Photo credit: Pete Duval

Books and Books @ The Studios is pleased to partner with the Key West Library as they present Mark Powell, author of literary thriller FIREBIRD, on Tuesday, January 7th at 6pm at the library (700 Fleming St.).

Spanning the U.S. and Eastern Europe, from New Haven and D.C. to Kiev and Bratislava, Mark Powell’s FIREBIRD takes you into the 2014 Ukraine-Russia conflict and reveals the corrupt relationship between war, money, and political power.

The plan was simple: foment a small-scale conflict in Eastern Ukraine that will prevent the vast Ukrainian shale gas field from being tapped. Should the project succeed, Leviathan Global’s billionaire founder stands to profit mightily from the sale of gas reserves in Slovakia. But when a disillusioned staffer named Hugh Eckhart uncovers a dossier containing bank accounts laying out the conspiracy, things begin to unravel.

Patricia Engel, author of The Veins of the Ocean writes FIREBIRD is “[a]n unrelenting thrill ride across the globe and deep into the political intrigue and machinations that drive our lives without our knowing; this is a thriller with a conscience that will change how you see the world. Mark Powell is a fearless and master storyteller and FIREBIRD is an absolute powerhouse of a novel.”

Prior to his event, we had the opportunity to ask Mark a few questions:

Q: In one or two lines, how would you describe the new novel?

A: FIREBIRD is a political thriller set between the U.S. (Washington, New Haven, Florida) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine and Slovakia) that addresses (speculatively) the U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war in the run-up to the 2014 election. Bob Shacochis once said he writes books that are “entertainment for people who pay attention.” I’d like to steal that line.

Q: The novel is very concerned with the spiritual and the political inclinations of its characters. Do you see these as being inherently linked? How does it drive the narrative?

A: The theologian John Caputo once wrote “The greatest fantasy of religious belief is the fantasy of political power.” I’m always interested in how fervently-held (if deeply-misguided) beliefs manifest themselves in the actual world.  Think of George W. Bush’s “Crusade” into Iraq — we may well feel the violent repercussions for the rest of the 21st C.

Q: Did you read any great books this year?

A: I read a number of great books this year. Two that I think will really stick with me are FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and OUR MAN by George Packer. FLEISHMAN, as one blurb notes, reads like John Updike updated for Tinder and the #MeToo movement. It’s also hilarious and poignant. OUR MAN is equal parts a biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke and an autopsy of those five or so decades we sometimes call the “American Century.” Both books capture perfectly our current political, moral, and emotional moment.

Q: What advice would you give to new writers?

A: My advice to beginning writers is embarrassingly basic, but, I think, remains true: read everything you can, particularly the writers you want to write like; don’t chase trends, they’ll be gone by the time you catch up; and, at least at first, develop a certain discipline about when and how often you write.

Special thanks to Key West Library Administrator Michael Nelson for the questions and facilitating this interview.

Ayse Papatya Bucak’s stories have been called: “fearless,” “elegant,” “kinetic” and “wildly imagined.” What you’ll find for sure in her story collection, THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM, is that the stories will take you to unexpected places.

We had a chance to ask Bucak, who is a former Artist-in-Residence at The Studios of Key West, a few questions before her reading and book signing on Dec. 10.

Q: Please tell us a little about your time as a Studios Artist-in-Residence.

A: My residency at the Studios was in May 2016. I also attended the Literary Seminar in 2017. I loved my time in Key West–I got plenty of writing done but I also went to dance and music performances at the Studios, I heard Edmund White read at Books & Books, I went to a performance of The Cripple of Inishmaan. I visited Fort Jefferson. I walked all around town whenever I needed to clear my head. I drank so much Cuban coffee.

The amount of nature and art that I was able to take in during that month was so restorative.  I always tell my students they need to do things to feed their artistic well, and my well was well fed in Key West.

Writing-wise, I worked on drafting “Mysteries of the Mountain South” (ironically set in Appalachia) and I researched “The Dead” which is set in Key West.  “The Dead” is about the sponge merchant Edward Arapian–who I first heard tell of in Joy Williams’s guide to Key West–where she refers to the brick house of a Turkish sponger but doesn’t give his name. So I literally walked over to the brick house, looked up the street number, and then looked through an old Key West phone book until I found the name…at which point I realized he was not just Turkish but Armenian which led me down a long research path culminating in a story about sponge-diving and genocide. Not quite where I expected to go. But I never would have written that story if it hadn’t been for my residency.

