Sheldon Lee Compton

Sheldon Lee Compton passed on April 13, 2026. He was an author of the memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound as well as many novels, short stories, and newspaper articles; he helped and published a wide range of writers from Ketucky and beyond. I'm grateful that he published two excerpts from the as yet unpublished Spark Park, "Night Shift" and "Uncle Sam's Decline."

a library copy tucked away with all the other invisible books

 

a tale of three Brookses

From the April 6 print issue of The New Yorker, I read Becca Rothfeld's review of a book by Arthur C. Brooks. At some point in the middle, I took a moment to scroll twitter and was immediately presented with a clip of Dillon Brooks watching a shot by Kevin Durant fly over his head. Soon after, I returned to the middle of Rothfeld's book review and for a moment found myself confused and considering that I was reading a paragraph about David Brooks because the title of the book seemed similar to one this third Brooks might write.

Jon of Havana

Jon Lee Anderson phones home from Havana: "Leonardo Padura, Cuba's best known novelist, told me about his frustrated efforts to buy a home power station for his elderly mother-in-law, to provide light when the electricity goes out."

 

#fridayreads

Find affordable copies of Auggie's Revenge at Apple Books, on eBay, for Kindle, as well as at Bookshop and Smashwords, too.

no fabrication

"I have no problem calling 'Mr. Hunter's Grave' nonfiction. Although [Joseph] Mitchell altered the truth about elapsed time, he used a dramatist's prerogative to compress and focus his story, thereby giving the reader a manageable framework. If he had told the story in real time, strung across all the days and months he did spend on Staten Island, he would have achieved the numbing truth of Andy Warhol's eight-hour film of a man having an eight-hour sleep. By careful manipulation he raised the craft of nonfiction to art. But he never manipulated Mr. Hunter's truth; there has been no 'inferring,' no 'fabricating.' He has played fair."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser