Contemporary Authors

• Publish This Book: The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book Sourcebooks (Naperville, IL), 2010
• Ohio Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2018

1. Ohio LCCN 2017040397 Type of material Book Personal name Markley, Stephen, author. Main title Ohio / Stephen Markley. Edition First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781501174476 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3613.A75426 O38 2018 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Publish this book : the unbelievable¹ true² story of how I wrote, sold, and published this very book³ LCCN 2009036474 Type of material Book Personal name Markley, Stephen. Main title Publish this book : the unbelievable¹ true² story of how I wrote, sold, and published this very book³ / Stephen Markley. Published/Created Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks, c2010. Description 469 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9781402229350 (alk. paper) 1402229356 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PN6231.A77 M37 2009 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER PN6231.A77 M37 2010 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Tales of Iceland or Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight - 2013 GiveLiveExplore LLC, Chagrin Falls

• Stephen Markley - https://www.stephenmarkley.com/about/

  Stephen Markley is the author of Ohio: a Novel, which is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in August of 2018. He's also the author of Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and his essays and short fiction can be found scattered across the internet. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

• Simon & Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.net/authors/Stephen-Markley/2139674729

  Stephen Markley
  Stephen Markley is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Markley’s previous books include the novel Ohio, the memoir Publish This Book: The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book, and the travelogue Tales of Iceland. He lives in Los Angeles.

• Chicago Reader - https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2018/08/22/in-stephen-markleys-debut-novel-ohio-is-more-than-just-a-political-football

  QUOTE:
  It's a book that attempts to be both a murder mystery involving four former classmates who return to the fictional town of New Canaan and a social critique about a place devastated by social, political, and economic upheaval over the last generation.
  boozy, irreverent travelogue of a stint in Iceland

  LIT & LECTURES / POLITICS / ARTS
  In Stephen Markley's debut novel, Ohio is more than just a political football
  Posted By Ryan Smith on 08.22.18 at 06:15 PM
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  Stephen Markley and his debut novel, Ohio - COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
  Stephen Markley and his debut novel, Ohio

  Since the election of Donald Trump, Ohio has served as a sort of political Rorschach test. Depending on the ideology or affiliation, some squint and see the state as the avatar of humble, plain-speaking "Real America." Others view it as a downtrodden place that embraced Trumpism after being abandoned by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Then there are those who see a state of racist white people are angry about the crumbling foundation of white supremacy.

  But former Chicagoan Stephen Markley hopes his novel—named after his native Great Lakes state—will help readers think of Ohio as not just a swing state but a diverse, complicated region full of flesh-and-blood people. It's a book that attempts to be both a murder mystery involving four former classmates who return to the fictional town of New Canaan and a social critique about a place devastated by social, political, and economic upheaval over the last generation.

  Out this week, Ohio (Simon & Schuster) is an ambitious debut of fiction from Markley, whose last book was a boozy, irreverent travelogue of a stint in Iceland (Tales of Iceland, or Running With the Huldufólk), written in 2013. Prior to that, in 2010, was Publish This Book: The Unbelievable Story of How I Wrote, Sold and Published This Book. The 34-year-old native of Mount Vernon, Ohio, cut his teeth as a freelance writer in Chicago, with jobs including a gig as a columnist for RedEye, then attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before making a Chicago stop on his book tour on Thursday evening, Markley spoke with the Reader about his topsy-turvy career, the politics of military service, and, yes, Ohio.

  How did you go from writing an absurd travelogue in Iceland to serious fiction about your hometown?

  The way I've been describing it, I have wanted to be a novelist this whole time but I got sidetracked because I was getting paid to write that jocular stuff. And that led to Publish This Book. And I just sort of found myself in a different career than I actually wanted. A major turning point was getting into Iowa. Just saying, This is what I'm gonna get myself into, full-bore. Five years later I emerged with this novel, but it is like a pretty serious departure from everything else I've written.

  It's funny because I read some blurb where you're hyped as some hot new talent.

  Yeah, it's weird, you're slogging away for your entire adult life—I've been working on this since I was 22. Maybe I'm new to them but I feel old and beat up. [Laughs.]

  This is sort of the book I've been wanting to write for a decade or more. There was something about getting distance and time away from the absolute breakneck, terrible broke-ass life of freelance writing that was what I needed.

  How did you decide on this book specifically?

  I had plenty of unprocessed material from my hometown in Ohio. Year after year I'd go back home and hear of various tragedies that had befallen people I'd grown up with, some of whom were very close friends and others who were peers or people I looked up to or admired in high school.

  That sort of coupled with what I have been referring to as a social, political, and economic chaos that has sort of defined my adult life. I think the lives of a lot of guys from our generation—I was 17 going on 18 on 9/11, when the towers fell. In college, I was protesting against the Iraq war, and when I graduated it was into the teeth of the recession and the financial crisis. And then you look up and suddenly we're in the midst of this current major institutional failures. And I think all of those threads are present in this book.

  It's basically a snapshot of this Ohio town through four people's lives as they return to their hometown the same night—all of whom graduated around the same time and knew each other or were at least aware of each other. It starts with a soldier character killed in Iraq, and the parade to honor him is being thrown in the town square. None of the main four characters are present for it. They're all missing. That's sort of the blank-space way of introducing them—why aren't they there?

  And you've had friends that have enlisted in the military and fought overseas?

  Yes, and I leaned on their expertise and experience. There's one character in particular who is a veteran, and I think he is not based on anybody in particular—he is his own original person. But I certainly mined the thoughts of the people I know and the stories they told me over the years.

  I read a recent interview with you where the publication made it sound like you were once against our military involvement in the Middle East but had changed your mind?

  That's a strange characterization. No, I remain very fervently opposed to our military presence in the Middle East. Writing the character, it's important for me to understand the ways in which people are drawn to military service, especially during that post-9/11 period when the impetus to intervene in Iraq was so strong. I tried to put that onto the page with as much honesty and understanding and empathy as I could possibly manage.

  Sure, it's possible to be against the war yet show some sympathy for the individuals who choose to fight in them, especially when they're young and the army offers a steady salary and benefits.

  And especially if you talk about reasons in the midwest, where de-industrialization and our staggeringly inequitable economy means there are few options in terms of advancing oneself. It's a very attractive option.

  People who serve in the military tend to be an abstraction to most of us. Did you think about trying to humanize them in this book?

  Absolutely. I think it springs from the fact that I know normal human guys who served. Because it's such a small percentage of our population that actually does serve, there's this weird way in which it's alien to some people and venerated blindly and sort of ignorantly by a lot of others. And troops are used for political reasons, or to sell car insurance or cell phones or whatever else.

  Sometimes our only interaction is standing up and cheering for them at a football game.

  And that's another way we're all propagandized into not thinking about what it means to actually send 18- to 23-year-olds to fight overseas.

  Speaking of a group of people that have become abstractions, the white working class in states like Ohio has become this political football since the election. Does your book address how we should think about these working-class people who may have voted for Trump or not?

  What I got lucky with is that I wrote the whole book before it was even a figment in anybody's imagination that Trump could possibly be president. November 16th definitely helped me sell the book, but it was not something I ever saw coming. Later, I went back and read it and it looked—and this is going to sound self-aggrandizing—weirdly prescient and strikingly relevant.

  From my perspective, I'm writing every single character as a full human being who has been hurt by somebody, who's loved somebody, who cares about the people around them and could easily be any of us if we were brought up in whatever position and condition they were. And that also applies to the self-righteous liberal character. I just wanted to write a book about people and have those political themes emerge through their characters.

  What exactly is it that you've seen since 9/11 in your hometown that influenced you?

  To be clear, the town in the book is not my hometown, they're different beasts. The really shocking one has been the opioid epidemic. I don't know a single person who hasn't been affected in some way. I've known people who've died or overdosed—it's just really jarring.

  I grew up in central Illinois, and in my own town I've seen the opioids and alcoholism, suicide, and just this profound sense of alienation and decline.

  That's sort of the town here in the book, the sense that the breaking down is really acute. At the center, there's this despair that is eating the place out from under itself.

  Do you think in some broader sense too that you're trying to also put a human face on Ohio itself? Since the election, it's become shorthand for all kinds of political ideas.

  It's interesting, I've gotten a lot of questions about that. I had no idea of propaganda behind the name. You're just looking for something stark and effective. I think the word itself is sort of haunting—Ohio has this ghostly quality to it and this novel is essentially a mystery. But, no, I really didn't have any swing-state notions behind the name.

  Maybe all of our brains are just broken by politics. And the fact that everybody is trying to put everything and everyone in a political frame means we're part of the problem.

  You're exactly right. And I'm guilty of it too. Obviously, that was part of my past writing. It's hard not to, because that's the paradigm that's forced down our throats every single day.

  But no, this book is not concerned with flipping the House of Representatives. It's about human beings, and seeing certain political events through the eyes of various people and giving them their full view in terms of how they feel and what they think.

  So even though it's called Ohio, John Kasich isn't in it?

  Nope, he didn't make the cut.

  Stephen Markley will be at Barnes & Noble, 1130 N. State, on Thursday, August 23, at 6 PM.
  Tags: Stephen Markley, Ohio, Tales From Iceland, John Kasich, RedEye, Donald Trump, Iowa Writers' Workshop, Image

• Ohio Magazine - https://www.ohiomagazine.com/ohio-life/article/3-questions-stephen-markley

  QUOTE:
  visceral debut novel,
  My childhood was defined by reading Stephen King’s books at 3 a.m. when I should have been sleeping,” Markley says. “The best books are the ones you fall into — the ones that make you forget who you are and who the author is.”I entered it with more of a mercenary approach of getting into this small world of literary publishing. I thought it would be a bunch of nerds who like books too much, and I would have nobody to watch basketball with. But everyone was astonishingly smart and funny, and there were ideas about writing I needed to hear.

  ARTS OHIO LIFE
  3 Questions: Stephen Markley
  The author’s acclaimed debut novel offers a contemporary take on a fictional northeast Ohio town.

  SEPTEMBER 2018
  BY BARRY GOODRICH | PHOTO BY MICHAEL AMICO
  The haunted characters in Stephen Markley’s visceral debut novel, Ohio, are members of a lost generation — sons and daughters who emerged from the shadows of 9/11, the Great Recession, two wars and the opioid epidemic.

  Set against a gritty backdrop of Rust Belt despair and poverty in the fictional northeast Ohio town of New Canaan, Ohio is a contemporary mystery where the past is forever linked to the present.

  Markley, who grew up in Mount Vernon, Ohio, uses a character-driven narrative and flashbacks to tell the tale of four former classmates, who revisit the dark secrets of their hometown,

  “My childhood was defined by reading Stephen King’s books at 3 a.m. when I should have been sleeping,” Markley says. “The best books are the ones you fall into — the ones that make you forget who you are and who the author is.”

  Released Aug. 21, Ohio has already created a stir, with Time and the New York Post naming it one of the best books of the summer.

  “Publishing a novel is enormously difficult in every way,” says Markley, whose story has already been optioned for a television project. “Novelists are the Marines of writing. They’re the first people sent into the most difficult tasks.”

  We talked with Markley about small towns, addiction and the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  Is the setting for your novel, New Canaan, based on Mount Vernon?
  The sense of place comes from Mount Vernon. It’s really recognizable as a range of towns and has kind of an everyplace American character to it. There was a bookseller from the South who said the book reminds him of his own home. These characters see the town through their own specific lens. You get four different points of view of the town as a character.

  A lot of the book deals with addiction, particularly Ohio’s opioid crisis. Why?
  I was writing about [addiction] before I really understood it that well. It worked its way into the book before I understood the larger story. It’s become such an epidemic. It’s a really harrowing situation, and I don’t know anyone back home whose life hasn’t been touched by it. It makes you totally unrecognizable to those who care about you.

  How important was your experience at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?
  I entered it with more of a mercenary approach of getting into this small world of literary publishing. I thought it would be a bunch of nerds who like books too much, and I would have nobody to watch basketball with. But everyone was astonishingly smart and funny, and there were ideas about writing I needed to hear.

  For more information, visit stephenmarkley.com.

  See More Articles on:

• Alana Saltz - http://alanasaltz.com/an-interview-with-stephen-markley

  QUOTE:
  I found Stephen’s memoir to be incredibly funny, honest, and inspiring. It really spoke to where I was in my experience of being a recent college grad with no real idea of how to navigate the complicated and highly competitive literary world as an aspiring author.

  An Interview with Stephen Markley, Author of “Publish This Book”
  September 21, 2011 by Alana 10 Comments
  I first read Stephen Markley’s memoir, Publish This Book, shortly after graduating college. Stephen’s book chronicles the unique journey that he took in becoming a published author. Stephen was only 26 when he started the project, and has since added himself to the growing list of talented and accomplished young memoir writers.

  I found Stephen’s memoir to be incredibly funny, honest, and inspiring. It really spoke to where I was in my experience of being a recent college grad with no real idea of how to navigate the complicated and highly competitive literary world as an aspiring author. I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to interview Stephen for this blog. To learn more about Stephen and Publish This Book, please visit Stephen’s website.

  1. How did the process of writing Publish This Book, a memoir, compare with your fiction and journalistic writing endeavors?
  It was a strange experience because I had to form a narrative as events were happening. The process was on this kind of hyper-drive where I was reflecting and assimilating my conscious and sub-conscious observations–the way you would normally do as a writer–only at this accelerated rate, while also dealing with a whole host of very personal subjects. It was certainly a once-in-a-lifetime idea and experience.

  2. You call Publish This Book a “premature memoir” among other things. In what ways do you feel the memoir was premature? Have people questioned your decision to write a memoir at a young age?
  The “premature” was kind of a joke I threw in last-second. Conjuring images of the author disappointing women sexually was great fun, but I also think people have this tendency to go “You’re 26? You can’t write a memoir when you’re 26! You haven’t done anything!” As it turns out, if you’ve got the right juice, you totally can.

  3. A lot of writers feel concerned about the reactions of friends and family if they were to publish a memoir. How have your friends and family reacted to the book now that it’s been published?
  I’m sure there are parts that everyone wasn’t 100% thrilled with, but no one’s questioned the book’s honesty or intent, and I certainly haven’t lost any relationships over it. One of things you have to understand when you’re writing and intending to put your soul on the page, in a public forum, is that you can’t please all the people all of the time. If you get hung up on that, you’re finished. You’ll lose your mind. My aim was to be as true to the emotional reality of events as I could be.

  4. In a review, Publisher’s Weekly made a remark about how you may have been better off cutting some of the “more self-indulgent sections” of the book. Do you think memoir is an inherently self-indulgent genre? Where do we draw the line between honest self-expression and unnecessary self-indulgence when it comes to writing a memoir?
  Ah, Publisher’s Weekly, those scumbags. No, just kidding. I think the part they objected to was my experience as a columnist in college, but I’ve received many e-mails and Facebook messages from fans who cite that as their favorite chapter. It’s one of those books where the way the reader feels about different sections says almost as much about them as it does about me. I think all art is inherently self-indulgent, which is okay. There is no hard and fast line separating honest self-expression from the rest, but my feeling is that a successful memoir usually has the reader reflecting about themselves and not just following along the bitching of some other guy. I like to think that’s what I achieved, but as I said, everyone’s cup of joe comes differently.

  5. In Publish This Book, you talk a lot about the process of getting the book itself published. After this experience, what do you think about the traditional publication process? Do you have any thoughts on indie/self-publishing as an alternative?
  Publishing has changed so much from the time I finished the book to now that I can’t believe it will be the same in the next five years. Technology, the recession, the decline of readers–writers face challenges now that they couldn’t have even imagined a decade ago. I think it’s getting much harder to be successful without some serious luck, connections, or divine intervention. Self-publishing may be practical for some, but you have to understand that for every success story where a self-published author gets big, there are probably 10,000 who sold 36 copies to friends and family. It’s a tricky thing, this “writing”.

  6. What’s next on the horizon for you? Any new projects for us to keep an eye out for?
  I’ve finished a novel, which my agent is shopping around to different editors and publishing houses. Also, it seems as though there is a strong possibility that “Publish This Book” will be a movie, which would be so surreal I haven’t even really wrapped my brain around it. I’m kind of at the point where I just want to dispatch any pay-the-bills writing and get to work on full-blown epic projects that will require days and days locked in front of my laptop. I’ve forgotten more books that I want to write than I’ve had hours to sit down and put them into words.

  Book Giveaway
  You can purchase a copy of Publish This Book on Amazon.com or at your local bookstore. I am giving away one copy of Publish This Book to a random commenter, so please leave your thoughts about the interview in a comment for a chance to win a copy of the book. Trust me, it’s a great read.

• Galley Cat - https://www.adweek.com/galleycat/how-stephen-markley-went-from-temp-to-published-author/20896

  QUOTE:
  Basically, I was getting tired of trying to break into a career as a writer. I’d written a few practice novels, queried for a few other book ideas and was living in Chicago making $320 a week as a temp and feeling like my life was essentially going nowhere. The book was born of this frustration. It began just as an irreverent idea but grew into a lot of different things as I began to write it.
  Peter Lynch of Sourcebooks was the one editor who kind of got what I was trying to do, and admittedly he took a chance. One of the best days of my writing career was when he finished reading what I’d sent him. He wrote me an e-mail basically saying it was one of his favorite books he’d ever gotten the chance to work on.

  AUTHORS | RESOURCES
  How Stephen Markley Went from Temp to Published Author
  By Maryann Yin on Dec. 27, 2010 - 3:47 PMComment

  Stephen Markley wrote the forthcoming nonfiction title, Publish This Book. After listening to him read from his work at the In the Flesh reading series, we caught up with him for an interview.

  Q: How did you conceive of the idea for Publish This Book?
  A: Basically, I was getting tired of trying to break into a career as a writer. I’d written a few practice novels, queried for a few other book ideas and was living in Chicago making $320 a week as a temp and feeling like my life was essentially going nowhere. The book was born of this frustration. It began just as an irreverent idea but grew into a lot of different things as I began to write it.

  Q: What pitch did you use to convince your agent to take you on as a client?
  A: My pitch letter is included in the book (with the grammatical errors left uncorrected). Basically, I just thought to myself, ‘Catch someone’s–anyone’s–eye.’ And out of 50, approximately 1.5 agents were interested in my idea. I went with the one and not the point-five.

  Q: Was it tough getting a deal with Source Books?
  A: My agent, Julie Hill, queried a lot of publishers and got very similar responses down the line: We dig this guy’s writing–it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it makes us laugh–but we have no idea based on these two chapters how this will work as a book, and we don’t think he can sustain it. Peter Lynch of Sourcebooks was the one editor who kind of got what I was trying to do, and admittedly he took a chance. One of the best days of my writing career was when he finished reading what I’d sent him. He wrote me an e-mail basically saying it was one of his favorite books he’d ever gotten the chance to work on.

  Q: What is the exact date of publication for Publish This Book?
  A: It came out on March 9, 2010. For its one-year birthday I’m going to buy it a Pabst.

