August 2010
34 posts
3 tags
guilfoile continued
“Across the miles into Iowa, Wayne heard the litany of wrongs done to Denny by his wife, Iris. She had cheated on him, abused him mentally and physically, borne children by other men, cuckolded him — he actually used the word cuckolded — stolen from him, made a fool of him, blackmailed him, spied on him, called the police on him, set his motorcycle on fire. Denny hadn’t...
3 tags
guilfoile continued
“The smooth sole of his clunky right shoe slipped out from under him and his big ass hit the floor with a sound like a gong, reverberating in Amoyo’s lamps and his flat-panel television and in glass all around. Wayne put his hand down and felt something wet, and then with a horrible sensation he held up his palm. Blood.” Of course, when it’s just pure clumsiness that sets...
3 tags
kevin guilfoile, the thousand
“Bea Beaujon had prosecuted maybe a dozen cases of home invasion, and twice that many rapes (including a satisfying guilty plea from Phillip Truman just that afternoon). She’d put away abusive husbands and identity thieves. She’d been the lead prosecutor in three murder trials and the second chair in seven more, all convictions. Frequently, one of the obstacles to conviction was...
5 tags
michael connelly, the scarecrow
“The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.”
Which is interesting, and accurate nowadays. We’re well removed from the time when...
4 tags
lee child, one shot
“Not an auto-parts store. The auto-parts store. Maybe the only one, or at least the main one. Which in any city is always right there on the same strip as the tire stores and the auto dealers and the lube shops. Which in any city is always a wide new strip near a highway cloverleaf. Cities are all different, but they’re also all the same.”
Late-summer head cold. Means pulp.
...
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valtat continued
“He entered the pub, noted for its remarkable painting of a rather muddy and dark whale hunting scene, asked for a Scoresby Stout and a Specksioneer Sandwich, and went to the Pneumatic Post Booth. There he wrote a message to Sybil to tell her he would be home late (though she would probably be partying somewhere), put it in a canister, sent it through the outward tube, and set about looking...
3 tags
valtat continued
“When the first trading posts had been established, with a slightly more realistic price policy (but with false weights, bottomless bushels for blubber and wares of wretched quality), the Inuit had been almost disappointed with how less expensive everything turned out to be, as it had seemed to take away the very worth of what they had gotten so far. It also made them realize how cheated...
3 tags
jean-christophe valtat, aurorarama
“‘Since when do you need support from anyone, Mr. d’Allier? You are a loner,’ said Gibiser, as if that settled the matter. The French half of Gabriel’s brain heard l’honneur and almost felt flattered, while the other half remained a cold blank. He got up and walked out without a word.”
Valtat’s a Frenchman, and Aurorarama has no credit for a...
6 tags
díaz continued
“She was this particular combination of badmash and little girl — even before he’d visited her house he knew she’d have a whole collection of stuffed animals avalanched on her bed — and there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks, that there existed a third Ana, a hidden Ana who...
4 tags
junot díaz, the brief wondrous life of oscar wao
“Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it.”
I’m not sure I’m entirely reliable on this one. I half-expect that Oscar Wao’s success, and Junot Díaz’s reputation, led me to expect more from the book than it could...
4 tags
baldwin continued
“And you stare at the side of your wife’s face, the same you’ve known, though now framed by short hair, touched attractively by crow’s feet. And she says without turning, ‘You don’t realize where that’s from?’ And you think, all those years, it was just a reference in her mind, a synapse, a junction between two points, whereas for you it was...
5 tags
baldwin continued
“A party game that Sara once invented: Reduce a famous movie plot to three bones, and elaborate only if the other players aren’t able to guess the title.
Southern lawyer had a way with kids. Can’t get an innocent off the hook. Boo.
Vito shouldn’t buy fruit. Michael won’t talk business. Diane Keaton?
Men embark on spaceship. Spaceship disembarks men. Sorry,...
3 tags
This summer, a new David Mitchell novel and a new... →
Rosecrans Baldwin’s pre-publication diary, “Writing is My Peppermint-Flavored Heroin.”
“It’s that the men these days, the dudes, watch so much pornography, there...”
– Rosecrans Baldwin, You Lost Me There | Riverhead 08.12.10
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rosecrans baldwin, you lost me there
“The ghosts of our research labs were old, clipped cartoons. Scientists treated them like Dead Sea Scrolls, as though nature’s mysteries were best explained by Far Side captions. Comic strips were the relics of investigative process. Scientists more esteemed than myself were probably above such things (if ranked, I would have made varsity within the Alzheimer’s disease community,...
4 tags
zambra continued
“When someone doesn’t come home in a novel, thinks Julian, it’s because something bad has happened. But this is not, fortunately, a novel: in just a few minutes Veronica will arrive with a real story, with a reasonable excuse that justifies her lateness, and then we will talk about her drawing class, about the little girl, about my book, the fish, the need to buy a cell phone, a...
