Last Chance At Love! (& More N.C. Events)

Today — Wednesday, September 16 — marks your last chance to catch N.C. readings by contributors to the great new anthology, Love Is A Four-Letter Word: True Stories Of Break-Ups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts. Editor Michael Taeckens and contributors Margaret Sartor and Patty Van Norman will each read from their contributions to the book at two locations: 3:30 p.m. at the Bull’s Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill and 7:30 p.m. at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books. (And there’s a rumor at the book’s Facebook page that Peppermint Schnapps will be involved…. We make no promises, but encourage you to become a fan of the page anyway.)

If you’ve missed coverage of the book, check out my interview with Taeckens here. One of the latest reviews of the book is from the Oxford American‘s September “Books We Love” column, and a survey of other reviews can be found at the book’s own webpage here.

If you don’t have the book yet: Get it. If you have the chance to make the readings: Go.

Trust me on this. This anthology is love at first read.

MORE N.C. EVENTS

On Thursday, September 17, Bull’s Head Bookshop and Quail Ridge Books host a similar one-two combo, so to speak, when each store welcomes Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, founders of of the indie record label Merge Records and popular pop-punk band Superchunk, with their new book, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label that Got Big and Stayed Small — same times as the readings above, but new day for all.

Also on Thursday evening, over at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop, Marianne Gingher (interviewed here) joins contributors Lawrence Naumoff, Joe Ashby Porter, Randall Kenan, Bland Simpson, and Elizabeth Spencer, for a reading from the terrific anthology Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-five of North Carolinas Finest Writers. That event begins at 7 p.m.

And on Friday evening, September 18, Quail Ridge Books welcomes Adriana Trigiani for a 7:30 p.m. reading from her latest novel, Viola In Reel Life.

For a complete schedule of events in the Triangle and Eastern North Carolina, check out the MetroBooks Calendar here.

Marianne Gingher On “Long Story Short”

Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers offers a concise, comprehensive, and compulsively readable collection of short-short stories. Concise on two counts: In total, the stories number less than 200 pages, and the longest of the stories is less than 1,700 words (the shortest is a mere 95). Comprehensive: The authors featured here make up a who’s who of writers with ties to the Old North State, including Russell Banks, Doris Betts, Will Blythe, Wendy Brenner, Orson Scott Card, Fred Chappell, Angela Davis-Gardner, Sarah Dessen, Pamela Duncan, Pam Durban, Clyde Edgerton, Philip Gerard, Gail Godwin, Randall Kenan, John Kessel, Michael Malone, Doug Marlette, Margaret Maron, Jill McCorkle, Lydia Millet, Robert Morgan, Michael Parker, Bland Simpson, Lee Smith, June Spence, Elizabeth Spencer, and Daniel Wallace, just to sample the list of contributors. And as for compulsively readable: Despite the pile of books I should have read first, as soon as Long Story Short arrived in the mail, I couldn’t resist reading at least one of the stories. Since that one was so short, I tried another. And then a third. And, as with a box of bon-bons, before I knew it….

The anthology, edited by Marianne Gingher (who also contributes a story) and published by the University of North Carolina Press, is a timely one. While Gingher points out in her introduction that short-shorts are as old as Aesop, there seems to be a growing trend toward the popularity of very short fiction in all of its forms: flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, even twitter fiction and hint fiction. While many of the stories in this collection tend toward the traditional, to my mind, the book as a whole offers an array of different storytelling strategies and narrative structures, and they’re short enough that you’re able to re-read them easily to figure out how they work. Pam Durban’s “Island,” for example, struck me as so marvelous when I read it the first time that I turned around and read it again, aloud, to my wife. (And the stories are ripe for discussion too: Tara (a flash fiction writer herself) and I disagreed about whether Durban’s piece was as effective as it could be — where the heart of it was, where it might have been cut further, how it all played out.)

Today (Sunday, September 13), Gingher debuted the new collection on the closing day of the North Carolina Literary Festival, and tonight the book will be the focus of the Chapel Hill Public Library Foundation’s 50th anniversary, but even if you miss those events, there are plenty more opportunities to catch readings by the contributors. (See a full list at the bottom of this post.) In advance of the NCLF, Gingher and I talked about the book via email, and I’m grateful for her time (especially in the midst of all the festival’s busy-ness!) and glad to share our interview here.

NC Literary Review: New Issue, New Look

The North Carolina Literary Review has just announced the publication of its 2009 issue, boasting a focus on N.C. drama and a smart new design! 

As always, NCLR offers a combination of scholarly criticism and creative works. For example, this issue includes both a recently discovered interview with Paul Green and the text of White Dresses, one of Green’s plays; and  the balance of the drama section includes both critical perspectives on works by Tennessee Williams (whose Clothes for a Summer Hotel was set in Asheville), Elizabeth Spencer, and Jim Grimsley, and insider views on the state’s history of “musician’s theater” by none other than Bland Simpson himself, and original plays by June Guralnick, Richard Krawiec, Kat Meads, and Sam Post. 

Beyond that focus on drama, the new issue also covers the full range of genres: an interview with Betty Adcock, a review of one of her poetry collections, and a sample of her own poetry; a short story by Malcolm Campbell, winner of last year’s Doris Betts Prize in short fiction; an interview with first-time novelist William Conescu (also interviewed by me in Metro Magazine), and much more. I’m proud to have an essay of my own included here as well, discussing mystery novelist John Hart‘s three books, The King of Lies, Down River, and The Last Child.

In all, a great issue, even without my bias in being included in its contents! I can’t wait to work my way through it, and glad to encourage it here.