Category: Book reviews

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The TNB Book Club: Get literary gems delivered to your door for under $10

A couple weeks ago, I got home to find a little, nondescript package at my door — a cardboard fold-up marked only with my and the return addresses. Which made me wonder: Who is Fat Possum Records and why did they send me mail and could it be anthrax?

Of course, I immediately opened the package — and out came a copy of The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan. That was all that was in there. There wasn’t even a packing slip!

Who sent me the mysterious book?

It took me a while, but I remembered that I’d signed up for The TNB Book Club a week or so earlier. TNB stands for The Nervous Breakdown (so yes, the book club is The The Nervous Breakdown Book Club), a literary website that publishes fiction, book reviews, and funny self-interviews where authors ask themselves questions then answer them too. I joined the book club on a whim, partly because I’m a fan of TNB founder Brad Listi’s literary podcast, Otherppl, and partly because I’m a fan of book subscription boxes in general.

That said, to call The TNB Book Club a book subscription box is a bit of a stretch. First of all, the book came not in a box but on an efficiently folded up piece of cardboard (Although does folded up cardboard qualify as a box? What is the definition of a box these days?). Second, it contained just the book — no letters from the author or signed bookplates or other tchotchkes. And third, although I was surprised due to my general absentmindedness, the book pick wasn’t actually a surprise for the subscribers. Books-to-come are listed on the TNB Book Club webpage long before they’re shipped — so you won’t see any unpackaging videos by ooh-ing and aah-ing bookstagrammers on Instagram stories.

But at $9.99 a month, you can’t beat the price on this book subscription!

And you get variety. Book picks might be hardcover or paperback or even advanced review copies. They might arrive pre-publication or post. They might come from big presses or tiny presses. They might be novels or memoirs or translations or biographies or something else — so joining this book club will likely make you read outside the genres you usually pick.

Past picks range from Jonathan Safron Foer’s much anticipated novel Here I Am to The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga, out of a small indie press called Two Dollar Radio. The Sarah Book also came from a small press called Tyrant Books.

And I loved The Sarah Book.

This novel is a crazy ride — a mostly true story about Scott and his relationship (and the end thereof) with one Sarah — starting off with his alcoholism and her bulimia and related chaotic antics — like living for days in a Walmart parking lot and destroying a computer with a ten pound sledge. It’s so messy and honest — I seriously couldn’t put this one down.

I wouldn’t have known to pick up this book on my own, so I’m glad it came my way. And while the book arrived on my doorstep alone, TNB has a review of The Sarah Book and Otherppl has a podcast interview with Scott McClannahan.

I’m already looking forward to the August book: One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul. You too can sign up to get this and future books at $9.99 a month! Just don’t be surprised if it comes in suspiciously nondescript packaging with a mysterious return address.

Earlier:
* The Book Drop: Handpicked reads delivered from an indie bookstore
* 5 best literary podcasts in Los Angeles

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One book review in The Los Angeles Review

The very last print issue of The Los Angeles Review came in the mail a few weeks ago — and in the back pages is a book review of Nadine Darling’s She Came From Beyond! written by yours truly —

I’m so glad that The Los Angeles Review has now gone all digital (there’ll still be a best-of print annual), because that means the reviews get published in a more timely manner. Seriously — I turned in this review for LAR back in April 2016!

More than a year later, it’s finally made its way into print — along with some other great reviews plus fiction and poetry. My favorite piece in this issue was a short fiction piece called “Stories About Men” by Rhian Sasseen:

I shouldn’t have strayed–but then again, what is literature beyond the stories of cheating wives? When that man standing beside me at the birthday party shrugged and confided, “I don’t really understand what women see in men,” I had to show him.

You can buy the last print issue of The Los Angeles Review online — and read and submit your work for future issues online.

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July giveaway: Dana Johnson’s Break Any Woman Down

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Calin in Los Angeles! ***

The first time saw Dana Johnson was on a panel at Skylight Books. I can’t remember what the panel was actually about, but I remember clearly what Dana said about her MFA experience — that she didn’t go right out of college, she waited a while until she was really hungry, ready. Then during her years at Indiana University, she wrote the stories in her first collection, Break Any Woman Down, winner of the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I did, which was go to grad school at USC straight out of college and use the time as a sort of prolonged adolescence — the totally unproductive kind with lots of flailing around and remarkably little writing.