Q: What, if anything, is the overarching theme or project of THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM?

A: My plan was to write stories that were both Turkish and American because I am both Turkish and American.  But I think most people read the collection as a series of stories that are both historical and fairy-tale-ish.

Q: If you can boil it down, what’s the top piece of advice you’d give aspiring writers?

A: Tortoise beats hare. But you have to remember the tortoise never stops.

Q: What are you reading and recommending?

Some of my favorites from this year are Good Talk by Mira Jacob, Lost Children Archives by Valeria Luiselli, and I Will Never See This World Again by Ahmet Altan.  All-time favorites: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.  I’m really looking forward to picking up a copy of Grand Union by Zadie Smith when I’m in the store.  I recently heard Ross Gay read at the Miami Book Fair and I was reminded of how completely delightful his essay collection The Book of Delights is.  And my friend and colleague Andrew Furman has a great book of Florida nature essays called Bitten. Oh, and favorite recent poetry collection: The Boy in the Labyrinth by Oliver de la Paz.

Q: What are you working on now, if you don’t mind saying?

A: I keep saying I’m writing a novel (which I am) but lately I have fallen into writing two new short stories, one about a creature known as the Anatolian monster, which in my story is found hiding at Topkapi Palace, and one about a (fictional) American writer imprisoned for her writing, as well as some essays about the two branches of my family (one side Turkish, one side very-waspy American).

Wednesday, Dec. 18 at 6pm, Phyllis Rose, literary critic and biographer will appear at Books and Books to read from and discuss her latest book – a biography of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame, and for many years, because of his active engagement in the camera club movement, he was in effect the CEO of photography in America.

As part of his strategy for establishing photography as fine art, he produced beautiful and influential photography magazines, including the legendary Camera Work. Simultaneously, he opened a gallery, 291, the first American gallery to show Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, Brancusi, and other great European modernists. After single-handedly introducing European modern art to Americans, Stieglitz devoted himself to nurturing American artists and to encouraging Americans to appreciate American art. His tireless work promoting Georgia O’Keeffe was essential in establishing her as the first respected and collected American woman artist.

In this compact and readable book, Rose argues that Stieglitz, so influential and important in his time, has been undervalued in ours. His missionary zeal for the art enterprise has been disregarded, and because his career was so long and varied, it has proved hard to position him as a photographer. Rose is a photographer as well as an award-winning biographer. With this new book, she presents a vivid portrait of a man whose work, marriage, and passion for art transformed American culture.

Friday, Dec. 13 at 6pm, artist Roberta B. Marks, will give a presentation of work featured in the new anthology book WORKS AND WORLDS. Marks, who has an MFA from the University of South Florida, is widely collected. Her works are featured in numerous museums and galleries throughout the country and Europe and she has taught widely, including regular classes at The Studios of Key West.

The first monograph on the artist explores her collages and constructions, which focus on the themes of memory, time, and transcendence through the feminist and Buddhist perspective that has defined the evolution of her work. Marks creates constructions that have an intimacy to them and at the same time contain entire worlds of feeling and memory.

Each vignette is a narrative of a personal nature as she transforms a range of objects and materials, often of mundane and humble origin, into eloquent and highly personal forms of self-expression.  Marks’s work speaks to the human impulse to collect, preserve, and immortalize and her pieces are intuitive and instinctual, exuding a sense of mystery. The viewer enters into an intensely private realm, yet the themes are universal—loss, longing, old age, death, repression, and liberation—evoking a feeling of familiarity within the mystery.

A practicing Buddhist, Marks achieves her clarity through daily meditation. She has written “when constructing a work, I pare it down to the essence–the minimal. Each chosen object represents years of seeing with acute awareness.” Marks’s writings accompany a selection of approximately 200 of her most evocative works.

For a reading and signing, Tuesday, Dec. 10 at 6pm, Pushcart Prize–winning author and former Studios of Key West artist in residence Ayse Papatya Bucak returns to the island with her debut story collection THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM.

In Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, showcasing spectacular imaginative range and lyricism, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is “performed” at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war.

A joy and a provocation, Bucak’s stories confront the nature of historical memory with humor and humanity. Surreal and poignant, they examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity.