the understory Pamela Erens and Oh Baby by Kim Chinquee. Good stuff. Really good stuff.

While we have been especially geeked to read two new books previously mentioned here, Stories by Scott McClanahan and Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon, a collection of letters between the poets Hosho McCreesh and Christopher Cunningham, we alas have not yet gotten our hands on them. That said, we have any number of books here at TBWCYL, Inc. headquarters that we have been wanting to read and so we took to the bookshelves this week in search of what might come next. As we did, it occurred to us that we have been reading a lot of books by dudes recently and while there is nothing wrong with that per se it seemed like it was time to mix it up a bit. Which we did after coming across the understory by Pamela Erens and Oh Baby by Kim Chinquee, two drastically different yet equally wonderful reading experiences.

the understory is a terrific novel and meditation on not just compulsion and isolation, but the role compulsion plays, good and bad, in the meditative life.

Oh Baby on the other hand is a collection of flash fiction and prose poems that seem to fall somewhere between shotgun blasts and song.

Both are like gifts that had been lurking right there before us just waiting to be discovered. We you hope you will discover them as well, because who knows, they just might change your life.