Last week I said: question everything you think you know about crime fiction.

This week, I’m going to introduce you to four writers who question everything you think you know about the way we live. They take nothing for granted. They don’t judge and they’d prefer you don’t either. All they give us (because they’d want it to sound like it’s no big deal) is the Truth. No small task.

Dennis Lehane

The third part in my Wire writers trifecta, the drunken poet of the Boston streets with clenched fists and a bleeding heart. His 1994 Shamus award-winning debut A Drink Before the War turned the P.I. genre on its head: the narrator Patrick-never Pat-Kenzie is a private investigator but not an ex-cop or ex-anything (before this it seemed as if any fictional P.I. had to be a former police by federal law), with intimate, ground-level knowledge of his south Boston neighborhood, rage issues stemming from his publicly adored and privately abusive firefighter father, and a stubborn terrier-with-a-rat penchant for saving lost souls and exposing corruption at its highest levels.

But the even more dramatic departure is Patrick’s partner and lifelong pal Angie Gennaro, who I feel confident saying is unlike any other woman in all of crime fiction, and possibly fiction in general. Even Lehane’s “whacky” characters, like Angie and Patrick’s lifelong friend Bubba–a former Marine who literally grew up on the streets, was homeless till age eight, and makes his bread as an arms dealer living in an abandoned warehouse with dynamite booby traps in the floorboards–have the hard sheen of reality. I know that doesn’t sound like it could possibly be real, but then again that’s what a truly great writer does–brings the unreal to life, fills out two-dimensional bags of bones into flesh and blood humans, spins straw into gold.

Lehane’s books, the six Kenzie/Gennaro books, stand-alones like the masterful Mystic River and the first two books of his Coughlin family trilogy The Given Day and Live By Night (part three coming next year) are about family and the relationships between people, and chronicle the myriad ways they can go wrong and right (the latter much less often). His work pits the great philosophical questions we all must ask against the violence, rage, hatred and misery of the great Underworld that is our baser instincts, and when he brings them together they collide with astonishing force.

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly: Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch is an orphaned, Vietnam tunnel rat, L.A. riot veteran cop combing the darkest corridors of the American dream (aka Hollywood) to satisfy his never-ending mission: when it comes to homicide, everybody counts or nobody counts.

With the possible exception of Richard Price, Connelly is the most procedure-driven writer on this list, but that’s only because he’s the only one who writes (at least in the Bosch series) exclusively about an active-duty police officer. In the books from the past decade or so Bosch has worked on the LAPD’s Open Unsolved Unit, unofficially known as the cold case squad, and it has proven to bea vein both deep and rich for Harry and Connelly.

Following in the hard-boiled L.A. noir footsteps of Chandler and others, Connelly shows us the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, and people from all different walks of life. What sets Connelly apart from the many other writers who specialize in police procedurals, and they are legion, is his devotion to character and an evocative, detailed sense of place that’s both spiritual and geographical. His characters are not just realistic but real, never used as simple plot devices, and while he does chronicle their weaknesses, their flaws, their worst predilections, he often allows us the context for understanding, and in nearly every case some small amount of sympathy.

Connelly is never sensational in his work; there are occasionally serial killers or race riots or high profile media circus cases but usually he’s about the banal horrors and quietly unfathomable complexities of everyday life. Indeed, even the multi-murderers and riots and O.J. Simpson-like debacles always seem to come from small people with small lives and simple desires and what Bosch calls “the ripple effect” of their actions. Bosch, like his Renaissance master namesake, is haunted by the darkness lurking in all of us, not just “criminals”. The very notion of a criminal as someone separate and somehow different and apart from the rest of us is debunked.

Andrew Vachss

Andrew Vachss: thirty years ago, while he was trying to get published, editors told Vachss (rhymes with “tax”) his work was too violent and irresponsible in its portrayal of child abuse (physical, mental and sexual, done by parents, relatives, family friends, legal guardians, strangers and profiteers among others) as commonplace, widespread, and oft-ignored.  Same went for his depiction of the criminal life in and out of jail.  Twenty-five or so years ago, to use a more specific but much more telling example, most critics, readers and law-enforcement types who should’ve known better scoffed at the idea of pedophiles trading child pornography through their computers, via the phone lines of all things.  In these and so many other instances, Vachss tells the truth, but as opposed to my earlier statement about all good crime fiction, his truth-telling is often of a less metaphoric variety, unblinking and unflinching authenticity gleaned from hard (very hard) won experience.  Much of the time, he recounts simply what actually happened, the names changed not to protect the innocent (because even the victims are no longer that, sad to say) but to slap readers in the face and, maybe, make some headway in protecting the future innocent.  He fights the only Holy War worthy of the name, and the struggle is best portrayed in his Burke series.

Burke and his Family of Choice, the one with bonds deeper than blood, are all Children of The Secret, those abused and victimized by the system, those within it and the system itself, and have never experienced justice. As he has said they don’t all fight under the same flag but Burke, Mama, the Mole — a Nazi-hating junkyard-dwelling psychopathic off-the-charts genius–Michelle, a transgender ex-prostitute who’s more of a lady in nearly every way than most genetic “women,” The Prof (short for either the professor or the prophet depending on his mood), Max the Silent, and too many other once in a lifetime characters to name, all come out for the same, dark show.

They’re on The Street, capital letters intended, not just the asphault where cars run, but the hard pavement where scams and hustles flow like a poison river, where you can fuck the system for once and, maybe, avoid being fucked by it. They are forcibly stuck there, sure, but they stay by choice. “Down where we live,” Burke says in 1988’s Blue Belle, “every day is a rainy day.”

