John Brandon is yet another author that I don’t want to miss at the Decatur Book Festival.  My dance card is filling up rapidly.  Brandon is the first to read at the Decatur High Stage on Saturday at 10AM.  It’ll be tight to see if I can get my act together in a timely enough fashion to get myself down there.  It should be worth it.  I am a big fan of Brandon’s first novel, Arkansas.  You can check out my glowing review, complete with my first question to ask the author.

Brandon’s second novel, Citrus County – which I have not read – yet, was featured recently on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

Another event on my “absolutely must see” list at the Decatur Book Festival is author Lev Grossman at 2:30 on Sunday.  I loved his wildly inventive novel, The Magicians.  Check out my glowing review.  Just make sure that you get behind me in the book signing line.  Thanks.

Laurel Snyder may be the hardest working author at the Decatur Book Festival.  The one-woman powerhouse will be part of events on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  She is the author of several books that are worth noting.

Her children’s picture book Inside the Slidy Diner is a favorite with the young reader in my home and introduced the family to our adopted catch phrase “Clatter and din! Hullabaloo!”  We’re actually able to work that into conversation more often than you would think.

Her novel for middle readers Any Which Wall was just named one of the 25 Books that all young Georgians should read.

On the occasion of the release of another novel for middle readers, Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, Laurel Snyder took the time to submit herself to a BGB interview, which you can check out here.

Her most recent picture book (just out last week), Baxter, The Pig Who Wanted to be Kosher, is awesome and was instant classic over at my house.  While waiting for the bus, Baxter meets a man who is headed home for Shabbat. Baxter is so enamored by the man’s descriptions of the upcoming celebration that he wants to join in, too.  Hilarity ensues as Baxter sets out to become kosher.  He doesn’t know what “kosher” means exactly, but he’s a determined pig.  He eventually learns from a young rabbi (a female rabbi, no less) what Shabbat is all about and finally gets an invitation to join in.  The illustrations are wonderfully comic and offer knowing chuckles for adult readers.  Snyder dedicates the book to “anyone who has ever felt excluded, which is to say…everyone.” It’s a wonderful story of inclusiveness and a great introduction into Jewish religious ideas for young readers.  Buy it for the glossary alone.

And if that weren’t enough, Snyder has another novel for middle readers coming out later this month, Penny Dreadful.

So far this week, we’ve been subtly referencing some of the goings-on at this weekend’s Decatur Book Festival.  Those days are over.  The remainder of the week will be given over to “OMG, I can’t wait to see this” fanboy posts.

One of the events that I am truly looking forward to takes place on Saturday at 1:45PM.  Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be in conversation “Tavis Smiley-style” about storytelling with Lain Shakespeare of the Wren’s Nest. Adichie is the author of the brilliant Half of a Yellow Sun (read our reviews here and here) as well as the novel Purple Hibiscus and the short story collection That Thing Around Your Neck.

The best part of this event is that BGB is totally responsible.  You can read all about how awesome we are at the Wren’s Nest Blog.

Part One is here. Part Two is here.

Jim Bouton’s Ball Four is known as the first “tell-all” book about professional sports—in this case, baseball—but it’s much more than that. First published in 1970, it told the story of Bouton’s efforts during the 1969 season to resurrect his pitching career with the expansion Seattle Pilots—a team that was so ill-fated that it left Seattle after one season and became the Milwaukee Brewers.

Bouton displayed an irreverent, even subversive, sense of humor and an absolutely original view of the world around him, not to mention some serious “stuff” as a writer. There are good reasons for the book’s popularity and staying power. A lot of what he wrote in 1970 is conventional wisdom among modern fans, but it was considered radical then. Many readers then would have said to themselves, “What?! I thought baseball players visited sick kids in hospitals in their free time. This doesn’t sound like the guys I’ve read about in the sports section.” Bouton portrayed his fellow ballplayers as dumb, juvenile, moral degenerates. But he also made them seem like a lot of fun, and if you’ve ever wished you could be one of them, you’ll want that even more after reading Ball Four.

Most famously, Bouton pulled the curtains back and exposed ballplayers’ illicit practices like popping “greenies” (amphetamines, which many ate on game days the way some people eat altoids) and “beaver shooting” (if you don’t know what that means, I’m not going to be the one to tell you). I had also thought that he introduced the world to the term “road beef,” but in re-reading the book for this post I see that I was mistaken in thinking he had used that charming turn of phrase.  Bouton did allude to players’ infidelities on the road, but ironically, it looks like it may have been that Cervantes of the Weight Room Jose Canseco who first used it in print, at least in the baseball context. (Again, if you don’t know what this refers to, you’ll have to find out from someone else.)

What I’m trying to tell you is that the book is a fun read, and it made a splash in the culture beyond the shallow pool of baseball literature.  For better or worse, it quickly became iconic. There is no chance whatsoever that Don DeLillo didn’t read it before he wrote “Pafko at the Wall.” None. As you’ll see, I can’t prove that, but I know it.

Ball Four is full of observations and asides that don’t necessarily have anything in common with anything else in the book. Here’s one (which is sandwiched between two separate anecdotes about throwing batting practice) from page 25 of my twentieth anniversary edition:

When I was a kid I loved to go to Giant games in the Polo Grounds. And a little thing that happened there when I was about ten years old popped into my mind today. There was a ball hit into the stands and a whole bunch of kids ran after it. I spotted it first, under a seat, and grabbed for it. Just as I did, a Negro kid also snatched at it. My hand reached it a split second before his, though, and I got a pretty good grip on it. But he grabbed the ball real hard and pulled it right out of my hand. No complaint, he took it fair and square. I thought about it afterward, about what made him able to grab that ball out of my hand. I decided it had to do with the way we were brought up—me in a comfortable suburb, him probably in a ghetto. I decided that while I wanted the ball, he had to have it.

Sound familiar?  DeLillo had to have gotten the idea for Cotter Martin and Bill Waterson and their experience with the ball—which, as we’ve seen, forms the very connective tissue of Underworld as DeLillo conceived it from the very beginning—from Ball Four. Had to have. I know that, but I went to the Ransom Center to see if I could prove it.

