{"id":3876,"date":"2016-01-02T08:43:03","date_gmt":"2016-01-02T15:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/i81.a52.mywebsitetransfer.com\/?p=3876"},"modified":"2017-08-07T19:15:04","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T02:15:04","slug":"final-nominations-for-dactyl-foundation%e2%80%99s-2015-literary-fiction-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dactylfoundation.org\/?p=3876","title":{"rendered":"Final nominations for Dactyl Foundation\u2019s 2015 Literary Fiction Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last two weeks of the year, Dactyl reviewers posted seven excellent reviews of some very fine works of fiction. Thanks to all those who participated in Dactyl Review <\/em>in 2015.<\/p>\n

\"seaofhooks\"Sea of Hooks<\/em> by Lindsay Hill
\nPosted on December 31, 2015<\/p>\n

Lindsay Hill casts a magician\u2019s spell across his Sea of Hooks (McPherson, 348 pages). On the surface his world is rendered in bright pixels of quivering light, while underneath a seamless narrative undercurrent pulls us into the mysterious depths of experience. For the reader willing to dive under, this journey is unforgettable.<\/p>\n

Sea of Hooks<\/em> is, on the one hand, a fiercely original Bildungsroman set in San Francisco in the 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s. Christopher is an overly imaginative boy, part Holden Caulfield and part Little Lame Prince, who lives in precarious affluence in a darkish Victorian on the edge of Pacific Heights. His delicate, high-strung mother is obsessed with Japanese culture and dead by suicide in the first paragraph. Dad works in finance on the Pacific Stock exchange, until he doesn\u2019t anymore. There are prep schools, bridge games, Dickensian neighbors like the wise and wonderful Dr. Thorn; along with house fires, a very nasty tutor\/pederast from Stanford, a trip to Bhutan and encounters with Buddhist monks. Hill\u2019s rich prose makes us feel Christopher is someone we have always known, a boy who lives in a house we have been to, whose eccentric mother we\u2019ve had tea with, whose city we are walking in. Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n

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\"coverThis Earth You\u2019ll Come Back To<\/em> by Barbara Roether
\nPosted on December 30, 2015<\/p>\n

This vivid, lyrical, character and place-based story (McPherson, 250 pages) begins with Rose Healy Koehner\u2019s youngest daughter, Stephanie, searching a rural Ohio cemetery for Rose\u2019s grave in 2008 while the deceased Rose watches from above and embarks on her life\u2019s story told in the first person. The prickly, fondly contentious, mother-daughter relationship is apparent from the start in the underlying current of criticism that Rose levels at her daughter:<\/p>\n

“Course you couldn\u2019t find it right away\u2026You should have used the sense God gave you and asked your brother\u2026Why you always insist on making things hard for yourself I\u2019ll never know; but it\u2019s just like you to take a simple errand and turn it into a full-blown crusader pilgrimage.”<\/p>\n

Stephanie, the youngest daughter of Rose\u2019s ten children, has returned home after decades of wanderings, having run away at an early age, in part as a result of abuse that her family refused to confront. Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n

\"emma\"Emma Who Saved My Life<\/em> by Wilton Barnhardt
\nPosted on December 28, 2015<\/p>\n

Every once in a while a reviewer receives a book he puts on the shelf and just wishes it would go away. Emma Who Saved My Life<\/em> (St Martin\u2019s, 496 pages) is that kind of book.<\/p>\n

Cursed with what is arguable the worst title ever given a novel ( and double-cursed with a depressingly ugly dust jacket), it had press releases that touted it with superlatives that would make Gore Vidal blush. It\u2019s in the fist person and has one of those woesome post-adolescent narrators. Worse, it\u2019s a first novel by a guy named Wilton who is at Oxford working on a doctoral thesis about Henry James.<\/p>\n

Eventually I opened it and started reading with a promise to break off after the first chapter (or 10 minutes) and go mow the lawn. When I reached Page 75 I realized that I hadn\u2019t been counting either chapters or time but was totally caught up in this stunning, witty story of a young man\u2019s attempt to become a New York actor.Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n

