Contemporary Authors

• Writing—The Translation of Memory ( edited by Eve Shelnutt) Macmillan (New York, NY), 1990
• All That’s Left to Tell ( novel) Flatiron Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. All that's left to tell LCCN 2016038533 Type of material Book Personal name Lowe, Daniel, author. Main title All that's left to tell / Daniel Lowe. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Flatiron Books, 2017. Description 290 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781250085559 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3612.O88155 A45 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Writing--the translation of memory LCCN 89012773 Type of material Book Main title Writing--the translation of memory / [edited by] Eve Shelnutt ; exercises by Daniel Lowe. Published/Created New York : Macmillan, c1990. Description xiv, 466 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0024098205 CALL NUMBER PE1417 .W737 1990 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Ravenous for Reads - https://ravenousforreads.com/2017/03/06/qa-with-author-daniel-lowe/

  Q&A with Author Daniel Lowe
  March 6, 2017
  Ari Augustine
  img_18301Daniel Lowe teaches writing at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh. His fiction and poetry have appeared in West Branch, The Nebraska Review, The Montana Review, The Wisconsin Review, The Writing Room, The Bridge, The Paterson Literary Review, Ellipsis, Blue Stem, Midway Journal, and The Madison Review. All That’s Left to Tell is his debut.

  Agent: Andy Kifer of The Gernert Company, 136 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

  Phone: 212.838.7777

  Dan, what can you tell us about yourself?

  I’m a community college professor and writer now for many years, though my writing predates my teaching. I had, for a long period of time, given up on having any success with my writing, but, after a particularly difficult semester with my students, I knew I needed something else, something involving the arts to balance out my intellectual and artistic (I don’t like using this word—it always sounds pretentious) life. For some years after that I drew and painted and refinished furniture (and now I miss that, too) but ultimately I returned to writing. Across all of these years, I also tended to my four children and two step-children.

  You recently published your first novel All That’s Left to Tell. In a nutshell, what’s it about?

  All That’s Left to Tell is a novel about a man who is held captive in Pakistan shortly after his daughter is murdered back home in the States, and the story-telling relationship that develops between him and the woman who is his interrogator as they reconstruct his daughter’s past and create for her an imagined future. Ultimately, thematically, the novel is about the necessity of story-telling and the constructive and destructive powers of grief.

  Was there anything particularly challenging you found when writing this story?

  It’s always challenging to write, to remove yourself from your self-consciousness as a writer and give yourself over to the story. More specifically, given the many narrative tracks of this novel, it was, at times, difficult to stay true to the nuances of each, but then again, that is the joy of writing a novel structured in this way. Though the book is quite serious, finally, it was fun to write. And hard work.

  What was your writing process like during the draft of All That’s Left to Tell?

  My goal each time I sit down to write is to produce 500 words. I often exceed that amount, and I sometimes fall short, but that’s the goal. Sometimes that forces me out of my comfort zone, as in I’m writing ahead of where I should be, or that I’m moving too fast through the story. I am also not someone who spills out the entire novel, then revises. Many writers do, and I think that’s a fine process. But I try to perfect as I go, and then move forward again. Once finished with a draft, that doesn’t mean there aren’t major tracts that need to be revised. But individual sentences don’t need as much attention as they might if I’d merely rushed them onto the page.

  Now, you’re also an instructor of English at CCAC. How did you manage to find time to write while also teaching?

  It must have been tough! It is tough! We’re required to teach five courses a semester, and that’s less pressing than the student papers that need to be evaluated. It’s a time-consuming form of issuing grades, much more so, say, then checking off multiple-choice tests. (It’s also more rewarding than grading those tests.) I try to get up early four or five mornings a week and write. To do this, I tend to schedule some classes online, and some later in the day to free up those mornings. When the papers start coming in fast and furious, I may have to take a week off, or write two or three mornings a week.

  What has been the most rewarding part of publishing All That’s Left to Tell?

  Well, ATLTT isn’t my first novel. In fact, from a time about fifteen years ago, when I began writing again, I wrote a novel, a collection of stories, another novel, another collection of stories, and then ATLTT. This was a long apprenticeship to serve now that I’ve reached almost sixty years old. So it was immensely gratifying, given this unusual path, to finally publish a book. It felt both like an accomplishment and a relief, as I knew I’d finally reached an audience.

  If there was one thing you’d go back and tell yourself when you first began writing this story, what would it be?

  What kind of advice would you give to yourself? Probably this: stop listening to yourself as writer as you write, and allow yourself to be immersed in the story.

  The publishing world can be a daunting place. It takes tenacity and on some level, courage, to be a writer. Did you always know you wanted to write or was this a dream that slowly revealed itself to you?

