James W. Bodden's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today, James W. Bodden throws drinks at the characters in his latest novel Coffin Riders:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Deep in the bowels of the hell, Bloom and the rest of the stiffs laze about and wait out eternity in the beaches of an assisted afterlife facility called Paradise Cove.

Bloom dropped to the underworld after getting tricked into a botched, double suicide by his ex-girlfriend, Lorraine. A modern day Dante, he journeys through the nine circles of hell to find a way back to the world of the living and get the revenge he thinks he is owed.

Death is a spiral: the deeper you go the worse it gets.

Bloom: Kamikaze

·       

      Equal parts vodka, triple sec and lime juice served straight-up in a cocktail glass.

Sip it or shoot it, but always take the kamikaze plunge. This refreshing cocktail is exactly what a serial suicide like Bloom needs to plan his escape from hell and get the revenge he thinks he is owed.

Lorraine: Bloody Mary

·       

      A zesty blend of tomato juice spiced with salt, pepper, bouillon cubes, lemon juice, Tabasco, and a dash Worcester sauce. Add vodka, generously.

A hot, red cocktail that matches Lorraine’s bloodstained past; she’ll mix her drink with her revolver and tempt you to deep-throat the barrel and pull the trigger every time.

 Leroy: Mojito

 Scramble mint sprigs with sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice in a Collins Glass. Pour a two shots of white rum over ice, add soda water, and enjoy.

A cold Mojito hit the spot just right for this blind denizen Paradise Cove. Leroy is Bloom’s psychopomp and good-time buddy; he’s a man that knows where all the bodies are buried.

The Reaper: Negroni

·       

      One part gin, one part Campari, and one part sweet vermouth. 

A strong, elegant cocktail for a cool night in the bowels of hell. The reaper of the dead is the sheriff of the underworld; the only creature down there that can keep the dead in line.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

James W. Bodden is the author of the novels the Red Light Princess, and Coffin Riders. He’s down some dank Cold War bunker, helmet on, and braced for impact.

Indie Spotlight: Mark Polanzak

It's that age old question... you wrote a book? What's it about?! As an author, it's important to polish up your elevator pitch. A two sentence, 40 second, all encompassing summary that will do the book justice and entice others to have-to-have-it. 

But how do you describe your book if it breaks the genre- boundary? Author Mark Polanzak attempts to do just that in today's Indie Spotlight. 

Check out he he handles the dreaded question:

Oh, you have a book coming out? What’s it about?

I should have the answer to this question down by now. I am getting better. But many times, it’s as if I’ve just now realized, Oh, shit, right, I have to articulate what the thing’s about because you, person here at the bar, don’t live in my head.

But the best answer for what the book is about is not one set in stone, perfect for any and all circumstances in which I’m asked. Giving a satisfying answer involves some on-the-fly literary psychology, some instant bookish mind-melding. I size up the question-asker and the current situation to give the person-and-scenario-appropriate summary of what the book is about.

Here are some case studies in how I’ve answered the question: Oh, what’s your book about?

First up, here’s the answer I gave the publisher of the book back when seeking publication:

“POP! is a memoir often told through fictional stories. If you reread that sentence, I understand your confusion (and so do the editors at virtually every major publishing house). When I was seventeen, my father left the house for his weekly tennis date and spontaneously combusted on the court, vanishing forever. This is how POP! begins. But, of course, no one spontaneously combusts, and the various characters and multiple narrative voices and perspectives acknowledge that this is not possible. Throughout the book, stories are told and then broken down by the narrators, who explain that the stories are fake but are born of real events. This is how the manuscript is ultimately nonfiction, ultimately a memoir, because I never lie about what isn’t true in the story.”

That’s about as professional and comprehensive a description as I can muster with my book. I agonized over the word choice. The balance between technical details and philosophy. It’s accurate but measured and tailored specifically for someone who is not only deciding whether to read and publish a manuscript but also whether they want to work with the person who wrote it. This answer comes off as component with a dash of headiness.

Next up: My wife calls a group of her friends to attention over drinks at a bar, and announces that “Mark’s book is getting published!” These people are vaguely aware I write but likely think of it as a hobby. And then, the question comes, and I’m staring at five beaming faces.

“It’s basically a 200-page car chase,” I say. A couple expressions change, indicating, Really? Are you an idiot? Many continue beaming. My wife protests. And, now that I’ve disarmed the situation, I get more accurate but light: “It’s about me and my mom and my brother after my dad died. It’s funny.” I don’t want to scare anyone off with a too serious death-downer at the bar. Don’t get into grief memoirs at the bar.

