Keeping alive the memory of the great Gustav Hasford. You can’t find a copy of The Short-Timers new in print anymore, which is a damn shame.
Available now at Amazon.com.
(Source: paragraphline.com)
Shameless plug… a.k.a. the plug with absolutely no shame.
(Source: paragraphline.com)
Herman Melville, the popular writer of adventure stories, all but lost his readership with the publication of Moby-Dick; or The Whale. “Mr. Melville has survived his reputation,” one critic wrote in 1851 of the “imposing” novel, with its diatribes, tangents, and verbosity. “If he had been contented with writing one or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all his chances for immortality, or even of a good name with his own generation.” While some reviewers recognized the greatness of Moby-Dick, it failed to achieve the success Melville had hoped for, selling only a scant 3,100 copies during his lifetime. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he lamented to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I shall die in the gutter.”
"Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?"
— William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Editor’s Note: This novel excerpt first appeared here March 11, 2012.
"The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist."
— Flannery O’Connor
When’s the last time you went to church and had a nice conversation like this with your parish priest? he asked, peering over at me through his brown lenses. It had to be like looking at the world through a pint of root beer.
