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There were several news reports yesterday that Oprah Winfrey has selected Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as her next book club selection. Publishers Weekly reported that the paperback edition was originally not slated for release until September, but as part of the Oprah push, Anchor is rushing out 950,000 copies of the book. Most amazing of [...]

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  “Grocery store sacker, house painter, hay hauler, pulpwood cutter-and-hand loader, fence builder, bricklayer’s helper, carpenter, carpet cleaner man, truck driver, forklift driver, dock worker, firefighter, pine tree planter, timber deadener, surveyor’s helper, plumber, answering service employee.” –Larry Brown This quote was in response to an interview question about the jobs Brown had held over [...]

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If you or I said this, we would be considered bitter, frustrated, bitchy aspiring authors. But thanks to this quote, for one brief moment in time, I am actually a Hugh Grant fan. “When I’ve finished it, I’ll send it to an editor, anonymously, in order for it to be judged objectively,” Grant says about [...]

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  I’ve been pretty hard on writing/publishing books. Far too many of them are just garbage. And I’ve been pretty vocal about the titles that comprise my Mount Rushmore of writing texts. An interesting new addition to the discussion is Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.

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Back in February, I mentioned plans for a tribute concert for Larry Brown that featured a number of respected musicians playing in the memory of their old friend. The concert was to be part of the Oxford Conference for the Book’s festivities. Yesterday, the New York Times ran this article about the concert and the weekend [...]

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In my own fiction, I’ve recently been making a concerted effort to remove absolutely everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. I’ve been looking at my short stories like a race car. Pull out the radio, the air conditioning, the cruise control, the power windows, everything. Get rid of everything that doesn’t contribute to speed. This isn’t [...]

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I posted some initial thoughts on A Miracle of Catfish over at Beatrice today. We’ll have more discussion about this novel throughout the week.

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It’s an odd coincidence. Just the other day, I was looking at the shelf full of Irvine Welsh books. Alongside some Alan Warner. And I wondered, “what ever happened to Duncan McLean?” The Scotsman answered my question for me. According to this intriguing article, McLean managed a jewelry firm, worked as a travelling salesman, and [...]

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A couple of reviews in the New York Times yesterday caught my attention. James Poniewozik reviewed Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and found it “perceptive and and darkly entertaining.” And Walter Kirn reviewed William Vollman’s newest book, Poor People. Kirn makes an interesting point that Vollman’s own motives in all of his adventurous [...]

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Yesterday’s Clarion Ledger had an article about how Mary Annie Brown is coping with the passing of her husband, Larry. She’s narrowed her focus and attention to work and family, shying away from too much else right now. Mary Annie also said she cannot bring herself to read A Miracle of Catfish yet.   The [...]

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  A Miracle of Catfish, the novel that Larry Brown was working on at the time of his sudden death, is released tomorrow. So we’ll have plenty of coverage this week. For now, I’ll refer to what Martin Clark, author of The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living and Plain Heathen Mischief, had to say about [...]

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At the back of a two-story warehouse, “there was a door wide enough for large cargo that led into a dim chamber,” Tom Zoellner writes. “Dead electric bulbs hung from wires in the ceiling. The two soldiers behind me unslung their rifles. They were held casually, but the muzzles were pointed at the approximate region [...]

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