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It can be so hard to write a short story, one that shines and holds your attention for thirty pages, especially when a writer writes in the opposite sex. Ms. Patterson delivers a narrator who for the time being is called ‘Nice Boy’. We meet him as he starts Continue reading Remoras, from Drift by Victoria Patterson
Continue reading Wonderful World by Javier Calvo and another word on DFW. 
Jonathan Evison: Probably my favorite writers are the ones who continually push themselves to new places. Shape-shifters. Writers compelled by the reckless impulse to test their own boundaries with every book, to plumb their own depths, disrupt their own smooth surfaces, subvert their own devices, and above all, frustrate their own comfort levels. Risk takers. I sometimes wish that some of the writers whom I greatly admire (Kurt Vonnegut Jr., say, or J.D. Salinger, or John Fante, or Charles Bukowski) would’ve pushed themselves a little further into new territory over the Continue reading The Art of Pushing Yourself to New Places: Hooray for Stewart O'Nan! 
Continue reading Firelight http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jrice/2009/03/this-is-cool/ 
Continue reading The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart 
Continue reading The Diver and David Foster Wallace. Dennis Haritou: Having JE on our blog has reminded me of how green our cities are. There’s a great story about Thoreau burning down the Concord woods in this City Journal article: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html I am presuming that Jonathan is more circumspect around the campfire. But JE and I have been talking about camping lately and I wonder if he could tell us at least one camping story. Jonathan, I’d love to hear one, I swear, so please. It’s exceptional to encounter a personality so strong, so open to new ideas that you become friends, even though that friend lives 3,000 miles away and you have never met him. We have to admit that from our sealed-up world back East, we don’t always know what we’re dealing with in the vast Western territory of Jonathan Evison’s mind. But that’s what we like most about him. The Three Guys have reviewed books and interviewed authors now for about a year. But ever since we covered All About Lulu, Jonathan’s debut novel, we have stayed in touch with him, sharing ideas and a growing friendship. His prose, through its agility and warm-humored intelligence, has inspired us and made us better Continue reading Welcoming Jonathan Evison to the Three Guys Blog 
Continue reading Jonathan Evison has something to say  Continue reading Awaiting Orders by Tobias Wolff Review | |||
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It is amazing when a short story jumps out of a collection and completely turns your day on it’s ass. Drift by Victoria Patterson won’t be in stores until June, but you can toss this little gem into your shopping cart and when it arrives you’ll be glad that you listened to me.
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Here’s my review of a second Tobias Wolff story, also from Our Story Begins. The first was ‘Awaiting Orders“. Firelight doesn’t begin with a cozy fire. Quite the opposite…it begins with boarding houses and window shopping. A mother and her boy are wandering around Seattle. They are smartly dressed and make a good impression but they haven’t got a dime…or hardly a dime anyway. Window shopping is an art. The mother in this story excels at putting up a good front. That’s why she gets attentive service from store clerks even though she doesn’t buy anything. But Wolff raises the
JC: I don’t know why the hell I knew nothing about this book before it started getting award nominations. Well, I do, actually. A distinctly southern tale about an outlaw and a hero rarely crosses the threshold of some of our finer New England establishments, and make it the product of a university press on top of that (other than the Ivys, that is) and this book is all but invisible to a wider audience. What a damn shame. Had I actually read it in 2008, it would have been among my favorites for the year. Still too early to tell about
I didn’t know how depressed David Foster Wallace was. The New Yorker article on him is good, but very sad. I liked the entire piece until it got to the point when you knew it was over, and so was DFW. The talk about his unfinished novel, The Pale King is wonderful, and the actual excerpt felt strange, out of place, and very hard to penetrate. It’s interesting to see what he was doing to get ready for this novel, and how hard he worked on Infinite Jest, a whopper of a story, the origins of which are very interesting. I never
All this recent bet-hedging in the publishing arena makes me want to get dangerous with my literature. It makes me want to read and write books that only the most fearless editor would ever dare to publish, and only the most uncompromising writer would ever endeavor–at the risk of starving their family– to write. Whether you’re talking about narrative decisions or acquisitions, nothing is worse for literature than safe choices. The closer you get to the sure-thing, the bigger turd you’re bound to unleash on the world. And I fully expect a steady diet of turds from the big houses in
Dennis Haritou: JR has recently reviewed two Cheever stories on Three Guys. I decided to take a turn and review two Tobias Wolff stories from Our Story Begins. Later on, JR and I had the notion that we would each review one Updike story. That’s still sort of up in the air since I haven’t settled the details with JR but I hope it happens. Cheever, Updike, Wolff: a triad of American short story masters, have been haunting our dreams. Cheever is the subject of a massive new biography from Knopf. Tobias Wolff has won the Story Prize and Updike is
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