Charles Yu, the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, is back with a collection of short stories Sorry Please Thank You. They are really good by the way. Like really good. What makes me qualified to make such a claim? Qualifications? I’ve read them, and I’ve read at least 3 other books in my life, so I’m pretty much a professional reader.

If you are not familiar with Yu’s work I think its time you check him out. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was Yu’s first novel, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a 2011 best book of the year by Time Magazine. Not to mention I thought it was awesome. In HTLSIASFU Yu is a time travel technician that floats, or speeds, or whatever through Minor Universe 31. What is his purpose? He gets people out of their time travel predicaments, cycles, loops, jams, pickles, etc. While he’s flitting about time and space saving folks he finds that he too suffers from the same cycles, loops, and melancholia of the age and might need a bit of some salvation himself.

Designer Emotion 67 is one the shorts featured in his new collection and was originally published in The Oxford American. The story begins with the CEO of PharmaLife, Inc. giving the 2050 fiscal report to its shareholders and announcing he will reveal their newest hottest drug after he’s gone over the numbers. PharmaLife has specialized in depression medications, but we are told they are moving on to bigger fish:

“Where was I? Yes. Depression. Depression has been good to us. But at this point, as you all realize, it has come to be run as an exercise in sales and marketing. We’re late in the product life cycle. The Depression-industrial complex has been built. Winning in the Depression/Suicide space these days means keeping the machine running smoothly…Depression earned three forty-two a share last year, or just over nine and a half billion dollars for PharmaLife. Not depressing at all! … Depression may have matured and become a marketing shop, but the DREAD business unit is still the domain of the engineers, … It’s an exciting time over at DREAD… We are going to cure dread by the end of the decade. And by cure, I mean, find a blockbuster drug that has a differential rate of indication greater than the margin of error in white mice that exhibit symptoms of dread. Or whatever the mouse version of dread is.”

Dread, though a big fish, is not the biggest in PharmaLife’s infinite ocean. I’m not going tell you the end, I’m not going to tell you how cool and weird and terrible Designer Emotion 67 is, because I want you to read it for yourself, I want you to experience Yu’s craftsmanship, because it is wonderfully hilarious and fun and yet frighteningly close to home.

So come by and get Sorry Please Thank You, you won’t be sorry.

(If you haven’t read HTLSIASFU you should also get that. If you have read it, well, just get it again.)

-Austen

My grandaddy, Robert Stockett, Sr., told me a Eudora Welty story once that I’ve never forgotten. It’s just about the most literary thing that’s ever happened to my family so please, if I’ve misremembered or misunderstood, don’t spoil it for me.

Grandaddy used to have what we called The Barn, which some old Jacksonians will know as Stockett Stables. It was where folks would come ride horses and drink coffee and read the paper.

Eudora liked to go down there too, which I found funny because it was mostly men who gathered on those early mornings, gossiping and running the legislature from the old rocking chairs. Eudora liked to sit and listen to the stories being told. Eudora knew how to listen.

If somebody started to tell a particularly salty story, Eudora would point to a sign she’d tacked up on the wall that read: NO CURSING. Over time, she added a few other no-no’s, but that was the one she pointed to most.

One morning, Eudora came down to the barn carrying her little beat-up blue travel typewriter- the kind that comes in a cardboard case with the floppy handle. Somebody started telling a story that was ‘right colorful,’ but Eudora didn’t point to the sign. She let those euphemisms run right on by her.

Grandaddy finally said, ‘Eudora. What’s gotten into you? What are you looking at?’

Eudora pointed to a new Royal typewriter sitting on Grandaddy’s desk. Somebody hadn’t been able to pay their horse rent and instead gave Grandaddy this brand new behemoth of a machine to settle up.

‘I’ll trade you, Robert,’ Eudora said. ‘This one for that.’

So Grandaddy, God knows why, traded his this for her that- or I hope to think, just gave it to her since he was a gentleman.

I have savored that story like a delicious secret: that the typewriter Eudora Welty wrote some of those poignantly beautiful stories on had belonged to Grandaddy– my granddaddy, the one who inspired my own stories.

‘Then she ran off to Europe to chase that boyfriend.’ And that was all I got out of him.

I beg of you, if you were a typewriter salesman in nineteen-hundred-something, and you know otherwise, don’t tell me. Please, just let me keep thinking this thing is true.

-Kathryn Stockett

———

If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa at lemuriabooks dot com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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One of the many things I worked hard to get right in Wilderness was landscape description. At the beginning of the book my character, Abel Truman, is living as a recluse on the wild northwest coast of Washington State. One of the reasons I chose to set much of the novel in that locale is the striking other quality to the landscape; to visit there—let alone live there—is alienating and strange and suits the character of Abel.