Next: A colleague at the college, first week back after summer break, asks.

“It’s about how I used fiction to deal with loss. It’s about a week in my life before talking at a bereavement group meeting, thinking through and analyzing all my short stories. It’s made up of short stories, and then a sort of meta read of them, seeing them as all related to grief and loss.” I am typically intimidated by my colleagues. So, I involuntarily use words like “analyze” and “meta” and generally make the book sound intellectual, more than emotional. I’m trying to grow into the colleague that is cool enough to not feel pressure to always present as impressive or intellectual, but I’m young for the office, so...

A student asks.

“Well, what do you mean by ‘what is the book about’?” Such a teacher move. So, do you want to know what happens in the book, or what it is about? “Do you want the abstraction—the internal struggle—or the concrete observable story—the external struggle?” The student wants to know what happens in the book. “When I was seventeen, a couple years younger than you, my dad died suddenly. Ten years later I had to speak to a group of teens who had a parent die. It’s about everything I thought about during that week.” When students are energetic and curious, I don’t want to bring them down. Students see me as an enthusiastic guy, into very strange surreal literature, so when I get real with them like this, they typically fumble for the proper facial expression, recognizing that I am a human being with a history. But students respect that quick emotional pivot. Young people are sensitive and nice, have you noticed? Like more than before. Am I crazy?

A stranger at a bar, with whom, perhaps drunkenly, the fact of my book’s publication comes up, he asks.

“It’s about how every relationship I’ve had with basically everyone in my life has been affected by the death of my father. It’s real, but it’s also made up.” Yeah, man, know what I mean, man?

My boss wants to know.

“It’s a memoir of the events that followed my father’s death when I was seventeen.” The loss is news to her. Leave this one elliptical. I don’t want my boss reading the book, seeing the embarrassing and unprofessional parts of the thing. She’s hopefully too busy to read it. My boss can’t know certain things about me.

An old friend asks.

“It’s about my dad.” They get it.

An old professor.

“It’s about writing fiction, but nonfiction.” They get it.

My therapist.

“It’s about how I never ever talked about my grief and instead hid everything in stories. It helped me so much.” My therapist loves this kind of insight.

A mime.

“It’s about how I don’t talk to communicate.” Sometimes, I gotta spin it to my given audience. Sell some books.

A bartender.

“About how there’s no actual proper grief process. You can’t do it wrong.” Here, I want to give the mood of the book, not the finer points.

A stranger at a party who has learned through a mutual friend, and who tells me she’s a writer, too.

“That’s such a hard question.” She apologizes. We move on to what she writes and what we’re both reading.

Myself asks.

“You wrote it. You tell me.” When in doubt, play dumb.

Mark Polanzak's stories have appeared in Third Coast, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar, among others. His fiction won second place in the 2014 Italo Calvino Prize. His hybrid memoir, POP!, is out March 22, 2016 from Stillhouse Press. He is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process, and teaches English at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Book Review: I Will Rot Without You

Read: 2/17/16 - 2/20/16
Stars: 4 - Strongly Recommended to lovers of the strange and gory
Pages: 143
Publisher: Fungasm Press
Released: February 2016





If you threw Joe's Apartment and the cockroach scene from Creep Show into a martini shaker with the books The Ruins and Hearers of the Constant Hum, and spiked it with a-broken-heart-love-story-of-your-choice, what you poured out might look something like this.

Fucked up in all the right ways, Danger Slater's I Will Rot Without You is the perfect companion book for the love-sick and left-behind. With Gretchen gone, our main man Ethan has slipped into a mental funk and has begun to let things go. The bills are piling up, his apartment is being overtaken by cockroaches, and strange, fuzzy mold is sprouting out of his bathroom sink. You know how it goes. When the heart aches something fierce, everything else can go to hell, including your personal hygiene, and you can say goodbye to a good night's sleep because that little bitch is no where to be found.

"For me, sleep doesn't come easy. Not anymore. And when it finally does come, it merely passes through me as transiently as the breeze that passes through the tops of the trees. There's nothing to hold on to. Just air. For me, sleep is just a series of extended blinks...It's the place where memories refuse to die. Memories like cockroaches themselves. It's the place where I can still see her."

