New Short Fiction Published in Waypoints Magazine

From Unsplash.

It's been way too long since I've had some short fiction published. I've been so busy over the past year with my thesis project and wine writing that I've long ignored short fiction submissions.

But I'm proud to be a part of the inaugural issue of Waypoints Magazine with a new piece of short fiction called "It Fell Through."

It's a story about fear, claustrophobia, mid-20s depression, cowardice, newspaper reporting and a dilapidated mental institution.

Check it out here.

Thanks for reading!

On Roberto Bolaño’s “Last Evenings on Earth”

Lately, I’ve found it difficult to post my usual amount of book reviews and literary essays. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that I’m busy in school this semester. My “Readings in Global Fact and Fiction” class at Johns Hopkins University sops up a lot of my free time. (We’ve been reading Borges for two weeks, and my literary brain is still recovering.)

I’ve developed some opinions about Borges, but I’ll leave the Borges criticism to the pros. I’ve developed far more coherent thoughts about the book I just finished: “Last Evenings on Earth” by Roberto Bolaño. This collection of stories was first published in 1997, and this Spanish-to-English translation from Chris Andrews came out in 2006. Bolaño’s world is much different than the world of Borges’ — or the world of any other writer, for that matter.

In Bolaño’s world, narrators have no names. If Bolaño is generous, he’ll refer to narrators and other characters as “B” or “A.” Writers — and there are many of them in these stories — live in obscurity, and they die in the same manner. Narrators thrash around in endless nightmares. Lovers leave and lovers die. People move around the globe, and when they try to go home — wherever that is — they can’t find it.

The best writers have an uncanny ability to draw the reader into the mind and body of a character from an entirely time and place. Truly great writers make the transition from reality to the mind of a character subtle and unnoticed, which means the reader is disarmed and vulnerable to the designs of the author. In this sense, Bolaño is a master seducer of the mind. His style is conversational, yet poetic. His stories flow smoothly, but they’re intensly literary and inctricarely designed. Bolaño finds value in the mundane aspects of life. He hones in on events that are not necessarily the most shocking or exciting, but he’s able to imbue them with richness and meaning. Like Hemingway, Bolaño uses brief, assertive language to convey deep and profound themes.

Soft-spoken, full of complex thoughts and inspirations, Bolaño’s characters are real people, the kind of people you want drink cervezas with and listen to long into the night. The settings in these 14 stories span much of the Spanish-speaking world: Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Spain. The characters are always crossing borders. They are natives of one place, vagabonds in another, trying desperately to get somewhere else.

A Brief Review of "The Dew Breaker"

The Dew Breaker - a novel by Edwidge Danticat

My first thought upon picking up this novel: Damn, this lady has the coolest name I’ve ever heard. See, I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve been ignorant about this incredible writer. This was the first book I’ve read from her, but it will not be the last.

What have here a novel, kind of. A novel-in-stories, kind of. A narrative, kind of. The stories have different settings, different characters, but they all contain the same dark, mysterious aura. The titular character, (but not really the “main” character), is a hired thug for the dictatorial Duvalier regime in Haitia. The Dew Breaker tortures people for a living, and he’s pretty damn good at his job.

But, wait. We’re not in Haiti anymore.

Now we’re in Flatbush, Brooklyn. I lived in this neighborhood for several years and I can honestly say that no one has captured the feel of this place better than Danticat.

Wait, now we’re back in Haiti, where a minister goes on the radio and denounces the brutal regime that is destroying his country. Knowing he will be murdered for his views, he says, “life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms.”

This book is about Haitians, their history, their families, their tragedies. Haitians are arguably the most abused and oppressed people on earth. Every empire and power-hungry thug has gotten kicks out of torturing these poorest of the poor. Danticat describes these horrors with beautiful language and poetic sensibility. But she’s no pessimist. This isn’t a sob story. It’s a story of forgiveness, love and, ultimately, freedom.  

Bukowski is Still Relevant

A Review of “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories” by Charles Bukowski

When asked “What’s the difference between prose and poetry?” Bukowski responds with one of the best quotes I’ve read from him: “Poetry says too much in too short a time; prose says too little and takes too long.” Well, this prose collection says a lot, and it doesn’t take long at all. At 200-plus pages, it’s a blur of horseracing, drinking, shitty relationships and shittier jobs.

