David Abrams's Blog, page 31

Friday Freebie: Eat the Apple by Matt Young

Congratulations to Tammy Zambo, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Our Lady of the Prairie by Thisbe Nissen.

This week’s contest is for Eat the Apple by Matt Young. I was an early reader of this offbeat memoir about Matt’s service in the Marines and had this to say about it: “Matt Young’s Eat the Apple is a standout in a crowded room full of war memoirs. It’s fresh, invigorating, and brutally honest in a scorched-earth kind of way. Eat the Apple scrapes the landscape of memory raw until it...

House Beautiful

It was love at first sight.

I’m not talking about the first moment I saw the woman who was to become my wife—though that’s very, very true (yes, my relationship with Jean began as a cliché). In this case, I refer to my love affair with 1923 Argyle Street in Butte, Montana.

Photo by Tyler CallAbout three weeks after my retirement from the U.S. Army in 2008, I got a job offer to come work for the Bureau of Land Management in Butte. We packed up our household goods and drove from the East Coast t...

My First Time: Susan Henderson

My First Mentor
I have a school assignment all the way back to third grade, declaring that I wanted to become a poet. I loved rhythm and word play and nonsense rhymes. I had crushes on the dead poet, Dylan Thomas, and the dead jazz singer and crooner, Donny Hathaway. I wrote bad copycat poetry on my arm and on my desk at school. I was a weirdo misfit everywhere I went—my hair stuck out in a lump in back because of the knots I couldn’t comb through, and was I often mistaken for a boy—but I fel...

Sunday Sentence: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


Walking into a warm steamy diner during a Chicago winter is like going from Alaska to a tropical country where the President is a giant onion ring who smothers you with greasy bear hugs while chain-smoking.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris

Front Porch Books: National Poetry Month edition

“It’s National Poetry Month,” I told the crowd in Dillon, Montana who had come to hear me read from my novel Brave Deeds last night, “and so in honor of that, I thought I’d try something a little different.” I coughed, took a shaky breath and, not without a little nervousness, recited a poem I’d recently written about the Iraq War, “We Drown Them in Night.” The poem was inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1959 classic We Real Cool . Since I’d just read the short chapter of the same name from Brave D...

Friday Freebie: Our Lady of the Prairie by Thisbe Nissen

Congratulations to John Smith, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: American by Day by Derek B. Miller.

This week’s contest is for Our Lady of the Prairie by Thisbe Nissen (author of T he Good People of New York and Osprey Island ). Here’s what Julianna Baggott, author of Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders , had to say about Thisbe’s new novel: “Our Lady of the Prairie is a tumultuous romp, both cautionary and liberating. A mystery winds its way through these pages, as Thisbe Nissen explore...

Order and Chaos: Jan English Leary’s Crowded Library

Reader:  Jan English Leary
Location:  Chicago
Collection size:  About 1,300 books that are mine alone and about as many in the rest of the house that my husband and I share. That doesn’t count our several hundred ebooks.
The one book I’d run back into a burning building to rescue:  My most prized published books are my Best American Short Stories editions, but they’re too numerous and cumbersome to grab in a fire. Instead, I’d rescue the self-published book my grandfather com...

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson

Though we are all distinguished and separated from each other by many things—race, sex, religion, and the varied impulses of our personalities—in the end, we all share one thing in common: all of us, each and every one, will someday die. Try as we might (and oh, we try so hard), none of us can avoid our inevitable status as a corpse. To be particularly indelicate about it, we all wind up as nothing more than lifeless meat on a cold stainless-steel table in some morgue or embalming room at a f...

My First Time: Michael A. Ferro

No Country for Recluse Writers: How My First Novel Brought Me Out of the Dark
Perhaps it’s the introverted, quiet side of me, or maybe it’s the cynical, brooding half that embraces absurdity and satire in all its forms, but when I long ago thought about being a writer, I’d imagined that I could do it like many of the reclusive literary heroes of my past: Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Harper Lee, and many such others. I wanted more than anything to keep out of the spotlight—to write novels,...

Sunday Sentence: The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


The grieving can pretend that their loved ones are merely sleeping. That they will hear you when you bend over to whisper all you had meant to say.

The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson