Elise Levine’s book of wry, bittersweet, character-driven stories, This Wicked Tongue, will be available in US bookstores on June 25. It’ll be in Canadian bookstores on May 28. But we can’t wait! We want Elise Levine now!

To tide us over, Elise Levine kindly consented to answer a few of our questions.

 

A Biblioasis Interview with Elise Levine, author of This Wicked Tongue

For those who are coming to your work for the first time, can you tell us a little about yourself and your writing?

This Wicked Tongue is my fourth book. My first is the story collection Driving Men Mad, and sandwiched between these two story collections I’ve had two novels published, Blue Field and Requests and Dedications. My fiction is highly compressed, employing charged, layered language and narratives that are propulsive and elliptical. Formally stylized, my work is, however, predominantly character-driven, excavating lives gripped by estrangement and imperilled by silence, and yet urged toward the need to transcend and engage.

I’ve always written about driven characters: obsessive risk-takers seeking to free themselves from tangled emotional legacies; marginalized, pressured characters. This Wicked Tongue examines the urge to break faith with expectations and rewrite the scripts of the past. The stories feature my most formally exploratory fiction to date, at times employing hybrid narrative techniques as well as fabulist elements and fairy-tale motifs. The stories also range from flash to near-novella-length. I’m currently working on The Takeaway, two linked novellas. They’re a mix of crime novel, flash prose, and prose poem. Yes, they’re pretty weird.

The stories in This Wicked Tongue vary widely in their settings, from medieval England to a future dystopian landscape to various places in contemporary North America. Do you have a favourite place and time for setting stories? How do you know what place and time each story belongs in?

I’m really interested in how our environments shape and even at times seem to mirror us. It’s as if we somehow mysteriously find our truest or maybe falsest (who’s to say?) selves in places that speak to our psychological needs during pressured times in our lives.

I don’t have a favourite setting that I fall back on, but for This Wicked Tongue I gravitated to settings that amplify the characters’ sense of literal or psychological leave-taking or return, critical experiences which provide a linking motif for the collection as a whole.

When I first get the idea for a story, character and setting are usually among the first elements that occur to me, seemingly out of the blue. As I develop the story, I increasingly realize why the setting is integral to the character—that it, how much it helps to reveal the character. Over many (so many!) drafts I try to sharpen this dynamic between setting and character, in hopes of translating this to the reader.

Some characters recur in more than one story. What draws you back to a character? Is Martin, for example (who appears in one story as a preteen boy and another as a grown man facing his mother’s mortality and his husband’s desire for children), likely to crop up in future story collections or possibly in a novel of his own?

I return to characters when I feel there’s unfinished business—when there’s another entire but related facet of their story to explore. The ideas keep coming, and I can’t stuff them all in one story without it collapsing under the weight of details and emotional unfoldings, and “infoldings”, as I think of them—the interior layers hidden within.

Martin, oh Martin! He really needed the space of two relatively long stories. So much going on with that guy. But I’m sure he won’t reappear. Some of the beauty of short stories compared to novels is how the brevity serves poignancy as we hover at the edge of possibility, doom or gloom. In Martin’s case, it seemed best to leave him at twin poised moments between who he is, who he might become.

How does This Wicked Tongue explore gender concerns?

I think all the stories in This Wicked Tongue are implicitly and in some cases explicitly concerned with gender. The characters grapple with and chafe against the constraints of received notions of how to be in the world, in particular the circumscribing conventions regarding masculinity and woman- or girlhood. It’s a significant—though not the only—factor in how some of the characters live out impaired ways of being that inflict and self-inflict emotional damage. Or how some of the characters seek ways to break faith with expectation, envisioning and risking new lives and worlds in which they might suffer more, or heal.

You often show your characters’ least flattering thoughts, impulses, and actions. Can you talk about why exploring characters’ less likable sides is important to you?

Yes! Making bad choices, and by extension being one’s own best villain, seems to have powered much of narrative in the Western tradition, from ancient Greek tragedy on down. Make a bad choice, be less than who you might have been, but learn who you really are, beyond the self-delusions. Or don’t learn—this can provide an equally illuminating experience for the audience.

I’m equal opportunity when it comes to the gender of my characters and their capacity to be stupid, manipulative, well-intentioned but ineffective, blind, cruel. And also, sentimental, clear-eyed, smart, loving, compassionate, visionary, ethical, goofy, wry. I believe bad-assery in whatever shape or form knows no bounds nor should it.

