The Masters Review

The Masters Review Best Books of 2014 List

To celebrate the year in books, our editors compiled a list of favorite titles we reviewed in 2014. Of course, this only represents a tiny slice of all the wonderful releases this year. Cheers to the books of 2014! Here is a look back at our highlights.

Andrew

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

This is why I love novels. You get a chance to be inside someone’s head, to understand their mistakes, even when you can’t condone them. Wolfis dark dark dark—it revolves around a wrongful death suit filed against our narrator, the survivor of a botched suicide. But Sean’s fertile imagination and resilience remind us of the beauty that can grow in the darkest places. I’ve already bought copies of this for other people; it’s one of those.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; October

In Case of Emergency by Courtney Moreno: One of the best messy love stories I’ve read, fleshed out with family drama, accurate (and fascinating) EMT action, and the science of the body. Plus, a bisexual protagonist that doesn’t fall into the common traps and tropes!

McSweenys, September

Kim

Our Secret Life in the Movies by Michael McGriff and JM Tyree- I have never read anything quite like Our Secret Life in the Movies. Michael McGriff and JM Tyree set out to watch every movie in the Criterion Collection and then wrote short stories based on the movies. The result is a gorgeous collection of flash fiction about growing up in the 80s. It is such an interesting multi-media project and yet the stories stay at the heart of the collection. Spot-on perfect.

A Strange Object, November

Sadye

By Light We Knew Our Names by Anne Valente

By Light We Knew Our Names is a luminous debut. The second story in the collection, “Dear Amelia,” is from the point of view of a group of girls who are morphing into Maine black bears, and it’s addressed to Amelia Earhart. It’s one of my favorite stories not just of the year, but ever. But my summary doesn’t really do it justice. All thirteen stories in this collection are intimate and palpable. Trust me. These stories resonate.

Dzanc, November

This is it. This is how it all ends. 2014, I mean. Who has the vim, the temerity, and—holy crap—the TIME to apply for these literary contests and still buy and wrap presents? Will it be you?

Sarabande Books – One of my favorite new (-to-me) publishing houses gets top billing here, mostly because they have earned my loyalty by putting out great books. So check out details on theirBernheim Writing Residency, a “two- to six-week residency at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Clermont, Kentucky…given annually to a poet, a fiction writer, or a creative nonfiction writer.” That’s a good look, and this a cool group, so do the right thing. NO ENTRY FEE. Due: December 15

Tethered by Letters Fall Literary Contests – Tethered by Letters is running three contests that close this month: one for the short story (prize: $250), one for flash fiction (prize: $50), and one for poetry (prize: $100). In their own words, TBL is looking for writers with “engaging stories, vivid characters, and fresh writing styles.” Winners of each contest receive publication and finalists earn free professional edits. Details here. Entry Fee: $10 for each short story; $4 for each piece of flash fiction or $10 for three; $5 for each poem or $12 for three. Due: December 15

Boulevard – A prize of $1500 is awarded by Boulevard for the best short story of up to 8000 words. The only catch is you can’t have already published a nationally distributed book. So Lorrie Moore, for example, would not be eligible. Nor would George Saunders or Amy Hempel, though hopefully they’ll apply and get disqualified and you can say you bested them in a literary contest. Check it. Entry Fee: $15. Due: December 31

Barbara Deming Memorial Fund – Individual artist grants of “up to $1,500 are given twice yearly to feminist writers” by the Deming Fund. This go-round, they will be awarding fiction writers. Check out the details here and apply before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. Entry Fee: $25. Due: December 31

Lascaux Review – Again, a short story contest? Why not poetry? Because we are your premiere short story outlet. Also because the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction allows previously published stories, which, if you’ve read as much fine print as I have, you know is rare. The winner receives $1000 and publication. Submit here. Entry Fee: $10. Due: December 31

Mississippi Review – Got a poem or a short story to beat the band, that is up to snuff and passes muster? Then submit it here, though I’d advise you to leave those sayings out unless you promise to use them better than I have. Winners receive $1000 and publication. Go for it! Entry Fee: $15 for mailed submissions, $16 for online submissions. Due: January 1