Tell me you haven't been there? Tell me that doesn't sum it up perfectly? Haunted by the history and memories you've made, tossing and turning and cry-vomiting yourself to sleep, knowing the moment you nod off, your unconscious mind will take over and bring her back to you, like old home movies being played against the back of your eyelids. You've been there. You know how hard it is to move on.

And Ethan's not the only one who's struggling to let go. There's his drop-dead gorgeous, down-the-hall neighbor Dee, whose jealous boyfriend has been severing off parts of his body and sewing them on to hers, and his other neighbor Humboldt, who has strung his dead mummified wife up like a puppet in their kitchen.

Things really start taking a turn for the bizarre, though, when Ethan awakens from one of his dreams to a cockroach feeding him some of the bathroom mold. As the ingested fungus starts to take hold and he slowly begins to rot from the inside out, Ethan goes from licking his love wounds to a man on a cockroach-ass-kicking mission, but the roaches have other things in mind for him. And so does the world, apparently. Because as Ethan and Dee prepare to battle the bugs, a storm of apocalyptic proportions is starting to gather outside...

Strangely beautiful in its repulsiveness, I Will Rot Without You continuously surprises you with its grotesque descriptions, which are softened only by the gentle prose in which Danger has wrapped them. The violence of the novel is astonishing, the gore is glorious, and though it physically hurts to read it, it's impossible to stop.

The gore...

"Buckets of intestine spray across the kitchen with geyserlike profusion. Guts and blood and chunks of torn flesh splatter against the cabinets like paint from the tip of an abstract artist's brush...from the cistern of Humboldt's ruptured abdomen the bugs Deirdre vomited into his mouth now reemerge. They spill over the edge of his wound like basalt from the earth and crawl out in all directions."

followed by the glorious...

"I press my face against hers and we kiss. We kiss like our kissing were the only raft we had left to hang on to. And my face starts to melt. And so does hers. Our faces melt into each other. And our bodies melt into each other too. Skin like sheets of paint stretching from her body onto mine, blended together..."

again, and again, and again.

Where Writers Write: Kipp Wessel

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

 

Where Writers Write is a series that features authors as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

Kipp Wessel is a devoted writer, husband, father of rescued mammals, and resident troublemaker. He earned a Fiction Fellowship and his MFA from the University of Montana, and his short fiction has appeared in a dozen commercial and literary magazines. He’s taught fiction writing at the University of Montana, the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and regional community arts programs. His debut novel, First, You Swallow the Moon is published by radialGRAIN.

Where Kipp Wessel Writes

Years ago, I tore apart a room in our small house all the way to its sheathing. I opened the exterior walls with windows and built a wall length desk with a view aimed into the lakeshore treeline. It’s a fine workspace. And perfect for slogging through the endless task of editing and revising. Or fielding email. Paying bills. 

But to tend the real flame of writing – the creation of the earliest drafts, the construction, word by word, of new ideas and emerging stories, and for the more opaque freedom of daydreaming, I wanted a studio apart from our living space – one merged more completely in the wilderness, and one I built, board by board, with my own hands, from the foundation up. So I found a cluster of three healthy red oak along our shoreline and built a tiny atelier wedged between them, a writing vestibule above the earth, an avian studio.

 

It’s a simple structure – timberframed doug fir with windows on three sides and corrugated metal on the third. The floor provides twenty square feet of space, and the sloping roofline allows just enough room to sit and write or recline and wonder.

But even more than utility, it’s the access to wilderness and quiet I treasure most.

 I write with the door and windows open. Even in the heart of winter, I bundle in layers of coats and scarves, stare out at the snow covered muskrat dens mounded along the shore. I listen to the melt drip from the roofline, the wind through what’s left of last summer’s leaves. When I’m lucky, just at dusk, a moon-limned red fox (hued one shade darker than ghost) darts and pauses between the weathered cattails and cottonwoods along the shore. Snow geese warble overhead, and a continually extended family of field mice stitch tiny footprints in the snow beneath the floor in an ever changing miniature petroglyph left for me to interpret. (They work their story, and I work mine.) In summer, the night sky is dotted with mosquito diving bats and tree swallows. A trio of loons echo song across the lake. My canine companion, Cousteau, sits in the open doorway, soaks the sun, and howls at the gray squirrels that scamper through the brush and trees and flick their plumed tails of indifference in his direction.

I’m in peace in this tiny space. I fill reams of paper with notes and new prose. I stare out at the water. I wonder about the world. I never keep track of time.

