Román Leão

Category: Reviews

  • What He’s Poised to Do: Stories—Ben Greenman

    Ben Greenman’s wistful collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do, begins at a remove. For a book that both posits and ponders the importance of interpersonal communication, Greenman chooses to keep readers at arm’s length—at least until he’s gotten to know you better. His use of characters identified only by third-person pronouns in the title piece underlines the faceless isolation that an unhappy businessman out on the road feels as he engages in a cool affair with a woman who works at his hotel.

    There is an echo of the relationship between Lydia and Ricardo Reis in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in that even within an ongoing carnal relationship, Greenman’s guest remains alienated from everyone to a debilitating extent. The businessman’s one remaining open conduit of exchange is the series of postcards he writes the woman, his wife, and his son. Even this method of expressing his feelings stumps him at the end of the story, revealing that Greenman’s title is, if not ironic, then overly optimistic.

    “He sits down at the desk, finds a pen, and holds it over a postcard, uncertain exactly what he’s poised to do.”

    Greenman underscores this theme throughout the collection by postmarking the first page of each story, indicating the date and place from which it was sent. Even a cursory glance at the contents page gives the reader a pretty good idea of the breadth of Greenman’s stages for his universal passion play; settings range from North Africa, in 1851, to Atlanta, in 2015, and everywhere (and when) in between—including the imagined Lunar City, in 1989, and the confounding Australindia, in 1921.

    One standout piece, To Kill the Pink, is written from Harlem in 1964 at a time when both racial and personal boundaries were burning. Greenman writes as an African-American man who, after a tragic incident, decides to travel to Malawi to better understand his heritage and the extraordinary woman he loves. When he asks her how a “twenty-four-year-old black girl who’s never been out of New York City” knows so much about the world, she replies, “I always paid attention… while you were busy studying the human comedy, I was trying to figure out the human drama.”

    “You’re the sad mask; I’m the happy mask,” he answers. “Takes both of us to put on a play.”

    While Greenman’s gift for whimsy does surface from time-to-time, owing perhaps to the impossibility to cage such a formidable beast, he is wearing his sad mask for much of What He’s Poised to Do.

    “I write often about sadness and loneliness … the only cure, I think, is intimacy,” Greenman writes in About the Author, “which is what the people in my stories are struggling to achieve.”

    It is telling that Greenman’s stories revolve around written correspondence, a form of communication quite possibly in danger of becoming archaic. How will future generations understand us, or how will we ultimately understand ourselves, if our written interactions diminish to texts scattered on the digital wind?

    If there is a lesson to be had from this book, it’s this: Go write a letter to someone you love.

    Also by this author:
    Superworse

  • The Time Machine Did It—John Swartzwelder

    After receiving this slim volume as a gift, I devoured it in one day—laughing my butt off throughout. As the cover so discreetly points out (this fact and the title are the only elements on the front of the book), Swartzwelder is better known as the author of 59 episodes of The Simpsons. The same twisted sense of humor that made the Swartzwelder years so hilarious is in full effect here.

    Pretty much everything you need to know is right there on that minimalist cover: there is going to be a time machine involved, and Swartzwelder has proven himself to be a very twisted individual. 59 times, in fact.

    The antics of Frank Burly, the world’s stupidest private investigator, found me searching for my Simpsons guide to see who penned “Time and Punishment,” the Treehouse of Horror episode where Homer inadvertently builds a time machine while trying to fix the toaster.

    It wasn’t Swartzwelder who wrote it, and maybe this is his way of getting back for not being invited to that party. Whatever his motivation, it’s a hit, and I’m looking forward to cracking open the next episode… ’erm, book.

  • Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch & the Beat Generation—Aram Saroyan

    At the behest of poet Ted Berrigan, a young Aram Saroyan interviewed a becalmed and nearly forgotten Jack Kerouac in 1967 for the Paris Review. Saroyan describes this meeting much later in an article for The Poetry Foundation. It is a watershed moment, one generation testing the next, and Saroyan walks away with Jack’s benediction, “You’ll do, Saroyan.”

    I doubt that Kerouac had in mind for the young writer to go forth and pen the History of the Beats, but 12 years later, Saroyan attempted just that. Perhaps the tired Kerouac recognized a comrade-in-arms, as Saroyan’s sensibilities would have fit right in with the tea-loving, electrified wordslingers of the past. His official biography for his collected papers at the University of Connecticut Libraries reads, “In the late 1960s Saroyan experimented with marijuana and began to develop a career as a poet.” Sounds about right; let’s go!

    Genesis Angels is no straight-ahead biography, but a long prose poem in its own right. Saroyan attempts to capture the feeling of the era, the mad rush toward an uncertain future and away from a stifling mid-century American mindset that had all but disappeared by the time he started his journey.

    Saroyan identifies the Eisenhower years with the monster movies that were throwing their own existential warnings up on the screens of the ’50s and early ’60s. “We were being condemned to endure a complete rescheduling of human experience: our routines no longer in any relation to the planet or the landscape or our neighbors. We had willingly locked ourselves up with comfort and convenience and suffered an immediate transformation. It was we ourselves who had become The Thing, The Blob, inside our private Houses of Wax.”

    The degree that Saroyan is successful in capturing the Beat gestalt, from the far remove of 1979, depends on how susceptible you are to that particular brand of amphetamine-driven patter. Me? I can’t get enough.

    On Jack Kerouac meeting Neal Cassidy: “Now this is where it did combust because what happened was Jack saw Neal and listened to his wild, never-get-a-word-in-edgewise, spontaneous patte… this man was a rapid, word chasing man chasing word chasing man chasing time chasing space—lookout! just like his driving—saved by exposure and the rare posture of ecstatic brotherhood.”

    On Allen Ginsburg: “Allen had the conceptual center of the universe in his belly and breath… so that then he could inhale and exhale planets, and snow storms, windows, and paper towels, Mickey Mouse and Hollywood, tits, and cocks, ambushes, and semesters, toothbrushes, and Coca-Cola—the whole litterbug earth with Indians and business man and women giving birth, inside his nature, and available.”

    Strangely absent from this cluttered stage is Welch himself. Whether outshined by the titanic personalities around him, or just a quiet guy whose poems did the speaking for him, I didn’t come away with any better sense of the man than when I started. This isn’t a deficit in research; the University of Connecticut’s Saroyan collection contains a recorded interview with Welch and David Meltzer from 1969, and Saroyan himself interviewed poet Joanne Kryger about Welch in 1977, presumably while doing research for the book.

    Perhaps the problem is that—like a total eclipse, or some other natural rarity—Welch began disappearing as soon as he appeared. You have to catch these things when they happen or you’re out of luck. Until next time.

    Saroyan best captures Welch’s spirit in a few throw away lines describing the importance of becoming a poet:

    Be a poet and save the world forever.
    And don’t forget to take a sweater.
    Put this flower in the peanut bottle with some cold water.
    It’ll be here when you get home.
    That’s the way the universe works.

  • Put on This Record: Funland—Unknown Instructors [2009]

    Shakespeare had it right. You really can’t trust anyone that doesn’t appreciate music. All of our greatest thinkers eventually seem to come to the conclusion that we are only vibrations in the great void. Call it the Big Bang Theory, call it what you will, but how could one go through life closed to the most primal and necessary form of human expression?

    Into the late spring of our discontent, like a silver dollar dropped down an outhouse shitter, the third, and most cohesive, album from Unknown Instructors—an unlikely supergroup of sorts—could just be the vital blast of L.A. punk you didn’t know the situation was calling for.

    On Funland, the planet’s premier punk rock rhythm section of Mike Watt and George Hurley consistently push each other in more and more complex jams supported by Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza playing at his most insectoid. Whereas Hurley played pretty straight-ahead on the previous album, producers Baiza, Joe Carducci, and Dan McGuire saved the most Rashied Ali-inspired grooves for its follow up.

    Recorded at the same time as 2006’s The Master’s Voice, Funland is no mere collection of second-rate tracks, but a cohesive work of art that follows a thematic surge. Of course, that theme is loose enough to include Pere Ubu’s père David Thomas (R.I.P.) wailing as if existentially wounded on Afternoon Spent at the Bar, Sunny; while elsewhere, poet Dan McGuire reprises his role as a modern-day Jim Morrison with a real penchant for language rather than just a vehicle for getting more whisky and leather pants.

    McGuire has an eye for the details of the less-than bucolic childhood that many of us aging suburban California kids can relate to. He remembers the forgotten places, the weed-strewn empty lots, and trampled-down hurricane fences, but he’s not the only poet on deck.

    Whereas Voice was a hard-charger right out of the gate with the swirling Swarm, the opening salvo on Funland is Maji Yabai—Japanese slang originally meaning something like, “Oh, shit,” and morphing in recent years into something like “sick” or “bad,” but in a good way—an introspective Watt-spiel.

    This paints the scene in a peculiar midway twilight. The unmerciful heat of the summer sun has finally abated and that belly full of PBR and corndogs isn’t going to hold you. It’s time to make some decisions. As the buzz threatens to loosen its grip, you can opt to reinforce with another semi-cold one, or pop out to the car for something stronger.

    Funland’s hard stuff includes a cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Frownland, welding its odd gravitas to the album’s own weird sense of bacchanalian carny freedom. In addition to Thomas’s unique contributions, artist Raymond Pettibon’s unexpected jazz-influenced rap on Lead! proves that his take on Voice’s Twing-Twang wasn’t just an anomalous laugh.

    Pettibon has a surprisingly direct and, dare I say it, swinging delivery that may just cause me to rethink my idea of him as a quiet, misanthropic artist; or someone you might meet working the ring toss. It’s good to remember not to confuse the artist with his art.

    Funland is all about pushing the boundaries of what you think you know about these musicians, and like the famous Tilt-A-Whirl, if you don’t hurl, you just might have the time of your life.

  • Put on This Record: Blows Against the Empire—Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship [1970]

    Credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship before there was such a thing, Blows Against the Empire remains one of my all-time favorite albums, the centerpiece to the Planet Earth Rock ’n’ Roll Orchestra (PERRO) experience, itself a loose (very loose) confederation of Bay Area musicians that cross-pollinated David Crosby’s masterful If I Could Only Remember My Name, as well as Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s first solo project, Garcia, the first eponymous Graham Nash/David Crosby record, and Nash’s own Songs for Beginners.

    If that heady company doesn’t given you an idea of what’s going on here, Kantner provides some insightful notes along with the 2005 remastered Legacy release. By the end of the ’60s, Kantner’s band Jefferson Airplane had begun to come apart at the seams. After recording their seminal album, Volunteers, in 1969 and watching as the hippie dream was beaten to death with pool cues by the Hells Angels at Altamont, the center could not hold.

    Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady had recently become more interested in their side project, Hot Tuna, and Marty Balin, perhaps tired of being arrested and/or punched in the head for a while, had disappeared—leaving Kantner to indulge his space fantasies at Wally Heider’s Studio in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. That’s where the story gets interesting.

    Kantner soon enlisted Grace Slick to help him sketch out some demos for the next Airplane album. According to Kantner’s notes, Slick had been really influenced by the playing of pianofighter-for-hire Nicky Hopkins on Volunteers. Slick’s rhythmic and dramatic grand piano work on Blows Against the Empire help to give the album a cohesive, timeless feel.

    Also wandering in and out of Heider’s at the time were various members of CSN, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Santana, as well as Jorma’s brother Peter Kaukonen, and Electric Flag bassist Harvey Brooks. Casady later joined the ad-hock group and added his heavier-than-God bass playing (most notably to Slick’s vocal tour de force, Sunrise).

    The new remastering job sounds fantastic, but beware: there is a very disappointing glitch four minutes into the first track, Mau Mau (Amerikon). I have to admit it took listening to the whole album three times in a row to notice it. The upside is that the record sounds so good that I was inspired to listen to it three times in row. Kantner’s dense lyrics helped hide the problem, as I often find myself drifting and riding the groove rather than hanging on every word. It’s a shame that an obnoxious digital goof mars such a great work of art.

