Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
The French magazine Marianne recently described Larry Fondation as “the Raymond Carver of Roman Noir.” I think the comparison flatters Carver.
Fondation’s new story collection, Martys and Holymen, was published this month. To coincide with that, I republished his earlier collection, Common Criminals, which was first published in 2003 and had been out of print for some years.
“Larry Fondation’s second book reads like a collaboration between Elmore Leonard, Dennis Cooper and Eminem.” - Metro Times (Detroit) Larry Fondation writes about what he knows best, the inner city with a twist. Raised in Dorchester, MA, where street fights and criminal acts were common occurrences, Fondation studied at Harvard University where the disparity between his history and his present stood out in sharp relief. He went on to become a community organizer in South Central Los Angeles and Compton, CA. The requirement for this job was not the degree in his hand but the fire in his belly. That fire burns in Common Criminals.
There are also stories by Tony Mason and Joe Clifford and an (online only) essay by Tom Piccirilli, who’s recovering from brain cancer. Go get it, and, better yet, subscribe. It’s one of the best magazines out there.
The clear winner for this reviewer is Kelly’s highly engaging historical mystery set in 1917 New York, featuring the crusading and already-famous female attorney and detective Mrs. Grace Humiston, whose derring-do in a case of abduction and white slavery is narrated by her earthy Transylvanian sidekick, an ex-Federal Department of Justice agent known as Kron.
This year’s Spinetingler Awards winners have been announced.
My novel The Wrong Thing was nominated in the Best Novel - Legend category, which was won by Lawrence Block’s A Drop of the Hard Stuff. I’m happy to be in such fine company.
I’m also happy that the award for Best Crime Fiction Publisher went to New Pulp Press, who published Jake Hinkson’s brilliant novel Hell on Church Street, a book that seems to be getting no attention at all.
Congratulations to all the other nominees and winners.
When asked to recommend “Zen books,” my friend Deb Saint Sensei says, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or any other D.H. Lawrence book.”
I agree with her. I think people in the West have a tendency to get confused between Zen and an Asian fetish, and so to overlook the rich Zen tradition in Western literature. Here are a few other great Zen books:
Hombre by Elmore Leonard
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Savage Night by Jim Thompson
Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman
Dalva by Jim Harrison
The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown
Drive and Driven, by James Sallis
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Fish, Soap and Bonds by Larry Fondation
Blues for Cannibals by Charles Bowden
The Burglar by David Goodis
I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond
Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers
Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
Also, the poetry of Burns (who wrote in both Scots and English), Stevenson, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Philip Levine, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman MacCaig, Wendell Berry and James Tate.
It begins with the narrator trying to rob a morbidly obese man at gunpoint outside a convenience store. They take a short road trip together, and the man tells his would-be captor the story of how he was once a youth minister in Arkansas, and how his obsession with a preacher’s teenage daughter led to a battle to the death with a drug-dealing sheriff and his violent, incestuous hillbilly clan. When the ride ends, the narrator learns the truth about himself - that he is only a normal person pretending to be bad, but that he has met an evil person who pretends to be good.
Yesterday I heard a debate on the radio as to whether Hunger Games (which I haven’t seen and don’t expect to) is a rip-off of a good Japanese film, Battle Royale.
