J.C. Hallman’s anthology, The Story About The Story, collects essays that approach book criticism from a personal angle. One of his favorite venues for that sort of thing is Tin House’s own “Lost and Found” section. In our most recent issue (Hope/Dread), Hallman writes about encountering Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight.
I had it pretty good: Big Wheel at six, go-cart at eight, ten-speed at twelve, Volkswagen Rabbit at sixteen, and I ran all of them into the ground. When I was twenty, a motorcycle ran me into the ground, and after two weeks in the hospital and a year of physical therapy I cashed a check for $120,000. I limp a little, like the devil—but he gets around, and so do I, and we’ve both, since our respective falls, signed our share of lucrative contracts.
Which isn’t to say I’ve rolled in dough. I haven’t. In fact, whether a writer should turn a profit—selling his soul to academia or otherwise—has been a live question ever since writers began to prematurely retire and hang out their shingles as teachers instead. I’ve always thought of the writing life as a protracted action of the mind, supported by a body that does whatever it needs to do to pay the bills. But it’s rare anymore to hear of a writer scraping by on this sort of life—of a Kafka in his insurance firm or a Melville on his boats. This is reason enough to consider the career of Kenneth Patchen.
I didn’t come close to dying in my accident, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that when I was kneeling on the asphalt and realized the blood pooled on the ground was my own. That shook me up. A young man who buzzes death and then receives a significant lump payment might be forgiven for taking a while to screw his head back on straight. And when he does, it might not be a surprise if he’s inclined to take stock of who he is and where he might go.
I ws a rich kid who’d never had a job. So when the $120,000 ran out, I went to Atlantic City—not to gamble, but to work. I’ve told the rest of this story elsewhere, but the important part is that I wound up as a table-games dealer with two master’s degrees. I was looking for the education my universities had left out of their core curriculums. I got it in about three months, and then I was stuck.
Well-read people were hard to come by in the casino world. Even literate people were a tough trick to turn. So I was surprised when one day on a high-action craps game—the very same table where a few months later I would watch a player seize and crumble and die right beside me—I realized that another member of my dealing crew, a guy named Tim Gosman, was far better read than I was. Books were not typical cross-table chatter for dealers, but the subject came up, and, like members of some guild who couldn’t simply reach out to see if the other knew the secret handshake, Tim and I at first regarded each other warily, tossing about titles and authors, plumbing the depths of each other’s libraries. Our box man and pit boss listened for a moment, then decided to ignore us, and we were left talking books across the felt bathtub of the craps table, all the while calling the game (“Come out roll! Craps, yos, highs and lows!”) and setting up come bets and proposition wagers for players so hypnotized by the action they were entirely deaf to our discussion. Read More
Like everyone else, at a certain point, several hours in, you begin to wonder if doing your job is insane. And, like everyone else, the first evidence that it’s not is that you get paid for it.
Parents: You know that 10,000th time you read your kid Go, Dog. Go! as your unfinished copy of that Anne Carson collection you really wanted to read sat on the coffee table and served as nothing but a sippy-cup coaster and a reminder of all the great writers you no longer had the time to fully appreciate? (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no particular experience with or knowledge of parenting.) Not to worry. Kingsley Tufts winner and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Matthea Harvey has a new book that your kids will love as much as you do. Next month, Tin House will make our foray into children’s book publishing with The Little General and The Giant Snowflake. Harvey was kind enough to answer some of my fanboy questions:
Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread (our designer, the fabulous Janet Parker, created stunning covers for each). In the dread corner, look for Nick Cave, Ander Monson, Alex Lemon, Matthea Harvey, and other doomsayers. Flying the colors of hope, we have Karen Russell, Abigail Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, Matthea Harvey (she’s good enough to have her cake and eat it too), and, as you’ll see below, Cory Doctorow. The “Genre” label created something of a controversy on this site awhile back, but Doctorow’s take on what Science Fiction is capable of is pretty tough to argue with. 
Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.
The essays in The Story About the Story differ from traditional literary criticism in many ways. They contemplate rather than argue. They do not artificially sublimate subjectivity. They preserve mystery instead of dissecting it. And often they expand the scope of what they are willing to address so as to speak to the basics—the history, the process, the purpose—of literature itself.
After thirty years on West Seventeenth Street in Chelsea, Deborah Eisenberg is moving house. The closets have “disgorged” their contents, books tip sideways on their shelves, boxes lie here and there. Eisenberg and her beloved comrade, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, will be moving to a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks away, a small “palace” of elegant moldings, terraces, a willow tree. Shawn says, in his lovely, wry, and bemused way, “We think it will make our declining years more . . . acceptable.” And the exercise they’ll get apparently makes their doctor “ecstatic.” It’s no accident that some people in sixth-floor walk-ups are ninety years old and going strong.
Rasskazy–”One Year in Paradise”–has been published by the Virgina Quarterly Review (you can read a preview of it 
Jeff Parker: In your story “Bregovich’s Sixth” from the Rasskazy anthology, the narrator is concerned about a neighbor’s dog he has nicknamed Ivan Denisovich. The story is in many ways a meditation on the condition of freedom in Russia. He imagines Solzhenitsyn himself voluntarily imprisoned at his dacha outside Moscow, and he seems to consider himself imprisoned, though he’s never been in jail. This results in a final, perhaps futile, act. How should an American reader understand this psychological context?
On September 1st we’ll be celebrating the release of our new anthology 
Michiel Heyns’ novel 
Michiel Heyns’ The Children’s Day is the second of our international series (you may have seen our first, When I Forgot, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review). We couldn’t be more excited to bring this novel to readers in the U.S. It’s a coming-of-age story set in apartheid South Africa, narrated by the sometimes precocious, sometimes naive Simon–it’s tender, and funny, and…
Exotic locales, conspicuous consumption, and sordid love triangles are all staples of the summer beach read, and Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. 
When we came home from the movie that night, my sister went into the bathroom and then called out to our mother, asking if she’d bought another toothpaste as a hint.
Over the next couple months, some of our authors and editors will be offering up their suggestions of what books you should be reading this summer. From all available research, sand and sunshine do not make the Twilight series any better. J.C. Hallman is the author, most recently, of 
