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     |  Searching for comparisons, I came up with War and Peace. I know that comparing a contemporary author to Tolstoy sounds silly. But there is something of the same commitment to telling the story of a people while also making the academic word “humanities” count for something. Orringer applies acid to the plate of her character’s lives. Continue reading The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer  Joseph O’Neill came to me with the ultimate seal of approval, one long essay by Zadie Smith that appears in Changing My Mind. There is nothing wrong with the prose here, the narrative structure is firm, and the hero, Hans, a Dutch born Englishman is severely arrogant, wealthy and unaccustomed to any kind of turbulence in his own life. In defense of the author, it must be said that the book is a recipe for post 9-11 fiction. It offers the city in all its splendid glory, or former glory, after that awful day. Continue reading Netherland, as it sounded to me  As the story unfolds, the characters are drawn to their extremes – mental breakdowns, rage, depression – but Ammaniti’s pace is relentless. He does a great trick with contrasting friends Rino and Quattro Formaggi – making one vile and the other pitiable at the beginning and spectacularly turning the tables. He’s good at creating empathy for his characters, and handles each player’s narrative cleanly, showing the multidimensionality of the people. Continue reading As God Commands by Niccolo Ammaniti  Over the last hundred years, millions of fully necessary murders brought—at long last—our daily misery to an end, blessed by worldwide accord. Only a few objected, and they were easy to discount. Now, joy never ceases. Every government treasures its citizens like sons. The twenty-first century has come already to resemble, even in the eyes of an amateur, the twentieth in its fullness of peace and glory. And you haunted, Clio, Dalmatia’s shoreline all last fall, amid karst, pine, resinous clearness. Heavy masses of lavender, a plant native to that coast, cleansed a fleeing breeze. Continue reading Caliban, An Essay by Sam Munson  I’ve always been fascinated by American extremist movements—especially The Weather Underground. Imagining something like that occurring today—an organized group of middle- and upper-middle class students (most of them liberal arts kids or Ivy Leaguers) using violent means in an attempt to stir revolt, and end a misguided war—might be hard to do. But that’s exactly the problem. Continue reading Interview with David Goodwillie  If you’ve paid attention this week, you’ve noticed that we like Sam Munson. We hope you will too, so here’s an opportunity: In the comments section, name your favorite adolescent protagonist, and tell us why, and get a chance to win one of five copies of SM’s new novel The November Criminals. Continue reading The November Criminals Giveaway  What are your best and worst qualities? Sure, it’s pretty standard stuff for college application essays and job interviews. You’ve answered at least a couple of versions of it over the years. But your answers were not much like Addison Schact’s – the mercurial protagonist of Sam Munson’s The November Criminals. After all, most of you are not caustic, pot-dealing cynics resolved upon solving the death of your classmate who you really don’t know that well in the first place. Continue reading The November Criminals by Sam Munson  I have the unfortunate sort of face that inspires people, usually drunks, to hand over their biographical details to me. But even this conceals self-praise. Let me say rather: I am too cowardly to discourage people from speaking to me, or that my capacious memory for the trivia of other people’s lives reflects a consitutional empty-headedness on my part. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Sam Munson  Written by Neil Landau, an experienced screenwriter and script consultant to the major movie studios, this is the perfect book for anyone who wants to know about the inner-workings of this industry. Fortunately, Three Guys One Book has five copies to give away. I’ll pick the five winners randomly from the authors of comments on this post. To liven it up a little, tell us what book you’d like to see made into a film. Continue reading 101 Things I Learned In Film School – Giveaway  New World Order is partly about how we as Americans thought the new century would unfold and how it actually has, since 9/11. So much of what we as a people are all about has to do with commerce and trade and economic might. It sort of defines our place in the world. But suddenly it all looks a lot more shaky than we had believed. Continue reading Interview with Derek Green  So there’s this guy, he is at home, late for work, watching TV, and he can’t get up, because he sees himself on the TV, going to work. Now this could be a comment on our society, how we are defined by our public personas, or it could by mystical, or magical realism (see, I can’t tell the difference, just call it magic, or realism, don’t put them together, it confuses me), but immediately I’m thrown off by the fact that a guy, any guy, can see himself on the television set while he eats his morning cereal and not flip the fuck out. Continue reading TV, Ben Loory in The New Yorker  I don’t have a very good reason for not reading Rabbit, Run. I wish I did. It’s a gap in my reading history, everyone has an author who they’ve missed, for me there are many. I have a two hour commute each day, and not enough time to read and write but I’ve taken to listening to audio books on CD. So far, Rabbit, Run has been an amazing experience, it’s like a trip to another time, when openly sexist husbands could leave their wives, and families, while they pursued the nearest piece of ass. Continue reading Listening to Rabbit for the first time  My mother’s family had been sharecroppers in the Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri when she was growing up, and much of what I was reading in the book mirrored stories my mother had told me about frequently moving around, picking cotton, and not having any spare money. The book stuck with me all these years, I suppose, because it was the first time I recognized something of myself and my family’s life in writing, and for a budding writer (I didn’t know I was a budding writer, of course), these are pretty good lessons. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – John McNally  After the Workshop centers around Jack Hercules Shannon – yeah, Hercules, no shit – he had a story published in the New Yorker when he was at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He was working on a novel, a rising star. Anthologized. He had the pedigree and the stuff to make it big. Somewhere, however, something went wrong. Twelve years later, he’s given up on that novel, and on writing altogether, scraping an income together by squiring authors around town for book signings and dinners, forgetting, when possible, what might have been. Continue reading After the Workshop by John McNally  At the behest of his editor, obituary writer Arthur Gopal is sent on assignment to interview an obscure, dying academic as information-gathering for the inevitable. Reading her texts, he becomes enthralled by her work, and despite his personal distaste for her, writes a beautiful elegiac obit for her. Herman Cohen, corrections editor, entertains a houseguest for whom he has had a hero-like worship for forty years. CFO Abbey Pineola finds herself uncomfortably seated next to the man she fired on an overseas flights, yet finds herself unexpectedly attracted to him. The onset of the internet age and the slow but obvious deterioration of the newspaper unveil a hazy future for all. Continue reading The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman |  | ||
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