A Book Trailer: The Graffiti Sculptor

The following book trailer was put together using Microsoft's Movie Maker and a handful of black and white photos from photographer Richard Vanek (www.piskoftak.com) and a few others that I purchased from iStockPhotos.com.

Motherless Brooklyn: A Book Revieww

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem was written for readers who like quirky, twitching, barking characters, and geez, who doesn’t. The hero of the story, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette’s and it’s this unnerving disorder that turns an average detective novel into an indisputably unique literary achievement.

Half the fun is waiting to hear what comes out of Lionel’s Tourettic brain. The other half is watching what Lethem does with his manic wit and admirable writing skills.

The Year of Magical Thinking: A Book Review

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion won the National Book Award in 2005 and was subsequently made in to a play starring Vanessa Redgrave. The story chronicles a year following the death of Didion’s husband, novelist, John Gregory Dunne, and the same year in which her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, battles a life threatening illness.

In many ways it’s a dreamy book. Didion knows her husband is dead, but that doesn’t stop her from waiting patiently for him to magically reappear. If this sounds a little whacky, it is. And it isn’t.

If you’re up for a good memoir, read the book. You’ll be glad you did.

The Tipping Point: A Book Review

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a nonfiction book about how small things can have big effects. It sounds boring. It’s not. On the contrary, it’s one of the most engaging books I’ve read in the last year, and deserving of the $1 million advance Gladwell earned for 280-pages of superstar prose.

Think of it as a really cool study of where buzz comes from and how it can be harnessed to commercial interests. Gladwell writes for the New Yorker, so it’s no wonder Tipping is so beautifully written. Because of the books success, and the follow up, Blink and more recently Outliers, this fuzzy-haired nerd gets a whopping $40,000 a lecture on the speaking circuit.

The Ultimate Memoir Writing Strategy

As you probably know, I've been writing for the past fifteen years. It took me awhile, but I cracked the code on writing memoirs and discovered how the majority of successful people leave their legacy. Do you want to know their secret? Pull your chair up a little closer, because this is powerful medicine.

All right, they basically do three things. Here it is:

1. They choose the Right Ghostwriter
2. They adopt the Right Mindset
3. They implement the Right Methodology

I know, it's deceptively simple—but that's the beauty of it. Let's go through it together…

First, successful people choose the right ghostwriter. They realize they can drastically reduce the learning curve by emulating and learning from someone they admire.

John F. Kennedy used a ghost writer for his memoir “Profiles in Courage,”
Hillary Clinton for “It Takes a Village,”
Alan Greenspan for "The Age of Turbulence,"
Ivana Trump for “For Love Alone,”
Alfred P. Sloan for “My Years with GM,”
Betty Davis for “The Lonely Life,”

and...

Ronald Reagan for "An American Life,"
Clay Aiken for "Learning to Sing,"
Pamela Anderson for "Above the Waist,"
Rush Limbaugh for "The Way Things Ought to Be"
Geraldo Rivera for "Exposing Myself," and
Naomi Campbell for "Swan."

I could go on...

These respected and highly intelligent people benefited from the honest criticism and insightful advice of a professional ghost writer. They watched, learned, listened, and…were transformed by this powerful influence.

Next, successful people adopt the right mindset. They move beyond limiting beliefs; they defeat the inner voice of criticism and nagging self-doubt. They develop a mental blueprint of the life they want to set to words, then sit down and do it.

Finally, successful people implement the right methodology. They don't try to reinvent the wheel. They simply look for a successful ghost writer and use the writer as a roadmap to their dreams. Sure they tweak and customize the story to fit their voice and personality—but, they get a tremendous leg up on success by plugging into the core competencies of an established ghost writer.

Freakonomics - A Book Review

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is about applying economics in luridly unorthodox ways. Levitt, the economist, Harvard undergrad, MIT PhD, and brainiac of this writing team, claims that economics is appallingly short of interesting questions. Levitt supplies those questions.

For instance, he asks: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live at home? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? I could go on. Read the book and find answers to questions you never thought to ask.

