John Updike

When We Fell In Love – David Abrams

September 6, 2012 - 3G1B - 0 Comment

On this day I first met Rabbit, I was a high school junior enrolled in an honors English class, one of those self-designed lit courses where advanced students get to pick their own novels. My classmates chose such literary classics as The Outsiders, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story. For whatever reason, I picked up Rabbit, Run by some guy I’d never heard of before. Maybe I thought it was like that Watership Down book or maybe I was going through a Trix cereal phase….I don’t know.

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

June 19, 2012 - 3G1B - 1 Comment

I saw Homes as working through all this dense material, fighting to get out from under it. When Ashley and Nate, George’s privileged, abandoned kids, urge the adoption of Ricardo, the plump, dysfunctional survivor of George’s violence, Homes remarks that it’s the way with kids to think that everything can be made all right, that the damage that adults think is irreparable can be mended.

Interview with M. Allen Cunningham

November 8, 2011 - 3G1B - 1 Comment

Both artist and bookseller stand at the vanguard of culture. Both struggle for something essentially impractical, unlucrative, and yet unspeakably necessary. Both have labored to build a life in accordance with a passionate vision. Both accumulate intangible rewards, usually in the absence of lower gratifications (prestige, affluence, vacations). Both are cursed and blessed to live in the conviction that what they do has relevance and worth in this world — to spend their days in service to something they love unreasonably and irredeemably.

"A & P" by John Updike

July 11, 2011 - 3G1B - 2 Comments

It’s a special kind of reflection that Updike conjures, in which I alternately zoom in to see the scene as young Sammy, and pan out to proudly observe from the safety of my adulthood. It really doesn’t matter whether the girls pay Sammy any attention, or whether we know anything deep about him or any of the other characters – the moral to this short story is that standing up to fight the good fight is an unconditional action.

Chris Offutt – Welcome & WWFIL

November 15, 2010 - 3G1B - 12 Comments

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.

Interview with Hannah Pittard

November 4, 2010 - 3G1B - 5 Comments

So many people have asked me about what really happened? Which is funny. What happened is what’s on the page. The point is, what actually happened doesn’t matter because what matters is the boys and what the boys believe happened. What matters is that this group of boys focused their entire lives on someone else rather than on themselves…