But something else begins at 23, too. Now that the writers behind the strongest forces of literature are a part of my own generation, there is an added pressure to connect, to get it on a level that other readers might not. Yael, Avishag, and Lea are, after all, like young women anywhere: their time spent in the military is dotted with the same conversations that peppered by college years, and they braid one another’s hair and gossip about boys as if there weren’t missiles falling outside their base. There is an alienation and embarrassment in not accessing what they go through, because there’s no Palestine to my Israel, as it were; I have no ceaseless, unsubstantiated enemy, no patriotic duties to my country. And so on some level, seeing the three girls emerge from their years of lost innocence is like seeing what my life could have been through purely geographical coincidences.

But right when I decide I can view The People of Forever through that lens of semi-relatable young womanhood, it all changes. The perspectives switch and I’m left with the close-third-person narration of a sandwich shop staff or a two-page diversion chronicling a man’s trip to a brothel. We zoom into and out of the lives of the three women, jump occasionally to their relatives and ancestors and classmates and crazy neighbors. It is hectic and dense, and without the book’s title as a collective guide, I would have no way of accessing this multitude. Sometimes I had to learn to let the stories fill me instead of trying to reach out and grasp them as they paraded by so loosely or tightly bound together. And that’s a little embarrassing at first, when you feel like you should align with the characters and their lives. It’s a frustrating learning process.

There is a violent passage in the book that takes place at a military base (one of many), after which the three women try to decide if what has just happened to them is interesting or not. That was never my doubt. Instead, I am left wondering if what I have extracted is meaningful or not – and though unnameable, the feeling I am left with is one with its own gravity. It is perhaps made all the more meaningful by the fact that I am not capable of this book – that there is something in it that eludes me. Boianjiu, unlike so many of her contemporaries, doesn’t seem to keep anything out of our grasp intentionally, but has instead created such a world that we only select so much of it to absorb.

So did I just review a book not knowing how on earth to attempt to review it? Did I make any impression upon you to read The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, or have I scared you off the idea entirely? I hope not. I hope someone can read it and tell me what they felt, I hope all of you can, because this novel will impact us most when experienced in tandem, just as we only know by the context of friends’ faces to fear or ignore every explosion we hear.

Another unanswered refrain: the torrent of ignored phone calls and text messages Eliot keeps receiving from his ex-girlfriend Lucy, who can only have bad news if her contact is this insistent.

Noughties is a thorough retrospective, a definitive anthology of Eliot’s time at Oxford, and the way the timeline jumps from past to present to past, sometimes within paragraphs, keeps the story feeling like a genuine investigation of Eliot’s sense of self, now at the end of the familiar and the beginning of something new. Since that frame works so well for the purposes of the story, there are other swaths of text that I found myself merely skimming. For example, there is a batch of commentary on the way we spend so much time and technology “performing” for our friends in the 21^st century, and this commentary is rendered entirely in text-speak:

“I number-eight this song,” snarls Jack, without looking up from his phone.
“Lower-case-y?” I ask.
“It’s number-two repetitive.”
“What lower-case r lower-case u talking about?” interjects Abi.

Then there’s the part where Eliot’s frustration with his poor decisions is rendered as a two-page cover letter for a future job application:

I have significant and diverse experience in fucking things up. During my time at Oxford University, where I have recently completed a BA in Fucking Things Up, I have been able to fuck things up to a very high standard through my unwavering hard work and dedication, while still managing to consistently fuck up academically.

Since Eliot’s narration is already so punchily idiosyncratic on its own (he is a 21-year-old in 2012, after all), passages like these are mildly entertaining, but kind of annoying in their uselessness to the story.

Then, on the contrary, there are passages that are so deft because they are never touched on again, much like the emotions in any seven-adolescent landscape would be. Their friend Abi discreetly regretting her time as the campus skank, Jack’s momentary faraway broodings, Sanjay’s desperate and secret love for Megan, and most ominous of all, Ella’s sudden, unexplained avoidance of Professor Dylan Fletcher. These peeks into the other characters, like the jumpy timeframe, are spot-on enactments of how we really can’t know everything about anyone but ourselves – just one more contributing factor to young adulthood’s struggle with me-centrism.

And if we’re mad as hell at Eliot, if we think he’s acting like a total tool – which I spend most of the book thinking – it’s made worse by the fact that he sees it himself, too, and doesn’t know how to put the kibosh on his own stupidity. If we’re frustrated with him (and we are), it’s precisely because we have been on the delivering or receiving end of the same behaviors and actions. Not knowing any better, or having no frame of reference, Eliot treats his first girlfriend and “true love,” Lucy, like crap under his shoe. Not knowing any better, Lucy allows it. There are silences where there should be conversations, and a hell of a lot of the reverse, too.

Then there are moments that make you cringe, and I mean literally, as you hold the book, and they’re the decisions real people have no doubt made: desperate midnight gambits to win back who they think they deserve, drunken soliloquies about the meaning of love, wallowing self-pity on display at the pub, etc. It’s all stuff I hope Masters hasn’t been on the head or tail end of, but of course he must have been. We all have been.

