Real life doesn’t end when the credits roll or the last page turns. There is always the slow, quiet drive home from the movie theater as we try to realign our own expectations with the temporary thrill of a good story. We did not just save the world from aliens or overcome all odds to find our soul mate. Instead we are left lingering in the stillness of our own choices, the anticlimactic wake of reality.

It is in this space that author Scott Nadelson introduces us to the characters in his new collection of short stories, Aftermath. A man trying to rediscover who he is after calling off his engagement with a fiancé who cheated on him, a teenage boy coming to terms with the abandonment of his father, a married couple struggling through a trial separation—each trying to understand exactly where they are suppose to go from here.

But Nadelson finds the beauty in that struggle, that stillness. He infuses a seemingly mundane reality with such heartbreaking authenticity that the truths uncovered by his characters are both touching and discomfiting in their applicability to our own lives.

In the collection’s title story, Richard Weintraub and his wife Alana have separated after almost seven years, and the reader follows Richard between alternating desires for freedom and the comfortable life he has become accustomed to.

When he finally called to arrange a meeting, the day after he visited Dawn in Philadelphia, Alana sighed and said, “Okay. I guess so,” as if he were asking her to help with some tedious chore, taking plastic bottles to the recycling center or scrubbing mold from his shower wall. Our Versailles, he called the meeting as they were making arrangements, and instantly regretted it. It was a stupid comparison, making him the defeated German, ready to accept all blame, all responsibility. Why did he feel like the wrongdoer, the one who deserved punishment?

The lives of the characters in Nadelson’s book are not wrapped up in neat little packages. The answers do not come easy, if at all, because things just don’t happen that way. We are left to wonder, along with the characters, whether or not they have made the right decisions, not knowing what will happen next but hoping for the best.

Aftermath: Stories
by Scott Nadelson
www.scottnadelson.com
www.hawthornebooks.com

Great interview with Lidia Yuknavitch over at Chuck Palahniuk's site The Cult.

Mid-April I posted a slew of reviews (that has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?) for Lidia Yuknavitch’s hot-off-the-presses The Chronology of Water. It was impressive then with the likes of Bookslut, HTMLgiant, Bookslut, Shelf Awareness, The Oregonian, PNBA Northwest Book Lovers, Pank Magazine, Eugene Magazine, Portland Mercury, Brain Candy Reviews all loving the memoir.

In the past month since that post there have been a lot more fantastic reviews for the book. Here are some highlights…

Molly Labell, Bust Magazine, June/July 2011:
“She takes us on a journey through addiction, sexual exploration, and perhaps most intriguing of all, through creation: of literature, of memories, and of life. Her sharp prose—witty, jarring, worthy of dog-earing—alternates between gleeful postmodern exercise and wrenching elegy. So honest and unapologetic is her writing that you can practically hear her sigh in catharsis as you turn the pages.”

Alison Barker, Chicago Reader, May 2011:
“Lidia Yuknavitch is a self-proclaimed language bandit. Other writers purposely disturb their readers’ comprehension, because, well, they want to change language as we know it. Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water plays with language, but it also brings an extra dimension to the wordsmith memoir: it’s a sputteringly good read.”

Amy McDaniel, Paste Magazine, May 2011:
“Speaking of water…as its title suggests, Lidia Yuknavitch’s fierce new memoir, The Chronology of Water (blurbed by Shields, among several eminent authors) takes place entirely off-shore, metaphorically speaking. Nothing about her life has followed the map. Yuknavitch gives new, rich meaning to the by-now-familiar idea of a fluid sexuality.”

Jen Graves, The Stranger, April 2011:
“I love how physical the book is, both in its writing and in its point of view. Her body threatened to rise up from every single page I read. It’s war in there. I’m going back in.”

Richard Thomas, The Nervous Breakdown, April 2011:
“Lidia Yuknavitch is an inspiring woman. Her story brought me to tears several times. The abuse she survived, ingested, and spit out in order to transform herself into the swan that she is today…was indeed a life-changing upbringing. Her story is haunting, touching, and heart breaking.”

