On "North Of" by Marie-Helene Bertino (5479 words) *****

This is my favorite story from Bertino's marvelous collection. It involves a woman bringing Bob Dylan home to visit her family--a mom who is clueless as to who Dylan is and a brother whose growing hatred of life doesn't allow him even to enjoy meeting a visit by his idol. What I like so much about it is the mix of absurdity--that someone could, on a seeming whim, bring home one of the greatest rock stars of all time (or the president or whomever)--and folks around deal with it so utterly nonchalantly. The narrator shows Dylan all the places she hung out as a child, in a sense sharing her life story. At one moment, someone recognizes Dylan--but as some other star. And yet, behind all of this is a familial relationship that is falling apart and that gives the story its true heart. Read it here at Electric Literature's Recommended Reading.

On "Safe as Houses" by Marie-Helene Bertino ****

Winner of the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Bertino's collection shines with stories often tongue-in-cheek and usually a bit odd in their telling, if not their focus on the strange narrator. The best stories in the collection manage to present psychological ideas in very literal ways.

Perhaps the best of examples of this ("This Is Your Will to Live")--though it is better as an idea than in execution--involves a salesman literally laying his heart on a platter for a woman. Another example--and a truly fun story to boot--is "The Idea of Marcel," which involves a couple going out with their ideal selves, that is, with the person they would like to date instead of the person the person is. How far are we willing to stray from ideal for a relationship? And how much of an ideal fades simply because we get to know a person? There is a certain joy in a first date admittedly.

In "Free Ham" a family deals with the burning down of a house. "Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours" is more a collection of great lines than a story, which the narrator admits right from the beginning. And the lines are good enough that the "story" remains compelling enough to complete reading. In "North Of," probably my favorite story in the collection, a woman brings Bob Dylan home to visit her family--a mom who is clueless as to who Dylan is and a brother whose growing hatred of life doesn't allow him even to enjoy meeting a visit by his idol. In "Great, Wondrous" young folks perform secret superhero-like miracles at a college, at the cost of a life. "Safe as Houses" involves burglars who break into homes not to steal things of monetary value but to break things of emotional value so that families will come to appreciate one another. And in "Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph" involves a gal trying to get over a boyfriend by living in a convent and teaching Catholic school.

On "The Edge of Water" by Kevin Jones (2891 words) ***

There's a kind of schtick that goes along with most fiction, a style that tells you this is a made-up story rather than nonfiction or even autobiography. Contemporary fiction exists in this strange land between the film and history. I'm going to tell you a story in words. I'm going to use descriptions to show how well I can use them, and I'm going to drop in lines of dialogue that will be used in the movie adaptation. I'm also going to use narrative in a format that is sort of like reading about what happened last night at the riots, but it's going to be much more full of detail about minor things that don't matter--and I'm going to make them matter.

That's why, an opening like that of Jones's "Edge of Water," is so pleasant. It had, for me, the feel of authenticity. I see now that I was being manipulated, as in any fiction, but starting off, I was launched immediately into a voice. This, I felt, is a real person writing these words, telling me about his recovery from his accident during the Iraq War. That voice is a start, and with it, Jones carries readers through to the tale's confrontational end. Read it here at r.k.v.r.y.

On "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" by Wallace Stegner ***

This book essentially recounts the life of John Wesley Powell, especially as it involves his work as an explorer, geologist, and Washington administrator. I was drawn to it because Powell is referenced in so many books about western water rights and because it was written by Wallace Stegner, whose work has not previously disappointed.

Perhaps had I not had such high expectations I wouldn't have been disappointed by this one either. What you get is a hagiographic portrait of the man's work, one that doesn't seem near as interesting as Stegner's random thoughts on the west in his book of essays Where the Bluebird Sings to Lemonade Springs or as in depth and nuanced as the character studies that show up in his novels.

Powell's claim to fame in water books is that he set up the hundredth meridian as the border between wet and dry land in the United States. In the east, there would never be worries; in the west, there would be nothing but. But of course, Powell did a whole lot more than that.

The book starts with a short summary of his earlier life, which included a stint in the army during the Civil War, during which he lost half of one arm (not that he let that stop him from rejoining). Afterward, he set off on an exploration of western rivers. The description of his first descent of the Green and Colorado proves exciting at times indeed, if a bit long winded. Much time is also spent disparaging Powell's detractors. The idea of the West post-Civil War world was one that was often wildly optimistic, with some claiming it as a Garden of Eden if only people would plant trees (the weather would change) or that the rapid-heavy rivers were actually navigable. Making down the Colorado proves dangerous indeed.

More and more, however, Powell's life is taken over by his work gathering funds and government support for his scientific surveys. He begins to leave the exploration to others, and the book shifts mostly to his battles with Washington bureaucrats, some of whom resent government paying for science (the arguments about socialism versus the free market go back more than a hundred years, it turns out).

