The Real McCoys

The Getaway is undoubtedly one of Jim Thompson's best known pieces of work. It's made it through two Hollywood adaptations, neither of which come close to resembling the novel in either feel or content. Thompson, quite often, sets his stories within a clearly defined genre with understood expectations only to push against them from the outset. The conflict created in the story of Doc, Carol and Rudy is not the conflict you would expect and ultimately becomes more of an internal conflict within the characters and the reader alike.

Memories of Bunker Hill

TODAY IS the thirtieth anniversary of the death of John Fante, the single most important American writer of the twentieth century.  I'm thirty-two this year so all contact with the man's literature is posthumous and removed but it still has had the greatest effect on me as a person.  When you read Fante you learn to dream, to love, to hate, to cry, to live, to fear, to hope, and to wish.  Emotionally I'm at John Fante Square today sharing a cigarette with Bandini and reminiscing until the dust settles.