Publishers Weekly, May 2011:
“This isn’t a memoir ‘about’ addiction, abuse, or love: it’s a triumphantly unrelenting look at a life buoyed by the power of the written word.”

Vanessa Nix Anthony, Portland Woman Magazine, May 2011:
“The most compelling thing about this story is not its raw palpability, but rather the pure hope and unabashed joy infused in its last chapters. Chronology is about the resiliency of the human heart and its ability to piece itself back together, over and over.”

Portland Monthly, May 2011:
“Lidia Yuknavitch’s unsparing memoir The Chronology of Water includes tragedy, abuse, oceanic booze consumption, and rated-X sexiness. And Ken Kesey, of course.”

Renee E. D’Aoust, The Collagist, May 2011:
“It’s rather a relief that this is not an addiction memoir or a book about too much sex, although there’s lots of great randy sex on these pages. The Chronology of Water is simply an unapologetic story about life.”

KLCC interview with Laura McCandlish

The New Yorker Book Bench

Check out this Lidia Yuknavitch self interview over at The Nervous Breakdown.

The last few weeks have been fantastic here at Hawthorne Books. Our spring title The Chronology of Water launched on April 1st and it’s been getting loads of great press!

Here’s what some of the reviewers are saying:

Debra Gwartney, The Oregonian, April 2011:
“I’m also convinced that this bold and highly unconventional book — hot, gritty, unrelenting in its push to dismantle the self and then, somehow, put the self back together again — gets not just under a reader’s skin but seeps all the way into her bloodstream.”

Jamie Passaro, PNBA Northwest Book Lovers, March 2011:
“If you love memoir or poetry or Ken Kesey or have ever spent time on the planet Sorrow, you’ll want to read The Chronology of Water by Portland author Lidia Yuknavitch. The memoir is somehow both brutal and dreamy—but it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its despair or lose you in the rapture of its pretty language. Yuknavitch has a powerful personal story to tell, and she does this in surprising ways.”

Kris Saknussemm, Bookslut, April 2011:
“The Chronology of Water is raw, real and honest — without a ripple of self pity…a delicate and shining work of rediscovered grace. The book redefines what the recounting of highly personal experience can be, in a way that reaches across the often very dark waters of gender and generational divide.”

Bridget Kinsella, Shelf Awareness, April 2011:
“The Chronology of Water is powerful and beautifully written–even the tough parts.”

Roxane Gay, HTMLGIANT, March 2011:
“I fucking loved this book and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to buy the book immediately and then keep it beneath your pillow or shove it down your pants or crack open your rib cage and hold the book next to your heart. It is really that beautiful and brilliant and any number of superlatives I will spare you from for the sake of decorum.”

Emily Grosvenor, Eugene Magazine, March 2011:
“Portland writer Lidia Yuknavitch seeks out conventions in life and art, then tears them down, in her exhaustively compelling memoir, The Chronology of Water, a book that is as much the making of a singular artistic voice as it is a document of a life that could have yielded a dozen memoirs.”

Alison Hallett, Portland Mercury, March 2011:
“Literary prose that embraces the experience of being a female, in a female body, occupying space in the world—it doesn’t come along too often. But here it is, and it’s worth your attention.”

Kirsty Logan, Pank Magazine, April 2011:
“The Chronology of Water is the kind of book that makes you want to hug it to your heart, kiss its cover, run your fingertips over the edge of each page…Yuknavitch has this uncanny ability of making me feel like she’s reaching out of the book and past my skin and into my ribcage and then there’s her fist around my heart, synchronizing my pulse with the pace of her prose.”

Jason Godbout, Brain Candy Book Reviews, April 2011:
“The Chronology of Water is a memoir unlike anything I have ever read. This book is a living breathing work of art. A completely absorbing visceral experience…gritty, raw, and alive with emotion.”