Boomer Lit: The Literature of Self Assessment

Boomer lit is fiction aimed at readers, women mostly, in their 40s, 50s, and 60's. The stories revolve around conflicts that affect Boomers—aging parents, career woes, retirement, health issues, where-the-hell-did-my-life-go, and good old-fashioned loneliness. The best of boomer lit involves a strong dose of self-assessment.

Recent boomer lit titles include The Botox Diaries, by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger, A New Lu by Laura Castoro, Younger by Pamela Redmond Satran, One Little Secret by Allison Bottke, and The Hot Flash Club by Nancy Thayer. Some critics have called the genre chick lit for the AARP crowd. Thayer's spirited novel, for example, is about a chance meeting at a cocktail party that brings four Boston-area women in their 50s and 60s together and who later agree to bond for life.

But (and this is a big but), boomer lit doesn't have to be 300-page women's support group. Boomer lit doesn't have to be about feminine bonding, getting the guy, makeovers, suburban shopping sprees, or other humorous feminine theatrics. In other words, boomer lit doesn't have to be shallow. The best boomer lit is about the human condition—human emotions, values and beliefs. It's about the search for meaning. The same search for meaning that literary fiction has been struggling with for decades.

Pete Dexter's latest novel Train is a good example. (Note, once this article hits the Web, I'll be on the lookout for Dexter to sneak up behind me and try to slit my throat for referring to Train as anything but literary fiction.) Pete Dexter sets this piece of fiction noir in a Los Angeles of the 1950s. A superb novel, it brings together a black caddy, a police detective, and Norah Still, the only survivor of a bloody boat hijacking. National Book Award winner, Pete Dexter's book is about pain and loss: the men and women who deliver the blows and how these characters carry on.

If you could simplify any great boomer lit novel to a single theme or controlling idea, it's this: self assessment. Boomer lit is the mature version of the coming of age novel. It's about taking a good hard look at your life, sifting through the hay stack of forty years of “issues” and “opportunities” (Boomer code words for screw-ups and bigger screw ups), and deciding where to go from here.

In Pete Dexter's Train, these issues are irreversible. Norah Still, one of the novel's most compelling characters, tries to rebuild her life after an attempted boat hijacking in which her husband is murdered and she is raped. Dexter is rarely politically correct and always unafraid to find pettiness in the lives of his characters. He is no less unsympathetic of Norah. Yet in Norah Still, we find a mature character we genuinely care for, troubles and all. At the same time, we recognize that there are no easy answers. Train is boomer lit at its best.

Novels by Pete Dexter:

• God's Pocket (1984)
• Deadwood (1986)
• Paris Trout (1988) (1988 National Book Award for Fiction)
• Brotherly Love (1991)
• The Paperboy (1995) (1996 Literary Award, PEN Center USA )
• Train (2003)

On the Firing Line - A Book Review

On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple by Gil Amelio and William L. Simon is about Amelio’s short-lived tenure as CEO of Apple Computer beginning in 1996. For a business book, it doesn’t get better than this—289 pages of drama, deceit, scandal, and sorrow. By the end of the story, I was sad to see Amelio go.

Amelio comes across as a straight shooter. He tells readers the embarrassing truth: when he took over at Apple, the place was a saw buzz of bad luck. Company execs were committed to nonsensical marketing strategies, ill-advised price wars, faulty products, and led by a board of directors in chaos. Oh, did I mention the place was pennies from insolvency.

Imagine you’re the kind of person who sees clearly what’s in front of him. What you see (but no one else sees) is a company with annual revenues of $9.8 billion losing money faster than you can say: This can’t be happening. Imagine you’re Gil Amelio and no one listens to you. Worse, they think you’ve come unstitched.

The bitter turning point occurs when Steve Jobs (Apple’s founder), slinks back to the company with all the class of a convenience-story stickup. On day 499, Jobs stabs Amelio in the back and takes his place as CEO. Keep in mind, this is a business book, folks. So go on, treat yourself to the best business biography of the last decade.

A Book Writing Guide for Professional Speakers – Tip #8, The Principle of Antagonism

How do you get readers to engage with your story or idea? The answer lies in how fully you outline your antagonist. Your book can only be as interesting and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make it. By antagonist, I’m not talking Darth Vader or Lex Luthor. I am talking about boosting the antagonistic forces within your story to the point that a reader feels a need to change.

