Tuesday night I’m reading with Alexander Chee at the KGB Bar for the True Story Nonfiction Series. Both of our essays are about family mysteries, conversations across generations, and I promise you, Alex’s is gorgeous and you want to hear him read it.
In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday, at age 76. As his son Byron told The Daily’s Claire Howorth, “[he] put more miles on the Chevy than most of us.” Amended . . .
I’m finishing up some longer projects and running around for the next little while. Wednesday night, March 28, I’ll be speaking at Butler University, in Indianapolis. On April 10, I read with the amazing Alexander Chee for KGB Bar’s nonfiction series. And I might as well be living at my favorite bookstore in April. On the 4th, I interview Madeline . . .
My friend Philip Connors’ excellent Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, an Orion Prize finalist, is out in paperback. Our Paris Review interview, which spilled over onto this site, is included.
The last time I visited Oxford, Mississippi, at the end of a trip through ancestral haunts in the Delta, I stopped by Faulkner’s grave, Rowan Oak, and Square Books, and consumed my weight in sweet tea and fried catfish with my favorite aunt. I aim to do some of the same things this weekend, when I’m in town for the . . .