Come Meet Jeff, Jeffrey, & Geoff at Borders!

Tomorrow (Saturday, November 21) I’ll be moderating a discussion with Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG to talk about some interesting intersections between fantasy/science-fiction and life in the big city. It’s going to be a free-floating conversation, really: We’ll talk about imaginary cities like Jeff’s Ambergris or Jeffrey’s Well-Built City, and urban planning theory—realized or unrealized—which is crucial to Geoff’s The BLDGBLOG Book. So we’ll probably hit upon J.G. Ballard at some point, and I wouldn’t mind if Mervyn Peake came up, but honestly you should just come join us and see what happens. It’ll be at the Borders at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle; we’ll start at 5 p.m. with some short readings and move into the conversation from there, and then I’m told we might conceivably go drinking afterwards.

20 November 2009 | events |

Laura van den Berg on Her First Love: “You’re Ugly, Too”

I first heard about Laura van den Berg two years ago, when she won the first Dzanc Prize for a project she had developed to teach creative writing in Massachusetts prisons. At the time, she was putting the final touches on the stories that form her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, and, well, here we are. I’m loving these quirky stories and the women who are trying to make their way through a world that’s just like ours, only sometimes a fraction weirder, from the professional Bigfoot impersonator of “Where We Must Be” to the botanist looking for a rare flower on the shores of Loch Ness in “Inverness.” Van den Berg was kind enough to share her thoughts about one of her favorite stories in this short essay.

Perhaps it is because I’ve been reading the reviews of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, or because I’ve been teaching her work in my classes this semester, but there are details from her brilliant short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” from the collection Like Life, that I just haven’t been able to get out of my head: that sad plastic baggie at the movie theater, Earl’s grotesque naked woman costume, the Illinois towns with names like “Oblong” and “Normal,” the earrings that stick out from the “sides of [Zoë’s] head like antennae.”

“You’re Ugly, Too has all the trademarks of a first-rate Lorrie Moore story—the dark wit, the well-observed characters, the arresting voice—but the reason this one remains my favorite of her oeuvre can, I think, be partially attributed to the way the story’s intense emotional power rises to the fore midway through the story like a jolt of electricity. For all its cleverness, the stakes for Zoë are deadly serious; her life, in respect to both her physical self and her psychic self, are at stake.

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19 November 2009 | selling shorts |