Authors: Joe Meno, Todd Taylor, Todd Dills and Bucky Sinister
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Responding to MySpace lies.
Subjects Discussed: Shirley Wins, pumpkin launching, Halloween, grandmothers, writing women convincingly, Sons of the Rapture, Strom Thurmond, the differences between North Carolina and South Carolina, moving to Chicago vs. moving to New York, Whiskey and Robots, populist poetry, the Icarus myth vs. Wayne Gretzky, independent book touring, BookScan, growing up books, novels that use fiction as an escape mechanism, Encyclopedia Brown, cryptograms, textual buildings, creating a sense of mystery, telemarketing, Mark Haddon, Alessandro Baricco’s Silk, Faulkner, Donald Barthelme, short chapters, savvy audiences and storytelling, inventiveness, how the success of Hairstyles affected Meno, sartorial colors, Dick Tracy, the Boy Detective play, and indie presses vs. corporate presses.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Meno: For me, the book is about how as an adult you negotiate a world of mystery, a world where you don’t have the answers. And so I wanted the audience, or the reader as they were reading, to feel that sense of surprise. That when you’re a kid and you get a detective kit, you look at the world a little bit differently because of that object. And so I wanted the actual text to be surprising. As you were reading through it, you weren’t exactly sure technically what was going to happen. If you’d have a couple pages that were blank. Or if you’d have some of the text that was broken up into these small little buildings that go throughout the book or if there’d be a piece of text that was shaped like a cloud. And so that, you know, using the text itself to give that sense of mystery or surprise to the audience as they were going through.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (