I picked up Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees at San Francisco’s recent MLA convention because one of the stories had been published in the same edition of McSweeney’s as a story of mine, and I’d been curious about Doyle ever since (though I hadn’t read any more of his work until now). And while some stories, [...]
This Side of Brightness is one of the most lyrically gorgeous novels I’ve read in quite some time, with quietly lovely and delicate sentences and descriptions that reveal their subjects’ inherent dignity and grace, whether those subjects are 1920s “sandhogs” (diggers who first built the New York City subway tunnels) or the modern day homeless [...]
In a frenzy of eleventh hour book-buying at December’s MLA convention (“All paperbacks three dollars! Everything must go!”) I picked up The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, which became my book of choice for the long flight back to Chicago. I’d read Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation, but this was my—and his—first experience with a book [...]
I’m working on a novel right now dealing heavily with music, and was originally attracted to Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butcher’s Singing Club based on its content–I wanted to see how another writer handled music, in both its description and technical aspects. I quickly discovered, however, that MBSC was only about music on the surface; [...]
I don’t usually focus on non-fiction, just like I don’t usually mention million-seller books. But Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, warrants an exception. Part of this posting is sentimental–my wife and I resolved to read more books together, and this is the first we’ve completed–but it is also out of respect for a well-crafted [...]
While riding a commuter train from Chicago to St. Louis earlier today (the train being a new addition to my annual Christmas migration back to my hometown) I read The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson, which claims that creativity, while to some extent random, can be harnessed and directed by recognizing certain qualities about its [...]
By Tom Franklin I learned a lot at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One thing I learned, for example, is that apparently everyone–at some point in their writing career–will meet and like Tom Franklin. Whether they interviewed him for an article, heard him at a conference, or met him as a visiting writer, the guy’s name [...]
by Claire Messud Another Sewanee writer (once the conference is over I’ll go back to reading non-Sewanee folks, I swear), Claire Messud has written an understated, deceptively simple pair of novellas entitled The Hunters, and while each story is strong individually, they are even stronger paired with one another. The first piece, “A Simple Tale”, [...]
by Tony Earley Earley, who teaches out of Vanderbilt, is attending this year’s Sewenee conference, and his debut novel Jim the Boy (which focuses on a young boy’s coming of age in a small, turn of the century Carolina town) impressed me. The writing has a sturdy, short clause quality that belies its elegance, and [...]
by George Saunders I’ve spent some time recently figuring out how to assemble a collection (how pieces fit together; whether there should be a chronological/ thematic progression) and Saunders’ book is a fine example of stories reinforcing one another. For In Persuasion Nation, Saunders uses passages from a fictional political tract by Bernard “Ed” Alton [...]
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