  I’d known since I was seventeen that I wanted to be a writer, but I would never have guessed the long and circuitous path to publication. You are absolutely right: the world of publishing can appear opaque and inaccessible as stacks and stacks of rejection slips come in from agents, publishers, and editors of literary magazines. I found it frustrating to the point of despair. But my story is one of persistence and a kind of faith that emerges from being interested in how a novel takes shape—there’s never a guarantee of the ultimate reward of publication, but there is always the implicit reward of writing, and writing something new.

  What advice would you offer to others currently drafting a story?

  Most plainly, finish it. Don’t let it linger. We learn most in writing by finishing projects, even if those projects are failing ones. (Again, that’s part of my story). Many people walk around with stories in their heads, and many intend to put them to paper or screen, but fewer actually get around to it, and fewer still finish what they’ve started. Finishing will teach you worlds about working in any form, and you will move on to other projects with greater confidence and the recognition of how important it is to persevere.

  Want to know more about Daniel Lowe? Go to http://www.danieljaylowe.com/

• Wales Arts Review - http://www.walesartsreview.org/in-conversation-with-daniel-lowe/

  DATE: 02.03.17 WRITTEN BY: SARAH HOENICKE POSTED IN: INTERVIEWS, LITERATURE
  In Conversation with Daniel Lowe
  IN CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL LOWE
  Sarah Hoenicke talks to the author of All That’s Left to Tell, Daniel Lowe.

  We know that stories have lives of their own, independent of their tellers. They wind and shape themselves differently in hearers’ minds, and then come out slightly transformed in retellings. In Daniel Lowe’s fiction debut, All That’s Left to Tell, stories create life, hope, pain, and they bend the mind, as story itself is investigated by the book’s telescoping structure of a story within a story, within a story.

  This is the tale of Marc Laurent, a Pepsi executive whose wife has just left him, and who decides to take on a six-month business stay in Karachi, Pakistan. We find out early that he’s been kidnapped, and that on top of his separation from his wife, his daughter, Claire, has been murdered. All of this feels overwhelming because it’s revealed in such quick succession, but then the book saves itself. Lowe’s real talents become apparent very quickly once one understands that the plot of the story is perhaps its least interesting facet.

  The conversations between Marc and his interrogator, Josephine, propel the story, as she tries to extract information from him in order to better know to whom to send a ransom note. Rather than torture him as one would expect her to, she tells him the story of his murdered daughter’s future as Josephine imagines it. In doing so, she makes him care about his life again.

  Marc has his eyes covered with a strip of cloth during most of his sessions with Josephine. Lowe plays with this detail – putting us inside Marc’s mind and having the images project out onto the screen of the blindfold, which becomes a sort of safe space for Marc. “In the blindfold,” he thinks, it is easy to imagine his former life. Lowe takes this further. Eyelids have the same function as a blindfold, but different implications, as, by closing one’s eyes, one chooses not to see. Marc does this when, his sight uncovered, he closes his eyes and “sees” Josephine, whose image he’s never actually beheld. Claire does this, too, when she closes her eyes to shut out the world so she can remember.

  The book truly takes off once, inside Josephine’s imagined version of Claire’s never-to-be future, the characters surrounding Claire begin to tell their own stories. The things that feel unbelievable, questionable – such as Marc’s exacting awareness of time passing during his imprisonment, or the strange echoes between the “real” story and the imagined one – are there for a reason. This is a book that is not fully understandable until one reaches the epilogue.

  Lowe is constant in his anticipation of readers’ questions, and his ability to arrest the reader’s mind, to take her far beyond the details of life and even of the book, to consider deeper questions. Is there a meaningful difference between memory and storytelling? What’s the difference between imagining the future of someone who’s died and imagining that they still exist somewhere, but aren’t talking to you?

  Lowe, a father of four, has taught English at a community college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for 25 years. He likes his work at the college because, he said, he’s “serving people who truly need help.” Lowe received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1983. That’s when he decided he was going to write fiction. A combination of family life and his work at the college, and “just simply drifting away from it over the course of years,” is how he only began writing seriously in his mid-forties.

  S: You’ve got four children. Was family life something that kept you from publishing earlier? Or was writing something that you turned to later in life?

  DL: There’s no easy answer to that. Before I started graduate school, I saw myself as more of a poet, and I sometimes wrote plays as well. I came to Pittsburgh for a teaching assistantship, and completed my MFA. Shortly after that I did get married and had my first child. Certainly, family obligations and raising children are time-consuming. But I would never want to present that as a reason that I didn’t do a lot of writing. Even through those years of raising children, I would write some poems, an occasional story, but without making a whole lot of effort to publish them. My work at the college is time-consuming – I teach five courses a semester. Unlike at a university or a four-year college, you’re not awarded for scholarships. What you’re rewarded and awarded for is teaching a large load.

