ThreeGuys1Book has 1605 followers | By Jason Chambers  One always runs the risk of reverting to platitudes when one talks about one’s publishing vision, and why should I be any different? After all, I am a little greener than most in the business and therefore even more prone to superlatives than my seasoned colleagues. The old saying goes, “You are what you eat.” For publishers, it should be, “You are what you publish.” If so, I’d prefer to jump right into the kitchen and talk about the books. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do – Judith Gurewich By 3G1B  The Guys are launching a new guest post series featuring our friends the indie presses. It’s called Why We Love What We do. It features publishers and editors talking about what gives their house its own special spin. We’re aiming for the pubs’ history, approach to publishing, title selection philosophy, plans for new projects and celebrations of favorite books published. We’re also hoping that the publishers and editors that are at the frontiers of the indie market will tell us something about themselves as book lovers and as a community of INDEPENDENT minds. How does the terrain of the indie book wilderness scope out from the lookout point of their offices? Continue reading Why We Love What We Do By Jason Rice  I didn’t grow up in a particularly literary environment, and until I asked my parents to put one in my bedroom aged ten, there were no bookshelves in my house. I read because I grew up in England, and there were only 4 TV channels. I was an only child. When faced with a Saturday afternoon either watching television coverage of darts matches, going to football matches, or playing in the grey rain that seemed to bathe the down most of the time, I became a reader by default. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tony O’Neill By Jonathan Evison  I don’t write with an outline or any kind of plan; I like the reckless discovery of surprising myself with each plot point. Of course, this leads to lots of wrong turns–maybe why I have to revise so much–but I dig that wanton, blind strategy of building story without any scaffolding around it. Continue reading An Interview with Joshua Mohr By Dennis Haritou  How to Read the Air is slipping away from me as I try to grab hold of it. Its complexity fights being analyzed. What a great book club selection it will make! And what a devious writer Dinaw Mengestu is! That’s why I love him. As Jonas crashes and burns lies into the fragile connections of his world, one is led to a wondering about his real sensitivities to his parents and himself that he is trying so hard to conceal from Angela. How can any relationship bear up if it is being asked to bear so much concealed emotional weight? Continue reading Charles Dickens, Meet Dinaw Mengestu, part III By Jason Rice  Reading was pure entertainment for me. It was adventure, discovery, private horror, and then the re-reading of private horror. These books were answering questions about the world that I didn’t even know were okay to ask. And maybe they weren’t. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Lindsay Hunter By Jason Chambers  I have a theory that after thinking in childhood that we will never be alone, in adolescence we suddenly see that we are alone (big time), and then along comes First Love, and we jump, thinking maybe we don’t have to go it alone after all. This is the primal reason why we become readers — to have that deep companionship of a good book. But at seventeen, nothing — not loving parents, or sympathetic girlfriends, or any of the usual remedies — worked, at all. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tatjana Soli By Dennis Haritou  You write about a book several times because you are peeling the onion. But there has to be an onion to peel. The praise is in the treatment, the attention that the book receives. Saying “I loved this book!” is silly. Talk it up. Books are the malls (agoras, if you prefer) of a literate society. When the mail packet from England arrived in NY harbor with the latest installment of the new Dickens serial, don’t imagine that the eager readers who snapped it up just read the content and then sat on their asses. They talked about it. And because the plot unfurled like a slow growing vine, everybody was on the same page when they talked about it. Continue reading Charles Dickens, Meet Dinaw Mengestu, part II By Dennis Haritou  As for who Montaigne was, I promised myself that I would not go to the Wikipedia entry or to the Bakewell biography for help. Montaigne was a 16th century guy, a total mensch, who lived on his family estate in the region of Montaigne not that far from the town of Bordeaux. His family estate produced wine. But Montaigne, after a political life with some hard knocks, preferred his tower writing room with his favorite books. art chachkas and commanding view of the countryside. I loved it that his wife had her own tower retreat on the other side of the chateau and that the family rooms were in the middle where card games were sometimes played. Continue reading How to Live by Sarah Bakewell By Dennis Haritou DH: On my main library shelves sits a massive edition of Dickens, still awaiting completion. And when I look at those intricately conceived word feasts, I am reminded that a lot of that story stuff first reached its readers in the form of installments in some scruffy periodical. How quaint, reading a mag by gaslight to find out what’s going to happen to little Dorrit! But when eras do axial shifts, the quaint can be transformed into the cool. Why can’t our e-readers function that way? Why can’t I arrange for Brad Watson to e-text me his latest story as soon as he has written it? And why can’t BW say, two weeks after that: “Oh, I revised it, dear Continue reading Charles Dickens, Meet Dinaw Mengestu By Jason Chambers  I was amazed when, as an undergraduate, I read Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s short story collection Family Ties. The book showed me how fiction can dig into the quiet, disturbing crevasses of human experience and illuminate the parts of life that are impossible to describe in straightforward language. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Stacey Levine By Jason Rice  I came upon Lee Rourke somewhere through my connection at 3AMMAGAZINE.COM, and I remember his first book, (great cover) called Everyday, a collection of short stories. Mr. Rourke has imagined a world void of cliche or pop culture with his debut novel, The Canal, published by Melville House. It’s great to read a story free of modern trappings, hooks, and snares, but ultimately stripped down to bare bone emotion. Continue reading The Canal by Lee Rourke By Jason Chambers  Othmer does a great job in the section showing how Henry and Rachel got to where they are: starting out a happy, upwardly mobile Manhattan couple, socializing and working in the city, handsomely rewarded for it. On a whim, based on a trip to the suburbs, they decide that their time in the city has come to an end – that they should move to Long Island and start a family. The smug wink-and-nod cynicism and their unraveling is reminiscent of Revolutionary Road, but, you know, really funny, including an excrutiating, more than you want to know account of vasectomies. A lot more. Continue reading Holy Water by James P Othmer, another review | |
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