Tag: literature

• 2020 Rhysling Award Winners

  Posted at 8:26 am by Michael Janairo, on June 26, 2020

  

  The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, of which I am a member, has just announced the winners of the 42nd annual Rhysling Awards for best speculative poems of the year.

  The winners were selected in two categories, Long Form and Short
  Form Poems, which were nominated by the members of the organization. From 67 publications. 77 poems in the Short Form category and 49 poems in the Long Form category were reviewed for almost 16 weeks by the membership, which includes award-winning educators, scholars, and poets from a diverse range of literary traditions and specializations. This year, the membership selected the following winners (links to the poems included where possible):

  SHORT

  First Place
  “Taking, Keeping” • Jessica J. Horowitz • Apparition Lit 5

  Second Place
  “when my father reprograms my mother {” • Caroline Mao • Strange Horizons, Fund Drive

  Third Place (tie)
  “Creation: Dark Matter Dating App” • , Sandra J. Lindow • Asimov’s SF, July/August, and 
  “The Day the Animals Turned to Sand” • Tyler Hagemann • Amazing Stories, Spring 2019
  

  LONG

  First Place
  “Heliobacterium daphnephilum” • Rebecca Buchanan • Star*Line 42.3

  Second Place
  “The Cinder Girl Burns Brightly” • Theodora Goss • Uncanny 28

  Third Place
  “Ode to the Artistic Temperament” • Michael H. Payne • Silver Blade 42
  and 
  “The Macabre Modern” • Kyla Lee Ward • The Macabre Modern and Other Morbidities (P’rea Press)

  Continue reading →

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  Posted in News | 0 Comments | Tagged Awards, literature, poetry, Rhysling Awards, SFPA, speculative poetry

• Review: ‘The Last Black Unicorn’ by Tiffany Haddish

  Posted at 10:29 am by Michael Janairo, on July 17, 2018

  Tiffany Haddish has just been nominated for an Emmy for her “Saturday Night Live” hosting duties.

  OVERJOYED to be nominated for an #Emmy for when I hosted @nbcsnl!!  I might even splurge for a new dress for this one!!  Thank you everyone for your love and support!  #sheready

  — Tiffany Haddish (@TiffanyHaddish) July 12, 2018

  She is very funny, and this book and its multiple, episodic stories adds to the story of her success.

  Some of the stories are already familiar from her appearances on late-night comedy shows, such as the Groupon swamp tour in New Orleans she took Will and Jada Pinkett Smith during the filming of “Girls Trip.” That story touched upon a few points that made Haddish’s story so effective: it marked a moment of her place within the world of entertainment as a relatable up-and-comer suddenly finding herself not only working with Hollywood superstars, but also socializing with them.

  The distance between them, with Haddish and most of her audience on one side, and the Smiths on the other, only deepens (and the comedy, too) when it becomes clear that the Smiths didn’t know that a Groupon is just kind of a coupon and that they swamp tour isn’t private but open to the public. (Another nice touch of separation in the story is when Will Smith gets in Haddish’s car and says, “I can’t remember the last time I was in a real car.”) It’s a winning story, and the book has lots of them that make Haddish relatable. Continue reading →

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  Posted in Reading, Reviews | 0 Comments | Tagged book reviews, comedy, comic, Emmy, Emmy Awards 2018, Girls Trip, Groupon, Jada Pinkett Smith, lit, literature, memoir, OUTSTANDING GUEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES - 2018, Tiffany Haddish, Will Smith

• Martin Amis on life and writing

  Posted at 11:02 am by Michael Janairo, on August 8, 2017

  

  Martin Amis: “My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.”

  ― Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir 

  vintageanchor

  (Source: http://www.facebook.com/MartinAmisAuthor)

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  Posted in Writing | 0 Comments | Tagged lit, literature, Martin Amis, memoir, Quotes, writing

• Lincoln in the Bardo and the impossible audiobook

  Posted at 11:10 am by Michael Janairo, on July 18, 2017

  On paper, it sounds like something magnificent: master short-story writer George Saunders’s very first novel! An examination of a moment in the life of America’s greatest president!

  As Penguin Random House says:

  George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

  And then there’s the audiobook: 166 characters! 166 voices!

  “The first truly blockbuster audiobook? …  it’s going to be incredible”

  — Emily Temple in Lit Hub

  Continue reading →

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  Posted in Reading | 0 Comments | Tagged Abraham Lincoln, Audio excerpt, audiobooks, Ben Stiller, Books, David Sedaris, Don Cheadle, EW.com, fiction, George Saunders, Lena Dunham, Lincoln in the Bardo, Lit Hub, literature, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, Penguin Random House Audio, sound cloud, Susan Sarandon, Time, Washington Post, Whitmanesque, Wired

• New poem: ‘Benevolent Assimilation’ in re:asian magazine

  Posted at 10:23 am by Michael Janairo, on May 31, 2017

  

  Thank you, re:asian magazine, for including me in the “firsts” issue!

  The poem touches upon things I’ve been thinking about since grade school when I first read the phrase “benevolent assimilation” as a U.S. description of its colonial policy with the Philippines.

  The magazine has also published a photo I took of the home my Lolo — grandfather — grew up in Cavite.

  Here’s an excerpt from the poem:

  Something like fear structured my feelings around the word
  Philippines and whatever it was that connected me to it

  Check out the full poem on the re:asian website here and let me know what you think — either here or on the re:asian site.

   

   

   

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  Posted in News, Writing | 0 Comments | Tagged firsts, flight, history, homeland, literature, manila, mestizo, pinoy, poem, poetry, re:asian magazine, US history

• Thank you, World Haiku Review

  Posted at 10:34 am by Michael Janairo, on February 21, 2017

  Thank you, World Haiku Review, for publishing my work in the latest edition.

   

  

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  Posted in Writing | 0 Comments | Tagged literature, neo-classical haiku, online journal, poetry, small press, world haiku review

• Book review: Umberto Eco’s ‘The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana’

  Posted at 8:00 am by Michael Janairo, on October 24, 2016

  

  This review originally ran in May 2005 in the Albany Times Union.

  Memory, identity evaporate in ‘Queen Loana’

  Among life’s great chores is the sorting through of old papers, books, records and magazines long ago left in the attic. Few events combine such tedium with unexpected moments of rich nostalgia, in which a single image can rise from junk and make the past profoundly present and vital.

  This is the magic of the intriguing but ultimately disappointing new novel by Umberto Eco, “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (Harcourt; 469 pages; $27; translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock).

  In Milan, Italy, in late April 1991 (soon after the end of the Gulf war) our narrator has lost his memory. What happened isn’t clear, but all he can remember are things he’s read. The first few pages are filled with references to writers such as T.S. Eliot, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle – and those are just the easy ones to spot for someone familiar with English literature.

  When a doctor asks the narrator his name, he responds with the first line of a novel by Edgar Allen Poe: “My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.” When the doctor tells him that isn’t true, he tries with: “Call me … Ishmael?”

  At once, Eco reveals his smarts and sly humor.

  Soon, we learn that the narrator is in his 60s, is an antiquarian book dealer and goes by the nickname Yambo. Yambo is mischievous. Having forgotten his personal life, including his relationship with his wife, he calls himself a 60-year-old virgin, even though he is a father and grandfather. His character raises the expectation of a wonderful tale of memory and identity. Unfortunately, moments of wonder are all too rare.

  Yambo returns to his family’s estate in the countryside in an attempt to regain his identity by going through the stuff in the attic. What he describes we see in reprinted lyrics and illustrations from posters, newspapers, comic books and magazines from the 1930s and ’40s.

  The time period is fascinating: Italian fascism, war and giddy pop culture. Yambo calls the mix of messages from the media “schizophrenic.” He says, “Allied troops were landing in Sicily, and the radio (in the voice of Alida Valli!) was reminding us that love is not that way, love won’t turn to gray the way the gold fades in a woman’s hair.”

  Yambo even finds an essay he wrote that praises fascism, but he doesn’t know if he was a true believer or if he had to play it safe at school. His predicament seems rich with possibility, as if Eco is suggesting that a new, multinational war (the Gulf war) is reminding Yambo’s generation how much of the past they had to forget in order to survive the horrors of war and fascism.

  Some of the novel’s best writing occurs in the retelling of Yambo’s adventure with a group of partisans, but what Eco is trying to say about these themes of struggle and violence gets muddled in the abundance of pop culture. The title even refers to a comic book, and the riveting, wartime passages aren’t sustained with the same vitality as Philip Roth’s great reimagining of Newark, N.J., in “The Plot Against America” or even John Dower’s social histories of Japan in “War Without Mercy” and “Embracing Defeat.”