I’m also very interested in the various literary traditions and tropes of women as monsters, which I interpret broadly as humans who refuse to conform to gendered expectations, from the Sirens on up through mermaids and femmes fatales to contemporary mean girls — feminized figures with voices (and who enact corresponding deeds) socially deemed either terrifically unpleasant or so captivating they lure the unsuspecting to their deaths. So much anxiety seems to still revolve around what are perceived as contesting voices.

What are you reading right now?

Right now I’m reading a linked story collection by Gabino Iglesias called Coyote Songs. It’s been described as barrio noir and horror, and features stories about la frontera, life along the Mexico-US border.

I’m not a great multi-tasker, so I tend to read only one book at a time and concentrate on it — so I’ll mention some books I’ve read recently, and loved. A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley. Jen George’s The Babysitter At Rest. Something for Everyone by Lisa Moore. Han Kang’s The White Book. Zolitude by Paige Cooper. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level. Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk. Also Last Days by Brian Evenson. And Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead.

 

Lucy Ellmann’s hilarious chapbook I Dated Graham Greene is almost ready for Independent Booksellers Day! Are you?

If you haven’t got your copies of this beautiful little chapbook yet ($7.00 USD/$8.00 CAD), email thummer@biblioasis.com.

 

I never feel too sure I know what I’m doing in a bookstore. The Country of the Pointed Firs. These are places for bookish people, people who can’t get enough of books. I have plenty of books at home that I haven’t read yet. Bibliophiles. They wallow in the smell of books, the look of books, the aura of books, the passive readiness of books to be found and bought and absorbed. Or collected, anyway. Books mean a lot to me, or they do in retrospect, but when confronted with a plateful, I take them with a pinch of salt. The Painter of Signs.

* * *

National Independent Bookstore Day is April 27, 2019.

We’ll be celebrating at Biblioasis Bookshop as well as by publishing “I Dated Graham Greene” by Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport, as a limited-edition chapbook, available for sale only at independent bookstores.

Bookstore stress triggers:

⏵Self-hatred, about my own ignorance of writers’s names and whole divisions of human thought: theosophy, astronomy, archery, accounting, Antarctica, animal husbandry, systems analysis, steam trains, Manga, orchids, forensics, and party-planning.

⏵Embarrassment, about how slowly I read and therefore how curtailed my reading has been, over my lifetime.

⏵Bewilderment, when I can’t find my way around. This happens to me no matter how small the store is.

⏵Amnesia, trying to remember all the books I meant to seek out.

⏵Fear of not finding what I want or, if I do find it, begrudging the cost.

⏵Disappointments, especially common in those halfempty bijou bookshops that only have one copy of no more than a hundred titles, curated for the color of their covers and how good they look facing outwards on the shelves.

⏵Geriatric affronts, when they don’t have the children’s books I remember.

⏵Bruising encounters with bookstore staff. Some are so gruff, some suspicious, some are eager beavers, some are never off the phone.

⏵Déjà vu, with all the usual suspects filling the shelves, as lurid as detergent packets: the cookbooks, thrillers, bestsellers, sci-fi, and exhaustive accounts of wild swimming, and the same in their audio versions. A good bookshop should teach a little taste, not just load you down with genre escapism and advice on adultery or cleaning your computer.

⏵Disgust, finding books like The Lovely Bones or anything by John Grisham given pride of place and a personal recommendation handwritten by an underling. While real novelists languish for want of a dime! In reality, though, fiction doesn’t sell. Cat books sell.

⏵Surprise in finding how prolific other contemporary writers are. Some people sure can pound the stuff out.

⏵A sudden sense of defeat, following such shocks. Feeling crushed, I start to plod around, searching the shelves for unlovely bones.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport will appear on September 10, and we absolutely cannot wait. We love this book so much. We’d try to explain why, but really . . . just see for yourself:

 

 

 

When you are all sinew, struggle and solitude, your young – being soft, plump, vulnerable – may remind you of prey. The damp furry closeness in the crowded den sometimes gave her an over-warm sensation akin to nausea, or boredom. Snaking her long limbs as far as space permitted, she longed to be out on her winding path, ranging wide in search of deer. In her dreams she slaughtered whole herds. She sought that first firm clasp on a stag’s neck, the swift parting of its hide, her mouth filling at last with what was hot and wet and necessary.

For all of life is really recoil and leap, leap and recoil.