James Ellroy

Ah, The Demon Dog. My favorite on this list and one of my favorite writers of all time. He got into The Life early, his mother murdered when he was ten, and the crime still unsolved. I saw him speak once. He said his heroes were Beethoven, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked why, he responded  (I paraphrase but I know this is close): when faced with all those men accomplished, how can we dare falter? This is a man of staggering vision and ambition, and damned if he doesn’t live up to it.

All his work is compelling, but he really hits his stride with The Black Dahlia (1987), fictionalizing the famous real life slaying of actress Elizabeth Short in 1947 Los Angeles. From there, he wrote the rest of his L.A. Quartet (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz). His next fiction was called The Underworld U.S.A. trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six-Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover.

Popular opinion varies on which is his best, but I go with the Underworld trilogy, and Six-Thousand specifically, though the Quartet is so, so good. All seven books are in loose chronological order, covering 1947-1973, first in L.A. and then across America and the world, focusing on loosely-related characters, some who had been minor characters earlier and others who go on to play supporting roles later. If they survive. Many do not. The books seamlessly blend fact and fiction, where real life people and events mix with the fabrications of Ellroy’s malevolent imagination.

His books are about fear. Fear of the Other: the other gender, other races, other political ideologies, other sexual preferences of all stripes, people with different moral codes, different vices, different priorities. Fear of yourself, what you’re capable of, what’s hiding inside you buried deep. Fear of History, the way the past keeps rolling back on the present, the way events and lives cohere into a bloody, terrifying outcome.

American Tabloid, Time magazine’s #1 book of 1995, shows us JFK as a compulsive philanderer who’s also a callow, power mad one-minute man, Jimmy Hoffa butchering an informant with a machete, J. Edgar Hoover cooly orchestrating EVERY mind-meltingly depraved atrocity of the era with only a telephone and a talent for extrapolation as well as dozens of brutal, barbaric shakedowns, beatings and slayings…and then on page fifty-one it gets so much worse. At the center of the story live three men, two FBI agents and an L.A. knockaround guy who kills without compunction (at first) and dishes the best dirt in town, and their stories intertwine with each other until an explosion they’re all, willingly or not, party to.

The sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, begins seconds after Tabloid ends in Dallas, just past noon, on 11/22/63. Yeah, you know what day that is. That’s the explosion, and it makes the earth shake. From there it spins into Vegas, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and a pair of well-known 1968 political assassinations that blow everything up once again.

Ellroy has begun the second L.A. Quartet, four novels set between the onset of WWII and 1947 or so that use many of the characters from the original Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy. The first installment, Perfidia, drops in September. Once they’re all out we can combine all eleven into one giant, cohesive mega-novel covering thirty-plus years of America’s dark places, a voyeuristic window peep into our hidden, hideous, and hideously plausible history, as told by bad men and women doing terrible things for love, survival, redemption, and vengeance. Ellroy, in typical self-aggrandizing fashion, calls himself the Tolstoy of crime fiction.

The thing is, though, he just might be.

 Join our email list to receive weekly reading recommendations.

There is a certain stigma to all types of genre fiction, and much of the time it is well deserved.  Crime fiction and its many sub-genres don’t have quite the same dubious reputation as, say, sci-fi or fantasy or, saints preserve us and our un-ripped bodices, romance, but it’s been kicked around a fair amount over the years. Again, not altogether unfairly.

There are the criticisms that any genre-oriented fiction produces: lazy and/or awkward prose, stale repeating characters/ongoing series, the false comforts of escapism (either to a world too benign or too hostile) and the general lack of relevance to, and partial to complete disconnection from, the reality we live in.  Crime fiction also feels the sting of more pointed barbs: racism, bass-ackwards political philosophy, excessive violence, unnecessarily graphic violence, violence as pornography (literally as well as figuratively), violence as the answer or the best answer or the only answer, a great deficiency of even the loosest sort of morality, and oh Lord so, so much misogyny.

While I don’t claim true authority, I have read quite a lot (perhaps a full clip?) of crime fiction and I will be first to say that there’s plenty of evidence of every shortcoming and misstep mentioned above in the crime world, and many others to boot. There’s a lot of terrible, stupid, silly and downright offensive stuff in this particular literary realm.

But.

Good crime fiction is different.  Good crime fiction, at its very least, can offer us a glimpse of a world that actually exists in the darker corners of our own while allowing us the distance to appreciate (hopefully) how alien it feels to us.

My favorites in the genre do a hell of a lot more, though: they show us these dark corners, yes, but then they reveal how small of a difference there really is between them and our own safe territory in the middle, where the light shines down plentiful and where the rain is both rare and welcome on its few appearances because all it does for us straight citizens is help revive the landscape and let the crops grow tall.

As a certain low poet of the Baltimore streets once proclaimed, “there’s a thin line ‘tween Heaven and here.”

Good crime fiction toes this line. Good crime fiction opens our eyes to the possibilities, good and bad, extant on the edges of things.  It shows us men and women not all that unlike ourselves forced into terrible circumstances and forces us into understanding, if not always condoning, the terrible things they do for survival, well-deserved vengeance, or even for fun.  Yes, fun.  It helps satisfy our baser instincts, act out our most repressed desires, slake our deeply-hidden thirsts.