New Delta Review Chapbook Contest – The New Delta Review chapbook competition will be judged by Michael Martone and is open to manuscripts of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrids. The winner will receive $250 and chapbook publication in Spring 2015! Go ahead, submit. Entry Fee: $17. Due: January 1

We’re so pleased to feature two new releases from Tin House Books. During this time of Best-Of Book Lists we wanted to carve out some space for two titles that are stand-alone great. That they happen to be from the same publisher makes it all the more special. Editor Andrew Wetzel reviewed both. (Think, Gifts for writers!)

The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write

In celebration of the thirty-year anniversary of Portland’s Literary Arts, Tin House Books has put together this collection to honor the nonprofit literary center’s storied lecture series. It collects speeches given by ten well-known authors on literature and craft, with warm words of introduction from Jon Raymond. Though I preferred the speeches that felt playful and biographical, as opposed to theory-heavy, the quality level is uniformly high. Dare I suggest that the unpublished majority find something vaguely aspirational in the very act of reading these essays? It felt like research, the fun kind; you’re combining trade tips and techniques with reading, which I imagine is the favorite activity of most writers. Read the rest of the review here.

Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D’Ambrosio

Blake Kimzey’s chapbook Families Among Us (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), is a collection of stories about transformation. Six stories nod to the magic of the natural world though surreal changes in its characters. “The boy grew like a regular boy… though each successive year his back curved more noticeably and his wings became stronger and his appetite larger.” Kimzey’s changelings sprout wings, slither on ringed bellies, grow snouts, claws, and fur; they carry full galaxies in their cheeks. His stories have been called, “beautifully written universes” and they are exactly that. We spoke with the author about his collection, below.

Author Interview: Blake Kimzey

My first introduction to Families Among Us was “The Boy and The Bear,” which we published in May. It’s a story (on the most basic level) about a boy who turns into a bear. At the time I didn’t know about the other stories, but “The Boy and The Bear” is part of an incredibly cohesive collection. I’m curious: when did you write this piece? Which story in the collection was first? And when did you begin to recognize these stories were part of a larger whole?

Thank you for such kind words about the collection, Kim. And thank you for publishing “The Boy and The Bear” as part of Short Story Month earlier this year. The stories in Families Among Us are close to me, the kind of stories I write when I want a break from the longer, realist fiction I normally write (splitting my time between dark comedy and fiction about the Iraq War). With each of the stories in my chapbook I started with an image, which is not the way I usually begin (with a character or a premise). For “The Boy and The Bear” that image was simply a boy nose-to-nose with a bear. When I zoomed out they were lost somewhere in a winter-crisp forest. And then I simply wanted to know how the boy and the bear ended up like that, and I wanted to know what their relationship was. As with all writing, it became an investigation. Image led to premise and then I felt comfortable. I tried to rewind the story from that moment and I found the boy in a village and then locked in a cellar. As it turns out, this was the fifth piece I wrote in the collection, giving me a handful of stories that felt connected. All of them are set in what looks and feels like the real world, but the characters give it a magical quality. I wrote “Up and Away” first after re-reading Metamorphosis when I was waiting to hear back from grad programs spring 2011. A bit of anxiety made my writing feel stale and I needed to change things up, and so I wrote fully into a new kind of imagination for me, and it has been the best thing for my writing practice, to have this outlet. All told it took me two and a half years to write these six very short stories. They take longer for me to imagine and write than the fiction I tend to write, and are influenced by Kafka, Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aimee Bender, Roald Dahl, and Angela Carter. I don’t know what is going to happen anytime I sit down to write, a feeling that is doubled when I can’t shake an image that begs investigation. Writing a short tale reminds me you can do anything in fiction, magical realism or otherwise. I wrote “And Finally the Tragedy” last and when it was complete I knew I had a short collection I could send out to chapbook competitions.