  Q: How do your friends feel about being included in Publish This Book?
  A: Most of them enjoy it. Some more than others. There was surprise, for sure, but not really any anger (at least from the people I’ve heard from; they’re are a few I haven’t, like my high school basketball coach and former president George W. Bush). What was important to me was that the people the book is based around–a former Love Interest, my college professor Steven, and my old friend Justin–that they saw it for what I think it is. That is partly to say a testament to my relationships with them, how much they mean to me.

  Q: Did you do a lot of research during the writing process?
  A: Some chapters are about me drinking, cussing, and fornicating, so I had to do a lot of hands-on research for those. Other chapters required more reading. For instance, when I went to write about the publishing industry, to try to understand and articulate what young writer’s face when they try to publish, I wanted to get as many perspectives as I could. In a way, that kind of research is more fun: attempting to distill a piece of the world into a thoughtful but entertaining little mid-book essay. It’s like fornicating with your mind.

  Q: Describe the writing process for Publish This Book?
  A: I basically wrote the first two chapters and sent those around to agents. That’s also what Julie and I sent to publishers. I’d written about half of the book (up to the point when I signed with Julie) when the economy collapsed in fall of 2008. At that point, I kind of figured I was SOL, but then Sourcebooks bought it, and I went into a mad four month dash to finish it. I spent those months staying up to 3 a.m. every night, getting by at work with a cup of coffee per hour, developing a permanent sleeping disorder. It was one of the best periods of my life, and I think the second half of the book reads with an urgency and vividness because of it. It was the moment when I thought, “Ok, this is it.” And the result was some of my favorite stuff I’ve ever put on paper–things I wasn’t entirely sure I was capable of when I started.

  Q: What is your advice for writers who are looking to get published?
  A: This question is tough because there really is no great answer. I’ll say ‘perseverance’ which is true, but I’m also a realist. The easiest way to get published is to know people. Or become famous. If you really want a book contract get on a reality television show and act like an asshole. That’ll get you published. Becoming a writer is a far more complex and troubling endeavor.

  Q: What is the ‘One-Beer YouTube Contest’?
  A: This was my attempt to start something ‘viral’ on YouTube and it ‘failed’ miserably. The book has developed this small but very passionate cult following, and I wanted to try to tap into some of the creative energy of the people who wrote me, to exploit them like Chinese factory workers, I guess. I said if they put up a video advertisement for Publish This Book and won, I would drive anywhere in North America and buy them a beer, as well as pimp their own creative projects on my Tribune blog. There has not been a single entry, so presumably if someone in the Yukon Territory wanted to throw up a video with just the book’s title just to annoy me, I would have to make the drive.

  Q: What’s next for you in terms of future projects and goals?
  A: I’ve just finished a really big, really ambitious novel, which I’m going to begin revising. It’s a source of unending anxiety in my life right now because I feel as if it’s pretty goddamn good, but that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a significant departure from PTB, really, really weird and complicated, and with a pretty epic word count. Then again, it’s exciting to be twenty-seven and have the world out there waiting for you no matter who you are, let alone a writer with one book at his back.

• Book Reporter - https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/stephen-markley

  Stephen Markley
  Stephen Markley is the author of OHIO, his debut novel. He's also the author of PUBLISH THIS BOOK and TALES OF ICELAND. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and his essays and short fiction can be found scattered across the internet. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

QUOTE:
Markley is a
knockout storyteller, infusing each section with realistic detail, from the drudgery of Walmart work to war
to the fleeting ecstasies of drugs to violence, especially self-harm.

9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Markley, Stephen: OHIO
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Markley, Stephen OHIO Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 21 ISBN: 978-1-5011-7447-6
A group of young men and women aggressively affected by the post-9/11 world reconverge in their Ohio
hometown.
Markley's (Tales of Iceland, 2013, etc.) flagrantly symphonic debut novel is effectively four linked novellas,
with each section circling around a high school friend or acquaintance of Rick, who was killed in action in
Iraq. Each person has hit on hard times in their 20s, and on one evening in their hometown of New Canaan,
they're laboring to set things right. Bill has an omnivorous drug habit and is hauling a plainly illicit but
unidentified (until the climax) package north from New Orleans; Stacey wants to confront the homophobic
mother of her high school girlfriend; Dan is an Afghanistan war vet who wants to catch up with an old
flame; and Tina has a score to settle with the jock who sexually abused her in high school. Markley is a
knockout storyteller, infusing each section with realistic detail, from the drudgery of Walmart work to war
to the fleeting ecstasies of drugs to violence, especially self-harm. (Tina's section is especially tough reading
on that last front.) High school, Markley writes, provided "stories of dread and wonder you could wrap
whole novels around," and he's followed through. There's an unsettling feeling, though, that while he's
mastered complex characterization, it's often in service of simplistic broader portraiture about the Rust Belt.
New Canaan, "sclerotic in every capacity," is doom-and-gloom to the edge of caricature: Its economy is
rotted and shored up on meth and disability checks, its community reduced to pro-Trump resentment and
anti-Muslim anger. The culture Markley describes unquestionably exists, and strong novels about America's
underclass are lamentably thin on the ground. But this novel is best appreciated as a set of portraits rather
than (as the title suggests) a definitive statement about an entire state.
This is a big character-driven epic, though it's overinflated in its pronouncements about its setting.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Markley, Stephen: OHIO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008929/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b8bdfd6.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543008929
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QUOTE:
Markley's novel is alternately disturbing and gorgeous, providing a broad
view of the anxieties of a post-9/H Middle America and the complexities of the humans who navigate them.

Ohio
Publishers Weekly.
265.24 (June 11, 2018): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ohio
Stephen Markley. Simon & Schuster, $26 (496p) ISBN 978-1-5011-7447-6
In Markley's standout debut novel (following nonfiction works Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland),
four former high school classmates return to their Ohio hometown to make amends. Once a bastion of steelmill
industry, New Canaan has been corroded by economic downturn and opiates; it's pervaded by a sense
of disillusionment shared by the four, whose rudderless adult lives pale alongside the blinding lights of their
adolescence. Over the course of one night--interlaced with high school flashbacks--the four settle old scores
and uncover some of the town's nefarious secrets. There's Bill Ashcraft, who drives into town to deliver a
package to a familiar recipient; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate who's sucked into the mystery of her
former lover's disappearance; veteran Dan Eaton, who returns from Afghanistan with a prosthetic eyeball
and emotional wounds; and Tina Ross, who confronts a violent part of her past. As the night progresses, the
long-buried truth behind a horrifying town legend takes shape, offering a window into the raw forces that
shape the town and its residents. Markley's novel is alternately disturbing and gorgeous, providing a broad
view of the anxieties of a post-9/H Middle America and the complexities of the humans who navigate them.
Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ohio." Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2018, p. 40. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542967283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b7c4e58.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542967283

"Markley, Stephen: OHIO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008929/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "Ohio." Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2018, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542967283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/08/24/ohio-stephen-markley-review/
  Word count: 881

  REVIEWS
  ‘Ohio’ Depicts an Unforgiving Life-after-War in the Midwest
  On Stephen Markley's "knockout" debut novel.

  BY MEREDITH BOE
  AUGUST 24, 2018
  COMMENTS 0
  In the wake of the 2008 recession and on-going wars overseas, the United States saw manufacturer closings and foreclosures and the growth of a new population of PTSD sufferers, anti-Muslim xenophobes, and next-generation revolutionaries.

  This new America is crystallized in New Canaan, Ohio, a small town constructed by Stephen Markley in his knockout debut, Ohio. At a time when “vultures…circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns,” a group of high schoolers wrestle with family burdens and internal monsters while living a seemingly normal teenage existence full of drunken parties, dysfunctional relationships, Total Request Live after school, and guilt-ridden Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings.

  While these young lives are still being developed, the aftermath of September 11 starts to faintly thunder in the distance, a sound that intensifies as these kids age into their twenties and head to war, come out of the closet, overdose on heroin, or try to make something of themselves.

  The novel begins with a funeral parade for one of them lost overseas in Iraq after high school—Rick Brinklan, the charming, dependable churchgoer, the “kind of guy you’d find teeming across the country’s swollen midsection: toggling Budweiser, Camels, and dip…calloused hands, one finger bent at an odd angle from a break that never healed right.”

  The kind of guy, anyway, who ends up dying for his country after being rejected by his high school sweetheart, Kaylyn—one of the former popular girls full of secrets and anguish. Though Kaylyn makes the funeral, incredibly high and sitting next to Rick’s grieving parents, there are a few old friends missing from the procession.

  Bill Ashcraft is a former friend of Rick’s and an alcoholic who was always sickened with rage at the military as a fall back. Once-innocent Stacey Moore has come out to her Christian family, and her former best friend Tina Ross still struggles with a lethal high school denial. The shrimpy redhead veteran Dan Eaton exhibits inklings of PTSD as he meets up with an old love.

  We meet this cast of missing characters when they happen to visit their home town on the same night ten years after graduation, six after the funeral, unplanned and unsure they even want to see each other. The shifting narrators throughout the book serve the whirlwind that Markley has created. It’s fully engrossing from the start, save moments when you’re taken aback by how good the writing really is, how flawless the storytelling.

  The high school flashbacks shine. Putting on Maybelline mascara in the bathroom before a school dance; lying to parents to stay out late with a crush; admiring the football team on a Friday night for their animal strength; being humiliated by someone popular at school; and realizing, finally, that the mixed, complex feelings for childhood friends never quite go away.

  And these lives continue on, unsteadily handling death, murder, substance abuse, money trouble, sickness, and most of all the mystery of memory.

