November 2, 2015, Ariel Dorfman, “The Gospel According to García”: A nameless substitute teacher enters a classroom of twelve pupils, whose teacher, García, has been relieved of his position. ¶ The author employs an effective but limiting first person plural, by which readers only know what the class tells them, namely that García is a charismatic teacher, who has left them a “gospel” of behavior, whose precepts alone will help them to survive their futures. For example, he tells them, “Never speak . . .You cannot capture anyone until you have heard his voice.” And there are others: ferret out the weakest link; never apologize if you haven’t done anything wrong. As a result readers learn all about the absent character García by way of his previous actions and words in this classroom of students who are on the verge of graduating—if only the sub will evaluate the half of twelve exams remaining ungraded, a task he seems to find more intimidating than even the silence which enshrouds the classroom, the precept García’s students seem to have most readily accepted. The exam question? Why is indifference worse than murder? This story begins in the past tense but evolves to the present as if the class might still be seated in that classroom, even to the last sentence. “We remain absolutely silent and wait.” Dorfman’s most recent book, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, came out in 2011.
Illustrator, Edel Rodriguez.
NEXT TIME: My Book World: Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Isherwood, Christopher. All the Conspirators: A Novel by Christopher Isherwood. New York: New Directions, (1928), 1958.  
 
All the Conspirators is Isherwood's first novel, published when he is twenty-four in 1928, although he later reveals he’d been working on it since he was twenty-one. It is a painful read, not because he was a poor writer. It’s just that now you know he’s going to become so much better!
 
At first, I am confused. I can’t seem to locate any thread, any continuity holding the novel together. Then I realize, of course, however misguided the author’s purpose may be, that this may be his intention. He’s creating a narrative of a young man largely like him, chapters strung together, almost as journal entries—consisting of interior monologue, unattributed dialogue, and sections that are epistolary in nature.
 
The protagonist, Philip Lindsay, is in the battle of his life with a mother who has very little sympathy for his youthful desires: leaving a perfectly fine job (though he hates it) to return to the family estate and do nothing but paint and write. The novel is told alternatingly between his and three other characters. There is no central narrator or storyteller, the author asking readers to put all the elements together themselves.
 
Isherwood, it seems, is attempting to forge a new kind of novel, or if not, at least improve upon those that have recently come before him. He might have, at least, tried to master the traditional elements of a novel before experimenting so severely with point of view, inner monologue, and the rejection of traditional grammar, so much to the point that many times the text doesn’t make sense. The problem isn’t that Isherwood shouldn’t have attempted such a novel; it is that perhaps he could have used the steady hand of a different editor, a knowledgeable one, who would guide and advise him on how to achieve his goals.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

October 26, 2015, Lesley Nneka Arimah, “Who Will Greet You at Home”: Ogechi, a young Nigerian woman, makes dolls of various materials until she can construct one that will live of its own accord. ¶ This delightful myth—one almost spun off another embedded within the story—expresses what women must experience during actual motherhood:

As in all myths, this one reflects certain values or morals to be passed down to others—in this case, perhaps the trials that mothers experience bringing their children to life and seeing that they are made of the right fiber to live a long and productive life. All of the babies in this narrative are, indeed, strung together like dolls. As in life, only the undying devotion of their mothers can fully bring them to life. This young author recently has published  the story “Light” in Granta and is currently working on a collection, as well as a novel.
Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Cortese, Katie. Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories. New York: ELJ Publications, 2015.

I liken Cortese’s short shorts to prose poems, narratives that are super compressed, requiring standard elements of a story to unfold quickly. You must pay attention to the cues and clues because they come up fast, like road signs on a ninety MPH romp through the countryside. At the same time, such clues are, at times, embedded a bit deeper, so you must, simultaneously, slow down. Cortese has created forty-four stories, which encompass great wit, pathos, and metaphoric imagery. She divides her collection into three parts: Maidenhood, Motherhood, and Matronhood.
 
In Maidenhood Cortese has no problem portraying the subjects of abuse or death: a girl drowns in the first sentence of “The Junior Superheroes Club of Tallahassee, Florida”; in “Best Laid Plans,” a baby boy strangles on a piece of hotdog; a PE teacher is shot, “not quite killing him” (16), in “Food, Shelter, Water.” Beginning in this section you notice a smooth linkage between the stories, shifting with the ease of an automatic transmission. For example, from the first story to the second, there exists a similar female voice of a certain age, coping with loss; later in the collection, an image in one story may be referenced in an adjacent or later story. Throughout most of these narratives lingers a menace: something bad is about to happen, and yet we’re pleased when it doesn’t. Biting satire, as well, becomes one of the author’s greatest tools: in “The Sum of Her Parts,” a younger sister copes with her eating disorder by storing her various body parts in jars in her room, while continuing to carry on a normal life; and “letluvintrin®” lampoons a drug that treats “Singlitis.”
 
