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Perpetual Folly (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
I first read Jesus's Son in 2000 (it first appeared in 1992) and my reaction at the time was simple: I hated it. What stayed with me over the years was the excessive drug use and the violence. I understand that these things are real and it all seemed authentic enough, but it just didn't appeal to me. Whenever I told people that I didn't like the book, they gave me strange looks, as if I was out of...
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Ward Six (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
This week's blogging caesura is attributable to work and an unfortunate pedestrian incident , but we are back in action with this bouquet of praise for Wells Tower 's amazing new story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned . I first came across Tower's fiction in The New Yorker, which published his story "Leopard." I thought it was pretty good, but not good enough to make me go...
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Lost in the Frame (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton in Jesus' Son (dir. Alison Maclean, 1999). Billy Crudup and Jack Black. Denis Johnson's 1992 book of short stories Jesus' Son not only leaves its narrator unnamed, but it leaves open to question whether this narrator is in fact the same from story to story. It's easy to see why so many readers assume it is. The voice throughout goes back and forth between various levels...
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The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Here comes the annual onslaught of year-end “best books” lists, beginning with Publishers Weekly . There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the fact that none of the titles on PW ’s top-10 rundown was written by a woman . But what’s lost in all of that is the fact that so many choices in the Fiction and Mystery categories are crime fiction: Michael Connelly’s The...
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Perpetual Folly (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Elizabeth Strout is a fine, fine writer, and I’m not just saying that because she wrote a nice blurb for my book, In an Uncharted Country . Her recent book, Olive Kitteridge , won the Pulitzer Prize this year, and deservedly so. It’s a finely crafted novel in stories, each of which is about—to greater or lesser degrees—the seventy-year-old Olive, a woman who doesn’t seem...
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Being and Writing (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Back from a fabulous time in L.A. Did so much, starting with a beautiful drive down Highway 1. Stopped to see the elephant seals snorting and snuffling on the beach. Stopped at a small town and had a conversation at a bar with a Vietnam vet who'd been stationed in Panama. His job was to drive the troops into the rain forest where they played war games in preparation for being shipped to Vietnam. In...
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49 Writers (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
We're eagerly awaiting our own upcoming interview with Alaska poet Joan Kane , but we can understand why she's a little busy today, as the secrecy veil lifts over receipt last night of a coveted $50,000 Whiting Writers Award. New York magazine had this to say about the prize, which was awarded to ten writers and playwrights. "...the Whitings are a ticket out of water-treading obscurity. Not everyone...
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Vulture (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Whiting winner Nami Mun at the Orange Award for New Writers ceremony earlier this year. In her forthcoming memoir Lit , poet-memoirist Mary Karr credits God with leading her to sobriety and, eventually, bestseller status. But she also owes the latter to a Whiting Award, which gave her some much-needed financial stability and led to her meeting Binky Urban, the agent who implored her to write a memoir....
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MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
"Congratulations to all ten of you. I'll put you all in my blog." author Margaret Atwood told the 2009 Whiting Writers' Award recipients last night. She delivered some droll advice for the winners: "Write a cookbook or a book about vampires. Or troll through the classics, adding monsters...Or, better yet, write a vampire cookbook." Last night, ten authors received a $50,000 check...
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MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
"Congratulations to all ten of you. I'll put you all in my blog." author Margaret Atwood told the 2009 Whiting Writers' Award recipients last night. She delivered some droll advice for the winners: "Write a cookbook or a book about vampires. Or troll through the classics, adding monsters...Or, better yet, write a vampire cookbook." Last night, ten authors received a $50,000 check...
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Real cycling (Free subscription) | 10/24/2009
Our North of England correspondents have drawn our attention to Alnwick Castle 's display of ancient bicycles. On a trip there recently, they saw this fine hobby horse from the 1820s. An information panel by it explains that this model belonged to the Duke. Built by a London maker called Denis Johnson, this particular hobby horse was more sophisticated than the 'draisiennes' popular on the Continent:...
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Blades Out (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine." While trapped on an airplane travelling from Detroit to San Diego last week, I read Denis Johnson's short story collection, Jesus' Son , cover to cover. This came on the heels of James Welch's Winter in the Blood , which shares a bit of a thematic thread with Johnson's short pieces about alcoholic, drug-addled fools living amidst the stink of...
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A Longhouse Birdhouse (Free subscription) | 10/05/2009
photo © bob arnold DAY OFF Yesterday was wonderful after we left the hospital and dropped off one more of Sweetheart’s medical tests. Now the day was ours! We drove north to a college town and arrived at 9 a.m., just in time to freeze in a bakery that took all day to warm up. When we returned at 5 o’clock in the afternoon to find an evening sweet to share on the ride back home, the...
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