Novelist Nell Zink takes on Sept. 11 in ‘Doxology’

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 10 AUGUST 2019

“This changes everything.” That’s the pronouncement on Sept. 11, 2001, by a colleague of Pamela Bailey, a longtime New Yorker, formerly obsessed with punk stalwart Ian MacKaye; a mother, wife, young woman who ran away from D.C. at age 17; and the center of a sweeping new novel by the bright and irresistible fiction writer Nell Zink.

Watching the skin of each tower peel away, Pam is “sort of surprised and sort of not. Even the attack itself was sort of surprising and sort of not. Who knew they had the nerve, and why did it take them so long?”

A novel can take a few months to write or maybe several years or even a decade or more. But the period of time any book actually concerns? That can be a single day in Ireland, or a few electrifying days in Paris or a couple weeks in Hong Kong. But another kind of book covers many cities and many years — declarations of war and mass death and a quiet birth and much more, all of which flow forth in Zink’s powerful fifth book, “Doxology.”

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Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Underland’ explores the inscrutable world beneath our feet

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 4 JUNE 2019

“We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet,” writes Robert Macfarlane, in his wide-ranging but uneven new project, “Underland.” “Look up on a cloudless night,” he suggests, “and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face.” Whenever we look down, Macfarlane argues, there’s an entirely different feeling: “I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only 10 yards below it.”

It’s a worthy project, going deep, making the space beneath us come alive, and it’s one Macfarlane seems uniquely suited to dispatch with aplomb. A fellow at Cambridge and the author of numerous much-lauded books, Macfarlane tries his best for hundreds of pages: from caves in Britain to the catacombs of Paris, from a raging subterranean river beneath the Italian-Slovenian border to the nuclear bunkers of Finland and Nevada to the wild underground on the frozen edges of Greenland, Finland and Norway.

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Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi reveals Ugandan life in England’s post-colonial world

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 17 MAY 2019

A boy sits in the window of a flat in Manchester, watching animals fight. “A whole fox?” the boy marvels. “Chased leaping and scurrying by a cat? So wrong. Like a husband walloped by his wife.”

Foxes, fighting, what’s right and who’s wrong: In Uganda, the boy muses — setting the terrain for this majestic new story collection by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi —“God was hands on. He watched and recorded every wicked deed, word and thought in his black book… But here in Manchester,” where the family has come, where something isn’t right, “God gave up a long time ago, [and] grown-ups are out of control.”

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In Chia-Chia Lin’s ‘The Unpassing,’ a Taiwanese family in Alaska searches for home

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 2 MAY 2019

A deep melancholy persists in the grim, breathtakingly beautiful debut novel by Chia-Chia Lin, who writes a story set in Alaska that tracks most closely Gavin, the school-age son of a family of four children and two parents with roots in Taiwan — “that junk island,” according to the father, “where you couldn’t find pizza … [y]ou couldn’t mention certain dates” — which they’ve abandoned to make a life on the bleak outer reaches of Alaska.

At the center of “The Unpassing,” even an attempt to make cookies is a kind of teeth-clenching disaster for the family — “always just a notch away from normal.” A foul burning stench comes from a stack of books they’ve forgotten in the oven, part of the meager belongings they’ve struggled to hide from their father’s boss. Then men drink baijiu, too much of it, and the matter of a faulty well the father built, which poisoned a child across town, remains unresolved. (“How sick?” his wife asks. “Sick enough to ask for money,” her husband says.) Moreover, the mother has forgotten to call Taiwan, and her father is going to die any day.

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Amy Hempel’s new collection, ‘Sing to It,’ resounds with a ‘nowness’ of the world we live in

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 30 MARCH 2019

“There must be a word,” Amy Hempel writes in her new story collection “Sing to It,” “for the state of going about your business without knowing something key, and with someone else knowing it, and knowing too that there could come a time when you will know it.”

In four previous collections, the first in 1985, Hempel has methodically and marvelously carved out a space in the canon of knowing and not, leading up to 2006’s omnibus, “The Collected Stories.” With her new book — 15 pieces set in New York City, upstate, various islands and, most deliciously, Florida — Hempel once again exercises the stylistic muscles that have earned her story slots everywhere from the New Yorker to smaller journals like Subtropics.

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Q&A: Mark Doten on ‘Trump Sky Alpha,’ which imagines the president ruling the future from a blimp

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 8 MARCH 2019

Ever read a crazy book standing up, yelping in horror, transfixed by the way it’s both insane and all too real? Mark Doten’s new novel, “Trump Sky Alpha,” might give you this feeling, imagining as it does one logical but dark conclusion to the current administration: our former reality star governing from a floating blimp, upon which corporations pay massive fees for a limited number of seats, while other blimps around the world also fill with paying customers, all of it moving in synchronicity, the whole thing live-streamed on YouTube.

