Neil Serven

In the mail: Post Road no. 43, featuring my story “We Don’t Joke About Such Things.” This story has been through a long journey before arriving at this destination. It’s gone through several revisions–the title is one I even used for an older story that looks nothing like this one–and earned honorable mentions in a couple of contests. It’s a story I workshopped a number of years ago at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in a class led by Alix Ohlin, a brilliant and thoughtful group among whom several members have since published novels. Their suggestions were vital in shaping the story to its final form.

1. The Tailor of Panama, John Le Carré
2. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, Laura Warrell
3. The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion*
4. Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
5. Wayward, Dana Spiotta
6. The Waste Land and Other Writings, T.S. Eliot
7. Lit, Mary Karr
8. Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon
9. The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd
10. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein
11. Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, Carolyn Kuebler**
12. Varieties of Exile, Mavis Gallant*
13. The Great American Novel, Philip Roth
14. It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth, Zoë Thorogood
15. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald*
16. Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson
17. In Universes, Emet North**
18. Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez
19. Finding a Likeness, Nicholson Baker
20. The Insides, Jeremy S. Bushnell
21. The Guest, Emma Cline
22. The Hydrogen Jukebox, Peter Schjeldahl
23. The Night Guest, Hildur Knútsdóttir** 
24. Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett
25. Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead
26. Blood at the Root, Patrick Phillips
27. Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner**
28. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
29. See Friendship, Jeremy Gordon**
30. Always Happy Hour, Mary Miller
31. There Is Happiness, Brad Watson
32. The Seas, Samantha Hunt
33. The Complete Novels, Jean Rhys*
34. The Best American Short Stories 2024, Lauren Groff, ed.
35. The Name of This Band Is R.E.M., Peter Ames Carlin
36. The Ice Storm, Rick Moody*

*reread
**read as galley

Thirty-six is a steep drop from the 50 books I read last year, and I can’t account for what happened there. I didn’t vacation this year, and I took on greater responsibilities at work, which may have left me with less headspace. There was also, of course, the lingering specter of returning fascism. It was all over everything, prompting so much doomscrolling over engagement. They say that book sales see a decline in presidential election years.

Among these, a few of my favorites were galleys. Creation Lake was genuine Kushner, a cool narrator roaming around in a loose plot with space to do damage. The Night Guest was fast-moving horror that gave a window into Icelandic culture, while the similarly-named The Guest was smart and knowing around its coy young narrator. Emma Cline and Rachel Kushner remain two of my favorite writers working today. One thing that slowed me down was re-reading the novels of Jean Rhys—five in all, though I count them as one here—as I wanted to make my way around the cafes of gloomy foreign cities. Was glad to find Bonjour Tristesse out in the wild, finally.

I turn fifty this year. I am trying to make the novel make sense against a world of shifting threat, where people seem starved to make noise rather than add something. A short story got pushed back but is still due to come out in Post Road. I was fortunate to have a flash-fiction story treated with great editorial care by The Cincinnati Review. And one of the most personal pieces I’ve ever written, about the resentment I felt from growing up with chronically ill parents, appears in the current issue of The Pinch. All things equal, I can’t complain about where I am.

The Fall 2024 issue (44.2) of The Pinch, the journal of the University of Memphis, is out today and I am thrilled to have an essay in it that’s one of the most personal things I have ever written. “Ill Nature” is about growing up with chronically sick parents and the resentments that I carried over into adulthood.

I’m grateful to Managing Editor Mia Day and the staff at The Pinch for giving this piece that means a lot to me such a good home.

I have a new flash-fiction story called “Red Eye” up at The Cincinnati Review today as part of their miCRo series. You can read it here as well as listen to a recording of me reading it.

With thanks to editor Lisa Ampleman, who introduces with this kind note:

This story makes me think about the different people we become over time—and how we create artifacts of past selves in photographs and papers (something I have familiarity with lately). Neil Serven’s story gives full complexity of character to the woman who is the speaker’s mother through the speaker’s contemplation of such artifacts.

