Guy Savage keeps a site called HIS FUTILE PREOCCUPATIONS… Guy reviews classics… but not just your classroom English lit classics.  Guy likes the gritty.  Noir, especially. But, Guy also likes to read books with a challenge, re-reading some of the true classics of the English language.  And those translated from other languages.  In the last five blogs, Guy has covered: Henry James, Emile Zola, Patrick McGrath, Nina Berberova, and Robert L. Fish Can’t blame you if you have never heard of the last three… that is Guy’s specialty, to seek out the lost books, read them and find out what made them work.  Eclectic, yes… the reviews are so well written that you feel just that much smarter for having read the reivew… even if you can’t find these obscure books in your local bookstore.

Mary Whipple has recently decided to take many of the reviews that she had previously written for Amazon or MostlyFiction.com and to post them in one place: SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS.  Thoroughly impressive when you see this body of work in one place. In this short time, she has also added over thirty new reivews. Any long time visitor to MostlyFiction.com knows that Mary Whipple has been a key reviewer for this site for many years, and yes, it was quite disconcerting to me when I first learned of her plans.  However, once I saw her site come to fruition, I was simply in awe.  Because MostlyFiction is shared among twenty reviewers, it only covers a small percentage of what Mary reads.   So, while there is overlap between our two sites (and we are working on the best way to approach this since Mary is still a contributor to MostlyFiction.com), Mary is able to do things that she was not able to do previously.  Take for example, this review of a poetry book that she recently discovered: LONG DIVISION by Andrea Cohen, Mary Whipple’s unbridled enthusiasm is contagious, almost made me want to reprint it on MF, until I remembered that we don’t cover poetry.  And the entry before that is about a visit with the McDowell artists… where she happened to have discovered this poet.  Still, the majority of her site is devoted to her thorough book reviews. One advantage in Mary having her own site is that she no longer needs to “share” books with the rest of the team. She can review what she wants, when she wants.  So, yes, we are covering a lot of the same books (but at different times). When she reviews a book that MF is not covering and she feels strongly that our readership should know about the book, then her review will be reposted on MF.  At least, that is our current arrangement. All things grow and change, thus we will see where this leads.

Ann Wilkes, has a been maintaining a blog site SCIENCE FICTION AND OTHER ODYSSEYS for quite some time. Ann is a sci-fi author herself and attends many Cons, often sitting on discussion boards with other authors and often sharing tables during book signings.  She meets a lot of authors, both established and newbies. Ann has taken advantage of this great opportunity to interview those that she meets and if she hasn’t met them yet… she introduces herself via e-mail to request an interview.  Ann and I have found it works well for her to submit a review to MostlyFiction and then to post the interview for said author on her site.   In those cases, you have already seen me provide the link to her interview.  Personally, I find author interviews interesting and would love to post her interviews on MF, but how greedy can I be?  When Ann isn’t interviewing, she’s usually providing an update on Cons or other related news.  It may not be all books, books, books but she does give you an idea of what it is like to be author, getting her current book noticed, her successes at getting short stories published (and sometimes rejected), and finding the time to work on her current novel.  I’m embarrassed to say that MostlyFiction.com has yet to review Awesome Lavratt — blame it on Ann being our “beyond reality” reviewer… so I can’t ask her to do it!  I’ve read and it is fun romp.

Next time I do a free-wheeling blog entry… I’ll talk about Facebook.

For now… remember that for this site or any of the other sites, the best way to get daily updates to subscribe to the RSS feed.

And no matter what I site I recommend that you visit, always come back here. Promise!

“There were places too murky ever to see through. The bloody fury of the night and everything storming up to it, none of it was ever going to lie flat and let her run knowing fingers across it and see all the patterns and shapes and meanings for what they were. There was no essence to them. It was all mayhem and blood and now preening sorrow” — BURY ME DEEP

Click here for interview with MEGAN ABBOTT

Gorgeous starlets who vanish from the elusive glitter of Hollywood, dingy dives that cater to the decadent, deviant tastes of the terminally depraved, and repressed housewives who clean by day and party by night–these are the sort of women who inhabit the novels of Megan Abbott, one of the most exciting names in today’s world of crime fiction. The Czar of Noir, author and film critic Eddie Muller gave Megan Abbott a tagline: Queenpin, and it’s a fitting name. Not only is it the title of Abbott’s third novel but it also refers to the idea that Abbott reigns in the world of noir. Males have long dominated this genre; consider the triptych of noir: Hammett, Chandler and Cain, and what of the creations of noir fiction? Immortalized in our minds are detectives Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. But where does that leave women in noir?

In noir fiction, the archetypal femme fatale emerges as the dominant female character, and of course the femme fatale is the polar opposite of that other oft-found character: the drab little woman in the kitchen. Megan Abbott’s novels stand apart from the herd because she successfully creates strong female types who transcend the typical noir boundaries. In noir fiction, female sexuality not only leads men astray, but it’s something to be controlled by men in a male-dominated world.

Abbott takes the idea of suppressed and controlled female sexuality and unleashes it through her female-centered novels. While men exist in the pages of Abbott’s novels, and they exist sometimes to control women’s sexuality, the male characters are not the centre of the novels, and each of Abbott’s novels pulse with the unslaked passion of the female protagonists. This is a remarkable feat and no small achievement, especially in The Song is You, the story of starlet Jean Spangler who disappears without trace. The tale of Jean’s disappearance is told through the eyes of a male, but the story remains firmly focused on a woman who isn’t there, and this, of course, recalls Laura–one of the greatest noir tales that also happens to have been written by a woman, Vera Caspary back in 1943.

In Queenpin, Abbott gives us two main female characters. There’s Gloria—a vicious “collector,” feared and respected by the males in her world. She promotes her protégé–an unnamed, ambitious twenty-two-year-old grooming her for the future. But is the future strictly professional? And while Abbott plays with traditional mother-daughter female roles, she cleverly lets other possibilities emerge.

It’s always rewarding to follow a novelist as they become increasingly more popular, and that’s exactly what’s happened with Megan Abbott. I came across my first Megan Abbott novel a few years ago, and incidentally, it wasn’t Megan Abbott’s first novel–it was her second, The Song is You. Even now a few years later, the novel still haunts me, and it was so good I was convinced to back track and pick up an out-of-print copy of Abbott’s first novel, Die a Little. From that point, I had to wait a year or so to get my hands on the third novel Queenpin, and this leads me to Abbott’s fourth novel, Bury Me Deep, based on the life and crimes of Winnie Ruth Judd.

In Bury Me Deep, it’s still a man’s world, and it’s a world inhabited by women who are the temporary playthings of the men who have the money and power to enforce society’s rules. The novel’s main character is Marion, an innocent, naïve and lonely woman whose much older husband finds her a job as a filing clerk in a medical clinic, and leaves her in a rooming house while he slaves away in Mexico, working as a doctor for a mining company. Left to her own devices, Marion is gradually led astray and slowly corrupted by a nurse named Louise. Louise pimps on the side in order to maintain her female lover’s drug habit, and so she feeds Marion to a local satyr, Joe Lanigan. The sexually naïve Marion is vulnerable to Lanigan’s sly courtship, and of course, she completely misunderstands the relationship, trading quick sex and the unchartered territory of female pleasure for vague promises. The book’s dark atmosphere of dread and impending doom is maintained steadily and relentlessly from page one. Even though Marion attends parties and imagines that her drab little life is “improving,” it’s obvious to the reader that the tension and drama can only go in one direction, and as Marion’s life spirals out of control, events take an explosive, irrevocable path.

In some ways, by reconstructing a real-life crime, Megan Abbott has returned to familiar territory in Bury Me Deep, but in this novel she enters the mind of a woman whose fling with sexuality leaves her scarred, damaged, and dangerously cornered by circumstance. Aspects of the crime committed by Winnie Ruth Judd remain a mystery, and Bury Me Deep addresses the mystery by its powerful recreation of the mind of a horribly damaged woman.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (July 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Megan Abbott
EXTRAS:	MF Interview with Megan Abbott
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Queenpin The Song is You

Bibliography:

• Die a Little (F2005)
• The Song is You (2007)
• Queenpin (2007)
• Bury Me Deep (2009)
• The End of Everything (2011)
• Dare Me (2012)
• The Fever (June 2014)

Blog Post by Poornima Apte 6-23-09

Last year, I visited the Taj Mahal with my family. This year we are planning something less glamorous – a few weekend trips but most of the summer is going to be a “staycation” for us.

I figured I’d need a few good books to “transport” me some place fun. I read a few really good ones recently and there are a couple of exciting ones in my book pile that I thought I’d share

Coming into the Country is by one of my favorite non-fiction authors, John McPhee. It is one of the best books about Alaska I have read. McPhee describes not just the gorgeous setting but also details the lives of the people who have moved to this last frontier and made the state their own. The first edition was written in the late ‘70s (long before Gov. Sarah Palin became a household name) but it reads fresh and relevant today. McPhee peppers the narrative with interesting characters, lively anecdotes and beautiful descriptions. The book is one wild adventure—as close to the real thing as the written word can allow.

A few weeks ago I heard Mark Kurlansky on NPR and talk focused on his new book The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food–Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal, writings from the Depression era about American food traditions. As intensely fascinating as it sounded, I decided to skip this one and try instead a slightly older book  America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA – the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define. What author Pat Willard has done here, is reproduced writing from the WPA project where out-of-work writers during the Depression Era were commissioned to write about local foods and then compared these to how things are today. I loved the contrasts between current and old traditions and it is heartening to note that in an era of McDonald’s and Chilis and Taco Bells, food is still being made with a sense of community as before. Yes, traditions are still waning but not all is lost. I was especially delighted when I saw  this article in the New York Times recently, which reminded me what a great read America Eats! was. There is one amazingly telling picture of a feast in the Carolinas: a long table and a wall separating the whites from the “coloreds.” The  paperback version of America Eats! releases in early July. It’s worth picking up. The book is a dash of history seasoned with good food. You’ll love the ride!

Smitten with the travel bug, I decided to take a look at
Route 66: A Photographic Essay by Susan Croce Kelly and Quinta Scott. We traveled along Route 66 many years ago and I am definitely looking forward to visiting again. The book is full of fascinating images and some great peeks into history. I can’t wait to really get into it.

Finally, I am currently on a wild ride all the way from Divide, Montana to Washington D.C. I have the 12 year-old genius,  The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet with me for company. I am really enjoying his quirky personality and the story. Stay tuned for my review.

These great reads truly fulfill one of books’ many functions—they transport you. If you have any good ideas for staycation reads (or even ones to take to the beach), why not share it in the comments section? Happy reading! Have a great summer!

Poornima