powerHouse Staff Pick
powerHouse Safe as Houses launch
The Nervous Breakdown publishes an excerpt from SAFE AS HOUSES
The Nervous Breakdown publishes an excerpt from SAFE AS HOUSES
The Nervous Breakdown published an excerpt of my story “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours!" They will follow it up later this week with an interview I did with…MYSELF. As you might imagine, things got ridiculous.
Tor.com's "Genre in the Mainstream" column gives Safe as Houses big love, my 11-year-old self explodes with happiness.
"Books like Safe as Houses remind me of the feeling I first had reading Lewis Carroll, a feeling that keeps me coming back to genre fiction in all its forms: that some people see the world very differently, and that it’s immense fun to borrow their perspective and see it along with them."
Book Review: The Rumpus buys into the "flimflammery" of Safe as Houses.
Book Review: The Rumpus buys into the "flimflammery" of Safe as Houses.
"…in each of her stories, Bertino seems to tweak some grand cosmological constant and set the universe askew, as if for a handful of pages she’d changed the laws of gravity."
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Safe as Houses Launch Party
Introduction to Safe as Houses by Ted Dodson
On October 1, 2012, poet Ted Dodson introduced me at the Safe as Houses Book Launch Party at The Center For Fiction, New York City…
Safe as Houses opens with a house that has attempted suicide. The house, as we read later, is not completely dead and nobody has set it on fire, either; rather, the house woke up in the middle of the night to spontaneously self-ignite. All evidence points to the fact that the house has acted alone and, although appearing different afterward in the sense that some would say another appears different after a major trauma, it remains standing if not defiantly alive despite its own best efforts. Still, this house and the book’s others — the ones that are vandalized and vanish and are the sites of fist fights with rockstars — are safe. Perfectly safe. As safe as a house can be. And this is no colloquial misunderstanding, the irony of the suicidal house being in fact safe, but the heart of what Marie offers to us, a heart that is aware both of its atriums pump alternating one another, in lamentation and laughter, that anything given is received through both bruising and absolution, that symbolism is a joining of alternating causes for meaning under the roof of absurdity.
“They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses,” she writes in “Free Ham." And, isn’t this the absurdity of a gift? That the gift will always be that, a gift? Its quality as an interlocutor between one being and another never changes and the gifts that seem to count, and all of them might, are the ones that, at once, give and take away. And, regardless of our reason to give — whether that gift be taking a seat next to someone you don’t know yet or the vandalism of a family’s personal and precious objects (macaroni anagrams and the like) — the gift is as irrational as the church in “Great, Wondrous" that vanishes but is still, somehow — and we only know this through feeling it — there.
And it’s magic, this feeling. The magician vanishes the elephant, and we are astonished at its vanishing despite knowing that somewhere it is still there, safe behind mirrors or under the stage’s trap door. We consciously contradict our own good sense with this irrational awe. We know the elephant is still there, we can feel it, but we are overwhelmed at the gesture. The church was there then it wasn’t so the elephant and the belief of its sudden and final departure. But where was the magic? Not in the disappearing, but in our belief that it did: our welcoming of the irrational and our sense of feeling the structure of the thing that was.
This world of Marie’s stories is a world much like ours but in which what we would see as irrationality or absurdity mediates a sort of praxis without losing the feeling of what we know, the structure of what was, as the world and the characters therein struggle to comprehend their gifts both sudden and intrinsic. And it only asks one thing from us, that we accept the irrationality that a book, this book, makes us feel safe, not that it is safe insofar as it keeps you out of the way of harm or keeps you tucked inside but it’s like high-beams on a precipitous cliff or “Light over the trees. A few stars.” And as with this book, the safety of a house is in the irrational gift it can give, a chance to feel and know the structure of it without its walls, when “The innards of our house are exposed…”
It is my great pleasure to introduce to you the author of Safe as Houses, the awesome and the magical, Marie-Helene Bertino.
- Ted Dodson
(photo: Marie-Helene Bertino)
Book Riot "The Best Books We Read in September"...
Book Riot "The Best Books We Read in September"...
Book Riot just published its list of “The Best Books We Read In September," and guess which little old short story collection was included? If you guessed Junot Diaz’s — you’re right! But Safe as Houses was too, with a lovely write-up from my future best friend Jenn Northington.
Interview Magazine interview with Royal Young, Marie-Helene Bertino on the Strength of Kindness
Interview Magazine interview with Royal Young, Marie-Helene Bertino on the Strength of Kindness
Last week I braved the wilds of a Lower East Side park with the enigmatic Royal Young to chat for Interview Magazine. We talked about music our exes ruined and then he saved me from a wild, swarthy rat!
Publication Day, Safe as Houses
Alice Munro on happy endings
Safe as Houses Book trailer by Ted Dodson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A37BMm5zrfsWowie zowie—The limitlessly talented Ted Dodson made a book trailer for Safe as Houses! It is light and weird and fun and dance-y and dark and whimsical and vintage and nutty and French-ish, that is to say, it is a lot like SAFE AS HOUSES. I just watched the part with Vet Stadium 100 times.
Interview with Jesse Hassenger for Fiction Writer's Review
Interview with Jesse Hassenger for Fiction Writer's Review
My dear friend, the seriously talented fiction writer and movie critic Jesse Hassenger, came over for pizza and this is what happened…
SAFE AS HOUSES Launch Party at The Center for Fiction, NYC
SAFE AS HOUSES Launch Party at The Center for Fiction, NYC
One week! My new favorite panic dream is that no one shows up and I spend the night reading someone else’s book quietly to myself, until the night cleaners ask me to leave.
My book is a book with other books
Canteen Magazine
