Books

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An enjoyable reading list

By DEIRDRE FULTON | September 16, 2009

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WEST ENDER Andrew McNabb, who lives in Portland, will appear on Wednesday.

Need a break from all that required reading this fall? You're in luck. In addition to autumn's amazing offerings on bookshelves everywhere (the coming months will see new releases from Lorrie Moore; Jonathans Franzen, Lethem, and Safran Foer; Margaret Atwood; Philip Roth; and A.S. Byatt), greater Portland will host events to reinvigorate our appreciation of the written word. Here's a round-up of some of the season's most-promising literary happenings (they'll tide us over until LeVar Burton starts his Reading-Rainbow-for-adults Webisodes!).

Andrew McNabb | The Body of This | September 16

From the Phoenix review of the Portlander's book: "McNabb's brief stories (there are 28 total in this slim volume) are full of detailed physical descriptions of both interior and exterior terrains. The characters struggle to find their places, in the world at-large and in relation to other people. They are immigrants, elderly people, city mice gone country, and lovers. In many cases, they interact rather clinically, both with each other and with their surroundings. This is a collection that strives to dissect and distill, to remind us that disparate parts and individual sensations are the bricks that comprise the buildings of our lives. It's not a comforting read, but it still has something of a celebratory feel; it revels in, as one character puts it, 'The beauty and surprise of pure human potential!'"

Sherrie Flick | Reconsidering Happiness | September 23

The start of this debut novel feels pensive, moody, and restless — which makes sense, given its subjects: young women looking for roots, looking for answers, looking for lives. The book has garnered praise from early reviewers; the author will read and sign copies of her book in Portsmouth as part of a brief New England tour.

Nicholson Baker | The Anthologist | October 1

A modern master of literary fiction (and a Mainer, at that!) will travel from his home in South Berwick to read from his latest, The Anthologist (Simon and Schuster), in Portland on October 1. After his recent non-fiction outings — Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2008) — Nicholson Baker has returned to his novelish roots with a story about a struggling poetry enthusiast who's recently lost a lover. With the trademark brilliance he showed in The Mezzanine and Vox, Baker picks apart bizarro minutiae to expose larger thought-themes, to examine neuroses and personal histories. Here's a teaser; The Anthologist's opening salvo:

"Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy word that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat."

Thursday, October 1 @ 7 pm | Longfellow Books | One Monument Way, Portland | 207.772.4045 | longfellowbooks.com

Third Page-to-Stage | October 6

The first installment of this season's Page-to-Stage collaboration between Portland Stage Company and the Portland Public Library will tackle Wendy Wasserstein's Third, the story of a university professor, her family, and an accusation of plagiarism.

Featured Reader at EFG Books | November 5

We tore off a fringe from a cryptic coffee-shop flyer the other day. All it said was: "efgbooks.com / first Thursday." Some Internet research revealed that EFG Books and Gallery, in Bridgton, is launching a First Thursday poetry-reading series; every third month, the event will feature special authors who will read and sign limited letterpress broadsides of their work. If you can't make the 50-minute drive to Bridgton, don't fret — audio recordings of the reading series will be available for streaming online.

David Swanson | Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union | November 6

It's been 10 months since Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, but our political world doesn't seem to have changed that much. David Swanson, of the watchdog organization After Downing Street, would blame at least part of that on the irreparable damage done to our government by the Bush-Cheney administration.

"Undoing the damage is probably going to be the work of many years," Swanson writes in the introduction to his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press). "While we can't erase the harm already done, we can reconstitute a nation of laws and a democratic system of government to ensure it doesn't happen again . . .We must chart a course that creates accountability for wrongdoing, that preserves and protects the rights we have or are supposed to have, and that institutes a new establishment of rights to face the new century." He'll tell us how when he comes to Longfellow Books on November 6, two days after the one-year anniversary of Obama's election.

Related: The shape of things, Which was fine, Back-to-school supplies, More

The shape of things
We are shaped by what surrounds us. Our exteriors — meaning geographical locations, physical infrastructure, and bodies alike — affect our interior states of mind.
Which was fine
There are probably 10 or 15 reviews I could write of Jessica Anthony's The Convalescent . Leitmotifs populate the book's 240 pages like thick, black hairs on the back of an old man's wrinkled ass.
Back-to-school supplies
After a summer that started with a monsoon and coasted into its final lap with a heat wave, when we talked about Wilco, celebrity deaths, and Shakespeare in the park, when we feared tasers and crime sprees, and we consumed Mexican food and ice cream, we're ready to make the transition into fall.
Deep impact
In the most memorable piece in Waterville author Ron Currie Jr.'s 2007 debut short story collection, God is Dead (Viking), God is reincarnated as a Dinka woman in a refugee camp in Sudan, who enlists a jive-talking Colin Powell in an effort to find a young boy.
Dead like me
"Perception vs. reality. In high school, they are pretty much the same thing." So writes Tonya Hurley, author of ghostgirl and ghostgirl: Homecoming (Little Brown), two books ostensibly written for young adults but with elements that are just as appealing to grown-ups.
Include everyone
"Voting Frights" (by Shay Stewart-Bouley, April 3) is xenophobia dressed up to look nice. The assertion that people who are not full citizens are disproportionally less likely to have "learned what is going on" is without factual basis.
Owning her identity
After twice seeing the one-woman stage adaptation of The Passion of the Hausfrau at Portland Stage Company, and perusing several issues of the Hausfrau mutha-zine , I was curious to see how Nicole Chaison's tales of motherhood would translate to book form.
Enrich thy neighbor, Portland
Back in the temperate zone, the local and national economies are in the crapper.
Not so elementary
On June 14, 1995, around two in the afternoon, I lowered my guard. I opened myself up just barely to the notion that there might be a God who cares about me in the same way that Jesus cared about, say, his friend Mary.
Duty calls
There is a special election on June 12, in which voters will decide the fate of the Portland Public Library and the state’s drinking water, highways, ports, and bike trails.
Review: Taam China Glatt Kosher Chinese Cuisine
Theoretically, there could be terrific kosher Chinese restaurants.
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Topics: Books , Barack Obama, Portland Fall 2009, Paul Chowder, More

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