Readers never do any more than they have to, expend any energy they don’t have to, take any risks they don’t have to. If you want readers to take action (to buy your products and services, create new habits, or just read your book and recommend it to others), you have to give them a compelling reason to do so.

Antagonism is Everything

Seth Godin, in his 1999 nonfiction bestseller Permission Marketing, does an outstanding job of introducing his antagonist early in the book. On page 25, he gives it a name—"Interruption Marketing."

Interruption Marketing is the traditional approach to getting consumer attention. It includes junk mail, spam, the flashy ads in People magazine, tacky billboards, all television commercials, and mass advertising in general. As consumers, we do our best to ignore these nagging intrusions, so marketers do all they can to interrupt us with bigger and dumber and trashier advertising messages. This old school approach to marketing is wasteful, time-consuming, and in many ways insulting. So now we know the bad guy—Interruption Marketing and interruption marketers.

Seth Godin’s good guy, on the other hand, is the primary focus of his book, Permission Marketing. Permission Marketing offers consumers an opportunity to volunteer to be marketed to. By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message. This new approach encourages consumers to participate in a long-term marketing campaign in which they are rewarded in some way for paying attention.

The More Memorable the Antagonist, the More Memorable the Book

The principle of antagonism gives your readers someone or something to hate. That someone or something is the antagonist, and it’s a critical part of your book whether you’re writing about marketing, business process improvement, life balance, or any other area of expertise.

The more powerful and complex the forces of antagonism opposing your idea, the more compelling your solution becomes. Without a thorough understanding of the intellectual, emotional, social, and financial conflicts inherent in traditional marketing, Seth Godin’s notion of Permission Marketing is nothing but a catchy slogan. However, by giving us some background and showing us just how infuriatingly annoying mass advertising can be, Godin has created a solution (Permission Marketing) that not only sounds feasible but is long overdue.

Before You Begin Writing That Next Book

A book is both a product to sell and a tool to help express your ideas. A well-written book can help launch your professional speaking career to the next level. However, before you get started, decide on the bad guy in your story. Don’t pick a weakling. Choose a story antagonist with the willpower to wreak havoc on your reader’s world if nothing is done to stop it. Ensure that your story contains negative forces of such power your solution must be implemented to gain the upper hand. Do that, and you’ll likely create some buzz. Do that, and you’ll most certainly keep readers reading.

A Book List for Non-Readers

Steve Jobs says Americans have stopped reading. “Forty percent of people in the U.S. read one book or less last year," says Jobs. In that vein, this post is for non-readers. What follows is a list of the best books on the planet. That’s it. Just the list. No commentary. No explanation. No proof whatsoever.

I can hear you non-readers groaning from here. What’s the point of a list of books (no matter how great the books) if you don't intend to read any of them? It's a fair question. Look, I’ll bet you can name several countries in central Europe (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.), but you’ve never been to any of them. I’ll bet you know the tallest mountain in the world (Mt. Everest), but you haven’t been within a rocket launch of the place. Hell, I’ll bet you can name the capital of South Dakota (Pierre).

My point is that knowing these things makes you infuriatingly clever, ridiculously self-aware, and a real joy to be around—even if the information is savagely useless. Memorize the authors and book titles on my list and you can add "mighty damn literary" to your list of virtues.

Not to mention that great books have uses other than reading them. Doorstops. Eye-catching knick-knacks. You get the picture. Okay, so here’s my list of all-time best doorstops. And don’t bother to read them. Really. It would take you months anyway. So forget it. Even if you did, no one would believe you.

Best Books on the Planet

Without further ado, here is my list of best books anywhere.