Naturally, this leads to the nuclear apocalypse, during which our most electric place to discuss what’s happening is … Twitter. More upsetting and delirious than Doten’s previous novel “The Infernal” — which tackled the Bush administration and its war in Iraq with a Robert Coover-esque level of playful density — “Trump Sky Alpha” is a vivid and explosive story, an urgent one that reemphasizes wholeheartedly the fact that Doten, also an editor at Soho Press, is one of our keenest and most inventive prose writers working today.

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‘Honey in the Carcase’ is Josip Novakovich’s darkest and, somehow, most hopeful book yet

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 14 FEBRUARY 2019

Only a few dozen writers have had careers estimable enough to have been nominated for the International Man Booker Prize, an award something like a cooler Nobel. Think Don DeLillo. Lydia Davis. Philip Roth. Joyce Carol Oates. Among the nominees in 2013 was the Croatian-born Josip Novakovich, who after several decades in America now calls Montreal home. Throughout a staggering career — story collections, novels, essays, poems — the terrain has often been the former Yugoslavia, a small town in America, or exotic locales such as St. Petersburg, Russia, where Novakovich has traveled as a writer and instructor of writing. With his new collection, “Honey in the Carcase” — which features some of his darkest work and also somehow his most hopeful — Novakovich once again ranges widely, from Denis Johnson-esque slices of Americana to utterly original tales from various war-torn villages, showing again and again how he is one of our best writers in the English language.

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Author Pam Houston bought a ranch for $21,000 — but the way it changed her life was priceless

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 25 JANUARY 2019

Two decades ago, the chair of the University of Utah English department shuffled a few papers on his desk. Pam Houston stood there, needing only a perfunctory signature for a tuition waiver. The problem was that the man didn’t particularly care for creative writing. “I can’t sign this today,” he said. Distraught and humiliated, Houston pictured the several-hour drive back to her cabin. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

Instead, the young writer walked out, never to return. With a $21,000 advance for her first book, the near-classic collection of short stories “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” Houston did something far more interesting: She bought a ranch in Colorado. It’s this brave — and slightly bonkers — decision that informs every page of “Deep Creek,” her beautiful and inspiring new book about writing and life in the American West.

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From a tell-all by Steve Jobs’ daughter to a Russian homecoming novel, the year’s best books were amplified by current events

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 28 DECEMBER 2018

It could feel like the most important stories this year were being published on the front page of the newspaper, loaded into chyrons on CNN or tapped into Twitter. But whether it was by accident or each author’s long-range design, in a year I read more books than any other, the central feature that united my favorites was how urgently or elegantly each title seemed to connect to — or shed light on — the weird and alarming world beyond their pages.

I found insight and direction, for example, in Tommy Orange’s “There There,” my pick for the year’s best novel, written by a young Native American man from Oakland. Not only is the book artful and voice-driven, listing its attributes — and the problems it tackles — you might feel you have assembled a rough draft for a really excellent special issue of the New York Times Magazine.

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Op-Ed: How I learned to love homeless housing in my neighborhood

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 8 NOVEMBER 2018

I live on Sunset Avenue in Venice, right across the street from three of the most contested empty acres in the city. You might have read about it: A couple of weeks ago at a town hall meeting, dozens of angry Venetians shouted down Mayor Eric Garcetti and Councilman Mike Bonin. Some in my neighborhood really don’t want the city to build transitional housing for the homeless on those 3 acres. I get their reasons, but I can’t join them. My daughter won’t let me.

Five years ago, I couldn’t believe our luck when my wife said she’d found us a tiny but adorable house in Venice. Annoyingly, I’d bring up where we lived within seconds of meeting someone. During down time, I’d pull up Google maps, astonished to see our tiny bit of property, so close to the historic boardwalk and Abbot Kinney and Muscle Beach and all the rest.

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'Heavy' by Kiese Laymon may be the most important memoir you read this year

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 17 OCTOBER 2018

 “At our house,” writes Kiese Laymon — recalling a Mississippi childhood in a startling, essential new memoir, “Heavy” — “there was no pantry. There was hardly any food other than spoiled pimento cheese, the backs of molded wheat bread, a half-empty box of wine, and swollen green olives.” When he thought of places like the “rich-white folk houses” his grandma cleaned for, he “imagined stealing all their food while they were asleep.”

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In 'The Browns of California,' Miriam Pawel shows how Pat and Jerry Brown shaped a state and a nation

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 19 SEPTEMBER 2018

A man from Germany settles in rural California. Nearly an adult, his daughter seeks more in San Francisco, where her son eventually mounts a successful campaign to defeat Richard Nixon. He’ll later telephone the disgraced president, offering condolences. With no love for the impeached, the governor’s son replaces his dad in Sacramento, and soon, everyone hears how the new man in town consorts with rock stars and visits secret societies and insists space is the future. There’s a difficult nickname, a run for president and two more. His sister rises to State Treasurer but misses her own bid for governor.

