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     | Which is worse, bad writers or poor judgement in blogging books? It’s almost a nonsensical question since everyone is entitled to their opinion no matter how inept their call. If many are fools when they blog an opinion, well, it’s their right…as fools. But since bloggers outnumber scriveners by at least a million to one, let’s give the writers a pass for now. Continue reading How to Read, Write and Blog  Dinaw Mengestu’s gotten plenty of press lately due to the buzz around his new book How to Read The Air, and his concurrent appearance on the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list. The new book, releasing in October, has been listed everywhere as one of the books to read for the fall. Continue reading Dinaw Mengestu Giveaway  About midstream through this exceptional novel, I realized something obvious that maybe I should have noticed before. None of its central characters have to be at a desk at 9AM or on a factory floor at 8AM. Indeed, neither avant-film director Mimi nor her sometime estranged daughter Violet, nor the legendary, lesbian, new wave writer, Eleanor, reaching for the last chapter of her maturity, who is texted by everyone else as “Picasso”, nor Romeo Byron, who defines cinematic sexuality in our age and overtures this story already dead from an orgy of self-destruction, probably, is obliged to keep any commitment to anybody that they don’t have the impulse to keep in these near breathless, cocaine-powdered pages. Continue reading Toxicology by Jessica Hagedorn  I was bartending at the time, earning more money than I really deserved. The bar was across the street from the harbor. Apart from the local crowd, the bar catered to the out-of-town yuppies on their way to or from sport-fishing trips, and the uber-wealthy who’d get tanked on their sailboats in the morning and stop by for a drink after coming ashore, still rocking on their sea-legs. Rich old men don’t like to get cut off by the snotty-nosed bartender. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do – Eric Obenauf – Two Dollar Radio  I’d been meaning to read A Fan’s Notes for over a decade, before I finally got around to it a couple of years ago. More often than not, due to alphabetical proximity, All About Lulu sits right beside A Fan’s Notes in bookstores everywhere, along with Middlesex, forming a Lulu sandwich (gotta’ love the bread on that sandwich). When I finally got around to inhaling A Fan’s Notes in three sittings, I felt as though I’d discovered a long lost father, as though it were possible to have been influenced by a voice I’d never heard before. Continue reading A Fan’s Notes Fan’s Notes  From what I could tell, Another Roadside Attraction broke all the rules. Robbins was part jester, part acrobat, part goofball-philosopher-genius. He wrote about my soggy corner of the world like nobody else. I started writing down my favorite sentences of his, hoping the magic would rub off. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jim Lynch  Exhibit B: Maria Semple’s dark, hilarious, acerbic debut, This One is Mine. Is that a pink bon-bon on the cover? Really? Is that a fucking joke? I read that book twice–where did they get a pink bon-bon? Seriously, marketing people, what’s with the double standard? Continue reading Someday I’m Gonna Be A Dead White Guy  There is much more to our publishing history that I’d like one day to tell, but because one circle that revealed itself in 1993 is moving into another rotation, it seems a good idea to make a record. Doing so just might shed light on what Greg Michalson and I—and our remarkable marketing and sales team—do at Unbridled Books. We’ve all been together for a long time. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do – Fred Ramey – Unbridled Books  A guy is tipsy at a party but knows the house he is in well enough to lurch toward the kitchen. He’s pretending to get ice but he really wants some space to pull himself together. You know, therefore, that he feels vulnerable. What reinforces this feeling of vulnerability is that he a familiar guest but not really one of the family. He can’t just pass out on the couch. That’s why he’s headed for the kitchen to pull himself together. Continue reading The Lottery by Shirley Jackson  Every activity that’s worthwhile in life is competitive. That’s the Greek in me talking. Reading is a form of competition as well. Reading poetry is a skill that you should have, like being able to swim. But being able to use a paddle board to get across the pool is not swimming. You can swim when you can do laps on your own. Likewise, if you haven’t read long poems then you haven’t read poetry. Continue reading Poetry for Straight Guys – The Comedian as the Letter C  Mr. Strauss has gone through a fairly traumatic event, and since it happened early in his life, he’s had time to process, and maybe figure out a way to deal with it. He killed someone. It was an accident, and it couldn’t be helped. The writing here is crisp, sharp, cliché-free, and brutally honest. It reminded me of the Stewart O’Nan novel Songs for the Missing. By the end of Half A Life you realize you’re reading something that really happened, and it’s true, which makes it all the more potent. Continue reading JR’s Picks 9-16  Two years ago, 3G1B reviewed Jonathan Evison’s All About Lulu, and a year later, he was the proud recipient of the Washington State Book Award. Last year, 3G1B’s DH interviewed Jim Lynch about Border Songs. This year? You guessed it – Washington State Book Award. . . again. I don’t want to start an argument about correlation and causation, but I’m just sayin’. Continue reading Washington State Book Award – Jim Lynch’s Border Songs  If your interest has been adequately piqued… and how could it not…then fortune smiles upon you. Harper Perennial has graciously provided ten finished copies for our readers. To have a chance to win, comment below, and, to liven things up, give us the name of a favorite short story that you think deserves more attention. Bonus opportunities to win for links to those stories, and to those who either comment on or “like” this entry on the 3G1B Facebook page. Continue reading Deborah Willis Giveaway  This is about that summer when I was 22. By then, I was already devoted to books and hoping to write my own someday. I worked as a tour guide for the summer in a French chateau, and if that doesn’t sound like a premise for a hot romance novel, I don’t know what does. Unfortunately, there was no romance that summer. There wasn’t even any sex. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Deborah Willis  It’s great the way the three characters are kept spinning for the entire story, side by side, quickly, like raindrops rolling down the window of your car while you drive down the road. Ms. Willis manages to make a serious mundane event, the act of a person leaving suddenly, sound thrilling for the other two people in the relationship. Continue reading “This Other Us” by Deborah Willis |  | ||
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