We are thrilled to announce that the author Kelly Link will be the special guest who will talk to author Carribean Fragoza about her short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, the December California Book Club selection. Link’s stories have consonances with Fragoza’s, although they are set in a different subculture of the United States.
The historian and literary critic Tzvetan Todorov defined the fantastic as a literary genre precariously flying somewhere between the uncanny and the marvelous. He located in that genre a psychological hesitation about whether a supernatural event had an explanation, as it does in the literature of the uncanny, or whether it was simply accepted without comment by characters, as it would be in the marvelous. Today’s mainstream fantasy novels and stories often fall within the marvelous genre. In a literary-fiction world that too often discounts girls and young women as serious protagonists, and also tends to undervalue the marvelous, both Link and Fragoza stand as bold and brilliant feminist scribes. Both write stories that contend, at times, with youthfulness and magic, loosely defined.
Link has authored many genre-bending, zany, and beloved short story collections: Stranger Things Happen; Magic for Beginners; Pretty Monsters; Get in Trouble, a Pulitzer finalist; and this year’s White Cat, Black Dog, a Kirkus Prize finalist. In her stories, contemporary, sometimes comically placed touchstones like Moon Pies, Risk, and YouTube are as much a part of the reader’s experience as zombies, fairy tales, and epic quests are. Link was ahead of the curve in mixing fiction categories that marketing teams considered to be distinct. Her earliest, surprising collections center on youthful characters, while the latest moves toward age and death but still eyes those themes through the lens of magic and fairy tales. These are stories about faerie handbags, proliferating real and stone rabbits in the moonlight readying for a war, a Land of Oz theme park with a disappearing yellow-brick road, and haunted cabins with mysterious visitors and peculiar house-sitting needs.
February will see the publication of Link’s much-anticipated first novel, The Book of Love. In it, three dead high schoolers who disappeared from their town find themselves back in their old classroom, where their teacher assigns them magical tasks.
Link was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and a grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the cofounder of Small Beer Press, which is more than two decades old, with her husband, Gavin J. Grant. They also coedit the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and have coedited many anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. While Link’s work always involves fantasy and fabulism, Fragoza’s stories, as you’ve seen, teeter back and forth between the marvelous and the real. Even the more realistic stories, however, like “Lumberjack Mom” and “Sábado Gigante,” have the dreamy, ancient, loopy intensity of fables.
This is bound to be a fascinating conversation about Fragoza’s collection and tapping into streams of the unreal as well as the off-kilter real. Once you’re finished with Fragoza’s darkly beautiful, unnerving collection, consider Link’s exuberant stories or preorder her novel.
Join us on December 21 at 5 p.m., when Fragoza will appear with Link and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
BETWEEN HERE AND THERE
Author Gabino Iglesias (The Devil Takes You Home) considers the different facets of Fragoza’s short story collection. —Alta
POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATION
Alta Journal contributor Rasheeda Saka reviews Anthony Veasna So’s Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes, which, Saka writes, affirms the meaning of legacy and art-making. —Alta
BOOKSTORES OF THE WEST
Remember to check out Alta’s bookstore guide, which the New York Times calls “a meticulous travel guide and a love letter to the independent book shops who help keep the region’s communities thriving.” —Alta
“REQUIEM”
A 30-line poem by Raymond Chandler has been found among papers his family donated in the 1980s. —New York Times
KAFKA’S AX
Read Alta books editor David L. Ulin’s compelling essay on writing his recently published Los Angeles noir, Thirteen Question Method. —Los Angeles Times
BOOK BUSINESS
Movie critic Mick LaSalle reviews Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, the film adaptation of prior CBC author Percival Everett’s satiric novel Erasure. (Read the book and watch the movie!) —San Francisco Chronicle
Alta’s California Book Club email newsletter is published weekly. Sign up for free and you also will receive four custom-designed bookplates.
