Edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Small Beer Press, 2007)

It is commonplace to hear that if certain canonical writers were writing today — Herman Melville, say, or James Joyce — they would never be published. Leaving aside the difficulties that such writers faced in getting their books published in their own times, it does seem that major publishing houses are skittish about publishing books that are unlike other books, difficult to classify. Which is why I like to say that if Franz Kafka or Mikhail Bulgakov were writing today, they would be published by Small Beer Press.

Kelly Link, perhaps Small Beer’s most well-known author, is also one of its editors; Link has made her reputation on a series of acclaimed short stories that bend genres and twist tropes in a Borgesian way. Likewise, Small Beer’s roster of authors is rife with writers like John Crowley and Carol Emshwiller, whose works are about as good as books get and also elude description by genre. As literary critics don’t seem to analyze anything until they’ve slapped a hot pink label on it, a host of contending terms have emerged to describe these indescribable books. One is “interstitial,” which Small Beer’s Interfictions, a multiple-author short-story collection edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, seeks not only to define, but demonstrate. The result is a wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring.

Each story in Interfictions is a highwire act, writers writing without a net, and it thus isn’t a perfect collection; while no story falls outright, some are wobblier than others. But it’s telling that previous reviews of the volume have picked different stories to champion; there really is something here for everyone to be blown away by. (For the record, my favorites are Christopher Barzak’s “What We Know about the Lost Families of — House,” a haunted house story that also turns a keen eye on social conventions and the relation of people to their environment in rural Ohio, and Veronica Schanoes’s “Rats,” a story about punk rock told as an extremely self-aware fairy tale, back when fairy tales didn’t shirk from darkness and violence.)

For readers who are more interested in ambitious experiments than modest successes — and the occasional story that leaves them breathless — Interfictions is a wonderful introduction to Small Beer Press’s broader catalog and a group of writers who are widening the publishing landscape’s horizon for what’s possible in fiction.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thanks to the generosity of Labyrinth Books, the New Haven Review is proudly hosting a summer book group in its New Haven store at 290 York Street. Each of the editors — Mark Oppenheimer, Tom Gogola, and Brian Francis Slattery — and one author from Issue 2 of the Review, Steven Stoll, will lead a discussion of a recent book that they have loved. The books are available at Labyrinth, but of course, having read the book beforehand isn’t mandatory to coming to the discussions or taking part in them.

First up is Brian Francis Slattery (i.e., me) on May 28, at 6 p.m., leading a discussion of A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya; an excellent overview of this slim, excoriating book appears on Labyrinth’s website. I chose the book because, in recent memory, I haven’t read a book that left me so shaken for so many different reasons, and it’s one of a few books that I recommend to anyone who will bend an ear to listen. I hope that you, dear readers, will all come whether you have read the book or not. The discussion is likely to range across freedom of information issues, war correspondence, the swiftly changing face of Russia today, and whether the conflict in Chechnya and the government’s massive cover-up of it will come back to haunt it. There is so much to talk about.

The New Haven Review Summer Book Group will continue on July 2 [formerly June 23 — ed.], also at 6 p.m., with Tom Gogola leading a discussion of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. On July 23, again at 6 p.m., Mark Oppenheimer will lead a discussion of Lush Life, the new novel by Richard Price. Finally, on August 13 at (surprise!) 6 p.m., Steven Stoll will discuss A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.

In sum, and for easy reading and marking of calendars:

New Haven Review Summer Book Group

May 28: Brian Francis Slattery discusses A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya.

July 2: Tom Gogola discusses The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. [As above, amended from June 23 — ed.]

July 23: Mark Oppenheimer discusses Lush Life by Richard Price.

August 13: Steven Stoll discusses A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.

