The galleys for THE ISLE OF YOUTH are in the house, and I am overwheled with graditude to the designer, Nayon Cho, for such a beautiful cover, and to Karen Russell, for offering this super kind blurb:

"Laura van den Berg is one of the most freakishly talented young writers at work today, and a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving and monstrous tales."

The official pub date is November 5, 2013 and the book can now be pre-ordered. Last night, I took the galleys out for their first drink. They thought the beer was okay, but they REALLY liked the tequila shots. They are going to raise hell on book tour.

It is January. It is cold. It is a new year. November feels like a long way off, so I'm extra extra grateful for Andrew Scott, Rebecca Morgan Frank, & An Tran for including The Isle of Youth on their lists of anticaped 2013 reads.

2012 has been an interesting creature, definitely a hills-and-valleys kind of year, with some pretty great hills. I am insanely excited and grateful that I have a second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, coming out from FSG in November. FSG has been one of my favorite publishers since, well, forever, so I am still pinching myself. I’m also grateful to have encountered some super books this year. The below is not a list per say, but just some stuff that I especially dug:

I loved A Hologram for the King. I read it while staying at a posh lakeside lodge Maine, where I was guest teaching at a summer conference. As a result, I did most of my reading in a hot tub, which might have influenced my opinion (how can you not like what you’re reading in a hot tub?), but I don’t think so. The novel captures a kind of psychic now without feeling like it’s trying to hard to capture that now—a tricky balance. Lauren Groff’s Arcadia is exquisite in both its beauty and its brutality. Groff gives the subject of utopias and their inevitable demise a tremendously ambitious treatment. Karolina Waclawiak’s How To Get Into The Twin Palms is an excellent debut novel—spare, sharp language, a memorable voice. A good example of how a potentially “small” story can transcends the immediate narrative stage and take on a greater largeness. I confess to being a little resistant to Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station at first. A novel about a poet drifting though a fellowship abroad, wrestling with privileged philosophical angst, did not sound especially appealing, but the book is so much more than that: Atocha gets at the core of something. It seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book too—no one I’ve talked to about Atocha was neutral in their response—usually a sign that something interesting is happening. I so admire the way Michael Kimball arranges moments into an expansive and intimate and strange grief in Big Ray. Amelia Gray’s Threats was unlike any novel I read this year. I loved its commitment to getting progressively stranger and more unhinged. Finally: The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada. Holy mother of god, what a novel. I loved this book so hard that I decided to use a line from it as an epigraph for The Isle of Youth.

I’ve never read Elizabeth Gilbert, but found myself wanting to after this interview, seeing as “Get up, look sickening...and make them eat it" is my New Year’s resolution for this year and probably for each one after.

It feels weird to not be listing story collections, though I read some wonderful stories this year. I spent so much of 2012 working on novel revisions, I focused my reading/thinking on novels, especially first novels, in ways that I haven’t in years past, but missed the hell out of reading collections. 2013 shall mark my return.

Which leads me to this list of 2013 reads (about 50% collections, FYI). Sorry! I know it’s another damn list. I’m just really excited about all these books.

The Isle of Youth, or Isla de la Juventud:

The Next Big Thing is a literary game of tag in which writers answer questions about a work-in-progress. I was tagged by the lovely Jane Delury, so here goes nothing:

What is the working title of your book?  

I’m working on a few things at the moment, but the most recent project is a novel-in-progress called Havana.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

A married couple goes to Havana and very strange things begin to happen.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

The idea for the novel grew out of a short story. Where the story came from, I have no idea.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  

I’d like to see Christopher Walken play all the roles, with a cameo by Chloë Sevigny.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Obsession took over and I wrote the first draft in about two months. I didn’t talk about it with other people, and I did a lot of the writing in public places—trains, metros, planes. It felt like a secret in the best way. Now I have to revise the gd thing.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I doubt I could ever write something that would live up to this, but I was very inspired by Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Running Away.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I wanted to know if it was possible to throw away a life, an identity, and start over. I’m pretty sure it isn’t, but I wanted to see people try.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If you have ever stopped recognizing yourself—literally or metaphorically—maybe this is for you. Also if you have ever been an inept American abroad, and/or if you are into Cuba.

Two new reviews of There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights have popped up in the last couple of weeks, one in the Baltimore Fishbowl, courtesy of Joseph Martin, and the other in Nib Magazine. At Nib, Ursula Villarreal-Moura writes: "It would be easy for this collection to sink with the sorrow of wrecked marriages, a drowned child, a collapsed business, and a paranoid single mother, but Laura van den Berg’s stories are, to borrow an image from the book, meticulously crafted origami animals...These touching failures are funny and painful in equal measure." Thanks, Ursula!

Beyond thrilled to be able to share the news that my next two books, a story collection, The Isle of Youth, and a novel, Find Me, will be published by FSG! I'm elated to be working with the wonderful Emily Bell and to have my books in the hands of one of my all-time favorite publishers.

There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights, a chapbook of short-short stories, has arrived from Origami Zoo! I'm grateful to Rebecca King and Sam Martone for giving these small stories about cannibals and reptile store owners and vengeful parrots (among other things) a home. Thanks also to the amazing Deb Olin Unferth and Kevin Wilson, two writers I admire enormously, for their words of support.

Here's an interview with me and Sam Martone in which we talk about pet wolves and fourtune cookies.

If you're in DC or Baltimore, I'll be doing a few readings in the area this fall: 510 at Minas Galley on 9/15; Fall for the Book on 9/27; Three Tents on 12/9. Come say hey and I'll tell you your fortune.

"How lucky for the characters in this amazing collection, who are shocked by the mysteries of their strange lives, that Laura van den Berg knows them with such clarity that their stories become, in such a short space, thrilling and resonant. This is a beautiful book, every story speaking to the one that came before it and the one that follows. It will quietly open you up and fill you with light."

- Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and The Family Fang

"Van den Berg's poetic voice fills the page with these eccentric, funny, heartful yet unsentimental stories about people turned peculiar in their quests for closeness. Fantastic work."

- Deb Olin Unferth, author of Minor Robberies, Vacation, and Revolution

My residency at VCCA—last gasp until fall semester begins!—started today, here in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. The feel of VCCA is different than Ragdale (affluent Illinois suburb vs. rural Virginia), but I have a good feeling about this place already. My studio space overlooks a green, slightly overgrown field and for a while I watched a chestnut horse graze through the window, not something I often see from my workspace in Baltimore. I am here to write a story for an anthology and finish a complete draft of a longer project. I am here to read all the books I brought in my suitcase. I am here to experience a new place, a different pace of life. I am here to empty my mind and then re-fill it again.

Alexander Chee wrote a lovely piece on colonies. A few of my favorite parts:

“One of the burdens of life among fellow civilians is that when you enter the fugue state required for making art, you can’t really be a normal person. The good news is that at a colony, you’re not expected to—you’re expected to be civil to other colonists, and respectful, but not normal. It’s a huge relief.”

“…by now I had learned that while colonies were for work, they could also act like rewards for the years of sacrifice made during the rest of your life. After years of hard work, rejections, doubt, and misery, suddenly, a castle.” [writing about Civitella Ranieri]

“The last rule then, learned at Civitella: Be in awe. However you get there.”

I’m relatively new to the colony thing. VCCA is my third residency. I did my first one, in Park City, Utah last summer, arriving with a healthy dose of skepticisms that was quickly erased by the picturesque mountains and acres of unfettered time (the hot tub at Spiro Arts didn’t hurt either). In many ways, the writing life is a tough road. The work itself, the failure inherent in the creative enterprise, can be exhausting. The rejection and doubt can feel unrelenting. But it is also a life that contains very special gifts—not only the freedom to make whatever you want, but the possibility that an institution will have enough faith and generosity to offer you shelter, often spectacularly beautiful shelter, from the world when you need it. That seems like as good a reason for awe as any.

I'm super thrilled to have "Opa Locka," a story from my recently completed collection, The Isle of Youth, appear in the summer issue of the The Southern Review. The story is about two sisters who work as private eyes. They are keeping it together in South Florida, that is until they take a case that gets really weird. Also featured: wayward fathers and opera.

Many thanks to Cara Blue Adams, SR prose editor and fiction writer extraordinaire, for running the story.

Also: the cover kicks ass.

On Saturday, I decided to take a break and head into Chicago, which is about an hour by train from Lake Forest. This means I got to have lunch with my friend Eugene, which was a treat. For those of you who cannot identify the gentleman in the picture below, that is Eugene Cross and he wrote an amazing story collection called Fires of Our Choosing. You don’t even have to take my word for it! Dan Chaon—“The stories in Fires of Our Choosing burn bright with an almost uncanny understanding of the human condition”—and Charles Baxter—“I loved this book; it's a brilliant debut”—think Eugene's book is amazing too. Really everyone should have at least three copies.

Later I hit the Art Institute and saw a lot of great stuff, including a Lichtenstein retrospective that is crazy good. My favorites were the abstract landscapes, like this seascape one below.

