Sadly, you don’t get a sticker or button for purchasing these books. But you’re not a kid anymore, right? It’s just the sheer, pure joy of reading that motivates you now, yes? So in the spirit of grown-up goodwill and having learned to share, here are the books I am the most excited to purchase very soon:

Pee on Water by Rachel B. Glaser. I have been so excited for this sucker, ever since I started reading the stories online, particularly the title story at We Are Champion. Glaser is one of my favorite newish discoveries (hey, everyone’s a somewhat newish discovery for me, okay?) and she’s writing things that no one else is writing, in slightly twisted-up versions of the English language. Also, video games and flaming sticks. I mean, what more do you need?

Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom by Mel Bosworth. Because Mel is awesome and funny and a fabulous, very human writer. How could I not buy this book, sure to be as good as he always is?

Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray. I would read the DC phone book if Amelia wrote in the margins of it. No lie. This book is going to be the shit. Also, if you like Amelia Gray you won’t want to miss this bit of awesome. Sadly, I am all the way on the other coast, but I will contribute anyway for the greater good of all West Coast kind.

Unclean Stories of Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting. Alissa Nutting is a powerhouse of a writer. Everything I’ve read of hers I’ve loved. Also, Starcherone is publishing this and Ben Marcus chose it as the winner. ‘Nuff said.

Cloud and Other Stories by Jason Jordan. Listen to this description and tell me you do not want this book:

Organized according to where the stories were written, Jordan’s eclectic compilation traces his path from Louisville, Kentucky, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through fiction. Though he’s absent from these stories, they’re firmly rooted in the places he’s lived, the places that have influenced him and his work beyond measure.

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Finally, okay, it’s not a book, but the new issue of New York Tyrant looks incredible. I got all paranoid and pre-ordered two copies, since last time I missed out and couldn’t get one.

Roxane Gay says some really lovely things about me and about some of my favorite writers at She Writes. Roxane is an amazing writer and also one of the most generous human beings ever. And she has excellent taste. She highlighted two of my favorite stories, “A History of Heart Disease” and “The Chemistry of Objects.” Thank you, Roxane! I am blushing but grateful.

I just finished reading The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao, which is a quick but remarkable and intense read. The protagonist is imprisoned in Mao’s China for nine months in a tiny cell, and even when he’s released his life is a waking nightmare. It’s a shocking p, brutal, beautifully written book published by Two Dollar Radio. I’ve never read anything else in their catalogue, but after reading this I’m definitely going to pick up more from this fine small press.

And it’s not even Friday yet!

American Gymnopedies by Scott Garson

Scott is awesome, first of all. As someone who’s just (barely) dipped her big toe into the cold scary waters of editing for a publication, I am always in awe of writers who find the time to run killer lit magazines AND write killer stuff. (Scott, for those of you who don’t know, runs Wigleaf, one of the single most fabulous flash fiction magazines out there, web or print. Period. ) I’ve been reading excerpts from Gymnopedies (and I’m sorry but I’m too lazy to put the accent over the “e”) and enjoying every single one of them, so I very much anticipated the release of this book. And I’m not disappointed at all. In fact, I’m the opposite of disappointed. Elated? Appointed? Whatever it is–I’m very much that thing.

That’s because Gymnopedies is this amazing sort of travelogue, this sad, weird, lovely, rough guide to backyards across America; it’s a travel guide to the places no one really wants to travel to–but you end up in just the same. Useful, no?  As we travel the map, we travel the mind, seeing and unseeing and hacking up memories and allusions and collecting the pilings-up of the past. These are not lovely piling-ups–they spill out of the pages like spare auto parts and broken pawn shop stock–but they become lovely, sometimes, through the spare language, and sometimes cracked,  often loving lens that Garson views them through.

Anyone who grew up not-wealthy here will recognize these pieces and the people who live in them. The boy at the Walgreens counter in Omaha. The depressed worker in the call center in Buffalo. The single mother in Seattle. The homeless man in Albuquerque. These people aren’t rich, and don’t have much or much of anything at all, maybe, but they have the rich portraits that Garson’s of them–and the idea that everyone, even the plain girl in L.A., has some kind of good, human thing inside of them. Something good for one story, at least.

when all our days are numbered, marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds by Sasha Fletcher

This is one of those books that makes me happy and sad at the same time: happy because it’s so good I want to eat it and digest it and make it part of my cells, sad because I know I will never be able to write anything like it. It’s a fable and a story and a meditation on love and dependence and the fear that goes along with both. It’s an exaggeration of the fear of death and of joy and a warning label on the bottle of Taking Thing Too Seriously.  “Don’t get carried away” is a warning throughout the book, both metaphorical and, as it turns out, literal.

Fletcher gives us this huge, beautiful language, this carefully-constructed-but-then-recklessly-torn-apart world which seems more impressive than real, more dream than sleep. It’s filled with policemen who build beaches and turn into birds, with whales that fall from the sky, with builders and building and destroyers and destroying. But this is a hopeful book, a romantic and beautiful book, in so many ways. It’s a sad tale, but also a tale, in the end, of love and possibility and endless renewal:

I was up all night drawing pictures of plants on pieces of paper. I cut them out & glued them onto some cardboard. I glued the cardboard to some paint stirrers & planted them in the yard. I tried to make sure there were some pretty good plants out there.

I am building you a garden the best that I can. I built you a steamboat. I built you a window. I built you a river.

I built the river out of what rivers have always been built of.

I believed in tradition as much as I could for all the ways it could help me & all the ways that it would.

Fletcher lets us know that he is the one doing the building, and that anything is possible while we can still build worlds out of what’s true and real, for ourselves and for the people we love.  These worlds may be shifting, changeable, and made of paint stirrers and glue, but we can tear them down and build them again and again and again. And that’s beautiful.

The New York Times has an interesting review, though I think they make too much hay of the generational divide.

Carving by Anthony Santella

Sam Tanenhaus has an interesting essay in the Times Sunday Book Review, on the New Yorker’s 20 over 40 list. He points out that these lists are designed with “futurity” in mind–the promise that these young writers show–and yet, that many writers have already hit their peak by the time they’re 40.

At the time, this anxiety struck some as comical, but history bears Ishiguro out. Even great novelists who endure in the collective memory as Prosperos, long seasoned in their “secret studies,” often performed their greatest magic when they were young. Flaubert was 29 when he began writing “Madame Bovary” (and was 34 when it was completed). Thomas Mann was 24 when he completed his first masterpiece, “Buddenbrooks.” Tolstoy, after a period of dissolution followed by military service, began writing “War and Peace” at age 34. Joyce, who wrote “Ulysses” in his 30s, already had two major works behind him. The late-blooming Proust, his youth idled in Paris salons, was only 37 when he began writing “Remembrance of Things Past.” Even Kafka, the 20th century’s most haunting exemplar of anguished paralysis, was 29 when he wrote “The Metamorphosis” and 31 when he began “The Trial.”

Personally, since I’m 32 and the idea of writing my masterpiece in a year or two is beyond comprehension, I like to think that maybe 40-is-the-new-30 applies here, too. Back in the day, 30 wasn’t all that young. In addition, an awful lot of people had to peak in their twenties or thirties, because they died not long after. Kafka and Proust may have gone on to produce thrilling and even more masterful work, had they lived longer. Fitzgerald barely got to middle age. (And yes, I know, but you never know. He may have sobered up eventually.) Crane died at 28. Nathanael West at 37. And once you go back a little further, you get the Brontes, Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud–dying before 40 was the thing back then.

The list of those, like Woolf, who accomplished more after they went over the hill, is just about as long as the list of those who didn’t. Or at least, it should be, if you factor in early death and its statistical significance to the promise of genius in a way that I would know how to do if I didn’t suck at math. Anyway, I like to think there’s hope for everyone at every age. And the older I get, the more I’ll continue to tell myself that.

Then again, Rudyard Kipling would have taken a dump on Glenn Beck’s new book. At least the poet could write.

Painting by amazing artist Dan McPharlin

PANK has just announced their latest selections for their Little Book series:

That said, we are excited to announce we will be publishing three manuscripts:

Matt Salesses Our Island of Epidemics (Fall 2010)
Ethel Rohan Hard to Say (2011)
Nicolle Elizabeth Read This Shit Out Loud (2011)

We also had a shortlist of finalists who created books we loved:

Anne Leigh Parrish An Imaginary Life
Laura Ellen Scott Curio
Gabe Durham Camp Bylaws for the Hearty and True
Jensen Beach Everyday Every Day
Joseph Goosey Rory Gilmore Wants to Fight
Stephen Mills A History of Blood
Sue Williams They Say We Don’t Exist
James Tadd Adcox The Artificial Mountain
Ravi Mangla Hear Ye Knives
Kerri French Instruments of Summer
Andrew Borgstrom Mumbling for the Chorus

Congrats to Ethel, Matt, and Nicolle, and to everyone on the shortlist as well. I’m familiar with almost all of these writers, and they’re all fantastically talented.  And I can’t wait to get my hands on Matt, Nicolle, and Ethel’s books this fall and next year.