Some great news - big ups for Pacazo from Malcolm Forbes in this weekend's Times Literary Supplement: “Pacazo is a richly capacious book... a full-blown affair which, once we sift and filter the exhaustive detail, reveals itself to be a searching study of love, loss and the corrupting and redemptive power of time.”
Twice in the past four years, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights (Bath, England) has been named the U.K's Independent Bookseller of the Year. Also, they really like Pacazo. Coincidence? You be the judge. And many thanks to Lucinda Corby for the kind words: “This is a book of great ambition and scope - including in terms of the writing style itself.”
Many thanks to William Rycroft for his kind words for Pacazo at the great Australian arts and entertainment site, The Blurb: “...it is surprising how many times the real blows to the gut come from a single sentence or image.”
Just found out that the philosopher Jonathan Barnes had kind words for Pacazo in an article called "Five First Novels" in the February 2012 issue of Literary Review:
"Although this is the kind of story that purposefully withholds any particular closure, it is not without considerable rewards. Kesey excels at evoking the geography of the country ... and at describing its venomous wildlife.”
So back a hundred years ago Tom Williams asked me a question about the future of fiction for a thing he was doing at American Book Review, and in my answer there was this preposterous little etymo-pun, or something. So then a hundred years later I took that whatever-it-was thing and gave it to a character who took it literally and the result just showed up (in the good company of Ha Jin and Heidi Julavits and John Wray and a bunch of other cool people) in a great magazine called The Literarian, published by the Center for Fiction and edited by Dawn Raffel.
March 26, 2012, 9:39 a.m.Categories: Litmags, Short Stories
Many thanks to John Self: "Loosening the ties of chronology, Kesey achieves extraordinary effects by twisting time frames together, so that within the same paragraph, he can simultaneously relate the "now" of the narrative, the narrator's memories, and historical events. This is three-dimensional storytelling, enhanced repeatedly by a neat trick something like the literary equivalent of Stanley Kubrick's bone-to-space-station jump cut in 2001."
March 3, 2012, 12:06 p.m.Categories: History, Pacazo, Review