Day # 10 means I am back to writing and also packing, as I have only one more full day left at Ragdale. I’m leaving with two new stories. I will be returning to a city where apparently the power is out everywhere due to a bad storm. I am excited to go home (there are people I miss!) and not so excited at the same time (it is very nice and peaceful here!). But at the moment, the sky is clear, the trees are green, and there is plenty of time.

I keep seeing deer while writing. Can't be a bad sign, right?

Some things:

1. Ragdale is a few doors down from the house in Ordinary People.

2. There is perhaps no better sound than that of a new draft printing (with apologies to the trees!).

3. Standing on the edge of Lake Michigan is like being on the edge of an ocean (I realize this is not news for most people).

4. A residency is kind of like a sanatorium for writers, minus the TB.

5. It is really hard to write clearly about an absence of clarity.

6. It is also really hard—and probably ill-advised—to write a story that incorporates three theoretical endings.

7. “For the last three days, alone, without characters, I depersonalize myself and take myself off as if taking off clothes. I depersonalize myself so much that I fall asleep.” ~ Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

8. Additional wildlife sightings: chimpmunks, more woodchucks, lightning bugs, some kind of blue bird.

I got to Ragdale, in Lake Forrest, IL, yesterday afternoon. So far, it seems pretty idyllic here: beautiful, tranquil, breezy summer weather, great food, civilization (and Lake Michigan!) within walking distance. I'm here to work on new stories, one about accidential pirates and one about a weather woman.

Ragdale is connected to 50 acres of prarie, which I can see from my window. Wildlife spotted so far: a fawn, a regular-sized deer, and a woodchuck. Ragdale is also close to the METRA, which will facilitate my non-literary (though still artistic!) desire to head into Chicago and pay a visit to the Art Institute, which I have decided will be my reward when I finish a full draft of a story. 

Till them, I'm feeling very inspired by these weather people videos, even though one of them is not in English. Shovel, drifts, shovel, drifts! Much like the writing process.

Good news this summer! Origami Zoo Press will publish a chapbook of my short-short stories, There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights. We have everything from parakeets to Amazonian jungles to space travel to cannibals here. If you happen to like any of these things, the collection will be out in September!

I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with my second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, and have reached the point where I’m stepping back at looking at the manuscript as a whole. Which story should come first? Which should go last? What about the rest? For me, ordering in a collection is important—kind of like how the success of a playlist depends on the sequence almost as much as it does on the songs themselves—and something I spend a lot of time thinking about. One thing I like to do is make a list of all the first lines of the stories and play with the arrangement. So I thought I’d share this list of my first lines, exact order to be determined:

The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris.

My sister was the photographer.

The first thing that went wrong was the emergency landing.

In Antarctica, there was nothing to identify because there was nothing left.

There are four of them.

My father leaving was his last act of magic.

Elle never intended to become a pirate.

I arrived at my sister’s apartment just before the hurricane.

The last few weeks have brought some great literary trips: San Francisco for the University of San Francisco’s Emerging Writers’ Festival; Chestertown, MD for Washington College’s Mary Wood Fellowship; Clemson, SC for the Clemson University Literary Festival; and Oxford, MS to visit my dear friend and current Grisham Fellow Josh Weil.

Highlights from my travels, in no particular order:

Crazy good dinner at Nopa with the amazing Reese Kwon and her lovely husband.

Hearing Deb Olin Unferth read from Revolution and one of my favorites stories of hers, “Pet.”

Fried catfish. Hush puppies. Oysters wrapped in bacon. Peach muffins. Shrimp and grits. Who needs vegetables, anyway?

Getting to see Richard Ford read from his new novel, Canada.

Picking up Heather Christle’s new book, What Is Amazing.

Touring Faulkner's house and placing pennies by his grave.

Washington College's Literary House, aka heaven for writers.

Square Books.

Getting to terrorize the town of Clemson in a golf cart.

Meeting approixmately 1 million cool people. The buzz of getting a new story idea. Writing on trains and planes and in hotel rooms. Stuffing books into my suitcase. Going home. 

My last post for Innovators in Literature runs on Monday. It was super fun to do this series for the Ploughshares blog. I learned a lot by talking to all these smart people, and I’m grateful to everyone who participated.

New stories are forthcoming in American Short Fiction and The Southern Review in 2012. Thank you, kind editors!

Also major thanks to Dan Torday for interviewing me for Glimmer Train and to KNPR's State of Nevada for taking the time to talk to me about Bigfoot, one of my very favorite subjects.

Need a writing workshop this summer? Come to Tinker Mountain! Very excited to be among this excellent faculty line-up.