  Who can blame them for wanting to disappear?

  “There was bitterness at murder, grief at accidents, and fury at suicide. But to disappear—well, there was only mystery. And mystery was all three of those things bundled together and made more frightening by the impossibility of it.”

  We see it’s no wonder betrayals are as common and as brutal as the active combat Dan still craves. And unimaginable secrets are buried with the dead.

  The book’s title state remains an unsettling backdrop, though the small-town story is the same nationwide. Characterized by its forgotten industry and growing accidental death rate, Markley’s Ohio is exactly the kind of place you hear about in the news. The state still has one of the highest opioid-related mortality rates in the nation. Families are strung out across the struggling towns with scrap metal junkyards on their overgrown lawns and Republican candidate signs from years back blowing in an unforgiving wind. The “cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit.”

  If only we could bury ourselves in those first moments of untouched pre-adulthood. Bill, a cynical activist at twenty-eight, still carries around a photograph of his friends in high school.

  He thinks, “you could look at anyone’s high school homecoming picture from any middling town or suburb in America, and they all looked like stock photos, the image that came with the frame, identical teenagers doing identical teenage shit and hoping it wouldn’t end because what lay beyond was too unknown.”

  Ohio is a ceaselessly beautiful and gut-wrenching debut.

  9781501174476_97e19

  FICTION
  Ohio
  By Stephen Markley
  Simon & Schuster
  Published August 21, 2018

  Stephen Markley is the author of three books: Ohio, Publish This Book, and Tales of Iceland. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and his essays and short fiction can be found scattered across the internet. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/08/28/639597285/ohio-is-a-wild-angry-devastating-debut
  Word count: 954

  QUOTE:
  Written with a real love for its characters, Ohio isn't just a remarkable debut novel, it's a wild, angry and devastating masterpiece of a book.

  BOOK REVIEWS
  'Ohio' Is A Wild, Angry, Devastating Debut
  August 28, 20188:53 AM ET
  MICHAEL SCHAUB

  Ohio
  Ohio
  by Stephen Markley

  Hardcover, 484 pages purchase

  Ohio, the debut novel from author Stephen Markley, begins with a parade, but it's not a happy one. The town of New Canaan has gathered to salute Rick Brinklan, a native of the city who was killed in action in Iraq. The novel then jumps in time to 2013, six years after that parade: "It's hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear," Markley writes. "There is only this wild ... flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died."

  Ohio, though, is more of a nightmare than a dream. Markley's debut is a sprawling, beautiful novel that explores the aftermath of the Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a powerful look at the tenuous bonds that hold people together at their best and at their worst.

  Markley follows four characters, all of whom knew one another as high school students in the fictional city of New Canaan. The first is Bill Ashcraft, who returns to his hometown on a mysterious errand; he's agreed to deliver a package from Louisiana to Ohio, although he doesn't know what it contains. While in town, he happens upon some old classmates, with whom he feels a particular affinity: "Once handsome, marbled, small-town athletes who couldn't understand why they hadn't conquered the world." Bill was an always an odd fit in his high school: a popular jock who embraced left-wing politics with a fervor that annoyed his friends.

  The second character is Stacey Moore, a graduate student who's come to New Canaan to meet with the mother of her ex-lover, a mercurial student named Lisa Han, who's been out of contact with her friends for years. Stacey isn't thrilled to come back to her hometown; it reminds her of her youthful awkwardness: "That's how teenagedness works: everyone lives in a bubble of their own terrifying insecurities oblivious to the possibility that so does everyone else."

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  Markley then turns to Dan Eaton, a soldier who lost an eye in Iraq, who comes back to visit his parents and his ex-girlfriend. Dan was always on the edge of the in-crowd in high school, brainy but athletic, and he has mixed feelings about running into his old friends. He complains to one about "how this town sucks you in. Keeps you doped on its own mythology."

  Finally, there's Tina Ross, whose life has been marked by tragedy. She was abused by her high school boyfriend, a cruel linebacker named Todd Beaufort; after years of struggling with an eating disorder and self-mutilation, she's come back to town to confront him. She knows she's not the only one of her cohort haunted by old ghosts, unable to explain to her current boyfriend "the sadness somehow born in their high school days that could reach out and touch any of them at random."

  The four acquaintances all return to New Canaan on the same night, but for very different reasons, and none of their homecomings go exactly as planned. The novel ends with a terrifying act of violence, the culmination of a set of lives that have been destroyed by abuse, drug addiction, hatred, war and poverty.

  It may sound like an odd thing to say for a book that's so unflinching in its look at violence, but Markley's novel is, in the end, about love.

  Markley intersperses the stories of the four Ohioans with flashbacks to high school, and his portrayals are horrifyingly accurate. He does a perfect job examining the casual cruelties teenagers inflict on one another, and how those cruelties never really end, but perpetuate themselves well into adulthood.

  There's a lot going on in Ohio — a sprawling cast of main and supporting characters, and a series of interconnected events that doesn't come together until the book's shocking conclusion. But Markley handles it beautifully; the novel is intricately constructed, with gorgeous, fiery writing that pulls the reader in and never lets go. It's obvious that Markley cares deeply about his characters, even the unsympathetic ones — he treats them with respect, never writing condescendingly about these people whose lives have been battered and bruised by circumstances they don't quite understand.

  It may sound like an odd thing to say for a book that's so unflinching in its look at violence, but Markley's novel is, in the end, about love — how it can unite and divide, sustain and destroy. "Love was what God gave you to make you both unbearably strong and intolerably weak," he writes. "Love was the ghost of yourself, a mirror image you saw in a crowd — different life, different ideals, different map of the world — but somehow still you." Written with a real love for its characters, Ohio isn't just a remarkable debut novel, it's a wild, angry and devastating masterpiece of a book.

• Seattle Times
  https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/ohio-this-look-at-life-after-9-11-is-not-for-the-squeamish/
  Word count: 688

  BooksEntertainment
  ‘Ohio’: This look at life after 9/11 is not for the squeamish
  Originally published August 24, 2018 at 6:00 am

  Welcome to Middle America. Stephen Markley's debut novel is about what happened after 9/11, the initial euphoria and the long depression that grips us still.

  Share story
  By Jeff Baker
  Special to The Seattle Times
  Book review
  Stephen Markley’s debut novel, “Ohio,” opens with a small-town parade for a local hero, Rick Brinklan, a high-school football star who enlisted after 9/11 and was killed in Iraq in 2007. The coffin is on loan from Walmart and the flag blows away and gets stuck in the branches of an oak tree. One of Rick’s friends looks at downtown New Canaan and sees “a magazine after it’s tossed on a fire, the way the pages blacken and curl as they begin to burn but just before the flames take over.”

  Welcome to Middle America. It’s tough out here.

  Six years later, when Markley picks up the story, life is much worse. “… New Canaan looked like the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst,” he writes. “… Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns — Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron — peddling home equity loans and refinancing. … A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. … Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit.”

  The people aren’t doing any better. Most of “Ohio” takes place on a single night, six years after Brinklan’s funeral, when four of his friends come back to New Canaan for different reasons. Bill Ashcraft was Brinklan’s childhood buddy who opposed the war Brinklan embraced and fell into a disillusioned drug haze. Stacey Moore is looking for the love that defined her. Dan Eaton’s done three tours in Iraq and is trying to connect with his lost love. Tina Ross confronts her first boyfriend in a twisted turn of events that ties it all together, emphasis on “twisted.”

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  “Ohio” is not for the squeamish. Opioids (and every other drug), gang rape, torture, murder, suicide, domestic terrorism, wartime atrocities — it’s all there, described in feverish prose that reaches for the stars and sometimes lands on the pavement. Markley works himself into a sweat trying to put an LSD-plus-crystal-meth experience into words and comes up with this: “The digits webbed, and the gnarled face grew stranger still as huge worms came writhing from the orifices and fell to earth in wet clumps.”

  For every misfire, there are a dozen triumphs, large and small. The characters walk and talk like real, messed-up people; the author cares about them, and so does the reader. The prologue-four sections-coda structure works because Markley took the time to connect everything in a masterful set of flashbacks and flash-forwards that parcel out enough information to make the conclusion both shocking and inevitable. “Ohio” is a big novel about what happened after 9/11, the initial euphoria and the long depression that grips us still.

  _____

  “Ohio” by Stephen Markley, Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $27

  Jeff Baker

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22978-stephen-markley-ohio
  Word count: 490

  QUOTE:
  those who have the temerity to let Ohio absorb them will be rewarded with an edifying and unforgettable read that leaves them breathless.

  BOOK REVIEWS

  Ohio
  Stephen Markley
  BookPage review by Stephenie Harrison

  Web Exclusive – August 21, 2018

  From its opening pages, in which an empty casket is paraded through the streets of a small town in Ohio so that its townspeople may pay tribute to one of their golden boys who has died fighting overseas, debut novelist Stephen Markley makes his intentions clear: Ohio is a eulogy to middle America and its flyover states. It is a battle cry for the forgotten pockets of the country and the tired, poor and dispossessed whose voices we do not care to hear.

  Bookended by death and spanning nearly 500 pages, Ohio interweaves the stories of four former classmates, all of whom have left New Canaan, Ohio, only to return home on the same fateful night. We meet Bill Ashcroft, an outspoken activist who has come to deliver a dubious package that is strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a grad student whose love life has plagued her since her school days, who has returned to make peace with the mother of an old flame; Dan Eaton, a history-loving bookworm-turned-veteran who lost his eye in the war and is back for dinner with his high school sweetheart; and Tina Ross, former town beauty who now lives one town over, works at Walmart and needs to get over her football star ex-boyfriend once and for all. Each character returns haunted by the ghosts of New Canaan’s past, unaware of how their past and present actions will converge with destructive and terrifying consequences.

