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     |  Let me be clear: I’m a writer. I’m at home when I’m alone, writing. But I likened it to my children. I’ll do just about anything for my kids. I don’t remember specifics, but I do know that among other efforts, I joined Facebook and mailed 64 copies of Drift. The only thing that remains is the box. Continue reading Victoria Patterson – Publication I had never watched a an episode of SCAN-TV’s The High Bar with Warren before JE brought it to my attention yesterday. I guess it’s a Seattle thing. Hosted over at vimeo.com, they interview a lot of interesting people from differing backgrounds including, this week, our very own Jonathan Evison, doing one of the things he does best – talk about books, writing, and publishing. Continue reading Jonathan Evison on High Bar  I like books by men who haven’t always had soft hands. (Examples: Ed Abbey, Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Raymond Carver, Dostoyevsky, Jim Harrison, Charles Bukowski, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau. What matters is that the author has done some kind of raw physical labor, either in a negative context (Carver or Bukowski’s menial jobs, Dostoyevsky’s forced labor) or ‘constructive’ (Berry, Thoureau).) Continue reading When We Fell In Love – David Miller  I hated every page of it. It was confusing. It was nonlinear. It broke the basic story rules that had been drilled into me. Beginning. Middle. End. This deviated. It told tales and tales and tales, leaving me wandering around in a story wasteland for months. The characters shared the same names, and even some of the same personality traits. I couldn’t keep everybody straight. I thought it was bizarre, even thought it was strangely lovely. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Mercedes M. Yardley  Growing up my father’s preferred answer to the question, “What does ‘insert alien word here’ mean?” was, “Go and look it up.” Because he was an English professor uninterested in dialing down his words when his kids could tune up their vocabularies, it was a question I asked a lot. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Michelle Orange  The first ‘real’ book I ever read all the way through was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Although I have little memory of the novel’s plot, I still claim it as one of my favorites. What I do remember is the name Sal Paradise, the weight of the pages, the feel of the back cover on the pads of my fingers. But only one short scene still lingers in my mind. “It was always mañana,” Sal narrates. “For the next week that was all I heard—mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.” Continue reading When We Fell In Love – David Joseph  I had a friend who always rode his bike with his pet rat perched on his shoulder. He let me try it too, and we had a great summer biking, losing the rat under the patio and coaxing it back out with some peanut butter, and getting into trouble for nailing our plywood fort to the side of his apartment. We were at that perfect age when the world is still entirely good, before puberty sets in and children mock one another for playing with rats or having the opposite sex as ‘just a friend.’ Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Natalie McNabb  I suppose I was lucky. My father owned hundreds of books, many from his own childhood in a log cabin, raised by a former schoolteacher. Lucky insofar as my experience was the ideal breeding ground for a writer—a classic over-sensitive misfit, no good at sports, smartest kid in school—living in an isolated world of national forest, dirt roads, trickling creeks, and unemployed men with guns. Continue reading Chris Offutt – Welcome & WWFIL  I discovered Montaigne by chance twenty years ago, when I was looking for something to read on a train from Budapest. A selection from the Essays was the only English-language book available in the station bookshop, so I bought it out of desperation. I was afraid it would be dull, but instead I found myself meeting a person I felt I already knew well – a person just like me. Since then, I’ve never stopped reading Montaigne. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Sarah Bakewell  It was the 1950s, Trenton, New Jersey. Gray. Dismal. Depressing. Trenton isn’t New York or Philadelphia, but rather a poor relation, and like many other grungy northeastern municipalities that have seen their best days pass into history, it was a city long on its way south. Aside from The Bible and those gossip rags, there wasn’t anything else in sight to read. Instead, we had the Friday Night Fights and The Honeymooners on the old black and white Zenith. The word culture was never uttered. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Mark Safranko  We should feel free to branch out, fool around on what we at first believed was our first true love. Because the reason we read is to keep falling in love. We don’t want to read books that disappoint us. We don’t want to read books that make us hate reading. We want books that show us new worlds, introduce us to new characters, and make us fall in love all over again. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Robert Swartwood  There I was – walking to the bus stop reciting out loud the high points of the book, and as time does in those years, suddenly I’m at the podium telling an audience of ninth graders about this book. I was thrilled when the main character in the story had to deal with his dead son, and how he just barely missed catching him before the kid got trampled by the truck. I went on and spun the story slower, gave details and had the class eating out of my hand, and I didn’t even know it Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Jason Rice  But here’s the thing: one day my English teacher spotted the paperback on my desk. She asked me if I was reading 1984 for another class. I said no. She asked me if I liked it. I said it was pretty good but some parts were hard to understand. The next day she brought in her personal copy of Brave New World and lent it to me. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Bob Thurber  But you as you push into the high school years, you start to find many of these vaguely dissatisfying. You can’t say why exactly. But you begin looking for writers that seem to push toward solving that dissatisfaction, books that grapple with deeper mysteries. You pick up Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick. Your parents subscribe to Harper’s magazine, and there you encounter strange and exciting stories by George Saunders and Stephen Millhauser. You begin, gingerly, to pick up more literary writers. Paul Auster. Angela Carter. Italo Calvino. Continue reading When We Fell in Love – Nick Arvin  Dark Coast goes after titles that are seriously inventive and adhere to the responsibilities of the craft that make books both readable and works of art. If one part of that equation is off a project feels imbalanced. A book that is too experimental isn’t palatable or interesting for a wide range of readers. And books that depend on generic language and simplistic devices bore us to death. The genius is there when those tendencies of both form and content, tone and structure, meaning and delivery, all come together at once. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do – Aaron Talwar – Dark Coast Press |  | ||
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