ThreeGuys1Book has 1605 followers | By Jason Rice  In The Young Painters, a piece of fiction appearing in The New Yorker, Ms. Krauss delivers a powerful story about he provenance of a painting. This work of art hangs in an apartment of a friend of the narrators who happens to be a renowned dancer. The story comes across as a confession, of sorts, like a person might tell a judge after harboring the awful truth for years, and when it all comes out, it does so with great force. The story turns to the severely morbid almost immediately when we learn that the people who created the painting were children, and they met with a gruesome end at the hands of their deranged mother, but I’ll let you sniff that part of the story out yourself. Continue reading The Young Painters by Nicole Krauss By Dennis Haritou  This is a historical novel that takes place in an “exotic” locale. The turn of the century from 18th to 19th at Dejima, an artificial island off the harbor of Nagasaki. This fortress of commerce is designed so that the Shogun’s government can keep its Dutch traders in their own ghetto but still have the advantage of doing business with them. You get the idea if you can imagine that we put Goldman Sachs employees on Governor’s Island in NY harbor and told them that they weren’t allowed to leave. Continue reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell By Jonathan Evison  Hilarious, disquieting, razor sharp, and Now with a capital N. Othmer is an absurdist straight from the trenches, a keen-eyed witness to the troubling but strangely hopeful times we live in, and a stylist of the first order. Continue reading Holy Water by James P. Othmer By Jason Chambers This week we can look forward to DH’s review of David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is finally to be released in the U.S., an inexplicable seven weeks after it’s UK release. To preface DH’s coverage, here’s a little video: Continue reading David Mitchell on Japan and De Zoet By Jason Chambers  A group of angry book reviewers, book publishers and prominent authors assembled on the lawn of Dan’s Papers in Bridgehampton on Saturday, June 5 to protest the pathetically low level to which book reviews have sunk and to award a bronze plaque known as the Donkey Award (Equus Asinus) to the reviewer selected as the person writing the worst review in 2009-2010. Continue reading And the Donkey goes to… By Jason Rice I don’t know why I did it, but I sent Ben Greenman a story recently, and in return, someone from Harper Collins sent me his collection ( I had no idea this collection even existed, and I’m supposed to know about this stuff…right?). Perhaps I’m being told something without actually seeing the person who is telling me? I’ve heard of Mr. Greenman, and he works at The New Yorker, which has been in the news lately, it’s 20 under 40 list rippling out through a ravaged industry, bringing hope to a legion of wanna be writers everywhere. Continue reading What He’s Poised to Do, Stories by Ben Greenman By Jonathan Evison Since I won’t be able to finish The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in time to join the conversation, I thought I’d warm up the seat by offering a few thoughts on Mitchell, whose narrative audacity and mischievous verbal energy have been an inspiration to me over the course of his first four novels, particularly the big beautiful mess called Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas is a mess like Moby Dick is a mess—a performance scarcely able to contain its own force of invention. You can argue about the cohesion. The construction. The mode. Even the conception. But you can’t argue about sheer narrative verve of the work, and you can’t argue about the ambition. Continue reading On David Mitchell By Jason Rice  The tales I wrote stole all the color, event, and gadgetry from Tom Swift, the intrigue from the Hardy Boys, and the teamwork and faux-science from the Doc Savage series, the narratives that grew out of these in turn amalgamations of movies, age-inappropriate films of action and adventure like The Guns of Navarone and The Magnificent Seven, sexy stuff like A Clockwork Orange and Logan’s Run, plus anything I could watch on Channel 11’s The 4 O’clock Movie before mom made it home (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Damnation Alley, to name a few). Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Adam Ross By Dennis Haritou  I just wrote a paragraph and it was sounding terrible and rambly and probably bullshit. Is it also, besides being sick of me, dinking around on four novels at the same time? Three of them in first person? I’m like some dandy deciding which gal I really like, or something, dithering. I’m doing the pages, and nothing’s really bad, but I can’t find the magnetic center yet. Like one of my favorite sayings, Lars Gustafsson telling his UT Austin students, “You must find the black hole to which everything is attracted.” Continue reading Brad Watson’s Guest Post By 3G1B  I remember when I first heard of Chris Adrian, and his debut novel Gob’s Grief hit the streets, prior to it’s publication he was slated to be a big deal. Broadway Books positioned him correctly, and then the book sort of vanished, (I’m sure there are sales #’s to dispute this) and I forgot about him. Then Children’s Hospital came out, via Mr. Eggers, (if you read my columns on this site, then you know where I stand on Eggers, but you know what, I’m not expecting a Christmas card from him either. Continue reading 20 Under 40, an honest reaction By Jason Rice  When I was ten-years-old, an alarming statistic hit the airwaves. Apparently, the average American child was watching over four hours of television a day. That translated to 28 hours a week, 112 hours a month and over 1,000 hours a year! By the time children entered college — assuming their TV-rotted brains even lasted through high-school – they had experienced more television than class time. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Simon Rich By Jason Rice  This sliver of genius arrives somewhere in the middle of Ms. Galchen’s story that is published in this weeks double fiction issue, or the 20 under 40 manifesto as I like to call it. Some how Trish, our smarter than usual writer/wife has been living in a scorched earth marriage, (hence the title) and didn’t know the man she met, and married after three weeks, was writing a blog about how much he hated her. She’s come home to find this man gone from her life, he left his winter coat, took a ton of shit, even the Parmesan cheese grater. Continue reading The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire, Rivka Galchen By Jason Rice  After I listened to Rabbit Run, I immediately found Rabbit Redux and listened, (I have a two hour commute by car) on audio cassette (not the ideal format, FYI). Redux is a book of it’s time, and is antiquated socially, but it is so right on about how a man feels and feels he must act, that it’s hard not to drive through the suburbs of New Jersey and see what Updike is talking about on every corner. Continue reading I hear Updike, and see him everywhere, or realizing that Updike is God. By Dennis Haritou  When I typed out Brad’s sentence I nearly put a comma between “weeks” and “they”. That’s where I would have put one. But when I double-checked the text I saw no comma. And how much better you sense Beth and Tex, flitting through each other like shadows, without a comma! The sentence itself becomes shadowy. Should you care about such small details? Every sentence that you write is a shot at taking the reader by the throat. Continue reading Noon by Brad Watson By Jason Rice  Over the last ten years as I struggled to write novel after novel, I’ve sent queries to Mr. Clegg, several in fact, and someone in his office is always polite enough to send a xeroxed form letter telling me, “Dear Writer, despite its obvious merit, your book does not meet our needs.” Something like that, dismissive, and fading, like all rejection letters. I used to save them, hundreds of letters (not all from Clegg’s office), then JE told me to throw them away. Continue reading Portrait Of An Addict As A Young Man by Bill Clegg | |
Recent Comments