Arts Calling Jaime Alejandro Cruz

Weekly Shoutout: Jim Clayton's latest album, LOOK OUT!

--

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Merrill J. Gerber!

About our guest:
Merrill Joan Gerber has written thirty books, including The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, the Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, and her essays in the American Scholar, Salmagundi, and Commentary. She has won an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is now at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Merrill! All the best!

--

REVELATION AT THE FOOD BANK, now available from Sagging Meniscus Press!

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/revelation_at_the_food_bank/

ABOUT REVELATION AT THE FOOD BANK:
These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer’s life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay (included in Best American Essays 2023) a food bank, assuaging the pandemic’s terrors with gifts of food and prayers, becomes a portal for intimate confidences entrusted to us by a voice of unspoiled authenticity and perennial vigor.

NOTICES:

“Often hilarious, deeply moving and warmly engaging, Merrill Joan Gerber’s collection of memoirist essays is delightful reading. ‘I have a lot to say from my own mouth’—so Gerber confides in her readers with admirable candor and enviable chutzpah. There is much here that is unnervingly intimate—close-ups of a very long marriage, painful memories of a brother-in-law who was abusive to his family before taking his own life, the disappointments as well as the rewards of an intense friendship with a famous woman writer embittered by religion and politics—all of it narrated in Merrill Joan Gerber’s distinctive voice.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Zero-Sum

“Written from her deepest truths, these intimate essays can be heartbreaking, maybe because we see ourselves in each of them. But they are told with such humor, such delicacy, that we close the book sighing, Yes, this is life! And this is why Merrill Joan Gerber has been one of my favorites for decades.”
—Judy Blume, author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“Uncommonly candid, honest, emotionally precise; irresistibly scrappy, edgy, visceral. Sentence by sentence, one of the best collections of personal essays I’ve read in years.”
—Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essays

" ‘Revelation at the Food Bank’, the essay that anchors Merrill Joan Gerber’s collection, gives voice to the widespread rage of the covid and post-covid era. If Gerber’s anger is universal, her expression of it is wholly her own—brutally honest, transgressive and at times hilarious. The subsequent ten pieces, including a contentious exchange with Cynthia Ozick on the subject of Jewish identity, present in kaleidoscopic form the complexity of her art.”
—Joan Givner, author of Playing Sarah Bernhardt

“Merrill Gerber’s new collection of essays adds up to a rich record of twentieth-century literary life, largely epistolary, in a period when epistles were epistles, not faxes, emails, texts or DMs. Closer to the present, she addresses the way we live now with a fine blend of pathos and wit, an exact intuition for the telling and well-timed detail, and all the freshness she must have had w

Weekly Shoutout: Listen to SPACEWALKERS FFEEATCOPO this instant!

--

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling poet MJ Gomez!

About our guest: MJ Gomez is the author of Love Letters from a Burning Planet (Variant Literature, 2023). His poems are featured in Surging Tide, the Dawn Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, the Selkie, and others. You can find him on Twitter @bluejayverses

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, MJ! All the best!

--

LOVE LETTERS FROM A BURNING PLANET, now available from Variant Lit!

https://variantlit.com/product/love-letters/

PRAISE FOR LOVE LETTERS FROM A BURNING PLANET:

In his scintillating debut, MJ Gomez weighs love against grief, grief against god, and asks: which governs what? Replete with sensuous pauses and lush imagery, Love Letters _unravels pointedly and fearlessly, the way you would at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, wine-drunk and unable to shake the rumor of a world you once built for someone.
—Letitia Jiju, poet and editor for _Psaltery & Lyre

From its initial holy invocation of the poet’s name through the course of its burning and urgent trajectory, Love Letters from a Burning Planet sees MJ Gomez detail the intricate inner workings of a “palace of flame” in what can only be described as a triumphant debut. Poignant and deliberate at every turn, Gomez circles the body in an act of poetic ceremony, executed with heart-rending care. At its core, Love Letters reminds us: “[the] truth is we are all immortal except for our bodies.”
—NAT RAUM, author of the abyss is staring back

MJ Gomez’s love letters from a burning planet crackles with language that sings and singes. “What should become of Man?” Gomez asks, and through self-portraits and studies, love letters and invocations, deftly answers: “a man is a song.” This is a radiant collection of poems that orbits devotion in all its pleasures and pains. Here are poems that bend light to make music. Here is a voice unafraid to speak in a world aflame.
—Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies

Electric, grand, and merciful. With blunt precision, Love Letters from a Burning Planet by MJ Gomez interrogates our human devotions to each other, and to the world. His debut reckons with the expanse of passion, of intimacy, and of love: “Magic doesn’t need to be real. / This body is enough, I swear.” Every poem brings new landscapes of memory to contend with these facts, overflowing with the worldly case of our own dissatisfactions and hopeless desires. Every poem traverses faith: religious, interpersonal, and individual. Gomez writes a universe beautiful and so, so human. “I send to you a flame / like a bullet / repenting.”
—Daniel Liu, author of COMRADE

--

Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Friend of the show Alvaro Saar Rios on The Scene Podcast, give it a listen!

