A Starred Review from Publishers Weekly for Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House
"In this beautiful anthology, the poetry editors of the literary journal Tin House have cherry-picked from the magazine's past contributors. Representing the establishment are venerable poets such as Sharon Olds, Charles Simic and Donald Hall. Hall's poems are heartbreaking meditations on loss, containing the ghostlike presence of his late wife and muse, the poet Jane Kenyon: 'The months of absence hurry./In sleep I touch her skin/And wake in the stain of dawn, in fury.' Among the younger poets are two who continue to draw wider attention: Matthea Harvey, who has a brilliant knack for whimsically relaying the everyday oddity of the contemporary world, and Christian Hawkey, who conveys some of the widespread feeling of helplessness: 'I will sit down in the middle of an intersection.../ & pour gasoline over my head,/ & gaze up at the clean white object of a gathering cloud.' Poetry in translation also has a strong presence, through Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and the late Yehuda Amichai, among others. Also adhering to the magazine's dictum to showcase both the very well known beside up and comers, this book gathers poems that are never self-indulgent, occasionally political, often intimate and in many cases timely, both universal and approachable, such as the title poem by Ben Doller: 'When I bend back to look at the satellite convulsions, I/ am an aqueduct for twilit rain.'"
The Journal of Jules Renard Featured in the Los Angeles Times Book Review!
"Jules Renard's endlessly amusing journals are available again, and whether read straight through or dipped into at random, they're a marvel to behold...readers of this work are certainly encouraged to laugh throughout at his singularly savage wit."—Tayt Harlin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Read full review
Human Resources: We Have a Winner!
Human Resources by Josh Goldfaden has been awarded the 2008 Devil's Kitchen Fiction Prize. As part of the award, Goldfaden will read at the Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival put on by Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His reading will be on Friday, October 24 at 5:00 pm.
"Looking at Animals," a story from Human Resources, was awarded the Lytle Fiction prize for being the best short story to appear in the Sewanee Review in 2007.
And Human Resources was also shortlisted for the 2007 Story Prize (http://www.thestoryprize.org/2007_short_list.html).
Two Starred Reviews for The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris
"As each chapter shifts from one voice to the next, Morris cranks up the tension so that by the time the dart match arrives, the book is impossible to put down. Morris explores how even the most banal choices we make—to get in the car or not?—can have a life-altering impact."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review and Pick of the Week
"Secrets and surprises are revealed as the narrative shifts among the five voices, injecting the culminating chapters with an almost unbearable tension. All the while, Morris continues to draw a subtle, near flawless portrait of the unique ways that small-town life can both nurture and suffocate its residents."— Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist, Starred Review
You Don't Know Me: A Citizen's Guide to Republican Family Values taking the country by storm
Win McCormack, Tin House publisher, kicked off his reading tour with a packed house at Powell's on Friday, August 22. Coming soon to a city near you! You Don't Know Me Events
"In graphic, devastating, and sometimes hilarious detail, Win McCormack reveals the true hypocrisy and depravity of those who love to quote the Bible but act like Caligula. When you finish You Don't Know Me, you will know for sure that the 'Family Values' phonies who have infected the GOP should never again be entrusted with the well-being of America."—Arianna Huffington, author of Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America
ELLE loves Lucia Nevai's Salvation!
"Crane is also, by way of Nevai’s humor and preternatural stylistic gifts, the kind of self-effacing, wickedly wise, subtly superior organic genius that we all long for in a protagonist...Salvation’s impossibly satisfying pearls begin arriving like rocks in an avalanche—one barely leaving its impression on you before another lands."—Rachel Rosenblit, ELLE
Girl Factory gets rave review in The New York Times Book Review
"In his delightful second novel, Girl Factory, Jim Krusoe manages to take lowly yogurt to new heights of repugnance...As with the best kind of horror story, Girl Factory occurs in a seemingly ordinary setting, and it's precisely the clash of the mundane with the horrific that the makes the narrative so absorbing."—Julia Scheeres, New York Times Book Review
Book Forum reviews Girl Factory, by Jim Krusoe:
As strangely whimsical as it is macabre, this tale could easily have become an on-the-run-from-the-law picaresque or an animal rights satire, but in Krusoe’s spirited hands it humbly fades into the backdrop, as the real story, far more sinister and equally madcap, unfolds...he is never heavy-handed—his writing is too unpretentious, his characters too wonderfully peculiar...We never learn, for instance, who the women are or how they came to be in their tubes. But this, too, underscores one of Krusoe’s themes: that life, unlike most stories, leaves so much unknowable. And this makes Girl Factory the best kind of novel—a wildly imagined tale with its own rules. A word of warning, however: You may never look at your yogurt the same way again.
