Mark wrote:
As I said, I've read A Childhood. I also have
Feast of Snakes, Gospel Singer, Knockout Artist and Classic
Crews. Which do you suggest to start with?
I'd go with The Gospel Singer. It's his first
book and his best - in fact it's a flat-out American classic
(someone once told me that Tom Jones had the movie rights for
a time, in which case it's a blessing it was never filmed. On
the other hand someone else told me it was Kristofferson,
which makes it a shame). Feast Of Snakes is very good and The
Knockout Artist one of the last decent ones before he went
into a precipitate decline with Scar Lover (an ancient
novella re-warmed and padded out) and The Mulching Of America
(indescribably bad).I interviewed Crews around the time of
the Mulching and it was pretty much the most depressing
literary encounter I've ever had. By and large writers prove
the exception to the never meet your heroes axiom, but Mr
Crews was definitely the exception to the exception - thirty
years of bullying students at Gainesville seemed to have
turned him into the husk of a writer. A real shame, hopefully
it was just a bad day. His non-fiction collection Blood &
Grits (long pieces, mainly from Playboy and Esquire, on the
Alaka Pipeline, Charles Bronson, the Apallachian trail, etc,
etc) is one of my absolute favourite books of its kind -
certainly puts Hunter Thompson in his place.
John
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
--------------------~--> Has someone you know been
affected by illness or disease? Network for Good is THE place
to support health awareness efforts!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/rkgkPB/UOnJAA/Zx0JAA/kqIolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Apr 2005 EDT