The Bare Necessities—Siobhan Fallon (YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE)

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.

Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone, a collection of eight linked stories about life on military bases in Fort Hood, Texas and Baghdad, Iraq, published by Amy Einhorn Books.

Wow, I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to narrow down my book choices to a mere five. So I am going to list the five books that I return to again and again, for insight, for craft, for inspiration, for escape. When there are so many amazing books in the world and never enough time to read all of them, reading a book more than once seems like the best indication of its value in my life. These are the books I always keep close:

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find
Flannery, my God, woman! Who in the world would think to write a funny story about a murdered family? The story starts out so innocuous, two smart-mouthed kids taunting their grandmother, the grandmother smuggling her cat on a car trip, the cat jumping out of its basket and causing the father to drive the car into a ditch. All of this is very amusing and slapstick until a car pulls up, seemingly to help the family out, and the grandmother recognizes The Misfit. Members of The Misfit’s gang lead the six members of the family, one by one (including an infant!) off to the woods to be shot. The story is told with eviscerating hilarity and ends with that unforgettable line, “She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Or “Good Country People:” a bible salesman seduces a woman, then steals her false leg and abandons her in a hay loft. There is something so cataclysmic about O’Connor’s stories, the characters left ravaged and despairing by something or someone seemingly harmless. The reader gets the unsettling feeling that nothing in the world is good. Every time I read this collection I am both electrified and terrified at how limitless and eye-opening fiction can be.

Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh
I think Benjamin Percy is one of our most exciting writers right now. His collection Refresh, Refresh, as well as his new novel, The Wilding, is fearless. He doesn’t shy away from the violence humans are capable of, how fine a line there is between civility and savagery, human and animal. All of the stories are fresh (no pun intended); he gives the reader everything from marital angst to nuclear meltdowns, but the title story, “Refresh, Refresh,” is the one I recommend the most often. It’s about these rough and scrappy teenage boys trying desperately to become men. Their fathers are all deployed and the absence hangs over the action, it creates the momentum and the tension, pushing these kids to the breaking point without ever having to dissect the plight of deployed soldiers or the politics of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an unforgettable point of view, an unforgettable story, an unforgettable collection.   Read more