Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): I love a nonlinear narrative told from multiple points of view that interweaves the lives of characters who, on Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): I love a nonlinear narrative told from multiple points of view that interweaves the lives of characters who, on the surface, seem unconnected to one another. I also love a fictional retelling of a historical figure or event. And, of course, I love beautiful prose. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Colum McCann is one of my favorite authors. McCann’s most recent novel, Transatlantic, is all of these things. It’s the story of Frederick Douglass’s trip to Ireland in the 1840s to promote his book and gather support for abolition. It’s the story of Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, the first two pilots to cross the Atlantic. It’s the story of Senator George Mitchell and his role in the Good Friday Agreement. And it’s the story of an Irish woman who has lost her son to the Troubles. But most importantly, it’s the story of how all of these people are connected and it’s a reminder of how our actions and decisions can affect those who come after us, even those who live thousands of miles away and hundreds of years later. The scope of McCann’s work doesn’t prohibit the intimacy he creates in his portrayal of each of these lives and the sensitivity with which he handles them.
Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Ellen Bass charmed the socks off me when she read “At The Padre Hotel In Bakersfield, CaliEmma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Ellen Bass charmed the socks off me when she read “At The Padre Hotel In Bakersfield, California” at the Writers @ Work conference in Alta, Utah. I loved its slyness and honesty, its willingness to walk right up to the real stuff of this world. I immediately bought Bass’s collection Like a Beggar and read it in happy fits and starts on the plane ride home, then the subway going to and from work, meting it out carefully poem by poem so as not to slurp it down too greedily. Bass’s poems in this book all have that same charm of “At the Padre.” They take pleasure in engaging with the thingness of living—zippers, planets, peaches, telephones for transacting affairs, feet—without any preciousness, with smarts and grace. Totally recommended to cure you of things you didn’t even know were ailing you....more
Miles Jochem (Editorial Intern, Tin House Books): You know you’re in for a doozy when the most famous literary appraisal of a book ends with the warniMiles Jochem (Editorial Intern, Tin House Books): You know you’re in for a doozy when the most famous literary appraisal of a book ends with the warning, “There are the Alps, / fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble.” These lines, written by Basil Bunting, are about Ezra Pound’s Cantos, one of the pillars of Modernism. Pound ranks among the most controversial of writers, not least due to his open sympathy for anti-Semitic fascists. In fact, the US government charged him with treason in 1945 and he spent years in captivity, first in an outdoor cage in Italy, then in an insane asylum in the States. But if we judged writers by their personal failings there wouldn’t be much left of the literary canon. The book itself is a behemoth – 120-odd sections comprising a modern epic in the tradition of Dante, but borrowing material from countless sources spanning global recorded history. You need help with this, unless you are a polyglot with an encyclopedic knowledge of economic, political, and literary history (not me). For example, the first canto is Pound’s translation of a 16th century Latin translation of part of Homer’s Odyssey, written in Pound’s take on ancient Anglo-Saxon poetic meter. Confused yet? I still am, but William Cookson’s excellent guide to the poem is helping me limp, slowly, through the dark forest of Modernist pretention. I’m still in the beginning cantos, but with any luck I will catch a glimpse of what the poet himself described as “the marrow of wisdom” contained within the words....more
Molly Dickinson (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I can’t say my repertoire of comic books/graphic novels is very extensive, but a copy of JuliaMolly Dickinson (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I can’t say my repertoire of comic books/graphic novels is very extensive, but a copy of Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color made it into my hands recently. Gfrörer manages an exquisite balance between heavy plot and slight instances of snarky humor. The limited dialogue allows the illustrations to speak for themselves: they are strikingly full of movement and depth. Though the characters use words sparingly they are accessible and relatable. This is a world full of bleakness, yet Gfrörer manages to illustrate a persisting (although perhaps deluded) faith in love and companionship. A must read for comic book appreciators and those new to the genre....more
Colin Houghton (Publicity Intern, Tin House Books): I heard about Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time a few years ago in a New Yorker article byColin Houghton (Publicity Intern, Tin House Books): I heard about Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time a few years ago in a New Yorker article by James Wood. He mentions that the friend of his, who recommended Petterson’s novels, had typed out the entire I Curse the River of Time manuscript just to see what it felt like. This seemed to me an insane thing to do, but like most American readers, I haven’t read much translated work, especially anything contemporary, so it seemed fitting. Not to mention, I convinced myself that based on the amazing title, I would undoubtedly love the book. And I did… I sprinted through it, slowing down only briefly to make sure I was savoring the wonderfully crafted sentences that Petterson seems to do so well. Bottom line, read it....more
Rebekah Bergman (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I am diving into Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, a novel publiRebekah Bergman (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I am diving into Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, a novel published in the US as The War of Dreams in 1972. In it, a super-villain wages war against an unnamed Latin American city by distorting reality. Needless to say, it is a highly theoretical novel, steeped in post-modernism, post-colonialism, and feminism. Carter possesses a unique ability to stage complex theoretical questions without losing sight of her story, her imagery, or her language. Theory aside, I’ve been delighting in her turns of phrase, lines like (on page 5) “[A]nyone could see that I myself was a man like an unmade bed.” The landscape is surreal and so richly imaginative and realistically conveyed I feel like it is distorting my own reality as I make my way through this bizarre world....more
Curtis Moore (Editorial Intern, The Open Bar): I’m back to reading Dune. I was spurred to finally reading this after seeing that Jodorowsky’s Dune is Curtis Moore (Editorial Intern, The Open Bar): I’m back to reading Dune. I was spurred to finally reading this after seeing that Jodorowsky’s Dune is playing in town and realizing I have heard so much about this book over the years, yet have no idea what is actually between its covers. What I’ve discovered, 100 pages in, is Herbert’s preternatural ability to keep me hooked despite an almost near lack of “action.” Oh, yes, people are training with knives and dodging drone assassins and traveling across the epic vastness of space, but mostly they’re talking and, more, thinking. There’s this sense of an authorial fascination with how the thinking mind interacts with the world around it, primarily through speech, through conversation. So the surprise for me as a reader is that what I came looking for—wild, imaginative landscapes and fantastical sci fi tech—pleasingly takes a backseat to an investigation into the dynamics of discourse and how fragile an endeavor speaking to another person can be....more
Thomas Ross (Editorial Assistant): This week, intimidated by the stack of unread books at my bedside (fine: spilling onto my bed), I bummed around theThomas Ross (Editorial Assistant): This week, intimidated by the stack of unread books at my bedside (fine: spilling onto my bed), I bummed around the internet, stocking a hypothetical anthology of online fiction. I was taken by Daniel Kowalski’s post-apocalyptic-O-Henry story “Our Meat” in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading series, in which Kowalski cutely subverts the common trope of the mysterious cataclysmic event by calling it “The Thing That Happened.” Another favorite was a Kevin Clouther story from his collection We Were Flying to Chicago, on Black Balloon’s blog, The Airship. The story, “On the Highway Near Fairfield, Connecticut,” is a strange, moving (and stopping) story that superimposes one moment over another unexpectedly. It’s hard to explain, even to myself, but that it can be so inexplicable and stay so grounded in the mundane is part of its odd charm....more
Jakob Vala (Graphic Designer, Tin House): I’ve spent the month slowly rereading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.1 House of Leaves is an academiJakob Vala (Graphic Designer, Tin House): I’ve spent the month slowly rereading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.1 House of Leaves is an academic study on The Navidson Record, a documentary film about a family that moves into a new home, only to discover a number of unsettling spatial discrepancies.3 House of Leaves is a portrait of Zapanò, a reclusive, blind man and the author of an academic study about a documentary film he may or may not have fabricated. House of Leaves is a novel about Johnny Truant, editor of Zampanò’s papers, who is driven mad by the specter of the house. It is a horror novel. It is a love story.4
1 See Appendix A for the transcript between myself and Mr. Ross, regarding sophomore efforts by authors of strange debut novels.2
2 Mr. Vala did not provide us with these records.—ed.
3 Danielewski, Mark Z. Chapter IV. House of Leaves. New York: Random House, 2000. (pp. 24). Print.
4 It also has a lot of footnotes.5
5 And nested footnotes, which I am unreasonably excited by....more
Lance Cleland (Workshop Director): Mention you are from Colombia to your average U.S. citizen and you are bound to get some careless joke about cocainLance Cleland (Workshop Director): Mention you are from Colombia to your average U.S. citizen and you are bound to get some careless joke about cocaine thrown your way. A wink about the sugar you put in your coffee; a smirk about a corbata colombiana. As I am about to marry a beautiful woman from Medellín, I can both attest to how ignorant these remarks can be and how they annoy to the bone. I thought a lot about those jokes as I read The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a novel that is set in post-Escobar Bogotá but is haunted by that mad king’s rein. Those looking for the warm hues of Marquez’s coastal Colombia will be surprised to find themselves in the muted streets of the capital, where much of the savagery of the drug traffickers took place. Rather than give a blow-by-blow history of all that transpired, Vasquez allows the mistrust and bitterness of a group of people who have lived through the siege to stand in for the collective scars of a nation. The plot follows the “ever present ghost” of a victim of the drug wars, as his friend, who witnessed his assassination, seeks answers as to why he was killed. The resulting search touches on the many ways Colombians were affected by the violence, summed up beautifully by Vasquez early in the novel: “There is a sound that I cannot or have never been able to identify: a sound that’s not human or is more than human, the sound of lives being extinguished…the sound of things falling from on high…that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook.” Literature often humanizes events that otherwise come to us as clichés, bringing to the surface what otherwise might stay submerged under the weight of history and the way it has been reported to us. I can’t imagine anyone who reads this novel ever making a joke about Colombia’s white lines again....more
Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Only Roz Chast could get me to read about aging, death, and taking care of failing parentsEmma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Only Roz Chast could get me to read about aging, death, and taking care of failing parents. Her new memoir, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, illustrated in her usual snarky style, is not exactly what I can describe as a fun read, but it’s about as honest and sympathetic an account of dealing with her parents’ incredibly difficult last years as one could wish for. Chast is serious in the right places here but also finds the best comic material in inherently dark territory, particularly in her portrayal of her mom and dad’s sweet and unhealthy codependency, the lucid dreaming of the senile, and the absurdities of Senior Living in a Place....more
Allyson Paty (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I’ve never read anything quite like Mei-Mei Berrsenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses. The poems have an eAllyson Paty (Editorial Intern, Tin House Magazine): I’ve never read anything quite like Mei-Mei Berrsenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses. The poems have an essayistic quality in their deliberate, attentive movement. However, unlike many discursive modes, Berrsenbrugge’s poems don’t seem preoccupied with fixing an idea in language; rather, language provides a medium for the material world to open out into sensation, emotion, and thought. Her images evoking the experience of sight as crisply as they evoke their referents.
Take this passage from “Pure Immanence”:
It makes of my experience a critique of innateness, the way a pink plastic chair, a mannequin in a pink bunny suit holding a painting of sunset accretes virtual rouge defining a space that doesn’t refer to objects or belong to me.
I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered; it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close to two sensations, passing from one to another pink is the slice through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation now as to pink petals forming toward me, those who love me in another life responding to me
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.
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