Bøger af John Skoyles

THE NUT FILE captures a world desperately trying to make sense of itself, the frantic regions of lives lived, including that of the author, whose portrait is drawn by the selection and composition of the assembled stories. Comprised of original as well as appropriated material -- obituaries, academic emails, private notes, micro-fictions, literary excerpts, weird memos, police logs, hard news, dear Johns and autobiographical confessions -- the entries range from the absurd to the grave, from the ambiguous to the bombastic, from the ironic to the tragi-comic. Patti Smith at Allen Ginsberg's deathbed, a portrait of the founder of One Finger Zen, a Joyce scholar gone mad, tabloid headlines announcing the deaths of Papa Wallenda and Brendan Behan, Chinese proverbs, stories of escaped murderers, cruel nuns and customer experiences at the Cuddle and Bubble spa on Valentine's Day are all glimpsed in THE NUT FILE. Many voices speak throughout this collection: those of friends, relatives and strangers. Some stories and anecdotes come directly from Jimmy Cannon, Truman Capote, Harold Clurman, Isaac Dinesan, Jim Harrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Perec, and Mary Heaton Vorse, among others.

"Yes and No is a book about looking back and looking forward. Many of the poems deal with the loss of friends and relatives whose spirits remain in the poet's life in memory and even apparition. As the title connotes, the collection is about affirmation and negation: there are love poems and poems of the devastating loss of love and poems of passion and the dwindling of it. A spiritual thread runs through the book as well, as seen in the opening poem, "Prayer at the Masked Ball," and in the question asked in the title poem: "are we connected to the infinite, or not?"--

A memoir that guides us through the New York of the 1960s. Caught between his uncle Fred, a man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures, 16-year-old John Skoyles finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street.

Driven is a travelogue in which the narrator reviews his life in the course of twenty four hours. A professor at a small college hopes for something different to happen on the last day of the academic year. And it does. When he leaves his home on Cape Cod for Boston where he teaches, he enters a world both real and imaginary. Two of his passengers are his dead parents. The third is the love of his life from years ago. He navigates issues of loss, class, fame and family as he passes familiar landmarks, stops at the same coffee shops, recalls the dance at the dump, the stories of barflies and entrepreneurs, eccentric colleagues and his newfound sobriety. Is it fiction or nonfiction? That depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts.

"Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alan Dugan described Skoyles's poems as "clear-eyed but passionate, sarcastic but grave, all at the same time." That description holds true for this selection of poems from his previous four books: A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. The title, taken from the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, alludes to the temporal quality of existence, how one moves from sunlight to twilight in the course of a lifetime. And how those evening hours arrive suddenly, as if in no time at all."

The poems in Inside Job range from intensely autobiographical lyrics to brief historical portraits of literary figures like Grace Paley and Jorge Luis Borges, to obituaries of idiosyncratic characters such as heavyweight boxing contenders and inventors of candy bars. The tone is often wry, sometimes wistful, and always compassionate. Praise for John Skoyles: "For poems so full of linguistic playfulness, there is a surprising accuracy of perception." --The Georgia Review "Wise, benevolent, witty." --Northwest Review "Skoyles scrapes at the surface of everyday things and finds a wonderful strangeness just underneath." --Harvard Review