  About 15 years ago, I started writing seriously again. I worked my way through several individual manuscripts. I started by writing a novel, completed it. I then wrote a story collection, and then another novel, and then another story collection, and then I wrote this novel, All That’s Left to Tell. It was sort of a mid-life apprenticeship that I served to the craft. I had interest in those manuscripts, and certainly a couple of those stories were published here and there, but I never could place those manuscripts with an agent or a publisher. Part of that was my fault, I was maybe not aggressive enough. I could sit here and try to explain to you what is different about this book, or what was different about the process that I went through in terms of contacting agents, and so on, but in all honesty, it wasn’t that different. This manuscript was snatched off the slush pile of my agent’s agency and moved forward from there.

  S: Do you have hope that those prior manuscripts will be picked up as well?

  D: I’ve gone back and forth with that. There are things that I love about those manuscripts. I would never say I’m not going to go back and touch them, because I would. There’s a collection of stories I wrote just prior to this novel that were founded in a nonfiction book that was written about a hospital in New York that served primarily psychiatric patients. The hospital was open over the course of a hundred years. When they were renovating the place, and changing it to something else, they found suitcases in the attic of one of the buildings where people’s belongings were contained. I started writing this collection of stories from the perspectives of these people who were in the state hospital, and the stories emerged from the listing of those artifacts. I was very fond of that collection of stories, and I’ve shared it with others. It’s difficult to sell a collection of stories – they’re not as marketable as a novel is. I would like to see a home found for them, but I try to be forward-looking and forward-seeing and it’s always more interesting to work on something new than to go back and try to fashion something I’ve written into something that is either more appealing to the publisher or more marketable.

  S: It has probably been interesting for you to do interviews with people who think this is your first novel, when it isn’t.

  D: It is! I did an interview a couple of weeks ago and the person talking to me said, this can’t be your first novel, come on, and I had to say, yeah, it isn’t. What happened, for me, is that I’d get done with one and schlep it for a while, and people would say, this is close, or a small publisher would be on the verge of accepting it but then decline it, or an agent wanted to represent me but then disappeared—things like that happen in the industry. I consider myself a fairly seasoned writer – I’m almost 60 years old, this is a late-breaking novel in my life, but it isn’t my first novel.

  S: How long did it take you to write All That’s Left to Tell?

  DL: I took it up shortly after finishing that collection of stories. In thinking back, I’m surprised because I remember it taking longer than it did, but it was pretty much done in about two years. I learned from the writing of my other manuscripts what I could do well. When I completed this manuscript, I had no sense that this would have any more success than the others. I don’t know if that means I don’t have the appropriate amount of distance from my work, or what. It was a surprise when it was met so eagerly. Maybe I got lucky. I did get lucky. There are many fine writers out there who haven’t enjoyed any of this opportunity that I’ve had. It’s a matter of getting into the hands of the right person – that takes perseverance and fortune. I had some perseverance and a lot of fortune. I got a big break here. It could’ve gone another way.

  S: I’ve never encountered a book with this kind of framing. Were there books that you read that made you feel this was possible? Or was this something you’d never seen done, and wanted to put out there?

  DL: I would never claim purely original thought fired this novel up. There are books I’ve read since I wrote this novel that people said it reminded them of such as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. I’ve always been interested in the edge between telling clear and true stories—I’m a highly self-conscious writer, aware of the act of storytelling—so also pulling into the writing of true and clear stories the recognition that this is something being deliberately formed and shaped.

  There are the classic writers whose work I admire—Nabokov, Borges, Toni Morrison, and other writers who play within the form and recognise that they are working with readers who know that they are writers writing and telling stories about characters in the best ways that they know how. That kind of reading certainly influenced my own work. It’s always difficult for me to recall the novels I read while writing this book. But I am always reading, and trying to find new writers doing things differently, whose work will inform mine. Those writers did influence it.

  I said to myself at the outset, that I’m going to try to tell this story. I’m going to have metafiction elements working in this structure that nests one story in another. Every reader is going to know that I am a novelist, telling a fiction. Yet there are several characters, principally Josephine, who create stories, too. The edges of those stories when they become independent chapters—when Josephine is sitting there with Marc and she starts to tell stories and then a new chapter starts and that story is there without the presence of Josephine or Marc—I was interested in blurring the lines, and for readers to think, okay, is she telling this story, word-for-word as it appears on this page, or might this be being said in some sort of other way. It was getting into those kinds of grey boundaries between the various stories that were told. I was very interested in readers having that awareness of construct.

  Ultimately, my goal was that readers would care about the characters, whose stories were being told, with the simultaneous recognition that they were clearly being manipulated—not just by me as the writer, but also the characters in the novel were manipulating each other to feel and respond in certain ways—and yet, to care about those characters and the stories they had. To think, I’m aware that you’re fuzzing the lines, but I’m going along for the ride because the story’s compelling enough that I care about the characters, though I know through these several layers, it isn’t actually happening.

  S: We’re all susceptible to story, and even the characters within your protagonist’s imagination have them. What do you think this susceptibility means for the time we’re living in now? How can we use story to shape our futures, and our political present?

  DL: Stephen Colbert used the word “truthiness,” a few years ago, talking about how we measure the accuracy of what we’re saying. Something can be sort of true, something can be more true—of course that’s a disturbing concept. A couple times, I’ve thought, we’re being pulled politically – we always have been, but even more so now – by stories. These lies or fantasies are being presented as truth.

  When I was writing this books, of course, it was prior to the rise of ISIS, I very much wanted the stories that Marc and Josephine were telling to be possibly redemptive, or possibly constructive. They’re telling these stories, and Marc is attempting to find solace in them. At the same time, I also wanted there to be the recognition that the stories we tell ourselves have great possibility of being destructive. We want to control the stories that we tell, but we have only so much control over them. They are crucial, whether they are factually true or not, to how we greet the world. This may be a bit of an overstatement, but probably there are people who would give up their lives before they would give up their stories. History is replete with examples. That’s how important story is to us. There’s a certain violence in losing one’s story. One of the initial premises of the novel was that everybody suffers grief and deep wounds in their lives; what do we do with that? What stories do we tell as a result?

  S: It must have been a harrowing task to keep the separate story lines straight. How did you manage and stay organized?

  DL: One of the things I have trouble with sometimes is recalling how I was thinking when I was writing the book. You get intimately involved in the writing. For me, one of my challenges throughout the period in my career when I wasn’t placing manuscripts, was writing in such a way that I would gain satisfaction from what I was working on, but not lose readers in the process. I had to learn that lesson as I was working towards this book.

  There were times when I was working on a certain section of the novel when I would then have to say, now wait a minute. Did I screw something up? Did I forget something happening in another chapter? I could feel the blurring of the lines of the story. But it was crucial that in every line of that book, that I be certain I knew what was going on. The real challenge was to draw the threads of the various narratives into a single narrative without betraying the characters or the stories themselves by overplaying or including a detail that destroys the conceit, or unravels the tapestry I was trying to put together. I would have occasional moments when I would have to go back and redo a sentence so it was consistent throughout, but for the most part I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t have to work too hard to keep the various narratives straight. The great pleasure of working on this book was to remain faithful to what I was doing. I ask: What can I get away with formally, and still not betray the characters or the reader?

  S: Throughout the book you anticipate readers’ questions and immediately allay any concerns that might have arisen because of the multiple stories and their overlaps, as on page 65 when Claire notes a stranger’s unaccountable knowledge of her life. You were not only able to keep the story straight for yourself, but when you did sense the blurring of lines and those gray boundaries you spoke of, you keep your reader with you by soothing that sense of worry that something’s falling apart.

  DL: There were moments when I wrote myself into traps with certain things that happened, and I wouldn’t discover those traps until I’d pushed on into the next chapter. Then I’d go back and say, oh boy. What you just described may have been one of those moments when I said, how can this be, when this happened? I would have to figure out a way out of that. There weren’t a lot of those moments, only a few.

  S: They reinforced my awareness of being told a story, which is something I felt, as a reader, you wanted me to be aware of. It also engaged me with the characters because even those who have been imagined by the other characters have this sense of themselves.

  D: Reinforcing the consciousness in their lives of the stories that they’re telling—I had to do that as I worked deeper into their stories. The stories always had to turn in on themselves, again and again, as opposed to spinning away and bursting outside the borders of the novel and beginning to unravel. That was enormous fun to do. These stories are often somber and serious, and sometimes violent, but the structure of the novel, and the way it’s working was what was fun for me—engaging.

  S: Talk to me about the blindfold. It feels very significant to storytelling, that the listener, in this case, Marc, be without sight.

