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a beautiful area not that far from Philadelphia, and she now lives in rural New Jersey, on a farm with her grandmother. How this author was able to transport herself into the modern wild west is a feat of almost superhuman imagination, with which I remain in awe. Delbianco has clearly set her sights on high ground, and with this novel, and has achieved something really remarkable – this is truly a brilliant first novel.

DelBianco has found her voice as a writer, and it’s a great one. I really recommend seeking out this novel and carving out a good block of time to spend with it. You will be richly rewarded. And I think hearing her talk about this novel, her writing, and the backstory behind this novel will make you want to read more from this new author.

Here is the author’s website, which is well worth a visit.

An interview with Rae DelBianco in Vogue magazine here. And Kirkus wrote a very good review of the book as well, here.

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