A sloppy list of the books that I enjoyed reading in 2023:

1. The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
2. Either/Or, Elif Batuman
3. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
4. Relentless Melt, Jeremy P. Bushnell
5. My Education, Susan Choi
6. I Meant It Once, Kate Doyle
7.  Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Isaac Fitzgerald
8. Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery
9. Tinkers, Paul Harding
10. The Price of Salt, or Carol, Patricia Highsmith
11. Cherry, Mary Karr
12. The Dinner, Herman Koch
13. In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
14. A Burning, Megha Majumdar
15. Brother and Sister Enter the Forest, Richard Mirabella
16. Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara
17. The Words, Jean-Paul Sartre
18. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
19. Weather, Jenny Offill
20. The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
21. Loitering With Intent, Muriel Spark
22. Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

I read 50 books in all–a high number for me–including seven re-reads. The year was remarkably busy in other respects, as I started a new job in July, completed the first draft of a novel, and published four pieces (two essays, a review, and a flash fiction), with a longer story due to come out next year. It feels like I end every year wishing to be able to make writing a more integral part of my life, but this year it feels like I genuinely made that happen. I look forward to keeping it going.

But to Evelyn, death was its own uncanny presence. It showed up like a clown in a horror film, it rendered you ridiculous, it could make any word a last word, even if that last word was sponge. All you could do was laugh at it. 

Sometime earlier this year my friend Soren posted that it was Varnish Day at the casket factory near where she lives, and that it sounded like the beginning of a Tom Waits song. I commented that I wanted to use the line as the first line of a story.

That’s what I did, and now it’s been published at Monkeybicycle. With immense thanks to Soren for the inspiration and to editor James Tate Hill for giving it a lovely home.

At Esquire, Isaac Fitzgerald (Dirtbag Massachusetts) writes a love letter to the paperback, noting that their durability and affordability make for a flexible, versatile reading experience:

But a paperback is built for adventure. Paperbacks are light, and—as already mentioned numerous times in this essay—foldable. If you forget one at the bar or by the swimming hole, you will not mourn, for the book will be found by somebody else, and if you haven’t finished it before you lose it, don’t worry—you can buy a new one for the price of a drink or two, not an entire meal.

A thing we have noticed since we acquired the bookstore is that carrying both used and new books means we see a wider range of customers. Our town is by no means wealthy, so one thing we like is the ability to have cheaper used options available for customers who only have a few dollars to spring on a book. When I am out and about I try to keep a small paperback with me for idle times like when I am waiting for a takeout order—a small one fits in my hoodie pocket, and I feel like my time is more richly spent getting in a couple pages of a novel then scrolling mindlessly on my phone.

But publishing seems to be getting away from mass-market fiction, even the genres. There was a time when the shelves in the mystery and science fiction sections of chain stores were cut to accommodate the old-fashioned John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell-sized mass-market paperback. Now publishers are tending toward trade-paper-sized titles even for genre writers like Ruth Ware or Louise Penny, and the cheap newsprint mass-market seems to be going extinct.

That doesn’t necessarily change my ability to read in public, apart from the need for bigger pockets. But it does affect the customer for whom we try to provide affordable books. Pricing has consequently soared as well—both due to the higher-quality paper and the seeming inflation that Amazon has caused. Publishers can inflate prices knowing that the largest retailer for books is going to discount them heavily as a loss leader. They’ve essentially taken a side against independent booksellers by default.

Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel, Tinkers, published in 2009. A slim volume from Bellevue Literary Press with a humble design, it caught a lot of people in the book business by surprise; the New York Times had never bothered to review it before the announcement was made.

I hadn’t known anything about Harding’s career, so when I googled him, I initially thought I had landed on a different Paul Harding, because Google called him a musician. It turns out that Harding was the drummer for Cold Water Flat, a shoegazey band formed by three classmates at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I know that they got some airplay on WFNX in the 90s, particularly the song “Magnetic North Pole,” and I am pretty sure they opened for Belly once, a show I regretted missing at the time. (CWF’s lead singer was Paul Janovitz, brother of Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz.)

So Paul Harding gets added to my library collection of Boston-area literary drummers, joining David Ryan (The Lemonheads, Animals in Motion), Freda Love Smith (The Blake Babies, Red Velvet Underground), and Chris Gorman (Belly, Indi Surfs).

I am halfway through Tinkers, a lovely story of remembrance about a son and his father. Harding’s descriptions of objects are made with the care of a museum curator.

Paul Janovitz passed away earlier this year.

Here’s “Magnetic North Pole”: