A great read! In this masterfully woven novel, Johnny Payne brings his engaging protagonist into 3-dimensional life in a variety of settings I found surprisingly fascinating, including the worlds of boxing and horse racing. We encounter a rich diversity of characters here as well, including an ex-wife who is writing a novel as we read, using the life of the protagonist as her subject. The plot of NORTH OF PATAGONIA is satisfyingly complex, and the reading is easy. I couldn't put this book down!

"Sun Inventions / Perfumes of Carthage" brings together two novellas by Teresa Porzecanski, a talented Jewish writer from Uruguay. "Sun" has been translated into English by Johnny Payne, and "Perfumes" has been translated by Phyllis Silverstein. Ilan Stavans provides the introduction to this two-in-one volume.

"Sun Inventions" is the story of a female academic and her family situation. The stronger (and longer) of the two novellas is "Perfumes." This is an engrossing multigenerational saga about a Jewish family that emigrates from the Syrian city of Aleppo to Uruguay. The family story takes place against the backdrop of a Uruguayan revolutionary movement of the 1930s. With its colorful, conflicted characters and problematic relationships, "Perfumes" has a Faulkneresque flavor.

The title of "Perfumes" refers to the perfume shop run by one of the novella's principal characters. In this novella Porzecanski explores such issues as racial conflict, propaganda, oral tradition, Jewish ethics, and the power of sensory cues to trigger memories and visions. "Perfumes" is a fascinating and rewarding text that effectively blends tragic and comic elements. If you are interested in Jewish studies, Latin American literature, or contemporary fiction, check out this volume.

Kentuckiana is a brilliant novel, and I urge everyone to read it. Payne presents the Miles--a suburban family forced to exist solely for the whims of his metafictional narrator--in an enrapturing, entertaining, and challenging manner, and by doing so, offers a provacative glimpse into the basic yearnings and darkness of the human heart. We are given well-crafted characters existing within the same collective conscious as the reader and, remarkably, in such an intricate and detailed manner that one can't help but empathize with the characters who face some of the most dreadful events life can throw at them, and with the narrator whose own bleak life compels him to create them. The dark appeal of this novel resides in the somewhat naive hope that they will eventually escape their dysfunction and, if not exist in happiness, at least not cause any more suffering, either to themselves or to each other. The comic undertones are bleak and disturbing--this is N OT a novel for the faint of heart (In one episode, a live cat is incinerated--ghastly and sickening, and one of the most brilliant bits in the novel). Nor is this book an easy read; it requires concentration, a suspension of disbelief, and the willingness to identify with and care about a set of characters incapable of caring about themselves. If you're up to the challenge, this novel will be a wonderful literary event for you.

Not since reading styron's Lie Down in Darkness years ago have I had such an emotional response to the power and absoluteness of someone's writing as I felt upon reading Payne's Kentuckiana. From the first page, I was absorbed and caught dead center by the honesty that resonated for me in the words I read. What the author gives readers here is a staggering, intensely persuasive, and haunting perspective of a flesh-and-blood American family. Despite the "metaphysical" premise of the opening chapter that we are to meet and interact with the smoke and mirrors of fiction, the characters proceed instantly to create their own dynamics and come alive in the mind of the reader. It doesn't matter who they are, but that they are. Alive, real, in the complexity of their relationships with one another in the settings that enclose/thwart/sustain/catalyze/compel them. Their immediacies, attitudes and behaviors are made compelling by the articulateness, the lyrical intelligence, the richness of their thoughts and words, so that their tragedy lies not in their disability (as distinct from inability) to communicate emotional pain, protest, anguish or joy within the family framework or the confines of other relationships. It is, rather, a sense of the inchoate, the unspokenness underlying the whole fabric of the straightforward context of the "ordinary" family unit from which they spring (and with which they are irrevocably enmeshed) that comprises the tragedy here--a bright sadness or gap of silence that remains mysterious, haunting to the mind and heart, even as their words flow on and on, over and through the misactions, the skewed attempts, the growths, acceptances, failures, compromises and intractabilities. I heartily recommend this novel for the insights it offers into the failures and successes of modern families.

If folks didn't catch the hyperbolic comedy of Payne's novel, then people are as humorous as the skiffy people that Harlan Ellison disdains. Kentuckiana creates wonderful personalities; often disturbing, but more often exposed with comic anecdotes that struck me with familiarity and resourceful curiosity. Johnny Payne is one of the finest storytellers in the field today; he cuts into the deep pathos of the Miles family with remarkable precision and insight. I high recommend this book.

An excellent collection of stories -- not merely in the presentation of a different set of stories than those which reach the common awareness, but also in the insights it gives to the shape of the Quechua culture and people. It is not presented as an explication of the way these people live, the way the thoughts go, but the stories show that shape, show that means, bring the world alive in a way both subtle and profound.

The stories are presented both in the Quechua language and in English translation, and it is possible to see the shape and patterns of the language with careful text comparison; it makes it worth considering learning the Quechua tongue to pick out the nuances which are inevitably lost in translation.

An enchanting book! Here is a unique opportunity to read stories never before written down, much less translated. The author was told them in the original language in the high Andes by Quecua storytellers. Now he has translated them into English, and in She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales we find, opposite each translated page, a page printed in the original Quechuan language. Fascinating! Johnny Payne further enriches our experience by sharing the similarities that he observed between these stories and stories with which we are already familiar. Included as well are wonderful background stories of experiences and people he encountered in the story-gathering process. For those interested in stories, folk tales, oral tradition, antropology, history, language, travel... This is not only a must-read, but a must-own. It's a keeper!

This is a marvelous collection of Quechua folktales, told by various Quechua speakers to anthropologist Johnny Payne. These are short and "catchy" tales printed in English with the Quechua version on the facing page. This gives you a chance to get acquainted with the sentence structure of the Quechua language which I found very helpful. The author also shares interesting insights into the people who tell the tales. I love to travel in Peru and I am going to pass this book on to a Quechua friend who will surely enjoy it as much as I did. If you're interested in the cultures of the Andes, or if you plan to travel there, don't miss this book! .

Within scant minutes of starting into Johnny Payne's treatment of Voice and Style, I have had to add the book to the pile of items being returned to the library. Why? In a 4-page discussion of Voice and Irony, Payne analyzes the technique he himself used in a novella entitled, The Ambassador's Son. The discussion might be germane were it not that Payne apparently did not do adequate research for the original work. For instance, he describes a Mr. Featherson as the "Peruvian ambassador." However, Mr. Featherson is not at all "Peruvian"-the last name alone would suggest otherwise-but an American in a foreign culture. Perhaps Payne intends Mr. Featherson to be the American ambassador to Peru?
Furthermore, it doesn't sound as though Payne has met many ambassadors. He describes how Mr. Featherson blatantly ignored health warnings about the dangers of eating shellfish and invited his son to try some at a local restaurant. That would be ludicrous: foreign service families take cholera warnings very seriously, and Peru is notorious for a high cholera rate.
Mr. Featherson displays other non-ambassadorial behavior as well, including sloppy deportment in a restaurant and excessive drinking: in reality, American emissaries and their families are extremely conscious of their public behavior because of its potential to reflect poorly on the US. After all, they serve their country, not as Payne seems to think, to impose American culture on a foreign environment (that was the old colonial agenda), but to facilitate exchange and communication.
In short, Payne undermines the very topic he is trying to illuminate: authority. To have authority one has to know what one is talking about, and if one doesn't know, one had better research!

I tried to read this book with an open mind, and it's clearly a book only an English lit teacher could love.

Given the book's target audience - beginning writers - it falls far short of being helpful to them. What the book SHOULD do and doesn't is present the broad concepts and principles, and then if the author chooses to "instruct by example" as Payne does, then provide examples that support and illustrate those concepts and principles.

Instead each chapter jumps into a seemingly endless stream of analysis of fiction works, attempting to instruct by way of example with no real "how-to's." The overwhelming problems - besides a tendency toward pedantic wordiness - are that the snippets used are too short and the analyses too specific to be useful to the target audience of this book: beginning writers looking for the broader principles to apply to their own writing.

Each chapter is followed by exercises. However, the exercises are not presented with the goals for each ("WHY am I doing this") or any way of analyzing or learning from the results after doing them ("WHAT worked when I did this"). Beginning writers could finish this book feeling as I did - somewhat confused and very much like I wasted my time.

I would highly recommend "Finding Your Writer's Voice" by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall instead.

I've read all the books in the Elements of Fiction Writing series and this is how I'd rank them.

"Scene & Structure" "Characters & Viewpoint" "Beginnings, Middles & Ends"

The above three books are invaluable -- must reads. They are the best of the series, in my opinion, and are packed with good information on every page. Well-done.

"Conflict, Action & Suspense" "Description" "Plot" "Manuscript Submission" "Setting"

The above five books are good, solid reads. Again, they contain good information and cover the subject decently.

"Voice & Style" "Dialogue"

To me, the last two books need to be rewritten. They are by far the weakest of the series. Both suffer from an annoying style, particularly Dialogue, and both are very skimpy on real information. Neither one is very helpful.

This is the order in which I'd recommend reading them.

I have to begin this review by stating I am a male. That in itself may make this dialogue between myself and the author (also a male), somewhat superfluous. But, I will go ahead with the hope that I can save someone the $14 or so dollars (and the even more precious reading time) you might spend on this book.

The primary flaw in Chalk Lake is the voice of the protagonist. Written by a male, this attempt at portraying a female plays to the worst stereotype of any white, male writer trying to create a main character that is female.

There was never a moment that I was unaware that the author was not a male. The language is saturated with the incorrect gender. Unfortunately, it gets worse...the main character, a female, is painted as being unable to cope with te pressures of today's world. There's not a single ounce of character within her...nothing that a woman could point to and say, "she is interesting to me because..." There is nothing redeeming about this character because she is simply a cartoon version of what a male thinks a female is like.

Makes me kind of embarassed to be of the same gender as the author. Of course, as I said earlier, it is kind of pathetic in the first place for a white male to be attempting to defend the female gender against another white male. But, all that aside, I would sum up by saying that the primary flaw of this book is the way the main character is painted...as a chalk outline of a woman...certainly not a character who is real enough or interesting enough to devote the time it would take you to explore her through this book.

I loved this compelling story of a woman learning to negotiate the complications of family with love, grief, the will to survive, and the seduction of despair. As a woman, I tend to be suspicious of male-authored women characters, but Payne's ability (as a male writer) to construct such a powerful female protagonist, whose voice rings true throughout this fine novel, is remarkable. I highly recommend this book.