Hemon on Handke; Hsu on Yang

Although I find the Asian-American politician in Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker a far more compelling figure, I enjoyed Hua Hsu on Andrew Yang and his presidential candidacy. Also, Aleksander Hemon on Peter Handke's Nobel Prize in Literature is one you don't want to miss. Hemon, who had rich words after Bob Dylan's win, is fast becoming a leading commentator on the Swedish literary prize in addition to writing engrossing fiction. In local news, Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back continues to impress me while a literary friend sent strong praise for "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served."

an early masterpiece

Eclectica Magazine has published an early masterpiece, "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served."

Kafkas in Spanish

The Spanish translation of Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served will go to press soon and features an English-to-Spanish rendition of the title story from Dr. Raquel Anido of Clemson University. Many thanks as usual to Dr. Daniel Dragomirescu of Romania.

Romanian hit

Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, with cover art by Nathan Holic, managed to sneak into the back cover (page 68) of a Romanian literary journal (left middle), but no one from the Carpathians has come to anoint, kill, or otherwise congratulate me on this success. . . so, tentatively, I'm uncertain of what this means or whether I should lay low, smile high, or merely continue with life's daily routines.

Kafkas arriving soon

I'm excited to announce that my bilingual short story collection, Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, is in the mail, and I'll soon receive 10 paperback copies.

Turquoise Truck for Mendicant Bookworks

I'm excited to announce that in addition to published paperbacks of Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served and Auggie's Revenge, I'll also have "Turquoise Truck," a car-lot story, published as a stand-alone e-book at Mendicant Bookworks by summer of 2015. Mendicant is known for gritty realism and has published Gerald Locklin, Mark SaFranko, Ben Tanzer, and other small-press stars in the past. This will be my second foray into the world of e-book singles; my first was a short novella (or long story), The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity.

books: 20 + 1

Lying on my couch at an uncommon angle, I looked up at a shelf with a small selection of paperback fiction and saw these ten titles in order: Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula, Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, Arthur Nersesian's The Fuck Up and Chinese Takeout, Chris Offutt's Out of the Woods, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Pynchon's V, and Roth's The Human Stain.

I have so many books in storage and in piles on the floor or shelves in other rooms, yet, possibly, these ten represent in exacting proportion all the fiction I read. Having said that, I soon realize that 30% women might be high, sadly enough, and 20% in translation is low, I think, and it would be weighted more toward fiction from Europe and Russia, not 50/50 between Europe/Russia and Asia. Also, because I anticipated teaching contemporary literature, after 1945, when I drove down to South Carolina, I left most of my titles written before World War II in storage space in Philadelphia.

I do have the white whale and friends, Pierre, etc. on hand, at least a couple of the same Penguin paperback editions I read in college. Of the ten I just named, only Olesha's Envy is one I was assigned to read as an undergrad, but the copy on the shelf is one I procured years later. The British Picador paperback V is one of two editions I've owned, and I bought it in England when I was working as a busboy in Paris and then traveling in Europe the summer and autumn before the Berlin Wall fell. The Crying of Lot 49 rests on a different shelf where I keep the books I've been teaching most recently.

What's on the shelf above the first ten, you ask?

Ha Jin's Waiting, Denis Johnson's Angels and Jesus' Son, Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City, two different editions of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then four Kafka Schocken Classics w/Dad's Kunderas leaning against them. Kerouac's On the Road rests horizontally on top the paperbacks just named.

When Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, my bilingual stack of stories, arrives from Romania, I'll let the copy I keep rest in its alphabetical place, between Kafka and Kundera, on the higher plane of shelf.

My Father's Great Recession

My print copy of Contemporary Literary Horizon arrived last week, and it included the first half of "My Father's Great Recession," a fiction based upon visiting the old man in Ponte Vedra, Florida when he was living in a studio by the beach but only had forty bucks in his pocket because a "backer" wanted him to have pocket change while his son was around. Perhaps it's not my best short story, but it's most meaningful to me, and it was great to see it printed on good paper in original English and Romanian translation. 

It will appear as the first story in the collection, Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served.

Thank you, as always, Daniel Peaceman.

Over Fifty Billion Served. . .

. . . but no longer in Moscow, at least not for now:

“We will be healthier,” Mr. Aksyonov told reporters in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, according to the Interfax news service. “This food does not suit. Look at people who regularly eat McDonald’s food. Some of them have to turn sideways to squeeze through a door frame.” 

According to this CNN video, the now closed Moscow McDonald's opened in 1990 and was once the largest in the world. Here's the famous first customer queue for burgers and fries "fresh" from fast-food freezers and deep friers.

We'll wait and see if this closing leads to a next wave of Russian immigration to the United States, a land where we are all somewhat free to spend our afternoons in any fast-food establishment we please.

coming soon