Flushboy by Stephen Graham Jones is my kind of book. Family dysfunction with a power element of the grotesque, in this case, the father's entrepreneurial drive toward starting a drive-thru urinal franchise. Buy Flushboy Mentioned: Stephen Graham Jones: http://www.demontheory.net/ Adam Johnson: http://creativewriting.stanford.edu/people/adam-johnson
November is here which means Movember is here which means NaNoWriMo is here which means nothing different for me, as I don't participate in National Novel Writing Month nor am I capable of growing a beard. For me it's NoNaNoWriMoNoGroMo. But that doesn't mean I can't give my two pennies about both topics while bringing in some bookish talk, as this channel is meant to do. Mentioned: Movember: http://us.movember.com/ NaNoWriMo: http://nanowrimo.org/ Kevin Rabas: http://kevinrabas.com/ Drinking: Southern Tier 2x Double Milk Stout Reading: Flushboy by Stephen Graham Jones
The always awesome Lori over at The Next Big Book Blog is constantly coming up with cool ways to combine writing/reading with general interest topics like food and booze. Just last week she had me over for a series called Would You Rather in which she asked me a series of questions, all following the would you rather _____ or ____ format. 12. Would you rather be forced to listen to Ayn Rand bloviate for an hour or be hit on by an angry Dylan Thomas? Getting hit on by Dylan Thomas would be quicker, so I’ll go that route. Today, she gave me some space to provide a recipe for my favorite authorly meal, Aunt Caleb's Author Surprise. The best part is, all the ingredients can be easily acquired at your local stepfather's liquor cabinet! Click over to read how to make Aunt Caleb's Author Surprise. Then stick around…
Families were important then, and they were important not because the children were useful in the fields to break corn and hoe cotton and drop potato vines in the wet weather or the help with hog butchering and all the rest of it. No, they were important because a large family was the only thing a man could be sure of having. Nothing else was certain. If a man had no education or even if he did, the hope of putting money in the bank and keeping it there or owning a big piece of land free and clear, such hope was so remote that few men ever let themselves think about it. The timber in the county was of no consequence, and there was very little rich bottom land. Most of the soil was poor and leached out, and commercial fertilizer was dear as blood. But a man didn't…
Many thanks to Sean P. Ferguson for his write up about my story "The Removal Kind," which appears in the fantastic The Booked. Anthology. Sean says: Ross doesn’t exactly ever do normal. His characters are flawed in ways that everyone really is, but he puts a little extra stank on those flaws. And he addresses those flaws with a blunt honesty that makes the reader just a little more uncomfortable. Like a lover that just won’t quit, when you think you’ve found some equilibrium with his particular brand of weird, he twists the knife just once more. and Yes. That’s a Caleb J Ross story. He’s a weird little man and I love him for it. His stories don’t always fit, but they’re good, in that sore thumb sort of way. Always. He’ll never be Jonathan Franzen, all literary and boring in some classically trained New Yorker bullshit manner, and…
Okay, we aren’t doing the work for you. But we are giving you a pleasant bump. Not as in cocaine. Unless you’re writing a book about cocaine. Perhaps a family of W.A.S.P (“pleasant”) take to cocaine to help them through their rigid dinner conversations, most of which painfully circumnavigate the 8 weeks pregnant daughter (another “bump”…). It works. For a while. Until the son, Tommy Fitzgerald, brings a friend to dinner. This friend, unbeknownst to the W.A.S.P family, happens to be the son of the city police chief and may be the baby’s father. A Pleasant Bump is a story of a family finding ways to bond in unlikely places, and of the law that tears them apart. There’s one idea for you right there. See, that was easy. Join me, Sarah Jane Connor (MotherEffingBooks), Liz Vallish (ElizzieBooks), and perhaps a few other guests as we extemporaneously formulate a collection…
