Monthly Archives: April 2014

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Interview: Q and A with William Boyle, Author of Gravesend

Metawriting

gravesend23 In William Boyle’s debut novel, Gravesend , Ray Boy Calabrese has just been released from prison after serving sixteen years for his part in the death of Duncan D’Innocenzio. Duncan’s brother, Conway, is stuck in the past and set on revenge, but isn’t sure he has it in him to murder Ray Boy. Two other major players in this Brooklyn drama are Alessandra, a failed actress who has just returned home from LA to take care of her widowed father, and Eugene, Ray Boy’s 15-year-old nephew, who is set on following in his uncle’s criminal footsteps.

The neighborhood is at the center of this novel, and Boyle really captures life in the New York boroughs, the weird mix of urban poverty and gritty small-townness. The novel opens at a firing range in a warehouse next to an abandoned textile company: “From the outside it looked like the kind of place where…

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Mixtape for the Doomed

I made a playlist for my novel Gravesend and it’s up at Largehearted Boy, my favorite site around. I love the Book Notes series, and I’m really honored to be included.

Also, I’ve got a story in the new issue of Needle: A Magazine of Noir, available 4/15.

poughkeepsie_needle

And damn sad news the last couple of days. RIP Jesse Winchester and Peter Matthiessen.

Matthiessen’s Paris Review interview.

Currently listening to: Jesse Winchester, s/t; Reigning Sound, Live at Goner Records; Rachel’s, Music for Egon Schiele; The Afghan Whigs, Do the Beast; Mirah, Changing Light.

Watching: Caught up on Mad Men season 6 and think it’s my favorite so far, which is saying a hell of a lot. Saw Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and thought it was goddamn perfect. Love the review on Letterboxd that starts this way:  “The Grand Budapest Hotel is the film with which Wes Anderson finally answers his critics, and the message could not be clearer or more immaculately embossed in Futura on an insert shot of the most delicate stationary: ‘Go fuck yourselves.'” Nails it.

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