DeLillo’s notebooks include a long running list of the books he consulted in the course of his research for Underworld. The “Pafko at the Wall” section of this hand-written bibliography includes sixteen books about baseball (mostly New York Giants fans’ memoirs about the team), four audio or videotapes, eight books on Harlem (e.g., Charles Mingus’s autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, and Aaron Siskind, Harlem Photographs, 1932-1940), and biographies of Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra, and Pieter Breughel. But no Ball Four.

I found in these notebooks the seeds that bloomed into the story of Gleason puking on Sinatra, the description of a drunk running the bases as he’s chased by security guards, and the blizzard of impromptu confetti that instantaneously followed Thomson’s homer (a piece of which forces Hoover to contemplate “The Triumph of Death”), among many others. The notebooks leave a trail of bread crumbs back to the book or newspaper column that gave DeLillo the initial idea for every one of those elements of the story. So how could he have left Bouton out?

I wouldn’t be much of a DeLillo fan if I didn’t appreciate a good conspiracy theory. If I had more energy for this I’d try to spin one. But I’m pretty sure he simply read Ball Four when it came out and something clicked when he read that passage; he filed it away mentally and accessed it when he wrote “Pafko” and, since he didn’t need to look at Ball Four again as part of his research—because he’d already internalized the story or some such—he didn’t include it in his notebooks.

So I left Austin without proving my theory, but I doubt that I would have enjoyed my time spent with the DeLillo papers any more than I did if I had found the evidence I sought. Watching Don DeLillo’s creative process unfold was literally thrilling for me. If you’ve read this far, you’d probably find it just as exciting as I did, so I recommend you try it: Find out where your favorite author’s papers are archived, make arrangements to go there, and immerse yourself for a while. You’ll go home thinking that the novelist is every bit as much an artist as Breughel or Mingus was, and I think you’ll redouble the pleasure you get from reading him or her.

**********

Editor’s note and DBF plug: Talk with author J. Todd Moye at the Decatur Book Festival, this Saturday at 12:30 PM about baseball, DeLillo, Tar Heels basketball — and  his new book, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

See you there.

I was able to get an early peek at the new Jonathan Franzen novel Freedom when President Obama loaned me his copy. Thanks, Barry.  The early reviews have been rolling out for a few weeks now, and each one seems to be trying to outdo the others in the superlatives heaped upon it.  So far the novel has been called “the novel of the century” and “a masterpiece of American fiction”.  Franzen is “alone in his willingness to tackle America’s big issues,” insists another critic.  And then the backlash started before the novel was even released. I had to stop reading if I was to ever be able to offer an opinion of my own.

I should start by noting that I was not especially a fan of The Corrections.  It was heralded as a Big, Important book. It was certainly a good book, but that’s as far as I was willing to go.  My problem with Franzen’s cast in that novel is that they were almost dripping with the author’s scorn.  He didn’t like them at all, and they were each clearly representative of a “type” that the author seemed intent on skewering.  If the author didn’t care for these people, why should the reader (me) care about what happened to them?  The praise for The Corrections was near universal, and mine appeared to be the minority opinion.  Fair enough.

Freedom is an enormous book, a veritable advertisement for the Kindle, and it is divided into several sections.  The novel begins with an introduction to Walter and Patty Bergland, urban pioneers to a newly gentrifying neighborhood in St Paul, Minnesota.  This introduction is often humorous and spot-on in its description of the travails of urban living:

…the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

After a mostly light-hearted introduction to the Berglunds, the next chapter is ominously titled “Mistakes were made.”   This section is written by Patty at the advice of a therapist.  It is written in the third person, as Patty says that she finds it easier to write about herself from a distance (and it was probably easier for Franzen, too). Despite being an “autobiography,” the chapter is fairly direct at laying bare the mistakes that Patty has made in her life.   Patty doesn’t commit the only mistakes in this novel, but she is the only one who gets to provide her own account.

Walter and Patty are both trying desperately to escape their pasts, which include dysfunctional families in the Midwest and the East.  True to Tolstoy’s famous quote on the matter, each of their unhappy families “is unhappy in its own way.”  Despite their efforts, the dysfunction begins to creep into their quiet Midwestern home.  Walter and Patty have two children, Joey and a girl.  (You don’t need to know the girl’s name, because she may be the least developed character in the novel.)  Joey rebels against his liberal parents by shacking up with the “white-trash” next door neighbor and becoming a committed conservative. (It reads like a horror novel at stretches for parents everywhere.)

For volatility, Franzen adds Walter and Patty’s friend Richard Katz, the iconic indie rock star, to the mix.  Richard was Walter’s roommate in college and the man that Patty passed up to marry Walter.  Tall and devastatingly handsome with cool to burn (even though he’s described as looking like Muammar Gaddafi), it can’t be a good thing to have this guy hanging around the family.

I’ll confess that I was concerned in the middle third of the novel when I feared that Franzen was returning to the form that I disliked in The Corrections.   Many of the characters become completely unlikable and begin to lose some of their dimension.  Add to that some observations bordering on caricature like, this one:

Walter wasn’t really even a neighbor, he didn’t belong to the homeowner’s association, and the fact that he drove a Japanese hybrid, to which he recently applied an OBAMA sticker, pointed, in her mind, toward godlessness and a callousness regarding the plight of hardworking families, like hers, who were struggling to make ends meet and raise their children to be good, loving citizens in a dangerous world.

…. and I feared the worst.  Luckily, the final third of the novel rides in to save the day.

The novel tackles many Big Ideas.  Franzen examines toxicity from both external (environmental) and internal (personal drama) standpoints, and highlights the extensive damage of both.  The author also explores  the profound impacts of the choices that we make, whether well considered or barely acknowledged,  on the direction of our lives.  Franzen also shows the blindness that we often have concerning our own actions.  For example,  when Walter accuses his son of “conniving with monsters trashing the country for their personal enrichment…”, he seems to be oblivious that this is precisely where he finds himself.

Of course, “Freedom” in its various forms is also a central theme to the novel.   When Joey is pursuing the sister of a well-connected college friend, the girl’s father delivers the following oration over a (just) post-9/11 dinner:

Freedom is a pain in the ass.  And that’s why it’s so imperative that we seize the opportunity that’s been presented to us this fall.  To get a nation of free people to let go of their bad logic and sign on with better logic, by whatever means are necessary.

Do nefarious Republican oligarchs really speak that way?  Or do we (Franzen and I) just imagine that they do?  Really, I have no frame of reference.