Alertness was her new mode, but the cubs’ easy slumber was contagious. To be woken, biffed in the face by the paw of a sleeping kitten. She was always briefly astounded, on waking, by their continued presence. They troubled her, they were so needy: if she died, they would die too, and soon. And she would forget them. But for now, she belonged to them. They were not so much a conscious concern as the whole purpose of her being – lives engendered by her body, created inside her and released through pain and panting upon the world. She had borne them, and now she fed them with her milk. They were part of her still.

For the first week they were sprawling, crawling mush to her, demanding gentleness, forbearance, cleanups. The air shook with the vibrations of her purr. She learnt to maneuver her way round their wriggling forms with all kinds of fancy new steps. The more they squirmed, the more adroitly she had to dodge them.

She never left them for more than half an hour. The mere thought of the kittens bleating and scrabbling around back in the den diminished her resolve, made her less surefooted, ruined her joy in the kill. She went hungry, even sank to eating snowshoe hares that ventured near the den. And, once, a disappointing goosander, all feather, feet, beak and bone.

Her infant cubs, drifting back to sleep midway across each other’s backs, never knew how long she was gone, or how far from them she roamed. She might still be inside the den somewhere, just an inch out of reach. In hope, they dragged themselves over to the wall like legless seal pups, their short stubby tails nothing like the muscly ropes they would later become. Little more than mush, they toured the den in slow circles, chirping enticingly, feeling out for any sign of her, just the tip of her giant paw or long whiskers. Longing for her warmth, her tongue, her strong sleek rump, they sought her with determination, for they too were hunters, and brave. Too brave to despair.