Read the full review
"DESPICABLE" says New York Magazine
The arbiter of taste for all things...New Yorky, has decreed in its Approval Matrix that the cover of Do Me, Tin House Book's anthology of Tales of Sex and Love, is indeed despicable.
That is "Highbrow Depsicable," however, not "Lowbrow."
WE HAVE A WINNER!
Literary Arts just announced the winners of the 2007 Oregon Book Awards and Lee Montgomery, Editorial Director of Tin House Books and Executive Editor of Tin House was the winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction for her memoir The Things Between Us (Free Press).
One of the judges, Lee Gutkind, described Montgomery’s work as “vivid and riveting like cinema” and praised her ability to craft “real-life characters with evocative sensitivity.”
Congratulations to Lee!
Publisher's Weekly reviews Saving Angelfish, by Michele Matheson:
Matheson's promising debut, a gritty novel from Tin House Books' New Voice Series, tells the bleak story of a wayward L.A. junkie named Max. Virtually disowned by her dysfunctional parents, out of a job, sickeningly underweight, months behind on rent and unable to kick her debilitating heroin habit, Max flits from day to depressing day in a constant state of decrepitude. When she's not shooting up, she's snorting coke, and when she's not doing that she's thinking about her next fix. Despite her spiraling decline and a number of near-death experiences, nothing really changes for Max throughout her story. Her dealers (Grandpops, her crusty, repulsive landlord; and Carlotta, a beastly legless woman) and fellow junkies (Wolf and a roller-skating waif named Tutu) share Max's single-minded pursuit of getting high. Though initially mesmerizing, the drug-centric plot begins to ware a little thin; the crux of the book can be found in Max's unchanging attitude toward her life: "The goal is not to think-about anything. She winds up places, and that's fine." Nonetheless, Matheson's sharp, highly detailed prose thrusts readers in the driver's seat of an out-of-control life.
*********
LOS ANGELES TIMES NEW DISCOVERIES!
Food & Booze:
Essays and Recipes Edited by Michelle Wildgen, illustrated by Nicole J. Georges, Tin House Books: 226 pp., $16.95
“MOSTLY booze. Thank God. Maybe it's coming back. Or maybe it's just that, as Chris Offut writes in his contribution to this marvelous essay collection, "[t]here are two kinds of writers, you will hear people say, the ones who drink and the ones who quit." Then again, Offut's recipe is for baked possum; who wouldn't rather have a drink? Elissa Schappell, in "Ode to a Martini," quotes Dorothy Parker: "I like to have a martini / Two at the very most / After three I'm under the table, / After four I'm under my host." Lydia Davis, in "Eating Fish Alone" (one imagines a raccoon washing its paws in the river and looking anxiously about), provides a recipe for a smelly sardine sandwich. Sara Perry's essay on the apple is a walk in the park that begins with Eve, moves through Alice B. Toklas and ends with an uplifting recipe for pâte brisée and several versions of pie. "My first loaf sucks," reports Matthew Batt in "The Path of Righteousness," on his efforts at sourdough bread ("a Quonset-shaped loaf of despair"). "I feel like a soiled, unfaithful, pathetic man" ˜ this after having attempted a "nice brown sauce," inspired by Julia Child. These essays are pure fun, pure joy, every last honey-colored, 80-proof, diet-be-damned one of them ˜ and excellent attitude training for the coming holidays.”
**********