I’ve always been intrigued by Bukowski’s love-hate relationship with the “the public,” “the people” and “the poor.” Although he never sticks to these issues for longer than a couple of paragraphs, this collection contains a lot of his musings about the working class, people’s movements and politics. He respects the poor and, rightfully so, counts himself among them. His characters are poor, his language is poorer and his settings (bars, racetracks, skid rows, post offices, loading docks, alleyways) are poorer still. He writes beautifully about the poor and downtrodden: “Only the poor knew the meaning of life; the rich and safe had to guess.”

At his heart, I think Bukowski is a populist. He maintains respect and admiration for poor people, even while he’s lambasting them for their idiocy and compliance. He’s also an introvert, quite possibly the most prolific introvert in modern American letters. He’s a man easily fed up with the hoi polloi. To Bukowski, people are crazy and scary. Individuals can be okay, but the collective “people” are a joke. They fritter away their lives at pointless jobs, and they maintain a pathetic hope that somehow they can change the ingrained system that is screwing them. But their votes, protest pins and catch phrases never amount to much. Just pick up the newspaper. Working people are also terrible at accomplishing large-scale goals, Bukowski says. (“once the public gets onto something it is dead and it changes. the public is not allowed to win in any game ever invented and that includes the American Revolution.” ) He also has no patience for the political process. Right wing, left wing, to him it's all crap, or, as he titles one of his stories: "Politics is like trying to screw a cat in the ass."

But while Bukowski gets in a few jabs here and there, he never gets bogged down in the corner with sociopolitical issues. He just doesn’t have time for it. For example, while much of Bukowski’s best work is seeped in skid row realism, he’s great when he adds in a dash of science fiction. There’s one story in this book about an ex-Nazi scientist who been retained by the American government to create a sex-bot. Bukowski meets this strange German guy in a bar, and he agrees to introduce Bukowski to the sex-bot. The sex-bot falls in love with Bukowski and says she doesn't want to be with other men. It ends, like many stories involving Bukowski and women, in tragedy.

I love the way Bukowski plays with his readers in this collection. He tells this great story about this sex-bot love affair, and ends it on the line: "what would you do?" This has the effect of drawing the reader into the story on a deeper level, and it's that deeper level that I think Bukowski works best. If his stories don’t really have an ending, he just wraps them up with a line like: “let that be story enough.” I love it.

In “The Gut-Wrenching Machine,” Bukowski takes on one of his all-time favorite enemies: work. The story is set in The Satisfactory Help Agency, a temp firm that keeps a factory of men and women work slaves around to rent out to companies. Before sending the human work-bots out into the world of 7-day work weeks, the Agency puts them through this machine that squeezes “the guts” out of them, metaphorically speaking. They’re still alive, they are just made compliant and pliable. After going through this machine a number of times they come out with no heart, no soul, no desire for leisure. They just want to work endlessly and follow orders. It’s an age-old theme for Bukowski (that mindless and heartless toil in pursuit of materialistic gain destroys the human spirit), but this story tells it in a hilarious sci-fi-inspired kind of way.

The titular story is perhaps one of his most heartfelt pieces ever. It’s about a beautiful woman who despises her beauty. She can’t stand herself, even though everyone wants her. It’s a truly heartbreaking piece that is worth reading.

That said, this collection is not for everyone. There are stories in here that will enrage even the most hardened and cynical. A few stories left me feeling like I needed to take a shower, or go back in time and punch Bukowski in the face for being such a prick. But, maybe in some odd and perverse way, that’s a tribute to a man who spent his life not giving a shit. It’s what brings me back to him after all these years. And it’s what makes this collection special.

A Master of the Short Story

When I read a short story by Tobias Wolff, it’s immediately obvious that I am reading the work of a master story teller. I become so enthralled in the characters, the storyline, and the pristine reality of Wolff’s world that I simply forget I am reading at all. Wolff offers escape into his creation, perusal into the minds of the people he has created, but his stories are believable, real and powerful. If you don’t believe me, pick up his quintessential 1996 collection “The Night in Question.”

