January 2011
6 posts
The Rumpus reviews THERE'S A ROAD →
The juxtaposition of the most mundane of details with the hugeness of New York City and the incomprehensibility of a terrorist attack manages to show us something not just about September 11 but about our 21st-century lives: how easy it is to lose our way as we confront the innumerable roads that stretch before us.
Read the full review.
HTML Giant Interview →
The hunger for closure is … heavy in the culture and a key aspect to a lot of memoirs—my life used to be a certain way, then some disruptive or traumatic thing happened, I more or less worked through it, I’m in a better place now. My book doesn’t offer that, mostly because I see that whole idea as a lot of bullshit. I especially felt that way in the year or so after 9/11, when there...
Book Notes feature on Largehearted Boy →
Music is memory. Sometimes I can’t stand it. I’ll hear a song from the old days and it’ll make me feel so sad and weird that I want to die … Here, then, in roughly chronological order (according to my experience with them, not necessarily their release dates), is a list of songs from the era depicted in There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From—not...
From Publishers Weekly
“In his third book, Charles (Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way) chronicles his early years in New York. The aspiring writer was 24 when he arrives in 1998 hoping to jump-start a literary career. Instead, he finds himself stuck in a dead-end job rewriting promotional material for Morgan Stanley in their World Trade Center office. The pay is good but the work is dull, fiction...
THERE'S A ROAD makes BlackBook magazine's Best... →
Adam Wilson calls it the “Best 9/11 Memoir That Doesn’t Read at All Like a 9/11 Memoir, but Rather Like a Really Good Novel That Just Happens to Be True and To Involve 9/11.”
Read the full list, which includes great books by Grace Krilanovich, Sam Lipsyte, and Justin Taylor, among others.
