PART 2: * David Attoe, Lion at the Door, Little, Brown, 1989.
In a quietly passionate voice that speaks to our hearts, David Attoe has brilliantly, honorably imagined himself into lives whose truths we recognize, lives otherwise only lost, and with his eloquent care, rescued them from the silence.
Here is American storytelling as tall as it is broadly imagined and deeply felt, exuberant with outlaw humor and honest magic. Reading Stone Junction is like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters.
Daringly imagined and darkly romantic -- a moral thriller.
Here is American storytelling as tall as it is broadly imagined and deeply felt, exuberant with outlaw humor and honest magic. Reading Stone Junction is like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters.
This provocative, dangerous, and high-spirited conversation sounds like one that many of us have been holding with ourselves, more and less silently, as times have grown ever 9 darker. Finally somebody has begun to talk out loud about what must change, and what must be left behind, if we are to navigate the perilous turn of this millennium and survive. For bravely lighting up these first beacons in the night, Ventura and Hillman deserve our thanks as well as our closest attention.
Lyrical and fast-driving, this tale of Dillinger's last days restores to us with brilliant fidelity a long-unredeemed part of our true outlaw heritage.
Mind-warping in its vision, absolute in its integrity, Arc d'X is classic Erickson -- as daring, crazy, and passionate as any American writing since the Declaration of Independence.
A post-Millennial spectacular -- dizzingly readable!
An astoundingly tuned voice -- graceful, dark, authentic, and funny.
A mind-opening tale of trespass and revelation, of road adventures, of technothriller hardware, of saucer folks, and aerospace outlaws -- as well as a daring account of our history through the Cold War and beyond by what we have seen, and often wish we had not seen, in the hazardous dreamscape of the American Sky.
A demented, deadpan comic wonder, this rude salute to the dark side of contract employment has the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud.
Slackjaw is an extraordinary emotional ride through the lives and times of reader and writer alike. It is maniacally aglow with a born storyteller's gifts of observation, an amiably deranged sense of humor, and a heart too bounced around by his history, and ours, not to have earned Mr. Knipfel, at last, an unsentimental clarity that is generous and deep. What begins as a cautionary tale turns out to be, after all, an exemplary American 11 life. The Park Service ought to be charging admission. Long may he continue to astonish us.
Blessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt -- a story that moves with ease and certainty, deeply respecting the given world even as it shines with the integrity of a dream.
Donald Antrim is in top form with this high-spirited hallucination, whose characters, undeniably ourselves, carry on engagingly and shamelessly, in an off-the-wall, not to mention off-the-ceiling, environment that is also the world we know, and sometimes wish we didn't.
Rick Moody, writing with boldness, humor, generosity of spirit, and a welcome sense of wrath, takes the art of the memoir an important step into its future.
The Balzac of the bin is at it again. With this paranoid Valentine to New York -- and to a certain saurian colossus noted for his own ambivalent feelings about large cities -- Mr. Knipfel now brings to fiction the welcome gifts which distinguished his previous books -- the authenticity, the narrative exuberance, the integrity of his cheerfully undeluded American voice.
Here's the intro to the biography of Donald Barthelme, The Teachings of Don B.
EDIT: I've linked the intro to Richard Farina's Been Down So Long...
EDIT 2: Oops... Just saw /u/sandman91 had already posted the link to the blurb page..
EDIT 3: Okay, hopped up on coffee so I added as many blurbs as I could find, mostly from this list compiled by someone named Patrick Lane.