  Timely and of vital importance, Ohio delves into the spectrum of issues consuming contemporary America’s Rust Belt, exploring topics like joblessness, addiction, terrorism, sexuality, religion and sex, to name a few. Markley’s disturbing masterpiece reads like the offspring of Harlan Coben, Jonathan Franzen and Hanya Yanagihara: an illuminating snapshot of our current era masquerading as a twisted character-driven thriller, filled with mordant wit and soul-shaking pathos. The picture Ohio paints is bleak, brutal and unrelenting, and while moments of wry humor exist, they are but pinpricks of light in an otherwise extremely dark novel. At times the graphic violence and ceaseless despair depicted seem so gratuitous that categorizing the book as “misery porn” feels like a justified warning. However, Markley purposely provokes his readers, challenging us to confront and ponder topics and people that make us uncomfortable. His method will undoubtedly prove divisive, but those who have the temerity to let Ohio absorb them will be rewarded with an edifying and unforgettable read that leaves them breathless.

  Medium
  Ohio
  By Stephen Markley

  Simon & Schuster
  $27.00
  ISBN 9781501174476
  Published 08/21/2018

  Fiction / Debut Fiction

• Salon
  https://www.salon.com/2018/08/25/stephen-markleys-ohio-this-years-hillbilly-elegy-of-fiction/
  Word count: 1871

  "Ohio" by Stephen Markley (Simon & Schuster)
  Stephen Markley’s “Ohio”: This year’s “Hillbilly Elegy” of fiction
  Markley’s aim and effort with “Ohio” is important and ambitious, but contempt and condescension ruin it

  follow us in feedly
  DAVID MASCIOTRA
  AUGUST 25, 2018 3:00PM (UTC)
  The American publishing industry appears to believe that placing the words “in the age of Trump” in as many book subtitles as possible will make everyone rich. The shrinking percentage of serious readers can learn about the Republican Party in the age of Trump, journalism in the age of Trump, social media in the age of Trump and even, “truth” in the age of Trump. As obesity rates continue to climb, one can eagerly await the eventual release of “low carbohydrate dieting in the age of Trump.”

  “Ohio,” the debut novel by Stephen Markley, might as well have a picture of Trump’s gruesome face on the cover. Set in a blown out, working class town in Ohio – the fictional New Canaan – it is the literary version of the countless and redundant reports that major newspapers competed to run in the months subsequent to Trump’s presidential victory. New Canaan was once a thriving community of middle class stability, familial bonds and neighborhood solidarity, but as its manufacturing base crumbled, with company after company moving operations overseas or automating production, so too did the small town’s quality of life perish. Its beleaguered inhabitants are now universally miserable. They are diabetic, nicotine addicted, and enraged over their empty pockets and the burial of their loved ones who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  “Ohio’s” story develops over the course of one summer night in 2013, with plenty of flashbacks to happier days, and it is likely that Markley began writing it before November of 2016. It seemingly aspires to become a fictional analog to J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” — a big book that can explain “what the fuck happened to this country,” to borrow words from the blurb that Charles Bock provides.

  Click for Sound
  The similarities of the two books converge at points beyond intention and promotional angle but also in a thinly — or, in Markley’s case, barely — concealed contempt for their subjects. It is a massive failure of both writers that their books, while aiming to incite outrage over the conditions of poor rural people, would only inspire indifference from any reasonable reader. “These people deserve what they get,” is the wrong but natural reaction to “Hillbilly Elegy” as Vance accuses his former friends and neighbors of “spending their way into he poorhouse” and refusing to adapt to modernity. Since New Canaan and its characters are fictional, the response is even harsher. By the book’s conclusion, I would not have cared if the entire town blew up.

  “Ohio,” unlike “Hillbilly Elegy,” reaches to the grand heights of literary art, meaning that the criteria for its judgment will differ from that which readers can use to evaluate a work of political commentary and social criticism. First and foremost, does “Ohio” work as a story?

  The novel is divided into four sections, each featuring one of the four major characters as a narrator. It keeps a pleasant pace and makes for breezy reading, even if the length, given that all the characters are unlikeable, becomes cumbersome at nearly 500 pages.

  Markley first introduces readers to Bill, a left-wing antiwar and anti-capitalist activist whose vulgarity and inhumanity make him seem like he emerged out of the imagination of Sean Hannity rather than that of a novelist attempting to provide a complex delineation of political argument in provincial America.

  Bill is a drug-addled loser — an unkind word that actually applies in this case since Bill essentially boasts about his refusal to do anything productive. He also refuses to attend the funeral of his boyhood friend who died wearing the Army uniform in Iraq. When people challenge Bill on his heartless obstinance, he rambles borderline incoherent, dorm room bromides about how the memorial is actually a “celebration of imperialism.” Bill’s language is bizarrely and bemusedly contradictory. For most of his episode, he speaks in an endless stream of obscenities but will occasionally drop a chestnut phrase like “Liberals are the Harvard grads interested in diversifying the plutocracy.”

  These attempts at political profundity fall flat, and while one should never read a novel through a lens of priggishness, the constancy of crude jokes, scatological references and “shock jock” banter undermines the seriousness of the subject matter. Many men in small, Midwest towns are vulgar, but they are not cartoons out of Mike Judge’s sketch pad. The lack of nuance and subtlety becomes a burden that “Ohio” cannot bear. It becomes backbreakingly onerous in Bill’s episode and never relents.

  Political evaluations of art are typically calculated in error, but one also has to wonder why Markley, whose politics are firmly on the left, chose to make the only leftist in the book so utterly reprehensible. The good news, as far as politics goes, is that Markley is a misanthropic equal offender. With possibly one exception, no one’s humanity survives the merciless “Ohio” depiction.

  The dead veteran is a mindless, gung-ho patriot. Tina, a Walmart employee who suffered sexual assault as a teenager, has taken a predictably vigilante turn, revealing a transformation from victim to offender; innocent to psychotic deviant. Even the minor characters in the book — friends of the narrators, parents, a drug dealer who spends time with Bill — are empty of any redeeming qualities. The closest thing to an exception is Stacey Moore, a doctoral student who is desperate to reunite with a female lover she had a clandestine affair with in her amorous teenage years.

  There is a one short passage in Stacey’s section in which she enjoys a chance encounter with Mr. Clifton, a kind and dedicated high school teacher. They sit down for drinks in a bar, enjoy each others’ company, and discuss the differences separating their lives when she was his student, and now — separating New Canaan, then and now. It demonstrates that there are people in small towns worthy of sympathy and that not every New Canaan — whether in Ohio or Indiana, the state where I live — is a monolith of crudity, bitterness, failure and hatred. The worst and best people I’ve ever known are from the small town where I grew up. Most Americans would probably make a similar declaration, whether they claim New York or Mayberry as hometown. Markley never provides readers with this variety, however, except for the one brief interlude with Stacey and her former teacher.

  In a flash, the moment of relief ends, and we are instantly transported back into hell with a passage about a successful musician who arose out of New Canaan to stardom only to die of an overdose, and memories of Stacey’s peers telling her that she will receive an eternal sentence of damnation for her homosexuality.

  Small towns in the Midwest, as I have written several articles recalling and explaining, are regularly guilty of racism, homophobia and the particularly fatal strain of ignorance that spreads in a closed mind. (Major cities, as anyone with even a modicum of historical knowledge is aware, are not altogether different. America’s current president, a native of New York City, is a good example.)

  The persecution complex that the white working class often adopts, along with its joyous zeal in violating the boundaries of civility in the name of “political incorrectness,” is particularly loathsome. Towns like the one where I live, and the real life New Canaans, are also full of wonderful people — people who struggle to establish lives of decency and dignity while raising their children and trying to demonstrate kindness and generosity to their neighbors.

  A novelist does not have the obligation to accurately portray all of the complexities and contradictions of any particular community, but a novel that purports to “explain what happened” to America does have a need to give a humanely rich and varied perspective of people and their lives.

  During an interview about “Ohio,” Stephen Markley claims as partial inspiration the Bruce Springsteen masterpiece, “Darkness On the Edge of Town.” The attempt at a Springsteen kinship is made even more obvious by the name Markley gives one of his characters, Dan Eaton, the same name as a character in the Springsteen song “Youngstown.” He might want to listen more closely to those records because Springsteen, while never a delusional optimist or a naïve idealist, is, in the words of Desmond Tutu, a “prisoner of hope.”

  Nowhere in “Ohio” is there the defiance and pride of “Badlands” or the aggression and rebellion of “Prove It All Night” or the combative faith of “The Promised Land” or even the sad search for redemption in “Racing in the Street.”

  It is likely that many novels and films will follow the “Ohio” formula as Americans scramble to dissect Trump’s frightening rise to power and decipher the decline of the United States. They will all remain small and small-minded — nothing more than fictionalized and cinematic versions of "Hillbilly Elegy" — if their creators do not have the courage to risk what John Irving called “the slur of sentimentality.”

  In his assessment of Charles Dickens, Irving wrote, “It seems that what we applaud in Dickens--his kindness, his generosity, his belief in our dignity — is also what we condemn him for (under another name) in the off-Christmas season. The other name is sentimentality — and, to the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But as a writer it is cowardly to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether.”

  Irving concluded with what amounts to a brutal warning, “When we writers — in our own work — escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters.”

  Art that can only ridicule, condemn and accuse but that can never affirm the human spirit, will not matter.