Hence the desperation to just “have a good night, yeah?” Everyone trying to prove they can be better than they’ve been, and none more so than Eliot Lamb. Whether or not they are any better is the investigation throughout Noughties, and so authentically rendered, it’s enough to make you hope so, for all our sakes.

MORRIS:  So how did it feel to win the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award? To my recollection, your name has come up a lot in the various near-miss categories for a number of awards. Was this something that felt more possible because you were so much on the cusp, or was it difficult to maintain a positive attitude with so many variations on the “you almost got there, slugger” rejection?

SIMPSON:  Because I was a finalist for two book contests in 2011, I don’t think I was quite as shocked as I might otherwise have been when I received the phone call from the University of Iowa Press. I was surprised, no doubt, but the call didn’t floor me. Over the course of the past several months, as the news has both spread and had time to sink in, I’ve begun to realize just how much luck is involved in winning a contest like this. You have to submit a decent manuscript to win, of course, but it takes a lot more than that. So, I feel lucky. And humbled. And very excited that this book of mine is going to be released into the world.

MORRIS:  Is it any more enjoyable winning an award presented by a Midwestern institution? Certainly the University of Iowa’s writing program is internationally recognized and very diverse. That said, the press release made mention of not only the location of your stories, but also the Midwestern-ness of them: blue-collar subjects, small towns, etc. Do you feel like Midwestern readers might connect better with the characters in your stories? 

SIMPSON:  I do like the fact that the University of Iowa is just a ninety-minute drive from my house. So far, I’ve liked all of the people at the press I’ve talked and emailed and worked with. It feels right that a Midwestern institution is handling the collection. I hadn’t thought much about that until answering this question, but I guess what I typed there is as true as anything.

That second question of yours is a tough one. I come from what I would call a pretty working-class family. When I left my job as a juvenile probation officer to attend graduate school, I was very happy to get the chance to study fiction writing, as I’d spent the previous four years working various jobs and doing a lot of reading and writing on my own. Still, I felt a little guilty, too. I mean, what person in their right mind would take such a huge pay-cut just so they can make some art?

I combated this for a while by attempting to tell stories that I thought were fairly accessible. I wanted people like my parents and grandparents, and the guys I’d worked with in the pallet shop out at the slaughterhouse, to be able to take something away from my stories. No art for art’s sake bullshit. Just storytelling with maybe a little bit of heart.

Over time, though, I’ve stopped caring as much about the accessibility I used to strive for. I’ve stopped worrying about whether the people I love in this world are going to “get” my stories. I suppose I still want people to “get” them, and to be moved by them, but I don’t make any conscious decisions while writing that affect a story’s accessibility.

I suppose, too: Maybe what I’ve done over time on some subconscious level is broaden my conception of what might be accessible to both the people I know and love and the other people I’d always imagined might one day be reading my work.

MORRIS:  So is it a maturation thing? Did you carry around a chip on your shoulder about it—that sort of Midwestern we-take-pride-in-the-fact-that-we’re-not-proud thing? (If that makes no sense to you, I understand—I can’t really articulate it well myself.)

Wouldn’t you say that your stories reflect your own life experience? You were consciously writing stories set in the Midwest—as the press release for Tell Everyone I Said Hi raves—seemingly crafted from real-life experience. It may have felt conscious, but it may have been you sticking to your own level of comfort.

So maybe I’m conflating three things here: your feelings about your own work’s accessibility + your own life experience in the Midwest + the fact that the rejections were piling up for you. And I might be wrong to do that.

I keep thinking back to your story “Estate Sales,” a story I quite like. And maybe I’d like it less if I weren’t from the Midwest, if I hadn’t been surrounded by the sort of small-town people in that story.

Am I even asking a question at this point? I’m not sure. Here’s one: do you think it’s dangerous to think about your reader – and not in the crafting of a story, necessarily, like am I giving them enough information here to blah-blah-blah – more like in a broader context, like what kind of person is going to read my book? It sounds like you think it may have held you back, somehow.

SIMPSON:  I’m not sure if it’s a maturation thing. Maybe it is, in that I think what’s happened over time is I’ve gotten better at figuring out what any given story needs or wants in order to work. My focus then isn’t on whether people are going to understand what I’m doing but instead on image and syntax and scene, what’s there and what’s being left out and inferred, all that.

I should say, too: I don’t really carry around a chip on my shoulder about any of this. It’s a privilege to be able to write stories and have there be people in the world who are willing to read them. I take the art of it all pretty seriously, but not so seriously I forget how lucky I’ve gotten over the years.

Well, maybe I do carry a chip on my shoulder about one thing: A few editors at those big, slick magazines have rejected my stories in the past for being “small.” These editors have given the stories good reads, and had smart things to say about them, but I’m still not sure about that “small” business. Maybe some of the stories are, in fact, “small,” but a few that have been called such really aren’t. And I still wonder a little if “small” in these editors’ rejections isn’t code for “Midwestern.” Again, I don’t lose sleep over any of this, but it’s something I think about every now and then, less with regards to my own work and more because I wonder why certain Midwestern writers I love aren’t publishing stories in some of the magazines I’m referencing.