If there is a wasted word in these pages, I sure as hell can’t find it. The prose is trimmed like a golf green, but it flows like poetry. It is lyrical, rhythmic and down-right beautiful, page after page after page. It is evident that Wolff selects his words with the utmost care, and each paragraph is filled with extracted meaning. The symbolism, the use of hard and soft consonants, the repetition, the rhythm, Wolff has a surgeon’s precision with language. Each piece is meticulously crafted, leaving no room for waste or doldrums. Take ten books of short stories, boil them down, and this is what you get. The book weighs in at just more than 200 pages, but I got more from this book than the last 400 page novel I read. The only problem with this collection is that there are not more stories.

Wolff has a profound ability to connect the reader to his characters. The characters in this collection are every bit as real as the people you pass on the street everyday. Great fiction writers have many skills, but among the essentials ones should be a desire to explore the intricacies of the human spirit. Wolff has insight into the human experience that is unique in modern American letters.

If short stories are paintings, Wolff uses only black and gray hues, but he crafts an experience that is so real, it doesn’t matter that he leaves out the red, green and yellow paint. Wolff is “strangely roused, elated by those... words, their pure unexpectedness and their music.” He loves the subtleties of language, and that love fills these pages.

“Mortals” is profound and powerful story, one that deserves a level of literary analysis I will not attempt here. Wolff’s writing has so much to offer about the short story as a craft. He is a master, and it’s stories like this that prove it.

“Casualty” is a story about Biddy, a man who has been in Vietnam for months, seen many firefights, but hasn’t killed someone in battle. He’s two months away from leaving when his friend Ryan, also nearing his plane out of Asia, is sent on an ambush mission. B.D. has lost a lot of his soul in Vietnam, but he refuses to let go of his dedication to friendship. “He had been forced to surrender certain pictures of himself that had once given him pride and a serene sense of entitlement to his existence, but the one picture he had not given up, and which had become essential to him, was the picture of himself as a man who would do anything for a friend.” This is all that is left of his self-worth and identity. B.D.’s fate is inseparably tangled up with Ryan’s.

His heart is not in the fight and his Lieutenant tells him: “It sounds to me like you’ve got a personal problem, soldier. If your mission requires personal problems, we’ll issue them to you. Is that clear?” Through his thoughts and actions, Biddy, the protagonist, represents the American public’s struggle with the war in Vietnam. Biddy sits around “waiting for something; he didn’t know what.” He, like the American populace, struggles for someone to blame for all the chaos. “Somebody around here’s got to take responsibility.” This story of friendship, brotherhood and war is one to remember.

“Powder” is a brief story even for Wolff, but it is in these brief stories where Wolff’s talent is most evident. This story is about a father and son who need to get home on Christmas Eve, and the only way to do so is by driving on a closed road over inches of fresh snow. That’s all that happens in this story. But Wolff packs so much meaning and truth into this short piece. “Now you’re an accomplice,” the father says to the son as they pass a police barricade and head into the snow. “We go down together.”

“The Life of the Body” The protagonist, Wiley, is a man with honor, a man with desires both rational and irrational. He’s a smart man, but, like all men, he is subject to innate whims of unknowable origin. “Well, the body had a mind of its own.” A misunderstanding during a conversation at a bar leads a woman to think Wiley is a creep and a potential stalker. He wants to set the record straight, so he tries to track her down, which only leads the woman to think that he’s even crazier. I found myself begging Wiley to stop making things worse, but unable to put the story down.

“The Other Miller” is a Vietnam-era tale of a young man named Miller who is training for deployment when he gets notice from the Army that his mother has died. Miller thinks the Army has mixed him up with “the other Miller” of the same name, even though there is no apparent reason to believe this is the case. Miller is a cynic. “The future. Didn’t everybody know enough about the future already, without rooting around for the details? There is only one thing you need to know about the future: everything gets worse. Once you have that, you have it all. The details don’t bear thinking about.” Miller hasn’t spoken to his mother in two years, ever since she married the Phil Dove. Wolff loves playing with the names to up the moral heft of his stories, and this is a great example of that. Miller hates Phil with the same passion the military and political hacks hated the “doves” during the Vietnam conflict. This is a story of family tragedy, but it’s also the story of a nation ripped apart by war and animosity. The ending is superbly vague and haunting. This is one of my favorite Wolff stories ever, and it deserves to be read and taught in high school English classes instead of whatever crap the kids read these days.

