Then, without explanation, Natalie wakes up one morning living on an actual 1880s frontier farm and having a passel of kids, a brutish husband and suddenly cooking every meal from scratch loses its allure.
It was a good summer read but if you’re looking for depth you won’t find it here. It strains belief and the characters are all as unreal as Natalie’s perfect online life.
An excerpt from George Singleton's Wounded Boarders.
It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials. In between, the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s deliverer, or mail carrier set down on my front porch a Cuisinart blender, a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble, an ottoman, a six-pack of Yankee bird feeders, one vintage ukulele from a place called Imperiala all the way out in Santa Ana, California, plus enough Venetian blinds to darken one of those French cathedrals. There might’ve been other things. On days I found nothing misdelivered, I blamed porch pirates from one of the new modular-home-filled subdivisions up and down what was once, twenty years earlier, a country road. Everything delivered had the correct address—my address—but a name I didn’t know: Edmund Conyers. I’m talking the washer/dryer, ottoman, ukulele, blinds, etcetera, they all showed EDMUND CONYERS, and then the exact place where I lived on Carolina Ponyfoot Road, Cannonburg, SC.
I kept all these unordered gifts and even used the toaster and ukulele until I happened to watch one of those cable series shows about crooks that involved harboring stolen goods. Harboring might not be the correct term. On the show, the dude kept taking on people’s swiped sailboats. Receiving stolen goods, I guess. I didn’t want to be charged with receiving stolen goods—but if I did, I planned ahead of time to bring in the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s person, and mail carrier as accessories. Oh, I had it planned out. Anyway, I got paranoid about bringing things I never ordered into my den, opening the boxes, then staring at them, these things Edmund Conyers needed, evidently. I imagined a man with his feet up, strumming his four-string, looking out at the birds through a bunch of slats, petting his dog, thinking about making one of those healthy green slushies, lulled by the rumble of a dryer while awaiting the time when he could drive off on Michelins. That’s me. I thought of those types of things.
I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but it occurred to me that perhaps one Edmund Conyers used to live here at 111 Carolina Ponyfoot Road, maybe thirty or sixty years ago. I’d bought the house, back when I was married, from, I don’t know, someone named Lagrone or Lagroon. I forget. We bought the place, I worked my job, my wife worked her job, she fell in love with her boss at the law firm and left me, and so on.
“This is starting to take up too much room,” I said to myself. I thought about moving, or at least calling a licensed contractor to add a nice twenty-by-twenty room at the end of the house. I’d like to say that I stood out front, awaiting the UPS woman, in order to say, “Hey, this isn’t mine.” But I did the opposite. One time I stood outside staring at a dying citronella plant when one of those people showed up, and I ran back inside and stood at a place in the kitchen where no one could see me if they peered in. Ten minutes later, I walked out on the front porch to find a box of vitamins, supplements, and such—A, Bs, C, D, folic acid, milk thistle, all the rest. A few of those bottles, I learned after doing some research, concerned memory problems. And that’s when it hit me: someone used to live in this house, they’ve forgotten, and they keep ordering shit and sending it to their old address. Somebody named Edmund Conyers has forgotten where he lives now. Oh, how sad, I thought. I thought, I need to run down the Conyers family and return what was theirs.
Listen, I’m not a detective. My last job happened to be as a door-to-door salesman selling welcome mats. You know how I did it? I put down a mat that read welcome, stood on it, then rang the doorbell. This was back when I had all my teeth. I smiled bigger than possible. Whoever answered the door, man or woman, always looked puzzled until I took my right forefinger and pointed downward. “Don’t you think you need something like this?” I might say.
“Don’t you want people showing up and feeling like they belong?”
Things started falling apart when people ordered their welcome mats online. I knew it because of the misspellings. There were too many people who kept mats that read things like the sinclair’s or the funderburk’s. Is there no one at the welcome mat store who contacts buyers and says, “Do you want me to add house or front porch at the end of this?” Though even then, it would only be the domain of only one singular Funderburk. Like I said, I’m no genius, but I know the rules of the apostrophe. Sometimes, driving around aimlessly, I saw such spellings on mailboxes and knew to keep going.
It’s not just mats that read welcome. I had a trunkful, all different shades, one of which read GO AWAY, ha ha ha. If I’d’ve had that particular mat on my front porch, maybe I’d’ve not gotten all the unsolicited packages that Edmund Conyers deserved. For the religious folk, I urged them to buy one that read, in tiny font, IF NO ONE ANSWERS, WE HAVE ANSWERED THE CALL OF THE SECOND COMING. It might’ve been my best seller.
For the record, I’m only missing one back molar, but it caused all my other teeth to space out like a worthless picket fence. People won’t buy welcome mats, evidently, from a guy with such spacing.
Read more: Literary Hub
“For years after, there were tales told in Colorado of the amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve 1899. Next day’d be full of rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions—but that night there was man-made lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie, electricity flooding up through the iron of their shoes, shoes that when they finally came off and got saved to use for cowboy quoits, including important picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or steel, that’s when they weren’t collecting souvenirs on their way through the air—gunmen’s guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out from under pants legs, keys to traveling ladies’ hotel rooms and office safes, miners’ tags, fencenails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that long-ago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got to humming through their bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers’ offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed.”
I’d be thrilled if someone bought me this book.
“Five years after the publication of The Wind in the Willows, author Kenneth Grahame penned a succinct essay for his old school magazine at Saint Edward’s in Oxford. In it, he celebrates the profound and simple joy to be found in walking, and why a companion isn’t necessarily a benefit on the journey.”See more at Fiddler’s Green
Danish designer Klaus Krogh and the team at 2K/Denmark lead the typography and book design for Ascension’s Liturgy of the Hours, Second Edition. Every detail is carefully designed to make the text easier to read, follow, and pray with. His passion for his craft shines through.
Jamison Firestone remembers the moments leading up to the collapse of the world’s largest communist state:
On the evening of August 18, 1991, my friend Terry and I were staying at the Pribaltiyskaya Intourist hotel, a huge Soviet hotel complex built in an ugly brutalist style on a windswept island close to the Gulf of Finland, far from the center of Leningrad.
On the morning of August 19, I tried to wake Terry for breakfast. He was having none of it and told me to go on my own. So I walked over to the lift, pushed the button, and got in. As the door closed, a tall American looked down at me and said, “Do you speak English?”
“Yes.”
“So I guess we’re all going home.” “What?”
“Haven’t you heard? There’s been a revolution! Gorby is out.
There are tanks in the streets!” “What?! You are kidding!”
“Turn on your TV, watch CNN.”
Shocked, I went back to the room and woke Terry.
“Terry! Terry, get up! There has been a revolution! Gorbachev is out! There are tanks in the streets! Your mom was right, and you can bet she’s worried. Call her!”
Terry cocked an eye. “Seriously?”
Euphoria was in the air. I couldn’t believe what happened, nor could anyone else. The people had stood up. Soviet tanks had backed down.
We then turned on the TV to find Swan Lake was playing on all the Soviet channels. This was something the Soviets usually did before making a huge announcement, as when a leader died or had been replaced. However, CNN was broadcasting live, and we watched in shock as tanks rolled into Moscow and then President George H. W. Bush spoke about the coup. It wasn’t really clear what was going on, other than a group of eight hard-line high communist officials and KGB officers were trying to remove Gorbachev from power, claiming he was “sick” at one of his country houses. I watched as President Bush urged the new government of the Soviet Union to honor its foreign debt and other international obligations. WTF? This thing wasn’t even over yet, and the president was treating it as a done deal. What had I gotten us into? I wasn’t terribly worried about our personal safety. It seemed unlikely that people were going to go out of their way to kill foreigners. I just kept thinking, Is this coup really a done deal, and if so, how the hell do we get home? Read more
An excerpt from Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia by Jamison Firestone.
I was lying in my attic bedroom reading a book, when my husband came up to speak with me. I wriggled over to make room for him and heard a muffled sound like a wet branch snapping. As I stood up, an electric bolt of pain shot down my leg.
Time suspended. After an x-ray, I learned that the disc between L5 and S1 in my lumbar spine had burst, the gelatinous core herniated out, pinning down the nerve root and driving pain down my right hip into my leg. My physiatrist kept insisting that if I used the elliptical on its most difficult setting and did my clam shells, I’d improve.
My life shrunk.
“Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French author whose graphic novel series “Persepolis” introduced millions of readers to the struggles of ordinary Iranians during the turbulent years around the Islamic Revolution, has died at 56.
With the publication of “Persepolis” in the early 2000s, Ms. Satrapi became one of the best-known exponents of a form of graphic novel — influenced by Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” — that combined political history and memoir.”
Read more: NYT Gift Link