The best stuff in this world is the opposite of escapist, ripping our blinders off and roughly jamming reality in our faces.  It does not glorify violence, but acknowledges its existence and occasional use, and shows us the consequences without judgement.  Justified or not, a fist or a knife or a bullet (or a tongue) wreaks terrible havoc.  It is, actually, especially important if the violence is supposedly justified–we need to know, to see, to understand how it looks, sounds, and feels.  We don’t get to ignore the aftermath, cannot be shielded from its malignant glow.

Likewise, good crime fiction does not promote racism or sexism as much as it admits they are real and plays with our notions about them, makes you wonder about other lines, like when you do find yourself hating someone of another color or gender because hate happens between humans, and why and when that descends into something else, something unconscionable, something our parents taught us was wrong (but only if we were lucky).

Speaking of sexual politics, the better class of crime fiction (over the last few decades anyway) dives further into sexual politics, touching on homophobia, trans issues, other alternative sexualities (even that is noteworthy, not too long ago it all would’ve been called deviant but now the better writers know what such a term truly covers and what it doesn’t), and women’s issues less directly related to sex.  Greg Rucka’s debut novel Keeper (1996), for instance, concerns a professional bodyguard who is hired by the head of an abortion clinic to protect her and her daughter when she begins receiving death threats…after the bodyguard in question and his girlfriend visit the clinic for her professional services.

The good stuff is simultaneously apolitical and opinionated as hell, observant but not didactic, content (to utilize a creative writing 101 cliché in a more literal sense) in showing you without needing to tell you.  It recognizes there are different points of view on any given subject, but more importantly acknowledges the fact that sometimes both sides of an argument can be right.

Money runs through pretty much all crime fiction, good and bad, but the better stuff doesn’t just feature stacks of cold hard cash; it talks about class, socio-economic struggles, boundaries and divides, the great rift between the haves and the have-nots that sometimes, especially these days, is a more powerful and more destructive force than race or any of the other more “traditional” hot-button issues.

Think you don’t like crime fiction?  Dostoevsky might have something to say about that.  Or Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Steinbeck, Dickens, Toni Morrison, fucking Shakespeare and Homer too.  No less than Graham Greene, that supreme British stylist and chronicler of the 20^th century’s ills and fallacies, split his books into the categories of “novels” (The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, etc) and “entertainments” such as The Ministry of Fear and Our Man In Havana, and while I don’t make a habit of disagreeing with geniuses I defy you to differentiate which category is of more “value”.

(Granted, his “entertainments” can be seen more as spy/espionage novels than straight crime, but crime fiction is like rock and roll–it’s less about the content than it is the style, the attitude, the overall perspective, and purists be damned).

Good art in any medium is supposed to hold up a mirror to the world, to humanity, to one’s self. Crime fiction’s mirror is just of the funhouse variety; our reflections come back twisted and distorted, monstrous even, but no less real.  Crime fiction can be “literature” and vice-versa. It has power and poignancies and contains good, evil, destruction (self- and otherwise) and occasional redemption.  It can also be funny as Hell (literally?  Perhaps).

So here are some of the living writers I don’t recommend you read but urge, plead, beg you to read, to absorb, to inhale, to fucking mainline.  Good crime fiction is truth, straight up, no chaser, pedal on the floor going full tilt boogie.  Anyone who claims they don’t have the stomach (see: guts) for it might as well give up reading altogether, I’m sure you can find something more reassuring, something a little more safe to take to the beach. I say fuck that.  Let’s go Down in the Zero and dredge up some bald warts-and-all reality.

Just remember to hang on.  This kind of reckless verisimilitude doesn’t come with a trigger warning or NSFW disclaimer. it just hits you hard, fast, and with unerring bullseye accuracy.  Whether they’re shooting or swinging (and some do both), these motherfuckers aim for the head.

George Pelecanos

DC born and bred, a sharp dresser with impeccable taste in music who isn’t afraid to get down and dirty.  He shows us the DC most people never even heard of let alone know about, and he’d been doing it for years by the time it became cool to watch The Wire–which he helped write and produce.  His heroes are ex-cons, lifelong vagabounds, hustlers who sling drugs, shoes and discount electronics with coke-and-amphetamine-fueled panache, alcoholic cops, ex-cops still stuck to the Job, P.I.s with noble hearts and wandering eyes, and vets from all of America’s more recent foreign conflicts just trying to make their worlds make sense, often with disastrous results.  He makes you think about crime, violence, pain of all stripes, men and women and black and white, cops and criminals, sex and love and back again, different types of education (usually dependent on where you live and who you are), law and order and right and wrong and the difference between them, even atomic dread in the Nuclear Age in The Big Blowdown (1996).  He talks about addiction, how it hurts but also, sometimes, how it helps, and why you become addicted and to what.

Constantine, one of Shoedog’s (1994) two protagonists, lives his life according to The Beat, the rhythm of life itself you don’t hear with your ears, mental music blaring from the deep running subconscious radio station all of humanity is tuned into, and in all George’s work you can hear The Beat yourself.  His characters live (mostly) in DC, most of them are criminals, cops, and con men who drink or smoke too much, and nearly all have either way more or (more often) way less money and social standing than you or I.

Like all crime fiction it shuns the Great Middle in every regard, but really the place is Anywhere, Everywhere, and the people are you, me, and us.

Richard Price

Did I already mention The Wire?  Price wrote for it, too.  But more importantly, he wrote several novels that were basically the catalyst for that show’s entire goddammed existence.  Clockers is the holy grail of modern urban fiction, and if you watched the show I’ve already mentioned too many times you’ll surely share a knowing and slightly smug grin with me when I say that the book is truly Dickensian in all the right, best ways.

