Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s illustrated TOUGH ISLAND, Complete!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence / Serial Sunday
comments: 2 comments
The Complete, Illustrated Tough Island
Chapter One
March 1991
I’d just finished a stint as a sailor in the Coast Guard, fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Haitian Refugees. No money. No job. No leads. A rudderless 23-year-old couch-surfer crossing back and forth over the state line between Portsmouth and Kittery. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Free,” by Willy Vlautin
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 3 comments
Willy Vlautin
One of the exquisite pleasures of book reviewing, besides assuaging the small guilt at, as one friend described it, “wasting so much of my time reading,” is introducing readers to a new author. For the past few years I have marveled at the work of Willy Vlautin. His latest novel, The Free, continues to deepen his role as the purest chronicler of the down-and-out writing in English today. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Want Not,” by Jonathan Miles
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
Want Not by Jonathan Miles has been widely reviewed and praised by many critics who primarily have focused their attention on Miles’s preoccupation with garbage as the novel’s thematic center (indeed, one reviewer, before lavishing the book with compliments, calls it “the best trashy novel of the year.”) My reading of this delightfully written triptych of stories is as a searing indictment of the obsessive and mindless consumerism that, in the end, may be the defining characteristic of modern American culture. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Epicure’s Lament” by Kate Christiensen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: Comments Off on Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Epicure’s Lament” by Kate Christiensen
Kate Christensen
Hugo Whittier, protagonist of Kate Christensen’s beguiling novel The Epicure’s Lament, is an incorrigible cad to rival any similar miscreant in recent American literature. Hugo is not a criminal exactly, unless we are talking about moving through life without the slightest regard for the basic laws of social niceties. What he is, is brutally honest, without artifice or any semblance of regard for the feelings of the various targets of his invective. Continue reading →
E.B. White and Me
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 4 comments
“I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.” —E.B. White, One Man’s Meat
During the years I worked on a memoir of farming, I learned that book folk interested in country matters wanted assurance my literary-agrarian pedigree was pure. Maybe that I had one. Those early draft-readers wondered if I’d read Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. This irked me. Sure, I knew their work. Their writings on agriculture and American society have informed my thinking from my late teens; Berry’s Jayber Crow is one of my all-time favorite novels. Continue reading →
Greatest Sportswriter of 2013? David Gessner!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
The Greatest Sportswriter
.
USA Today has picked our own David Gessner’s essay “Ultimate Glory” as one of the greatest pieces of sportswriting for 2013. That puts him in great company, of course, and puts Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour on the list with ESPN.com and The New Yorker. Here’s the link, and now, here’s the essay: Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: The Best of 2013
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: Comments Off on Lundgren’s Book Lounge: The Best of 2013
Rachel Kushner
.
Let’s begin by acknowledging the inherent flaws in any “best of” list, especially when we’re talking about books. There are simply too many extraordinary books published each year for any one person to possibly read them all. So, with apologies to those books and authors I haven’t yet gotten to (Pynchon, McBride, Lahiri, Tart, Bass, Shaccochis, Paterniti, etc., ), below are a dozen of my favorites from 2013. Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: Bodwell’s Baker’s Dozen, Best Books of 2013
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
AMERICAN SALVAGE
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
It’s in my nature to love an underdog. So I love that Bonnie Jo Campbell’s dark but beguiling American Salvage was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction after being released by Wayne State University Press, which publishes a modest thirty-five titles per year. In the landscape of Campbell’s Michigan, things are hard, bleak, booze-soaked, meth-laden, even incest burdened. The air is tainted with the stench of pig manure and the smoke of suspect fires. So how then does Campbell manage to make us both see ourselves in her stories and make us laugh? Her stories feel American, yes, but they are also something far more important: Authentic. Continue reading →
Oh, You’re a Writer? (Reasons I’ve Started to Bite My Tongue)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 6 comments
.
Oh, you’re a writer? You must have a lot of time on your hands. Would you like to do some editing for me for FREE?
Oh, you’re a writer? Would you like to get some coffee sometime?
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Men We Reaped,” by Jesmyn Ward
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
