Endless Knots

He really matters

He's funny, his thinking original, his second book unlike anything you've ever read. "How old is this guy?" one friend asked when he finished reading the book. It's hard to believe that someone with such insight and such an unblinking eye toward human foibles is only 34.

 

Our Fiction Book Club spent last evening with Ron Currie Jr. to talk about his award winning second book,  Everything Matters! I've already raved about the book and written aplenty about my admiration for Ron's work. Just read it - and if you're lucky, he'll come to your book club too.

Why Everything Matters! really matters

If you've ever...

... felt you're so different that you don't match the rest of humankind (a few of us); or

... thought the world might end precipitously (some of us); or

... had your heart broken (that would be most of us); or

... tolerated an annoying sibling, lost a parent, enjoyed a baseball game, or lived in Boston (have I gotten everyone else?); or, just in case I've missed someone...

... heard a voice in your most quiet mind that tells you what's about to happen (hmmm);

and/or,

...wanted to hold those you love most tight in your most fearful moment...

Read Ron Currie's new book, Everything Matters!

It's risky reading books by friends. You want to love the book because you love them while, at the same time, if you're a really good friend, you have to be honest otherwise they'll never trust your opinion.

So I read with trepidation but only for a few pages because soon I was burning through them so fast that I was also wishing I could slow the whole thing down yet none of this was possible because before I knew it, 320 pages had slipped past, I turned Arctic cold, my arm hairs literally (it's a book) were standing straight up, and I was reaching for the phone to call Ron to tell him that this book is indeed one apart.

All the stars line up for a great read - Ron's usual energetic writing and ability to reach for words that elude others, not fancy words, just ways of using those we know in ways we've never known; a story that likely has never crossed your mind (at least not mine); insight into broken characters that both provokes that inner click and makes you wish you could redo their lives for them...and so much love for parents and children that...let me only say this: If I type much more, I'll have to have the keyboard repaired from water damage.

And then there's the ending, previously noted. Others who've read it have described sobbing at the end, ignoring their very own children, or, as one person wrote: "It's a life-changing book. I'm beside myself with emotion. I want everyone in the world to read this book."

That means you. Please read it and tell me what you think. If you've already read, then lucky you.

Thank you, Mr. Currie, for what must have been a lot of tears yourself to get to the end.

Ron reads from Everything Matters!

Sarah Eustis photo

And while I'm on the subject of writers reading, join me tomorrow night, Wed, July 8 at 7 PM, to hear Endless Knots Writer (a select group of my faves) Ron Currie, Jr. reading from his new one, Everything Matters! at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA.

I had the privilege of reading the first four chapters of one of the earliest drafts. No surprise that readers are raving. One friend on Zoetrope said the book left her sobbing; several more have said they couldn't put it down, and, as previously reported, Janet Maslin generously praised it in The New York Times. So happy for and proud of Ron.

See you there?

"Everything Matters!" - the world according to Ron Currie

It's almost publication day (officially June 25) for Ron Currie's new book and it's being eased into existence with a generous introduction from none other than The New York Times's superb reviewer, Janet Maslin--see yesterday's insightful study, "The Sky Is Falling Soon! (And Junior Is Agitated)."

Her praise is unqualified for Everything Matters! (a prophecy cum coming-of-age set in rural Maine) and the set-up for many similar reviews to follow, which is just what a supremely talented writer needs in an era where publishing on paper is in peril, where people are watching every penny, and I'm sure there are three more phrases I can think of where all the important words start with p.

And the review is very long, sports a great picture of Ron, and makes all of us who've been on his team since before any publisher even knew who he was very happy. I love this guy so much he's a category here (one of a very small number of writers dubbed "Endless Knots Writers), even gave the book party for his first book, God is Dead."

Here's a taste of what Maslin says:

What these opening passages also announce is that Mr. Currie is a startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions. His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own. He seems equipped to succeed at almost anything...

PS: Just tried to look up his reading schedule for the book and found this picture on his site, which I apparently snapped, taken in our dining room. Something very recursive about all this. He'll be at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., on July 8 at 7 PM. Other places too and I'll post as soon as he sends me the schedule (come'on, Currie).

