Cleveland and Other Distractions

Ah, the dangers of the summertime, when it becomes more and more difficult to click things on the internet and log into accounts. But it's been far too long since I've posted an update on the very easygoing Round 2 of readings for The Cradle. I spent the first three days of this week in Cleveland, hosted by the inimitable Cuyahoga County Public Library, literally the best library system in the country, and jumped all around, from dinner to webcast to radio to reading. All in all, a lovely three days.

This month also marks the release of THE2NDHAND's 32nd broadsheet, a story about a felon, set in Kaukana, Wisconsin. While the story does contain a dramatic arc, the whole point, really, was to give myself a platform from which to attempt a description of Kaukana's smell--a goal since I was a small child, and the holy grail of Wisconsin Literature.

And finally, I will again be venturing out toward the eastern lands next week, when I join the traveling band of merry, probably stinky featherproof writers for the final leg of their Great American Dollar Store Super-Tour. I know not what I will find when I meet up with them in Boston, on July 14th, nor do I know what will come of our Albany (July 15th) and Ann Arbor (July 16th) events. If you live in one of these cities, however, I demand your presence. Look at these beautiful people, for God's sake.

Reading in West Bend

Business Meeting, Buffalo Joe's

Sun-Times Profile

With all the hubub of the quarter coming to a close in the last weeks, I completely forgot to post about this profile in the Sun-Times. Mary Houlihan and I had a nice long talk about Wisconsin, folk music, and literature.

Since I know you've been feeling as though you don't know me well enough, I'd like you to take this opportunity to find out more.

Rumpus

The Rumpus.net is a relatively new lit site I've been checking from time to time in the last year; it was a nice surprise to find, yesterday, that they'd reviewed the Cradle.  Here's a little bit of the review:

With The Cradle, Patrick Somerville offers a novel about the many layers of the self—what is found and what is lost and found again. It’s a Midwestern story, with the cold, dank, wide open mystery of abandoned prairies at its hopeful heart.

On a side-note, I'd like to say that when my father moved into his new house, he kept referring to an upstairs room as "The Rumpus Room," which, well...it made me uncomfortable to hear the word coming from his lips, I don't know why. Rumpus. Rumpus. I'm glad Stephen Elliott is taking the word and recalibrating it. For me.

Rumpus.

Coffee

Reading Tonight!

The St. Petersburg Times Takes a Look

Angie Drobnic Holan likes the way The Cradle bounces from story to story:

These two story lines — one of young parents-to-be, another of older parents saying goodbye — unfold in tandem in The Cradle, and part of the pleasure is deducing the connections between the stories through a surprising number of plot twists. The structure allows Patrick Somerville to create a short novel with the sweep and depth of a much longer work (and this, his first novel, no less).

Click here to read the whole review.

Washington Post Takes a Gander

The Washington Post already had their weekend book content up, and they're running a roundup with a strong, albeit brief, review of the book. Here's what they have to say about The Cradle:

The adult lost boy in Patrick Somerville's marvelous debut, "The Cradle" (Little, Brown, $21.99) starts out beholden to his pregnant wife's obdurate demand that he retrieve a long-lost cradle. On this dubious premise Somerville builds a road narrative that gradually accumulates the mythic echoes and dreamlike inevitability of allegory. Matt's search for the cradle takes on a picaresque nobility; he's like a blue-collar Odysseus, crisscrossing the Midwest in his quest to return home to his Penelope. What gives "The Cradle" its potent emotional resonance, however, is the way Somerville's prose calmly, relentlessly pulls at the Gothic skein of family tragedies that lurks behind the peeling paint and sagging porches, where a sense of inherited sin settles like a thick fog.

fivechapters story/Beatrice piece

I've got a couple of new items floating out there on the internet this week. A new short story called "People Like Me" is up at fivechapters. For those of you who don't know about this cool site, the basic idea is to serialize a short story over the course of the week, unfurling it in five parts. Pretty awesome idea, right? My story's about a mercenary trying to quit his job, and having some trouble.

Also, have a look over at Ron Hogan's site Beatrice.com...there, you can see me pull out my somewhat rusty close-reading skills to talk about one of Wordsworth's Lucy poems. Beatrice is asking authors to look at poems they like in honor of National Poetry Month, which is now: the prettiest/cruelest.

Also the slushiest.