This is the fourteenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one American, or maybe it’s that I’m revising a story about cannibals that try to stop being cannibals after a little loving contact with a group of Europeans, I don’t know. But communicaton seems all the rage these days.

It’s a strange thing. We read so much fiction by authors who were ostracized in their youths and who write about ostracized characters, yet it seems especially true in stories that people need people to talk to. (Unless you like those stories with only one character–I generally don’t.) This doesn’t necessarily mean people really get to communicate, but it means they’re trying. I re-read Carver’s Cathedral recently, and what struck me about the collection is how much more grace seems offered to the characters than in his earlier stories, and how that grace comes through finding someone to communicate with. I don’t mean to say these stories are better–I actually prefer the earlier ones–but stories like “Fever” and “A Small, Good Thing” allow characters to connect in a way that some of the earlier stories don’t. This seems to give the book a more hopeful take on life.

So, since I’m in a hopeful mood, full of Christmas spirit and eggnog, I think I’ll give my cannibals a chance to connect . . . just before they eat each other. I guess what I meant to talk about was how giving your protagonist someone who will listen to him can be a great thing for fiction, but oh well. Instead, I’ll recommend some recent lit mag releases (shameless plugs and more!): Redivider, MAR, Black Warrior Review’s sad animal issue. Read.

The end of the year approaches, and with it, the closing of Fringe’s 25 Books Poll.

In a nutshell, we were appalled that the New York Times top 25 list included only 2 women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list. We vowed to make our own list, where the public could qualify to vote by reading two or more books from our pool.

We still want to hear from you about the books you read from the pool, and which novels of the last 25 years changed your outlook, inspired you, or moved you to tears.

The polls close on January 1, so you only have 2 more weeks to sound off and let us know what you think.

Click here to read about the project.

Clear here to VOTE.

Not sure what book to read next? Click here for a list of Fringe Reviews.

Okay, I know. I wrote my review of The History of Love and gushed about it, and now you’re all going to think that I only write gushy reviews. But here’s the thing…this book *really* made me think about who I am and where I am going, and who I want to be as a woman, a wife, a soon-to-be-mother, a daughter, and a human.

I didn’t always like Paulo Coehlo’s work. I tried to read The Alchemist in college and the novel just didn’t do it for me. But a friend recommended Veronika Decides to Die to me while a loved one was in the hospital for depression and I was struggling to understand what might be happening in there, and ever since, Coehlo has been one of my obsessions.

When I picked up The Witch of Portobello, I didn’t know quite what to expect. The synopsis said “How do we find the courage to always be true to ourselves—even if we are unsure of whom we are? That is the central question of international bestselling author Paulo Coehlo’s profound new work…”

“Oh. Profound,” said the skeptic in me. “We’ll just see about that.”

But all I know is this…the protagonist of the book, Athena, follows a winding path to enlightenment in the form of a female deity. And along the way she struggles to transcend society’s expectations of her. The book is about the power that everyone has to find their own spirituality and fight against the norm. And in spite of myself, the novel made me feel able to make my own decisions, both practical and spiritual.

Coehlo uses a number of narrators to flesh out Athena’s story, and these differing perspectives add a real depth to the story line. As a reader, you like some narrators and dislike others, which gives you the ability to take what you like from each and leave the rest, creating your own picture of Athena as you go.

This is a book to be read slowly and with a great deal of self-reflection. It’s not a breezy beach vacation read, but it’s worth the work. It’s a book about soul, so get ready to grapple with your own.

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can tell from page one whether the story is going to be good or not at least 90 percent of the time. So print this out, crumple it up, and eat it–that’s supposed to work for memory. Three simple rules:

1. do something new.
2. start the story arc.
3. write a brilliant sentence.

Why? Because (1) editors are sleepy and they’ve probably already read 20 stories by the time they get to yours, (2) the most tiring thing in the world–more tiring than Thanksgiving–is waiting for a story to begin, and (3) the editor carefully reading your opening sentences should be given a reason to continue doing so. I think if I don’t get two of these three things in the first page, the monster under my bed ends up finishing the story. He likes to eat paper too, but not for memory. He likes it because “it tastes like smart.”

