In the first pages of Carmen Boullosa’s powerful yet whimsical novel Texas: The Great Theft, we are introduced to dozens of characters – butchers and lawyers and chicken dealers and grocers and judges and escaped slaves and housemaids and vaqueros, Mexicans and Americans and Indians and Africans and Germans – everyone trying to survive in the precarious, often violent territory between the Rio Bravo and Nueces rivers. It’s a place bursting with stories, a place where every perspective – no matter how small or marginalized – has something to add to the conversation. The story begins with an insult. It’s…
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Joe Milazzo’s “Crepuscule w/Nellie”
Dallas native Joe Milazzo’s new novel Crepuscule w/Nellie is an inspired work of art, a “speculative historical fiction” twenty years in the making, and the book deserves a wider audience than it will get. Titled after the jazz standard of the same name – a song composed by the famously idiosyncratic pianist Thelonious Monk, while his wife Nellie was undergoing treatment for a thyroid disorder – the novel imagines itself into the uncomfortable love and economic triangle existing between Monk, Nellie, and their benefactor, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The story is, like Monk’s work, unique – strange, dissonant, profane,…
Playlist for “The Midnight Man”
These songs served as inspiration for my first novel, “The Midnight Man.” I’d listen to them while writing, jogging, driving in the car, whatever. Listen up, there’s some powerful stuff here.
Douglas Kearney on Fatherhood as Inspiration
Also, Doug’s great interview on NPR about this new collection.
On Genius
“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” – Arthur Rimbaud
A Post-Graduate DIY MFA Reading List
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Another reading list for another novel.