06/02/2010

By Christopher Stokum & Sarah Schiavoni
Writers Rules 2-5 were taken from Kurt Vonnegut's Creative Writing 101

Attention: WritersNewsWeekly is preparing a series on the impact childhood books have on their young readers. If you’re an author interested in being interviewed, or if you think you have a unique perspective on the topic, contact us at submissions@writersnewsweekly.com.

The Day Miriam Hirsch Disappeared

The Day Miriam Hirsch Disappeared is a short story from the collection Nice Girl Does Noir I by Libby Fischer Hellmann. "THE DAY MIRIAM HIRSCH DISAPPEARED was the first short story I wrote. My son had been given a book called “THE JEWS OF CHICAGO” for a Bar Mitzvah present, and when I thumbed through the photographs, they resonated -- especially the ones taken in Lawndale side during the ‘30s, a prosperous Jewish community on Chicago’s near west. Little did I know then that the story I wrote about those photos would become the “prequel” to my Ellie Foreman series. Or that the Ellie Foreman series would be the prequel to the Georgia Davis series. The following story, which won the Bouchercon short story contest in 1999, was first published in the Bouchercon Program book. It was later published in ANTHOLOGY TODAY, where it also won a contest, and in the now defunct FUTURES MAGAZINE. You can also find it digitally on Amazon Shorts, and it is available on audio at www.sniplits.com..."

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Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

By Carlotta G. Holton

At first reading, one might think this is a book about death and dying. With London’s famous Highgate Cemetery as part of the backdrop and the death of one of the main characters at the onset, it’s a natural assumption. While this is a modern ghost story, it is also a book about living and the degree to which some will go to prolong their lives at any and all costs. In essence, it asserts that death is only the beginning...

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Karen M. Bence Video Interview

Karen M. Bence is the author of Midnight Revelations, which recently won the fiction horror category in the 2010 International Book Awards. She graduated from Dickinson College with a bachelor of arts in Psychology, and went on to earn her master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania. Having worked as a social worker, psychotherapist, and educator, Ms. Bence is now settled with her family in a farmhouse outside of Atlanta, GA, where she enjoys her equestrian and dog-breeding activities.

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By Sarah Schiavoni

Looking at the collection of my old poems and short stories, I laughed, I cried…I resisted the urge to crumple them up and play trashcan basketball with them. Leafing through the contents of two old black binders, one filled with neatly dated and filed poems and the other stuffed with short stories and doodles, was like rediscovering my former self—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Looking in my poetry binder at the black, Times New Roman text centered on 118 pages was like reliving middle school in tiny pieces. In the sixth grade, nature imagery and elements of myth and magic fascinated me. In the seventh and eighth grades, I was caught up in the torment of being a young teen girl with the desire to both follow and condemn “the crowd.” In the ninth grade, I fell in love—that childish, giddy kind of love you feel when a boy sits by you everyday in class and laughs at your jokes when no one else does. There are forty-five poems in this binder about him—forty-five gut-wrenching, lovesick, embarrassing poems that I can hardly believe I wrote now that I am so far removed from these kinds of school girl crushes. Those middle school years provided a torrent of emotions and inspiration, and despite this embarrassing collection of my thoughts and feelings, I am grateful to have this record of my past.

In the other black binder covered in stickers with witty commentary and fun pictures, are all of my short stories, along with half-finished writing ideas and doodles hastily sketched out on loose leaf paper. Unlike my poetry binder, which has been hidden deep in a dresser drawer for five or six years, my writing binder has, until recently, been kept on a shelf in the nightstand by my bed. To this sentence: I carefully selected each sticker on that binder, from the girlish Hello Kitty stickers stuck haphazardly on the back cover to the "Tact is for people who are not witty enough to be sarcastic" sticker smacked on a front corner. When I decorated this binder in the ninth grade, filling it with blank sheets of paper, it was a way for me to graduate from emotion-drenched poetry to more challenging and expansive writing. It was with the move to this binder that I fell in love with writing all over again through my discovery of short stories. My first short story, written sometime during the winter of ninth grade, was a simple love story called “City Lights” that ended with a clichéd romantic scene of a boy kissing a girl under a lamppost. Other stories filled this binder, with titles like “Rain” and “Ashes to Ashes”—titles that I felt were simple yet elegant. Though not as numerous as my poems, my short stories were more thoughtfully constructed and dealt more fully with the concepts that most interested me: love and loss. These stories provided a way for me to hone my craft, create meaningful characters, and explore new ideas in a more expansive way. Like my poetry binder, I have come to appreciate this short story binder as yet another piece of my past.