  Markley’s aim and effort with “Ohio” is important and ambitious. He clearly aspires to depict the cruelty that is abundant, and often dominant, in American life. The failure of humanism to ever take root in American politics has created a country where families must choose between medicine or bankruptcy, mass shootings are a national routine and many states annually construct more prisons than schools.

  The novel self-destructs, despite its good intentions, because by showing nothing but contempt and condescension toward its characters, and toward New Canaan and the countless towns it represents, it becomes what it despises: Just another exercise of American cruelty.

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  DAVID MASCIOTRA
  David Masciotra is the author of four books, including "Mellencamp: American Troubadour" (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) and "Barack Obama: Invisible Man" (Eyewear Publishing, 2017).

  MORE FROM DAVID MASCIOTRA

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/books/review/stephen-markley-ohio.html
  Word count: 960

  QUOTE:
  The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives. It’s the human scale that most descriptively reveals the truth about the world we’re living in.

  FICTION

  ‘Ohio’ as the Locus of 21st-Century Rust Belt Despair
  Image
  Stephen Markley
  CreditCreditMichael Amico
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  By Dan Chaon
  Sept. 27, 2018

  OHIO
  By Stephen Markley
  484 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27

  Graduates’ young heads are full of anticipation: What will we become? How will our friends turn out? Will we be the voice of our generation? It may be that our imaginations burn brightest at these gateway junctures, latching onto ideas about ourselves that prove difficult to ever let loose.

  So, naturally, a class reunion is an irresistibly juicy narrative device for writers. The trope can take many forms, whether set at an actual alumni gathering, as in Mary Higgins Clark’s “Nighttime Is My Time”; or applied more loosely, as in Hanya Yanagihara’s ensemble bildungsroman “A Little Life.” Still, the cruel pleasures are the same: We get to see how those teenage hopes have played out in adulthood.

  For the characters in Stephen Markley’s first novel, “Ohio,” the future has not exactly gone according to plan. Set in the imaginary Ohio town of New Canaan — which serves as a microcosm for all that has gone wrong with Middle America this century — the story focuses on 10 members of the high school class of 2003 whose youthful friendships and various romantic entanglements still haunt them a decade later. Once they were the popular kids, celebrities of their small-town Rust Belt universe, but time has not been kind to them as they close in on their 30s, and in fact a few of them haven’t survived to see 29.

  Image
  The book begins with the funeral of a former football hero and soldier killed in Iraq. Shortly thereafter, another in the group dies of a drug overdose in Los Angeles, and the remaining eight either drift apart or lose touch altogether. But one night in the summer of 2013 the surviving members of the clique come together again, by sheer coincidence, back in New Canaan. The crew satisfies all the American High School Archetypes we know so well: the boorish football jock, the conniving mean girl, the smarmy prepster, the Christian athlete who discovers she might be gay, the opinionated jackass, the innocent, puzzled beauty. But they are never simply stereotypes.

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  The majority of the novel takes place over a single period of roughly 12 hours wherein secrets are revealed, betrayals unveiled, terrible choices made, regrets experienced. This sounds cornier than it is. Their convergence is a contrivance, but it allows Markley to do some enormously clever things with the structure of the book, essentially composed of four novellas, each focusing on a different character with his or her own purpose for returning home. The reader witnesses the same night from distinct, and often conflicting, perspectives, which creates a beautifully layered, “Rashomon”-like effect in which threads left dangling at the end of one section are picked up in the next, and casual details suddenly take on new, surprising significance. There’s a real pleasure in this hopscotching narrative: With each new point of view, a clearer sense of the hidden story emerges as the reader slowly pieces together some shocking revelations.

  But Markley clearly has more on his mind than a tightly wound plot. This book wears its significance on its sleeve, showering its characters in hot-button issues of the past dozen years, including opiate addiction, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamophobia, fracking, the Occupy movement, alt-right militias, self-harm, sexual exploitation and politicized rage. The novel churns with such ambitious social statements and insights that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid. Nearly every character delivers a speech that wouldn’t feel out of place on “Rachel Maddow” or “Tucker Carlson,” and occasionally an omniscient narrator interrupts to explain the broader implications of, for example, the 2008 housing crisis. “Bill had never actually met a person to whom he did not enjoy ranting,” one character observes, astutely.

  “Ohio” would have been a better novel with less of this explication. The most moving parts of the book are those that step back and let the events and the actions speak for themselves, as when one character (the shy, bookish one from high school) recalls his three tours in Afghanistan. The beautifully precise details are all the more vivid for their lack of accompanying commentary.

  The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives. It’s the human scale that most descriptively reveals the truth about the world we’re living in.

  EDITORS’ PICKS

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  Dan Chaon is the author, most recently, of “Ill Will.”

  A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 29, 2018, on Page 19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Rust Belt Despair. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• Shelf Awareness
  https://www.shelf-awareness.com/max-issue.html?issue=290#m619
  Word count: 886

  Ohio
  by Stephen Markley
  It began with the economic devastation of cities and towns in America's Rust Belt, and the housing crisis that sparked the Great Recession of 2007-09. It accelerated when the news of thousands of deaths annually from drug overdoses, many of them in the country's small towns and rural areas, started making headlines. And it culminated in the political tsunami of 2016, when voters in many of those same communities tipped the electoral balance in Donald Trump's favor in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and sent him to the White House.

  Nonfiction writers and memoirists like George Packer (The Great Unwinding) and J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) have captured the roiling sense of unease and dislocation that has gripped the United States in the first two decades of the 21st century. It was inevitable that an ambitious novelist eventually would take on that task. In his bold debut novel, Ohio, Stephen Markley visits the fictional northeastern Ohio town of New Canaan to paint in vivid colors the shattered dreams and stunted lives of young adults removed by roughly a decade from their high school graduation. It's an intensely realistic and keenly observed portrait that puts a human face on subjects often obscured by statistics and expert opinion.

  Structured as four novella-length sections and a brief, shocking coda, the contemporary action of the novel unfolds over the course of a single night in the summer of 2013. On that evening, four people--three of them members of the Class of 2004 and one two years their junior--return to New Canaan, "the microcosm poster child of middle-American angst," to deal with some painful or difficult piece of unfinished business.

  Bill Ashcraft, a bitter critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose political activism has foundered as a result of an intemperate tweet, is carrying a mysterious package from New Orleans to earn $2,000. Stacey Moore, a graduate student in literature, comes home for an encounter with the mother of her high school lover Lisa Han, missing since graduation, and to deliver a letter to her estranged brother. Dan Eaton, a veteran of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan who has lost an eye in combat, returns to visit a former girlfriend. And Tina Ross, who's never made it farther away than the nearby town where she works at Walmart, is back to avenge a terrible wrong inflicted on her.

  Markley slips effortlessly from each character's crisis on that single night into reminiscences of their high school days. But these are anything but the happy recollections of idyllic prom dates or joyful autumn nights at the football stadium. There are darker memories unleashed here, ones that include rape and a suspected murder.

  All of those memories have been shadowed by the specter of 9/11 and the economic decline that seems to have slowed the characters' progress into adulthood. "Their generation, the classes of the first five years of the infant millennium," as Markley sums them up, "were all stepping through life with a piano suspended above them and bull's-eyes on the crowns of their skulls."

  Dan Eaton, for one, who's been emotionally and physically devastated by his service in the wars of the Middle East--his anguish revealed in vividly rendered scenes--comes to question the point of that service as he reflects on the death of Rick Brinklan. Rick is one of several losses from the high school football team (the death of the quarterback by overdose among them), whose star, Todd Beaufort, loses his grip on dreams of fame at Ohio State and an NFL career.

  And though it's been spared the worst of the damage of industry fleeing for places where cheap labor is readily available, their home town, New Canaan, seems as if it's treading water. Like some of its real-life counterparts, the town, "one of the minor places that bore the aftershocks of deindustrialization," reflects the telltale signs of decay. The steel plant, an "ugly industrial boil" that closed in the 1980s, has been left standing by a town "hoping that someday whatever mechanized processes lay inside would simply start back up of their own accord."

  But for all his evident desire to make a big statement about America's current troubled temperament, Markley doesn't neglect the intimate dimension of his characters' inner lives. In the most emotionally resonant section of the novel, for example, he describes the love between Stacey Moore and Lisa Han, an affair whose intensity is equal to the risk these high school girls take that their relationship will be exposed. It's a profoundly empathetic and moving portion of the novel. And in the novel's concluding scene, when Bill Ashcraft confesses to Stacey, "You have no idea how much I miss all of them. How sorry I am for everything," we've come to share his sense of regret.

  Ohio is a dark and deeply felt examination of a generation confronting problems that can't be solved quickly or with ease. It won't be the last novel written about the current troubles in small-town America, but it has earned a place in any conversation about the important role fiction can play in reflecting life back to us when we look squarely in the mirror. --Harvey Freedenberg

• The Daily Californian
  http://www.dailycal.org/2018/08/27/stephen-markley-ohio/
  Word count: 809

  LITERATUREMONDAY, AUGUST 27, 2018
  Stephen Markley’s ‘Ohio’ grimly examines horrors of reality
  Frances Yang / StaffFRANCES YANG/STAFF
  Frances Yang / Staff
  BY DANIELLE HILBORN | STAFFLAST UPDATED AUGUST 27, 2018

  Comment
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  Grade: 4.0/5.0

  Stephen Markley’s debut novel “Ohio” is an unforgiving portrayal of post-9/11 life in a small Midwestern town. Horrific in a way that is only possible when grounded in reality, Markley’s novel explores the cruelties that have been inflicted by and on each of the characters.