Clockers, Freedomland, and Lush Life, to name a few of his books, capture perhaps the truest vision of real people living their real lives on the front lines of America’s various (and in some cases undeclared or even unacknowledged) domestic social wars: drugs, race, class, poverty, etc.  I call Michael Connelly (who I’ll get to in Part 2) the most purely procedural writer of this bunch, and while I stick to it I have to admit Price’s cops are the realest of any on this list.  In fact, he’s way up there for writing the most realistic cops period, save for perhaps Joseph Wambaugh–who was one–and Ed McBain, who devoted the large part of his fifty-year career to writing them.

The thing about Price, though, is all his other characters are equally well-drawn.  They have ulcers, they stutter, their feet hurt after a long day.  They make mistakes, but not just the cataclysmic blunders leading to jail or death so prevalent in this world–little bullshit slips of the tongue, stumbles over the curb, dialing the wrong number.  Wearing a badge, wielding a pen mightier than absolutely nothing at all or sporting gang colors, his people are authentic enough to step off the page and join you for a beer.  Sure, inner-city gangs had been written about before, but Price was one of (if not the) first to show them as people and not stock villains, hordes of walking Iceberg Slim parodies, and he certainly does it the best.  He stares truth, actual truth, in the face and doesn’t blink.  People, and let’s face it most people, are prejudice to varying degrees; Price is interested in how these prejudices manifest themselves, and how they can either be overcome or driven deeper into the heart, where they can consume and destroy.

Price’s secret is admitting how many of these judgements turn out right as well as how many turn out wrong, and why it’s important to recognize and understand both.  Sounds a little pretentious maybe, and I’m sure Price would hate reading this, but, shit, his work helps show us how to live.

Joe R. Lansdale

His own self, the night-runner and the mojo champion.  Lansdale started out, and is still best known, as a writer of sci-fi, fantasy and horror, but he really got going (in my opinion anyway) when he brought his impeccable ear for dialogue hilarious, sacred and profane, his Twain-ian sense of local (off) color, his keen eye for detail in people and geography, his surprising morality, and his inherent grasp of the surreal aspect of reality, to crime fiction.

Southern connection aside–Joe would assert he’s from Texas, which is a totally different thing–the Hap and Leonard books are the Drive-by Truckers of the genre–dark, heavy, intelligent, literate, down-home but self-aware, sensitive, funny as all get out and just an all around badass series.  Start with Savage Season and just keep plowing ahead.  His heroes almost seem deliberately designed to subvert expectations: Hap, the narrator, is white and Leonard is black. Hap is a reformed hippie, and Leonard is a Vietnam vet. Hap is a secretly hearts-and-flowers romantic straight guy, and Leonard is a macho alpha male-type homosexual.  Plus they’re both born-and-bred Texans with thick accents and less than ideal physiques who are nonetheless genuine martial arts masters.

I’m not crazy for thinking that’s unique if not downright weird am I?

Finally, not only is neither an ex-cop (Leonard is an ex-soldier, but that doesn’t really help for investigative work), but they’re not even P.I.s. Eventually, Hap picks up part time work with a P.I. but he remains unlicensed, and it also doesn’t happen till one of the later books.

All this would seem like a cynical, sneering and possibly craven attempt on Lansdale’s part to stand out, be different, if only the characters weren’t so rich in complexity.  Hap and Leonard aren’t wealthy. They have no friends in high places. No scams to trick the system. Just each other and the few others they can trust.  Their “adventures” are more like road maps through hell…but they, and you, usually manage to find their way out as well.

Also, check out Lansdale’s newest, a stand-alone novel called The Thicket.  Think Huck Finn in Texas but way darker and more violent with less rafts and greater existential and philosophical weight, all while still being laugh-out-loud funny.  These last mostly provided by Shorty, the smartest, toughest and most appealing dwarf this side of Tyrion Lannister.  Though I love The Imp, Shorty is way more boss.

Lawrence Block

The Grand Master of the realm.  No, literally he’s a grand master of the Mystery Writers of America.  His Matthew Scudder series is right where the fuck it is at.  Everyone on this list, pretty much anyone younger than Block with even an indirect connection to this world, stands in his shadow.

Scudder is an alcoholic ex-cop, drinking his life away and occasionally solving crimes as an unlicensed P.I.  He drinks because he’s bored (he left his wife and kids when he left the force), because he enjoys it, but also to banish his demons.  Standard stuff, really, or at least it would be if it wasn’t written so well.

But then things change when he starts attending A.A.  In the hard-boiled world drinking too much is almost a requirement, but the struggle to stay sober puts the Scudder books on a higher level.  As does his ongoing relationship with Elaine, a high-end prostitute he used to visit while still married and wearing a badge.  More standard stuff, and potentially naïve or even offensive.  But Elaine has got real depth, a personality and a perspective, not to mention how, later on, she quits the lady of the night gig and uses all the money she’s widely invested over the years to open an art gallery.

Any character can start out as a cliché. Every character is one initially when you think about it, but that’s okay.  People are clichés, too. It’s only when you dig deeper that you see their individuality, and Block goes deep indeed.  The books deal with moral and ethical choices, from drinking to infidelity to murder.  Motivations for the latter (among Scudder and various other characters) come in stunning variety: self-defense, protection of others, revenge, pleasure, profit, exploitation (one book is about a terrifyingly enthusiastic and unapologetic maker of snuff films), even a moral imperative in a few cases: people who really must die.  Shaky ground to stand on, but Block never judges. He just shows you why it happens and lets you decide.

