I. B. “Berl” Pickett, M.D., named after Irving Berlin, did not grow up in normalcy. He endured the spectacle of Pentecostalist Sunday worship; the accompaniment of his parents on their rug-shampooing business; the technical advancement and emotional retardation that ensued from his erotic initia...
Loved "Gallatin Canyon" as that was my first exposure to McGuane. "Driving on the Rim" gave me more of what I'd previously gotten from this author, but it also gave me the sense that even the best writers will tend to ramble at times, and that is fine as far as it goes. But when it meanders with ...
A superb collection of stories—his first in twenty years—from one of our most acclaimed literary figures, whom The New York Times Book Review has called “a writer of the first magnitude.” Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognizable and unforge...
Skelton thought about the electrical drill and how it could take the hole of the light socket and modify it to another; hole power; perhaps ridiculous but close to his father and his mysteries. He though of the vultures you could see circling a pit (usually filled with garbage but never mind that...
We like to think of the idea of selective trout; it serves our anthropocentricity to believe that we are in a duel of wits with a fish, a sporting proposition. We could do well to understand that trout and other game fish are entirely lacking in sporting instincts. They would prefer to dine unmo...
"This is the first time I've worked without a net." The speaker is Chester Pomeroy, a washed-up rock star turned casualty of illicit substances and kamikaze passion. But we may also read these words as an aesthetic statement from Chester's creator, Thomas McGuane, who has made Panama a high-wire ...
Thomas McGuane's high-spirited and fiercely lyrical new novel chronicles the fall and rise of Frank Copenhaver, a man so unhinged by his wife's departure that he finds himself ruining his business, falling in love with the wrong women, and wandering the lawns of his neighborhood, desperate for th...
Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick him...
Nicholas Payne est un jeune homme désœuvré qui parcourt à moto les grands espaces américains pour s’efforcer de ne jamais être aux prises avec la réalité de la vie. A l’âge où commencent les interrogations sur le sens de cette vie, il fait deux rencontres qui auront chacune sur lui une influence ...
Una scrittura rodata da anni di mestiere ma ancora affilata, un romanzo che trova nei particolari, nelle descrizioni e soprattutto nei personaggi una forza inaudita, una tridimensionalità più unica che rara. Thomas McGuane, classe ‘39, è un narratore di razza . Il canto dell’erba (Alet, pp. 224 -...
I imagine a literary agent. A Hollywood-stock character in his late sixties with big, plastic-framed glasses, sitting in a crummy office in Manhattan or Burbank and barking into the telephone: “Tommy, I love you like a brother but the critics are bustin' my balls. They want a story. If I'm gonna ...
A physical novel in which Lucien Taylor, a native son of Montana, embarks on a half-witted, half-unwilling journey into self-discovery.
J. Clovis too was now asleep in the mobile home; he had removed the two artificial limbs. Since the missing arm and missing leg were from the same side of his body, he looked, sleeping on his stomach, like a boomerang. In his dreams, he twitched with happiness. He saw his towers crossing the coun...
The Weatherfax hadn’t shown a good picture of it the day before, but you could see it on the radar, streaming through above Cuba, across Grand Bahama, and now it was on top of us. Chris went forward to the windlass while Phil laid down another hundred feet of chain between us and the anchor. The ...
Its charter was written in 1868 while the big timber was being converted to pioneer houses on the treeless prairies of the West. The operations of the Centennial Club are shrouded in well-guarded mystery. Nothing is known of its procedures but that membership is handed from fathers to eldest sons...
As she walked, the light descended the trunks and ignited balsamic forest odors, awakening the birds and making it easy to find stepping-stones to cross the narrow creek. She’d found this trail on a Forest Service map; the contour lines had suggested a climb she could manage, and by scrutinizing ...