A wonderful, insightful review in today’s The Dallas Morning News discusses my debut novel THE MIDNIGHT MAN in relation to the deep-seated political divide resulting from this year’s election: “Tomlinson has nice timing, and a good handle on voice … The characters are nicely fleshed out – real human beings with flaws that never lapse into cartoon two-dimensionality. It’s a book about hope, which comes at a good time. After last year’s polarizing election, it feels good to see through the eyes of his creations — people who are really interested in understanding one another’s lives as opposed to just…
Posts Tagged with Dallas
Carmen Boullosa’s “Texas: The Great Theft”
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…
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,…
DIY MFA Reading List: “Libra” by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo gets to the heart of the Kennedy assassination plot – and the murderous American soul – in his psychological thriller “Libra”.
Local Hero
Searching for a satisfying, complex plot structure for your next story? Look no farther than your front window – the answer might be closer to home than you think.
Small Victories
My wife Lisa and I went out with some friends of ours to a posh local dance club in Dallas Friday night. Lisa’s physician friend was able to “get us on the list” and the four of us arrived around 9:30 pm – late for us but the place was still empty – a pert, tanned graveyard of bouncers, bartenders and idling go-go dancers waiting for the real fun to begin. We milled around for awhile, touring the multi-level dance floors and checking out the pricey VIP rooms, equipped with flat screen TVs, red velour couches and large balconies overlooking…