Big Lonesome

MAIN STREET BRATS

I has had the pleasure of interviewing seminal punk band The Zeros a few weeks ago at the guitarist's home in National City. Check it out and be sure to come see them on June 25 at Bar Pink in San Diego.

HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!

No fresh and frothy pints of Guinness for me today, but you can check out this inspired Q&A conflicted catechism at Jacket Copy.

FILL IN THE BLANKS

This great new record by Blank Dogs is in heavy rotation on my iPod, vehicle CD player, and record player. I'll be listening to Under and Under over and over all summer long.

DAYDREAM REINCARNATION

 

Did you know Sonic Youth was set to release their 15th studio album this week? Now you do.

BOOK REVIEW ROUND-UP

Once again, I've neglected to provide links to recent book reviews. Working backwards chronologically, the most recent review is of Mary Miller's Big World in The Believer. You don't need to be a subscriber to read the complete review. Big World is the second book in Hobart's Short Flight/Long Drive series and Mary Miller is one of my favorite contemporary short story writers. It's an all-around beautiful product. Here's a quote:

Miller’s characters tend to be introverted women whose appetite for alcohol and/or desire for sex make them extroverted, but only for a little while. They get involved with men who aren’t available, emotionally or otherwise, and are invariably treated like kitchen appliances: “convenient, yet out of the way.”

As you can gather, Miller's stories are anything but dull. I find them artfully energetic. Moreover, I'm thrilled to be back in the pages of The Believer, one of my favorite magazines.

I didn't intend to review J. Robert Lennon's Castle, but when it arrived from Graywolf Press I simply ouldn't put it down and jumped at the chance to review it for Bold Type. Since I still can't access the Bold Type archives I'm going to link to the review at Gooreads, but here's a taste:

J. Robert Lennon's fourth novel starts out in a familiar territory, but quickly strays from the path, following signs and markers from ghost stories and fairy tales. Eric Loesch has returned to rural upstate New York to renovate a house on a large parcel of land he has purchased. Although it's not clear why Loesch has come home, it quickly becomes apparent that something is very wrong. The forest behind his house beckons, but it rebuffs Loesch's efforts to explore it with inexplicable hostility. When he does manage to penetrate the perimeter, Loesch quickly finds himself disoriented in a dark and preternaturally quiet wood, calling to mind stories of New England's haunted forests. He's infatuated with an elusive and seemingly sentient white deer, but the discovery of a malevolent presence in his domain threatens to upset the peace Loesch craves.

It's not a perfect book and its receieved some rough reviews, but it's easily the most suspenseful book I've read all year. I've also come to enjoy reading Ward Six, a collaborative blog where Lennon shares his thoughts on the books he's reading and how they relate to writing projects past and present.

Last but not least, is this L.A. Times review of the excellent anthology Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry edited by Andrew Blauner. It's a surprisingly moving collection of essays that I can't recommend enough. My brother and I are 13 months apart so I'm a bit biased, but I couldn't agree more with the following quote from Tobias Wolff: "The good luck of having a brother is partly the luck of having stories to tell." I was fascinated to read about the relationship between John Cheever's sons, John and Dominick Dunne, Mikal and Gary Gilmore (yes, that Gary Gilmore) and many others.