If you want a look at the new issue of Knock Magazine, edited by the great JE, go here:
http://knockmagazine.com/issues/11/index.html
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The first person narrator, clerking in a grocery store, is having a day so slow that he can hear the “buzzing of the flies”. I think the whole town can hear those flies. He is thinking about a scruffy young man, a stranger, who had pitched a tent at the edge of town. He hit town in the spring…as if unkempt young men were seasonal. Continue reading Vast Hell 
Continue reading Brooklyn by Colm Toibin 
Of course his past is not so transparant, and neither is Continue reading A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick 
Continue reading Western Swing Cool contest, go here: http://robertswartwood.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/hint-fiction-contest/ -JR 
Continue reading Matrimony by Joshua Henkin 
Continue reading Three Randomly Selected Books from JE's Shelf (all by dead guys) 
Okay. You’ve read it…right? Did you ever wonder what people were like before Netflix and the Internet…even cell phones. When you knew everyone in your apartment building, and it seemed that most people were good mannered, dressed well, and invested in the stock market. You know…when men wore hats everyday. Cheever offers a peak into the mind of a man who is watching his own neighbors go from skid Continue reading Just One More Time – John Cheever 
John Cheever seemed to focus his finer talents on the people of Shady Hill, this story, ‘The Worm In The Apple’ is the third story from this little suburb that I’ve read, and it’s about seventy-five percent shorter than ‘The Continue reading The Worm In The Apple – John Cheever 
Jim and Irene Wescott are Cheever citizens, keepers of the faith, holding down jobs, and keeping their apartment clean. They have children, (Cheever likes to have a few crumb snatchers around just to humble his main characters) and the strains of life aren’t apparent right away. But when they buy a new radio and Continue reading The Enormous Radio – John Cheever |  | ||
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Guillermo Martinez short story, Vast Hell, appears in the current (April 27th) issue of the New Yorker. It takes place in a small town by the name of Puente Viejo; which means “small bridge’ in Spanish.
Brooklyn is a myth. This may come as a surprise to the several million people who live there. In these parts, it is second only to Manhattan in glamor. But in coolness, it has the edge. You can no more take down a myth than you can pin an angel. Just as you think you may have a lock on it, it changes into something else and eludes your grasp. Like clouds, fairy tales, the reflection of the sky in a lake…or like beauty in your friends or strangers on the street…never the same from moment to moment…always metamorphosis is in
JC: I’m a bit late to the party on this review. Robert Goolrick is already getting some very good press on his new novel A Reliable Wife, and deservedly so. He performs a couple of pretty fantastic tricks in it. The first is in the very impressive opening chapter. He creates such a vivid picture in his first paragraphs that it’s like he has frozen a moment in time, snowflakes in midair, gawking onlookers, and all of Ralph Truitt’s tragic past is obvious. I thought it was quite a stunning scene.
JE: With so much discussion around here recently about Cheever and Updike and Yates, I thought I’d venture past the suburbs today for a quick post about a writer out west whom I greatly admire for his warmth and humor, and his distinctly western brand of eccentricity: Mr. Tim Sandlin of Wyoming. This morning, attempting to govern the chaos of books ever threatening to overwhelm my fortress of solitude, I ran across Sandlin’s Western Swing among the stacks. Though it has been at least four years since I read Western Swing, I remember the novel in vivid detail. This is rare for
I am taking liberties by thinking of Joshua Henkin as a friend. The good JH sent me a copy of his novel, Matrimony, after reading a couple of my Tobias Wolff reviews. He figured from reading my reviews that I would like his book. He was so genial about it that I just had to like him. Thanks, JH. I have a friend who once told me that friendship was like a marriage. Well…I don’t think that’s true…only a marriage is like a marriage. But matrimony is the paradigm for being involved surely, and in that sense writing, and marriage and friendship, all pull together in Matrimony. Julian,
I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND – BOHUMIL HRABAL Though widely considered a masterpiece throughout Europe, Hrabal’s hilarious, sensual, and unforgettable portrait of Nazi-occupied Prague through the eyes of a Quixotic young waiter is–in my humble estimation–vastly underexposed stateside. Anyone who has ever worked in the food service or hospitality industry, must read this book, which was released in 1971 by Petlice, an underground anti-communist press in Prague, and not published in America until 1990. Hrabal was a bigger-than-life (though highly accessible) figure in Czechoslovakia, where he died at the age of 83, falling from a fifth-story hospital window while trying to
I beg you to stop what you’re doing and read ‘Just One More Time’, I’ll wait. (At this point I’ll assume you have Cheever’s collected stories handy, if not, buy it here.)
Take a moment in time; when you’re standing alone behind that person who can’t seem to get their groceries out of their cart fast enough, and you start to concentrate on their bald spot, or how this person’s wallet has made a permanent impression in their jeans, you start to imagine all kinds of things about people if you stare long enough.
I’ve seen this idea bobbing it’s head in Hollywood, Cheever planted this seed a long time ago, and to read it now after seeing it mentioned the New York Times daily review of Cheever; A Life, I feel ashamed that I’ve never read The Enormous Radio.
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