free shipping!

Support independent bookstores and enjoy free shipping this weekend; there are twelve hours left to save.

Fante's Hunger

"From the bookcase behind his writing table, I pulled down a copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. This book, my father used to say, caused him to become a writer. I held it in my hand and flipped through the old pages. Somewhere in the middle, I discovered a sheet of typing bond that had been folded in quarters. It looked to have been used as a bookmark. It was yellow from age at the top where it had been exposed to the air.

"I unfolded the make-shift bookmark and immediately recognized the handwriting as my father's. But over and over, the signature written was Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun. A paper was filled to the bottom of the page. The eccentricity jolted me because I'd done the same thing a hundred times, filling legal tablets with E. E. Cummings' signatures. The old man and I had things in common after all."

~~ from Chump Change by Dan Fante

Life got away from me

"We drank coffee together standing in the kitchen. He wanted to know what had happened to me. Why had I landed in the nut ward? He was a very intense guy, and his directness came from a fear that what I had, might be inherited by him too.

"I had not planned to be crazy, I said. Arrests for lewd practices in public were things that happened when I drank. I'd not planned on being a degenerate. Life got away from me. Out of hand. I couldn't figure it out either . . .

"We talked about him too. Fab was proud that he had put himself through college and into grad school mostly from working in a supermarket. When the old man had gotten sick and his only income had been his Social Security and Writers Guild Pension, my brother had paid for his education by himself. At one store, working his way up from box boy to checker to assistant manager. Union wages. Vacations. Dental benefits. Six years at USC. The CPA exam."

~~ from Chump Change by Dan Fante

#fridayreads

Don't be shy about messaging me if you'd like a signed copy of Auggie's Revenge or Fight for Your Long Day.

T. C. Boyle's collected stories

T. C.'s phone books, I & II

 

Life for Sale

I'll soon return to Yukio Mishima's Life for Sale. It's good.

Beyond Good and Evil Sold Eleven Copies

Will Lloyd hearts the lads.

Letter from Philadelphia

"My father grew up here and escaped. I ran back."

A Living Remedy

Nicole Chung's A Living Remedy is the latest "American poverty" memoir to be embraced by corporate media. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was hardly the first, but it seems central to the theme among contemporary titles. A modified excerpt of Nicole Chung's book appears at The Atlantic, and in Esquire she recognizes that she most likely could have helped her parents a lot more if she hadn't chosen a writing career. It seems worth noting that among millions of Americans, helping parents is rarely considered; rather, it's a value left behind in the Old Worlds of multiple continents.

Philip Roth will never die

For Esquire, Erin Somers wrote about her "Wild Weekend at the Philip Roth Festival."

to know nothing

"After this last letter, everything changed. After this last letter, Vicente wanted only to know nothing; to know nothing about anything. To be brutally, absolutely ignorant of everything. He wanted to learn what it meant not to know. He wanted to live in darkness. He wanted not to know any more, but more than that, he wanted to no longer know. To no longer know anything. Not even the things he already knew. He no longer wanted to know anything about what was already past and about what might happen in the future. Not to his mother, or to his brother—nor to his wife or his children, or himself."

~~ from The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena

reading update

READING UPDATE: I'm making good progress with Yukio Mishima's Life for Sale, but I put it down to read two satisfying magazine pieces this weekend: "The Novelists Whose Inventions Went Too Far" by D. T. Max and "The Melancholy Universe" by Laszlo F. Foldeyni. I'm also cheating on the Mishima with a new library book, The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena.