First of all, what I mean by unusual is pretty broad. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re strange or obscure, although some of them are. They range from novels to short stories to a novella to ‘a children’s book for adults.’ I haven’t really seen many of these around, so I thought maybe you hadn’t either. =) I decided on eleven, so I’m going to do this in two or three parts.
Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson: I hadn’t heard of Steve Erickson before reading an article in a back issue of The Believer by Brian Evenson, which billed his work as “Narnia for Adults.” You can read it online here. I was intrigued, so I looked into it. It’s apparently part of a sort of trilogy (or quadrilogy?) but I haven’t read any others yet. It’s written with the same surrealistic, magical realism style that Haruki Murakami employs (there’s even strange relationships between people and cats.) Erickson’s language is mesmerizing, poetic but still sparse. On two characters meeting: “They were introduced in murmurs; she loved him immediately, as he did her, but this guaranteed nothing.” It’s full of characters who inscrutably wear eyepatches and say things like, “You know, yours is the first face I’ve seen in two years that looks exactly the same from either eye.” It’s a little hard for me to describe the plot, but there’s multiple love stories, from characters both past and present, there’s a never-ending bicycle race, a presumed lost silent film, an amnesiac, a filmmaker growing up secretly in a brothel. If you try it, you’ll know in the few few pages whether or not it’s for you, at least I certainly did. I fell so hopelessly in love with this book and writing this has reminded me how much that I just placed a hold on his next novel.
The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret: This is a collection of very, very short stories, often only two or three pages long, by Israeli writer Etgar Keret. But what Keret manages to do in such a small amount is astounding. There’s not gimmicks or cheapness here. He makes every word count. A sample from the first story: “When an asmatic says ‘I love you,’ and when an asthmatic says ‘I love you madly,’ there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.” I’d never read stories this short before, I think the kids are calling it ‘flash fiction,’ and I very impressed. This is a collection you can dip in and out of as the mood strikes.
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower: This is Wells Tower’s first published book, and it’s a doozy. I read a fair amount of short stories (although not so much lately), and I had never read ANYTHING like these before. His style and narrative ability would probably make me throw in the towel had I been a writer. He has the elusive ability of saying but not saying at all, it’s what’s left out that’s important. His understanding of people, all kinds of different people, from eleven year old boys angry with their stepfathers to carnival workers to down on their luck middle aged men to Viking marauders. A strong focus that I saw was on the relationships between fathers and sons, which Tower potrays wonderfully. It’s truly an incredible debut.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman: Written by neuroscientist David Eagleman, this little book imagines forty potential scenarios for the afterlife. There’s a few that are expected, including aliens, various religions, God as a woman, and waiting room limbo. But there are many that surprised me. My favorite was the one in which you wait around to go ‘elsewhere,’ a place you can only travel to once the last person on Earth has spoken your name. Those with small, or no families, move on fairly quickly, but those with long legacies, such as Columbus or Washington, stay there indefinitely. In another, death places you as an extra in the living’s dreams. It was a really fun read, but I took my time with it, prefering to think over the afterlives as I read them, rather than speed through all of them and most likely forgetting them.
