I came to this collection the way I recently came to reading The Sheltering Sky; years of occasional recommendation and rare instances of picking up a book by Paul or Jane Bowles, reading a passage, and putting it back. A couple of years ago I arrived in San Francisco and every so often stayed on...
In his eighth novel, novelist Robert Stone revisits familiar ground via similar characters, themes and settings. As with protagonists from earlier novels, Michael Ahearn, a teacher at a small Midwestern college, is a dissatisfied academic—a half-man, compartmentalized and walled off from hope, sl...
“A Flag for Sunrise” is less a novel than an existential exercise in meaning, sacrifice, and cosmic collisions. Set in a fictionalized Nicaragua, the novel simmers over a flame of political intrigue, religious desperation, and maniacal selfishness, until it explodes at the end as all these strand...
This is one of my favorite novels of any kind. It brings together everything I like about Robert Stone: characters with great potential and terrible flaws, a variety of approaches to love, a strong feeling for place and for different kinds of work, physical danger described in unusual poetic term...
A few weeks ago I happened to catch the 1978 adaptation of this novel, Who'll Stop the Rain, starring Nick Nolte when he was only, like, 36 instead of 902. The movie made me nostalgic for Robert Stone's original novel, so I found a first edition online for amazingly cheap and re-devoured it in a ...
Two things that will color my review of this:1. I'm convinced I was born in the wrong decade. I am completely addicted to and fascinated by the '60s and '70s, to the point where it actually grieves me that I didn't live through them.2. Within the first 10 pages, I knew that Robert Stone is the ki...
Geez, dude. This thing was . . . I mean don't let the pink cover trick you. Some serious intensity here. I'm fully in love with this guy Stone. COL concerns a Hollywood production in Mexico, and basically revolves around the screenwriter (a serious coke-head) coming together with the star (who's ...
Damascus Gate is an unusual great novel because the constellation of characters who variously serve as its protagonists are comparatively uncompelling individual actors. The desultory freelance journalist Christopher Lucas; the half-Jewish, half-black, Communist true-believer and jazz singer Son...
The stories collected in Bear and His Daughter span nearly thirty years - 1969 to the present - and they explore, acutely and powerfully, the humanity that unites us. In "Miserere," a widowed librarian with an unspeakable secret undertakes an unusual and grisly role in the anti-abortion crusade. ...
This was the accursed national forest famous for its tangled kudzu, its meth reek and the outlaw lives played out on the pulses of the strong, the failing and the weak among its inhabitants. No one had been meant to actually live there. Of that place an arguably wise man once said: “This here is ...
Attending was a gesture of support for the director, who happened to be a friend of mine. The film's distributors had made a halfhearted lurch toward an old-style Grauman's opening, breaking out a hastily dyed red carpet. A couple of searchlights swept the murky night sky over downtown Hollywood....