 For me, it’s the simple rhythm of the natural world surrounding and reaching me in this tiny space that helps clear my mind, inspire me and nudge me toward the next sentence or paragraph or page. Or idea. And even when the page remains empty, when the act of writing slows – I’m still sitting in a treehouse with nothing more to lose than time spent watching storms churn the water, eagles dive the current, or field mice burrow into roots of sumac.

Sometimes the act of doing barely anything leads its way to almost everything.

Bronwyn Reviews: Underground

Underground by Antanas Sileika
Pages: 310
Publisher:Thomas Allen Publishers
Released: 2011

Reviewed by Bronwyn Mauldin





Don’t pity little Lithuania. She’s a small European country long batted about by her larger and more powerful neighbors, Russia, Poland and Germany. Napoleon called her capital, Vilnius, the “Jerusalem of the north” because of her large, vibrant Jewish community. That same community was decimated by the Nazis and their local collaborators during World War II. Even Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, though born in what is now Lithuania, is known to the world as a Polish writer. Today though she is an independent state and a member of NATO, westerners often lump Lithuania together with her neighbors Latvia and Estonia, referring to them as simply “the Baltics.”

Through all the years and struggles, though, Lithuanian language and culture have survived. One of the almost unknown struggles of recent memory took place as World War II was coming to a close and the Iron Curtain came down, trapping Lithuania on the Soviet side. Tens of thousands of men and women went into the forests and fought a nine-year guerrilla war against the occupying powers and their local allies.

Antanas Sileika’s novel, Underground, tells the story of two people caught up in that struggle. Lukas has left college and joined the partisans in the forest. He describes his fellow fighters this way:

“Field Partisans… consisted of foxes that ran along the roadsides, among the brambles and through woodlots to dart into fields and granaries when opportunities presented themselves. Visiting farmhouses at night, they knocked on shutters to ask for food and news of slayer squads and Cheka interior army forces. If their luck was bad, the field partisans found their enemies on the other side of the shutters.”

Elena is a Town Partisan helping to produce and distribute an underground newspaper. She moves back and forth between the forest and her day-to-day life in a provincial capital. Though they are in love, their duties keep Lukas and Elena apart. When they finally become engaged, they volunteer to use their engagement party to assassinate several Lithuanian officials who are collaborating with the Soviets. Once the deed is done, Elena must join him in the forest where they can now be together, fighting for their country.

Before long Elena is killed in action and the authorities are searching for Lukas. The partisans arrange for him to escape through Sweden, and he eventually makes his way to Paris. His new work is to secure support from western nations for a struggle Lithuania is slowly losing. He tours refugee camps in Europe, meeting with Lithuanian expatriates, raising money for the fight. But for the most part, he finds the rest of the world has accepted Lithuania’s place in the Soviet Union and moved on.

Demoralized, Lukas, too, moves on. He remarries and settles in to the life of an expatriate. But when he hears a rumor his beloved Elena might be alive, he risks everything to return home to learn the truth.

In the late 1940s there were as many as 30,000 partisans fighting in the Lithuanian forests and many others who quietly supported them. By the early 1950s their numbers were down to a few thousand. The focus of the Cold War was on bigger powers, like the Soviet Union and East Germany. Sileika, a Canadian writer and critic of Lithuanian descent, has said Underground is based on the true story of partisan fighter Juozas Luksa, whose story was published under the title Partizanai and published in 1950.

The cover of Underground promotes the novel as a love story between a man and a woman. It is that, but it’s also a love story between a man and his country. The people of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and others did not go quietly into Soviet control, but their guerrilla wars are almost unknown in the west.

Ultimately, Lithuania would go on to fight a “Singing Revolution” in the 1980s, another type of struggle that was deeply rooted in her national language and culture. She would become the first of the Soviet republics to declare independence from the USSR in 1990. Lithuanian partisans like Lukas and Elena may not have won the war, but their fight helped keep a nation alive.

Bronwyn Mauldin is the author of the novel Love Songs of the Revolution. She won The Coffin Factory magazine’s 2012 very short story award, and her Mauldin’s work has appeared in the Akashic Books web series, Mondays Are Murder, and at Necessary Fiction, CellStories, The Battered Suitcase, Blithe House Quarterly, Clamor magazine and From ACT-UP to the WTO. She is a researcher with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and she is creator of GuerrillaReads, the online video literary magazine.

Book Giveaway: Glory Over Everything

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved.

It's the beginning of a new month and you know what that means.

It's time to bring you April's Author/Reader discussion book!