As for the stories reflecting my life experiences: I’d say that’s certainly the case. The way I see things, I don’t necessarily write what’s comfortable to me; instead, I write the things that I’m drawn to write about. My life experiences—whether I’m talking about growing up in small towns, or working at a homeless shelter in Champaign, Illinois, or in a steel factory in Logansport, Indiana, or repairing those broken pallets out at the slaughterhouse I can smell most days from my house—more than anything have shaped my sensibility: how I see the world and what makes me yearn, ache.

And this is all related, I think, to whether it’s dangerous to think about the reader. I’d say, yes, it’s dangerous to think too much about who’s going to come into contact with your stories, especially if those stories aren’t yet written. If I’m going to be true to the stories I’m writing, I think it’s more important for me to know something about that sensibility I was talking about above, and to be true to the image that has compelled me to the page, and to the sentences themselves than to the reader.  Somewhere down the road, if you’re lucky, you get to work with a good editor or two who might help you to more fully sate that imaginary reader, but early on, I don’t think she’s really worth thinking about, unless, I suppose, that reader you have in mind is your ideal reader, the one who is going to get what you’re writing no matter what.

MORRIS:  Given that you submitted Tell Everyone I Said Hi to a lot of different contests, coming close in many, did you ever feel compelled to pull back and revise them more? Certainly lauded, published pieces like “Let X,” I’d imagine, are off limits—but did it ever cross your mind to do a lot of changing, or has the whole of Tell Everyone I Said Hi been a finished product for some time?

SIMPSON:  In late 2008 and for much of 2009, I had an agent who was submitting the collection to several big publishing houses. The collection then had what I think of as a more traditional structure. There were twelve or thirteen stories, around 200 pages, and the pieces were linked thematically and geographically.

That was kind of a rough time to try to sell a book of short stories, especially as a one-book deal, without a novel attached to it. Most of the editors seemed to like the collection, and a few of them loved it, but it didn’t get through anywhere, though it came close.

In late 2009, I began submitting the same collection to a few indie presses, and one editor, Gina Frangello at Other Voices Books, took the time to write me a personal rejection in which she addressed the collection as a whole. While most of the previous editors merely praised the writing, the subject matter, etc., Gina pointed out what I realized was a pretty big flaw: The stories were too similar structurally from one to the next.

When assembling the collection, I hadn’t thought much about this aspect of it—how the structure or architecture of one story leads into the structure of the next, and then the one after it. I think I got rid of about half of the stories in that collection and added maybe a dozen more, and I spent a lot of time arranging them, looking specifically at how the individual stories were structured.

This is the book I was sending out in 2010, the one that came close at a couple of national book contests. It was more like sixteen stories, 150 pages. I’d also sent this collection to Victoria Barrett at Engine Books, and she, too, offered a pointed criticism that I took to heart. She thought two of the stories didn’t belong with the rest, and so I cut those two stories and added four more. The book was eighteen stories now, still around 150 pages, and the first place I sent it to in 2011 was the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Suffice it to say: This collection has gone through a number of iterations. There was a handful of stories that remained in each, but the thing as a whole was always changing. Early on, I think I was pretty lazy when it came to putting together the book. I wasn’t thinking too much about the role each piece played as a single unit and as a contribution to the whole. Over time, I think—I hope—I got a little better at that, at figuring out how collections really work.

MORRIS:  Now that it’s finally happening, in a way, with this collection and these eighteen stories: where to go from here? Do you feel exhausted or do you feel invigorated?

SIMPSON:  I feel both exhausted and invigorated, in the best way. This collection of stories was written over a span of about nine years. I probably wrote more like 100 stories over that time, and published maybe 40 of them. I also wrote the draft of a YA novel, and much of a novel I deemed a failure around page 150, and several other things.

Lately, I’ve been working on several stories all told via the same narrator that I’m hoping eventually becomes an impressionistic/collagist novel.

And I do want to get back to that YA novel and give it the attention I think it deserves.

MORRIS:  It sounds like this entire process of revision—the broad, building-a-collection sort—is a bear. Do you think this will free your mind to go new places with your writing? Take on bigger projects?

SIMPSON:  It was a bit of a bear, but it was fun, too. One of the good things about having a steady job is that I don’t rely on my writing to pay the mortgage or put food on the table. Some people might say this is a crutch, that it hurts American letters, but I kind of like that I have the freedom to spend a month or two trying to get a 4-page story right, or to experiment with stories that I have no intention of ever submitting anywhere.

I’d say my mind feels fairly free. To be honest, I can never keep up, can never get written everything I’d like to try to get written.

MORRIS:  Along these lines: do you view yourself strictly as a short-story writer, or is that sort of lineation unnecessary? I’m bringing this up because the whole collection + novel thing got me thinking: what’s the longest piece you’ve had published? You’re not strictly a flash-fiction guy by any means; so what are you? Or is that sort of identifier unnecessary.

SIMPSON:  I don’t know that it’s necessary to identify as anything so specific. I’d say I’m a writer, a maker of texts, of fictions.

