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     |  One of the fascinating aspects of Ford’s narrative technique is that he pre-figures decisive events in his story. It takes remarkable boldness and confidence as a writer to provide your own spoilers! We know the crack-brained attempt at armed robbery that Dell’s parents are going to commit will fail. Continue reading Canada by Richard Ford  Three Guys One Book has more readers in New York City than any other place. But one of the places that we have a concentration of readers is London. Three Guys is read in over 50 countries. That’s not such a big deal for a noted book blog. Most book blogs of some reputation have a global readership. Continue reading Over There  I hope you will excuse my nuance of immodesty but readers need to blow their own horns when they are applying for a job. Otherwise, I might wind up like one of those wallflower book club members. You know, the kind that bring the snack when it’s their turn but never make a comment. Continue reading The Reader’s Resume Cover Letter: I’m The Reader You Should Want I used to come across countless mass market books, genre stuff mostly, that was being thrown away. I would grab a stack and at night drive to a nearby neighborhood and put a different book in each mailbox. I have no idea what happened to those books, if anyone read them. Imagine the surprise… Continue reading Give a Book to a Stranger  What we’re up against is Alphaville, the deconstruction of the human which can’t be accomplished unless our everyday literary culture is dismantled first. That’s a world where no one can ask why only because. Where there can be no rebellion and words are systematically banned from the dictionary because they would encourage independent ideas. Continue reading Independent Bookstores and the Rise of the Zombie  Imagine that forming a home library was a kind of horticulture. Imagine books without writers. Here’s how it might work: You lay out for yourself a fine selection of bookshelves in a sunny room. You water the shelves appropriately and then leave time for the books to germinate and start to grow on their own! If you had a fine basement library like my good friend JC, then you could grow books like mushrooms, direct from the fungus! Continue reading When Robots Can Read, Will You Still Want To? 
I loved “The Odds”. Art is Continue reading The Odds by Stewart O’Nan  Tell me how you read and I’ll tell you who you are. It’s the most common type of readership that we want to avoid. But we are all guilty of engorging an enormous hunk of text into our brains and letting nothing come out. It’s like sitting down to a gourmet meal at a friend’s house and then when it comes time to clean up, refusing to join in. Continue reading Montaigne Reads A Book  “Media fawning is addictive,” Lionel Shriver writes in The Guardian, “but not very nutritious… The world is teeming with hungry has-beens snuffling around for public acclaim with all the unseemly desperation of heroine addicts. Snort a few hits, just don’t start main-lining.” Continue reading Dispatch from the Story Prize Underdog  Huey P. “The Kingfish” Long inspired numerous authors, though none of the resulting fictional characters entranced the public’s imagination like Warren’s Willie Stark. Stark bears the least resemblance to the politician, yet he’s the fictional character most associated with him. Continue reading Thinking and Feeling: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men  Someday, a graduate student will do a catalog of every cultural reference in the book: every Hollywood movie, every piece of music high or low, every pop culture reference, writer, philosophical and religious concept that Murakami has included and form a snapshot of Murakami’s brain. Continue reading On Murakami’s 1Q84 part 3  The opening of 1Q84 grabbed me immediately. A businesswoman is trapped in a taxi in gridlock on an elevated expressway. She will be late for an important appointment. We wonder what kind of an appointment it is. I have been tempted to ditch a gridlocked cab in the middle of the street to make my appointment. But I’ve never been tempted to climb down a service ladder to the street below. Continue reading On Murakami’s 1Q84  The Icelandic sagas were an ancient path that subsequent writers didn’t go down. I’m fascinated by lost versions of reality and thought I had found one in the still-born Icelandic sagas that seemed to dead-end their literature. Continue reading How to Write Like a Viking | |||
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JE: It’s no secret around here that I’ve long been a big fan of Stewart O’Nan. In his unassuming and workmanlike way, he may be the best American novelist of the past twenty years. Certainly, he’s the most underrated. I love his tiny apertures, his luminous details, and of course his range. Despite O’Nan’s obvious attention to craft, his writing never feels overworked.–it always serves the story,. He rarely draws attention to himself. I love that he’s not a show-off–because he could be if he wanted to. The bottom line is O’Nan doesn’t need to show off, because he knows the characters are the story, and he knows how to unfold them.
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