    The good news is the bonus tracks help make it well worth upgrading your copy. The “original” version of Let’s Go Together has been restored to the running order whereas the alternate version that had been strangely slipped into the first CD offering is now a bonus track. Kanter’s question “Shall I go off and away to South America? / Shall I put out in my ships to the sea?” owe more to Crosby, Stills, and Kantner’s original vision of escape captured in the Airplane/CSN song, Wooden Ships, and it makes more sense in context of Kantner’s space opera for him to ask “Shall I go off and away to bright Andromeda?”

    Slick’s acoustic demo of Sunrise proves that it is her amazing voice and not the myriad of overdubs that bring on the chills whenever I hear that song. SFX is Garcia and Mickey Hart goofing with musique concrete in much the same way as what became X-M on the album and Spidergawd on Garcia.

    The final track is a live version of Starship from the Fillmore West later that year, although it sounds like latter-day Airplane, the notes don’t reveal what confederation is responsible. The Airplane would drift back together the next year for the uneven but shamefully out-of-print Bark, and hold together for one last primal hurrah, Long John Silver in 1972.

    To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, this is the high water mark where the crest of a beautiful wave broke and began to roll back.

    Go to the forest and move.

  • Put on This Record: Another Side of Bob Dylan—Bob Dylan [1964]

    I was 11 years old in 1977 and while punk was exploding elsewhere, I was in a backwater of the San Francisco Bay Area discovering Bob Dylan. My best friend’s dad was an ex-folkie with a guitar and a great collection of vinyl. Whereas my dad still loved and played Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles at full volume (at all hours), to enter the neighbors’ house was to glean a small residual bit of the magic and late-night menace of New York and Greenwich Village. Red wine. Mysterious women of Gypsy origin. Bob Dylan.

    I seem to remember the gateway drug for us was Blonde on Blonde with its classic leadoff track Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, but like Bob himself said, we “started out on burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff.” We were kids raised on AM rock radio, and as such, we understood Dylan after 1965. The classics were still in heavy rotation: Hendrix transforming All Along the Watchtower, The Byrds chiming about Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan himself spitting out Like a Rolling Stone.

    It was the earlier records that were a revelation.

    The tracks on 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan painted a picture of that world we had only guessed at. Talkin’ World War III Blues introduced us to a world of Cold War paranoia filtered through Woody Guthrie, while Corrina, Corrina reached back to a deep well of traditional music that, even then, we sensed was the secret current; the hidden aquifer of American culture.

    The Times They Are a-Changin’ was a little intense for a couple of suburban kids. It would be a few years before we understood the power in Ballad of Hollis Brown and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll; even the face staring out in disdainful sepia was off-putting. At the bottom of the pile, however, was a simple black and white cover with a photo that seemed almost like an afterthought. It showed a quite different person than the disapproving fundamentalist folkie from the year previous. This guy seemed to be comfortable in his own skin. This guy was cool.

    When the needle hit the first track, we knew something else was going on here. The Jimmy Rodgers yodel in All I Really Want to Do, along with the song’s platonic admonishments showed a fun side of Dylan that we had missed wading through the heavy hitters. Sure, Rainy Day Women had been fun, but to a 11-year-old, even a serious one, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was decidedly not.

    Spanish Harlem Incident laid out the bohemian mise-en-scène we had imagined was out there, but hadn’t yet experienced roaming our backyard kingdoms; but the track that totally captured out imaginations and ensured that we both would be life-long fanatics, was Motorpsycho Nitemare. Dylan’s ability to set a scene and tell a story was, and remains, unparalleled.

    For years, we called each other “unpatriotic rotten doctor commie rats.” Good times.

  • Life—Keith Richards

    Whether or not you will be captivated by Rolling Stones guitarist and all-around bon vivant Keith Richards’ autobiography all the way to the end of its 547 pages swings on a couple of factors.

    Number one: How much do you still like and care about the Rolling Stones?

    Number two: How much you can stomach reading about the sordid intricacies of heroin addiction?

    If those two caveats check out, then this book has a lot to offer in the way of insightful musings on the emergence, “maturation,” and decline of rock ’n’ roll, as well as dispatches from the gutter as harrowing as anything William S. Burroughs phlegmatically coughed up in junk-sick reverie.