One of the most interesting sections to me, after the discussion of the first foray downriver, had to do with maps of the Old West. Powell set out to map the United States, a task that was not even finished in 1952, when Stegner was writing. It's crazy to think it took so long to do something that is now essentially completed and updated regularly using satellite technology. Anyway, in the early days, many cartographers simply assumed rivers continued on, using anecdotes or other mapmaker's work as their sources, so often water would be plotted where it didn't appear, rivers would be joined that didn't join and lakes would appear that didn't exist. Powell set out to correct this.

The other most interesting sections for me had to do with Powell's irrigation survey, something that was related to his attempt to map the country. It was Powell's desire to spell out where the best dams could be built and what land could be easily irrigated. His hope was to hold off speculators while helping out people who might put a life savings into land that had no adequate supply of water. Of course, the survey took forever, and local politicians grew restless and eventually got the survey tossed so that development could occur without adequate planning. But ten years later or so, after droughts and other "I told you so" problems, many of Powell's ideas were readopted under other names.

Of course, I couldn't help but wonder if Powell could do anything wrong. Such is hagiography.

On "The Door Key" by Hans Christian Andersen (4188 words) ****

One of the more amusing and potentially sophisticated tales of Andersen, this one recounts the life of a man who believes that his key holds prophetic powers. Twist it to find out what letter comes next. The future can be spelled out in a few seconds. Is the man self-deluded or is there power in the key? Does it matter? Perhaps, delusion and belief, perception and imagination, are opposite sides of the same coin. Read the tale here.

On "A Man Called G." by Renee Reynolds (1344 words) ****

This is the story of a hypochondriac, or not. It's also reminiscent of Ionesco's Rhinoceros. It's the story of G., a man who takes a fall for a company and whose reputation is tarnished forever on thereafter. In that sense, though a similar plot device is used, the tale is quite different from Ionesco's in its actual substance. Here, the rhino snout is not a fad to imitate but a kind of albatross around the neck, a feature that must be worn for the rest of life, uncomfortable as it is. Read the story here at Unshod Quills.

On "This Strange Way of Dying" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (5170 words) ***

Death takes a bride in this tale--or tries to. The story starts off like fantasy, but the longer it runs, the more it feels like fantastic realism of the Latin American variety. I'm reminded also of the work of Georges Battaile, whose book Erotism ties sex (or love) and death together. When we lose ourselves to another, we essentially die to ourselves. And in this way, the two aren't far apart. Moreno-Garcia's tale falls solidly within his theory. Read the story here at GigaNotoSaurus.

On "Prison Girls" by Emily Alford (8070 words) ****

The child--or in this case, the young teen--offers a great perspective for stories. That combination of naivete and the hard situations of life is compelling, especially because stories generally focus on moments of change, on moments where that naivete is broken, replaced by some deeper understanding of the world around. Because of this potential, the story about the child is used often--and often not to very good effect.

Alford's tale, however, is not one of those. This is a tale where the child's perspective works perfectly. Madison is a consummate liar, sent to a boarding school by her parents and her psychologist to overcome her bad habit. She also doesn't like anyone--or life in general. She's about to learn some very tough lessons, however, at the instigation of a Ukrainian janitor. Think "Boy Cries Wolf" but with the complexity of a Dickens novel. Read the story here at Trigger.

On "There Is No Year" by Blake Butler ***

This innovative novel is not easily summarized, as unlike most works of fiction--indeed, unlike many works of nonfiction--there is no concrete narrative, no problem that needs to be resolved, no thrust toward climax and resolution. What there are are motifs and words and images, some of them amazing, a joy to read. In fact, it is this, Butler's constant play with language that drove me to read another of his books, despite my only halfway satisfaction. (That I was satisfied only halfway but read all four hundred pages of text in less than a week says something about how engaging the work is, despite my not being able to put a finger on exactly what happened or what the book even is.)

Motifs are a strong part of the book: family, homes, bugs (most especially ants), death, dreams, the letter O, boxes, light, circles, copies, disease--all these play a part. On the surface, the book is about a family--a father, mother, and son--living in a home. Early on, the family discovers a copy family within their own home. The copy home, discovered later by the dad, hints at one of the book's likely themes: the dark underside of all life--our inevitable deterioration and death. While the real home has two stories with stairs leading up to the second floor, the copy home has two stories with stairs leading down to the bottom. The copy home has no windows, just darkness.

At various points in the book, the family tries to sell the home. The son grows sick. The son befriends a girl at school and goes to her home. The dad goes to a job to stare all day at a computer, at the light in a computer, a job that each day grows farther and farther away, as if the boredom of driving can extend not just time but space. The son too stares into a computer, playing a game that has no point or ending--a figure simply walks across a room on a screen until being haphazardly destroyed, only to be resurrected and start again.