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Fire lookout Philip Connors' reckoning in 'A Song for the River'

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 7 SEPTEMBER 2018

“Fire Season,” published in 2011, felt like an instant classic. A soulful and surprising mediation on the life of a fire lookout, the book placed Philip Connors on a shelf beside giants of Western literature, including Norman Maclean, Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.

A few years later, a second book appeared, “All the Wrong Places,” which seemed quieter and more complicated but no less successful and stirring. This time the focus is on New York, where Connors was a reporter, working to process his younger brother’s devastating suicide.

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Learning To Take A Stand

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE - 3 MARCH 2017

I’d just moved to Venice from the Middle East, where my wife was a foreign correspondent. For years I played a supportive role, mostly raising our young daughter around the region—from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Turkey to Lebanon—always in a kind of panicked hypervigilance because of the shoot-out on our block in Beirut, more than one car bomb elsewhere in Lebanon, and all the other rigors of being a parent in a faraway place.

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Wayne Barrett, The Best Reporter I Ever Knew

THE NEW REPUBLIC - 20 JANUARY 2017

 My first day working for Wayne Barrett in the fall of 2004, I was one of six terrified interns, all of us sitting in a windowless room at The Village Voice, listening to a man in Brooklyn barking orders over a speakerphone. I was somehow nominated the stenographer and tapped furious notes—pausing to stare at the others in bafflement—as this loud and blunt man, Wayne Barrett, rattled off assignments.

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Loss haunts Rabih Alameddine's new novel, 'Angel of History'

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 16 OCTOBER 2016

A man awaits his fate at a San Francisco psychiatric hospital. His partner is dead. Nearly an entire generation is gone. But not all is lost for our hero, Jacob, born Ya’qub; he is the product of a brief tryst between a powerful man in Beirut and a woman from Yemen who later takes her gifted son to live in a Cairo whorehouse to thrive under the care of a voluptuous auntie named Badeea. Back in Lebanon, more or less ignored by his father, he’s so savagely beaten by bigger boys at a Catholic orphanage that his battered body must be sent to Sweden. In San Francisco, years later, he’s an Arab male and a homosexual and one of the last of his kind — everyone else felled either by the great calamity of AIDS or the furious meat grinder that is life as an Arab. Oh, and he talks regularly with Satan. And the Devil.

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Jonah Lehrer returns with 'A Book About Love.' Can it rescue his reputation?

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 14 JULY 2016

What do we want from the disgraced among us? Atonement, or at least an accounting, and perhaps some sense they’ve learned from their mistakes. No meticulous mea culpa is on offer from Jonah Lehrer in “A Book About Love,” his first title since the last was hurriedly withdrawn. Instead of an apology, in a cunning move Lehrer has written a new book that purports to be about love — but is ultimately a reflection on the inevitability of failure.

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Bob Shacochis travels the world in 'Kingdoms in the Air,' but doesn't always enjoy it

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 2 JUNE 2016

Over more than 30 years, Bob Shacochis has gained a reputation as a swashbuckling, fish-catching man’s man capable of a certain kind of rugged reportage for Outside, Harper’s and other magazines.

Not as widely known as big-hearted Bill Bryson, wandering Paul Theroux or the ravenous Anthony Bourdain, longtime author Shacochis is something of a writer’s travel writer. He teaches at Florida State and has won awards for his fiction – “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize — and so his latest book of essays, “Kingdoms in the Air,” could serve as a kind of career-defining collection of magazine writing from 1989 to today. It starts powerfully enough in Kathmandu in the spring of 2001.

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Right by the beach, and the bus depot

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 6 MARCH 2016

The house my wife found in Venice was close to the beach. It was also alarmingly close to Division Six: a 3.5-acre bus depot ringed by tall fencing and barbed wire. On the sidewalk out front, happy people walked by, carrying surfboards or shopping bags. Just as continuously, in and out of the depot, the variously numbered orange city buses lumbered and wheezed.

I wanted the house, yet I did not want the house. And then it didn't matter, because it was ours.

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In the age of Google Maps, why walk the 4,000 mile Nile River? Levison Wood's book explains

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 18 FEBRUARY 2016

The Nile, from its disputed source, runs for as many as 4,000 miles. In recorded history, no man has ever walked its full course — and in April 2014 former British paratrooper Levison Wood set out to do just that.

"To some, the very idea seems archaic," Wood writes of his journey, "and, in a world of Google Maps, where every valley and hillside has already been plotted, the traditional age of exploration is certainly gone. But exploration has always been about more than pure discovery or of being the first to do something."

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