Best Edgy Fiction: Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Best New Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Best Norwegian Novel: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Best Coming of Age Novel: Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks
Best Career Advice Book: The Dip by Seth Godin

Best First Person Novel: Independence Day by Richard Ford
Best Brazen Voice: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Best Literary Thriller: The Havana Room by Colin Harrison
Best Idea Book: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Best Tokyo Fiction: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Best Niger River Novel: Water Music by T.C. Boyle
Best South Africa Novel: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Best Crime Novel: Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
Best Literary Crime Novel: Train by Pete Dexter
Best Money Book: Millionaire Next Door by T. Stanley

Best First Novel: The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta
Best Mystery: Silent Joe by T. Jefferson Parker
Best Dialog Novel: Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Best Opening: Suspect by Michael Robotham
Best Travelogue: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Best Funeral Novel: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
Best Mt. Everest Tale: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Best Paul Auster Novel: Oracle Night
Best Cop Drama: The Hangman’s Song by John Sandford
Best Short Story: Towel Season by Ron Carlson

Best Appalachia: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Best Book on Writing: How to Write by Richard Rhodes
Best Katrina Tale: Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
Best Explorer Book: Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz
Best Screenplay Primer: Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

Best Memoir: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Best Story Collection: The Whore's Child by Richard Russo
Best Bicycle Novel: Going to the Sun by James McManus
Best Teen Angst Novel: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Best Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - A 15-Second Book Review

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father and son. And survival. The father pushes himself and the boy to the edge of death to reach their destination. Where that destination is no one knows. Not even the father. The brilliance of this novel is the things that never get said. McCarthy isn’t a writer to fill in any holes for readers. You have to bring a little imagination with you, but if you do, then this spare and touching novel will brighten your day, probably your month. Hell, it’s one of the best books of the year. There, I said it.

The Dip by Seth Godin - A 15-Second Book Review

The Dip by marketing guru Seth Godin is a little nonfiction book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick. Frankly, it’s a book that sounded boring and turns out to be inspiring. Godin’s hook is that you can get farther in your career, faster, with less pain if you did a little more quitting. It’s a good hook because it appeals to readers. Hell, we all know how to quit.

Godin also suggests that each of us try to be the best in world at whatever it is we do. The book isn’t directly about being the best, it’s about seeing our life-paths as curves and when we hit that curve he calls The Dip, knowing when to keep slogging forward or when to quit. (You MUST quit when you know you're on a dead end path.) Buy the book. It’s all of 80 pages, and I dare you, (no I double dare you), to quit reading before you reach the end.

How to Write a Book: Tip #4, The Inciting Incident

The nonfiction bestseller Blink by Malcolm Gladwell opens with curators at the J. Paul Getty Museum being scammed for $10 million while purchasing a sixteenth century BC sculpture, known as a kouros. The Tin Roof Blowdown, a novel by James Lee Burke, opens with a priest standing on a roof of a shack in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, trying to save the people trapped in the attic, as the full force of Hurricane Katrina bears down on him. Both books begin with a dramatic opening, or what screenwriters call the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is the first major incident in the telling. It’s the cause of all that follows, and if you want your readers to keep reading it’s critical that you begin with a single extraordinary event. Typically an event that happens to your protagonist or is caused by the protagonist. I’m not talking about contrived action scenes or overexagerated promises. I am talking about beginning your book with a story, anecdote, or event that upsets the balance of forces within your story.

In the Blink of an Eye

Malcolm Gladwell’s subtitle to Blink is The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. By opening with a $10 million art scam, rather than explaining exactly what he means by thinking without thinking, we follow the story of Federico Zeri, an art historian and a member of Getty’s board of trustees. Zeri finds himself staring at the statue's fingernails. Though a dozen experts had signed off on the kouros—geologists had taken core samples of the statue and analyzed the marble under an electron microscope, electron microbe, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, etc.—according to Zeri, something didn’t look right.

Then we meet Evelyn Harrison, an expert on Greek sculpture, who knew the statue was a fake the moment she saw it. In a way, Blink is about why our hunches usually turn out to be true. Malcolm Gladwell might be the master of show don’t tell. He doesn’t begin his book by telling us how bright he is. He doesn’t wow us with facts. He doesn’t try to convince us he’s right. What he does is tell us a story. A story about high-powered people being duped—experts with PhDs, and museum curators blinded by fame, and harebrained lawyers. In other words, he tells us a story we can’t put down.

