Review and Excerpt of The Summer She Was Under Water

The first read of The Summer She Was Under Water appeared yesterday at The Collagist. Michael Tager writes a stirring, lyrical analysis of brother-sister tensions:

"What is it about siblings that brings out the worst in people? Is it the way they entwine familiarity and contempt? Is it the inherent power dynamic that so often pits elder against younger? Maybe it's the favoritism that parents so often (and rightly) refuse to acknowledge but is still often self-evident. In the case of The Summer She Was Under Water, it's all of the above, and more."

To read more, go here.

Also, at The Nervous Breakdown, you can find an excerpt of Summer:

"Everything feels all right, right now. Perhaps Steve would be lighthearted and charming and teasing and they’d spend their days trying to fish and maybe they’d fish for their father’s old beer cans and the lost city of Conowingo. And Steve would be the person Sam always hoped he would be, was capable of being, and maybe their family would close ranks around each other and there would be a tacit understanding that they each would rise their tide a little and all their boats would float comfortably, not mired in the muck or run ashore. If they all did their part and dammed their happiness in, here, this summer, there would be plenty to drink from, to siphon, in the lean times."

To read more, go here.

7/5/13: Part 4 of "1892," a deleted scene from The Tide King

Part 4 (and final part) of the deleted scene "1894" (from the Tide King) ran yesterday at apt magazine. Thanks again so much to Carissa Halston and Randolph Pfaff for the week-long segment! The Tide King will be available from Amazon at the end of July.

Safine thought the blood meant she was dying. She had not noticed at first because her clothes all were stained red, various shades of it. She thought maybe she had sat in it, for the tomatoes were everywhere, on the tables and on the floors and in the outhouse and one’s nostrils and fingernails. As soon as one scrubbed them out at night, they would just as soon appear the next day, and the day after. But this red was different, fresher and darker, and it was inside her too. She wondered whether she was dying and her insides slowly leaking. She felt a pain between her legs, her back, and was convinced it was so. She watched for Olga to walk down the row, as she often did, and tugged on her skirt.

To read more, go here.

This is the fourth installment of a four-part story, a deleted scene from The Tide King. Read the my introduction and part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

Click here to purchase The Tide King.

7/3/13: Deleted scene from the Tide King, Part 3

Thanks again to apt magazine for running a deleted scene, "1894," from the novel, The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press). There will be one more installment. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Safine lay awake and wondered what Ojciec would be like, whether three bodies in space would disrupt the natural harmony that two created. When she looked at Matka, she could see she was awake, too. She wondered if she had the same worries. Morning lighted the windows, brought the clean but bare grayness of the room into focus, bunks full of Poles and other immigrants. Each bed was a breathing cell connected to its partners, in and out, and in a few hours, minutes, this vast system, this superhuman that sailed from Europe would be broken into little pieces, reassembling with others at factories, city blocks, places of worship. It overwhelmed, ached Safine to see the world in full, and when she opened her mouth to try and articulate the wonders of the world, she closed it, gauging her mother’s hard eyes, their drawn corners, the single-minded concentration of zeroing in on one cell in the sovereign city.

To read more of part 3, go here:

6/10/13: Interview and Excerpt of The Tide King in Cobalt Review

Andrew Keating, a Baltimore writer and founder of the high-trajectory Cobalt Review, was kind enough to interview me about The Tide King in the current issue (issue eight). Also included is an excerpt, "1949." From the interview:

In this excerpt, in 1949, Calvin Johnson heads to Helena, Montana, in search of a fellow solider, Stanley Polensky, with whom he served in WWII. Johnson can’t be sure, but after waking up in a mass grave of dead soldiers after getting shelled, he dimly remembers Stanley shoving something in his mouth before he lost consciousness. He doesn’t understand the correlation between Stanley did and how it came to be that he’s still alive and has this uncanny ability to heal. He gets roped into helping put out the Mann-Gulch fire. In the actual fire, 12 smoke jumpers were killed, and Norman Maclean wrote a beautiful and haunting book, Young Men and Fire, in which he tries to piece together what happened many years later. It’s one of my favorite books, and I knew I wanted to included it somehow. In fact, a lot of the book is like that–a lot of things that I was interested in (female country music singers of the 1940s, World War II, Partition-era Poland). Fortunately, I was able to make it all work–I think.

To read more, go here. To read the excerpt, go here.