Featured - Michelle Richmond

Now available: The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, originally published in 2001 by the University of Massachusetts Press and winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, is now available for Nook, Kindle, and other ereaders.

“The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character…smart and adept…” The New York Times

“This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions has a novel’s heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women’s lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.” ~The Boston Globe

“Richmond’s writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.” Publishers Weekly

The New York Times Book Review:
The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character. Gracie is nearly 30 when we first meet her, sitting in a rented car on the way to the Jersey Shore and just about to break up with her Bruce Springsteen-obsessed boyfriend. Most of the stories circle similar small, critical moments. In the crushingly sweet and brief ”Curvature,” for example, Gracie stands in the doorway of her sister Celia’s bedroom and watches her mother dress the wound on Celia’s back, made by surgery to correct curvature of the spine. A child at the time, Gracie envies the intimacy between her mother and sister and, in those few minutes, recognizes her mother’s capacity for sacrifice and tenderness. In ”Mathematics and Acrobatics,” set years later, Celia and her young daughter, Roberta, witness a bus accident on an icy Georgia road. Celia doesn’t stop to help the victims, and Roberta’s insensitive reaction to the scene makes Celia question both her mothering abilities and her own response to the crash. The settings here — from the Alabama coast to Iceland — frequently shift, as does the perspective; there are stories from the point of view of each of Gracie’s three sisters and a few of her childhood friends…smart and adept.”

About THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS

A series of locations both familiar and exotic delineate the nineteen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the New South.

Michelle Richmond introduces us to a memorable extended family, in which lies come more easily than forgiveness, and parents and siblings conceal the truth as often as they reveal it. In many cases, the women are forced to choose—between family and lovers, safety and self-sufficiency, the religion they grew up with and the reality of the world they have found for themselves.

In “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right,” twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In “Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force,” a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In “The World’s Greatest Pants,” three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.

An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. “Propaganda” finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband’s lengthy absence. In “Fifth Grade: A Criminal History,” adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences. A woman dancing naked on a bridge in San Francisco is the central figure of the title story.

The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in this volume. “O-lama-lama” portrays the scene of a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while “Slacabamorinico” celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In “The Last Bad Thing,” a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.

Wandering San Francisco with Paul Auster, plus Love in a Ten-Year Key

Has it really been ten years since I walked down the aisle at the little chapel in Yosemite, tripped on my dress, married that boy I met in Arkansas, went a bit too far with the tequila, and spent all night in our room at the Wawona Hotel searching for ghosts in the closet? It has!

Tonight, to celebrate, we’ll spend the night in the city and have dinner at Fleur de Lys. The last time we were at Fleur de Lys was a warm September evening a little more than two years ago, right after I’d interviewed Paul Auster at the Herbst Theatre for City Arts and Lectures. It was a rather surreal evening, as I have long been an achingly devoted fan of Mr. Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and many other wonderful works of fiction. The Gracious Author and I drank single-malt Scotch well into the wee hours, while my husband drank his usual, a single Bailey’s with milk, because my husband prefers his cocktails the way he prefers his entrees: as close to dessert as possible. Mr. Auster told some amazing stories. Some of them, I thought I might have read before in his books, but then I wondered if perhaps his books were so infused with his voice, his own voice so inseparable from his books, that I only felt I’d heard the stories before, when in fact I was hearing them for the first time.

We also talked politics for much of the evening, as the economy seemed on the brink of utter collapse and the presidential election was only a couple of months away. We talked a bit about movies, and houses, and Brooklyn, and Curious George, and an obscure Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entitled “Twenty Days With Julian and Little Bunny Papa.” I believe Slovenia might have been mentioned, for reasons I can’t recall.

Afterward, we went off in search of my Jeep, which I had characteristically misplaced. We walked many blocks and kept doubling back, over and over again, an endless loop. As we were wandering the deserted streets, I kept thinking of that book by Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, or more precisely the film version of the book, adapted by Harold Pinter, in which Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) get lost in Venice, and are rescued by an enigmatic and charming gentleman named Robert (Christopher Walken), who takes them back to his home and tells them some brilliant and terrifying stories. In Pinter’s film, as in McEwan’s novel, things do not end well for the tourists. Of course, this was San Francisco, not Venice, and I was not a tourist but a resident, and I should not have been so hopelessly lost.