More from Endless Knots writers - Roland and Ron

In History Rechanneled, Roland Merullo reviews Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World in today's Boston Globe. Master of the beginning and end, Roland's conclusion (I posted final words from his Agni essay, Visions of Gerard, yesterday) five stars Horwitz's book:

...Which only serves to prove the author's point. Our story, our real story, is as painful, shameful, and grim as it is uplifting and grand. We have doctored the events of the past to make ourselves feel good about them. All cultures employ this collective denial mechanism, ignoring crimes and failures both ancient and recent in the name of an upbeat patriotism. It makes you wonder what we will say about ourselves 100 years from now. And it makes you think that "A Voyage Long and Strange" - disturbing, honest, wonderfully written, and heroically researched - should be required reading in every high school in the land.

Roland Merullo's political novel, "American Savior," will be published this summer.

And Ron Currie's pictured in today's NY Times SundayStyles at the NYPL Young Lions event. Unfortunately, the Times doesn't run these photos online...but the subhead today on the "Evening Hours" section where a full page of NY nightlife photos runs each week is "Town and Gown." An inspiring aspect of Ron's story is that he is just a writer. No college degree, no MFA. Just a writer.

NYPL Young Lion Currie in pictures

As per below

Before

Accepting

Ron signing for Brian O'Byrne, actor who read Ron's story, "Indian Summer"

Sierra Currie, Ron's niece, and Aaron Eckhart, Ron's fan

 

Zoetropers David Fromm, Anne Elliott, Don Capone, moi

 

 

Ron Currie: Young Lions Fiction Awardee 2008!

NYPL lion from ForgottonDelights.com - thanks! Event photos to come...Photo of Barbara Currie by David Gerard Fromm.

On the steps of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street sit two massive marble lions. My mother loved her joke about them, told it frequently: They roar whenever a virgin walks by. Last night they did roar when Ron Currie won the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award for God is Dead.

Actor Ethan Hawke and a group of his friends (Rick Moody, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and Hannah McFarland) started the award in 2001 for writers under 35, making Ron the eighth winner. Hawke was MC in the Bartos Forum of “this wonderful building,” a banquet hall with a glass "saucer dome" ceiling and marble walls. We sat at round tables, ours all the way to the left in front of the stage, the one with the Ron Currie tent card. At tables next to ours, the other nominees: Ellen Litman (The Last Chicken in America); Peter Nathaniel Malae (Teach the Free Man); Dinah Mengetsu (The Beautiful Thing that Heaven Bears); and Emily Mitchell (The Last Summer of the World).

Hawke was exuberant, congratulating the nominees regardless of the outcome. Ron's mother, Barbara, had brought along a stunning picture of her husband , Ron Currie Sr., who passed away last December.

Four actors read excerpts from the works of each nominee, Ron’s “Indian Summer” was first, read by Brian O’Byrne, star of “Coast of Utopia.” Brian took a wide stance, right hand in his pocket, sometimes carving the air, weight shifting, knee bending, leaning into the tough parts of the story adding more punch to the raw prose, his mouth just an inch or two from the mic, dressed in black jeans and a charcoal sweater much as the characters in the story might have worn, he not that different in age from them. The story is awful and riveting, the same excerpt Ron read at the book party last summer (well, apparently, I never revealed in these pages that we hosted a book party for him here last July when the book came out so this link will have to do). "Indian Summer" will stand as the emblem of hopelessness, hilarious yet so raw that each time I hear it, I wish Ron had never written it because of what it must have taken out of him to do so. But, horrible as it is, it fits the book as a whole - and everyone lunges for it, readers and reviewers alike.

The other excerpts were wonderful - two emigré stories, one Russian, one Ethiopian, a jail story that had Ron’s not preceded it would have been even more powerful, and a portrait of Edward Steichen - all beautifully written, as one would expect from nominees for this award, humorous, and all well read by Hawke, Amanda Peet, and Michael Shannon - but when Brian finished, I felt sorry for the other nominees. Ron’s work is a different kind of original and that, I’m certain, is why he won.

The judges considered 142 books, chose five as finalists, said Paul LeClerc, NYPL president, before receiving “the envelope, please.” Not a second between his opening it and his “Ron Currie.” We erupted, we being his mom, Barbara, his niece Sierra (who got to have her picture taken with actor Aaron Eckhart), and three of my Zoetrope friends - Anne Elliott, Don Capone, and David Fromm. Congratulations is a small word for what this means to Ron and for his career. And lest I overlook one detail: Prize = $10,000 for Ron; $1000 for each of the other finalists.

