Three Guys One Book

I’m not the biggest James Bond fan in the world, don’t get me wrong, of late Daniel Craig has brought a much needed face life to the franchise, but sadly he’ll be type cast like Henry Winkler. But if you get a chance rent Flashbacks of a Fool, which is a wonderful movie done by 007 when he’s not 007.

Marc Forster has been making damn fine movies for a while now, Monsters Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, Stay (a personal favorite) and seems to be pushing the corners of the medium in an attempt to find something new.

I’ve got a tiny bone to

Continue reading Quantum of Solace

The first two stories in Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, are both about adolescence: that awkward period in human development that reveals its full freakishness best when you attempt to depart from it.

So let’s have some laughs at the expense our fictional narrator, who is on a train bound for a town called Murska Sobota, entrusted with a family mission to buy a huge freezer chest. If our hero wasn’t so young he’d remind me of Don Quixote. But our hero’s quest is no less improbable. He is trying to grow up.

He’s in a train compartment with a secret, he’s

Continue reading Everything by Aleksander Hemon

Continue reading look…it's Saturday morning and this is what's on my mind right now…

It’s about time for me to react to another Narrative Magazine Story of the Week. I can’t praise this site enough…both for its high editorial standards and the literary crap shoot it offers the reader in which you nearly always win.

You can’t help it…if you choose your own stories to read then you are going to run down a well-worn channel. JE has mentioned getting dangerous with his literature. Well, here is one suggestion…let Narrative Magazine showcase a story for you and then react to it…as I’m doing here. You will find that NM never volleys in the same direction twice.

I figure that the community where I live is the land without literature…like I’m the only one within ten blocks of my

Continue reading Ismail by Hasanthika Sirisena

There isn’t a good reason why I’ve been so quiet about John Updike. I’ve dabbled here and there over the years, usually under some peer pressure, trying to read him. I really like A&P, a story that everyone points

to as a classic.

In June of this year Knopf will be publishing a collection of his short stories, My Father’s Tears. Discovering it laying on my desk reminded me that I did intend to read it.

There are moments in your life when you find yourself stuck in another part of the world, like the family Updike describes in ‘Morocco’. He’s stranded them with what seems like a

Continue reading Morocco, from My Father's Tears by John Updike

Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Angel Bones from Endpoint and other poems

Next to the statue-laden cathedral of Reims,

the bishop’s palace has become a museum

containing many stones cast down by wear,

bombardardment, renovation, and the rare

too-thunderous Te Deum.

Huge saints and angels, retired from the weather,

stand tall above us. Their visages were carved

to show a soul-a face of grace above the wars,

the plagues, the congregational stench of masses-

to worshippers they dwarfed.

Now chips and missing chunks give proof

Continue reading Angel Bones by John Updike

JR has had a new story published online at the demanding Failbetter.com.

It’s as if you’re driving through rocky terrain and come across a lot of turn-offs and signs pointing in different directions. Each turning will lead you into a new look at yourself…maybe even into a new life.

But you don’t know where you’ll end up. All you know is that somewhere up ahead there’s a destination waiting for you. Friends is a complex, power drive through such

Continue reading Friends by Jason Rice

Jonathan Evison: While my livelihood insists that I consume as much current fiction as possible — and the same can be said of all four Three Guys — I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss reading my dead guys. Last week, even as my galley pile grew four books higher, and my five-hundred-pound-gorilla of a novel required much editing, and my lovely pregnant wife was nagging me (I mean reminding me!) about something neglected (the unfinished floors? the nursery? the taxes?), I managed to carve out a little time between petting my bunnies and drinking my beers to revisit Frank Norris’s 1889 classic McTeague, which

Continue reading Revisiting McTeague

Kevin Wilson is dynamite in a tube. I started reading the first short story, grand stand-in, in his debut collection, tunneling to the center of the earth, and I wanted to read standing up and shout “wow”. But I was sitting in a Long Island Rail Road car at the time so I decided to cool it.

KW takes a silly “what-if” and treats it seriously until you are totally wrapped up in a nutty world that casts a dark shadow over this one: reality squared-you’ve been checkmated by literature, bub.

The conceit in grand stand-in is that successful, middle class families, know

Continue reading grand stand-in

JC: Readers may recall that some time ago JR wrote about the first chapter of Glen David Gold’s forthcoming novel Sunnyside, and had a short interview with Gold. I’ve been entranced by the book for the last couple of days and, as a result, have been thinking a lot about Chaplin. Did you know that the California blood test evidence rules were changed in part because of the injustice done when CC was railroaded in his ex-lover’s paternity suit? And that the Mann Act, under which he was prosecuted, was later used against the man thought to be the inspiration for Humbert Humbert?

Of course all that comes much later than Gold’s story. What he discovers is a younger Chaplin, and every

Continue reading Sunnyside & A Dog's Life

Here is the first page of Caitlin Macy’s story ‘Christie’ from her short story collection, ‘Spoiled’. It is reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved by Random House…who are very nice people. My discussion of ‘Christie’ can be found below this post.

-DH

Christie – Page One

When you met Christie for the first time, it took only minutes to learn that she was from Greenwich, Connecticut, but months could go by before you got another solid fact out of her. After a couple of years in New York, she realized that she had to give people a little more information to stop them from digging, so once

Continue reading Christie The First Page

I took this picture at Columbus Circle last summer. My favorite figure is the guy in the upper right-hand corner, looking at his watch. But I also like that fourth guy, standing frontally, who is gesturing and dominating their conversation…the leader.

If you asked watch-guy, who looks so pissed-off, to tell you about his dominant friend, you’d have the basis for a good short story.

That’s what happens in ‘Christie’, the overture in Caitlin Macy’srequired reading collection of short stories, Spoiled. Christie’s girlfriend gives you the scoop and boy, is she ever a bitch. But maybe not…she is just speaking realistically for her status-obssessed group, wealthy young people from Greenwich or

Continue reading Christie

Check this out: http://www.hulu.com/watch/55345/movie-trailers-500-days-of-summer

It has nothing to do with this book.

There are great moments in a readers life, everyone has a story, for me; I was in the South of France, (living/teaching for a year, that’s another story) and my father sent me a copy of Where I’m Calling From, by Raymond Carver. I hadn’t done much reading up to that point, unless it was for school, but suddenly I’m flying through these stories one after the other, really getting my ass kicked. From then on I’ve always looked for a story that connects with me, really, right down to

Continue reading Castaways, third story from Drift by Victoria Patterson

Continue reading Many things to see, many places too.

A funny thing happened while I was writing yesterdays post about Drift, by Victoria Patterson. I’d been thinking about Victoria Robinson, an old friend from my days of working in film production in New York City, she was really something special, a wonderfully smart, witty, good humored person that I lost touch with. When I saw Victoria Patterson’s name, I immediately thought of Victoria Robinson, because up until yesterday I’ve only known one Victoria. So every time I mentioned the author of Drift, I used the wrong last name, and, well…shame on me, but it’s been fixed for those of you watching at

Continue reading Holloway's: Part Two, second story from Drift, by Victoria Patterson