Having plunged myself into my personal history through an exploration of my writing, I’ve come to appreciate just how much I’ve matured and just how much my writing has changed. I still love nature and am a sucker for overwrought descriptions of scenic displays. Though I once struggled to fit in with my peers and wrote bitterly about my troubles, I now have a better understanding of who I am and how I fit in. Always wanting that fairytale “true love,” I often wrote about it in my poems and short stories. When I was younger, I wrote about love as a girl desperately seeking it; I wanted those passionate kisses I saw in the movies. Now that I’m older and have found true, meaningful love, I write about love as I have come to know it for myself. My writing is now more finely wrought, but even now, looking at these old poems and stories and thinking about my future in writing, I can see that I still have room to grow.

Since going to college, I’ve had little time to devote to creative writing, but looking through these old binders has been like having lunch with an old, dear friend—I’m picking up right where I left off. I have a brand new binder stocked with lined paper waiting for me on the shelf by my bed and there are fresh writing ideas stewing in my head. My poetry binder is still jammed in a dresser drawer, and my short story binder has now joined it, but the point is that they’re there, ready to be looked through again at any time. So here’s my advice to all of you writers out there: don’t throw away your old writings. Keep those poems you wrote for English class, that short story you wrote for a literary magazine, and that first book you had published. Your old writing may be embarrassing, amusing, strange, or any number of things, but most importantly, your old writing is part of your past as a writer and its influence on your future as a writer is immeasurable.

The Day Miriam Hirsch Disappeared is a short story from the collection Nice Girl Does Noir I by Libby Fischer Hellmann (http://www.libbyhellmann.com).