Lets talk about some of the elements that tie these stories together. First, none of your characters have names. Instead they are the mother, the boy, the man, the girl, etc. Where did that choice come from? To me it contributes a fable-like quality to these stories, and allows characters to be any person for any reader. At the same time it develops a purposeful distance. How did you intend for the not-named characters to be received?

I wanted to keep a healthy distance from the characters in each of these stories so that the audience would actually feel closer to them. That makes no sense, but I wanted to give the reader enough room to make part of the story their own, to cede some of the imaginative work to the audience. When I encounter a character with no name I feel that gives me license as a reader to make a few of my own determinations about who/what they are within the context of everything else the author gives me. And for me the best way to do that as an author was to keep the cast nameless. It also felt like a directive for the audience to read the stories as tales, and maybe even to shoulder more of the emotional freight as they read along. This was a story-by-story decision that gathered into a meaningful choice for the collection as a whole. I wanted the characters to feel particular on the physical level and within individual family units, but I also wanted them to feel unconstrained by the specificity that naming brings. One of the things I love most about writing a great character is choosing the perfect name. A name can take a character all the way to the end, but in these stories it felt like the absence of that particularity was an essential component to sparking the emotional charge in each story. For me, the absence of a name also contributed to the sense of timelessness I wanted to convey in each story.

Author Interview: Amanda Pauley

Our third anthology, with stories selected by Lev Grossman, is available now. As part of a continuing series of interviews with our anthology authors, we talked to Amanda Pauley. Her story “Braids,” which alternates between the point of view of a man in prison and the point of view of his wife on the outside, is full of texture, detail, and depth. Here, we talk to Amanda Pauley about research, her MFA, and her writing process.

For the most part, Graydon liked his job. Barbering had advantages over working in the cafeteria, machine shop, or janitorial services. The barbers were a mainstay for prisoner communication, and they earned tips in the form of packets of mackerel or tuna, postage stamps, or X-rated magazines, cigarettes having died out with the smoking ban.

One thing that I found so remarkable about your story “Braids” was the incredible detail; the prose was full of texture. One of the most detailed parts of the story, for example, takes places in a prison hair salon. I’m wondering: how much research did you do for this story, and how did you go about incorporating it? For example: is there a lot of research you didn’t use?

Research is probably my favorite part of writing. For two years, I worked at the Department of Social Services, which is a hotbed of material and characters. While there, I worked with a woman whose husband had been in state prison and was about to go to federal prison. I was fortunate in the fact that both were quite willing to discuss their situation. Hollins University provides travel grants each year to students in the MFA program, so I applied and received funding to go to the federal prison in Morgantown, WV, and spend the day in the visiting room with the inmate.

While I already had much of the story in mind, I wanted to learn more about daily life to keep it authentic. I wanted to know the first thing an inmate heard in the morning, or what he had to do in order to move about the building. Did he have a choice in what job he worked while there? I wanted to experience the visitation room for myself and see the interaction. I could make up stories all day long, but keeping them realistic was another task. I was lucky that I had someone willing to talk and who had spent time in both state and federal prison. I also had the perspective of his wife on the outside. While “Braids” is not this couple’s story, it certainly pulls from their circumstances a great deal, and I am grateful for their willingness to share.

From the information they gave me, I wrote with true detail. Of course I only used what supported the story. So yes, there was plenty of detail left over for other stories.

We are thrilled to announce the judge for our printed anthology is author Kevin Brockmeier, who says he is “looking for the kind of stories that result when a writer combines imaginative daring with dynamic, exact, emotionally suggestive prose.”

Unlike previous years, this category is open to ALL EMERGING WRITERS.(Anyone who has not yet published a novel-length work qualifies for submission.)

This anthology is a showcase of the country’s best writers. Ten stories will be chosen for publication in our nationally distributed, printed anthology. In addition to availability by all major retailers, we send this work to over 50 agencies and editors to fulfill our promise of showcasing new writers. The Masters Review serves as a major endorsement for emerging talent.