See also: Don Capone's Hit List, Paper Cuts (NYTimes book blog), NYPL Young Lions site, GalleyCat

A double for Endless Knots writers

Two of our favorites here, Ron Currie Jr. and Roland Merullo, have mentions in today's Boston Globe book section. In "Shelf Life," a column of shorts on good books, Ron's book is featured:

Belief systems

Nonfiction titles questioning the existence of God are among this year's notable books. Now fiction writer Ron Currie Jr. of Waterville, Maine, enters that territory with "God Is Dead" (Viking), a dark and comic collection of interrelated stories, in which God inhabiting the body of a Dinka woman in the Sudan is killed, and parents turn to worshiping their children while dogs walk on water.

And in the "New & Recommended" section that runs at the top of one of the Globe book pages, Roland's picture appears (one of the really great ones taken by his talented photographer wife, Amanda S. Merullo):

Breakfast With Buddha
By Roland Merullo

Enlightenment meets "On the Road" in this witty, insightful novel (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $23.95).

Hint: On the off-chance you still have a gift or two to procure, well, hint.

Those Zoetropers

Bright-eyed readers recall my prattling on about Zoetrope, the great resource for writers provided by Francis Ford Coppola. For no discernible monetary gain or fame, the director has, for nearly a decade now, supported a free website for artists of many stripes--writers, photographers, costume designers, set designers, poets, screenwriters, songwriters, film scorers, sound designers, and, although it's technically against the rules, essayists and novelists. Somewhere in the vicinity of 80,000 people around the world have signed up. But it doesn't feel that big once you join.

In exchange for posting five reviews of others' work, you can post one of yours which then goes up for critique. Members, especially the really good writers (in whose midst, of course, I am), complain from time to time about lame reviews but generally it's a jury of peers, offering excellent and generous advice.

For me, the real gift of Zoetrope has been the hallway talk. People open "offices" (read discussion boards) on topics serious and nutty. There, members can keep up on new markets for their work, gain invaluable advice on how to pitch, and buck one another up for the inevitable bad news. As I've written elsewhere (lovvve quoting myself): writers are in the rejection acceptance business.

One very big name who's erupted out of Zoetrope is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer whose second novel, Half a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize this year (in very good competitive company). There are others: Roger Norman Morris's The Gentle Axe got a full-page review with picture  when it came out last spring in the New York Times Book Review; Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami has been a critical success with multiple translations (proud to say I co-hosted a luncheon for her when she was in Boston to promote the book); Roy Kesey, who's got a short story in Best American Short Stories 2007 and two books in two years from Dzanc; Xujun Eberlein, who's just won the Tartt First Fiction Award for Apologies Forthcoming; and, of course, Ron Currie Jr, whom I've written about here before, given his triumphant debut with God is Dead (another book party chez nous).

All of which is a very long-winded introduction to Mississippi Review's current issue, with the theme of The Extended Family, edited by Darlin' Neal, which features nearly a full cast of Zoetropers: TJ Forrester, Liesl Jobson, Girija Tropp, Kim Chinquee, Jim Ruland, Joan Wilking, Tiff Holland, and Jeff Landon. Congrats to all.

Ron Currie Sr must be smiling

If you love them, you are very happy. We all do/are. The Red Sox are on fire (never mind the Pats but that would take too long to cover :).

You know, because you keep up with this and many other arcane stats about the Sox, that they ARE first in the American League East division FOR the first time since 1995.

Baseball is all about playoffs. This one begins tomorrow night, just after sunset, at sacred Fenway Park here in Boston.

I know my friend, Ron Currie Sr, father of God is Dead author, Ron C Jr, is incredibly happy. He was wearing his Sox cap the first time I met him.

I'm wearing mine too...while my friend June wears her Red Sox pajamas and many others put on their talis(wo)mans of good luck. Go Sox.

Sidenote: Recently, I picked up a copy of How to Talk to a Yankee Fan by Andy Wasif and Rick D'Elia. Excellent for irritating "Yankee" (singular) fans.