Guest contributor: John Clayton
Serial Sunday: “Original and Solitary Lovers” (Another Great Short Story by John J. Clayton)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
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“I am getting used to considering every sexual act as a process involving four individuals.” -Freud in an 1899 letter to Fleiss.
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But why, my beauty, stop at four? Of course, yes, there’s my mother, never one to diminish her importance, filling the bed as she filled a room, and your father, critical of the whole world, especially his family. They take up a lot of space. Hardly any left for us. But that’s hardly the end of it; it gets much worse. For there’s also my father, weighing in at 200 blustering pounds, swinging that belly of his around the bed, and your mother, who, God knows, never stopped talking, never stopped talking never. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Taylor Swift in Nashville (An Ode upon Elysia’s 13th Birthday)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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12 tractor trailers.
Guest contributor: Rick Van Noy
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Pick the Flowers! An Un-Fairy Tale
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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The context: We learned at the beginning of the school year that kids on the Radford, Virginia, High School Cross Country Team could no longer run on roads. The boys were state champs last year and they have a tradition of roaming all over the place, hilly streets, through neighborhoods, waved at by friends. Parents pushed back, and the administration gave no good rationale for it, or shifting ones, or they changed what is was called (a policy, then a directive?). Anyway, the overprotective fear of kids getting hurt is something I touched on in in A Natural Sense of Wonder. The original piece led to a sequel after a board meeting and there will be at least one more. As we discuss a ban on road running in Radford, you may be interested in a similar town that banned flower picking. It was written by one Jonathan Slow, a little-known friend of Jonathan Swift’s. Tune in for the next installment when the queen herself speaks. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Katherine Heiny
Table for Two: An Interview with Elizabeth Cohen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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I read The Hypothetical Girl because my friend Elizabeth Cohen wrote it. That’s what you do when a friend writes a book, you buy it and read – it’s like if a friend opened a barbershop, you’d go and get your hair cut. But I was so knocked out by the collection that I wound up emailing Elizabeth after nearly every story, because each is more wonderful than the one before. All the stories are about looking for relationships online, and finding heartache, surprise, betrayal, and – just maybe – love. Elizabeth’s writing is funny, wise, insightful, and memorable. All the things you want fiction to be that it hardly ever is. In the end, I had to ask her more questions, and she was kind enough to answer.
Katherine Heiny: Did you set out to write a collection about Internet dating or did you realize as you went along that that’s where the book was headed? Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Booktopia, Petoskey Michigan (a photo decastich)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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An intermediate milkweed species, lakeside
Pick You Own Caption: A Bill and Dave’s Contest
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I opened my drawing pad the other day and found that my daughter had drawn this. It seemed to demand a caption and I thought “Let’s put it up on Bill and Dave’s and see what people can come up with.” Winner gets their own cartoon head!
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Maid’s Version,” by Daniel Woodrell
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Daniel Woodrell
Daniel Woodrell is a writer’s writer, the kind of literary artist that too frequently in a culture driven by the whims of publishers interested only in the next big thing, might quietly churn out unnoticed masterpieces. Fortunately Woodrell was rescued from a lifetime of being praised mostly by his fellow writers and literary juries, when his novel Winter’s Bone was adapted for the screen and won widespread praise at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Academy Awards. And now he has shared with us another small masterpiece, The Maid’s Version. Continue reading →