THE DAY MIRIAM HIRSCH DISAPPEARED

The day Miriam Hirsch disappeared was so hot you could almost see the sidewalk blister and sweat. It was summer, 1938, and I'd been hanging around with Barney Teitelman in Lawndale, the Jewish neighborhood on Chicago's west side. Barney's parents owned a restaurant and rooming house near Roosevelt and Kedzie. Miriam rented a room on the third floor. She was a looker, as my father would say, although if he knew his only son was spending that much time with Barney he'd have kittens.
You see, we lived in Hyde Park, a few miles and a universe away from Lawndale. We were German Jews; the Teitelmans weren't. They were from Russia, or Lithuania, or one of those other countries with "ia" at the end of them, and what separated us wasn't just the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We were cultured, assimilated. They were rabble. We had come over before the Civil War; they poured in at the end of the last century. We were merchants, doctors, lawyers. They worked in factories, sweat shops, and, well, restaurants. In fact, when my father was being especially snooty, he'd ask which delicatessen their family owned. I, of course, disagreed with my parents. The Teitelmans talked louder and laughed more, and Mrs. T made a hell of a Shabbos brisket.
Barney and I had met by accident the previous May. We were waiting for the bus outside the College of Jewish Studies near the Loop, both of us in bowties and yarmulkes. My parents had sent me there to "enrich" my Jewish heritage. I guess Barney's did too. We stared warily at each other for a few minutes, like dogs sniffing each other out. Then I offered him a piece of Bazooka. He took it. We were best friends.
He only came to my house once. The frosty reception my mother gave him, after he told her where he lived, was enough. There wasn't much action in Hyde Park anyway. We tried to sucker the Weinstein girls into a game of strip poker behind the rocks at the Fifty-Seventh Street beach, but they gave us the brush off. We didn't care. They were ugly. By June I was taking the Cottage Grove street-car to Roosevelt and transferring west to Lawndale as often as possible.
The first time I saw Miriam, Barney and I were wolfing down brisket sandwiches in the restaurant; I could feel gravy dribbling past my chin. I heard a rustle, turned around. She was walking past our table. No, more like gliding. Dressed in a pearly gown that swept to her feet, she was perfectly proportioned, with a waist so tiny that my hands ached to encircle it, and such a generously endowed bosom that my hands ached -- well, you get the idea.
Her hair was gold, her lips red, and she had the most enormous gray eyes I'd ever seen. A guy could lose his way in them. Especially a fifteen year old. My mouth dropped to my chin; gravy stained my shirt. She was even carrying a parasol. I was in love.
There weren't many people in the restaurant that day, but you could feel the collective hush as she passed through. It was as if her presence had struck us dumb, and we were compelled to stare. As her skirt brushed our table, she cast a dazzling smile on Barney. He turned crimson. Then she was gone. The voltage in the air ebbed, and I heard the clink of silverware as people started to live, breathe, and eat again.
"So, who the hell was that?" I said, in my best tough guy tone.
Barney looked me over, knew I was bluffing. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
I leaned across the table and grabbed Barney's collar. "You don't tell me, Barney Teitelman, I'll tell your parents what you were trying to do to Dina Preis behind the shul last Saturday."
"You wouldn't." He didn't sound convinced.
I clutched his shirt tighter. "You got five seconds."
Barney's eyes narrowed. I guess he figured he'd better give me something. "All's I'll say is she's not for the likes of you, Jake Forman."
I dropped my hold on Barney's neck and jumped up from the table. "Mrs. T? I have something to tell you." I headed toward the kitchen.
"All right already," Barney whined. "Don't go up the wall. She's Miriam Hirsch. She's an actress with the Yiddish theater."
"When did she show up?"
"Couple days ago."
Most of the actresses at the Yiddish theater were from Eastern Europe, but Hirsch was a German name. She and I had something in common already. Then I chastised myself for doing the same thing as my parents.
"I'm gonna be an actor," I said.
Barney balled his napkin up and threw it at me.