We will be reading and discussing Glory Over Everything

with Kathleen Grissom

Simon and Schuster has graciously given us 10 hardcover copies to give away!

(sorry folks, this one's limited to US Residents only)

What it's about:

A novel of family and long-buried secrets along the treacherous Underground Railroad.

The author of the New York Times bestseller and beloved book club favorite The Kitchen House continues the story of Jamie Pyke, son of both a slave and master of Tall Oakes, whose deadly secret compels him to take a treacherous journey through the Underground Railroad.

Published in 2010, The Kitchen House became a grassroots bestseller. Fans connected so deeply to the book’s characters that the author, Kathleen Grissom, found herself being asked over and over “what happens next?” The wait is finally over.

This new, stand-alone novel opens in 1830, and Jamie, who fled from the Virginian plantation he once called home, is passing in Philadelphia society as a wealthy white silversmith. After many years of striving, Jamie has achieved acclaim and security, only to discover that his aristocratic lover Caroline is pregnant. Before he can reveal his real identity to her, he learns that his beloved servant Pan has been captured and sold into slavery in the South. Pan’s father, to whom Jamie owes a great debt, pleads for Jamie’s help, and Jamie agrees, knowing the journey will take him perilously close to Tall Oakes and the ruthless slave hunter who is still searching for him. Meanwhile, Caroline’s father learns and exposes Jamie’s secret, and Jamie loses his home, his business, and finally Caroline.

Heartbroken and with nothing to lose, Jamie embarks on a trip to a North Carolina plantation where Pan is being held with a former Tall Oakes slave named Sukey, who is intent on getting Pan to the Underground Railroad. Soon the three of them are running through the Great Dismal Swamp, the notoriously deadly hiding place for escaped slaves. Though they have help from those in the Underground Railroad, not all of them will make it out alive.

This giveaway will run through March 8th . 

Winners will be announced here and via email on March 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment here or in the giveaway thread over at TNBBC on goodreads. You must be a resident of the US in order to qualify for this one. 

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from May 9th through the 15th. We'll be discussing this one a little late due to Kathleen's promotional tour schedule. Kathleen has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for her. 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred).

ONLY COMMENT ONCE. MULTIPLE COMMENTS DO NOT GAIN YOU ADDITIONAL CHANCES TO WIN.

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

GOOD LUCK!

Indie Book Buzz: Casperian Books

It's a great day for some Indie Book Buzz here at TNBBC. 
It's back again and we're inviting members of the indie publishing houses to share some of the upcoming 2016 releases they are most excited about!

This week's pick is brought to you by Lily Richards, 

Editor and Designer at Casperian Books.

Single Stroke Seven -Lavinia Ludlow

March 1st release 

Single Stroke Seven appealed to me because while on the surface it’s an entertaining sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll yarn, at its heart is does have points to make about class and economic inequality, and the fact that “middle class” in the US really now means working class by First World standards, and that what differentiates the millennial “middle class” from a true working class are educational qualifications that no longer offer any economic advantage. 

Bio: A photographer by trade (but often accused of having an accountant’s soul by her husband), Lily Richards currently divides her time more or less equally between publishing books, running an artisanal food business, raising a trilingual brood, and consulting in the areas of supply chain management and strategic procurement. 

Lavinia Reviews: Kinda Sorta American Dream

Kinda Sorta American Dream by Steve Karas
4 Stars - Strongly recommended by Lavinia
Pages: 242
Publisher: Tailwinds Press
Released: December 2015



Reviewed by Lavinia Ludlow




Plainly stated, Kinda Sorta American Dream is social commentary on the everyday life and pursuits of the common American. Steve Karas reserves us front row seats in a theater streaming the intimate inner workings, thoughts, and desires of fast food chain managers, YouTube stars, Facebook stalkers, Mr. and Mrs. Claus’ in training, all striving to overcome the odds and to survive one day at a time. 

It’s easy to approach a collection titled Kinda Sorta American Dream with the assumption that every piece will be about Smalltown, USA middle-aged white guys complaining about their wives, jobs, and blue balls, and thinking about cheating on their wives, quitting their jobs, and sitting in front of the TV self-medicating with Doritos and a bottle of gas station whiskey. Quite the contrary, this collection contains an eclectic mix of protagonists and points of view that represent a diverse America, from the first generation Indian girl wishing she could communicate openly with her mother the way she believes all American girls talk with their mothers (HA! that was a laugh out loud moment) to the lonely thirty-something career woman trying to find happiness in online dating to the twelve-year-old girl who wants to see her Syrian pen pal freed from an environment of war and violence. The contrasting perspectives bring a broad spectrum of color to the collection, and paint a realistic picture of a real American society.  