There’s a story that was in the collection for a while but ended up getting cut that’s about 7000 words, 25 pages or so. It’s going to be published soon in Five Chapters. (Ed: And since has!) I think that’s the longest thing I’ve published. I had two or three stories that clocked in around 35 pages each, but they were all pretty bad. One of them ended up a failed attempt at a novel.

Lately I’ve been taking notes on a crime novel. I’m not letting myself start writing it for now because I’m trying to focus more on the projects I mentioned above, but I love reading crime novels—Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, etc.—and I think I have a pretty decent scenario and a sweet set of characters for one. It’s probably the text I’m most looking forward to making.

MORRIS:  Who do you consider to be your influences?

SIMPSON:  I didn’t really think very much about reading and writing until I was eighteen and about to make a spring break trip with my college baseball team. Prior to the trip, I randomly checked out from the library Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I didn’t know anything at all about either writer, but by the time our bus pulled back in to Garden City, Kansas, I’d read both books and decided I was done with baseball and wanted to be a writer. I have no idea how or why this happened, but I’m glad it did.

Since then, a number of writers have been very important to me: Anne Carson, Joy Williams, William H. Gass, Rodney Jones, Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Denis Johnson, Kevin Young, Lydia Davis, Mark Richard, Philip Levine, Dan Chaon, Mary Robison, Peter Orner. I’ve also been influenced and/or inspired by a lot of rap music/hip-hop, and by Radiohead, and Miles Davis and, very recently, Richard Buckner. Every day I try to spend some time looking at visual art, either in person or online. Then there are movies, and all those great TV series. I am pretty much always being influenced and/or inspired by something. It’s not a bad way to move through life.

MORRIS: Who/what are you reading right now?

SIMPSON: Right now I’m actually reading the other winner of this year’s Iowa Short Fiction Award, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Safe As Houses. I’ve read about half of the stories and am finding a lot to love. It’s also kind of amazing to me just how different her book is from mine, amazing to me that Jim Shepard chose two such disparate books to win the award. I also recently began reading Karolina Waclawiak’s How To Get Into The Twin Palms, and Ted Sanders’ No Animals We Could Name, and Big Ray by Michael Kimball. I’m excited about all of them.

Chad Simpson was raised in Monmouth, Illinois, and Logansport, Indiana. His stories and essays have appeared in “McSweeney’s,” “The Sun,” “Esquire,” “Barrelhouse,” “American Short Fiction,” and many other print and online publications. He also is the author of a chapbook of short fiction, “Phantoms,” published by Origami Zoo Press in 2010. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in prose, he teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he received the Philip Green Wright/Lombard College Prize for Distinguished Teaching in 2010. He lives in Monmouth, Illinois, with his wife, Jane. 

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace.

Little, Brown releases 15 never-before-anthologized essays by our most revered literary genius. The titular essay on Roger Federer is held up by fans alongside Infinite Jest as Wallace’s unparalleled masterpiece (something with which Kevin wholeheartedly agrees), and we’re particularly excited to read (and re-read) his dissection of Terminator 2, which we hope will cause the same unexpected stir of emotions that his 1996 essay on David Lynch and the film Lost Highway did. Though of course, because of whom we’re talking about, it will cause the unexpected either way.

 An End to All Things: Stories by Jared Yates Sexton.

It’s exciting when DBC’s Illinois-born-and-bred contingent can read a collection rooted entirely in the Midwest. Indiana, with its contrast between vast cornfields, a storied state university, and Gary’s industrial narrative, serves as a microcosm for America as a whole. These stories chronicle a town wracked with doubt as the collapsing economy closes in — written in presumed contrast to the book’s author, earner of an MFA who has the choice to be there or not be there. It’s a dangerous thing to trust just anyone with a Midwestern voice, so likely to accidentally condescend or misconstrue as they may be. But I trust Atticus Books, and doubt they’d put their faith in anything less than the real deal.

Well, if I may, Down the Rabbit Hole is everything that the movie Life Is Beautiful never had the courage or simply never wanted to be. The quirky novella by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey) places a child unwittingly in similar circumstances as the Benigni film does – seven-year-old Tochtli lives in the blood-money trappings of a palace with his Mexican drug lord father – but rather than stripping down to a simple tale about the leaps we take to protect our children, this book is about the insane measures we take to, for lack of a better term, enjoy them – the compulsion we have to raise them in camaraderie and with authority at once.  As “good parents,” we want our children to lead the lives that make them happy, but maybe a less acknowledged part of us wants even more to raise them as an affirmation of ourselves and our choices. Add to that, of course, the very concrete dangers of what would ever happen to Tochtli if he left the confines of his palace, and all the genuine pre-adolescent boredom that goes with it. And finally, add what is perhaps the most palpable emotion of a seven-year-old’s life: wanting. In this particular case, Tochtli seeks a new animal for his menagerie, namely the Liberian pygmy hippopotamus, and nothing short of exactly that will do.

Villalobos constructs an entire parallel narrative through everything that Tochtli doesn’t say, just like Jack’s five-year-old vernacular contextualized the blurred horrors in Emma Donoghue’s Room.  And unlike the saccharine Life is Beautiful, Tochtli’s father Yolcaut is in fact trying to expose and protect his son simultaneously from the dealings of the cocaine business, as if he can’t decide whether his offspring should be more or less trusted with the full truth than anyone else – and how soon is too soon to train him as an heir to the business?  This is much more interesting than simply veiling life’s cruelties from one’s child – because, let’s be honest, that approach doesn’t work and it’s uninteresting to see it fail.