It’s incredible how quickly Wolff can draw his readers into his story. Using only the title and the first line, Wolff grabs the reader. This is best exemplified in his story “Two Boys and a Girl.” The title already spells trouble. Then comes the dynamic first line: “Gilbert saw her first.” Wolff tells the reader so much in those first four words, and the rest of the story moves along the lines those words establish. It’s a tragicomic love story full of tension and desire. Rafe is away and Gilbert is feels the need to move in on his girlfriend. The crux of the tragedy is Gilbert’s inability to stop himself: “he knew what he was doing and could not otherwise.” The story is plotted perfectly but not weighed down. Its themes are poignant and easy to relate to. This story is about rationalizing things we know inside to be wrong. “Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. But there’d been no struggle. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.” It ends with a hilarious twist that leaves the reader feeling fulfilled and relieved.

“Migraine” also starts off in declarative and powerful prose: “It began while she was at work.” In addition to being a story about a woman has a migraine, is a story about loneliness, alienation and the inability to relate to others on an intimate level. It’s also about passive aggressive people, and how they are hell to deal with.

The titular story is one of chaotic family relationships. The father is a violent, dominant prick and beats his kids. But his son refuses to back down. It’s about avoiding our inability to control external events, and about what happens when we stake a moral claim and refuse to back down.

The final story, “Bullet in the Brain,” has a startling title, and the first line backs it up by describing a man waiting in line at a bank with a “murderous temper.” This can’t go well, and Wolff wants us to know it. Sure enough, robbers with guns come in. I’m reminded of Chekov’s advice that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third. Without giving away the ending, I’ll just say that Wolff knows his Chekov. But Wolff’s writing a short story, so there’s no time for a third act. The action is quick, blunt and brutal. But in this story, death isn’t the end. Far from it. This short story is like a play or a novel trimmed down to its core. It’s a superb piece of work, and a great way to end this collection.

If you love storytelling and you love language, you need to read this collection. Enough said. Cheers, Isaac.

Bury My Heart in New Orleans

As soon as my feet hit the streets of New Orleans, I felt a profound sense of belonging. Why, I thought, had it taken me 27 years to visit this city?

I roamed the streets of the French Quarter drinking absinthe, getting into discussions with homeless men, ordering Cajun coffee from women dressed like wenches. I ate a lot of amazing foods that involved meat and olives and fried sea critters. I met a gravedigger who gave me a tour of a half-dozen of the city's cemeteries. We strolled through the wealthiest and most decorated cemetery I'd ever seen, then drove ten minutes away and found one of the poorest and most decrepit ones I’d even seen. Much of it had been washed away by Hurricane Katrina and it was littered with unearthed tombstones, broken headstones, rotten wooden crosses, stray bones, sinkholes, crawfish huts. I roamed around pondering and taking pictures. Then I drank beer on Bourbon Street and moseyed through quirky art shops on Royal Street. Seriously, where else on earth could this happen besides New Orleans?

As a writer, I felt an overwhelming desire to write down what I saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt because it was all so new and exciting. My journal, which I’ve read over several times since visiting the city in April, is filled with lots of personal impressions. I also wanted to read a bit more about New Orleans, specifically what local writers were saying about it. While perusing a book store in the Garden District I came across a "New Orleans" section stocked with all sorts of books. Most focused on Hurricane Katrina, some on the oil spill, others on food and culture. There were a lot of cookbooks. But I did find a fat collection of short stories all written by Louisiana writers. So I picked it up, and it turned out to be a great purchase. These stories are great slices of Louisiana life. I probably would've preferred a book just about New Orleans, but apparently there are other places and people in the state as well. A lot of these stories take place in New Orleans or relate to the city somehow, and I’ll admit that I'm probably biased toward the ones that do.

If you've ever been to New Orleans or are planning on going, pick up this book. The stories in here are moving and powerful, and the writers deserve some serious credit. Below are some brief overviews of the stories that stuck with me the most.

Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers - Edited by Ann Brewster Dobie

“The Work of Art” – John Biguenet
A New Orleans man sells everything he owns to buy a sculpture of a woman in the tub made by Degas. He is also falling in love with a real-life woman. He’s an obsessive man, one who is all in or not at all. And he’s sure of both his decision to buy the statute and marrying this girl. This is an anti-climactic, slow-paced but insightful love story.

“The Convict” by James Lee Burke is an incredible story set in the 1940s. The narrator is a young white child whose father's sociopolitical views are fifty years ahead of his time. He is a man of honor who can't stand bigotry and hatred and evil prospering. A convict breaks out in town (drama introduced), and the father finds himself helping the convict, a burglar, hide from the authorities. What happens when a man is too helpful and honest for his own good? That’s the theme of this powerful story.