*

The fact that the raccoons are now banging an empty yoghurt carton around on the driveway, the fact that in the early morning stillness it sounds like gunshots, the fact that, even in fog, with ice on the road and snow banks blocking their vision, people are already zooming around our corner, the site of many a minor accident, the fact that a guy in a pickup once accidentally skidded into our garage, and next time it could be our house, or a child, Wake Up Picture Day, dicamba, Kleenex, the fact that a pickup truck killed Dilly, the fact that she’d successfully dodged cars for three whole years, the fact that she knew all about cars, but during that time the traffic grew, the fact that it’s crazee now, the fact that after Dilly got killed, the kids painted a big warning sign with a big black cat on it and stuck it right by the fence, but nobody notices it, the fact that they’re all going too fast to see it, ♬ When the cat died we had catnip tea ♬, the fact that failure to yield causes one in five accidents in Ohio, the fact that car crashes are up twenty percent since 2009, haw tree, buckeye, black walnut, hickory, butternut, the fact that Stacy’s old enough to handle the road but the other kids aren’t, the fact that a little boy was killed in his bed just the other day by a skidding car crashing into his house, Ben asleep, the fact that there are two cardinals right now in the lilac tree, brown sugar, the fact that eleven percent of Americans carry on driving when the fuel-tank-empty light comes on, the fact that, boy, you’d think it’d be more like eighty percent, Ronny, chicken feed, the fact that there are macrophages, the fact that I dreamt I flew all the way to India to get a teaspoon of cinnamon but when I got home I realized I needed flaked almonds too, security, holding pattern, go figure, not in my backyard, the fact that we have to do our taxes and try to remember every little bit of income and expenditure, the fact that there was more of the latter than the former, Family Dollar, Baker’s IGA, password, username, “Your card is now active and ready to use,” the fact that not only do we have to calculate our income and expenditure but we gotta figure out how to get more money, and keep on getting money till we’re dead, Medicare For All, the fact that by the time Leo’s old enough to get Social Security it probably won’t even cover the price of a ham sandwich, much less a bottle of wine, the fact that we’re in for a wineless old age, oi veh, OJ, the fact that Leo has to go to Philly tomorrow and I’m not so good on my own, the fact that Ben knows so much for such a little kid, maybe too much, the fact that he says drugs work on a molecular level that can be assessed using logarithms and Schild Curves, but I just pop ’em and leave the rest to chance, breakfast, alarm clock, laundry, Spinbrush, the fact that we have to have a cocktail party and I don’t know what to wear, the fact that the only fun part is deciding on the canapés, cocktails, cock-a-doodle-do, cock, oh my word, the fact that words just pop into my head like that, dear me, the fact that I’ve got to get the dough going for the cinnamon rolls, the fact that at least we’re not having any more dinner parties, the fact that I put my foot down there, ♬ Your feet’s too big ♬, feat of strength, footloose and fancy-free, the fact that our parties are always a big flop anyway because the kids come down in the middle in their onesies and kill all conversation with cuteness, the fact that they look like polar bear cubs and they know it, the fact that sometimes they end up serving the drinks too, the fact that I don’t know what Prof Pranump would make of that, especially since she’s teetotal, tea, Triscuits, Ritz crackers, Saltines, Fritos, Doritos, Frito-Lay, Planters peanuts, Blue Diamond smoked almonds, Prohibition, Some Like It Hot, the fact that soon polar bears and walruses will have nowhere to go, because the polar ice is melting, cheese and pineapple on sticks, cheddar cheese logs, school bus, ground cardamom, dried cherries, zest, the fact that walruses can swim for four hundred miles, sure, but not forever, for Pete’s sake, the fact that animals don’t pride themselves on irrationality the way we do, the fact that, according to Ben, half the mammals on the planet will disappear by 2050, two hundred species a day or something like that, the fact that Ben says everybody on earth will soon be starving or suffocating or dying of SARS or Ebola or H5N1, the fact that H5N1 only has to mutate a few more times and we’re all goners, so maybe it was all for nothing, human achievement, but before that happens, we still have to do our taxes, and Leo needs to fix the garage door, the fact that it keeps sticking, missing button, bathroom grouting, the fact that Stacy would probably approve of a global pandemic, as long as it included us, her nearest and dearest, the fact that I don’t know why we released our poor little terrapins into the pond at Northwestern, the fact that we thought they’d be happy there, free, the fact that nobody ever told us they were tropical terrapins, the fact that we actually thought they’d like swimming free, in that freezing cold pond, the fact that I saw a dead dog with rabies there once, near the pond, so theoretically our turtles could have gotten rabies first, before they froze to death, the fact that we weren’t much good as pet owners, I guess, the bumblebee at Bread Loaf, the fact that what we liked best was going to the Big Building, where Daddy worked, because sometimes you got a free pencil, the fact that we loved climbing on the big painted rock outside, the fact that there was this great big boulder right in front of the building, the fact that I don’t know if somebody dragged the thing there or it was just there when they built the university and they couldn’t get rid of it, the fact that the paint was interestingly chipped and you could see how many layers it had, blue, red, white, yellow, green, Chris Rock, the fact that I think they painted it a new color every year or so, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the fact that Mozart had a starling, the fact that female starlings sing too, not just male starlings, murmurations, Ohio Blue Tip matches, phone call, a big ask, the fact that I don’t know where my cellphone is, the fact that I never know where it is, the fact that cellphones are always trying to escape their owners, the fact that there are earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, the fact that where did I see that red velvet cushion with gold trim, Gillian’s tall bird with sequins, felt and sequins, Christmastime, alone with Mommy in their bedroom at twilight, twi-night double header, sidewinder, sidecar, sidelines, left field, the fact that Stacy never mentions Frank, well, not to me anyway, Rex the Walkie-Talkie Robot Man, the fact that I don’t think she misses him at all, Reader’s Digest, Hardee’s on 2nd Street, Arby’s, Hy-Vee, Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom in the late afternoon, the fact that I always liked sequins on felt, the fact that I don’t think Stacy minds having a stepdad at all, the fact that these days most kids have half brothers and sisters, so they must be pretty used to it, the fact that all in all we’re really just a normal Joy, Pledge, Crest, Tide, Dove, Woolite, Palmolive, Clorox, Rolaids, Pepto-Bismol, Alka-Seltzer, Desitin, Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Anacin, Bayer, Excedrin, Vitamin C, Kleenex, Kotex, Tampax, Altoid, Barbazol, Almay, Revlon, Cetaphil, Right Guard, Old Spice, Gillette, Q-Tip, Johnson & Johnson, Vaseline, Listerine, Head ’n’ Shoulders, Tylenol, Bayer, Anacin, Safe Owl, Eagle Brand, Jolly Green Giant, Land O’ Lakes, Lucerne, Sealtest, Clover, Blue Bonnet, Half ’n’ Half, Snyder, VanCamp, Wish-Bone, French’s, Skyline, Empress, Gerber, Nabisco, Heinz, Kraft, Quaker Oats, Sunkist, Purina, Vlasic, Oreos, Shredded Wheat, Arm & Hammer, Jell-O, Pez, Sara Lee, Chock Full o’ Nuts, Libby, Pepperidge Farm, Fleischmann’s, Morton, General Mills, King Arthur, Bell’s, Reese’s Pieces kind of household like everybody else, “Houston, we got a problem” . . .

