This small volume of brief short stories smashes against any theory that short short stories are not great fiction. Awkward 2 – Brevity fills itself with short stories that run the gamut from crime to bald-faced imagination. Within only 104 pages, this volume is crammed with great short stories and fast-paced and compressed short story writing. They say that poetry remains the compression of thoughts into the smallest amount of words possible; in this manner, the authors of Brevity 2 present short stories that are small microcosms of reality – and unreality. Since I am a lover of fiction, I appreciated the pop-zang effect of creating an imaginary tableau in 1,500 words or less. Short stories have a beginning, middle and end, and to produce a powerful short story in this amount of words shows great intensity and talent.

You can read the whole review right here.

And you can buy the book right here.

In fact, whether pensive or inventive, there’s a surprise or two in every package – practically every 33 of the micro-short stories – economically bubbling over the bounds of Awkward Two's one hundred pages. An array of subject matter, themes, styles, tones, and characters are represented. Don’t like one story in this mostly hit, some miss, affair? Turn a page or two, flip on through – there’s another, and another…

You can read the whole review right here.

And you can (and should) buy a copy of the book right here.

Before we started doing the Meet the Writers pieces, I had never heard of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. But after Rachel Lieberman and John Harrower both mentioned it as a book that blew their minds, I had to check it out. My introduction to House of Leaves is exactly as it should be ... you want to imagine this book as a grungy, undiscovered masterpiece that one of your friends found mysteriously deposited on his doorstep and passed on to you. The fictionalized jacket copy confirms that this is exactly how Danielewski was hoping you would discover the book ... as opposed to going into it fully conscious of the plot and the critical reception. I'm sure I'd be just as captivated if I had read extensive press on it before picking the book up, but it's an extra bonus to have no preconceived notions.

I'd like to sustain this feeling throughout the rest of the book, so I'm not planning on reading anything about it before I finish. I'd suggest you buy it immediately and do the same. I'll only tell you this: it is very, very scary. It is dense, but in a very captivating way. It makes Infinite Jest seem like a lark. I don't know anything about Danielewski, but from what I can gather through the book, he isn't just a great writer: he is language. Where other people see images, Danielewski sees words. And then he just plucks them from the air and puts them on paper. I can't tell you the last time I've felt like blowing off everything in my life and reading a book, but that is exactly how I'm feeling right now about House of Leaves. Absolutely essential reading.

That being said, now that we have this lovely new website, I think it's probably a pretty smart idea to try and fill it with something. And what better thing for a publishing house's website than book reviews? Answer: no better. There is no better thing.

I picked up a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at BEA last year, the big annual publishing trade show. The editor's note on the back described it as an "international sensation." I like international sensations, and books are free like magical candy at the BEA, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Then I read that it was the author's first book and he died right after delivering the manuscript to his publisher. And everyone knows that people who die are usually the best authors, so, duh.

The story, in brief: Mikael Blomqvist, founder of Swedish investigative news magazine Millennium, is sentenced to jail for writing a slanderous article about some high-powered executive dude named Wennerstrom. Only it wasn't really slanderous, Blomqvist was just set up. Apparently in Sweden you can choose when you go to jail, 'cause Blomqvist dorks around for a few months after the trial, getting involved with another high-powered executive named Henrik Vanger. Henrik tells Blomqvist he'll help him bring Wennerstrom down if he can figure out what happened to his niece Harriet, who has been missing for 30 years.

Meanwhile, back in Stockholm, Lisbeth Salander is slaving away as a researcher for a private investigation firm. Lisbeth is a wormsy goth girl who is able to find out anything about anybody. She was a troubled kid, and everyone always assumed she was retarded -- like, literally retarded -- until she met the head of the private security firm who discovered that she was a secret genius.

So Blomqvist works on the Vanger case and goes to jail for awhile and then eventually he meets Salander and they work together and then some really horrible shit happens and then all the mysteries are solved and everyone pretty much gets what he or she deserves. The end.

Here's my main problem with the book ... MAN did it need to be chopped down. I guess when someone dies it means you're no longer allowed to correct his work, because I sure can't for the life of me think of another reason to let someone draggle on as long as this Larsson fellow draggles. Here's a typical completely useless passage that I just found on the first page I opened to:

By the time Berger left Hedeby [the town where Blomqvist lives for much of the book] on Sunday, Blomqvist was still so annoyed with Vanger that he did not want to risk running into either him or any other member of his clan. Instead, on Monday he took the bus into Hedestad and spent the afternoon walking in the town, visiting the library, and drinking coffee in a bakery. In the evening he went to the cinema to see The Lord of the Rings, which he had never before had time to see. He thought that orcs, unlike human beings, were simple and uncomplicated creatures.

He ended his outing at McDonald's in Hedestad and caught the last bus to Hedeby. He made coffee, took out a binder, and sat at the kitchen table. He read until 4:00 in the morning.

I mean, right? Spoiler alert: orcs do not ever figure into the plot again.

Easily half of the book is composed of totally unnecessary information like this. Now, if the book were about a real person who was actually working on a real case, maybe I'd have a better tolerance for the amount of detail. But this is a fake person, and no, he did not take out his binder and sit at a kitchen table and read because he did not ever really exist. I don't want to read about a person reading. Here is my edited version of this passage:

Berger was annoyed at Vangar so he went to Hedestad where he thought about how awesome orcs are and then he came back and dicked around way too late.

And okay, I only saw Lord of the Rings once, but I sure don't remember orcs being the driving narrative force behind that flick. If he walked away thinking that the evil eye in the sky looked like a vagina, that might have been interesting, because it totally did and also Lord of the Rings is more homoerotic than Brokeback Mountain. Orcs? Not so much.

But besides that, the story was interesting and I actually managed to whip through all 500 pages in less than three weeks, which is like running a book marathon for me. The characters were unique and believable and the mystery at the center of the novel came to a slightly-ludicrous-but-otherwise-intriguing conclusion. If they ever chop the length down to 250 pages, it might be a 6 pizza treat, but as it stands, I give it:

3 pizzas out of a possible delicious 6.

Oh and yes, here at Awkward, we rate things on the scale of pizzas which I just made up.