Generated by All in One SEO v5.0.0.1, this is an llms.txt file, used by LLMs to index the site. # Three Guys One Book Reviews and Writings ## Sitemaps - [XML Sitemap](https://threeguysonebook.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website. ## Posts - [Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp](https://threeguysonebook.com/wolf-at-the-table-by-adam-rapp/) - I challenge you to read the first chapter of this book and put it down. The Larkin family is visited by so much drama, you’ll be turning pages to see what happens next. - [Everything, Nothing, Someone: a Memoir by Alice Carrière](https://threeguysonebook.com/everything-nothing-someone-alice-carriere/) - Hearts shoot out of my eyes for this book; in fact, I’m in love with Alice Carrière’s memoir Everything, Nothing, Someone. There, I said it. I became obsessed with her story, and it doesn’t let the reader off the hook. When finished, I left the book on my bedside table and spied it during my - [The Guest by Emma Cline](https://threeguysonebook.com/guest-emma-cline/) - I’m a fan of bleak, dark, sad, run-the-bathtub prose. With The Guest, Emma Cline has somehow cornered the market on bleak realism in the 21st century. - [The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-librarianist-by-patrick-dewitt/) - When The Librarianist landed in my lap I felt lucky to be living in a world where Patrick deWitt is still writing books—really, really, writing books. - [Biography of X by Catherine Lacey](https://threeguysonebook.com/biography-x-catherine-lacey/) - When a deeply-flawed tell-all biography of her late wife, X, is released, her widow, CM Lucca., decides to correct the record and write a biography of X that will tell the truth about the mysterious iconoclast, - [We Are Too Many, A Memoir (kind of) by Hannah Pittard and Other Thoughts](https://threeguysonebook.com/we-are-too-many-hannah-pittard/) - Have you been married? Have you thought about getting married? If you don’t want to get divorced, then don’t get married. - [New Yorker: My Sad Dead by Mariana Enriquez](https://threeguysonebook.com/my-sad-dead-mariana-enriquez/) - The old woman’s daughter, also living in the city, doesn’t need her anymore, having a successful career in the fashion world. If you don’t think not being needed is rough, then you must be a young person. - [This Other Eden by Paul Harding](https://threeguysonebook.com/this-other-eden-paul-harding/) - Facebook Twitter [et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]Apple Island, “hardly three hundred feet across a channel from the mainland” on the coast of Maine, is a return to his usual stomping grounds by Paul Harding, the same turf mined for Pulitzer Prize winner Tinkers and Enon (you can read the review from Judy Krueger here). It is a departure, - [Turning on "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett](https://threeguysonebook.com/turning-on-bel-canto-by-ann-patchett/) - Facebook Twitter [et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]Bel Canto, which means “beautiful singing” in Italian, refers to the art of classical singing in the novel, although it more precisely refers to an early romantic style of opera with a very elaborate vocal line. A party is being given at the Vice President’s mansion in an impoverished Spanish speaking nation - [On the Horizon: February 2023](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-the-horizon-february-2023/) - I've got a pile of books on my desk, and in my e-reader, so let's take a look at what we're hoping to get on the site in the near future. - [Enon by Paul Harding](https://threeguysonebook.com/enon-by-paul-harding/) - Enon. An abbreviation of a Latin word? A biblical name? Here it is the name of a small town in New England, home of Charlie Crosby. I have not read Tinkers, Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, but Charlie is the grandson of the man who is dying in Tinkers. The writing is exquisite. - [Why I Wrote a New Moby Dick by John Minichillo](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-i-wrote-a-new-moby-dick-by-john-minichillo/) - Moby-Dick was a book that loomed large. I’d never read a book that long, and while I was just fine with reading Hawthorne and Poe, most of the other writers from the same period were work for me. I knew enough, however, to understand that when the National Merit Scholar told me Moby-Dick was “the Great American Novel,” the qualifier was a joke and not a joke. All novels are flawed to some degree. - [The Infamous Bengal Ming by Rajesh Parameswaran](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-infamous-bengal-ming-by-rajesh-parameswaran/) - I don't believe animals can talk, and any writer who writes a story about one that does, is pulling my leg. I especially don't like it when dogs talk in fiction. There is a reason they can't talk. Because they are animals. There is also a reason why humans should be careful of all animals. Because they are animals. - [Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey](https://threeguysonebook.com/nobody-is-ever-missing-by-catherine-lacey/) - FSG Originals is one of the few publishers still giving a home to new and exiting writers. If you need proof go here: http://www.fsgoriginals.com/books. I maintain a steady diet of literary fiction, and was sniffing around Nobody Is Ever Missing long before I got it in my head to review it. - [Why I Love What I Do - Michael Reynolds](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-i-love-what-i-do-michael-reynolds/) - I wonder if my route out of publishing may end up being more interesting, or at least more telling, than my route in. There are forces at work in the industry that apparently cannot appreciate the importance of bibliodiversity and seem to want nothing more than to homologize, incorporate, consolidate, iron out any bumps and rough spots. Diversity is as necessary to the book industry as it is to any ecosystem, which is something these mindless forces will not, or cannot understand. - [Why We Love What We Do: Francois Vigneault](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-we-love-what-we-do-francois-vigneault/) - Good Ink grew out of the Scout Book format, a pocket-sized, efficient, and all-around great format that was developed in 2009 to offer as a marketplace for custom notebooks and books. We've had a great response from the public, who loved the ability to easily create their own pocket notebooks and books. During the summer of 2011 we began discussing releasing more original content under the Scout Books banner, and the Good Ink imprint was born. The goal for us is to both publish work we are excited about and to inspire other creators to expand their ideas of what the Scout Book format can do. - [Fugitives of the Heart by William Gay](https://threeguysonebook.com/fugitives-heart-by-william-gay/) - Fugitives of the Heart is the last of William Gay’s posthumous, stolen novels. You can read the story about that in the introduction by Sonny Brewer, a welcome addition to the literature on Gay. - [Godspeed by Nickolas Butler](https://threeguysonebook.com/godspeed-nickolas-butler/) - Bart, Teddy, and Cole are the team behind True Triangle Construction, a small-time outfit struggling to get over the hump to real projects. - [Interview with M. Allen Cunningham](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-m-allen-cunningham/) - Both artist and bookseller stand at the vanguard of culture. Both struggle for something essentially impractical, unlucrative, and yet unspeakably necessary. - [The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan](https://threeguysonebook.com/thirty-nine-steps-john-buchan/) - The Thirty-Nine Steps is a primitive case of the Man on the Run archetype, and an early espionage thriller. - [Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin](https://threeguysonebook.com/tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow-gabrielle-zevin/) - Gabrielle Zevin draws a line that extends from the play of children to video games as a means to self-expression, and gameplay as intimacy and community. - ["A&P" by John Updike](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-p-by-john-updike/) - 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. - [Games to Play After Dark by Sarah Gardner Borden](https://threeguysonebook.com/games-to-play-after-dark-by-sarah-gardner-borden/) - Kate is immediately likeable and despicable at the same time. I knew she had one foot out the door when it came to relationships, and Colin never saw it coming. Women get just as bored men, and Kate not only gets bored with Colin she also gets fed up with her own life. She almost isn’t prepared for parenthood, or being an adult. Like she is insulted by the burden of responsibility. - [Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory](https://threeguysonebook.com/stories-for-nighttime-and-some-for-the-day-by-ben-loory/) - Sometimes they are perfect little fables, but often when I walk away from them, I have no idea what they were about. But they stick with me, like great episodes of “The Outer Limits,” or asparagus—I'm not sure why they have the effect they do, but it's strong. And like cryptic things crazy people shout in your face, you end up trying to unravel their significance for a good while after the fact. And they're downright addictive,too. It's hard to put this book down. - [Ben Loory Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/ben-loory-giveaway/) - I think that if you read the first story in this collection, you'll have to read the next one. And once you finish that, you're probably going to have to read the next one, and so on until you read the whole damn thing. Loory's stories are quizzical, puzzling, magical little parables. Perfect. You should go out and get one. - [How to Write Like a Viking](https://threeguysonebook.com/how-to-write-like-a-viking/) - 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. - ["The Slap" by Steven Millhauser](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-slap-by-steven-millhauser/) - What is the root of this assault on the good citizens of our town? Surely, it must be political, the financial state of the world being what it is. Three businessmen attacked equals someone angry about the economy. Until Ray Sorenson, cable repairman; and Sharon Hands, high school senior. - [The Naturalist by Maureen F. McHugh](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-naturalist-by-maureen-f-mchugh/) - McHugh gives the reader great set pieces; the interiors of apartment buildings which have been looted or a pharmacy that has nothing left inside, except expired medications. Cahill builds a life in the small corners of the city and observes the dwindling zombie population while trying to remember what it is like outside the walls. Meanwhile he’s sharpening his game on the latest “inmates”. - [On Being Voted Most Helpful](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-being-voted-most-helpful/) - I once had a coworker who would frequently employ the phrase: “You’re 100% right.” In the years that I knew that person, they never uttered the phrase: “You’re 100% wrong.” But what is your praise worth if you never censure anything? The funny thing is, it’s worth a great deal. The opinions of those who praise almost everything are highly coveted. This is called publishing politics....or writerly politics if you’re a writer. File under: how to get published. - [A Blogger Looks at Book Reviews](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-blogger-looks-at-book-reviews/) - So you can see why I am not concerned if most casual newspaper reviews disappear. No great loss. We are not seeing an extinction of the critical evaluation of literature but an evolution into a more wide open country where any reader who cares can find a wealth of critical opinion. Some by paid professionals, some by unpaid bloggers...or write it yourself. The old passive model where we say: “If only that casual reader will stumble onto that book review on their way to the telly listings, then publishing will thrive.” is dead. - [Is This A Good Review?](https://threeguysonebook.com/is-this-a-good-review/) - What we’re doing here on the blog is trying to steer overwhelmed and distracted readers to what’s good, and what is worth their time. Writing a bad review? I could do it all day, and have done just that with my take on the recent television show The Newsroom. I don’t know if I would go all out to slam a writer, knowing what the process is like. - [Literacy Talks](https://threeguysonebook.com/literacy-talks/) - Literate talk is our contemporary version of Latin. It sets a common standard of excellence that’s universal so that the conversation can go global. Any literate person anywhere in the world can participate and relate to any other literate person. Why develop a private language that only a few can share? You might as well form a lost tribe of indigenous South American natives. - [Gently Read Literature](https://threeguysonebook.com/gently-read-literature/) - Just when I thought there was nothing more fantastic Good Reads could do for me Daniel Casey asked me to write a review for the great Baby and other stories. Check out this great journal. - [When We Fell In Love - Matthew Norman](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-matthew-norman/) - Along with infuriating almost every other character in the book, Hank lampoons academia, makes a mockery of political correctness, goes on the local news and threatens to kill a goose, tries to run his son-in-law out of town, advises a young writer to always understate necrophilia, and manages to complete the painfully difficult task of making the reader love him. - [Death as a Side Effect by Ana María Shua](https://threeguysonebook.com/death-as-a-side-effect-by-ana-maria-shua/) - The novel is essentially an unsent letter to this disappeared lover: Ernesto’s desperate attempt to become real to himself without her. “For many years I lived to tell you what was happening in my life, and my every action or thought was transformed, at the very moment it was happening, into the words I would use to describe it to you.” - [The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Part One](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-strangers-child-by-alan-hollinghurst-part-one/) - I'm left with this memory from early in the book, when an artist and master of all-encompassing charm, spent a weekend, one lousy weekend, in a stuffy middle class domicile. The withdrawal of charm is a terrible thing. Once you've experienced it and then had it taken away. It's like being thrown out of Eden just when you were getting used to the place. - [Don DeLillo, I Denounce You](https://threeguysonebook.com/don-delillo-i-denounce-you/) - There is a huge gap in my reading history, and it is filled with unopened copies of every book written by Don DeLillo. That’s a lie, I read Libra. There was a time when I seemed to be convinced that Oswald couldn’t possibly have done that shooting job on his own. I read the first fifty pages of Underworld (that’s me lying again), which was great. Have I tried to make it work between myself and Don? Of course. - [Green Apple Books to petition state government to become exempt from sales tax](https://threeguysonebook.com/green-apple-books-to-petition-state-government-to-become-exempt-from-sales-tax/) - “Sure, the sales tax on books purchased at our store contributes to a better quality of life for all Californians, including social services for the elderly and disabled, but collecting sales tax kind of feels like overkill. We do enough for the community anyway,” - [You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik](https://threeguysonebook.com/you-deserve-nothing-by-alexander-maksik/) - Will teaches his kids in a freestyle fashion. They come to class willing to listen and learn, and he will listen and learn from them. The school in which he teaches seems buttoned up, and he’s a wild card in a stack of red queens. The pages of this book that take place in the classroom are so unique, powerful and hypnotizing, that it reminds me of every teacher I had that really made a difference in my life. - [Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolais](https://threeguysonebook.com/widow-stories-by-michelle-latiolais/) - Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolais is a compact collection, intimate and charged. The female protagonists in these eighteen stories are unnamed and vary in ages, and the theme of widowhood is entwined with stories that share a sense of loneliness and loss. - [The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Part Two](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-strangers-child-by-alan-hollinghurst-part-two/) - In The Stranger's Child, it's as if Alan Hollinghurst was in possession of a pile of faded rose petals, the kind you would keep in an old book as a memento, and with his writer's pride AH was going to impossibly make time reverse and reassemble the bloom from its faded parts. - [Lev Grossman at Vroman's Bookstore](https://threeguysonebook.com/lev-grossman-at-vromans-bookstore/) - Seriously, major nerd-fest. And Grossman was like the high priest. King, actually: Grossman recently won the Campbell Award for best new writer, and was crowned with a brass and jewel-studded tiara, which he donned for us last night. The nerds went wild. - [Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman](https://threeguysonebook.com/housewifely-arts-by-megan-mayhew-bergman/) - "At first, it is so quiet my teeth hurt." This line falls somewhere in the middle of this first story, and comes while our motherly narrator is standing in her childhood home, after she's broken in. She wants to show her son around, as they are on a trip to find a bird that was once a pet of our narrators mother, as the bird sounds just like her. - [On Murakami's 1Q84](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-murakamis-1q84/) - 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. - [The Cow That Milked Herself by Megan Mayhew Bergman](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-cow-that-milked-herself-by-megan-mayhew-bergman/) - The narrator's husband is named Wood, which seems almost intentionally funny, and Ms. Bergman once again gives readers a kind of relationship insider gossip, and captures what it feels like to have a partner that cares more about himself than his unborn child. But is it real until it's real? - [When We Fell In Love - Eric Olsen](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-eric-olsen/) - I was reading this stuff throughout my childhood and into adolescence, and so by the time I got to high school, I had a serious attitude problem, especially when it came to lit classes. They’re making us read Hawthorne and I’m wondering where the hell are the proton beam deflectors! - [Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman](https://threeguysonebook.com/birds-of-a-lesser-paradise-by-megan-mayhew-bergman/) - Mae narrates this place, like the Waltons without a baker's dozen crumbsnatchers to navigate. Dad has bought the local school, for a cool $1k, and rents it out. The town sounds like, if it were at a low enough elevation, could be flooded to make way for a resevoir. - [When We Fell In Love - Lenore Zion](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-lenore-zion/) - There’s nothing I love more than a good physical deformity. Thalidomide babies (otherwise known as flipper babies), good old fashioned amputees, the Elephant Man (whose official diagnosis was neurofibromatosis type 1), good old fashioned extra limbs, and so on and so forth. I’m a little bummed that Western medicine has significantly decreased the number of birth defects, and I’m extremely bummed that our state of political correctness has prevented the expansion of traveling freak shows. - [On Murakami's 1Q84 part 2](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-murakamis-1q84-part-2/) - What moved me most about the sometime diffident Tengo was his caring relationship to his dying, dispirited father. The patient, day-by-day attentiveness to that cryptic and silent lost man who may or may not be Tengo's biological father, the worked-to-the-bone retired TV fee collector, whose is a keeper of family secrets. And whether he was truly Tengo's father or not, Tengo cared for him as if he were. - [When We Fell In Love - Christopher Bollen](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-christopher-bollen/) - Oh my god, oh my god, as the final pages turned and Hercule Poirot turned with his stout Belgian frame to deliver the shocking conclusion. How could I have trusted the narrator, considered him a reliable eyewitness, believed he was on the side of good, when suddenly Poirot was accusing him (and, by first-person association, ME!!) of double homicide. - [What JE's Reading](https://threeguysonebook.com/what-jes-reading/) - After two novels and some short stories, I now number Chaon firmly among my favorite working American novelists (a group that also includes Stewart O'Nan and Jess Walter). What do these writers have in common? Pathos. Amazing characterization. Supreme confidence. A shit-ton of voice. - [Yesterday's Whales by Megan Mayhew Bergman](https://threeguysonebook.com/yesterdays-whales-by-megan-mayhew-bergman/) - How big is your carbon foot print? Malachi wants to know, and he sounds like a giant pain in the ass. He's convinced the human race will go down like the dinosaurs. So why is she with him? Oh, well, she gets pregnant, and Malachi wants her to choose between his set in stone ideas that the world isn't worth spit, and a child. - [On Murakami's 1Q84 part 3](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-murakamis-1q84-part-3/) - 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. - [Saving Face by Megan Mayhew Bergman](https://threeguysonebook.com/saving-face-by-megan-mayhew-bergman/) - Ms Bergman reveals in short bursts how she can slide a character that is run of the mill, down a path that is anything but. Does she bump into a farm hand that wants her to save more than an animal? I immediately thought of the movie Brubaker when I read this. - [A Tasty October](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-tasty-october/) - Fall is blockbuster season, but if you're looking for proof that there's much more to celebrate in October than eagerly awaited releases by Messrs. Eugenides and Murakami, look no further than this post. October also marks the release of Joshua Mohr's Damascus and Greg Olear's Fathermucker, two titles I read in galley months ago and enjoyed immensely. - [The Bathtub Spy by Tom Rachman](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bathtub-spy-by-tom-rachman/) - After stumbling on this story I immediately emailed Tom Rachman and demanded to know if this was the start to his next novel. Tom is an incredibly nice guy and a great writer, so he crushed my hopes and told me it was just a short story. But it could be his next novel, I think, hope, wish, dream. - [Three Weeks in December by Audrey Schulman](https://threeguysonebook.com/three-weeks-in-december-by-audrey-schulman/) - Social freaks sometimes relate better to animals than to people. Max finds when she gets to the mountain retreat of the embattled apes that she has a lot in common with them. In their society, the direct approach or direct eye contact is considered scary, either among their own kind or with humans. - [Oubliette by David Long](https://threeguysonebook.com/oubliette-by-david-long/) - Having established that Nathalie is daddy's little girl, our shrewd writer then seems to counter this conception with evidence that Nathalie has had an ideal early childhood with her mother. Hadn't she...this is an almost Wallace Stevens' turn of rhetoric...hadn't she done thus and so: a great idyllic set piece follows with mother scooping her daughter up for the beach, going out for treats and enjoying being home alone with mom. - [When We Fell In Love - Anna David](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-anna-david/) - For years, I’d tell people how obsessed I was with Catcher and they’d always recommend books that were “just like it”—usually A Separate Peace, which bored me silly. It was only when I read A Clockwork Orange and discovered the language that Anthony Burgess had crafted that I actually felt I’d found a book that appealed to me in the same way that Catcher in the Rye did. - [We Wanted To Be Writers by Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer](https://threeguysonebook.com/we-wanted-to-be-writers-by-eric-olsen-and-glenn-schaeffer/) - I'm a bit of a star fucker when it comes to writing colonies, and I have to say that this place, the Iowa Writers Workshop, is the wet dream of any wanna-be writer. I have a few dozen things on my plate right now which have prevented me from getting a few words out about this great book. - [When We Fell In Love - Larry Watson](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-larry-watson/) - An author can write like this? It’s possible not only to write about a neurotic smart ass teenager, but you can use his actual language to do it? Maybe I can write something like that someday—hell, I already talk like that. When I closed The Catcher in the Rye my own stories and novels were years ahead of me, but I was on my way. - [Monstress by Lysley Tenorio](https://threeguysonebook.com/monstress-by-lysley-tenorio/) - The title of this great first story comes from a hack Hollywood filmmaker who has convinced a beautiful girl from Manila to star in his horror picture. It's not really a horror movie, more like an Ed Wood production, and this guy, a Hollywood wanna-be named Gaz, has just spirited the beautiful Reva Gogo away from a life of dirt cheap movies and a no future director boyfriend named Checkers. - [Attraction by David Long](https://threeguysonebook.com/attraction-by-david-long/) - Our swain, Charlie, lives decidedly upscale. His older brother goes to West Point. His father is an architect. Charlie is slated for Rensselaer. My gosh, Rensselaer, the Cambridge of engineering schools! When I was in high school, I knew a kid who was going to Rensselaer. He intimidated the shit out of me. - [When We Fell In Love - Joan Leegant](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-joan-leegant/) - In the early 1960s, my parents had what I suppose was a typical-for-the-time collection on the shelves in our post-war suburban living room. A row of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, for which they had a subscription. James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. Leon Uris’s Exodus, of course. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (partially hidden). From Here to Eternity by James Jones. The much loved How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewelyn. - [When We Fell In Love - Tyler McMahon](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-tyler-mcmahon/) - Amidst the pleasure, I remember feeling a twinge of resentment toward the teacher who’d turned me on to this story—as though she’d somehow usurped a piece of my individuality before I’d gotten the chance to discover it for myself. - [The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-next-right-thing-by-dan-barden/) - If you find it hard to get your head around an ex-cop who becomes an exclusive home designer, the bridge is AA. Terry is more than Randy's best friend, He was also Randy's sponsor in AA. Terry asked Randy, his life a wreck, what he would want to do if he could do anything. Then Terry made sure that Randy went back to school and earned the credentials that enabled him to design homes. - [The Postmortal by Drew Magary](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-postmortal-by-drew-magary/) - By the time things go Cormac McCarthy, you will have a hard time looking at this book because it's so weird and sad. When Magary takes us up to 30,000 feet for a view of the rest of the world's solution to over population, you get the idea about "Great Correction". - [Interview with Drew Magary](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-drew-magary/) - Obviously, the book itself is fairly pessimistic, but that doesn't mean I necessarily feel the same way. The book is meant to be a nightmare. Maybe we would find a way to manage a population that doesn't age, but that wasn't where the idea took me. The idea took me right to the shitter. FUN! - [Thinking and Feeling: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men](https://threeguysonebook.com/thinking-and-feeling-robert-penn-warrens-all-the-kings-men/) - 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. - [Hemingway on The Chauffeurs of Madrid](https://threeguysonebook.com/hemingway-on-the-chauffeurs-of-madrid/) - Tomas is 4 foot eleven, an unattractive dwarf. Then Hemingway wows me by bringing in the court dwarfs that appear in paintings by Velasquez..only this one's in jeans, has broken teeth and likes Scotch whisky, which makes me presume that he is drinking Hemingway's. - [Dispatch from the Story Prize Underdog](https://threeguysonebook.com/dispatch-from-the-story-prize-underdog/) - “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.” - [Montaigne Reads A Book](https://threeguysonebook.com/montaigne-reads-a-book/) - 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. - [420 Characters by Lou Beach](https://threeguysonebook.com/420-characters-by-lou-beach/) - It is like a jukebox at the diner, flip through until you find one you like. There is one that I particularly love, about a man falling to earth afer his parachute didn't open. He hits a pigeon in his flight, and the bird dies pressed against his chest. The man can feel the birds heart beating it's last beats as they fall to earth. - [The Perfect Gift](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-perfect-gift/) - So the volume I recommended is now in the process of disappearing from your local bookstore. When my rep told me that I couldn't have a reorder, my response was: "Well, at least I have one". I had bought it. I'm glad that I didn't take the chance and ask for a review copy. I probably wouldn't have gotten it. - [Flatscreen by Adam Wilson](https://threeguysonebook.com/flatscreen-by-adam-wilson/) - Eli whips us with is quick wit, savvy tongue. He can't stand his brother, and his mother is "putting up" with him. There is a wave of depression that wafts from these characters. It does not crush the book, but gives the sense that even prozac won't help. These worries are permanent. - [Vivian Maier: Street Photographer](https://threeguysonebook.com/vivian-maier-street-photographer/) - The kid on page 11: In striped 50's tee and slicked-down hair. What is he, 13? He's down the corner from a crap town bar called the Minute Tavern. Can you imagine yourself going into a bar called the Minute Tavern? On his left a pile of ash cans on the street. You have to be tough on the street and this kid knows it. He glares a swagger into the camera. "Can I take your picture, kid?" - [The Sleepers of 2011, part 1 - Jonathan Evison](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-sleepers-of-2011-part-1-jonathan-evison/) - Some titles have to make their own way in the world almost exclusively on the strength of the work itself, and the power of good old fashioned word-of-mouth. Since we love the spirit of independence around here, we thought we'd give you something a little different than the run- of-the-mill “best of” list this year. - [Best of 2011, part 2: Jason Rice](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-of-2011-part-2-jason-rice/) - At first you might see this book as pornography. I suppose if it helps you pick the book up then that's okay. This is a razor sharp snapshot of several families, circa: right now. It examines every inch of their personalities, from eating disorders to sexual frustrations to the local PTA. It also showers you with more graphic sex than anyone could possibly handle. In the words of Kate Christensen, "it's unputdownable." - [Best of 2011, Part 3: Dennis Haritou](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-of-2011-part-3-dennis-haritou/) - It's like friendship really is if we could live out several dimensions of it at once. And do you really need to have the finished version? I'd rather have three or four versions of the same story without an ending than one story with a decisive conclusion. Love the mess. - [Best of 2011, Part 4: Jason Chambers](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-of-2011-part-4-jason-chambers/) - I loved this short novel about Finch, a corporate drone fired from his job creating fake lives in the blogosphere to promote his company's products. He receives an offer from an eccentric gazillionaire to become the man's "garden hermit" and heads down the road to completely removing himself from social contacts. A sort of Walden meets Being There. - [Signs and Wonders by Alix Ohlin](https://threeguysonebook.com/signs-and-wonders-by-alix-ohlin/) - She tells me that they are both stuck in this college town, teaching tidy little classes meant for people with no real goal above teaching. They want a divorce she tells me, and I wonder aloud, (weirdly I'm not out of breath), why? They're cool with it she says, as we jog in place at a traffic light. It turns green, we take off again, and she keeps telling me more about Kathleen. - [Forks by Alix Ohlin](https://threeguysonebook.com/forks-by-alix-ohlin/) - They have taken Alan to Stephanie's place, as Tom describes how he got to this part of the world. We switch back and forth momentarily between what Tom understands and what he is a witness to. Alan is killing himself one bender at a time. But neither drugs or booze will do the job right. - [The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories by Joseph Gordon-Levitt](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-tiny-book-of-tiny-stories-by-joseph-gordon-levitt/) - The book itself reminds of an art school freshman's journal that has been left behind absently in the lunchroom, a stranger picks it up only to discover it is almost too good to give back to this student. Each little page gives a different riddle, or joke, a conundrum wrapped in a riddle, or a funny little saying. - [When We Fell In Love - Dan Barden](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-dan-barden/) - I'd come to Cal hoping to become the kind of poet and scholar who would look down on American movies with big strong heroes in them, but something else happened: I fell in love with directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks. I'd grown up in Orange County, and my father had a professional relationship with John Wayne, a great star for both filmmakers. I'd come to Cal thinking that this actor, particularly, represented all that I had hated about my life up to that point - [The Odds by Stewart O'Nan](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-odds-by-stewart-onan/) - 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 - [New York Diaries](https://threeguysonebook.com/new-york-diaries/) - Resolutions are such empty things, worthy of being thrown out with the January 1st trash. Reading this diary anthology, you can learn what people really committed their lives to on any particular day. What they fought or played through in the dark, because we're all in the dark about any particular day we're living. 1923 may be past, but turn to the page of someone who is still living it in their diary entry. - [Buzzers by Kevin Moffett](https://threeguysonebook.com/buzzers-by-kevin-moffett/) - Andrew is sitting on a plane bound for London when he hears the news that his father has died, via text message from his own mother. Andrew doesn't move. It's not as though he doesn't care. It is callous not to get off the plane that is sitting at the gate waiting to leave. He is torn between doing what he wants, living his life without this tragedy, and doing what is right. - [Story Prize Finalists](https://threeguysonebook.com/story-prize-finalists/) - The finalists for this year's Story Prize are The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner), We Others by Steven Millhauser (Knopf), and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books). The Story Prize, which annually honors the top book of short fiction, chose the three finalists from a field of 92 books from 60 different publishers. The judges for this year's prize are Sherman Alexie, Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman. - [The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan by Rajesh Parameswaran](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-strange-career-of-dr-raju-gopalarajan-by-rajesh-parameswaran/) - Gopi checks out some books from the library and decides that he is going to be a doctor that specializes in women's troubles. It's hilariously ambitious, and can only lead to catastrophy. Gopi easily fools his wife, and she thinks the books he is reading are his solution to their inability to have children. Gopi is fooling people without trying. He occupies a small office that was once housed vertrinarian's office. - [When Robots Can Read, Will You Still Want To?](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-robots-can-read-will-you-still-want-to/) - 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! - [Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam](https://threeguysonebook.com/crusoes-daughter-by-jane-gardam/) - It's brilliant sleight-of-hand by Gardam who keeps her fictional cake while eating it. She has a character who's a social misfit, impractical for all her vaunted practicality and self-reliance, but still makes her a daughter-in-law via role playing. And it's not unkind, it's one the the many surreal but touching scenes in the book. It seems to scream, man, this is weird, only no one says it is, which is ideal. - [Interview with Matthew Norman](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-matthew-norman/) - I’d say I shopliftabout 75% of the books I read. I can run surprisingly fast for a tall person. But, when I actually do buy a book, I try to hit The Ivy Bookstore—which, for those who don’t know, is a great indie bookstore in Baltimore. My two year old single-handedly destroys their children’s book department every time she’s there. - [Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted by Dan Chaon](https://threeguysonebook.com/patrick-lane-flabbergasted-by-dan-chaon/) - Death hangs around Brandon like a necklace. People die, and that's what defines this story, but it seems to me that this is more about Brandon's inability to accept death as a part of life. Of course he is moving on, but is he really? His parents have voluntarily departed this mortal coil, and left Brandon and his sister the family house. Brandon lets that drift away, and he finds it particularly hard to enter his parents bedroom where they died. - [Independent Bookstores and the Rise of the Zombie](https://threeguysonebook.com/independent-bookstores-and-the-rise-of-the-zombie/) - 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. - [Shame](https://threeguysonebook.com/shame/) - In the end, the brother and sister played by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in the searing but warmly realistic 'Shame', are so clearly ruined that it is hard to imagine a pain they have not endured. But what? I don't care what it was, to be honest. Perhaps this incident was so horrendous that nothing they ever do, good or bad, will match that moment. - [The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bellwether-revivals-by-benjamin-wood/) - But one evening (this sounds like a fairy tale or an improbable upsurge of romanticism in the story), Oscar passes Kings College Chapel on the way home from work. There is an open-to-the-public performance of evensong taking place. Entranced by the singing and the extraordinary eloquence of the organ, Oscar goes in to listen. Oscar is an atheist but he is drawn in by the experience. - [Birds of a Lesser Paradise Video](https://threeguysonebook.com/birds-of-a-lesser-paradise/) - If you read the blog, you know how much I loved this collection. Full disclosure, the author sent me cookies. (after I reviewed the book) - [The Book Thief](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-book-thief/) - What if you sent your first editions to a famous author to get signed, and this author didn't send them back? - [The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood, the conclusion](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bellwether-revivals-by-benjamin-wood-the-conclusion/) - The students have their own digs off-campus, an old Victorian house that the Bellwether family owns. So even within the Cambridge campus they are a hothouse group held apart. The 20-something group has a shared identity like a vaporous social envelope. They see the world through collective eyes. It's as if Benjamin Wood has created this group of friends as a proto-character in itself. - [The Pile, or What I'm Reading Now.](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-pile-or-what-im-reading-now/) - The book that never leaves my side, Inside by Alix Ohlin, on sale June. This novel is so good, hard to ignore, searing, funny, impressively slick, that I can't believe I've never read her books. If you poke around the blog you will see my reviews of her collection, Signs and Wonders, which goes on sale at the same time as Inside. Ms. Ohlin will also be doing a little blog work, keep your eyes peeled. - [Give a Book to a Stranger](https://threeguysonebook.com/give-a-book-to-a-stranger/) - 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… - [Pure by Andrew Miller](https://threeguysonebook.com/pure-by-andrew-miller/) - In the 19th century, the writing of historical novels was a big deal, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, A Tale of Two Cities... They were eagerly gobbled up by the rising middle class, who longed for literature that would expand their horizons. - [On Adopting a Writer](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-adopting-a-writer/) - I recently passed on reviewing a poetry collection. It's difficult to write about verse. I've only tried it once or twice. But what really stopped me was that I hadn't read the last four or five seminal works by the author. So I felt I lacked the background. I prefer to adopt a writer. - [Inside by Alix Ohlin](https://threeguysonebook.com/inside-by-alix-ohlin/) - Just when you think a thread of this story is complete, you turn the page and discover another angle. By the time we get to Hollywood with Anne, where the book hits it stride, I began comparing this novel to the brilliant Eat the Document. When I finished that book, I was begging for another hundred pages. With Inside, and Anne, I would have gone on to War & Peace lengths just to see how Anne turned nothing into something. - [The Drought by Miles Harvey](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-drought-by-miles-harvey/) - This is billed as neo-fabulists/surrealists writing, and I couldn't disagree more. For me it seems like Coen brothers writing, almost, and that's a high compliment. Maybe that's fabulist or surreal, I've never been one to judge. It isn't even that surreal, when you think about it, as nothing falls from the sky, and no one gets oddly run over by something terrible. - [The Reader's Resume Cover Letter: I'm The Reader You Should Want](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-readers-resume-cover-letter-im-the-reader-you-should-want/) - 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. - [Over There](https://threeguysonebook.com/over-there/) - 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. - [The March Pile](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-march-pile/) - I finally got my hands on the much talked about Other People We Married by Emma Straub, and it sits quietly on my desk like a coiled snake. She's everywhere, and seems to be more plugged in with what's going on in the book world than almost anyone I know. - [P.E. by Victor Lodato](https://threeguysonebook.com/p-e-by-victor-lodato/) - It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a New Yorker story and there have been one or two near misses in the past several months. I’m glad I waited. You think that maybe this is the one but you’re not absolutely sure. Then you strike a pen that’s seems to write in liquid gold instead of ink and you are absolutely sure. So my advice, story lovers, is to wait for the real thing. Don’t compromise. - [Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike](https://threeguysonebook.com/rabbit-run-rabbit-redux-rabbit-is-rich-rabbit-at-rest-by-john-updike/) - Harry leaves his wife and son at the start, which left me wondering where it was going, but he comes back. Harry is obsessed with getting laid, not uncommon in a marriage, but Updike digs into Harry for a long time, examining his former basketball career, (redone by Franzen in Freedom, if anyone other than me and Kakutani were paying attention). - [Some People Must Really Fall In Love by Emma Straub](https://threeguysonebook.com/some-people-must-really-fall-in-love-by-emma-straub/) - Amy is smitten with Paul, a student who, in her words, has seen enough of the Ohio sun to make his hair the color of straw, and his eyes the color of cold water, from a pond. What does cold water look like? It is a great question, but a little bit quaint. - [Ambition & the Writer](https://threeguysonebook.com/ambition-the-writer/) - Your real opponents and the smartest ones, are those that cultivate an indifference to your work and the people who were born indifferent. But we know that those who were born indifferent to literature are dead to the world, so they don’t count. Writers know that the world consists of an arrangement of letters, letters that live and breathe and cry out and sing. - [Rosemary, from Other People We Married, by Emma Straub](https://threeguysonebook.com/rosemary-from-other-people-we-married-by-emma-straub/) - Motherhood is no joke, and watching a woman evaporate before your eyes, especially when you come home from work, and find that woman going up in steam, and holding the thing that means the world to you, is a dish typically served hot. - [Dead Tree Readers](https://threeguysonebook.com/dead-tree-readers/) - It's the nature of Eden to be recognized only when you are leaving it. The studious, private, tactile appropriation of the text in the self-imposed isolation of a physical book, shielded from the ten thousand-eyed monster of marketing, may become a rare experience, celebrated by a bereft band of book connoisseurs, dead tree readers. - [The Petrified Forest of Book Marketing and the Great Chain of Other People's Writers](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-petrified-forest-of-book-marketing-and-the-great-chain-of-other-peoples-writers/) - I call petrified any form of book marketing that is doesn't encourage the end user to give back. Example: newspaper ads. What's on offer from houses most of the time is book NARCeting where publishers try to sell books that marketing departments haven't read. Do the writer a favor and don't sell their book. Tell the - [Old Filth by Jane Gardam](https://threeguysonebook.com/old-filth-by-jane-gardam/) - The central character is a compass that points in many directions from it’s central locus. Or it’s like the beacon of a lighthouse that illuminates reality, including other characters, with its own distinctive coloring as it sweeps around the circumference of the social ocean. - [Pile](https://threeguysonebook.com/pile/) - Someone has to write about 9-11 NYC and their name doesn't have to be McInerney. There is this weird light that is captured in a few novels, especially ones about NYC in the last ten years. I'm sure that's a generalization. Certainly, it is not to be overlooked because it is actually being published. - [When We Fell In Love - Bruce Holbert](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-bruce-holbert/) - My father’s mother, Dot, pioneered the country I came from. Her name appears in all but the most sterile of regional histories. She taught school in one room school houses and traveled by sled to teach in homes. The canyon bracketing her farm is still named after her father. - [Interview with Emily St John Mandel](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/) - We're undeniably obscure in this culture. The overwhelming majority of "famous novelists" are only really famous within the literary world; my suspicion is that a poll of the general population would report that Snooki has a higher level of name-recognition than, say, Jennifer Egan. I think of my audience as anyone who likes their fiction both literary and plot-driven. - [Lola Quartet by Emily St John Mandel](https://threeguysonebook.com/lola-quartet-by-emily-st-john-mandel/) - Mandel’s writing contains countless lines that might get overlooked, and it is not because of fast prose. She wanders, politely, and pauses just as you would in the middle of your day when your mind darts to something pure or radiant. - [The House on Paradise Street by Sofka Zinovief](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-house-on-paradise-street-by-sofka-zinovief/) - No one escapes politics in The House on Paradise Street. Antigone was a communist insurgent during WW2, fighting in the mountains to rid Greece of the Nazis. Her sister Alexandra swung to the opposite pole and is traditionally religious and conservative. Her husband, Spiros, was a Nazi sympathizer, something that Alexandra doesn’t want to admit to herself or to anyone else. - [A Map Of Modern Palm Springs by Emma Straub](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-map-of-modern-palm-springs-by-emma-straub/) - The hot air and the cloudless vista bathe our sexy heroines and create a canvas that is more like a prison. I liked how the sister with the most to say has nothing to lose, and the other, well, she’s just in it for the sunshine. When she admits to herself that the only coping mechanism she has is to make fun of her sister in a stand up comedy routine. - [Canada by Richard Ford](https://threeguysonebook.com/canada-by-richard-ford/) - 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. - [From Stag Preston to Smoking Eyebrows: Why Rock Novels Rarely Work](https://threeguysonebook.com/from-stag-preston-to-smoking-eyebrows-why-rock-novels-rarely-work/) - I’ve interviewed hundreds of bands and once, even, toured with a group. I sold their t-shirts up and down the West Coast. In that time I learned touring rock bands are mostly boring. I also learned the above story arc is never the case. Thirdly, I learned rock bands love cigarettes. Who knew? - [Conversations: Jason Rice & Very Unphotogenic](https://threeguysonebook.com/conversations-jason-rice-very-unphotogenic/) - Has TV become the '70s cinema of the '00s? That decade produced some of the most interesting movies made in our lifetimes. I don't see movies of today coming close to anything that I want to watch. TV has replaced movies, ad hoc. Books. No one really reads. Not in the numbers of those who watch TV and talk about it. - [The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-green-shore-by-natalie-bakopoulos/) - I can't imagine wanting a collective identity either so I'm not very Greek. But I'm Greek enough to love this book. The Green Shore reminds me of the old novels on Greek themes that I read in my student days...all the Kazantzakis I could obtain. - [Funfair by Ferdinand von Schirach](https://threeguysonebook.com/funfair-by-ferdinand-von-shirach/) - The economy of this story, the sheer speed of the prose, is breathtaking. There isn't a moment wasted, a sentence too heavy with metaphor, or a silly cliché. A girl brings over a few drinks, gravity teaches a lesson and presto, we have an awful, awful crime. - [The Absolutist by John Boyne](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-absolutist-by-john-boyne/) - Information is usually veiled in The Absolutist before it is disclosed. It’s a story where even the paragraphs can seem to be veiled off from one another. As you progress through the novel, the veils are ever so slowly and delicately removed, as if you were unwrapping bandages off a patient with painful injuries. - [James Salter to Receive 2012 PEN/Malamud Award](https://threeguysonebook.com/james-salter-to-receive-2012-penmalamud-award/) - James Salter has been selected to receive the 25th annual PEN/Malamud Award. Given annually since 1988 in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, this award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction. - [DNA by Ferdinand von Schirach](https://threeguysonebook.com/dna-by-ferdinand-von-schirach/) - Two young street kids allow get caught up in a seedy situation which at first sounds like something it isn't. At least that's what they claim. The dirt under their fingernails becomes the evidence, so to speak, that allows the law to slowly close in. - [Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain](https://threeguysonebook.com/billy-lynns-long-halftime-walk-by-ben-fountain/) - A lot of people are going to call this partisan fiction, but they'll be missing the point. Like it or not, this book says a lot about the American way of life. I keep hearing it referred to as a satire in the realm of Catch-22, but I don't think that does it justice, either. Fountain is a storyteller first, and a social critic second, which is how he manages to absorb the reader so fully. - [Interview with Benjamin Wood](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-benjamin-wood/) - I did not attend the university, but I lived in Cambridge for three years, which was about how long it took to write the novel. Walking around the place, it is difficult to ignore the monuments to history that surround you. It is a greatly inspiring environment for someone who values the importance of learning, as I do, but it is also an overwhelming place for someone who is not an invited member of that world—the colleges are mostly walled off and unavailable to non-members, and there’s a feeling that you’ll somehow never be completely connected with it, as much as you peer in from the outside. - [When We Fell In Love - Alix Ohlin](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-alix-ohlin/) - The story was about a girl not much older than I was, traveling to a big city by train. A man—a priest; fat; ugly—sits down next to her and falls asleep. Accidentally, he lets his hand brush against her thigh. She lets it happen. Even once she realizes he isn’t, in fact, asleep, she doesn’t put a stop to it. I blushed furiously and kept reading, hunched over in the chair, hiding the cover as if it were something dirty—and it was dirty, profoundly and interestingly dirty in a way that, no exaggeration, changed my life. - [Children by Ferdinand von Schirach](https://threeguysonebook.com/children-by-ferdinand-von-schirach/) - Our hero, or shall we say, a hero to be, has been living a great life, kids someday, money in the bank, a good gig to occupy his days and a wife he still finds sexy. Then one morning the law pays him a visit. Turns out he's been touching, inappropriately, a young girl. He has some saucy videos on his laptop, and the hammer swings heavy on his head. - [We Only Know So Much by Elizabeth Crane](https://threeguysonebook.com/we-only-know-so-much-by-elizabeth-crane/) - Why do people move to the suburbs? Does it's own particular insanity offer a relief from the city? Why am I so compelled by this kind of writing? I live in the suburbs, but don't really think it means more than that. Are there suburbs anymore? People stacked in tight, next to other people, stacking on top of...you get the idea. - [When We Fell In Love: Elizabeth Crane](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-elizabeth-crane/) - Here’s why this book kills me. This is the premise: a guy has ninety-nine brothers, and they all gather at their father’s house for a dinner. The first person narrator briefly seems affable and reliable, but a few pages in there are clues otherwise. The story takes place in just one twenty-four hour period and builds to a rather dramatic climax. I don’t want to say too much more if you haven’t read it. - [The World Without You by Joshua Henkin](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-world-without-you-by-joshua-henkin/) - It’s amazing what you can learn about two people if you put them in a van together for a long drive into the country. Lily drives Noelle, with two of her kids in the back seat, to their parent’s place in Lenox. Even though Lily has promised herself that she’s not getting into a fight with youngest sister Noelle, it virtually happens anyway. Lily is totally secular and Noelle is an orthodox Jew. Noelle didn’t attend deceased brother Leo’s wedding because he married outside the faith. - [Interview with Joshua Henkin](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-joshua-henkin/) - Good fiction is always about the particular, never about the general. The critic may tell you that Toni Morrison is writing about African American women, but she isn’t. She’s writing about Sula. Tim O’Brien isn’t writing about the Vietnam War; he’s writing about Jimmy Cross. Updike isn’t writing about New England WASPs; he’s writing about Rabbit Angstrom. - [I decided to write or perish - James Salter](https://threeguysonebook.com/i-decided-to-write-or-perish-james-salter/) - We've spilled some ink on James Salter in the recent past, including his recent receipt of the PEN/Malamud Award. Now Open Road is releasing two of his earlier novels in e-format. They've also put together this great video and, below, an excerpt from A Sport and A Pastime for us. - [This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman](https://threeguysonebook.com/this-beautiful-life-by-helen-schulman/) - All along Richard is on the tip of a big deal, brokering it wildly like some bookmaker at OTB, and Lizzie is torturing a former lover by pretending to be someone she's not. Lizzie is bored to death, Richard is earning enough for both of them. Their children, Coco the chinese baby is old enough to surf the internet, Jake is winning the "dumbest kid in Manhattan" award every day. - [Why Revising Your Novel is like wanting to Throw Up.](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-revising-your-novel-is-like-wanting-to-throw-up/) - You're right that editing is just the first level of hell. Getting published can be a nightmare and then you have to worry about how you'll be received or if you'll just be ignored. The whole process is pretty miserable, which makes me think that novel writing is for masochists. That old stereotype of the depressed, alcoholic, volatile writer persists for a reason. Even Zadie Smith has said that she can't read her old novels without dying inside. - [When We Fell In Love - Benjamin Wood](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-benjamin-wood/) - The macabre quality of the stories was so enthralling: Dahl was a writer who could make my spine tingle and my lungs ache with laughter at the same moment. The story about the young girl who sits on a porcupine and has the prickles extracted by a gleeful dentist, Mr Myers, will stay with me forever—“Quite honestly, I cant pretend, I’ve ever pulled things from this end...” - [Girls - HBO](https://threeguysonebook.com/girls-hbo/) - What makes this show different than that heat rash Sex in the City, is that it's cruelly realistic, which of course makes me salivate for it. I love Lena Dunham's badass writing, its almost like she really doesn't give a shit how it looks, sounds or feels. - [What Readers Know - Ed Haley and Victoria Patterson](https://threeguysonebook.com/what-readers-know-ed-haley-and-victoria-patterson/) - I think you’d like Turgenev. He is always ironic but he is gentler and less determinist than Chekhov. Sometimes in reading Chekhov’s stories I grow angry with him for not allowing his characters to escape or change. Chekhov’s way of seeing the world around him has a moral significance... - [There But For The by Ali Smith](https://threeguysonebook.com/there-but-for-the-ali-smith/) - In There But For The, the more you love wordplay, the more uplifting a character you are. And Miles is a master. He writes Mark a letter on what the word and means. The word is a conjunction. I hope you got that because I'm not helping you with it. There is also a fine sentence later on that uses the word the five times at the beginning of a sentence. The the the... I can only handle three iterations. That's my limit. - [The Inverted Forest by John Dalton](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-inverted-forest-by-john-dalton/) - One of the best features of Dalton's writing in The Inverted Forest is the careful generosity of it all. In a story with ample opportunity for offense and cruelty, his portrayal of Wyatt, his colleagues (save one), and his campers, even at their worst, is tinged with humor. It renders the reader's shock at the transgressions greater, and makes the book's resolution very satisfying. - [Two Friends by Alberto Moravia](https://threeguysonebook.com/two-friends-by-alberto-moravia/) - In the original manuscript, Moravia also followed his fascinating practice of writing select passages into the text in triplicate. Why would he do this? I suppose to keep one version pristine while he would be left free to experiment with revising the other two instances of the passage. Moravia would revise by writing over his typewritten pages. Are you old enough to remember typewriter ribbon? Yes, you did get ink on your hands. - [Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman](https://threeguysonebook.com/domestic-violets-by-matthew-norman/) - Matthew Norman’s characters remind me of Lit Life by Kurt Wenzel, almost. Where Lit Life lost its edge, Domestic Violets comes to life with a realistically poignant sorrow mixed with resignation. At the heart of this story is a writer who can’t get it up. He has whiskey dick, except he is not drinking or having sex. I laughed so hard when I read this first page, and you will too. - [The Bret Easton Ellis Interview Part 2](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bret-easton-ellis-interview-part-2/) - The little terrors of the everyday, they shock people. Casey Anthony trial is shocking in the terms of the details that keep coming out. They bother and disturb me. I turn CNN off if I hear chloroform, or mouth taped over. She partied after she murdered her little girl. There is still stuff, as a culture, what are we shocked by, or are we even interested in being shocked anymore. That’s interesting to me. - [Tea Obreht Wins Orange Prize](https://threeguysonebook.com/tea-obreht-wins-orange-prize/) - The Tiger's Wife is an exceptional book and Téa Obreht is a truly exciting new talent. Obreht's powers of observation and her understanding of the world are remarkable. By skilfully spinning a series of magical tales she has managed to bring the tragedy of chronic Balkan conflict thumping into our front rooms with a bittersweet vivacity. - [An Interview with Kate Christensen](https://threeguysonebook.com/an-interview-with-kate-christensen/) - ...friendship is a peculiar animal – like marriages, no two are alike. Sometimes a friendship runs its course, and its end comes as a relief. But the end can also be as heartbreaking and devastating as a romantic breakup. Friendships can be as intensely passionate, turbulent, and complicated as love affairs, and the sense of shared history, trust, and love in a lifelong friendship is as sustaining and important as marriage. And two friends’ mutual delight in each other’s company can sometimes even surpass the feelings between spouses, which can become muddy and dulled over time, with the familiarity of daily life, the boredom and tension of monogamy and cohabitation. - [Valentines by Olaf Olafsson](https://threeguysonebook.com/valentines-by-olaf-olafsson/) - I finally hit upon the technique of taking a break after reading one of these stories and then coming back to Valentines. Olafsson's stories pack too much of a wallop to be read straight through. But the writer wields his sentences with a martial art. He seems to employ the greatest economy in his shots but the reader still goes down, floored by the intensity. - [Last Werewolf Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/last-werewolf-giveaway/) - The good folks at Knopf have offered Three Guys One Book three finished copies of The Last Werewolf to give to our readers. These are the lovely first editions with the blood red page edges. Awesome. - [The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-last-werewolf-by-glen-duncan/) - after 400 years of ravaging the innocent and the deserving (“Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist...I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants”), he's come to the end. He's the last of his kind, hunted by professional zealots with their own particular taste for blood, and he's ready to just accept his fate, expose himself and go, as gently as his hunters will allow, into that good night. - [Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events by Kevin Moffett](https://threeguysonebook.com/further-interpretations-of-real-life-events-by-kevin-moffett/) - Kevin Moffett delivers the characters of this story like a true father and son, the arguments are real, and they have a forever-binding tragedy dropped in their laps. The son is a bit of show off, like someone that screams I'M A WRITER, LOOK AT ME!. The father writes and submits his stories to the same journals his son does. - [Nostalgia](https://threeguysonebook.com/nostalgia/) - We can't rely on