STORIES FROM THE BLUE MOON CAFÉ

Name: STORIES FROM THE BLUE MOON CAFÉ
Author: Sonny Girard
ISBN: 1-931561-09-5

edited by Sonny Girard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 19, 2002

Eschewing most of the usual clichés of southern writers—but not self-consciously trying to avoid them either—Blue Moon Café...

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The satisfying result of a bunch of southern writers deciding: “Hey! Let’s put out an anthology!”

It started at the annual meeting of Southern Writers Reading in Fairhope, Alabama, when the group’s erstwhile leader, an editor and bookstore owner named Sonny Brewer, announced to the group that he thought it would be a cool idea if they published a chapbook. Thirty writers then contributed pieces, mostly fiction, just about all very short, and generally quite good. Like any good southern anthology, it starts off with a Civil War story—“Final Spring,” by Marlin Barton—that tells it straight and sad. A jump into the present day comes with C. Terry Cline Jr.’s hilarious, Barthleme-esque “S. Trident,” which consists of an exchange of letters between a man who buys an old Army base at auction (only to discover it’s a not-entirely-decommissioned missile silo) and the stunningly blasé officer who answers his questions about the utilities and strange leaks. There are some bigger names scattered throughout this smorgasbord, like W.E.B. Griffin and Pat Conroy, but their pieces are pretty slim and feel tossed-off. Suzanne Hudson’s “The Fall of the Nixon Administration” uses Watergate as a backdrop for her comic tale of a prudish daughter caught between her wanton mother, her closeted husband, and the beautiful and repulsive rampant id figure that’s her mother’s younger boyfriend. The Civil War shows up yet again, in “Killing Stonewall Jackson” by Michael Knight, an almost unbelievably horrid and gothic slice of the lives of some soldiers who go by the monikers Ghost Story and Gellar the Jew; it’s funny and haunting simultaneously. With the exception of some pieces that feel just too painfully thin, this is an uncommonly even and rewarding collection.

Eschewing most of the usual clichés of southern writers—but not self-consciously trying to avoid them either—Blue Moon Café is a decidedly tasty buffet.

Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2002

ISBN: 1-931561-09-5

Page Count: 385

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
HIS OLDEST FRIEND
by Sonny Girard

- BOOK REVIEW
THE POET OF TOLSTOY PARK
by Sonny Girard

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAD IN 5 HEARTBEATS
by Sonny Girard with Keith Zimmerman & Kent Zimmerman

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.