Eventually we found the Jeep. It is now, as it was then, an old car, and a beloved one, and it had spent a great many days at the beach with me and my toddler, and it smelled accordingly, as if someone might have put a bucket of seaweed and sand crabs in there at some point and sort of forgotten about it. In such a state we transported Mr. Auster back to the hotel, and he, in his graciousness, swore that he could not smell a thing. And on the way home my husband and I remembered a story of a smelly car, in which the smell turns out to be blood, a story set in Albania. The story was written by my husband long before he was my husband, and I happened to have read it in a small literary magazine several months before he walked into a dismal University of Arkansas classroom in his furry Giraudon boots and changed my mind (I was, at the time, otherwise betrothed) and my life. Amen.

Time. I can’t believe it was fifteen years ago that I met that guy with a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead. Ten years ago that I tripped gracelessly down the aisle at the chapel in Yosemite, to be wedded by one kindly Reverend John Paris, who, for reasons I have yet to comprehend, kept saying that Jesus was like a fizzy tablet, and marriage was a glass of water, and you just had to drop that tablet in the water and see what happened. I know I remember it right, because when he was saying all that stuff I had not yet had any tequila. My husband had not yet had a Baileys with milk, and he remembers it the same way.

Not long ago I found a piece of notebook paper on which I had written our wedding budget. We paid $150 to rent the Yosemite Community Church from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. on January 5; $50 for Reverend Paris; $500 to reserve the reception room at the Wawona Hotel. It was a very cheap wedding, as weddings go. We didn’t have much in material terms; we didn’t think we needed it. We were kids and now we’re not. Now we have more stuff, and more responsibility, and a kid of our own, and the man I married still has a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead.

He is to this day the funniest guy I’ve ever met, with (hands down) the best hair. Happy Anniversary, Kevin. Here’s to ten more years.

Below: apartment in the Marais district of Paris, 2008, on a trip to meet my French editor and translator.

Fiction Attic launches with Albanian story collection

I’m excited to announce the launch of Fiction Attic Press, which will distribute fiction of exceptional literary merit via the ebook format. The press’s first publication is a collection of short stories in translation by the writers whose work launched the magazine Fiction Attic nearly a decade ago.

Winter in Tirane: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, is now available for Kindle, Nook, and all ebook formats.

About the book: Winter in Tirane brings together for the first time twelve interconnected and enigmatic tales of bittersweet love, absurd politics, and comic hijinks, set against the final days of the Albanian empire. The stories chronicle an unnamed narrator–the Deputy Minister of Slogans–and his young friend Leni as they attempt to navigate their way through a landscape of shifting political alliances and complex personal affairs.

About Fiction Attic:

During its three-year run, Fiction Attic featured the work of Steve Almond, Stephen Elliott, Gloria Frym, Katia Noyes, Vanessa Hua, Michelle Tea, Kevin Phelan, Bill U’Ren, and Anita Garner, among others, as well as interviews with such literary luminaries as Kate Braverman and fiction in translation by the celebrated Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern (translated by Elizabeth Harris).

Fiction Attic’s final issue, #20, devoted entirely to flash fiction, was published in 2004. In the winter of that year, the magazine’s editor, designer, and sole reader had a baby. A rather long silence followed.

In the ensuing years, online literary journals have exploded, and the world of online publishing has become far more vibrant and diverse than anyone might have imagined nearly a decade ago, when Fiction Attic first began accepting submissions.

The goal of Fiction Attic, as always, is to be relevant, interesting, and utterly unique. We refer you to the meaning of attic, which explains pretty much everything:

attic salt (phrase): a poignant, delicate wit, peculiar to the Athenians
attic (noun): a story or room directly below the roof of a building
attic (adj) : characterized by purity, simplicity, and elegant wit

Help me map the fog

Some time ago, I began building an interactive map of THE YEAR OF FOG, so that readers can follow Abby through the streets of San Francisco as she searches for Emma. The map contains images, text from the novel, and personal reflections on places that hold a special meaning for me. Now, I’m looking to expand the map, with your help. If there’s a specific location from the book that you want to see incuded, please send me the page number and any text from the book that you would like to accompany the marker. I’m also trying to build an image gallery for the map, so any personal photographs from readers would be much appreciated! Please email images and suggestions to fogtalk at g mail dot com; please include your name so that I can credit you. View the complete map, along with a list of mapped locations and street view capabilities, here.

View Interactive Map of San Francisco, based on the novel THE YEAR OF FOG in a larger map