“Crickets” by Robert Olen Butler is the story of a Vietnamese immigrant and his son living in Louisiana. The father wants to teach his son how to make crickets fight, a game the father used to play in Vietnam. Loaded with symbolism, this is both a great immigrant family story and a story about how people from different backgrounds relate to new surroundings.

In “Where She Was” by Kelly Cherry a seventeen-year-old daughter tells the story of her mother’s childhood in Louisiana. The story is short and reflective, offering a kind of voyeuristic journey through this secretive woman’s life.

Ernest Gaines, who wrote the foreword, has the longest story in this collection, aptly titled “A Long Day in November.” And I’m guessing he pulled some strings with the editors and publishers to get this 50-page behemoth in here, because there’s no reason to include this huge piece. It’s narrated by a young boy stuck in the middle of his parents marriage crisis. It’s a mundane and boring story with way too many pages for my taste.

Tim Gautreaux’s “Welding With Children” is an oddly-titled but well-done story. It’s told from the perspective of an old man who is babysitting his four grandchildren all at once. The grandfather holds lingering guilt about not raising his daughters up as well as he could have. But he’s trying to make right by his grandkids. He sits the kids down to tell them Bible stories, which they’ve never heard before. The kids all think the Old Testament is like an action movie. Hilarious and touching, this story is simple yet oddly memorable.

Ellen Gilchrist definitely has the most disturbing story in the collection, “Rich.” A rich Catholic husband and wife in New York seem to have everything going their way. They adopt a child and have children of their own. Maids take care of the kids while they go to country clubs and roam around the Garden District. But things go bad very quickly for this family. Gilchrist has a knack for writing beautifully about terrible occurrences. This story is so well done that it will surely haunt anyone who reads it.

“It Pours” by Tim Parrish is set in the late 1960s. It starts off with a massive rainstorm. The rain, which is getting worse and worse as the ground soaks up all it can, is a metaphor for the increasing American involvement in Vietnam. The weather is bad and getting worse, as is the war. Parrish is a master of craft and this story perfectly weaves the international and historical with the local and personal.

"Brownsville" by Tom Piazza is my favorite story, and it's only two pages. But it's two amazing pages of prose. The book was worth buying for this story alone.

The last two stories by Nancy Richard and James Wilcox are total bores, so the book ends on a bad note. That said, it's still a solid collection.

Old Fashioned Religious Satire With an Edge

Review of "Beware of God: Stories" by Shalom Auslander

This book of short stories is filled with hilarity of a uniquely dark, absurd and blasphemous variety. Shalom Auslander pokes fun at the ridiculous religious environment of the 21st Century, and while sparing no self-appointed prophet or vengeful deity from ridicule, Auslander manages to keep his stories funny and insightful. I couldn't put this down, and ended up finishing it in a day.

Each story is so unique, but this bizarre compilation somehow works as a whole, as each story deals with some sort of thematic commonality: God, sin, death, the afterlife, the relationship between humans and animals. And a warning to those easily offended or holders of religious sensitivity: Some of this stuff is really edgy. In this day and age, it’s hard to shock a reader, but Auslander shocks even me with some of his stories. Sex, masturbation, the Holocaust, it’s all in there. And it’s all somehow funny. Auslander’s prose occasionally reminds me of Terry Pratchett. His literary sci-fi-humor reminds me of some of Kurt Vonnegut’s work. Coming from one of the biggest Vonnegut fans ever, that’s really saying something. But Auslander has an incisive wit and a sense of pop-culture awareness that is purely his own.

The first story is one of the best. It’s about an aging Jewish couple obsessed with the afterlife to the point that they can't function in real life. Bitter, stuck in a sexless marriage, they end up trying to get each other to sin. They both want the other to end up in a deeper level of hell. She feeds him bacon and nonkosher wines. The wife drives herself crazy trying to figure out how to get her husband to sin without getting herself sent to hell in the process. This is just one example of the absurdity of the whole scheme: “Of course, if the total punishment of causing a sin is a sin of causation plus the sin of the sin that is being caused, then shouldn't causing a commandment to be fulfilled result in both the reward for the commandment of causing a positive commandment to be fulfilled plus the reward for the positive commandment she was causing to be fulfilled.” The mathematics of sin and punishment are absurd, and Auslander shows that beautifully through this chaotic short story.

