ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Landfall by Ellen Urbani

Landfall-Cover-FINAL-web-sized-copy


The destinies of two families converge in Landfall, an elegant page-turner set during Hurricane Katrina. Eighteen-year-olds Rose and Rosy haven’t met but they share a birth year, a name, and a bloody pair of sneakers. Rose’s quest to atone for her mother’s lethal crash unfolds alongside Rosy’s battle to escape the flooding and chaos in New Orleans. These unforgettable characters give voice to the dead of the storm while exposing how our preconceived notions can blind us to what matters most.


What People Are Saying about Landfall

With her new novel LANDFALL, Ellen Urbani enters the world of American fiction with a bang and a flourish. She brings back the terrible Hurricane Katrina that tore some of the heart out of the matchless city of New Orleans, but did not lay a finger on its soul. Her descriptions of the flooding of the Ninth Ward are Faulknerian in their powers.
– Pat Conroy, THE PRINCE OF TIDES

Ellen Urbani has written an amazing and original piece of literature. If you love family sagas characterized by women holding the generations together via a magical combination of grit and grace, such as Isabel Allende’s HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS, you will love this haunting book!
– Fannie Flagg, FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLE STOP CAFE

A gorgeous and raw rendering of a young woman’s struggle for redemption, for forgiveness, for salvation, in the aftermath of the devastating catastrophe of Katrina. LANDFALL is not about a storm; it is about the resiliency of the human spirit, and our ongoing need to make sense of the world around us, no matter the cost.
– Garth Stein, THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN


Publisher’s Information

  • PUBLISHER: Forest Avenue Press
  • ISBN: 978-0-9882657-7-6
  • DIMENSIONS: 6X9
  • PAGES: 300]
  • PRICE: $15.95
  • RELEASE DATE: 08/11/2015
  • PURCHASE HERE

  • Recommended Works by Ellen Urbani

    Favorite Eckleburg Work: http://eckleburg.org/eckleburg-book-club-the-little-free-library-book-by-margaret-aldrich/

    Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

    Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice

    In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.

    After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

    Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

    In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis. READ MORE


    The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld

    A wondrous and redemptive debut novel, set in a stark world where evil and magic coincide, The Enchanted combines the empathy and lyricism of Alice Sebold with the dark, imaginative power of Stephen King.
    “This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it, but I do.” The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits. Fearful and reclusive, he senses what others cannot. Though bars confine him every minute of every day, he marries visions of golden horses running beneath the prison, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs with the devastating violence of prison life.
    Two outsiders venture here: a fallen priest and the Lady, an investigator who searches for buried information from prisoners’ pasts that can save those soon-to-be-executed. Digging into the background of a killer named York, she uncovers wrenching truths that challenge familiar notions of victim and criminal, innocence and guilt, honesty and corruption—ultimately revealing shocking secrets of her own.
    Beautiful and transcendent, The Enchanted reminds us of how our humanity connects us all, and how beauty and love exist even amidst the most nightmarish reality. READ MORE


    Discussion Questions for Landfall

    1. In her 2006 memoir When I Was Elena, Ellen wrote half the chapters in the voice of indigenous Guatemalan women. In Landfall, she writes half the book from the point of view of an African American girl. What might be the authorial challenges and rewards of immersing oneself so deeply in the perspective of another so as to write with authority in that person’s voice?

    2. Prior to leaving the medical field to focus on a writing career, Ellen worked as an oncology counselor, specifically focusing on work with end-of-life patients and children whose parents were dying. She also trained as a psychiatric/disaster relief specialist with the American Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA.) Can you see that background reflected in the pages of Landfall?

    3. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer Szalai wrote of Hurricane Katrina, “The actual words of the actual survivors are devastating already, and a novelist who dares to create a fictional version of their experience has also taken it upon himself to issue more than a swell of emotion. The citizens of New Orleans were failed by government officials in thrall to foolish optimism and best-case scenarios; what fiction offers is the potential to confront such lazy habits of thinking with a relentless focus on complexity and nuance.” Do you believe Landfall achieves that?