people for nostalgia because people change. They get old and fat and remind us that time is racing forward at an obscene pace. The only touchstones you can really count on are the music, movies, and books of your childhood. - [May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes](https://threeguysonebook.com/may-we-be-forgiven-by-a-m-homes/) - 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. - [My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante](https://threeguysonebook.com/my-brilliant-friend-by-elena-ferrante/) - Ferrante understands that friendship is an interplay between alliance and competition. This dance of friends emulating and then pulling away from each other continues through their adolescence. Lila is the rebel, her courage unrelenting. She can even stand up to the roughneck boys of the neighborhood who try to bully her. Pity the boys. - [When We Fell In Love - Robert Anasi](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-robert-anasi/) - It’s hard to underestimate the damage Joyce did to the novel. So many difficult books, for so many years. The list of victims is long – from John Dos Passos to Malcolm Lowry, John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino, and that’s just in English. I came to the cult late but it still took me a decade after college to free myself – my (unpublished, unpublishable) first novel has an entire chapter written in stream-of-consciousness interspersed with the lingo of short-order cooks (really). The writing isn’t terrible, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. - [Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn](https://threeguysonebook.com/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn/) - The Amazing Amy books are a wonderful piece of skywriting on Flynn’s part, and these little moments blow in and out of the book. The years leading up to the disappearance which is the central theme of this novel are so precisely woven together that I can only imagine how wonderfully fantastically intricate Flynn’s flowchart on her office wall must have been. - [The Pile - July](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-pile-july/) - The most shocking development to date is the fact that I've not read The Angry Buddhist by Seth Greenland. I typically sell Greenland soap on a rope, and loved his first two books, yet, this summer pile has gotten in my way. My apologies. I should be reading it shortly. - [The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-news-from-spain-by-joan-wickersham/) - The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham consists of seven associated stories which are all called "The News from Spain".There’s an opening quote from Robert Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony...in diverging stories, all others are reflected. And there’s a wonderful conditional conversation that closes the first story, where Wickersham outlines a whole dialogue, laden with significance, that might have took place but didn’t. - [Forty Stories](https://threeguysonebook.com/forty-stories/) - Harper Perennial has risen to the very top of my list of great publishers. They do it right, from publishing writers in trade paper and making it work, (Matt Norman, Domestic Violets - Elizabeth Crane and We Only Know So Much) while bringing some kick ass fiction into a world filled with distractions. - [Interpreters of Men Get It On by Fiona Maazel](https://threeguysonebook.com/interpreters-of-men-get-it-on-by-fiona-maazel/) - I am also a big fan of spying. Listening to other people talk and then writing it down. I often sit in diners and coffee shops and transcribe what I'm hearing and work it into a piece of fiction. Who will know? Nobody, that's who. - [Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller](https://threeguysonebook.com/year-of-the-gadfly-by-jennifer-miller/) - At the heart of this wonderfully cosmic and flawless novel is a love story, or two and this reporter in training armature is just that, something to hang it all on. What separate’s Gadfly from becoming a run of the mill coming of age in the time of boarding school novel, is the fractured narrative-time-space-continuum story lines that zip forward and back with great ease. - [The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham (2)](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-news-from-spain-by-joan-wickersham-2/) - This second iteration of The News from Spain is an indie bookstore lover’s story. Have you ever worked in a bookstore and had a customer try to pick you up? Have you ever, throwing caution and your job to the winds, tried to pick a customer up? As Rebecca discovers, your friends could have seen this coming. - [Newsroom](https://threeguysonebook.com/newsroom/) - Sorkin writes incredibly earnest material for his actors to blather on about. Lots of it, long-winded and heavy on big words. He jams the script with dialogue that can only come out of an actor's mouth, long speeches, heartfelt crusade-like hyperbole that sounds as if it were written for the actors, just for them. No one talks like that. No one. - [When We Fell In Love - David Gillham](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-david-gillham/) - I have always been captivated by history. Not just its broad sweep, but also its intimate corners, where the shadows gather. And Berlin, during the Second World War, was a city defined by its shadows. In 1943, the Nazis were trying to distract the population from the bitter truth that Germany was losing the war. - [Expectations by Peter Stamm](https://threeguysonebook.com/expectations-by-peter-stamm/) - When I read "Expectations", the first story in the collection, We’re Flying, I was surprised to discover that I was reading a tightly told tale of erotic bliss. I’ve heard so much about this collection, its no wonder PW gave it a starred review. It’s not that this was soft porn, or some odd tale of a person telling a friend about his or her sexual hopes, dreams and desires. It was Peter Stamm telling me of someone who is desperate with loneliness and broken by longing. - [The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham (3)](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-news-from-spain-by-joan-wickersham-3/) - I find the literature of Joan Wickersham emotionally involving, inevitably intelligent and with a flair for the best kind of drama, which is the drama between complexly realized people who find despite their best intentions, that their instincts and passions don’t mesh. Wickersham writes that we choose in rapture and ignorance, which her stories light up, as if we were peering into an illuminating tube, our vision diverted into glittering angles. - [Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates](https://threeguysonebook.com/disturbing-the-peace-by-richard-yates/) - It is crazy that I have not read this book. John reminds me of myself, I never wanted to kill anyone, certainly not. But the horrors of work, the mundane brutality, and how cold life can be, is something I can identify with. John realizes that life is short and to live it sober would be such a mistake. So he takes after booze like a dog chasing a car, with the same results. - [Books I Know - The Pile, Part 1](https://threeguysonebook.com/books-i-know-the-pile-part-1/) - I have stubbed my toe on a new imprint at Penguin, Blue Rider Press, maybe there was some big to do, a party, which I wasn’t invited to, but that’s okay. Two books from the press that caught my eye, Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton, on sale now, and it got that great daily NYT review. It’s a smashing little package. - [Restless Nights: Selected Stories by Dino Buzzati](https://threeguysonebook.com/restless-nights-selected-stories-by-dino-buzzati/) - Way down below but slowing coming into fine detail is the entrance to a building crowded with limos. Throngs of glamorous people are crowding the doors. It looks like Truman Capote giving one of those parties. All her life, Marta has dreamed of belonging, and that’s where she wants to belong...even if she’s had to leap for it. - [Books I Don't Know - The Pile, Part 2](https://threeguysonebook.com/books-i-dont-know-the-pile-part-2/) - The Paris Review is putting together a collection of short stories called “Object Lessons”, the Paris Review presents The Art of the Short Story. Writers on their favorite short stories. Dave Eggers on James Salter, Ann Beattie on Craig Nova, David Means on Raymond Carver, and that’s just a few of the notables, on sale 10-12 from Picador. - [Man-Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami](https://threeguysonebook.com/man-eating-cats-by-haruki-murakami/) - This is echo chamber writing. Murakami is setting up a thematic resonance. Your mind is being primed by these little anecdotes.You are being set up for what happens later. Writers think with a special associative logic. They pull images together as if they were assembling a site on Pinterest. You can think of a short story as a page on Pinterest where items are pulled together from which the reader constructs a surprising gestalt. - [Toby’s Room by Pat Barker](https://threeguysonebook.com/tobys-room-by-pat-barker/) - Look down at your right hand up to the wrist. Now try to imagine that it’s not there. Now imagine that the nose on your face is missing. You are breathing through a hole in your face. Now attempt to imagine, I think it’s near impossible, the physical torment of having your hand or your nose blown off of you. Most of us never have to face the horror of physical dismemberment. In an age like ours, where the survival of the soul seems increasingly unlikely to be pulled off, your body is all you’ve got. Your body is you. Isn’t it terrifying how vulnerable your body is? I know, you don’t want to think about it. - [Why I Collect Real Books I](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-i-collect-real-books-i/) - I started collecting contemporary American fiction about twenty years ago. I was living in a small closet apartment on 28th and Broadway in NYC; the bathroom was down the hall. The rent was around $300 a month, so it was a bargain. I came home for Christmas December of 1993 and my father gave me a copy of Fathers & Sons, An Anthology edited by David Seybold. Inside the book are pictures of his father, my grandfather who died before I was born. - [Why I Collect Real Books II](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-i-collect-real-books-ii/) - In the years I was collecting Ford, he wrote a story that appeared in the New Yorker about his relationship with Raymond Carver. A small press in England printed a limited staple bound run, and I bought one. Ford was happy to sign it. I was shaking when I met him, I don’t know why, just nerves. I told him how much I loved his collection Rock Springs, and specifically the story Rock Springs, and the last paragraph. Ford recited that last paragraph word for word and I nearly broke down in tears. I may never meet him again, but that was a really nice moment. - [NW by Zadie Smith Part 2 “Guest”](https://threeguysonebook.com/nw-by-zadie-smith-part-2-guest/) - The second section of NW is called “Guest”. It’s a chronicle of the last day in the life of Felix. The reader knows he’s going to die in a mugging. But a moment after Felix steps out of the bed of his new girlfriend, Grace, you forget that. Felix is in the deep shit of his life. When you are in it, there is no death. It’s all plans. You’re wrong if you think the dead don’t make plans. - [Three Strong Women by Marie Ndiaye - The First Woman](https://threeguysonebook.com/three-strong-women-by-marie-ndiaye-the-first-woman/) - Three Strong Women is a sort-of fiction anthology of three novellas that conjoined, make for one reading experience by French writer, Marie Ndiaye. Norah’s story is told in third person narrative style with a subtle distinction. The story so focuses on Norah and what she is feeling that you could be excused if you thought of this story as being in first person. That’s a gifted storytelling strategy. - [Why I Collect Real Books III](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-i-collect-real-books-iii/) - Lately I’ve been partial to American realism, specifically Richard Yates, John Cheever and John Updike. I don’t have any first editions from this gang, but different editions of their paperbacks. I keep the Rabbit trilogy handy, as it really keeps my creative juices flowing while writing my own book. In the picture I have here, the four books are watched over by a shadowy Paul Auster. My collection is my own, sort of unique, based in nothing more than my tastes, which I think is how all collections should be. - [A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-hologram-for-the-king-by-dave-eggers/) - Dave Egger’s A Hologram for the King is built as well as the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a landmark work of American craft. Of all the works of contemporary American literature, this is the one that I’m most sure will last. It’s an ironic literary event, since its theme is the flight of soulcraft from shop work in the United States. The irony is that it’s so superlatively constructed itself, its mutually reinforcing metaphors and anecdotes giving it a shot, like the Great Bridge, of enduring. - [After Ellen by Justin Taylor](https://threeguysonebook.com/after-ellen-by-justin-taylor/) - I had no intention of reading this story, but it grabbed me. Our hero Scott is a douche bag, and leaves Ellen while she’s at work. He felt the seed of something going wrong growing in his stomach, relationship jitters of the cold feet variety, and presto he’s packing up and taking their car with him. He gets in, turns off his phone, and leaves town. Scott tells us that he’s a DJ, and we get to see him throw down a crazy set in San Francisco. - [Three Strong Women by Marie Ndiaye - The Second Woman](https://threeguysonebook.com/three-strong-women-by-marie-ndiaye-the-second-woman/) - I had thought that the third person narrative voice was prosaic, the most obvious way to tell a story. But it’s like having a dozen eggs in your kitchen. Their ovoid, off-white form is simple; but there is so much that you can do with them. - [The Harvest Moon by Molly Ringwald](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-harvest-moon-by-molly-ringwald/) - Ms. Ringwald perfectly inhabits these characters with a kind of romantic oily magic that dips into melodrama but quickly emerges with sinister plans. I was convinced that Phillip was cheating on Greta, because he just can’t take the process of conceiving another child. Because it’s less about them, and more about the science, and at some point it becomes too difficult to endure. - [Redbud by Molly Ringwald](https://threeguysonebook.com/redbud-by-molly-ringwald/) - Ilise and her husband are taking in the son of one her other daughters, Laurel, who lives in a cult somewhere in Sri Lanka. Clearly a replacement for her lost son, Ilise doesn’t seem to mind that this boy is a recovering heroin addict who will rip her off. She needs a reason to live, someone to count on, and someone to justify her existence, even if it means she gets hurt in the process. - [When We Fell In Love - David Abrams](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-david-abrams/) - 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. - [Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker](https://threeguysonebook.com/age-of-miracles-by-karen-thompson-walker/) - The world slowing down and we get to see what happens to the landscape. During "the slowing" birds fall from the sky, and most importantly, the sun rarely sets. Gravity, it’s not only a good idea, but the law. This throws everyone out of rhythm, and suddenly the population begins to splinter into those who live by the clock, and others who don’t. The nights are days, and the days are night, kids still go to school, people to work, and life goes on. Days that never end, truly, never come to an end, and darkness only arrives like an unwanted stranger. - [NW by Zadie Smith Conclusion](https://threeguysonebook.com/nw-by-zadie-smith-conclusion/) - How the reader views the overall form of a novel, or an art lover a work of art, or a listener music, can be very subjective. The more conservative composer Gluck thought that Beethoven’s Seventh wasn’t really music, just a chaos of noises. Many casual observers think Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm is just the painter making a big mess on the canvas. - [Dare Me by Megan Abbott](https://threeguysonebook.com/dare-me-by-megan-abbott/) - How exactly do you market Fight Club for girls? This book isn’t exactly like Palahniuk's masterpiece; it is a little bit more down to earth. Dare Me took me into the mind of a cheerleader. Wait, that’s a lie, it took me inside the warped and fucked up brains of two cheerleaders. It’s unlikely that I will ever look at a group of cheerleaders the same. - [Three Strong Women By Marie Ndiaye - The Third Woman](https://threeguysonebook.com/three-strong-women-by-marie-ndiaye-the-third-woman/) - Since Khady has no friendly family member to talk to, there’s no true dialogue for most of this story. Only when she is trying to break out of her life do we hear a regular exchange of voices. By having Khady imprisoned within her own inner voice, Ndiaye makes you feel her isolation, as if the lines of text, along with Khady’s personality, were disappearing into a tiny hole in the page. - [Soho](https://threeguysonebook.com/soho/) - Soho Press has been kicking around my tiny little world for a while now. Their style is crime, simple as that. But wait; there is one little book that begs to be chosen first for a game of dodge ball, Paula Bomer’s debut novel, Nine Months. Back in the not too distant past she delivered a searing collection that cut right through all the bullshit of first collections and defiled the genre. - [Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents The Art of the Short Story](https://threeguysonebook.com/object-lessons-the-paris-review-presents-the-art-of-the-short-story/) - The neat part about this book is the writers who talk about the short stories they love. I’m partial to Raymond Carver, and I’ve always loved the writing of David Means, who in this book talks about Carver’s story "Why Don’t You Dance". It’s a great moment, as Carver was keen on capturing, about a man who is giving away his life, selling it on the front lawn. It was made into a great movie with Will Ferrell, and surprisingly Will embodied a lot of what I felt when I first read this story. - [When We Fell In Love – Antoine Wilson](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-antoine-wilson/) - The collision of these three books helped me make the leap from literary daydreaming to the conviction that I had to be a writer immediately. I’d already taken the MCAT, but I dropped my plans to apply to medical school. I started writing, or thinking about writing, every single day. It took me a long time to get my head screwed on straight, but I owe something of the past twenty years to the early lessons I absorbed from these three books. - [Play the Man by Jim Gavin](https://threeguysonebook.com/play-the-man-by-jim-gavin/) - Our hero is obsessed with playing basketball, just better than everyone else. Pat Linehan has just been transferred into the program from a cross-town rival and he’s just a little bit bitter about it. Pat’s parents are less than driven, and this kind of low expectations home life gives us a glimpse into the mind of a boy that wants more, but just can’t get it. - [Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg](https://threeguysonebook.com/several-short-sentences-about-writing-by-verlyn-klinkenborg/) - Klinkenborg wields her sentences short and swift, as if they were the blade of a samurai. He’ll teach you to avoid all wasted motion. He’ll teach you to distrust mushy notions like “inspiration” and place your reliance on craft. To be attentive to that slight brush of wind in your face that tells you a sentence is a misplay. He’ll even say honor the inspiration but maybe throw out the sentence. She’ll teach your sentence-making to dance. - [Talking Books with Ben Schrank](https://threeguysonebook.com/talking-books-with-ben-schrank/) - I read The Broom of the System in high school, too, and probably didn’t like it as much as Less Than Zero. Now I would fault the myopia of my adolescent self. The Pale King is, I think, a brilliant if fragmented novel. I read a few pages of that book every few days and I’m wowed every time. I think it really is a novel about boredom and it serves as a beautiful antidote to my day job. The same is true for Emily Alone by Stuart O’Nan. - [The Eyes of Venice by Alessandro Barbero](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-eyes-of-venice-by-alessandro-barbero/) - The Eyes of Venice is such a guilty pleasure that you should be arrested for reading it. It’s a 482 page novel with glossary that takes place in the world of Venice in the 16th century. I say “world” because at that time, Venice was just past its peak and ruled over an extended eastern empire of island possessions. Its nemesis was the overwhelming Islamic empire of the Turks, the great superpower of the region. This was a time when the European world could still be seen as Mediterranean, as “a blue pool in an old garden” as the poet says. There are bare hints in the story of the rise of the Atlantic view and the eclipse of Venetian and Turkish influence that’s to come. - [Bermuda by Jim Gavin](https://threeguysonebook.com/bermuda-by-jim-gavin/) - Brian chases a girl he meets to Bermuda. When Brian departs he has twenty dollars in his pocket and a plane ticket that he got from selling a donated piano. I love the ends that he goes to, bottoms out, and goes a little further. Brian and his mashed potato sandwich friends are grinding towards the middle with a kind of ease that makes you wonder if they ever want to become more. - [Illuminati by Jim Gavin](https://threeguysonebook.com/illuminati-by-jim-gavin/) - Apparently there is a fantastic story to be told to Sean who is a screenwriter in waiting. It’s so good that it can only be told over a steak dinner at a swank Hollywood eatery. Gavin gives this story a strong odor that often reminded me of what it’s like to be in your salad days and the overall flavor of struggle. Sean is already jaded, and feels worthless, but his father has endless desire to put wind in the kid’s sails. - [Hole by Andrew Porter](https://threeguysonebook.com/hole-by-andrew-porter/) - ‘Hole’ is the first story, a wafer-thin affair about a kid who goes down a hole in his driveway and never comes back up. I’m not spoiling it for you; it’s the first sentence of the story. The writing here is a good introduction to the collection, it’s quick and slick, and reflective in the ways that Cheever, Updike and Yates showed readers everyone and everything all at once. - [The Hidden Powers of Book Marketers](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-hidden-powers-of-book-marketers/) - I’ll disclose to you my secret way of judging how close married couples are. Talk to the husband, just talk, and see how many times, if ever, he refers to his wife by name. This experiment may take some time. But if you have repeated casual conversations with a man, and he never refers to his wife by name during any conversation, or at least says “my wife”, I would wonder how close the couple is. - [Free Ham by Marie-Helene Bertino](https://threeguysonebook.com/free-ham-by-marie-helene-bertino/) - A fire ravages their home and puts our heroine and her mother in Dutch, their dad repairs to a temporary living situation; all combined this is both funny and tragic. When the fireman asks cheeky questions about the members of the family who might still be in the house, repeatedly, Mom asks, “Sir,” my mother steps forward, her eyes as small as stars. “What is the right answer to your question?” I laughed and laughed. - [Sometimes You Break Their Hearts by Marie-Helene Bertino](https://threeguysonebook.com/sometimes-you-break-their-hearts-by-marie-helene-bertino/) - Filling your day with useless obsessions, like how would you get to know everyone on earth is possibly pathetic but humane and realistic in a infantile way. I get a sense that this character is just sliding through life seeing little things and then taking them to extreme levels of resolution. She works reception at a dead end job, aspires to nothing, has no hobbies, and just exists. You sometimes see those people in stores and malls; they wander through life with nothing on their minds. - [The Idea of Marcel by Marie-Helene Bertino](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-idea-of-marcel-by-marie-helene-bertino/) - Emily is going on a date with her ex Marcel and she’s a bit nervous. He shows up as the guy she wants him to be, not the douche bag he is. They sit, as couples do, dinner, and all that goes with it. She is really impressed that he has changed. He admits to being 180 from what he was, and for all real and imagined purposes this date sounds good. Then it goes into the alternate universe - [Kurt Vonnegut: Letters](https://threeguysonebook.com/kurt-vonnegut-letters/) - His letter to Gail Godwin, where he tells her that shyness is a form of hostility, and scolds her for not looking him up when she was in NYC. She was a student of his at the Iowa Workshop, and became a famed novelist. Other letters reveal that he championed Godwin, and tells her that she will be one of the three-hundred writers in America who make a living at it, and that her chances of success are numerous. - [Claire Messud The First Chapter](https://threeguysonebook.com/claire-messud-the-first-chapter/) - How could we have ended up, after decades of the women’s movement, with girls in school in the 21st century who care more about their hair than what’s in their minds? That’s Nora’s rant. But Messud has her say something more interesting about, in my words, how hard it is to sift the true significance out of your life like you are panning for gold when there is so much fool’s gold lying around. - [Love is a Canoe by Ben Schrank](https://threeguysonebook.com/love-is-a-canoe-by-ben-schrank/) - Emily loves Peter’s book, worship’s it, and wants the love she reads about to be real. Love is a lot of things, a feeling, passion, companionship, and a good greeting card. It’s never real. Eli, he just wants to have fun, and I get that, but he needs to remember, who suffers when he has fun? Eli and Emily cruise at an altitude where so much happens, it hurts to read. Peter tries to guide them from his bucolic backwoods AARP existence. - [The Sun, the Moon and the Stars by Junot Diaz](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-sun-the-moon-and-the-stars-by-junot-diaz/) - “The Sun, the Moon and the Stars” is structured with a big set-piece cantilevered into the end of it to serve as a satisfying conclusion. In better days the couple had planned on a trip to Santo Domingo. Now Magda is stalling on going, acting like it’s too much of a commitment. So he goes ahead and buys the tickets anyway, forcing the issue. The account of the trip, which totals the relationship, is a masterful piece of writing. Reading it is like enjoying the spectacle of a train wreck without feeling guilty about it. - [The Average American Marriage by Chad Kultgen](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-average-american-marriage-by-chad-kultgen/) - This character doesn’t care what you think. He is offensive. I love how mundane he thinks his life is, because it is. A shitty job that he hates, we don’t know exactly what it is he does, and a wife he could care less about. Her body gives him chicken skin because it is no longer the shape he married. However she given him two kids and spends her days taking care of them. The children seem like cardboard cut outs, but that certainly is the purpose. It feels like Kultgen has taken the black & white Cheever ideal and colored it in with magic markers, but forgotten to stay inside the lines. - [Alma by Junot Diaz](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-third-story-in-this-is-how-you-lose-her-by-junot-diaz/) - I’m getting personal because I want to give a honest reaction to this story. There comes a poignant break, where the guy parts ways with the object of his desire and goes off to college. Up to that point, the couple are both living on the same streets. I remember the friends in public schools that I never saw again, because my head was in books and all they knew was the neighborhood. - [Don Begs To Be Alone](https://threeguysonebook.com/don-begs-to-be-alone/) - Professionally Don wants to be left alone to make his name and he knows that he needs to get paid to achieve that. Freedom does cost something, and Don doesn’t live cheaply. It’s almost enough for him to work his sincere magic on people, making them think that he needs them. At least it’s enough Don, or it’s what makes him happy, but not really, really happy. Remember when he got a check for five grand as a signing bonus? “Now I know what makes Don Draper smile,” said Roger. - [Silver Linings Playbook, the movie](https://threeguysonebook.com/silver-linings-playbook-the-movie/) - Cooper is a sly actor, he totally steps aside and lets the real talent shine, John Ortiz (underrated) and Jennifer Lawrence feed off him. In my novice estimation, an actor’s performance goes up a notch when he or she shuts up and lets the scene come to them. Cooper does this over and over. - [Books to Watch](https://threeguysonebook.com/books-to-watch/) - On sale now, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, by Susannah Cahalan, Free Press. I met the author recently, and she was very convincing, to say the least. This is the first piece of non-fiction that I’ve wanted to read, really wanted to. And finally, Jim Crace has a new novel, Harvest, on sale February ‘13 from Nan A. Talese. This guy seems to be writing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. - [The Cheater’s Guide To Love, Summing Up Junot Diaz](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-cheaters-guide-to-love-summing-up-junot-diaz/) - I can see a point in reading the last story in This Is How You Lose Her first. It’s the master story from which all the other stories in this collection are derived, like brilliant fictional shards. I don’t mean that the derivation of the other stories is direct from “Cheater’s”. But the last story is the most ambitious and the most focused on the Diaz demons. “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” is the most original in form. - [& Sons by David Gilbert](https://threeguysonebook.com/sons-by-david-gilbert/) - & Sons by David Gilbert is the one book you must read, if you read a book in 2013. - [Invierno by Junot Diaz](https://threeguysonebook.com/invierno-by-junot-diaz/) - “Invierno” is the penultimate story by Junot Diaz, and the fourth, that I’m going to review. Although “review” seems presumptuous. It’s more like I am reacting in print to a primary cultural document. For while I have been exasperated by the predatory male gaze, the male adolescent gaze, of many of these stories...and been ambivalent, - [The Best of 2012-ish](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-best-of-2012-ish/) - A.M Homes has been setting the Cheever/Updike suburban ideal on fire for her entire career. May We Be Forgiven is a tough and relentless book; there is no way around that. She delivers one brutality after the other, and for some unknown reason, she’s still not a big deal. I just don’t get it? Strangers should be stopping you on the street, any street, in any town, and telling you about her novels. - [Jonathan Evison's Favorite Books of 2012](https://threeguysonebook.com/jonathan-evisons-favortie-books-of-2012/) - 2012 was one of the best book years I can remember. So much great stuff crossed my desk this year, and I still haven't touched some of the year's most talked about fiction-- Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, Louise Erdrich's The Round House, A.M Homes' May We Be Forgiven, Peter Mountford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, and Lauren Groff's Arcadia, all of which are on my plate for 2013. Nonetheless, I read a ton of great fiction this year, which made compiling this list a tall order. - [DH’s Brave New World of Books 2012](https://threeguysonebook.com/dhs-brave-new-world-of-books-2012/) - These are the writers who were discoveries to me in 2012. Their books made the world new. Made me want to start exploring again. Sometimes we have to be reminded that the world is always new, always born yesterday, if you have the eyes to see it. - [When We Fell In Love - Scott Spinelli](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-scott-spinelli/) - When summer would come around every year, I’d get that whiff of childhood where, once allowed to read freely, I’d enjoy the activity. Without fail each year, Rosh Hashanah would come (as a Jew, it serves the purpose that Memorial Day does for the rest of the world), school would start up again, and back into the “I hate reading” world I’d retreat. - [& Sons by David Gilbert](https://threeguysonebook.com/sons-by-david-gilbert-2/) - At the center of this tale you will find three sons, a father, and another son that isn’t so much a blood relative, but a narrator of the most unreliable sort. A.N Dyer is the equivalent of J.D. Salinger and his novel Ampersand just as big, if not bigger than Catcher in the Rye. How do you sum up A.N. Dyer? How does one describe his life? You ask his sons. Well, no one asks them anything, but they show us everything. - [After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story by Michael Hainey](https://threeguysonebook.com/after-visiting-friends-a-sons-story-by-michael-hainey/) - I started dog-earing this book right away. It’s not a story about Michael finding out how his father really died. Okay it is, and it takes up a lot of space, and it’s the perfect engine. But this is about his mother, how he finds out who she really is, and what Michael means to her. I loved the childcare by dresser drawer, potatoes on the neck, and eggs “polish-style”, which sound delectable. Michael and his brother are left father-less, but their mother is a tough bird. - [Beautiful Boy, Warm Night by Katie Roiphe](https://threeguysonebook.com/beautiful-boy-warm-night-by-katie-roiphe/) - Stella was from a trailer park or a small town in the South. She seems to be on record as Katie Roiphe’s first betrayed friend. The betrayal was over a boy, naturally. This was when Stella and Katie were both students at Harvard. Stella was brilliant. But you have to believe that Katie was more brilliant, even though she doesn’t say so. - [When We Fell In Love - Ben Schrank](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-ben-schrank/) - I've been friends with Ben Schrank since before electricity. We're lucky enough to hear about his love of Richard Price, a writer close to my heart. Ben's novel, Love is a Canoe just went on sale, and it getting raves all over town. When We Fell In Love by Ben Schrank I turned nine at - [Amundsen by Alice Munro](https://threeguysonebook.com/amundsen-by-alice-munro/) - I don’t think that Alice Munro writes stories that are actually short. There’s a wealth of detail about the hospital and town and the people in it. A short story writer of Alice Munro’s platinum standard is always going to enumerate the facts. Reading one of her stories is like laying out an extensive dossier in front of you. A full security report on the nature of human character replete with incidents, details about appearance, what was said and done. - [The Journal](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-journal/) - So, beyond the obvious, one great reason to start keeping a journal is because it’s great competition. Instead of answering the question, “How many books did you read last year?” (basically a Johnson-size contest for the literary nerd) with the vague “I don’t know, I think about 10 to 15”, you now can have a definite answer. Three years ago, I read 10 books. In 2011 and 2012, I read 16 each. That’s progress, folks. - [When We Fell In Love - Harrison Demchick](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-harrison-demchick/) - One of my earliest memories has me lying on the floor of the den, right below the TV, teaching my then best friend how to read Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop. I may have been three or four at the time—past the age of gleefully shouting out the letters of the alphabet while watching Sesame Street, but apparently also past the point of discovering how much fun lay in the words on a page. - [Book Sales, Brought to You By Mr. Potato Head](https://threeguysonebook.com/book-sales-brought-to-you-by-mr-potato-head/) - When television started on an experimental basis in this decade, MGM wouldn’t allow its movies to be broadcast on the tube. They had a TV show in the mid-50’s, “The MGM Parade”, that promoted movies that were in release or re-release in theaters. The MGM executives figured that no one would want to sit in their living room and watch movies in monochrome on a tiny screen. Sometimes with cultural and technological change, there’s no tsunami until it envelops you. And then it’s so obvious, it’s barely worth mentioning. - [Giveaway:Middle Men by Jim Gavin](https://threeguysonebook.com/giveawaymiddle-men-by-jim-gavin/) - JR's been raving about Middle Men, the debut collection from Jim Gavin since October, at least. If you need a reminder, read what he said about Play the Man, Illuminati and Bermuda. He has five copies he can't wait to put in the hands of a reader. - [An Embarrassment of Riches](https://threeguysonebook.com/an-embarrassment-of-riches/) - Three that need to be read: A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter, I know, I know. At least I have a copy, now there is no excuse. Ride A Cockhorse, Raymond Kennedy, NYRB, on sale now. I feel like anything can happen to me with these two, like I might turn into someone else if I actually sit down with them. And Lawrence Osborne’s latest, The Forgiven, Joyce at Three Lives swears by this book, I feel truly left out for not having read it. - [What The Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam](https://threeguysonebook.com/what-the-family-needed-by-steven-amsterdam/) - In Steven Amsterdam’s debut collection, Things We Didn’t See Coming, he entertained me with a dystopian reality that wasn’t quite The Road bleak, but had its moments of despair. His writing in those stories was smooth, sparse, and comfortably minimal. He dressed the characters with cinematic clarity, free of cliché. He has written a novel that combines these skills, and with What The Family Needed, we bask in the sunlight of a family with superpowers. We visit different points on a family tree, and with each chapter Amsterdam unearths the great pleasure their tricks, skills, and varnished talents that sometimes curse as much as they help. - [Leaving Maverly by Alice Munro](https://threeguysonebook.com/leaving-maverly-by-alice-munro/) - This is an ensemble piece. Munro opens the whole town up before she’s through. In the triad of tales that I’ve reviewed; this is the last, Munro puts into play a school of characters, like a school of fish. I feel like I’m looking into a koi pond, only it’s people. There’s so much, there’s so much that I can’t specify it all. Leah can only take an evening job because during the day she has to help her mother look after the younger children. So you can sense how burdened the dutiful daughter is by obligations, day and evening. The feeling that something was about to break out was under the surface as I read. - [The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-woman-upstairs-by-claire-messud/) - Messud makes a key point about creative work. It means smashing boundaries, using imagination to remake the world. It’s Serena who’s doing professional work while Nora, with her recessive and fading fantasies that she’s an artist also, having a hobby, making exact copies of rooms from women’s history. James has a character say in The Ambassadors that if you want to succeed at anything then you must give your whole soul to it. Nora has been trained to hold back, to compromise. - ["Cartography" and "Paranoia" by Said Sayrafiezadeh](https://threeguysonebook.com/cartography-and-paranoia-by-said-sayrafiezadeh/) - Said Sayrafiezadeh wrote a great memoir a while back called, When Skateboards Will Be Free. It is a wonderful package, enjoyed heavy praise, backlisting well. While on my search for Intel on the new Tom Rachman novel, I came across these stories, and in the opening moments of this love affair, I have welcomed butterflies. - [Grandmothers on Deck: Safe Passage by Ramona Ausubel](https://threeguysonebook.com/grandmothers-on-deck-safe-passage-by-ramona-ausubel/) - Dozens of grandmothers find themselves sea-stranded on a cargo vessel. They don’t know how they got there. They got there because they are in the “Birth” section of Ramona Ausubel’s story collection A Guide to Being Born, coming from Riverhead in May. You can hear their canes and orthotics tap and scrape against the metal deck. This ship wasn’t meant to take passengers, just cargo. It’s like the grandmothers are the main cargo. Or somehow got dropped off on this ship by mistake. Maybe that’s what they think. - [Forget the Classics… Sort of](https://threeguysonebook.com/forget-the-classics-sort-of/) - As I detailed in my WWFIL piece a month or so back, I generally hated reading in high school. I hated the Brontë sisters with the passion of a thousand suns (one of those thousand, I’m honest enough to admit, was ignorant to enough to think that the author’s name was actually Jane Eyre). I couldn’t even lift Moby Dick. If we needed an incredibly abridged version to even get through the text (ahem, Mr. Dickens), I was out. - [When We Fell in Love - Lane Heymont](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-lane-heymont/) - When I was kid my grandfather paid me to read. That’s right. Five dollars for every classic I read. He offered Ivanhoe first, because he knew I loved medieval history. After reading the absurdly long novel I promptly told him how much I hated it. Suffice it to say, I read a lot of the classics of great literature such as The Iliad, Don Quixote, A Tale of Two Cities, which I also hated, and too many others to try and bore you with. - [The Morels by Christopher Hacker](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-morels-by-christopher-hacker/) - The Soho press catalog came my way and aside from all the crime fiction, there was this interesting book about a writer/artist, his family, and how fucked up things get when a certain “novel” is published. In The Morels, it was really hard to see what was coming, but things ended badly, as they say. The hero, (you can call him all kinds of things) Arthur Morel is a monster, if you look at it the wrong way, and a legend if you turn it over and look at the other side. I suppose this fits the Soho Crime vernacular, a little, because there is a crime in these pages, of the most unbearable sort, or wait, did that crime happen? That’s what they want you to think. - [You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt](https://threeguysonebook.com/you-are-one-of-them-by-elliot-holt/) - So what do I do now? I spent the last two days either on a plane, or with this amazing debut novel. I was just in Kansas City with a bunch of booksellers, hosting this really nice dinner, and one of them asked me what I was reading. After I got done hyperventilating and they revived me, I told them about the plot of You Are One of Them. - [You Are One Of Them Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/you-are-one-of-them-giveaway/) - Short of selling Elliott Holt soap on a rope, we're giving away 5 ARC's of her debut novel, You Are One of Them. Email JR with your shipping info. - [When We Fell In Love - Darryl Shelly](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-darryl-shelly/) - Referencing my assignment, she informed me that my first paragraph, alone, held more impact than her best students combined over the past ten years. None of which made the slightest impact upon me. Writing was nothing to get excited about, and reading even less so. For me it was like homework: neither pleasurable nor worthy of my time. I had girls to chase and the visceral rush of riding a wave along the La Jolla shores. I was supposed to give up my social life for reading and writing? It felt like Tom Sawyer was hustling me to whitewash his fence. No thanks, Mrs. B; I’m not falling for that act. - [The World' Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-world-strongest-librarian-by-josh-hanagarne/) - By Josh Hanagarne's account, the consistent presence of books is the base on which his life finds its stability. Particularly in the context of the public library, to which a substantial chunk of The World's Strongest Librarian is an unabashed yet clear-eyed love letter, Hanagarne finds his larger purpose and his story's shape. For certain, the structure and culture of librarianship -- with its endless subject classifications and the necessary absurdity of public spaces dedicated to contradictory knowledge -- lend the book its shape. - [Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo](https://threeguysonebook.com/total-chaos-by-jean-claude-izzo/) - My favorite part of these crime sprees are when the guys get together to burn cash. They’re a wolf pack of marauders, wearing beautiful clothes, driving cool cars, eating in great restaurants. Tasting all the luxe material treasures that their training, education and professional skills don’t entitle them to. Instead of peering through the glass at what society’s insiders have, they’ve broken through the glass. - [The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-accursed-by-joyce-carol-oates/) - I first read JCO in the late 1980s. Languishing in Los Angeles, where I was involved in an attempt to “go straight” after years of rebellion and excess by taking a course in management training, I haunted a used bookstore on Franklin Avenue and picked up Marya: A Life (1986). Plunged into a world of impoverished grit and abuse that shocked my soul, I began to suffer from delusions of being followed by creepy people. I even managed to get mugged one evening. The novel reawakened all my deepest childhood fears. - [When We Fell In Love - Helen Sedwick](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-helen-sedwick/) - For years, my parents ran a summer stock theater in the Poconos. It was a family affair. My siblings and I built the sets, scrounged for props, and manned the box office. The plays were light, summer comedies, romances and mysteries, certainly not “art.” Night after night, I watched the audience reactions. Laughter, tears, fear, anticipation, relief, applause. I grew up witnessing the power of a story, even a simple story, to touch an audience and connect a roomful of people to a common experience. That’s when I fell in love. - [Mary Coin by Marisa Silver](https://threeguysonebook.com/mary-coin-by-marisa-silver/) - Marisa Silver’s Mary Coin, based off the famous “Migrant Mother” photograph, proves this analogy doesn’t necessarily extend to literature. Expertly, Silver weaves the stories of three seemingly disconnected characters. Of course, there’s the titular Mary Coin, there’s modern day professor Walker Dodge, and Depression-era photographer Vera Dare. Upon first glance, based solely on timing, you could see how the first and last of that group may interact but it’s the true joy of this novel to discover the ways in which all three characters are tied together. - [Love Rehab: A Novel in Twelve Steps By Jo Piazza](https://threeguysonebook.com/love-rehab-a-novel-in-twelve-steps-by-jo-piazza/) - I love it when a publicist knows exactly what I want to read, and just sends it. I told a woman very close to me that I was reading this book, and she laughed, knowing it is at least 180 degrees away from what I normally love. What grabbed me first? This book made me feel like I might die if I didn’t read it right now. Sophie is a disaster; hearts are shooting out of her eyes for the less than interested Eric. He makes nice bank, and lives in a gilded cage on the Upper East Side, in a city where women out number men five to one. With those odds it’s very difficult to imagine relationships not appearing like Chinese menus in everyone’s mail slot. - [How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid](https://threeguysonebook.com/how-to-get-filthy-rich-in-rising-asia-by-mohsin-hamid/) - Back in my MFA days at a midwestern university whose faculty came a bit late to the whole postmodernism thing, I took a contemporary fiction course with a professor who liked to make the claim, during nearly every class, that all works of art were in some way about the making of art. While this grand proclamation opened up all kinds of slippery slopes about the fungibility of texts -- and thus crimes against literature such allowing a PhD student to turn in a review of a book of television criticism in lieu of a review of an actual book of contemporary fiction -- his hobby-horse from that semester has since provided me with an occasionally useful tool for looking at some books. - [Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler](https://threeguysonebook.com/ten-things-ive-learnt-about-love-by-sarah-butler/) - A box of ARC’s arrived and as I was making a reading pile, this books red cover grabbed me. Inside was a letter from the editor, and I immediately took it to the couch and gave it my full attention (the writing whispered of Elliott Holt, more on that in a minute). Two sittings later I was done with the book, sadly, and wished it would never end. In the best cases, characters in books that I love live on, and they still reside in the town where I left them. Perhaps the author is writing the rest of their lives. I suspect Alice and Daniel are still steadily gazing at the stars that hang over London, right where I left them when this book ended. - [The Mothers by Jennifer Gilmore](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-mothers-by-jennifer-gilmore/) - Jesse’s voice is a raw and naked scream of anger, anxiety, and longing. Because Jesse’s mother was so busy flitting around the world working for social justice, she and her sister were mostly raised by an African American nanny Now approaching 40 and having endured years of fertility treatments and In Vitro Fertilization, she and her husband Ramon have resigned themselves to adoption. The process only gets more complex and nerve wracking as it sends them into new rollercoasters of hopes raised and dashed. - [When We Fell In Love - Lydia Crichton](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-lydia-crichton/) - It’s a funny thing, this love of writing. For me, it’s a passion that involves an unquenchable thirst for learning coupled with a fascination for the intricacies of expression: a burning desire to find the exact right word. This devotion is also married to the need to explore important issues, but present them in an accessible way that will appeal to a broad audience: To tell entertaining stories rooted in complex, controversial and important issues that affect—and will for some time continue to affect—millions of lives. - [Chourmo by Jean-Claude Izzo](https://threeguysonebook.com/chourmo-by-jean-claude-izzo/) - Fabio Montale, the detective hero of Total Chaos, lives in Les Goudes, a sort-of harbor enclave removed from central Marseilles. You could be excused for thinking it’s an isolated village but it’s actually an urban district of the city. It seems remote but it isn’t. Like Fabio, who seems remote but he isn’t. Private but not remote. Both the village and the man. - [Our Frail Blood by Peter Nathaniel Malae](https://threeguysonebook.com/our-frail-blood-by-peter-nathaniel-malae/) - Our Frail Blood by Peter Nathaniel Malae, is a brilliant, heroically Catholic novel. Dense, Proustian in its savor of the quality of time and its lost chances. Emphatically West Coast in its culture, in a way that convinces us that there really is a distinct West Coast culture. And it exemplifies what that culture might consist of. It’s also an indictment of early 20th century America. A bill of charges against an egoism untempered by obligations to family or tradition. Selfishness, even selfhood, gone wild. Clownish. - [My Trip To The Strand](https://threeguysonebook.com/my-trip-to-the-strand/) - If you’re a fan of the site at all, you’re aware that we’re (I can say we’re now, I’m in the “About Us” page!) fans (in a not-so-subtle-way) of independent booksellers. With that said, I’ll admit, you can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to the local vintage record store or any of the independent booksellers either in my town or in New York City. And by one hand I mean, of course, no hands. - [The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-rosie-project-by-graeme-simsion/) - I’m hard pressed to find a character with a more vexing charm than Don Tillman, a genetics professor specializing in Asperger’s, and the spectrum of personality disorders. Unfortunately for Don, he has a full-blown case of the disease but doesn’t know it. Well, he does, but his friends are really aware, (his own family mistake’s his illness with homosexuality) but don’t want to say YOU HAVE ASPERGER’S! - [Giveaways](https://threeguysonebook.com/giveaways-2/) - We've got three books to give to our readers this week. - [Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel](https://threeguysonebook.com/woke-up-lonely-by-fiona-maazel/) - The publisher’s letter to the reader in the front of my review copy of Woke Up Lonely suggests there are two ways to read the novel: speedily while being propelled by the action or taking one’s time to savor Maazel’s precision, wit, and prose. In my first reading I attempted the speed method but kept being foiled by the prose. I got to the end feeling supremely annoyed. Who is this Fiona Maazel anyway, I thought, and why is she considered to be so hot? - [Solea by Jean-Claude Izzo](https://threeguysonebook.com/solea-by-jean-claude-izzo/) - “We had nothing to lose, because we’d already lost everything.” Fabio is in a favorite bar with Hassan, the owner, who comes out with: “Don’t you think working class people are a bit clumsy?” All through Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy of which Solea is the swan song, we have a community divided between those who are included and those - [When We Fell In Love - Jane Vandenburgh](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-jane-vandenburgh/) - Early reader? Let’s just say that had the word had currency in the L.A. of the Fifties, I’d have been the girl with the big dictionary on her lap looking up “dyslexia.” Since I could not read it’d never have occurred to me that I’d become a writer. I wanted to get married and have - [Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain](https://threeguysonebook.com/son-of-a-gun-by-justin-st-germain/) - Justin St. Germain, the sound of whose name I love, is a cliche slayer. That’s a high compliment for a writer. We learn gradually how to avoid cliches. And it’s a sign of a mediocre scribe that they’re not aware of cliches in their prose. Dull conversationalists talk in cliches, using the same stock phrases; - [Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich](https://threeguysonebook.com/odds-against-tomorrow-by-nathaniel-rich/) - I’ve seen the future, and Cormac McCarthy has written it. The Road is the only novel about the end of days that needs to be read. Having said that, the odds of me liking this book are very high, or low, depending on how you look at it. At the dog track it would be - [The Son by Philipp Meyer](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-son-by-philipp-meyer/) - The Son is a fictional multi-generational saga set in Texas, the second novel by the author of American Rust. Readers who have read American Rust will be used to Meyer’s ability to capture atmosphere, the ripples that violence can have over a community, and the effects on a town mired in the wake of a - [Pile of Awesome](https://threeguysonebook.com/pile-of-awesome/) - I’m still waiting on the new Tom Rachman, it’s out there, don’t worry (I’m not worried, just really anxious because I know a little about it, but I’m under the cone of silence). A debut collection from Rebecca Lee, Bobcat (Algonquin 6-13), and How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman (FSG 10-13), I’ve read the first section - [Life After Life by Kate Atkinson](https://threeguysonebook.com/life-after-life-by-kate-atkinson/) - "No point in thinking," [Ursula] said briskly, "you just have to get on with life." ... "We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try." Some not terribly serious things I thought about during and after reading Kate Atkinson's Life After - [Distracted by Feeling](https://threeguysonebook.com/distracted-by-feeling/) - This post was originally published in open.salon.com In my review of Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, a book about the end of the world, which actually felt like a really smart Michael Bay film, I touched on its lack of feeling. Yes, that’s a knock on Michael Bay films. When you leave the theater, if - [The Prologue to Marisha Pessl’s Night Film](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-prologue-to-marisha-pessls-night-film/) - The quotation that opens Pessl’s second novel is by a fictional character, Stanislas Cordova, who seems to be a darker version of Alfred Hitchcock. He’s quoted from a 1977 edition of Rolling Stone. It’s seven lines, few words wasted. Line 1. “Mortal fear” is as crucial as love. Is that when we are afraid for - [When We Fell In Love - Elliott The Spy](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-elliott-the-spy/) - I was in second grade the first time I read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. I was seven and already sure that I wanted to be a writer (I’m still in touch with my second grade teacher, who can vouch for my literary ambitions at that age) and I identified more with Harriet than with - [Tampa by Alissa Nutting](https://threeguysonebook.com/tampa-by-alissa-nutting/) - Tampa held my attention, but it was very difficult to read because I couldn’t accept the main character as a human being. My idea of a sexual taboo doesn’t revolve around pedophilia, but I understand there are people in this world who have that “taste”. As a society we have agreed that anyone who has - [Transatlantic by Colum McCann](https://threeguysonebook.com/transatlantic-by-colum-mccann/) - Part family saga, part historical fiction, and a big love song to Ireland, Transatlantic is an emotional journey of a novel. Interwoven with the lives of four women are tales of historical figures. Lily, a housemaid who escaped the Irish Potato Famine in 1845, was inspired to find freedom in the United States by Frederick - [TransAtlantic by Colum McCann](https://threeguysonebook.com/transatlantic-by-colum-mccann-2/) - The first thing I noticed is how beautifully it’s written. This confidently brilliant novel with its original form. There’s a documentary quality about TransAtlantic, as if you were watching an important series on PBS. The book opens where it ends, in 2012, as if its prologue is really its epilogue, only you can’t realize that - [The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-shining-girls-by-lauren-beukes/) - Before we even get into this review, let me offer the following disclaimer: if you are one of those people (read: my mom) that has to ask a thousand questions just to make it through an episode of Law and Order, this book might not be for you. That said, if you enjoy page turning - [Screwed by Eoin Colfer](https://threeguysonebook.com/screwed-by-eoin-colfer/) - I want to bawl like a drunken aunt. I wanna grind my teeth to stumps and punch the wall, but I don't and the effort of containing it starts me shaking all over. For a moment I think I might actually be having a heart attack then the moment passes and I collapse onto a - [Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld](https://threeguysonebook.com/sisterland-by-curtis-sittenfeld/) - I like Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels. She writes with insight about life as a female, whether teenager, college student or married woman. She captures the inner, silent monologue of daily existence for characters who are intelligent but have fractures when it comes to self-identity. I also harbor a fascination for stories about sisters since I was - [The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-last-banquet-by-jonathan-grimwood/) - On October 1st, Europa Editions will release its first cloth title. There’s 45K announced first printing. Quite a speculative risk for such a moderately scaled, literary publisher. I know that its editor, a good acquaintance of mine, is very excited about it. Not excited just in the sense that one hypes a book, but emotionally - [Month of the Gadfly](https://threeguysonebook.com/month-of-the-gadfly/) - Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin: To celebrate the paperback release of her acclaimed debut novel, The Year of the Gadfly, Jennifer Miller is embarking on a project dubbed “The Month of the Gadfly.” In July, Miller will attempt to set the world record for the most book clubs visited in a month, with a goal of - [When We Fell In Love - David Corbett](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-david-corbett/) - This is not so much the tale of when I fell in love with reading, as when I first learned a book could break my heart. I was not expected to survive my birth. These were the days when the Rh factor killed mothers and infants alike, and after nearly dying when Jim, the second - [The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-night-gwen-stacy-died-by-sarah-bruni/) - Last night I saw “Man of Steel” which I liked and disliked in equal measure. This may be the year of Superheroes in film and books, though actually what year isn’t? The Night Gwen Stacy Died is loosely connected with Spiderman. Being raised by careful parents in the 1950s, I was not allowed to read - [The Ask by Sam Lipsyte](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-ask-by-sam-lipsyte/) - There are basically two ways that novels hang together: you either get terrific plotting that overrides pedestrian, plodding prose or you are carried on a tidal wave of stylistic overkill that holds the reader transfixed for the length of the book. The Ask belongs in the latter camp, not to say that there isn't a - [Scissors by Stephane Michaka](https://threeguysonebook.com/scissors-by-stephane-michaka/) - The take-off point for Stephane Michaka’s novel is the agonistic relationship between Raymond Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish. I recoil from movies based on a “true story”. I just want to see a good movie. It means nothing to me if it’s based on yesterday’s headlines. So while reading Scissors, I tried to forget - [Big Brother by Lionel Shriver](https://threeguysonebook.com/big-brother-by-lionel-shriver/) - Lionel Shriver's timely new novel Big Brother is not about who is the next housemate to be evicted from the Big Brother House ,or who the NSA is watching today. It’s a about a sister waiting for her big brother to visit her. It turns out that her big brother is actually now her obese - [My Education by Susan Choi](https://threeguysonebook.com/my-education-by-susan-choi/) - Susan Choi’s new novel will be known as that steamy book about an affair between two women. Steamy it is, but that is only a part of its allure. The sex writing is extremely good but that is because Susan Choi can write as well as, if not better than, anyone writing novels today. This - [When We Fell in Love - Robert Dunn](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-robert-dunn/) - Moby Dick certainly wasn't the novel that made me fall in love with books (Curious George the Monkey, in the fifth grade?), but I think of it as the book that set me on my course as a writer—and the book that taught me how much the hard work could pay off. I was scary - [Mother, Mother by Koren Zailckas](https://threeguysonebook.com/mother-mother-by-koren-zailckas/) - Mother, Mother is the debut novel by Koren Zailckas, the bestselling writer of the memoir, Smashed. It’s coming from Crown on September 17th and it’s awesome. Mother, Mother is A. M. Homes with a twist of Gillian Flynn and a dash of Mommie Dearest. I read an e galley provided by the publisher. If you - [Want Not by Jonathan Miles](https://threeguysonebook.com/want-not-by-jonathan-miles/) - So many things have changed since 9-11. Nothing really changed; we just made choices, and some of them were wrong. We are different because of those choices, older, and with a newfound inability to concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds. Our society has lost its way; we prefer to naval gaze, while over-sharing - [The Never List by Koethi Zan](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-never-list-by-koethi-zan/) - In a tense psychological thriller, Koethi Zan, author of The Never List explores the ordeals of four women, forced into captivity by a madman who keeps girls in chains and makes them endure unspeakable things in captivity. The stories of Sarah, Christine, Tracy and Jennifer in captivity reveal what some of the trauma must have - [When We Fell in Love - Koethi Zan](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-koethi-zan/) - By some fluke of DNA, I was born into a family of scientists. My mother had me when she was just eighteen, so I spent my early years tucked in a corner of her college science labs playing with molecular model kits instead of Tinker Toys. Even at home, all we had was one solitary - [The Never List Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-never-list-giveaway/) - We hope you read Koethi Zan's WWFIL earlier this week, and that Billy Pilgrim's review piqued your interest in Zan's newly released novel The Never List. Now, the good folks at Viking are offering a pair of copies of The Never List for Three Guys One Book to give to our readers. So if you - [Night Film by Marisha Pessl](https://threeguysonebook.com/night-film-by-marisha-pessl/) - The idea propelling Night Film forward for six hundred odd pages seems to be something to do with the question of whether terror – the absolutely grotesque: that which is morally most base and repulsive – and art are on some level knotted together in an indissoluble symbiotic relationship. An attempt is made over the - [Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller](https://threeguysonebook.com/norwegian-by-night-by-derek-b-miller/) - With a theme of guilt and whether we can ever overcome it, Derek B. Milller’s debut novel Norwegian by Night is a summertime thriller with something to say. I found myself mesmerized by the central character Sheldon Horowitz, a decorated war hero from the Korean war who is forced to live in Norway with his granddaughter - [Letters from the Mud](https://threeguysonebook.com/letters-from-the-mud/) - Tom Jenks said it best, Good writing is really, really, really, really, really, reeeeeaally hard. The comment came in a phone conversation we had years back and was finished with a mixed laugh that at the time was difficult to place. It was a laugh that'd come to haunt me thereafter. Jenk's maxim went on - [When We Fell In Love - Richard Alther](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-richard-alther/) - Out of the closet and into the library at age eight. Are we born this way or is it our suffocating mother, absent dad? I had neither, but who cares? Well before eight years old I knew something was weird when most little guys strained like a dog on a leash to get onto the - [The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-hired-man-by-aminatta-forna/) - Perhaps in an ancient land like Croatia it’s easier to find stories underneath stories. Especially in the case of the small, centrally located town of Gost, which used to be important as a provincial capital but lately ekes out an existence as a ghost town with people still in it. It seems like half its - [What Changes Everything by Masha Hamilton](https://threeguysonebook.com/what-changes-everything-by-masha-hamilton/) - At the heart of this novel lies an effort to describe a involuntary tilt or shift in the American worldview, a forced reappraisal of the safe vantages and distances to which we have grown accustomed and to which we feel in some senses are our inheritance and our right. The kidnapping of an American aid - [When We Fell In Love - Masha Hamilton](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-masha-hamilton/) - I begin by stressing that in this context I am faithfully an unfaithful lover, too easily captivated by a fresh turn of line that opens my heart in a new way, a dramatic arc like the sole of a ballerina, an image so sharp it stabs. When this happens, it’s like the first time all - [When We Fell In Love - Nick Antosca](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-nick-antosca/) - “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” - Mark Twain I loved books as a little kid, but I - [& Sons by David Gilbert](https://threeguysonebook.com/sons-by-david-gilbert-3/) - Every so often, you come across something that’s the perfect hybrid of what you’re looking for. If it’s a girl, maybe she’s both stunningly beautiful, disarmingly intelligent and remarkably easy to get along with. As a kid, you might find that perfect sports role model… the athlete with the million-dollar smile to match his contract, - [The Abomination by Jonathan Holt](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-abomination-by-jonathan-holt/) - Tom Gauld, cartoonist for the book review section of The Guardian, published a piece that I think summarizes in a few panels how I feel about Jonathan Holt's novel, The Abomination. Please go have a look at it (and while you're there, take a good look at Gauld's graphic novel, Goliath and his cartoon collection, - [What's So Funny by Tim Conway](https://threeguysonebook.com/whats-so-funny-by-tim-conway/) - Tim Conway may be Catholic, but he is a mensch. According to the dictionary a mensch is an upstanding, worthy and honorable person. It would not be a stretch to put Tim Conway’s picture next to that definition. In What’s So Funny, Tim tells his life story in a concise, honest and entertaining way. What shines - [The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-salinger-contract-by-adam-langer/) - Adam Langer has been stalking me for years, and he finally found a way to get my attention. The Salinger Contract reminds me of early Paul Auster. It seems that Adam Langer the writer, has found a way to fold reality around the man-made construct of time, and deliver a story that probably didn't happen, - [An Interview with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh](https://threeguysonebook.com/an-interview-with-said-sayrafiezadeh/) - Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the widely praised memoir, When Skateboards Will be Free. He's the son of an Iranian Muslim father and Jewish mother, both of whom were dedicated to the triumph of socialism. After his parents separated when he was nine months old, Said grew up with his mother in Pittsburgh. Brief Encounters - [The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-execution-of-noa-p-singleton-by-elizabeth-l-silver/) - Within a month of this writing, the state of Texas performed its 500th execution since 1982. That convict was the first woman executed in the United States in three years and only the thirteenth woman executed since the 1976 Supreme Court decision re-allowing capital punishment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_executed_in_the_United_States_since_1976). This horrible little factoid is important when considering - [Night Film by Marisha Pessl](https://threeguysonebook.com/night-film-by-marisha-pessl-2/) - Night Film is suspenseful, obsessive and quirky read up to a point. The story revolves around Investigative reporter Scott McGrath and his obsession with film director Stanislas Cordova. McGrath was disgraced earlier in his career when he got a tip from a source that Cordova was a pedophile and is convinced that the tip was - [Interview with Natsuo Kirino](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-natsuo-kirino/) - Natsuo Kirino is the author of the recently released The Goddess Chronicle, from Canongate Books, as well as bestselling crime fiction such as Out, Grotesque, and Real World. She has graciously consented to an email interview with Three Guys One Book. Special thanks are due to Ms Kirino and also to Ayako Akaogi for the translation of the - [Just What Kind of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly](https://threeguysonebook.com/just-what-kind-of-mother-are-you-by-paula-daly/) - I don’t know who Lisa Gardner is, and I suppose it really doesn’t matter because this has nothing to do with her specifically. On the cover of my copy of Just What Kind of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly, Ms. Gardner has been quoted as saying the following: “Riveting! Daly plunges straight into the - [Nostalgia by Dennis McFarland](https://threeguysonebook.com/nostalgia-by-dennis-mcfarland/) - This Civil War-era novel explores the consequences of a decision to enlist in the Union army for a young man of nineteen by the name of Summerfield Hayes. Left unclear at the outset of Nostalgia is the question of whether Hayes’ decision to sign-up and fight is a conscious attempt not only to forget the - [Interview with Stephane Michaka](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-stephane-michaka/) - Stephane Michaka is a gracious and thoughtful French writer whose novel about the complex relationship between Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish, Scissors, has been lately translated into English and published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Random House. I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Stephane about Scissors. It's interesting to get a European - [Victory by Yu Hua](https://threeguysonebook.com/victory-by-yu-hua/) - “Victory”, which can be found in the August 26th issue of the New Yorker, opens like a venerable folk tale. There’s a sequence of discoveries, of discoveries within discoveries until a secret is revealed: In Hong Kong, Li Hanlin is cheating on his wife, Lin Hong. Often in stories it’s the smallest details that matter - ['90s Island by Marty Beckerman](https://threeguysonebook.com/90s-island-by-marty-beckerman/) - Merriam-Webster defines a novella as “a work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel.” I suppose I already knew that intuitively before I read Marty Beckerman’s novella ’90s Island, but I remember looking it up because I hadn’t ever (officially, at least) read one. I’d read short stories, novels, - [Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw](https://threeguysonebook.com/five-star-billionaire-by-tash-aw/) - The best part of Five Star Billionaire is the end because of a surprise plot twist that I did not see coming at all. Getting to the end took a while but the slow build involved five complete life stories and skillful character development. Most reviews I have read are heavy on the five main - [Morphine By Mikhail Bulgakov](https://threeguysonebook.com/morphine-by-mikhail-bulgakov/) - Mikhail Bulgakov is a landmark twentieth century writer. You could be excused from knowing that if you haven’t read his greatest work, The Master and Margarita, a wild, sideshow carnival kind of read, oddly beautiful, which takes place chiefly in the writer’s beloved Moscow. That is, when his characters aren’t being magically transported to remote - [MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood](https://threeguysonebook.com/maddaddam-by-margaret-atwood/) - Margaret Atwood is one of my top three favorite authors. She is frighteningly intelligent, has a sense of humor, and writes about women better than anyone else. Her speculative fiction trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake, followed by The Year of the Flood, wraps up perfectly in this final volume. I suppose you could - [Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon](https://threeguysonebook.com/bleeding-edge-by-thomas-pynchon/) - With the recent passing of Elmore Leonard, it is apt that Pynchon has chosen a quote from Leonard’s contemporary Donald Westlake to serve as the epigraph for what follows in his second straight detective yarn: New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would - [The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-aftermath-by-rhidian-brook/) - Rhidian Brook’s novel, The Aftermath, is an engaging journey, driven by emotionally charged characters drawn from a fascinating and seldom explored period of history, the immediate aftermath of World War II in Germany. The book is not set in the familiar terrain of the Cold War, once “De-Nazification” has absorbed and absolved the guilty and - [The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-signature-of-all-things-by-elizabeth-gilbert/) - Everything living thing has been given a signature of what it is meant to do on planet earth. That's according to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the bazillion copy bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. In her new novel The Signature of All Things, Gilbert has written an intelligent book that will have you spellbound to the last - [Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman](https://threeguysonebook.com/troubled-daughters-twisted-wives-edited-by-sarah-weinman/) - Sarah Weinman, queen of mystery and crime fiction reviews, has done a great thing. In this collection of stories, subtitled Stories From the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, she has revived female mystery and crime writers from the middle third of the 20th century. These women laid the groundwork for Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Tana French, - [Happyland by J. Robert Lennon](https://threeguysonebook.com/happyland-by-j-robert-lennon/) - The idea of a fantastically wealthy doll mogul making a snap decision to transform a small, all-female college town in upstate New York into a veritable life-size dollhouse and the fact that this, more or less, actually took place in the real world likely provided irresistible satirical fodder for the novelist J. Robert Lennon. Beginning - [When We Fell In Love - Erin Byrne](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-erin-byrne/) - This painting from 1968, captures the moment I fell in love with reading and writing: a nine-year-old girl sits on the foredeck of a sailboat. Cream colored sails are rolled up along the mast, water glistens blue behind me. My legs are curled underneath to one side, one arm bent at the elbow with a - [Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee](https://threeguysonebook.com/childhood-of-jesus-by-j-m-coetzee/) - Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s new novel Childhood of Jesus takes its main characters Simon and David and drops them into a new world and forces them to discover where they belong in it. Simon, the father figure and a boy named David, whose mother’s whereabouts are unknown because the papers telling them who - [Happyland Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/happyland-giveaway/) - Did you read Jim Ryan's review of J. Robert Lennon's Happyland the other day? If not, take a look, because the great folks at Open Road are offering 3 digital copies for 3G1B readers. I'll be choosing the recipients randomly on Monday, so stake your claims before then. If you need more impetus to act, - [The Circle by Dave Eggers](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-circle-by-dave-eggers/) - It has gotten a lot easier to love Dave Eggers' fiction. I read his “memoir” and experienced all the theatrics that came with it (I was front row at the Astor Place, BN in NYC for A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius book tour, which is like saying I saw The Police open for - [Interview with Marty Beckerman](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-marty-beckerman/) - Scott Spinelli: From what I've been able to discover about you, it seems as if we both grew up in the 1990s, so while it might seem obvious, I'm curious, what exactly was your inspiration for writing this story? Marty Beckerman: A huge part of it was the recession. Back in the '90s, there was a - [Interview with Jonathan Grimwood](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-jonathan-grimwood/) - DH: Jonathan, thanks so much for considering my questions about The Last Banquet. In writing about France on the eve of revolution, did you feel that you were escaping from the concerns of our own era or revisiting them with a fresh perspective? JG: When I first thought of writing The Last Banquet I thought - [Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush](https://threeguysonebook.com/subtle-bodies-by-norman-rush/) - I was won over by Subtle Bodies early and what did it was the elf shoes. Nina is enroute to upstate New York from her home in San Francisco. Her husband Ned is on the trek ahead of her and has already arrived at a threadbare location in the Catskills. Why didn’t they go together? - [Bombshell by James Reich](https://threeguysonebook.com/bombshell-by-james-reich/) - So many great “Avantpop” works—Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope, Jonathan Lethem’s early genre novels, most everything by Kathy Acker—are hanging out, waiting for adventurous oddball filmmakers to adapt them, bringing delightful visions of an American wasteland to silver screens everywhere! Bombshell, a novel by James Reich, descends from this literary sensibility, and it forges the conventions of - [Alice Munro](https://threeguysonebook.com/alice-munro/) - As you're no doubt aware, Alice Munro has received the Nobel Prize for Literature. We thought we'd show our readers the times her name has surfaced here at 3g1b over the years, from reviews to mentions in various WWFIL essays. Here they are: Leaving Waverly by Alice Munro Amundsen by Alice Munro To Reach Japan - [On The Floor by Aifric Campbell](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-the-floor-by-aifric-campbell/) - Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s a man’s world. And in this man’s world, a woman has to shed – or at least suppress – her femininity so that she can play hardball with the Masters of the Universe surrounding her. Because she’s the protagonist, she thrives on a combination of talent - [Love by Drowning by C.E. Poverman](https://threeguysonebook.com/love-by-drowning-by-c-e-poverman/) - At sea, a group of men struggles to reel in a marlin—a struggle that lands two brothers in the water, “shimmering into a deeper twilight blue.” 20 years later, one of those men, Val, is married, has one son, and lives comfortably in Arizona. Yet he cannot escape the haunting memory of that day with - [The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-goldfinch-by-donna-tartt/) - Donna Tartt’s first novel in ten years begins with thirteen year old Theo Decker and his mother rushing in to the Metropolitan Museum to escape a violent rainstorm and finding themselves abruptly set down before an exhibition entitled Portraiture and Nature Morte: Northern Masterworks of the Golden Age. No sooner have they submitted to the - [Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories by Aurelie Sheehan](https://threeguysonebook.com/jewelry-box-a-collection-of-histories-by-aurelie-sheehan/) - “Some days it seems […] that life holds important and beautiful stories. Other days, life isn’t shaped like that—into stories and whatnot.” - [At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcon](https://threeguysonebook.com/at-night-we-walk-in-circles-by-daniel-alarcon/) - When I read Daniel Alarcon’s first novel, I knew I had found a writer I would follow, that I would read every novel he would write. It has been a long wait, five and a half years to be exact, since I read the last page of Lost City Radio. His new novel is similar - [Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante](https://threeguysonebook.com/story-of-a-new-name-by-elena-ferrante/) - This Europa release is Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels. I’d rather call it Book Two in the love/hate relationship between characters Elena and Lila. I’m issuing a Three Guys fatwa that you are not to turn away from The Story of A New Name if you haven’t read the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, - [When We Fell In Love - Anthony DiPello](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-anthony-dipello/) - Greg was studying for law. Dick was studying for pharmacy. Russ was studying for accounting. Sonny was studying for medicine. Jack was studying for teaching. Ron was studying for business. What was I doing there? I didn’t have a clue about what I was going to do. So I left college and got a job - [The Land of Steady Habits by Ted Thompson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-land-of-steady-habits-by-ted-thompson/) - I bet Ted Thompson blends in, wears nice glasses, and dresses like Don Draper on holiday. One thing I know for sure; he writes like a house on fire. Picturing the days and nights he spent on The Land of Steady Habits, maybe at a desk in a remote house in upstate New York, one - [A Few Words On Jonathan Tropper](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-few-words-on-jonathan-tropper/) - So, Jonathan Tropper has a “new” book out. New is in quotes for two reasons. First, it came out in hardcover over a year ago (seriously though, who has time for hardcover any more?) Second, and more importantly to this particular post, is it really that new? If you’ve read one Jonathan Tropper novel, you’ve - [The Circle by Dave Eggers](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-circle-by-dave-eggers-2/) - What do you get when you cross Scientology, Apple, Facebook, and a side of Orwell? David Eggers new novel The Circle is what you get. It’s a page turning/stomach turning novel about what will happen to us if we allow the Internet to leave us as citizens with no secrets. Could we become a race - [The Antagonist by Lynn Coady](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-antagonist-by-lynn-coady/) - Not every story follows a killer on the lam or a treasure hunt. Not every plot details, in page-turning fashion, the story of an island-marooned group of strangers looking to find civilization. Some stories are about characters. Relationships between sons and fathers, mothers and sons, friends, the past and the future. The Antagonist by Lynn - [An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick](https://threeguysonebook.com/an-impenetrable-screen-of-purest-sky-by-dan-beachy-quick/) - Imagine a college classroom. The professor is giving his umpteenth lecture on Moby Dick when an annoying student begins to call Melville boring. Fed up, the professor tells the student that “to find a book boring speaks, perhaps, to a lack of inner resources. Even boring books aren’t boring. The people who read them are.” - [The Accident by Chris Pavone](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-accident-by-chris-pavone/) - I’ve never encountered an embargoed book that was worth the embargo from the point of view of the reader. Although I understand well enough the point of the embargo to the publisher, who has sold a preview of some of the “sensational” content to the media. The Accident by Chris Pavone is a suspense novel by - [When We Fell In Love - Alma Bond](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-alma-bond/) - Publish or Perish I was coming home from jogging in Central Park when a nutty taxi driver came around a bend in the road and hit me. I flew 20 feet in the air, then came down and hit a pole hard. I lay on the road unconscious, in a coma, with seven broken bones. - [Mass Distribution and the Survival of the Text](https://threeguysonebook.com/mass-distribution-and-the-survival-of-the-text/) - I was wondering lately about the distribution of books. How it strikes me as funny that you have to print at least five thousand copies of a book or no copies of that book. I know, print-on-demand has given us other options. But I’m talking about the open distribution of books that can be explored. - [Hild by Nicola Griffith](https://threeguysonebook.com/hild-by-nicola-griffith/) - I have spent the last four days in seventh century Britain so fully engrossed in its brutal and beautiful world that sitting down at my computer feels like I have come back to the future. Saint Hilda of Whitby, daughter of a Northumbrian prince, grew up to become an Abbess, a trainer of bishops for - [Furious Cool by David Henry and Joe Henry](https://threeguysonebook.com/furious-cool-by-david-henry-and-joe-henry/) - After putting down David and Joe Henry’s biography of Richard Pryor Furious Cool, I thought to myself, "where is a comic like Pryor when we need him?" In a world with comics offering raunchy material with not much substance to it which is the complete opposite of Pryor who was a comic who didn't give a - [The Antiquarian by Gustavo Faveron Patriau](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-antiquarian-by-gustavo-faveron-patriau/) - You know what music built on a chromatic scale is like? I’m listening to some now. It’s dark, harsh, shadowy...gothic...or goth if you prefer. The traditional diatonic anchors of standard key signatures have been removed. There’s no reassuring return to C major because there is no C major in this scheme...just a perpetual floating between - [Understudies by Ravi Mangla](https://threeguysonebook.com/understudies-by-ravi-mangla/) - I am hesitant to read novels under 200 pages, especially when it is fed to me one spoonful at a time from different bowls, in the dark. Ravi Mangla’s debut was excerpted on Vol. 1 Brooklyn a few weeks ago, and I immediately bought it. Reminiscent of J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand, - [When We Fell In Love - Ravi Mangla](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-ravi-mangla/) - My sister was the reader in our family. I was the unruly one, not a scholar by any stretch. At the end of each term she brought home a box of books from college. I remember browsing one such box and coming across David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. She told me the - [Onward Toward What We’re Going Toward by Ryan Bartelmay](https://threeguysonebook.com/onward-toward-what-were-going-toward-by-ryan-bartelmay/) - Chic wants a “normal life”—or so he tells Diane when he begins to date her in 1950. If this seems like a timid aspiration, consider that Chic’s father froze to death behind the family barn and that Chic’s mother ran off with a close family friend, leaving him and his brother, Buddy, parentless. Looking around - [Saving Mozart by Raphaël Jerusalmy](https://threeguysonebook.com/saving-mozart-by-raphael-jerusalmy/) - Writers do not often attempt the epistolary form, and the reasons seem obvious: All action happens at a temporal distance, summary narration often seems unavoidable, and—depending on the audience for whom the epistles are written—exposition can sound forced. Imagine, for a moment, an epistolary novel written in the form of diary entries. What kind of - [The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-crane-wife-by-patrick-ness/) - The Crane Wife is nominally based on an old Japanese folk tale that Patrick Ness has taken as his starting point and inflected with his own spin. In my line of work, I pay a lot of attention to genres and under those classifications Crane would be considered paranormal romance. The novel’s forays into serious - [Kids These Days by Drew Perry](https://threeguysonebook.com/kids-these-days-by-drew-perry/) - This is easily one of the strangest reviews I’ve written since joining the team here at 3G1B. Most times, I’ll tell you how much I loved a book. How I couldn’t put it down, how the story grabbed me right from the beginning. How I never would’ve thought I’d have enjoyed it as much as - [The Way Of All Fish by Martha Grimes](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-way-of-all-fish-by-martha-grimes/) - According to the book jacket for The Way of All Fish, Martha Grimes has published at least one book a year for the last thirty years. Amongst her most famous, of course, are her Richard Jury novels. Her latest is a continuation of her take on the current world of publishing and let’s just say, I’m still - [My Favorite Books of 2013](https://threeguysonebook.com/my-favorite-books-of-2013/) - I have struggled mightily with short story collections of late, because there are always a few self-indulgent clunkers in the mix, I read a page or two, and move on. Engagement in all walks of fiction is my entry point, whether it is slow or fast, I still need someone to love. A book should - [The Scent of Pine by Lara Vapnyar](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-scent-of-pine-by-lara-vapnyar/) - The Scent of Pine reminded me of the stories of Sana Krasikov, who has been discussed on this blog. Lara Vapnyar’s characters have had their formative experiences in Russia but now they are living somewhere else. The tenuous homeland thread that connects old acquaintances, while frayed, refuses to break. Lena is waiting in New York’s - [When We Fell in Love - James Scott](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-james-scott/) - JR: I met James at the New England Independent Booksellers Association annual meeting in Providence. I am currently reading his fantastic novel The Kept. James was kind enough to provide us with an essay, which covers one of my favorite books. When We Fell In Love - James Scott In high school I got decent - [The Girl With A Clock For A Heart by Peter Swanson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-girl-with-a-clock-for-a-heart-by-peter-swanson/) - Can you blame a debut author for writing a book with the intention of continuing his story in another book? Reading Peter Swanson’s book The Girl with a Clock for a Heart makes you wonder if this crossed the author’s mind. The book’s rights have already been sold to Hollywood. I’m not saying it’s a - [Bingo’s Run by James A. Levine](https://threeguysonebook.com/bingos-run-by-james-a-levine/) - “You feel doubt. You feel shame-for what? Come sit beside me. Do not worry about the dirt-you were filth before you got here.” Put your rave hat on. It’s time to get excited about a book again. It’s Bingo’s Run by James A. Levine. I have to admit to a prejudice against reading novels written - [59 in 84 - Old Hoss](https://threeguysonebook.com/59-in-84-old-hoss/) - About a year and a half ago, a friend suggested I start following a really funny account on Twitter. Like most people when they hear things of this ilk, I assumed the account was either A) not as funny as this person thought, B) would simply read like a bunch of loosely connected stand-up ideas, - [Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III](https://threeguysonebook.com/dirty-love-by-andre-dubus-iii/) - Andre Dubus III is the kind of writer every MFA student in the 1990s aspired to be. A well-received collection of stories, followed by a couple of successful novels, one made into a successful movie. A Guggenheim fellowship, a few awards, an Oprah pick. Enough success that you could write a memoir of your dysfunctional - [Orfeo by Richard Powers](https://threeguysonebook.com/orfeo-by-richard-powers/) - The year has just begun and Richard Power’s stunning new novel Orfeo will certainly end up on my top ten list. Orfeo revolves around Peter Els, a musician/scientist who hears music in the world around him, whether that is a symphony or someone unwrapping a candy bar. The novel opens with Peter’s dog dying and - [The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic by Christopher Merkner](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-rise-fall-of-the-scandamerican-domestic-by-christopher-merkner/) - When I was a kid, flying with my parents from Maine to Minnesota to visit family, I would look out the airplane window, fascinated by the geometrical weirdness of the upper Midwest. New England always looked like a mess, random and haphazard, neighborhoods built along unruly rivers and roads, everything curved and bent like the - [The Big Crowd by Kevin Baker](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-big-crowd-by-kevin-baker/) - ... Doesn't it always seem that's how it is, Tom? We lie the most to those nearest to us, and why is that? -- The Big Crowd, chapter 19. There's a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit that I promise is relevant here: Judge Doom: A few weeks ago I had the good providence to stumble upon a plan of - [Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates](https://threeguysonebook.com/carthage-by-joyce-carol-oates/) - Joyce Carol Oates' 40th novel Carthage is one that you’ll either love or hate. This reviewer has been reading Ms. Oates’ novels, plays, short stories and her underappreciated memoir for the past 30 years. There have been very few years where there hasn’t been something published by her. Now some may say this is a - [A Life In Men by Gina Frangello](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-life-in-men-by-gina-frangello/) - Gina Frangello’s A Life in Men doesn’t really have a plot—it has accumulation. Proceeding loosely from incident to incident, the novel seeks to encompass (as its title suggests) the entirety of a life and all the emotional highs and lows therein. It contains so much that you might think no possible ending can bring satisfactory - [Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet](https://threeguysonebook.com/save-yourself-by-kelly-braffet/) - To get the mundane aspects out of the way early: there's nothing mechanically wrong with Save Yourself. Like much contemporary fiction, including the "thriller" genre to which the book ambiguously aspires, a lot of the novel is heavily dependent on dialogue—either characters conversing with each other or with themselves—punctuated by particularly rendered actions, either sexual or - [An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine](https://threeguysonebook.com/an-unnecessary-woman-by-rabih-alameddine/) - Imagine a world where you spend close to your entire life translating a book a year into your native tongue and once completed you store them in a box for no one to see. It sounds crazy but when you meet Aaliya Saleh the lead character in Rabih Alameddine’s engaging new novel An Unnecessary Woman - [Marshlands by Matthew Olshan](https://threeguysonebook.com/marshlands-by-matthew-olshan/) - At first, the protagonist of Matthew Olshan’s novel Marshlands is defined by who and what he isn’t: He isn’t a doctor, though he once was. He isn’t able to write—not in his journal, nor on his cell walls (they have been repainted). He isn’t wearing his uniform, though the guards hand it to him upon - [Trieste by Dasa Drndic](https://threeguysonebook.com/trieste-by-dasa-drndic/) - Reading Dasa Drndic’s novel Trieste is not easy. She has decided to tell the story of Haya Tedeschi in a way that will probably frustrate most readers but if you stick it out it will be worth it. It’s just too bad Ms. Drndic cared more about her subject than her reader. It could have - [The Girl With A Clock For A Heart by Peter Swanson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-girl-with-a-clock-for-a-heart-by-peter-swanson-2/) - Through the dust motes dancing on the sunbeams George spies the dream his life once was and he imagines can be again: back together with the college crush he never got over. So opens Peter Swanson’s first novel with our protagonist not quite believing his eyes that the love of his life is, a couple - [Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos](https://threeguysonebook.com/quesadillas-by-juan-pablo-villalobos/) - First, you need to understand the deal with the quesadillas. See, there are four categories, each reflecting a different national economic reality: inflationary quesadillas, normal quesadillas, evaluation quesadillas, and poor man’s quesadillas. For one particular large, poor family in Mexico, the size of the quesadillas—and the “savage struggle” that erupts over them at dinner—is more - [Dead Eye by Mark Greaney](https://threeguysonebook.com/dead-eye-by-mark-greaney/) - Usually, I avoid quoting from book jacket copy, but in the case of Mark Greaney’s Dead Eye (which is “A Gray Man Novel”), I need help. Dead Eye’s hero is Court Gentry (a.k.a. the “near-mythical Gray Man”) an “Ex-CIA master assassin” who prides himself on his ability “to fly below the radar and exist in - [Debarking by Lorrie Moore](https://threeguysonebook.com/debarking-by-lorrie-moore/) - “All his tin-penny miseries and chicken shit joys would lead him once again to Sparky’s.” Ira has been divorced for six months after fifteen years of marriage, so he takes up psycho-dating. Lorrie Moore says he can’t work his wedding ring off. Yet when it slips off in a hot bath he puts it on - [Best Adapted Screenplays - The Book Is Always Better Than the Movie -](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-adapted-screenplays-the-book-is-always-better-than-the-movie/) - This is part 1 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow. The Magus. The Scarlet Letter. The Sound and the Fury. Tropic of Cancer. Ulysses. Do you remember those films, such rickety things, devoid of psychological depth and stylistic complexity—do you remember them? What - [Best Adapted Screenplays - The Wolf of Wall Street](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-adapted-screenplays-the-wolf-of-wall-street/) - This is part 2 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow. The films of Oscar season often generate controversy—or rather, Oscar bloggers and bored film critics generate controversy, sometimes hysterically and pointlessly. This year, one such controversy regarded The Wolf of Wall Street, the - [Best Adapted Screenplays - Captain Phillips](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-adapted-screenplays-captain-phillips/) - This is part 3 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow. Richard Phillips’ memoir A Captain’s Duty needs nowhere near as much deconstruction as The Wolf of Wall Street, but the differences between the book and Captain Phillips, its film adaptation, are no less - [The Splendid Things We Planned by Blake Bailey](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-splendid-things-we-planned-by-blake-bailey/) - It is a rare thing to find me reading non-fiction. I tend to like the escape that fiction provides, it has been this way since I read Pet Cemetery in one sitting in the ninth grade. I did have to give an oral book report the next day, but still. When John Updike died a - [Best Adapted Screenplays - 12 Years a Slave](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-adapted-screenplays-12-years-a-slave/) - This is part 4 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow. The adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave—the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold into slavery—is remarkable, the result of numerous artists and craftsmen working at an extraordinarily high - [Best Adapted Screenplays - Philomena](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-adapted-screenplays-philomena/) - This is part 5 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow. “Philomena is the extraordinary story of an extraordinary woman.” Actress Judi Dench writes these well-meaning words in the foreword to the movie tie-in edition of Martin Sixsmith’s book—you know, the edition with co-stars - [A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-man-came-out-of-a-door-in-the-mountain-giveaway/) - "A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is a rich, haunting, original novel that captures evil in many forms--mythic, magic and chillingly real. Adrianne Harun's writing can hold you breathless." — Jess Walter, author of The Zero and Beautiful Ruins "Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic - [Police by Jo Nesbø](https://threeguysonebook.com/police-by-jo-nesbo/) - When Jo Nesbø’s Police showed up at my apartment a while back, I groaned in disappointment. Another Norwegian crime thriller? Good lord. Soon as I finish one, it’s all I can do to get even a moment to myself before another one lands on my desk. And so, reluctantly I picked up the substantially sized - [Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow](https://threeguysonebook.com/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow/) - It isn't often that I search for other reviews of a book before finishing at least a draft of my own thoughts, but I made an exception for E.L. Doctorow's latest novel, Andrew's Brain. The book is short and I read it slowly twice and skimmed it cover to cover a third and fourth time, looking - [The Bosnia List By Kenan Trebincevic](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bosnia-list-by-kenan-trebincevic/) - I've read lots of books about the war in the former Yugoslavia; in fact there are three shelves in my library devoted to it. I am glad to say that one that will go on the top shelf is Kenan Trebincevic's memoir The Bosnia List. Kenan was twelve when all hell broke loose in his - [The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-heaven-of-animals-by-david-james-poissant/) - The first story in this collection entitled “Lizard Man” is a sharp and glorious concoction, containing potent irony, and acute misery. According to Hoyle: it is a story about men in trouble who are too afraid to end it all.I will not envy "Lizard Man"! It is too good, bitter, and hopeful. We quickly come - [Jennifer duBois Q&A with David Ebershoff](https://threeguysonebook.com/jennifer-dubois-qa-with-david-ebershoff/) - David Ebershoff: In Cartwheel you give us four characters – Lily, the foreign exchange student in Buenos Aires arrested for murdering her roommate; her father; Eduardo, the prosecutor determined to convict her; and Sebastien, the enigmatic young man who lives next door. Describe your process of structuring the novel through these four points of view. - [The Last Days of California by Mary Miller](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-last-days-of-california-by-mary-miller/) - They liked movies from the 80’s: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Last Starfighter, Sixteen Candles, The Goonies, The Breakfast Club. Their lives were punctuated with junk food that they considered just food and by a succession of chain restaurants whose menus they knew by heart. Their father didn’t believe in global warming. It had - [When We Fell In Love - Chris Pavone](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-chris-pavone/) - When Chris Pavone published his first novel, The Expats, about a lady spy coming in from the cold, I was curious. His second book, The Accident, takes a shot at the publishing business, which is always rich chocolate cake, flour included. We are thrilled to have an essay from him, and couldn't be happier to - [Being Dead in South Carolina by Jacob White](https://threeguysonebook.com/being-dead-in-south-carolina-by-jacob-white/) - In Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Warren Beatty’s John McCabe—with all his roughness and maundering—grumbles, “I got poetry in me,” an assertion with which nobody around him seems to agree. This dialogue kept running through my head while I read Being Dead in South Carolina, Jacob White’s debut short story collection, which begins with - [When We Fell In Love - Tejas Desai](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-tejas-desai/) - Faulkner on the Subway I attended a specialized high school in New York City in the 1990s so that meant a two hour journey—one bus and two trains—from Queens to the north Bronx. The trains were so crowded I had to stand, holding a rail and ignoring threats from gangbangers. But that didn’t stop me - [Mount Terminus by David Grand](https://threeguysonebook.com/mount-terminus-by-david-grand/) - Mount Terminus is an allegorical novel that’s at its best when it’s not. At times, it reminded me of Marquez and the flow of magical realism. However, it’s not really magical realism in those phases but improbable realism. This is when I said to myself...hold on, people don’t behave this way...this story has more the - [A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies by Douglas Watson](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-moody-fellow-finds-love-and-then-dies-by-douglas-watson/) - If you tell me that Douglas Watson isn’t the nicest person alive, I won’t believe you. A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies exudes warmth and love—toward its characters and toward its readers—in each of its 170 pages. But the good feelings extend beyond the story itself. In his “Acknowledgments,” Watson thanks friends and - [When We Fell In Love - Marina Peralta](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-marina-peralta/) - I fell in love with reading in my teen years. I was a lonely teenager my books were my amazing companions. I was trying to find some answers to my desires and I was confused. There were glimpses of shame and guilt due to these desires. I was also searching for love. I read Corin - [Vernon Downs by Jaime Clarke](https://threeguysonebook.com/vernon-downs-by-jaime-clarke/) - Some authors everybody has an opinion about. For instance, remember that controversial writer from the early 90s? You know the one. He wrote that satirical novel about the yuppie executive who moonlights as a serial killer—who plays Whitney Houston for his victims (usually women) before swinging his axe. Some people accuse him of being famous - [Frog Music by Emma Donoghue](https://threeguysonebook.com/frog-music-by-emma-donoghue/) - I’ll admit I may be the only person on earth who did not love Emma Donoghue’s book club bonanza Room. I don’t know, I just was not a fan, so I was little hesitant when her new book Frog Music popped into my mailbox begging to be reviewed. I loved the title and was willing - [First 1000 Words - The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-the-marrying-of-chani-kaufman-by-eve-harris/) - Chapter 1 Chani. Baruch. November 2008 – London The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats. Sweat dripped down the hollow of her back and collected in pools under her arms staining the ivory silk. She edged closer to The Bedeken Room door, one ear pressed up against it. - [Why We Love What We Do - Jon Roemer](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-we-love-what-we-do-jon-roemer/) - Some days I'm baffled by what this business is all about. Other days it's hard to contain my excitement. Several days a week it's a heavy blend of both. Over the next several months, Outpost19 welcomes more innovative work by some hard-working writers, which I always happy to crow about. A Moody Fellow Finds Love And Then Dies, Douglas - [First 1000 Words - Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-nest-of-worlds-by-marek-s-huberath/) - The Only Version All things defined, distinct. Black and white, zero and one. Here is song and song alone. 1 The thuds of the stabilizers stopped; the plane came to rest on the runway. The roar of the engines changed in tone and finally died. But the thunder continued in Gavein’s head; its incessancy now - [The Fata Morgana Books by Jonathan Littell](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-fata-morgana-books-by-jonathan-littell/) - It is once again a tremendous pleasure to be in the presence of Charlotte Mandell: her earlier translations are in large part responsible for introducing the English-speaking world to the full range and Maurice Blanchot, and for that alone we should be eternally grateful. The achievement of The Fata Morgana Books lies in paring down - [1000 Words - Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-every-day-is-for-the-thief-by-teju-cole/) - On the way home from the airport, at the roundabout of Ikeja bus stop, where the late afternoon rush makes the traffic snarl, we come to a complete standstill. - [When We Fell In Love - Heather Brittain Bergstrom](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-heather-brittain-bergstrom/) - I grew up in eastern Washington in a fundamentalist Baptist church and unaccredited basement school where secular books were literally banned, as well as rock music, movies, TV, and pants for females. The county library was as off limits as the local tavern. The library, I’d been warned, was full of pornography and atheist manifestos—and - [During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase](https://threeguysonebook.com/during-the-reign-of-the-queen-of-persia-by-joan-chase/) - Once in a while, a serious reader of fiction has to grapple with a depressing question: how the hell has a great book been forgotten? In the case of Joan Chase and During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, it seems a matter of timing. First published in 1983, Chase’s debut novel inhabits farm-life - [First 1000 Words - Echo of the Boom by Maxwell Neely-Cohen](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-echo-of-the-boom-by-maxwell-neely-cohen/) - They were all born after the fall of the wall but before the fall of the towers. Eight years before the end, ten-year-old Steven stepped off the train holding his father’s hand. There was an unattended bag resting beneath a bench on the platform. Which was worse? Not spotting the bag in the first place - [When We Fell In Love - Charles Driskell](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-charles-driskell/) - My reading and writing are borne of the same DNA. They’re my oxygen.My love affair with books has been a long, winding, delightful road. The reading came first. The writing came much, much later. I didn't start writing until I was thirty-three years old and I wasn't serious about it until I was thirty-seven. That’s - [The Storied Live fo A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-storied-live-fo-a-j-fikry-by-gabrielle-zevin/) - Is it me or recently are there lot of books being written about booksellers, book lovers, and authors; An Unnecessary Woman, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair and The Quick, to name a few? I’m not complaining because I love them all. We can now add another one to the book pile of books - [The Pile Grows](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-pile-grows/) - The pile grows, and though I don’t have time to read all of these books, I want to mention them. Summer House With Swimming Pool, by Herman Koch, Hogarth, on sale June 2014. This is Mr. Koch’s second novel after last year’s New York Times Bestselling The Dinner. As the jacket copy says, it is - [And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass](https://threeguysonebook.com/and-the-dark-sacred-night-by-julia-glass/) - In 2002, Julia Glass won the National Book Award for Three Junes, a rare accomplishment for a debut novel. Reading that book twelve years later, it feels very much of its time, its kin consisting of other early-aughts award-winners that plumbed family strife with a genealogist’s precision (e.g., The Corrections, Empire Falls, Middlesex). But Three - [Interview with Novelist Steve Ulfelder](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-novelist-steve-ulfelder/) - I picked up Steve Ulfelder's first crime novel Purgatory Chasm shortly after it was published in 2011. Apart from being a fantastic hard-boiled mystery novel, it shed light on many issues, including those between father and son, and moral vs. legal pursuits of justice. Since then, Ulfelder has written three more novels with the protagonist - [The Most Dangerous Book by Kevin Birmingham](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-most-dangerous-book-by-kevin-birmingham/) - The Most Dangerous Book, The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, should be understood as broader than you might think. Yes, it’s about the legal struggles to prevent the book from being suppressed, censored or destroyed. The early twentieth century was an era when offensive books were burned. It wasn’t just the Nazis who did that - [When We Fell In Love - Max Neely-Cohen](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-max-neely-cohen/) - Even though I did not fall in love with writing until I was 19, I always loved books. From elementary school onward, I bought and hoarded as many as I could. I loved them as objects, as works of art, as things, as ideas. I cared about having books around, hosting them on carefully organized - [When We Fell In Love - Jaime Clarke](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-jaime-clarke/) - If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys mystery series, had reason to feel flush with praise. (As an adult I would learn that Franklin W. Dixon wasn’t, in fact, a real person but a pseudonym for a variety of writers, though most of the original titles - [To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris](https://threeguysonebook.com/to-rise-again-at-a-decent-hour-by-joshua-ferris/) - The themes of truth, meaning and self-knowledge all stem, in Joshua Ferris’s latest novel, from the side-effects of a peculiarly modern crime: that of online identity theft. This is the story of that crime: as the pages go by, the lineage or genealogy, the mysterious origin, of this crime eventually branches out to include the - [Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous](https://threeguysonebook.com/dispute-over-a-very-italian-piglet-by-amara-lakhous/) - Being an animal person I couldn't resist picking up Algerian born writer’s latest novel Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet. Funny title, funny book, what could go wrong? Let’s say a lot can go wrong in this slim volume, coming in at a mere 162 pages, but the good news is it has a lot - [How Evan Broke His Head by Garth Stein](https://threeguysonebook.com/how-evan-broke-his-head/) - We meet Evan at Tracy’s funeral and we are given the following facts: Tracy and Evan used to date, Tracy is no longer alive and Tracy was killed in a car accident. Oh, and she has a son named Dean. What we come to find out is that Dean is actually Tracy and Evan’s son - [When We Fell In Love - Richard Kramer](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-richard-kramer/) - When did I fall in love? So often, too easily. Looking back, I see myself as a pre-teen Chet Baker, with a book instead of a trumpet, falling in love, and in love, and in love. I had more first kisses than I can count, but some of the most exciting ones were-- "The Diamond - [Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill](https://threeguysonebook.com/dept-of-speculation-by-jenny-offill/) - The title of this novel comes from the return address that the married couple in this wafer thin story uses on correspondence to each other. Like bait, Ms. Offill dangles these wet mice over the reader, and I wonder, did she imagine a public that was eager for these morsels? It is not until late - [Funny Once by Antonya Nelson](https://threeguysonebook.com/funny-once-by-antonya-nelson/) - I requested Funny Once from Bloomsbury. I had the feeling, that all bibliophiles have from time to time, that I would like it. There are ten stories, taking place in Houston and Wichita mostly, and also New Mexico and Colorado. These are non-bicoastal stories about middle class Americans, that increasingly ephemeral social class. Their - [First 1000 Words - Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-cartwheel-by-jennifer-dubois/) - There was, of course, no possibility that Lily had actually been involved in any of this; Andrew’s confidence on that point was part of what had made the situation seem, initially, not catastrophic. The accusation was so ghastly and so wild and so patently, transparently, ludicrous that he’d nearly laughed when he first heard of - [When We Fell In Love - Jennifer duBois](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-jennifer-dubois/) - When I was a child, I was drawn to the knotty questions posed by Natalie Babbitt books: if you had a chance to live forever, would you want to? Do we sometimes cherish what we claim to fear? I also loved Phillip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart trilogy, about an intrepid young woman who was forever finding - [American Innovations by Rivka Galchen](https://threeguysonebook.com/american-innovations-by-rivka-galchen/) - Rivka Galchen tells stories about characters who obsess over strangers; who cling to things that may not be real; who see patterns where patterns don’t necessarily exist; who invoke science as an almost supernatural force, carrying with it the power to alter lives. Her 2008 debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, hit the literary world hard, earning - [Why We Love What We Do - Scott Esposito - Two Lines Press](https://threeguysonebook.com/why-we-love-what-we-do-scott-esposito-two-lines-press/) - Recently, I was taken aback by the outpouring of remembrances on Twitter that followed the death of the great Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. This was the passing of a true legend, the kind of person whose death really made me stop and think as few celebrities can. I’ve long since grown accustomed to seeing - [The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-truth-about-the-harry-quebert-affair-by-joel-dicker/) - It’s that time of year again, worrying about your body looking good in a bathing suit, making sure you have enough sun protection products to keep you from getting a bad sunburn and having in your beach bag the book everybody is going to be talking about this summer. Trust me, that book is going - [Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor](https://threeguysonebook.com/praying-drunk-by-kyle-minor/) - About two-thirds through Praying Drunk, a widow and seasoned survivor of missionary tragedies follows up a list of brutal deaths with this curious line: “I don’t know what to do with any of it.” She wants her moribund world to make sense, but is given nothing. Kyle Minor’s new book of short stories is so - [Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch](https://threeguysonebook.com/summer-house-with-swimming-pool-by-herman-koch/) - Ever wonder what your doctor is really thinking about you when he is giving you a physical? Is he repulsed by what he sees? What about your best friend visiting you and he holds that glance a little too long on your young daughter and you wonder if he is actually checking her out. These - [Terms & Conditions by Robert Glancy](https://threeguysonebook.com/terms-conditions-by-robert-glancy/) - A truly awesome book takes the reader by surprise, and you never see it coming. There are exceptions, The Goldfinch, The Corrections, and I am sure there are others. Terms & Conditions is an in your face blizzard of short chapters told from the point of view of a man who has lost his memory, - [Further Joy by John Brandon](https://threeguysonebook.com/further-joy-by-john-brandon/) - Within the last couple months, a handful of complex fictional works have traveled to the kinds of rural locations that erudite artists often leave behind, and have dug around in unpaved parking lots and browsed broken-down thrift stores. These works—among them Mike Harvkey’s In the Course of Human Events, Katherine Faw Morris’ Young God, and - [First 1000 Words - The Looking Glass Brother by Peter von Ziegesar](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-the-looking-glass-brother-by-peter-von-ziegesar/) - March 12, 1995 New York City The phone at my desk rang and a crusty, vaguely familiar, tobacco-hoarse voice crackled in my ear. “Peter, it’s Peter. Your stepbrother,” said the voice. “Your stepbrother, Peter, who you haven’t seen in many years. Little Peter, meet Big Peter. Isn’t that funny? Anyway, it’s me.” I looked out - [Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson](https://threeguysonebook.com/fourth-of-july-creek-by/) - I’ll say this upfront. I’m not a fan of books about guys being rough and tough because they come from the salt of America. Most of the books are filled with characters that come across like they just rode in from a Hollywood lot and not actually the place the author tries to place them - [The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-last-illusion-by-porochista-khakpour/) - The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour is based on a legend from the medieval Persian epic the Shanameh the Book of Kings. This beautiful and haunting novel is about a boy named Zal who is unwanted by his mother and is left to spend his childhood in a birdcage. He takes on rituals of being - [The Stories of Jane Gardam](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-stories-of-jane-gardam/) - The Stories of Jane Gardam is an exceptional cloth release from Europa Editions. Exceptional because Europa rarely issues cloth editions and exceptional on account of what they have issued, the inventive, exploratory stories of Jane Gardam. There are thirty stories in this collection dating from 1977 to 2007 although most stories are from the 80’s - [Euphoria by Lily King](https://threeguysonebook.com/euphoria-by-lily-king/) - When our society seems to be reeling back from the enlightenment ideals of reason and tolerance, it’s a welcome relief to be offered a “science” novel by a book brother. That is, a work of fiction where scientists and the struggle for scholarship, the striving to create a book worthy of inclusion on a university - [Young God by Katherine Faw Morris](https://threeguysonebook.com/young-god/) - Katherine Faw Morris has a lot to say and decided to say it in as few words as possible in her frustrating debut novel Young God. Ms. Morris can write but she’s going to have to move on from gimmicky prose, put the remote down from watching Breaking Bad and get to work on a great American - [The Professor and the Siren by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-professor-and-the-siren-by-giuseppe-tomasi-di-lampedusa/) - Nobody knows much of anything about Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa these days, and it is a real shame: toward the end of his life, almost as an afterthought, he produced one masterpiece: a novel entitled The Leopard that not only captures the decay of a form of life – the trappings and habits of an - [The Detective & The Pipe Girl by Michael Craven](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-detective-the-pipe-girl-by-michael-craven/) - Most mysteries are the same, aren’t they? Whether or not the writing is compelling, the desire to find out—whatever it is—overrides whatever the book lacks in originality or style. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Of course, a great many mysteries are well-written novels that stand on more than just the power of the - [The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-string-diaries-by-stephen-lloyd-jones/) - A monster story with something of a pity the monster touch, The String Diaries is set in several centuries with a deft weaving between eras as Stephen Lloyd Jones picks up and then drops one thread after another. The reader is diverted by the time shifts, it’s like channel hopping. Lloyd Jones tells you just - [California by Edan Lepucki](https://threeguysonebook.com/california-by-edan-lepucki/) - Despite the fact that a certain television personality brought this book to the world's attention, creating a publicity gold mine, I was already thinking about reading it because of my own interests in the end of the world. Sad as that may sound, my interests are warranted, because finding good stories about how it all - [The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north-by-richard-flanagan/) - The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize. “Why at the beginning of things is there always light?’ That’s the first line. In which Richard Flanagan references a book. The name of his Australian novel doppelgangs Basho, some of whose haiku are part of the text’s pattern. - [Dear Committee Member by Julie Schumacker](https://threeguysonebook.com/dear-committee-member-by-julie-schumacker/) - Dear Reader, I want to recommend the funniest book you will read all year. Dear Committee Members is comprised of letters imagined by author Julie Schumacher. Before you begin reading this book, I highly recommend not doing so while drinking any beverage because you may find yourself laughing out loud causing a huge liquid mess. In this - [I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck](https://threeguysonebook.com/i-married-you-for-happiness-by-lily-tuck/) - I may have just witnessed a story about how marriage doesn’t work, no matter how hard you try. How many passes can you give a spouse, how many times can you close your mouth instead of saying what is on your mind. This might be marriage. It is not ball gowns, bouquets, speeches and ice sculptors doused in champagne. - [The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-lowland-by-jhumpa-lahiri/) - Earlier this summer, I began Midnight’s Children. It was tough going and I spent as much time in the dictionary and on the Internet as I did reading, due to my ignorance of Indian history. Because I am a book reviewer and am ruled by deadlines, I had to abandon that book and so far - [Peerless Four by Victoria Patterson](https://threeguysonebook.com/peerless-four-by-victoria-patterson/) - Victoria Patterson’s The Peerless Four is a sports novel for people who don’t really like sports. It’s also the most cautious and measured novel I’ve read in a while, quickly establishing its tension with two epigraphs: The first (familiar) quote tells us that “it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the - [Married Love by Tessa Hadley](https://threeguysonebook.com/married-love-by-tessa-hadley/) - Lottie looks young for her age, 13 or 14. She’s worn the same glasses with thick black frames for years. You assume that those glasses are not flattering and that Lottie is too socially awkward, too much of a clumsy child, to get more fashionable lenses. Lottie wears her hair in pigtails. Lottie cries: “You’re not taking me seriously!” “Cries” is Hadley’s choice. You should never take someone seriously who says that. Hadley is undermining her character. Writer’s strategy. A fine one. - [because the night by Tessa Hadley](https://threeguysonebook.com/because-the-night-by-tessa-hadley/) - The story’s first line won me halfway over: “Their parents had fantastic parties; they were famous for it.” That’s abstract, but then we get the downstairs bath filled with ice and bottles of Veuve du Vernay, which is described in ad copy that I found online as “the ultimate party wine.” The extravagance of wine bottles in the bathtub makes me want to be there. It doesn’t matter that I don’t drink. - [Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley](https://threeguysonebook.com/clever-girl-by-tessa-hadley/) - Writer talking...through her character: “And I thought that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you." “What befell” - [When We Fell In Love - Eric D. Goodman](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-eric-goodman/) - My earliest memories of reading come in flashes of unassociated images and feelings: my father reading to me about a Cat in a Hat; my mother feeding me with Green Eggs and Ham; a book about a Giving Tree and one about a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Without even noticing, the Wild Rumpus had begun - [When We Fell In Love - Shann Ray](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-shann-ray/) - When I met Jenn we agreed to read the ten major books that had most influenced our individual lives. I wasn't much of a reader then, twenty-five years ago. In fact, when we exchanged our books she'd already read each of mine, while I had read none of hers. She, with her fresh horizons, broke my every resistance, and changed me in ways I needed to be changed - [American Masculine by Shann Ray](https://threeguysonebook.com/american-masculine-by-shann-ray/) - There's a ton of humanity in these stories, a ton of heart, a ton of gratitude. They are the antithesis of post-modern coolness, and that in itself is something worthy of celebration. The people who populate these stories are the hardscrabble people of Carver, and early Richard Ford, and Sherman Alexie, but Ray's treatment is unique and transformative, and yes, graceful, powerful, muscular, and forgiving. - [Of Gossip and the Authenticity of Essays](https://threeguysonebook.com/of-gossip-and-the-authenticity-of-essays/) - There's an authenticity to great essays as if they are purged of any spin. any falsity of expression, any slander masquerading as a thirst for truth. The essay is an enlightened form. The writer can't lie or cheat in an essay. They would be found out. The false essay sinks its author. It's like you're turning the camera on yourself. - [On Jennifer Egan](https://threeguysonebook.com/on-jennifer-egan/) - Egan really nailed this hot literary device of writing characters that nobody likes - and it is effective: when not rooting for their personal hero, a reader is forced to really dig in and grasp the situation at hand. The device - does it have a name? - calls attention and respect to the writing, story structure, and consistency of character development. It's a bold and potentially risky choice that makes me stand up and pay attention: this writer has something to say. - [Notable New Releases 6/6/2011](https://threeguysonebook.com/notable-new-releases-662011/) - Did you know that two writers won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975? Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers was one; The Hair of Harold Roux was the other, all but forgotten. I wonder what modern award winners will stand strong 30 years from now. - [Notable New Releases 6/14/2011](https://threeguysonebook.com/notable-new-releases-6142011/) - Friend of the blog, JPO's enormously fun satire is one of my recommendations for paperback reading this summer. Here's what I said last year: "The smug wink-and-nod cynicism and their unraveling is reminiscent of Revolutionary Road, but, you know, really funny, including an excrutiating, more than you want to know account of vasectomies." JE reviewed it too, and put it on his Manly Books of the Year list. - [You Have My Permission To Read Anything You Want](https://threeguysonebook.com/you-have-my-permission-to-read-anything-you-want/) - Have you checked in with your soul lately? If you haven't then that's the problem. It's siren song is always calling out to you. Homer was wrong. You shouldn't stop up your ears. Your ship won't flounder, it will reach Ithaca. Maybe you wouldn't know Cormac McCarthy from your postman.You must have greatly appreciated it when Oprah gave you permission to read him. There was the added advantage that you got to bear witness while Oprah talked to CM. - [Thoughts Without Cigarettes Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/thoughts-without-cigarettes-giveaway/) - Hijuelos grew up in a small apartment in a rough, ethnically diverse Morningside Heights neighborhood. After falling ill following a trip to Cuba to visit his mother’s family, Oscar finds himself for a year in a children’s convalescence hospital, separated from his family, his native language Spanish, and ultimately his heritage that creates a lifelong crack in his identity. - [The Good and the Ghastly Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-good-and-the-ghastly-giveaway/) - Scribner has generously offered to provide five copies of The Good & the Ghastly to our readers in a giveaway. As usual, we can't resist a literary hoop to jump through. So, to enter the contest just comment below with either a favorite gangster/mob/organized crime novel or a favorite novel set in the future. - [DH's Ten Cardinal Rules of Book Blogging](https://threeguysonebook.com/dhs-ten-cardinal-rules-of-book-blogging/) - Read only the writers who will talk to you. There is no greater thrill than reading a novel, being amazed, and knowing you can ask the writer about it. Not that you'll learn much from asking the writer questions. You'll learn that literature is mysterious. Not even the writers can explain it. - [Interview with Carmela Ciuraru](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-carmela-ciuraru/) - Carmela Ciuraru was kind of enough to answer my questions about her wonderful new book, Nom De Plume. JR: Pseudonyms give people the license to lie (I stole that from you). Especially writers, who in most cases, lie all the time, in one way or another. This is a very specific book, and you take - [LA Noire: The Collected Stories](https://threeguysonebook.com/la-noire-the-collected-stories-2/) - LA Noire looks like about the only video game I'd be interested in. This is even better, since it's the book version, and it's only $.99 on Kindle. How can that not be worth it? Here's the marketing spiel: Rockstar Games has partnered with Mulholland Books to publish a collection of short fiction expanding the - [The Bret Easton Ellis Interview Part 1](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bret-easton-ellis-interview-part-1/) - The power from any of the great American writers comes from their style. Not their storytelling. That’s my overly strident opinion on why literary novels should never be filmed. I didn’t create American Psycho to be a movie. I created it to be a literary experience. I thought it was interesting that it had no plot, and had nothing in it that would interest Hollywood. There are a lot of murders in it. - [The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-miniaturist-by-jessie-burton/) - Chosen as one of this year’s Top Ten Buzz Books at Book Expo America, The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton deserves all the buzz that will be coming her way. This is one of those books that you come across every once in a while where you just want to tell everybody you know to read - [When We Fell In Love - Julia Mary Gibson](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-julia-mary-gibson/) - At five years old I had zero siblings, no television, and two parents who spent most of their time writing and reading and talking about books with each other and their friends, so I taught myself to read for something to do. I still have one of my instruction manuals in this pursuit, the musty - [Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel](https://threeguysonebook.com/station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mandel/) - If you’re a fan of Indie bookstores then you already know who Emily St. John Mandel is. We have mutual friends although I've never read her work before or spoken to her. A galley for Station Eleven was provided by a friend. Her three previous novels, Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun and The - [The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-laughing-monsters-by-denis-johnson/) - It is hard to believe that I have only read a few books by Denis Johnson, and prior to The Laughing Monsters felt left out of the fan club that spoke the “Denis Johnson language”. There is a unique point of entry to his writing that has always mystified me, up until this moment. Jesus’ - [Best to Laugh by Lorna Landvik](https://threeguysonebook.com/best-to-laugh-by-lorna-landvik/) - Here’s the problem with being a stand-up comedian: people expect you to be funny. Maybe not all the time—hopefully not all the time—but certainly at a higher rate than Alan from accounting. As recently as two years ago, I was a funny guy. I’d dabbled in stand-up for about three or four years, had made - [Sweetness #9 by Stephan Eirik Clark](https://threeguysonebook.com/sweetness-9-by-stephan-eirik-clark/) - You are what you eat, and after reading Stephan Eirik Clark’s Sweetness #9, you may be looking down at your plate for dinner this evening and wonder if what you’re eating is really what it claims to be. Is that really meatloaf you’re looking at or is it something made up to taste like meatloaf. - [Interview with Greg Bottoms](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-greg-bottoms/) - I met Greg Bottoms during our days in the MFA program at University of Virginia. I admired his work then, and I admire it even more now. We both came from similar backgrounds, with what would appear from the outside to be stable homes in solid communities; he in Virginia, me in Vermont. Yet our - [The Children's Act by Ian McEwan](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-childrens-act-by-ian-mcewan/) - Ian McEwan”s newest novel The Children Act is certainly timely and may be a predictor of things to come in American life if we start to allow religion to creep closer to the laws of the land. The novel revolves around a High Court judge in London named Fiona Maye. Her job is to decide - [Straight White Male by John Niven](https://threeguysonebook.com/straight-white-male-by-john-niven/) - Here’s the scenario: I’m walking around (last time I’ll mention it, I swear) at BEA, just letting my eye wander to whatever caught its fancy. It’s the final day of the convention; a lot of the stands are already being packed up and what remains are a bunch of publicists and reps that are having - [Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami](https://threeguysonebook.com/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage-by-haruki-murakami/) - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is certainly a book you can judge by its cover. It is another beautifully book designed by Chip Kidd showing a Japanese subway system map with windows of color. I highly recommend buying the real book for this and not the e-book. It’s truly one of his - [The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-man-who-loved-dogs-by-leonardo-padura/) - Growing up in a rural part of the Midwest in the 1980s, what I learned about Communism was limited to pop culture caricatures, network news and newspaper coverage, and the scare stories told to me by our school’s civics teachers–walrus-mustached men whose socks always matched their shirts and whose politics leaned far to the right, - [An Interview with Richard Flanagan](https://threeguysonebook.com/an-interview-with-richard-flanagan/) - Richard Flanagan is the author of the The Narrow Road to the Deep North, recently released in the US by Knopf, and longlisted shortlisted for Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Dennis Haritou: First off, Mr. Flanagan, thanks very much for considering my questions. You referenced a lot of literature in The Narrow Road to the Deep - [Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce](https://threeguysonebook.com/love-me-back-by-merritt-tierce/) - Literary book publishing is a rarefied club to be sure. It is not every day that you come across a writer that takes such incredible risks in a debut. I bet Merritt Tierce has had a long, long time to write this story, and it is not a tale that is too far from what - [The Bone Clocks](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bone-clocks/) - Having attended this years’s BEA, one thing that I will remember about it is the literary author that was the rock star with crazed fans it was hands down David Mitchell, the author of The Bone Clocks. There was literally going to be a scene if people who waited for hours didn't get their hands - [Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood](https://threeguysonebook.com/stone-mattress-nine-tales-by-margaret-atwood/) - Summer is over, kids are back to school, and the summer beach books that you read sit on your shelf with bent spines and sand in between the page (for e-readers you are cleaning the film of suntan lotion off your screen). Either way it’s time to prepare for great fall literature and what better - [When We Fell In Love - Dan Dembiczak](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-dan-dembiczak/) - It all started in kindergarten. It’s when I knew I was a bit different. We had this little library of books and we got to spend a little bit of time each day reading through the series. I don’t recall the name of the series, but the books were yellow and black slim paperbacks. And - [Perfidia by James Ellroy](https://threeguysonebook.com/perfidia-by-james-ellroy/) - Between 1987 and 1992 the Los Angeles-born writer James Ellroy published the LA Quartet, a sequence of four novels – The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz – that placed him as right up there with Elmore Leonard at the cutting edge of US crime fiction. Ellroy did not so much reinvent or re-imagine what we understand - [Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball](https://threeguysonebook.com/silence-once-begun-by-jesse-ball/) - The Poet. The Novelist. You know the type. The capitalization shows even when they refuse to capitalize their own names. There’s one in nearly every writing workshop. They’re a hazard of the form. If things have really gone south, the workshop is led by one who fosters the development of more just like them. Identified - [When We Fell In Love - John Mauk](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-john-mauk/) - One Hundred Years of Solitude threw me overboard—and I mean off the whole institutional/intellectual ship. I’d finished a PhD in English. I was thirty, a little burnt out from reading rhetorical theory, histories of rhetoric, and stacks of academic journals. A friend of mine had been nudging (yelling at) me to read Gabriel Gárcía Márquez. - [James Baldwin, Everybody’s Protest Novel](https://threeguysonebook.com/james-baldwin-everybodys-protest-novel/) - How do you challenge a novel that mainstream judgement considers an icon? How do you say: “It’s not so hot.” or “The idol is hollow.” Imagine the publishing world and the marketing world were in their own galaxy. If you ask those questions, you leave that galaxy behind. The novel is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Moral - [When We Fell In Love - Justin Forest](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-justin-forest/) - English was one of my worst subjects in school; I read only one novel, Jack London’s White Fang by age sixteen and quit high school at seventeen. Yet, with the first one-hundred dollars I earned from my parents’ cleaning service, I bought a Sears electric typewriter and wrote a one-hundred and twenty page novella, single - [A Review with Teeth - Peter Medawar Reviews The Phenomenon of Man](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-review-with-teeth-peter-medawar-reviews-the-phenomenon-of-man/) - I came across this scalding review of Pere Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man on the recommendation of a friend. I’m not drawn to science essays, being a liberal arts person. So I never would have come across Peter Medawar’s review on my own. It’s contained in Medawar’s collection of pieces called Pluto’s Republic. The title - [J: A novel by Harold Jacobson](https://threeguysonebook.com/j-a-novel-by-harold-jacobson/) - J: A novel by Harold Jacobson is a 2014 Booker Prize Finalist. It’s a novel about something that may or may have not happened. It’s a novel with characters named Edward Phineas Zermansky, Kevern “Coco” Cohen, Ailinn Solomoms, and Densdell Kroplik to name a few. It’s also a novel you won’t forget for a very - [Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr](https://threeguysonebook.com/tennessee-williams-mad-pilgrimage-of-the-flesh-by-john-lahr/) - Since 1992, John Lahr has been senior drama critic of The New Yorker. In 1994 he wrote a New Yorker profile of Tennessee Williams' frenemy, Lady Maria St. Just, the executor of his estate. St. Just had used her control of the estate to limit access to Williams papers, suppressing research on the playwright’s life - [When We Fell In Love - Ann Hamilton](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-ann-hamilton/) - There was no ah ha moment – no specific golden-hued childhood memory of me snuggled in my mother’s lap, watching her slowly open a book and begin to read. The realization of how the power of words on a page can take you anywhere. Oz, Narnia, the moon. Instead I have scattered images. Going to - [Collections](https://threeguysonebook.com/collections/) - I had this grand idea of reviewing a handful of short story collections, and then ran across Laura Van Den Berg’s story "Antarctica", which ends The Best American Short Stories of 2014. Her writing brought everything to a stop, and I turned all my attention to her work. In early 2015 FSG will publish her - [First 1000 Words - Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-1000-words-demigods-on-speedway-by-aurelie-sheehan/) - "My city is in danger. It’s out of hand, we’re overrun—the dealers coming up from Mexico and the lazy sons of bitches sending their lazy sons of sons of bitches to our schools, and now what am I seeing? Here’s something new: Africans. I’m not talking brown, these are black people, real native types, headdresses, - [Just Call Me Superhero by Alina Bronsky](https://threeguysonebook.com/just-call-me-superhero-by-alina-bronsky/) - If you haven’t heard of Russian-born author Alina Bronsky hopefully by the end this review you’ll become a fan and read her latest novel Just Call Me Superhero. After her other two novels Broken Glass Park and The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, Europa Editions published her latest about a teenager named Marke whose - [Guide for the Single Man and Woman by Aaron Goldfarb](https://threeguysonebook.com/guide-for-the-single-man-and-woman-by-aaron-goldfarb/) - There are few things in life more frustrating than realizing how clever someone else is. Imagine being the guy that went to school with the kid that went on to invent the zipper. Sure, you’re happy—you’ve got a family, nice job, maybe even a 401k and season tickets to an MLS team of your choice—but - [Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves by Carolyn Chute](https://threeguysonebook.com/treat-us-like-dogs-and-we-will-become-wolves-by-carolyn-chute/) - Carolyn Chute’s new book Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Becomes Wolves is one the most memorable books of 2014. It’s a book that comes in at a whopping 691 pages including acknowledgements, but it is a book that is worth the effort, even though the cast of characters include Big Brother, space aliens, - [Poole's Paradise by John Vorhaus](https://threeguysonebook.com/pooles-paradise-by-john-vorhaus/) - Writing a novel about college is tough. Hell, telling a college story in virtually any medium isn’t easy. Take a look at just about any of the books or movies or TV shows you’ve seen that try to depict some aspect of college life. Ask yourself,, “Does any of this, even remotely, identify with my - [Charles Dickens in Hard Times](https://threeguysonebook.com/charles-dickens-in-hard-times/) - He’s a gossip. He dishes it out on his characters. His authorial voice is very present. He doesn’t disappear into the text. I imagined him as a very good friend standing slightly behind my right shoulder and whispering all the dirt about everybody into my ear: Who was a piece of work, who was having - [The Happiest People in the World by Brock Clarke](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-happiest-people-in-the-world-by-brock-clarke/) - Are Danish people really happier than the rest of us? With Brock Clarke’s new book The Happiest People in the World we get a little taste of whether that is true or not. The story starts out with a newspaper cartoonist in Denmark republishing a comic featuring Mohammad. Sound familiar? Yes, Mr. Brock goes there - [Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano](https://threeguysonebook.com/suspended-sentences-by-patrick-modiano/) - Suspended Sentences by recent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano is a collection of three novellas called respectively: Afterimage, Suspended Sentences and Flowers of Ruin. The original French title, Chien de Printemps, meaning roughly “Dog of Spring” bears no relation. Wondering if the French phrase had some idiomatic meaning that I was missing, I came up - [Skylight by Jose Saramago](https://threeguysonebook.com/skylight-by-jose-saramago/) - If you never read a novel by Jose Saramago now is your chance. You can begin this experience with his first rejected novel by his publisher. Now I know that may not sound enticing, but trust me -- you won't be sorry you did. Since his death in 2010 I was always hoping for secret - [Killing Kennedy by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard](https://threeguysonebook.com/killing-kennedy-by-bill-oreilly-and-martin-dugard/) - Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat: if it’s an issue for you that Bill O’Reilly co-authored this book, you’re going to have to get over it. You’re going to also have to get over the fact that O’Reilly’s name takes up more real estate on the cover than anything - [A Discussion of William Eggleston’s Guide](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-discussion-of-williams-egglestons-guide/) - Dennis Haritou: JR, I had come across a remark about William Eggleston to the effect that he was a pioneer in the use of color in serious art photography. Since I don’t know very much about photography but wanted to improve my knowledge, I picked up a copy of William Eggleston’s Guide, which is considered - [Shark by Will Self](https://threeguysonebook.com/shark-by-will-self/) - Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low, And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go, Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long, Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song, comes Love's old sweet song. A bit like the way sound travels intact across a body of water - [The Room by Jonas Karlsson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-room-by-jonas-karlsson/) - If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know exactly the person I’m about to describe. He or she (sex in this case does not matter) just doesn’t quite fit in. They aren’t a bad person, per se. Just off. Something isn’t quite right about them. Like a computer that’s been dropped a few times - [Against the Country by Ben Metcalf](https://threeguysonebook.com/against-the-country-by-ben-metcalf/) - If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to read truly great books than I have a book that will keep you from breaking that resolution after the first week. It’s an unusual but extremely satisfying read. The novel is Against the Country by Ben Melcalf. The debut novel has a sole narrator who tells the - [Hollywood Frame by Frame by Karina Longworth](https://threeguysonebook.com/hollywood-frame-by-frame-by-karina-longworth/) - I have come to a conclusion that of all the information with which I am plagued, I find it very hard to tell whether or not any of it is actually is true. Here is a good example of where my head has drifted. I thought the plane that was shot down over Russia recently - [Blood-Drenced Beard by David Galena](https://threeguysonebook.com/blood-drenced-beard-by-david-galena/) - David Galena’s debut novel is cathartic journey into a son trying to figure out who he is after the death of his father and the mysterious tale of the disappearance of his grandfather. The novel opens with up with a story of a boy who loses his uncle who is the main unnamed character of - [Appreciating Photography with Susan Sontag](https://threeguysonebook.com/appreciating-photography-with-susan-sontag/) - The most offensive use of photography I personally know takes place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where I sometimes linger just outside the crowd in front of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. The painting, an old friend, has been lost to me as I look at tourists having their picture taken standing - [Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda](https://threeguysonebook.com/bonita-avenue-by-peter-buwalda/) - Bonita Avenue by Dutch author Peter Buwalda is a firecracker of a novel that will literally leave you speechless. It’s a novel filled with despicable dishonest people but you will find each and every word of their delicious dishonesties a delight to read. I for one did not know what to expect from a novel - [Interview with Laura Van Den Berg](https://threeguysonebook.com/interview-with-laura-van-den-berg/) - Find Me, Laura van den Berg’s debut novel will go on sale 2-17-15, and as a kind of warm up for our readers I thought it only fair that she answer a few of my questions. You should run out and pick up a copy of her fist collection, What The World Will Look Like - [When We Fell In Love - Laura Van Den Berg](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-laura-van-den-berg/) - In my MFA Program, there was a clear divide in the student body: those who hated the literature requirement and those who did not. Those who did were in the majority. We’re here to be writers, their argument went. Why would we waste time in lit classes, writing academic papers and talking theory? Fair enough, - [When We Fell In Love - Roderick Vincent](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-roderick-vincent/) - To imagine the year my reading journey began would indeed be a difficult feat. I would have to crawl back in memory all the way back to Where the Wild Things Are when what was more alluring were the pictures of oafish, horned monsters with sharp, pointy teeth and a little boy in a white - [The Marauders by Tom Cooper](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-marauders-by-tom-cooper/) - If Carl Hiaasen had a long lost brother in Louisiana it would be debut writer Tom Cooper - author of the blissful novel The Marauders. It’s all about the BP oil spill and the effect it has on a cast of memorable characters that would make most novelists weep with envy. Cooper’s writing makes you feel, - [How To Fight Presidents by Daniel O'Brien](https://threeguysonebook.com/how-to-fight-presidents-by-daniel-obrien/) - Being funny on paper is difficult. Being consistently funny is really hard. And being all that when writing about presidents is basically unheard of. Daniel O’Brien’s How To Fight Presidents, against all odds, does just that. Hell, even the illustrations contained in the book and the full title (“Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran - [Penelope Fitzgerald A Life by Hermione Lee](https://threeguysonebook.com/penelope-fitzgerald-a-life-by-hermione-lee/) - When Penelope Fitzgerald went up to Oxford, still not the commonest thing for a woman to do in the 1930’s, she attended the same college as her mother had a generation before. She took with her the copy of a “textbook” that her mother had used, of Spenser’s poetry, with her mother’s notes written in - [The Earliest Stories Ever?](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-earliest-stories-ever/) - I got over my desire to be a completist a while back. I no longer have to see all the episodes of a series if I’ve seen a few. And I don’t have to read all of Chekhov's stories because I’ve read some, although in that case I’m tempted. But I still have an obsession - [Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem](https://threeguysonebook.com/lucky-alan-by-jonathan-lethem/) - Jonathan Lethem had me hooked on his writing ever since the day I picked up his fantastic novel Motherless Brooklyn. It will always be one of my favorite books of all time that I recommend to people on a daily basis. So anytime there is a book by Lethem I’m always ready to preorder my - [The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-sex-lives-of-siamese-twins-by-irvine-welsh/) - Sometimes simply saying whether a book is, for lack of better terms, good or bad isn’t quite the point. Sometimes, you’ll read a book and not even be sure which of those descriptors fights. Hell, if you’re smart with words and stuff, you might be able to come up with something better than good or - [A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-little-life-by-hanya-yanagihara/) - A Little Life is Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, which after reading it should send shudders down the spine of other writers. It is truly remarkable how someone can have this much talent after only two books. I wonder if she knows it or even feels guilty about it. Ms. Yanagahara, I may suggest you start - [The Victorians by A.N. Wilson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-victorians-by-a-n-wilson/) - We commonly approach the past with a selfie stick. We insert ourselves into it. We crash the party that we haven’t been invited to, get drunk and vomit on the host’s carpet. We exaggerate the importance of outliers, if the positions of those odd men or women out happen to accord with our own views. - [When We Fell In Love - Lisa Doctor](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-lisa-doctor/) - My father dropped out of the ninth grade, abandoning his studies shortly after the first World War to help support his immigrant parents. Rather than continue his education on his own, he lived out his life eschewing “book learning.” I didn’t share his feelings. I craved the feel and the smell of every page I turned, always eager - [The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-unfortunates-by-sophie-mcmanus/) - When someone tells me that there is a book about to be published that will remind me of Edward St. Aubyn and his wild creation Patrick Melrose, I am typically on board but quietly saying to myself “yeah-yeah.” To be totally honest there is nothing like Patrick Melrose. The Unfortunates doesn’t open in the same - [Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum](https://threeguysonebook.com/hausfrau-by-jill-alexander-essbaum/) - Hausfrau, the positively delectable novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum, has a shiny book jacket with roses in bloom on the cover. One could say it’s almost like a foiled chocolate that you would open up and want to eat. Well, what’s inside the pages of this book are ones you are going to devour like - [West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan](https://threeguysonebook.com/west-of-sunset-by-stewart-onan/) - What a sad story. A fictionalized tale of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years, it is even sadder than that author’s fiction. Stewart O’Nan is masterful at writing about sad, tortured, sometimes broken people. In an interview on the Other People podcast, he says he wanted to get inside the facts presented in Fitzgerald biographies and - [The Wisdom of Perversity by Rafael Yglesias](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-wisdom-of-perversity-by-rafael-yglesias/) - The Wisdom of Perversity is the ripped from the headlines new novel by Rafael Yglesias from Algonquin Books. It’s a novel about child molestation and the devastating and long-term effects it can have on all parties. The Wisdom of Perversity is not an easy read. In fact I would say it’s a very uncomfortable book - [The Writer as Moralist by Saul Bellow](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-writer-as-moralist-by-saul-bellow/) - Saul Bellow’s essay on this subject was written in 1963. When Bellow refers to the cultural trends of his time, his comments have dated. When he leaves off observations of the current scene he attains a perennial relevance. Bellow notes that novels with messages are popular, a sly condemnation. He cites the quote attributed to - [The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-harder-they-come-by-t-c-boyle/) - The Harder They Come, T. C. Boyle’s new novel, is his best in years. It opens with a killing and ends with a killing. What is in between these pages will keep you turning them well into the night. After finishing it you’ll understand why Mr.Boyle is one of America’s great writers. The first killing is one - [Independent Ed by Ed Burns](https://threeguysonebook.com/independent-ed-by-ed-burns/) - I’m not typically a rah-rah, go-team type of guy. I’ve never really been one to read something about or by someone and get the sudden gust of energy needed to tackle the day. Maybe I’m just a self-motivated fella or simply an incredible cynic. All of this is preface to the fact that I’ve recently - [The Moon in the Gutter by David Goodis](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-moon-in-the-gutter-by-david-goodis/) - “The Moon in the Gutter”, such a poetic image? But I was wrong. In the shacks, alleys, dumps and dive bars of Vernon Street, all the moonlight seems to be for is a closer look at our nightmares. Relatively unknown noir, more than a shade dated in its sexual politics, being a tale over sixty - [The Last Days of Video by Jeremy Hawkins](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-last-days-of-video-by-jeremy-hawkins/) - Do you remember the days when you had to get the video store before it closed so you wouldn’t be charged a late fee, or how about remembering to rewind the VHS tape before you put it back in the box? If you don’t then those not so distant memories will come back to you once you - [Skepticism and the Depth of Life by Saul Bellow](https://threeguysonebook.com/skepticism-and-the-depth-of-life-by-saul-bellow/) - This is the last essay from the 60’s, sort of Bellow’s swan song to the era, in the recently released collection of his nonfiction. The thrust of its meandering thought is that our innovations in literary practice, combined with the soul killing of our commercial culture has created a kind of anti-matter of literacy. Early - [God Help The Child by Toni Morrison](https://threeguysonebook.com/god-help-the-child-by-toni-morrison/) - Sweetness says, “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me, I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me.” A light-skinned high - [When We Fell In Love - Mark Falkin](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-mark-falkin/) - I am not the writer whose backstory includes always having my nose in a book. Most author interviews include a bit about how they were reading in the crib, by flashlight at night under covers, voracious, unstoppable, unflappable readers. They loved bookstores, the smell of a mass of book paper, and got off sniffing binding - [The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-jazz-palace-by-mary-morris/) - The Jazz Palace is an atmospheric novel that literally takes you back in time to Chicago (1915-1929) with its underground jazz clubs, gangsters, and the struggles faced by African Americans. The novel opens with a part of history that this reviewer did not know about. The SS Eastland was a ship docked on the shores - [Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates](https://threeguysonebook.com/jack-of-spades-by-joyce-carol-oates/) - Joyce Carol Oates new novel of suspense, Jack of Spades, is novel about an author of suspense. His name is Andrew J Rush, and he is a man who has it all in the world of books: big sales, a great agent, and side job writing novels with a character, Jack of Spades, that brings in extra - [I Do and I Don’t by Jeanine Basinger](https://threeguysonebook.com/i-do-and-i-dont-by-jeanine-basinger/) - Recent events have led me to wonder when, and indeed if, same-sex marriage will be a theme taken up by Hollywood. To gain perspective, I took the opportunity to pull down a never read book from my shelf, I Do and I Don’t A History of Marriage in the Movies by Jeanine Basinger. I’m a - [The Green Road by Anne Enright](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-green-road-by-anne-enright/) - Almost in time for Mother’s Day, Anne Enright delivers a classic Irish mother. Rosaleen Madigan has a propensity for “going horizontal” when any of her four children disappoint her and they do so regularly. As the book opens, her elder son Dan sends her to her bed by announcing he has decided to become a - [Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag](https://threeguysonebook.com/against-interpretation-by-susan-sontag/) - When we read we want to soften the blow. We read the lines but we don’t get the impact. So when Sontag says that we interpret because we can’t accept what’s on the surface, that’s extremely subversive. We look away, like we don’t want to see the accident we have caused. I’ve read Philo, whom - [Germinal By Emile Zola](https://threeguysonebook.com/germinal-by-emile-zola/) - A.N. Wilson’s The Victorians, reviewed on this site, mentions four 19th century novels that deal with radical social conflict. I decided to read all of the them, one of which will be a rereading. The first is Germinal, written in the 1880’s. We meet Etienne wandering down a country road in northern France. He is - [In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume](https://threeguysonebook.com/in-the-unlikely-event-by-judy-blume/) - All my life, I’ve had all kinds of friends, many of whom would never get along with each other. One of the best things about being a voracious reader is being able to hang out while reading with so many different kinds of writers: highly literary writers, mystery, thriller, science fiction, and fantasy writers. Those - [My Life as a Mermaid by Jen Grow](https://threeguysonebook.com/my-life-as-a-mermaid-by-jen-grow/) - My Life as a Mermaid is an award winning short story collection by writer Jen Grow. It consists of a dozen stories which show people struggling with themselves and the world around them. The opening story is the title story “My Life as a Mermaid”. It is one of the most touching of the short - [Nobody Walks by Mick Herron](https://threeguysonebook.com/nobody-walks-by-mick-herron/) - A quick glance at Mick Herron’s bibliography and you might think you’re dealing with some sort of thrill-ride, crime and mystery version of Danielle Steele. Many (if not all) of the synopses of his novels seem to begin the same way… a disgraced, down-on-his-luck, former secret agent based somewhere in the UK is out to - [When We Fell In Love - Audrey Taylor Gonzalez](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-audrey-taylor-gonzalez/) - I believe in inspired writing. Sitting down with a thought, trying to create a sermon, a poem or a story from bowls of information, fingers on keyboard and swoosh, let loose. Silence gives a tender musical background. Letting the mind wind down rivers and crawl over rocks even gallop on the back of a horse - [Muse by Jonathan Galassi](https://threeguysonebook.com/muse-by-jonathan-galassi/) - I really wanted to like, no wait love, the novel Muse by the publisher and president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jonathan Galassi. I mean, what’s not to love? It’s a book about the publishing world and all the dirty secrets that us common folk know nothing about. It’s centered around two rival publishing houses - [The Daemon Knows by Harold Bloom](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-daemon-knows-by-harold-bloom/) - When I was a teenager the F. O. Matthiessen edition of The Oxford Book of American Verse fell off a truck and became my bible. I absorbed Whitman and Dickinson, and also Emerson and Hawthorne as if they were my mother’s milk, not taking in how radical they were. Their gift was the ideal of - [Calf by Andrea Kleine](https://threeguysonebook.com/calf-by-andrea-kleine/) - John Hinckley Jr. would probably write a mean autobiography. Since Publisher’s Weekly hasn’t announced that just yet, you will have to settle for a fictionalized version of his life prior to shooting President Reagan. Readers of this page-turner will need to digest new names surrounding that moment in history, which were changed presumably to avoid - [The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and At Last by Edward St. Aubyn](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-complete-patrick-melrose-novels-never-mind-bad-news-some-hope-mothers-milk-and-at-last-by-edward-st-aubyn/) - Edward St. Aubyn is a handsome man. Readers would be lying if they didn’t want to hang out with the guy in the author photo. It’s a bloke who is sharpish, distant, but clearly plagued by unseen troubles- in other words, a gentleman impersonating an anonymous mannequin in Amsterdam. If you’re a novelist that draws - [A View of the Harbor by Elizabeth Taylor](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-view-of-the-harbor-by-elizabeth-taylor/) - Elizabeth Taylor is a private writer and a slow teller. In a recent reissue of a 1947 novel, A View from the Harbour from New York Review Books, the range of characters she presents is great. At first I had trouble keeping them all straight. Up until about page 80 of the 323 page novel, - [Dietland by Sarai Walker](https://threeguysonebook.com/dietland-by-sarai-walker/) - When I picked up a copy of Dietland, the debut novel by author Sarai Walker, I had no idea what to expect from a book jacket with a picture of a cupcake made to look like a hand grenade. There were book jacket blurbs that used words like subversive and devious. When I started the - [Quicksand by Steve Toltz](https://threeguysonebook.com/quicksand-by-steve-toltz/) - Steve Toltz is the author of one of my favorite all time one hundred books, A Fraction of the Whole. It was also a Booker Prize Finalist so I wasn’t the only one who loved it. He was born in Sydney and currently lives in New York. His latest book is called Quicksand. It’s a - [Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh](https://threeguysonebook.com/eileen-by-otessa-moshfegh/) - Boston writer Ottessa Moshfegh new novel Eileen was a 2015 Book Expo America Buzz book and I can see why it was chose out of all the books presented at the expo. It is a slow boil of a book that has an ending you won’t see coming. Eileen is a pretty boring character but - [This is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison](https://threeguysonebook.com/this-is-your-life-harriet-chance-by-jonathan-evison/) - If you never read a book by Jonathan Evison then I feel sorry for you and I’m not just saying that because he has reviewed books on our website. Mr. Evison has written four books and each one them is a book you would proudly display on a bookcase or keep forever on your ereader. - [A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe by Fernando Pessoa](https://threeguysonebook.com/a-little-larger-than-the-entire-universe-by-fernando-pessoa/) - The use of an alternative name is one of the civil rights in the country of literature. Only a state authority, for example Facebook, has the right to tell you that you can’t do it. Even prominent writers have used pen names. Although publishers, who have less imagination than their writers or they wouldn’t be - [Sea Lovers by Valerie Martin](https://threeguysonebook.com/sea-lovers-by-valerie-martin/) - If you are to read only one short story collection this year make sure it’s Sea Lovers by Valerie Martin. It’s one of those collections where it’s not filled with stuff that literally should never have seen the light of day. It’s a collection of twelve stories that make you want to discover Valerie Martin - [The Little Brother by Victoria Patterson](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-little-brother-by-victoria-patterson/) - This is a story about rape told from the viewpoint of the rapist’s little brother. It is horrific, apologetically honest, lacking easy answers, and the best thing I have ever read about what is popularly called Rape Culture on the wild and often irresponsible Internet. Victoria Patterson is a ridiculously under-sung, under-appreciated novelist. She publishes - [Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi](https://threeguysonebook.com/pereira-declares-by-antonio-tabucchi/) - Pereira Declares is a taut, intellectual thriller with a strong moral compass, published in 1995 in English by New Directions. It’s only 136 finely wrought pages, carefully paced out and reasoned with the quality of a parable, like something a second cousin of Kafka would write. Its narrative voice is oddly formal and original. The - [Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor](https://threeguysonebook.com/miss-emily-by-nuala-oconnor/) - I have always had a fascination with Emily Dickinson: her secluded spinsterhood, her white clothes, the simplicity of her poems. But when I was asked to review a novel about her, I had reservations. I’ve read several novels about famous artists of one type or another over the past few years and been less than - [Bad Sex by Clancy Martin](https://threeguysonebook.com/bad-sex-by-clancy-martin/) - You don’t read this book, it happens to you. The self-destruction on display in Bad Sex is palpable, and will take most readers past the point of empathy for its booze soaked heroine. Some people might call it coincidence that I just finished reading Blackout by Sarah Hepola and soon after, almost by chance tore - [The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis De Bernieres](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-dust-that-falls-from-dreams-by-louis-de-bernieres/) - When I first picked up Captain Corelli’s Mandolin years ago and devoured it in a sitting, I wondered who Louis De Bernieres was and how and why did I never hear about him before. The minute I finished his backlist I anxiously waited for what he would write next. He has written a few books - [Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West](https://threeguysonebook.com/black-lamb-and-grey-falcon-by-rebecca-west/) - …Reading an old book, I find myself on a train in the 1930’s: A Selection from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Zeal combined with ignorance is a destructive force. You have only to consider our politicians who, the more ignorant they are, the more vehemently they express their opinions. This has been true - [The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell - The First 1000 Words](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-lower-quarter-by-elise-blackwell-the-first-1000-words/) - Clay pulled the second drawer of his filing cabinet out as far as it would go and removed from the second-to-last folder in the second-to-last hanging file the neat sheet of paper with his identities and passwords typed in columns and rows. He slid the drawer halfway in and pulled from the second folder in - [The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-lower-quarter-by-elise-blackwell/) - Sometimes I find a novel that so successfully melds place, character, and story it is hard to determine what makes reading it so compelling. The Lower Quarter is such a novel. The place is New Orleans, specifically the Lower Quarter, the more residential and less touristy section of the French Quarter, just five weeks or - [The State We're In by Ann Beattie](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-state-were-in-by-ann-beattie/) - Ann Beattie’s new short story collection is entitled The State We’re In. It’s a collection of loosely interconnected stories about the citizens of Maine. It reads like Ms. Beattie visited a small town in Maine and knocked on a door of a few dozen people and asked to them to tell her the most interesting - [The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-heart-goes-last-by-margaret-atwood/) - If you are looking for a novel that makes you feel good about life, the world, and yourself, DO NOT read Margaret Atwood’s latest. She opens with Stan and Charmaine, a married couple reduced to living in their beater car after an economic collapse has taken away their home and hopes of a happy family. - [Marty McFly](https://threeguysonebook.com/marty-mcfly/) - Today is the day. Sure, it’s a bit hollow to attach significance to a random day from a fictional film that came out nearly 30 years ago. But I’m also a fan of random strangers playing kids games that I can no longer play. Which is to say, I root for professional sports teams, so - [The Stain by Tessa Hadley](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-stain-by-tessa-hadley/) - The interior lives of homes have their own emotional logic. From the inside of the old stone house, where we just see the old guy and Marina growing closer like a bowl with only two goldfish in it, it seems perfectly sensible that Marina has inherited. - [The Misfortune of Marion Palm by Emily Culliton](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-misfortune-of-marion-palm-by-emily-culliton/) - I had a chance to meet and talk to Emily Culliton this past summer during a busy and crowded industry event in Brooklyn, and I’m sorry I missed that chance. I should have been reading this book back in the advance reading copy stage of publication so I could have announced to the world that - [When We Fell in Love - Peter Grandbois](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-peter-grandbois/) - My love of reading began when my uncle read me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was five years old. Actually, he only made it through The Fellowship of the Ring because I was so traumatized after Gandalf died that he realized the books might be a bit too old - [Exit West by Mohsin Hamid](https://threeguysonebook.com/exit-west-by-mohsin-hamid/) - The impact of Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker, depends on the fulcrum of global migration and displacement. As the title Exit West implies, that movement is westward towards Europe and the Western Hemisphere. No one, or almost no one, is exiting east, and the implication of the word “exit” in this - [Strangler Bob by Denis Johnson](https://threeguysonebook.com/strangler-bob-by-denis-johnson/) - 'Strangler Bob', in the Oct 23rd New Yorker is as perfect and satisfying a short story, a prison tale, as I’ve read. but it starts out with a technical challenge that nearly led me to reject it: first person narration by an adolescent. First person narration is matchless in its immediacy but the reader needs - [The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-underground-railroad-by-colson-whitehead/) - This is the third of my readings from the 2017 Man Booker longlist, including the winner, Lincoln in the Bardo and Exit West. I didn’t intend to read three “fantasy” novels in a row; the Man Booker jury had more to do with that than I did. Contemporary fiction still divides itself between realist fiction - [Mrs. Osmond by John Banville](https://threeguysonebook.com/mrs-osmond-by-john-banville/) - Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, an early work, was published in book form in 1881 after being serialized the previous year. John Banville’s sequel, Mrs. Osmond, will be published in the U.S. in November. In Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer, a newly affluent young woman, determined to remain independent and experience life, stumbles - [Faith Fox by Jane Gardam](https://threeguysonebook.com/faith-fox-by-jane-gardam/) - Faith Fox by Jane Gardam is the perfect holiday read, even if you’re a secular person like me and reach for the antacid when you read anything sentimental. If you’re religious, even if only once a year, then you’ll find in Faith Fox a clear-eyed, entertaining read, worthy by far of a BBC production, that - [When We Fell in Love - LaToya Jovena](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-latoya-jovena/) - I got my first library card in first grade. So my love affair with reading began then, it’s just that we’ve taken a few breaks. One of the earliest books that made an impression on me was THE LUCKIEST GIRL by Beverly Cleary. As a kid growing up just outside of Washington D.C., sunny southern - [Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi](https://threeguysonebook.com/frankenstein-in-baghdad-by-ahmed-saadawi/) - 20 years ago, Elisha, a resident of the Baghdad district of Bataween, said goodbye to her son Daniel who was conscripted against his will under the old regime. He never came back. But Elisha thinks he will return someday. The elderly woman, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, talks to her icon of Saint George, who talks - [Obsession: Nudes from Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from The Scofield Thayer Collection](https://threeguysonebook.com/obsession-nudes-from-klimt-schiele-and-picasso-from-the-scofield-thayer-collection/) - Obsession is a loaded word that smacks of some hypocritical voyeurism. It implies a pathology, which implies a wickedness. As if the Met, which is such a reactionary institution anyway, with its David Koch black granite fountains pouring out the waters in front of its main building, were hacking its wares among the philistines. This - [Cartwheel Giveaway](https://threeguysonebook.com/cartwheel-giveaway/) - It seems strange that Jennifer Dubois is not a household name by now. Her novel Cartwheel is just out in paperback this week, and there is no excuse for not reading it, because we're giving away 3 three copies to the first 3 people who comment below. When you do read this wonderfully assured novel, - [Call for 2018 Spring Submissions](https://threeguysonebook.com/call-for-2018-spring-submissions/) - Litbreak Magazine and Three Guys One Book are open for 2018 Spring Submissions. Please consult Litbreak Magazine's Submissions page and About page for details on our policies. - [Hiking with Nietzsche by John Kaag](https://threeguysonebook.com/hiking-with-nietzsche-by-john-kaag/) - John Kaag, in Hiking with Nietzsche, his account of tracing Nietzsche’s legendary sojourns in the Swiss Alps, provides one of the best introductions to Nietzsche’s thought since the work of Walter Kaufmann. Philosophers vary in the personal relationship that they have with their readers. You can’t understand Plato’s Socratic dialogues without grasping Socrates as a - [When We Fell in Love - E. P. Floyd](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-erica-floyd/) - Growing up, my single mom could not afford those omnipresent, overpriced classroom book club orders. Offered to elementary school participants every quarter, the books ranged from educational to purely plot-driven entertainment. I pouted, of course. I assumed parents of kids my age across the country bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of books every quarter. - [The Diamond Setter by Moshe Sakal](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-diamond-setter-by-moshe-sakal/) - I’m awed by the six years of comprehensive research that went into the composition of The Diamond Setter and equally impressed that Mr. Sakal could sensitize my imagination to the extended families, both Jewish and Arab, who struggled to both maintain connections and break them, who struggled to hold onto love, memories and homes and - [When We Fell in Love - Charles Haddox](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-charles-haddox/) - Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries. His work has appeared in over forty journals including Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, Folio, and Concho River Review.[/author_info] [/author] Although I have been writing practically my whole life in one capacity or another, I - [The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand By Geoff Dyer](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-street-philosophy-of-garry-winogrand-by-geoff-dyer/) - Cellphones are the new cigarettes. It’s the only way I can figure out the burst of pixels that are barfed out on the Internet from every single person with a cellphone camera. Eventually a warning with be issued by manufacturers of these devices (emblazoned on the back, just under the camera lens), “Warning: May Cause - [First Person by Richard Flanagan](https://threeguysonebook.com/first-person-by-richard-flanagan/) - Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Man Booker 4 years ago. His new novel, First Person, which I think is even better, certainly deserves to be in contention for this year’s Man Booker. The Three Guys' interview with Mr. Flanagan, on The Narrow Road, can be viewed here. First Person - [Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman](https://threeguysonebook.com/theory-of-bastards-by-audrey-schulman/) - Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards from inventive Europa Editions is the third of her novels that I’ve read and, at 412 pages, the most ambitious. It’s America on the verge of a dystopia that it has brought on itself through a hyper-fix of AI devices and a denial of climate change. In this near-future world, - [When We Fell in Love - A.N. Block](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-an-block/) - I first fell in love with language listening to my mother and grandmother arguing in Yiddish, an evocative but mysterious tongue whose words I felt rather than understood literally, and whose musical rhythms both captivated and frightened me. The next linguistic influence to absorb my attention was television, in particular the trashy, staccato patterns - [There There by Tommy Orange](https://threeguysonebook.com/there-there-by-tommy-orange/) - There There, by Tommy Orange, is one of the must-read novels of the year. You could read instead the third or fourth novel by a writer that you know you already love. But this is a debut, and the writing is so strong that, in my opinion, it requires your attention. In our time, the - [Kant and Hegel Humming: On Adrian Piper](https://threeguysonebook.com/kant-and-hegel-humming-on-adrian-piper/) - Recently, I went to the Adrian Piper show at MoMA. When you are partway through the show you run into the Humming Room. To see the rest of the show, you must pass through the Humming Room. To pass through the room, you must hum. This is announced in a large sign plus there’s - [When We Fell in Love - Tom Evans](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-tom-evans/) - The first time I read I shocked everyone, including myself. I had lived in a succession of foster homes until I was five, had never gone to school, in fact spent most of the time in bed recovering from one illness after another. Then one day my adopted mother was reading the newspaper and when - [Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami](https://threeguysonebook.com/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage/) - In 2011, JC and I had a massive 3-part discussion of Haruki Murakami’s 624-page 1Q84. It was one of the last Three Guys discussions that we did, our signature feature was petering out and our last several talks were more like two-guy dialogues. I recall also having one of those with JR on photography. It - [When We Fell in Love - Z.Z. Boone](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-z-z-boone/) - It happened pretty much by accident. Not that I wasn’t a reader, just that my choice of reading material was mostly comprised of comic books, Mad magazine, and TV Guide. In eighth grade we were assigned Moby Dick, and I recall being excited by the cover: a guy standing in a small lifeboat, harpoon - [History of Violence by Edouard Louis](https://threeguysonebook.com/history-of-violence-by-edouard-louis/) - The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis’ fiction/creative nonfiction/memoir of growing up working class in Northern France, which he could write only because he was no longer working class, not entirely anyway, but had made himself into a literary writer, was reviewed in Litbreak Magazine last year. History of Violence is 213 small trim-size pages in - [Audition by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh](https://threeguysonebook.com/audition-by-said-sayrafiezadeh/) - I was very happy to see Audition by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in the 9/10/18 edition of The New Yorker. Saïd and Three Guys have history. In the winter of 2013, JR reviewed two of SS's stories, and that summer I interviewed him on the subject of his debut collection, First Encounters with the Enemy. Since Three Guys archives well, you can still check - [Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig](https://threeguysonebook.com/beware-of-pity-by-stefan-zweig/) - Beware of Pity is a is an astute New York Review reissue and a kind of “ghost book” from a vanished civilization. The characters seem to be in a shadow play in which they act out roles that are about to be rendered extinct. In that respect, I was reminded of the posthumous atmosphere one - [The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-sparsholt-affair-by-alan-hollinghurst/) - The Sparsholt Affair is an encyclopedia of gay desire. It’s sensitive, lyrical, very English, London-centric, takes plenty of chances and it’s the gay novel that I wish straight people would read. The kind of music that Hollinghurst says isn’t listened to anymore seems the music of choice for many of the older characters, who are - [When We Fell in Love - Liam Lowth](https://threeguysonebook.com/when-we-fell-in-love-liam-lowth/) - I fall in love, often ridiculously. Sometimes, these feelings change as quickly as the Queensland sun turning toes in morning warmth to a red raw burn. Sometimes they don’t. It all depends, really. I use the indefinite ‘feelings’ here because it’s important to know that I’m not talking about romantic love that rises and falls - [Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner: Writers and Their Borrowings](https://threeguysonebook.com/angle-of-repose-by-wallace-stegner-writers-and-their-borrowings/) - How can we, as writers, best utilize our resources? What choices can we make to pay adequate tribute? What techniques have other writers used? What are our responsibilities? How can we best tell our stories while valuing integrity? What would a writer be without his or her borrowings? - [NW by Zadie Smith, Part 1](https://threeguysonebook.com/nw-by-zadie-smith-part-1/) - Zadie Smith’s characters are like sparrows trapped in a pedestrian tunnel. No matter how often they fly at the glass partitions, trying to find the sky that will liberate them, they can never figure out that you have to fly down a staircase before you can fly up. They’re utterly, vividly drawn characters, totally themselves every minute of the day. But that does not help them at all. - [The Bees by Dan Chaon](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-bees-by-dan-chaon/) - I remember reading Chaon's collection Among the Missing on the train to and from work. I got so involved I would often miss my stop. Over the years Chaon wrote two more novels, which are highly literate and wildly entertaining. Await Your Reply is possibly one of the best literary thrillers to come along in some time. - [Diaboliad by Mikhail Bulgakov](https://threeguysonebook.com/diaboliad-by-mikhail-bulgakov/) - From my prejudiced POV, this wicked little atom of a collection is the perfect remedy for anyone, like myself, who sometimes suffers from the very stale beer of American realism. That sort of placid realism, which as Lionel Trilling has observed, doesn't think of our ideas as part of reality...consigning our fantasy lives to some netherworld...banning our interior dreams and nightmares from the sacred precincts of fiction. - [To Reach Japan by Alice Munro](https://threeguysonebook.com/to-reach-japan-by-alice-munro/) - You reach “character” in fiction by showing how it configures the world around it. It’s as if the events in the world were the envelope but the letter inside is the person. Alice Munro says that Peter “seemed” to want to get himself out of the way as his family is leaving by train. He stands on the platform; his family...beloved daughter Katy and wife Greta above him...looking out and down from the train window. It is one of two important scenes where Greta and Katy are looking down from that window. - [Flaca by Junot Diaz](https://threeguysonebook.com/flaca-the-fifth-story-in-this-is-how-you-lose-her-by-junot-diaz/) - I liked the touch that they met in their Joyce class. And the ethnic bit that Veronica (her real name), who is a teacher, has a new student whose mother says she has “the touch”. How many worlds is Diaz, who teaches at MIT, living in, I wonder? How many worlds are his stories living in? “You were the white girl who danced bachata...” I had to look up “bachata” - [The New Yorker: The Abduction by Tessa Hadley](https://threeguysonebook.com/the-abduction-by-tessa-hadley/) - Tessa Hadley says the most remarkable thing. That with a great deal of happiness, a great deal is forgotten. It’s a very Edith Wharton kind of thing to say. Wharton’s literature is full of characters who end up being forgotten. It’s like, for some people, in a happy life the mind becomes a huge bouquet. 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