  In the acknowledgements, Markley writes of that particular feeling of wanting a version of yourself that no longer exists — a feeling that is remarkably similar to grief. The characters of “Ohio” are haunted by this wanting, unable to escape its effects. One fateful night in 2013, the four main characters return to their hometown of New Canaan, their nights crossing over one another even as each person is profoundly alone in their experiences.

  Bill, Stacey, Dan and Tina are all running from their own ghosts. But as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more clear that these individual lives have been entangled long after they each left New Canaan in hopes of escaping their fate and remain enmeshed even as they return to it.

  “Ohio” is gripping; it is hard to look away from even as there are moments that are difficult to stomach. In the past few years, middle America has been a central topic of discussion, with some people crediting Donald Trump’s election to the undetected anger that thrummed throughout these “flyover states.” The novel understands this anger in all of its myriad ways. We see characters who do horrible, unspeakable things only to learn that they faced similar abuse. “Ohio” is an understanding of the human condition, but not an excusing of it.

  The novel is split into four sections, with two additional sections serving as a prologue and an epilogue. This structure is masterfully wielded to create an interlocking story in which each individual account both corroborates and conflicts with the others. In doing so, Markley is effectively calling attention to the way memory is a subjective thing. Everyone remembers the past, especially their own, slightly different than anyone else would. And because of the way each character’s story is told, taking place over the same night with liberally distributed and lengthy flashbacks to the characters’ lives over the past decade, the unknowability of an individual life is explored. Bill sees a woman crying at a red light, Stacey sees someone getting into a car — these moments are brief for them but earth-shattering for the characters involved in those moments. Meanwhile, mysteries in one account are answered by another account. Each individual account reveals that whole tragedies and life-changing realizations were occuring for the other characters in these brief moments that they saw one another.

  Everyone is looking for answers that they think no one has, when in reality there are no secrets, no mysteries in New Canaan. It is just a question of who knows what.

  New Canaan is aptly named, calling to mind the Biblical Canaan, who was cursed by Noah for the sins of his father, Ham. Throughout the novel, each character returns to the questions of the New Canaan curse. They note the number of their friends who died of drugs or in war. These events have led this group of people — the four characters as well as the vast collection of other individuals, dead or alive, who were all finishing high school in 2001 and 2002 — to believe that the lot of them are cursed. As each of these kids turned 18 they were met with 9/11, the 2008 recession and the opioid crisis. There is a weight of hopelessness.

  Markley writes of wanting some part of yourself back, wanting to return to a time of life that made more sense. But if anything, the more “Ohio” unfolds, the more it becomes apparent that perhaps you never had it, and that part of your life never existed to begin with.

  “Ohio” is certainly not the first story to tackle the complex experience of growing up in a small town, chafing to leave while slowly realizing that leaving a place does not mean it leaves you. However, the novel stands out in the way it manages to accurately, realistically contain so many different experiences. The ghosts of “Ohio” will linger long after the last page is read.

  Contact Danielle Hilborn at dhilborn@dailycal.org.

• Seattle Pi
  https://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Book-Review-Publish-This-Book-The-Unbelievable-1000456.php
  Word count: 649

  QUOTE:
  funny and overall skilled style of writing that draws you in
  The book is definitely humour-based for the most part, but there is an absolutely heartbreaking and wonderfully well written description of his relationship with his first real love.
  This is a book I would recommend for all aspiring writers, as it will ring true with a lot of them.
  Book Review: Publish This Book: The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold and Published This Very Book by Stephen Markley
  By SCOTTY2, BLOGCRITICS.ORG Updated 4:31 pm PDT, Tuesday, April 26, 2011

  The concept for the first book of Chicago-based freelance writer Stephen Markley is an interesting one: the story of how he wrote and sold the book that this review is about (and is billed as "A Premature Memoir," which I thought was a great way to put it). By definition, there is no suspense -- since you're reading the thing. He acknowledges this several times.

  However, he makes up for that by possessing a funny and overall skilled style of writing that draws you in regardless. This is improved (in my view) by the immense quantity of footnotes that he uses to add humorous asides or tell anecdotes relating to the subject at hand.

  globe

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  It helps that I enjoy the general style he uses and the voice he speaks with through his writing, and I have to admit that this probably won't be enjoyed by anybody who doesn't like lewd and somewhat strange stories. Or indeed, the copious amounts of footnotes. There are 214 footnotes, all told -- which works out to about one every two pages (the book is about 470 pages long).

  The book is definitely humour-based for the most part, but there is an absolutely heartbreaking and wonderfully well written description of his relationship with his first real love. Throughout the book he says that he doesn't really have a hook to grab people with (being white, middle class and had a normal childhood) in the way that other authors have stories of abusive childhoods to draw people in, but in my opinion that part had the makings of a successful book right there.

  I have to say that some parts of the book didn't quite agree with me, such as the bits where he tries out new literary ideas that haven't been done before. One of these ideas was to put the bulk of the chapter in footnote form while leaving one or two sections at the top of the page for normal text, while another was to not capitalise the first letter of a new paragraph. This served to be extremely distracting. There's a reason these things haven't been done before.

  One idea that did work though was filling the breaks between paragraphs with his samples of rejections from satirical newspaper The Onion. Highlights include "Weather Saves Man From Awkward Racial Tension," "Osama Bin Laden To Join Cast Of Hit Fox Show 24" and "Area Woman Thinks Of Perfect Onion Headline." Another idea that worked was writing about a conversation with his friend while rewriting the location of the conversation to places like space stations orbiting black holes or on the edge of a volcano.

  As you may be able to tell, I liked the book a lot. I feel that Markley really should've been published before as a novelist. His main appeal would be as a humour novelist rather than the serious novelist he intends to be (which, again, he addresses in the book). This is a book I would recommend for all aspiring writers, as it will ring true with a lot of them.

  View the original article on blogcritics.org

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781402229350
  Word count: 257

  QUOTE:
  there are compelling, emotionally resonant passages, too

  Publish This Book: The (Incredible, Unforgettable, Hilarious, Heartwrenching, Unbelieveable, and) Completely (Mostly) True Story of How I Wrote, Got Published, and (Hopefully) Sold a Memoir About Nothing
  Stephen Markley, Author Sourcebooks $24.99 (480p) ISBN 978-1-4022-2935-0

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  It doesn’t matter what problems you’ve got with Markley’s sprawling, self-referential account of his efforts to sell a book about his efforts to sell the book he’s writing at that very moment—he’s already anticipated your criticisms, from the imperfect echoes of writers like Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman to the preponderance of dick jokes and other forms of frat boy humor. “Of course, on a basic level, the book is a stupid idea,” he admits early on; later, he concedes, “I’ve just been winging it, and it shows.” He might have been better off cutting down some of the more self-indulgent sections, like a minihistory of his tenure as a “political sex columnist” for his college paper or an exploration of the fake memoir phenomenon featuring made-up conversations with Chicago drug dealers and underprivileged high school students. But there are compelling, emotionally resonant passages, too: a reflection on what it’s like to shake loose the influence of a literary mentor, for example, or a best friend’s realization of just how much an unplanned pregnancy has changed his life (Mar.)

  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 01/11/2010
  Release date: 03/01/2010

• Brevity Book Reviews
  http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/bookrev/wittle_publish.html
  Word count: 380

  QUOTE:
  Publish This Book is great for any writer seeking publishing insights. For a mere $14.99, one can read about what it’s like to be a young writer struggling to be published. Markley uses his wit to separate myth from reality. It’s up to you, whether you use his advice or not.

  Review of Stephen Markley’s Publish This Book: The Unbelievable Story of How I Wrote, Sold and Published This Very Book
  Sourcebooks, 2010
  By M.M. Wittle

  The myth: getting a book published is easy. All one has to do is write a book. Then the book signal (think Batman) flashes in the sky and the eyes of the book publishing executives turn towards the heavens. Agents and publishing house executives respond with near hysteria, grabbing their iPhones, wanting to be the first to make the author the first offer.

  The reality: the above scenario would never happen. In Stephen Markley’s premature memoir, Publish This Book, Markley shows how difficult it is not only to publish a book, but to publish a book that is in the process of being written.

  Using his sense of humor and honesty, Markley comes across as an experienced older brother leading the way. He shares steps he's taken to publish this book, along with the conversations and the mistakes made.

  I knew nothing about book proposals until last spring at Rosemont College, when I enrolled in a course called Getting Published. Book proposals weren't a few paragraphs but massive documents filled with research about your book and where it fits into the marketplace. Markley, in creating his own query letter and book proposal, found in chapter eleven, takes a hybrid approach, peppered with his own rookie mistakes.

  Publish This Book is great for any writer seeking publishing insights. For a mere $14.99, one can read about what it’s like to be a young writer struggling to be published. Markley uses his wit to separate myth from reality. It’s up to you, whether you use his advice or not.

  M.M. Wittle is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Rosemont College in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories.

• Iceland Review
  http://icelandreview.com/stuff/reviews/2013/07/26/shire-iceland
  Word count: 1177

  QUOTE:
  Markley is a modern-day explorer who offers a unique and sometimes provocative view of his destination. He is unafraid to speak his mind, perhaps much to the discomfort of some, but also much to the enjoyment of others.

  From boyish nonsense interpretation to heartfelt poesy, Markley’s book is a damn good read
  Maybe it’s the starving traveler in me but I so enjoyed the boyish and romantic (in the literary sense) narrative. Markley’s sense of humor combined with the experience of a mature traveler is an irresistible fusion for both the seasoned traveler and ‘friends of Iceland’

  REVIEWS
  The Shire that is Iceland
  July 26, 2013 15:00Updated: January 30, 2014 19:49
  Review by Júlíana Björnsdóttir.

  tales-of-iceland_coverFact number one: Iceland is a peculiar place with funny place names and people who claim to believe in elves and huldafólk (‘hidden people’).