--

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Effy Redman! (www.effyredman.com)

About our guest: Effy Redman's writing investigates the intersection of disability and identity. She has work published in The New York Times, Vice, Ravishly, Chronogram, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among other places. She holds an MFA in Memoir from CUNY: Hunter College, where she received an Honorable Mention for the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship, and a BA in Literature/Drama from Bennington College, where she was an Ellen Knowles Harcourt Scholar and a Bennington Scholar. effyredman.com.

Twitter: @effyredman
Facebook: Effy Redman
Instagram: @effyredman38

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Effy! All the best!

--

SAVING FACE, now available from Vine Leaves Press!

https://www.vineleavespress.com/saving-face-by-effy-redman.html

ABOUT SAVING FACE:
What's in a smile? Or the absent smile? Saving Face is Effy Redman's thought-provoking answer.
Born with a rare condition of facial paralysis called Moebius Syndrome, Redman's grit and eye for beauty help her survive childhood bullying and adolescent doldrums. Her physical transformation at age thirteen via plastic surgery eviscerates her concept of image, just in time for her and her family to immigrate from hardscrabble Manchester, England to America's disorientingly scenic upstate New York. Not until diagnosis in young adulthood with bipolar disorder does Redman come out of the closet as a lesbian, finally claiming her most inherent identity. Saving Face is a searing personal tribute to anybody who has ever felt like an outsider. This memoir honors the grace of a face that stands out in a crowd, defying societal beauty norms. Disability meets transcendence, suffering becomes hope, and the individual expands into community. The inability to smile, in Redman’s book, lights a window onto the human capacity for redemption.

★★★★★ “This author goes where no other might dare.” Catherine Filloux, award-winning playwright

--

Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Cruznotes is back! One email a month to bring you everything happening across the cruzfolio network, join Jaime's newsletter here: cruzfolio.com/cruznotes.

--

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Paul Cody! (paulcodywriter.com)

About our guest: Paul Cody was born in Newton, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School and from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, magna cum laude, With Distinction in English, and Senior Honors in Creative Writing. He worked at the Perkins School for the Blind for three years, and earned an M.F.A. from Cornell University, where he was twice co-winner of the Arthur Lynn Prize in Fiction. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, and was awarded a Stegner Fellowship by Stanford University (declined). He has worked as a housepainter, teacher, editor and journalist, was associate editor and staff writer at Cornell Magazine, where he twice won CASE awards for articles; and has taught at Cornell, Ithaca College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the Colgate Writing Seminars, and in Auburn Prison. His published novels include The Stolen Child (Baskerville, 1995), Eyes Like Mine (Baskerville, 1996), So Far Gone (Picador USA, 1998), Shooting the Heart (Viking, 2004), Love Is Both Wave and Particle (Roaring Brook, 2017), Sphyxia (Fomite, 2020) as well as a memoir, The Last Next Time (Irving Place Editions, 2013). His work has appeared in various periodicals, including Harper’s, Epoch, The Quarterly, Story, the Boston Globe Magazine, and Cornell Magazine, and he has appeared on Voice of America as a Critic’s Choice. He lives with his wife in Ithaca, New York.

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Paul! All the best!

--

WALK THE DARK available May 27th from Regal House Publishing!

https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/walk-the-dark

ABOUT WALK THE DARK: Oliver Curtin grows up in a nocturnal world with a mother who is a sex worker and drug addict, and whose love is real yet increasingly unreliable. His narration alternates between that troubled childhood and the present of the novel, where he is serving the last months of a thirty-years-to-life sentence in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York for a crime he committed at age seventeen. His hope for redemption is closely allied with his memories, seen with growing clarity and courage. If he can remember, then life in the larger world might be possible for him.

Praise for Walk the Dark

"Paul Cody’s Walk the Dark is creepily beautiful, full of stillness and darkness. Cody takes us into places we don’t know and shows us strange states of mind that feel absolutely true. It’s both soothing and terrifying being in Oliver’s mind, because he sees such beauty but also feels forever separated from it. For decades now I’ve seen Paul Cody’s work as the ultimate cross between horror and literary fiction, taking us deeper into the weird American night than anyone in either camp.  Walk the Dark is a continuation of that same world we know from Cody’s The Stolen Child and So Far Gone, both of which are great, terrifying novels." - Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster,  Emily, Alone; and Wish You Were Here  

"Walk the Dark is harrowing and vivid, taut as a wire. Paul Cody intertwines terror and hope; he knows how to hook his readers from the start -- and on every page. Keep the lights burning when you open this spell-binding book." - Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members

--

Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Cruznotes is back! One email a month to bring you everything happening across the cruzfolio network, join Jaime's newsletter here: cruzfolio.com/cruznotes.

--

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author David Winner! (david-winner.com)

About our guest: David Winner is the author of three novels, Enemy Combatant, Tyler’s Last and The Cannibal of Guadalajara, winner of the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions, The Kenyon Review and other publications in the U.S. and the U.K. He is the fiction editor of The American (www.theamericanmag. com), a monthly magazine based in Rome, a senior editor at Statorec magazine and a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail. Most recently, he is the co-editor of Writing the Virus: Work from Statorec magazine. Learn more at david-winner.com

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, David! All the best!

--

MASTER LOVERS is now available from Outpost 19!

https://bookshop.org/p/books/master-lovers-david-winner/20232214?ean=9781944853884

ABOUT MASTER LOVERS: While clearing out his great aunt's midtown apartment after her death, author David Winner discovered artifacts of her storied existence: notes from opera stars, love letters and artifacts from the Middle East of the 1930’s. His Aunt Dorle Soria had been a co-founder of Angel Records and a prominent figure in the mid-century classical music world. But the more he learned about her world, the more complicated her story became, a twisted puzzle full of love and fascism, a record of a young woman grappling with her attraction to lovers with hair-raising political ties. A powerful work of family discovery, rooted in a bygone Midtown Manhattan and involving artists and politicians from around the world. 

BOOKLIFE STARRED REVIEW! "An engrossing story about the life and times of a singular woman who lived life to the fullest... A fascinating 'fictional memoir' memoir of a trailblazing great aunt and her mysteries."

KIRKUS RAVES! "A fascinating blend of the personal and the historical, and a provocative comment on the ways in which both resist interpretive finality."

Full reviews and advance praise from Ann Beattie, Clifford Thompson and Sean O'Driscoll.

--

Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout:
Cruznotes is back! One email a month to bring you everything happening across the cruzfolio network, join Jaime's secret newsletter here: cruzfolio.com/cruznotes.

--

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Lee Upton! (www.leeupton.com)

About our guest: Lee Upton’s comic novel Tabitha, Get Up is forthcoming in May 2024. Another novel, a literary mystery, will be out in May 2025. Her books include her seventh collection of poetry, The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia Books 2023), two short story collections, a novella, four books of literary criticism, and an essay collection. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Southern Review, as well as three editions of Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, Poetry Society of America awards, the Miami University Novella Prize, the Open Book Award, the Saturnalia Book Prize, and other honors. www.leeupton.com

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Lee! All the best!

--

TABITHA, GET UP is forthcoming May 22nd, 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press, is now available for pre-order: https://bookshop.org/p/books/tabitha-get-up-lee-upton/21257767

ABOUT TABITHA, GET UP: Tabitha is a lonely fifty-year-old biographer who, in order to restore her self-respect and pay her rent, attempts to write two biographies simultaneously: one about an actor so famous his face is on the side of buses, and the other about a popular writer of children’s books recently outed as an author of erotic fiction. Is Tabitha ready to deal with interviewing an actor so handsome and charismatic she thinks he should be bottled and sprayed on belligerent people as a form of crowd control? Can she form a genuine friendship with a cult novelist who pressures her to compromise her values? While facing these and other challenges, Tabitha is bedeviled by memories of her long-ago divorce and the terrible wedding when, accidentally bumped on a balcony, she shot off into the shrubbery. Is it true, she wonders, that there’s probably a dead body beneath the floating rot of any marriage? When surrounded by pretentious beautiful people does it help to imagine their intestines are full of worms? Are champagne bubbles the devil’s air pockets? Is it ever too late to change your life—from the bottom up?

NOTICES:
“For starters, Lee Upton’s novel Tabitha, Get Up is funny—really, really funny. On top of that, narrator Tabitha’s clumsy, desperate, charming search for human connection—not to mention a paying gig—is also a serious look at whether it’s possible to bluff and hustle a life together. You’re going to love this book.”
—David Ebenbach, author of The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy

“Tabitha, Get Up is another remarkable book by the irrepressible Lee Upton, a novel that might remind you of the work of some of our finest living comic novelists—Elizabeth McCracken, Jincy Willett, Elizabeth McKenzie—but in the end is a book only Upton herself could have written. Its protagonist, Tabitha, is a glorious piece of work: a biographer with a feverish mind and a long list of antagonists and an indomitable spirit and an unforgettable voice and major money problems. I wouldn’t want anyone to live her life, but I very much want everyone to read her book. It’s Lee Upton’s best, funniest, and most ingenious work of fiction yet. Which is to say, it’s the best, funniest, most ingenious work of fiction you’ll read this year, and most other years, too.” —Brock Clarke, author of Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? and I, Grape

“There is no form of the novel. The novel has no form. The novel takes no form. The novel takes forms. It is a voracious form, the novel. Tabitha, Get Up, Lee Upton’s comely new novel, presents as a series of exquisite “Notes,” and thus a “Notebook,” a book of Notes, to self, to random others, to you who finds them. A compendium of memorandums makes up the meat of t