  DL: That was something that I thought of very early. I had initially thought that he would never see Josephine, but my editor and agent convinced me that there needed to be a moment when he saw her, so I wrote that into the novel. That was extraordinarily important to me. We are a culture that’s far more cinematic than traditional 19th century storytelling. I’m aware of that when I write. That blindfold, for Marc, even though there are times when it’s removed, it becomes a kind of screen on which he can see these stories unfold in his mind, without visual distraction. For Josephine, it becomes an instrument of seduction because she needs it there as much as he does. Toward the middle parts of the novel, he almost looks forward to being blindfolded. Even when he knows he can turn and look at her, he doesn’t. He sometimes closes his eyes, looks away—he wants to see the story unfold in his mind. I knew I wanted to work with that device early on. It was, again, a proposition: If you were being interrogated and then told stories, and you were blindfolded and bound, how much more sharply felt would those stories be?

• Pan Macmillan - https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/daniel-lowe

  Daniel Lowe

  Daniel Lowe teaches writing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh. His fiction and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines. He is the author of All That's Left to Tell.

• Littsburgh - http://www.littsburgh.com/4-questions-daniel-lowe/

  What comes to mind when you think of Pittsburgh?

  I am a transplant from rural Michigan, but I’ve lived here now for thirty-five years. When I arrived for graduate school in 1981, the coke ovens would pump their exhaust into the close August evenings, and now, with the ovens in the city long ago closed, on the rare occasion when I catch that distant, pungent odor, possibly downwind from the Clairton Works, I’m filled with a nostalgia for the time when Pittsburgh was, for me, a big city filled with promise and possibility.

  What books are on your nightstand?

  Currently, Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography (Born to Run), and The Everything Labrador Retriever by Kim Campbell Thornton (puppy on the way).

  Is there a book you’d like to see made into a film?

  You mean other than mine? David Mitchell’s Slade House would be fun to watch, as would John Banville’s The Infinities.

  Who would you most want to share a plate of pierogis with?

  After my wife, and any of my children, probably James Joyce, not because I enjoy reading him more than a number of other writers, but because of how much I’d have the opportunity to learn. (I’d treat to a shot and a beer, too.)

  Ed. note: Speaking of Joyce, when you’re done reading our excerpt of All That’s Left to Tell, check out Littsburgh’s Bloomsday reading list!

• Daniel Lowe - http://www.danieljaylowe.com/bio/

  ABOUT
  Daniel Lowe teaches writing at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh. His fiction and poetry have appeared in West Branch, The Nebraska Review, The Montana Review, The Wisconsin Review, The Writing Room, The Bridge, The Paterson Literary Review, Ellipsis, Blue Stem, Midway Journal, and The Madison Review. All That’s Left to Tell is his debut.

  Agent: Andy Kifer of The Gernert Company, 136 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

