We offer a big shout-out today to Portland's Hawthorne Books for helping us organize last night's Skype chat with A Very Minor Prophet author James Bernard Frost and an even bigger shout-out to Jim for taking the time to chat with us last night (even though he WAS drinking the wrong beer during the chat!).
Topics discussed:
--how autobiographical is this thing anyway? (answer: not as much as you'd think).
--the importance of Fayetteville, Arkansas as the origin of many religious quests.
--zines!!
--the extreme difficulty of reading an unusual manuscript such as this in electronic formats and whether or not it should even be attempted.
--dwarf preachers and why they are important.
A good time was had by all and we look forward to the film version of A Very Minor Prophet (please, please, let it star Peter Dinklage!!).
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Our May selection is Matt Bell's Cataclysm Baby (are you ready to Skype with us, Matt Bell?).
What does Swamplandia author Karen Russell think:
"In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys."
Check out Matt Bell's site for a great collection of reviews and interviews and tweet along with us at the #pbrbookclub hashtag. And we're on Facebook too: visit us here .
I thought the Skype session would be interesting but in fact it was a good time all around. Thanks Hawthorne for setting it up, Jim (you said we could call you Jim now) for making time despite clanking pots beckoning from the background, and our venerable host for making it happen.
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