Scudder’s world is a cold and harsh one, full of damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemmas, degradation, stiff consequences, darkness, and sporadic rays of hope.  Just like ours.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the series next week. In the meantime, join our email list to receive updates.

But even the best workshop participants have their go-to comments—those suggestions we throw out when we can’t think of anything to say, or can’t find the right way to express what we think, or have just plain given up because it’s been four hours and the vending machine is out of skittles.

Here’s what those workshop comments really mean:

1. Is this ending earned?

Means: Anything from ‘I only read the ending’ to ‘I just don’t get the ending,’ but most often ‘I didn’t think about your poem or story long enough to understand how its parts come together.’

2. You should read (insert name of writer who undoubtedly influenced commenter’s life but is entirely irrelevant here).

Means: I am a tireless name-dropper.

3. What about the title?

Means: Your workshop time is almost up.

4. I’m not sure what this character wants.

Means: Either I didn’t read into the story or your character is boring.

5. I think you just need to let the story breathe some more. Put it away for a while and come back to it.

Means: What a hot mess.

6. I think you should have ended on page 12 instead of page 19; it’ll just feel more urgent.

Means: I got bored on page 12. Or I was speed-reading before workshop and only made it to page 12.

7. What’s at stake here?

Means: I think you’re the speaker of this story or poem, and I’m a little worried.

8. If it were my story/poem, I would…

Means: I’ve been thinking about my stories or poems the whole time.

9.  Should the reader have to do this much work?

Means: Either I spent more time consulting the OED than reading your poem, or I am a lazy reader.

10.  You’ve established a really great sense of place.

Means: You described a tree.

My father was conscious until the last two hours or so of his life. My understanding of how things should go, gleaned from stories I’d read and watched, was that this was my last chance to reconcile with my father, to say all those things that had gone unsaid. But my father and I had a very good relationship. I always enjoyed spending time with him. He was supportive and loving. So I had very little to say in the way of unfinished business, and I know I am very lucky in that. I told my father I didn’t regret anything about our relationship, that I loved him and would miss him terribly, but that he had done very well and we had nothing to resolve. He said that made things easier.

That took about two minutes. What then?

My family didn’t have time to prepare for this. We didn’t know how advanced the cancer was until we got to the hospital two nights before my father died. We hadn’t read any books or received any counseling. Perhaps those who have read the books and received the counseling know what to do when sitting next to a dying man. There were questions I might have asked my father. There were stories I might have asked him to tell. But if they hadn’t been important enough to ask before, they didn’t seem important enough to bring up now. I didn’t want to look at old photographs or revisit old times. I didn’t want to remind my father of his life. Maybe that was only for my sake.

My family is not actively or particularly religious. If we found comfort in scripture and clergy, perhaps we would have known how to structure our time in the hospital room. But I have no faith, no clear idea of divinity, no concept of an afterlife. Sitting next to my father, I didn’t want to talk about life because it would only remind me that he would soon be out of mine (as a person, a living being. Of course he continues in memory, and we could get metaphysical and contemplate how much of a person exists in matter and how much more of a person exists in the minds of those who know that person, if this were that kind of essay).

So a more mundane problem: what to talk about? It would be rude to sit silent next to a dying man who is awake and knows he is dying.

My father was a reader, loved books. I asked if there were any books he wanted with him, anything he wanted to hear. “I can’t think of anything,” he said. I can’t think of anything that will change this, make this easier or harder, more mysterious or more comprehensible.

Sitting by my father’s bed, holding his hand, listening to him breathing through the oxygen mask, I thought of a story I’d read earlier in the year, David Ebenbach’s “We’ll Finish When We’re Done,” originally published as an AGNI web exclusive. It’s a short short story about a barber giving a haircut. It’s narrated by the barber in a conversational—at times folksy—voice, and the narrator explains his personal business philosophy and describes a remarkable haircut he recently gave. If you haven’t read it, you should. I can wait.

I had read this story only twice before. My father had never read the story. I don’t know any other work by David Ebenbach. So why is this what I wanted to read to my dying father?

Part of it is practical. I was stuck in a hospital with limited reading material at hand, and I knew I could easily find “We’ll Finish When We’re Done” with my phone. But so could I have found any one of the millions of stories, poems, and essays in the public domain and available online. I could have read my father Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, Cervantes, Austen, Homer, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Laozi, the Dhammapada, the Quran, the Bible. In short, almost any text produced and preserved by humanity outside of the last 90 years was available to me in that room. But I chose Ebenbach’s 1,600-word story.

It helped that the story is so self-contained. I knew that I could share the whole thing with my father in only a few minutes, rather than picking and choosing passages from a longer work. The tone of the story helped, the casual first-person narrator. The story reads like a friendly chat, and I thought that bit of levity would be nice in a hospital room. It helped, too, that I knew my father hadn’t read it before. The story wouldn’t call attention to itself in that way, and I might avoid drawing too much attention to the moment. If I had read “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” for example, then I would have really been trying to say something, and it would have been the wrong something. Ebenbach’s story—so unassuming—allowed me to pretend I was just sharing something I found interesting and a little amusing.

But I did want to say something. I wanted to say something about dying and about the body and about our hope for an eternal whatever that moves past us and continues when we’re done in the flesh. And I think Ebenbach wants to say something about those things, too. He dwells on the body: the layers of hair under the barber’s scissors, the skin beneath the hair, the bone beneath the skin, the brain beneath the bone, all of it cut and shed away and lying on the floor of the barbershop. Then he shows us the soul, glowing, beautiful, and real, floating out of the barbershop and down the street, leaving the body behind. I wanted to tell my father he had a beautiful soul. That he, like the man in Ebenbach’s story, had “taken good care of the thing.” That he would be mourned and missed but stay with us. I wanted to tell him what we want to tell all the sick and dying; that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

I don’t know if Ebenbach’s story helped my father in any way. I know I felt better having shared it; having articulated, in someone else’s words, some of the things I thought needed to be said. There was real comfort in the story, for at least one of us.

Mike Anderson Campbell’s stories have been published in PANK, BULL, Eclectica, and Microchondria: 42 Short Short Stories Collected by Harvard Book Store. He lives in Boston with his wife and dog. He occasionally blogs at mandercamp.com.

It’s only natural, then, that we take advantage of this brief respite from nail-biting competition and make some very important distinctions before the knockout stage begins.

If this were the World Cup of Westeros, which house would your team belong to?

Argentina = House Baratheon

Lionel Messi is the one true King of Soccer. He also never misses an opportunity to remind us.

Costa Rica = House Targaryen

How did Costa Rica win a group with three former World Cup Champions? Dragons, clearly. Nobody can prepare for unexpected dragons. We should’ve recognized the omen when Joel Campbell impregnated himself with a soccer ball after scoring the tying goal against Uruguay.

United States = House Greyjoy

No matter how hard they try, the Americans are still outsiders in the world of soccer, gazing in at the old clubs, hoping to pick one or two off when they get the opportunity. They’re also as beat up as Theon heading into the knockout stage. And yet, American fans still have hope for this iron-strong team because they’re facing…

Belgium = House Tully

Respected? Sure. But, like House Tully, it doesn’t seem like anybody really fears this squad.

France = House Arryn

France easily dropped their group stage opponents through the Moondoor. And it doesn’t look like they’ll be seriously pushed until the quarterfinals. Just like the Knights of the Vale, who are pretty much the most formidable knights-we’ve-never-really-seen-fight in all of Westeros.

Brazil = House Lannister

It’s not just the home field advantage and generous calls from the referees. Brazil bankrupted itself on this wa — I mean tournament.

Germany = House Tyrell

Plain beautiful soccer. No matter what the circumstances, this team gets the job done by playing well together and focusing on a single purpose: domination.

Mexico = House Stark

It’s frustrating being a Stark, and, with so many (wrongly) denied goals in the group stage, the Mexican squad knows that feeling well. But the Starks are resilient, and the Mexican squad is still in it, with a shot at the glory that comes with a win over the Dutch. Or a massacre. There’s no middle ground when you’re a Stark.

Uruguay = The Thenns

Sure, The Thenns aren’t a house. But Luis Suarez — Uruguay’s star striker — and Styr pack the same thing for lunch.

Portugal = House Martell

Flashy. Cunning. Cocky. And, ultimately, dead. Plus, who wouldn’t want to see Ronaldo’s head squeezed to watermelon pulp?

Did we leave out your team? Let us know on Twitter #cupofwesteros

Dear Well-Intentioned People who Keep Telling my Family to Hedge our Bets,

Here’s the thing: Please stop.

When I showed up at college, my adviser, an English professor, informed me that I couldn’t be a Creative Writing major, alone. I had to be interdisciplinary because, obviously, being a writer would never really pay. He suggested I go into a field that looked promising at the time: computers. I told him that I had no aptitude for computers. He picked at the mustard crusted on his sweater and shrugged. I had to choose something else.

I went back to my dorm and called the chair of the department. I told him that I’d come here to be a Creative Writing major and asked why I couldn’t just get the education as promised. He said, “What? Do you want to work at McDonalds when you get out?” I told him that it wasn’t any of his business what I did upon graduation, that I’d come for an education not to become financialy stable enough to give back to the alumni fund. I was this kind of freshman.

Since the foregone conclusion was that I’d fail as a writer, I wanted to make sure that my back-up plan was even less likely to pay off. I opted for a second major in French — because I sure as hell didn’t have a chance of becoming French.

So, yes, I was told at 17 — my first weeks in college — to hedge my bets. This is what we do to kids — in high school and in college. We tell them to follow their dreams — as long as they also have an incredibly practical back-up plan.

Look, it’s fine with me if our culture wants to play it this way. Each individual parent has to figure out the kindest way to parent. And for many the kindest way is to give the advice: hedge your bets.

Dave and I aren’t doing that. We’ve never done it.

We’ve said, “Go deep.”

We’ve said, “If you lose yourself while making art, hours on end, make art.”

We tell our kids, “Work hard at what you love. Put in the hours.” Our kids know that if your passion is in one of the most competitive, maybe even brutal arts — visual, performing, literary… — they’ll need the hours of craft. (I’ll add hours in sports as well — if that’s the gift and dream.)

And you know what takes up a hell of a lot of hours?

Hedging your bets.

So, yes, when someone walks into our house — a house that has been paid for by working in one of those brutal artistic fields — and then while talking to our daughter about some of her art installations in our living room this person tells my daughter that she shouldn’t major in art because she’ll never make any money, I don’t take it well.

When people use the phrase “you want fries with that?” when talking to my son about pursuing acting and film, it strikes a nerve.

So when we’re counseled to suggest more practical, back-up plan majors to our kids — when they’re only 17 — I try to accept that it’s coming from a well-intentioned place. To be honest, I think it mostly is, but I wouldn’t rule out that it might also come from a scarred place or a culture-on-automatic-pilot place. You know what? I don’t care where it comes from…

Listen, sure, I’ll tell a struggling 32 year-old that their back-up plan might need consideration, but I’m never going to tell one of my kids to hedge their bets before they even get to the casino.

My husband Dave’s philosophy on betting on each of our kids? “All-in. That is the best bet.”

You can raise your bet-hedgers. Let us raise our own kids.

In the end, there are worse things than “you want fries with that” and that’s settling for something you don’t love before you’ve even given the thing you do love a fighting chance.

Meanwhile, no more. Back off. Kindly shut up.

Sincerely,

Us

Julianna Baggott is the author of twenty books, published under her own name as well as Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode, most notably The Pure Trilogy, and, forthcoming Harriet Wolf’s 7th Book of Wonders. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Best American Poetry, and NPR’s All Things Considered, Here & Now, and Talk of the Nation. For more, visit her at juliannabaggott.com.

Start reading The Pure Trilogy:

Get the Book

We can confidently say: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

Copywriters Without Borders needs someone who doesn’t just write copy, but who can masterfully write a retargeting ad for a smoked-glass pendant lamp so that every Pinterest-loving blogger sees it in their Facebook news feed with such unrelenting frequency that they buy it, then blog about how easy it was to install. You just madeDIY kitchen remodels all over the United States that much easier, and this kind of creative ingenuity is what we need to solve copywriting crises in communities ravaged by natural disasters worldwide.

Nor is it about the horrific events that occurred last week, nor the fear I have for a culture, our own, which not only struggles in the aftermath of violence toward women but sometimes seems to openly foster such violence.

This is about the uproar I’ve watched unfold across the internet this week in response to Seth Abramson’s “The Last Words of Elliot Rodger Remixed into Poetry,” a poem that word-for-word employs and rearranges— yes, remixes— the language of Elliot Rodger’s video, and which has received scorn, it seems, from almost everywhere. This is about the hazardous trend in contemporary poetry toward impulsive responses, reactions grounded in the pretense of leftism that in fact funnel themselves into a quite conservative position in regard to art and culture.

In an article on Flavorwire, Jason Diamond twice refers to Abramson’s poem as “bad poetry,” without engaging on any kind of aesthetic or literary level the reasons— and such reasons exist— the poem should be called “bad.” Likewise, Facebook and Twitter have reverberated this week— at least if my own feeds are any indication—with poets denouncing Abramson’s poem as “offensive” without commentary on how and why it is so. This is an irresponsible treatment of art. This is what happens when the careful attention a poem demands is replaced by hashtags, and when social commitment and meaningful engagement gives way to lazy, knee-jerk internet responses. More than Abramson’s poem itself, the large-scale and hasty reaction to the poem—without significant, intelligent engagement with what is wrong with it, and more importantly without a discussion of how we can successfully engage with tragedy—makes me fearful that poetry will cease to engage with tragedy at all. 

One word that has appeared over and over in the reaction to Abramson’s poem is “misogynist,” but, like with Diamond’s labeling of the poem as “bad poetry,” I’ve yet to read someone explain how his poem is misogynistic. The quick pasting-on of labels—calling poems or, more disturbingly, poets misogynist or racist or sexist or classist—without an intellectual discussion of these categories points to a growing problem in the poetry world today: the embracing of quick, politically correct public statements and the dismissal of art that takes risks and that challenges the canon of what we deem acceptable to write about. There’s no question that a vigorous conversation needs to happen about Abramson’s poem, but we need to be careful that views couching themselves as leftism or feminism don’t eerily plummet into a conservative, censorious realm. This kind of conversation serves no one. If what Abramson wrote isn’t successful—which I’d love to read a careful discussion of why it isn’t—then let’s talk about how it could be.

Somewhat ironically, the hurried response to Abramson’s poem ended up resembling the kind of publicity grabbing of which Abramson himself has been accused. No doubt Flavorwire and poets posting various online denunciations have benefited from the controversy surrounding “The Last Words….” But I’ve yet to see these poets or Flavorwire—which interestingly tagged Diamond’s post as “upworthy”—called out for performing the same rash response. And since when did the important discussion of art revolve around its impetus? When all that is left is the poem, or the painting, or the sculpture, aren’t we meant to engage meaningfully with what is left—with the art in itself?

The concern with the timing of Abramson’s poem has turned toward a discussion—if one could call it that—of who is and is not in a position to respond publicly to tragedy, of who has been given—or who has taken—the authority to do so. This is no small concern. But, upon reading urgings for Abramson to “sit down and listen” I began to feel a bit queasy. Would a woman be condemned, as Abramson was, to sit in silence in the face of tragedy? Might not our censorship of art based upon demographics be just as irresponsible as the art our censorship condemns?

Yet it’s not only demographics that lie behind the condemnation of Abramson, but also, I think, the reputation of Abramson himself. I don’t know Seth Abramson, but I do know, in my limited interactions with the poetry world, that he’s someone people love to hate. I’m willing to accept, as a poet and as a woman, a denunciation of “The Last Words…” that comes from our deep care for language and for poetry, but I’m not willing to accept a critique of the poem based on resentment toward the poet himself.

Omnidawn Publishing’s decision to discontinue their publication of another, unrelated artistic project led by Abramson—a project that champions the work of other writers, not his own—is a disturbing repercussion for a risk that could be seen as bad taste, and one I can’t help but see stemming from fear of the public eye, of how others view Abramson (*correction). It’s deeply troubling that so many writers have lauded Omnidawn’s action, that they’ve chosen to condemn a fellow writer for taking an artistic risk, particularly given Omnidawn’s failure to explain why and how Abramson’s poem is problematic. We need risk-taking, potentially upsetting figures like Seth Abramson, just as we need Patricia Lockwood and Tony Hoagland and Michael Robbins.