  Phone: 212.838.7777

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Print Marked Items
Lowe, Daniel. All That's Left To Tell
Lawrence Rungren
Library Journal.
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Lowe, Daniel. All That's Left To Tell. Flatiron: Macmillan. Feb. 2017. 304p. ISBN 9781250085559. $25.99; ebk.
ISBN 9781250085542. F
In this notable first novel, an American corporate executive is kidnapped by a shadowy Pakistani group. At a low point
in his life, Marc Laurent has taken a position in Pakistan hoping to make a break with the difficulties of his recent past.
These include a divorce from his wife, Lynne, and the murder of their daughter, Claire. Not long after his arrival, he is
kidnapped while wandering near a sketchy neighborhood in Karachi. Held for ransom, he is visited by a member of the
group, a woman who appears to be an American and calls herself Josephine. She questions him about his daughter, and
the two surprisingly begin a series of ongoing sessions in which they tell each other stories about Claire, inventing a
life she might have lived. Through these conversations, Marc works his way to a better understanding about who his
daughter was and toward a degree of healing and peace. VERDICT While the subject matter is taken from the news,
this is a largely nonpolitical title. Lowe's concern is with the intricacies and intimacies of family life and the power of
stories to sustain, even under the most extreme circumstances. A remarkably accomplished debut.--Lawrence Rungren,
Andover, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Rungren, Lawrence. "Lowe, Daniel. All That's Left To Tell." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 77+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702093&it=r&asid=6d5f08e67f5c3b17cf6ed24df8000130.
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All That's Left to Tell
Carol Haggas
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* All That's Left to Tell. By Daniel Lowe. Feb. 2017.304p. Flatiron, $25.99 (9781250085559).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"Tell me a story" may be the most hopeful request in the English language. In Lowe's luscious, if elegiac, debut novel,
it produces an effect that is both alien and familiar. Kidnapped while on business in Pakistan, Marc Laurent is bound
and blindfolded as he awaits daily visits from a woman known only as Josephine. She is not there to torture him,
though torture him she does every time she commands him to tell her the story of his daughter, Claire, who was
murdered at 19. Like a call-and-response religious ritual, Marc's stories then compel Josephine to create an alternative
narrative of what Claire's life would have been like had she survived. Within that imagined story line runs yet another,
of Claire's life as told by Genevieve, a hitchhiker who accompanies Claire on a cross-country trip to see Marc as he lies
dying in a cabin in Michigan. This is a complex novel, without a doubt. And compelling. Lowe's elaborate tapestry
showcases humankind's reliance on the power of stories to comfort, correct, and clarify both our hidden feelings and
exposed fears. With its shifting points of view and emotional authenticity, Lowe's masterfully crafted first novel will be
a surefire hit with book discussion groups.--Carol Haggas
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "All That's Left to Tell." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077937&it=r&asid=70379c7100bb0fea22053425db90dccb.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479077937
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Lowe, Daniel: ALL THAT'S LEFT TO TELL
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lowe, Daniel ALL THAT'S LEFT TO TELL Flatiron Books (Adult Fiction) $25.99 2, 14 ISBN: 978-1-250-08555-9
The haunting tale of a severed bond between father and daughter.This captivating debut novel tells the story of Marc,
kidnapped and held prisoner in Pakistan. At first, he is questioned by his captor in what seems to be an effort to
uncover details that might aid in the collecting of a ransom. Soon, however, the line of questioning morphs: the
interrogator, known as Josephine, asks Marc to tell her the story of his daughter's past life, uncovering such traumas as
the time he forgot himself and kissed her when she was 13. In exchange, Josephine offers stories of his daughter's
future life, a life that could have been had she not died in a violent attack--or so we are, at first, led to believe. In
Josephine's stories, Marc is not abducted in Pakistan; Marc's daughter, Claire, who once chose to live a life without her
parents, is traveling across North America to see her dying father, to whom she has not spoken in 15 years. On her way,
Claire picks up a hitchhiker named Genevieve who in turn tells Claire stories of the life Marc could have led in the
years since father and daughter stopped speaking. These stories, which are stories within Josephine's, give parallel
details to those Marc is hearing in his cell; for example, a song that appears in one--"Circle Game" by Joni Mitchell--
will appear in both. In this way, the line between real and unreal blurs, and the Claire of Josephine's stories
materializes. While the truth may never be totally clear, the takeaway is that regardless of distance by death or
estrangement, Marc and Claire are desperate to know one another's stories and comforted by the life the other may
have led. Lowe's prose is evocative, the plot gripping, and the attachment that reaches across the alienation between
these characters reaches out to the reader as well. A story about storytelling, stirring and effective.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Lowe, Daniel: ALL THAT'S LEFT TO TELL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471902069&it=r&asid=b99e4a19c397402f1564099de01ec575.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471902069
8/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502039985006 4/4
All That's Left to Tell
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
All That's Left to Tell
Daniel Lowe. Flatiron, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-250-08555-9
The spirit of Scheherazade animates this first novel about a midlevel Pepsi executive working in Pakistan, Marc
Laurent, who is kidnapped by terrorists and held for ransom. Unfortunately, Marc was already personally estranged
from everyone he knows back in the U.S. While his captors try to figure out what to do with him, blindfolded Marc is
befriended by a woman who asks to be called Josephine and seems to have an upstate New York background. When
she finds out that Marc has a 19-year-old daughter, Claire, who was murdered a month ago, and he didn't even go home
to attend her funeral, Josephine begins spending their time together making up a narrative of what Claire's life might
have been like if she hadn't died. In her story, Claire is 34 and lives with her husband, Jack, and their young daughter,
Lucy, in California, where they operate a small motel. When she hears that her estranged father is in the hospital, Claire
drives east to Michigan to see him. On the way, she picks up a hitchhiker named Genevieve, who spends their time
together spinning out for Claire stories of Marc's life after he divorced her mother. Not since Kevin Brockmeier's The
Truth About Celia has a novel made a more dramatic case for the importance of stories as a way to deal with life's
tragic events. Despite one too many meta-games with the reader, the characters here remain real and memorable, a
credit to Lowe's storytelling skill. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"All That's Left to Tell." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224830&it=r&asid=2903868456b9f5997177ef2d350a2137.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224830

Rungren, Lawrence. "Lowe, Daniel. All That's Left To Tell." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 77+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702093&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. Haggas, Carol. "All That's Left to Tell." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077937&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "Lowe, Daniel: ALL THAT'S LEFT TO TELL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471902069&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "All That's Left to Tell." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224830&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.