The father clears the family's mailbox of creepy crawlies, merely to find them return in greater numbers each time that he opens the slot. The son worries about ants eating his flesh.

Perhaps, if anything, the book's title hints at the overall trajectory of this work: this is a novel written outside of time. There can be no motivating plot that propels readers on because "there is no year." There is just one long dream that leads, inevitably, toward death or light or whatever one will have these things to be over and over.

On "Somewhere the Desert Hides a Well" by Maria Deira (6846 words) ***

I like genre fiction that has an aura of simply being a regular, realistic story. Maybe it is a regular story with just one thing off, or it's a story that starts off realistic and takes a sudden turn to the weird. Deira's story is of the latter variety. What I like about such stories is that they're easier to identify with. They're still about human beings doing human things, except that this one thing . . . and you know what else? Real life goes on, even as the weird multiplies.

In Deira's story, students returning from an academic bowl somehow end up being discovered passed out in a van in a field. No one knows what happened, but foul play from the team's coach is suspected. It's a tale of mystery straight out of the X-files. Read it here at Giga Noto Saurus.

On "Covered in Soot" by Lynnet Ngulube (1005 words) ****

What can I say? This piece starts slowly enough, but it manages to shock--twice. The first shock involves an act of violation, random, quick, disgusting, like the male streaker that ran through a class of teen-age girls when I was in high school but more personal, more hurtful. The second is even more powerful. Here, a teen-age girl goes with her father and sisters to meet her grandmother at the train station. She's a teen-ager; she doesn't want to be there, and like many a teen-ager, she's sullen and moody. And she pays. Read the story here at Our Stories.

On "Speak, Memory" by Vladimer Nabokov ***

This is certainly one of the most elegant memoirs I've ever read. In fact, it reads more like an accumulation of discreet remembrances than a sustained narrative, and in that is probably where Nabokov often lost me. When I read reviews of certain contemporary authors, the reviewer will quote certain lines, will talk about the brilliance of a particular phrase or sentence, but the whole is left untouched, as if all readers want are these singular pieces of brilliance. There are a lot of pieces of singular brilliance in Nabokov's memoir.

I particularly liked the book when Nabokov focused in on a particular subject for a while and sustained the discussion such that I could walk along with him for a while. One chapter, for example, focuses on his love--and how he came be it--for collecting butterflies. Another focuses on the various home instructors he and his brother had. One talks of the emigrant Russian literary culture of the 1920s. And one talks of fleeing from one part of Russia to another in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution.

Nabokov's feelings about Lenin are particularly strident. He notes his unease with peoples in the Western world, where liberals tend to hold Lenin up and conservatives tend to talk him down, but for entirely different reasons than Nabokov would. Nabokov comes across as a liberal who unfairly finds himself thrust into the conservative camp because Western liberals don't know the true story of Russian socialism. I couldn't help but sympathize with Nabokov's feelings of being politically misunderstood.

On "A Beijing Feast" by Peter Tieryas Liu (1700 words) ***

I like Pang Nan, the character at the center of this tale. It is, perhaps, a story more centered on him than on the narrator, if it's even a story. Liu's piece reads more like an account of a final interview, but at its heart is the fascinating subject, a filmmaker who is larger than life and who likes it that way. Better to fail disastrously than to wallow in mediocrity. He wants to make a two-hour movie in which nothing happens and then everyone dies, and he does. This is an arthouse guy to the extreme, and while I'd never want to watch one of his movies, hearing him pontificate is interesting indeed. Read the story here at Fox Chase Review.

On "The Gardener and His Manor" by Hans Christian Andersen (2496 words) ****

Something of a story about politics and popularity, this piece traces the life of a caretaker of a rich couple's garden. The rich couple doesn't know what is in their own garden and tends not to appreciate its contents until someone else praises what the gardener sells out of the garden to kings and diplomats. Andersen no doubt was critiquing a culture that values the foreign over the homegrown merely for the sake of exoticism and "sophistication." Look at home--there's sophistication right there, he's saying. But some folks will never learn. Read the story here.

On "Private Empire" by Steve Coll ****

This exploration of the culture and recent (last twenty-five years) history of Exxon did not turn out to be as interesting to me as Coll's book on the Bin Ladens. I think that may be because the book seemed to sprawl so far and wide like a discrete set of articles rather than like a single narrative or a singular argument. Still, I suppose that's in keeping with Coll's point--that Exxon is wide ranging, sprawling, a world power not unlike any nation-state.