All events begin at 6 p.m., at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, CT. Hope to see you there.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

By Conor O’Clery (PublicAffairs, 2007)

On January 22, 1997, from a payphone in the San Francisco airport, Chuck Feeney gave The New York Times a story for the ages. Although he had appeared regularly on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, Feeney was not, he revealed, the billionaire everyone presumed. This kid-done-good from Elizabeth, New Jersey—a Horatio Alger boy on steroids—had indeed built a great fortune by mastering the duty-free trade. But the recent sale of his company, Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), had forced Feeney to confess his great secret: he had given this fortune away. In The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing, Irish journalist Conor O’Clery chronicles how Feeney quietly amassed astonishing wealth, and, with equal stealth, signed it all over to his philanthropic foundations.

O’Clery’s account reads like a spy novel. Feeney and his business partners succeed through cloak and dagger secrecy: closed bids for duty-free concessions (Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, Hong Kong), off-shore havens to shelter their cash profits from U.S. taxation. Feeney’s commercial savvy is also characterized by an uncanny intuition for profitable opportunities, a penchant for shop-floor management (well into his later years, Feeney is coaching the sales force), and remarkable care for employees and their families. These traits also underpin his philanthropy, which is characterized by fierce anonymity, opportunistic giving that seeks to amplify the power of his philanthropic buck (in places ranging from the U.S. to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, Vietnam to Cuba), and extensive vetting (“kicking the tires”) of potential grantees. Ultimately, Feeney says, he is driven by a basic desire to help others, learned at a young age from his parents.

Feeney’s is an extraordinary tale of entrepreneurial dynamism, no doubt—but even more of unusual beneficence. His “outing” presents a number of important challenges. First, Feeney embodies “inter vivos” charity—giving while living. This is significant in an era when, for many, wealth serves as a competitive “scorecard” (Feeney’s words) for success. In offering an equally competitive, alternative yardstick—charitable largesse—Feeney joins Gates, Buffett, and others in harnessing new resources for the disadvantaged. The second challenge Feeney poses is to the philanthropic sector, where foundations typically expend five percent of their assets each year. Feeney has called for a full spend-down of his Atlantic Philanthropies within the decade: inter vivos in extremis. Though to date his foundations have granted nearly $4 billion to “vulnerable” people around the world, nearly $4 billion in assets remain. This means trying to give away—efficiently, effectively, entirely—about one million dollars a day. “Spending it,” he says, “is not a big problem. Spending it meaningfully is.” Understatement, ambition and optimism: vintage Feeney.

Georgia Levenson Keohane is a writer and consultant in the fields of social policy, philanthropy, and non-profit management. She lives in New York City.

By Anders Nilsen (with Cheryl Weaver) (Drawn & Quarterly, 2006)

This book will wreck you, if there’s a person in the world whom you love.

In March 2005 Cheryl Weaver, an artist and bartender and the fiancée of the cartoonist Anders Nilsen, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. By November she was dead. She was thirty-seven. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is Nilsen remembering her, trying to remember everything about her, recounting days they spent together and apart. Those memories are exquisitely banal: bags of chips, the losing and finding of keys, everyday conversations, travel mishaps, ice cream cones. These are what you forget when someone dies. One day you’re fighting about leaving the milk out, and the next day she’s gone.

In the early part of the book, before Weaver gets sick, there are almost no drawings — instead there are photographs, reprinted letters, other artifacts. The first image is a postcard Weaver sent to Nilsen early in their courtship: “I know this boy named Anders. He makes my heart ache and my stomach flutter.” Then come Nilsen‘s journal entries and vacation snapshots, doodles and lists (“Things He Does, in Spite of Which, She Will Probably Marry Him Anyway”). When the book finally switches over to pure drawing, the shift in tone is shocking — appropriately so, because that’s when Weaver is first admitted to the hospital, complaining of fatigue. Life never goes back to normal. The book’s pages fill with sketches Nilsen makes and notes he takes while his fiancée sleeps in her hospital bed. There are excruciatingly literal, intensely concrete little portraits of Weaver sleeping, connected to an IV, her head shaved. There’s a diagram of her body, with Nilsen trying to record everything he’s seeing: IV tubes, feeding tube, urinary tube, rectal tube, surgery scars, bruises from past IVs, pulse meter, blood pressure cuff, “bag to collect aceites fluid, leaking from drainage site on abdomen,” etc. You wonder what all this detail is for. Is it so he can show her later, when she’s better, what she looked like? Or is this the moment he realized she would never get better? In his journal he writes: “What do you say to someone when they ask you ‘Am I going to die?’ and you kind of think they might, but there’s no way to know, and you don’t want to upset them.”