Villalobos writes in the voice of a precocious seven-year-old with astonishing accuracy. The idiosyncrasies of a child’s speech are all there: the obvious repetition of words and phrases, the overly explicated daily routine, the me-centric world of the narrative, and most poignantly, the tallying and quantifying of everything Tochtli knows. Through these numbers, we see much of the gritty infrastructure of which our narrator is only half-aware:

I know a lot of mute people: three. Sometimes, when I tell them something, they look as if they want to talk and open their mouths. But they stay quiet.

Our palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut’s bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcaut’s business room and five more empty rooms we don’t use.

Today Miztli and Chichilkuali did mysterious things, like filling a truck with crates they took out of one of the empty rooms we don’t use…the empty rooms we don’t use are always locked, but today one was left open. And it turns out we don’t have five empty rooms we don’t use, only four, or none: one of the empty rooms we don’t use is really the gun and rifle room.

It speaks to the abilities of translator Rosalind Harvey that the childish vernacular is kept intact across languages; had it not been so preserved, the book would lose its heart, and Tochtli’s nature (not innocence, mind you, but typicality) is what informs every page. This book has been published in thirteen countries, and it is easy to see why: Tochtli is the son that any of our best intentions and worst choices would raise. Tochtli is smart, quick, and eager, but for the lack of any other example has become hardened and proud of his father’s formidable gang. He shrugs off death as a consequence for blabbing, and spends entire mornings making lists of things he wants bought for him.

But here’s the best part about Tochtli: the narrative has caught him at a moment where we still think he can be saved, some concept of innocence abstractly restored. He stands unwittingly poised on the brink of any number of things – his father’s arrest, his palace’s raid – but even though those potential calamities would force him into a more normal life (something we are compelled to want for him), we know that there is only this life for Tochtli. And something about that lets us love this story more freely, and love this child as any other, not just as one that knows a dozen different ways to make a man into a corpse.

This titular phrase in Laura van den Berg’s brief and beautiful collection of short stories thoughtfully toes a line between prophecy and command, resolution and insistence. Balancing on that line, the book is laid bare: van den Berg’s pieces are always pushing on an elastic wall between observer and observed – flexible in distance but absolute in scope – and the characters all seem to beg, if not for that disconnect to be removed, then at least to find their place in it. There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Bad Nights has the lovely ability to leave you satisfied by its sadness; at least surrendering to it affords the most honest version of ourselves.

With the consistency of a Lydia Davis collection, each story somehow involves unhappy marriages, broken ones, lost ones, or a combination of the three. In each of the nine pieces, however, just like Davis, van den Berg uses the seed of that melancholy to radically different ends: a child desperate to send herself to Mars, a fateful Monopoly board, the opening and eventual closing of an exotic reptiles store. In this way, marriage is a rhizome from which discrete realities grow. Marriage, the fundamental joining of a self to other, is splintered and dissected here. The results are stunning in every sense of the word, such as this picture of a mouth mounted to the wall:

“It looks like some kind of tunnel.”
It was, Lenore had realized after staring at the photograph for a while, the kind of boundless space she had pictured her son, and now her ex-husband, passing through during the moment their life turned to non-life, presence to absence, as though Mr. Masiki had photographed a hidden part of her consciousness and hung it on his living room wall.

Mr. Masiki, the next-door neighbor whom Lenore observes through three layers of separation – window, yard, window – is a perfect demonstration of everything van den Berg has the chops to pull apart and compress in the world of her stories, a gesture by characters hesitant to reach too far forward for fear of what they’ll find there, but with no option besides that leap.

And sometimes the world of the story is barely rooted in this one, where we could almost cry science fiction or fantasy, but not quite: the husband who trains his parakeets to turn against his cheating wife, or the fiancée who stows a dead tortoise away in her purse in order to give him a proper burial at home, the agency that guarantees second chances at life housed in an empty warehouse, staffed by people who seem half-invisible. These turns are at once playful and necessary for a deeper access to loneliness and emptiness and void, and van den Berg’s ability to stay hovering on the line is a skill she shares with writers like Aimee Bender – creators of a modern, grounded era of fantasy.  Because, jesus, there are even cannibals.

The cannibals loved music. They’d found their instruments – a ukulele, an oboe, and a French horn – at a Salvation Army and paid for them with a dozen human teeth…The cannibals had cradled the instruments in their long arms and grunted. What’s the problem here? Their expressions seemed to say.

What’s the problem here? Like the titular phrase, this too plays atop a highwire. Is there nothing wrong, or is there something very wrong that we can’t pinpoint or trace? Or does one only point toward the other?

There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights says more in thirty-six pages than any book has business doing. It is, if not flash fiction, then a flash of something—of quiet chaos and quieter discovery, a flash of what could be solace in every unanswered question.