***
Apparently, I wasn't the only one Miriam impressed. The next afternoon, as we were hanging out the window trying to blow cigarette smoke into the street instead of the Teitelman's living room, Miriam came out the front door. Sun-baked heat hung in the air like a blanket, and she opened her parasol to protect her head. Half-way up, it got stuck. I was about to run down and offer my assistance when Skull cut in front of her.
Ben Skulnick, or Skull, as we called him, hung out at Davy Miller's gym and pool hall. The Miller brothers were the closest thing Lawndale had to gangsters. They'd moved over from Maxwell Street a few years earlier and built a restaurant and gambling casino next to the gym. Covering all the bases, I guess. Except the type of people who frequented the place weren't exactly high society.
Not that the Miller Boys didn't have their fans. It was Davy Miller's gang who fought the Uptown goyim in the twenties so that Jews could use Clarendon Beach, and it was his gang who kept all the Yeshivah-buchers, religious students, safe from the Irish street gangs. The scuttlebutt these days was they were going after Nazi sympathizers on the north side. Whatever the truth, Davy Miller and his crew were proof that Jewish boys weren't sissies, a myth we were all eager to dispel.
"Look at that, Barney," I said, my eyes riveted on the scene below us.
"I see."
Tall and dark, Skull cut a dashing figure. He was probably running numbers, greasing palms, and taking cuts off the locals in the area, but with his well-trimmed whiskers, neatly pressed shirt, and Italian suit, he looked like a successful businessman, not a thug. He wore a hat too, a snap-brimmed Fedora, and moved with a sinewy grace, like a cat stalking its prey. No one knew where he came from.
"He's gonna make a play for her." I wasn't sure if I was devastated or curious.
"Do you blame him?"
We watched as he struggled with Miriam's parasol, opened it, and presented it back to her with a flourish. Before she disappeared underneath its shade, I saw the smile she gave him. And the lazy, appraising smile he gave back.
"You see that, Jake?"
I swallowed.
"Give it up, pal. You're way out of your league."
By the following week, Skull was dropping by the restaurant every afternoon. He'd order a glass of iced tea which he tipped plenty for, but never drank. Sometimes he'd grab a game of gin rummy in the back room, but mostly he checked his watch every few minutes. Around two, he'd make sure to bump into Miriam and walk her to rehearsal. And back home again later.
One evening he walked her all the way up to the third floor. That was the last we saw of them all night. Of course, Barney and I snuck up to the third floor landing, but all we heard were strains of "Don't Be That Way" wafting down the hall from her radio. Benny Goodman. Barney dragged me back downstairs.
But I hadn't lost all hope. When Miriam's show opened, we started to hang around the stage door of Douglas Park Auditorium to catch a glimpse of her. Skull did too. When she came out, sometimes with her stage make-up still on, he would offer her his arm and they'd saunter down the street together. Sometimes they stopped for ice-cream or a sandwich at Carl's Deli. On Sundays, they headed over to the roof of the Jewish People's Institute to dance. Even at a distance, you could feel the sparks fly between them. When they smiled at each other or danced the two step, it broke my heart. I was jealous. I was in love -- with both of them. They were the epitome of glamour. They were swell. With bells on.
One night, though, was different.
"No, Skull, I won't do it." Miriam stared straight ahead as they stepped through the stage door. "Stop asking me."
There was a gleam in Skull's eye. "Oh come on, baby, it's only for a little while."
"No." Miriam walked three steps ahead of him.
"But you're the only one who can. You speak their language."
"I don't care."
He stopped short. "How can you say that?"
"You have some chutzpah. How can you ask me to – well, to do something like that?" She whipped around to face him, her eyes flashing. Barney and I flattened ourselves against a building.
Skull backed off. His voice grew as soft as cotton. Wheedling. "You love me, don't you baby?"
She looked at him. She kept her mouth shut, but her eyes, as luminous as waves on the moonlit lake, said it all.
Skull moved in for the kill. He pushed a lock of hair off her forehead. "All I need is a little information. Then you can stop. Please. Do it for me.” He paused. “For us."
Miriam pursed her lips, and I thought she was going to cry. Then, she sagged against Skull, as if he had somehow managed to squeeze all the air out of her.
Skull grinned and pulled her close, planted a victory kiss on her lips. "That's my baby."
She buried her head in his shoulder. We didn't hear her reply.

***

Whatever Miriam agreed to that night must not have lasted long, because we never saw them together again. Skull didn't come around to Teitelmans any more, and he didn't show up at the auditorium. Miriam came and went by herself. Occasionally, she hailed a cab and never came home at all. It was strange, and I was confused and angry. What had Skull asked her to do? It had to be something so evil that her only recourse was to break up with him.
A week later, on an afternoon so humid that nothing felt dry, Barney and I lugged groceries past the banks on the corner. Across the street we spotted Skull getting his shoes shined. He was reading a newspaper and scowling. When he saw us he tipped his hat. Barney and I glanced at each other. Did he really mean us?
As if to answer our question, he called over to us. "Hey, Teitelman."
Barney nodded tentatively.
Skull dropped a buck in the shoeshine guy's box, overtipping as usual, and crossed the street.
"You guys been following me for a while, haven't you?"
I swallowed. Here it comes. Our first real conversation, and he's gonna tell us to butt out.
"I'm glad I run into youse. I've been meaning to call. Are youse -- young gentlemen interested in a business proposition?"
My jaw dropped to my chest.
He squinted at us. "My business in other parts of the city has picked up recently and requires my -- my presence there. But I still need some --whadd'ya call it -- some representation here. You guys interested?" He yanked his thumb toward our bags of groceries. "Pays better than that."
I looked at Barney, then at Skull, trying to mask my excitement with a shrug. It didn't work. A soft yelp escaped my mouth.
"Good. Come around to Miller's at three." Skull turned on his heel, dropping the paper in the trash on the corner. I glanced at the headline -- something about hooligans throwing rocks at a group of German-American Bund members on the north side.
The long and the short of it was that Skull wanted us to do errands for him in the neighborhood. Nothing major, just running messages to Zookie the Bookie and picking up envelopes from some of the shops. At first he came with us to show us the ropes. Then we were on our own.
It was a fair trade off. We didn't have Miriam, but we did have Skull. In some ways, it was better. We were important. Even the guys in the pool hall nodded to us after a while. And we were making great money. Almost ten bucks a day. Barney and I made up new names for each other. I was Jake the Snake; he was Barney Bow-Tie.
On the days Skull was with us, I watched him operate. He was smooth. He’d flash one of his lazy smiles, and even the people he was bilking smiled back. Especially the ladies. The only time he lost his cool was the afternoon we passed Miriam. She was crossing the street to catch a cab. Their eyes met, and I thought I saw a look of infinite sadness, passion, and what-might-have-been pass between them. How could it be over, with looks like that?