One of the most memorable stories in Motherhood may be “Insatiable,” in which a woman, who’s lived through seventeen infertile years, finally gives birth to a child—offering up the experience by way of hyperbole. “Now I was poisoned by love, heavy without daughter, beaten and weak, drowning, insensible to everyone else . . . .” (98). Cortese does not let up in the closing section, where the mother portrays her new infant’s lust for life: “She claimed his nose, which she loved to pull, then the rest of him. The cat, then the collie. She ate the front porch, then the neighbor’s split-level ranch. She swallows bathrobes off my back as soon as I can buy them” (98). What a wonderful way to express joy!
 
In Matronhood, Cortese pens “Gliese 581g,” a delightfully fanciful story in which she draws certain parallels between the celestial model that Harmony, an astronaut, designs on her laptop of 581g, with an affair she’s had with her married scientist partner. By way of the model planet, Harmony is indicating that the heat and cold of her affair are similar to the heat and cold of 581g, the galactic distance Harmony must now feel, as her partner leaves the lab to return to his wife.
 
Cortese has taken a literary form fairly recent in its development and pushed its boundaries in gentle, yet startlingly ways. As a reader I hunger to see more from this exciting writer and scholar in her third year of teaching creative writing at Texas Tech University, and I believe I won’t have to wait long.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

October 19, 2015, Ben Marcus, “Cold Little Bird”: Ten-year-old Jonah abruptly indicates to his parents, Martin and Rachel, that he longer loves them, no longer needs or desires their love and attention. ¶ What is more, this very intelligent boy twists the dagger once he’s inflicted the initial pain. He becomes more like an adult, helping out with this younger brother, to the degree, however, that he begins to indoctrinate the six-year-old, is able to tame the boy’s tantrum at the dinner table. Jonah is so skilled in his calculations that he blackmails his father into not hugging him, by threatening to report him to the school officials for touching him inappropriately. The narrative blows wide open when Martin finds Jonah reading a book blaming 9-1-1 on the Jews. Because the family is nominally Jewish, and because Jonah’s sympathies seem to lie with the lunatic author of the book, the boy’s parents decide it’s time to seek a therapist. The boy’s cold, calculating ways are not resolved in this chilling but perceptive story except perhaps by way of the last sentence, which, in a sense, gives the reader a clue:
 
“On the cover a boy, arms outspread, was gripping wires in each hand, and his whole body was glowing.”
 
The author edited New American Stories, an anthology that came out in July.
Photograph by Tina Winkhaus.
NEXT TIME: My Book World—Katie Cortese's Girl Power

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind 1929-1939. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
 
My interest in this book was aroused after viewing a 2011 BBC production bearing the same title. Of course, reading the book version of a work is always more satisfying, though I do believe good films can spark interest in doing further research. The text is an appealing one for several reasons.
 
An older Christopher Isherwood (seventy-two) writes about these ten years in the third person, as if this “Christopher Isherwood” is one of his fictional characters. At the same time, any passage in which he’s unsure about a fact or date or is definitely speaking retrospectively he employs the first person. I suppose the practice helps Isherwood to separate himself from the past, from the time when he may have acted as a callow yet, at times, callous fellow.

This is the callow part. It is indeed a lovely way of using the third person: “Christopher” is Isherwood’s manifestation as a young man. He will never again be quite like he is in 1928, age twenty-four, away from his home in England for the very first time, frozen in history, just like a fictional character.

But Isherwood makes some startling admissions, too, one in particular concerning his feelings toward Heinz, a young man with whom he shares a life for five years, mostly in Berlin. When it comes time to help Heinz escape Nazi Germany (and conscription), many complications arise—including lengthy and expensive legal battles—that ultimately disallow it. They must part ways. Even though Isherwood draws on his diary for this passage, it is nonetheless very telling:

Why this interest in a largely British writer (even though he becomes an American citizen and spends more than half of his life in Los Angeles), born over a hundred years ago, and, except for garnering high praise from other fine writers, has not gained due recognition for his literary contributions? Perhaps this passage from the late Virginia Woolf’s diary sums up my response to his work:

Indeed. And for this reason alone, over the course of the next twelve months, I am making it my goal to read (and re-read, in some instances) all twenty works in Mr. Isherwood’s oeuvre. Wish me luck!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015
NEXT TUESDAY: Profile of Katie Cortese's new book, Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

October 12, 2015, Rivka Galchen, “Usl at the Stadium”: Twenty-eight-year-old Usl, a man who evaluates used gold for a living, is caught sleeping by the Jumbotron camera at a Yankees game, and becomes the focus of widespread Internet harassment. ¶ In this compact story author Galchen captures the essence of fame, the bad kind, for what can be worse, it seems, than nodding off at a Yankees game. Her prose is airtight, waterproof, solid, not a word or thought out of place. You trust it. You’re in it from start to finish, from the point that Usl’s ever-loving mother defends him publicly to where his boss Gregory poses this philosophical nugget: “The question isn’t, Why is there evil? The question is, Why is there good . . . Why is there spring and love and barbecue? Why is there ever an unrequired kind act?” (91). Galchen sets up her metaphoric imagery without beating the reader over the head, giving Usl the ability to recognize real gold from the fake and eventually the ability to recognize real friends, real people, from the fake. His mother texts him, via automated delivery, as automated as her love: “Gold is unaffected by oxygen at any temperature” (89). Because her son is golden, she’s saying, he will survive this onslaught, will, in fact, rise from a certain fire to be stronger than ever. Rivka Galchen is the author of American Innovations, a collection of stories released in 2014.
Illustration by Paul Sahre.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Isherwood, Christopher. Diaries Volume One: 1939-1960. New York: Vintage, 1996.
 