    About Ellen Urbani

    Ellen Urbani is the author of Landfall, a work of historical fiction set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the memoir When I Was Elena, a Book Sense Notable selection documenting her life in Guatemala during the final years of that country’s civil war. She has a bachelor’s degree from The University of Alabama and a master’s degree from Marylhurst University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and numerous anthologies, and has been widely excerpted. She’s reviewed books for The Oregonian, served as a federal disaster/trauma specialist, and has lectured nationally on this topic. Her work has been profiled in the Oscar-qualified short documentary film Paint Me a Future. A Southern expat now residing in Oregon, her pets will always be dawgs and her truest allegiance will always reside with the Crimson Tide.




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    The destinies of two families converge in Landfall, an elegant page-turner set during Hurricane Katrina. Eighteen-year-olds Rose and Rosy haven’t met but they share a birth year, a name, and a bloody pair of sneakers. Rose’s quest to atone for her mother’s lethal crash unfolds alongside Rosy’s battle to escape the flooding and chaos in New Orleans. These unforgettable characters give voice to the dead of the storm while exposing how our preconceived notions can blind us to what matters most.

    ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | California by Edan Lepucki

    California

     

    Be the first two readers to leave a comment below and win a FREE copy!

     

    California by Edan Lepucki

    The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they’ve left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they can’t reclaim, they seek solace in each other. But the tentative existence they’ve built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she’s pregnant. 

    Terrified of the unknown and unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses dangers of its own. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.

    A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind’s dark nature and deep-seated resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love. 

    “In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush, intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully exploits its dramatic possibilities.” —Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad 

    “Rewarding….[One of] 30 books you NEED to read in 2014.” —Huffington Post

    “An expansive, full-bodied and masterful narrative of humans caught in the most extreme situations, with all of our virtues and failings on full display: courage, cowardice, trust, betrayal, honor and expedience. The final eighty pages of this book gripped me as much as any fictional denouement I’ve encountered in recent years….I firmly believe that Edan Lepucki is on the cusp of a long, strong career in  American letters.” (author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara).

    “Edan Lepucki’s first novel comes steeped in Southern California literary tradition….One thinks of Steve Erickson or Cynthia Kadohata, or Carolyn See, whose 1987 novel Golden Days ends with the nuclear holocaust.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

    “Stunning and brilliant novel,  which is a wholly original take on the post-apocalypse genre, an end-of-the-world we’ve never seen before and yet is uncomfortably believable and recognizable. By turns funny and heartbreaking,  scary and tender, beautifully written and compulsively page-turning, this is a book that will haunt me, and that I’ll be thankful to return to in the years to come. It left me speechless. Read it,  and prepare yourself.” (author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake).

    “Noteworthy….Lepucki’s debut is an inventive take on the post-apocalyptic novel, about a couple who moves from an isolated existence in the wilderness to a guarded community that, they soon realize, harbors terrifying secrets and unforseen dangers.” —Laura Pearson, Time Out Chicago

    “Edan Lepucki is the very best kind of writer: simultaneously generous and precise. I am long been an admirer of her prose, but this book—this book, this massive, brilliant book—is a four alarm fire, the ambitious and rich introduction that a writer of her caliber deserves. I can’t wait for the world to know what I have known for so many years, that Edan Lepucki is the real thing, and that we will all be bowing at her feet before long.” (author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures).

    “In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush, intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully exploits its dramatic possibilities.” —Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

    “When the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper, you want a guide whose insight into the subtle revolutions of the heart are as nuanced as her perceptions about the broken world are astute. In prose witty, seductive, and exacting, Lepucki reminds us that, in the after-life of social collapse, it’s not only the strongest willed, but the most compassionate among us, who must rebuild. California is an epic of interiors.” (author of Forecast).

    “An expansive, full-bodied and masterful narrative of humans caught in the most extreme situations, with all of our virtues and failings on full display: courage, cowardice, trust, betrayal, honor and expedience. The final eighty pages of this book gripped me as much as any fictional denouement I’ve encountered in recent years….I firmly believe that Edan Lepucki is on the cusp of a long, strong career in  American letters.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

    “Stunning and brilliant novel,  which is a wholly original take on the post-apocalypse genre, an end-of-the-world we’ve never seen before and yet is uncomfortably believable and recognizable. By turns funny and heartbreaking,  scary and tender, beautifully written and compulsively page-turning, this is a book that will haunt me, and that I’ll be thankful to return to in the years to come. It left me speechless. Read it,  and prepare yourself.” —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

    “This thrilling and thoughtful debut novel by Edan Lepucki follows a young married couple navigating dangers both physical and emotional in a wild, mysterious post-collapse America. It’s a vivid, believable picture of a not-so-distant future and the timeless negotiation of young marriage, handled with suspense and psychological acuity.” —Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black

    “Edan Lepucki is the very best kind of writer: simultaneously generous and precise. I am long been an admirer of her prose, but this book—this book, this massive, brilliant book—is a four alarm fire, the ambitious and rich introduction that a writer of her caliber deserves. I can’t wait for the world to know what I have known for so many years, that Edan Lepucki is the real thing, and that we will all be bowing at her feet before long.” —Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures

    “When the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper, you want a guide whose insight into the subtle revolutions of the heart are as nuanced as her perceptions about the broken world are astute. In prose witty, seductive, and exacting, Lepucki reminds us that, in the after-life of social collapse, it’s not only the strongest willed, but the most compassionate among us, who must rebuild. California is an epic of interiors.” —Shya Scanlon, author of Forecast

    “It’s tempting to call this novel post-apocalyptic, but really, it’s about an apocalypse in progress, an apocalypse that might already be happening, one that doesn’t so much break life into before and after as unravel it bit by bit. Edan Lepucki tells her tale with preternatural clarity and total believability, in large part by focusing on the relationships — between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child — that are, it turns out, apocalypse-proof. Post-nothing. California is timeless.” —Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

    “There’s been no shortage of apocalyptic scenarios in our recent literature. What makes Edan Lepucki’s novel so stunning is that her survivors don’t merely resemble us, they are us, in their emotional particularity and dilemmas. The result is a book as terse and terrifying as the best of Shirley Jackson, on the one hand, and as clear-eyed and profound a portrait of a marriage as Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, on the other. California is superb.” —Matthew Specktor, author of The American Dream Machine

    “In her remarkable debut California, Edan Lepucki has conjured a post-apocalyptic vision that is honest, frightening, and altogether too realistic. At times disturbing and often heartbreaking, California is an original examination of the limitations of family and loyalty in a world on the verge of collapse.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street

    “Edan Lepucki’s novel California kept me up for five nights.  This was a problem.  However, I was not just tired, but often worried for the characters, for our world, and then astonished and laughing at her skill with humor and lyricism even in the fearful landscape.  It’s a ruined place, yes, but the bonds of family, and the betrayal of blood, are as true as every in her surprising imagery and her complicated humans, who could be any of us.” —Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales

    “Breathtakingly original, fearless and inventive, pitch perfect in its portrayal of the intimacies and tiny betrayals of marriage, so utterly gripping it demands to be read in one sitting: Edan Lepucki’s California is the novel you have been waiting for, the novel that perfectly captures the hopes and anxieties of contemporary America. This is a novel that resonates on every level, a novel that stays with you for a lifetime. Read it now.” —Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age

    California is carefully drawn and beautifully textured.  It’s a pleasure to watch love and family transform in this dark, strange forest.” —Ramona Ausubel, author of A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us 

    California is a wonder: a big, gripping and inventive story built on quiet, precise human moments. Edan Lepucki’s eerie near future is vividly and persuasively imagined. She is a fierce new presence in American fiction.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia

     

    Publisher Information & Purchase Links

    • Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
    • Price: $12.99 US/$12.99 CAN
    • Pages: 400
    • ISBN-13: 9780316250825
    • On Sale Date: 07/08/2014
    • PURCHASE HERE

     

    Excerpt

    From publisher

     

    Discussion Questions for California

    1.  From publisher

     

    Edan-Lepucki-Author-Photo-199x300

    Edan Lepucki is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a staff writer for The Millions. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s and Narrative Magazine, among other publications, and she is the founder and director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles. This is her first novel. 

     

     

    Eckleburg Book ClubEckleburg Book Club is an outreach of The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, supporting good books and talented authors/poets. Check out our other outreach projects at The Eckleburg WorkshopsThe Eckleburg Bookstore, The Eckleburg Gallery and Rue de Fleurus Salon & Reading Series in NYC, DC, Baltimore & More.

    eckleburg-bookstore-logo rue-logo-black-white-background The Eckleburg Workshopseckleburg-gallery-logo 

     

    ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | The Whack-Job Girls by Bonnie ZoBell

    Whack-Job

    The Whack-Job Girls portrays a posse of women who either don’t quite fit in or are deeply disconnected from society. Dark humor creeps through these quirky tales as one thinks she sees the Virgin Mary on her living room wall, another losing her eyesight refuses to the end to quit her rock’n’roll parade, still another must clean mysteriously revolting mishaps as a hotel maid working graveyard. moment.  Published by Monkey Puzzle Press in March 2013.  