***

I should have known it wouldn't last. One morning in late July my mother and father woke me up. Poised for attack, they stood at the foot of my bed.
"Jacob, you have some explaining to do." My mother's eyes were cold steel.
I tried to play dumb. "What's that, Ma?" I yawned. Slowly.
"Just exactly what have you been doing in Lawndale?"
"What do you mean?"
"Jacob, don't try to weasel your way out of this one." My father glared. "Henry Solomon saw you outside Davy Miller's the other day. How long have you been consorting with gangsters?"
"Gangsters? What gangsters?"
My father cut me off. "You want to play it that way? Fine. You're forbidden to go there anymore."
"But Barney's my best friend."
"He's a bad influence. They all are." My father wheeled around as if there was nothing more to say.
"But I've got a job. I'm making good money."
"Good money?" My father whipped back around. His face was purple. "That kind of money you don't need. You want a job, you work in Kahn's bakery. It was good enough for me -- it'll do for you."
I wanted to ask him why he figured Henry Solomon, one of our most respectable Hyde Park neighbors, was over in Lawndale, but somehow I didn't think the time was right.

***

If the boredom didn't get me, the pretense did. Life in Hyde Park was intolerable. And hot. Not even a wisp of a breeze fluttered through the curtains of our wide-open windows. About a week later, it got so bad even my parents took off for the Michigan shore. I pled a toothache. As soon as they left, not without suspicious glances at the icepack clamped to my cheek, I hopped the street-car over to Lawndale. Mrs. Teitelman was washing the floor of the restaurant.
"Where have you been, Jake? Barney's at a concert in Douglas Park. You just missed him."
"I'll wait." I looked around. The place was empty. I snuck a glance at the door leading to the stairs.
"How are things?"
Mrs. Teitelman followed my gaze. She shrugged, a grim set to her mouth.
"Did Skull come back?"
Another shrug.
I was just breaking out a bottle of seltzer when the door to the stairs opened, and a man crossed the restaurant. He had blond whiskers, a round red face, and an odd twitch in one eye. He didn't look Jewish. He hurried across the room, staring straight ahead, as if he knew he didn't belong and wanted to get out fast.
A few minutes later, Miriam skipped down the steps, her smile as bright as a box of new Shabbos candles. I froze. Who was this impostor? Where was Skull? I felt betrayed. She waved at me before gliding out the door.
Barney got back from the park around four.
"What's been going on around here?" I asked
"I don't know." He hung his head as if he were responsible for the turn of events.
"Didn't they get back together?"
"Nope. He hasn't been here at all. In fact --"
"What?" I was starting to feel panicky.
"I dunno, Jake. Sometimes she doesn't come home at night. And then one time, her eyes were all red rimmed like she'd been crying, and her dress was ripped. She didn't even have her key. My father had to let her in."
"Jesus, Barney."
He nodded. "And when she's here, she's 'entertaining' in her room. But it isn’t Skull."
"The guy I saw earlier?"
"Yeah. I think he's goyim. Mother's ready to kick her out."
I turned to Mrs. T in desperation. "You can't do that. Where will she go?"
Mrs. T just looked at me. "Jacob, there are some things you're still too young to understand."
That afternoon we ran down to the pool hall and caught up with Skull at Miller's. We were sweating like pigs, but he was cool and dapper.
"Where ya bin, Snake?" He grinned.
"I was grounded, Skull. My parents." I rolled my eyes.
He looked at me speculatively. "Your parents must be real Nervous Nellies." "They're German," I admitted.
"So are Miriam's," Skull said. "Crabbers. Stiff as sandpaper."
I took that as an opening and screwed up my courage. "How is Miriam these days?"
He ignored my question. "You know, it's a damn shame about you Yeccas." That was slang for German Jews. "One of the best guys I ever heard of was Arnold Rothstein. Practically started the Mafia. His family was German, but he was tops. You know what he did?"
I shook my head.
"Hustled the most famous pool shark in the country. Beat his tuckus off. And he hardly even played pool."
"How'd he do that?"
"Kept the guy up until he won. Forty hours with no sleep." Skull winked at me. "Rothstein had style too. He ran a casino, moved a lot of booze, financed all sorts of capers. But he always wore a tux and he danced with the ladies every night." Skull's chin dipped. "He was -- whadda'ya call it -- a smooth operator."
I wanted to ask him more about Miriam, but I didn't have the guts.