“The Masters Review Volume III delights with a stunningly eclectic array of voices, uniform only in their excellence. This anthology is a testament to the health of contemporary literature.” – LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of Find Me and The Isle of Youth

“The Masters Review is a lovely magazine, in form and content. How awesome it is to see the next generation of writers kicking ass, taking names, and making beautiful art.” –STEVE ALMOND, author and essayist

“With their third volume, The Masters Review continues their rapid, upward trajectory of literary awesomeness. Reading the ten stories in this anthology, it is easy to think we will one day look back at this collection as the launch pad for the careers of ten amazing writers.” –TROY PALMER, editor, Little Fiction | Big Truths

“If these are the voices we’ll be hearing from, American literature has an awful lot to look forward to.” –RAMONA AUSUBEL, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born

SUBMISSIONS OPEN JANUARY 1, 2015.

Book Review: A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka

Lev Golinkin’s memoir, out this November from Doubleday, is a fantastic debut. As he explores his family’s journey of emigration, the reader gets not only a first-hand look at the last great migration out of the USSR, but also an incredibly personal story about the search for identity and meaning as an adult immigrant.

As a Jewish family in the Soviet Union, Lev’s family suffered under an oppressive and anti-Semitic regime. Lev was bullied and beaten at school; his sister, Lina, was barred from attending medical school; and his father was threatened by the KGB. When news came that the United States was closing its border, and all immigrants had to be registered in Vienna by December 31st, 1989, his mother knew that it was time to leave. Six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lev and his family board a bus out of the country, headed toward Vienna, where there is only a simple rumor of help for refugees.

In honor of Thanksgiving we’re highlighting a few ways for you to make a difference with your stacks of old books. Sure, you could sell your used titles back for a measly few bucks, but wouldn’t it feel better knowing you’ve made a difference? Thought so. Read on.

Better World Books - We don’t want to play favorites, but Better World Books is an excellent way to go if you don’t live near a drop site and you want your books to make a big difference. All you need to do is box up your old books and print a shipping label from their site. No need to fret, BWB will pay the shipping and either donate your book or resell it in order to raise money for charity. But it doesn’t stop there. Their site is full of some really great initiatives (for every book you buy from them, they donate one!), so take some time to check out all the great stuff they have to offer.

Libraries Without Borders –  This site is a great way to benefit libraries and library projects around the world. They stock libraries, train librarians, provide support to create and build new libraries, and they work to computerize library systems. If you have a soft spot for the little library card in your wallet, consider donating books to their cause.

Books for Soldiers and Operation Paperback – Both of these organizations are a great way to get books to our troops. Though they’re run differently, you register on both sites in order to get information on requested books from soldiers. Then you ship directly to the organization or soldier. And no need to worry about shipping costs. Both offer really affordable ways to send your books overseas.

Books for Africa –  According to their site, Books for Africa is, “A simple name for an organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship, and distribute books to children in Africa. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa.” This organization has good cause written all over it. Though the donations do have restrictions, it’s an excellent way to get involved with promoting literacy and learning.

Book Up - Run by the National Book Award, this organization focuses on getting kids in middle school (a time when research shows kids are most likely to stop reading) into books. “The program introduces activities that emphasize reading as both fun and interactive, all designed to improve students’ social/emotional skills along with their reading skills, and build the confidence necessary to become engaged citizens as adults.” Great cause.

Looking for a different way to give?

Have you ever gone home with a friend for Thanksgiving or another holiday and found their family to be strangely happy and polite? Folded napkins, everyone is excited to see one another, they may even sing carols in front of you. And isn’t it profoundly disturbing when you realize you might have to reciprocate the invite and show your friend the deep dysfunction that plagues your visits home? All the mumbled complaints, the piercing clatter of chipped dishes being stacked, Grandma trying to show off the weal on her neck in the middle of dinner.

Author Interview: Anne Valente

We had the pleasure of talking with Anne Valente, whose debut collection By Light We Knew Our Names was published by Dzanc Books this fall. In these thirteen luminous stories, adolescent girls morph into black bears, a man is tasked with caring for one hundred baby octopi, and abused women form a fight club under the northern lights. Throughout all of this, Valente’s stories maintain an intimacy with their characters. Here, we talk to Valente about structuring her collection, magic in nature, inspiration from research, her nonfiction, and what’s next.

