TCR Story of the Month for February: "Arab Spring" by Joseph Giordano

Joseph Giordano

The Committee Room is pleased to offer "Arab Spring" by Joseph Giordano as TCR Story of the Month for February. Using evocative detail and a firm sense of history, "Arab Spring" tells the story of an honest man doing business in a culture where political corruption is a centuries old practice.  

Joseph Giordano is a Texas-based writer whose work has appeared in more than thirty magazines including Bartleby Snopes, The Foliate Oak, and The Summerset Review.

"Arab Spring" was published in Newfound (Fall 2013).

To read "Arab Spring" click here

TCR Story of the Month highlights an outstanding work of short fiction published online within the preceding twelve months.

Update on TCR Story of the Month Author: Jean Ryan's story "Greyhound" included in Ashland Creek Press anthology Among Animals

Among Animals (cover shows red fox
photographed at San Juan Island, Washington).

The Committee Room is pleased to share the news that the short story "Greyhound" by Jean Ryan is included in the anthology Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction, to be published this month by Ashland Creek Press.

Ryan's story "Paradise," published in Blue Lake Review, was TCR Story of the Month for March 2012.

Among Animals is a varied collection of stories by writers from around the world exploring the ways in which animals and humans both understand and challenge one another.

In "Greyhound," a woman brings home a rescued racing dog for her troubled partner in the hope that they might help each other heal.

Publisher's Weekly has called Jean Ryan a writer who "controls devastating psychological material with tight prose, quick scene changes, and a scientist’s observant eye."

The Los Angeles Review says "Ryan’s stories praise the transformative power of compassion, and reveal how the rescued can become the rescuer."

A Recovered American Classic: "The Lost Weekend" by Charles Jackson (An Interview with Charles Jackson Biographer Blake Bailey)

Novels are often overshadowed to the point of near oblivion by successful film versions. Forrest Gump. The Silence of the Lambs. Kramer vs. Kramer. Midnight Cowboy. In the Heat of the Night. True Grit. The Graduate. Would anyone think of this as a list of novels?

Similarly,The Lost Weekend  is remembered today, if it is remembered at all, as an Oscar winning 1945 film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland as a struggling and not so young anymore writer on a harrowing, five-day drinking binge in Manhattan.

The even harder hitting novel The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson, upon which the movie is based, was published seventy years ago this month, in January 1944. The Lost Weekend sold a half million copies in its first few years of publication, was translated into several languages, and made its author famous, at least for awhile.

Jackson and his novel have recently emerged from the shadows. Vintage Books has brought out a trade paperback edition ofThe Lost Weekend. Also, a superb biography of Jackson -- Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson -- by Blake Bailey was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

TCR Story of the Month for January -- "Translating Kun" by Inderjeet Mani

Inderjeet Mani

The Committee Room is pleased to offer "Translating Kun" by Inderjeet Mani as TCR Story of the Month for January.

"Translating Kun" is set in Thailand, which Mani calls a "land of bars and Buddhism" and nights "full of heady tropical scents with the chatter of humans and insects riding on the breeze." Employing a dreamlike mood, the story looks at the very different realities of a pleasure seeking expatriate writer and a hardworking Thai woman with whom he is involved.
 
Inderjeet Mani studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, at Bread Loaf, and at Harvard. He has been published in Eclectica, BLIP Magazine (now New World Writing), 3:AM Magazine, Drunken Boat (Finalist for the Pan Literary Award, also one of storySouth’s Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007), Nimrod (Finalist for Katherine Anne Porter Prize), WIND (2003 Short Fiction Award), Word Riot, Asia Writes, The Deccan Herald, and various other venues. His books include The Imagined Moment, which analyzes time in fiction. Mani is also one of the people behind the Solpix lit-film web portal.

The Healing Power of Fiction: "The Novel Cure" by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin

"This is a medical handbook -- with a difference," begins the introduction to The Novel Cure, a comprehensive guide to bibliotheraputic treatments to help alleviate physical and mental pain.

What is bibliotherapy?  "The prescribing of fiction for life's ailments," is the definition provided by The Novel Cure authors Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin. Berthoud and Elderkin are both members of the faculty at The School of Life, a London-based international organization founded in 2008 by essayist and philosopher Alain de Botton, that is devoted to developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture.

Suffering people have long turned to non-fiction self-help books for assistance. But fiction? Can reading fiction really help cure what ails you? Berthoud and Elderkin unequivocally say yes. "Our belief in the effectiveness of fiction as the purest and best form of bibliotherapy is based on our own experience with patients and bolstered by an avalanche of anecdotal evidence," they write in The Novel Cure. "Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will simply offer solace, showing you that you are not alone. All will offer temporary relief of your symptoms due to the power of literature to distract and transport."

TCR Recommends -- "Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry" (An Interview with Editor Charles Henry Rowell)

The Committee Room recently spoke with Charles Henry Rowell, editor of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Critics have called Angles of Ascent, which was published by W.W. Norton earlier this year, "monumental...an enormous and solid bequest to readers of American poetry" and a "a must-have powerhouse poetry anthology."

The anthology focuses on poems created in the last thirty years. "I wanted to give readers a cross-section of what I consider as the representative literary poetry that African Americans are now producing," Rowell explained to The Committee Room.

In order to provide a clearer understanding of what makes contemporary African American poetry different from what went before it, Angles of Ascent offers a sampling of earlier works by poets Rowell calls the "Precusors", including Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, and Robert Hayden.

Poet Amiri Baraka, a "Precursor."
(photo by Newark Mosaic)

The title of the anthology comes from a line in Hayden's poem "For a Young Artist." Rowell told TCR that he hopes "that new and emerging writers will read the contemporary poets—poets who began the main of their writing and publishing since the 1980s—in Angles of Ascent as exempla of what is necessary to do with literary traditions: with a critical eye and ear to pick and choose what to use or discard...Whatever you, as artist, choose, you, like the contemporary poets in the anthology, should try to extend, refine, or remake it, in your own voice, or reshape it in terms of your own vision as a necessary voice in your time."

TCR Story of the Month Author Update: Jay Duret's Essay "Riding Sidecar" in December Magazine

San Francisco-based writer Jay Duret, whose story "Ordinary Life" was TCR Story of the Month for June, has just had his essay "Riding Sidecar" published in December Magazine.  

In this thoughtful and witty piece Duret writes about his experience with the social movement "collaborative consumption," specifically getting a ride to the airport by a willing and available stranger summoned by phone app.

To read "Riding Sidecar" click here.

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