***

Mrs. T never had the chance to evict Miriam. She never came back. Three days later they found her body in an alley off Lincoln Avenue. The German part of town. She'd been raped, beaten, strangled. The cops identified her by her purse.
A tough-looking Irish detective, Patrick O'Meara, came around to question us. Mrs. T told him everything she knew. About the theater. Skull. The man with the blond whiskers.
O'Meara hustled over to Davy Miller's to question Skull. We trailed behind. It was the first time we'd seen him ourselves in a couple of days. He looked bad. His shirt was wrinkled, he hadn't shaved, and his bloodshot eyes kept darting around the room. His mood seemed to shift from arrogance to desolation, and his answers were clipped and curt.
I began to think the worst. Miriam and Skull broke up. Miriam started up with other men. Skull must have been crazy with jealousy and he snapped. It looked that way to me. And to O'Meara. He wasn't nice to Skull. Told him not to go anywhere for a while.
Of course, the next morning Skull was gone, and no one knew where. Or they weren't telling. That was the only proof I needed. He killed Miriam. Maybe my parents were right after all. Lawndale people were different.
Barney and I were puzzling it over at the restaurant when O'Meara showed up. Mrs. T was upstairs getting dressed, so he nabbed Joey, the head waiter.
"Ever seen this guy?" He showed him a picture.
Joey shook his head.
"You sure?" You could tell O'Meara didn't believe him. "Seen Skulnick recently?"
Joey kept wiping glasses with his towel. "Nope."
O'Meara turned around, saw us sitting at a table. We froze. His eyes narrowed, then he came over. I tried to look nonchalant.
"Your turn, boys. You ever seen this guy?"
He threw the picture down on our table.
I could hear Barney's sharp intake of breath. It was the man with the blond whiskers. I tried to be blasé.
But O'Meara was patient. Eventually, my eyes drifted back to the picture. O'Meara was waiting.
"So what's it gonna be, boys?"
"Who is he?" I croaked.
"You seen him?"
I met O'Meara's eyes and nodded.
"Name's Peter Schultz. They call him Twitch. Some kind of problem around his eye." O'Meara stared at me. I looked at the floor. I knew the name. Peter Schultz was the head of the German-American Bund in Chicago. They were Nazis.
"He was murdered last night," O'Meara said. "We found him in the same alley they found the girl."
Barney made a mewling sound in his throat. I felt old.
"He was stabbed about fifteen times, then strangled. They got him pretty good."
I didn't move.
O'Meara kept the pressure on. "You know, it's interesting. With him gone, their whole organization is up for grabs, you know?"
I didn't say anything, but the pieces were finally coming together. I knew who killed Miriam, and I knew who killed Schultz. I wondered if O'Meara knew too.
O'Meara went on. "Someone—someone close to him—knew the Kraut's habits so well they even knew what time he took a dump. They got him on his way to a Bund meeting. You have any idea who that might be?"
I kept my mouth shut.
He shook his head. “"Well, whoever it was, now there's one less Nazi in the world." O'Meara stood up, put his hat on, threw us a world-weary glance. "They say all's fair in love and war. What do you think?"
What I thought was that I may have been wrong about Skull all along; that this was more about war than love. There may have been a reason why Miriam was dating Schultz; why Skull was pressuring Miriam to get information she didn’t want to do. While Skull used Miriam, he was also her avenger.
“I’ll be seeing you boys around,” O’Meara said, then stepped through the door and left.
***

