Book of Jobs: A Collection of Helen Wu and Amy Dresden by M.L. Grider
Publisher: Thursday Night Press, an imprint of DX Varos Publishing (October 18, 2022) Category: Crime drama, LGBT subgenre, Short Story Collection Tour Dates October, 2022 ISBN: 978-1955065542 Available in Print and ebook, 292 pages
Description Book of Jobs by M.L. Grider
In this prequel to Bitter Vintage, M.L. Grider explores events in the lives of Helen Wu and Amy Dresden prior to their adventure in 1995. While these incidents may seem at first glance unrelated, they all contribute to what makes Amy and Helen who they are.
Some are funny, others tragic, but that all adds up to why Helen quit the LAPD in favor of a gun shop, and Amy gave up her dream of acting to become an antique dealer.
Review Book of Jobs by M.L. Grider
Guest Review by Mark
“You’re real tough when it comes to people half your size, aren’t you?” Helen’s voice was so controlled that it sent a cold shiver down O’Connor’s spine. “You try it, fat boy. You just try and put your meat hooks on me and see what happens to you.”
This was such a great collection that I went back and re-read some of the stories after I finished.
M.L. Grider’s book, ‘Bitter Vintage,’ starred both Helen Wu and Amy Dresden as two young women from different worlds who collide with each other in a spectacular way. But this book, ‘The Book of Jobs: A Collection of Helen Wu and Amy Dresden,’ contains stories from before these women met each other.
My favorite stories were, ‘New On The Job,’ which detailed one of Helen’s first days as a cop and how she helped a teenage girl after the girl had been pranked by a classmate and ‘The Paint Job,’ which was a story about Amy taking on a modeling job that she never intended to take. But there wasn’t a story in this book that I didn’t love!
Watching Amy and Helen grow both mentally and emotionally over the course of the stories was a huge treat, as a reader. Watching them come to terms with their sexuality and who they are as people was moving and really affirming.
Grider’s writing of both characters, as well as all of the side characters, was not only realistic, but relatable and entertaining. This is one of those books that makes you want to seek out something else like it to read the moment you’re finished with it, but unfortunately, I don’t think there are any other characters quite like Helen Wu and Amy Dresden! It is one of a kind, the kind of book I don’t want to end because I know I may not get the chance to read a unique book like this again! ‘The Book of Jobs’ deserves all 5 stars!
About M.L. Grider
The Book of Jobs is the second published novel to escape the twisted mind of M.L. Grider. In addition to writing, Grider is a professional photographer. He is busy at work on the next adventure in the Helen Wu series among other wild and warped stories.
This giveaway is for 3 print or ebook copies. Print is open to the U.S. only and ebook is open worldwide. This giveaway ends on November 18, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Book of Jobs: A Collection of Helen Wu and Amy Dresden by M.L. Grider
Publisher: Thursday Night Press, an imprint of DX Varos Publishing (October 18, 2022) Category: Crime drama, LGBT subgenre, Short Story Collection Tour Dates October, 2022 ISBN: 978-1955065542 Available in Print and ebook, 292 pages
Description Book of Jobs by M.L. Grider
In this prequel to Bitter Vintage, M.L. Grider explores events in the lives of Helen Wu and Amy Dresden prior to their adventure in 1995. While these incidents may seem at first glance unrelated, they all contribute to what makes Amy and Helen who they are.
Some are funny, others tragic, but that all adds up to why Helen quit the LAPD in favor of a gun shop, and Amy gave up her dream of acting to become an antique dealer.
Interview with M.L. Grider
TR: Please tell us something about The Book Of Jobs that is not in the summary. (About the book, characters you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)
MLG: It was challenging to write a book involving more internalized character struggles for Helen and Amy rather than having a clearly defined antagonist to come into conflict with. In these stories, I had a chance to get more into their heads than in Bitter Vintage.
In ‘The Paint Job’ Amy is forced to confront the repressed parts of he own identity as much as her frustration with her failing acting career. In ‘Job Choices’ and ‘New on the Job’ Helen must confront her own lack of empathy and understand how to cope with other people. Both of them must redefine who they are and who they want to be.