Excite Me, and Do It Fast

We’ve come to expect an exciting opening from mystery and suspense novels like James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown. Burke starts by putting us smack in the middle of Hurricane Katrina. A storm, as Burke describes it, “…with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima and peeled the face off southern Louisiana.” It’s only after we’ve been sucked into the book that he concentrates more intensely on his characters’ inner lives than on the havoc around them.

Whether you write nonfiction or fiction, it’s important that you create an inciting incident that throws your characters out of balance in a way that arouses in your readers, and your characters, the desire to restore that balance. Do that, and you’ve got your readers just where you want them. Reading.

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Latham Shinder is author of The Graffiti Sculptor and founder of Shinder Consulting, a network of professionals who provide ghostwriting and editing for organizations and individuals.

www.memoirghostwriter.com

Become an Author Without Writing a Word: Use a Ghostwriter

So you want to be an author but don’t want to write? I’m here to say you don’t have to. Stop worrying about what to say and find a ghostwriter to say it for you (and probably better). With that out of the way, your challenge is to find a good freelance writer to produce your books and articles for you.

It’s important to keep in mind there are many types of writing, and each writer has special skills. Writing categories include novels, how-to, self-help, biography, news, general informational, copy writing, poems, technical, medical, special reports, sports writing and others.

As a ghostwriter and book editor myself, I typically work with national speakers, trainers, and consultants writing books for back-of-the-room sales. My specialty is what I think of as “personal experience/lessons learned” books. These are books with a personal narrative—a boy growing up in a depressed area of Chicago, several generations of doctors struggling with an increasingly profit-conscious health care industry, a executive recruiter who makes good—and blend these personal stories with the lessons learned along the way and how a reader may apply those lessons.

Finding a Ghostwriter or Freelance Writer

To find a ghostwriter or freelance writer, research a handful of good freelancing Web sites—Elance and Guru.com are two of the best. These sites allow you to post your writing requirements and your budget and invite professional freelance writers to bid on your project.

These sites encourage competition. They are typically flooded with talent but scarce on jobs, which is good for you. When a good gig gets posted, it's mobbed with bids. Twenty to fifty people may bid on each project, and everybody low-balls just to get the job.

It’s critical that the freelance writer you choose can produce the type of content you need. Make sure you choose a writer who offers one or more writing clips of the type of book or article you’re looking for. If you need a copywriter, don’t hire the writer who sent you a clip of a cool sports story. He or she may be an outstanding sports writer, but copy writing is about selling. How-to writing is about educating. Novel writing is about entertaining. You get the idea.

Pay What You Can Afford, If Not a Little More

The more you can pay, the more bids you’ll get from quality writers. These higher priced writers can entertain while they inform readers. If you need a ghostwriter to create content for your Web site, this type of edgy, insightful writing will help surfers keep coming back. If $50 for a 500-word Web article sounds like a deal, it’s not. Internet readers are savvy and they hate sloppy writing. They’ll read the headline and a sentence or two and click to another article or Web page.

Top-tier writers are more likely to charge a $1 a word for Web content, and in my experience, they’re worth it. Look, this article or book we’re talking about is going to have your name on the cover. Focus on quality first and plan to make up for any upfront costs on the back end when you sell your book or other products. Hard advice to swallow, I know, but good advice, nonetheless.

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Latham Shinder is author of The Graffiti Sculptor and founder of Shinder Consulting, a network of professionals who provide ghostwriting and editing for organizations and individuals.

www.lathamshinder.com

The Graffiti Sculptor - Book Trailer

The following book trailer was put together using Microsoft's Movie Maker and a handful of black and white photos from photographer Richard Vanek (www.piskoftak.com) and a few others that I purchased from iStockPhotos.com.

It Turns Out

The Graffiti Sculptor - Novel Excerpt #2

It turns out the house is easy to find if you’re a jungle commuter or a mountain climber, but for a city girl like me it’s not so easy. From Preston, where the bus drops me and a shaggy-haired college type who I hope isn’t following me, I hike Beverly to Drexler and go left, in the dark and all uphill, clear to Mockingbird and back down again, and finally find it tucked in behind some trees away from the road on Stratford. No mailbox I can see, and I interpolate the address from the houses on each side, also without mailboxes.