  All those who know me, either share my passion for travels or are blatantly aware of that passion. They know, either pretending or actually comprehending, my need to travel unbound by routine and roots. It is the nature of the natural born traveler to sniff the air and inhale it for sake of curiosity, taking in the novelty lands under excavation. It’s not about gathering an enormous amount of factual data or researched information but the deeply personal and individual experience.

  The thread tying together all the witty—sometimes crude—remarks and the poetic and picturesque images the author paints with words alone of Icelandic landscape is the curious observer and equally passionate traveler, Stephen Markley.

  Fuelled by passion for his topic, a destination he once upon a time discovered through the audacious but clearly effective words of Quentin Tarantino, he is constantly alert and awake and taking in the sights and the people passing him by and lending a word or two, or giving him an impression of the national character.

  As with all travel books in the first person narrative, the writer and his companions become the protagonists and the story a depiction of personal experiences. In the case of Tales of Iceland or Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight, Stephen Markley is the first person narrator narrating a tale of an exotic journey through Iceland’s rough landscape and giving an account of his relationship with his two friends and companions, Trin and Bojo on the road.

  As a traveler myself, I was immediately drawn by the very first sentence, a question with a semi-answer as to why we choose to travel where we travel and the inspirations behind our pre-selected destinations.

  Iceland, as Markley explains, was one such pre-decided destination. The idea of Iceland came to him from director Quentin Tarantino but as his journey unfolds, it takes on a Markley-ish shape and the superficial “supermodels working in McDonald’s” sentence, is forgotten.

  Like a good thesis, the opening chapter is the mission statement without the academic references, and the final chapter the closing words, the summoning together of the topic.

  From a superficial imagery and vague idea of the country Iceland, Markley’s final words are philosophic at heart and poetic in structure. A thoughtful contemplation that on less than two pages ties together the whole journey and the romantic in him that is overwhelmed by the extraordinary nature Icelanders too often take for granted.

  His own passion for the environment and fear of what may be is contagious, and in particular his concerns for our glaciers and their gradual disappearance with all the environmental catastrophes that may cause.

  His perspective of the Icelandic national character as drawn up in one of Halldór Laxness’ most famous works, Independent People, is perhaps a little more accurate than we are willing to admit ourselves: “The love of freedom and independence has always been a characteristic of the Icelandic people. Iceland was originally colonized by freeborn chieftains who would rather live and die in isolation than serve a foreign king.”

  Icelanders are indeed a tribe of people whose need for independence is fierce. It is perhaps the reason why Icelandic women are among the most liberated in the western world and why liberal views generally thrive in Icelandic society.

  But it’s the pride that is sometimes the downfall of the eagerly independent people, and the need to stand on our own two feet and create a basis for economic prosperity using (in excess at times) our natural resources.

  As an environmentalist myself, it may be my consent of his beliefs and fears for the future of our planet, but as he points out, Icelandic nature has not gone unharmed from mankind’s mistreatment of it.

  Albeit the book is primarily intended for American travelers, it does succeed in interesting Icelanders to explore, either for the first time or once more, places such as Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in all of Europe or the glacial kingdoms many of us are yet to explore despite the great proximity.

  Despite the on-the-surface Kerouacian laddish adventures on the road, it is more than that. As a protagonist, he is not shy to be himself and letting the reader see him for who he is, or how profoundly the journey unites the three friends in unbreakable bonds of friendship.

  The boyish remarks and sometimes inaccurate interpretation of Iceland and Icelanders as locals see their land and themselves may seem slightly obnoxious, but as Markley clearly states in the opening chapter, the book is not a guide to Iceland but “travel-lit with a distinctly Markleayn flare.”

  And that’s precisely what it is.

  Markley is a modern-day explorer who offers a unique and sometimes provocative view of his destination. He is unafraid to speak his mind, perhaps much to the discomfort of some, but also much to the enjoyment of others.

  From boyish nonsense interpretation to heartfelt poesy, Markley’s book is a damn good read in league with J. Marteen Troost’s hilarious but endearing Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu. Like Troost, Markley’s voice is distinctly his.

  Maybe it’s the starving traveler in me but I so enjoyed the boyish and romantic (in the literary sense) narrative. Markley’s sense of humor combined with the experience of a mature traveler is an irresistible fusion for both the seasoned traveler and ‘friends of Iceland’ (people who’ve traveled to Iceland), the Icelander who’s never ever traveled abroad and everyone up for a light-hearted and sometimes hilarious travel tale but also heartwarming appreciation of little Iceland.

  stars35Tales of Iceland or Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight is available on Amazon.

  Júlíana Björnsdóttir – julianabjornsdottir@gmail.com

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/ohio-explains-how-america-got-into-this-dark-mess-of-alienation-and-frustration/2018/08/23/1f9f13a4-a6c6-11e8-a656-943eefab5daf_story.html?utm_term=.7779125e8750
  Word count: 914

  QUOTE:
  bruising novel chronicles a decade in which those in the sinking parts of our nation began looking for anyone to blame and anything to relieve the pain of loss.
  Novels that simultaneously attempt to explicate political history and plumb the human condition are liable to succeed at neither, but Stephen Markley’s exuberant embrace of such risk is laudable in itself. “Ohio” burns with alienation, nihilism, frustration and finally love for a place that gave birth to all of them.

  Ohio’ explains how America got into this dark mess of alienation and frustration
  By Melissa Holbrook Pierson August 23
  This dumbfounding moment in national history brings for many the sensation of being stuck in a political remake of “Groundhog Day,” each morning renewing the same confusion: How did we get to this destructively divided place?

  (Simon & Schuster)
  “Ohio” is Stephen Markley’s answer. A prehistory of now, Markley’s bruising novel chronicles a decade in which those in the sinking parts of our nation began looking for anyone to blame and anything to relieve the pain of loss. “Out here on the edges of the fracturing economy,” he writes, “people muled mysterious packages back and forth across the scorched American landscape.” In the Midwest, everyone’s getting evicted or dying of overdoses. The only people who succeed are cooking up scams or meth.

  Markley nominates 9/11 as the departure for the present and the lightly fictionalized northeast Ohio burg of New Canaan as the emblematic locus of the nation’s crackup. The novel opens in 2007 with a funeral parade (or “jingoistic spectacle,” according to a dissenter) for local football star Rick Brinklan, dispatched from a life of broken promise in Iraq. In truth, every one of this socially representative cast of characters is broken; the only variety is by what. There’s the Great Recession, the flight of manufacturing, the ravages of addiction, sexual violence — the full smorgasbord of American tragedy. As throughout the plot generally, the opening scene is pregnant with symbolism: The hero’s casket is empty. The real funeral occurred months before, and the shiny box is due back at Walmart.

  Four main and several secondary characters appear in flashbacks and flash-forwards from the heady years of high school. Each is shadowed by revelations of their damaged state 10 years on. All return to their hometown bowed under the dead weight of secrets. Naturally, all will eventually collide in a Shattering Conclusion, but that is less interesting than what brings them there.

  Author Stephen Markley (Michael Amico)
  Two left Ohio for the wars that resulted from 9/11: the steadfastly right-wing Brinklan, and Dan Eaton, who in coming home alive might be considered to have fared better than his classmate, but he does have a glass eye and the invisible injuries visited on every warrior made to bear the unbearable. Another left in search of social justice and mind-altering substances. A promising songwriter, whose lyrics form one of several nostalgic leitmotifs, might have made a full getaway but for heroin. Three women are variously wounded by the cruelties of their era and their cohort, but one nonetheless escapes to academe; she has a line from Yeats tattooed on her arm and a dissertation titled “Transnational Ecological Catastrophe in the Context of the Global Novel.”

  The diverse trajectories of these young people provide the author an arsenal of cultural signifiers with which to mine his fictional landscape, as well as the opportunity to expound on contemporary politics, religion, sex, drugs, literature, music and much else. This is novel as compendium.

  A yearning for youth and the places in which it flamed is the source of the book’s most honest lyricism. Ohio represents prison and paradise both, its beauty insidious: “Stars and moon all swimming out there in the infinite. It made him think that if he could stretch his vision far enough, he could see to the end of it all, where the universe simply trickled back to God’s eye.” And so the novel’s secondary subject is its most persuasive: the persistence, and modifications, of memory.

  But for all its genuinely absorbing qualities, “Ohio” retains a whiff of calculation. Its author is ambitious (his first effort, in 2010, was a high-concept memoir titled “Publish This Book”), and the determination to create an explosive powerhouse of a book emanates from every page here. Markley can’t resist using his characters as mouthpieces, as if to embody the current sense that America has degenerated into a nation of warring ideologies. They offer expositions on a welter of hypocrisies. His female protagonists sound well vetted by a sensitivity reader: They come out both ahead (in intellect and maturity) and behind (in complex perversity and morbid trauma) the men, who seethe with bequeathed anger. Theirs are legacy mistakes.

  Novels that simultaneously attempt to explicate political history and plumb the human condition are liable to succeed at neither, but Stephen Markley’s exuberant embrace of such risk is laudable in itself. “Ohio” burns with alienation, nihilism, frustration and finally love for a place that gave birth to all of them. As the native-born can attest, that goes for the state of Ohio, too.

  Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of “The Place You Love Is Gone,” among other books.

  OHIO
  By Stephen Markley

  Simon & Schuster. 496 pp. $27

Word Count