Monthly Archives: October 2014

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Review of GRAVESEND at Dead End Follies

“Every reader remembers his first. The first novel that swept him off his feet and sent him stumbling into a parallel universe. It’s like a first girlfriend, it’s hard to get over, yet the very reason why you’re reading is to reproduce that feeling again. I’ve been lucky in 2014, because it happened a couple times. It wasn’t EXACTLY that feeling, but it was close. The last time it happened, I was reading Gravesend, by William Boyle. It’s a wonderful, sad, elegiac and understated novel about a community of people at the crossroads. Truth is, I felt a very particular sense of satisfaction when I’ve read Gravesend, because finding novels like that is the reason why I read.”

Floored by this really wonderful Dead End Follies review of Gravesend. Thanks so much, Benoit!

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A Good Time For Pie

There’s a great piece up at Grantland today about Pulp Fiction on its twentieth anniversary.

Twenty years. Man. Can’t remember how many times I saw it in the theater – the old Loew’s Oriental on 86th Street where the screen was crooked and rats raced under the seats – a few times in the first couple of weeks, I think. It lit everything up. I was 16. The world was Pulp Fiction. Got into Hemingway a couple of years later, when I first read The Sun Also Rises as a freshman in college. The influence of Hemingway on QT is something I never really thought about, but it makes a lot of sense, especially in terms of Hem’s role as the “stylistic and philosophical headmaster” of the hard-boiled tradition (I think it was Foster Hirsch who said that).

pulpfiction

 

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