I’ve been dipping in and out of a lot of books lately, partly for research and partly because my schedule’s been a bit too hectic to dig into any one project for very long (though War and Peace is still on my list):

• Faulkner Absalom, Absalom. I reread about 2/3 of this one and it’s great. I’m working with this idea of the dictator novel, which is primarily a Latin American form but which I think translates to American literature in the form of a larger-than-life character obsessed with power. For instance, Moby-Dick or All the King’s Men. Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s story is another one.
• Donald Platt, Dirt Angels. My old poetry professor at Purdue has a new book of poems (well, 2009, so not that new). Like his previous collection, My Father Says Grace, he uses a three-stanza line (primarily) and writes about his family. His poems about his daughters are particularly affecting.
• Bret Lott, Jewel. This is the only novel by my undergraduate writing professor that I haven’t read, and it’s also his most famous (it was on Oprah). I tend to put off an author’s supposed masterpiece. For instance, Suttree was the last McCarthy I read. Not sure if that’s because I want to save it or because I feel like I need to be extra attentive. Either way, Lott’s novel is good, but a bit hard to stomach in places. The subject is a woman’s last child, who has Down’s Syndrome (opens in the ’40s and spans forward). Very Steinbeckian, if that’s a word.
• James Dickey, Selected Poems. Dickey is an interesting writer, and he created a mythology about himself. Allegedly, he would walk up to pretty young woman and ask, “Do you want to fuck a poet?” The NY Times says “he slept with too many women; he drank oceanically.” I’m interested in him beyond his books because he spent many years working in advertising, and said he spent his days selling his soul and his nights trying to buy it back. I can relate. I’m not a poetry critic, so I don’t have much to say about his poems, but I think it was in his Paris Review interview where he said he was a bit skeptical of “southern literature,” about the trope of the alcoholic father and the troublemaking son and the slatternly daughter, but he did think landscape was one way to tap into that realm. His poems do have great imagery.
• Speaking of, the Paris Review released all of their archived interviews from the past 60 years. Good way to kill an afternoon.
• On my bookshelf: Paul Harding’s Tinkers, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Marianne Boruch’s Into the Blue Pharmacy, and Dostoevsky’s Demons.
• Finally, this year’s National Book Award winner was Jaimy Gordon’s The Lords of Misrule, which was published by an independent press. That’s two major awards going to small press books this year, a good sign for the future of literature I hope. Two books I’m interested in reading from the small presses: Charles Dodd White’s Lambs of Men and the new anthology of Appalachian short fiction, Degrees of Elevation.

Slow going on the novel revisions, but I do have a handful of book recommendations:

• Robert Morgan, The Balm of Gilead Tree. Morgan is an elder statesman of Appalachian literature, and this book of his selected stories is excellent. Set in the Green Valley near Hendersonville, N.C., the stories move chronologically from the 17th century and the arrival of the white man to present day (or at least the late ’90s). I particularly enjoyed “Poinsett’s Bridge,” which is about a stonemason working on a bridge to connect the Piedmont to the mountains; “Kuykendall’s Gold,” which is about a young woman who marries and old man who has gold buried in his woods; “Dark Corner,” which is about an impoverished family on the road; and “The Welcome,” which is about a soldier returning from WWII and is reminiscent of Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” Overall, the collection is a good example of a writer plumbing deep into a setting, and the way Morgan explores history should offer an explosion of creativity to any aspiring writer.
• Patricia Engel, Vida. This is an excellent first collection of stories from a young writer I met in Key West. The stories are linked by a common protagonist, Sabina, a Colombian-American living in New Jersey and who migrates to New York City and then to Florida. The stories have a funny, sharp voice along the lines of Junot Diaz, though I think the subject matter is a bit more bold — a young woman confronted with love, death, terrorism, and ennui — all presented in a wry, unsentimental voice. The line that won me over came early: “around here, they card you to buy smokes and nobody has the nerve to break any kind of rules. It’s a town full of wusses, a polo-shirt army of numbnuts.”
• Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Franklin’s new one is a contemporary murder mystery set in rural Mississippi. It’s a quick read and a great study in plotting. Looking back on it, I do think the plot is a bit too neat, the characters not quite as deep as in Hell at the Breech or the novella “Poachers,” but it’s still a good read and a must for southern bibliophiles. I’ve got a review coming out in the newspaper in a couple of weeks, which I’ll link to.