Another kind of freedom the author brings to mind comes from disentangling oneself from family, loved ones, and any kind of meaningful personal attachments in order to live life “unencumbered.”   However, Franzen shows in the third act that this type of freedom is illusory and empty.   Our families/loved ones provide nourishment for our souls and provide the only real paths to forgiveness and acceptance. These are  hardly the ironic hipster sentiments that I was expecting. Is irony truly dead?

As I’ve mentioned, the novel’s concluding third saved the novel for me.  It turned the novel away from what I was expecting, into largely unexpected territory.  Overall, I thought that this was an exceptional novel.  There were quibbles that I had along the way, some of which I’ve mentioned here, that leave me wondering about Franzen’s coronation as our greatest living writer and this the great novel of our times.  Time and perspective will tell.

Jonathan Franzen will be delivering the keynote address and signing books at the opening of this year’s Decatur Book Festival.  I’d love to hear the author talk about this book.  The event is free, but it requires a ticket.   If you waited, like me, to get your tickets, I’m sorry to say that there are no more available.  Come on down anyway and join me on the sidewalk outside looking for kind souls with extras.

Last night the Georgia Center for the Book unveiled its inaugural selection of the top 25 books all young Georgians should read.  You may recall that in May, they announced the fourth list of 25 books all Georgians should read.  Says The Center:

The list, selected by the writers, educators, librarians, and media representatives who comprise the Center’s advisory council, represents the first time a compilation of some of the best of children’s literature by Georgia writers and artists has been made available. Many of the authors and illustrators on the list will participate in free public readings throughout Georgia libraries and schools over the next two years.

The Young Georgians List, includes the following honorees:

Picture Books (Pre K+)

• Liz Conrad (illustrator) – Little Duck
• Carmen Deedy (author), Thomas Gonzalez (illustrator) – 14 Cows for America
• Elizabeth O. Dulemba (author & illustrator) – Soap, Soap, Soap – Jabόn, Jabόn, Jabόn
• Nathaniel Lachenmeyer (author), Aki Sogabe (illustrator) – The Origami Master
• Eric Litwin (author), James Dean (illustrator) – Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes
• Danny Schnitzlein (author), Bill Mayer (illustrator) – The Monster Who Did My Math
• Diane Z. Shore & Jessica Alexander (authors), James Ransome (illustrator) – This is the Dream

Early Readers (grades K – 3)

• Lola Schaefer – Mittens

Graphic Novel (grades 4+)

• Andy Runton – Owly

Middle Readers (grades 4-8)

• Evelyn Coleman – Freedom Train
• Ted Dunagan – A Yellow Watermelon
• Gail Karwoski & Loretta Johnson Hammer – The Tree that Owns Itself and Other Adventure Tales from Out of the Past
• Shelia Moses – Joseph
• Mary Ann Rodman – Yankee Girl
• Vicky Alvear Shecter – Alexander the Great Rocks the World
• Kim L. Siegelson – Honey Bea
• Doris Smith Buchanan – A Taste of Blackberries
• Laurel Snyder – Any Which Wall
• Deborah Wiles – Each Little Bird That Sings

Young Adults (grades 7+)

• Jodi Lynn Anderson – Peaches
• Lynn Cullen – I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter
• James Dashner – The Maze Runner
• S.A. Harazin – Blood Brothers
• Terra McVoy – Pure
• Walter Sorrells – First Shot

The kids’ book that’s not for children, All My Friends Are Dead, share a few more pages:

If you missed the first batch of pages, check ‘em out here.

I had read a little bit about the film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but I didn’t realize that it was based on a book by John Boyne.   I hadn’t seen the film and decided to read the book.  As I’ve said in other reviews, Holy Cow.  What a marvelous, gut-wrenching book.

Like other books I’ve read and enjoyed (e.g., The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), this book is written with a child’s innocence; unlike those, this one is told in the third person.  The story focuses on our main character Bruno, a nine year-old German boy, and tells of the events surrounding the early 1940′s from his perspective.  And Boyne’s skill at portraying such a brutal period in human history through the eyes of a child is positively spellbinding.

Bruno’s father is in the German military, although Bruno doesn’t really know what his job is — just that he’s very important.  And after a visit from “the Fury”, Bruno’s father gets put in charge of “Out-with”, and uproots his family from their comfortable life in Berlin to live in a large house bordering the concentration camp.  Bruno is devastated at having to move and leave his best friends, and as he tries to find ways to occupy himself in his new environment (including getting along with his older sister Gretel), he is perplexed by the people he sees who live on the other side of the distant fence, all of whom wear the same style of striped pajamas.  Hearing the scenes and events told as they are seen and understood by a nine-year old innocent child is incredibly moving.  And when Bruno goes “exploring” along the fence, walking for an hour into the woods, he comes across a boy on the other side of the fence and the two become secret friends.  As the boys begin meeting on a daily basis and as they talk and relay their experiences through the fence – being uprooted to a new place they didn’t want to go to, etc. — the similarities might resonate to the untrained eye; however, knowing the horror behind Bruno’s friend Shmuel’s story brings tears to your eyes.

Like the film Life is Beautiful, this book is a moving tale about a horrific and tragic time, and anyone with a heart would be stunned by this story.

Reading the comments on the cover of I’m Down (“hilarious” “laugh-out-loud”) including the picture of a young white girl with a big afro by Mishna Wolff, it would appear this book could be a natural extension of my Chelsea Handler summer reading material since I love to laugh. Not so. In fact, I found this memoir to be a bit unsettling.

I’m Down is about Ms. Wolff, a white girl growing up in the proverbial black ‘hood of Seattle. She does not fit into the neighborhood as completely as her father would like. He wants her to be “down” – to act like all the other kids on their block. To please him, she tries her best. At one point she does enjoy some success with ‘capping (public insults similar to “yo moma” jokes). She feels almost accepted by the kids in the neighborhood – but is suddenly moved to a more academic school where the population consists of smart, rich, white kids. She finds she is not a natural fit there either. Ms.Wolff can not believe that these white, presumably privileged kids are not happy either. She is introduced to a world of depression and cutting by girls who are also crying for acceptance and love from their parents.

At first glance, I was a bit insulted regarding the race issue. Normally I’m not the most politically correct person but reading that her dad wants her to be more “black” made my blood boil. Ms. Wolff claims that her father thinks he’s black because he has permed his hair into an afro, doesn’t have a job, begins but never finishes construction projects on the house and plays a lot of poker with the other unemployed men who live nearby. Is this being black? Or is this being economically disadvantaged (a.k.a. “poor”) in an urban neighborhood? It’s curious to me because my husband is black (I am not) and no one in his family acts like the people in this book. If you don’t go deeper into the book, then it’s just more of the same stereotypical trash that never seems to end.

At second glance however, race isn’t the real issue. The issue is acceptance and love. I was reminded of my childhood and the difficulties I encountered trying to ‘fit in’ being the fat kid from divorced parents that no one wanted to hang around. Whether racial, socio-economical, educational or even appearance, most children experience similar challenges. Unfortunately for Ms. Wolff, she didn’t have parents to whom she could trun to sort all of this out. My heart broke for Ms. Wolff and her endless effort to please her father. Ms. Wolff overhears her father’s girlfriends commenting on her new classmates:

They are not gifted unless gifted is another word for bad……….That girl is no more gifted than any of my kids and she’s disrespectful, thinking she knows more than grown folks.” Her dad then replies “ But even before she went there [to the school] Mishna thought she was better than everyone. She’s just snotty like her mother.

Ms. Wolff (and I) cringed at her father’s response. She aches for her father’s acceptance and love but she never measures up to “his” world. Even during her parents’ divorce, she was hoping the judge would ask her who she liked better so she could say:

Mom. Not because I liked her better, but because I knew I was cool enough for Mom. And I felt that not being quite good enough for Dad might cause problems down the road – like I’d cramp his style and maybe he’d decide to leave me at a party.

Although she felt cool enough for her mom, her mom is emotionally absent. She left the family to take care of her own personal issues. Later Ms. Wolff does move in with her, but it’s because she feels she causes too many problems in her dad’s new family with his new wife, not because her mother gives her any emotional support or positive guidance.

The story ends with hope that everything will eventually work out. When I Googled Ms. Wolff, I found that she had dropped out of high school at 16. I can only hope that by writing the memoir and speaking about her life she can understand the reasons for her father’s behavior and break that emotional abusive cycle with her future children.

All in all, a decent collection of childhood experiences – just don’t expect to laugh.

Part One is here.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” With this compact, beautiful, Whitmanian sentence Don DeLillo introduces Cotter Martin, a major character in “Pafko at the Wall/The Triumph of Death.” Cotter, a teenager from Harlem, has skipped school to watch the decisive third game of a playoff series between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ home stadium, on October 3, 1951.

Cotter can’t afford a ticket to the game so, with a group of fellow truants, takes a run at the entrance, jumps the turnstiles, and escapes a stadium cop. DeLillo achieves a slow-motion effect as he describes that action:

Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he’ll land and which way he’ll run and even though he knows they will be after him the second he touches ground, even though he’ll be in danger for the next several hours—watching left and right—there is less fear in him now. …

Then you lose him in the crowd.

Cotter finds purchase in the left-field stands; Bill Waterson, a white businessman in his early forties, strikes up a conversation and a temporary friendship with him as they endure the game together. (Lost in the collective memory of the contest is the fact that the Giants misplayed balls in the field, made base-running mistakes and otherwise had a hell of a time generating any offense. They probably didn’t deserve to win the game, and up until the last pitch it seemed certain they wouldn’t. Cotter and Bill and all the other Giants fans there that day had to have felt like they were bleeding from a thousand cuts—until they didn’t.)

Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” the game-winning home run into the left-field seats—the most legendary home run in the history of Major League Baseball—sends Cotter, Bill, and dozens of other fans scrambling for the ball. Cotter emerges out of the scrum with it, but only after wrestling it away from Bill. Bill chases Cotter all the way back to Harlem in pursuit of the ball, pleading, “Hey Cotter buddy come on, we won this game together.” Hadn’t Bill shared his peanuts with the kid? Hadn’t they bonded at the game, almost as father and son? “I looked at you scrunched up in your seat and I thought I’d found a pal,” he says. “This is a baseball fan, I thought, not some delinquent in the streets. You seem to be dead set on disappointing me. Cotter? Because buddies sit down together and work things out.” But they don’t work it out. Bill makes a run at Cotter, Cotter eludes him (in a rough replay of the opening scene), and Bill goes home empty-handed.

In an early draft of the typed manuscript DeLillo has Bill yelling, “Don’t be so god damn all mighty nigger ish. Not with me, okay?” then catching himself and halfway apologizing: “Look at that now, Cotter. Aw Christ you made me say the word.” Everything in this subplot of the story has built toward that moment and that word. It had to have taken a monumental act of restraint for him to cross that section out with pencil, as he did. My jaw dropped several times while digging through DeLillo’s papers, but never so low and for so long as it did when I read this page of manuscript. The final draft is stronger for having left the word unsaid.

(Until recently no one knew conclusively what had really happened to the ball; within days of the home run dozens of people had contacted the Giants, each claiming to have it in their possession. This author claims to have solved the mystery. I’ll take a look at his book and get back to you.)

The ball shows up as a talisman at various points throughout Underworld. In an exceptionally rare interview that DeLillo gave to the New York Times on the occasion of Mark McGwire’s historic 62nd tater in 1998 he said, “Every baseball carries with it the history of the game, in a mysterious way that you don’t find in football or tennis or basketball. People have scrambled over baseballs, fought over baseballs, and the wonderful mystery of the Bobby Thomson home-run ball is in part what prompted me to write ‘Underworld.’ If we knew who had that baseball, it’s possible I never would have begun work on the novel.”

In one of his research notebooks DeLillo sketched out Cotter’s (and the baseball’s) importance to what would become the novel’s structure:

“Cotter Martin

Break up account of the game and its aftermath—and distribute throughout book, so that Truman Cotter becomes a kind of underground figure. The unknown individual who has in his possession the baseball Thomson hit for a homer on Oct. 3, 1951—The Shot Heard Round The World.”

Even though Cotter ends up not being much of a presence in the rest of the finished novel, it’s hard not to fall in love with the kid. I like knowing that he seems originally to have been named Truman.

