His writing was good, but his mentoring was unparalleled. His mentoring is exemplified in the collection “The Last Best Place”.
Tag: Writers
Joseph Paul Summers Brown 2021 RIP
I just received word that Joe Brown died; he was 90. I did not know him well, but I knew him and enjoyed him. He was the often-unsung BEST of all the cowboy writers, certainly of the border writers. He could throw a rope and tell a story. He bought ranches on both sides of …
Hemingway’s Guns– new edition
Silvio Calabi and Co. hav come out with a new ed of the already- good Hemingways’s Guns that adds the Cuban guns from the Finca Vigia (a uniformly ruined unshootable lot BTW) to the already good scholarship of the first volume. Two things are particularly notable. First, most American rich folks back then shot good …
William “Gatz” Hjortsberg, 1941- 2017
Chris Waddington, my old editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and now a happier man in his belovcd New Orleans (even though Katrina flooded his house) emailed to tell me that our mutual friend Gatz Hjortsberg died at his home in Livingston after a “short illness” i.e. pancreatic cancer (it’s a bad one; it’s the …
Flyover Country- Who Knew?
Reading the WSJ, I was startled to encounter two old friends in an unusual context. The relevant passage: I called Russsell, who is in California and recovering from a shoulder operation ( casting lead- core steelhead lines in deep water for 60 years has got to have SOME effect!) and he was as bemused as …
Tom McGuane on Raptors
Novelist Tom McGuane, while noted for his horses and pointing dogs, has always had a feel for birds of prey, notices them, and on occasion writes lyrically about them. There is a vivid set piece in the novel Something to Be Desired, in which which the protagonist, LucienTaylor, takes his young son, who does not …
James Salter, RIP
James Salter, novelist, is dead at ninety. The BBC report, which Reid sent, said that he “never converted critical acclaim into commercial success.” Really? He was a “writer’s writer”, and a maker of perfect sentences and some small perfect books, as well as a big one– in that sense, and because of the slightly icy …
McGuane at the Strand
As promised. These have generated a lot of email (personal, off blog, though I would encourage them here) enough that I might start looking for such interviews. I will put some thoughts in reaction below (above?), probably tomorrow… OK, in-stream commentary to friends edited only for a minimum of sense and coherence: “Living in the …