I have not read The Virgin Suicides or Middlesex, even though I am a little obsessed with hermaphrodites, less so with virgins. Thus, before finishing up The Marriage Plot a few days ago, I had boringly not yet been touched literarily or physically by Eugenides.

Want to preface this whole long look at the author’s newest endeavor by saying that I enjoyed the book immensely. I will continue with the information that many elements of this book hit home with me, personally. Finally, I want to talk about structure and how the subject matter influenced, in a few ways, the manner in which Eugenides handled his characters and the unveiling of the story.

Let’s begin.

Superficially, the novel tells the tale of three characters transitioning from college to the real world, but that’s not something that I thought about much while reading, or I probably wouldn’t have finished this book. What attracted me was how Eugenides relates preppy but smart Madeleine’s emotional undoing during her break up with crazy ass but brilliant Leonard. What reeled me in more was thoughtful and religiously curious Mitchell, who is totally in love with Madeleine and who I kind of spent the whole novel being obsessed with, in a completely narcissistic way.

Recently I found myself wandering the shelves at the Brooklyn Central Public Library in Grand Army Plaza. with nothing to do and an hour to kill before meeting a friend for dinner. There I found a copy of The Stories of Ray Bradbury and aimlessly pulled it off a shelf.

I used to be obsessed with Bradbury. I’d chewed through Martian Chronicles in a matter of 2 days in High School and still count Dandelion Wine as one of my favorite books. I didn’t realize until a well after reading each that they were actually short story collections that had been glued together to form something resembling a coherent narrative. Conversely, the book I had just picked up was a large volume of Bradbury stories organized in some handpicked order and with an introduction by the guy who wrote Thank You For Smoking. The introduction is quite long and begins by name dropping Mad Men in the very first sentence.

This was not a promising start.

There is a special kind of book I would like now to address before discussing my first entry in this week’s Halloween Reading series.

There are morals present in these books. There is tragedy. There is fear, yes, but it is the fear we confront as children when we switch rapidly from the warmth of innocence to the cold of nothing. The rug is drawn out from under one who never knew a rug was there, leaving them spinning momentarily in limbo before a precipitous fall into abyss, down down down and further down forever.

The plots are one part Twilight Zone, one part horror and one part just plain fantasy, the last usually not too dissimilar from that of Roald Dahl or the sometimes disturbing fables from whence all childrens literature sprung. Dahl realized that the world was a terrible place for which there was no reason to sugarcoat it for children any more than there was to sugarcoat it for adults. Like in fables, the wicked were punished and the just luckily escaped with their hides. Good was served, but only barely and not without suffering a great many knocks in the process.

Ray Bradbury masterfully touches on this in many of his short stories about youth. Around every corner or within every dark spot lies an unknown that is wholly evil and will stop at nothing to suck even the best of children down forever. Adults have some names to assign to these things – sociopaths, pedophiles and the like. However mostly what’s addressed is the simple fear of the unknown and of the endless spectre of inanimate things that can cause harm but whose interjection is a result of bad luck or cruel fate. In short, the things that always seem to happen where the road is darkest and help is furthest away.

These books are hard to describe but lie somewhere between Dahl’s child drowning in a lake of chocolate and Bradbury’s lurking horror in the ravine. Within this nexus lies one of my favorite books of all time: Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always.

Everything in the sky looked ominous.
“I’m hungry,” Zeus said. “Make me a salami and provolone sandwich.”
“Order out,” Hera said.
“Quiznos doesn’t deliver to Olympus.”
“What do you want from me?” Hera said.
It was the latter part of a dark afternoon.
“Come on—” “No.” There was a long, deep, bellow in the sky.
“Will you listen to my stomach? Do you want to scare the mortals?”
“Go fuck yourself, Zeus.”
“Baby.” He walked toward Hera and placed her head on his breast. “Is this about Semele?” Pitter, patter, pitter, patter, splat, splat. “She’s not worth your tears, Goddess.”
“I hate you.”
“Will you listen to my stomach?”
On the planet below a black Labrador yelped and ran into the bathroom to cower behind a white shower curtain stained with a brown chalky film.
“You make me sick,” Hera cried.
“Enough of your crying,” Zeus said, stomping his foot. “And fuck Semele.”
“You already did.”
“Go make me a sandwich, goddamn it.”

“I’ll get you, Zeus. I’ll get you and that fucking slut.”

J.J. Colagrande is the author of Headz, a novel.

“Thunderstorm” is part of the collection Are You Hungry? scheduled for publication Spring 2012.

FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY
(After Marcus Cafagña’s “Roman Fever”)
A poem by Abel Folgar

.1.

This was no honeymoon, no way,
not in this humid heat
of wet crushed bodies
tilting this bar.
Overtown and Parkwest
and Wynwood blur by like snapping limbs.

I fall back into somebody,
a move that began with
a friend’s description of
Japan’s demise,
detonating slowly in pulses
while I stand sweaty and oblivious.

I want to save the moment
from the ATM receipts
I won’t remember tomorrow
that will pile up like Miami’s
congested and afflicted
skyline.

Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise is on bookstore shelves now. Here are five reasons you should read it:

1 – You love Miami, and by extension, Miami authors, and stories set in Miami.

2 – Abu-Jaber responded to sexist remarks from V.S. Naipul with class.

3 – While the names have been changed in Paradise, playing “spot the location” appeals to you.

4 – You love the lyricism of poetry but hate reading actual poetry.

5 – Its an exploration of a family in crisis which will probably struggle to find the accolades afforded a Franzen Freedom or a DeLillo White Noise because the author lacks a penis, but the characters are richer and prose is worlds better.

Visit Aaron’s blog, because it’s good: Sweet With Fall and Fish.

These quotes from various travel guides make we wonder, does Miami suffer from an image problem, or are these descriptions right on target?

“Ouch.  What did I drink last night?  An ashtray based on the taste in my mouth.  Best get some caffeine to stave off the hangover, and fresh Florida orange juice to wash off the tongue at Puerto Sagua in South Beach.  Then I believe I’ll sleep on the beach….

“Miami is a city made for tourists, staffed by folks who abase themselves before tourists as if they were Greek Gods.  As long as you can pay, expect some serious tropical coddling and cuddling.  Unfortunately, this town still manages to aggravate.  There can be snooty and/or self-absorbed attitude at some hotels and restaurants.  Driving through heavy traffic and around frequent construction sucks almost as much as the state of the city’s public transportation.”

- Lonely Planet Miami & the Keys: City Guides

I’m not sure how any of that is supposed to make me want to visit Miami. 

“SoBe (South Beach). . . is where the trendy, tanned, sexy, rich, and young play to excess. By day, supermodels preen in the surf and sand, the fashionistas and glitterati cruise the boulevard on shiny Harleys and in top-down convertibles, while the common folk stroll and gawk. By night, the SoBe crowd, believing that too much of a good thing is wonderful, has raised hedonistic celeb-studded clubbing to an art form. Put your sexy on and get naughty at top clubs like Mansion, Cameo, the Delano, or B.E.D., where you may catch a glimpse of Beyonce Knowles and You-Know-Who snuggling in the corner.”

- Fodor’s Miami and Miami Beach

Fodor’s thinks Beyonce dates Voldemort? That’s just weird.

Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy’s Wildwood comes out next month. Here are five reasons you should read it.

1 – You like the Decemberists not because it’s required by the Hipster Code of Conduct, but because of the story-telling inherent in Meloy’s songwriting, as evidenced here and here. And here, if you like murder ballads.

2 – You hung the dustjacket from The Mysterious Benedict Society on your wall.

3 – Imagining the original, unsuitable-for-children version between the lines appeals to you.

