Gil Adamson’s book, The Outlander, took me by surprise. It was a recommended book at Powell’s bookstore, and I had heard that Adamson was by trade a poet. It brought to mind other books written by poets, the most famous of which was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a sprawling, glacial eight-hundred pages. The Outlander clocked in at around three hundred and seventy pages, and I put off reading it for a few months. When I finally did sit down to read it, I expected a turgid, image driven book that suffered from a dearth of character. I was completely wrong.
The plot (a dirty word to most literati) is established in the first four paragraphs. The widow murdered her husband and she is running from her brother-in-laws—twin red heads that feel like they came straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel—who are hunting her: simple, straightforward, and spare. Once the broad strokes of the plot have been established, Adamson subtly fills in successively finer details in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s withholding critical information.
In many ways, this book has the immediacy of James Dickey’s (also a poet) Deliverance, the spare, diction driven prose of McCarthy’s The Road, and the hallucinatory nature of Mempo Giardinelli’s Sultry Moon. It’s a quick, rewarding read that is difficult to put down.

Apropos of nothing, an author once told me that if I wanted to become a writer, the first thing I should do is hire a good photographer and get some pictures taken, so in the highly unlikely event that everything worked out, I’d at least have some good book jacket portraits ready to go. The author tipped his glass of wine at me and winked as if he had just imploded my mind with his advice. I asked him about the importance of reading living authors and the cannon, and he rolled his eyes.
“You sound like an MFA student.”
When I said I was, he laughed and told me to get my jacket photos taken while I was thin and young and relatively sober.
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I was in traffic the other day. There was a homeless woman on the side of the road with a sign that read “Need Money To Feed My Dog, God Bless.” At her side was an Australian Sheppard, cowering in the bushes. When I’m trapped at a traffic signal with a homeless person begging for money, I usually stare right at them. The woman took this as an offer for money, but gave up after I didn’t roll my window down. She had a good look at my car—a heap of shattered plastic and divot ridden pot metal filled with garbage. In her defense, it looks like I live in my car, and in a way I do. According to the IRS, the woman begging at the side of the road and I were probably in the same tax bracket.

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http://believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_beha

Dear Mr/Mrs,

Hey, I liked your essay/story/poems in ____________. I really didn’t read it or anything, but we need some work ‘n’ stuff. I don’t read much anyway. Most of what I have to read takes a backseat to my Xbox. BTW, have you played Modern Warfare yet? We won’t be able to pay you, except in contributor’s copies, but most likely we’ll reject you anyway because you’ll send us your crappiest piece. You know, the one you wrote while you were drunk, thinking you were channeling Donald Barthelme.

So please, send us something. I need a good grade.

Other examples of bad solicitations:

Norman Mailer: “We need a guy who’s good with a knife.”
Vladimir Nabokov: “….excuse me, how do you pronounce your name.”
Haruki Murakami: “You’re like the Japanese Stephen King!”
Stuart Dybek: “I’m a breast man myself.”
Alice Munro: “Tell all of us aboot hockey, and we’ll let you know what real bacon is like.”

They were dead all along.
Hurley was still fat. He liked opening cans. There should’ve been more hunting on the island. More boar hunting with spears. Shirtless men following the beast into the jungle, surrounding it, thrusting their spears, a final killing blow. I would have watched another season if the producers stocked the island with other animals to hunt: panthers, Kodiak bears, Wallace Stevens. If the show was more like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter on Wii. I love that Goddamned game.
There should’ve been more broads too, but on a separate island. I liked the dark-headed one. She was feisty. I wonder what she would look like in jodhpurs, polishing my rifle. The blonde one with the bad hair reminds me of my second wife.
The last episode was sappy, a candy-ass convention, everybody kissing and embracing each other. I almost changed the channel to watch some UFC. Ken Shamrock was a god. Now there was a man. He settled his problems the way a man should, half naked and choking his enemies into submission. LOST should’ve been about courage. Sawyer and Jack drinking aperitifs, and complaining about women. If only Sawyer would cut off that lady hair of his.

Now the first thing you need to do is get yourself an epigraph, something smart like from http://www.brainyquote.com/ Worry about the structure, the ideas, and content later. What’s most important about the use of an epigraph is to let the reader know as bluntly as possible that you majored in English because that’s what gets you published. Non-English majors would probably quote Dean Koontz, or Jayne Ann Krentz, a classic mistake for the uninitiated. Something from Henry James, or Edith Wharton, however, guarantees a thorough reading and is just as good as, “BTW, I got a 3.9 in my American Literature class.” I can tell you from experience that a really good epigraph forces someone like me, an editor, who only had a few moments of clarity in English class, to acknowledge that I’ve been faking it for years. A well placed Coleridge quote makes me admit that I’m a fraud, so I send it up the food chain for publication.
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I have a friend who is a literary sort. Like me, he’s plodding through the cannon, looking for those books that like two hits of acid subtly shift how you see everything. When he gets tired of reading literary novels and short story collections, he picks up a palate cleanser. In his case, it’s a Star Trek novelization or some other space opera. In my case, I read a fantasy novel—a sprawling mess of a book with a hundred characters in a thousand pages—with something ridiculous on the cover like a guy dressed up like an extra from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat playing chess with a sphinx.
My friend and I are constantly giving each other shit for our reading tastes. At a party, I’ll say something like, “You should’ve worn your Starfleet officer’s uniform.” And he’ll say, “Only if you bring your wizard staff.” When we’re bored, we’ll argue over which genre, sci-fi or fantasy, is better.
We met in college, in a 400 level English course called Studies in Epic Fantasy, a class entirely devoted to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. We both thought it would be an easy A, but all I remember was writing forty pages of essays about hobbits. I’d never read The Lord of the Rings before. I’d been putting it off for years. Unless you count Beowulf, J.R.R. Tolkien started the fantasy genre, a genre that got me interested in reading when I was a kid. My friend and I were creative writing majors, simultaneously reading Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, and J.R.R. Tolkien. It was a quarter of minimalists and maximilists.
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Isabella, Cullen, and Jacob are the top baby names in the U.S., according to the 2009 Social Security Administration. All three of these names are the primary characters from Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/37017629/ns/today-todaymoms?Gt1=43001 This is incontrovertible evidence that our society’s fixation on youth has left our culture at the mercy of the discretionary income of fifteen-year-olds.
Whenever I go to the bookstore, I find myself standing in front of one of the many six-foot cardboard advertisements for one of the new young adult bestsellers. It’s no accident that many of these look like movie displays from a video store (the movie rights have probably already been opted anyway). In the aftermath of Harry Potter, the Young Adult section in every bookstore has grown dramatically, the publishing houses playing the same lottery numbers as Bloomsbury did in 1995 with some success.
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