1 of 4
2 of 4
Photograph by Mark Fisher
Mitchell, Illinois
Photograph from "Turn Left at the Blinking Light"
3 of 4
4 of 4
Which would you rather admit: that you suffer from the heartbreak of psoriasis, or that you read books in your spare time? Based on trends in the publishing industry, we’re guessing the former. If you believe the scuttlebutt, book publishers are in trouble. Bookstores are dying, E-readers are the future, and kids are dumbing out on the loathsome charms of Nicki Minaj and GoGurt, bypassing books and real food entirely.
So here’s a list of cool books published in the last year or so by local authors. If you’re the sort of freak or rebel who reads books, you might dig them.
The science fiction community is having a collective white-eyeball petit mort over Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. The book, by a first-time novelist no less, has been busily snagging pretty much every prestigious award offered for the best sci-fi novel of the year. It’s considered a space opera, and it’s pretty dense stuff:
Breq is an “ancillary,” an artificial intelligence housed in a human body (as opposed to the other way around). She is also the sole surviving unit housing the collective knowledge and memories of everyone and everything aboard a massive starship that no longer exists. Her mission is revenge (not unlike this sci-fi classic) upon the dude that destroyed her ship; that dude just happens to be the nigh- omnipotent ruler of the galaxy.
At the same time that Leckie limns this sprawling good-vs.-evil tale, she takes on sexism via a pioneering stunt: in the future, both male and female characters are all identified with female pronouns. It’s a hallmark of gender-blindness. It’s also confusing for the reader, but it grows on you.
Ancillary Justice is the first of a planned trilogy, with the follow-up, Ancillary Sword, already in the hands of the publisher.
Lovers of the aesthetics of urban decay got nothin’ on lovers of small-town decay. Photographer Mark Fisher spends his days driving aimlessly through the small towns of Missouri and Illinois, photographing faded signs, collapsed buildings, disused cafes and other leavings of progress. His first bound collection of work, Turn Left at the Blinking Light is a feast of haunting images from the region.
Grass grows up around a vintage gas pump in Shamrock, Mo. A car rusting to the state of Swiss cheese guards a ravaged concrete bunker of a building in Garrett, Ill. A thoroughly weather-beaten Airstream trailer sits at a tilted angle in a field of weeds next to the Interstate in Millerberg, Mo. Some 120 color photos are a testament to Fisher’s heavy investment in gasoline; he’s been driving to small towns and chronicling their well-worn declivity during every spare moment of the last several years.
Fisher’s book is the product of a successful Kickstarter campaign; read about it and watch a cool video of his methods here.
If St. Louis had a specialized Literary Walk of Fame, Jan Greenberg would be on it. Greenberg has written no less than 23 charming books for children about visual art. Her subjects have included Jackson Pollack, Louise Bourgeois, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Frank Gehry, Chuck Close and others.
The author’s latest triumph is a 56-pager for ages 9 to 12 (and up) about a figure familiar to even casual observers of American pottery.
The Mad Potter: George E. Ohr, Eccentric Genius, co-authored with Sandra Jordan, is the biography of a man who spent his entire adult life telling everyone in his orbit that he was a genius. Then he died broke. Then—and this is pretty much always how it goes for our lionized visual artists—he was vindicated, branded a genius, and his works started selling for the kind of big bucks that he’d chased in vain for all his days.
George Ohr’s pottery often looks bent and warped, with the outer surfaces folded in on themselves. His vocation was relentless experimentation in clay, but in his time, the late 19th and early 20th century, he was essentially considered a huckster with an expansive mustache. (And amongst his family, he was considered a black sheep and a career failure.)
Now, work by the “Mad Potter of Biloxi” commands huge prices (sometimes on Antiques Roadshow, even).
Greenberg’s book is 100 percent fun. She uses fonts of different sizes to vary the attention of young readers, and gobs of color photos.
It’s worth noting that Greenberg has made a commitment to regularly giving away large numbers of her books to local students via the RIF Reading Is Fundamental program, too.
(And by the by, Jan’s husband Ronald owns the Greenberg Gallery, which, under various names and in various locations, has been showing modern art since 1972. Its latest digs are in Clayton.)
It’s not hard to imagine Brian Katcher coming to his agent and saying, “Hey, you’re gonna love my next book—it’s a paranormal story for the young adult market.” The agent then licks his/her chops, naturally, because of a certain series of vapid, hotcake-popular books that became movies in which Kristen Stewart tries to smile but finds that her face is frozen in an undead grimace. (It was frozen that way in real life, though, so all bets are off.)
Well, we can all commence the chops-licking, because Katcher’s Everyone Dies in the End is a ripping yarn.
Sherman goes off to attend the Missouri Scholars Academy, where his apprenticeship as a newspaper writer quickly becomes a matter of life and death. The cub reporter uncovers a conspiracy of Satanic rituals, foul beings from yucky under-dimensions, and an unscrupulous no-goodnik who’ll do anything to prolong the human lifespan.
The demonic menace in the book may not be realistic, but the voice of the young protagonist is. Sherman is a hormone-addled teen looking for lust and love in any order, and practicing a familiar brand of grade-grubbing, overachieving, academic perfection. He has a lot to learn, and he’ll learn it the hard way—while being pursued by homicidal cultists.
It just happens that Katcher can’t write a bad book. His previous books, more down-to-earth efforts about the travails of a high-school-age burn victim and a high-school age transsexual, are as enchanting as Everyone Dies, if not more so.
When Katcher reads this, he might be displeased, but I believe it’s important to note that he’s a truly fine author who deserves aggressive national distribution from a renowned publishing house. The publisher of this book probably does not have the reach—or the book cover-design capabilities—of a company with deeper pockets. Katcher’s work should be read by a larger audience, a la John Green or Laurie Halse Anderson.
