The 10 Best Book Endings

Jessica Soffer

By Jessica Soffer

Jessica Soffer’s Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is a novel about families, food, and facing uncomfortable truths. It also culminates in a revealing and satisfying ending that brings all its pages together. For Tip Sheet, Soffer shared 10 of her favorite endings in books.

I don’t like to play favorites. It’s not right. Sometimes, it’s an act in futility. Apples and oranges and such, especially in literature. But here we are. Ten Best Book Endings, according to me, a woman who has read as much as she possibly could during her twenty-seven years and who wishes every day for more reading time so that she could say “Ten Best,” and feel more certain. Until then, “best” is a moving target—and I’m not even in possession of all the darts.

Bottom line: the most we can look for is an end that justifies, honors, makes meaningful the means. And sometimes we might hope for an end that does more: an end that outdoes the means. Sometimes, a deftly plotted twist will do the trick, or a really grand grand finale, or a thought so moving, so appropriate that we write it down and keep it in our wallets for years. When endings work they feel both inevitable and earned, which just doesn’t happen in real life where nothing is ever still long enough to really end at all. And so good endings must do more than life: honoring what’s come before, swelling with the promise of what’s to come, and hovering in exactly the right place so that when it’s over, it’s hardly over. It’s just right.

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12 Things We Learned From Chuck Palahniuk’s AMA

By Emily Temple

As you may have heard, Chuck Palahniuk has some forthcoming novels lined up, and to ramp up anticipation for these (as well as appease his hordes of fans) he hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at Reddit last night. We waded through the cheeky banter, multiple counts of Internet failure, and sometimes sexually aggressive commenters to bring you the most interesting tidbits we gleaned from the session.

1. He’s not as hardcore as he wants the world at large to think. “A secret truth? Those [Jack Daniels] bottles on that tour… they were filled with Lipton’s tea. I wanted a sight gag that would look cool.”

2. He does research for his books with the (stoned) professionals. “Not to lose anybody his job… but some very stoned guys came from Stanley Steamer and taught me the blood-cleaning stuff. And this was ten years before Sunshine Cleaning.

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Little Big People

By CHELSEA CAIN

As a professional writer, committed to improving my work, I meet with not one, but two weekly writing groups. The first is made up of New York Times best-selling authors and literary darlings. The other is made up of 7-year-olds. Guess which group cries more?

My grown-up group meets Monday nights in the back room of a gallery full of sharp metal sculptures. Chuck Palahniuk, author of “Fight Club” and cult superstar, likes to take off his shoes and rub his socked feet together as he reads. He prefers SmartWool socks, by the way, made from high-performance merino. Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir, “Wild,” inspired Oprah to bring back her book club, is a chatter; she will chat right up until the moment we start. Monica Drake — Kristen Wiig is adapting her indie novel hit, “Clown Girl,” for the big screen — is almost always five to seven minutes late; you can set your watch by it. Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the freak-pride novel “Dora: A Headcase,” once had a cake made for Chuck’s birthday that cannot be described in a family newspaper. There are nine of us in total. There used to be 10, but there was a fight and someone left.

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Bedtime Stories for Grownups Plays to Second Sellout

By Jordan Foster

At the sold-out November 2event in Eugene, Oregon’s WOW Hall, Portland authors Lidia Yuknavitch, Chelsea Cain, and Chuck Palahniuk gave another raucous performance of their “Bedtime Stories for Grownups,” the second such event that gave fans—and the authors—a chance to wear pajamas in public, cuddle with stuffed animals, and listen to spooky stories.

After the success of trio’s first story time—at Portland’s Broadway Books on September 13—the three gathered again in Eugene, home to the University of Oregon, and regaled the crowd of over 400 people with readings from their work, interspersed with prize giveaways.

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What Scares You? 30 Terrifying Horror Stories Straight Out Of Your Worst Nightmares

By Kimberly Turner

Fear is subjective and personal. The things that haunt your nightmares and the things that cause my breath to quicken—they are probably not the same. Some people are hit hardest by subtle seeping dread and things unseen. Others, by in-your-face gore and guts. Still others, by the darkness of the human psyche.

That’s why making a definitive list of the most terrifying books of all time (which I originally set out to do) is a futile endeavor. Instead, I invite you to stroll down phobia lane until we find the horror that pushes your buttons, poking around until we discover a soft spot that makes you cringe. Because that’s what Halloween is all about.

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“Somewhere a Dog Barked”

Pick up just about any novel and you’ll find a throwaway reference to a dog, barking in the distance.

By Rosecrans Baldwin

As a reader of novels and not much else, I keep a running list of authorial whims. Male writers of the Roth/Updike generation, for example, love the word cunt. Also, where novelists once adorned their prose with offhand French bon mots, Spanish now appears. Here’s another: Novelists can’t resist including a dog barking in the distance. I’ve seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: “There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully.” (American Star) “She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway.” (Light in August) “This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody’s rose bush. Somewhere a dog’s barking.” (Choke)

Having heard the dog’s call, it seemed like I couldn’t find a book without one. Not The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Not Shadow Country. Not Ulysses. Not Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, or Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue, or Stephen King’s Itor Christine. Not Jodi Picoult’s House Rules. If novelists share anything, it’s a distant-dog impulse. Picture an author at work: She’s exhausted, gazing at her laptop and dreaming about lunch. “[Author typing.] Boyd slammed the car door shut. He stared at his new condominium, with the for-sale sign in the yard. He picked up a pistol and pointed it at his head. [Author thinking, Now what? Gotta buy time.] Somewhere a dog barked. [Author thinking, Hmm, that'll do.] Then Boyd remembered he did qualify for the tax rebate for first-time home buyers, and put down the gun.”If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea.