Caleb Powell, Bookslut, March 2011:
“Yuknavitch weaves lucid stories with lyricism and experimental flourishes that never seem overloaded. She travels from the heartbreak of stillbirth, unhappy childhood, and a reckless coming of age; intertwines aquatic sports with various addictions and sexual escapades; and pays homage to the ghosts of literature, chief among them Ken Kesey and Kathy Acker. In doing so, she has created a simply beautiful work.”

Lidia Yuknavitch with Ken Kesey and the other University of Oregon students that collaboratively wrote the novel Caverns.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water still has five weeks till launch date but that’s not stopping the current coverage. Check out the latest press release here if you haven’t already. There’s some serious buzz building around the book and here’s just a snippet of media over the past year…

Publisher’s Weekly
The Oregonian
HTML GIANT
Reading Local Portland
NorthWest Book Lovers
Chuck Palahniuk’s forum
Indie Literature Now
The Rumpus
More on The Rumpus
AuthorScoop
YA Highway
Molly Gaudry blog
Register Guard

Check out David Shields' newest title.

Review by Scott Nadelson

For several years now, since he first published an essay in The Believer that would form the seed of his new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I have been arguing in my head (and once or twice in person) with David Shields.

In that original essay, and far more expansively in the book—released this month—Shields makes an argument for a new literature that strives toward a “deliberate unartiness,” that embraces authenticity, that avoids contrivance at all costs. He champions collage over linear narrative, meditation over invention, lyric essay over the well-plotted novel. He challenges long-held notions about the primacy of fiction in the literary universe, calling instead for work that is self-reflective, confessional, messy. He encourages writers to borrow and recontextualize passages from others’ work the way hip-hop artists sample beats and riffs. He does so in a series of essays built on collage, aphorism, and appropriated quotation, few of which he attributes, except in a series of notes at the book’s end—these the publisher added against the author’s will, and he encourages readers to cut them out and throw them away.

In the private, imagined arguments we’ve been having, Shields is intelligent and articulate, saying things like, “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t,” and I answer with something less intelligent or articulate, something along the lines of, “But I like stories.” And it’s true. I do. I’m a sucker for the way a story can cast a spell, can draw me into the world of people I don’t know, can make me feel things other than the dull ache of boredom and anxiety I feel when I’m going through the motions of daily tasks, can allow me to experience things (or at least imagine the experience of things) I’ll never experience in the limited boundaries and duration of my “real” life.

And while I love much of the work Shields discusses in Reality Hunger—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example, or Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, or Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, or Leonard Michaels’ Journal, or John Cheever’s journals—I also still long for stories with intricate plots and invented characters and beautiful language; I want to read “Goodbye, My Brother” at least as often as I dip into Cheever’s Journals. While reading Reality Hunger, I find myself nodding along with all the brilliant things Shields has to say, and yet…

And yet, this, I believe, is the point of Shields’ book.

What’s wonderful about Reality Hunger is that it asks you to argue with it, it demands dialogue and wrangling in a way that few books do. In the classic tradition of art manifestos, it is forceful, fiery, sometimes belligerent, but its main goal is to challenge readers to think deeply about preconceived notions, to defend their own artistic choices, their own aesthetic tastes. From now on, whenever I choose to read or write a linear narrative, I have to ask myself, what is the artifice hiding? What does it obscure? Is the work as honest as it can be, or does its construct keep me at a safe distance from the messiness of life and the ugly complexity of human nature?

Shields’ book is a guide for those of us hungry to connect with each other in a world that does all it can to keep us apart.

I finished it yesterday, and a few minutes after I put it down, I picked it back up and started reading it again. I have a feeling that my argument with Shields will continue for a long time to come.

Hawthorne Books author Scott Nadelson is author of The Cantor’s Daughter, winner of the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the forthcoming Aftermath: Stories.
Visit Scott Nadelson’s website @ www.scottnadelson.com