Here are some passages from Wilderness, paired with photographs of the landscape that inspired them:

“Within the bounds of his little cove stood sea-stacks weirdly canted from the waves.  Tide gnawed remnants of antediluvian islands and eroded coastal headlands, the tall stones stood monolithic and forbidding, hoarding the so by moonlight their rough, damp facings took on a soft, alien shine: purple, ghostblue and glittering in the moon- and ocean-colored gloom.  Grass and small, wind-twisted scrub pine stood from the stacks in patches…”

“All along the shore, behind the cabin and down the banks of the river, stood the dark and olden wilderness tumbling in a jade wave to the shore.  Numberless, green centuries of storm and tide had stranded massive logs of driftwood against the standing trunks so they lay in long heaps and mounds.  Strange, quiet citadels of wood, sand and stone.  Natural reliquaries encasing the dried bones of birds and fish, raccoons and seals, and the sad remains of drowned seamen carried by current and tide from Asia.  Seasons of sun over long, weary years, had turned the great logs silver, then white.  The endless ranks of wood provided the old man’s home with a natural windbreak in storm seasons, and he spent many nights awake, listening to the mournful sound of the wind at play in the tangle.”

“Their meal finished, Abel threw sand on the remains of the fire before walking with the dog out across the beach into the surf.  The massive, dark sea stacks rose from the water like strange teeth from the floor of the ocean’s jaw.  Occasionally, the setting sun would come flaring through the clouds to silhouette a tiny hogsback island farther out to sea.  The old man and the dog sat together on a boulder and watched the tide come in all around them.”

“A thick, wet mist clung to the forest at his left and a cool wind slowly tattered it.  The tide lay far to sea and the sand was crossed and recrossed with the rolling, wheel-like tracks of hermit crabs and the precise, pencil-thin prints of oystercatchers.  The smell of beached kelp and broken shells, of damp sand that had never been dry and rock pools astir with tiny fishes was as heavy as the sound of crashing surf was constant.  And wind never-ending.”

____

Join us TODAY at 5:00 for a signing and reading to follow at 5:30 with Lance Weller. Wilderness is one of our favorite books of the year and is our September pick for First Editions Club.

Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and signed first editions will be available at Lemuria for $25.

Check out Lance Weller’s blog here.

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I was born in 1965 in Everett, Washington to parents too young. I was born small but still too large for my mother and my birth was hard on her. My father, side-by-side with his father, worked the freezers of a local dairy company and to this day I feel nostalgic when I drive by a dairy factory. In the end, my parents were equal to the task of raising me and raising me well but the doing of it made inroads into them, into their lives, that scoured away what joys in being young they might otherwise have known. They came home from work tired and went to bed tired and woke in the morning tired still. I remember trailers and mobile homes and tiny apartments but little in the way of conversation or music. I remember quiet and I remember books.

By the time I was old enough to read, I felt old enough to write. I spent weekends that became weeks that, at least once, stretched to months, with my paternal grandparents where my grandmother harbored dreams of writing romance novels. I remember the books from her correspondence courses and her old typewriter that she let me practice on. My earliest memory of writing is of sitting at that typewriter tapping out short stories of Twilight Zone episodes I had watched on my grandparents’ black and white television.

At some point, I came across a picture of Hemingway at his desk. He was still in the prime of his prime, sitting in profile with his fingers upon the keys of his typewriter—you couldn’t even see the desk itself, but you just knew it was there and that it had to be either grand or just some plain table. I kept that picture in my pocket for a long time and the first birthday gift I ever remember asking for was a desk like Hemingway’s, but I never found one.

I fell in love at 20 and at 24 my heart was broken. At 25 I met the great love of my life and married her and, somewhere along the line, she finally convinced me to give up the dreary, desperate world of restaurant work to write since that was all I wanted to do. I wrote a terrible novel and then another. I wrote a few short stories that were alright and that were published and I was paid for one of them and began to feel like a real writer. I began thinking of an old man and his dog by the sea and would tell my wife stories about him before sleep.

To support us, my wife remained with restaurant work I’d abandoned and I would drive her home every night after closing. While waiting for her, I’d sit and drink coffee and I’d often see a man sitting alone in a booth with his own books. He was architect and he was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. One night, apropos of nothing, he started talking about the audacity of General Lee dividing his army in the face of the enemy at Chancellorsville. I knew nothing at all of the Civil War and he shamed me for it asking why I didn’t know the first thing about my own country. So I picked up a general history and then another and a third and then gathered books on specific battles. The old man who I’d tell my wife stories of began to take better shape, gaining a history and, finally, a name. After a summer of reading, I sat down and began to describe Abel’s shack and his dog, his rifle and his crippled arm. Slowly, the book accreted detail to itself.

