Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov was originally the second in a trilogy of novels. First published in 1952, the novel is in fact two stories or two novellas originally published (separately) in 1945.

Things you should know:

*Foundation was good. Really good. But Foundation and Empire was even better.
*Foundation and Empire is infinitely better than Prelude to Foundation.
*While I would certainly recommend reading Foundation, I think you could pick up Foundation and Empire without having read the other and still appreciate it for the great book that it is. It does in fact include a nice two page summary of the novel Foundation.
*Foundation and Empire has a certain something-special about it that makes it stand apart from Foundation. The writing seems wittier, funnier, more tongue-in-cheek. There's just something about it that makes it pop.

I am still operating under the philosophy of sometimes it is better not to know, BUT at the same time I don't want to be accused of not "reviewing" it properly.

Foundation and Empire roughly picks up about three hundred years after Foundation opens. In the first novella, "The General" the reader learns of the fourth (I believe it's fourth) Seldon crisis. One of the strongest generals of the Empire (what remains of the Empire) is out to destroy the Foundation. Bel Riose is the general's name. Ducem Barr, the son of a man we met briefly in Foundation, is a main character--a character that opposes the Empire even at great risk to his own life and his own family. Lathan Devers, a trader, is also of importance. The plot of "The General" is relatively simple, and this is the shorter of the two stories. In the second novella, "The Mule" the Foundation faces its GREATEST threat so far. It begins simply with the homecoming of a bride and groom. Bayta and Toran. They're visiting Toran's family on the planet of Haven. Haven is a "rat hole" of a planet where traders--mostly retired traders--go to hide out and evade paying taxes to the Foundation. The planet is technically a part of the Foundation. But they're more of a rebellious bunch on Haven. The reader soon learns that not everyone thinks Foundation is perfect when it comes to running the galaxy--or their small part of the galaxy. There is discontent among the ranks of citizens. But even the threat--the small threat--of civil war pales in comparison to the REAL threat of The Mule. I will say no more about the Mule or the rest of the story. I don't care how curious you are! Some things you can't pry out of me.

One Voice, Please

McBratney, Sam. 2008. One Voice, Please: Favorite Read-Aloud Stories.

One Voice, Please is a delightful gathering of stories--some familiar, some not-so-much--perfect for reading aloud to children of all ages. Family-friendly reading, if you will, that while kid-friendly is not unappealing to adults. Most stories are two to three pages, and could easily be read in a few minutes. This is a good thing. Perfect reading to fill in those gaps during the day when you don't quite have enough time to get settled into a longer book--like a novel or even a traditional picture book.

Originally published in Great Britain in 2005, the collection has recently been published in the U.S. With over fifty stories, there is sure to be something that is just right for your mood. The book would be a great edition to the classroom as well. My personal favorite was "Many Littles Make A Lot."

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THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED by Elizabeth Berg

I must begin this review with a full confession: Elizabeth Berg is my aunt. I adore her and I want to be her when I grow up. :-) There. The secret is out.

Beth's new book of short stories, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation, was released yesterday, and I immediately acquired a copy for myself and sat down to read the title story. Anyone who has ever been on a diet will relate to the narrator's defiant act of hookey from her Weight Watcher's meeting. And the giggly elation of eating all day with no boundaries! And, most likely, that final unfulfilled feeling.

Then I moved on to the second story about a middle-aged woman who unexpectedly comes face to face with her first love. Remember all the amazing feelings your first love was able to conjure up? Would you still feel that way now?

I have another confession to make. I have only read three of Beth's books. Why? Because she's so real that it hurts. I love Beth's writing. I always feel like we're having a private conversation when I read her work, and these little stories are no exception. It's like gossiping with a really funny friend. A really funny friend who is acutely aware of what makes us human, aware of the insecurities and tears beneath the laughter. She doesn't always point it out directly, but you know she knows. And you love her for it, because she makes it okay to be imperfect.

I only read the first two stories in this collection, because I want to stretch these little nuggets of fun and real life out for a while. I'm going to laugh out loud, and I know for a fact she's going to make me cry. And I'm going to feel vulnerable, empowered, ridiculous, smart and okay just the way I am. Thanks, Beth!

Lezlie

This review is cross-posted on my blog at http://booksnbordercollies.blogspot.com

Short Stories – Raymond Carver - cross reviewed here.

