Edmond Caldwell, a longtime Millions commenter and member of the golden age of lit blogging, has passed away. Caldwell was the founder of The Chagall Position and Contra James Wood. Read a tribute to Caldwell by his friends Boyd Nielson and Joseph G. Ramsey at Dispatches, here.
A Worthy Send-Off
Thrill Ride
Stephen King’s next book is a thriller set in a Midwestern town suffering from unemployment. Before this sounds a little too close to home, the synopsis reveals it’s about a retired cop trying to stop a mass murderer. Mr. Mercedes will be out June 3rd. Pair with: Our own Lydia Kiesling’s essay on her love of King novels.
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To Essay
“For a while, shortly after I finished an undergraduate creative writing course, everything I wrote started with an observation or a realization…I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome.” At The Morning News, Martin Connelly writes about how he lost his drive to become an essayist and the surprising thing that makes him want to start again — his daughter. For more on the power of the essay, read our interview with Leslie Jamison.
Hamming it up with Scott McClanahan
Is writing an inherently performative medium? Scott McClanahan thinks so. “I think my favorite writers are hams,” he said in an interview for The Rumpus. He also discussed staying at hotels with pimps during his book tour, indie presses, his book Crapalachia (which our own Nick Moran recommends), and his aversion to tote bags.
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The Opposite of Slouching
“Aspiring journalists tend to worship at the altar of Joan Didion,” writes Heather Havrilesky (who some of you may know as Polly) in the latest issue of Bookforum. The fact that so many writers look up to Didion as an example necessitates that the lit world find at least one offbeat alternative. In Havrilesky’s eyes, that alternative is obvious: the late Nora Ephron was the anti-Didion, she argues.
Letterman Has Done Creepy Things
David Letterman has possibly topped himself. As told on the show last night, he has been doing some creepy things. Click here for the video of one of the most bizarre, fascinating — and arguably brilliant, from a PR standpoint — mea culpas in recent history.
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How Do You Raise a Bookworm?
Joe Pinkser takes a closer look at how a love of reading is fostered from a young age.
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Carolyn:
Thanks for mentioning EC (and Boyd and Joe’s worthy tribute)! This is just to point out that, far more than being a blogger, EC was a dedicated and deeply-educated writer who had lots of short stories out there, as well as having had a well-reviewed novel, Human Wishes/ Enemy Combatant, print-published in 2012. To quote Jacob Bacharach, at HuffPo (from a piece called “All Good Books are Weird Books”):
“And then there’s my recent favorite, a small-press novel called Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant by Edmond Caldwell, which manages to combine the surreal landscapes of airport hotels with a living Matryoshka doll with a wrenching account of the massacre of Lydda in the 1948 Palestine War with a rambunctious conspiracy to abduct and replace James Wood—yes, that James Wood—with a subversive double.”
Edmond had another novel to his credit, as well, unpublished, that I hear was also quite wonderful. Here’s to hoping that both books find a new life in the coming years. Once in a blue moon quality does (or should), briefly, rise to the top…