I worked steadily, producing a draft and then another. I managed two trips back east to visit the battlefields for research on Abel’s war and drew on what was outside my window for his northwest world. Sometime after high school, my father introduced me to the outdoors and together we hiked in the Cascades and the Olympics and on the wild north coast of Washington State. Something stirred within me, out in the wilderness, something in the breeze and the green and the moss and the stones resonated within me. I took trips alone into the backcountry where the stars were nothing like the stars over town and the darkness seemed somehow more absolute. I twice hiked the Wonderland Trail, which circles Mount Rainier, and came off the trail once at a high place and almost died for it. On a solo hike above Mowich Lake on Rainier, a black bear surprised me as I was eating a ham sandwich and I’ve seen coyotes slinking through the blasted fields around the ruins of Mount St. Helens. And as I walked in these places, seeing these things, I was crafting sentences and paragraphs and pages. Soon enough, the manuscript gained a title, Wilderness, and Abel Truman found a home amidst the sea stacks and weird rocks of Washington’s north coast.

But then I got sick. For weeks I barely left the house and for months I wrote nothing at all. I’d had no real success for years of work. I put the book away because what faith I’d had in it and in myself was lost and they were lost a long time. I was lost a long time. Eventually, I stumbled across a call for manuscripts for a magazine dedicated to Lincoln’s literary essence and recalled I’d once had a single paragraph in Wilderness (long since stripped out) where Abel watched the lonesome funeral train pass by in the distance. Finding the fragment, I rewrote it, researching the train’s route and making a story of Abel encountering it and, just like that, Abel came back to me. The writing was easy and it felt good; my fingers felt good doing it and my health improved. I sent the story in and it was accepted right away which gave me the confidence I needed to give Wilderness a final rewrite and sent it out into the world.

But I’m still looking for the right desk.

-Lance Weller

Join us Wednesday at 5:00 for a signing and reading to follow at 5:30 with Lance Weller. Wilderness is one of our favorite books of the year and is our September pick for First Editions Club.

Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and signed first editions will be available at Lemuria for $25.

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The reviews have been mixed for Padgett Powell’s newest novel, You & Me. The dust jacket description starts the commentary off, in fact, by calling itself “a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot.”

Yet all the reviewers seem to be saying the same thing about the book, only some reactions to it are “oh, brother,” and some are “how delightful.” I prepared myself to be a little annoyed, I will admit, by the novel’s structure, which is comprised entirely of dialogue without attribution (in Godot, because it’s a play, we at least know who is speaking at all times), and the days? hours? that pass between the conversations are marked with an ampersand “chapter heading.”

The structure as it is leaves the reader with little more narrative flow than his last novel, An Interrogative Mood, which was comprised entirely of questions. Some reviewers have begun to quibble with Powell’s definition of “novel” now that, with You & Me, he has shown that he will stretch its literal definition (our English word comes from the Italian novella, “new,” “news,” or “short story of something new”) to its limits.

The reviewers all seem to mention You & Me’s shortest chapter, which reads

Dude.

What?

Nothing.

& one says: “Those three words are pretty much this slight and flatulent book in microcosm. It’s as if the author had put some ribs on the grill but forgot to light the charcoal.” (Dwight Garner, New York Times)

& another says: “Take it for a synopsis of the novel, an existentialist joke or an all-American salute to Beckett, in context, it thumps like a punch line.” (Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle)

But. 
But.
But. I loved reading this book. The experience of losing yourself in a novel is what we’re all after, after all, right? All of us literary fiction readers are somewhat dorky, we all just need to admit it, and Powell’s book facilitates a total geek out: there are references to pop culture and politics, all tangled up with profound ideas on what it means to grow old, to lose yourself to ennui and depression, to die. The old codgers toss jokes back and forth with sometimes dizzying wit; they reference themselves, riff on their own flaws, and complain about their lives. And it’s all wrapped in packaging that is nothing if not postmodern.

Those who are less than flattering about Powell’s novel, I believe, secretly loved it. Yet, because they’re “literary critics,” it’s their job to pick it apart. Yes, the novel is weird. But its weirdness doesn’t get in its own way, and by the end I was super happy to have been introduced to a very talented writer.

Introduce yourself to Padgett Powell on Tuesday, September 4th in Lemuria’s Dotcom building, where he will present and read from his novel, You & Me. Live music by Beth Mckee, a southern musician promoting her second album, Next to Nowhere. The event starts at 5 o’clock.