Gobble, Gobble

It's almost turkey time people! I, for one, can't wait to eat a great turkey dinner and watch some college football!

Dear Friends: It has been one year since I started sending out this newsletter. I am proud of myself for keeping it going.

I have learned a lot about the publishing industry in the past year - mainly how slow it can be, how the large number of people writing manuscripts and stories is not aligned with the small number of agent gatekeepers, literary journal editors and readers.

Many of us are just too busy to read books daily. We watch T.V., doomscroll through newsfeed, endlessly scroll through social feeds, but we all probably have a stack of books near our bed that we plan to get to someday.

Photo by Amy Clark on Unsplash - an illustration of Tsundoku

The Japanese actually have a word for that - they call it tsundoku - acquiring books and then letting them pile up without reading them. I do read most of mine eventually and today I want to tell you about two great books you should go out and read right now.

The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is given to a mid-career author each year by the New Literary Fund.

What I’m Reading

And what these books have in common is that they are both winners of the 10th anniversary Joyce Carol Oates Prize this year.

Jennine Capo Crucet is the first of the two winners, writing Say Hello to My Little Friend, a book as much about Miami as it is a tale weaving Scarface lines (where the title is derived) to the sad story of a Cuban family who made it to the U.S. despite the odds and how Izzy, a failed Pitbull impersonator, attempts to make a life for himself in Miami. Interconnected to the plot is the story of Lolita, a captive whale at the Seaquarium, based on a real eponymous whale who died in captivity.

Willy Vlautin is the second of the two winners, writing The Horse, a book about a failed traveling musician name Al, who is now down on his luck and holed up on the outskirts of Nevada. The story explores his storied past of honky tonks, song lyrics and ex-wives and bandmates, while showing how sad his current state is until a blind and nearly dead horse shows up at his door. Al manages to overcome his own struggles to be able to care for the horse, in a moving redemptive story.

What I’m Watching

I wanted to plug a show I watched a while ago. Although it’s been a while, the show still resonates for me - it’s a K-Drama - meaning it is in Korean - about an attorney who is on the spectrum. She is hired by one of the premiere law firms and becomes a top lawyer there partly due to her unique worldview from being autistic. The show doesn’t shy away from her various phobias - like her fear of entering into a revolving door - or dating. She wants to be ‘normal’ but knows that she is different.

Like many Korean shows, it has whimsical scenes interspersed with standard drama. When she gets nervous, she often thinks of whales, so the screen is filed with what is in her head - whales! The show is a lot of fun and more dramatic and thoughtful than many shows I have seen. If you haven’t tried it - give it a shot on Netflix.

Feedback

Let me know what you think of my newsletter, my writing and any other comments you have.

And a disclaimer: All opinions are my own and don’t represent my employer.