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Tag Archives: Jacob M. Appel

Buzzed Books #31: Scouting for the Reaper

04 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Jacob M. Appel

Buzzed Books #31 by Shawn Whittington

Jacob M. Appel’s Scouting for the Reaper

Scouting for the Reaper

Jacob M. Appel’s recent collection of stories, Scouting for the Reaper, has all eight narratives threaded by one theme: the revelation of secrets in daily life to loved ones. More peculiarly, the revelations do not necessarily solve the conflicts within the tales but herald the thickening of plots yet to come. In other words, the stories mirror real life.

The first three stories, including the story the collection receives its name from, feature young teens in pursuit of romance. At first, these 1st person narratives seem to suggest a typical impulsive urge to pursue a forbidden love interest. But ingeniously, these goals mask the true conflicts, which take place more with the adults in the stories rather than the teenage protagonists. The 1st person point of view enhances the disorganized thought process in the teens’ minds as Appel artfully incorporates the mental distortion of their insatiable drives. Even more so, Appel’s stories become steadily unconventional in their plots and accomplish a rather extraordinary endeavor in writing, completing character arcs without “finishing” the story.

The other five stories place adults as the protagonists, which feature 3rd person points-of-view. Another thing to notice in this collection is Appel’s ability to weave the conflicts under the fabric of these accounts in a subtle manner that hint at the larger theme. An example of this technique is the story about a mother who suffers from seizures while nurturing a blind rabbit to the point of treating it like a human child. The narration does not point out that she misses being a mother to her grown and now successful children.

Appel is wonderful at partially revealing a realistic sense of a character’s emotional redemption. One story, written in 1st person, features a seasoned trucker transporting live zoo animals to Orlando, particularly penguins. Due to the trucker’s coarse, somewhat humorous, lingo, Appel demonstrates the procedure of subtle clues to the divorce the protagonist suffered and conceals deep down. When a teenage girl stows away in his truck, he faces the dilemma of being accused of kidnapping the difficult teen or risk not delivering his load on schedule. During this, the trucker retains a rustic charm despite these treacherous circumstances. He has a paternal quality he keeps from even himself. His character arc goes from wanting to move on from his previous marriage to wishing to see his son more often. His redemption is subtle and relative.

Scouting for the Reaper is an excellent read; Appel’s craft is remarkable. His work engages with the mundane in ways that both respect and heighten one’s sense of reality, through prosaic language and bold sentence structures. These eight stories are an immensely memorable read.

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Shawn Whittington 2

Shawn Whittington (Episode 156) is a writer living in Orlando, Florida.

Buzzed Books #23: Einstein’s Beach House

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Einstein's Beach House, Jacob M. Appel, Rachel Kolman

Buzzed Books #23 by Rachel Kolman

Einstein’s Beach House by Jacob M. Appel

einsteinsbeachhouse Einstein’s Beach House, Appel’s latest short story collection (and his third publication of 2014), is a quick, fun, clever read.

Appel is a writer who knows how short stories work best. He knows how to hit all of the right notes and how to balance humor with serious emotional engagement. Appel’s diverse background (on top of being a writer, he’s also a physician, attorney, and bioethicist) gives him a rich world of details that provide authenticity to his characters. Each story is a line-up of quirky character habits and genuinely unique conflicts. The opening story, “Hue and Cry,” features two young female pre-teens, who might have slight crushes on each other, spying on the registered sex offender who lives next door. In “La Tristesse Des Herissons,” (which translates to “the sadness of the hedgehogs”) a couple tends to their depressed pet hedgehog while the husband wonders if their marriage is falling apart.

And these quirky stories are great, for a while. However, by the end of the collection (which is only 8 stories, mind you), the consistent, similar beats and voice of every story grows tiresome. There’s not one, but two stories that feature a couple strangely over caring for a pet as if it were a child, and two stories that feature a young daughter being exposed to some aspect of adulthood through a disturbed father. There are also at least four older narrators looking back on some anecdote of their childhood, as is the case in “Einstein’s Beach House” and “Limerence.”

Often, Appel’s tells the readers just exactly what his story is about at the end – essentially, a statement of the story’s theme summed up in one line. In case we missed it, an extra beat to feel the author’s smugness at his own clever nature, after a deeply enjoyable narrative. And the few stories that strayed away from that idea (“The Rod of Asclepius,” for one) were incredibly more enjoyable.

There’s still plenty that Appel is doing right: he aptly explores the way the past influences us, with insights that linger long after the story is finished. “Einstein’s Beach House” and “Limerence” both feature older narrators looking back at some particular incident of their childhood, attempting to figure out what it meant, using the distance to reveal more insight into what could seem on the surface as a meaningless childhood adventure.

The distant narrator looking back works well for these two stories; it doesn’t work, however, for the most intriguing story in the bunch, “The Rod of Asclepius.” This story shows a father and seven-year-old daughter going around to hospital rooms and “injecting” patients. It is later learned that the father is quietly targeting and killing the relatives of doctors, due to a bitterness over his wife’s own death in a malpractice case. It’s an intriguing, complicated storyline, which loses some of the immediate thrill with the distance of the narrator, the seven year old now re-telling this story in her thirties, ironically now a doctor herself. Personally, I’d rather have stayed in the scenes with this young girl who already knows at seven that what her father is doing is wrong. The whole present-day narrative of her now being a doctor steals from the complex internal conflict she faced with at such a young age

Despite this, the idea of facing the past and trying to understand the complex dynamic of relationships is a commendable theme and explored thoroughly and inquisitively in this collection. There’s no doubt Appel’s voice is fresh, contemporary, quirky, and lively. Sure, he might be a bit “one-note,” but lucky for him, it’s a remarkably good note to hit.

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rachelkolmanphotoRachel Kolman (Episode 85) received her MFA in fiction from the University of Central Florida. She currently teaches composition at Valencia College and Seminole State College. She’s also a barista at Vespr Coffeebar and can make a mean cup of joe. When she’s not grading papers and drinking coffee, she’s probably watching Netflix and eating Vietnamese food.

Episode 22: Jacob M. Appel!

03 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Hunter S. Thompson

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Craft of Writing, Creative Writing, Jacob M. Appel, Literary Magazines, Writing Podcast

Episode 22 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I discuss fiction writing with Jacob M. Appel, the recent winner of both the Dundee International Book Prize and the Hudson Prize.

Plus Lisa Martens writes about The Catcher in the Rye.

And I answer some mail, and find myself talking about tequila, really bad tequila.

Texts Discussed:

N.B.: Please sign my petition requesting Disney Online to offer Disney historian Jeff Kurtti (our guest on episode 15) an official blog.

From November 11-18l, Miami Book Fair International Will offer a cornucopia of literary culture.

 Episode 22 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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