I’ve always believed that poets are the caretakers of language. But that doesn’t mean we should make language precious. In fact, that’s the worst thing we can do. If we are indeed caretakers, I hope we are so in the sense of tearing walls down, not bolstering them; protecting certain subjects and language does poetry a disservice. If, though, we must say there are taboo subjects and stances in poetry, why not take them as an opportunity to say something important about art, instead of engaging in reckless internet slander? It’s easy to say what poetry can’t do, but what about opening up the conversation to how poetry can accomplish these difficult maneuvers?

I’ve been disheartened this week by the discussion of who has license to respond to tragedy, in what capacity, and when. As writers, we will always be using the language of murderers. As writers, we will always be attempting to use it in the service of art, and, inevitably, at times, failing. In the wake of that failure, great art is born. Gregory Orr has said that he believes in poetry “as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.” Let’s stop ridiculing someone who is attempting this kind of survival. Let’s be good caretakers of language, and foster it, not stifle it. Let’s be democratic as an audience, not in taste, but in compassion for our fellow artists, artists who are taking risks, as I hope the rest of us are doing as well. Let’s have conversations, instead of hashtags, about what art can do.

Because art can do anything.

*Correction: Omnidawn’s decision to cease publishing the anthology preceded these events by a few months. Nevertheless, Omnidawn’s decision to publicly denounce a writer with whom they worked closely, and to imply, in a rather misleading statement, that they were dropping Abramson because of his poem strikes the author as itself problematic.

But suffice it to say that Upworthy’s headlines do have emotional appeal and do excel at leveraging what’s called the curiosity gap. You encounter a mysterious phrase. You want to find out what it means. You have to click on a link or watch a video to find out.

If you haven’t seen one, they read like this:

This Is What Happens When Parents Love Their Children Unconditionally

or

The Wildest Thing About This Job is Not Even How Disgusting It Is

In good fun, we wondered what would happen if you applied the same tactics to short stories. What we ended up with was a pretty fun lit quiz.

See if you can guess the famous short story below from its fake Upworthy headline.

1. This Man Decided to Jump in His Pool. You’ll Never Guess Where He Ends Up.

2. These Hospital Workers Accomplish More During a Few Hours Off Than Most People Do in a Lifetime.

3. This Man Can’t Even See But The Wisdom He Holds Will Blow Your Mind.

4.  No One Gave These Girls a Chance. You Won’t Believe What Happens When They Grow Up.

5. This Man’s About to Die and His Last Thought Will Make You Cry.

6. This One Town’s Strange Ritual Will Make You Sick to Your Stomach.

7. The Reason This Boy Refuses To Go Back to Class Will Teach You Something About Religion.

8. We Bet You Had No Idea By Looking At These Guys What They Were Really Up To on Their Trips.

9. This is What Happens When You Aren’t Honest With Your Family While You Still Have the Chance.

10. It’s So Simple Everyone Will Be Wanting to Do This Soon.

How’d You Do? Share Your Score:

I ran into a friend this morning at the grocery store. He’s graduating this year—a year behind me, I finished my MFA last May—and was recently accepted into a PhD program.

That’s a great program, I said. Congratulations!

He didn’t seem excited about it. He said he didn’t have any other choice, considering he hadn’t yet finished his novel. It’s the way I hear many graduate students talk, as if the publication of their novel (or even the mere completion of it) will lead to life as a full-time writer. No more worries, at least not for a long while.

At the Michener Center, we have seen recent graduates publish to great acclaim. We flip through magazines and see their faces, remembering those same faces from workshop. While we know how difficult writing is, and how much time and energy is involved, these people have made it look easy. Or at least doable. And they have given us a skewed perspective on what we might expect.

Because I also published a book, some of them look to me as a writer who has “made it,” a novel out with a major publisher, some good reviews, including a starred one in Publishers Weekly, for which—don’t misunderstand—I am grateful. But it doesn’t mean that my life has changed all that much. Mostly I just feel like shit for living off my advance and watching my account dwindle while I watch The 4400 on Netflix. (I have a job lined up teaching for the fall. I don’t really plan on watching Netflix full-time for forever.)

My point is this: the publication of your novel is probably not going to change your life. It may lead to other positive things: a visiting writer’s gig, some fan letters, perhaps even a big grant (I’m not speaking from experience in regards to the big grant), but it’s not going to mean that you are set, by any means, or that work can cease or even take a hiatus. Perhaps I’m feeling more sensitive than usual because I haven’t been writing much, or I’ve been writing sporadically and working on a dozen different things while knowing that nothing that I’m working on is going to lead to my next book.

And that’s what it has to be about, the next book.

When writer friends send me congratulations, more than a few of them have asked, “When’s the next one coming out?” I’m sure this is an innocent question, but it’s an awful one when you’re spending your time watching TV and feeling like maybe you aren’t really a writer after all. Perhaps you’ll never publish anything again. Perhaps you’ll even have to move back in with your parents and everyone will talk about the promise you once had. These are unlikely scenarios, really, but maybe not all that rare post-publication. At least I’d like to think I’m not alone.

What’s the point of all this? I don’t mean to say that publishing a novel isn’t awesome. It is. In so many ways. But it disheartens me to see my friends talk as though it will solve all of their problems and alter their lives completely when I know it won’t. Or perhaps this is part of the required delusion in order to accomplish their goal? I don’t know. If that’s the case, maybe we could all use a little more delusion. I know I could right now.

Did this resonate with you? Share it.