    “ZoBell is able to capture a poetic lyric in short narratives of socially and economically outcast women in her text: the maid working at an upscale hotel called upon to attend to a room at three AM, or the Midwesterner from Spokane who rides a train to Harlem when “the only black people [she] ever saw were Crips and Bloods in movies of the week.” These stories develop their characters’ personal situations . . . but there is also a layer of gothic séance, which produces a feeling one gets from a Denis Johnson or Shirley Jackson novel.” Matt Pincus, PANK

    “ZoBell’s stories cut to our existence and our desires to connect with others, whether this connection be in the communal approach to bedding with animals and a sleep apnea-machine breathing husband in ‘Deep Sea Dive’ or the reduction of all the earth’s inhabitants to the violence of the animal world we all live in in ‘Serial.'” –  Brandon Shuler, Prime Number Magazine

    “Bonnie ZoBell is my favorite sort of whack-job girl—a writer with a sharp eye, a sharper tongue, and a reckless heart. Read this book. Then read it again.” – Steve Almond, blurb on cover

    Publisher:  Monkey Puzzle Press 
Price: $9.00 book/$2.99 Kindle
Pages: 58
 Physical Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.4″
 ISBN-13: 978-0985170578 
On Sale Date: 03/01/2013 

    Click here to purchase the book.

     

    Discussion Questions about The Whack-Job Girls

    1.  How might these stories have been different if they were longer?

    2.  Is there one of these characters who you relate to the most?

    3.  Do you think these women are “whacky,” or are they like most people?

    4.  Why do you think there are so many animals in these stories?

    5.  In what way do you think these stories are related? 

     

    Books Bonnie ZoBell Recommends

    tide kingThe Tide King by Jen Michalski

    This spellbinding debut novel is the winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2012 Big Moose Prize. Magical realism is woven through the extraordinary tale that encompasses Africa and Germany during World War II, and 1800s Poland, where a small girl lives in fear of being found by the Nazis who murdered her mother for being a witch. Immortality is explored in ways you haven’t imagined.

    Jen Michalski is also the author of two collections of fiction, From Here and Close Encounters, and a collection of novellas, Could You Be With Her Now. In 2013 she was named one of “50 Women to Watch” by The Baltimore Sun and won a “Best of Baltimore” for Best Writer from Baltimore Magazine. She is the founding editor of jmww and host of The Starts Here! Reading Series and the biannual Lit Show. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

     

    Quarry Light by Claudia SmithQuarry Light

    In this elegant yet often terrifying short-story collection published by Magic Helicopter Press, the imagination works as an escape from what the young-girl narrators need to hide from. The prose is delicate but the themes are not. A rat scratches behind the walls a father has painted and left. A man sends his daughter a friend request. A man draws a woman pictures she doesn’t want, of her hair wound around her neck. Women search for life after darkness and breath after violence. Their mother swims in quarry water the coolest, deepest green they have ever seen. 

    Claudia Smith’s flash fiction collection The Sky Is A Well And Other Shorts was reprinted in Rose Metal Press’s book A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness; her second collection of flashes, Put Your Head in My Lap, is available from Future Tense Books.  

     

     

    incompetent translationsIncompetent Translations and Inept Haiku by Bill Yarrow

    In this literary tour de force of twenty-seven poems published by Cervena Barva Press in 2013, Bill Yarrow explores poetic possibilities of theme, form, tone, and style while offering a masterful and original, not to mention hilarious, course in comparative poetics.

    Bill Yarrow is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. He is the author of a volume of poems, Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012). The Lice of Christ (MadHat Press, 2014), Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku (Cervema Barva Press, 2014), Fourteen (Naked Mannekin, 2011), and Wrench (erbacce-press, 2009).  

     

     


    Bonnie

    Bonnie ZoBell’s new connected collection, What Happened Here, is centered on the site PSA Flight 182 crashed in the North Park area of San Diego in 1978. She has received an National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has held resident fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, and Dorland. She received an MFA from Columbia University on fellowship and currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College.