Ever wonder what would happen if the tortoise and the hare had a rematch?

Or what made Elvis, well, ELVIS?

B.J. Novak wondered, and imagined, and here you have the answers to these intriguing questions and many more you never, ever thought to ask but will be glad he did.

One More Thing features short stories, snippets of thought, and ideas that will make the corners of your mouth curl up even as you're thinking "What the h*** was that?!"

Mischief, mainly.

Enjoy.

Sheila M. Trask for Foreword Reviews

Fiction can reveal truths that are difficult to face directly. That’s the case with Gaza Writes Back, Refaat Alareer’s stunning and sobering collection of short fiction by young-adult Palestinian writers. The twenty-three pieces in this collection offer fictional yet hyperreal experiences during the Gaza War, also known as the Cast Lead Operation. While no two stories are exactly the same, they all carry a palpable sense of urgency and expose a violent, terroristic world that few of us have seen so clearly before.

Alareer, a literature and creative-writing professor at the Islamic University-Gaza, has selected these stories as much for their unique voice as for the particular place and time they illuminate. All are originally written in English, though their authors’ first language is Arabic. This allows a “much-needed Palestinian youth narrative without the mediation or influences of translation or of non-Palestinian voices,” writes Alareer in his introductory notes.

The pieces themselves are short. A few entries are only three pages long. The spare format reflects the urgency of day-to-day life during the Gaza War, when one bomb blast could change a family’s fate in a second. There’s no time to explain it all, so we drop into people’s lives mid-flow and experience the disruptions of war along with them. One minute, a child watches a football match in the street, and the next all he can see is smoke, blood, and his neighbors running for shelter.

The writers are a talented lot, most of them current or former graduate students who worked with Alareer. But the editor’s own contributions rise above the other slice-of-life vignettes to become thought-provoking, allegorical lessons in human nature. In “House,” for instance, we are privy to a twisted psychological power struggle between the occupiers and the occupied. Similarly, in “The Old Man and the Stone,” Alareer uses symbols to show the strengths and weaknesses of knowledge, innocence, and faith. These more complex pieces stand out as stories you will want to read again, to yourself and to others.

Gaza Writes Back is not an easy book to read, but it effectively shines light on the effects of war on the civilians caught in the crossfire. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of Middle East politics and the mind-set of the latest generation to live amidst the ongoing struggles there.

Sheila M. Trask for Foreword Magazine
February 27, 2014

Even the stories have stories in Gabrielle Zevin’s thoroughly charming novel, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. Open the doors at bookseller AJ Fikry’s Island Books and find tragedy, comedy, romance, mystery, and more. Open this book and find an affectionate portrait of a curmudgeonly bookseller who faces loss through literature, with surprising results.

Readers who delighted in the eccentric neighbors in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, will get the same feeling from AJ Fikry’s community at Alice Island in a small, tucked-away corner of New England. Although Zevin’s story is not historical fiction, it carries an old-fashioned, small-town feel. If there’s an accident, it’s probably Chief Lambiase you’ll talk to. He’ll call your sister-in-law to help you. She’ll let herself into your apartment above the bookstore because you never lock the front door. Others seem to know what you need before you do.

Just because it’s a small town doesn’t mean nothing ever happens, however. That open-door policy lets in a lot more than well-meaning relatives, things that will turn life around for the man who keeps a rare volume of Poe in a climate-controlled case but hates the uber-cheerful Muppet Elmo because he’s “too needy.” Zevin never explicitly tells us what AJ is like but rather shows us through unique—and often humorous—details like these.

AJ’s personality also shines through in the “shelf talkers” scattered throughout the narrative. While most of the book is written in the third person, here AJ gets a chance to talk to us directly. In each of these notes, the book lover describes a piece of classic fiction, his take on it, and his prediction of the reader’s reaction. From Flannery O’Connor to Roald Dahl, AJ’s notes on works reveal important bits of his own story as it unfolds. It’s fascinating to speculate about exactly who he is writing these notes for, and why.

After each shelf talker, we get right back to the story in progress, and a lively story it is, told largely through dialogue. Each character has a unique voice, which comes through clearly in peppy conversations. The topic of many conversations is literature, with AJ himself in the lead in comparing real life to books and finding life wanting. Book lovers will be thrilled by each literary reference (though they do lie a bit thick on the ground at certain points), but the book banter generally feels natural and always serves to move the story along.

Sheila M. Trask for Foreword Magazine
February 27, 2014

Sheila M. Trask
February 27, 2014

Deni B. Sher reports from the trenches of motherhood and middle age in the pages of this sincere memoir.

How One Parent Engaged Addiction: A Mother’s Healing Journey Through Her Son’s Addiction chronicles her son Ryan’s recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as her own personal reinvention after her grown child got well. While the content of Sher’s story is not new, her presentation is. Inspired to create not only a journal-like narrative, but also a musical production to honor her family’s experience, Sher offers a unique memoir that’s part diary, part poetry, and part musical theater.

Sher has devised a literary scrapbook that captures various aspects of how she reckoned with her son’s illness and her own role in it. Anybody who has had an addict in their family will recognize the stages of denial, discovery, controlling, and codependency that Sher went through as her son’s health deteriorated before her eyes. She is articulate about her dawning recognition of the problem, and she shows exactly what the process was like through journal entries, letters, e-mails, poetry, song lyrics, stage dialogue between imaginary characters, and Ryan’s artwork.

While the variety allows Sher to create a multifaceted portrait of her struggles, some of the entries are quite lengthy and repeat themes already addressed. For instance, readers probably don’t require reproductions of entire e-mails between Sher and her son’s girlfriend, Michelle. Email excerpts and the many songs shared here would suffice to showcase Sher’s creative approach to recovery.

The five chronologically based sections of this memoir set up an unrealistic expectation that the story is told in a linear fashion. Instead, the time line of events gets a little confusing, particularly in the final sections devoted to Sher’s own biography. She chooses to “‘fess up” to her own dysfunctional behaviors—workaholism, serial marriages—only after she has essentially finished telling Ryan’s story. Her confessions, however, require her to mine memories that are directly related to the earlier material, and might have been more useful to readers in Parts I and II. Stories about Ryan’s reckless, undependable father, for instance, might be better integrated into Ryan’s own story, where their relevance would be evident.

In addition to her own thoughts, Sher shares insightful quotations from a number of authors, reflecting the evolution of self-help theories from Melody Beatty’s codependency theories in the 1990s to Rhonda Byrne’s law of attraction methods that are so popular today. A list of recommended books encourages readers to explore their ideas and many others.

While Sher’s story is sometimes more creative than cohesive, her consistently upbeat tone brings a unifying voice to the book. Throughout her story, the author conveys her intention to inspire others. Indeed, the title itself includes an uplifting acronym—How One Parent Engaged Addiction—that quite intentionally contains the word “hope.” While readers may wish for further refinements in Sher’s storytelling choices, they will never doubt her message about the power of perseverance and a positive outlook.

Sheila M. Trask for ForeWord Reviews
February 10, 2014

If you're a fan of The Big Bang Theory, you'll hear Sheldon Cooper's voice all over this unconventional romantic comedy. I love Sheldon, and I loved Don, the "differently-wired" narrator at the heart of Graeme Simsion's charming and thought-provoking novel.

Don is a brilliant geneticist who has worked very hard to live a life that makes sense to him. He's got a meal plan, and accompanying grocery list, for each day of the week. He knows precisely how many minutes it takes to clean his bathroom. He has exactly two friends, and calls his mother on Sundays.

Surely he can apply the same organizational skills to his latest project: finding a wife. All he needs is a simple questionnaire and he can eliminate all but the most compatible women. He doesn't need the complications of dating. He has science!

Enter Rosie, a smoking, drinking bartender who would fail every question on Don's test, and yet Don can't stay away from her. Chaos ensues, much to Don's chagrin.

Simsion nails Don's voice throughout, making him both brilliant and awkward. Several scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, and would be perfect movie scenes, as when Don practices dance steps with--what else?--a skeleton from the biology department.

Don is always trying to sort out the world, and so shows us that he's just like everyone else, even with his Asperger's Syndrome traits.

And we're all just trying to sort it out, aren't we?

Sharing Eden covers a wide range of religious beliefs in a package small enough to make us believe there are really very few crucial differences in our various belief systems.

Authors Natan Levy, David Shreeve, and Harfiyah Haleem offer this small guidebook as a place to start talking about the places where different faiths may intersect, particularly on environmental issues. As Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers, the authors offer a sampler of varied readings and teachings that show how the common threads of stewardship, conservation, and cooperation run through each of the Abrahamic faiths.

To this end, they share quotations from the Torah, the Bible and the Qu’ran and discussion about how these teachings relate to six modern environmental issues: sustainability, water, energy, climate change, food, and biodiversity. It’s a daunting list, but one of the book’s strengths is that it comforts us with reminders us of our shared human agreement to care for our environment and each other.

Sharing Eden is not a thorough discussion of each faith’s perspective, or the science of climate change. Instead, it is a welcome introduction to these ideas, a starting point for constructive and hopeful planning for the future.

Dreams of Totality

Where We Are When There's Nothing at the Center

Angel Hair

Sheila M. Trask
January 21, 2014 for ForeWord Reviews

I read a lot of memoirs. I never cry. Except this time.

Lindsey O’Connor’s memoir of awakening from a medically-induced coma did it to me. I’ve read many memoirs of medical trauma and recovery, and while O’Connor’s descriptions of her rise to consciousness are unique in their clarity and refusal to resort to cliché, it wasn’t the medical struggle that made me cry. It was the emotional struggle.

Waking up in the hospital with three months missing from your memory, a body that barely functions, and a maddening inability to communicate with others should be more than enough for one woman to handle. But O’Connor faced another, stranger truth: the day before her medical nightmare began, she gave birth to a baby girl. And she doesn’t remember a thing about her.

It’s this story that pushed me over the edge, the story of a mother struggling to bond with a baby she barely recognizes. O’Connor is brutally honest about her doubts, her shame, and her pure astonishment that she could have a 3-month old baby and actually forget about her. Even when she began to realize the depth of crisis she survived, and envision the long road to recovery, she still felt guilty that she wasn’t doing a better job parenting this baby. Of course she wasn’t! She could barely breathe! But, mother guilt knows no boundaries, and there it was on top of everything else. She was failing her baby.

I appreciated the other themes of O’Connor’s book—the strengths and weaknesses of marriage, the puzzle of faith in the face of prayers answered and unanswered—but it was the bonding-with-baby struggle that fascinated me. Perhaps this is because I adopted my son when he was 7 months old, so I know what it feels like to miss those first precious days. And to be stunned that bonding wasn’t instant the moment they finally put that much-hoped-for child in your arms. O’Connor was able to portray both this emptiness and the crystalline moment that comes later, when you fall head over heels, hopelessly in love with this child of yours. There’s no going back.