First of all, let me just say how much I enjoyed your debut collection, By Light We Knew Our Names. I thought it was incredible. I’m wondering how you decided to order the collection—if you had a particular pattern or arc in mind. To me, it seemed like the first few stories were about the magic of self-discovery, as the characters came of age. Then, I felt a palpable shift as the characters looked outwards to focus on the harshness of the world, and the frustrating mystery of those closest to them. I thought this was a lovely progression. So: how did you structure the collection?

Thank you so much for your kind words! Your observation is spot-on in how I ordered the collection. When I put these stories together, I saw them as a progression from the wonder of childhood to the grief, loss and even violence of adulthood. It was my hope, however, that even amid the losses of growing older, the characters and stories still find some capacity for wonder, and that magic isn’t entirely lost when childhood is left behind. There is an unadulterated hopefulness to the earliest stories in the book that I hope serves as a touchstone through the darker traumas of the later stories, where ghosts and northern lights and pink dolphins still cut rays of wonder and light through the dark.

I really loved the story “Dear Amelia.” It’s now on my list of The Best Stories of All Time. I’ve been describing it to people as “a story about girls who are slowly turning into Maine black bears, and it’s addressed to Amelia Earhart.” But that summary doesn’t really encompass the power of the story. I’m wondering: what was the inspiration for this story? I would love to know anything about the process of writing it.

Thank you! The idea for this story came to me after I read a Center for Cartoon Studies graphic novel,Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean by Sarah Stewart Taylor and Ben Towle. The Center for Cartoon Studies has done a series on famous historical figures including Thoreau, Houdini, Satchel Paige and Helen Keller. The illustrations in this particular book were magnificent, and they made me think more about Amelia Earhart’s journey and what it must have looked like to young girls in the 1930s when women had fewer options than they do now, and when women’s rights were first being discussed. I’d taken a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine around the time of reading this graphic novel and recalled a naturalist in the park mentioning that it was one of the easternmost points to view the sunrise in the United States. Since Amelia Earhart took off from the easternmost points of the United States in her attempts to travel across the Atlantic, I began to think about what that must have looked like to those who witnessed this, and in particular, those in Maine. The bear transformation came quickly from these ideas as a way of exploring frontiers, limitations, and the boundaries of one’s own biology and body.

What are some of your favorite short stories of all time?

Oh, there are so many. A few that I return to again and again are Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “Housewifely Arts” (the final lines make me teary every time), Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” Anthony Doerr’s “The Caretaker” (his use of language is incredible), and Aimee Bender’s “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.” I also reread Margaret Patton Chapman’s “The Wormhole, A Romance” often, which appeared in DIAGRAM a few years ago. It’s just lovely. Definitely one of my favorites of all time.

Book Review: Our Secret Life in the Movies by Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree

Out of a set of unique constraints, Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree have written a strange and wonderful little book of fiction. Our Secret Life in the Movies does not follow any obvious narrative path, depending instead on a set of prompts to lead the way. The authors, former university classmates, decided to watch the entire Criterion Collection and write stories based on each film. This slim volume of short fiction is the result, a work of experimental writing that offers mainstream readers cinematic references as ballast.

Appropriately, for a book based on the viewing of a thousand-plus hours of cinema, hundreds of non-movie pop culture touchstones, both high- and low-brow, are uncovered. Though the narrators clearly place the setting in the 1980s, Richard Brautigan is evoked in one chapter and paid great tribute throughout the text. Every page contains a narrative non sequitur or a moment of underlinable poetic insight. Wisps of a plotted through-line exist if you squint, but they’re less important to the mood of the book than the brief bursts of impressionistic descriptions. The chapter for Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry begins: “To begin, consider water pouring over the gray marble of the salamander’s eye, hard water whose deposits shimmer in goosenecked sink pipes, water that stains the teeth of widows, water and its mineral shadow floating over the city, crossing the new moon, entering the machine of hours.”