4 – It’s an instant classic that pays homage to some of the best epics in children’s book history – think Narnia, Middle Earth, and The Brothers Grimm – without robbing any of them. It’s quietly awesome, engendering nostalgia without being cozy and adventure without putting the entire universe in peril.

5 – You want to guess what Colin Meloy wrote about just to give Carson Ellis an excuse to draw it.

(Yes, that’s a badger pulling a rickshaw)

Check out Aaron’s blog Sweet With Fall and Fish.

Dave Landsberger recently contributed poetry to complement photos for the hard to explain, subscription postcard magazine Abe’s Penny. Landsberger lived in Miami for three years before moving home to Chicago last year. According to him, “I miss my Miami friends, the ocean, and el Rey de las fritas.” He currently teaches English and literature at Harper College. Read more of his poems here after you read the ones below. He enjoys writing poems about sports. We like to read his poems about sports. We sent him several photos and he added one and so we have his poetic reaction to some tense Chicago-Miami sports games and a clip art of a flamingo.

ROBBINS & ENGLEWOOD
A Michael Jordan jersey is a white boy’s passport to the ghetto in Chicago.
Last week I got called a “face nigger”. Was it my beard? Who cares.
Chicken & fries & white bread & Flamin’ Hot Cheeto bags in the streets.

These blizzards combust you, cover you like white wicker baskets,
letting just enough sunlight slip in, so,
who cares, game’s on,

Bulls vs. Heat, who cares; always something to be proud about.
All famous black people come from Chicago,
The Harlem Renaissance 2: The Big Score.

ACROSTIC
Be it a billy goat or an expansion team in teal,
Another reason will manifest from the prairie grass to contra.
Real Marlins fans exist; I’ve seen them Casino-style and cartwheel
To the scent of nacatamales, down and up three Kia Sephias,
Marrying the scent of Miami fall (live here two years, you’ll smell it too) outside the bastille
And bonkers of Whatever’s Paying Us Stadium. Cubbies, change your jerseys to aqua.
Name another blame: a farm animal, or yourselves?

Check out the other two after the jump.

The talented artist and my childhood friend Venessa Monokian and I will be putting together a zine as part of a project for the Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Main Library. The library system around these parts is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year (congrats!). In honor of this momentous occasion, they’re also paying homage to the 1990s, a big ten years for the library, apparently.

Venessa and I thought it’d be neat to include you and your stories in the THL-Venessa-Liz zine. We remember the ’90s fairly well, the first half of them, at least. You also probably remember something from that strange, tacky, opulent decade that you want to share with the world. Maybe it was losing your virginity or losing your first tooth. Perhaps it was innocently dancing to Paula Abdul, or maybe it was giving it to Paula Abdul. Either way, we’re open to your memories.

If you can, want to, or feel obligated to send us stories and pictures and stuff, just shoot us an email at mail@theheatlightning.com. Your tale will then likely be immortalized at the Enter the Nineties exhibition (on display in the Main Library from June 16 through September 13). It would be extremely radical of you.

Yaddyra Peralta will be reading at O, Miami’s finale reading on April 30 at 7:00 p.m. at the New World Center. The Mexican poet Carla Faesler is opening for W.S. Merwin’s, and Yaddyra will be reading English translations of her Spanish poems onstage.

TWO POSTCARDS FROM MIAMI

one:

A centipede in the shower this morning! Oh, the translucent antennae leading this writhing intrusivness into my air. You would have marveled at the distance it traveled from the yard and through the kitchen “Such tenacity,” you would have said: four-inch body over twenty-five feet, a pilgrimage no matter how many legs.

two:

On our wall-too-wall carpets and ceramic tile, we forget the palimpsest we stand on, the ancient seabeds and broken arrowheads. The centipede is back, like a pulsing messenger from the dead. If you ever find one, forgo your first instinct to crush it. Gather it gently onto a newspaper or dustpan. Walk it back outside, feel yourself grow lighter with each subsequent step.