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alejandro zambra, the private lives of trees
“In any case, teaching classes in Italian poetry without knowing Italian is not terribly extraordinary in Chile, as Santiago is full of English professors who don’t know English, dentists who hardly know how to pull a tooth, overweight personal trainers, and yoga teachers who could never manage to face their classes without a generous dose of antidepressants.”
The Private Lives...
jonathanbogart:
Well, I guess we all know who used the queue now.
The queue hates it when I go away for a week. See you next week.
3 tags
tranter continued
“This was what my eyes had been doing, I realized, wanting to hold up a screen of memory against that impossible hole in the sky, blue and invisible. This hole was of a different order to the actual hole in the ground, which I’d only seen images of, which seemed to present such a clean wound. The hole in the ground was also somehow impossible, an affront to the imagination: it was...
7 tags
tranter continued
“The time with Ralph and then Ingrid seems so short when I look back on it now — the time when things were good, just beginning, the dynamic I seemed to spend forever trying to recapture and recreate afterward. It was short in terms of the actual days, weeks, and months involved. There weren’t many, compared with how many there have been since then. But those months were so full...
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kirsten tranter, the legacy
“Ingrid agreed to come to Paris with us after all — she had decided that she had to see the Louvre — and was planning to go on to London with Grey after that. Her taking this time to spend with Ralph and me seemed in a way calculated to show that she wasn’t enslaved to this new relationship; for Ralph especially it was an important signal that he still mattered to her, He...
5 tags
alan furst, spies of the balkans
“Poor Mussolini.”
Alan Furst does this better than anyone else. He’s carved out a space, in history and in genre, with the early-’40s spy novel, openly heroic rather than LeCarre conflicted, richer in characterization and atmosphere than Ambler. This allows him occasional latitude, panoramic pans across the landscape of prewar Europe, psychologizing Il Duce or checking in...
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langer continued
“‘I’ve always wanted readers to feel the full impact of Shakespeare,’ I heard Iola Jaffe say as she raised her book, then hit me hard across the face.”
Of course, sometimes the jokes aren’t clever.
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langer continued
“In the press, these hoaxes were viewed mostly as symptoms of a declining industry struggling for relevance and attention and a society of declining morals. The writers in question and their publishers were savaged as betrayers of the public trust. At one time, I might have found them despicable too, but now that I was one of them, and had dated another, I saw them as All-American rogues....
3 tags
“That was the problem with trying to write about reality, Roth thought —...”
– Adam Langer, The Thieves of Manhattan | Spiegel & Grau 07.13.10
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adam langer, the thieves of manhattan
“But even when Anya was telling me how much she luffed me, even when we were kissing in subway cars or making mad, passionate chinaski on my lumpy pull-out couch, or skinny-dipping at dawn beneath the Morningside Park waterfall, even when she was discussing how much she weeshed she could tekk me home to Bucharest to meet her femmilee but that was eemposseebull now, spending time with her had...
“It wasn’t six degrees out here, separating the guilty from the innocent,...”
– Dennis Tafoya, The Wolves of Fairmount Park | Minotaur 06.22.10
3 tags
tafoya continued
“He was afraid there was a calculus in the way she looked at him, measurement along the arc of his trajectory, and he felt there would be a point she’d pull back, float away as he picked up downward momentum. She’d retreat to some safer place, he thought, and he’d have to be ready for that. Maybe she’d go back to her parents out on the Main Line, maybe just on to...
3 tags
tafoya continued
“That was her name. It came to his lips, somehow bypassing his brain, the way it sometimes worked. He had seen her around the neighborhood, in the bars and on the street. A party girl, maybe a hooker. He had taken her in on the periphery of things without registering her before. People moved through the scene, sometimes up and out, sometimes down, like now. The drinking and copping stopped...
5 tags
dennis tafoya, the wolves of fairmount park
“He thought it was something like the look that he’d heard vets talk about. The thousand-yard stare. They’d seen something, the ones who’d kicked, and it was always there forever in their eyes. They’d been where Orlando went every day and it changed them, but now they were on the other side of things and it wasn’t there for them anymore except as an image burned...
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“Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing...”
– The Great Learning, Confucius / Zhu Xi
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sublett continued
“A city can let a whole neighborhood go to hell because of zoning and disintegrating economics and when it’s so bad off, a no man’s land where no one can stand to live except for the poorest of the poor, and the only people who make money there are drug dealers, what does the city say about it?
Go after the drug dealers.”
This is written in 1989, set in 1984, which puts...
3 tags
sublett continued
“Human bodies are made of enough chlorine to disinfect five swimming pools, about two ounces of salt, fifty quarts of water, three pounds of calcium, and enough fat for a bar of soap, iron for a six-penny nail, sulphur to kill a dog’s fleas, glycerine for an artillery shell, and phosphorous for twenty thousand match heads.” He can also do hard-boiled, when he needs to.
...
