Cut Through the Bone: And So It Begins

Where to begin? There's so much I need to tell you, so much I need you to know. My first post, first impression. I want you to like me. I want you to like this book I like: Cut Through the Bone by Ethel Rohan. I want you to like what we are doing here at The Lit Pub. This is all new to us. This is all new to you. We are on the same page. Let's begin.

Hello.

I'm Chris Newgent, and this is my little corner of The Lit Pub. I wish I could offer you a drink, maybe some snacks: chips, peanuts, party mix, what have you. I can offer you this book by Ethel Rohan, Cut Through the Bone, published by Dark Sky Books. See, The Lit Pub is something of a car crash of online bookstore/online publicity/Book of the Month club.

Each month, we're featuring 1 of our favorite books; we're talking about it for a month; we're encouraging you to talk about it with us. If you've read it already, if you already own it, that's fantastic! I hope you stick around and talk to us about how much you loved it (or didn't, okay; that makes for interesting conversation, too, just please be respectful). Ethel is a really awesome, gracious person, and there's a good chance you'll see her around in the comments at some point, too.

If you don't own it and you think, "This conversation is compelling. I'd like to read this book," then you're in luck! You can buy it from us! (Technically, there are a lot of places you can buy it, but if you like what we're trying to accomplish here, it'd be rad to have your support through your purchase.)

A quick "about this book":

You probably want to know a bit about this book, about what we'll be talking about this month, about why you should be interested.

Cut Through the Bone is a collection of 30 short stories about loss, about absence and wanting, about quiet grief bubbling to the surface. In "How to Kill," Ann feels the hollowness of an intentionally empty belly. "Gone" reads like a retelling of Robert Hass's classic "A Story About the Body," in which a woman reflects on the loss of her breasts to cancer, and bares herself to an artist attracted to a body she knows he does not understand.

But of course, Rohan's expert storytelling doesn't leave the reader with mere loss without the realization of what's gained. Tracy's humiliation in "On the Loose" gives way to finding it in herself to fight, to breathe, breath as an act of truly living. Similarly, in the titular story, massage therapist Joyce is asked to massage an amputee's phantom limb, "her heart knocking against her ribcage, and [she] reminded herself to breathe."

Throughout Cut Through the Bone, Rohan explores what it is to find life and hope and renewed breath through loss, which is perhaps why this book affects me so. I tend to get pretty personal in my blogging, allowing myself to reflect on personal experience in reviewing and expounding. So if you stick around here, you'll learn about some of the loss I've found hope and breath and life through, you'll learn why a book like Cut gets straight into the very marrow of me.

I hope you stick around.