TR: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters? Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your characters?
MLG: Names for major characters more or less just come to me as the character does.
Helen Wu has just always been Helen Wu. Amy was always Amy, but she had several last names before settling on Dresden. I wanted it to be something ethnic and a little awkward, that a manager would want her change to something more glamorous like Winona Ryder from Winona Horowitz, Natalie Wood from Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, or Judy Garland from Frances Gumm, but she would refuse to. I knew it had to be a German surname. I had very nearly settled on Amy Vonnegut, in tribute to the brilliant Kurt Vonnegut when I saw a documentary about Ellis Island and how many immigrants had lost their real names when bureaucrats either misspelled them or simplified them for the paperwork. So her family name became the city her great grandfather emigrated from, Dresden, the city where Billy Pilgrim was a POW in Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five.
None of my characters and all of my characters are based on real people. Some of Amy Dresden’s personality quarks and back story are borrowed from two real women I did know. But I wouldn’t say she is based on either of them. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Many of the supporting characters are “inspired” by people I have known but not directly taken from any one real person. Some traits came from fictional charters as well. There is a lot of Clarice Starling and Harry Callahan in Helen Wu.
TR: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?
MLG: The cover for The Book of Jobs was very difficult for me. Because it is 9 separate stories there is no one defining moment that could represent them all. The thing that ties them all together is Helen and Amy but they only have one brief scene together in ‘The Paint Job’ and that is only in passing. Nothing dramatic is happening. So my publisher and the cover artist came up with the image of the two of them over the city.
TR: Which actresses would you like to see playing Helen and Amy from ‘The Book Of Jobs’ if it were optioned for a movie or series?
MLG: Oh that’s easy. I always try to imagine an actor in the part of any of my characters. If I have a specific face in mind for each it helps me keep them consistent in descriptions. Actor, director and producer Joan Chen has always been the inspiration for Helen Wu. Actor and model Stacy Fuson is the face and body of Amy Dresden. At least that is how I imagine them.
TR: What draws you to the crime genre?
MLG: That’s hard to say. I am working on some other genre as well. I have a handful of other stories that include supernatural elements as well a crime. ‘The Odd Job’ is a good example of that. I think the thing about the crime genre that appeals to me it that it is so close to home. You could come home from work and find your home has been robbed. An argument with your neighbor gradually escalates into a firefight. True crime is always just under the surface.
TR: Describe the room you are sitting in as though it was a scene that Amy was describing.
MLG: The basement office was dominated by an overflowing book collection occupying well-crafted handmade floor to ceiling book shelves, taking up an entire wall. The desk in the center of the room was less well-made from mostly scrap particle board and was painted white to match the bookshelves. Distracting from the poor carpentry of the desk is a three-foot-deep shelf displaying an intricate diorama of customized 1970s G.I. Joe action figures.
TR: How about if Helen was describing it?
MLG: The office was cluttered with books and old dolls. Whoever worked here must have been some kind of headcase.
TR: When did you first have a desire to write? How did this desire manifest itself?
MLG: I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t want to write. Even as a child, people like Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien were my heroes. But having dyslexia made that challenging. Learning to read was very difficult for me and to this day I am not able to spell. My handicap in spelling was largely why I became a professional photographer.
For many years I filled my need for story telling by playing Dungeons and Dragons.
TR: What is next for Helen and Amy?
MLG: I am currently editing a story collection called The Con Job set at a comic book convention in 1991. It will prominently feature a Helen Wu adventure and an Amy Dresden story, as well as other interwoven stories that all took place simultaneously at the “con from Hell.”
I am also hard at work on Bitter Sacrament a new novel set in 1997 in which Amy and Helen must contend with a murderous religious cult.
About M.L. Grider
The Book of Jobs is the second published novel to escape the twisted mind of M.L. Grider. In addition to writing, Grider is a professional photographer. He is busy at work on the next adventure in the Helen Wu series among other wild and warped stories.