Here’s another note DeLillo wrote to himself:

“Everything is connected—the end—

in the computer

in the paranoid structure of cyberspace

But also in a series of human linkages, beginning in the Prologue with Russ Hodges’ voice connecting people to the drama of the game—and continuing throughout as various connections between characters are revealed, and as chapters themselves are linked

-coincidence, serendipity, happenstance

Everything after the Prologue is generated by the baseball

-Nick Shay’s ownership of ball

-Marvin Lundy’s search for ball

-Texas Highway Killer, who shoots the man who has the ball in his possession[.]”

I dug into the DeLillo Papers in the first place because I thought I knew where he’d originally gotten the idea for this story about the ball and wanted to see if I was right. I was excited to find his notes establishing how he conceived the ball’s place in the novel’s structure. But could I find the smoking gun I needed to prove my theory?

To be continued…

Friend of the blog and lover of a nice pale ale, Ben Tanzer, has a new e-book out called 99 Problems: Essays about running and writing.  He’s using the Radiohead sales approach – pay what you want.  Check it out.

This just in:  Dr. Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Novel Peace Prize for his work extending microcredit to women in developing countries, will present a lecture at Agnes Scott College next week in association with the Decatur Book Festival.  The details:

The book so nice, they reviewed it twice: Michiko Kakutani likes the new Franzen – more or less – as does Sam Tanenhaus. And only two weeks before it comes out.

The Guardian has a clip from the Swedish screen adaptation of The Girl Who Played with Fire.  It looks like the staff of Millennium will actually get some screen time this time around.

And speaking of…Rooney Mara has been cast as Lisbeth Salander in the upcoming Hollywood version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

It’s a little late, but if you haven’t read Christopher Hitchens’s piece in Vanity Fair about being diagnosed with esophageal cancer – read it now.

After last week’s link to the worst use of technology – EVER, it was fun to read McSweeney’s Our Daughter Isn’t a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn’t Read Atlas Shrugged.

First it was “fart jokes may be the answer to getting boys to read”, then it was “comic books are the answer to getting boys to read” – ergo, a comic book called “Fart Party” seems like a slam dunk. Help save Fart Party!  For the kids…

This may be the most excited anyone has ever been about Ray Bradbury (via Bokhora).  Please let the title of the song be your guide to whether you should watch this one at work:

I just stumbled across this trailer for the new movie Howl starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg.  Wow.  And Don Draper is his attorney! Is there anything that guy can’t do?

On the heels of Dr J’s excellent post delving into the DeLillo archives to research “Pafko at the Wall” and the two big baseball news stories yesterday (the death of Bobby Thomson and the new medical paper that suggests that Lou Gehrig may not have died of the disease that bears his name), it seems appropriate that I finally get around to posting about one of the best baseball books I’ve read: The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant.

If you’re not from Atlanta or Milwaukee, maybe you haven’t thought of Hank Aaron in awhile.  Here in Atlanta though, Henry Aaron is difficult to miss.  Hank Aaron Drive is a walking distance from my house. A visit to Turner Field yields virtually unlimited references to number 44.   Hank Aaron owns several car dealerships in town (I once bought a car from Hank! Well, not Hank exactly…).  Hank Aaron also remains active in our city and in baseball, often serving as a spokesman for both.  It’s clear that the man long-ago reached hero status in this town.

Bryant’s previous book, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, addressed the slow path to integration taken by the Boston Red Sox.   Last Hero focuses on racial issues, too, in explaining the man Henry Aaron.  The book traces Aaron’s journey from the Jim Crow south to the pinnacle of American sport, where he was not always welcome.  Along the way, Bryant highlights how Aaron was shaped by his experience and how his outward expression of those experiences shaped how he was perceived by others, often to his detriment.

The book begins before the beginning, in 1884, with the birth of the first Henry, Aaron’s grandfather in the rural post-slavery south in a geographically isolated corner of lower Alabama called Gee’s Bend.  Henry’s father Herbert left Gee’s Bend for the relative prosperity of Mobile, Alabama.  Bryant describes what racial segregation was like for the young Henry Aaron.  It was a time when a boy going to the grocery store would watch as white people would cut in front of his father at the checkout store line and societal norms dictated that Herbert would have to endure the public insult in silence.  Bryant points to these daily humiliations of segregation as formative in the psyche of Henry Aaron and the man that he would become.

Henry is soon discovered by a scout while in high school playing for a local team made up mostly of adults.  Major League Baseball was newly integrated at this time, but he was signed by the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro League team. Aaron would be the last Major Leaguer to begin his career in the soon to be defunct Negro League.  His stay in the Negro Leagues was short-lived. He moved on to the minor leagues, playing first in the South Atlantic League, and eventually making it to the big club, the expansion team Milwaukee Braves.  While his rise through the ranks was in some ways meteoric, Bryant points out the indignities that Aaron endured at each step.

In the South Atlantic League, which Aaron integrated, he was greeted in many cities with the worst kind of racial epithets.  Of course, he was also unable to lodge with his team mates in the integrated south.  Even after escaping the South Atlantic League for the big club in Milwaukee, racism was persistent.  During spring training Henry Aaron and the other black Braves players were not allowed to lodge at the beach side resort where the white players stayed with their families, staying instead at a lodging house in the black part of town. The black players were assigned lockers together that were separate from the white players and were expected to shower separately.  Despite being a star player for the Milwaukee Braves, Aaron was expected to live within the boundaries of the tightly controlled black part of town in his early years.

Despite these injustices, Aaron was expected by the media to have a “just glad to be here” attitude.  Media reports of the day would describe the young Aaron as quiet, aloof, and bitter.  Charges that would stick to him throughout his career.  Aaron had never finished high school and had a southern accent, so he was often portrayed as a simpleton.  The legendary AJC sportswriter Furman Bisher penned a high-profile magazine piece on Aaron that quoted the slugger in phonetic “dialect” that would go a long way in cementing this view of Aaron.  The press also routinely compared him to the much flashier and media-savvy Willie Mays, usually to Aaron’s detriment.  In the face of this public criticism, Aaron became determined to let his playing do the talking and to be among the best that ever played the game.