Regardless of race, creed, or color, most protagonists find themselves in transitory periods, striving to alter their fates or to persevere over hopeless circumstances—think being the man of the house one day to unemployed the next, and your pride in shambles like the men in The Full Monty, minus the stripping and ’80s music, plus a Santa suit and Christmas songs blaring over the mall PA system.

For ten years running I was racking up World’s Best Dad T-shirts and mugs each Christmas. Now whose fault is it I can’t keep up the act? Whose fault is it I’m reduced to vying for the title of Super Santa?

Other subjects are more aimless, living the daily slog and hoping to find glimmers of happiness in bland dating encounters, in being someone’s side whack, or in other forms of mediocrity wherein they dupe themselves into believing that they’re kinda sorta satisfied in what they could get, even if low-hanging fruit, or even the fruit rotting at the base of the tree.

Karas has a simplistic writing style, and there’s nothing flashy or fancy about it, there are no hidden corners or agendas with twists. The result is a book without awkward transitions, or opportunity to venture into unnecessary sub-plots. By steering clear of clichés and literary gristle, he tackles the art of fictional density in an original and brilliant manner. In a mere few sentences, he can convey a multifaceted conflict, or in a notable case, a single seven-word sentence: “Hello and goodbye all in one breath,” a man says as he and his wife welcome their stillborn baby into the world.

He opens his collection with a dynamite piece, Ain’t Like the Movies, where in a woman passive-aggressively outs her adult son from her house by getting a bunch of cats in which he’s severely allergic. In a mere few pages, Karas not only sets the scene, but we learn that this young man is not only a second priority to his mother’s boyfriend, but he’s a minimum wage drone on a sinking ship known as Blockbuster, has a high schooler for a boss and a father who makes his own son call him by first name. In straightforward fragments, Karas fully illustrates the protagonist’s striving and frustration. 

I’m driving around town looking for “Now Hiring” signs. I’m desperate. I’m willing to take a job anywhere at this point, to start saving, begin my life.

Another story high in conflict and dense with content is Sculpting Sand. Karas balances the right amount of background, observations, emotional responses, and dialogue to narrate the story of a father whose twenty-something son is on the run from the law. This man finds himself snarled between his wife’s desire to discipline and his desire to help his son: 

I know there’s a fine line between helping and enabling. I understand that, but every father wants to see his son become a man.

My only qualm with short fiction is the limited real estate it allows writers to build. There are a few instances when a story lacked sufficient anecdote, although, never severe enough to create an unsatisfying experience, just enough to evoke an ever so slight yearn for more resolve, as if Karas had forgotten to flick off the light before leaving a room.

All in all, Kinda Sorta American Dream reveals much about the evident problems in our society, and injects harsh realities into delusions surrounding the traditional American Dream. We are an over-medicated, under-nourished, and self-mutilating nation whose social affairs have reached such a dismal state that most can no longer identify with fictional TV families like the Simpsons and the Bundys. Yes, we continue to laugh at these dysfunctional shows and believe them to be satire on the traditional American household, but no one’s divorced, splitting custody, spouse-beating, philandering, unemployed (by choice), and both families inhabit homes in suburbia on a single man’s salary. In reality, the majority of American homes are broken, we are at war abroad and on our own soil, with our economic recessions, our personal and professional demons, and most of all, ourselves.

But Karas’ collection doesn’t obliterate hope of a brighter future. His characters fight the good fight, even if their interpretation of the “good fight” may vary from one to the next. Through their experiences, we see that perhaps we can find meaning in our journey toward a destination only we can define, and we must continue to hope that the result is worth the sacrifices and suffering beyond our wildest (American) dreams.

Lavinia Ludlow is a musician and writer dividing time between San Francisco and London. Her debut novel, alt.punk (2011), explored the ragged edge of art, society, and sanity, viciously skewering the politics of rebellion. Her sophomore novel, Single Stroke Seven (2016), explores the lives of independent artists coming of age in perilous economic conditions. Both titles can be purchased through Casperian Books. Her short works have been published in Pear Noir!, Curbside Splendor Semi-Annual Journal, and Nailed Magazine, and her indie lit reviews have appeared in Small Press Reviews, The Rumpus, The Collagist, The Nervous Breakdown, Entropy Magazine, and American Book Review.