In another story a man scheduled for death escapes because his Volvo has good side impact safety features. God, Lucifer and Death are all in it together to kill him, but they don’t take the car’s safety features into account, and therefore botch the operation. The man becomes convinced God is after him and tries to go about his days hiding. The rabbi’s advice for this man who believes God is after him? “Do what He says any nobody gets hurt.” As God devises more ways to kill man, man just comes up with a way of slowing down God’s death-dealing. Cancer patients now have chemotherapy. Cars now don’t explode as easily. It’s an arms race between God and man, and it makes for a very funny story.

The awkwardly hilarious story “Holocaust Tips for Kids” features one child writing down all the advice he can think of on how to fight back against Nazis when (not if) another Holocaust happens. These tips include things like pretending to be dead in firing lines, to building bombs out of tennis balls and match heads and throwing salt packets in Nazis’ eyes. While it may be a bit sadistic, Auslander has written a hilarious story about a child’s crazy Nazi-killing fantasies.

Then there’s a story told from the perspective of two hamsters: one religious and one skeptic. I will say this is probably the first piece of fiction I’ve read written from a hamster’s perspective. And it’s just as funny and ridiculous as it sounds. The most hilarious part is when one hamster tries to defend the writer James Patterson to the other hamster, who is a literary snob and completely baffled that his friend enjoys reading that crap.

A man goes to Israel and finds the oldest version of the Old Testament ever recorded. Only thing is that it is prefaced by the following statement: “The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.” But no one wants to hear about this new, old, Old Testament because they’re all so engrained in their own religious structures. “Whatever they believed was unbelievably right, and whatever everybody else believed was unbelievably wrong. Piety and passion were in great supply… Arms dealers had never been busier.”

There’s also a story of religious war told through the characters from Schultz’ Peanuts: (Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Schroeder) that made me laugh aloud while I was reading it on the train.

In an era of political correctness when extremist religious beliefs frequently pass by without question or critical doubt, this book is a breath of fresh air. No doubt, many people will consider it offensive blasphemy. But even if you’re religious, as long as you have a sense of humor, this book will crack you up. And, more importantly, it will make you think.

Fighting for Respect: F.X. Toole's Short Stories

Review of "Million Dollar Baby: Stories from the Corner" by F.X. Toole, originally published as "Rope Burns."

Though F.X. Toole writes novellas and short stories, this collection reads like a rough and gritty love poem to the science, art and war of boxing. To Toole boxing isn’t a sport, it’s a mindset, an epic struggle battle, a code of honor and a way of life. Boxing is such an integral part of America’s collective social and cultural history, there’s no denying that. But what Toole does in this collection is show the boxing fan and fiction reader alike that the real stories in boxing haven’t been told, or at least haven’t been heard. Contenders and champions are always major characters in mainstream boxing tales. The boxing narrative is one of a tough-minded and rock solid fighter who’s determined to win and does. Not in this collection. Toole’s short fiction focuses on the cut men, the trainers, the promoters, the gamblers, the managers, the losers and the criminals.

Toole is fascinated with a dichotomy within the boxing world. On one hand, it’s an individual sport. The individual has to have the skills, the physical ability, the endurance, the mental strength and the dedication, or he (or she) is in for a beating. On the other hand, a boxer is no one without support. A boxer is only as good as those in his corner. And that’s where Toole comes in. A corner man for his entire life, he offers a unique perspective on the boxing world that is rarely, if ever, seen.

The short story “The Monkey Look” has one of the best opening lines I’ve read in a long time. “I stop blood.” It’s a story told from the perspective of one of boxing’s unsung heroes, the cut man. The monkey look refers to the face of a fighter who’s been cut a lot. Scar tissue builds up around the eyes and the skin above the eyelid droops from severed nerves. The story is a close-up look at the physics and details of what goes on during those three-minute rounds and the sixty second rests between them.