As an Atlanta Braves fan, I found it interesting that Aaron wanted no part of the team’s move from Milwaukee to Atlanta.  He feared that he would be forced to backtrack  on the relative racial equality that he had scratched out for his family in Milwaukee. It was also an interesting side note that Atlanta’s progressive civic boosters desperately wanted Hank Aaron and the Braves to serve as a center piece of their “City to busy to hate” marketing campaign.

The historic chase of Babe Ruth’s record and the racially-charged death threats that Aaron received is well documented, but it underscores the difficulty Aaron would always have in simply being allowed to enjoy the game.  When Aaron ultimately retired, he found that the expected jobs in the front office or managing within the ranks of the organization were not forthcoming.  His reputation as being embittered would once again stand in his way.  Interestingly, it  would be Bud Selig, a long-time friend from the Milwaukee days, who would be instrumental in finally reconciling Aaron with Major League Baseball.  It’s only relatively recently, Bryant notes, that Henry Aaron has found peace with himself and with the game.

If my enthusiasm for this book has not been self-evident so far, let me be clear: this is an incredible book.  It is guaranteed to appeal to any fan of the Braves in particular or baseball history in general.  Henry Aaron’s life-long struggle with institutional racism and a game that never really let him just be himself is an epic story of heroism. The Last Hero does that story incredible justice and deserves a wide audience.  It should be mandatory reading in Atlanta public schools.  But you should check it out, too.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs tells of a group of women, each with a considerable amount of emotional baggage, who come together to knit on Friday nights.  For example, the main character, and owner of the knitting shop, Georgia Walker, is still upset with the man that left her pregnant with their daughter – eight years ago.  She can’t seem to let it go and then one day he unexpectantly walks into her shop.  There are minutes (certainly pages) spent on her pining away for this man in the form of unconvincing anger.  After two CDs I hit a wall:  I could no longer listen.  I just wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to listen to a bunch of whiney women with issues – I can certainly find that in real life.  This just wasn’t my kind of story and after reading The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel (my review), I have raised my standards – Ms. Mandel has such a unique talent of expressing so much without being maddingly literal that now I cannot seem to handle an author spoon feeding me the obvious.

My grandma, however, did enjoy The Friday Night Knitting Club.    She knits so she could understand the knitting references and she does not get out much, so the women in this book are not people she comes in contact with in her life.

Eight years ago at the age of 80, my grandma found she had an extraordinary amount of free time and picked up her first novel.  No kidding.  I am so proud of her and thrilled that she has taken up this most wondrous hobby.  She realizes, as do I that stories are like gifts; mini-other-worlds in which we can immerse ourselves for a healthy escape.  I have been sending her books that I believe will resonate with her and she will enjoy.   Knowing they probably wouldn’t be my first pick to read makes doing this a bit of a challenge.  In her vast reading experience she has enjoyed Joshilyn Jackson and Sandra Dallas and doesn’t care for Nicholas Sparks or Nora Roberts (the latter two being the first choice of her friends).

I would like to throw this out to the BGB readers and ask for recommendations to pass along to my grandma for her future reading exploits.  If anyone out there has any ideas from yourself or your relatives that you feel fall in this category, I would love to know them.  We thank you!

I had to drive through Austin last month, and I arranged my trip so that I could spend a few hours in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas. If the HRC isn’t the most important English-language literary archive in the world, it’s close. I went there to nose around in Don DeLillo’s papers, hoping to find a smoking gun that would prove a pet theory of mine—more about which in a future post.

DeLillo published a novella under the title “Pafko at the Wall” in Harper’s in 1992. Intrigued by the cover photo, I bought the magazine off of a supermarket newsstand in Chapel Hill, N.C., and devoured it. “Pafko at the Wall” instantly became one of my favorite pieces of writing anywhere, and it still is. It later showed up as “The Triumph of Death,” the prologue to DeLillo’s 1997 master opus Underworld.  In the years since I’ve tried to put a finger on why I love this story so much. For starters, the writing is incredible; I’d put the first sentence right up there with “Call me Ishmael” in the annals of great American letters. It also has to do with the characters who show up in it—historical figures, to be sure, but I always figured that DeLillo had to have made up their being together in the same place (New York City’s Polo Grounds, the home of the baseball Giants) at the same time (on the the last day of the 1951 season, when the Giants finished a three-game series against the Brooklyn Dodgers to decide who would play the New York Yankees in that year’s World Series). How else could you explain a story in which Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover take in a ballgame together? That’s way too far-fetched to have really happened–or so I had always assumed.

It has race relations as a major subplot. That’s kind of my thing.

It obviously didn’t hurt that it takes an iconic moment in baseball history as its subject, or at least its backdrop. For a guy whose nickname on the high school baseball team was “Team Geek”—because, according to my teammates, it was unheard of for a baseball player to read books—literary fiction riffing on baseball history was pretty much a hanging curve down the middle of the plate. (Not that I could ever have done much with a non-metaphorical curveball, hanging or otherwise, anyway–which, if we’re telling the truth, probably does more to explain the nickname.)

My trip to the Ransom Center allowed me to examine DeLillo’s research materials and first drafts for “Pafko at the Wall.” The research he did was voluminous. It includes a hand-written transcript of Russ Hodges’s radio call of Bobby Thomson’s game-deciding home run, much of which ended up in “Pafko/Triumph” verbatim, and photocopies of the next day’s New York Times, in which one-half of the front page covers Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” and the other half reports on a successful Soviet nuclear test. (If you’ve read the novella, you know that this worked its way into another subplot in the story.) It includes a photomontage of scenes from an unidentified season’s spring training—clipped from a magazine, possibly Look—inscribed “From Philip Roth.”

It includes an obituary of Donnie Moore, the California Angels pitcher who never recovered mentally from a decisive home run he served up in the 1986 playoffs, alongside stories about Ralph Branca, the Dodgers pitcher who served up the game-winning homer in 1951, but made his peace with it. DeLillo wrote this note to himself in a cheap spiral notebook: “Branca was able to survive the crushing defeat because he was white—given every chance to be the celebrated figure. Compare with Donnie Moore, who killed himself after giving up a home run in a key game.”

I especially enjoyed DeLillo’s notes on contemporary issues of Life Magazine; I assume he browsed through them to help compose a mental snapshot of New York in the fall of 1951, because many of the notes are on advertisements. DeLillo notices a report in the September 24, 1951 issue on the Robinson-Turpin prize fight that took place at the Polo Grounds, not because he was interested in boxing but because the article mentions gate-crashers–again, more about this in a future post, but it’s easy to see how he worked this small detail into the plot of “Pafko/Triumph.” Even more revealing was his response to a spread in the October 1, 1951 issue of the magazine on a touring exhibition from Madrid’s Prado Museum that had opened in New York. Here’s his reaction to one painting that’s featured in the magazine in particular:

“’The Triumph of Death’

Breugel

↓

tumbrels, skulls

wasted landscape

burning ships

pale horses

the magazine is

LIFE [by which I imagine he’s saying, “This is supposed to be life magazine, for cryin' out loud.”]

thoroughly unpleasant painting

shrouded skeletons

dogs nibbling on corpses[.]”

Another notebook entry says this illustration “dominates the magazine” and a third describes a detail from the painting: “Death on a slatribbed hack with scythe driving the living into a projecting anteroom that resembles the entrance to the subway.”

If you’ve read the novella, you know that DeLillo gives exactly these thoughts to the least likable character in the story when the character is confronted with exactly this magazine illustration. I found it utterly fascinating that DeLillo would have the fictional J. Edgar Hoover share his, the nonfictional DeLillo’s, thoughts. It takes a big man and a magnanimous author to imagine Hoover sharing one’s opinions about anything, much less art criticism.

To be continued…

The “Great Typo Hunt”: two men cross the nation armed only with a Sharpie (well, and some other stuff) and the will to correct egregious public spelling and grammar mistakes

This one might have been beyond the corrective scope of a Sharpie.

“Next stop, Dostoevsky.”  This new Moscow subway station makes me want to hop the next plane to Russia.

25 literary pick-up lines that are guaranteed to get you nowhere.

With a new novel coming at the end of the month, Jonathan Franzen is going to be everywhere (except maybe on Oprah).  So far he’ son the cover of Time and in Vogue.

Check out the poster for the zombie movie version of Eat Pray Love.

I was really put off by a recent Huffington Post piece that listed “the most overrated contemporary writers”.  So annoyed that I’m not going to link to it directly (take that!).  Check out this reaction piece instead.  Many are not household names, which sort of begs the “overrated” question.  I’ve also seen reactions that question the inclusion of disproportionate representation of groups on the list (e.g., too many women, gays, poets).  And what is Michiko doing on the list?

Like reading novels that are ostensibly for Young Adults?  You’re not alone.

Author Diane Meier argues against the “chicklit” label.

Worst use of technology – EVER.  This guy used a GPS and drove over 12,000 miles in 30 states to spell out this message, visible only on Google Earth.

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my favorite books of all time.  Full stop.  When I heard that Tom Key, Executive Artistic Director of Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, had written a stage adaptation of the book, I was beside myself with anticipation.  A few years ago I wrote about Mr. Key:  ”If you’re not from Atlanta, there is a simple way to tell if a play here is going to be any good – check to see if Tom Key has anything to do with it.  If so, your odds are pretty good.” That assessment still stands.  Tom Key is a pillar of the Atlanta arts community, and I couldn’t be happier that he agreed to field a few questions from the likes of us.

Baby Got Books interview with Tom Key, author of the Theatrical Outfit’s stage adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces

Baby Got Books: Can you tell how us how the idea to adapt A Confederacy Of Dunces came about?

Tom Key: When I first read it in the early 80s I knew it would make a great stage adaptation because the character of Ignatius is as profound a creation as Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and the dialogue tells the story for a stage audience as effectively and with as much hilarity as the most classic Theater farces.

BGB: How did your team go about adapting the novel into something that would work on the stage?

TK: I was able to attain the rights to adapt the novel and to produce it this fall here in Atlanta at Theatrical Outfit.  The next step was to hire the right director, design team for set, lights, costumes, sound and props, and then, to cast the right company of actors.  I chose Richard Garner, Artistic Director of Georgia Shakespeare Festival, because Toole’s novel is as complex as Shakespeare, and I knew Richard could take that kind of an epic script and create Theatrical combustion.  We had a series of production meetings discussing the design elements, particularly the set, designed by Sarah Ward who is from New Orleans, and how it all had to evoke 1964 New Orleans while at the same time allowing the actors to go from scene to scene in an instant.  Casting was done in about two days auditioning close to 70 actors. We knew we had assembled a comic “Who’s Who” of Atlanta, and we also knew that Aaron Munoz, a classically trained actor and Improv comedian, is perfect, and I mean, perfect for the role of Ignatius J. Reilly.  Once casting was completed everyone’s energy went up a notch because there’s a lot of confidence and excitement created when you know who exactly is going to be incarnating these incredibly funny and insane characters, and know they are going to be doing it so well.  After I heard the actors read the script the first time, and with the help of our Dramaturge, Michael Evenden of Emory, I completed another draft of the script.  Then after I saw it all the way through with all the staging completed I did another draft and now we’re literally in technical rehearsals putting all the elements together for our opening next week.

BGB: New Orleans accents are unique and have been notoriously botched on screen.  How will your adaption tackle this problem?

TK: It was very important to us to get the authenticity of those dialects.  So, we hired a dialect coach, Kathleen McManus, from New Orleans, and to our great advantage, she has also been cast in the role of Mrs. Reilly.  All of our actors are incredibly gifted at dialect and it certainly adds to the fun.  Toole wrote a lot of the dialect in the novel and I adhered to that as I extracted his dialogue for the script.  With some characters there are clues by their names whether or not they might have, for example, an Italian (Battaglia) or Spanish (Gonzales) influence in their speech and our actors have certainly taken that and run with it.

BGB: Various attempts to adapt A Confederacy of Dunces to the screen have failed.  However, there have been a few well received adaptations for the stage. Is there something about the novel that lends itself better to the stage than the screen?

TK: I don’t believe one medium is superior to the other, but I do think there are certain advantages and limitations that both have, and in the case of A Confederacy of Dunces, I think the Theatre has two advantages.  One is some readers have found Ignatius so offensive that they can’t finish or really get the book.  So, I think meeting him in person onstage gives someone the maximum advantage to not just encounter this bombastic personality but to begin to understand him, empathize with him and eventually root for him.  In our day to day life, we have a much better chance of understanding someone different than ourselves if we can be with that person face to face, and I think this is an advantage for grasping such an iconic kind of literary character as Ignatius.  Second is that the Theatre tells the story in language whereas the dominant story telling element in Film is image.  A film version I’m sure would be hilarious and can, unlike the Theatre, show the audience a real setting.  But a screenplay simply could not contain as much of this rich dialogue and narration as a Theatre version.  Obviously adapting a 400 page novel I have to leave out a lot!  But, a screenwriter on this story would really have to delete much more of Toole’s writing for a movie.  I imagine it could be tempting to settle for the visual comedy inherent in this story for the film, but I think it would be a real mistake if the audience just laughed at Ignatius as a sight gag.  To me, what is crucial in dramatizing this story, is to make sure the audience comes to care, and to care deeply what happens to him.  Whether he is ultimately received with violence or with compassion is, on one level, the larger drama of the human condition.

BGB: Several of the other characters are about as politically incorrect as they could possibly be. Do you have any worries about portraying, say, Burma Jones, in a city with a history of racial discord?

TK: No, on the contrary, because Toole has created such complete characterizations, I think one of the virtues of sharing this story in a group experience will be that it will help to build bridges of understanding through laughter.  What’s offensive is when a character is presented to an audience as a stereotype, a reduction or a one note representation of a category.  That’s an insult.  It honors our diversity for an author as observant as Toole to render our humanity with the complexity it deserves.  In my experience, I have seen political correctness segregate us out of fear into fractions rather than to unite us in community.  Common courtesy is what is needed in all successful relations.  It’s interesting to me that the people in this story who are fundamentally courteous of Ignatius, or at least tolerant, end up well, whereas those who try and negate him, attack him or in someway get rid of him do not fare well.

BGB: What can you tell us about the cast you have lined up?

TK: I will just say that I am a firm believer in the Theatre wisdom, “There’s no such things as small parts, only small actors”.  I’m very proud of the fact over the years that Theatrical Outfit has developed a reputation for hiring excellent actors in all roles.  We are a professional theater company associated with the union Actors’ Equity Association.  If every single cast person is strong than the production will add up to being greater than the sum total of its parts, and I can assure you that is certainly happening with this production.  After I saw the first run through I was exhausted that night from all the laughing I had done.  Their dialect work, their skill with physical comedy, their skill for characterization, their capacity to work as an ensemble and, in some cases, their ability to portray a dazzling variety of characters within this one play, are talents on a world class level.  I couldn’t be prouder of the talent pool here in Atlanta.

Be sure to check out the short clip about the play at the Theatrical Outfit’s web page.

August 11 – September 5, 2010

Wednesday – Saturday at 7:30 pm
Sundays at 2:30 pm
Saturday Matinee on August 21 at 2:30 pm

The idea of ‘summertime’ reading always sounds so romantic to me: lying on a beach or next to a pool, drink on the table and book in hand for some undisturbed reading. Fat chance. For me, summer is when my kid, who is normally in school, is with me almost 24/7 and “needs” me every ten minutes. Thus, my summertime reading must be a book that I can pick up and put down without missing a beat. I have found a few such books by Chelsea Handler.

Normally, I would not have picked up a book called Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang but listening to my sister laugh uncontrollably while reading, I decided she shouldn’t have all the fun.  After finishing Bang Bang, I glided through her two others: My Horzontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands and Are You There Vodka?, It’s Me Chelsea.

If you are a member of the Moral Majority or if you take pride in always being politically correct, then you probably won’t find these books as funny as I did. There is a lot of alcohol, drugs and sleeping around and I have no problem laughing at her mishaps (whether they are true or not, I don’t care.)

My Horzontal Life was my favorite of the three and of course none of it can be quoted here. The book delivers exactly what the title suggests, supposedly her experiences with many one-night stands as well as with men she did actually date. What I really admire most about Ms. Handler is her ability to create elaborate lies – on the spot! While working as a waitress, she sees a man with whom she just spent the night walk in with his wife. Chelsea becomes her own twin sister, Kelsey, and proceeds to make up several stories about her “loose” twin, Chelsea. He’s pretty ‘smart’ too, he says “wow, you look just like her” and she responds, “that’s usually what happens with twins.”

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang was written after she became famous with her E! late-night show and she reminisces more about growing up with her nutcase family. We all need a retired, widowed father who dates the 22 year old Jamaican cleaning women to keep us laughing.

Next up, Are you there Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea? My 6-year old daughter promptly informed me that Vodka is a drink and thus the title makes no sense. Once again, this book is loaded with short stories of Ms. Handler’s supposed life. At one moment, someone emails her a picture of their dog in front of Niagara Falls. She confesses that pictures of people’s children are ok by themselves, but a pet? She has a great response that I may try:

“I clicked reply and sent a picture of my cleaning lady. Standing next to the toilet, alone. I attached a message that read, “’Not interested? Me neither.’”

Certainly this is not high-brow, award-winning literature, but once in a while it’s just fun to laugh.

One of the neat things about the Nook is the access to some free stuff — works that are in the public domain, as well as new works that Barnes & Noble gives you for free.  Serial, a short story by Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch, was one of the latter.  A quick, free, impromptu read before bedtime — not a bad deal.

The Overview of the story initially led me to believe that I knew what was going to happen.  It reads:

Remember the twin golden rules of hitchhiking?  #1 — Don’t go hitchhiking, because the driver who picks you up could be certifiably crazy.  #2 — Don’t pick up hitchhikers, because the traveler you pick up could be a raving nutcase.  So what if, on some dark, isolated road, Crazy #1 offered a ride to Nutcase #2 . . . .

Having read that Overview, and then having read the opening line of the book, “The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker is finding one to pick up”, as our character Donaldson is driving down the road, I assumed that as soon as he picked up a kid at a Cracker Barrel parking lot, I knew exactly what was coming.  Well, suffiice it to say that I didn’t.

Apparently this little story, referred to as “the original horror novella” has been downloaded over 200,000 times, and so maybe I’m late to the party on this one, but it’s downright creepy and shocking.  And not in the way you think it’s going to be, even when you think you know what you think you should expect.  Go check it out.  I personally am going to check out the subsequent longer version that apparently picks up where this one left off.  But I might leave the light on while I read that one . . . .

(and it looks you can download it – legally – for free over here in PDF or ePub versions.