Time to update my short story reading. It’s not as if I am totally ignoring this category, not at all. I read short stories like I read a poem, one at a time and from different books and by different authors, not sequentially as in one book full of short stories before going on to another. Recently I’ve read a couple of stories from Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From. The book is always somewhere in reach, on my table in my work room, the bedside table or somewhere around the house. The stories are, according to the blurb ‘masterpieces in American fiction’. And so they are. Nobody said anything is about a day in the life of a teenager whose parents quarrel as he and his brother are still in bed, early in the morning. He fakes illness and his mother allows him to stay home from school. The innuendo of the relationships between the brothers and the mother is subtly evoked and as a reader you are drawn into the world and thoughts of the teenager, the way he thinks and nothing is crystal clear, of course it is not, he’s a teenager and male. Once everyone has gone he gets his fishing tackle and goes out to fish in familiar territory. He comes across another boy and together they land a huge fish. Both want it to show off to their parents and the decision is made to cut if in half. The story comes to its excruciating end when the teenager proudly shows his half of the fish to his parents, back home and quarrelling again. Then he is shouted at and is told by both to take it out and away. He has managed to divert them from their quarrelling, but only because they now both have a go at him.

I’ve read some more in this collection. They’re all subtle, not a word too many, snapshots of life, of a man who has given up smoking and whose son becomes embroiled in a quarrel with friends and their parents about a bike; then there’s the story of a sleepless student’s wife, who desperately tries to keep her husband awake with her but finally loses and when morning finally comes she gets back into bed, and he’s fast asleep.

You read one and close the book and get on with whatever you have to do. It is like reading poetry, it takes time and you want to savour them.

Etgar Keret, "Knockoff Venus"

Etgar Keret's "Knockoff Venus" (which is online at Nextbook.org and is part of his new collection The Girl On the Fridge) is an oddly affecting little tale which somehow manages to be prosaic and fabulist at the same time. Prosaic in that it involves the lovesick musings of a lonely office worker, and fabulist in that the object of his crush is Venus - yes, the Roman goddess of beauty and love.

How an immortal deity came to work as a lowly copyist in an Israeli office is never explicitly explained, other than her vague reference to having emigrated, with several other gods, from deplorable conditions somewhere else. But other than her beauty - which has narrator quite dazzled - she seems remarkably ordinary: she speaks only bad Hebrew, has questionable taste in men (which is, admittedly, to the narrator's benefit) and only dully goes through the desultory motions of her job, as the narrator describes with Keret's typically deadpan humor:

Venus worked from eight-thirty to six, sometimes later, Xeroxing reams and collating them into neat stacks. Even in that position, sweaty and bent over the machine, wincing against the flashing light, she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to say so, but I couldn’t get up the nerve. In the end, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and left it on her desk. The next morning, the note was waiting for me, along with fifty copies.

Despite the lightness of Keret's touch, the unspoken implications of the narrative are considerably more troubling: the narrator's world is one in which Roman gods, who in antiquity ruled over all of mankind and the natural world, are now forced to work menial jobs in Israel which, while an improvement over the gods' former home, has long been a site of ethnic tensions and violence and thus is far from paradise. The gods scuffle along, working as movers and mechanics and office temps, grateful for their new situations but still far removed from their past glories. They have lost any semblance of the supernatural, and seem all but powerless to change their plight. Our world, Keret seems to say, has declined so much that even the gods are at a loss to do anything about it.

Or maybe that's nothing more than my overwrought interpretation. Maybe Keret didn't mean to imply any of that at all. Maybe he just wrote a quirky story about a mortal and a degraded goddess making the best of their humble situations and falling in love. Or maybe Keret meant to deliver both: a love story with weighty undercurrents. The final line of the story resolves none of the above, and is as charmingly ambiguous as the rest - from the narrator's comment it's unclear whether he thinks the relationship will never last and he'll soon need something else to occupy his time, or if the relationship is the first step toward the domesticity and stability he desires.

Whatever the interpretation, Keret makes the reader think - which is what all good storytellers do. And Keret is certainly one of the good ones.

www.petelit.com

Roy Kesey's All Over

I have been shockingly remiss about posting here, and I am very sorry about that. But it doesn't mean I haven't been reading short stories. It's just that I am a bit busy with The Short Review. So, finally, I thought at least I should post here one of the reviews I have written this year, of a collection I loved: All Over, by Roy Kesey. Here's my review:

Reading Roy Kesey's collection made me happy. Re-reading it soon after made me even happier. This is not because Kesey's stories are hopeful or optimistic. It is because this is a writer so clearly in love with language and rhythm that it is a delight to experience what he does with words – both those we are familiar with and those I suspect he invented.

The 19 stories range in length from one to ten pages. Several were previously published in literary magazines such as McSweeney's and Opium, publications with a reputation for clever, sharp, irreverant writing. While Kesey's work does fit this description, this is not cleverness for the sake of it. In almost all the stories, even those that on the surface appear utterly absurd, he is unearthing the complexities of our world, the messes we make of it, and the small moments of joy.

This is no easy book; Kesey's reader is required to work hard. He strips down to the essentials; there are few names or places here, anything that might anchor us. here were several stories that, however hard I worked at them, I couldn't squeeze any meaning from at all. This doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the wordplay and the flow of language, I just had no idea what I was supposed to understand here. But the struggle to make sense of the worlds he has created is well worth the effort, though, because most of the stories give and carry on giving on each subsequent reading.

In Fontanel, a story I found very moving, what we presume is a fertility doctor or gynaecologist is describing to an unidentified listener the collage of pictures he creates for each and every birth. As he talks about each picture, we slowly realise all is not what it seems. This “collage” contains images not only of the couple about to give birth, their first child, the wife's mother , but “the gas station attendant who is friendly and serviceable and pretends not to notice the wife's screams”, “the taxi driver scrubbing the back seat of his taxi”, “the aneastheologist, resting for a moment in the break room, imagining new sorts of pain”.

Wait begins as the ordinary story of a flight delayed due to fog. The omniscient narrator pans across the departure lounge, dipping in and out of passengers' thoughts. The language throws out clues that here, too, we are not in reality is we know it: “Airline personnel daydream of islands, and speak urgently into handheld radios though this is only for show: the batteries have been on backorder for years”. As the hours pass, disasters accumulate, the passengers form alliances and organize distractions, until the entire situation crumbles.

Kesey's stories often begin with some semblance of order and then descend into chaos, but the endings are by no means uniformly hopeless: they manage to satisfy while also, in many cases, being suprising or shocking. Kesey's characters sometimes get what they want, but not in the way they - or we - may have predicted. There is an allusion to war or some other, larger event in many of the stories, as if to remind reader and protagonists alike that, although we may imagine we are in control, there is always something greater than us.

All Over is the first release from Dzanc Books, a non-profit small press whose stated aim is to “to advance great writing and champion those writers who don't fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses”. With this book, they have set themselves a high standard. This is an astonishing debut collection by a writer who deftly uses language, rendering it both spare and rich, sentences and paragraphs reverberating long after the book has been put down. Kesey's keen eye slices through pretence and artifice and although we may not always comprehend his writings on the surface, in our bones we know what he writes are truths.

The Short Review interview with Roy Kesey is here. And forgive me for another quick plug: Issue 6 of The Short Review just came out, so if you are stuck for inspiration, I invite you to go and take a look.

Tania

PS I am so remiss I didn't realise until I had posted this post that the previous post was also a review of a Roy Kesey story! Well, that says something about him, doesn't it?

"Wait" by Roy Kesey

I'm in the middle of reading Best American Short Stories when I stumbled upon Roy Kesey's "Wait."

"Wait" was originally published in the Kenyon Review in Fall 2006, and also published in Kesey's short story collection All Over, had easily become one of my favorites on first read.  The story is not for everyone.  Kesey's style here is droll, the tone is very matter-of-fact with a grammatical structure that someone else pointed out to me as being almost entirely absent of adverbs and descriptions.  Verbs work hard here.  And the humor is over-the-top absurd.  I'm not spoiling anything by telling you this, but if you don't like absurd comedy then this story won't resonate with you.

Me?  I'm all over absurd.

It takes the reader on a wild ride through the waiting lobby of an airport where fog disrupts the flow of normal air traffic.  Wackiness ensues much to my delight.  If you've ever been stuck in an airport, you may be able to appreciate Kesey's wit.  It's one of those stories when you ask yourself "what else could go wrong" might call for something absurdly unusual as well as disastrous.

What's also great about "Wait" is the deft way Kesey characterizes everyone.  He relies on stereotypes (a technique common in humor writing), and the characters jump out of that on their own.  By the end you'll have remembered the girl from Ghana, the boy from Mongolia, the Honduran woman and the Canadian accountant because they all play a part in Kesey's story world.  No character is not important.  No one is forgotten.

And by the time you're done with it, you'll appreciate how much something so literary can also be so entertaining and carry you away to another place.

It's magical.

Crossblogged here.