BOOKS: APRIL

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent books that have knocked our respective socks off.

STREET SHADOWS: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption
by Jerald Walker
(Bantam, 2010)

Elegant, absorbing, transcendent. An improbable but true tale of how intelligence, education, and writing transformed a young man's path of self-destruction (guns, gangs, ghettos) into an honorable life. The pressure of environment, stereotypes, and self-defeatism can crush the spirit; at twenty-two, Jerald Walker was a drug addict, a high-school dropout, and a criminal—a thug from the Chicago projects, destined to die young—but a perceptual shift liberates him. As well-crafted as it is insightful, this book is a masterpiece.

LINES WE LIKED: "I was surprised when I reached twenty, amazed to see twenty-five. Then I was twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-five, and now forty, a college professor living far from Chicago's killing fields, but I still had not been able to shake the feeling that a violent, premature death was my due."

—CAF

UNFORGIVABLE
by Philippe Djian
(Simon & Schuster, 2010)

In his latest literary thriller, Philippe Djian, the French writer whose juicy, torrid novel became the juicy, torrid film 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue, starring the hypnotic pixie Béatrice Dalle), takes on an older protagonist, an irritable and irritating sixty-year-old gent, un écrivain, who manages to inspire a smidgen of sympathy (he saw his wife and daughter killed in a car accident) until his narration turns deliciously unreliable. It may not be as sexy as 37°2, but UNFORGIVABLE draws you into a web of poisonous relationships (man and second wife, man and daughter, man and boy he enlists to spy on his wife) and, mais, bien sûr—it all ends wickedly.

LINES WE LIKED: "Then I sat down in an armchair with the books section and very soon began to boil inwardly: this process was triggered weekly, each page being a source of anger, incredulity, despondency; each page fully deserving of being chucked into the wastepaper basket, were it not for a few authors, here and there, who, miraculously, really were worthy of interest; powerful, innovative, and uncompromising writers, who alone were worth the effort."

—CAF

AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND
by Brock Clarke
(Algonquin, 2008—paperback edition)

The tale of Sam Pulsifer, a self-described, lifelong "bumbler"—in addition to arsonist, murderer, amateur detective, and budding memoirist/novelist—is both a razor-sharp satire of all things literary and a laugh-out-loud front-porch read. We're looking forward to catching Clarke at the Arkansas Literary Festival, on Saturday, April 10, as he shares a panel with local fave Kevin Brockmeier. 

LINES WE LIKED: "The memoir section, it turned out, was the biggest section by far in the whole bookstore and was, in its own way, like the Soviet Union of literature, having mostly gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of fiction and poetry.... After browsing for a while, I knew why it had to be so big: who knew there was so much truth to be told, so much advice to give, so many lessons to teach and learn? Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?"

—SCA

THIS IS JUST EXACTLY LIKE YOU
by Drew Perry
(Viking, 2010)

In Drew Perry's first novel, thirtysomething protagonist Jack Lang negotiates the demands of suburban domesticity—holding together a crumbling marriage, raising a child with autism, managing a mulch-and-tree business, taking on over-the-top home-improvement projects—with varying degrees of success. Despite his quixotic blunders, Jack is believable as an everyman for whom adult responsibility is a daily struggle. Most poignant are Jack's tender, if bewildered, interactions with his son, Hen, a six-year-old savant who emerges from his shell, under the tutelage of Jack's coworker, as a fluent Spanish-speaker. Jack's good intentions don't quite pave the road to Hell, but they do mastermind the construction of a "backyard sidewalk tricycle racetrack" for Hen, accented with fiberglass crustaceans rescued from a defunct mini-golf course. Ultimately, Perry's debut is as charming, as touching, and as odd as Jack's magnum opus.

LINES WE LIKED: "Jack is naked and tilted headfirst into a closet, looking into a hole that leads into the crawlspace, hitting a rat with a wok. He stands back up. His hurt toe is throbbing, maybe broken. But the rat is gone. He has run the rat off. He's a conquering hero."

—SCA

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING: 1977, BASEBALL, POLITICS, AND THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF A CITY
by Jonathan Mahler
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005)

Mahler's many-faceted account of the infamous New York City summer of 1977 is a must-read for those who wouldn't mind a little political history with their baseball literature. The title, lifted from Howard Cosell's remark during game two of the 1977 World Series, epitomizes the apocalyptic feel of a city in turmoil. Lest we forget, this was the year of Mr. October's ascent, the heatwave blackout resulting in thousands of arrests, the Son of Sam murders, and the launch of the mayoral contest that eventually landed Ed Koch in office. Considering the specter of Wall Street collapse, and MLB Opening Day here at last, Mahler's book makes for aptly timed reading. Mahler appears at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock, on Saturday, April 10th.

LINES WE LIKED: "They met at a bar called the Banana Boat. Reggie showed up in a windbreaker, which he promptly ditched, revealing a blue T-shirt on which the word superstar! was spelled out in silver letters across the chest. It was from the TV show that he hosted, but the implication was clear."

—NE

BURNING BRIGHT
by Ron Rash
(Ecco, 2010)

There may not be any writer who conveys mood and builds suspense as sharply as Ron Rash. It often only takes two or three sentences, sometimes fewer, to be captivated. "Dead Confederates," a story about grave robbers searching for Civil War memorabilia, begins this way: "I never cared for Wesley Davidson when he was alive and seeing him beside me laid out dead didn't much change that."

Those familiar with Rash will again be greeted by his straightforward prose, balanced and clear. The stories in his collection Burning Bright are humane, despite the harsh surroundings, drab lives, and revolting personal choices. Much is made of his use of the imposing Appalachian terrain, which largely serves as the setting in Burning Bright, but Rash's true gifts are his haunting characters, people who may be down, but can never be counted out.

LINES WE LIKED: "Marcie had not been to church in months, had not prayed for even longer than that. But she did now. She shut her closed eyes tighter, trying to open a space inside herself that might offer up all of what she feared and hoped for, brought forth with such fervor it could not help but be heard. She prayed for rain." (From "Burning Bright")

—MB

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
(Crown Publishing Group, 2010) 

Henrietta Lacks gave (or, as her family asserts, was robbed of) a very unusual cancerous tumor at a time when doctors routinely took cells without asking. Her cells were the first to multiply in culture, becoming the "immortal" HeLa cell line. HeLa research led to the development of the polio vaccine and in vitro fertilization, cloning, gene mapping, and advanced understanding of cell-culture contamination. But no one in her family knew Henrietta's cells were still alive until twenty-five years after her death. This account interweaves the history of the HeLa cell line with personal stories: Those of the real Henrietta Lacks, those of her daughter Deborah, and the mythical form that the cells take on in Deborah's imagination, as she struggles to understand that a part of the mother she lost as a child is still, in some ways, living.

LINES WE LIKED: "The more Deborah struggled to understand her mother's cells, the more HeLa research terrified her. [...] When she found out scientists had been using HeLa cells to study viruses like AIDS and Ebola, Deborah imagined her mother eternally suffering the symptoms of each disease: bone-crushing pain, bleeding eyes, suffocation."

—MF

Photographs by Southern Girl.