Eric Barnes's Blog
December 16, 2009
Keith Gessen, co-editor of the journal N+1 and former book critic for New York Magazine, selected one of my short stories, "Dreams Where I Can Fly" (Raritan, Spring 2009), for publication in the Italian magazine L'Internazionale as well as listing it as one of his favorite stories for 2009. This was my thank you note to him, which, for reasons eventually explained in the post, I couldn't send to him directly.
This is really nice of you to list my story as one of your favorites of the year and ...
November 27, 2009
I was recently followed on Twitter by someone looking for tips on make up. This is not an uncommon occurrence for me. How could I have known that giving my novel the title Shimmer would result in so many Web references − via Twitter, blogs and news articles − to lipstick, lotions and body rubs?
Yet it's one thing to receive a Google alert on how some new lotion "wrote the book on body shimmer." It's another to have someone actually go to the trouble of following me on Twitter because I used...
November 4, 2009
October 13, 2009
I wrote this almost two months ago for another blog, but thought I'd put it up here.
I bought a book of William Eggleston's photographs recently at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. They are the photos collected in the book titled Paris.
Eggleston's photos, when I first saw them more than ten years ago, were disturbing and thrilling to me in the way that it was, many years ago when I first started writing, disturbing and thrilling to read the short stories of Raymond Carver and Richard...
August 29, 2009
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In some ways things have quieted down, but then I look up and realize they haven't. I'm doing Thacker Mountain Radio at Off Square Books this Thursday at 6 pm, go to Tulsa for Tulsa BookSmart soon, and on it goes.
I sent an update to some people on things that have happened and are happening for Shimmer. Here it is:
A quick update on the book, book tour, reviews and the first day of school.
Thanks to everyone who's been at readings and signings, everyone's who's bought the book, and everyone who h
August 17, 2009
Perfekt Boy
It's the first day of school for most of our kids on Tuesday. All of the kids go to a great, truly remarkably school called Grace St. Luke's here in Memphis. One of the kids has moved on to another school now, but GSL has shaped so much of our lives and the kids' lives.
It's a sweet, smart, deeply goofy, nicely imperfect-in-a-very-genuinely-human-way-sort-of-way place. I can't ever thank the people there enough.
Because it's about to be the first day of school, some friends of ours who
July 30, 2009
If I could write what I wanted to write, this would be a note about a man throwing chairs at one of my readings or the fairly hyperactive "mediation" a person was engaged in prior to a morning TV talk show. No one was injured in either instance, but they are great stories nonetheless.
However, some combination of age, maturity and especially the cautionary place occupied by a new writer leads me to hold off on telling these sorts of stories quite yet.
Time needs to pass, I think. Just a little mor
July 3, 2009
June 27, 2009
June 17, 2009
ShimmerTheBook.com - A book trailer
There’s a trailer now, a preview basically, of Shimmer.
And it’s on a new Web site, although it’s basically just an address to host the trailer.
I like the trailer very much. I could say it’s not like the book, not technically accurate, in a hundred ways. But it is absolutely like the book, absolutely accurate in how it feels and what is captured, in a hundred more. And so I like it very much. Ridiculously enough, I still struggle to explain
