new members

I've started inviting all sorts of LT members to this group, people who have read Arlt or at lest own his books, but we should broaden the scope to include people interested in 1) Latin-American fiction; 2) crime fiction; 3) Russian lit; etc. Please add to the list of categories.

And let's hope new members start joining...

I'm reading Daniel Woodrell's early trilogy--The Bayou Trilogy. He became famous when Winter's Bone was made into a movie and now the early trilogy has been re-issued. Like me, he went to the Iowa Writers Workshop--I think he must have been there in the decade before I was (him in the 80s, me in the 90s). At the end of his book there is an brief interview and when the workshop is brought up he mentions that a couple faculty members loudly let him know they'd rather he not have been invited. He won a Michener award, probably for his first novel, as that is how such things usually go. So I'm waiting for the film version of a book so my own early trilogy can be brought back. I, too, had some issues with faculty--though one difference is that I may have been the only writer from the workshop ever to need to publish two books before being awarded a Michener, such was my own effect on Frank Conroy.

His books are straight up noir, unlike my satires. Thus far, a hundred pages into the first one, I'd say he writes with an easy authenticity and intelligence, the poetic surfacing like lake fish, unpredictably, unmistakeably, and thoroughly at home.

ETA:

Dialogue

"Never seen brains before?"
"Not in so many places."

glimpses of poetry

"...adolescent drollery and derivative insolence..."
"Urban Darwinism was at work in the grim light of this place, and the mean got over with their no-limit rage, while the weak went under, silently."

#3--I've read Woodrell's Woe to live on---and it was really good--atmospherically it's kind of like some of Cormac McCarthy's earlier work. Landscape--or the Ozarks in this case fit very much into what made the novel work.