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) Well, Marquez relates this being-left-behind to expatriation and isolation. Sounds heady, I know, but as a minority and an adoptee, isolation is all up in my writing’s business, so I thought I’d talk about it. I thought I’d talk about setting as well, so be prepared for the following mess.

So here’s what I’m thinking. Sure, Marquez uses the unfamiliarity of the setting to isolate his characters. Why not? They’re pilgrims, after all. But when they really feel isolated is when they run into things that should be familiar to them but aren’t. Like when the Prez in the opening story runs into people from his home country who lie to him about their motives.

Marquez also uses the ole pathetic fallacy, where the Prez’s thoughts are mirrored by the weather and place. This is okay if you’re going for the magical realism thing. Yet what is it Charles Baxter says about the pathetic fallacy–that a setting can be stronger when it doesn’t rely on the character? I think there’s something damn good to say for that. The character should experience isolation in spite of what’s around him. I’m just saying, it gets a little tiresome to see rain when someone’s sad, sunshine when happy, no one around when the character feels lonely. Why not let your characters feel lonely when they probably shouldn’t? It’s more lonely when you’re sitting next to someone and still feel alone.

Depressing and serious. I’ll try for something more ridiculous in my next post, I promise. Let’s just say my dreams are about dinosaurs and The Paris Review. Don’t ask.

This year, for the second time in my writing life, I thought about participating in Nanowrimo.

When I did Nano before, in 2003, I wrote an awful 50,000 word genre novel. I didn’t pretend it was serious work, but I was proud of the accomplishment. There’s something intimidating about a novel–all that time, and all those words, namely–and in a month I had created one.

This year, working upwards of 60 hours a week, Nano just doesn’t seem feasible, at least if you are also trying to get some sleep.

While I spent the last week of October stressing about logistics–Could I do it? How would I carve the time out of my schedule to write? What shape would the novel I had in mind take, and how would I link its disparate pieces together?–I allowed an even larger, scarier question to form in my mind.

Was it still the best way to get my writing out there? Is the novel, in our current society, a valuable product? Is it the best use of my time, of my reach? Hardly new ideas, I know. While we’ve all been talking about print culture being dead and how no one ever buys novels anymore, we’re still waiting for the rise of e-books and their ilk, and we may wait a while more.

About a month ago I was sending out a piece of flash fiction to online journals. I’d worked over the piece and was fairly happy with it, but couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t “worth” sending out to print journals. I submitted the piece to over a dozen journals and within four days it was accepted. I’m not saying this to brag, but because the experience was just so shocking. Another writer in my writers’ group, Jamey Genna, shared that she’s also been getting a lot of flash fiction placed recently. There seems to be an energy around the form that isn’t present around longer stories. What we want to hear, what we have time and space to hear, is it changing? Where do you read, and what do you read? If what we are after as writers is to affect other people, or to get out stories out there, how do we make the novel relevant and critical, and not an artifact?

This time, these questions are coming out of my experience as a blogger. Some time back I started an anonymous food-writer blog (and subsequently became un-anonymous), and while it’s audience is not large by any means I do have some readers, many of whom are also in the culinary industry. An old Emerson professor of mine Pamela Painter always stressed the importance of giving your characters a good, unusual job because the wealth of useable details was such a gift to your story. By becoming a pastry cook halfway through my course in Emerson’s MFA program I essentially gifted myself. While there are many food blogs out there in the blogosphere, the voice of the chef is still rare.

As inimitable Bay Area pastry chef/writer Shuna Lydon wrote in a guest-post on writer Michael Ruhlman’s blog, what it means to be a chef is still a story largely created not by us, the people in the kitchen. What really happens behind those doors is not Top Chef and it’s not represented accurately. I have a unique story to tell now, and I have a voice that tells mostly true stories, and I have learned a little something along the way about appropriate content.

Chef culture finds its way into my fiction, and this Nano novel that I wanted to write would have taken chef culture as its focus. But it seemed more important to blog. To write flash fiction. The food blogging sphere is being mined for book deals. Maybe you’ve heard of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, but do you know Gluten-Free Girl? Confessions of a Restaurant Whore? Conversely, authors such as Maryusa Bociurkiw, whose novel Comfort Food for Breakups is by turn both funny and wrenching, are turning to blogging as a promotional tool once the novel is published.

There are different kinds of stories we tell in blogging and in print. There is an immediacy at play in blog posts that does not translate well to the slow pace of fiction. But somehow, as I’ve let a part of my writing work be through blogging–and writing about the work I do, in which the voices of women and of queers are hardly well represented–is informing and changing the writer’s work I do. Blogging is no longer a sidebar to my work. It is part of my writing identity. Perhaps, troublingly at times, the most important and far-reaching part.

Here at Fringe, we love novels, writers of color, and women writers (along with a whole lot of other things like feminism, culture, and judging from our blog tags, more feminism). That’s why the New York Times’ list of the Best 25 Novels of the Last 25 Years made us sad. (As the Guerilla Girls might say, “Hormone Imbalanced! Melanin Deficient!”)

So we launched the 25 Books Project…and now we need to hear from YOU.

To vote, you must have read 2 or more books from the Pool, which we’ve been reviewing on this blog. For each additional book you’ve read, you get an additional vote, up to five.

All votes are write-in — the only parameters are the ones set by the NYT list — only novels by American writers written since 1981 are eligible.

Vote here soon — the polls will close at the end of this year!

This is the twelfth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.

Dorothy Allison’s devastating novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was the last fiction book I read before entering journalism school. The day I started reading it, two different strangers on the train came up to me and said, “that’s a really good book,” and Bastard delivered.

The novel falls into the Bildungsroman category, following Ruth Ann Boatwright, nicknamed “Bone,” who, like the author, was born to a 15-year-old unmarried waitress in South Carolina. The first person voice is compelling and takes the reader inside poor white rural culture.

Although the novel is about abuse, Alison writes against stereotype, keeping Bone’s pedophiliac stepfather, Daddy Glen, looming ominously in the background for most of the book, which keeps the story from lapsing into the sentimental. This authorial choice makes the subject of the book Bone’s early life, rather than the abuse, which shapes, but does not define her.

Due to the subject matter, it’s not the easiest read, but the passion of this book makes its unpleasantness well worth it.

This is the eleventh of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project.

Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel runs each of its engines at full capacity. It is completely intelligent, completely feminist, completely hilarious, completely furious, completely compassionate, and it does the whole thing inside out. It is an exhausting book. It is worth the effort, and then you will force it on your friends.

This is a story of the rebirth of the straight white middle-class American feminist, written in the mid-1980s, and it takes place in Buffalo. It is dated, but to a feminist era and type I feel unlived nostalgia for: there’s a Midwest-runaway New Yorkiness about this sarcastic, corny, male-affectionate, DIY feminism; little bits Gilda Radner and Silver Palate Cookbook. Characters are tortured by middle-class feminist questions like, does it bring me pleasure to serve others? I say this without mockery. It’s a good, often hushed question.

Heartbreak Hotel is intentionally written to be diffuse, not like those, ahem, linear books you’re used to reading, and it has the guts to create two-dimensional characters and give each a voice, and through jokes, compassion, and a series of haunting witness-bearing litanies, resurrect the squashed third dimensions. Six women, each a type you’ll recognize, live in a house attached to the Museum of the Revolution, in which they all work. They’re resting, because they’re all burned out from their roles. The Museum’s humpbacked curator is in a coma, and they must decide whether or not to save her; also, Buffalo wants to close the Museum.

I quit; it’s impossible to explain the plot without sounding ridiculous. The book is a joyride. If you made it this far, you’re gonna love it.

Katie Spencer graduated from Skidmore College in 2004 and is tiptoeing toward a master’s degree at Emerson. She spends most of her time in the kitchen, and likes to walk around with a cat on her head.