J.C. Hallman
J.C. Hallman’s most recent book is B & ME: A True Story of Literary Arousal, a work of “creative criticism.” He sort of lives in New York City.
As a champion of the way that writers write about other writers, I believe that John’s essay “Rings, Planets, Poles, Inferno, Paradise: A Poetics for W.G. Sebald,” from The Sea-God’s Herb, is as fine a piece of “creative criticism” as I’ve ever encountered.
Ted Genoways’s Tequila Wars is a little bit Gabriel García Márquez, a little bit Mario Puzo, maybe a little bit Deadwood, and even a little bit Cormanc McCarthy, at times.
I don’t think most people know the story. Or if they do, only in a very basic way: that someone at some time stole the Mona Lisa. Any story can be retold if it is reimagined, and that’s what I did. I wanted to take the facts and mix them with fiction to create a fast-paced thriller that combined real history and art, an international chase, corruption, and even murder.
It’s rare, I would say, to read a book that is a pitch perfect projection of the personality of its author. There is usually a little mediation, a smoothing out of the edges, a tendency to perfect the self-portrait. Not so with Erica Buist’s This Party’s Dead, which can perhaps be described as a rollicking, globe-trotting death adventure, albeit not of the victim tourism sort.
Jay Kirk’s second book is a novelistically novel form of literary investigation that is by turns bizarre and brilliant, hilarious and heartbreaking. There is no attempt to be objective or comprehensive, and as much as anything else the goal is to project Kirk’s own achingly honest story first onto a mystery, and then onto an adventure, both of which he more or less stumbles into.
It’s quite rare, these days, for a poem to become front page news in the New York Times.
By J.C. Hallman
What you’re probably going to hear about this delicate, intelligent, and conscientiously slight debut memoir—if you haven’t already—is that ultimately it’s a foodie book: the story of a young woman in a bad marriage preparing elaborate dinners for a mother who has fallen ill and who will fail because no meal is medicine enough. That’s all here, but there’s much more to this memoir that will likely be treated only scantly in what is sure to amount to a smorgasbord of praise.
Where the Dead Sit Talking is narrated by a weird kid—kind of innocent, kind of ignorant—named Sequoyah. The story unfolds during Sequoyah’s stint as a foster child during his mom’s period in lockup.
I’m on the record as having said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: the most fundamental problem of criticism today is the belief that, by definition, an act of criticism is an act of argumentation.