Skull never came back to Lawndale. At least we never heard from him again. I didn't hang around much either. School started, and I got busy with homework and sports. I met a girl at Hyde Park High, Barbara Steinberg. She was pretty nice. Barney called a couple of times, but neither of us pushed it. Other things were fast taking precedence. Hitler annexed Austria, and the news coming out of Europe was grim. No one seemed to remember the day Miriam Hirsch disappeared.

THE END

By: Christopher Stokum

Ah, summer. When the home improvements you’ve planned for six months will always get done next weekend. When you can decide to take a walk and spend less than fifteen minutes dressing for the weather. When you can read all of the books you’ve said you’d read for the past three years.

But where to start? Your options are certainly diverse. According to bibliographics titan R.R. Bowker, approximately 300,000 titles are published each year in the United States alone. Don’t let the number deter you, now. We may be able to pare it down to a manageable amount if we can give an answer to a key question: why do we read?

Countless books have been written on the subject, and I don’t intend to add to the debacle; a simple answer should suffice. Let’s say that you read for education, self-growth and enlightenment. You read books that you can gain something from, books that take you aloft and purify you. You read books that lay the truths of the world bare and that connect you to something greater than yourself.

Bullshit. That answer is right maybe a sixth of the time, no more.

You read books to forget about either the insanity or, more often, the overwhelming mundanity of your life. To ease the pain you feel somewhere behind your eyes, which is almost certainly the result of watching five consecutive (10 nonconsecutive) hours of television per day. You read for an escape, a memory-wipe, a distraction.

We now have competing motivations: the fact of reading as transportation to a better, or at least different place, and the ideal of reading as illumination. Turning to third parties for advice only compounds the confusion. “Read Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” your overzealous philosophy major friend cries. “Read Catch 22,” your somewhat more grounded but still way too optimistic roommate counters. “Finish the Harry Potter series,” your mother insists on the phone. Etc., etc.

I think I see a hypothetical solution rising to the surface of your now confounded mind. You’ll add them to your list, right? Common as this technique is, it truly amounts to shirking the issue. If you’re anything like me, you don’t actually have a list, regardless of whether you use the phrase. At best, you have a mental junk drawer of books, from which you can draw titles on command, but in no particular order.

Before you object, consider an example. “Chris, what’s on your to-read list?” asks a good old literate friend of mine. “Well,” I say, “I want to reread For Whom the Bell Tolls, check out Lolita…ah, Slaughterhouse Five, Buddha’s Little Finger, maybe. Grant’s memoirs. The essay in the May or June Harpers on the Homeless World Cup; that sounded interesting. Howl, the poem, the Ginsberg one. I’d be rereading that, too, I think, like Absalom! Absalom!” Did I say any Vonnegut yet? Love Vonnegut…then maybe Oblivion, Brothers Karamazov…” and so on and on. Ask me for a list tomorrow, and I doubt I’ll repeat a single title.