The drive is faux-earth and must have cost a fortune to get the feel of a real dirt drive. I lumber up the path toward the house and now that I’m here, I feel stupid. I came because I was mad, but now I’m more wired than angry. For the briefest moment, I consider stalking into the first all-night Baskin-Robbins I can find, where I’ll demand a fat scoop of Rocky Road from a narrow-eyed Pakistani with marginal verbal skills and call it a night.

The house is one of those semi-rustic, mini-mansions Dallasites are so fond of. Designed to look exploded or deconstructed or just plain queer for the sake of queerness. None of the lights are on in what I take to be the back of the house, which faces the street.

I sneak around to the front and see a light at the far end of a curved wall. Skulking to the window, I display all the grace of an earthmover and bang my shin on a garden gnome, a fat little guy with a red pointy hat. The window is high, so I pile some bricks from the flowerbed into a step. I peek inside a bedroom and see Billie Fatso herself and Mr. Fatso having an argument. Billie’s seated on the edge of the bed dressed in a puke-green sweat-suit top and panties, her fleshy legs squishing out in all directions, her eyes on the wall of mirrors, shouting and pointing at Mister’s reflection. He’s still in a pressed dark suit, his tie not quite long enough to cover the hump of his belly.

Buy The Graffiti Sculptor Now!

First of All

The Graffiti Sculptor - Novel Excerpt #1

First of all, Billie Hannah’s a professional critic, which ranks her up there with serial killers and dead baby eaters. And what’s with the two first names? The woman is a cow with bad teeth and body odor, and if there’s a god, she’s suffering from an itchy yeast infection as I sit here on the bus reading her column. She uses words like maladroit, clumsy, off the mark, and tells her readers my work is as cuddly as the latest round of anti-abortion propaganda. She can offer only two words for the gallery-goer. Don’t go.

If I had it in me, I’d kill her.

The bus is filled with a handful of losers from my part of town heading north on Oak Lawn, zigzagging our way up to Hannah’s hamlet in Highland Park. I’ve no idea what I’ll do when I get there. I’d briefly thought of stuffing her critique, pages C2 and the continuation on C18, down her throat; but she’s a goddamn elephant, as I said, and I might get trampled in the process.

I’ve got on your standard breaking-and-entering getup: black leotard body suit with matching black leather jacket that comes to my belly button. Black bra. Likewise the panties. I carry a black shoulder pack that never leaves my side. My watch says one a.m. If I get caught, I can always say I’m heading to a late-night aerobics class.

Stoner

“She brought the coffee, in delicate white china cups, on a black lacquered tray, which she set on the table before the couch. They sipped the coffee and talked strainedly for a few moments. Then Stoner spoke of the part of the manuscript he had read, and the excitement he had felt earlier, in the library, came over him; he leaned forward, speaking intensely.”—from Stoner, by John Williams (NYRB)

The first two sentences in this passage (from a 1965 novel long out of print, and just reissued) enhance the sense of unease between the characters—especially the first sentence, chopped as it is into four distinct phrases, each of about equal weight. The vivid detail of the delicate white china and the black lacquer draw attention to each separate description, emphasizing the stiltedness. The second sentence flows smoothly but contains the wonderfully effortful word strainedly. The structure of the last two sentences suggests the characters’ connection and the beginnings of some complications they then experience. As Stoner’s excitement builds, his actions are linked with a semicolon rather than cut apart with a period. Here are participles—speaking and hiding—rather than the simple past tense of these verbs, which, to remain consistent with the overall style, would have had to be set apart with an and (“he leaned forward and spoke intensely”). There is a suggestion here of forces beyond the characters’ control: Stoner doesn’t get excited; the excitement “came over him.” And the two don’t just talk; they are “able to talk—a reminder that something had to be overcome first. Williams, whose writing style is strikingly plain, finally employs a rare and lovely metaphor—“hiding themselves under the cover of their discourse”—precisely when it’s most necessary: to communicate a sensation that might shrivel in the light of straightforward expression.

Christina Schwarz

Christina Schwarz is the author of the novels Drowning Ruth and All Is Vanity.