Boxing, for this cut man narrator, is about respect, rules and honor. “I love boxing almost as much as I love the sacraments. You play by the rules. You never throw a fight, and you never throw intentional low blows… unless the other guy does it first.” And, sure enough, this story is about the one time when “the other guy does it first.” The cut man’s fighter plans to screw him over financially, take all his money and beat him up after the fight. But the cut man gets word of this and comes up with a plan of his own. He knows his fighter’s a bleeder, and he knows if he pretends to heal the cuts the fight could be stopped and his fighter TKO’d. So the cut man bets on the other guy. During the fight, he goes through the motions, but doesn’t really stop the cuts in his fighter’s eyes. Sure enough, his fighter bleeds and bleeds and the fight is called off. The cut man has broken the rules, but only because the rules had to be broken. In the end, it’s not the best fighter, but the smartest and most determined man who walks away the winner. The story is gritty, real and packed with humor. Hemingway would have been proud to read this story.

“Black Jew” is told from the perspective of a different first-person narrator, still a cut man, but a cut man with a grinding accent and streetwise prose that’s clipped of all the possessive pronouns and articles. It’s the story of a fighter who just can’t get no respect. He’s heading into a fight he’s expected to lose, and the promoters, hotel staff and boxing professionals treat him like a loser. But Reggie has come to win, and win he does. After his upset win, the promoters and marketers are all over him. In boxing, you’re up or you’re down. It’s a cruel and cutthroat business, and this story does a great job of depicting that.

“Million Dollar Baby” starts off with a great quote from trainer Frankie Dunn: “Everything in boxing is backwards to life.” It’s written in third-person, which isn’t Toole’s strongest. A woman fighter named Maggie comes in and wants Dunn to train her, but Dunn is reluctant to say the least. “Girls getting busted up went against everything he believed in.” The story breezes through days, months and years. Dunn and Maggie become “blood,” and Dunn becomes the father she never really had. Dunn finally gets Maggie a shot at a title fight, and that’s when tragedy strikes. She’s cut down by a blow after the bell and breaks her neck. She’s paralyzed for life. Dunn, a Catholic, has a hard time when Maggie asks him for one final favor. She wants him to put her out of her misery. The story reads like a clipped pitch for the screenplay. And maybe because I loved the movie so much, I found the story to be a bit lacking in drive and emotion. Still, with the fantastic Clint Eastwood film in mind, I was able to picture the characters in the film through the story, which made for a great reading experience.

“They say we because they fight when their fighter fights and when their fighter gets hit, they get hit. When the fighter wins or loses, they win or lose, and together they feel what that’s like.” This is the theme of “Fightin in Philly,” a story about a boxer and his team. Toole writes so poetically about wrapping a fighter's hands before the fight. It's something so mundane, but Toole brings it to life and makes the reader feel it, and understand its importance. The trainer in this third-person story is like a student of the human body and what happens when that body is put into extreme physical circumstances. On tour with his fighter, he takes time to run to an art museum and studies Michelangelo’s casts. He says a professional boxer, "uses what he needs when he needs it, this explains how one fighter will run out of gas in the second or the sixth round, while another can fight all night." It's those fights that the boxing fan remembers, those of two professionals going at each other. And this trainer wants to train only the best. He points out how carefully the hands must be wrapped before a fight. Fighters can miss punches if they lose circulation or shatter bones if the hands aren't wrapped enough. A fighter really has to trust his team with his own safety. In this story, Toole really breaks down the socio-political and racial events of the fifties and sixties. He shows this through the realm of boxing. The world of boxing was a hotbed of racial tensions in that time, and still is to some extent. And Toole provides great insight into that time period in American history. What do you do in a fight with someone who is dedicated to hitting you below the belt? This story is about boxing done dirty, and about how a good fighter can deal with a dirty one and still come out on top.

“Rope Burns,” the original titular story, is a powerful piece of prose. It's the story of Mac, a streetwise old white trainer, and his young black fighter Puddin. Mac shows Pudin that if you want respect, you've got to take it. Mac is full of lots of witty and hilarious statements. Great boxing is “like chess with pain.” You fight fair. The only reason to fight dirty is if the other guy does. The story of a young fighter who turns to boxing as an alternative to a life of crime is set against the backdrop of the impending decision in the Rodney King beating case. Mac is a hard drinking, tough Irishman, and Puddin is a poor black kid with promise. These two powerful forces come together to form the apex of this narrative. Puddin, the promising, dedicated fighter, ends up in tragedy and Mac is left feeling like he lost a son. The story, like the streets of L.A. after the King decision, ends in an orgy of violence that would put Quentin Tarantino to shame. Still, it's an amazing story, and F.X. Toole is a talented storyteller.