We survived.

If anyone would like a shipped paperback copy of Auggie's Revenge or Fight for Your Long Day, the internet can deliver. There are also affordable copies of Auggie's Revenge at Apple Books, on eBay, for Kindle, as well as at Bookshop and Smashwords, too.

Independence Day's Frank Bascombe

Richard Ford's Independence Day remains the best novel I've read whose action takes place in and around an American holiday, and in the past few years, I've discovered that the fourth and fifth novels in the Frank Bascombe series are as equally compelling. The Sportswriter is possibly my least favorite of the five, although for years that was all there was to Frank. Without putting too much thought into it, I'd rank the five books from favorite to least favorite thusly: (1) Independence Day, (2) Be Mine, (3) The Lay of the Land, (4) Let Me Be Frank With You, and (5) The Sportswriter. I read them in the order in which the appeared, but it was years after the date of publication for all except Independence Day. Speaking of which, happy Fourth of July.

America's Bicentennial

Consider a memory from Independence Day, 1976.

The Angel of the Bridge

Consider John Cheever's opening paragraphs from short stories he wrote in the early 1960s.

 

beach reads

Enjoy the sun with a novel or two unless an eclectic mix of poetry and fiction suits you.

This is not the signed copy linked to above.

Mr. Pastern was far from dead

"Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement. She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead. He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, 'Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss.' He was brigadier of the club's locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China."

~~ from "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" in The Stories of John Cheever