Three Guys One Book

What subterfuge is this? HarperCollins had the great idea to re-issue some classic short story collections in well-designed but inexpensive trade paperbacks and then include a bonus story from a new writer as part of the package.

I’ve just read the bonus story, ‘The Beast of Beddgelert’ by Alex Burrett, in the Melville collection, The Happy Failure.

On the basis of The Beast, reserve your copy of My Goat Ate Its Own Legs by Alex Burrett from Amazon or Powell’s or whomever right now.

“The Beast of Beddgelert” is a demented Welsh folktale of man, woman and dog. Young man on the make does well, becomes a lord and marries the

Continue reading The Beast of Beddgelert by Alex Burrett

JE: My friend Bill Kenower of Author Magazine does an excellent series of interviews with touring writers in conjunction with Third Place Books in Seattle, one of the great indie bookstores anywhere. Chris Cleave (he of Little Bee) rolled through our town recently. While I haven’t read Little Bee yet, I totally dug Chris Cleave’s 2005 debut, Incendiary, which was given to me on my wedding day by none other than (name drop alert!) Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. In retrospect, I kind of think Stoney was just showing me the purchases he’d made at Eagle Harbor Books prior to the wedding, and it being my big day (well, Lauren’s too), I just commandeered Incendiary, along with MacKenzie Bezos’ debut, The

Continue reading Chris Cleave with Bill Kenower

It was great to hear that Scott Caan is a photographer, it’s even better that he’s got talent to spare. The oversized slipcase that I got in the mail the other day speaks a great deal about Caan’s work as a photographer. It’s not easy being someones kid, and I think Caan has done a great job in the Ocean’s movies as Turk Malloy, as an actor he’s got a kinetic visceral charm which his father had, and a kind of coiled rage that is simmering just beneath the surface. If you get a chance check out a movie he directed

Continue reading Scott Caan – Photographs Vol 1.

Tiger, Tiger is the second story in the incredible Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy.
There isn’t a moment that flashes by when you don’t think to yourself that the creepy unnamed narrator is a little off-kilter. For a long time I thought this was a relationship between two men, but slowly this odd woman crept out from behind her boyfriend’s shadow to somehow control everything. She describes her boyfriend Brian and his father who has left Brian’s mother for another woman. Our narrator doesn’t tip her hand as to where she stands on this decision, she only reports

Continue reading Tiger, Tiger, Simon Van Booy from Love Begins in Winter

This story is in the current (May 18th) issue of The New Yorker. So there’s still time to pick it up on the newsstands if you have a yen to read it. I think it’s my job to make you want to read it.

The story starts with a tease. The day Junior fell down was such a day as…what follows is an explosion of sensuality with (I counted) thirteen concrete examples…all beautiful, quotidian essences like: “the cheap film music rising from the floor below”…that’s my favorite.

It’s like Rushdie is saying: this is life…hitting

Continue reading In The South by Salman Rushdie

Love Begins in Winter, the title story of this stunning collection is nothing more than a brilliantly hard-edged chisel. We follow Bruno Bonnet all over the world, he’s an accomplished cellist with a wonderfully vivid imagination about his childhood, and his family. There seems to be a remote sadness to this writing, it’s unusual and vividly reduced, which is to say that Van Booy wastes nothing with Bonnet’s stark observations about the world around him. Bruno meets Hannah along the way in this longish story and she herself is obsessed with birds. There is a strange unseen destiny that these two seem to

Continue reading Love Begins in Winter – Simon Van Booy

It’s been years since I first discovered Kevin Canty’s sterling prose. I was sitting at a sales conference meeting in Florida, listening to his editor talk about Nine Below Zero, having just read it, I felt like the only other person in the room that connected to Canty’s writing. He’s gone on to write other fine collections of short stories, all of them will make you pay more attention to the life around you.

Canty is an inspector of margins, not just people, but people’s marginal feelings, things you think but don’t say. In his new collection Where The Money Went he

Continue reading No Place In This World For You – Kevin Canty

These days, Random House sales reps can read their advance reading copies on company-provided Sony Readers. Of course, how many reps are actually doing this is an open question. I haven’t found one yet who claimed to have read a galley in this way. But it’s early days.

