Bøger af Matthew Crain

No one in Big Hole, Kentucky, denies that Monroe Furnace is pious. Heck, he's been preaching (well, O.K., occasionally) since he was twelve, hasn't he? But by means of an ear plug and a transistor radio, Monroe injected himself with a new Holy Ghost: rock 'n' roll. Monroe thought, "Guitar players might be men on the outside but they're boys on the inside, boys at play, the life they love has been given to them, with no responsibilities to anyone." God, please don't destroy the world before Monroe can play like Eddie Van Halen! Or before Monroe can save Beans, the monkish ex-hippie subsisting in a bar band. Or save Dorothy, the blasphemous bassoonist powerless before the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. But will Monroe be able to save himself?DETERMINATION is a Fundamentalist comedy, a love story divided against itself, and a dead-on portrait of an earnest hopeful trying too hard. It's got passionate footnotes, and how about that cover!

In a book group reading James Joyce's Dubliners, Matthew Crain almost jumps across a table and slugs a guy about Gretta Conroy's galoshes in "The Dead." Determined to have the last word, he writes his way through Dubliners from beginning to end, "finishing the sentences my enemy interrupted." Reading Dubliners is a snappy, thoughtful, literary, detailed and often obsessive study of Joyce's inherently absorbing stories. How obsessive? Know anybody else that writes a love letter to a paragraph? Reading Dubliners is not only a convincing study of Dubliners the book. It is also a self-portrait of Crain himself and a testimony to the lessons on storytelling he has found in Joyce's early fiction. Crain's essays are 290 pages of bluntness and passion, offered casually, and they show readers that they don't need to read an encyclopedia before they read James Joyce. 2014 marks the centennial anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Dubliners, and a great way to celebrate is with Matthew Crain's Reading Dubliners.