The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026) by Ken Liu

 Audiobook Review

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026)

by Ken Liu

   I'm a Ken Liu fan, if only because my guy doesn't respect high/low genre boundaries and he is committed to putting out work. I'm firmly ANTI the romantic ideal of the artist/visionary who can only produce under the influence of inspiration.  I'd rather take someone who puts out new product on a regular basis, even if that means working in areas that are more product than art.  I also like that Liu, unlike many writers of literary fiction has actually done something in his life besides write and teach. It's a subject that is rarely addressed in the world of literary fiction but screams out every week from the pages of the New York Times Review- for most writers of literary fiction, their biggest real-life achievement is either getting a full-time teaching position or a graduate degree... in creative writing.

  Specifically, I like this work in the field of "hard" science fiction. Regrettably, this collection sees him dabbling in genres like magical realism (the title story) and steampunk.  Part of the issue with this part of Liu's bibliography is that I never read his four-volume set, The Dandelion Dynasty- I just can't with the world-building fantasy. Like any collection of genre short fiction, there are hits and misses.  I thought the best stories in here were the two that had a cosmic point of view.  There is no theme more interesting to me in the realm of hard science fiction as the nature of time. Timekeeper's Symphony- which is just about time with no plot or characters, and Cosmic Spring, about a sentient spaceship living through the end of the universe, were the stand-out stories for me. 

The Hawkline Monster (1974) by Richard Brautigan

 Audiobook Review

The Hawkline Monster (1974)

by Richard Brautigan

       Richard Brautigan's literary career is a real rags-to-riches-to-drinking yourself to death 20th century tale.  Brautigan started out as a Bay Area poet publishing at the end of the 1950's to little critical or commercial acclaim. He struck mass-market and critical success at the exact same time with his back-to-back novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar in 1967 and 1968.  Brautigan was well positioned to capitalize on the aftermath of the summer of love with an already established publishing history (and publisher).  Unfortunately, the zeitgeist moved on and Brautigan, like many of the artists who achieved popular success in the 60's and post-60's era, faced questions of authenticity and relevance, and his commercial success guaranteed that critics would abound.  His two hits set him up, but he never stopped publishing.

   I heard about The Hawkline Monster from a random Instagram account which featured a slide show of alt-westerns.  I was intrigued, and became more intrigued when I saw that someone had made an Audiobook for this 1974 novel for the first time in 2016.  Anyway, I listened to the Audiobook via the Libby library app and I liked that the whole run time was four hours (216 pages long in print).  Listening to the Audiobook, it seemed like maybe history (and certainly contemporary critics) had been a little cruel to Brautigan- I went and read the New York Times review for the print edition and it was kill yourself awful.   I can see a real direct connection between the tail end of the hippy period- which was dismissed, as this novel was dismissed, as silly and inconsequential, and some of the thematic preoccupations of postmodernist, who were already well underway in the mid 1970's. 

  There seems to be a parallel to the way that disco music was written out of the history of electronic music because it wasn't cool, even though it was undoubtedly electronic music. 

Clay's Quilt (2001) by Silas House

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clay's Quilt (2001)

by Silas House

Free Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 14/16

  I actually heard about Silas House before I started reading Clay's Quilt- from my girlfriend who keeps in touch with the Tyler Childers led contemporary music scene- House directed a recent Grammy nominated video of a song by Childers I think Silas House was made the official poet of Kentucky or something like that which is cool because he is LGBT and Kentucky is... Kentucky.  I'd actually have to say that Kentucky seems to me, on the basis of the books from this chapter, maybe the most intellectually interesting place on the map since I left New York.  

   

   Clay's Quilt was House's first novel.   Since then, he's kept up an impressive resume both as an academic, where he is a teacher at Berea College, author (five novels and an equal number of collections of poetry) and public intellectual.   He's won some regional prizes but hasn't really broken out nationally, which I guess is why I hadn't known about him.  He's a good example of why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project makes sense, introducing the reader to authors they may have missed. 

  Clay's Quilt is about Clay, an orphan child of a West Virginia mountain woman who is murdered by her vengeful ex when Clay is an infant.  I expected the quilt to play a bigger role given the name of the book, but it doesn't really work out that way.  Nor, for that matter, is Clay's Quilt about LGBT issues. Rather, it tells the story of Clay, a happy-go-lucky coal miner, who meets and marries a woman who plays a mean fiddle and has a nasty ex-husband.  

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010) by Glenn Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010)

by Glenn Taylor

Huntington, West Virginia

West Virginia: 1/10

    Of all the state thus far in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, West Virginia is a tie for last place in terms of my personal encounters with the state (Alongside Delaware (train ride through only), North Carolina (drove through only), South Carolina (no contact), Alabama (no contact), Kentucky (no contact) and Florida (flight lay over only).  The closest I've ever come was in college, when some friends of mine went to a college football game in West Virginia (driving from Washington DC.) They described a wild time, but it sounded like a pretty standard "big game" in a college town atmosphere to my college self. 

    These days, the only thing West Viriginia is likely to evoke in the national psyche is the lyric from the John Denver song, coal mining and opiate addiction.  Culturally, I'm expecting lots of continuity with the Kentucky chapter and The Marrowbone Marble Company seemed like a book that could have just as easily been set in Kentucky as it was in West Virginia.   I enjoyed the ambition of this book and author Glenn Taylor, about a man who comes back from World War II with questions about the unspoken rules of West Virginia life.  He marries the spinster-adjascent daughter of the owner of the glass factory where he works (Taylor uses the phrase "glass man" about a million times in the 300 pages of this book), reconciles with his long-lost hillbilly relatives who resides in a holler, and goes about building a marble factory.  I'm talking children's marbles here- which is something I didn't fully grasp until I was actually reading the book- I thought it was going to be some kind of quarry operation.

  Conflict comes from the judgments of "outsiders" who dislike the racially mixed, communal aspects of the protagonists' vision. There is also support, and Taylor does a good job situating the action in the national tide of integrationist activity in the1960's.   Certainly, The Marrobone Marble Company made a welcome respite from the standard sad, realist -girl/woman fare centered of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.