If only I’d waited to go to USC until Dana started teaching there! Then I’d have been the recipient of her sage advice — though whether or not I would have done anything with it at that point, who knows.

That said, everything’s turned out fine —

But back to Dana.  Break Any Woman Down is a complex and provocative collection of short stories, often starring characters in the margins of society.  A black stripper tries to figure out what she wants in her relationship with a controlling white porn star. A woman defiantly goes to bars alone, over her daughter’s protests. They’re stories of power and acquiescence, stubbornness and change — all cutting across lines of race, class, and gender.

My favorite story is the first one, “Melvin in the Sixth Grade.” Avery, a young black girl whose family just moved from South L.A. to West Covina to get away from the gangs, becomes friends with a white boy called Melvin. He too’s new to town, and with his bell bottoms and Oklahoma drawl, doesn’t fit in. When Melvin gets in a fight, Avery’s loyalty is tested — with heartbreaking consequences.

This story just tackles so much — from the petty allegiances of grade school and the giddiness of childhood crushes to the casual racism absorbed by children as a matter of course and the brutal dislocation that comes from shifting social classes. What Dana reveals about education is truly thought-provoking — how the learning of standard English, even the “correct” pronunciation of words, can be a sociocultural marker that connects and divides, confers privilege as well as exiles us from those we’re closest to.

Enter your email below for a chance to win a free copy of Break Any Woman Down. Already signed up for my newsletter? Then you’re already entered! US addresses only; giveaway ends July 31 at 11:59 pm.

Enter to win!


Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Dana Johnson.

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June book reviews: Mostly New York stories

Brief reviews of books by contemporary authors I read this month — along with photos of what I ate while reading. The list is ordered by the level of my enjoyment:

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (FSG, 1949)

“They want attention and praise and sometimes they’ll do almost anything.”
*
Fuck I love Shirley Jackson. I love the creepy ways she reveals the cruel violent minds of children especially — a boy excited by the thought of strangling then chopping up his little sister to bits, two sibling filled with glee at the prospect of killing the family dog with a collar of nails. There’s also a story about a woman who goes on vacation to NYC — and slowly starts freaking out at the random violence of the city until she’s immobilized by anxious panic attacks. Obviously, this was the perfect read before flying to NYC on book tour!

Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (Vintage, 1988)

“Years pass as moments do. And the moments of the past are stones behind her, over which she stumbles forward.”
*
I love Joy William’s writing: spare, exact, disturbing. Liberty and Willie are drifters, breaking into strangers’ vacation homes and living in them a while — but Willie is turning stranger and stranger, spouting weird philosophies and disappearing for days at a time. There’s the disconnectedness of vacation communities, the intimate revelations of total strangers, and sudden, brutal acts of violence. Fantastic summer reading.

You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero (Viking, 2017)

“People are to money what a French fry is to ketchup: They’re just the conduits.”
*
Jen Sincero’s latest book is inspiring and motivating. I actually picked up Jen’s first book, You Are a Badass, a few years ago because she and I have the same agent. She has made him a lot more money than I have so far but that will change now that I’ve read this book and am putting it into action!

Washington Square by Henry James (Harper and Brothers, 1880)

“She watched herself as she would have watched another person, and wondered what she would do.”
*
The way Henry James finely sketches his characters really carried me through this novel about a plain but rich girl who falls in love with a cute guy — who ditches her once it’s clear the girl’s father would disinherit her should she marry him. Spoiler: The girl then snubs her father as well as all other men who express an interest in her, living out her days alone with her aunt. In a way it could be read as a feminist novel — or a cautionary tale against the impulse to withdraw / reject people after a painful event….

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (Scribner 2009)

“For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened….”
*
Set post WWII, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis, a young Irish girl from a tiny town who is made to leave everything behind and move to Brooklyn for a job at a department store. In many ways Eillis’s life — while with hardships — is a charmed one, with kind friends and strangers often going out of their ways to help her out, with one happy opportunity after another coming her way. I would guess not all immigrants to the US in that time had things go so smoothly. Incidentally I got to hear Colm speak at a Live Talks LA event a few weeks ago, which inspired me to pick up this work.

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro (Knopf, 2017)

“The city still feels like mine…. Wherever I go–in every neighborhood–I catch younger versions of myself disappearing around corners.”
*
Dani wrote this about revisiting New York in this latest memoir — a fragmentary and often touching mediation on the way marriage shapes you and your partner. Even for a memoir, there was a lot more navel-gazing in this book than I’d expected — Dani spends a lot of time worrying out her Google search results and Instagram feed — but I enjoyed its many poignant, intimate moments.

Hemingway’s Girl by Erika Robuck (Berkeley, 2012)

“The blue of the sky and the water were almost the same, and the breeze blew the fresh saltwater smell over her.”
*
Hemingway’s Girl came in The Book Drop, and is about a young girl who starts working as a maid for Earnest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline when they’re living in the Key West. There’s lovely ocean scenes, race and class conflicts, and a lot of sexual tension.

The Gaffer by Celeste Gainey (Red Hen, 2015)

“The house fills with my ringing. / You rise to answer.”
*
I got to read with Celeste in Philly earlier this month, which is when I picked up this slim volume. Her poems are about light and filmmaking and love and self-discovery — and Los Angeles, where Celeste lived for a while —

After the Dam by Amy Hassinger (Red Hen, 2016)

“It seemed that they were running down the knife edge of time, both surrounded by and creating the pulsing, tremulous unfolding of it, striving to touch it, hold it, taste it even as it passed into memory.”
*
I got to read with Amy Hassinger earlier this month in Brooklyn! Her novel is about a young mother who suddenly runs away from her husband to visit her grandma at her childhood home. There, the mother reconnects with a long-ago ex, questions her marriage, and gets involved in an emotional dispute over family land….

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Cake Time on Newport Mercury’s summer reading list

It’s already summer — or at least it feels like it — and the summer reading lists are coming out! I’m overjoyed that Cake Time is on Newport Mercury’s list — Fictional encounters: 12 books to take you away this summer:

Wendy Fontaine writes that “Ju’s writing is witty, blunt and entirely unsentimental, which makes this book a lot of fun to read.” Thanks Wendy! I’m honored to be in such great company — with Edan Lepucki (who blurbed Cake Time!), Elizabeth Strout, and George Saunders!

If you add Cake Time to your own summer reading list, I’d love it if you reviewed it on Goodreads or on your own blog, like my friend Zandria did. Thanks Zandria!

What else are you reading this summer?

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May book reviews: Rules and emotions

Brief reviews of books by contemporary authors I read this month — along with photos of what I ate while reading. The list is ordered by the level of my enjoyment:

The Rules of Inheritance: A Memoir by Claire Bidwell Smith (Hudson Street, 2012)

“Even in the moments when you don’t think you are moving forward, you really are.”
*
The Rules of Inheritance is about the deaths of both Claire’s parents from cancer — and the painful aftermath of twenty-something Claire’s coming to terms with her loss while finding her own place in the world. There’s a toxic relationship, copious drinking, and a lot of flailing around — but the story ends on a hopeful, happier note. Claire’s one of the three women behind the L.A.-based Story and Soul — and has a new self help coming out next year.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

“Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.”
*
How Emotions Are Made argues that feelings don’t just happen to us — we actually play a huge role in constructing them through prediction and interpretation. There’s even a very helpful section on how best to calibrate emotions. Interestingly, a lot of that just has to do with living a healthy lifestyle — getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, etc. — since physical factors really shape our emotions quite a bit. FYI one of my poetry chapbooks is titled Feelings Are Chemicals In Transit —

The Protester Has Been Released by Janet Sarbanes (C&R, 2017)

“Yes, there comes a time when you have to look at your life and ask yourself, can I do better than this?”
*
Janet Sarbanes’s collection features smart incisive stories about scientific experiments, political apathy, climate change, and other human foibles. Many of the stories are written from an animal’s wise, world-weary, yet innocent point of view. Get ready to see life from the perspective of Dolly the cloned sheep, Laika the dog shot into space, and Koko the chimp.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead, 2017)

I reviewed this lauded book for The Los Angeles Review. Read all my thoughts there —

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Books, 2016)

“Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”
*
A girl witch who can talk to animals. A boy science nerd who can build time machines. A supercomputer with a personality of its own. The three together save the world, sort of, in this fantasy-sci-fi-love story by Charlie, whose reading series Writers With Drinks I got to participate in earlier this year in San Francisco! Charlie’s novel is full of cryptic, philosophical musings to make you stop and think a while.

Failing Paris by Samantha Dunn (Lake Union, 2011)

“I have just erased the last vestige of the notion that the future should be charted with careful planning.”
*
Failing Paris follows an American girl in Paris for a week — through scheduling a abortion, dropping out of school, becoming a nude model for an intimidating man, meeting an intriguing fellow wanderer. It’s a moody, emotional, and gorgeous snippet of a life — very different from Samantha Dunn’s hilarious salsa memoir that made me curious to pick up her fiction!

My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta (Red Hen, 2014)

“Constantly on a journey of self-improvement, I attempt to fix my attitude, weight, spending habits, use of time, sometimes slovenliness, treatment of others, living conditions, treatment of myself, outlook on life, nutrition, resume, and the general sweating of the small stuff.”
*
Each chapter of Elissa’s intense memoir takes on a different innovative form — academic sociological study, dating profile, bibliography — yet in many ways each chapter is about the same subjects — a rape, eating disorder, mental illness, Native American identity. A heavy, riveting read.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (Namaste, 1997)

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you have chosen it. Always work with life, not against it.”
*
A few friends have recommended The Power of Now to me over the years — and though I’m not much of a spiritual person, I finally sat down with it! I especially liked what Tolle had to say about embracing change — perhaps because in working through the change pack on my Headspace meditation app. In a lot of ways, I feel like Headspace actually distilled a lot of the useful parts of this book in a more tangible way…. I finished it determined to be more present.

Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you by Janice Lee (Success and Failure Series, 2015)

“The memories congregate like / a slow-moving herd of dots.”
*
Janice’s brief work is a fragmentary piece examining Janice’s ghostly dreams of her mother, who died of a brain aneurism — alongside memories of her and philosophical quotes and ideas about memory. It’s a slim but rich text.

Kinship of Clover by Ellen Meeropol (Red Hen Press, 2017)

“I’m building a new life, one that’s all mine.”
*
I picked up Ellen’s novel at AWP earlier this year when she and I signed books together at the Red Hen Press booth — and I’ll be reading with her in Brooklyn on June 8! Kinship of Clover is about Jeremy, a college student who grows up in a commune then becomes really obsessed with plants going extinct and almost gets involved with an ecoterrorist group. Despite the subject matter, this was a calm, genial read.

Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow by Peg Alford Pursell (ELJ Editions, 2017)

“The night grows long until it’s short, and the sweetened tongue kisses the breath, and the breath is the breath is the breath.”
*
Peg’s slim volume of short prose pieces each give a glimpse of a seemingly nondescript yet poignant moment — a girl watching her mother fall while chasing a dog, a chat between strangers at a bus stop, a woman going hiking with a hole in her sock. A poetic read — and I was lucky enough to get to read with her last month at a reading for Why There Are Words — a series Peg founded!

Travels on the Dance Floor: One Man’s Journey Into the Heart of Salsa by Grevel Lindop (Andre Deutsch, 2010)

“Salsa gives you a new and different experience of your body.”
*
Since I’ve been getting back into salsa, I picked up this hard-to-get memoir — by a tall British poet guy who got so into salsa he decided to go on a 6-week trip to all the major salsa cities of the world, from Havana to Panama City to Miami. Not all the details of the ensuing trip are interesting, but it was cool to learn about how both the dance and the culture around it really varies depending on location.

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