New Mormon Books

I was exposed to Brian Evenson several years ago when someone, I forget who, pushed a copy of his novel The Open Curtain on me. I thought, “Cool. Crazy Mormon murder mystery. This looks tolerable.” That brilliant book ended up being so much more than that, and remains for me one of the sharpest, most gripping examples of how the possibilities of literature are far from spent (I swear I’m not overstating a thing. If anything, the opposite).

An Interview with Brian Evenson
By Drew Toal
Bookslut, July 2009
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_07_014753.php

Shannon Hale’s The Actor and the Housewife was a fantastic read, and a much different book than what I expected from the cover and plot synopsis. I can tell form some of the other reviews I’ve read that I wasn’t the only one surprised by this book. I expected this to be light and funny – a perfect summer read. And it was funny, but it was anything but light.

Book Review: The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale
By CarrieK
Books and Movies, July 2, 2009.
http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com/2009/07/02/book-review-the-actor-and-the-housewife-by-shannon-hale/

Eleven short slices of life. Eleven stories without beginning and without end, open, concise, cut at random from the raw material that is life. Snapshots at once incisive, funny and desperate that are part of small dusty desert Arizona or Utah, where he nothing ever happens and where an unlikely hero of an Indian father visits at night his sleeping son, of small-minded agricultural workers, one of the last cowboys who believe themselves as such, an old fool who is crazy, a brother, an ex-husband…

Lâchons les chiens: la preuve par onze
Mediapart, 27 Juin 2009.
http://www.mediapart.fr/club/edition/les-mains-dans-les-poches/article/270609/lachons-les-chiens-la-preuve-par-onze
Google Translation to English:
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediapart.fr%2Fclub%2Fedition%2Fles-mains-dans-les-poches%2Farticle%2F270609%2Flachons-les-chiens-la-preuve-par-onze&sl=fr&tl=en&history_state0=

Among my many weird fascinations is polygamy. I have watched and read many books about polygamy. Frontline produces a series of shows on the Mormon Church that was really, really interesting and well done. Political feelings aside, I find the idea intriguing. Why would anyone want to share your husband and, on the other hand, why would a man want to be married to more than one woman?

Book Review: The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
By Tracie Yule
Yule Time Reading, June 26th, 2009.
http://www.yuletimereading.com/2009/06/book-review-the-19th-wife-by-david-ebershoff/

Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, will read from his soon-to-be-published novel, The Lonely Polygamist, at 7 p.m. June 11 at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum.

Novelist Brady Udall reads from new polygamy novel in Ketchum June 11
Twin Falls ID Times-News, May 29, 2009.

Udall, who lives in Boise’s North End with his wife and kids, is teaching in his third year with Boise State’s Master of Fine Arts program, and he has just completed his new tome, the 700-page novel, The Lonely Polygamist. The novel, which should be released in late 2009/early 2010, is about a man with four wives and 20-plus kids, who has an affair with a woman who does not know he is a polygamist; complex human drama ensues.

Telling Tales Out of School: Boise author Brady Udall prepares to let loose The Lonely Polygamist
by Christian A. Winn
Boise Weekly, May 27, 2009
http://www.boiseweekly.com/boise/telling-tales-out-of-school/Content?oid=1055898

As a returned missionary, I found certain aspects of Tice’s story pretty implausible. It seems evident to me that the author either never served a mission or else deliberately altered certain basic realities of mission life so drastically as to make the experience unrecognizable. The story features two elders–Case, a smooth-talking cynic who baptizes by manipulation and evidently believes in nothing except his own power to make district leader, and Joseph, his earnest, socially inhibited companion. The familiar pairing of innocent and cad could have been interesting, but it wasn’t.

Write What You Know, Know What You Write: A Review of Bradford Tice’s “Missionaries”
By Eve
Zelophehad’s Daughters, 19 July 2007
http://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2007/07/19/write-what-you-know-know-what-you-write-a-review-of-bradford-tices-missionaries/

[Note that this story first appeared in the Summer Fiction issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and was then included in Best American Short Stories, 2008]