The last chapter reads like a regular graphic novel, with traditional panels and narrative. Nilsen and his family and friends gather at Promontory Point, the spot along Lake Michigan where he and Weaver had planned to get married. The scene is cinematic—the POV hovers behind Nilsen the whole time, like someone watching without participating. We see that the crowd has grown rather large. Nilsen narrates the scene to Weaver: “There are a lot of them. I don’t know if we could have had that small wedding we talked about.” In these panels she’s the only person he talks to, like he’s numb to everything but this receding connection with her in his head. “You are in my arms,” he says, and that’s when we notice that he’s holding a small black box, and figure out that he’s come here to scatter her ashes. And then we come to understand the weird camera angle, too: “I think you wouldn’t have liked this very much, to have been there,” he writes to Weaver. “Everyone fussing over you. It would have driven you nuts…. I think you might have liked watching it, though. Hovering above it.”

Nilsen saves a final postcard that he wrote to Weaver before she got sick for the end of the book, just to tear us apart a little bit more: “In sixty years from now, when I’m on my deathbed dying (before you, because you’re a smoker and smokers always outlast people like me with healthy habits) and you come up to our room just before I croak, I’m going to say ‘I told you so.’ Because we’ve been in love all that time and been having great sex (except for the last year because I had been ill) and been happy. And then I’m going to croak and … you won’t be sad. Because we had such a good life together.” If that doesn’t utterly destroy you, you do not have a heart beating in your chest. It’s also weirdly reassuring, and ridiculously romantic.

Anaheed Alani is a freelance writer, researcher, and editor.

By Esmé Raji Codell (Algonquin Books, 2001)

For teachers and the general public alike, Esmé Raji Codell’s Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, which chronicles Codell’s first year of teaching in an inner-city Chicago charter school, is a refreshing antidote to the fantasy of the inner-city schoolteacher as a dedicated, creative, inspirational miracle worker in the mold of Hilary Swank’s character in Freedom Writers or Edward James Olmos’s in Stand and Deliver. The primary reason for this is that Codell is a dedicated, creative, and inspirational teacher, yet her first year of teaching does not end with a slow clap leading to a standing ovation, students standing on their desks in salute, or state-high marks on standardized exams. Even the goofy craziness, selfless investment of time outside the school day, instructional skill, and personal charisma Esmé brings to her work is sadly, as she discovers, not enough to prevent children from falling through the cracks in the public-education and social-services support networks, to dissolve the blockheadedness of well-meaning but narrow-minded administrators, or to ensure that every student performs at the legally mandated grade level on a standardized test.

As an inner-city teacher who is less creative and wacky, and possibly less instinctively skilled, than Codell, I found her book to be both inspirational and reassuring. It was instructive — and funny, and heartwarming — to see her incorporate elements of physical and imaginative play into her lessons. It was also a relief to see her lose her temper in front of her students; I was reassured to know that this happens to even the most gifted teachers. But anyone who draws pleasure from reading engaging, conversational prose will enjoy Codell’s account of her careen through her first year of teaching. Readers will also experience a firsthand account of the obstacles faced by teachers of disadvantaged children — and by the children themselves.

Codell does not fail as a teacher. It is clear that she uses her creativity successfully to engage struggling children in their schoolwork, as when she constructs a time machine for students to sit in while reading historical fiction, teaches her students the distributive property of multiplication using cha-cha steps, or insists (to her principal’s chagrin) on being called Madame Esmé rather than Ms. Codell. Still, her efforts are not enough to solve the problems at her school, or save every single one of her students.

Nathan Day is a high school English teacher at César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, Parkside Campus in Washington, DC. An outrigger canoe enthusiast, he has been teaching for six years.