    Occasional partner-in-crime Tom Waits puts it best towards the end of the book when he describes Richards as “a frying pan made from one piece of metal. He can heat it up really high and it won’t crack, it just changes color.” Spiritually changing his color from pasty postwar English white to the richer tones of the blues artists he and his friends immortalized became an obsession early on, and one that somehow, against all odds, he managed to pull off.

    Richards recalls fondly of being accepted on the “other side of the tracks” much more openly than in the “Whites Only” areas of the still-segregated American South. Richards writes in his journal about coming to the United States for the first time, “Finally I’m in my element! An incredible band is wailing… so does the sweat and the ribs cooking out back. The only thing that makes me stand out is that I’m white! Wonderfully, no one notices this aberration. I am accepted. I’m made to feel so warm. I am in heaven!”

    This ability to fit in wherever he finds himself belies a truthfully warm and open heart on the part of a young Keith Richards. You never get the sense that this English kid is culture slumming, he has done his homework, paid his dues, and remains respectful and—as an outsider in an uptight society still struggling to shrug off the ’50s—simpatico. At least until the drugs kick in.

    Later in the narrative, Richards bemoans the way that the other half of his musical partnership has become too enamored with controlling all aspects of the now multi-million dollar business interest called the Rolling Stones. This is after spending most of the ’70s in a narcotic fog, forcing his band mates to practice, record, and exist on “Keith time.” He doesn’t seem to realize that he has passive-aggressively set the agenda for years by placing himself outside of the “normal” constrains of time, laws (local, Federal, and international), sleep, etc.

    What saves this tale from being just another tale of debauched rock royalty (not that there’s anything wrong with those) is Richards’ voice. Life is written very much in Keef’s voice, along with reeling asides, obscure English slang, and most of all, heart. As much as they squabble and moan about each other, the Rolling Stones have been tempered by a half-century of dealing with each other’s shit.

    Richards explains, “Mick and I may not be friends—too much wear and tear for that—but we’re the closest of brothers, and that can’t be severed… Best friends are best friends. But brothers fight… At the same time, nobody else can say anything against Mick that I can hear. I’ll slit their throat.” Judging from his track record, and the sticker in his boot, he may end up doing just that.

  • Always Something—Jim Dodge

    I am always hoping that Jim Dodge will surprise us all and finally announce the novel he has long been threatening to finish; his most recent, Stone Junction, dropped in the far-distant reality of 1990. A collection of poetry, Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose, followed twelve years later in 2002, but only served to whet our appetite for his deft wordplay and masterful use and abuse of the English language.

    Whenever I get the itch, now that the all-mighty algorithms know everything, I’ll check in to see what the good ol’ apple picker has been up to. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Idaho’s Limberlost Press, a beautifully archaic letterpress printer of chapbooks, broadsides, and I’m guessing… manifestos, had published a new collection of poems, Always Something, in 2023.

    Limberlost’s publications are artifacts from an anachronistic world of archival-quality papers and hand-sewn assembly—not a shout against the digital darkness, but more of a whispered word of kinship in a sun-dappled meadow, but I digress.

    I recognized one of the poems, the sublime, Owl Feather, from a broadside that Dodge was gracious enough to send me upon the publication of my first novel, welcoming me into the guild ten years ago, so this collection has been simmering for a minute, all the better to let the flavors infuse.
    

    I have no doubt there are powers far beyond us
    Because the grey-and-brown barred wing feather
    From a Great Horned Owl that I found this afternoon
    While walking the old logging road above McKenzie Creek
    Seemed beautiful beyond the ability to behold it…

    Dodge’s capacity for wonder has always been a feature of his personality and his work, it’s in evidence here as is his prankster’s sense of humor. In A Manual of Sabotage, he incites delightful mischief.

    Of course, only a heartfelt kiss can derail a munitions train,
    Explode the tube in a color TV,
    Destroy a computer’s mother board,
    And get you so exited
    You want to feel completely totaled and totally complete.

    Further imaginings should be enough
    To get us together to wreck more stuff.

    I, for one, am ready.

    Limberlost Press



    Also by this author:

    Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose

  • Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer—Chuck Thompson

    Former Maxim features editor and all-around bon vivant Chuck Thompson peels back the faux-bamboo veneer of the travel business in a scathing, often hysterically funny, exposé. Thompson bemoans the lack of any kind of authentic point of view in contemporary travel writing while explaining precisely why such a voracious growth industry likes it that way.

    With some clever tips, handy editing advice, and a career’s worth of self-effacing globetrotting disasters to draw from, he serves up some tasty travel tidbits (number one on Thompson’s list of things a writer should never do: describe anything other than food in culinary terms).

    As a former magazine designer, my favorite part of the book is Thompson’s whole-hearted yet utterly doomed attempt to manage a start-up magazine for Travelocity. The sense of dread when consultants show up two weeks before the first issue is due on press is palpable—and spot on. Consultants are like bubonic rats and only bring misery and grim death to any workplace.

    Unlike Holidays in Hell, wherein professional misanthrope P.J. O’Rourke simply reinforces American xenophobic attitudes toward the Third World, Thompson actually dispels many preconceived notions toward places we never go, and portrays the usual hot spots as the crap holes they usually are.

    Thompson and I see eye-to-eye on the questionable appeal of the Caribbean, Graceland, and Las Vegas. I also agree that Eric Clapton, while technically not a vacation destination is somewhat overrated. And thanks to Thompson’s detailed romp through Bangkok’s red-light district, I will never look at Ulysses S. Grant’s signature the same way again.

    Holt Paperbacks

  • The Buzzing—Jim Knipfel

    I don’t know if Jim Knipfel presaged the conspiracy-laden epoch we find now ourselves mired in, or perhaps somehow helped to manifest it—a conspiracy theory in its own right. In 2003’s The Buzzing, we are treated to the sensational spinout of newspaper reporter, Roscoe Baragon, once a globe-trotting newshound who is now content with covering the “freak beat” for the New York Sentinel, itself a not-yet-failing enterprise, but the check is in the mail.

    All the time-honored tropes of noir are present here. Part of the reason Baragon stays at the paper is “the fact that was working in what he assumed was the last office space in New York City in which he would be allowed to smoke at his desk.” Instead of a girl Friday, he has a city forensic pathologist, Emily, who also spends too much time holding down a stool at their favorite dive bar after work.

    Of course, no noir would be complete without a city editor riding our protagonist’s ass about filing a story. Ed Montgomery revels in his roll, “sleeves rolled up, tie undone, a porcine face that grew a magnificent shade of magenta whenever he got angry—and he was almost always angry.”

    As a former newspaperman myself, Knipfel’s time writing for the New York Press helps lend a certain credence to his depiction of the business at the cusp of the information age. Baragon still has to occasionally get off his prodigious posterior to—in the parlance—slap some shoe leather in order to put his increasingly unhinged copy together.

    At one point, lost in conspiratorial mania, he steals an atlas (an atlas!) to physically connect the dots of a far-fetched theory. At this remove, it comes off as quaint, and leads one to wonder just what sort of insane shit someone could concoct if all of the world’s information was at your fingertips. Oh. Oh, yea.

    It would be a disservice to lay out all of the disparate points that Baragon connects like some fucked up The Family Circus dotted-line recap, but let’s just say it ends up containing proverbial multitudes. Godzilla? Check. An undersea toga-wearing real estate cult? Sure, why the fuck not? It is all certainly no stranger than imaging that the Democratic party was running a child sex trafficking ring out of the non-existent basement of a DC pizza parlor.

    It seems that Knipfel has slowed down, his last novel, Residue, was published in 2015. Perhaps the retinitis pigmentosa that has plagued him his whole life has finally caught up with him, although his website claims that “his other senses have been honed to almost superhuman levels, save for those dulled flat by years of chain smoking, alcohol abuse, and punk rock.” It would be a shame if he is sitting these days out as he certainly had our number from the jump.

    “Oh, all the conspiracies were evil and horrible and terrifying, yes—but where would they be without them? There has to be a certain tingle of superiority in knowing you were the only person in the world who really knew what the score was. Conspiracies, mover, also help make the normal redundancies of life a little more bearable. More than bearable even—they made things exciting.”

    Penguin Random House

    Also by this author:
    These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories