Photography by Jason Rice
Continue reading Self-confidence and a good heart can overcome many difficulties.
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     | As no doubt most of you have learned by now, literary giant John Updike has died at the age of 76. He wrote more than 50 books, and includes 2 Pulitzer Prizes and 2 National Book Awards among the many recognitions of his work. Read the Salon article listing the highlights of his life, his many accomplishments, writings, and criticisms. Also check of the NYT database including reviews for many of his older works. There’s also a lot of links to interesting pages to be found here Continue reading Rabbit at Rest  I don’t read historical fiction, as a rule. It’s not for me, and I tend to read what I like, you know, the whole ‘life is short’ thing. Glen David Gold has written, in my humble estimation, nothing short of a masterpiece (I’ve only read the first chapter). I like Charlie Chaplin, and the dawn of the motion picture business is intriguing but this chapter made my heart race and I found myself re-reading the pages over and over. Gold manages to write about a specific time and place with incredible assurance, much like Kurt Andersen in Turn of the Century. Continue reading First Chapter of Sunnyside Reviewed…Interview with Glen David Gold!  Two kinds of people graduate college. The first kind have already made plans to attend grad school or are heading for a career. It’s like they are on a train track that is not going to vary. Career, family, regular hours, home for dinner, television, bedtime…five days a week plus weekends off. This pattern will probably persist for most of their lives once they leave school at one end of the adult life cycle until they are ready to retire at the end of the line. Continue reading The Slide by Kyle Beachy Jason Chambers: While we’re at it, why don’t you take a look at this trailer for The Slide, created by Brendan McGrath. Don’t forget to come back tomorrow for the 3Guys discussion. Home Video (For: The Slide) from Edsel Denk on Vimeo. Thanks to all our readers for their interest in The Slide! In co-operation with Kyle’s publisher, Dial Press, we are happy to offer a FREE copy of The Slide to the first Three book lovers who ask us for it. You will have to provide us with your name and a shipping address so the publisher can send you the free copy!  What was good about the road was that the road’s decisions were already made. For two full days I’d watched it emerge on the horizon and disappear beneath me. I saw it change colors, from black to gray to brown, and sometimes felt the seams between them, a clunk against the steady tremble. Los Angeles giving way to glittery Vegas, Martian Utah, and a blind nighttime passage through the Rockies. Then a fresh morning of eastern Colorado fading into prodigious fields of Kansan wheat, forever-sized and flat like nothing you’ve ever seen, until finally Missouri, blunt and dark, a series of brake lights to guide along the final leg. I surrendered to the road. Only once did I pick up my phone and call Audrey. After eight rings I heard her voice mail, and here I likely should have made some gesture, but everything had already been said, repeated, thrown around like rolled-up socks. Continue reading Excerpt from The Slide by Kyle Beachy  When my own parents were divorced it came as a total shock to me because I never saw them angry, or sad, or anything less than (what I thought was) content. For a long time afterward, because I wanted to understand better, I devoted a lot of energy into creating my own versions of how their marriage failed. Because how? How did this nice pretty marriage between two nice loving people fall apart? If they couldn’t endure, who possibly could? Continue reading Kyle Beachy Interview Part 2  I think the ineffable “something” of baseball has do with the balance between isolation and teamwork, and the division of labor. Stand roughly here in the grass or dirt and be ready because the ball might come to you. Chew what you like. Spit. When the ball comes, run after it and throw it to the right place. And now step to the plate and take your cuts. Reach base and run fast and score the run, celebrate, and take the field all over again to protect that run. Offense and defense. Hit, run, catch, throw — everyone (the designated hitter is an insult to the game). Baseball is physical poetry amidst an ongoing war between numbers and intangibles, the novelistic pace of a 162-game season dense with intertwined narratives, rookies and veterans, middle-relief specialists and franchise superstars, all playing beneath the strategic aegis of the old, grizzled manager who, god bless him, is wearing the same uniform. Continue reading Kyle Beachy Interview Part 1 Remember the days when you went to your local bookstore and bought a book you read about in the New York Times Book Review, and they had it displayed in the window because they read the review too? Chains sell everything, toys, dolls, chocolate, magazines, book marks, pens, pencils, notepads, and some bestsellers in their closely guarded bestseller rack. (Which makes me wonder, how do you determine a bestseller in your store? The New York Times does it by sales, how do you figure it out?), and lots of mass markets. But it’s like going to Dunkin Donuts and expecting your tires to be rotated. Continue reading Read It Before It’s Written DH: Our blog partner Jason Rice just attended one of the hottest book parties of the season, for the launch of Maria Semple’s This One Is Mine from Little Brown. The account of his adventures is below:Jason Rice: There isn’t a good time to show up at a book party, too late and you miss all the fun, too early and the conversation gets stiff. I’ve been to a few parties, (I can name them on one hand) and I always show up too early and end up talking to myself while sipping Pellegrino in the corner. Sometimes I get lucky and suddenly find myself standing next to a movie star of note (you’re asking yourself, “this is Continue reading Party  Here’s what I thought of the fiction part of the Penguin Summer list, the part of the list that seems blog worthy anyway. The first Viking I come to has reached the mountains of Wyoming. I am talking about The Signal by Ron Carlson. Now I know that my beloved friend, Jonathan Evison (who I have never met) thinks that I wouldn’t like any novel that had a tree in it…but that’s not true JE, I can take a few anyway. Continue reading Summer Penguins Raped by Vikings! |  | ||
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