J. Robert Lennon's "Castle" and the "Best New American Voices 2009"

It's been at least a couple of weeks since an update, so how about this...

I just plowed through J. Robert Lennon's new book, Castle, in the last  days and... wow. What a great freaking book. Lennon is one of those writers who's stories I've read here and there and always enjoyed (plus he was in Hobart 4!), the one book I've previously read (The Funnies) I really loved (was just telling a friend a day or two ago about it, about how it made me deeply care for a "Family Circus" style comic strip, and how difficult that must have been), and I love his blog, but I still haven't gone out of my way to track him down. I don't know why. I'm obviously a big fan. Anyway, what was so great about Castle was that it seemed to be enjoyable to the first 90% or so but I didn't really think it was something that would stick with me, and then the last two or three chapters just made it so much more powerful than what I thought I was expecting. So, take this as a rec: pick it up.

Next up, I've been using the hell out of the library here in town the last few weeks and I picked up the 2009 BNAV. I've just been reading the first few pages of each story thus far, our of curiosity, and here are two observations:

1) Each of the first FOUR stories mentioned a death on the first or second page. I don't know what that means, and don't really have much else to say about it, but still.

a) 1st sentence from Baird Harper's "Yellowstone": "Hurst struggled to keep up with the van transporting Emily's casket."

b) 1st sentence from Will Boast's "Weather Enough": "His younger brother died young."

c) last sentence of first para in Anastasia Kolendo's "Wintering": "Then, in 1999, Varvara's mother, having fallen asleep on her route, crushed a pedestrian with her truck on a gravel road north of Mountain Air Beach."

d) 5th sentence in Sharon May's "The Monkey King": "I can't say Rahu is real -- only that one bullet did not reach him and instead killed my five-year-old cousin in Phnom Penh during the lunar eclipse in late 1974, two years before I went into the jungle."

2) This is one of my new favorite lines, from the story "Little Stone, Little Pistols, Little Clash" by Jacob Rubin (the first story to not mention a death!):

"We were like cowboys who traveled through time to an era when they had Corvettes, then went back in time (with the Corvettes) and rode them through the Wild West until all our corrupt enemies and all the sweat corseted prostitutes went more or less ape-nuts because they'd never seen a Corvette before -- and therefore had never seen a group of men rock a Corvette with such skill and such conviction."

Super rad, no? I'm definitely going to try to track down some more from Rubin.

-aaron

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Castle is definitely one that sneaks up on you, and his Pieces for the Left Hand is pretty great too. And that is a fucking great sentence.

BTW, nice trio of your own over at Memorious!