This clearly isn’t the time for a list. Alternatives are limited, however, as is my word count, so I’ll wrap this up fast. The mention of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind – a Wilfrid Sellars masterpiece – earlier is still resonating with me. If we gently bastardize Sellars’ conception of knowledge, catchily referred to as the “Space of Reasons,” it might serve our purposes well.

So, let’s throw out the idea of a list of books and instead say that we have a non-hierarchical collection. Each book in this collection leads to at least one other book, but almost certainly more. Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! might remind you of a Raymond Carver short story, and the Carver story might push you to dig out your Richard Ford collection. Now, all of the books in this collection can be read, re-read and read again – gained and discarded as new shelving is added or as you run out of space – but not all can be read at once. “Non-hierarchical” is really the central term here. Any attempts to structure the collection into a list are artificial and, speaking from experience, wholly in vain.

That, essentially, is my recommendation. Forget about reading books this summer in any kind of order. Pick up the first one that arrests your attention, finish it, and then move on to the next book you think of. You’ll notice connections between books that you wouldn’t have noticed had you used a less natural system. You’ll automatically balance; you’ll read intellectually weighty books when you tire of fluff and mindless entertainment when you tire of thought. Best of all, you’ll stop fretting over what you should be reading, and you’ll start actually reading.

Karen M. Bence is the author of Midnight Revelations, which recently won the fiction horror category in the 2010 International Book Awards. She graduated from Dickinson College with a bachelor of arts in Psychology, and went on to earn her master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania. Having worked as a social worker, psychotherapist, and educator, Ms. Bence is now settled with her family in a farmhouse outside of Atlanta, GA, where she enjoys her equestrian and dog-breeding activities.

Midnight Revelations is the first book of the Dark Whispers Series and follows the eerie events that take place in the old farmhouse where Sara Miller and her family live. You can find more information about the author and her award-winning book on her webpage, http://www.karenbencebooks.com.

By Carlotta G. Holton

At first reading, one might think this is a book about death and dying. With London’s famous Highgate Cemetery as part of the backdrop and the death of one of the main characters at the onset, it’s a natural assumption. While this is a modern ghost story, it is also a book about living and the degree to which some will go to prolong their lives at any and all costs. In essence, it asserts that death is only the beginning.

It is conceivable that some might not be willing or interested in suspending their disbelief, but I found the premise, the characters and the plot fascinating. On the heels of the wildly successful Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger has created a scenario involving two sets of twins (hence the symmetry in the title, which is borrowed from William Blake’s poem, “Tyger!”). One of two sisters, Edie, gives birth to mirror twins. When the single, childless sister, Elspeth Noblin, succumbs to cancer at 44, she leaves her London flat to her two nieces, Julia and Valentina, who live in America.

The hitch is that the twins are not alone in their apartment. Hiding in a drawer until she can retrieve a mortal body, Elspeth continues—in ghostly form—to wreak influence over the girls and to lay claim to her own place in the world of the living so that she won’t feel as though she has been “erased.”

Her unwitting accomplice is her younger lover, Robert, who gives tours in the cemetery and is unable to finish his doctoral thesis. Elspeth offers the flat to the girls under two conditions: the girls’ parents may never visit, and the girls must reside in the apartment for one year. Her reasons will be explained if Robert can bear to read the diaries she left him.

Love is a theme here as well, though it’s a love that is felt by characters who are, in some cases fatally, flawed. There is the inseparable love between the twins who at the same time long to be separate individuals, Elspeth’s love for Robert and her refusal to accept non-existence, and the love between husband and wife who live in the flat above. Robert is unsuccessful in completing his degree and letting go of Elspeth, while Martin, the man in the floor above, cannot leave home because of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The conflicts are staged within an effectively unnerving atmosphere. Characters move in and out of the overgrown cemetery, cavort with a spirit and experiment with reincarnation. There are enough twists and turns to elicit questions and wonder. Niffenegger has woven a tale that disturbs and promotes much thought. Her Fearful Symmetry will stimulate conversation, as any good book should do.

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead and Vampire Resurrection, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.