I resented that, and would just do a worse job in turn: leave little isosceles patches at every pivot, not get too close to the trunk when rounding the trees, forget to sweep loose grass off the driveway.

And soon he stopped having me do the grass, and I felt like I won, somehow. Twenty fewer dollars in my pocket a week, but a sense of pride about the fact that I’d somehow stood up, let that too-serious old guy have it—however silently the message was delivered.

But I knew he had a lot of stuff going on: I heard he was a veteran (WWII) and his wife had just died. Long after he stopped having me, when I mowed my grandma’s lawn across the street, I’d see him sitting on his two front steps, grilling a steak on his Smokey, looking around, neither contemplative nor engaged nor even really there at all.

I haven’t thought about the mowing or that old man or that whole juvenile triumph in a while. But after reading Chad Simpson’s short story collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi, I’m finding it difficult to think about anything else, to cover up the image of that man and that stoop and that Smokey, the understanding that he was profoundly sad and I was cruelly happy in the way that only adolescents can be.

Simpson’s eighteen stories masterfully capture similar contrasts, and captivate the reader with their compassion and cleverness.

They feature men and women who are often at a crossroads: a young baseball player must decide if he should sign a contract after being taken first in the major league draft, a middle-aged man considers bedding a woman out of pity.  A widower is unsure how to deal with his daughter’s suicide attempts.  A young couple weighs the consequences of adopting a foster child. Simpson’s skill shows in his deft crafting of these conflicts, his ability to make the reader consider the characters’ predicaments: you know, I couldn’t blame her for drowning that bulldog, really—all it does is fill her with grief and resentment. 

It’s difficult to talk about Simpson’s collection in a broad fashion. One can plainly say that they’re all quite good and heartfelt—there’s no postmodern silliness or linguistic showing off, just straightforward, skilled prose, stories depicting the lives of men and women from the Midwest, their occasional struggles, and their most unshakeable memories. But the stories also have a way of surprising the reader, heading in directions that are plausible but not at all predictable.

In the haunting “You Would’ve Counted Yourself Lucky,” a boy walks out of his house while his parents wait up for his sister. He encounters his neighbor, a once beautiful girl, scarred and hobbled by a car wreck. Their interaction soon becomes strangely intimate—Simpson produces some convincing and unsettling sexual tension, between the scarred girl and the confused, pubescent boy.

Rebecca picks up the boy’s fingers again and moves his hand down her leg to her calf. There is a divot the size and shape of a small football where doctors have taken skin at the back of her calf, and she sets his fingers inside it. The skin there is cool and completely hairless. It feels smooth in a way that skin shouldn’t.

Rebecca, the boy, and the reader are all feeling something powerful. She someone’s curious touch to her damaged places. He the skin of the opposite sex. We the sensation that what what’s happening might not be wrong or strange at all, but right for all parties, a necessary and innocent satiation. Simpson nudges us to such consideration.

One might get the sense reading out-of-context excerpts or promotional copy or even some individual stories that Simpson’s writing is heavy and serious and totally heartbreaking. But it’s not. The stories are by no means light or simple—conflicts may involve life or death or similarly high stakes. But just as often they can be funny as hell.

In “Fostering,” a man weighs the consequences of adopting a clearly damaged foster child—a heavy situation indeed. While at the pet store with the boy, Marcky, his attempt at humor falls flat.

“He’s a cutie,” the girl said. “How old is he?”

“That kid?” I said. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.” I chuckled, to let her in on the joke, but the girl’s brow furrowed the way it had when Marcky had mentioned Hydrangea. I followed Marcky to find out where he’d gone.

The story’s power dynamics aren’t totally inverted by this scene—Marcky’s still a six-year-old who probably won’t end up finding a home with this dude and his pregnant wife, so he’s obviously going to get the short end—but there’s something reassuring  and funny about the way things play out here: nervous dude makes nervous joke and it doesn’t land, he looks pathetic—so much so that he has to go find some solace in the kid he probably won’t adopt.

Tell Everyone I Said Hi is a collection carried by its interesting and diverse set of sharply drawn characters, and it’s moments like the one in the pet store that give Simpson credibility. He can convincingly write in the first person as a middle-aged Vietnamese man or a fourteen-year-old girl or a blue-collar drunk (our narrator in the tremendous cover story, who, I feel obligated to mention, seems like he just walked out of a Carver story—I mean this in a good way (meaning that: I could be saying it’s derivative; it’s not, not at all)), and it’s all good. Really, really good.

So then, why the mowing story at the outset? I don’t know, precisely, why Tell Everyone I Said Hi stirs that particular memory, but I have an idea. Simpson has a knack for conveying the significance of seemingly small moments—you know, things like shitty little battles with some neighborhood boy about your grass—finding something in them that stays with the reader: maybe an image of an old man, sitting fifteen inches high on some stoop in his slippers, charring a flank.

