ThreeGuys1Book has 1737 followers | By Jonathan Evison  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 By Jason Chambers  When I truly fell in love with a writer I was in a beat up convertible 1970 VW Bug, primer gray, my sister’s boyfriend’s prize possession. It was the summer of 1978 and the writer was not a novelist, or a short story writer, or a poet. Not technically. Though his words resonated with more life and romance and tragedy and pain and moodiness than anything I’d ever read. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric Rickstad By Jonathan Evison  We didn’t know the first thing about the publishing industry. But I thought books could use a little more design. Jonathan brought important things to the table like spelling and grammar, so it ended up being a good match. I sold my car, a ’68 Volvo, to fund the start up. And though I miss it, I have to say: it has been worth it. Continue reading Why We Love What We Do – Zach Dodson – Featherproof Books By Jonathan Evison  The book I was trying to power my way through—Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again—was bumming me out, both because of the madly desperate fever dream quality of the prose, written by a man in the throes of fatal illness, and because, in a literal sense, I could barely focus on it. Whenever I would read more than a page or two, my vision would get fuzzy, I would feel unbalanced, I would have to close my eyes or squint before I could try to read another page. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Adam Langer By Jonathan Evison  He introduced me to storytelling. In my infancy, it was the oral tradition. In the darkness of my room before bedtime, he spun whole worlds for me out of thin air. He was masterful. His characters won my sympathy right off the bat. He understood tension. Pacing. Climax. For the most part, these stories comprised an ongoing serial concerning three orphaned tiger cubs and their adventures in the jungle. I’m guessing my old man liked Kipling. Continue reading When We Fell in Love – Jonathan Evison By Jason Rice  Growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood, what I remember about the shelves often were built into the walls of Chicago apartments is that they were usually full of cheap, decorative items (plastic flowers; imitation Lladros), rarely books. Most of my friends’ parents were first generation American, and had grown up speaking Italian or Spanish; few had finished high school. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Gina Frangello 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 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 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  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 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 3G1B  Over the last hundred years, millions of fully necessary murders brought—at long last—our daily misery to an end, blessed by worldwide accord. Only a few objected, and they were easy to discount. Now, joy never ceases. Every government treasures its citizens like sons. The twenty-first century has come already to resemble, even in the eyes of an amateur, the twentieth in its fullness of peace and glory. And you haunted, Clio, Dalmatia’s shoreline all last fall, amid karst, pine, resinous clearness. Heavy masses of lavender, a plant native to that coast, cleansed a fleeing breeze. Continue reading Caliban, An Essay by Sam Munson By Jason Chambers  I have the unfortunate sort of face that inspires people, usually drunks, to hand over their biographical details to me. But even this conceals self-praise. Let me say rather: I am too cowardly to discourage people from speaking to me, or that my capacious memory for the trivia of other people’s lives reflects a consitutional empty-headedness on my part. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Sam Munson | |
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