the architect of flowers

there's a saying, those who have spent a lot of time in the dark have the tendency to find great beauty in the smallest hints of light.  the characters in william lychack's latest book, The Architect of Flowers are great examples of this.  lychack's slim collection of stories will introduce you to a cast of delicately developed characters facing heartbreak and disappointment.  You will then get to bear witness as they find beauty in their seemingly mediocre lives.  don't be surprised if you find yourself pausing between stories, lost in dreamscape to recapture the characters' regrets of everyday failings, small victories or memories of past joys.  well-crafted, each story has a depth and detail that defies its brevity.

lychack's skill is clearly infusing the ordinary with special qualities: the softness of summer's yellow morning light in a kitchen, the depth of a mother's longing for her adult son and what she's willing to do to bring him home, the haunting of wanting to make something right years after an event.  it's a rare skill and one to be savored on a quiet weekend afternoon with tea and blankets.

The Architect of Flowers will be released as a paperback original on march 23rd.  william lychack will be reading at the odyssey bookshop on thursday, march 31st at 7pm.  come out and get lost with me.

the fates will find their way

Back in October, i was lucky to happen upon a galley of The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard.  Although it was just sitting on a shelf in my office, i'm not sure how it made it's way there.   It's cover was lovely and immediately drew me to it.  i felt even more lucky when the story turned out to be better than i hoped... a real score.  If you're looking for a story to draw you in, don't need all your questions answered and like your narrator to be first-person plural, you'll probably dig The Fates Will Find Their Way as much as i did.

The tale of  the missing 16-year-old Nora Lindell, told collectively by the boys who knew and loved her before her disappearance, is heavy with the purity of youth and the deep melancholy of suburban dystopia.  The two make a enticing recipe for the eerie and suspenseful unfolding of Nora Lindell's possible story following the night she disappeared.  

Hannah Pittard has done something quite magical here in using this collective voice and the obsession a town has with this young woman. The obsession absorbs the boys minds as they grow into men, married with children of their own.  The magic is in Pittard's way of drawing us through the multiple possibilities of Nora's fate through this collective voice as if each one is fact; details so rich and often lovingly and tenderly thought up by this collective.  

The boys grow into men who do what they are "supposed" to do.  Most get married, have children, become doctors, and although they expect these things lead to happiness, they end up disillusioned and looking for an escape.  Their obsession with what may have happened to Nora Lindell is such an escape; where they can live vicariously through her and with her, no longer left behind.  The Fates Will Find Their Way, reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides and The Swimmer, is simply a remarkable first novel.   

Here's a fun interview with Pittard with a bookseller at Powell's.

i can't say how excited i am to host an event with her (& Teju Cole, author of Open City) Friday, February 11th, 7pm at the Odyssey Bookshop.  i hope you can make it out.

exley

brock clarke's latest novel is Exley.   
he'll be reading and signing at:

the odyssey bookshop 
south hadley, ma

thursday, december 16th

at 7pm

here's a favorite snippet 
from the book:

"As far as I'd known up until that point, the most important thing about reading a book was to say you'd finished it faster than anyone thought you could.  
But I did not want to finish this book.  

Some of the books I'd read had told me that love is fleeting; 
some of the other books I'd read had told me that love is eternal.  
But they were wrong... Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.  
I was in love with A Fan's Notes, just like my dad was.  

And I was in love with my dad, just like I was in love with A Fan's Notes. 

 I wanted both of them to last forever."