And indeed, Exxon's loyalties, as the book makes clear, are chiefly to itself and its shareholders. At one point, the former CEO even states as much, when asked why Exxon doesn't do more to help out with energy costs and jobs in the United States: our responsibilities are to the shareholders not to any particular nation. And yet, ironically, Exxon, when it needs to be, is an American company, happy to take advantage of tax discounts, U.S. military assistance, and U.S. diplomatic assistance. I can't say multinational companies come off looking very nice in Coll's rendering.

The book begins with an account of the Exxon Valdez spill, an event that would shake Exxon badly and that would lead to a heavy focus on safety, in an attempt to never repeat such an incident. It would also lead--as would many other similar events--to a long set of court cases that Exxon would appeal and appeal and appeal until penalties were rejected or reduced to a negligible amount for the damage done. Most galling of all in this regard would be how Exxon, while agreeing to pay for damages to water supply and property values a leak at a gas station caused--but not any kind of penalty beyond the actual physical damage--would eventually even contest what physical damages it agreed to pay. Another lawsuit from people in Indonesia would sit in courts for such a long time that the people who brought the suit would die before seeing any benefit. If you're a regular person, forget ever getting anything from corporate bigwigs.

Other chapters focus on how Exxon works with powerbrokers in Africa, Indonesia, and Russia. They bring out how difficult it is to show a concern for human rights in nations where the rule of law is often that of the local rebel group, where who's in charge might change from day to day, where pirates range freely.

Why bother drilling for gas in such locations given the risks? Wall Street. Exxon and other oil companies continually have to show that they have replaced or surpassed the number of oil reserves they've used up or lost in a given year. This means looking for oil in bad places, merging with other oil companies, playing shady with the numbers (counting certain technologies Wall Street doesn't count as reserves).

Coll starts with Valdez and ends with the BP Gulf spill of 2010. In between, Exxon merges with Mobil; liquified natural gas comes to be a resource of growing importance; and tar sand oil begins to be profitable. There's a lot here to chew on.

On "The Lakes of Florida" by Charlie Smith (2110 words) ****

It's wonderful to read a writer in utter control of the language, and that's what Smith does here, effortlessly churning out one gem of a phrase after another. The story itself is collage of events. There's a basketball star whose lost his girlfriend and also who has lost his job to drinking. There is a father and son hanging out drinking at a boat house. There is a tall tail about an alligator wrestler. All of them are here, in almost less space than a college paper. Read it here at Fifty-two Stories.

On "The Snake Charmer's Arms and Other Altered States" by Alexandra Isacson (484 word) ***

Not so much a story as a set of musings by belly dancers and the like, Isacson's anecdotes sparkle primarily on the linguistic level. "Touching your hair while dancing is not an invitation," the first dancer advises, "but never touch your body." It's bits like this, dancer musings I'd never have considered that make this piece memorable. Read the story here at the Fox Chase Review.

On "The Banker and the Poet" by Matthew Sharpe (9427 words) ****

Sharpe's tale is a story of contrasts--heart and head, art and money, poverty and wealth. I'm reminded a bit of other buddy stories, opposites who stick together, like the friends in Sideways or the brothers in Adaptation or True West. Rick works in investment. He has a girlfriend and can have virtually any gal he wants. He lives well. He's a winner. Alec is a poet. He sometimes gets the gal but more often doesn't. He lives poorly. He, we might say, is the loser, at least when playing against Rick. And yet, they are friends, with conversations about philosophy that would put most others' conversations somewhere on the level of kindergarten swing-set dares. One other thing: Alec is about to fall in love, with a transsexual prostitute. He is about to ruin his life, what there is of it, and Rick is about to find out just how much he too can love. Read the story here are Failbetter.

On "Whoa, Hey" by Julie Odell (887 words) ***

This story delves into a situation that may not be all that uncommon--the return of, or reference to, an item from one's past from someone in the past. How are we to interpret such signals? I think about this quite often, as do many other people, as searches of just about any dating forum shows. A woman you meet in a chat room online seems friendly and interested and ends a pleasant follow-up e-mail with "Take care." Over the course of the next week, you hear nothing more to your reply--was the line a generic closing with response to follow much later or a subtle kiss-off? A man you work with and who you've had a crush on for a while offers you a ride home one day, knowing you always take the bus. Is he just being considerate, or is he subtly signaling an interest? Wouldn't it be easier if we just asked? Wouldn't it be easier if we could ask? In this story, the object of concern is a necklace, a gesture, from an ex. What is the ex trying to say? Find out by reading the story here at New World Writing.

On "This Fable Is Intended for You" by Hans Christian Andersen (274 words) ****

A fairly modern fable! I guess I like this one because it fits so many situations so well, and it was, at the moment that I first read it, so seemingly linked to my situation, as wavered between interest in two girls. Waver too long, and you lose both. Not that I blame the dog in the story; he's just trying to figure out where the food is really going to be. Read the tale here.