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I've written about Brad Watson here before.

I've told you the story—of how, through my first editor, W.W. Norton's Alane Mason, I began to hear this writer's name. How my dear friend Alyson Hagy, with whom Watson now teaches at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, has perpetuated the tales about his talent. How I have read his books myself, his essays, his interviews, and been grateful for the care he extends toward literature, the idea he seems to represent (and that he shares with Alyson) that, even today, in a world of quick and trending fiction, real literature rises.

Watson has a new book coming. It's called Miss Jane.

Friends, whomever you are, whatever you love, this one's for you. This one—the story of a young girl born with a genital difference in the early 20th century south—transcends all categories, will touch all hearts, will go down in history as a classic. I see no other way around it.

Inspired by Watson's own great-aunt, Miss Jane is the story of a child limited by her body and uncircumscribed by her heart. She discovers her own difference over time. She discovers it in parallel to discovering the beauty of things on the farm where she lives ("the burst of salty liquid from a plump and ice-cold oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the quick and violent death of a chicken, the tight and unopened bud of a flower blossom") and in the heart of the older doctor who treats her with kindness, adopts her as a near-daughter, and explains the facts of life—and the facts of her life—as simply as the truth allows. Jane will learn the art of aloneness. The art of forgiveness. The art of self-acceptance. She will have to starve herself in order to mask her terrible incontinence. She will have to say goodbye to a hope she has. She will have to live without physical intimacy, and yet—she will not live without love.

Watson's sentences are simpler here than they have been in his other work. His story streams. He takes the attention away from his own narrative self so as to give everything to Jane. It's the tenderness (without sentimentality) that I most admire here. The wait and the wrestling with the right scenes.

Paragraphs like these:

There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals' passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That's what it was like.

The meadow did not exist if she wasn't in it.

Congratulations to Brad Watson. Congratulations to Alane, who, according to the book's acknowledgments, has waited a long time for this.

It was worth the wait.

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My friends:  I'll be at the BEA on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, working for Publishing Perspectives, the fabulous book news pub for which I have written about Pamela Paul (New York Times Book Review children's book editor), Jennifer Brown (Shelf Awareness children's book editor), Lauren Wein (Harcourt Houghton Mifflin editor), Alane Mason (WW Norton editor, not to mention my first editor), and others.  I'll be getting the inside scoop on some important stories.  But I'll also be looking for you.

If you'll be there, let me know?

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What do you do when the very perfect title you'd picked out for your new book is—uncomfortably, sadly, a fact discovered late in the game—a title David Foster Wallace used for a short story a few years back?  What do you do when nothing else seems to fit?

You find a quiet place in which to think, for one thing.

And you call your son, a genius at titles, among other things, who, years ago, when a certain untitled book was a day away from final catalog copy, called out to you, from where he was writing,

But Mom, he said, isn't that book (a memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man) about how there is still love in strange places?

Still Love in Strange Places? you said. 

Yeah, he said.  Something like that.

Two minutes later you were on the phone with Alane Mason, your W.W. Norton editor.  We have a title, you told her.  She didn't skip a beat.  She agreed.

Late last night, you called your son.

I need another miracle, you said.

Give me a day or two, he told you.

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I have often spoken of Alane Salierno Mason here on this blog—as my first editor (she edited three of my memoirs), as a friend, and as the editor of authors, mostly recently Brad Watson, whose books often feature on my blog. I'll soon be sharing with you another Alane Mason book, this one by debut author Jake Silverstein, but before I get to that, I'd love for you to watch this video, in which you'll see New Yorkers talking about recent books read or not read, as well as Alane herself, who is the founder of the extraordinary publishing phenomenon, Words without Borders. You'll learn about what people read, and about why Americans should be reading more in translation. You'll also get to peer inside a rather cool-looking Brooklyn deli.

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Sometimes it seems that I already know people I've never yet met. The profoundly talented Brad Watson is one of those. I first heard of him through my W.W. Norton editor, Alane Mason, who recounted discovering Watson's work in a literary magazine. He was a fresh talent, book worthy. She got in touch. Their first publication, Last days of the Dog-Men was uncanny and brave. It won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction.

I was working with Alane then on a sequence of books, and so, from time to time, I would hear wind of a new Brad Watson book—this one a novel, The Heaven of Mercury, set in the early 20th century south. It was gothic, Faulknerian, adjective-rich, a thing utterly apart from the short stories. It was named a National Book Award finalist.

A few years ago, my friend Alyson Hagy, while having dinner at my house, spoke of her hope that a certain Brad Watson would join the creative writing staff at the University of Wyoming. After he did, I would sometimes hear stories of long hikes or fishing trips. A few weeks ago, Alyson mentioned that she'd seen an early copy of Watson's new collection of stories, Aliens in the Prime of their Lives. "It's gorgeous," she said.

Yesterday and this morning, I've been reading through. This isn't Dog-men. This absolutely isn't Mercury. This new collection of stories is so utterly new and once again bold; it is internally consistent. It's as if Watson, having expended so much energy on the lyrical and braided in Mercury, decided to see what might be done with a minimum of back story and a scarcity of adjectives.

A whole heck of a lot, is the answer. These stories achieve power, momentum, and absolute artistry through the accretion of odd facts, strange circumstances, and the wholly exposed wires of human circuitry, which are not, as it turns out, always so pretty. But pretty wouldn't be half as compelling as these stories are.

"Vacuum," my personal favorite, is the story of three boys who hear their overworked and unhappy mother threaten to walk away and not come back. With the boys' father already missing, the brothers set out to save the mother. Rarely have so many good intentions gone so terribly wrong; rarely does innocence yield such havoc. Watson lays it all out, one crooked turn after another, in language that is spare and terrifying. You finish reading "Vacuum" and you understand that you are going to have to steel yourself for whatever comes next. It will be undecorated and uncompromising. It won't be like any other story you've read.