  A 16-page section in the back of Eco’s book cites the sources for the illustrations, and a repeated phrase says that many of the images came from the “author’s collection.”

  Suddenly, all the illustrations and references are indulgent. They disrupt the novel. The particulars of Yambo’s life don’t point to any general truth of the human condition, they point to Eco. As the novel progresses, this conflation of narrator and author makes one think Eco is no longer exhibiting his pleasure of language, culture and life through writing; instead, he is writing lists about things that brought him pleasure.

  In the end, the “mysterious flame” that rises in Yambo’s (or is it Eco’s?) heart from seeing the pop culture of his youth has, unfortunately, left this reader feeling cold.

  Perhaps it would have been more enjoyable to sort through my old books and papers.

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  Posted in Reviews | 0 Comments | Tagged literature, Queen Loana, Umberto Eco

• Book review: ‘Ash’ by Holly Thompson

  Posted at 7:46 am by Michael Janairo, on October 23, 2016

  

  This review originally appeared in the March 2002 edition of Multicultural Review.

  Ash

  Thompson, Holly. Ash. Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2001. 292 pp. ISBN 1-880656-65-5, $16.95.

   

  Thompson excels in her first novel at making Japan, from the volcanic-ash strewn streets of Kagoshima to the temples around Kyoto, accessible while conveying her protagonist’s “rootless expatriate world.”

  Caitlin Ober, though, is unlike other foreigners. She is an American who returns to Japan 15 years after a traumatizing childhood experience in Kyoto, where her family lived while her father, a scholar, did research. She now teaches English in Kagoshima, but her real mission is to overcome the guilt, sadness and silence that surrounds events from when she was 8. This drama leads to some of the most affecting passages in the novel, especially when Caitlin is reunited in Kyoto with her “number-two family,” the family of her best friend from childhood. The novel is less effective, though, when the narrator, like Caitlin, withholds for many pages a clear explanation of what happened in the past.

  Nonetheless, Thompson’s straightforward narrative allows her to map out many fascinating aspects of Japanese life, such as the problems faced by a 14-year-old girl with a Japanese mother and an American father. The teen is bullied at schools and must choose between taking Japanese or American citizenship when she turns 20.

  Though the novel, at times, veers toward melodrama, and more could be said about the biracial’s teens problems, instead of having her resolution subsumed by Caitlin’s drama, “Ash” successfully shows a Japan through Western eyes that isn’t the exotic locale of samurai and geisha but a place where an American can have powerful, emotional connections.

   

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  Posted in Reviews | 0 Comments | Tagged ash, holly thompson, japan, literature

• Book review: After Birth by Elisa Albert

  Posted at 7:13 am by Michael Janairo, on March 3, 2015

  

  I love this book. Get it. Read it. Now.

  “After Birth” by Elisa Albert tells the story of three months in one woman’s life around a year after giving birth who befriends a former “almost” rock star/poet who is about to give birth. The narrator says of the poet: “I’m a little obsessed with her, by which I mean a lot, which I guess is what obsessed means.”

  In that sentence, Albert achieves the creation of a distinctive character in her narrator: a sharp sense of humor, somewhat confessional, somewhat striving for clarity, while also somewhat muddled. Ari, the narrator, may not always be a sympathetic character (one of the first things she does is call the upstate city she lives – a fictional town called Utrecht, but an easily readable blend of Albany, Troy, Schenectady — a “shitbox”), but her language is so seductive that it can charm the reader, even in her most negative moments.

  After all, Ari seems to be suffering from a kind of post-partum depression, a severe disorientation in which she feels betrayed by a world that didn’t prepare her for life after having a child, she’s lost interest in completing her doctorate in women’s studies, she feels isolated in the aforementioned “shitbox” town, and all of it has been exacerbated by having undergone a c-section operation.

  If that weren’t enough, there is also that special kind of existential dread a parent faces by bringing a new life into the world: “I’m not going to pretend my kid is special, like other kids who starve and freeze and get raped and beaten and have to work in factories and get cancer from the fumes, too bad, so sad, but my kid is going to be warm and organic and toxin-free and safe and have everything he wants when he wants it and go to a good college and all is right with the world! Fuck that myopic bullshit. He’s going to suffer. He’s going to get mauled by some force I can’t pretend I can predict. We all live in the same fucked-up world.”
  Continue reading →

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  Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment | Tagged book, elisa albert, fiction, lit, literature, motherhood, review

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