But what’s indisputable is that their accounts can’t read e-galleys. They aren’t available. But we figure that eventually publishers will see the clear cost savings in distributing advance copies this way and overcome their shyness.

Until that nirvana arrives, I have fallen back on the old-fashioned practice of requesting bound ARC’s for the forthcoming books that

Continue reading The Three Random House Galleys That I Asked For

I was in 192 Books, about six feet away from him, when Orhan Pamuk said he decided to be a writer. It was an off-the-cuff remark but he lowered his voice slightly when he said it. Orhan is one of those guys whose speech becomes softer when he is saying something serious.

In his introduction to the Paris Review Interviews, Volume II , he cites the trinitarian math of Faulkner: 99% talent, 99% discipline, 99% work as the requirements for a writing career.  Also a quiet room of his own and the time to spend working in it.

I loved the idea of adopting

Continue reading Parallel Writers: Orhan Pamuk and Margaret Atwood

It’s a strange thing to review novels while you’re trying to write one. You sit at home pounding out the impossible and then you read a book that accomplishes those impossibilities, and makes it look easy. Writing novels = pain, but not for Nick Laird.

Something really amazing happened between his first book Utterly Monkey and now. This new book is really exciting, Glover’s Mistake is…well, a real achievement for a writer who should be a bigger deal than he is. I don’t know why this book is getting published in July, but that’s life. It seems to me that

Continue reading Nick Laird, Glover's Mistake

It’s been almost twenty years since I first read ‘Vitamins’. So much has happened to me since then, I’ve read so many books, and written so many pages of fiction in the vein attempt to recreate what I first found thrilling in that story, it’s strange now to look back that far. It struck me differently this time around, I’ve never heard a man’s penis referred to as a “hammer”, but Carver places that word in the mouth of a Vietnam Vet who treats everyone around him like shit, and blames his time in Vietnam for his bad manners.

Continue reading Vitamins, Raymond Carver

Jonathan Evison guest editor, with fiction from Keith Dixon, Matthew Comito, James P. Othmer and Jason Rice, and many others. Interviews with David Liss and Cris Mazza, and a lot more, pictures, fiction, all for the low price of $9.

You can buy it now online, it goes on sale May 18th at stores across the country.

Tonight there is a party…if you live in Seattle:Friday, May 8th, 2009KNOCK Magazine release party for issue #11.Performances by Jonathan Evison, Paul Constant, Aaron Diets, Neil McCrea, and Ben Loory.

Issue #11 is an all-fiction issue edited by novelist Jonathan Evison, author of All About Lulu.Party location:The Jewlbox Theatre

Continue reading Knock Magazine Online Sale Starts Today

Jonathan Evison: I’m midway through reading two novels at present, both of which came as recommendations from editors I greatly admire–one a commercial editor, and the other an indie editor–both of whom are excellent readers. These novels could hardly have less in common; one is a rollicking western adventure set in the 1860s, and the other is a tender-hearted coming-of-age set in New York City in the 1970s. One features a male protagonist, the other a female. One doles out its language in measured helpings, while the other speeds along under its own momentum. But

Continue reading Two in the Queue – What I'm Reading This Week

There is a strange feeling that comes off this story, it’s a hybrid between the moments you’re about to vomit and the seconds after you wake up from a nap. Carver dishes some of the most hallucinatory dialogue I’ve ever read, it’s all simple he said she said, but it’s riddled with paranoia and repetitiveness.

Carl and Mary have been invited to Helen and Jacks for a party, it’s a simple affair, but they have to pick up some “snacks” first. Carl just got a new pair of shoes which will bookend this story, and give us a much

Continue reading What's In Alaska? Raymond Carver

Dennis Haritou: Thanks very much, Mr. Toibin, for helping me with my reaction to your novel, Brooklyn. I found the title enigmatic. That might seem strange to most people…it’s about Brooklyn right? But if readers were expecting some kind of James Michener-like geographical novel: a sentimental, pop-culture exposition of a place in the guise of a family saga, that’s not what they’re getting in Brooklyn. It reminded me more of a quest with a very ambivalent grail as its reward. Brooklyn looms up like magic, a paradigm of the unfamiliar, full of strange promise, the promise of new possibilities, even of a new identity. But also it’s

Continue reading The Colm Toibin Interview