Reading the collection, I thought again of just how lucky the creative writing students of the University of Wyoming are to have the equally talented Alyson Hagy working alongside Brad Watson, sharing space this semester with Edward Jones, among others. (Last semester they even had Kate Northrop, the poet, with whom, through Alyson, I've also become friends.) I never went to school to learn how to write prose, but if I were younger, just setting out, I'd want to know what these writers would teach me.

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This past weekend we took refuge, for a spell, inside the New York Public Library, a place I always try to visit whenever I come to New York.

As we stood beneath this Rose Room sky, I recalled, as I always do, my first trip to that building, which happened in the company of my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason. Alane bought three of my books, not just the first, and she brought to each one a rigorous, unyielding eye. Alane cares very much about the state of books, not just in this country, but in the world.

I wrote something about that Rose Room in 1998, in the wake of my experience at the National Book Awards and published it then. Today, in between a spate of client projects, I was feeling melancholy and looked at that old essay again:

Hours before the 49th National Book Awards ceremony got under way, Alane Salierno Mason, my literary editor, remembered a room I had to see; we went. A lion, an edifice, a swoop of stairs, a room: big as a city block, and skied with permanent weather. There were six-hundred pound tables and a constellation of polished lamps, people enough for a subway station, though this was the New York Public Library, the newly splendoured Rose Reading Room. I thought I heard a holy hush. I felt drawn out, thrown out of kilter by the hundreds hunkered down with books.

A while later, John Updike took the stage at the Marriott Marquis to accept the 1998 award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His voice had a quiet, avuncular appeal, and in that darkened room he stepped his audience back into the library of his youth, the glamor of a typeface, the beauty of a book “in proportion to the human hand.” There were stacks of books on every table, images of books hung like pendants on the walls. There were authors in the room, editors, publishers, agents, reviewers, there were readers, and we understood why we had come.

The media, the next day and for days to come, would write of dark horses, battlefields, upset victories, dueling styles. They would tally winners and losers as if bookmaking were a gamble or a sport. They would declaim the event because their heroes had not been crowned, because somehow they had not deduced the final outcome. But what too many lost in their rush for the headline was the reality of what that evening was: a celebration of books. A communion of stories. A tribute to the humanity of words.

What I’ll remember is not so much who won, but what was said. What I’ll remember is how Gerald Stern, upon accepting the poetry honor, venerated his fellow poets: individually, distinctively, with elemental and essential grace. I’ll remember how Louis Sachar, winning for Young People’s Literature, did the same, and how Alice McDermott, one of the most exquisite, time-proven novelists in the land, hadn’t the ego to believe her name was called. I’ll remember the dignity of that old-fashioned tribe, the integrity of the jurors, the company I was keeping—my husband, my parents, my brother, the W.W. Norton team, my agent, Amy Rennert. I’ll remember how it felt to be sitting there amongst the others all because I’d been given the certain exceptional privilege of publishing a little book about love.

Why do we read? Why do we write? For me, the answer made itself known some 24 hours prior to the ceremony, when t

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The books are stacking taller and taller about my tiny house—beckoning, desired, and unread. No One You Know (Michelle Richmond), which I won from Presenting Lenore, who lists it as a favorite book. Halfway House (Katharine Noel) and Home Schooling (Carol Windley)—gifts from a certain editor at Grove. John the Baptizer, by Brooks Hansen, a long-time friend and an Alane Mason author, Alane being my first editor. The Language of Things (Deyan Sudjic), also an Alane book, and The Little Strangers (Sarah Waters), because I adored Waters' The Night Watch and because I trust the independent film producer who suggested that I add Strangers to my list. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery), because everyone is talking about it. Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), because they are books by two of my favorite living writers.

I have been out, I have been dancing, I have been taking photographs, I have been Body Pumping and Zumba-ing and walking the streets of Philadelphia and running this business of mine. I have not been reading, and I have barely been writing, and I've gotten that ache in my bones.

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.

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Years ago, Alane Mason introduced me to Gioia Timpanelli, through her exquisite Sometimes the Soul. A few days after Christmas this year, a package, wrapped in pink, showed up at my door. Another gift from Alane—Gioia's newest, signed. What Makes a Child Lucky.

This is the slim volume I read early yesterday morning while the sun rose over the kicked-up ocean and the wind blew the gulls from from green-slicked rock to rock. A perfect book in that it is an ageless book, timeless, too (the two not being the same thing at all, I realized, as I read on and through). Lucky is the story of a boy whose best friend is murdered by the very gang of thugs who soon absorb the boy into their strange circle. The setting is rural Sicily. The hills are ripe but also lonely. There is a shepherdess who tends her flock and then there's Immaculata, the old woman who keeps the boy alive amidst the murderers and kidnappers. She teaches him to cook and to hunt for wild asparagus. She whispers a saving grace into her ear and teaches him the meaning of compassion.

Lucky feels like fable, except that it's so immaculately told. It is saturated with the patient knowing Gioia has marked out as her own. "A great poet said that we make all art from memory and hope," her narrator says toward the end. "Memory is a funny companion. I myself love and trust it. And hope? It is stranger still. Both qualities are essential in my everyday life, as essential as seeing that thin red bird that stitches the high branches of a fir tree with its flight."

Joseph, who tells his story after he's grown up, reminded me of the children I met in the squatter's village of Juarez a few years ago. Of this boy, pictured here, who had nothing but his own great happiness and a borrowed baseball cap, and who would not be defeated.

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