This giveaway is for 3 print or ebook copies. Print is open to the U.S. only and ebook is open worldwide. This giveaway ends on November 18, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Publisher: C&R Press (October 15, 2021) Category: Linked Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction Tour dates: October 11-November 24, 2021 ISBN: 978-1949540239 Available in Print and ebook, 150 pages
Description Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
A Mother’s Tale is a tale of salvaging one’s soul from received and inherited war-related trauma. Within the titular beautiful story of a mother’s love for her son is the cruelty and senselessness of the Vietnam War, the poignant human connection, and a haunting narrative whose set ting and atmosphere appear at times otherworldly through their land scape and inhabitants.
Captured in the vivid descriptions of Vietnam’s country and culture are a host of characters, tortured and maimed and generous and still empathetic despite many obstacles, including a culture wrecked by losses. Somewhere in this chaos readers will find a tender link between the present-day survivors and those already gone. Rich and yet buoyant with a vision-like quality, this collection shares a common theme of love and loneliness, longing and compassion, where beauty is discovered in the moments of brutality, and agony is felt in ecstasy.
Excerpt Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
From the Short Story, A Mother’s Tale
The barge arrives very late, the rain falling in gray sheets across the quay.
I wipe my face and pull my raincoat tight around me. I cough. My throat hurts. People are coming onto the quay. Bicycles and motor scooters rev in tandem in their lanes. The air smells of gasoline fumes. The wet dusk glows with the scooters’ headlights. I watch for the next wave of passengers, those on foot. Waiting behind them are the big, blue trucks. Rain slants and pops on the quay, on the gray-steel hatch of the barge’s liftgate. I scan the blurred faces of the passengers hurrying up the quay, nylon bags, pink, blue, in hands, jute bags slung across shoulders. They stream past me, rustling in their nylon raincoats. Here, the locals bring them along after checking the color of the sky and shapes of the clouds.
Then I see them: a girl and a white woman, both wearing wide-brimmed straw hats but no raincoats, lugging their suitcases down the hatch. They are coming toward me, as I stand to one side, hunched, on the quay’s slope. I raise my hand. “Mrs. Rossi?”
The woman turns toward me. “Hello!” she says, half smiling, half wincing from the pelting rain.
I extend my hand to help her with the suitcase. Instead, her hand comes up to shake mine.
“Please, let me help,” I say, reaching for her suitcase.
“Are you from the inn?” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m terribly sorry about the delay. I thought you must’ve left. I’m awfully glad to see you still here.”
“Yes, ma’am. May I take you and your daughter to the car?”
“Yes, of course.” She smiles, wrinkling the corners of her blue eyes. She takes the girl’s hand and both of them follow me to the Peugeot, parked on the ramp. She talks to the girl about getting raincoats for their stay, for monsoon season has arrived. Although wrinkled and gray, perhaps in her late sixties, Mrs. Rossi has a clear, cheerful voice.
I open the rear door. The girl says, “Thank you,” as she slides onto the seat. She must be Vietnamese, slender, rather tall. Her blue jeans are notched above the ankles, and her light skin blends perfectly with her scarlet blouse, collarless, fringed white. Mrs. Rossi takes off her wet straw hat, shaking it against her leg, and says, “No one here carries an umbrella.”
“People here wear raincoats when it rains,” I say as she clears a wet lock of white hair from her brow.
“In Ho Chi Minh City, too?” Mrs. Rossi asks.
“Yes, everywhere.”
I put their suitcases in the trunk and close it. The rain smears the windshield as I drive through the town. Shop lights flicker. Water is rising on the main street and motor scooters sloshing through standing water kick up fantails in light-colored spouts. Ho Chi Minh City. The old name is Saigon. I hunch forward to look through the smeary windshield. Rain drums the car roof. From the ferry comes the sound of a horn. Another barge is arriving.
“This looks like a badly crowded Chinese quarter,” Mrs. Rossi says from the back seat.
“Very crowded, ma’am. You never see the sun when you walk the streets here.”
A surge of running water against the tires shakes the steering wheel. Water is rising to the shops’ thresholds; store awnings flap like wings of some wet fowl.
“Are you from here by any chance?” Mrs. Rossi asks me.
“No. Most townspeople here come from somewhere else. Drifters, ma’am.”
“You too?” Mrs. Rossi asks with a chuckle.
“Me too,” I say, coughing, my throat dry as sand.
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Giang, ma’am.”
She repeats my name. “Can you spell it for me?” Then, hearing it spelled, she says, “So it’s Zhang, like the Chinese name.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Catherine Rossi. My daughter is Chi Lan.”
The girl offers a hello from the back seat. I simply nod. Mrs. Rossi says, “My daughter understands Vietnamese. Only she can’t speak it very well.”
“She must not have lived here long.”
“No, she didn’t. She became my daughter when she was five years old. She’s eighteen now.”
“You adopted her, ma’am?” I glance again at the rearview mirror and meet the girl’s eyes. I feel odd asking her mother about her in her presence.
“Yes, I adopted her in 1974. Just a year before the collapse of South Vietnam. How fortunate for us!”
“You came here that year?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Rossi clears her throat. “And what were you doing in ’74?”
I give her question some thought, then say, “I was in the South Vietnamese Army.”
“Were you an interpreter?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you must excuse my assumption. You speak English very well. And I’m glad you do. Otherwise we’d be making sign language now.”
She laughs and the girl smiles. Her oval face, framed by raven, shoulder-length hair, is fresh. Her eyebrows curve gracefully, like crayoned black. I remember a face like that from my past.
“Were you an army lifer?” asks Mrs. Rossi.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Did you spend a lifetime career in the army?”
“No, ma’am. Only a few years.”
“Did you teach school before that?”
These curious Americans. “I was on the other side. A soldier of the North Vietnamese Army.”
“Were you born in the North?”
“Yes.”
“And then you defected to the South and joined the South Vietnamese Army?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They have a name for those. I’m trying to remember.”
Then I hear the girl say it for her: hoi chánh.
Mrs. Rossi seems to be deep in thought as we leave the town, following the one-lane road north toward the U Minh district. The headlights pick up windblown rain in sprays, blurring the blacktop. There is no lane divider. Along the road drenched palms toss in the wind. Wet leaves and white cajeput flowers fall onto the windshield, and the wipers sweep over them, pressing them to the glass.
Praise Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
WINNER C&R PRESS 2021 FICTION AWARD
“. . . a highly recommended literary work for those who seek fictional pieces embedded with the spirit and history of the Vietnam War and the nation. . . . This juxtaposition of pain and beauty runs through every story and makes them impossible to put down and hard to forget. . . . Literary collections strong in Asian cultural representation should consider A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories a key acquisition.—Midwest Book Review
“The eleven linked short stories of this collection revisit the complexities of the controversial Vietnam War. . . . The author navigates this amalgam of the living, the dead, and those caught in a hard limbo between the two extremes with grace and a superb sense of dramatic rhythm. . . . This compelling collection could only be imagined and written from the perspective of a native intimately familiar with his national culture and history, making this a must-read for anyone interested in the French Indochina and Vietnam conflicts.”—The US Review of Books
“It is often the second generation, the children of immigrants and refugees, who add their stories to enrich and expand the American literary canon. The best of them also add to and expand the human canon—a feat Khanh Ha accomplishes with grace and power in this collection.”—Wayne Karlin, winner of the Juniper Prize in Fiction
“In these eleven poetic tales, Khanh Ha individualizes the Vietnam War and makes it hauntingly real. . . . Told with Heming- way-esque simplicity, these stories assail us like ghosts and linger way beyond their initial reading.”—James Hanna, author of The Siege and Call Me Pomeroy.
About Khanh Ha
Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh, The Demon Who Peddled Longing, and Mrs. Rossi’s Dream. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, and the Orison Anthology Award for Fiction. Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner. A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories has already won the C&R Press Fiction Prize.
Giveaway Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
This giveaway is for 3 print copies, 1 per winner, U.S. only and ends on November 24, 2021, 12 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Book of Jobs: A Collection of Helen Wu and Amy Dresden by M.L. Grider