First of all, these diaries are beautifully and ably edited by Katherine Bucknell, providing a fascinating introduction of over fifty pages. In addition to the journals themselves, Bucknell provides an Isherwood chronology, glossary, and index at the end. She divides the journal into three parts: The Emigration, January 19,1939–December 31, 1944; The Postwar Years, January 1, 1945–April 13, 1956; and The Late Fifties, April 14, 1956–August 26, 1960. The voice of Isherwood evolves from that of a solid mid-career writer to that of an “emeritus professor,” beginning his senior years with as many projects as he can handle.
 
I’ve always felt a certain affinity for writer Christopher Isherwood (born in Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire, England) 1904-1986, for a number of reasons. Largely because he is one of the first important writers of his generation to write fiction with gay characters—with gay love lives, as if it is a normal situation (and it is)—I’ve looked to his writing for a certain guidance. Through his well-traveled life he demonstrates a certain brand of courage. He never seems to hide who he is from the world at large—even the Hitler’s Gestapo as he lives in Berlin in his twenties. He doesn’t marry a woman as cover, as many of his colleagues and friends do. He openly loves and shares a domestic life in a major way with at least two men, three, if you count one relationship that is rather ill-fated. The latter one, his partnership with artist Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior, endures from 1953 until Isherwood’s death in 1986.
 
I also feel "close" to Isherwood because of the career he chooses, one that is rather skin-of-your-teeth at times. He writes the projects he wants to, not the ones that necessarily earn him the most money. Granted, he does work in Hollywood, writing and co-writing screenplays for any number of films. Even with regard to these, he seems to turn down the less interesting projects or the ones in which he knows working with certain personalities will be difficult. He lives by his wits but also by a strong artistic intuition, and by his own well-honed critical skills. Seems that he is seldom wrong in assessing the work of others, and his own, as well. Through reading this 1050 page document, I’ve attained yet another view of Christopher Isherwood, and that is as human being. At one point, in the 1950s, he and Bachardy have around $6,000 in the bank (a little over $50,000 in today’s currency). You can’t get more skin-of-your-teeth than that.
 
Isherwood begins keeping diaries when he is twenty; however, those written prior to this time he himself destroys. He is in his mid-thirties when he begins keeping the series of diaries that are featured in this volume. It is also at this time that he begins publishing, in particular, the novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains. This volume of diaries is a blend of many features.
 
Isherwood writes of his daily travails with lovers, physical ailments, which seem to grow in number as he ages, tussles with film studios, accounts of social events, both formal and informal. From the limited amount of Isherwood’s fiction that I’ve read (The Berlin Stories, Down There on a Visit, and A Single Man), I wouldn’t expect to encounter a person encumbered with a number of insecurities: his health, his weight, his looks, his mostly tentative drug use (he has a real penchant for mescaline), alcohol consumption, driving, finances. Yet you name it, and he seems to fret over it. Daily. At the same time, there emerges from these journals a man who is quite serious about his work. I paraphrase some of his oft-repeated wording: Didn’t write today. Too hung over from last night’s party. Wrote four pages on novel today. Want to write 100 pages by my birthday. He is as critical of his own work, when it doesn’t come together, as he is of others’. He lives for his art. Even in his fifties, to insure an income, he accepts film writing offers and part-time teaching opportunities at various colleges and universities in the Los Angeles area, where he chooses to make his home following his naturalization as a US citizen. In fact, an important part of each entry seems to be a report of the weather (again paraphrased). Went to the beach today. It was hot. It was cold. Still hot. Still foggy. Absolutely gorgeous. These comments could well be representative of his internal weather. At any rate, the Diaries provide any writer with plenty of positive and negative examples of how to be successful writer.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

October 5, 2015, Tim Parks, “Vespa”: Mark, a British art student, loses his Vespa by way of the motor’s theft, and spends a frustrating period attempting to recalibrate the equilibrium of his life. ¶ In some ways this story is a timeless one. Young lad, Mark, forms a relationship with Brazilian immigrant girl, Yasmin, whom he trusts completely—even after his parents and the police point out what may be her obvious faults, one of which may be a lack of trustworthiness. One really can’t tell, which makes the story intriguing. Mark seems like the kind of person who can detect things quite clearly, like the obese artist’s model whom he must draw week after week, every flabby curve. And at the same time Mark appears to have a blind faith in Yasmin’s fidelity, even after one senses she may know a bit too much about a stolen and then reappearing Vespa motor. ¶ The story ends with a rather charming ultimatum Mark offers without ever saying a word to Yasmin. Either jump on the back of my Vespa and join me in my life, or stay with your friends who are just a bit too comfortable with missing Vespa parts. Tim Parks’s Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books was published earlier this year.
Illustrator, Sunday Büro

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!