"The fact is, June Akers Seese refuses to lie. When her eye lights on something, she arrests it with a photographic infallibility that is simply breathtaking. She writes Hemingway's best declarative sentence through the lens of Kafka and the searing elegance of Joan Didion. Yet, on top of everything, she manages to be very, very funny-often excruciatingly so. "Some Things Are Better Left to Saxophones," her latest novel, embodies vintage Seese and her all-too-human, all-too-like-us, unforgiving domestic landscape: inside our houses, insides our heads, inside our hearts."

-Joseph Bathanti, Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University

In this novel, June Akers Seese writes of two retired Detroit teachers and their retarded daughter, Melody, who lives with them and works at a downtown hotel folding napkins and polishing tabletops. Melody's sisters and brother have moved on. One sister to Japan to study languages and literature; another to a boarding house on the Wayne State University campus where she collects Master's degrees that go nowhere and earns her living as a sometimes waitress. Their brother has fled to Alaska where land is cheap and his carpentry skills valued. All approaching 40, these offspring have no plans to marry or return home. They are all trapped in a dream of escaping the responsibility of Melody when their parents die.

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.

June loves stories-and not just the kind you find in books, but stories you dream up of overheard conversations, family secrets, whatever was left unsaid the last time you hung up the phone. She collects them, hoards them, and then transforms them into fiction. Her immediate gifts, then, are a sharp eye and quick ear-making her a kind of spy, voyeur, but also a guardian angel. She sees but she also sees through. She's vigilant but she's also tender.

Writing about the blood and mystery under life's surfaces puts her in the current of some of the best writing being done today. This is fiction that's lean, somewhat tight-lipped, un-flashy, and careful. It's built on suggestion, not statement. And it pays no more attention to plot than ordinary life seems to do.

June's writing is of this strain, but there's a difference-a difference built up from her deeper gift. That gift is empathy. June's writing rises in power because she's down in the skin along with her characters. Mining the covenants and conspiracies of ordinary life, she's not at all detached. She's a participant. Someone who's been there-and hence understands.

-Paul Evans

"I met June Seese in a class on writing fiction. As a teacher, one of my biggest kicks was that moment when the writers first read something they'd written. It was a nervous time-many writers shaking inside, for the first time showing their work to strangers, sympathetic, but nonetheless, strangers. June was remarkable. What has flowered since was already sturdy, strong distinct. She read with a confidence that moved beyond the personal, a faith outside herself in the certainty of her work. Here was a writer who had risen to that essential power where her work becomes necessary to her, a gift as sure and heedless as her pulse. She was right on track, and would move, beyond discouragement or criticism or even appreciation, into the strength, that difficult ease that's the mark of a writer who will continue regardless, achieving an undeniable, unmistakable voice.

What makes a writer? Originality, a delighted care for language, a commitment to push words into new music and finally into pure emotion. June has these gifts-and her writing's strengths- toughness, speed, lyricism, observation acuity and, ultimately, a compassion that's never unsteady, never weak-make her the best kind of writer-impatient, hip, timely and transcending."
-Paul Evans, Editor, "Southline Press"

"The fact is, June Akers Seese refuses to lie. When her eye lights on something, she arrests it with a photographic infallibility that is simply breathtaking. She writes Hemingway's best declarative sentence through the lens of Kafka and the searing elegance of Joan Didion. Yet, on top of everything, she manages to be very, very funny-often excruciatingly so. "Some Things Are Better Left to Saxophones," her latest novel, embodies vintage Seese and her all-too-human, all-too-like-us, unforgiving domestic landscape: inside our houses, insides our heads, inside our hearts."

-Joseph Bathanti, Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University

In this novel, June Akers Seese writes of two retired Detroit teachers and their retarded daughter, Melody, who lives with them and works at a downtown hotel folding napkins and polishing tabletops. Melody's sisters and brother have moved on. One sister to Japan to study languages and literature; another to a boarding house on the Wayne State University campus where she collects Master's degrees that go nowhere and earns her living as a sometimes waitress. Their brother has fled to Alaska where land is cheap and his carpentry skills valued. All approaching 40, these offspring have no plans to marry or return home. They are all trapped in a dream of escaping the responsibility of Melody when their parents die.