 

Critics are loving Eric M B Becker’s English translation of Mia Couto’s Rain and Other Stories. The New York Times included Rain and Other Stories in a sneak-peek list of titles from around the world.

Published in the aftermath of Mozambique’s bloody civil war, Mia Couto’s third collection seeks out the places violence could not reach, the places where, the author writes, “every man is the same: pretending he’s here, dreaming of going away, and plotting his return.” Shifting masterfully between forms—creation tale to meditation, playful comedy to magical twist—these stories grapple with questions of what’s been lost and what can be reclaimed, what future exists for a country that broke the yoke of colonialism only to descend into internecine war, what is Mozambican and what is Mozambique. Following fishermen and fortune-tellers, widows and drunks, and one errant hippopotamus, this new translation of stories by the Man Booker-listed author of Confession of the Lioness rediscovers possibility and what it means to be reborn.

Vanity Fair writes, “[Couto] has been creating his own utterly original take on African life for decades now, rich and lyrical works immersed in the soil and mind-set of rural Mozambique…These literary fragments are dreamy but hopeful responses to Mozambique’s violent past, magical tales that find solace in the wisdom of rivers and trees, fishermen and fortune tellers, children and blind men. An assortment of transcendent sketches, fables, and creation tales, Couto’s stories are rooted yet timeless, both whimsical and deeply spiritual—essential qualities of the work of the masterful Mozambican author.”

The Winnipeg Free Press found Rain “Magnificent…The wonder of the collection, indeed its grip on the reader, is that such seemingly disparate tales come together to ultimately present how the land is remade…Nearly each sentence is astonishing in this riveting, challenging collection.”

In a starred review, Library Journal calls Rain “Stellar…offers fable-like gems capturing lives hurt and heroic, damaging and enduring…At a low point, Blind Estrelinho “remained on the side of the road, like a balled-up handkerchief soaked with sadness,” and such language stuns throughout. A woman deserted by her husband, a problem child rushing to rescue her father—these are some of Couto’s poignant stories. VERDICT: Highly recommended.”

Kirkus Reviews reports that Rain “Convey[s] a sense of profound loss flecked with a measure of optimism about life after the bloodshed is over. An impressionistic flash-fiction trek through the wreckage of war,” while Words Without Borders says Rain “encompasses everything from unlikely confessionals to dreamlike forays outside of realism; it’s a concise and wide-ranging demonstration of Couto’s authorial range.”

Booklist raves, “Wide ranging in theme, mood, and genre…[Couto’s] descriptions of landscapes and people have the power and mystery of the best style of folklore. The strength of his characters, whether he’s portraying an old math professor exploring love, a cross-dressing neighbor, or a businessman creating a happy communal space as a gift to God‚ is most apparent in how with few words their varied lives become relatable. Becker’s translation conveys Couto’s precise use of language to capture the innately elusive nature of human experience.” Shelf Awareness praises Rain‘s “stunning imagery,” which “draws power from unexpected comparisons…Playful and poignant, Rain and Other Stories cements Couto’s reputation as one of the finest writers in the Portuguese language, and proves Becker’s talent as a discerning and perceptive translator.” 

Foreword Reviews muses, “Even the nothingness of linguistic voids are used to their best advantage. When an ideal word or phrase fails to exist in the English language, this void becomes a laboratory where words are cajoled into serving functions not normally within their job descriptions. The blind man, upon suffering the loss of the companion who did so much more than merely tend to him, experiences an overwhelming sensation of being ‘dis-tended to’…Were the phrase ‘all that remained was absence’ to be embedded in any other collection, it might signify grief or hopelessness, but in Mia Couto’s Rain, translated from Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker, it promises the opposite.”

Arkansas International describes how “A Chekhovian subtly is achieved, even when their realism turns to the magical…What’s most successful about this collection are the ways in which Couto repeatedly asks unanswerable questions, piquing reader curiosity… answers manifest through subtext, and the effect is both chilling and tragic. In this collection, Mia Couto, via Eric M. B. Becker’s aesthetically rich translation, packs an emotional resonance in each story—despite brevity, many only reaching five pages—that lingers with readers long after putting the book down.”

Blogger Joseph Shreiber notes that “The roots and spirits of these tales seem to run deep into the very bedrock of the earth. They are uniquely Mozambican and yet timeless…[Couto] has an uncanny ability to create miniature worlds peopled with wonderful characters, images and happenings…simply enchanting.”

If we weren’t already in love with Rain and Other Stories, these reviews would have us running to our nearest bookstore to scoop up a copy!