• The Scotsman
  http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-all-that-s-left-to-tell-by-daniel-lowe-1-4456575
  Word count: 874

  Book review: All That’s Left To Tell, by Daniel Lowe Daniel Lowe STUART KELLY Published: 10:45 Thursday 25 May 2017 0 HAVE YOUR SAY Two-thirds of the way through this debut novel, we are told “Marc had stood for what seemed a long time, watching his father take a pinch of tobacco from a pouch, and then tamp it into his pipe with his forefinger”. I think “tamp” is one of those words given away for free on Creative Writing courses. Nobody who actually smokes a pipe thinks “tamp”; it is an arch and pseudo-literary word wishing to convey atmosphere and character and some sort of heightened diction. When I judged the Man Booker Prize, the use of the word “tamp” – it occurred in several novels we read – was a clear indicator of a book that was striving and not succeeding. My insight has not been overturned by this work. All That’s Left To Tell begins with Marc, a Pepsi executive, being kidnapped in Karachi. He is held prisoner by two men called Azhar and Saabir, and is visited each day by the mysterious Josephine, in whose presence he is always blindfolded. She asks him to tell stories and she tells stories back. Call it a kind of critical telepathy after so long reading books, but in the first few pages I wrote down “Dialogue very like Harold Pinter”, and on page 34 we are told that Josephine appeared in a production of Pinter’s The Homecoming. Sometimes it’s best not to signal your influences so gauchely. It later morphs into a version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, and does so equally ineptly. Marc, it seems, did not attend his daughter Claire’s funeral, and Josephine, as a kind of torture, tells him stories of what her life might have been like. They are then filtered through another set of stories, as the fictional Claire conjured by Josephine has Marc’s later life narrated by a hitchhiker, Genevieve, who seems to have surprising access to the story of Marc’s imprisonment. It is very similar to Paul Auster’s later and weaker works: two blind men playing chess in the dark, stories within stories, and a strange valorisation of story in and of itself as a good thing. Just keep talking. Compared with a work like Tahar ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence Of Light, the kidnapping and yappity torture scenes here are frankly embarrassing. It is in fact merely a conceit, and I mean that with all the double-entendres it might carry. The novel is fundamentally sentimental rather than political. It is, as Sir Walter Scott said of Tobias Smollett, “sedulously polished into excellence”. It is so honed, so desperately chiselled, one wonders if it might not have been better if every word had been slowly eroded. The back-and-forth between Marc and Josephine is a structural device to put short stories into a kind of novel. We get various stories of Claire’s childhood friendships, off-the-rails period, putative life running a motel, hypothetical point where she is driving to her father’s deathbed. They are all quite good, and intermittently affecting, stories, but the names could have been changed with no consequence and published separately. They are, of course, in the key of Raymond Carver: blue collar blues, macho men who are weak, dirty little epiphanies. It seems as if this book was pre-written to a set of prescriptions and prohibitions that no-one now thinks relevant. For all its attempts to tug the heart strings, it comes across as a singularly sterile and stagnant work. “She thought the story would be like a thick haze through which only slowly the other things of her life would emerge, and the memory of the haze would cling to those things for a long, long time”. I can imagine the lazy drawl with which these words might be spoken, but if you begin to unpick them for actual meaning, they mean nothing at all. It’s Creative Writing, not writing. The sexual politics of the book are both complicated and blunt. Marc cannot see and wants to see Josephine’s face. Josephine’s Claire is ambiguously attracted to Genevieve. Claire’s boyfriend in the Josephine version of her is haunted by her partner’s fantasies about her being raped. A nasty incident happens, which seems like narrative expediency more than necessary plotting, a plot device rather than a narrative necessity. The central story of this book of unreliable stories is not about terror, but lust. Marc – rather too early – confesses he once kissed his daughter on the lips when she was 14. It seems a rather glib confession for a topic so toxic. One might have thought that he would have held out a bit, given the shamefulness. But the “lyrical” writing around it, and its echo in one of the other stories, left me feeling queasy, and not in a good way. The jacket flap says this is a book where “neither Marc nor Josephine are sure which stories are true and which are imagined, or even if it matters”. Take it from me: it doesn’t.

  Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-all-that-s-left-to-tell-by-daniel-lowe-1-4456575

• Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/all-that-s-left-to-tell-by-daniel-lowe-1.3119197
  Word count: 287

  All That’s Left to Tell, by Daniel Lowe
  Browser review

  Daniel Lowe: the American’s debut novel has enjoyable stretches but suffers from some flat dialogue and indistinct characterisation
  Daniel Lowe: the American’s debut novel has enjoyable stretches but suffers from some flat dialogue and indistinct characterisation
  Giles Newington
  Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 00:00
  First published:
  Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 00:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  All That’s Left to Tell
  ISBN-13:
  978-1509810550
  Author:
  Daniel Lowe
  Publisher:
  Picador
  Guideline Price:
  £12.99
  A middle-aged American, Marc Laurent, has been taken hostage in Pakistan, although for what reason we are never certain.
  Under guard in a small room, he is regularly bound and blindfolded for visits by Josephine, one of his captors, who, more therapist than terrorist, takes a greater interest in Marc’s relationship with his recently deceased (or is she?) daughter, Claire, than in extracting a ransom for his release.
  As they settle into a cosyish (but implausible) routine of nightly storytelling, Josephine invents fictional futures for Claire and Marc, while Marc interjects with memories and revelations about their past.
  Josephine’s concoctions include a road trip between Claire and an imagined hitch-hiker, Genevieve, who (spookily like Josephine) offers Claire speculative tales about Marc’s fate. But how does this stranger know so much about Claire’s family? And ditto Josephine? Which stories are true? And what is their purpose?
  This debut novel from the American writer Daniel Lowe has enjoyable stretches, but some flat dialogue and indistinct characterisation mean the questions it raises about the human need to tell stories only occasionally compel.

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2017/02/12/Book-review-Local-author-writes-a-refreshing-first-novel-about-memory-and-estrangement/stories/201702120047
  Word count: 714

  'All That’s Left to Tell': Local author Daniel Lowe’s refreshing novel of memory and estrangement

  JULIE HAKIM AZZAM
  9:00 PM FEB 11, 2017
  I’ve long been bothered by the fact that the same authors appear on national best-seller lists and in double-deep stacks in store displays. At the time of this writing, James Patterson, David Baldacci and Jodi Picoult have novels on The New York Times best-seller list. A decade ago, they did as well. With all due respect to these literary giants, there are many other works that readers could also be enjoying but don’t get adequate publicity or readership.

  "ALL THAT’S LEFT TO TELL"
  By Daniel Lowe
  Flatiron Books ($25.99).
  Daniel Lowe’s “All That’s Left to Tell” is a refreshing debut novel that should not go unnoticed. This introspective book is about memory and taking stock of the past, and asks readers to think about the stories we tell to make sense of our lives.

  Mr. Lowe is a local author; he holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh and teaches writing at the Community College of Allegheny County.

  The novel centers around Marc Laurent, a 47-year-old middle-level manager at Pepsi Co., who moves from the U.S. to Karachi, Pakistan, in order to open the Pepsi market and get some emotional distance from a divorce and a grown daughter who no longer speaks to him. When the novel opens, Marc has just been kidnapped. Blindfolded and restrained, he is visited by a female interrogator who probes him with a peculiar question: A month ago your 19-year-old daughter was attacked and killed. Why did you not go back to the U.S. for the funeral?

  This rather personal question sets the plot — and suspense — in motion. Marc’s interrogator, an American woman whose own ties to Pakistan are nebulous, instructs Marc not only to tell stories about his past life, but his future as well.

  Despite the fact that this book wears a South Asian setting and accessorizes itself with the accoutrements of political Islam, this is not a novel about political intrigue; the novel’s main concern lies in the personal issues of its American protagonist.

  This focus on the personal produces both fascinating and disturbing results. Marc’s captor is every bit the Scheherazade: She imagines a scenario in which his daughter survived her attack. She also imagines Marc’s life years after his kidnapping. When she tells a story about his daughter’s childhood, we see a very different version from what the father remembers. These stories beg readers to ponder how others might experience and remember events differently.

  One of the most moving things to emerge from the novel’s many stories is a poignant exploration of estrangement. The novel gives nuanced voice to the personal violence that occurs when one person in a family stops talking to another.

  The novel’s use of Pakistan is unsettling. Marc learns that family members of his armed Pakistani guards have been murdered by drone strikes. They too have experienced loss and are left with only memories of the past. The shifts between a vague mention of the Pakistani men’s experiences of violence to Marc’s extensive narrative can feel jarring. In giving ample voice to Marc’s grief, the novel seems to privilege his experiences over others, while the Pakistanis are little more than props.

  There were moments in which the storytelling conceit wore thin, and I found myself with neutral, if not apathetic, feelings toward Marc and his estranged family members. While I am sympathetic to the notion that the act of telling stories matters, I felt like the plot needed something more than just stories to propel it forward.

  Despite these moments, Mr. Lowe demonstrates exceptional talent as a wordsmith, and for plotting an intriguing story whose premise invites readers to practice empathy for another by imagining their story. There is much to look forward to in Mr. Lowe’s rising talent.

  Julie Azzam is a visiting lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Twitter @JulieAzzam.

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