It’s a strong debut from what is obviously a trained and critical mind (Much of the book takes place in Yale’s Comparative Literature department), but those analytical tendencies seem to border on the clinical – and permeate the book much more obviously – after the death of the father in the first third of the story. Thereafter, it seems like Roth’s trust in us as fellow critical thinkers waxes and wanes throughout, so when you aren’t being given a 15-page deconstruction of an obscure Russian novella, you’re being spoon-fed forced analogies between the Roths’ family life and the literary tradition. I suppose to FSG this meant The Scientists would appeal to a wider range of readers, an audience both cerebral and practical. But given that the swaths of literary theory are where Roth appears to be having the most fun, and connecting with his father at the deepest level, the remaining (and admittedly more readable) areas of the memoir seem injected solely for our benefit, and that gesture falls a little flat.

Though I came just short of enjoying literary criticism as a student, I want to make something clear: I did not consider these aspects of The Scientists tedious because of what Roth is unpacking. It was not for lack of understanding or for boredom, or desire for more climactic sequences. This is a memoir, and the very point of it is that his life was (and is) nothing of the sort. Rather, it is made tedious by what I perceived as an imbalance of sentimental moments like these:

I went out and waited on the black sofa in the music room.  Motionless, I looked out the windows as I’d done so often, staring at the skeletal branches still hung with tattered leaves and a stray wind-whipped plastic bag.

– with wholly unbelievable and/or inaccessible exchanges like these:

“Do you ever feel like we belong to a generation that will never do anything?” I asked my new friend.

“You mean we are what Nietzsche would call ‘last men,’ people who remain stuck in the old ways without knowing why they’re in the old ways and without being able to change themselves? People whose lives have no meaningful motive apart from basic human animal wants: food, clothing, shelter, sex.”

As it is, these two tones exist in equal measure but remain decidedly segmented, never combining in a satisfying, fulfilling way, more like oil and water than a black-and-tan. Indeed, a form of this tension causes Roth As Protagonist to struggle with the idea of whether we, the characters of our own life, experience things in a consistent narrative thread, or whether we are each bundles of random, episodic learnings. An interesting thought, and one that is presented in the mouthpieces of Roth’s British colleagues at Yale:

It does seem like something people go on about here: human beings are no longer just Artistotle’s imitating animal but we’re supposed to be the animal that plots everything. Our identities are supposed to have something to do with the stories we make up about ourselves or the stories we accept to have imposed on us…well, it’s not true, is it? I mean in every case…I bet most people don’t even think of their lives as ‘plotted,’ in any meaningful way.

Where Roth falls on this debate is completely up to him, and far be it from me to dictate the course of his memoir – but the approach he takes is a little needling, because he goes to all the effort to set up that interesting dualism of narrative v. episodic, and then totally blows it to pieces with neatly tied-up passages like this, as 26-year-old Marco finds himself a girlfriend:

When I double-parked the car in front of her house, she invited me up for a nightcap…I accepted. The next morning she somewhat guiltily went with me to the tow pound to retrieve my car. I drove her home and she invited me up again….It was the start of something, but a something that seemed impossible to reconcile with my relationship to my father’s books.

Boy, it’s pretty convenient that Marco was thinking about his dad in the exact moment the reader needs to remember crucial facts about Marco’s dad. This is the sort of forced narrative connection that would make the earlier-quoted Brit squirm! It would behoove Roth to bend more toward the episodic in such moments, because it would, at least, feel more honest than always taking pains to draw these one-to-one ratios between Life and Story Arc. And given Roth’s vow throughout the book to seek “the full truth” about his family, these strained parallels are vaguely hypocritical on his part. Sometimes the full truth is only as good as happenstance or incident.

The Scientists isn’t a book I regret reading by any means, but it’s one whose dry turns I wish I was more prepared for. Roth should trust that some of his best instincts needn’t be couched in a greater literary tradition – or at the very least, he doesn’t need to foist that connection onto a reader. The struggle Marco feels with this tradition is real, but it is a struggle so cerebral that we don’t gain from that toil the way he does, nor can we gain from it the way he expects us to.

The memoir is undoubtedly at its most powerful when we must consider the paradox of families: despite their best intentions, can parents actually allow or encourage children to establish individualized identities when those children come into the world literally from everything the parents were and are? That generations are doomed to repeat themselves is inevitable, as our protagonist sees and has lived it:

It didn’t matter what my father had done or not done in the hours when he wasn’t being my father. What mattered was what he’d done to me: his obscure injunctions…to be my own person as long as I was never disappointing or embarrassing him or watching televised sports, or playing the wrong music, or reading the wrong books…

With this tension, and the application of scientific method to a force as thoroughly haphazard as family, Roth has invited us to think about something in The Scientists that perhaps only the product of an unhappy childhood could have offered.  As someone who can’t say the same of her own childhood, it almost feels like he’s our ambassador, or even our martyr – that we may even take the time amidst our happiness to understand what we can’t shake.

There’s nothing special about Harry. He is a not-quite-old, not-quite-young man who has suddenly lost everything that gave his life any meaning. He bumbles through – he doesn’t say the right thing, he does his best to do good. Homes has a spare, simple writing style. We don’t get much physical description of Harry, and the first-person viewpoint will have readers questioning who is the crazy brother at times. We only have the inside view of Harry, directly out of his eyes as he see the world. Which is all each of us has anyway; examined too closely, we would all appear strange, wrong, our actions downright confusing. Homes’ starts the novel by saying, “Was there ever a time you thought – I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don’t know why“. We can’t explain ourselves except to say: we’re human. And maybe we’ve lost sight of what our humanity means at its core. We live in an age where technology reigns supreme, where it feeds back to us our own image in word, sound and images. We can see ourselves, rationalize ourselves so well that somehow we’ve lost sight of what it actually means to inhabit a body, to feel and move and be and enjoy this life that we’ve been given. We’ve been so busy trying to lead some ideal life, some vision, that we’ve forgotten how to live at all.

We have been obsessed with seeing ourselves because we have wanted to see how great, how powerful we could become. But power can come at a terrible price and globalization and the internet allow us to see more that just what we want to see. We’ve seen ourselves, as Americans, at war, as not the best people we could be, despite how good, honest and true we might like to be. Nathan, Harry’s nephew, provides the opportunity for us to see ourselves in a good way, although complicated. He has a relationship with an African community that the main characters visit at one point, bringing their American way of life into a land and culture that is foreign. What he does with his time and money are good things, helping the village to help themselves. And although it is a place that is foreign, what lies at the heart of their relationship is the human struggle, a level that they can always connect on. Nate concludes:

I have thought of hardships of economy, race, and illness and become aware of how privileged my life is. When things got difficult for me, I thought of you and felt and obligation to survive, not just for myself, but for others. And it is what you taught me two years ago which kept me alive – for this I come back and say thank you – you have given me my life.

Which is a lesson for us all: that we are nothing without our relationships, without the connections that we make. Our lives only have meaning in the context of one another.

May We Be Forgiven is a book about the American Dream, how it has changed, how it must change to encompass who we are, who we’ve become as a nation. We are immigrants, we are the poor, we are the rich; there is no right or wrong (except the looming, large good-versus-evil). We have the choice, we are so lucky to have a choice. May we be forgiven for sometimes doing the evil thing, but we do our best as humans. We stumble through relationships, connect in myriad ways every day, but in the end, these relationships are the most important things we have. Yes, money makes it easier for everyone to get what they want (the main characters in the novel don’t hurt for money), but it is also evident from their experiences that it is not the amount of money the spend, but where they spend the money that really matters. Does your money touch lives? Or does it only touch things, new and hard, things without a soul? Homes addresses the age-old question: what does it mean to be rich? And we find, yet again, that our society is rich in people, as it has always been. People are our greatest resource, and can be a great source of happiness if we let them, or have we forgotten? May we be forgiven for that. May we remember.

A.M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven
We spend much of our time around these parts reviewing debuts—because they excite us, because we’re not always knowledgeable enough of an author’s canon (like, say, Michael Chabon, whose latest we declined to cover for those reasons) to offer anything especially worthwhile. So when we can review something from someone well established, it’s an interesting change of pace. A.M. Homes’s seventh novel, May We Be Forgiven, offers that and more. As our review, which will be published Monday, offers, “May We Be Forgiven is a book about the American Dream, how it has changed, how it must change to encompass who we are, who we’ve become as a nation.”

Chad Simpson’s Tell Everyone I Said Hi
Chad Simpson’s long-awaited short story collection feels less like the arrival of a new voice than the culmination of years and years of hard work. Tell Everyone I Said Hi features eighteen stories—some of traditional length, some flash, some stuff in between—all of which are observant, important, and fresh. Simpson, whose work you may have seen in McSweeney’s Quarterly, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, and Necessary Fiction (among many other places), writes with a remarkably tender understanding of his own characters’ imperfections.

Marco Roth’s The Scientists: A Family Romance
Debut memoirs ain’t easy. Like, why you so important? And at first glance, Roth’s story is grating: only child of an academic and a musician grows up on New York’s Upper West Side. But as it often does, tragedy upsets Roth’s idyllic adolescence, as his father dies of AIDS. Despite the pall of sadness this may cast, The Scientists is not a saccharine exploration of grief and the impact of lives lost, but an honest—I want to say discussion?—reckoning of Roth’s life.

Jeffrey Pilcher’s Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food
For all the totally annoying pining I do for my semester abroad in London—did you know no one has guns there? did you know that they DON’T EVEN LIKE THE ROYALS AS MUCH AS WE DO? did you know our concept of British food is totally antiquated now that the country’s been so welcoming to South Asian immigrants? did you did you did you???—there was one unforgivable aspect of life in the UK: the total and complete absence of decent Mexican food. Yeah, I went to Wahaca a few times, it was all right; and yes, I was a dumb college kid, so I probably didn’t venture too far off the city’s main paths. Still. So Jeffrey Pilcher’s exploration of arguably the world’s greatest and most misunderstood cuisine obviously caught my eye, and of all the books I’m looking forward to opening, this might be the only one I literally devour. Like: put inside my mouth.

Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid
There have been some very good books about the army this year, albeit by American men. Enter Shani Boianjiu, a twenty-five-year-old Israeli woman, and one of the fall’s most hotly anticipated debuts. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid tells the story of three Israeli women whose conscription, of course, greatly alters their lives and perceptions of the world around them. Boianjiu’s debut, out last month, has been received warmly. Earlier this year, she won the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.”