\"isaac\"Isaac: A Modern Fable<\/em> by Ivan G. Goldman
\nPosted on December 27, 2015<\/p>\n

How should we suppose poor Isaac felt \u2014 son of a father all-too-willing to sacrifice him at the suggestion of some voice in his head? Christians are wont to overlook the obvious horror and absurdity of the Biblical tale. According to some (less awful) Jewish interpretations of events, it was perhaps Satan, as an agent of God, who spoke to Abraham, which would make more sense to those who imagine God to be not quite so sadistic.\u00a0 Either way though, what kind of man would this traumatized son become?\u00a0 In Isaac: A Modern Fable<\/em> (Permanent, 223 pages), Ivan G. Goldman has arranged it so that Isaac, after the mishap at the altar, has been granted the gift of eternal youth. The identity of benefactor is not clear; the gift may be from Satan or from Jehovah. Isaac himself has never been able to decide, as his immortality and eternal youth often seem to him like a curse.<\/p>\n

Goldman\u2019s Isaac has spent a couple thousand years bouncing around from identity to identity, never amounting to much, despite his miraculous powers of longevity. Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n

\"deadwomanhollow\"Dead Woman Hollow<\/em> by Kass Fleischer
\nPosted on December 19, 2015<\/p>\n

In these Instagram days it seems any book can find itself tagged a #ForgottenClassic a little more than an hour after its published, and so the best books have to await the time when we find them, just beyond the nearest rise, waiting for us when we get to them. Kass Fleisher\u2019s Dead Woman Hollow<\/em> (SUNY Excelsior Editions, 194 pages) is one of the latter, a book for the ages, published just short of four years ago as I write, a historical novel in three parts and with two intermezzos, titled \u201cBefore\u201d and \u201cAfter\u201d respectively and perhaps unsurprising. But that\u2019s all that\u2019s unsurprising about this tightly woven, triple-stranded, tragic yet transcendent, even triumphant, ages-of-women chronicle set in the mountains of twentieth century Appalachian Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a hard book to describe though an easy, and compelling, read. NPR luminary and poet Andrei Codrescu describes it as \u201ctak[ing] its place alongside True Grit, My Antonia, and Deliverance,\u201d a list that will strike the careful observer as taking a bloody turn at the end.Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n

\"wanderer\"Wanderer Springs<\/em> by Robert Flynn
\nPosted on December 13, 2015<\/p>\n

Up in that part of state just east of the Cap Rock, south of the Red River and west and north of Wichita Falls is a region of the country the residents continue to call \u201cEast Texas,\u201d although, even at 70 mph it is hours from Amarillo, Lubbock or Spur, a half-day from San Angelo and Odessa, and a long, hard, hot day from Ozona or El Paso.<\/p>\n

It is a part of the country that rhetorician Jim Cordon once called \u201cterra incognito,\u201d forgotten by most of Texas, ignored by everyone else. It is a hard land, filled with rattlesnakes, mesquite, winters that freeze livestock and people, summers that dry the ground so hard it cracks.<\/p>\n

It is an area where sandstorms, \u201cblue northers,\u201d tornadoes, floods, droughts, insects and wild animals are the norm, and where the greatest accomplishment many folks can boast about is their ability to seek prosperity in an environment that is at its best inhospitable and at its worst hostile.\u00a0Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n

\"californiarush\"California Rush<\/em> by Sherwood Kiraly
\nPosted on December 11, 2015<\/p>\n

Ted Williams once said that the hardest thing in the world was to hit a baseball with a bat. The second hardest thing, he continued, was to throw baseball where a batter couldn\u2019t hit it with a bat.<\/p>\n

Williams might have added that the third hardest thing to do is to write an original novel about baseball. Oh, it\u2019s been done. But for every home run such as Ron Hays\u2019 The Dixie Association<\/em> or Ray Kinsella\u2019s Field of Dreams<\/em>, for every Bull Durham<\/em> and The Natural<\/em>, for every book by Ring Lardner, Jim Bouton and Lawrence Ritter, there are volumes of strikeouts. Continue reading<\/a> \u2192<\/p>\n