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Transgression in Theory: The Idea of a Fight Club

By Phil Jourdan

Not very much has been written, on even a basic theoretical level, about this weird thing we call transgressive fiction. I call it weird because the very idea of lumping together some twisted and “dangerous” novels and seeing them as part of a “group” — or worse, a genre — feels, to me, like a bad move. Certainly, as I’ll happily concede, novels like American Psycho and Fight Club have thematic similarities, as well as stylistic ones. Still, considering them in terms of a genre, which apparently we have come to do, means softening them, cushioning their blows, and attributing (in hindsight) a pattern to their development.

It doesn’t, in the end, matter very much, because as the popularity of the transgressive genre rises, so will its impact diminish. Not to say the texts themselves will lose their power: it’s trickier than that. I think, rather, that whatever is genuinely transgressive about these novels — assuming they are transgressive in any real sense — will be overlooked.

Transgression is a very difficult concept. I’ve found that in conversations about Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk, it’s rarely made clear what exactly is being transgressed. Beyond that, it’s hard to explain why the transgressions are needed in the first place. And since so little theoretical discussion exists that deals directly with this kind of text (notwithstanding some excellent film criticism), I’m going to try my hand at starting a conversation.

I must take certain things for granted, at least at first. For instance, I think that the idea of jouissance, an irrational, exuberant enjoyment without any purpose except itself, is a fantastically useful one. It was developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and more recently by the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, to explain many apparently unreasonable kinds of behavior in people. This enjoyment has to be understood as extremely desirable: it’s a thrill, it’s the kick we get out of things even though we probably wouldn’t if we operated on cold logic. A football team wins and your friends start screaming with joy; or you hear someone say something arousing to you that nobody else can hear, and you feel those “butterflies” in your stomach; or you’re about to have an orgasm. That generic, almost boundless feeling of “being alive” — let’s call that jouissance.

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“I tell the truth, even when I lie.”: A Discussion of Unreliable Narrators

Unreliable Narrators

Column by Taylor Houston

Can your narrator be trusted?? Reliable narrators are the norm, but unreliable narrators are great to read and fun to write. We briefly discussed unreliable narrators in Sixth Sense Settings, but I thought I might expand on the topic.

Definitions

Let us first define a reliable narrator. As you might have surmised, reliable narrators are trustworthy; they relate the story as it happened or at least as they experienced it. Third-person omniscient narrators are usually reliable (they are sort of like fact-tellers) and many first-person narrators are, too. On the rare occasion that a third-person narrator slips into the action by saying “I” or offering some other particular judgment, then an argument might be made for unreliability, but it’s not typical. Reliable narrators sound authoritative and display a thorough knowledge of the characters and events that the story unveils. They offer unbiased, or at least equally-weighted, descriptions of characters and events. The narrator for most Jane Austen novels, I’d argue, is reliable, because it is third-person and mostly impartial.

On the flipside of the narratorial coin, we have the unreliable narrators. These may be first-person (or even second-person) narrators who, for whatever reason, cause the reader to doubt his or her retelling of events. Maybe the narrator is a drunk or psychopath. Maybe the narrator is an admitted liar or “yarn-spinner” or like Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Consider, too, literature’s well-known pedophile Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita. He often attempts to excuse his deplorable activities, such as preying on his young stepdaughter. He also tries at times to convince the reader his intentions are not as terrible as they seem by arguing that it’s natural or that the young girl is tempting him (Yuck). Another great contemporary example comes from LitReactor’s patron saint—Chuck Palahniuk. How long did it take you to realize Tyler Durden wasn’t a real person? Long enough, I’m betting, for you to get invested in him as a character. I know I was duped.

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Miami Book Fair 2011: The Year’s Hottest Authors Are in Town

© Shawn Grant Palahniuk: "My books all start with some horrible, unresolved thing in my own life."

In a few days, South Florida takes off its dunce cap, trades its oversized reflector shades for a pair of sturdy bifocals, and flees the thumping club beats for the quietest stall at the library. It’s that great time of year when the Miami Book Fair brings the world’s literary elite to town to talk writing, politics, religion, and the enduring search for the great American novel.

The fair consists of a slew of events spread over eight days, but the main draw is the Street Fair, happening Friday through Sunday. New Times interviewed some of its biggest headliners. Unless otherwise noted, these authors will speak at the Chapman Conference Center (Building 3, Second Floor, Room 3210).

What would happen if Judy Blume rewrote Dante’s Inferno to star a sexually repressed teenager who thinks she’s in hell for overdosing on pot? There’s only one author alive qualified to tackle that question; luckily Chuck Palahniuk, maverick author of Fight Club and Choke, decided to give it a shot.

The result is a rollicking trek through a land of cascading shit waterfalls and oceans of hot vomit populated by Hitler and a cast of teen stereotypes out of the Breakfast Club. Palahniuk uses the gruesome setting in Damned, his new novel, to skewer America’s Puritan obsession with healthiness.

“My books all start with some horrible, unresolved thing in my own life,” Palahniuk says. “Before I wrote this, I was taking care of my mom with cancer.”

Palahniuk has cultivated a reputation for shocking audiences. One infamous short story, called Guts, is so brutal that when Palahniuk reads aloud on his tours, dozens have reportedly fainted. But in Damned — which has its own share of stomach-churning encounters — and other works, Palahniuk says his real goal is a legit human response.

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