Freedom suite
February 1st marks National Freedom Day in the United States. Initiated in the 1940s, the holiday commemorates Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which banned slavery. Its intent is to “promote good feelings, harmony, and equal opportunity among all citizens and to remember that the United States is a nation dedicated to...
Spats
The dogs are scratching at the kitchen door. How long, Lydia thinks, has she been lost in the thought of her rival dead? She passes her hand over her eyes, an unconscious effort to push the hot red edge off everything she sees, and goes to the door to let them in. When Ivan confessed...
A wager
One evening in Toronto, the gods Apollo and Hermes were at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern. Apollo had allowed his beard to grow until it reached his clavicle. Hermes, more fastidious, was clean-shaven, but his clothes were distinctly terrestrial: black jeans, a black leather jacket, a blue shirt. They had been drinking, but it wasn’t the...
David Gates: Mixed emotions
David Gates’ smart, scary and intoxicatingly funny novel Jernigan, about the destructive downward spiral of a restless, alcoholic recent widower, received ecstatic reviews when first published in 1991, but since fell on hard times in the UK. Serpent’s Tail has now reissued Jernigan alongside Gates’ first new book in sixteen years, the story collection A Hand Reached...
Jami Attenberg: How to be
Jami Attenberg’s new novel Saint Mazie tells the fictionalised story of one of Manhattan’s real-life heroes of the early 20th century: Mazie Phillips-Gordon, the brassy, big-hearted proprietress of the Venice movie theatre in the Bowery who spent most of her adult life helping the homeless. In 1940 Joseph Mitchell profiled Mazie for the New Yorker – a...
Philip Teir: Question everything
Philip Teir’s debut novel The Winter War chips away at Scandinavia’s much-trumpeted model society by examining individual lives in a well-to-do but barely functional Finnish-Swedish Helsinki family as they scrabble for meaning and identity. Max Paul is a retired lecturer on the point of turning 60, who is working on a biography of pioneering sociobiologist...
J. Robert Lennon: Short, weird stuff
We talk to the author of Familiar about his new story collection See You in Paradise, the story ‘The Wraith’ (published here), music, adaptations, and other creative engagements. MR: ‘The Wraith’ touches on a lack of political engagement, our complex and disturbing inner lives, the disabling terror of depression, a refusal to accept the anodyne, the...
The wraith
Carl Blunt was fully aware when he married her that Lurene was an unhappy woman, and he’d had no illusions about the possibility of her ever changing. She had told him as much when they met: “I’m not happy,” she’d said, on their second date, a dinner followed by a walk along the lake, “and...
Gifted
When the nurses handed me my son, I couldn’t believe how perfect he was. Ben was so robust, nearly fifty inches tall, including horns and tail. Even the doula was impressed. “My God,” she said. “My holy God in heaven.” Alan and I knew instantly that our child was exceptional. He was just so adorable,...
Lightning strikes
I don’t remember a time when I was not spinning tales of one kind or another. In long arduous sermons I’d cover my notebook in handwriting so cramped I never knew later who or what I’d conjured up; and lying in my bunk bed with my sister restless above me I’d be commanded to tell...
Nicholson Baker’s smokes and mirrors
In Travelling Sprinkler, Nicholson Baker revisits floundering poet Paul Chowder, the protagonist of 2009’s The Anthologist, and finds him abidingly disengaged. Pining for ex-girlfriend Roz, he seeks solace in protest songs, political hand-wringing, garden implements and other passing distractions, including a desire to be taken seriously as a cigar aficionado. Through it all, he has...
The conversation
Before my novel The Death of the Poet was published, I was used to experiencing certain sorts of conversation about writing. After all, that’s what I do for a living – talking and writing, I mean. Talking, as in radio; writing, as in novels; talking about writing, as in critical discussion. For a good number...
